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How can you ban interracial couples and not recognize or admit that this is a racist action? What reality does this guy live in?
He lives in the same reality the rest of us do: an internal reality.
♦◊♦
In our own stories, we are beleaguered heroes with complicated histories. We seldom see ourselves as the aggressor or oppressor. When we act against other people, we aren’t able to see it in the context of a greater social issue. Our actions seem reasonable. We are not acting out of racism or sexism. We have our reasons.
Sometimes, we are simply outraged by injustice. Other times, what we are most ashamed of in ourselves is what we find the most intolerable in others. So the church leader’s racism, and obliviousness (or disingenuousness) hits close to home. We’re all guilty. When someone sets themselves up with such offensive, unlikeable behavior as I am not racist after clearly demonstrating they are, it’s a magical moment: such a luscious scapegoat just begs to be chased out to the wilderness.
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Public shaming is powerful, and sometimes necessary. I believe that the ban was lifted due to public pressure, and that makes me feel good about our country. But when we all fall in line behind the scapegoat, yelling and waving, it starts look like we’re letting it lead us: the hypocrite parade.
It seems that nobody is racist or sexist any more. It has fallen out of fashion as an identity label, but it remains popular as part of identity. The actions abound, but we find another way to explain our intent.
♦◊♦
When we don’t support someone dealing with sexual or other abuse? It’s about the fact that the victim is this-or-that: shifty, crazy, promiscuous, male, troublesome, never-writes-thank-you-notes, whatever. It’s not about the social systems that systematically denigrate and further abuse abuse survivors. But it is. Our personal is hard to see as political. But it is.
“I’m not racist! My best friend is black” is as ridiculous as: “I’m not sexist! My wife is a woman.” Yet we hear it, all the time. We’re the one saying it.
So, I am going to come clean: I am racist. I am sexist. I am prejudiced.
I admit it. I judge, or have judged, people based on their race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, faith, excessive faith, lack of faith…and so on. I make assumptions. I see color. I have ridiculous expectations of men. I have laughed at racist/sexist/otherwise hurtful jokes. I have had reflexive fear-reactions because of how people look. I have judged, justified, injured. I have looked the other way. I am racist.
♦◊♦
My marriage is interracial. My family is mixed-ethnic, inter-faith, multi-linguistic, trans-national. I have lived all over the world. My friends are nationally, ethnically, religiously, economically diverse. People often turn to me when they have questions about those of different faiths or cultures. I’m still racist.
I am a woman and a racial minority. I have been discriminated against and hurt because of my ethnicity and my gender (I am not even going to start on religion). I know how damaging it is, and I do not wish it on anyone. I still have my own prejudices, some of them helped along by my experiences. I’m racist. I’m sexist.
I like to think I’m a good person that tries to help others. I advocate for good cultural manners, pluralism and social equity. I believe that every American should have the same civil rights. I don’t think one person’s belief ought to influence another person’s human rights. But I’m still racist.
I am ashamed of these thoughts and feelings. Some are from my past, others are with me every day. Some are fleeting, some entrenched. I understand that my prejudices do not tell me anything about the group I am prejudiced against. They tell me something about myself. I try to be aware of them so that when they come up I can stop myself from subjecting others to my issues. I’m sure that I fail. I’m sorry for this, and sorry for any pain or harm I cause because of it. I strive to be better.
I engage in interfaith/intergroup and social equity work not only because I have something to teach. I do it because I have something to learn.
♦◊♦
We have to own our prejudice if we are going to deal with it. And we have to deal with it. As a society, as communities, as families, but first and most of all, as ourselves. That is where we have the most control over reality. Know what you are. Admit it. Recognize that it says something about you, not about the group of people you view one way or another. Assess it, change it. Don’t beat yourself up or wallow in guilt. Know you are made up of many parts. But call each what it is.
I believe that one of the reasons we lie is because we wish it were the truth. We lie about who we are because we wish we were something else. Our lies reveal us. Look at the things about yourself you wish were true: I’m not racist.
I’m not racist but my actions are: this is what it means to live in a “post-racial world.” Sorry, but I don’t live in that world. We can call ourselves anything we want. We can tell ourselves anything we want. That doesn’t make it true. I try to live as close to reality as I can; I’d rather endure the worst of myself than be a hypocrite. So, there: I’m racist. But I deal with it.
—
photo: Losttrekker / flickrFrom the Napoleonic Wars to the battle of the Falklands, from the pike and musket to the Challenger tank, The Oxford History of the British Army brings to life the far-reaching history of this long-lived institution.
This definitive one-volume reference provides a wealth of historical detail as it takes readers on a lively journey through the annals of the British Army. Here are vivid descriptions of all the famous military campaigns and battles--from Agincourt and Crecy, to Trafalgar, Waterloo, and Yorktown Heights, to Dunkirk and D-Day--as well as insightful portraits of the great commanders, including Edward I, the Duke of Marlborough, Cromwell, the Duke of Wellington, and Field Marshall Montgomery. Military experts and military history buffs will be particularly interested in the special sections that highlight vital aspects of the Army, including tactics, weaponry, and major figures. Finally, the volume boasts a distinguished roster of contributors, including not only prominent military historians, but also former servicemen, who provide expert technical insight and vivid, eyewitness accounts of modern soldiering and warfare. Comprehensive and authoritative, The Oxford History of the British Army will fascinate military history buffs as well as anyone seeking a broader understanding of British or modern world history.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Conservatives in Spain are celebrating a landslide victory in today's national elections.
Spain's centre-right Popular Party (PP) has won a resounding victory in a parliamentary election dominated by the country's deep debt crisis.
With almost all the votes counted, the PP, led by Mariano Rajoy, is assured of a clear majority in the lower chamber.
The Socialist Party, which has governed Spain since 2004, has admitted defeat.
Mr Rajoy, who is expected to tackle the country's debts amid slow growth and high unemployment, said he was aware of the "magnitude of the task ahead".
He told supporters there would be "no miracle" to restore Spain to financial health, and that the country must unite to win back respect in Europe.
Analysis The Popular Party had already erected the platform for its victory speeches at its Madrid headquarters by mid-morning. Hours before the polls closed, workmen unfurled a huge, new banner that said "Gracias". Somewhat premature, it was quickly removed. But there was no doubt who would win this race. Left-wing voters have punished the governing Socialist party: it is pretty tough asking to be re-elected when almost five million people are unemployed. So the mood over at PSOE (Socialist) headquarters today was distinctly subdued. Here, though, the music is pumping through loud speakers. The crowds have gathered - many wrapped in the Spanish national flag. The PP and its supporters are beginning their party.
"Forty-six million Spaniards are going to wage a battle against the crisis," said the 56-year-old PP leader.
The PP won about 44% of the votes and the Socialists 29% in Sunday's election, according to near-complete official results.
The PP is expected to take about 186 of the 350 seats in the lower house.
As the results were announced, jubilant, flag-waving supporters danced outside party headquarters in central Madrid.
Socialist Party spokesman Jose Blanco congratulated the PP on its victory.
The BBC's Sarah Rainsford in Madrid says the right is headed for its biggest win since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975.
Parliament is expected to meet next month to confirm Mr Rajoy as the new prime minister.
'Sacrifices ahead'
The new government will have little time to show results and people are bracing themselves for a new wave of spending cuts, our correspondent adds.
Over the past week, borrowing rates have risen to the 7% level which is regarded as unsustainable. Unemployment stands at five million.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption PP leader Mariano Rajoy: "We can only go forward if we all go forward together"
Miguel Arias, the Popular Party's campaign co-ordinator, said Spain was "going to make all the sacrifices".
"We have been living as a very rich country," he told BBC News.
"People are used to a very high level of public services and it takes time to them to acknowledge the realisation that we now are a poor country, that we have lots of debts and in order to pay them back we must reduce public expenditure and then we must recover the confidence of the markets."
Outgoing Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was not standing again at this election.
His successor as party leader, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, has accused Mr Rajoy of planning severe cuts to health and education.
"Spain is at a historic crossroads," he told reporters in Madrid.
Correspondents say many are angry with the Socialists for allowing the economy to deteriorate and then for introducing tough austerity measures.
Spain's is the third Eurozone government in as many weeks whose fall has been attributed to the debt crisis.
The socialists in Greece and Silvio Berlusconi's Italian conservatives have also been swept from power.
Earlier this year, the governments of debt-stricken Ireland and Portugal also fell.The social photo app Instagram now has over 100 million users, who between them upload 40 million photos every day. That’s more photos of hot dinners than I’ve had hot dinners. Thanks to the easy to use Instagram smartphone app loads of these photos look great, so it’s no wonder that there’s an increasing demand to print these images rather than keeping them locked up inside your phone.
Well, good news! Using Diginate you can order fantastic art prints, posters and stickers of your Instagram photos in minutes, all via your smartphone. Let me show you how!
First up, I’d like to print one of my photos on textured art paper. More and more exhibitions featuring Instagram photos are taking place around the globe, so this seems like a nice paper to try. Here’s the photo I’m going to use:
I like the look of art prints with a white border, so I’m going to add a border on Instagram and apply the toaster filter, which gives you a nice wide, light border.
Once you’ve shared the photo on your feed it will also save a copy to the camera album on your phone.
Let’s set it up for print! First up, head over to Diginate.com on your phone’s browser. Isn’t it cute!
Since Instagram always produces square images there’s no scaling issues to deal with. Instagram photos are surprisingly large – I’m going to print mine at 50cm x 50cm. Much larger than that and you’re going to start losing quality. Here’s the quote:
Once you have a quote you can tap ‘Continue’ and move to the next step. Choose ‘Upload file’, ‘Choose Existing’ and select your photo:
Once your photo has uploaded you’ll see it nestled nicely in your cart:
Whilst I was playing with the Instagram photos for my art print I noticed the Nashville filter, which I thought would look great on a satin poster:
Once the image is saved in your camera library you can return to your browser, tap ‘Continue shopping’ and repeat the process for your poster. I’m going for 50cm x 50cm again:
Here’s my cart with this in:
Finally, I’m going to get a different photo printed as stickers. It would seem rude not to. Here’s the image I’ve chosen; I’ve applied the Brennan filter to give it a sultry vibe:
Holy CCTV – Watching you 24hrs. I’m going to print these as 4cm square gloss stickers. Remember, Instagram images are always square so selecting sizes is simples:
Once I’ve uploaded my Holy CCTV image from my camera library everything is sat in my cart and ready to go!
Now it’s just a case of logging in and placing your order, all via your mobile phone:
Here’s how my Instagram prints came out. First up, the textured art paper print:
Nice huh? Here’s the satin paper poster:
The quality is great – who knew instagram photos could print so large?
We have stickers as well!
Here’s some more images of my posters:
You can get hold of Instagram for iOS here, and for Android here.Students at the University of South China in Hengyang, Hunan Province mourn Run Run Shaw (inset) in a building donated by the media tycoon and philanthropist. Photo: CFP
Tributes have poured in from all over the world for the late Hong Kong media tycoon Sir Run Run Shaw, who passed away early Tuesday morning.
Although many have applauded his movie and TV empire in Asia, he is remembered especially in the Chinese mainland for his generous philanthropic endeavors that dwarfed those of many other tycoons.
Hong Kong-based Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), which was launched by Shaw in 1967, Tuesday announced the passing of the mogul.
Shaw died peacefully at home surrounded by his family at 6:55 am Tuesday, aged 107, said TVB.
His passing immediately made headlines on major news portals in the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, where movies and TV programs produced by Shaw's media empire have influenced generations of Chinese people.
Movie mega-stars such as Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung, Andy Lau and Stephen Chow were all given their start by Shaw's media empire.
While some on the mainland may not have known the man behind their favorite films and shows, many learnt about Shaw from the buildings in their schools or universities that are named after him.
In 1973, Shaw established a foundation to promote the development of education, healthcare and arts. Since 1985, the foundation has poured billions of yuan into constructing school buildings and hospitals in nearly every provincial region in the mainland.
As of last September, this included over 6,000 school buildings from primary schools through to universities, according to xinhuanet.com.
Run Run Shaw. Photo: CFP
In 1977, Shaw received a knighthood for his charitable activities.
In commemoration of the billionaire, Net users Tuesday answered a call to post photos of Run Run Shaw Buildings at their schools on Sina Weibo.
"I hope there will be another Run Run Shaw to shoulder these social responsibilities," a Net user wrote on Sina Weibo, adding that many people had become useful members of society thanks to his generous donation to education.
"People say the Chinese hate rich people, but why do so many Chinese mourn Run Run Shaw?" wrote another Net user. "It's because his name is on school buildings everywhere, compared to so many Chinese moguls who splurge on yachts, limousines and weddings."
Chen Xuqing, a professor with the School of Management at Minzu University of China, has studied charitable activities by the nation's super wealthy.
"Shaw started his philanthropic endeavors very early, when the rich in the mainland were still accumulating their wealth," Chen told the Global Times.
However, while the number of millionaires in the mainland has risen in recent years, their charitable donations cannot compete with those in Western countries, a study by Chen showed. According to the study, the ratio of donations to GDP in China was only 0.01 percent in 2009, while the ratio stood at 2.2 percent in the US.
The Hurun Report showed last year that there were 8,100 billionaires in the mainland, 600 more than a year earlier. However, the average donation made by the mainland's top 100 philanthropists was 55.97 million yuan ($9.22 million) each, a 45 percent decrease from 2012.
"Against the backdrop of the widening wealth gap and frustrations toward the disparity from the underprivileged, the elites should take on more social responsibility," Deng Guosheng, director of the Center for Innovation and Social Responsibility at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times, adding that the country should also alter its systems to encourage charity.
Born Shao Renleng in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang Province in November 1907, Shaw was the sixth of eight siblings. TVB has put his age at 107, not 106, due to the Chinese system of calculating ages.
He started out helping his elder brothers set up a film studio in Shanghai in 1925. The brothers later moved into Hong Kong - making and distributing films to a chain of around 100 cinemas across other Asian markets such as Singapore and Malaysia.
Shaw eventually split from his brothers to set up his own studio in the 1950s, which ushered in a golden era of Hong Kong movie making.
The Shaw studio produced about 1,000 titles, including melodramas, historical epics and kung fu classics, which influenced Hollywood big names like Quentin Tarantino.
TVB said Shaw's funeral will only be attended by his family members.
Reuters contributed to this storyThe European Investment Bank, led by Werner Hoyer, has effectively imposed a moratorium on new long-term loans to Britain since Article 50 was triggered REX FEATURES
The government is facing a multibillion-pound shortage of funding for new schools, hospitals and social housing after a decision by the world’s biggest public lender to freeze its UK operations because of Brexit.
The Times has learnt that the European Investment Bank, which financed £6.9 billion of public infrastructure projects in Britain last year, has effectively imposed a moratorium on new long-term loans to the UK.
The decision was taken after the government triggered Article 50 in March. Since then only three UK projects have had funding signed off and no projects have been financed since June.
In the first three months of the year the EIB approved nine projects worth a total of £1.4 billion.
The moratorium has been confirmed by sources within the…It’s a bit weird interviewing Paul McCartney. A day and time is agreed, your mobile phone number is taken, and in the following weeks you tell your mates about it, you tweet about it, you tell pub smoking areas about it, you tell your mum about it. Everybody knows Paul McCartney. Everybody loves Paul McCartney.
But it’s not until an unknown number calls you two weeks later, you answer it, and the voice at the other end says, “Hey Joe, it’s Paul here,” that you fully comprehend what is happening – “Shitting hell, I’m on the phone to Paul McCartney.” You’re talking to a living Beatle, a 21-time Grammy winner, a figure more integral to the history of contemporary music than the humble turntable – he’s waiting for you to say something, and all your questions just abandoned your head and floated skywards like dead souls.
If articulating those questions was hard, writing them was ten times worse. In the build up to the call, I toyed with all sorts of research. Four CDs of Pure McCartney arrived first, his new 67 track brain-busting compilation of the greatest tracks he’s ever blessed – a blueprint, basically, for modern pop music. Then a book arrived in the post titled Paul McCartney: The Biography, written by Philip Norman. Totalling an intimidating 853 pages, it occupied a space on the left of my desk for days; casting a dark, towering shadow on everything within a five metre radius, and taunting me silently like a gremlin. Next, an incredibly in-depth BBC radio interview went online, in which Paul was thoroughly dissected for an hour about his entire career. Finally, as if to twist the knife, he dropped a six part virtual reality documentary containing stories, reflections and anecdotes that span his whole musical output. And this is just 2016, I’m tediously listing off. I’m not including every little bit of McCartneyography that has been happening since “Love Me Do” dropped in 1962.
What purpose can another interview with Paul McCartney serve anymore? What could I ask that hasn’t been asked a million times? How did you write this thing? Nope. How did you meet John? Nope. What do you think of modern pop music? Nope. Something something something Kanye West? Nope. Nope. Nope. As Adam Gopnik wrote about McCartney in April’s New Yorker, “What’s to know is known.” So, what then? Should Britain stay in the EU, Paul? What do you order at Dominos? Do you ever covertly look at people in the reflection of train windows? Are ghosts real?
After two weeks of blank stares, my extremely thorough research reached its conclusion – there was nothing in particular left to question Paul McCartney about. So, I figured, my only hope of an angle was to talk to him about exactly that: nothing in particular. Whether or not a conversation with Paul McCartney about nothing in particular can be interesting or even remotely publishable, I was about to find out.
Paul, 1979, by Linda McCartney
Noisey: Hi Paul. Do you ever feel like you have nothing left to tell people?
Paul: Yes, definitely. There is one story for every situation. I do it in my live show. I’m talking and a story comes up. I think to myself, “If anyone’s been to my show before then they’ve heard all this.” There’s only one story about how I met John. I can invent another if you like, but everyone knows it wouldn’t be true. I always think to myself, “I’ve told this a million times.”
Is there a positive to all the documenting? Has anything recently ever triggered anything you'd totally forgotten? Or have we literally milked you dry?
That’s interesting, and it does happen. I enjoy it when it does. I did a poetry book a few years back. I had a reading coming up, so I asked my poet friend Adrian Mitchell, “What do I do?” He said just think of something to say about how the poem came about. I was planning on reading out “Blackbird”. I started to remember writing it. It was in the 60s when all the civil rights stuff was happening in America – Arkensas, Little Rock, and Alabama. I remembered that I had first started writing that song as something that I thought would give hope to the people going through those struggles. Now, I’d not thought about that in a long, long time. Now, when I do the song, I always remind people that’s what it was originally about.
You’ve been stupidly famous for over 50 years. You haven’t publicly shamed yourself, suffered a breakdown, wrestled with addiction, or even just mysteriously disappeared for a decade. How do you survive something as deadly and unpredictable as fame?
It’s something I’ve asked myself a lot. I think it all stems from my Liverpool family. They are very down to earth. Whenever I would go up there, it’s as if I’m not famous. I’m just “Our Paul”. It’s all, “Alright Paul, how you doing man? Okay, great.” I got grounding from them. Once we got famous, you could remember that. You’re just an ordinary Liverpool person. Yes, it all spirals out into the fame thing, but as long as you remember who yo–
[At this point in our call, there were a couple of sudden thuds and bangs, and a small McCartney sounding yelp – then the line went completely dead. Obviously, after about ten seconds, I started to think, “Oh no, what if I just heard Paul McCartney die?” By twelve seconds, I was feeling the sadness of a world without him. I saw the news reports, the tributes, the Tweets, the respectful street parties in Liverpool, the content, all of the content, the gigs, and the widespread national mourning. By fifteen seconds, I overcame my grief, and selfishly started to see newspapers interviewing me about it all: “We spoke to the guy who was on the phone to McCartney when he snuffed it.” Pull quote: “I couldn’t believe it. One minute we were talking normally then bang.” Then my phone rang, and it was Paul again.']
Paul: Sorry, I dropped the phone and all the batteries fell out… Anyway, I grew up with quite a good idea of how to keep things normal. I wasn’t always successful, but most of the time I was keen to keep it grounded. I go on public transport, I keep cool.
Have you seen fame swallow those around you?
Yes I have. That is what happens. That’s another way to keep yourself grounded, by seeing how fame goes for others. Once you’ve seen the “Do you know who I am?” syndrome in full effect, you know you’ll never do it yourself. If you do, then the minute you leave the room, everyone you were shouting at will just laugh and go “Fuck off!”
Have you ever mentored others struggling with fame?
There have been a few people I’ve tried to help over the years by chatting to them, but not always successfully. Some of them I could see were too heavy into drugs. I’d tell them to ease off a bit or be careful. But I wasn’t always successful, and some of them are no longer here.
Does it feel different being on stage now to how it felt as a teenager?
It’s different. You used to be unsure of what people thought of you. That is the basis of stage fright. You think, “They are going to hate me and something is going to go wrong.” In the early days, I used to get very nervous. I remember thinking about giving it all up one time in the early days of the Beatles.
The difference now is, I just say to my promoter, “Just stick one show on sale and see how it goes.” He calls back he says, “Chicago just sold out in 2 minutes!” That boosts your confidence. Now, I’m more confident that people want to come and see us play.
Is there anywhere in the world music hasn’t taken you that you wish it would?
China. I’ve never been to China. Lots of people have. I’ve never been. I quite fancy that. Maybe one of these days. It could be pretty cool couldn’t it?
Have you ever fallen out of love with music?
It’s always something I love. Before I called you, I was noodling around on one of my guitars. I’d pick it up and play a little something. Suddenly you’re writing a song and not just noodling around. That is the excitement; that you can magically craft something that never existed. That is very addictive.
Where is that moment of satisfaction? When you craft it? Or when you’re playing it onstage to thousands?
There are a few moments. The moment when you craft it is one. The moment you record it is another one. Then, when you play it for the first time to people. They are the three moments of satisfaction.
Paul, 1991, by Linda McCartney
What have you learned from your time on earth?
That’s a difficult question. The first thought that comes to mind is: don’t underestimate anyone. If you saw my Liverpool family, you’d think they were just a bunch of scousers. But once you get to know them, there are all sorts of hidden depths in there. One of my cousins – who was older than me – he compiled the crosswords for The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph. They have got to be three of the hardest crosswords in the world.
They sure are.
He’s just some scouse bloke. You’d never spot him in a crowd. You’d think he’s nobody. He doesn’t look like anything. But he is. That’s why I love talking to different people. I ask them “Where you from?”, “What you doing?” It sounds like I’m being nosey, but I just want to know. Because sometimes you find out the most amazing things about people. The world has taught me to never to assume somebody is nothing. You might be completely underestimating them.
What would you tell a sixteen year old Paul McCartney if you could?
Don’t go into the music business.
Wow.
No, I’m joking. What would I tell him? Be careful, son. Take it easy. Be true to yourself and enjoy it.
So, you wouldn’t change a thing?
You have certain regrets just like anyone does in life. Moments I look back on and think I wasn’t cool enough in that situation, or I wasn’t very kind to someone. But that’s life. When you’re growing up, you’re not always sensitive to people. But apart from that, I’d do it all again.
What scares you?
I suppose the way you can’t nail life down. You grow up thinking that if you learn enough stuff and get the right education then you’ll be able to nail life. I’ll know what’s going on. One thing you discover is that the goalposts are always changing. The rules change. The world changes. When that happens, you realise you still don’t have a clue. And it shocks you. You think, “I don’t have the information I need to deal with this.” That scares me.
I do that a lot. I think, “If I just read this one book… If I just finish this one project… If I just go running for three months... I’ll be bossing life.” I never am bossing life.
Then you read that book, you get that done, and somebody changes the rules. It’s this book now, it’s this thing now. The unpredictability of life. Other than that, I’m not too bad. I don’t live a fearful life.
Has the Internet made your life better or worse?
I kinda like it. In music specifically, it had got very boring to do everything the traditional industry way. Releasing a record had become the worst part of making a record. You created it – a labour of love – you’ve played it as nice as you could. Then suddenly it was like you’d finished your exam paper and you had to wait for the teacher to judge you. I wasn’t making music to be judged; I was making it for the love of it.
I don't know if I can even remember a pre-Internet music industry anymore.
One of the funniest cliches about the old music industry was 'going to Cologne.' They’d always send you to Cologne, and they’d invite everyone from France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany. You would do a series of interviews, and it was so mind numbingly boring. We talked earlier about having the same stories to the same questions? Well, you would do that all day long. “What is this song about?” I’d answer. [*Affects German accent*] “Hey, what is this song about?” I’d say the same thing again. I remember saying, “I’m never going back to Cologne”. The Cologne syndrome.
But in answer to your initial question, I like that the Internet has made it an open game now. Anything that opens up the game is good. The Internet does that. Having said that, I’m not sure I would just ‘drop’ an album.
Would you ever get Snapchat?
Yeah! Sure! But I’m not technical. I’m barely technical with guitars. Someone tells me, “Hey Paul, I have an L130.” I have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Could be a train for all I know. This translates to the computer and Internet world. I watch stuff on my iPad and take photos on my iPhone, but I’m not, you know… a gamer.
Do you think you’ll ever be a gamer?
I wish I had the time. But there is always something to do. Like this interview. If I didn’t have this interview, maybe I’d be gaming?
Did you learn anything from becoming a grandfather that you didn’t from becoming a father?
You just remember it all again. I suppose the thing is, your grandchildren are different from your own children. Time has passed. Now they are all on screens. Should kids be on screens all the time? There’s new stuff around that weren’t for my kids. So that’s what you learn from becoming a grandad… you learn how to operate a computer.
You said in one of the episodes of your new virtual reality documentary, that you discovered the meaning of life in Bob Dylan’s hotel room one night, and you wrote it down. The next day, you found the piece of paper and it just said “There are seven levels.” First question: Were you on drugs, Paul?
Okay, first answer: Yes! I think that was our first pot experience. Yes! Answer: yes! Moving on.
Second part: has your interpretation of the meaning of life changed since then?
I never quite knew what I meant that night, but the weird thing is, I’ve run into people who have said they got something from it. They start going into scriptures and ancient texts and stuff, and apparently there are people who say that, about levels. All I know is, it seemed very definite to me at the time. And because it was my first pot experience, my overriding concern was telling everyone back home. You know how you do that? If you do something great, you can’t wait to tell your mates? Like, “I’ve just been there!” or “I’ve just met this person!” or “I’ve just been to Disneyland!” Well I thought I’d cracked the meaning of life, so I couldn’t wait to tell everyone back home. Who knows… Maybe “There are seven levels” is right. It certainly seemed very right that night.
You can follow Joe Zadeh on Twitter.
Pure McCartney is out now.by Tracy Barrett (W&M contributor)
It’s striking how much of medieval women’s literary output is description and explication of mystical visions. Why were so many medieval mystics female? Why did so many women claim to receive visions from God or the saints?
The reasons, paradoxically, are related to women’s lower status in society and the Church. First, women were considered to be more primitive than “intellectual” men and thus their connection with the Divine was more direct. This was reflected in their writing: since few women had the education to write in Latin, their writing in the vernacular “made possible a direct, unmediated relation with the Holy Ghost.”[i] Since a mystic was essential a passive conduit for the word of God, anyone, including an uneducated woman, might (if she were worthy) be chosen to take this role.[ii]
Also, since many positions of authority in the Church were denied to women, a woman feeling a connection to the Divine could not become a priest, much less rise in the Church hierarchy (legends like that of Pope Joan, a woman pope of the ninth century notwithstanding). But “[v]isionary women could bypass the human, male, authority of the Church on earth, and claim to be the instruments of a higher, divine authority.” Not only did this give them a powerful voice, but also “[i]n this way,... they could validate their activity as writers.”[iii] At a time when “Christianity... came to forbid women the genre of the sermon; it tolerated–even feared and revered–their visions.”[iv]
The Church hierarchy did manage to get involved, of course. No one could expect to have her claim of mystical experience accepted without question. Doubtless in an out-of-the-way village a woman could be revered as a visionary with no stamp of authority, and some women—and men—undoubtedly were called mystics without validation from the authorities. But these people ran the risk of being accused of heresy for taking the word of the Devil as the word of God. The Church developed mechanisms to recognize what it considered “true” visions, often including a kind of trial, or an interview with an established mystic, or some other test.
Most mystics followed a relatively orderly progression in their visionary life.[v] First came purgation and self-loathing, often characterized by anorexia (which sometimes lasted the duration of the mystic’s life). The next step often involved more outward-looking evidence of a special gift: telling someone what scandal she is hiding, for example, or what is his secret wish. Some mystics would then claim they had authority to interpret the Bible—a dangerous step, for a thin line divides interpretation and preaching, a practice strictly forbidden to women. Next would usually come devotional visions that arose from meditation on a saint, usually the Virgin Mary, or Christ.
Almost invariably the mystic would then have an experience of Christ’s crucifixion, and—what often strikes modern readers as odd and unsettling—frequently a visionary experience of sexual union with Christ. Medieval thinkers did not have as much of a problem accepting this kind of vision as do moderns: The mystic was in effect wedding Christ through her visions, and a marriage, after all, must be consummated. Also, erotic and spiritual ecstasy were—and often still are—closely linked, for both men and women. Margery Kempe, although desperate to be declared a legitimate mystic, was honest enough to admit that although Christ appeared to her naked, she wasn’t able to do more than grasp his toes!
The last stage was a vision of universal order. When this step was achieved, the vision attained was frequently very difficult for the mystic to explain and others to understand. Today this difficulty tends to either attract readers eager to puzzle out the mystery, or repel those baffled by the vision’s opacity.Real Madrid Interview with Radio SER
Keylor Navas: I've seen Ramos sing Sevilla's hymn
After hearing the rumours about the possible rivals for the Real |
the world” and will call on Obama to “call on leaders of both parties to fix the budget and address the shortfalls in our defense spending.
“He should show leadership – and commitment to solving the problem,” Bush will say, adding that a powerful military “also makes it less likely that we will need to put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way.
“Because I believe, fundamentally, that weakness invites war… and strength encourages peace,” he will say.
While Bush seeks to make his own claim on foreign policy, his sounding board of advisers include veterans of his father and brother’s administrations.
The foreign policy experts who his campaign say have committed to support Bush and whom he is consulting as he considers a run for the presidency include:
Former Secretary of State James Baker, who also served as Secretary of the Treasury and Chief of Staff to President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush; former George W. Bush administration Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff; former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Miami; former George W. Bush administration Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky; former George W. Bush administration CIA director Porter Goss, a former Florida congressman; Stephen Hadley, former President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor; John Hannah, who served for eight years on Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff, including as his national security advisor; former George W. Bush administration CIA director Michael Hayden; Kenneth Juster, who served in senior positions in the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Commerce; former Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey; Robert Natter, former Commander of the United States Atlantic Fleet/Fleet Forces; John Negroponte, the first Director of National Intelligence and a former ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, The Philippines and Iraq; Roger Noriega, former Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere; Meghan O’Sullivan, a former Deputy National Security Adviser; Pierre Prosper, the second U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes; Otto Reich, the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela under former President Ronald Reagan; former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; former Secretary of State George Schultz; Kristen Silverberg, an Assistant Secretary of State and as a special assistant to the White House Chief of Staff; Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president and Deputy Secretary of Defense; and Robert Zoellick, former World Bank president, Deputy Secretary of State and U.S. Trade Representative.As the media continues to focus on international affairs and growing threats abroad, including the rise of ISIS and Moscow’s provocations in the East, American voters are still deeply concerned about the nation’s troubled immigration system.
The most recent bit of news: A majority of U.S. voters now say they oppose the White House unilaterally offering amnesty to illegal immigrants already in the United States and say Congress should mount a legal challenge against the Obama administration should it try to go down this road, according to Rasmussen Reports.
They survey, which was conducted on Aug. 28-29, 2014, and contains a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, found that 62 percent of likely voters say they oppose President Obama offering amnesty without first seeking the approval of Congress, while only 26 percent of respondents say they approve of the president going it alone.
Further, the survey, which polled some 1,000 U.S. adults aged 18 and older, also found that roughly 57 percent of respondents do not believe that the president has the authority to act alone, while only 27 percent say that he does.
And this creates an interesting issue heading into the November midterm elections: At least a few candidates running for public office, including former Republican Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who is now running for Senate in New Hampshire, have taken notice of voter opinion on immigration, making this topic one of the central talking points of their campaign.
“Thanks to the pro-amnesty policies of President Obama and [Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.], we have an immigration crisis on our hands,” Brown said in a recent campaign ad. “We respond with compassion, but it’s time for us to secure the border once and for all.”
Once considered a long-shot candidate for the Senate seat in New Hampshire, Brown has since narrowed the race to a dead heat, his recent focus on immigration widely credited for his recent good fortune.
“Immigration reform is just one of many issues that Obama and Republicans in Congress publicly disagree on,” the report notes. “But just 20% of voters think the opposition between the two is mostly due to honest differences of opinion, while 69% say it’s mostly due to partisan politics. Yet on most major policy issues, our surveying regularly finds that there is a wide difference of opinion between Democratic and Republican voters.”
“Sixty-seven percent (67%) of all voters say America is a more divided nation than it was four years ago, and they think both sides are to blame,” the report added.A restructured system could attract more sponsor interest in the Associate nations © Peter Della Penna
In international cricket, few notions are discussed more and acted upon less than the need for "context". Test and ODI series come and go, leaving no tangible remains. World rankings exist, but for what end?
The structure of bilateral cricket, if it can be called that, is entirely at the whims of the individual boards, who are free to play each other as much or as little as they like, knowing that the consequences of winning or losing Test matches are no greater than that of an international football friendly. The system devalues cricket's premier form.
That Test cricket has always been run on these lines is no defence. Until 1982, only six nations played Tests; with so few teams, each played the others enough to make an overarching structure less urgent. Now Test cricket has ten nations, and several other countries would love to join them. Tests face more competition than ever before, both from other formats and other sports. Scheduling between the Big Three has become increasingly aggressive - Australia and England played each other 40 times across all formats between June 2013 and September 2015. Regardless of how they perform, the other Test nations are doomed to endure a second-class schedule and fans are noticing: about 500 spectators attended each day of the recent Sri Lanka-West Indies Test series.
Most importantly, broadcasters are taking note. "If people can't be bothered to buy a ticket and show up to the game, then people who turn on the television will turn it straight off again," says Andrew Wildblood, the executive vice-president of IMG, the international sports marketing firm. "You need to fill the stadiums - there's nothing that looks worse on sports television than empty stadiums. The one thing falling in value, or at least standing still, is Test match rights."
The ICC is concerned about this, and also considers the value of bilateral one-day cricket to be under threat. Such anxieties led David Richardson, the ICC's chief executive, to ask representatives from each Full Member, and Ireland, representing the Associates, to give presentations about how they would like international cricket to be structured at the recent ICC meeting in Dubai.
David Richardson's proposal for league-based Test cricket holds merit for its pragmatism © ICC
Now the ICC has done what it does best: commissioned a review. Those familiar with the Woolf Report will not be holding their breath about the review of the context and structure of bilateral cricket being undertaken by the ICC Board and Chief Executives' Committee.
It is also far from the first time a structure for Test cricket has been discussed. The World Test Championship was postponed and then cancelled. In 2008, the Boston Consultancy Group was commissioned by Cricket Australia to devise a scheme to give Test cricket a structure; its proposal of a four-year cycle and a pooling of broadcasting revenue was flatly rejected by England and India. As long ago as 2004, Richardson, then the ICC's general manager, first mooted the idea of a league system in Test cricket.
"I personally would favour a league, and that might be two divisions, six and six, so that we can promote teams like Ireland," Richardson said after the last ICC board meeting, envisaging something similar for ODI cricket too. He believes such a structure would create greater context, more commercial value, and a path for teams to get promoted or relegated based on performance.
It would work something like this. In the two Test divisions of six, each side would play the other in two-match series home and away every three years, giving 20 Test matches per country over the cycle before the playoffs to determine promotion and relegation. The structure could begin soon after the 2019 World Cup, as few countries have broadcasting deals that go beyond that date.
"You need to fill the stadiums - there's nothing that looks worse on sports television than empty stadiums" Andrew Wildblood, executive vice-president, IMG
Perhaps the greatest virtue of Richardson's proposal is its pragmatism. The divisional structure would take about five to six months a year, leaving deliberate gaps in the schedule for bilateral fixtures outside the system. So there would be plenty of opportunities for the Big Three to play extra games outside the structure (the Ashes could still take place on its traditional cycle). This nod to commercial reality means that the Big Three would not suffer from the new structure.
"Meritocracy", the ICC's mantra, would cease to be anathema to the structure of international cricket. "Anything which promotes context and merit-based progression, of course we embrace," says Warren Deutrom, Cricket Ireland's chief executive, noting how such a structure would encourage Ireland to approach broadcasters with a package of matches. Alistair Campbell, the out-going managing director of Zimbabwe Cricket, expressed support for more structured international cricket earlier this year. "All the lesser nations would love a better structure so they could be guaranteed a certain amount of games. It's very difficult at the moment to go out and try and get a sponsor. They're saying, 'Who are you playing against, and how many games?'"
Yet the danger of Richardson's proposal is clear. "The effect of two divisions would mean that Test cricket would become completely uneconomical in the division-two countries and would, in all probability, die," warns Ehsan Mani, the former ICC president. Countries that miss making the cut to the first division - Sri Lanka and West Indies on the current ICC Test rankings (at No. 7 and 8 respectively) - would fear irrelevance, even if they already have a de facto two-tier format to contend with.
Any reforms could only be passed if such nations did not have much to lose. The top sides in the second division could be guaranteed a certain amount of fixtures against first-division sides, outside of the league schedule.
Pooling TV rights would further ameliorate the perceived negatives of a divisional structure. In Premier League football, all rights to domestic and overseas matches are sold equally before being divided up between teams. The top team gets only 1.5 times as much from the league as the bottom one does. While the Big Three reforms moved away from such a distribution model, pooling broadcasting rights for structured bilateral cricket and then dividing them up according to an agreed formula could yield benefits for all teams. "The likelihood in my view is that the whole would be worth more than the sum of the parts," Wildblood says. "Look at the Premier League. It sells the rights collectively and the value of the sum is greater than the sum of the individual parts. The same might well be true of cricket."
The divisional structure would take up about six months of the year, leaving the rest of the time free for bilateral or other cricket © Getty Images
If that is the case, then an overarching structure is much easier to envisage: with a bigger pie, all countries could be better off. "The history of bilaterals means there is no higher order to play for the vast majority of the games played. That robs interest in the sport, which translates into a lot of economic value left on the table," says Rohan Sajdeh, the author of Boston Consultancy Group's report on Test cricket in 2008. He argues that a structure would result in "greater value" in broadcasting rights. And while fans will always be far more likely to watch their own countries play, if England and India supporters, say, had a reason to care who won a series between South Africa and New Zealand, that could provide a further boost to broadcasting rights.
Variants on Richardson's idea of divisions are also possible. One alternative is two parallel groups of six, as opposed to one division below another, each playing the other sides in their group in two or three Tests at home and away over a four-year-cycle, giving a total of 20 or 30 structured matches. Playoffs to determine an overall winner and whether the leading teams in the Intercontinental Cup replaced the bottom-placed sides in the two groups would follow. This would avoid creating a gulf between those ranked sixth and seventh, although fewer Tests would be between evenly matched sides and a broadcasting distribution model would need to be agreed on so that teams' finances are not adversely affected by being drawn in a different group to India.
None of this is to suggest that a structure worthy of the name will prove a panacea to Test cricket. But if it were combined with playing more over weekends, day-night Tests, and innovative ticket schemes to allow supporters to come for a session, it would amount to a sustained effort to promote Test cricket.
The challenges to getting a proper structure for Test and ODI cricket are formidable. It would require coordination and trust between international boards of the sort that the game has seldom benefited from. A structure would have to be passed by the ICC's executive board (where three of the five votes are held by the Big Three) and then supported by seven of the ten Full Members. It could only be achieved by allowing the Big Three copious time to play each other regardless of their on-field performances; also, proper financial safeguards to appease mid-ranking Test nations; and by strengthening the Test fund. But if the individual boards were convinced that a new structure would result in more money, they might be inclined to vote it through. Few forces are more powerful than self-interest.
If a structure for international cricket does finally come to pass, it would be a realisation of Richardson's decade-long vision to give bilateral cricket context. Those who deride the ICC's chief executive as a lackey of the Big Three might yet be forced into a reappraisal.
Tim Wigmore is a freelance journalist and author of Second XI: Cricket in its Outposts
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.The International coverage hub
More interviews from TI7:
Bulba: "I want to find [what went wrong for us in the group stage]"
Mason: "I didn't know if I wanted to play Dota for a living"
When the letters OG are dropped in a conversation, Dota fans will immediately think of Johan "n0tail" SundsteinTal "Fly" Aizik or, the carry player and the captain who have been with the org since the beginning, or Gustav "s4" Magnusson, the TI championed who transferred over from Alliance to OG last year. But the truth is, one name is just as tied to OG's successes as its legendary players: Sébastien "Ceb" Debs.
Coming into TI7, OG carried four Major titles, more than any other team in Dota 2 and three of those four were won under the coaching of Mad. The former support player is highly praised for his analytical mind -- and with good reason -- and even though he'll likely never exit the booth as an Aegis-winning player, he very much intends to do so as coach.
Before OG play their Lower Bracket match against Infamous, we spoke to Mad about facing challenges OG never expected and the mythical creature that is the Dota 2 metagame.
* * *
After the group stage, you found yourself in the lower bracket, which most people would see as a disappointment. How do you deal with those expectations, because the mental mind game in Dota is very important. You’re facing Infamous, a team who has nothing to lose and everything to gain, and that makes them dangerous.
How do you prepare for that kind of team, the kind of team that will best-of-1 cheese you? Is there a certain mindset you need to get your players into compared to preparing for any other team?
That’s a very good question you’re asking, and I need to get the team to understand that we’re playing a team that has nothing to lose. And if we go into that match believing we have something to lose, they’re going to tear us apart, it happened to us last year vs TNC.
I believe there’s no coincidences in life, stuff happens because it’s meant to happen, and there’s a reason we got knocked out last year by TNC. They had nothing to lose, and we were terrified because any thought of us getting knocked out that early at TI as OG scared us. And they just slaughtered us, we never got a chance to win a game. Even when we were 15k ahead, it never felt like we were going to win the game. And I realized why they were playing, and I know why it happened. It’s something we’ve talked a lot about since last year, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our back is against the wall again, facing the same situation. It’s a test to see if we’ve learned from our mistakes, do we understand what happened last year, and if we do, we have to prove it.
I think this match [vs. Infamous] is a blessing.
I think this match is a blessing because if we prove ourselves, and we prove we’ve learned from last year, we’re going to build momentum and that’s what we want. We all know we’re good enough to win TI, no doubt about it. We also know we’re bad enough to be the worst team at this tournament. What matters is for us to approach Infamous and the other teams with the correct mindset, every team we have to face, they deserve all the respect in the world. We don’t think that we’re favorites to win this match, but we’re not scared of them.
Infamous is the kind of team that’s not afraid to just pick Huskar and run at you.
Exactly, we’re ready for anything at this point. And there’s a lot that we have to learn about ourselves, seeing how the group stage went. We have to humble ourselves to the point to where we’re willing to give up on whatever we think is right, even though we practiced it. It’s hard to give up on your practice, it’s a very natural thing to want to use the stuff you’ve practiced a lot before the tournament.
Your style at Kiev was very illusion based, heroes that created their own space and pushed towers, and then Icefrog took a nerf hammer to all the illusion heroes. As a result you’ve picked up heroes like Visage: still pushes lanes, a bit related to the illusion heroes in that your main hero can be doing whatever while creating space and forcing people to show. However it’s not the same finely tuned machine that was running in Kiev. Do you think there’s one small piece that needs to fall into place for everything to work?
How I look at it is that we’ve lost a lot after we understood the game really well, and we’re definitely missing something. I can’t get into details because I would be giving away too much, but what I can say is that we’re looking at things that we haven’t looked at before, or haven’t respected before.
And some teams have opened our eyes, I can tell you the biggest adjustment was before Game 2 against LFY, where we completely changed our approach to drafting and playing. And coincidence or not, that was probably the best game we’ve played here. We were able to defeat them pretty convincingly Game 2. So hopefully we learn from that. We’re playing some scrims later today [Sunday], and we have a lot of ideas we want to try out. When you’re missing something, and you see this TI meta that’s impossible to understand, and you’re thinking ‘why is this team doing this’ and then suddenly you see one thing and everything falls into place and makes sense.
I think I’ve figured it out, and I’m trying to get my team to the same page to see the same things I’ve seen. I can’t say what’s going to happen [on Monday], but how good a tournament we’ll have depends on what happens then.
Yeah, I call it a lightbulb moment, where suddenly everything falls into place and everything just clicks.
That’s where I got to yesterday, and hopefully it’s not the wrong idea.
Photo by: Epicenter
You’re a very strong team of players, very experienced. Do you get nervous trying these new things the day before you play an elimination match? Or are you confident enough in yourself as players to know you can play anything.
I don’t think we’re nervous about trying something new. Obviously there’s something in your head that tells you you haven’t practiced this to your 100%, but we don’t mind trying anything risky, like we’re not going to not play something because we haven’t played it. It’s good to play stuff you know fits you, but at the same time we have to pick to win these games. We’ve talked about the comfort hero picks, and we think that is not how you win this tournament, you’ll have to go outside that comfort area.
And that’s why playing a lot of pubs is important, because you need to be able to play a lot of heroes on maybe short notice, and you may have been playing that hero in a pub and not a scrim.
Yeah, we got some practice games going, because we want to test if our understanding of the game is correct, otherwise we wouldn’t be practicing.
We all know we’re good enough to win TI, no doubt about it. We also know we’re bad enough to be the worst team at this tournament.
Do you ever aspire to be part of a Wings-esque lineup, a team that can just play any hero despite if they’re “meta” or not? I think a lot of heroes are good but people just forget about them and why they’re good.
I don’t think we aspire to be this as a team, but I can tell you myself that if I were a captain I would want to be that kind of captain. I’d want to do the wings type of drafting, because I have a passion for all the heroes in the game, and there are a lot of heroes that I look at, and I have a lot of ideas about them.
I’ve never believed in the metagame, the word to me is bullshit, there’s never been a metagame. There’s just teams copying other teams, and other teams looking for counters. Of course you have patches where some heroes are really strong and you have to acknowledge that, and there are heroes you have to first phase ban. And Dota used to be imbalanced, like when Wisp came out that hero was so unbalanced and you just had to ban it. But where Dota is at now, the game is so balanced, many heroes are balanced, and I don’t think there’s a metagame. If a team just starts playing a hero tomorrow and they start succeeding with it, and other people start picking it, it doesn’t mean the hero got better.
It’s a cycle: if this hero is good, it means this heroes counters are good, and the heroes that are good with that hero becomes good, and those heroes counters become good. It keeps going in circles. I never have believed in the metagame, and I tell every team I go to that, and I’m very lonely in that method of thinking.
If you know Scant, he has the thought that pro players don’t know why something is good until after they’ve played it a bit -- when they start playing something, their only justification is that it “feels good”. They won’t be able to justify it until afterwards. But I think it’s important to be able to say “I think this hero is good because reasons x, y and z” is better than just being able to play the hero without justification.
Yeah I do, and I think you’re very right, it’s important to understand the nuances of a hero and what that hero does. It’s something we do a lot on OG. At the same time, you have to respect that there is a meta, that there is a hero teams are willing to pick, and if you’re sitting there thinking there is no metagame and you don’t respect it you will lose to it. It’s about finding a balance between the two.
Yeah, you can’t just walk into a match and say “I don’t expect anyone to pick Puck”, because they are going to pick Puck, everyone is going to pick Puck.
Yeah you have to respect that and take it into account, and it’s something we’re doing.
What I really respected about Wings is their understanding of the game, with strats and heroes. They understood Dota, they understood how the game fit together and what countered what. I go back to Wings replays sometimes when I’m thinking about a hero when I’m trying to anticipate. I’m seeing right now what people are doing, and I have to figure out a strategy against what they’re doing.
It’s going to get to that point where people are going to figure out what people are doing, and I want to be there already. I’ve always been like this as a captain: if you want to play that hero then play it. That’s the kind of mindset that I want to develop, and that’s how I think about the game personally, OG is a bit different.
Personally I was a big fan of Treant coming into this tournament, because I was watching the NA qualifiers, and I saw all these people dual lane cheesing. And my thought is “hey, I can pick this hero and just press E and save them” because all these ganks happen so slowly and Treant could save them so easily, and I’m disappointed I haven’t seen him yet.
Yeah you can still ruin someone’s lane with Treant Protector, but a lot of things have to come together. It’s really hard to know what a team is going to do something in advance, and at the end of the day what you do relies on what the enemy team does. And even if you think it’s not good, and you don’t understand why they did it, you still have to play around it and create a strategy or you’ll lose.
If people are picking Lich, and you had this strategy ready but it’s not good against Lich, you have to abandon that strategy until Lich stops being picked. And maybe Lich only started being picked because it’s good against that strategy, it’s very cyclical.George Washington’s extraordinary accomplishments set the stage for American liberty — so of course Progressives must reduce him to a racist slave owner.
No figure was more central to the birth of our nation, first in war, then as a Constitutional Republic, than George Washington. In 1776, with the Revolution by all accounts lost and our army in tatters, it was Washington who led a ragged band of men in history’s most audacious, decisive and pivotal raids at Trenton and Princeton. It was Washington who, through 1782, kept the military together under unimaginable adversity and who, at the end of the war, stopped a military coup by his unpaid officers. It was Washington in 1783 who, unlike almost all other military leaders throughout history, laid down his sword at the end of the war and bowed to civilian control of the government.
It was Washington, called from retirement in 1787, who presided over the drafting and passage of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. It was Washington who, in 1789, was unanimously elected to serve as our President. And it was Washington who, eight years later, stepped down as President, establishing a precedent of a peaceful and orderly transfer of power. He was, as Lord Byron later wrote, the Cinncinatus of the West.
Few people in history have succeeded under the adversity Washington faced. Even fewer accomplished so much in both war and peace. None but he accomplished those in the furtherance of freedom from government. He is one of the few historical figures that was truly indispensable. And yet...
Enter Drake Univ. Prof. Jennifer Harvey – she a progressive with an exquisitely fine tuned sense of social justice and white guilt. Writing an op-ed at the NYT, she asks “Are We Raising Racists?” It seems that her seven year old daughter came home from school “singing the praises of George Washington.” Ms. Harvey found herself “dismayed” at this “one dimensional” teaching of history. Well, history does indeed have countless dimensions, all of which contribute to the context and understanding of any particular event of note. But Ms. Harvey had only a very selective second dimension in mind:
[O]ne morning, [her daughter] overheard the news on our kitchen radio about a politician charged with ethics violations. “What’s that about?” she asked. I told her someone in the government had done something wrong, and she asked how an adult who was a leader could possibly do something bad. Unfortunately,” I responded, “a lot of our country’s leaders have done bad things.” When her eyes grew big and she said, “Like who and what did they do?” I knew I had my opportunity. Well,” I said, “you know how you’ve been running around here celebrating George Washington? We always talk about George Washington fighting for freedom. But George Washington also owned black people as slaves.” Her intrigue turned to horror.
If you know anything about Ms. Harvey, you know that is the reaction she wanted to get from her child. Talk about intellectual dishonesty. What she has done is teach her daughter a second, but in this case false, dimension to our history.
True, Washington owned slaves. But Ms. Harvey fails utterly to tell her child that in 1776 this was not an ethical issue in America, let alone anywhere else in the slave owning and slave selling world – i.e., the entire world at the time. That world included black slave owners and the blacks who sold the slaves, Native American slave owners, Muslim slave owners and slave sellers, and Muslim pirates who enslaved twice as many white Europeans in raids as the North American colonies ever imported of African slaves into North America. Nor did Ms. Harvey tell her child:
That Washington considered selling his slaves for economic reasons but opted against it because some had married and he did not want to break up the families. On several occasions in his later years, Washington expressed his opposition to slavery, including in a 1786 letter wherein he wrote “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see some plan adopted for the abolition” of slavery. When Washington died, he freed his slaves in his will, while also providing that those who were old or infirm or who otherwise chose to could stay on the plantation, and he created a trust to pay for their lifetime care. That for much of the Revolutionary War and after, Washington’s closest friend was Billy Lee, his black valet.
Thus it is all the more ludicrous when Ms. Harvey later proclaims “it’s more critical than ever that we talk about difficult and morally complex issues with our children.” No, she is feeding her daughter a narrative, not discussing complex issues. What makes this complex for Ms. Harvey is that she is trying to sell the narrative to her child in the absence of evidence of the racism that Ms. Harvey claims is pervasive.
White children are exposed to racism daily. If we parents don’t point it out, show how it works and teach why it is false, over time our children are more likely to accept racist messages at face value. When they see racial inequality — when the only doctors or teachers they see are white, or fewer kids in accelerated classes are black, for example — they won’t blame racism. Instead, they’ll blame people of color for somehow falling short.
Does teaching her daughter to jump immediately, unquestioningly and irrevocably to a “racism” conclusion sound like complex, critical thinking?
To progs such as Ms. Harvey, racism is original sin and unchanging in society. From that standpoint, everything, including our nation’s history, must be strained through the narrative. Of course, doing that to our history is particularly toxic, as it then delegitimizes all that our nation stands for. Our Constitution and all of our national precedents can all be tossed out in a New York second if the progs get the opportunity. We really are in a zero sum game.
Ms. Harvey is a very open and obvious example of all that is wrong with progressive left academia. But she is just one among countless many in the ivory towers spewing this Marxist toxin instead of teaching facts and critical thought. I don’t see how we address this problem short of a complete overhaul of higher education. And maybe intercession by CPS on behalf of Ms. Harvey’s daughter.
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TwitterTeammates say Brandon Meriweather isn’t a dirty player. (LM Otero/Associated Press)
Fellow Washington Redskins defensive backs expressed support Wednesday for suspended safety Brandon Meriweather.
Cornerbacks DeAngelo Hall and Josh Wilson said they do not believe that Meriweather, who was suspended for two games by the league Monday after being penalized twice Sunday for illegal hits on Chicago Bears receivers, is trying to hurt opposing players. Hall and Wilson also fired back at Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall and tight end Martellus Bennett for public comments they made about Meriweather.
“I don’t agree with other players coming out and saying things,” Wilson said. “It’s football, man. You signed up to play football. You signed up to get hit. Nobody is hitting and purposely trying to hurt anybody. Brandon is not that type of guy. He’s not that type of man. I don’t agree with other players coming and calling him out. He’s not a dirty guy.
“We wouldn’t call [former NFL safeties] Steve Atwater… Ronnie Lott or John Lynch a dirty guy. Those guys played football and that’s what we grew up watching. A guy comes and says he’s gonna punch you in the face, I don’t think that’s the way to handle a situation either. I don’t agree with the players coming out against him like he’s just a bad guy.”
Marshall said after Sunday’s game that Meriweather “needs to get suspended or taken out of the game completely.” Bennett said during a radio interview Monday, “I still want to punch him in the face.”
Hall said Wednesday of the Bears’ public comments: “That’s just something you don’t do. At the end of the day, nobody is out there trying to purposely hurt somebody else. Brandon Marshall and Brandon Meriweather grew up together. They’ve got a relationship beyond football. So I’m pretty sure B. Marsh, if he had to think about what he said, he probably wouldn’t have said [it] that way.
“And Martellus, I don’t know him personally, but he had a chance to say whatever he wanted to during the game, after the game, and the kid didn’t open his mouth. So no respect for a guy who wants to take a shot after the fact. If you want to take a shot, take a shot when you’re right there. No respect for a guy like that.”
Of Marshall’s comment that Meriweather perhaps should be kicked out of the league, Wilson said: “Brandon Marshall should be kicked out of the league for pushing off every time he gets to the top of the route. Every time a receiver comes in and cracks my safety, he should be kicked out of the league. The guy that hit Reed Doughty on the kickoff, when I can hear it from the sideline, nobody says anything about punching him in the face. You know, like, come on, man. That has nothing to do with anybody trying to do anything, having a vendetta against anybody. It’s not. We’re just out there trying to play football the best way we know how. Let the league decide what they’re gonna do. Let the refs throw the flags. And let’s just play the game.”
Meriweather’s appeal of his suspension was to be heard Wednesday. He was penalized Sunday for hits on Bears wide receivers Alshon Jeffery and Marshall.
“He’s out there playing football,” Wilson said. “The one with Jeffery — believe me, I had a front-row view. Jeffery has got his feet down, looked right at him and he hit him in the chest. I can’t say that’s a guy trying to be a bad guy. The one with Marshall, I’m again right there. Marshall ducks down. It’s hard to readjust. As a defensive player, when you’ve already decided that you’re gonna try to dislodge the ball through hitting the guy as hard as you can because that’s what we’re paid to do, when a guy ducks down, it’s hard to readjust. I can’t say that Brandon was trying to hurt anybody on any of these plays.
“That’s the league we live in right now. And we’ve got to understand that. You’ve just got to adjust. I feel like [Meriweather] is. He’s trying to be a better player, not doing the things he did in the past. But sometimes it’s hard to lose that reputation that he had.”
Brandon Meriweather delivers a hit on Alshon Jeffrey that results in a penalty on Sunday. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Said Hall: “I didn’t think the first one was a bad play at all. I didn’t think the second one was as outrageous as I think a lot of people think. I don’t think it was a hard hit at all…. Our guy [Doughty] got hit a lot harder than that in the game on an onside kick. If we want to protect guys, we need to protect every single player on the football field and not just the receivers or the tight ends or the quarterback. If it’s about protecting football players, we need to protect everybody because we get hit just as hard as a lot of other guys out there. But we don’t get any flags. We don’t get any sympathy for it. We just get up and keep trying to play or we sit out with concussions like Reed is doing today.”
Doughty, a Redskins safety, suffered a concussion Sunday on an onside kick by the Bears.
“I thought it was a little harsh,” Hall said of Meriweather’s suspension. “I don’t like to throw any other players under the bus. But there’s definitely been some other players out there who have made some pretty outrageous hits and plays and haven’t been suspended. So he’ll appeal it and hopefully we can get him back.”
Wilson said he does not take issue with the league’s efforts to promote player safety.
“I understand safety,” Wilson said. “I get safety. I understand what the league is doing. I just don’t agree with players coming out and trying to regulate the game. Let’s play the game. I understand they want to make it a better league. But I don’t think Brandon is a bad guy, a dirty guy or anything like that. |
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Debug Transient StateThe terrorists exchanged fire with security forces for nearly 12 hours (AFP Photo)
The three terrorists who stormed a police station in Punjab's Gurdaspur this morning "seemed tall, athletic and well-trained," said a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) commando of Punjab Police who was part of the counter-terror operation.The attackers - between 25 and 30 years of age, the SWAT commando said - hid on the second floor of an empty building in the police station complex and exchanged fire with security forces for 12 hours.The commando said one of the terrorists shifted his position constantly, leading them to believe for that there were more than three people holed up. "One person was shooting at us from different points giving the impression of many people being there. We finally realised there were only three and we managed to reach them," he said.The gun battle ended at about 5.30 pm with all three terrorists being shot dead. They wore Army fatigues which had no labels or tags that could identify them and had carried a small amount of food.The terrorists used grenades made in China, said sources, adding that three AK-47, at least 10 magazines and two navigation devices with GPS were also found.Very early on Monday morning, the terrorists fired at a public bus in Gurdaspur, near the Pakistan border, before car-jacking a Maruti 800, pulling up at the police station and opening fire with their automatic weapons.The terrorists killed four police officers and three civilians in today's attacks. This was the first major attack in Punjab in eight years. Government sources told NDTV that Pakistan's "ISI has been encouraging the revival of Khalistan militancy over the last year". About 50,000 people died in the militancy that swept through Punjab starting in 1983 as part of a violent demand for a separate Sikh homeland.March 12, 2013 | Written by Liam Cronin | Written by
Animals are thinking, feeling beings, and we shouldn’t eat them. The following are 16 reasons why:
1. Because this calf lives in a dirty, fly-infested veal crate.
2. Because this goat is about to be slaughtered.
3. Because these ducks, rescued from the foie gras industry, need their livers.
4. Because this rescued cow escaped from a burning transport truck bound for slaughter.
5. Because this cow isn’t so lucky.
6. Because this rescued chicken had her beak burned off without any painkillers.
7. Because this rescued rooster survived a factory farm that collapsed during Hurricane Katrina.
8. Because this pig just arrived at the slaughterhouse.
9. Because the mother-calf bond is instantaneous.
10. Because these other mother cows look on. They’ve all had their babies taken from them just hours after birth.
11. Because these cows don’t want their baby taken away.
12. Because she was taken away anyway.
13. Because calves raised for veal spend their short lives in a small pen and are then shipped to slaughter.
14. Because this calf can’t even walk to her prison.
15. Because this is where she’ll stay until she’s either slaughtered for veal or used for her milk.
16. Because later that day, the fly-covered calf we saw before is now dead.
Don’t support an industry that steals life and living away from the most vulnerable. Order your free vegan starter kit now and start living a cruelty-free lifestyle.
All images from We Animals.Israeli military refuses to provide explanation for attack; Adalah, Al Mezan appeals military advocate's decision not to launch criminal investigation.
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (Gaza) filed an appeal on 9 January 2017 against the decision by Israel's Military Advocate General (MAG) to refrain from conducting a criminal investigation into an August 2014 Israeli missile attack that killed an entire family during Israel's "Operation Protective Edge" in the Gaza Strip.
On the night of 22 August 2014, an Israeli warplane fired two missiles at a home belonging to the Abu Dahrouj family in central Gaza. The Israeli missile strike killed five family members: father Hayel Shehda Abed-Rabbo Abu Dahrouj, 28; mother, Huda Mohammed Khamis Abu Dahrouj, 27; their children Abdel Hadi Hayel Shehda Abu Dahrouj, 2, and Abdullah Hayel Shehda Abu Dahrouj, 3; and the father's aunt, Hayat Abed-Rabbo Suleiman Abu Dahrouj, 49. In addition, the air strike wounded multiple civilians, including Shehda Abed-Rabbo Abu Dahrouj, 67, Mohammed Suleiman Abu Dahrouj, 11, Abdel Hamid Suleiman Abu Dahrouj, 9, and caused extensive damage to neighboring homes.
The MAG recognized that the missile attack was carried out directly on a civilian residence but claimed that the intended target was a weapons warehouse located in an open area at a distance of approximately 100 meters from the Abu Dahrouj family home.
The Abu Dahrouj home and inset of family mourning poster seen following the Israeli air strike in August 2014. (Photo courtesy of Al Mezan)
According to a statement issued by the MAG, "for an unclear reason – likely an unexpected technical malfunction – the fired ordnance hit a structure at some distance from the target."
Adalah and Al Mezan filed the appeal on behalf of the Abu Dahrouj family. [CLICK HERE for more photos and information on the Abu Dahrouj family]
Adalah Attorney Muna Haddad stressed in the appeal that the details of the Israeli attack strongly suggest violations of international humanitarian law and therefore obligate the commencement of an independent criminal investigation.
"This incident was characterized by serious violations of the law of war forbidding intentional harm to civilians and civilian objects and forbidding attacks that do not differentiate between military and civilian targets," Attorney Haddad wrote in the appeal. "This was, for all intents and purposes, either a direct intentional attack against a civilian object and against civilians or, at the very least, an attack that was carried out in a reckless manner thus constituting a serious violation of international humanitarian law."
The Israeli attack on the Abu Dahrouj family is another example of the negligent manner in which the Israeli military makes decisions and executes attacks in densely-populated civilian areas, particularly before the target is determined to be of a military nature and that no disproportional "collateral damage" will be caused to civilians.
Moreover, the appeal raises deep doubts that the MAG conducted an impartial, effective, thorough examination of the incident as obligated by international law.
"We cannot ignore the MAG's use of vague phrasing terminology that leads to baseless conclusions lacking any real substance. When discussing the need to examine the legality of the attack, the MAG uses the word 'apparently,' highlighting the ambiguous, hesitant, and indecisive circumstances of the incident. This shows that there was no thorough and independent examination conducted that was sufficient to determine whether or not it was necessary to open an investigation."
The appeal also highlighted the fact that the MAG did not conduct even the most basic investigatory steps when considering the incident.
"It seems as if no evidence or testimony was collected from military authorities or from Palestinian witnesses who were at the scene, nor was the 'technical malfunction' that resulted in this tragic result examined, nor were the missiles themselves examined, nor was the question as to why two missiles were fired to begin with ever answered."
The Israeli military refused to provide any of the results of its probe nor to detail the reason for its decision to refuse to open a criminal investigation, claiming that all case materials are classified – in clear contravention of international standards of investigation which dictate independence, impartiality, effectiveness, promptness, and transparency.
Adalah and Al Mezan demand the MAG move to open an independent criminal investigation into the missile strike that killed five members of the Abu Dahrouj family. Like other innocent victims in Gaza, the Abu Dahrouj family have a right to justice and redress that must not be sacrificed for the sake of the Israeli military's persistent insistence on providing a shield of impunity to its personnel and commanders who are involved in such serious violations of international law.
READ: Adalah and Al Mezan’s appeal (Hebrew)
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Gaza Two Years On: 27 cases of suspected war crimes, 0 indictmentsWhen it comes to music players for Android we’re pretty much spoiled for choice, just type “music players” into search on the Play Store and you’ll see what I mean. We all have our favourites, and it’s probably safe to say that many of us have had more than one installed at any given time. I know I’ve sometimes had up to 6 or 7 on my devices, looking for that perfect player, but never actually settling on one, instead, having 2 or 3 that I keep returning to, one in particular….PowerAmp. It was always my favourite player, but then I found GMMP (GoneMAD Music Player). GMMP is a step closer to that perfect player, at least in my opinion. It gives you plenty of customization options, much like the ones you get in PowerAmp, plus a few nice extras. On first starting the app, it asks if you would like to customize the file paths it scans for media, an option all media players should have as far as I’m concerned, having random ringtones and game audio files popping up in my music player really annoys me, there’s no excuse for it.
So, you have the option of adding the folders you prefer, or choosing to skip whichever folders you like. Obviously, choosing a couple of dedicated music folders is simpler and less time consuming than selecting folders to ignore, but having a choice is always a good thing.
Having set the two folders I use on my external card, it’s a simple case of hitting scan. Even though I’m using a 64GB MicroSDXC which is close to half full, the scan is pretty quick. Up until now, PowerAmp was the only player I’d found that correctly displayed all of the ID3 tags on my music, but not anymore, so far GMMP has performed perfectly in that respect.
On a tablet this looks stunning, the default ICS Holo Dark skin just looks like it belongs. There are several free skins available to download, 7 of them colour variations of the Holo theme including a black & white one, plus 2 classic versions, reminiscent of the stock player of old. It looks equally good on a phone, though the lack of real estate doesn’t do it quite the same justice as a larger display.
Pick something to play, hit the Now Playing tab and you are presented with a view like this:
You have the choice of using a plain black background, the default background (visible in the pics above left), or you can use the actual album art as a background, which, while looking pretty cool, can make it difficult to discern the controls and information displayed in the upper right area depending on how garish the album art is. Tapping on a blank area of the screen zooms the album art on the right hand side of the screen and hides the player controls and seek bar.
The information displayed in the upper right is customizable to an impressive degree, with 20 possible choices for the 6 available slots, and is a very nice touch. You can select either text or icons for the slots themselves, which is handy on a smaller screen or in portrait mode.
You can also choose which tabs are displayed along the top, again, very handy for phones or just portrait mode. That’s most of the cosmetic stuff out of the way. GMMP like most players has it’s own EQ, though it allows you to use Androids own in-built EQ (2.3+) if you prefer. There are 17 presets in GMMP’s arsenal, plus a 5 band manual EQ that can be expanded to 10 band in the settings. Enough then for most tweakers.
Sound quality is great, using.flac’s with the default flat setting on the EQ it actually seems slightly louder and clearer than PowerAmp. GMMP supports gapless playback, which is a huge plus, and something the majority of players lack. You also have the option of removing the silence between tracks that have no gapless data. It’s one of the things that drew me to try it out in the first place. Gestures, and headset controls are all supported too. Volume adjust mode allows you to set default volumes for the onboard speaker, wired headsets and bluetooth. The buffer size can be adjusted in case you experience skipping during use while you are active. The priority of the decoding and DSP processing threads can also be adjusted. You can choose to preload the next track in steps of 1, 5, 10 or 20 seconds before the end of the current one. The app can be set to kill itself if idle for more than 5 minutes, though on occasion I found it didn’t actually kill the app, and you can also find a dedicated exit option in the menu.
If you like to use your device to listen to music as you fall asleep, you’ll find the sleep timer handy too. There are a wealth of options. You get 6 widgets to choose from, when GMMP is inactive the widget will display the GMMP logo, tap it once and the last played track and controls appear.
There are lockscreen options, though unfortunately setting it to bypass Android’s own swipe to unlock doesn’t work, on my 3 devices at least. Hopefully this will be addressed in future updates.
GoneMAD Music Player is available on the Play Store here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gonemad.gmmp&feature=search_result or directly from the developer’s blog here http://gonemadmusicplayer.blogspot.ie/. It’s a full feature timed trial, lasting 14 days, so grab it and give it a test for yourself. The full version can be unlocked for a mere €3.04, I actually upgraded after only 2 days of the trial.
It’s that good 😉"...now I'm going to jump off Foxconn, really leaving now, but you don't have to be sad, because Foxconn will pay a bit of money, this is all your son can repay you now."
At yesterday's annual shareholder meeting, Foxconn revealed that it'll no longer be compensating families of dead employees as a move to discourage further suicides. CEO Terry Gou reasoned by exhibiting evidence that showed the money -- an amount almost equivalent to ten years' worth of salary -- was a major motivation for the suicides. One such exhibit was a man's suicide letter that contained the following message for his parents:Gou also blamed a possible "Werther Effect" created by the news coverage, which might have led to six of the twelve suicides all taking place in May. Consequently, the company will be handing over its welfare management work to the local Chinese government, as it's unable to deal with too many social responsibilities.In the same meeting, the company made an unsurprising announcement that it's looking to relocate some manufacturing work, amid a worsened earnings forecast due to increased wages -- basic salary has gone up from ¥900 ($132) to ¥1,200 ($176), rising to as much as ¥2,000 ($293) for those who meet new performance criteria. This will involve setting up a fully automated facility in either Taiwan or Vietnam, while the existing Vietnamese plant will be receiving more orders. Chairman Samuel Chen also said that Foxconn will be working with its clients to share the load -- no further details on this, but we suspect Apple's rumored direct subsidies are part of the plan.Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss PDF: Does It REALLY Work?
In this Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss PDF review, we will be looking at a program that promises to help you lose a lot of fat in a sustainable, non-torture-like way.
The fat loss equation seems to be fairly simple. Your body uses fat for energy storage. If it does not get enough energy out of the food you eat, it uses up fat. There is an easy way to create the necessary calorie deficit — eat less, burn more. Yet somehow, this straightforward formula fails for nearly all dieters.
Men and women alike struggle and fail at fat loss all the time. After all, the current overweight rate in the U.S. is nearly 70%. Europe is doing a bit better but it is heading in a similar direction. While it would be naive to say that Greg’s program could solve our obesity epidemic, the stats clearly show that we are doing something wrong.
We will look into Greg’s solution a bit further on into this Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss PDF review.
For now, let’s check out why fat loss is not a mere calorie deficit sort of thing.
Why Most People Fail At Fat Loss
I would not say this for girls, but guys usually start their fitness journeys with one goal in mind. Get ripped.
Since the male body can grow muscle fairly easy, with a good exercise program guys will soon see some lifting gains. In general (this is true for women, too), building muscle is less difficult than losing fat.
And it makes sense if you take it from an evolutionary perspective.
For a man in the prehistoric era, a.k.a. the time when the human species evolved, fat was essential.
When you rely on hunting and gathering your food, you never really know when you could be left without dinner. Thus, paleolithic dudes that were better at storing energy for rainy days were at an advantage to their skinnier buddies. Over time this meant that it was their genes that got passed on. Since we are basically their grandchildren, we have those energy preserving mechanisms as well.
The body holds onto it’s energy reservoirs because it never knows when it might be starved.
If it gets enough nutrients and if it seems like a good idea to gain muscle (i.e. when you are training hard and you use your muscles more than before), then by all means, it will gain muscle. Both muscle and fat were valuable to the survival of our ancestors. This is why you have more mechanisms for preserving muscle and fat than you have for losing them.
Of course, you wouldn’t object to not losing muscle—but it is a whole different story with fat.
Fat Is Not Bad (So Stop Thinking It Is)
Many bodybuilders compete at very low body fat percentages and it is no wonder that they see all sorts of negative effects. One particularly nasty side effect of not having enough fat in your body are lower testosterone levels. When your testosterone goes down, your libido does, too. That is enough to put most guys off.
Just in case you telling yourself ‘No biggie, I don’t mind having my libido lower for a few weeks if it means I will get my dream body’, the other cool thing about testosterone is that it promotes protein synthesis.
Muscles are made out of protein. Testosterone is basically responsible for you gaining more muscle.
This is also why men are usually more muscular than women. But if your body is not producing enough testosterone, you will not be getting the same results from strength training as you did before. You will lose fat, but you will also stop gaining muscle.
One of my favorite things about the Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss PDF program is that the focus is not on demonizing fat. Greg’s goal is to get you as lean as possible without any negative effects on your health. What is more, he focuses a lot on fat loss that does not hinder muscle gain. He does not actually recommend a diet low in fat (which would also be a diet that leads to low testosterone) like most people do.
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So What Is The Nutrition Plan Then?
Intermittent Fasting.
I can feel the eye rolls already.
Yes, I am well-aware of how popular intermittent fasting is in the fitness community and how people seem to think it’s the Holy Grail of getting results. Still, bear with me, because it the nutrition of the Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss program is just about the best thing in it.
First off, I am not a huge fan of how Greg has kind of put his own definition of what intermittent fasting is. Because there is literally no universal definition of the term. The Kinobody version is to go 16 hours without food and only eat during an 8-hour interval. The way this works is during the fasting period your body depletes all of it’s glucose stores and it is forced to use up fat.
How Is Intermittent Fasting Different?
A conventional diet will have you eating once every 2-3 hours. Once you eat that carb-rich meal, your insulin will go up, your cells will get as much glucose as they can and the rest will be stored in your liver and muscles. If you happened to eat a larger meal, some of the energy might even go to fat cells. Anyhow, your insulin will stay up until the amount of glucose in your bloodstream starts to drop.
The trouble is that while your insulin is up, you can only get energy from glucose and not fat. This is because insulin actually inhibits the action of the hormone that tells your body to break down fat. You are perpetually craving another meal to raise your glucose and your fat stores remain untouched.
Intermittent fasting has your body deplete all of it’s glucose, lets it have some fat-breakdown time and then you are allowed to eat. So far, so good.
What I don’t particularly like is how Greg is somewhat strict about how long you are supposed to be fasting. My advice would be to take it a bit slower at first. It might seem tempting to test your limits and see if you can go 16 hours without eating. If it is so hard that it has you wanting to quit, then you are doing something wrong.
Other than that, I love how he advises you to do your cardio when fasted.
This skips you an entire step of having to deplete your glucose stores before you start burning fat. In terms of workout length, this saves you 20-25 minutes of cardio. I think this is actually how the Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss PDF program manages to give you better results.
It maximizes your workouts by shifting your diet pattern.
You can effortlessly achieve a calorie deficit, too. When you are eating fewer meals, you are also consuming fewer calories without being on a diet, per se.
Here Is Why You Will Love The Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss PDF Approach…
…Greg lets you have your favorite food!
Not your favorite diet food, he lets you have your favorite greasy, salty, crunchy piece of junk food every day if that is what you want. Or chocolate. Or candy. Literally whatever you want. You get to have it as a snack every day if you want to.
Personally, I would not do it. I know, I know.
Why would I miss an opportunity to enjoy my favorite food and still lose weight? Well, personally I am not a huge fan of the sugar crash and I happen to be a bit prone to binging.
For that reason, I now hardly have any junk food because I can’t have just a little. I start with chocolate and then I remember there is ice cream in the fridge, then I grab the chips. News flash: unhealthy food is addictive and super bad for you. Healthy food doesn’t taste bad. So even though the program allows it, the junky snacks are a no-no for me.
That being said, willpower is a muscle.
The cool thing about the Kinobody Agressive Fatloss PDF program is that it does not lead to fatigue — neither physical nor mental. By allowing you to micro-cheat, Greg makes sure you will stick to the plan. So, if you are not already off sugar (like I am), picking a tasty and not so healthy snack will actually be beneficial to your long-term results.
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Why Didn’t We Mention The Exercise?
In a review for a fitness program, we only discussed the food. This is because your diet will determine at least 70% of the results you get. It is worth mentioning though, that the Kinobody Aggressive Fatloss PDF exercise plan is really optimized for giving you the best fat loss. For instance, there are no super long moderate intensity sessions (that only fatigue you and they do nothing for metabolism).
It is mostly RPT instead.
RPT, if you are not familiar with the term, is where you begin with the heaviest weights for the first set of reps.
Then you decrease the weight and increase the reps. This supercharges the workout.
You start rested and you can use all the explosive strength your muscles are capable of for the first set. Then, as you fatigue, you start working on resistance (hence the increased weights). You gain muscle mass, strength, and resistance much quicker because your workouts are more intensive.
Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss PDF: The Verdict
The Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss PDF program is great.
Period. Is is worth buying?
Yes, for most people.
Unless you have the time to research and build a program yourself, you are better off relying on this one.
Not that Greg does not use techniques that are common knowledge but he has already created a balanced and effective program. It saves a lot of guesswork and trial & error.
So yup, I think it is totally worth it to spend $50 on a program that he put months (if not years) into creating and fine-tuning.
Got questions or comments about the Kinobody Aggressive Fat Loss PDF program? Leave them in the comments below.
-Sam
PS: If you’re like to start losing fat NOW, make sure to check out the Aggressive Fat Loss program here.
Get Instant AccessGiven that an OSU administrator posted an oddly sympathetic Facebook post urging compassion for Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an Ohio State student who injured 11 people with a car and a knife before being shot dead, this shouldn't come as too much of a shock, but here it is: a student group at Ohio State is now mourning Artan as a person of color who is a victim of police violence.
Seriously.
From The Lantern:
The event began with the reading of a eulogy for all those who are on the list, a reading of the individuals’ names, ages and the location of their death, followed by a moment of silence. “In some cases, the deceased may have committed acts of violence against others before they were killed. Perhaps they were domestic abusers, perhaps they threatened or killed others. This possibility is not something to shy away from. The protest against police brutality extends to the innocent and the guilty alike, because we know that no matter the crime, justice and due process don’t come from a cop’s bullet,” Abidi said while reading the eulogy. Among the names on the list was Artan. Those in attendance said they did not condone his actions, but some said they have compassion for the attacker, who expressed feelings of anxiety related to how he was perceived as a Muslim. “You can understand where an act of violence comes from without condoning that act of violence,” said Pranav Jani, an associate professor of English.
This begs the question: would these students have preferred that Artan not been shot by the police officer, but rather had been able to kill their classmates? Artan was an armed man on a rampage who had just run down a crowd of students. He had a "big-ass knife." ISIS took credit for the attack and Artan had posted "heated" messages on Facebook. He had reportedly purchased the knife days before the attack, so this was a carefully-planned event. Had the police officer not been nearby, innocent people would have died or been seriously injured. This shooting was not an act of police brutality, it was an act of heroism.
This is reminiscent of the time one of the Boston Marathon bombers was mourned by Mayor Bloomberg's group as a victim of gun violence. Thankfully, Mayors Against Illegal Guns had the common sense to realize that a terrorist fleeing police isn't a victim of anything, and apologized for including his name. It seems unlikely that Ohio State will follow their lead.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
During an interview on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) responded to Jeff Sessions’ testimony, by calling on the Attorney General to come before the Judiciary Committee so that the Minnesota Senator can question him.
Clip of Franken on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling for AG Sessions to resign. Sen. @alfranken says Sessions should testify before Senate Judiciary Cmte first: pic.twitter.com/OLDkHHuXuQ — The Last Word (@TheLastWord) June 14, 2017
Sen. Franken called out Sessions and virtually demanded that the Attorney General testify before the Judiciary Committee on multiple occasions during the interview. Franken didn’t join the calls for Sessions to resign, but he did say no less than three times that Sessions testify before the committee that he sits on.
Franken called Sessions’ answer convoluted and false and added that the Attorney General did not correct his false answer until a story ran in The Washington Post seven weeks later. Franken said that the Trump campaign and the administration have “collective amnesia” when it comes to meeting Russians, and they don’t act like people who have nothing to hide.
Sen. Franken was calling out the Attorney General. It was telling that after several appeals for Sessions to testify, Franken said that if the AG refuses he is going to appeal to Judiciary Committee Chairman and Ranking Member to compel him to testify.
In other words, Jeff Sessions isn’t going to be able to hide from Franken forever. Sooner or later, he is going to have to answer for the lies he told during his confirmation hearing.
Al Franken sounds like a man who is going to relentlessly pursue Sessions until he gets answers.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:ATTENTION chocolate-spread fans: there’s a new toast-topper on the block.
Taking spreads to a whole new level, Mars has just released spreadable Twix in the UK.
Yes, you heard right — those lucky Brits can put their Nutella aside and get ready to chow down on pure liquefied Twix-y tastiness.
The spread can be eaten on top of toast, biscuits or straight out of the jar with a spoon (if that’s the way you roll).
It’s described as a “smooth chocolatey spread, with a hint of caramel plus pieces of crunchy Twix biscuit”.
Mars has also released a Maltesers Teasers and a Bounty spread too.
According to Mars, the Twix spread works best as a topper for toast or crumpets.
The 200g jars are being sold for £2 ($3.78) at ASDA supermarkets in the UK.
Now we just need to campaign to get those delicious treats to Australia.
This article originally appeared on The Sun.In this post, we provide a download link to a free (German) eBook for your reading pleasure (if you can read German, that is): Komatsu Sakyô’s “Omeshi”. This is a German translation of a Japanese short story, so it doesn’t make much sense to write a post about this in English, soeverything below this paragraph will be in German. It might still be a good idea to convey a tiny bit of information in English, however: Komatsu Sakyô (1931-2011) (where “Komatsu” is the family name) was a Japanese science fiction author. “Omeshi” was first published in Japan’s S-Fマガジン (S-F Magazine) in 1964. As far as we know, this short story has never been translated into a western language before. We do not have the distribution rights for the Japanese version, and we do not have the rights to sell our translation for money. Nonetheless, donations are appreciated! If you don’t want to spend any money, it would be just as awesome (or even awesomer!) if you could tell possibly interested friends or acquaintances about Qiqitori, this blog, and/or about this eBook. Please note that we do not have the rights to pass on distribution rights of this eBook to you. This means that you shouldn’t just pass on the files you have downloaded here, but rather link to this blog post. We would license this eBook under a Creative Commons license if we could, but as far as we know, we can’t. :(
In diesem Blog-Eintrag stellen wir ein kostenloses eBook zur Verfügung: „Der Abruf“ von Komatsu Sakyô (1931-2011) (wobei Komatsu der Familienname ist), einem japanischen Science-Fiction-Autor. „Omeshi“ ist eine Kurzgeschichte und wurde das erste Mal im japanischen S-Fマガジン (S-F Magazine) im Jahre 1964 veröffentlicht. Nach unserem Wissen hat es bisher noch keine Übersetzungen in eine westliche Sprache gegeben. Wir sind leider nicht im Besitz der notwendigen Rechte, um die japanische Version zum kostenlosen Herunterladen zur Verfügung zu stellen, und die deutsche Version dürfen wir auch nur kostenlos anbieten, aber falls Sie merken, dass Ihnen das Lesen dieser Kurzgeschichte Spaß gemacht hat, würden wir uns um eine kleine Spende freuen. Noch besser wäre es jedoch, wenn Sie möglicherweise interessierte Freunde und Bekannte auf Qiqitori, dieses Blog und/oder dieses eBook aufmerksam machen könnten! Bitte beachten Sie, dass wir nicht im Besitz der Rechte sind, das Distributionsrecht dieser Übersetzung an Sie weiterzugeben. Das heißt, dass Sie möglicherweise Interessierten nicht die Datei selber, sondern einen Link zu diesem Blog-Eintrag geben sollten. Wir würden dieses eBook unter einer Creative-Commons-Lizenz veröffentlichen, wenn wir könnten, aber soweit wir wissen, dürfen wir das nicht. :(
Damit Sie dieses eBook auf möglichst angenehme Art und Weise lesen können, stellen wir es in verschiedenen Formaten zur Verfügung. Drücken Sie auf einen der folgenden Links, um das eBook herunterzuladen.
Aktuelle Versionsnummer: 1.0 für alle Formate.
Komatsu Sakyo – Der Abruf (PDF, A5-Format)
Komatsu Sakyo – Der Abruf (Mobipocket (.mobi), unter anderem für den Amazon Kindle)
Komatsu Sakyo – Der Abruf (EPUB, unter anderem für den Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo eReader, Sony Reader und viele eBook-Apps auf Smartphones)SALT LAKE CITY — A woman preparing to move from Utah to West Virginia for a new job had all of her belongings stolen and burned, according to friends.
"They lit it on fire and everything is destroyed. Her whole life in the back of the truck, destroyed," said friend and co-worker Josh Wall.
Beth Fisher, who worked as a pilot for AirMed at University Hospital and is a former member of the military, had packed all of her belongings in the back of a Budget moving van with a trailer towing her Subaru Legacy Outback behind it.
Between 9:40 p.m. Monday and 8 a.m. Tuesday, someone stole the moving van while it was in the parking lot of Springhill Suites, 12111 S. State, said Draper Police Sgt. Chad Carpenter.
About 7 a.m. Wednesday, the moving truck was found in an industrial area near 656 S. Fulton St. (3000 West) when a local business owner spotted it on fire.
Responding Salt Lake fire crews were initially concerned that the truck had a mobile meth lab in the back, said Salt Lake fire spokesman Jasen Asay. When the fire was extinguished, investigators found most of Fisher's possessions that were still in the back had been destroyed.
"All of her personal belongings, everything that has meaning to her has been taken. It's just sad to think that somebody who has helped saved countless lives with us over the years could have something so tragic happen to her," Wall said. "It's absolutely devastating."
Asay said friends of Fisher helped sort all the contents of the moving truck. Some items were believed to be salvageable, but most weren't, he said. The fire was believed to have started in the back. It was unknown Wednesday whether any accelerants were used.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Fisher's black 2005 Subaru, with Utah plate 388UJR, and the trailer it was on were still missing, Carpenter said.
Anyone with information can call Draper police at 801-840-4000. A gofundme site was established to help Fisher get back on her feet.
Contributing: Sandra Yi
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Photosctvottawa.ca
Ottawa police are using an unconventional method to crack down on drivers using handheld devices behind the wheel.
Officers have been patrolling intersections dressed as panhandlers to catch unsuspecting drivers as they break the law by using their phones.
"I mimic panhandling at the corner," said Cst. Dan Jesty. "It gets me in close to the vehicles. I can look inside to see if they're talking on a cell phone or texting on a cell phone."
Part of the costume is a cardboard sign. Instead of asking for change though, the sign identifies the officer as a member of the police force.
Once the disguised officer catches a distracted driver, they radio partners in nearby patrol cars who then pull the driver over.
"If you have a police officer standing in full uniform and a cruiser well you'd probably never pick up a person," said Jesty. "Blend in with the public, people feel at ease and the first thing they do is pick up that cell phone."
Drivers who were stopped in the operation had mixed reactions to the disguise.
"All I can say is it is clever," said driver Daniel Lachance. "I can't say anything else. They caught me. There it is. And here I am."
Others though were angered by the tactic. Allison Boyles said she was frightened when someone who she thought was a stranger approached her vehicle.
"In that moment, I reached for my phone hoping that sends a message to somebody approaching my vehicle," she said.
Boyles plans on disputing her ticket in court.
Ottawa police have caught 97 people for distracted driving since they began the undercover campaign on Monday. They've also issued 18 tickets for seatbelt violations.
With a report from CTV Ottawa's John HuaDive Brief:
The Federal Rail Administration (FRA) has announced its plans to replace the aging 1.4-mile Amtrak Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel at a cost of $4 billion, according to The Baltimore Sun.
The FRA identified three route options in its final environmental impact statement, but its preferred choice would see the new tunnel’s path be carved out underneath |
crisis, with its banking sector needing a bailout from its European partners in 2012.Everyone seems the loser from the Gulf Oil Spill with one exception -- the oil companies themselves, especially those with major production facilities onshore. The uncertainty of the governments policies toward offshore drilling and the 'temporary' moratorium that is shutting down dozens of offshore rigs pending further study is beginning to put serious upward pressure on oil prices. Today alone the price of oil has jumped near $2.00 per barrel.
Meanwhile, sitting there staring the government in the face, are 727 million barrels of oil in a filled-to-the-brim Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). Sitting there while our oil world is navigating, perhaps better said stumbling, through an unparalleled disaster.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve exists according to the Department of Energy's statement of purpose, "first and foremost, as an emergency response tool the President can use should the United States be confronted with an economically threatening disruption in oil supplies."
Duh!? If not now, then when?
Economically threatening? Can our precarious recovery, if it really exists, really survive another tax in the form of higher oil/gasoline prices at this time, on top of the enormous economic disruption along the Gulf Coast?
If the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is not put into play to balance out the distortions in oil prices resulting from the Gulf oil spill, what is the sense of the billions upon billions expended in purchasing and storing the oil in the first place? The SPR reserve should be drawn down at the very least until firm policies are formulated for future drilling and until we have a full accounting of the current damage incurred and a resolution of the spill now spewing forth.Story highlights Sunday is Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 82nd birthday
Social media memes mark the occasion
(CNN) It's no secret that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a young, liberal fanbase that shows its devotion in distinctly millennial ways.
Her positions on wage parity, same-sex marriage and women's rights (to name a few) have earned her the nickname "The Notorious R.B.G." thanks to a Tumblr of the same name dedicated to her. There are tattoos, muscle tees and YouTube serenades paying homage to the soft-spoken justice, who has been on the nation's highest bench for 21 years -- longer than some of her followers have been alive.
So it seems appropriate that her fans would celebrate her 82nd with social media memes, the Internet's favorite tool for honoring/mocking public figures. Here are some of the tributes wishing Justice Ginsburg a #NotoriousBday.
Wish the #NotoriousRBG a Happy Birthday! Sign our card now: http://t.co/mpOg6BqCTB — Kat Robertson (@mountainkat47) March 15, 2015
We ride for women who ride for women. Happy Birthday to Justice Ruth Ginsburg! pic.twitter.com/jM7nmgcqwS — Parlour Magazine (@ParlourMagazine) March 15, 2015HEARTS have reported a loss of £1.65 million last season – almost entirely due to a historic tax liability – but increased their turnover by almost £2m.
The club, who face an anxious wait to see how Lithuanian insolvency practitioners will act in relation to their debt to bankrupt Ukio Bankas, yesterday announced their headline financial figures for the year to 30 June, 2012.
In a statement on their official website, Hearts revealed turnover had gone up to £8.7m from £6.9m the previous season, with their debt standing at £24.7m after what they termed a “modest increase”.
They put this improvement down to their participation in the Europa League qualifying rounds, where they faced Tottenham, and their
William Hill Scottish Cup triumph.
Hearts players faced delays in wage payments throughout the period in question and PFA Scotland submitted an official complaint to the Scottish Premier League midway through the season.
The club also recorded a net gain of almost £2m in player trading thanks to the sale of Lee Wallace to Rangers and Eggert Jonsson to Wolves.
The club have included in the figures a £1.58m tax liability, but they did not start paying back this amount until agreeing a repayment plan with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in December last year.
Hearts also faced a winding-up order over a separate £450,000 tax bill around the same time, averting it with the help of a share issue which raised more than £1m.
Neither of those issues are reflected in the latest figures.
The club revealed they would hold their annual general meeting on 23 May but fans who purchased their stake during the October-December issue will not receive their shareholder packs until after that date and would only be “entitled” to attend future AGMs.
Earlier this week, Hearts assured supporters they were doing everything possible to trade normally in the wake of the collapse of Ukio Bankas, which is owed most of the club’s debt.
The bankruptcy court ruling in Kaunas last Thursday heightened fears that the club could face administration if the debt is called in over the coming weeks but yesterday’s statement took on an optimistic tone.
The club even expressed their desire to build a stadium that is “befitting of one of the biggest clubs in the United Kingdom”. Previous plans to boost Tynecastle’s capacity were shelved.
The statement added: “We continue, however, to work with the City of Edinburgh Council and business partners in order to deliver a stadium befitting of a top European football team playing in one of the world’s finest capital cities.”
Hearts stated that only a “realistic” offer would be considered by the supporters groups who are bidding to take control from UBIG, the investment group set up by Vladimir Romanov.
The statement continued: “The board can assure supporters that the club will only be sold on the basis of a constructive and realistic offer for the company and secondly, and as importantly, can prove that they have the resource, determination, and business acumen to allow Heart of Midlothian to prosper in future years.
“The board has, post-year-end, offered supporters the opportunity to take an increased share of
the club which could lead to an outright purchase of the club in the future.
“The club is delighted with the positive response received and this gives it confidence that supporter ownership can be a viable proposition for the club.
“We remain resolute and due to the commitment of all those associated with the club we are cautiously optimistic about the future of the business.”Edmonton has become the first Canadian city to buy its own mini weather radar station, hoping the high-tech equipment will minimize damage from severe rain storms before the pipes back up and manholes blow.
The egg-shaped canister is already installed on a rooftop in northwest Edmonton. It’s scanning the skies for 32 kilometres in every direction and will give city engineers far more and better quality data on each storm than they could get from Environment Canada or a rain gauge.
“For us, this is high-definition rainfall data,” said Steven Chan, senior hydraulic engineer with the city’s drainage department.
It won’t let them predict the storms. But will let them predict how different types of storms will affect the capacity of underground pipes underground. The radar data will feed into a computer model that will predict effects and immediately send instructions to the main control room.
That will allow operators to remotely adjust the pump stations, drain storage tanks or engage diversion chambers to better prepare for the onslaught.
“The goal is to make more capacity available,” Chan said. “The system is so interconnected. … Our main focus is to increase our knowledge about the capacity of our sewer network.”
Edmonton can be hit by severe storms in the summer. The last big, in July 2012, struck parts of Mill Woods and southwest Edmonton, causing caused an estimated $137 million in damage. Residents in Tweddle Place watched manhole covers blow straight up off the street before water flooded their streets and basements.
That storm dropped five centimetres of rain in 90 minutes and woke Edmonton up to the vulnerability of its aging drainage systems.
Edmonton’s radar system arrived in September and is at Campbell Scientific (Canada) Corp. near 131st Avenue and 145th Street while city officials learn to use and calibrate it. Chan is hoping for live data feeds starting in May. It will take at least a year of measuring storm and calibrating their computer models before they’ll be ready to take action on the data during a storm.
Edmonton is particularly vulnerable to flash floods because of how flat it is, said Daniel Jobin, chief executive with RadHyPS, the company that will maintain the radar. He thinks Edmonton is the first municipality in North America to buy one. Engineers typically rely on simple rain gauges.
Edmonton’s 30 rain gauges tend to underestimate the total rain fall because rain doesn’t fall consistently across a neighbourhood. And that’s a big deal, he said. “A good storm can produce millions of cubic metres of water very quickly. If you’re trying to avoid flooding, well that much water will end up at your treatment place.”
Jobin said the new $170,000 radar system is scanning the sky at least every five minutes and gives images with a resolution of 125 metres by 125 metres. That’s compared to the nearest Environment Canada station that’s 40 kilometres away. It scans the Edmonton sky every 10 minutes and gives a resolution one kilometre by one kilometre.
Once the full system is up and running, Chan hopes to offer the data to other municipalities around Edmonton to see if it can help with their infrastructure. He’ll also look at making it publicly available, like the city’s rain gauge data are, on the city’s open data website.
[email protected]
twitter.com/estoltePhiladelphia Police release surveillance video of an AK47 shooting that happened inside a gentleman's club. Read the full story here. (Published Wednesday, May 22, 2013)
Philadelphia Police say minutes after two men were kicked out of a gentleman's club, one of them returned, brandishing an AK-47.
Surveillance video released today shows the man, who police identify as Henry Pettigrew, running from the parking lot into the Purple Orchard, located at 61st and Passyunk Avenue, with the assault rifle in hand.
He slips and falls twice, before opening the door of the club and spraying gunfire inside.
One person was injured in the May 11 shooting, but police say that victim will survive.
The video also shows Pettigrew firing several shots at a car in the parking lot.
According to court records, Pettigrew was arrested in 2008 for a dozen charges-- including several charges involving firearms. All twelve of those charges against him were withdrawn.
The second suspect, who police are working to identify, is believed to have been the getaway driver who fled the scene in a light-colored sedan.
Pettigrew is considered armed and dangerous and police say to call 911 if you spot either suspect.House Appropriations Committee Votes to Fund Donald Trump’s Border Wall
According to Paul Ryan, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, the House Appropriations Committee just green-lit President Donald Trump’s $1.6 billion request for funding to begin construction of a wall along the southern border with Mexico.
Although this will not be enough to fund the wall to completion, it is a big step for an otherwise lethargic Republican Congress.
Ryan issued a statement, saying:
The purpose of our government is first and foremost to ensure the security of our nation. This week, the House will take up the appropriations package for national security priorities. It includes the appropriations bills for defense, military construction and veterans, energy and water, and the legislative branch.
Breaking News → the House just passed a bill funding package for our national security priorities. https://t.co/RN13KBobsS pic.twitter.com/QRtDdvjApH — Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) July 27, 2017
Paul Ryan issued a press release to clear up some information about what this vote means, quoting:
1. It fully funds President Trump’s FY2018 $1.6 billion request for a wall along our southern border.
2. It gives our service members a much-deserved pay raise—the largest military pay raise in eight years.
3. It takes the next step in our efforts to rebuild our military with a substantial increase for the Department of Defense.
4. It pays for updated equipment and weapons so that our men and women serving abroad are fully prepared for the ever-evolving threats of modern warfare and defense.
5. It funds military infrastructure so that our service members can be safe and prepared.
6. It takes care of our vets by providing the highest level of funding—ever—for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
7. It deters and defends against attacks by increasing funds for the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons program.
8. It authorizes the EPA to withdraw from the Obama administration’s disastrous Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule.
9. It increases funding for our Capitol Police, who bravely protect members of Congress, their staff, and visitors to our nation’s Capitol. This will increase security here at the Capitol and at home in our districts.
Although more could be done, this is a good step in the right direction.UPDATE: From Adam Schefter, Tuesday morning:
More definitive scans today but initial tests showed small fracture in Aaron Rodgers' collarbone that could sideline him about three weeks. — Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) November 5, 2013
Taylor Price, senior reporter covering the San Francisco 49ers, tweeted Monday night that Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers has a broken collarbone.
Aaron Rodgers reportedly suffered fractured left collarbone. — Taylor Price (@TaylorPrice49) November 5, 2013
And then, Zack Zaidman said on the radio that it was, indeed, a fracture.
.@ZachZaidman reporting Aaron Rodgers has a fractured collarbone. — Adam Hoge (@AdamHoge) November 5, 2013
Rodgers was sacked by Shea McClellin in Green Bay's opening drive against the Chicago Bears, and landed hard on his left shoulder. He was taken to the locker room a few minutes later for x-rays, but the team did not provide any updates other than he would not return to the game.
Price sent his tweet at the beginning of the 3rd quarter, or about 90 minutes after Rodgers went to the locker room. The others came within minutes after that.
We will provide more updates as they are available, but in the meantime, we send our thoughts to Rodgers. Such terrible news, if true, for one of the league's most talented quarterbacks. The NFC North will definitely be a little more interesting moving forward.
Veteran Seneca Wallace steps in for Rodgers at quarterback in the meantime.
Stay tuned...People hate hypocrites, as an interesting recent study from Yale University researchers found, not because their beliefs and actions are inconsistent, but because their moral proclamations imply—falsely—that they are more virtuous than they really are.
As the study authors described in a recent New York Times op-ed, people are more likely to believe that someone does not waste energy if he says “It is wrong to waste energy” than if he says “I do not waste energy.” We believe the moral assertions of hypocrites more, so we feel more let down when those assertions prove to be BS.
And, perhaps expectedly, we’re harder on hypocrites when they belong to the opposite group. Look at hypocrite from your own tribe, and the alternate explanations begin to creep in: “He’s still new at this!” In fact, when the leader of a group gets caught behaving hypocritically, members of that group will rally behind the hypocritical leader, rather than abandon him, according to Jeff Stone, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona.
“This might be one reason why we see some members of a political party continue to bolster their support for a leading politician from the party who is perceived as hypocritical,” Stone says—noting that’s the case for both sides of the aisle. “They have to support the politician because the group is such an important reflection of who they are and what they believe.”
Of course, the Twitter peanut gallery knows hypocrisy when it sees it, but do the hypocrites themselves? Do politicians—or regular people—realize when they’re contradicting themselves?
First, it’s worth noting there are reasons for going back on a statement other than hypocrisy, like having a weak will, changing one’s mind, or realizing a lofty idea is just not practical. Hypocrisy’s telltale sign, meanwhile, is that holier-than-thou attitude, the haughty tsk-tsking from the gutter. You can’t attack people personally.
Dan Stalder, a psychology professor at University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, told me that people don’t typically realize when they’re being hypocrites, and they usually don’t stop after they’re called out for it, either. Instead, they might deny the accusation so they can “stay in a state of hypocrisy,” he said. Less commonly, hypocrites might “acknowledge the inconsistency and either undo it or vow to do better.”
For example, Stalder says, Conway could explain her comments away by saying this is just her job, or by saying everyone in her business says contradictory things sometimes, or by “distorting perceptions of [her] own behavior—‘I'm not actually being hypocritical—this is different.’”
According to Daniel Effron, a professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, people underestimate how much they’ll be condemned for being a hypocrite. The condemnation is painful, and if it’s painful enough, people might try to resolve the inconsistency, either by, say, actually starting to recycle or by dropping the moralizing about separating plastics from cans.Town Relies On Troubled Youth Prison For Profits
Enlarge this image toggle caption Phoebe Ferguson for NPR Phoebe Ferguson for NPR
First in a two-part series on private prisons
Prisons are filled with stress and violence; without proper supervision they can revert to primitive places. That's what happened at Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi, an NPR news investigation has determined.
As the nation's largest juvenile prison, Walnut Grove houses 1,200 boys and young men in a sprawling one-story complex ringed by security fences about an hour's drive east of Jackson. The State of Mississippi pays a private corrections company to run the prison.
NPR's investigation found that allegations swirling around the prison raise the fundamental question of whether profits have distorted the mission of rehabilitating young inmates.
An Environment Of Violence
Walnut Grove "started out and it was formed to be something good for youth, but somewhere down the line it took a turn for the worse," said former inmate Clayborne Henderson, 27. He spent two years for kidnapping in "the Grove," as they call it, between his 19th and 21st birthdays. Now he's working at a car wash and taking community college courses in Jackson, trying to straighten out his life.
Enlarge this image toggle caption John Burnett/NPR John Burnett/NPR Walnut Grove, Mississippi
He and other former inmates describe an environment of violence inside the youth prison as so pervasive it became entertainment.
"It'd be like setting up a fight deal like you would with two dogs," Henderson said. "I did witness twice while I was at Walnut Grove, they actually bet on it. It was payday for the guards."
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU National Prison Project have filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 13 inmates against the prison operator, GEO Group, the prison administration and state officials. The complaint describes rampant contraband brought in by guards, sex between female guards and male inmates, inadequate medical care, prisoners held inhumanely in isolation, guards brutalizing inmates and inmate-on-inmate violence that was so brutal it led to brain damage.
"When we began investigating conditions inside this facility and seeing how these kids were living with the beat downs and the sexual abuse and violence and corruption, it became a no-brainer. It became something we had to do," said Sheila Bedi, the lead attorney on the case and deputy legal director for the SPLC.
Earlier this year, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice launched its own investigation into some of these charges. A spokesperson in Washington, D.C., said the probe is ongoing and declined to comment.
Questionable Prison Guards
Several former inmates who spoke to NPR say guards are a big part of the problem. Justin Bowling, who spent 17 months in the Grove in 2007 and 2008 for marijuana possession, says the prison is overrun with gangs, whose members include correctional officers.
A lot of times, the guards are in the same gang. If the inmates wanted something done, they got it. If they wanted a cell popped open to handle some business about fighting or something like that, it just pretty much happened.
"A lot of times, the guards are in the same gang. If the inmates wanted something done, they got it. If they wanted a cell popped open to handle some business about fighting or something like that, it just pretty much happened," Bowling said.
There's also a problem of too few guards. A state audit in 2005 and another one last year noted that staffing at Walnut Grove decreased even as the prisoner population increased.
According to the audit, in 2009 there were three inmate injuries a day. In the first six months of 2010 there was more than one fight a day, an assault on staff at least every other day and nine attempted suicides.
The Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, whose members represent youth facilities in all 50 states, reports that a guard-to-inmate ratio of 1 officer to 10 or 12 juvenile prisoners is common. The state audit of Walnut Grove found the guard-to-inmate ratio to be 1 to 60. Salaries are the largest expense of a correctional budget, and reducing staffing is typically a way to keep costs down.
Pablo Paez, vice president for corporate relations for GEO Group, based in Boca Raton, Fla., declined repeated requests by NPR to give the company's side of the story. He cited the pending lawsuit. GEO, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, is the nation's second largest prison corporation and had more than $1 billion in revenue last year.
Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps also declined repeated requests for an interview, citing the litigation. In a brief email in January, he wrote, "If staff... abused inmates they should be punished. However, I have no knowledge of them abusing inmates."
He added that the facility has improved since GEO took over last August. Two months later, his spokesperson confirmed in an email to NPR that the Department of Corrections had hired an independent consultant, experienced in fixing troubled lockups, to review operations at the Grove.
Ethel Heard is one of 100 parents who have banded together to pressure the state to make reforms at Walnut Grove. Her 21-year-old son, Tyrone, is serving time there for armed robbery.
"We know that our children have made mistakes," she said. "We're not asking that they open the cell doors and let our kids out. We're asking for them to have better treatment."
Creating A Distinct Youth Facility
When Walnut Grove opened 10 years ago it was a model youth facility. The idea was to get teenaged felons out of the notorious Parchman penitentiary and away from hardened criminals. As one young inmate said, "An old fool has lived his life, but a young fool can change."
But that's not how it has turned out, says state representative John Mayo, a member of the corrections committee that oversees Walnut Grove and other Mississippi prisons.
"To me, in my mind, it's just a prison," he said. "It's another adult prison."
Mayo says the Legislature kept raising the age of inmates sent there — from 18 all the way up to 22. He says he voted against the age increases.
Today, Walnut Grove is the only juvenile facility in the country that locks up 22-year-olds with 13-year-olds.
"Initially, it was to be 13- through 18-year-olds," Mayo said. "And then, quite frankly, that did not populate Walnut Grove to what I'm going to call a 'profitable operation.'"
Enlarge this image toggle caption Phoebe Ferguson for NPR Phoebe Ferguson for NPR
Two years ago, Walnut Grove added 500 beds to accommodate all the new prisoners. According to the 2008 and 2009 annual reports for Cornell Companies, the prison operator at the time, the expansion created an extra $3.4 million in revenue. GEO acquired Cornell last year.
George Cole, a career educator who served as principal of the prison school for four years, was at a legislative hearing held in January to look into alleged abuses at Walnut Grove.
"I thought when I went to Walnut Grove I was going to a place that was really interested in the rehabilitation of our children, but I found out quite the opposite. And I guess as a private facility they had to make money," Cole testified.
The hearing was heavily attended by inmates' parents, most of whom are black, and all of whom wore bright orange T-shirts that read, "Friends & Family Of Youth Incarcerated At Walnut Grove." Though invited, neither GEO nor the state corrections department sent a representative to the hearing.
Taking Educational Grant Money
NPR examined thousands of pages of public records associated with federal grants paid to the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. Records show that Warden Brick Tripp and his deputy wardens — already paid by GEO — have been receiving checks for $2,500 to $5,000 as "supplemental salaries" for administering federal Title 1 education funds.
"The warden and deputy warden had no dealings whatsoever with educating students," Cole stated emphatically in a phone interview.
The warden declined an interview request. Jeff Webb, the lawyer who represents the five-member Walnut Grove Correctional Authority, which writes the checks, says overseeing the grants is part of the warden's job, though he did not say why deputy wardens receive paycheck bonuses.
GEO Group's Paez was also asked why the prison administration was receiving supplementary paychecks from federal education grants, which have nothing to do with the civil rights lawsuit or Justice Department investigation. He said he had no comment.
NPR forwarded the paycheck supplements to the U.S. Department of Education and asked if this was normal. Chief of Communications Justin Hamilton said the agency is concerned and has referred the matter to its Office of Inspector General for investigation.
Support For Walnut Grove
Despite all the controversy, the youth prison has staunch defenders.
Dennise Jones-Putnam, municipal clerk of the town of Walnut Grove, says her nephew is in the prison boot camp program. "He will be one of the first ones to tell you that's the best thing that's ever happened to him. It's turned his life totally around," she said.
Enlarge this image toggle caption John Burnett/NPR John Burnett/NPR
As to why the kids are frequently placed on lockdown and fight with staff?
"Walnut Grove is not a day care," said the Rev. Justin Chaney, the prison chaplain there from 2007 to 2010. "I'm afraid a lot of people think it might be just a little detention center. It's maximum security. So yea, you do have those that can be rough."
Grady Sims, mayor of Walnut Grove, says he visits the prison frequently and knows the staff well. "I wouldn't interfere with the way they're operating it," he said. "They've done an excellent job."
Why The Prison Matters To The Town
The town of Walnut Grove is so small there's no stoplight or supermarket. In fact, inmates outnumber citizens 2 to 1. The prison just about saved this town from extinction. The 200 prison jobs helped fill the void when a shirt manufacturer and a glove maker closed and moved overseas several years ago.
The mayor's own vending company has 18 snack machines inside the prison.
"It's been a sweet deal for Walnut Grove," Sims said. Indeed, every month, the prison pays the town $15,000 in lieu of taxes — which comprises nearly 15 percent of its annual budget.
"For a small town, that's a lot of money," the mayor said, "and it helps us maintain a full-time police department that we wouldn't be able to afford without that income."
There's more.
GEO pays the Walnut Grove Correctional Authority — which sends the prison all of its grant money — $4,500 a month. Webb, the authority's lawyer, says the money is kept in escrow and rarely spent.
Finally, there's a full-time state corrections employee whose job is to monitor how the prison is run. His salary is reimbursed by GEO.
All of this raises the question: Is oversight of the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility negligent because it's a golden goose?
"All this community is just making so much money off Walnut Grove that no one wants to upset the applecart. Then that means they're not gonna make their money anymore," says State Representative Earle Banks, chairman of the state Juvenile Justice Committee. He called the recent hearing to investigate Walnut Grove. Banks, a plaintiff's lawyer, is suing the prison for wrongful death of an inmate.
That hands-off policy might be about to change.
"If there's mistreatment going on at Walnut Grove and the Justice Department finds that it is, they ought to sue the hell out of somebody," Mayo said. "I can't understand why we have to be sued to do what's right."
Aarti Shahani contributed to this NPR News investigation and report.Online sexual harassment criminalized in Egypt
Egypt’s outgoing Interim President Adly Mansour has issued his final law as President, criminalizing all forms of sexual harassment, regardless of the medium it occurs through.
The new law declares that those found guilty of verbal sexual harassment in a private or public place will be sentenced to a minimum of six months in prison and fined no less than EGP 3,000 ($US 420).
The amended law, under Article 306, defines verbal sexual harassment as occuring through stalking, using gestures or words or through modern means of communication (i.e. internet, mobile and more) or in any other means through actions that carry sexual or pornographic hints.
Meanwhile, repeat offenders face a punishment of a minimum of one year in jail and a fine of at least EGP 5,000 ($US 700). Those who repeat the act once more will face double the fine and jail sentence.
Crackdown on forcible sexual contact
A new article has also been issued into power, adding a harsher punishment to those found guilty of unwanted sexual contact. Violators of this law will be punished with a minimum of one year in prison and a fine between EGP 10,000 and EGP 20,000.
If such sexual contact is by an authority figure, whether it be in the work place, at school or even at home, then the punishment would be a prison sentence of at least two years and a fine between EGP 20,000 and EGP 50,000.
Battling the sexual harassment epidemic
Earlier this week, 23 male school students were arrested for harassing their female classmates during their end of year examinations.
Meanwhile, a man was sentenced to one year in prison and fined EGP 10,000 ($US 1,427) after he had been found guilty of sexually harassing a woman in Cairo under a draft of the new anti-sexual harassment law.
Sexual harassment continues to be an epidemic in Egypt with almost 99 percent of women surveyed in a report released April 2013 by the United Nations in collaboration with Egypt’s Demographic Centre and the National Planning Institute, have reported being sexually harassed.
Previously, Egypt had no specific law forbidding sexual harassment. However, some articles in the penal code were sometimes enforced in the occurrence of harassment cases.
Subscribe to our newsletterFrown of thorns.
Steve Bannon is a devout Catholic who believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But it’s the story of Christ’s descent into hell that occupies his mind most this Easter weekend.
The embattled chief strategist to President Donald Trump is a student of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, a 19th-century nun and German mystic whose visions, documented in The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, served as inspiration for The Passion of the Christ, the 2003 film by Mel Gibson (who, incidentally, Bannon once reportedly tried to work with on a movie about, among other things, Adolf Hitler and eugenics).
In that book, in a chapter favored by Bannon, this is how Emmerich describes hell: “All in this dreary abode tends to fill the mind with horror; not a word of comfort is heard or a consoling idea admitted; the one tremendous thought, that the justice of an all-powerful God inflicts on the damned nothing but what they have fully deserved, is the absorbing tremendous conviction which weighs down each heart.” Those poor souls in hell are notable not for their misfortune, but for their deservedness. (Coincidentally, I’m sure, Emmerich also predicts that Lucifer will be “unchained for a time fifty or sixty years before the year of Christ 2000”; Trump was born fifty-four years before, in 1946.)
Likewise in the White House, where Bannon has endured a cinematic and enthusiastically documented fall in recent weeks, there is a sense that he made his own dismal fate. “All of his problems today are of his own making,” one source with knowledge of the latest West Wing drama told me of Bannon. “Whether Bannon is gone or not is an open question. Whether he’s neutered? He’s neutered. There was a time he had influence. His influence has waned.”
Media reports have not been subtle in characterizing Bannon’s political future. The New York Times branded him “doomed” while Politico planned his funeral (while also predicting a “revenge saga”). But as with all things Trump, the truth may be at once less and more predictable than that. “You’re always up and down with Trump,” another source said. “There’s always gonna be a favorite.”
Trump is dissatisfied and looking to assign blame for a first 100 days in office defined by humiliation and defeat, according to half a dozen sources I’ve spoken to in recent days. At any given moment, what irks him might be the death of the health-care bill, or the early misstep on the travel ban, or, perhaps most painfully of all, the old media chatter that Bannon is, in the words of Time, “the great manipulator.” Trump attempted to dispel the latter perception last week in a remark to the New York Post, denying Bannon credit for the election victory against Hillary Clinton (“I’m my own strategist”). “There was obviously residual lagging effects for all the press that Steve got,” another source said. Trump mentioned to the Post an ominous threat to “straighten out” tensions between Bannon and the presumably untouchable Jared Kushner. Bannon also might be paying the price for press Trump believes, accurately or not, Bannon engineered: “He thinks Steve was leaking against Jared and Ivanka,” the source said. “If I was trying to fuck Steve? That’s what I would do.”
White House sources tell me the ideological split with Kushner is real but not quite the point — Bannon’s primary “gunfight” is with economic adviser Gary Cohn, a longtime Democrat whose influence has ballooned as Bannon has fallen out of favor with the president. The Goldman Sachs alums — Bannon was an investment banker there in the ’80s, Cohn was the COO until earlier this year — can comfortably “shoot the shit,” but mutual suspicion looms beneath the superficial friendliness. “Look, in all honesty? Steve has said things to me about Gary,” a source close to Bannon told me. “He’s never said one thing to me derogatory about Jared.”
“The president has started his love affair with Gary,” another source said, “Gary’s not aware of this: That love affair will end abruptly. Gary Cohn will step on a landmine.”
Many sources believe Bannon’s “fatal mistake” was choosing to stay out of early, top-tier hiring disputes, focusing instead on his big picture, anti-globalist agenda. But now Bannon stands alone — a self-styled radical seated at the table with ideological opponents Kushner and Cohn, who haven’t similarly been blamed for the turmoil of the first 100 days. Even White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, a natural ally to Bannon, has been working more closely with Kushner recently, a source said.
Another administration official close to Bannon added, “He’s an intellectual messiah, right? There’s a little bit of a messianic, I’m gonna cure all the ills of the United States — him and Trump are like that together. But what I do think is he’s realizing [that] he needs more allies.”
For his part, Bannon appears to be abiding, if nervously — with the official divulging that he’d been “rocked” by his abrupt change in status with the president, and the uncertainty he now faces.
Trump is, for instance, both prone to nostalgia — recently calling a former aide in the middle of the night to ask his advice on a Tweet — and also deeply unsentimental. “You could play golf with this guy for 40 years, have a heart attack on the ninth hole, he’ll pick up a new golf partner on the tenth hole like nothing happened. He doesn’t give a shit, okay? Doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you,” the official said, adding, “What happens with all these guys is they get very confident in their relationship with Trump and then Trump blasts them. As soon as you think you’re in Trump’s good graces and you start to be at ease and take that for granted, that’s when you get annihilated.”
But fittingly, given the holiday, in this week’s carnage was a miracle of sorts for Bannon. The president, according to multiple sources, has been distracted at least a bit by the military strikes in Syria and Afghanistan as well as his needling of North Korea. “He’s always been enamored of the generals,” a source close to him said. “The more medals you’re wearing on your chest, the more he likes you — that’s a danger.” For someone trying to keep a low profile in the White House, it might seem like welcome cover.Race figures in many of the new term’s most important cases, including two to be heard in October, and that seems to be part of a new trend. “The court hasn’t had a lot of cases recently dealing with race in the criminal justice system,” said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford.
In June, a dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor brought a new perspective to the issue. Citing James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” she insisted that the brutal history and contemporary reality of racism in the United States must play a role in the court’s analysis.
That dissent may prove influential, said Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “One item to keep an eye on this term,” he said, “is the extent |
begin to move to wrap up a tax bill. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib explains some factors standing in the way and how likely it is a bill will get passed by Christmas. Photo: Getty
Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas), who will lead the conference committee, said there were four or five options lawmakers were considering to address the concerns of lawmakers from high-tax states.
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That includes Ms. Walters’s suggestion of letting the $10,000 be used for income or property taxes. Mr. Brady said he is also considering how to adjust the tax bracket structure.
And he is considering whether the family and child tax credits in the House bill should be changed. The House bill starts phasing out those tax breaks at $115,000 for individuals and $230,000 for married couples. That is above current law, but below the Senate’s $500,000 threshold.
“All of those options and a few more are being discussed,” Mr. Brady said.
Republicans are also debating limits on the mortgage-interest deduction. The House voted to limit the mortgage-interest deduction to loans totaling up to $500,000, down from $1 million in current law, which is also the level preserved by the Senate. Californians in expensive real-estate markets are pushing for a higher mortgage-interest deduction.
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“I think it should be somewhere in between, that you can get it between or higher,” Mr. McCarthy said.
All of those changes would reduce revenue and Republicans would need to find money elsewhere to make up the difference.
Mr. McCarthy doesn’t sit on the House committee that will iron out differences between the House and Senate bills, but as a leader who played a key role in assembling the Republican majority that passed the legislation to begin with, he will be pivotal behind the scenes in the days ahead.
Write to Richard Rubin at [email protected] and Siobhan Hughes at [email protected] after third parties were able to demonstrate that Comcast was throttling some BitTorrent (and Lotus Notes, since fixed) traffic, the cable giant has quietly changed its terms of service. Comcast updated the ToS on January 25—the first update in two years, according to company spokesperson Charlie Douglas—to more explicitly spell out its policies on traffic management.
According to Section III of the revised ToS, Comcast "uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards." The company points out that it is not alone in the practice, saying that "all major" ISPs engage in some form of traffic shaping. Comcast does it to keep its subscribers from suffering the heartaches of "spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion, and other risks and degradations of service" and to "deliver the best possible Internet experience to all of its customers."
The revised language exactly mirrors that of the FCC's 2005 Internet Policy Statement, which allows ISPs to engage in "reasonable network management." At the same time, subscribers are entitled to run lawful applications and services, access their choice of lawful content, and hook up any hardware as long as it doesn't harm the network.
Not long after Comcast's traffic management practices came to light, the company was hit with a class-action lawsuit by a disgruntled subscriber. Online video provider Vuze complained to the FCC, and the Commission officially opened its investigation of the cable company in mid-January.
Since the investigation began, the FCC has been bombarded with comments from angry users. "If you so much as open a BitTorrent client on a computer on the Comcast network, your entire connection drops to almost a crawl," says one comment. Another user: "I have experienced this throttling of bandwidth in sharing open-source software, e.g. Knoppix and Open Office. Also I see considerable differences in speed ftp sessions vs. html. They are obviously limiting speed in ftp as well."
Comcast has denied throttling BitTorrent traffic, saying that the ISP just "delays" or "postpones" it on occasion. One analogy used by a Comcast executive was that of trying to make a phone call and getting a busy signal for a time, until the call actually goes through. A more accurate explanation of Comcast's use of TCP reset packets, to build on the phone analogy, would be talking on the phone with someone and then both of you hearing the other's voice saying "hang up." That's the effect of the forged reset packets: convincing the BitTorrent clients that the other(s) have stopped responding.
Douglas told Ars that the change in the ToS was made to better clarify the company's policies. "We updated the terms of service as part of our normal course of business," he said.
Comcast's decision to affirm its traffic management practices in the newly revised ToS is a welcome baby step towards greater transparency. Subscribers (disclosure: Comcast is my ISP) would love to see even more transparency from the company, which remains cagey when it comes to its nebulous usage caps as well as what type of traffic is liable to be "delayed."
Further readingBy Kim Chandler | Associated Press
MIDLAND CITY, Ala. — The wife of embattled Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore drew ridicule online after she declared that “one of our attorneys is a Jew,” and said some of their close friends are “Jewish and rabbis” while defending him against accusations that he doesn’t care for blacks or Jews.
Speaking at a campaign rally Monday night in Midland City, Alabama, Kayla Moore pointed out that her husband appointed the first black marshal to the state Supreme Court. She said they also have many friends who are black.
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But she raised the most eyebrows in her defense against claims that her husband, who’s a Republican, is anti-Semitic.
“Well, one of our attorneys is a Jew,” Kayla Moore said, pausing for effect and nodding before adding, “We have very close friends who are Jewish and rabbis and we also fellowship with them.”
People immediately reacted online, some expressing anger but many others made jokes. They mocked her for citing an association with a professional whom she and her husband pay to do work for them as a way to prove they don’t dislike Jewish people. Some said her comments echoed the “I have a black friend” comments often derisively attributed to people defending themselves against allegations of bigotry and racism.
Kayla Moore’s assertions were just the latest flashpoint for controversy in a campaign that’s been rocked by accusations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls when her husband was in his 30s. He’s running against Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s special election.
Associated Press writer Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this story.Popular Science names ‘Power Over Wi-Fi’ one of the year’s game-changing technologies
Jennifer Langston UW News
University of Washington engineers have developed a novel technology that uses a Wi-Fi router — a source of ubiquitous but untapped energy in indoor environments — to power devices.
The Power Over Wi-Fi (PoWiFi) system is one of the most innovative and game-changing technologies of the year, according to Popular Science, which included it in the magazine’s annual “Best of What’s New 2015” awards announced Wednesday.
The technology made headlines earlier this year when researchers published an online paper showing how they harvested energy from Wi-Fi signals to power a simple temperature sensor, a low-resolution grayscale camera and a charger for a Jawbone activity tracking bracelet.
The final paper will be presented in December at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CoNEXT 2015 conference in Heidelberg, Germany, on emerging networking experiments and technologies.
“For the first time we’ve shown that you can use Wi-Fi devices to power the sensors in cameras and other devices,” said lead author Vamsi Talla, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student. “We also made a system that can co-exist as a Wi-Fi router and a power source — it doesn’t degrade the quality of your Wi-Fi signals while it’s powering devices.”
“The Best of What’s New Awards honor the innovations that surprise and amaze us — those that challenge our view of what’s possible in the future. The 100 winners — chosen from among thousands of nominees — are each a revolution in their respective fields.” — Cliff Ransom, Editor-in-Chief of Popular Science
PoWiFi could help enable development of the Internet of Things, where small computing sensors are embedded in everyday objects like cell phones, coffee makers, washing machines, air conditioners, mobile devices, allowing those devices to “talk” to each other. But one major challenge is how to energize those low-power sensors and actuators without needing to plug them into a power source as they become smaller and more numerous.
The team of UW computer science and electrical engineers found that the peak energy contained in untapped, ambient Wi-Fi signals often came close to meeting the operating requirements for some low-power devices. But because the signals are sent intermittently, energy “leaked” out of the system during silent periods.
The team fixed that problem by optimizing a router to send out superfluous “power packets” on Wi-Fi channels not currently in use — essentially beefing up the Wi-Fi signal for power delivery — without affecting the quality and speed of data transmission. The team also developed sensors that can be integrated in devices to harvest the power.
In their proof-of-concept experiments, the team demonstrated that the PoWiFi system could wirelessly power a grayscale, low-power Omnivision VGA camera from 17 feet away, allowing it to store enough energy to capture an image every 35 minutes.
It also re-charged the battery of a Jawbone Up24 wearable fitness tracker from zero to 41 percent in 2.5 hours.
The researchers also tested the PoWiFi system in six homes. Users typically didn’t notice deterioration in web page loading or video streaming experiences, showing the technology could successfully deliver power via Wi-Fi in real-world conditions without degrading network performance.
Although initial experiments harvested relatively small amounts of power, the UW team believes there’s opportunity for make the PoWiFi system more efficient and robust.
“In the future, PoWi-Fi could leverage technology power scaling to further improve the efficiency of the system to enable operation at larger distances and power numerous more sensors and applications,” said co-author Shyam Gollakota, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
The research is funded by the National Science Foundation, Qualcomm and the UW.
Co-authors include UW electrical engineering doctoral students Bryce Kellogg and Saman Naderiparizi, research associate Benjamin Ransford and associate professor of computer science & engineering and of electrical engineering Joshua Smith.
For more information, contact Talla at [email protected] Nena Perry-Brown
Rendering of planned Busboys and Poets in Anacostia Rendering of planned Busboys and Poets in Anacostia
Six months ago, UrbanTurf reported that the Anacostia Busboys and Poets would likely open at the end of this year or early next. However, that estimate was based on build-out of the restaurant beginning around September — and it has yet to begin.
Landlord and nonprofit partner the Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative is still at work preparing the building at 2004-2010 Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE (map) for tenancy, and owner-restaurateur Andy Shallal has informed UrbanTurf that he’s still waiting for an update on when he’ll be able to begin building out the restaurant.
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With the build-out process taking roughly 4-5 months, the first Busboys and Poets restaurant east of the Anacostia River may not open until some time in the spring. Meanwhile, the swelling development pipeline in the neighborhood means the restaurant will likely be serving a larger population than expected when it was first announced.
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This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/anacostias_busboys_and_poets_opening_date_likely_pushed_back/13233Nintendo is discontinuing the NES Classic Edition, a plug-and-play console that became popular with collectors as soon as it launched last fall.
A Nintendo representative confirmed that the last shipments of the NES Classic Editions will hit stores this month. Once that stock dries up, retailers will not receive any additional new consoles.
Throughout April, NOA territories will receive the last shipments of Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition systems for this year. We encourage anyone interested in obtaining this system to check with retail outlets regarding availability. We understand that it has been difficult for many consumers to find a system, and for that we apologize. We have paid close attention to consumer feedback, and we greatly appreciate the incredible level of consumer interest and support for this product.
This was the plan all along, according to Nintendo in a statement to IGN.
“NES Classic Edition wasn’t intended to be an ongoing, long-term product. However, due to high demand, we did add extra shipments to our original plans,” it told IGN.
Those extra shipments never made it any easier to purchase the NES Classic Edition. Prices skyrocketed on reseller websites throughout the hardware’s short life. Any time a retailer received a limited quantity in stock, the entire shipment would sell out in minutes.
Along with the NES Classic Edition systems, Nintendo will also discontinue the NES Classic Controller. The peripheral is sold separately and compatible with both Wii and Wii U as well. It plugs into the Wii Remote to be used for NES Virtual Console games.
Considering the difficulty in procuring an NES Classic Edition, Nintendo managed to sell an impressive 1.5 million units as of late January and was increasing production.
Update: The Famicom Classic Edition, the Japanese version of the mini-NES, has also ended production. Yet Nintendo phrased this announcement in an interesting way on its Japanese website:
This product has ended production for now. When production is being resumed, we will tell you on our website.
There’s no telling whether this is a “temporary” discontinuation or a permanent one, but that the company is leaving room open for a possible return is curious.
A LOOK AT THE NINTENDO NES CLASSICSan Francisco is a weird magnet for poop. Travel around the city in the grimmest of Easter Egg hunts, and you'll find turds basking on sidewalks, chilling in flower gardens, gumming up subway escalators—hell, you'll even find them littering the roof of a three-story building with no roof access.
I assumed upon moving here this was the marking of irresponsible dog owners. I wish I could still believe that. But Jennifer Wong has torn the brown veil asunder with "(Human) Wasteland," a revolting map of all the anthropogenic excrement around San Francisco.
Wong's venture into crappy cartography began with her needing a hack-week project for her company, HotPads. So the San Francisco native scoured the web for "cool" data sets, and found that the Department of Public Works, for whatever reason, keeps records of sidewalk cleanings for reason of "human waste or urine."
"Honestly, the data inspired me," she emails.
Unfortunately, Wong was shortchanged on several years of poop records. "DataSF's site said that they have information from 2008, but when I started processing it, I found that I only had six months' worth," she says. But it was enough to craft a map of the fecal landscape for part of 2013, shaded in the disgusting hues of an unflushed toilet. You can view the poo sightings as squishy piles (June 2013 is shown above), or as this heat map distressingly akin to an earthy stain:
Locals won't be surprised that the densest cluster of dung lies in the notoriously filthy Tenderloin. A healthy trickle descends into Mission, too, and smaller spots defile Chinatown and western Haight-Ashbury. If you want to know the situation on your specific block, enter an address into the map's search feature and it will attempt to answer the question: "Will I Step in Human Poop?"Sunda pangolin mum with her pangopup
By Bec Crew |
Contributor Bec Crew Becky Crew is a Sydney-based science communicator with a love for weird and wonderful animals. From strange behaviours and special adaptations to newly discovered species and the researchers who find them, her topics celebrate how alien yet relatable so many of the creatures that live amongst us can be.
WHAT AN ADORABLE family, walking around looking like two lovely pinecones come to life. This pangolin mum will no doubt take great care of her young, born in May 2014 at the Bali Zoo in Indonesia.
No one really knows for sure, but it’s thought that with each pregnancy, pangolins usually only give birth to a single offspring – often called a ‘pangopup’ – although a few very rare cases of twins have been reported.
There are just eight species of pangolins in the world, and this one is the Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), found in the forests of Southeast Asia, including in Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and Singapore.
Very little is known about this curious species – they’re nocturnal and shy, and very sensitive to the signs of approaching humans. And with good reason – just this week the IUCN Red List bumped their risk of extinction up to critically endangered. All eight species of pangolin are now threatened with extinction, thanks to an illegal demand for their flesh and scales.
Which is of course a travesty, because to lose any one of them would be to lose one of the world’s strangest, most wonderfully adapted creatures.
Sunda Pangolins critically endangered
Everything about them is in aid of collecting their absolute favourite things – ants and termites. They have a conical head and a long, sticky tongue for poking into submerged nests, and zero teeth to get in the way.
They’ve got huge, powerful claws for digging their prey out of the ground and cracking open ant nests and termite mounds like a melon. And their peculiar keratinous scales provide the perfect shield against the stinging bites of their prey.
But what of all those missing teeth? Just as echidnas have keratinous spines, or ‘teeth’, on their tongues and palates to help grind up their insect prey, the stomach lining of a pangolin is equipped with scores of similar tiny spines, and together with a few ingested pebbles, they make digestion a breeze.
“One of many.
A new poll shows that support for removing President Trump is building. Four in ten Americans favor Trump’s impeachment, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, up 33 percent from just 6 months ago. And this poll was conducted before his controversial response to the events in Charlottesville.
Unsurprisingly, support for the idea is split along party lines. Nearly three-quarters of Democrats — 72 percent — support impeaching Trump, while only 7 percent of Republicans are onboard. Thirty-eight percent of independents say it’s time to remove him from office.
The survey, which was conducted from August 2 to August 8 (the Charlottesville protests were August 11 and 12), found that many more women than men are ready to boot Trump from office. While only 32 percent of men said Trump should be impeached, 47 percent of women said he should go.
As support for Trump’s impeachment grows across the country, Democrats in Congress continue to warm to the idea. Some, such as representatives Maxine Waters and Al Green, have been beating this drum for months. But gradually, they’re winning over more of their colleagues. Last month, Representative Brad Sherman formally introduced articles of impeachment for Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey. This week, representatives Gwen Moore and Jackie Speier called for Trump to be removed from office, and Tennessee’s representative Steve Cohen announced plans to introduce articles of impeachment based on his defense of neo-Nazis in Virginia.
These Democrats are a long way from their efforts being taken seriously, but as this poll shows, they have the support of the majority of their constituents. And if the trend continues, they’ll soon have the support of the majority of the nation.On Syria’s digital battlefield, hackers loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are defeating the rebels' cyber militias.
Just as the Syrian opposition leans on the West to supply weapons and other military aid, rebel hackers depend on the international community to help bolster their tactics.
But even as the conflict reaches new stages of violence – more than 70,000 people have been killed so far – support among international hacker communities is waning.
Last year, rebels enjoyed massive support from international hacker collectives like Anonymous, which launched several attacks on the Assad government. Early in 2012, Anonymous said it accessed several regime email accounts, including an account belonging to the Syrian president. Anonymous renewed their pledge to support Syrian hackers last November as the Assad regime threatened to shut down internet access across the country.
But after several arrests and convictions, Anonymous’ OpSyria seems to have ground to a halt. Without wider international support, Assad's Syrian Electronic Army’s dominion in the Syrian internet war is all but unchallenged.
In recent weeks, the Syrian Electronic Army has launched a number of successful campaigns, seizing control of social media accounts belonging to a broad range of news organizations and nonprofit foundations. The Syrian Electronic Army says western news organizations are outlets for Syrian rebel propaganda.
More from GlobalPost: CFAA: Some in Congress join fight to reform cybercrime law
On Thursday, the Syrian Electronic Army continued their string of high profile hacks when they took control of several BBC Twitter feeds, including @BBCWeather, @BBCArabicOnline and @BBCRadioUlster.
“The Syrian Electronic Army Hacked Today BBC Network accounts on Twitter and that came in response to what BBC practiced of lies and fabrication of news and in addition to the bias to the bloody opposition...,” read a statement from the Syrian Electronic Army, which claimed responsibility for the security breach.
Last week, the Syrian Electronic Army also gained access to an administrator account for Human Right Watch, calling the organization’s report that Assad is using cluster munitions “false."
This year alone, the Syrian Electronic Army hacked social media platforms used by the Qatar Foundation, France 24, Deutsche Welle, AFP and Sky News.
The Syrian rebels are partly hamstrung by a lack of electricity and technology. Their numbers, too, have been depleted as Assad forces make arrests, aided by the work of the Syrian Electronic Army, which tracks dissent on Facebook.
More from GlobalPost: Pro-Assad hackers take over BBC Weather on Twitter
To protect their ranks, rebel hackers are breaking into their allies’ Facebook accounts to remove anti-regime media.
"We replaced the flag of the revolution with pornography," rebel hacker Ahmed Heider told NPR. "Like pictures, you know, to keep the investigator busy."
As the toll of the fighting ravages Syrian infrastructure, anti-regime hackers are struggling to stay active on the digital front in Syria’s civil war. Heider, a member of a rebel hacker collective known as Pirates of Aleppo, is now living in Turkey.
More from GlobalPost: Activists rally to support Matthew Keys, claiming he is a victim of CFAA
"Not alone — no one can take an [Syrian Electronic] army alone," Heider told NPR.Delhi is the most crowded city in India. People work here full day in their office or shop. They have very much hectic schedule full day. So, they wants some refreshment and relax from routine life of Delhi. Local people mostly visited city tourist attractions. So, I have compiled list of best weekend getaways from Delhi. I have tried to give untouched and virgin tourist places. It means We have provided here mostly unexplored, unusual and unique weekend locations. If you are still looking for tourist attractions in Delhi then refer this article.
10 Best Weekend Getaways from Delhi for Family Trip, Friends Group Trip and More
1. Barog, Himachal Pradesh
Barog is a small hill station located in Solan district of Himachal Pradesh state. It is perfect weekend holiday destination for Delhi people. It is just 293 kms (approx.) far away from the center of Delhi. It takes roughly 4-5 hours of road journey. Shimal is also just 65 kms away from Barog.
Barog is the best location if you are looking for weekend getaway from Delhi heat in summer. Weather of Barog is very cool due to hill station. It is also perfect place for couples and love birds. Temperate ranges between 10 to 23 degree in summer. So, it is one of the coolest place near Delhi. The best time to visit Barog is April to July to enjoy weekend.
2. Bharatpur, Rajasthan
Bharatpur is the perfect destination if you are looking for weekend getaway from Delhi within 250 kms. Bharatpur is located in Brij region of Rajasthan state. Bharatpur is also included in National Capital Region (NCR) recently. Bharatpur is also known as Lohagarh and Eastern Gateway to Rajasthan.
Keoladeo National Park is the major tourist attraction in city. Keoladeo Ghana National Park has been declared as UNESCO World Heritage Site. Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Sikandra can also be included in your weekend getaways from Delhi. All these places are very near with each other.
The best time to visit Bharatpur is August to November and October to February to see bird sanctuary. Delhi to Bharatpur distance is 223 km. You can reach Bharatpur within 3.5-4 hours by driving a car/bus (approx.) from Delhi.
3. Jim Corbett National Park
Jim Corbett National Park is the oldest national park in India. It is located in Nainital of Uttarakhand (Uttaranchal) state. Opening timings of park 7:30 to 10:30 AM and 2:30 to 6:30 PM. Formerly it was known as “Hailey National Park”, established in 1936. Park’s aim was to protect endangered Bengal tiger. The park is opens throughout the year.
Park is one of the most visited tourist attraction in the state. Almost more than 70,000 visitors come to the park every season. It is the perfect weekend getaway for your kids. Children loves to see tigers, birds and other animals which they can’t able to see in Delhi. Greenery is the best if you arrives in the park during monsoon season.
There are lots of tour operators in Delhi provides special packages and deals for this tour. Jim Corbett National Park is falls within 300 km destination. It is 295 kms far away from New Delhi. Visit Wikipedia page of Jim Corbett National Park here for further details.
4. Alwar, Rajasthan
Alwar is one of the nearest and closest tourist destination from Delhi. Alwar was royal state before Indian Independence. So, obesiovly you will find lots of historical sites in the city. Major tourist attractions in Alwar is Alwar Fort, Bharathari temple, Sariska Place, City Palace, Moosi Rani Ki chhatri, TalVraksh, Palace Museum and others. Bhangarh fort is also located in the Alwar, which is described as the most haunted place in India. The best time to visit Alwar is starting from September and ends on March. During these months, Alwar has pleasant weather and environment for tourists. Try to avoid Alwar during summer due to hot weather/temperature.
Alwar is just only 168 kms far away from Delhi. So, people who is looking for places within 2-3 hours, Alwar is the ideal place for them. We can consider Alwar as the family picnic destination for weekends. If you own a car, then visiting Alwar by car from Delhi is the best way to save your time.
5. Rishikesh, Uttarakhand
Are you finding a place for religious tour in weekend? Rishikesh is the best place for Hindu followers to get blessings. It is the perfect place for Yoga and peaceful weekend. Rishikesh has best tourist places such as Gita Bhavan, Triveni ghat, Swarg Ashram, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Ashram and so on. If you love adventure then Rishikesh is the place where you can do rafting, bungee jumping, camping and trekking. Best time to visit Rishikesh is between March and April for pleasant weather.
Delhi to Rishikesh distance is just 237 kms which can be completed within 5 hours (approx). It is also one of the cheapest destination for budget travelers. There are so many places in Rishikesh where you can stay with normal rates. If you didn’t own a car or don’t want to travel in a car then train is the best way to reach there. There are so many Indian Railways trains are running from Delhi to Rishikesh. You just need to book your ticket in advance to get confirmed reservation.
6. Jaipur, Rajasthan
Jaipur is well known royal state in India. If you have already visited Jaipur’s forts, royal palaces and heritage hotels; still there are many places left for you. Jaipur’s weekend destinations such as Jantar Mantar, Albert Hall Museum, Govind Dev ji Temple, Raj Mandir Cinema, Jaipur Zoo, Birla Mandir, Laxmi Narayan Temple and so on. Best time to visit Jaipur is winter season, starting from October and ends on March.
Delhi to Jaipur distance is just 273 km (approx). We can include Jaipur if you are ready to spend 4 hours in one way journey by car or bus. Delhi to Jaipur trains are also available. Just visit Indian Railways or IRCTC website for list of trains.
Jaipur’s heritage hotels are the perfect places to feel luxury and richness. Many royal palaces in Jaipur are converted into five star hotels. It is recommended to stay at one of the heritage hotel to feel like royal. You should ready to spend like royal for hotel stay! Spa is also provided in some hotels. I am recommending you to first read TripAdvisor reviews before booking any hotel. It will provide you best deals and experience.
7. Neemrana, Rajasthan
Neemrana is the perfect holiday destination for ancient sites lovers. Neemrana is situated on the Delhi-Jaipur national highway. You have to spend here full weekend to get refershment. Major tourist places of Neemrana are 1. Baba Khetanath Aashram Garden 2. Neemrana Fort Palace and others.
Related: Royal Palaces and Forts in Rajasthan
Delhi to Neemrana distance is just 122 km away which takes only two hour of journey by car. Neemrana destination falls under places within 150 km from Delhi. Do not visit Neemrana in summer, try to avoid it. The best time to visit Neemrana is between September to March. You can also enjoy new year party here with less crowd.
8. Amritsar, Punjab
Amritsar is one of the holy city in Punjab. Amritsar is more crowded city than any other locations given here. Amritsar is too much far away and you just need to spend your one night in travelling. Amritsar has best tourist places such as Harmandir Sahib (world famous temple known as Golden Temple), Jallianwala Bagh, Akal Takht, Durgiana Temple, Wagah border ceremony and Chand Baori.
Delhi to Amritsar distance is 450 km (approx.). As per my calculation, it will take almost 8 hours by driving a car. Most of people choose destinations which falls maximum within 400 km for weekend. The best time to visit Amritsar is between October and March. December and January months are also good if you don’t mind feeling a little chilly. You can download official tour guide of Amritsar from the Official website of Amritsar.
9. Gurgaon, Haryana
Gurgaon is the perfect place to enjoy within NCR limit. Major tourist places of Gurgaon such s Damdama Lake, Sheetala devi Temple, Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary, Fun n food village, Leisure Valley Park, Kingdom of Dreams and so on.
Delhi to Gurgaon distance is just 42 km. This distance can be chased within 50 mins or less by car. Gurgaon is falls in category of weekend getaways within 50 km from Delhi. The best time to visit Gurgaon is through out the year. If you are planning to visit Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary, visit it during winter time to see large numbers of birds.
10. Manesar, Haryana
Manesar is one of the fastest growing industrial hub in NCR region. Manesar is famous for heritage hotel and its handicrafts. Manesar’s greenary will give you inner peace for relax. It is located within 100 km from Delhi and perfect destination for weekend.
Notes:
Try to avoid hot places to visit in May month. Temperature of May month during summer is too much. Only visit cool places during this month. June month is also considered as the starting month of rainy season in India. So, better careful and keep all things in mind while planning your weekend vacation from Delhi. Do not plan quickly for your weekend. Try to do some homework before final decision.
Questions Asked by Our Readers
Q. 1: Please suggests us places to visit near Delhi within 150 kms
Answer: Manesar (52 kms), Sohna (54 kms), Gurgaon (34 kms), Tughlaqabad Fort (20 kms), Neemrana (120 kms), Faridabad (31 kms), and Pataudi (78 kms) are popular weekend getaways from Delhi. These are the best weekend getaways from Delhi.
Q. 2: We are looking best weekend getaways from Delhi in April, you know hot temperature?
Answer: Yes, April is hot but not like May month. We strongly recommends you to visit resorts, and a few other tourist attractions. Some of them are, Tivoli Garden Resort Hotel (Mehrauli), Aapno Ghar Amusement and Water Park (Gurugram), Heritage Village Resort & Spa (Gurugram), and a lot more! These are the best weekend getaways from Delhi.
Q. 3: Which are the best hill stations near Delhi within 100 km
Answer: Sorry, we couldn’t have best hill stations near Delhi within 100 km.
Q.4: Which are best places to visit near Delhi within 250 kms
Answer: Surajkund (30 kms), Alwar / Neemrana (120 kms), Mathura / Vrindavan (160 kms), Bharatpur (195 kms), Rishikesh (230 kms), Corbett (235 kms), Lansdowne (250 kms). These are the best weekend getaways from Delhi.
Q.5: Which are the best places for short vacations from Delhi
Answer: Corbett is the best place for short vacation which is located just 235 kms from Delhi.
Q.6: Which are best travel destinations for overnight trips from Delhi
Answer: Jim Corbett National Park (248) is one of the best destinations for overnight trip from Delhi. Haridwar is also an option which is located just 222 kms from Delhi. There are several other places too, such as Nainital (300 kms), Haldwani (288 kms), and many others. These are the best weekend getaways from Delhi.
Before booking with local travel agents, check rates with MakeMyTrip, Nivalink, Yatra, LonelyPlanet and other online portals. It will helps you to get idea of actual pricing.
Read Also: Tourist Attractions in Delhi
Article Title: 10 Best Weekend Getaways from Delhi for Family Trip, Friends Group Trip and More
Article last re-published on April 14, 2017.There are boys and girls among us who have never overcome the Randian infection. The Galt speech continues to ring in their ears for years like a maddening tinnitus, turning each of them into what next year’s Physicians’ Desk Reference will (undoubtedly) term an Ayn Rand Asshole (ARA). They constitute a relatively small percentage of Rand readers, these ARAs. But they make their reading count. Thanks to them, the Rand Experience is no longer limited to those who have read the books. It’s metastasized. You, me, all of us, we’re living it. Because it’s the ARA Army of antigovernment-antiregulation puritans who have spent the past three decades gleefully pulling the cooling rods out of the American economy. For a while, it got very big and very hot. Then it popped. And now the rest of us have to spend the next decade scaling the slippery slopes of the huge suppurative crater that was left behind. Feeling fisted by the Invisible Hand of the Market lo these past fifteen months? Lost a job lately? Or half the value of your 401(k)? Or a home? All three? Been wondering whence the too-long-ascendant political and economic ideas and forces behind Greenspanism, John Thainism, blind Wall Street plunder, bankruptcy, credit-default swaps, Bernie Madoff, and the ensuing Cannibalism in the Streets? Then you, sir, need to give thanks to Ayn Rand Assholes everywhere--as well as the steely loins from which they sprang.A familiar talking point deployed by supporters of marijuana prohibition focuses on the seemingly large share of people in drug treatment who are seeking help for a cannabis use disorder.
A new federal study sheds some light on how meaningful — or not meaningful — that claim really is.
Nearly 52 percent of people in drug treatment primarily for marijuana were referred by the criminal justice system, according to the latest Treatment Episode Data Set, which was released last Thursday. Fewer than one out of five people in treatment for marijuana checked themselves in voluntarily or were referred by another individual.
Among the criminal justice referrals, 44.1 percent were from probation or parole officers, 16.2 percent were from courts and 2.2 percent were from prisons, according to the new study published by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (Full data available in Table 2.6here.)
“Primary marijuana admissions were less likely than all admissions [for other drugs]combined to be self- or individually referred to treatment (18 vs. 37 percent),” the study found. “Primary marijuana admissions were most likely to be referred by a criminal justice source.”
In other words, many cannabis consumers are being forced by cops, courts and corrections officers to undergo drug treatment that they themselves don’t feel they actually need.
At a time when America is experiencing an epidemic of opioid overdoses, drug policy reform advocates have questioned whether it makes sense for the criminal justice system to mandate that cannabis users take up so much space in drug treatment programs.Sami Khedira and Ángel Di María return to Real Madrid's training sessions today even though they will reportedly be out of the club soon. While Khedira apparently now wants to stay but demands a big contract that Real Madrid is not willing to offer, Ángel Di María prefers to leave the club and look for |
July, killing all 298 people on board. DPR-affiliated insurgents blamed the Ukrainian government for the disaster, whereas the government, Netherlands, and Australia blamed Russia and the insurgents.[237][238] This disaster followed two similar incidents earlier in the week, when two Ukrainian Air Force planes were shot down.[239] Meanwhile, fighting in Luhansk resulted in the loss of electrical power and water services across the city.[240] Shelling damaged an electrical substation in the district Kamennobrodskiy, causing the power loss. An oil refinery in Lysychansk was also set alight.[240] At least twenty civilians were killed in the shelling of Luhansk, according to a statement by the city administration.[241] The statement said that a barrage of rockets hit "virtually every district". The shelling forced OSCE monitors to flee from their office in Luhansk, and move to Starobilsk.[242] Government forces went on to capture the south-eastern section of the city.[243] Another sixteen people died overnight, and at least sixty were wounded.[244] According to a government report, Luhansk airport was secured by government forces amidst the battle.[245]
Government push into Donetsk and Luhansk cities [ edit ]
Damaged tower block in Lysychansk, 28 July 2014
Heavy fighting also resumed around Donetsk airport overnight, and explosions were heard in all districts of the city. The city fell quiet by 09:00 on 19 July.[246] By 21 July, heavy fighting in Donetsk had begun again.[247] Donetsk was rocked by explosions, and heavy weapons fire caused smoke to rise over the city. Fighting was concentrated in the northwestern districts of Kyivskyi and Kuibyshevskyi, and also near the central railway station and airport, leading local residents to seek refuge in bomb shelters, or to flee the city.[248] The city's water supply was cut off during the fighting, and all railway and bus service was stopped.[249] The streets emptied, and insurgents erected barricades across the city to control traffic.[250] The cities of Dzerzhynsk, Soledar, and Rubizhne[251] were also recaptured by government forces.[252]
The suburb of Mayorsk, just outside Horlivka, and the city of Sievierodonetsk, in Luhansk Oblast, were recaptured by the Armed Forces on 22 July.[253] OSCE monitors visiting Donetsk following the previous day's fighting there said that the city was "practically deserted", and that the fighting had stopped.[254] On the same day, DPR prime minister Alexander Borodai said that he wanted to resume ceasefire talks. DPR commander Igor Girkin also said "The time has come when Russia must take a final decision – to really support Donbas's Russians or abandon them forever".[255] Also, the pro-Ukrainian paramilitary Donbas Battalion captured Popasna.[256]
Destroyed railway flyover, 25 July 2014
After having retaken Sievierodonetsk, government forces fought insurgents around the neighbouring city of Lysychansk.[257] An insurgent car bomb killed three soldiers during the fighting there. Grad rocket attacks were launched against government forces garrisoned at Vesela Hora, Kamysheve, and also Luhansk airport. The press centre for the government military operation said that situation remained "most complex" in the areas around "Donetsk city, Luhansk city, Krasnodon and Popasna".[258] Government forces broke through the insurgent blockade around Donetsk airport on 23 July, and then advanced into the northwestern corner of Donetsk city.[259] Subsequently, the insurgents withdrew from many areas on the outskirts of the city, including Karlivka, Netailove [uk], Pervomaiske, and the area around Donetsk airport.[259] Insurgent commander Igor Girkin said that this was done to fortify Donetsk city centre, and also to avoid being encircled by government forces. He also said that he did not expect a government incursion into Donetsk city centre.[259] Meanwhile, clashes continued in Shakhtarsk Raion, along the border with Russia. Amidst the fighting, two Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jets that had been providing air support to ground forces near Dmytrivka were shot down by the insurgents.[260]
By the next day, government forces recaptured Lysychansk.[261] On the same day, fighting raged around Horlivka.[262] Government forces launched air and artillery strikes on insurgents within the city, and clashes were fought all around it. One important bridge collapsed in the fighting, severing a critical route out of the city. People fled the violence in cars and on foot.[262] Despite these advances by the Armed Forces, the border with Russia was not secured. Izvaryne border post in Luhansk Oblast, which is controlled by the Army of the South-East, was reported to be the main entry point for weapons and reinforcements from Russia.[262] Shelling began again in the Kyivskyi, Kirovskyi and Petrovskyi districts of Donetsk city. According to Donetsk city administration, eleven houses were damaged in Petrovsky, and at least one man was injured.[263] The fighting continued overnight into 26 July, with explosions, shelling, and shooting heard across the city.[264]
During the third day of the government's offensive on the insurgent-stronghold of Horlivka, between twenty and thirty civilians were killed on 27 July.[265] Horlivka was virtually abandoned, with electric power and water cut off. Shelling damaged or destroyed many buildings, including a hospital, greengrocer's, and energy company office.[266] Ukrainian troops also entered the town of Shakhtarsk, fought the insurgents that had been occupying it, and captured it around 14:30.[267][268] This cut off the supply corridor between the territories held by the DPR and LPR, isolating insurgents in Donetsk city.[269] Skirmishes also broke out in the nearby towns of Snizhne and Torez.[267] The intense combat across Shakhtarsk Raion forced a party of Dutch and Australian policemen to call off an attempt to investigate the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.[267] Forty-one Ukrainian soldiers deserted their posts and went to the insurgent-controlled Izvaryne border crossing, where they told insurgents that they refused to fight against their "own people".[270] The insurgents allowed them to flee Ukraine, and cross into Russia.[271] By 28 July, the strategic heights of Savur-Mohyla were under Ukrainian control, along with the town of Debaltseve.[272] Insurgents had previously used Savur-Mohyla to shell Ukrainian troops around the town of Marynivka.[273] By 29 July, a further seventeen civilians had been killed in the fighting, along with an additional forty-three people injured.[274] Shelling continued in the Leninskyi and Kyivskyi districts of Donetsk city. According to the city administration, these districts were heavily damaged.[275]
According to a report by National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, crossing points on the border with Russia were attacked from Russian territory at least 153 times since 5 June.[276] 27 border guardsmen were killed in these attacks, and 185 were injured. Government forces made a further advance on 30 July, when they evicted insurgents from Avdiivka, near Donetsk airport.[277] Military operations were paused on 31 July.[278] This was meant to allow international experts to examine the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which is located in Shakhtarsk Raion, where the fiercest battles had been taking place on the previous few days. Monitors were escorted to the site by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. After fighting severed various transmission lines, Luhansk city lost all access to electrical power.[279] Little fuel remained to power emergency generators. Minor skirmishes occurred in Vasylivka and Zhovtneve.[280] Meanwhile, talks between the separatists, Russia, Ukraine, and the OSCE were held in Minsk.[278] Fighting continued in Shakhtarsk. An ambush by the insurgents on government forces there resulted in the deaths of ten soldiers.[281] Eleven went missing, and thirteen were wounded. A government offensive on the city of Pervomaisk in Luhansk Oblast continued.[281]
Damaged building in Snizhne, 6 August 2014
Following a series of military defeats, Igor Girkin, insurgent commander for the DPR, urged Russian military intervention, and said that the combat inexperience of his irregular forces, along with recruitment difficulties amongst the local population in Donetsk Oblast had caused the setbacks. He addressed Russian president Vladimir Putin, saying that "Losing this war on the territory that President Vladimir Putin personally named New Russia would threaten the Kremlin's power and, personally, the power of the president".[282] Government forces closed in on Luhansk and Donetsk cities on 3 August.[283] A number of civilians were killed in fighting in both cities. Luhansk was reported to be "virtually surrounded", with little electrical power or water supply available. The situation in the city of Donetsk was less dire, as trains to Russia were still running, but fighting and shelling did not relent.[283] According to the Armed Forces, three-quarters of the territory once held by the insurgents had been recaptured.[284] They also said that they had completely cut off supply lines between the DPR and LPR, after more than a week of fighting in Shakhtarsk Raion.[285]
After a prolonged battle, the Armed Forces recaptured the vital town of Yasynuvata on 4 August.[286] At least five soldiers died in the fighting to capture the town, which is a strategic railway junction on the main road between Donetsk and Luhansk cities. The pro-government paramilitary Azov and Shakhtarsk battalions said that they had advanced into Donetsk city, and had begun to "liberate" it.[287] The Ukrainian government said that all civilians should evacuate from Donetsk, and issued statements asking DPR and LPR forces to help establish "humanitarian corridors" to allow civilians in Donetsk, Luhansk and Horlivka to flee.[288] Commenting on the situation in Luhansk, mayor Sergei Kravchenko said "As a result of the blockade and ceaseless rocket attacks, the city is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe".[289]
As government troops pushed into Donetsk on 5 August, heavy fighting erupted at 17:00 in the Petrovskyi district of the city.[290] Elsewhere, insurgents recaptured the town of Yasynuvata after a retreat by government forces.[291] A spokesman from the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine said that the Armed Forces left the town to avoid harming the "peaceful population", and that the city was being evacuated so that it could be "completely liberated".[292] He also said that the railway station remained under government control, and that all railway traffic had been blocked. Fighting between insurgents and government forces across the Donbass region continued "constantly" over the course of the day.[293]
Burning block of flats in Shakhtarsk, 3 August 2014
Fighting and shelling continued around Donetsk on 8 August, with several civilians killed or injured.[294] By 9 August, insurgent commander Igor Girkin said that Donetsk had been "completely encircled" by government forces.[295] This followed the capture of the vital town of Krasnyi Luch by the government, after insurgent-aligned Cossacks stationed there fled.[295] Further skirmishes between insurgents and the Armed Forces took place in Mnohopillia, Stepanivka, Hryhorivka, Krasny Yar, Pobeda, Shyshkove, Komyshne, Novohannivka, Krasna Talivka, Dmytrivka, Sabivka, and Luhansk airport.[296] Overnight and into 10 August, government forces launched an artillery barrage on Donetsk city, causing "massive damage" across it.[297] According to a spokesman for the Armed Forces, insurgents began to flee the city during the barrage, and were in a state of "panic and chaos". Hospitals and residential buildings were heavily damaged, and many remaining residents took shelter in basements.[297] The cities of Pervomaisk, Kalynove, Komyshuvakha, in western Luhansk Oblast near Popasna, were captured by government forces on 12 August after heavy fighting.[298] Heavy shelling of Donetsk continued into 14 August.[299] During this artillery barrage, Igor Girkin resigned from his post as commander of the insurgent forces of the Donetsk People's Republic.[300] He was replaced by Vladimir Kononov, who is known by the nom de guerre Tsar.[301]
Later in the day, a convoy of some two dozen armoured personnel carriers and other vehicles with official Russian military plates crossed into Ukraine near the insurgent-controlled Izvaryne border crossing.[302][303] NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen confirmed that a "Russian incursion" into Ukraine had occurred.[304] Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said that Ukrainian artillery engaged and destroyed a "significant" portion of the armoured column.[305] The Russian Defence Ministry denied the existence of any such convoy.[306] Following this incident, the newly appointed prime minister of the DPR Alexander Zakharchenko said that his forces included 1,200 Russian-trained combatants.[307]
Damaged building in Donetsk, 7 August 2014
A Ukrainian Air Force MiG-29 fighter jet was shot down by the insurgents in Luhansk Oblast on 17 August. Ten civilians were killed during continued shelling in Donetsk.[308] The insurgent-occupied city of Horlivka was encircled by the Armed Forces on 18 August.[309] Government forces also advanced into the edges of Luhansk city. A convoy of refugees from Luhansk was hit by Grad rockets near the village of Novosvitlivka. Dozens of civilians died in the attack, which the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine blamed on the insurgents. Insurgents denied attacking any refugee convoys.[309] DPR prime minister Aleksandr Zakharchenko stated that if the Ukrainian government made "reasonable proposals to lay down arms, close borders, we will talk on equal terms as equal partners".[310] He added, however, that the government "must recognise us as a state, now it is already impossible to ask for a certain degree of autonomy".[310]
After having edged into Luhansk city on 18 August, government forces began to advance through the city "block by block" on 19 August.[311][312] Fighting was heard in streets across the city, and shelling of many insurgent-occupied districts continued. There was also fighting Makiivka and Ilovaisk, two cities just outside Donetsk city. A spokesman for the Internal Affairs Ministry said that government forces were "clearing" Ilovaisk of insurgents, and later captured most of the city.[311][313] The headquarters of the DPR in Donetsk city were also shelled. Fighting across Donetsk Oblast on 19 August resulted in the deaths of 34 civilians.[314] By early evening on 20 August, government forces said that they had recaptured "significant parts" of the city of Luhansk, after a series of running battles in streets throughout the day.[315]
August 2014 counter-offensive by pro-Russian forces [ edit ]
Ukrainian troops guarding a road in Donbass
By 25 August, an insurgent counter-offensive had stalled the government's offensive on Donetsk and Luhansk cities.[316] Insurgents attacked government positions in Shchastya, and along the Siverskyi Donets River in Luhansk Oblast. As this attack occurred, insurgents in Luhansk received reinforcements. Government forces near Ilovaisk and Amvrosiivka in Donetsk Oblast became surrounded by insurgents, after their attempt to take Ilovaisk was halted by heavy shelling.[316] The pro-government volunteer Donbas Battalion, trapped in the city for days by the insurgents, accused the Ukrainian government and Armed Forces of "abandoning" them.[317] Other volunteer battalions, such as the Azov and Dnipro, left Ilovaisk after encountering heavy resistance. Donbas Battalion leader Semen Semenchenko said "I think it is profitable for the defence ministry not to send help, but to achieve a situation where volunteer battalions start blaming each other about who helped who".[318] DPR forces stated their intention to "fight their way to the Azov Sea" on 23 August.[319] In line with this statement, an artillery barrage rained down on the coastal city of Novoazovsk, in southern Donetsk Oblast.[319] A column of armoured vehicles crossed into Ukraine from Russia near Novoazovsk on 25 August.[36][320] There were no insurgent formations within 30 kilometres (18 2⁄ 3 mi) of this area for many weeks.[321] Heavy fighting took place in the village of Markyne, 7 kilometres (4 1⁄ 4 mi) from Novoazovsk. Insurgents used the village as a base to shell Novoazovsk.[322] A spokesman for the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine said that the entrance of the column into Ukraine was an attempt "by the Russian military in the guise of Donbass fighters to open a new area of military confrontation".[320] According to the Mariupol city website, the Dnipro and Donbas battalions repelled the attack, and the "invaders" retreated to the border.[323] Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he had no knowledge of the incident, and suggested that reports of the incident being an incursion by Russian forces were "disinformation."[324] Directly prior to the appearance of the column, the area was heavily shelled. The nearest insurgent artillery positions were beyond the range of this area.[321]
Villagers from Kolosky in Starobesheve Raion told Reuters that military men with Russian accents and no identifying insignias had appeared in the village at the weekend of 23–24 August.[325] They set up a roadblock near the village. The men wore distinctive white armbands.[325] The villagers referred to them as "polite green men", a term that was used to refer to the irregular Russian forces that took control of Crimea from February 2014. Following the appearance of these men, ten soldiers in green military uniforms with white armbands were detained by Ukrainian forces at Dzerkalne. This village is north of Novoazovosk, 7 kilometres (4 1⁄ 4 mi) from Kolosky, and about 20 kilometres (12 mi) from the Russian border.[325][326] The Russian military confirmed that these men were indeed Russian paratroopers, and that they had been captured. The Russian Defence Ministry said the men had entered Ukraine "by mistake during an exercise".[325][326] The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) released videos that they said were interviews with the captive Russian soldiers. In one of the videos, a soldier said that their commanders had sent them on a 70-kilometre (43 1⁄ 2 mi) march "without explaining its purpose or warning that they would be in Ukrainian territory, where they were apprehended by Ukrainian forces and surrendered without a fight".[327]
People queueing for water in Donetsk, 22 August 2014
Insurgents pushed into Novoazovsk on 27 August.[37][328] Whilst the Ukrainian government said they were in "total control" of Novoazovsk, town mayor Oleg Sidorkin confirmed that the insurgents had captured it.[328] He also said that "dozens" of tanks and armoured vehicles had been used by the insurgents in their assault on the town. At least four civilians were injured by insurgent shelling. To the north, close to Starobesheve, Ukrainian forces said that they spotted a column of 100 armoured vehicles, tanks, and Grad rocket lorries that was heading south, toward Novoazovsk.[328] They said these vehicles were marked with "white circles or triangles", similar to the white armbands seen on the captured Russian paratroopers earlier in the week. Amidst pressure on this new third front, government forces retreated westward toward Mariupol.[37] They evacuated the town of Starobesheve, among other areas in the 75-kilometre (47 mi) stretch of borderland from the Sea of Azov to the existing insurgent-held territories.[37][329] A report by The New York Times described the retreating soldiers as "exhausted, filthy and dismayed".[37] Western officials described the new insurgent actions as a "stealth invasion" by the Russian Federation, with tanks, artillery and infantry said to have crossed into Ukraine from Russian territory. US State Department spokesman Jen Psaki said that "these incursions indicate a Russian-directed counteroffensive is likely underway", and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said "An invasion of Russian forces has taken place".[37][330][331] A statement by the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine (NSDC) later said that Novoazovsk had been captured by "Russian troops", despite earlier denials by the Ukrainian government.[332] According to the NSDC, Ukrainian troops withdrew from Novoazovsk to save lives, and were instead preparing defences in Mariupol. Meanwhile, fighting continued in and around Donetsk city. Shells fell on the Kalininskyi district of Donetsk, and the Donbas Battalion continued to fight against the insurgents that had trapped them in Ilovaisk for days.[317][330][333] NATO commander Brig. Gen. Nico Tak said on 28 August that "well over" 1,000 Russian soldiers were operating in the Donbass conflict zone.[334] Amidst what The New York Times described as "chaos" in the conflict zone, the insurgents re-captured Savur-Mohyla.[37][335]
Despite these advances by pro-Russian forces, the National Guard of Ukraine temporarily retook the city of Komsomolske in Starobesheve Raion of Donetsk Oblast on 29 August.[336] However, two days later, Ukrainian forces retreated from the city, and Komsomolske was once again taken by the DPR forces.[337] Elsewhere, Ukrainian forces retreated from Novosvitlivka after being attacked by what they said were "Russian tanks". They said that every house in the village was destroyed.[338] The trapped Donbas Battalion withdrew from Ilovaisk on 30 August after negotiating an agreement with pro-Russian forces. According to some of the troops who withdrew from Ilovaisk, DPR forces violated the agreement and fired on them whilst they retreated under white flags, killing as many as several dozen.[339]
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk awarding Donbas Battalion volunteers, 1 September 2014
A Ukrainian patrol boat in the Sea of Azov was hit by shore-based artillery fire on 31 August.[340] Eight sailors were rescued from the sinking boat, whilst two crew-members were missing. Former insurgent commander Igor Girkin said that the insurgents had "dealt the enemy their first naval defeat". Government forces withdrew from Luhansk International Airport on 1 September, despite having held the airport from insurgent attacks for weeks prior.[341] The airport saw fierce fighting on the night before the withdrawal, and Ukrainian officials said that their forces at the airport had been attacked by a column Russian tanks.[342] Clashes also continued at Donetsk International Airport.[341] Heavy fighting was observed by OSCE monitors near the villages of Shyrokyne and Bezimenne on 4 September.[343] Respectively, these villages are 24 kilometres (15 mi) and 34 kilometres (21 mi) east of Mariupol. Ukrainian officials in Mariupol said that the situation there "was worsening by the hour", and that there was an imminent danger of an attack on the city.[343] DPR forces came within 5 kilometres (3 mi) of the city on 4 September, but their advance was repulsed by an overnight counter-attack launched by the Armed Forces and the Azov Battalion.[344] They were driven back about 20 kilometres (12 1⁄ 2 mi) east of the city. Constant shelling was heard on the outskirts of Mariupol.[344]
September 2014 ceasefire [ edit ]
A funeral service for Ukrainian soldier, 11 September 2014
After days of peace talks in Minsk under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Ukraine, Russia, the DPR, and the LPR agreed to a ceasefire on 5 September.[41] OSCE monitors said they would observe the ceasefire, and assist the Ukrainian government in implementing it.[345] According to The New York Times, the agreement was an "almost verbatim" replication of Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko's failed June "fifteen-point peace plan".[346] It was agreed that there would be an exchange of all prisoners taken by both sides, and that heavy weaponry should be removed from the combat zone. Humanitarian corridors were meant to be maintained, so that civilians could leave affected areas. President Poroshenko said that Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts would be granted "special status", and that use of the Russian language in these areas would be protected by law.[346][347] DPR and LPR leaders said that they retained their desire for full independence from Ukraine, despite these concessions. Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Poroshenko discussed the ceasefire on 6 September.[348] Both parties said that they were satisfied with the ceasefire, and that it was generally holding.
Destroyed terminal at Luhansk airport, 4 September 2014
The ceasefire was broken multiple times on the night of 6–7 September, and into the day on 7 September.[349][350][351] These violations resulted in the deaths of four Ukrainian soldiers, whilst twenty-nine were injured.[352] Heavy shelling by the insurgents was reported on the eastern outskirts of Mariupol, and OSCE monitors said that the Ukrainian government had fired rockets from Donetsk International Airport. The OSCE said that these breaches of the agreement would not cause the ceasefire to collapse.[351] Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said on 10 September that "70% of Russian troops have been moved back across the border", and also added that this action gave him "hope that the peace initiatives have good prospects".[353] Ceasefire violations continued, however. In line with the Minsk Protocol, OSCE monitors said that they observed a prisoner exchange near Avdiivka at 03:40 on 12 September.[354][355] Ukrainian forces released 31 DPR insurgents, whilst DPR forces released 37 Ukrainian soldiers. OSCE monitors documented violations of the Minsk Protocol in numerous areas of Donetsk Oblast from 13–15 September.[356] These areas included Makiivka, Telmanove, Debaltseve, Petrovske, near Mariupol, Yasynuvata, and Donetsk International Airport, all of which saw intense fighting. Two of the armoured vehicles that the monitors were travelling in were struck by shrapnel, rendering one of the vehicles inoperable and forcing the monitors to retreat.[356] According to the monitors, troop and equipment movements were being carried out by both DPR and Ukrainian forces. They also said that there were "command and control issues" amongst both parties to the conflict.[356] A visit by the monitors to Luhansk International Airport took place on 20 September.[357] They said that the airport was "completely destroyed", and entirely unusable. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said on 21 September that the Armed Forces of Ukraine lost between 60% and 65% of its total active equipment over the course of the war.[358]
DPR policemen in Donetsk, 20 September 2014
Members of the Trilateral Contact Group and the DPR took part in a video conference on 25 September 2014.[359] According to a statement released by the OSCE on the day after the conference, all parties agreed that the fighting had "subsided in recent days", and that the "situation along 70%" of the buffer zone was "calm". They also said that they would "spare no efforts" to strengthen the ceasefire.[359] Scattered violations of the ceasefire continued, nonetheless. In the most significant incident since the start of the ceasefire, seven Ukrainian soldiers died on 29 September when a tank shell struck the armoured personnel carrier that they were travelling in near Donetsk International Airport.[360] A skirmish ensued, leaving many soldiers wounded. Over the next few days, fighting continued around Donetsk International Airport, whilst Donetsk city itself came under heavy shelling.[361][362] Amidst this renewed violence, OSCE chairman Didier Burkhalter issued a statement that "urged all sides to immediately stop fighting", and also said that putting the ceasefire at risk of collapse would be "irresponsible and deplorable".[363]
According to a report released by the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on 8 October, the ceasefire implemented by the Minsk Protocol was becoming "increasingly fragile".[364] The statement that announced the release of the report said that at least 331 people had been killed since the start of ceasefire, and that the most fierce fighting took place around Donetsk International Airport, Debaltseve, and Shchastya.[365] The report also said that the majority of civilian deaths were caused by both insurgent and Ukrainian shelling.[366] Several hundred National Guard troops protested outside the Ukrainian presidential administration building in Kiev on 13 October.[367] They demanded the end of conscription, and their own demobilisation.[367] According to Kyiv Post, many of the protesters stated that they had clashed with Euromaidan protesters, and that they were not in favour of that movement.[367]
November 2014 separatist elections and aftermath [ edit ]
Donetsk suburb after shelling, 7 November 2014
Heavy fighting continued across the Donbass through October, despite the ceasefire. In violation of the procedure agreed to as part of the Minsk Protocol, DPR and LPR authorities held parliamentary and executive elections on 2 November.[368][369] In response to the elections, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko asked parliament to revoke the "special status" that was granted to DPR and LPR-controlled areas as part of the Minsk Protocol.[370] DPR deputy prime minister Andrei Purgin said that Ukrainian forces had launched "all-out war" against the DPR and LPR on 6 November.[371] Ukrainian officials denied any offensive, and said that they would adhere to the Minsk Protocol. Despite this, battles continued across the Donbass, leaving many soldiers dead. Concurrently, separatist representatives requested a redraughting of Minsk Protocol, as a result of recurrent violations.[371] Intermittent shelling of Donetsk renewed on 5 November.[372] OSCE monitors reported on 8 November that there were large movements of unmarked heavy equipment in separatist-held territory.[373] These movements included armoured personnel carriers, lorries, petrol tankers, and tanks, which were being manned and escorted by men in dark green uniforms without insignias.[373] Ukrainian government spokesmen said that these were movements of Russian troops, but this could not be independently verified.[374] Overnight into 9 November, intense shelling from both government and insurgent positions rocked Donetsk.[372] OSCE chairman Didier Burkhalter said that he was "very concerned" about the "resurgence of violence", and stressed the importance of adhering to the Minsk Protocol.[375] OSCE monitors observed more munitions convoys in separatist-held territory on 9 November.[376] These included seventeen unmarked green ZiL lorries loaded with ammunition at Sverdlovsk, and seventeen similar Kamaz lorries towing howitzers at Zuhres. Another convoy of forty-three green military lories, some towing howitzers and rocket launchers, was observed by OSCE monitors in Donetsk on 11 November.[377]
Damaged building in Kurakhove, 26 November 2014
Following the reports of these troop and equipment movements, NATO General Philip Breedlove said on 12 November that he could confirm that Russian troops and heavy equipment had crossed into Ukraine during the preceding week.[378] In response, the Ukrainian Defence Ministry said that it was preparing for a renewed offensive by pro-Russian forces.[379] Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said "there was and is no evidence" to support NATO's statement.[378]
By 2 December, at least 1,000 people had died during fighting in Donbass, since the signing of the Minsk Protocol in early September.[380] A BBC report said that the ceasefire had been "a fiction". In light of this continued fighting, Ukrainian and separatist forces agreed to cease all military operations for a "Day of Silence" on 9 December.[381][382] Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said that he hoped that the "Day of Silence" would encourage the signing of a new peace deal. Whilst no new peace talks took place following the "Day of Silence", fighting between Ukrainian and separatist forces lessened significantly over the course of December.[383][384] A report by the International Crisis Group stated that the late 2014 financial crisis in Russia, in tandem with American and European economic sanctions, deterred further advances by pro-Russian forces.[385] The report also raised concerns about the potential for "humanitarian catastrophe" in separatist-controlled Donbass during the cold winter months, saying that the separatists were unable "to provide basic services for the population".
Ruins of Donetsk International Airport, December 2014. The control tower has since been completely destroyed.
In line with the Minsk Protocol, more prisoner exchanges took place during the week of 21–27 December.[386][387] More OSCE-organised talks were held in Minsk during that week, but they reached no result. In a press conference on 29 December, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said that the Minsk Protocol was becoming effective "point by point", and also said that "progress" was being made.[388] Since the signing of the Protocol, over 1,500 people held by the separatists had been released as part of the prisoner exchanges. Whereas Ukrainian forces had been losing about 100 men per day prior to the Protocol, only about 200 had been killed in the four months since its signing. Poroshenko also said that he believed that conflict would only end if Russian troops were to leave Donbass.[388]
Escalation in January 2015 [ edit ]
OSCE monitors reported a "rise in tensions" following New Year's Day.[389] Numerous ceasefire violations were recorded, with most occurring near Donetsk International Airport. Infighting amongst insurgent groups broke out in Luhansk Oblast.[390] In one incident, LPR militants said that they had killed Alexander Bednov, the leader of the pro-Russian "Batman Battalion", on 2 January 2015. LPR officials said that Bednov had been running an "illegal prison", and that he had engaged in torturing prisoners.[391] In another incident, the leader of an Antratsyt-based Don Cossack militant group, Nikolai Kozitsyn, said that the territory controlled by his group, claimed by the Luhansk People's Republic, had become part of the "Russian empire", and that Russian president Vladimir Putin was its "emperor".[390] An intercity bus stopped at a government checkpoint in Buhas was hit by a Grad rocket on 13 January, killing twelve civilians.[392][393] Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko declared a day of national mourning.[394] Buhas is 35 kilometres (22 mi) south-west of Donetsk city.
DPR Sparta Battalion commander Arseny Pavlov, Donetsk, 25 December 2014
The new terminal building at Donetsk International Airport, which had been a site of fighting between Ukrainian and separatist troops since May 2014, was captured by the DPR forces on 15 January.[395] In the days prior to the capturing, the airport was heavily barraged by separatist rocket fire.[396][397] DPR leader Alexander Zakharchenko stated that the capture of the airport was the first step toward regaining territory lost to Ukrainian forces during the middle of 2014. He said "Let our countrymen hear this: We will not just give up our land. We will either take it back peacefully, or like that", referring to the capture of the airport.[395] Such an offensive by separatist forces would signal the complete breakdown of the frequently ignored Minsk Protocol, which established a buffer zone between Ukrainian-controlled and separatist-controlled territories.[398] Ukrainian forces said that there had been "no order to retreat" from the airport, and DPR parliament chairman Andrey Purgin said that while DPR forces had gained control of the terminal buildings, fighting was ongoing because "the Ukrainians have lots of places to hide".[399] Concurrently, a new round of Minsk talks, scheduled for 16 January by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, was called off after DPR and LPR leaders Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky refused to attend.[400]
A government military operation at the weekend of 17–18 January resulted in Ukrainian forces recapturing most of Donetsk International Airport.[401] According to Ukrainian NSDC representative Andriy Lysenko, the operation restored the lines of control established by the Minsk Protocol, and therefore did not constitute a violation of it. The operation caused fighting to move toward Donetsk proper, resulting in heavy shelling of residential areas of the city that border the airport.[401] DPR authorities said that they halted government forces at Putylivskiy bridge, which connects the airport and the city proper.[402] The bridge, which is strategically important, was destroyed during the fighting. OSCE monitors reported that shelling had caused heavy damage in the Donetsk residential districts of Kyivskyi, Kirovskyi, Petrovskyi, and Voroshilovskyi.[403]
DPR Somalia Battalion in the new terminal building of Donetsk Airport on 16 January 2015
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said on 21 January that Russia had deployed more than 9,000 soldiers and 500 tanks, artillery units, and armoured personnel carriers in Donbass.[404] An article that appeared in The Daily Telegraph said that deployment appeared to be "a response to Kiev's success" in retaining control of Donetsk International Airport.[405] On the |
the right to be on the internet. We know that if we allow them to experience the joys of the internet they will join the digital revolution.”
“Airtel Zero is a technology platform that connects application providers to their customers for free. The platform allows any content or application provider to enroll on it so that their customers can visit these sites for free. Instead of charging customers we charge the providers who choose to get on to the platform.”
TRAI chief: Telecom watchdog TRAI Chairman Rahul Khullar said “shrill voices” will not win the debate and the concept is not “practiced strictly” even in countries like the US and the UK.
“There has to be democratic debate. It’s a debate that is waiting to happen. Shrill voices do not win debate. Cool headed reasoned arguments on both sides are need of the hour,” Khullar told PTI in an interview.
And finally comedy group AIB’s statement on the whole Net Neutrality debate has been the strongest one yet. Watch their video belowRead the prologue of this series here. We are now in a digital age, touching more designed experiences than ever before. Experience Design allows us to craft experiences that solve problems for real people — experiences that will ultimately improve their lives. With this end goal in mind, research becomes a crucial part of the UX process. It allows us to understand the perspectives of the people we are designing for. What pain points are they experiencing? How can we use our creative and strategic skills to design real solutions for those problems? Popular image used to describe the difference between UX and UI The image above is commonly used to explain UX. It shows a well-treaded path beside a elegantly crafted sidewalk. What can we infer from this picture? If the person who designed this sidewalk had spent time researching the people it was designed for, it’s likely she would have noticed that most people cut across the field to save time. Now consider the images below that depict two sides of the same door. Which side requires you to push? Which side requires you to pull? This image displays two sides of the same door with handles that are visually identical. Without seeing “Push” or “Pull” written above the handle, we are not able to infer which way to open the door. This image displays the labels push and pull above the handles. Which is pull? Which is push? Take a look at another set of doors. Which side requires you to push? Which requires you to pull? This image displays two sides of the same door with handles that are visually different. These doors don’t require directions in regard to pushing or pulling because their design matches user intuition. Had the first designer conducted research about the people she was designing for, it is likely that the doors would have been designed differently. In her presentation Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX, Hess displays the image below of the intimate aisle at a grocery store. The photo shows contraceptives sitting beside pregnancy tests on store shelves. What UX problems do you see in this picture? If we were to research consumer behaviors (or even consider our own), we would easily realize that most people do not want to think about the possibility of pregnancy when they are ready to get-it-on. A better UX for intimate products might be to separate the contraceptives from the pregnancy tests and place them outside — something a few convenience have actually done. This allows shoppers to quickly, and discreetly, get the protection they need without having to think about the possible consequences. As Kara Swisher points out in her Interaction15 talk, we spend most of our time staring down at tiny boxes, our computer and mobile screens. Designed experiences have taken over most of our time. They have become the majority of the human experience.
The modern evolution of man from http://wordinfo.info/
If we were to add another state of evolution to the image above, it would certainly depict a human fully hunched over a mobile screen. And, in the age of mobile, we are experiencing disruptive moments on our phones far too often. Have you ever tried to go to webpage on your phone, only to be told that you have to switch devices in order to access that information? In a world of constant connectivity, nothing is more frustrating than not being able to connect when you want to. Or not being able to load something when you need it immediately. And even though you pour tons of time into researching your users and crafting the most amazing life-changing miraculous holistic omni-channel user experience ever… no one can experience it if it doesn’t load. Designing a great user experience is more important today than ever before. We are able to design better experiences if we truly understand the people we are designing for. Empathy allows us to to identify problems and create working solutions. If we are actually solving a need for people, we are able to design products, services and experiences that are meaningful. Things that people will love to use. Things that they will tell their friends about. So, how can we learn more about the people we are creating experiences for? User Experience professionals have discovered many ways to get to know people on a closer level. These UX methods and tools include user research, interviews, ethnography, personas, user flows, sitemaps, wireframes, prototypes and usability testing, among many other artifacts and techniques.
User Interviews are a great way to get know people in the context of their own home, office or natural environment. Once there, we can establish a real relationship with them by listening to their story. UX professionals ask questions like: How would you describe your experience with this brand through out your lifetime?
How do you interact with them (in person, online, multiple channels)?
What about the current design or experience is causing you pain? How can we design a solution that will help you? User Interviews are a great way to understand the people you are designing for before you start designing. When researching, we can also feel-out the experience ourselves. Ethnography allows researchers to immerse themselves in the mental state of the person who is experiencing the design. By forcing ourselves to truly understand the context of the user, we are able to empathize with them on a deeper level. After we have conducted interviews and ethnographic research, we can take insights learned and turn them into personas. Below are the personas that MailChimp uses — they have them hanging around their office so that employees may be constantly reminded of who they designing for. Personas designed by MailChimp Once we have conducted our initial user research and created personas, we use these tools to craft user flows, sitemaps and information architecture that consider the person’s mental mode. How do they expect to find this information?
How would they sort this information into categories?
Where would they expect to find this feature? Each detail must have a purpose — the user should be guided through the resulting experience with ease and simplicity. After we understand the people we are designing for, we can begin to concept solutions. Wireframes are probably the most common UX tool to help us visualize, build and test these concepts. Wireframes come in all shapes and sizes, from a quick sketch to a fully-functional interactive prototypes. These wireframes validate the chosen concepts with actual users. With quickly sketched wireframes that take no more than a few hours, we may start testing designs with real people. In a paper prototype test, the UX facilitator acts as the computer, asking people to perform tasks and then placing the next screen once they tap on the paper button. Instead of waiting for a pixel-perfect mock up or a fully functioning prototype, these wireframes allow major issues to be identified before they cause major roadblocks later in the design and development process. Similar tests can be run later in the process using clickable wireframes, front-end prototypes and fully developed beta products. In these usability studies, a user will be asked to perform key tasks under the observation of a UX researcher. Although it may at first be painful to watch someone try to use your design, this is the most impactful way to see what is broken and then fix it — before the product is placed in the hands of more users. 85% of UX problems can be solved early by testing only 5 users. — Nielsen Norman GroupSupreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has issued a temporary order blocking a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that would have limited President Trump's travel ban.
The "administrative stay" issued by Kennedy on Monday puts on hold the ruling from the liberal federal appeals court which said the ban wouldn't cover refugees working with U.S. refugee agencies and other refugees "covered by a formal assurance."
The ruling allows the Trump administration "to exclude most refugees from entering the United States while the Supreme Court considers challenges to its revised travel ban," The New York Times wrote.
Had the Supreme Court not acted, an appeals court ruling lifting the ban on refugees would have gone into effect on Tuesday. The Supreme Court has now interceded three times to fine-tune the scope of Mr. Trump’s revised ban while it considers broader issues about its lawfulness. Issued in January and revised in March, the ban caused chaos at airports nationwide and gave rise to a global outcry, prompting a cascade of litigation as well. Two federal appeals courts blocked central parts of the ban. One said it violated the Constitution because it discriminated based on religion, the other said that it exceeded the president’s statutory authority to control immigration. In June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear appeals from those rulings and temporarily reinstated part of the ban — but only for people without “a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.” The court did not specify who qualified as a close relative, though it did say spouses and mothers-in-law “clearly” counted. The Trump administration interpreted the Supreme Court’s decision to mean excluding most refugees. It also said that only some relatives of American residents — parents, children, spouses, siblings, parents-in-law, sons- and daughters-in-law and people engaged to be married — could enter. The administration barred other relatives, including grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and cousins.
But the administrative stay will likely only be in effect for a short period, as the full court is likely to issue a ruling on the matter within days.A new Russian film on the 1968 events in Czechoslovakia has revived accusations that the Kremlin is twisting historical facts to forge a new ideology and justify some of its most controversial actions and policies.
Here is a look at some remarkable recent Russian treatments of history:
1968 Soviet-Led Invasion Of Czechoslovakia
A Russian film glorifying the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 has sparked fury among Czechs and Slovaks.
Warsaw Pact: The Declassified Pages, which aired on state-run Russian television on May 23, justifies the armed crackdown on the democratic "Prague Spring" movement and claims Warsaw Pact troops were sent into Czechoslovakia to protect its citizens from a purported NATO threat.
Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek accused Russia of "grossly distorting" history and summoned the Russian ambassador in protest. Czech President Milos Zeman, who is seen as relatively Kremlin-friendly, dismissed the film as "Russian propaganda lies," according to his spokesman.
The Slovak Foreign Ministry accused Russia of "trying to rewrite history and falsify historical truths about this dark chapter of our history."
Defense Of The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Putin caused dismay across Europe last year by arguing there was nothing wrong with the infamous 1939 nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which led to the carve-up of Eastern Europe.
"What's bad about that if the Soviet Union didn't want to fight?" he asked a meeting with historians in Moscow. "Serious research must show that those were the foreign-policy methods then."
Last month, Putin again defended the pact during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying the deal was signed "when the Soviet Union realized it was being left one-on-one with Hitler's Germany" despite what he described as "repeated efforts" by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to form an anti-Hitler coalition with Western countries.
Merkel responded by pointing out that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact encompassed a secret protocol under which Stalin and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler agreed to divide Eastern Europe into respective spheres of influence.
The agreement paved the way for Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, as well as the Soviet Union's invasion of eastern Poland in the following weeks and its occupation of the Baltic states in 1940.
Hitler Was 'Good' Until 1939
Amid Russia's persistent claims that Ukraine is teeming with neo-Nazis, a pro-Kremlin Russian newspaper caused stupor last year with an article asserting that Hitler was actually "good" before World War II.
"We should distinguish between Hitler before 1939 and Hitler after 1939, and separate the wheat from the chaff," read the piece in Izvestia, which rejected comparisons between Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Putin's annexation of Crimea.
The author, Andranik Migranyan -- who heads the New York office of the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, an NGO set up under President Vladimir Putin in 2007 -- credited Hitler with uniting Germany, Austria, the Sudetenland, and Memel "without a single drop of blood."
"If Hitler stopped at that, he would be remembered in his country's history as a politician of the highest order," Migranyan stated.
Critics reminded Migranyan about some of Hitler's most horrific policies prior to 1939, including the establishment of concentration camps, the purges of "non-Aryans," the creation of the Gestapo, and the bloody Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938.
Crimea As Sacred Cradle Of Russian Civilization
President Vladimir Putin has gone to great lengths to defend Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine by portraying the peninsula as a holy cradle of Russian civilization.
Speaking in a state-of-the-nation address in December, he said Crimea had an "enormous civilizational and sacral meaning for Russia, just as the Temple Mount of Jerusalem does for those who profess Islam and Judaism."
Grand Prince Vladimir is believed to have converted Kievan Rus to Orthodox Christianity in the 10th century after being baptized in Crimea.
The logic behind the annexation, however, is disputed as the conversion of Kievan Rus established the foundations for both the Russian and Ukrainian states.
The Black Sea peninsula was also home to various populations before Russia first annexed it from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, including Greek colonies some 2,500 years ago and Crimean Tatars, who today are considered the region's indigenous population -- and have been under increasing pressure since the Russian takeover in March 2014.
-- Claire BiggAlready in debt and understaffed, the U.S. Forest Service just spent $600,000 in purchasing handheld Tasers for every member of its Law Enforcement division.
Near the end of the U.S. Forest Service's fiscal year in September, there was a hurried single-source purchase of 700 Tasers for the Law Enforcement and Investigations division of the U.S. Forest Service. The Tasers are now sitting in storage, as there were no rules governing their use or a required training program yet developed by the USFS.
In fact, there was no public input, or congressional review of the purchase. There wasn't even a written explanation as to why the devices were needed. There was a very brief justification statement that really only described the item for purchase.
Jeff Ruch of the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) did request and receive, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), records relating to the amount the Forest Service paid for the devices ($600,001.52 -- $857 apiece), and the justification statement, but not any information that described the training that would have to be provided to agency personnel who will use the electronic Tasers. USFS director John Twiss issued a statement: "In the interest of customer service, we can tell you that the Forest Service is currently developing the required training and law enforcement officers will be required to attend prior to the issuance of, or authorization to carry or use, an Electronic Control Device."
With the devastating forest fires of the past summer, one would think that director Twiss would have more important matters to address than the purchase of what we now know to be lethal weapons. The agency is presently a quarter of a billion dollars in debt and has 200 vacant positions, some lost to budget cuts and more to agents who have been reassigned to other obligations such as border patrol for the Department of Homeland Security. The USFS has over 750,000 million annual visitors and that leaves one officer overseeing approximately 1.5 million visitors and covering 300,000 acres of forest, and even more budget cuts are looming.
PEER, in 2005, released information on director John Twiss, claiming he is the first person without any law enforcement qualifications or credentials to head the USFS -- he's a civilian with desk experience and nothing more. In the early 1990s, Congress mandated that the Forest Service law enforcement division be independent of the agency chain-of-command, in order to ensure fair and independent investigations and internal probes. But Twiss signaled that he would see an end to such independency, and according to Ruch would see to it, "that all future Forest Service investigations will be politically vetted."
Lethal Tasers in the hands of untrained federal agents, compounded by the bureaucratic management style of the present director, with the accompanying potential for serious abuse certainly doesn’t bode well for park visitors.
Jeff Ruch of PEER said it best when he opined, "As a result, in addition to the howl of the coyote and the hoot of the owl, the plaintive cry of "Don't tase me, bro!' may soon echo through the forest night."Christoph Bangert for The New York Times
The United States military has announced that it will be sending a company of Marine Tankers to southwest Afghanistan, bringing a much-needed armor presence to an asymmetrical fight.
U.S. Tanks En Route to Southwestern Afghanistan
By Jim Garamone — American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19, 2010 – Servicemembers in Afghanistan’s Regional Command–Southwest will receive 14 M1A1 Abrams tanks to aid in the fight against the Taliban.
The Marine Corps tanks, which pack a super-accurate 120 mm main gun, will begin to arrive in January.
Despite serving in an infantry company and performing infantry patrols during my 12-month tour in Afghanistan, I am actually an armor officer trained to command tank and scout platoons…and the news absolutely warmed my heart.
Most tankers with whom I served in Kandahar recognize the inherent value that armor assets can bring even to the most civilian-friendly counterinsurgency. It is often thought that heavily armored vehicles (Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, etc.) would be excessive instruments. This argument is not merely in the context of combat, or even intimidation of locals, but the tracks of a main battle tank would most likely destroy the few poorly engineered concrete roads that facilitate the Afghan economy.
Offense & Defense
Driving through minefields is one of the scariest parts of an Afghan tour. A 500-pound I.E.D. is comparable to the psychological effect of a tank’s main gun concussion. My body armor felt more like a pressure cooker around my sweaty chest. As vehicle design has attempted to adapt to this modern threat, the vehicles have inherently become more defensive in nature. They are elevated from the ground to make room for V-shaped hulls. They sacrifice visibility for protection, and combat effectiveness for survivability. But a more defensive vehicle is also an ample target for the enemy.
A battle tank is different. The tank is clearly an offensive vehicle, but with a mine-roller in front and 70 tons of steel to protect its crew, tanks are a fantastic combination of offense and defense on the battlefield. No vehicle is ever immune to the I.E.D. If there is a vehicle on the ground in Afghanistan, the enemy will find a way to blow it up. But tanks are weapon systems capable of taking the hit and continuing the fight.
MGS Stryker photo courtesy of Rajiv Srinivasan
The Army’s Mobile Gun System Stryker variant (MGS, see above) is the closest thing the Army has to a tank at its disposal in Afghanistan. This weapon system is rarely discussed when the issue of Stryker Brigade performance is on the table. In fact, I imagine few who have followed the Stryker’s progression in the global war on terror would even recognize the 105 mm main gun turret that rotates on an amplified Stryker hull…but I guarantee the Afghans in Kandahar province know it very well.
However, as I say, a battle tank is different.
Psychology
Driving a Stryker or MRAP down the Afghan highway is much like driving a bus down a crowded street. As Afghan locals become more aware of what behaviors they can get away with before soldiers will respond with their restricted levels of force, it becomes difficult to keep both soldiers and Afghan civilians safe during our movements. But tanks elicit a far different response from the average Afghan.
The New York Times
Most Afghans have distinct visions of the havoc that T-72 Soviet tanks were able to produce from their occupation. As my MGS vehicle rolled through Kandahar streets, no motorcycles cut us off. No oncoming traffic tried to lure us into a game of chicken, as sometimes happened with the infantry carriers. People kept their distance, which kept them safe, and us free to control the tempo of operations.
I’m certainly aware of the argument that rehashing these memories of Soviet tanks to the Afghan people might not be in the best interests of earning their “hearts and minds.” But in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, we are still working on earning their respect. A tank demands respect.
The Power of Sight
Firefights are the bread and butter of daily life in Zhari District; and the enemy has nearly a 100 percent vote in when and how he engages us. Most of these skirmishes occur at ranges exceeding 750 meters amidst dense vegetation. Above all else, the power to see is the most limiting factor in an armed conflict. Currently, most American military vehicles are equipped with remote optics systems, which are useful for urban fire fights at short ranges but do not offer the depth necessary to fight effectively in southwestern Afghanistan. However, tanks offer optics systems that dwarf the traditional capabilities of an infantry carrier…and, oh yeah, these days each tank can acquire targets clearly in excess of four times as far.
Once a target is finally acquired, most people are unaware of just how diverse an array of ammunition choices there are to engage it properly. There are high explosive rounds for light targets, canister rounds for dismounts, which will preserve the local infrastructure, and of course anti-tank rounds in case the Taliban are able to fix up an old relic of previous wars. The tank does not have to be a source of complete destruction. But it is a game changer. And when that fearsome concussion reverberates, the enemy always second guesses its fight.
The Elephant in the Command Post
Joao Silva for The New York Times
As I discussed with colleagues the addition of tanks to the Kandahar mission, I was not surprised to find a strong variety in responses and interpretations of how an armor company integrates with a counterinsurgency mission. A memorable quote from a colleague:
“One minute they’re saying minimize civilian casualties and let ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] lead the way; the next, we’re bringing in arguably the most fierce ground weapon system in our Army’s arsenal. I think we’re sending mixed signals.”
Another veteran of the Afghan war currently set to return as a civilian noted:
“Anything that separates us from the population makes us less likely to win the war. All the successful COIN initiatives in Afghanistan involve dismounted operations, living with the population, minimizing the distance and difference between us and them.”
But from a tactical perspective, a senior tanker NCO hailed the idea:
“We can talk about Afghans all day, but it’s really hard to go interact with locals when there’s a minefield and Taliban fighting positions in the way. Tanks will help us fill the gaps where the infantry cannot cover. Both are important.”
Thus, the real strategic question becomes, are these tanks a supplement to the counterinsurgency mission, or a diversion from it? If the latter, what implications arise for our approach to state-building?
Not the first. Not the last.
One of the most memorable moments during our 12 month tour was arriving on FOB Wilson in Zhari, Kandahar, for the weekly district security shura and watching the tanker half of my platoon swoon over the troop of Canadian Leopard 2A6Ms parked in the motor-pool. Memories of past I.E.D.s and firefights flowed through our heads. And of course, we couldn’t help but wonder, “What if…”.
Perhaps in my excitement for these tanks I am personally still stuck in “survival mode” from my year in Kandahar; perhaps I’m failing to see the negative strategic implications that will follow these tanks into southern Afghanistan. But then again, the soldiers who patrol those sectors each day are always in survival mode. If a tank has any chance at keeping them safe during their dangerous tour, I’ll be the first to give it a fair shot.
These Marine tanks will not be the first to enter Afghanistan. But they will no doubt make a resounding impact when integrated with conventional infantry. This will no doubt be a game changer in our fight against the Taliban. From the sidelines here in the United States, the crossed sabers on my chest beat with tanker pride.
If you are a service member who has recently been deployed to or worked in the Iraq or Afghanistan conflict zones and would like to submit a post, please e-mail us on [email protected] — Stephen Farrell, At War
Rajiv Srinivasan of Roanoke, Va., is a lieutenant in the United States Army. He served for 12 months as a Stryker platoon leader in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province and has now returned to the United States. See his previous At War posts here.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense or the United States government.I have asked them to stop reorder any kind of liquor from DIAGEO. I asked them to do this discreetly. Un-list products like Tanquerray, Bulleit, Zacapa, lots of Malt Whiskys etc. But do not make it a big story. If guest ask for specific DIAGEO brands, just answer "Oh sorry, currently we ran out of stock - but how about this one?"
Our Bartenders did this quite quick. Nearly perfect. For example - we just found out that also PICON is a DIAGEO product. We will keep it. Maybe for the „frenchiness“. But in general, I think you understand what this is all about: Taking out all high volume, major brands from a luxury global player.
DIAGEO has done nothing wrong. They have a great team here in Germany, Heiko, our Hamburg contact, for example, is an awesome guy.
But I wanted to prove myself a thesis:
"Brands need bartenders - but bartenders do not need brands".
I was quoted on this sometimes. I gave this quote out first a few years ago. Around seven month ago an on-trade magazine picked this quote up again and I felt it was time for the next step.
When Monkey 47 Gin, a brand I respect very much and we sold 700+ bottles a year, sold a major share to Pernod Ricard, we took the Gin out of the shelves of Le Lion the next day.
And to be honest: Because of this great emotional story that this amazing Gin brand built up in germany, that was maybe the only time some consumer really complained because they missed "their (former craft) brand. I had the feeling they did not complain because we did not stock Monkey Gin anymore - some just kind of felt offended that we indirectly would critic their taste now (which we would never do / me at least not as long as you do not ask for an energy drink in an adult place - just saying)
Today I am struggling with Sipsmith. I love Jared and the boys. But now they are a hundred percent sold to Beam Suntory. So, time to take out Sipsmith and „give“ the money to the next small producer (may we keep this unique London Cup).
I am really struggling with former craft brands bought by Global Players. I am not judging. I love the people who built this brands and I do love the fact that they now have this entrepreneurial success. But: its is simply shit for me as a re-seller. The brand has lost a part of the story. The romantic part. The sympathetic part. Always.
I am also struggling with this small new producers having big "secret" partners like Distill Ventures. Different stories - but they have kind of the same background.
Bars and Bartenders sell stories and experiences - not brands. And great products with authentic attributes like regional, organic, niche, small, personal and maybe craft - which are great story to sell if you ask me - just have become a suprisingly very bitter aftertaste if you have to finish with "yeah and its 20% owned by a global player and one day I guess they will take over...".
So please: before I go on, I like to make sure: I do not want to give someone an advice. Please feel free to pour every brand you want and work with you ever brand you want to. I am not judging. As long as you can pay the bills and pay your staff very well - you may do it all right... Just my story - not yours.
So, we took out (nearly) all DIAGEO brands and I gave orders to the bartenders to give me feedback on how our customers will react on this. I was curious: Global Players like DIAGEO invest hundreds if millions of dollars in brand awareness.
It is the old battle between bar owners and liquid brands.
Does a liquid brand and a brand call becomes so strong - that you as an bar owner have the feeling that you need to stock it? If „yes“- the pricing will go up. Always. Same old story. And you as a owner / bartender become dependent. And to be honest: the biggest joy of running your own business is independence.
Dependence of all kinds are a bad situation. We as bar owners and bartenders always have to make sure, that our brand of the bar is stronger then a liquid brand call.
The highest value you have as a bar or bartender, especially if you look for a life long career in our business, is the trust of your guest. If you want to run you business or your career successful over years - the most important thing to build is your credibility.
Something that takes years. I am not talking about this foolish arrogant self proclaimed "mixologist" who wants to "educate" his guest and just act like a stupid child.
I talk about credibility and trust built over years because you always delivered real value for money, you always made the extra mile in quality and service.
If you have built this, you personal or business brand becomes so strong, that your guests just don't care what you offer them - because they know you will never cheat them, would never serve them something bad or rip them off.
And I think it is very important for you to always keep this in mind. If you start to rely on someones brand instead of your own brand - you already lost the game.
So, honestly, I was very happy to see, that the feedback of „taking out one of the biggest players in our industry from our bars“was very relaxed.
Some people ask for this specific brands, a very few were kind of irritated, but I did not hear one single serious feedback that someone was truly disappointed.
Guests followed our alternative recommendations and had a great night. We live in great times: So many great brand to choose from - time to make our own stronger!
I am very happy about this - because it shows that we have build a strong brand and our guests trust us.
This is not about this classic David VS Goliath game. It is not about the "bad" global player vs the small independent producer. So please: Do not contact me with this: "oh - may I offer you our craft handmade Gin - because I saw you are now kicking out all Global Players".
No! F••k you! Some of these so called small brands are just bullshit as well. If you cannot organize a professional bottling of your product and think "Hand-bottled" on your ugly homemade label gives somehow a value to a far overpriced product you play in the same league like these US Rye Brand who doesn't like to tell you that a 95% Rye Mash Bill is not the special brand fact - it is just the mash bill this factory distillery in Indiana where you buy it from, is using for all ryes they produce or this "world best" rum who „upssy“ add quite a lot of sugar and still writes an „age“ number a kind of big and the „Systema Solera“ a kind of small on the label.
I am not on a mission small brands vs big brands. I, as an liquid entrepreneur, and hopefully my bartenders too, are on a mission "making our own brand stronger than anything else“.
And, If I can give you one final advice: You should do the same. Build your brand - do not build other peoples brands.
Find the fine line in what makes your guests happy. What makes them coming back. For years.
Believe me: Guests do not care about your pouring contracts. This is not an USP. This is short term money. For sure: Your bar NEED to be financial successful. But this will happen when you build a real USP and a great own brand reputation. I do not need a brands cash, a Brand Ambassadors to train my stuff or other benefits. We do it on our own way. With the highest possible quality standards.
Will we reorder this DIAGEO products again? I do not think so. They are replaceable - like many brand of global players. Will I list out more and more common big players? I guess so.
Will I try to make great deals with smaller brands which gives me and them a value and a USP for my guest? For sure!
Will I keep some Global Player? Yes. At least in my current concepts. When I have the feeling that they have a great story and a good value for money for my consumers.
Please: make sure that people come for stories and an experience in your bar. Not for bottles.
I would like to close with a text from HARRY JOHNSON from 1882 - from his book „New and Improved Bartenders Manual and Guide for Hotels and Restaurant“.
It is an amazing text, 135 years old. It is quite a couple of lines worth reading. Could not be more actual in this brand soaked times behind our bars today.
I would love to hear your opinion on this. Here on this
Keep up the good work and keep in mind: The only brand you should build, is your own!
Cheers
Joerg Meyer Around seven month ago, I have send an Email to my head bartenders of Le Lion • Bar de Paris and the BOILERMAN BAR Eppendorfer Weg.I have asked them to stop reorder any kind of liquor from DIAGEO. I asked them to do this discreetly. Un-list products like Tanquerray, Bulleit, Zacapa, lots of Malt Whiskys etc. But do not make it a big story. If guest ask for specific DIAGEO brands, just answer "Oh sorry, currently we ran out of stock - but how about this one?"Our Bartenders did this quite quick. Nearly perfect. For example - we just found out that also PICON is a DIAGEO product. We will keep it. Maybe for the „frenchiness“. But in general, I think you understand what this is all about: Taking out all high volume, major brands from a luxury global player.DIAGEO has done nothing wrong. They have a great team here in Germany, Heiko, our Hamburg contact, for example, is an awesome guy.But I wanted to prove myself a thesis:I was quoted on this sometimes. I gave this quote out first a few years ago. Around seven month ago an on-trade magazine picked this quote up again and I felt it was time for the next step.When Monkey 47 Gin, a brand I respect very much and we sold 700+ bottles a year, sold a major share to Pernod Ricard, we took the Gin out of the shelves of Le Lion the next day.And to be honest: Because of this great emotional story that this amazing Gin brand built up in germany, that was maybe the only time some consumer really complained because they missed "their (former craft) brand. I had the feeling they did not complain because we did not stock Monkey Gin anymore - some just kind of felt offended that we indirectly would critic their taste now (which we would never do / me at least not as long as you do not ask for an energy drink in an adult place - just saying)Today I am struggling with Sipsmith. I love Jared and the boys. But now they are a hundred percent sold to Beam Suntory. So, time to take out Sipsmith and „give“ the money to the next small producer (may we keep this unique London Cup).I am really struggling with former craft brands bought by Global Players. I am not judging. I love the people who built this brands and I do love the fact that they now have this entrepreneurial success. But: its is simply shit for me as a re-seller. The brand has lost a part of the story. The romantic part. The sympathetic part. Always.I am also struggling with this small new producers having big "secret" partners like Distill Ventures. Different stories - but they have kind of the same background.Bars and Bartenders sell stories and experiences - not brands. And great products with authentic attributes like regional, organic, niche, small, personal and maybe craft - which are great story to sell if you ask me - just have become a suprisingly very bitter aftertaste if you have to finish with "yeah and its 20% owned by a global player and one day I guess they will take over...".So please: before I go on, I like to make sure: I do not want to give someone an advice. Please feel free to pour every brand you want and work with you ever brand you want to. I am not judging. As long as you can pay the bills and pay your staff very well - you may do it all right... Just my story - not yours.So, we took out (nearly) all DIAGEO brands and I gave orders to the bartenders to give me feedback on how our customers will react on this. I was curious: Global Players like DIAGEO |
icky Ponting [Australia] 2006
Kumar Sangakkara [Sri Lanka] 2007
Mahela Jayawardene [Sri Lanka] 2009
Jacques Kallis [South Africa] 2012
Younis Khan [Pakistan] 2014
Kane Williamson [New Zealand] 2016
New Zealand's leading run scorers in test cricket
Stephen Fleming [111 tests 1994-2008] 7172
Brendon McCullum [101 tests 2004-2016] 6453
Ross Taylor* [71 tests 2007-2016] 5529
Martin Crowe [77 tests 1982-1995] 5444
John Wright [82 tests 1978-1993] 5334
Nathan Astle [81 tests 1996-2006] 4702
Daniel Vettori [112 tests 1997-2014] 4523
Kane Williamson* [50 tests 2010-2016] 4241
Bevan Congdon [61 tests 1965-78] 3448
JR Reid [58 tests 1949-65] 3428
*Still active
Sign up here for the Rio Olympics: Going for Gold newsletterI’m excited to present this Energy Insights post. I’m highlighting a few interesting insights from the The Complexity of a Zero Carbon Grid show. This is very special as The Interchange podcast has only been publicly relaunched recently.
The show considers what may be necessary to get to levels of 80-100% renewables. Stephen Lacey and Shayle Kann host the show with Jesse Jenkins as the guest.
The concept of flexibility
Jenkins observes that the concept of flexibility of electrical capacity appearing in literature. Flexibility means how quickly an asset is able to respond to change.
A combined cycle gas turbine plant is usually more flexible than a coal or nuclear generator. One reason for this is the ability to control plant electric output by modulating the supplementary burner gas consumption.
We will need flexibility on a second, minute, hourly or seasonal basis.
This concept of flexibility was also recently touched on by the excellent Energy Analyst blog. Patrick Avis notes that we need both flexibility (kW or kW/min) and capacity (kWh) for a high renewables scenario.
The post Flexibility in Europe’s power sector could easily be enough material for a few Energy Insights posts. Well worth a read.
One investment cycle away
Jenkins observes that the investment decisions we make today will affect how we decarbonise in the future. Considering the lifetime of many electricity generation assets, we find that we are only a single investment cycle away from building plants that will be operating in 2050.
Most deep decarbonisation roadmaps include essentially zero carbon electricity by 2050. We need to ensure that when the next investment cycle begins we are not installing carbon intense generation as it would still be operating in 2050.
Table 1 - typical lifetimes of electricity generation plants (years) given by Jenkins Nuclear 40-60 Wind & solar 30 - longer Gas & coal 30-40
For both gas and coal the implied cutoff date for plant operation to begin is between 2010 – 2020.
Increasing marginal challenge of renewables deployment
The inverse relationship between the level of deployment of renewables and the marginal value added is well known. Jenkins notes that this relationship also applies to the deployment of storage and demand side response.
As renewable deployment increases the challenges for both storage and demand side response also increase.
#### Seasonal storage technologies
1 – Power to gas
Electricity -> hydrogen -> synthetic methane.
Figure 3 – Apros Power to Gas
Intermittency of the supply of excess renewable generation means that power to gas asset wouldn’t be fully utilized.
Didn’t cover the possibility of storage of electricity to allow a constant supply of electricity to the power to gas asset.
2 – Underground thermal
Limited to demonstration scale.
Didn’t cover the feasibility of generating electricity from the stored heat.
I would expect that the temperature of the stored heat is low. Perhaps the temperature could be increased with renewable powered heat pumps.
Thanks for reading!Introduction
Just a week shy of a year ago was when the M90 review went live on the pages of TweakTown, and while the M90 was a great concept on paper, some of its features held it back a bit in my opinion. The mouse was contoured correctly, even if it was made for those with larger hands. With more of a medium sized hand, I found that some of the programmable buttons on the side were just slightly out of reach for my thumb, and the fact that the activation pressure needed to use them was so high, even if you could get to the buttons, they were still tough to use. When I first jumped into the Vengeance Series of mice, there was also a LOD issue that would pretty much make the mouse dysfunctional if set to the lowest setting. While that issue was corrected in later software, sometimes little things can be overlooked when taking your first leap into a market, and I think that is exactly what happened then, I just hope everything is tended to this time around.
With a year of time passing, Corsair decided it was time to refresh the entire peripherals lineup. They are now offering revised versions, or soon will, of both keyboards and both mice. This time, simply changing zeros to fives in the naming scheme, they took a serious look at the customers comments and have adapted these new products to what the customers felt the originals may have been lacking or needed changed in internal components to make things work and feel better. Specifically in the product to hit our desk most recently, the sensor and some of the switches have been changed, but the design keeps almost everything else aesthetically that everyone loved about the first released series of products.
Today we will be looking at the Corsair Vengeance M95 laser gaming mouse, and yes it is still designed with MMO & RTS gamers in mind. There are things like the ability to keep many profiles in the mouse, and the 15 button layout of the original to allow for as much programming of the mouse as one thumb can handle. They did address the sensor, and this time it has been upgraded to the current top of the line offering in laser sensors. The other major change was to the buttons on the side as I had mentioned. They used to be super tough to press, and while it made accidental clicks a non-issue, they would fatigue the thumb quite a bit. This time around they are only need about half of the activation pressure to use them, so even if you have to stretch a bit to hit the "sniper" key, it is much easier when the button is half as tough to press.
With new things to look out for, and some software to tinker with, let's see if the Vengeance M95 is better than the original, and more importantly, if it is worth your investment.
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Got an opinion on this content? Post a comment below!In this age of partisan and ideological polarization, something unusual happened in May: A writer from the right delivered an encomium to a writer from the left. The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney—a relentless libertarian who has never seen a government program he did not view as a squalid arrangement between statist liberals and corporate welfare seekers—paid tribute to Gabriel Kolko, a historian identified with the New Left of the 1960s who had passed away earlier that month.
Carney wrote that Americans typically believe a classic “fable” that courageous “trust busters” like Teddy Roosevelt used “the big stick of federal power to battle the greedy corporations.” Kolko’s work, especially his most significant book, The Triumph of Conservatism (1963), though little known today to anybody but specialists in early twentieth-century history, “dismantled this myth.” Carney quoted Kolko’s core argument: “The dominant fact of American political life” in the Progressive Era “was that big business led the struggle for the federal regulation of the economy.” And to both Carney and Kolko, this is pretty much everything you need to know.
It’s hard to call a historian “forgotten” in a country in which the phrase “that’s ancient history!” is about the most withering description of irrelevance imaginable. But Kolko is, at least, semi-forgotten. While a nontenured faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania during the Vietnam War, Kolko, at great risk to his academic career, exposed to the media and led protests against a university research program in chemical and biological weaponry funded by the Defense Department. Penn froze his salary and forced him to leave. Perhaps if Kolko had remained at an Ivy League research institution, he would have been better known at the time of his death. Instead, he ultimately spent most of his career teaching at York University in Toronto, writing several highly critical works about U.S. foreign policy before living his final years in Amsterdam.
When it was published, The Triumph of Conservatism completely undermined the dominant narratives about the Progressive Era: that a countervailing federal government, determined to limit the power of big business, had done just that; or that middle-class professionals and technocrats had engineered a rational mixture of markets and regulatory monitoring to moderate both business concentration on the right and labor and agrarian agitation on the left.
Kolko was one of several important scholars who came to prominence in the 1960s and, in the words of Peter Novick, the great interpreter and chronicler of the American historical profession, became “homogenized” as “New Left historians.” The phrase captures in its large net scholars who, despite a shared adversarial stance against the conventions of the profession, vehemently disagreed with one another about historical interpretation, the political prospects of the larger New Left, and the relationship between scholarship and political activism.
Still, when a prominent libertarian writer extols a half-century-old work that is contemptuous of the reform of modern American capitalism, written by a leftist scholar who spent most of his career teaching in Canada, attention must be paid. And not just to that scholar, but also to the current of thought that nurtured his career. New Left historiography was at once a movement to transform—and lead—the historical profession, a set of methods and topics to alter historical scholarship, and an effort to create an intellectual infrastructure that would be linked to an ascendant political movement and that would educate that movement about the successes and failures of its radical antecedents. Who were these historians who grew to intellectual maturity with the New Left and saw themselves as both scholars and activists? What did they accomplish intellectually? Can liberals and leftists take anything from their work today in the way the admiring libertarian, Timothy Carney, finds support for his arguments in the scholarship of Gabriel Kolko?
Against Consensus
New Left historiography focused, not always congruently, on the machinations of the powerful and the resistance of the powerless. The historical scholarship paralleled contemporary developments: The post-New Deal state of the 1950s seemed feckless and enervated to these young historians (and then, during the ’60s, criminal), and the civil rights and anti-war movements in which many of them participated were great upsurges of mass protest that encouraged scholars to seek historical precedents.
New Left-affiliated historians emphasized three large themes of historical interpretation. The first was corporate liberalism (or what Kolko called “political capitalism”), the purported collusion between political and business elites—with a cameo role for labor unions—to stabilize the economy and suppress a radical leftist alternative. Secondly, they embraced history “from the bottom up”: the depiction of a culturally semiautonomous resistance against mercantile and professional elites among the poor, non-property-owning class in colonial and early America; against industrial capitalism among the white working class in the nineteenth century; and against the system of Southern chattel slavery among the slaves. Finally, they voiced a sharp criticism (undertaken by Kolko, among others) of the self-serving rationale since the late nineteenth century for the use of U.S. power abroad—what William Appleman Williams referred to in his 1959 classic, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, as America’s conception of itself as embodying a “unique combination of economic power, intellectual and practical genius, and moral rigor” that allowed it “to check the enemies of peace and progress—and build a better world—without erecting an empire in the process.” Williams was, of course, ahead of his time: Several years later, the focus on the historical roots of American interventionism synergized with the growing movement against the war in Vietnam.
In addition, feminist and African-American history overlapped somewhat with New Left history—especially in the latter case, via the work of Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Vincent Harding, and Harold Cruse—but those disciplines followed separate trajectories in conjunction with the feminist, civil rights, and black nationalist movements.
As a movement of paradigmatic thought, New Left history had a primary locus of intellectual fermentation: the history department at the University of Wisconsin. Madison was the spawning ground for many (but far from all) New Left historians, including Gutman, Martin J. Sklar, Ronald Radosh (then another expositor of corporate liberalism, but later a convert to conservatism), and Paul Buhle. Madison had a great tradition of producing progressive politicians like Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette. In addition, a long list of iconoclastic academics such as Frederick Jackson Turner and the pioneering labor economists John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely had taught at the university. As it happened, it became a kind of upper Midwest oasis for the next leftist generation, many of whom were Jewish and/or Red Diaper babies from New York or Chicago. (Kolko, too, passed through Madison, receiving his master’s from Wisconsin in 1955 before earning his doctorate from Harvard.)
Wisconsin’s Appleman Williams, the leading revisionist historical critic of American foreign policy, inspired and taught many of the radicalized young historians. Graduate students at Wisconsin founded Studies on the Left, the short-lived (1959-67) but most significant historical journal of the New Left. As Buhle suggests in the introduction to his fascinating anthology of reminiscences from faculty and students at Wisconsin, History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-1970 (1990), two roughly contemporary frames of historical analysis originated, competed, and complemented each other in Madison. These were a top-down focus on the “manipulation of the masses by the American elite” as a “smooth” process, which, especially in Williams’s work on foreign policy, made intuitive sense (except when war triggered public opposition, elites controlled foreign policy and made it on their own behalf); and a bottom-up depiction of the social dynamics and cultural and political agency of workers, slaves, and (later) women.
Gutman was already working within the latter framework in the late 1950s, but his work and that of countless other young American leftist historians was given an enormous lift by the publication of the paperback version of E.P. Thompson’s monumental The Making of the English Working Class (1966). As Thompson eloquently argued in perhaps the most quoted introduction from a work of history in English of the past 50 years, he did not “see class as a ‘structure,’ nor even as a ‘category,’ but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships…. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.” Class as a lived reality constructed by workers through collective actions rather than as a static category imposed upon them by intellectuals became the guiding tenet of American left social history for a generation and more.
To this was added the mantra of “thick description” taken from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz: the close analysis of culturally embedded group behaviors. The quotidian habits of social solidarity, which Gutman described with passionate brilliance in small nineteenth-century Midwestern and Eastern towns and slave communities alike, evoked a logic of tough, even fierce agency, without quite obscuring the grimmer truth that the elites remained in control of the political economy.
As Daniel Rodgers writes in his 2011 book Age of Fracture, culture was for Thompson and Gutman a “resource of the oppressed.” But it was not, frequently, a winning resource. Thompson’s justly famous plea in his introduction that he wished to “rescue the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver…from the enormous condescension of posterity” readily concedes that these workers might have been, as he continued, “casualties of history.” To quote a hesitant but perceptive undergraduate student of mine from long ago, as I fervently related Gutman’s argument that black families under slavery created their own wedding ceremonies and maintained separate surnames from those given them by their slave masters: “But…they were still slaves, right?” This exchange dampened my enthusiasm for teaching Gutman for a very long time.
A Critique of Liberalism
Rereading The Triumph of Conservatism and other works by Kolko after 35 years is to consider an almost mirror-opposite set of interpretative problems to those posed by Gutman and Thompson’s work. I opened the book with a vague memory that it was what it claimed to be: a powerful revisionist reading of the Progressive Era. The dutiful underlining and margin notes remain in my battered text, but a more skeptical eye has replaced my youthful credulity. The book is not nearly as compelling as I remember it.
It is arid and mono-causal, indeed almost monomaniacal. It marches through one rote example after another designed to demonstrate the author’s thesis without the slightest ambiguities or qualifications. Kolko tells story after story that reveals his overarching thesis that big business and capital joined with Theodore Roosevelt and other key politicians to regulate the economy to their advantage and to the disadvantage of potential competitors. For Kolko, even the Socialist Party, an influential political force at the time, shares the same views as the titans of business. Via selective quotations, Kolko subsumes the party of the great anti-capitalist Eugene Debs into the vast machinery of a centralized oligarchic capitalism.
Like Foucault, Kolko constructs a closed system of power: Resistance is not only futile, but merely a muffled shout somewhere outside the locked-door meetings in which politicians, bankers, and corporate leaders consciously worked to co-opt any and all challenges. There is barely a hint in the book—a paragraph on page 285, to be exact—that there were enormous social tensions roiling the country during the period under discussion. Labor was organizing and striking and frequently meeting violent resistance from companies and the state; farmers were unhappy; there were countless variations of aggressive and influential middle-class reformers dealing with issues ranging from immigration to family socialization to restrictions on alcohol; and the Socialist Party was growing, from the tenements of New York to the flatlands of Oklahoma. Kolko, himself writing before the apex of the New Left’s own activism, notes all of this, but doesn’t really see it; as Gutman shrewdly observed in a 1982 interview, the interpretive schema of corporate liberalism “is a expression of the political pessimism of the 1950s and early 1960s, which is simply being projected backward.”
Despite their apparent mastery of the political process he describes, the big corporations and banks, in Kolko’s own words, fail frequently. Somehow, the major insurance companies were unable to attain their goal of federalizing insurance regulation—to this day, each individual state regulates (rather laxly, say reformers) multibillion-dollar insurance companies. A bill to regulate food and drugs that industry opposed was passed in 1906. Similarly, the “Aldrich Plan,” developed to create a national system of reserve banks, named after as powerful an elite as one could imagine (Nelson Aldrich was the leader of the Senate Republicans, and his daughter married John D. Rockefeller Jr.), and supported by many of the nation’s most powerful bankers, could not even come to a vote in Congress.
And the book contains strange historical misreadings. In a particularly peculiar yet revealing example, Kolko downplays J.P. Morgan’s role in organizing his fellow plutocrats to limit the great financial Panic of 1907. Morgan was at the time America’s most prominent and powerful banker. His actions during the panic are so well documented by historians and biographers that Kolko’s contention that he “sat by and watched inexorable fate move in” is bizarre. But, as always, Kolko wants to drive home his larger thesis: in this case, that the New York banking interests were unable to rationalize their own sector in the face of industrial combines financing their own expansion via stock offerings. So Morgan, rather than being a whirlwind of self-interested activism—creating lending consortiums, reaching out to fellow titans like John D. Rockefeller and steel magnate Henry Frick for logistical and financial support, and deciding whether key banks would live or die—becomes, in Kolko’s unique telling, a passive stooge of the Treasury Department.
Kolko is also (like his present-day admirer Carney) obsessed with the motives of powerful actors at the expense of policy results. Because the major meatpackers wanted to “enforce and extend” the inspection laws in order to impose compliance costs upon their smaller competitors, Kolko dismisses meat inspection as a scam by big business. But even if the large meatpackers got something they wanted (and even if the law could have been much improved), maybe it’s still a good idea for a government that doesn’t want its citizens to be poisoned by rancid meat to, you know, inspect the meat. This was the goal of progressive reformers, and it also happened to benefit many more people than just the behemoth of Big Meat. Conservation, too, in Kolko’s telling, is just a sop to the lumber industry. And indeed, the industry played a major role in creating conservation policy, because its long-term fortunes were being adversely affected by “indiscriminate cutting”—yet so were those of the general public, which relies upon rational and prudent management of natural resources.
Another telling example, this from Kolko’s Main Currents in Modern American History (1976), is his curt dismissal of child labor laws. Again, the idea—in part true—is that Northern textile companies wanted to impose the costs of hiring adults on their Southern competitors. As Kolko sees it, their support for child labor laws was “purely and simply to strike a blow” against their competitors. But this ignores the longstanding movement against child labor—Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Lillian Wald had formed the National Child Labor Committee in 1904—that was a primary reason that a bill, however limited, was ultimately passed (if then struck down by a conservative Supreme Court two years later).
The bald instrumentalism of Kolko’s analysis marks every page of Triumph. Martin J. Sklar, as a graduate student at Wisconsin, invented the term “corporate liberalism” and had a sophisticated analysis that carefully distinguished different variants. (Sklar, who died a few weeks before Kolko, was a self-destructive but much more creative historian than Kolko, and was recently the subject of two long, informative profiles in The New Republic and The Nation by friends and former colleagues John Judis and James Livingston, respectively.) For Kolko, who preferred the term “political capitalism,” large corporations and finance capital sought to protect themselves from competition and to use weaker federal regulation as a shield from potentially more meddlesome state regulations. They also rolled over small-business competitors.
Moreover, according to James Weinstein, another analyst of corporate liberalism and an important editor of Studies on the Left, the unions were also in on the deal, as a kind of junior partner to the federal government, big business, and banking. But in fact, as Sklar later pointed out, labor was too weak in the early twentieth century to be much of a partner to capital and the state. Rather, suggests Sklar, big business and small business together, over a couple of decades, reached an accommodation with unions to integrate widespread collective bargaining into the economy—a deal that bore fruit only beginning in the late 1930s and early 1940s, with the wartime production/no strike agreement reached by the Roosevelt Administration, business, and labor during the Second World War.
Leftists like Kolko, Weinstein, and Sklar emerged at exactly the moment when a huge cohort of postwar college students was chafing at the quiescence of the Eisenhower compromise with the New Deal order. The Triumph of Conservatism is a great example of a scholar, his subject, and his times harmonically converging. Kolko expressed the contempt the New Left historians felt toward both their professional predecessors—the “consensus” historians, with their too-easy assumption of American virtue (as seen even in their book titles: The Genius of American Politics; People of Plenty)—and the entire rotting edifice of the bureaucratic liberal state and its massive twin failures: its acquiescence to Southern white supremacy, and, a few years later, its hubris in undertaking the brutal, imperialist fiasco of Vietnam. In the early and mid-1960s, the New Left, holding aloft the Port Huron Statement, its signature rejection of every major American institution, concluded that the liberal state had shamed America, and Kolko and Weinstein were there to explain that liberalism was never what it was cracked up to be. As Weinstein wrote in his 1967 essay in Studies on the Left, “Notes on the Need for a Socialist Party,” it was a “myth” that “liberalism is a movement against the power of business…. Liberalism is not a neutral system of political thought, but an ideology that sustains and strengthens the existing power structure.”
Infiltrating the Establishment
During the late 1960s, every major American institution seemed up for grabs, subject to the withering criticism of Black Power and anti-war student activists and their allies among junior faculty. New Left historians not only challenged the reigning methods and interpretations within American historical scholarship; they attempted a takeover of the profession itself.
In 1969, at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War, a group of New Left historians, mostly junior scholars, attempted to capture the profession’s major organization, the American Historical Association (AHA). The two-pronged effort consisted of proposing a resolution condemning U.S. involvement in the war and electing as the AHA’s new president Staughton Lynd, the son of the eminent sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, authors of the emblematic study of middle America, Middletown (actually Muncie, Indiana). Lynd was an activist, an intellectual historian of colonial and early America, and a teacher who sought to bring his activism and his revisionist scholarship to the classroom. In comparison with Kolko’s bleak outlook in the early 1960s, Lynd’s work was tied optimistically to what he believed were the increasing revolutionary possibilities of the New Left. For example, in his 1968 work The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, Lynd attempted a tortured comparison between Marx and the Founding Fathers as cautious elites distrustful of radical movements from below, concluding that the abolitionists could teach all of these trimmers a lesson because “one should not invoke the ultimate act of revolution without willingness to see new institutions perpetually improvised from below; the withering away of the state must begin in the process of changing the state; freedom must mean freedom now.”
After doing his doctoral work at Columbia, Lynd had taught at all-black Spelman College in Atlanta during the civil rights movement and went on to help create the Mississippi Freedom Schools, an extraordinary effort at alternative education for black Mississippi children during what became known later as the “Freedom Summer” of 1964. In 1965, now with a position at Yale, he went to Hanoi with Tom Hayden, the young author of the Port Huron Statement, and Herbert Aptheker, a Communist Party member and Marxist historian of slavery. While there, Lynd (accurately) accused the U.S. government of lying about its participation in the war. Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster (later something of a hero to the left for defending the rights of the Black Panther Party), “used language from the law of treason” to describe Lynd’s activities in Hanoi, according to Lynd’s biographer, Carl Mirra. Yale fired Lynd in 1968, and he was unable to get a job anywhere else for political reasons. Later, he was to become a rank-and-file labor lawyer. But in 1969, then a scholar without an institution, he remained one of the most compelling historians of the New Left generation.
While Lynd attempted a procedural challenge to the AHA, his colleague Jesse Lemisch made a powerful intellectual assault on the historical establishment. Like Lynd, Lemisch had also been let go from an elite academic post, in his case at the University of Chicago. Also a historian of early American history, he had popularized the phrase “history from the bottom up” as a way to “make the inarticulate speak.”
Lemisch presented an extraordinary paper at the 1969 AHA convention entitled “Present-Mindedness Revisited” (later reprinted as “On Active Service in War and Peace”). The paper had already been rejected by the two major journals in the field—and rejected with genuine shock that its author could possibly have imagined it might be published. As an anonymous peer reviewer wrote to the editor of the Journal of American History, “I don’t know how you can tell [Lemisch] that he certainly can’t do this, and that he simply cannot do it in the pages of the Journal.” Lemisch’s paper is highly polemical, but it is also a careful reconstruction of the political biases of the consensus historians, accusing them of reflexively expressing the very same “present-mindedness” that Irwin Unger, a mainstream historian, had angrily accused the New Leftists of in an infamous paper two years earlier. Lemisch flips Unger’s attack on the New Leftists back onto the leading figures of the profession. He criticized prominent historians like Daniel Boorstin, who blithely admitted to the House Committee on Un-American Activities that some of his scholarship was, essentially, hagiography in the service of extolling the “unique virtues of American democracy,” and Stanley Elkins, the scholar of slavery who chastised the abolitionists for lacking the “balance” to oppose slavery while supporting social stability. Ultimately, Lemisch’s point was to assert that he and his young colleagues were trying to be better historians than their mentors, “trying to come a little closer to finding out how things actually were.”
For sheer chutzpah, Lemisch’s essay is remarkable in a way that is impossible to imagine in today’s more placid university environment (“You cannot lecture us on civility while you legitimize barbarity”). Just as some of the young New Left historians like Lynd feared, professionalization—the fear of losing a job in academia or the desire to enjoy the perks that came with holding one—would make such an attack on the most powerful scholars in the field by an aspiring junior faculty member unthinkable today. (Lemisch did survive to have a long academic career at SUNY Buffalo, and later at John Jay College.)
The establishment did not sit still in the face of these attacks. The anti-war resolution and Lynd’s presidential candidacy triggered a counter-movement from the AHA mainstream. It was led by perhaps the country’s most distinguished historian, Richard Hofstadter, abetted by various other liberals, a few more conservative eminences like the aforementioned Boorstin, and, in a fascinating twist, Eugene Genovese, the prominent Marxist historian and subsequent author of what remains the most influential history of American slavery in the past 40 years, Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974). Genovese had himself often been linked to the New Left historical cohort; he was a former editor of Studies on the Left after the journal moved to New York in 1962. Hofstadter invested his behind-the-scenes reputational capital, while Genovese provided the public firepower.
Hofstadter, who would die from leukemia at age 54 the following year, was profoundly worried that the profession, like his beloved Columbia University after the campus uprising of 1968, would become hysterically politicized—though he himself, at age 28, had briefly participated in a failed attempt in 1944 to oppose the elevation to the AHA’s presidency of a historian (and former ambassador to Spain) who’d been accused of supporting Franco during the Spanish Civil War. The New Left historians’ plan (a classic one for any small group of committed adherents seeking to take over an organization) was to surprise and overwhelm with numbers the business meeting of the AHA (typically a low-attendance snoozer), pass the anti-war resolution, and elect Lynd over R.R. Palmer, the establishment choice and eminent historian of the era of the French Revolution.
As Peter Novick mordantly observes, the radicals, in an almost parodic example of insurgent naiveté, deliberately left their key strategy memo in the reserved stacks at the State Historical Society in Wisconsin so it could be shared with prospective comrades. But instead, the non-radical faction of Wisconsin’s history department sent the memo along to the offices of the AHA. Hofstadter, as his biographer, David Brown, writes, sent a group letter to every member of the AHA, urging them to attend the business meeting and, in Brown’s words, “put down the young Turks…looking to politicize the association.” As Brown tells it, attendance swelled from 116 the previous year to more than 1,400. The anti-war resolution was defeated and Lynd received just 28 percent of the vote. The AHA, in a procedural hedge against future left-wing rebellion, weakened the power of the business meeting going forward.
Far more flamboyantly, Genovese opposed the New Left faction with a characteristically subtle argument that he expressed in a characteristically unsubtle way. Unlike Hofstadter, Genovese did not want, precisely, for universities to be apolitical. As Novick notes, he worried that the effort of Lynd and other New Leftists to make scholarship “immediately relevant” would undermine the university as a safe haven for a long-term Gramscian “war of position” undertaken by strategically farsighted leftist intellectuals like, well, himself. For similar reasons, Genovese, who had famously welcomed a Viet Cong victory just four years earlier, fought against an institutional resolution opposing the war. Lynd’s gambit had enraged Genovese and revealed his own authoritarian temperament. Genovese (and then-fellow leftist Christopher Lasch) thought Lynd’s scholarship was garbage: a delusional and ahistorical fantasy, polemically imposing on the past Lynd’s romantic hopes for a contemporary social revolution, full of presentist formulations like the one about Marx and the Founders.
In this academic chapter in the history of intra-left disputes, Lynd and his rebellious colleagues played the role of the abolitionists demanding freedom now, and Genovese, in turn, displayed the rage against Lynd and his attempted takeover of the AHA that Lenin and Trotsky had for the rebellious Kronstadt sailors in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Labeling Lynd and his supporters “totalitarians” during the AHA’s business meeting, Genovese—“screaming,” as Mirra describes it—urged his colleagues to “put these so-called radicals down, put them down hard, and put them down once and for all.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral of New Left historiography: Soon enough, leftist and feminist historians took over the field, particularly in American history. In 1978, Genovese was elected president of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the historians’ organization that focuses exclusively on the study of the United States. In 1980, even William Appleman Williams, the great Wisconsin mentor to New Leftist historians whom conservative historians frequently disparaged, assumed the same office. Linda Gordon, whose feminist activism in the 1970s integrated with her scholarship, is one of less than a handful of historians who have been twice awarded what is probably the profession’s highest honor, the Bancroft Prize. Another two-time Bancroft Prize winner who came along about a decade behind Kolko is Eric Foner—arguably not only the leading leftist historian today and the leading historian of the Civil War/Reconstruction era, but perhaps the most eminent contemporary American historian, period. In fact, the next two generations of great American historians, following the cohort of Kolko and Lynd, have been mostly identified as liberal-left and/or feminist.
Progressive History in a Conservative Age
The writing of history has its own history. Today’s historians no longer chastise the hegemonic liberalism of the post-New Deal order in the way young historians like Kolko, Weinstein, and Sklar did 50 years ago. Since 1980, liberal and leftist historians have written in an era of conservative ascendancy, while within the discipline itself, a kind of social democratic left-feminism dominates the profession’s leading organizations: Foner has served as president of both the AHA and the OAH, and a profession that, for decades, elected only men to run its top organizations now regularly elects women.
Today, historians of the left are more interested in the study of the rise of modern American conservatism, especially its mobilization at the state and local level. As Timothy Carney’s respect for Kolko’s work indicates, corporate liberalism may be an attractive paradigm for conservatives and libertarians. Many of them wish not only to limit corporate influence on the state but also to limit the federal government’s power to provide basic social insurance and to regulate the environment, occupational safety, and consumer products. Libertarians just wish to leave private economic power to its own devices (but without statist favoritism). Kolko wanted to destroy “political capitalism,” although he did not think a leftist alternative was up to the task. Libertarians, by contrast, want to boost capitalism and merely destroy the political-statist link to it. (Throughout his career, Kolko, unlike erstwhile comrades like Genovese, Sklar, and Radosh, remained a committed leftist and believed that libertarians misused his work for their own ideological purposes.)
There is a variation of the libertarian critique of state-capital collusion—which echoes the critiques made by Kolko and Weinstein—that is expressed among leftists critical of the Obama Administration. Critics of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), for example, made much of the fact that the Obama Administration had cut deals with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries that would provide those sectors with billions of dollars from newly insured |
Seahawks draft Russell Wilson, Bobby Wagner, Robert Turbin, and Bruce Irvin, but they re-signed Chris Clemons, Max Unger, Marshawn Lynch, Red Bryant, Breno Giacomini, Paul McQuistan, Heath Farwell, and Mike Robinson! That is eight pretty significant "re-ups" right there. They also did very well in rookie free agency by nailing Rishaw Johnson, Sean McGrath, and Jermaine Kearse.
(E) The 2013 offseason will probably be known for "big time" free agency because of the signings of Cliff Avril, Michael Bennett, Antoine Winfield, and the trade and subsequent 6-year deal given to Percy Harvin. It is too early to tell how the draft and rookie free agency will be perceived - but the "outside" free agency work is significant, and the Seahawks have only "re-signed" one player so far: Kam Chancellor.
Every year, the offseason has brought different themes to the Seahawks in regards to their focus for player acquisition and retention. Pete Carroll and John Schneider continue to be aggressive in all avenues of player acquisition.
You know where to find me!
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Nov. 8, 2015, 9:04 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 8, 2015, 9:05 PM GMT By The Associated Press
ORLANDO, Fla. — A company whose name is synonymous with eyeballs on the Internet is turning its attention to hearts.
Google Life Sciences, a research group recently spun off from its parent corporation, is teaming with the American Heart Association in a $50 million project to find new ways to fight heart disease.
The heart association's half, $25 million over five years, is the largest single research investment in its history. For the Google group, its latest biomedical venture will join projects that include whiz-bang devices such as driverless cars, contact lenses that monitor blood-sugar for diabetics and health-tracking wristbands.
The project was announced Sunday at a heart association conference in Orlando.
Heart disease is the world's top killer, a problem that "seems ripe for new innovation" and disruptive, unconventional thinking, said Andy Conrad, Google Life Sciences' chief executive. Progress has been slow and "we should shake it up a little bit," he said.
Besides cash, Google has tech tools to offer such as sensors to monitor the health of "people in the wild" versus just when they go to doctors and huge capabilities for data analysis. The company is aiming for a cure, Conrad said. There's no guarantee of success, but "the only thing we can promise is that we'll try harder."
By early next year — Valentine's Day, "a big heart day," Conrad said — a team from Google and the heart association hope to pick a project leader, who might be a cardiologist, a nurse or "a teenager from Wisconsin," depending on what skills and ideas that person can bring to the table. The team is looking for "a maverick," he said.
The venture "really allows us to think about... doing research in a different way," said Dr. Robert Harrington, chairman of the Stanford University School of Medicine and a member of the heart association's board.
Traditional research has brought only incremental improvements in heart disease treatment.
"We are trying to do something disruptive here," Harrington said.Munir A. Sheikh is executive fellow at the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, and a former chief statistician of Canada.
During Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's recent visit to Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper commented on climate change: "No matter what they say, no country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country. We are just a little more frank about that." Mr. Abbott, having abolished Australia's carbon tax, added: "I've always been against a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme because it harms our economy without necessarily helping the environment."
These two prime ministers were saying that a theory we economists have studied all our working lives, based on knowledge that has been accumulated for a century, is all wrong.
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In 1920, the great economist Arthur Cecil Pigou argued that when an economic activity creates external disservice (such as pollution), a properly designed tax improves, not worsens, resource allocation and makes an economy better. Perhaps the two prime ministers know of empirical evidence that economists have ignored.
I've examined the performance of a number of countries that are known to rely heavily on environmental taxes: Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. I also looked at the average performance of the OECD area (a collection of 34 developed countries), the United States and Canada. To evaluate performance, I looked at the following:
A number of environmental indicators that include the share of environmental taxes in total taxes, the environmental taxes to GDP ratio, the energy and materials intensity of production and consumption, and the growth of greenhouse gasses over the period from 1990 to 2012;
Two economic variables, the level of per capita GDP as an indicator of the current standard of living and labour productivity growth over time, as an indicator of potential growth in living standards in the future. I also included income distribution across income groups using the Gini coefficient, which captures income inequality.
In total, I have eight indicators and seven jurisdictions. This is what I found, using standardized data from the OECD.
Canada's reliance on environmental taxes is the lowest among the group, along with the United States. On average, OECD countries rely significantly more on environmental taxes than Canada does. Each of the four European countries in our sample has carbon taxes, as do a number of others in the OECD. Given this, one would expect that Canada would use energy resources and materials much more heavily than others in production and consumption activities, and that is indeed the case. Canada's performance in curbing GHG emissions is the worst in this group.
We find as well that the performance of the countries with high environmental taxes, while the best in our sample for environmental outcomes, is better as well for both economic and social outcomes than Canada's. On GDP per capita, Canada is above average, with Norway at the top. On labour productivity growth, Canada is the second worst, with Sweden and Norway at the top. On income inequality, Canada and the United States are at the bottom, while Denmark and Norway are at the top.
The picture that seems to emerge is that Canada is not doing well in relation to any of the six jurisdictions for environmental, economic or social outcomes. To get a better overall picture, I added the rankings on the eight indicators: With seven countries, the worst possible score would be 56, if a country were at the bottom for each of the indicators. The best possible score would be 8. In this ranking, Canada scores 48, worst of the group. The U.S. scores 44. The best of the group is Denmark, at 20. Even if we were to concentrate on outcome indicators alone – greenhouse gasses, the two economic indicators and income distribution – Canada continues to rank at the bottom.
Let me be clear about what this evidence does and does not show. The evidence does not establish causation – that environmental taxation generates better economic and social outcomes. It does show, however, that environmental goals are achievable at the same time as economic and social goals. I believe that intelligently designed policies would let us realize the outcomes that economic theory predicts.
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So, with due respect to Mr. Abbott and Mr. Harper, economic theory is alive and well, and there is evidence to back it up.Mockups let you demonstrate to a client or employer what your design will look like once it’s printed and folded into shape. These PSD templates give you a quick and easy way to turn your design into a realistic folder mockup.
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Tutorial: Create a Realistic Emboss/Deboss Effect in Photoshop
An embossed or debossed design won’t look the same in real life as it does within the die cut template you submit to a printer; the design on the die cut template will usually consist of only a simple solid color. If you want to show off these types of designs in your mockup, you’ll need to get a little creative. Use this Photoshop tutorial to simulate a lifelike emboss or deboss effect.A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on bitcoin as protocol that got a couple of hundred comments from which I learned a lot. This is an important topic and Chris Dixon has done a lot of good thinking and writing on this. He has a new short post on the relationship between Bitcoin and the Byzantine Generals problem. Chris wrote this mostly as a reaction to various New York Times coverage of Bitcoin which so far misses the protocol innovation. While I agree with Chris, here are some (possibly helpful) clarifications to his post.
First, the actual cost of money transfer in the traditional banking system could be tiny if the banks wanted it to be. The high existing cost is largely an incentive problem not a technical problem. That’s because the banking system isn’t fully distributed and decentralized the way that Bitcoin is. Between two banks we are only dealing with a 2-phase commit situation which has been solved (efficiently) for a long time.
Second, solutions to the Byzantine General’s problem have existed pre Bitcoin and a lot of work was done on this by Leslie Lamport in the early 1980s (he coined the name). Many of these solutions, however, work only if no more than one third of the nodes are potentially traitorous and also involve a lot of overhead / or make assumptions that cannot be guaranteed in fully distributed systems. Nonetheless there was a big breakthrough here pre Bitcoin in work by Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov.
Third, the Bitcoin proof of work really is wasteful in the sense that all the computation carried out by nodes that do not succeed is in fact discarded. There are some new systems that already supplement the proof of work with a proof of stake. Beyond that I am aware of work on a proof of storage system which would be most appealing as it would align the expense (storage) with an objective (archiving of transaction).
Finally, it is worth noting that there is still no research consensus on just how effective the Bitcoin proof of work system is in guarding against malicious nodes if those nodes engage in “rational” mining (see for example the controversial Cornell paper).
As I said at the outset though I do agree with Chris that these kind of mechanisms will lead to important new decentralized systems. And it is great to see the excitement in the developer community to work on this. For instance, here is a call for more decentralized applications on github.Pens Fans Can Watch Game 1 On Outdoor Screen Tonight, But Screen Will Not Be In Operation For Game 2 Sunday by Staff Writer / Pittsburgh Penguins
Penguins fans will be able to watch Game 1 tonight and most of the remainder of the Penguins-Canadiens playoff series on the outdoor screen in front of Mellon Arena.
However, the Penguins are not permitted to show Game 2 on the outdoor screen Sunday afternoon in accordance with league broadcasting rights.
All other games of the best-of-seven series will be shown on the outdoor screen.
The outdoor screen is provided courtesy of CONSOL Energy and Trib Total Media. For safety reasons, grills and alcohol will be prohibited in the viewing area.
Fans with tickets to Friday and Sunday’s home games are invited to attend the “Tailgate on the Terrace” presented by Trib Total Media. Admission to the open-air concession area located above Gate 3 is free; however, patrons must have tickets to that day’s game to enter. Aramark will sell a variety of food and beverages and live entertainment will be provided.
Fans can have their tickets scanned and enter the terrace beginning at 5:00 pm on Friday and noon on Sunday. The entrance will be located near the Will Call windows at Gate 1. Will Call will open two hours before game time to accommodate patrons planning to attend the event. Fans may enter Mellon Arena from the terrace when gates open to the general public. In the event of inclement weather, the tailgate area will be closed.
Game times are 7 p.m. on Friday and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Mellon Arena gates will open at 6:00 pm on Friday. Gates will open at 12:30 pm on Sunday – a half-hour earlier than normal – due to the Pittsburgh Marathon.
In addition, the Penguins are calling for “whiteouts” for this weekend’s home games. Each fan in attendance will receive a white t-shirt and rally towel. Friday’s rally towels are presented by GNC. Sunday’s rally towels are courtesy of 84 Lumber and Nemacolin.
View LessPhoto: Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC
When we last left Don Draper on Mad Men, he … how did Roger put it in the season six finale? He “shit the bed.” After the ugly truths of his past surfaced during a Hershey’s pitch, Don went on a forced leave of absence from SC&P, and Megan walked out on him (all, perhaps, temporary situations). Where does he go from here? At the end of last season, Mad Men creator-executive producer Matthew Weiner spoke with Vulture at length about how tumultuous a year 1968 was for Don and the other characters, and today, he talks about bringing those stories to a close. As they did with Breaking Bad, AMC is splitting up the goods, premiering the first seven episodes on April 13, and the rest in spring 2015. (Weiner is writing all 14 remaining episodes now.) He tells us all about where Don is now, and why this will definitively be the end.
Last season was about Don hitting bottom, recognizing his own issues, and saying “I don’t want to do this anymore.” How will this season deal with the consequences of that?
I can just say that we take the events that happen on the show very seriously. This is the last season of the show, so it has its own story, but certainly the place to start is: What are the consequences? Just because Don’s changed, even in that infinitesimal way, doesn’t mean anybody else thinks he has.
How do you feel about Don now? Can he grow and still be “Don Draper”? He wants to see himself at the head of the cultural forefront, but he’s a lot older now than he was when Mad Men began. He’s from a different time than Ginsburg and Stan. Is he being left behind?
I don’t fault you for seeing the show that way, but he never hung with those people. That’s the secret to Don Draper’s success. The thing that has changed is the facade of Don Draper has been punctured by him saying, “I can’t do this anymore.” That was a product of the events in his life more than the events in the world. Some of that does have to do with coming of age, getting older. But his relationship with his daughter was the pure thing in his life, and he ruined it, and it obviously spurred him on to do something about it.
So, the secret to his success is in not being a fad-ist. It’s not like someone’s coming in and blowing him away with brand-new work that’s super ingenious. He operates from what he wants. His creative style is timeless. Things that have torpedoed him at work have much more to do with drinking too much and letting his anxiety overwhelm him, acting impulsively, acting selfishly. That is not a product of the times.
So you wouldn’t say he’s embittered to the culture then.
No. What I was trying to show last year, and I’m not sure the country was in the mood for it because we were in that state, was that the culture had caught up to Don. The culture was impulsive and carnal and on the brink of disaster for all of 1968. Then, just like the French Revolution ended with Napoleon, this revolution ended with Nixon back in the White House. My fascination has been about what hasn’t changed despite all those activities. I was trying to show that Don was very much aware of what was going on and, like everyone else in the culture, felt a sense of anxiety and instability and despair about the possibility of change and it being thwarted. Don’s facade has been punctured and the facade of the United States has been punctured. We had lost our confidence.
Maybe we don’t turn to entertainment for that all the time. We turn to entertainment for images of justice and revenge and power, and last season was an exercise in showing this man was a mess. [Laughs.] Maybe that’s where he had to get to to confront himself.
Just curious: Who would Don have voted for in 1968? Nixon or Humphrey?
We kind of established he doesn’t vote. Part of it is his assumed identity, but also Don has a very cynical attitude about politics. I know he’s against the war. But like a lot of people who grew up in the Great Depression, I don’t think Don’s someone who’s saying, “We have to restore order. This thing is out of control.” I think he knows things have to change. As he says in last season’s finale, “Everything’s back where Jesus wants it.” The world was in the midst of a revolution, whether it was the students in Paris, or Mexico City, or the Chicago convention, the two assassinations … all of it was gone by the end of 1968. I think Don might be a little cynical about the political process. Again, with regard to his being in touch or out of touch, being someone who probably sees himself on the outside of society, that’s probably where he wants to stay.
Elisabeth Moss is on the cover of this week’s New York. The story says she’s been the hero of Mad Men all along. How do you feel about that?
Her story has been told in tandem with Don’s. She’s introduced in the pilot, and she’s slightly a device there because it’s her first day and she’s discovering the world as we do, but she surprises us right away. To me, their stories are being told in parallel. The conflicts between them and their interactions with each other are definitely running side by side. That said, people can say whatever they want about it. Peggy is a very important character. What happens to her every season is No. 2 on the list.
Photo: Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC
You’re writing straight through all 14 episodes, unlike the writers of Breaking Bad, who took a long hiatus between the two halves of its last season. You’ve said you like to “leave it all on the table” at the end of each season. Has anything about your process changed knowing that you’d have a yearlong gap between the first seven episodes and the rest?
It’ll be ten months, not to split hairs, but it’s a little less than a year. But, yeah, I was immediately surprised to realize that they should have some independent strength to them, these two halves. It is one story running across. Much of what is set up in much in the first seven episodes is paid off in the last seven as we do traditionally, but the stories are denser and the first seven episodes are their own arc. What I realized is that this is kind of organic to how we tell the story here. If you look at the episode sevens over the course of the series, “The Suitcase,” “The Lawnmower,” “The Gold Violin,” “The Merger,” which was episode six but it was hour seven — we always split the season in half because that’s the midpoint for me. What I discovered is I better make sure episode eight feels like a premiere and episode seven feels like a finale.
That meant a lot more work. I have a lot of help. I started the season by not just asking for ideas like I always do after I tell them what I want to do, but by also saying, “Is there anything you always wanted to do on the show that we’ve never done?” It was a fascinating couple of days of conversation. What it’s forced us to do is to pay attention to the main characters. There’s not as much digression. I don’t know if someone viewing it is going to feel that way because it’s still Mad Men.
Has this show always been working toward a particular ending, or is the ending not the point here?
There’s no mystery to solve, so I’ve never had that pressure. I had an image in between seasons and four and five of how the show would end. But as you said, I’ve treated every finale like it was the end of the show. They could all be the last episode of the show. This particular ending is something I’ve had in mind, and I don’t want to over promise anything, but I’m worried only in the sense that however it ends will reflect on the entire thing. That’s why I haven’t wavered from what I wanted to do. Will it be satisfying? I have no idea. It will be for me.
Last year, you told NPR that the show was going to end on an “ambiguous note” and that we should all be ready for that. Still sticking to that?
[Laughs.] I said that?
You did.
You know, I think the context of that — and I’m not backtracking — is no matter how definitive I am with the show, it always seems to be ambiguous for the audience. For me, that’s just the nature of the show and the nature of the audience. Convincing the audience that Lane had actually died and was not coming back … I mean, that’s why we showed his body! I ended “Shut the Door, Have a Seat” with Don moving into a new apartment, Betty on a plane to Reno with her lover and her baby, and all that I heard about in the off-season was, “Are they getting divorced?” I had no idea that would be ambiguous. [When I said it would end on an ambiguous note] I was probably defensively preparing myself for all the crap you get when a show ends no matter what you do. I get it. I watch TV. Hopefully it will be a loss for the audience that it’s going away. It’s been a long relationship. I don’t think anyone’s going to be happy about it. [Laughs.]
AMC is doing a prequel of Breaking Bad and is developing a spinoff of The Walking Dead. Have you thought in any way — or been approached about — continuing the story?
I have not been approached, but I think it’s because they know I’m not interested in it. There are going to be 92 episodes of this. It’s a lot more than Breaking Bad. I feel that I’ve exhausted this. That’s not a judgment, that’s just the kind of person I am. I would like to do something else, but I also would like to leave it in its state, as a whole thing, as a work. I don’t want to tamper with what we did.
The network sent us a few pictures of Don, Peggy, Megan, and Roger —
Those are all gallery shots, or, in the language of the show, advertising.
The shot (below) of Roger and Don looks like it was from an episode.
We picked the airport partially because of the irony of the fact that there is zero glamour at an airport now, and in travel in general. It doesn’t defy analysis, because all those people will be in the show, but I would not read meaning into it. Sorry!
Photo: Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC
You were there in the writers’ room for the final season of The Sopranos and wrote the penultimate episode. What was the process of bringing that show to a close like, and how does it compare to your own?
I finished my episode and had started on Mad Men when David Chase was shooting the final two episodes. We went on the air about six weeks after they went off the air. It wasn’t my show, you know? Even though I worked there for four and a half years, I didn’t have that experience. I saw David going through it. I remember getting the last outline of “Made in America” and I was already at Mad Men, giving him my thoughts on it, which I think were completely positive and emotional. It turns out to be a spectacular episode. I got to experience the end with the public. I do remember a lot of people asking me about the ending before it aired because there were all these wagers. Like, “Hey, you could make some money. Does Tony live or die? Just tell me,” and I’m thinking, Las Vegas has no idea. I don’t know how they settled those bets. You know, The Sopranos had been on the brink of ending a few times before that and I benefited from David continuing that last season. It was still a slightly intellectual exercise when I was there. I heard the emotions exploded after that and I missed it.
I imagine many viewers are already bracing themselves for the end of Mad Men.
I think that’s one of the positive things about AMC splitting it up. There’s a little bit of weaning — for me, for sure. I will be completely done with this process when we go on the air in 2015 and I will get to not be writing the show during that time. I’ll tell you one thing: I am surprisingly upbeat about this experience right now. The show has gone on long enough. I’ve always been appreciative that this has happened. On some level, I can’t believe this has happened. But I am the person here who has been reminding people constantly that we need to savor this. It’s still really hard work that you forget sometimes, but we’ll finish a four-hour meeting and I’ll say, “You know, you’re going to miss this.” And they’ll start laughing.
There are different stages of good-bye. There’s the final day of shooting when all the actors are done. Then they start wheeling the sets away and dismantling, the writers will go on to their new jobs, the actors will be testing for pilots all during this period. Once the actors leave, I still have another eight to ten weeks of postproduction. That’s going to be really, really interesting. I’m not anticipating anything but a deeply emotional experience. [Laughs.] I wrote the pilot when I was 35, got it on the air when I was 42, and I will be 49 when it ends. That’s a huge part of my life.
Where are you now in the process?
I’m writing episode nine. Right now, I’m definitely thinking about the pilot. We had a very emotional and fun evening at the beginning of this season. I showed the cast their auditions. There’s a little bit of that going on, like, “Can you believe this happened to us? A seven-year job in television?” I’m sure I’ll be a puddle, believe me.
How did those auditions play now? It’s been many years. Anyone mortified?
They loved it. I’m sure there was some mortification, but they all got the job. As someone who’s auditioned thousands of people, these are really good auditions. I think the fun part for them was seeing each other’s. It was kind of a mutual respect thing going on. I mean, this is their bread and butter. It’s totally private. Another actor never sees it unless they’re directing or something. I think they were kind of impressed, but yeah, I was totally terrified it was going to backfire. John Slattery’s audition is for Don. Christina auditioned for Midge. Lizzie’s audition is amazing, but there’s a power drill going off in the back of it. January’s audition, honestly, was one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life. It was emotional, of course, but mostly funny. Jon joked with me, “Well, which audition of mine did you pick?” because the network kept making him read over and over and over again. He was so clearly that guy. He did that Hershey’s meeting scene in one take. During the off-season, Jon’s voice was so strained, so we gave him a day off and his voice became so crystal clear for that performance. Now his voice is back, too.
I was worried when I read he was having a procedure for that.
I know, I know. Believe me, your entire livelihood is not riding on that voice. [Laughs.]If ever there was a wonder drug, aspirin might be it. Originally derived from the leaves of the willow tree, this mainstay of the family medicine cabinet has been used successfully for generations to treat conditions ranging from arthritis to fever, as well as to prevent strokes, heart attacks and even some types of cancer, among other ills. Indeed, the drug is so popular that annual consumption worldwide totals about 120 billion tablets.
In recent years scientists have discovered another possible use for aspirin: stopping the spread of cancer cells in the body after an initial tumor has already formed. The research is still developing, but the findings hint that the drug could one day form the basis for a powerful addition to current cancer therapies.
Not everyone responds equally well to the drug, however, and for some people it can be downright dangerous. Investigators are thus trying to develop genetic tests to determine who is most likely to benefit from long-term use of aspirin. The latest research into the drug's cancer-inhibiting activity is generating findings that could possibly guide those efforts.
Myriad Mechanisms
During the past century researchers demonstrated that aspirin inhibits the production of certain hormonelike substances called prostaglandins. Depending on where in the body these prostaglandins are produced, they may trigger pain, inflammation, fever or blood clotting.
Obviously no one wants to block these natural responses all the time—particularly as they help the body to heal from cuts, bruises, infections and other injuries. But sometimes they linger for too long, causing more harm than good. Long-lasting, or chronic, inflammation, for example, increases the risk of developing heart disease and cancer by causing repeated damage to otherwise normal tissue. Eventually the damaged tissue, depending on where it is located and a host of other factors, may become a vessel-clogging plaque in a coronary artery or a tiny tumor hidden deep within the body. By turning down the prostaglandin spigot, aspirin prevents thousands of heart attacks every year and probably stops a significant number of tumors from forming in the first place.
In 2000 scientists discovered a second major mechanism of action for aspirin in the body. The drug boosts the production of molecules called resolvins, which also helps to quench the fires of inflammation.
More recently, investigators have started to elucidate a third way that aspirin works—one that interferes with the ability of cancer cells to spread, or metastasize, through the body. Intriguingly, in this case, the drug's anti-inflammatory properties do not appear to play the starring role.
Metastasis is a complex process that, somewhat counterintuitively, requires a certain amount of cooperation between tumor cells and their host. Some number of malignant cells must break away from the original tumor, cross the walls of a nearby blood vessel to enter the bloodstream and avoid getting detected by immune system defenders as they travel about the body. Those that survive this gauntlet must then cross the walls of another blood vessel at a different location in the body, nestle into surrounding tissue that is completely different from their original birthplace and start to grow.
Elisabeth Battinelli, a hematologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, has shown that cells called platelets, which are better known for their ability to trigger blood clots, also have an important part in allowing tumor cells to spread. First malignant cells coopt certain chemical signals from the platelets that collect along the blood vessel wall. Instead of directing the repair of a potential breach in the wall, however, these repurposed signals help the cancer cells break through the barrier and sneak into the bloodstream. Then the cancer cells cloak themselves in a protective layer of platelets to hide from the patrolling sentries of the immune system. Once the tumor cells leave the bloodstream at some distant location, they instruct the platelets that have come along with them to produce so-called growth factors that trigger the development of new blood vessels, essential avenues that carry nutrients and oxygen to the now thriving secondary tumor.
Researchers often inject tumor cells into the bloodstream of mice to approximate what happens during metastasis when cancer cells must navigate the bloodstream to find a new home in the body. When Battinelli and her team fed aspirin to certain strains of mice and then injected them with malignant cells, the investigators discovered that the platelets did not shield breakaway cancer cells from the immune system or produce the necessary growth factors that allow cancer cells to grow and divide in a new location. Thus, aspirin appears to fight cancer in two ways: its anti-inflammatory action prevents some tumors from forming, and its antiplatelet properties interfere with some cancer cells' ability to spread.
Rewiring platelets
How does aspirin stop tumor cells from hijacking platelets to do their bidding? Instead of blocking a single compound (a prostaglandin, for example), in this case the drug seems to turn entire groups of genes on or off in the nuclei of certain blood cells.
To try to better understand this previously unknown effect of aspirin, cardiologist Deepak Voora of Duke University and his colleagues looked at cells called megakaryocytes, which give rise to platelets. Using complex mathematical and pharmacological tools, they identified about 60 genes that are either turned on or off in the megakaryocytes in response to aspirin. The end result of all this genetic manipulation: the platelets produced by the megakaryocytes did not clump together, which presumably prevented them from camouflaging cancer cells. Thus, in addition to blocking prostaglandins, aspirin basically “rewires the platelets” so that they do not serve as inadvertent accomplices to metastasis.
There is still a lot of basic research that must be conducted, Voora says, before the feasibility of an aspirin-based therapy to prevent metastasis can be determined. The next steps are to confirm these experiments in larger, more diverse groups of people and to better understand the normal functions of these aspirin-sensitive genes. In the meantime, investigators hope to learn enough to create a genetic test that will make it possible to tell whether a patient might benefit from taking aspirin. Ideally, such a test would determine not only the most effective dose of the drug but also whether or not the person's body is reacting to the medication as predicted.
Much of aspirin's cardiovascular benefit, for example, stems from its ability—at a dose as low as 81 milligrams—to prevent clots from forming in the bloodstream. And yet one study of 325 people found that aspirin has no effect on the clotting processes of 5 percent of patients who consume the drug, with another 24 percent having a reduced effect. Furthermore, some people may experience severe side effects—such as bleeding. Thus, no responsible clinician would advise everyone to take the drug on a daily basis.
To date, the only way to know for sure that a patient is resistant to aspirin's anticlotting effects is to test the person's blood after several weeks of therapy to see if it takes longer to form clots than it once did—an expensive proposition that is not very practical. Genetic tests would presumably be less expensive, but they are a long way off. “It's challenging to develop a single molecular test that will tell you if someone will respond [to aspirin] or not because it's become clear that there is no single pathway by which aspirin works,” says Andrew Chan, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. In other words, researchers and physicians will have to look at many different genes—and their complex interactions—to determine how likely a patient is to benefit from aspirin treatment, whether for cardiovascular disease or cancer.
Until then, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a national panel of independent health experts, recommends low-dose aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer in only a very select group of people. Those who may benefit the most, according to the available evidence, are adults aged 50 to 59 years who are likely to live at least another decade, have a 10 percent or greater risk of having a heart attack or stroke in that time, are not at increased risk for bleeding (because of other medications, for example) and are willing to take low-dose aspirin daily for at least 10 years. For adults aged 60 to 69 years, the task force recommends selectively offering aspirin treatment depending on individual circumstances. It has determined that there is not enough evidence to weigh the potential benefits against possible harms for daily aspirin use in adults younger than 50 years or older than 70.
Most patients who have already suffered a heart attack or stroke, however, seem to benefit from regular aspirin therapy regardless of age, says Paul Gurbel, director of the Inova Center for Thrombosis Research and Translational Medicine in Falls Church, Va. And if you think you are currently suffering a heart attack, many doctors recommend chewing a 325-milligram tablet of aspirin immediately after you have called 911 to minimize the damage from any potential clot |
work when she worked for the Obama administration. The Saudi donation to the McCain Institute Foundation may be the first congressional instance of that trend coming to light.
John McCain needs to decide which desert oasis he wants to protect – Arizona or Saudi Arabia? Make a choice, John, because you can’t defend Huma and protect America.4592971
Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia graduate famous across the country as “Mattress Girl” after she hauled a mattress around campus for a year to protest the school’s handling of her alleged rape, has apparently released a sex tape recreating her alleged rape.
Titled Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol (‘This Is Not A Rape’), the video shows two people, one of whom appears to be Sulkowicz, entering a dorm room and proceeding to have sex from four different camera angles. Timestamps in the upper corner of each camera are used to make the video appear dated to August 27, 2012, the date Sulkowicz claims she was raped by fellow student Paul Nungesser. Over the course of the video, Sulkowicz’s partner becomes violent and begins to hit her, essentially recreating the experience Sulkowicz claims she underwent at the hands of Nungesser.
The video’s release comes just two weeks after Sulkowicz graduated from Columbia, drawing renewed attention after she completed her project by carrying her mattress on-stage despite the protests of Columbia administrators. (RELATED: Mattress Girl Carries Her Mattress To Graduation) The video’s release comes just two weeks after Sulkowicz graduated from Columbia, drawing renewed attention after she completed her project by carrying her mattress on-stage despite the protests of Columbia administrators.
While the video is more or less pornographic in nature, Sulkowicz claims that it is a work of performance art similar to her mattress-carrying effort. The website the video is on includes a preface of Sulkowicz’s artistic intent, reproduced in full below:
Trigger Warning: The following text contains allusions to rape. Everything that takes place in the following video is consensual but may resemble rape. It is not a reenactment but may seem like one. If at any point you are triggered or upset, please proceed with caution and/or exit this website. However, I do not mean to be prescriptive, for many people find pleasure in feeling upset. Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol is not about one night in August, 2012. It’s about your decisions, starting now. It’s only a reenactment if you disregard my words. It’s about you, not him. Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you, or my nuances are indecipherable. You might be wondering why I’ve made myself this vulnerable. Look—I want to change the world, and that begins with you, seeing yourself. If you watch this video without my consent, then I hope you reflect on your reasons for objectifying me and participating in my rape, for, in that case, you were the one who couldn’t resist the urge to make Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol about what you wanted to make it about: rape. Please, don’t participate in my rape. Watch kindly. A special thank you to everyone who made Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol possible, especially my actor (*********), my director (Ted Lawson), and those I love who have guided and supported me.
The preface also includes questions for the sake of “reflection,” reproduced in full below:
Searching: Are you searching for proof? Proof of what? Are you searching for ways to either hurt or help me? What are you looking for?
Desiring: Do you desire pleasure? Do you desire revulsion? Is this to counteract your unconscious enjoyment? What do you want from this experience?
Me: How well do you think you know me? Have we ever met? Do you think I’m the perfect victim or the world’s worst victim? Do you refuse to see me as either a human being or a victim? If so, why? Is it to deny me agency and thus further victimize me? If so, what do you think of the fact that you owe your ability to do so to me, since I’m the one who took a risk and made myself vulnerable in the first place? Do you hate me? If so, how does it feel to hate me?
“I am interested in what the public does with it, which begins with the way they deal with it from the moment it’s disseminated,” she told artnet, adding that she “definitely” was seeking to make a statement about how videos can go viral.
Sulkowicz’s decidedly unique artistic career isn’t finished either, she says. She told artnet that a third work of art would be debuting within a week, and insisted she wants to become known for more than just carrying a mattress.
“Yeah, I mean, when people call me ‘Mattress Girl’ I find that really infuriating,” she said. “It’s like, OK great, so you think that I’ll never progress beyond that point. That I’ll be a ‘Mattress Girl’ rather than a living, breathing person who has the ability to change.”
It’s safe to say that Sulkowicz has her wish. She won’t just be known for carrying a mattress anymore.In addition to the planned and permitted "Patriot Prayer" rally in San Francisco's Crissy Field on Saturday, there's been a planned "No to Marxism" rally in Berkeley on Sunday that is semi-connected, and organized by one of the speakers at the Saturday rally Trump-supporting trans woman Amber Gwen Cummings. As of Thursday, as ABC 7 reports, the City of Berkeley denied a permit application by Cummings for the event, scheduled for 1 p.m. Sunday in Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, based on the fact that the application was both late and incomplete. However you can rest assured that the rally will happen anyway or at least, as happened on March 4 and April 15, activists on the left and right will converge there to scream at each other and get in physical fights.
#DEVELOPING Letter @CityofBerkeley sent to Sunday's "Anti-Marxism" rally organizer denying permit on several grounds, inc lack of security. pic.twitter.com/aL4VOBRtgP — Laura Anthony (@LauraAnthony7) August 25, 2017
Permits weren't issued for the previous Berkeley gatherings, and critics have suggested that Berkeley police didn't do enough to quell the violence that broke out at either event.
Last week, as ABC 7 notes, the Berkeley City Council voted to give police "greater latitude to enforce bans on certain items and set perimeters beyond the rally at Civic Park." They say they'll be publishing a list of banned items 24 hours before the event.
As KRON 4 reports, counter-protesters have already planned a "anti-hate rally" at the UC Berkeley campus at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, followed by a "anti-hate march" to Civic Center Park, where they will confront the alt-right rally.
Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin gave a statement saying, "Anyone who threatens to engage in violence and we have seen from earlier events that this is exactly their intent will be arrested and punished to the fullest extent of the law. We urge residents to avoid the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park on this day. The best way to silence the white nationalists is by turning your back on their message."
Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood tells NBC Bay Area he hopes counter-protesters will just stay on the UC Berkeley campus, but that's not likely to happen. He declined to reveal what the police force's strategy will be for keeping the peace this time around.
While the Patriot Prayer rally in SF appeared to have been scheduled immediately in the wake of Charlottesville for maximum attention, this No to Marxism event was created on Facebook back in June. Currently 325 people have said they are attending.
Previously: Neo-Nazis And Alt-Right 'Patriots' To Bring Racism Road Show To Bay Area This MonthThe Freedom From Religion Foundation is asking Donald Trump to "faithfully execute" the secular Constitution by keeping faith and prayer out of the Inaugural.
Religion should not be part of "a ceremony about pleading fealty to a secular Constitution," says the state/church watchdog. The framers of the U.S. Constitution thought the presidential oath so important they included the exact wording:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." (Article 2, Section 1, U.S. Constitution)
Notably, there's no reference to "So help me God" or placement of a presidential hand on a bible. In their letter to Trump, FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor note that it took nearly a century before "religious verbiage" was added to the presidential oath-taking. Presidents all the way from George Washington to Andrew Jackson — including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe — did not tamper with the wording of the Constitution while being sworn in.
The couple suggest that Trump place his hand not on a bible, but on the "godless" U.S. Constitution, which "unites us all under that hallowed mantle, 'We the People.'"
FFRF contacted the president-elect on behalf of 70 million nonreligious Americans — including its 25,000 nonreligious members.
The organization notes that Trump appears to be turning the secular inauguration into "a religious circus" — given reports Trump has invited as officiants Rev. Franklin Graham, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Rabbi Marvin Hier and even controversial "prosperity" preacher Paula White, who was the subject of a Senate probe for operating a scam.
"If you wish to hold a private religious convocation to personally celebrate your inauguration with religion, of course we would have no objection based on the Establishment Clause," FFRF says. "(We might question your taste in ultra-conservative clergy.) But you were not elected pastor in chief, but president of all the people."
FFRF ends its homily: "Our message to you is, as it is to public officials everywhere: Get off your knee and get to work, using reason, compassion and the Constitution — not religion — as your guide."
President Trump would do himself — and the country — well to follow the advice.PV Magazine
PV arrays coupled with battery storage systems are becoming the “new normal” in Australia’s wide-open spaces. The number of installations continue to increase as governments and businesses begin to realize the new reality of off or edge-of-grid solar+storage affordability.
Rapidly falling costs in solar and battery storage technology, coupled with an increasing familiarity with the technology is driving these solutions into the mainstream in remote areas of Australia. In Western Australia a growing number of innovative solutions are providing proof of the technological solution and its economic advantages.
In a demonstration of the shift in thinking that is taking place, the state’s Minister of Energy Mike Nahan has acknowledged the strong economic case for solar+storage and has called for the state’s rural and remote utility to accelerate its uptake. Nahan has previously expressed doubts about renewable energy and, as a strong advocate of free-market of libertarian principals, is not a supporter of subsidies for renewable deployment.
In response to questions raised in the WA parliament last week about the poor level electricity supply to the remote mining town of Ravensthorpe, Nahan said that the local utility Horizon is investigating a number of solutions including a micro-grid with decentralized solar component.
“I am not a technologist,” Nahan initially cautioned. “[However] we could tell everybody in Ravensthorpe to put in solar and have a wind–diesel–solar combination. They already have a micro-grid. These are the things that Horizon is supposed to look at, and we will go down and discuss it.”
Nahan continued that he had “entrusted” the utility to come up with alternative electricity solutions for supplies to remote towns such as Ravensthorpe. He has also appointed a renewable energy expert, Ray Wills, to the board of the utility. Wills is the former head of the now-defunct Sustainable Energy Association.
The parliamentary exchange was reported by the leading Australian cleantech site RenewEconomy.
This shift in thinking comes after a UBS report last month that solar+storage is already economic in some parts of Australia.
Real-world applications
While the apparent about-face of the WA Energy Minister is impressive, solar+storage arrays are going into remote Australian communities on an increasingly regular basis.
In the mid-west region of Western Australia, the Meta Maya Regional Aboriginal Corporation has announced that it will install a 100 kW solar+storage system at its headquarters in Wedgefield, Port Hedland. The array will be coupled with a 76 kWh lithium ion battery bank and backed up by a 40 kW diesel generator.
Due to technical constraints put on solar arrays by the utility Horizon Power, it made financial sense for the Meta Maya Corporation to go off the grid. EMC Solar Construction will supply and install the system.
“EMC had been engaged to install a grid connect solar array at our new office and depot in Port Hedland, but due to constraints required by Horizon Power, the system was not financially viable,” said Luke van Zeller, Meta Maya’s GM. “EMC was able to engineer and demonstrate that we would be better off installing a larger solar array connected to a large battery that would produce and store all of the energy we would need, and at a lower cost than our current Horizon tariff.”
Meta Meyer, which provides a range of services across the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia, hopes to begin developing similar off grid solutions for industries in communities in the area. These include remote Aboriginal communities, mining companies and agricultural operations – all of which can be literally thousands of kilometers from major electricity grids.
“We are seeing an increase in the number of energy consumers who are willing to take courageous efforts to side-step the constraints that are being imposed on them by the electricity suppliers,” said EMC’s John Davidson. “Meta Maya is one of those companies that has a vested interest in finding better ways to provide power and water services to the remote communities of Western Australia.”
Mary’s Farm Cottages 40 kW system
In the south of the vast state, solar+storage arrays are also proving economic. In the grain-growing region inland and south of the state capital of Perth, a 40 kW solar+storage system has been installed to supply holiday accommodation on local rural property. The system will be inaugurated by the local member of parliament next week.
Off-grid specialists solarmatrix completed the installation – which was partly funded by a regional tourism grant. Solarmatrix has previously installed a number of off grid solar arrays with battery systems in remote communities.
Source: PV Magazine. Reproduced with permission.Trusting research over their guts, scientists in New Zealand and Canada examined the phenomenon Stephen Colbert, comedian and news satirist, calls “truthiness”—the feeling that something is true. In four different experiments they discovered that people believe claims are true, regardless of whether they actually are true, when a decorative photograph appears alongside the claim. The work is published online in the Springer journal, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.“We wanted to examine how the kinds of photos people see every day—the ones that decorate newspaper or TV headlines, for example—might produce “truthiness,” said lead investigator Eryn J. Newman of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. “We were really surprised by what we found.”In a series of four experiments in both New Zealand and Canada, Newman and colleagues showed people a series of claims such as, “The liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium” and asked them to agree or disagree that each claim was true. In some cases, the claim appeared with a decorative photograph that didn’t reveal if the claim was actually true—such as a thermometer. Other claims appeared alone. When a decorative photograph appeared with the claim, people were more likely to agree that the claim was true, regardless of whether it was actually true.Across all the experiments, the findings fit with the idea that photos might help people conjure up images and ideas about the claim more easily than if the claim appeared by itself. “We know that when it’s easy for people to bring information to mind, it ‘feels’ right,” said Newman.The research has important implications for situations in which people encounter decorative photos, such as in the media or in education. “Decorative photos grab people’s attention,” Newman said. “Our research suggests that these photos might have unintended consequences, leading people to accept information because of their feelings rather than the facts.”Newman EJ et al (2012). Nonprobative photographs (or words) inflate truthiness. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review; DOI 10.3758/s13423-012-0292-0Once immigrating to Istanbul and European countries, Turkey's Assyrians have begun to return to their homelands, rebuilding their lives and community, including founding a sports club.
Due to the migration to Europe, the previous sports club founded by Assyrians - Telkarispor - was dissolved in 1994. However, with Assyrians' return to their native land, a brand new sports club - Midyat Turabdinspor - has been founded in Mardin. The club's football team will compete at Mardin's 2nd Amateur League with blue and white jerseys bearing the logo of the club - a white dove carrying an olive branch.
Turabdinspor's president, Mesut Aslan, aims high. "We want to carry the team to the professional league. We dreamed of founding this team with young Assyrians. We will cherish this team without judging people by their race, religion or ethnicity," Aslan said.(KRON) A new video controversy for the San Francisco Police Department.
Today, Public Defender Jeff Adachi released a Muni surveillance video showing a San Francisco police officer striking a homeless man with a baton and pepper spraying the man after being removed from the bus.
This incident took place on February 11 at Cabrillo and La Playa streets near Ocean Beach.
At 11 p.m., San Francisco Police Officer Raymond Chu responded to a report of a person sleeping on a 5-Fulton bus that had reached the end of the line. The video shows Chu trying to rouse 36-year-old Bernard Warren for more than 30 seconds before Warren awakes, disheveled and disoriented.
Warren was arrested for threatening an officer. A trial is scheduled for March 6. He faces up to a year in jail if convicted.
The District Attorney has refused to dismiss charges against Warren. Chu faces no discipline from police.Congratulations are in order for soccer star Robbie Rogers and producer Greg Berlanti — they’re engaged!
The couple both shared sweet messages about the bright parts of their years, particularly their engagement in late December. Rogers, who plays for L.A. Galaxy, shared an Instagram post of a the couple posing for a selfie in front of a string quartet.
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“Thank you to everyone before us that made this moment possible… I feel extremely lucky and blessed to end 2016 engaged to the love of my life. Happy New Year!” Rogers, 29, wrote in the post.
Berlanti — a writer and producer behind shows like Dawson’s Creek, Arrow and Supergirl — shared similar sentiments in his post using the same photo.
“2016 was memorable for many reasons, for me it as the year my heart doubled in size,” Berlanti, 44, wrote. “First, when my son Caleb was born. And second, a few days ago, when I got engaged to my soulmate.”
He continued: “Though I dreamed of both those things happening, i’m not sure I truly believed they were possible. Thanks to the friends and family who helped me find my way to this moment in my blessed life. a happy and healthy 2017 to all.”
Rogers and Berlanti, who have been dating since 2013, welcomed their son Caleb in February via surrogate.
“It is with much pride and love that I introduce to the world my son, Caleb Gene Berlanti. Born on February 18, 2016,” he captioned a photo collage of him and Rogers holding the newborn. “There is nothing I’ve wanted more, or waited for longer, than to be a father.”
He concluded his post with, “My heart is full forever.”Does anyone else get a little uncomfortable when the entire Internet all of the sudden decides to simultaneously agree on a singular issue? Usually I go online expecting to see a steady stream of bickering and debate, like my Aunt Joan arguing about gun control with one of my college roommates in the comments of a status update I wrote about going to see Ant-Man last weekend.
Aside from baby photos and saying happy birthday, there’s really no such thing as a neutral position online. You’re either for something, you’re against it, or you’ve gotten to the point where you don’t say anything at all. Which is why this whole Cecil the Lion business makes me feel kind of weird.
Like I said, it’s not every day where you find everyone on your social networks unanimously agreed on one subject. And what’s there to disagree about? Some rich dentist went to Africa, he paid a ridiculous sum of money to go lion hunting, he lured a national mascot out of his protected habitat, and he shot it with a crossbow two days before he finished the job with a handgun.
That’s terrible, right? Right? I don’t hear you! You’re going to have to do a lot better than that. I said, that’s terrible, right? Right! Who the hell does this asshole think he is! Let’s shoot him with a bow and arrow and track him in the jungle for two days! Yeah! And then let’s skin him alive! That murderer! Let’s make sure everybody knows his name! And where he works! Let’s send him death threats! Let’s kill him!
Right? Jeez. And again, I’m not trying to defend this guy. I just don’t understand the strength and scope of the pitchfork mentality. Everyone has something to say about Cecil the Lion. It’s like, we’re constantly divided, on politics, government, gun control, race, police … it’s just nice that, finally, we all have something that we can all hate together.
Here’s a guy who killed a lion, and his actions are allowing us to get past all of the petty noise that usually defines our differences. Hand in hand, Republicans and Democrats, black and white, we can all of us join together to say, “Fuck that guy.” Finally we can go online and write stuff like, “That guy should be publicly executed,” without sounding like too much of a crazy person.
Because everyone’s saying crazy stuff. Someone went to this guy’s office and, amongst a makeshift Cecil-inspired cat-memorial, wrote #CatLivesMatter. And nobody’s getting upset! Jimmy Kimmel went on TV and made a joke about this dentist not being able to get an erection. And everyone’s like, “Yeah!”
Because fuck that guy. Am I right? Doesn’t it feel good? Isn’t it nice to be able to go online and say “Fuck that guy,” without sounding like an extremist?
I just don’t get it. Say what you want about hunting and lions, this whole Cecil story is just another case of runaway Internet mass hysteria. These things come and go in waves. Usually, by the time you even notice what’s going on, the popular opinion has already been cemented and repeated and amplified to the point where there’s only one acceptable discourse. You can either join in or keep quiet. Pour a bowl of ice water over your head or keep your mouth shut.
But what’s really going on? The whole idea that you’re allowed to pile on this cat-murderer and spew whatever you want on the Internet, it’s because what he did was wrong, right? This is as clear as it gets, black and white, good vs. evil, this guy is a bad guy, right?
I mean, maybe. But the way I see it, these sorts of online movements, these public shamings, all they do is kind of blanket over a series of complex issues with an easily digestible false narrative of right and wrong. Here’s a situation, one side is good, the other side is evil, I’m publicly standing up for the good side, so I’m a good person, right? Easy.
But what about the complex economies of big game preservation, hunting as sport, and African tourism? What does any of this say about the firearms issue? Because, isn’t one of the big points of gun control that Americans are allowed to keep weapons for hunting? How about Africa and the legacy of western imperialism? The Zimbabwe officials are all upset that their precious lion was killed. What about Zimbabwe President-for-life Robert Mugabe? Didn’t that guy just recently orchestrate a massive government crackdown after he technically lost his last election? In siding with Cecil, are we complicit in validating Zimbabwe’s political establishment?
And what about #BlackLivesMatter? Why does the killing of a lion command an across-the-board outrage that’s not seen when a human life is taken? Why was Sandra Bland dragged from her car during a traffic stop, and there’s a very real debate about whether or not she was doing anything wrong? How is it that a church full of black parishioners is shot up by a white supremacist, and weeks later there’s a KKK march in South Carolina?
We’ve got bigger fish to fry than one lion getting hunted in Africa. Was it an injustice? Sure. But it’s a problem much, much lower on the list of priorities that deserve our universal attention.Still Awesome After All These Years: The Michael Tobias Journey…
Founder and Master Luthier Michael Tobias
At Michael Tobias Design (MTD), you will find some of the best luthiers creating some of the finest handcrafted instruments made right here in the good old USA. MTD world famous for the creation of custom bass and guitars, one of which I have been the proud owner of for many years now. With a craftsman focus on tone, ease of play, and of course, the look and style of each instrument for which they are known. All instrument they make are custom, built to endourance, and built to for the unique needs and desires of the payer for which it is personally created.
They build only ten instruments per month, But it’s not just electric basses, they also fabricate both acoustic basses and guitars. Most days you will find Michael Tobias, with his son Daniel Tobias, and “old” friend and associate Charlie Kniceley practicing their art.
With such a vast skill set and knowledge, the Team has been hired as consultants for many instrument brands such as Alvarez (with Joe Veillette) baritone acoustic and ABG, Modulus Genesis bass, Lakland hollow body bass, and a special project for American Showster (alongside Chris Hofschneider).
Michael Tobias has been building instruments since the mis 70’s. Humble beginnings working in “The Guitar Shop” in Washington, D.C., doing repairs, study the work and techniques of other luthiers’. Originally working in acoustic instruments, Michael laid hands on names like Fender, Martin, Gibson, Kohno, Ramierez.
After leaving Tobias Guitars at the end of 1992 and fulfilling my contractual obligations for consulting and non-competition with Tobias, I started building MTD instruments at the beginning of 1994. Music has evolved over the years but there are still a few basic and fundamental constants— rules that must be dealt with. The instrument must satisfy the creative and emotional needs of the owner and it must play in tune.
Charlie!
“Charlie Kniceley, a Hudson Valley native (of thirty years), is a long-time friend and employee. He is a fine luthier, exceptionally talented musician, and is a cherished member of MTD. Charlie has worked with a number of top-notch artists such as Al Martino, Jerry Bale, Ron Carter, Eileen Fulton, Joe Beck, Ed Summerlin, Danny Lewis, Randy Ciarlante, Jack Dejohnette, Mike DeMicco, Warren Bernhardt, Pete Levin, Connie Francis, Danny Brubeck, Honi Coles, Billy Reed, Jimmy Eppard, Brenda Buffalino, Machan Taylor, Mimi Hines, Hal Linden, Enzio Stuarte, Lucille Ricardo, Lew Soloff, Lou Marini, Rashid Ali, and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. After retiring from the music scene in 1995, he has returned and has re-established himself in the musical fabric of the North East.”– M.Tobias
Tobias Guitars came into being in April of 1977, and were available at The Guitar Shop, in DC. The first Tobias Guitar was stamped with serial number 0178
The Guitar Shop was sold in 1980 and Michael relocated to San Francisco. He did a short joint venture with Sierra Guitars but that partnership never grew legs. Traveling on his musical path, he relocated to Costa Mesa California to run a repair shop. Next stop, Hollywood California and started making some custom instruments with friends, Kevin Almieda and Bob Lee.
It took about 12 months for Tobias Guitars to transition to only the fabrication of custom instruments. Bob McDonald and Makoto Onishi joined the Team after Kevin Almieda departure.
“The business grew by leaps and bounds. In June of 1988, we had so many back orders that we could not accept any new orders until the January NAMM show in 1990.”- M.Tobias.
Tobias Guitars grew rapidly and the need for a bigger and more equipped work space was require just to try to keep up with demand. On January 1st of 1990, Michael Tobias sold Tobias Guitars to Gibson.
TOBIAS and GIBSON
“Gibson was instrumental in moving us to a bigger shop in Burbank and setting us up with a great spray booth and dust collection system. We finally met So Cal safety codes. Basses built during 1990-1992 era were built initially by the same crew that had helped establish Tobias Basses, as one of the most sought after bass guitars on the planet. We added several people during 1990 and ended up with a great 10-man shop.”- M.Tobias
Gibson was able to obtain the work place required to have Michael Tobias meet the demand for his instruments. Business was good but keeping up with the increasing orders proved taxing. So they looked to out source some items with quality approved vendors, these produced the “Model T” and “Standard Tobias” basses. They relocated operations to the “Music City”, Nashville to better handle the increased demand.
Tobias Kingston Line
Michael Tobias left Tobias Guitars in December of 1992 but continued to give consulting services to Gibson. No Tobias original Team were involved in the instruments produced in Nashville.
“They had some trouble at first, but have since done a fairly good job making Tobias basses.”- M.Tobias
THE NEW INSTRUMENTS
Today you will find Michael Tobias carrying on his art in New York State. The first 50 instruments to come from the New York shop were mostly 35” scale bolt-ons with 3 neck thrus. They renamed the brad Michael Tobias Design (MTD) and thee adventure continues…
We at Back Stage Indie Report are excited to see the Tobias MTD booth at NAMM 2017 in Nashville. Got our airline tickets, hotel reservation, and Media Credentials. Michael and Daniel, as a Tobias Bass owner, we will be camping out at your booth and touching everything (that is a MTB instrument)!PHNOM PENH - Baton-wielding Cambodian police clashed Sunday with protesters _ including Buddhist monks - demanding higher wages for garment workers and the release of 23 people arrested during a recent bloody crackdown on a rally.
Cambodian protesters, left, clash with security forces, right, during a protest in Phnom Penh on Sunday. Cambodian police briefly clashed with protesters who were demanding higher wages for garment workers and the release of people arrested during a recent bloody crackdown. (AFP photo)
About 200 textile workers, union members, land protesters and several monks attempting to rally at a Phnom Penh park were met by scores of riot police, according to an AFP reporter at the scene.
A brief clash broke out when some of the protesters tried to make it through police lines into Democracy Park, prompting security forces to use batons against them.
Protesters then responded by throwing rocks, water bottles and sticks.
At least 10 people from both sides were injured during the violence, according to activist Am Sam Ath of local rights group Licadho.
"The clash shows zero tolerance from authorities (to protest),'' he told AFP.
Authorities have quelled recent street protests against strongman Prime Minister Hun Sen.
The government says the rallies were illegal and has indefinitely banned demonstrations in the capital by the opposition - which accuses Hun Sen of vote-rigging in polls last year.
A protest organiser told reporters that they would press on with their bid to free those arrested earlier this month during a police crackdown on striking garment workers, which left at least four civilians dead.
The employees were demanding a minimum wage of US$160 (5,200 baht) a month for their work in an industry which supplies brands including Gap, Nike and H&M.
"Our activity today is not the final one. We are making a stand and we will not stop our demands,'' said union leader Ath Thorn.
The 23 people arrested in connection with the unrest are being held at a prison near the border with Vietnam on charges linked to the incident.
Cambodian police broke up a rally in the capital Tuesday and briefly detained 11 activists who were calling for international assistance to secure the release of protesters.
Hun Sen faces mounting criticism by rights groups of his government's suppression of street protests intended to challenge his nearly three-decade rule.
He has faced accusations by rights groups of excessive force against the garment workers as well as against the opposition.
The main opposition party has boycotted parliament since the polls but 61-year-old Hun Sen, who has vowed to stay in power until he is 74, has refused to step down or call a new election.It’s eerie to walk out onto the bleachers, watching racers pull triple-digit speeds in relative silence. Walking through the pits and not seeing oil stains and cans of gas strewn about. Sure, you still smell the burning rubber, but not the familiar aromas of gasoline and oil. The mechanics all have clean hands and for the most part are just looking at computer screens. This is the future we are heading towards, and Victory Motorcycles is taking us there. Last month Victory brought myself and a group of other motorcycle journalists to the High Plains Raceway in Deer Trail, Co. A unique track that seemed to be made for Victory's new race-bred electric motorcycle: the Empulse TT. This track is completely isolated, we drove for hours through the vast beautiful landscapes of Colorado before seeing several flags and towers sticking up in the distance indicating our arrival. It was the perfect place to unveil the electric bike: a completely silent track, beautifully designed, all to ourselves. I had seen images of the bike, but now it was sitting in front of me and I was chomping at the bit to get my turn at riding one. The Victory Empulse TT was my first experience with a modern electric bike, and it was unlike anything I had ridden before. It wakes up with a flare on the meters in front of you, rather than roaring to life like an internal combustion engine, and doesn’t make any noise other than a faint hum until you turn the throttle. Holding down the starter button to turn it to Sport Mode (one of three riding modes, including normal and rain), I headed out to line up behind the other riders on the track. Our first couple of laps were slow, just pacing and getting used to the throttle response and feel of the bike. My first impressions were that it was very thin and had quite a low center of gravity, which was nice getting into the turns. After a couple of laps they let us open it up.
Going 104 mph with your chest tucked to the tank and hearing nothing but the wind on your helmet is an incredible feeling.
This is not the cruiser that we have grown to expect from Victory. This is their step into not only the electric market, but the sport/standard market as well. The massive Brembo dual-disc front brakes provide the shortest stopping distance in-class and adjustable front and rear suspension provide that race-tuned feel specific for your weight and riding style. Also, with the highest in-class lean angle, riders during our track day had no problem dragging a bit of knee. In fact, I took the thing out in my casual boots(dang it) and ground half the soles off from getting down in it. The Empulse TT only weighs 460 lbs and delivers a healthy 54 hp and 61 ft-lb torque, which it wears very well. A low center of gravity and improved steering dynamics make this a fun package that’s easy to throw into the corners at speed or just whip through the city streets.
This new bike is building off of the technology from the company Brammo, which Polaris acquired at the beginning of this year. They have increased the battery capacity by ten percent, and increased the range to 140 miles. Stylistically the bikes have very much in common, as the TT seems to be the next step after the Brammo Empulse R, under a different banner. But it’s the banner that makes the difference moving forward. Having Polaris and Victory backing this project means that we will continue to see a push towards faster electric bikes and higher performance with the funding of a major company behind it, which is important because this is an exotic beast. It’s a full-blown little sport bike: unlike anything in the Victory line-up. But we shouldn’t be surprised, as Victory has been pushing performance and demonstrating it all over the world this last year. The bike that took Lee Johnston to podium at Isle of Man was built on the same platform, and when legendary racer Guy Martin took that bike for a spin he only had one thing to say through a massive grin: “It’s the future”. And it absolutely is. Whether or not the future has arrived with the Empulse TT, however, is up to you. While the Empulse will surely be a universal object of desire, it’s not going to be a bike for everybody. With a price tag of $20k, it’s not marketed towards the average Joe, and Victory knows that. The customer for this bike is your Tony Stark type. The well off, established individual who has a couple other bikes and cars and wants to add something unique and economical to the collection. The bike that might be out of reach for most customers, goes to show that the technology we’ve been waiting for is within reach. And so it seems Victory is not pushing sales, they are pushing performance and they are pushing |
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Nothing says beach day like a cold beverage with a splash of lime — but, keep the tiny citrus fruit's juices off of your hands. The combination of skin, sun and lime can cause a painful reaction and red, blistering rash.
"It's called Berloque Dermatitis, and it's very comon this time of year," says Dr. Neil Sadick, a clinical professor of dermatology in private practice in New York City, “The lime juice is a sun sensitizer, so it makes you susceptible to rashes and burns on your skin, sometimes resulting in a change in pigmentation.”
Although not everyone is susceptible (it's genetic), there's no way to determine that before it's too late, so always wash your hands after handling lime (or a lime-related beverage) and of course lather on the sun block, which may help, says Sadick. And if your priorities somehow shifted in the sun and you find yourself afflicted, there is a treatment plan:
1. Immediately try an over-the-counter cortisone cream or Aquaphor Healing Ointment.
2. Get thee to the derm's office for a prescription topical steroid or bleaching cream.
For more healthy beach tips, read:
Birchbox's beach essentials
Surprising beach snacksThe entire political class have taken leave of their senses. Both during the referendum campaign and since the result was announced, their behaviour has bordered on the clinically insane.
Of course, you should never underestimate their uncanny ability to make everything about them. But the unedifying orgy of self-indulgence we have seen over the past week has plumbed new depths of cynicism and opportunism.
Yesterday's Tory leadership contest fiasco resembled a Whitehall farce scripted by David Chase, the man who created The Sopranos. If you ever doubted that politicians are an alien race apart, then here was conclusive proof.
Following David Cameron's inevitable resignation after his humiliating defeat at the ballot box, the Conservative Party in Parliament decided that the best response was to form a circular firing squad.
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If you ever doubted that politicians are an alien race apart, then yesterday's Tory leadership contest fiasco was conclusive proof
Instead of sober reflection, they embarked on an incestuous bout of infighting and jockeying for position, as the real world looked on aghast.
As I wrote on Tuesday, only inside the Westminster village could anyone in their right mind interpret the most momentous decision the British people have taken in half a century as a clear message that: What we want is Stephen Crabb.
Yet here was someone most people have never heard of being touted seriously as the saviour of the nation, despite the fact that he was on the losing side in the referendum argument.
Crabb is now one of five names that will go forward to Tory MPs before the field is whittled down to two and laid before the wider membership.
Home Secretary Theresa May is the odds-on favourite.
When 17,410,742 people put their cross in the Leave box a week ago, how many of them thought that what they were really voting for was to install Mother Theresa as Prime Minister?
After all, she had rarely been seen in public for the past five months, having spent the referendum campaign hiding behind the sofa.
Yet now, if the polls and the bookies are to be believed, she will be in overall charge of the negotiations to extricate Britain from the EU — something she didn't believe in.
May announced her candidacy in a tartan trouser suit that made her look like one of the Bay City Rollers — an outfit presumably intended to reassure voters north of the border that she would protect Scotland's best interests, too.
The one name conspicuously missing from the list was the early front-runner Boris Johnson, who withdrew from the fray after being comprehensively shafted by his Leave colleague Michael Gove. During the campaign, the two men had been joined at the hip and it was assumed that they'd run on a joint ticket.
The first we knew of a rift between them was when an explosive private email from Gove's wife, Mail columnist Sarah Vine, fell into the wrong hands and was leaked to Sky News.
Even so, no one predicted that Gove would chuck his own hat into the ring, especially as he had once said that he was prepared to write 'on parchment in my own blood' a guarantee that he did not want to lead his party or become Prime Minister.
It was a promise he restated during one of the televised referendum debates. Then again, he is a politician, so we shouldn't be too surprised that he's gone back on his word. They all do.
At heart, every MP dreams of making it to No 10. They're all living in their own movie. Politicians don't have friends in any meaningful sense, just disposable alliances. Their principles are infinitely flexible when it comes to career advancement.
They talk frequently of loyalty, but none of them actually means it.
The Goves and the Camerons were supposed to be bosom buddies, but that didn't stop Call Me Dave sacking Gove from the education department to appease the teaching unions and the so-called 'Blob'.
In return, Gove knifed Cameron over Europe and now he's knifed his ex-New Best Friend Boris, too.
Gove may be an impeccably mannered chap, but he's clearly a student of the Cosa Nostra and now appears to fancy making the leap from consigliere to Godfather. Be careful what you wish for, Michael.
As for Boris, he has suffered the same fate as his hero Winston Churchill, who was also discarded immediately after his finest hour.
Whether, like Churchill, he can make a comeback remains to be seen. But after a brilliant campaign, Boris didn't do himself any favours by deciding to lay out his vision of the road ahead in his newspaper column, rather than in public — and appeared to back-pedal on his promise that a Leave vote would drastically reduce immigration.
Nevertheless, he had earned his crack at the leadership and the conspiracy to keep him off the ballot paper is yet another affront to democracy. So is the suggestion that May and Gove might stitch up a deal to prevent party members even getting a vote on who becomes the next leader and occupant of Downing Street.
There have been far too many affronts to democracy over the past week, particularly from resentful Remainers who have howled petulantly from the rooftops about the electorate stupidly voting the 'wrong' way.
As for Boris Johnson, he has suffered the same fate as his hero Winston Churchill, who was also discarded immediately after his finest hour
The first we knew of a rift between Michael Gove and Boris Johnson was when an explosive private email from Gove's wife, Mail columnist Sarah Vine, fell into the wrong hands and was leaked to Sky News
The notion that they will still try to scupper Brexit, either in Parliament, by holding a second referendum or by trying to force a General Election, is monstrous.
I suppose I should mention the turmoil in the Labour Party, which has also suffered a nervous breakdown. Labour MPs have interpreted the Leave vote as an opportunity to force Jeremy Corbyn to resign and replace him with one of the Eagles.
Not that I care what happens to him, or who comes next, but it should be pointed out that all along Corbyn has shown little enthusiasm for the EU and if he did, as reported, vote to Leave in the privacy of the polling booth, then he was more in touch with the mood of the British people than 80 per cent of MPs from all parties at Westminster.
And there's the rub. When it came to the EU, the overwhelming majority of the political class — including the woman who may well become our next Prime Minister — were on the wrong side of history and at odds with the people they are supposed to represent.
We have had a week of lunacy, whining and navel-gazing at Westminster, time which should have been devoted to working out how quickly the will of the people could be implemented in an orderly fashion
Where's the leadership from anyone? Certainly Theresa was missing in action during the campaign. Most of the Cabinet backed Remain and went along with Cameron and Osborne's disgraceful efforts to bully and terrify people into doing as they were told.
There certainly aren't any outstanding or obvious leaders on the Tory ballot paper, nor within Labour's ranks either.
Once again the political class — not that they've shown much class lately — have been obsessed with settling their own petty scores, squabbling among themselves and advancing their own careers rather than getting on with the job in hand.
Lest they need reminding, the British people have just given them a clear mandate to get Britain out of the anti-democratic, corrupt EU racket. That's what they should be concentrating on right now.
Instead, we have had a week of lunacy, whining and navel-gazing at Westminster, time which should have been devoted to working out how quickly the will of the people could be implemented in an orderly fashion.
They also need reminding that this wasn't just a rejection of the EU, it was a revolt against the entire political class, whose antics over the past week have been an insult to the magnificent exercise in popular democracy we have just experienced.Faced with stubbornly sluggish job growth numbers, Finance Minister Joe Oliver has announced a cut in employment insurance premiums for small businesses.
Businesses that pay up to $15,000 in EI premiums will benefit from the break, which reduces the EI premium from $1.88 per $100 of payroll to $1.60. That is a drop of 15 per cent in EI costs.
Oliver estimates about 780,000 Canadian businesses will benefit from the credit, which takes effect in the 2015 tax year.
“Small businesses drive our prosperity and give back to our communities,” Oliver said, speaking at a small family-owned business in Toronto called Value Wood Products.
He estimated small businesses provide half of private sector jobs.
$500M to small business
The cut would take effect Jan. 1, 2015 and remain in effect through 2016.
The EI cut will return about $500 million to small business owners to encourage job creation, Oliver said.
There's no paperwork associated with the change — instead Revenue Canada will calculate it when businesses file their taxes.
Asked whether the policy reflects concern about Canada’s job picture, which showed that 100,000 jobs were lost in the private sector last month — the highest one-month drop on record — Oliver seemed to downplay any such link.
“It’s not a sign of worry, it’s a sign of confidence that we’re continuing on the right path,” he said.
In addition to the cut announced today, Oliver touted the Harper government’s decision to impose a seven-year break-even rate-setting mechanism on EI in 2017. This will mean that EI premiums are no higher than needed to pay for the EI program and should lower premiums for all employers, he said.
The union Unifor pointed out that EI costs are down in Canada because fewer unemployed Canadians are eligible for them. It estimates only 36 per cent unemployed Canadians is eligible, either because they have worked too few hours or because they have claimed EI before and haven't worked long enough to collect again.
Unifor president Jerry Dias says instead of cutting premiums, the federal government would get more economic impact from improving benefits for unemployed workers.
"Increasing access to EI benefits would mean unemployed workers could better support their families. And let's face it, unemployed people are spending every cent they have in the local economy, not hoarding it like business often does," he said.
'Big, big news for small business': CFIB
The Liberal party has urged the Harper government to lower EI premiums to encourage job creation. Employment critic Scott Brison says premiums have been kept artificially high and should have been cut when the account balanced.
NDP finance critic Nathan Cullen suggested the cut is the wrong measure for the Canadian economy, saying it’s an “insult for those Canadians who are either out of work or facing the prospect of losing their job.”
Cullen was critical of the multiple changes made to EI by the Harper government.
“These guys continually play politics with everything that the government does and my concern is that in their desperation, they will introduce short-term, not very thoughtful, measures to get a couple of headlines, but that more over the medium and long term hurt the Canadian economy,” he said.
This is a half billion dollars coming back into the pockets of entrepreneurs at this tough economic time. - Dan Kelly, CEO Canadian Federation of Independent Business
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business was among the business groups that have called for cuts to payroll taxes. Its CEO Dan Kelly was at Oliver’s news conference, calling the premium cut “big, big news for small business.”
“This is a half billion dollars coming back into the pockets of entrepreneurs at this tough economic time,” he said.
Restaurants Canada also welcomed the change and said young people would benefit.
"The regressive nature of payroll taxes discourages employers from hiring youth because the tax rate compared to their wages is disproportionately high," said Joyce Reynolds, executive vice president of government affairs.
She called for deeper tax relief for small businesses.
"A way to make the tax more progressive and benefit youth job seekers would have been a tax credit program focused on youth hires," she said.
The Conservative government is gearing up for an election in 2015, hoping to focus on economic issues and, in particular, items that hit the pocketbook of everyday Canadians.A little blue sky before the beginning of fall, you know this season that requires you to wear long sleeve clothes, recalls the trauma of the school year and inspires singers with mustaches.
As I am a great guy nice that I would dream of having as a friend, I give you the desktop
FR : Encore un peu de ciel bleu avant le début de l'automne, vous savez cette saison qui vous oblige porter des habits à manches longues, rappelle le traumatisme de la rentrée des classes et inspire les chanteurs à moustaches.Comme je suis un mec super sympa que je rêverais d'avoir en ami, je vous offre la version fond d'écran de cette illustration à cette adresse! Non ne me remerciez pas, par contre, si l'envie vous prend, vous pouvez participer ou partager la page du Ulule pour commander l'album des Badass Cartoons! ENG :Who started all this Crossposting? I'm not sure about this but I think it was the Romans. 101 Ways to be Obnoxious on Usenet 1. Post a message asking how to post messages. 2. Lead a tireless crusade for the creation of newsgroups with silly names like alt.my.butt.is.hairy. 3. Put 4 addresses, 5 lines of "Geek Code", 6 ASCII-art bicycles, a PGP key, and your home phone in your signature. 4. Reinvigorate a discussion by switching attributions in followups. 5. Post recipes on rec.pets.cats. 6. Post a compendium of old articles from a thread that died months ago with a title such as "*** HAS JOE SMITH FORGOTTEN HIS LIES? ***" 7. Post a 56-part binary MPG file of your dog throwing up to news.answers. Announce that you screwed it up and repeat. 8. On the MST3K groups, ask what happened to Joel. 9. Ask readers of rec.music.misc to post their favorite Zeppelin tune "for a poll". 10. Reacquaint the readers of rec.humor with the "two-strings-go-in-a-bar" joke. 11. Determine a perversion so bizarre or obscure that it doesn't yet have its own sex group. 12. Post your new "War Heroes of India" FAQ to soc.culture.pakistan. 13. Start this week's new AOL virus rumor. 14. Format your posts for 90 columns (or 20). 15. Provide a valuable public service by notifying the eager readers of roughly 1,200 newsgroups of your new "HOOTERAMA" phone sex service or "PorqWhiffe" pheramone cologne. 16. Post elaborate conspiracy theories to talk.politics.misc detailing how ATF agents under the control of Chelsea Clinton and Socks has implanted invisible microchips in your genitals. 17. Fill that empty mailbox, make new friends, delight your postmaster, and selflessly lead others to riches with a few "MAKE MONEY FAST" posts. 18. Attempt to sell your sweaty underwear in alt.clothing.lingerie. 19. Follow up a 200-line post to add only your signature. 20. Crosspost Amiga articles to the Mac and PC newsgroups for a valuable interchange of provocative ideas. 21. Announce a mailing list for Bill Gates' VISA card number. 22. Inform the readers of alt.sex that your friend at a particular address is taking a penis length survey, and the first 1000 people to send him their measurements will receive free naked pictures of Cindy Crawford. 23. Correct every spelling mistake you encounter, but misspell the word "imbecile" in your followup flames. 24. Flame yourself, and complain to your own postmaster. 25. Ask readers of the Star Trek groups when they last had dates. 26. Post personal ads on groups such as alt.sex.diapers listing your work phone number. 27. Post under the name Dave Rhodes. 28. Followup every post in a newsgroup by ranking them on a scale from 1 to 10. 29. Establish your own little Usenet niche by writing a Wink Martindale FAQ. 30. Advise other readers to ftp to 127.0.0.1 for "really cool nudie pics". 31. Post daily word searches to rec.puzzles. 32. Post your trig homework to sci.math and ask the readers to e-mail you the answers, since you "don't read the group". 33. Provoke insightful and productive debates on fresh new topics such as abortion, gun control, the existence of God, penile circumcision, and the relative superiority of Mac or PC operating systems. 34. Pick a cutesy handle that inspires vicarious embarrassment in other readers, such as "SoHot4U", "SokSnifer", or "WetNWild". 35. Maintain a high-level of constructive decorum by addressing someone with whom you disagree as "monkey boy". 36. Inform the readers of the sex groups that they're "going straight to hell", and then proceed to followup a variety of titillating posts. 37. Post to alt.folklore.urban that this guy that a friend of your uncle's ex-girlfriend's boss knew received the donated heart of River Phoenix. 38. Relentlessly inform the readers of groups such as rec.pets.iguanas or sci.agriculture of your UFO, JFK, OJ, NRA, NSA, Nutrasweet, and Azeri genocide theories. Relate them all to sunspot activity and ancient astronauts. 39. Post instructions telling other readers how to put you in their killfile. 40. Post whining, misspelled, and vaguely creepy personal ads in wildly inappropriate newsgroups, and followup to berate the readers for not responding. 41. Announce that a particular site has opened up a new combination OJ Jury Info/Homemade Bombs/Kiddie Porn/Scientology Documents/Computer Subliminal Hypnosis ftp archive. 42. Construct a device that lets your pets post to Usenet by pawing or pecking a feeder bar. 43. Post the Niemann Marcus cookie recipe to rec.food.recipes. 44. Eliminate nearly all meaningful traffic on a newsgroup for weeks by challenging its readership to come up with as many synonyms as possible for the word vomit. 45. Accuse other posters of being AI experiments, Perl scripts, or Emacs macros. 46. Claim that you can see "hidden images" in another person's posting when you cross your eyes. 47. Ask Austrian readers about kangaroos. 48. Ask Australian readers about alpine skiing. 49. Include Rush lyrics or Rush quotes in all your posts. 50. Accuse female posters of being male. 51. Make an anonymous posting accusing others of cowardice. 52. Accuse a fellow AOL or Prodigy subscriber of being a "newbie" because their 3 months on the net are dwarfed by your own span of 4. 53. Insist that anyone objecting to your compulsive fascination with consuming the flesh of strangled disabled minors is "judgemental". 54. If you've grown tired of typing, effectively end a thread by accusing others of being Nazis. 55. Ask readers of soc.culture.nordic whether the Swedish Chef has a Sampo. 56. Write and regularly post a FAQ about yourself. 57. Post graphic descriptions of your bowel movements, genital sores, and various suppurating wounds to alt.tasteless. 58. Ask readers of sci.med for urgent, step-by-step instructions on removing arrows, or inquire why all your extremities have turned dark purple. 59. Insist that there's no such state in the U.S. as "New Mexico". 60. Post only in Esperanto. 61. Claim a copyright on the word "Usenet", and followup with a bill all posts you encounter that contain it. 62. Sell "posting permits" in news.announce.newusers. 63. Post single-part text messages in MIME format. 64. Ask the readers of rec.sewing whether any of them want to be the drummer for your new band, "Death Monkeys". 65. Claim to be an amorous highschool cheerleader while posting under a name such as "Robert Bradley Smith, Jr." 66. In the spirit of purest optimism, ask other readers to followup with their account passwords and credit card numbers. 67. Why use a single question mark or exclamation point when you can use at least thirty?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? 68. List a cute organization name in your header, such as "Canadians for Global Warming". 69. Insult a poster from another nation based on his country's performance in World War II. 70. Post vitriolic, frothing, hair-trigger flames in polite newsgroups, as if you were a testosterone-crazed adolescent debating which shotgun is superior in alt.games.doom. 71. Followup spam posts in the belief that the originator, who probably follows the group closely and is desperately curious about receiving feedback, will see your impassioned plea and be so moved by your lengthy, point-by-point indictment of their conduct that they pledge to desist from such activity for all time. 72. Regardless of its accuracy, followup another post with the line "BZZZT! Wrong answer!" or "Hello! McFly!" 73. Use a 120-line ASCII graphic of Spock as your signature. 74. Post to soc.culture.women asking "what's your favorite brand of oven mitt, little ladies?" 75. Post to news.annnounce.newusers asking if there are any nurses in Portland willing to spank you. Followup with an apology. Followup again with the original article. 76. Post with a newsreader that replaces punctuation marks with strange, non-ASCII characters. 77. Steer all debates to your own pet subjects of expertise, regardless of their relevance. 78. Make it clear from your postings that you've a profound inability to distinguish "The X Files" as fiction. 79. Insist that another poster is really Serdar Argic or Kibo. 80. Post 20-part encoded image files from NASA ftp archives that you claim show clear evidence of alien settlements. 81. Insinuate vague conspiracies in all your posts. 82. Spam post alarming ten-year-old files about Congressional bills to tax modem usage "in the name of freedom". 83. Claim that unidentified government agencies are censoring your posts. 84. Ask readers to collect aluminum pop-tops on behalf of Craig Shergold. 85. Ask readers of comp.sci.algorithms how to get Super Mario to the castle. 86. POST IN ALL CAPS 87. omit all punctuation 88. omitallspaces 89. DOALLTHREEOFTHEABOVE 90. Ask the readers of alt.current-events.net-abuse where to purchase Cantor and Siegel's book. 91. Post the phone number of the Michigan Militia to alt.conspiracy as the "Classified ATF Secret Hotline". 92. Compose an exhaustively researched 15-part FAQ detailing the favorite movie musicals of relatives of the Deep Space Nine cast. Post it weekly in its entirety. 93. Strive to ensure that no two consecutive words in your posts are correctly spelled. 94. Enrich the lives of thousands with a thoughtful and impassioned debate on the topic "AOL users suck". 95. Dispense essential and priceless financial advice, such as the assertion that no one is legally required to pay taxes. 96. Demand that others cease using the letter e, as you find it "dply offnsiv". 97. Post to rec.music.misc insisting that "Curt Kobain should leave Pearl Jam since they'll never tour again." 98. Assume that the entire Usenet hierarchy shares your interest in helping lonely Ukrainian lasses find love. 99. Followup another person's posts every twelve minutes to accuse them of "obsessing". 100. Followup two dozen of another person's posts to accuse them of harassing you. Send copious e-mail if you're ignored. 101. Start pointless debates over topics such as whether Whoopi Goldberg has eyebrows, what happens when you cross the International Dateline, and whether the bad guy in Popeye cartoons was named "Bluto" or "Brutus".Molly Gains of Tiffin enjoys a ride with Addi Mougin of Walford at the Johnson County Fair last summer.Molly Gains of Tiffin enjoys a ride with Addi Mougin of Walford at the Johnson County Fair on Tuesday, July 22, 2014. (Photo: David Scrivner / Iowa City Press)
Can you smell the funnel cakes? Hear the screams of people enjoying carnival rides?
Well, you probably cannot yet, but the Johnson County Fair is bringing all that and a whole lot more to the Iowa City area starting Monday.
The annual festival brings just about everything you could want in a Midwestern festival to town: rides, carnival food, concerts, fireworks, baking competitions and a bunch of livestock competitions for the large crowd of farmers and rural life lovers we have in the area.
Here's a list of some of the most enjoyable highlights of the festival that will supplying fun for the entire family from Monday until Friday, July 27, at the Johnson County Fairgrounds. Entrance is free Monday through Thursday, so there's not a lot holding you back from taking all of the county fair in.
Glorious carnival food
Funnel cake is just one of the foods that makes the fair worth going to. (Photo: Contributed)
No county fair would be complete without an abundance of deep-fried fair food, and the Johnson County Fair has that in abundance. Jones Company Carnival, the organization that brings the bulk of the rides and special carnival food to the area, has everything you could want: cotton candy, funnel cakes, popcorn, pizza, corn dogs and a lot more.
If you're looking for something a bit different than standard fair food, Brenda Christner, the business manager at the fairgrounds, said that there are plenty of local food purveyors offering up delicious food.
Bahn MI Amor, a new food truck to this year's Iowa City Farmers Market, is at the fair for the first time offering up twists on the baguette-based Vietnamese sandwich known as the bahn mi.
Sno Biz Iowa City will be creating colorful shaved ice throughout the festival to help people stay cool. Jerry and Margie's Catering of Riverside will also be on hand to make a plethora of barbecue items for those who need something more substantial than flavored ice.
The Johnson County Pork Producers will be grilling up pork products Monday and Tuesday. Not to be out done, the Johnson County Cattlemen will serve beef products Wednesday and Thursday. The Johnson County Dairy Council will scooping out treats Monday through Thursday.
Rodeo & live country music
Buy Photo Charlie Isaacs rides a bronco Friday at the Johnson County Fair. David Scrivner / Iowa City Press-Citizen Photos Charlie Issacs rides a bronco at the Johnson County Fair on Friday, July 26, 2013. (Photo: David Scrivner / Iowa City Press-Citizen)
The Sixth Annual Friday Night Main Event at the Johnson County Fairgrounds is a bit different than the normal fair Monday through Thursday. On Friday, July 28, instead of entrance being free, tickets for the event are $15 in advance and $20 at the door.
With that money, you get quite a bang for your buck: live rodeo from the Sandburr Rodeo from 7 to 9 p.m., carnival rides until your heart is content from 5 to 10 p.m. and then a concert from country musician Jake Dodds from 9 to 11 p.m. To get tickets, visit johnsoncofair.com or call 319-325-4049. Tickets are also on sale at Theisen's in Coralville.
Pie contest
Buy Photo From left to right, Pat Hobson, Charity Nebbe, Emily Saveraid and Michael Knock have a laugh before the eating part of their pie judging duties kicked in at the 9th annual Jo Beers Pie Contest & Auction on July 30. (Photo: Zach Berg/Iowa City Press-Citizen)
The 11th Annual Jo Beers Pie Contest and Auction is named after longtime Press-Citizen writer Jo Beers, so of course we have to give some love to the event.
The annual contest features local celebrity judges sampling and rating a bevy of pies made be locals and also other well-known Johnson County residents. Don't be surprised if Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek has a pie to enter. The competition starts at 12:45 p.m. Thursday, July 27, and ends with a live auction of the pies at 3 p.m. at the variety tent in the fairgrounds.
For those who want to enter the contest, you can bring any homemade double crust fruit pie to the tent from noon to 12:30 p.m. to register the pie. No meat, dairy, custard or eggs are allowed in the fillings, per contest rules on the fair's website. Also, the pie and the container it's served in will be auctioned off and sold at the end, so make sure its not your great-great grandmother's pie pan you're baking your pies in.
Ugly cake contest
Buy Photo Residents competed in the 2013 Ugly Cake competition at the Johnson County Fair Tuesday, July 23. / Alesha Crews / Iowa City Press-Citizen (Photo: Alesha Crews / Iowa City Press-Citizen)
The fair is also host of some more bizarre competitions. Case in point: the ugly cake competition. At 12:30 p.m. Monday, judges will pick the ugliest cakes of the group of cakes made by locals. Judged for looks alone, the cakes will be divided into age groups of the bakers: 9 and under, 10-17 and 18 and older. First place gets a $25 gift card from Yummy's Gourmet Cakes in Fairfield, second place gets a $10 gift card.
"The creativity I've seen involved in making something look that gross and disgusting is amazing,” Christner said.
To enter, the cake and all of its adornments must be completely edible, and a recipe card must be included. Bring your ugly cakes to Building C by noon to be entered into the contest.
Fireworks
Buy Photo Fireworks explode over S.T. Morrison Park in Coralville on Tuesday, July 4, 2017. (Photo: David Scrivner/Iowa City Press-Citizen)
To offer up a proper end to festivities, a full fireworks display will be shot off above the fairgrounds starting at 9:30 p.m. July 27. The fireworks will be presented by the Stumptown Shooters. Christner said the Stumptown Shooters are compromised of members of the Hills Fire Department, so they definitely know how to handle pyrotechnics.
Other weird contests
Michael Zamora/For the Press-Citizen Contestants strut their stuff for the judges Tuesday as they compete in the Mr. Legs competition at the Johnson County Fair in Iowa City. Contestants strut their stuff for the judges Tuesday, July 28, 2015, as they compete in the Mr. Legs competition at the Johnson County Fair in Iowa City. (Photo: Michael Zamora/The Register)
Weird contests may be the calling card of the fair, so here are a few of the most fun ones.
The hog calling contest starts at 5 p.m. Tuesday at the variety tent. Anyone can enter, just be sure to sign up starting at 4:30 p.m.
The Mr. Legs contest is an opportunity for guys to show off their legs to the crowd. Classes include oldest legs, sexiest legs, overall best legs, most muscular legs and thinnest legs. Register for the contest at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday at the variety tenet. The contest beings at 4 p.m.
The rubber chicken throwing contest is exactly what it sounds like: who can throw a rubber chicken the farthest. Broken up into four classes, the first place winner for each class gets a $20 gift card to Kentucky Fried Chicken, the second place winner gets a $10. Register at 4 p.m. in the road between Exhibit Building A and Exhibit Building B. The throwing starts at 4:30 p.m.
Reach Zach Berg at 319-887-5412, [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at @ZacharyBerg.
Read or Share this story: http://icp-c.com/2uJaknQ(CNN) There may be plenty of idiots on the road, but is putting them in the skies taking it, quite literally, to the next dimension?
For Dr. Heinrich H. Bülthoff -- one of the leading researchers on the 'MyCopter' project -- it's a serious question.
Making an idiot-proof flying car that anyone can pilot has involved years of painstaking research and may be the secret to the long-held dream of firing up the rotors, levitating and simply flying out of the bumper-to-bumper grind.
Now the European Union wants to make the dream a reality, researching the feasibility of small commuter air vehicles to ease the world's traffic congestion.
"It's been a dream of mine since I read it in science fiction books and in the movies as a kid, but science fiction is becoming the reality these days," says Dr. Bülthoff, director of perception, cognition and action at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany.
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Under the four-year project, the EU has drawn together six institutes from across Europe to look at the problems associated with commuting in personal aviation vehicles (PAVs). At the center of the research is a focus, not so much on building the vehicle, but on all the issues and challenges surrounding commuter aviation.
In the case of his institute, it's how to make the machine accessible to ordinary drivers.
A flying car for everybody
"There's no intention with this project to actually build the system," explains Dr.Bülthoff whose research is part of a 2007 EU report called "Out of the Box: Ideas About the Future of Air Transport". "They said to us 'please, not another proposal for a flying vehicle' - we have received so many - there are so many other issues to address," he said.
These challenges involve setting up "virtual corridor" traffic systems in the sky that guide PAVs under existing aircraft, using advances in swarm technology to stop them crashing into each other and working on landing systems that do not involve air traffic controllers.
"If you want to make a flying car it should be for everybody, but you can't make every car driver into a pilot," he said. "The idea is to fly in uncontrolled airspace without interfering with all the other aircraft."
He said the plan is to make the flying vehicles so intelligent, they communicate with each other and avoid collisions without any human input.
Keeping it simple
His institute, in particular, is focused on the problems of the human-machine interface: creating a design that reduces the withering array of dials and monitors in a helicopter or plane into a few simple controls on a dashboard.
Keeping the simple steering wheel on a flying vehicle -- where controls must make adjustments for traveling through three rather than two dimensions -- has been just one of the challenges of the project.
"For more than 100 years cars have used the steering wheel. It was a good idea for cars, but if you make the transition to the air why should a driver learn something completely new?" he said.
Pilotless planes
The aircraft would be largely autonomous and would, for the most part, need no piloting at all. Flying through "highways in the sky" - flight paths designed to host swarms of PAVs flying in formation - the PAVs would avoid obstacles and select landing spots autonomously by using intelligent sight sensors.
The controls would be shared between the pilot and the machine allowing for what researchers call "comprehensive situational awareness." So-called "haptic" controls that put a feeling of resistance in the steering wheel would allow drivers to know when they were edging towards the confines of the "highway in the sky".
Other aspects of the study have looked at the social impact of PAVs as the commuter vehicle of the future.
A flying car should be for everybody, but you can't make every car driver into a pilot Dr. Heinrich H. Bülthoff
"Many people might ask whether we really want thousands of these things buzzing around in the sky," Dr Bülthoff said.
Researchers have been looking at ways of constructing PAV flight paths above existing freeways and roads to minimize the environmental impact, keeping the flight ceiling at 50 meters to avoid commercial aircraft.
While flying time is relatively short due to the constraints of battery life using current technology, researchers on the project had found that 90 percent of commuter trips were shorter than 25 km (15 miles) and averaged about 30 minutes with peak hour delays of about 15 minutes, making |
dark hair and full beard, he might be mistaken for a graduate student who wandered into ChurchKey near Logan Circle to down a few drafts after banging out his thesis. But this youthful 39-year-old has a remarkably varied résumé: Before brewing caught his fancy, he worked as a photographer covering the war in Serbia; he spent nine years as an investment banker; and he made an unsuccessful attempt to start the Middle East’s first low-fare airline.
Within minutes we’re clinking glasses of 961 Lebanese Pale Ale, a marriage of European brewing tradition and Levantine cuisine. Hajjar supplements the hops with a melange of Middle Eastern herbs and spices: mint, sumac, anise, chamomile, sage and za’atar. The pale ale is delicate but flavorful, with a dry, herbal, savory flavor that would pair nicely with a skewer of well-seasoned chicken or lamb.
961 Lebanese Pale Ale is available in kegs and 11.2-ounce bottles. Hajjar’s American importer, St. Killian in Kingston, Mass., carries four other 961 varieties in bottles only, all solid interpretations of classic European styles. They are a clean-tasting golden lager; a red ale balancing citrusy American hops with lots of caramel malt; a Belgian-style witbier incorporating wheat from Lebanese farmers; and a roasty porter full of mocha flavors.
Many U.S. craft brewers like to talk about their baptism of fire in a highly competitive industry, but Hajjar literally was under siege when he hatched his grand plan. “I started in 2006,” he says. “Israel and Hezbollah were bombing... each other. The electricity was off; I was sitting on my balcony reading the first chapter of “Beer School” by Steve Hindy and Tom Potter. That’s when I thought, ‘Eureka!’ ”
Hajjar took inspiration from Hindy, a former Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press. Like Hajjar, Hindy had to dodge bombs and bullets; he was sitting in the grandstand behind Anwar Sadat in 1981 when the Egyptian leader was assassinated. Like Hajjar, Hindy was led by the region’s lack of decent beer first to take an interest in home-brewing, then to turn pro. (He’s now president of New York’s Brooklyn Brewery.)
“Pretty unremarkable” is how Hindy describes Middle Eastern beer in general. He remembers quaffing Stella, an Egyptian brand that had dubious quality-control standards: “I don’t think I ever got two bottles that ever had the same fill level.” The brewery, according to a persistent rumor, spiked the beer with formaldehyde to perk up the flavor. Hindy couldn’t verify that, but he said, “It did seem to have a kind of numbing effect after a few bottles.”
The quality of Stella improved markedly after 2002, when Heineken took over the brewery, Hindy says. Likewise, Heineken controls Almaza (Arabic for “diamond”), a Lebanese light lager with no particular regional character.
There are a few oases in that bleak beerscape. Israel has sprouted between 20 and 30 microbreweries and brewpubs, beginning with the Dancing Camel in Tel Aviv in 2006. Taybeh Brewing in Palestinian territory predates the Dancing Camel by a decade, brewing golden, amber and dark lagers, plus a non-alcoholic brew for observant Muslims.
961 Beer, however, might be the only Middle Eastern microbrewery that exports worldwide, from Spain to Hong Kong to Australia. Hajjar’s output is modest: 200,000 cases last year, or about 14,500 barrels. But Hajjar ships to 14 countries and 12 American states; you can find it in the District, Maryland and Virginia. His business strategy might reflect his cosmopolitan outlook: “My uncle lived in Chicago for 40 years. My wife grew up in New York. I proposed in Sweden and we got married in Seattle.”
His visit to Washington is part of a brand-promotion tour that includes stops in New York and Philadelphia. “I love coming here. I feel like it’s my second home,” he says. “I feel like a rock star, but without the groupies and drugs.”
Hajjar buys malt from Germany and hops from Europe and the United States. It might not be the most efficient or environmentally friendly way to make beer, importing almost all of his brewing materials and sending his beer abroad in throwaway bottles and one-way disposable barrels called KeyKegs. But Hajjar says he has a goal “one day to be a zero-emission, carbon-neutral brewery.”
He admits that goal is a long way off. In the meantime, he contributes a slice of his profits to the reforestation of Lebanon. (A small drawing of a cedar graces his labels.) He uses local ingredients when possible. He planted an experimental hop plot and used the crop to make a Harvest Lager for the German Embassy in Beirut to celebrate German Reunification Day last Oct. 4. Upcoming releases include a barley wine refermented in cedar with raisins, and a Lebanese-style stout flavored with coffee and cardamom.
Can he keep the pipeline filled? At the time of our meeting, Hajjar seemed concerned about meeting demand, citing that 961 Beer is growing at a clip of 300 percent to 400 percent annually.
Kitsock is the editor of the Mid-Atlantic Brewing News.Dan Harmon is one those creators who is bound to the work wholeheartedly. Without Harmon, Community isn’t the same. What I mean is, when you watch Season 4 of Community it’s still Community but without its voice. It feels hollow. When he got fired from the show he decided to take his podcast Harmontown on tour, document it, and release it as a film.
If you don’t really know who Dan Harmon is, this documentary gives you the history of the writer. If you don’t know the controversy surrounding him and Chevy Chase, you’ll get that too. You’ll also get a very human side to a creator and that comes with all the dark side as well. This is part of Harmon’s charm. He’s an open book and he doesn’t mind if he may be the kind of book you don’t want to read or may not like. He doesn’t like taking showers, he’s probably an alcoholic, he’s a dick to his girlfriend, and he openly admits he leaves the tour having learned nothing.
That is essentially what I like about him, what his audience likes about him. If you know you can be a bad person, and openly admit your faults that may make you a bad person, does that mean you’re a bad person? Even if I believed deep down that Harmon was a bad person the fact that he doesn’t hide it softens the blow.
We watch him self-destruct and then when he’s done self-destructing he picks up the pieces and moves on. Harmon isn’t a rebel or subversive but openly criticizes the system he works in to make his money. His audience are people who feel like outsiders trying to become Dan Harmon or something like him. They want to work within the systems but feel as if they don’t belong in that system.
“Our mantra would always be make the shows you would want to see, and I think that really affected Dan’s work.” – Rob Schrab, director of The Lego Movie sequel.
That’s where Spencer comes in. Spencer is one of those audience members who stayed true to himself, and Harmon plucked him from the audience to become his dungeon master in live D&D games. Spencer is the hero of the documentary, and Harmon openly admits that.
Harmontown is crude, silly, dark, sad, uplifting, and pretty funny. It’s worth a watch if you’re a writer. It’s worth a watch if you’re a fan of Community. It’s worth a watch if you even if you just like to watch someone implode then try to reconstruct themselves.
AdvertisementsA few weeks ago we reported that Sony was planning to bump up production of its PlayStation VR (PSVR) headset around E3 time. Following that the company confirmed the headset was now readily in stock at retailers and, this week, it’s specifically confirmed it’s making more units.
Simon Benson, Director of Sony’s Immersive Technology Group, recently said as much in an interview with MCV. “It is still very early days, but we have a better feel for the demand for VR gaming and so we are planning to increase production,” Benson said.
He continued, noting that the demand had been a “positive sign for the future of VR gaming” going forward. Following PSVR’s launch in October 2016 some have struggled to find stock but hopefully this increased production cycle will bring about an end to those issues.
Elsewhere, Benson spoke about a different kind of demand, this time from developers wanting to make games for PSVR. “To be honest, we have so many VR developers approaching us that we don’t see [getting more developers to make VR content] as an issue currently,” he said. “In the first few months of PS VR’s life, there are already around 100 VR games and experiences on the store with lots more in the pipeline.”
That news will also come as a relief given that PSVR’s release schedule past May is looking a little empty. As we said, E3 is just around the corner, and we’re hoping for some big reveals at the show, especially given recent rumors surrounding both Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and Marvel Games.
“If people think PS VR gaming is great now, then I think they will be even more amazed in a year’s time by the types of experiences that will be available, and I believe that the social element will be a huge contributor to the value of VR gaming,” Benson concluded.Get the Recipe Easy Oven-Cooked Pulled Pork
More Sandwiches Tips and tricks for making the best sandwiches at home.
The easiest way I know of to ruffle the feathers of food-minded folks mounted atop high horses is to refer to some sort of vegetable preparation as "bacon." Second is to speak ill of a regional specialty that ought to stay regional (here's lookin' at you, cheesesteaks).
Coming in a close third? Suggesting that pulled pork can be prepared via any method other than low-and-slow in a smoke-filled barbecue.
I used to count myself among those rankled by that third one. My experience with indoor pulled pork was limited to the extra-wet and extra-sweet variety, braised in a slow cooker like a beer-bellied vacationer who accidentally fell asleep in a hot tub of bottled barbecue sauce. How could it ever compare to the tender and moist—but never wet—texture of real barbecue with a dark crust, a rich and smoky flavor, and a lovingly crafted sauce?
Easy: It can't compare, and it shouldn't compare. Just as it's perfectly possible to love both grilled steaks and pan-seared steaks, or grilled burgers and burgers smashed on a griddle, it's okay to enjoy pork shoulder cooked both outdoors and in-. The two dishes are similar but completely different foods that can both be appreciated on their own merits,* without involving a slight to your man- or womanhood.
* That said, I am working on a method for producing real barbecue-style pulled pork at home, complete with smoke ring and bark, which will show up in the follow-up volume to my first book. Stay tuned!
But, just as there are great burgers and poor, not all indoor pulled pork is created equal. My goal with this recipe was to come up with a technique to produce pulled pork that shreds into large, tender chunks that are moist but not wet, with a flavor that balances sweet molasses, bright vinegar, heat, and just a hint of smoke. Oh, and I wanted it to be darn easy to boot.
Going Dutch
Most simple pulled pork recipes involve dumping a pork shoulder into a slow cooker, adding some bottled barbecue sauce and stock, and letting it cook until the pork falls apart. There were two simple and obvious upgrades that could be made to this method.
First was to ditch the slow cooker and use a Dutch oven placed in the oven instead. A slow cooker heats only from the bottom and, subsequently, cooks only through simmering and steaming. A Dutch oven placed in the oven, on the other hand, heats from all sides, allowing browning to occur on the surface of the stew and around the edges of the pot, leading to far superior flavor. I'll trade the convenience of countertop cooking for more flavor any day, and besides, so long as you're hanging around the house (or are comfortable leaving the oven on), the convenience factor is more or less equal.
The second step was to ditch the bottled barbecue sauce and instead mix up a quick sauce of my own: dark molasses, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, cider vinegar, hot sauce, and a spice blend consisting of black pepper, cayenne pepper, coriander, cumin, paprika, brown sugar, and salt. Seeing as I was already mixing up a spice blend for my barbecue sauce, I let the same blend perform double duty as a dry rub for my pork shoulder.
The browning I was getting around the edges of the Dutch oven was better than nothing, but giving the shoulder a sear at the start of cooking boosted flavor even more. (It goes fast because of the extra sugar in the spice rub.) I also sautéed an onion in the browned bits left behind by the pork.
On a whim, I decided to grab a bottle of bourbon from my liquor cabinet and dump some into the pot. First, I made sure to do this with the burner off in order to prevent accidentally setting it on fire and losing an eyebrow, then I carefully ignited the booze with a long lighter, letting it flambé until the flames died down. It was a good whim to follow, adding complexity to the finished sauce.
(Plus, flambéing gives you an excuse to both play with fire and take a sip of booze while you work. Double win.)
The next issue was sauce quantity. Some recipes call for as much as a full quart of liquid in the pot, perhaps based on the idea that more moisture to start will lead to moister pork in the end. But, as my Ultra-Crisp-Skinned Slow-Roasted Pork Shoulder recipe proves, it's perfectly possible to get supremely moist pork even with no added liquid at all. Adding excess sauce during cooking is the prime culprit in the wet-pork issue. We're after pulled pork here, not ragù.
The other interesting factor I noted was that no matter how bright and flavorful my sauce was to begin with, it would lose that brightness over the course of cooking. Sure, it picked up some great pork flavor, but the tanginess was gone. Turned out I could fix both of these problems with one simple solution: Don't add the sauce all at once.
By starting with only half the sauce, along with a small amount of chicken stock, and then adding the remaining half after shredding the pork, I ended up with pork that had better texture and sauce that had brighter flavor. A small splash of good-quality liquid smoke (I like Wright's brand because it contains nothing but real smoke and water) simulates that true smoked flavor.
By the way, just as it's possible to overcook beef in a beef stew, it's quite possible to overcook pulled pork. You want your pork to be pull-apart tender—an indication that the connective tissue binding muscle fibrils together has broken down—but not so cooked that the muscle fibrils themselves start to lose structure and turn to mush.
As soon as the pork pulls apart in easy chunks, you're done.
I'd nailed the moistness of the pork and the flavor of the sauce, but there was still a little something lacking: texture. Whether indoors or out, I like my pulled pork to have a combination of moist meat and crunchy bark. This was another easy fix: Orienting the pork fat (or skin) side up and taking the lid off of the Dutch oven for the last hour of cooking allowed the exposed surface of the pork to brown and crisp into a dark bark.
Subsequently shredding that pork and mixing the bark in with it gave me the texture I was looking for.
At this stage, you could take this pork in any direction you like. Mix it with a vinegary, Eastern North Carolina–style barbecue sauce. Shred it and stuff it into tacos with salsa. Maybe go with a mustard-style sauce.
In this case, I stuck with the sweet-and-tangy, Kansas City–style sauce I'd already started with.
After skimming the excess fat off the surface of the liquid in the Dutch oven and adding the rest of my barbecue sauce to the pot, I folded in the pork, adding a little more vinegar to help brighten up the richness of the meat and stirring it around to try to get some of the great flavor in the browned juices around the side of the pot.
Despite giving away mountains of pulled pork to neighbors, my wife and I and the dogs were on a steady pulled pork sandwich diet for over a week, which helped me to make one last observation: From the moment you mix the shredded pork with the sauce, the pulled pork is on a steady decline. At first, it tastes as it should: moist pork, flavored with a tangy barbecue sauce. After it rests in the sauce and gets reheated the next day, however, it more closely resembles that wet, ragù-style pulled pork I'm used to seeing in slow cookers. The flavor is there, but the texture starts to suffer.
My advice? Keep the sauce and the pulled pork separate, dressing only what you'll eat in one go. (For some of you out there, that may be all of it.)
PS: Cheesesteaks are just swell, but let's take bets on how many feather-ruffled folks jump straight down to the comments section before reading through the article, shall we?
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Riad Hijab, who was chosen by Syrian opposition groups as coordinator of a negotiating body to lead future peace talks attends a news conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, December 18, 2015. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser
Hijab, who was chosen in December as coordinator of the opposition negotiating body to lead future Syria talks, said the opposition still had disagreements with the Syrian government and the United Nations over the talks’ agenda.
“Sadly, there is very clear backtracking, especially from the United States, with regard to the agenda of the negotiations,” Hijab said on Tuesday. “They want the creation of a government whereby the regime would leave us, the opposition, a few ministries.”
He said this U.S. backtracking had enabled the December U.N. resolution, which had a great deal of “holes and ambiguities”.
The U.N. Security Council resolution adopted on Dec. 18 set out a two-year road map for peace talks, but failed to address the issue of Assad’s future.
“The Russians and Americans did not cite Assad (during the negotiations) and did not talk about his departure and that is clear backtracking,” he said. “When (President Barack) Obama said he (Assad) had no legitimacy, Kerry was making concessions.”
It also called for an end to the bombing of civilians and on the parties to allow aid workers unhindered access throughout Syria, particularly in besieged and hard-to-reach areas.
He took specific aim at the U.S. administration and President Obama over his policies, including proposals to create a no-fly zone to protect Syrians and his handling of Assad’s chemical arsenal.
“Obama didn’t want (a no-fly zone).. (and) with the red lines on chemical weapons, he took out the weapons, but not those who used them. I don’t think history will forgive Obama.”
DIFFICULT CHOICE
The peace talks are scheduled to be held under U.N. auspices in Geneva on Jan. 25.
However, with the continued bombing of civilians, Syrian towns being besieged with some citizens starving to death, and differences on the agenda, the prospects of holding the talks to end the five-year-old war appear complicated.
“The choice is extremely difficult,” Hijab said when asked if the opposition would attend the talks. “If we don’t go to the negotiations they will say we don’t respect the U.N. resolutions, but our people are being bombed and starved.
“If the negotiations are not well prepared they will fail,” he said, warning that failure would mean more refugees heading to Europe and more moderates turning to extremism.
“If we go and they fail, it would be catastrophe for Syrian society and it would be the world that pays the price.”
He said there were still disagreements with the United Nations and the Syrian government over the agenda of the talks, primarily the transitional governing body.
A senior Western diplomat also said the differences among regional and international actors as well as rivalries among opposition groups was playing into Syrian government hands.
“In December 2013 (former negotiator) Lakhdar Brahimi said he was obliged to show something was being done when all sides were not ready for talks. I fear that two years later we will reach the same conclusion. I regret it, but for me I have already seen this happen,” the diplomat said.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
July 13, 2016, 7:25 PM GMT / Updated July 13, 2016, 7:25 PM GMT By Linda Carroll
Despite dire warnings about the dangers of synthetic cannabinoids, popularly known by names such as K2, Spice, Black Mamba and Kronic, they continue to grow in popularity. Just yesterday, 33 people were rushed to the hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. with symptoms that suggested an overdose on the drugs, according to an NBC4 New York report. The city’s health department told the station that there have been more than 6,000 K2-related emergency room visits and two confirmed deaths in New York City since 2015. In January, the American Association of Poison Control Centers listed 1,462 exposures.
To get a better understanding of what K2 is and why the drug is so dangerous, NBC News spoke with Marilyn A. Huestis, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and former chief of chemistry and drug metabolism at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Q: What exactly is K2?
A: These are synthetic compounds that bind to the same receptor in the body and brain as THC, the most psychoactive ingredient in [marijuana]. In fact, they can have really different structures from THC. The first synthetic cannabinoids were actually produced legitimately as tools for us to investigate the pharmacology of the endogenous cannabinoid system. This system is important for critical functions such as temperature control, hunger and reproduction. It also plays very important roles in the brain for executive function, which is what we use to take in information from the environment, evaluate it, and determine a course of action. The researchers who figured out how make these synthetics published their findings in scientific journals and illicit manufacturers learned from those articles.
Q: So, if the drugs just mimic compounds that are not only found in marijuana, but are also naturally occurring in the body, what’s the problem?
A: People are dying all the time from synthetic cannabinoids. They can be up to 100 times as potent as the THC in cannabis. Though this is a natural system in the body, marijuana or cannabinoids basically hijack the system and take over.
Q: Just how dangerous are these compounds — can they actually kill you?
We have learned that they can not only lead to death, but we have seen histories of kidney damage. They can destroy the kidneys so people may die or need to have dialysis and/or transplants. They can cause cardiovascular effects and can bring on heart attacks and strokes in the brain.
Q: What worries you most about these drugs?
A: It’s frightening. I have studied drugs my whole life and what is so frightening is that so many young people are using these compounds. This is already a known problem with cannabis. We know that if you start before age 17 and you use it frequently, not occasionally, it affects the brain in a way in which the nerves in the brain connect during brain development. So it can reduce IQ and can permanently change the brain, which isn’t fully developed until the end of one's 20s.The actor, currently playing Shakespeare’s villainous king, says Brexit has brought the play a pertinence that is not lost on audiences
It is a story of vaulting ambition and ruthless scheming which takes a nation very quickly from stability to chaos. Sound familiar?
Richard III review – Ralph Fiennes gets to grips with Shakespeare's ruthless ruler Read more
The parallels between Shakespeare’s Richard III and British politics this summer are striking and it is not being lost on audiences, the actor Ralph Fiennes said on Tuesday.
Fiennes is playing the villainous king at the Almeida theatre in north London, a production that will be filmed and broadcast to cinemas around the world on Thursday.
“Most Shakespeare plays that deal with power, whether they are the history plays or the Roman plays, you can always broadly speaking find a parallel somewhere in the world to what’s going on,” Fiennes said.
“It’s quite rare that you actually are close to a political crisis, political uncertainty. We went into this not knowing what the referendum result was going to be, so when it was as divisive as it was and we saw all these political figures making a play for leadership, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove... the audience suddenly, it changed.
“Not through our doing but just because of events happening around us. Suddenly it became full of a pertinence that perhaps it hadn’t had before.”
Many people are seeing parallels between the character of Richard III, his brilliant scheming and then apparent reluctance to take the throne, and Tory politicians. “Michael Gove is closest,” said Fiennes. “Because all those protestations about ‘I could never lead, it’s not in my DNA to lead’ – that’s classic Richard.”
Milibands as princes in the tower
The play is directed by the Almeida’s artistic director, Rupert Goold, who said he originally – in 2012 – planned to do a Richard III that riffed on the character of Johnson. “I thought Boris is this figure who is physically strange and yet sexually predatory and potent, inherently comic, outside the rules, of questionable motives, ultimately ambitious. It was going to be very crude... Milibands as princes in the tower.”
Those ideas were abandoned, particularly when Fiennes became part of the project. But Goold added: “What’s potent about the play is that people are able to read all those parallels without us banging them over the head.”
While there are parallels, Goold hopes politicians will come to the play and see dangers. “Sometimes we people in theatre think we are ‘responding’ to events,” said Goold. “I weirdly feel now, having MPs come to see the production that, without being pretentious about it, potentially the arts have the ability to offer an example as well as respond. It is our job to offer warnings and inspirations.”
Fiennes, who has been attracting strong reviews in the role, called Richard a complex, tormented figure “with different degrees of self-loathing … He is a man who has been without intimacy all his life and I feel there is lots for any actor to mine to find an interior life.”
Fiennes and Goold were speakingbefore Thursday’s broadcast, the first outing for Almeida Theatre Live. It will be in partnership with Picturehouse Entertainment, which is distributing it.Here's what you need to know...
Due to harsh laws based on Reefer Madness-like myths, the personal use of steroids for aesthetic purposes can land lifters in prison or get them fined for more money than they probably have. Ironically, steroid usage in sports, which these laws were created to curb, has not decreased. Steroids and other PEDs have been in widespread use in bodybuilding and Olympic lifting since the late 50s. Their usage in baseball, the Ben Johnson debacle, Lyle Alzado's questionable death, the Lance Armstrong farce, and the sad case of Taylor Hooton brought steroids to the forefront. Politicians and those with agendas took full advantage. Although it has many medical uses and is now commonly prescribed to aging males, the illegal use of testosterone puts you into the same criminal category as a heroin addict. And science has never backed up the hysterical claims made by anti-steroid zealots.
"I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail." - Milton Friedman
The following account is something I lived through and was a small part of. It is my view of the fascinating history of how steroids emerged as an ergogenic aid in sports and subsequently became an ominous facet of the modern age - becoming criminal while at the same time assaulting the very core of America by representing a proposed danger to our youth and, worse still, sullying the most hollowed of all things American - baseball.
This odd journey, especially the inception, involved numerous colorful characters from all over the globe who together eventually created a culture. Many of you reading this have adopted this culture without perhaps knowing the full extent of what it means to be a steroid-using bodybuilder and how it got that way.
I find it unfortunate that the younger guys embracing our culture today have to adapt to a whole different set of circumstances regarding steroids than my contemporaries did. Today you have to understand that the general public - the people you deal with, work with, live next to - believes that "steroids" cause a plague of maladies, from liver, brain and kidney cancer, to heart attacks and strokes, to psychotic episodes that end in madness, mayhem, murder and death. Given the current state of the public discourse, if your next door neighbor found out you were a juicehead, he'd probably wish you were a heroin addict instead.
Back when I adopted our culture it was perfectly acceptable to drive down to Mexico and buy all the real pharmaceutical gear I wanted, at incredibly low prices, and drive it back to LA with no problema. And no one cared if a bunch of guys down at the gym took steroids. We didn't bother anyone. We were totally under the radar and really not doing anything that wrong, certainly nothing even remotely felonious.
Well, it's not like that today. Not only are steroids listed by the feds in the same class as narcotics - with prison time for possessing, importing or selling them - the media has also driven the "Reefer Madness" hysteria to such a degree that there are families in Kansas who believe Gold's Gym is the incubator for the Zombie Apocalypse. What hatched such two-headed insanity? I'm going to skim over the last 30 years and describe what I believe are the milestones that lead to the concomitant criminalization and vilification of the very sex hormones our bodies produce.
The Perfect Steroidal Storm
The demonization of steroids in America has been perpetuated by three equally reprehensible yet powerful groups: vocal alarmists with agendas who incite hysteria based on fiction, the media who reports it, and the vote-hungry law-makers in Washington who believe they can do something about it.
In the 80-90 years that steroids have been around, they've gone from virtually innocuous, unknown medical compounds to a public menace nearly eclipsing heroin, cocaine, amphetamines and club drugs, with federal penalties for distribution and possession that can put you away for a fairly extended part of your life. How did the media wrap itself around this issue and funnel politicians, athletes and bereaved parents into promoting one of the biggest scams in US pop culture?
I've been around the block a few times, seen a bit of the world with all of the bark off, but I can't for the life of me think of another situation in which a single topic has gotten so misconstrued as that of performance enhancing drugs. With the mega amount of intellect in the demonization camp regarding PEDs, any person of reason would have to ponder... why? Unfortunately, when it comes to this group of drugs, most, if not all, common intellect goes right out of the window.
It was about that very same time 24 years ago that noted economist Milton Friedman uttered the words quoted above, and President George H. W. Bush signed house bill HR 4658 IH "Anabolic Steroids Control Act of 1990" into law, adding anabolic steroids to Schedule III of the DEA's list of controlled substances: the same legal class as amphetamines, methamphetamines, opiates, and morphine. Subsequently, in 2004, the law was amended to add prohormones and other "steroid like" compounds to the category, thus criminalizing anything that even remotely resembles testosterone or its effect. Later, the US Sentencing Commission reconvened to raise steroid penalties.
Today, in America, it is possible to be sentenced to 30 years in prison, and fined up to $5,000,000 for the possession and distribution (or importation) of testosterone, the very same hormone that human males and, to a lesser degree, human females, have been carrying around in our bodies since the early dawn of man. Let that sink in for a minute. Did I just say thirty years and 5 million bucks for testosterone? Yes, I did. We're talking about America here, not North Korea, right? How could such an insane thing happen? Well, let's work backwards.
Muscles, Narcotics, and Prison Time
First let me give you the sentencing guidelines as they stand today to give you the full magnitude of just how far we've come since the dawn of testosterone in the lab - the very same hormone that half of the American male voting public used to produce when they had testicles.
In the wake of the BALCO case, high ranking government agents were incensed over the four month slap on the wrist Victor Conte received after the government spent four years and over 50 million dollars chasing and prosecuting him. On March 27th, 2006, the US Sentencing Commission amended the sentencing guidelines for anabolic steroid cases by changing the way steroid quantities are factored to effectively increase sentences. The Commission's amendment made injectable and oral steroids comparable to other Schedule III drugs in a 1:1 ratio. That means that now, instead of the 50 pills that used to equal one unit, one "unit" of oral steroids is now one pill. One "unit" of injectable steroids goes from a 10 cc bottle down to half a cc.
Naturally, the government's 1:1 ratio is wrought with stupidity, not the least of which being the absence of any language pertaining to the potency of a particular drug. In the eyes of the law, a steroid is a steroid. That means a 5 mg Anavar tab is as equally felonious as a 50 mg tab of Anadrol, or 1 cc of equipoise being equal to a Sustanon 250 preload.
The guideline change also pays no attention to the diametric differences between steroids and other Schedule III drugs. All Schedule III drugs are narcotics that elicit an immediate, mind-altering effect when used for recreation, while steroids actually elicit a beneficial physical effect and no mind-altering effect. Unfortunately, no cogent argument can usurp the law of the land, which under title 21 U.S.C. states that possession of just one tablet of any steroid is now a federal crime punishable by up to one year in jail for a first offense, and up to two years in prison for anyone with a prior drug conviction.
And, if you think that's bad, you really don't want to get caught "distributing" steroids. The following increases apply to possession with intent to distribute, importation and internet sales.
For convictions of a "controlled substance in Schedule III, such person shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of not more than 10 years and if death or serious bodily injury results from the use of such substance shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of not more than 15 years, a fine not to exceed the greater of that authorized in accordance with the provisions of title 18, United States Code, or $500,000 if the defendant is an individual or $2,500,000 if the defendant is other than an individual, or both."
"If any person commits such a violation after a prior conviction for a felony drug offense has become final, such person shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of not more than 20 years and if death or serious bodily injury results from the use of such substance shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of not more than 30 years, a fine not to exceed the greater of twice that authorized in accordance with the provisions of title 18, United States Code, or $1,000,000 if the defendant is an individual or $5,000,000 if the defendant is other than an individual, or both."
What could this mean to you? Let's imagine you have a buddy down at the gym who picked up a few bottles of test for you and a few of his other buddies while he was down in Mexico. On his way back to the US he was detained by US Customs and searched, uncovering 30 or 40 bottles of various steroids. Certainly nothing out of the ordinary - for bodybuilders.
He was brought before a federal magistrate and charged with importation and intent to distribute a Schedule III drug. The judge looked at the unit amount of juice and figured he better not kick back to the state the prosecution of such a high-level steroid kingpin and assigned the case to federal court. And he probably won't grant bail because your buddy is considered a flight risk because he's an accused importer with alleged ties to a foreign country. Since the feds tend to feed upstream, they're not too likely to offer your buddy a deal to follow him to your house and wear a wire. But, the possibility does exist, especially if the investigation is being handled by inexperienced agents who, based on the unit amount and country involved, think they're investigating a savage steroid cartel.
If your buddy doesn't have a good lawyer he'll be convicted of steroid importation and possession with intent to distribute, and if it's his second offense, he could be looking at 20 years in prison. If someone gets hurt using the gear he imported then add another 10 years. And then there's the seven-figure fine...
While such sentences rarely ever see the top of the guidelines, the potential still exists, under the law, for a 30 year sentence for what would amount to a few bottles of testosterone you picked up for a few of your buddies along with your own. More down to reality, for a first offence: up to two years just for having it in your possession and up to five if you're importing and |
on her own. My son Luis is almost 9, and after several years of walking, cycling and skateboarding to school accompanied by an adult, he is eagerly anticipating the opportunity to walk to school on his own, for the first time, this year.
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My greatest fear has been that my kids might get hit by a car. I can teach them street smarts, but it’s unfair that they have to contend with people driving too fast, and too carelessly. A child on foot is no match for a hurried, driving commuter. Children have a right to be in the city, to experience the pleasure of starting and ending the day with a walk. It’s a sad testament to the mess we’ve made if children are not safe — or welcome — on our neighbourhood streets. But this is a mess we can fix. We can choose to slow down when we drive and look out for children, to make walking to school safer. Neighbours can work together to organize “ walking school buses,” thereby normalizing the walk to school once again. If we must drive, we can drop our children off for the last leg of the trip, or maybe only drive a few days a week, such as when there are hockey bags or instruments to lug. They will experience the benefits of walking at least part of the way to school, or at least some of the time, and we reduce the traffic congestion that accumulates in proximity to our schools. We can also choose to get out and walk ourselves, becoming the “eyes on the street” that make the places we live, real neighbourhoods. According to research by the University of Toronto, 22 per cent of all morning rush hour traffic is generated by parents driving their children to school. Sometimes it’s necessary, but we also know that often this is a choice. The more that children are encouraged to walk to school, the safer — and healthier — our city will become. Jennifer Keesmaat is chief planner and executive director for the city of TorontoIf there’s an offseason award for Most Careful Viking, backup quarterback Taylor Heinicke probably raised the trophy this offseason.
As for last offseason, well, let’s just say Taylor has gone from worst to first in the Most Careful Viking category. But, hey, at least he learned something from last offseason. Primarily don’t try to kick in the front door when you’re locked out and don’t have a key. Especially when said door has a glass window that can break and sever ligaments in a man’s left ankle, causing pain, surgery and an embarrassing phone call to Vikings head athletic trainer Eric Sugarman.
“When it first happened, I thought, ‘I was always kind of told myself I wasn’t going to be that guy,’” said Heinicke, an undrafted rookie a year ago. “And, sure enough, I’m that guy who does something stupid and gets hurt. It was hard. It’s tough being injured, let alone having it be a stupid injury that I did to myself.
“I beat myself up about it for a week or so, but then got positive and tried to get something out of it. Last year, I came out here with the boot and still got some mental reps out of it. I’m just happy to be out here this year.”
With Teddy Bridgewater on the physically unable to perform list to start training camp, Heinicke is battling Case Keenum for the top backup spot behind Sam Bradford. Heinicke has yet to play in a regular-season NFL game, while Keenum has four seasons and 24 starts on his resume.
Keenum and Heinicke reported to camp with the rookies on Sunday. They’ll drift into the background a bit today as the Vikings’ full roster goes through a morning walkthrough and an afternoon practice without pads.
“Every rep counts, so it was good to be down here early,” Heinicke said. “You can learn something about what the defense is doing on every rep. It makes you better. It’s been good work.”
Heinicke said he studies the guys up the depth chart to see how they got there.
“Same is one of the most accurate quarterbacks ever,” Heinicke said. “It’s kind of unbelievable how he does it. I learn a lot from him. I also was fortunate to learn from Shaun Hill, who was in the league for 15 years. And Teddy has played well. And Case has been a starter, too. So I’ve got four starters that I can pick their brains.”
Of course, he also learned from himself. Maybe call a locksmith the next time, eh?
“I called Sug and it was kind of like, ‘Sug, you’re not going to believe this,’” Heinicke said. “I flew up here the next day and had surgery. And it was successful, obviously.”
So were you more careful this summer?
“Absolutely,” Heinicke said. “It was an accident, but at the same time, you have to remember that you got a job to do and can’t do things to let the team down.
“This year, when my friends did things that could cause you to get hurt, they didn’t even ask me. The most dangerous thing I probably did was go to the beach.”
But he did use sunscreen.Google has more than 40 core products, and hundreds of products depending on how you count them. Even with over 30,000 employees, that’s a lot to support. In the name of refocusing, today the company announced that Picnik, Sky Map, Urchin, Needlebase, Google Message Continuity, and the Social Graph API are all headed for the deadpool, open source, or absorption into more central divisions.
Today’s culling follows this summer’s shut downs of Google Labs and most of the products internally developed by former acquisition Slide. While Google has long encouraged experimentation, its found itself overextended. The company needs all hands on deck fighting the wars for social, mobile, and the cloud.
Google typically reassigns employees from scrapped projects rather than fire them. The teams from Picnik and Sky Map could increase the concentration of product leaders working on Google+. With any luck they can give Google’s social network a more human feel.
Now, the fate of the forsaken:
Picnik – The browser-based photo editor Picnik will be shut down on April 19th and its team likely integrated in to Google+ and Picasa. Premium customers will receive refunds. Google+ already offer Creative Kit, which includes basic editing, filters, and decorations. Picnik uses almost an identical interface, but includes advanced editing, frames, and seasonal effects that could soon show up in Google’s other photo products soon.
Google Sky Map – The augmented reality star gazing Android app will become open source. Google appears to be moving away from standalone apps, given the recent deaths of Disco, Photovine, and Pool Party. This will make it easier for the iOS developers of Starmap and Star Walk to develop Android versions.
Social Graph API – Google’s graph of public interconnections between people on services like Twitter and Flickr will be deprecated on April 20th. The API allowed developers to pull in information about their users to improve their products, but Google says “The API isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like”. Google will instead be working on catching up to Facebook by developing its own social graph with Google+.
Google Message Continuity – No more resources will be wasted on a cloud backup system for on-premise enterprise email. Google will dedicate itself to support for its fully cloud-based enterprise system Apps, which has proven much more popular.
Urchin and Needlebase – The acquired client-based predecessor to Google analytics and its data management platform are being formally shut down. The Urchin team is now work on browser-based analytics, while Google is still considering whether to integrate or simply eliminate Needlebase.
A firm handshake and hearty pat on the back to all those working on these projects. Remember, you don’t have to toil away on more small features. Consider this your opportunity to go Do Great Things.WATCH ABOVE: While accepting the award that recognizes the best goaltender in the NHL, an emotional Carey Price encouraged First Nations youth to become leaders in their communities.
Montreal Canadiens goaltender Carey Price was a near-unanimous choice as the Vezina Trophy winner on Wednesday – but it was his speech upon receiving the award that will be remembered.
“I would like to take a moment to encourage First Nations youth,” he said.
Price was born in Vancouver, but when he was three his mother, a former chief of the Ulkatcho First Nation, decided to move their family back to her hometown of Anahim Lake in central B.C.
The predominately aboriginal town has just 1,500 people and is 850 kilometres north of Vancouver. To play hockey, Price’s dad would drive – and later fly – his son to Williams Lake, over 300 kilometres away.
“A lot of people would say it’s very improbable that I would make it to this point in my life. I made it here because I wasn’t discouraged. I worked hard to get here, took advantage of every opportunity I had,” said Price.
“I would really like to encourage First Nations youth to be leaders in their communities, be proud of your heritage, and don’t be discouraged from the improbable.”
READ MORE: Habs goalie Carey Price chokes up after emotional meeting with B.C. boy
Price, who also won the Hart Trophy as Most Valuable Player and Ted Lindsay Award as most outstanding player, picked up 27 of 30 first-place votes from the NHL’s general managers.
Pekka Rinne of the Nashville Predators finished second and Devan Dubnyk of the Minnesota Wild third.
Rinne, Dubnyk and the New York Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist each picked up a first-place vote.
Price was by far the biggest reason the Canadiens finished first in the Atlantic Division.
The 27-year-old went 44-16-6 with a league-best 1.96 goals-against average and.933 save percentage.
WATCH: Later in the evening, Price won the Hart Trophy for most valuable player
– With files from The Canadian PressIn the most recent sign that Louisiana lawmakers aren't keen on fully embracing the teaching of evolution in state schools, members of the House Education Committee voted Wednesday to kill an effort to remove an obsolete and unconstitutional pro-creationism law from the books.
Louisiana's Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act has existed in state statutes since 1981, despite being ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1987 as a violation of the First Amendment. The law forbade public schools from teaching evolution unless "creation science" was in the curriculum as well. Members of the the state Senate Committee on Education voted earlier this month to advance a measure to do away with it, but their colleagues in the state House apparently didn't agree with the move.
State House members voted Wednesday to remove the amendment to Senate Bill 205 that would have officially dispatched with the Balanced Treatment Act.
Science educators were displeased with the move.
“There’s no good reason to keep an unconstitutional law on the books,” Josh Rosenau, programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education, told Raw Story. “But since a law which has been struck down is dead letter, the choice to remove it is symbolic, too.”
It's been a discouraging month for the science curriculum in Louisiana. Earlier in May, the state Senate Committee on Education rejected a move to repeal the Science Education Act, which essentially allows the teaching of creationism in science class.The shift from pensions to 401(k) plans is making retirement inequality much worse — and education is what separates the haves from the have-nots, a new study has found.
College graduates have always been able to get better jobs. What's new in recent decades is that traditional pensions have all but vanished, replaced by 401(k)-style plans.
In 1980, 38 percent of private sector workers had a pension and 19 percent a 401(k). By last year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the numbers had more or less reversed —just 15 percent had a pension and 43 percent a 401(k).
That shift is creating "double disadvantages for the less educated," wrote University of Kansas sociology professor ChangHwan Kim and Social Security Administration researcher Christopher Tamborini in a paper presented Tuesday at the American Sociological Association's annual conference.
The authors analyzed surveys linked to W-2 tax data to figure out how much Americans with varying levels of education were saving in their retirement accounts.
Among workers who hold similar jobs with the same pay and who both contribute to 401(k) plans, a college graduate tends to save 26 percent more than a worker with just a high school diploma, the study concluded.
Workers with college degrees aren't only far more likely to hold jobs that offer retirement plans. When offered the plans, they're also far more likely to sign up and to contribute enough to retire comfortably.
The median private sector worker without a college degree is contributing nothing to a retirement plan, while the median college graduate pitches in more than $2,000 a year, the study found.
One reason is that workers who are less educated are likelier to hold lower-paying jobs that don't offer retirement plans. According to the study, 83 percent of workers with a bachelor's degree have access to some kind of retirement plan — compared with 62 percent of high school graduates and 43 percent of high school dropouts.
Even when they are offered 401(k)s, the less educated workers find it much more difficult to take full advantage of them.
One advantage of a traditional pension is that it's automatic: A set amount is contributed for each worker — an amount that's supposed to guarantee a good income in retirement — and investments are managed by professionals.
The typical 401(k) is anything but automatic. Workers must decide whether to participate, how much to contribute, and which investments to choose.
While more than 80 percent of college graduates sign up for the 401(k) offered to them, only 69 percent of high school graduates do the same. Less than 61 percent of those without a high school diploma fill out the 401(k) paperwork.
College graduates are also saving more, pitching in 7.3 percent of their salaries if they're participating in a retirement plan — still less than the 10 percent or 15 percent experts usually recommend, but more than the 5.1 percent that workers with high school degrees contribute.
That's not necessarily surprising: By earning more, the college-educated can afford to save more. Tamborini and Kim found that if workers earn an extra 1 percent in salary, they tend to contribute an extra 1.28 percent to their retirement plans.
But the researchers also wanted to know if factors other than income are influencing how workers save. When they controlled for these factors — income, occupation, industry, company size, and years on the job — they found college graduates were still saving 26 percent more than similar high school graduates.
To explain this gap, the researchers looked at surveys that asked about savings habits and financial knowledge. The less educated workers tended to be less financially sophisticated, with less familiarity with investing and how to save for the future.
"The advantage of college education goes beyond the monetary return during the work-life," Tamborini and Kim write. "College-educated workers are taking steps to better prepare financially for retirement, even when the earnings levels are taken into account."
As workers spend their entire careers in this system, the authors warn, the inequalities will widen between the well-educated and everyone else. The only fallback for many workers will be Social Security, which now covers 40 percent to 45 percent of the average retiree's career earnings (and has its own fiscal challenges).
What might be done to narrow the gap?
Financial education could help, although studies have cast doubt on the effectiveness of financial literacy programs.
Some employers have experimented with making the 401(k) more automatic — signing up all workers and setting default contribution rates and investments, while letting workers adjust them or decline to participate. (Few workers do.)
But the number of new companies introducing these automatic features is no longer rising. Vast swaths of the workforce aren't covered by any retirement plan at all.
In response, lawmakers in a growing number of states are passing legislation to force employers without 401(k)s to sign up workers for state plans, with the goal of ensuring they can save for retirement without filling out confusing paperwork or picking their own investments.
The next state to approve such a plan could be the largest: California lawmakers could vote as early as this week to create what's known as the Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program.Myanmar authorities have denied any civilian deaths but confirmed a clash took place after a rights group reported Several people including women and a child have been killed in an attack on Rohingya Muslims in western Myanmar.
The authorities on Friday confirmed that clashes had taken place, in which a police officer was presumed to have been killed, but said there had been no information about the killings of women and at least on child, as reported by Thailand-based advocacy group Arakan Project.
Details of the unrest on Friday were unclear, but Rohingya activists said at least two women and a child were stabbed to death in an attack on a village near the border with Bangladesh earlier this week, with possibly several dozen casualties.
The United States and Britain called on the government to investigate and to hold those responsible accountable.
"We have had no information about killings," Deputy Information Minister Ye Htut told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers in Myanmar's ancient city of Bagan.
His comments were echoed by other government officials.
Chris Lewa, director of the Thailand-based advocacy group Arakan Project, which has been documenting abuses against Rohingya for more than a decade, said details about the violence in Du Char Yar Tan village were still emerging, with many conflicting reports.
The death toll could be anywhere from 10 to 60, said Lewa, whose sources range from a village administrator to witnesses.
One described the slashed-up bodies of three acquaintances two women and a 14-year-old boy found in their homes.
Some of the victims also were hit by bullets, the group was told.
Grappling with violence
Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, which runs a nearby clinic, said it was concerned that residents who are in hiding may not be getting the medical care they need.
"MSF confirms that on Wednesday it saw two wounded people suffering from injuries inflicted as a result of violence, one from a gunshot wound and the other exhibiting injuries consistent with a beating," said the group's Myanmar head, Peter-Paul de Groote.
Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation of 60 million people, has been grappling with sectarian violence for nearly two years.
Myanmar's government considers the estimated 800,000 Rohingya in the country to be foreigners while many citizens see them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and view them with hostility.
More than 240 people have been killed and another 250,000 forced to flee their homes, most of them Muslims from the western state of Rakhine.The English city of Chester is known for its unique medieval architecture, but recently it seems to be home to another medieval relic in the form of a creepy plague doctor that has been spotted roaming the streets at night.
As reported in the Chester Chronicle, social media has been buzzing with sightings of a mysterious cloaked figure wearing the iconic beaked mask and brimmed hat of a medieval plague doctor. No information other than blurry pics posted to social media has arisen about the figure, leading most people in Chester simply scratching their heads.
Historically, plague doctors were traveling physicians who went from place to place, treating the epidemics that would infect entire towns and cities. They came to be associated with the eerie beak mask that many of them wore to keep themselves from catching the very sicknesses they were treating. The masks would be filled with aromatic items that, according to the belief of the time, kept the doctors from inhaling infectious vapors.
Today the image of the plague doctor simply looks like something out of a horror movie. While the spooky figure roaming the streets of Chester and haunting the historic, stacked “Rows” has yet to be identified, their silent, scary enigma schtick is reminiscent of similar stunts where people dressed as sinister clowns. The mini-trend of creepy clown lurkers popped up in cities from California to Northampton around 2015, with a number of different sightings of silent clowns aimlessly wandering the streets.
A sort of ambient prank by way of a horror movie, the Chester plague doctor seems to be a new twist on this fad. Either that, or there is really the ghost of a damn plague doctor roaming the streets.In a random shuffle, you want to take the elements of a list and reorder them randomly. In a “fair” random shuffle, all possible permutations must be equally likely. It is surprisingly hard to come up with a fair algorithm. Thankfully, there is a fast and easy-to-implement algorithm: the Fisher-Yates shuffle. It is a rather intuitive algorithm and there are YouTube videos about it… so, I will just point you at a piece of C code:
for ( i = size ; i > 1 ; i - - ) { int p = random_bounded ( i ) ; // number in [0,i) swap ( array + i - 1, array + p ) ; // swap the values at i-1 and p }
What can we expect to limit the speed of this algorithm? Let me assume that we do not use fancy SIMD instructions or parallelization.
If the input array is not in the cache, and we cannot fetch it in time or it is just too large, then cache faults will dominate the running time. So let us assume that the array is in the CPU’s cache.
If we have N input words, we go through the loop N – 1 times. At each iteration of the loop, you need to read two values and write two other values. A recent x64 processor can only store one value to memory per cycle, so we cannot do better than two cycles per input word. In the very next iteration, you may need to read one of the recently written values. So, two cycles per input word is probably optimistic.
What else could be the problem? The generation of the random numbers could hurt us. Let us assume that we are given a random number generation routine that we cannot change. For this blog post, I will stick with PCG.
What remains? Notice how the Fisher-Yates shuffle requires numbers in a range. The typical techniques to generate random numbers in a range involve frequent divisions.
For example, you might want to look at how the Go language handles it:
func ( r * Rand ) Int31n ( n int32 ) int32 { max : = int32 ( ( 1 < < 31 ) - 1 - ( 1 < < 31 ) % uint32 ( n ) ) v : = r. Int31 ( ) for v > max { v = r. Int31 ( ) } return v % n }
This function always involves two divisions. Java, the PCG library… all involve at least one division per function call, often many more than one. Sadly, divisions are many times more expensive than any other operation, even on recent processors.
In an earlier blog post, I showed how to (mostly) get around divisions.
In general, no map from all 32-bit integers to a range can be perfectly fair. In practice, the effect is quite small unless your range is close to the maximal value of an integer. Thus you can simply use the following function:
uint32_t random_bounded ( uint32_t range ) { uint64_t random32bit = random32 ( ) ; //32-bit random number multiresult = random32bit * range ; return multiresult > > 32 ; }
Maybe you feel bad about introducing a slight bias. You probably should not since the random-number generation itself is unlikely to be perfect.
Still, we can correct the bias. Recall that some of the values are mapped ceil(4294967296/range) times whereas others are mapped floor(4294967296/range) times. By sometimes redrawing a new random value, we can avoid entirely the bias (this technique is called rejection sampling):
uint32_t random_bounded ( uint32_t range ) { uint64_t random32bit = random32 ( ) ; //32-bit random number multiresult = random32bit * range ; leftover = ( uint32_t ) multiresult ; if ( leftover < range ) { threshold = - range % range ; while ( leftover < threshold ) { random32bit = random32 ( ) ; multiresult = random32bit * range ; leftover = ( uint32_t ) multiresult ; } } return multiresult > > 32 ; }
This looks quite a bit worse, but the “if” clause containing divisions is very rarely taken. Your processor is likely to mostly ignore it, so the overhead of this new function is smaller than it appears.
So how do we fare? I have implemented these functions in C, using them to compute a random shuffle. Before each shuffle, I ensure that the array is in the cache. I report the number of clock cycle used per input words, on a recent Intel processor (Skylake). As usual, my code is available.
Random shuffle timings, varying the range function range function cycles per input word PCG library 18.0 Go-like 20.1 Java-like 12.1 no division, no bias 7 no division (with slight bias) 6
Avoiding divisions makes the random shuffle runs twice as fast.
Could we go faster? Yes. If we use a cheaper/faster random number generator. However, keep in mind that without SIMD instructions or multi-core processing, we cannot realistically hope to reach the lower bound of 2 cycles per input words. That is, I claim that no function can be 3 times faster than the fastest function we considered.
You can save a little bit (half a cycle per input word) if you replace the 32-bit PCG calls by 64-bit calls, processing input words in pairs. Using SIMD instructions, we could go even faster, but I do not have access to a SIMD-accelerated PCG implementation… We could, of course, revisit the problem with different random-number generators.
Further reading: Daniel Lemire, Fast Random Integer Generation in an Interval, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (to appear)Qassem Suleimani celebrating with Hade Amre, chief of Shia militias, during the liberation of Jawlala in Iraq from the Islamic State. Iran As the US provides air cover for Iranian-backed militias fighting ISIS (aka the Islamic State, ISIL, and/or Daesh) in Iraq, the longest continuously serving American official in the country has strong opinions about who is in control.
Ali Khedery, who served as a special assistant to five US ambassadors and a senior adviser to three heads of US Central Command between 2003 and 2009, told The New York Times: "For the Iranians, really, the gloves are off."
He highlighted the role of Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Qods Force, the foreign arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps. Qods is directing sectarian militias in both Iraq and Syria. At the same time, Suleimani is nurturing the guerilla proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis rebel group in Yemen— in other words, he is controlling powerful Shia proxies all across the Middle East.
"Suleimani is the leader of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen," Khedery said. "Iraq is not sovereign. It is led by Suleimani, and his boss, [Iranian Supreme Leader] Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."
For the Americans, any campaign against ISIS means US planes and combat advisors working in parallel with Iranian planes and Shia militias who have US blood on their hands.
"In Iraq, a degree of coordination between the American military and Iran's is imperative but also awkward," The Times notes, "making it appear that the United States is working in tandem with its adversary."
Reuters
The Obama administration, while denying any coordination, does not seem to mind Iran's empowerment as the two countries negotiate a potential nuclear deal that Obama hopes will rebalance the region for the better.
The consequences of the Iran-backed agenda are becoming increasingly clear, however, as the regime of Bashar Assad continues to rain barrel bombs on civilians, Al Qaeda's Syria affiliate routs US-backed rebels, Tehran sends more fighters to bolster Assad, Iraqi Shia militias torch Sunni villages in Iraq, and ISIS runs a self-declared caliphate across both Iraq and Syria.
In August, Khedery told Reza Akhlaghi of the Foreign Policy Association that these circumstances will only breed more sectarian violence.
"So what will happen is that the spiral of sectarian warfare will increase more and more, radicalizing the Sunni populations more and more and eventually spilling over into countries across the region almost all of which have mixed Shia-Sunni populations," the former adviser said.
A look at the Sunni-Shia divide across the Middle East. Morgan Stanley
Khedery has been very critical of the Obama administration's handling of Iraq.
The thrust of his critique involves Obama's decision to back former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, an Iran-backed Shia, in December 201o while also betraying promises made to the Sunni tribal leaders who had previously fought with American troops against ISIS predecessor Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
America's continued support of Maliki made it so that "Iraq's path toward civil war was really inevitable," Khedery said in August, explaining that Maliki steered Baghdad "toward a very pro-Iranian and sectarian agenda, which inevitably disillusioned and disenfranchised Sunni Arabs for a second time."
Meanwhile, the US turned away from Iraq after Washington went along with the plan created by Suleimani, effectively handing off the country to Iran as a way to remove US troops and still stabilize the country.
"Maliki's misrule in Iraq and Assad's misrule in Syria, and their cooperation along with the Iranians and Hezbollah to wage a campaign of genocide, led to a region-wide sectarian war while the United States under President Obama stood back and watched and did nothing as the violence spiraled further and further out of control," Khedery argued in August.My Dear Pakistan
By Sidra_Akhlaq
(Requires editing) After spending 11 years of her life in London... Aiman, a born Pakistani, becomes a fashion and a party freak, as well as a spoiled brat of her family! She loves the way she is and totally loves her country...England.!!! Unaware that her parents have already decided to go back to Pakistan, to attend a wedding which enrages her to the full!! Will Aiman be able to adjust in Pakistan? Will she get over her misunderstandings?Will she hate...her desi relatives and the culture of Pakistan? Or will she relish the beautiful gems of her homeland and the most adventurous and memorable moments of her lyf?? START READING IF U ARE AN ADVENTURE /NATURE and ofcourse Pakistan LOVER...U won't regret!At the 2011 NAMM Show, Fairlight offered a preview of their upcoming iOS version of the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument.
The iOS Fairlight CMI app offers most of the features of the original Fairlights, but not the 25K price tag. It can also do some things that were never possible on the original Fairlight CMIs, because of the additional computing power afforded by iOS devices.
Above, Fairlight CEO Peter Vogel demonstrates the Fairlight CMI app running on an iPad.
We asked Vogel about CoreMIDI support and he said that the initial release will not have it, but that it may be coming later.
Here’s a video of the Fairlight CMI synth app in action:
Vogel said that the Fairlight CMI sampling synth app has been submitted to the app store and will sell for about $50.A witness' description of a driver police believe was returning to the scene of a fatal hit-and-run last summer more closely resembles a daughter of suspect Amy Senser than Senser herself, investigators noted in a series of newly unsealed search warrants.
The batch of warrants dated Sept. 1 and unsealed Tuesday seek evidence including cellphone records and bank and credit card records from the Senser family in the wake of the Aug. 23 crash that killed Anousone Phanthavong, 38, who was filling his car with gas on an Interstate 94 exit ramp at Riverside Avenue. Amy Senser, who said she was the driver of the Mercedes sport-utility vehicle that killed Phanthavong, is scheduled to stand trial April 23 for two counts of felony criminal vehicular homicide.
According to the affidavits, a witness reported seeing a Mercedes SUV with front-end damage return to the area about 45 minutes after the hit-and-run. The affidavit noted that hit-and-run suspects often return to the scene "to determine the seriousness of the crash they were involved in." The witness described the driver as a woman "approximately 30 years old with light colored hair."
The affidavit went on to note that Senser, who is 45, has brown hair, and that her daughter, who was 26 at the time of the crash, had light-colored hair and an address on her expired driver's license "in close proximity to the scene."
Amended charges filed by the Hennepin County attorney's office last month say an account by the same witness described the driver as having "long, sandy-blond hair." Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman has repeatedly said prosecutors are confident Amy Senser was driving the SUV at the time of the accident. Senser is the wife of former Minnesota Vikings star Joe Senser.
The affidavit also says a witness reported that Senser may have had dinner with her brother that night, also near the crash scene.
Both Senser's defense attorney and prosecutors gave little merit to the discrepancies noted in the unsealed warrants.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson declined to comment on specific information in the affidavits, but said that any information vital to his case would have been presented in a motion filed last week to dismiss the charges. Nelson contends that Senser, who got lost on her way to pick up her younger daughters from a concert at the Xcel Energy Center, did not know that she had hit Phanthavong.
"In any search warrant or criminal investigation, there may be tips or pieces of information reported to police that they have an obligation to investigate. Sometimes they turn out to be true, sometimes they turn out to be completely irrelevant and lead to nothing," Nelson said. "If I had felt that at this point there was any contest to who was driving, that would have been contained within the motion."
Hennepin County attorney's office spokesman Chuck Laszewski also declined to address specific claims in the affidavit.
"As we've been saying all along, we are confident we can prove the facts of the charges," he said.
Abby Simons • 612-673-4921OpEd News has published an open letter from attorney Dana Jill Simpson (8/20/09) to “Mr. Murdoch and all the editors at the Wall Street Journal,” in which she expresses her wish to “thank you from the very bottom of my heart for running Karl Rove’s delusional article, ‘Closing In on Rove,’ on August 20, 2009″:
The reason I want to thank you is that Mr. Rove has clearly lied about me in this article. You have captured and printed it without even checking to see if it is so or not. The lie he has told is and I quote, “Judiciary Democrats didn’t get testimony from either Mr. Siegelman or Dana Jill Simpson, the eccentric Alabama lawyer, who drew attention by publicly supporting the allegations.” In case you are unaware, I testified on September 14, 2007, before the House Judiciary Committee lawyers that were selected to question me. I most definitely gave sworn testimony to the House Judiciary Democrats. In fact, I gave over 143 pages of testimony before the Judiciary Democratic and Republican lawyers. It is unfortunate that your paper does not give a rip about the truth or you would have checked out the bold-faced lie that Karl Rove put in his article before you printed it.
The OpEd News mini-bio of Simpson notes that she “has appeared on 60 Minutes and Dan Abrams MSNBC,” and that “stories were written in Time magazine, Harper’s magazine, and the New York Times about her being a witness in the Don Siegelman case on corruption at the Justice Department.”
Still, in closing, Simpson tells the Journal she’s actually “happy today to call Mr. Rove a liar and you have provided the cold hard proof. You, Mr. Murdoch, gave me that opportunity. I am thankful that you run a paper that apparently does not check for the truth.”A key architect of President Obama’s 2008 campaign — national finance chair Penny Pritzker — has resurfaced on Air Force One today and is listed as a headliner on invites to two pricey Obama fundraisers at Hunts Point tonight.
Pritzker is a billionaire Chicago businesswoman, co-founder of a political power group called “Ladies who lunch,” a director of Hyatt Hotels and a member of the family that controls the hotel chain.
The latest presidential foray, for events at the home of Costco co-founder Jim Sinegal and his wife Janet, is expected to clear $1.75 million for the Obama campaign coffers. Obama has already raised $6 million in the state.
Pritzker has taken a low profile of late, quite likely because she has become a target in a long-running dispute between Hyatt and United Here, the nation’s largest union of hotel and hospitality workers. A cousin, Thomas Pritzker, is chairman of the hotel chain.
Unite Here has announced a worldwide boycott of Hyatt hotels, backed by a bevy of groups that support Obama, such as the AFL-CIO, the National Organization for Women, and the National Gay/Lesbian Task Force. The NFL Players Assn. has also lined up behind the boycott.
The union charges that Hyatt has replaced longtime employees with minimum wage temporary workers, particularly at three non-union hotels in Boston. It alleges that retained workers have been put under stress.
In response, Hyatt has claimed it gives employees an “industry-leading wage and benefit package.”
The nasty, prolonged dispute has come at a time when Obama’s campaign is striving to keep up with the furious fundraising pace being set by Republican nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney.
Romney has courted the very rich in the past month. He has huddled with big donors in Park City, Utah; broken bread, with Donald Trump at a pricey New York fundraiser; squeezed in three events during a Sunday at the Hamptons; and visited ex-Vice President Dick Cheney’s digs in Wyoming for a $50,000-per-person event.
Romney has taken in as much as $10 million, according to the Los Angeles Times, during a two-day California swing this week.
Obama and Romney are seeing little of the folks during many of their campaign swings.
The President has held no rally or public event — aside from a brief plane tour at Boeing’s Everett plant — during four trips here since September. The only people able to ask Obama questions have been guests at $35,800-a-couple dinners. The event Tuesday night |
2017
My BFF gay, Republican friend is afraid to say he's Republican. Just FYI. — Boo Musket (@Patriot_Musket) July 19, 2017
Sounds a lot like party before country, eh Alyssa?
I'm a conservative lesbian. Ive been told I'm not welcomed me in three Chicago clubs because politics came up and I didn't hide. — Sb51Gorl (@Sb51Antinomy) July 19, 2017
I was having dinner with my liberal friend. I was explaining how OCare negatively affected my business and she called me racist? — whatAboutism (@Muelann) July 19, 2017
If you want to know how leftists treat women that don't toe your party line, look at @gogreen18's TL. — Ron Barker (@wrongnowshutup2) July 19, 2017
Ask @DLoesch about the death threats to her kids by leftists. Happens all the time. — Pam Brewer (@brewer_pam) July 19, 2017
I've had to look up names of some of the things I've been called. People are awful. Apparently I'm not a real woman or hispanic either.? — Michelle Lancaster (@CyFitFreedom) July 19, 2017
Let's not forget that a "Gays for Trump" group was blocked from participating in a gay pride parade in Charlotte. @Chadwick_Moore — clayjohanson (@clayjohanson) July 19, 2017
What Alyssa doesn’t seem to understand is that the Left thinks they OWN these groups of people, and when a woman, minority or gay breaks from the herd they’re a traitor and should be destroyed.
Truth.
Related:
Blue checks, SJWs and snowflakes, OH MY! Sean Spicer parody’s timeline is a MESS of Lefty STUPID
GREAT question! James Woods BAFFLED by something in McCain hating prof’s bioIn March of 2013, two months before Microsoft officially unveiled the Xbox One, they accidentally mailed one of their prototype units to a random customer. For years that story has remained quiet—until today.
Over at Business Insider, my good friend Ben Gilbert tells the story of the time Microsoft lost track of top-secret hardware. Back in 2013, 25-year-old Jia Li bought a new laptop online, then somehow received a package with a zebra-striped prototype for the Xbox One, which was code-named Durango. Li contacted the website Engadget, where Gilbert worked at the time. He eventually found himself talking to Microsoft’s people. “In March 2013, a Microsoft representative arrived at Mr. Li’s house and retrieved the prototype Xbox One,” Gilbert writes. “Mr. Li was given a new Xbox 360 and Kinect for his trouble. He also finally got the laptop he ordered.”
It’s a wild story—just how does Microsoft accidentally mail a top-secret prototype to a random customer?—and it’s almost equally wild that this has remained secret for so long. I asked Gilbert why Engadget didn’t report on this back in 2013 when they heard from Li, and he explained that they’d negotiated with Microsoft for an exclusive story on the Xbox One.
“After receiving the box in March 2013, Jia Li wanted to either sell it or return it to Microsoft (to get the laptop he ordered!),” Gilbert told me via gchat. “We weren’t going to buy it. So we facilitated returning the box to Microsoft in exchange for exclusive, early access to the Xbox One. The condition of that exclusive: not writing about the story of Microsoft losing the Xbox One. It’s been three years. I’m no longer at Engadget. The people who worked with me at Engadget on the deal are no longer at Engadget. It felt like the right time.”
Now we wait for Microsoft to accidentally send Kotaku a Scorpio.Tommy Hottovy’s position within the Chicago Cubs organization isn’t high profile. It is, however, important to the team’s success. The 34-year-old former pitcher is the club’s Coordinator of Advance Scouting, with a focus on run prevention.
A graduate of Wichita State University, Hottovy played 10 professional seasons after being selected in the fourth round of the 2004 draft by Boston. His big league playing career consisted of 17 relief appearances for the Red Sox and the Kansas City Royals in 2011-2102. Hottovy was hired into his current position last December.
——
Hottovy on his current position: “I was in spring training with the Cubs in 2014, playing, and blew out my shoulder. I had a feeling I was done, but I spent the summer rehabbing, anyway. Along the way, I took the online Sabermetrics 101 course from Boston University. I was a finance major with an economics minor at Wichita State, so I have a numbers background. I wanted to refresh my statistics knowledge, and the sabermetrics course, which is obviously about baseball, helped with that.
“I started talking to teams. I told Theo (Epstein) and (Director of Video and Advance Scouting) Kyle Evans what I was interested in, and once we signed Joe Maddon, we discussed how the whole dynamic may work. They were in and we kind of ran with it. Nate Halm, who’s been here for a few years, took on the hitting side of our process. I think we’ve formed a really good rapport with the coaching staff and players.
“We’re working with our R&D guys and have to be able to speak their language – we have to be able to speak sabermetrics – and he have to be able to translate that to the coaches. We also have to be able to answer questions from the players. It’s a role that combines three facets: front office, research and development, and the players and coaches. We have to speak all three languages, and build the trust of the people who are taking it to the field every night.”
On his role and responsibilities: “I do most everything in house, and I’m with the team all the time – home and on the road. Occasionally I will work from the clubhouse, but I’m usually scouting from the stands or from up in the booth, to get more of an aerial view. I’m double-checking to make sure we’re in the places we need to be, and that we’re attacking hitters according to the game plan we came up with.
“The view from high home gives me a very good perspective of where guys are positioned on the field not only during the pitch but also in between pitches which you usually can’t see on a TV feed. When we are on the road, outfield dimensions of opposing parks come into play and may throw off how an outfielder looks to the coaching staff in the dugout. With a higher view I am able to reassure them that we are in the right position or discuss any changes that we want to make for the rest of the series.
“We’ve got our traditional advance scouts out there watching the teams we’re going to play. I do more advancing with data and video work while helping the staff with in-game strategy and coordinating with our advance scouts on what they are seeing.”
On breaking down hitters: “When I was pitching, I had to break down hitters quite a bit. I didn’t have the ‘stuff’ that most of these guys have. A lot of what I do is data accumulating. Baseball is a data game. It’s stats, stats, stats; there are numbers for everything. How do we want go about breaking down a hitter? How do we want to attack his weaknesses, and at the same time use our pitcher’s strengths? I go through video and data and formulate a game plan based on my perspective, then I sit with Chris Bosio and Mike Borzello. We discuss everything.
“When you have a bunch of eyes breaking down hitters, and you get everybody on the same page, you feel a lot more confident in what you’re trying to do. We each have our own approach, and when we come to the same conclusion, we have a good feeling about how we want to attack guys.
“Sequencing is huge. What gets lost sometimes is that you either get caught up in what a pitcher’s strength are, or in what a hitter’s weakness may be. As a result, you lose sight of how to set a pitch up. You can’t just go to that pitch all the time. These guys are big league hitters, so they make adjustments. You have to be able to do both – pitch to weaknesses and your strengths – and set up pitches. The guys who do that best are the ones you’ll see get a lot of soft contact and can keep their pitch counts down. The best guys have a good combination of all of it.”
On game planning and sequencing: “If we come up with a game plan and then don’t execute a pitch, or if a guy gets a hit on pitch that we think was good, I can go back and run through the data. I might say, ‘Yeah, that was a good option for us in that count and situation,’ or maybe it’s, ‘No, we might want to stay away from that based on more information.’
“Sometimes you just have to tip your cap to the hitter. Sometimes you make a good pitch, and it’s the pitch you want to throw, and the guy hits it. That’s baseball. What I’m able to do a little bit more is dig into some stuff, to double check that we’re on the right page with what we’re trying to do in the game.
“In the playoffs, we had a hitter that we felt a certain pitch was good, and we threw it back to back in one at-bat. You have to be careful going back to back with any big-league hitter and make sure they’re quality pitches. The first one was an 0-0 chase pitch and the second one just caught a little too much of the zone and he got a hit on it.
“In a situation like that, if we can go back and look at it, and still believe it was the right pitch, we move on. In that case, it was a good piece of hitting on a decent pitch that was not executed perfectly but still quality. You don’t want to second-guess every pitch that goes for a hit. I’m not always diving in and saying, ‘Why did he get a hit on this pitch?’ But there are times we want to do a specific thing with a hitter and we just want to confirm what we saw earlier in our research.
“Take a hitter like Alcides Escobar, who we could have faced in the World Series. He was a super aggressive guy all year, but I think that got accentuated more once he was leading off, instead of hitting eighth or ninth. He’s a guy you need to open with quality. You don’t want to say, ‘I don’t want to throw him a strike, because I know he’s swinging.’ But inducing weak contact is good. If you can throw a quality pitch, there’s a good possibility for soft contact and an out. If I know a guy is swinging 0-0, I’m not going to be afraid to throw a strike. I just need to make sure it’s a quality pitch, whether it’s in or out of the strike zone. You can use a hitter’s aggressiveness against him if you make quality pitches.”
On defensive positioning and defending the running game: “In terms of the running game, we try to point out certain situations that a team might like to be aggressive or get guys moving. You do a lot of research into tendencies of not only the players but also the coaches, as to anything they may like to do, and I feel we have done a very good job with it this year.
“The Mets had success against us in the NLCS, even though they aren’t a big running team. They were aggressive and took advantage of opportunities that presented themselves. If you know a team wants to steal second in a one-one count, and you don’t hold the runner, there’s not a whole lot you can do. We knew how we wanted to approach them – we know the counts and the outs they liked to run in – but sometimes the game gets sped up and you don’t put the right focus in those situations. We simply didn’t execute. There’s no hiding the fact that they did a good job against us.
“We have a lot of data for positioning and shifting. Our data analysts have a lot of information that we use to compile our reports. We take into consideration everything they give us and balance that with how we want to pitch guys. We need that happy medium. We try to come up with a positioning scheme that includes everything. Without going too deep into how we do it, I basically sit with down with Gary Jones, Brandon Hyde and Dave Martinez and discuss all the data. It’s good to have the one-on-one conversations to get everyone on the same page and then trust their instincts and knowledge to implement it during the game.”Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
An ex-Ukip MEP has been made the vice president of a group involving France's far-right National Front.
Janice Atkinson, who was expelled from Ukip over false expenses claims, has joined a group led by National Front leader Marine Le Pen in the European Parliament.
The Parliament has 751 members and because they come from 28 countries, like-minded parties have to join together to secure votes and influence.
Ms Le Pen - whose party came second in this year's French local elections with 25% of the vote - revealed today she had enough support to form a new Eurosceptic group.
It means that anti-EU and anti-immigration MEPs will have more influence in the assembly.
(Image: Getty)
The new group will be named Europe of Nations and Freedoms, and will "represent a political strike force that will go far beyond our previous situation" she told reporters in Brussels.
They have been joined by Geert Wilders and Marcel De Graaff of the Netherlands and Harald Vilimsky of Austria.
Ms Atkinson was expelled from UKIP over an alleged expenses scandal and "bringing the party into disrepute" after allegations that a member of her staff tried to organise a false receipt for a meal.
She denies any wrongdoing.
She said today: "A stable and committed new group in the European parliament is launched, bringing new weight to bear against the ideology of the European Union.
"The bitter fruits of the European project are an everyday reality for citizens in Britain and for the whole continent of Europe.
"The mercilessness of the European agenda is felt by millions across Europe impoverished by the cruelty of the Euro. Mass immigration into Britain and Europe continues to accelerate at the behest of the same EU ideology."
(Image: Reuters)
By forming a group, it means that the National Front will get more speaking time during Parliament sessions.
The party will also be in a better position to get its members on parliamentary committees.
It will be the second Eurosceptic group in the European Parliament. The other is Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy, which includes Ukip and is chaired by Nigel Farage.
David Cameron has promised an in/out referendum on EU membership will happen before the end of 2017 after including it on his election manifesto.
But he has been forced to back down over holding the referendum next May after backbench Tories complained it would be too soon to press their case.Researchers say a small number of young law enforcement officers who participated in the World Trade Center rescue and cleanup operation have developed an immune system cancer.
The numbers are tiny, and experts don't know whether there is any link between the illnesses and toxins released during the disaster.
But doctors who coordinated the study, published Monday in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, said people who worked at the site should continue to have their health monitored.
"What we are trying to get out there is: Be alert," said Dr. Jacqueline M. Moline, director of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
The researchers looked at 28,252 emergency responders who spent time amid ground zero dust and found eight cases of multiple myeloma.
Those findings were no surprise. Multiple myeloma is the second most common hematological cancer in the U.S. after non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Normally, researchers would expect to find about seven cases in a group as large as the one examined in the study.
However, four of the people who fell ill were under age 45, and multiple myeloma is thought to be more rare among people of that age. Under normal circumstances, researchers would have expected to find only one case of the disease in that age group.
Those four young multiple myeloma patients included one officer who was caught in the dust cloud on 9/11 and then spent months working long hours at the site. Another spent 111 days at the Staten Island landfill where the rubble was sifted. Two others had less exposure, working 12 and 14 days each in the pit and rubble pile.
The study said it is possible the monitoring program was simply more effective at finding the illness among people who wouldn't ordinarily be subjected to intense medical tracking.
Nevertheless, Moline said, "You shouldn't be seeing so many cases of myeloma in younger folks." The median age of diagnosis for that cancer in the general public is 71.
Several groups are studying New Yorkers exposed to toxic dust when the skyscrapers collapsed.
To date, no study, including the one published Monday, has established a link between that dust and cancer, said Lorna Thorpe, a deputy commissioner and epidemiologist at New York City's health department.
The timing of the four cases examined by the team at Mount Sinai also raised questions about whether they are related to their work at ground zero, she said.
Most research on multiple myeloma indicates that it usually takes 10 to 20 years for someone to develop that cancer after an environmental exposure to a carcinogen.
In these cases, the cancers were diagnosed in as little as three to four years after the attacks, suggesting that something else caused the disease.Smokey Bear is in the running to be inducted into the Advertising Week’s Walk of Fame, and we need your vote to get him there! Need convincing? Here are 5 reasons you should vote for Smokey.
1. He’s a talking bear who gives out hugs
The poignancy of his message, “Only you can prevent wildfires,” recognized by 96 percent of Americans, his lovable nature, his strong bear hugs and that deep Sam Elliott voice all add up to a bear we’d like to hang out with.
2. He’s an icon
Smokey just turned 70 making him the longest running public service ad icon in history. Since 1944 his old school message has had totally new school results with a decrease in average annual acreage burned by wildfire from 22 million to 6 million. Remember, respect your elders.
3. His hat is in a museum
Maybe you’re thinking of the hat Pharrell wore to the Grammys which did just make it into a museum but we are actually talking about the original Smokey Bear campaign hat that made it into a museum first.
4. He’s got his own zip code
Smokey received so much fan mail he needed his own zip code. (It’s 20252 – go ahead and write Smokey. He’ll write back.)
5. He needs only you
He needs your vote. But most of all he needs you to step in and make a difference in wildfire prevention. Douse out that unattended campfire. Make sure those BBQ coals are cold. Don’t drag chains on your car. Even though Smokey would like to be in the Advertising Walk of Fame he’d much rather see all of you in his Wildfire Prevention Hall of Fame.The title is sadly accurate. Lil Wayne is a full-blown cottage industry now, a one-man corporation that provides succor and service to careers ranging from Nicki Minaj and Drake’s to Gudda Gudda and Lil Chuckee’s. With this many shareholders come obligations, so despite the increasingly obvious and pressing personal needs of Dwayne Carter the man, Lil Wayne Inc. steamrolls forward, impervious to setbacks. When Carter landed in the ICU for six frightening days this month, after seizures that many assumed were related to his ongoing, years-documented problems with codeine addiction, his handlers smoothed things over with the panicked dissembling of hangers-on propping up an ailing dictator. After his release, Wayne gave a thumbs up to TMZ cameras to allay fears, announcing he was “better than good.” He did look good, but he also, tellingly, shrugged and offered this: “My bum-ass album is coming out... March 26? It's 26?...You’re gonna get that shit or you won’t. If not, it’s whatever.”
This spirit of indifference hangs heavy on I Am Not A Human Being II. In his review of 2011’s Tha Carter IV, Ryan Dombal observed that "after an epic run, it seems as though Wayne has finally run out of inventive ways to say he's on drugs, or great at sex, or extremely interested in making money,” and two years later, the prognosis has only grown more grim: No song on IIis meaningfully distinguishable from the next. Everything pumps out in an undifferentiated slurry of interchangeable dick jokes, drug references, and lame puns. Tha Carter IV moved nearly a million copies in a single week, and this staggering success may have sealed Wayne’s artistic fate.
All of the quirks and peculiarities that once made Wayne great have hardened, six or seven years later, into nearly unbearable tics. All of his lyrics have devolved into barely rearranged little puzzles of themselves, with countless versions of his "She ride/ Take this dick like ___” formulation, none of them funny or creative: On “IANAHB”, a woman takes it like “advice,” while others ride it like both "go-karts" and "the Kentucky Derby" on "Curtains”. His tweaking of gangsta-rap’s language has never been more perfunctory. He sounds terminally bored, and even the better rap songs on here-- the hits, like the Mike Will Made It-produced, Future-and-Drake-featuring “Bitches Love Me” or the rubbery, Bay Area-influenced clap of “Rich As Fuck”-- work around him, not with him.
The only moments where Wayne sounds marginally interested in his own music come when he veers furthest away from rap. On “Romance”, he sings in his croaky, limber way about his profane version of love while Cool & Dre’s synthesizers smear like bionic fireflies: “She kissed my ankle when I twist my ankle/ She even did anal when she don't do anal.” On the big, clomping pop rock of "Back To You”, his voice is a shpritz of Lil Wayne on the surface of a towering club-pop production, the kind that mashes together the respective sugar highs of Euro club-pop, hair-metal, and synth pop into a glutinous ball (If you’re wondering whose sampled voice that is crooning at the bottom of all that mess, by the way, it’s Jamie Lidell’s.) This might not be the most promising future to ponder for Wayne’s music, but they’re the moments he sounds happiest: as a cog in a much bigger machine than himself, set free from being the all-consuming center for the first time.Are you ready for the definitive, ultimate uncut interview with Nathan Johnson, brought to you in pristine High-Definition 16:9 with fully restored dialogue?!
As a Dragon Ball fan you are most likely familiar with Bruce Faulconer (Faulconer Productions) and Mark Menza, who composed for Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT, respectively.
But you may not be as familiar with Nathan Johnson, the composer responsible for Dragon Ball Z: The Ultimate Uncut Editions [aff] in 2005, which are episodes 1 to 67, and Dragon Ball Z movies 2, 3, 10, 12 and 13.
Why is that? Who is Nathan Johnson and how did he end up working on these DBZ projects?
Nathan has never been interviewed before and was gracious enough to be a guest on The Dao of Dragon Ball.
Now for the first time ever you will get to hear Nathan’s story of how he helped create the #1 action anime series of all time.
For the Love of Music
Derek: Welcome, Nathan, to The Dao of Dragon Ball.
Nathan: Flattered.
Derek: Nathan, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me, I know you’re very busy. I really want to find out the inside story of composing for Dragon Ball Z.
Your professional background has little to do with entertainment. Before you got the job composing on Dragon Ball Z, you were in business litigation law. You graduated from the University of Arizona in 1990 with a degree in Physics and from the University of Texas School of Law in 1993.
Can you tell me about that? Why would a practicing business lawyer suddenly switch over to creating Japanese entertainment?
Nathan: I played music throughout my childhood, usually not as well as I should have. Always wrote music and enjoyed it, but it was always bad and I knew it was always bad. I didn’t really consider music as something a person could have as a profession. I was pretty ignorant in that respect. But I couldn’t shake the bug.
My road to writing music for Dragon Ball Z started in law school. I went to the University of Texas in Austin and the law school was right next to the music building, which had several floors of Steinways and practice rooms.
I wound up spending more time at the piano during law school then I ever had in my life. I focused on piano performance studies so that one day if I wanted to write music my hands would be able to do that.
I then got out of law school and became a lawyer and continued to play and write. I shared it with a professor at a local university and he said, “Gosh, this stuff is pretty good.” I thought it was still terrible. I found a world renown symphonic and opera composer in town who heard my music and confirmed it was quite bad, but said that I might have something to offer if I really worked hard at it.
So for the next several years while I was a lawyer I essentially went to school without going to school, and really learned to how to write music with Robert Xavier Rodriguez. He was a classical symphonic composer, and I was doodling around with the blues and things like that.
Derek: What did you do next?
Nathan: I eventually quit my job as a lawyer and lived off my wife’s income for a while because I wanted to make a real go at this. I figured other people who really tried writing music spent all their time doing it, not half their time while trying to be a lawyer. I wrote classical music for a while and at some point decided I want to make a living.
I studied opera composing and got the chance to study with a famous opera composer, Carlisle Floyd, who decided I wasn’t very good at writing for opera, but that writing for theater or stage was something I could do.
I launched into the world of film and television composition. It was a long, difficult road starting from nowhere. I did a little film, made almost no money, and worked very hard at putting together demos where I ripped music off of and re-scored TV commercials, trying to find jobs. A local shop here saw my stuff and said, “Hey, this is pretty good!” and the pay [for a gig with them] was good, but my career was still going nowhere.
I put myself on a timer and said if I haven’t broken into the entertainment industry by a certain point, I give up. I started taking some contract law jobs to make it financially, and one day I gave up on music.
A Twist of Fate
I was trying to open up my own law office because if my contract law gigs weren’t paying enough, then I needed to have my own office.
A place near my house was for rent. I called the number on the sign out front to rent an office, and the guy on the phone said, “What will you use it for?” I said “To practice law, but to be honest I might throw an electric keyboard in there and make some musical noise, but nothing to disturb the other tenants.” He said, “What kind of music?”
Well it turned out the person on the phone and the owner of the building was Robert Cocanaugher.
Derek: Get out of here!
[Note that the Cocanaugher’s are co-founders and executives of FUNimation.]
Nathan: Yeah, haha, he owned that building. Robert said, “Do you have a website with any music on it?” I said, “Yeah, but I’m not a composer anymore.” So I gave him a link to this awful website that I had built in a word processor. Haha.
Apparently Robert ended up going to the website and listening. Then he walked into Barry Watson’s office and said, “I think I’ve found that composer you’re looking for.”
Derek: Wow.
Nathan: He called me back about an hour later and said “We’d like to meet with you tomorrow.” I went and they offered me the job. That was a Friday, he said, “You’ve got to tell me by Monday.”
Derek: That’s amazing.
Nathan: He gave me a bunch of DVD’s of Dragon Ball GT because that’s what was sitting around in his office. I looked at it, and, well, I had a classical world music background. These rock tunes, I knew how to do that, but wasn’t sure if I could. I went in and asked Barry, “What do you have in mind?” He said, “We’re going to release this Dragon Ball Z Uncut and I want to take it to a new place. I want it to have an orchestral element of sound, something a little more cinematic.” I said, “Okay, I’ll take the job.”
Derek: So there was no…
Nathan:
I had never seen Dragon Ball, never heard of Dragon Ball Z in my life. Never seen an episode of an anime in my life. I had never scored anything commercial in my life. But Barry and Robert apparently liked my music.
After the interview they thought for some reason I could handle it. They also figured they could fire me as I was their first in-house composer, with all the benefits and drawbacks of that kind of arrangement.
Derek: Haha, I’d love to hear about those. But that’s extremely fascinating, Nathan. I am astounded that there was no audition process and that you were at a place in life where you were like, “I’m done with this and don’t even want to compose music anymore.” And you just happened to go to the building that was owned by the guy who is connected to FUNimation and Dragon Ball Z, and I guess he liked your style and wanted to give you the job.
Nathan: It was one of the most bizarre collisions of circumstance I’ve ever experienced. The building wasn’t even in Fort Worth or Northwood Hills where there offices were. It was out in Dallas. But it was about a mile from my house.
Derek: That’s unreal and very fascinating.
Starting the Job
Derek: So you didn’t know anything about Dragon Ball Z and you had never seen it. What did they tell you when you told them that you wanted to do the job? What was the next step?
Nathan: They wanted to know what I thought I would need. I had to be honest with them that I did not have the resources that Bruce Faulconer or Mark Menza had in terms of production.
I was able to make sounds that people liked using a lower level, but I needed to take it up a notch and would need their help. They set me up in a little studio in this building. We went shopping for speakers and software and put them on a great big desk and got to work.
Interestingly enough, Dragon Ball Z Uncut wasn’t yet up on the block at that time. They were rescheduling things. I originally thought we would start on that, but they said “Actually no we’re going to work on this other show called Case Closed.” We worked on Case Closed for a couple episodes and then they decided they didn’t want original music. I don’t think they didn’t like my score, because we did this really cool theme music for it.
There was another show that we did a couple episodes for that also they decided not to use music on. By the time we came up with musical concepts and did a pilot of each of those shows, DBZ was up and ready. Barry said “Never mind those. Let’s get to work on this, this is my real deal anyway.” Then he explained to me that these are the episodes that weren’t done before and they wanted to do something new with it. Barry and I and another guy from FUNimation, Matt Cheney, worked with me on these.
We sat down to work for a quite number of hours for a week or two, to try to come up with the sound for the show before we really started scoring. When we thought we generally had an idea Barry turned us loose and got to work.
Matt and I worked well together on certain things and not on others. Ultimately FUNimation found things that they thought he would very well that didn’t involve Dragon Ball Z. So now it was on me to do everything, which artistically we rarely like to simply… it’s hard to collaborate straight out of the box. It kind of turned me free because Matt and I had very different styles. It turned me free to follow my style, but frankly I was a little green, so my style wasn’t all that firm either. Down the road I collaborated with some people who were completely different from me and it was great because I had found my voice.
One of the most fun things I did on a Dragon Ball Z project was to collaborate with Dave Moran, the heavy death metal guy, on one of the movies. He was death metal and I was electro orchestral, and it was a blast. That score for Fusion Reborn had a really strong fan response.
Mixing Things Up
Derek: So you started with a partner and that didn’t work out, or FUNimation just decided, “Let’s split these guys up?”
Nathan: Yeah, Matt and I didn’t work well together on that show. But they did bring me a guy who I had a great time working with later. A mixing engineer named Neal Malley, in Dallas. Neal’s job was to go through what I did on a particular score for a few episodes and mix it. But his other job was to look for stuff that worked particularly well for a chase sequence, fight sequence, or humor or suspense. He would harvest it and create a categorization. Remember, this was wall to wall music, it was very hard to fill every second, but that’s how they wanted to do it.
Derek: Right. Barry Watson did the same with the rest of Z and GT as well. He told Mark Menza “We need constant sound.”
Nathan: Constant sound. We composers always want to take a breath [though]. Oh, and by the way, [they’d say] “Turn the volume up.” Haha. “Make this louder and constant.” But that was the job.
In the commercial business you don’t have 8 weeks to sit around thinking about your episode. In fact some weeks you had to knock out 2 episodes a week, which is a PHENOMENAL weight. I was really struggling in the early episodes to find my voice and get a handle on the show. Some of it didn’t work so well.
There are passages in Dragon Ball Z where I hope people aren’t listening to the music very well because it’s not very good. You do your best and get it out.
There are other passages that work really, really well, and Neal would go and harvest those. He would find another episode where the music could be placed intelligently. Either it would stay there as is or he’d say, “Hey Nathan, I like the thing you did here but to work in this episode it needs to be modified.” I would take the sequence from my software and line it up there and figure out how to rework it into that episode.
That may sound like a cop out but it’s not really a cop out. The highest level scoring in films you’ll find they use the same material over and over again because it lends continuity. It was a necessity.
After about 20 episodes I hit a stride. We had enough material to fill up chunks of entire episodes, and that would allow me to concentrate on the areas that didn’t work with the library of stock that Neil had built. Or the scene particularly appealed to me and I could get excited about it and write something new and good. I think some of my favorite moments of the episodes were from those times.
Derek: So it was very much a collaborative effort between you the composer and Neal the mixing engineer, is that right?
Nathan: Absolutely.
Derek: A lot of people don’t know that. They think the composer makes the music and puts it in the show and what you hear is all his responsibility.
Nathan: No, and not only did Neal help me fill space, sometimes what comes out of the composers box, however brilliant it might be conceptually, it doesn’t sound that good. A good mixing engineer can take that and turn it into what it really is, what it really wants to be. He adds in panning and that sort of thing. Neal would have fun panning things around the room and adding all kinds of whiplash. We had a good time and did some good work together.
Understanding Dragon Ball
Derek: Was the original contract that you got hired for only for the episodes 1 to 67, or was the possibility out there that you would continue onto the remaining episodes? If you were given the chance, would you have continued with the rest of DBZ?
Nathan: I think the contract said absolutely nothing about how many episodes I would score. But I think the intention was to only do those 67. I also think somebody was kicking around the possibility of rescoring the other episodes also, but I think that was only at the back of somebody’s mind, and it was never presented to me.
Derek: So when you got the job you didn’t know anything about Dragon Ball Z. How was it described to you? What was your perception of the series? 67 episodes is a lot of work to do when you don’t know anything about what it is you’re supposed to work on.
Nathan: Dragon Ball Z was completely foreign to me, and not foreign in a national or geographic sense. I didn’t understand it. It took me a while to start to relate to.
Sort of on a level of Star Trek, there were these silly references in DBZ to pop |
Jaipur, Deloitte Touche Tohmastsu of Japan with Bidhannagar in West Bengal, Data World of South Africa with remote Namchi in Sikkim," Naidu said naming the companies.
This speaks for the global interest in our Smart City Mission, he said. Naidu said that it is for the first time in our country, the cities are being selected based on competition under an urban development mission. He said the Prime Minister wants these capable cities to act as light houses for others to follow in due course for ensuring good quality of urban life.
Naidu said that his ministry has given time till 15 December this year to urban local bodies to submit their city level Smart City Plans which will then be evaluated in the second stage of City Challenge Competition for picking up the first batch of 20 cities based on rankings for financing during this financial year. We would like to announce these 20 cities to be selected based only on merit in January and release funds, he added.by Thomas DiLorenzo, LewRockwell.com
It only took the Obama administration a couple of weeks to prove that the national leadership of the Democratic Party is guided by totalitarian-minded socialists who seek to create an omnipotent government. The U.S. government is now controlled by people who have been dreaming of living out their utopian socialist fantasies ever since the fantasies were brought to their attention in college decades ago by their Mao/Castro/Che Guevara poster-hanging, capitalism-hating, communistic professors.
The administration’s main agenda is an explosion of federal spending and debt so large and outrageous that America will soon exceed Sweden in the proportion of the economy that is controlled by government – if it hasn’t already. That’s just for starters. They also want to sharply increase taxes on the most productive and hardest-working people in society; increase the capital gains tax to deter private investment; expand the welfare state; spend trillions on pure, pork barrel spending in a massive vote-buying spree; set all corporate compensation levels by governmental fiat; tax away the wealth of unpopular business people (only starting with those AIG executives); regulate and control all risk taking by private entrepreneurs; enforce a civilian draft to create a modern-day, American version of the Hitler Youth (See Rahm Emanuel’s creepy, Stalinist-sounding book entitled The Plan); nationalize entire industries, starting with the capital markets (they understand that there can be no capitalism without private capital markets); and double, triple, and quadruple the number of “regulators” who already regulate all aspects of human life in America.
At the recent G-20 meeting Obama even signed off on the creation of an international regulatory “authority” that could set compensation policies in American corporations. On top of this, there is a never-ending drumbeat of anti-capitalist propaganda coming from the administration and its worshipful mouthpieces in the “mainstream media.”
What can be done? How can this rush toward totalitarian socialism be stopped? Will the Republicans find another old, angry geezer to appeal to the angry white male vote? How about another mumbling and incompetent Bush family heir? Will there be another Reagan who will talk libertarian while governing more like a European Social Democrat? Will they trot out another old “war hero” who will plunge us into war with Iran, North Korea, China, or whomever, to divert our attention away from the economic mess government has placed us in? These are the likely alternatives if we cling to the fantasy that “throwing the bums out” at election time leads to something other than another group of slightly different bums.
The fact is that the American people have been servants or slaves to their government for generations. It wasn’t always that way. When the Adams administration enforced the Sedition Act that made criticism of the federal government illegal, Jefferson and Madison responded with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves of 1798 that clearly stated that the people did not intend to allow the enforcement of this unconstitutional law within those two states. Section One of Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolve stated, for example, that “the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government...” Other states supported Jefferson and Madison in their defense of free speech.
When President Thomas Jefferson imposed a national trade embargo and consummated the Louisiana Purchase, New Englanders, led by George Washington’s Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering, loudly threatened to secede. They decided against it (for practical economic and political reasons) at the Hartford Secession Convention of 1814, but their actions sent a clear message to national politicians.
Outraged by the embargo, the Massachusetts legislature used the language of Jefferson’s own Kentucky Resolve to proclaim that the embargo “was not legally binding on the citizens of the state” while denouncing the federal law as “unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional” and reminding President Jefferson that “this state maintains its sovereignty and independence...” All the New England states, plus Delaware, did the exact same thing and nullified the embargo.
When Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, a precursor to the Fed, created 72 percent inflation in the first five years of its existence and corrupted politics with its politicized spending policies, citizens all over the country assisted President Andrew Jackson in eventually destroying the institution. The heroic Ohio legislature slapped a $50,000/year tax on each branch of the BUS, attempting to drive it out of business. “The states have an equal right to interpret the Constitution for themselves,” announced the Ohio legislature, and it decided that the BUS was not constitutional. Kentucky, Tennessee, Connecticut, South Carolina, New York, and New Hampshire followed suit.
When the War of 1812 broke out the New England states effectively seceded from the union by refusing to participate. A proclamation by the Connecticut legislature was representative of the opinions of New Englanders: “[I]t must not be forgotten that the state of Connecticut is a FREE SOVEREIGN and INDEPENDENT State; that the United States are a confederated and not a consolidated Republic,” and that it was refusing to support the war.
When the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” created an average tariff rate of 45%, applying mostly to Northern manufactured goods, South Carolinians clearly understood that this was a pure act of political plunder at their expense. They convened a political convention to utilize the Jeffersonian idea of nullification and refused to collect the tariff. They even got the South Carolina legislature to allocate $160,000 for the purchase of firearms with which to fend off any would-be federal tax collectors. The result was that they forced the federal government to lower the tariff rate.
During the 1850s the “middle states” of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey developed a very active secession movement that sought to either join a Southern confederacy, form a middle-states confederacy, or support Southern secession. (See The Secession Movement in the Middle States by William C. Wright). Their overriding desire was to separate themselves from the imperious New England Yankees.
When the Southern states seceded in 1860–61, Abraham Lincoln pledged his everlasting support for Southern slavery in his first inaugural address, an address in which he endorsed a constitutional amendment (the “Corwin Amendment”) that would have forbidden the federal government from ever interfering with slavery. In the same speech he promised a military invasion and “bloodshed” in any Southern state that ceased paying his beloved tariff on imports which, at the time, accounted for more than 90% of federal tax revenue. The average tariff rate had just been doubled by the Republican-controlled Congress.
The Southern states, along with most people in the North, still held the Jeffersonian belief that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and when that consent is withdrawn the citizens have a duty to abolish the existing government and form a new one. Jefferson never wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the citizens have a duty to abolish the government and form a new one “as long as the other states all agree that you may do so.” If the right of secession depends on someone else’s permission, then one does not have a right of secession. That was a fantasy invented by Lincoln, which he used to “justify” waging total war on his own country, murdering some 350,000 American citizens, including some 50,000 civilians. From that time on, government in America was no longer “for the people, by the people, of the people,” as Chief Justice John Marshal once said in a phrase that was later plagiarized by Lincoln. From that time on the purpose of government has been for those who run it to plunder those who do not. Nullification and secession were no longer tools with which the citizens could control their own government.
The final nails in the coffin of government by consent were pounded in during the year 1913 with the advent of the federal income tax, the creation of the Fed, and the Seventeenth Amendment calling for the direct election of U.S. senators. The income tax and the Fed gave the federal government the ability to do whatever it wanted to do regardless of the Constitution – even to wage “undeclared” wars. These vast “riches” were used to make millions of Americans totally subservient to the state lest they lose their tiny government subsidies, and to bribe or threaten state governments to do whatever our masters in Washington, D.C. decree, lest they lose their cherished federal highway grants. The ability of the citizens to oppose the federal Leviathan by organizing political communities at the state and local levels was finally destroyed and the centralized, monopolistic bureaucracy that rules America and much of the rest of the world today was created.
The direct election of U.S. senators, as opposed to the original system of having them appointed by state legislature, ended popular control of the federal government. Today, candidates for the senate go to New York, California, China, or wherever the big money is that can be raised as “campaign contributions” to finance their political careers. The interests of such “contributors” are not necessarily congruent with those of the folks back home.
If American citizens are to resist the rush to Obammunism they must first give up on the fantasy that the Republican Party is anything but another cabal of crooks, conmen and clowns, just like the Democratic Party. The only realistic route to freedom, including a restoration of genuine free enterprise, is through the devolution of power away from Washington, D.C. via peaceful secession and nullification, the original American ideals.
Thomas Jefferson understood that democracy could never work in a country as large as the U.S., let alone one with more than 300 million people. In a January 29, 1804 letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly he wrote: “Whether we remain one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children & descendants as those of the eastern.” On the topic of secession, Jefferson continued: “[D]id I now foresee a separation at some future day, yet I should feel the duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family which should fall within my power.” When the New England Federalists were threatening secession, Jefferson wrote to his friend John C. Breckinridge on August 12, 1803 that if New England seceded and created a second confederacy, “God bless them both if it be for their good, but separate them, if it is better.”
Unlike Lincoln, Jefferson did not believe in threatening “bloodshed” in the case of a “separation” or secession. He understood that such behavior would be a moral abomination and an unimaginable act of barbarianism. A civilized society does not wage total war on “our children,” as Jefferson described the future citizens of a new state formed by an act of secession. Yet it is Lincoln, not Jefferson, who is portrayed by American court historians as a kindly, benevolent, and charitable angel.
The Constitution long ago ceased placing any meaningful limits on governmental power. This social contract between the American people and their government was destroyed long ago by Hamiltonian nationalists. Americans now live under a series of dictators (called “presidents”) who all believe that they are essentially dictators of the world, capable of ordering the bombing of any place on earth without anyone’s approval. (Within weeks, Obama dipped his hands in blood by ordering a few bombs to be dropped in Pakistan).
As of this writing, several dozen states have reportedly issued resolutions in support of the Jeffersonian principle of nullification. These will all be completely meaningless unless the American public has the fortitude to actually enforce the resolutions and begin ignoring any and all federal government actions that they interpret as unconstitutional and illegitimate. In addition, citizens of every state should learn about the Second Vermont Republic which, for several years now, has been laying the groundwork for Vermont to secede and once again become an free and independent republic, just as all the states thought of themselves as being prior to 1865.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.
Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.Unfortunately, he adds, this approach to education goes against the grain of how young people learn. Research has confirmed what most parents of young children can already see for themselves — that children are born to learn, rather than to be taught, as Abbott puts it. Driven by an inborn desire to make sense of the world and find purpose in life, they naturally observe, deconstruct, piece together and create their own knowledge. They learn best when this intrinsic motivation is harnessed in what he calls “highly challenging but low-threat environments.”
Re-Imagining Society First, Education Second
The bottom line, Abbott notes, is that the current system excels at preparing children to be dependent “customers,” so if we hope to instead create a world of responsible, community-minded adults, we need to overhaul the educational paradigm. That means replacing the metaphor — the concept of the world and its inhabitants as machine-like entities — that has shaped the education system, as well as many other aspects of our culture. Because humans are not machines, a reliance on this metaphor has created a large disconnect between people’s actual lives and their inherited expectations and predispositions, which lies at the root of many inter-related modern challenges, says Abbott.
His recommendation: Start by re-examining our collective values and envision a society where individuals once again matter. Clues to a more suitable paradigm can be found in the metaphors that characterize the dynamic, networked Information Age. These share some key characteristics with the pre-industrial past, when people learned in the community, from a variety of adults with whom they built relationships. Learning continued over the course of a lifetime filled with meaningful work (in contrast to today’s high unemployment rates and low workplace engagement levels), and success was judged by whether a person carried out his or her fair share of responsibilities within the community.
All of these elements have a direct bearing on education. “Such a vision is as essential to motivate whole generations of young people to delight in the development of their intellectual powers, as it is to create an adult society that is able — and willing — to devote quite enormous amounts of its energy to the slow, fascinating, if sometimes frustrating but totally essential, task of inducting all its young people into adulthood,” Abbott has written on the Initiative’s web site.
“Children learn most from what they see going on around them,” he explains. “We become who we are based on things around us that we admire or not. Children don’t just turn their brains on when they go to school.”
Therefore a young child is dealt “a shattering blow to its sense of order and purpose when a parent it loves and admires is made redundant …. Too much of that, and the web of life is shattered, and life becomes a crap game where the lasting lesson is take all you can, and put nothing back.”
Creating “Collaborative Learning Communities”
“It is essential to view learning as a total community responsibility,” he says, and to expect no short cuts. Children need to be integrated, fully contributing members of the broader community, so they can feel useful and valued. (It is not just the children who need this, he adds; healthy communities also need children.)
On a practical level, the most powerful lever for change, Abbott says, is people coming together to “rethink the role of community in the learning process,” agreeing how to divide up responsibilities among professional teachers and other community members, and then launching small pilot projects that are true to their new vision. These efforts will build on each other, he says, and large-scale change will follow.
He cautions against simply copying a specific model that worked elsewhere — each community must figure out what’s best, given its unique circumstances. But he is convinced of one thing: The formal school system needs to be “turned upside down and inside out.” It should be based on the biological system of weaning — i.e., gradually reducing children’s dependence on teachers. Teacher-student ratios should be high in the early years, then decrease dramatically in adolescence, when “the whole community has to become a place of learning,” with mentorships, apprenticeships and other hands-on learning experiences complementing highly self-directed classroom learning.
Teachers as Guides
In general, schools should move away from “an overemphasis on teaching,” Abbott says, and instead view teachers as imaginative, knowledgeable guides. “Any kid can read a textbook — they don’t need a teacher standing over them telling them to do so,” he points out. “They need teachers to inspire them to think about things in a much bigger way than they’ve done before.”
He cites an example from his time as a substitute teacher, when he found himself assigned to teach history to a class of 15-year-olds one afternoon. Casting about for inspiration, he expressed an interest in a student’s book about prisoners of war. When the boy asked him why wars get started, Abbott used the question as a launching pad for a discussion on the topic. He urged the students to consider not only what they’d been taught in school, but also what they’d gleaned from relatives. “It went so well,” he recalls, “that no one heard the bell ring.”
Twenty years later, while waiting for a train during the time of the Falklands War, he was approached by a porter who said he recognized him as the teacher of that class. It had opened his eyes, the man added, to how wars can serve politicians’ careers, and he had referenced it in a discussion with friends the previous evening. “At the end of my history lesson, something had stuck,” Abbott notes, “so that 20 years later, he remembered how between us we had constructed an explanation for the Second World War.”
Simply following a lesson plan wouldn’t have had the same result. “I don’t think teachers should be over prepared for any particular lesson,” he says, “because if they are, they lack flexibility to adapt to where the children are in their understanding.”Do you find yourself often running a yank or undo immediately after killing lines? Would you like to copy a line instead of killing it? Do you wish that there was a prefix argument to C-k ( kill-line ) that made it copy instead of cut (to use the non-Emacs terminology). Here is your solution—a command that acts just like kill-line except that it is a copy.
( defun copy-line ( & optional arg ) "Do a kill-line but copy rather than kill. This function directly calls kill-line, so see documentation of kill-line for how to use it including prefix argument and relevant variables. This function works by temporarily making the buffer read-only, so I suggest setting kill-read-only-ok to t." ( interactive "P" ) ( toggle-read-only 1 ) ( kill-line arg ) ( toggle-read-only 0 ) ) ( setq-default kill-read-only-ok t ) ( global-set-key " \C -c \C -k" 'copy-line )
See also http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CopyingWholeLines.A year ago today the Mohammed cartoon contest held by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller in Garland, Texas was interrupted by gunfire when two mujahideen attempted to storm the venue. An alert and well-trained security force quickly resolved the emergency, and no one was harmed except the jihadis, both of whom were killed.
It seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? There’s been a lot more jihad in the past year to occupy our attention: Paris, San Bernardino, Cologne, Brussels… And then there’s the European “refugee” crisis, which is a slow-motion form of jihad known as the hijra.
The pace of the Islamic push against the infidel West seems to be accelerating. What will the situation look like a year from now in Garland, or Berlin, or Stockholm, or Brussels?
To commemorate the first anniversary of the Garland jihad attack, Bosch Fawstin, the winner of last year’s Motoon contest, has drawn a new cartoon featuring Geert Wilders. The PVV sent out this notice along with the cartoon:
Today, exactly one year ago in Garland, Texas, an attack took place on the freedom of speech. Geert Wilders spoke at a meeting where Mohammed cartoons were shown. To commemorate this event the winner of the Garland cartoon contest Bosch Fawstin has created a new cartoon.
After last year’s events in Garland, a death fatwa against Bosch Fawstin was announced, and the cartoonist had to go into hiding. He’s been keeping a lower profile since then, but he hasn’t quit drawing his Counterjihad cartoons.Mad Max is back! The first trailer for the fourth installment of the series, Mad Max: Fury Road, was shown during the recent Comic-Con event, and it looks like the new movie has all the right ingredients to be another hit. Only this time Max is played by Tom Hardy rather than Mel Gibson, but original director George Miller is there as well as original writer Nick Lathouris and comic book great Brendan McCarthy.
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Filming for the new movie took place primarily in Namibia, although it’s—presumably—set in Australia, where the previous three movies were. Other actors starring in the movie include Charlize Theron, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz and Australian model Megan Gale.
For those unfamiliar with the legend of Mad Max, it’s about a retired police officer by the name of Max Rockatansky. He lives in a dystopic world where the remaining humans battle for resources, mainly fuel. In Mad Max: Fury Road, the battle is for water.
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Just as popular as the human characters were the vehicles, including Max’s choice of ride, a coupe version of the 1973 Ford Falcon sold in Australia that was converted into the ‘Interceptor’ for its role in the movie.
The current release date for Mad Max: Fury Road is May 15, 2015.
via Motor Authority
More From High Gear Media:The Chicago Timmy Awards
The Chicago Timmy Awards is an award ceremony hosted by Tech in Motion, a national events organization for tech enthusiasts created by Jobspring Partners & Workbridge Associates. The Timmy Awards recognize companies and individuals that strive to create the best places for technology professionals to work in the Greater Chicago Area. The Timmy’s are presented in three categories: Best Technology Work Culture, Best Technology Manager and Best Tech Startup. We want to hear your voice in awarding the top tech employers in your community. Stay tuned for more information on the 3rd Annual Chicago Timmy Awards in 2017.
Chicago Timmy Award Winners
For questions or comments about the Timmy Awards, please contact Courtney Grab at [email protected]
Rules & Regulations:
Finalists are selected based on the quality of their nomination submission. Winners are selected by the number of public votes they receive.
We have a zero tolerance policy for cheating. Therefore, any bots created to vote multiple times on a finalists behalf or the use of any third party platform to pay individuals to vote will result in disqualification.
Winners will be honored at the Timmy Awards Gala.Paul Addis sets the man on fire early Tuesday morning during a lunar eclipse in 2007 – Photo by Tristan Savatier
Beyond the usual kvetching about Burning Man being “better last year,” or the timeless tale of being taken over by elites, it seems like there is actually a growing fear that Burning Man is, once and for all, being irreparably infiltrated by Silicon Valley. The latest to jump on the pile is person whom I admire a great deal, Breaking Open the Head author Daniel Pinchbeck, who wrote this post about why he is skipping Burning Man. This has particular significance to me as it was his book that cemented my desire to go to Burning Man; this year will be my tenth.
The Time Burning Man Allowed Tesla to Advertise for One Day
The concerns mostly seem to focus on Silicon Valley infiltrating Burning Man and “ruining” it from the outside, but let’s rewind to 2007 when Burning Man almost allowed itself to be “ruined” by Silicon Valley from the inside, until it was ironically saved by an arsonist vandal who later committed suicide. The theme of 2007 was The Green Man, a response to what a decent faction of Burners said was unconscionable consumption and a huge carbon footprint for an event with radical roots.
To make The Green Man theme not completely hollow, Burning Man came up with a novel idea to finally allow brands in: the Green Man pavilion would be a “World’s Fair” type demonstration of world-changing technology. From the Burning Man website:
The Burning Man stood atop a structure that resembled green mountain peaks. Nestled at its base was the Green Man Pavilion, 30,000 square feet of shaded exhibition space for the display of interactive artistic, scientific and educational models, a trade show-type display of emerging technologies. This pavilion was surrounded by the Mangrove, made from simulated trees fashioned from recycled industrial materials.
Beneath the pavilion were a number of green technologies, some from very large brands; including a prototype of the now-famous Tesla Roadster. Elon Musk is a well-known burner and I can understand why this seemed like a good idea at the time; on the website, the project’s “artist” was listed as Aaron Platshon, a former Tesla product manager.
The one condition these brands had to agree to was that they would strip the logos from their products, and simply provide them as “white labeled” objects, much as the closer you are to Center Camp, the less you will see corporate logos on rental vehicles like Budget trucks and U-Hauls. The effect was the creation of a de facto “corporate pavilion” of Burning Man-approved companies allowed to display directly under what is supposed to be the very symbol of decommodification. Even the loosest reading of the Ten Principles makes this decision a head scratcher.
The Corporate Pavilion Goes Down in Flames
Burning Man faced a tremendous amount of criticism that year, both from within the community and without, including a scathing Business 2.0 article that made it sound like Larry Harvey himself had orchestrated Burning Man’s big cashing-out. People screamed on ePlaya, Tribe and elsewhere that Burning Man had finally jumped the shark, sold out, and that they were livid.
That year, the gate opened at midnight on Monday. Monday afternoon was extremely dusty, with a several hours-long whiteout that deterred most people from going to the corporate pavilion. Monday night was clear, but the dust storm had delayed many people’s camp setup, so very few people were outside their camps. Around 2 AM, a total lunar eclipse overtook the moon. While everybody was looking at the moon, Paul Addis climbed the man and set it on fire with a blowtorch. An amplified voice at Opulent Temple, the only sound camp that was up and running, shouted, “Oh my god, the man’s on fire!”
Sure enough, the man was on fire. Personally I thought this was awesome – it was the chaos that older burners always lamented the loss of, the unpredictability, the makings of a Cacaphony Society prank. Other people were not amused.
Conspiracy Theories
Was the 2007 Early Burn an inside job? Obviously not, but it had the makings of a good conspiracy theory. Did Larry Harvey want to deflect the criticism of the corporate pavilion? Did he want people to focus on the enemy without instead of the enemy within, like George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden? Was Paul Addis just a fall guy to preserve the empire? While these are all absurd ideas, one fact is extremely lucky for Burning Man: After the Early Burn, literally nobody ever mentioned the corporate pavilion ever again. The people who actually saw it must number a few hundred at most, many of whom have probably stopped going to Burning Man.
A Lesson for Today
So before you start shaking your fist at the cloud and saying, “Damn Silicon Valley bros! Stop infiltrating our event!” don’t forget “your event” once invited Silicon Valley in all by itself, and that nothing is new under the sun.Want to join filmmakers like the Daniels and Jordan Vogt-Roberts by securing a coveted Vimeo Staff Picks badge? Here's how.
With more than 240 million monthly viewers, Vimeo has grown into one of the best online platforms for filmmakers to share their work with the world and discover other talented artists. The site’s flagship channel, Vimeo Staff Picks, features the best videos on Vimeo, and is billed as a “never-ending film festival” that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
The benefit of a Staff Pick can be getting your short film, music video or other short form work seen by production companies, advertising agencies and brands looking for emerging talent. Filmmaker Patrick Jean’s short film “Pixels” was chosen as a Staff Pick, went viral, and attracted the attention of Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions, which hired Patrick to direct the feature-length version. Though Happy Madison ultimately brought Chris Columbus on board to direct, Patrick stayed on as an executive producer and co-writer of the script.
Timelapse cinematographer Drew Geraci’s “District Nights” similarly landed him a job shooting the opening credits sequence for Netflix’s “House of Cards,” while Daniel Mercadante’s two-minute short “Laughs” led to Volkswagen hiring him to shoot a second version for a TV commercial. Other Staff Picks alumni who have gained critical exposure through Vimeo include “Swiss Army Man” co-directors the Daniels (12 Staff Picks), animated film director Kisrten Lepore (6 Staff Picks) and “Kong: Skull Island” filmmaker Jordan Vogt-Roberts (2 Staff Picks). New Staff Picks added in the last week include Kristine Stolakis’ short documentary “The Typist” and Hannah Jacobs’ music video for Tom Rosenthal, “Take Over.”
READ MORE: John Early and Kate Berlant’s ‘555’ Just Raised the Bar for Every Short Form Comedy Ever
Curated by a five-person in-house team, Staff Picks is comprised of the core verticals of Drama, Comedy, Action Sports and Documentary, and also includes Music Video, Animation, Travel and Eye Candy. Vimeo selects around four Staff Picks per day and features the videos on its homepage. Out of the tens of millions of videos uploaded to Vimeo on a yearly basis, roughly 1,000 are chosen as Staff Picks. The site also selects around 10 “Best of the Month” videos per month.
Though Staff Picks are free to watch, Vimeo on Demand offers filmmakers a way to monetize their work via a 90/10 split, with 90 percent of revenue going to the creators. Launched in 2013, the site’s VOD content features more than 50,000 videos with more than 1 million paying customers. If a filmmaker wants to earn revenue off of his or her Vimeo Staff Pick, the film can be moved to the subscription-only platform.
So how can you secure a coveted Vimeo Staff Picks badge for your film? Here are five key factors paraphrased from a presentation by Meghan Oretsky, one of the company’s five curators, during an event at the company’s New York office.
Exceptional craft
Staff Picks should look good and sound amazing, but filmmakers should also ask themselves whether their work innovates and pushes the medium to a new level. Check out “Analogue Loaders” by from Raphael Vangelis.
Conversation starting
To get people talking about a short film, it should present provocative ideas and visuals that ideally appeal to a millennial audience. Vimeo knows a video is a winner when the curators anticipate it being shared and sparking conversations amongst friends. Check out “Black Holes” by Noodles.
Engaging storytelling
Stories should draw the viewer in, elicit an emotional response and ultimately be something that people want to the share with their friends. A good example is the short film “Con Amor” by Cole Webley.
Originality
Vimeo creators should have a unique style and story. A good question to ask is, have we seen this story told time and time again? If so, are they bringing any new ideas or a new voice to the genre? Check out Ilya Naishuller’s music video for Leningrad’s “Kolshick.”
READ MORE: Danny Devito’s Short Film ‘Curmudgeons’ Launches Vimeo’s Staff Pick Premieres
Diverse Voices
Vimeo’s curators attend niche festivals in order to find content from female filmmakers, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, the indigenous community and more. Check out David M. Helman’s music video for Michael Kiwanuka “Cold Little Heart.”
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You have said that Croatia could go "all the way" if some things click for you. Do you really mean that?
You can call me a madman, but I think I'm just being realistic. There are teams that are stronger than us on paper, as well as those who are weaker, again on paper. For the last five years, we have been either among the top 10 teams in the world according to the Fifa rankings or very close to that. And those rankings are realistic, because they take results into account, not natural beauty or shirt design.
If we stay clear of injuries and prepare properly, which I'm sure we will, than we have a chance against anyone. There are only five matches on the road to the final – if we take each one as it comes, with a right plan and motivation we really could go all the way. In 2008 we were only one minute away from the semi-final, and if we got through [the group] we would have a big chance to win the tournament. I'm saying that because I know the character of this team – when we take off, it's an explosion.
How important for you is the fact that, for the first time in four years, you now have enough time to prepare?
It's the greatest blessing we could possibly have. Croatia is a small country and has a very limited pool of players, and almost all of them play abroad. During the qualifiers we only had a few days together before each game, so sometimes we had to look for temporary solutions and improvisations. But now, finally, we have enough time to solve the problems we have – maybe we can't completely eradicate them, but we will do everything in our power to minimise their impact on our play, as well as maximise our strengths. Besides, we have a very positive common experience of preparations and tournament from four years ago, so that calls for optimism, too. These players love being together.
It seems that, as a strategist, you put emphasis on individual instructions rather than specific formations. Do you agree?
My opinion is that formations are slowly dying out and a large number of experts will confirm that. It has become increasingly difficult to mark the movement of the players, with regards to the ball, just by assigning numbers to each line. Fluidity is much more important – you want your team to stay compact, and your lines to remain close to one another, so they can flow over. You need to make sure that no gaps emerge, and that tends to happen often to teams who play with strict lines. A quality opponent will always find your weak spot and massacre you.
But that doesn't mean the system is any less important. Organisation and automatism are the foundations for everything – only if you have that, will the individual quality of your players show in a positive way. I will never underestimate the value of individualism and inspiration – but without a solid system, improvisation is just anarchy. And anarchy can also sometimes bring you a result, sometimes even better than your established schemes, but it cannot be a long-term solution.
Croatia always had strong individuals. How much was your tactical outlook influenced by the fact that you were part of the team that finished third at the 1998 World Cup, and played with three playmakers – Boban, Prosinecki and Asanovic?
A lot, because that's when I realised what kind of football is best suited for the Croatian character. We have strong individuals now, too. My intention wasn't to build a system around them, but I didn't want to fit them into a system either. I simply try to give each of them a mandatory frame in which their lucidity will hopefully flourish.
You're known for being one of few managers, especially in the international football, who use five, sometimes even six offensive-minded players in the team at the same time. Does that reflect your desire to play attacking football or simply a necessity, because Croatia has much more options up front than at the back?
It's pure pragmatism. Of course I prefer a passing, possession-based attacking game more than destructive, defensive play, but you have to look at what's best for the team with regards to the players at your disposition. When I took this job, my assistants and I analysed our pool of players and realised we're much better covered in attacking positions. We concluded that our chances against |
Rogen was going to say the title of the project but found himself taking another direction. It sounded like the project may be called The Singularity, but I’m not sure. Nerdist podcast host Chris Hardwick asked if the project was announced and Rogen was unsure: “I don’t know if it is, I think it is? I don’t know if it is… It’s about Singularity,” revealed Rogen, confirming it’s based on the hypothesis pushed by futurist Ray Kurzweil.
The technological singularity is the hypothesis that “the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.”
According to this hypothesis, an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) would enter a ‘runaway reaction’ of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that would, qualitatively, far surpass all human intelligence. Science fiction author Vernor Vinge said … that this would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity to occur around 2045 whereas Vinge predicts some time before 2030.
As for what the project will be about, Rogen revealed the following:
It’s about artificial intelligence, it’s a half-hour comedy about the singularity basically. And I won’t say anything else because I honestly don’t know if it’s [been announced].
On the subject of the approaching nano-technology, Rogen commented: “Oh, it happening, it super scary and we’re trying to make a comedy about it.” No word on if Rogen would be involved as an actor.
This isn’t the first time that Rogen and Goldberg have tried to make a television series for FX. In 2013 it was announced that the network had ordered an animated comedy from the duo called Bigfoot, based on Graham Roumieu’s faux autobiography books In Me Own Words, Me Write Book, and I Not Dead. American Dad writer and supervising producer Matt McKenna was set to write and executive produce the pilot. We haven’t heard any official updates since the news was announced three years ago, but recently I heard it might still be “in the works.”
For those of you interested in hearing more about the Singularity, here is a good video explanation:For Syria’s beleaguered moderate rebels, 2013 has been a year of disillusionment and crushed hopes: Hopes that the US would follow through on promises of arms in the spring; hopes that US, French and British missiles would shatter Bashar Al Assad’s military forces in the summer and hopes that they could survive in between Al Assad’s murderous forces on one side and Islamist and jihadist rivals on the other.
Yet, Syria’s moderate rebels are collapsing. Western policy, including hope for next year’s peace talks, is crumbling with them. Last week, the US and Britain suspended non-lethal aid — such as communications equipment and trucks — to rebels in northern Syria, after bases belonging to the largely moderate, western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) were ransacked and their equipment seized by the Islamic Front. This rebel-on-rebel fratricidal orgy sums up so much that has gone wrong with Syria’s revolution. The Islamic Front, a recently formed coalition of seven of the most powerful rebel groups from across Syria, is dominated by the Salafists — Sunnis who hold to puritanical and literalist readings of Islam. None of its members are US-designated terrorists and they collectively oppose the most powerful and extreme jihadist group in Syria, the rapidly growing Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham, which is out-muscling other rebels.
The Front, nevertheless, works with Al Qaida-aligned Jabhat Al Nusra on the battlefield and welcomes recruits from among the thousands of foreign fighters — including the thousand-plus European Muslims — who have travelled to Syria to fight Al Assad. Its aim is an Islamic state under sharia, with an ambivalent, probably inferior, status for Syria’s large minority communities. This is not a moderate group.
The Islamic Front’s members have also withdrawn from the FSA’s Supreme Military Council — the main conduit for what little western arms have trickled in. But it is a sign of the moderates’ pitiable military and political standing that they felt compelled, through gritted teeth, to welcome the very same Islamists who had overrun their bases and stolen their weapons: “We believe that those brigades [in the Front] are our brothers.” In truth, moderate rebels are being obliterated as a force. Their best units have peeled away and their foreign support is dwindling to nothing. Saudi Arabia, fed up with American hesitation to provide arms or drop bombs, impatient with the FSA’s weakness and eager to check Iranian influence at a time when Washington and Tehran are moving closer together, is throwing its weight behind members of the Islamic Front, particularly the Damascus-based Army of Islam. Riyadh sees these groups as the only way to contain the growing influence of Al Qaida. It is also gambling that the Front’s members will not turn their guns outside the region or give sanctuary to jihadists once Al Assad falls.
Washington and London do not agree; hence the suspension of aid. This has important implications for the West’s entire approach to Syria. Six out of the seven groups in the Islamic Front have explicitly rejected US and Russia-backed peace talks, the so-called Geneva II conference set for January 22, and some have threatened to try for treason those moderate rebels who attend.
It is, therefore, impossible to imagine anything productive coming out of next month’s talks, whose main purpose appears to be keeping up appearances of diplomacy. Those who might attend — like the Syrian National Coalition, the political body linked to the moderate rebels — have little ability to influence events on the ground; those with influence, like the Islamic Front, will not show up (nor is it clear that the Al Assad regime will talk to them if they do). The US may threaten the Islamists with a terrorism designation if they do not participate, but it is hard to see this working. As for the regime’s sponsors, Russia will attend and Iran will do so if invited. But both Moscow and Tehran assess that military trends are on Al Assad’s side.
Over the past weeks, government forces, helped by Hezbollah fighters from neighbouring Lebanon, have won a string of victories in the Qalamoun region near the Lebanese border. This could tighten the regime’s grip over the north-south axis of the country, protect the pro-Al Assad coastal areas and choke off rebel links in and out of Lebanon. Why, then, do we expect either of Syria’s allies to apply pressure on Al Assad to initiate a genuine political transition? They can see that the rise of jihadists, along with the continued imperative of destroying Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile by next summer, has pushed western powers away from regime change. The US still wants Al Assad to go, but it wants the Syrian state — which must include parts of the military forces brutalising Syrian towns and cities — to survive.
The window has closed on arming moderates, but the US will not arm the Islamic Front. So western efforts will now turn to containment: Shielding Lebanon, Turkey, Israel and Iraq from the spill-over, checking the spread of jihadists, tracking European fighters returning to their home countries, destroying Syria’s chemical weapons and praying that next year’s peace talks do not degenerate into a complete farce.
— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London, 2013Steven Smith spoke about the difficult decision to leave out Lockie Ferguson and the bond within his team after Rising Pune Supergiant defeated Gujarat Lions by five wickets in Pune (2:01)
Ben Stokes has won three Man-of-the-Match awards in eight matches in IPL 2017, each performance leading to a Rising Pune Supergiant victory. His most recent award was also his first for a batting performance - an unbeaten 63-ball 103, that saw Rising Pune recover from 10 for 3 to chase down 162 with five wickets to spare. It is numbers like these that Stokes would like to judge himself on instead of being bogged down by the pressure of the INR 14.5 crore price tag at the auction, Rising Pune captain Steven Smith said.
"He's been hitting the ball really well," Smith said on Monday. "We're very happy with where he's at and how he's played. That was an amazing innings: under pressure, came in at three for nothing and to play the way he did, he timed his innings beautifully, took the game on at the right time. Fantastic knock to get us home. He hit some very clean balls there, chose the right balls to hit, too.
"He's always said from the start that he judges himself on how he plays. He's not going to put any extra pressure on himself just because he has a big price tag next to his name."
Smith, who had reportedly played an active role in identifying players for the franchise at the auction, revealed he had asked the team owners to go all out for Stokes. The England allrounder eventually became the most expensive overseas player ever in the auction.
"We were very excited to get him. I had said before the auction to the guys [owners] just do what you have to to get him," Smith said. "Allrounders are so valuable in T20 cricket and he bats, bowls and fields well. He's a perfect fit for our team, particularly after Mitchell Marsh was ruled out as well. He's done a terrific job for us. We paid a big amount to get him. We know he's a quality player. [He] certainly earned his cash tonight.
"For us it's about trying to get to know each other for six or eight weeks and try and get the best out of each other. Even learn a bit about one another. The team's been really good. We've got some really good characters in the shed there."
Rising Pune have won five of their last six games, with three victories at home. Over the last 10 days, they played four games in Pune and one in Mumbai, and Smith had identified this clutch of matches as an opportune time for a surge on the points table.
"I actually said to the group of guys that we had five games, four here [in Pune] and one in Mumbai," he said. "Not a lot of travel. Home ground, we wanted to try and make it a bit of a fortress.
"We're four [wins] and two [losses] here, if I'm right. That's reasonable going. One more game to play here against the Kings [XI Punjab on May 14], so hopefully we can make it 5 and 2. I've said that these five games are very important for us and I think we've played some really good cricket and it's nice to get over the line and be in the position where we are now."
With the exception of the victories against Royal Challengers Bangalore, all other Rising Pune wins were clinched in the last over. Smith recognised that closing out tight games has proved to be the defining factor in their improved run in IPL 2017, after a seventh-place finish last season. The good work on the field, according to Smith, has coincided with off-field bonding.
"It's certainly been a different season for us," Smith said. "This year we've been able to get over the line in those close games. Last year we were at the end of that. That's how T20 cricket works sometimes. We've been really fortunate there.
"It's been good how we've been able to gel together as a team. I'd say for us and Gujarat [Lions] as well, would've been the toughest for the two franchises, given that we were new teams. A lot of other teams have had their core players for a long time so they know each other really well. They have had many years of bonding together. It's nice to be playing some good cricket at the same time; it helps."
Rising Pune's upswing has meant New Zealand pacer Lockie Ferguson, who picked up 2 for 7 against Royal Challengers and was named Man of the Match, didn't find a place in the XI on Stokes' return from an injury on Monday.
"It was difficult [to leave out Ferguson] but we had some different thoughts," Smith said. "We thought this is our best combination. Dan Christian has bowled particularly well in the games he's played and he's a power-hitter towards the end as well. He's done a really good job for us. So tonight it was the right call.
"It's about trying to get the right balance for your team in any conditions you play. It's not just our team that faces this. Every team has some quality players on their bench in the opposition, so it's tough on the guys that they miss out, but you have to try and pick your best team for each game."Jan Zwartendijk on the left and Chiune Sugihara. The picture was taken at Holocaust Museum at Vilnius.
Last of two parts
(Part 1: Japanese Visas That Saved Jewish Refugees Are Just Half of the Story)
I wondered why Jan Zwartendijk’s achievement was not known even in his own country. One of the reasons is that the Curaҫao visas were made expediently, and not as proper visas. Strictly speaking, a visa was unnecessary for entry to Curaҫao, but the permission of the governor of Curaçao was required for landing. So Zwartendijk intentionally not only omitted the term “should have the permission of the local governor,” but also noted “no visa needed” and he issued the permits.
For this reason, most probably, the Netherlands government later took the position that they did not approve the Curaçao visas that were issued. In other words, the government could not justify Zwartendijk’s actions, and therefore could not agree to approve them totally.
Another reason that Zwartendijk’s act is not properly recognized in Netherlands until now was the political situation at that time. In May 1940, the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany. What would have happened if Nazi Germany knew that the Netherlands consul had helped Jewish refugees escape?
Naturally, the Japanese Consul Chiune Sugihara took a risk as well by issuing the visas. However, unlike the Netherlands under German occupation, Japan was Germany’s ally. There is no way that the Nazi guards could have stepped into an allied country’s consulate, saying, “What you are doing is disgraceful,” and arrest the diplomat.
In contrast, in the case of the Netherlands occupied by the Nazis, people had learned that anyone defying Nazi wishes was committing an act of treason and could be gunned down. In light of this terrible danger, full preparedness was needed to issue visas for the Jews. The Curaçao visa was indeed a “visa for life” offered in exchange for the life of the Netherlands consul.
In August 1940, the Netherlands Consulate at Kaunas in Lithuania was closed down and Zwartendijk returned to the Netherlands. Until the end of the war in 1945, he literally must have been holding his breath at every moment.
After World War II ended, the embers of war were still smoldering. Jan Zwartendijk and his family were forced to live quietly for this reason, withholding the fact that he had issued visas to Jewish refugees. Even after his acts were revealed, the Netherlands government never publicized the facts.
On the other hand, in this respect, Chiune Sugihara fared better. He was obliged to retire from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs right after returning home. After experiencing various hardships, Sugihara got a job in foreign trade. Sugihara visa recipients found him during his overseas work in Moscow.
During the war, the lives of many Jews were saved by Sugihara. Upon learning this fact, many were eager to return the favor to Sugihara. After some survivors lobbied Israeli government officials, Sugihara was awarded Yad Vashem’s award as “Righteous Among the Nations” from the Israeli government a year before his death in 1985. In the sense that the achievement was recognized before he died, Sugihara must have been very happy.
Jan Zwartendijk passed away in 1976. The Israeli government finally recognized his achievements posthumously. The Yad Vashem “Righteous Among the Nations” honor was bestowed on him 21 years after his death.
Both Sugihara and Zwartendijk devoted themselves to the deliverance of the Jewish people as diplomats, but the evaluation of their achievements showed quite a contrast. In Zwartendijk’s native country, the Netherlands, some continued to honor his activities, but there is nothing compared to the acclaim Sugihara has acquired in Japan.
However, there were some among the Jewish people who kept inquiring about Zwartendijk’s whereabouts in memory of his actions. He was called “Curaҫao’s Angel” among Jews who fled from the hands of the Nazis. They were probably motivated by thoughts like, “What is that Angel of Curaҫao doing? We must find him and express our gratitude as Jews!”
Twenty years ago, a group of survivors saved by Curaҫao visas visited New York City from Israel. They cooperated with survivors living in New York, and invited Zwartendijk’s children for a meeting of gratitude.
Former Jewish refugees never forgot the favor received from Zwartendijk. They collected signatures and led a campaign that the Angel of Curaçao should be given a Yad Vashem Award. They continued to appeal to the Israeli government. As I mentioned, Zwartendijk was conferred the award in 1997.
As a result a movement belatedly spread in the Netherlands to honor the humanitarian diplomat in his own country. In 2016, a television drama aired, and a publishing plan for a Zwartendijk biography is shaping up. The book, by a well-known author, will be published in 2018.
My research about the drama of Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis during World War II was originally triggered by one photo album. It was when I was at the Japan National Tourism Organization that my former boss, Mr. Tatsuo Osako, showed the album to me. During the war, as an official of Japan Tourist Bureau (currently JTB), Mr. Osako was involved in the maritime transportation of Jews escaping through Japan to America and Israel. (In particular, he was involved in assisting transit from Vladivostok to Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture.) In the album, there were seven photographs of mostly Jewish men and women that Osako cared for on his boat duty.
It was September 2010 when I started my journey of searching for and investigating Sugihara survivors in the United States. One of them was Benjamin Fishoff, an 87-year-old banker. He had been seeking to land in Tsuruga with a Sugihara visa but had to turn back once to Vladivostok because he did not have a Curaҫao visa, Fishoff told me. Although I had heard stories about Curaçao visas and Zwartendijk from the persons concerned, I think I wasn’t paying much attention at the time.
However, as my knowledge of Curaçao visas deepened, I started to reflect on the fact that, without Curaçao visas, Sugihara visas could not have been arranged. Therefore, we Japanese should show respect not only to our Japanese brother Chiune Sugihara, but also extend honor to Jan Zwartendijk, who issued Curaҫao visas. Such a thought grows stronger day by day.
In recent years, Japanese school textbooks have covered Chiune Sugihara and praised him as a person that Japan can be proud. There are absolutely no objections to that. But the existence of the Netherlands consul who rescued Jews, besides Sugihara, and the fact that Curaҫao visas were a necessary condition in the background for arranging Sugihara visas, are things we ought to know.
Good intentions of countless people saved the life of Jewish people. Jewish people who left Lithuania with Sugihara visas and Curaҫao visas must have experienced indescribable hardships. In the background, enabling them to pass through Japan to safely travel to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel, there would have been an abundance of the good faith of countless people.
Saburo Nei, acting consulate-general of Japan in Vladivostok at the time, also recognized the Sugihara visa “Issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan” and approved the departure of the Jews. Jewish refugees aboard the ship, Amakusa Maru, traveled over the Japan Sea. With Osako’s devoted assistance, they landed in Tsuruga, Japan.
Picture taken at the Sugihara House at Kaunas.
As people in Tsuruga warmly welcomed the sudden appearance of the large number of Jewish refugees, a wide variety of actions in support were carried out, such as presenting food to feed people and opening public baths just to the refugees.
Also, in Kobe, Hebrew scholar Dr. Setsuzou Kotsuji banqueted local senior police officers and successfully extended the duration of the Jewish people’s stay. Without such cooperation of the people in Tsuruga and Kobe, thousands of Jewish refugees could not possibly have been sent safely to their third country, the last stop on their journey to freedom.
However, in the current situation, stories of these anonymous people are almost totally untold. Without showing the whole picture in which all these famous and obscure people have supported this escape drama, an accurate historical awareness cannot arise. I would like to proclaim this loudly.
At the Yaotsu town office in Gifu Prefecture, Chiune Sugihara’s hometown, they have preserved an original document, a passport bearing a Curaçao visa together with a Sugihara visa. The document was donated by a survivor named Sylvia Smoller. A replica of the document is exhibited in the Sugihara Chiune Memorial Hall in Yaotsu. Nearby in Jindounooka Park, the name of which means “Hill of Humanity,” there is a bust of Chiune Sugihara. Couldn’t we honor Jan Zwartendijk more in Japan by installing the bust of Zwartendijk sitting next to Chiune Sugihara’s?
Along with Chiune Sugihara, there were more people who dedicated their lives to the deliverance of the Jewish refugees. In addition, the escape of Jewish refugees was supported by the goodwill of many anonymous people and unsung heroes. Understanding their role and honoring their contributions should start from Japan.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The number of Jewish refugees saved by Sugihara is said to be 6,000. This number was not claimed by Sugihara himself; rather, it is estimated on the basis that a family of three members could travel with one visa. Although the “Sugihara list” records the names of 2,139 Jewish refugees who received visas from him, it is believed that Sugihara issued more visas than this figure.
Also, taking into account the difficult situation in which he was working in those last days and hours of the consulate, it can easily be imagined that Sugihara could not record the names of those to whom he issued visas after number 2,139.
***
Akira Kitade was born in Mie, Japan, in 1944. After graduating from Keio University in 1966, Akira Kitade worked for the Japan National Tourism Organization, and was stationed in Geneva, Switzerland; Dallas, Texas; and Seoul, South Korea. He was appointed Convention Promotion Manager in 1998. He retired from JNTO in 2004. Akira Kitade has published several books, including Poet of the Snow, Charisma of Korea’s Tourism, Pusan Harbor Tales, and, most recently, Visas of Life and the Epic Journey, a 2017 Foreign Minister Commendation recipient.“Climate change is not an environmental issue. It is fundamentally an issue of both racial and economic justice,” stated NY State Assembly Member Latrice Walker (D-55), chairperson of the Assembly Subcommittee on Renewable Energy. Walker’s East NY/Brownsville district has a high rate of chronic asthma and bronchitis.
Environmentally minded state legislators pushed for the passage of the NYS Climate & Community Protection Act of 2017, which passed the NYS Senate in early June and is now awaiting the governor’s signature.
The bill sets into law the elimination of climate pollution from all economic sectors in New York while making sure at least 40 percent of state energy funding is directed to disadvantaged communities.
Eddie Bautista of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance explained that state “environmental injustice” activists are looking to local and state actors to highlight the disproportionate vulnerability of communities of color in dealing with Washington’s cutbacks to the EPA as proposed in President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget.
“People don’t realize that the president’s budget cuts won’t really take effect until 2019-2020,” Bautista said. However, he argues that activists are now realizing that they have the ability to influence local politicians. “We first began to realize the power of local governments over climate/environmental issues at COP21 [in Paris],” he stated.
Bautista said that across the nation the environmental injustice activists are involved in the “Just Transition” movement, a framework for climate justice and for preparing the frontline communities most vulnerable to climate change to use local resources to combat the problem.
“Just Transition is about being oppositional and transformative—in our communities, families, neighborhoods…We’re looking at the current political moment and trying to figure out a way we can move toward non-extraction but toward sustainability and doing things that are in alignment with the planet,” said Brandon King of Cooperation Jackson, based in Jackson, Miss.
Cooperation Jackson is a member of the Climate Justice Alliance, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and Grassroots International.
Sara B. Mersha, director of Grantmaking and Advocacy at the Boston-based Grassroots International, explained that her group has been organizing in Black communities to create positive solutions such as reclaiming land. “Sometimes it is taking back vacant lots, showing how communities growing food locally helps toward self-sufficiency and also a way to heal the planet,” Mersha said.
Quinton Sankofa, staff collective member at Movement Generation, said, “A resource connecting Black communities is the Black Land and Liberation Initiative. This initiative brings together organizers, activists, artists, farmers and healers across the country as part of a national cohort.”
Sankofa continued, “Divest from industrial use of fossil fuels and reinvest in community-based sustainable energy
solutions to make sure communities most impacted (Black communities) are helping to lead that shift.”
Will Copeland, from the East Michigan Environmental Action Council, stated, “We are part of the Just Transition movement fighting for water affordability because people in Detroit have faced thousands of water shut-offs; fighting against continued use of incinerators to burn trash—making Detroit an epicenter for asthma in Michigan. According to a study by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation, Detroit is No. 4 out of 100 cities studied. A lot of the environmental stuff relates to our health issues.”
Copeland emphasized, “We are a movement-building organization.”
What the Hip-Hop Caucus has been doing since 2004 is bringing the message of climate change and environmental justice to young folks, noted Mustafa Ali, senior vice president of the Washington, DC-based organization. The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO, founded the organization with backing from Russell Simmons, Jay-Z and Sean Combs.
“We are very focused on utilizing our culture, and how culture can influence politics. Our Respect My Vote campaign, using artists who are connected to the environmental movement through their music, launching at the end of July a revitalizing vulnerable communities program,” Copeland said.
Some observers say that Trump’s moves to reverse federal plans to fight against global warming will contribute to poor health, even premature deaths.The following tables give an overview of notable finds of hominin fossils and remains relating to human evolution, beginning with the formation of the Hominini tribe (the divergence of the human and chimpanzee lineages) in the late Miocene, roughly 7 to 8 million years ago.
As there are thousands of fossils, mostly fragmentary, often consisting of single bones or isolated teeth with complete skulls and skeletons rare, this overview is not complete, but does show some of the most important finds. The fossils are arranged by approximate age as determined by radiometric dating and/or incremental dating and the species name represents current consensus; if there is no clear scientific consensus the other possible classifications are indicated.
Most of the early fossils shown are not considered direct ancestors to Homo sapiens but are closely related to direct ancestors and are therefore important to the study of the lineage. After 1.5 million years ago (extinction of Paranthropus), all fossils shown are human (genus Homo). After 11,500 years ago (11.5 ka, beginning of the Holocene), all fossils shown are Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans), illustrating recent divergence in the formation of modern human sub-populations.Abstract
PURPOSE: The main aim of the present study (FITFATTWIN) was to investigate how physical activity level is associated with body composition, glucose homeostasis, and brain morphology in young adult male monozygotic twin pairs discordant for physical activity. METHODS: From a population-based twin cohort, we systematically selected 10 young adult male monozygotic twin pairs (age range, 32-36 yr) discordant for leisure time physical activity during the past 3 yr. On the basis of interviews, we calculated a mean sum index for leisure time and commuting activity during the past 3 yr (3-yr LTMET index expressed as MET-hours per day). We conducted extensive measurements on body composition (including fat percentage measured by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry), glucose homeostasis including homeostatic model assessment index and insulin sensitivity index (Matsuda index, calculated from glucose and insulin values from an oral glucose tolerance test), and whole brain magnetic resonance imaging for regional volumetric analyses. RESULTS: According to pairwise analysis, the active twins had lower body fat percentage (P = 0.029) and homeostatic model assessment index (P = 0.031) and higher Matsuda index (P = 0.021) compared with their inactive co-twins. Striatal and prefrontal cortex (subgyral and inferior frontal gyrus) brain gray matter volumes were larger in the nondominant hemisphere in active twins compared with those in inactive co-twins, with a statistical threshold of P < 0.001. CONCLUSIONS: Among healthy adult male twins in their mid-30s, a greater level of physical activity is associated with improved glucose homeostasis and modulation of striatum and prefrontal cortex gray matter volume, independent of genetic background. The findings may contribute to later reduced risk of type 2 diabetes and mobility limitations.Jose Baxter has scored seven goals in 28 games this season
Sheffield United forward Jose Baxter apologised to the club's supporters after their 1-0 defeat by Bury.
The Blades have won just one of their last five games and are now five points outside the play-off places.
"We can only say sorry to the fans, it was a bad performance. I think we are letting them down a bit too much at the moment," Baxter told BBC Radio Sheffield.
"I'm a football fan myself and losing a game ruins your week."
A first-half goal from Craig Jones gave the Shakers, who lost 6-0 at Coventry on Saturday, their first win in four matches.
Baxter said his team could have no excuses for their first league defeat at Gigg Lane since 1952.
"These are the games that we have got to go and win to get up the table where we should be. It's very hurtful to get beat," he added.
"I'm not really sure what was missing, because we started the game well. They say goals change games and it did.
"Once the goal went in we were chasing the game but there's no excuses. It was a poor performance from us."No.
overall No. in
season Title Directed by Written by Original air date
26 1 "End of the Curse" Terry Hughes Susan Harris September 27, 1986 ( )
While Rose and Dorothy try their hands at mink-breeding, Blanche thinks she is pregnant. A visit to the doctor reveals otherwise: it is the onset of menopause. Blanche becomes depressed about it but eventually manages to snap out of it when she realises that she can still attract men. The mink-breeding however, is a disaster when it turns out that they're non breeders due to being not only too old, but also gay.
27 2 "Ladies of the Evening" Terry Hughes Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan October 4, 1986 ( )
The roommates are excited when they win tickets to the premiere of Burt Reynolds's new movie and passes to the after-party, except for Sophia, who does not get a ticket. On the way, the girls stop for a drink in the bar of the hotel where they are staying: a hotel that turns out to be a brothel. The girls are mistaken for prostitutes and end up in jail in a mass raid. Sophia bails them out, but not before grabbing the tickets and attending the party alone.
28 3 "Take Him, He's Mine" Terry Hughes Kathy Speer and Terry Grossman October 11, 1986 ( )
Blanche takes Dorothy's ex-husband Stan (Herb Edelman) out as a favour to Dorothy. Surprisingly, they hit it off, which ultimately angers Dorothy. Rose and Sophia team up to sell sandwiches, despite threats from "the mob". Dorothy makes up with Blanche when she discovers Stan is not sleeping with Blanche, but a much younger woman, while Rose and Sophia decide to get out of the sandwich business due to lack of profit.
29 4 "It's a Miserable Life" Terry Hughes Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan November 1, 1986 ( )
The girls campaign to save a 200-year-old oak tree in their neighborhood, but the tree is on the property of Frieda Claxton (Nan Martin), a notorious grump. When Rose yells at her to "drop dead" in an angry moment, Mrs. Claxton dies then and there, and Rose is wracked with guilty feelings. The girls agree to pitch in to pay for her funeral, but nobody attends. Rose scatters her ashes around the tree, which convinces the council to not disinter it.
30 5 "Isn't It Romantic?" Terry Hughes Jeffrey Duteil November 8, 1986 ( )
Dorothy's friend Jean (Lois Nettleton), a lesbian, comes to visit after her longtime partner dies. Rose and Jean have a lot in common and they strike up a fast friendship, but Jean starts falling in love with Rose, who is unaware of her new friend's sexuality.
31 6 "Big Daddy's Little Lady" David Steinberg Russell Marcus November 15, 1986 ( )
Blanche is pleased when her father, Big Daddy (David Wayne), announces he plans to marry "the widow Spencer" (Sondra Currie) until she learns that the widow is a woman younger than she is. Blanche struggles to deal with her father's choice, while Dorothy and Rose enter a song-writing contest, in which they come second.
32 7 "Family Affair" Terry Hughes Winifred Hervey November 22, 1986 ( )
Rose's visiting daughter (Marilyn Jones) and Dorothy's visiting son (Scott Jacoby) bicker their way into bed together in Blanche's room, where Blanche and the other girls catch them in the act.
33 8 "Vacation" Terry Hughes Winifred Hervey November 29, 1986 ( )
Dorothy, Rose, and Blanche vacation in the Caribbean, but find the accommodations seriously not to their liking. Events culminate in the girls being marooned on a deserted island and facing the possibility that they will not return home alive. Back in Miami, Florida, Sophia woos a Japanese gardener (Keye Luke).
34 9 "Joust Between Friends" Terry Hughes Scott Spencer Gordon December 6, 1986 ( )
When Dorothy is forced to take 10 weeks' leave from teaching, Blanche gets her a job at the art museum where she works. It quickly causes a rift between them, as Blanche becomes jealous of Dorothy's aptitude at her job and rapport with the boss. Blanche then discovers that Dorothy is hiding something from her (unaware that it is a surprise party to honor Blanche), and quits her job in a fit of rage.
35 10 "Love, Rose" Terry Hughes Kathy Speer and Terry Grossman December 13, 1986 ( )
Rose gets answers to her personal ad from "Isaac Q. Newton" — a fictitious suitor invented by Blanche and Dorothy. They panic when Rose finds a real Isaac Q. Newton (Paul Dooley) in the phone book and invites him to a banquet.
36 11 "'Twas the Nightmare Before Christmas" Terry Hughes Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan December 20, 1986 ( )
A series of mishaps almost ruins the ladies' Christmas.
37 12 "The Sisters" Terry Hughes Christopher Lloyd January 3, 1987 ( )
Dorothy arranges for Sophia's sister, Angela (Nancy Walker), to fly from Sicily, Italy to Miami, Florida, USA, as a surprise gift for Sophia's birthday, not realizing that Sophia and Angela have been feuding for decades, over what turns out to be a big misunderstanding.
38 13 "The Stan Who Came to Dinner" Terry Hughes Kathy Speer and Terry Grossman January 10, 1987 ( )
After major heart surgery, Stan temporarily moves in with the ladies, and quickly overstays his welcome.
39 14 "The Actor" Terry Hughes Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan January 17, 1987 ( )
The ladies act in a community play that stars a suave actor, Patrick Vaugnh (Lloyd Bochner). With all the girls smitten, he secretly dates Blanche, Rose, and Dorothy. During the play's opening performance, it turns out that he is actually been dating everyone in the cast and he makes a quick exit.
40 15 "Before and After" Terry Hughes Bob Rosenfarb January 24, 1987 ( )
Rose decides to live every moment after suffering an esophageal spasm. After clashing with Blanche and Dorothy, she moves into a new apartment with new, younger roommates. Rose then feels out of place with these new women as they simply live together and are not friends as she was with her old roommates. With the girls missing Rose and Rose feeling lonely, she decides to go back.
41 16 "And Then There Was One" Terry Hughes Russell Marcus |
pedestrians and vehicles from passing... Separately, a group of youths also organized a march inside Qalandiya refugee camp, calling for the Palestinian Authority to pressure Israel to deliver the 14-year-old girl’s body.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769039
Israeli forces shoot, injure 16 during funeral of slain Palestinian
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 26 Nov — Israeli forces shot and injured nine Palestinian youths with live fire, and seven more with rubber-coated steel bullets during clashes that erupted following the funeral of a young man who was killed by Israeli forces earlier on Thursday in the town of Qatanna northwest of Jerusalem City, locals said. Locals said at least 40 others suffered from severe tear gas inhalation and had to be treated by medics after Israeli forces attacked the funeral of Yahiya Yusri Taha, 21, who was killed after being shot in the head by Israeli forces hours earlier. The funeral set off from the Palestine Medical Center to Taha’s home where his family said their final goodbyes, before heading to the town’s cemetery where he was laid to rest. Mourners held Palestinian flags and chanted slogans against “Israeli crimes and violations” against Palestinians. Israeli forces opened live fire and rubber-coated steel bullets at youth who threw rocks and empty bottles in an attempt to prevent Israeli forces from entering the town. Taha was shot dead after forces stormed the Palestinian town at dawn, ransacking homes and detaining several residents.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769040
What drove a popular Palestinian girl to attempt a stabbing attack?
Haaretz 28 Nov by Gideon Levy & Alex Levac — One can, of course, label a 16-year-old girl a “terrorist” and also justify, with unbelievable, knee-jerk insensitivity, the wild car-ramming and then the confirmation-of-kill that occurred immediately after her attack – the two bullets fired by a settler, and the two others by a soldier, into the body of the girl who was run over and lying injured on the road. No one is questioning the fact that this past Sunday morning, the teenager Ashrakat Qattanani, wielding a knife, chased an Israeli woman at the Hawara junction, near Nablus, attempting to stab her. But we must ask what motivated the daughter of the imam from the Askar refugee camp to tell her father that she was going to school – where she was a good student and a popular girl – and then instead to go to the junction and try to stab an Israeli woman... Taha Qattanani, the girl’s father and the local imam, is an impressive man in a traditional robe and with a well-groomed beard. Speaking softly, he doesn’t try to conceal the fact that his daughter set out to stab Jews. “Ashrakat responded to the occupation,” he says with self-control, hiding his emotions. Those are the emotions of a newly bereaved father who must face the loss of his daughter alone, because Israel continues to deny Ashrakat’s mother entry into the West Bank, even during the mourning period... In the past month, he tells us, Ashrakat spoke a great deal about her dream of praying at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. “The occupation prevented her from living with her mother, and the occupation also prevented her from praying at the holiest place for her in her country,” he says. She often watched television reports of the recent acts of stabbing and the killing of the assailants, he says... Ashrakat’s uncle, Hassan, adds, “Since the Dawabsheh family in Duma was burned to death, all our children see on television what is going on – the terrorist behavior of the settlers and the army that supports them. No respect for women or the aged. The humiliation is so deep in the soul of every Palestinian. (Continued)
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/twilight-zone/.premium-1.688557
Israeli forces raid al-Fawwar refugee camp, injure 5
HEBRON (Ma‘an) 26 Nov — Clashes broke out in the al-Fawwar refugee camp in southern Hebron on Thursday when residents attempted to prevent Israeli forces from reaching the home of a Palestinian killed after stabbing an Israeli soldier, locals said. A resident of the camp, Adel al-Muhseiri, told Ma‘an that messages were relayed through speakers in the refugee camp after the forces entered, calling on locals to stop them from accessing the home of Muhammad Shubaki, 19. Youths threw rocks, empty bottles and Molotov cocktails while Israeli soldiers responded with live fire, tear gas bombs and rubber-coated steel bullets, al-Muhseiri said. Five Palestinians were injured with live bullets, one of whom was hit in the stomach, while dozens of residents suffered from tear gas inhalation. Another witness told Ma‘an that an Israeli patrol vehicle broke down during the raid, and that Israeli reinforcements arrived shortly after, firing from rooftops at residents.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769032
Israeli forces shoot, injure 82 Palestinians in Gaza, West Bank
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 2 Nov — At least 82 Palestinians were shot by Israeli military forces during ongoing clashes across the occupied Palestinian territory, the Palestinian Red Crescent and officials said Friday. A Red Crescent spokesperson told Ma‘an that 16 Palestinians were injured by live bullets, as well as two by rubber-coated steel bullets, in the Gaza Strip [see Gaza section]...
Palestinians in the Ramallah district meanwhile staged a demonstration near Israel’s Ofer detention center, where medics told Ma‘an that Israeli forces opened fire on protesters. One of those shot by live fire was left in critical condition, medics said, adding that dozens of others suffered from tear gas inhalation. A total of 24 injuries by live fire were reported from the occupied West Bank, the Red Crescent spokesperson told Ma‘an, as well as 40 injured by rubber-coated steel bullets and over a hundred who were treated for tear-gas inhalation. In Hebron, 14 Palestinians were hit with live bullets, and 10 with rubber-coated steel bullets, the Red Crescent said, adding that Israeli forces targeted an ambulance with tear gas, shattering its windshield. In Kafr Qaddum near Qalqiliya, Qaisar Jihad,13, and Hamza Mutei, 22, were shot in the legs and lightly injured after Israeli forces trapped protesters and opened fire, according to a spokesperson for the village’s popular resistance committee, Murad Shtewei. In the village of Bil‘in in the Ramallah district, locals told Ma‘an that photojournalist Hamdi Abu Rahma was shot with a rubber-coated steel bullet in the thigh as Israeli forces fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinian demonstrators. Meanwhile, in the Nablus district, Ibrahim Khatayta and Salih Hanani, both 14 years old, were shot in the lower extremities by live fire in Beit Furik, a local council member, Mounadhel Hanani, told Ma‘an. He added that the teens were interrogated by Israeli forces before ambulances were allowed to treat them. Thirteen Palestinians were also injured with rubber-coated steel bullets in the village of Qusra, including the head of the village’s council Abd al-Athim al-Wadi, a Palestinian Authority official who monitors settler activity in the northern West Bank, Ghassan Daghlas, told Ma‘an.
Over 10,300 Palestinians have been injured by Israeli forces since Oct. 1, not including those injured by Israeli settlers. Around 160 Israelis have been injured by Palestinian individuals during the same time period, according to documentation by the UN Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769051
Palestinian worker attacked by Israelis in Beit Shemesh
BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 27 Nov — A Palestinian worker from Hebron was attacked by a group of Israelis in the city of Beit Shemesh west of Jerusalem on Friday, the victim’s family said. Relatives told Ma‘an that Mamun Ghneimat, 32, from Surif was assaulted and injured in his neck by a “sharp object” during the attack. The assault was allegedly a failed attempt to kidnap the Palestinian man, his family said. Ghneimat was taken to the Beit Jala hospital for treatment following the assault, with his condition described as stable.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769047
Israeli border police officer stabbed north of Haifa
BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 27 Nov — An [Arab-]Israeli border police officer was stabbed Thursday near Nahariya north of Haifa before the suspect fled the scene, Israeli police said. Israeli police spokesperson Luba al-Samri said that a 37-year-old police officer was heading back to his home in Fassoula when he was stabbed in the upper body near a central bus station. Police who arrived on scene began searching for the suspect, and the officer was taken to the hospital for treatment of light injuries, al-Samri said. While the spokesperson said following an initial investigation that the stabbing was most likely “nationalistically motivated,” she later said the suspect and the officer had been engaged in an argument that evolved into a fight. She added that the officer who was stabbed was Arab and serves with border guards in Jerusalem. Fassoula, the officer’s hometown, is a Palestinian village. The suspect was later identified as a 16-and-a-half-year-old Palestinian from the village of al-Mezraa, near Nahariya.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769058
Weekly report on Israeli human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (19-25 Nov)
PCHR-Gaza 25 Nov —Israeli forces have escalated the use of excessive force against peaceful protests 8 Palestinian civilians, including 3 children, were killed in the West Bank. 2 other civilians, including a child, succumbed to their injuries. One of the killed civilians was attacked by settlers while a girl child was killed by Israeli police officers. 121 Palestinian civilians, including 29 children, 2 young women and 2 journalists, were wounded in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israeli forces conducted 88 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and a limited one in the Gaza Strip. 166 Palestinian civilians, including 35 children, were arrested. 27 of them, including 14 children, were arrested in occupied Jerusalem. Hebron Radio was closed for 6 months under the pretext of “incitement” and its contents were confiscated. Israeli warplanes targeted a training site in the central Gaza Strip, but no casualties were reported. (Continued)
http://www.pchrgaza.org/portal/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11391
Punitive demolitions
Israeli forces raid homes of Palestinian teens who stabbed soldier
HEBRON (Ma‘an) 25 Nov — Israeli forces early Wednesday raided and took measurements of homes belonging to two Palestinian teens killed after reportedly stabbing an Israeli soldier last month, local sources said. Hussam al-Jaabari, 17, and Bashar al-Jaabari, 15, were shot dead after the soldier was stabbed and injured at a military checkpoint in Hebron’s Old City on Oct. 20. Israeli officials have stepped up a policy of punitive home demolitions — considered illegal collective punishment by international rights groups — carried out on the residences of Palestinians who attacked or attempted to attack Israeli military or civilians. Measurements like those taken Wednesday are typically taken prior to the demolition of a home. Several homes in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank have been demolished this month, displacing family members and causing severe structural damage to nearby homes.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769010
In pre-demolition step, IDF maps attackers’ West Bank homes
Times of Israel 2 Nov — Israel Defense Forces troops entered two West Bank villages in the early hours of Saturday to map out the homes of two Palestinians killed as they carried out separate car-ramming attacks Friday. The mapping procedure is conducted ahead of home demolitions. Soldiers from Kedem Battalion and engineering troops from the Binyamin Brigade went to a house in Bir Nabala belonging to Fadi Hasib [Khseib], who wounded two soldiers in an attack at Kfar Adumim Junction on Friday morning, the Hebrew media reported. Hasib’s brother also attempted to run over a group of Israelis at the same Kfar Adumim bus stop on Sunday. The troops also visited the home of 19-year-old Omar Za’aqiq, 19, of Beit Ummar, near Hebron, who wounded six soldiers in an attack at the entrance to the village. Palestinians protested as the forces went into the village, the Walla news website said, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at the troops, who responded by using riot-dispersal measures. Israel’s practice of demolishing the family homes of terrorists has been criticized by non-governmental groups, but government officials have repeatedly defended the measure as a deterrent against future terror attacks. The IDF has warned also the family of a terrorist who killed a rabbi and his teenage son in the West Bank that their home is to be demolished, Hamas’s al-Aqsa network said Thursday. Military sources confirmed army officials had visited the family home of Shadi Ahmad Matua in Hebron, and carried out some survey work, according to the Hebrew-language website Walla. The demolition has not received court approval, and therefore no date has been set for a demolition.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-pre-demolition-step-idf-maps-attackers-west-bank-homes/
Land, property theft & destruction / Ethnic cleansing / Settlements / Closures
Israel demolishes al-Araqib village for 91st time
BEERSHEBA (Ma‘an) 26 Nov — Israeli forces demolished homes in the Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the Negev region of Israel for the 91st time on Thursday, local activists said. Palestinian activist Aziz al-Touri said that Israeli excavators raided the village in the morning and demolished all the housing structures in the area, as well as the village cemetery, which was leveled. Residents of al-Araqib have repeatedly fled into their village cemetery and lived there after Israeli authorities bulldozed parts of the town, since they had been assured the cemetery would not be destroyed. Saleem al-Araqib, a resident of the village, said the latest demolition of houses and the cemetery “will not change our attitude toward defending our land.” Al-Araqib is populated primarily by Palestinian Bedouins with Israeli citizenship and has been targeted repeatedly since 2010 for demolition by authorities. Israel considers al-Araqib and most other Arab villages in the Negev illegal, while Bedouins say it is their ancestral land and that they have a right to live in the area. There are about 260,000 Bedouin in Israel, mostly living in and around the Negev in the arid south. More than half live in unrecognized villages without utilities and many also live in extreme poverty. Al-Araqib is among some of the 40 Negev villages Israeli authorities have deemed unrecognized, arguing that the 53,000 Palestinian Bedouins living there cannot prove land ownership.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769036
Israeli forces demolish Palestinian homes in Jordan Valley
IMEMC/Agencies 26 Nov — Early Thursday, Israeli authorities demolished residential structures in the northern Jordan Valley locality of al-Hadidiya, according to PNN municipal sources. Aref Daraghmeh, who monitors settlement activities in the Jordan Valley, said an Israeli occupation army force accompanied by heavy machinery broke into al-Hadidiya and proceeded to demolish residential structures that shelter local Bedouin families... As stated by WAFA Palestinian News & Info Agency, many Palestinians in Area C of the occupied West Bank, under complete Israeli occupation control, have no choice but to build without permits to be able to provide a shelter for their families, risking demolition of their residential structures by Israeli forces.
http://www.imemc.org/article/74023
Q&A: ‘We are being evicted because we are Palestinians’
Al Jazeera 25 Nov by Patrick Strickland — The Sub Laban family may soon join tens of thousands of Palestinians evicted from occupied East Jerusalem by Israel — The Sub Laban family has lived in their home in the historic Old City of occupied East Jerusalem for more than six decades. But, like many Palestinian families in the city, they have been struggling since 2010 against an eviction order that will allow Jewish settlers to take over their home. Rafat Sub Laban, a 28-year-old human rights activist, says his grandparents first rented the home from the Jordanian government in 1953, and his mother Nora was born there just three years later. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and took over all of the property that had been under the control of the Jordanian government. But for the last five years, the Sub Laban family’s legal proceedings have been shrouded in secrecy. A group of Israeli settlers who are suing the Sub Laban family claim that the home belonged to a Hekdesh, or Jewish religious endowment, before Israel’s 1948 establishment. More confusing still, Rafat and his family have never seen the settlers in court: Only their lawyer and their representative come to the hearings. He recently learned that an American company is involved in the takeover of his home... Speaking to Al Jazeera, Rafat explained that his family recently received an injunction while an Israeli district court decides if they can appeal the country’s high court. Al Jazeera: What is at risk if you and your family are evicted from the home? Rafat Sub Laban: For me, this is the only home I’ve known. I grew up in the home since I was 12 years old. We used to rent a home elsewhere in Jerusalem while we did renovations, but we moved back in when they were finished. My mum has the most intimate connection to the house. She was born in the home and my grandmother died in the home. We feel targeted. But it’s not just the settlers behind this: It’s the whole government, the whole regime. They cut off my family’s national health insurance, as well as the Israeli district court claiming that we haven’t lived in Jerusalem for the last 30 years. This has been a struggle for my family. It has disrupted our life completely, even on a day-to-day basis. (Continued)
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/11/qa-evicted-palestinians-laban-151125151324323.html
What the Israeli army takes, it doesn’t give back
+972 Blog 27 Nov by Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz — The army maintains its hold on a piece of Palestinian land it seized in the late 1970s. Here’s the catch: the land has been abandoned for nearly a decade — Two weeks ago, the council chiefs of the West Bank villages of Jaloud, Douma and Qusra appealed to Israel’s High Court of Justice, demanding that the hundreds of dunams of land seized by the IDF in 1978 be returned to their rightful owners. The IDF built a military camp (Jaloud camp) on a small part of the land, yet it has been abandoned for many years. Now is the time to revoke Seizure Order T/5/78. Readers of this blog are already familiar with the practice of land seizure by military order: we dealt with it in the case of the Dura Al Qara seizure (of which the Dreinoff houses affair is a descendent of): a seizure that was on its face illegal, as an IDF officer specifically wrote in the seizure order that it is to be hidden from the Palestinian residents. We also dealt with this very seizure practice when we managed to return the land taken from the residents of Burkeh for the purposes of building the settlement Homesh. Military seizure have served, time after time, not to fulfill a military need but for settlement building. (Continued)
http://972mag.com/what-the-idf-takes-it-doesnt-give-back/114231/
Israeli forces seize buses from Palestinian transport company
NABLUS (Ma‘an) 26 Nov — Israeli forces early Thursday seized eight buses belonging to a Palestinian transportation company in Nablus after the organization transported Palestinian youths to partake in demonstrations, local sources said. The offices of the al-Tamimi bus company were stormed, locals said, and the eight buses were transferred by Israeli forces to Huwarra military checkpoint south of the occupied West Bank city. Regular demonstrations — often organized by local universities — have taken place since last month near the Israeli military checkpoints that surround and control movement in and out of Nablus, leading to large-scale clashes between youth and Israeli soldiers... An Israeli army spokesperson confirmed that several buses were seized overnight Wednesday from the Palestinian transport company, which they identified as an “illegal association known to have links to the Hamas terror organization.” The spokesperson told Ma‘an that the buses were taken on the grounds that the company has been providing transportation for large groups to partake in “violent riots” against Israeli forces.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769029
Al-‘Issawiya falls into ‘economic recession’ as shops face fines
JERUSALEM (Ma‘an) 25 Nov — The occupied East Jerusalem village of al-‘Issawiya has fallen into an “economic recession” as the Israeli municipality continues to target shop owners, locals said. Member of a local follow-up committee in the village, Muhammad Abu al-Hummus, told Ma‘an that shop owners have been shutting their storefronts in order to avoid being fined by the Israeli municipality. Al-Hummus said that some shop owners have been heavily and repeatedly fined for arbitrary reasons. On one occasion, an owner was fined for leaving empty boxes in front of the store, he told Ma‘an. On another occasion, a shop owner was reportedly fined on the grounds that the sign above his storefront did not accurately describe the store’s contents. Al-Hummus told Ma‘an that the economic stability of residents is worsened by frequent raids by Israeli forces through al-‘Issawiya’s streets and homes that cause damage. Last night, four Palestinians were detained from the village during a such a raid, identified as Akram Mustafa, Shadi Kleib, Adham Sabta and Karim Jaber. He said that the interior and exterior of houses often receive damage during the raids when Israeli forces “randomly fire tear gas bombs, stun grenades, and rubber-coated steel bullets, targeting homes and possessions.”
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769012
Stores demolished near Bethlehem, settlers close major junction
IMEMC/Agencies 26 Nov — The Israeli army, Thursday, demolished two commercial structures and seized some of their contents in the village of Hosan, west of Bethlehem, according to local sources. Hassan Hamamreh, mayor of Hosan, told WAFA that an Israeli army force, accompanied by bulldozers, broke into the village and demolished two commercial structures belonging to Ishaq Shousha and Bajes Oudeh, two local Palestinians, citing unpermitted construction as a pretext for the demolition. The two structures are used as stores to sell construction related material and scrap. The Israeli military also seized heavy machinery and other equipment available in both stores, including a bagger, forklift trucks and motor homes.
http://www.imemc.org/article/74026
Israeli forces raid East Jerusalem sports club
JERUSALEM (Ma‘an) 25 Nov — Israeli forces on Wednesday morning ransacked the Jabal al-Zaytoun (Mount of Olives) sports club in the al-Tur neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem and seized data from surveillance cameras, club officials said. Secretary-general of the club, Talal Sayyad, told Ma‘an that Israeli forces stormed the gym hall and “confiscated hard drives which record footage taken by surveillance cameras.” Israeli forces raided the sports center at the beginning of November and detained a man they claimed had hidden in the facility after throwing stones at Israeli forces. A court hearing reviewing video footage from surveillance cameras at the center did not support Israeli claims about the incident in early November, Sayyad added.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769019
Ministers authorize West Bank closures that IDF was already conducting
Haaretz 27 Nov by Barak Ravid, Gili Cohen, Jack Khoury — The security cabinet has authorized the Israeli army to impose full closures on Palestinian villages in the West Bank while searching for suspected terrorists, a senior official in Jerusalem said Friday. However, it has emerged that the IDF hadn’t needed such approval in the past. The cabinet decision taken on Thursday evening allows military commanders to decide whether to put a village under lockdown without waiting for approval from the government. But a military source confirmed that in effect, the tactical decision to put a village on lockdown is already made by military commanders on the ground. One such example took place earlier this month, when a Palestinian teen fired a hunting rifle at an IDF soldier, seriously wounding him. Shorly after the attack, the village of Beit Anoun, near Hebron, was placed on lockdown. A closure temporarily bars residents from leaving town, while military forces surround the area.
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.688778
West Bank water crisis puts Palestinians in firing zone – in pictures
al-Rashayda (The Guardian) 27 Nov by Jovita Sandaite, photographs by Arturas Morozovas — In area C of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian families must brave a military firing zone in order to obtain water for their land and livestock
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2015/nov/27/west-bank-water-access-palestinians-al-rashayda-in-pictures
Prisoners / Court actions / Legislation
Israeli courts set witnesses’ testimony data in Manasra court case
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 26 Nov — The Israeli Central Court will hear witness testimonies on Jan. 6 for the case of a 13-year-old boy accused of attacking Israelis last month, the Palestinian prisoners committee said on Thursday. Israel’s Jerusalem District Court indicted 13-year-old Ahmad Manasra on charges of attempted murder on Oct. 30, following an attack on two Israelis on Oct. 12. Following the new court scheduling, the boy’s lawyer, Tareq Barghouth, said Ahmad was pleading not guilty to all charges, claiming that he “did not have the will to stab or kill anyone, and any claims otherwise are fabrications and exaggerations of the incident” aiming to “kill his childhood.” Barghouth added that the prosecution is attempting to continuously postpone the case, pointing out that the witnesses’ testimonies will not be heard in court until January because judges presiding over the case would be going on vacation until that time. Others have alleged that the Israeli courts are trying to delay the case until Ahmad turns 14 in January, at which time he would be old enough under Israeli law to be given a prison sentence.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769034
Knesset bill to jail minors on terror charges passes 1st vote
BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 25 Nov — The Israeli parliament on Wednesday approved a bill that would allow Palestinian minors under 14 who are facing terrorism charges to be sentenced to time in prison, a Knesset press release said. The bill was approved in a preliminary vote with 64 in favor of the bill and 22 against. If the bill becomes law, children under 14 would reportedly be placed in a children’s home until they turn 14, after which the child would be transferred to a mainstream security prison. If passed, the law would only affect children who are citizens of Israel, as Israeli military law already allows for children from the occupied West Bank and Gaza to be placed in security prisons from the age of 12. The move is an amendment to the Youth Law, initiated and sponsored by Anat Berko, a far-right politician from the Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Before the vote took place, Berko reportedly said she believed the law was necessary as “today children are being used [in terror],” citing the Islamic State group as an example. “There are 11-year-old Palestinian terrorists – kids who are recruited at the entrances to schools,” Berko said.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769026
Freed Palestinian prisoner: Swap deal with Israel is worthless if it excludes the sick
Al-Monitor 25 Nov by Ahmad Abu Amer — In an interview with Al-Monitor, freed Palestinian prisoner Mohammed Allan talks details about his detention and release, stressing that he would not hesitate for one moment to resume his hunger strike if the Israeli army were to put him under administrative arrest again — Al-Monitor: What were the reasons for your arrest by the Israeli army? Were you formally charged with anything? Allan: The Israeli army arrested me three times. The first was in 2006, when dozens of soldiers stormed my house in the village of Ainabous in Nablus, took me to my law office, searched and destroyed its contents, then led me to Megiddo Prison, where I spent three years and was released on March 31, 2009. The second time was in 2011, when I remained in prison for 50 days. I was arrested a third time on Nov. 6, 2014. The Israeli authorities never charged me with anything, and throughout my detention, I was only asked two questions: Why was I still unwed and did I pose any threat to the Israeli state? On Nov. 11, 2014, Israeli intelligence put me under administrative detention for six months. When the six-month period verged on expiring, the Israeli Prison Service [IPS] extended my administrative detention for an additional six months
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/11/palestinian-prisoner-released-swap-deal-israel-hunger-strike.html
Gaza
Army injures eleven [updated later to 16] Palestinians in the Gaza Strip [with live fire]
IMEMC/Agencies 27 Nov — Israeli soldiers shot 11 Palestinians with live rounds, including one who suffered a serious injury, while dozens suffered the effects of tear gas inhalation, during clashes near border areas in the besieged Gaza Strip [on Friday]. Dr. Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesperson of the Health Ministry in Gaza, said five Palestinians were shot with live rounds, four in the legs and one was seriously injured after the soldiers shot him with a live round in his chest, near Nahal Oz Crossing. Three Palestinians were shot with live rounds east of the al-Boreij refugee camp, in central Gaza, while two others were shot, also with live rounds, near the Erez Terminal. In addition, one Palestinian was shot in the leg during clashes in the al-Faraheen area, east of Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. The soldiers used special army vehicles and launchers that can fire dozens of gas bombs, from a large distance.
http://www.imemc.org/article/74036
Israeli forces enter Gaza border area, create new barriers
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 25 Nov — Israeli bulldozers escorted by military vehicles on Wednesday entered a Gaza border area and created earth-mounds in an area used by Palestinian agricultural land owners, locals said. Witnesses told Ma‘an that Israeli vehicles entered 300 meters into the northern Gaza Strip near Jabalia and piled up earth to create mounds which will prevent Palestinian farmers from accessing their land. Israeli forces routinely enter border areas around the Gaza Strip and level agricultural land, usually with the intention of improving security capabilities around the besieged enclave.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769018
In Gaza, Israeli forces brutally stop farmers from working on land
KHUZAA, Gaza Strip 27 Nov by ISM, Gaza Team — In Gaza, farmers should have started to plant wheat almost a month ago. However, in Khuzaa, a village close to Khan Younis, farmers who own land near the fence have not been able to start, as they don’t have the permission to access their land. They have been waiting for help from the Red Cross, who has a project to support farmers who need to work their land in that area. However, each time they contacted the Red Cross during the last weeks, they were told that the Israeli Forces didn’t allow them to work, and threatened to shoot any person aproaching the lands. Two days ago, tired of waiting, they decided to go to their land and start planting. A few minutes after beginning to work, several jeeps and a tank approached the area. A group of soldiers came out of one of the jeeps and stayed hidden next to the fence. They shot several rounds of live ammunition, without injuring anyone, and insulted the farmers and the international human rights activists.
http://palsolidarity.org/2015/11/in-gaza-israeli-forces-brutally-stop-farmers-from-working-on-land/
PA to build 2,110 new housing units in Gaza Strip
GAZA (Ma‘an) 26 Nov — The Palestinian Authority announced on Thursday that the government is going forward with a plan to build 2,110 new housing units in the Gaza Strip, the PA Minister of Public Works told Ma‘an. Mufied al-Hasanyneh said that despite the PA having faced numerous obstacles in starting the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, it will “replace all the houses that were destroyed in the latest Israeli aggression.” The 2014 war on Gaza killed 2,200 Palestinians and displaced half a million more. It also destroyed or severely damaged more than 20,000 Palestinian homes, 148 schools, 15 hospitals and 45 primary healthcare centers, according to the United Nations development agency.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769043
198 Palestinians from Gaza pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 27 Nov — Dozens of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip headed to pray in East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday, Gaza’s Ministry of Interior said. Buses carrying worshipers over the age of 60 headed early Friday towards the Erez crossing from areas across the Gaza Strip and then to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Gaza Ministry of Interior said that 198 Palestinians headed to the holy site and would be returning after Friday prayers.
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769045
Other news
IDF recommends Israel bolster Palestinian Authority to prevent further security deterioration
JPost 25 Nov by Yaakov Lappin — The IDF has recommended the government take a series of steps to strengthen the Palestinian Authority and its security forces, which the defense establishment perceives as a moderating influence, as a way to help prevent further deterioration of the security situation in the West Bank and Israel. Recommendations included enabling PA security forces to acquire more firearms and armored vehicles and releasing Palestinian prisoners with light security offenses. Additional suggestions include increasing the number of Israeli work visas for West Bank Palestinians, to bolster the Palestinian economy and to moderate the ongoing terrorism against Israelis. According to assessments, the IDF has been concerned about the potential future disintegration of the PA for the last two months, a scenario that could occur if violence spikes and spreads anarchy across the West Bank.
http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/IDF-recommends-Israel-strengthens-Palestinian-Authority-abate-security-deterioration-435379
Haaretz Editorial: IDF ‘gestures’ are simply steps to continue the occupation
27 Nov — The same sober, realistic army that knew there was no military solution to the occupation is offering a band-aid solution that will ultimately bring the responsibility for the situation onto its own head — The IDF’s recommendations to the government to ease the Palestinians’ conditions in order to calm down the uprising in the occupied territories should raise a number of questions. On the face of it these steps are worthy gestures, like increasing the number of work permits for Palestinians in Israel, lifting restrictions at the checkpoints, strengthening the Palestinian Authority and equipping it with weapons and releasing Palestinian prisoners. The army once again emerges as a sober, realistic organization that understands there is no military solution to the situation in the territories... But this very same army is acting contrary to its own recommendations. It is expanding its authority continuously in its acts against a civilian population, breaking into houses, harassing civilians at road barriers and checkpoints, and in many cases turning a blind eye to settlers’ illegal activity. The IDF, which declares that the government isn’t restricting its authority to act, is acting with force alone. It’s a pity it doesn’t use its broad authority to restrict its own aggressive acts. The steps the army proposes, which are described as gestures, are based on the assumption that the Palestinian uprising stems from dissatisfaction with the conditions of occupation, as though it were a prisoners rebellion over their prison conditions. Such ideas feed the illusion that if only the occupation were eased, if more Palestinians could work in Israel and a few dozen prisoners were freed, the occupation itself could continue tranquilly and pleasantly. Submitting the recommendations for easing the Palestinians’ conditions is therefore no more than a tactical discussion between the IDF and the government on the way Hebron, Nablus and Ramallah should be occupied.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.688692
Israel to coordinate with Google, YouTube to censor Palestinian videos of conflict
IMEMC/Agencies 27 Nov by Saed Bannoura — The Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, Member of Knesset Tzipi Hotovely, held meetings this week with representatives of YouTube and Google, to find ways of cooperating to censor Palestinian videos from occupied Palestine, videos she dubbed as “inciting violence and terrorism.” Israeli daily Maariv said Hotovely will be working with Google and YouTube officials in a joint mechanism that will be in charge of “monitoring and preventing” any publication of materials deemed by Tel Aviv to be “inflammatory.”... Hotovely said that she received a comprehensive review mechanism for companies to monitor the films that allegedly incite violence, claiming that the supposed ‘incitement videos’ drive young children to go out and stab... The Israeli move comes amidst escalating tension in occupied Palestine, and a large number of videos, including those showing Israeli soldiers and officers killing Palestinians execution-style after injuring them, and many videos that in general highlight the suffering of the Palestinian people, living under the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. The Israeli coordination with Google and YouTube has very serious implications, and |
and several state statutes protect Americans’ reading habits from some scrutiny, in part by protecting public libraries or requiring search warrants to obtain book sale, lending, or rental records.
Stanley suggests that if the TSA wants to expand the policy, that it take two particular recommendations.
First, he says, the agency needs to realize that there are major privacy concerns. “That means training screeners to be aware of the privacy issues around books and papers, along with orders curbing any agents’ temptations to snoop through, draw attention to, comment on, or discriminate upon” anything they find, as well as considering protocols for private screenings if requested.
Second, Stanley suggests, the TSA should allow books and papers “to be contained by themselves within another package.” In other words, you should be able to put your file full of papers in an opaque folder inside some kind of clear plastic sleeve or even a large Ziploc bag, and run that through a bin by itself in the same way you already do with your three-ounce bottles or laptop.
The ACLU isn’t the only group that’s concerned: College faculty nationwide have worries about the searches too, Inside Higher Ed reports.
“Academics are unsurprisingly big readers, and since we don’t simply read for pleasure, we often read materials with which we disagree or which may be seen by others as offensive,” one academic expert told Inside Higher Ed. “For instance, a scholar studying terrorism and its roots may well be reading — and potentially carrying on a plane — books that others might see as endorsing terrorism. In addition, because scholarship is international, I suspect academics are more likely than others to be reading and carrying material in foreign languages, which might arouse some suspicion … Finally, academics (as well as editors and journalists) may well be carrying pre-publication materials — drafts for peer review or comment, etc. — and these could raise special concerns.”
And on top of privacy concerns, there are of course logistical challenges. Having everyone unpack their entire bag item by item, place its contents into a half-dozen bins, and then have to repack their bags after getting through the machines isn’t exactly going to speed up the screening process. More the exact opposite, really.
And the more densely packed your bag is, the more likely you are to have to unpack it, which just makes the situation even worse, since those are the bags that have the most stuff and take the longest to deal with.
The TSA is testing a new type of carry-on bag scanner in Phoenix (and soon, in Boston) that would give agents a better insight into what you’re packing without you first having to unpack it all publicly. Those could significantly speed up the security process, but they’re big and expansive so it’ll take a long time for them to roll out.
So for now, leave a lot of extra time before your flight — and maybe be prepared to explain that the copy of George R.R. Martin’s latest book, that you brought for beach reading, really is just that long.You must sign in or register to continue reading content.
GOLD BAR — A state board on Tuesday turned down a compromise that would have set aside part of a timber harvest to protect trails and scenery near Wallace Falls State Park, leaving local elected leaders and trail advocates disheartened.
The Board of Natural Resources voted 4-2 to oppose a request from Snohomish County. As a result, the whole 187 acres of second-growth forest known as the Singletary sale could go to auction within the next month or so.
“I’m strongly disappointed in the decision,” said County Councilman Sam Low, who played a lead role drumming up local support for the compromise. “I think we were very collaborative. We brought a lot of different people to the table on this.”
Low spoke to the board before Tuesday’s vote. The proposal would have protected 25 acres for four years.
The forest is managed in trust by the state Department of Natural Resources. Logging it would provide revenue to schools, firefighters, hospitals and other local taxing districts. While local governments depend on the revenue, environmentalists and outdoors enthusiasts worried that logging could exact a toll on the natural habitat and hurt local tourism. Debate about the harvest has been ongoing since 2008.
The amount at stake is significant. The Singletary sale is a minimum bid of $1.8 million. It could go out for bids at the DNR’s February or March timber auction.
State Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz, who oversees the DNR, discussed the potential compromise with Snohomish County officials. She supported the deal on the Board of Natural Resources, where she’s one of six members along with other political representatives and scientific experts.
Representing another seat is state Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal, whose responsibilities include guarding the financial interests of public schools. Reykdal voted “no.” Through an office spokesman, he relayed two reasons for his vote: a lack of guarantees to make the trust beneficiaries, including the Sultan School District, whole after four years; and the absence of a more detailed plan for preserving trails.
The timber trust land is part of the DNR’s Reiter Forest, which also includes the Reiter Foothills recreation area.
Wallace Falls attracts up to 160,000 visitors each year, said Virginia Painter, a state parks spokeswoman. Most visitors trek up to see the park’s eponymous falls.
Logging the Singletary tract would require building roads and bridges. That infrastructure would provide access for future logging of another 1,500 acres of trust land. Those harvests would border the state park, which measures about 4,700 acres.
State parks officials have been working with DNR to lessen the impact of any timber harvests in the area, Painter said.
Mike Town is a past volunteer with an advisory group that helped the DNR plan out the area. Town and others who supported the compromise believed it would have gone a long way toward keeping the park appealing and accessible. He said the county proposal did provide assurances to the state that the land could be logged after four years, barring some other solution. He also contends that a 2011 recreation plan showed how trails through the state trust land would connect to Wallace Falls.
“We are disappointed that the board voted against a compromise resolution which was passed unanimously by a bipartisan county council,” Town said.
The County Council voted 5-0 on Feb. 1 in support. County Executive Dave Somers, who used to represent Low’s council seat, also approved.
“For 10 years, efforts have been made to find a compromise that balances good stewardship of our natural resources with appropriate land management,” Somers said in a statement. “It took Snohomish County Councilmember Sam Low, the City of Sultan, the environmental community and many concerned citizens years of work to craft a reasonable compromise. The Board of Natural Resources ignored both the needs of a local community and a sensible solution.”
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465; [email protected]. Twitter:@NWhaglund.Spread the love
Since the War on Drugs began in earnest under Nixon and Reagan, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has ruined millions of lives for nonviolent, victimless behavior. The DEA’s drug crusade is not limited to the homeland either, as it also has sole responsibility for pursing international drug investigations.
After 9/11, among the many travesties of the Patriot Act was a little-known section that gave the DEA powerful new abilities, under the guise of “narco-terrorism.” The agency says that these new pursuits are promoting national security, and it uses the purported success to lobby Congress for more funding.
However, according to ProPublica, these narco-terrorism cases are merely staging threats, not stopping them. Many targets of the DEA have no actual involvement in terrorist groups and are the hapless victims of entrapment.
A federal court recently showed the reality of this when it threw out a conviction because the DEA relied on a known “fabricator.” This Afghan informant, identified during trial only as Qari, formed almost the entire basis of the DEA’s case against alleged narco-terrorist Haji Bagcho.
“In a 24-page ruling, issued last Friday, Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle vacated the narco-terrorism count against Bagcho, saying “the government violated the defendant’s right to due process by failing to turn over favorable impeachment evidence.” She wrote, “Evidence that the DEA’s Kabul office was told that Qari had been deemed a liar by another government agency, yet it still elected to use him as a witness would serve to undermine the reliability of the government’s investigation and its sources.””
Qari was paid $45,000 by the DEA for acting as a confidential informant while the usual income in Afghanistan was less than $600. A previous court had already designated Qari a “fabricator and/or information peddler,” and that other agency mentioned in Huvelle’s ruling had deemed his information “unrealistic and sensational.”
The DEA pleaded ignorance in using Qari, saying its failure was due to “discrepancies in the spelling of Qari’s name.”
Only a month ago, ProPublica and the New Yorker “examined some 37 narco-terrorism cases highlighted by the DEA and found that a disturbing number of them also unraveled. In most of the cases, the only evidence of a link between drugs and terrorism entered into evidence was provided by the DEA, which used paid informants to lure targets into staged narco-terrorism conspiracies.”
The case of Harouna Touré and Idriss Abdelrahman provides another example. The DEA launched an elaborate scheme to entrap the two smugglers in a narco-terrorism plot, involving fabricated tales of thousands of FARC fighters ready to collaborate against the U.S. This was the first narco-terrorism case brought against al Qaida, and DEA was hoping to make a big show.
“As the Malians’ case proceeded, however, its flaws became apparent. The defendants emerged as more hapless than hardened, childhood friends who believed that the DEA’s informants were going to make them rich. “They were lying to us. And we were lying to them,” Touré told me from prison. Judge Barbara Jones, who oversaw the final phases of the case, said, “There was no actual involvement by the defendants or the undercovers … in the activities of either al-Qaida or the FARC.” Another judge saw as many problems with the statute as with the merits of the case. “Congress has passed a law that attempts to bind the world,” he said to me.”
These sting operations, better known as entrapment, are a favorite tool of law enforcement—from local police departments to the FBI to the DEA in Afghanistan. Besides being a waste of taxpayer money, they are a morally reprehensible way for the state to carry out its dirty drug war. Even judges are not buying it anymore.French people with multiple sclerosis (MS) may look forward to some help against spasms, after the authorisation of a cannabis-based mouth spray called Savitex that is already available in Germany and the UK.
Sativex is made by GW Pharmaceuticals in Britain.
MS is an inflammatory deficiency of the body’s immune system, a disease that damages the insulation around cells in the brain and spinal cord.
This impairs nervous system communication, provoking many different symptoms, including pain. The cause is not clear, and there is no known cure. The name multiple sclerosis refers to scars particularly in the white matter of the brain and spinal cord.
The World Health Organisation 2008 estimate of people affected by MS globally was between 2 and 2.5 million. The disease is twice as common in women as in men.
According to the Multiple Sclerosis Society website, muscle stiffness and spasms are common MS symptoms, and are often described as spasticity. Certain things can trigger this, and the symptoms can make daily activities difficult and may vary over time.
Authorisation for cannabis-derived drugs has made slow headway in France, and the decision by the French Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament et des Prodiuts de Santé (ANSM) to permit the sale of Sativex, the Health Ministry said, is only a preparatory step.
It is not yet in pharmacies there.Louise Mensch’s #NeverTrump Blog, HeatStreet, Goes After The Gateway Pundit. They Fail – Miserably.
In the wake of party girl Malia’s alcohol outing, Heat Street scum attempts to go after The Gateway Pundit & Wintrich. They fail. Sad!
Heat Street’s own resident nobody Lukas Mikelionis has made somewhat of a career for himself out of posting absolute nothing stories with vacuous or equivocal titles to go along with them. His recent hit piece on conservative superstar lawyer and writer Mike Cernovich revolved around the blogger’s changing of b-roll material in a documentary – this reached Mikelionis’ usual scant audience. His work usually dies in silence.
They literally ran an entire “hit piece” on @Cernovich changing b-roll in a doc. @heatstreet has no integrity, no sense of journalism. https://t.co/e5EdYB5PP3 — Lucian B. Wintrich (@lucianwintrich) March 27, 2017
All of this should not come as a surprise considering Heat Street is the product of conspiracy-spewing lunatic Louise Mensch. From her numerous appearances lately on mainstream outlets to her now trademarked errant stupidity on Twitter, Louise Mensch has solidified her publication’s reputation as an insufferably lame liberal never-Trump propaganda tool.
The former British MP can be seen speaking without a filter on nonsense time and time again:
Oh, and for those of you who don’t know, Mensch also believes that Trump was installed as our President by the Russians, and that Steve Bannon paid Putin to kill Andrew Breitbart so that he could take over:
https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/835152898631864320?ref_src=twsrc% 5Etfw&ref_url=http% 3A% 2F% 2Facecomments.mu.nu% 2F% 3Fpost% 3D368602
https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/835153463248105472?ref_src=twsrc% 5Etfw&ref_url=http% 3A% 2F% 2Facecomments.mu.nu% 2F% 3Fpost% 3D368602
Mensch has been vocal in her support of feminism, but like so many other crazed feminazis, Mensch appears to live in the land of make believe as she can be seen ranting and raving endlessly about Russian conspiracies and strange connective links as well as the “misogyny” and abuse she receives on Twitter.
The thing to note with Heat Street is the total lack of positive support from their audience. The readership tends to condemn the work of the writers or question their merit and legitimacy, take for example the comment section on the poorly put together Joe Simonson hit piece against TGP’s own Lucian Wintrich: as one commentator wrote, “You can’t even TRY to be objective and actually tell the news, can you? The gay conservatives just break the mold. Therefore: ATTACK!!!”
Look at the following tacky intro by Simonson, clearly, he is unaware of who Lucian Wintrich even is seeing as he’s not British, sounds nothing like Milo, and has a completely different approach to being a conservative, and why are they so quick to lump him in with Milo? Because they’re both gay and wear suits, of course! Tacky and unprofessional.
Leave it to the failing Heat Street and their lazy, pandering lefty-in-disguise editorial staff to totally miss real news, real topics, and real content. Considering Louise Mensch’s role in the development of the site’s reputation, it’s no surprise they don’t work in reality.
This all came to a head today, when Lukas Mikelionis reached out to Lucian Wintrich for comment on his altercation with Malia Obama just a few nights ago:
Mikelionis, obviously ignoring the actual story to focus on a separate tweet of Wintrich’s that shows the eldest Obama girl at yet another 21+ bar. Wintrich was quick to correct him:
At this point, the transparently incompetent HeatStreet writer attempted to get Wintrich to disparage a fellow Gateway Pundit writer:
That is when Wintrich had enough and issued a lengthy letter criticizing the Never-Trumper publication, calling it out for what it is:
The fact you see the story as “TGP has to correct headline because of location” rather than “Malia Obama spotted at two 21+ bars” is telling https://t.co/BOr4WJdL1A — Lucian B. Wintrich (@lucianwintrich) March 27, 2017
I’ve had it with Never-Trump publications like @HeatStreet that solely exist to kill modern Conservatism. They’re trash. pic.twitter.com/xBp7ZkWSIY — Lucian B. Wintrich (@lucianwintrich) March 27, 2017September 2017 (version 1.17)
Update 1.17.2: The update addresses these issues.
Update 1.17.1: The update addresses these issues.
Downloads: Windows | Mac | Linux 64-bit:.tar.gz.deb.rpm | Linux 32-bit:.tar.gz.deb.rpm
Welcome to the September 2017 release of Visual Studio Code. There are a number of significant updates in this version that we hope you will like, some of the key highlights include:
If you'd like to read these release notes online, go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.
You can also check out this 1.17 release highlights video from Cloud Developer Advocate Brian Clark.
The release notes are arranged in the following sections related to VS Code focus areas. Here are some further updates:
Workbench - Better macOS native tabs support, new editor label formats.
- Better macOS native tabs support, new editor label formats. Editor - Snippet transforms, more Emmet preferences, optimized history navigation.
- Snippet transforms, more Emmet preferences, optimized history navigation. Languages - TypeScript 2.5.3, Extract Method triggers rename, language support in Markdown code blocks.
- TypeScript 2.5.3, Extract Method triggers rename, language support in Markdown code blocks. Extension Authoring - macOS Touch Bar support, styled completions and signature help text.
Insiders: Want to see new features as soon as possible? You can download the nightly Insiders build and try the latest updates as soon as they are available.
Workbench
macOS Touch Bar support
There is now support for showing actions in the macOS Touch Bar. Out of the box we add actions to navigate in editor history as well as the full debug tool bar to control the debugger:
Extensions can add commands to the Touch Bar as well via the new touchBar menu identifier. See below under Extension Authoring for more details.
Better macOS native window tabs support
You can enable native window tabs on macOS (Sierra) with the "window.nativeTabs": true setting. In this milestone, we made working with native tabs easier.
For one, you will now find a "+" action next to the last tab to open a new window as tab. We also added the typical actions to the window menu for managing tabs.
Note: Native tabs on macOS High Sierra (10.13) are currently only partially supported. We are working on a fix, stay tuned!
New Visual Studio Code logo
We've updated the VS Code logo and colors, orange for the stable release and green for Insiders.
Release Stable Insiders macOS / Linux Windows
Note: Depending on your platform, you may still see the earlier logo due to operating system caching of the application icon.
Better --wait support
VS Code can be started with the --wait argument from the command line to wait until the instance that opens is closed. In this milestone, we made this feature more powerful by also terminating the calling process when all of the editors are closed that got opened. As a consequence, you can now use --wait with instances that are already opened, making this a much faster experience.
Note: By default, we will now reuse any opened instance. To avoid that, add the -n argument to the command line.
New features around file encoding
It is now possible to configure the files.encoding as well as files.autoGuessEncoding setting per language. VS Code also now supports CP 850 and CP 865 encoding.
New setting to control editor labels
A new setting, workbench.editor.labelFormat, adjusts the default label for editors. Possible values are short, medium, long and default. By default, editors will only show information about the file path when multiple editors with the same name are opened. If any of the other options is used, the editor label will always show path information.
${workspaceFolder} in launch.json and tasks.json
We have introduced a new substitution variable ${workspaceFolder}. This variable will get substituted to the absolute path of the workspace folder containing the appropriate launch.json or tasks.json. This has the same effect as the previous ${workspaceRoot}, however we felt like the old name was not specific enough for the upcoming multi-root workspace scenarios. We are deprecating ${workspaceRoot}, though we will still support substituting it for backwards compatibility. More about variable substitution can be found here.
QuickOpen uses ripgrep
QuickOpen (⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+P)) now uses ripgrep to retrieve the full list of file names before applying the user's input filter. Windows users should see improved performance on large folders getting them on par with Linux and macOS which were previously using find to boost listing file names.
Editor
Folding regions
Folding now supports region markers. Markers are defined by the language in the language configuration.
The following languages currently have markers defined:
TypeScript/JavaScript: //#region and //#endregion and //region and //endregion
and and and C#: #region and #endregion
and C/C++: #pragma region and #pragma endregion
and F#: //#region and //#endregion
and Powershell: #region and #endregion
and VB: #Region and #End Region
Each language also has snippets available for the markers. Type '#' and invoke code completion to see them.
To have region markers configured for your language, contact the language extension provider.
Folding in off-side languages
In languages that follow the off-side rule for code blocks, empty lines belong to the next folding region.
The setting is configured in the language configuration and is enabled for the following languages:
Python, Yaml, Pug, Markdown, Clojure, CoffeeScript, FSharp.
Snippet selector
The snippet picker drop-down shown by the Insert Snippet command now displays snippets in two groups, User Snippets and Extension Snippets. User-defined snippets are listed on top to give you quick access to your favorite snippets.
Snippet transforms
The VS Code snippet engine now supports variable transformations. Transformations can change the value of a variable before inserting it. The format is var_name/regular_expression/format_string/options. The sample below is a snippet that creates a public Java class whose name is derived from the filename.
"Public Class" : { " prefix ": "pclass", " body ": [ "public class ${1:${TM_FILENAME/(.*)\\.java/${1:/capitalize}/}} {", "\tpublic $1 (${2:params}) {", "\t\t$0", "\t}", "}" ], " description ": "New public class" }
The new part is this: ${TM_FILENAME/(.*)\\.java/${1:/capitalize}/} and this is what it does:
Resolve the value for TM_FILENAME, for example myClass.java. Use the regular expression /(.*)\\.java to create a matching group for everything that precedes the.java ending, for example myClass. Take the value of the first matching group, ensure it start with capital letters ( /capitalize ), and insert it ( MyClass ).
To learn more, check out our snippet grammar to see what you can do and then get creative.
Lightbulb improvements
The new editor.lightbulb.enabled setting enables or disables the Code Action light bulb in the editor. The default value is true.
setting enables or disables the Code Action light bulb in the editor. The default value is. The Code Action menu now selects the first entry by default making it easier to run.
Improved history navigation
VS Code has commands to navigate within the editor history ( workbench.action.navigateBack, workbench.action.navigateForward ), either across or within files. During this milestone, we tweaked the experience to produce less unwanted stops in history:
We now require a minimum distance of 10 lines from one selection to another to add a new entry to history (previously we required a distance of 5 lines).
Navigating less than 10 lines replaces the last history stop within the file with that location and thus avoids introducing unwanted stops.
In addition, we no longer center the selection vertically when navigating unless the selection is outside of the view. This makes it easier to stay in context while navigating around.
Coloring of warning squiggles
You can now use a different color for warning squiggles to differentiate them from information:
Emmet preferences
We're continuing to add support for more Emmet Preferences in Emmet 2.0. In addition to the preferences we added in the last release, we now have:
bem.elementSeparator
bem.modifierSeparator
filter.commentBefore
filter.commentTrigger
filter.commentAfter
The format for the filter.commentAfter preference is different and simpler in Emmet 2.0.
For example, instead of the older format
"emmet.preferences" : { " filter.commentAfter ": "
<!-- /<%= attr('id', '#') %><%= attr('class', '.') %> -->" }
you would use
"emmet.preferences" : { " filter.commentAfter ": "
<!-- /[#ID][.CLASS] -->" }
Integrated Terminal
New rendering engine
The integrated terminal is now using a new canvas-based rendering engine which renders approximately 5 to 45 times faster, depending on the situation. This change reduces the input latency, power usage, and increases the frame rate of the terminal significantly.
You can read about this in more detail in our recent blog post.
Debugging
Debug Console messages show source location
Output messages in the Debug Console now optionally show the originating source location on the right hand side:
Clicking on this origin opens the source file in the editor.
Note: The following debuggers already support this feature:
Node.js - "inspector" protocol only
Extension Host debugging
Debugger for Chrome extension
We expect more debug extensions to adopt this feature soon.
Node Debugging
First steps towards WSL support
Thanks to a feature contributed by Bartosz Sosnowski (@bzoz), the Node.js debugger (for this milestone "legacy" protocol only), supports launching and debugging Node.js applications in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
With this feature, you can add a useWSL flag to a debug configuration to make it run in the Linux subsystem on Windows. The flag configures the debugger not only to launch the Node.js runtime in WSL but it also maps paths correctly between WSL and Windows.
Here is the simplest debug configuration for debugging hello.js in WSL:
{ " type ": "node", " request ": "launch", " name ": "Launch in WSL", " useWSL ": true, " program ": "${workspaceFolder}/hello.js" }
Viewing output from direct stdout/stderr writes
There are a number of Node.js logging libraries that write directly to the stdout stream, with process.stdout.write, rather than console.log. This is faster, but it isn't sent through Node's debug socket, so these messages were previously not shown in the Debug Console when debugging with the new 'inspector' protocol.
A PR #138 from Vakhurin Sergey (@igelbox) adds a new launch config option, "outputCapture": "std" which will tell the debug adapter to show stdout/stderr output in the Debug Console.
Tasks
We added multi folder support to tasks. If you have created a workspace with multiple folders, tasks from all workspace folders using task version "2.0.0" are collected and presented in the corresponding Run commands. Launch configuration can also reference tasks as preLaunch tasks from the same workspace folder.
Tasks auto detection for Gulp, Grunt, Jake and npm now also support multi-root workspaces. In addition, the task contribution API was enhanced to support contributing tasks for different workspace folders.
Please note that multi folder support still requires the Insiders build.
Languages
TypeScript 2.5.3
VS Code now includes TypeScript 2.5.3. This updates brings a few important fixes and improvements, with a focus on the extract method refactoring.
Import path quick suggestions in JavaScript and TypeScript
JavaScript and TypeScript have provided IntelliSense for import paths ever since VS Code 1.9. However, you may not have known about this feature because it required manually triggering IntelliSense while typing the import. With VS Code 1.17, we now automatically show module and path suggestions as soon as you start typing an import or require path:
Improved colorization in Dark+ and Light+ themes
VS Code's built-in Dark+ and Light+ themes now highlight regular expression components so that they can be more easily identified:
Colorization of format strings and string interpolation has also been improved for a few languages.
Python:
Ruby:
Extract method now triggers rename
The extract method and extract function refactoring for JavaScript and TypeScript will now automatically trigger a rename on the extracted method or function.
Auto detection of TypeScript watch build tasks
TypeScript now automatically creates watch tasks for tsconfig.json files in a project, along with the normal build tasks:
JavaScript and TypeScript IntelliSense now supports Markdown
Suggestions and parameter hints for JavaScript and TypeScript can now render Markdown content.
Improvements to JSX language scoping
JavaScript expressions inside of JSX tags now are correctly marked as being of the JavaScript language. This fixes a number of bugs around basic language features such as bracket matching and code commenting.
Language support in Markdown code blocks
Fenced code blocks in Markdown files now set the language mode for their contents. This means that basic language features such as bracket matching and code commenting now use the settings for the fenced code block's language rather than the generic Markdown language settings:
Reference links and reference link definitions are now detected as links in the editor:
Some text with a [ link ][ link definition ] in it [ link definition ]: /path/to/link
Clicking on link definition will jump to [link definition]:. /path/to/link is now also detected as a link.
CSS language improvements
The built-in CSS/LESS/SCSS language server was updated and now supports the following features:
Validation and completion for the @supports rule.
rule. Support for @import with queries.
with queries. Support for contain and various flex properties.
R language improvements
R has improved syntax highlighting based on the grammar published here.
Source Control
Improved multiple SCM support
Continuous iteration on the multiple source control provider support UX has led us to a master-detail implementation.
There is a new SOURCE CONTROL PROVIDERS section which gives you an overview when you have multiple active repositories. These can be contributed by several SCM providers; for example, you can have Git repositories side-by-side with TFS workspaces. As you select repositories in this view, they get highlighted underneath. You can use ctrl+click or shift+click to select multiple repositories. They will appear as split views underneath.
Increased Performance
We did quite a bit of performance work around the Source Control extension API and UI. Overall, the experience should be much smoother especially in repositories with a large number of objects.
Git stash commands
You might have missed this in the last release, but thanks to a PR from Krzysztof Cieślak (@Krzysztof-Cieslak), VS Code has Git stash commands in the Source Control view More Actions (...) dropdown.
New Documentation
Java language support
A new Java language topic describes how to install and use the Java Extension Pack for great Java code intelligence and debugging support in VS Code.
Tips and Tricks
We've added a Tips and Tricks topic to help you quickly become productive with VS Code. It includes the VS Code team's favorite features and keyboard shortcuts which they use on a daily basis.
Debugging Recipes
We've been working on recipes for various debugging scenarios and added a new topic outlining these guides and providing links to helpful blog posts. See Debugging Recipes for help on debugging frameworks such as React and Angular and runtimes like Electron and Docker.
We refreshed the keyboard shortcut PDFs and added the keybindings for useful commands such as Open User Settings (⌘, (Windows, Linux Ctrl+,)) and Open Keyboard Shortcuts (⌘K ⌘S (Windows, Linux Ctrl+K Ctrl+S)).
Extension Authoring
Multi root guide for extension authors
We are very close to shipping multi-root support for all users. All of the VS Code core features [SCM, Settings, Debug, Tasks,...] and extensions [HTML, JS/TS, ESLint, Docker,...] now support multi-root concepts.
We've created a guide for how to make your extension ready for multi-root workspaces. See the Adopting Multi Root Workspace APIs guide for more information. All the APIs discussed are considered stable and currently available. Note however that multi-root workspaces are only enabled in VS Code Insiders release.
The extension authors guide covers:
Basic APIs
Settings
Impact on extensions that have a language client/server model
In addition to the guide, there are new samples on our samples repository that exercise the new APIs. Look for samples with'multi' in their folder name (for example, basic-multi-root-sample).
File Save & File Open dialogs
The extension API has two new functions that allow extensions to show dialogs for saving and opening files or folders. The snippet below will show an open dialog to select image files.
vscode.window.showOpenDialog({ canSelectMany: true, filters: { 'Images' : [ 'png', 'jpg' ] } }).then(result => { if (result) { console.log(`${result.length} files have been selected`); } });
Styled completions and signature help
We have extended the API for CompletionItems and SignatureHelp such that documentation can be provided as MarkdownString. This allows for fancy rendering, embedded code snippets, and links to further documentation. Our own TypeScript and JavaScript extension is already using MarkdownString.
const item = new vscode.CompletionItem( 'Pretty' ); item.documentation = new vscode.MarkdownString( '*Hello*, `World`' );
CompletionContext
CompletionItemProvider.provideCompletionItems now is provided with a new CompletionContext parameter. This context contains information about how the completion provider was triggered:
interface CompletionContext { readonly triggerKind: CompletionTriggerKind; readonly triggerCharacter?: string ; }
Touch Bar support
Extensions can now contribute commands to the touch bar on macOS. A new menu identifier touchBar was added for this purpose:
"contributes" : { " menus ": { " touchBar ": [ { " command ": "markdown.showPreview", " when ": "editorLangId == markdown", " group ": "navigation" } ] } }
The command context is always the currently active file making it possible to show and hide the command dynamically based on the when condition. It can either have a label or an icon. If the command provides an icon, the label will not be shown because the space is very limited in the touch bar.
Note: We currently require the commands icon to be of PNG file type. SVG is not supported.
Refer to the 'active' view column
The editor layout works with columns 1, 2, and 3 and when using the showTextDocument function, you can set a column. However, often you simply want to refer to the currently active column. To make that easy, we have added a new symbolic column: ViewColumn.Active. It will always show a document in the currently active column and saves you from figuring out what column that is.
Thanks to Eric Amodio (@eamodio) for this contribution.
MarkedString vs MarkdownString
Note that with this release, you cannot use command links in MarkedStrings anymore. If this affects your extension, we have likely already contacted you. In short, use the new MarkdownString and make sure to mark it as trusted. All the details and background can be found here.
New Source Control menu
You can now use the scm/sourceControl menu id to contribute commands to the inline source control provider rows in the new SOURCE CONTROL PROVIDERS section of the Source Control view. Only context menu commands are supported for now.
Tasks contribution API
The tasks API was enhanced to support contributing tasks for different workspace folders. The constructor to create tasks in an extension has an additional argument to specific whether the task is global, user local, or belongs to a workspace folder. The constructor signature looks like this:
export class Task { constructor (taskDefinition: TaskDefinition, target: WorkspaceFolder | TaskScope.Global | TaskScope.Workspace, name: string, source: string, execution?: ProcessExecution | ShellExecution, problemMatchers?: string | string[]); }
Command vscode.startDebug is deprecated
With the introduction of a proper vscode.debug.startDebugging(...) API in the July release, it is no longer necessary to use the vscode.startDebug command to start a debug session. We've deprecating the vscode.startDebug command in August and still plan to drop it in October. If it is difficult for you to move off this feature, please speak up by commenting here.
Command vscode.workbench.customDebugRequest is deprecated
With the introduction of a proper DebugSession.customRequest(...) API in the July release, it is no longer necessary to use the vscode.workbench.customDebugRequest command to send a custom request to the debug adapter. We've deprecated the vscode.workbench.customDebugRequest command in August and still plan to drop it in October. If it is difficult for you to move off this feature, please speak up by commenting here.
Debug contributions in package.json
New Activation event onDebug
With the new debug API, extensions need a way to register their DebugConfigurationProvider early enough so that VS Code has them available when it needs them. Since DebugConfigurationProvider are typically registered in the activate function of an extension, we've introduced a new activation event onDebug which is fired just in time before any debugging activity starts (for example, configuring launch configurations or launching a debug session).
If your extension registers a DebugConfigurationProvider, make sure that your activationEvents contribution in the package.json has an onDebug entry.
Activation event onDebug:type is deprecated
With the introduction of the DebugConfigurationProvider API, it has become difficult to correctly support the activation event onDebug:type (where 'type' is a debug type). We recommend using the newly introduced activation event onDebug instead.
We are deprecating the onDebug:type activation event in the September milestone and plan to drop it in October. If it is difficult for you to move off this feature, please speak up by commenting here.
Using debuggers.startSessionCommand in package.json is deprecated
With the introduction of the resolveDebugConfiguration method on type DebugConfigurationProvider, it is no longer necessary to contribute a startSessionCommand on |
few delays, but as of now all three have been released.
Cigar Reviewed: Ramón Allones Allones Extra Edición Limitada 2011
Ramón Allones Allones Extra Edición Limitada 2011 Country of Origin: Cuba
Factory: Francisco Pérez German
Wrapper: Cuba
Binder: Cuba
Filler: Cuba
Size: 5 5/8 Inches
Ring Gauge: 44
Vitola: Fransiscos
MSRP: $12.00 (Boxes of 25, $300.00)
Release Date: September 2011
Number of Cigars Released: n/a
Number of Cigars Smoked for Review: 2
The wrapper of the Allones Extra is a bit frail, although still quite attractive. Something that is not captured so well in the photographs is the triple cap, which really stands out. The roll itself appears to be a bit tight, which is somewhat concerning, although it seems that the past two-three years of Habanos production has produced solid cigars. Aroma off the wrapper of the Ramón Allones is medium-full with leather and bits of cedars. Cold draw is a bit stronger with a sweet twang dominating hickory, a generic sweetness and a bit of a floral note. It begins the first third with a dominating twang over cedar, although eventually earth and hickory join the mixture. The Allones Extra is definitely a bit young, but the flavors are still rather Cuba. Pretty quickly in the first third the core becomes earth with grass and cedar underneath and a pepper that becomes much more noticeable on the finish. Smoke production is generally above average, but definitely inconsistent.
Into the second third and it’s becoming quite obvious that despite the overall relatively full nature of the flavor profile, the Ramón Allones still is rather frail when it comes to the flavors themselves. The underlying sweetness definitely infuses itself into the profile, although the cedar, earth and grass are still dominating. While the pepper begins to show itself more consistently, there are some complexities that begin to come through including a bit of a welcomed floral note. Strength is medium, body is medium-full.
As the final third approaches, the smoke production noticeably begins to trail off. In addition, the burn rate definitely picks up, something that began happening in the second third. There’s not a whole lot to say on the flavor side of things: a generic coffee adds itself, the grass begins to go and the flavors predictably begin to show their youth. While there’s a definite change, I definitely could see it coming.
Final Notes
Absolutely love the bands. I loved them when I saw the press release, I loved them in person. Great job on the presentation side of things.
The construction overall was above average, although it’s definitely finicky.
There’s an ongoing discussion in the BOTL.org forum (you need to register/login to view) about how non-Cuban these taste, I definitely don’t see it. To me, these are a fuller version of a lot of Cuba’s more recent releases, particularly of the smaller cigars, but these definitely don’t taste Nicaraguan to me.
While I do think they are young, some part of me has reservations to make the these will age awesome statement. I’m just concerned by the aforementioned delicacy.
The ash of the Allones Extra is signature Cuba in my opinion: bit uneven, dark and wavy.
This is not a cigar that I think would pair well with any other than water. Definitely seems like it would be overwhelmed by heavy alcohol.
Final smoking time was one hour 15 minutes.
Ramón Allones Allones Extra (EL 2011) Charlie Minato March 28, 2012 90 / 10 I like the Allones Extra and while it was not a holy grail-like experience, the reasonable price and decent availability are a bit refreshing, particularly when you compare these to the Cohiba 1966 counterpart. The Allones Extra is a good cigar, a bit young and a bit inconsistent at times, but a cigar that can be enjoyed now and will likely be a lot better in a year. For me, when contemplating a purchase on these, I'd look at them more as a regular production cigar, particularly with the price point, than a special release from Habanos. When you do that, picking the Allones Extra is not difficult. March 28, 2012Performance -- Red Hot Chili Peppers / Pearl Jam / Nirvana
San Francisco, CA, The Cow Palace, December 31, 1991
by Gina Arnold
Every year for the past twenty years on December 31st, San Francisco's famed Haight Street has been overrun by a fluorescence of Deadheads, in town for the annual Grateful Dead show at the Oakland Coliseum. Their inescapable presence on that particular day has long been a frustrating symbol that for much of America, culturally speaking, time has continued to stand stock-still.
On the afternoon of December 31st, 1991, however, the Deadheads finally met their match. They were greeted on the streets by a healthy host of obsteperous young longhairs clad in cutoffs and combat boots, their thighs all bulging from a lifetime spent on skateboards. This new contingent of rock fans had invaded the city not for the Dead, but for the concert featuring Pearl Jam, Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even the most casual observer would have had no trouble deciding which side of youth culture would be more fun to belong to.
An atmosphere of jubilation pervaded the Cow Palace as the 16,000 fans who crowded the sold-out arena celebrated a mass victory for a new popular-rock aesthetic. The victory was articulated by all three bands, each of which dissed their cross-Bay rivals in very specific terms, beginning with opening act Pearl Jam, whose singer, Eddie Vedder, greeted the roaring throng with "Want to hear some songs by the Dead?" The audience booed with gleeful derision, as Vedder burst into an a cappella rendition of Fugazi's antirape song "Suggestion." "Don't go partying on other people's pussies unless they want you to," he said (referring to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' anthem "Party on Your Pussy").
The point was well taken, for despite the rampant Seventies-isms of much of the evening's music -- Nirvana's work is often compared to Blue Oyster Cult's, the Chili Peppers draw heavily on Seventies funksters like George Clinton, and Pearl Jam is equally rooted in other, more staid classic-rock-radio conventions -- there is clearly an entirely different sensibility at work here. One of the most visible differences is a reliance on athleticism to carry each show, and the ingenuity of each band is quite amusing, from Nirvana's impromptu baseball game -- which utilized guitars as bats and amplifiers as balls -- to Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis's long handstand during one of Flea's impressive bass solos. Pearl Jam's opening set was particularly energetic. Singer Vedder climbed up the lighting ladder and, at the set's close, leapt courageously into the audience's maw.
The crowd was impressed, but the night clearly belonged to the next band up, Nirvana, whose new album, Nevermind, hit number one on the Billboard charts that very week. In fact, the record sold so unexpectedly well in the months since the show was booked that its popularity had well outstripped the headlining Chili Peppers by a factor of four to one.
Thus, after the briefest of set changes, Nirvana played a taut forty-five minute set that completely wrecked what was left of the audience's composure. Members of the mosh pit, which stretched from the stage to the back of the arena, were being thrown in the air like clods of dirt caught up in a live minefield. By the time Nirvana threw in its hit "Smells like Teen Spirit" in midset, the crowd had risen up, rolling forward in a relentless wave of motion. The atmosphere was so infectious that even members of the band's own entourage, standing in the comparative safety of the stage wings, periodically lost their heads and leapt off the rim into the boiling crowd below.
Nirvana's set drew largely from its first album, Bleach, but the audience was as familiar with those songs -- "School," "Floyd the Barber," "About a Girl" -- as it was with the selections from Nevermind which included "Lithium," "Breed," and "Drain You." Singer Kurt Cobain, his hair dyed purple for the occasion, vacillated onstage between nearly cataleptic detachment and unnerving inner intensity. The instant the set finished, he and his band mates destroyed their instruments in a cheery display of wanton violence. They didn't just throw them around, either -- they lovingly unscrewed each piece, the better to batter them into little tiny shards, while the audience howled with glee. There was no encore.
When the lights came up, the exhausted audience attempted to marshal its resources to match the Chili Peppers' legendary live force. But when the Peppers appeared -- bassist Flea upside down, lowered to the stage by ropes tied to his ankles -- they seemed to have trouble finding their much-vaunted groove. Despite the two fire-eaters, numerous naked dancers painted in Day-Glo and huge sonic booms that were set off at midnight, the final twenty minutes of the set -- which included bits of Clinton's "Atomic Dog" and all of Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic" -- were by far the best. Once again, the audience roiled. The final stage diver, Eddie Vedder, took the plunge during an encore version of "Yertle the Turtle."
The Chili Peppers ended up ruling the night out of sheer noisiness and force of character. But it was Nirvana that had already had the last word -- when bassist Chris Novoselic butchered the Youngbloods' "Get Together" as the band ended its set with the song "Territorial Pissings." "Gotta find a way, a better way," goes the manic chorus -- but it was an injunction that had just rendered itself entirely needless. Well before midnight the crowd already had.Kendrick Lamar dropped a bombshell on hip-hop again yesterday with the release of a 15-second clip from his BET Cypher at the BET Hip-Hop Awards last weekend, which will be aired in full on October 15. Kicking the section off with, “Nothing’s been the same since they dropped ‘Control,’” most initially thought K.Dot was going after Drake, with the first part a reference to Drizzy's Nothing Was The Same. But later in the day, a new theory emerged —Papoose, the Brooklyn MC who unleashed a fiery response to Kendrick's "Control" assertion that he was the "King Of New York," may have been the real target, not Drake. The lyrics lined up— XXL has detailed the entire exchange here, if you'd like a refresher —and last night Papoose seemed to agree, tweeting, "@drake, fall back sweetheart I got this #Bkln." The tweet has since been deleted, and Pap claimed today that his account was hacked. Papoose called in to XXL today to speak about the 15-second clip, his Twitter hack, why he thinks he "Ethered" Kendrick and the reason his upcoming mixtape is called Blackballed. —Dan Rys ( @danrys )
I gotta ask about your Twitter last night. You said today it got hacked?
Yeah, it was some weird shit like that, but you know, I got a team that handles that for me. I reached out to them and they handled that, and we caught it real quick.
So you saw the Kendrick clip that came out from the BET Cypher?
Yeah, yeah, I was hearing about it a lot, and then when I actually clicked on that, I couldn't believe that that was what everybody was making a big deal out of.
What was your reaction?
Oh, it was comical, man. I laughed.
A lot of people said he was going at you.
I agree with the people, I looked at the majority and they were saying he was going at me. So I agree with the listeners, I agree with the fans. They say majority rules, so I agree with the majority.
You've gone back at Kendrick in the past with a verse. Are you planning on that this time?
Yeah yeah, he can't fuck with me. He'll never be able to shine my shoes, lyrically. So I'm just gonna be able to continue to prove that, to show and prove, like I did on "Control." This is hip-hop, I love hip-hop, but I just want to continue to show and prove that he can't fuck with me lyrically. You can look forward to that in my next release, straight up. I live in the studio, that's my second home. So yeah, I'm definitely going to respond.
Are you going to wait to hear the full verse?
I don't gotta wait, he's very predictable. I already know what he's capable of and what he's gonna say; he's very predictable. I don't gotta wait. I can go right now and crush that little 15-second shit he did. That ain't even about nothing. The guy's predictable; he's a very predictable artist. I already know what he's gonna say before he even says it.
It kinda seemed like Kendrick had gone through your "Control" response line by line in his verse.
Oh, definitely. Cosmic Kev out in Philly, when he played it, he said the record reminded him of "Ether." I think that just ate his soul alive; as much as he wanted to take the high road and try to say that he was too much of a big shot to respond, I think it ate him alive and he couldn't resist.
You think you struck a nerve with him?
Oh, more than a nerve, I struck the entire nervous system. He couldn't sleep at night, when he opened his freezer he'd see my face, when he closed his eyes...[ Laughs ] I'm just bullshitting. But I think that struck a nerve, definitely. It shook the ground up, let's keep it real—when I dropped my response, it shook the ground up. You got guys who say, "this response or that one," but come on, man, my "Control" response has over a million views already. I look around at some of the other guys, they got 300,000 or something like that, you know what I mean? There's no comparison. Come on.
It seems like there's more and more people getting into the competition spirit recently.
You know what, it's hip-hop and it's all about competition, but don't get into a competition with someone you can't fuck with lyrically. I think when you're out of your league, you're out of your league, and I think lyrically, what hip-hop is about is showcasing your talent, and I think I show and proved that I'm a true lyricist. So for me to go at somebody, I'm not stepping out of my boundaries. I don't give a fuck about how much records have sold, how much arenas he's sold out, how shiny his shoes is, or how real or how fake his chain is. This is hip-hop, it's not about that, it's about showcasing your talent, what you're about, what you can bring to the table. So I feel like some guys are out of their league, jumping out of a window with a true lyricist. But to each his own; this is hip-hop, let's keep hip-hop what it's about, and it's about talent, it's about ability, substance, concepts. It's about being a true MC, it's not about anything else. So don't tell me a guy sold this, or sold that, and that makes him a great artist; that don't make him shit but a good salesman, and that's it. Period.
I love hip-hop, man, I'm enjoying this. His response at the BET Awards was comical; they should have brought me there if they wanted a real MC on the microphone.
What else have you been working on?
A lot, man, I got a mixtape I've been working on called Blackballed, because that's what I am, I've been blackballed. I am the most feared MC, the industry is afraid of me, and that's the only reason why I'm not in the position that I deserve to be in, but I keep resurfacing because you cannot deny talent, you cannot stop destiny. So for me to always be in the headlines, in the worst and the best ways, every time they turn around, that's just the reaction that takes place when you try to stop destiny or control talent and hold somebody back. This is what happens. It has a way of reacting. They'll never be able to stop me or control what I do. But I am the most feared MC, and a lot of your favorite artists and execs—a lot of people hated on me, man. I've been hated on, and that's the only reason I'm not in the position I deserve to be in. So that's why that's the title of my new mixtape, Blackballed.
I'm also working on my next album at the same time. I'm still working Nacirema Dream, it's doing well for an independent release; I released it on my own, it charted, and it did extremely well for an independent project. I'm focused, man. I won't let you down, never man.A Cowboys fan took video of fans fighting on the concourse of the Skins’ stadium in Landover after Dallas beat Washington Monday night. Though the clip’s narrator claimed a man was stabbed, EMS says they did not respond to a stabbing.
Mike Vaughn uploaded the video to Facebook. At one point in the video, he finds a Cowboys fan on the floor getting help. Nearby, Vaughn sees a knife as a security member steps on it to keep it in place.
Vaughn deduces that the man in the Dallas jersey was stabbed. According to Fox 5, however, the Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department took no calls about a stabbing at the game. PGPD said they made two arrests, but more details aren’t available. If you have any information, drop a line at [email protected].
Update (2:24 p.m.): Vaughn emailed us with some more details about the incident.
I have a bit more which wasn’t in the video. After I stopped filming, I was talking to a couple guys who witnessed the knife altercation and they said that they guy on the ground was the one who pulled the knife. The guy he pulled the knife on then punched him in the face, which is why he was bloody on the ground.
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[Fox 5]The Strange Life of Ilya Ehrenburg
Mark Weber
Ilya Ehrenburg, the leading Soviet propagandist of the Second World War, was a contradictory figure. A recent article in the weekly Canadian Jewish News sheds new light on the life of this "man of a thousand masks." [1]
Ehrenburg was born in 1891 in Kiev to a non-religious Jewish family. In 1908 he fled Tsarist Russia because of his revolutionary activities. Although he returned to visit after the Bolshevik revolution, he continued to live abroad, including many years in Paris, and did not settle in the Soviet Union until 1941. A prolific writer, Ehrenburg was the author of almost 30 books. The central figure of one novel, The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitschwantz, is a pathetic "luftmensch," a recurring character in Jewish literature who seems to live "from the air" without visible means of support.
As a Jew and a dedicated Communist, Ehrenburg was a relentless enemy of German National Socialism. During the Second World War, he was a leading member of the Soviet-sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. (At fund-raising rallies in the United States for the Soviet war effort, two leading members of the Committee displayed bars of soap allegedly manufactured by the Germans from the corpses of murdered Jews.)
Ehrenburg is perhaps most infamous for his viciously anti-German wartime propaganda. In the words of the Canadian Jewish News: "As the leading Soviet journalist during World War II, Ehrenburg's writings against the German invaders were circulated among millions of Soviet soldiers." His articles appeared regularly in Pravda, Izvestia, the Soviet military daily Krasnaya Zvezda ("Red Star"), and in numerous leaflets distributed to troops at the front.
In one leaflet headlined "Kill," Ehrenburg incited Soviet soldiers to treat Germans as sub-human. The final paragraph concludes: [2]
“The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German means to use the most terrible oath. From now on the word German strikes us to the quick. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day... If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, or if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime. If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another -- there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days, do not count kilometers. Count only the number of Germans killed by you. Kill the German -- that is your grandmother's request. Kill the German -- that is your child's prayer. Kill the German -- that is your motherland's loud request. Do not miss. Do not let through. Kill.”
Ehrenburg's incendiary writings certainly contributed in no small measure to the orgy of murder and rape by Soviet soldiers against German civilians.
Until his death in 1967, "his support for the Soviet state, and for Stalin, never wavered," the Canadian Jewish News notes. His loyalty and service were acknowledged in 1952 when he received the Stalin Prize. In keeping with official Soviet policy, he publicly criticized Israel and Zionism.
The Canadian Jewish News further writes:
“ … The recent disclosure that Ehrenburg arranged to transfer his private archives to Jerusalem's Yad Vashem library and archive, while still alive, comes as a stunning revelation. The reason this information has come to light only now is that Ehrenburg agreed to transfer his archive on condition that the transfer, and his will, remain secret for 20 years after his death. On Dec. 11 [1987], with the 20-year period expired, Israel's daily Maariv related Ehrenburg's story…”
The collection includes material about the important wartime Jewish partisan movement. Among the documents in the collection is one concerning a pogrom in Malalchovka, a village near Moscow, which took place in 1959.
This new revelation about one of the most influential figures of the Stalinist regime shows that, whatever he may have said for public consumption, Ehrenburg never privately disavowed Zionism or forgot his ancestry.
Notes
1. Rose Kleiner, "Archives to throw new light on Ehrenburg," Canadian Jewish News (Toronto), March 17, 1988, p. 9.
2. Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam (London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 2nd edition, 1979), pp. 6546, 201; Erich Kern (ed.), Verheimlichte Dokumente (Munich: FZ- Verlag, 1988), pp. 260-61, 353-55.
From The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89 (Vol. 8, No. 4), pages 507-509.A colleague of mine severely nerd-sniped me at work recently with this rather innocuous-sounding challenge. I think it's a rather lovely little exercise and decided to write up my solution.
This post is designed to be read as a programming exercise. It will guide you along as it helps you break the problem into parts. If you want, you can skip to the end and read all the solutions (but that would be cheating).
Download the literate haskell source file first; you can fill in the gaps and then compile it with ghc permutations.lhs or load it into GHCi with :l permutations.lhs, like any other haskell file.
Consider the following shuffling technique:
Take one card from the top of the deck and discard it into a second pile. Take another card from the top of the deck, and put it at the bottom of the deck. Repeat these two steps, putting all discarded cards from step 1 into the same pile, until the original deck is all gone and the second pile has all the cards in it.
For example, suppose we have a deck with 5 cards. The process looks like this:
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The problem is: how many shuffles does it take until a deck is in the same order as when you started, for a deck with an arbitrary number of cards? Write a function, f :: Int -> Int, such that, for a deck with n cards, f n is the minimum number of shuffles required to return it to its original order.
We're going to use Haskell, because this is all about functions (in the mathematical sense), and so Haskell, being a functional programming language, is especially well suited to the job.
{-# OPTIONS_GHC -Wall #-} {-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-} module Main where import Control.Monad (forM_) import Data.Maybe (catMaybes) import Data.List (nub, sort) import System.Environment (getArgs) import Test.QuickCheck hiding (infiniteList) todo :: a todo = error "todo"
A Card is represented as an Int, except that the type checker should ensure that we don't put a Card where an Int should go, or vice versa.
newtype Card = Card { unCard :: Int } deriving ( Eq, Ord, Arbitrary ) instance Show Card where show = show. unCard
We will represent a deck of cards as a list. The head of the list will represent the top of the deck.
type Deck = [ Card ] unCardAll :: Deck -> [ Int ] unCardAll = map unCard makeDeck :: Int -> Deck makeDeck n = map Card [ 1.. n]
Our first job is to define a function that only performs steps 1 and 2 of the shuffle. What type should this function be? It should take a deck and a new pile, and return an updated deck and pile, so let's go with (Deck, Deck) -> (Deck, Deck).
step :: ( Deck, Deck ) -> ( Deck, Deck ) step = todo
Now, we should think about what properties our step function should satisfy, so that we can get QuickCheck to test them for us. Here's one: after performing step some arbitrary number of times on a deck, we should end up with the same number of cards that we started with:
prop_step_sameLength :: Deck -> Int -> Bool prop_step_sameLength deck n' = sumLength (times n step (deck, [])) == length deck where n = (abs n') `mod` (length deck + 1 ) times m f z = iterate f z!! m sumLength (a, b) = length a + length b
Here's another: after one step, we should have one fewer card in the deck (unless we started with an empty deck, in which case we should still have an empty deck)
prop_step_oneFewer :: Deck -> Bool prop_step_oneFewer deck = length (fst (step (deck, []))) == newLength deck where newLength [] = 0 newLength d = (length d) - 1
Write step and make sure it satisfies these properties before continuing! You can run the tests by typing runhaskell permutations.lhs, or by loading it into GHCi and typing main.
Next we need to write a function, shuffle, that performs the shuffle on a deck. So its type should be Deck -> Deck. Here are some Prelude functions that might come in handy:
dropWhile :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> [a] : drops elements from the front of a list until it finds an element that satisfies a predicate.
: drops elements from the front of a list until it finds an element that satisfies a predicate. iterate :: (a -> a) -> a -> [a] : successively applies a function to a value, and returns all the intermediate values. So iterate f x is [x, f x, f (f x)...]
shuffle :: Deck -> Deck shuffle = todo
Test properties for shuffle : shuffling a deck should return another deck with the same number of cards:
prop_shuffle_sameLength :: Deck -> Bool prop_shuffle_sameLength deck = length (shuffle deck) == length deck
Shuffling a deck should move the top card to the bottom:
prop_shuffle_topToBottom :: Deck -> Bool prop_shuffle_topToBottom [] = True prop_shuffle_topToBottom deck @ (topCard : _) = last (shuffle deck) == topCard
Next up is a function order which, given a function, gives us the number of times we have to apply it to a given value to get that value again. So its type should be Eq a => (a -> a) -> a -> Int. We need the Eq constraint so that we can test values to see if they're the same as the first one.
order :: Eq a => (a -> a) -> a -> Int order = todo
To test order : Suppose we have a function f, and some arbitrary number n. Define f such that f(x) is x - 1 for positive x, and n otherwise. Then, the number of times we have to apply f to n to get n again should be n + 1:
prop_order_subtractOne :: Int -> Bool prop_order_subtractOne n' = order f n == n + 1 where n = abs n' + 1 -- ensure that n >= 1 f x | x > 0 = x - 1 | otherwise = n
For our first attempt at answering the question, we can use a naive solution, which is just to keep shuffling the deck until we get the same deck again. We've got all the building blocks now, and all that remains is to put them together.
f1 :: Int -> Int f1 = todo
f1 is easier to test by looking at particular cases. This code gives a few inputs and expected outputs for f. If you run the tests (with runhaskell permutations.lhs, as before) it will check that your f1 works for all of these values.
examples_f :: [( Int, Int )] examples_f = [ ( 4, 2 ), ( 5, 5 ), ( 52, 510 ), ( 53, 53 ), ( 100, 120 ) ]
Now try doing f1 200, which should give you 8460. Notice how long it takes to compute. We can do much better than this, but in order to improve our implementation, we need to do some maths.
shuffle is a function of type Deck -> Deck, but we can also imagine it like a function S -> S, where S is the set of natural numbers from 1 up to n. Let's call this new function g. g takes the initial position of a card in the deck, and gives you the position after shuffling the deck once. So in the case where n = 5, we have:
g :: S -> S g x = case x of 1 -> 5 -- The card on top goes to the bottom 2 -> 1 -- The card second from the top goes to the top 3 -> 4 -- and so on 4 -> 2 5 -> 3
What do we know about this function?
Firstly, we know that this function must be injective, that is, each output corresponds to exactly one input. This is true because we can't end up with two cards in the same position after shuffling.
We also know that it must be surjective, which means that for every position in the deck (ie every number from 1 up to n), after a shuffle, there must be one card that ends up at that position. If we have a deck of 5 cards, and we shuffle it, we must always end up with a deck where there is a card in the 1st position, and a card in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
Another thing we know about this function is that it its domain (the set of values that it accepts as input) and its range (the set of values that its output is in) are the same. In our case g has S as its domain and its range.
A function that is both injective and surjective is called a bijective function, and a bijective function whose domain and range are the same is called a permutation. Permutations have some really nice properties, and knowing about these will help us write a correct and efficient program.
Here's another way of writing g :
g = (1 5 3 4 2)
This is called cycle notation, and is a useful way of writing permutations. It says that g takes 1 to 5, 5 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 2, and 2 back to 1.
We can tell from this notation that g has an order of 5, because the cycle has 5 numbers in it. Each time we apply g, we move the cycle around by 1 step; therefore moving the cycle around 5 times gets us back to where we started.
What about the permutation for a deck of 13 cards? In Haskell, it would look like this:
g :: S -> S g x = case x of 1 -> 13 2 -> 2 3 -> 12 4 -> 6 5 -> 11 6 -> 3 7 -> 10 8 -> 5 9 -> 9 10 -> 1 11 -> 8 12 -> 4 13 -> 7
In this case, g takes 1 to 13, 13 to 7, 7 to 10, and 10... back to 1. What can we do when the cycle doesn't have all of the numbers in it?
The answer is to take the next number that isn't in any of our cycles and make a new one. So given that one of the cycles in g is (1 13 7 10), we can start with 2, to get another cycle: (2). We are still missing 3, so start with 3 to get another cycle: (3 12 4 6). Repeat this until all of the numbers occur in at least one cycle:
g = (1 13 7 10)(3 12 4 6)(5 11 8)
We usually leave out one-cycles (eg: (2), (9) ) because they don't change the meaning of the function.
Since no number appears in more than one of these cycles (another way of saying this is that they are disjoint), when trying to determine the order, we can consider each of them individually.
The first cycle has 4 elements, so on its own, it must have an order of 4. Does that mean g has an order of 4? No, because applying g four times to 5 gives us 11.
We know that (1 13 7 10) on its own has an order of 4, and so does (3 12 4 6). However, (5 11 8) has an order of 3. What's the minimum number of times we have to apply g to get all of these back to where they started?
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The visualisation says that f, applied n times to any of the numbers in the big circles, gives you the number in the corresponding little circle. We start with n = 0, that is, the identity function; clicking 'Next' increments n, and clicking 'Prev' decrements it. If a number is mapped to itself then it is highlighted. The dots along the bottom show how often each of the cycles maps all of the numbers in it to themselves.
The answer, which hopefully is demonstrated by the visualisation, is the least common multiple of all of the cycle lengths. So in this case, it's 12.
So now we have a new way of calculating the order of the shuffle for a given deck size: do the shuffle once, use the resulting deck to work out how to represent the shuffle as a set of disjoint cycles, and then get the least common multiple of the cycle lengths.
First we need a way of representing a cycle in Haskell. Let's go with this:
newtype Cycle = Cycle [ Int ] deriving ( Eq, Ord ) instance Show Cycle where show ( Cycle xs) = "(" ++ join " " (map show xs) ++ ")" where join glue (y : ys) = y ++ (concatMap (glue ++ ) ys) join _ [] = ""
So the cycle for g when n = 5 would be:
g = Cycle [1,5,3,4,2]
There's a small problem here: suppose we make another Cycle from the list [5,3,4,2,1]. This Cycle still takes 1 to 5, 5 to 3, and so on, like g. So we should consider them to be the same. However, Haskell will look at the inner list to decide whether two cycles are equal. Because the lists are different, Haskell will think that the cycles are different.
We can get around this issue by saying that a Cycle should always start with its smallest element. So the second representation of g above would be invalid.
A good way of implementing this in Haskell is to define a smart constructor: a function like Cycle whose type is [Int] -> Cycle, but which makes sure our statement above holds. Then, as long as we remember to use our smart constructor rather than Cycle, we'll be ok.
If we were writing a proper program, we would probably define Cycle and its smart constructor in a separate module and then only export the smart constructor, to ensure that we don't make this mistake. Here it's probably not worth the effort.
The next task is to write this smart constructor function. Let's call it makeCycle. It should take an infinite list of cycling values, cut it off at the first instance where a value is repeated, and then return a Cycle where the smallest value comes first.
While implementing makeCycle, you might find it useful to define a function |
, said: ‘What we learned from Fukushima, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, is the risk (of a meltdown) was underestimated at the beginning.
A preventative solution developed in new plants is In-Vessel Melt Retention (IVMR), which intends to stop the progression of a meltdown by automatically flooding the reactor pit with water if the system detects a rising temperature in the core, reducing the risk of human oversight.
‘IVMR strategy will be implemented in some of the new reactors, in particular in new Chinese designs for which IVMR is the preferred strategy,’ said Fichot.
Similar to sC02-HeRo and SAMOFAR, this would increase the level of safety at nuclear power plants. But at the moment IVMR can only prevent meltdowns in reactors with a power capacity below 600 megawatt electric (MWe). Many reactors run at 1 000 MWe and higher, and for them the possibility of IVMR preventing the progression of nuclear meltdowns can’t be guaranteed.
Fichot is the project coordinator of an EU-funded study, also called IVMR, investigating the IVMR strategy for higher power reactors.
'We are trying to identify the maximum level of power in a plant for which this strategy can be implemented.’
IVMR can help reduce the risk of a nuclear meltdown, but if it still occurs it won’t completely eliminate the risk of contaminating the environment. It would have to be combined with other safety measures to maximise the level of safety.
Responsibility would then rest with utility companies who implement these safety measures. However, this can be difficult in light of the very large investments needed to build a nuclear power plant, as well as for the general costs during its lifespan.
Despite this, utility companies want to build reactors as safely as possible, as this would help sway public opinion, but to do so they need to have a better picture of the overall costs.
‘If there is a clear cost of electricity production, and also transparency on safety, then public acceptance for nuclear energy may be easier,’ said Fichot.
If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.We live in a world filled with material wealth, live longer and healthier lives, and yet anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and depression have never been more common. What are the driving forces behind these interlinked global epidemics?
In this series, Professor Mark Williams (Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at Oxford University) and Dr Danny Penman discuss the recent scientific advances that have radically altered our understanding of depression and related disorders. Also discussed is the latest treatments and therapies that are offering hope to those suffering from depression.
Professor Williams co-developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), a treatment for anxiety, stress and depression that is at least as effective as drugs at preventing new episodes of depression. It's now one of the preferred treatments for depression recommended by the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The same technique, based upon an ancient form of meditation, can also help us cope more effectively with the relentless demands of our increasingly frantic world. Professor Williams and Dr Penman co-authored the bestselling book Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World.Earlier this week, we provided some tips for busy parents and how they can cope with the stress and anxiety of the busy back-to-school season, but today I want to talk about the anxiety our children may experience as they ease into the school year.
You may remember back-to-school time fondly from your childhood as I do, ripe with the anticipation of new experiences, new friends and the excitement of autumn. But if you really put yourself back in that place, I bet you remember those end-of-summer nerves too; the uncertainty of what lies ahead (“What if I can’t find my locker? What if I have no one to sit with at lunch?”) as well as the worry once reality sets in (“Will I ever make it through with such tough teachers? How can I get my classmates to like me?”). A brand-new school year can be daunting when you’re young!
School is a drastic shift in routine for kids who’ve grown used to a more relaxed summertime schedule, and it forces them to face a variety of challenges – new classes, the return of homework and tests, pressure to find a place among their peers. These challenges can be even more pronounced for children who are transitioning between elementary to middle school or middle to high school, as well as students who are starting out in a completely new school system. This time of year, it is important to know how to support your children through normal anxiety as they undergo this transition, as well as how to spot signs that there may be a deeper problem.
Be Your Child’s Rock
Kids pick up on their parents’ anxiety, so it’s really important that you are a positive role model. If you’re able to demonstrate a confident and optimistic outlook, it can boost your children’s ability to handle situations confidently as well.
Engaging with your children should be a priority year-round, of course, but during the back-to-school transition, check in with your kids often and try to show some extra support for a couple months. Make an effort to really talk to them and offer an ear to listen. Ask about the challenges they’ve faced so far and what they’re looking forward to.
Encourage them to explore new opportunities, and discuss their goals for the future. Share the obstacles you faced and overcame in your youth. If your child is feeling anxious or fearful, be sure to validate his worries and assure him that what he’s feeling is normal.
Remember: Stay Firm but Flexible
Be careful not to contribute unnecessarily to your children’s stress by making them participate in activities they don’t like, or pushing them to be academically perfect. Mistakes are part of the process of growing up, and it’s important to be flexible as a parent and work with your children’s own strengths and weaknesses. There is a difference between “good” stress that engages and energizes, and “bad” stress, which can lead to anxiety, depression and other help problems — and the line is different for every child. There should be clearly defined rules that you don’t budge on – they have to attend school unless they’re sick, work hard in their classes, and go to bed by a certain time, for example – but also areas where you allow your children to exert their own control, such as letting them choose what to wear to school (within reason), what to eat for lunch, and which activities to participate in. It is healthy and important for children to begin making decisions for themselves – an age-appropriate degree of autonomy contributes to self-confidence, maturity and emotional intelligence.
Practical Steps to Ease Your Child’s Transition
Implement structure. Kids succeed when they have structure in their lives. To cut down on stress, set a consistent routine. This includes a practical bedtime that allows for restorative sleep and plenty of time to get ready for school so that mornings aren’t chaotic.
Focus on nutrition. Make sure your children are well-fed. This doesn’t just mean a full belly and enough calories. A well-balanced, nutrient-dense diet is key to ensuring that your kids have the energy and focus they need to get them through the day. (Check out this interesting and informative interview with dietician Toni Havala about kids, nutrition and the school year, which recently appeared in the Chicago Tribune.)
Create a homework haven. Younger kids, as well as older kids who have trouble focusing, may need a designated homework area that’s free from distractions. While they’re working, check in and offer to review their work, but be careful not to hover — and definitely fight the urge to do any of the work for your children!
Special surprises are nice. If you can, have something nice planned for when your kids get home from school, whether it’s a fun activity or yummy treat. Even aloof teenagers will appreciate coming home to a warm batch of cookies, even if they won’t admit it!
Limit “screen time” after school. In the hours between school and bedtime, kids’ time is best spent getting fresh air, focusing on homework, reading, or otherwise enjoying themselves without TV, cellphones, video and computer games, and the Internet. Too much screen time can amplify behavioral issues and lead to attention problems, impaired academic performance, and trouble sleeping, among other problems.
Recognizing a Serious Problem
It’s completely normal for students of all ages to experience stress as school starts up again. However, if your child hasn’t seemed to adjust within a few weeks to a month, there could be cause for concern.
Your child may be struggling with a more serious anxiety issue if he:
Is particularly upset in the mornings or tries to get out of going to school, perhaps complaining of an ailment that suddenly goes away if he stays home.
Experiences frequent stomach aches not attributed to other causes, which recent research has indicated may be an early warning sign for anxiety in children.
early warning sign for anxiety Is angry, irritable, or has trouble concentrating or doing homework
Shows a change in eating or sleeping patterns, or has frequent nightmares
Withdraws from activities and friends he once enjoyed
“If your child is becoming more upset in the mornings, or refusing to go to school, listen to your child’s specific fears and concerns and then check in with the teacher. The teacher may have some clues about what is hard for your child. And sometimes a child’s fears can look like a lack of cooperation, and a teacher’s response to that can only reinforce the fears. It may be that some good teamwork and sharing of information can help create a sense of safety and continuity for your child and help him over the hurdle,” said Dr. Tamar Chansky, in a Q&A for Psychology Today.
However, talking to your child’s teacher or school officials may just be the beginning of what you’ll need to do to address the situation. If you suspect that your child is experiencing anxiety or stress beyond what could be considered normal back-to-school nerves, schedule an appointment with a professional. The sooner anxiety is caught and dealt with, the better. (For more information, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America offers a great resource on anxiety in children and teens on their website.)
A Note on Bullying
Unfortunately, bullying in schools today has become a more serious problem than ever before – and not only can it cause serious anxiety and depression in kids, but it can be deadly, with bullied children at a heightened risk for suicide.
Bullying happens among all age groups, in private and public schools alike. And with cellphones, laptops, and iPads, the bullying can take place well outside of school hours. In these often frightening times we live in, it’s good for parents to know some of the signs of bullying so that they can recognize them and open a dialog with their children.For a few days there the Romney campaign was boasting a lot about having Big Mo — and the press corps actually fell for it, briefly. At this point, however, the reality seems to be sinking in: if Romney has Big Mo, it looks like this:
Photo
Despite the Denver Debacle and its aftermath, state polls are showing a clear Obama lead in the electoral college, which if anything is getting a bit stronger. The polls could be systematically wrong — although the most likely sources of systematic error are undercounting of cell-phone-onlys and Latinos, both of which would suggest that Obama’s position is stronger, not weaker, than the polls say. Or there could be a game-changing event, even in these waning days. But the odds are strongly in Obama’s favor — three to one, says Nate Silver, even better than that, says Sam Wang. (I worry that Sam understates correlation, but that’s another story).
Why? Jonathan Cohn singles out the auto bailout, and rightly so. I’d add, however, that the killing of Osama bin Laden mattered too. Foreign policy hasn’t been a big issue in this election, but that in itself is a big gain for Democrats compared with the usual taunt that they’re weak on terrorism or whatever; notice how hard Romney has tried to restart the usual meme, with negative success.
And what the auto rescue and the bin Laden strike have in common is that they were both very courageous decisions — decisions that could easily have gone wrong, that faced lots of second-guessing. You can criticize Obama for many things (and I have, and will in future), but he showed true grit when it mattered, and now seems likely to reap the reward.This April 15, a strange anniversary passed without comment. Twenty years ago on that date, a cheap-looking, utterly surreal TV show aired at 11:00 p.m. on a network that showed nothing but reruns of crusty old cartoons.
That show was Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and over the next two decades it would completely reshape Cartoon Network in its image, spawning the entirety of Adult Swim and inspiring a new generation of surreal humorists.
We talked to many of the creative minds behind SGC2C, and assembled this terrifyingly complete history of the show’s rise and fall. Read on, and check out our list of the show's best moments in the gallery at the bottom of the page.
IN THE BEGINNING
"You have to spend money to make money," they say. But Ted Turner isn't a guy who plays by the rules. When Turner founded Cartoon Network in 1992, he'd gained the rights to the cartoon libraries of MGM, Fleischer Studios and Hanna-Barbera, totaling something like 8,500 hours of animation. Plenty to keep a channel running.
Mike Lazzo started out in the mailroom at TBS before winning a promotion to be the fledgling network's first programmer. His job was, essentially, to arrange these crusty old cartoons into combinations that would entice '90s kids to watch them. It wasn't easy. For the first four years of the network's history, the budget for original programming was a big fat zero.
Lazzo says, "We went to Ted and said, 'Please can we have some money?' And he said, like any parent would, 'Use what you've got, and then maybe we can talk later about this.'"
With next to no budget, Lazzo's team realized they couldn't even hire an artist to come up with a character. So they went into the only pool of assets they had -- the Hanna-Barbera catalogue. Unfortunately, Turner had bought the Hanna-Barbera catalogue, but not necessarily the rights to the characters. When Lazzo asked which ones Cartoon Network could make new properties out of, Hanna-Barbera's answer was pretty much "just the forgettable ones."
We're talking Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har-Har. Touche Turtle and Dum-Dum. Wacky Races. And, of course, Space Ghost.
Space Ghost and Dino Boy premiered on CBS in 1966 and lasted a meager 20 episodes. The title character was a white-clad intergalactic policeman created by legendary cartoonist Alex Toth while working for the company. Toth hated the design, complaining about the character's "amoeba-like" cape and clunky wristbands. "I don't know what all the shouting's about. I always thought it was mediocre," he said.
So Lazzo and crew started to have daily meetings to come up with ideas for ways to play with these properties. One of the strongest involved Wacky Races -- each episode began with the race already in progress, so the team decided, as a stunt, to edit them all together into one long movie where the cartoon drivers would traverse the entire United States. They'd call it Wacky Races Coast to Coast.
The night before production was set to begin, Mike Lazzo had a fever dream about Space Ghost hosting a talk show. He woke up, went into the office, sat down and said, "Cancel the Wacky Races thing. We're doing Space Ghost: Coast to Coast." At least it rhymed.
BEHIND THE DESK
1994 was the height of the Late Night Wars, as Leno and Letterman and Arsenio brought in huge viewers for their respective networks. A cartoon talk show was an obvious fit.
Cartoon Network staffer Andy Merrill and producer Khaki Jones took a reel-to-reel tape machine and a CNN interview with Denzel Washington and hid out in a closet in the Williams Street building, splicing together bits of Space Ghost episodes with the footage to create a low-budget pilot that featured SG asking Denzel questions about his first Oscars experience and introducing a clip of his new movie.
It was funny, so Lazzo took $100,000 of the budget and sent it to a production company in Los Angeles to put together a super-slick second pilot, with original Space Ghost voice Gary Owens, Film Threat founder Chris Gore and an interview with Emma Thompson. And it sucked. Sucked hard. It was flat and corny and charmless (not to mention insanely expensive). So Lazzo and crew pulled back and decided to produce the show guerrilla-style in Atlanta on the cheap.
HIS MASTER'S VOICE
They went to Crawford Communications, an Atlanta-area production house that had done work for Turner in the past, and asked them to pitch out the series. Clay Martin Croker, an animator at Crawford, heard producers talking about it and quickly realized they had no idea how to approach the project -- they didn't even realize that Space Ghost was a pre-existing character. He jumped in and helped them conceptualize many of the show's core concepts, including having SG's foes be his production team.
Croker had seen the L.A. pilot and understood why it didn't work. It needed context. He told me, "I always felt like if you put Batman on The Tonight Show set and took away the cave, the Batmobile and the villains, it's going to be boring."
At the first meeting with Cartoon Network, Croker pitched Zorak as the show's bandleader. When the team sat down to watch old Space Ghost episodes, the first one they did was "The Ovens of Moltar," which featured a clip of the villain Moltar looking into a computer monitor and pulling levers. Bingo, he was drafted as Coast to Coast's director.
Croker wasn't angling for a voice role -- he thought Zorak would be done by Don Messick, his original actor -- but Cartoon Network didn't want to pay for Messick. Croker mentioned that he could do the voice. He delivered a test line and Lazzo gave him the gig on the spot. Andy Merrill was originally supposed to voice Moltar (in a sort of hillbilly accent), but when the team decided they needed more of a "Ted Cassidy approach," Croker worked up a pitch-shifted character voice that nailed it.
The team brought in actor George Lowe, who had done VO spots for TBS and could do a reasonable (and affordable) Gary Owens. Lowe's take on Space Ghost was more sardonic and unhinged, and his off-script asides and ad-libs in the recording booth quickly began to find their way into episodes.
Writer Matt Maiellaro came on board as well, contributing to many of the show's early episodes.
Space Ghost Coast to Coast's core team was completed with editor Michael Cahill, who is credited with the notoriously awkward timing that made the humor sing. Cahill had to edit the show in a closet next to a photocopier, and the team would get together at nights when Turner conference rooms were empty to write scripts.
Less than 90 minutes of Space Ghost animation was created over the course of the original show's 20 episodes, so the production team was heavily limited in what they could have their stars do. Croker created five new pieces of animation for the first episode. It wasn't until two years into production that Croker pitched a list of new scenes that the show could use -- things like Space Ghost zapping the guests, for example. They produced about 15 new animations in 1995, deliberately blurring the linework and adding film grain so they'd meld with the older clips.
The talk show set was actually created in miniature by prop designer Jack Maloney and shot from multiple angles to make camera changes feel more natural. The entire thing was built from plexiglass, and the monitor that guests appeared on was run by a little motor. Animation footage was rotoscoped to remove the backgrounds and composited over these new backgrounds.
Editor Tom Roche says that each episode contained over 1,000 edits in under 15 minutes, with the majority of those being the "lip flap" required to make Space Ghost's mouth roughly match his dialogue. Far and away the longest section of each episode's production was spent in the editing room.
Because the network's programming was so free-ranging, Lazzo and crew could pretty much do whatever they wanted. Hence, the birth of Space Ghost's half-length running time -- one commercial break in the middle and a total length of around 15 minutes.
Zoom In
POWER BEAMS
The first episode premiered on April 15, 1994. Lazzo and crew had a half-dozen in the can at the time, and you can see how they were mastering the format as the first few episodes went by. Questions about superpowers and archenemies were phased out in favor of a blanket disregard for interview subjects and more focus on the backstage dramas and hijinks with Space Ghost, Moltar and Zorak.
The turning point probably comes with "Banjo," the show's sixth episode. With Bobcat Goldthwait as a guest and Zorak's overgrown sea monkey coming to a grisly end, it captured the show's zeitgeist.
Space Ghost Coast to Coast was a success, as much as a show in the 11:30 timeslot can be considered a success. Ratings were solid -- by the third season, it was bringing in a respectable 1.1, great for the timeslot and 20 percent over the network's average. But the team didn't rest on their laurels -- by the third "season" in 1996, they'd established the show as one of the most boundary-pushing things on TV.
PLANET ROCK
As the show picked up speed, Space Ghost became a de facto spokesman for Cartoon Network. So it was only logical to have him host "World Premiere Toon-In," a Turner-created special that showcased the first products of Turner's in-house animation studio. The show, which aired simultaneously on TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network on President's Day, featured Space Ghost and crew interviewing animators like Craig McCracken and Van Partible along with showing clips of Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls and other soon-to-be-hit cartoons. It just so happened that Ted Turner was actually tuned into his own programming at the time and was extremely taken by the product, especially the banter between Space Ghost, Moltar and Zorak. He called up Mike Lazzo and asked him, "Why don't we have something like this on the SuperStation?" The next day, Cartoon Planet was born.
Airing on TBS, Cartoon Planet was a "variety show" (aka "excuse to show old cartoons") starring Space Ghost, Zorak and the newly popular Brak, a cat-faced alien villain from the original show now being voiced as a sort of lisping dimwit by Andy Merrill. The show gave Lazzo's team chances to stretch their wings in different, more audience-friendly areas like song parodies.
Cartoon Planet ran fairly briefly on TBS before being offloaded back to Cartoon Network. The amount of effort required to run two shows off of decades-old footage turned out to be not worth the effort, and production shut down in 1997.
Lazzo had to staff up to run this new show, and one of his essential hires was writer Dave Willis, who would eventually cross over to the main show. And with that, the Space Ghost team -- and the core of what would become Adult Swim -- took on its final form.
THE MINES OF MOLTAR
The show's early episodes were written around the interview footage. During some interviews, Andy Merrill would actually sit with a homemade Space Ghost costume off-camera and lob questions at celebs, but most of the time, Willis would handle it, with Croker occasionally sitting in as Zorak.
Willis's first aired episode was "Sharrock," in which the crew paid tribute to the avant-jazz guitarist who composed their theme song by blaring 15 minutes of his music over the entire show, including an interview with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore.
1997 was the show's production peak, with a staggering 27 episodes produced. The team was creating episodes on a weekly basis, on a grueling schedule.
Willis's memories of the show were not universally positive. "Writing for Space Ghost was like being falsely accused of murdering your wife. It's like taking the SAT with a ballpoint pen filled with your own blood. You suffer constantly, and everything you say is wrong."
As the show grew, the team began to bring in freelancers to handle the writing. One of the first was Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson, but others included cartoonists Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer, and Seinfeld "Soup Nazi" writer Spike Feresten. Dorkin, who wrote 14 episodes with Dyer, let me in on the process of writing an episode.
"You would get taped interviews with transcripts, and you spliced those into the script as you saw fit. You came up with an idea, chose guests from the interview or requested interviews, and then you took your interviews and wrote your script. The producers really trusted the writers and gave them a lot of freedom; they just wanted things to be funny and weird. They even let Sarah and I sit in on the editing of one of our episodes when we were in Atlanta, and they let us go over the 11-minute running time on several occasions. It was pretty great. There was a lot of trust and good will and freedom to just try things, and I think it resulted in a lot of good work."
As the show continued, the pace of episodes began to slacken. 1999 saw eight new episodes. 2000 none at all. 2001 debuted eight more, 2002 saw only a back-to-back airing of "Kentucky Nightmare" with different directors' commentaries.
But these later years also saw some of the show's brightest moments. The gas-addled shenanigans of "Flipmode" with Busta Rhymes and the bad romance of "Knifin' Around," both from the 2001 season, are true classics.
Zoom In
DEATH OF A HERO
Space Ghost Coast to Coast came to a bizarre end on April 12, 2004, with "Live at the Fillmore," the show's 93rd episode. Structured around an interview with financial guru Susan Powter, the episode has the crew run out of money and not even finish. And then Ghost Planet went dark.
The crew had 60 unused interviews in the can when production stopped, including a spectacular one with Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. So what happened?
The answer is simple: AOL happened. In 2000, the Internet megalith purchased Time Warner for $164 billion, and according to Croker everything changed at Cartoon Network as soon as the papers were signed. The Space Ghost team, which had been working for the network full-time on salary, were all told that their employment would be changed to an "as-needed" basis.
Space Ghost Coast to Coast was born out of an environment in which failure was almost a certainty, and they managed to snatch success from it. With a new corporate structure in which any "wasted time" was frowned upon, the atmosphere that the show needed couldn't survive.
So the team went their separate ways -- Croker and Willis to Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Merrill to The Brak Show, Lazzo and Matt Harrigan to Perfect Hair Forever. None had the same magic.
TAPPED OUT
Two years later, the show reappeared on a very different platform. Turner had launched GameTap, an online subscription service for videogames. They were trying to find ways to promote the platform without spending a ton of money. And that was Space Ghost Coast to Coast's specialty.
A camera crew traveled to the E3 convention in 2005 and did interviews with famous designers from gaming history, and then Turner hired a number of different agencies to produce short episodes exclusive to GameTap.
Rick Webb, founder of the Barbarian Group, remembers producing some of the episodes. "The premise was to bring back Space Ghost Coast to Coast as a digital property within GameTap that kept the same format and used the same voices, but interviewed gaming legends. I think we did 2-3 episodes. The cast members would record in their home studios and send us the audio, and Mike Rubenstein at Barbarian, who was a fan of the original show, would go through the old clips and find things that would match up, and edit, and composite the interviews together. No new animations were made, so it was a pretty painstaking process."
Williams Street had no influence on the GameTap episodes, and it shows. While they have some good jokes, and the interview subjects are game, the sense of anarchic freedom isn't there. GameTap itself was eventually sold to French company Metaboli in 2008, and the Turner original programming was removed from the service.
MISSING: SPACE GHOST
Since then, Cartoon Network has brought Space Ghost back on a few occasions, mostly to promote other properties. The show's biggest legacy, however, is probably seen in The Eric Andre Show, Adult Swim's second attempt at a late-night talk program. Host Eric Andre was hugely influenced by Coast to Coast, saying "Before we started shooting, I rented as many seasons I could get my hands on and did a Space Ghost marathon by myself in my house, just so I could absorb as much Space Ghost as I could."
The show's influence has been staggering -- the entire Adult Swim block grew out of Williams Street's experiments. Aqua Teen Hunger Force originally debuted as characters in the scrapped "Baffler Meal" episode. Sealab 2021 used the same repurposing technique to put a new spin on an old Hanna-Barbera show. And The Brak Show was... well, it was Brak from Space Ghost, given some actual animation and a family to play off of.
Rumors have been swirling about Space Ghost making a return for over a decade, but Mike Lazzo, for one, has moved on. It was a product of its time and that time was over. The foundation it laid for Adult Swim -- the surreal humor, mismatched visuals and disregard for the accepted norms of TV -- changed animation as we know it. Not bad for a show that started with Denzel Washington in a closet.Doesn't anyone listing their name on this page fail to meet some basic criteria of membership? Posiduck 22:31, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I don't care. Dysprosia 22:37, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
For the record, if a vote were eventually to be held for general secretary, I would prefer to abstain. 24.27.60.170 19:09, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
http://www.reddit.com/r/apathy would offer its solidarity, but we're just not in the mood.
is it just me or does 'AAW' seem like an acronym meant for the association of empathetic wikipedians? we should do something. somebody do something.
Meh.
Cease and desist [ edit ]
It has come to the attention of the WikiFun Police that the Association of Apathetic Wikipedians is in violation of Section 3.14159, Article X, which states "Wikipedians should have fun and not be apathetic." Please cease ceasing and desist desisting. Thank you for your cooperation. You have 48 hours to do so, lest we open satire on you. Bob the Wikipedian 02:05, 19 June 2011 (UTC)POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. -- Motorists are being told to expect delays while traveling on Route 9 in the city of Poughkeepsie, according to state Department of Transportation spokeswoman Gina DiSarro.
Highway crews began working on the road 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 20 and will continue to 3 p.m. through Friday, Jan. 27, she said.
The traffic stoppages are expected to occur between Pine Street and Fox Street in the city.
They are expected to last an average of 10 minutes, DiSarro said.
Motorists should take alternate routes when possible, she added.
Drivers are being asked to be extra careful when traveling through work zones and to pay attention to flaggers and all traffic control signs.
In accordance with the Work Zone Safety Act of 2005, convictions of two or more speeding violations in a work zone could result in the suspension of an individual’s driver license. Fines are doubled for speeding in a work zone.
For up-to-date travel information, call 511 or visit www.511NY.org.
Click here to sign up for Daily Voice's free daily emails and news alerts.It seems every day we read about another mass shooting on a campus, in a pizza parlor or at a movie theater.
There doesn’t seem to be any stopping this mass violence that is resulting in needless deaths of so many innocent people. Many gun advocates, including the National Rifle Association, say the only way to stop bad guys with a gun is for the good guys to have guns. Well, on Sunday, three good guys all had guns and they were shot down in cold blood before they even had a chance to use those guns.
I’m not saying this is all political. Many of the shooters have had serious mental problems, but they were able to obtain pistols and automatic weapons.
Sunday’s massacre of three innocent people, including two of our finest law enforcement officers, appears to be from the fringe that claims they are patriotic Americans but feel they do not have to obey the laws of the land.
It is my understanding that the two people who shot the policemen and the innocent bystander were part of the right-wing fringe that “defended” Cliven Bundy so that he did not have to obey the laws of this country and the constitution.
We could be on the verge of another civil war.
The vast majority of Americans are sick and tired of this senseless violence. Yet our “do-nothing” members of Congress sit on their hands so they don’t upset the NRA and the right wingers who donate so much money to their re-election campaigns, and they keep beating the same old tired horses like Obamacare and Benghazi so they don’t have to face the realities of what is really happening in this country.
The pollsters seem to think that the Republicans can control both the House and the Senate in the next election. If the Democrats sit on their hands and not vote in these midterm elections, then they will get what they deserve by not going to the polls en masse to defeat the radical right.M ovies don’t come any more self-satisfied than ovies don’t come any more self-satisfied than Deadpool. From the air of smugness that pervades this Marvel adventure, you would think it was the first picture to break the fourth wall or feature a profane, badly behaved hero. In another sense, though, it has earned the right to be pleased with itself: it does break a small amount of new ground in the area of its hero’s sexual identity. In the comics from which the movie is adapted, Deadpool is pansexual – he makes no distinction between genders or gender identity in his choice of partners. The term “bisexual” would be too narrow for Deadpool, who has flirted with Thor, propositioned Spider-Man and wouldn’t rule out, say, unicorns. A pendulum moves in just two directions; he is more like a sexual swingball.
The truth is both less sensational and more interesting. The sole instance of interspecies intimacy in the film is confined to its animated closing credits, during which Deadpool is shown rubbing a unicorn’s horn until it ejaculates rainbows. Orthodox definitions of pansexuality exclude socially unacceptable manifestations of desire (necrophilia, paedophilia); the jury will have to be out for now on the question of whether cartoon sex with a mythical creature qualifies as bestiality. In all other respects, this is a Deadpool who meets in word but not deed the requirements of pansexuality. His libido is indiscriminate; every adult is fair game. But it might help his cause if he were shown having sex with someone other than his girlfriend, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). It’s true that their antics are not exactly vanilla – he wears plastic vampire teeth to administer oral sex on Halloween and allows Vanessa to proceed beyond the point on his body where Kanye West would draw the line.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reynolds with Morena Baccarin in Deadpool. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock
From the moment Deadpool asks us to speculate on whose balls he had to fondle to get his own movie (the answer is Wolverine’s, who has, we are informed, “a nice pair of smooth criminals down under”), his conversation is littered with homoerotic references. He asks a male bartender for a blowjob, but that turns out to be the name of a cocktail in which cream is the predominant ingredient. He calls a male cab driver “pretty damn cute” and lands crotch-first on an adversary’s face with the unconventional warcry: “Teabagged!” He speculates on the relationship between other superheroes (“I’m pretty sure Robin loves Batman”) and says, in response to the question of whether he has an on-switch: “It’s right next to the prostate. Or is that the on-switch?”
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In the arena of outwardly straight men preoccupied with other men’s bodies, Deadpool is eclipsed only by the Jackass team. But how serious is he about his predilections? Without sending him into the arms or beds of other men, the movie leaves that point moot. In its entire 107-minute running time, it finds room for only one male-on-male kiss, and this takes the form of Deadpool giving a peck on the cheek to a man whom he has just threatened to rape.
On the evidence of the film, he seems (to adapt the infamous quote by Brett Anderson of Suede) to be a pansexual who has never had a non-heterosexual experience. Or, like Robbie Williams, maybe he wants to evoke the sassy, risque side of gayness without going the whole hog. “I am 49% homosexual and sometimes as far as 50%,” Williams said in 2013. “However, that would imply that I enjoy having a particular sort of fun, which I don’t.” Actions speak louder than words and there is nothing in the movie to prove that Deadpool would be any more willing than Williams to put his body where his mouth is and sample that particular sort of fun.
The film’s reluctance to make good on its hero’s pansexuality should not overshadow the little moments of daring, the subtle advancements, that have survived to |
of a very large section of Kesennuma – a town of 70,000 people in Miyagi province – ablaze, with firefighters unable to put it out.
According to military observers who have looked at the fires from the air, the blaze covers a strip 4.5km wide and 2.5km deep.
#TSUNAMI: waves of various sizes are expected for the next 10 hours. Largest waves may be yet to come. AVOID THE COASTLINE. Emergency_In_SF
Emergency_In_SF
7.05pm GMT: The Emergency in SF Twitter account has posted this tweet for San Francisco residents.
7.16pm GMT: A 6.6 magnitude shock has just been reported in the Nagano Niigata area of Japan, apparently on a different faultline from the 8.9 magnitude quake earlier.
7.23pm GMT: The US Geological Survey has said the new quake around Nagano a few minutes ago was measured at 6.2 magnitude – a big quake in most places. It's 4.23am in Japan and I suspect quite a few people have had an early wake-up jolt.
7.28pm GMT: Ecuador's president Rafael Correa has declared a national state of emergency and urged coastal and island residents to evacuate fast to higher areas, as the tsunami approaches.
7.35pm GMT: Police in Miyagi prefecture say 200-300 bodies have been found in the northeastern coastal city of Sendai, the city closest to the epicenter of today's first earthquake. Another 151 were confirmed killed, with 547 missing. Police also said around 800 people were injured.
7.41pm GMT: A Japanese minister says a radioactive leak likely to come from the damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima – 240km (150 miles) north of Tokyo – is expected to be small. Reuters reports:
"It's possible that radioactive material in the reactor vessel could leak outside but the amount is expected to be small and the wind blowing towards the sea will be considered," Chief Cabinet Yukio Edano told a news conference. "Residents are safe after those within a 3km radius were evacuated and those within a 10km radius are staying indoors, so we want people to be calm," he added.
The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co, said pressure had built up inside a reactor at the plant after the cooling system was knocked out by the earthquake, the largest on record in Japan. The company had been operating three out of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the time of the quake, all of which shut down. The remaining three had already been shut down for planned maintenance.
7.47pm GMT: Felicity Carus is on the west coast of the US, watching the reaction to the huge waves generated by the tsunami arriving there:
Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from coastal and low lying areas along the west coast of the US this morning as seven-foot waves generated by the 8.9 earthquake near Japan first struck the US mainland coast at Crescent City, 20 miles south of the Oregon border. The West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Centre issued a warning for the California coast after waves travelled at 500 miles an hour across the Pacific, hitting Hawaii with waves up to 11ft high. The first surges hit the US mainland at around 7.30am local time. Schools, highways and national parks were closed as authorities urged people to stay away from beaches, jetties and harbours. Sirens sounded across Crescent City in far northern California in the early morning and police went door to door evacuating homes in the tsunami impact zone along the coast as fishermen left the busy harbour. A tsunami in 1964 devastated Crescent City and killed 11 people. Surges were expected continue to hit the California coast for up to 12 hours. In the event, Crescent City experienced increasingly large waves from 3ft at 8.15am rising to 8.1ft at 10.15am. Some 6,000 people were evacuated from Crescent City town and police have sealed off the harbour. In San Francisco police closed the city's Great Highway and the National Park Service closed Ocean Beach, Baker Beach, China Beach, Fort Funston and Aquatic Park tucked inside the bay. Transport services to these areas were stopped and boats took shelter within the bay. There were also concerns that surging waves would pass under the Golden Gate Bridge and flood low-lying areas within the Bay Area, but low tide was expected to reduce their full force.
7.56pm GMT: More awful footage of Kesennuma from Japan's public broadcaster NHK – at night the town appears to be one giant bonfire, covering multiple blocks, and still burning more than 15 hours after the earthquake struck.
8.02pm GMT: New Zealand has had its own earthquake problems in recent weeks, so it's a relief to learn that the tsunami caused sea levels to rise by only 15cm by the time it reached the southern Pacific nation.
8.16pm GMT: Friday's earthquake in Japan was the the strongest quake in the area in nearly 1,200 years, the Associated Press reports:
David Applegate, a senior science adviser for earthquake and geologic hazards for the U.S. Geological Survey, said the 8.9-magnitude quake ruptured a patch of the earth's crust 150 miles long and 50 miles across. He said the earthquake, which also spawned a massive tsunami that hit Japan before racing across the Pacific to Hawaii and the west coast of the United States, likely caused tens of billions of dollars in structural damage in Japan.
8.23pm GMT: Follow reactions in Japan using this Google maps and Twitter mash-up, showing tweets in real time and their location.
8.37pm GMT: The Associated Press has news of US workers at the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plants in Onahama city, about 270km northeast of Tokyo:
Pineville, Louisiana, resident Janie Eudy said her husband, Danny, was working at Fukushima No 1 when the earthquake struck. After a harrowing evacuation, he called her several hours later from the parking lot of his quake-ravaged hotel. He and other American plant workers are "waiting to be rescued, and they're in bad shape," she said in a telephone interview. Danny Eudy, 52, a technician employed by Pasadena, Texas-based Atlantic Plant Maintenance, told his wife that the quake violently shook the plant building he was in. "Everything was falling from the ceiling," she said. Eudy told his wife that he and other workers were evacuating the plant when the tsunami swept through the area, carrying away homes and vehicles. They retreated so they wouldn't get caught up in the raging water. "He walked through so much glass that his feet were cut. It slowed him down," she said.
8.50pm GMT: Experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists are raising safety concerns about the shutdown of the damaged nuclear plant, writes the Guardian's US environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg:
UCS notes that the company has evacuated surrounding areas in a 3 km radius from the plant while they try to restore downed coolant system. The campaign group quotes Tepco as saying the shutdowns were caused by the loss of two off-site power systems. The shutdown triggered emergency diesel power supply. But that system failed when the tsunami hit about an hou later. According to UCS: "This power failure resulted in one of the most serious conditions that can affect a nuclear plant – a "station blackout" – during which off-site power and on-site emergency alternating current (AC) power is lost. Nuclear plants generally need AC power to operate the motors, valves and instruments that control the systems that provide cooling water to the radioactive core. If all AC power is lost, the options to cool the core are limited." The plant reactors have a steam driven cooling system which does not need electricity - but it does need batteries. If those run down before mains power is restored the water level in the reactor will drop. The UCS warns: "If it drops far enough, the core would overheat and the fuel would become damaged. Ultimately, a'meltdown' could occur: The core could become so hot that it forms a molten mass that melts through the steel reactor vessel. This would release a large amount of radioactivity from the vessel into the containment building that surrounds the vessel. "The containment building's main purpose is to keep radioactivity from being released into the environment. A meltdown would build up pressure in the containment building. At this point we do not know if the earthquake damaged the containment building enough to undermine its ability to contain the pressure and allow radioactivity to leak out. "According to technical documents translated by Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action in Japan, if the coolant level dropped to the top of the active fuel rods in the core, damage to the core would begin about 40 minutes later, and damage to the reactor vessel would occur 90 minutes after that."
9.01pm GMT: Kyodo news agency is reporting that four commuter trains are still unaccounted for in the Miyagi and Iwate prefectures, the coastal area of northeastern Japan that were hardest hit by the tsunami.
9.20pm GMT: More unsettling news from the Fukushima Daiichi's No 1 nuclear power reactor in Onahama: the plant's operator Tepco says that radioactive substances "could have already been released" from the damaged reactor, while Japan's prime minister Naoto Kan is saying that residents within 10km of the plant must leave the area.
Kan was set to visit the plant this morning.
Previously, the area of three kilometres around the reactor had been evacuated, while those within 10km were told to stay indoors.
Radiation has been more than eight times the normal level according to a monitoring post near the main entrance to the plant, the Japanese industry ministry's nuclear and industrial safety agency said.
9.43pm GMT: The level of radiation in the control room of the No 1 reactor of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is "1,000 times higher than normal," according to Japan's nuclear and industrial safety agency, visiting the site.
According to the Kyodo news agency: "The discovery suggests radioactive steam could spread around the facility operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co."
9.51pm GMT: A tsunami emergency has been declared for Chile's Easter Islands, with waves expected there within the hour.
10pm GMT: It's getting light in Japan now, on Saturday morning. Reuters previews the day to come:
Daybreak was expected to reveal the full extent of the death and damage from Friday's 8.9 magnitude earthquake and the 10-metre high tsunami it sent surging into cities and villages, sweeping away everything in its path. In one of the worst-hit residential areas, people buried under rubble could be heard calling out "help" and "when are we going to be rescued", Kyodo news agency reported.
10.12pm GMT: An AP news alert:
Japan says radiation levels surged outside nuclear plant, expands area subject to evacuation.
10.19pm GMT: Some grim footage from Japanese television. This screengshot is of a carpark in Tokai – a coastal town in in Ibaraki prefecture – showing cars that were first pushed together by the force of the tsunami, and then caught fire.
10.34pm GMT: The damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor may have already been leaking radiation outside the plant, confirms Japan's nuclear safety agency and the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power company.
Compared with the government briefing last night that everything was fine, that's a turn around.
According to AP, the continued loss of electricity has delayed the planned release of radioactive vapor from inside the reactor to ease pressure. Pressure inside one of the reactors had risen to 1.5 times the level considered normal.
The Daiichi site is located in Onahama city, about 170 miles (270km) northeast of Tokyo. The 460-megawatt Unit 1 began operating in 1971 and is a boiling water reactor that drives the turbine with radioactive water.
10.45pm GMT: Now there are reports from nuclear plant operator Tepco that the Fukushima Daini plant has lost cooling to three of its reactors.
It was one reactor in the Fukushima Daiichi plant that had been the cause for concern earlier – so this news is certainly unwelcome.
According to Dow-Jones, Tepco says that the temperatures of its No 1 and No 2 reactors at its Fukushima Daini nuclear power station are rising, and it has lost control over pressure within the reactors.
Fukushima Daini station is the second nuclear power plant the company has in Fukushima prefecture in northeastern Japan, where the troubled Fukushima Daiichi plant is located.
11pm GMT: The Kyodo news agency is reporting that the Japanese government is ordering Tepco to open valves on the Fukushima Daiichi No 1 reactor to release pressure.
11.10pm GMT: The Fukushima Daini plant has now been added to the government's emergency list.
Earlier, Tepco – the Tokyo Power company – had reported:
A seriously injured worker is still trapped in the crane operating console of the exhaust stack and his breathing and pulse cannot be confirmed.
11.29pm GMT: This is more chilling news from Kyodo:
The cooling system failed at three reactors of the quake-hit Fukushima No 2 [Daini] nuclear power plant Saturday, the operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said. The company, which has already scrambled to deal with radiation leaks at its Fukushima [Daiichi] No 1 plant, notified the industry ministry that the failsafe system at the No 2 plant stopped functioning as the temperature of coolant water has topped 100C.
So much for the "failsafe system", which appears to have failed.
11.34pm GMT: Meanwhile, Japan's nuclear safety agency is set to issue an unprecedented order for Tepco to open a valve at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to release pressure, as we reported earlier.
The good news is that the 3,000 residents in the initial evacuation radius have been safely removed.
11.47pm GMT: In the comments, many people are asking what the implications of the nuclear reactor power failure is. Given how little we are being told by Tepco and the Japanese government, it's hard to say. The increase in background radiation near the plant isn't dangerous at this point, but of course that could change.
Reuters has a piece explaining what happens when a reactor loses coolant:
When all sources of power fail like at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, coolant begins to boil off, exposing the fuel rods. It would likely take several hours to boil off enough coolant before the core is hot enough to damage it. If the fuel rods became damaged they would release radioactive material into the remaining coolant. - Hours beyond that the metal surrounding the ceramic uranium fuel pellets could potentially start melting if temperatures reach well beyond 1000F as occurred at Three Mile Island. The ceramic fuel pellets would not melt until temperatures reached about 2000 degrees F. - Hours after the fuel rods started to melt, the heat could potentially melt through the reactor vessel, which is made of high tensile steel four to eight inches thick - It would take even more time before the containment fails, which could result in radioactive releases to the environment. The containment is an air tight steel or reinforced concrete structure with walls between four to eight feet thick. As the Three Mile Island accident showed, operators can regain control of the situation if they can get the coolant flowing again.
Trying to suss out what model containment buildings the Fukushima Daiichi BWRs have. 1976 vintage would probably mean Mark I, maybe Mark II arclight
arclight
11.55pm GMT: For informed commentary on the nuclear reactor problems in Japan, those of you with Twitter accounts should follow @arclight who appears to know the stuff.
12.06am GMT: Japan's urban search and rescue team left New Zealand today to return to Japan, having been working in Christchurch since last month:
The team was planning to leave Christchurch this weekend, and brought forward their departure time in response to the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan last night. Civil Defence National Controller Steve Brazier thanked the team members for their efforts in assisting with the Christchurch rescue efforts. He sent his condolences to the people of Japan in the wake of yesterday's earthquake and tsunami.
12.12am GMT: A number of readers have raised Chernobyl in comparison to the events at the Fukushima plants.
The Chernobyl disaster was caused by a power surge and subsequent explosion that caused a fire. The situation in Fukushima (from what we know) is power failure shutting down reactor coolant systems, and the failure of back-up generators.
12.20am GMT: Scientific America is on the case with an excellent explanation of what's going on at the Fukushima nuclear plants:
Tokyo Electric Power confirmed that pressure had been rising inside reactor No. 1 at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the northeast coast, one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. That means cooling water is not getting to the reactor core, causing a build up of steam inside the containment vessel. The problem, according to Japanese media reports, is a loss of grid electricity to run the pumps that bring in cooling water. The backup diesel generators that are supposed to provide emergency power in that case are out of order, according to the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, but replacements were being taken to the plant.
Scientific America's David Biello has an interview with Scott Burnell, public affairs officer at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission:
What happens when a reactor gets disconnected from the grid? There are emergency diesel generators. You also have a battery system to keep instruments running, but that can also provide power to safety systems [which prevent a meltdown by cooling the reactor core]. It's all meant to provide defense in depth. First you rely on the grid. If the grid is no longer available, you use diesel generators. If there is an issue with the diesels, you have a battery backup. And the batteries usually last long enough for you to get the diesels going.
12.25am GMT: Now an official from Japan's powerful trade ministry is telling news organisations that Tepco is "also considering releasing pressure" at the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant.
The government has also just ordered the evacuation of a three kilometre radius around Fukushima Daini plant – following the previous evacuation order of a 10km radius around Fukushima Daiichi.
12.31am GMT: Given the events at the Fukushima plants, other useful Twitter accounts worth following on the subject: the International Atomic Energy Agency @iaeaorg and the US Nuclear Energy Industry @N_E_I (and yes I know they are a lobbying outfit for the industry but they are following events in Japan).
12.41am GMT: Some expert comment from Professor John Luxat, chair in nuclear safety analysis at Canada's McMaster University:
What seems to have happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant?
It's very difficult to make definite conclusions at this point because information is coming in bits and pieces. What we do know is that when the quake hit the reactors at Fukushima [Daiichi], there were three of the reactors up and running – the other three were shut down for regular inspection. The three that were up and running immediately shut down, as they are designed to do when the ground shakes above a certain level. The emergency backup diesel generators that provides electricity to the shutdown cooling system operated as designed for about an hour, and then they failed for some reason that's not clear. They lost power to the pumps providing cooling water. Reports are that they have brought in backup generators and hooked them up. One reactor is reported to have a slightly greater problem with cooling, which is not fully clear. At this stage, they need to reestablish the electrical power supply to the cooling system. The other thing is that the containment buildings haven't suffered any reported damage. The plants are designed to strict seismic requirements because they're in an earthquake region in Japan, and there's no reported damage to these structures. The function of a containment building is to contain any radioactive material released from the reactor and limit any subsequent release outside the plant.
Events have moved on slightly since then but this is still an illuminating explanation.
12.50am GMT: The Japanese government is currently holding an emergency meeting on the subject of the Fukushima nuclear plants.
1.13am GMT: The latest from the Fukushima reactors is that the government is now saying that there has been "no radioactive leak so far" at the nuclear plants. That seems to contradict an earlier statements by Japan's nuclear safety agency and the Tokyo Electric Power company.
Update: no, it seems the government meant that the plant was leaking through damage, as opposed to venting steam containing radioactive material, which has already happened.
1.25am GMT: The two nuclear plants currently having difficulties need some explaining, to keep everything clear. Here's what we know:
• Diesel generators that normally would have worked as back-ups to keep cooling systems running had been disabled by tsunami flooding.
• Power supply systems to provide emergency electricity for the plants were being put in place, the World Nuclear Association said.
• Both plants are light water reactors operated by the Tokyo Electric Power company (or Tepco):
Fukushima Daiichi (No 1) plant
- has six reactors, three of which were shut down for maintainence. Two of the remaining reactors, Unit 1 has significant problems with a rising temperature and in another the operator says it has lost cooling ability.
– the Unit 1 reactor has seen radiation levels inside its control room rise, and slightly higher radiation levels have been detected outside the reactor. Pressure inside the reactor is twice the normal level, and the operator has been forced to vent radioactive vapor to relieve the pressure.
Fukushima Daini (No 2) plant
– has four reactors, and in units 1, 2 and 4 of them the operator has said it has lost cooling ability.
– Tepco says pressure is stable inside the reactors of the Daini plant but rising in the containment vessels.
• Both plants have been declared to be in a state of emergency by the government, and residents moved outside of a 10km zone around both plants.Washington (CNN) The White House is contemplating a scenario to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo within the next few months, multiple government officials tell CNN.
The vacancy at the CIA would likely be filled, according to the tentative plan, by Sen. Tom Cotton, a hawkish Arkansas Republican, the sources said.
There's no decision yet on the timing of Tillerson's departure, which has been expected for months. But multiple sources close to the White House and across government said Pompeo is the leading candidate to take over at the State Department.
President Donald Trump offered, "He's here, Rex is here," when asked if he wants Tillerson to stay on the job by reporters at the White House Thursday after the news broke of the potential exit plan.
"As the President just said, 'Rex is here,' " White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement, adding that the administration has no personnel announcements to make.
"Secretary Tillerson continues to lead the State Department and the entire Cabinet is focused on completing this incredibly successful first year of President Trump's administration," she said.
The New York Times reported Thursday morning that the plan to replace Tillerson has been developed by White House chief of staff John Kelly and is likely to be triggered late this year or early next year.
The news fleshes out some detail on a possible Tillerson ouster, anticipated for months as tensions between the top US diplomat and Trump have played out in unprecedented public fashion. Accounts of Tillerson dismissing the President as a "moron" have been matched by Trump's public statements deriding Tillerson for "wasting his time" on diplomatic efforts.
The tepid expressions of support that regularly followed these reports haven't been enough to dampen speculation, as support for Tillerson has eroded across Washington in the nearly 10 months since his appointment.
Administration officials have chafed at Tillerson's resistance to Trump policy positions, lawmakers have expressed alarm about his cuts to the State Department, staff there decry the agency's dysfunction and senior members of the US national security establishment from both parties warn that he is creating a "national security emergency," in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
When, not if
For weeks, Tillerson's departure has been a "when, not if" question in Washington. It's a secret so open that in October Pompeo and a staff member openly discussed when the CIA director would move to the State Department, a person present in the room told CNN.
The switch at the top levels of the Trump administration's national security team would come at a time of bristling tension with nuclear armed North Korea, which now has the capability to reach the US with its missiles. That's one reason the news about Tillerson provoked dismay in some quarters and an accusation of skullduggery.
"It's been evident to me that for some time, somebody is seeking to undermine his presence here," said Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "
I don't know who that is," said Corker, who has long argued that the US needs Tillerson in place as a stabilizing presence on the administration's national security team.
"We and the rest of the world need someone like Tillerson in that position," Corker said. "Especially when the world's on fire... Rex Tillerson is a strategic thinker."
Defense Secretary James Mattis said Thursday that "there's nothing to" the rumors about Tillerson being forced out by the White House.
"I make nothing of it, there's nothing to it," Mattis said before a bilateral meeting with Libya's Prime Minister.
The expected shake-up would take the role of top US diplomat out of the hands of an official whose relationship with the President has grown increasingly fractured and put it into the hands of another whose bond with Trump has only strengthened this year.
Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, has grown increasingly close to the President in recent months -- a bond largely formed over the President's free-wheeling daily intelligence briefings, which one White House official said Pompeo delivers in person three to four times a week.
After the briefings, Trump frequently asks Pompeo -- who graduated first in his class at the US Military Academy at West Point and went on to Harvard Law School -- to stick around to continue chatting one-on-one, the official said.
A source close to Pompeo says the President hasn't told the director about the plan in any certain terms, but there has been a quiet sense in Pompeo world that this is certainly possible, perhaps even likely. They caution that the decision is obviously Trump's call and they are well aware that someone's standing with the President can change at any time.
Pompeo would accept this elevation without hesitation, this source says.
Publicly undercut
Since he was sworn into office on February 1, Tillerson had to contend with a President who publicly undercut him, a shadow State Department that sprang up under Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, competition from US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, and a litany of complaints from diplomats, foreign ministers and others in Washington that his State Department was deeply dysfunctional.
Tillerson aggressively pushed back against those claims in a November 28 appearance, portraying it as an insult to State Department staff.
"I'm offended on their behalf when people say somehow we don't have a State Department that functions," Tillerson said. "I can tell you it's functioning very well from my perspective."
But a steady drip of negative news, and reports of Tillerson's alleged resentment over Ivanka Trump leading a delegation to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in India, in November, continued to undermine the former ExxonMobil CEO.
The painfully public airing of his troubles with the President perhaps hit a low when one lawmaker faulted Trump for his tendency to "publicly castrate" the secretary of state. That exchange forced Tillerson, when asked about the comment by CNN's Jake Tapper, to declare: "I checked. I'm fully intact."
Corker had told the Washington Post that Trump repeatedly neutered Tillerson with Tweets that undermined or flatly contradicted policies he was pursuing. That, Corker said, shut down options for the US and damaged Tillerson's efforts to peacefully resolve tensions with North Korea.
The castration episode followed an extraordinary October 4 public statement in which Tillerson stressed his commitment to his job as secretary of state, but didn't definitively deny an NBC report that he had called Trump a "moron."
That report also detailed Tillerson's "fury" about the ways Trump has undermined him publicly on several foreign policy initiatives and his thoughts about resigning.
Calling the story "erroneous" during his remarks, Tillerson pointed the finger at "some who try to sow dissension" to undermine the President's agenda and said he has been asked "repeatedly" if he's going to step down.
"For some reason, it continues to be misreported," Tillerson said. "There's never been a consideration in my mind."
Soon after that, in mid-October, an administration official was telling CNN that Tillerson was on thin ice, even as the President was publicly declaring he had confidence in his top diplomat.
"It certainly isn't a good relationship, and its problems that have been building," the official said of Tillerson's fate in the Trump administration. "I think everyone is trying to stick it out for a variety of selfish reasons. But not for the same reasons."After three decades of explosive growth, the nation’s prison population has reached some grim milestones: More than 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars. One in nine black men, ages 20 to 34, are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.
Nationwide, the prison population hovers at almost 1.6 million, which surpasses all other countries for which there are reliable figures. The 50 states last year spent about $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, up from nearly $11 billion in 1987. Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan and Oregon devote as much money or more to corrections as they do to higher education.
These statistics, contained in a new report from the Pew Center on the States, point to a terrible waste of money and lives. They underscore the urgent challenge facing the federal government and cash-strapped states to reduce their overreliance on incarceration without sacrificing public safety. The key, as some states are learning, is getting smarter about distinguishing between violent criminals and dangerous repeat offenders, who need a prison cell, and low-risk offenders, who can be handled with effective community supervision, electronic monitoring and mandatory drug treatment programs, combined in some cases with shorter sentences.
Persuading public officials to adopt a more rational, cost-effective approach to prison policy is a daunting prospect, however, not least because building and running jailhouses has become a major industry.
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Criminal behavior partly explains the size of the prison population, but incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen. Any effort to reduce the prison population must consider the blunderbuss impact of get-tough sentencing laws adopted across the United States beginning in the 1970’s. Many Americans have come to believe, wrongly, that keeping an outsized chunk of the population locked up is essential for sustaining a historic crime drop since the 1990’s.
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In fact, the relationship between imprisonment and crime control is murky. Some portion of the decline is attributable to tough sentencing and release policies. But crime is also affected by things like economic trends and employment and drug-abuse rates. States that lagged behind the national average in rising incarceration rates during the 1990’s actually experienced a steeper decline in crime rates than states above the national average, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group.By Hilary Andersson
BBC News, Darfur
The BBC tracked down Chinese-built military trucks inside Darfur The BBC has found the first evidence that China is currently helping Sudan's government militarily in Darfur. The Panorama TV programme tracked down Chinese army lorries in the Sudanese province that came from a batch exported from China to Sudan in 2005. The BBC was also told that China was training fighter pilots who fly Chinese A5 Fantan fighter jets in Darfur. China's government has declined to comment on the BBC's findings, which contravene a UN arms embargo on Darfur. The embargo requires foreign nations to take measures to ensure they do not militarily assist anyone in the conflict in Darfur, in which the UN estimates that about 300,000 people have died. More than two million people are also believed to have fled their villages in Darfur, destroyed by pro-government Arab Janjaweed militia. Plates on the first truck show it was imported after the embargo Panorama traced the first lorry by travelling deep into the remote deserts of West Darfur. They found a Chinese Dong Feng army lorry in the hands of one of Darfur's rebel groups. The BBC established through independent eyewitness testimony that the rebels had captured it from Sudanese government forces in December. The rebels filmed a second lorry with the BBC's camera. Both vehicles had been carrying anti-aircraft guns, one a Chinese gun. Markings showed that they were from a batch of 212 Dong Feng army lorries that the UN had traced as having arrived in Sudan after the arms embargo was put in place. The lorries came straight from the factory in China to Sudan and were consigned to Sudan's defence ministry. The guns were mounted after the lorries were imported from China. When it is shooting or firing there is nowhere for you to move and the sound is just like the sound of the rain
Hamaad Abakar Adballa describing attack by anti-aircraft gun The UN started looking for these lorries in Darfur three years ago, suspecting they had been sent there, but never found them. "We had no specific access to Sudanese government army stores, we were not allowed to take down factory codes or model numbers or registrations etc to verify these kinds of things," said EJ Hogendoorn, a member of the UN panel of experts that was involved in trying to locate the lorries. Culpability China has chosen not to respond to the BBC's findings. Its public position is that it abides by all UN arms embargoes. China has said in the past that it told Sudan's government not to use Chinese military equipment in Darfur. Sudan's government, however, has told the UN that it will send military equipment wherever it likes within its sovereign territory. An international lawyer, Clare da Silva, says China's point that it has taken measures in line with the arms embargo's requirements to stop its weapons from going to Darfur is meaningless. "It is an empty measure to take the assurances from a partner who clearly has no intention of abiding by the resolution," she said. Ms da Silva said the BBC's evidence put China in violation of the arms embargo. The UN panel of experts on Darfur has said it wants to examine the BBC's evidence. Homes scorched The BBC found witnesses who said they saw the first Dong Feng which the BBC tracked down being used with its anti-aircraft gun in an attack in a town called Sirba, in West Darfur, in December. "When it is shooting or firing there is nowhere for you to move and the sound is just like the sound of the rain. Then 'Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!'" said Hamaad Abakar Adballa, a witness in the Chadian refugee town of Birak. The Chinese are accused of training pilots to use Fantan fighter jets The lorry's powerful anti-aircraft gun fired straight into civilian houses. The gun carries high calibre shells that explode on impact, spreading hot shards of metal and causing terrible wounds Witnesses saw one hut take a direct hit from the gun: "An intense wave of heat instantly sent all the huts around up in flames," one witness, Risique Bahar, said. "There was a lot of screaming." In the attack on Sirba one woman was burnt to death, another horribly injured. Genocide accusation Sudan's government has been accused by the United States of genocide against Darfur's black Africans. The terms of the embargo cover not only just the supply of weapons, military vehicles, paramilitary equipment. It also covers training any technical assistance, so the training of pilots obviously falls within the scope of the embargo
International lawyer, Clare da Silva Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) say war crimes by Sudan's Arab-dominated government have included summary executions, rape and torture. Recently the conflict has deteriorated into more confused fighting, with rebel and militia groups also fighting each other. Two hundred thousand people have been displaced already this year. Malnutrition rates are set to soar in South Darfur later this year due to insecurity and drought. Darfur's landscape is spotted with blackened circles representing the hundreds of the villages that were burnt down by government forces and their Janjaweed allies. Air attacks In these attacks Darfur's civilians have been hunted not just from the ground, but from the sky. Most civilians who tell stories of aerial attacks talk about Russian made Antanovs and helicopter gunships. Many also talk about fighter jets being used, but no-one has ever answered the question of which type of fighter jets these are. President Bashir says facts have been distorted and exaggerated Kaltam Abakar Mohammed, a mother of seven, watched three of her children being blown to pieces as they were attacked by a fighter jet on 19 February in the town of Beybey in Darfur. The BBC has established that Chinese Fantan fighter jets were flying on missions out of Nyala airport in south Darfur in February. Panorama acquired satellite photographs of the two fighters at the airport on 18 June 2008, and its investigations indicate these are the only fighter jets that have been based in Darfur this year. When Kaltam heard the sound of fighting early that morning, she took her children and ran. "We start running near the well," she said. "We hid behind a big rock. Something that looks like an eagle started coming from over there. It looked like an eagle but it made a funny noise." Jem rebels used a BBC camera to film a truck fitted with an anti-aircraft gun When the plane unleashed two bombs Kaltam's five-year-old daughter, Nura, was dismembered from the chest up. Her eight-year-old son, Adam, was killed instantly, as was her 20-year-old daughter, Amna. Kaltam's 19-month-old grandson still has shrapnel in his head from the fighter jet bombing. He cries a lot and often calls out for his mother, but she was killed in the attack. Kaltam's 13-year-old girl, Hawa, cannot grasp what she saw happen that day to her brother and two sisters. She rarely speaks now. Pilot training The Chinese Fantan jets are believed to have been delivered to Sudan in 2003 before the current UN arms embargo was imposed on Darfur. But the BBC has been told by two confidential sources that China is training Fantan fighter pilots. Sudan imported a number of fighter trainers called K |
raid, SUPERHOT and Crypt of the Necrodancer.
Isometric action-tactics game for Windows, Mac and Linux
Hybrid real-time / simultaneous turn-based tactical gameplay
Procedurally generated levels and campaign that plays different every time
Sci-Fi noir Berlin as a divided city in which the Cold War never ended
Mind-bending time manipulation abilities that allow you to experiment with possible futures and rewind to the past.
Synaesthetic nightclub environments and audio
A simulation sandbox featuring crowd simulation and destructible objects
NEW GAME+ mode that allows you to keep upgrading your gear as you increase the challenge - forever
A parable that reflects on free will, moral ambiguity and the meaning of freedom
Developed by a team of former AAA professionals using Unreal Engine 4
Original Soundtrack
All Walls Must Fall features a killer soundtrack that reacts to the gameplay, and features original music from talented artists drawn from both the Berlin club scene and the world of video game music:
Jukio Kallio (Nuclear Throne, LUFTRAUSERS, Bleed 2)
Ben Prunty (FTL, Darkside Detective, Into the Breach)
Kuedo (Knives, Planet Mu)
The Orion Correlation and Lost & Found (Voidance records)
Mona Mur (Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Velvet Assassin)
muuutsch (inbetweengames)
Languages
English
Deutsch / German
Español / Spanish
Português-Brasil / Brazilian Portuguese
Русский / Russian
简体中文 / Simplified Chinese
Minimum System Requirements
Windows
OS: 64-bit Windows 7
Processor: Dual-core Intel or AMD processor
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: DX10 compatible video card
DirectX: Version 10
Storage: 2 GB available space
Mac
OS: Mac OS X 10.12.6 or later
Processor: Quad-core Intel processor 2.5 GHz or faster
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Metal compatible graphics card
Storage: 2 GB available space
LinuxESPN.com and the TrueHoop Network are ranking every NBA player -- and counting them down on Twitter (@NBAonESPN), from No. 500 to No. 1. As the rankings are announced, you can also find them here on the pages of ESPN.com.
.@nbaonespn Kobe not in the top 5 of @nba players??Going to have to respectfully disagree on that.What do you think @lakers? — Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) September 27, 2012
No problem. Kobe will be showing his #6 rank. With his fingers. In June. #NBArank — Kobe Bryant Fans (@teamKB24) September 26, 2012
Kobe #6 in #NBArank. I thought he'd be at least #3 behind LBJ and KD. That's a diss — Daniel Artest (@TheRealDMArtest) September 26, 2012
Kobe moved up from No. 7 to No. 6 in #NBARank. Six is certainly an appropriate number considering his goal this year. http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/8428091/2012-nba-player-rankings-no-6 … — Dave McMenamin (@McTen) September 26, 2012
I can't wait for Kobe to say in an interview after scoring 45, "Not bad for being the 2nd best player on my team." #NBARank — Rey-Rey (@TheNoLookPass) September 26, 2012
According to #NBARank there are two better NBA players (Dwight & CP3) in L.A. than Kobe. We'll see. — Arash Markazi (@ArashMarkazi) September 26, 2012
Seriously tho did the #replacementrefs came out with the#NBARank? — chris(@lakersfan818) September 26, 2012
What is #NBArank?
#NBArank is the Twitter hashtag to use if you want to get involved in the discussion or just follow along.
You can also follow along here: @NBAonESPN
How did we rank the players?
We asked 104 experts to rate each player on a 0-to-10 scale, in terms of "the current quality of each player."
Here is the full list of voters from ESPN.com, the TrueHoop Network, TrueHoop TV, Daily Dime Live, ESPN TV, ESPN Radio, ESPN Deportes, espnW, ESPN The Magazine, ESPN Insider, ESPN Fantasy, ESPN Games, ESPN Dallas, ESPN Los Angeles, ESPN Chicago, ESPN New York, ESPN Stats & Information, ESPN Topics and ESPN Analytics.No one will be charged over the mining accident that trapped 33 Chilean workers deep underground for more than two months in 2010, while the world watched with baited breath as rescuers worked desperately to bring them back to the surface.
The decision, announced by prosecutors today, prompted a furious reaction from the victims – many of them still traumatised by their ordeal. They were eventually plucked to safety in a metal capsule, one by one, up a narrow 2,300ft shaft at the San José mine in the Atacama desert, 500 miles north of in the capital, Santiago.
“It is impossible that in an accident of this magnitude no one is held responsible,” said Mario Sepulveda, one of the survivors. “Today, I want to dig a deep hole and bury myself again. Only this time, I don’t want anybody to find me.”
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
In separate comments, he attacked Chile’s “crappy” justice system and told the website Soychile that the former mine owners, Alejandro Bohn and Marcelo Kemeny, were now “wandering around free and happy … despite the fact that they left us buried”.
Another survivor, Esteban Rojas, told the Chilean paper La Tercera: “Sernageomin [Chile’s National Geology and Mining Service] should be found guilty for not investigating as it should have.”
But Hector Mella, chief prosecutor for the Atacama region, said the decision not to charge the pair was unavoidable given that Sernageomin investigators could not reach the scene of the accident to carry out forensic research and establish the precise cause. “The base element, the ‘why’ the cave-in occurs, is not there,” he said.
Mr Mella also dismissed claims from the miners that they heard rumblings, a clear warning sign, before the accident, saying: “I am not in a position to refute or confirm what the miners were saying, that there were signs the deposit was presenting problems.”
The decision comes despite the fact that the mine had faced several safety alerts in the decade prior to the accident, including at least three deaths and one amputation. Union leaders had repeatedly complained about standards at the mine, which nevertheless had no shortage of willing miners due to the relatively high wages it offered.
It also contradicts a 2011 report by Chile’s Congress that found the owners “could have avoided” the collapse of the mine ceiling and accused Sernageomin of failing to enforce its own safety rulings.
The 33 miners were trapped in a small chamber nearly half a mile underground after a cave-in at the 120-year-old gold and copper mine on 5 August 2010. Initially presumed dead, they survived in searing heat for 17 days, eating tiny rations of tinned tuna and sipping sour milk until rescuers using remote listening devices realised they were still alive.
A major international rescue effort was then launched, involving a team of Nasa scientists, nutritionists and psychologists dedicated to keeping the men in good physical and mental health, with several thin shafts drilled to the group, to provide them with fresh air, food, water, medicine and ultra-violet light, while a wider shaft, just big enough to fit the custom-made cage, was finished. The 33 were eventually brought to the surface on 13 October – after 69 days underground – in an operation covered live by the world’s television stations.
After the rescue, the men became global celebrities, invited on all-expenses-paid trips to everything from Disneyworld to Real Madrid’s training camp. But since then, back in Chile, they have struggled to come to terms with their ordeal. Several have had high-profile problems with drink and drugs, and many have struggled to find work, even claiming that potential employers are intimidated by the 33’s unwanted fame and the risk that any problems they now have could attract the media spotlight.
Just about the only people who did appear satisfied with the prosecutors’ decision were the owners of the mine. Their lawyer, Catherine Lathrop, said: “We have always insisted that although the 33 was a regrettable accident, it is just that, an accident.”
Hard times: Miners suffer out of spotlight
For a while, they had the attention and adulation of the world. Each of “Los 33” was handed a free motorcycle by Kawasaki and $15,000 by a local businessman. They enjoyed all-expenses-paid trips to Greece, Israel and Disneyworld. But as the limelight faded, many returned to impoverished lives, and have struggled with psychological and health problems.
“Super” Mario Sepulveda, the charismatic spokesman during their time underground, has toured the world giving motivational lectures and will be played by Antonio Banderas in the forthcoming film The 33.
Most have returned to their humble origins. A year after the 2010 rescue, Samuel Avalos was back selling pirate CDs. Two others, Osman Araya and Dario Segovia, took jobs selling fruit. A few went back down the mines. Others are unemployed. Yonni Barrios, like several others, is dying of an incurable lung disease caused by crystalline silica dust in mines.
After their rescue, the miners decided to pool any money from film rights and book deals and appointed survivor Omar Reygadas as their spokesman. He has toured the world on behalf of the group, though he is still tormented by nightmares.
Eric Randolph
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Behold the magnificent installations of the St. James' Park Open-Air School in London, one of the many educational establishments from a hundred years ago that intentionally exposed kids to the elements, all year long, due to a tragic misunderstanding of how medicine works. Before the discovery of antibiotics, doctors pretty much took their best guess and made shit up about how to cure disease. To treat tuberculosis, for example, the thinking was that plenty of fresh air, all the time, would fix those lungs right up. For kids, especially those in the inner city, this meant "no heating for you."
Naturally, this custom also found its way to the New World, because we couldn't let those Brits prove that they cared more about the children than us (and if we did so while saving on utility bills, even better) -- here's a school in Minnesota with a troubling lack of walls, made even more troubling by the fact that it's winter:
Library of Congress
Turns out kids behave a whole lot better when their butts are literally frozen to the seats.
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Making matters worse, it was precisely the kids identified as being weak or sickly who were sent to the open-air schools, because apparently science hadn't quite made the connection between constant cold and the little brats getting even sicker than before.
Library of Congress
Pneumonia seemed a fair trade for tuberculosis, apparently.
They weren't completely heartless in the pursuit of fresh air, though: Parents could buy or make "sitting-out bags" to keep the kids warm(ish). Of course, like everything else in the olden days, these primitive Snuggies sound fairly miserable, being "made of a brown, pliable, hairy, felt-like cloth." So, yeah, we're not sure what's worse: doing math while warding off hypothermia or spending all day inside an early 20th century version of a hollowed-out Mr.Snuffleupagus.The Sly Collection features Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, Sly 2: Band of Thieves, and Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves. The Collection takes the three PlayStation 2 classics, remasters them and brings them to the PlayStation 3. The video games are great stories for all ages and are full of humor, action, adventure with some nice themes in and amongst the stories. The series is set in an anthropomorphic universe populated by animals (like Zootopia) and centers around Sly Cooper, an raccoon who is part of a long line of master thieves who steal from criminals due to the challenge and a sense of justice. He is joined by his childhood friends Bently, a turtle and brains of the operations, and Murray, a hippo who serves as the brawn of the team. Together they are the Cooper Gang and embark on various journeys to steal and take down renowned criminals while avoiding capture by Interpol Inspector Carmelita Fox, who Sly is romantically attracted to.
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus
The first entry in the franchise and the one that remastering is more difficult to do due to the dated graphics. The graphics still look better than the PS2 graphics but they are still dated, but it adds for a nostalgia factor. This game centers around Sly and the gang recovering the pages of the Thievius Raccoonus, the ancient Cooper book that entails skills, abilities and what it means to be a thief, since it was stolen from Sly’s father after a gang of villains known as the Fiendish Five attack Sly’s home and kill his father. Sly embarks on a journey across the globe to take down the Fiendish Five, restore the Thievius Raccoonus and become a master thief. The gameplay is pretty basic and is explained as you go along with plenty of collectibles and extra abilities to obtain along the way. This is a great start to the franchise and can be frustrating sometime due to the rather dated use of lives and collection of coins and such, but it’s a classic and definitely has a nostalgic feel to it, similar to Jak and Daxter, or Crash Bandicoot.
Sly 2: Band of Thieves
The next installment centers around Sly and the Gang tracking down the location of the Clockwerk parts. Clockwerk was an ancient foe of the Cooper Clan who is a giant owl who replaced parts of his body with robotic parts as he began to age and die. Sly defeated him in the first game but now the threat re-emerges and threatens the Cooper gang again as the Klaww gang divide up the parts among themselves to use for their own devious purposes. Sly once again embarks on a quest across the globe to put an end to his ancient family enemy before it is too late. This journey will push Sly and the Gang to their limits and things will never be the same again. This game steps away from the classic nature of the first game and opens up vast levels to explore and missions to do with broader steps and plans in mind. The artwork and concept for these vast levels are amazing and detailed and really fit in to the Sly universe.The stealth and abilities are improved for Sly and you can play as Bentley and Murray. Bentley is much more tactical with sleep darts and bombs, Murray is a straight up brawler and can take down anyone. This game definitely improved the series and moves it forward into a new modern feel for the series.
Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves
The third installment of the series focuses on the Cooper gang getting back together again after the events of the second game and actually opening their roster for some more interesting figures to join. All of these things are in preparation for the biggest heist yet, the Cooper Vault. The Cooper Vault is where all of the Cooper Clan has stored their wealth and plunder for centuries and now Sly and the Gang are going to reclaim his family’s legacy one final time from the nefarious Dr. M. Loyalties will be tested, lines will be drawn and things will definitely never be the same once again as Cooper prepares for the fight of his life and his last heist……or not? The game is very similar to Sly 2 in many ways, so that is kind of a complaint about the game, it doesn’t improve the formula in Sly 2 by much. There are some new features and mechanics, such as disguises for Sly and Murray is slightly weaker, but the other characters that are invited in to the game add some diversity to the gameplay, when you get to play as them that is.
Overall, this collection is great and is a must have for anyone who has played the Sly games before or anyone who wants to relive some of the greatest games on PS2.DAVID Cameron’s plans for English Votes for English Laws (Evel) were passed by the House of Commons last night despite opposition politicians warning they will create two classes of MPs.
The Conservative majority ensured that the plans were passed by 312 votes against the 270 MPs who voted against the controversial plans.
During a stormy debate, SNP MPs warned the plans would fuel demand for independence and after votes were counted one Nationalist went as far as claiming that the Conservatives had ended the Union.
Owen Thomson, the SNP MP for Midlothian, tweeted: “The Tories ended the Union today – not SNP & not the people of Scotland – result of this will have a huge consequence for whole UK.”
Labour, the SNP and politicians from Wales and Northern Ireland warned the proposals would create two tiers of MPs as they lined up to criticise the proposals brought forward in an attempt to answer the West Lothian Question – posed by theformer Labour MP Tam Dalyell who asked why, under devolution, Scottish MPs could vote on English-only legislation while English MPs could not vote on some Scottish laws.
During the debate, Pete Wishart, SNP MP for Perth and North Perthshire, described the government’s plans as “stupid” and claimed they would fuel demand for independence.
If this is an exercise in saving the Union you could not have contrived of a more inept way to save the Union. Support for independence is actually increasing. Pete Wishart
Mr Wishart was joined by Labour MPs as he claimed that the plan would make Scottish MPs “second-class citizens”.
“Scotland is watching this and the mood is darkening,” he warned. “If this is an exercise in saving the Union you could not have contrived of a more inept way to save the Union. Support for independence is actually increasing.”
Mr Wishart also said Evel would “politicise” the role of the Speaker.
All MPs will continue to speak and vote on the existing legislative stages but only relevant MPs will be allowed to vote at the new phases where the Speaker declares a bill, or clause within a bill, is English or English and Welsh only.
SEE ALSO: MPs warn of legal action if Evel proposals go throughAngela Merkel Net Worth is $13 million dollars and earns an annual income of $3 million dollars. The Net Worth of Angela Merkel has seen a hike of 23% over the past few years. Angela Merkel is a German politician and the Chancellor of Germany since 2005. While calculating the Net Worth of Angela Merkel we have included the data updated as of this Quarter. Check out the Exclusive information on Angela Merkel Net Worth details such as Yearly Income, House, Car Collection, Investments etc. Also read Net Worth details of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Conor McGregor and Sebastian Vettel.
Angela Merkel Net Worth
Net Worth $13.4 Million Annual Income $2.9 Million Personal Investments $6.2 Million Luxury Cars –03 $1.3 Million
Angela Merkel Cars included in her Net Worth
The Car collection of Angela Merkel is quite Small. Angela Merkel owns few of the best luxury cars in the world. The Car brands owned by Angela Merkel include Mercedes Benz, Ford and Bentley.
Angela Merkel House included in her Net Worth
Angela Merkel Resides in Germany. Angela Merkel bought this luxury home in 2008. Estimated Value of this Real Estate Property is around $2.1 Million.
Angela Merkel Biography
Angela Merkel was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in 1954, in Hamburg, West Germany, the daughter of Horst Kasner (1926–2011; né Kaźmierczak), a Lutheran pastor and a native of Berlin, and his wife Herlind (née Jentzsch), born in 1928 in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), a teacher of English and Latin.
Angela Merkel has two younger siblings, her brother Marcus Kasner, a physicist, and her sister Irene Kasner, an occupational therapist. In her childhood and youth, Angela Merkel was known among her peers by the nickname “Kasi”, derived from her last name Kasner.
Angela Merkel is of Polish and German descent. Angela Merkel paternal grandfather, Ludwik Kaźmierczak, was a German policeman of Polish ethnicity, who had taken part in Poland’s struggle for independence.
He married Merkel’s grandmother Margarethe, a German from Berlin, and relocated to her hometown where he worked in the police. In 1930 they Germanized the Polish name Kaźmierczak to Kasner.
Angela Merkel’s maternal grandparents were the Danzig politician Willi Jentzsch and Gertrud Alma née Drange, a daughter of the city clerk of Elbing (now Elbląg, Poland) Emil Drange.
Angela Merkel has mentioned her Polish heritage on several occasions, but her Polish roots became better known as a result of a 2013 biography.
Religion played a key role in the Kasner family’s migration from West Germany to East Germany.
Angela Merkel’s paternal grandfather was originally Catholic but the entire family converted to Lutheranism during the childhood of her father, who later studied Lutheran theology in Heidelberg and afterwards in Hamburg.
In 1954, when Angela Merkel was just three months old, her father received a pastorate at the church in Quitzow (a quarter of Perleberg in Brandenburg), which was then in East Germany. The family moved to Templin and Angela Merkel grew up in the countryside 90 km (56 mi) north of East Berlin.
The fall of the Berlin Wall served as the catalyst for Angela Merkel’s political career. Although she did not participate in the crowd celebrations the night the wall came down, one month later Angela Merkel became involved in the growing democracy movement, joining the new party Democratic Awakening.
Following the first (and only) multi-party election of the East German state, she became the deputy spokesperson of the new pre-unification caretaker government under Lothar de Maizière.
Angela Merkel had impressed de Maiziere with her adept dealing with journalists questioning the role of a party leader, Wolfgang Schnur, as a secret informant for police.
In April 1990, the Democratic Awakening merged with the East German CDU, which in turn merged with its western counterpart after reunification.
Angela Merkel stood for election at the 1990 federal election, the first since reunification, and was elected to the Bundestag for the constituency of Stralsund – Nordvorpommern – Rügen, which is in the district of Vorpommern-Rügen.
Angela Merkel has won re-election for this constituency at the six federal elections since. After her first election, Angela Merkel was almost immediately appointed to the Cabinet, serving as Minister for Women and Youth under Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
In 1994, Angela Merkel was promoted to becoming Minister for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, which gave her greater political visibility and a platform from which to build her political career.
As one of Kohl’s protégées and his youngest Cabinet Minister, she was frequently referred to by Kohl as “mein Mädchen” (“my girl”).
In 1977 at the age of 23, Angela Kasner married physics student Ulrich Merkel and took his surname. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982. Angela Merkel second and current husband is quantum chemist and professor Joachim Sauer, who has largely remained out of the media spotlight.
They first met in 1981, became a couple later and married privately on 30 December 1998. Angela Merkel has no children, but Sauer has two adult sons from a previous marriage.
Angela Merkel is a fervent football fan and has been known to listen to games while in the Bundestag and to attend games of the national team in her official capacity.
Data Analysis : Angela Merkel Net Worth
We can easily conclude that Angela Merkel is one of the highest net worth politicians in the world. Angela Merkel Net Worth has been on the top of the charts since many weeks.
Angela Merkel Net Worth will keep growing at a staggering pace in the coming months. This data provided by us on Angela Merkel Net Worth is just on estimated basis and statistical analysis.
If readers find any issues with this article on Angela Merkel Net Worth, we recommend you to send your questions below through our comments section.
Angela Merkel Net Worth Growth Estimate
The Net Worth and Income of Angela Merkel is expected to continue to grow at a Strong pace. Over the next few years, Angela Merkel’s Net worth is likely to grow by around 34%.
Share on: WhatsAppDemocratic messaging gurus and pollsters have warned embattled incumbents not to defend Obamacare. It's too toxic. They've also admonished their party against touting the economic recovery. It's too weak; the idea that America's economy is roaring back to life isn't resonating with voters. Democrats have virtually zero chance of winning back the House, so their primary concern is retaining the Senate -- which the GOP can reclaim by netting six seats in November. Some losses are expected, but Team Blue believes it can use political triage to save their majority. In order to do so, they'll need relatively strong turnout from the voting blocs that were instrumental to re-electing President Obama in 2012, so strategists are dialing up every play in the book to galvanize specific constituencies. Colorado Senator Mark Udall's first ad of the cycle hews to this strategy. It attacks Udall's Republican opponent -- Rep. Cory Gardner -- for wanting to "outlaw" birth control, an outlandish claim:
A friend snarks that Udall's facial expression near the end of the spot is eerily reminiscent of " blue steel." As preposterous as the attack seems, setting the record straight on this sort of issue is important. So important, in fact, that I'd recommend that Gardner push back forcefully in an on-air ad of his own. Democrats got a lot of mileage out of the "Republicans want to take away your birth control" garbage in the 2012 cycle, and Terry McAuliffe used the issue to define Ken Cuccinelli early in last year's gubernatorial race in Virginia. Cuccinelli ended up closing a large gap because of Obamacare, but fell short. Perhaps the biggest reason? Unmarried women, who overwhelmingly backed McAuliffe. This narrative needs to be nipped in the bud -- or else, like a mendacious weed, it could take root with just enough potential voters to make a difference.And while I'm dishing out unsolicited advice, I'd urge Team Gardner to be highly prepared to push back on the abortion attack, too. Two Republican candidates fumbled the "rape exception" question last cycle, arguably costing them Senate seats. Out of curiosity, Does Mark Udall support his party's extremist position of taxpayer-funded, late-term abortion on demand? Does he agree with the strong majority of American women that abortion shouldn't be allowed in most cases? Of course, Udall is frantic to distract from his own record on other issues, which includes reciting his party's " keep your plan " lie of the year to Colorado healthcare consumers. He's so anxious about this issue, in fact, that his office pressured a state agency to cook the books on cancellation notices, a nakedly political attempt to minimize the fallout from his broken pledge. Recent polling shows a close race -- with Udall's numbers looking shaky, and Obama's popularity in the toilet. Unfortunately for Udall, his pro-Obama voting record is among the most slavish in the entire Senate. He's sided with Obama line 99 percent of the time. The numbers, unlike certain Senators, don't lie:
Also of note is the fact that Udall's signature was conspicuously absent from that letter sent by red and purple state Democrats urging the Obama administration to approve the wildly popular Keystone pipeline. Those ineffectual Senators were ignored, of course, but at least they made an attempt. Mark Udall evidently believes that he has too much at stake with deep-pocketed environmentalists (he is a Tom Steyer beneficiary) to go to bat for a broadly-supported, job-creating infrastructure and energy project. Thousands of American jobs can wait, it seems. Gardner is hitting Udall over the issue:
The Obama Administration and Senator Udall continue to play politics with the American economy. pic.twitter.com/SFbfbX3AMa — Cory Gardner (@CoryGardnerCO) April 18, 2014
To recap, the Republican in this race is talking about job creation. The Democrats is fear-mongering about birth control.
- A solid web ad from American Commitment shoves back at Udall. Too bad this isn't airing:CLOSE Reversing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would take an unprecedented worldwide effort, say NOAA researchers. Video provided by Newsy Newsy
This image of Earth from the International Space Station captures the curvature of the Earth and shows its thin atmosphere. Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a milestone level of 400 parts per million in March 2015, NOAA reported. (Photo11: NASA/JPL/UCSD/JSC)
Worldwide levels of carbon dioxide — the gas scientists say is most responsible for global warming — reached a significant milestone for the month of March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday.
The global monthly average for carbon dioxide hit 400.83 parts per million in March, the first time the average surpassed 400 ppm for an entire month since such measurements began in the late 1950s, NOAA said.
"It's both disturbing and daunting," said NOAA chief greenhouse gas scientist Pieter Tans. "Daunting from the standpoint on how hard it is to slow this down."
The burning of the oil, gas and coal for energy releases "greenhouse" gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. These gases have caused the Earth's temperature to rise over the past century to levels that cannot be explained by natural variability.
The last time carbon dioxide reached 400 ppm was millions of years ago, according to the journal Nature Geoscience. A 2009 report in the journal found evidence of CO2 levels of 365 ppm to 415 ppm roughly 4.5 million years ago.
"Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone," Tans said.
CO2 levels were around 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, when large amounts of greenhouse gases began to be released by the burning of fossil fuels.
Carbon dioxide is invisible, odorless, and colorless, yet it's responsible for 63% of the warming attributable to all greenhouse gases, according to NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
Levels of carbon dioxide go up and down each year, reaching their highest levels in May and then going back down as plants absorb the gas. But the long-term trend is up, according to NOAA.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1PoKXXFAs Americans argue about the influence political attack ads made with secret special-interest money might be having on the upcoming midterm elections, a shadowy group in Canada has taken credit for trying to sway voters in a tight mayoral race in Winnipeg.
The makers of this Internet ad, featuring video of Winnipeg’s incumbent mayor, Sam Katz, accidentally kicking a child in the face during a soccer game, say it was paid for by a previously unknown group called “FOPATKITFOC,” or, “the Friends of People Against the Kicking in the Face of Children.”
The ad was posted on YouTube in August, the day after Mr. Katz was penalized for dangerous play during a televised soccer match pitting city officials against children from the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba. (The mayor’s young opponent reportedly suffered no serious injury from the badly-aimed kick.)
As a blogger for the Winnipeg Free Press noted, the play-by-play announcer’s call on the original footage of the game — “Oh! He’s booted him in the face in an election year!” — helped propel the mayor to viral infame within hours.
Reached by The Lede on Friday, David Leibl, a spokesman for Mr. Katz’s main opponent, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, said that her campaign was not responsible for the ad and had no idea who had made it. Mr. Leibl explained that “our campaign has respected the fact that it was an accident” and added that, although American political bloggers have drawn attention to the ad this week, “fortunately in Winnipeg the discussion has remained focused on more important issues,” related to the governance of the city.
The fact that a third version of the ad says that it was “paid for by Concerned Pediatric Orthodontists,” strongly suggests that it might be the work of a comedian rather than “Canada’s Karl Rove.”
On Thursday, the CBC reported that Mr. Katz, a successful businessman who opened his first retail store after dropping out of dental school, is “in a neck-and-neck race with Wasylycia-Leis as he seeks a third term in office,” in 12 days.Astrology is based on the superstitious belief that the heavens rule our destiny and thus offers people the false consolation that their destinies can be manipulated or altered for personal desire. Many people, up to the present day, still cling to such absurdity that astrology works and newspapers unfortunately do continue to set aside columns for horoscopes which surprisingly retain a large following.
The success of astrology largely relies on loose statements that can be equally applicable to anyone. It has largely been kept alive by the persuasive appeal of confirmation bias, the subconscious ability to cherry-pick supportive evidence while forgetting evidence to the contrary. That one accurate horoscope stands out as a salient confirmation and in turn, induces a self-fulfilling prophecy where people, hence-forth, adjust their personalities accordingly. Their behaviour is ultimately dictated by the prediction.
In reality, astrology does not even have good predictive power. This can perhaps be evidenced by one major study that aimed to examine the validity of astrological predictions over a five year period from 1974 to 1979. The predictive failure rate was 90 percent which means that only 300 predictions were fulfilled.
One way to scientifically test astrological claims is to examine whether the successful predictions are more than one would expect by chance events in the absence of the effect of the astrologer. But, astrologers have so far mostly failed to design experimental studies that run on controlled statistical tests.
Perhaps, one of the most notable studies examining statistical significance of celestial motion and corresponding influences on humans was Michel Gauquelin’s “Mars effect”. The study is most often cited by astrologers as evidence of their claims because it reports that a number of statistically significant sports champions appear to have been born when Mars was directly overhead, between the eastern horizon and the celestial meridian (more than one would expect by pure coincidence alone). Later studies by Gauquelin however were entirely negative and they study was never replicated. It is, therefore, quite possible indeed that Gauquelin’s findings were embellished by selection bias, where the subjects studied are not representative of the target population, for instance because the researcher has only selected subjects who are already athletic and thus their score would be already higher than one would expect by chance.
Aside from the validity of the astrological predictions, the entire concept is nonsensical because it does not take into account the precession of the equinoxes and their motion upon the ecliptic which results in shifts in Earth’s axial rotations and the equinoctial points no longer coinciding with the constellations. Some astrologers counter that by saying that their predictions are actually not based on the pattern of stars but rather on the orientation of the Earth to the sun, the tropical zodiac. This begins with the Sun being at the point where the ecliptic and the equator intersect, known as the vernal equinox. In the tropical zodiac, the vernal equinox is defined as the start of Aries, the first moment of spring and, thus, it would not matter much where the constellations are. The zodiac, in this case, is aligned to the seasons and not the stars. But, even then, this sort of tropical astrology determined with reference to the seasons still would not make sense. That is because any signs that you conceive in the Northern Hemisphere would be reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. A Cancer born in the summers of the Northern Hemisphere would be born in the winters of the Southern Hemisphere. And, a Capricorn born in the winters of the Northern Hemisphere would be born in the summers of the Southern Hemisphere.
There is absolutely no scientific basis for astrology. It is a 4000 year old pseudo-scientific belief masquerading as science that has unfortunately persisted up to the present day.
Bibliography
R.B. Culver and P.A. Ianna The Gemini Syndrome: A Scientific Evaluation of Astrology. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984.
Gauquelin, M. 1972. Planetary effect at the time of birth of successful professionals, an experimental control made by scientists. Journal of Interdisciplinary Cycle Research 3(2): 381-389.
Patrick Grim (Ed.). Philosophy of Science and the Occult. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982.
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book, there are things more seductive than blood:
Then you found that what you really wanted was power, and there were much politer ways of getting it. And then you realised that power was a bauble. Any thugs had power. The true prize was control. Lord Vetinari knew that. When heavy weights were balanced on the scales, the trick was to know where to place your thumb.
Now, you could try and argue that she is worse than Vetinari, but if you were to convince me, you probably should go into politics. There’s a general election on in a few weeks, apparently.
Then there’s the Low King of Uberwald, a progressive ruler and one looking above and beyond the underground of where he rules. He’s a background player for a lot of the novel, despite his import, but somehow it makes his revelation at the end more of a shock. He asks Cheery, the controversial dwarven Watchwoman who fully embraces her feminine side, for clothes advice. Is the dwarves’ ruler female? Trans? Or just fancies wearing a well-tailored dress whenever it takes his fancy? It’s not clear – the continued use of the ‘he’ pronoun suggests he is male but dwarven sexual identity is a complex issue, as Pratchett has established in previous books.
I feel it’s Cheery and Angua that underline that Ankh-Morpork is the more progressive society. Not by much, but enough. Cheery is a brilliant character and her struggle with her identity in Feet of Clay gave the book an intense emotional power and one that made the antagonist golem, also struggling with what he was, that more compelling a villain.
Here you see how shocking her lifestyle choices are in the eyes of other dwarves. It’s baffling but she is an outlier when it comes to her community. The approval of the Low King at end of the novel shows that things could change.
Angua is even more interesting. There are 16 Discworld novels after this and I would happily stick with it if I knew every one was about the Watch’s resident werewolf. She represents something different to the Discworld. Not a traditional werewolf like the rest of her family, some of whom are happy sticking to their traditional blood-crazed roles. Not a wolf, given her never quite explained relationship with Gavin, the wolf who brings her back to Uberwald. Not a human either, given her difficult dealings with Carrot and colleague. As Gaspode (GASPODE – the mangy talking mutt is back!) explains:
When she’s human shaped she’s just like a human. And what’s that got to do with anything? Humans don’t like werewolves. Wolves don’t like werewolves. People don’t like wolves that can think like people, an’ people don’t like people who can act like wolves. Which just shows you that people are the same everywhere.
But there is a place for both of them in the Watch, where they have no need to hide their true selves. And this is a place that is traditionally conservative, with its adherence to law, order and upholding the status quo. As ever with Discworld, things are complex, but what’s important is you are forced to think about these issues and tease out what is the best from all the available options. Vetinari may be Lex Luthor with a limp, but he’s also someone whose will can bend Ankh-Morpork into shape around it. Let’s just not mention that he is hardly leading a democracy, is he?
There are some neatly meta bits of plot here, which means I have to do the needful and draw attention to the fact that Wild Speculation may likely follow. There are two spectacular MacGuffins in the novel. The first is the Stone of Scone in Uberwald, which we eventually learn is a fake of a replica of a fake of a replica dating back decades after the original dwarves’ holy symbol first crumbled. Secondly there’s the eponymous Fifth Elephant itself. Pratchett has made a lot about the power of symbols and how it’s not what they *are* but what they represent that is so important. The Fifth Elephant, a pretty awesome pun in tribute to an amazing sci-fi film (and even better graphic novel) aside, serves no purpose but to attempt to explain why Uberwald is so resource rich.
Throughout the novel, we see how Ankh-Morpork versus Uberwald is the tale of ‘modernity versus the lore’. Vimes is repeatedly told he can’t win because he fails to understand the importance of myth. Things happen, but the lore endures:
‘There’ve been rebellions against kings before. Dwarfdom survives.The Crown continues. The lore abides. The Scone remains. There is…a sanity to come back to.’
As we see, that’s not true. Lore is defeated by modernity with the rather literal image of a mythical werewolf being killed by a flare from the clack. Something to chew upon (sorry). Pratchett has spent the best part of 25 books discussing the power of stories. Here he posits that there might be something more. Not necessarily better, but different and maybe more powerful. You could argue The Fifth Elephant is the first in his Industrial Revolution series (The Truth, which is discussed next week, is generally seen as the first). This is an area that will dominate the Discworld as it enters the Century of the Fruitbat.
As ever, a good sign of a Discworld novel is when I look at what I have typed and feel dejected that I have barely done it justice. There’s no mention again of Sybil Vimes, wonderful wonderful Sybil, Pratchett’s excellent grasp of long-term relationships and a content marriage. I (capital-L) LOVED Inigo, the slick diplomat-cum-assassin who was swiftly bumped off but I still hope escaped somehow. After their comedic brilliance in Carpe Jugulum, it was great to see the Igors back, although I assumed that Pratchett writing one who doesn’t have a speech impediment, out of sheer rebellion, must have meant they were a complete bugger to write.
The book heralds a change in what the Discworld is and where it is going. That’s its strength. It’s a novel that benefits from some thought after the book is long closed and neatly fits in with its publication time. We were all asking where we were heading as the years approached 2000. This book shows the Discworld has a decent idea. Next week’s book, the 25th (TWENTY FIFTH! Blimey), underlines it. See you next week for The Truth.
AdvertisementsBuilding the thought decoder began by developing an algorithm tailored to each individual subject. The participant was asked to read a passage, for instance John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, aloud to get a base reading. Then they were asked to read it to themselves. And finally, to just sit and do nothing. That allowed the team to isolate which neurons were firing when vocalizing the text. Then a visual representation of the sound waves is created and those sounds are matched with particular brain patterns. Then while the participants read silently to themselves the decoder is able to reconstruct the words based purely on what neurons are firing.
Of course, the technology is far from perfect. While the results were described as "significant" a reliable device that can translate thoughts in to words is a long way off. But the team from Berkeley is optimistic that one day they'll be able to give the gift of speech to someone who is paralyzed or "locked-in."
[Image credit: Science Photo Library - SCIEPRO/Getty Images]The 2018 House Republican budget plan — which has passed out of committee and may be voted on by the full House of Representatives in early September — would severely and disproportionately hit low- and moderate-income families and individuals. If the framework it sets out were to become law, we find that programs serving low- and moderate-income people would:
be cut by approximately $2.9 trillion from 2018-2027;
be cut by about 36 percent in 2027 alone;
constitute half of the plan’s budget cuts (see Figure 1), even though they represent about a quarter of non-defense spending; and
outside of health programs, fall to their lowest level of spending as a share of the economy in 50 years — even before some key low-income programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) were established. (See Figure 2.)
About half of the low-income cuts would reflect the plan’s incorporation of the House-passed American Health Care Act, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates would cause 23 million people to lose health coverage by 2026. Other cuts would significantly undermine the modest levels of basic food aid now provided to poor and near-poor households, and would make it far more difficult for students from low- and moderate-income families to attend college, among other negative effects. At the same time, the budget paves the way for the enactment of tax cuts that likely would largely benefit the wealthy; for example, the tax cuts in the House GOP’s Better Way proposal from last year would provide tax cuts to millionaires totaling $2.6 trillion over a decade. The budget also creates a fast-track approach in which cuts to low-income programs could be used to offset such tax cuts.
Distribution of Budget Cuts
As Table 1 shows, the plan proposes $5.8 trillion in non-defense budget cuts through 2027. Based on information from the CBO and the House Budget Committee, we estimate that cuts in low-income entitlement and discretionary programs would account for about $2.9 trillion — or 50 percent — of the non-defense reductions.
TABLE 1 Non-Defense Spending Cuts Under House GOP Budget
2018-2027, in billions of dollars Total Low-Income Entitlement programs -4,440 -2,580 Function 650: Social Security 0 0 Function 570: Medicare -490 0 Function 550: Health (Medicaid, Affordable Care
Act, etc.) -1,500 -1,450 Function 600: Income security -890 -660 Function 500: Education, social services, etc. -210 -90 Other specified functions -530 0 “Improper payments” -700 -330 Other “government-wide” -120 -40 Non-defense discretionary programs -1,360 -300 Total non-defense program cuts -5,800 -2,880
Over the coming decade, the low-income cuts include:
$1.5 trillion in entitlement cuts for low- and moderate-income people in the health area of the budget. The budget incorporates the House Republican bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This bill, according to CBO, would cause 23 million people to lose coverage by 2026 and result in less adequate or more expensive coverage for millions more. [1] The bill would effectively end the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and restructure Medicaid by converting virtually the entire program to a block grant or a grant that pays each state a capped amount of money per enrollee, regardless of actual health care costs (a “per capita cap”). But whether or not the House health bill is enacted in part or in whole, the health cuts in the House GOP budget would be significant. For example, on top of the cuts in the health bill, the budget proposes a work requirement for Medicaid, cutting the program by another $110 billion.
The budget incorporates the House Republican bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This bill, according to CBO, would cause 23 million people to lose coverage by 2026 and result in less adequate or more expensive coverage for millions more. The bill would effectively end the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and restructure Medicaid by converting virtually the entire program to a block grant or a grant that pays each state a capped amount of money per enrollee, regardless of actual health care costs (a “per capita cap”). But whether or not the House health bill is enacted in part or in whole, the health cuts in the House GOP budget would be significant. For example, on top of the cuts in the health bill, the budget proposes a work requirement for Medicaid, cutting the program by another $110 billion. $150 billion in cuts to the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps). The plan would cut SNAP funds by $150 billion; most of these cuts would not occur for several years, but they would grow to roughly 40 percent in 2027. The plan would impose direct program cuts and also transfer “significant authority” over SNAP to the states (something akin to a “block grant”), starting midway through the next decade. A funding reduction of this magnitude would end food assistance for millions of low-income families, reduce benefits for tens of millions of such families, or some combination of the two. [2]
The plan would cut SNAP funds by $150 billion; most of these cuts would not occur for several years, but they would grow to roughly 40 percent in 2027. The plan would impose direct program cuts and also transfer “significant authority” over SNAP to the states (something akin to a “block grant”), starting midway through the next decade. A funding reduction of this magnitude would end food assistance for millions of low-income families, reduce benefits for tens of millions of such families, or some combination of the two. Roughly $500 billion in other low-income entitlement cuts in the income security area. In addition to the SNAP cuts, the budget calls for about $500 billion in entitlement cuts to federal income support programs. The plan identifies certain specific cuts in the school meals program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and refundable tax credits, all of which would have harmful effects on children. The budget would limit “community eligibility,” an option that allows high-poverty schools to provide school meals at no charge to all students and get reimbursed based on the school’s poverty level; reduce children’s SSI benefits if another member of their family is also a recipient; require more onerous income verification for the EITC; and eliminate some low-income families’ eligibility for the Child Tax Credit. But the specific potential cuts discussed in the budget plan — including the proposed cuts in federal employees’ pensions, which are not counted in our analysis of low-income cuts — explain only a portion of the total entitlement cuts in income security programs. The remaining, unspecified cuts would either harm the programs described above in yet other ways or come from other safety net programs such as child care, foster care, adoption assistance, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, among others.
More than $90 billion of cuts in education and social services programs, including deep cuts in student aid. The budget calls for significantly scaling back Pell Grants, which help nearly 8 million students from low- and moderate-income families afford college. It would also repeal the Social Services Block Grant, which helps states provide services to their most vulnerable populations. The Pell cuts of more than $75 billion would occur even though Pell Grants currently cover just 29 percent of the costs of college — the smallest portion covered in the program’s history. The cuts in Pell would be accompanied by up to $120 billion in cuts to student loans. These student loan cuts are not classified as low-income cuts in this analysis, though they would also impact lower-income students. In combination, the Pell Grant and student loan reductions would make it more expensive and thus more difficult for young people in low- and moderate-income families to attend college, thereby limiting their future prospects. [3]
$330 billion in “improper payments.” This is the portion of the budget’s targeted reductions in “improper payments” that we estimate would come from low-income entitlement programs. This translates to reductions in spending of another $330 billion in low-income programs such as Medicaid and the EITC (on top of what’s described above). [4] Yet the budget does not offer any specific proposals to reduce improper payments, instead offering a commission to study the issue and come up with a plan. Given the long history of past budgets that claimed large savings through cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” only to have those savings ultimately prove to be illusory, it is unlikely these savings would materialize. Or if they did materialize, it’s likely much of the savings would come in the form of real benefit and eligibility cuts, not rooting out erroneous payments. [5] Note that CBO assessed the President’s budget’s claims that it would reduce improper payments by $140 billion over the next decade and found that it should not be counted on to produce any savings. [6]
About $300 billion in cuts to low-income non-defense discretionary programs over the coming decade. On top of the significant cuts in non-defense discretionary programs already imposed due to the tight spending constraints imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the plan would cut non-defense discretionary programs another $1.4 trillion (from 2018 to 2027). We assume that low-income discretionary programs would be funded in the same proportion as they are in the 2018 appropriation bills that have been approved by the House Appropriations Committee; this method produces an estimate of approximately $300 billion in reductions in these programs. These cuts would hit important areas such as rental assistance and job training.
The Reconciliation Process: A First Step
The budget also puts in place a fast-track reconciliation process to achieve the first tranche of its cuts through legislation this year, calling for congressional committees to produce at least $203 billion over ten years in “reconciled” entitlement cuts to be enacted in the months ahead. This reconciliation process permits Congress to enact the program cuts with only a simple majority in the Senate — i.e., without any Democratic votes — and is the same process that GOP leaders have been using to try to undo the ACA. The $203 billion target is a floor for the required cuts, not a ceiling. As a result, the cuts could end up substantially deeper than $203 billion. In particular, tax-cut proponents could have an incentive to increase the size of these budget cuts; tax cuts enacted through the reconciliation process could be made larger if they were offset by bigger entitlement cuts.
The budget plan requires a number of specified congressional committees to come up with these reconciled budget cuts. Many of these committees have jurisdiction over programs important to low- and moderate-income families, including the Ways and Means Committee (which has jurisdiction over a number of income-assistance programs), the Agriculture Committee (with jurisdiction over SNAP), the Energy and Commerce Committee (with jurisdiction over Medicaid), and the Education and the Workforce Committee (with jurisdiction over Pell Grants and student loans).
Unprecedented Cuts to Low- and Moderate-Income Programs
If enacted, these proposals would constitute reductions in the safety net of unprecedented magnitude. If enacted, these proposals would constitute reductions in the safety net of unprecedented magnitude. The cuts would grow over time until, in 2027, 36 percent of the resources for low- and moderate-income programs would be lost. In contrast, other non-defense programs would be cut by 14 percent that year. (See Figure 3.)
All types of low-income programs would be hit hard. Low-income health programs would be cut by 35 percent in 2027, while other low-income programs would be reduced by 39 percent.
The cuts in discretionary programs would come on top of cuts that have already occurred or would be required in future years due to existing appropriations caps and sequestration. [7] Overall, from 2010 to 2027, low-income discretionary programs would be cut by a stunning 55 percent, or more than half, after adjusting for inflation (and by significantly more if population growth or economic growth is taken into account).
Overall, from 2010 to 2027, low-income discretionary programs would be cut by a stunning 55 percent, or more than half, after adjusting for inflation (and by significantly more if population growth or economic growth is taken into account). Outside of health care, the share of national resources devoted to programs assisting low- and moderate-income people would fall dramatically. Currently, spending on these programs equals 2.1 percent of the economy (or GDP), which is close to its average of 2.0 percent over the past 40 years. Even without policy changes, this percent will soon drop considerably below its historic average. Under the budget plan, the drop would be even sharper — with expenditures for these programs falling to 1.0 percent of GDP in 2027 — which would be the lowest percent since 1966, when programs like the EITC for low-earning workers didn’t even exist. (See Figure 2 above.)
Large Tax Cuts to Millionaires Could be Facilitated by Big Program Cuts Hitting People with Low or Moderate Incomes
As noted above, the House Budget Committee plan also includes a fast-track “reconciliation” process that would permit a tax bill to be passed with a simple majority vote (thus making it possible to pass without votes from any Democratic senators).
Although the budget resolution can’t dictate the actual details of the tax plan, it does include a section that highlights potential tax priorities. These priorities favor high-income households or corporations and are consistent with the House GOP’s “Better Way” tax plan from last year.[8]
The vast majority of the tax cuts in the Better Way plan would ultimately go to the highest-income households. Of the plan’s $3.1 trillion in tax cuts over ten years, millionaires would receive an estimated $2.6 trillion in tax cuts, gaining $330,000 apiece in 2017 alone, Tax Policy Center data indicate.[9] So if a proposal such as the Better Way plan were to be adopted, millionaires might benefit nearly as much from the tax cuts facilitated by the budget as low- and moderate-income people would be harmed under the budget. The poor would become substantially poorer and the rich, still richer.
The budget does call for its tax reform bill to be deficit neutral, but it fails to identify specific revenue-raising measures to pay for it. Similarly, the July 27 Joint Statement on Tax Reform[10] by the Trump Administration and congressional GOP leaders referenced several tax cuts benefiting those with high incomes without identifying a single offsetting revenue-raising proposal. This follows a familiar political story — promise large tax cuts and provide specifics about which taxes will be cut, and then claim that the tax cuts will be offset but provide limited or no information about how this would occur. This year’s budget resolution leaves open the possibility that the cost of some of the tax cuts could be offset by entitlement cuts that reduce assistance to people struggling to get by, as well as by gimmicks that help mask the tax cuts’ true cost.
A Different Approach Is Possible
The budget plan’s structure essentially dictates severe cuts to certain types of spending. The plan is designed to balance the budget in ten years while cutting revenues, increasing defense, and essentially holding Social Security harmless.[11] As a result, other programs, especially low-income programs, would be hit hard.
The plan could have aimed for significant deficit reduction without insisting on a deficit of zero in the final year.[12] Or it could have taken a more equitable approach, including new revenues, to reach its deficit reduction goal. Past bipartisan plans have taken a more balanced approach to deficit reduction, including the plan advanced by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson in 2010 as co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.[13] These plans accomplished significant deficit reduction by both increasing revenues and reducing expenditures, while largely avoiding cuts in programs for low-income people. Bowles and Simpson stated a principle that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or inequality.
Moreover, the House Budget Committee plan ignores what should be one of the largest sources for deficit reduction: tax expenditures. These are the more than $1 trillion a year in deductions, credits, and other preferences that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called “tax entitlements” and former Reagan economic adviser Martin Feldstein said are the best target for cutting wasteful government spending. Tax expenditures tilt heavily toward the affluent, with half of their benefits going to the top fifth of households. A reduction in tax expenditures could be used to pay for tax cuts that advocates of the House plan envision, or tax expenditures could be scaled back to help reduce the deficit.
Rather than limit tax expenditures or take other steps that would have allowed for a less unbalanced approach to deficit reduction, however, the House Budget Committee’s plan adopts an approach that would make Americans with the least bear the brunt of the sacrifices.On April 7th, an American University undergrad named Alex Louden was assaulted while walking near campus. His assailants allegedly first ran him down with a car, and then beat him while yelling anti-gay slurs until Loudon began to fall unconscious. He was hospitalized with a severe concussion and a spinal strain. Two of Louden's three alleged assailants were members of Epsilon Iota, an illegal, "secret" frat that has operated with impunity on American University's campus for over a decade. It's the same fraternity that in recent days was the subject of an anonymous "leak" of incriminating, rapey emails.
According to student newspaper The Eagle, Louden may have fallen into Epsilon Iota's bad graces after beginning the process of pledging his freshman year only to withdraw himself from consideration and instead join a "rival" frat. After that transgression, Louden says he was harassed and intimidated by EI members, who regularly referred to him using hissed anti-gay slurs. Things came to a violent head in early April, when EI members Milain Fayulu and Anthony Abdelnour, along with non-EI member Miguel Lama allegedly spotted Louden walking home from class. And then,
The three men allegedly attempted to run Louden over with a car as he passed the Nebraska parking lot while walking home after class. They exited the car and yelled at Louden, who said he yelled back and then left, continuing to walk down New Mexico Ave., away from campus. The car then appeared to drive in the opposite direction, but abruptly turned to follow Louden, he said. The three assailants then exited the car and kicked him in the head 20 to 30 times, according to the incident report obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department. "They spat in my face. They were yelling, 'We're gonna kill you, you [anti-gay slur]. You f***ing bitch, you're dead…We'll put you in the hospital. We'll f***ing kill you.' Just stuff like that, the whole time," Louden said.
All three alleged assailants were arrested on April 11th and are currently facing disciplinary action from the University.
A casual observer might wonder what the hell is going on at American University. Why is an "illegal" frat with a documented history of violence, illegal activity, and a culture that encourages rapey behavior allowed to operate with impunity? How much does the University know about Epsilon Iota's activities? And is anything at all being done to stop it?
Epsilon Iota is a nonfrat (or fauxternity, if you will) that came into existence as the result of the sort of liability dodgeball Universities like to play with alcohol and Greeks. In the early 1990's, American University kicked its fraternities and sororities off campus and became "dry." Greeks were still allowed to exist; they just had to do whatever it was they were going to do off campus. As a result, the Bacchanalian partying that has come to characterize a particularly embarrassing phase of young adulthood moved from AU's campus to the surrounding neighborhoods. Local residents were less than thrilled.
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In 2001, after a few pledges to AU's Alpha Tao Omega chapter had to be hospitalized with alcohol poisoning that resulted from hazing, the national chapter revoked the charter of its AU branch, leaving the brothers of Alpha Tao Omega's Epsilon Iota chapter sans national affiliation. In the words of a former AU student, "AU had a rogue chapter on its hands."
But, thanks to its "dry" campus that pushed Greeks into the surrounding neighborhoods and away from University control, there was little American could do to keep EI from doing pretty much everything that all of the other fraternities were doing. And it seems that, for years, American has turned a blind eye to EI despite the fact that their existence and the identity of its members is an "open secret" on campus. And on social media, where as of Wednesday, two days after we initially ran the damning emails, several current and former members of the EI whose names were mentioned in the emails still had publicly perusable Facebook profiles.
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American University's campus is in Washington DC, which generally has good transportation infrastructure. But frat houses aren't concentrated in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding American; they're in more far-flung neighborhoods as far from campus as across the edge of the District, in Maryland. Girls can't exactly meander down frat row from party to party; socializing takes trip planning and ride coordinating. To combat the problem of logistics, on Friday and Saturday nights, parking garages on and around campus become de facto transportation hubs for cars driven by frat guys of questionable sobriety hauling dolled up freshman girls by the carload from campus to their off-campus houses. Courtney* a current AU freshman, told me that this is how things usually go:
You line up in the parking garage, they pick who they want in their cars (based on looks), you pile in (six people in the backseat is not uncommon) and they bring you to the party and back to campus later (or if you can't get a ride back, you take a cab). This is true for all AU frats including EI.
While frats at AU have utilized the parking garage meat market system for years, the difference between "sanctioned" frats at AU and the "secret" frat EI is that EI isn't beholden to a national fraternity, or even to a spot on the university's Greek Council. As soon as they lost their charter, the group was freed from the rules that governed the other frats. They could recruit new pledges whenever they wanted instead of waiting until the spring semester like everyone else. They could avoid paying sky-high insurance fees and instead spend all of their money on booze and parties and, I don't know, big light up beer signs for their living room.
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At the same time, EI continued to operate just like a sanctioned frat, lining up their cars in the same parking garage line as their legitimate counterparts, recruiting pledges, mixing with sororities (even though, according to one recent AU graduate who was involved in the Interfraternity Council, most sororities strongly discouraged their members from participating in EI activities). Epsilon Iota bros even have a super secret hand signal that is so super secret that a bunch of them were doing them in tagged, public Facebook photos.
It didn't take long before super secret-but-not-actually-at-all-secret fraternity EI had a bad reputation. And I don't mean "cool;" I mean like "destructive, predatory, and rapey." One AU student who was a freshman in 2002 recalls that even then the frat was a haven for party creeps. A current AU sophomore told me that within the first couple weeks of her freshman year, she'd been warned against attending EI parties, older students had warned her that girls get drugged and raped there. A young woman in her freshman year at American told me a similar story, that she was told upon her arrival on campus that EI parties are bad news for girls who don't want to get drugged and raped. Another AU student said she was told not to dip into EI parties' free-flowing supply of "jungle juice," because, rumor had it, the brothers lace it with roofies. Another avoids the frat entirely, terrified that if she ever stepped foot in their off campus house, she'd be assaulted.
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There is no "typical" EI member. An alum who graduated in the mid-2000's recalls that when he was there, EI was a place that seemed to attract less privileged men than the other frats, men who picked up freshman girls from parking garages in several-year-old BMW's rather than brand new ones. But current students tell me that in recent years, EI has earned the dubious reputation of being a place that attracts "foreign, rich, wild partier[s]." They've even got their own closely affiliated club promotion company called Pretty Boy Promotions, sources on campus tell me. According to the company's Facebook page, Pretty Boy is "the foremost nightlife events production, and promotions [sic] company in the Washington Metropolitan Area," great for parties that are "catered for [again, sic] young professionals in both the 21+ and 18+ demographic."Imagine a joint venture between Tom Haverford and Jean-Ralphio from Parks & Rec, minus the likability imparted by the comedy writers behind their most memorable lines, and you get the idea. At one point, the user pic for Pretty Boy Promotions was a head shot of Gian Varela, a DJ and former EI member whose name appears in the cache of gross emails leaked to the media last week.
Being a douchebag isn't a crime. Being a rapist is. From the language tossed around in the cache of leaked emails, its clear EI brothers at least talked big game about using alcohol to incapacitate women pre hookup.
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In fact, the 70+ pages of EI's leaked emails reflect a bizarre obsession with getting girls drunk and then having sex with them, or what the law and American University would classify as "date rape**." But when I asked several current and former AU students whether they knew anyone personally who had been sexually assaulted by members of EI while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, only one person answered in the affirmative, a freshman girl whose dorm mate had returned from an EI party wasted and saying she'd been sexually assaulted on the dance floor last fall.
One would think that an organization would actively fight a "club of criminal douchebags" reputation and work to expel members that were a liability to their reputation, especially if what they really wanted was to be accepted back into mainstream Greek life. And, in public at least, EI members attempted to establish themselves as upstanding members of the student body, as seen by this letter to the editor of campus newspaper The Eagle from 2006,
In the September 28, 2006 edition of The Eagle it was reported that, according to an attributed source, the organization Epsilon Iota "does not follow any sort of by-laws and engages in questionable behavior such as hazing and excessive drinking." As the President of Epsilon Iota, it is not only my duty to know the by-laws of the organization, but to enforce them with the rest of my Executive Board. The university administration has clearly not put in the time or effort to examine the reasons why Epsilon Iota is so strong and so resilient. One of the primary reasons is because we have, contrary to popular belief, a set of rules and principles that govern the behavior of our organization. In the fall of 2003, judicial cases were brought against the individual members of Epsilon Iota in an attempt to expose them as Alpha Tau Omega "rip-offs." At this the administration was unsuccessful. Instead, the legitimacy and right of Epsilon Iota to exist within the Washington, D.C., community was established. In the past, members of Epsilon Iota have interned at the White House and Capitol Hill, served our country in Iraq and been elected to the university's student Senate. In addition to being students and friends, we are all part of an unrecognized, social organization. Our brothers do not lie about and are not ashamed of this fact. We have waited years for the administration at American University to do the same. We are still waiting.
One member of EI spoke anonymously to American's student newspaper in the wake of the email leaks and said that the fauxternity has its own set of rules, and as an organization condemns sexual assault.
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But, judging by private conversations, it's clear that what goes on in private when EI brothers think no one is listening is much different than what EI brothers tell the public. Emails released in the cache remind fraternity members, over and over again, that their power is in their anonymity and mystique.
In one "state of the frat" style email from December 2012, Epsilon Iota member Philemon Dawit warned listserv members "DON'T RELEASE FRATERNITY INFORMATION TO FUCKING RUSHES OR I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN. We are the best thing to ever happen to this campus and always act like it. No one is better than you so don't act like it."
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In fact, after talking to several members of the AU community, it seems the rumored "date rape" fraternity at AU is actually much better at property destruction, drug dealing, and assault than they are at documented sex crimes. One former AU student who graduated in the mid-2000's would buy drugs from the EI house, until his drug dealer was arrested. Emails traded by the brothers show the fauxternity members regularly engaging in the drug trade with each other.
They weren't great neighbors, either. Here's student newspaper The Eagle in fall 2010:
Last year, of the 27 total neighbor complaints, 15 were filed by the same residence, Hradsky said. The house at the source of the alleged misconduct has since been sold and the new owner will probably not rent it to students, Hradsky said. The house had previously been rented by members of Epsilon Iota, the remnants of a fraternity barred from AU due to misconduct. According to neighbor complaints, there were continuous instances of loud parties, public urination and trash. Members of EI have refuted these claims.
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When Alex Louden was assaulted on April 7th, students tell me they were unsurprised that his alleged assailants were Epsilon Iotas. In fact, one of the men implicated in the assault was implicated in another assault on campus alluded to in the leaked emails. By the alleged assailant himself.
Students at AU tell me that many on campus knew about Louden's assault, but were afraid to post anything on social media or speak to anyone on the record out of fear they would also face possibly violent repercussions from EI brothers. The day after the April 7th assault, the University did not issue a statement. Nor did they issue a statement on April 11th, when the students allegedly responsible were arrested.
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American University, for its part, hasn't done much to combat the existence of EI as a threat to campus safety, but they do have a long history of saying they care deeply about fighting EI and promoting campus safety.
In 2006, the Interfraternity Council passed a resolution barring recognized fraternities and sororities from formally interacting with EI and the campus's other unsanctioned frat at official Greek events. That year, the Office of the Dean of Students hired a federal prosecutor to look into how to remove EI's lamprey-like presence from AU's campus, but ultimately, nothing happened. In 2010, the University expanded its code of conduct to include the ability to discipline students for off campus misconduct. EI continued on. When I reached out to the University for comment on the current fracas, I was sent an excerpt from a statement issued by the President of the University on the 24th, which read:
We apply our student code of conduct and local and federal laws. An intense investigation is underway and will |
and you'll be taking someone else's place.
After another silence, a soft voice gets softer: I also want you to know, we don't care what your reasons are. We're not going to judge you.
In the kitchen of the Boulder Abortion Clinic, the abortionist bolts down two microwave tamales. He talks fast and doesn't smile. It is my view that we are dealing with a fascist movement. It's a terrorist, violent terrorist movement, and they have a fascist ideology...
He goes on like that for some time. Long before the first doctor got shot back in 1993, he was warning that it would happen. He was getting hate mail and death threats way back in 1970, just for working in family planning. They started up again in 1973, two weeks after he helped start the first nonprofit abortion clinic in Boulder. I started sleeping with a rifle by my bed. I expected to get shot. In 1985, someone threw a brick through his window during a protest by the quote unquote Pro-Life Action League. He put up a sign that said THIS WINDOW WAS BROKEN BY THOSE WHO HATE FREEDOM. In 1988, somebody fired five bullets through his window. In 1995, the American Coalition of quote unquote Life Activists put out a hit list with his name (and Tiller's name) on it. The feds gave them protection for about six months, then left them on their own.
People don't get it, he says. After eight murders, seventeen attempted murders, 406 death threats, 179 assaults, and four kidnappings, people are still in denial. They say, Well, this was just some wingnut guy who just decided to go blow up somebody. Wrong. This was a cold-blooded, brutal, political assassination that is the logical consequence of thirty-five years of hate speech and incitement to violence by people from the highest levels of American society, including but in no way limited to George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Bill O'Reilly, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. Reagan may not have been a fascist, but he was a tool of the fascists. George W. Bush was most certainly a tool of the fascists. They use this issue to get power. They seem civilized but underneath you have this seething mass of angry, rabid anger and hatred of freedom that is really frightening, and they support people like the guy who shot George — they're all pretending to be upset, issuing statements about how much they deplore violence, but it's just bullshit. This is exactly what they wanted to happen.
He goes on about Bill O'Reilly for a while. Over the course of twenty-nine separate shows, O'Reilly accused "Tiller the Baby Killer" of performing a late abortion for any reason at all, even so a girl could attend a rock concert — a charge that is blatantly untrue. O'Reilly is a disgrace to American society, he says.
But O'Reilly says he's just exercising his right to engage in vigorous debate, you point out.
He's full of shit. This is not a debate, it's a civil war. And the other people are using bullets and bombs. I think O'Reilly is a fascist, and he would fit right in in Nazi Germany as far as I'm concerned.
It's odd, you say, trying to be agreeable. They always go after the doctors. They never go after the moms.
His eyes snap up. What moms? The patients?
Yeah, the patients.
They're not moms until they have a baby.
By the way, he hates the word abortionist. Though it is a simple descriptive term like "podiatrist," the opponents of abortion have turned it into a degrading and demeaning word that has the same negative connotations as the most despicable racial epithet. All the same, it is the right word, an accurate word, and our discomfort with it is but a measure of how poisoned the language of abortion has become.
Late that night, he calls you at your hotel. You're reading one of his many scientific publications, which have titles like Shipibo Polygyny and Patrilocality or Urban Malignancy: Similarity in the Fractal Dimensions of Urban Morphology and Malignant Neoplasms. This one argues that man is a "malignant ecotumor" laying waste the planet. One of the main characteristics of a cancerous growth is that it resists regulation. A cancer cell is a cell that reproduces without limits.
He's sorry, he says, but he must turn down your request to ride in his car to the Tiller memorial in Denver. He has to go with four U. S. marshals in an armored car. Even his wife can't ride with him. Same with dinner in a restaurant. I will never be safe, he says. I'm always looking over my shoulder.
You use the term "partial-birth abortion" and he bristles. It's a barbaric and grotesque term for a procedure that was described at National Abortion Federation meetings in the early nineties by two doctors who didn't take the deadliness of the psychological warfare seriously, and then the Republicans took it up and it became this obscene and basically pornographic antiabortion pornography with pictures that made it look like you were killing this beautiful Gerber baby — and when he tried to tell his colleagues, No, this is not the safest way to perform a delayed abortion, they accused him of working with the antiabortion people and basically rode him out on a rail. The whole thing turned into a tumultuous, writhing, tortured witch hunt — an incredibly painful experience.
Nothing pains him more than the disdain of other doctors. Sometimes the young ones ask to come in for an afternoon so they can learn to make a little money while their careers get started — they think it's as simple as changing a tire. There's no sense that this is an important operation that has to be done well, that a person's life depends on it. But let's face it, abortion is the lowest-status activity in medicine. That's why they always call their clinics Family Planning Centers or Women's Wellness Facilities or some crap like that. Not his place. It's had the same name since 1975. Because I felt that performing abortions was the most important thing I could do in medicine.
The patients can be upsetting too. They're under terrible stress, of course, but sometimes they come in very angry. One had conjoined twins and would have died giving birth, but she exploded when he told her she couldn't smoke in the office. And some treat him with contempt and disgust, usually the ones who have been directly involved in antiabortion activities. They hate all abortion except for their special case. One even said they should all be killed. Only fourteen, she came with her mother. What brings you here? he asked. I have to have an abortion. Why? I'm not old enough to have a baby. But you told the counselor we should all be killed? Yes, you should all be killed. Why? Because you do abortions. Me too? Yes, you should be killed too. Do you want me killed before or after I do your abortion? Before.
He told her to leave. Her mother was very upset. But he isn't an abortion-dispensing machine. He's a physician. He's a person.
The abortionist's mother is ninety-two, but she still has a girlish smile and twinkling eyes that summon gingham skirts and radio serials. When you come in, she's sitting in an easy chair surrounded by her family. You bend down to shake her grandson's hand.So you're the one who wants to be a pirate. He nods and adds in a shy voice: Or now maybe a doctor.
The phone rings and the abortionist goes to answer. He speaks in a heated voice. Hanging up, he's visibly agitated. That guy got your number off the Internet. He's a reporter.You have to change your number.
Oh well, his mother says.
You have to change it. We'll talk about it later.
When he takes his family home, escorted by the U. S. marshals, she explains, almost apologetically, that her number hasn't been listed for almost forty years because the antiabortion people used to make nasty calls at two o'clock in the morning. Then there was a mix-up and it appeared in the phone book. Warren kept saying, You have to change your number, and I said, I don't want to change my number. I've had it all these years. Now she doesn't tell him about most of the calls. He's got enough to worry about.
As a boy? Always helpful. When he was just three, she'd give him a dust rag and let him dust. She'd set him on the counter and let him stir the cake. When he was ten, she and her husband, they went out one night and left the girls with a babysitter who spanked the oldest girl for refusing to go to sleep. When they got home, Warren said, Mother, I don't want you to hire anybody else to take care of Cindy. I can take care of her. So they never hired a babysitter again.
Warren sang in the choir. She felt it was important for the kids to go to church and Sunday school, and they didn't send them, they took them. They got involved in church activities. But politically, they were always on the liberal side. Warren likes to tell the story of how they cried when Roosevelt died. He was six, but he still remembers it.
He loved to go camping and fishing. He played clarinet in the Highlander Boys Band. He liked pranks — once he put an ad in the paper saying everybody could put their dead Christmas trees in a neighbor's yard.
His father was a carpenter, so they didn't have much money and couldn't afford to travel. But they always had exchange students from all over the world — Germany, Brazil, Italy, France, Pakistan, Japan, thirteen countries in all. That was a way the kids could learn how other people lived.
In fifth grade, Warren got interested in photography. Soon he was selling sports pictures to The Denver Post, staying up till midnight to develop the film, make prints, and rush them down to the paper. I probably saved every one of those pictures. He won second prize in Kodak's national contest for high school photography.
One thing that's probably important, she says: She had terrible migraines from as far back as she could remember. She'd get up in the morning and feel like her head was gonna roll down the hall. And one day she asked Warren what he wanted to be and he said, I really want to be a doctor, Mother. He thought he'd be a neuro brain surgeon and maybe he could figure out what to do about my headaches.
That same year, he read a book about Albert Schweitzer healing the sick in Africa and announced, Mother, I'm going to go to Africa before I go to medical school. And he did. He raised money from the Lions Club and the Rotary Club so he could be a community ambassador with the Experiment in International Living. She wasn't surprised. Usually when he says he's going to do it, he's going to find a way to do it.
At college, she says, he was the only white student in the African Club.
He worked three jobs to pay his tuition.
He began reading books like The Golden Bough, Man and His Gods, A Man Against Fate. He learned ancient Greek and studied the Bible in the original. Then he sat her down and said, Mom, I don't believe in this stuff anymore. She said, Well, you don't have to believe in it. Maybe I don't believe in all of it either. But she wasn't worried. She knew his heart.
In his last year of college, he went to a fundamentalist church to see an anticommunist movie called Operation Abolition. He came home and told his parents quite a story. You want to hear the Word of the Lord, you've got to pay! And I don't mean that jigglin' money, I mean that foldin' money! In an article he wrote for the school paper, he compared it to the "Two-Minute Hate" in George Orwell's 1984.
In medical school, he saw his first botched abortions. Then he spent two years as a doctor for the Peace Corps in a Brazilian town so desperately poor, it wasn't unusual to see a dead baby on a trash heap. After that, he worked as a family-planning chief for the Nixon administration and spent some time in Appalachia, where he saw unintended pregnancies dragging families deeper and deeper into poverty. In an article for The New Republic, he quoted one exhausted mother: Each one makes it harder on the ones we already got.
But even after all that, there are still some family members who can't accept what he does. And other doctors too. It really hurts him terribly, she says. In his mind, he's trying to help women who desperately need help. And why can't these doctors, of all people —
In her opinion, he needs to retire. He has a dozen books he wants to write. And this just takes his life.
The shooting? He called her as soon as it happened. He said, Jeanne just told me that George was shot in church. He said MSNBC wanted to interview him, told her what time to watch, trying to stay calm, but she could tell how upset he really was. It was all he could do to keep from losing it. I could hear the terror in his voice.
But when he was on TV that night, all you saw was his anger.
Well, you know, the people that really know Warren could see it, I'm sure. But not that many people probably.
You're a parent yourself, so you have to ask if she ever tried to get him to stop. Especially now that he's kind of making himself a target.
I know that, she answers. I understand that. But that wouldn't do any good. He's got a mind of his own.
The rims of her eyes are getting red. She moves her glasses and dabs at them with a balled-up tissue. You apologize for making her cry.
It's okay. It's all right.
Then she tries to be cheerful again, for the sake of her guest.
The next morning, you're just sitting down to breakfast when the phone rings. It's the abortionist's mother. She's been calling hotels looking for you. Please don't mention that thing I told you, she says. You know exactly what she means, a story so personal and revealing that she preceded it with the words Don't use this in your story. You try to convince her that it would be the perfect humanizing detail. I was up all night worrying about it, she says. I would never forgive myself if anything happened.
You promise.
Jamie Kripke
The abortionist's wife likes good coffee. So you meet at an espresso bar where the menu is in Italian.
She has a strong Roman nose and black hair that breaks against her cheeks in an ebony wave. Her earrings are shaped like dolphin tails. In a charming mixture of English and Spanish, she tells you about growing up in Cuba, happy sun-filled days and good medical training until she started ducking the weekly "discussion" meetings and they told her she wasn't a good communist. But when she finally managed to leave, she saw the other side. For example, when I going to Argentina, I have intrauterine device for anti-conception. When the ginecólogo attend to me, "You need take off this! This makes an abortion!"
Later, working in a hospital, she saw women who tried to induce their own miscarriages bleed to death.
Then she got pregnant. At eighteen weeks, she went to her gynecologist for the blood test. They say, The baby's no good. Have really problem. She went to a geneticist and a specialist in prenatal diagnosis. The geneticist suggested an abortion, butthe prenatal diagnoser, for one hour he was making the sonogram high-resolution. When he finish, he say, What do you think about the baby? And I say, I think he is good. I feel it in my soul, and I want to take him. He say, Go and take your baby.
Labor lasted thirty-six hours, intensive care a month. The specialists told her the baby might have lifelong seizures or learning disabilities. To lighten her workload, she moved to Barcelona and took a job in an abortion clinic. She sees no contradiction in this. Because I am happy in my pregnancy and I have a beautiful relationship with my belly. For many reasons, I believe in God and my fate. It's true in myself. But I know that many women don't feel nothing when they're pregnant and many women feel sad, feel angry. In this situation, you never can judge who's God. You need to respect women.
All that led to the man who would become her husband. She was at a medical conference in 2003 when he came up to her and said, You are so beautiful. He was sixty-four, she was thirty-seven. She was struck by his confidence. I say, This man is really seguro de sí mismo — sure of himself. I say, I like this man.
On the last night, he went to his knees and begged her to dance. Stand up, she said. Stand up! But she felt good dancing with him.
They began to send letters across the ocean and talk for hours on the phone. He was not one of these men who was just para enamorarla. He tried to know her, the woman and the professional and the mother. And he always showed to her his miedos, his fears and loneliness, especially the long grim years when he thought no woman could tolerate a life under siege by fanatics. She could relate. When I was aborting in Spain, I finished the abortion to a young woman, first trimester. When I finish this procedure, she sit on the table, see me to my face, say, Oh, doctor, you are really nice, you are such angel, how do you kill babies? I say, I'm sorry, I don't kill any baby. I aspirate gestational sac. You kill your baby.
But most important, he always asked about her son. Other men did not do that.
In March, he flew to Palma de Mallorca and they spent three beautiful days together.
In May, she noticed that her son had no grip in his left hand. She took him to the hospital and they discovered a brain tumor — a big one, nearly four centimeters.
Warren started calling her every day, sometimes twice a day. The hospital suggested high doses of chemotherapy, her doctor disagreed, Warren said to send him the MRIs. He doesn't rest one second. He find find find information. She decided to try surgery. She told Warren not to come and moved into the hospital to focus on her son. One by one, her other friends stopped calling. Warren called three times a day.
At Christmas, she took her son to Boulder and Warren introduced him to Santa Claus. I think I totally fall in love with him.
Warren said, Will you marry me?
Warren is the most passionate man she has ever known, apasionado about everything he does. He is the kind of people that he going up to the mountain and he see the beautiful sunset, he sit down, he don't want to speak, and he cry.
In the summer of 2006, they were married.
But that was not their happy ending. At the end of May, when they were just back from a rafting trip in Utah, the wet clothes in a pile on the stairs, the phone rang. Warren took the call in his office. I start to take the breakfast in and he don't have color in his face. I say what happen? He say, A shooter shoot George Tiller. I think it's crazy people, and he say, No Amor, these people killed him. But why? You know why. I go to close the window but he no move, he no speak. I say, Do you need my help? He say, No. I need a little time.
When the shock passed, he called CNN. All day long the phones kept ringing. I kept say, He's on the other line. He cannot speak with you now.
Since that day, he hasn't relaxed one second.
Jamie Kripke
The abortionist barely has time to eat. Reporters come and go, the phone rings constantly, he disappears to the hidden rooms where no outsider is allowed to go. Every so often he snatches a minute or two to drop into the counseling room. I want to talk to you about this dustup with National Abortion Federation, he says. They're not going to like to see this dirty laundry, but you know, this was a witch hunt. Just hideous attacks on my character. And I think that it's frankly far more painful to me than the fucking antiabortion people.
He suggests you read a paper he wrote, "Administrative Incongruence and Authority Conflict in Four Abortion Clinics." But he doesn't have time to say why. I have a lot of stuff to do. You're welcome to hang out.
You squeeze in another question. This idea about mankind being a "malignant ecotumor." Doesn't it just invite the hate?
I'm not inviting people to do anything. I'd like them to think. What a concept.
But still.
I do think that helping people control their fertility is highly consistent with helping people be responsible citizens of the planet. If somebody misunderstands it or tries to distort it, I don't give a shit. I'm sorry, I'm living in this country because I can say what I think.
But you're seventy. You have ideas for a dozen books. Why not retire?
I have work to do here. I have important work to do here.
You wanted to cozy up to the next question but there's no time, so you just blurt it out: What are your limits? When would you tell a woman no?
There's no specific answer to that. I'm in the process of turning down somebody who's going to be thirty-four, thirty-five weeks, with an important reason for doing abortion. I'm not going to do it.
The phone rings. Okay. I'll be right there, and he's gone.
Hours pass. You've been moved to the nurses' office, where a soft felt sunflower weaves through the metal in-box. On the wall, a poster of female reproductive organs looks vaguely like the mother alien from Aliens. You are staring at a flyer advertising the clinic's services: "Specializing in late abortion for fetal disorders. Outpatient abortion over twenty-six menstrual weeks for selected patients with documented fetal anomaly, fetal demise, or medical indications."
The opponents of legal abortion often use the phrase "abortion on demand," implying there are no restrictions at all. This characterization is untrue. It has always been illegal, even under Roe v. Wade, to perform abortions after viability without a compelling medical reason. In Kansas, for example, where Dr. Tiller practiced medicine, the law for any abortion after twenty-two weeks requires two doctors to agree that failure to abort would put the mother at risk of "substantial and irreversible harm." But the abortionist's long list of fetal abnormalities that have led women to his clinic ranges from anencephaly to dwarfism, and you know a few dwarfs. You like to think you'd be happy with a dwarf child.
The abortionist comes in, remembers that the U. S. marshals don't like him to use this room because the window is too exposed, and walks right back out. You follow, asking about the patients who were supposed to see Dr. Tiller.
The patient I just finished was very unhappy to see me. I think they are very antiabortion. She had a fetal abnormality, and she and her husband are just devastated. Stuff like that.
What kind of fetal abnormalities are we talking about?
One was Down syndrome, another was a lethal brain abnormality along with a lethal heart abnormality. Another one had a catastrophic — we're not talking about cleft lip, we are talking about cleft face. There was no face.
Is there any chance of interviewing some of them?
Absolutely not.
The abortionist goes home, riding in the bulletproof car with three U. S. marshals. You follow in a separate car. Another set of marshals checks your credentials before they let you in. Inside there's a beautiful Bösendorfer piano with Beethoven on the stand and a primitive bow and arrow from the Amazon rain forest, where the abortionist has traveled to cure diseases and conduct ethnographic studies for more than forty years. There are books everywhere, and many of the nature photographs he has published in environmental books and magazines. Then he leads you to his office. This is the descent into hell. I haven't had a chance to clean this up.
It's an understatement. There's a narrow path between the books and papers. The stacks rise like the houses in Horton Hears a Who! You walk around reading titles: Organization of Insect Societies. Sister Carrie. The Black Death. Cleansing the Fatherland. Abortion and Medical Ethics. Eve's Herbs. The Complete Idiot's Guide to MBA Basics. There's a book on clutter control, which is obviously not doing much good. Even the bathroom is stuffed with boxes.
Don't go in there. It's pretty bad.
He sits down to bang out a letter to President Obama. As you know, Dr. Tiller was unarmed, vulnerable, and acting as an usher for his fellow worshippers. It's four in the afternoon and he still hasn't eaten his miserable microwave tamales. You can't help wondering if he's the abstemious type who doesn't take pleasure in simple things like food.
I enjoy food when I have a chance. I love to cook. Grown men lie down on the floor and cry with ecstasy over my paella.
What do the women do?
They watch the men.
In three days, it's the first light thing you've heard him say. So you take the opportunity to try to reach the emotional core everyone keeps telling you about. This woman you refused to treat, what was her reason?
She was raped. I'm very sympathetic, but I can't risk my medical license for someone who just didn't get around to doing anything about it. I've done some cases over thirty-six weeks, but very few.
For what cause?
For some catastrophic problems.
Like what?
Oh, anencephaly or lack of kidneys, you know. Lack of a brain.
The antiabortionists say that in those cases, the woman should just give birth naturally and let God take the baby.
The sharp tone comes back. Having a delivery is not a benign procedure. When you are trying to keep the baby alive, that increases the risk for the woman. And Reagan put in a bunch of rules about requiring to keep babies alive no matter how hopeless it is. You have people going to Europe to get away from that.
You mean the hospital requires them to save the baby?
The hospital requires full resuscitation measures, no matter what.
Also, his seaweed procedure is very slow and gentle on the cervix. The tissue dehydrates, the collagen starts to pull apart, the uterus gets softer. If you do a forceful dilation, you're going to tear the cervix. All around, his way is safer.
Safer for the mom?
Not for the mom, he snaps, for the woman. Till she's had a baby, she's not a mom.
While you wait, you try to chat up his staff. Most don't want to talk on the record, but Amanda says she's been working here for thirteen years.The abortionist is very caring with all of them, she says. Like all doctors, he wants things done exactly his way. But he doesn't tolerate them being treated poorly. He pays them well. He gives them insurance and 401(k)'s, which is not routine in the abortion trade. Once, he took them all rafting down the Green River. That was delightful. He didn't care where anything was laid out in the camp.
The pens in the counseling room are always diagonal to the pad of paper, you've noticed.
He'll move them, too. As he talks to you, he'll move them.
So what brings out his emotions?
Well, I think it is really difficult for him when women are experiencing pain and he's not able to control that for them. That really affects him.
How?
He becomes very introverted.
Have you ever seen him cry?
That's a question for Dr. Hern.
Does it bother him when the patients show disgust?
That's a question for Dr. Hern.
The abortionist is on the phone, talking with the editor of a scientific journal. Well, I went to George's funeral in Wichita, and I was probably the most heavily protected son of a bitch in the state. I was surrounded by rings of marshals and they might've been able to get me with a shoulder-mounted rocket or something. But the grief of this situation was pretty hard.
He hangs up and dials another number. Well, it's been a very tough week. You know, I liked the world a lot better the way it was a week ago Sunday morning — with George in it.
Another line lights up. Amor, cómo estás? Tengo mucho trabajo. No, no, está bien, Amor. Beso, beso, ciao.
Back on the other line, he tells a reporter that he's just staggered by what happened last week and grieving the loss of a wonderful friend and an excellent doctor. Then a graphic designer comes in to chat about his latest book, an elaborate collage of photographs, stories, and poems:
I have resigned myself to temporary complicity with evil in order to accomplish certain strategic things for people whose suffering is more important than my need to maintain moral purity
The poem is about his work in the Nixon administration, he says.
The phone rings again. This time it's the president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, Steven Keiles. The abortionist wants him to issue a statement denouncing the murder, the sooner the better. I'm sorry, this is not very complicated. You make a statement and you issue it to the press, a one-page statement condemning the brutal assassination of a conscientious and dedicated doctor who helped tens of thousands of women. As far as I'm concerned, it should have been issued last Monday. I don't know why you have to go through a PR firm. I'm sorry, but it just seems very, very bureaucratic to me. I know that abortion is controversial among the members, but I think that the statement by the NSGC would be very important. He slamsdown the receiver. That guy is a fucking clerk.
It's ridiculous, the designer says.
I have no patience for this kind of bullshit. George gave them so much money and so much help.
Encouraged by the designer, he starts ranting about the time the militant antiabortion activist Randall Terry prayed for his death on national Christian radio. These guys are just despicable. If anyone wants hope for the human species, don't talk to me.
A receptionist comes to close the door so the patients don't hear him.
In passing, the abortionist says you can never get used to this. Next time he gives you a minute, you ask him to elaborate.
You can't, he says. I think we're hardwired, biologically, to protect small, vulnerable creatures, especially babies. The fetuses may not be babies, but some of them are pretty close.
Since you've become wary of even saying the word baby around him, always using fetus instead, this surprises you. But he refuses to say any more. He suggests you read an essay called "What About Us? Staff Reactions to D&E." The antiabortion people quote the shit out of it. It's kind of antiabortion porn for them. But the pro-choice people don't like it either. They don't like it when you talk about how it really feels to do this work. His voice is somewhere between bitter and proud.
So why did he write it? For that matter, why does he write so many papers and books? And why does he escape to the jungles of Peru every chance he gets? And what about this theory that man is a cancer? Is it all some kind of elaborate coping mechanism that makes it easier for him to do what he does?
I wrote it because, A, I'm a human being, and B, I'm a writer, and C and D, I'm a physician and I'm trying to understand what we're doing here.
You read the paper. He describes the reactions members of his staff have when they see residue of late abortions, which include shock, dismay, amazement, disgust, fear, and sadness. The later the pregnancy, the harder it is to accept. One assistant resented the patients for putting them through such a horrible experience. Two others described dreams where they vomited fetuses or felt an overwhelming urge to protect others from viewing the fetal parts. Common coping mechanisms were denial, projection, and rationalization. For the senior author, rationalization has been shown by his intensive involvement in professional meetings, where this matter is discussed, and by his seeking peer support from colleagues who have similar experiences. Another great help was the relationships with the patients, which helped the senior author maintain his sense of commitment. It ended with the passage the antiabortionists love to quote, always out of context, words so honest they are almost as painful to read as they must have been to write:
We have reached a point in this particular technology where there is no possibility of denying an act of destruction. It is before one's eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current. It is the crucible of a raging controversy, the confrontation of a modern existential dilemma. The more we seem to solve the problem, the more intractable it becomes.
The abortionist is in the basement doing an abortion. Today is Thursday, operating day. He said you couldn't be here but he called at 7:30 A.M. and said he changed his mind. Now it's just after 8:00. It's very quiet. The waiting room is empty. So are the examining rooms. A receptionist tells you he just got done with a patient and should get back shortly.
A woman comes to the door. Is it okay if I go outside for a minute?
Sure. Knock on the door if you're starting to feel bad.
The phone keeps ringing. If you have tissue samples, says the receptionist you cannot name, that makes it logistically easier. Can I put you on hold one second?
She opens the door for the sad woman and her daughter. Thank you, the daughter says in an emphatic tone that suggests she's not just talking about the door.
A few minutes pass and the phone rings again. Good morning, Dr. Hern's office. Okay, did you get any measurements from the ultrasound? Okay. And where was this done? Okay.
Another line rings. Could you hold for a second? Good morning, Dr. Hern's office. Okay, I can make an appointment. Can I have your last name and date of birth? Can you hold for a second?
When the calls slow down, the receptionist tells you about the time a pro-life reporter pretended to be looking for information and then quoted her by name. They do these things to scare you. They like to let you know they know where you live.
The U. S. marshals keep walking up and down the hall, carrying black bags that look ominously tactical.
The abortionist comes upstairs and moves you to the nurses' office so he can do an interview with a reporter from The Wichita Eagle. Her husband was in the church when Tiller got killed. They're just getting started when he jumps up. I'm sorry, I have to go see a patient.
The receptionist you cannot name is on the phone again. Is someone reading the results for you? Is there someone who can interpret them for you?
The other receptionist lets a man in the door. Thanks for being here, she says. You'll wait downstairs.
The abortionist comes back to the reporter from Wichita. The antiabortion movement is the face of fascism, he says. It cannot be separated from the ruthless and cynical manipulation of antiabortion rhetoric by the Republican party.
The receptionist opens the door again. It's a woman in an ankle-length Amish dress. You've seen her before. She's usually with another woman in the same kind of dress. She's waiting downstairs, the receptionist says, hitting a button that rings an internal line. Dr. Hern? Can you tell B — — her mother is coming down to be with her?
While you wait, you read another one of the abortionist's essays.It has been my practice to rupture membranes with ring forceps, it says.
Another man comes to the door. I'll tell her you're on your way down, the receptionist says.
The phone rings. Dr. Hern's office. I can check for you. He's with a patient. Are you sure you don't want me to take a phone number?
The phone rings again. Dr. Hern's office.
At 11:30, the abortionist comes up in a cheerful mood. I have to go check the level of molecular degeneration in my tamales.
It's the second lighthearted thing you've heard him say this week. And when he comes back from the kitchen, he says another. I identified a new species in my tamales. But I think with a gastroenterologist standing by...
The receptionist smiles. It's your risk.
The two Amish women leave. The abortionist walks them to the door. Have a safe trip home, he says. Give my regards to Dr. H —.
In the counseling room, which the marshals have judged safe, he sits down with a weary sigh and picks up the phone. Amor, he says.
In the nurses' office, the soft felt sunflower weaves through the metal in-box. The poster that looks like the mother alien glares down at you. From the room next door, the abortionist's voice rises so high you can hear it through the wall. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I can't meet with every person who wants to talk to me.
He stops in to say hello, forgetting the rule about not using this room for a moment. I have to go downstairs and finish seeing a patient, he says.
The phone rings. June 24 is the first time we are seeing patients. At that time, based on the information you gave me, the fee will be $7,500.
A young woman wearing a 1920s flapper scarf that Isadora Duncan might have worn comes up the stairs alone. At that very moment, you are reading page 83 of Abortion Practice, the section called Isolation: One of the |
of blood sugar control with pioglitazone," it says, "should be weighed against the unknown risks for cancer recurrence."
Even the diabetes drug that the most people with type 2 diabetes use can't be completely safe. Metformin carries what the FDA calls a "black box warning." Named for the black box that usually surrounds the warning, it means that the drug may cause serious adverse effects. Metformin's black box warning says that lactic acidosis is a rare result of taking metformin, but when it happens it can lead to death half of the time.
I took my chances with metformin until February 2006. That's when I took an even bigger chance.
In 2005 I had written here about the "Worst Diabetes Pills," citing the sensible advice of Public Citizen's Health Research Group not to use most pills until seven years after they came on the market. The only exception they made was for breakthrough drugs that were much better than anything else.
When I stopped metformin to take a chance on Byetta, I was gambling on a drug that had come on the market less than a year earlier. Even now the Health Research Group's cautious waiting period is not quite over.
I had assumed that Byetta was indeed a breakthrough drug. Our subsequent experience with it seems to bear out this assumption. But some researchers are concerned that the GLP-1 medications, including Byetta and Victoza, might cause pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer.
I seem to have lucked out with Byetta. But I'm not much of a gambler with my money, much less with my health.
When a good friend of mine who is also a wise Certified Diabetes Educator encouraged me to manage my diabetes without drugs, I accepted the challenge. In December 2007 I stopped taking any diabetes drugs.
Since that time I have been able to control both my blood glucose level and my weight. I did it by chosing the only alternative that I knew at that time, following a very low-carbohydrate diet. It's still the only way that I know to manage diabetes without drugs.
In the past four or five years I've written again and again about new studies showing the benefits of a low-carb lifestyle. But now I can report a new study on the flip side of the coin.
A study that the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) published recently shows just how dangerous the side effects of diabetes drugs are. The study is a meta-analysis, one that combines the results of several studies to more powerfully estimate the real effect of something. In this case that something is the diabetes drugs that most of us take.
The BMJ editors thought that the article is so important that they made the full-text free online. You may want to read through its dense, scientific language for yourself. Here is a taste from the concluding paragraph: "The overall results of this meta-analysis do not show a benefit of intensive glucose lowering treatment on all cause mortality or cardiovascular death. A 19% increase in all cause mortality and a 43% increase in cardiovascular mortality cannot be excluded."
Note that the meta-analysis reviewed studies of intensive glucose-lowering treatments. Still, as the authors point out, "It is paradoxical to propose intensive glucose lowering treatment when available drugs have no proved intrinsic efficacy."
Does this mean you should throw away your pills? I would never give that advice. Instead, I urge as many of us as possible to use the safest diabetes drugs that we can and only as a temporary measure. When you and your doctor agree that you are managing your diabetes well enough with your diabetes drugs, you can then become drug-free with the only alternative that works.VTA will Offer First Bus Rapid Transit Service in Bay Area
Lucas Perez
San Jose, Calif. – On Friday, March 21, local elected and transit officials from the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) will commemorate the beginning of construction on the Santa Clara-Alum Rock Bus Rapid Transit Project – the first in the entire Bay Area and the first of three Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Projects planned for Santa Clara County. A ground breaking celebration will be held at the School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose at 2 p.m.
“The Santa Clara-Alum Rock BRT Line will connect the culturally rich, east San Jose neighborhoods to downtown’s art, entertainment, retail, restaurants, business and residential districts. This upgraded transit service will enhance the economic viability, visual identity, and the pedestrian and business environment of the corridor,” states Ash Kalra, VTA Board Chairperson and San Jose City Council Member.
This state-of-the-art transit option will provide passengers with faster, more frequent service from the Eastridge Transit Center to the future Arena Station near the San Jose Diridon Transit Center in downtown San Jose. Limited-stops, 10-minute frequencies, all door boarding, traffic signal priority that holds green lights longer for approaching buses, and a dedicated median bus-only lane on Alum Rock east of 34th street will improve travel time for customers. New articulated hybrid vehicles with modern interiors and on board Wi-Fi will offer a comfortable, convenient and productive new way to travel.
The 7.2-mile project features 11 new, light rail-like stations along Capitol Expressway, Alum Rock Avenue, and Santa Clara Street with off-board ticketing machines, attractive shelters, enhanced lighting, and real-time information signage. In addition, pedestrian improvements, signal upgrades, new streetlights, new landscaping and roadway resurfacing will be implemented throughout the corridor.
“This is our opportunity to set the stage for bus rapid transit and the many benefits this service can offer other important transportation corridors like El Camino Real and Stevens Creek Boulevard,” said VTA General Manager Nuria Fernandez. “Let this be a shining example of our commitment to deliver innovative transit options for residents and visitors of Santa Clara County -- options that will help change the transportation landscape as we envision it for Silicon Valley.”
Over the last three years, VTA has delivered improvements along Capitol Expressway in East San Jose that are trailblazing the ultimate transformation of the corridor. The first phase of improvements was completed in fall 2012, providing better pedestrian access and safety along Capitol Expressway. New sidewalks, street lighting, and a landscaping buffer were installed from Capitol Avenue to Quimby Road. The second phase began in fall 2013 with the reconstruction of the Eastridge Transit Center now underway. Once complete, the new transit center will feature a central walkway; a bike and pedestrian path; landscaping; seating; new shelters with updated lighting; and real time information signage.
The vision is that by late 2015, VTA will be operating high-amenity rapid transit buses through downtown and east San Jose from the newly reconstructed Eastridge Transit Center, connecting passengers and the community to the regional transit system, future BART service and planned light rail service in the corridor once funding is identified.
About VTADonald Trump’s inauguration is shaping up to be booming business for Washington. It’s just not the type of business the president-elect may want.
Protesters distraught over Trump’s victory will be flooding into Washington next weekend, creating a potent — and potentially tense — mix as they collide with the billionaire’s die-hard supporters at hotels and restaurants, and on the National Mall. Like much of Trump’s campaign, the festivities and crowd descending on Washington for the inauguration will not neatly fit into Washington's norms.
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"These are unprecedented numbers," Mike Litterst, a spokesman for the National Park Service, said about the protests. "We're trying to help the groups find suitable alternate locations."
The Park Service has credentialed at least 28 groups on the National Mall and is expecting more than 350,000, according to an internal agency spreadsheet. That’s compared to the five or six requests from groups that they usually receive for inaugurations. The service has struggled to accommodate all of the protesters, including a demonstration of about 200,000 women protesting Trump, and others who will sing and fast, for next weekend, Litterst said.
Initially, it looked like Trump’s inauguration could be a relatively low-key affair. After Trump won, a number of hotels, restaurants and party planners had a rash of cancellations, according to interviews with more than a dozen businesses.
Republicans in particular struggled to fill blocks of rooms at hotels, with an email last week going to Republican National Committee members encouraging them to pass it along to anyone who still needed lodging. "At this time, we are pleased to extend the room block to guests and affiliates of RNC Members and state parties. Rooms will be available on a first come, first serve basis," the email obtained by POLITICO says.
Also, the Inauguration Committee is hosting only three balls, a departure from the usual eight to 10, with a president who doesn't necessarily enjoy schmoozing and small talk.
Yet many hotels and businesses say they are doing fine — just with a different crowd.
The Embassy Row Hotel's main event next weekend is a women-themed disco, catering to the Women’s March on Washington planned for next Saturday. The invitation to "dance, dance, dance" at the Dupont Circle luxury venue bills three female DJs and colored wireless headphones but has no mention of the president-elect. The hotel is sold out.
Activists gather Jan. 11 in Washington to make signs for demonstrations against the upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump. | Getty
Some restaurants like the Foggy Bottom bistro Ris, are expecting business to boom with a mix of protesters and guests, said owner Ris Lacoste, who was initially worried about whether there would be a dip in diners. Lacoste said this year’s event would have more protesters than she'd ever seen in Washington for an inauguration. "We're going to have all walks of life here," she said. "This one is very divisive. We want all the business we can get."
Stacy Smith, general manager for the Hyatt Place hotel located just four blocks from the National Mall, said the hotel’s the 214 rooms are almost evenly divided between revelers and protesters. Calling the inauguration "a very unique event," Smith said the hotel's senior management will roam in the lobby not only to greet guests but also to defuse tensions.
At the Courtyard by Marriott located on the Capitol Riverfront, hotel officials have hired outside security, worried about tense situations flaring up between Trump's friends and foes. They are also sold out.
"We've never seen anything like this for an inauguration," operations manager Jonathan Kebede said, noting the hotel hasn't felt a need to bring on additional security for other inaugurations.
To be sure, the traditional revelers are still coming, and some of Washington is behaving as usual. Lobbyists are throwing fetes overlooking the parade, hoping the views will lure new clients. Corporations like AT&T are throwing mix-and-mingles. One of the hot soirees is being hosted by former Ambassador Mary Ourisman at Cafe Milano, according to Sally Quinn, the Washington Post columnist and noted party host.
A representative for the Trump International Hotel, with its plush blue couches and cocktails starting at $24, said the hotel is sold out. At the St. Regis Hotel, long a favorite of dignitaries, where the master of ceremonies sabers a bottle of champagne every evening, the rooms are gone, a spokeswoman said. They are filled mainly with people celebrating the inauguration.
Liliana Baldassari, a spokeswoman for the Four Seasons, says rooms started at $1,925 and went to $20,000. Guests had to promise they'd stay five nights and were given a gold-encrusted, cast-leather stationery box. All the rooms are gone, she said, and revelers are already beginning to ship their long ball gowns.
"This inauguration really looks very similar to Obama's second inauguration and Bush's second inauguration," Baldassari said. "The Obama one was a very unique one, because we were 75 percent sold prior to Election Day, and we had so many international guests."
But Quinn said many of her friends are skipping the parties — she is attending a birthday party instead — and many just want to leave town. Vivian Deuschl, a longtime D.C. hospitality consultant, said associations are having parties, "but you aren't having these glitzy, glamorous parties with the coveted invitations because the excitement is just not there."
"There are lot of venues in town that are normally full that are empty," said Philip Dufour, a D.C. party planner. "A lot of groups gave up holds on venues after the elections."
Philip Wood, general manager of the Jefferson Hotel, a boutique venue with 98 rooms, said there were many cancellations after the election. "Everyone was like, ‘What the hell happened?’" he said. Soon, the rooms were filled again.
This time, he's having a bipartisan cocktail party, hoping not to inflame tensions.
"We're concerned about the guest privacy," he said. "We have guests that are sympathetic to the two different parties staying with us. When alcohol is involved, sometimes voices get raised, so we'll be watching carefully."For years there have been rumors that NVIDIA has a top-secret x86 processor project, and last November an NVIDIA exec all but confirmed that the company is looking at making an x86 chip at some point. That's why today's processor announcement from NVIDIA was both surprising and unsurprising.
No, NVIDIA didn't finally take the wraps off its x86 project—assuming that it hasn't been cancelled, that's still a secret. But the chipmaker did unveil Project Denver, a desktop-caliber ARM processor core that's aimed squarely at servers and workstations, and will run the ARM port of Windows 8. This is NVIDIA's first attempt at a real general-purpose microprocessor design that will compete directly with Intel's desktop and server parts.
The company has offered nothing in the way of architectural details, saying only that the project exists and that the company has had a team of crack CPU architects working secretly on it for some time. Indeed, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsuan's very brief but dramatic announcement of Denver raised more questions than it answered. However, I think I have a good idea of exactly what the first Denver-based chips will look like.
But before I try to put the pieces together, let me lay them all out on the table by walking back through the relevant section of the keynote.
Supercomputers, ARM, Windows 8
Jen-Hsuan set up the Denver announcement in a very peculiar way. After spending most of the event talking about mobiles, he suddenly put up a slide about supercomputers. Immediately, I flagged this as a change of topic to Tesla, but alarm bells started going off. Tesla is not a topic for CES—the Consumer Electronics show. In fact, supercomputing, aka high-performance computing (HPC) is not a topic for a CES presentation. This was truly the moment where I heard the record scratch and thought "what's happening here?"
Then Jen-Hsuan started talking about ARM and the power of the ARM ecosystem, with that supercomputing slide up the whole time. The press conference had now gone from curious to downright bizarre. And, just when it couldn't get any weirder, he put a Bloomberg quote about an ARM port of Windows up on the screen and basically confirmed the rumor by saying he was headed over to the Microsoft announcement shortly.
So he started out talking about supercomputers and servers, then he jumped to ARM, and then to Windows 8. I already had whiplash when he dropped the Project Denver bombshell.
After it sunk in that NVIDIA will produce a high-performance, desktop- and server-caliber, general-purpose microprocessor core, and that this processor core will power PCs running Windows, most of the picture had clicked into place. As of today, Wintel is officially dead as a relevant idea and a tech buzzword with anything more than historical significance. Sure, not much will change in the x86-based Windows PC market this year, but "Wintel" is really and finally dead as a term worth using and thinking with.
As I said, most of the picture is now complete, but there are still some pieces of this puzzle left on the table.
Missing pieces and TV
What still nags me about Denver is that ISSCC, not CES, is the place where new high-performance processor architectures are announced. This is especially true when those processors are aimed at servers and supercomputers. Announcing such a beast at CES is just strange.
The primary way that this timing makes any sense is that NVIDIA wanted to tie the unveiling to the Windows/ARM announcement, so they couldn't wait for ISSCC in September. They had to announce before Microsoft, so they did it at CES with only a few minutes to spare. I'm mostly happy with this explanation, but only mostly.
Maybe it's just the CE-heavy show environment, but I'm strongly inclined to believe that the Denver CPU is going to make its way into televisions, as well. HTML5 and Flash on an HDTV take real horsepower, both CPU and GPU—this is a job for a multicore, out-of-order processor. That's why Intel is going to be putting real x86 silicon in TVs, and the TV is going to have enough of an appetite for those clock cycles that this move will make sense.
Tegra 2 will be fantastic for phones and tablets, especially if you're looking for a phone that can double as a portable game console. But an Internet-connected TV can use even more horsepower than Tegra 2 can provide. That's where Denver could be NVIDIA's answer to Intel's CE-oriented SoC line.
Then there's Microsoft's Windows/ARM port. Microsoft clearly wants a piece of the Internet TV action—capturing this convergence moment was the whole point of the original Xbox effort within the company. But as much as the Xbox 360 does, it's still a game console, and Kinect takes it further in this direction. One of the upcoming Windows/ARM flavors could be aimed at the TV, and it could very well run on Denver. Such a combination would take on Intel's Smart TV effort directly.
Supercomputers, desktop gaming, and what Denver will look like
Ironically, despite the project's debut at CES, the consumer electronic piece of the Denver picture is the murkiest. When it comes to HPC and desktop gaming, things are a lot clearer, down to what the first Denver-based chips will look like when they launch.
A few months back, I wrote the following about AMD's Fusion project. You can read the following paragraphs, but substitute "ARM" for "x86":
It may turn out to be the case that few workloads really benefit from more than four cores, and most of those that do will run better on GPU hardware. If this happens, then why not put those four CPU cores on a high-end GPU? In other words, in a world where Moore's Law continues to drive transistor counts up but where exceeding four CPU cores offers rapidly diminishing returns vs. a four-core + GPU combination, the best arrangement would seem to be one that looks essentially like a large GPU with four CPU cores attached to it. Thinking about the ultimate x86 gaming system of 2015, a processor that combines four general-purpose CPU cores with a massive amount of GPU vector hardware and cache sounds ideal. With this arrangement, the relative amount of die area that goes to those four CPU cores can shrink as the (infinitely scalable) cache and vector hardware grow with transistor counts, to the point where you ultimately end up with a "GPU" that has four little CPU cores embedded in it. Of course, you wouldn't be able to physically turn on all that hardware at once, so dynamic power optimization would be key to making such a part work. But in terms of cost, efficiency, and raw performance, it would probably beat the pants off of a 12-core x86 chip + discrete GPU combination for games and most of the other tasks people care about.
Given that the Denver core is designed to be integrated onto the same die as a GPU, and that NVIDIA is pitching it as a server and supercomputer part, it seems likely that the above describes the route that they're taking with it.
The first Denver-based products will probably be two or four high-performance ARM cores, embedded in a much larger pool of GPU vector hardware. In subsequent product generations, the core count might stay at four (or even go up to six), while NVIDIA scales the vector and cache hardware out to the horizon.
To make such a chip live up to its full potential, NVIDIA will have to do a lot more than just design a top-notch ARM core and a top-notch GPU. The company will also have to link those parts together in an optimal way—this is not an easy thing to do, and it has a huge impact on overall performance. Sandy Bridge's graphics performance is a testament to what successful die-level integration can do; the Sandy Bridge GPU itself is no great shakes, but the way that Intel has clocked it and linked it to the rest of the die makes all the difference.
If NVIDIA can execute in all three areas—CPU design, GPU design, and SoC system design—then it could potentially make one killer gaming and supercomputing CPU. But this is a very tall order, and a lot of things could go wrong here. Right now, the GPU execution part is the only one where confidence is warranted based on a track record. With the system integration stuff and CPU part, NVIDIA is in uncharted territory. (The Tegra SoC part of NVIDIA's record isn't as relevant as you might think, because Denver is a different kettle of fish entirely.)
We'll keep you posted as more details unfold. Right now, I'm currently trying to line up a deep dive briefing on Denver's core, so stay tuned.Story highlights Shawna Blackmon got a call saying that her boyfriend had been pulled over by police
Her boyfriend, Daiwon McPherson, had actually staged it all
(CNN) With interactions between black men and police officers sometimes striking a contentious tone, Daiwon McPherson had an idea that if successful, he figured would spread peace and love on two totally different fronts.
He wanted his marriage proposal to his girlfriend, Shawna Blackmon, to be unique and memorable. He also wanted to flip the script on police-community relations.
Last Friday, McPherson was pulled over by Mobile, Alabama police on his way to a date with Blackmon. The situation then got tense.
According to WPMI, Blackmon got a call telling her where McPherson was stopped.
"I was scared. I said...'They are going to shoot him,'" Blackmon told WPMI.
Read MoreAuthor and political commentator Ann Coulter said there should be a 10-year freeze on immigration to the U.S. since the federal government has demonstrated it cannot enforce current law.
“There’s a law on the books that says if a country will not take a criminal back the attorney general shall, not may, shall deny visas, any visas coming from that country – that is on the books right now. Has it been enforced by Republicans or Democrats? No, it has not,” Coulter said during an interview with PJ Media.
“There’s a law on the books right now that says an immigrant who has been convicted of a crime in America who does not cooperate in being sent home, that itself is a crime, not signing the papers, not showing up when you’re supposed to, that itself is a crime punishable by 4 years in prison – that’s never enforced. It’s just not enforced. Three times Congress has voted to build a fence and it never gets built,” she added.
According to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released 33,007 illegal immigrants with criminal records in 2013. Following these releases, 121 were charged with homicides.
Based on the research Coulter conducted, she concluded that a legal fix is not going to improve the immigration system.
“The entire thing has to be shut down. No more immigration for 10 years. We get our books in order. We assimilate the ones already here. Build a fence. Repeal anchor babies and then we start up with the pre-1970 immigration policies,” Coulter said.
“It’s not just Obama; Bush was the same way. Bush didn’t enforce it, either. The entire immigration bureaucracy is corrupt. It is run by and staffed by left-wingers who hate America who in other times would have been fighting with revolutionaries in Latin America and getting themselves arrested. Now they punish Americans here at home. They say we are racist, sexist, imperialistic, greedy, they want to transform America because they hate America,” she added.
Coulter told PJ Media that Republicans can win in 2016 without substantial support from the Hispanic community.The rallying cry hashtag: #PrimaryGraham. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Graham's very bad day on Twitter
As good a day as this was for Sen. Rand Paul on Twitter, it was at least that bad for Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Laced throughout the thousands of tweets cheering on the filbustering Kentucky Republican was a vicious, visceral anger aimed squarely at the South Carolinian up for reelection next year.
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The rallying cry hashtag: #PrimaryGraham.
( WATCH: Rand Paul responds to McCain, Graham criticism)
“This very well could be a defining moment in this particular campaign — the moment Lindsey Graham lost his grip on the boots on the ground in South Carolina,” Daniel Encarnacion, state secretary for the Republican Liberty Caucus, said in an interview.
Paul emerged as a folk hero whose appeal spread far beyond his tea party base for perhaps the first time, as seen by the enduring strength of the hashtag #StandWithRand. More than 18 hours after Paul yielded the floor following a 13-hour stemwinder, it continued to trend.
One reason for that longevity: Graham and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took to the Senate floor to castigate Paul and express disappointment in fellow Republicans such as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for supporting the filibuster.
The episode was already not looking great for Graham before he rebutted Paul on Thursday. Graham and McCain were dining at the White House with Obama while Paul was filibustering, a contrast picked up early and often by many online.
“Not only is @LindseyGrahamSC missing from tonight he has openly mocked” the filibuster, groused Randan Marie Swindler, a former staffer to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). Then came two hashtags: #StandWithRand and #PrimaryGraham.
Graham’s decision to vote for John Brennan as CIA director — a response, he said, to the Paul filibuster — further infuriated his many Twitter critics.
Graham did not respond to requests for comment.
The senator was already looking like a primary target for his conciliatory gestures toward Democrats on immigration and sequestration. Missing, however, had been a certain level of outrage — anger that is now exploding on social media.
“The way he responded to it today on the floor was particularly a setback for him within the grass-roots movement,” Encarnacion said. “People who have given him the benefit of the doubt within the regular GOP ranks here are no longer giving him the benefit of the doubt.”
One name that surfaces regularly as a likely primary challenger is state Sen. Lee Bright of Spartanburg. His name was floated again by callers on Glenn Beck’s radio show Thursday, and although he’s undeclared, sources say he already has a campaign manager in place.
What may be holding him back is money. Graham has a war chest in excess of $6 million, which South Carolina-based GOP digital strategist Wesley Donehue said “goes a long way in our cheap media markets.” Donehue doubts the anti-Graham flare-up over Paul’s filibuster will last long because “there is no one for the pissed-off Internet crowd to give money to.”
( PHOTOS: Highlights from Rand Paul’s filibuster)
People like Encarnacion believe that could change pretty quickly if, say, Paul were to swoop in to do a fundraiser or campaign for a Graham alternative. Paul, of course, was himself an outsider who beat establishment candidates in Kentucky en route to his seat.
“No doubt the money Lindsey Graham has is a significant roadblock for challengers to go after him, but we have seen time and time again where grass-roots activism and the passion people have overcomes that,” Encarnacion said. “What I saw yesterday and what I’m seeing today is that people identify with what Rand Paul said yesterday. Yesterday, we were all Rand Paul Republicans. And then Lindsey Graham jumps all over that.”AFTER TWO DECADES of studying the inner workings of extremist groups in the United States, Brian Levin, a professor at California State University in San Bernardino, has developed a routine for attending Ku Klux Klan rallies. He’ll tape an interview or two, collect whatever literature is available, see if he can spot any notable figures, and make a count of the demographics on hand. The aim, Levin says, is to maintain a degree of anonymity. That was the plan Saturday afternoon when he showed up to Pearson Park in Anaheim, California, for a demonstration by the local chapter of a Klan faction known as the Loyal White Knights.
At around 12:08 p.m., a black SUV carrying several Klansmen arrived at the park. It soon became clear that Levin’s hope for a quiet afternoon of anonymous research was shot. There were a few dozen counterprotestors waiting for the Klan. “Fuck Racism — Love Is The Answer,” said one demonstrator’s sign. “Save a cross, burn a racist,” said another. The Klansmen stepped out of their vehicle. They wore black uniforms with confederate flags on their shoulders and patches that said “The original boys in the hood.” Levin said the confrontation — both verbal and physical — between the two sides was instantaneous.
“It was immediate,” Levin recalled in an interview with The Intercept.
The professor found himself on the driver’s side of the Klan’s SUV as a fight was breaking out on the other side. Images from the melee, including video Levin shot on his phone and photos from photographers on the scene, depict a chaotic situation. Two counterprotestors are seen punching a Klansman holding a small knife on a blood-splattered sidewalk.
“The best chance that whites have”
After police arrived on the scene in Anaheim, Levin asked some of the Klansmen about the motivations for their demonstration. They explained that the theme of the day was “White Lives Matter” and that their primary focus was immigration and a fear of school children being indoctrinated into Islam. One of the Klansmen told Levin he was a Donald Trump supporter. When asked if that was common among the groups he studies, Levin told The Intercept, “Oh, gosh yeah.” He added, “Many of the groups that I monitor are explicit for Mr. Trump. … They think that he’s the best chance that whites have.”
The violence in California erupted two days after David Duke, arguably the most recognizable name in the white nationalist movement and an ideological forefather of the Loyal White Knights, called on white people to support Trump, the Republican frontrunner, arguing that failing to do so would amount to “treason to your heritage.” When asked about Duke’s support on CNN Sunday, Trump said, “Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke.” He added: “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.”
Trump’s failure to immediately repudiate Duke’s endorsement triggered a political firestorm, with condemnations coming from both sides of the aisle. (Trump appears to have first been asked about Duke on the campaign in August, when he told Bloomberg TV he would “certainly repudiate” the racist leader “if that would make you feel better.”) His claim to ignorance appeared patently disingenuous, particularly given that in 2000, in his decision not to run for president on the Reform Party ticket, he explicitly distanced himself from Duke. Amid the pushback on Sunday, Trump later tweeted a clip from a press conference on Friday in which he disavowed Duke’s support.
Trump’s appeal to the white supremacist community has been documented before. In June, less than two weeks after he announced his candidacy, Trump received an endorsement from the nation’s most popular neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer (the site often refers to Trump as “Glorious Leader” and features his face on the top of its homepage). In an August article for the New Yorker, Jared Taylor, the former editor of the defunct white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, said, “I’m sure he would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.” Taylor has since spearheaded an unauthorized robo-calling campaign on behalf of Trump, dubbed “Great White Hope,” telling potential voters, “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”
For his part, Trump has also reflected white supremacist talking points online. In November, he tweeted a bogus statistic, popular among hate groups and peddled by the Council of Conservative Citizens, the modern extension of the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and ’60s, claiming that 81 percent of white homicide victims were killed by African-Americans. Taylor, the robocaller, serves as spokesperson for the CCC. Trump’s troubling retweets continued Sunday, when he shared a quote by the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” the tweet read.If Publishers Can't Cover Their Costs With $10 Ebooks, Then They Deserve To Go Out Of Business
from the you-don't-price-based-on-your-bloated-infrastructure dept
In all the discussions about why book publishers demand that eBooks should be $15 and not $10, they say it is because they cannot afford to sell books at $10. That is, they cannot cover their legacy cost models on that number. Right. Which is why you must rebuild your cost structure for a digital goods industry with far lower prices. You start by paying your top execs much less than millions of dollars a year. Then you move your offices out of fancy midtown office buildings. Why should eBooks cost $15? Amazon is far more of an expert on optimal book pricing. They have far more data than publishers, since they experiment with pricing hundreds of thousands of times a day across millions of titles. Amazon can tell you the exact price for a title that will produce the most number of copies sold. Amazon is pretty sure that number is closer to $10 than to $15. Yes, they want to sell more Kindles. And they believe that lower eBook prices mean more eBooks sold which means more demand for Kindle. The negative coverage of Amazon is centered on them selling eBooks below cost in order to reach the $10 price point. But that is a function of publishers setting the cost higher than $10. If the profit-maximizing price for an eBook is $10, then publishers must adapt to set a wholesale price lower than that, even if it means your legacy cost structure doesn’t allow it. And that’s the rub.
With the legal dispute over ebook pricing going on, one thing we've heard over and over again from the traditional publishing industry and their supporters is that higher prices for ebooks make sense because of all of the "costs" that the publishers have to cover. This is a fundamental error in how pricing (and economics) works. It reminds me of the MPAA folks who demand to know the business model for making $200 million movies. Years ago, someone who understood these things taught me why cost-based pricing will always get you into trouble. If you start from the overall pricing, including overhead and other fixed costs, then you're not basing the price on what the consumer values -- and, more importantly, you're taking away your own incentives to become more efficient and decrease costs. Instead, you're just "baking them in." But the most important reason not to base pricing on overhead costs is that, and they'll under cut your price and then you're in serious trouble.That moment of reckoning is coming for book publishers, even if they don't realize it yet. David Pakman, who watched all of this happen in the music industry for years, is pointing out that publishers are fooling themselves if they keep trying to rationalize higher ebook pricing:The public seems much more interested in lower prices, not higher prices. You can understand why the publishers don't like it, but they really ought to learn how pricing elasticity works. They can make a lot more money with more optimal pricing.
Filed Under: ebooks, fixed costs, pricing, publishingOriginally posted on http://www.apixio.com/technical-post/notes-from-the-2016-chrome-dev-summit/
Two weeks ago I got to attend the Chrome Dev Summit, an annual two-day conference
hosted by Google where they announced latest developments relevant to the web
technology. Here are my full notes from this conference. Since there was so
much information presented, I decided to organize it by subject, instead of
chronological order of talks presented.
You can watch all of the recorded talks on their YouTube Channel.
Statistics and Charts
Over 2 Billion Chrome Browsers worldwide across desktop and mobile
53% of users say they will leave a site if it’s not loaded in 3 seconds or less
Mobile Stats 19 seconds – average mobile page load time 77% of mobile sites take 10+ seconds to load 214 server requests per mobile web page
Housing.com reports user acquisition costs – $3.75 mobile install vs $0.07 Progressive Web App
The mobile web is no longer a subset of the web. It is the web. @samccone #ChromeDevSummit pic.twitter.com/i6LjPYKxHE — Sam Richard (@Snugug) November 11, 2016
Progressive Web App
When I attended Chrome Dev Summit for the first time in 2014, my key complain
was “this is great, but all of the talks are about the mobile web.” This year,
Google pushed to get rid of this mentality, by calling everything (mobile and
desktop) a Progressive Web App.
Progressive Web App is a newish term, that according to Mozilla Developer
Network (MDN) means:
Discoverable
Network Independent (Even offline)
Responsive
Installable
Works for every browser
Safe
Linkable
Re-engageable
Progressive Web Apps as a term is new but the concept has been around for a very long time. Look at HTA #chromedevsummit @patrickkettner — Abraham Williams (@abraham) November 12, 2016
Progressive Web Apps takeaways
Progressive Web App!= Single Page Application
Progressive Web Apps = Smaller user acquisition funnel and faster updates (no need to wait for the App Store)
Older technology can be leveraged to provide Progressive Web App experience on all platforms today. If you are interested in supporting various platforms (including Mobile Safari) I highly recommend watching a talk by Patrick Kettner, Edge PM, Microsoft – The “Progressive” in Progressive Web Apps
Tech
Service Workers
Service Workers (not to be confused with |
schools and replaced with keyboard typing.
To reiterate, Finland — where playtime is heavy, homework is light, creativity is encouraged and standardized testing is a rarity — is home to one of the sharpest (the most geniuses per capita) and the most literate populaces in the world.
What’s more, unlike in the U.S. where teachers are woefully underpaid, Finnish educators are as generously compensated — and respected — as typical white-collar workers such as doctors and lawyers. Teaching is a highly prestigious gig. “The kind of freedom Finnish teachers enjoy comes from the underlying faith the culture puts in them from the start, and it's the exact kind of faith American teachers lack,” writes Weller.
As Doyle, an American who enrolled his child in the Finnish education system for five months while living abroad, explains, politics have no place in the Finnish education system. “Our mission as adults is to protect our children from politicians,” a Finnish childhood education professor tells him. “We also have an ethical and moral responsibility to tell businesspeople to stay out of our building.”
Refreshing right? It’s certainly a far cry from how America’s underfunded, bureaucracy-dominated public education system functions.
This all being said, the U.S. has plenty of other walls to knock down in the realm of public education before we can get to actual classroom walls. But Finland, land of saunas, death metal and Marimekko, has provided us with an excellent template if we ever get there.
In Finland, classroom design offers a radical departure from the norm
More and more Finnish schools are doing away with chalkboards, desks and walls in favor of less regimented learning spaces for students.Lil BUB's HELLO EARTH is going to be a retro video game made up of equal parts science, magic, and heart. The free demo is proof.. download it now for Mac, Windows, iOs, or Android HERE. If you're new to BUB's campaign, please scroll down past our latest updates for the full story.
2,000 BACKERS and FIRST THREE STRETCH GOALS - MET!
Now that we've reached 2,000 backers and zipped by $130,000, everyone can enjoy:
$5+ supporters will get a FREE digital download of the HELLO EARTH Album
of the HELLO EARTH Album $25+ supporters get a FREE set of two HELLO EARTH Magnets!
! $50+ supporters get a FREE Compact Disc of HELLO EARTH!
of HELLO EARTH! The final version will be FREE on Android (with gamepad support), iOs, PC, Mac
The game will feature the Expanded Music Collection feature
feature The game will feature Internal Time Sync and other bonuses
and other bonuses We will personally donate at least $13,400 to special needs pets
NEW AND UPCOMING STRETCH GOALS:
Now that we've breezed by our 130K Stretch Goal, and are about to whiz past 140K, the fun stuff begins. Can we really reach 200K in 4 hours? It's unlikely, but if there's one thing that I've proven on this planet, it's that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.
$140,000: WiiU Version of the Game!
$150,000: Pet Rescue Feature added to platformer levels
$155,000: Lil BUB Sunglasses and Accessories (power ups!)
$165,000: Basic Level Builder (build your own levels!)
$175,000: Basic 8-Bit Music Maker and Sequencer (make your own music to play to)!
$200,000: Advanced Level Builder and 8-Bit Music Maker
The 10% PROMISE:
Now that we've reached our $100,000 goal, TEAM BUB is going to personally contribute 10% of our final funding goal to Lil BUB's Big FUND for special needs pets. So the more we can fund, the more cool stuff our backers will get, the cooler the game will be, and the more homeless pets will get our help.
New ADD-ONS!
You can no add any of these items to your existing rewards by increasing your pledge by the amount specified for each item (newly added items are in bold). Once you've done that, please send us a message here on Kickstarter letting us know what you've added. Remember, if all you want is one of the add-on items, you can always pledge $1 and then add-on to that!
BUB CLUB Embroidered Patch ($5)
HELLO EARTH PDF Instruction Manual ($5)
HELLO EARTH Set of Fridge Magnets ($8)
HELLO EARTH Soundtrack on CD ($10)
Sparkling Glow-In-The-Dark Numbered Space Pod Pin ($12)
Exclusive BUB T-Shirt ($20)
HELLO EARTH Socks (two different pairs, $25)
HELLO EARTH Soundtrack - Color Vinyl and Download ($25)
Handmade Large Double-Sided 3D Pillow ($40)
Signed Picture Disc LP : $50
: $50 Collector's NES Cartridge with box and manual : $65
: $65 HELLO EARTH YOGA PANTS : $75
: $75 Ultimate Collector's Enamel Pin Set : $150
: $150 Two Tickets to the VIP Party and Meet and Greet at Logan Arcade in Chicago: $200
___________________________________________________________
The goal of this campaign is to raise the funds needed to create a rich and complex video game in the true spirit of Lil BUB, that will be FREE (and ad-free) for all to download and enjoy on their mobile devices. We estimate that it will take one year to complete the development of the game. If successfully funded, we aim to have the game completed, and all rewards fulfilled by November of 2017.
As with all of BUB's endeavors, this entire project exclusively involves the hard work, creativity, and talents of BUB, her Dude, and their friends. With your help, we believe we can create a truly unique and magical gaming experience.
Please read on to see what makes HELLO EARTH so special, and please consider helping us help BUB find the missing pieces to her space pod so that she can find her long lost friend Spooky...
Look, I'm going to be brutally honest with you... I can't do this alone. I need your help to find my space brother Spooky, and the only way to do that is to find the 8 missing pieces to my space pod. And the only way to do THAT is to make this elaborate video game. And the only way to do THAT is by successfully funding this project.
You're probably wondering how I got here and what this is all about. So before I get ahead of myself, let me give you a little backstory.
About 6 years ago, I found Spooky as a helpless kitten in a whomblewomp tree on my home planet of Bub Ub Bub. That same night, he was plucked out of my bed by a large winged monstrosity. Without hesitation, I fired up my tricked out space pod and flew off into the great unknown to find Spooky, and bring him back home to cuddle again.
Barely a lightyear into my adventure, I stumbled into danger when I found myself face-to-face with Pupilera, the Giant Space Eye. She's scarier than she sounds. But neither she, nor her infinite litter of Eyebabies were any match for my tricked out space pod, so I took her out, but the sheer force of her explosion hurtled me down to the planet below. And that's how I wound up on Earth.
There's no knowing how long I lay unconscious in the darkness. Then, suddenly, my eyes opened to find that I couldn't see a thing. As they adjusted, I found myself in a dark forest, my space pod nowhere to be seen. Helplessness and despair washed over me, but I did what any magical space cat would do - I engaged my third eye and followed my heart deep into the woods Before long, I came across the wreckage and noticed that my space pod was no longer tricked out. In fact, it was nothing more than a bare shell, missing all 8 Critical Pod Pieces: The Battery, Grappling Arm, Yogurt Cannon, Power Blaster, Tape Deck, Invisibility Cloak, Invincibility Drive, and most importantly, the Atmospheric Thruster, which is my ticket out of Earth's atmosphere.
I knew that it was impossible for all 8 Pieces to just fall off (I installed them myself). Meaning someone or something must have taken them. So I pressed on. It wasn't long before I found myself face-to-face with with Rosco the Raccoon and his no-good fugitive family.
Sure enough, they had my stuff.
With nothing more than my bare tongue and laser-eyes, I was able to successfully retrieve my battery from the grip of Rosco's claws. But before I could say SQUONK, his rascally raccoon babies scurried away with the seven remaining Critical Pod Pieces, disappearing into the shadows of the forest.
The battery was all I needed to get my space pod fired up. Thankfully the navigation circuit was intact, the internet was working, and my space pod could take me to anywhere on Earth.
And so here I am, sitting alone in my stripped down space pod in the middle of an unnamed forest, typing out this Kickstarter campaign on my ship's wi-fi, hoping that I can enlist the help of as many big-hearted humans as possible to fund this game so I can find the missing pieces, and go back into space to find my friend Spooky.
Don't believe my story? Well then check it out for yourself by downloading and playing the FREE DEMO. It's all there, it's all true, and I hope that once you see how badly I need your help, that you'll join me, and you'll get your friends to help out as well. We can do this together! We're coming Spooky!
Hello, it's me, BUB's dude. While BUB's story is mostly true, she left out a few important details in an effort to make it sound more impressive. The truth is that me and some gaming pals were out on a hike and stumbled across a strange critter (BUB) fumbling around with her weird little ship. After she told us her amazing and heartbreaking story, we decided to help her out by telling her about Kickstarter, and agreeing to do everything we could to help her find Spooky. Fortunately for BUB, we had the skills to make the video game she needed to find the pieces to her ship to leave the atmosphere to find Spooky, but we didn't have the funds or resources to get it done. So now we need your help to help us finish the story and get the game made.
In the meantime, you can experience first-hand BUB's adventures in the FREE DEMO of HELLO EARTH.
Experience HELLO EARTH for yourself on your mobile device by downloading the free demo for Mac, Windows, iOs, or Android below:
Download for Apple HERE
Download for Android HERE
Download for Mac HERE
Download for Windows HERE
Please note that this demo is a work in progress! We've done everything we can to have something ready for you to play in time for the launch of this Kickstarter so that you can see how amazing the game will be if we get to finish it. The demo is still far from perfect: we are constantly working on it, improving it, and implementing fun and exciting features, challenges, and artwork. We'll be uploading regular updates during the campaign so you'll be able to see the game dramatically improve and expand through the process as we implement finer gameplay and functionality details that will ultimately make HELLO EARTH shine as bright as BUB's peepers.
HELLO EARTH is a retro mobile game heavily influenced by the classics from the 80s and 90s, while implementing contemporary and unique concepts, gameplay, and design.
The game will alternate between two level types: a side-scrolling shooter level (controlling BUB's Space Pod) and classic platformer levels (controlling BUB herself). Each level has it's own set of controls and gameplay characteristics, so it's like having two games in one.
While the demo is still a work in progress, we hope to have most, if not all of the gameplay features fully functioning before the Kickstarter is over. Here is a list of all of the features currently featured in the demo, plus ones you can expect in the final version, should this project get funded:
Beautiful original graphics and animation
Parallaxing backgrounds
Unique level design
Huge variety of unique levels, bosses and enemies
Complex gameplay and controls
Unique storyline with twists and surprises
Item Inventory: collect items to be used strategically throughout the game
Completely original 8-bit soundtrack
Tape Deck feature that allows you to select your favorite music from the game
Ability to revisit and replay levels to further your progress and unlock achievements
Truly innovative Easter Eggs throughout
Not only do want to make an amazing game, we also want to make a difference.
Hi. It's me, BUB. I've done a lot of cool stuff in my life. From hosting my own talk show, to writing books, to making records, each of my projects has one important thing in common: benefitting Earth animals in need through awareness and fundraising. In the past 4+ years my dude and I have raised more than $400,000 for homeless pets, and even founded the first national fund for special needs pets, Lil BUB's Big FUND for the ASPCA.
I place equal importance on charitable work as I do on creativity and engaging content. And for that reason, I am excited to announce that should we reach our funding goal, our team will make a personal contribution of $1 for every free download of the final version HELLO EARTH, up to $10,000, to Lil BUB's Big FUND for special needs pets.
To learn more about Lil BUB's Big FUND and the amazing work we've done, please visit http://www.lilbub.com/bigfund
The music in HELLO EARTH is one of many features that makes this game really stand out. If you've been following my adventures for a while, you are likely familiar with my debut album, "Science & Magic" which came out last year. And if you're familiar with the album, chances are you LOVE IT, because it's phenomenal.
Part of the reason that album is so good is because I collaborated with my old friend Matt Tobey (my bubbysitter and "Creative Vessel"). And guess what? He's responsible for all of the original 8-bit music in HELLO EARTH as well!
As a hardcore video game fanatic and a musical wizard, he is able to compose video game music that can tug at your heartstrings or heighten the intensity of gameplay. Want to hear one of his hot jams while you continue to read? Here you go:
One of the unique features of the game is that you will be able to choose which songs you play along to by using the Tape Deck in my space pod for the shooter levels, or my Walkcat portable tape player for the platformer levels (this feature is not yet active in the demo, sorry!).
And the very first stretch goal for this project is BUB's Extended Tape Library! If we reach this first stretch goal, Matt will compose an entire expanded collection of hidden bonus songs that can be discovered throughout the game in the form of cassette tapes. When you find a new tape, a new song will be added to your library.
In addition to creating the soundtrack to HELLO EARTH, Matt is also responsible for creating all of the 8 bit sound effects for the game. Every single laser, explosion, and squonk in the game has been exclusively created for this game by Matt in his bedroom.
In addition to helping the game get completed, there are many benefits to contributing to this campaign. As a backer of this Kickstarter project, you have the opportunity to get some truly amazing exclusive merchandise that can only be obtained here, as well as some pretty amazing experiences (like having me, BUB, over for dinner). Additionally, you will receive exclusive access to a version of the game that will only be available to Kickstarter backers, which will include all Stretch Goal Features for free (which would otherwise only be available as in-app purchases). Most importantly, you have the opportunity to dictate how amazing the game will be by helping us reach our stretch goals by providing input and ideas on our Developer Blog, and by inspiring us to make the best game possible.
Please read the different reward tiers carefully! There is A LOT of REALLY cool stuff, all of it exclusive to this Kickstarter, and lots of it is limited edition and will go fast. Rewards range from glow in the dark pins, to handmade pillows, to special versions of the game, to vinyl records of the game's soundtrack, to private hangouts with me, to playing the game as your own pet, to owning your own arcade version of HELLO EARTH!
One thing you can be sure of is that all of the merchandise we're offering in these rewards is of exceptionally fine quality. If you've ever shopped for BUB STUFF from my online store, you know that I don't believe in cheap, chintzy products. Almost everything we're offering is handmade right here in the USA by people that I know personally. It is of the finest quality, and it is made with love. You can rest assured that your items will be more amazing than you had imagined, and will be packed and shipped with care, as promised.
Please note that shipping to the continental US is included in each reward price, but there is an additional fee for international shipping. It's not that BUB doesn't love people everywhere, it's just that the cost of international shipping, especially on larger packages, is very expensive. Unfortunately the same goes for any reward tiers that involve travel and accommodations. If you are from another country and are interested in any of those reward tiers, please contact us to see how we can work something out!
If and when the Kickstarter campaign is fully funded, you will receive a backer's survey from us in which you will let us know what sizes, designs, etc you prefer for your rewards. Our goal is to fulfill most physical rewards in time the holidays this year, and expect them to ship in November or sooner. Some exceptions include: vinyl records (the music won't be done yet, and they take a long time to manufacture) and possibly some of the more exclusive rewards like the NES Cartridges and the Collector's Enamel Pin Set.
If you have any questions about the products, reward tiers, shipping, etc, please shoot us a message! You may also add any non-limited item to any pledge level. To do so, please carefully read the Add-Ons section below.
All physical and digital rewards are slated to ship once the game has completed, which will be in the fall of 2017. If possible, we will attempt to ship some physical rewards sooner than that, but we can't make any promises at this time.
(No physical rewards, but you can Add-On any non limited edition items!)
While we have done the best that we can to create a reward tier just for you, we realize that there's a good chance that you may want some very, very specific things. The Add-On feature allows you to add any non-limited edition item to any reward tier.
The way it works is relatively simple: select your reward level, add an additional contribution equal to the total of the items you'd like to add from the list below, and then send us a message here on Kickstarter specifying exactly which items you'd like to add.
For example, let's say that you want to get all three HELLO EARTH T-Shirts, but don't want everything in the Intergalactic BUB CLUB Membership ($250). In this case what you'd do is select the Exclusive BUB Tee Membership for $50, and then add another $40 to your pledge for the two additional shirts ($20/each). After you make the contribution you would just send us a message that says "Hello BUB! I added another $40 to my contribution for 2 more t-shirts. Thanks!"
And then we would respond with something like this: "Thanks for your support, Dr. Seuss! Your order is noted. If and when the project is funded, we'll send you a Project Survey in which you will provide us with your shipping address, and shirt size/design preferences."
If you're only interested in getting the cool physical items, you can support us at the $5 "HELLO EARTH Supporter" level, and then simply add-on the items you want from the list below.
Make sense? I hope so!
Here is a list of available Add-Ons, and their associated costs. Prices include shipping.
Signed Picture Disc LP : $50
: $50 Collector's NES Cartridge with box and manual : $65
: $65 HELLO EARTH YOGA PANTS : $75
: $75 Ultimate Collector's Enamel Pin Set : $150
: $150 Two Tickets to the VIP Party at Logan Hardware in Chicago : $200
: $200 BUB CLUB Embroidered Patch ($5)
HELLO EARTH PDF Instruction Manual ($5)
HELLO EARTH Soundtrack - Digital Download ($8)
Sparkling Glow-In-The-Dark Numbered Space Pod Pin ($12)
Exclusive BUB T-Shirt ($20)
NEW! HELLO EARTH Socks (two different pairs, $25)
(two different pairs, $25) HELLO EARTH Soundtrack - Color Vinyl and Download ($25)
Handmade Large Double-Sided 3D Pillow ($40)
We may add more items and rewards as the Kickstarter progresses (socks? yoga pants? blankets?) so please check back for more STUFF.
Naturally we need to take this one step at a time, but we've really got some cool stuff lined up in case we exceed our funding goal. While we've set our funding goal as a bare minimum to create a free, mind-blowing, ad-free mobile game, we also have a lot (A LOT) of really amazing bonus features that we're dying to add to the game. But as you can imagine, creating and incorporating them will require more time, money and resources, so we've added stretch goals to help us make them a reality.
Please note that any new stretch goal features that get funded will be FREE to all $15+ backers of the project, but will be only available as in-app purchases to anyone that downloads the game otherwise. So the more the Kickstarter community can raise, the more awesome free features you get.
Read on below to see what we've got cooking.
JUST ADDED 7/13:
We've moved the Desktop Version of the game up to the first stretch goal at $110,000. We understand that a lot of folks don't want to play this game on a phone, so if we reach this goal, everyone will be able to play it on their PC or Mac, and it will be totally free for all!
The very first stretch goal we've got lined up is BUB's Expanded Tape Collection. If we are able to reach our first stretch goal of $115,000, Matt Tobey will create a greatly expanded catalogue of original 8-bit music for the game, which can be obtained song by song by finding hidden cassette tapes throughout the game! Each new song that you find will be added to BUB's Tape Library, and can be selected during gameplay. You can expect some truly awesome jams, including 8-bit versions of songs from BUB's album "Science & Magic" and maybe even some 8 bit versions of your favorite hits.
If we reach $120,000, we'll create a complete desktop PC version of the game AND Gamepad support for phones!
The second stretch goal we're hoping to reach is a pretty unique and exciting feature. Did you notice while playing the Forest Platformer Level in the demo that the level gradually turned from night to day? Pretty cool right?! Well the Internal Clock Time Sync feature will allow the game to sync to the clock on your mobile device, so that the look of the level will follow your actual time! So if you play at night, the game takes place at night. If you play at dawn, the game takes place at dawn. If you play through the night into the morning, the game will gradually transition from night to day. And as cool as that is, that barely touches on the incredible possibilities made possible with this feature. You will battle different creatures and enemies depending on what time of day you're playing (coyotes and moths at night, mosquitos and birds during the day), and there will be Easter Eggs planted throughout as well. For example, if you come back to the Circus entrance on level 5 at midnight, you can go up into space in a hot air balloon! The Time Sync feature is literally a game changer. Pun intended.
If we can make it $140,000, we'll port the game to WiiU. Let's make this happen!
Meet TEAM BUB! They are all really great guys, they are all my friends, and with your help, they are the ones that will make this game a reality. Check out their 8-bit bios below.
You might be wondering where all of this money would go, and rightly so. Below you will find a breakdown of how the funds will be allocated for the project.
It's important to understand that we are offering really well-made, high quality products in each of our reward tiers, and that the cost of manufacturing, packing, and shipping these items is quite expensive.
(This outlines how our initial $100,000 goal will be distributed)
www.TheYetee.com
What makes Kickstarter so perfect for a project like this is not simply its ability to raise the money needed to get it done, but its ability to build an enthusiastic and engaged community that plays a critical role in the final outcome of the project. This is not just my project, or the project of my dude and his friends. It's OUR project. And the more people that join our community and support the game, the more incredible the game becomes, and the more connected we all become. It's a win/win/win situation folks. Let's do this.
GOOD JOB KICKSTARTER. ♥New Delhi: Heightened surveillance and a crackdown on black money has led to a three-fold increase in PAN (permanent account number) registrations, an 18% rise in income tax returns as well as a significant increase in the number of properties seized by the tax department to 475.
“This is the effect of demonetisation and operation clean money launched in January. Data analysis of information collected during the months after demonetisation has led to higher surveillance and a more effective crackdown on black money," said a top official in the tax department who asked not to be named.
The department aims to bring large tax evaders to account and gently persuade those making minor violations to comply with the rules.
The official’s comments come days before the first anniversary of last year’s invalidation of high-denomination currency notes on 8 November.
With almost all the money in circulation before the exercise—around 86% of this was in the form of invalidated notes—coming back to the banking system, the tax department has embarked on an exercise to follow the money and track down defaulters.
The Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Act was notified for implementation on 1 November last year. Since then, show-cause notices have been issued in 520 cases. Benami properties are those that are held by an owner through proxies. The government is celebrating 8 November as Anti-Black Money Day.
The official said that out of 1.8 million of questionable cash deposits made after demonetisation, specific cases of suspected tax evasion and other non-compliance have been identified for scrutiny.
These include about 22,000 cases of “erratic behaviour" of people who have either filed returns for the first time or have revised their returns for financial year 2015-16 (filed in 2016-17) to justify their cash deposits after the invalidation of high-value bank notes.
Of the 1.8 million deposits, around 200,000 were deposits of more than Rs50 lakh in bank accounts in the days following demonetisation; 70,000 of these are by individuals who have not filed their tax returns yet. The official said notices will be issued to them after 7 November—the last date for filing returns with audit reports.
The official added that while questionnaires were sent to all 1.8 million, only 1.2 million have responded thus far.
The tax department is in the process of writing to the 600,000 individuals that have not responded. If they fail to respond, action such as searches and surveys may be required, the official said.
The tax department, this person pointed out, will also try and match the information in the explanations provided with that in tax returns and also with data sourced from third parties such as banks. The department has two years to complete the scrutiny and assessment from the year in which the return is filed.
“The priority is to ensure compliance by those who pose large risk of revenue leakage to the exchequer," said the official.
An expert welcomed data-based investigations.
“Tax compliance is definitely improving as the data collected by the government after demonetisation acts as a deterrent. The safeguard needed here is to ensure that to the extent possible, this vast data is used carefully and does not result in enquiries that are avoidable," said Rahul Garg, partner, PwC India, an accounting firm.
In a statement issued in August, the tax department said that tax searches increased 158% since November 2016, resulting in the doubling of black money seized to Rs1,469 crore from Rs712 crore in the year-ago period.
Official data for the past 10 years show a 154% increase in tax raids under the Modi government in 2016-17 compared to 2006-07, leading to an almost four-fold increase in black money recovery.
The biggest increase in admission of undisclosed income came in 2016-17 with tax payers reporting undisclosed income of Rs15,496 crore, a 38% jump from the previous year’s Rs11,226 crore.
A second official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the impact of demonetisation can be seen in the surge in PAN registrations every month.
From around 2.7 million registrations in November 2016, the number went up to 9.6 million in April 2017. In the past three months, an average of 6.6 million people have signed up for a PAN every month.
“The number of tax returns filed for assessment year 2016-17 has also gone up 55.4 million, an increase of close to 18% (from the previous assessment year)," added the second officer mentioned above.
To be sure, this number is based on the first deadline for filing tax, and the real impact can only be gauged by early 2018.
Another area in which the tax department has made progress in the past year is benami properties.
It has attached 475 properties, worth over Rs1,600 crore, since the Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Act was notified for implementation on 1 November 2016.
Data available from the finance ministry shows that the maximum benami properties were seized in Gujarat, followed by Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Mumbai and Bhopal. These numbers are significant.
The Benami Act was first notified in 1988, but there wasn’t a single case where property was attached till the act was strengthened last November.
The creation of separate teams to dredge-out benami properties has led to better enforcement of the Act, said senior tax officials. These teams are called benami prohibition units (BPU) and there are 24 such teams across the country. Each team has at least five members.The soft runner down the middle of the paint that won Utah its Game 1 against the Clippers was classic Joe Johnson. Both Johnson and the man defending him, former Hawks teammate Jamal Crawford, had seen this one before: down late in the game, a one-on-one situation followed by a sure-fire bucket. The NBA fan community pledged allegiance to the former All-Star, chirping “ISO JOE” with nostalgia through a medium that was still five years from inception when Johnson entered the league in 2001. The 35-year-old’s final drive, handled by a body a decade past its prime, was almost like a tribute to himself.
We all know how much Johnson favors the iso, but his turning back the hands of time is no isolated incident in these playoffs. Benches with what appear to be throwaway veterans — your Gerald Greens, Nenes, Deron Williamses, even Lance Stephensons — have altered the course of the postseason in their favor … save Lance, who, in the closest sweep by point margin in NBA history, at least kept that series interesting. Add in Fountain of Youth poster children Jamal Crawford and Vince Carter, and these playoffs have been shaped by the past as much as the present and future.
Joe Johnson
Los Angeles won two straight after Johnson’s Game 1 heroics, but again thanks to him, the Clippers-Jazz series now sits tied 2–2. Game 4 belonged to Johnson, who might as well be the captain of the playoffs’ Old Head Reclamation All-Stars. Just like old times, Johnson put the team squarely on his back with Utah’s two stars reeling: Rudy Gobert made his return on Sunday, but in limited minutes; Gordon Hayward logged only nine minutes in the first half, still suffering from a bout of food poisoning (in the words of Josh Smith: “Can’t eat sushi in Utah, brother — landlocked”), and didn’t return. The Clippers were up 87–80 in the fourth, seemingly on their way to a 3–1 series lead. Then, Joe Jesus: Johnson dropped 13 in the final frame, including 11 straight Jazz points in the span of three minutes, for a lead that the Clippers wouldn’t reclaim for the rest of the night.
The 16-year veteran’s performance was “unbelievable” to Chris Paul, especially Johnson’s knowledge of “how to get to his spots.” It’s the kind of performance that keeps an aging player in 78 games a season, and teams — including Doc Rivers and the Clippers — calling during free agency. That’s why Utah brought Joe in. Last summer, Johnson, in perhaps the seven-time All-Star’s last go at a ring, chose to believe in the Jazz (granted, believing is easier when it entails a two-year, $22 million contract), and passed on the Clippers’ nucleus of Paul, Blake Griffin, and DeAndre Jordan. The only thing wilder than Johnson choosing Utah — and it becoming the right decision — is how he’s controlled the series on the team’s behalf.
Or maybe Johnson’s game was always made to last. After dropping 25 in the loss, Crawford gave his former teammate the biggest compliment a veteran (not named Vince Carter) can receive: “His game wasn’t built on athleticism.”
Gerald Green
For Green, who replaced Amir Johnson in Boston’s starting lineup after the Celtics opened their series with the Bulls down 0–2, the opposite is true. Outside of Boston, the 31-year-old’s name will always be associated with his dunk contests; inside the city, they’re still thankful for him being a trade piece that made the 2008 championship a reality. Either way, in his second start for Boston since 2007, it was Green’s athleticism that woke up the Celtics in the third quarter after an unrelenting Bulls shot them into a stupor. His 16 first-half points contributed to Chicago’s 20-point deficit early in the second quarter, but a missed 3-point shot in the third quarter mattered more. Green threw up a deep attempt from the left corner. It clanked off the rim, but the rebound bounced favorably back in his direction, so he grabbed the board and reminded everyone what the word “cupcake” meant in the NBA back in his day.
Green’s 18 points in 23 minutes pushed the Celtics to even the series. Brad Stevens couldn’t have won without him, even as Green sat with multiple parts wrapped up in ice toward the end of the game. Let’s check in on Boston:
Lance Stephenson
The Pacers might not be winners, but Stephenson sure is: Lance bought himself a few extra years in the league — and the glowing support of his new teammates.
Nene
Nene’s Sunday shot chart was as dotted with makes as his dreads are now peppered with gray, tying a playoff record for the most field goals without a miss. The 34-year-old’s unblemished 12-for-12 gave his new-style Rockets a much-needed old-school bump to douse the fire that is Russell Westbrook’s will.
In a series with Clint Capela scoring less and less with each outing (down to just four points in Game 4), Nene’s reliability in the paint has been a boon. He is shooting 92 percent from the field in the postseason, which currently serves as the highest field goal percentage in NBA playoff history among players with at least 50 minutes and 20 shots attempted. (Next up is Chris Andersen in 2013, a distant second at 81 percent. He was also 34 that year. Shouts to old heads.)
Deron Williams
LeBron begged for another playmaker all year, and Williams fit the bill. Williams’s late-season signing with Cleveland was double-edged: The two-time All-NBA player was finally primed for a ring with a roster spot on the defending champs, but at 32, Williams has to grapple daily with being the same age as LeBron, who is still capable of this.
Remember the “Chris Paul or Deron Williams” best-point-guard-in-the-league arguments in comment threads on sites that no longer exist? Of course you don’t; Williams’s prime is excruciatingly far behind him. Still, against a Pacers squad desperate to avoid being the first team in franchise history to be swept in a seven-game series, Williams came through on Sunday. He hit two huge 3-pointers in the second quarter and finished with 14, going four-for-four. He finished the series with only two misses from deep, only three misses overall, and a gig as an opening act on Joe Johnson’s Reclamation Tour.The number of people killed in Syria’s civil war is probably approaching 70,000, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said Tuesday. Less than six weeks ago, Pillay said the death toll had exceeded 60,000, a figure she called “truly shocking.”
On Tuesday, she told the UN Security Council on Tuesday that there have probably been almost 10,000 new deaths in recent weeks.
Pillay said the council’s deep division and inaction over the nearly two-year-old Syrian conflict “has been disastrous, and civilians on all sides have paid the price.”
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She again urged the council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court.
Earlier Tuesday, a major Syrian opposition faction accused the government of a deadly bombing at a border checkpoint, saying it |
the draw length and the size of the coil spring. Which will cut down nearly half an inch on its own. This is the final stage of pre-production, and should be completed before this project becomes fully funded.
Are There Different Sizes?
Although it was not the original intent to include more than two sizes, in order to make the buckle small enough, we decided it would be best to create three different sizes of Future Belt.
Sizing goes as follows
Small Waist size 24-36
Medium Waist 34-46
Large Waist 44-56
Does It Work?
Top View of Prototype 3's Mechanism
Absolutely! In fact, our second prototype was able to draw in nearly two and a half feet of material! (Although, this made it pretty bulky, so future models will only pull in around 12-14 inches)
How does it work?
Normally companies would be all sorts of uptight hiding just how their product works so that they can stay ahead of the game. However, the technology in Future Belt is used in so many applications, that hiding it really isn't a necessity.
Future Belt relies on a flat steel coil spring to retract the fabric from visible sight. Thus giving the illusion of a perfectly sized belt. (Much like the jacket that Mr Marty McFly wears in Back to the Future's depiction of 2015)
Cool. This is an Interesting Idea... but It's Not Really My Style...
Buckle Design Proposals
We understand everyone has a different taste palette. This is great! As soon as we begin fabrication of the Future Belts, we will start production of numerous designs of interchangeable buckles. So far, we have decided to include such designs as: The Industrial Look, Brushed Aluminum, Carbon Fiber Print, and The California Republic. (Please note, this project is entirely separate and is not part of this Kickstarter Campaign. This is an extension that shows the direction our company will head if our goal is met. (Work on this will continue alongside normal production)
I Wasn't Interested in a Belt, But a Shirt Sounds Cool..
Shirt Design
You are helping us just as much as all of our other backers. Every dollar really does make a difference. So thank you!When news about the hottest beer in the world,
, went national, the staff at Boulder's
Continue Reading
was a little nervous. After all, they'd named the beer, which is made with ghost peppers, after rapper Ghostface Killah from the Wu-Tang Clan without asking for his permission.
But this week, Wu-Tang's manager called Twisted Pine founder Bob Baile and signed off on it. His only request: a couple of cases sent to New York.
"They are completely ecstatic. They thought it was the coolest thing in the world," says brewery spokeswoman Jody Valenta. "They weren't worried about trademarks or anything, which is what we were hoping, but not necessarily what we expected."
Valenta thinks Wu Tang -- and Ghostface Killah himself -- probably found out about the beer from Rolling Stone magazine, or maybe from the L.A. Times, or maybe from any number of other hip hop magazines that ran little stories about it.
"It's been a lot of fun," Valenta says about the national attention.
But now people are calling and e-mailing from all over the country asking for it. Sadly for them, Twisted Pine only made 100 cases of Ghost Face Killah (or roughly 7.5 barrels) and it will only be sold in single, twelve-ounce bottles in liquor stores in Colorado.
"For most people, a four-pack or a six-pack of Ghost Face Killah is too much," Valenta says; ghost peppers, also known as bhut joloklia, are 200 times hotter than jalapenos. "Most people will probably open a single bottle and share it between friends."
Twisted Pine will begin pouring the beer in five-ounce glasses at its tap room on Cinco de Mayo -- and serving it with a queso dip made from the beer -- but won't be putting it on tap. "It's so hot, you can't even put it on tap. It will destroy your tap line," Valenta says, adding that the brewery had to replace its tap line after serving the beer on tap last year.
That was how I tried it last year, when I made this video of my tasting and wrote:
"The heat starts on the insides of your cheeks and on your tongue in the same way that eating a popper or a bowl of green chile might. But then, the smoky warmth of the peppers travels down in the back of your throat, where it simmers. Take another sip, and your lips start to burn, like you're wearing pepper Chapstick. That was the flame that took the longest to extinguish."
Right now, the brewers are toying with the idea of making a second batch (it takes about two weeks to produce). If they do, they're likely to repeat their Ghost Face Brewing ritual. "Everyone has to try a tiny piece of the pepper before we brew...and we listen to Wu-Tang while we're brewing and in the tap room," Valenta says.
And before this, we only knew that Ghostface wasn't a Budweiser fan (listen to the intro.)
Follow Westword's Beer Man on Twitter at @ColoBeerMan.EXCLUSIVE: UNSCRUPULOUS farmers are enticing backpackers to work for free in return for visa extensions.
This is despite the Federal Government employment watchdog saying backpackers must be paid for any work they do.
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More than 20 advertisements for volunteer farmhand roles targeting backpackers have appeared on online classified site Gumtree.
And while most offer food and accommodation, others ask backpackers to pay for food or lodgings despite working for free.
All the advertisers offer to sign immigration documents for working holiday makers to help them qualify for a second-year visa extension.
Under the working holiday scheme, backpackers can apply for a second year to their visa if they have done “specified work” for 88 days in a regional area. This work includes tasks essential to primary production, such as harvesting, packing and picking vegetables, pruning and livestock work.
The Fair Work Ombudsman told The Weekly Times these volunteer arrangements appeared unlawful.
“There is a certain possibility that the situation may be viewed, under workplace laws as an employment relationship in which the backpackers contribute to the profit-taking of a particularly enterprise,” a Fair Work Ombudsman spokesman said.
“If this was the case under workplace laws there would be a lawful obligation on the relevant employer to provide the backpackers with their minimum lawful employee entitlements.”
Some farmers are asking backpackers to pay for food and lodging as well as providing free labour.
Others suggest the foreign workers take paid work on weekends to supplement their volunteer role.
A Yarragon beef farm asked the backpackers to work at least three hours a night five days a week and proposed they could go to “Melbourne like other backpackers have to earn some more money” on the weekend.
Another ad said some paid work may eventuate for farm workers “if you’re a hard worker.”
Thousands of backpackers flood to regional areas attempting to qualify for their second year visa.
The number taking up this option has grown 165 per cent a year since 2005.
Immigration figures show working holiday visas increased 10 per cent to 178,982 in the 12 months to December 31 last year, with one in five being granted an extensions.
But, despite the visa extension being introduced to entice workers to rural areas and provide much-needed staff for primary industries, the Immigration Department was unconcerned about this latest situation.
Assistant Immigration Minister Michaelia Cash said the working holiday visa was a “cultural exchange visa and not a work visa per se”.
Senator Cash said as long as the applicants completed three months of specified work in regional Australia while on their first working holiday they would be eligible whether this was paid or not.
This is despite Senator Cash saying backpackers were required to provide evidence of their 88 days of work, such as pay slips, group certificates, payment summaries, tax returns, employer references or equivalent documents.
Senator Cash said working holiday participants were subject to the same workplace laws, entitlements and protections as citizens.
“Employers who hire program participants are obligated to do so in accordance with Australian workplace law,” she said. This also called into question the Willing Workers on Organic Farms movement, where visiting workers stay on registered farms and work voluntarily.
Neither the Immigration Department nor the FWO would comment on whether workers on this program were allowed to work for free.
But several Gumtree ads appeared to be trying to take advantage of this loophole, advertising “WWOOF-style” volunteer roles.
WWOOF Australia managing director Garry Ainsworth said the Immigration Department had approved volunteer work under their program to qualify for the second year program.
And said WWOOF hosts were registered and required to follow their guidelines on the treatment of workers and said they had a complaints policy for any backpackers unhappy with their situation.
Victorian Farmers Federation senior workplace relations adviser Rob Martin said they were not aware of farmers using volunteer backpackers, except for the WWOOF program.
Mr Martin said the VFF did not endorse workers not being paid and farmers should pay award rates and document any deductions such as accommodation and food expenses.
Australian Workers’ Union Victorian pastoral industry co-ordinator Sam Beechey said it was “ exploitation”.One of Canada’s largest Internet providers appears to be planning a move toward a metered pricing model for Web access, a move that has drawn swift condemnation from critics of so-called usage-based billing practices.
During a conference call with shareholders on April 13, executives with Calgary’s Shaw Communications Inc. alluded to plans to implement a usage-based billing (UBB) regime on its Internet customers as early as this summer.
Until recently, Shaw had managed to largely avoid the UBB firestorm that erupted earlier this year following the CRTC’s Jan. 25 ruling that effectively allowed larger Canadian Internet service providers (ISPs) such as BCE Inc.’s Bell Canada to impose the same bandwidth caps and overage fees on the third-party ISPs that lease network space from them, as they do on their own retail customers.
In February, Shaw announced plans to hold a series of public consultation meetings with its customers before going ahead with any kind of usage-based billing.
However, it now appears after meeting with its users, Shaw appears set to go ahead and implement some form of UBB on its retail customers.
“We are of the mind that we still have a tremendous upside in terms of pricing power on our Internet services and through the course of our consultations with our customers, I think what we’ve seen from that is a recognition that the principle of ‘if you use more, you should pay more’ holds true,” Shaw chief executive Bradley Shaw is quoted as saying in a transcript of the call from April 13.
“But we believe as we work our way through some of the feedback we received from them that there really is a win-win for our shareholders [as all of] their customers in the way we offer our tiers of Internet services.”
Mr. Shaw said the company would have more to say about its new pricing and packaging plans in the “late spring, probably May, early June.”
“People have said to us, let’s not divide the Internet product today,” Mr. Shaw said. “Let’s figure out how to create a world-class Internet experience and then we can figure out how to do pricing and packaging from there. So, we think it would be reasonable to get further clarity before we’re going to go back and talk to some more customers about it. You’ll probably read about it on the social media like you seem to be reading about all the stuff, which is great and probably have more formal announcements end of May or early June.”
Critics of UBB are slamming Shaw’s decision to go ahead with plans to implement new pricing schemes. OpenMedia.ca — the populist organization that launched the Stop The Meter protest campaign, which garnered nearly half a million online supporters — accused Shaw’s executives of using “skewed language” and misrepresenting the views of its customers by claiming users would be happy with UBB.
“Shaw expects Canadians to forget the outcry surrounding usage-based billing,” OpenMedia founder Steve Anderson said in a statement.
“This display of hubris is insulting not only to those who attended the consultations, but also to the half a million citizens who added their names to the Stop The Meter petition.”
The CRTC’s January ruling on so-called UBB enabled Canada’s largest Internet providers to impose the same bandwidth caps and overage fees on their wholesale customers as they currently employ with their own retail customers.
In late March, Bell backed down and pulled its initial application to the CRTC, instead putting forth a proposal for a new pricing model known as “aggregated volume pricing.”
Under a new proposal submitted to the CRTC, Bell would charge third-party ISPs for the total amount of data they use, and do away with overage charges for individual users on those networks. The move puts more power back into the hands of the wholesale ISPs, which can then tailor their pricing structures accordingly, according to Bell.
Some of Canada’s largest ISPs have argued the caps and overage fees are necessary to fund future network upgrades and innovation, while critics of the initial ruling claim it is anti-competitive and essentially forces smaller ISPs to offer the same services as their larger competitors.
Shaw’s president, Peter Bissonnette, said in an interview the company is still going through customer feedback and hasn’t made any specific decisions regarding usage-based pricing structures.
He said while Shaw believes most customers agree users who consume more bandwidth should pay more, he also said the company is carefully examining what the thresholds should be that determine when a user must begin paying overage fees. “There is an economic side to this,” he said.
“We want customers to want our service, so we’re not doing this to upset people, we’re doing this to attract customers to our service because they will see the value in the service.”
[email protected]: A new study sheds light on the neural mechanism behind why some people with autism are unable to make eye contact with others.
Source: Mass General.
Imaging studies reveal overactivation of subcortical brain structures in response to direct gaze.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often find it difficult to look others in the eyes. This avoidance has typically been interpreted as a sign of social and personal indifference, but reports from people with autism suggests otherwise. Many say that looking others in the eye is uncomfortable or stressful for them – some will even say that “it burns” – all of which points to a neurological cause. Now, a team of investigators based at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital has shed light on the brain mechanisms involved in this behavior. They reported their findings in a Scientific Reports paper published online this month.
“The findings demonstrate that, contrary to what has been thought, the apparent lack of interpersonal interest among people with autism is not due to a lack of concern,” says Nouchine Hadjikhani, MD, PhD, director of neurolimbic research in the Martinos Center and corresponding author of the new study. “Rather, our results show that this behavior is a way to decrease an unpleasant excessive arousal stemming from overactivation in a particular part of the brain.”
The key to this research lies in the brain’s subcortical system, which is responsible for the natural orientation toward faces seen in newborns and is important later for emotion perception. The subcortical system can be specifically activated by eye contact, and previous work by Hadjikhani and colleagues revealed that, among those with autism, it was oversensitive to effects elicited by direct gaze and emotional expression. In the present study, she took that observation further, asking what happens when those with autism are compelled to look in the eyes of faces conveying different emotions.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Hadjikhani and colleagues measured differences in activation within the face-processing components of the subcortical system in people with autism and in control participants as they viewed faces either freely or when constrained to viewing the eye-region. While activation of these structures was similar for both groups exhibited during free viewing, overactivation was observed in participants with autism when concentrating on the eye-region. This was especially true with fearful faces, though similar effects were observed when viewing happy, angry and neutral faces.
The findings of the study support the hypothesis of an imbalance between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory signaling networks in autism – excitatory refers to neurotransmitters that stimulate the brain, while inhibitory refers to those that calm it and provide equilibrium. Such an imbalance, likely the result of diverse genetic and environmental causes, can strengthen excitatory signaling in the subcortical circuitry involved in face perception. This in turn can result in an abnormal reaction to eye contact, an aversion to direct gaze and consequently abnormal development of the social brain.
In revealing the underlying reasons for eye-avoidance, the study also suggests more effective ways of engaging individuals with autism. “The findings indicate that forcing children with autism to look into someone’s eyes in behavioral therapy may create a lot of anxiety for them,” says Hadjikhani, an associate professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. “An approach involving slow habituation to eye contact may help them overcome this overreaction and be able to handle eye contact in the long run, thereby avoiding the cascading effects that this eye-avoidance has on the development of the social brain.”
The researchers are already planning to follow up the research. Hadjikhani is now seeking funding for a study that will use magnetoencephalography (MEG) together with eye-tracking and other behavioral tests to probe more deeply the relationship between the subcortical system and eye contact avoidance in autism.
About this neuroscience research article
The co-authors of the Scientific Reports study are Nicole R. Zürcher, Amandine Lassalle and Noreen Ward of the MGH Martinos Center; Jakob Åsberg Johnels, Eva Billstedt and Christopher Gillberg of Gothenburg University, Gothenburg, Sweden; Quentin Guillon of the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Lyon, France; Loyse Hippolyte of the University of Lausanne, Lausanne, France; and Eric Lemonnier of CRA, of Limoges, France.
Funding: The study was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant PP00P3-130191), the Centre d’Imagerie BioMédicale of the University of Lausanne, as well as the Foundation Rossi Di Montalera, the LifeWatch Foundation, the AnnMarie and Per Ahlqvist Foundation, the Torsten Soderberg Foundation and the Swedish Science Council.
Source: Terri Ogan – Mass General
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Full open access research for “Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism” by Nouchine Hadjikhani, Jakob Åsberg Johnels, Nicole R. Zürcher, Amandine Lassalle, Quentin Guillon, Loyse Hippolyte, Eva Billstedt, Noreen Ward, Eric Lemonnier & Christopher Gillberg in Scientific Reports. Published online June 9 2017 doi:10.1038/s41598-017-03378-5
Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article
MLA
APA
Chicago Mass General “Researchers Explore Why Those With Autism Avoid Eye Contact.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 16 June 2017.
<http://neurosciencenews.com/eye-contact-autism-6923/>. Mass General (2017, June 16). Researchers Explore Why Those With Autism Avoid Eye Contact. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved June 16, 2017 from http://neurosciencenews.com/eye-contact-autism-6923/ Mass General “Researchers Explore Why Those With Autism Avoid Eye Contact.” http://neurosciencenews.com/eye-contact-autism-6923/ (accessed June 16, 2017).
Abstract
Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) seem to have difficulties looking others in the eyes, but the substrate for this behavior is not well understood. The subcortical pathway, which consists of superior colliculus, pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus, and amygdala, enables rapid and automatic face processing. A specific component of this pathway – i.e., the amygdala – has been shown to be abnormally activated in paradigms where individuals had to specifically attend to the eye-region; however, a direct examination of the effect of manipulating the gaze to the eye-regions on all the components of the subcortical system altogether has never been performed. The subcortical system is particularly important as it shapes the functional specialization of the face-processing cortex during development. Using functional MRI, we investigated the effect of constraining gaze in the eye-region during dynamic emotional face perception in groups of participants with ASD and typical controls. We computed differences in activation in the subcortical face processing system (superior colliculus, pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus and amygdala) for the same stimuli seen freely or with the gaze constrained in the eye-region. Our results show that when constrained to look in the eyes, individuals with ASD show abnormally high activation in the subcortical system, which may be at the basis of their eye avoidance in daily life.
“Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism” by Nouchine Hadjikhani, Jakob Åsberg Johnels, Nicole R. Zürcher, Amandine Lassalle, Quentin Guillon, Loyse Hippolyte, Eva Billstedt, Noreen Ward, Eric Lemonnier & Christopher Gillberg in Scientific Reports. Published online June 9 2017 doi:10.1038/s41598-017-03378-5
Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.What started with a message board post became a law student wearing an Ohio State sweatshirt in protest:
This and all following photos: Ace Anbender/MGoBlog
While at first it appeared the media members would outnumber the protestors, that changed in a hurry, with the assembled crowd alternating chants of "Fire Brandon," "We Want Harbaugh," and "Down With Dave."
A little while in, a small group chanted "Schlissel's House!" Lo and behold, a few minutes later, the protest had moved to the university president's front lawn:
“I’m proud of our history. I’m not proud of Dave Brandon being a part of that history.”
The guy with the megaphone—I didn't catch who he was, but since he was interviewed by several media outlets, I'm sure it'll get out there—spoke for a while about his pride in the University's athletic history, his support of the students and athletes, and the failure of Dave Brandon to protect either. The rally ended with a mocking "Dave Sucks" chant and a rendition of The Victors. A certain blogger may or may not have been interviewed on live television.
The full set of photos from the rally is embedded below. I'd estimate the turnout ended up at somewhere around 400-500 people—not bad for something that started just hours earlier on a message board...UPDATE 11/07 2.30PM BST: BioWare has released the second E3 gameplay video walkthrough for Dragon Age: Inquisition, this time focusing on Redcliffe.
UPDATE 9/07 5PM BST: BioWare has released a new Dragon Age: Inquisition gameplay video. It's a walkthrough of the Hinterlands area narrated by creative director Mike Laidlaw.
ORIGINAL STORY 9/07 2.30PM BST: BioWare (collectively Mark Darrah, Mike Laidlaw and Cameron Lee) answered a barrage of questions about Dragon Age: Inquisition on Raptr yesterday. I've combed over the Q&A and reposted, in sections, the relevant information here.
A Tumblr titled andaran atish'an caught a few more details I'll include with an asterisk. I couldn't find them - it's laborious navigation on Ratpr.
Nothing particularly revelatory but some new detail nonetheless.
Character creation
Described as "really in depth"
You'll create your Inquisitor before the big opening cut-scene
Can change inner and outer iris colours*
Can have scars*
Qunari horns are customisable
Male Qunari player model will be smaller than Iron Bull (party member) model
There are "a lot" of lip options
There are no 'body type' choices
Your Inquisitor will also be referred to by his or her surname. (Not clear if the surname will be set and voiced like Shepard in Mass Effect.)
Your background depends on your race/class choice. No dwarven mages
Customisation
Follower's armour will change colour as you equip new gear. Dyes are "still being looked at" for them
"You can use different materials to change how items look and the stats of the items, enchant them, make potions etc," wrote Lee
"Find the template of the new armour you want to look like, then make it from materials which give it the look and stats you want. You wouldn't modify the original armour," added Lee
Qunari don't wear helmets - they have a different head slot
Mage Inquisitors can wear heavy armour as Knight Enchanter by crafting it and then summoning weapons
Level-cap is 25-30
There are three specialisations for each class, and specialisations can affect moments in the story
Specialisations (filled out by Wiki): Knight Enchanter, Necromancer, Rift Mage (Mage); Artificer, Assassin, Tempest (Rogue); Champion, Reaver, Templar (Warrior)
Loot
There will be colour-coded loot according to rarity
Mounts will be earned through quests
Companions
You can hug "some" of them
"Major characters all track something similar to approval, but the system has changed to put more focus on what you are doing and what you say instead of grinding by constantly giving them gifts. Each follower does have their own set of goals they want to achieve and if you help them, they will appreciate it. And if you piss them off, they might just leave," wrote Laidlaw
It matters "a lot" who you take with you on quests
Solas' voice is Welsh
No Mabari (dog) companion
No Shale. "Maybe later. No current plans," wrote Darrah
Voice actors
There's a British and American option for both the male and female Inquisitors, it sounds like
The male Inquisitor can be voiced by Harry Hadden-Paton (British) or Jon Curry (American)
Jon Curry voiced Zevran, a character who won't be in Inquisition (but not for that reason)
Harry Hadden-Paton is less well known
The female Inquisitor can be voiced by Alix Wilton Regan (British) or Sumalee Montano (American)
Alex Wilton Regan was Mass Effect 3's Comm Specialist Samantha Traynor
Sumalee Montano voiced the Enchantress companion in Diablo 3
Darrah said "you may indeed see Gideon Emery again". Emery voiced Dragon Age 2 follower Fenris. His IMDB page doesn't mention Inquisition
Romance
Eight romances
Two have racial preferences
"There will be romance scenes, but not necessarily just focused on sex," wrote Laidlaw
There will be "at least one" romance option outside of the Inquisition
One will be Lady Josephine Montilyet - AKA Scribbles - who's bisexual
Combat
Combat settings will range from easy to nightmare, as in previous Dragon Age games, but there is not (yet, at least) a story mode*
Rogues can set traps
Stealth had to fit with party combat so sneaking up on people outside of combat and backstabbing them didn't fit the bill
No flailing with fists if you don't have a weapon
"Having control over Fade rifts may provide some interesting possibilities in combat," wrote Lee
You can control abilities individually
There are "lots" of abilities and spells from previous games but a "ton" of new ones too
"Destruction and environment plays a part in combat," wrote Lee
"The tactical combat is more like DAO with the tactical camera (extra improved) and the real-time combat is slower with more weight behind the attacks, defence, hits etc. You can swap between these modes whenever you like and as always you can swap between party members at any time," wrote Lee
There will be cross-class combos possible, as expected. "A lot of abilities can capitalise on states like frozen, or stunned, encouraging teamwork, yes"
Story
As an Inquisitor you're considered holy, to a degree
But how the Chantry - the world's religious organisation - regards you after you walk out of a Fade rift, BioWare doesn't want to say. A major plot point?
Also: "I think the best villains are the ones you can relate to," teased Lee.
"You'll see a lot of Morrigan in Inquisition," added Lee
You can 'judge' people in the world
Missions
There's "a goodly dose" of side missions that are contextualised to make sense as something the Inquisition would be getting involved with, "to either win the hearts of people or otherwise grow the Inquisition's power", for example
Good or evil or joker?
"The overall tone is more neutral," wrote Laidlaw, "until you hit what we call a'reaction' hub, where you can respond more strongly, often to questions, by being pleased, stoic, angry, sad, etc."
Map
Allows custom plot markers
Can choose which quest is active quest
There's a mini-map
You'll experience snow and rain and dust storms
You can fast-travel but only to Inquisition camps you've set up and populated
Your Inquisition HQ is big - much bigger than any base you've had in Dragon Age games so far
Misc
"There will be some Red Jenny. Because I've wanted to answer 'who ARE they?' for a while now," wrote Laidlaw
Morrigan's Witch mother/dragon Flemeth may return, but you can't visit her shack. "Yep there's a number of recurring NPCs", wrote Lee
Female Dragon Age: Origins dwarf Dagna "does appear" at some point
You can jump but that doesn't mean jumping puzzles*
No flying mounts*
No capes*
DLC
"Plans aren't firm yet. Nothing at launch," said BioWare - answer not attributed to anyone in particular.
Dragon Age Keep
Dragon Age Inquisition's web presence and social glue
It will be available before launch
It's in beta now
ToolsetLimited Mini Squishable Triceratops
no. 1-500 All gone! no. 501-1000 All gone!
$19.50 Aw! This Squishable design is retired! But there are lots of other great Squishies out there that would love to give you a cuddle! Yes indeed!
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new
Squishers who bought the Limited Mini Squishable Triceratops also got:
You know what rhinos, narwhals, and goats all lack? They just don't have enough horns! Sure they're able to survive in this day and age, but with their very apparent horn deficiency there's no way they would have made it in the Cretaceous period! That's because more horns mean more places to store all your hole-y baked goods! Like donuts! And bagels! And bundt cakes! And Swiss cheese, if you're in a savory mood!The Triceratops is nothing but horns! "Tri": Latin for "three", and "Ceratops": Indo-European for long pointy donut holder! More horns means more food! That's why the Triceratops is alive and well today!How many dwarf planets are there in the outer solar system? (updates daily)
(As of 1 Nov 2013 also includes latest thermal and occultation results)
As of Mon Nov 12 2018there are:10 objects which are nearly certainly dwarf planets,26 objects which are highly likely to be dwarf planets,64 objects which are likely to be dwarf planets,127 objects which are probably dwarf planets, and661 objects which are possibly dwarf planets.
In 2006, when the vote on the definition of "planet" was made, and the eight dominant bodies in the solar system were declared (quite rationally) a class separate from the others, a new class of objects was defined. The "dwarf planets" are all of those objects which are not one of the eight dominant bodies (Mercury through Neptune) yet still, at least in one way, resemble a planet. In other words, a dwarf planet is something that looks like a planet, but is not a planet. Specifically this means that dwarf planets are bodies in the solar system which are large enough to become round due to their own gravitational attraction.
Why do astronomers care about round? If you place a boulder in space it will just stay whatever irregular shape it is. If you add more boulders to it you can still have an irregular pile. But if you add enough boulders to the pile they will eventually pull themselves into a round shape. This transition from irregularly shaped to round objects is important in the solar system, and, in some ways, marks the transition from an object without and with interesting geological and planetary processes occuring (there are many many other transitions that are equally important, however, a fact that tends to be overlooked in these discussions).
How many dwarf planets are there? Ceres is the only asteroid that is known to be round. After that it gets complicated. All of the rest of the new dwarf planets are in the distant region of the Kuiper belt, where we can't actually see them well enough to know for sure if they are round or not.
While we can't see most of the objects in the Kuiper belt well enough to determine whether they are round or not, we can estimate how big an object has to be before it becomes round and therefore how many objects in the Kuiper belt are likely round. In the asteroid belt Ceres, with a diameter of 900 km, is the only object large enough to be round, so somewhere around 900 km is a good cutoff for rocky bodies like asteroids. Most Kuiper belt objects have a lot of ice in their interiors, though. Ice is not as hard as rock, so it less easily withstands the force of gravity, and it takes less force to make an ice ball round. The best estimate for how big an icy body needs to be to become round comes from looking at icy satellites of the giant planets. The smallest body that is generally round is Saturn's satellite Mimas, which has a diameter of about 400 km. Several satellites which have diameters around 200 km are not round. So somewhere between 200 and 400 km an icy body becomes round. Objects with more ice will become round at smaller sizes while those with less rock might be bigger. We will take 400 km as a reasonable lower limit and assume that anything larger than 400 km in the Kuiper belt is round, and thus a dwarf planet.
How many objects do we know in the Kuiper belt that are 400 km or larger? That question is harder to answer, because we don't actually know how big most of the objects in the Kuiper belt are. While we can see how bright there are, we don't know if they are bright because they are larger or are highly reflective. In the past, we had to just throw our hands up in the air and say we don't know enough to even make reasonable guesses. But in the past few years, systematic measurements of the sizes of objects from the Spitzer Space Telescope and now the Herschel Space Telescope have taught us enought that we can make some reasonable estimates of how reflective objects are. (It's complicated: read the details here ) These reasonable estimates, combined with all available actually measurements, give us the list of the largest Kuiper belt objects, sorted by diameter, below. Carefully note the lack of any error bars. Every single measurement or estimate below is uncertain to some extent or another. I don't include the individual uncertainties in the table, but instead use the ensemble uncertainties to inform classification below. In other words: take the sizes of specific objects with bigger or smaller grains of salt.
I subjectively divide this list into a few categories, taking into account both the uncertainties in the sizes and the uncertainties in the size where an object becomes round.
Near certainty: We are confident enough in the size estimate to know that each one of these must be a dwarf planet even if predominantly rocky.
Highly likely Anything larger than 600 km is all but certainly round. Even objects significantly smaller are likely round. The predicted and/or measured size of an object in this category would have to be grossly in error or the composition would have to be primarily rocky in order for it not to be a dwarf planet.
Likely: Anything icy larger than 500 km is highly likely to be round. But the size uncertainties are large enough that some of these objects could, in reality, be small enough to be less certain.
Probably: All icy satellite larger than 400 km are round, so we expect these objects to be round if the size estimate is correct.
Possibly: We don't know where the transition from non-round to round occurs, but in icy satellites it is between 200 and 400 km. Objects this size in the Kuiper belt could thus possible be round, but we don't know. Probably not: Below 200 km no icy satellite are round. We expect the same in the Kuiper belt. A few of these object could be bigger than expected, however, and could turn out to be large enough to round themselves.
The table also lists the estimated albedo used to determine the size or the calculated albedo from the measured size. Also listed is the absolute magnitude, which in this case refers to how bright the object would be if you were looking at it while you were standing on the surface of the sun and the object were at the distance of the earth. As in the rest of astronomy, smaller magnitudes are brighter and every 5 magnitudes represents a factor of 100. In the comments section I list the source of the size or albedo as described here and add subjective comments when required.
As of Mon Nov 12 2018
there are:
10 objects which are nearly certainly dwarf planets,
26 objects which are highly likely to be dwarf planets,
64 objects which are likely to be dwarf planets,
127 objects which |
had occurred and the officers had sufficient probable cause for the search.
The judge was apparently not moved by the Hartes' argument that field drug tests are notoriously unreliable and that field testing the substance found in their trash -- tea leaves, according to the Hartes -- would have been even less likely to produce accurate results.
"The deputy did not acknowledge in the affidavit that the field tests are not to be used with saturated or liquid samples and that the 'false positive' rate of the test used is 70 percent," the Hartes' complaint read. "Many common botanical substances from the kitchen or yard also test positive [for the presence of marijuana], including vanilla, anise, peppermint, ginseng, eucalyptus, cinnamon, basil, lemon grass, lavender, cloves, cypress, ginger, oregano -- and tea."
Lab tests conducted after the raid concluded that the material in the Hartes' trash was indeed not marijuana, nor did it "look anything" like the plant. The Johnson County sheriff's office now requires lab confirmation of suspected drug material, so perhaps there's one small victory to come out of the Hartes' misfortune.
The Hartes also argued that police displayed "excessive" force during the raid, opting to use a "heavily armed SWAT-type team" and even accusing their son, then 13, of having a "drug problem." But the judge found that the officers had conducted themselves in a lawful and reasonable manner.
The Hartes were seeking $5 million in compensatory damages and $2 million in punitive damages for violations of their Fourth and 14th Amendment rights.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution states that search warrants may be issued only "upon probable cause." Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum neatly sums up why probable cause often rests on improbable evidence:
[T]he Supreme Court has said it need amount to no more than a "substantial chance" or a "fair probability" that evidence of a crime will be discovered. It's clear that a probability substantially lower than 50 percent will do, which is why courts continue to treat highly unreliable indicators such as drug field tests and dog alerts as sufficient to justify a search.
The Hartes' case also offers another sad commentary on the ineffectiveness of the drug war. If we're going to pay police to enforce draconian marijuana laws at all, we should at least hire officers who can tell the difference between marijuana and wet tea leaves -- or okra, tomatoes, elderberries, hibiscus and ragweed, all plants that police have managed to mistake for marijuana.
Also on HuffPost:Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer based in Dublin. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, teleSUR, RBTH, The Calvert Journal and others. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ
For months, American politicians and pundits have been busily debating whether or not Russia hacked (or somehow influenced) last year’s presidential election in an effort to support Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
The pressing issue for many has been how the US should respond to this (unproven) meddling by a foreign power. It’s a real tough one, but luckily, long-time Clinton family adviser Paul Begala has an idea — and it’s so obvious that it’s hard to believe no one thought of it before.
Trump should just bomb Russia.
Begala made the casual suggestion during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, declaring the US was “under attack by a hostile foreign power” and Trump should be “retaliating massively” to any interference in the country’s political system.
Instead of just debating more sanctions on Russia, there should also be a debate about “whether we should blow up the KGB, GSU, or GRU [Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency].”
Read more
There’s a lot to unpack here, but a few things jump out: 1. The KGB hadn't existed since 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. 2. If bombing a country was an acceptable response to alleged election meddling, the US would already have been reduced to dust by now. 3. Trump bombing Russia could spark World War 3 — over unproven claims Russia somehow cost Clinton the presidency.
I just don’t think that decades from now, future generations would see Justice For Hillary as good enough reason to have incinerated the planet with nuclear weapons, but who knows, maybe I’m wrong.
This Begala is obviously not the sharpest tool in the shed. Nonetheless, there he is being given a platform on CNN to advocate for an action that could easily escalate to nuclear war — just because people on the opposite side of the political spectrum aren’t as angry about something as he is.
Imploring Trump to more drastic action against Russia, Begala even tries to play to the president’s noted ego, tempting him to get back at Russia for “tainting his victory.” This unhinged rhetoric coming largely from Democrats is dangerous, particularly in a climate that has Trump eager to prove that he did not collude with Moscow to achieve victory.
What’s interesting is that while Begala clearly feels that bombing Russian intelligence agencies is a reasonable thing to do, he probably wouldn’t endorse the bombing of the FBI or CIA — despite the fact that, by his logic, it would be a perfectly legitimate response, given the US’s interference in a whole host of foreign elections.
Even more interesting than that, though, is how Begala seems to have changed his tune about Russia now that a Republican is in the White House. During the 2012 election, when President Barack Obama called out opponent Mitt Romney for describing Russia the US’s number one geostrategic threat, Begala agreed, even tweeting that Obama had nailed Romney and quoting from the exchange: "The 1980's called. They want their foreign policy back."
Fast-forward, a few years and Begala, wants to bomb “the KGB.” Hey, Begala, the 1980s are calling again.
It’s true, American politics has never been short on fear-mongering about Russia, but it has been elevated to a whole new level, thanks in large part to Clinton, who believed that talking ad nauseum about Russia during the presidential campaign would ensure her victory — and when it didn’t, decided that even more talking about Russia would be the remedy. Now we’re stuck on the Russia loop for God knows how long — and still there has been no indisputable evidence proving that Trump colluded with the Kremlin, or that the Kremlin did in fact even meddle in the election.
The hysteria, promoted heavily by Clinton, has led us to a place where it’s normal to suggest on live television that the United States bombing Russia is a good, reasonable and justifiable idea. It was the kind of comment that should have seen Begala either laughed out of the CNN studio or seriously called out on air for utter lunacy — but of course, nothing of the sort happened.
Someone else who should have been called out last week for similar absurdity is Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley. Quigley, also on CNN, suggested that all Russians should be regarded with suspicion. In fact, all Russians, he implied, are inherently linked to Vladimir Putin by virtue of their nationality: “When you meet with any Russians, you’re meeting with Russian intelligence and therefore President Putin.”
That’s right. All Russians are spies for Putin and Americans can’t talk to or meet with any of them because if they do, they have obviously betrayed their nation. Quigley might want to get in touch with some members of his own party since they too have met with Russians on occasion.
Read more
Given the opportunity, one would hope that Quigley might roll back his statement and apologize for implying that meeting with any Russian person is equivalent to meeting with Putin. But it would have been great if he had been more careful in the first place, before contributing to the Russophobic mania which has taken over American political discourse and turned people’s brains to mush.
Then again, we can hardly expect journalists to take issue with bland commentary like that, given that no one batted an eyelid when former FBI director James Clapper said Russian people were “genetically driven” to be untrustworthy. This kind of commentary — which would be almost career ending if uttered about any other ethnicity, race or religion — is just par for the course when talking about Russia and Russians.
Regardless of whether or not Trump or his people colluded with Russian officials, or whether or not the Kremlin actively meddled in the US election, there is simply no way to deny that McCarthyism is back. For many Democrats, meeting with Russians is now forbidden — and bombing Russia is an option seriously worthy of consideration. That’s a pretty sad state of affairs."If that Apple SSL thing happened to Microsoft, literal s*** would be pouring down on Redmond right now. Pouring," tweeted @explanoit on Monday. And, as Kyle Maxwell added soon after, "Gates would be holding public executions in the courtyard". Both of these people show signs of knowing a bit about security. Both are, at least metaphorically speaking, 100 percent correct.
Thousands of words have already been written about Apple's little coding oopsie, so I'll just summarise things before moving on to my key point: Apple seems to have a serious cultural problem.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) authentication wasn't working in either iOS or OS X. A vast amount of software running on iDevices and Macs believed that their encrypted connections were connecting to the right place, and were being given the visible padlock of security, when they may not have been. Key SSL tests simply weren't being done. Apps could well have been connecting somewhere else — including to an impostor executing a "man in the middle attack", decrypting and monitoring users' data before re-encrypting it and passing it on to the correct destination.
It is of course hilarious that the actual error consisted of the repeated words "goto fail;".
The legendary computing scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote about the risks of the goto statement in programming languages way back in 1968, in his famous letter Go To Statement Considered Harmful — the text of which is available online, both in the original 1960s-style formatting (PDF) and more modern typography. "The go to statement as it stands is just too primitive, it is too much an invitation to make a mess of one's program," he wrote. Dijkstra instead promoted the discipline of structured programming.
Even though I was indoctrinated in structured programming, I don't think the goto is the real problem here. Anyone can screw up code with an ill-judged copy-paste or a slip of the mouse. We've all been there, right? Pointy-haired managers, think "reply all".
But Apple needs to answer some serious questions.
Why wasn't this broken code spotted by some sort of review process before it ended up in a software build? After all, this sort of mistake can even be picked up by various automated code analysis tools, let alone by human reviewers.
Why wasn't the failure picked up in the testing phase, before the software was published? After all, testing that each step in a security authentication process still works is kind of important.
Why was a patch for iOS released, thereby revealing the existence of the problem and giving security researchers good and evil the opportunity to reverse engineer it and see whether the problem also existed in OS X — which it did — before that operating system was also patched? After all, both operating systems are produced by the same company. Don't these people talk to each other?
I think we have some cultural problems here, folks.
The apparent lack of communication between the iOS and OS X teams is bad enough. But what's far more worrying is how such a serious error could have escaped detection — let's skip the more tinfoil-oriented explanation that it was a deliberate "mistake" to help the NSA, and a programming error gives Apple plausible deniability — and how the impact of the error is magnified by Apple's complete lack of transparency when it comes to security issues.
"For the protection of our customers, Apple does not disclose, discuss, or confirm security issues until a full investigation has occurred and any necessary patches or releases are available," says Apple. Which means it may know full well about unpatched vulnerabilities, but even if they're being actively exploited, you won't know about them.
Nothing must tarnish the image of Apple's pretty, pretty garden, even if beneath the surface it's rotten. Or poisoned.
That's why I agree with Eugene Kaspersky, head of Kaspersky Lab, who nearly two years ago wrote that when it comes to security, Apple is 10 years behind Microsoft. At the time, I called him a "glorious global megatroll" for that suggestion, but also wrote that Apple's supposed invulnerability is a myth based on ancient history.
Back when Windows was vulnerable to myriad viruses and worms, Bill Gates issued his Trustworth Computing memo and Microsoft completely re-engineered the way it made software. The Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) methodology was the result. Windows was dramatically improved — well, at least from a security standpoint — so much so that the attackers moved up the stack and tore Adobe's products a new one.
Apple's goto fail is a clear sign that the magic garden needs weeding — or even a good dose of Agent Orange, rather than endless Kool-Aid. But the first step in fixing a problem is admitting that it exists, and Apple has yet to do that. It seems that when it comes to security, Apple still couldn't find its butt with both hands. Perhaps it should be using Apple Maps to help. No, wait.
Disclosure: Stilgherrian has travelled to US security events twice as Microsoft's guest, including a briefing on SDL. He uses a MacBook Pro, having been primarily a Mac user since 1985, and an Android phone.1966 photo of the crew and personnel of Project Stormfury
Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by flying aircraft into them and seeding with silver iodide. The project was run by the United States Government from 1962 to 1983.
The hypothesis was that the silver iodide would cause supercooled water in the storm to freeze, disrupting the inner structure of the hurricane. This led to the seeding of several Atlantic hurricanes. However, it was later shown that this hypothesis was incorrect. It was determined that most hurricanes do not contain enough supercooled water for cloud seeding to be effective. Additionally, researchers found that unseeded hurricanes often undergo the same structural changes that were expected from seeded hurricanes. This finding called Stormfury's successes into question, as the changes reported now had a natural explanation.
The last experimental flight was flown in 1971, due to a lack of candidate storms and a changeover in NOAA's fleet. More than a decade after the last modification experiment, Project Stormfury was officially canceled. Although a failure in its goal of reducing the destructiveness of hurricanes, Project Stormfury was not without merit. The observational data and storm lifecycle research generated by Stormfury helped improve meteorologists' ability to forecast the movement and intensity of future hurricanes.
Hypothesis [ edit ]
The working hypothesis of Project Stormfury
Cloud seeding was first attempted by Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir. After witnessing the artificial creation of ice crystals, Langmuir became an enthusiastic proponent of weather modification.[1] Schaefer found that when he dumped crushed dry ice into a cloud, precipitation in the form of snow resulted.[2]
With regard to hurricanes, it was hypothesized that by seeding the area around the eyewall with silver iodide, latent heat would be released. This would promote the formation of a new eyewall. As this new eyewall was larger than the old eyewall, the winds of the tropical cyclone would be weaker due to a reduced pressure gradient.[3] Even a small reduction in the speed of a hurricane's winds would be beneficial: since the damage potential of a hurricane increased as the square of the wind speed,[4] a slight lowering of wind speed would have a large reduction in destructiveness.[4]
Due to Langmuir's efforts, and the research of Schaefer at General Electric, the concept of using cloud seeding to weaken hurricanes gathered momentum. Indeed, Schaefer had caused a major snowstorm on December 20, 1946 by seeding a cloud.[2] This caused GE to drop out for legal reasons. Schaefer and Langmuir assisted the U.S. military as advisors for Project Cirrus, the first large study of cloud physics and weather modification. Its most important goal was to try to weaken hurricanes.[5]
Project Cirrus [ edit ]
Project Cirrus was the first attempt to modify a hurricane. It was a collaboration of the General Electric Corporation, the US Army Signal Corps, the Office of Naval Research, and the US Air Force.[1] After several preparations, and initial skepticism by government scientists,[6] the first attempt to modify a hurricane began on October 13, 1947 on a hurricane that was heading west to east and out to sea.[5]
An airplane flew along the rainbands of the hurricane, and dropped nearly 180 pounds (82 kilograms) of crushed dry ice into the clouds.[1] The crew reported "Pronounced modification of the cloud deck seeded".[5] It is not known if that was due to the seeding. Next, the hurricane changed direction and made landfall near Savannah, Georgia. The public blamed the seeding, and Irving Langmuir claimed that the reversal had been caused by human intervention.[6] Cirrus was canceled,[5] and lawsuits were threatened. Only the fact that a system in 1906 had taken a similar path, as well as evidence showing that the storm had already begun to turn when seeding began, ended the litigation.[5] This disaster set back the cause of seeding hurricanes for eleven years.
At first the seeding was officially denied and it took years before the government admitted it. According to the Sept. 12, 1965 edition of the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, in 1947 a hurricane "went whacky" and "Twelve years later it was admitted the storm had in fact been seeded."[7]
Between the projects [ edit ]
The United States Weather Bureau's National Hurricane Research Project, founded in 1955, had as one of its objectives to investigate the scientific validity of hurricane modification methods. To this end, silver iodide dispensers were tested in Hurricane Daisy in August 1958. The flares were deployed outside of the hurricane eyewall, so this was an equipment test rather than a modification experiment. The equipment malfunctioned in all but one of the flights, and no conclusive data was acquired.[5]
The first seeding experiment since the Cirrus disaster was attempted on September 16, 1961, into Hurricane Esther by NHRP and the United States Navy aircraft. Eight cylinders of silver iodide were dropped into Esther's eyewall, and winds were recorded as weakening by 10 percent.[8] The next day, more seeding flights were made. This time, the silver iodide did not fall into the eyewall, and no reduction in windspeed was observed. These two results were interpreted as making the experiment a "success".[9]
The seedings into Hurricane Esther led to the establishment of Project Stormfury in 1962. Project Stormfury was a joint venture of the United States Department of Commerce and the United States Navy.[9]
Project BATON [ edit ]
The objective of Project BATON was the analysis of the life history of thunderstorms. A Department of Defense research activity supported by the Advanced Research Project Agency, Project BATON sought to expand understanding of storm physics as an aid to weather forecasting, fire prevention, and, possibly, for artificially controlling the weather. Dr. Helmut Weickmann, as an employee of the U.S, Army Signal Research and Development Laboratory, and Dr. Paul MacCready of Meteorology Research, Inc., were joint leaders of the Project BATON team.[10]
During the 1962 July–August storm season in Flagstaff, Arizona, the scientists, selected "guinea pig" storms, and seeded them with chemicals. Effects were thoroughly analyzed from the ground and from the air with time-lapse motion picture cameras, stereo still cameras, storm radar, lightning detectors, and airborne heat sensors. Among the agents inserted in selected clouds were "condensation nuclei" which temporarily increased the number of water droplets in the cloud, and pulverized dry ice, which turns a portion of the cloud to fine snow crystals that remain aloft. The utilization of these agents facilitated study of a storm's characteristics.[10]
Project STORMFURY begins [ edit ]
Robert Simpson became its first director, serving in this capacity until 1965.[11] There were several guidelines used in selecting which storms to seed. The hurricane had to have a less than 10 percent chance of approaching inhabited land within a day;[12] it had to be within range of the seeding aircraft; and it had to be a fairly intense storm with a well-formed eye.[8] The primary effect of these criteria was to make possible seeding targets extremely rare.[13]
No suitable storms formed in the 1962 season. Next year, Stormfury began by conducting experiments on cumulus clouds. From August 17 to 20 of that year, experiments were conducted in 11 clouds, of which six were seeded and five were controls. In five of the six seeded clouds, changes consistent with the working hypothesis were observed.[14]
On August 23, 1963, Hurricane Beulah was the site of the next seeding attempt. It had an indistinct eyewall. In addition, mistakes were made, as the seedings of silver iodide were dropped in the wrong places. As a consequence, nothing happened.[9] The next day, another attempt was made, and the seeders hit their targets. The eyewall was observed to fall apart and be replaced by another eyewall with a larger radius.[14] The sustained winds also fell by twenty percent.[14] All in all, the results of the experiments on Beulah were "encouraging but inconclusive."[15]
In the six years after Beulah, no seedings were conducted for several different reasons. In 1964, measurement and observation equipment was not ready to be used.[14] The year after that, all flights were used for additional experimentation in non-hurricane clouds.[14]
Joanne Simpson became its director beginning in 1965.[11][16] While out to sea in August of the 1965 Atlantic hurricane season, Stormfury meteorologists decided that Hurricane Betsy was a good candidate for seeding.[12] However, the storm immediately swung towards land, and on September 1, the planned flights were canceled. For some reason, the press was not notified that there were no seedings, and several newspapers reported that it had begun.[12] As Betsy passed close to the Bahamas and smashed into southern Florida, the public and Congress thought that seeding was underway and blamed Stormfury.[12] It took two months for Stormfury officials to convince Congress that Betsy was not seeded, and the project was allowed to continue.[12] A second candidate, Hurricane Elena, stayed too far out to sea.[14]
After Betsy, two other hurricanes came close to being seeded. Hurricane Faith was considered a likely candidate, but it stayed out of range of the seeding planes.[14] That same year, recon flights were conducted into Hurricane Inez, but there were no seedings.[14] Both the 1967 and 1968 seasons were inactive. Because of that, there were no suitable seeding targets in either of those two seasons.[14]
Dr. R. Cecil Gentry became the director of Stormfury in 1968.[17] There were no more near-seedings until 1969. In the interim, equipment was improved. What once was the primitive method of hand-dumping dry ice was replaced with rocket canisters loaded with silver iodide, and then gun-like devices mounted on the wings of the airplanes that fired silver iodide into the clouds. Observation equipment was improved.[12] Additional reconnaissance data was utilized to modify the working hypothesis. The new theory took cumulus towers outside the eyewall into account. According to the revised theory, by seeding the towers, latent heat would be released. This would trigger the start of new convection, which would then cause a new eyewall. Since the new eyewall was outside the original one, the first eyewall would be choked of energy and fall apart. In addition, since the new eyewall was broader than the old one, the winds would be lower due to a less sharp pressure difference.[12]
Hurricane Debbie in 1969 provided the best opportunity to test the underpinnings of Project Stormfury. In many ways it was the perfect storm for seeding: it did not threaten any land; it passed within range of seeding aircraft; and was intense with a distinct eye.[18] On August 18 and again on August 20, thirteen planes flew out to the storm to monitor and seed it. On the first day, windspeeds fell by 31%.[14] On the second day, windspeeds fell by 18%.[14] Both changes were consistent with Stormfury's working hypothesis. Indeed, the results were so encouraging that "a greatly expanded research program was planned."[19] Among other conclusions was the need for frequent seeding at close to hourly intervals.[20]
The 1970 and 1971 seasons provided no suitable seeding candidates.[14] Despite this, flights were conducted into Hurricane Ginger. Ginger was not a suitable storm for seeding, due to its diffuse, indistinct nature. The seeding had no effect. Ginger was the last seeding done by Project Stormfury.[14]
After the seedings [ edit ]
Atlantic hurricanes meeting all of the criteria were extremely rare, which made duplication of the "success" reached with Hurricane Debbie extremely difficult. Meanwhile, developments outside of meteorology hindered the cause of hurricane modification.
In the early 1970s, the Navy withdrew from the project.[21] Stormfury began to refocus its efforts on understanding, rather than modifying, tropical cyclones.[22] At the same time, the Project's aircraft were nearing the end of their operational lifetimes. At the cost of $30 million (year unknown)[21] two Lockheed P-3's were acquired. Due to the rarity of Atlantic hurricanes meeting the safety requirements, plans were made to move Stormfury to the Pacific and experiment on the large number of typhoons there.[13] This action required many of the same safety requirements as in the Atlantic, but had the advantage of a much higher number of potential subjects.[21]
The plan was to begin again in 1976, and seed typhoons by flying out of Guam. However, political issues blocked the plan. The People's Republic of China announced that it would not be happy if a seeded typhoon changed course and made landfall on its shores,[13] while Japan declared itself willing to put up with difficulties caused by typhoons because that country got more than half of its rainfall from tropical cyclones.[13]
Similar plans to operate Stormfury in the eastern north Pacific or in the Australian region also collapsed.[23]
Failure of the working hypothesis [ edit ]
Multiple eyewalls had been detected in very strong hurricanes before, including Typhoon Sarah[24] and Hurricane Donna,[25] although the double eyes were usually seen in very intense systems. Double eyewalls were also seen post-seeding in some of the seeded storms. At the time however, the only known times that rapid changes in eyewall diameter, other than during presumably successful seedings, was during rapid changes in intensity.[26] It remained controversial whether the seedings caused the secondary eyewalls or whether it was just a natural cycle[27] (as without further information, correlation does not imply causation). Basically, if eyewall changes similar to those observed in seeded hurricanes were rare in unseeded tropical cyclones, it would provide powerful evidence that Project Stormfury was successful. Conversely, if such changes were common in unseeded systems, it would throw doubt on the very hypothesis and assumptions driving Project Stormfury.[28]
Data and observations began to accumulate that debunked Stormfury's working hypothesis. Beginning with Hurricanes Anita and David, flights by Hurricane Hunter aircraft encountered events similar to what happened in "successfully" seeded storms.[28] Anita itself had a weak example of a concentric eyewall cycle, and David a more dramatic one.[27] In August 1980, Hurricane Allen passed through the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico. It also underwent changes in the diameter of its eye and developed multiple eyewalls. All this was consistent with the behavior that would have been expected of Allen had it been seeded. Thus, what Stormfury thought to have accomplished by seeding was also happening on its own.[29]
Other observations in Hurricanes Anita, David, Frederic, and Allen[30] also discovered that tropical cyclones have very little supercooled water and a great deal of ice crystals.[31] The reason that tropical cyclones have little supercooled water is that the updrafts within such a system are too weak to prevent water from either falling as rain or freezing.[32] As cloud seeding needed supercooled water to function, the lack of supercooled water meant that seeding would have no effect.
Those observations called the basis for Project Stormfury into question. In the middle of 1983, Stormfury was finally canceled after the hypothesis guiding its efforts was invalidated.[33]
Legacy [ edit ]
In the sense of weakening hurricanes to reduce their destructiveness, Project Stormfury was a complete failure because it did not distinguish between natural phenomena in tropical cyclones and the impact of human intervention.[31] Millions of dollars had been spent trying to do the impossible. In the end, "[Project] STORMFURY had two fatal flaws: it was neither microphysically nor statistically feasible."[33]
In addition, Stormfury had been a primary generator of funding for the Hurricane Research Division. While the project was operational, the HRD's budget had been around $4 million (1975 USD; $16 million 2008 USD), with a staff of approximately 100 people.[34] Today, the HRD employs 30 people and has a budget of roughly $2.6 million each year.[35]
However, Project Stormfury had positive results as well. Knowledge gained during flights proved invaluable in debunking its hypotheses.[35] Other science resulted in a greater understanding of tropical cyclones. In addition, the Lockheed P-3's were perfectly suitable for gathering data on tropical cyclones, allowing improved forecasting of these monstrous storms.[35] Those planes are still used by the NOAA today.[36]
Former Cuban president Fidel Castro alleged that Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaponize hurricanes.[37]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]With VPN apps, users in China were able to circumvent the state censorship and trigger foreign sites like Facebook. Now the applications have disappeared from Apple’s App Store – apparently at the urging of the government. According to allegations to Apple, Tim Cook has now responded.
Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed in a statement substantial pressure from the Chinese government on Apple. His group was forced to implement a tightening of the laws for VPN apps from the year 2015. “We were prompted by the Chinese government to remove some of these applications that do not comply with the new regulations from the App Store,” Tim Cook said on Tuesday in an interview with analysts at the launch of Apple’s quarterly figures.
Apple is not alone, but other VPN vendors are concerned, so Cook continues. “We would have preferred not to remove the apps, but as in any other country we do business, we follow the laws,” said the Apple CEO, Tim Cook.
China is an important market for Apple and brought the company in the last quarter about 18 percent of its total revenues. The Group, therefore, does not want to take the risk of being banished from the country due to regulatory violations. Tim Cook says he is confident that the restrictions will be relaxed over time. Experts see behind the VPN ban the attempt by the Chinese government, on the one hand, to strengthen the local competition to Apple and on the other hand to be able to act better against civil rights activists, said Tim Cook. They use the VPN client to circumvent government measures. Critics accused Apple of creating a dangerous precedent by kinking.
Background
Apps like ExpressVPN, VyprVPN, Torguard, AirVPN and IP Vanish are no longer accessible via the Chinese iOS Store. Apple has issued a statement against the New York Times. “We have been prompted to remove VPN apps in China that do not comply with the new regulations. […] These apps remain available in all other markets, ” said Tim Cook.
The VPN applications “tunnel” a connection between two points. For example, you can establish a connection to a foreign server and only go to the Internet there – so the state censorship in China could be effectively circumcised. Apple had already several times at the urging of the Chinese government apps removed; The current case, however, shows once again how important the Chinese market is for the tech group and how great is the influence of the government, said Tim Cook.
On the topic of VPN, there is also news from Russia: The government under Putin has now passed a law prohibiting VPNs in Russia from November 1, 2017. As TechCrunch reports, the new law also prohibits other technologies that allow users to access web sites anonymously. Another blow to the open Internet.For all of the love of freedom and fear of oppressive government, America demands unequivocal compliance over honesty and courage when it comes to our irrepressible national security state. Certain Democrats and neoconservative Republicans share an almost visceral hatred of whistleblowers while giving deference to incompetents and war criminals like David Petraeus and Henry Kissinger. And as we learned this past week, due to a cowardly decision by Harvard to rescind a fellowship given to Chelsea Manning in the face of pressure from current and former heads of the Central Intelligence Agency, it appears that there is no whistleblower they hate more than Manning.
Manning, whose 35-year prison sentence was commuted by former President Barack Obama earlier this year, revealed the absurdity and depravity of the War on Terror in the hundreds of thousands of documents she leaked to Wikileaks in 2010. One was a video, which Reuters had unsuccessfully tried to access through the Freedom of Information Act for nearly three years, of a 2007 airstrike in Baghdad that killed at least a dozen people, including two of their photographers. Another leak revealed that the United States had knowingly imprisoned more than 150 innocent people in Guantanamo Bay.
Despite later allegations that her actions put American soldiers and assets in harm’s way, the chief investigator for the Pentagon in the Manning case admitted at her sentencing hearing in 2013 that the agency found that there was no evidence of anyone having ever been killed as a result of being named in the documents that she leaked. And a classified 2011 report obtained by BuzzFeed in June through a FOIA request said “with high confidence” that Manning’s leak would have “no direct personal impact on current and former U.S. leadership in Iraq.”
Obama was blasted for his decision to commute Manning’s sentence, not only by the usual gang of apoplectic Republicans but by finger-wagging centrist Democrats as well. “I have serious concerns about equivocating sentences when national security is at stake,” said New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who is currently in the middle of a federal corruption trial, while his Virginia colleague Mark Warner (another Democrat) said it sent the “wrong signal.”
There is no whistleblower more hated than Manning.
In spite of this, Manning has been a forceful voice for civil liberties and transparency since her release. And her Harvard appointment, which was also bestowed upon former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and recently departed White House press secretary Sean Spicer, was notable in that she was a departure from the litany of powerful stooges who have historically populated the halls of Harvard, such as triple-degree holder Henry Kissinger, who some historians say is responsible for three to four million deaths worldwide, former President George W. Bush, who is chiefly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and thousands of American soldiers, and Larry Summers, the former Harvard president who played an instrumental role in dismantling financial regulations (paving the way for the financial collapse of 2007-2008) and who championed the pillaging of Russia by private interests following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Despite boasting a Murderers’ Row of, well, murderers, Manning isn’t the only person who Harvard has recently deemed unworthy to walk its halls. Michelle Jones, a woman who became an accomplished historian while serving over twenty years in prison for the death of her four-year old son, was recommended for acceptance to Harvard’s history department as a Ph.D student. Although the university’s leadership usually “rubber stamps” these decisions, they overturned the history department’s recommendation and rejected Jones. (John Stauffer, a white professor of African-American studies who “flagged” Jones’s file for the dean of admission, implied in an interview with the Marshall Project that he was motivated by a fear of Fox News to stop Jones’s admission.)
Jones served two decades for her crime and is a model of rehabilitation. But it seems that crimes such as Kissinger’s — which he will never, ever face time in prison for — can be forgiven or even applauded if they are committed in the name of America, while Jones can never be fully rehabilitated and Manning can never recover from the greatest sin: going against the interests of the state. Indeed, Manning was charged under the same law — the Espionage Act — as Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, both of whom sold secrets to the Soviet Union and Russia.
But if what Manning did was so “treasonous,” Kissinger and his ilk ought to be on the hook for much worse. As Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley noted, Kissinger “leaked nonpublic information about President Lyndon Johnson's 1968 Vietnam peace talks” to Richard Nixon while he was serving as a mediator for the Johnson administration in the peace talks. Nixon subsequently sabotaged peace talks to help his election chances; U.S. forces wouldn’t officially withdraw until after his resignation six years later, during which time more than 21,000 soldiers died.
A more contemporary hero of the security state, former Obama CIA director David Petraeus — a retired four-star general whose name was floated by op-ed columnists all over as a potential presidential candidate last year — gave classified information in the form of “eight personal notebooks” to biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell. “The Justice Department said the information, if disclosed, could have caused ‘exceptionally grave damage,’” Adam Goldman reported for the Washington Post in 2014. “Officials said the notebooks contained code words for secret intelligence programs, the identities of covert officers, and information about war strategy and deliberative discussions with the National Security Council.”
Although, as Goldman noted, the Justice Department considered bringing Petraeus and Broadwell up on charges of violating the Espionage Act — as they did to Manning — they decided against it, and Petraeus took a plea on a misdemeanor |
There may be even worse news for Whitman. It remains to be seen but her early advertising strategy may have backfired. Since she entered the campaign with near zero name recognition in the state, she introduced herself to voters in a multimillion-dollar radio campaign in which she portrayed herself as a friendly and reasonable person who favored education and lower taxes — and, you know, puppies and rainbows.
But when the gloves came off in her race against Poizner, so did the mask. What voters saw then was someone who was quite unreasonable, a typical pol who would do or say — or spend — whatever it took to be elected. And then there was a bizarre incident when she angered reporters by luring them to a remote site on the Oakland docks ostensibly for a news conference but then, after a brief photo op session, announced that she would not be taking questions. As security shoos the loudly objecting reporters out of the room, Whitman was caught on video smiling with her teeth clenched in response to the reporters’ effrontery. More recently, she was forced to admit that she had angrily shoved a staffer when she was an executive at eBay. The staffer was awarded $200,000 after the incident.
Still, Washington pundits are predicting the California governor’s race will be close.RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - The International Olympic Committee warned organizers of the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro five years ago that construction contracts they drew up could give developers incentives to cut corners, presaging problems with athletes’ housing that drew complaints from several countries this week, documents showed.
A view of one of the blocks of apartments where Canadal's athletes competing in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games are supposed to stay in the Olympic Village in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 23, 2016. Picture taken July 23, 2016. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
Rio’s city government, responsible for the vast majority of infrastructure projects for the Games, has used public-private partnerships, or PPPs, to get private firms to cover the cost of building venues in return for permission to build real estate on the sites.
Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, has taken pride in the fact that 57 percent of the nearly 40 billion reais ($12.3 billion) spent on the Olympics is private money, garnered by using PPPs on a scale never before seen at a Games.
Yet criticism erupted this week over the quality of the work at the privately funded Olympic Village. Australia said housing was “not safe or ready” and other countries such as Italy, Argentina and New Zealand also expressed concerns.
In documents seen by Reuters, the IOC told the city in 2011 it needed to carefully monitor its partners because they might pay more attention to their own commercial interests than delivering Olympic projects on time and to high standards.
“The city recognizes that the PPP contractor most likely has two primary objectives, maximize land value and deliver venue obligations at least cost,” the IOC said in one of the documents assessing infrastructure plans for the Games, seen by Reuters using a freedom of information request.
“The city must be diligent in making sure the Games obligations are fully met,” the IOC said.
Rio city officials did not respond to requests for comment. The IOC said in a statement that it was very supportive of Rio’s efforts to ensure the Games venues were constructed in an efficient and cost-effective way, while making sure that what was needed for the Games was delivered.
The IOC document reviewed by Reuters did not go into details about how problems might arise with the contracts, which marked a departure from previous Games dominated by public spending.
London’s 2012 Olympics was over 80 percent publicly funded and the Olympic Village was paid for using taxpayer money, with the government taking on the risk of having to sell the apartments after the Games.
By contrast, the 31 tower blocks of the Olympic Village in Rio, built at a cost of $880 million to house 18,000 athletes and team staff during the 17-day event, will be sold off as luxury housing after the Games.
The IOC has publicly welcomed PPPs as a way of reducing the cost of the Games for host nations but three sources involved in Rio’s preparations told Reuters there were widespread concerns over the quality of work being delivered.
Related Coverage Games organizers say Rio's Village is ready after repairs
They said the local organizing committee, Rio 2016, had been constrained in its ability to ensure projects met IOC standards because it was operating under huge financial strain.
This month, Reuters reported that despite deep cost cuts, Rio 2016 was running a deficit of $120 million to $150 million.
Low ticket sales, a slump in the Brazilian currency and lukewarm appetite from sponsors have all taken their toll on the privately funded organization that runs the Games before handing infrastructure back to the city.
NOT SAFE OR READY
Organizers deployed more than 600 workmen to tackle last-minute problems with water and electricity at the Olympic Village this week.
Rio 2016, the local organizing committee, said the accommodation was delivered in May but electricity and water were not tested properly.
“Theoretically, the builder should have delivered everything ready but we all know what it’s like with building work; there is always something to be fixed,” spokesman Mario Andrada told reporters on Monday.
On Thursday evening, Rio 2016’s Chief Operating Officer Rodrigo Tostes said emergency work had finished and all 31 towers were now “operational.”
Ilha Pura, the joint venture between construction companies Carvalho Hosken and Odebrecht that built and own the village, said the project had been delivered complete and to agreed standards.
“Ilha Pura has completely supported Rio2016 in carrying out tests and maintenance work, deploying specialized technicians and work teams - they are working long hours for the solution of problems as quickly as possible,” it said in an emailed statement.
Developers say they have sold just 240 of the 3,600 Olympic Village apartments that go for between 750,000 and 3 million reais ($230,000 to $925,000), as Brazil’s worst recession since the 1930s has dented demand.
Rio house prices are down 20 percent in real terms over the past year.
Slideshow (4 Images)
The development comes complete with a landscaped central park, fountains, tennis courts and swimming pools. Critics said the city missed a chance to build affordable housing like London did.
Just across the lagoon from Ilha Pura, finishing touches were being made to the Olympic Park, which has nine venues and will hold 16 Olympic sports.President Vladmir Putin warned Europe to keep its hands off Ukraine on Tuesday, as Brussels sent its top foreign policy envoy to Kiev to try to mediate in the 10-week stand-off between President Viktor Yanukovychand the opposition on the streets.
Russia’s intervention in Brussels followed Yanukovych’s biggest concession to the opposition, the sacking of his hardline prime minister and government and a promise to repeal draconian laws criminalising protest and freedom of speech.
Putin met EU leaders for the first time since November’s clash between the Kremlin and Europe over the future of Ukraine triggered the crisis in Kiev. Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, took part in the meetings with Putin in Brussels then travelled to Kiev to try to mediate between the opposing sides.
“The more intermediaries there are, the more problems there are,” Putin said. “I am not sure Ukraine needs intermediaries.” He pointedly noted that European leaders would complain if Russia sent envoys to mediate in the Greek crisis of the past four years.
Full article herePlaying with CSS Grid Layout
Mirza Joldic Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 26, 2017
I had the chance to see Jen Simmons present at the General Assembly in NYC. The workshop was titled How CSS Grid is Reinventing Webpage Design but it was much more than that. Jen did an amazing job at setting the stage for CSS. She talked about how we got to where we are today and why CSS grid came into existence. It was also super awesome to have Elika Etemad there who is one of the main authors of CSS Grid Layout.
CSS Grid came out of the need to reduce the complexity of designing the layout of a web page. Sure, you can probably create any layout for your site using tables, floats and more recently Flexbox but those tools were not intended to be used that way. Flexbox was designed for efficient space distribution of elements across one direction of the page. People have embraced its efficiency and figured out ways to use it for their page layout because there was no better solution available. Well as of March 28, 2017 CSS Grid is fully supported by Firefox, Chrome, Safari (iOS as well), and Opera. It won’t be long until it is supported by every browser with the exception of Internet Explorer. More on that later.
Browser support as of March 28, 2017 | source
Intro to CSS Grid Layout
While learning more about CSS Grid, I thought it would be fun to create a tool to easily explore how different grid properties affect the overall grid layout. I named it appropriately as CSS Grid Playground 🙂.
Brace yourself, the gifs are coming…
CSS Grids behave similar to Flexbox in that there is a Parent-Child relationship like so:
So the first step we need to do is define the property display:grid; on our parent element.
Nothing happened. That’s okay because we’re not done yet. What did happen was that behind the scenes our parent div is now a Grid Container which means that all of its direct children are Grid Items.
Next let’s define a 3 column grid with grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 1fr;.
Now we see something happening. It looks like our colorful block shrunk but it’s hard to tell exactly how it got divided. Adding a grid-gap: 5px; will make the divisions more prominent.
Ok, so now we see that we have a collection of 7 div elements that are evenly divided into 3 columns. You can think of the 1fr as a fractional unit. By defining all 3 columns as 1fr, the browser will evenly distribute the space between all columns. Let’s see what result we get with 1fr 2fr 1fr.
Now, the second column is twice as long as the first and last column. Using fr units makes it really easy to define your grid dimensions.
Alright, so we’re getting closer to something usable. Let’s make the top row be as wide as possible. It can be used to hold a top navigational menu for example. To do this we want to add grid-column: 1 / 4; to the first grid item.
The 1 / 4 may look cryptic but lets break it down. The first number is the starting position and the second number is the ending position. The positions are the Grid Lines associated with your grid. In this example, our grid has four grid lines going from left to right. So what we’re saying here is that we want our grid item to start at grid line one and end at grid line four.
Next let’s make a left sidebar thats 300px tall. We also want it to take up positions 2 / 3 vertically. We can do this with grid-row: 2 / 4.
Next let’s make the content area span 2 grid lines down and 1 grid line right.
Notice how we used the keyword span in this example. What we are saying with grid-column: 2 / span 1; is, start at grid line 2, and span only 1 grid line over. In the previous step we specifically indicated the start / end grid lines.
Next let’s make a footer that also spans horizontally across the entire grid. At the same time, let’s remove 2 grid items while we’re at it. We don’t need them anymore.
Let’s take care of the last grid item by aligning it towards the bottom.
To align the grid item to the bottom we used align-self: end;. The other options you have here are start, center, and stretch which was the default behavior if no specific height was given.
Ok, so here we have a relatively common layout and it was really easy to set up. Just for fun, let’s give the content body a height and width, and center it vertically and horizontally.
Here we used justify-self: center; to horizontally center the grid item.
There is a lot more to CSS Grid than covered here. For more detailed examples, I highly encourage Jen Simmons article on Learning CSS Grid. There she outlines a wide ranges of resources on learning more about CSS Grid Layout.
Internet Explorer Support
Believe it or not, the original spec for CSS Grids was implemented as far back as IE 10. Many new features have been added to the spec since then however Microsoft has no plans to update the Grid implementation in IE 10 and IE 11. What this means is that if majority of your users are on these browsers, ie. enterprise intranet, then you should carefully consider which CSS Grid features you include in your design. For guidelines on creating Grid Layouts in IE 10 and IE 11, check these Microsoft docs out.
Lastly, Edge is one of the browsers that still does not support the latest CSS Grids spec so I encourage you to make it a priority for Microsoft.
If you found this useful, recommend it by clicking the 💚 so that others may find it as well.
Thanks ✌️Over 7,800 Prosecutions Questioned After NJ Lab Tech Caught Faking Drug Test Results
from the so-fast-the-tests-can't-even-keep-up-with-him dept
Hey, it's only someone's freedom at stake. Why try harder? (via Fusion.net)
A lab technician for the State Police allegedly faked results in a drug case, and has drawn into question 7,827 criminal cases on which he worked, according to state officials.
Kamalkant Shah worked as a laboratory technician for the State Police laboratory in Little Falls and was found to have "dry labbed" suspected marijuana, according to a Feb. 29 memo to Public Defender Joseph Krakora from Deputy Public Defender Judy Fallon. Shah's essentially accused of making up data.
"Basically, he was observed writing 'test results' for suspected marijuana that was never tested," Fallon said in the memo.
Mr. Shah was employed with the lab from 2005 to 2015; obviously all his “results” have been called into question. In Passaic County alone, the universe of cases possibly implicated in this conduct is 2,100. The Prosecutor’s Office is still in the process of identifying them. Their plan is to submit for retesting specimens from open cases. The larger, and unanswered, question is how this impacts already resolved cases, especially those where the specimens may have been destroyed.
This gave us a rough list of clients on The List, and we used these names to create a list of their co-defendants. We then checked The List for the co-defendant names. Unfortunately, a lot of these were missing. If we assumed the same rate of missing names across all cases, it seemed The List was missing somewhere between 0 and 9,600 names. Wait, what? That’s right, thousands of potentially missing names. The uncertainty came from the fact that we had to match names. The List did not come with dates of birth, addresses, or Social Security Numbers—just names. So occasionally, we could not find a name we were looking for because the Commonwealth and CPCS disagreed on the spelling of a name or someone made a transcription error.
Kevin Walker, an assistant public defender, issued a statement on behalf of the Public Defender's Office Wednesday saying the office does not have "a practical mechanism for identifying all the cases involving" Shah.
"The prosecuting attorneys are going to have to do that, by reviewing the records from the Little Falls lab and cross-referencing them with their files," he said. "We assume the prosecutors will do that promptly. Pending that review, we are going to keep all our options on the table, including filing motions to vacate convictions in appropriate cases."
Shah has not been charged with any crime, and is believed to have retired.
If Shah wasn't concerned about putting a possibly innocent person behind bars, it's unlikely his yearly salary of $101,039 would have been much of a motivating factor for better work either. It could be that this was an isolated incident -- thetime Shah cut corners to increase throughput. (Which, truth be told, is kind of how our entire criminal justice system operates: throughput is preferable to diligent effort.)But odds are that if Shah got caught, it's something that happened eventually, rather than immediately. Bad habits are easy to develop and tend to spiral out of control until the inevitable happens. There's no way to tell if this was a one-off. Conversely, there's no way to positively state this didn't happen all the time. Hence the thousands of criminal cases now being viewed as questionable.Now comes the hard part of setting things right -- which is actually an impossibility, as the public defender's memo points out.Closed cases with no surviving evidence are still questionable, but there's no way to get answers. No one's going to start reversing convictions en masse just because the results might have been faked. The hundreds or thousands of cases where the tested samples may still be available aren't suddenly going to become a priority for the State Police either. It's more than just a question of will. It's also a question of resources. And when resources are scarce, possibly falsely imprisoned citizens will remain imprisoned.In a case we discussed last year, a drug lab chemist was discovered to have been faking test results for years, resulting in nearly 40,000 criminal prosecutions being called into question. An examination by David Colarusso, a public defender turned data scientist, pointed to several issues that would put thousands of manhours between the suspect test results and any exonerations. It's not just that results were deliberately faked, but that the paperwork associated with them could have any number of flaws.This particular effort has its own roadblocks. For one, the reopening of cases has been tossed to the prosecutor's office. While this is definitely the department that should handle it -- what with the misconduct occurring under their supervision and the office being better staffed and funded than their defense counterparts -- there's very little in it to motivate prosecutors to move quickly. No one likes having to erase wins from the board.On top of that, this will requireeffort -- and lots of it.The public defenders are playing their cards right. Filing motions to vacate convictions will motivate prosecutors who want to keep wins on the board to track down the tests and verify their accuracy. But that still does nothing for those whose supposedly culpatory test results have already been destroyed. And there will be many who simply fall through the cracks thanks to clerical errors, incomplete documentation or just because tangling with bureaucratic filing systems tends to wear people down quickly.Prosecutors place a lot of faith in forensic lab results. So does almost every law enforcement agency, including the FBI. But over the years, investigations have found some forensic testing to be mostly junk science. In others, the science holds up but the test results are only as solid as the people performing them. Even the best scientists are susceptible to confirmation bias and the most knowledgeable expert witnesses can unconsciously act on a desire to please, rather than offer unbiased testimony.Some mistakes are human error. Some are more malicious. When human lives and freedom are at stake, standards should never be allowed to slip. This means increasing the level of personal accountability -- by hiring the right people and by deterring future misconduct with harsh penalties for those who play fast and loose with criminal evidence. The latter hasn't happened here, which does not bode well for future criminal defendants.
Filed Under: drug tests, faked results, kamalkant shah, new jerseyNew Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his wife Mary Pat Christie visit the One Nucleus life science company headquarters in Cambridge, Britain, Feb. 2, 2015. (Neil Hall/Reuters)
“Chris Christie breaks with Obama on vaccines.”
Such was one of many headlines after a kerfuffle in which New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and President Obama both made statements about vaccinations that had some daylight between them — with Obama standing up strongly for measles vaccinations, and Christie stating that “parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.”
Christie later clarified his views, seeming to also back vaccinations strongly. But not before Americans were given an opportunity to view vaccinations as a matter upon which leading Democratic and Republican politicians disagree — a development that Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, commenting on Twitter, called “very dangerous.”
The reason? Right now, most Americans do vaccinate and support vaccinations, and there’s no evidence of a partisan divide on the subject:
But imagine what would happen if that were to change. We already have the blueprint readily available from other science based issues that have become substantially partisan, namely, embryonic stem cell research, global climate change, and the teaching of evolution.
In each of these cases, we see that people seize on facts (and behaviors) that align with their political and religious identities and belief systems. Partisanship leads people to divide over scientific fact itself, and then creates policy dysfunction, gridlock, and quite a lot of divisiveness.
A version of this happens, too, with vaccine deniers as they argue back against the medical establishment. But that’s still a fringe battle that doesn’t map easily onto U.S. political divides.
“Vaccine risks are neither a matter of concern for the vast majority of the public nor an issue of contention among recognizable demographic, political, or cultural subgroups,” writes Yale’s Dan Kahan, who researched the topic through a nationally representative survey.
If at some point, vaccinations get framed around issues of individual choice and freedom vs. government mandates — as they did in the “Christie vs. Obama” narrative — and this in turn starts to map onto right-left differences in American, then watch out. People could start getting political signals that they ought to align their views on vaccines — or, even worse, their vaccination behaviors — with the views of the party they vote for.
Granted, I’m not saying we’re there now. Christie’s backtrack suggests he himself doesn’t want to go there. But it’s a scary thought. Just as we lament how polarized and partisan the climate issue has gotten, we should also pray that the same never happens with vaccines.
This post is part of our new Energy and Environment coverage. If you like it, please bookmark our page, follow us on Twitter, sign up for our online newsletter — and come back often!Colour your apps in React Native using Material Palette
Raúl Gómez Acuña Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 21, 2017
Successful apps invest in good visual design. That’s essential for a pleasant user experience, where our eyes are delighted with every interaction that occurs inside. Material design meant a big step forward on that matter, providing a visual language that synthesises the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. Material as a metaphor, graphically intentional and motion as a way of providing meaning are some of the principles they established to layout beautiful experiences.
With the release of Android 7.0 Nougat, the Palette API was born. It allows you to extract prominent colors from images to help you create visually engaging apps. Mobile apps like WhatsApp leverage it (see the contact details page) and whether you are building an application following material design spec or not, that’s a really powerful feature you can make use of.
Today, I’m excited to announce react-native-material-palette, a library which wraps the Palette API in a nice JS API to use in React Native.
Which colors can I get?
According to the specification, the palette API defines by default six color profiles for a given image, being those:
Light Vibrant
Vibrant
Dark Vibrant
Light Muted
Muted
Dark Muted
Probably that sounds to you like a hieroglyph, like it did for me the first time I saw them. Let’s try to get a better insight by understanding how are they calculated.
The profiles are determined by analyzing the HSL (Hue, Saturation and Luminosity) color profile of the pixels on the image, based on predefined target ranges for luminance, saturation, and population (how many pixels in the image are represented by that particular profile). It uses a weighted average calculation with preference given to luminance, then it comes saturation and finally population.
Generally speaking, vibrant colors are more saturated than muted colors and the light/dark variations of the profiles operate on luminosity.
Enough technicalities, let’s move to the library itself.
The React Native Module
Let me highlight some of the features the library offers in terms of implementation details.
Kotlin
Since Google announced on their keynote the support of Kotlin as first class language for developing Android apps, we wanted to give it a try for implementing the native part. Kotlin is certainly an awesome language to work with, very easy to set up and the runtime library is less than 1KB. Also, as of RN 0.47, react-native link works for modules developed in Kotlin, so you don’t have to worry about manually setting up project dependencies.
100% test coverage
We have created this library having in mind robustness but also future external contributions. The JS logic is fully tested with jest, so not only we make sure the functionality works as expected, but also external contributions can be speeded up by just committing to the test suite we put into place.
Caching
We use Fresco on the native side to automatically cache images downloaded from the internet, so that we have a good performance in our applications.
Use cases
Our API supports basically two use cases, which are image galleries and styling screen color schemes based on a particular image. A picture paints a thousand words so here you have a visual cue of what you can achieve with the library:
Image gallery
Styling screen color scheme based on an image
Future work
There are still some limitations that we are planning to overcome for the upcoming future:
iOS support
At the moment the library only supports Android. However it’s feasible to extend the functionality to iOS as well, since the algorithm is open source and there’s been already successful attempts to port it to other environments, such as web. If you would like to help out on that, PRs are more than welcome!
Customising your own profiles
The API provides six color targets by default. Sometimes, a given image has no colors fulfilling the criteria of the predefined profiles. It’d be useful to define some custom targets in addition to the existing ones, with different weighting and target lightness and saturation values, in order to increase the chance of finding a useful color. It’s in our roadmap to support that as well.
Wanna try it out?
You can find the whole API in the github repository. We also have an example app available for you so that you can play with it immediately :)
What are you waiting for? Take the brush and enjoy!Tualatin Police: Homeless man arrested for TriMet driver assault
Song Sushumna Landis, 24, allegedly punched driver who refused him free transportation.
A 24-year-old transient faces an assault charge after punching a TriMet bus driver in the face after the driver refused to give him a free ride Tuesday morning, Tualatin Police said.
According to TriMet and Tualatin Police, Song Sushumna Landis was found sleeping in a bus shelter at the intersection of Southwest 65th Avenue and Borland Road in east Tualatin by the driver, whose name has not been released. The driver asked him to leave, they said.
"The Line 76 operator was on a break at Legacy Meridian Park Hospital and when the operator returned a few minutes later, the man wanted to ride for free," Roberta Altstadt, a TriMet spokeswoman, told The Times in an email. "The operator stated that wasnt possible, and the suspect then assaulted the operator."
Landis struck the driver in the eye, knocking him to the ground, and fled the scene, said police. He was found a few blocks later and arrested at about 6:18 a.m., said Tualatin Police Department spokeswoman Jennifer Massey.
Landis was lodged in the Clackamas County Jail. He faces charges of third-degree assault, which is a felony, and interfering with public transportation, a misdemeanor crime. He has also been excluded from all TriMet property.
"TriMet takes the issue of any operator assault very seriously, and we prosecute to the full extent of law anyone who assaults one of our employees," Altstadt told The Times.
She concluded, "We appreciate the work of the Tualatin Police Department in quickly arresting the suspect."
The driver had a cut over his eye following the attack, said Massey. Altstadt said he "received treatment for minor injuries."
Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional information from a TriMet spokeswoman.
By Mark Miller
ReporterThe lucky winner will brew PBW’s 10th anniversary collaboration brew in Oostvleteren.
Philly Beer Week (PBW) has announced that this year’s fundraiser and live raffle drawing will be held on Thursday, November 17 from 6 p.m. until 9 p.m. at City Tap House Logan Square. PBW is teaming up with famed brewery De Struise Brouwers and head brewer Urbain Coutteau to brew a special collaboration craft beer to celebrate PBW’s 10th Anniversary that will be served at select bars and restaurants during PBW 2017.
Per annual tradition, one lucky beer lover will travel to Oostvleteren, Belgium, accompanied by a local brewer of their choice, to create the collaboration brew. Tom Peters, proprietor of Monk’s Café and famed Belgian beer ambassador, will lead a whirlwind tour to some of Belgium’s most storied breweries, complete with VIP access and private tastings. Raffle tickets can be purchased online (click to purchase); and the trip will take place in January 2017. In addition, PBW fans and supporters are invited to follow the group’s adventures on social media by using the hashtag #PBWEuropeanVacation.
The annual PBW Raffle is a fundraiser for Philly Beer Week, a 501(c)6 non-profit that supports the diverse and dynamic beer and brewing culture of the greater Philadelphia area.
Tickets are $6 each or 4 for $20; when purchased, the entrant chooses among a list of participating local brewers to accompany them in the event that they win.
This year’s Grand Prize is a trip to Belgium to collaborate with De Struise Brouwers.
The trip is sponsored by Shelton Brothers Importers, led by Dan Shelton.
The package includes two roundtrip airline tickets from Philadelphia to Belgium, along with accommodations for two nights in Belgium.
This year’s runner-up will win a Brew Day at Tröegs Independent Brewing in Hershey, PA. This special prize package will include: a private tour of the brewery, with a chance to brew with Tim Mayhew; complimentary food and beer, plus a $50 gift card for use on merchandise and swag.
in Hershey, PA. This special prize package will include: a private tour of the brewery, with a chance to brew with Tim Mayhew; complimentary food and beer, plus a $50 gift card for use on merchandise and swag. This year’s third-place winner will receive two complimentary tickets to PBW’s marquee event, Opening Tap 2017.
All entrants must be at least 21 years old. The winner will be drawn live on Thursday, November 17 at City Tap House Logan Square, during a lively party featuring special firkins and rare brews from participating local breweries. Winners need not be present to win, but are encouraged to attend. Winners must have a valid passport or the ability to secure one in time for the trip. Tickets can be purchased online (click to purchase). The ticket purchaser will select a professional brewer from a designated list of participating Philadelphia area breweries (see below) at the time of purchase; the two will head to Belgium together for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Contest open to only local brewers; there is a 3-year waiting rule for previous winners – John Stemler (Free Will) was the 2015 winner and Tom Kehoe (Yards) was the 2016 winner.Canada's economy added 74,000 jobs last month, pushing the unemployment rate down to its lowest point since December 2008.
Statistics Canada reported Friday that the jobless number dropped by 0.2 percentage points to 6.8 per cent.
For comparison purposes, the U.S. jobless rate was 5.9 per cent in August, but Canada and the U.S. calculate their job numbers differently. If Canada's numbers are crunched the way the Americans calculate theirs, the two countries have the same jobless rate — 5.9 per cent.
Most of Canada's gains in September came in Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador. The rest of the provinces were largely unchanged.
Many of the new jobs — more than 69,000 — were full-time positions, with the construction, natural resources,
accommodation and food services and health care industries posting especially strong showings.
Biggest job number since 2013
September's figure is the biggest monthly jobs gain this year, but some economists wonder if the wobbly global economy could derail what looks like encouraging signs in Canada.
"As a stand-alone report, this is no doubt highly impressive, but given the rising turmoil in the rest of the world, not to mention growing questions over the reliability of the jobs data, these results may not have much lasting impact," BMO economist Doug Porter said in a note to clients.
And at least one market watcher couldn't help but notice that the strong month offsets a sudden decline in numbers the month before.
"All that happened here was that the record 98,000 plunge in private payroll employees in August reversed higher by 130k in September," Scotiabank said, adding that the record number of self-employed seen in August, (up by 87,000) turned around and got wiped out in September, losing almost 56,000 positions.In a year overwhelmed with dramatic departures, the profundity of Leonard Cohen’s exit was a little washed over—and may have been all the more appropriate for it.
It was the pull quote heard ’round the world. “I am ready to die.”
Admittedly, it has a certain zing to it. And as Biggie knew, it’s a pretty undeniably badass stance to take. But when those five words spread around on social media last month, they were missing the point.
As Steven Hyden wrote recently for UPROXX, Leonard Cohen came out of the womb ready to die. That fact was tied to the whole essence of him—that he was spiritually engaged at the highest level, that he was a seeker. In that regard, Cohen was no more concerned with death than he was with life. It’s just that in his journey to seek answers, he was never afraid to ask the darkest questions of our existence. And clearly, in the end, we did indeed want it darker—and Cohen delivered.
You Want It Darker is, naturally, an album that deals deeply with death. But it isn’t an album wholly focused on death—and for the most part the death inside doesn’t even seem to be Cohen’s own. For my money, anyway, the extinguishing candle consistently referenced within seems more likely to belong to Marianne Ihlen, his longtime muse, who died earlier this year (following one last heartbreaking exchange with Cohen on her deathbed). Regardless, though, I am highly skeptical of the predominant interpretation of this album, in which it is viewed as the outgoing statement of a terminal man.
This suspicion was further validated by the news last week that Cohen’s death was not due to some drawn-out illness, but rather by a fall in the middle of the night. It was just an accident. To call You Want It Darker a deliberate parting gift is an arbitrary interpretation. Cohen was here, he made the album, and then he died. That’s all we can concretely say.
And yet, it’s certainly too perfect an ending to ignore. Whether by design or not, the album does serve as a career-encapsulating bow, itself rivaling Blackstar (a.k.a. ★), David Bowie’s unreal departure, which was definitively conceived and released as a likely final statement on life and death, celebrity and art. But when people look back—in either upcoming year-end lists or far-future retrospectives—it’s hard to imagine that Bowie’s release will not be the more revered artifact. Partially, that’s because Bowie was the bigger star, and partially that’s because the whole Blackstar package—from the music videos down to the album art—was a uniquely curated experience built for us to cope with losing him. Even though it’s somewhat unfair to outright stack up the two releases tit for tat, Cohen’s swan song simply doesn’t have that kind of firepower to it—and it didn’t help that his death was announced in the immediate aftermath of a devastating and highly distracting election.
To call You Want It Darker a deliberate parting gift is an arbitrary interpretation.
That’s a shame because, besides Cohen being infinitely more worthy of our attention than Trump (duh), You Want It Darker is actually a better album than Blackstar. In fact, it’s better than a lot of the truly great music that’s come out this year—and better than a good number of the works that Cohen put out over his own legendary career. Owing in part to the production work of Cohen’s son, Adam (who worked alongside his father and Patrick Leonard), the album is bursting with emotion, but delivered with composed exactitude. Measured in style, but lush in arrangement. In a word, it’s essential. And if it’s a goodbye, it’s sublime. But most of all, if it’s a horse in a race, it’s destined to be the one wearing the sash.
In David Remnick’s now-definitive New Yorker portrait of Cohen (from which the aforementioned “ready to die” quote was pulled), there’s a story about Bob Dylan. According to Cohen, the two were driving together, telling stories, when Dylan told him of a recent compliment he had received from a famous songwriter, who said, “Bob, you’re Number One, but I’m Number Two.” This led Dylan to compliment Cohen (in his own way), saying, “As far as I’m concerned, Leonard, you’re Number One. I’m Number Zero.”
It’s hard to imagine a better anecdote to encapsulate the fifty-year musical career of Leonard Cohen. Even when he came in first, he still couldn’t win. But that’s fine. He was Our Man—our Field Commander Cohen—precisely because of how he tossed the power rankings aside and soldiered on. Year by year. Month by month. Day by day. Thought by thought. FLAlgae numbers increase as living corals die, so measuring the two across wide areas should give a good indicator of reef health. At the same time, the team will be taking in-water measurements to double-check PRISM's measurements, and also evaluating the surroundings -- physical, chemical and human factors |
Choosing not to focus on the ugliness but on the beauty and not on the adversity but on the blessings, is Marcus Aurelius’ way to battle demotivation.
Individuals can act in any way they find plausible, and this allows them to accrue benefits or suffer costs, depending on the circumstances.
The responsibility that our actions necessitate is the only true weapon we can exploit in order to antagonize the nefariousness of the world around us.
Marcus Aurelius realized the power of that weapon and that helped him become an exemplary emperor despite adversity and despite his weaknesses. That is what makes him a respectful example for all of us.
In closing
You have probably noticed that all three major Stoics lived in Rome during the first and second century AD. This was the time when the Roman Empire was at its greatest territorial extent.
I cannot say for sure how this affected the rise of stoicism, but I do know that during prosperous but at the same time turbulent times, great philosophies emerge.
There is one thing I know for sure, though: Becoming enamored with stoicism is a truly a life-shaping experience.
Stoicism is a way of life and the best way to move towards embracing a more stoic life is the strategic adoption of the right habits and practices. If you are unsure where to start, “30 Challenges – 30 Days – Zero Excuses” ebook provides a selection of habits and practices that can prove extremely valuable in that respect.
Also, don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter to get my articles in your inbox whenever they are posted. It is awe-inspiring, free, easy to unsubscribe and some great resources will wait for you once you confirm your subscription
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And for those who prefer a more visual version of the post, you can check out my video essay on stoicism:The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
Can the experience of faith be shared by those unable to believe in the existence of a transcendent God? Might there be a faith of the faithless?
For a non-Christian, such as myself, but one out of sympathy with the triumphal evangelical atheism of the age, the core commandment of Christian faith has always been a source of both fascinated intrigue and perplexity. What is the status and force of that deceptively simple five-word command: “you shall love your neighbor”? With Gary Gutting’s wise counsel on the relation between philosophy and faith still ringing in our ears, I’d like to explore the possible meaning of these words through a reflection on a hugely important and influential philosopher not yet even mentioned so far in The Stone: Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55).
Paradoxically, non-Christian faith might be said to reveal the true nature of the faith that Christ sought to proclaim.
In the conclusion to “Works of Love” (1847) — which some consider the central work in Kierkegaard’s extensive and often pseudonymous authorship — he ponders the nature of the commandment of love that he has been wrestling with throughout the book. He stresses the strenuousness and, in the word most repeated in these pages, the rigor of love. As such, Christian love is not, as many non-believers contend, some sort of “coddling love,” which spares believers any particular effort. Such love can be characterized as “pleasant days or delightful days without self-made cares.” This easy and fanciful idea of love reduces Christianity to “a second childhood” and renders faith infantile.
Kierkegaard then introduces the concept of “the Christian like-for-like,” which is the central and decisive category of “Works of Love.” The latter is introduced by distinguishing it from what Kierkegaard calls “the Jewish like-for-like,” by which he means “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”: namely a conception of obligation based on the equality and reciprocity of self and other. Although, as a cursory reading of Franz Rosenzweig’s “The Star of Redemption” — one of the great works of German-Jewish thought — could easily show, this is a stereotypical and limited picture of Judaism, Kierkegaard’s point is that Christian love cannot be reduced to what he calls the “worldly” conception of love where you do unto others what others do unto you and no more. The Christian like-for-like brackets out the question of what others may owe to me and instead, “makes every relationship to other human beings into a God-relationship.”
This move coincides with a shift from the external to the inward. Although the Christian, for Kierkegaard, “must remain in the world and the relationships of earthly life allotted to him,” he or she views those relationships from the standpoint of inwardness, that is, mediated through the relationship to God. As Kierkegaard puts it emphatically in Part One of “Works of Love”:
Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.
The rigor of Christianity is a conception of love based on radical inequality, namely the absolute difference between the human and the divine. This is how Kierkegaard interprets Jesus’s words from the Sermon on the Mount, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye.”(Matthew, 7:3) The log in my own eye does not permit me to judge the speck in the other’s. Rather, I should abstain from any judgment of what others might or might not do. To judge others is to view matters from the standpoint of externality rather than inwardness. It is arrogance and impertinence. What others owe to me is none of my business.
This is why it is very hard to be Christian. And maybe there are not as many true Christians around as one might have thought. Kierkegaard writes, “Christianly understood you have absolutely nothing to do with what others do to you.” “Essentially,” he continues, “you have only to do with yourself before God.” Once again, the move to inwardness does not turn human beings away from the world, it is rather, “a new version of what other men call reality, this is reality.”
The address of Kierkegaard’s writing has a specific direction: the second person singular, you. He tells the story from the Gospels (versions appears in Matthew and Luke) of the Roman centurion in Capernaum who approached Jesus and asked him to cure his servant or boy, the sense is ambiguous, “sick with the palsy, grievously tormented.”(Matthew, 8:6) After Jesus said that he would visit the boy, the centurion confessed that, as a representative of the occupying imperial authority with soldiers under his command, he did not feel worthy that Jesus should enter his house. When Jesus heard this he declared that he had not experienced a person of such great faith in the whole of Israel. He added, and this is the line that interests Kierkegaard, “Be it done for you, as you believed.”
Love is that disciplined act of absolute spiritual daring that eviscerates the old self.
This story reveals the essential insecurity of faith. Kierkegaard writes that it does not belong to Christian doctrine to vouchsafe that you — “precisely you,” as he emphasizes — have faith. If someone were to say, “it is absolutely certain that I have faith because I have been baptized in the church and follow its rituals and ordinances,” then Kierkegaard would reply, “Be it done for you, as you believed.” The point of the story is that the centurion, although he was not baptized as a Christian, nonetheless believed. As Kierkegaard writes, “in his faith, the Gospel is first a gospel.” The New Testament Greek for “gospel” is euaggelion, which can mean good tidings, but can also be thought of as the act of proclamation or pledging. On this view, faith is a proclamation or pledge that brings the inward subject of faith into being over against an external everydayness. Such a proclamation is as true for the non-Christian as for the Christian. Indeed, it is arguably more true for the non-Christian, because their faith is not supported by the supposed guarantee of baptism, creedal dogma, regular church attendance or some notion that virtue will be rewarded with happiness if not here on earth, then in the afterlife. Thus, paradoxically, non-Christian faith might be said to reveal the true nature of the faith that Christ sought to proclaim. Even — and indeed especially — those who are denominationally faithless can have an experience of faith. If faith needs to be underpinned by some sort of doctrinal security, then inwardness becomes externalized and the strenuous rigor of faith evaporates.
What sort of certainty, then, is the experience of faith? Kierkegaard writes, and again the second person singular direction of address should be noted: “It is eternally certain that it will be done for you as you believe, but the certainty of faith, or the certainty that you, you in particular, believe, you must win at every moment with God’s help, consequently not in some external way.” (Emphasis mine)
Kierkegaard insists — and one feels here the force of his polemic against the irreligious, essentially secular order of so-called Christendom, in his case what he saw as the pseudo-Christianity of the Danish National Church — that no pastor or priest has the right to say that one has faith or not according to doctrines like baptism and the like. To proclaim faith is to abandon such external or worldly guarantees. Faith has the character of a continuous “striving … in which you get occasion to be tried every day.” This is why faith and the commandment of love that it seeks to sustain is not law. It has no coercive, external force. As Rosenzweig writes, “The commandment of love can only proceed from the mouth of the lover.” He goes on to contrast this with law, “which reckons with times, with a future, with duration.” By contrast, the commandment of love “knows only the moment; it awaits the result in the very moment of its promulgation.” The commandment of love is mild and merciful, but, as Kierkegaard insists, “there is rigor in it.” We might say love is that disciplined act of absolute spiritual daring that eviscerates the old self of externality so something new and inward can come into being.
Faith is a subjective strength that only finds its power to act through an admission of weakness.
As Kierkegaard puts in earlier in “Works of Love,” citing Paul, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”(Romans, 13:8) It sounds simple. But what is implicit in this minimal-sounding command is a conception of love as an experience of infinite debt — a debt that it is impossible to repay, “When a man is gripped by love, he feels that this is like being in infinite debt.” To be is to be in debt — I owe therefore I am.
If sin is the theological name for the essential ontological indebtedness of the self, then love is the experience of a countermovement to sin that is orientated around a demand that exceeds the capacity or ability of the self. Love is shaped in relation to what, in my parlance, can be called an infinite demand. Kierkegaard writes, and the double emphasis on the “moment” that finds an echo in Rosenzweig should be noted, “God’s relationship to a human being is the infinitizing at every moment of that which at every moment is in a man.” Withdrawn into inwardness and solitude (“If you have never been solitary, you have never discovered that God exists,” Kierkegaard writes), each and every word and action of the self resounds through the infinite demand of God.
At this point, in the penultimate paragraph of “Works of Love” Kierkegaard shifts to auditory imagery. God is a vast echo chamber where each sound, “the slightest sound,” is duplicated and resounds back loudly into the subject’s ears. God is nothing more than the name for the repetition of each word that the subject utters. But it is a repetition that resounds with “the intensification of infinity.” In what Kierkegaard calls “the urban confusion” of external life, it is nigh impossible to hear this repetitive echo of the infinite demand. This is why the bracketing out of externality is essential: “externality is too dense a
body for resonance, and the sensual ear is too hard-of-hearing to catch the eternal’s repetition.” We need to cultivate the inner or inward ear that infinitizes the words and actions of the self. As Kierkegaard makes clear, what he is counseling is not “to sit in the anxiety of death, day in and day out, listening for the repetition of the eternal.” What is rather being called for is a rigorous and activist conception of faith that proclaims itself into being at each instant without guarantee or security and which abides with the infinite demand of love.
Faith is not a like-for-like relationship of equals, but the asymmetry of the like-to-unlike. It is a subjective strength that only finds its power to act through an admission of weakness. Faith is an enactment of the self in relation to an infinite demand that both exceeds my power and yet requires all my power. Such an experience of faith is not only shared by those who are faithless from a creedal or denominational perspective, but can — in my view — be had by them in an exemplary manner. Like the Roman centurion of whom Kierkegaard writes, it is perhaps the faithless who can best sustain the rigor of faith without requiring security, guarantees and rewards: “Be it done for you, as you believed.”
Simon Critchley is chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, and part-time professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He is the author of several books, including “Infinitely Demanding.” His new book, “The Faith of the Faithless,” is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2011.
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From the 2009 series, Happy Days, “Kierkegaard on the Couch,” by Gordon Marino.
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Watch a 2009 bloggingheads.tv dialog with Simon Critchley and the author David Shields, in which they discuss living in the present, anxiety and regret and other topics.About
Intricately designed Ultra Violet Ink on the front and back of Every Card!!!
Hello, we are 421 Creations a graphic design team out of Lexington Ky consisting of 3 childhood friends (Andy Wethington, RK Carter and Craig Smith). "A-GLO Playing Cards" is a concept we have been working on for several months now. After our original campaign was unsuccessfully funded we re-evaluated almost every aspect of our project, from design to manufacturing, and now we are back with A-GLO 2.0! A completely new design for our hypno-psychedelic theme that encompasses our vision of bringing a new youthful look to playing cards. A-glo 2.0 will now be printed by the USPCC (Bicycle) and comes with ULTRA VIOLET INK on the front and back of every card! Every design is finished and has been approved by the USPCC, all we need now is the funding to pay for the purchase order! With your help we can bring these unique cards to our table and yours!
Please Like and Share!!!
These mesmerizing cards are GREAT for:
Magic Tricks! (Especially Under a Black Light!)
Cardistry!
Party/Drinking Games!
Impressing your friends!
Camping!
Gift Giving!
Road Trips!
Card Collectors!
Kids!
Festivals!
Retail!
Uniformed arrangements for each number card makes them easier to identify!
Each Deck will be printed by the USPC on Bicycle Grade card stock with an Air Cushion finish and Ultra-Violet Ink! You can reference Bicycle's own Tragic Royalty deck to get a glimpse of how our finished product will handle and what it will look like.
Super Stellar Card Backs!
Far Out Jokers!
Ultra Violet stroke around all the pips, numbers and letters.
Court cards are upgraded to include extravagant detail...
Each their own unique look, style, and personality.
All of which radiate underneath a black light!
The Uncut Sheet will make a Great Addition to anybodies wall!
Each deck comes cellophane wrapped for guaranteed freshness!
Each Deck is Proudly Made in the U.S.A!
Help us complete our quest to bring these colorful, energetic, and exciting playing cards to our table and yours! Thanks for taking the time to have a look.
Seriously.... Please Like and Share!!! :]To Whom It May Concern,
I'm writing to you today, on behalf of my 3 year old, Pit Bull, Cupcake. She is in need of surgery to repair her two, front broken legs(multiple fractures-one of them compound), sustained after she was somehow lured out of our second-story window. This occurred while I was out purchasing her another bag of dog food & a new toy. I came home to an empty apartment and to my dismay, no one had seen or heard anything in regards to her whereabouts.
Thankfully, Cupcake was found by the Oakland Police Department and Animal Control four blocks away. They brought her to Veterinary Surgery Centers: Berkeley, where she was treated with amazing care.
Cupcake is a Pit Bull rescue that came to me through a good friend via Rural Iowa Animal Rescue a couple years ago, and since then, we haven't been apart. She has demonstrated nothing, but love for other animals and humans & has the sweetest demeanor.
Back in January of this year, Cupcake and I relocated from Iowa to Oakland in search of new opportunities and a more Pit Bull-friendly city. We settled into the apartment where the accident occurred, but being that Cupcake's safety & well-being are my number one priority, we are currently looking for a more suitable place to call "home." We currently are staying at a motel in the area, while I continue this search.
In addition to being new to the area and having to find a new home, I am presently unemployed, but actively looking. The job search also has been difficult as Cupcake requires around the clock care due to the injuries she sustained. As a result, we are living off of the savings I had set aside for moving to Oakland. In addition to our daily living expenses, I am paying for her continued veterinary care and the funds are becoming limited.
The procedure for both legs is necessary for her full recovery because of the severity and places at which she broke them. There are multiple breaks in both legs. One of them is a compound fracture, there is torn tissue in one foot that needs repair, and both legs and feet need implants to correct the damage. The estimated total cost of the surgery is $4,952.50. I would like to give you a breakdown of costs but I would need some kind of spreadsheet to make any sense of it, and the Veterinarian could better answer any further questions about the specific damage and resulting need for treatment.
Cupcake is not just a dog to me, but my companion, my heart, and my daughter. I am dedicated to giving every cent I have to ensure she gets the utmost care. Unfortunately, the cost and extent of the surgery she needs goes well beyond my means & this is why I am searching for a guardian angel of sorts for her. I am willing to do whatever it takes to obtain additional funding so she can heal & continue to enjoy her life. Any monetary assistance would be very much appreciated whether it is by donation or loan.
Please feel free to contact either myself or Cupcake's Veterinarian with any questions or concerns you may have. I thank you in advance for your time and consideration on behalf of both Cupcake and myself.
You can contact them here:
Veterinary Surgery Centers: Berkeley
1048 University ave.
Berkeley, Ca 94701
Tel:(510) 548-6684
Sincerely,
Peter & Cupcake Jablonski
Amendment:
We made surgery, but it cost more than expected and I am as of yet incapable of covering the total cost of surgery or her continued medical care(bandage changes, recheck radiographs, medication, etc.). We have been through far too much together to be separated now, and we need help just to stay together at this juncture. The only financial or housing help I can get from any of the programs available for my situation is contingent on me giving her up. As that is not an option, I am currently exploring any and all of the other possibilities. If there is any work I can do in exchange for any help we can get I would gladly do anything I am capable of.
The only trade I'm skilled in is Culinary, though I have been known to be handy with landscaping and gardening work as well as in a lot of other areas. I'm still exploring all of my work options while applying for jobs across the board, there are a couple of jobs hanging in the balance, but they haven't started yet any time not dedicated to Cupcake is open to the opportunity to give back somehow, physically only in the bay area, but I'm open to suggestion for anything that can be done via Internet.
It is a difficult thing for me to ask for this much help still, but I love Cupcake more than anything in the world. She is the best friend I've ever had and is worth every ounce of struggle, every tear shed, and every dollar spent on getting her the appropriate care. Together, we have done that, and make it possible to continue.
Thank you for taking the time to read our story.
If you can't help financially, please, even help sharing our story, or sharing yours with us is invaluable. Thank you again, for your time, and consideration.
-Peter & Cupcake JablonskiTOPEKA, Kan. (Aug. 21, 2017) -- The Sports Car Club of America® has unveiled a new, free Tire Rack National Solo mobile app for smartphones just in time for the 2017 Tire Rack Solo National Championship. The app, available for Apple and Android devices, replaces the text notification system utilized the last few years.
The primary purpose of this simple mobile app is to provide push notifications. Competitors will receive information on the status of heats so drivers know when cars should be on Grid, or when participants should check in for work assignments. Updates will also be provided about groups that do not have enough competitors to make a class, and keep people abreast of impending weather. Along with push notifications, the app contains links to live scoring, the event schedule, and Run/Work order.
The app can be downloaded through the Apple App Store or Android Google Play Store by searching for “SCCA National Solo.” Once downloaded, be sure to turn on the notification functionality. For Solo Nationals, users then select from a list of 10 different notifications they wish to receive on smartphones, including general Solo Nationals information and ProSolo Finale updates.
For those without an Android or Apple device, announcements will still be made over public address systems on each course. However, it is highly suggested that those without an Android or Apple device communicate frequently with other participants who do have said devices.Glyphy Legend
This page shows the available glyphs for the housing layouts.
— A 2x2 house — An alternative 2x2 house — 4x4 elite housing — Alternative 4x4 elite housing
1x1 Buildings and resources
— Road — Road block — Plaza — Olive tree — Vines
2x2 Buildings
— Fountain — Maintenance Office — Podium — Tax office
3x3 Buildings
— College — Drama School — Gymnasium — Storehouse
Larger Buildings
— Hero Hall — Infirmary — Pier
(rotating when using
pier1-4.gif) — Tradepost — Granary — Theater — Stadium (horizontal) — Stadium (vertical) — Palace (horizontal) — Palace (vertical)
Agora
— Fleece — Food — Horses — Olive oil — Weapons — Wine
Industry
— Armoury — Carding Shed — Foundry — Grower's Lodge — Mint — Olivepress — Quarry — Sculpture Studio — Timbermill — Winepress
Food sources
— Boarhunter — Cheese maker — Fishery — Urchin catcher — Wheat Farm
Desirability Enhancing Structures
— Generic Pillar — Garden 1x1 — Garden 2x2 — Garden 3x3 — Hedgemaze — Fishpond — Monument
Sanctuaries and constructionThe core driver of US prosperity has disappeared and no one has noticed. Growth has been the central driver of the American economy ever since early settlers built up the East Coast and moved into the Appalachians; by the middle of the nineteenth century, the California Gold Rush and the Transcontinental Railroad had finished the growth from coast to coast. But it was much more than geographic growth. The United States had become the world's leading economy, a position it consolidated in the twentieth century as two World Wars devastated Europe.
Throughout this entire period, immigration helped to fuel expansion as new immigrants formed an economic underclass of unskilled laborers, acquired the skills to move into the middle class, and were replaced by still newer immigrants as growth continued. Immigration became increasingly important for economic expansion in the United States (and also in much of Europe) as the native birthrate fell below the 2.1% necessary for population replacement.
Growth continued into the twenty-first century, though the effects of economic globalization became increasingly evident: US companies systematically moved manufacturing operations overseas, while an emerging global market for intellectual work gradually drained many good-paying US jobs. Then the bursting of the US housing bubble in 2008 brought first US and then global economic expansion to a screeching halt.
The housing bubble was caused by an artificial rise in house prices. There was a parallel pressure on companies to expand, to grow their stock prices. New companies were established and their values inflated as quickly as possible so that an Initial Public Offering would provide the founders a financial windfall without any real economic benefit.
For years, the cornerstone of many investment portfolios had been blue chip utility stocks, prized for their ability to provide steady income, year in and year out. Turmoil in the utility markets and volatility in the overall markets replaced a reliance on steady income with a search for rapid capital gains. So it was not only an overpriced housing market that collapsed but also an overpriced stock market. The Dow Jones fell almost 50% from May 2008 to March 2009.
Economic stimulus actions have generally stabilized the economy; growth is expected to be well over 2% in 2010, but one key indicator remains worryingly resistant to improvement: the jobless rate. At the current growth rate, employment may not recover for a decade. One underlying problem is that there is now a global competition for higher-paying jobs, so many of the jobs US workers lost will not come back. More fundamentally, the US economy was a consumption economy and this was an underpinning of the entire global economy. High unemployment and a new sense of economic wariness have significantly limited consumption, complicating the resurgence of not only the US economy but also the global economy.
US economic growth has depended on the continuing growth of the service sector. Immigrants supplied the manpower necessary for this continuing growth, but now much of the growth of the service sector has moved overseas. There are still many menial and unskilled jobs, but jobless skilled workers are very reluctant to take them - for good reason. They do not provide a real living wage. Immigrants still take them, even though they are becoming more difficult to find. More importantly, they are no longer a stepping stone to a middle class life. Instead, unskilled immigrants face being part of a permanent underclass. They are no longer needed as a source of new semi-skilled and service workers because such workers are already in excess.
The artificial concentration of good paying jobs in the industrialized world in general and the United States in particular is gone. The global leveling of the job field is also resulting in the global leveling of the population field: higher birth rates provide more mouths to feed without providing the employment opportunities to support them. Now it is clear that lower birth rates are a prerequisite for increasing national wealth. Global population dynamics have shifted dramatically. Almost half the world is now below the replacement fertility rate - this applies to some 70 countries, including most of the industrialized world. By 2020, the global fertility rate will be below the replacement level; world population will level off by mid-century.
Now the nation works hard to re-gain the economic growth seen as essential to prosperity. The entire world looks for renewed US expansion to fuel renewed US consumption and thus renewed global expansion. But this is not going to happen. The key question is not how to maintain growth when the population stagnates, but rather how to maintain prosperity with a stable population. The challenge is not how to re-ignite growth, but of how to maintain a high standard of living without it, how to create a more efficient society that, like the blue chip stocks of old, can continue on indefinitely with modest but steady profit.
A steady economy can still be a dynamic one, as companies put more emphasis on efficient and profitable operations rather then on steady growth. Of course, some companies will inevitably grow and others decline. Economies of scale will drive some size increase, though rising transportation costs (both for fuels and driver wages) will counter this to some extent. But the economy as a whole needs to stabilize, to accept that growth will no longer be the core driver of prosperity.
Growth is gone. Prosperity will now depend on constructing a viable steady state state.Who hasn’t been annoyed at one time or another by those Princess Zelda players in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, spamming the very powerful ‘Din’s Fire’ attack over and over again? Zelda’s signature move is returning in Super Smash Bros. 4, having been revealed by director Masahiro Sakurai on Miiverse and is now even more powerful than before. Sakurai said that the core of the attack is much more powerful and the further the attack is launched, the larger the attack will become, hence making it much more lethal. He does warn though that in order to make foes “fall”, you will need to hit them with the core of the attack, which would take much more precision than what was needed in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
“Zelda’s Din’s Fire is now stronger in its core.”
Sakurai, the series director of Super Smash Bros., had this to say about Din’s Fire in Smash 4: “Zelda’s Din’s Fire is now stronger in its core. The farther it’s projected, the bigger and more powerful it will be, but you need to hit foes with the core if you want to make them fall.” Will the attack frustrate players even more in Smash 4, or will it be harder to land hits given the fact that precision for Zelda users is more essential now than ever? As a Princess Zelda user myself, I am very eager to find out!A week after US officials said a Russian group hacked the White House, Pentagon officials told the Senate that they are creating cyber “surge forces” trained to defend America’s energy, telecommunication and critical infrastructure.
READ MORE: Obama announces hacker sanctions amid cyber-security 'national emergency'
The Pentagon intends to draft personnel for its cyber reserve force from civilians as well as the National Guard in the event of a network emergency, a top military official told the Senate Armed Forces committee on Tuesday.
“Cyber attacks pose a serious threat to networks and systems of critical infrastructure. The Department of Defense relies on US critical infrastructure to perform its current and future missions. Intrusions into that infrastructure could disrupt or destroy critical systems in a time of crisis,” Eric Rosenbach, the defense principal cyber adviser to the Secretary of Defense, told the Senate Armed Forces subcommittee.
Eric Rosenbach, SecDef's cyber advisor, testifying in front of Senate Armed Services subcomm. on emerging threats/capabilities right now. — Justin Doubleday (@JustinDoubleday) April 14, 2015
The testimony given to the subcommittee was regarding the military’s cyber programs, which were mentioned in the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal year 2016 and Future Years Defense Program.
Rosenbach said the cyber threats also target companies that work with the Department of Defense (DoD) in its Defense Industrial Base, and have already led to the loss of intellectual property and sensitive information. Those attacks, he added, threaten US economic growth and enable adversaries to more easily achieve technological parity with the US.
Pentagon looks to recruit cybersecurity talent through National Guard, Reserve: Eric Rosenbach, the principle... http://t.co/K3eKoraUh1 — Hack Nus (@hacknus) April 14, 2015
The Pentagon is building the Cyber Mission Force under its offensive and defensive Cyber Command, which, when fully equipped in 2018, will have 133 teams and nearly 6,200 military and civilian personnel. Part of the force will be the “surge force,” with “up to 2,000 Reserve and National Guard personnel.” So far, the department is half staffed.
“External actors probe and scan DoD networks for vulnerabilities millions of times each day, and over one hundred foreign intelligence agencies continually attempt to infiltrate Department of Defense networks. Some incursions – state and non-state – have succeeded,” said Rosenbach.
READ MORE: 'Cyber Armageddon?' Worried NY Fed unveils infosec big hitters
Due to these constant cyberattacks, the Pentagon wants to bring in security reinforcements, though it’s currently facing a cyber workface shortage. Military and civilian agencies are competing with the private sector for scarce cyber talent. Lawmakers and advisory councils have long recommended the federal government institute a civilian cyber militia to aid agencies during crises.
The department is talking to industry members about incentives and career pathways to bring more cyber expertise into the military, Rosenbach testified.
He singled out North Korea’s alleged attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment as an example of “the most destructive cyberattack against the United States to date.”Researchers from Canada have proven that something is different about Mormons, and even those who do not subscribe to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can see it.
A study done by psychology professor Nicholas Rule, of Toronto University, shows that Mormons and non-Mormons alike can identify Mormons based on no more than their skin quality.
The 2010 study was conducted while Rule was a graduate student studying at Tufts University and was published in the Public Library of Science Journal. The study was prompted by a comment Rule received from a colleague who said he believed Mormons could identify fellow Mormons from non-Mormons in a crowd.
Rule began the study by collecting images of Mormon and non-Mormon men and women from major cities in the U.S. The criteria for the images of the individuals was limited to people ages 18–30 years old and to individuals without facial adornments, including piercings or glasses.
“We first took out the hair, then took away the shape of the face, then looked at different features: Is it the eyes, the mouth, the nose?” Rule said. “We kept going until we got to having a face with very little left, and so the only thing that seemed reasonable was that it was skin texture.”
Participants were brought in for each of the different studies and were asked to look at a series of images and to differentiate between who was Mormon and who was not.
After additional testing based on this supposition, Rule and his colleagues found that skin texture was the key indicator and determinant in distinguishing a Mormon from a non-Mormon. Rule attributes these results to the healthy lifestyle adopted by active Latter-day Saints, relative to the average American. Mormons abstain from alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, coffee and tea. Consequently Mormons have an average lifespan of six to 10 years longer than does the average American.
Non-Mormons were able to identify Mormons 60 percent of the time, and the percentage of Mormons identifying Mormons was slightly higher. While the results are not fool proof, Rule concluded the results are statistically significant and higher than simple chance.
“People make inferences about group membership based on how healthy someone looks, and some see spirituality in that,” Rule said. “The study shows how tiny pieces of information can have a big effect, and we don’t even know it’s happening. Something as benign as skin texture can tell us if someone is in a particular group and may affect how we behave toward that person.”Eightball, MJG And Rap From Memphis 20 Years On
Enlarge this image toggle caption Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Two decades ago the essence of adolescence was leaving hip-hop. In 1993, the wild success of cinematic albums like The Chronic and Doggystyle had shown corporate America just how large the appetite for rap was, but the next wave of musicians had something more serious in mind. A pair of young rapper-producers from Memphis straddled the tonal shift, and you can hear, on the two albums they released between the summer of '93 and the spring of '94, the unease of an industry flooded with money just as regional markets were wolfing down less commercial, grittier records. Last year, right around the 20th anniversary of the first of those records, Comin' Out Hard, I went to the birthplace of both Stax and Sun Records to hear the story of Premro Smith and Marlon Jermaine Goodwin, better known as Eightball and MJG.
When I got into my rental car at the Memphis Airport, the bass on the stereo was at +9. I left it there, because I was in the city to talk to the men who put a drop-top Lexus coupe on the front and back covers of their first CD and to the people who kept it in their CD players for years.
"I remember popping it into my Oldsmobile — I had a '83 Cutlass Oldsmobile — and we just hit the block, hit the mall and we just went everywhere. Just, 'Woo!' You didn't want to get out the car," says Drumma Boy, a producer born and raised in Memphis, who was 11 when Comin' Out Hard dropped. Even after he got his driver's license, "Mr. Big" was still that song, and Eightball, the rounder half of the group, still an inspiration. "I had a lot of big, fat-ass homies, you know what I'm saying? And I remember, like, how comfortable big dudes started feeling wanting to go out and hit the club more. Like, 'I'm balling, not because of my size.' His flow and who he was — he was just like a fly fat dude."
"I used to always listen to everything my big cousin listened to. You know how you run up behind you big cousin, and whatever they on, that's what you on, from the |
the hold.
'Alternatively customers can choose to buy an extra seat to carry them in the cabin at a discounted rate.'Since January 1st 2015, 22 states and the District of Columbia have introduced bills to assess and excise tax on vaping hardware, e-cigarettes, and E-Liquid. 8 States have failed to bring these taxes to fruition. But this doesn’t mean they won’t try it again. This is why it is so important to bring these issues to the forefront and why it is so important that we the people take action against these measures!
I applaud not only the Representatives of these 8 states, but also the voters for writing to their Representatives and showing the rest of the country that your voice is being heard, your emails are being read, and most importantly, your vote does matter!
Listed below are the 8 States along with what the proposed tax would have been if it had not been voted down. The following 8 States have succeeded in not allowing vapers to be taken advantage of:
Arizona: 18 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.
Arkansas: 7.5 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.
Indiana: 24% of the wholesale price.
Kentucky: 40% of the wholesale price.
Montana: 1.73 cents per milligram of nicotine solution.
Nevada: 30% of the wholesale price.
New Mexico: 4 cents per milligram of nicotine solution.
Virginia: 18 cents and 40 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.
If you think those numbers are ridiculous, just wait till you see some of the percentages on the remaining 15 states!
The remaining 15 States who have legislation still pending are:
Alabama: 25 cents-per-milliliter of nicotine solution.
Hawaii: 70% of the wholesale price.
Maine: Cigarette tax rate of $2.00.
Massachusetts: Cigarette tax rate of $3.51.
Minnesota: 30 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.
New Hampshire: 73.94% of the wholesale price.
New Jersey: 75% of the wholesale price.
New York: 75% of the wholesale price.
North Carolina: 3 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.
Ohio: 60% of the wholesale price.
Oregon: 81.25% of the wholesale price.
Rhode Island: 80% of the wholesale price.
Vermont: 46% of the wholesale price. – Passed Legislation
Washington: 60% of the retail price.
Washington D.C.: 70% of the wholesale price.
Hopefully for vapers and the thousands of smokers who are predicted to switch to vaping this year, these 15 states have Representatives and voters who are not afraid to stand up to this proposed legislation.
I urge all of you reading this, to head over to The Consumer Advocates for Smoke-free Alternatives Association (CASAA), and join the organizations 40,000+ members. CASAA is our “Lobby” as Vapers. They are defending our rights! When you sign up, CASAA sends emails out to you when a call to action is needed in your state. It then directs you to a webpage with a prewritten letter to email your State Representative. It can’t get any easier.
They also allow you to add your own personal testimonial regarding vaping and how it has effected your life! To date over 4,000 members, including myself, have shared their story!To succeed in America means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past. Vijay Iyer’s speech to Yale’s Asian American alumni
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You expect your college reunion to be weird, nostalgic, and alienating. You don’t expect it to serve as a metaphor for contemporary race relations. When I attended a reunion of Asian American alumni of Yale last month, I found it curious how much the event mirrored the ambiguous and often bipolar position that Asian Americans occupy in the landscape of American racial politics.
On the one hand, such a convening of New Haven-bred Asian peeps (the first ever, astonishingly) was the culmination of more than a century of Asian American activism at Yale, which graduated the first Chinese American to get a college degree in the United States (Yung Wing, class of 1854) and served as a radical hotbed in the ‘70s, when it fostered a historically important Asian American journal (Amerasia) and one of the most active Asian American student groups in the country (the East Coast Asian Students Union). The reunion, on the other hand, was somewhat more Harold and Kumar than Cheech and Chong. Elite colleges like Yale now serve essentially as front offices for financial services recruiting—in other words, the very inequity-producing forces that the earlier wave of activism was meant to dethrone. At Harvard, almost half of all students (!) rolled up to Wall Street before the financial bubble popped. While Yale has always been an artier school (only 17% of 2011 alums headed to finance), you could glimpse this schizophrenic split throughout the weekend’s programs, which featured both corporate CEOs and lefty agitators. At a certain point, you just started to wonder who the hell were these Asian Americans anyways? Are we people of color fighting for some New Left vision of social justice or are we what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “honorary whites”? Are we destined to vertically assimilate into the white-collar elite or are we, as a recent study showed, the poorest immigrant group in New York? In other words, are we activist-playwright David Henry Hwang or Tiger Mom Amy Chua? (Both of whom, incidentally, were in attendance.)
And so in this context, it was incredibly inspiring to hear the following speech from musician and intellectual Vijay Iyer. Asked to keynote the reunion, Iyer used the occasion to essentially try to answer this question. Talking about racial complicity, the piece hits on two intertwined issues: the role of Asian Americans as upwardly mobile minorities and the role of the artist as a potential transgressor within elite institutions. You need to read this now.
—Ken Chen
* * *
Dear friends – I am so happy and proud to be among you, gathering here for the first time as Asian American Yale alumni across generations.
Just for those who don’t know, I’m a pianist, composer, improviser, bandleader, electronic musician, and producer. I’m probably best known in the jazz world, but I’m also generally known for working both with and against that category. I recently joined the music department at Harvard as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts.
I am no better than any of you at being Asian American, and probably don’t have any wisdom to offer today that hasn’t already been stated here by others. But what I would like to do is talk about us.
It’s especially interesting being back at Yale, which of course bears the name of a privileged, wealthy imperialist scoundrel who made his fortune in India. From 1687 to 1692, Elihu Yale was the governor of Fort St. George, the British East India Company’s post at Madras (now Chennai), India—home of my ancestors. He was then relieved of the post of governor due to his illegal profiteering and repeated flouting of East India Company regulations.
I don’t know if that makes him the George W. Bush or the Mitt Romney of the British East India Company, but anyway, it was his unchecked imperial marauding that set all of this in motion. He became wealthy enough that he could donate some of that money in the early 1700s, enough to get his name on the front gate. No matter what we do and what institutions we build, we’re still in his house, you understand.
Now that I am hanging my hat each week at that other centuries-old corporation of higher learning, just up the road in Cambridge, I am more and more mindful of what the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare has called “complicity with excess.”
And as we continue to consider, construct and develop our trajectories as Americans, I am also constantly mindful of what it means to be complicit with a system like this country, with all of its structural inequalities, its patterns of domination, and its ghastly histories of slavery and violence.
Many of us are here because we’ve become successful in that very context. That’s how we got into Yale, by being voted most likely to succeed; and that may be what emboldened some of us to show our faces here this weekend, because we actually have something to show for ourselves, that somehow in the years since we first dined at the Alternate Food Line we’ve managed to carve a place for ourselves in the landscape of America. Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America—which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.
Given all that, I guess I’d like to take success off the table for a while, and try some other ways to talk about us.
For most of my adult life, probably just like you, I’ve been thinking about “us”—about questions of community, belonging, identity, and coalition; about Americanness and Asianness. I’ve been intrigued in recent years by the work of legal scholar Karen Shimakawa, who uses the term “national abjection” to theorize the Asian American experience. It means that our lives here are characterized by a constant borderline status with respect to Americanness; we’re always right on the frontier of what it means to be American.
This has been more, I should say, than a train of thought for me, this question of “us.” Since I graduated from here in 1992, I’ve been a cultural worker out there in the world. I’ve made 18 albums, played hundreds of concerts, had my recordings and performances broadcast on radio and TV, and received literally thousands of reviews. I’m saying that not to boast, but to underscore that I’ve had the privilege of putting some ideas into practice, making work that inquires, proposes, and connects, and then actually observing the response, locally and internationally, more or less in real time.
This trajectory of mine has primarily taken place in the west—in North America and Europe—and it’s been in the context of one of America’s most racially fraught forms of cultural expression: this strange, composite, and contested thing called jazz. This is a music generally understood either in terms of Black power or through white liberal notions of colorblindness; either as an African American community force, or as a fetishized idea of American Blackness consumed by whites here and abroad.
I’ve found myself right in the middle of conversations about race for most of the past 20 years. Now I’ve managed to maintain a stable and consistent presence in the jazz world; by any measure I’ve been one of jazz’s success stories, and at this point I have no bitterness; I just observe how things unfold. For example, I’ve seen my work described repeatedly (mostly by white men, who tend to do most of the talking in jazz) as “mathematical,” “technical,” “inauthentic,” “too conceptual,” “jazz for nerds,” “dissonant,” “academic,” and just last month, a “failure.” Over the years a racialized component emerges in such language—basically a kind of model minority discourse that presumes that Asians have no soul and have no business trying to be artists, especially in proximity to Blackness, which is, in the white imagination, a realm of pure intuition, apparently devoid of intellect. No such critique, I should add, is typically leveled at white jazz musicians, of which there are many.
Back in the early 1990s I found myself in a PhD program in physics at UC Berkeley. I also found myself apprenticing with elder African American musicians in Oakland. And I found myself connected to a community of Asian American artist-activists, the musicians’ collective known as Asian Improv Arts, formed more than 30 years ago by Jon Jang, Francis Wong, Mark Izu, Fred Ho, and others.
Asian Improv was inspired directly by a legacy of African American coalitional politics and activism. Circumventing the superstructures of the music business, they started their own record label (which generously hosted my first two albums) and they present their own annual festival, the San Francisco Asian American Jazz Festival, and countless other events for the Bay Area’s massive Asian American community. They use their mutual Asian heritages in different ways: not merely to create some kind of exotic Asian jazz fusion, but as zones of creative inquiry, as ways of articulating multiplicity, as a critical project of de-fetishization and anti-Orientalist reconstruction, and finally, as a practice of community organizing. Their performances became a space and an occasion for Asian American communities to gather and build.
They embraced me into their ranks as a young creative Asian American musician. At the time it was an open question to me, whether South Asians were welcome in Asian American coalitions. The demographics on the west coast were a bit different, with generations-deep Japanese American and Chinese American communities, and meanwhile the South Asian American community was barely 30 years old. We weren’t yet present in any large numbers, except maybe in Silicon Valley and in Queens. And more to the point, there wasn’t yet any sense of unity between South and East Asians. It felt a little awkward—I remember thinking, maybe we weren’t quite ready or perhaps mutually willing to consider ourselves to be in similar predicaments.
This was compounded by northern California culture’s imperial relationship to all things Indian. It’s ground zero for white America’s fascination with yoga, meditation, incense, tanpura drones, tablas, shirpas, baubles, bangles, and beads. (Of course it continues to this day—if you are in the Bay Area in the next few weeks, you should go visit the Asian Art Museum’s rather problematic exhibit on yoga. Alongside this exhibit, my friend, the artist and designer Chiraag Bhakta, has created a fascinating intervention, a massive assemblage of ephemera with the controversial title #Whitepeopledoingyoga.
White-people-doing-yoga was the context in which I found myself 20 years ago, as a South Asian American navigating and resisting the exoticizing, incorporating tendencies of white American cultural omnivores. Because of the circles I traveled in as an artist, I noticed a similar tendency in the way that whites in the Bay Area dealt with jazz, hip-hop, and all things Black: not as a defiant assertion of Black identity and community, but as the fetishized trappings of cool—something white people could wear, collect, or otherwise incorporate into white subjectivity.
There was also the fact that South Asian Americans were so new, people didn’t really know who or what we were. We hadn’t yet emerged en masse into mainstream culture; that only began to happen in the 1990s, as my generation came of age. We were the first generation of children born to that post-1965 wave of carefully curated immigrant doctors, scientists, and engineers from outside the west—we were a new kind of American, with aspirations, a degree of class and educational privilege, and a certain amount of cultural invisibility.
I remember when I mentioned to an Anglo-American percussionist that I was putting out my first album on the Asian Improv label, he said to me, insinuating that I had made a grave error: “I didn’t know India was in Asia.” I told him that India is in South Asia, which is probably part of Asia. His retort was, “Well, in that case, I’m Northwest Asian. Can I be on your label?” It was a small step forward from when my eighth-grade classmates yelled names like “Sanchez” and “Felipe” in my direction. We were primarily a mystery; our experience was framed by difference; we were mostly unconsidered, our existence largely unacknowledged.
Nurtured both by the Asian Improv collective and by a number of crucial elder African American mentors, my overall “project” as an artist developed in the 90s. I’ve done a lot of different things, mostly characterized by conjuncture, collaboration, and community. I have developed collaborative projects with other South Asian Americans, other Asian Americans, African Americans, and other people of color, as a way of considering, enacting, testing, and perhaps critiquing notions of community.
What is a community? A friend of mine, political scientist Cara Wong, in her book Boundaries of Obligation, defines community as “an image in the mind of an individual, of a group toward whose members she feels a sense of similarity, belonging, or fellowship.”
Community, in other words, is very much the work of our imaginations; this was Benedict Anderson’s key insight. And exactly because of this imaginative power, a notion of community has important real-world repercussions. As Professor Wong demonstrates in her book, “self-defined membership can lead to an interest in, and a commitment to, the well-being of all community members… regardless of one’s own interests, values, and ideology.”
In the years since 9/11, the South Asian American community has been challenged repeatedly, and common causes with others have led us to imagine ourselves bigger. As the African-American writer Greg Tate told me in fall 2001, “Welcome to racial profiling.” We have had to embrace our own religious and cultural diversity—Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains; Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalis, Indians, Afghans, Bhutanese—as well as other communities of color—Arabs, Middle Easterners, north and east Africans, east and southeast Asians, all of their diasporas, and yes, African Americans and Latinos—because of a common predicament, a common cause, a common atmosphere of fear, surveillance, suspicion, and paranoia, and the persistence of inequality.
Also, as we have become one of the most affluent and nominally “successful” demographics in post-1960s America, rapidly amassing wealth in our communities, we have had to develop new empathies to understand our place in the world, our relative positions of privilege, even as we endure a daily onslaught of microaggressions and find ourselves still repeatedly dismissed or undesired in mainstream culture.
We have had to remind ourselves that Dr. Martin Luther King adopted the tactics of Mahatma Gandhi, that our freedoms as Asian Americans are spiritually yoked to the struggles for justice for the African Americans and other minorities who built this country.
This morning I flew here from Florida, one of the states in the US where it is still not yet illegal to shoot and kill unarmed black children. So today I have to ask “us”: what is our relationship to that ghastly truth about America?
Last fall I was in Atlanta with my family, and we visited the Martin Luther King Jr. Historical Site. There is a beautiful statue of Mahatma Gandhi at this site. There is also a trenchant quote from Dr. King on display. It says, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?”
I want you to know that, all titles aside, I am first and foremost an artist. As an artist I ask myself Dr. King’s question every day. What am I doing for others? To this end I have pursued three main goals. First, I have strived to generate a consistent, un-ignorable, complicating presence in the landscape of culture. As African American innovators like Paul Robeson, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, and Jimi Hendrix found, in the face of a culture that would deny them, it becomes necessary for an artist of color in the west to defiantly announce to the world: I am a fact.
That kind of defiant presence—the same kind you get from M.I.A., or Himanshu Suri of Das Racist, the kind that coolly roars from the margins—has the power to disrupt and transform culture, to hearken and inaugurate a new America. That kind of defiant presence also has the power to activate and mobilize the imaginations of others like ourselves: young Asian Americans in our global diaspora finally seeing themselves represented positively in culture, finally empowered to dream a little bigger.
My second main goal has been to initiate and sustain alliances with other artists of color, from Amiri Baraka and Haile Gerima to Teju Cole and Mike Ladd, so that we can imagine, build, and enact a concept of community that transcends heritage, nation, and creed—so that we can really become an undeniable force: a disruptive multitude, imagining and bringing forth a new reality.
The third goal is to articulate and demonstrate a commitment to social justice. As Yo-Yo Ma has said, and as I always remind my students, a life in the arts is a life of service. I invite all of you who are political activists and community organizers to collaborate with the artists in your midst, so that our missions can serve your missions—so that we can activate radical imaginations in order to bring about necessary action.
What I humbly ask of you, and of myself, is that we constantly interrogate our own complicity with excess, that we always remain vigilant to notions of community that might, perhaps against our best intentions, sometimes, embrace a system of domination at the expense of others. Can we radically submit ourselves to the pursuit of equality and justice for all? If we choose to call ourselves Asian American, can we not also choose to be that kind of American that refuses to accept what America has been, and instead help build a better America even for others, who might not immediately seem to “belong” to us?
In the end, who do we mean by “us”? For me, if I choose to belong to a coalition, a community, an “us,” it must mean, we who remember the past; we who care about the future; we who are compassionate, generous, patient, and committed deeply to the welfare of others; we who agree that naming ourselves as an “us” is not an end, but a beginning. Thank you, and keep fighting for justice for ourselves and for others.
Tweets from the keynote
Incredible speech by the one and only @vijayiyer. Thank you for inspiring us. — AAAYA (@aayalealumni) April 13, 2014
I’ve never listened to any @vijayiyer songs (yet). But he’s inspired me to do more, as a Yale student. What an incredible speech. #humbled — John Tam (@john_g_tam) April 13, 2014
Read more from The Margins
The Authentic Outsider | Bill Cheng, Anthony Marra, and the freedom to write what you don’t know.
A Global Jim Crow | How Kumar Goshal (1899-1971) carved out a theory of US imperialism in the African American press
Refusal=Intervention | “Asian American Poetry” is not a manageable category—it is not a list.
“I’m Really Sorry for that Horrible Line Break” | An interview with poet Tung-Hui HuFive years after the start of the global financial crisis, officials at the International Monetary Fund fear the stability of the global financial system may yet again be threatened. As in the past, the global institution is pointing its finger at the euro zone as a primary cause of the threat.
In a report on global financial stability released on Wednesday, just days before an IMF meeting that will bring together the world's finance ministers in Tokyo, the Washington-based institution has called on European countries to move swiftly to implement a pan-euro zone banking oversight regime and other measures aimed at preventing a recession and restoring market confidence.
"Commitment to a clear roadmap on a banking union and fiscal integration are needed to restore confidence, reverse the capital flight and reintegrate the euro area," said José Viñals, the head of the IMF's monetary and capital markets department. "Despite many important steps already taken by policymakers, this agenda remains critically incomplete, exposing the euro area to a downward spiral of capital flight, break-up fears and economic decline," the IMF said in its report.
Faltering market confidence has led to capital flight from countries on the periphery to the core of the euro zone, the IMF stated. This is leading to higher borrowing costs and a "growing wedge between the economic and financial 'haves' and 'have nots'."
Asset Shrinkage
The IMF warned that unless additional, decisive policy measures are taken "urgently," mounting pressure on banks could result in "asset shrinkage by as much as $2.8 trillion to $4.5 trillion" through the end of 2013.
The warning shot from the IMF comes in the midst of a heated debate over the form a future pan-European banking supervisory authority should take. The establishment of the authority is considered to be an important step toward creating a true European banking union. Currently, Germany and the European Commission are bickering over those plans, which German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble believes are poorly conceived. Schäuble, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, has also expressed doubts about the planned start date of January 2013, which he has described as overly ambitious. Some have said it could take months or longer before an agreement is reached.
The European Commission foresees a key role for the European Central Bank in monitoring European banks, but Schäuble has warned of conflicts of interest at the ECB, which is responsible for both monetary policy and interest rate decisions. But the start date for a common supervisory authority for banks operating within the common currency zone is important, because it is considered to be a prerequisite for providing direct aid from the euro bailout funds to troubled banks, including those of Spain that have been particularly afflicted by the crisis.
Germany is also at odds with France, which would like to see all 6,000 financial institutions in the euro zone be monitored by the ECB. Berlin, however, believes that a regime which keeps an eye just on "systemically important" banks would be sufficient.
Credit Crunch Warning
In its report on Wednesday, the IMF also warned of a potential credit crunch in Europe. The report warns that a rapid contraction of bank balance sheets could cause lending by these institutions to decline by 4.5 percent by the end of 2013. The report warns that in a worst-case scenario, if only "weak policies" were pursued, that rapid bank deleveraging could lead to a contraction of GDP as high as 4 percent of the periphery euro-zone countries and 1.5 percent at the core. "It is important that Europe as a whole that there be regional efforts to support the recapitalization of banks," David Lipton, the IMF's first deputy managing editor, told Reuters.
In addition to the euro-zone crisis, IMF officials are also concerned about the threat of high national debt in the United States and Japan, which it claims is eroding market confidence. On Tuesday, the IMF had already warned of the threat of a global recession -- a forecast attributed to both the euro crisis and American fiscal policies. The IMF said it was unable to see how the US would manage to deal with its major budget problems in the medium term. In the short term, the IMF warned, the United States presents a threat to the global economy.
The IMF also forecasts slow growth for the global economy in the report. It is expecting growth of 3.3 percent in 2012, following by an increase of 3.6 percent in 2013 -- 0.2 percent and 0.3 lower, respectively, than the IMF's previous forecast in July. The IMF also trimmed its 2013 growth forecast for Germany by 0.5 percentage points to 0.9 percent.Only bishops could refer child abuse allegations they discussed within a Catholic Church committee to the police, despite the fact one of its members was a police officer, a royal commission has heard.
Monsignor Glynn Murphy helped establish the church's Special Issues Committee in the 1990s, initially to help survivors of convicted paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale. The committee also advised Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns on child sexual abuse and other issues. The committee members included police officer Paul Murnane, a retired magistrate and another priest who was a clinical psychologist.
Justice Peter McClellan paid tribute to survivors of child sexual abuse who have shared their stories. Credit:Jeremy Piper
Monsignor Murphy told the child abuse royal commission on Thursday that he advised Bishop Mulkearns in 1991 that Father Paul Ryan be "removed immediately and indefinitely pending any investigation" after he heard allegations that the priest had invited a 12-year-old boy to have a bath with him. The boy's mother did not want to report the allegations to police, as she was worried this would subject him to bullying.
Bishop Mulkearns delayed removing Father Ryan for a number of weeks to keep up appearances, the commission heard, writing in a letter: "It was agreed that (Ryan) would remain there until after Easter when other diocesan changes were to be made so that his change would not be seen as completely out of the ordinary."A'remarkably rare' medieval Welsh manuscript has sold in an auction at Sotheby's today. The tenth century text, thought to be written is a small handbook for a professional lawyer to use at trials, is called 'The Laws of Hywel Dda'. The manuscript is being sold by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and sold for £541,250.
The book sets out the 'Laws of Hywel Dda', King of Wales in the tenth century. Hywel used social infastructure to underpin his rule, issuing both this lawcode and the first Welsh coinage in over a thousand years.
The laws focus on restitution for crimes, rather than violent punishment and it became the standard template for Welsh law until 1282.
Then, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd rebelled against English supremacy, prompting his murder and the imposition of English rule via the Statute of Wales in 1284. Many areas of traditional Welsh law were banished, and so over the years the 'Laws of Hywel Dda' became a symbol of national identity.I often write about displays, and sometimes wonder whether all the new features we're seeing really matter to real consumers. When it comes to TVs, the size of the display certainly matters, but sometimes I wonder whether most people can really tell the difference when it comes to "full HD" and 1080p. In my office, we happen to have two nearly identical TVs that vary only in resolution, so I decided to give it a try.
To do this, I set up a room with the very similar 42-inch LCD TVs. Both are quite good sets made by LG Electronics: the LG 42LH20, which has a 720p display, and the LG 42LH30, which offers a 1080p display. (The difference is the number of horizontal lines on the display; the "p" stands for progressive, meaning the display refreshes the lines one after the other.) For both sets, I used the factory defaults, which is what I think most consumers actually use at home. And then I invited my coworkers to judge which set they preferred, while both were playing back the recent "Star Trek" movie on Blu-ray.
Of the 64 participants, 59 percent said they preferred the 1080p set. Interestingly, 25 percent said they preferred the 720p one, while 16 percent had no preference.
Of those who preferred the 1080p set, the average distance at which they said they could tell the difference was 10.7 feet, although this was limited by the maximum difference of 17 feet in the room. Of those who preferred the 720p set, the average distance at which they said they could tell the difference was 11.4 feet. (Theoretically, if you sit back further than this distance in the room with the TV, you won't notice the difference.)
A fair number of people on both sides (about 15 percent) said they could tell the difference from very far back, so it's likely they were noticing and preferring subtle variations in the color, contrast, and so on, rather than pixel density. On the other hand, a couple of people walked in, and from the back of the room, they said the 1080p set was sharper.
In the U.S. market today, the vast majority of 42-inch-and-larger sets are 1080p, and at the moment, there doesn't seem to be any real price difference, so it's certainly worth buying a 1080p set. And it's good to know that most--though not all--people can tell the difference.As the Decentralized currency, Bitcoin is now receiving a heavy demand from the investors and traders. Comparing price of Bitcoin 2 years ago was extremely low than that of today’s price.
According to july report 2017, Bitcoin prices surges heavily, it is $2505.63 for one BTC. This growth coerces me to explain our reader How bitcoin initiated, how it works and how mining happens.
What is Bitcoin: It’s a medium of exchange (like US dollar) but not printed at all. It is a decentralized currency which is free from regulation and bank authority.
How Bitcoin Works and How does it mine?
As I said, Money is not printed rather it is discovered.
How does Mining Take Place?
Bitcoin Networks are sent to ensure people send money all the time. But without any specific record of these transactions, it would be analyzed to decide who had paid what. Thereby a list is created to collect all these transactions which has been made during a set of periods- this list is referred as Block. Then a Miner must confirm those transactions and write them into a ledger.
What is a general ledger in Bitcoin Mining?
A general ledger is nothing but a long list of blocks referred as Blockchain. This Blockchain enable users explore all the transactions happen among bitcoin address. This is not subjected to any specific times, means it can be explore any point of time. Every new bitcoin transaction (i.e Block) it is added to the blockchain. It is then becoming a lengthy list of transactions. As and when a new transaction is added to blockchain, then an undated copy of this block is given to every participant of Bitcoin. This update enables them identify what’ happening.
Miners & the process: The ledger has to be updated, accurate and trusted – This is where the Miners comes into picture.
Hash Functions: It is a mathematical Process that takes up input data irrespective of any size, performs an operation on it and then return with output data of a fixed size. To be specific, this hash function used to store password.
Making a Hash of it:
When a Block is created, a process initiates by the miner. They gather the information in a block and proceed with mathematical formula to it. This turns into a hash and stored in a block. Though, with the collection of data like Bitcoin block, it is easy to produce hash but in a practical view, it is impossible to work by just looking at the hash. However, it is easy to produce has through a larger amount of data. It is where each has is just unique and if you change a little (say one character in a Bitcoin Block), its hash will change entirely.
There is not only a transaction used by miners to generate hash, rather other data are also used. For instance, hash of the last block that was stored in the blockchain.
Each block’s hash is initiated with the earlier hash of the block – this becomes a digital vesion of a wax seal. It is to confirm that this block alongwith every block after this is legitimate. It is because if you interfered with it, everyone would know.
If anyone tries faking the transaction just by changing the stored block in blockchain then block’s hash would change. AT the time, if someone checks the authenticity of block (which is done by running the hashing function on it), they would then identify has was different from the has already store with the block in blockchain. This instantly spots the block as a fake.
The previous hash is followed to create the hash in the next block in the blockchain, alleviating with a block results making subsequent block’s hash wrong else. This is how Miners “seal of the block”.
Competing for Coins:
Once creating hash successfully, Miners will obtain a reward of 25 bitcoins. With this, Blockchain will be updates and status of the same will be received by Miners on the network. This award is an incentive to keep mining and transactions active.
The key problem lies here is, creating hash is easy, since this can be done through collection of data. However, computers are very good at this. This coerces a strict system thus Bitcoin protocol introduces the “Proof of work”. Otherwise users would be hashing transaction blocks irrespective of the limit in each second. This would results in mining of Bitcoins in each minute.
This protocol does not simply accept any old hash. It demands to look over with certain conditions and specifications. For instance, at the start, it should have certain number of zeroes. There can be no certainty of analyzing the hash before it produces and when you merge a new data in it, the hash will have different look.
Miners are supposed to change the data they use to create a hash. Creating this can be possible with something called “Nonce”. In order to create the hash, Nonce is used with transaction data. In case, if the hash does not get in the format, the Nonce will then change. To find the working and proper Nonce, miners has to go through many attempts and all the miners tries it at same time. It is where Bitcoin Miners earn Bitcoin.It is a shame, then, that by 2012 a road will have been built on this path, destroying this experience and, according to many, placing the last nail in the coffin of what was once the greatest trek on earth.
Many walks lay claim to the title of World’s Greatest Trek — the Milford Track in New Zealand, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the Inca Trail in Peru are a few. But none of those are epics through valleys surrounded by five-mile-high peaks, staying every night in teahouses run by local villagers and stocked with good kitchens, cold beer and Snickers bars. The Annapurna Circuit marries natural grandeur, cultural immersion and relative luxury in a union found nowhere else.
The circuit is a tale of two river valleys: up the steep, lush Marsyangdi, then over the pass and down the wide, arid Kali Gandaki. But in recent years a road, usable by buses and four-wheel-drive jeep-like vehicles, was completed that runs up the Kali Gandaki to the base of the pass. On that side, most trekkers now opt to ride in the jeeps rather than walk in their dust, and as a result, the time needed to complete the circuit has shrunk from 17 days to 11. In the coming years, with the road now being built on the Marsyang |
lawyers asked Foley, who admitted that the paper was indeed a for-profit company.
Last month, Gawker filed a motion in Florida state court to exclude his testimony on the grounds that it is subjective, "pure opinion" testimony. Under current Florida state law, only expert testimony based on "sufficient facts or data" and "reliable principles and methods" is admissible in court.
Gawker's lawyers repeatedly emphasized the subjective nature of Foley's testimony during his deposition, asking him whether he had conducted any actual surveys of journalists before writing in his report about how "journalists" in general think about ethical issues. They also asked whether journalists from outlets like TMZ and the National Enquirer would agree with his interpretation of journalism ethics. Foley said that he has not conducted any such surveys and he does not know whether TMZ and National Enquirer reporters would agree with him.
Gawker's lawyers also asked Foley about his previous work as an expert witness. He said that he has previously consulted as an expert witness in two defamation cases, but that neither case made it to trial. Since neither case made it to trial, he has never been "qualified" by a judge as an expert in journalism or journalism ethics and he has never actually presented expert testimony to a jury.
Judge Pamela Campbell of Florida's Sixth Judicial Circuit Court will rule later this month whether or not Foley's testimony should be excluded from the trial, which is scheduled to start on July 6 in St. Petersburg, Fla. If his testimony is not excluded, Foley will likely testify before the jury next month, at his $350 hourly rate.One famous Hollywood celebrity is sharing his American pride – in a touching dad-to-son kind of way.
For Memorial Day, actor Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World), taught his 2-year-old son Jack the Pledge of Allegiance – and captured the moment on camera. The May 27 Facebook video, with almost 2 million views and more than 85,000 likes, shows the two saying the pledge in front of the American flag.
Standing on a house porch, Pratt instructs his son to repeat the pledge after him. “Good job!” he figh-fives Jack afterwards.
“Meant to post this on #MemorialDay but I was in China and my phone wasn't working,” Pratt wrote in the Facebook post accompanying the video. “I'm proud to be American. I'm blessed to get to travel the world! #IPledgeAllegiance.”
Pratt, a proud God-believer and gun owner, boasted a special relationship with his son with wife Anna Faris while giving a speech at the 2014 March of Dimes Celebration of Babies. Born nine weeks early at 3 pounds, 12 ounces, Jack stayed in the NICU for a month.
“I made promises in that moment about what kind of dad I wanted to be and I just prayed that he’d live long enough that I could keep them,” Pratt said of cradling his son during that time.
“I’ve done all kinds of cool things as an actor,” Pratt stressed, “I’ve jumped out of helicopters and done some daring stunts and played baseball in a professional stadium, but none of it means anything compared to being somebody’s daddy.”Nov 5, 2017 | By David
3D printing is definitely a groundbreaking technological development in and of itself, but what’s also exciting is the way that it can be used to encourage innovation in other technological fields, either by stimulating new research or by being directly implemented in practical studies. Continuing this trend, a group of scientists in the UK recently 3D printed a prototype helmet that can now be worn by test subjects in their pioneering research project. They are exploring a new form of brain imaging technique, known as Magnetoencephalography (MEG).
The research is being funded by UK biomedical research trust Wellcome, which has provided a £1.6 million Collaborative Award in Science to the team to construct a new type of MEG scanner that could potentially have four times the amount of sensitivity as devices currently used. MEG is a technique that creates maps of brain activity by measuring the magnetic fields that are generated by natural electrical currents in the brain.
Leading the research is Dr Matthew Brookes and Professor Richard Bowtell, both from the University of Nottingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy. They are working in collaboration with scientists from their school as well as from University College London, and the project is predicted to last another three years.
Studies began two years ago, as the team assessed the potential of quantum sensors to improve sensitivity in MEG scanning. The Wellcome contribution was awarded after the completion of this pilot stage, and now they can set to work on building a fully functional MEG system.
£800,000 of the total funding will be going to Nottingham, where the physics-based development needed to get the scanner working will be done. The design and production of the 3D printed prototype helmet was one of the first parts of this physical development, which is still in its early phases. Meanwhile, UCL researchers will use the rest of the grant to carry out detailed computational and theoretical modelling of the brain, framing the neuroscience and establishing what neuroscience questions can be addressed.
According to Dr Brookes, “Quantum technology has allowed the development of a new type of optical sensor which has the sensitivity to detect the weak magnetic fields from the brain. Unlike current technology, these new sensors can operate at room temperature, so they can be placed directly on the scalp surface. Our calculations show that by getting the sensors closer to the head we can quadruple the sensitivity of the field detection. This will revolutionise the kind of effect that we are able to detect from the human brain.”
Unlike the static, one-size-fits-all systems that were previously used, the new MEG system should be highly flexible and adaptable. This means that the fit will be more comfortable and patients will be able to undertake tasks and move freely in a natural environment. This will greatly expand the range of possible research questions and topics.
The new MEG system will also be particularly useful for experimenting with children, as the way the previous systems worked meant that sensitivity was limited for subjects with smaller heads. “Room temperature quantum sensors can be mounted directly on the scalp of any subject,” explains Professor Bowtell. “This will give us a projected four-fold increase in sensitivity for adults, but the sensitivity could potentially be up to a 15 or 20 fold increase for children or babies.”
Posted in 3D Printing Application
Maybe you also like:Through a series of messages posted on official ISIS social media accounts and Telegram channels, the terrorist group has announced the creation of a mega hacking unit called the United Cyber Caliphate (UCC).
The new group consists of the Cyber Caliphate Army (CCA), Daesh's main hacking unit, and other pro-ISIS groups that have carried out attacks supporting the terrorists' cause, such as the Sons Caliphate Army (SCA) and Kalacnikov.TN (KTN).
Earlier in January 2016, Cyber Caliphate Army also merged forces with Pro-Palestinian hacking group AnonGhost, a former Anonymous division from which the hacktivist group distanced itself.
ISIS hackers unite to improve their collective skills
The new hacking group is far from being considered a major threat since none of them has ever carried out anything more than simplistic website defacements and small data leaks.
At the start of March, the Cyber Caliphate Army (CCA) made a fool of themselves when they hacked an SEO company from India called Add Google Online and then bragged about hacking the real Google.
Nevertheless, with all the hackers joining their skills, more dangerous attacks are bound to follow. Since the start of April, security and cyber-intelligence firms like the SITE Intel Group have been tracking UCC's actions.
Since forming, UCC has been very active
Just in the past days, UCC hackers claimed they've hacked the US State Department and leaked info on 50 staff members, ran a mass defacement campaign against Australian websites, defaced the Russian Federal Customs Service, and leaked information on 18,000 employees of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation.
The group also ran a second mass defacement campaign using the "#KillCrusaders" tag and continued its anti-Christians campaign when it defaced the website of a Michigan church last week, leaving an ominous Jihadi message behind.
The biggest data breach since UCC formed also happened last week when the group posted the names and addresses of 3,602 of the "most important citizens of #NewYork and #Brooklyn," asking ISIS sympathizers to use the information and carry out lone wolf attacks.
Image announcing UCC posted on Telegram by ISIS members
The US is not impressed
Last year, ISIS had a more reputable cyber division called the Cyber Caliphate (CC) which managed to leak private details of many US servicemen.
These leaks got CC's leader, Junaid Hussain, on the US Army's most wanted list. Hussain was eventually killed in a drone strike in Syria last August.
Ever since then, the newly formed Cyber Caliphate Army never lived up to the name and reputation set by Hussain and his collaborators, one of which was arrested in February 2016.
After taking Hussain down, the US has been dominating the cyberspace and US officials have bragged about using cyber-attacks with "surprising" methods at the start of March, and again yesterday, when they said they're "dropping cyberbombs" on ISIS militants.108
Building Branded Hospital Apps
Engage your patients and boost your healthcare brand with beautiful native apps – you don’t have to be a programmer! In 10 short video lessons, you will learn how to design and build awesome, branded patient engagement apps for your healthcare organization – from idea to launch.
Lectures
Ideating your Hospital's App Portfolio
Lesson #1: Where do mobile app ideas come from? What can mobile apps do for your hospital? Who should own the mobile app strategy? Ideating your Hospital's App Portfolio Outlining and Refining Your Mobile Use Cases
Lesson #2: Key components of a mobile app use case; examples of great patient app use cases; six steps to outlining and refining a successful mobile app use case. Outlining and Refining Your Mobile Use Cases Wireframing your App
Lesson #3: Take your app from idea to execution with this quick wire-framing process Wireframing Your App Creating your Mobile App Mockup
Lesson #4: Start adding your own branding and graphics to your mobile app mockup - and plan your user experience between app screens. Creating your Mobile App Mockup
Prerequisites
None. No coding experience is required, although graphic design experience will help speed your app-development process.
Syllabus
The Course begins on July 2nd, although late-comers are welcome. We will be hosting the majority of our videos on Youtube, although interactive videos and quizzes will be hosted on the MobileSmith website.
Additional information
Successful completion entitles you to receive a certificate identifying you as your healthcare organization’s Mobile App Expert.
Teacher qualificationsStory highlights House Republicans want to roll back regulation, dismantle "Obamacare"
None of these measures will likely become law, but are election-year manuevering
Congress must act by the end of the year to avoid dire fiscal consequences
If House Republicans have their way this summer, the Bush-era tax cuts would become permanent, "Obamacare" would begin to be dismantled and energy regulations would be rolled back.
On Friday, House GOP leaders unveiled their summer agenda with an eye on the fall campaign, including those and other items that probably won't become law, but will highlight the party's message on the economy.
In a memo to GOP members, Majority Leader Eric Cantor promised a vote on the most contentious issue --extending the Bush-era tax cuts that expire at the end of the year — before the House begins its monthlong summer break in August.
Republican leaders have been mum on the details, but the measure is expected to renew the current rates for some period and lay out a framework for tax reform that lowers rates across the board. Many of the details, however, including which deductions would be eliminated, would be put off until next year.
Cantor's memo says the House will focus in the coming months on "addressing job creation and the economy, reducing spending and shrinking the size of the federal government while protecting and expanding liberty."
In addition to the tax issue, the majority of items Cantor cites for floor action -- votes to repeal portions of Obamacare, roll back "job-inhibiting" red tape and press for more domestic energy production -- will land with a thud in the Democrat-led Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has made it clear that anything the GOP-led House passes dealing with taxes or deficit cuts is DOA in the Senate. With the November election five months away and almost zero motivation for bipartisan cooperation, the reality is that any major action will be postponed until after the election.
The fiscal cliff
Another thorny issue facing Congress: how to deal with automatic spending cuts to federal agencies scheduled to go into effect in January as part of the budget deal last summer. Republicans in the House and Senate are pushing bills to fence off any impact on defense with deeper cuts to domestic programs.
In a recent letter to GOP senators, Reid said the Republican line in the sand against new revenues means no deal on these issues can happen."Unfortunately, it appears that Republicans' blind adherence to tea party extremism is making it impossible to reach this sort of balanced agreement before the election," Reid wrote.
Cantor's memo leaves out how the House will deal with some lingering and politically charged issues before the election.
Both Democrats and Republicans say they want to avoid interest rates on student loans doubling in July, but there is no agreement yet on how to pay for legislation to head off the increase. The House passed a bill targeting what the GOP says is a "slush fund" that pays for public health programs as part of the health care law. Democrats want to offset the costs with a tax on some businesses. After the Senate failed to pass either party's preferred plan, the standoff continues.
Transportation, women, drugs, post office on agenda
While both chambers passed legislation -- the "Violence Against Women Act" -- that funds programs combating domestic abuse, the issue has become a political battle, with Democrats arguing GOP resistance to expanding protections to gays and lesbians and native Americans amounts to a "war on women." Republicans counter that Democrats hijacked the measure for political purposes and are picking a "fake fight" to appeal to female voters.
House and Senate leaders are also still negotiating details on a multiyear transportation bill that gives states billions of dollars for new infrastructure projects. But both sides are tangling over how long to authorize the federal program and the GOP's insistence that the bill include authorization for the Keystone pipeline that would transport oil from Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico.
There are some areas where bipartisan action is expected. After the Memorial Day holiday the House will take up a bipartisan intelligence bill, and legislation reforming how the Food and Drug Administration approves new drugs, a measure that passed overwhelmingly in the Senate.The House will vote on Oversight Committee Chariman Darrell Issa's proposal to overhaul the postal service, which will need to be reconciled with a different package the Senate passed this month.
Dialing up the rhetoric
The Republican agenda signals the rhetoric on the House floor in June and July will match the sticky Washington heat. The GOP is planning votes on energy bills most Democrats oppose, pushing for more drilling on public lands and removing federal regulations on energy producers.
Nadeam Elshami, spokesman for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, immediately dismissed the GOP calendar.
"The Republicans have spelled out an agenda that fails to address jobs and will hold the middle class tax cuts hostage because the GOP refuses to let millionaires, Big Oil and corporations that ship jobs overseas pay their fair share," Elshami said.
While both parties eagerly await the ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on whether the president's signature health care law will stand, the House will vote to repeal a tax on medical devices that helps fund the law and overturn a provision of the law that would prohibit the use of personal spending accounts to pay for over the counter medications.
GOP congressional leaders have been huddling on how to address health care if the high court strikes down the law, but aides caution that nothing has been decided on what kind of reforms Republicans would pursue if they were given a clean slate.
Continuing their pledge to slash federal spending, the House will also vote on bills reducing federal agencies' budgets, but few of these bills are expected to pass the Senate, so both sides are gearing up for negotiations on a short-term bill to keep the government funded after the current authority runs out in September.
While there may be a flurry of activity this summer on Capitol Hill, it's safe to say the December "lame duck" session of Congress will be a jam-packed month where most of these issues will be resolved.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If U.S.-led attacks knock out oil fields controlled by Islamic State militants, petroleum from the American drilling boom could make up for any shortfall on global markets, a report released by a Republican senator said on Wednesday.
U.S. bombs blasted Islamic State positions in Syria for a second day on Wednesday. Militants have been funding their efforts in part by seizing a dozen or so oilfields in Syria and Iraq, controlling refineries and smuggling oil and fuel to nearby markets.
In the United States, fracking and other advanced drilling techniques have helped push U.S. oil production to the highest level since the 1980s. That has led to a glut of light oil that many refiners are not able to process, and a call by some lawmakers to relax or lift the 40-year ban on oil exports.
“The historic growth in U.S. oil production could easily make up the shortfall to global oil markets,” if Islamic State facilities are wiped out, said a report released by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the chamber’s energy committee.
Murkowski and other supporters of lifting the export ban have also urged using U.S. oil supplies to pressure Russia over its intervention in Ukraine. Russia is a major producer and exporter of oil and a top supplier to Europe.
It is unclear exactly how much oil production is in control of Islamic State militants. The output appears to be less than 100,000 barrels per day, Adam Sieminski, head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, told the North Dakota Petroleum Council at its annual meeting on Wednesday.
Sieminski’s office, part of the Department of Energy, and the State Department are working on getting more precise numbers, he said.
The amount, however, is very small compared with the global market of about 90 million barrels per day. And concerns about oil prices damaging the world economy have ebbed for now. Brent crude oil prices, a global benchmark, hit 2-year lows of $96 per barrel on Wednesday.
Still, the world’s spare oil capacity, or the amount crude producers can quickly bring on line without major investments, is only a few million barrels per day and is held mostly in Saudi Arabia.
The Obama administration opened a crack in the crude oil export ban earlier this year with two approvals to ship minimally processed light oil known as condensate, but such approvals have been put on hold since then.Anonymous asked: Unpopular Opinion: I don't think Erwin Rommel should ever be praised or hailed for being an "honorable" person, or "a guy who has standards compared to other nazi bastards. Rommel is and was a nazi and a loyal one, plain and simple. If he were caught by the allies; I say fucking kill him never listen to him, never take his word on account, he was a nazi and should've deserved a brutal fucking death being a nazi scumbag, PLAIN and SIMPLE, not humanizing that bastard.
fujisan-ni-noboru-hinode:
enrique262:
This is the kind of line of thought that brought us the Cold War.
This anon is a fucking retard. A fucking retard, in fact, who obviously doesn’t know anything about the honorable Erwin Rommel, or, quite frankly, anything related to the Second World War. Had anon actually invested some, or even any time into research and study, they’d have known that Rommel never joined the Nazi Party, and was, in fact, staunchly anti-Nazi, refusing membership on multiple occasions.
Erwin was, at heart, a pure statesman, displaying a love and pride for his country - not the political party running it - and as his actions during both WW1 and WW2 proved, as he fought valiantly in both world wars, was a man of high virtue, and a humanitarian, as well as an example soldier and exemplary tactician. You speak badly about a man who directly defied the orders of Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Europe, and his own superior, because he believed it was wrong to kill Jews and PoW’s. A man who treated his prisoners as equally as his own men, and who stood in solidarity with his enemies in the deaths of soldiers on both sides. A man who was on the ‘bad side’, yet is looked at as a hero by those who fought against him, and had committed no War Crimes, something somewhat uncommon for German personnel in the later portion of the war.
Truly a shining example of what a man (or woman) should aim to be, soldier or civilian.
Truly, the reason he has achieved such a status of legend, is because the man had a character of of legendary compassion and cleverness. Anon’s uninformed besmirching of such an individual is not damaging to said legendary reputation, but is, in fact, evidence of the lack of intelligence of said anon, who is, again, a fucking retard. Have some respect for the dead and try harder next time.Want to stick around Royal Oak to ring in 2014?
From dancing and dinners to comedy and champagne toasts, there's lots happening on the last night of 2013 in Royal Oak. Here's a roundup of events; add yours to the comments section here.
BlackFinn: The Twenties were nicknamed "roaring" for a reason. They knew how to throw a party. Every dame and fella is invited to make this Gatsby-inspired New Years the bee's knees in Royal Oak. Ticket cost is $30 and includes party favors, $10 gift card, complimentary champagne toast at midnight and complimentary hor d'oeuvres served throughout the night.
Cafe Muse: Enjoy a four-course dinner that begins with strolling appetizers and a glass of prosecco. The cost is $70 per person. Click here to see a menu.
Comedy Castle: Spend New Year's Eve with David Dyer. He's worked with some of the best performers in the industry including Drew Carey, Lewis Black, and Kathleen Madigan. Tickets are $27.50 - $35.
Fifth Avenue: Be sure not to not miss out on the excitement of the Times Square Ball Drop viewed on over 40 high definition TVs and the largest projection screen in Metro Detroit. Tickets are $30 and include admission, party favors, and two delicious buffets; one served at 11 p.m. and the other at 12:30 a.m.
Luna: Party until 4 a.m. with the award-winning Luna dancers. Tickets are $5 in advance; $7 at the door and include champagne, pizza and party favors.
Royal Oak Music Theatre: Stay and Play Social Club presents Revolution NYE 2014 with special guests Big Will and the 360 Degrees Band. Tickets are $75 and include four drink tickets redeemable between 8:30 – 11:30 p.m., party favors and a champagne toast.
Star Lanes: Roll in the New Year. Formal wear is optional, but who wouldn't want to bowl in a suit or party dress? Enjoy two hours of bowling with complimentary party favors. Tickets are $30 per person or $50 per couple. Call 248-414-1000 to reserve your lane.The Republican party has won approval for the.gop domain from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a move the party hopes will consolidate its online outreach efforts and make official websites easier to find. The domain will be available in 75 days.
Democrats have not countered with their own domain extension yet. “Republicans didn't lose in 2008 and 2012 because people had trouble finding their addresses,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Michael Czin told FoxNews.com.
ICANN began approving new domains last summer, adding everything from.horse to.xyz. Some brands have had trouble securing their names, however. Both retailers Patagonia and Amazon had their applications for their eponymous domains rejected after objections from South American governments who said the names should be reserved for their geographical counterparts.Not long ago, the atheist movement was the preserve of a few eccentric gadflies like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, whose endless lawsuits helped earn her the title “the most hated woman in America.” But over the past decade it has matured into something much larger and less cranky. In March of this year, some 20,000 people marched through a cold drizzle at the “Reason Rally” in Washington, billed as a political debut for the movement. A string of best-selling atheist polemics by the “four horsemen” — Hitchens and Dawkins, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — has provided new intellectual fuel. Secular-themed organizations and clubs have begun to permeate small-town America and college campuses, helping to foot the bill for bus and billboard ad campaigns with messages like “Are You Good Without God? Millions Are.”
The reasons for this secular revival are varied, but it seems clear that the Internet has helped, and many younger atheists cite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment of disgust with religious zealotry in any form. It is hard to say how many people are involved; avowed atheists are still a tiny sliver of the population. But people with no religious affiliation are the country’s fastest-growing religious category. When asked about religious affiliation in a Pew poll published this summer, nearly 20 percent of Americans chose “none,” the highest number the center has recorded. Many of those people would not call themselves atheists; “agnostic,” which technically refers to people who believe that the existence of a higher being can’t be known by the human mind, remains the safer option. The godless are now younger and more diverse than in the past, with blacks and Hispanics — once vanishingly rare — starting to appear in the ranks of national groups like the United Coalition of Reason and the Secular Student Alliance.
The movement has also begun cultivating a new breed of guru in men like DeWitt and Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps, the leader of Westboro Baptist Church, which pickets military funerals and gay-pride events with signs declaring “God Hates Fags.” Nate Phelps, a big, barrel-chested man who delivers fierce rebuttals of his father’s theology and narrates the agonies of his fundamentalist upbringing, has become a star speaker at atheist rallies and gay-pride events around the country. At the Reason Rally, crowds cheered as he declared that the Sept. 11 attacks played a critical role in blasting away his lingering belief in any sort of deity.
Because they started out as fervent Christians, unlike Dawkins and Hitchens and company, Phelps and DeWitt are seen as heroes within the movement. They tend to live and work in the country’s most Bible-soaked places. “I think what’s happening is that nontheists are realizing we can’t just leave this cause to Ivy Leaguers and intellectuals,” DeWitt told me. “We’ve got to convey the secular worldview in a more emotional way.”
At the same time, DeWitt is something of a reality check for many atheists, whose principles rarely cost them more than the price of “The God Delusion” in paperback. DeWitt refuses to leave DeRidder, a place where religion, politics and family pride are indivisible. Six months after he was “outed” as an atheist he lost his job and his wife — both, he says, as a direct consequence. Only a handful of his 100-plus relatives from DeRidder still speak to him. When I visited him, in late June, his house was in foreclosure, and he was contemplating moving into his 2007 Chrysler PT Cruiser. This is the kind of environment where godlessness remains a real struggle and raises questions that could ramify across the rest of the country. Is the “new atheism” part of a much broader secularizing trend, like the one that started emptying out the churches in European towns and villages a century ago? Or is it just a ticket out of town?
DeRidder is a four-hour drive northwest of New Orleans, near the Texas border. It is a tiny place, surrounded by thick forests of long-leaf pine, where many of the 10,000-odd residents have known one another all their lives. There is one major commercial strip lined with fast-food restaurants and chain stores, and in the rest of town it is difficult to drive a block without passing a church. Many of them are Pentecostals, part of the revivalist Christian movement in which worshipers often speak in tongues — babbling in what is thought to be a sacred language — sometimes while writhing on the floor. In the local Walmart, it’s easy to recognize the more conservative Pentecostal women, who wear modest, long dresses in a high-waisted style, their hair, which they do not cut, pulled neatly into buns.
When I first met Jerry DeWitt, I half expected a provincial contrarian hungry for attention. Instead, he was mild and apologetic, a short, baby-faced man with a gentle smile and a neatly trimmed dark beard. He was earnest and warm, and I soon discovered that many of his fellow townspeople cannot help liking him, no matter how much they dislike his atheism. He appears to have reached his conclusions about God with reluctance, and with remorse for the pain he has caused his friends and family. He seems to bear no grudge toward them. “At every atheist event I go to, there’s always someone who’s been hurt by religion, who wants me to tell him all preachers are charlatans,” DeWitt told me, soon after we met. “I always have to disappoint them. The ones I know are mostly very good people.”
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DeWitt is a native son in every way, and this must make his apostasy all the more difficult for others to make sense of and to accept. He is descended from a long line of preachers on both sides of the family. His paternal grandfather helped establish at least 16 different churches in Louisiana, including one in DeRidder, he told me. (I found 69 churches in the town directory, though some may be inactive.) DeWitt grew up in the church, but it was only at 17, after being “saved” during a weekend visit to Jimmy Swaggart’s church in Baton Rouge, that he became a passionate Christian. Weeks later he spoke in tongues for the first time. Soon after that, sitting in church, he heard his pastor call on him to deliver a homily. Terrified, he asked if he could have a few minutes to pray for guidance. He stepped to the pulpit with his finger on a passage from the Gospel of Mark, and spoke for 15 minutes on the “seed of David.” The crowd loved it. “It was the biggest high I’d ever had,” he told me. “I knew right then that preaching was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.” He married a local girl at age 20, and two weeks after the wedding, he received an invitation to speak at a camp meeting in Lucedale, Miss. There he preached to overflow crowds of whooping Pentecostals who were speaking in tongues.
He and his wife began touring the South, building a reputation for the power of his sermons. It was a tremendous ego charge, especially for a short, chubby young man with dyslexia. For the first time, he was treated with respect, even awe. “I had this whole prophet persona going on. I wouldn’t really mix with people before the sermon,” he told me. “All kinds of people were seeing miracles, and I believed it 100 percent.”
For the next few years, DeWitt preached across the South, doing itinerant jobs to pay the bills. In 2004 he became a full-time preacher at a church near DeRidder. By that time, though, he had drifted away from the literal claims of Pentecostal doctrine and espoused a more liberal Christianity. He had begun reading more widely (he never got a college degree), starting with Carl Sagan’s books on science and moving on to Joseph Campbell and others. But equally, he told me, he found it unbearable to promote beliefs that only seemed to sow confusion and self-blame. He recalled how one middle-aged woman in his church who was suffering from heart disease asked him anxiously: “How am I going to believe for salvation when I can’t believe enough to heal?”
Finally he began to feel that his rationalist impulses were alienating and hurting his flock, and he resigned — reluctantly, he said, because he loved the human side of being a pastor, “playing Mr. Fix-It for the community.” He continued preaching part time for a while, invoking an ever more misty and ethereal God. By now he had also read Dawkins and Hitchens, and even weak-tea Christianity was becoming hard to swallow. He preached his last sermon in April 2011, in the town of Cut and Shoot, Tex. A month later, Natosha Davis called, and DeWitt found himself unable to pray at all.
DeWitt never meant to go public with his unbelief. He figured he could “stay under the radar,” he said, and continue working as a buildings inspector in DeRidder, where, over the years, he had gained a reputation as a community champion and was talked about as a future mayor. But when he heard that Richard Dawkins would be attending a Freethinkers gathering in Houston, he couldn’t resist. He took a day off, without telling his boss where he was going. He got a picture taken of himself and his son Paul (who was then 19 and who has never been religious) with Dawkins. DeWitt posted the photograph on his Facebook page, assuming that “nobody in DeRidder knew who Dawkins was.” He also, perhaps unwisely, updated the “religious views” box on his Facebook page to read “secular humanist.”
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It was his grandmother’s cousin, an 84-year-old woman he knew as Aunt Grace, who saw that page and outed him. Word spread quickly. On Dec. 1, his boss asked to meet him at a diner in town. Sitting at the table, the man took out two printouts from secular Web sites with DeWitt’s name on it. “He told me: ‘The Pentecostals who run the parish are not happy, and something’s got to be done,’ ”DeWitt recalled. “Half an hour later I was out of a job.” (His former boss did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.)
Almost at once, DeWitt became a pariah in DeRidder. His wife found herself ostracized in turn, and the marriage suffered. She moved out in June. He received a constant stream of hate messages — some threatening — and still does, more than seven months later. He played me a recent one he had saved on his cellphone as we ate lunch at a diner in town. “It’s just sickening to hear you try to turn people atheist,” a guttural voice intoned. It went on and on, telling DeWitt to go to hell in various ways. “I’m not going to sit around while you turn people against God,” the voice said at one point.
But DeWitt also hurled himself into his new role as a faith healer in reverse. He became the first “graduate” of the Clergy Project, discarding his anonymity and giving the clandestine preachers’ group its first dash of publicity. It was formed in early 2011 with a few dozen members, mostly recruited through Dan Barker, a former pastor who is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and through Linda LaScola, who in 2010 co-conducted a study of nonbelieving pastors with Daniel Dennett, the atheist philosopher. The project now has more than 300 members, with about 80 applicants awaiting clearance (the group is very careful about admissions, to secure the members’ privacy).
DeWitt also became the executive director of Recovering From Religion, formed in 2009 by Darrel Ray, a Kansas -based atheist proselytizer. The group grew quickly under DeWitt’s leadership and now includes at least 100 local chapters scattered across the country, each one typically with 10 to 12 participants. Like other public figures in the movement, DeWitt also serves as a one-man clearinghouse for religious doubters via Facebook and e-mail. During the four days I spent with him in DeRidder, he was almost constantly checking his cellphone and tapping out messages.
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There is more involved in this work than sympathy. The transition away from faith may start with an intellectual epiphany, but it runs through a difficult reinterpretation of your own past. For believers, this often involves what DeWitt calls a “hook,” or a miraculous story that helps anchor your faith. He gave me an example: he was born again in Jimmy Swaggart’s church thanks to his former elementary-school teacher, who persuaded him to come along with her to Baton Rouge. He later discovered that his teacher almost died while she was being born, and that she had emerged safely from the womb only after a preacher from a neighboring town was roused from sleep to offer a blessing in the delivery room. That preacher was DeWitt’s paternal grandfather. This coincidence had seemed providential to DeWitt, a sign that he was meant to be a preacher himself.
“This story has kept you feeling that God has a destiny for you,” DeWitt said. “So now how do you reconcile that? How do you make sense of your life? It’s not easy.”
I heard parallel stories from a number of other participants in post-religion networks. “People have a really difficult time making decisions after they’ve lost their faith,” said Amanda Schneider, who organized a local Recovering From Religion group in Santa Fe (and also helps manage the broader organization). “They used to always base it on ‘What is God’s plan for me?’ |
have any major terrain changes, but there is a possibility of new rocks and trees that have the potential to destroy parts of bases, or spawn on top of tames and destroy them.”
Meanwhile, the small green area of the map is where the current swamp biome is being converted to the redwood biome. The rest of the swamp will remain unchanged from how it is currently.
The reason why players will want to move their bases and any tamed animals is due to the fact a previous biome change in the game destroyed bases and animals. Any new rocks, trees, or other objects added with the new biome will essentially overwrite any player structure or tamed animal in the same spot.
Unfortunately, moving an entire base can be a tedious and time-consuming affair. This is why Studio Wildcard has given players a three-week-plus warning.
Studio Wildcard originally extended the snow area biome all the way across to the northern coast to overtake the very popular “Hidden Lake” area located in the northeast part of The Island. The developers decided against stretching the winter wonderland area that far and it now stops just to the west of the “Hidden Lake.”
[Image via Studio Wildcard]
ARK: Survival Evolved on the PC may have noticed several small updates have hit the game over the past few days. Studio Wildcard has been busy fixing lingering issues from the 240.0 release. This includes adding the ability to teleport tamed T-Rexes into the boss arenas, the ability for Giganotosaurus to knock down trees, and a 10-second timer on being affected by the Bola a second time after being hit by it once. There are some performance improvements as well, but you should check out the official patch notes for the full details.
The Xbox One version of ARK is still targeting May 16 to receive all the content from the 240 and 239 patches. This will also add new servers to the game featuring the custom-made Center map.
Looking ahead, here is what Studio Wildcard is targeting for the ARK: Survival Evolved 241 patch for the PC.
New Creature: Diplodocus!
New Creature: Leech!
New Mechanic: Permanent Diseases & Cures
Biome Update: Snow Extension & New Redwood Forests (this is a major environmental overhaul!)
Tribe Groups Phase 2: Support for Limited Non-Admin Invites & Promotions per Group!
Dragon Arena
Ruins & Explorer Notes
Added server option to override per-Item Crafting costs
Added server option to override the loot tables for each kind of supply crate
Added server option to limit number of members in Tribes. Default: no limit.
Breeding Mechanics Phase 2 (Random Mutations, Family Trees, & Interactive Baby Raising)
[Image via Studio Wildcard]
[Update: Studio Wildcard released a new version of the map showing the biome changes. This article has been updated to reflect the new map.]Holidays can be busy and joyous times but holiday decorations and new toys can bring risks along with festive cheer. Stay safe by knowing how to manage the health or safety hazards of holiday items you bring into your home. Minimize your risks by following the safety tips on this page.
Holiday trees
Holiday lights and decorations
Toys and gifts
New toys and gifts are holiday highlights for many children. Minimize potential hazards from new gifts by buying sturdy, well-made toys that are appropriate for your child's age. Toys for older children may contain small parts or other hazards that may make them unsafe for young children.
Toys can be recalled for health or safety reasons. Check the Healthy Canadians Recalls and Safety Alerts Database for more information about the latest recalls.Senate
● FL-Sen: Sen. Bill Nelson is something of an endangered species in Florida as the last remaining Democrat to hold statewide office, but a new University of North Florida survey indicates he isn't quite on the brink of extinction yet in 2018. The pollster finds the senator winning a fourth term by a 44-38 margin over Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who faces term-limits next year and is considering a Senate bid. Nelson sports a decent 42 percent approval rating with only 28 percent disapproving, while voters only narrowly approve of Scott's job performance as governor by a 46-40 spread.
Scott is incredibly wealthy and could self-fund tens of millions in this expensive state, just like he did in his two gubernatorial elections. However, the governor's strong support for Donald Trump could come back to haunt him if Trump remains unpopular on Election Day. It's still very early in the cycle, but few other major Republicans have made much noise about challenging Nelson. If Scott does pull the trigger, Florida could be in for yet another heavily contested and costly Senate race.
● ND-Sen: Rep. Kevin Cramer is now engaged in a competition with himself to see just how much of a colossal asshole he can be. Speaking last week of his women colleagues who wore white to Donald Trump's congressional address to honor the suffrage movement, Cramer bleated it was a sign of mental instability:
"But by the way, did you notice how poorly several of them were dressed as well? It is a syndrome. There is no question, there is a disease associated with the notion that a bunch of women would wear bad-looking white pantsuits in solidarity with Hillary Clinton to celebrate her loss. You cannot get that weird."
His attempts to explain away his remarks have not gone well, and his latest effort is just embarrassing:
"These are not victims of some, you know, egregious action by their male-dominant counterparts. I referenced, you know, the bad-looking pantsuits, if you will. That's not a literal statement. I wouldn't know a good-looking pantsuit from a bad-looking pantsuit."
So I insulted the way women were dressed, but I didn't mean it literally! Man, is that perfectly Trumpian or what? It all makes perfect sense, though: Cramer has claimed he's Trump's top choice to challenge Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp next year. At the rate he's going, he might just be Heitkamp's top choice, too.
Gubernatorial
● AL-Gov: In response to a Facebook page trying to recruit him, Troy University Chancellor Jack Hawkins Jr. only says he's "humbled and flattered" in seeking the governorship next year, but for now, he's only focused on his school. That response, of course, is far from a no. There's no word which party Hawkins would run under, though in 2009, he considered seeking the GOP nod. Hawkins has been chancellor of Troy University, a public school located about an hour southeast of Montgomery, since 1989.
● CO-Gov: Ex-Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar has been mentioned as a possible Democratic candidate to succeed termed-out Gov. John Hickenlooper for a while, but the former secretary of the interior doesn't seem to be in a hurry to decide. Salazar publicly acknowledged his interest for the first time a few days ago, and he tells the Denver Post he'll likely make up his mind "[p]robably by the end of the summer." Salazar sounds genuinely unsure what he'll do, since he went into his backup plan if he sits the race out: writing a book "that would tell the history of the Southwest and the history of the U.S.-Mexico border in a way that could help raise the consciousness of Americans."
Two weeks ago, an "unnamed "Democratic close to" Rep. Ed Perlmutter told the Colorado Statesman that the congressman would likely announce if he'd run by the end of February, but if Perlmutter has made a decision, he's kept it to himself. Around the same time, The Gazette reported that, according to people in Perlmutter's inner circle, the congressman's decision will at least be partially dependent on what ex-Sen. Ken Salazar does: If that's true, it looks like Perlmutter will be waiting a few months.
A number of other Democrats are also eyeing this seat, and Salazar could scare many of them out if he runs. However, Salazar is unlikely to have a clear primary if he does go for it. Salazar is no one's definition of a political outsider: In addition to his stints in the Senate and the Obama cabinet, Salazar also served as head of Hillary Clinton's transition team in August, and he also founded the Denver division of the prominent international law firm WilmerHale. A strong primary challenger could draw blood by portraying him as a part of an unacceptable status quo. Right now, ex-state Sen. Mike Johnston and businessman Noel Ginsburg are in, while some other Democrats are publicly considering.
On the other side, the GOP picked up a new candidate, though he doesn't look especially formidable. Lew Gaiter, a county commissioner in Fort Collins' Larimer County, announced he was in over the weekend. Gaiter is friends with 2016 Senate nominee Darryl Glenn, who attended his kickoff, but he doesn't seem to have the same far-right fire-in-the-belly that propelled the little-known Glenn to the GOP nod last year. Gaiter described himself as "pretty conservative," and says he believes in leaving people alone to live their lives if they're not impacting anyone else.
Wealthy ex-state Rep. Victor Mitchell is the only other declared GOP candidate. However, prominent suburban Denver District Attorney George Brauchler is talking about jumping in, while state Attorney General Cynthia Coffman and state Treasurer Walker Stapleton are reportedly considering, and it won't be easy for Gaiter or Mitchell to match any of them.
● FL-Gov: Back in mid-February, Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn said he'd decide if he'll seek the Democratic nod, "Within the next month or two." Buckhorn has now moved up his timeline quite a bit, telling the National Journal on Monday that he'll decide "within days."
● IL-Gov: It'll be a while before the Democratic field to take on first-term Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner coalesces, and that means it'll probably be a while before we see any good polling featuring head-to-head matchups between the incumbent and actual challengers. But in the meantime, there's a new survey from Democratic pollster Anzalone Liszt Grove, taken on behalf of the American Heart Association, that pits Rauner against an unnamed "Democratic candidate" and finds him trailing by a painful 47-32 margin.
Now, as we always caution when polls test "generic Democrat" or "generic Republican," it's easy for these numbers to be inflated. Respondents get to imagine their most ideal Platonic form of a candidate, whereas in reality, parties nominate flawed people who wind up getting hammered by attack ads. And given Rauner's personal wealth (his net worth is reportedly $1 billion, and he already seeded his re-election campaign with $50 million), there will be no shortage of attacks.
But all caveats aside, 32 percent is still a rough place for any incumbent to be, especially a Republican running in a blue state where, thanks to decades of endemic corruption and governmental sclerosis, voters often seem to sour on their elected leaders. Interestingly, the Heart Association paid for this poll to gauge support for a tax on sugary drinks, which voters back 56-41; their original press release didn't even mention Rauner, but presumably they leaked the horserace data to demonstrate that the governor is even less popular than a proposed new tax.
Rauner's money, though, assures that this will be a difficult race no matter how it unfolds—or whom Democrats nominate. So far, three candidates are running, most prominent among them businessman Chris Kennedy, a son of Robert F. Kennedy, but several others are considering. And with Rauner's position looking uncertain at best, the field may yet grow.
● OH-Gov: Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley has been considering seeking the Democratic nomination next year, but she's also running for re-election this November. However, if Whaley wants to seek both offices at once, her job got a lot easier last week when the filing deadline for the mayoral race passed and Whaley learned she was running unopposed.
● TN-Gov: Wealthy businessman Randy Boyd stepped down as commissioner of the state's Department of Economic and Community Development back in January and soon began talking about running for governor, and on Monday, he announced he was in. Boyd, who also owns two East Tennessee minor league baseball teams, joins state Sen. Mark Green in the GOP primary. However, a number of other Republicans are eyeing this open seat, so they'll likely have plenty of company before too long. On the Democratic side, ex-Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has the field to himself, but state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh says he's leaning towards running.
House
● CA-34: If Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez doesn't win the upcoming special election for this safely blue downtown Los Angeles seat, it won't be because he didn't get enough endorsements. Ex-Rep. Xavier Becerra, who represented this district until he became California's attorney general earlier this year, threw his support behind Gomez on Friday. Becerra joins Sen. Kamala Harris, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the state Democratic Party, and a number of major unions in Gomez's corner. A number of other Democrats are also in and; in the all-but-certain event that no one takes a majority in the April 4 jungle primary, the top two candidates will advance to a June 6 general election regardless of party.
● GA-06: With the April 18 primary now six weeks away, the special election for Georgia's 6th Congressional District is starting to heat up. Signaling some worry about the intense outpouring of enthusiasm for Democrat Jon Ossoff, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC close to Paul Ryan, launched the first ads of the race last week, a $1.1 million campaign that (seriously) "attacked" Ossoff for dressing up as Han Solo when he was in college. Judging by anecdotal evidence, at least, the effort has some real potential to backfire, as most online comments have been along the lines of, "This guy seems cool—I just donated! #jonshotfirst".
Perhaps, though, the ads are faring better with older, Jabba-supporting voters (known to be a very pro-Hutt cohort), since Ossoff responded with a trio of spots of his own. (The reported buy is much smaller, though: just $75,000 so far.) Ossoff's first ad directly pushes back at the CLF's attempt to paint him as inexperienced, with a narrator describing Ossoff as "a national security aide with top secret clearance" who "fought to stop" "waste and abuse by military contractors." The spot adds that in his work as an investigative filmmaker, Ossoff "took on corrupt foreign officials who were stealing U.S. tax dollars and helped send them to jail."
Ossoff himself narrates the second ad, laying out his priorities, including fixing Obamacare, because "repealing it makes no sense." At the end, he also goes right at Trump, saying, "When President Trump embarrasses our country or acts recklessly, I'll hold him accountable." The final spot, meanwhile, is focused entirely on Trump. It shows Ossoff in a high-tech command center as a digital clock counts down above him: "Imagine you had thirty seconds to make a life or death decision affecting thousands of Americans," he says. "That's what we expect of our President. Sound judgment. That's why it's so concerning to see President Trump act so impulsively. He's not only embarrassing us on the world stage. He could start an unnecessary war." Concludes Ossoff as the clock strikes zero: "We can't let Donald Trump put us at risk."
And the first ad from a GOP candidate has now dropped, too, though it's a weird one. Former state Sen. Dan Moody, who's reportedly putting $300,000 behind this buy, is out with a minute-long spot that looks like a particularly whacked-out nature video, featuring footage of distressed-looking donkeys and elephants. A narrator delivers a meandering, metaphorical discourse on how poorly these animals behave until finally, 41 seconds in, Moody finally appears, shoveling up behind them, because he's "repeatedly proven he's willing to joyfully do the hard stuff." It's a poop-themed ad. We get it.
Finally, we also have a new survey of the race, from Republican pollster Trafalgar Group. The poll finds Ossoff tied at 18 with the best-known Republican running, former Secretary of State Karen Handel. Another Republican, wealthy businessman Bob Gray is at 13, while four other Republicans are in single digits. (Former state Sen. Ron Slotin, the only other Democrat tested, takes 3 percent.) The only other poll we've seen came from another GOP firm, Clout Research, which found the same players in the top three spots, but with much more spacing between them (Ossoff 32, Handel 25, Gray 11). With most candidates not yet on the air, a lot can and will change.
● MT-AL: The field is now set for Montana’s May 25 special election to replace GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke, who was just confirmed as Trump's interior secretary last week. On Sunday, Democrats selected well-known country musician Rob Quist, who had been endorsed by former Gov. Brian Schweitzer. Quist defeated state Rep. Amanda Curtis 90-69 on the fourth ballot cast by delegates; Curtis had been chosen at a similar convention back in 2014 to serve as the Democrats’ Senate nominee after Sen. John Walsh dropped out following a plagiarism scandal.
Republicans, meanwhile, chose businessman Greg Gianforte, who lost a bid for governor last year, on their first ballot at a gathering on Monday night. Gianforte is extremely rich—he sold a software company to Oracle, reportedly for $300 to $400 million—and plowed over $5 million of his own fortune into his 2016 campaign. But even though Donald Trump carried Montana by 20 points, Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock defeated Gianforte 50-46.
In part, Bullock won because Democrats successfully painted Gianforte as a wealthy carpetbagger (DGA ads called him “a millionaire from New Jersey”) who, among other things, had sought to block public access to a river along which he owned property—this in a state with deep reverence for hunting and fishing. That issue won’t go away, though of course, Gianforte can once again flood the Montana airwaves, where advertising is cheap.
Quist’s Montana roots, on the other hand, are not in question, and he’ll offer an interesting test-case for Team Blue: He's running as a populist outsider (he was a Bernie Sanders supporter) with a real focus on rural communities in a state heavily dominated by white working-class voters. He's not a complete newcomer to politics, though, seeing as he served on the state's arts council for 11 years (which explains his connection to Schweitzer). Lots of pundits and operatives have called for Democrats to adopt a message more like Quist's; we'll have to see if it resonates.
Republicans, at least, are taking Quist seriously enough that they've already launched a $700,000 ad campaign against him. The spot, from the Congressional Leadership Fund, follows the predictable GOP red-state playbook: It attacks Quist for supporting "a government health care plan even more expensive than Obamacare" and "devastating cuts to America's military budget." Concludes the narrator: Quist is "too liberal and out-of-touch for Montana."
● SC-05: The GOP primary has gotten most of the attention in this special election, which is no surprise since Trump carried this northern seat 57-39. But last week, former Goldman Sachs senior advisor Archie Parnell confirmed he would run, making him the first declared Democratic candidate. Parnell's Wall Street ties may give him access to some money, but he'll need a lot to go right to be competitive in a district this red. The filing deadline is March 13, with the general election taking place June 20.
● House: The NRCC recently unveiled the first 10 members of its Patriot Program to defend potentially vulnerable members. This week, their counterparts at the DCCC released the names of the first 19 members of its own Frontline incumbent defense program. Below is the list of members, as well as Trump's 2016 performance in their seats:
AZ-01: Tom O'Halleran, 48-47 CA-07: Ami Bera, 41-52 CA-24: Salud Carbajal, 37-57 CA-36: Raul Ruiz, 43-52 CA-52: Scott Peters, 36-58 CT-05: Elizabeth Esty, 46-50 FL-07: Stephanie Murphy, 44-51 FL-13: Charlie Crist, 46-50 IA-02: Dave Loebsack, 49-45 IL-10: Brad Schneider, 33-62 IL-17: Cheri Bustos, 47.4-46.7 MN-08: Rick Nolan, 54-39 NJ-05: Josh Gottheimer, 49-48 NH-01: Carol Shea-Porter, 48-47 NH-02: Annie Kuster, 46-49 NV-03: Jacky Rosen, 48-47 NV-04: Ruben Kihuen, 45-50 NY-03: Tom Suozzi, 46-52 NY-18: Sean Maloney, 49-47
Many of the 12 Democrats in Trump seats are on the list, but not all. Missing from the list are MN-01's Tim Walz (53-38); MN-07's Collin Peterson (62-31); PA-17's Matt Cartwright (53-43); and WI-03's Ron Kind (49-45).
Other Races
● VA-LG: Four years ago, the Virginia GOP nominating convention picked little-known minister E.W. Jackson to serve as their standard bearer, a decision that proved disastrous. This time, the GOP will choose their lieutenant governor nominee at a June 13 primary, but that's not stopping this race from becoming an utter shit-show. To sum things up: State Sen. Bryce Reeves is accusing GOP primary rival and fellow state Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel, or at least someone close to her, of spreading false rumors insinuating that he had an affair with a campaign staffer. Reeves recently asked a judge to allow his lawyers to question two of Holtzman Vogel's neighbors and two GOP activists to see what they know. A third Republican, Del. Glenn Davis Jr., is running and has managed to stay out of this mess.
The Democratic primary is far more sedate. The candidates are former federal prosecutor Justin Fairfax, who lost the 2013 primary for attorney general to eventual winner Mark Herring 52-48; Gene Rossi, another former federal prosecutor; and Susan Platt, who served as Joe Biden's chief of staff in the Senate in the 1990s. While the general election will be overshadowed by the gubernatorial race, this is an important contest. The GOP has just a 21-19 majority in the Virginia Senate and if Democrats can net just one seat in the 2019 elections (or through a special election before then), the lieutenant governor will be tasked with breaking the tie. The lieutenant governor's office is also one of the few statewide elected offices in Virginia, and it can be a good stepping-stone to bigger things.
● Los Angeles, CA Measure S: The Los Angeles municipal primary election is on March 7, but the top-of-the-ticket item is a real snooze, since Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti faces only minor opposition in his quest for a second term. Instead, the most hotly contested item is a ballot measure, Measure S. You wouldn't expect a measure about zoning and land use laws to generate much passion, but Los Angeles is one of those major cities that's choking on its own success, where skyrocketing housing costs are the main sources of dissatisfaction and in fact a potential threat to further growth and dynamism. The problem is, everyone has their own theory about what's driving those costs, and Measure S's proponents think that overdevelopment is what needs to be stopped.
Measure S is, ostensibly, about stopping the nexus between elected officials and developers, who allegedly give donations to officials in exchange for "spot zoning" changes (which, in theory, are already illegal in California) that let them build expensive new buildings. However, Measure S is a particularly broad response, which would create a temporary ban on all new projects in that lift land use restrictions or increase building heights or densities.
Opponents contend that the problem is not enough units in a city that people are pouring into, and Los Angeles needs 382,000 new units just to meet current demand; that increasing supply is the only way to bring down costs; and that passing the measure will bring new development to a halt, making it even less affordable for future generations of people who'd like to move to L.A. and participate in its otherwise thriving economy. Though most of the city's elected officials, business interests, and labor are all on the "no" side, the "yes" side has actually spent more money on the election. However, most of that money comes from one source, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation … for whom the main objection seems to be a literally "not in my backyard" objection to a particular new project next to its headquarters.
Grab Bag
● International: Daily Kos Elections published its latest International Elections Digest covering key electoral developments around the world. Left-wing populists could lose power in Ecuador's presidential runoff after a decade in power, and France's critical presidential race keeps lurching from one surprise to the next. Check out the full March edition for other stories on the Netherlands, Macedonia, East Timor, and other countries.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Stephen Wolf, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, and James Lambert.“What fool dares awaken me, the great Laharl?”
—Laharl, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
Laharl is a recurring character in the Disgaea series. Arrogant and self-centred, Laharl attempts to maintain the attitude of a typical demon. He is actually a half-demon, due to his mother being a human. He is known for his evil laugh which is heard numerous times throughout the series. The first game in the series, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness chronicles his attempt to inherit his title of Overlord after the death of his father, King Krichevskoy, and his eventual discovery of love.
Contents show]
Appearance Edit
Laharl's appearance hasn't changed much between games, but there are some noticeable differences. In Disgaea 1 he is shown to have short blue hair with a set of antennae-like hair strands coming off of it, bright red eyes, pointy ears and a rather unimpressive body. He wears a red cape that by Disgaea 2 has been changed from one cape trail to two cape trails. His other clothes include a pair of red shorts, red-and-brown shoes and a set of gold bracelets.
In Disgaea D2, his outfit has been slightly re-designed. His shorts are now a slightly-longer pair of red pants, tied at the bottoms with small ribbons. His shoes have beem simplied to all-brown boots, and his "hair stalks" have seemingly grown in length. He also now sports a set of black gloves and his body appears more physically mature overall. Laharl also possesses a female form in DD2, which has a very similar clothing design to his normal form. However, there are some noticeable changes. Her cape has gone back to one trail and her pants have been extended to a pair of ripped skinny jeans. Her chest has expanded greatly and now needs to be held back by a small red bra top, and her shoes are now all-black. She also has much longer hair compared to her male self as well as a much skinnier and more feminine figure.
Personality Edit
Laharl is incredibly arrogant as well as snarky and always tries to prove that he is the strongest demon in the Netherworld and takes being Evil seriously, finding virtues to be vices and vices to be virtues. He is, however, extremely powerful for his appearance, which, despite his age, is still that of a small human child (his large hair antennae and billowing scarf are meant to mask this fact). However, he has a weakness towards (as in, he literally gets hurt by) optimistic sayings (especially anything concerning the word 'love') and women with sexy bodies. Maderas took advantage of both weaknesses in both the game and the anime by having pretty girls say optimistic things (succubi in the game and miscellaneous pretty demon girls in the anime). He claims that Flonne and Etna don't bother him since they're flat-chested, something which they obviously take as an insult. He appears to have gotten over his aversion in his later appearances, as he isn't bothered by Rozalin's revealing outfit (Although a conversation with Machiko in Disgaea 3 after being recruited shows he's still highly nervous around them). Although Laharl considers himself evil, he never does anything that may be considered truly immoral. He only briefly considers doing anything to the Earth, and the only things he can think of are making it rain pepper and giving kids an addicting video game. Laharl also loves to laugh evilly, believing it is an important part of being the Overlord. Even when towards the end of the first game when Laharl has clearly turned good, he still continues acting like he's evil, except for when Lammington turns Flonne into a flower. At that he point he displays outright hate for the Seraph, believing that he turned on Flonne after she believed in him. This is, and in the normal ending where Laharl sacrifices his life to revive Flonne, are the only times he admits to caring about her, any other time he denies doing so. It is strongly implied that he harbors romantic feelings for Flonne because the only way to cast the revival spell that takes the user's life is if the user has love for the person he/she revives, similar to how Laharl's mother took her own life to cure Laharl's deadly disease. This is the reason Laharl rejects love and thinks love is useless because it was the cause of his mother's sacrifice.
In Laharl's future appearances, he maintains his ego and view that he is evil, and displays outrage whenever he isn't the main character, and attempts to take the role from whoever it happens to be at the time. His obsession with this is perhaps best shown when he appears in Disgaea 3, where he accuses Mao of being the "Legendary Overlord" that stole from him, but reveals after fighting him that he knew it was really Baal and only accused him just so he could increase his screen time.
In Disgaea 4, Laharl again appears in the post-game, wanting to become the new protagonist of the story and take over the Presidency from the challengers aiming to get at it, after Axel, Raspberyl, and others try to take it. He loses against Valvatorez and his party, and joins the party, supposedly to increase the time he spends on-screen. He also asks Valvatorez if he could whip his prinnies back into shape due to current obedience problems he has with them.
Story Edit
Spoiler warning : Plot and/or ending details follow.
Laharl is the son of King Krichevskoy, ruler of the Netherworld. However, after awakening from a two year slumber, he discovers that his father is dead and almost all of his vassals are gone - most of them are, in fact, trying to take Laharl's place, rather than serving him. As the rightful heir to the throne, Laharl sets out to take the throne by force with his vassal Etna's help, and proclaim himself as the true Overlord of the Netherworld
He begins by crashing the house of a nearby demon Vyers, "the Dark Adonis", defeating the newly christened "Mid Boss" as the first stepping stone on the path to the throne - a path to be built of his defeated foes. However, his plans are interrupted by the appearance of the angel trainee Flonne, sent from Celestia to assassinate (the late) King Krichevskoy. Chasing the would-be assassin, he eventually manages to corner and defeat her. Laharl then informs her about her target's death, and upon learning of Laharl's lack of grief for his father's demise, Flonne joins his party to study demon nature and threatens that, if in need, she will switch her target.
Flonne is at first discouraged by his evil behavior: crashing another demon's house, pillaging it, and then preparing to kill the house's owner, Hoggmeiser, one of Krichevskoy's former vassals. However, Laharl chooses to spare Hoggmeiser when his son, Porkmeiser appears to defend him, leading Flonne to believe that his heart is indeed capable of love. When Vulcanus, a stubborn angel, steals Flonne's pendant, which angel trainees need to survive in the Netherworld, Laharl is enticed by Flonne's promise of "something good" to go and find it. The group finally track it down to Vyers and defeat him once again, recovering the pendant. At this time, Laharl is relieved to find that the pendant burns him, meaning that his heart is wicked. Etna praises Flonne for deceiving the Prince, as her "something good" was giving Laharl the chance to see the kindness in his heart.
Even after Laharl is crowned the new Overlord half way through the game, he is still referred to as "Prince" by Etna and all those who still remain in the Overlord's Castle, probably out of habit (although there are hints that several of Laharl's vassals do not see him as worthy enough to replace his father as Overlord).
It is also shown that Laharl has incredible power within him that he unleashed only when the Seraph had turned Flonne into a flower. It could be that his true power is being held back by his human-half, and only releases the power when he's feeling incredible rage.
In general, the accepted ending is the good ending, in which Laharl spares Lamington's life and is stopped by Mid Boss before he sacrifices himself, allowing him to see Flonne become a Fallen Angel.
In the last episode of the anime, however, Laharl gives the title of Overlord to Etna, then he sacrifices himself in an attempt to revive Flonne. This ending is similar to the normal ending of the game, except that in the game Laharl succeeds in killing Lamington, who would've brought Flonne back to life had he been spared. In the last scenes of the final anime episode it is shown that he has become a Prinny, possessing all the powers he had before when he darkens the sky and very unwilling to work like a regular prinny since he is found in a sun lounger.
Etna Mode Edit
In the alternate story Etna Mode in the PSP/DS version, Etna kills Laharl as he wakes up by accident. While playing this mode, the player will not have access to Laharl. In order to prevent suspicion from Maderas, Etna places fake antennas on a Prinny and passes it off as Laharl. By the end of Etna Mode, Laharl is actually revealed to be alive. The shot that supposedly killed him only knocked him out, and he is found by Etna in Stellar Graveyard.
Manga Edit
In the Disgaea manga, Laharl's personality slightly differs. While he is selfish, arrogant, and is willing to use violence to solve his problems, he comes off more mature than his game counterpart, appearing to also be slightly smarter (when Flonne tells Laharl that the Seraph believes demons have love too, Laharl reminds her that her mission to assassinate the Overlord was given to her by the same person). Laharl also appears to hate his father even more in the manga as Laharl is often overshadowed by Krichevskoy, not to mention Krichevskoy's personality annoys Laharl.
Gameplay Style Edit
Main article: Demon Prince
Laharl is the usual "Hard-Hitting Warrior" character. His attack stat and aptitude are both high to suit this. His default weapon is the sword, making Laharl flexible and easy to level due to the Sword Skill "Winged Slayer" (or "Slayer's Descent" in the third game). His unique special skills are Blazing Knuckle (獄炎ナックル), Overlord's Wrath (魔王玉), and Meteor Impact (メテオインパクト). In Disgaea D2, however, he learns a new move (albeit at a very high level) called Overlord Dimension. Laharl can wield any melee weapon with ease however, as he has a Mastery of "A" in every weapon except for Guns and Staves.
Other Appearances Edit
Laharl first appears in Disgaea 2 after he learns that Etna has defeated Overlord Zenon, and goes after her to force her to come back to his castle, having had nothing to eat but canned tuna because she took the Prinnies with her. He encounters the party in episode 11 and defeats them easily. However, Rozalin stubbornly stands against him, causing Laharl to break the seal on True Zenon out of curiosity. True Zenon proves far too powerful for Laharl, who quickly runs away (though it should be noted that Laharl didn't even seem injured after the fight, just frustrated that he wasn't able to overcome her). He later returns and tries to make himself the main character of Disgaea 2, blaming not being the main character for his defeat. It's revealed that the reason Etna left was because Laharl stole her rare pudding. He is playable after completing the optional missions "I want to fight an Overlord!" and "Summon Laharl!". When completing the final mission, Laharl joins after tasting Hanako's cooking since he can't make her his chef. In the good ending, Etna goes back to serving him and Hanako joins her.
Laharl appears before Mao, who Laharl assumes to be the legendary Overlord who stole his height (Claiming to be 6'6). Mao, however, believes that Laharl is the legendary Overlord and the two fight. When the battle ends, Mao and Laharl appear to be evenly matched until Almaz makes them realize that neither of them are the legendary Overlord. Laharl, along with Etna and Flonne, joins the party and reveals to Mao that the legendary Over |
"neo-Nazis" and on the brink of chaos and collapse.
The Ukrainian National Council for TV and Radio Broadcasting instructed all cable operators on 11 March to stop transmitting a number of Russian channels, including the international versions of the main state-controlled stations Rossiya 1, Channel One and NTV, as well as news channel Rossiya 24.
It said it was acting in the interests of "information security". It was also responding to calls from the National Security and Defence Council, which on 6 March said the presence of Russian TV channels in Ukraine's "information space" represented a threat to "national security".
'Apocalyptic'
Russian TV's attacks on Ukraine have been relentless. As critic Yekaterina Bolotovskaya wrote on Russian website Gazeta.ru, they have been painting an "apocalyptic" picture of the country, embellished by "bellicose language" reminiscent of the height of the Cold War.
Writing for the American magazine Politico, journalist Leonid Ragozin said that Russian propaganda usually contained a "grain of truth", but this was then used in the service of a "big lie".
For example, he said, it was perfectly true that ultranationalists played a key role in the street clashes that led to the overthrow of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, but "all this is a far cry from Nazis taking over Kiev, an image now being stamped into the brains of Russian and East Ukrainian audiences 24 hours a day on Kremlin mouthpieces".
This message has been supplemented in recent days by a constant stream of reports backing Crimea's unification with Russia, ahead of a disputed referendum on the peninsula's future on 16 March.
"We have not stopped regarding Crimea as ours," a Rossiya 1 news presenter declared on 9 March.
Image copyright AP Image caption News channel Rossiya 24 is one of the four channels blacklisted by Ukraine's regulator
Russian TV's role in the current crisis has been crucial because it has been widely watched in Ukraine, especially the mainly Russian-speaking east and south of the country.
In Crimea, Russian TV channels have now almost completely replaced Ukrainian ones.
Ukraine's media news website Telekrytyka has been at the forefront of efforts to confront what it calls the "manipulation of facts" and "overt lies" disseminated by Russian TV.
It pointed to a Rossiya 1 report from 1 March, which appeared to show a gun battle outside a government building in Crimea. "An analysis later showed the video was staged," Telekrytyka said.
Reports like this were used to justify Russia's stepping up its military presence in Crimea and supporting the separatist movement there.
Russian TV has also repeatedly alleged that Ukrainian "extremists" have been harassing and terrorising journalists, though until recently it had provided little actual evidence for this.
That is, until pro-Moscow journalist Sergey Rulev told several of Russia's leading TV channels how he had been set upon by a gang of nationalists who had punched and kicked him, and tried to rip out his fingernails. A report on Gazprom-Media's NTVon 6 March even showed YouTube footage of the alleged attack.
But, as Ukrainian blogger Pauluskp pointed out, the full video of the incident (which took place on or before 20 February) clearly shows that Rulev was attacked not by nationalists but by ex-President Yanukovych's hired heavies - the so-called titushki.
Activists at StopFake, a website set up by Ukrainian journalists to monitor media coverage of the current crisis, have compiled a whole dossier of what they call "distortions and propaganda"
Showing how Russian TV passed off disturbances in Kiev as violent clashes on the streets of the Crimean capital Simferopol
Highlighting evidence that contradicts Russian media claims of a mass exodus of refugees from Ukraine to escape the violence and chaos there
Collecting extensive photographic and video evidence that appears to show that parts of Crimea are occupied by Russian troops - something flatly denied by President Vladimir Putin and ignored by Russian TV
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A Ukrainian soldier watches a news broadcast at the Belbek military base in Crimea
Evidence of Russian military activity in Crimea can also be found on the YouTube channel of Information Resistance, an impromptu news agency set up by Dmytro Tymchuk, head of the Ukrainian Centre for Military-Political Studies.
'Dictatorship'
The issue of how to respond to Russian TV's onslaught has been hotly debated in Ukraine in recent weeks.
Some MPs and media experts have been calling for a clampdown. But others, such as Telekrytyka's chief editor Nataliya Lihachova, have warned that this could be "senseless and harmful".
In a news conference on 4 March, she said that blocking Russian TV channels could have a similar effect to the Ukrainian parliament's annulment of the law on regional languages, which would have, among other things, lowered the status of Russian in Ukraine.
The annulment was vetoed by interim President Oleksandr Turchynov after a public outcry.
Russian nationalist MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky told a news conference at the State Duma on 12 March that the ban on Russian channels in Ukraine was an act of "dictatorship". Rossiya 1 said he spoke for MPs of all parties.
Russia has also reacted angrily to Ukraine stopping some Russian journalists from entering its territory. The Foreign Ministry accused the international community of turning a blind eye to "such manifestations of censorship".
Up to half of Ukraine's cable operators have now stopped carrying the main Russian channels, according to the media regulator. The largest operator Volya has said it will follow suit in the next few days.
Viewers in Ukraine are also able to access Russian TV via satellite.
BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. For more reports from BBC Monitoring, click here. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.I had a chance to fondle the new Kawasaki Ninja 300 at the International Motorcycle Show in DC last week, and it certainly is a sharp looking little bike.
However, looks can be deceiving – if you check out the specs, Kawasaki’s new “lightweight” sportbike tips the scales at an embarrassing 379lbs.
Now, I’m not going to try and argue that the new Ninja’s design choices were bad from a commercial perspective. At the end of the day, Kawasaki is out to make money, and the Ninja 300 falls in an extremely competitive market segment. Conventional wisdom is that American motorcycle buyers only look at horsepower per dollar, so they built a bike with a hot motor and a low price tag. The Ninja blows it’s competition out of the water in terms of peak HP, and I’m sure it will sell briskly based on that fact alone. I would venture to guess that most of the target buyers won’t even bother to look at dry weight, because they don’t know enough to give a damn about it.
The end.
I just want to point out that, along with practically every sportbike on the market today, the little Ninja is a big fat pig of a motorcycle.
Some of my past posts (here and here) have featured custom builds that reduced weight substantially from the stock figures, and I think with the high stock output of modern engines, weight reduction is really the most effective modification you can make to a bike.
If you take a look at the world of racing to get a sense of what’s possible with current engineering, you will see that 250cc singles racing in the Moto 3 class weigh in at less than 150lbs. Admittedly, these bikes would be cramped for a grown adult (see below), don’t have any lights or DOT mandated junk, and the frames probably get checked for cracks after every race.
But with even the lightest road going 250 bikes coming in at more than double the weight, it’s clear that the current offerings are laughably overbuilt. Should you care?
Riding my 1989 VTR250 (at 310lb the lightest street bike I’ve owned) back to back with a modern FZ6 (420lbs), the weight difference has an obvious impact on handling. Even with 1980’s suspension and brakes, the VTR has effortless, telepathic, almost supernatural handling compared to the FZ. On the tight mid-speed stuff I like to ride, 110lbs is the difference between fighting to keep the bike on the road and being able to push it hard into the corners.
I can only imagine what losing another 100lbs would do to the ride since, apparently, nobody is willing to sell me such a bike.
The KTM Duke 390 down below, which comes in at a claimed 306lbs, is quite a bit closer to the goal than any of the Japanese offerings, but again, not even in the same league as the racers.
The best alternative anyone has come up with so far is a converted dirt bike, a so-called “super single” sportbike build. A Yamaha WR450 which cranks out almost 60hp and weights less than 250lbs stock could be built into a formidable road weapon if you could get a street title for it, but there is some serious re-engineering necessary to get the correct chassis geometry. Roland Sands Design has a beautiful conversion kit that you can buy for only $15,000, but until I find that huge pile of money I misplaced (or I can lay hands on a suitable donor bike for my own super single), the plan is to see how light I can go with the little VTR.
Stay tuned for build updates on that one. I’m currently staring at it and trying to decide what I should cut off first.
[subscribe2]Update 9/10 All of my textures are now copyright free! You can find all of my textures on https://texture.ninja/ or download them here.
This is a pack of (non-tiling) 1032 textures for commercial use. License type CC-0
You can either download it straight from Gumroad or download the torrent. I've included a half resolution download as well. For those who don't need the full resolution. Full res download is 11.5 GB, low res is 5.4 GB.
The majority of these textures were shot with my new Nikon d750. Uncropped resolution is ~6000x4000.
I've put in a lot of effort to ensure the quality is MUCH better and more consistent than the previous pack. Sharper textures, better perspectives and calibrated colors to name a few things. I was also a lot more strict in removing undesirable textures.
If you have the means I'd appreciate any donation, even if it's $1. I'm no longer working full time so donations directly affect my ability to dedicate time to work on more texture packs and other useful products.
Rough contents:
Wood 403 ( There was a lot of interesting wood around me)
Paint 296 ( Quite a broad category but there's some really useful textures in there)
Bark 35
Brick 48
Concrete 16
Cracks 12
Ground 32
Grunge 18
Metal 29
Signs 19
Sewer covers/misc 16
rust 19
http://joostvanhoutte.com/The world’s most sensitive search for dark matter announced today that it has found—nothing. The first results from the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector are null, scientists say, indicating that the invisible matter thought to make up a large chunk of the universe is even more elusive than many experts thought.
Buried about a kilometer and a half underground in a repurposed South Dakota gold mine that is now the Sanford Underground Research Facility, the LUX experiment searches for signs of dark matter particles colliding with the atoms in a vat of liquid xenon. During its first three months of operation the detector found no such signals whatsoever. “We looked hard for these dark matter particles and we didn’t see anything,” says physicist Rick Gaitskell of Brown University, LUX co-spokesperson. The results, presented at a seminar today and submitted to Physical Review Letters for publication [pdf], rule out a number of possible masses and characteristics for the particles that make up dark matter. The null result also conflicts with earlier experiments that had reported possible dark matter signals.
About a quarter of the universe seems to be dark matter, which makes its presence felt through gravity, despite the fact that it cannot be seen or touched. A leading explanation for dark matter posits that it is made of particles called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). If they exist, a billion of these WIMPs probably pass through your body every second without any of your atoms noticing. The particles’ reticence to interact with normal matter presents a challenge to physicists who aim to detect dark matter. Hypotheses suggest, however, that once in a very rare while WIMPs should slam into normal atoms instead of passing through the space between them.
LUX researchers hope to catch these scarce impacts by measuring light particles (photons) given off by a xenon atom that has been bumped by dark matter. To reduce the chances of anything else causing the xenon to emit light—such as charged particles from space called cosmic rays—the detector is heavily shielded and buried deep in the mine. In terms of background radioactivity, cosmic rays and other contaminants, the center of LUX’s tank of 370 kilograms of xenon is the “quietest place in the world,” Gaitskell says. The experiment is twice as sensitive as other detectors to hypothetical dark matter particles with large masses, and provides an even greater improvement if dark matter particles are relatively lightweight, the scientists say. The fact that LUX has yet to register any such hits indicates that the particles in the mass range it is sensitive to—between five and 10,000 times the mass of a proton (a unit called a giga–electron volt)—interact extremely rarely with regular matter.
The new LUX results also cast doubt on previous claims of possible dark matter detection. The DAMA (for DArk MAtter) project in Italy claimed to have seen signs of WIMPs more than a decade ago, and more recently the CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) and the CoGeNT (Coherent Germanium Neutrino Technology) experiment, both in Minnesota, saw handfuls of events that might be attributable to dark matter. “I’m afraid I can’t see their claims really surviving this,” Gaitskell says.
The other teams, however, are not ready to concede defeat. Juan Collar of the University of Chicago, who heads the CoGeNT project, says he believes that the LUX team has not properly accounted for electric field effects and may therefore have overestimated the sensitivity of the xenon detector for low-mass WIMPs. Blas Cabrera of Stanford University, who leads the CDMS project, also maintains that what his project has seen may still prove to be dark matter. “It is unlikely that LUX has ruled out the entire region of interest” for low-mass WIMPs because xenon is not as sensitive as other materials to dark matter in that mass range, he says. (CDMS uses silicon and germanium detectors.) “In spite of these friendly criticisms we are all excited by the success of a new carefully built WIMP search experiment,” Cabrera says. “We also continue to believe that, given the difficulty of all experiments and the uncertainty of the properties of dark matter particles, it is very important [to use] multiple target materials and different detector technologies.”
The competition is fierce to be the first experiment to find dark matter, but the researchers say they care more about answers than fame. “At this point in my career, I am much less concerned with which experiment discovers the dark matter particles, and much more I would like to know within my lifetime,” Cabrera says.
LUX is the latest in a series of searches that have been running for more than three decades, all without finding conclusive evidence of dark matter. But the scientists are not discouraged. “I can’t say I’m disappointed,” says LUX co-spokesman Daniel McKinsey of Yale University. “We’re just so happy the instrument is performing so well.” LUX continues to gather data, and the researchers are already planning an even bigger xenon detector called LUX-ZEPLIN. “Hopefully, next time we’ll be announcing a [positive] result,” Gaitskell says. “That, as they say, we’ll leave in the lap of the gods.”(Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)
Saturn’s diminutive moon, Mimas, poses as the Death Star – the planet-destroying space station from the movie Star Wars – in an image recently captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
A giant crater 138 kilometres across dominates the landscape of Mimas and represents almost one-third of the moon’s diameter.
Scientists first noticed Mimas’s resemblance to the Death Star when the twin Voyager spacecraft flew past Saturn in 1980 and 1981. The second film in the movie series – The Empire Strikes Back – had just hit movie theatres, recalls Cassini deputy project scientist Linda Spilker.
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Now, Cassini has taken an even better image than those from the Voyager probes with its narrow-angle camera. It snapped the photo on 16 January 2005 from 213,000 km away at a resolution of 1.3 km per pixel.
Heavy fire
Like the Death Star, Mimas has found itself on the receiving end of some heavy fire. The crater was probably caused by an enormous asteroid impact. But the moon only just survived – if the asteroid had been any bigger or moving much faster, it probably would have split the moon in two.
Most of the craters on Mimas are named after characters in Camelot. But the biggest crater was named after Sir William Herschel, the scientist who discovered Mimas. “Herschel’s the oddball crater that doesn’t really fit in,” Spilker told New Scientist.
The peak in the middle of Herschel crater was also formed by the impact, when pulverised or molten rock rebounded upwards like a droplet of water splashing up from a pool of water.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, released the image on Thursday.The Monarch, along with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry are due to sit down with 10,000 guests at the Patron’s Lunch next month.
A mystery millionaire has spared the blushes of the Queen’s grandson Peter Phillips by buying £100,000-worth of tickets for her 90th birthday party on The Mall.
With charities struggling to afford the £150-a-head asking price for the street party tickets, it had been feared that the highlight of Her Majesty’s birthday celebrations would be a flop.
But a benefactor has stepped in at the 11th hour – on condition of anonymity – and bought hundreds of unsold seats for charities, the Mail can reveal.
The Monarch, along with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry are due to sit down with 10,000 guests at the Patron’s Lunch next month.
Yet even with the anonymous donor’s help, a quarter of the tickets have had to be sold to the public, suggesting the situation was more dire than first thought.
Mr Phillips, who is the London director of Australian firm Sports and Entertainment Limited, initially announced just 1,000 of the 10,000 tickets would be available to the public, with the rest going to the Queen’s charities.
That figure has now risen to 2,500, meaning at least a quarter of those who go to the event on June 12 will have no link to her charities at all.
Mr Phillips’ firm will take an undisclosed fee for the event as invited organisations struggle to find the cash for tickets. Charities have even been told they can auction up to 40 per cent of their allocation in order to raise money for their staff to be able to attend.
The Patron’s Lunch will be the highlight of three days of celebrations, which include a national service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral and Trooping the Colour.
Guests at the street party – one of the biggest ever – will have a luxury hamper-style lunch provided by M&S and ‘carnival-style’ entertainment.
There has been criticism over Mr Phillips, who is Princess Anne’s son, being paid an undisclosed fee to organise the not-for-profit event.
His firm’s cut will be paid out of money raised by ticket sales and programmes. Any profit will go to the Queen’s charities.
Questions were raised over why organisations supported by the Monarch should have to pay to attend an official royal celebration of their role.
One charity worker described it as a ‘sting in the tail’.
It is thanks only to the anonymous donor that many smaller organisations are able to attend. A source said: ‘A donor approached Buckingham Palace saying they wanted to donate a number of tickets anonymously.
There has been criticism over Mr Phillips (pictured), who is Princess Anne’s son, being paid an undisclosed fee to organise the not-for-profit event.
‘The Palace approached the Patron’s Lunch organisers to see if they could help facilitate this and then wrote to the 600-plus organisations and charities involved in the event to let them know about the generous offer and the tickets were allocated.’
It has not been revealed how many tickets were donated but it is known to be up to a tenth of the 7,500 seats for charities.
A Patron’s Lunch spokesman said: ‘We are delighted that a number of tickets have been provided to patron’s organisations by a third-party donor.’
They highlighted that 76 per of the international organisations represented by the Queen and 90 per cent of UK-based charities were attending the event, which will be televised by the BBC, but it is unclear how many owe their attendance to the donation.
Mr Phillips has insisted he did not secure the contract to organise the event because the Queen is his grandmother.
But he has admitted that he had discussed it with her.This article is a series of quick tips for anyone that has ever wanted to bold, italicize, underline, or highlight a portion of text in a NativeScript app. For example, suppose you had the following code in your app.
<StackLayout class="p-20"> <Label textWrap="true" text="NativeScript is an AMAZING framework!"></Label> </StackLayout>
This code works, and displays the label as such.
Although this code works, let’s be honest—a sentence without formatting can’t convey how amazing NativeScript really is. If you switch to use the code below you can make AMAZING really stand out in bold.
<StackLayout class="p-20"> <Label textWrap="true"> <Label.formattedText> <FormattedString> <FormattedString.spans> <Span text="NativeScript is an " /> <Span text="AMAZING" fontAttributes="Bold" /> <Span text=" framework." /> </FormattedString.spans> </FormattedString> </Label.formattedText> </Label> </StackLayout>
NOTE: If you’re using Angular with NativeScript the syntax you’ll need is slightly different—more on that in a moment.
The label now renders like this.
This code leverages NativeScript’s FormattedString class, which is a handy little utility for altering portions of text in NativeScript apps. Notice how the code breaks the string into three parts, or spans.
<Span text="NativeScript is an " /> <Span text="AMAZING" fontAttributes="Bold" /> <Span text=" framework." />
Each of these Span components can use a number of attributes, such as backgroundColor, fontFamily, fontSize, foregroundColor, strikethrough, and underline. We’ll look at a few examples of this in a moment, but first there’s one caveat we must discuss.
Angular usage
If you try to copy and paste the above example into a NativeScript & Angular app your life will be full of syntax errors.
But no worries! NativeScript has a special built-in directive to make use the same FormattedString class possible, and actually a lot easier. The following code snippet runs just fine in a NativeScript & Angular app.
<StackLayout class="page m-20"> <Label> <FormattedString> <Span text="NativeScript is an "></Span> <Span text="AMAZING" fontAttributes="Bold"></Span> <Span text=" framework."></Span> </FormattedString> </Label> </StackLayout>
And this code renders exactly the same as the previous example.
The syntax is so much nicer that I’m going to use it for the rest of this article, because no one needs more <Label.formattedText> and </FormattedString.spans> in their lives. If you are using NativeScript without Angular, just know that you’ll need to wrap this article’s subsequent examples with the markup from the first example.
With that out of the way, let’s do some practical and ridiculous things with <FormattedString>.
Fun with FormattedString
For the rest of this article I’m going to show a few code snippets and how they render. You can always look up these APIs your self on the FormattedString API docs.
Italics
<StackLayout class="page m-20"> <Label> <FormattedString> <Span text="NativeScript is an "></Span> <Span text="AMAZING" fontAttributes="Italic"></Span> <Span text=" framework."></Span> </FormattedString> </Label> </StackLayout>
Underlining
<StackLayout class="page m-20"> <Label> <FormattedString> <Span text="NativeScript is an "></Span> <Span text="AMAZING" underline="true"></Span> <Span text=" framework."></Span> </FormattedString> </Label> </StackLayout>
Colors
<StackLayout class="page m-20"> <Label> <FormattedString> <Span text="NativeScript" foregroundColor="#3C5AFD"></Span> <Span text=" is an AMAZING framework."></Span> </FormattedString> </Label> </StackLayout>
Crazy
<StackLayout class="page m-20"> <Label textWrap="true"> <FormattedString> <Span text="NativeScript" foregroundColor="#3C5AFD"></Span> <Span text=" is an "></Span> <Span text="AMAZING" fontSize="28" underline="true" backgroundColor="green" foregroundColor="white" fontFamily="Courier"></Span> <Span text=" framework."></Span> </FormattedString> </Label> </StackLayout>
Other UI Components
Oh yeah, one more thing before you return to the rest of the internet—you can totally use the FormattedString with other NativeScript UI components.
In fact, I can change the previous “Crazy” example from a <Label> to a <Button>, and everything just works.
<StackLayout class="page m-20"> <Button> <FormattedString> <Span text="NativeScript" foregroundColor="#3C5AFD"></Span> <Span text=" is an "></Span> <Span text="AMAZING" fontSize="28" underline="true" backgroundColor="green" foregroundColor="white" fontFamily="Courier"></Span> <Span text=" framework."></Span> </FormattedString> </Button> </StackLayout>
The button looks like this on iOS.
And like this on Android.
It’s actually pretty crazy what you can use these APIs to do. Believe it or not, this works.
<StackLayout class="page m-20"> <TextField> <FormattedString> <Span text="NativeScript" foregroundColor="#3C5AFD"></Span> <Span text=" is an "></Span> <Span text="AMAZING" fontSize="28" underline="true" backgroundColor="green" foregroundColor="white" fontFamily="Courier"></Span> <Span text=" framework."></Span> </FormattedString> </TextField> </StackLayout>
Fun, huh? Hopefully I’ve shown you that NativeScript’s FormattedString class is a powerful way to format any text in your NativeScript apps.University astronomy departments and planetariums, especially those near large population centers, typically receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of daily telephone calls per year from the general public with questions about cosmic phenomena. Some of the calls are induced by heavily publicized events such as lunar and solar eclipses, or planet-Moon conjunctions, while other telephone calls are simply the consequence of people with curious minds who should have otherwise been busy at their jobs. In all cases, however, the array of questions reveals a genuine interest in celestial happenings that serve as a daily reminder to professional astronomers that in the absence of telescopes and computers and theories, one can still be awed by just looking up.
Earth
It is often said that Earth’s axis is tipped in space. But in space, there is no uniform up or down, so being tipped can only have relative meaning. We can draw on a sheet of paper the slightly flattened circle of Earth’s eccentric orbit, and ask whether Earth’s axis points straight out of the page. It does not. Earth’s axis is tipped slightly more than one fourth of the way towards the plane of the page. When measured in angle, it amounts to about 23 ½ degrees. That the round Earth rotates on a tipped axis and revolves around the Sun required millenia of the worlds greatest thinkers to unravel. So there is no need to get upset if this circus of motion has ever left you confused.
It is sometimes convenient to think of the sky above you as the inner surface of an inverted salad bowl, which forms what is otherwise known as a hemisphere. Following this analogy, the entire sky as seen from Earth, is known as the celestial sphere. By helpful coincidence, the North Pole of Earth’s axis points near a star “on” the sky, which is, of course, called the North Star. The South Pole points to a big empty area that is not too far from the Southern Cross. If we continue this cosmic correspondence, we can also project Earth’s equator onto the sky. With this simple exercise, we have identified three places: the North Celestial Pole, the South Celestial Pole, and the Celestial Equator. In a layout that is analogous to Earth’s longitude and latitude, there exists coordinates for the sky called right ascension and declination.
Contrary to popular belief, Earth rotates on its axis once in 23 hours and 56 minutes, not 24 hours. In other words, a star, or any other spot on the sky, will return to the same location above you every 23 hours, 56 minutes. On average, however, the Sun reaches its highest spot on the sky every 24 hours. For daily scheduling, people tend to respect, honor, and obey the Sun—not the rest of the stars in the sky. Most of human civilization has therefore chosen to set clocks against the 24 hours of the Sun. Astronomers, however, conduct business in star time. All time-keeping devices that are set to the stars are called sidereal clocks, where midnight sidereal time equals midnight Sun time only once a year on the first day of autumn, which falls on or near September 21st. Thereafter, for every day of the year, the sidereal clock will lose 4 minutes against the Sun clock because Earth must rotate an extra 4 minutes just to return the Sun to the same location as the day before.
Earth’s orbital motion insures that day-to-day the Sun’s position in the sky will migrate across the background of stars1. There is nothing complex about this. If your name were Fido, and you were tethered to a pole, and if you decided to run in circles around it, then you would systematically observe the pole to appear in front of every part of your surroundings. Earth is tethered to the Sun by gravity, and Earth moves in unending circles around the Sun. The only important difference is that Earth is not likely to strangle itself.
Longitude on Earth is measured in degrees, yet right ascension, the corresponding cosmic coordinate, is measured in hours. Where does right ascension begin? In the same place that longitude begins, at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Greenwich, England. Using an accurate clock—sidereal of course—the time in Greenwich is the right ascension of the star that happens to be crossing a line through the zenith that connects due north and due south. For anybody in the world, this line is called a meridian, but for Greenwich it is exaltedly known as the Prime Meridian—not by cosmic mandate, but by international convention. Zero degrees longitude, the Earth boundary between east and west, is also defined to go through Greenwich. Incidentally, there is no cosmic reason why the Prime Meridian could not have been Eddie’s Steak House in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Except that Eddie would be obligated to supply right ascensions to the world astronomical community for all stars in the sky. He could, however, start a catchy ad-campaign, “Enjoy your Prime Rib on the Prime Meridian!”
Sometimes simple longitudes, latitudes, and meridians are not enough. I once received a telephone call at my office from a practicing Muslim, who was new to the New York City area. The caller needed to know the exact direction that points toward the shortest distance to the sacred Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (not to be confused with Mecca, California or Mecca, Indiana). It is this direction that one uses when it is time to pray toward Mecca. The solution is a non-trivial problem in spherical trigonometry that begins with a straight line that connects New York City to Mecca through the Earth, and then projects the line up to Earth’s surface. The result is what is called a great circle, which is normally the most desirous path for airplanes to fly. I computed the direction and told the caller. And like the proverbial boy scout who helps old ladies cross the street, I logged it as a public service deed for the day.
As you might expect, the annual path that the Sun appears to take against the background stars is obliquely tilted from the celestial equator at the same 23 ½ degree angle as the tilt of Earth’s axis from a direction that is straight out of its plane of orbit. There can only be a solar or lunar eclipse when the Moon is very near the Sun’s path. Reflecting this requirement, the Sun’s path has been and officially named the ecliptic. The ecliptic and the celestial equator form tilted rings across the entire sky that intersect at two nodes. The angle of the tilt is mouth-fillingly called the obliquity of the ecliptic.
The Sun is south of the celestial equator for half the year and north of the celestial equator for the other half. Therein lies the origin of the variation in daylight through out the year and the origin of the seasons. By definition, spring begins when the center of the Sun’s disk crosses the celestial equator from south to north—the ascending node. This is why newspapers report the particular minute of the day when spring begins. They could, if they felt so inclined, report the beginning of spring to the fraction of a second. By definition, summer begins when the Sun has climbed the farthest north of the celestial equator. This is where the two tilted rings have their greatest separation. As is true with spring, summer occurs at a particular moment that could be reported to the fraction of a second if there were public demand for such precision.
The important spots along the rest of the Sun’s path can be readily deduced. The first moment of autumn is when the Sun crosses the celestial equator going south—the descending node—and the first moment of winter is when the Sun has descends the farthest south of the celestial equator before it resumes its journey northward. Two thousand years ago, on the first day of every summer, the Sun was superimposed on the constellation Cancer. The first day of summer is the only day of the year where the people on Earth who live at a latitude of 23 ½ degrees north get to have the noon-day sun directly overhead.
Not surprisingly, this band on Earth’s surface can be identified on most maps and on all globes as the Tropic of Cancer. Equivalently the first day of winter historically found the Sun to be superimposed on the constellation Capricorn. Only then can the residents along 23 ½ degrees south latitude enjoy a midday sun that is directly overhead. On Earth, this latitude is identified as the Tropic of Capricorn. At no time of any day in the year do Earth residents outside of the region between 23 ½ degrees south and 23 ½ degrees north have a midday sun that is directly overhead. More bluntly stated, most of the population of the world has never seen the Sun directly overhead. They can only envy those who have traveled to the “tropics” or who just happen to live there.
The Sun begins its journey north along the ecliptic toward the celestial equator after the first day of winter. It begins to make larger and larger arcs across the daily sky, and thus stays in the sky longer and longer for northern hemisphere dwellers. If you have ever paid attention to the daytime sky then you might have noticed that the winter sun rises far south of east and sets far south of west. The daily path is a low arc across the sky. In the summer, the Sun rises far north of east and sets far north of west. The daily path is a relatively high arc across the sky. During your lunch-break, you can discover this for yourself if you measure the height of your shadow at noon on the first day of winter, and again at noon on the first day of summer.
A more revealing experiment, if you have nothing better to do for every one of your lunch breaks over the next year, is to stand in the same place every day at exactly 12 noon and put a mark on the ground where top of your shadow falls2. After a year of missed lunches you will notice that your marks on the ground will grow longer and longer as December 21st approaches. The length of your shadow will pause for a day or two, and then by Christmas, you will see it get shorter and shorter again for the six months up to June 21st. Beginning June 21st, your shadow length will once again pause for a day or two before it begins to get longer and longer for the six months that lead back to December 21st. You already know June 21st to be the first day of summer and December 21st to be the first day of winter. Your experiment showed that for each of these days, the change in the length of your noon shadow stopped. If we deduce the Sun’s behavior from your markings on the ground, we conclude that the noon-day Sun reached its highest point on June 21st and its lowest point on December 21st. In each case, before the Sun turned around, it appeared to stop for a day or two. This phenomenon is endowed with its own name: solstice from the Latin sol = sun, and stitium = stationary. The terms summer solstice and the winter solstice are no less common than the “first day of summer” and the “first day of winter.”
Had the descent of the Sun not stopped on December 21st, then each day your shadow |
upgrade campaign is scheduled to begin on October 17, 2016 and end on December 31, 2017.
Users who purchased the PlayStation®3 Collector's Edition will be upgraded to the PlayStation®4 Collector's Edition automatically.
Users who registered FINAL FANTASY XIV: Heavensward to their service account are not required to register a second copy when upgrading to the PlayStation®4 version.
The fourteen days of free play granted by this campaign are only valid in the event your service account is expired at the time of upgrade. Please be advised that this promotion cannot be used to extend the duration of free play periods granted by other campaigns.
Important Reminders
Please take care when confirming the service account to be upgraded to the PlayStation®4 version, as this process cannot be undone once complete.
When the upgrade process is complete, you will be issued a promotionproduct code to download the PlayStation®4 version. To register this code, you must sign in on the PlayStation®4 with the same Sony Entertainment Network (SEN) account you used to play on the PlayStation®3. Registering with a new or different SEN account will prevent access to the game from the original SEN account. This may also result in complications when purchasing other products related to FINAL FANTASY XIV on the PlayStation®Store.
Users will not receive an additional 30-day trial period by upgrading to the PlayStation®4 version.
Users who possess multiple service accounts registered to the PlayStation®3 version must complete the upgrade process for each service account individually.
Transferring PlayStation®3 Save Data
Players will also be able to carry over configuration settings including hotbar and macro settings from the PlayStation®3 version.
Learn more about transferring save data.
（http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/playguide/ps4/upgrade/）Description
Closeup of an eggplant flower The eggplant is a delicate, tropical perennial plant often cultivated as a tender or half-hardy annual in temperate climates. The stem is often spiny. The flowers are white to purple in color, with a five-lobed corolla and yellow stamens. Some common cultivars have fruit that is egg-shaped, glossy, and purple with white flesh and a spongy, "meaty" texture. Some other cultivars are white and longer in shape. The cut surface of the flesh rapidly turns brown when the fruit is cut open (oxidation). Eggplant grows 40 to 150 cm (1.3 to 4.9 ft) tall, with large, coarsely lobed leaves that are 10 to 20 cm (3.9 to 7.9 in) long and 5 to 10 cm (2.0 to 3.9 in) broad. Semiwild types can grow much larger, to 225 cm (7.38 ft), with large leaves over 30 cm (12 in) long and 15 cm (5.9 in) broad. On wild plants, the fruit is less than 3 cm (1.2 in) in diameter; in cultivated forms: 30 cm (12 in) or more in length are possible for long, narrow types or the large fat purple ones common to the West. Botanically classified as a berry, the fruit contains numerous small, soft, edible seeds that taste bitter because they contain or are covered in nicotinoid alkaloids, like the related tobacco.
History
Long purple eggplants The plant species is believed to have originated in India, where it continues to grow wild.[8] It has been cultivated in southern and eastern Asia since prehistory. The first known written record of the plant is found in Qimin Yaoshu, an ancient Chinese agricultural treatise completed in 544.[9] The numerous Arabic and North African names for it, along with the lack of the ancient Greek and Roman names, indicate it was introduced throughout the Mediterranean area by the Arabs in the early Middle Ages. A book on agriculture by Ibn Al-Awwam in 12th-century Arabic Spain described how to grow aubergines.[10] Records exist from later medieval Catalan and Spanish.[11] The aubergine is unrecorded in England until the 16th century. An English botany book in 1597 described the madde or raging Apple: This plant groweth in Egypt almost everywhere... bringing foorth fruit of the bignes of a great Cucumber.... We have had the same in our London gardens, where it hath borne flowers, but the winter approching before the time of ripening, it perished: nothwithstanding it came to beare fruite of the bignes of a goose egge one extraordinarie temperate yeere... but never to the full ripenesse.[12] Because of the plant's relationship with various other nightshades, the fruit was at one time believed to be extremely poisonous. The flowers and leaves can be poisonous if consumed in large quantities due to the presence of solanine.[13] The eggplant has a special place in folklore. In 13th-century Italian traditional folklore, the eggplant can cause insanity.[14] In 19th-century Egypt, insanity was said to be "more common and more violent" when the eggplant is in season in the summer.[15]
Etymology and regional names
Cultivars
Three cultivars of eggplant, showing size, shape, and color differences Different cultivars of the plant produce fruit of different size, shape, and color, though typically purple. The less common white varieties of eggplant are also known as Easter white eggplants, garden eggs, Casper or white eggplant. The most widely cultivated varieties—cultivars—in Europe and North America today are elongated ovoid, 12–25 centimetres (4 1⁄ 2 –10 in) long and 6–9 cm (2 1⁄ 2 –3 1⁄ 2 in) broad with a dark purple skin. A much wider range of shapes, sizes, and colors is grown in India and elsewhere in Asia. Larger cultivars weighing up to a kilogram (2.2 pounds) grow in the region between the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, while smaller ones are found elsewhere.[citation needed] Colors vary from white to yellow or green, as well as reddish-purple and dark purple. Some cultivars have a color gradient—white at the stem, to bright pink, deep purple or even black. Green or purple cultivars with white striping also exist. Chinese cultivars are commonly shaped like a narrower, slightly pendulous cucumber. Also, Asian cultivars of Japanese breeding are grown. Oval or elongated oval-shaped and black-skinned cultivars include 'Harris Special Hibush', 'Burpee Hybrid', 'Bringal Bloom', 'Black Magic', 'Classic', 'Dusky', and 'Black Beauty'.
Slim cultivars in purple-black skin include 'Little Fingers', 'Ichiban', 'Pingtung Long', and 'Tycoon' In green skin, 'Louisiana Long Green' and 'Thai (Long) Green' In white skin, 'Dourga'.
Traditional, white-skinned, egg-shaped cultivars include 'Casper' and 'Easter Egg'.
Bicolored cultivars with color gradient include 'Rosa Bianca', 'Violetta di Firenze', 'Bianca Sfumata di Rosa' (heirloom), and 'Prosperosa' (heirloom).
Bicolored cultivars with striping include 'Listada de Gandia' and 'Udumalapet'.
In some parts of India, miniature cultivars, most commonly called vengan, are popular. Varieties S. m. var. esculentum – common aubergine, including white varieties, with many cultivars [27]
var. – common aubergine, including white varieties, with many cultivars S. m. var. depressum – dwarf aubergine
var. – dwarf aubergine S. m. var. serpentium – snake aubergine Genetically engineered aubergine Bt brinjal is a transgenic aubergine that contains a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis.[28] This variety was designed to give the plant resistance to lepidopteran insects such as the brinjal fruit and shoot borer (Leucinodes orbonalis) and fruit borer (Helicoverpa armigera).[28][29] On 9 February 2010, the Environment Ministry of India imposed a moratorium on the cultivation of Bt brinjal after protests against regulatory approval of cultivated Bt brinjal in 2009, stating the moratorium would last "for as long as it is needed to establish public trust and confidence".[28] This decision was deemed controversial, as it deviated from previous practices with other genetically modified crops in India.[30] Bt brinjal was approved for commercial cultivation in Bangaladesh in 2013.[31]
Cooking and preparing
Cultivation and pests
Nutrition
Host plant
The potato tuber moth (Phthorimaea operculella) is an oligophagous insect that prefers to feed on plants of the family Solanaceae such as eggplants. Female P. operculella use the leaves to lay their eggs and the hatched larvae will eat away at the mesophyll of the leaf.[50]
Chemistry
The color of purple skin cultivars is due to the anthocyanin nasunin.[51] The browning of eggplant flesh results from the oxidation of polyphenols, such as the most abundant phenolic compound in the fruit, chlorogenic acid.[52]
Allergies
Case reports of itchy skin or mouth, mild headache, and stomach upset after handling or eating eggplant have been reported anecdotally and published in medical journals (see also oral allergy syndrome). A 2008 study of a sample of 741 people in India, where eggplant is commonly consumed, found nearly 10% reported some allergic symptoms after consuming eggplant, with 1.4% showing symptoms within two hours.[53] Contact dermatitis from eggplant leaves[54] and allergy to eggplant flower pollen[55] have also been reported. Individuals who are atopic (genetically predisposed to developing certain allergic hypersensitivity reactions) are more likely to have a reaction to eggplant, which may be because eggplant is high in histamines. A few proteins and at least one secondary metabolite have been identified as potential allergens.[56] Cooking eggplant thoroughly seems to preclude reactions in some individuals, but at least one of the allergenic proteins survives the cooking process.
Taxonomy
See alsoPresident Trump's recently removed chief strategist Steve Bannon has vowed to paint a target on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to a report Friday evening.
"Mitch McConnell, I'm going to light him up," Bannon told the Economist.
While Trump has been unsuccessfully trying to motivate the senator from Kentucky to take action on his policy agenda, the chairman of Breitbart News is taking a different approach to getting McConnell to cooperate with the White House.
"In the White House I had influence... At Breitbart, I had power," Bannon repeatedly told the Economist reporter.
Bannon left his West Wing job earlier this month and promised he would fight for his former boss.
"We will never turn on him. But we are never going to let him take a decision that hurts him," Bannon said.
Bannon will focus his energy on McConnell, who has failed to make progress on Trump's GOP healthcare, filibuster, and tax reform agendas. He spoke of other plans to take on China, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street — all of which are no longer acting in the interests of the American people, according to Bannon.This article is about the Libyan government. For the Congolese entity, see National Transitional Council (Congo)
The National Transitional Council of Libya (Arabic: المجلس الوطني الإنتقالي al-majlis al-waṭanī al-intiqālī ), sometimes known as the Transitional National Council,[3] was the de facto government of Libya for a period during and after the Libyan Civil War, in which rebel forces overthrew the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya of Muammar Gaddafi. The NTC governed Libya for a period of ten months after the end of the war, holding elections to a General National Congress on 7 July 2012, and handing power to the newly elected assembly on 8 August.[4]
The formation of the NTC was announced in the city of Benghazi on 27 February 2011 with the purpose to act as the "political face of the revolution". On 5 March 2011, the council issued a statement in which it declared itself to be the "only legitimate body representing the people of Libya and the Libyan state".[5][6][7] An executive board, chaired by Mahmoud Jibril, was formed by the council on 23 March 2011 after being de facto assembled as an "executive team" since 5 March 2011. The NTC issued a Constitutional Declaration in August 2011 in which it set up a road-map for the transition of the country to a constitutional democracy with an elected government.
The council gained international recognition as the legitimate governing authority in Libya[8] and occupied the country's seat at the United Nations.[9] In referring to the Libyan state, the council used simply "Libya". The UN formally recognized the country as "Libya" in September 2011,[10] based on a request from the Permanent Mission of Libya citing the Libyan interim Constitutional Declaration of 3 August 2011. In November 2011, the ISO 3166-1 was altered to reflect the new country name "Libya" in English, "Libye (la)" in French.[11]
Background [ edit ]
Uprising and civil war [ edit ]
After popular movements overturned the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, Libya's immediate neighbours to the west and east, Libya experienced a full-scale uprising beginning in February 2011.[12][13] By 20 February, the unrest had spread to Tripoli. Much of Libya had slipped out of Gaddafi's control, falling to anti-Gaddafi forces. Eastern Libya, centered around the second largest city and vital port of Benghazi, was firmly under the control of the opposition. The opposition began to organise themselves into a functioning government.[14] Anti-Gaddafi forces marched on Sirte (Gaddafi's hometown) on 28 September 2011. Gaddafi loyalists delayed the attack with the use of their snipers. The fight for Sirte ended on 20 October with the capture of the town and the death of Colonel Gaddafi.[15]
Early efforts to form a government [ edit ]
Opposition meeting in Bayda, 24 February 2011
On 24 February 2011, politicians, former military officers, tribal leaders, academics and businessmen held a meeting in the eastern city of Bayda.[16] The meeting was chaired by former justice minister Mustafa Abdul Jalil, who quit the Jamahiriya government a few days before. The delegates discussed proposals for interim administration with many delegates asking for UN intervention in Libya.[17] The podium at the meeting displayed the pre-Jamahiriya flag.[18][19]
On 25 February, Al Jazeera TV reported that talks were taking place between "personalities from eastern and western Libya" to form an interim government for the post-Gaddafi era.[18] The following day, former justice minister Mustafa Abdul Jalil was announced to be leading the process of forming an interim body, to be based in Benghazi.[20][21] Jalil stated that "Gaddafi alone bore responsibility for the crimes that have occurred" in Libya; he also insisted on the unity of Libya and that Tripoli was the national capital.[22] The efforts to form an alternative government have been supported by the Libyan ambassador in the United States, Ali Suleiman Aujali.[23][24] The Libyan deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Ibrahim Omar Al Dabashi, stated that he supported a new alternative government "in principle".[25]
Establishment of a national council [ edit ]
A National Transitional Council was formed on 27 February to act as "the political face of the revolution".[26] Its spokesman, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, made clear at the launch press conference that the national council was not a provisional government and added that the newly formed council was not in contact with foreign governments and did not want them to intervene.[27] He later clarified that an airstrike mandated by the United Nations would not be considered a foreign intervention.[28]
An Al Jazeera journalist in Benghazi reported that a fully fledged interim government would not be formed until Tripoli was under opposition control.[29] This contradicted Jalil's statement of the previous day about the formation of a provisional government. These comments were later clarified by the council as Jalil's "personal views".
On 5 March, the council issued a statement in which it declared itself to be the "sole representative of all Libya". Mustafa Abdul Jalil was named as chairman of the council.[5][6][7]
On 10 March, France became the first country to recognise the council as Libya's only legitimate government.[30]
Formation of an executive board [ edit ]
On 23 March, the council established an Executive Board to act as a transitional government for Libya. Jibril, who had served as chairman of the informal "executive team" since 5 March, was appointed as Chairman of that board, stating that council would serve as the "legislative body", and the new Executive Board would serve as the "executive body".[31][32] Jibril led the meeting and negotiations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a meeting that resulted in France officially recognizing the council as the sole representative of the Libyan people.[citation needed]
Instability in 2012 [ edit ]
In mid-January 2012, protesters against the NTC stormed its Benghazi headquarters, demanding greater transparency on expenditures, that Gaddafi-era officials be sacked, and that Islamic sharia law be the source of the country's future constitution.[33] Jalil was in the building, but slipped out the back before protesters broke in and stole computers and furniture. A few days earlier, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, vice president of the NTC, was surrounded and jostled by a group of university students in Benghazi, before being pulled to safety by supporters.[34]
Dissolution [ edit ]
In a ceremony on 8 August 2012—held in the evening due to the daytime fast of Ramadan—the NTC formally transferred power to the General National Congress. Jalil stepped down as chairman, passing the position to the GNC's oldest member, Mohammed Ali Salim.[35] The NTC was then dissolved, while the GNC members took their oath of office, led by Salim.[36]
Hundreds of people gathered in Tripoli's Martyrs' Square with candles symbolizing reconciliation.[35] The date of the transfer—20 Ramadan on the Islamic calendar—had also been selected for symbolic reasons, as 20 Ramadan the previous year had fallen on 20 August, the date that the rebels attacked Tripoli, leading to Gaddafi's flight.[36] As Jalil addressed the crowd, attendees chanted "Allahu Akbar!" or another phrase meaning "The blood of martyrs will not go wasted!"[37]
According to BBC News, the transfer was "the first peaceful transition of power in Libya's modern history",[35] meaning the history since the end of the monarchy.
Aims and objectives [ edit ]
The "Declaration of the founding of the National Transitional Council" stated that the main aims of the council were as follows:[38]
Ensure the safety of the national territory and citizens
Coordination of national efforts to liberate the rest of Libya
Support the efforts of local councils to work for the restoration of normal civilian life
Supervision of the Military Council to ensure the achievement of the new doctrine of the Libyan People's Army in the defense of the people and to protect the borders of Libya.
Facilitate the election of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for the country; be put to a popular referendum
Form a transitional government to pave the holding of free elections
Guide the conduct of foreign policy, and the regulation of relations with other countries and international and regional organizations, and the representation of the Libyan people
In another statement clarifying the goals for a post-Gaddafi Libya, the council committed itself an eight-point plan to hold free and fair elections, draft a national constitution, form political and civil institutions, uphold intellectual and political pluralism, and guarantee citizens' inalienable human rights and the ability of free expression of their aspirations. The council also emphasized its rejection of racism, intolerance, discrimination, and terrorism.[39][40] Article 1 further declares Tripoli the state capital and Arabic the official language while reserving the linguistic and cultural rights of ethnic minorities as well as the freedom of religion for religious minorities.
The stated aim of the NTC was to form a de jure interim government based in Tripoli and hold elections for a General National Congress to replace it. The GNC would then elect a prime minister, appoint a Constituent Assembly to draft a constitution subject to its approval by the Public National Conference (PNC) and by referendum, and then oversee free elections for a representative government.[41]
Structure and membership [ edit ]
Legislative body [ edit ]
The National Transitional Council claimed to be, and was widely recognized as, the "only legitimate body representing the people of Libya and the Libyan state".[42] Starting off at 33 members, it rose to 51,[43] with proposals to increase its size further to 75 or even 125.[44]
Al Jazeera English reported that each city or town under opposition control will be given five seats on the new council and that contact will be established with new cities that come under opposition control to allow them to join the council. The identities of members of the council were not disclosed at the launch conference. Human Rights lawyer Hafiz Ghoga was the spokesperson for the new council. An Al Jazeera English journalist in Benghazi stated that Mustafa Abdul Jalil still had a leadership role within the new council.[27] The Council declared that Jalil was the head of the council.[7] The council met formally for the first time on 5 March 2011[7] when it was announced that the council had 33 members.[45] The names of some of the members were kept secret to prevent threats to their families that were still in Gaddafi-held areas of Libya.[46]
In September 2011, some of the NTC's members were in Benghazi, while some had moved to the de jure capital Tripoli. On 8 September, the head of government Mahmoud Jibril became the highest-ranking NTC official yet to move to Tripoli. Prior to Jibril's relocation, Deputy Chairman Ali Tarhouni was the de facto leader of the NTC in Tripoli.[47]
Members [ edit ]
The members of the council included:[48][49][50]
Council Members:
City Representatives:
AbdAllah Banoon of Tripoli resigned to form a political party.
Executive Board [ edit ]
On 5 March 2011, a crisis committee was set up to act as the executive arm of the council. An Executive Board was announced on 23 March 2011.[32][51][52] It originally had 15 members, but a minor reorganisation apparently removed the post of Military Affairs from the council proper and created a successor position for Defence on the board, expanding the bureau to 16 members.[53][54]
The Executive Board was dismissed on 8 August 2011 due to administrative mistakes in investigating the assassination in July of Free Libyan Army commander General Abdel-Fatah Younes.[55] Chairman Mahmoud Jibril, the only designated member of the Executive Board who was not fired, was tasked with forming a new Board.[56]
Members (March–August 2011) [ edit ]
Prior to the re-shuffle in August 2011, the board members were:[52]
Mahmoud Jibril – Chairman and Head of International Affairs
Ali Al-Issawi – Vice-Chairman
Ahmed Hussein Al-Darrat – Internal Affairs and Local Government
Jalal al-Digheily – Defence (formerly Military Affairs)
Mahmoud Shammam – Media
Naji Barakat – Health
Mohammed Al-Allagi – Justice and Human Rights
Hania Al-Gumati – Social Welfare
Abdullah Shamia – Economic
Ali Tarhouni – Finance and Oil
Anwar Fituri – Transportation and Communications
Abulgassim Nimr – Environment
Atia Lawgali – Culture and Community
Abdulsalam Al-Shikhy – Religious Affairs and Endowments
Ahmed Al-Jehani – Reconstruction and Infrastructure
Suliman El-Sahli – Education
Members (October 2011) [ edit ]
A new cabinet was unveiled in early October 2011, though not all of its members were announced at once. Individuals confirmed to be part of the new board included[57] Mahmoud Jibril as prime minister, Ali Tarhouni as deputy prime minister, and Jalal al-Digheily as defence minister. On 23 October, Jibril resigned as Mustafa Abdul Jalil declared an end to the Libyan civil war,[58] and Abdurrahim El-Keib succeeded him as prime minister on 31 October.[43]
The executive board was dissolved on 22 November 2011 as per the Interim constitution which stated that the Executive board must be dissolved upon the formation of the Interim Government.[citation needed]
Interim government [ edit ]
El-Keib unveiled the interim government on 22 November 2011:[59][60][61]
Local government [ edit ]
During the war, in opposition-held Benghazi, a 15-member "local committee"[62] made up of lawyers, judges and respected local people was formed in order to provide civic administration and public services within the city.[63] Residents have organised to direct traffic and collect refuse. Many shops and businesses have opened again.[63] A newspaper[64] and two local radio stations were also established.[65]
Similar "local committees" were formed in other cities controlled by opposition groups.[66]
Commercial bodies [ edit ]
The council established the following commercial bodies to manage its financial affairs:
The Central Bank of Benghazi – to act as the "monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya" [67]
Libyan Oil Company – to act as the "supervisory authority on oil production and policies in the country"[68]
Armed forces [ edit ]
The anti-Gaddafi forces were Libyan armed forces which were constituted during the 2011 war by defected military members and armed citizens in order to engage in battle against remaining members of the Jamahiriya's armed forces, hired mercenaries and paramilitary loyal to the rule of Muammar Gaddafi. The National Liberation Army, formerly known as the Free Libyan Army, was the NTC's military arm, with the small Free Libyan Air Force operating assets including captured and defected fighter jets and helicopters.
Omar El-Hariri was the first military affairs minister the NTC named, holding that position from 23 March 2011 forward. By 19 May 2011, however, Jalal al-Digheily had replaced El-Hariri.[69] Then on 8 August 2011, Digheily along with 14 other members of the Executive Board were fired and the position left vacant, but was reappointed in early October 2011 after continuing in the role of interim defense minister for almost two months.[70] Then on 22 November 2011, the Executive Board was dissolved for the formation of the Interim Government and Osama al-Juwali became the new Defense Minister.
On 1 April 2011, Abdul Fatah Younis was announced as commander of the NTC's forces, in an attempt to form an organized fighting structure due to a string of failures. Younis was killed in an attack on 29 July 2011 which was variously blamed on pro-Gaddafi agents,[71] rogue rebel militiamen, and the NTC itself.[72] Suleiman Mahmoud, Younis's top lieutenant, replaced him as army commander.[73]
Foreign relations [ edit ]
Libya Countries that recognised the NTC as the sole legitimate representative of Libya during the civil war Countries that have yet to formally recognise the NTC, but voted in favor of it to take Libya's UN seat Countries that formally opposed recognition of the NTC at the UN Countries that voted against the transfer of Libya's UN seat to the NTC
In July 2011, the Libya Contact Group of representatives of many nations announced its participants' agreement to deal with the National Transitional Council as the "legitimate governing authority in Libya".[74][75] The council also received the backing of the Arab League[76] and the European Union.[77] On 16 September 2011, the United Nations General Assembly voted to award Libya's UN seat to the NTC.[9] On 20 September 2011, the African Union officially recognised the NTC as the legitimate representative of Libya.[78]
Mohammed El Senussi, the pretender to the throne of Libya, also voiced his support for the NTC.[79]
While NTC forces were working to secure military victory on the ground, the NTC's chairman, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, was working to foster good diplomatic relations overseas. Before Gaddafi was killed Abdul Jalil negotiated a deal with the British government to pay millions in compensation to victims of IRA attacks that used Jamahiriya-supplied arms.[80]
Military intervention [ edit ]
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 authorised a multi-national effort to establish a no-fly zone. On 19 March, British, French and US air forces began attacking targets in Gaddafi-controlled Libya, thereby initiating the UN military intervention. Operations were led by NATO under Operation Unified Protector, after initially being led by a joint UK, US and French command. Non-NATO states such as Jordan, Qatar, Sweden, and the United Arab Emirates also contributed to the military mission.[citation needed]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Some Of My Friends Think That Being A Socialist Is About Being Nice. How about yours?
Being a socialist is about being nice? Do you have a friend who claims to be a socialist? In the 20th century there have been numerous political systems, but in the latter half of the century there were only two survivors, Socialism and Capitalism. So we have at this time in the Western world, which for all practical purposes controls the world, two opposing political systems. (I have already previously stated that there is no basic difference between socialists and communists. There are, however, some very important factors relating to socialism of which you should be aware. Socialism will not work in a free market economy and, as a consequence it invariably deteriorates into a totalitarian state. Anyone wishing to argue that point is asked to point to one single instance where this was not the result).
It therefore behooves us to remember who the worst despotic governments of this century were: Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy, Communists in the USSR, [Romania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc.] and China – each and every one of them a paragon of socialist endeavor. Their leaders; Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin [Ceausescu, Tito, Pol Pot, etc.] and Mao Tse Tung. The outstanding legacy of these individuals is that they each tried to out-do the others in the total number of their own citizens which they murdered. It is a fact that each of these men killed more of their own civilian citizens than they lost in military conflict.
The reason for this is inherent to socialism. It promises things that it cannot possibly deliver. When socialist politicians in power come to the realization that it is impossible to deliver on their promises and political unrest develops, they have two options if they plan to stay in power. First, they must locate a scapegoat on whom they can blame their inability to deliver. Any Jew can tell you who that was for the Germans and the Russians. The second is to develop, and rapidly so, a state security apparatus to keep them in office – the SS, the KGB, [Securitate, Stasi] etc.
The basic tenets of socialism are:
1. Seduce the populace into accepting the government as the arbitrator of all problems; government from cradle-to-grave
2. Begin delivering on those services to make the citizens dependent
3. Take away the citizens’ guns
4. Increase taxes on all services while destroying any free market alternative services
5. Blame the chosen scapegoat for the inability to meet demand for services
6. Have the centralized national police force round up any dissidents
Socialism cannot work because the cost of services must be collected in the form of taxes, and this is not a sustainable possibility. The reason is that since government pays for all services, neither the producer nor the consumer cares about the cost, and hence there is an uncontrolled spiral of inflation (today’s medical costs are a case in point and healthcare is not yet totally socialized). Furthermore, the government has no funds or assets. It only has the funds it confiscated from its citizens. The total inefficiency of a centralized bureaucracy does not help either.
Once citizens are weaned on this cradle-to-grave concept and are no longer self-reliant, they become wards of the state and will not accept any reduction of services. The government subsequently has no option but to reduce services, and as popular resistance develops State repression begins. This is the socialist cycle. It has been found to occur in every socialist state in existence to date.
The current most outrageous examples of this are North Korea and Cuba. These two societies share much in common – both are socialist, both are totalitarian, both have more political prisoners then any nation close to their size, both have non-working universal health care, in both the citizens suffer malnutrition, and both have food and fuel rationing. Their leaders and party members, in the meantime, eat caviar and drink champagne.
Socialism can never work in any environment. It violates human nature and logic.
The capitalist economic system differs greatly from its socialist adversary in numerous ways. While the socialist system is a top down centralized arrangement, the capitalist system, which can only exist in a free market economy that recognizes the right of private property, is totally controlled by the market itself. Interestingly, personal freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can also only thrive in free market economies. Capitalism is a sort of volatile and confusing situation where the capital markets dictate demand, price, and methods of distribution. The reason that the left is so very successful in criticizing capitalism is because it is not regulated and therefore difficult to explain. The reason capitalism works so well is that demand dictates production as well as price, thus avoiding market inequities and shortages.
Socialism’s principal theorem is centralization of markets under government control. This has never worked and there is not one single instance in world history where centralized governmental market manipulation has been successful. This, however, does not deter the Robert Reichs (America’s socialist Secretary of Labor who said, “Greedy corporations are screwing their employees, squeezing down wages while increasing profits.” This statement, from an economic illiterate who has never in his entire life worked for, or in, a business that made a profit. He appears to me to be a little man with a Napoleon complex, who, while having no clue about anything to do with economics, presents himself as a great expert. Corporate downsizing, mergers, and staff reductions has a great deal to do with international trade policies, NAFTA, EC, WTO, etc. and very little to do with greed.) of this world, who continuously make every effort to centralize economic as well as social and political power for themselves and their Satori masters (the ruling elite).
George Washington said it best: “Government, like fire, is a good servant, but a fearful master.” All capitalist functions are directed at free market concepts. A free market is one that serves society with little government interference. This concept is unpopular with the Satori because in order to attain more and more power they require centralization of all economic, social, and political functions. Because of their poor performance in the political frame they have altered their modus operandi and are now implementing their schemes through judicial activism. These judicial incursions, which by the way, in the United States are in violation of constitutional law, have been sold to the public based on the false misnomer that greedy capitalists don’t care about the people, their welfare, safety, or health, but that politicians do.
This, without doubt, is a ludicrous statement. The capitalist must perform to market standards. Competition will put him out of business if he provides an inferior product or service. He is furthermore constrained by his customers, stockholders, board of directors, lending institutions, as well as numerous laws, and, if all else fails, product liability statutes. In addition there is a veritable alphabet soup of governmental agencies which oversee his product, conduct with employees, public safety, product safety, environmental compliance, and financial performance.
In fact capitalists are over-regulated, which causes a considerable burden to be put on the public in the form of increased prices. A noteworthy fact is: the most egregious acts against the consumer, the environment, and the public in general, have all been made by socialist states.Compact 22x60mm M.2 Form Factor with cable
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do this, however, both because it's expensive and because usually the symptoms are clear enough that there's really no need to test for anything.
But the root cause of the "disease" is generally psychological. For example, I've always found it difficult to sit still, and will generally be doing something all the time, whether at work or in my spare time. So on holiday I'll always be trying to squeeze as many experiences into each day as I possibly can, and push myself to see another castle, check another pub, or whatever. At work it's pretty similar, in that I demand a lot from myself, and push myself to deliver as much as I possibly can. Of course, this can be taken too far, and it's pretty clear that over the past ten years that's exactly what I've done.
Effects
Several people who know I've been ill have on seeing me reacted with a "You look surprisingly good" comment, as though they expected to see a real wreck. This is part of what's strange about this "disease". I look entirely like normal, except more tanned, since I can spend more time outdoors, and behave very close to normal. There are, however, some differences. The main one, of course, is that I get tired quickly.
This experience has made me question quite a few things about how I live my life, because I've found that most of what I like to do, apart from being social and indulging my beer hobby, is very like work. That's part of what has caused me to come down with burnout, and it also means that for much of 2008 the only thing I've really been able to do is read. To illustrate what that really means, here's a photo of the books I've read this year.
Boredom
Another effect is that when I'm really worn out I find that any serious thinking gets to be too much for me. For example, if I have a different point of view on something from my girlfriend explaining what I mean is just too much effort. For the first couple of months of the year I didn't read popular science books, because they were just too much mental effort for me. Similarly, non-trivial programming was also too much.
I've also found that it's very easy to misjudge how well I am. We went on a two-week interrail in Germany in April/May, and this actually turned out to be too much for me, even though we didn't do anything much and took things very easy. The last couple of days of the holiday I had to spend partly in bed, and it took several weeks after we came home for me to recover the energy I'd had before the holiday.
Treatment
Well, that's a little misleading, actually, because there isn't really any treatment in the usual sense for burnout, except for resting, of course. I have been to my doctor (general practitioner) and he after asking some questions basically said I should take it easy and do things I enjoy. I remember looking at him and wondering whether he might possibly be deaf. Not fully five minutes earlier I'd told him a 15-minute walk each day was literally all I was capable of doing. So clearly it didn't much matter what I enjoyed doing; I wasn't up to it, anyway.
The specialist I was sent to by Bouvet is a psychologist, and he was much more helpful. For one thing he had time to talk to me and really get some grasp of how I was doing and what my problems were. He's given me a lot of useful advice and helped me change some of my attitudes, and also been able to help me see that I'm actually making progress at times when I've been depressed at my seeming lack of progress.
Outlook
I'd say mine is pretty good. I haven't been hit anything like as hard as some people get this, and it doesn't seem that I have the chronic fatigue version of this. By now, I'm definitely on the road to recovery, but unfortunately this is a pretty slow road. I go jogging three times a week, and work 2-3 hours every day these days. That takes up a lot of time which I have to spend relaxing to recover from jogging and work, but it's worth it, as I notice that I'm getting better. However, the pace of recovery is very slow, and it seems like it could easily take me the rest of the year to get well.Manila (CNN Philippines Life) — The day Mogwai died, its most faithful patrons lit candles along a small strip of sidewalk in Cubao Expo. They sat down on the pavement and clinked their beer bottles as a fond farewell to the cinematheque. It was their way of memorializing their old haunt, a place that was way more than just a casual drinking spot.
I remember going there one rainy Saturday night in my last week of college to catch a Raya Martin double feature. I dried off, went up the narrow cinema staircase, took off my shoes, and found a cushy spot on the floor that wasn’t already occupied by a warm body. I sat there staring at that bright wall in that dark room, getting lost in the live music that played along with the moving silent images. I wouldn’t have experienced that anywhere else.
I belong to a generation of Filipinos who grew up in the advent of digital cinema — a period when independent films became a lot easier to produce; thus, there were more of them to see. The problem then was access to these movies. Beyond festivals like Cinemanila and Cinemalaya (which was still in its infancy at that time), films like Martin’s “Indio Nacional” were hard to come by. You really had to go out of your way to find them.
Mogwai was a constant. It continuously showed flicks that weren’t likely to hit the big screen. It was a haven for fledgling cineastes who were looking for a break from Hollywood. When the beloved cinematheque closed down almost five years ago, it took with it a safe space for seekers of alternative cinema. Sure, there were other pop-up screenings here and there, and other venues sprouted and disappeared, but none of them could quite match the intimacy Mogwai had offered — that is, until recently.
Cinema ’76 opened its doors in February this year. It’s the brainchild of TBA, a filmmaking supergroup that combines three prominent film outfits: Tuko Film Productions, Buchi Boy Films, and Artikulo Uno, the company responsible for last year’s breakout hit, “Heneral Luna.”
It was sometime in April when I first stepped into Cinema ’76. My goal was to see Elwood Perez’s bizarro masterpiece, “Esoterika: Maynila.” I wasn’t able to catch it during its original run, so an ad for a limited screening was a godsend.
The cast of Jerrold Tarog's "Heneral Luna" during a special Independence Day screening at Cinema '76. Photo from CINEMA 76/FACEBOOK
The moment I arrived in that tiny theater, I was instantly hit by the smell of fresh woodwork. The seats were custom-made and comfy. I took a spot near the screen and hugged a pillow while waiting for more people to trickle in. There were only three of us there: me and two college girls who were busy taking notes. Alas, no one else came. It was a pity. They missed out on 99 minutes of insanity and genius — two things that aren’t mutually exclusive.
The turnout from that night is a far cry from how many people actually show up to screenings now. Just this weekend, Cinema ’76 had a full house, packed with people waiting to get their fill of Marie Jamora’s “Ang Nawawala” and Jerrold Tarog’s “Sana Dati.”
“Hugot films that are romantic in nature, as we’ve discovered, are the most appealing films for our audience,” says Vincent Nebrida, president of TBA. The audience he’s pertaining to is composed of “young millennials,” acknowledging that although several older cineastes show up to screenings, it’s the younger crowd they’re ultimately targeting.
“The audience is growing faster than expected,” he says. “June was our breakthrough month and we’ve been trying to program titles that are desired by our relatively young audiences.”
It did take a while for Cinema ’76 to gain its footing. Programs were tweaked. Social media promotions were amped up. But it was the events that kept drawing in crowds. Having Artikulo Uno in its fold allowed TBA to hold a special “Heneral Luna” screening that was graced by the movie’s cast members. This was soon followed by a midnight screening of “The Blair Witch Project.” Kevin J. Foxe, executive producer of the film and, coincidentally, Nebrida’s classmate at New York University, showed up for a special question and answer session.
This increasing audience count may be a good indicator of Cinema ‘76’s steady path to success, but TBA’s mission does not stop there.“After getting into festivals, many films remain in limbo,” explains Nebrida. “They aren’t picked up by distributors and don’t get shown in cinemas. We wanted to create a distribution platform for filmmakers.”
In order to do this, he and his TBA colleagues conceived a three-pronged distribution strategy. Cinema ’76 is the first. The second is a partnership with Magnavision, which will allow filmmakers to have their movies distributed on DVD and home video. Lastly, there’s Cinetropa.com.
The screening schedule of Cinema '76 from July 8 to 14 features a double bill of the "hugot" films, "Ang Nawawala" and "Sana Dati." Photo from CINEMA 76/FACEBOOK
“We created Cinetropa.com as an online digital platform where you can watch quality Filipino movies,” Nebrida says. Launched in June, the pay-per-view service allows viewers from across the country, and even other parts of the world, to view some of the best that Philippine cinema has to offer. The initiative doesn’t only favor the audience; filmmakers also get a cut of the sales, making it easier for them to gain profit compared to going through traditional distribution channels.
Film scholars say that the golden age of Filipino cinema was from the 70s to the early 90s, but the most ambitious year was definitely 1976 — the year of “Ganito Kami Noon... Paano Kayo Ngayon?”, “Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo,” and “Insiang.” It’s only apt for Cinema ’76 to be named after it. The cinema’s goals are challenging, and TBA’s even more so. But if they succeed, then soon, alternative cinema will be much easier to reach.
***
Cinema ‘76 is located at 160 Luna Mencias St., Brgy. Addition Hills, San Juan City. Visit its Facebook page for screening schedules.For 20 years, detectives haven’t known baby “Hope’s” real name.
But Cold Case Homicide Detective Angela Curran is eager to learn it.
Curran spoke to members of the media at the Virginia Beach Police Department Wednesday about “Hope.”
The newborn was found dead in a plastic bag on Dec. 21, 1996 at the Lillian Vernon mail order warehouse. The bag was hanging in a locker located in an employee-only women’s bathroom.
“Hope” was dead for three to five days before a custodian found her. Her body was wrapped in a small, red golf shirt and police believe she may have been born in the bathroom and left there, Curran said.
“Hope” would have been 20 years old on Wednesday. Even with few substantial leads to go on, Curran hasn’t given up on finding her mother.
“Our goal is to give her a name,” Curran said. “She’d be 20 years old today, and it’s disheartening to know she doesn’t have a name. Her family doesn’t know that she was there.”
Police were never able to determine “Hope’s” race because of decomposition, but they were able to gather a full DNA profile on the baby.
Now they are in the process of searching for the 2,800 regular and seasonal female employees who were working at the warehouse when the baby was found and asking them for DNA samples.
So far, police have gathered and tested DNA samples from 51 of the women. They have ruled out 41 of them as the baby’s mother and are waiting on the results from the other 10.
“We have to locate, interview and hopefully obtain a DNA sample from 2,800 employees,” Curran said. “That, as you can imagine, can be very, very extensive work.”
Although the police department has no plans to stop working the case, Curran said she hopes the infant’s mother will come forward and claim the baby voluntarily.
“If the mother of the child is out there we urge you to come forward. It’s been a long time,” Curran said. “It’s time to come forward and give this baby her name.”
Curran is asking members of the public to submit tips to the Virginia Beach Cold Case Homicide Unit at 757-385-4241 or the Virginia Beach Crime Line at 1-888-LOCK-U-UP.
“No detail is too small,” Curran said. “All tips have been followed up on… and we’re going to continue to follow up on anything that comes in now.”
Watch Curran’s full interview on Southside Daily’s Facebook page.
Mayfield can be reached at [email protected].
[pdf-embedder url=”https://southsidedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Hope.pdf” title=”hope”]Real Madrid Isco or Asensio to take his place
Isco: I want to stay at Real Madrid but it cannot be a surprise that I want to play more
Cristiano Ronaldo and Bale both hit with muscular discomfort
In a season defining week, with matches against Bayern Munich and Barcelona, Real Madrid will be without Gareth Bale after a knock to the soleus muscle in his calf.
Zinedine Zidane is taking no risks with the Welshman, and Isco and Marco Asensio's recent performances go a long way in minimising the impact of his absences.
It still remains to be seen whether Bale will play in El Clasico, but the Bayern Munich match on Tuesday is just too soon.
Asensio, Isco and Lucas Vazquez are all fighting for that starting spot, and squad depth has been one of Real's strongest qualities this season.
After Isco's masterclass against Sporting, plenty will be calling on him to start, but the Malagueno has only played twice in nine matches for Los Blancos in the current Champions League campaign, for a total of only 77 minutes.
In other words, the talent of Asensio could be what Zidane opts for, especially considering he is a more of a like for like change.
The Sporting match acted as a test of sorts to see whether Asensio, Isco, or Lucas Vazquez would replace the Welsh winger, and now the French boss faces a tough choice in making the decision, as all have more than made their case this year.The campaign to defeat a proposed gay marriage ban in Minnesota is reaching out to young Republicans.
According to Politics in Minnesota, Minnesotans United for All Families, the coalition of groups working to defeat passage of the amendment in November, is looking to young Republicans to help achieve that goal.
A recent event sponsored by the group which featured GOP Reps. John Kriesel and Tim Kelly drew roughly 50 people. Among the organizers was Madeline Koch, who worked for former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman.
Video of Koch's testimony before a Minnesota Senate committee hearing considering the ban went viral earlier this year.
In her testimony, Koch, 24, said the amendment would take the GOP in the wrong direction.
“I don't believe that equal rights for same-sex couples – or anyone – is a partisan issue.”
“The need for equality and the full acceptance of GLBT people is something Minnesota's next generation of leaders has already embraced,” Koch told senators. (The video is embedded in the right panel of this page. Visit our video library for more videos.)
Kriesel, who heads the group Republicans Against the Minnesota Marriage Amendment, and Kelly voted against the amendment.
During the debate in the House on whether to send the issue to voters, Kriesel told colleagues that a near death experience while serving in Iraq changed his mind on the issue.
“It woke me up. It changed me,” Kriesel said. “Because of that, it's made me think about this issue. And say, 'You know what, what would I do without my wife?' She makes me happy. Life is hard. We're in a really tough time in our history. Happiness is so, so hard to find for people. So they find it, they find someone that makes them happy, and we want to take that person away. We want to say, 'Oh no, you can be together, you can love that person, but you can't marry them.' You can't marry them. That's wrong.”
Koch told Politics in Minnesota that her generation of Republicans sees sexual orientation as a non-issue.When Wright State University unveiled its most recent budget proposal, some professors were dismayed at what appeared to be more than a million-dollar boost to athletics spending -- particularly since every category of academic funding was being slashed.
University leaders framed the $1.6 million boon as a reduction -- since the department had overspent for years, this level of funding would actually amount to a decrease, and so athletics would rein in its spending and be held to a budget of about $11.6 million. But to view that as a decrease requires one to say the previous overspending -- which didn't happen in other departments -- was the comparison point.
But faculty members, particularly in the union, question the financial support for athletics amid a budget crisis, when games, even higher-profile men’s basketball, generate little revenue and, at times, lackluster campus buzz if the team hasn’t performed well. Per a 2016 report from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, attendance at a Wright State men's basketball games -- its most popular sport -- averaged 4,355 people. The university's Nutter Center's maximum capacity is 11,500 seats.
Wright State’s Board of Trustees recently approved the university’s $284 million budget, dozens of layoffs and almost $31 million in cuts after what officials universally agree was chronic overspending under the former president, David Hopkins, who resigned in March, nearly four months before he was set to retire.
Wright State’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors -- the faculty union -- mostly did not direct its ire toward athletics, said Jim Vance, a retired associate professor of mathematics at Wright State, now an adviser to the union’s executive committee. He said of major concern was the university’s overall poor financial planning and misplaced priorities that ended in at least 50 layoffs -- other vacant positions would remain unfilled.
Still, the union in June drafted a letter to the trustees, the interim president at the time and the new president, Cheryl Schrader, calling on them to eliminate the additional athletics money and devote it instead to scholarships.
“Under normal circumstances, it would be rational to give intercollegiate athletics a realistic budget, in line with the overspending that annually has occurred. But in this fiscal crisis, it is inexplicable -- even absurd,” reads the letter, signed by more than 250 faculty members.
A university spokesman, Seth Bauguess, stressed that those who added their names to the letter represented a fraction of Wright State’s roughly 1,800 faculty members. (Adjuncts and other part-time employees aren’t eligible to join the union.)
Bauguess said that during Hopkins’s tenure, other departments were funded in a similar way, in which they didn’t follow their budgets to the penny. He could not explain why athletics was treated differently in this year’s budget planning.
Some faculty believe athletics is being preserved as a “sacred cow,” but Bauguess said that is not so, and the interim president, Curtis McCray, in budget trimming, was charged to maintain the university’s athletics program. Wright State is a NCAA Division I institution and part of the Horizon League.
Bauguess touted reports that showed the monetary value of positive media coverage -- essentially what the clip was worth in lieu of an advertisement. In the last fiscal year that ended June 30, Wright State generated what it considers the equivalent of $12.6 million in ad value from more than 13,600 pieces of news.
Wright State is also not an anomaly in that few sports programs generate profits and are often subsidized by their institutions, Bauguess noted. This phenomenon is well documented in a report from the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
From the report:
Because sports revenues so often fall short of meeting the needs of athletics programs, almost all programs must rely on allocations from general university funds, fees imposed on the entire student body and state appropriations to meet funding gaps. This is a significant concern at a time when economic woes have devastated state budgets and institutional endowments alike. Conflicts over funding between academics and athletics are growing. Indeed, reliance on institutional resources to underwrite athletics programs is reaching the point at which some institutions must choose between funding sections of freshman English and funding the football team. And student athletes in nonrevenue sports risk seeing their teams lose funding or be cut entirely.
Wright State’s men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams were initially supposed to be discontinued, but a grassroots fund-raising effort and an appeal to the trustee board saved them, but probably just for another season, Bauguess said.
A report shows that for the fiscal year ending June 2016, Wright State’s athletics department was operating at a $1.4 million deficit.
At its June meeting, Wright State’s trustees voted to increase out-of-state tuition and room and board fees by 3 percent.
Neither the chairman of the board, Douglas A. Fecher, nor Schrader, responded to requests for comment. Bauguess did not arrange requested interviews with Schrader or administrators, and instead emailed a statement: “Wright State University President Cheryl B. Schrader has shared with campus that the university will conduct an in-depth review of all university academic and nonacademic programs, to include athletics, as part of the strategic planning process that will begin in the fall.”
Marty Kich, president of Wright State’s AAUP chapter, said in theory how the university has budgeted isn’t bad -- but by setting athletics funding at the level it overspent in a previous year is rewarding bad behavior.
Kich criticized the amount that the university subsidizes athletics, pointing out how little it takes in from ticket sales -- largely, it’s from men’s basketball, as Wright State doesn’t field a football team. The university has estimated about $375,000 in ticket sales in the current fiscal year.
Kich recalled an encounter with an administrator who was surprised he had written so critically about athletics -- the administrator pointed out the buoyant feeling on campus when Wright State’s men’s basketball reached the NCAA tournament.
“But was it worth the millions of dollars?” he said
Wright State has struggled for years as it dipped into reserves to cover consistent financial shortfalls. The recently approved budget returns $6 million to the university’s reserve funding, but the institution is still expected to be set on “fiscal watch” by the state of Ohio because it has not replenished reserves enough.
Relations with the faculty union also remain rocky. The university’s contract with the union expired, and it has missed key dates in negotiating a new one, which will likely not occur until the fall semester.Anthony Joshua is prepared to fight anybody Anthony Joshua is prepared to fight anybody
Anthony Joshua could find himself fighting for Charles Martin's world heavyweight title on April 9, Eddie Hearn has revealed.
Although Hearn claims the IBF champion initially demanded an 'extortionate amount of money' to bring his title to The O2, the Matchroom promoter has confirmed negotiations are continuing.
Martin (23-0-1-KO21) won the vacant title in January when he benefited from an early knee injury to Vyacheslav Glazkov, but he did enough to impress the likes of trainer Peter Fury and would represent an ambitious step up for British and Commonwealth king Joshua (15-0-KO15).
Hearn told Sky Sports News HQ: "We were due to announce his opponent today. There have been a lot of people calling Anthony Joshua out, claiming they want to fight him and we need to find out which of those are real.
They both punch with immense power. It's one of those you might have to watch through your fingers. Eddie Hearn
"There have been some big opportunities that have been bandied around, some of which I think people felt we wouldn't be willing to take but after speaking to Anthony and his trainer, he's more than willing to take.
"Now it's a case of flushing out the people that aren't real and focusing on the ones that are and April 9, if we get our way, is going to be a night to remember at The O2.
"He's IBF world champion and he's been calling Anthony Joshua out. It shows the size of Anthony Joshua, you've got a world champion there calling Anthony Joshua out.
"He's made some noise saying: 'We've offered Anthony Joshua the fight.' It doesn't really work like that. You phoned us up and told us you want an extortionate amount of money and then you'll fight him so we're working the numbers on that fight.
'Prince' Charles Martin is the new IBF heavyweight champion 'Prince' Charles Martin is the new IBF heavyweight champion
"It's the 16th fight of Anthony Joshua's career. Is it too early? It's a huge gamble. Two relatively inexperienced guys. I think Charles Martin is 6ft 5in and Anthony's 6ft 6in. They both punch with immense power. It's one of those you might have to watch through your fingers.
"Anthony Joshua wants the challenges. Sometimes it's difficult to win a world heavyweight title. Now you have a guy who appears to be prepared to come to London on April 9 so we have to take it seriously.
"He's not our only option. We've got three or four others that we're looking at but over the next 48 hours, we'll find out exactly where we're at. Could it be a shot at the world heavyweight title? Just maybe..."
Joshua was last in action in December when he beat long-time rival Dillian Whyte via seventh round stoppage in a thriller at The O2.Close
As if watching reruns of Criminal Minds alone at night wasn't terrifying enough, a team of developers at the Kansas City-based Novum Analytics have released a trailer for their app that can turn your own house into your worst nightmare.
Night Terrors, an alternate-reality game, uses your phone screen and horror-trope sound effects to create an immersive (and terrifying - don't forget terrifying) experience that you can have right in the comfort of your very home.
Because demon eyes glowing in the dark just screams comfort.
According to their IndieGoGo page, the app uses your phone's camera to process everything in real time: "photorealistic elements are added to the camera feed. Audio is spatialized, mixed with the microphone feed, and then routed to the headphones delivering an immersive binaural audio experience."
The game does have an imperative (besides making it impossible for you to fall asleep ever again): your mission is to save a girl that is trapped inside your house, and to, well, not die.
Novum Analytics also has some parting advice on how to win the game: "it doesn't involve sitting on your couch."
ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Priscilla Marté sits about six rows back in the elite seats behind home plate, her 13-month-old son in her arms, while his 7-year-old brother hangs out in a playroom beneath the stands. On deck, waiting for his next at bat, is her husband, Andy, star of the last place KT Wiz, the newest club in the 10-team Korea Baseball Organization.
Ms. Marté watches while Andy, who played off and on for three US major league teams and spends winters playing ball in his native Dominican Republic, takes a few practice swings. From 25 feet away, his wife is confident he senses her presence.
"He knows I'm here, he knows where I am," she says, smiling broadly as the home-team crowd at the newly remodeled stadium in this historic, one-time dynastic center about 15 miles south of Seoul chants to the beat of drums and the animated gyrations of cheerleaders in mini-skirts.
The Korea Baseball Organization, founded 32 years ago, has so captured the passion of fans both for the game and the stadium experience that baseball has become the nation's No. 1 one spectator sport, forging far ahead of soccer. Two years ago, 6,809,965 fans paid to watch baseball while soccer got 2,852,388. (Basketball is surging here in popularity but remains a distant third among the sports-watching public.)
The baseball teams are all fielded by Korea's major conglomerates, which value them for both advertising and revenue.
Korean fans more enthusiastic?
While Korean schools and colleges produce star-quality players, each team also imports foreign players. Teams are limited to three foreigners each except for the Wiz, allowed four foreign slots as a new team. But it remains hard going for the Wiz. They've been known to defeat established clubs by wide margins but are now 10 games behind the ninth-place team, the LG Twins. Their record now stands at a dismal 37 wins and 72 losses.
Such is the Korean passion for going to the ballpark though, that Cho Joo-han, Wiz marketing director, predicts more than half a million people will have bought tickets to Wiz games by the time the 144-game season ends next month.
Mr. Cho, who got a master's degree in sports management from Indiana University and dreamed of working for an American team, believes Korean fans are more dedicated than are Americans. "Baseball is part of the culture," he observes, but wonders whether Americans go to games largely for "the atmosphere."
Cho cites two factors behind his judgment: One is that Korean parks hold no more than about 30,000 seats, so everyone can see.
Another is that all teams have wildly enthusiastic cheerleaders who put on elaborate routines similar to those of K-Pop groups on Korean TV. Typically, the female cheerleaders are led by a young man who acts as emcee, backed by loud music. The effect draws thousands into cheering and singing in full-throated solidarity.
By now baseball "has become a unique Korean culture," says K.C. Park, at the league's office in Seoul. "When people want to relieve stress, they go to the stadiums to unleash their energy."
Yes, he acknowledges, "Cheerleaders are indeed quite famous" and "some fans visit the stadiums just to see them" -- though "what really matters is the game itself."
Concentrate for all nine-innings
At 32, having batted in the low 200s with the Cleveland Indians, Marté is having his best year, leading the Wiz with a.362 batting average and 16 home runs. "I had a good year in triple A," he says, explaining why he was offered a contract. "They were looking for a third baseman."
How is it making the transition from American to Korean-style baseball? "They play small-ball here," he says. "There's a lot of bunting, stealing bases, hit-and-run. That's their strategy."
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Above all, though, it's the Korean passion that's different. "They take it so seriously," he says. "They are in the game all nine innings. It's awesome."
Will he be here next year? "I don't know yet," he says, as he leaves the stadium with his family for a short walk to their nearby apartment. "I hope so. I love it."The stand is small, about six square feet. Empty coffee cups, rolls of quarters and notepads litter the desk. A calendar featuring models with cars hangs next to a rusty saw. Newspapers cover the front of the shack. Stan Hallmark’s weathered hands lift his wooden pipe to his mouth.
“I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t think that for democracy to work, you have to have an informed public,” says Hallmark, 75, of Alameda. He has been working in newspapers for decades — 25 years delivering with his wife, who passed away in 2013, and now five years at historic Paul’s Newsstand.
Hallmark knows stands like this are numbered, but is afraid that something is being lost with the decline of newspapers. “The truth has been taken hostage and is being held somewhere in the clouds, because we don’t get a lot of it.” He says television and the Internet assaults our reason and often stories in all media outlets remain half-told.
He says he’s one of the few people who still reads the newspaper front to back everyday. “There are some young people who really have never read a newspaper.”
Back to Gallery Vendor sticks by historic Alameda newsstand 8 1 of 8 Photo: Tim Hussin / The Chronicle 2 of 8 Photo: Tim Hussin / The Chronicle 3 of 8 Photo: Tim Hussin / The Chronicle 4 of 8 Photo: Tim Hussin / The Chronicle 5 of 8 Photo: Tim Hussin / The Chronicle 6 of 8 Photo: Tim Hussin / The Chronicle 7 of 8 Photo: Tim Hussin / The Chronicle 8 of 8 Photo: Tim Hussin / The Chronicle
The small shack has been around since 1939, when Paul Manning, a wheelchair-bound newspaper salesman garnered sympathy from John J. Mulvany, the vice president of the Bank of America across the street. “When the rains came it was pretty difficult for him, holding an umbrella and shuffling newspapers,” Hallmark says.
So the shack was built. And it has survived through bouts of neglect and the more recent changing climate for the printed product.
Hallmark admits that selling a newspaper is not that interesting, but talking to the patrons is what he enjoys most. Regulars trickle by, bring him tangerines and coffee, make jokes and chat about current affairs. “We’re talking less and less now face to face and I think that’s a bad thing.”
Despite his grim outlook on the industry he has made such a large part of his working life, Hallmark sees a future for the stand. “I always thought it would make a good information center,” he says. “ I kinda do that on the side anyway.”
The Regulars is a weekly photo and video column by Erin Brethauer and Tim Hussin that offers a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people in the Bay Area, caught in routine activities of modern urban life. If you know a regular, e-mail [email protected] demise of OPEC as the price manipulator is what virtually every American president since Richard Nixon had in mind when they promised to find a way to make the United States energy independent, not chained to Middle East or OPEC oil, after the oil embargoes of the 1960s and 1970s.
Hydraulic fracturing, the blasting of oil and gas out of shale rock with water and chemicals, is the single most important factor of change in global markets in more than a decade, with an environmental outcry commensurate to its magnitude.
As soon as railroads connected North Dakota’s Bakken shale field to East Coast refineries the last couple of years, imports from the Middle East and Africa dried up, forcing various OPEC producers to redirect their product to China and other Asian markets. There, they battled it out for market share by slashing prices. That is just one example of how shale drilling not only transformed the United States from dependent consumer to a robust producer, but is also transforming the price dynamics of the global market.
Shale fields differ in several ways from conventional fields. Shale is not hard to find, but drilling is expensive because wells decline precipitously — by 60 to 70 percent in their first year. That means companies are obliged to drill well after well to keep production and revenue up.
That is not always good for individual producers, especially small ones, when prices fall. But those characteristics give shale producers collectively more power to influence the market because it condenses the amount of time companies have to respond to the inevitable cycles of boom and bust. Oil producers operating in the United States have the ability to rapidly accelerate or tap the brakes — much as Saudi Arabia and its OPEC partners have turned on and off their spare capacity in the past — depending on market conditions.
Image Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, before an OPEC meeting last year. Credit Heinz-Peter Bader/Reuters
Jack Gerard, chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, noted that the United States, which produces roughly the same amount of oil as Saudi Arabia and is poised to surpass the kingdom, is positioned to become the new OPEC but without the overt manipulation.
“The only difference is our position as swing producer will be managed by the free market,” he said, noting that a few all-powerful sheikhs are being replaced by hundreds of executives serving competing companies deciding when, where and how to drill in the new shale fields.A female jogger was robbed Friday during a morning run in Thousand Oaks. Gordon Tokumatsu reports for the NBC4 News at 4 p.m. on Friday, June 14, 2017. (Published Friday, July 14, 2017)
A thief stole a woman's cellphone while she was out for a morning jog Friday on a Wildwood Park trail in Thousand Oaks.
The woman said she heard footsteps behind her.
"She turned around to see a male with his face covered," Detective Tim Lohman of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department said. "He took her cellphone and he ran north, out of the park."
The jogger was not hurt. Authorities described the suspect as tall, in his 20s and wearing dark clothing.
Residents were concerned.
Holly Healy said she uses the park on a regular basis and doesn't see many joggers during the early morning hours.
"I would never go by myself," she said. "I would suggest that for anybody."
The thief reportedly took her cellphone, which he tossed before he disappeared.
Deputies searched with a helicopter and dogs throughout the morning, but found nothing.
Deputies encouraged runners to run in pairs when traversing on remote trails and to carry a cellphone for emergencies.Join us for opening weekend and our first retail bookstore! 321 Books is one of the largest Amazon used book sellers. We are bringing our books to Tyrone Square Mall and stuffing 10 |
increased human population and proximity to growing infrastructure is partially responsible, organised crime syndicates and intensive hunting carry the weight of the blame. In the Asian countries that use it, rhinoceros horn is more expensive than gold. Demand for the precious horn is ever increasing, resulting in elevated levels of poaching. If attention and resources are diverted from the protection of these majestic animals, we may have yet more candidates for resurrection in the future.
Altogether, this group of scientists identified the top 15 potential conservation issues (out of an initial group of 81 issues). In addition to the above topics, extensive land loss in southeast Asia from subsidence of peatlands, carbon solar cells as an alternative source of renewable energy, and an emerging fungal disease amongst snakes, have also been voted as plausible threats that need to be stopped before they can be realised.The Pirate Bay is under fire from an unknown attacker in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) strike that has lasted at least 24 hours.
In an early morning post to its Facebook page, The Pirate Bay announced that it was "under a quite big ddos attack."
"We don't know who's behind it but we have our suspicions," the post continued. "Once we've awaken our tech guru Winston Q we'll get on the issue." By 12:20pm, the site said it was "getting back up [and] stronger than ever," and pointed user to its list of proxies.
As of 2pm Eastern time, access to the site was still spotty.
The attack comes after ISPs in the U.K. and the Netherlands were ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay over copyright violations. In retaliation, the hacking group Anonymous struck out at Virgin Media, one of the U.K. ISPs ordered to block to the site, prompting The Pirate Bay to equate the move to censorship.
In a blog post, the team responsible for the Virgin Media attack - AnonAteam - wrote that it had "no involvement" in the DDoS attack on The Pirate Bay.
"It is not a legitimate protest for anyone to be involved with nor does it fall within our objectives," AnonAteam said. "Anyone involved in the attack should stop. It is our understanding Anonymous have no involvement in this attack."
Later in the day, The Pirate Bay said "we KNOW that it is NOT Anonymous who is behind the ddos attack."
As noted by TorrentFreak, "Pirate Bay downtime happens a handful of times each month, [but] it rarely persists for more than a few hours. When it goes beyond that the steady flow of reader emails to TorrentFreak quickly transforms itself into a torrent."
In related news, TorrentFreak this week also reported on a Microsoft-backed torrent blocker known as the Pirate Pay. Created in 2009 by brothers Andrei and Alexei Klimenko and their friend Dmitry Shuvaev, the effort received $100,000 from the Microsoft Seed Financing Fund, according to Russia Beyond the Headlines.
In a translated blog post, Microsoft's Alexander Krakovetskiy praised Pirate Pay as a proactive way to combat piracy.
For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.
For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.THE hot dry weather is revealing some of Oxfordshire’s Bronze Age history normally hidden from view.
Hot air balloon pilot Michael Wolf, of Reading Road, Wallingford, was training another pilot near North Stoke when they spotted several dark circles in a farmer’s field.
Crops had grown at different speeds because of ancient ditches hidden beneath the soil which once surrounded prehistoric burial mounds.
The site dates back 3,500 years but is hidden under fields and normally cannot be seen.
The 52-year-old said: “In twelve years of ballooning, I have never seen anything as clear as this. It was like looking down on a map.
“I have flown over this field before, and never seen any marks. The hot weather must have created absolutely perfect conditions for seeing the marks.”
He added: “There were seven or eight big circles. It was absolutely fantastic.”
County archaeologist Paul Smith said: “There are very extensive areas of Bronze Age barrow cemeteries in that area, and some Roman remains too. There is a whole mix of multi-period sites.
“There has not been a lot of excavation, but these sites periodically show up through crops.
“When it has been dry, the ditches once dug for round barrows hold more moisture than the surrounding area, and when the rest of the field is ripening, the crops above the ditch are considerably greener.
He added: “This period of the summer is the best time to see crop marks, but it may last for just a few days or a few weeks.
“Some summers are definitely better than others. This year, a lot of sites are showing up.”
He said the county council’s archaeology service had been contacted by a number of people who had spotted other marks across the county, either from planes and hot air balloons, or while passing through the countryside on trains or buses.
The barrows, constructed between 2,200 BC and 1,000 BC, would once have been mounds, like the prehistoric Seven Barrows site on the Lambourn Downs south of Wantage, but over the centuries, farming has obliterated all surface traces of them.
[email protected] announced quite a few new devices at CES 2016 this week. Including a new desktop that runs on Chrome OS. It's the new Chromebase 24. Which is a 23.8-inch Full HD Monitor that has Chrome OS built in, it'll come with a keyboard and mouse as well, so you won't have to worry about that. It's a great desktop for those that just need or want to browse the web. It does offer USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports as well as a SD card slot that allows you to bring pictures onto your Chromebase 24.
We were able to get some hands on with the Acer Chromebase 24 at CES 2016 this week, and we walked away pretty impressed with this one. While it's not as portable as a Chromebook, it's still a great product to pick up, which it'll be available in the coming months. There's also no price announced for the Acer Chromebase 24 just yet. But we should know more pretty soon, hopefully. We've seen other Chromebase's from LG and Acer, which have performed pretty well, and we largely expect the same from the Chromebase 24 as well. It's also the first Chromebase sporting an Intel Core processor inside - typically we have Atom processors inside these.Today, NRDC joined with our colleagues at the Defenders of Wildlife and The Bay Institute to ask California’s State Water Resource Control Board (“State Board”) to take emergency steps to save the threatened Delta Smelt from extinction. The State Board has the authority and the duty to preserve and restore California’s native fish and wildlife for future generations—that’s what it means to protect public trust resources. But the State Board has shirked this duty for years now, ignoring its own critical role in protecting the Delta and its species, while allowing federal fish biologists and the Endangered Species Act to do all the hard work. But, now, the State Board must act quickly if the Delta Smelt—the first in a long line of imperiled fish native to the Delta, including chinook salmon, steelhead, and sturgeon—is going to be saved.
Our request for emergency action is based on recent urgent calls issued by biologists at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (“USFWS”) and California’s Natural Resources Agency to increase flows through the Delta in the summer months to allow young fish to reach food-rich habitat and grow and survive to rear the next generation of Delta Smelt. On June 1, USFWS stated that providing these increased flows from June through September of this year was “critical to maintaining adequate habitat conditions for Delta Smelt.” USFWS has explained that the species’ population is so low that “[e]nsuring survival of this year's offspring [which the increased outflow is designed to do] is critical to the future existence of the species.” California’s Natural Resources Agency echoed these findings, calling for increased freshwater flows through the Delta this summer, and in subsequent years, to improve the condition of Delta Smelt, whose population has fallen to all-time lows.
Despite these urgent calls, the state Department of Water Resources (“DWR”)—an agency of the Natural Resources Agency—and the federal Bureau of Reclamation have utterly failed to provide the increased flows this summer, instead diverting the needed water to urban water agencies, like the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, that claim they no longer need to conserve because their water situation is so improved, and agricultural users that are generating record revenues in the drought. Since June 1, when the fish agencies called for increased flows, DWR and Reclamation have met the minimum level of flows only 10 of the past 69 days, and have basically stated that they are not going to try to increase flows through September, which marks the end of the increased outflow period defined by the fish agencies. That’s a 14% “success” rate and dropping. That wouldn’t even merit an “F” if the water agencies were being graded on this exercise.
But the State Board has the power and the obligation to require these agencies to leave more water instream through September of this year, and in future years, to give the Delta Smelt a fighting chance. It’s long past time for State Board to exercise this authority. Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is losing patience with the State Board’s long-delayed update of its Bay-Delta water quality standards, noting the need for “more freshwater flow through the Delta” is "overdue by at least 3 years":
The time for the State Board to act to protect the Delta Smelt is now. As recently as the 1970s, the Delta Smelt was one of the most abundant species in the San Francisco Bay-Delta. It served as an important food source for other fish and wildlife and as part of a prosperous bait fishery in the Delta. Delta Smelt were harvested by Native Americans for food, and, if restored, could again provide a local source of sustainably-raised protein. As Congress pointed out when enacting the Endangered Species Act, the failure to act threatens not just them, but us:
[A]s species are threatened with extinction, we threaten their—and our own—genetic heritage. The value of this genetic heritage is, quite literally, incalculable.... From the most narrow possible point of view, it is in the best interests of mankind to minimize losses of genetic variations. The reason is simple: they are potential resources.... Who knows, or can say, what potential cures for cancer or other scourges, present or future, may lie locked up in the structures of plants which may yet be undiscovered, much less analyzed?... Sheer self-interest impels us to be cautious.
H.R. Rep. No. 93-412 at 4-5 (1973) (quoted in TVA v. Hill, 437 U.S. at 178).
This blog provides general information, not legal advice. If you need legal help, please consult a lawyer in your state.OTTAWA — The Liberal government says it plans to introduce legislation later this fall to regulate vaping.
Health Canada offered few other details Tuesday beyond saying it would both protect young people from nicotine and allow adult smokers to use vaping as a quit-smoking aid or as a potentially less harmful alternative to tobacco.
In a statement, the department said it is also renewing the federal tobacco control strategy for one year, giving the government time to develop a new long-term plan. The strategy was introduced in 2001 and last renewed four years ago.
Health Minister Jane Philpott will host a national forum early next year to discuss the future of tobacco control.
“Smoking tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death in Canada, affecting the well-being of all Canadians, including youth.,” said Philpott. “The government of Canada is continuing to explore new and better ways to address smoking in Canada, and its impact on the health of Canadians.”
Health Canada also said federal work continues on a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes, as well as a commitment to introduce plain and standardized packaging requirements on all tobacco products.
Several provinces and municipalities have already brought forward measures on vaping, but federal legislation is required, said Rob Cunningham, a senior policy adviser at the Canadian Cancer Society.
“It’s clearly something that needs regulation,” he said. “We don’t want kids to be using these cigarettes.”
Regulations covering where an individual can — and cannot — smoke varies according to province, although generally smoking is prohibited in workplaces and a wide variety of public places.
But municipalities can be even tougher. Since May 2012, Hamilton, Ont., for instance, banned smoking on all municipal property. Break its bylaw, be found guilty and end up convicted will dig a maximum $10,000 hole in your pocket.
Revised tobacco legislation must address not only e-cigarettes, but topics such as new industry marketing tactics, water-pipe smoking and regulation of marijuana, Cunningham said.
“There’s a whole bunch of new issues that have suddenly made the tobacco issue more complicated, and that’s why the new strategy has to be done right.”
The government says an estimated 87,000 Canadians, including many young people, will become daily smokers this year — placing them and others at risk of developing a variety of diseases and illnesses.
And that’s not counting the 4.2 million current smokers, admittedly a smaller number than in the past.
Ottawa has been surveying Canadians about smoking prevalence for 14 years and found rates have fallen from a high of 25 per cent in 1999 to 15 per cent in 2013.
The 2013 Canadian tobacco, alcohol and drugs survey found that nine per cent of Canadians reported having tried an e-cigarette. Among youth and young adults, 20 per cent reported having ever tried an e-cigarette.
Canada was the first country to introduce graphic warning labels to inform people of the risks of smoking, and the government bills itself as a pioneer in the restriction of tobacco advertising and flavouring to reduce the appeal of products.Our busy lifestyle today has left us to become much immersed in catching deadlines, attending to our superiors and coming home tired every day. This daily cycle has left us with no more energy to make ourselves happy in between rush hours and busy days at the office or in any workplace. Even if you have a decent amount of earnings to allow you to buy whatever you want, you would still end up feeling incomplete if you lack some important things that should keep your happy hormones up and running.
This is why aiming to live well and be happy should be a part of your daily mantra. It is easy for us to search the Internet or read in magazines about the things that are supposed to make us happy. In fact, you can even find a lot of good reads from different literature and TV shows that consist of a multitude of techniques to brighten up your mood. However, it is important that you discover your personal wants and desires first before determining which tools can make you ultimately happy with your life. Although this part of finding your true happiness can take some sweet time, this is very crucial in order for you to make use of all the other help coming from your friends, your favorite counselors or even your favorite self improvement books.
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions – Dalai Lama
For the meantime, here are some points that will surely help you get their one step at a time.
1) Think less about what others think about you.
As cliché as it may seem, the saying “You cannot please everyone” is very much true in our case. You can never guarantee that all the people around you share the principles that you uphold. This naturally follows that they may not be in sync with what you are doing or thinking. Dwelling with this fact can be quite disappointing, so it is better that you move on and do the things that make you live well.
2) Go out of your comfort zone and take some risks.
You can never find out what truly makes you happy if you confine yourself in your own limits of comfort. How else would you know that cliff diving or bungee jumping is the thing that could bring your hype up if you are too afraid to do anything that is more than just getting out of your car? By exploring your limits, you can help yourself with the amazing things that your body and willpower can give you.
3) Compete with yourself, not with everyone else.
We are so used to gauging our lifestyle, performances and outputs with those who are around us. This could bring so much disappointment because, truth be told, you are not born with the same skills as your officemate, classmate or your best friend.
4) Do not be afraid to make mistakes.
You can hear a lot of people saying that success does not come from being free from failures. It results from being able to stand up with every fall and learning from your mistakes. This is true in the sense that our mistakes are basically pointers for us on what to improve so that we can live well.
5) Stop living in the past.
Previous struggles and disappointments are very powerful things to cause us some big time setbacks in moving forward towards self-improvement. We can help ourselves live happily in the future by letting go of the ghosts of the past and start living for yourself and for your loved ones today.
6) Be patient.
You have not been alive if you have not heard of the adage “Patience is a virtue.” True enough, good things come to those who wait while boring things come to those who do not.
7) Choose the people that you want to be around with
You can never be in front of a mirror all the time to cheer yourself up and help yourself live well. This is why choosing the right friends who share the same principles and virtues as you can help you in finding what makes you happy.
8) Fight for what you believe in.
Nothing is more monotonous with your lifestyle than just complying with everything that other people say to you, regardless of them being correct or not. As long as you think that what you are doing is right, then do not let others trample your ideas.
9) Love what you do.
As what the famous Kahlil Gibran said, work is just another manifestation of love. Just put your whole heart in whatever you are doing and it is guaranteed that it will not feel like work at all.
10) Think it. Say it. Do it, Live it
Nothing is more satisfying than being able to achieve the things that you have dreamed of. Start by doing small things that will definitely help you on your journey towards self-improvement.
SaveSaveWhen the weather has settled and it’s time to plant your seeds, prepare your beds, smoothing the lumps out. Dig shallow furrows and unroll your seed tapes into them. Cover them with about a ¼ inch of fine soil or sand. Water gently and keep the areas moist until your seedlings appear. They’ll be as straight and evenly placed as soldiers on parade. (That was a welcome surprise in my garden.)
This is a fun project you can tackle when you want to garden and the weather is too unsettled to work outside. It is also a good way to introduce children to gardening by letting them help make seed tapes. Children are then eager to see their flowers and veggies appear and to help harvest them. I think you’ll also find them eating produce willingly after they’ve helped to prepare the seeds for planting.
A fascinating project for older children is to take an opened sheet of newspaper (preferably the want ads) and let them write their name on it very large with magic marker. Make X’s on their name as far apart as the seeds should be placed. Short plants like alyssum, lobelia, dwarf marigolds and zinnias are good choices. Plant the sheets of paper where they want their names to appear in living color and you’ll be surprised at how willing they are to weed those beds!Every once in a while, you might get a feeling you need to shoot a picture. I would follow through on those, no matter how awkward, or sad, or inconvenient it might be. Over the years, I’ve made pictures of some feelings. Missed lots of times. Some, though, I still have a picture of, and I’m glad I do. Those pictures, of those feelings, have become my memory. When I saw my mom over Christmas, I had a feeling it would be the last time I would see her. So I made a picture.
My mom was an Irish lady with a trip wire temper and a pretty good right cross. She was also a good mom, in her way. She spent her life raising three kids, fiercely, and uprooting us as my dad kept changing jobs. He was gone a lot, so she bought and sold five homes on her own, and stuffed all of us and the dog into a Plymouth Belvedere, and headed for neighborhoods and schools unknown. She also spent her life doing battle with just about anybody she felt looked at her cross-ways, which was just about everybody, including, maybe even especially, her own family. She always spoke her mind. And if you didn’t agree with her, you were just, you know, wrong. Her steely bluntness made for lively family gatherings, which diminished in popularity and numbers over the years.
Ma was just about always at DEFCON One or Two at the least. Prickly to a fault, she went through her day on the alert for any fault or slight, real or perceived. If you did business with her, you pretty much got sued, or at the very least received a legally loaded, relatively unpleasant letter. She went through lawyers like popcorn.
Mom was a sword that cut both ways, of course. Her fearsomely direct approach to parenting left you no doubt as to where you stood as one of her kids, to be sure. But woe to someone she thought might have crossed one of us! One of my high school teachers who didn’t care for my attitude, an Irish Christian brother no less, drastically re-jiggered one of my grades once to negatively affect my GPA. She went to the school and fixed it, and him. I’m sure he said his prayers that night with renewed vigor.
Neighbors were an especially favorite target, especially if they had the temerity to actually stick around, and plant bushes she didn’t find attractive, or re-grade their property so that by her lights their runoff water would then hurtle, Niagara-like, towards her property. Once, a neighbor came over to ask her to shut down the light bulb she kept on overnight above her driveway door. He alleged it was keeping his toddler up at night. I don’t think it was reasonable to ask a 75 year old woman living by herself to shut down the comfort of a 60 watt bulb in the driveway, really. Neither did Ma.
She nodded when informed of the youngster’s sleep travails, and thanked the neighbor for the information. The very next week, after a visit by an electrician, her driveway was lit up with multiple 150 watt floodlights that sprayed so much illumination her place looked like a POW camp, minus the razor wire and the bark-less Dobermans. Those neighbors irked her so much she put up a laundry line on the thin, heavily shaded strip of property between her garage and their backyard, a place where literally, the sun didn’t shine. Every time those folks launched a barbecue or had some company, her undies would go up on the line. They would stay wet, on the line, all day. Drying them, you see, wasn’t the point.
Our parents live on in all of us, of course. Once, approaching the George Washington Bridge in heavy traffic, with four lanes squeezing to two, I went Road Warrior on somebody who was trying to cut in front of me. White knuckling the steering wheel, muttering ancient curses, I was on a bumper grinding heading with this guy when my ever perceptive oldest daughter called out from the passenger seat, “Dad, you’re becoming grandma.” I let the guy in.
All of mom’s flinty antics were of course amusing and exasperating until they became serious. As the police chief of her town said to me and my sisters, “We really don’t want to put an 85 year old in jail. But she has to stop.” Ma was pushing it. In the end she was the one who moved.
We had our bumps, to be sure, and long periods of silence as the years wore on, as she got ever angrier at the world and her diminished power over it. Eventually, given the haze of aging memory, she softened a bit, and there were a couple of visits. At almost 97, she could hear and see just fine, and took one aspirin a day as the sum of her medication. What she couldn’t do particularly well was remember.
She had flashes, though. That last visit, I do think she recognized me, if only briefly, and she reached to hold my hand. As difficult as it was, I made a picture.
We talked for a bit. It was nice. As I left, I made this last photo. I guess I just had a feeling.
She’s gone now. True to form, she resolutely refused to share space with my dad, preferring to go with her mom and pop, at rest in the Bronx. The ground there will be richer for her presence, I’m sure. And, if a tree ever grows out of the earth where my mother lays, I guarantee you it will be a tree to be reckoned with.
More tk…..Quote
My main concern at the time was the issue of reclaiming dyes from collections, something I was against.
Here is what I wrote:
The_Natoorat Quote: Originally Posted by Hi,
I want to talk a out dyes.
There are quite a few topics on this subject, mostly focusing on reclaiming CM dyes through "Collections". Personally... I think it's a poor idea. Let me explain:
Making dyes "reclaimable" would drive up their desirability, and with it, their price. There would be some increase in "low tier" CM dyes (mostly from packs) price, but the "high tier" dyes (black-black) would become way more desirable and that would lead to greater price increase, which is sky-high already.
As a result of "reclamation" and price increase, the volume of CM dyes sold on GTN would quickly fall for because of:
A) lower affordability due to higher price
B) being able to reclaim additional modules from collections discourages additional purchases by the same player
With that in mind I believe that in longer term the price for "low tier" dyes would fall, but volume of sales would still became lower than before due to Collections reclamation. I do not believe that there would be a great effect on craftable dyes, maybe some small fall in sales of "low tier" modules due to "reclaimability" of "low tier" CM dyes, but highly desirable modules (black-red) will remain the same, because they still remain an affordable alternative to CM black-black ones.
But...
That's just my justification against "Collection Unlocks". However allow me to offer an alternative. I posted something like that before, but I can't remember where exactly, and now I can refine it. My idea would help crafters and would increase CM sales so more $$$ for EAWare:
An overhaul of Dye Crafting.
* Instead of "ready to use" modules, crafters are able to make any single "dye colours". Those "dye colours" are tradeable on GTN. Cost of crafting them should be lower than current modules, maybe slight variation in cost based on colour desirability (eg crafting "sith black" colour would require more materials than "neon green" colour).
* Colours have to be inserted into "dye frame" which in turn can be inserted into armour, and works exactly in the same way as current modules (single use, destroyed on removal, canot be altered after inserting colour into the frame). Frame has 2 slots, one for primary and one for secondary colour, player can insert any colour into either primary or secondary slot, and can leave one slot empty if so desired.
* "Dye frames" can only be obtained through CM, with some reasonably low price, say 50cc. Frames are tradeable on GTN.
The changes proposed by me would allow constant, affordable supply of all dyes to the market, everyone would be able to get any module they want. Crafting would get a boost, making crafters happy. CM sales would increase because of constant demand for low cost frames.
IMO that's a WIN-WIN-WIN scenario.
All of the above is just my speculation, I am open to suggestions and/or counter arguments I wrote about dyes before. Overall I agree that an overhaul is needed, and my idea was similar to yours, but I believe it's simpler because it doesent require changing any armous.My main concern at the time was the issue of reclaiming dyes from collections, something I was against.Here is what I wrote: "One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny." - Bertrand RussellMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "Everybody was in a panic"
A woman has been bailed after six people, including three children, were injured when a car mounted a kerb and ploughed into a crowd of people.
The crash happened outside Newcastle's Westgate Sports Centre where an Eid event was taking place.
Northumbria Police said four people remained in hospital on Monday being treated for "various injuries".
The force added that a 42-year-old woman has been released on conditional bail pending further investigation.
The incident was not believed to be terrorism-related.
Image caption Emergency services included six ambulances, two paramedic rapid response vehicles and the air ambulance
Of the three children hospitalised, two were in intensive care.
The woman who was arrested had been celebrating the end of Ramadan with her family and hundreds of others when the collision happened at 09:14 BST on Sunday.
One eyewitness said: "From what I understand [a woman who had been at prayer] was about to leave in her car and I believe she lost control.
"I ran up straight away because everyone was moving in on all the injured, trying to put water in their mouths.
"The parents of the kids were there. I had to sort of try and calm them down just to tell them the ambulance is there and they will take care of it; they know what they're doing."
'Prayers for recovery'
Emergency services included six ambulances, two paramedic rapid response vehicles and the air ambulance.
In a statement, the nearby Newcastle Central Mosque said: "We pray and hope that all those affected recover soon fully.
"We thank the emergency medical services, the police and over 100 volunteers from the mosque for their quick response to the incident.
"We urge everyone to please pray for all those affected."
Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, tweeted: "So sad, I was at the prayers earlier & there were so much joy & unity. Thinking of those affected by what I am told was terrible accident."
Image caption People at the scene created a human chain so emergency services could help the injured
'Everyone locked arms' - medical student Ahmad Ali
We were here for Eid. Everyone had just finished praying. The imam had finished his speech and everyone was talking to their families and getting some food.
Then we heard a commotion and screaming.
I ran up to the hill. A man got out of the passenger side. He seemed distraught.
Someone was trapped under the car and then everyone just pushed the car so they were free.
They were two children there, one of them - he was a boy about eight - was really badly injured,
There were about five doctors there so he had a lot of medical attention. We checked to see he had a pulse.
Everyone locked arms so there was a ring of locked arms around the injured people so they had space and the ambulances could get to them.
Everyone was distraught. I am very grateful it's not an attack.
It's very shocking to see a child injured like that. We are all hoping that he is fine, I just want to hear that.
Abdul Mahdoul, who was at the event, said: "We were wishing everyone happy Eid and suddenly we heard a lot of shouting and screaming. We didn't know what it was.
"People were panicking. The police did a great job to calm the situation down.
"It was a very happy atmosphere beforehand, but afterwards just chaos. I just wish for the people to recover very quickly."
Image caption Abdul Mahdoul said a "very happy atmosphere" turned into "chaos"
Councillor Dipu Ahad said: "We saw people crying and sobbing, it was like what you see in a horror movie, people were crying on the street, in corners.
"It was a real sad situation to see this and I think people were in confusion about what really happened.
"I had tears in my own eyes - it was a day of celebration for Muslims and others as well and it's a very sad situation and I hope this never happens again."
Image caption Westgate road has reopened following earlier closures in both directions
Get news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morningDynamite, Paizo, and Humble Bundle have teamed up again to bring you Humble Book Bundle: Pathfinder Worldscape! To celebrate, we're going to be streaming all day from the Paizo office with gaming and Q&A sessions covering Pathfinder Worldscape, Starfinder, and more. You can join the livestream directly on our Twitch channel and check out the Humble Bundle to grab comics and adventures at a "pay what you want" price to support both Camden's Concert and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
What can you get by participating in Humble Book Bundle: Pathfinder Worldscape? Get a number of Pathfinder comics from our friends at Dynamite Entertainment such as Pathfinder: Goblins! or Pathfinder: Hollow Mountain, as well as exclusive maps and posters. You can also pick up must-have Pathfinder products like the Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box, Core Rulebook, and Strategy Guide. Plus, we've included everything you need to kick off a starbound adventure with volumes of Pathfinder Adventure Path Iron Gods, People of the Stars, Distant Worlds, and Technology Guide.
Last night we posted a preliminary schedule of our livesteam, but you can find the full details for today's marathon below. Can't make time to watch? Don't worry, we'll be posting the archived video to our YouTube.
Humble Book Bundle: Pathfinder Worldscape Livestream Into the Worldscape at 11:00 AM
Erik Mona, with Jason Bulmahn, Crystal Frasier, and Valeros (Erik Keith) Worldscape Q&A at 1:00 PM
Erik Mona answers all your Pathfinder Worldscape questions! Starfinder Preview Playtest at 2:00 PM
Jason Keeley, with Amanda Hamon Kunz, Owen KC Stephens, and James L. Sutter Starfinder Q&A at 4:00 PM
The Starfinder creative team reveals the secrets of the Starfinder RPG! Pathfinder Society: The Horn of Aroden
John Compton, with Logan Bonner, Mark Seifter, and Tonya Woldridge Pathfinder Adventure Path Iron Gods
James Jacobs, with Erik Mona, Jessica Price, and Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Humble Book Bundle: Pathfinder Worldscape runs until January 25, 2017, so be sure to check it out and support Camden's Concert and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. And if you can, join us on Twitch!
Chris Lambertz
Community & Digital Content DirectorSpiritual education is a keystone of how I am raising my sons, and I am always inspired to hear how other parents are working to raise their children along a spiritual path. In the series Parenting and Faith I feature posts from bloggers discussing how their religion or philosophy influences their parenting. I am so pleased to share today’s post, which comes to us from my friend Stephen of Head of the Heard, a fellow member of Multicultural Kid Blogs.
At first glance I shouldn’t be writing anything for this series on faith and parenting because I have no faith. I was brought up a Catholic, but by the age of 16 I had decided that wasn’t for me. I spent a few years investigating other faiths and one of the reasons I started to travel a bit was to look for different ideas. One of the attractions of living in Taiwan for a year was that it was a Buddhist country so I would be able to find out a bit more about that religion.
After a while, though, I stopped searching for a religion that could offer me answers and decided that there probably isn’t a god of any description. If this was true then I had to find some other way of bringing order and meaning to my life.
The fact that I don’t believe in a god does not mean that I am not spiritual. For me, spirituality is all about asking ourselves the big questions and searching for answers. Those questions run along the lines of Why are we here? What are we supposed to do with our time here? Is there any meaning to this life? Where can I get a decent cup of tea?
I have found my own answers through science and philosophy, but I don’t have any claim to being right. I think I am right, but I don’t know I am right. And the search for answers to these questions is ongoing. I need to challenge my ideas all the time by reading, talking to people and observing the world. Ask me in 10 years what I believe and it might be exactly the same as today, or it could be totally different. Anyone who says they know the truth is lying and should not be trusted.
It is this search for my answers and distrust of self appointed authorities that informs my parenting style. I want my son to question everything and everyone. I don’t want him to accept an answer just because I told him it was true. Many parents hate the phase of the constant questions from toddlers; I am learning to love it.
While he is questioning everyone he also needs to learn that other people are also on their own journey of discovery. Some will be happy with the answers they learn as children, some will never find their answers. Whatever their state, he needs to accept that it is the journey that is important and everyone has the right to find their own path without being judged by anyone else. We try to teach that respect of everyone else is key to being a good human.
And then there is one other thing that I learned from looking into different religions and humanism: the Golden Rule. This rule is present in all of the major religions and most of the minor ones as well. It can be found in the writings of |
was parched.”
Bonus Facts:
Milk is white thanks to a protein called casein, which makes up about 80% of the proteins in milk. Casein scatters and deflects light more or less uniformly throughout the visual spectrum, so milk looks white to us. Read more about this and other milk facts here: Why Milk is White
While playing baseball at the age of nine years old, Verlander elicited many complaints to his coach due to the fact that he could throw incredibly hard, for that age, but had almost no control over his fastball. As such, many kids were afraid, and some refused, to step into the batter’s box against him due to his propensity to accidentally hit them with his high velocity pitches.
The reason raw milk goes bad so quickly when left out, at least for drinking purposes, is that the lactose in milk ends up getting processed by microorganisms into lactic acid. Depending on the microorganisms performing this processing, this can produce a variety of tasty products, such as various types of cheeses, yogurts, buttermilk, etc. or create something quite rancid.
The pasteurization process that kills microorganisms in milk also destroys the Vitamin C content, as well as significantly diminishes various other health benefits of raw milk.
Verlander was named Rookie of the Year in 2006. At the time it happened, he was out washing his car. He claims he even forgot what day the announcement would be made so wasn’t thinking about it. He came inside half way through washing his car to find 20 missed calls on his phone from the Tigers. As excited as he was finding out about winning, rather than immediately celebrating, he stated “I had to go out and finish washing my car—can’t leave the soap on there.”
In Verlander’s very small home town of Goochland, VA. a restaurant there sells a “Verlander Burger”. Verlander noted in an interview that “they didn’t consult me before they made it. It has raw onions and tomatoes, and I don’t like either one.”
To date, Verlander has thrown two no-hitters. The next game after the second no-hitter, in 2011, he managed to get into the sixth inning before giving up a hit, making a span of 15 2/3 innings over three starts without giving up a hit.
As impressive as that stretch is, Neftali Feliz of the Texas Rangers this month had just shy of a 20 inning no-hit stretch against the Seattle Mariners, spanning three seasons, snapped. The streak was finally broken during Feliz’s first start of his career (having been converted from a relief pitcher). In the 4th inning of the game, Justin Smoak, a former Ranger himself, singled off Feliz. During the 0-58 stretch the Mariners endured off of Feliz, they struck out 24 times. Further, they had just three line drives during that stretch. Ouch… Mariners….
Grade A and Grade B milk are the two varieties allowed in the United States. Grade A milk is used for direct consumption. Grade B milk is used for making cheeses and other types of milk product. There is very little difference between the two; Grade A milk is cooled using refrigeration (due to the requirement to keep it at 45 F within two hours of milking) and Grade A milk farms are inspected every six months. Grade B milk is typically cooled in cans immersed in cold flowing water underground (same temperature of 45 F). Grade B milk farms, though, only need inspected every two years. There are also a few differences in terms of bacterial count and things of this nature, but this isn’t a significant difference when factoring in eventual pasteurization and the like of milk sold to be drunk.
Expand for ReferencesWorld football’s governing body Fifa has taken another step in its reform efforts by scrapping bonuses for its senior executives, according to the Bloomberg news agency.
The development will apply to Fifa’s Executive Committee, a 25-strong body which is responsible for approving lucrative broadcast and sponsorship agreements. The Executive Committee has been at the centre of a number of high-profile corruption cases in recent years and Domenico Scala, chairman of Fifa’s audit and compliance committee, said executives agreed to end the bonuses after he argued that they created a risk of unethical behaviour.
“FIFA’s executive committee is an oversight and decision-making body, they are not responsible for sales,” Scala said. “From a governance perspective we don’t want to provide a bonus to people overseeing the operations.”
Scala declined to say how much the bonuses were worth, only describing them as “significant.” Fifa’s 2012 financial report detailed that it paid $33.5m (€24.8m) to “key management personnel,” who included the executive board and finance committee.Here’s a shocker: Sen. John McCain of Arizona is more popular among Democrats than Republicans, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday.
Poll: McCain is now better liked by Democrats than Republicans https://t.co/YXPapdI2yH pic.twitter.com/fH2hNikHpw — The Hill (@thehill) November 2, 2017
The Hill reports:
Forty-four percent of Republicans surveyed in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday hold a negative view of McCain, while only 35 percent have a positive view of him. Meanwhile, 52 percent of Democrats surveyed now see him in a positive light. Overall, 43 percent of survey respondents had a favorable view of McCain and 28 percent a negative one.
The Hill notes that, in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, 79 percent of Republicans viewed him positively.
Surprising to no one on the right. https://t.co/f1mjxDFeBw — Jedediah Bila (@JedediahBila) November 2, 2017
And vice versa. Just one big ole love fest. They recognize the maverick that he is. https://t.co/iuyEPh7TZn — Stule Cvel (@stule) November 2, 2017
That's not how this works… that's not how any of this works. https://t.co/qb8ltSbsf2 — Trump❷⓿❷⓿ (@He_Has_Failed) November 2, 2017
He’s the media’s favorite again… I guess their numbers are already included with the Democrats. https://t.co/NPjpNauEDr — Rschrim (@Rschrim) November 2, 2017
And yet …
They’d still shit all over him if he ran for president again. https://t.co/xF4MA66gpF — #DumpSpeakerRyan? (@Goaliemom3533) November 2, 2017
Yep … just look at the newfound love and respect Democrats have for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney.
Quick… someone Remind them about Palin! https://t.co/5ea5fN2OgI — Larry O'Connor (@LarryOConnor) November 2, 2017
* * *
Related:Image copyright Reuters Image caption Muslim Seleka, such as these rebels, are under attack from Christian anti-Balaka - or "anti-machete" - militia
At least 30 people have been killed and another 10 wounded in fighting between rival sectarian militias in the Central African Republic (CAR), police say.
Officials say most of those who died in the central town of Dekoa were civilians hit by stray bullets.
The predominantly Christian anti-Balaka militia attacked positions held by mainly Muslim Seleka rebels, they say.
CAR exploded into violence in early December amid mounting resentment toward a Muslim-led government.
Muslim rebels seized power in March 2013 by overthrowing President Francois Bozize - who had been in power for a decade.
The rebel leader who replaced him, President Michel Djotodia, was accused of failing to prevent his forces from raping, torturing and killing civilians - particularly among the country's Christian majority.
When Mr Djotodia's government fell in January, Christian militia fighters began attacking Muslim civilians in retaliation.
Thousands have been killed since the conflict began and tens of thousands more have fled the country. The UN says that about 1.3 million people - a quarter of the population - are in need of aid.
Fighting escalates
The UN Security Council is due to vote on Thursday on expanding the nearly 5,000-strong African mission in CAR into a UN peacekeeping operation.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Mainly Muslim Seleka rebels seized power a year ago, perpetrating abuses on the majority Christian population that triggered waves of revenge attacks
Image copyright AP Image caption The UN Security Council is due to vote on Thursday on expanding the nearly 5,000-strong African mission in CAR
Image copyright AFP Image caption Muslims in Bangui are feeling increasingly nervous - tens of thousands have already fled the country
Image copyright AFP Image caption Some 2,000 French and 6,000 African peacekeepers are struggling to keep the violence in check
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned of "ethno-religious cleansing" in CAR, with lynchings, decapitations and sexual violence all going unpunished.
Some 6,000 African and 2,000 French peacekeepers are currently struggling to keep the violence in check.
Correspondents say that they face a hugely difficult task as Seleka rebels, who have been pushed north from the capital, Bangui, attempt to regroup.
French military police have, however, begun patrolling the streets of Bangui as the first part of a new European Union combat force which is expected to number 800 troops by the end of May.
Escalation
In the latest violence, police said that the anti-Balaka militia attacked Seleka positions early on Tuesday morning in Dekoa, about 300km (180 miles) north of Bangui.
They said that the fighting escalated when the Seleka called in reinforcements and went on for more than four hours.
"Most of the victims were civilians who were hit by stray bullets," a police source told the AFP news agency.
Meanwhile the US ambassador to the UN on Wednesday urged more support for African and French troops in CAR ahead the UN peacekeeping vote.
Ambassador Samantha Power - currently in CAR - said that the African peacekeeping mission was working hard to fill the gap left by the departure of about 850 troops from neighbouring Chad and were being deployed into the areas they previously guarded.
CAR is rich in gold, diamonds and other natural resources but decades of unrest and mismanagement have left most of its people stuck in poverty.A common misconception is that the pro-life movement is a religious one. While the pro-life movement has its religious members, there is a considerable secular following as well, for several reasons. Here are four non-religious reasons to be pro-life…
1. Science
To debate “personhood” is a spiritual, moral, or philosophical argument. While “personhood” is an abstract argument, “life” is not. Undisputed science, from a host of sources, states that life begins at conception.
It’s also important to note the quickness at which a child develops. Substantial development takes place even within the first 12 weeks.
First trimester fetal developmental milestones pulled from Mayo Clinic, include:
Fertilization & implantation (process begins approximately 2 weeks from last menstrual period): formation of a new single celled entity, placenta begins to form
Week 3 (5 weeks from LMP): brain, spinal cord, and other organs begin to form.
Week 4: (6 weeks from LMP): facial features begin to appear, baby’s heart pumps blood
Week 9 (11 weeks from LMP): genitals develop
The start of life is an undisputed fact and is an effective and just measure from which to shape policy.
2. Pro-life Laws Improve Women’s Health
Pro-abortionists claim that pro-lifers disregard women’s health. They also add that if abortion was illegal, the procedure would be performed, regardless – the only difference being that it would be performed under dangerous, substandard conditions.
First of all, you can’t have it both ways. If the fear is that abortion’s illegality would make the procedure more dangerous, then why object to laws that hold abortion clinics to higher standards and consequently protect women’s health? Secondly, as Live Action News has previously reported, there is substantial evidence to demonstrate that pro-life laws protect women’s health. A study published in the British Medical Journal shows that Mexican states with “less permissive” abortion laws experienced lower maternal mortality rates from abortion complications. A Stanford University study shows lower rates of abortion complications for American states with those same types of laws.
Pro-life laws help, not hurt.
3. The Constitution
Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Pace v. Alabama. The Supreme Court has gotten it wrong before.
“Abortion” is not mentioned in the Constitution. The procedure was legalized by determining that it fell under an implied right to privacy found within the Fourteenth Amendment. “Privacy” is not mentioned in the Constitution either.
Even abortion advocates and sympathizers criticize the Roe v. Wade decision for numerous reasons, including the Justices’ broad definition of privacy. For many, the decision remains a prime example of Supreme Court overreach and legislation from the bench. Ronald Reagan said it best. In Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation he wrote, “Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators–not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973.”
4. Domino Effect
If personhood can be removed from preborn lives, what’s to stop us from removing it from others? We live in a world where “post-birth abortion”, the murder of newborns, is gaining popularity. It’s heartbreaking that Congress has to pass a law that says children who survive abortions must be provided standard medical care.
Abortion advocacy is a slippery slope and opens doors to other injustices. We’re already aware of the racism and discrimination inherent in the institution: blacks and children with disabilities are aborted disproportionately more. More recently, we’ve been made aware of the trafficking of body parts. It’s frightening to think of what’s next.Pavel Osipov of Sport-Express has interviewed Andrei Kirilenko on the phone after the game against Cavaliers, during which Kirilenko had eight points, seven rebounds, six assists, four steals and three blocks.
Here’s my translation:
– Does the back bother you anymore?
– Everything’s all right. I played today, after all, so this means my back is alright. But physically it was hard, yes. When you get out of game rhythm for a week and a half, it takes its toll.
– So you got a bit out of shape over this time?
– It’s not exactly like that. I just need to get into game rhythm once again. Today I just got winded after the first few minutes. Though after that I went back to normal.
– After your first game against Sacramento you said you were about to miss three or four days. But the rehab took 10 days. Why did it happen?
– Actually I always rehab for about eight to ten days when my back starts bothering me. If you let it slide a bit, then it takes no less than two weeks. So I rehabbed according to my normal schedule.
– Are you content with what you were able to do during your first game back?
– The team won, which means I’m content. Also, it was a fun game. I personally played well, though I could have been more active on offense. But, on the other hand, during this exact game it wasn’t needed.
– Don’t be so modest – you’ve been quite active. It was your first attempt at a five-by-five this season.
– I was surprised by only one thing – I thought I had more steals than four.
– Actually there were five listed in the boxscore, but after a few minutes since the buzzer they took away one.
– [Laughing] And I have counted about seven! Though it’s not important by now, anyway – I didn’t get enough blocks. Actually, coming back from the injury it’s very important to be very active, sometimes to even do extra. So I tried to be everywhere.
– Nobody had a five-by-five since January 2006 in the NBA. Is it something that you are capable of?
– Now it’s more difficult to block shots. During my first few seasons in the NBA it was easier. Now everybody knows it perfectly what I’m able to do, so they don’t drive straight to the hoop. More often they would just fake a shot or make a pass.
– Your whole career you were saying that team results are much more important than individual accomplishments. But still, what does five-by-five mean to you?
– It’s a nice thing, but not more than that. And it’s nice from the perspective that you make a lot of useful actions on the court. What it means, you took the ball away from the opponent no less than ten times. And, you helped to organize five or ten scoring plays.
– Your came back and Kevin Love had his best game of the season so far. Is that a coincidence?
– Absolutely. It’s just that Kevin can’t have many bad games. Today he started well from the very first minutes, and having caught that wave he played the whole game great.
– This season, all of Minnesota games have been close. But during the two of the last three – against Philadelphia and Cleveland – you managed to avoid a close ending. Can you say that the team gained experience, got better teamwork, became better?
– We are playing better with each other now. And when facing teams that aren’t among the best, we need to dominate. These two games prove that. Though we still had a slump in the second quarter when we let Cleveland tie the game. Other than that we pressured them all the time.
– What do Timberwolves lack right now? Or maybe someone? Ricky Rubio?
– Of course things will get easier when he returns. Ricky can keep the high tempo of the game. Right now Minnesota is playing well, but we miss the quick passes which shred the defense. Sometimes we have this problem: we get into set offense, make the first pass – to that same Kevin, for example, and then just start waiting. But when you have the ball, you need to pass it to each other quickly, make the opponents move, creating more opportunities for the shots. Rubio will help us greatly in this area. His playing style is similar to Shved‘s, but he’s more pass-oriented. Though Alexey can make a timely pass too.
– Rubio is already practicing with the team. When do you expect his comeback?
– As I heard, it should happen no earlier than mid-December. I think in about seven or ten days. Ricky is already in good playing shape. But then it takes some extra time for him to get comfortable playing with new teammates.Story highlights Clashes between protesters and police mar Chinese New Year celebrations
Police fire warning shots, a police official confirms
There do not appear to be direct links between the disturbance and Hong Kong's Occupy protests in 2014
Hong Kong (CNN) A government crackdown on illegal street food vendors turned violent in Hong Kong in the early hours of Tuesday morning, as riot police clashed with protesters in the shopping district of Mong Kok.
The disorder erupted following government officials' attempts to evict street vendors who were selling fishballs and other local delicacies during the Lunar New Year holiday.
Traditionally, authorities have turned a blind eye to unlicensed food stalls during the festive period, but authorities took a stronger line against them this year, fencing off areas which had previously been used by the hawkers.
Dozens of protesters hurled bricks and bottles at police who responded with pepper spray and batons. Police also reportedly fired two warning shots during the clashes.
Responding to a reporter's question about the shots fired, Hong Kong's highest-ranking official, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying replied: "Everyone has seen what happened on TV... Police were lying on the ground and injured but people kept attacking."
Photos: Lunar New Year celebrations in the city turned chaotic as protesters and police clashed over a street market selling fishballs and other local street food. Protests sparked by government officials attempting to clear street food vendors spilled over into Tuesday morning local time. Hide Caption 1 of 16 Photos: A protester hurls a brick at riot police during clashes in Mong Kok early February 9. Hide Caption 2 of 16 Photos: Protesters build fires in the middle of the street in Mong Kok on February 9. Hide Caption 3 of 16 Photos: Objects are set on fire as bricks lay scattered about at an intersection in Mong Kok, a busy shopping district. Hide Caption 4 of 16 Photos: A masked protester, carrying a canister, throws a brick at police. Hide Caption 5 of 16 Photos: Protesters ready to hurl bricks at a line of police in Mong Kok in the morning of February 9. Hide Caption 6 of 16 Photos: A man is bloodied after a police charge. Hide Caption 7 of 16 Photos: The windshield of a taxi is smashed by bricks on February 9. Hide Caption 8 of 16 Photos: A view of riot police through the smashed windshield of a taxi, pictured on February 9. Hide Caption 9 of 16 Photos: Fires were lit in trash bins as protesters faced off with riot police. Hide Caption 10 of 16 Photos: A protester holds a smoking object before throwing it at riot police on February 9. Hide Caption 11 of 16 Photos: An injured protester is led away by an officer after police charged with batons. Hide Caption 12 of 16 Photos: Smoke rises as protesters set fires on a street in Mong Kok in the early hours of February 9. Hide Caption 13 of 16 Photos: Rioters carry bricks along a street in Mong Kok in the early morning of February 9. Hide Caption 14 of 16 Photos: Riot police move forward to the protesters on a street in Hong Kong's Mong Kok district, Tuesday, February 9, 2016. Hide Caption 15 of 16 Photos: Riot police advance on protesters in a street in Mong Kok on February 9. Hide Caption 16 of 16There is scientific evidence to suggest that life can continue after death, according to the largest ever medical study carried out on the subject.
A team based in the UK has spent the last four years seeking out cardiac arrest patients to analyse their experiences, and found that almost 40 per cent of survivors described having some form of “awareness” at a time when they were declared clinically dead.
Experts currently believe that the brain shuts down within 20 to 30 seconds of the heart stopping beating – and that it is not possible to be aware of anything at all once that has happened.
But scientists in the new study said they heard compelling evidence that patients experienced real events for up to three minutes after this had happened – and could recall them accurately once they had been resuscitated.
Dr Sam Parnia, an assistant professor at the State University of New York and a former research fellow at the University of Southampton who led the research, said that he previously that patients who described near-death experiences were only relating hallucinatory events.
One man, however, gave a “very credible” account of what was going on while doctors and nurses tried to bring him back to life – and says that he felt he was observing his resuscitation from the corner of the room.
Dr Parnia said, that the evidence provided by a 57-year-old social worker Southampton, “We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating.
“But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes.
“The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.
“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”
Dr Parnia’s study involved 2,060 patients from 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria, and has been published in the journal Resuscitation.
Of those who survived, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections, nine per cent had experiences compatible with traditional definitions of a near-death experience and two per cent exhibited full awareness with explicit recall of “seeing” and “hearing” events – or out-of-body experiences.
Dr. Parnia said that the findings of the study as a whole suggested that “the recalled experience surrounding death now merits further genuine investigation without prejudice”.
Dr Jerry Nolan, editor-in-chief of the journal which published the research, said: “The researchers are to be congratulated on the completion of a fascinating study that will open the door to more extensive research into what happens when we die.”KRAKOW, Poland— Pope Francis on Sunday closed the Catholic week-long rally know as World Youth Day on a high, inviting the almost two million young women and men who’d gathered in the land of St. John Paul II to meet him again in 2019 — this time in Panama.
“God’s providence is always one step ahead of us,” Francis said during the Sunday Angelus prayer, after celebrating Mass in Campus Misericordiae, in the outskirts of Krakow.
“Think: it has already determined the next stop in this great pilgrimage begun in 1985 by Saint John Paul II! So now I am happy to announce that the next World Youth Day – after the two that will be held on the diocesan level – will take place in 2019 in Panama!” he said, to the roar of the exulting crowd.
Inés Escudero, from Panama, told Crux that Francis’ visit to her nation will be a blessing for the whole country, and that despite its size and the number of pilgrims who often participate in these events, they are- or will- be ready.
“From our hearts, we were the one’s pushing for this to happen! I can’t believe it finally will!” she said.
Panama has less than four million inhabitants, 80 percent of whom are Catholics.
If Sunday’s Mass was any indication, up to two million pilgrims could arrive in the country by land, air or water.
Despite the small size, however, Panama is the second most competitive economy in Latin America. Given that organizing Krakow’s WYD cost $50 million, this may well have been a consideration.
The country is on the isthmus linking Central and South America. The man-made Panama Canal cuts through its center, uniting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to create an essential shipping route.
Bordered by Costa Rica to the west and Colombia to the southeast, President Juan Carlos Varela, a Catholic, has set his mind to making his country a cultural and economic bridge between north and south.
The president spent the last week in Poland, participating in many of the papal events. He was also in Philadelphia last year, attending the World Meeting of Families.
Roberto Santoria, audiovisual producer of Panama’s first lady, was also in Krakow participating in the closing Mass.
“I believe that this event in 2019 will unite the world’s youth, not in a commercial way, but a spiritual one,” he said.
WYD Panama, Santoria told Crux, would be the biggest tourist event in the history of Panama.
He acknowledged that the country faces a logistical challenge but said: “We have the space, the will, and all the support from the government and the country to welcome the pilgrims from around the world.”
In his closing remarks on Sunday, Francis told the young he joined them in “thanking God, the father of infinite mercy, for allowing us to experience World Youth Day.”
“You filled Krakow with the contagious enthusiasm of your faith. Saint John Paul II has rejoiced from heaven, and he will help you spread the joy of the Gospel everywhere,” he said.
During the July 25-31 event, Francis continued, it was possible for them to experience their universal fraternity in Christ.
“These days have given you a spiritual ‘breath of fresh air’ that will help you live lives of mercy once you return to your own countries and communities,” he said.Vids finally!
Albums:
Modification:
It's still a work in progress but most of the major components are there.
-The reason/story behind this hideout is that i have a background in landscaping and garden creation so i decided to apply what i know to this hideout.
-I chose the backstreet hideout because it was very unpopular and had the perfect lighting setup for what i had in mind. The goal of this hideout was for the player to experience different level of surprise while walking into the garden/ruins, this is why backstreet was perfect for this design because of its 3 levels of stairs.
-The 3 key concept i had in mind while designing it were lush Amazonian like vegetation, wealth and the mysterious ruin discovery feeling.
-Here are some of the rules i decided to work with:
1)NO RED! Red (represented mostly by carpet) is one of the most common color you see in hideouts and it was something i absolutely wanted to avoid.
2) Great vision of the hideout and of your character all around the hideout, so most of my object placement was thought to not obstruct the player experience.
3)No workbench. I don't like the fact that most of the time workbench are exposed everywhere even if it doesn't fit the theme so i decided to take them out of the equation completely.
Hope you enjoy it. If you ever want to take a look just pm me IGN: CptnMcSlacSack i'm online 7 days a week.
Modif Log:
28/10 : Added couple of details and Halloween pumpkins to match the season!
30/10 : Added the new collum and archs + statues + couple of pumpkin, Starting to redo the ''tent'' area
4/11: Made both of the staircase. Added Zana 8 Golden Arch in the back ground + Glittering effect from zana 8
11/11 : HUGE CHANGES to the top part
12/11 : Added Water pots/Walls in the end section / Statues
Old Images/albums
So here is my hideout!Vids finally! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1vYDtLBI4I&feature=youtu.be Version 3Albums: http://imgur.com/a/wHdpd VERSION 2 http://imgur.com/a/l1glo NEW STUFF HEREModification:It's still a work in progress but most of the major components are there.-The reason/story behind this hideout is that i have a background in landscaping and garden creation so i decided to apply what i know to this hideout.-I chose the backstreet hideout because it was very unpopular and had the perfect lighting setup for what i had in mind. The goal of this hideout was for the player to experience different level of surprise while walking into the garden/ruins, this is why backstreet was perfect for this design because of its 3 levels of stairs.-The 3 key concept i had in mind while designing it were lush Amazonian like vegetation, wealth and the mysterious ruin discovery feeling.-Here are some of the rules i decided to work with:1)NO RED! Red (represented mostly by carpet) is one of the most common color you see in hideouts and it was something i absolutely wanted to avoid.2) Great vision of the hideout and of your character all around the hideout, so most of my object placement was thought to not obstruct the player experience.3)No workbench. I don't like the fact that most of the time workbench are exposed everywhere even if it doesn't fit the theme so i decided to take them out of the equation completely.Hope you enjoy it. If you ever want to take a look just pm me IGN: CptnMcSlacSack i'm online 7 days a week.Modif Log:28/10 : Added couple of details and Halloween pumpkins to match the season!30/10 : Added the new collum and archs + statues + couple of pumpkin, Starting to redo the ''tent'' area4/11: Made both of the staircase. Added Zana 8 Golden Arch in the back ground + Glittering effect from zana 811/11 : HUGE CHANGES to the top part12/11 : Added Water pots/Walls in the end section / StatuesOld Images/albums http://imgur.com/a/JBpwh (VERSION 1) http://imgur.com/a/Sb23d (Modif 1) http://imgur.com/a/00EtY (Modif 2) IGN DrShagarama / Vajejeconcarne / CptnMcSlacSack
Hideout: view-thread/1092029
Store (Rampage) view-thread/1074998
Mixed GG ( Rampage) view-thread/1015110
Mixed GG (Standard) view-thread/250693 Last edited by Antiaboo on Dec 6, 2014, 5:21:38 PM(Newser) – Now that California has lifted its moratorium on the death penalty, convicted murderer Kevin Cooper, 57, is once again preparing to be executed for high-profile slayings he says he didn't commit. "I am innocent," Cooper tells NBC News. "And it's not my execution, it's my murder." Cooper has been on death row since 1985, when he was convicted of the brutal 1983 slayings of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, and another child who was spending the night in their Chino Hills, Calif., home. The Ryens' 8-year-old son, left for dead with a slit throat, survived. He initially told police that three white or Latino men committed the murders but has since come to believe that Cooper was the lone killer. Prosecutors say Cooper, who had escaped from a nearby prison the previous night, had been hiding out in a house near the Ryen home. Wielding a hatchet, ice pick, and one or more knives, they say he slaughtered the victims and drove away in their station wagon.
Cooper has maintained his innocence throughout, and there are plenty of people who believe him, saying police withheld information, ignored other suspects, and tampered with evidence, particularly blood samples. In 2004, Cooper was three hours away from being put to death when a federal appeals court stopped the execution, deciding some of the evidence was flawed. "You watch the clock as your life goes off," he says, "minute by minute." Nonetheless, many others say Cooper is guilty, even former defense team members, writes San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders. To think otherwise is "utterly unreasonable," the California Supreme Court ruled in 1991. Cooper's conviction was upheld in 2009, keeping him on death row. Now, Cooper tells NBC, he is appealing to California Gov. Jerry Brown to have "an open mind" about the evidence in his case and intervene. (Read more California stories.)Jeff Gill (Photo:.)
It’s time for congregations to get out of the property and real estate business.
Our buildings eat up a fair amount of most faith community budgets and the paid staff we have, the other largest chunk of how we use our members’ contributions, spend significant amounts of time dealing with issues around the use, maintenance and expansion of our physical plants.
Whether a small country chapel by a cemetery, or a mega-ish campus with multiple buildings on the property surrounded by parking prairies, let’s just all agree to stop. Let it go. Let those hunks of real estate roam free.
They’ll go back, in many cases, onto the property tax rolls as businesses and other everyday uses occupy the square footage, or be torn down for additional strip malls and big box retailers, bulldozed for new residential options.
Some older church buildings in our area have been re-purposed and remodeled for residential use and a few in the Columbus area have become clubs and restaurants and other businesses. A bank’s office operations are in an old church structure in downtown Newark and it was a muffler shop before that, so there’s precedent.
Yes, let’s see all our Christian churches of pretty much any stripe or sort sell off their buildings and use the proceeds for ministry. This is a refrain that many younger advisers to church life in the U.S. are starting to say, especially to older congregations with antique buildings, of which our area has quite a few. The counsel is to cash out and put that money to use in “creative ministries” and not “just spend it on ourselves” but use the donations of church members more flexibly with outreach a higher priority.
Of course, there’s a catch. Or two. Or three. One is that we can’t all do this at once. The real estate market for distinguished older edifices couldn’t absorb so many properties all together, without the prices for them plummeting below what you can currently get for a retired church building. So we’re going to have to figure out: who goes first? You? Me?
Then there’s the whole concept of weekly Sunday worship (or Saturday for some of you, Friday for a few, to think more broadly across faith traditions, but we’re thinking all religious bodies should join in with this move). Some new church plants start in middle school auditoriums, which aren’t getting used on Sundays mostly anyhow, so it’s a revenue source for school districts with minimal cost.
If we all get out of our buildings, there’s probably not enough rent-able spaces around for all of us to go into. We might see more merges and combined congregations if we all shed structural investments, but in general, this move would swamp the meeting halls and gathering spaces on weekends. Then you’d see rents going up for such use, as it becomes more of a sellers’ market than a buyers’ advantage.
And sooner or later, someone is going to sit down and do the math, and say “you know, for what we pay each year for this space, we could put up a decent building.” So folks would get together and say “for that matter, we’d really like it if we could set up the raised platform this way, and seat the people here, as opposed to what we’re stuck with.”
Then some others would say “if we’re creating a dedicated space for worship, we should honor our God by making it beautiful, with decoration that spurs good thoughts, divine aspirations.” Some will call for simple lines, others a more ornate elegance, but those buildings will develop and elaborate over time as people try to express their faith through architecture.
So how long would it take, even if every church property was sold or liquidated or divested to the private market tomorrow, for faith communities to build again what would simply be another generation of church buildings? I’d guess about a generation, tops.
Maybe it’s not such a good idea after all. Perhaps |
is against the law. Discharging a firearm into the air is a crime and can lead to felony charges under California state law or federal charges if that person is prohibited from possessing a firearm. ATF will continue to assist state and local law enforcement agencies by tracing bullets and shell casings recovered during New Year’s Eve. ATF will also aggressively pursue any federal charges applicable to help deter this senseless act. ATF wants you to know that you can enjoy the festivities without placing the public in danger.”
— A public advisory from the federal agency.
JUST SO YOU KNOW
A hearty “Hoo-ah” at 11:59 p.m. on Friday: Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, a Medal of Honor winner, will press the New Year’s Eve ceremonial button that launches — well, eases — the 12,000-pound, 12-foot crystal ball into its annual one-minute descent over Times Square.
POLL DU JOUR
• 68 percent of Americans do not plan to go out to dinner with family or friends on New Year’s Eve.
• 14 percent are not sure about their plans yet.
• 66 percent plan to say a prayer when the clock strikes midnight.
• 25 percent will not.
• 64 percent do not plan to attend a New Year’s Eve party this year.
• 21 percent will attend one.
• 48 percent will not drink to celebrate the night.
• 42 percent will indulge.
Source: A Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,000 conducted Dec. 26 and 27.
• Hoopla and ballyhoo if there is any to [email protected] washingtontimes.com.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission."We can blacklist him from returning to Indonesia at any time if he keeps posting incitement or provocative statements in his social media," Heru Santoso, spokesman for the Directorate General for Immigration at the Law and Human Rights Ministry, said Saturday.
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio may be banned from returning to Indonesia over his criticisms that palm oil plantations are destroying the country's rainforests and endangering wildlife, an immigration official said Saturday.
The Oscar winner made a one-day visit to protected Mount Leuser National Park in northern Sumatra last weekend and uploaded photos to his Instagram account, expressing concerns over species whose habitats are threatened.
"The expansion of palm oil plantations is fragmenting the forest and cutting off key elephant migration corridors," he posted. "A world-class biodiversity hotspot, but palm oil expansion is destroying this unique place."
Heru Santoso, spokesman for the Directorate General for Immigration at the Law and Human Rights Ministry, said that DiCaprio used his visit to discredit the palm oil industry and the Indonesian government.
"We support his concern to save the Leuser ecosystem," said Santoso. "But we can blacklist him from returning to Indonesia at any time if he keeps posting incitement or provocative statements in his social media."
Slash-and-burn practices destroy huge areas of Indonesian forest every year during the dry season, creating haze that pollutes neighboring countries and causes massive economic losses as well as contributing to Indonesia's carbon dioxide emissions. The fires are often set to clear land for agriculture, including palm oil plantations.
Santoso said companies and organizations that objected to DiCaprio's comments have the right to request that immigration authorities bar him from re-entering Indonesia, though none have done so yet.
He said DiCaprio entered and left Indonesia legally with a proper visa and immigration documentation. DiCaprio and his entourage arrived on a private jet at Kualanamu Airport on the island of Sumatra on March 26, took a helicopter to the protected park and left the island a day later.
DiCaprio is not the first Hollywood star to anger Indonesia's government with criticism of how it treats the environment.
Harrison Ford, known for his starring roles in the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films, has visited several national parks and caused a stir by interviewing activists, businesspeople and government officials.HONG KONG — Nearly three years after sweeping pro-democracy protests filled the streets of Hong Kong, a local court delivered the struggling movement a severe blow on Friday, removing four legislators from office and assuring China greater influence over the city’s government.
The pro-democracy lawmakers were dismissed from the Hong Kong Legislative Council because they had used unacceptable words or even dubious tones in taking oaths of office that require declarations of loyalty to China. The ruling means that democracy advocates in the semiautonomous city’s legislature will no longer have enough votes to block legislation from their pro-Beijing counterparts.
“Voters entrusted us with the task of monitoring the government,” said Leung Kwok-hung, one of those unseated. “We’ve lost that power.”
Hong Kong has been rattled by episodes that have raised fears that China is reaching deeper into the city to enforce its will. A bookseller who sold lurid titles about China’s leaders was abducted and taken to mainland China. Xiao Jianhua, a prominent billionaire who grew up in China, was snatched from a high-end hotel and brought to the mainland.BamaOnline has learned from a source that Alabama has hired Sam Petitto, who is currently Georgia's Director of Player Personnel. Petitto first joined the Bulldogs staff in 2014 as the Assistant Director of Player Personnel.
It is still unclear what position Petitto will fill in T-Town.
This won't be Petitto's first time working under Nick Saban, as he served as a defensive intern at Bama during the 2008 season. The Louisiana native has made stops at North Carolina, Grambling State and Southeastern Louisiana University after getting his start as a high school coach in the Bayou State back in 1998.
New Georgia coach Kirby Smart, formerly the defensive coordinator at Alabama, tabbed UA secondary coach Mel Tucker to be the new defensive coordinator for the Bulldogs.
Stay tuned to BOL for more details on this breaking story...
For more news on Alabama sports and recruiting, follow BamaOnLine on TwitterUpdate: Saturday 11:30 a.m.
A Multnomah County sheriff's spokesman said investigators have no new information on the disappearance of Kyron Horman. The search is part of ongoing efforts.
"This is a case very near and dear to our hearts and any chance we can get out with search and rescue teams, we do that," Sgt. Brandon White said.
Law enforcement on Sunday will conduct a search near Northwest Skyline Boulevard related to the 2010 disappearance of Kyron Horman, a Multnomah County sheriff's spokesman confirmed late Friday afternoon.
The spokesman said Northwest Springville Road is scheduled to be closed Sunday for the search. He said he did not know of any new information or evidence that prompted the search, which is "ongoing," he said.
Kyron Horman: 8 things to know about the case Seven-year-old Kyron Horman went missing Friday, June 4, 2010.
The 7-year-old Horman disappeared on June 4, 2010, from Skyline Elementary School in Northwest Portland. Investigators conducted the largest search and rescue operation ever in the state, but they found no sign of him.
No arrests were made in the case.
Springville will be closed from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. between Northwest Skyline Boulevard and Northwest 128th Avenue, Multnomah County officials said in a news release.
The area is about five miles from Skyline Elementary School.
— Samantha Matsumoto
[email protected]; @SMatsumoto55Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Game of Thrones has now won 38 Emmys in total
Game of Thrones has broken the record for the highest number of Emmy Awards won by any fictional series.
The HBO fantasy drama triumphed in three categories at Sunday's ceremony, including outstanding drama series.
The show's total number of awards now stands at 38, which means it has beaten Frasier's previous record of 37.
This year's British winners included Dame Maggie Smith, who won outstanding supporting actress in a drama series for her role in Downton Abbey.
It is the third time Dame Maggie has won an Emmy for her portrayal of Violet Crawley, but she has never attended the ceremony in person.
Host Jimmy Kimmel joked: "We're not mailing this to her. Maggie, if you want this, it will be in the lost and found."
Image copyright EPA Image caption Veep won best comedy series and best comedy actress for Julia Louis-Dreyfus (centre)
BBC One's Sherlock was named best made for TV movie for its special episode The Abominable Bride.
Accepting the award, Sherlock creator Steven Moffatt made reference to the The Great British Bake off, currently shown on BBC One but bought by Channel 4 last week. He said: "Thank you to the BBC who we love above all bakery. British people will get that."
Susanne Bier, the Danish director of the BBC's spy thriller The Night Manager, won for best directing in a limited series.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Susanne Bier directed every episode of The Night Manager
Bier, who was the only female nominee in the category, told BBC Breakfast: "This is such a traditional men's world, and I hope the fact a woman director has won this prestigious prize is going to mean that more non-conventional series and movies are going to be directed by women."
John Oliver won best variety talk series for his HBO series Last Week Tonight, beating fellow British nominee James Corden, who was nominated for The Late Late Show.
Veep won the outstanding comedy series award for the second year in a row, while its star Julia Louis-Dreyfus won outstanding lead comedy actress for the fifth time.
In her acceptance speech, Louis-Dreyfus said: "Our show started out as political satire but now feels like a sobering documentary." She dedicated her award to her father, who died on Friday.
Image copyright Getty/AP Image caption Rami Malek and Tatiana Maslany won the trophies for leading actor and actress in a drama series
The outstanding comedy actor gong went to Jeffrey Tambor, who plays a transgender woman in the Amazon series Transparent, for the second year in a row.
Accepting the award, Tambor encouraged the industry to offer more opportunities to the trans community.
"I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a transgender female on television. We have work to do," he said.
Rami Malek won outstanding lead actor in a drama series for his role in Mr Robot - the first time an actor from an ethnic minority has won the award since 1998.
Tatiana Maslany from Orphan Black won the outstanding leading actress in a drama prize.
Other big winners of the night included The People vs OJ Simpson - a dramatisation of the OJ Simpson trial of the 1990s, which was broadcast on BBC Two in the UK.
Image copyright AP / Getty Image caption Courtney B Vance, Sarah Paulson and Sterling K Brown all won acting trophies
The show won five trophies including outstanding limited series plus acting gongs for Sarah Paulson, Sterling K Brown and Courtney B Vance.
Kate McKinnon, who recently starred in the all-female Ghostbusters reboot, won outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series for her performances in Saturday Night Live.
Netflix series Master of None scored its first Emmy award, winning outstanding writing for a comedy series.
The show's co-writer Alan Yang called for better Asian representation on screen in his acceptance speech.
Image copyright AP Image caption Kate McKinnon won outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series
Elsewhere, The Voice took home the award for outstanding reality competition series, beating Project Runway and Dancing With The Stars.
The 38 Emmys won by Game of Thrones includes the nine trophies the series picked up at last weekend's Creative Arts Emmys.
The HBO series is now the most decorated drama series in Emmy awards' history - the overall record is held by Saturday Night Live, which has won 44.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Host Jimmy Kimmel presented Jeffrey Tambor with the award for outstanding comedy actor
Kimmel made several references to diversity during the ceremony in light of the "Oscars So White" controversy earlier this year.
"Here in Hollywood the only thing we value more than diversity is congratulating ourselves on how much we value diversity," he said in his opening monologue.
"The Emmys are so diverse this year the Oscars are now telling people we're one of their closest friends."
Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram, or if you have a story suggestion email [email protected] has fared pretty well in a streaming device market where its rivals include tech giants like Amazon, Apple, and Google, to name a few.
Despite facing off against those bigger competitors, Roku has been steadily winning the battle for your living room. The streaming hardware company cites Nielsen numbers showing that, as of December 2016, Roku accounted for 48% of the active streaming players in the U.S. (with Amazon, Apple, and Google all trailing behind). Roku currently boasts roughly 14 million active accounts—up 40% year-over-year—and the company says its users streamed 9 billion hours of content last year, a 70% increase from the previous year. The company also posted its highest annual revenue in 2016, reaching $400 million, and sales already topped $100 million in the first quarter of the current fiscal year.
One thing that helps Roku stand out is the fact that, unlike many of its biggest rivals, the Los Gatos, Calif.-based tech company relies solely on deals with outside content producers. In other words, Roku doesn’t make its own original programming, in contrast with Amazon, Google’s YouTube, and others. That means it can stay neutral when it comes to carrying streaming apps and the content it markets to users.
As Roku’s user base has climbed, the company’s focus has shifted somewhat, from selling hardware to generating additional revenue by selling advertising to its many content partners. Advertising and content distribution comprised roughly 75% of Roku’s gross profit in the most recent quarter, up from a little over 50% last year, says CEO Anthony Wood, a Silicon Valley veteran and a former vice president at Netflix.
Roku also has the backing of a handful of major players in both media and tech, with nearly $210 million in reported funding so far from a list of investors that includes News Corp, Viacom, 21st Century Fox, and Netflix. (Wood disputed reports from February suggesting the company was working on a $200 million funding round, telling Fortune that Roku is “well capitalized” at the moment.)
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Wood recently spoke with Fortune about competing with tech giants in the streaming hardware market, how user data and targeted ads are the “future of TV,” and what the evolving landscape of streaming content means for companies like Roku. (The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.)
Fortune: You currently have the largest market share in the U.S. for streaming devices over companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google. How can you maintain that position and keep growing?
Wood: If you look at the market share, it has been growing. We had our biggest market share ever in Q1—not just players, also televisions. 48% of active streaming players in the United States are Roku [according to Nielsen], and that number hasn’t changed in about a year. The other half is split between Amazon, Google, and Apple.
Our market share is growing fast. It’s growing 40% to 45% active accounts year-over-year and that’s on a big installed base: 14 million active accounts. That comes from players and TVs. We released the Roku Express at the end of last year at $29 and it’s now our number one player. And, last year, one in eight TVs sold were powered by our OS [operating system]. This year, we expect it to be almost one in five TVs—almost 20% of the Smart TV market this year will be powered by our operating system.
Roku Ultra— Courtesy of Roku
Roku has been described as “Switzerland” in the streaming devices market because it’s content-neutral. How does that strategy help you stand out versus bigger rivals who produce and distribute their own original content?
Having a strategy of carrying as much content possible and the most content definitely is a big part of our strategy and works well for us. And we can do it because we’re an independent company. We’re not vertically integrated like our competitors where they can’t carry each other’s content. So we have Amazon Instant Video and Google Play, for example. And, more importantly, we have built the only proprietary operating system for TV. We have the only purpose-built OS for TV and it’s got lots of advantages: it’s better for partners, it costs less to build TVs with our own OS, it’s a better consumer experience, and it has more content.
So, I guess we shouldn’t expect to see any Roku original programming anytime soon?
[Laughs] You’d have to have a lot of scale, even more scale than Roku [with 14 million active accounts]. We have reasonably large scale and are growing quickly, but Netflix has 100 million accounts. So it makes sense for them to do original content. It doesn’t really make sense for us.
You mentioned the success of the relatively new Roku Express. How important are those low-cost devices (including Google’s Chromecast and Amazon’s Fire TV Stick) to the market versus more expensive set-top boxes?
What low-cost does is it brings more customers into streaming. That’s one of the things that we saw with the Roku Express is it was so inexpensive that people who hadn’t streamed before said, “Oh, well I’ll give that a go.” And, then as they say, “I love this,” then I think there’s a decent chance they will, at some point, upgrade to a more expensive product with more features. With that said, the vast majority of unit retail sales are sub-$50 price points. Most of the market is below $50. It’s one of the main reasons Apple is last in market share for streaming players.
We have focused on great value for customers from the beginning as a way to gain market share. We introduced the first $100 streaming player. We introduced the first streaming stick, the first $29 player. We have a strategy of driving prices down to make the product more accessible to consumers. Because, for us, hardware is not a business, it’s a way to acquire active accounts. Our business is advertising and content distribution services.
Roku Express— Courtesy of Roku
A big part of the advertising platform is tracking what users are watching to compile and analyze that data for targeted ads and content recommendations.
It’s super important. The future of TV—both with content distribution and advertising—is based on data and machine learning. And it’s a huge competitive advantage to be good at that.
I just want to clarify that the ACR [Automatic Content Recognition] program is opt-in for our customers. We don’t just force it on them, although it has a very high opt-in rate because we have some very cool features that they get access to that are powered by that data. One of those features is called “More Ways to Watch.” If you opt in to the ACR data feed—let’s say you’re watching The Big Bang Theory on CBS—it will pop up with an overlay and say “Hey, you’re watching The Big Bang Theory, do you want to watch it from the beginning?” Because it’s available on CBS All Access and also you can watch all of the back episodes, so it gives them more ways to watch that TV show. There are lots of privacy issues around data that we have to be careful about, but it really delivers a much better end-user experience.
When it comes to video content, does Roku root for companies like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon to upend the entertainment industry because it means more people are streaming content and that’s good for device-makers? Or, at this point, is most content streaming at some point anyway?
The big picture is one of the big drivers of our growth is when more content comes to streaming. Like you said, there’s been an explosion of streaming content. There’s not much you can’t get, if anything, streaming. So, in that sense, we’re completely neutral. We don’t really care. We want to offer our customers choices. I think one of the biggest advantages of streaming, for customers, is that it’s created competition in the TV business, which used to be controlled by a few big distributors and that’s really changed. So, that has resulted in lots of choice for customers: the choice of more content, the choice of not having to watch ads if they don’t want to, they can pay extra or they can sign up for Netflix, or whatever. So that’s all good.
I guess we’re not really in anyone’s particular camp. Our biggest focus is just bringing on as much content as we can and keeping our UI [user interface] simple. One of the challenges with a simple UI when there’s so much content is how do you make it easier for customers to find what they want to watch in that sea of content.
What are some ways that Roku helps customers manage the deluge of content?
We were the first company to offer universal search, so you can search for a program and find out how much it costs and where it’s available and we sort results by price. Another example is we came out with a feature called My Feed, which allows you to follow shows you’re interested in and you’ll get notifications when new episodes come out.
What are your thoughts on the proliferation of live-TV streaming services? If they succeed in drawing more consumers away from traditional cable packages, isn’t that a game-changer for online content and streaming devices?
We’re super positive on those services, because they’re bringing more content to the platform, they bring more people to streaming. We have business deals with all of those services, they buy audience development products, so it’s driving a big increase in our business. But, the dynamics are interesting. They often have overlapping content, so there’s going to be a lot of competition between them. And, I think that will result in better value for the customers.
Personally, I am not sure how popular repurposing a linear cable network will be in a streaming environment. Certainly, it’s in the millions the number of customers who want it. But is it 100 million, like Netflix? I think that’s an interesting question: whether people have changed the way they want to watch content and what content they want to watch.Sure, stickers, photos and T-shirts are nice, but the real fun comes when you pledge something substantial, like $200. At that level Stompy will live up to his name and crush any inanimate, non-volatile object of your choosing. Project Hexapod will even post a video of the destruction on YouTube for the world to enjoy. But, wait, it gets better. Cough up $300, and you'll get to ride the 18-foot wide steel beast. Jump to a cool grand and they'll let you man the controls. There's a few more levels above that, but get this, if you contribute $300,000, they'll build you your own Stompy (we've already started emptying our retirement accounts and pooling our funds). The goal is a perfectly reasonable $65,000 -- especially when you consider each leg is roughly $6,000 in raw materials. But, at $95K, the team will add a "performance upgrade" package that'll allow it to move faster, smoother and over more rugged terrain.
If you're at all concerned at all about where your money is going, we'll leave you with these parting pieces of information to consider. One: When the project is complete, everything from the CAD designs to the lesson plans used in the associated class will be posted online for anyone to download. Two: In the course of designing Stompy, the Project Hexapod crew developed a position-controlled hydraulic actuator capable of generating 18,000 pounds of force with a two-foot stroke that's two orders of magnitude cheaper that comparable hardware. And, three: If the team reaches $300,000 in funding, they will buy a waterjet cutter and install it at the Artisan's Asylum for public use. It will also be used to build a "zoo's worth of rideable robots." Neither we, nor they are kidding.Story highlights "You wonder why we're having shootings, and killings here in 2017? Because we've asked for it," Moore said in video reviewed by KFile.
"We've taken God out of everything. We've taken prayer out of school, we've taken prayer out of council meetings," he continued.
(CNN) Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore said in a speech last month that Americans have asked for "shootings and killings" by removing the "acknowledgment of God" from society.
Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, made the comments to the group Citizen Impact USA on August 24 at an event on defending religious liberties. Video of the speech was uploaded by the Atlanta-based production company, Studio 25 productions, on YouTube on August 25.
Moore is running against fellow Republican and incumbent Sen. Luther Strange in a runoff primary race set for September 26.
"We are losing the acknowledgment of God, and I'm standing here talking, to Christians and Pastors, and I'm telling you we're losing the acknowledgment of God," Moore said, before reciting several verses from the Old Testament book of Hosea that deal with lack of knowledge of God.
"You wonder why we're having shootings, and killings here in 2017? Because we've asked for it," Moore said. "We've taken God out of everything. We've taken prayer out of school, we've taken prayer out of council meetings."
Read MoreBBC Two, BBC Studios and BBC Music have today announced that Eurovision: You Decide, the national song selection show for the UK entry, will take place on Wednesday 7 February 2018, live from the world-famous Brighton Dome, the site of ABBA’s 1974 Eurovision Song Contest win with Waterloo.
Joining the BBC Eurovision family is 2015 Eurovision Song Contest winner Måns Zelmerlöw, who will co-host the fantastic night of television and song alongside self-confessed Eurovision superfan Mel Giedroyc, who returns to host the proceedings.
Eurovision: You Decide will broadcast live on BBC Two and tickets are on sale from today (Thursday 16 November).
Måns Zelmerlöw says: “I’m really, really looking forward to hosting Eurovision: You Decide together with Mel this year. I’m sure we’ll have a great show and I would love to see the UK achieve a great result in Eurovision 2018. I can’t wait to be part of the You Decide journey and make both You Decide as well as the Eurovision Finals, a part of every UK home.”
Mel Giedroyc says: “My favourite time of year has come round again! I can't wait to hear the songs and meet the artists. And what a thrill to host proceedings with THE hero of my time - the Måns Zelmerlöw all live from the Brighton Dome. It will be a night to remember!”
Guy Freeman, Editor, Special Events and Formats, BBC Studios says: “We are so happy to be able to bring the show to such an iconic Eurovision venue. It will be the perfect home for what is shaping up to be a very exciting contest.”
The 90-minute show will feature performances of six brand new songs.
The artists will compete for the honour of representing the United Kingdom at the Final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal.
The performers will take to the stage in a bid to impress both the viewers at home and a professional jury at Brighton Dome.
After each performance, a panel of experts will be on hand to provide their critique about the songs and the artists, and give their view on how the songs could translate to the Eurovision stage in Lisbon for the Grand Final next May.
The winner will be revealed on the night after the results from the live public vote have been combined with the results from the professional jury.
The six competing songs and artists will be revealed to the public in January 2018.
Also confirmed, BBC Four will broadcast both live semi-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest 2018 on Tuesday 8 and Thursday 10 May. The Grand Final itself will be broadcast on BBC One on Saturday 12 May 2018.
EHSo on Thursday, the city’s Board of Health is scheduled to vote on a proposal that would require parents to sign a consent form indicating that they are aware of the risk of herpes transmission when a circumcision procedure, or bris, includes direct oral contact.
The measure, which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg strongly supports, would probably be the first governmental regulation of the ritual in the United States, rabbis say. It would not affect the way most Jewish ritual circumcisions are performed — gauze or a sterile pipette is used to pull blood from the wound — nor would it ban the practice. But the issue being raised in New York coincides with moves in Denmark, Germany and other countries toward restricting or banning infant circumcision.
Mr. Cohn, 83, said that he would rather go to jail than comply with the consent requirement. While he acknowledged that there were unqualified circumcisers who work without proper health testing and training, he said he believed that the ritual was completely safe when performed by him or another practitioner certified by an association of circumcisers; he is the chairman of the group.
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“If you follow strictly the ritual, there will be no harm to the baby,” he said. A circumcision, he added, “is a joyous occasion — nothing traumatic about it.”
And Benjamin Asher’s father, Isaac Mortob, 27, said his family had sought out Mr. Cohn in part because he did the procedure in the traditional way, including the oral suction. “I don’t want a 99 percent job, I want a 100 percent job,” he said. “I want him” — his firstborn son — “to be fully Jewish.”
But city health officials say the mohel’s safeguards, which include rinsing with Listerine before the procedure, sterilizing tools, scrubbing hands with surgical soap and being tested annually for pathogens, are insufficient.
The main virus that worries the city is oral herpes, which is present in some 70 percent of the city’s adult population and can cause fatal infections in babies. Highly contagious, it is spread through contact with infected saliva, even by sharing drinks or towels.
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“There is no safe way to perform oral suction on an open wound in a newborn,” said Dr. Jay K. Varma, the city’s deputy commissioner for disease control. If the measure passes, he said, circumcisers who do not comply could face warning letters or fines.
Ultra-Orthodox leaders plan to sue the city if the regulation is passed, arguing that the measure would constitute an unconstitutional infringement on their religious freedom. Some 200 ultra-Orthodox rabbis published a decree in late August warning adherents that it was forbidden “to participate in the evil plans of the New York City health department,” according to a translation by Yeshiva World News. And a Jewish religious court in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, went further, stating that oral suction was a mandatory part of the procedure that should be promoted.
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“There is nothing to worry from metzitzah b’peh,” the judges wrote, according to a translation by the Chabad Lubavitch movement. “To the contrary, it is very beneficial, even according to the doctors.”
But other Jewish leaders disagree.
Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik, the president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of conservative rabbis, said he supported the Board of Health’s move to require parental consent. He said that direct suction was not required by Jewish law and that the serious risks of the practice were “inconsistent with the Jewish tradition’s pre-eminent concern with human life and health.”
In 2005, the Rabbinical Council of America, the main union of modern Orthodox rabbis, urged that a sterile glass tube be used for suction, rather than the mohel’s mouth. But the group opposes the city’s effort to regulate the practice; instead it has asked the city to work with Orthodox groups “to voluntarily develop procedures to effectively prevent the unintended spread of infection.”
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Mr. Cohn, a Holocaust survivor and retired real estate developer who lives on Staten Island, has written a textbook on circumcision. He said he had trained some 80 mohels over the years. After each circumcision, he places the thimble-size foreskin in a small jar of sand and ground cloves that he carries. He wants one day to be buried with the jars at the Mount of Olives in Israel, where Jewish tradition says the Messiah will arrive.
When he stands with a prayer shawl over his head awaiting the babies — he sometimes does three or four a day — he looks out into congregations filled with men he has circumcised; sometimes grandfathers, fathers and sons in the same family. Because he is performing a religious obligation, his services are free. Never, he said, had there been an infection.
But not everyone involved always knows there is oral suction included in the bris — or that herpes can be transmitted by contact with infected saliva.
Benjamin Asher’s grandmother, Sara Mor, who had carried him carefully up to the altar last week at the Sephardic Synagogue on Avenue S in Brooklyn, said she had not heard of it, though she has four sons.
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“I never watch it, I’m scared to watch it,” she said of the circumcisions. “I don’t know what they are doing there.”
And in Brooklyn last week, at a bris so fancy with glittering dresses and Louboutin heels that it looked like a wedding, Danielle Alfaks, 22, said she had found out two days earlier that the mohel would put his mouth over the wound of her 8-day-old son, Eli. “That’s freaky, for me,” she said at a brunch reception after the circumcision at Congregation Shaare Zion on Ocean Avenue. But she added she would sign a consent form if asked.
Eli’s uncle, Mourdi Alfaks, 32, held him as Mr. Cohn performed the procedure. “He’s the greatest mohel who ever lived in history,” he said. He would not sign a consent form, he said, because “it makes no sense.”
Earlier that morning, Eli’s father, Albert Alfaks, 29, wiped a tear from his eye as he handed Mr. Cohn the scalpel, echoing Abraham’s circumcision of his son, Isaac, in the Bible.
Of the mohel, he said, “I guess I feel like if that’s what he has to do, God bless him.”That Darling moment
Now is the time for a political party to confront the economic challenge of Brexit
Theo Bertram Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 9, 2017
After the crash hit, there was no politics any more: it was just a desperate series of actions to limit economic damage.
If Gordon Brown had known — a year or two before — that it would hit us like it did, he would have acted differently.
The storm could not have been avoided but we could have better gotten ready. Batten down the hatches. All hands on deck.
10 years on from the first signs of the crash, Labour remains unforgiven for failing to foresee what would follow.
Just imagine what damage would be done today to a political party that knew an economic storm was coming but did nothing about it.
Among many leavers and remainers in Westminster, there is a fallacy that Brexit will — one way or another — work itself out in a few years. It will take its political and economic toll and then there will be an opportunity to pick up the pieces. Give it time. Ride it out. And things will return to normal.
They will not.
Brexit will soon mutate from a political challenge to a fundamental economic one. As it does so, it will grow. If you think Brexit already dominates political debate: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The nature of the economic challenge is still unclear. Perhaps we are embarked upon a glorious trade adventure on calm seas.
Perhaps not.
Either way, it is striking that neither Labour nor the Conservatives are preparing the nation for the economic journey ahead.
It is hard — very hard— in politics to be anything but incremental and short-termist. Political capital is hard-won: betting your entire political credibility on an outcome that — even if you are proved right — could take a year or more to pay out is almost unthinkable.
On August 29 2008, the Observer published an interview with Alistair Darling — the Chancellor of the Exchequer — in which he set out an apocalyptic vision of the economy.
‘Britain is facing “arguably the worst” economic downturn in 60 years which will be “more profound and long-lasting.”’
It was ridiculous. The Chancellor was trashing the economy. Torching Labour’s reputation for economic management. The interview sent shockwaves through Whitehall and the City. Gordon was absolutely furious. He wanted to kill him, not sack him.
But at some point — six months, maybe a year later — that interview was the only thing that our economic credibility could still cling on to. After all, Alistair had been right. He had grasped the magnitude of the crisis. In retrospect, that interview was a pivotal moment in Labour’s response to the crash: it kept Alistair — and Gordon — at the helm.
In August 2017, we know with certainty that within one year we will enter a major new and challenging economic system.
A year from now, it will seem quaint — a distant luxury—that the Brexit debate was a political one about immigration, border controls and the judicial system.
The pound. Interest rates. Housing. Jobs. Whatever the economic forecast, these will be the fundamentals.
If a political party prospers from Brexit, it will be one that openly faces the economic challenge: that Darling moment.
It could be Labour. It could even be the Conservatives. Or it could be a new one built for purpose.
A change in the weather is coming. We have all been warned. The electorate will not forgive a failure to prepare.OPINION: EU policy has helped create this crisis by sealing off discussion of the political problems thrown up by austerity
THE DEBATE on ratification of the fiscal treaty in Ireland is now in its final phase. Given |
cabs to JFK Airport and back — trips that cost a total of $80 — on the co-op’s dime, according to members.
Herpel defended the jaunt to The Post on Sunday, saying the Parisian co-op, located in that city’s 18th Arrondissement, paid for their airfare and put them up in a private home.
“We think that we have a great thing going on here, and we think it’s wonderful. Why wouldn’t we help?” she said.
She added, ”We report regularly on what we are doing to help other co-ops. When I finished [the presentation] Tuesday, people clapped.”
The Park Slope institution, founded in 1973, has earned a reputation for its frequent boycotts of products and strict rules requiring members to show up for shift work.
Some well-heeled members have skirted the rule of having to contribute their time in exchange for reasonable prices by paying their nannies to do it, according to reports.
Phone messages left for Holtz at numbers associated with him were not returned.Supporters of President Donald Trump on Reddit are possibly being duped into becoming opponents to net neutrality by a one-month-old account with almost no previous activity. The account in question, geotus, has posted for 15-days exclusively in r/The_Donald, a subreddit where nearly half a million followers refer to Trump as a “God Emperor.” Nearly all of geotus’ activity has had to do with opposing net neutrality.
Net neutrality is the principle that any internet service providers from Comcast to Verizon should offer the same level of access to all content and applications regardless of the source, without throttling speed or access to others. Many sites like Google and Twitter recently took part in the “Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality,” after Ajit Pai, head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and appointed by President Donald Trump in January, proposed changes to the rule.
According to Reuters, “Pai wants the commission to repeal the rules that reclassified internet service providers as if they were utilities, saying the open internet rules adopted under former President Barack Obama harm jobs and investment.”
In May, the FCC voted 2-1 to advance a Republican plan to reverse net neutrality.
The above video was shared by geotus on r/The_Donald and was noticed by followers on r/HailCorporate, a separate subreddit dedicated to identifying perceived corporate subterfuge. r/HailCorporate followers believe that a similar thing is happening with net neutrality like what happened in the 2016 election, where Russia hired internet trolls to pose as pro-Trump Americans to excite the base, reports Business Insider.• Discussions between the two clubs ongoing for Ivory Coast midfielder • Chelsea likely to have to wait until summer to conclude any deal
Chelsea are still in talks with Atalanta over the possible signing of Franck Kessié but the Premier League club but may have to wait until the summer before a transfer can be concluded.
Antonio Conte is a huge admirer of the Ivory Coast midfielder and would be keen for the player to join Chelsea during this transfer window but there is an acceptance that Atalanta will want to keep him until the end of the current campaign.
Atalanta are holding out for up to €35m-€40m (£30m-£34m) for Kessié, who spent last season on loan at Cesena but has become a key player for the Nerazzurri this campaign. The 20-year-old has scored six goals in 16 appearances as Atalanta have moved up the table to sixth in Serie A, only three points behind third‑placed Napoli. Losing Kessié now would be a big blow to their hopes of qualifying for Europe.
Gian Piero Gasperini, the Atalanta manager said after the club’s last game before the winter break that he hoped he would keep all his players in January. “I am not worried as I don’t think that any player will leave in January. The club have every intention to keep the players until June and we may even strengthen.”
The Ivorian midfielder’s agent claimed last week that several other Premier League sides, including Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and Arsenal, were also monitoring Kessié’s situation and Juventus and Napoli are also interested in signing the player. Napoli, indeed, have a first-refusal option if they can agree a fee with Atalanta.
Kessié has been selected in the Ivory Coast squad for the Africa Cup of Nations having become a regular in Michel Dussuyer’s side in recent months.
A proposed move to Sunderland in August broke down after he was denied a work permit but his new status as a regular international and one of the highest-rated young midfielders in Italy should mean that is no longer an obstacle to any move to England.
Kessié’s agent George Atangana told the Guardian last week: “We have a lot of interest from the Premier League. I cannot say at this stage how much he will cost but we are talking about one of the best young players in the world.
“But for us the most important thing is that the technical project is the right one for him. Franck is very young so we have to be very careful about his development.
“Chelsea are very interested and it is a great club but we must take our time to consider all the options,” Atangana, who was due to meet Stamford Bridge officials in London this week, added. “Now we are in January so he has to play at the Africa Cup of Nations for Ivory Coast so I am not going to rush anything.”The Geography of Genital Mutilations
James DeMeo
The Truth Seeker, pp 9-13, July/August 1989
� 1989 James DeMeo. All Rights Reserved
Presented in 1989 at the First International Symposium on Circumcision
NOTE: Links with a right-facing blue arrow will take you off this site.
Genital mutilations elicit severe pain and terror in infants and children
and are often very dangerous to health.
This paper summarizes portions of a prior study of the geographical aspects of human behavior among subsistence-level aboriginal peoples (DeMeo, 1986,1988). The focus here will specifically be on the phenomenon of male genital mutilations. Genital mutilations are often classified as a "cultural practice," but there is growing evidence that this benign-sounding label merely serves to dismiss or evade the painful and contractive effects the mutilations have upon the psyche and soma of the child. Genital mutilations elicit severe pain and terror in infants and children and are often very dangerous to health, which raises important questions how they could have gotten started in the first instance. People who do not engage in such practices view them almost always with horror and disbelief, while people who do them often have difficulty imagining life without the practice. Oftentimes, the presence or the absence of the rites are seen as important requirements for the selection of a marriageable partner, and very powerful emotions focus upon them. Genital mutilations are among the most strongly defended, or defended against, of all cultural practices. Among the various theories developed to account for the mutilations, their geographical distribution has only rarely been discussed (DeMeo 1986).
Genital mutilations are among the most strongly defended,
or defended against, of all cultural practices.
The global distributions of the male and female genital mutilations among native, non-Western peoples, along with history and archaeology, suggest their genesis in the deserts of Northeast Africa and the Near East, with a subsequent diffusion outward into sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and possibly even into parts of the New World. They have generally been transmitted from one region to another by virtue of relocation diffusion, accompanied by phases of military conquest of cultures which do not mutilate by invading cultures which do, or by voluntary adoption in association with other cultural changes of an anti-sexual and anti-child nature. One must keep in mind the premarital, pubertal character of the mutilations as originally practiced by most cultures, performed at a time of otherwise great sexual interests and passion. I have demonstrated elsewhere that the global distributions of genital mutilations are similar to that of other patrist anti-child, anti-female, and anti-sexual cultural factors, such as infant cranial deformation, swaddling, the virginity taboo, vaginal blood taboo, male domination of kinship and inheritance, and so on (DeMeo 1986).
Figures 1 and 2 show the overlapping distributions of various types of male and female genital mutilations, respectively, as they existed among aboriginal, subsistence-level peoples within the last several hundred years. As such, the maps greatly minimize or eliminate the influences of the diffusion of European peoples within the last several hundred years. For example, the maps do not reflect the existence of male circumcision as adopted in the USA over the last 100 years [NOHARMM note: See Fig.1B, which illustrates this contemporary development] ; North and South American data is composed from aboriginal peoples only. The various forms of the mutilations, and the source for the mapped data, are discussed below. A detailed discussion of female genital mutilation will be given later by Fran Hosken, whose work (1979) provided the basis for the map of female mutilations.
Fig. 1: Map of Historical Male Genital Mutilations
Fig. 1B: Map of Contemporary Male Genital Mutilations [added by NOHARMM]
Circumcision only gained the status of being a "hygienic operation" in relatively recent times.
Male Genital Mutilations
Incision, the least harsh of the male genital mutilations, consists of either a simple cut on the foreskin to draw blood, or a complete cutting through of the foreskin in a single place so as to partly expose the glans. Incision existed primarily among peoples of the East African coast, in Island Asia and Oceania, and among a few peoples of the New World. Circumcision, a harsher mutilation where the foreskin of the penis is cut or torn away, was and is practiced across much of the Old World desert belt, and in a number of Sub-Saharan Central Asian, and Pacific Ocean groups. When performed during puberty, circumcision was largely a premarital rite of pain endurance.
Circumcision only gained the status of being a "hygienic operation" in relatively recent times, although the most recent and best medical evidence has in fact shown that routine circumcision has neither short nor long-term hygienic benefits; indeed, it has mild to severe negative psychological and physiological effects. Particularly in the bush, under less than sanitary conditions, the circumcised boy infant or child would have been at greater risk than the uncircumcised boy. The most severe male genital mutilation, a form of skinstripping, was practiced along the Red Sea coast in Arabia and Yemen, at least into the 1800s. Here, in an endurance ritual performed on a potential marriage candidate, skin was flayed from the entire penile shaft as well as from a region of the pubis. The community blessing would only be bestowed upon the young man who could refrain from expressing emotion during the event (DeMeo 1986).
Another harsh ritual, subincision, was practiced primarily among Australian aborigines and on a few Pacific Islands. It consisted of a cutting open of the urethra on the underside of the penis down to as far as near the scrotum; the subincision ritual was generally preceded by a circumcision ritual. The practice did not confer any contraceptive advantage, and no claims as such were made for it by the Australian aborigines. The geographical aspects of the Australian genital mutilations has been studied previously, and two competing theories were developed: Northwest Australia, specifically the Kimberly region, was identified as a location where genital skin stripping was performed, and some believed that circumcision and subincision spread into Australia from that region, diffusing to the east and south. On the other hand, independent development of the traits within Australia has been argued, based upon the observation that the most intense forms of subincision occurred in the desert center of the continent, being absent in a few border regions where only circumcision was practiced (DeMeo 1986).
Fig. 2: Map of Female Genital Mutilations
...genital mutilations possessed a widespread distribution,
centered on Northeast Africa and Arabia.
The Ethnographic Atlas of G. P. Murdock (1967) provided most of the data for Figure 1. Murdock's Atlas also contains raw data on the age at which the mutilations were customarily done among a globally-balanced sample of 350 cultures. A map of that data which I constructed indicated that genital mutilations possessed a widespread distribution, centered on Northeast Africa and Arabia. Furthermore, the greater the distance from those central regions, the older was the male at the time of the mutilation (DeMeo 1986, p. 159). As one moves farther and farther east from Africa and the Near East, the males are progressively older at the time of the mutilation. Furthermore, the practices occur less frequently and undergo a gradual dilution of harshness as distance from those central regions increases. Genital skin stripping, the harshest mutilation, was centered on the Red Sea region, and was surrounded by a region practicing only male circumcision. Circumcision, in turn, gives way to the less harsh practice of incision as one moves eastward across the Pacific. Genital mutilations were not practiced at all among most of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas or Eastern Oceania. It was precisely in these regions of mutilation absence where the decorative "penis tops" were most frequently found among native peoples, indicating a similar interest in the genitalia, but only in a decorative and pleasurable sense.
Genital mutilations were not practiced at all among most of
the aboriginal peoples of the Americas or Eastern Oceania.
From the standpoint of the pain involved in circumcision as a puberty or premarital rite, the easterly decline in mutilation frequency and dilution of the rite towards less painful methods, and to older ages, makes perfect sense if we also assume that the emotional attitudes, beliefs, and cultural institutions which originally mandated the painful ritual were likewise diluted as they were carried eastward from a Northeast African or Arabian point of origin (DeMeo 1986). With the social and emotional root reasons for the rituals becoming diluted with time and distance, less painful methods such as incision were substituted, or it was put off as long as possible, certainly well past the period just before marriage, preferably into the period of old age. Or it was relinquished altogether. In the Near Eastern desert regions where the social institutions and emotional roots for the ritual remained but where the pain of the mutilation was feared as a puberty/premarital rite, it was occasionally shifted into infancy, or adopted as such from the start.
...it seems probable that genital mutilations, were introduced before 2300 BC,
when the Nile Valley was invaded by militant pastoral nomads,
and culturally transformed around 3100 BC.
There have been several phases of diffusion of the mutilations. Egyptian bas-reliefs give the earliest known unambiguous evidence of male genital mutilations, performed as a puberty rite during the early Dynastic era, about 2300 BC (Paige 1978, Montagu 1946). However, it seems probable that genital mutilations were introduced before 2300 BC, when the Nile Valley was invaded by militant pastoral nomads, and culturally transformed around 3100 BC. These invaders, who possessed Asian and Semitic characteristics, ushered in an era of divine kings, ritual widow murder, a military and priestly caste, massive graves and fabulous grave wealth, temple architecture, and other trappings of extreme patriarchal authoritarian culture (DeMeo 1986, p.218-294). As discussed below, cultural tendencies of a similar direction, but of lesser intensity, are positively correlated with genital mutilating cultures of more recent times.
According to biblical scripture, the Hebrews institutionalized the mutilations
after the Exodus from Egypt, and it thereafter became a special mark of the tribe.
According to biblical scripture, the Hebrews institutionalized the mutilations after the Exodus from Egypt, and it thereafter became a special mark of the tribe. The mutilations appeared widely across the Near East prior to the eruptions of Moslem armies in the 600s A.D., but were subsequently spread wherever Moslem armies ventured. While neither male nor female genital mutilations have any specific Koranic mandate, Mohammed thought them to be "desirable," and they predominate in Moslem areas. Still, there are regions of' non-Moslem Africa and Oceania which possess the mutilations as a probable diffusion from ancient, pre-Moslem times. Diffusion from these earliest periods may also yet account for isolated, rare examples of the traits in the New World (DeMeo 1986, p. 358-426).
Fig. 3: Historic Spread of Human Genital Mutilations
Areas Influenced or Occupied by Arab Armies Since 632 AD (after Pitcher 1972). The Islamic empire spread genital mutilations into many new areas of the globe, and reinforced it in others. However, genital mutilations had spread into sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the New World, prior to the Islamic period, notably among caste, high god, and warrior-emphasizing peoples.
Male genital mutilations were never adopted widely in Europe, European Australia, Canada, Latin America, in the Orient, or by Hindus, Southeast Asians, or Native Americans.
Male genital mutilations were never adopted widely in Europe, European Australia, Canada, Latin America, in the Orient, or by Hindus, Southeast Asians, or Native Americans The spread of the rite of infant circumcision to the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s is a most recent phenomenon not reflected on the maps. Circumcision gained in importance in the USA only after allopathic medical doctors, playing upon prevailing sexual anxieties, urged it as a "cure" for a long list of childhood diseases and "disorders, "to include polio, tuberculosis, bedwetting, and a new syndrome which appeared widely in the medical literature known as "masturbatory insanity." Circumcision was then advocated along with a host of exceedingly harsh, pain-inducing devices and practices designed to thwart any vestige of genital pleasure in children (Paige 1978).
Reich saw the real purpose of circumcision, and other assaults upon the child's sexuality,
to be the reduction of the child's emotional fluidity and energy level, and their ability
to experience maximal pleasurable genital excitation later in life...
Freud and other psychoanalysts have discussed male genital mutilations as inducing a form of "castration anxiety" in the child by which the taboo against incest and parricide is pathologically strengthened (DeMeo 1986). Montagu (1946) and Bettelheim ( 1962) have discussed their connections to the male fear of vaginal blood, where menstruation is imitated (subincision), or where the male must be ritually absolved of contact with poisonous childbirth blood (infant circumcision), or hymenal blood (pubertal circumcision). Reich identified genital mutilations as but one, albeit a major one, of a series of brutal and cruel acts directed toward infants and children which possess hidden motives designed to cause a painful, permanent contraction of the child's physical and emotional self. Reich saw the real purpose of circumcision, and other assaults upon the child's sexuality, to be the reduction of the child's emotional fluidity and energy level, and their ability to experience maximal pleasurable genital excitation later in life, a major step in, as he put it, transmuting Homo sapiens into armored Homo normalis. Reich argued that parents and doctors blindly advocated or performed the genital mutilations, and other painful shamanistic medical procedures, in proportion to their own emotional armoring and pleasure-anxiety, in order to make children more like themselves: obedient, docile, and reduced in sexual vigor and emotional vitality (Reich 1967, 1973).
Male genital mutilations are found present in a cultural complex where children, females,
and weaker social ethnic groups are subordinated to elder, dominant males
in rigid social hierarchies of one form or another.
These ideas, as disturbing as they may be, find support in cross-cultural comparisons of cultures which mutilate the genitals of their males. Textor's Cross-Cultural Summary (1967) demonstrates positive correlations between male genital mutilations and the following other cultural characteristics (also see Prescott 1975, DeMeo 1986):
High narcissism index
Slavery and Castes are present
Class stratification is high
Land inheritance favors male line
Cognatic kin groups are absent
Patrilineal descent is present
Female barrenness penalty is high
Bride price is present
Father has family authority
Polygamy is present
Marital residence near male kin
Painful female initiation rites are present
Segregation of adolescent boys is high
Oral anxiety potential is high
Average satisfaction potential is low
Speed of attention to infant needs is low
High God present, active, supportive of human morality
One cannot extract a list of correlated pro-child, pro-female, or sex-positive traits from Textor's work, as cultures which mutilate the male genitalia do not generally possess such characteristics. Male genital mutilations are found present in a cultural complex where children, females, and weaker social ethnic groups are subordinated to elder, dominant males in rigid social hierarchies of one form or another. While the cross-cultural analysis contrasted only aboriginal, subsistence-level cultures, many of the factors identified in the above list are or once were applicable to the USA, where male circumcision predominates. It must be noted, however, that many or most of those patristic characteristics may be present in cultures where genital mutilations are absent, but which can be accounted for by deprivation of physical affection in the maternal infant and adolescent sexual relationships (Prescott, 1975, 1979, 1989).
The underlying psychology of genital mutilations is anxiety regarding sexual pleasure,
mainly heterosexual genital intercourse...
Summary:
The underlying psychology of genital mutilations is anxiety regarding sexual pleasure, mainly heterosexual genital intercourse, as indicated by the associated virginity taboos and ritual absolutions against vaginal blood. In the final analysis, these mutilations say more about predominant attitudes regarding sexual pleasure than anything else.
...female infibulations and other forms of female genital mutilation persist
in accordance with the arranged marriage system, and other vestiges
of a powerful and hysterical virginity taboo.
Given their similar distributions, similar cross-cultural aspects, and similar psychological motifs, the time and location of origins of male and female genital mutilations are probably identical, the use of each being mandated and widely expanded by groups where dominance of the sexual lives of children by adults, and of females by males, was most extreme. The use of eunuchs has died out over the last 100 years with the decline of the harem system, but female infibulations and other forms of female genital mutilation persist in accordance with the arranged marriage system, and other vestiges of a powerful and hysterical virginity taboo.
The urge to mutilate the genitals of children stems from deeply ingrained
cultural anxieties regarding sexual pleasure and happiness.
The genital mutilations of young males and females are major examples of cultural "traits" or "practices" which, on deeper analysis, reveal roots in severe pleasure-anxiety, with sadistic overtones. The parent or tribal elder who cuts the genitals of young children, was subject to the rite himself as a child, and is made very anxious or angry when confronted with a child whose genitals are not mutilated. This incapacity to tolerate pleasurable movement or feeling in others (pleasure anxiety) was first identified for Homo sapiens by Reich who also identified the role that social institutions play in demanding a systematic recreation of trauma and damage in each new generation; primatologists have identified similar processes of abuse transmission at work in monkeys deprived of maternal love in infancy (DeMeo 1986). Prescott (1975) previously confirmed many of these relationships in a cross-cultural manner. The materials summarized here in geographical form further confirm these processes which possess historically identifiable roots in specific regions. The urge to mutilate the genitals of children stems from deeply ingrained cultural anxieties regarding sexual pleasure and happiness. Genital mutilations always exist within a complex of other social institutions that provide for the socially sanctioned expression of adult sadism and destructive aggression towards the infant and child with unconscious motivations aimed at destroying or damaging the capacity for pleasurable emotional/sexual bonding between mothers and babies, and between young males and females. In the absence of such deeper motivations, genital mutilations would not be welcomed or championed by parents or birth attendants.
[For more on this, read James DeMeo's Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World 1998. You can order this book through NOHARMM's Online Bookstore.]
James DeMeo, Ph.D., earned his doctorate at the University of Kansas and has served on the Faculty of Geography at Illinois State University and the University of Miami. He is currently the Director of the Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory, PO Box 1148, Ashland, OR 97520, Editor of the environmental journal, Pulse of the Planet, and author of The Orgone Accumulator Handbook.
References
Bettelheim, B. (1962): Symbolic Wounds, Collier Books, NY.
DeMeo, J. (1986): "On The Origins and Diffusion of Patrism: The Saharasian Connection," Dissertation, U. of Kansas, Geography Department. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor; see section on "Male and Female Genital Mutilations," p. 153-178.
DeMeo, J. (1987, 1988); "Desertification and the Origins of Armoring: The Saharasian Connection," J. Orgonomy, 21(2):185-213, 22(1):101-122, 22(2):268-289.
Hosken, F. (1979): The Hosken Report on Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females, 2nd Edition, Women's International Network News, Lexington, Mass.
Montagu, A. (1945): "Infibulation and Defibulation in the Old and New Worlds," Am. Anthropologist, 47:464-7.
Montagu, A. (1946): "Ritual Mutilation Among Primitive Peoples," Ciba Symposium, October, p.424.
Murdock, G.P. (1967): Ethnographic Atlas, Pittsburgh, HRAF Press.
Paige, K. (1978): "The Ritual of Circumcision," Human Nature, May.
Pitcher, D. (1972): An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire, E.J. Brill, Leiden, Map V.
Prescott, J.W. (1975): "Body Pleasure and The Origins of Violence," The Futurist, April, p.64-74.
Prescott, J.W. (1979): Deprivation of Physical Affection As A Primary Process In The Development Of Physical Violence. In: Child Abuse and Violence. (David G. Gil, Ed). AMS Press New York pp 66-137.
Prescott, J.W. (1989): "Affectional Bonding for the Prevention of Violent Behaviors: Neurobiological, Psychological and Religious/Spiritual Determinants. In: Violent Behavior Vol. 1: Assessment and Intervention. (Hertzberg, L.J., et al., eds) P M A Publishing Corp. New York 1989, p. 109-142.
Reich, W. (1967): Reich Speaks of Freud, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, p.27-31.
Reich, W. (1973): Ether, God & Devil, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, p.67-70.
Textor, R. (1967): A Cross-Cultural Summary, HRAF Press, New Haven.
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Your Rights | Attorneys for the Rights of the Child | Video Excerpt | Dads | FGC Experts | Position Statement | Harm Form | Class ActionI never thought I’d look forward to a visit to Texas. But here I am, counting down the days to the conclusion of the 2014 club season in Frisco.
The season has been exhilarating, especially since I have watched the most competitive games in person. Watching live ultimate is a completely different experience from watching games through a monitor. While broadcasts convey the action, they cannot capture the electric intensity needed to do our sport justice. If you ever have time to take a weekend away and visit an elite tournament, do it. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.
This is the first year that I’ve paid close attention to club, so I am ecstatic for Nationals. This is the tournament everyone has been training for. The most elite talent across the United States – the entire planet, really – will duke it out for the highest honor a club can receive. I’ll finally have the opportunity to witness the peak levels of ultimate in person.
I can’t wait.
Aside from ogling the talent, I’m going in with a mission: questions have been piling up in my head all summer, and I want answers.
My queries are derived from my perspective as a ultimate fanatic– I’m going off of the few tournaments I have attended plus what I’ve gathered from Skyd, Ultiworld, and Twitter. There are holes in my knowledge about the sport, and every time I attend a tournament, I walk away with information that rounds out my understanding of the big picture. As the last and most important tournament of the season, Club Nationals is one of the most crucial parts of my journey.
Here are my top seven questions:
1. Which of the top five men’s powerhouses will take the gold?
Since I’ve been at these tournaments and seen the same few teams several times, I’ve gathered some novice first impressions of their abilities. Consensus says there are five teams with the potential to win it all: Revolver, Machine, Sockeye, Ironside, and Johnny Bravo.
Revolver. Can they bring home another gold?
Losses this season:
Johnny Bravo at US Open, 8 – 15
Ironside at US Open, 13 – 15
GOAT at ECC, 12 – 14
Chain Lightning at ECC, 11 – 13
All research points to Revolver being the clear favorite for the title. They took gold at the US Open and Worlds, and they are the defending national champions. They didn’t medal at Emerald City Classic (ECC), but hey, they had a Worlds Hangover. (They went pretty hard to win in Lecco, so the break they took leading up to ECC was well-deserved.)
If Revolver’s stats aren’t convincing, one only needs to watch their harmonious playing style to be convinced of their worthiness. Even I can tell it is a work of art. Watching their field movement is like watching a string quartet perform a marvelous composition. Just as one instrument in a quartet is not complete without the other three compliments, the players on Revolver cannot execute their offense without the full cooperation of the others on the field. It’s clear they’ve rehearsed their cutting and field spacing countless times, and in-games, they demonstrate a comfortable ability to remain flexible. Simply put, they’re damn good. Nobody, myself included, will be surprised if Revolver wins Nationals.
Machine. Is this darkhorse a true contender?
Losses this season:
Chain Lightning at Chesapeake Invite, 7 – 13
Madison Club at Heavyweights, 9 – 11
Revolver at ECC, 9 – 13
Ironside at ECC, 11 – 13
All season long, I had no expectations of Machine. I was too busy marveling over the teams I had heard of. I watched them win at the Chesapeake Invite, but the absence of the powerhouses meant that I wasn’t paying close attention to their abilities. Clearly, I should not have overlooked them. I was absolutely stunned when they cleaned up snoozing Johnny Bravo and sauntered their way to first place at ECC. Later, I was informed that their performance should not have shocked me; the core of the group has been playing with the AUDL’s Wildfire – upping hours spent together in practice – and they’ve finished in the quarters the last two years. They are dangerous. The team obviously feels confident, as made evident by the recent release of their D-Line and Nationals promotional videos. Will they still be ample competition against teams recovered from the Worlds hangover? Other teams need to be on their guard against Machine.
Also, Bob Liu. Why isn’t he a bigger name? This season has put him on my radar. He is easily one of my favorite players to watch. His throws, such as his randomly casual scoober for a score against Revolver during ECC, are sick. And he’s fluent in both hands. Can he be effectively contained?
Sockeye. Can they limit sloppy play?
Losses this season:
Furious George at US Open, 13 – 15
Revolver at US Open, 15 – 16
Sub Zero at US Open, 8 – 15
Chain Lightning at ECC, 11 – 13
GOAT at ECC, 11 – 12
Revolver at ECC, 13 – 14
My first exposure to this year’s Sockeye squad was their game against Clapham at the US Open. The intensity of the game was lackluster at best, and though Sockeye won 15 – 10, I was thoroughly unimpressed. I made bets that they would lose by five in their next game to Johnny Bravo. Sockeye startled me by winning by two, appearing radically different from the bumbling team who scraped by in their win the day before. Here was the Sockeye that I knew and loved, the team that was a contender for gold.
I’ve noticed Sockeye to be a team with two faces: one that slinks by when a victory appears imminent, and one that ramps up the intensity against higher level teams. Perhaps this playing style is effective to prevent from burnout later in the day, but sometimes their sloppiness seeps over into gameplay when it is unneeded and they lose. A perfect example of this is their disappointing loss to Sub Zero during the US Open. Can they be counted on to convert on breaks? Will their trademark rapid speed offense blaze past attempts to halt their upfield movement, or will it result in miscommunication and dropped discs? To win, they’ll have to perfectly operate in the system they’ve created for themselves without being strangled by it.
Ironside. Could this (finally) be their year?
Losses this season:
Johnny Bravo at US Open, 13 – 15
Sockeye at US Open, 11 – 14
Revolver at US Open, 11 – 15
Buzz Bullets at WUCC, 16 – 17
Revolver at ECC, 10 – 13
Machine at ECC, 10 – 13
Ironside has always been a contender for gold, having made semis every year since 2008. But they’ve never taken that top spot on the podium. They’ve played excellently this season. Conversations with more knowledgeable individuals have revealed that this year looks like their best chance to defeat the competition. The defense has been revamped, most notably with the addition of handler Mark Sherwood and shift of captain George Stubbs to the D-line. Also, they are probably determined to prove they are truly an elite American team; as the only US team which lost in quarters during WUCC, can they claim they are on the same level as the other Worlds squads? Will that loss help to motivate them to untap their full potential? Will their line shakeups prove to have been the right idea? Have their years without a title come a end?
Johnny Bravo. Will they become a team?
Losses this season:
Sockeye at US Open, 12 – 14
Furious George at US Open, 13 – 14
Revolver at US Open, 12 – 14
Revolver at WUCC, 16 – 14
Sockeye at ECC, 12 – 13
Machine at ECC, 11 – 15
Revolver at ECC, 10 – 15
Doublewide at ECC, 11 – 15
When Johnny Bravo’s 2014 roster came out, I thought the club season was over before it had begun. How could a roster packed with so many big names possibly not win? During the first day of the US Open, they decimated their competition, including a seven point win over Revolver. Then, the seemingly perfect team showed their flaws. I keep waiting for the magic to return, but somehow… things keep going wrong. I don’t really understand why, but I am beginning to suspect that the talent of the individuals is detrimental to the team. Bravo’s lineup exists as players on a team, and not a team of players. I saw a glimmer of ultimate insanity during Brodie’s huck and Mickle’s unbelievable grab during their universe point against Doublewide at the South Central Regionals. The play was definitely questionable, but they made it work. And that’s the problem. While I expect this kind of athleticism from Johnny Bravo, I’d also think they’d play smarter since their players [should] have such a high ultimate IQ.
Some speculation: If their team is going to mesh, they’ll need to take a page out of Revolver’s playbook and understand that an ultimate player absolutely requires the cooperation of his teammates on the field. A squad containing Watson, Matzuka, Brodie, Mickle, Gibson, Lance, and Farrell could theoretically be filled with ESPN-level bids and epic skys. However, just because players have the ability to make incredible one-man-one-play glamourous throws doesn’t mean they should rely on it. If they can synchronize the strengths of those on the field and forgo the risky decisions, they should be unstoppable.
2. Will Brodie Smith play?
I’ve compared more than the skill levels of individual teams. I’ve also used my exposure to club to also compare the abilities of individual players. Some have stood out as exceptionally talented. Brodie Smith is not on this list. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to watch him play because he has been injured. Rumor has it that he’s not only good at throwing discs into garbage cans and basketball hoops– he’s supposedly skilled on the field as well. Has he finally overcome |
odor is encountered in the vastly different olfactory context of whole body odor with the products and habits that give rise to diplomatic odor. Though humans ought to be able to use this type of olfactory information to inform social judgments, empirical evidence for this behavior is lacking. Thus, the present work aimed to provide a first step in demonstrating that perceivers are able to use ecologically relevant olfactory information to inform social judgments in semi-realistic situations.
We developed a paradigm that allowed raters to make social judgments of others based solely on their live, whole body odor at distances resembling typical social interactions. In study 1, raters made highly consistent olfactory-based social judgments based on others’ diplomatic odor. Relying solely on olfactory cues, if a rater judged an unknown other to be friendly in a first meeting, the rater was also likely to judge this person favorably in a second meeting. In study 2, we replicated these findings, and extended them by showing that raters made highly consistent social judgments based on natural body odor, that our live, whole body approach converges with the traditional t-shirt approach, and that judgments based on diplomatic odor are weakly related to judgments based on natural odor.
The results of our study show that raters made consistent social judgments about donors based on their body odor alone. Raters were able to do this in spite of the fact that they encountered donors at a social distance and were presented with whole body odor rather than with donors’ isolated axillary odors, commonly regarded as the major source of salient social olfactory information (Prokop-Prigge et al. 2016). Further, donors wore perfume and deodorant in the diplomatic condition, factors that are commonly eliminated in social olfactory studies for fear that they will impact the perception of social olfactory information. Additionally, judgments based on whole body odor converged with judgments based on the standard t-shirt method. This convergence provides important construct validity of our new approach, and increases confidence that perceivers’ judgments in the live rating paradigm were based on their preferences for olfactory cues, rather than artifacts based on our methodology. Finally, by employing only heterosexual females, we show that olfactory information is important in social contexts outside of those motivated by mating pressure.
The present work focuses on the influence of diplomatic odor in everyday social judgments. Our findings indicate that judgments of social partners based solely on olfactory cues reflect idiosyncratic preferences that rely on unique combinations of rater and donor. Research suggests that a person’s olfactory preferences are driven both by genetics (Milinski and Wedekind 2001; Keller et al. 2007) and experience (Balogh and Porter 1986; Davis and Porter 1991; Mennella et al. 2001). Social judgments based on diplomatic odor in particular are likely informed by preferences for fragrance components, and underlying genetic, dietary, and health information. The present findings suggest that perceivers use diplomatic odor to make social judgments about a person’s friendliness and familiarity, driven by this plethora of genetic and experiential biases.
Interestingly, the relationship between judgments based on natural and diplomatic olfactory cues from the same individual was weak. Such findings are consistent with research showing the potential of perfumes and deodorants to change the perception of body odor (Lenochova et al. 2012; Allen et al. 2015). The lack of congruency that we and others have observed between judgments of fragranced and natural body odor highlights the need to examine the extent to which phenomena observed with traditional samples of natural body odor—perception of fear signals or health information, for example—occur when people wear their typical diplomatic odor.
To the best of our knowledge, no study has compared how judgments based on olfactory cues presented on t-shirts relate to judgments of those same individuals in a live setting. We found that body odors presented on t-shirts were perceived similarly to live body odors. Given the large body of olfactory work using t-shirt based samples and other similar approaches, the present work provides important empirical validation of current social olfactory research methods. However, the fact that t-shirt based judgments converged only moderately with live judgments suggests that t-shirts may convey some—but not all—of the information available in a live interaction.
When considering the robust consistency in social judgments across meetings, one speculative implication is that participants demonstrated some degree of implicit recognition of individuals by olfactory information alone based on a single exposure. Although research has demonstrated that individuals have a unique odor signature (reviewed in Lenochová and Havlicek 2008), there has been limited investigation into whether individuals can learn and recognize the body odors of strangers, or how quickly this might happen. It is clear that humans can recognize the odors of familiar others, both kin (Porter et al. 1986) and non-kin (Olsson et al. 2006; Lundström and Jones-Gotman 2009), and that neural processing of familiar body odors differs from that of strangers (Lundström et al. 2008). Additionally, a recent study shows that individuals can differentiate between the odors of strangers on a single trial (Allen et al. 2015), although this study did not investigate differentiation of individuals across multiple trials. To the best of our knowledge, no study has addressed how quickly people gain recognition of an individual, either implicitly or explicitly. Our study suggests the possibility that implicit recognition can occur based on a limited duration meeting (1 min) in an emotionally neutral dyadic context. We temper this conclusion, however, with the fact that our study assessed liking, but not individual recognition explicitly. Additionally, judgments based on natural odor did not significantly converge with judgments based on diplomatic odor, suggesting that our participants did not recognize individuals across the 2 conditions.
Future directions
The present work shows the importance of olfactory information in shaping women’s first impressions of other women in platonic interactions. In the context of mate selection, women typically attribute more importance to olfactory information than men (Herz and Inzlicht 2002; Havlicek et al. 2008). There is a general dearth of studies focusing on male perception of male body odor, though men are capable of perceiving social olfactory signals from other men (Chen and Haviland-Jones 2000). Future research should investigate the role of live, diplomatic odor on men’s first impressions of other men.
Additionally, our study asked raters to make judgments based on odors collected on whole t-shirts, not just the axillary area as much previous research has done (e.g., Havlíček et al. 2011). Whole t-shirts present a different odor profile than axillary areas alone. Thus, future research should investigate the extent to which judgments of whole t-shirts converge with those of axillary-only samples.
The present study focused on explicit social judgments—consciously available attitudes of liking. Implicit measures of liking are typically less reliable (Ho et al. 2014), and often take much longer than explicit measures to administer, which makes them impractical to administer multiple times, as we did in this study. Moreover, explicit and implicit measures show convergence in situations where pressures for self-presentation and distortion are low, which is likely the case in the present work. For instance, one study shows that judgments based on explicit measures predict spontaneous behaviors related to warmth, engagement, and enjoyment that reflect more implicit processes (Gunaydin et al. 2016). Future work might use implicit measures of liking.
Finally, in our live olfactory judgment paradigm, we isolated the olfactory cues by having raters wear earplugs and blindfolds. Drawing perceivers’ attention to olfactory cues presented in isolation is a methodological feature not only of our work, but also of the majority of social olfactory research (e.g., Doty et al. 1978; Prehn et al. 2006; Roberts et al. 2011). We therefore relied on similar methodology in our studies. However, everyday dyadic interactions are multimodal, including visual, auditory, and a variety of behavioral and other cues, and are also bidirectional (Zayas et al. 2002). It is probable that our paradigm encouraged participants to focus more strongly on olfactory information than they would in a normal multimodal interaction. Because humans are enormously reliant on visual cues (Gunaydin et al. 2016), it is possible that in a multimodal interaction, visual information would overshadow olfactory information, making it difficult for participants to report on olfactory perception. In order to determine whether olfactory cues are perceptible in the semi-realistic situations employed here, we chose to eschew multimodal input in favor of participants’ focus on olfactory cues, in order to maximize our chances of capturing this phenomenon. We believe that the present findings provide an important first step in demonstrating olfactory-based social judgments in semi-realistic settings. Future research should explore the influence of olfactory cues in multimodal contexts.
Conclusion
Our study provides evidence that olfactory cues affect social judgments in semi-realistic social interactions, outside of the framework of mate choice, but shows that the presence of exogenous odors may modify the social value of these cues. We argue that, when examining the perception of body odor, outside odor influences such as hygiene and dietary choices should be considered. Our study also demonstrates that judgments made about body odors collected on t-shirts are moderately correlated with those made in semi-realistic interactions, suggesting that the information available in live interactions is not completely congruent with that available in body odor presented on t-shirts. Given the plethora of cues that can be gleaned from traditional laboratory body odor samples, it is important to examine the extent to which perceivers are able to make such judgments when interacting with whole bodies in ecologically relevant settings. Our study suggests that natural and diplomatic odor are perceived differently, highlighting the importance of examining the effect of olfactory cues on social judgments in the context of normal fragrance and deodorant use. It is our hope that this study will inspire others studying human social olfaction to employ more ecologically relevant methods. Here, we provide an initial framework for how this might be accomplished, along with evidence that methodological revision may be important for revealing the true functions of human body odor in daily life.
Funding
This work was supported by a grant for the project titled “Platonic Friendship and Social Olfactory Cues in Human Body Odor” from the Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences.
Acknowledgements
Idea conceived and study designed by both JG and VZ. Data collected by JG. Data analysis conducted by JG with VZ. Manuscript written by JG in collaboration with VZ. Both authors have approved the final version of this manuscript. The authors would like to thank Francoise Vermeylen for her invaluable help with statistical analyses, and Lovely Pierre, Caitlin Parker, Kyle Kurkela, and Madeleine Gerrick who assisted with data collection and entry.
References
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© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] looks like NECA is ready to stop teasing its Master Chief-inspired motorcycle helmet and finally start flogging an actual product as early as July of this year.
And while it might look like a Halloween or cosplay costume accessory, this helmet is officially DOT-approved in the US (where does the DfL stand, we wonder?) and will protect your noggin whether you're riding a motorcycle, Warthog or Scorpion tank.
Pricing details still haven't been finalised, but when finally available the helmet will come in four sizes, include a glove-friendly flip-up visor and have enough capacity inside to accommodate a rider wearing glasses.
However, die-hard Halo fans might be disappointed to learn that Cortana won't be accessible while wearing the helmet, although she'll certainly be with you in spirit. [NECA via Polygon]
This article originally appeared on Toyland, a Gizmodo blog that loves toysPac-Man has a bug in it that prevents it from being completely finished. This bug occurs at the 256th board, where it will cause an overflow in the 8-bit byte distinct values. As a result, the final board is almost unplayable, with the right half replaced by a series of scrambled symbols, garbage tiles, and letters.
Contents show]
How does this glitch occur? Edit
It's extremely hard to do this glitch unless you have extreme patience and dedication. You have to play up to the 256th board, which can take up to 6 hours of non-stop playing. You can also use an emulator and skip to it.
Why does this exist? Edit
While probably not the first game to suffer from a kill screen, Pac-Man's is possibly the most famous. Pac-Man's level counter was a single byte, and could therefore store only 256 distinct values (0-255). Players who reached the 256th board would cause a buffer overflow, causing the data in other areas of the stack to be overwritten. The final board was unbeatable, with the right half replaced by a series of random symbols and letters.
How can I prevent this from happening in my arcade cabinet? Edit
You can't with normal arcade machine versions. Some versions, however, have a board reset after completing the 255th board, meaning the player will start again at the first board with the score staying the same as before the reset. This allows the player to continue with the game without encountering the bug. Donhodges.com has a fix for the glitch. If the player somehow manages to beat level 256, they will return to level 1, as the game reads level 256 as level 0. Some tiles will act like walls.
So what does this mean for me? Edit• First professional cricketer to 'out' himself while still playing • 'This is the right time to be open about my sexuality'
Steven Davies, the 24-year-old Surrey and England wicketkeeper, has become the latest high-profile sportsman to announce he is gay. In today's Daily Telegraph Davies becomes the first serving professional cricketer to 'out' himself.
Davies, who began his career at Worcestershire, says he hopes his decision will encourage other young gay people to do the same. He said: 'This is the right time for me. I feel it is the right time to be out in the open about my sexuality. If more people do it, the more acceptable it will become.'
Davies follows the former Wales rugby union player Gareth Thomas, who also went public about his sexuality.Vegetarianism, although questioned by some, has proven to have numerous health benefits. It is an eating style that manages to provide all the necessary nutrients for the human body and is a way to prevent many diseases.
Here are 10 Good Reasons to Become a Vegetarian:
There are several types of vegetarians: vegans, who eat only foods of plant origin, ovo-lacto vegetarians, who eat fruits, vegetables, but also eggs and dairy products and partial vegetarians or pescevegetarian who, in addition to the foods above, eat fish as well.
#1 More Vitamins
Vegetarians consume more vitamins and less saturated fat, unlike those with a classic style of eating. Due to the high consumption of vegetables and fruits, vegetarians have an increased intake of vitamin C, E, potassium, magnesium, folic acid, flavonoids, and carotenoids.
#2 Lower LDL Cholesterol
Vegetarians usually have lower levels of bad cholesterol (LDL) and a lower risk of being hypertensive.
#3 Lower BMI
Those who follow a vegetarian diet have a lower body index, so are skinnier and even longeval. While the percentage of obese people in the common population is very high, among the vegetarians the percentage of overweight varies between 1 and 6%.
#4 Better Heart Health
In the case of vegetarians, the risk of suffering from cardiovascular diseases is lower. In a study conducted a few years ago, it was shown that vegetarians were 25% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease.
Eating fiber-rich vegetables and whole grain, which are digested slowly and have a low glycemic index, helps maintain a normal blood sugar level. Also, consumption of nuts and seeds protects the vegetarians from cardiovascular diseases.
#5 Cancer Prevention
The risk of cancer is reduced when you follow a vegetarian diet. There have been numerous studies that have demonstrated that there is less incidence of cancers in vegetarians, unlike those who eat meat. Colon cancer, for example, is a type of cancer that occurs far less frequently in vegetarians.
#6 Healthier Sperm
Vegetarian men have better quality sperm, which means fewer fertility problems. In addition, consumption of red meat seems to lead to a decreased libido and circulatory problems, associated with erectile dysfunction. So even your sex life could gain from a vegetarian diet and improve considerably.
#7 Anti-inflammatory Properties
Foods commonly eaten by vegetarians reduce the risk of inflammatory diseases. Some of these foods include: fruits, nuts, tomatoes, olive oil, green vegetables, fatty fish.
#8 No Antibiotics In Food
Vegetarians are less exposed to the intake of various toxic substances, such as antibiotics or hormones administered to animals which remain in the meat we eat.
#9 Fewer Junk Food Intake
Vegetarians are less likely to eat junk food and carbonated drinks, whose harmful effects on the body we already know. Once you’ve adopted a healthy lifestyle, your body gets used not to crave when passing a fast food or when your friends eagerly sip sodas.
#10 Environmental Benefits
In a 2006 report, the UN states that livestock farms emit more greenhouse gasses than all the cars and trucks in the world combined. So, if you are vegetarian or about to become one, you can be proud to have a small contribution to reducing global warming.This article is over 8 years old
Amsterdam, Zagreb, Paris and Mexico City become first cities to pledge to cut their carbon emissions by 10% in the next year
Mexico City's taxis and Paris's city halls are about to become greener after four worldwide capitals signed up to the 10:10 climate campaign.
The mayors of Amsterdam, Zagreb, Paris and Mexico City announced this week that they intend to cut their cities' carbon emissions by 10% in the next year.
The 10:10 campaign, supported by the Guardian, is championed in 40 countries with 3,000 businesses and 100,000 individuals signing up, including celebrities Sienna Miller and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
This is the first time that capital cities have signed up, said campaigners.
Speaking from the Hôtel de Ville, Paris mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, said: "10:10 is an invitation to act concretely and determinedly. I am very happy about this partnership."
Social housing complexes will be renovated, head offices of the 20 arrondissements given energy-saving refurbishments and the city's fleet of public vehicles will be "rationalised" in an attempt to cut carbon emissions.
Plans have also been unveiled for geothermal wells in the north-east of the city which will power 12,000 homes.
The formal agreement from Paris came just before a separate day of international mass participation climate action on 10/10/10, when 7,000 events took place around the world.
Twenty four hours later, Paris was joined by the largest city in the Americas, as Mexico City signed the pledge.
Its carbon-cutting programme includes the opening of a new line of its Metrobus system (saving 35,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide), replacing all the city's taxis (saving 100,000 tonnes of CO 2 ), building more sustainable homes and large-scale water-saving methane-capture programmes.
"It's about the survival of our civilisation," said mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, as he appealed to the city's 21.2 million residents to use less electricity and water and make more journeys by bicycle and public transport.
The city's average temperature had risen by 3C in the previous century, he said.
Meanwhile, 1 million people tuned in to watch Dutch celebrities quizzed on their environmental knowledge on a 10:10-themed television show. It followed Amsterdam's decision to join the campaign, where viewers were given the number of a hotline to sign up to 10:10 over the telephone.
Staff in public buildings in the city are already using energy monitors, lights are being turned off when not in use, and thermostats have been turned down.
Zagreb would also soon be joining the movement, confirmed the mayor, Milan Bandić, speaking in the Croatian capital on Sunday.
10:10 now has hubs in 45 countries worldwide, and in May, the prime minister, David Cameron committed the UK government estate to cutting its emissions by 10%.
Ben Margolis, global strategy director at 10:10, said: "This fantastic commitment from four very different capital cities shows how local 10:10 campaigns around the world have grown in strength and confidence."Georgetown suffered its first defection in two-plus years today, announcing that rising junior forward Paul White will transfer. White's departure ends two up-and-down, injury-riddled years on the Hilltop.
White initially appeared to be a versatile offensive threat perfectly suited to John Thompson III's Princeton-based offense. The Chicago product earned immediate minutes as a freshman and provided much-needed shooting and passing in a sometimes stagnant half-court offense. Even after he declined in the latter half of his freshman year, White figured to start, or at least contribute significantly as a sophomore. However, he then missed nearly all of his last season with a hip injury. Georgetown suffered in his absence as Thompson plugged in guys who either weren't ready or weren't good enough to replace White. White played limited minutes in this summer's Kenner League but still did not appear to be at full strength. Today's news appears to confirm grumblings throughout last season that White was planning to transfer.
It's hard to say how much the Hoyas will miss White's on-court production going forward. For one thing, he still did not appear to be fully healthy this summer, calling into question his ability to contribute to the team in the coming season. Georgetown also appears to have a much deeper rotation than last season, losing one player while adding four (counting Akoy Agau), all of whom should be able to contribute immediately. Depending on whether JT3 prefers to go big or small (traditionally, the former), White's departure could free minutes for almost everyone on the roster.
Regardless, White is a good kid, and we wish him well.
Below is the school's full release.
*******************
Georgetown University rising junior men’s basketball player Paul White (Chicago, Ill./Whitney Young) will transfer to another institution.
White appeared in seven games during the 2015-16 season, averaging 1.6 points and 1.6 rebounds. He had season-ending surgery in January.
He appeared in all 33 games as a freshman in 2014-15, averaging 5.0 points and 2.8 rebounds per game. In two years at Georgetown, he averaged 4.6 points and 2.6 rebounds in 40 career games.Shares of gun makers tumbled again on Monday as recent government data and analyst comments worried investors about a drop in demand.
Smith & Wesson Holding Corp.’s stock US:SWHC slumped 4.9% in midday trade, which put it on course to close at a 4-month low. Volume of about 2.5 million shares at 1 p.m. Eastern was already nearly double the full-day average over the past 30 days of 1.3 million shares, according to FactSet.
Sturm, Ruger & Co. Inc.’s RGR, -1.60% slumped 6.3%, also toward a four-month low, on volume that was more than double the full-day average.
The selloffs follow data released Friday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which showed background checks related to firearm sales in May rose 18% from a year ago, but fell to an eight-month low of 1.87 million.
On Friday, shares of Smith & Wesson slid 7.1% and Sturm, Ruger shed 4.8%.
Shares of Vista Outdoor Inc. VSTO, -2.06% which makes ammunition and long guns and related equipment, fell 2.9%, after losing 2.4% on Friday.
FactSet
Ruttenbur downgraded Sturm, Ruger to hold from buy on Monday, citing indications that consumer demand for firearms was slowing. He removed his stock price target of $80, which was 24% above Friday’s closing price of $64.28.
Besides the fact the background checks data was well below his expectations, Ruttenbur said recent conversations with a leading supplier about component orders to firearms makers suggests a “meaningful drop in order activity from manufacturers” occurred in the last half of May.
“As a result of these factors, we believe we are seeing the start of a slowdown in the industry,” Ruttenbur wrote in a note to clients.
Smith & Wesson and ARC Group Worldwide Inc. ARCW, -7.56% which said in the filing of its 2015 annual report that it derived a “significant portion” of its sales from firearm manufacturers, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.Canon’s XA35 and XA30 Camcorders Feature New HD CMOS PROSensor,
20x HD Optical Zoom Lens and Built-in Wi-Fi® Capability
MELVILLE, N.Y., November 10, 2015 – Responding to the evolving needs of professional |
Cameron's Titanic, he admitted that he was hesitant at first since this wasn't the kind of film he had told himself he wanted to make.
His father George is of half German, half Italian descent and his mother is German.
His father had a very interesting job - he was a comic book dealer.
He attended the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies before attending Marshall High.
It's no wonder he is such a talented actor, he was trained by renowned Hollywood Gun Coach Thell Reed, who has also trained such actors as: Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer, Edward Norton, Russell Crowe and Ben Foster.
He was chosen by People Magazine as one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" in 1998.
Director Baz Luhrmann had cast DiCaprio in the key role in his long-planned epic of Alexander the Great. A rival film directed by Oliver Stone helped derail Luhrmann's project.
He was meant to star in American Psycho and would have earned $20 million for the role. However, he had to drop out due to schedule conflicting issues and the role went to Christian Bale.
His role in Aviator hit close to home. In an interview with Katie Couric, he said it brought back his own obsessive-compulsive disorder that he had as a child.
DiCaprio turned down the role of Camerlengo Patrick McKenna in Angels and Demons. He declined despite being offered the role personally by Tom Hanks.
Director Tarantino sought the actor to play the Nazi colonel Landa in Inglourious Basterds, but he declined and the role went to Christoph Waltz.
DiCaprio turned down Michael Pitt's role in The Dreamers (2003) because he felt he was too old to play a twenty-year-old student.
He was considered for the role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Spider-Man, the role went finally to childhood friend Tobey Maguire.
DiCaprio really wanted to play Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby because he was drawn to "the idea of a man who came from absolutely nothing, who created himself solely from his own imagination. Gatsby's one of those iconic characters because he can be interpreted in so many ways: a hopeless romantic, a completely obsessed wacko or a dangerous gangster, clinging to wealth."
He dated Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen between 2002-2005.
DiCaprio openly supported John Kerry in the 2004 election. He went around to 11 states and gave 20 speeches about the environment and how the Bush Administration has damaged it.
During the 2008 Presidential election, Leonardo gave $2,800 to Barack Obama's campaign which is the maximum amount an individual can give during an election.
One of his closest friends is Mark Wahlberg.
He's a father! Well, technically. While filming Blood Diamonds in South Africa, he "adopted" a South African baby girl after meeting her at an orphanage. He sends her a monthly check and speak often on the phone.
Leonardo supports environmental causes. He created a spoken word piece entitled "Global Warning" which is Global Warming and Climate Change.
In 2005, he created his second spoken word piece entitled "Water Planet."
He received the Environmental Leadership Award from Global Green USA.
In 2006, he produced, co-wrote and partly narrated on screen his environmental documentary, The 11th Hour.
He loves sports and he likes to play basketball, hockey, football, rollerblade, and go surfing.
He had a song written for him. The Flemish chick-rock band, K3, wrote a song titled "I'm in Love with Leonardo DiCaprio."
He teamed up with Discovery Communications to executive-produce a 13-part reality series, titled Eco-Town, chronicling the eco-friendly rebuild of Greensburg, Kansas, which was destroyed by a fierce tornado on May 4, 2007.
His favorite director to work with is Martin Scorcese. Leonardo starred in five of his movies; Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, and The Wolf of Wall Street.
In November 2010, DiCaprio donated $1,000,000 to the Wildlife Conservation Society at Russia's tiger summit. DiCaprio's persistence in reaching the event after encountering two plane delays caused then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to describe him as a "muzhik" or "real man".
Leo owns two homes in New York City and one in Los Angeles. He also purchased a sizable 104 square acre island off the coast of Belize in 2005, which he plans to transform into an eco-friendly resort and vacation destination.
To prepare for his role in Edgar Hoover, DiCaprio conducted extensive research. He visited many of Hoover's haunts in Washington, D.C. "I do love playing historical figures simply because there's so much incredibly diverse interesting information about a character when you can research their life. A lot of the stuff you'd never be able to make up as a writer," he explained to Back Stage.
Despite being such a talented actor, he has never won an Academy Award. He has been nominated five times for Best Supporting Actor for What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Best Actor for The Aviator, Blood Diamond and The Wolf of Wall Street. He was also nominated as producer for The Wolf of Wall Street.
He has won two Golden Globe awards for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama for The Aviator and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Leonardo has been nominated for two Razzie Awards throughout his career - one for Worst Actor for his role in The Man in the Iron Mask and one was Worst Couple for his role in
The Shining and Taxi Driver are among his favorite movies.
He remains close friends with Titanic and Revolutionary Road co-star, Kate Winslet.
He is 6' (1.83 m) tall.
DiCaprio is an activist for gay rights and in April 2013 he donated $61,000 to GLAAD, an organization which promotes the image of LGBT people in the media.
He has dated a string of models including Naomi Campbell (1995), Helena Christensen (1997), Bijou Phillips (1998), Amber Valletta (1998), Eva Herzigova (1998), Bar Rafaeli (2005-09) & (2010-11), Anne Vyalitsyna (2009), Madalina Ghenea (2011), Erin Heatherton (2011-12) and Toni Garrn (2013-present).
So what does he look for in a woman? "Humility, a sense of humour and not a lot of drama", he said in an interview.
DiCaprio's net worth is $200 million.Added some more due to demand.
This is an 4GB SD card with printed Dragons Lair label and has my ZX81 version of the cult arcade hit Dragon's Lair pre-installed on it. it also has the ZXpand firmware update ZXpand 2.5 "Dragon" release.
It can be used with a real ZX81 which has the ZXpand ( also sold here on SellMyRetro http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/Brand-New-Sinclair-ZX81-ZXpand-Interface-2435 )
Or it can be run on a PC in the EightyOneX emulator that's on the SD card.
The SD card will be the same as this one only it won't have the Xof10 on the bottom as they were from the first 10 made, I've not printed the new ones yet, just waiting on the SD cards to arrive today or tomorrow, will upload new pic once it's printed and on the SD card.
This edition of Dragon's Lair has been officially approved for distribution by Digital Leisure to whom we are most grateful.
Added: just to let you know, this is the full game not just a demo.
Here are some links on where the real Dragon’s Lair can be found if you want to play it on a Current Gen device.
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380/
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/dragons-lair-30th-anniversary/id688402750?mt=8
PS3: https://store.playstation.com/#!/en-ca/games/dragon's-lair-trilogy/cid=UP2043-NPUB50001_00-B000000000000003High concordance between EGFR mutations from circulating-free tumor DNA and tumor tissue in non-small cell lung cancer.
Murry W. Wynes, PhD
IASLC Special Projects Manager
[email protected]
(720) 325-2945
High concordance between EGFR mutations from circulating-free tumor DNA and tumor tissue in non-small cell lung cancer.
DENVER – Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations found in the circulating free tumor DNA (ctDNA) from the plasma of advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients correlates well with the EGFR mutations from patient-matched tumor tissue DNA.
EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy is approved for EGFR activating mutation positive patients with advanced NSCLC, but the standard for determining mutation status is with DNA derived directly from tumor tissue, which can be limited or not available. A more abundant and less invasive source of tumor DNA may be cell free tumor DNA found circulating in the blood.
International researchers prospectively analyzed and compared tumor and matched plasma DNA for EGFR mutations from 1060 patients that were screened as part of a phase IV, open-label, single-arm, first-line gefitinib in EGFR mutation positive Caucasian patients. Also, when two plasma samples from the same patient were available the mutation status of each was compared.
The September issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, the official journal of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), reports that the mutation status concordance between tumor and matched plasma for 652 patients that had results for both was 94% (95% CI 92-96) with a sensitivity of 66% (CI 56-75) and specificity of 100% (CI 99-100). The reproducibility between two plasma specimens from the same patient was also high with a mutation concordance of 97% (CI 94-99) for 224 matched specimens. Post-hoc analysis of the efficacy of first-line gefitinib revealed there was similar progression-free survival (PFS) for those with EGFR mutation positive tissue (9.7 months [CI 8.5-11.0]) versus both mutation positive tissue and plasma (10.2 months [CI 8.5-12.5]).
The authors acknowledge that “tumor tissue should be considered the preferred sample type when available, however, our encouraging results suggest that a single plasma-derived ctDNA sample may be considered appropriate for assessment of EGFR mutation status when tumor tissue is unavailable or exhausted”. “As there are no published guidelines for the use of ctDNA for EGFR mutation analysis in the absence of tumor tissue, these results may help address this current unmet need.” Dr. Douillard, lead author of the study, says his next steps are to “look for resistance mutations, like T790M, during treatment to better understand mechanisms of resistance and anticipate later line treatment at progression”. For future research he also suggests “searching for other resistance mutations along the EGFR pathway, as well as other related pathways, and improving the sensitivity by using more powerful testing methods, like next generation sequencers”.
First author Dr. Jean-Yves Douillard and co-author Dr. Gyula Ostoros are both members of IASLC.
-30-
About the IASLC:
The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) is the only global organization dedicated to the study of lung cancer. Founded in 1974, the association’s membership includes more than 4,000 lung cancer specialists in 80 countries. To learn more about IASLC please visit www.iaslc.orgThe Moonlight Bay Trilogy is an unfinished trilogy of three novels by Dean Koontz. They revolve around the mysterious events in Moonlight Bay, a fictitious Southern California town, that are investigated by the main character Christopher Snow, who suffers from the genetic disorder Xeroderma pigmentosum.
Only the first two books have been released; no release date is scheduled for the third novel. The books in the trilogy are:
According to a January 14, 2000 interview with Bookreporter.com, Dean Koontz was quoted as saying "I'm half way through Ride the Storm, the third Christopher Snow story, but another book will appear between False Memory and Ride."
As of 2003, Koontz was still reportedly "halfway through" Ride the Storm.[1]
As of 2018, there is still no word on if Ride the Storm will ever be finished or released.I got some snacks all the way from the US of A! Let's see...
Twizzlers, a new thing for me. It starts out innocent and a bit chewy and then there's a WHOOP BANG as the flavor kicks in. I like it! These state on the package "naturally and artificially flavored" which to me is one of those only-in-America expressions..
Peeps, which are cute green marshmallow-bird-thingies. Strangely enough without a defining taste yet completely addicting. Two Ring Pops, watermelon and blue raspberry, haven't tried those yet. There's only one of each!
A bag of Sour Patch Kids. I tasted these before, they're yummy!
A Slim Jim beef jerky kind of snack? This was absolutely amazing.
A bag of Sweet Southern Heat Barbecue potato chips. Haven't tried them yet, but I think they'll be finished quickly too!
Thank you! I love them all!Trump: We Need To Tell The Truth; Radical Islam Is Anti-Woman, Anti-Gay, Anti-Jewish
Donald Trump says that radical Islam is a danger to women and minority groups.
Later in the speech he says that radical Muslims "enslave women and murder gays." "I do not want them in our country," Trump said.
.@realdonaldtrump: "Remember this: radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-American."
Fact check: True. — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 13, 2016
DONALD TRUMP: I refuse to allow America to become a place where gay people, Christian people, Jewish people, are targets of intimidation and persecution by radical Islamic preachers of hate and violence.
This is not just a national security issue. It is a quality of life issue.
It we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans -- women, children, gay and straight, jews and christians, then we need to tell the truth about radical islam and we need to do it now.
We need to tell the truth also when how radical islam is coming to our shores. With these people, folks, it's coming.
Full speech:Look for young carrots with their greens still attached - you can get a good sense of whether the bunch is fresh or not. On the bean front, I cooked the alubias from scratch, but you can use well-drained canned white beans if you want to throw this together on a whim.
I bought a single bunch of bushy-topped carrots the other day. At first glance it was a good looking cluster - bright orange in color, vibrant greens still attached. But it was on second glance that I noticed the tiny carrots nestled beside their larger brothers and sisters. Some of the smallest carrots were no thicker than a knitting needle, not much longer than my pinky finger. I snacked on those after a quick rinse. The bigger guys I put to work in this dill-flecked white bean skillet salad. Nothing too complicated - warm, coin-shaped slices of golden, pan-fried carrots, white alubia beans and chopped dill tossed with a tangy-sweet lemon shallot dressing. It tastes good the day you make it, even better the day after. And although it's certainly not as pretty, in my opinion, it might have tasted best on day three as the shallots infused the beans and the lemon mellowed.
Carrot, Dill & White Bean Salad Recipe
I like to buy young carrots at the farmers' market - slice them slightly thicker than a banana chip for this salad.
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon fine grain salt
1/2 cup thinly sliced shallots more olive oil (or ghee) for cooking
2 cups sliced carrots, cut 1/4-inch thick on deep bias
3 cups cooked white beans
scant 1/4 cup chopped fresh dill
2 tablespoons brown sugar (or honey)
1/3 cup sliced almonds, toasted
Combine the olive oil, lemon juice, salt and shallots in a small bowl. Stir and set aside.
In your largest skillet over medium high heat, toss the carrots with a splash of olive oil or a spoonful of ghee (I love ghee with carrots). Let them cook in a single layer - they'll give off a bit of water at first. Keep cooking, tossing gently every three or four minutes until the carrots are deeply browned. All told, about twelve minutes.
Add the beans and dill to the skillet and cook for another five minutes, or until the beans as well heated through. If you are using beans that weren't canned you can allow them to brown a bit as well (just cook a bit longer, and stir less frequently) - they can handle this in a way that most canned beans can't. If you need to add a bit more olive oil to the pan - do so.
Place the contents of the skillet in a large mixing bowl, sprinkle with the brown sugar and pour the 3/4 of the lemon-olive oil mixture over the top. Toss gently. Let sit for ten minutes. Toss gently once again, taste and adjust with more salt or sugar or lemon juice if needed to balance the flavors. Serve warm or at room temperature and finish by sprinkling with the almonds just before serving.
Serves 6 - 8 as a side.There was no doubt in my mind I wanted to do a NOTD for Halloween this year. I intended to use some cute little nail transfers and I had everything set up ready when I discovered they wouldn’t peel off the plastic sheet! Not at all! Unfortunately I still don’t have any nail art pens, so plan B was some spooky free hand nail art with the small brush I have (actually an old eyeliner brush!).
I went for blood dripping down my thumb nails, ghosts and skulls. I know they aren’t particularly professional but I don’t think they are too bad and they still look quite fun!
The polishes I used were:
Sally Hansen Hard as Nails French White Tip polish in Natural White
Rimmel Lasting Finish in No. 30 Double Decker Red
Miss Sporty Lasting Colour in Fatal Black
No 7 Stay Perfect Nail Colour in No. 220 Tangy
Sally Hansen Super Shine Top Coat
AdvertisementsLONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The majority of children living in areas of Gaza hardest-hit during last year’s conflict are showing signs of severe emotional distress and trauma, including frequent bed wetting and nightmares, a global children’s charity said on Monday.
Palestinian children look out through a bus window as they wait to cross into Egypt at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the southern Gaza Strip June 23, 2015. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Files
A ceasefire last August ended 50 days of fighting between Gaza militants and Israel, in which health officials said more than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed. Israel put the number of its dead at 67 soldiers and six civilians.
Israeli air strikes and shelling hammered the densely populated Gaza Strip, dominated by the Islamist Hamas movement, causing widespread destruction of homes, schools and other buildings.
Hamas and other militant groups launched thousands of rockets and mortar bombs from the Palestinian enclave into Israel. [ID: nL8N0Z81K9]
Some 551 children were killed in Gaza and 3,436 were injured during the conflict, while an estimated 1,500 lost their parents, according to a report by Save the Children.
More than 70 percent of children in the worst-affected areas of Gaza suffer from regular nightmares and bed wetting and live in fear of further fighting, while half do not want to attend school because they are afraid to leave home, the charity said.
“We saw our home being destroyed. I was crying because we have memories and dreams there, from the day of our birth. My memories, pictures, clothes, toys... everything is gone. I can’t live, I only feel pain,” a 12-year-old girl told the charity.
MENTAL TRAUMA
Homelessness and repeated exposure to violence, coupled with soaring unemployment for parents and limited mental health support, have prevented children from recovering from the mental trauma of war, according to Save the Children.
Around 100,000 people in Gaza are still homeless a year on from the conflict, while major reconstruction of health facilities, water networks and schools has yet to begin, the charity said.
Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip after the Islamist movement Hamas won power there in elections in 2006, and the flow of reconstruction materials into the territory has been greatly restricted since the end of the 2014 conflict.
So slow has the influx of goods been that the United Nations last month said it could take 30 years to repair the damage.
The continued blockade and threat of renewed conflict has made it difficult for children in Gaza to live normal lives, according to Save the Children.
“Many children in Gaza have now lived through three wars in the past seven years, the last one notable for its brutality. They are emotionally and, in some cases, physically shattered,” Save the Children CEO Justin Forsyth said in a statement.
Of the 1.8 million people living in Gaza - a population growing by 50,000 a year - nearly two-thirds are dependent on aid in some form or another. It is the United Nation’s longest-running relief operation, set up in 1949.A landmark announcement was made today from Suzuka Circuit at the Suzuka Circuit Motorsports Fan Appreciation Day, as Japan’s Great Race, the International Suzuka 1000km, will evolve into the Suzuka 10 Hour Endurance Race from 2018 onwards.
With the change in distance also comes the bittersweet announcement that the summer endurance race at Suzuka will no longer serve as the crown jewel event of the Autobacs Super GT Series after the 2017 season.
Mobilityland Corporation president Susumu Yamashita, and Stéphane Ratel of the Stéphane Ratel Organisation (SRO) were on hand at Suzuka to make the big announcement of the new event, which will be organized by the SRO, and the GT Association, the promoter and sanctioning body of the Autobacs Super GT Series.
The 47th Suzuka 10 Hour Endurance Race will be promoted as a “dream race” between the JAF-GT300 cars from Super GT, as well as the top FIA GT3 cars and teams from Super GT and the Super Taikyu Endurance Series.
To attract the top teams from around the GT3 racing world, such as the Blancpain GT Series and Pirelli World Challenge, the Suzuka 10 Hours will award a prize of 100 million Japanese Yen (¥100,000,000).
In its planning phases, the 47th Suzuka 10 Hours – the “47th edition” confirming its place in the lineage of the 1000km that has been run since 1966 – will be held from August 23rd to August 26th, 2018, with the 10 hour race to start at 10:30 AM on Sunday the 26th, and end at 8:30 PM the same day.
Yamashita says that the Suzuka 10 Hours will maintain the festive atmosphere of the Suzuka 1000km, with the aim of cultivating it at a larger scale, one that holds new value for the entrants, the fans, and everyone else involved.
It was originally thought that the Suzuka 10 Hours would join the calendar of the 2018 SRO Intercontinental GT Challenge, alongside the likes of the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps and the Bathurst 12 Hour race. However, Ratel confirmed that the event will not be part of the Challenge in 2018, saying that “nothing is decided for the future.”
As for Super GT at Suzuka, circuit president Yamashita made it clear that the series will continue to host a race at Suzuka, as it has every year since 1995.
Yamashita said that he wants to host a new Super GT event at the circuit, at a new date and distance, with an announcement of the new event to come some time before the 46th -and final – running of the Suzuka 1000km as we know it today.
Susumu Yamashita, Mobilityland Co. Ltd. President: “First and foremost, I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep appreciation and respect for both partners; the GT Association and the SRO Motorsports Group, here today with us, for their collaboration in the realisation of this promising project. We are proud to announce that in August of 2018, the Suzuka Circuit will host as a new project the 47th end-of-summer Endurance Race in the new format of a 10-hour endurance race, as a new project.”
“In collaboration, the Suzuka Circuit will provide the dream stage where worldwide GT series will gather in the prospect of future worldwide expansion. We are determined to, together with the entire local region, fully support the event, the public, the entrants and all of those involved in this promising project. By implementing this new project, we aim to create and nourish a brand new festive summer style which will certainly also promote new values.”
“This summer Suzuka Circuit will host the last SUPER GT Series 1000km race at Suzuka. Hence, we will also be devoting ourselves to detailed preparations in order to assure the hosting of a further innovative and appealing 2018 Suzuka Round SUPER GT Series, which will include updates in race distance and event date.”
Masaaki Bandoh, GT Association Co. Ltd. President: “Following the GT Association vision concept, this new project will constitute one more link and step into the globalisation of the SUPER GT Series. We are and will continue working close together in the effort of establishing this race in the calendar as one of the rounds that will unify the GT300 in South East Asia.”
“Concerning the new race format for the Suzuka Round SUPER GT Series in 2018 and onwards we are determined to, together with Mobilityland, bring to the circuit and to the enthusiasts much new excitement and emotion. We are determined to provide the ultimate environment that continues to invite and satisfy the vast public and motorsports fans.”
Stephane Ratel, SRO Motorsports Group Founder and CEO: “I am very excited to be here at Suzuka Circuit today to officially unveil the 47th Summer Endurance Suzuka 10 Hours. SRO fully supports this new project undertaken by Mobilityland.”
“We are at a legendary circuit that is highly valued both in Europe and Asia. It is therefore a most appropriate platform to host a global GT race and write another chapter in the Suzuka Circuit’s long and valuable history.”
“SRO will fully embrace the event by supporting champions from our numerous affiliated global categories and those teams currently competing in the European and Asian Blancpain GT Series to ensure that it flourishes and becomes a success.”Security researchers have lifted the lid on a gang of Russian-speaking cybercrooks, dubbed MoneyTaker.
The group has conducted more than 20 successful attacks on financial institutions and legal firms in the USA, UK and Russia in the last two months alone, according to Russian incident response firm Group-IB. MoneyTaker has primarily targeted card processing systems, including the AWS CBR (Russian Interbank System) and purportedly SWIFT (US).
In addition to banks, MoneyTaker has attacked law firms and financial software vendors. In total, Group-IB has confirmed 20 companies as MoneyTaker victims, with 16 attacks on US organisations, three on Russian banks and one against a Brit IT company.
By constantly changing their tools and tactics to bypass antivirus and traditional security solutions, and most importantly carefully eliminating their traces after completing operations, the group has largely gone unnoticed. "MoneyTaker uses publicly available tools, which makes the attribution and investigation process a non-trivial exercise," said Dmitry Volkov, Group-IB co-founder and head of intelligence. "In addition, incidents occur in different regions worldwide and at least one of the US banks targeted had documents successfully exfiltrated from their networks, twice."
The first attack in the US that Group-IB attributes to this group was conducted in the spring of 2016: money was stolen from the bank by gaining access to First Data's "STAR" network operator portal. In 2016, Group-IB identified 10 attacks conducted by MoneyTaker; six on banks in the US, one attack on a US service provider, one attack on a company in the UK (providing financial software) and two attacks on Russian banks. In 2017, the number of attacks has remained the same with eight US banks, one law firm and one bank in Russia targeted. The geography, however, has narrowed to only the US and Russia.
Group-IB identified connections in the 20 attacks not only in the tools used, but also the distributed infrastructure, and exfiltration tactics used to siphon off data from compromised organisations. "Another distinct feature of this group is that they stick around after the event, continuing to spy on a number of impacted banks and sending corporate emails and other documents to Yandex and Mail.ru free email services," Group-IB added.
MoneyTaker's attacks on bank ATM cards have followed a pattern, the firm said.
The first attack on card processing that Group-IB specialists attribute to this group was conducted in May 2016. Having gained access to the bank network, the attackers compromised the workstation of First Data's STAR network portal operators, making the changes required and withdrawing the money. In January 2017, the attack was repeated in another bank. The scheme is extremely simple. After taking control over the bank’s network, the attackers checked if they could connect to the card processing system. Following this, they legally opened or bought cards of the bank whose IT system they had hacked. Money mules – criminals who withdraw money from ATMs – with previously activated cards went abroad and waited for the operation to begin. After getting into the card processing system, the attackers removed or increased cash withdrawal limits for the cards held by the mules. They removed overdraft limits, which made it possible to overdraw even with debit cards. Using these cards, the mules withdrew cash from ATMs, one by one. The average loss caused by one attack was about $500,000 USD.
MoneyTaker uses a combination of commercial (e.g. the Metasploit pen-testing tool), cybercrime underground and its own self-written tools.
MoneyTaker's toolkit [source: Group-IB]
MoneyTaker's hacking kit included privilege escalation tools compiled from codes presented at the Russian cybersecurity conference ZeroNights back in 2016. In some incidents, the crooks called the infamous Citadel and Kronos banking Trojans into play. Kronos was used to deliver Point-of-Sale (POS) malware, dubbed ScanPOS.
In an attack on a Russian bank through the AWS CBR, hackers used a tool called MoneyTaker v5.0, which the group has been named after. Each component of this modular program performs a certain action: searches for payment orders and modifies them, replaces original payment details with fraudulent ones before erasing traces of the changes.
After infection, the group normally erases malware traces. However, when investigating an incident in Russia, Group-IB managed to discover the initial point of compromise: hackers penetrated the internal network by gaining access to the home computer of the system administrator.
Exfiltrated documents associated with attacks include: admin guides, internal regulations and instructions, change request forms, transaction logs, etc. A number of incidents featuring documents that describe how to make transfers through SWIFT. "Their contents and geography indicate that banks in Latin America may be targeted next by MoneyTaker," Group-IB said.
Group-IB has turned over its MoneyTaker research dossier to Europol and Interpol as part of its recently signed cooperation in fighting cybercrime. ®Mass Effect 3 From Ashes DLC Adds New Companion By Pete Haas Random Article Blend Mass Effect 3. Xbox Live Marketplace outed the DLC pack, dubbed "From Ashes," which will add a new squadmate for Shepard.
Warning: The squadmate's identity is a bit of a spoiler for ME3's plot.
The DLC has since been pulled from Xbox Live but not before the juicy details were uncovered. It adds a new squadmate who is apparently a Prothean. The Protheans are the ancient alien race thought to be wiped out by the Reapers long before the events of the ME trilogy. However, it's revealed in ME2 that the Reapers turned many of them into twisted servants called "Collectors."
"From Ashes" weighs in at over 600 MB. Like the DLC companions in Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age, this probably means that a new mission or two is included in the pack. I'd hope so, because it's a fairly pricy add-on: 800 MS Points, or $10.
"We're happy to confirm that Mass Effect 3: From Ashes DLC will be available at launch for all platforms," said BioWare's Mike Gamble on the
BioWare did a similar thing with Mass Effect 2, providing players with a mercenary squadmate called ME3 will need to fork over money for this squadmate - that's not going to go over well. It appears that BioWare will be releasing day one downloadable content for. Xbox Live Marketplace outed the DLC pack, dubbed "From Ashes," which will add a new squadmate for Shepard.The DLC has since been pulled from Xbox Live but not before the juicy details were uncovered. It adds a new squadmate who is apparently a Prothean. The Protheans are the ancient alien race thought to be wiped out by the Reapers long before the events of thetrilogy. However, it's revealed inthat the Reapers turned many of them into twisted servants called "Collectors.""From Ashes" weighs in at over 600 MB. Like the DLC companions inand, this probably means that a new mission or two is included in the pack. I'd hope so, because it's a fairly pricy add-on: 800 MS Points, or $10."We're happy to confirm thatDLC will be available at launch for all platforms," said BioWare's Mike Gamble on the official game forums. "For those of you who have purchased the N7 Collector's Edition (including the PC Digital Deluxe Edition), you will get this content at no extra charge. We'll have a lot more details for you later this week! Stay Tuned!"BioWare did a similar thing with, providing players with a mercenary squadmate called Zaeed on launch. The big difference, though, is that Zaeed was free for everyone who bought a new copy of the game. Everyone who buys a standard edition ofwill need to fork over money for this squadmate - that's not going to go over well. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topAmericans for Tax Reform chief Grover Norquist joined Alex Wagner on MSNBC’s NOW to discuss the current status of negotiations between President Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans to avoid the upcoming fiscal cliff. Norquist told the MSNBC host that he thinks President Obama is overplaying his hand in these negotiations, as he did in his first term, and Obama will cede the political advantage to Republicans because he “doesn’t have the mandate he thinks he does.”
Wagner asked Norquist if he supported the plan put forward by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). Norquist replied that Boehner’s plan is “amorphous,” and said that there is danger in projecting revenues through closing deductions. He advocated for a plan that would focus on growth in order to reduce the nation’s debt burden.
Norquist slammed the White House’s fiscal cliff proposal, which includes new spending and stimulus proposals and counts savings from ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
He warned that President Obama is in danger of providing the Republicans in Congress with more leverage in the fiscal cliff negotiations than they entered them with. He says that a similar condition occurred in Obama’s first term.
“Why? Because Obama overplayed his hand,” Norquist said. “He’s doing it again, just as he did in 2008. He thought that the country had given him a blank sheet of paper to work on. He did the stimulus spending. He went from 70 percent support down to below 50. He lost the house.”
Norquist said that, because Obama won reelection, he must think “somebody made him king.”
“It’s a real problem for him,” Norquist said. “He doesn’t have the mandate he thinks he does. So, I think he takes us over the cliff because he has blinders on. He doesn’t see where he stands in the universe.”
Watch the clip below via MSNBC:
> >Follow Noah Rothman (@Noah_C_Rothman) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] document, titled “Grassroots Advocacy Vision Document,” reveals that Erin Jacobson, the former deputy director of strategic communications in official opposition leader Thomas Mulcair’s office, has been acting as “Canadian program lead” since joining Edelman’s Energy East team to “provide Canadian-specific advocacy counsel” on June 1, mere days after she left the NDP. Ms. Jacobson has been acting as vice-president of digital public affairs at Edelman, the world’s largest private public relations firm.
Jacobson was an NDP employee from 2008 until Edelman hired her. She worked as constituency communications assistant in the office of former NDP leader Jack Layton before moving up to the party’s communications team, serving first as manager, then director of communications for the federal NDP.
Erin Jacobson, the former deputy director of strategic communications in official opposition leader Thomas Mulcair’s office, has been acting as “Canadian program lead” since joining Edelman’s Energy East team
“While there, she was critical to developing the party’s national brand and identity in a period in which it grew from 36 elected Members of Parliament to 100,” writes Tristan Roy, Edelman’s national digital practice leader, on the company’s blog. “This appointment is the next step in Edelman’s ongoing efforts to play a bigger role in the Canadian public affairs marketplace, with a focus on political campaign style, digital public affairs advocacy.”
Jacobson’s appointment as Energy |
with single-key encryption, multi-key encryption, or no encryption at all (but don’t do that!). This is a very big deal, not just for security, but for usability.
“Apple already has FileVault encryption in software. It’s not done by the file system, it’s done by the operating system,” says Greg Norcie, staff technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “In general, if you’re going to do something in software it’s going to be slower than if you do it at the file system level. It’s going to make everything more seamless.”
As for the encryption itself, on most devices APFS will use AES-XTS encryption, which Norcie notes is what’s used to protect top-secret government information.
APFS is still an early developer preview (translation: a lot of it doesn’t work yet) so it’s not quite ready for road testing unless you really know what you’re doing. When it takes over next year, though, it’s going to give you far more granular control over your security than Apple ever has before.
It’s understandable that these features didn’t make the keynote stage. They’re wonky, and technical, and don’t sound quite as cool as “differential privacy, a term that was touted on stage—which is, in fairness, actually pretty cool. In terms of how they impact your safety day to day, though, each represents serious, tangible progress. The best part? When these updates are working best, you won’t notice them at all.Connor Wood at Science on Religion has a non-controversial piece on the need for humility in science and religion, focusing mainly on science:
The thing is, people often talk about Science (with a capital “S”) as if it’s a clear and perfect window into Truth (with a capital “T”). I don’t think this is true. I think science gives us remarkable tools to reflect on the world and come up with ways to test our ideas about it. But our ideas are always just that – our ideas. The world is, by definition, always bigger, badder, wilder, and more complex than our ideas could ever be. Map, in other words, is not territory. You have to simplify the world to create models of it. This doesn’t mean our models or ideas aren’t accurate, or useful – not at all! We used Newtonian mechanics to send rocket ships to the moon, for Pete’s sake. Something about science sure works.
I agree completely. I’ll go further and say that I think that science will never provide us with final answers – or at least we can never be sure that any answer is final. Wood’s reference to Newton is apt, since Newton’s refusal to hypothesize about what causes gravity led to a turn away from grand certainties in enlightenment science. Hume noted the transition:
IIRC, Voltaire’s version was even more provocative, “The book of nature is ultimately blank.”
But while I’m willing to give up on science discovering nature’s “ultimate secrets,” I’m not yet willing to give up on science’s methodology. Science attempts to test every conclusion by holding up to the natural world. So science checks every answer against reality to see if it works.
That’s important to me. Science at least offers a way that you can weed through competing theories. It offers a way to find out if you’re wrong, hence all of Feynman’s quotes about how science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.
One of my problems with most forms of religion is that I don’t see this check. I’m not sure how to evaluate the thousands of competing claims about the divine.
What’s offered to me by conservatives is usually authoritarian – a text, a tradition or a religious leader. But how do I know that they’ve got it right? What’s offered to me by liberals is usually subjective – an inner witness or personal revelation. But how do I know if I’ve got it right?
I’m prepared to be humble in the beliefs that I hold, but if I’m wrong I want to to have some way of knowing.Police are investigating the disappearance of funds from the bank account of the parent advisory council (PAC) at a second elementary school in Surrey.
The PAC at Serpentine Heights Elementary first noticed the funds were missing while reviewing their books at the end of the last school year, according to the school district.
"A few days later, they decided they needed to call the RCMP," said Doug Strachan, the spokesman for the Surrey School District.
Strachan said between $15,000 and $20,000 were found to be missing from the account.
RCMP began their investigation in late July. Parents were informed of the situation at the PAC's annual general meeting last week.
At this point in the investigation, RCMP said there does not appear to be a connection to the funds recently discovered to be missing from the PAC account at École K.B. Woodward, another Surrey elementary school.
The school PAC in that case discovered, through a statement from the bank, its account, which contained $20,000 to $30,000, had been emptied — money that was to have been put toward a new playground.
The PACs at both K.B. Woodward and Serpentine Heights have already begun fundraising efforts to replace the missing money.Rapists and would-be rapists are opening up about “the other side of the story” — theirs — on a massive Reddit thread about the motivations behind sexual assault. The conversations range from exasperating to disturbing, and the whole of it may make you want to roll your eyes in disgust. But you shouldn’t dismiss the thread as mere rape apologia. There’s plenty of that, sure, but there’s also a lot more to it.
Yesterday, a Redditor solicited stories of sexual assault from assailants. “Reddit’s had a few threads about sexual assault victims, but are there any redditors from the other side of the story?” he asked. “What were your motivations? Do you regret it?”
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Given the disturbingly high amount of men’s rights activists and rape apologist Redditors — a recent Reddit thread counted the many, many ways the site is “anti-women” — it’s easy to see why some would be skeptical about the possibility for productive discussion. “In other words: Yeah, yeah, enough about rape victims, let’s hear from the REAL VICTIMS here: the POOR MENZ,” Shit Reddit Says lamented. A commenter added, “The thought that my rapist is PROBABLY a redditor and could very well be getting patted on the back RIGHT NOW by HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE for relating how rough raping me was for him is making me literally nauseous.”
But it’s impossible to talk about the reasons people rape without involving rapists in the discussion. Rapists aren’t hiding in the bushes: around two-thirds of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim, and 73 percent of sexual assaults are perpetrated by a non-stranger. It’s a mistake to think we’re justifying rapists’ actions by listening to their stories. Some of them are tough to read, but their brutal honesty illustrates how a lack of communication and education perpetuates rape culture. Ignoring or dismissing these men (and women) out of hand may be an effective coping strategy for a given individual, but not for society. It gets us nowhere.
So why’d they do it? What were they thinking? Here are some of the reasons why rapists said they raped or almost raped from the original thread.
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(What they perceive as) mixed messages:
She ran to my bed and didn’t want me to touch her. I didn’t understand what had happened. This hypersexual person who had offered to give me head suddenly didn’t want to touch me.
Or:
I was a freshman and hooking up with this girl who got naked in bed with me, then said no. I think she just wanted to do oral. I was extremely horny and already close to doing it, so I ignored her and did it. She realized what was happening and tried to clamp her legs shut, but it was too late and I was much stronger than her.
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Or:
Sue had always been quite flirty, she was a cop’s daughter and I feel that lead to her being a bit rebellious. I remember instances from years ago (possibly 8th grade or freshman year) where she would make jokes about different bras or thongs she was wearing, and was always freely talking about sexual desires and experiences. She just had this unusually sexual way of carrying herself, I don’t know if anyone knows what I’m talking about, but she’d kind of leave her mouth hanging open/bend over quite a bit/almost unreal-porn star like. Remember though, this was all happening in my high school library during study hall. Not a whole let ever happened more than some dry groping. I wanted to take it further though, she had really begun to turn me on...
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Or:
I can’t remember how it happened, but me and the girl (she was maybe 17) ended up play wrestling with me pinning her down. We were all laughing, but we when made eye contact...it was “that” look we exchanged. The..”I’d fuck you” look. Now, I remember exactly what I was thinking at the time. This girl gave me “the look” earlier, she invited me into her bed. What teenage girl would pass up the oppertunity to be with a 22 year old guy? She MUST want it. I tried again, and slid my hands over her body.
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Peer Pressure:
I got peer pressured in to hooking up with this girl. I kept saying I didn’t want to and my friends kept saying I had to lose my virginity. They say this for about a week and finally new years come so I figured might as well. We are both completely wasted and go to a room. I was to drunk to get it up so I fingered her and ate her out but she wasn’t really into it. So I stopped and then threw up all over her and I passed out. I guess she ran out and told them I raped her. She never said stop or anything but I could see how she could have froze up in fear. I don’t doubt she feels molested and I feel like an awful person but it wasn’t rape as SnugglesWithRuggles pointed out it was rape.
Women are objects for the taking:
Ended up happening again after a party. She was a good friend. I was drunk and super horny. I looked at her and knew I could never be with her. She had already hooked up with my friend. It was that feeling of never being able to do something, or have something. I looked at her and just saw something I would regret not trying for. So I thought if I could feel her I would know what it was to be with her. I grabbed her boob, over the shirt. I touched her lip and she moved her head. I stop dead thinking I woke her up, but she relaxed again. I started going upstairs but felt a sudden urge to lift her skirt. I ran my hand across her ass and between her legs. I was so drunk I turned on the light to get a better look, then quickly realized that it would wake her up and turned the light off.
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Biology (The “I can’t help my dick!” argument):
Most girls don’t really understand how horny guys are, how much stronger guys are, how guys will rationalize what they do. I see feminists and women on the Internet saying that no means no and women should be able to get as drunk as they want and not be sexually assaulted, and I couldn’t agree me. But the reality of the situation is that women have to be careful because guys are one way when they’re hanging out and another way when they’re horny or worse drunk and horny. That doesn’t make what happened okay, but it is what it is.
Bad influences:
I was an extremely isolated youth who came from a broken home. My escape was the internet. At about sixteen I was exposed to alot of PUA material, which (not having a father or mother really around) shaped my life up until I was about 20. Most of the material was very objectifying and sexually aggressive towards women.
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Multiple men said that they didn’t end up going as far as they had intended once they actually looked the woman they were with in the face:
I’m a good man. I have a wife and a couple of kids now and I’m a good father and husband. I’m a pretty moral guy. But I think the thing that has always stuck with me...is how close I came to actually doing it. If I hadn’t looked up at her face and seen what she was feeling, I might have continued. In my mind, at the time, she wanted it. I can remember staring at the ceiling while on the couch thinking “in a couple of minutes she’s going to come out here and get on top of me.”
Or:
...It was then I looked at her face. She was petrified. I at that point pulled myself together, rolled off her and apologized. My hormones were RAGING. I asked her why she didn’t want to. I told her what I thought above. She started to cry.
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That’s arguably the most disturbing takeaway from the thread: these guys are so disconnected from reality that they don’t even feel the need to look women in the face to be sure they’re interested.
It’s very clear that many of these people didn’t feel like what they were doing was wrong because they didn’t (and/or still don’t) think of themselves as rapists. Rapists are the scary strangers hiding in the bushes. Rapists don’t feel remorse. Rapists prey on pure girls, not sluts who show cleavage and want to fool around. Some even say that straight up; “I didn’t want to be the kind of guy who pressured girls, so I said it was fine [when she asked if she could stop performing oral sex],” says a man who had literally just pressured a girl who had “always been quite flirty” to go down on him.
Many stories end with Redditors expressing how horrible they feel about what happened:
I have never in my life felt as shitty and depressed as when she told me that she felt what happened was rape. The depression made me have to drop out of school and go live back home. My parents thought I was gonna try to kill myself so I started taking medication and going to therapy and it actually helped a little. I’m over my depression now but I never, and will never, feel as low as I did because of that night.
I still think about it sometimes, and I feel terrible. It took a very long time for me to get over her. Dated another girl immediately after for many months, wishing it was this first girl the whole time. Then I met someone who really helped me get past her. I’ve never done anything like that ever again, and never will. I just wish I hadn’t learned that lesson in that way, and that she had to suffer for it.
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It’s not hard to see why some people would dismiss this thread as a circle jerk of rape apologists, especially because some quality Redditors assured the storytellers that “it’s not your fault.” (This is Reddit, after all.) And certainly this isn’t light reading for everyone. But I think it’s a mistake to write it off. Charlotte Shane put it well in a recent essay for The New Inquiry on moving past rape by being able to talk about it in non-victimizing terms:
...our culture is unable to address rape with the sobriety and clarity the topic deserves because we are still unable to address sex with the sobriety and clarity it deserves. The contention that rape should be regarded as an asexual act has done nothing to remedy this. Nor will it. As activist and writer Wendy McElroy points out, “there can be as many motives for rape as there are for murder and other violent crimes … Rape is every bit as complex.” Insisting that no rape is ever “about” sex but is rather about an individual man acting on a patriarchal mandate to sow terror by exercising “power” does a disservice to us all. This sorry state of affairs should foster honest conversation, not suppress it. We should not be so desperate to establish the seriousness of rape that we stigmatize intelligent discussion of it.
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(Emphasis ours.)
“Let me leave you with this message, you never know who someone truly is, so be careful,” said one man who posted a particularly disturbing account of how he used to repeatedly rape women. “I’m going back to my main account to do normal reddit looking at cats and posting pictures of bacon, and I think it’s kind of funny that no one will ever know if the person they’re talking to on reddit, or someone who moderates their subreddit, is me on my main account... just food for thought.”
He’s right — not about the “be careful” victim-blaming, but about his multifaceted identity. We have to acknowledge that the people telling these stories and making these decisions are the men (and women) next door, not necessarily inhuman savages. Otherwise, anti-rape campaigns will continue to tell victims to dress and act differently as a matter of “prevention,” college campuses will continue to report high rates of sexual assault, and people will continue to take advantage of others without even looking them in the eye while doing so.
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http://jezebel.com/5908472/my-weekend-in-americas-so+called-rape-capital
Nothing will change if we discuss rape culture in a vacuum. Taking the discussion beyond that vacuum, however, means opening it up to a wider audience that isn’t necessarily sympathetic. Reddit may not be the best place for that, but it’s certainly a start — and that’s important. It’s in these less-protected, less-sacred spaces where the conversation is needed the most.8.5k Shares 0
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Germany is teaming up with California to cooperate on tackling climate change following the U.S. government's decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement, Reuters reported.
Europe's largest economy and the biggest U.S. state in economic terms will back the work of the "Under 2 Coalition," which includes cities, regional governments and states, German Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said on Saturday.
"We cannot achieve our climate goals without the engagement of local and regional communities. That has become even clearer after the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement," Hendricks said after agreeing on the joint approach with California Governor Edmund Brown in San Francisco.
"California and Germany unite the world leaders in the fight against climate change, the existential threat of our time," Brown said in a statement released by the German ministry.
U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pull the United States from the landmark 2015 Paris agreement drew anger and condemnation from world leaders and industry.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week pledged her country's continued commitment to the agreement, calling the U.S. decision "very regrettable."
Hendricks said the German government would ensure that cities, communities and regions played an important role in the U.N. climate change conference in Bonn in November.
Since Trump's decision to withdraw US from the Paris Agreement, US states are joining the campaign to remain with the accord. Hawaii was the first state to legally ignore Trump by passing a law to document sea level rise and set strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The bill signed by Gov. David Ige aligns the state’s goals with the Paris climate accord, AP reported.
*(Dr. Barbara Hendricks, Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), speaking at the Global NDC Conference 2017, Berlin. Image credit: LEDS GP/ flickr).Paul Krugman in End This Depression Now! and elsewhere uses a story about a babysitting cooperative near Washington, D.C., to illustrate how Keynesian stimulus policies work. Each of the families in the cooperative needed a babysitter if it wanted to go out for an evening. Every family was given a certain amount of scrip, each unit of which was good for half an hour of babysitting services. If a family wanted to go out, it could use its scrip to purchase the hours of babysitting services it needed.
Unfortunately, the families got so little scrip to begin with that almost everybody preferred to offer to be a babysitter, in order to accumulate scrip, than to go out. But if almost no one wants to go out, there will be almost no demand for babysitters and people will be unable to accumulate scrip. The system was at an impasse.
As Krugman tells the tale, the problem was solved by giving everybody more scrip. After doing this, people were more willing to go out, because they now had enough scrip to purchase babysitting time; and then those who wanted to accumulate scrip were able to find purchasers for their services. Krugman uses the story to show the merits of a Keynesian policy of stimulus. An increase in government spending can, he says, get us out a situation where almost no one wants to spend but almost everyone wants to save.
According to Tim Harford, in his recent The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, Krugman did not tell the full story. Just as Krugman says, the increased distribution of scrip got the babysitting cooperative going. What he failed to mention was that the cooperative soon broke down again. The amount of scrip grew beyond the amount needed to balance supply and demand for babysitting, and now people wanted to go out but there were few babysitters available. Because people had large amounts of scrip already, they saw no need to add to their supply of scrip through offering to babysit.
Krugman’s story, though designed to show the merits of Keynesian stimulus, actually shows, as Austrians have long pointed out, that. a stimulus policy can quickly become inflationary.Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
People have been obsessively filming bridge collapses for over 70 years. Here is some footage of classic disasters that look like they could have been caused by kaiju.
Honeymoon Bridge or The Upper Steel Arch Bridge (also known as Fallsview Bridge), Niagara Falls, Ontario, collapsed after an ice storm on 27 January 1938 due to huge ice pressure against the abutments.
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(via Niagara Falls Public Library)
Tacoma Narrows Bridge or "Galoppin' Gertie", between Tacoma and Kitsap Peninsula, Washington. It was collapsed in under 40 mph (64 km/h) wind conditions only four months after its opening, on November 7, 1940. The only casualty was a dog who had been left in a stalled car by its owner.
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The collapse was recorded on 16mm Kodachrome film by Barney Elliott, a local camera shop owner and can be seen after 3:15 here:
Part of the second longest floating bridge on Earth named Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge (I-90 Bridge) across Lake Washington from Seattle to Mercer Island, Washington, sinking after the Thanksgiving Day floods on November 25, 1990.
The workers noticed on November 24 that the day was about to sink but on the next day more than one-third of the bridge (2,790 ft or 850m) was sank.
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Three sections of a truss bridge named Walnut Street Bridge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania carried away by flood and ice floes on January 22, 1996.
Collapse of the I-580 East Connector, on the east end of San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, 29 April 2007. A tank truck carrying 8,600 gallons (32,500 liters) of gasoline overturned and the starting fire weakened the steel structure.
(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma.)
The eight-lane, steel truss arch I-35W Mississipi River Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Built in 1964, collapsed on August 1, 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145 more.
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(via Mike Wills and Kevin Rofidal/United States Coast Guard)
A more than 100-year-old footbridge in Camerton, Cumbria, United Kingdom, washed away during the floods of November 19-20 2009
(via BBC)
A flood-destroyed bridge in Poland, May 2013
Bonus: An iconic scene from the Buster Keaton movie The General (1927) where a real locomotive plunges into the Row River, Oregon. It cost more than $42000 (now that's more than half a million!) in the age where you could buy a brand new car for less than $300.
Most of the train is now gone, but Lloyd Williams of the Cottage Grove Historical Society told reporter Meghan Kalkstein in 2007 that bits of track and steel can still be seen in the river when the water level is low. – according to Offbeat Oregon History.
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(via Cottage Grove Historical Society)Iran could play a helpful role in finding a solution to the conflict in Syria even on the sidelines of peace talks in Geneva later this month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunda.
It would be difficult to see how Iran, which did not support last year's international accord on Syria, could be a "ministerial partner" in the Geneva 2 talks slated to begin on January 22, Kerry said. But at a news conference during a visit to Israel he held out the possibility of Iran playing a constructive role on the sidelines even if it was not a formal participant.
"Now could they contribute from the sidelines? Are their ways for them, conceivably, to weigh in? Can their mission that is already in Geneva... be there in order to help the process? It may be that there are ways that could happen," Kerry said.
Iran is the main backer, along with Russia, of Syrian President Bashar Assad in a conflict that has lasted more than two years, killed more than 100,000 people and uprooted millions more.
Tehran's participation in the peace talks would likely strengthen any agreement reached in Geneva, and Iran has said it was prepared to take part if invited.
But Washington has opposed Iran's attendance because it has not signed on to a core element of the so-called "Geneva 1" framework. This says a future Syrian government must be formed by "mutual consent" of the authorities and the opposition, a stance the United States says means Assad cannot stay in power.
Relations between Iran and Washington, frozen for decades, have improved sharply since the election in June of President Hassan Rouhani who promised to pursue a policy of "constructive engagement" with the West in order to win relief from international sanctions over Iran's nuclear program.
Fighting in Syria near the border with Israel. Gil Eliyahu
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Enlarge this image toggle caption Richard Vogel/AP Richard Vogel/AP
California is already on track to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
Now under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, the state will ratchet up its fight against climate change by launching an ambitious campaign to scale back emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
"This is big, and I hope it sends a message across the country," Brown said.
California reduced emissions by imposing limits on the carbon content of gasoline and diesel fuel, promoting zero-emission electric vehicles, and introducing a cap-and-trade system for polluters.
The new plan, outlined in SB32, involves increasing renewable energy use, putting more electric cars on the road, improving energy efficiency, and curbing emissions from key industries.
Brown signed another bill, AB197, that gives lawmakers more oversight of regulators and provides aid to low-income or minority communities located near polluting facilities such as oil refineries and factories.
California's crusade against climate change started under former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed the state's original emissions-control law, known as AB32.
"Here we are, 10 years later, emissions have gone down and the economy has gone up," said Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills), who wrote AB32 as well as SB32. "It's a success story."
But not everyone agrees. The two new laws signed by Brown faced fierce opposition from the state's business community, including the oil industry, as well as from Republicans.
In a statement, California Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Allan Zaremberg said, "Taken together, SB32 and AB197, impose severe caps on the emission of greenhouse gases in California, without requiring the regulatory agencies to give any consideration to the impacts on our economy, disruptions in everyone's daily lives or the fact that California's population will grow almost 50 percent between 1990 and 2030."
Brown noted at the signing ceremony that opponents are not going away. The San Francisco Chronicle carried this quote: "There's powerful opposition," Brown said. "These are real people with real bucks and real influence."
The fight against climate change faces other hurdles. Revenue from the state's cap-and-trade system is falling. That program allows companies to buy permits to pollute at auctions; the money is then spent to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There are concerns about the program's long-term viability.Most action movie fans remember Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and the famous recurring theme of "Two men enter, one man leaves." On June 21, GLORY kickboxing will turn the newly-renovated Forum in Los Angeles into its own Thunderdome with the promotion's first entry into pay-per-view (PPV), called "Last Man Standing."
On this night, it will be eight men entering into a one-night middleweight tournament, with only one remaining, for the right to be called the GLORY middleweight champion and "Last Man Standing."
Before any of the fans that tune into Spike TV every month get annoyed with the PPV news, GLORY CEO Andrew Whitaker wants to make it abundantly clear, that in no way, shape, or form, is GLORY abandoning the current platform on free TV.
"The important message here is the numbered events are continuing on national TV. That's not changing. That's not going anywhere," Whitaker recently told MMAmania.com.
"That is, and has been the plan from day one, prior to us even having the agreement with Viacom and Spike TV -- to have that programming out in the clear -- that is going to continue. Our free to air, national U.S. Clearance with Spike TV continues every month going forward. It's a monthly thing. You are going to see four-man tournaments, which is the format that we have with Spike. That's the G-numbered events: G16, G17, G18, G19 going forward, those will be on national free TV."
On June 21, fans will get to see two tournaments: GLORY 17, which will feature the usual, four-man tournament on Spike (weight class has not yet been decided), then immediately following that on PPV, will be GLORY "Last Man Standing," the eight-man middleweight title tournament.
"We will have GLORY 17 on Spike TV. Then after... the difference is after that national clearance of G17 on Spike TV, there is a special attraction -- which has not been delivered in the U.S. before on national TV on a pay-per-view basis -- as a GLORY eight-man tournament referred to as 'Last Man Standing.' So, eight men go into a tournament, one is the last man standing. We have a lot of the top GLORY fighters going into that tournament. So that is the 'Last Man Standing' pay-per-view attraction on the 21st of June, after the two-hour national Spike broadcast of GLORY 17."
The fans that are attending live on June 21st at The Forum in Los Angeles will get the best of the three GLORY platforms, and buying a ticket will have tremendous value, as Whitaker revealed there will "still be a GLORY Superfight Series," which always precedes the two-hour broadcasts on Spike, in addition to GLORY 17 and "Last Man Standing."
"The people that are going to the venue will get to see the best of GLORY and a lot of what GLORY produces," The GLORY CEO stated. "The people that look at it on a television basis, or on a online basis, or a combination thereof, will see different programs in different places in different times from that particular venue."
According to the promotion's official press release, GLORY Sports International has partnered with PPV distributor inDemand for the delivery of "Last Man Standing" for $34.95.
Said inDemand's senior vice president of programming and business development, "We are thrilled to welcome GLORY kickboxing into our stable of top notch event providers for the cable PPV audience."
Seven out of eight of the top GLORY middleweight fighters have been confirmed for "Last Man Standing," including: Joe Schilling (USA), Wayne Barrett (USA), Alex Pereira (BRA), Filip Verlinden (BEL), Bogdan Stoica (ROM), Simon Marcus (CAN), and Melvin Manhoef (NED).
The final competitor has yet to be revealed, although many pundits are expecting the No. 1-ranked GLORY middleweight Artem Levin -- who is scheduled to face Robert Thomas at GLORY 16 -- to be the last entry in the tournament.
For more on the tournament participants click here.
The Forum -- which was recently purchased and renovated by The Madison Square Garden Company -- was the former home of the LA Lakers and LA Kings. The historic venue reopened with the "History of the Eagles Tour" in January and hosted the Men's Freestyle Wrestling World Cup.
Whitaker explained the reasoning and decision behind choosing The Forum and Los Angeles for GLORY's first venture into PPV.
"Obviously it's the number-two market in the United States," he said. "We've been there before. Obviously we are expecting to be pulling GLORY fans from all over, however on a local market basis, California is a strong in the combat sports space, and specifically there is a pretty strong kickboxing community there. We have some good local promoters there that we work with, and it was just a combination of things. The venue is brilliant. It is a Madison Square Garden venue. It is a historic venue. It has an amazing scope, scale and look to it. It's been renovated. It is a beautiful and iconic, American facility with a very storied history."
GLORY's last eight-man tournament was won by Tyrone Spong at GLORY 9 in New York and featured the light heavyweight division. At GLORY 4, Semmy Schilt won the 16-man heavyweight tournament. Not only is "Last Man Standing" the promotion's first tournament on PPV, it's also the first kickboxing tournament on PPV in years, and the first combat sports tournament on PPV since Yamma Pit fighting in 2008.
"GLORY has done a "Road to GLORY" tournament before in California," Whitaker said. "As far as GLORY is concerned -- the premier league, so to speak, of kickboxing -- as far as that is concerned, this is the first time we will have delivered an eight-man tournament on pay-per-view. We've done big tournaments internationally before, but this will be our first in the United States and first on pay-per-view. We are looking forward to it."
"The fact is there's multiple lines of business that sports media is in, and this is one of them. It's not by any means the only one, but at the same token it is a very, very important one. We are putting together a very special attraction: eight men going into a tournament and one becoming the last man standing is a very, very exciting and strong format, no question about it. The caliber of the GLORY fighters going into that tournament format makes for very compelling content and is perfect for our first step into the pay-per-view space in America."
The GLORY CEO is looking forward to "Last Man Standing," but he left any mention of future PPV plans right there saying, "Right now, we aren't releasing anything other than this." In closing, he reiterated the importance of the fans to know that GLORY will be remaining on Spike TV.
"The fact is, we are offering something exclusively different somewhere else," Whitaker explained. "Our programming on Spike is tremendous. In the two-hour block, the four-man tournament is the perfect format. We've had some success in the few broadcasts we've had so far on Spike. Both GLORY and Spike are pleased with the progress. Obviously, we look for that to continue for the numbered four-man tournaments."
"Whether it's GLORY 16 on May 3 in Denver, or it's GLORY 17 in Los Angeles on June 21, we look to deliver our best that we can produce for Spike and for the fans watching on national television. So this is just another delivery of another separate piece of content, a special attraction in the pay-per-view space. We will then come back after that and it will be GLORY 18, 19 and 20 and it will continue on."Get the biggest Weekday Swansea City FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Jack Cork capped off one of the best weeks of his career with a goal and a victory, but still had time to spare a thought for his former club and manager.
The 28-year-old swapped Swansea for Burnley in the summer in a transfer worth up to £10million.
He has excelled at Turf Moor, with a series of fine performances seeing his rewarded with his first England cap in the recent Wembley friendly against Germany.
He returned to club action by scoring the opener for the Clarets as they eased past his former employers 2-0 in Lancashire.
As the midfielder spoke with the media following the game, he broke off to speak to Swansea boss Paul Clement.
The pair have known each other since Cork's academy days at Chelsea, and Cork skippered Swansea regularly under Clement as they fought for, and secured, survival last term.
And, having just piled further pressure on the Swansea head coach, Cork said: “I’ve known him for years, we’ve been close for a few years. He just wanted to know how I was and how the family were," he said of his chat with Clement.
“I was with him for a few years at Chelsea, going back to when I was a kid at 15, 16. He’s been a really big part of my career and when I was coming through the youth team. I’ve always been close to him.
“It was one of those things when I ended up leaving, but he said he |
they hope to draw thousands to stand in solidarity with longshoremen and port truckers they said are being exploited, though the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents many thousands of longshoremen up and down the West Coast, has distanced itself from the shutdown effort.The union's president suggested in a letter to members that protesters were attempting to co-opt the union's cause to advance their own agenda.Protesters have cited a longstanding dispute between longshoremen at the Port of Longview in Washington and grain exporter EGT as a key reason for the blockades. Shutdown supporters said they're not asking longshoremen to organize a work stoppage in violation of their contract but simply asking them to exercise their free speech rights and stay off the job, in keeping with the union's historic tradition of activism.If protesters muster large enough numbers to block port entrances, arbitrators could declare unsafe working conditions, which would allow port workers to stay home.Organized labor appears divided over the port shutdown effort. In Oakland, which saw strong union support for the Nov. 2 general strike that culminated in the closing of the port, the city's teachers union is backing Monday's action, while the county's construction workers have come out against the shutdown, saying the port has provided jobs to many unemployed workers and apprentices.The federal minimum wage reached its highest inflation-adjusted value in 1968, when it was worth $9.54 per hour in 2014 dollars. Since that time, infrequent or inadequate increases have allowed inflation to eat away at the minimum wage’s value such that today’s federal minimum of $7.25 has lost roughly one quarter of its purchasing power.
Measuring the minimum wage against changes in prices, however, is only one way to think of where we could set the national wage floor today. Given growth in the economy and improvements in labor productivity over the past 45 years, the minimum wage could have been raised to a point considerably higher than its 1968 inflation-adjusted value. As the figure below shows, if the minimum wage had been raised since 1968 at the same rate as changes in average hourly wages of nonsupervisory production workers—a group that comprises roughly 80 percent of all U.S. workers and excludes highly-paid supervisors and executives—the minimum wage would be almost $11 today. Had the minimum wage been raised since 1968 at the same rate as growth in productivity—i.e., the rate at which the average worker can produce income for her employer from each hour of work—it would be nearly $18.50 per hour.By and large, on balance, we can all agree that it has not been a great election for the pollsters. But there is (or so we read) one notable exception. The private polls commissioned from the Tory bunker by the campaign chief Lynton Crosby and the US guru Jim Messina got the result absolutely right, at least according to, well, Lynton Crosby and Jim Messina. If they say so, I’m sure it must be true. But why leave any room for scepticism? Come on, chaps: now it’s all over, show us the numbers so we can all see how you did it. (Perhaps I shouldn’t hold my breath.)
Voodoo in Thanet
Even if the Tory team is taking a retrospectively generous view of its own prescience, its success means it deserves its day in the sun. But elements of the commentariat are indulging in a good deal of wisdom after the event, or post-hoc smart-arsery, to use the technical term. One detractor carped that I had not polled in seats where the Tories made some of their most spectacular gains – for instance, Gower in south Wales. Yet curiously I don’t recall the detractor in question, or even the sages of the New Statesman’s excellent may2015.com blog, saying before the election that the excitement would all happen in seats held by Labour for more than a hundred years.
Before 7 May critics of my research argued rather different points: that the Lib Dems would do much better than my surveys suggested because I did not name candidates (in fact, they did rather worse); and that my polls putting the Conservatives ahead in South Thanet and Rochester and Strood had, to quote Nigel Farage, used “voodoo” to do down Ukip and overstate the Tories. So much for that.
Still, the armchair experts come with the territory, and there is no point denying that, outside Scotland, the polls didn’t indicate anything like the result that came to pass. All the pollsters are trying to work out why. But I can point to some successes. To pick just a few, my polls in Battersea, Berwickshire, Bristol North-West and Bristol West were on the money. Indeed, my record in constituencies beginning with B is unsurpassed.
Shaggy-dog story
One criticism of political commentators is that they have little connection to life outside Westminster, or, as Lynton put it, “Last time they met a punter was when they picked up their dry-cleaning.” This is why focus groups have become such a central part of my research. Since January I have held 66 groups in 33 places, involving well over 500 “punters”. Though most people are refreshingly detached from politics their observations are acute. We should have seen how things were going when Nick Clegg was described as “the chihuahua in David Cameron’s handbag”.
The voter is always right
Yet even at an election-night party, speaking just before the polls closed, I declined to make any prediction about the outcome. Instead, I declared that “one thing all this research has done is remind me just how wise and sensible the British people are... Whatever they have decided today, I’m sure they knew what they were doing.”
The speed of the Labour Party’s recovery, incidentally, largely depends on whether it can bring itself to concur. It didn’t in 2010, when I found that Labour activists thought undecided voters who had swung behind the Tories were ignorant, credulous and selfish. The voters thought Labour needed to change, but Labour didn’t agree, and now we know the consequence. The story is eerily familiar to anyone who followed the Conservatives’ glacial progress after 1997.
Labour should choose a leader who understands that after being rejected by the voters the first step to recovery is accepting that the voters had a point.
Many bridges to cross
My post-vote poll found most Labour voters thought people from some backgrounds will never have a chance to be successful, however hard they work; that for most children growing up today life will be worse than it was for their parents; and that life in Britain now is worse than it was 30 years ago. Most Tories believed the opposite. Labour needs to have something to say to the optimists.
But the Conservatives should not misunderstand the result. In a straight choice, people preferred them to Labour, and were uneasy about a possible Labour-SNP pact (an observation of which I informed the Prime Minister a couple of weeks before polling day on the basis of our focus groups). But the reservations people had about the Tories have not gone away. An election-day poll I conducted of people who had already voted found that people who prioritised leadership and competence voted Tory by a landslide; those for whom values were more important were more likely to go for Labour. The prize is to win both.
Brief lesson
Meanwhile, work continues on Call Me Dave, the very much unauthorised biography of the PM coming out in the autumn. Last week I was in Moscow following up a story or two with my co-author, Isabel Oakeshott. (Isabel is experienced and formidable but distressingly youthful. During the election she answered the door to a canvasser who duly asked whether her parents were in.) Downing Street seems apprehensive about the book – I have even been tipped off that the party machine is planning a pre-emptive strike in the form of an anti-Ashcroft media barrage. In fact, there is some evidence that this has already begun, in the form of slurs briefed against my old colleague Tim Montgomerie and a straightforward lie that I embarrassingly predicted a Tory “annihilation” moments before the exit poll showed the opposite. But perhaps I am doing CCHQ a disservice. Surely they would not behave in such a way?
Michael Ashcroft is a life peer. His research appears online at: lordashcroftpolls.com. He tweets: @LordAshcroftAfter meeting with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif on Sunday, two days ahead of the July 7 deadline, Kerry told reporters that it is now time to see whether or not he and his foreign minister colleagues returning to Vienna are able to close an agreement.
However, despite genuine progress made in the past few days, Kerry said consensus are still not reached on several of the most difficult issues.
"At this point, this negotiation could go either way. If hard choices get made in the next couple of days, and made quickly we could get an agreement this week. But if they are not made, we will not," Kerry said.
"We want a good agreement, only a good agreement, and we're not gonna shave anywhere at the margins in order just to get an agreement. Right now we're aiming to try to finish this in the timeframe that we've set out. That's our goal, and we're gonna put every bit of pressure possible on it to try to do so," he said.
Meanwhile, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the foreign ministers will meet again on Monday for the negotiation.
"My message today is that, if the deal can be closed, it's now. It's not time the issue, the issue is political decisions that need to be taken now," said Mogherini.
China remains optimistic. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Thursday that a comprehensive Iranian nuclear deal is very likely to be reached after intensive meetings between Iran and six world powers.
Despite the optimism, gaps remain in some areas of the talks, especially on the pace and timing of sanction relief.
Earlier, reports said that Iran may change track on the Lausanne framework, raising concern of a possible setback in the talks.
Iran and five United Nations Security Council permanent members plus Germany (P5+1) missed the previously set self-imposed June 30 deadline for a comprehensive deal. Both sides agreed to extend the deadline to July 7.
All parties have been negotiating over the past 16 months to reach a long-term deal over Tehran's disputed atomic plan.
In a successful deal, Iran would suspend some sensitive nuclear activities, and in return, Western states would partially relieve some sanctions imposed on Tehran.Never get involved in a land war in Asia: HexWar releases Napoleon in Russia By Dave Neumann
Any of you guys bring extra snow boots?
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not very well versed in the conquests of Napoleon. I know he looked like Ian Holm and that he tucked his hand in his jacket because it was made of gold. I also know he was defeated by English magic at the Battle of Waterloo. Other than that, he's a complete mystery to me. Oh wait, I do remember something about him invading Russia and it being a complete disaster. Or was that Hitler? Why not both! HexWar's latest covers that ill-fated campaign of 1812 in which the Grande Armée was nearly destroyed by the one-two punch of Russian army and Russian winter. Napoleon in Russia covers five historical battles from the invasion of Russia as well as non-historical skirmishes from the era, aka "filler". There's also a bonus mission in there somewhere, but why it's not a regular mission is a mystery. Guess we'll have to explore and find out. As for mechanisms, its got HexWar's usual plethora of unit types as well as the ability to play as either the French or Russian army in every mission except the tutorial.Napoleon in Russia is available right now for iOS Universal and is on sale for $2. If you want to play it on Mac, you can do that as well, but it will run you $8 to download.A diverse chorus of aboriginal women, police leaders and former prostitutes took turns Tuesday denouncing as insufficient the Harper government's five-year, $20-million pledge to help sex workers leave the industry.
The steady barrage of criticism came on the second day of rare summer hearings by the House of Commons justice committee as it examines Bill C-36, the government's proposed new prostitution bill.
The offer of funding fits the so-called "Nordic model" that several Scandinavian countries have adopted to fight prostitution, and which the Harper government's proposed legislation appears designed to emulate.
In addition to making it illegal to be a client or a pimp, the Conservative government approach calls for social spending to help exploited women get out of the sex industry.
Justice Minister Peter MacKay has said the government hopes the funding, along with the new bill — which targets demand for sexual services by criminalizing pimps and johns — will foster an end to prostitution entirely.
But throughout the day Tuesday, a parade of witnesses dismissed the level of funding as falling well far short of the mark.
"From our perspective, $20 million is peanuts," said Michele Audette, president of the Native Women's Association of Canada.
"We are very, very far behind for aboriginals, especially for aboriginal women. So it's going to be very difficult to divide up this pie."
Audette linked the prostitution issue to the broader problem of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada.
Aboriginal groups and international organizations have asked the Harper government to conduct a federal inquiry into the problem, but the government has so far refused.
Audette said her group also has tried to lobby MacKay for a national roundtable to discuss how to prevent prostitution, as part of a broader socio-economic approach.
'Woefully inadequate'
Rick Hanson, Calgary's police chief, also called for a national strategy in which Ottawa, the provinces, municipalities and social agencies would work towards abolishing prostitution.
Hanson described the $20-million pledge, which he said amounts to $125,000 a year in Calgary, as "woefully inadequate."
After his testimony, Hanson said he hasn't directly approached the Harper government — or the city's best-known MP, the prime minister himself — about increasing their funding commitment.
But he said the underlying causes of prostitution — child abuse, drug addiction and domestic violence — need to be addressed, and the agencies that deal with these problems need more help.
"I don't think the prime minister lays awake at night wondering what Rick Hanson has to think about anything, chief of Calgary, or otherwise," he said in an interview.
"I can tell you that $20 million, when you actually spread it across five years, and you spread it across the country, it's a start, but that's all it is — it's a start."
The Supreme Court of Canada struck down the existing prostitution law last December and gave the government one year to bring in a replacement.
Minister's office defends proposed spending
The $20-million commitment is an additional government commitment to help women get out of the sex industry, but it is not part of the actual bill.
MacKay's office defended the spending initiative as Tuesday's testimony was unfolding, but a spokeswoman declined to say whether the minister would consider boosting spending.
"Our government has increased transfers to provinces and territories to an all-time high and will continue to work in collaboration with our counterparts to assist the overwhelming majority of prostitutes looking to leave this dangerous and harmful line of work," Mary Ann Dewey-Plante said in an email.
Several witnesses at the hearings have said increased social spending is a vital component the fight against prostitution.
'Women exiting need our help,' says former sex worker
Katarina MacLeod, the founder of the group Rising Angels, said she was trapped in the sex industry for 15 years.
When she got out, said she had to be taught self-worth, along with how to speak and how to dress.
"Women exiting need our help," MacLeod told the all-party panel of MPs.
"I was trapped in the sex trade for 15 years. In those years, I was subjected to all kinds of different abuse. I was anally raped, spat on, had my jaw dislocated, had my hair pulled, been punched — and the list goes on."
Manitoba Attorney General Andrew Swan testified Monday that he'd like to see a larger federal spending commitment, since his province already spends $8 million a year on the problem.
NDP justice critic Francoise Boivin said the government needs to spend more in that area.
"The Conservatives will spend more on the commercial" to advertise the bill than they will on helping prostitutes, she predicted.
"He (MacKay) wants to eradicate prostitution. But with $20 million, I tend to take him not too seriously."1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare 24 muffin tins with lightly sprayed liners. Put the strawberries in a bowl and coat with 1/4 cup sugar.
2. Once the sugar is somewhat incorporated, place the bowl in the fridge. Pour the vinegar into a measuring cup, and add just enough milk to reach 1 1/2 cups. Set aside. Sift together dry ingredients.
3. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and whisk just enough to combine. Fill each tin about halfway full.
4. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until lightly golden. Let cool. After they've cooled, frost each cupcake with vanilla frosting and top with a generous teaspoon strawberries, including juice.
Eat and enjoy! I am going to try to make this as a actual cake, so if anyone beats me to it let me know how it turns out.The Pocket Drone is a flying robot device that enables anyone to capture photo or video footage from the sky using a GoPro.
The way it works is that the device comes as a ready to use multicopter, complete with batteries, battery charger, radio controller, and more. You attach a GoPro to the front facing mount, and just like that you’re ready to take off and capture stunning aerial footage.
This product has an incredible list of features that really make this drone very special:
Unique cutting-edge collapsible compact design. Easy to fly and simple to maintain. Lightweight with maximum payload. Ready to fly (RTF) with everything you need out of the box and quick to deploy. Advanced software and systems with autopilot and “Follow Me” mode. Longest flight time of any multicopter under $500. High quality materials and components. Upgradeable, expandable and hackable. Designed with multiple safety features.
Of the features listed above, the thing that really blew us away was number 5 on the list, the advanced software*. They plan to offer state of the art flight connectivity where you can integrate an autopilot flight plan with Google Maps, make a flight plan by setting GPS waypoints, and even a “Follow Me” mode using a mobile device with GPS capabilities.
*Software compatible with: PC, Mac, Linux, Android, with iOS compatibility coming soon.
THE STEAL: The Pocket Drone has a ready to fly package available for $495.
All the bells and whistles mentioned earlier come included with this backer package, no stretch goals or future additions to wait around for.
The Pocket Drone is put together by a team of three drone fanatics over at AirDroids, based out of San Diego, CA.
The lead of AirDroids is Timothy Reuter, founder and creator of The Pocket Drone. Timothy has a long history of experience with drones. These experiences range from being the president and founder of the Drone User Group Network (or DUGN for short) with 10 chapters internationally and 2,000 members, to being a major advocate and pundit of commercial and consumer drone operations.
The rest of AirDroids team is comprised of TJ Johnson and Chance Roth. TJ is the primary engineer, designer, and developer of the Pocket Drone. Chance is a serial entrepreneur that has a wide range of business acumen, with strong expertise in the Internet and consumer product industry.
The Pocket Drone is clearly a product unique to the market, with very few competitors. After searching through GoPro multicopters already on the market, nothing even comes close when you look at the features the Pocket Drone offers.
As of right now, the campaign for the Pocket Drone has 403 backers, surpassing their $35,000 goal with a total of $173,100 raised. This all comes after 6 days of campaigning, and 54 days to go before its over.
Why I think this campaign has seen such wild success (besides having a unique product):
1. They have a working product.
To have actual footage from a working Pocket Drone makes backers far more comfortable supporting the project. These guys don’t just have experience in the field and have a cool concept; they’ve brought their idea to creation and used to it to shoot real footage in their video.
2. No annoying/distracting stretch goals.
The AirDroid team let everyone know that all the bells and whistles come included. They don’t need to reach a certain amount of money raised to do something, they already thought of it and added it.
3. The Airdroids team clearly have a passion for and are respected veterans of the Drone Community.
In Mark Cuban’s 12 rules for startups, rule number 1 states, “Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love.”
4. They have a transparent campaign.
Backers are able to see the exact steps they took for pre-production, and the steps they will take for production after funding is completed. No backer wants to see their money go to waste, and AirDroids has a well thought out and prepared Kickstarter campaign.
THE STEAL: The Pocket Drone ready to fly package runs at $495.
This article was written by Trevor McGrath of CrowdDistrict.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
After a general election in 2015 and a referendum in 2016 to decide whether we would leave the EU, we have another general election on June 8.
Prime Minister Theresa May called for the snap election on April 18 citing that Britain needed certainty, stability and strong leadership following the EU referendum.
Despite repeatedly saying she was against the idea of an early vote, following the Easter break she made a shock announcement on the steps of Downing Street.
“I have only recently and reluctantly come to this conclusion but now I have concluded it is the only way to guarantee certainty for the years ahead,” she said.
She explained the decision was her way of asking the British people to put faith in her as her party tries to negotiate trade deals for the country after we leave the EU.
When is the 2017 general election?
The UK general election will take place on June 8 2017. Parliament broke up on May 3 to allow just over a month of full campaigning.
Can I watch the general election on TV?
Yes, it will be widely broadcast across most TV networks on the day.
BBC One and the BBC News channel will have rolling coverage from 9:55pm on the night as the results come in and continue into Friday morning.
Channel 4 will also be broadcasting their Alternative Election Night show. Presented by Jeremy Paxman, David Mitchell and Richard Osman from 9pm, the show will continue into the morning.
When will the results for the general election be out?
The final results will be confirmed sometime on Friday morning (June 9) but the exit poll at 10pm will give us the first indication of what has happened. If there is a Conservative landslide the final result could be in around 3 or 4am.
What time do the polling stations close?
The polling stations open at 7am and voting stops at 10pm sharp. Counting will begin immediately after that.
Where is my nearest polling station?
If you are registered to vote, your polling card will tell you the location of your polling station.
If you’ve lost your polling card or just want to check where your nearest polling station is, all you need to do is enter your postcode on the Where Do I Vote? website.
Who is my MP?
Since the start of the campaign there have been no MPs, only candidates. Our unique constituency guide - Find Your Seat - gives you a wealth of information about your constituency, to help you make an informed choice.
Simply enter your postcode and you'll get a range of crucial information before you cast your vote at your polling station – such as who is standing, and who is likely to win.
Who should I vote for?
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That’s for you to decide. If you’re unsure, it might help to ask questions based on how you feel about various key policies. The results may indicate which party best represents your views.
You can do this here.
What are the odds for the general election 2017?
The Conservatives remain the favourites, but talk of a landslide victory for Theresa May has lost traction over the past few weeks.
We have a guide to the main odds here.
What do the opinion polls say?
A range of pollsters are publishing regular snapshots of opinion, most easily tracked through Twitter - including YouGov here and ComRes here. However, remember these polls are not gospel and should be taken with a pinch of salt.
In 2015 the gap between Labour and the Conservatives was between 0 and 6% but the Conservatives performed much better than expected.When it comes to warring monkeys, females wield the real power.
A study has found that female vervet monkeys manipulate males into fighting battles by lavishing attention on brave soldiers while giving other males the cold shoulder.
After scraps with rival gangs, usually over food, females would groom males that had fought hardest, while snapping at those that abstained.
Female vervet monkeys have been seen manipulating males into fighting battles by showing active males more attention and snapping at those who sit out the fight
When the next battle came along, both those singled out for attention and those aggressively shunned would participate more vigorously in combat, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Female grooming and aggression 'both appear to function as social incentives that effectively promote male participation in intergroup fights', a research team from Switzerland and South Africa reported.
They had observed four vervet monkey groups at a game reserve in South Africa for two years.
Vervet monkeys live in mixed-gender groups and both sexes take part in frequent battles with rival troupes. Only a handful fight each time.
Researchers found that female grooming and aggression may function as social incentives to encourage males to participate in skirmishes, giving an advantage to the group overall
HOW FEMALES DRIVE THE MALES TO FIGHT Researchers observed groups of vervet monkeys at the Mawana Game Reserve in South Africa. They found that the females used a carrot and stick approach when it came to fights. Gangs of monkeys clash over food and territory, with the larger males picking up the fight. But females were seen to show fighting males more attention, grooming them more. Those males who sit out the fight were shunned, with females being more aggressive to them. The researchers found that both approaches manipulated males into fighting, which could potentially benefit the group as a whole and improve the female's chances of rearing more babies.
Males are larger than females and have longer canine teeth, making their presence valuable in the front lines.
Success in battle ensures control over territory and food sources - a key concern for females, who take care of the young.
But why would males risk involvement in a potentially high-stakes battle just for a bit of female attention? It's all about sex, the researchers believe.
'Receiving punishment' from females for not taking part in battles 'could damage the... male's social relationship(s)' either with the female in question or 'other female group members', the researchers wrote.
On the other hand, being rewarded could 'potentially signal to other female group members that the... male is a valuable social partner', likely boosting'male mating success'.
In group animals, such as humans, a delicate balance must be maintained between participating in hunting or defence, which can be risky, and free-riding, which is less hazardous but can lead to social rejection.The Big Day Out is reeling mid-tour, plagued by detailed rumours that organisers have inflated attendance figures and that its owners, AJ Maddah and Texas-based company C3, are likely to face off in court as they face losses between $8 million and $15 million.
Several senior music industry sources have also told Fairfax the touring festival's chief executive officer, Adam Zammit, was sacked this week with two shows remaining: Adelaide on Friday and Perth on Sunday. It is believed Mr Zammit's plane tickets to Adelaide were cancelled, but another source said he has since been re-hired.
Confetti covers the crowd as Arcade Fire play their final song at the Big Day Out in Sydney. Credit:Rachel Murdolo
Mr Zammit, who was appointed in November 2011, was in charge of the day-to-day planning and operations of the event, and it is believed he oversaw several clear-outs of long-standing Big Day Out staff.
One source claimed the only Big Day Out so far to achieve attendance of 30,000 was the Auckland event, run by promoter Campbell Smith. The Australian legs, promoted by Mr Maddah, achieved much lower numbers, believed to be around half 2013 attendance figures. Sydney is believed to have drawn 27,000, Melbourne 26,000 and the Gold Coast 23,000. Organisers are believed to have told media 35,000 attended in Sydney and the Gold Coast and have reportedly faced questions from the management of headliners such as Pearl Jam over their estimates.America has been captivated by the podcast “Serial” — a week-by-week breakdown of a murder case that was supposedly solved more than a decade ago.
It’s a spinoff of “This American Life” hosted by journalist Sarah Koenig. The entire season focuses on one story with new angles explored every week.
The final episode of season one will air on Thursday.
For the first season, Koenig examined the murder of Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee. She was killed in January 1999, and her body was found in a shallow grave in a park about a month later.
Her ex-boyfriend and classmate, Adnan Syed, was eventually convicted of her murder. He has always proclaimed his innocence, and Koenig is trying to piece together a fuller picture of what happened to Hae and Adnan all those years ago.
Police charged Adnan with Hae’s murder after his friend Jay, a former classmate of Hae’s and Adnan’s, told police that Adnan told him about the murder and enlisted his help in burying Hae’s body.
“Serial” has a big audience on Reddit, and Redditors have created an entire subreddit dedicated to discussing their theories and trying to determine who killed Hae.
We’ve complied some of the best theories surrounding the case.
Warning: Spoilers below.
Theory #1: Adnan hired Jay to kill Hae, and Jay turned on him.
Many “Serial” fans believe Jay is more involved in Hae’s death than he let on.
Jay knew details about Hae’s manner of death and burial that suggested he was involved in some way. He claims he just got dragged into the aftermath of the murder by Adnan, but some think he was also involved in her murder — not just burying her body.
Redditor zmachine52 explains:
Adnan had/hired/convinced/coerced/ etc. Jay to kill Hae. Does this solve all of the issues? They are both guilty. Therefore neither can implicate one another. Jay cuts a plea deal to get himself off the hook, meanwhile Adnan is able to (somewhat) plausibly deny much of [the] issues at hand, yet would still be guilty of murder 1, if discovered. This could help explain the the timeline issues, the character issues, the “alibi”, Jay’s inconsistent stories (as he had to work Adnan into the story to cut his plea), the burial, the shovels, the car, cleaning the items, etc. Basically a good dude somehow convinced a shady friend to commit murder for him. They are essentially both guilty, but one was able to plea out. The other is caught in a catch 22 but with lots of plausible deniability.
This is an interesting theory, but it doesn’t quite explain why Adnan wouldn’t have a more solid alibi prepared or turn on Jay once he figured out that Jay sold him out to the police.
Theory #2: Jay and his friend Jenn did it.
Redditor justforserial argues that Jay and Jenn, a friend of his and Adnan’s, might have committed the murder.
Justforserial theorizes that Jay and Jenn might have been carrying on an affair behind Jay’s girlfriend Stephanie’s back and Hae knew about it. Therefore, the pair killed Hae to shut her up.
Here’s the theory:
Hae knows that Jenn and Jay are together behind Stephanie’s back and they are both worried she will expose them. At some point during this time Jenn pages Hae. Hae calls her back from a phone at the school. Jenn asks her to meet her at the Best Buy parking lot so that they can talk. Jay agrees to the plan because he doesn’t want Hae to expose their secret. Jenn and Jay drive together to best buy. At 2:36 Adnan uses the phone in the library or a pay phone near the library and tries his own phone again to reach Jay and Jay answers but immediately hangs up the call. Right after this time Asia sees Adnan in the library and they start talking. Hae meets Jenn and Jay in the parking lot, she’s surprised to see Jay because she expected it just to be Jenn. Jenn and Jay get into Hae’s car. Hae is sitting in the driver’s seat, Jenn in the front seat and Jay in the back. The interaction starts as a conversation but escalates quickly. Jay and Jenn hadn’t intended to kill Hae, but they had had a conversation that if she wouldn’t agree to keep quiet they would kill her. They had intended at first just to scare her and intimidate her into keeping their secret. However, Hae is strong willed and she argues back about how Stephanie is one of her best friends and she is going to tell her no matter what they say. Jay sees red, because Hae is threatening his relationship, and he reaches around her neck and strangles her in the car. Jenn holds down Hae’s arms while she is being strangled, and this is when she kicks the blinker off.
Justforserial also has explanations for the various other mobile phone calls from Adnan’s phone that occur before and after the murder, but this theory as a whole seems farfetched.
Theory #3: Adnan is a psychopath.
While listening to “Serial,” it’s important to keep in mind that we don’t know everything. We’ve been given a lot of information about the case, but there are also many people we haven’t heard from, including some of Adnan’s friends.
Someone who claims to have known Adnan growing up writes on Reddit that several of Adnan’s former friends saw psychopathic tendencies in him. Because the Muslim community Adnan grew up in is so tight-knit, according to this person, those who were close to Adnan might have been afraid to speak out over fear of retribution from their community.
So, although Adnan seems charming and smart when he talks to Koenig, and she has admitted that she thinks he’s a good guy and likes talking to him, some still think he’s guilty and has managed to manipulate those around him. Friends of his might have been reluctant to come forward with their true feelings about Adnan over fear of being ostracized from their community for implicating Adnan in Hae’s murder, the theory goes.
Redditor swframe666 explains why Adnan had to be the killer:
The one fact that is not in dispute is that Jay knows too much about the crime and has communicated his knowledge about it in a way that strongly supports that he knows the killer. The killer isn’t an unknown person. I think there is only one source of information that we need to review. It is the statements that Adnan makes about what he and Jay did together. Adnan statements indicates that he was with Jay that day and Adnan is the only person with Jay that doesn’t have a strong alibi. And Jay’s information very strongly indicates that he was with the killer that day. The logistics of the cars, shovels and cell phone strongly indicates there was another person involved and the only other person that could have been involved is Adnan. To happen in a short time frame, the murder had to have been premeditated. The car and mobile phone exchange means that it couldn’t have been spontaneous. Another person couldn’t have gotten to Hae so quickly given they would not have known that the car and mobile phone was going to be exchanged that day. In addition, no other person Jay is in contact with that day is known to be involved with Hae. Hae had to have been killed just after school and had to have been killed by someone she knew and trusted. Given the short time frame, Adnan is the only one who could have gotten that close to Hae that quickly. There is no evidence that Jay could have killed Hae so quickly and easily given that they are not known to be close friends. I think Jay’s testimony is inconsistent because he is an accomplice and he is trying to frame the events in a way that doesn’t implicate himself. I think Adnan didn’t turn on Jay because Adnan didn’t think he would lose the case. I don’t know Adnan’s motives. I don’t know why Adnan would pick someone who he was not close to help cover up a murder. Jay turned on Adnan very quickly. I don’t think any other facts matter because Jay must know the killer, must have been involved in the murder and the only other person with Jay is Adnan.
In episode 11 of “Serial,” Koenig acknowledges that people who knew Adnan growing up have contacted her over the past two months to talk about how he had a different side to him that ran counter to his persona as a good Muslim son.
Some who knew Adnan back then called him “duplicitous” and said that they thought he was capable of murder. Koenig was able to partially confirm a story that appeared on Reddit about Adnan stealing donation money from the mosque.
It’s certainly possible that Adnan has psychopathic characteristics, since psychopathy generally makes people more predisposed to committing violent crimes. But psychopaths are also very rare. One expert has estimated they account for only 1% of the US population.
Theory #4: Adnan was trying to frame Jay for the murder.
Many have speculated Adnan and Jay were in it together. Jay knew a lot of intimate details about the murder and admitted to police that he helped Adnan bury Hae in Leakin Park.
Redditor miketetzu’s goes a step further and reasons that Adnan was trying to frame Jay and Jay figured it out, which is why he sold Adnan out to the police:
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10 people were believed to have suffered serious injuries following the accident between junctions 23 and 26 northbound at about 8.25pm on Friday.
Police said: "Around 27 vehicles are involved and there are believed to be approximately 35 people injured. Some of these people are seriously injured. Some have tragically lost their lives."
At least four vehicles, including two lorries, caught fire and firefighters using hydraulic cutting equipment had to rescue four people trapped in their vehicles. Television footage of the accident showed members of the public attempting to pry open car doors to help those trapped.
The force of the collision sent debris on to the other side of the carriageway, where tailbacks stretched to junction 22 – about 12 miles away.
Devon and Somerset fire and rescue service said 15 fire teams and 50 firefighters were called in from areas across the county, including Taunton, Glastonbury, Bridgwater and Yeovil. Helicopters were sent to the scene.
Paul Slaven from the rescue service said that "20 light vehicles and six articulated lorries" were involved. He described it as "the worst road traffic collision anyone can remember".
Assistant Chief Constable Anthony Bangham said: "Undoubtedly this is a tragic incident. All emergency services are at the scene and are working tirelessly to attend to those who are injured."
Bangham said there would be a "comprehensive and thorough" investigation of the accident. The cause was not clear but there were reports of wet weather, poor visibility and thick fog in the Bridgwater area. Simon Bruford, 38, from Williton in Somerset, described the scene as "total carnage" as he drove south on the motorway.
"I could see the flames from quite a way back. I spent 18 years in the Somerset fire service and have seen a lot nasty things, but that was horrific," he told the BBC.
Tim Shires, 29, from Bristol, said he was caught in the southbound traffic on his way to Plymouth for work and expected to be stuck for a few hours. "We've been told a couple of helicopters could land on the carriageway," he said. "I've heard helicopters up above but nothing has landed but it's foggy and visibility is poor."
Jaysen Sharpe, a deputy member of the Youth Parliament for Taunton Deane, said he had been at a nearby rugby club when he saw a number of explosions that may have caused by petrol tanks. "I could see the black smoke rising up. There were a number of heavy goods vehicles that were on fire in the accident," he said.
Vanessa Wigmore tweeted: "Lots of ambulances leaving scene. Slow moving with lights on. Lots of smoke still v sad."
A number of tweeters sent out pleas for information about family and friends.
Visitors to the nearby Bridgwater Guy Fawkes carnival, Europe's largest illuminated procession being held on Friday night, were being diverted from the motorway.
Rob Clayton, from travel news organisation Trafficlink, said people on the southbound stretch of the motorway faced a long wait as police cleared the backlog of traffic along the motorway. The motorway was closed in both directions and police said it was likely to remain shut for up to 24 hours.
A telephone number was set up for those concerned about relatives and friends and the police said they expected lines to be busy. "Before you call this number please make all attempts to contact them via mobile phones or via friends, family or by any other usual measures," Bangham said. The number is 0800 092 0410.This is the third article in a series on pornography and its impact on families.
William's wife didn't have a chance.
It didn't matter how attractive she was. William wanted her blonder, taller, thinner and to have a larger bust. He wanted her to resemble the kind of women he had become used to since his elementary school days, when he first discovered his parents' stash of pornography.
The child may have struggled to understand his fourth-grade geometry, but he had memorized intimate angles of a woman's body.
It didn't matter that the porn he was perusing was old-school — pages of conservatively posed Playmates. He didn't need the high-definition sex videos that would saturate the Web decades later.
A few glossy pages on occasion were enough to hook him — for the next 40-plus years of his life.
"It grips you with claws like you can't imagine," said William, now a 50-year-old Salt Lake City man who spoke about his sex addiction on the condition of partial anonymity.
For the next 15 years of his adolescent life, his "occasional" exposure to pornography programmed in him a particular understanding of what sex is, as well as a clear impression about its perceived roles: Her role is passive, ever ready and always wanting more. His role is to show up.
Such modern pornographic conditioning is leaving women to wonder if they can ever satisfy the kind of sexual appetite millions of men are learning to anticipate during days, months and years of pornographic education, often while they're young.
If you ask American feminist Naomi Wolf, "They can't compete, and they know it. For how can a real women — with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own... — possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who (is) utterly submissive and tailored to the customer's least specification?" she wrote in a 2003 New York magazine essay.
Wolf claims the onslaught of porn "is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women and leading men to see fewer women as 'porn worthy.' " The power and allure of modern pornography, she suggests, has actually superseded real-life nudity: "Today, real naked women are just bad porn."
Although research disagrees — a majority of surveyed men still say they prefer sex to pornography — only a third of college students consider it a "poor substitute" for sex, according to research by Leland Elliott and Cynthia Brantley.
If the survey defined sex to include intimate foreplay, considered a "given" by most women but often a "give-in" for many men, psychotherapist Phillip Hodson isn't so sure a greater part of men would still choose reality over a "no-hassle" solution to such a biological impulse.
Porn is making "sex-lazy men even sex-lazier," he told a British newspaper, the Independent, in 2006.
And when Jennifer Schneider, an internal doctor based in Tucson, Ariz., studied a group of 94 women whose partners and husbands were involved in pornography, more than half reported that their partners were no longer sexually interested in them; one-third of the women lost interest in their partners after discovering their addiction.
It's a terrifying thought for soon-to-be brides like Kristi, a 24-year-old college student from southeastern Idaho, who requested anonymity.
"It's always in the back of my mind," she said.
She said she hasn't talked to her fiancé about pornography because it would be "way too awkward," even "accusatory."
However, a different young woman had that kind of chat with her fiancé.
Now, instead of using her time deciding whether to frost her wedding cake with fondant or Viennese buttercream, she's learning to deal with a broken engagement in therapy sessions with Dr. Bernell Christensen, co-founder of Candeo, a Utah-based website for fighting sexual addiction anonymously, CandeoCan.com.
"Her life had turned into a nightmare of fear, confusion and doubt," Bernell said about the young woman's profound feelings of betrayal and rejection when she found out he was addicted to pornography. Her now ex-fiancé had gone from a caring, spiritual guy, to a blaming one, Christensen said. He would get angry when she didn't allow him to take the relationship to new physical levels before marriage.
Those same feelings, a common byproduct of being in a relationship with someone who seems to care as much about porn as his partner, may be more common in the future. College-age women are increasingly accepting of pornography, according to Larry Nelson, a BYU professor who surveyed 813 students from six campuses across the United States about pornography with researchers from BYU and East Coast colleges Loyola and McDaniel.
"By way of comparison, emerging adults were much more accepting of pornography than their parents were, with daughters even reporting more acceptance (48.7 percent) than their fathers," Nelson said.
William didn't talk to his wife about his pornographic past before they got married. In fact, a spiritual leader suggested maybe he shouldn't, because he had confessed and completed a repentance process.
So, he didn't tell her.
It's a decision he regrets deeply today.
He blames himself for not being honest up front, because he says he believes if his wife had known, she could have recognized future behavioral signs and pushed him into getting help sooner.
"At the time, I thought getting married would cure me," he said. "Oh no!... I couldn't have been more wrong."
In the first five years of marriage, William pressured his wife to get breast enhancements, wear shorter skirts and higher heels.
That wasn't enough — it never was. Not for him. He was used to experiencing new stimulating erotica as fast as he could turn a page or click a mouse.
"She became vanilla," he said.
In a desperate attempt for more sexual excitement, William concentrated his efforts on introducing her to his world of pornographic training. Perhaps then — finally — she would learn sex etiquette... her exact role.
For years, William said he tried to "groom" his wife to watch pornography by arguing it would make them a closer, more intimate couple.
He started visiting strip clubs behind her back and eventually had a long-term affair to feed his insatiable, still-secret addiction.
One evening, though, after paying for sex at a massage parlor, enough guilt seeped through a decades-old callus on his heart, and he decided to tell his wife. That night, he returned home, sat her down and broke her heart
"All that time, my wife had become an object for my enjoyment," said William, who's now nearing the completion of his first year in sex addiction therapy.
But it doesn't take a sex addict, nor a completely nude female for men to think of women's bodies as objects, according to research by Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton.
Fiske showed that men regularly objectify provocatively dressed women in less than a single second. When viewed under a brain scan, the area of a man's brain associated with performing actions and handling tools routinely lit up when researchers quickly flashed images of women in bikinis. There was a lack of activation in the social cognition area, a place were people ponder other's intentions. Fiske said her study explored how men think of women — in the context of near nudity — as a means to an end.
"It's fulfillment of a bodily biological drive rather than anything to do with a relational state," Jennings Bryant told the Deseret News. "It's like the Tina Turner song, 'What's love got to do with it.' "
Bryant has spent the last three decades in and out of labs, publishing research on the devastating effects of pornography, especially on young, mostly unmarried emerging adults. Using a large sample of both female and male applicants, Bryant discovered that watching just six hours of pornography (one hour each week for six weeks) was enough to significantly reduce a person's satisfaction with their present relationship, both with their partner's sexuality and appearance. Participants, who were surveyed before and after the study, also reported that being faithful to their partner was less important by study's end; and their view of sex without emotional involvement rose in favor.
If six hours of pornography can measurably decrease real-life sexual satisfaction and rotate a person's moral compass a few degrees, many researchers like Bryant wonder the long-term effects of the multigenerational group of teens and young adults who are going out of their way to educate themselves with dozens or hundreds of hours by the time they get married.
Last year, UK teens watched an average of 87 hours of pornography, according to CyberSenitnel.co.uk., a British computer software company that collects data while allowing parents to monitor their children's browsing history.
In the United States, 9 out of 10 emerging adults (18-26) are viewing pornography monthly, half of them at least a couple times a week, and many daily, according to a study in the Journal of Adolescent Research, published by BYU's Nelson and his associates.
"Is it destructive? Absolutely," said Dr. Don Hilton, a practicing neurologist based out of San Antonio, Texas, and author of "He Restoreth My Soul," a blend of scientific and spiritual advice for overcoming a pornography addiction. "Current social science in terms of peer-reviewed, published literature uniformly shows that porn damages the ability of men and women to love each other, to relate to each other, to emotionally bond. It damages the ability of children, adolescents and young children to bond to each other, to view sexuality as a mutually beneficial experience."
Looking back on a "self-inflicted" difficult life — dragging his wife and kids through a divorce, making them deal with his embarrassing addiction and losing his church membership — William's advice is simple: "Tell someone, anyone: your dad, a friend, your spouse. Just don't let it keep growing in the shadows."Star Trek Actor George Takei to Wed Partner Brad Altman
Our California dream is reality. Brad Altman and I can now marry. We are overjoyed! At long last, the barrier to full marriage rights for same-sex couples has been torn down. We are equal with all citizens of our state!"
For now, Brad and I are enjoying the delicious dilemma of deciding where, when, and how we will be married."
A second set of gay celebrities have announced their plans to wed, according to People magazine., 71, of Star Trek fame announced on his website that he plans on marrying his companion of 21 years,. Their union is possible because the California Supreme Court has ruled in favor of same sex marriage.The actor, who kept his sexual preference private until 2005, is anxious to live the rest of his life as a marriage partner and couldn't imagine being with anyone else. The men have yet to set a date but Takei also said: The first celebrity couple to announce that they would take advantage of the court ruling wereand. Congratulations to both couples. We wish you much happiness.
Check out more photos below.I'm not one of those who view sports celebrities as heroes. It is too easy to overlook everyday heroes whose sacrifices receive no media attention, while high-profile athletes or entertainers are held up as role models.
But I make an exception for Jose Altuve, for my personal 2017 "Houstonian of the Year." Altuve does not "need" the recognition; he is already honored as the American League MVP and Sports Illustrated's sportsman of the year (along with J.J. Watt.) Yet his national accolades do not fully highlight how well he symbolizes the values of modern Houston.
Most of the people who live in our region came from somewhere else seeking economic opportunity. So naturally, most of us understand that it shouldn't matter who your daddy was or how long you lived here - if you work hard and play by the rules, you are as much a Houstonian as anyone else. That attitude has helped foster Houston's distinct business and civic culture, resting on merit-based economic success and respect for diversity.
Jose Altuve demonstrates the value of overcoming stereotypes when hiring and promoting employees. Despite his exceptional ability as a young player, the scouts would not even let him try out at first. They said he was too short and looked younger than the minimum age for tryouts. When eventually he was signed as an undrafted free agent, his $15,000 signing bonus was paltry by those given to taller players with less ability.
Studies show that our brains tend to reflect biases based on appearance. Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink," for example, describes how, without conscious racism, African-Americans develop biases reflecting low expectations concerning other African-Americans. Michael Lewis' best-selling book, "The Undoing Project", tells how the Houston Rockets overcame the tendency of scouts to rank basketball prospects partly, and mistakenly, based on their physical resemblance to established stars.
Altuve's success shows how an employer's willingness to suspend stereotyping is good business, and not only an issue of fundamental fairness (and in some cases, legal compliance.) By setting aside biases and taking a bit more time to examine an individual's potential or performance, employers often can discover a "hidden gem," perhaps the added benefit of grit acquired by those who have overcome obstacles.
When Altuve came up to bat late in the season, a loud chorus of hometown fans repeatedly chanted three letters - "M-V-P! M-V-P!" Another three-syllable chant would have celebrated another key to the Astros' championship - "IM-MI-GRANTS." The Astros owe much of their success to hires from Cuba and Venezuela as well as citizens from Puerto Rico. They played well in the field and anchored the batting lineup. We didn't complain about the loss of an "American job" when Altuve, a native of Venezuela, came up to bat.
You also don't hear many complaints when lives are saved by many talented immigrants working in Houston's elite hospitals. And, in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, few complained when so many residents depended on hard-working foreign-born workers for much of the vital sheet rock and floor removal and replacement.
The first generation of immigrants to Texas - the "Anglo" Texians that migrated to the Mexican province that included modern-day Texas - used their own hands to build their homes here. How many native-born Texans today can do so without relying on the labor and skills of recent immigrants?
Obviously there is a legal difference between immigrants with current green cards and those who stayed past the expiration of work or tourist visas. Americans can debate in good faith how best to bring our immigration laws in line with our social and economic realities. But denying the importance of immigrant workers to Houston is like denying their contributions - including those of Altuve - to the World Series championship.
Yes, Mr. Altuve has the benefit of extraordinary hand-eye coordination. For that he may thank God and his parents' genes. But, at the close of 2017, let us thank Altuve for reminding us "not to judge a book by its cover" and for symbolizing the immense contributions to our city of those who have immigrated to our nation.
White, chairman of Lazard Houston, is a former Houston mayor.The last figure released by the Mexican government on the number of dead during its 4 1/2-year, military-led crackdown on organized crime came in January, at just over 34,000. It covered the period from the start of the drug war in December 2006 until the end of 2010.
Homicides attributed to the drug war continue across the country on a daily basis, and many more violent incidents probably go unreported. Self-censorship is widespread among news outlets in violent states such as Tamaulipas and Chihuahua.
With 2011 nearing its midway point, how many people have been killed in Mexico?
Until May many major international news outlets covering Mexico used the general figure of 34,000 or 35,000 drug war deaths -- while bodies have kept piling up in shootouts or discovered in mass graves by the hundreds. In the border city of Ciudad Juarez alone, for example, at least 976 people have been violently killed in the metropolitan region since the beginning of 2011, reports the tally at Frontera List.
But several news outlets in Mexico, as well as the peace movement of poet Javier Sicilia, have begun citing a figure of 40,000 dead since last month. A U.S.-based law-enforcement group favoring more liberal drug policies assembled this online data map from news and Internet sources to arrive an estimate topping 40,000, an increase of about 6,000 since the last official figure. (The Times lately has cited an estimate of at least 38,000, based on the official figures plus an approximation for the first months of 2011 derived from mainstream Mexican media tallies.)Samsung could be just a few months away from offering a smartphone with a foldable display. A new, but unconfirmed, report claims that the company will launch this particular smartphone in parts of Europe and South Korea this coming January.
SamMobile claims, via their unnamed sources, that the phone has the code game "Project Valley" and that the display on the phone folds into a V-shape when it is closed. It also claims the phone will have the model number of SM-G929F, which is close to the SM-G928 used on the Galaxy S6 edge+.
The article claims the smartphone will launch in the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Poland and the Nordic countries in Europe, in addition to South Korea. The list does not mention the US as a launch market for the phone, but it's possible it could go on sale in that country sometime later in 2016. Again, none of this has been confirmed by Samsung, so take this report with a grain of salt.
Source: SamMobileEvery year towards the end of the Grammys, the president of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, gives a few wonkish remarks. It’s such a famously incongruous moment that this year’s Grammy host James Corden joke-introduced Kanye West before Portnow took the stage, just in case anyone was thinking of taking a bathroom break. During a show lightly punctuated by protests against President Trump, Portnow called on Washington “to help keep the music playing by updating music laws, protecting music education, and renewing America’s commitment to the arts.” The Academy doesn’t just hand out trophies, after all—this is a major industry group advocating for policies that benefit both creators’ rights and the record-biz bottom line.
By the bottom line for a TV broadcast—ratings—this year’s Grammy ceremony looks like it was a success. Still, the show was marred by an Adele false start, a Metallica/Lady Gaga non-working mic, and a speech cut-off that led to audible boos. More importantly, artists ranging from current Album of the Year winner Adele to former AOTY honoree Win Butler have said what Kanye has all along: Beyoncé was robbed. Others, like Sufjan Stevens and Bey's own sister Solange, have suggested the Grammys need to do better all around when it comes to racial equality (a sentiment our own writers share).
In a call with Pitchfork late Monday, Portnow rejected the view that race is an issue for the Grammys. Portnow also revealed that Kanye was approached about possibly performing at this year’s awards, commented on Frank Ocean’s decision not to submit Blonde for the Grammys, discussed plans for working with the Trump administration, and more.
What did you think of this year’s Grammys in general?
We were incredibly pleased. It’s three and a half hours. It’s 20-plus performances. It felt like we really did hit almost all the marks of a high bar in excellence.
Any marks you felt like you didn’t hit? It seemed like there were a couple of little mistakes.
There were some technical errors. And we really regret and are not pleased when they happen. But I would say to anybody that’s watching, how many times did you go to do something at home or plug something into the wall and plug it in the wrong way? Or you put the wrong key in the door? So it’s human error, and these things do happen. Because of the complexity of what’s going on, it’s frankly amazing to me that there aren’t more issues than we have. It’s also the nature of live television. Whatever is going to happen is going to go out on the air.
A stat has been going around since the show, about how a black artist hasn’t won Album of the Year since Herbie Hancock in 2008. Do you think the Grammys has a race problem?
No, I don’t think there’s a race problem at all. Remember, this is a peer-voted award. So when we say the Grammys, it’s not a corporate entity—it’s the 14,000 members of the Academy. They have to qualify in order to be members, which means they have to have recorded and released music, and so they are sort of the experts and the highest level of professionals in the industry. It’s always hard to create objectivity out of something that’s inherently subjective, which is what art and music is about. We do the best we can. We have 84 categories where we recognize all kinds of music, from across all spectrums.
We don’t, as musicians, in my humble opinion, listen to music based on gender or race or ethnicity. When you go to vote on a piece of music—at least the way that I approach it—is you almost put a blindfold on and you listen. It’s a matter of what you react to and what in your mind as a professional really rises to the highest level of excellence in any given year. And that is going to be very subjective. That’s what we ask our members to do, even in the ballots. We ask that they not pay attention to sales and marketing and popularity and charts. You have to listen to the music. So of the 14,000 voters, they listen, they make up their minds, and then they vote.
Now here’s the other interesting part of the process, and we stand 100 percent behind the process: It’s a democratic vote by majority. So somebody could either receive or not receive a Grammy based on one vote. It could be that tight.
The Motion Picture Academy took steps last year to increase diversity among their voters. Is that something the Recording Academy is interested in doing?
Well, they may have had a problem. We don't have that kind of an issue in that same fashion. But we are always working on increase diversity in membership, whether it's ethnicity, gender, genre, or age. In order to maintain our relevance, we have to be refreshing all the time and we have to be doing that across the board.
We’re set up as chapters in 12 cities across the country, so we’re on the ground in each of those cities with staff. Each of these cities has a board of governors, which is volunteers who are again the professionals in the industry who give their time to the Academy, they get elected, it’s a vote among peers again. So each chapter has between 20 and 30 governors that are elected every year. Our board of trustees is 40 people, from all of the 12 chapters across the country. I think we have more elected leaders in the Academy than there are members of the House of Representatives. And the reason for that is to have diversity and broad participation in a very democratic and very open environment.
At the end of the day, we just went through a popular election, but you had the overlay of an electoral college. And so the popular vote doesn't necessarily in and of itself create the recipient of the election. In our case, the popular vote stands by itself and completely determines who receives an award in any given year. There certainly could be those that are disappointed and that had a difference of opinion about another artist than perhaps received a Grammy in any given year, but the fact is that they had a chance to vote. That's the way it came out.
And also, looking for more participation. I think maybe we’ve just seen this in the last national election to some degree. Sometimes people are perhaps disappointed at the results and then when asked, “Hey did you participate in this election?,” the answer is no. And then, it’s after the fact, not much you can do if you haven’t been a part of it. So to anybody that is unhappy with the results or even feels that there could be a stronger representation of any genre or ethnic group, bottom line is very simple. Just become members, join and vote. Then you have the say if you want it.
Are you concerned at all about some of the big names like Frank Ocean, Drake, and Kanye not wanting to attend this year?
They're all different situations. Not everybody comes to the Grammys every year. There’s no requirement that they do it. There are all kinds of reasons why they don’t. I totally respect that. In the case of Drake, we know he had a European tour booked. That's a big piece of business for an artist, to do a continent. So, can’t argue with that.
Kanye, as you know, had some medical concerns and situations. We had dialog with him about actually performing. At the end of the day, what we had heard was he just wasn't in a place where he felt comfortable doing that. That’s completely understandable. And by the way, we hope both of them will be there, whether next year or the year after. They all have very long careers ahead of them.
Frank Ocean’s a different story, because he made a conscious decision to not enter his music in the process. I think that’s a personal choice. Not everybody likes or wants to be part of every organization or awards process. I respect that. What I’ll say about Frank is he did have his earlier album out at an early stage of his career, we were delighted that it was entered, we were delighted that he was a Grammy winner, we were delighted to have him on our stage, which gave him a platform very early in his career. That’s something we're proud of, and down the line he may feel differently. Artists change their opinion. I don’t begrudge his choice at all and we’ll see what the future brings.
One of the feel-good stories at the 2017 Grammys was Chance the Rapper. Besides his obvious talent, why do you think he did so well this year specifically? Did the new policy qualifying streaming releases for nomination, or his campaigning efforts within the industry help him at all?
There really isn’t a great mechanism for campaigning. You can take advertising during the entry period, just as some of the Hollywood publications have for-your-consideration advertising. But there’s no way of knowing if all our voters around the country subscribe to any of those publications. So in the case of Chance, clearly our members listened, liked what they heard, and felt that he was deserving of the Grammys that he won.
To your earlier question about a racial problem. The album, record, song and best new artist categories are ones that the entire voting membership is entitled to vote on. You don’t get Chance the Rapper as the Best New Artist of the year if you have a membership that isn’t diverse and isn’t open-minded and isn’t really listening to the music, and not really considering other elements beyond how great the music is.
People usually think of the Grammys when they think of the Academy, but how important is the advocacy side to what you do all year round?
It’s a huge part of our mission, and it’s actually grown dramatically over the past decade. At this point I would say we are certainly the leading advocates for creators in Washington on policy. That's not to say that there aren’t others who do a phenomenal job and work for their constituents, but in those cases many of them have a more defined constituency: music publishers, the writers, record labels. We are that one organization that represents the entire creative community.
There’s obviously been quite a bit of change in Washington. How much do you plan to work with the current administration?
We have found that many of our issues really are nonpartisan. What we’ll need to do most immediately here is the education process for those that are new in Washington, whether it’s congresspeople or the executive branch. They don’t necessarily have all the background on our issues and we’ll need to make sure that they have accurate information and understand what’s, no question, a fairly complicated ecosystem. But that being said, we’ll work with the Congress and the President as much as possible to further issues we think are important.Thoughts on a few ‘anti-female’ hadiths.
by
Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood.
In this article I wish to put forward a few thoughts concerning some of the more well-known hadiths that are thought by some to show anti-female bias. Once the background to them is known, it can easily be seen that there is no anti-female feeling in them whatsoever. In fact, the Prophet (pbuh) was a great champion of women, and had many staunch female friends and supporters.
1. It is better for women to pray at home.
It was the normal practice of the female Companions to pray in the mosque, with no sutrah (ie. barrier) dividing them from their men. They prayed behind them, but with no dividing walls or curtains – which one could argue might have invalidated their congregational prayer by separating them from the leader and the congregation. Yet nowadays, in some places we find devout Muslim men depriving women of their rightful place in the mosque by quoting the hadith that it is better for women to pray at home. It does not say this in the Qur’an – so where did this originate?
In fact, it came from an occasion when an elderly and arthritic Muslim lady - Umm Humayd - expressed her regret to the Prophet (pbuh) that although she longed to pray behind him in the mosque, as so many others did, it was impossible for her to be there. The Prophet (pbuh) assured her she need not be concerned about this, it was better for her to pray in her own home (Abu Dawud 570). Many male Muslims have misguidedly used this hadith to try to prevent their women from going to mosques, and have turned them into ‘male clubs’ where any women who do go feel obtrusive, shy and ‘pushy’.
Yet it is obvious from many, many other hadiths that it was the normal practice in Madinah for them to go. For example, Caliph Umar’s grandson tried to prevent his wife, but was over-ruled by his father since the Prophet (pbuh) had encouraged them saying: ‘Do not prevent the handmaids of Allah from attending the mosque.’ Muslim 888, Abu Dawud 568.
2. More women than men in Hell?
After the Farewell Pilgrimage at the Eid prayer the Prophet (pbuh) used his humour to charm his female companions into donating more for charity than they might have intended. Abdullah b. Abbas, who was there as a child, recorded that after he had offered up the prayer and delivered his khutbah the Prophet (pbuh) waved at the people to make them sit down, came down from the pulpit and walked towards the women who were sitting in rows behind the men, leaning on Bilal’s arm, while Bilal held out his cloak for them to throw in their gifts of charity. This was not the required zakat-ul-Fitr (contributions made by every Muslim who can afford it so that the poor can be given money in advance in order to be able to pay for their feast obligations) but extra personal gifts according to their own choice. One woman might donate a ring off her finger, and others would see and do the same.
He urged the women to be generous with their gifts, for when he had glimpsed into the flames of Hell, he had noted the vast majority of people being tormented there were women. The women were outraged, and one of them instantly stood up and demanded to know why that was so. ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘you women grumble so much, and show ingratitude to your husbands! Even if the poor fellows spent all their lives doing good things for you, you have only to be upset at the least thing and you will say, 'I have never received any good from you!’ At that the women began vigorously to pull off their rings and ear-rings, and throw them into Bilal’s cloak. (Bukhari 1.28, Abu Dawud 439 etc).
Jabir b. Abdullah’s version recorded that he recited to them the verse: ‘O Prophet! When believing women come to you to take the oath of loyalty to you... (to the end of the verse)’ (60.12) and then asked the women if they were fulfilling their covenant? None except one woman said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Then give in charity,’ the Prophet (pbuh) declared. ‘Keep on giving alms, ladies, let my father and mother sacrifice their lives for you,’ Bilal urged them. So the ladies pulled off their fatkhs (large rings, which were popular in pre-Islamic times) and other kinds of jewellery and put them in Bilal’s garment. (Bukhari 2.95).
I feel strongly that this example shows us the Prophet’s (pbuh) down-to-earth humour, and not a terrible indictment upon the fate of female believers!
(For fuller information, please refer to my article on ‘More Women than Men in Hell’).
3. Women lack common-sense, therefore there evidence is only worth half that of a man.
After the ‘more women in Hell’ hadith, some versions go on to add that the prophet (pbuh) commented: ‘I have seen none lacking in common sense and failing in religion but (at the same time) robbing the wisdom of the wise, besides you.’ Upon this a woman remarked: ‘What is wrong with our common sense and with religion?’ He observed: ‘Your lack of common sense (in) that the evidence of two women is equal to that of one man; that is the proof of your lack of common sense. And you spend some nights (and days) in which you do not offer prayer and in the month of Ramadan (during the menstrual days) you do not observe fast; that is your failing in religion.’ (Muslim 31. This hadith was also narrated on the authority of Abu Tahir with this chain of transmitters. See also Muslim 448).
Would the Prophet seriously teach something not in keeping with the teaching of the Qur’an? It is perfectly possible that this, and the previous wry comment of the Prophet, were examples of his humour? It is vital that it should be made very clear that women not offering prayer during their menses or fasting on those days in the month of Ramadan is NOT a failing in their religion at all – it was a concession allowed by Allah in His revelation. As regarded the fasts, women were simply required to make up the missed days at some other time before the coming of the next Ramadan month. Their period of uncleanness and discomfort during menstruation coming under the category of illness.
‘Therefore, anyone of you who witnesses that month should fast therein, and whoever is ill or upon a journey shall fast a similar number of days later on. Allah intends your well-being and does not want to put you to hardship. He wants you to complete the prescribed period so that you should glorify His Greatness and render thanks to Him for giving you guidance.’ 2:185:
Imam Malik, who did not regard travelling as being a good enough reason, accepted menstruation as valid reason. ‘No one who, by the Book of Allah, has to fast may |
outine()
/Users/bill/Spaces/Test/src/test/main.go:33 +0x65
gosched0()
/usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:1218 +0x9f
Counter = value
Goroutine 5 (running) created at:
main.main()
/Users/bill/Spaces/Test/src/test/main.go:17 +0x66
runtime.main()
/usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:182 +0x91
go Routine(routine)
You can see that the race detector has pulled out the two lines of code that is reading and writing to the global Counter variable. It also identified the point in the code where the routine was spawned.Let’s make a quick change to the program to cause the race condition to raise its ugly head:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"sync"
"time"
)
var Wait sync.WaitGroup
var Counter int = 0
func main() {
for routine := 1; routine <= 2; routine++ {
Wait.Add(1)
go Routine(routine)
}
Wait.Wait()
fmt.Printf("Final Counter: %d
", Counter)
}
func Routine(id int) {
for count := 0; count < 2; count++ {
value := Counter
time.Sleep(1 * time.Nanosecond)
value++
Counter = value
}
Wait.Done()
}
I have added a billionth of a second pause into the loop. I put the pause right after the routine reads the global Counter variable and stores a local copy. Let’s run the program and see what the value of the global Counter variable is with this simple change:
Final Counter: 2
This pause in the loop has caused the program to fail. The value of the Counter variable is now 2 and no longer 4. So what happened? Let’s break down the code and understand why the billionth of a second pause revealed the bug.Without the pause the program runs as follows:
Without the pause the first routine that is spawned runs to completion and then the second routine begins to run. This is why the program appears to be running properly. The code is serializing itself because of how fast it is able to run on my machine.Let’s look at how the program runs with the pause:I didn’t complete the diagram for space but it shows enough. The pause is causing a context switch between the two routines that are running. This time we have a much different story. Let’s look at the code that is being run in the diagram:
value := Counter
time.Sleep(1 * time.Nanosecond)
value++
Counter = value
With each iteration of the loop the value of the global Counter variable is captured locally, then the local copy is incremented and finally written back to the global Counter variable. If these three lines of code do not run immediately, without interruption, we begin to have problems. The diagram shows how the read of the global Counter variable and then the context switch is causing all of the initial problems.In the diagram, before the incremented value by Routine 1 is written back to the global Counter variable, Routine 2 wakes up and reads the global Counter variable. Essentially both routines perform the same exact reads and writes to the global Counter variable so we end up with a final value of 2.To fix this problem you might think we just need to reduce the incrementing of the global Counter variable from three lines of code to one line of code:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"sync"
"time"
)
var Wait sync.WaitGroup
var Counter int = 0
func main() {
for routine := 1; routine <= 2; routine++ {
Wait.Add(1)
go Routine(routine)
}
Wait.Wait()
fmt.Printf("Final Counter: %d
", Counter)
}
func Routine(id int) {
for count := 0; count < 2; count++ {
Counter = Counter + 1
time.Sleep(1 * time.Nanosecond)
}
Wait.Done()
}
When we run this version of the program we get the right answer again:
Final Counter: 4
If we run this code through the race detector our problems should go away:
go build -race
And the output:
==================
WARNING: DATA RACE
Write by goroutine 5:
main.Routine()
/Users/bill/Spaces/Test/src/test/main.go:30 +0x44
gosched0()
/usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:1218 +0x9f
Previous write by goroutine 4:
main.Routine()
/Users/bill/Spaces/Test/src/test/main.go:30 +0x44
gosched0()
/usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:1218 +0x9f
Goroutine 5 (running) created at:
main.main()
/Users/bill/Spaces/Test/src/test/main.go:18 +0x66
runtime.main()
/usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:182 +0x91
Goroutine 4 (running) created at:
main.main()
/Users/bill/Spaces/Test/src/test/main.go:18 +0x66
runtime.main()
/usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:182 +0x91
==================
Final Counter: 4
Found 1 data race(s)
We still have a race condition with line 30 of the program:
Write by goroutine 5:
main.Routine()
/Users/bill/Spaces/Test/src/test/main.go:30 +0x44
gosched0()
/usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:1218 +0x9f
Counter = Counter + 1
Previous write by goroutine 4:
main.Routine()
/Users/bill/Spaces/Test/src/test/main.go:30 +0x44
gosched0()
/usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:1218 +0x9f
Counter = Counter + 1
Goroutine 5 (running) created at:
main.main()
/Users/bill/Spaces/Test/src/test/main.go:18 +0x66
runtime.main()
/usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:182 +0x91
go Routine(routine)
The program runs correctly using one line of code to perform the increment. So why do we still have a race condition? Don’t be deceived by the one line of Go code we have for incrementing the counter. Let’s look at the assembly code generated for that one line of code:
0064 (./main.go:30) MOVQ Counter+0(SB),BX ; Copy the value of Counter to BX
0065 (./main.go:30) INCQ,BX ; Increment the value of BX
0066 (./main.go:30) MOVQ BX,Counter+0(SB) ; Move the new value to Counter
There are actually three lines of assembly code being executed to increment the counter. These three lines of assembly code eerily look like the original Go code. There could be a context switch after any of these three lines of assembly code. Even though the program is working now, technically the bug still exists.Even though the example I am using is simple, it shows you how complex finding these bugs can be. Any line of assembly code produced by the Go compiler can be paused for a context switch. Our Go code may look like it is safely accessing resources when actually the underlying assembly code is not safe at all.To fix this program we need to guarantee that reading and writing to the global Counter variable always happens to completion before any other routine can access the variable. Channels are a great way to serialize access to resources. In this case I will use a Mutex (Mutual Exclusion Lock).
package main
import (
"fmt"
"sync"
"time"
)
var Wait sync.WaitGroup
var Counter int = 0
var Lock sync.Mutex
func main() {
for routine := 1; routine <= 2; routine++ {
Wait.Add(1)
go Routine(routine)
}
Wait.Wait()
fmt.Printf("Final Counter: %d
", Counter)
}
func Routine(id int) {
for count := 0; count < 2; count++ {
Lock.Lock()
value := Counter
time.Sleep(1 * time.Nanosecond)
value++
Counter = value
Lock.Unlock()
}
Wait.Done()
}
Let’s build the program with the race detector and see the result:
go build -race
./test
Final Counter: 4
This time we get the right answer and no race condition is identified. The program is clean. The Mutex protects all the code between the Lock and Unlock, making sure only one routine can execute that code at a time.To learn more about the Go race detector and to see more examples read this post:It’s not a bad idea to test your programs with the race detector on if you are using multiple routines. It will save you a lot of time and headaches early on in your unit and quality assurance testing. We are lucky as Go developers to have such a tool so check it out.“I said some years ago that the genius of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was to have discovered a niche market in American broadcasting—half the American people,” Charles Krauthammer once observed. “The reason Fox News has thrived and grown is because it offers a vibrant and honest alternative to those who could not abide yet another day of the news delivered to them beneath layer after layer of often undisguised liberalism.”
Since Fox’s creation in the mid-90s, the media has become less and less interested in disguising its liberalism, which has, ironically, ensured Fox’s continued success. Certainly, the escalating polarization is lamentable and it seems particularly pronounced among older Americans. My parents watch a lot of Fox News, as do my in-laws. Frankly, the majority of people over 60 that I know watch a lot of Fox News. However, are Fox News viewers victims of a “conspiracy” to brainwash them? That’s literally what a new documentary by Jen Senko—“The Brainwashing of My Dad”—is claiming:
If it seems surprising to you that older viewers watch a lot of Fox News, you should probably take care to let your eyes gradually adjust to the light once you finally venture out of your cave. Fox is easily the highest-rated cable news channel, and older voters skew conservative. But it’s also fair to say that interest in politics generally increases with age. The demographic base for subscribers to political magazines—Right and Left—always skews older.
Projecting Their Aggression onto the Right
Sure, there are times when I wish my parents weren’t so obsessed with politics. Then again, I wish so much of my life wasn’t consumed by politics, and I write about the topic professionally. Indeed, part of the problem is that contemporary progressivism ensures that politics consumes everything, no matter how trivial—from what shirt a rocket scientist wears at a press conference to daring to call yourself “American.”
[It] also warns of how generations of Americans have been tricked into an angry cult-like devotion to a new conservative lord and savior: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
They then whinge that those who express exasperation by having to refute this nonsense are obsessed. But believe it or not, it’s possible for people—even within the same family!—to disagree without classifying dissenting opinions as evidence of a pathology. Yet, according to this highly sympathetic Daily Beast write-up—“How Fox News Made My Dad Crazy”—that’s the entire premise of the documentary:
In a new documentary unveiled this week at Michael Moore’s film festival, one filmmaker takes aim at the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ Hillary once put on blast. The Brainwashing Of My Dad also warns of how generations of Americans have been tricked into an angry cult-like devotion to a new conservative lord and savior: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
Her case study? Her own dad.
Now, maybe Senko’s dad did become obsessed, and maybe he really is not well. But if that’s the case, her father’s issues can’t be projected on to half the country. It also doesn’t seem like Senko is at all interested in evaluating things from her father’s perspective. Senko describes her dad as a “nonpolitical Kennedy Democrat.” In other words, he supported the Catholic pro-life guy who slashed marginal tax rates, fought the commies aggressively, and would otherwise be a completely unwelcome figure among today’s liberals, both culturally and politically.
Indeed, among today’s Democrats Thomas Jefferson is persona non grata, while the current liberal Democratic president of the United States shared an office with a left-wing domestic terrorist for years. Yet, Senko seems convinced that the rapid cultural and political shifts in the country are the product of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Who’s Afraid of Fox News? This Gal
So Senko trots out a host of liberal bugaboos that she’s convinced are revealing and novel, even though they’ve been standard liberal agitprop for the last 15 years. The Powell Memo is cited as the founding document of the vast right-wing Conspiracy. Of course, at the time the Powell Memo was written in the early ’70s, liberals were doing plenty of their own conspiring to radicalize the political debate. And progressives have done plenty of backroom plotting since then, even citing the Powell Memo as their direct inspiration.
Liberals, progressives, we want to be fair—but it’s not about being fair, it’s about being objective.
Senko informs us Fox News personalities “use hand gestures to subliminally connect with their viewers.” She claims the GOP has used language to manipulate voters. That’s true of every politician, but hilariously, she seems to think use of the word “climate change” over “global warming” is a GOP plot. (Frank Luntz did write memo to Republicans endorsing the term, but it’s a phrase that dates back to the ’50s and even climate-change advocates say the idea Republicans convinced everyone to adopt new terminology is bunkum.)
Not only that, George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist who has long advised Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats on how to manipulate language to their own end is used as a talking head in Senko’s film. (Other unimpeachable experts on right-wing conspiracies such as Media Matters’ David Brock, Noam Chomsky, and liberal talk-radio host Thom Hartmann also make appearances.) Lakoff is so oblivious to his insanely biased academic pettifogging, in 2009 he was asked about the anger being expressed in congressional town halls over Obamacare being rammed through in the face of overwhelming public opposition, and he said this: “I think it is very hard because [Democrats] don’t have the message machine the Republicans do. The Democrats still believe in Enlightenment reason: If you just tell people the truth, they will come to the right conclusion.”
Senko made more or less the same argument to the Daily Beast. “Centrists and liberals and progressives have to wake up and smell the fucking coffee,” she said. “We’ve all sort of been polite. Liberals, progressives, we want to be fair—but it’s not about being fair, it’s about being objective. So I really hope to make people aware of this. Oh my God, it’s the media, stupid.”
Exploiting Dad Is Totally Okay to Make a Political Point
Senko’s claim that liberals are getting rolled because they’re the only ones playing by the rules is particularly rich coming from a documentary, a form of media that has come under repeated scrutiny for distortions and liberal bias. Not one sentence later: “Senko, incidentally, calls herself a Progressive and is throwing her weight behind Bernie Sanders. ‘I’m tired of seeing Democrats allowing themselves to be slapped in the face, allowing and adopting the language that people like Frank Luntz came up with for the Republicans,’ she said. ‘Just being aware is a huge step. It’s going to change conversations.’”
Senko needs to take a long, hard look at what she’s done, and ask herself a simple question: Which member of her family has really been brainwashed?
Rarely does a single word do so much to demolish an entire argument, let alone all the work Senko has put into this documentary over the last number of years. Whereas Senko’s father’s right-wing politics are the result of being brainwashed by a media conspiracy, Senko is “incidentally” a progressive. (Elsewhere, the Daily Beast describes her as an “ex-hippie.”) But nothing about this documentary is incidental. Senko has quite deliberately made a film that invites the public to pass judgment on her own aging father. She thinks her father’s obsessed with politics, but all he did was rant and rave to people he thought loved him enough to be sympathetic. It’s his own daughter who’s fine with humiliating him in the national press so long as it “changes conversations” in a way that helps Sanders get elected and stick it to the Rethuglicans.
Senko needs to take a long, hard look at what she’s done, and ask herself a simple question: Which member of her family has really been brainwashed?PHOENIX -- Two children have been taken to the hospital after being struck by a bat and a ball at Monday's game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Francisco Giants.
A 13-year-old boy seated near Arizona's dugout just beyond the start of the protective netting, was hit on the right side of the head in the fourth inning after San Francisco's Buster Posey lost the bat swinging at a pitch.
In the next at-bat, the Giants' Pablo Sandoval sent a foul ball into the upper deck, where it struck a 2-year-old girl on the forehead.
Medical personnel rushed to the boy and started applying pressure and a cold compress to the side of his head for several minutes. He was later fitted with a neck brace and strapped to a stretcher.
The boy was alert and speaking with medics as they worked on him and gave a thumbs-up to the crowd as he was carried away. A security official at Chase Field said he was taken to a hospital as a precaution.
"I felt terrible, obviously," Posey said. "Somebody told me he left thumbs up, so I wish him the best. Hopefully, everything's all right."
The girl also was taken to the hospital.Parenting Magazine has released its latest list of the “Best Cities for Families.” As a result of some changes to the way the list is compiled, Arlington has dropped all the way from No. 1 to No. 70.
Replacing Arlington at No. 1 is our neighbor, the District of Columbia. Parenting says the District was chosen as the best city in the country to raise kids based on “the quality of schools, affordable homes, low crime rates, jobs, and parkland.” Needless to say, some are questioning the methodology that allowed D.C. to top a list based on schools, affordability and crime.
Last year, when Arlington was the top-ranked city, Parenting said it was due to the county’s “fabulous schools, great home values, and an attractive unemployment rate.” This year, the District won praise for its cultural attractions.
“The history, the government, the breathtaking architecture and inspiring monuments—you don’t have to be a child to get an amazing education in this city,” the magazine wrote, adding that “family dinner nights are easy at quirky local favorites like Matchbox restaurants or Busboys & Poets.”Getty Images
The Buccaneers have a crucial game against the Falcons this Sunday and one of their best defensive players is dealing with a hand injury in the days leading up to the game.
Defensive tackle Gerald McCoy injured his left hand in last weekend’s loss to the Colts and hasn’t practiced this week after having what he described as a “small procedure.”
“I had an injury first half of the game, got it looked out, kept playing, was necessary to keep playing,” McCoy said, via Greg Auman of the Tampa Bay Times. “I had it looked at after the game, had a small procedure, and hopefully will be out there on Sunday.”
Auman reported McCoy kept his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt while talking to the media about his injury. McCoy’s seven sacks lead the Bucs, who also practiced without defensive ends Jacquies Smith and George Johnson on Thursday.In a Republican primary filled with notes of fear and anger, John Kasich is heading in the other direction.
“We’re spending too much time being negative about our lives, and I don’t think that’s very healthy,” Kasich says, warning of a nationwide morale problem, “because when we are positive we come together to solve our problems.”
On the campaign trail, the Ohio governor is sounding more like a self-help guru than presidential candidate, preaching optimism and the importance of rebuilding community. He tells college-aged kids to keep “reaching for the stars,” and seniors to focus on positivity.
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“You have to be a person who represents a place of justice and healing,” he tells the several dozen students among the crowd at his town hall at New England College in this quaint New Hampshire town. “Changing the world doesn’t mean becoming president, changing the world means that you do something special for somebody else, living outside of yourself.”
As the Republican presidential field has devolved into a contest to see who can best display and capture the angst and anger of the GOP electorate, especially as candidates like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush takes on front-runner Donald Trump, Kasich is trying a radically different course, encouraging the country to “count its blessings.”
“We’re constantly pummeled with all the bad things that go on in our country, but where else would we want to live,” he said at a town hall Wednesday in New London.
Kasich says he was called to the new message because of all the negativity he’s seen from voters and his fellow candidates.
“I just get a little tired of everybody running around moping about how terrible everything is,” he tells TIME.
“There are some real issues, but if you keep hearing about how bad everything is all the time, you start getting negative,” he adds, comparing it to a football coach who only points out his players’ faults. “Pretty soon you have a morale problem on the team.”
Kasich, who has a reputation as a prickly executive but has effectively masked it on the trail, said he decided to emphasize a more positive message in recent days after realizing the magnitude of the negativity. His tone is more reminiscent of the “joyful tortoise” campaign Bush set out to run, but has now abandoned as he goes toe-to-toe with Trump.
On Wednesday morning, Kasich bristled at a reporter who questioned this strategy, turning it into a new stump speech line. Following an event in Hookset at the historic Robie’s Country Store, Kasich was asked by a reporter whether he was “angry enough” to win the presidency.
“If it takes mean and angry, count me out,” he says later, referencing the question in his subsequent events, “I’m going to remember that for a very long time.”
“If it takes determination, if it takes a degree of toughness count me in,” he continues. “But we’ve got too much to be thankful for in this country to be waking up in a bad mood. Don’t let them get you down.”
It was that problem, he says, that contributed to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, particularly when the then-GOP nominee campaigned in Ohio, warning of economic collapse when the state’s economy was recovering. “I don’t think that was the right message,” he says, adding it’s “ancient history.”
Kasich has taken to using his stump speech to encourage a rebuilding of community, telling the story of his childhood neighbor calling his parents to tell them he was sledding into traffic in the street.
“We need to start sticking our noses into other people’s business and start rebuilding and re-strengthening our communities,” Kasich said in Hookset, a line that drew titters from Democrats and questions from fellow Republican candidates for appearing to support the notion of big government.
Kasich, who has come under fire from many Republicans for his decision to expand Medicaid in Ohio under the Affordable Care Act, defended the comments.
“I think it’s a very conservative and Republican line, because if neighbors are helping neighbors, then government doesn’t have to do as much,” Kasich tells TIME. “I think rebuilding communities is a part of rebuilding America.”
Contact us at [email protected]! Check out this week’s episode of Bugsmashers!
Bugsmashers
Transcript
Short Form (By Erris)
Helmets were all wonky, because the game thought players were dead and weren’t breathing, because they weren’t making any sound. Fixed with code. BUG SMASHED.
Medium Form
Alright, so today you saw a fun little issue with our helmets where they were jittering all about, which affected boht our ships and our FPS module, because well, when you have a helmet on, it’s going to be controlling your HUD, and that’s used for both your ships and your, when you’re walking around as a player.
This bug was introduced when we enabled the breathing manager, but then code was disabled for sounds because we’re doing WWISE integration, and it was the natural conditions for a bug where you enable something that’s been enabled for a long time, and you disable some code here and here, they get together, and hey! Here’s a brand new bug.
It took a while to track this one down, cause we’re also integrating our large world stuff, and it was like, is this a 64 bit problem, is this something else, and luckily one of the illfonic guys was like, Hey, this might be the breathing manager, and… holy crap it is. And we looked at it, and BAM, there it was.
Questions
WopWop 0482 – I wonder what is the average length of time that a guy can perform work like this before burnout?
THat is an interesting little question. It depends on a lot of factors. Are we on crunch, how much sleep have we had, is there bad traffic today, was there… I Don’t know, something personal that affected you, was there a long overhaul. THere’s a lot of factors. I’ve seen, not only myself but other developers you could go, holy crap, it’s been 16 hours already, I haven’t eaten, but I got a lot done, to okay, I got here at 6, it’s 6:10, I need a break. It just depends what you’re working on, what the workload is, if you want to work on the thing or if you have to work on the thing. It just really depends. But from what I’ve seen here most of the time, everyone just zones in, and they’re, holy crap, 8 hours have passed, I need to go on lunch, I need to take a break, and then they go back right in. But another factor that ties into this too is, when you’re here early in the morning or late at night, you can really zone in on something and then time passes by and you don’t really get bruned out. But if you get here in the middle of the day and someone comes up to you, or you have a call, or you have a meeting, then you get… disorganized cause you can’t work on that one thing, and then everytime you try to work on it you get bugged, so you can burn out that way, so… THere’s all sorts of reasons why and how you can get burned out. THe best thing to do is jhust take a quick little break, go PHOOO AHHH, get a soda or something, and get right back to it.
RyanMatthewlick – What pathway did you follow to get yourself a spot working for CIG?
So, prior to working here I worked for a company called New World INteractive, and they were a small little indie group in Colerado working on Insurgency. At the time, I wanted to move back to California, but I still wanted to work on Insurgency, so I was.. looking around, job searching to see what’s available, and I saw Star Citizen, and I was like, ooh, this is Chris Roberts, he made Freelancer, I loved that! I didn’t play Wing Commander at the time, I was small, please don’t kill me. I did play it later on, I do like it, but Freelancer was my game, and I was like, that sounds fun, I’ll apply. I don’t have as much industrial experience, but I do have a lot of indie work, so the worst they could say is no. And a couple months later, they brought me on for an on-site, they liked me on, and here I am.
PD12 PD12 – What kind of design diagrams do you use, or does CIG use? Which EML ones, what kind of standard does CIG have?
What he’s referring to is, before you design or code something, you want to have some kind of framework of what is going to be the overall scope. How it’s going to work, how it’s going to interact with things, and we use a combination of tools. The two biggest that i use is Visio and, there’s a plugin through visual studio, Design Patterns UML Toolbox. But, we use Visio to create little code blocks that say this section of code’s going to call this section of code, this section so you can see the flow, and we’ll use confluence so we can post these pictures, and state ‘code interfaces’, and how it’s going to work with descriptions. Designers will do the same, they’ll have code blocks with the flow saying here’s how it’s going to work, and they’ll have diagrams and pictures along with words describing how and where things are supposed to happen. This will be basically the prototype or design phase where, once this gets approved, then it gets moved on to the design implementation, which usually gets tasked out by all the lovely producers and leads. Then from there it gets integrated in as a feature, bug-tested by QA, and then eventually given out to you lovely folks.
Hope you had some fun with those questions. If you have any more, can’t wait to answer them next week.
Hope you enjoyed this weeks episode of Bugsmashers, see you next time!
Long Form
Hey everyone, welcome to bugsmashers episode 5, I’ve got my man here, Shia La Beof, lets DO IT, lets DO IT, lets DO IT.
Hey everyone, we’re here in our fancy dancy oh, good old multiplayer server, and if you see here we have the HUD shaking like crazy. Funnily enough, a little issue with our recording process where, when we recorded this, as you see now, it stopped bouncing, and then when we stopped recording, it started bouncing again. We found a trick where if we don’t have the mouse inside the game, it will actually do the shaking, so somehow oh, it stopped, but, what happens, regardless if we’re unable to capture it, our helmet from the FPS module is for some reason shaking very rapidly and, because it’s shaking, it’s causing our HUD to go crazy cause our HUD’s attached to our helmet, so the helmet shakes like crazy the HUD will shake like crazy.
This is a fun little thing that was introduced I believe on the WWISE integration. So, we’re switching over our sound system from FMOD, and because of that we had to disable a whole bunch of sounds so that we could slowly convert them over. We have a full audio team that’s working on that, and in the progress, this particular bug has to do with the good old breathing manager.
How you ask? Well, breathing manager actually looks up, as you can see here there’s some sound stuff disabled, until we get to the WWISE integration. But the breathing manager will actually get its duration, here we go, will actually get its duration from either some parameters in the XML or from the sounds themselves, and since the sounds were disabled, the breathing duration was obviously set to zero. Unfortunately, in our little code, this controls what the players sees, or in this case it’s going to control the player helmet so that when he breathes he’s like this, actually I think it controls some bones down below that end up going up, but either way this messes with the helmet so when you breathe it goes like this, in, out, in, out, and unfortunately if we put a little break point here, our transition is going to be zero our duration is also zero but because of coding optimizations this duration is not actually used here, but it is zero and every frame, we’re just getting 0 0 0 0 0. So, what we want to do, let’s get back in the game, is we want to make sure that, for one, we don’t want to do any of this stuff unless… Why isn’t… of course everything breaks at the last second.
So what I’m going to do, is copy this bad boy, and what this does is it makes sure our floating point value is above the minimum value that would be recognized by floating point. I could also use zero, but this is pretty much a standard to use across multiple platforms, just to make sure that, basically if it’s greater than zero, then we have a duration. And if we don’t, we want to make sure that we reset this lovely value, which controls your view. ANd if you look in here, it goes HEY! we’re going to apply an offset so that you breathe in and out based on a couple of different parameters, and it’s always set to zero, so it’s trying to go to the next one, next one, next one, and it constantly resets.
So we’re going to be like hey, no, stop, we have NO breathing duration cause apparently our player is dead cause our breathing is related to sound, so hold up, don’t do any of this unless we have a valid duration, otherwise set everything to 0 so it doesn’t modify any of our offsets.
Give that a good old recompile through recode, and as you can see, the helmet is no longer jittering, so our HUD stays pretty much static, and we go out, and about, see, the player’s kind of moving, but that’s from a different issue, but his helmet, for all intents and purposes, is sticking with is head. SO if his head moves his helmet moves, so you should see the HUD in the same exact place, which is good.
Now if we were to actually do the reverse logic to break it, we should see his helmet freak out, and it’s kind of hard to hell, but his head is moving independent of the helmet and that’s causing that weird offset. So if we go back in here, you can see that kind of jerking a little bit. And because of the recording it slows it down, but if I were to… yeah, you get the drift.
So there’s your little fun fix. And the other thing I did was, inside this breathing manager, it’s checking to see if this float is 0 by doing naught. So if we’re zero, then we’re going to return zero. Problem is, you may not ever get just 0. You may get very very tiny values, so I did a little code tweak here that gets the duration. If it’s less than floating point Epsilon, then we return, otherwise we divide by the duration.
That was a quick optimization. With that and our fix here, our camera no longer shakes. This also affected FPS, when you’re running around in the map the FPS HUD is also attached to your camera, so that would shake here and there. So this affected both FPS module and Arena Commander module. Now that that’s fixed, hopefully the WWISE integration will go much smoother.Tens of thousands of people chanting anti-government slogans and holding up pictures of jailed activists have taken part in Bahrain's first authorised opposition protest since June.
No clashes occurred at Friday's march along a three kilometre stretch of a highway west of the capital Manama.
Protesters carried Bahraini flags and held up images of rights activist and protest leader Nabeel Rajab, calling for his release.
Bahrain, where the US Fifth Fleet is based, has been in crisis since a revolt led by majority Shia Muslims began 18 months ago to demand democracy in the Sunni-ruled kingdom.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from Bahrain, journalist Reem Khalifa said that since protests started, "It has never been quiet... especially in the over-populated Shia areas".
"Every day there is tension in various areas around the island,” Khalifa said.
The government has denounced the protest movement, inspired by uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world, as sectarian.
This claim denied by protesters who say they face discrimination from the ruling Sunni minority.
The rally, under the banner "Democratic Freedom" and organised by opposition groups led by the biggest bloc, al-Wefaq, was the first since the interior ministry banned Wefaq-led marches in June, saying these had ended in violence.
Since the ban, protests have continued in villages around the country.
Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch's Middle East division, told Al Jazeera that while he would give the Gulf nation's human rights record "a very bad review", he believes concern over the nation's tarnished image is "having an impact".
"It's also true that some members of the government are very sensitive to their international image. They're concerned about their reputation that Bahrain has gotten over the last couple of years as a place that doesn't tolerate any peaceful dissent," said Stork from Washington.
On Aug 22, protesters pelted police with petrol bombs and stones at the funeral of a teenage demonstrator killed by police gunfire the previous week.
Rajab was sentenced two weeks ago to three years in prison on three counts of leading illegal protests, a verdict that drew criticism from Washington.There are still 27 days and 15 hours until this Eli Roth film of an election comes to a close, and literally the only thing that's keeping me from bringing cyanide pills to work is Samantha Bee's debate commentary. Sunday's debate sucked hard, unless you enjoy watching a prevaricating narcissistic fascist mangle the English language while fucking a chair, but Bee's recap of the showdown between a "well-prepared if uninspiring public servant and a crotch-fondling slab of rancid meatloaf" is, at least a small respite from the madness.
Honestly, though, how much more of this horror show must we endure? How are we at all giving credence to this swamp creature who openly lied at least 9 times onstage and seems to hang out exclusively in the locker rooms at Westworld? Can we be done with this American experiment now?
Speaking of so-called "locker room talk," it appears Trump actually kicked WWE star Maria Kanellis off a season of Celebrity Apprentice because she said fellow contestant Curtis Stone "took a crap, and left the stench in the [dressing] room," on a 2010 episode. Trump told her, "This is my boardroom. It's not a locker room. Maria, you’re fired."
Trump, somehow, has neither been fired from |
held with adult inmates in Guantanamo. Khadr had been taken to Afghanistan by his father, who was affiliated with Al-Qaida. He was accused of participating in the firefight by throwing grenades. One of grenades thrown in the fighting killed an American soldier and wounded a medic. Khadr later admitted to the act, but claimed that he did not know whether it was him that killed and wounded the soldiers.
The Canadian government has settled out of court for $10.5 million. The federal Liberal government has publicly defended this settlement arguing that a drawn out battle in court would have resulted in taxpayers having to pay even more. The government has also formally apologized for the breach of Khadr’s charter rights. This has caused a huge backlash from the Conservatives and right-wing media. A campaign has been initiated attacking Khadr as a terrorist and opposing the government settlement.
A recent poll by Angus Reid revealed that 71 per cent of Canadians are opposed to the settlement, believing the government should have fought it in the courts instead of settling. Many are particularly upset about the high price tag of the settlement.
Right-wing hypocrisy
In light of the settlement surrounding Khadr, the right-wing pundits and the Conservatives have come out in a storm of scathing remarks. Alberta PC Party leader Jason Kenney remarked that “Omar was a confessed terrorist who should be in prison.” The Conservatives even launched a website, detailing Khadr's supposed crimes and asking supporters to sign if they agree. The crux of their criticism surrounds the payout to Khadr and how taxpayers are paying for it. Newly elected federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has openly stated it is “disgusting” and called it a secret deal done behind the backs of Canadians. Scheer stated, “This payout is a slap in the face to men and women in uniform who face incredible danger every day to keep us safe."
The sentiment against the whopping $10-million dollar payout is understandable among working class people struggling to make ends meet. However, coming from the Conservatives, the criticism stinks of hypocrisy. The Tories have had no problems with misusing taxpayer dollars, especially on war and assisting their corporate friends.
During the Harper era tens of billions of tax dollars were lost as the Conservatives slashed corporate tax rates, which were lowered from 22 per cent to 15 per cent during 2007 to 2013. The federal Conservatives under Harper also gave billions in subsidies (aka handouts) to big corporations, from the aerospace to the auto sector.
It therefore seems that the federal Conservatives’ problem with the settlement has less to do with the principle that government should not waste taxpayer dollars on a multi-million dollar settlement. Rather, their principle is that taxpayer dollars should only be wasted on their multi-billionaire friends at the stock exchanges in Toronto, Calgary or Montreal. If Khadr had been a billionaire receiving government subsidies and tax breaks, it is hard to imagine a right-wing campaign being whipped up to protect the “pocketbooks of taxpayers”.
Then there is the Conservatives’ lavish spending on war. During Harper’s tenure as prime minister, the defence budget was increased to 1.2 per cent of GDP. Harper twice extended the mission in Afghanistan, which kept forces fighting for the first six years of his time in office. Increased spending on a mission is recognized as a failure, with the continued and growing Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan being clear proof of this fact. This, of course, didn’t stop rich arms manufacturers from making hundreds of millions in profits through government contracts or “settlements”.
Considering the record the Conservative Party in misusing taxpayer money, their criticisms of Khadr's settlement rings completely hollow. The only purpose of this campaign against the settlement is to score points against the Liberals by playing on anti-Muslim prejudices, whipping up fears of terrorism and reinforcing the aims and goals of the disastrous War on Terror. It should never be forgotten that far from ending the threat of terrorism, the destruction due to western intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria have massively strengthened extremist Islamic organizations.
The accusation that Omar Khadr was a terrorist is particularly disgusting coming from the Conservatives. This is coming from the same Conservative Party that reached a $15 billion dollar arms deal with the Saudi royal family, who are the main financiers of reactionary Islamic organizations in the Middle East. The Saudi dictatorship regularly uses the methods of terror inside and outside the country, as with its recent repression of protests and with its ongoing invasion of Yemen. Khadr was only a vulnerable minor when he was manipulated and dragged into Afghanistan by his father to fight alongside Islamic militants. The federal Conservatives and their partners in House of Saud actively support, strengthen or promote terrorism in the Middle-East - and unlike Khadr, they are not children.
Liberal empty gestures and the ongoing war on terror
As this case was settled, the Liberal government has pointed out that Khadr was owed an apology and the settlement. They have claimed this as a victory for civil rights, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stating "The Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects all Canadians, every one of us, even when it is uncomfortable....This is not about the detail of the merits of the Khadr case. When the government violates any Canadians’ charter rights we all end up paying for it."
One has to wonder what happened to Trudeau’s concern for civil rights when he voted for Harper’s Bill C-51. The draconian Bill C-51 emphasizes defending Canada from 'terrorism' over the rights of individual Canadians and includes significant breaches of civil liberties that the Liberals have defended.
The Liberals in fact voted in favour of this bill when Harper was prime minister and although Trudeau promised during his election campaign to amend the bill (but not revoke it), even this has still not happened. In a brazen display of hypocrisy, the Liberals have expanded the powers of the bill to increase Canada's internal spying network, allowing the CSE (the Communication Security Establishment) to conduct cyber operations against suspected terrorists. This unaccountable body can decide for itself who fits the description of a 'terrorist' and invade their privacy at will. Clearly, if the Liberal government cared so much about civil liberties, they would stop eroding them. It is exactly these breaches of civil liberties, justified on the basis of national security, that allowed Khadr's rights to be infringed in the first place.
The Liberals have been presenting themselves as defenders of diversity against the prejudice, xenophobia and bigotry of the Conservatives. The recent federal motion M-103 passed by the Liberals which condemned Islamophobia was another gesture which served to reinforce this image of Trudeau as a defender of the rights of immigrants and minorities. As Fightback explained, this was an empty gesture aimed at shoring up electoral support for the Liberals while having no concrete positive impact for immigrants.
It must be remembered that it was the Liberal Party that initiated the War on Terror and the invasion of Afghanistan when they were in government in 2001. Far from the image they present of being against Islamophobia and racism, it was the Liberals who pushed the War on Terror, which served to demonize people from the Middle-East, deem them a national security threat and justify surveillance and other infringements of civil liberties.
The imperialist policy of the Liberals cannot be viewed in the past-tense. It was only a couple months ago that Trudeau declared that the Canadian sniper who made a record kill shot in Iraq “should be celebrated”. This occurred in a country where Canada is supposed to have no combat role. The Liberals also recently passed a bill to increase military spending by more than thirty billion dollars over the next two decades. This is an increase of over 70 per cent! This money would go to the buying new fighter jets and other weapons of war. Such spending on the military could instead be used by the government to expand health care, grant students universal education, or expand government housing programs and daycare to help everyday working families.
In a continuation of Conservative policy, the Liberals have signed off on the 15 billion dollar arms deal to Saudi Arabia. The country will use the weapons, particularly the armoured vehicles, to repress opposition protesters. This will strengthen the Saudi regime, allowing it to promote its reactionary ideology all over the Middle East-- to the detriment of the Middle Eastern masses. Behind the Liberal mask of “tolerance” and “diversity” is the real face of the interests of the Canadian ruling class: imperialist war, militarism, racism and surveillance. The Trudeau government’s settlement with Omar Khadr does not represent a commitment or step forward towards justice for victims of the war on terror, the defense of civil liberties or ending Islamophobia.
Cynicism and Hypocrisy On Both Sides
Both the Liberals and the Conservatives are cynical hypocrites in the scandal that has surrounded the settlement. The Liberals are not concerned about civil liberties or justice, and the Conservatives are not concerned about the “average taxpayer” or opposing right-wing Islamic extremism in the Middle East.
The appeal to “justice” by the two wings of the capitalist class is nothing but cynical maneuvering intended for the purpose of shoring up electoral support. On the one hand the Conservatives play into backward prejudices and bigotry, and the Liberals on the other play on fears of racism faced by workers from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Real justice can only be attained when imperialism, racism and poverty are eliminated, which can only occur once the ruling capitalist class that benefits from and promotes them is overthrown. Until then, the number of victims of imperialism will continue to rise. That is, and will remain, the true story behind the Omar Khadr case.At the very beginning of last year, I decided to track my reading habits and share the best stuff here, on Baeldung. Haven’t missed a review since.
Here we go…
1. Spring and Java
A quick, journalistic look at Java 8 Streams performance – something we’re starting to be aware of in the community.
This writeup is going to be referenced for a long time, as this kind of low level information is really missing from the Spring ecosystem.
I had to do something similar several times in practice – adding a custom method into a Spring Data repo – so this guide is a welcome reference.
Short and to the point – upgrading to Spring 4 is a solid productivity boost across the board.
A must read if you’re working with Hibernate and aren’t quite sure how your logging should be set up.
Just because we can do some low level stuff in Java doesn’t mean we should. Mockito made some choices about all of that, and about what you can and cannot do with the tool.
This is a quick dive into the way mocks can be injected at runtime.
A very interesting and pragmatic look at the Java 8 functional story, now that it’s no longer new and shiny.
Also worth reading:
Webinars and presentations:
Time to upgrade:
2. Technical and Musings
I listened to the “Integration Tests Are a Scam” and it really opened up way of thinking about the way I did testing back then.
Later on I continued to learned from J.B. live, so I’m excited to see here a thought out analysis on the topic. Good stuff.
Also worth reading:
3. Comics
And my favorite Dilberts of the week:
4. Pick of the WeekI stumbled upon an article the other day where Rob Pike implements a rudimentary regular expression engine in c. I converted his code to Javascript and added test specs so that someone can self-guide themselves through the creation of the regex engine. The specs and solution can be found in this GitHub repository. This blog post walks through my solution.
The Problem
Our regex engine will support the following syntax:
Syntax Meaning Example matches a Matches the specified character literal q q * Matches 0 or more of the previous character a* "", a, aa, aaa? Matches 0 or 1 of the previous character a? "", a. Matches any character literal. a, b, c, d, e... ^ Matches the start of a string ^c c, ca, caa, cbb... $ Matches the end of a string a$ ba, baaa, qwerta...
The goal is to provide a syntax robust enough to match a large portion of regex use cases with minimal code.
Matching One Character
The first step is to write a function that takes in a one character pattern and a one character text string and returns a boolean indicating if they match. A pattern of. is considered a wildcard and matches against any character literal.
Here are some examples
matchOne('a', 'a') -> true matchOne('.', 'z') -> true matchOne('', 'h') -> true matchOne('a', 'b') -> false matchOne('p', '') -> false
function matchOne ( pattern, text ) { if (! pattern ) return true ; if (! text ) return false ; if ( pattern === '.' ) return true ; return pattern === text ; }
Matching Same Length Strings
Now we want to add support for patterns and text strings of greater length. For now, let's only consider a pattern/text pair of the same length. I happen to know that the solution lends itself very naturally to recursion, so we will use it here. We are going to want to repeatedly invoke matchOne on successive pairs of characters from the pattern/text combination.
function match ( pattern, text ) { if ( pattern === '' ) return true ; else return matchOne ( pattern [ 0 ], text [ 0 ] ) && match ( pattern. slice ( 1 ), text. slice ( 1 ) ) ; }
The above code advances character by character across the the pattern/text pair. It first compares pattern[0] to text[0] and then pattern[1] to text[1] and continues comparing pattern[i] to text[i] until i === pattern.length - 1. If they ever don't match, then we know that the pattern cannot match the text.
Let's take an example. Suppose we invoke match('a.c', 'abc'), which returns matchOne('a', 'a') && match('.c', 'bc').
If we continue evaluating these functions, we get matchOne('a', 'a') && matchOne('.', 'b') && matchOne('c', 'c') && match("", ""), which is just equal to true && true && true && true, So we have a match!
The $ Character
Let's add support for the special pattern character $ that allows us to match the end of a string. The solution simply requires adding an additional base case to the match function.
function match ( pattern, text ) { if ( pattern === '' ) return true ; if ( pattern === '$' && text === '' ) return true ; else return matchOne ( pattern [ 0 ], text [ 0 ] ) && match ( pattern. slice ( 1 ), text. slice ( 1 ) ) ; }
The ^ Character
Let's add support for the special pattern character ^ that allows us to match the beginning of a string. I'm going to introduce a new function called search.
function search ( pattern, text ) { if ( pattern [ 0 ] === '^' ) { return match ( pattern. slice ( 1 ), text ) ; } }
This function will be the new entry point to our code. Up till this point, we were only matching patterns that began at the beginning of the text. We are simply making that more clear now by forcing the user to preface the pattern with a ^. But how do we support patterns that appear anywhere within the text?
Matches Starting Anywhere
Currently, the following return true
search("^abc", "abc") search("^abcd", "abcd")
But search("bc", "abcd") will just return undefined. We want it to return true
If the user does not specify that the pattern matches the beginning of the text, then we want to search for that pattern at every possible starting point within the text. We will default to this behavior if the pattern does not begin with ^ 1.
function search ( pattern, text ) { if ( pattern [ 0 ] === '^' ) { return match ( pattern. slice ( 1 ), text ) ; } else { return text. split ( '' ). some ( ( _, index ) => { return match ( pattern, text. slice ( index ) ) ; } ) ; } }
The? Character
We want to be able to match 0 to 1 of the character before?.
Here are some examples
search("ab?c", "ac") -> true search("ab?c", "abc") -> true search("a?b?c?", "abc") -> true search("a?b?c?", "") -> true
The first step is to modify match to detect when a? character is present and then delegate to the matchQuestion function, which we will define shortly.
function match ( pattern, text ) { if ( pattern === '' ) { return true ; } else if ( pattern === '$' && text === '' ) { return true ; } else if ( pattern [ 1 ] === '?' ) { return matchQuestion ( pattern, text ) ; } else { return matchOne ( pattern [ 0 ], text [ 0 ] ) && match ( pattern. slice ( 1 ), text. slice ( 1 ) ) ; } }
matchQuestion needs to handle two cases:
Where the character before the? is not matched but the text matches the remainder of the pattern (everything after the? ). Where the character before the? is matched and the rest of the text (minus the 1 matched character) matches the remainder of the pattern.
If either of these cases is truthy, then matchQuestion can return true.
Let's consider the first case. How do we check if the text matches everything in the pattern except the _? syntax? In order words, how do we check if the character before the? appears 0 times? We strip 2 characters off the pattern (the first character is the one before the? and the second is the? itself) and invoke the match function.
function matchQuestion ( pattern, text ) { return match ( pattern. slice ( 2 ), text ) ; }
The second case is a little more challenging, but just like before, it reuses functions we've already written
function matchQuestion ( pattern, text ) { if ( matchOne ( pattern [ 0 ], text [ 0 ] ) && match ( pattern. slice ( 2 ), text. slice ( 1 ) ) ) { return true ; } else { return match ( pattern. slice ( 2 ), text ) ; } }
If the text[0] matches pattern[0], and the rest of the text (minus the part that is matched by matchOne ) matches the remainder of the pattern, then we are golden. Note that we could rewrite the code like this:
function matchQuestion ( pattern, text ) { return ( ( matchOne ( pattern [ 0 ], text [ 0 ] ) && match ( pattern. slice ( 2 ), text. slice ( 1 ) ) ) || match ( pattern. slice ( 2 ), text ) ) ; }
The one thing I like about this latter approach is that the boolean OR makes it explicitly clear that there are two cases, either of which may be true.
The * Character
We want to be able to match the character before the * 0 or more times.
All of these should return true.
search("a*", "") search("a*", "aaaaaaa") search("a*b", "aaaaaaab")
Similar to what we did when supporting?, we wan to delegate to a matchStar function within our match function
function match ( pattern, text ) { if ( pattern === '' ) { return true ; } else if ( pattern === '$' && text === '' ) { return true ; } else if ( pattern [ 1 ] === '?' ) { return matchQuestion ( pattern, text ) ; } else if ( pattern [ 1 ] === '*' ) { return matchStar ( pattern, text ) ; } else { return matchOne ( pattern [ 0 ], text [ 0 ] ) && match ( pattern. slice ( 1 ), text. slice ( 1 ) ) ; } }
matchStar, like matchQuestion, also needs to handle two cases:
Where the character before the * is not matched but the text matches the remainder of the pattern (everything after the * ). Where the character before the * is matched one or more times and the rest of the text matches the remainder of the pattern.
Since there are two cases that both result in a match (0 matches OR more matches), we know that matchStar can be implemented with a boolean OR. Furthermore, case 1 for matchStar is exactly the same as it was for matchQuestion and can be implemented identically using match(pattern.slice(2), text). That means we only need to formulate an expression that satisfies case 2.
function matchStar ( pattern, text ) { return ( ( matchOne ( pattern [ 0 ], text [ 0 ] ) && match ( pattern, text. slice ( 1 ) ) ) || match ( pattern. slice ( 2 ), text ) ) ; }
Refactoring
We can now go back and cleverly simplify search using a trick I learned in Peter Norvig's class.
function search ( pattern, text ) { if ( pattern [ 0 ] === '^' ) { return match ( pattern. slice ( 1 ), text ) ; } else { return match ( '.*' + pattern, text ) ; } }
We use the * character itself to allow for the pattern to appear anywhere in the string. The prepended.* says that any number of any character can appear before the pattern we wish to match.
Conclusion
It's remarkable how simple and elegant the code for such a sophisticated and generalized program can be. The full source is available in this GitHub repository
Here is a follow up article where I fuzz test the regex engine.
If you work at a company using javascript, I do consulting work and am currently looking for new clients. Please contact me for more details.
FootnotesA failed teenage suicide bomber has spoken about how he and other children were brainwashed in a special special camp by ISIS terrorists in Iraq.
Mahmoud Ahmed was arrested and disarmed by Kurdish security forces before he was able to launch his attack on a sports stadium in Kirkuk, northern Iraq in August.
The 15-year-old boy had been stopped hours after two other attacks targeted mosques in the city.
Scroll down for video
Mahmoud Ahmed, pictured, was arrested by security forces during a planned suicide attack
He was arrested in Kirkuk, northern Iraq in August and stripped of his explosive device
Following his arrest, he was placed into custody and is awaiting trial on terrorist charges.
He said children as young as nine were being trained to become suicide bombers.
He told Sky News: 'They taught us how to use a Kalashnikov and a PKC machine gun and then transferred us to Hawija.
'There were four older men who would teach us about heaven and stuff like that. Twenty-four hours a day they'd teach us about this stuff. There were 60 of us born from 2002 onwards. They would scare us and would show videos of beheadings and stuff like that.'
On the day of his planned attack, the youngster said he had second thoughts.
'When I reached the target I knew it was wrong. When I saw the young kids I knew it was wrong immediately. I returned back to him (my handler) but he said go straight back. I told him no and he said this is an order from Abu Islam (an ISIS commander).
'I returned back around the stadium and they caught me.'
When he was arrested, Ahmed was wearing Barcelona football shirt with Lionel Messi's name on the back.
At the time of his arrest, he had initially claimed he had been kidnapped and forced to put on the suicide vest."CELAC" redirects here. For other uses, see Celac
The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Spanish: Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños, CELAC; Portuguese: Comunidade de Estados Latino-Americanos e Caribenhos; French: Communauté des États latino-américains et caribéens; Dutch: Gemeenschap van Latijns-Amerikaanse en Caraïbische Staten) is a regional bloc of Latin American and Caribbean states thought out on February 23, 2010, at the Rio Group–Caribbean Community Unity Summit,[5][6][7] and created on December 3, 2011, in Caracas, Venezuela, with the signature of The Declaration of Caracas.[8] It consists of 33 sovereign countries in the Americas representing roughly 600 million people. Due to the focus of the organization on Latin American and Caribbean countries, other countries and territories in the Americas, Canada and the United States, as well as the overseas territories in the Americas of France (Overseas departments and territories of France), the Netherlands (Dutch Caribbean), Denmark (Greenland) and the United Kingdom (British Overseas Territories) are not included.[9]
CELAC is an example of a decade-long push for deeper integration within Latin America.[10] CELAC was created to deepen Latin American integration and by some to reduce the significant influence of the United States on the politics and economics of Latin America. It is seen as an alternative to the Organization of American States (OAS), the regional body that was founded by United States and 21 other Latin American nations originally as a countermeasure to potential Soviet influence in the region.[10][11][12]
CELAC is the successor of the Rio Group and the Latin American and Caribbean Summit on Integration and Development (CALC).[13] In July 2010, CELAC selected President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez and President of Chile Sebastián Piñera, as co-chairs of the forum to draft statutes for the organization.[14]
Member states [ edit ]
CELAC comprises 33 countries, speaking five different languages:
Eighteen Spanish-speaking countries (56% of the area, 63% of the population)
One Portuguese-speaking country (42% of the area, 34% of the population)
One French-speaking country (0.1% of the area, 1.6% of the population)
Exclusive Economic Zones of the member states of the CELAC. Considering them, the total area of the CELAC reaches 39,436,573 km².
Twelve English-speaking countries (1.3% of the area, 1.1% of the population)
One Dutch-speaking country (0.8% of the area, 0.1% of the population)
Twelve countries are in South America, which accounts for 87% of the area and 68% of the population.
Rationale [ edit ]
v • d • e A clickable Euler diagram showing the relationships between various multinational organisations in the Americas.
On February 23, 2010, Latin American leaders at the 23rd Rio Group summit in Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, Mexico, said they were forming an organisation of the Latin American and Caribbean states. Once its charter was developed, the group was formally established in July 2011, at a summit in Caracas. The bloc will be the main forum for political dialogue for the area, without the United States or Canada.[15][16]
Prominent left-wing leaders in the bloc praised the founding of the organization as a step towards separating Latin America from the United States with Evo Morales, President of Bolivia saying "A union of Latin American countries is the weapon against imperialism. It is necessary to create a regional body that excludes the United States and Canada.... it is the best time for prime ministers of Latin America and the Caribbean to gestate this great new organization without the United States to free our peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean."[12] Hugo Chávez, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Rafael Correa were among the other prominent far-left leaders who praised the creation of CELAC [17][18][19]
Reaction [ edit ]
The announcement prompted debate and discussion across Latin America and the Caribbean about whether it was more beneficial to have close ties with U.S. and Canada or to work independently.[20][21]
Raúl Zibechi, writing for Mexico's center-left La Jornada newspaper said, "The creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States is part of a global and continental shift, characterized by the decline of U.S. hegemony and the rise of a group of regional blocs that form part of the new global balance."[22]
An editorial in Brazil's conservative Estadão newspaper said, "CELAC reflects the disorientation of the region's governments in relation to its problematic environment and its lack of foreign policy direction, locked as it is into the illusion that snubbing the United States will do for Latin American integration what 200 years of history failed to do."[18]
As the first summit was underway in December 2011 United States President Barack Obama's senior adviser on Latin America, Daniel Restrepo, informed reporters from Miami that the U.S. government would "watch and see what direction CELAC takes".[23]
CELAC Summits [ edit ]
Summits list [ edit ]
First summit [ edit ]
[31] ESO exhibition area at the CELAC–EU summit in Santiago
CELAC's inaugural summit was due to be held in mid-2011, but was postponed because of the ill-health of Hugo Chávez, president of the host nation, Venezuela. The summit was instead held on December 2 and 3, 2011 in Caracas.[32] It primarily focused on the global economic crisis and its effects on the region. Several leaders, including presidents Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Dilma Rousseff and Juan Manuel Santos, encouraged an increase in regional trade, economic development, and further economic cooperation among members in order to defend their growing economies.[20][21]
Chavez, and other leaders such as Rafael Correa and Daniel Ortega, expressed hope that the bloc would work to further Latin American integration, end U.S. hegemony and consolidate control over regional affairs.[20] Chavez, citing the Monroe Doctrine as the original confirmation of U.S. interference in the region, openly called for CELAC to replace the OAS: "As the years go by, CELAC is going to leave behind the old and worn-out OAS."[21] Correa called for a new human rights commission to replace the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Other leaders argued that the organisation should be used as a tool to resolve regional disagreements and uphold democratic values, but not as a replacement of the OAS.[20][21] Santos stated that he would like to see dialogue within the group over whether existing counter-drug regulations should be revised.[20] The president of the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino) said he expects that Parlatino will become the main legislative institution of CELAC.[33] Amongst the key issues on the agenda were the creation of a "new financial architecture," sanction for maintaining the legal status of coca in Bolivia and the rejection of the Cuban embargo by the U.S.[34]
2013 Summit – Chile [ edit ]
The EU-LAC chose CELAC to be the main organization representative of the relationship between European and Latin American and Caribbean countries. Therefore, the EU-LAC is now called the EU-CELAC.
2014 Summit – Cuba [ edit ]
During the summit, the region was declared a "peace zone". After three days and with the approval of participating representatives, a document with 83 focus points was created. It emphasized that, despite cultural and regional differences, unity between the participating countries is necessary in order to create progress. "Unity and the integration of our region must be gradually constructed, with flexibility, with respect to differences, diversity, and the sovereign right of each of our countries to choose our own forms of political and economic organization" stated the document. It also states which countries have been developing the best and how they are doing it in order for them to be a model for other countries.
The issue of poverty was widely discussed. Cuba's Raul Castro pointing out that throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, people want a fairer distribution of wealth, access to affordable education, employment, better salaries, and the eradication of illiteracy. He argued that CELAC countries can work together, support each other, to create new plans and solutions for these problems.[35]
2015 Summit – Costa Rica [ edit ]
Countries discussed plans to eradicate hunger by 2025. Venezuela would host a follow up meeting in late 2015 to review the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organizations plan for their region. They called for the U.S to stop meddling in regional affairs, for Puerto Rico to be able to participate in future summits, and for the embargo against Cuba to be lifted. Statements in support of Cuba and Venezuela were widely heard. CELAC rejected U.S. sanctions against Venezuela. It was decided that a monument would be built in memory of victims of the slave trade. Member countries also supported Argentina's right to the Falkland Islands and peace negotiations in Colombia.[36]
Indicators [ edit ]
The following table shows various data for CELAC member states, including area, population, economic output and income inequality, as well as various composite indices, including human development, viability of the state, rule of law, perception of corruption, economic freedom, state of peace, freedom of the press and democratic level.
a CELAC total used for indicators 1 through 3; CELAC weighted average used for indicator 4; CELAC unweighted average used for indicators 5 through 13.
CELAC total used for indicators 1 through 3; CELAC weighted average used for indicator 4; CELAC unweighted average used for indicators 5 through 13. b Data from CIA World Factbook for 2014.
Data from CIA World Factbook for 2014. c Data refer to 2014. Note: The colors indicate the country's global position in the respective indicator. For example, a green cell indicates that the country is ranked in the upper 25% of the list (including all countries with available data).
Highest quartile Upper-mid (3rd quartile) Lower-mid (2nd quartile) Lowest quartile
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]Not to dash any dreams here...
But... I believe those are slide-pads.. which I 'think' are some sort of flat resistor. I think the X and Y axis are combined into one single value reading. (similar to a drawing tablet)
Hacking these may not be easy, unless you have some sort of hardware encoder. Not sure.
Also, even when using mini-pots, Im pretty sure that the travel is still the same as a large pot. Meaning, you would still need to use gearing to have the correct resolution.
Making a Yoke full size is challenging enough... but making a mini yoke would be even more difficult. It has to be durable enough to widthstand a slamming... but, smaller gears means smaller & weaker diameter drive tubes.
Also, with smaller gears, means smaller teeth... which means that tolerances have to be VERY tight. If there is any loose play, a gear will slip and or chip/break. A good example of this is actually the older Arkanoid spinners. Almost all the used ones Ive seen are completely non-functional because of these very facts. Wear and vibration causing play... and then gears getting all jacked up. And an Arkanoid controller is fairly hard to jostle... vs... a Starwars yoke that gets Slammed around heavily and frequently.
Optical would be helpful with ultra high resolution encoders... IF... you could manage to have super precision in alignments, and IF you didnt have to worry about calibration. However, optical isnt good, because of the calibration issues.
And finally, you run into playability & comfort issues. The standard yokes handles are not actually that big... and fit the hands perfectly. If you make the handles too small, trying to control the thing will be very hard and awkward.
I think anything less than 3/4 traditional size is too small for good playability, with almost any controller type.La Paloma Candy and Grocery, at 1862 Lexington Avenue. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Dartunorro Clark
EAST HARLEM — A fearless bodega worker used a tangle of wires to whip a pepper mill-wielding attacker who tried to rob the store, police and the employee said.
Terrance Gilford, 40, walked into La Paloma Candy and Grocery at 1862 Lexington Ave. on March 1 around 11:35 p.m. and began threatening the employee, police and prosecutors said.
The cashier on duty at the time, Mar Qutaina, 29, said the suspect walked into the store while it had a line of several customers and approached his Plexiglass-protected counter demanding cash.
“He was like, 'I have a knife,’” Qutaina told DNAinfo New York.
“I didn’t believe him until he went over there with a knife and tried to break it,” he said, referring to a side door that leads behind the counter.
“He was like, ‘Gimme credit,” Qutaina continued. “I was surprised. I was like, 'what do you mean, gimme credit?'”
Video surveillance from the store shows Gildford pacing and then trying to push his way behind the counter. When he tried to climb over the counter, Qutaina said he used a braid of wires to whip him.
The suspect also had a pepper mill in his pocket that he used to strike the cashier on the hand, causing a cut, authorities said.
Qutaina said customer eventually called police, who arrived and arrested the would-be robber, who was found with the knife and pepper mill in his coat pocket, officials said.
He was charged with attempted robbery and criminal possession of a weapon. His was set at $7,500 cash and $15,000 bond.
His next court date is March 28.
Gilford’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Twitter’s Streaming API provides developers access to a global stream of tweet data. By setting up a persistant HTTP connection to one of the streaming endpoints you will be pushed tweets and other messages. There are some good posts and tutorials on the web about how to use the Streaming API, there are also libraries that you can use. But if you want to roll your own code there are several things you need to think about if you want to get it all right.
In this tutorial we will create a complete example of how to consume the public stream and getting all tweets that mentions the products iphone, ipad or ipod. We will connect to the stream using OAuth and deal with common errors and warnings.
Setting up the connection
Lets start with some code for setting up the connection:
import time import pycurl import urllib import json import oauth2 as oauth API_ENDPOINT_URL = 'https://stream.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/filter.json' USER_AGENT = 'TwitterStream 1.0' # This can be anything really # You need to replace these with your own values OAUTH_KEYS = {'consumer_key': <Consumer key>, 'consumer_secret': <Consumer secret>, 'access_token_key': <Token key>, 'access_token_secret': <Token secret>} # These values are posted when setting up the connection POST_PARAMS = {'include_entities': 0,'stall_warning': 'true', 'track': 'iphone,ipad,ipod'} class TwitterStream: def __init__(self): self.oauth_token = oauth.Token(key=OAUTH_KEYS['access_token_key |
Lamb put forward proposals for an independent commission to review the future of the NHS, citing experts who claimed there could be a £30bn gap in NHS funding by 2020.
Did Labour say anything?
Not prominently.
The UK-Saudi relationship
Tim Farron told the Independent:
It is time the Prime Minister came clean about whether the Government supported Saudi Arabia's election to the UN Human Rights Council.
(Picture: Carl Court/Getty Images)
It would make a utter mockery of the values we hold dear if they did support them. We must be stronger with our supposed allies and say that systematic abuses of human rights will not be tolerated. If the Government did support the Saudi bid - it would show once and for all that the Government puts profit above fundamental human rights.
Did Labour say anything?
The ‘memorandum of understanding’ – signed in September 2014 – tied the two countries into cooperating on judicial matters and Downing Street confirmed the cooperation continues, despite Mr Gove cancelling the Government’s £6m prison training contract with Saudi Arabia last October.
Threat to block cuts to Universal Credit in the House of Lords
Lib Dem peers plan to table an amendment which would repeal the Universal Credit (Work Allowance) Amendment regulations passed last year, during a debate on the Welfare Reform and Work Bill on Tuesday.
The amendment would derail cuts to universal credit, but would only affect new claimants.
It would also represent another showdown of late, between the House of Lords and the House of Commons.
Did Labour say anything?
No, however Lib Dem sources told the Mirror they were confident Labour and crossbench peers would back the bid.
The'sexed up' letter released by NHS England about junior doctors
It revealed a controversial letter, signed by the NHS’s top “independent” medic, which questioned whether striking junior doctors would be available in the event of a Paris-style terror attack, had been backed and signed off by Whitehall officials.
Emails between senior Department of Health staff and professor Bruce Keogh, the Medical Director of the independent body NHS England, showed that Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, was given approval on the text of the letter.
It was revised a number of times to ensure concerns about the possible impact of a major incident during the strike were made as “hard-edged” as possible.
After the letter was made public, three thousand medics wrote to Keogh accusing him of using fears of a terror attack for “political purposes”.
Did Labour say anything?
Labour health spokesman Justin Madders said:
The NHS is clearly under growing pressure this winter. Hospitals are dangerously full, patients are waiting hours in A&E and some hospital bosses have had no choice but to close their doors in order to cope.
North Korea announcing H bomb detonation
An earthquake occurred near the country's Punggye-ri nuclear test site at around 10am local time.
State-run television then announced a hydrogen bomb test had been a "complete success".
Did Labour say anything?
Hilary Benn MP, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, said:
There is still uncertainty about exactly what has happened but, if verified, the nuclear test carried out by North Korea represents a clear violation of numerous UN Security Council Resolutions and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.
Calls for RAF food drop into the besieged city of Madaya
(Picture: Getty Images)
The Syrian town of Madaya is currently blockaded by the Assad government.
On 8 January, Lord Ashdown and Labour MP Jo Cox, a former head of policy for Oxfam, said the UN was not being firm enough in getting aid to the starving families.
The letter read:
We find it astonishing that so little has been done by the international community to break these sieges when life-saving medical and food aid are often only minutes away. We urge you to push the UN, in particular the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, to be far bolder in its aid delivery and stop asking unnecessary permission from the Syrian government.
The government said that the images of starving children are “heart-rending” and funding for more aid to Syrian refugees will be secured at a London conference next month.
For the starving and dying of Madaya, next month is a very long time.
Did Labour say anything?Kathleen Sebelius and Presdent Obama have their work cut out for them. Next up: ACA worst-case scenario?
Enrollment surge or no enrollment surge, the next Obamacare challenge is a big one: How will the White House make sure all those people with canceled policies get new coverage by Jan. 1?
At the rate the signups are going — even with the speedier, newly functioning Obamacare website — the administration has a vast distance to travel before the estimated 4 to 5 million people with canceled policies get new health coverage.
Story Continued Below
In fact, health care experts say, it’s not out of the question that the Obama administration could face the worst-case scenario on Jan. 1: the number of uninsured Americans actually goes up.
( Also on POLITICO: White House aims to build on HealthCare.gov’s numbers)
That’s a long shot, and there are plenty of reasons why it might not happen, since there are other ways those people could replace their health coverage, like signing up directly with insurers. Not all of the policies will expire in December. And even if the ranks of the uninsured did increase, it could be such a brief event that no one would ever be able to confirm it.
But even with all the variables, one thing is for certain: the Obama administration has one seriously long road to travel from the signups it has now to the number who will likely need to replace their coverage. That’s a bad place to be, given that the point of the law was to cover more people, not fewer people.
“It’s hard to know [the outcome], but it’s hard to see how it’s not a heavy lift given the numbers,” said Gail Wilensky, who ran the Medicare agency under the first President George Bush.
( Driving the Day in 90 seconds: Democrats excited about health care again)
Ron Pollack of Families USA believes the “overwhelming majority” of people with canceled policies will be able to replace it. But even Pollack, one of the law’s most vocal supporters, concedes: “That does not mean 100 percent, because you never get 100 percent.”
Administration officials say they’re not concerned. The new, improved website can handle 800,000 visitors a day, they say, which allows plenty of capacity to help all of the people who need to replace their coverage — if they use the federal website. And some, though not all, will be able to extend their current health insurance now that the administration is allowing insurers to offer that option.
“Anyone who selects a plan by Dec 23 and pays by the date set by the insurer will have coverage by Jan. 1. The site can now handle at least 800,000 visitors a day and is stable,” said Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.
( WATCH: Health care: What Obama said, why it mattered)
“We are seeing consumers apply and enroll in coverage, and expect enrollment to increase given all of the technical improvements we have made to the site. Additionally, [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] is reaching out to consumers who may be having difficulty to help them with next steps,” Peters said.
The most likely outcome is that some people will get coverage through the health insurance exchanges, some will get it directly through their old insurers, and some will get extensions on their old health insurance. All of the dominoes would have to fall the wrong way for the number of uninsured people to go up.
But if there’s one thing the health care rollout has specialized in so far, it’s dominoes falling the wrong way. That’s why health care experts can’t rule it out. And even a small number of people who can’t replace their coverage — and end up uninsured on Jan. 1 — would send Obamacare right back into P.R. hell.
( See POLITICO's full Obamacare coverage)
The math, roughly, works like this. During the slow, balky month of October, 106,000 people selected health coverage through the federal HealthCare.gov enrollment site and the state websites, according to administration estimates. Another 400,000 were determined to be eligible for Medicaid. Add to that the 100,000 or so who signed up through HealthCare.gov alone in November, according to Bloomberg — assuming that number is at least in the ballpark — and the surges in state enrollment that are still being tallied.
And the enrollment does seem to be taking off on HealthCare.gov since the relaunch this weekend, as POLITICO reported that 29,000 people signed up on Sunday and Monday alone.
But by the best insurance industry estimates, as many as 4 million to 5 million people have gotten cancellation notices because their individual health insurance doesn’t meet Obamacare standards — meaning they’ll have to replace their health coverage. Even if the new, post-repair rate of signups continued at the faster pace, HealthCare.gov — the enrollment site that covers 36 states — would still be lucky to enroll 450,000 people by the end of December.
That pace certainly could speed up, and could even take off rapidly. It’s still early December, after all, the site has just been relaunched, and a lot of people who have just been browsing health plans may wait until later in the month to sign up. And not everyone who needs Obamacare coverage will use the federal website — some will use the state websites that are being run by 14 states and the District of Columbia.Former President Barack Obama returned to Chicago Tuesday to join mayors from around the world at a summit addressing concerns about climate change.The gathering was part of the North American Climate Summit hosted by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. It's the first of the kind for the city."2015 was the warmest year on record until 2016 became the warmest on record. That what that tells us the climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it," Obama said. "And that's why I made climate change a priority while I was president."President Obama signed the Paris Agreement, in which countries committed to reducing emissions and increasing the use of renewable and sustainable energy sources, on Earth Day in 2016 and formally joined the agreement in September of 2016.President Donald Trump said in June that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.Chicago's efforts to retrofit buildings, both public and private, by improving heating systems and using more energy efficient lighting to reduce consumption and save money won the city an award from an organization funded by Michael Bloomberg.Tuesday Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo joined Emanuel and another 50 mayors from around the world in signing the Chicago Charter, their commitment to the tenets of the Paris Agreement."The Chicago Charter that we all signed today are specific plans for how we get to 2025. And we can't afford the leadership out of President Trump that has been AWOL on this issue. Can't afford it," Emanuel said.The mayors said they are taking steps because they believe it's the right thing to do, even if the leadership won't come from Washington. There was also a message for President Trump from north of the border."The President of the United States needs to listen to the mayors of the U.S. who lead all these cities and communities who are taking a stand on behalf of a viable future and creating great economic opportunity in that process," said Gregor Robertson, Mayor of Vancouver.Obama praised the mayors and encouraged them to continue their efforts."As a consequence of you seeing meaningful impacts in your own cities and you realizing that you are part of a broader movement, that that inspires you to bolder and bolder work, and that in turn, I think, can inspire a country. And that will inspire the world. So thank you very much for your outstanding work. God bless you," Obama said.The former president called climate change a generational issue, and highlighted the importance of each city knowing what their own issues are.Mayor Emanuel wrapped up the day saying the summit represented a way of solving a global challenge in a local way.As we get closer to Christmas, you’ll be able to find more and more themed maker projects like this Beholder Christmas tree topper, which is 3D printed.
Maker and game dev Erik Beyer is to thank for this festive take on the classic Dungeons & Dragons monster.
When we spoke to Beyer he told us that modelling the print took him around six hours in Maya. The bulbous Beholder had to be sliced down the middle to make printing possible, and the eye stalks presented a problem, needing to be thick enough to survive the slicing process.
Printing of both sides took around 12 hours, resulting in an ornament 5 inches high, 5.5 inches wide, and 3.5 inches deep (12.7 x 13.9 x 8.8 centimetres).
Most of the colour here comes from the green filament it was printed in. The white details for the eyes and teeth were done with white-out, and the different colours inside of the eyes are simple Sharpie markings.
To make your own, start with the free files hosted on Thingiverse. You’ll notice that the main eye is hollow, which is an intentional choice to allow the Christmas tree lights to shine through, giving your Beholder a more menacing look.Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
– Katharina, the shrew from The Taming of same.
Hey, I didn’t say it; she did. Well, okay. She’s fictional. Actually, Shakespeare said it. Alright, well, he didn’t “say” it; he wrote it. And no, I don’t believe that women should be subservient to men, although I hereby give license to all my earthly enemies to try and make it look like I do.
A modern woman may read the above lines, see the words “thy lord… thy keeper,/Thy head, thy sovereign” without being able to see further, and consequently join the feminist cry of “Patriarchy!” However, it should be clear to the intelligent reader (whose sex shall remain anonymous) that the main portion of the above quote, indeed, of the entire monologue, deals with making the simple mental effort – one that appears to be beyond the scope of a great many modern women – to remember what men actually do when they’re not harassing, raping, or otherwise lording over their women.
I believe that one of the major contributing factors in modern-day social ills has to do with subdividing the community, something which I hope to delve into in later articles. Subdivision against one’s will, as in sending boys and girls to a school where they don’t want to be, sending Dad and Mom on long commutes miles away from the house, and continuing this process ad infinitum across the human community, means ultimately that we will all be certain to know each other a great deal less. The one we’re most surely to know the least is the taller, heavier, hairier, bass-resonant creature, trained in keeping his emotions to himself and communicating only when necessary. Suddenly, everything he does, all that “painful labour,” becomes ephemeral and unimportant, since it happens far away from the senses and thought processes of the beneficiaries.
This is, I believe, at least part of what led to a silly poll I saw at the gym on one of those women’s shows. I don’t know if it was “The View” or one of the others. (To me, they’re all “The View.”) Based on the poll I saw, I can tell you that “the view” is looking bleaker, if not stupider. The poll simply stated: “Do women need men?” 40% responded “Yes,” and a full 60% responded “No.”
It’s become so routine for me to hear cultural misandry and feminist-infused cultural doctrine that I was prepared to wave this off like so many shit-obsessed flies. Then something amazing happened on one of the other TV screens. The poll, it seems, was displayed on “The View” at the same time that an all-news station was reporting more than 100 earthquakes throughout Southern California the previous day. No major, stop-the-presses quakes. Apparently, these sorts of small quakes are quite normal in that part of the world, but so many in a 24-hour period was considered newsworthy. The televised report went on to mention that a great many water and gas lines were ruptured during the quake. That’s where the idiotic 60% need to be directed, I thought. Do women need men? Well, ladies, you do if you want your Southern Californian water and gas turned back on. Would you like to know why?
Because you never, ever, ever see women fixing the water and gas lines. When you do, it’s an anomaly. Anyone who dares shout “Patriarchy!” at this should be aware that Betty Friedan wasn’t looking out her suburban living room window pining to dig in the dirt with the construction boys. As far as water and gas lines are concerned, women have never had to be. All they have ever had to be, as Shakespeare pointed out centuries ago, is grateful.
60% of these “View”-watching, heavily subdivided layabouts have forgotten how to express any gratitude at all, apparently. That “60%” was displayed on a pixilated television screen that was conceived and designed by many men, from older television screens that were conceived and designed by men now deceased. The characters 6, 0, and % were chosen out of innumerable visual aids available on modern computers, all of which were conceived and designed by men. The raw materials requisite to make every single machine that displayed that “60%”; the rockets that propel the satellites into space; the satellite dishes; the cables that connect those dishes to those televisions; the electrical power to make the machines work; the cameras that recorded that women’s program; the lights that lit the set; the set; everything, everything, everything the women – enjoying the program from home or starring in it – participate in and gab about incessantly has something to do with some man somewhere first figuring it out, then standing “To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,/Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe”; yet that is as nothing to millions of unthinking participants.
A stupid, thoughtless, pointless poll like that can be easily displayed on one television screen while a report on an accompanying screen merely implies the fact – the undeniable fact – that it’s going to be “blue collar” boys out in the California heat making certain that water and gas are restored to the creatures who don’t need them. The men, I meant; not the water and gas. Hell, we need water and gas.
Much of my problem with the poll actually lies with using the word “need.” As I have pointed out elsewhere, all needs are based on desires. Therefore, whenever we use the word “need” we should make every effort to remember that somewhere, however loosely connected, we are implying some sort of desire. I would like to ask the poll-takers what the lack of desire is behind that lack of “need.”
Regardless, I would have to agree with the 60% and say, “No,” women don’t need men. But my interpretation of the question is undoubtedly too broad for the poll-takers, and too literal. You see, it all depends on what you want. What do women typically want from men? Let’s list the personal wants first:
Sex
Procreation
Companionship
Physical protection
Financial resources
Wisdom
Division of labor
Stability
If you’ve got yourself a man, new or used model, then you undoubtedly have some combination of the above. Subtract physical protection and financial resources, and the man will most likely have some combination of the remainder in his association with you. Well done, if that’s what you want, or if you want anything at all.
But there’s a community outside your front door. Your sense of it, due to its subdivided nature, may be muted, but it’s there, whether you want (need?) to think about it or not. Do you want (need?) to be able to walk out your front door not only feeling safe and secure, but also feeling engaged in your community to some extent? Then let’s expand the list further:
Physical protection within and without the community
Division of labor at the macro level
Paved, relatively flat surfaces for travel
Electrical power
Shelter
Consumer goods
Communication capability
Transportation vehicles
Regular food supply
Access to and ability with various natural resources for furtherance of the above
If you’ve got yourself a herd of males, then you most definitely have some greater combination of the above than you apparently ever even bother to think about. If, of course, that’s what you wanted, way back when you said you didn’t need men.
Unless you’re a hermit. Are you a hermit? Then for all of the above in both lists, the answer is “No.” You, as a hermit, don’t need a man to _____. Enjoy your newfound freedom as a hermit (or is it “hermitess”?). In fact, here’s a list of things you’ll “need” in your life without men. For all those who would accuse me of misogyny, I hope that my affirmations below of women’s magnificent abilities will dispel those arguments:
Women know how to make fire.
Women know how to hunt.
Women know how to fish.
Women know how to skin dead animals.
Women know how to make tools from rocks.
Women know metallurgy.
Women know carpentry.
Women know how to pour concrete.
Women know how to read.
Women with natural leadership ability can help coordinate the other hermitesses to get all of the above done.
If any individual woman does not know how to do one or more of the above, she can quickly learn, because she has a human brain.
If, ladies, that is how you wish to live, without men as any sort of necessity, then go to it. I myself have never hunted, am quickly bored with fishing, and skinning anything is beyond my ability to stomach. Furthermore, if I can’t light it with a match or a lighter, then that fire is going to remain unlit. Therefore, beyond my feeble abilities at a handful of the above, I am also quite lazy. I see that list and can think of not one single thing I want to do very much, and certainly not on a daily, do-or-die basis. I’m pretty sure that most female readers feel the same, unless there’s an avid hunter or fisher among them.
We could call up the hunter, e-mail the fisher, find a carpentress, get a book on pouring concrete, and start making lists, ladies. We could do it. But think about it: How many of you really, really want to? Furthermore, hunters and fishers eventually like to go back to the hunting cabin to turn on the electric light and play cards. It is in that precise moment that a little gratitude ought to be in order, or you can forget about cabins, electric lights, and printed playing cards.
Because, you see, this far after Betty Friedan’s righteous anger and the Second Wave, women aren’t flocking to the occupations required for the backbone of civilization to remain aligned and sturdy. Men fill these occupations, and only in part because it’s expected. I seriously doubt that many construction workers would really want to leave that work behind to crochet or knit. Construction work is not pleasant work, but there is the camaraderie, the paycheck, the chance to be outside on a nice day (or a horrible one), the opportunity to build and maintain muscle, the methodical and pleasing effect it can have on the thought process, etc. You also get to build something, which is cool.
This many decades after “NOW! My Body, My Choice! Take Back the Night! Slut Walk!” and the like, if a group of women actually built something straight from the raw materials all the way to the gables on the roof without a single man’s assistance, two things would happen: 1) We’d fail to acknowledge that what they accomplished was due not only to moxie, but to the information provided by men who had previously accomplished something similar; and 2) We’d have to have a big, big celebration that everyone who’s anyone would have to find out about and participate in; and which would eventually become a national holiday and a staple of Women’s Herstory Month. Otherwise, “Patriarchy!”
If civilization is what you want, then men are what you need. Nature is fun until you have to rely on nature for survival. If you do not wish to do that, and you’re the sort of woman who wants a high-powered job to feel fulfilled as a woman or a human being or whatever, all you will ever do is that which so much of the rest of humanity, including me, does: You will climb a set of stairs built on the backs of men. The only difference is that it is you, not I, who claims not to need them.
It is unconscionable for a woman to stand and proclaim “The End of Men” in a studio built by men, with cameras invented, maintained, and improved upon by men, connected to power sources that are kept running by men, all the while using a language hammered out and spun to dizzying heights by the thoughtful processes of countless male writers. It is equally dumb to flash a silly poll denigrating everything that makes knowledge of the poll results possible to millions, and expect us all to laugh heartily along.
Think about it: A worker for “The View” picks up a headset designed by a man, connected to a computer fixed by the IT guy, and sends a ring signal out of the building built by “blue collar” butt cracks, into the home or the very pocket of the poll voter. Throughout this process, one sex has most definitely been required to be not only present, but physically and mentally active to a high degree, in order for 60% to completely ignore that same sex, and we’re not talking about ignoring women.
Now for the bit that ought to sober any female reader. Let’s look at what men typically want (need?) from women on a personal basis:
Sex
Procreation
Companionship
Wisdom
Division of labor
Stability
Not too much different from what women usually want from men. But what will men require of women if they want community, or civilization itself? It’s an exhaustive list, but here we go:
Thank God you’re still wanted, ladies.
In spite of the fact that she’s female, it seems that every gay man alive wants Judy Garland. She belted out a torch song in “A Star is Born,” a song that, in my opinion, simply torches all other torch songs. Her soon-to-be mentor and suitor, Norman Maine, played by James Mason, walks into a dimly lit, low-ceilinged nightclub, where he watches Esther Blodgett (Garland), surrounded by male musicians moving rather seductively to the rhythm, in a highly sexually charged scene, singing a song about “The Man That Got Away.” It’s a fantastic film and an electric song. It was probably composed with Garland in mind. (Boy oh boy, is that how she sings it!) The movie mainly concerns the rise to stardom of Blodgett (who is turned into Vicki Lester by her brilliant husband), due only in part to her extraordinary talent as an entertainer. Mostly, it was due to Maine’s tireless efforts, in spite of his faded career, depression and alcoholism. The movie ends tragically, but there, to an expectant crowd of admirers in a theater, Vicki meekly steps up to the mike to tell it like it is:
“Hello, everybody. This is Mrs. Norman Maine.”
With a single song and a single line, Judy says it all.After again a great response, we proudly present the winners of the TrancePodium Awards 2013! Congratulations to all of you!
Global Awards 2013
Best DJ
Previous winners:
2008: Markus Schulz
2009: Markus Schulz
2010: Markus Schulz
2011: Armin van Buuren
2012: Armin van Buuren
Best Producer
Previous winners:
2008: Leon Bolier / Sied van Riel / Daniel Kandi
2009: Gareth Emery
2010: Arty
2011: Armin van Buuren
2012: Armin van Buuren
Best Vocalist(e)
Previous winners:
2011: Emma Hewitt
2012: Emma Hewitt
Best Newcomer
Previous winners:
2008: Sied van Riel / Akesson
2009: Jorn van Deynhoven / Ashley Walbridge
2010: Arty
2011: Arty
2012: Andrew Rayel
Best Track
Previous winners:
2008: Ferry Corsten - Made Of Love / Simon Pattersson - Us / Akesson - Perfect Blue
2009: Gaia - Tuvan
2010: Bart Claessen - Hartseer
2011: Menno de Jong - Turtle Paradise
2012: Gaia - J'ai Envie De Toi
Best Remix
Previous winners:
2008: Paul van Dyk & The Starkillers & Austin Leeds feat. Ashley Tomberlin - New York City (Super8 & Tab Remix) / Offer Nissim - For Your Love (Sied van Riel Remix)
2009: Bobina - Invisible Touch (Ferry Corsten's Touch) / Ferry Corsten - Shelter Me (Rafaël Frost Remix) / Ram - RAMsterdam (Jorn van Deynhoven Remix)
2010: Faithless - Tweak Your Nipple (Tiësto Remix)
2011: Massive Attack - Teardrop (Bart Claessen & Tom Fall Bootleg)
2012: Zedd feat. Matthew Koma - Spectrum (Armin van Buuren Remix)
Best Mashup
Previous winners:
2009: OceanLab vs. Gareth Emery - On A Metropolis Day (Myon & Shane 54 Mashup)
2010: Sophie Sugar vs. Sunlounger feat. Zara - Lost Together (Armin van Buuren Mashup)
2011: Sander van Doorn vs. Afrojack & R3hab - Koko Prutata (First State Mashup)
2012: Mark Burton vs. Sunlounger feat. Zara Taylor - Try Understatement To Be Love (Armin van Buuren Mashup)
Best Artist Album
Previous winners:
2008: Ferry Corsten - Twice In A Blue Moon
2009: Tiësto - Kaleidoscope
2010: Armin van Buuren - Mirage
2011: W&W - Impact
2012: Markus Schulz - Scream
Best Mix Compilation Album
Previous winners:
2008: Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance 2008
2009: Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance 2009
2010: Ferry Corsten - Once Upon A Night
2011: Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance 2011
2012: Armin van Buuren - Universal Religion Chapter 6
Best Radioshow/Podcast/Cloudcast
Previous winners:
2008: Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance
2009: Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance
2010: Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance
2011: Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance
2012: Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance
Best Liveset
Previous winners:
2008: Menno de Jong @ Menno Solo (Amsterdam)
2009: Armin van Buuren @ ASOT 400 (Rotterdam)
2010: Menno de Jong @ ASOT 450 (New York) [02.04.2010]
2011: Menno de Jong @ Menno Solo (Bloemendaal) [18.06.2011]
2012: Markus Schulz @ Los Angeles ’12 Release Party (Los Angeles) [19.02.2012]
Best Studiomix
Previous winners:
2008: Armin van Buuren - A State Of Trance 350
2009: Menno de Jong - Intuition Podcast 14 (Yearmix 2008) / Tiësto - Club Life 100
2010: Menno de Jong - Intuition Radio Show 203 (Classics Part 3) / Ferry Corsten - Trance Podium 4th Anniversary Celebration
2011: Ferry Corsten - Trance Podium 5th Anniversary Celebration
2012: Menno de Jong - TrancePodium 6th Anniversary Celebration
Best Event
Previous winners:
2008: Armin Only (Utrecht)
2009: A State Of Trance 400 (Rotterdam)
2010: A State Of Trance 450 (New York)
2011: Luminosity Beach Festival (Zandvoort)
2012: A State Of Trance 550 (Den Bosch)
Best Radiostation
Previous winners:
2008: Digitally Imported
2009: Digitally Imported
2010: Digitally Imported
2011: AfterHours.fm / Digitally Imported
2012: AfterHours.fm
Best Label
Previous winners:
2008: Armada Music
2009: Armada Music
2010: Armada Music
2011: Armada Music
2012: Armada Music
Community Awards 2013
Best TrancePodium Member
Previous winners:
2008: Marjan
2009: Remco
2010: Remco
2011: Remco
2012: Remco
Favorite TrancePodium Member
Previous winners:
2008: Remco
2009: Remco
2010: Remco
2011: Remco
2012: Remco
Best Staff Member
Previous winners:
2008: Remco
2009: Remco
2010: Remco
2011: Remco
2012: Remco
Best Newcomer
Previous winners:
2008: vera
2009: Semir
2010: trancen2heaven
2011: UbuntuElphie
2012: Benson
Best DJ/producer
Previous winners:
2008: Ben
2009: Ben
2010: R33
2011: Semir
2012: Semir
Best Track
Previous winners:
2008: Ex-Driver vs. Ben Parker - Turbulence
2009: Ben Parker - Sylva
2010: Nery - Redawn
2011: DJ Ranz - Katakana
2012: DJ Ranz - そらのうた (Sora No Uta)
Best Studiomix
Previous winners:
2008: Ben Parker - TrancePodium 2nd Anniversary Celebration
2009: Green Octopus - TrancePodium 3rd Anniversary Celebration
2010: Swaveto pres. Mr. White - TrancePodium 4th Anniversary Celebration
2011: Semir - Menno de Jong vs. Leon Bolier
2012: R33 - TrancePodium 6th Anniversary
Best Discussion Topic
Previous winners:
2008: TrancePodium 2nd anniversary - Marjan
2009: A State Of Trance 400 with Armin van Buuren (ASOT 400) [16.04.2009] - Marjan
2010: Future Classics - Shadowman
2011: TrancePodium 5th Anniversary - Remco
2011: TrancePodium 6th Anniversary - Remco
Funniest Topic
Previous winners:
2010: Funny Clips Topic - Semir
2011: New Bart Claessen arcade game (+8bit "Fantomah") - "Party Hard With Bart"! - whois
2012: This video will completely change the way you listen to music! - DJRANZ(Reuters) - Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and his employer have made payouts totaling about $13 million to five women to settle claims of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
FILE PHOTO - Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly poses on the set of his show "The O'Reilly Factor" in New York March 17, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
O’Reilly said in a statement that he has been unfairly targeted because of his public prominence.
“In my more than 20 years at Fox News Channel, no one has ever filed a complaint about me with the Human Resources Department, even on the anonymous hotline.” O’Reilly, host of “The O’Reilly Factor,” the network’s biggest star, added, “I have put to rest any controversies to spare my children.”
Fox News declined to comment.
“While he denies the merits of these claims, Mr. O’Reilly has resolved those he regarded as his personal responsibility,” Twenty-First Century Fox Inc, the parent company of Fox News, said in a statement. “Mr. O’Reilly is fully committed to supporting our efforts to improve the environment for all our employees at Fox News.”
The report follows heightened scrutiny of the workplace climate at Fox News, the top-rated cable news network and unit of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. Founding Chairman Roger Ailes left the company last year after sexual harassment allegations.
The five women who have received settlements either worked for O’Reilly or appeared as guests on his program, the New York Times reported. Two of the five settlements were previously known.
The largest settlement was a payout of $9 million in a sexual harassment lawsuit former Fox News producer Andrea Mackris brought against O’Reilly in 2004, according to the New York Times.
Two settlements were reached last year after Ailes’ departure, the newspaper said.
Fox News anchor Laurie Dhue accused O’Reilly and Ailes of harassing her, but not sexually, and Juliet Huddy, a regular guest on O’Reilly’s show, accused O’Reilly of pursuing a sexual relationship with her and trying to hamper her career after she rejected his advances, the newspaper reported.
Attorneys for Mackris, Dhue and Huddy did not respond immediately to calls seeking comment.
Fox News last year agreed to pay $20 million to settle a harassment suit by former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson on behalf of Ailes, who denied any wrongdoing."PS90" redirects here. For the Russian aircraft engine, see Aviadvigatel PS- |
on the Trump campaign to his friend Deripaska. We didn’t know that Manafort would engineer the removal of the so-called “Russia plank,” which was critical of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, from the Republican party platform at their July convention. We didn’t know that Manafort and Gates had received as much as $75 million from their various business contacts in Ukraine and Russia and had been laundering that money through front-companies and banks in Cyprus.
We didn’t know that in early March, a 30 year old “energy consultant” by the name of George Papadopoulos was named by Jeff Sessions to Trump’s foreign policy advisory council, along with another “energy consultant” specializing in Russian oil and gas deals by the name of Carter Page. We didn’t know that Carter Page had been recruited in 2013 in New York by a Russian spy named Victor Podobnyy, who was recorded by the FBI telling another Russian spy, Igor Sporyshev, about a meeting he had with Page concerning the Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom: “I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am,” Podobnyy said. “He got hooked on Gazprom thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up.” Podobnyy and Sporyshev fled the United States to avoid espionage charges. Another Russian spy, Evgeny Buryakov was convicted and sent to Federal prison by New York U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who Trump fired from his job soon after he took office.
We didn’t know that after he joined the Trump campaign team, Papadopoulos would run into a London-based “Professor” by the name of Joseph Mifsud in Italy. We didn’t know that this obvious agent of Russian intelligence calling himself “Professor” Mifsud would show great interest in young Papadopoulos as soon as he learned he was part of the Trump campaign. We didn’t know that in late March, Papadopoulos would be introduced by Mifsud to a Russian woman he described as a “niece” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. We didn’t know that Mifsud would introduce Papadopoulos to another Russian who had close ties to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, and that Papadopoulos would, with the knowledge of the Trump campaign, try try to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. We didn’t know that over breakfast in London, Mifsud would tell Papadopoulos he knew some Russians who had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton and thousands of her emails. We wouldn’t know until July 22 what those emails contained, when WikiLeaks released them in an attack on Clinton’s candidacy for president.
We didn’t know that senior campaign officials told Papadopoulos to go ahead and set up a trip to Russia for a “low level” campaign official or to travel there himself. We didn’t know that the other Russia-connected foreign policy adviser to Trump, Carter Page, (according to an interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC) would be copied on the email exchanges within the Trump campaign, and that Page would take just such a trip to Russia in July to give a speech to the New Economic School, where he would be reported to have met with Igor Sechin, the Russian oligarch close to Putin who is the head of the Russian state oil company Roseneft. We didn’t know that the FBI and U.S. intelligence were so shocked by Page’s behavior in Moscow that they would open a counterintelligence investigation of him and obtain a FISA warrant in an attempt to learn about his contacts with Russian government officials.
We didn’t know that on June 9, a meeting would take place at the Trump Tower headquarters of the Trump campaign between Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and four Russians who had been advertised as having negative information to share with them on Hillary Clinton. We didn’t know that one of the Russians at the meeting would be a lawyer by the name of Natalia Veselnitskaya, and that she would present a memo to the assembled Trump campaign officials that contained language about Russian sanctions that Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, had shared with California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher two months previously.
We didn’t know that members of the Trump campaign, including Campaign manager Manafort and chief foreign policy adviser Jeff Sessions, would attend an event at the Republican National Convention and meet with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the first of a series of contacts between the Trump campaign and transition staff and Kislyak that would extend through the end of 2016 and into 2017.
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In fact, way back in March, April, May, June, and July of last year, we didn’t know a thing about all of these contacts between members of Trump’s campaign and so many Russian citizens. We also didn’t know that not once did anyone from the Trump campaign pick up the phone and call the FBI and report that Russians were offering them material they had stolen from the Democrats.
We didn’t know any of this stuff about the Trump campaign and Russians last year, here is what Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller knows this year.
He knows what’s in the tax returns of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, because he’s seen them. If Mueller suspects anyone else of money laundering, he will subpoena their tax returns and examine them, too.
There was nothing in the charges against Papadopoulos about who he told about the “dirt” and “thousands of emails” the Russians had on Hillary Clinton. But Mueller knows the names of those in the Trump campaign Papadopoulos told about the stolen emails, because the former Trump foreign policy advisor is cooperating with him.
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Donald Trump Jr. described the meeting with Russians at Trump Tower as “such nothing... a wasted 20 minutes.” Jared Kushner claimed he was so bored he got up and left early. Campaign manager Manafort claimed he just ducked into the meeting as a courtesy. But Special Prosecutor Mueller knows why the meeting was a bust. Everyone from the Trump campaign already knew the Russians had the Democrat’s emails because Papadopoulos had told them. They knew the Clinton and Podesta emails would soon be released. They took the meeting with the Russians because they were looking for new dirt on Hillary. Mueller knows they quickly brought the meeting to a close because the dirt they were being offered wasn’t new.
Mueller knows that the claims by Trump that there was “no collusion” are hollow because he already has evidence of that collusion and the crimes that flow from it. He knows that Papadopoulos informed the Trump campaign about the emails Russia stole from the Democratic Party. He has a long list of the dozens of times Trump talked about the stolen emails in his campaign. Mueller knows what crimes were committed as a result of this collusion, and he is looking to prosecute somebody for them.
Mueller knows that charging Manafort and Gates with serious crimes that carry sentences of 20 years in Federal prison will incentivize them to reveal what they know about the Trump campaign’s connection to Russians. Mueller knows that announcing the deal he made with Papadopoulos will send a signal to all of those named and not named by Papadopoulos that he is coming after them, and he’s serious.
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Mueller knows the contents of all of the other documents he has subpoenaed so far. Mueller knows what was said in the interviews with other witnesses he has conducted. And he knows the answer to the biggest question of them all. He knows why he didn’t charge Michael Flynn.
There are only two reasons Mueller didn’t charge Michael Flynn on Monday. The first is that he hasn’t finished with his investigation and he’s going to charge him at some point in the future. The second is, like he did with Papadopoulos, he has already arrested Flynn, charged him and made a plea deal. It’s known that Flynn failed to register as a lobbyist for foreign powers, a charge that Mueller has already brought against Manafort and Gates. It’s known that at the time Sally Yates reported him to the White House for lying to the Vice President about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Flynn lied to the FBI, a charge Mueller has already brought against Papadopoulos.
Michael Flynn spent more time with candidate Trump last year than anyone. Michael Flynn was the cut-out Trump used to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Michael Flynn was in the meeting at Trump Tower between Jared Kushner, Kislyak, and Sergey Gorkov, the head Vnesheconombank, the Russian state bank currently under U.S. sanctions. Michael Flynn knows everything there is to know about Trump and the Russians.
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I think Special Counsel Mueller already knows what Michael Flynn knows. When it comes to Trump and the Russians, Robert Mueller knows what happened.The second round certainly wasn’t easy for either team, as they both were pushed to the limit in a pair of exciting seven game series. Ultimately though, the Chicago Blackhawks prevailed over Detroit Red Wings, and the Los Angeles Kings outlasted the San Jose Sharks to give us a Western Conference Final between the two best teams in the Conference over the last 14 months.
The story line here is simple, the defending Stanley Cup Champion Kings are back in the final four. They are once again riding their tough, physical, grind it out style of play, and the outstanding goaltending of last years Conn Smythe Trophy Winner in Jonathan Quick to have gotten this far. At 16-4 in last year’s playoffs the Kings were a juggernaut, and while their 8-5 record isn’t quite as impressive this year, they are getting the job done, and any time you face the defending Champs you can expect to be facing a big time challenge.
Waiting for them at the United Centre in Chicago for Game 1, is the NHL’s best team this season, the President’s Trophy winning Chicago Blackhawks. The team that started the season with an incredible 24 game run of not losing a single game in regulation. Oh, and lets not forget the fact that said streak started in Los Angeles, where the Hawks spoiled the Kings banner raising party on the opening night of the season.
As the 2010 and 2012 Stanley Cup Champions, these teams both feature a ton of playoff experience. They both have been through the wars, and both teams know what it will take to win 8 more games this year, and hoist Lord Stanley’s famous mug. In this way, there really is no underdog. Its the hockey equivalent of Frazier vs Ali, two top notch heavyweights going toe-to-toe, and what a series we are in for.
On the Blackhawk side of things, they come in despite some disappointing performances from some of their stars thus far. Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane have combined for just 3 goals in 12 playoff games for the Hawks, while Brent Seabrook had just 1 point and was a -6 before becoming the game 7 overtime hero vs Detroit. While Patrick Sharp, Marian Hossa, and Duncan Keith are providing the production that the Hawks have come to expect from them the rest of the core pieces must start to step up. In a pleasant surprise, Bryan Bickell is second on the team with 5 playoff goals so far.
Scoring against the Kings will not be easy. The rugged and talented defence doesn’t give up that many prime scoring opportunities, and even when they do, they are backstopped by a guy who is arguably the NHL’s best goalie right now. Quick’s playoff numbers are out of this world good. He leads the playoffs in goals-against average (1.50), save percentage (.948) and shutouts (three). His numbers show great consistency, but the reality is Quick has not only been steady, he’s also been spectacular. The spectacular was highlighted in game 7 vs San Jose and can be seen in his remarkable split pad save against the Sharks’ Logan Couture and his diving save on Joe Pavelski late in the third period that preserved the victory. No goalie is playing better in these playoffs, and the Hawks must find a way to solve Quick if they have any hope of winning the series.
Meanwhile the Kings offence in the playoffs has been sputtering along. The team has scored 26 goals in 13 playoff games. Consider the fact that one of those goals was an empty netter, and you have a pop-gun offence that is putting up less than 2 goals per game in this years playoffs. This is the big difference between the juggernaut kings of last year’s playoffs who were scoring nearly a full goal more per game (2.85). Mike Richards (10 points in 13 games) and Jefff Carter (5 goals) lead the way on the Kings’ second unit, but they must get more out of the first line. Anze Kopitar and Dustin Brown are just not going in the same way as they did last year, but they do have the opportunity to break out at any time. Vyacheslav Voynov’s 4 goals from the blueline have been a pleasant addition and have helped him add on to a breakout regular season where he put up 25 points in the shortened schedule.
The Hawks defence and goaltending had problems at times with the Detroit Red Wings, especially in the transition game, but they eventually came to shut them down in games 5, 6 and 7 to take the series. Everyone remembers the bad goal that Corey Crawford gave up in game 6, but those things happen to a goalie. What was more impressive was the way Crawford battled back from that goal, and stymied the Wings for the rest of the series. While he’s not as good as Jonathan Quick, Crawford has really come into his own as a netminder, and should provide the Hawks with a decent backstop.
Now, that we’ve gone through all that… Prediction Time.
Personally I love the fact that we will see what are in my opinion the two best teams in the Western Conference go toe to toe. This really is an epic matchup. Now I think it comes down to goaltending and the Hawks had serious issues finding enough offence to get past Jimmy Howard and the Red Wings. Jonathan Quick than Howard and this could really gives the Hawks fits. However the Kings offence is going to need to step up and fulfill their end of the bargain, I think the will. Ultimately though, Quick is better than Crawford and in such a tight series goaltending is often the difference. I think the Kings take this in 7.
Our other writers weigh in:
Russell McKenzie: The Kings have an uncanny ability to get amazingly skilled teams to submit to playing their game. The Hawks have not seen a team like this during this playoff run. They’ll just be the latest victim on the Kings road to repeat. Kings in 7.
Mitchell Tierney: The Blackhawks are a team playing scared at the moment. The desperation they needed to claw back into there last season can only help them against the Kings. Jonathan Quick may be the better goaltender but I really like Corey Crawford in these playoffs. His ability to bounce back has been immense, and a major factor as to why the Hawks are still here. Plus, Toews is due to start scoring in bundles eventually. It may well be at the expense of the defending champions. Hawks in 7, with the United Centre crowd behind them in the crucial game.
Max Vasilyev: I am not sure how you can bet against the LA. They are the more physical team with the speed that can match the Hawks. I know Hawks have weapons, but they can be shutdown as proven by Detroit in games 2, 3 and 4. If Toews let Henrik Zetterberg get under his skin, welcome Dustin Brown who should spend plenty of time in his face. Kings in 7.
So there you have it, while 3 of our 4 writers took the Kings, all 4 see this as a 7 game series. Its so close betweent the two clubs, that ultimately the result here might be a coin flip.
Game 1, Jun 1, 5:00pm Los Angeles Kings vs Chicago Blackhawks at United Center on TSN, NBCSN
Game 2, Jun 2, 8:00pm Los Angeles Kings vs Chicago Blackhawks at United Center on TSN, NBCSN
Game 3, Jun 4, 9:00pm Chicago Blackhawks vs Los Angeles Kings at Staples Center on TSN, NBCSN
Game 4, June 6, 9:00pm Chicago Blackhawks vs Los Angeles Kings at Staples Center on CBC, NBCSN
Game 5, June 8, 8:00pm Los Angeles Kings vs Chicago Blackhawks at United Center on CBC, NBC
Game 6, Jun 10, 9:00pm Chicago Blackhawks vs Los Angeles Kings at Staples Center on CBC, NBCSN
Game 7, Jun 12, TBA Los Angeles Kings vs Chicago Blackhawks at United Center on CBC, NBCSN
Thanks for reading, as always feel free to leave comments below and follow me on twitter @lastwordBKerr. Give the rest of the hockey department a follow while you’re at it – @BigMick99, @IswearGAA, and @LastWordOnNHL, and follow the site @lastwordonsport.
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photo credit: Dinur via photopin ccFear & Anxiety in the Brain (What Causes Panic Attacks)
Fear and anxiety in the brain (What Causes Panic Attacks)
Panic attacks can be categorised into 2 areas -
•The non-phobic panic attack that seems to come out of the blue (the spontaneous panic attack)
•The triggered panic attack
The non-phobic panic attack tends to come out of the blue, or so the person believes, but there is often a trigger. This could be stress, diet, thoughts, etc. The brain usually has been stimulated by being over sensitized by a trigger which is not obvious. It leads to us feeling unable to breath, impending doom, heart palpitation, suffocation feelings, etc. There is also a theory called the suffocation alarm theory which suggests the brain is triggering a panic attack. Let me explain……..
As you probably know when we exhale carbon dioxide is produced. Our brains via neurons in our solitary nucleus are forever monitoring the blood circulating in our brains for levels of carbon dioxide (CO2). These neurons will activate if they sense a drop in CO2. This will cause the feeling of being unable to breathe properly. In this case your body is saying I really need to take over and make you breath as CO2 has dropped. As a panic attack sufferer I often felt my breathing go haywire, and feel like I was not getting enough oxygen and try to breathe more. After this process, the locus coeruleus is essentially sent a message. But what is the locus coeruleus?
The hypothalamus is the main fear centre of the brain and has been traditionally known as the bodies sentry and alerts us using various sensations to warn us of danger. The locus coeruleus is a lot smaller than the hypothalamus but virtually all the bodily functions are linked to it including the hypothalamus.
Research has shown that if the locus coeruleus is electrically shocked a panic attack can be induced. So it may be that the locus coeruleus is the first button to be pushed in the brain to fire off the flight or fight response. Whether it’s the locus coeruleus or the hypothalamus (or both) the same process is happening – a burst of electricity is being triggered within the brain.
The EEG (Electroencephalography) measures voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain. However it’s not sensitive enough to pick up electrical activity deep inside the brain. I don’t want to get too deep into the technical science stuff as to fellow panic attacks sufferers all we feel is all the nasty symptoms of racing heart, headaches, confusion, etc. It doesn’t really matter to us what is calling the shots.
Opiate Receptors
Further studies of the locus coeruleus have shown that they have high number of opiate receptors. You may ask what is an opiate receptor?
They are a type of protein found in the brain, digestive system and spinal cord. Opiates activate the receptors once they reach the brain, which they tend to do quite quickly. Any effect on the brain directly correlates with what has been stimulated. Opiates facilitate the feel good centre of the brain and help stop pain. This is why you often hear about drug addicts injecting heroin (an opiate) into their bloodstream.
Once the heroin gets into contact with the brain, its changes to morphine which stimulates the receptors. Research shows that once the opiate receptors are stimulated by heroin and other drugs there is a feeling of a great satisfaction. There is also a feeling of euphoria as large amounts of dopamine are released. After the initial rush there is a state of calm and relaxation which can last for many hours. You can see now why heroin is so addictive!
Endorphins
The mystery to scientists was how did the human body know man would inject himself with heroin to get the rush of euphoria, or was there some naturally occurring chemical in the body with the same the structure, which was doing the same job. Eventually they found it and called the chemical endorphin.
Endorphins are great for us. The diminish pain and anxiety, help promote our immune system and ability to withstand stress, and help us feel pleasure more easily. Endorphins and opiate receptors are like peas in a pod, the fit together perfectly to inhibit panic and fear.
After scientist discovered the fear centre in the brain and that this centre had opiate receptors, it was a great breakthrough. By knowing this we can tackle the fear factor in our brains.
So if we can increase the endorphins in our brains we stand a good chance of lowering the fear response to events in our life.
Locus Coeruleus
Lets go back to the out of the blue panic attacks, when the locus coeruleus has been aroused and symptoms of panic occur. When we feel fear and the need to escape, our respiratory rate increases. Hyperventilation can kick in making sure we breathe faster taking in more oxygen. This can occur when our respiration system slows down or CO2 builds up if we exercise. Thus it’s possible that panic attacks can occur during sleep or as one falls asleep or after relaxing. This is because our oxygen intake has decreased allowing the carbon dioxide level to rise. This can then trigger the over sensitive suffocation alarm system (solitary nucleus). If you suffer this type of panic attack you will frequently suffer hyperventilation.
It’s worth noting that women are more susceptible to panic attacks after child birth and during periods. Both of these times are when levels of progesterone drop very sharply. Progesterone can lower levels of carbon dioxide in the brain by making us breathe faster. The loss of progesterone can increase carbon dioxide and make the body more susceptible to panic.
The second type of panic is phobic panic or triggered panic attacks. It’s more common and is the fear of fear. Sufferers also tend to suffer from anticipation anxiety. The symptoms include feeling like you want to escape, unable to concentrate, shaky, sweaty, etc. Remember out of the blue panic attacks tend to be feelings of breathlessness and suffocation sensations. The difference with this type of panic attack is the locus coeruleus is stimulated by a perceived threat in the mind. In other words the threat is by negative, panicky thoughts.
Sometimes these thoughts are so instinctive we don’t actually realize we have thought them. In other situations it might be some sort of traumatic incident that that keep triggering the same anxious thoughts habitually. For example if you were involved in a bad car crash, you might every time you drive a car, get panic attacks. The unconscious mind associates cars with a stressful event and the locus coeruleus is activated because the brains thought patterns (neural pathways) have linked car driving and scary experiences together. The fight or flight response is then activated, and adrenaline is sent around the body and noradrenalin (more commonly known as nor epinephrine) to the brain.
Whether your experiencing 'out of the blue' panic attacks or if you know whats triggering them (or both), then my two articles WHAT ARE PANIC ATTACKS & THE ANXIETY NERVOUS SYSTEM will help you overcome them.
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” Eleanor Roosevelt - You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
RESOURCES
Why do you Fear?
What causes Panic Attacks?
What are the symptoms of Panic Attacks?
How to Stop a Panic Attack?
What Triggers Panic Attacks?
Tools of the Trade - Recovery
What are Panic attacks
The Nervous System
Self Help for your Nerves - Dr Claire Weekes
Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway: How to Turn Your Fear and Indecision into Confidence and Action
Instant Confidence (Book and CD)
Overcoming Panic and Agoraphobia
The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook (Anxiety & Phobia Workbook)
Control Stress : Stop Worrying and Feel Good NowAccording to Nokia's 2017 Threat Intelligence Report over two-thirds of all infected devices in the past year were running Android. Android's prolific presence appeals to the perverse parts of people who purposefully position themselves to perpetuate problems. If you think that's hard to say three times fast, consider how difficult it is to avoid the more than 75 percent of Android apps that are secretly tracking users. Yale Privacy Lab found hidden trackers in hundreds of popular Android apps including Spotify, Tinder, PayPay, Uber and SnapChat. Yes, three out of four Android apps have been tracking billions of user's locations, behavior and device usage and could even access smartphone cameras without user's knowledge. Even more problematic is that these trackers could come as part of an app update rather than being a part of the apps original install. That's a lot to chew on if you're considering joining team Android. In response, Google is implementing new standards that will require apps that collect user data to provide a warning to that effect. Google will begin enforcing this in January 2018. Will it be enough? Locations were off, but Google was still tracking users
A recent Quartz report revealed that since the beginning of 2017 Google had been actively tracking Android phone users even with device locations turned off and no SIM card inserted. Android phones were actively sending Google the address of every cell tower to which a user's device connected. A Google spokesperson said that the data wasn't stored and was only used to "improve the speed and performance of message delivery." Still, this data gave Google the ability to track a user's movements to a degree that was both unknown to consumers and beyond reasonable expectations of consumer privacy. Google could actually triangulate a user's location up to a quarter mile and even more accurately in urban areas. The potential of a third-party hijacking and misusing the data was an additional risk. There are numerous scenarios where individuals locations are legitimately concealed. A law enforcer, a battered woman in a safehouse or anybody who just wants to keep their personal business personal. Beyond improving messaging could Google's intent as a company which profits from advertising been to provide advertisers with location data so that users could be targeted if they entered particular businesses? After Quartz uncovered its snooping, Google agreed to stop tracking users by the end of November. But given this history and evidence of the company's character, is the damage already done and what might Google do in the future? Android is a fragmented mess
Of the two billion Android devices in use, half are running some version of the OS that's over two years old with no hope of an upgrade to something newer. The latest version, Oreo, was only on 0.3 percent of devices as of November, and the preceding version Nougat (which was released in November 2016) was only on 20.6 percent of devicesRepublicans want to run against Hillary Clinton for president, the head of the party insisted Friday, laying out how the GOP is already planning to capitalize on their wins in 2014 to be ready to take on Clinton in 2016.
Speaking at a breakfast with reporters hosted by the The Christian Science Monitor in Washington, D.C., Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Republicans are keeping staff in key presidential swing states such as Florida, Ohio and Virginia, and explained how the GOP plans to avoid the “circus” of the 2012 nominating process.
The RNC is overhauling its rules to shorten the primary and caucus calendar, and reducing the number of debates, which numbered a whopping 23 in the 2012 cycle. “We’re taking it from a six month slice and dice fest to about weeks,” Priebus said. “We’re going to contain the process so we don’t end up with rogue debates that provide the temptation for candidates to break the rules.”
They’re also improving their voter mobilization efforts, which has traditionally been a strength for Democrats, he said, explaining that 2016’s “ground game” will have to be at least three times larger than in 2014. “I think we’ve got to be about perfect to win a national turnout vote in this country. I think Democrats can be good and win, we’ve got to be great,” he added.
Are Republicans worried about running against Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee? “I sure as heck hope we’re running against Hillary Clinton,” Priebus said.
Clinton allies have been trying to spin Tuesday night’s Democratic drubbing as a secret victory for Clinton, who will now have a clear villain to run against in the GOP-controlled Congress.
Nonsense, Priebus responded Friday. “If your job was to unify the party and raise a ton of money and get a ton of volunteers on the ground, I promise you, you would want no other opponent to run against than Hillary Clinton,” he said. Priebus also said voters rejected the Clintons when they rejected candidates endorsed by the Clintons.
Of course, that is exactly what a Republican leader would say, since it’s his job to project confidence and rally donors and activists. If the RNC were really so eager to take on Clinton, for instance, one might wonder why they bothered sending a staffer dressed as a squirrel to stalk the former secretary of state this summer.
Priebus said Tuesday’s wins were obviously very good for Republicans, but declined to say the party now had a mandate to govern. “I would call that a pretty sweeping victory, but whether it’s a mandate or not, that’s a different question,” he said.
Voters in Wisconsin, for instance, “accepted” conservative Republican ideas, Priebus said. “Perhaps embraced might be a little over the top.”
Clinton defenders aren’t worried by Priebus’ talk, however, said Adrienne Elrod of the main group defending her, Correct the Record. ”We agree with Reince – we hope she runs too! And Reince should be careful what he and the GOP wish for – 83% of Democrats think Hillary would make a good president, according to exit polls from Tuesday. Hillary Clinton’s overwhelming, across-the-board popularity and admiration among Americans is a result of her vision to strengthen the middle class, increase opportunities for women, and ensure a better future for Americans from all walks of life,” Elrod said.The BJP-led NDA government has dropped the names of former Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi from two awards for propagating Hindi.
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The two awards have been discontinued by the Home Ministry and instead launched two new schemes for doing outstanding work for promoting the progressive use of official language.
According to a Home Ministry order, the ‘Indira Gandhi Rajbhasha Puraskar’ and ‘Rajiv Gandhi Rashtriya Gyan-Vigyan Maulik Pustak Lekhan Puraskar’, launched more than two decades ago, have given away for ‘Rajbhasha Kirti Puraskar’ and ‘Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar’.
Home Ministry officials have denied that the earlier two awards, named after two former Prime Ministers belonging to Congress party, have been changed due to political consideration by the BJP-led NDA government.
“It is purely an administrative decision to make the awards more useful,” an official said.
Earlier, there were four categories of Rajbhasha awards of which two were named after the two former Prime Ministers. The four awards were merged into two now.
Under the ‘Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Scheme’, awards will be given to any citizen of India for writing original book in Hindi on knowledge and science based subjects, to central government employees (including retired one) for writing original book in Hindi and to Central Government Employees (including retired one) for writing an excellent article in Hindi.
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‘Rajbhasa Kirti Puraskar’ will be given for outstanding work in promoting the progressive use of official language to Ministries, Departments, Public Sector Undertakings, banks and in-house Hindi magazines.Story highlights Israel Defense Forces target Syrian military posts
Israel accuses Iran of sponsoring the rocket attacks
(CNN) Israeli forces struck a car in a Syrian-controlled area of the Golan Heights on Friday, killing five civilians, Syrian state media reported.
The Israeli military said its forces targeted the area, describing those there as "part of the terror cell responsible for the rocket fire at northern Israel on Thursday." It did not say how many people were killed in the attack in al Qom in Quneitra.
This was the second day of Israeli strikes.
"Earlier this week, I said that whoever tries to fire at us, we will hit them back, and so we did," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
"The Israel Defense Forces targeted the cell that fired, and the Syrian forces that allowed it. We have no intention to escalate the situation, but our policy still stands."
Read MoreCrimson Dragon Director Wants To Work With Nintendo Again
By Kris. September 19, 2013. 3:38pm
At Tokyo Game Show, Siliconera got to speak with Yukio Futatsugi, creator of the Panzer Dragoon series and director of its upcoming spiritual successor, Crimson Dragon.
Grounding, the company Futatsugi founded after leaving Sega, have released a variety of games, one of the most prominent being Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword for Nintendo. In the future, Futatsugi says, he’d like to work with Nintendo again.
When we asked Futatsugi what sort of games he would like Grounding to work on as the company matures, he replied, “If it sells well, we’d be interested in RPGs for Crimson Dragon, or even outside of the franchise. My personal interest is in smartphones. They’re gradually becoming capable of having visuals like this.”
“We’ve worked on a number of mobile games so far, and I’m really interested in using the network aspect to make a more interesting game,” Futatsugi continued. “Perhaps we’ll work with Nintendo again, since we have a good relationship with them… and naturally, Microsoft has been great to us. We want to do a lot of different things, so I guess we’re kind of a greedy company!”
This is the second time Futatsugi has hinted at another collaboration with Nintendo. Back in June, he stated that Grounding were already working on a Nintendo game.March 12, 2017
nullprogram.com/blog/2017/03/12/
tl;dr: Enchive (rhymes with “archive”) has replaced my use of GnuPG.
Two weeks ago I tried to encrypt a tax document for archival and noticed my PGP keys had just expired. GnuPG had (correctly) forbidden the action, requiring that I first edit the key and extend the expiration date. Rather than do so, I decided to take this opportunity to retire my PGP keys for good. Over time I’ve come to view PGP as largely a failure — it never reached the critical mass, the tooling has always been problematic, and it’s now a dead end. The only thing it’s been successful at is signing Linux packages, and even there it could be replaced with something simpler and better.
I still have a use for PGP: encrypting sensitive files to myself for long term storage. I’ve also been using it to consistently to sign Git tags for software releases. However, very recently this lost its value, though I doubt anyone was verifying these signatures anyway. It’s never been useful for secure email, especially when most people use it incorrectly. I only need to find a replacement for archival encryption.
I could use an encrypted filesystem, but which do I use? I use LUKS to protect my laptop’s entire hard drive in the event of a theft, but for archival I want something a little more universal. Basically I want the following properties:
Sensitive content must not normally be in a decrypted state. PGP solves this by encrypting files individually. The archive filesystem can always be mounted. An encrypted volume would need to be mounted just prior to accessing it, during which everything would be exposed.
I should be able to encrypt files from any machine, even less-trusted ones. With PGP I can load my public key on any machine and encrypt files to myself. It’s like a good kind of ransomware.
It should be easy to back these files up elsewhere, even on less-trusted machines/systems. This isn’t reasonably possible with an encrypted filesystem which would need to be backed up as a huge monolithic block of data. With PGP I can toss encrypted files anywhere.
I don’t want to worry about per-file passphrases. Everything should be encrypted with/to the same key. PGP solves this by encrypting files to a recipient. This requirement prevents most stand-alone crypto tools from qualifying.
I couldn’t find anything that fit the bill, so I did exactly what you’re not supposed to do and rolled my own: Enchive. It was loosely inspired by OpenBSD’s signify. It has the tiny subset of PGP features that I need — using modern algorithms — plus one more feature I’ve always wanted: the ability to generate a keypair from a passphrase. This means I can reliably access my archive keypair anywhere without doing something strange like uploading my private keys onto the internet.
On Enchive
Here’s where I’d put the usual disclaimer about not using it for anything serious, blah blah blah. But really, I don’t care if anyone else uses Enchive. It exists just to scratch my own personal itch. If you have any doubts, don’t use it. I’m putting it out there in case anyone else is in the same boat. It would also be nice if any glaring flaws I may have missed were pointed out.
Not expecting it to be available as a nice package, I wanted to make it trivial to build Enchive anywhere I’d need it. Except for including stdint.h in exactly one place to get the correct integers for crypto, it’s written in straight |
misconduct. However, the integrity of the Act has been questioned in recent years, with some believing the WPA does not ensure whistleblowers are protected.
This was the argument the US Supreme Court heard in November 2014 in a case involving the Department of Homeland Security and Robert MacLean. (1)
Robert MacLean was a federal air marshal and a military veteran. In 2006, MacLean was fired from his position after he disclosed information that contained “Sensitive Security Information” (SSI) to an NBC News reporter.
The SSI is one of many secrecy categories produced by the US government agencies for unclassified information. MacLean was fired on grounds that he has disclosed SSI after he made the disclosure three years earlier in 2003.
As the National Law Journal reports (2), MacLean had made contact with a reporter about the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) plans to eliminate marshals from long-distance flights.
MacLean was relying on the WPA when he challenged being removed as a federal air marshal. MacLean appealed to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. In January of 2013, the Federal Circuit held “oral arguments for Robert MacLean v. Department of Homeland Security.
Court Decision
In April of 2013, the Federal Circuit issued a decision to remove the former MSPB ruling which preserved the termination of Robert MacLean. As Whistleblower.org informs, the ruling “restores WPA rights for MacLean, as the court ruled that he did not cross the legal boundary that would negate his right to make public disclosures”. (3)
This is not the first time the WPA has been criticized for failing to protect whistleblowers.
Another case that highlights the shortcomings of the WPA took place in 2003. A former US Park Police Chief, Teresa Chambers blew the whistle to the Washington Post about there being an increase in road accidents on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway which had two patrol officers working instead of four.
Chambers was consequently ousted from her job for criticizing the staff shortages. The former Park Police Chief spent the (4) next eight years battling to get reinstated, claiming that she was protected by the WPA by making her disclosures.
In 2011, Theresa Chambers was reinstated as Park Police Chief.
The Washington Post described the case as a, “Long high-profile battle in which a whistleblower scored an uncommon victory.”
And, as the National Law Journal writes, it was victory under the WPA which should not require years of litigation to achieve.
The National Law Journal also informs that the WPA deprives federal employees of the opportunity to seek relief for violations of their First Amendment rights.As a financial adviser, I have occasionally found myself feeling envious of certain clients. Not because of their wealth — but because they were disciplined and determined enough to do all the right things that enabled them to accumulate their wealth and, in many cases, retire early. Despite my expertise, I, like a lot of people, sometimes struggle not to do the wrong things that make being rich, let alone retiring at all, a pipe dream.
Financially responsible and successful people don’t build their wealth by accident — or overnight. Becoming rich takes serious willpower and long-term vision. You have to be able to keep your eye on the prize of financial freedom, be willing to sacrifice your present wants for the sake of your future and develop good habits to win. Here are 10 habits you can start putting into practice now.
Start early
As the old saying goes: The early bird catches the worm…or, in this case, gets to retire in style. The sooner you put your money to work, the more time it has to grow. Earning a paycheck, whether you are self-employed or work for a company, means the opportunity to contribute to an IRA, which you should seize ASAP. If you’re fortunate enough to get a job with a company that offers a matching contribution to their retirement plan, you need to make it a priority to enroll in the plan as soon as you are eligible. It can be the difference between retiring early and never retiring.
Think about this: If you invested $10,000 and left it to grow for 40 years, assuming an average return per year of 8%, you would end up with over $217,000. But if you waited 10 years and invested $20,000 — twice as much — you would only end up with just over $200,000.
Whatever your situation might be, saving and investing money today is better than waiting until tomorrow. Start now.
Automate
You can be your own worst enemy when it comes to financial success. It’s all too easy to procrastinate and neglect what needs to be done and, meanwhile, give in to temptation and spend more than you should. It’s the perfect recipe for not becoming rich.
The best way to protect yourself from yourself is to automate your savings. That means setting up recurring transfers on a regular basis from your checking account to your savings and investment accounts (or setting up auto deduction from your paycheck to your employer-sponsored retirement plan). This way, you force yourself to avoid bad money habits and save what you would likely otherwise spend. If you haven’t already, set aside 15 minutes on your calendar now to do it. Not later, now. Your rich future self will thank you.
Maximize contributions
When it comes to retirement account contributions, you’ve probably been told to start small and then try to increase the amount by at least 1% every year until you max out. If you’ve been procrastinating, then yes, even a small starting contribution is better than none. The problem is that small efforts can lead to small results. If you want to be rich, you have to save like you mean it. And that means contributing the max amount allowed from the get-go (and at least as much as your employer will match in your 401(k) plan).
This is especially true if you are starting to save later in life and need to play catch up. You might worry that maxing out your contributions will squeeze your cash flow too tightly, but it is easier to get in the habit of spending less if you don’t have that extra to money to spend in the first place. It’s much harder to increasingly scale back your budget year after year to accommodate for increasing contributions.
Never carry credit card balances
Revolving, high-interest debt is one of the biggest threats to your financial freedom. It can seriously drag you down, costing you thousands in unnecessary fees and interest charges — and prevent you from saving more. If you ever want to be rich, you have to ditch the bad habit of carrying credit card balances, along with the minimum payment mentality.
Instead, you need to learn how to use credit wisely, rather than as a crutch, and commit to paying off your balances in full each month. Smart credit card holders know and practice the tricks to maximize rewards, points, discounts and monthly cash flow without getting in over their head. Of course, living within your means is key to your success.
Live like you’re poor
Have you ever met someone who is unassuming and modest and then were surprised to later learn that they are actually rolling in dough? I had an older client who was stuck in 1983: he wore ugly brown suits and running shoes, drove a beat-up baby blue Volvo station wagon and lived in the same modest house he bought 40 years ago. Turns out, this man was an uber-successful entrepreneur and multimillionaire — and even richer because of his humble habits.
Millionaires are all around us, and many of them are probably not who you would think. This is because they smartly live below their means and save their money rather than showcase it. Of course, it’s easy to live below your means when you have millions, but even if you have far less, getting into the habit of spending minimally now will help you have a lot more later. The trick is adopting a “less is more” mentality and sticking with it, even when your income and net worth increase in the future.
Avoid temptation
The temptation to live large and beyond our means is all around us: TV, magazines, friends, family, colleagues, “the Joneses.” It is nearly impossible to escape the pressure to spend, spend and then spend some more. The problem is that overspending often leads to debt accumulation, undersaving and long-term financial insecurity.
Force yourself to avoid negative financial influences as much as possible. That means going cold turkey: Avoid malls, unsubscribe from all those retail emails and don’t sign up for new ones and say “no” to invitations that you know will cost you.
Then, replace these temptations with things that motivate you.
Be goal-oriented
Goals inspire us, motivate us and give us purpose. Many of us have common goals, such as paying off debt, buying a house and retiring by a certain age. Maybe you have another goal of starting your own business or buying a second home. Unfortunately, goals are easily overshadowed by the daily stresses of life and all too often forgotten and neglected. When goals are just fleeting thoughts in your mind, they lose their meaning and influence over your behavior. This leads to bad financial habits, and your dream of becoming rich stays just that — a dream.
To make it a reality, stay focused on your goals by committing the time to think about them, prioritize them and assign a target saving amount to each of them if possible. Then you should display your goals in places where you can be reminded on a regular basis, which will keep you accountable and help you stay on track.
Get educated
Successful investors take the time to study key financial concepts, learn the dos and don’ts and stay abreast of current trends. They take advantage of opportunities to strengthen and expand their understanding and expose themselves to financial information on a daily basis. Take a cue from them and subscribe to The Wall Street Journal NWS, +0.38%, watch CNBC CMCSA, +0.60%, pick up Fortune US:TIME instead of a gossip magazine and follow financial experts on Twitter TWTR, -3.06%. Become a devoted student of money, and you can master the science of getting rich.
Be careful not to overwhelm yourself, and only follow advice from credible sources, so you don’t fall victim to progress paralysis or unsuitable and potentially dangerous investments.
Diversify your portfolio
Successful investors also know not to put all of their money eggs in one basket—or two baskets, for that matter. They spread their wealth across a variety of investments, from stocks, mutual funds, ETFs and bonds, to real estate, collectibles and startups. A diversified portfolio means that you can potentially take advantage of multiple sources of growth and protect yourself from financial ruin if one of your investments bombs.
An easy way to achieve diversification is to invest in an asset-allocation fund, such as a target-date fund or “life strategy” fund that is based on your risk tolerance. And if you don’t have the means to buy property outright, you can explore investing in real estate mutual funds, ETFs or investment trusts (REITs), which can even offer steady income in some cases. Learn more about crowdfunding, which now gives the average investor the ability to support startup companies. Just be careful not to concentrate your money too heavily in any one investment.
Spend money to make money
Warren Buffett
It’s true that there’s a price to pay for wealth, but unless you’re Warren Buffett, it is not gambling — and losing — on stock picking. Impulse, naiveté, and emotions, particularly greed and fear, can seriously hinder your chances of being rich if you let them. The best way to protect yourself and get a step up on your financial goals is to first invest in a team of financial professionals. This means hiring a qualified and experienced financial adviser, accountant and in complex cases, an estate planner. Yes, working with pros will cost you, and you can still do some DIY investing, but their objectivity, expertise, personalized guidance and ongoing monitoring can be well worth it (and relieve you of the huge burden of figuring it all out on your own).
Make sure that you interview several candidates so you can find pros you trust, feel comfortable with and whose approach is a good fit for your situation. And even if you work with an adviser, make sure that you’re still involved and aware of where your money is going — and why.
Read these related stories:
Ten reasons you’re not rich yet
Ask an adviser: is it too late to start saving?
Ten blue-chip stocks to stock up onBathinda district has properties, worth over Rs 19 crore, belonging to Dera Sacha Sauda, and the quantum of loss due to violence after the verdict against Dera chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim is estimated to be Rs 23 lakh. Following the Punjab and Haryana High Court order in which Punjab and Haryana have been asked to submit details of DSS properties, Punjab has compiled details pegging Dera properties to at least Rs 52 crore.
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The reports are to be submitted on Tuesday. The High Court has ordered the attachment of Dera properties to pay compensation for the loss of public and private properties caused by the Dera followers, who went on the rampage to lodge their protest against the conviction. Dera has a huge following in districts located in the Malwa region. Bathinda has one of the biggest Deras of the sect in Salabatpura.
Till the filing of this report, the Punjab home department was in the process of compiling details. While a majority of the 22 districts had sent the details, a Punjab government official said details were awaited from the least affected districts like Amritsar and Hoshiarpur. “We have to submit report post-afternoon tomorrow. We are compiling the details and by tomorrow afternoon, we hope to get more details. Deputy commissioners of a few districts have sought time to provide details,” said the functionary.
The tentative figures of the loss reported from more than half the districts is estimated to be Rs 1.25 crore, including public and private property. In Muktsar district, another district in the Malwa region, a loss of Rs 10 lakh worth public property and Rs 13 lakh of private property has been calculated. Incidentally, Dera has properties worth Rs 5 crore in Muktsar district alone.
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Tentative figures for making police and non-police arrangements to maintain law and order in Punjab are around Rs 1.77 crore.
The government official said Punjab may seek time to submit the full report and is likely to submit details that would be received by Tuesday.SpaceBees Jul 12, 2008
It cost me an arm and a leg to get into this club!
Recently I've become a fan of reading about video game hoaxes and urban legends. Most of the ones I find are complete bullshit, and always have to do with the original Pokemon games to some degree. For example, that the Lavender Town music made some kids commit suicide. Or stupid myths involving things in Zelda games that would even be technically possible on N64 hardware.
However, I have stumbled across some good ones, some of which are more well known then others. If you know any, feel free to share them, I find this stuff really interesting.
Shen Long in Street Fighter
Probably the most famous one. One of the win quotes in Street Fighter 2 had a mistranslated version of the attack Shoryuken. The original victory phrase was "You must defeat my Dragon Punch to stand a chance!" It was translated as "You must defeat Shen Long to stand a chance!"
This caused Electronic Gaming Monthly to create what was probably the biggest prank in video game history. They convinced players that Shen Long was a hidden character in Street Fighter 2, and to unlock him you had to complete the game in an absurdly difficult way.
Eventually, it was revealed as an April Fool's Joke, and players were furious.
The character Gouken in Street Fighter 4 is more or less based on Shen Long.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_Long
Polybuis
This one is a crazy urban legend that is said to have originated on Usenet. Essentially, a new prototype arcade game was released that proved to be incredibly popular. Many players became addicted, with cases of insomnia, nightmares, and suicide apparently. There were also rumors that the FBI was monitoring players that achieved high scores. To this date there is no evidence it exists, but I guess a ROM was released about two years ago. It seems like a pretty normal game, but I could see how it would bother someone with epilepsy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_%28game%29
Killswitch
This one is really bizarre and difficult to even explain. The gist of it is that it was a Russian PC game with a very limited run, about 10,000 copies. Upon completion, it would delete itself. It is (in)famous because there were puzzles and levels that players never found ways to complete. The game took place in a Russian factory that was inhabited by demons.
Like I said, its difficult to explain what this game is even about, but you can read more here:
http://invisiblegames.net/archives/killswitch/
Phantom
The Phantom was a game console that basically played PC games. It had a ton of hype and then was never released. I really can't say much more about it because I can't find any information on it. I've heard it was some sort of investment scam.
So if anyone else has any good ones, feel free to share!NEW YORK—Former World Video Boxing Association heavyweight King Hippo opened a new boxing gym this month, saying he hopes to provide a healthy outlet for troubled 8-bit teens and keep poorly rendered youths off the pixilated streets.
“Most of these kids come from extremely low-res backgrounds, so our boxing programming offers a safe, positive 2-D environment,” said Hippo, adding that competing in the ring significantly improves discipline, mental focus, emotional management, and the ability to power up. “My mission is to ensure they don’t end up in some dark pixelated alley throwing boxes at thugs or striking a boss with a whip found on the pavement.”
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“Sadly, the majority of 8-bit teens never finish school or advance to the next level, and they end up wasting their extra lives,” Hippo continued. “It truly breaks your heart meter.”
Lamenting that the youths he’s met do not have the NES Advantages commonly found in more affluent areas, Hippo said he believes that at the very least boxing gives guidance to teens from neighborhoods decimated by terrible graphics.
The 25-year-old retired pugilist confirmed that his ultimate goal is to help outside the ring by preventing digital adolescents from becoming involved with alcohol, drugs, and gangs on large conveyor belts in abandoned factories.
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Hippo said he has enlisted Doc Louis, the trainer of 500-million-time WVBA champion Little Mac, to help at the gym by teaching the 8-bit juveniles about the basics of throwing a star punch, recognizing fighting patterns, and improving finger speed.
Louis, who reportedly derived his aerobic training plan from a 3-D world running regimen that has helped many youths in Solar System #517 to lose weight and overcome obstacles, said that at-risk 8-bit teens see almost immediate health benefits, including stamina boosts.
“On the first day, the young people think they’re fairly tough,” Louis said. “But after a few rounds, most of them are so exhausted they turn pink and are too tired to throw a punch.”
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“Just by boxing for a short period of time, these kids start making changes for the better, becoming more confident, healthier, and happier,” Louis added. “The big blocky smiles on their faces say it all.”
Both King Hippo and Doc Louis said they draw on their eclectic careers to share hints on increasing reaction time, causing extra damage, and alternating left and right punches to the face after an opponent misses with an uppercut.
“The 8-bit teens sparring at the gym are so eager learn,” Hippo said. “They understand the importance of patience, blocking attacks, and dodging. And they want to know everything about recognizing visual and audio clues so they can, for example, punch an adversary in the stomach right when a camera flash goes off in the crowd.”
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“It’s amazing that some of them have already developed a signature move,” Hippo added.
Hippo confirmed that his most crucial job at the boxing gym is to provide a well-rendered role model for the low-res youth.
“Now, for the first time in their lives, they believe they can escape their single-pixel homes when they grow up,” Hippo said. “They can even dream big about one day becoming champion of the Another World Circuit.”
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“It’s hard to fathom that a couple weeks ago the best they could imagine was becoming a Rad Racer and blasting loud square waves from the car stereo,” Hippo added.About the author
(NewsTarget) There are many reasons not to eat meat, but it's likely that most people don't consider avoiding the consumption of arsenic as one of them. But as it turns out, arsenic is regularly feed to chickens and sometimes also to turkeys and pigs. The poultry industry commonly uses additives with arsenic in them to induce weight gain and create the appearance of a healthy color in chicken meat. And it should be noted that if U.S. poultry producers need toof a healthy color, then the chickens are likely not healthy to begin with - and feeding them arsenic is only going to make the situation worse.Arsenic is a known poisonous compound. It's perhaps best known for being the murder weapon of choice among the noble classes from the Roman times to the mid-nineteenth century. At low levels, the consumption of arsenic mimics many chronic diseases, so it's likely you won't know that it's this poison affecting you. At high levels, arsenic is well known to kill.Medical professionals are commonly under the illusion that our bodies can simply detoxify all of the poisons that most people regularly consume - and that these poisons don't cause the diseases that most of the population suffer from. But, let's be honest. Our body's ability to detoxify us, however powerful, isn't even close to able to remove all of the chemicals that most people regularly take in. Unfortunately, chickens aren't born with the ability to detoxify arsenic either - which is why you consume arsenic in their flesh.If the chicken you're eating is eating arsenic - you're eating arsenic too. 2004 and 2005 studies confirmed this when they looked at the arsenic levels of raw supermarket and fast food chicken. Arsenic was regularly found. Organic chickens were also tested and were found to contain considerably lower or undetectable levels of arsenic. Unlike conventionally raised chickens, it's not legal to feed organically raised chickens arsenic.Long term exposure to small amounts of arsenic can cause cancer and nerve damage. Arsenic has also been found to contribute to heart disease, diabetes, and a decline in mental functioning. Regularly consuming animals that have been eating arsenic may take a few years off your life, but how would you know that when you're lying on your deathbed? Most people don't. They simply see the disease - but remain unaware of the common poisons that cause the disease.More:Kim Evans is a natural health writer and author of Cleaning Up! The Ultimate Body Cleanse offers deep cleansing and using methods in this book, people have gotten rid of dozens of different types of health problems, as well as just losing excess weight, thinking more clearly, and feeling better.Kim's next book chronicles events in her life that happen to match patterns in the Bible. She's also found three places in the Bible that tell us its about these patterns and even asking you to match them.Here's a little from the upcoming book...In Isaiah 22:20, it says, "And it must occur in that day that I will call my servant, namely Elia." But, because these prophecies are cryptic and they aren't meant to be understood until they are understood, it's only the last three letters.A few lines later, it says, "From the land of Kittim it has been revealed to them."Here, you just take out any three middle letters, and again, it's the name of the person bringing you this message, or the sacred secret of the prophecy. Actually, if you take those two passages, Kim is about the only name you can get from both of them.In Numbers 1:1 1:18, it's talking about "the family" and mentions Pagiel. It also twice mentions February 1st, (Kim's birthday) and then says that the youngest is 20 years old. Kim's little sister Paige is currently 20 years old.In Chronicles 1 11:20 it mentions the brother of Joab and then in the same sentence uses the word brandishing. Kim's middle name is Jo and her older sister's name is Brandi. There are other patterns to her sisters too but these sort of mention them by name.Of course, it helps if you know that there is a magical spiritual reality available that comes deep cleansing and often major dietary upgrades. It's also why Jesus was teaching the same thing, if you find his teachings in the Essene Gospel of Peace. In this text, he even says things like, "You'll never see the father unless you clean your colon." But, this is paraphrased...In the Bible Jesus says things more like, happy are those who wash their robes, as they can enter the tree of life. The tree of life is elsewhere explained as God's paradise. He also said, first clean the inside of the cup and then the outside will also be clean.Kim's bookis here http://www.cleaningupcleanse.com. You can also preorder here. It shouldn't be long.Dogged cold case detectives have linked a known sexual predator to the decades-old murder of a 19-year-old woman near San Francisco through DNA.
Leon Seymour, 71, was charged Wednesday with fatally stabbing Denise Lampe in Daly City, Calif., in 1976. Prosecutors said a blood stain on Lampe’s jacket matched Seymour’s DNA.
“We’re grateful to have the clarity that DNA evidence brings us,” San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Karen Guidotti said, according to the San Jose Mercury News. “Mr. Seymour can finally be brought to justice. Something he has avoided for many, many years.”
Seymour was civilly committed to a state mental hospital after serving a 33-year prison sentence for sexually assaulting six women, the San Mateo Daily Journal reported Saturday. The charges against him included rape and attempted sodomy.
Seymour is being held on $10 million bail after being charged with Lampe’s death.
Authorities had long believed Lampe and four other San Mateo County women had been victims of a serial killer. The killings became known as the notorious “Gypsy Hill Murders.”
The victims were all stabbed multiple times and were all suspected to have been raped before they were killed. The murders occurred over a span of five months in 1976.
In 2015, Rodney Halbower, an Oregon inmate, was arrested in connection with two of the murders, the Mercury News reported Thursday. He goes on trial for the murders in January.
DNA evidence also linked him to the murder of a female student in Nevada in 1976.
Following the DNA hit, police worked on a timeline for Halbower and determined he was incarcerated at the time of Lampe’s death, according to the paper.
San Mateo prosecutor Sean Gallagher said it was “a working assumption” one person killed the five women.
“They were all very similar,” he said, according to the paper. “The targeted ages of the victims, in how they were killed, close in time, close in geography to where they disappeared or where the bodies were found.”
Seymour’s attorney Paul DeMeester said the DNA match is the only evidence he’s aware of tying his client to the Lampe murder.
“DNA is going to be front and center of this case,” he told the Daily Journal.
San Mateo District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe told the paper that prosecutors notified members of Lampe’s family of the arrest.
“We believe we are going to be able to obtain justice for them by holding the killer of their loved one accountable,” he said.Mysterium Network Seed Round — first impressions and a thanks
Roberto Vis Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 16, 2016
Two weeks ago, on 2'nd of December, we wrote our first message — informing you about our intention to build a Decentralized VPN network. Today — we launched our Seed round. Insane — I know.
Feedback we received during those 2 weeks ranged from “amazing idea” to “terrible deal structure” and anything in between.
This morning we literally had no clue, whether we would collect at least a 100 ethers or whole amount.
We designed Seed round to last for 2 months (it ends around February 14'th). During this time our goal is to continue working on the project, with aim to provide you with proof of concept of the product, preparing clear value proposition, business model, technical architecture etc..
Our belief is — this will encourage those of you who are still in doubt whether to take part. Maybe what I am trying to say — we didn’t expect anything fruitful today, we just wanted to let it out, and work our way upwards during the next 2 months(after-all we opened up to the world with this idea only 2 weeks ago).
The result (so far)
Now as few hours have already passed — first results are here. And they are quite shocking (at least for our team).
The Seed Round collected predefined minimum of 2000 ETH in 28 minutes.
This was surprising. From this moment — we KNEW:
we’ve definitely got a job,
we are not alone who think this way
we have support and trust placed in us
If you have been wondering which side of the fence to choose, maybe this will help you decide:
from now on, we will be working on this project full time, because we have no other choice now :) During this process we will deliver what we promised.
What this means for you?
As of now (time of writing)— the Seed Round is still open. The cap is at 6000 Ethers, and those who will place their trust in this project now, will get 5x amount of coins, compared to ICO participants.
And lastly — Huge thanks to all the Seed round participants from all of Mysterium Network team.
P.S. They are is still catching their breath… :)CLEVELAND, Ohio - The city's plan to spend $2.4 million to build a track complex for dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles has quickly become an issue in Cleveland's mayoral campaign, one that prompted a fiery exchange Tuesday.
Mayor Frank Jackson has championed the idea as a part of a comprehensive solution to getting bikers off city streets and engaged in a more productive - and lawful - activity. His challengers, including Councilman Zack Reed, have been critical, saying the money could be better spent elsewhere. Monday evening Reed called for public hearings on the plan.
Against that backdrop, Jackson on Tuesday took a swipe at Reed, suggesting the motivation for criticisms Reed has raised at City Council meetings have more to do with political gain that genuine concern for safety or the city's budget.
"He can say anything, whatever he thinks is to his advantage," Jackson said, responding to a question at a news conference.
"There are pimps in every world," the mayor said. "He's pimping this situation... exploiting it for the purpose of his own interests."
Reed, in telephone interview afterward, said he was offended by the remark and that the mayor should apologize.
"Zach Reed may be a lot of things, but one thing Zack Reed is not is an exploiter of the issues," the councilman said. "None of what I'm doing is for political gain. As I continue to say, when they break the law, we have people in place to enforce the laws.
"We can talk about using $2.4 million on a lot of things if you're talking about reducing violence in the city of Cleveland," Reed said.
Councilman Jeff Johnson, who also is challenging Jackson's re-election, took to Twitter with his response.
Mayor Jackson, we who challenge you as elected leaders are not pimps for publicly challenging you to show leadership on dirt bike problem. pic.twitter.com/TL1PuGVaDg -- Jeff Johnson (@VoteJeffJohnson) May 16, 2017
Mayor Jackson has lost his way. He called @zachreed12 a pimp. A derogatory term that offends me. He disrespects us who disagree w/dirt bikes pic.twitter.com/sncSnFelAh -- Jeff Johnson (@VoteJeffJohnson) May 16, 2017
Watching Mayor Jackson speak @ his news conference on dirt bikes. He is not leading on this. Very weak response. #noDirtBikesonCLEstreets pic.twitter.com/xtQGc3HaTd -- Jeff Johnson (@VoteJeffJohnson) May 16, 2017
Jackson didn't back away from his comment when further questioned. He defended his approach to the issue - a multi-pronged effort that involves dialogue with those who are part of the dirt bike scene - as a better approach toward a long-term solution than just arresting people.
The effort involves relationship building, he said. And he was critical that Reed and others have referred to those on bikes as "thugs" and "terrorists."
"How can we work in a collaborative and cooperative way?" Jackson said. "We want to have a relationship with people involved in the activity."
cleveland.com is a partner of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. Every dollar buys four meals for the hungry. Click here to donate.
Follow me on Facebook.Three young Canadian nationals pleaded guilty to multiple drug charges when they appeared before Chief Magistrate Christopher Birch in the District ‘C’ Magistrates Court today.
Jordan Alexander Pinelli, 26; Lamar Diamonte Newman, 19; and Illicia Jade Orr-Campbell, 18, were charged with possession, possession with intent to supply, trafficking and importation of cannabis.
According to police, the trio arrived in Barbados from Canada at the Grantley Adams International Airport on Sunday, October 22. A subsequent search of their luggage by Customs Officers revealed they each had 41, 19 and 19 packages of cannabis respectively concealed in their suitcases. The police were informed and they were arrested and charged for the offences.
Pinelli was in possession of 12.3 kilos of cannabis, while Newman was in possession of 6 kg and Orr-Campbell, 6.2 kilos.
Pinelli was fined $10,000 for possession of cannabis and $10,000 for importation. He was convicted-reprimanded-discharged (CRD) on possession with intent and RD for trafficking.
Newman was fined $5,000 for possession of cannabis and $10,000 for importation, CRD on possession with intent and RD on trafficking.
Meanwhile, Orr-Campbell was fined $5,000 for possession of cannabis and $10,000 for importation of cannabis. She was CRD on possession with intent and RD on trafficking.
In recent months, several Canadian nationals have been brought before Barbadian courts on cannabis charges.Visits to some A&E departments are up 30% on last year leaving an "unprecedented demand" on hospitals, Jeremy Hunt has revealed.
The Health Secretary also told the House of Commons that the NHS is "committed" to a four-hour waiting time in A&E - but can only guarantee this to those requiring urgent medical care.
Earlier, Mr Hunt denied the NHS is facing a humanitarian crisis, saying "very serious problems" had been limited to "one or two hospitals".
The crisis description from the Red Cross came as two patients died last week in the same A&E department after awaiting treatment on trolleys, with one waiting for 35 hours.
Labour said Mr Hunt is living in "la la land," and urged him to admit the NHS is in a state of "crisis."Facebook Twitter Google+ LinkedIn
The Financial Times has several interesting pieces on recent trends in China:
Chetan Ahya, an economist at Morgan Stanley, said that alongside the decline in the Gini coefficient, China has also improved another measure of inequality, the rural to urban income ratio, from a low of 29.4 per cent in 2004 to 37 per cent by 2016. The rapid rise in rural incomes means Morgan Stanley now predicts that China will reach the World Bank’s high-income threshold of $13,700 a head by 2025, two years earlier than its previous forecast. Alongside rising wages, Mr Ahya said equality was also being aided by gradual, if slow, reform of China’s hukou system, which has restricted access to public healthcare, education and housing for the many millions of migrant workers who have flocked to China’s major cities. The existence of this system meant that, “on an underlying basis, income inequality was actually higher” than the Gini measure suggested, Mr Ahya argued. However, with cities with populations below 500,000 now fully open to migrants, those with populations up to 5m having to accept urban residency applications after five years of social security payments, and Beijing having set a target of giving urban residency status to 100m migrants by 2020, this impediment is starting to be removed.
There is also progress on the environment, something I noticed the last time I went to Beijing:
A lower Gini coefficient also helps de-risk investment in China, Mr Bakkum argued. “The current leadership understand that social inequality and environmental problems can lead to social unrest.” As an example, he cites the notoriously bad air pollution problems in Beijing, which now finally seem to be being addressed. “They have focused a lot on the environment in Beijing in particular and you can see the difference. The risk of big social unrest because of the environment has come down.”
Another FT article suggests that the Chinese are beginning to heed my “more money, less credit” suggestion:
China’s central bank injected $47bn into its financial system, its largest intervention in nearly a year, in an effort to calm investor fears that Beijing’s crackdown on debt-fuelled growth would put a brake on the country’s rapid expansion.
Please don’t take any of this as an endorsement of the recent political trends in China, which has followed the sort of anti-intellectual nationalism that we see in Russia, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Philippines, India, and yes, another former leader of the “free world”.
Speaking of China, this is a smart move by the GOP–at least in political terms:
The U.S. Justice Department has threatened to sue Harvard University to force it to turn over documents as it investigates whether the Ivy League school’s admission policies violate civil rights laws. Citing a 2015 lawsuit that charges the school’s affirmative action policies discriminate against Asian-American applicants, the federal government in a letter set a Dec. 1 deadline for Harvard to hand over documents on its admission policies.
I don’t have an opinion either way on whether this is good public policy, but the Dems are foolishly throwing away votes in the Chinese community by ignoring this issue. |
Passive systems alone won’t help vulnerable populations like the elderly ride out extreme heat events.
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This is why city planners advocate for planting street trees to promote urban cooling. Leafy trees and shrubs provide shade and increase evaporation of water from the ground, cooling the air. But like passive systems, these approaches serve only to moderate local temperatures. If a massive heat wave settles over a region, it’s still going to be extremely hot outside.
Since no approach is foolproof, why not apply apply all of these strategies? One challenge is that with limited funding, there may not be enough money to go around.
Moreover, these strategies may actually conflict with one another. Air conditioning systems reduce interior temperatures, but they increase household energy consumption, undoing the work of energy efficiency experts. In addition, air conditioners exhaust waste heat from inside houses to the outdoors, further warming surrounding neighborhoods.
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To address these conflicts, we need to make stronger connections between the environmental health science, building science and urban climate communities. Fortunately, cities like Cleveland are making strides in this direction.
Collaborative cooling
With support from the Kresge Foundation’s Climate Resilience and Urban Opportunity Initiative, the city of Cleveland, Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and the Resilient Buildings Lab at the University at Buffalo recently hosted a series of neighborhood discussions to better understand how climate change will affect Cleveland neighborhoods. One major concern is preparing for future heat waves.
The effort, led by Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, generated a series of climate adaptation strategies, including complementary ideas to reduce heat stress at the house, block, neighborhood and city levels. These ideas were incorporated into a climate resilience plan that will guide local efforts through 2018.
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Although it’s still early in the process, results from this collaborative effort are encouraging. Community members are engaging with city staff and preparing climate emergency kits to distribute to residents. These kits will contain information on cooling centers, weather radios to keep residents informed, and guidance on stocking food and water to ride out a multi-day emergency without power.
Scholars from university health, architecture and planning departments are also discussing heat preparedness challenges with the Cleveland emergency operations center and local community development corporations. Current efforts focus on setting up additional cooling centers, weatherizing homes and using vacant lots as green space to buffer temperatures.
In Cleveland, preparing for extreme heat events has brought professionals together and encouraged overlapping approaches because no single strategy is foolproof. Other cities, like Baltimore and Providence, are working on similar multifaceted approaches.
No city wants to repeat what happened in Chicago in 1995, when approximately 700 people died during a week-long heat wave. But with a collaborative approach to heat wave planning, perhaps cities cities can lower the risk of harm from hot weather.The last people you might expect to want to see the CIA's secret torture prisons kept intact are the people who were tortured there. But the defense lawyers for the 9/11 co-conspirators are arguing that the CIA's so-called "black sites" need to remain open, untouched and exactly as they were when top al-Qaida operatives were abused.
The CIA torture program isn't on trial at Guantanamo Bay. The five accused 9/11 conspirators are, and they face the death penalty. But the legal maneuver brings to light an irony of post-9/11 justice: The military tribunals that remain the bane of civil libertarians might be one of the last venues to investigate torture.
On Monday at Guantanamo, Army Col. James Pohl, the judge in the 9/11 tribunal, will hear a longstanding motion filed by the defense team to "preserve any existing evidence of any overseas detention facility used to imprison any witness in this case." The gambit, explains James Connell, a Defense Department civilian who represents defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, seeks to treat the black sites like crime scenes – something the Justice Department has been reluctant to do.
It's not that the defendants want others taken to the black sites. It's that, as Connell tells Danger Room, "If a site is still open, it's evidence."
Some of the treatment experienced at the black sites by the five defendants, which include the confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, include being doused with water for the simulated drowning known as waterboarding; being kept in contorted "stress positions"; and being deprived of sleep for extended periods, sometimes as a result of the stress positions. But the defense hasn't been able to review any official material about what went on inside the black sites – something crucial to its legal strategy, since the military commissions are supposed to exclude evidence obtained through "the use of torture, or by cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." (.PDF)
Emphasis on supposed to. "The government has not yet provided any discovery or information about our clients' treatment at the black sites," Connell says. "If the trial were tomorrow, I would have no way of introducing it."
The CIA sent 14 detainees from the black sites to Guantanamo in 2009. President Obama forbade the CIA in 2009 from holding any other detainees. But the CIA didn't build the black sites, it rented them, in places like Romania, Poland and Thailand. And since they've been closed, they're at risk of being destroyed or modified by their host countries in such a way that will prevent anyone outside of the torture program from ever knowing what exactly went on there.
Connell isn't even asking for documentation from inside the black sites. That's likely to come later this year, he says. For now, the defense team is looking to preserve the architecture of the sites, which it contends can reveal information about his clients' treatment. "If a person is in isolation," Connell argues, "how that isolation is enforced is a relevant legal factor as to whether they've been illegally punished, and the building design is relevant to that."
An earlier version of the military commissions insisted the government not mess with the shuttered black sites. In April 2009, Army Col. Stephen R. Henley, another military judge, ordered the government to "maintain the status quo" at any facility where the 9/11 defendants were held. (.PDF) But in 2010, the Obama administration voided the military commission for the five accused 9/11 conspirators in a failed bid to try them in civilian courts, only to start over with a different commission – one that may not be bound by Henley's order. "Unlike a civilian court, the authority of a military commission ends when it is dissolved," Connell clarifies.
If it seems strange that the black sites' building design should be a factor for disclosure about the treatment that took place inside them, consider that there's been practically no official disclosure about what did. The Senate intelligence committee recently completed a report into the CIA's "enhanced interrogation program," but for the time being, it remains a secret. The Justice Department declined to prosecute CIA officers involved in the torture program. Nearly everything else known about the treatment of detainees kept in black sites has been pieced together from references in declassified legal documents or from journalism.
The secrecy surrounding the commissions prevents Connell from saying if he has specific reason to fear that the black sites are at risk of destruction. ("I can neither confirm nor deny that," he says.) But it's not a hypothetical fear. The former chief of the CIA Counterterrorism Center destroyed nearly 100 videotapes documenting brutal interrogations.
Observers of the military commissions are reluctant to predict how Pohl will rule on the black-site preservation. But Daphne Eviatar, who monitors the commissions for Human Rights First (disclosure: a former journalistic colleague of mine), isn't optimistic after seeing Pohl kill the audio feed in the courtroom last October when it seemed like one of the lawyers was about to use the word "torture."
And even if Pohl orders the government to preserve evidence from the black sites doesn't mean he'll allow that information to be disclosed in open court. A victory for Connell isn't the same as a victory for openness about torture. And if that's the way Pohl rules, it may be a long time before the public has a better chance to learn even a little more about what the CIA torture program entailed.
"War crimes trials are often about a public presentation of what happened at some historical point," Eviatar says. "Here, although what happened [before] 9/11 is the primary subject of the trial, how the U.S. responded to 9/11, through these five defendants, is also important, and the trial out to be able to bring out all of that."
"If the government wants to go forward with a case seeking the death penalty against these men, it has to make the evidence which may still exist available to them," Connell says. "If they will not make relevant evidence available, the law suggests the prosecution cannot go forward with the case. " Unless Pohl decides otherwise.Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is facing backlash over a tweet he sent Sunday supporting far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders ahead of the Netherlands' Wednesday election that critics say had overtones of white nationalism.
"Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies," King tweeted Sunday, in apparent support of an anti-Turkish statement by Wilders.
Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO — Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017
King defended his statement on Monday, stating on CNN, "I meant exactly what I said."
The tweet also quoted from "Voice of Europe," an account that describes itself as being "Anti EU / Pro Europe / MAGA [Make America Great Again]" and has endorsed Wilders, who is known for his controversial anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim stances.
As many pointed out in response, King's rhetoric hewed closely to that of white supremacists, who often use terms such as "culture and demographics" to promote racism and xenophobia.
"It is hard to read that any other way than it was written. It is an apparent, explicit call to protect white 'culture and demographics' from immigrants," Elliot Hannon wrote at Slate Sunday.
That interpretation was bolstered after former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who also supported President Donald Trump during the 2016 election, responded to King's statement by tweeting, "GOD BLESS STEVE KING!!!" with the hashtag #TruthRISING.
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Social media users slammed the Iowa congressman and suggested that he will feel the backlash in the 2018 midterms.
"You, Congressman, are simply a bigot. Good thing is, I know a lot of smart Dems eyeing your seat," one person wrote.
Miriam Amer, executive director of the Iowa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also responded, calling on Republican leaders to condemn King's message.
"This racist tweet crosses the line from dog-whistle politics to straight-up white supremacist advocacy, which must be repudiated by state and national GOP leaders," she said. "King seems to believe that only babies of a particular demographic should be valued as part of America's culture and destiny."
While Republican leaders have largely remained silent, one party member, Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, demanded that King explain himself.
".@SteveKingIA What exactly do you mean? Do I qualify as "somebody else's baby?" #concernedGOPcolleague" he tweeted.
.@SteveKingIA What exactly do you mean? Do I qualify as "somebody else's baby?" #concernedGOPcolleague — Carlos Curbelo (@carloslcurbelo) March 13, 2017
King has previously come under fire for stating that white people contributed more to human civilization than "any other subgroup." He has also suggested that Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, "trades off" his legacy and has done nothing for the movement since the 1960s, when he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.
CNN's Chris Cuomo asked Rep. King on Monday whether he believed "a Muslim American, an Italian American, Jewish American, [are] all equal, all the same thing."
After hesitating, which sparked more criticism from Cuomo, King eventually answered, "They contribute differently to our culture and civilization. Individuals will contribute differently, not equally to this civilization and society. Certain groups of people will do more from a productive side than other groups of people will."Ohio Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor also heads the state Department of Insurance. She makes no secret of her dislike for what she derisively calls "Obamacare," the law formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
In June, Taylor wrote a guest column for newspapers in which she said, "I will do everything I can to protect Ohio’s citizens and job creators from this catastrophic law." She followed it by giving a speech with a similar theme.
In another guest column for newspapers that was posted Sept. 8 to the Department of Insurance website, Taylor says the health care law will limit choice and increase cost for consumers.
"The law’s heavy-handed mandates force insurance companies to include coverage for many benefits and services you may not want," she wrote. "Say for example, you do not have any children. Under Obamacare, you would still have to carry insurance that covers pediatric, maternity and newborn care even though you do not need it.
"Such mandates remove consumerism from the process and replace it with a one-size-fits-all approach. By requiring consumers to buy services they do not want or need, costs will rise significantly."
That got PolitiFact Ohio’s attention. Would consumers really be forced to buy unnecessary coverage, like pediatric, maternity and newborn care for people with no children?
We asked Taylor's office for support.
We were referred to Section 1302 of the Affordable Care Act as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. "It addresses the essential health benefits," a spokesman for Taylor said.
We read Section 1302, and it seemed to bear out Taylor's assertion. But we were frankly confused by the wording, and we turned for guidance to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a trusted independent source on health care issues.
"It is true that this (pediatric, maternity and newborn care) is covered as part of the essential benefits package," a spokesman told us. "The law does mandate that insurance."
But the spokesman added more: Current employer-provided insurance plans "may include coverage you will never use or need, such as maternity care for a man or prostate cancer coverage for women."
Wanting further explanation, we talked with Neera Tanden, who worked on the health care legislation as senior advisor for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services. She is currently CEO of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
"Ninety percent of all plans cover everything described in the bill as 'essential health benefits package," she said. "People are paying for all those benefits today. We all pay for things we never use. It is the nature of insurance."
Individual policies are usually more expensive, offer fewer benefits and are less regulated than group plans, she said, noting that Section 1302 of the health care act says that the scope of the package should equal the scope of benefits "under a typical employer plan."
The act also bans exclusions for "preexisting conditions" that exclusively or primarily affect women and ends the practice of charging women higher premiums than men, she said.
"The thrust of (Taylor's) case is there should be no requirements on what insurance companies offer," Tanden said.
Wanting the perspective of an authority without a dog in the political fight, we turned to J.B. Silvers at Case Western Reserve University.
He is professor of health care finance and professor of banking and finance at the Weatherhead School of Management, faculty director of the Health Systems Management Center and holds a joint appointment in the School of Medicine. He also is former CEO of a health plan and insurance company.
Silvers said the health care plan "makes the playing field level" by setting a standard for benefit packages.
"It is true you could buy some sort of stripped-down policy," he said, but such plans are "almost universally a bad deal" with higher costs.
Normally, he said, a company negotiates coverage for employees, and "wouldn't offer one plan for single males and another for people with families."
What does that say about the accuracy of Taylor's statement?
"It's irrelevant," Silvers said. "It's a silly argument, frankly. Insurance by definition includes things you don't think you need."
What it means to us is that Taylor, the top official at the state department that oversees insurance, was accurate in describing provisions of what she calls Obamacare. But it is misleading to imply that health insurance policies are purchased a la carte, that such purchasing would reduce costs to consumers, and that the "essential benefits package" represents a departure from current group plans.
And when a statement has an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, it rates Mostly False on the Truth-O-Meter.A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.
For most of my career as a PC analyst, I have followed and chronicled the evolution of the PC. My first project when I came to Creative Strategies was to work with a new group formed inside IBM that created the original IBM PC. By the time I was asked to be involved in some design strategies and retail projects, the IBM PC had just become a hit, and was in the process of solidifying the role of a PC in business.
A short time after the IBM PC became successful, clones started hitting the market. The most successful one of its day was the Compaq computer. I was privileged to attend the first-ever Compaq analyst event in which all (four) PC analysts at the time were invited. In the early days of the PC, there really weren’t any PC analysts per se, and those who had the title had been covering mini-computers — PCs were added to our research roles.
During the visit, we spent time with Compaq chairman Ben Rosen and Compaq co-founder Rod Canion to learn about their new PC clone and why they thought they would be successful. IBM had become a force with their PCs, and I found it curious that an upstart like Compaq would even challenge them.
In fact, during that visit, I asked Canion why he decided to put up his own money and go after funding to take on IBM. He told me that when he was at Texas Instruments, he learned early on that whatever IBM did, it would become a standard. He saw the success of the IBM PC and understood that it was created with off-the-shelf parts, and placed what he called a “sure bet” to create a competitor, knowing full well that IBM’s PC would become the standard for business computing. Not long after, Dell and others brought out clones, too.
However, the one constant for all of these computers was an operating system created originally for IBM, known as MS-DOS. Since it was not proprietary, it was also licensed to Compaq, Dell, Acer and about a couple dozen other PC vendors in the heyday of the PC. MS-DOS eventually became Windows, and this OS has been dominant for PCs and laptops for more than 30 years. Of course, Apple created a computer OS for the Mac, but Apple’s OS is proprietary, and even though it has done and is still doing very well, PCs running Windows outsell Macs exponentially.
It is interesting to note that, for most of Windows’ life, it was a local PC and laptop OS, but Microsoft had visions of this OS becoming a standard for use in tablets and smart mobile devices as early as 1990. However, due to a lot of infighting inside Microsoft and a huge emphasis on productivity, it was never able to really establish Windows as a dominant OS beyond the PC. This opened the door for Apple and Google to create new operating systems designed just for mobile computers and IoT.
While Apple’s iOS is a huge success in its own right, like OS X, it is proprietary and used only on Apple products. On the other hand, Android has a lot of the original characteristics of Windows in that it is a licensable OS that can be used by any PC, tablet, smartphone and IoT vendor in the world. Indeed, if you look at the number of mobile devices on the market today running Android, it makes up about 75 percent of all products shipped.
At its recent I/O developers’ conference, Google’s leadership clearly stated that they want Android to be the dominant OS for connected devices and Internet of Things. Like Windows, Android is hardware agnostic and can easily be applied to any mobile or IoT device. Even more important is that Android serves as Google’s OS/UI to its overall cloud vision, and it is building most of its worldwide ecosystem of products and services channeled through Android.
Almost from the beginning, Bill Gates and Microsoft wanted their OS, and especially Windows, to be dominant on devices around the world. I still see that as their goal, but due to various choices and infighting, they are far behind Google and Apple in this quest — I don’t see that Windows outside of the PC could ever become a dominant device OS worldwide.
Apple, with its proprietary approach, has made major strides in its quest to dominate the device market, and with the iPhone, iPad, HealthKit, HomeKit, CarPlay, Apple Watch and Apple TV, it has emerged as a serious powerhouse in this space. However, while in the past Apple’s main competitor was Microsoft and Windows, this time it is Google and Android, and Android has become the Windows of our generation.
The big difference between Microsoft and Google is that Microsoft still has to protect its legacy devices as well as try and move everything to its “One Microsoft” strategy. That is not easy to do. When it comes to mobile devices, Microsoft’s Windows mobile phones are a very distant third in the overall market of smartphones. As for IoT, iOS and Android clearly have an edge and momentum over Microsoft. Market projections from most research houses see Android basically dominating the market for mobile and IoT because it is device agnostic and is a free license for anyone that wants it.
From where I sit, it really does seem that Android is the Windows of our day, and Google is in a place to broaden its lead in mobile and IoT, barring any serious missteps. Apple will be a worthy competitor, and I don’t expect Microsoft to rest on its laurels and let Google dominate this space without a fight. However, Android’s lead in these two markets is quite huge and, if Google keeps moving in this direction and keeps its customers happy, I suspect that Android, at least from a numbers viewpoint, will continue to be the dominant mobile and IoT system for many years to come.
Tim Bajarin is the president of Creative Strategies Inc. He is recognized as one of the leading industry consultants, analysts and futurists covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Bajarin has been with Creative Strategies since 1981, and has served as a consultant to most of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry including IBM, Apple, Xerox, Compaq, Dell, AT&T, Microsoft, Polaroid, Lotus, Epson, Toshiba and numerous others. Reach him @Bajarin.Nearly 35 years ago, 1974 Nobel Prize winner in economics F.A. Hayek wrote:
“We understand now that all enduring structures above the level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society, are the results of, and can be explained only in terms of, processes of selective evolution…”
Mr. Ridley’s fantastic book will greatly help mankind finally catch up to Hayek.
To properly understand how the world works one must understand how at a fundamental level evolution is like an algorithm for creating order and everything around us. That is the essence of Hayek’s quote and Mr. Ridley’s book. Ridley cleverly titled his chapters as “The Evolution of Life”, “The Evolution of Genes”, “The Evolution of…” The chapters are bite sized chunks of evolutionary explanations that neatly tie everything together leaving the reader with a remarkably simple yet profound way of understanding how the entire world works. Hayek would have been proud.
Mr. Ridley was awarded the Manhattan Institute’s 2011 Hayek prize for his previous and also highly recommended book “The Rational Optimist”. In his acceptance speech he mentions how sort of shocking it is that someone like himself can get a PHd from one of England’s finest universities without ever hearing of intellectual giants like Adam Smith and much less F.A. Hayek. He says:
“Many of the insights that I thought I had discovered in my own readings and writings...it turns out Hayek had long before me.”
Yes! And I’m sure this happens to people all the time as they inevitably stumble upon the fact that “processes of selective evolution” are what shape all order. In chapter 7 titled “The Evolution of Technology” Ridley mentions Brian Arthur from the famed “Santa Fe Institute”. Arthur too is one of the many people who rediscovered Hayek’s and fellow free-market ‘Austrian Economists’ insights. Arthur once mentioned:
"Right after we published our first findings [on the implications of path dependence and complexity theory for economics], we started getting letters from all over the country saying, 'You know, all you guys have done is rediscover Austrian economics'.. I admit I wasn't familiar with Hayek and von Mises as the time. But now that I've read them, I can see that this is essentially true."
Sadly none of Arthur’s recent publications with titles like “Complexity and the Economy” and “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves”, which are such “Hayekian” themes, mention Hayek at all. It is as if Arthur discovered how to make a wooden decagon to use as a wheel when 20 years earlier Hayek and von Mises had created Michelins.
It was interesting to see in Ridley’s book how Stephen Jay Gould never saw how natural selection, without human conscious planning, was the key to a prosperous social order. Ridley mentions “As a Marxist, Gould surprisingly approved of this philosophy –for biology, but not for economics: ‘It is ironic that Adam Smith’s system of laissez faire does not work in his own domain of economics, for it leads to oligopoly and revolution’”
Ridley writes “A genome is a digital computer program of immense complexity.” Which reminded me of Dawkin’s wonderful ‘River out of Eden’ where I believe I first saw this important analogy.
Great paragraph showing evolution at work:
“As the rest of the cancer dies away, the descendants of this rogue cell gradually begin to multiply, and the cancer returns. Heartbreakingly, this is what happens all too often in the treatment of cancer: initial success followed by eventual failure. It’s an evolutionary arms race.”
One thing I did not like about the book were quotes from disastrous economists like Larry Summers. Mr. Summers seems like you average misguided Keynesian and even served as the head of the World Bank. That’s banking socialism at its best, the very opposite of free-banking which Mr. Ridley preaches and does a great and concise job describing in his book. Ridley writes: “The economist Larry Summers tells his students: ‘Things will happen in well-organised efforts without direction, controls, plans. That’s the consensus among economists’”. The last sentence in that quote “the consensus among economists” yikes! How many times have we heard “the consensus among climate scientists” or “the consensus among etc.” to push gigantic errors via government force upon the entire social order with disastrous consequences? Nasty quote.
On the other hand it was wonderful to see Ridley quote perhaps the greatest economist of the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises, who had a profound effect on F.A. Hayek and could have saved humanity millions of lives had more people managed to read and understand his utter destruction of Socialism as an economic system as early as 1922. As Hayek mentioned:
“When Socialism[Mises’ book that destroyed Socialism] first appeared in 1922, its impact was profound. It gradually but fundamentally altered the outlook of many of the young idealists returning to their university studies after World War I. I know, for I was one of them.”
Ridley writes:
---
“You will often hear people say that free markets have been discredited, as they sip cups of coffee while sitting on chairs, wearing clothes and checking text messages –each of which was supplied by hundreds, thousands of producers whose beautifully coordinated collaboration was unplanned but achieved by ‘market forces’…Who decreed that coffee shops should take the form that they do? The customers.
As Ludwig von Mises pointed out in 1944, the real bosses in a market economy are the consumers.
“They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors.”
--- End of Ridley's quote
Ridley continues soon after quote with “…Yet the history of government over the past few centuries is that when the state steps in to provide something that was underprovided by people for themselves, things do not necessarily improve; often they get worse. Market failure is a favorite phrase; government failure is not.”
It was interesting to learn about the early history of various government interventions in England, like how Lloyd George was responsible for a scheme where he “used the proceeds of the tax to double the minimum pay of doctors, effectively transferring wealth from poor workers to rich doctors.” Thus helping government bureaucracy begin to hamper the medical sector in England.
The discussion on eugenics was great and learning about how the US helped sterilize about 3 million people in India during 1972-73 was a bit shocking. Ridley writes: “In 1976, when eight million Indians were sterilized, Robert McNamara visited the country and congratulated it: ‘At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem.’”
The discussion on patents and how the social order is like a collective brain where people share knowledge and how all inventions or discoveries have much more to do with the workings of the system/free-market as opposed to individual brilliance was excellent too. For being a top scholar Mr. Ridley humbly shows how it is the free-market that makes us great and plays the leading role in innovation. ‘Great minds’ will have to rightly swallow their pride.
In chapter 15 “The Evolution of Money” Mr. Ridley makes the case for free banking by showing how banking too is not something that needs a central planner and that we would be better off without such banking-central-planning like we have these days with the Federal Reserve and so on. He rightly shows how artificially low interest rates created by central banks by increasing the money supply was a leading factor in the bubble that began to explode in 2008. It was great to see him quoting the various misguided “economic experts” like Nobel Laureates in economics Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman in a way that shows how wrong and misguided these Central/Socialist banking Keynesians were. Ridley writes: “The economist Paul Krugman was still insisting as late as July 2008 that ‘Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago,’ and also had nothing to do with sub-prime loans. By contrast, Congressman Ron Paul was already warning that the special privileges granted to the two GSEs meant that ‘the losses will be greater than they would otherwise have been had the government not actively encouraged overinvestment in housing’”
Mainstream Keynesians like Krugman and Bernanke are constantly having to fight off free-market libertarians in the US, especially a bunch of them who came to libertarianism and free-market ‘Austrian economics’ thanks to the 2008/2012 presidential runs of Dr. Ron Paul. But these people Krugman and Bernanke can dismiss as just libertarian teenage ideologues or whatever. The fact that Ron Paul is Christian and sometimes makes references to morality as a defense of free-markets, makes it easy for Krugman and Bernanke to dismiss Paul’s free-market views as some irrational Christian fundamentalism. This is well captured in a comment Bernanke made in 2011 where he said “I'm not a believer in the Old Testament theory of business cycles” which was a sort of stab or dismissal of Ron Paul, again, implying that Ron Paul’s economic views are more of religious conservative fundamentalism than being based on sound economic principle. But they won’t be able to make that mistake anymore. Now Krugman, Bernanke, and his replacement Yellen have to deal with Ridley, and it does not get much more “scientific” than a guy like Ridley who is good friends with the likes of Dawkins and leaders of the British scientific community. I have little doubt that given the clarity and readability of this fantastic little book, many minds in the upper echelons of the scientific community where Mr. Ridley swims so well will quickly come around to free-market economics. Thanks to books like Ridley’s, free-market economics is now firmly riding on the unstoppable evolutionary train which will bulldoze its way through economic ignorance just like it did with religious mysticism. Natural selection and evolution shape both the biological world of genes and living things and the macro world of the social organism/economy, to only know about their influence in biology is to have an incomplete understanding of them. So those biologists who think they are “experts” in natural selection and evolution really only know half the story and thus have an incomplete understanding of theories they hold dear.
One thing that I would have liked to have seen in this very important chapter is at least a passing reference to Carl Menger who was rightly mentioned in chapter 6 “The Evolution of the Economy” for his participation in the so-called “Marginalist Revolution” in economics. Chapter 15 begins as follows:
“Money is an evolutionary phenomenon. It emerged gradually among traders, rather than being created by rulers –despite the heads of kings on the coins: those just illustrated the tendency of the powerful to insist on monopolies. And there is absolutely no reason why money must be a government monopoly.”
Very true and makes a great point but “It emerged gradually among traders” is all the explanation the chapter has with respect to how money actually emerged from barter and how, without any human planning or design, money solves the “double coincidence of wants” problem which would otherwise keep market economies limited in size to just a few hundred or thousand people. To my knowledge it was Carl Menger who provided the evolutionary explanation for this transition in his groundbreaking book “Principles of Economics”. Hayek rightly referred to Menger’s book as “such a fascinating book—so satisfying.” But this is just a nice-to-have and in no way diminishes the chapter’s awesomeness.
One last very minor criticism of the book is how in one of the final chapters “The Evolution of the Internet”, while discussing all the internet spying that Governments are now doing, Ridley makes a somewhat condescending sounding remark about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. He writes:
“It was a pity, perhaps, that we found all this out from flawed whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who sometimes seemed only too happy to compound the state’s sins by then exposing the contents of the eavesdropping themselves (and throwing themselves on the mercy of illiberal regimes).”
“flawed whistleblowers”??? I don’t get it. I’m sure they would have loved to throw themselves at the mercy of “liberal” regimes but it seems like the “liberty” in “liberal” was going to give way to American bureaucrats and their pressures.
Ridley’s book is brief and easy to understand which increases its “viralness” and will thus greatly help spread its profound socioeconomic insights.
Next I’d like to make a few comments regarding the existing reviews of this book.
Mr. Edward Durney’s review on October 28th 2015 mentions:
“I don't buy everything Matt Ridley argues. There are shades of the largely discredited "Social Darwinism" of Herbert Spencer and others in Matt Ridley's thinking”
Looks like Edward overlooked a long footnote where Ridley debunks the negative stereotype that is often times thrown at Spencer with the “Social Darwinism” label. This gigantic error that plagues so many people misrepresents Spencer’s views and downplay the rightful representation of Herbert Spencer as one of mankind’s greatest intellectuals, right up there with Darwin. Spencer was a personal acquaintance of Charles Darwin who in a correspondence to Spencer said to him “Every one with eyes to see and ears to hear (the number, I fear, are not many) ought to bow their knee to you, and I for one do” and in another occasion referred to Spencer as “twenty times my superior.” Darwin might have penned a superior description of natural selection and evolution, but Spencer took the evolutionary paradigm much further than Darwin and used it to explain the entire workings of the world and was thoroughly aware of how evolutionary forces, not top down government planning, were the key to economic prosperity and an efficient social order. As Spencer so beautifully wrote:
“Consider first how immediately every private enterprise is dependent upon the need for it; and how impossible it is for it to continue if there be no need. Daily are new trades and new companies established. If they subserve some existing public want, they take root and grow. If they do not, they die of inanition. It needs no act of Parliament, to put them down. As with all natural organizations, if there is no function to them, no nutrient comes to them, and they dwindle away. Moreover, not only do the new agencies disappear if they are superfluous, but the old ones cease to be when they have done their work. Unlike law-made instrumentalities…these private instrumentalities dissolve when they become needless.”
Steve G.’s review on October 28th 2015 mentions:
“it is obvious from the chapters on finance and laws, that Ridley is a libertarian and is using the cover of evolution to give his politics legitimacy. However, once Ridley’s underlying beliefs became apparent, I filtered them out and enjoyed the historical information in the book.”
My guess is that Mr Ridley is not using evolution to give his political views legitimacy, it is Mr. Ridley’s understanding of evolution which drives his libertarianism not the other way around. To properly understand evolution means to eventually lean towards libertarianism. As Hayek tells us “…selection by evolution is prevented by government monopolies that make competitive experimentation impossible.” And since competitive experimentation is the best way to discover superior knowledge, one has to dismantle monopolies and thus government and thus lean towards libertarianism as opposed to statism/creationism/‘central planning’.
Bottom line. This is a fantastic book that |
Pa.) as a strong threat in Minnesota and attacked him Sunday for the first time in a few weeks.
Romney campaigned last week in Eagan, Minn., but canceled a planned trip back to the state on Monday to instead spend time in Colorado, where he has a more robust operation.
At his campaign stops these days, Romney arrives in dramatic fashion. He emerges through a tunnel or steps off his logo-emblazoned bus, bounds on stage to loud rock music, looks out at the cheering supporters behind him, at his sides and in front of him and feigns shock at how many people have shown up.
In Colorado Springs on Saturday: “Wow!” In Reno, Nev., last Thursday: “What a welcome — what a Reno welcome!” In the Villages, Fla., last Monday: “Thanks, you guys. Wow!”
Romney then powers through his stump speech: President Obama doesn’t know how to lead, this election is about the soul of America, recite (or, if so inclined, sing) “America the Beautiful.”
“I love America’s hymns,” Romney said at the Colorado rally. “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. When I was in Iowa, I said the amber waves of grain included corn, and I think that’s why I lost by 25 votes. You do have spacious skies here; no amber waves of grain that I know of.
“For purple mountains’ majesty,” he continued. “Oh, yes, you have those.”
Then Romney basks in the adoration of his supporters, shakes hands, poses with babies and heads for the airport to board his chartered Boeing 737. Another stop awaits.Earlier this week The Information reported that Apple is making a smart hub to compete with the very cool Amazon Echo and recently announced Google Home. This is not shocking. Consumer technology companies’ new favorite thing is to get their remarkably well-designed talons into every aspect of our lives. If we want the convenience they promise then we have to sell a little bit of our digital soul.
I’m okay with this.
To an extent.
Google Home worries me because Google already has my emails, search habits, and TV preferences and with Google Home it wants to sit on my mantle and listen to my every fart.
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But at least it isn’t rumored to have cameras with facial recognition like Apple’s skunkworks home helper.
According to CNET:
The device would be “self aware” and detect who is in the room using facial recognition technology. That would let the device automatically pull up a person’s preferences, such as the music and lighting they like, the sources said.
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It’s great that Apple wants to effortlessly acknowledge my love of mood lighting and a little Sleater-Kinney. It is also the stuff of ol’ George Orwell’s nightmares.
[CNET]Riding a wave of steady growth, glowing reviews for its beer and community goodwill, once-tiny Bike Dog Brewing is taking the next major step in its evolution by launching a high-profile taproom on Broadway.
The new venture, to be situated next to a Selland’s Market-Cafe at 915 Broadway in a renovated building across from the Historic City Cemetery, is part of an ongoing craft beer boom that has helped redefine Sacramento’s image. The taproom is slated to coincide with the Selland’s opening in January.
Selland’s will have 7,500 square feet and Bike Dog’s taproom will be 2,500 square feet, along with a patio facing Broadway. The remaining 3,400 square feet will house an architecture firm. The Broadway building has 80 parking spaces and 44 bike racks.
Josh Nelson, the chief executive officer of Selland Family Restaurants and an enthusiastic craft beer fan, recruited Bike Dog to the Broadway site.
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“I really like what they do. From top to bottom, they probably have the most solid lineup of beer produced locally,” Nelson said. “For us, I think it will be plenty of synergy. I think we’ll service a lot of the same clientele.”
Since launching its tiny brewery to plenty of fanfare in West Sacramento three years ago, Bike Dog gradually established itself as one of the top craft breweries in town, best known for its San Dog India pale ale and Mosaic pale ale, along with a casual, friendly vibe at its tasting room. Adding to the humble appeal was the idea that all four owners, who met working at the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, or SACOG, have kept their day jobs.
“We have grown organically and we like the feeling of that growth,” said co-owner Sage Smith. “We feel like we have done quite well considering where we started and where we are now.” The other Bike Dog partners are A.J. Tendick, Raef Porter and brewmaster Pete Atwood.
The Broadway project was initially positioned as the new site for The Kitchen, the $175-per-person special-occasion, performance-style restaurant owned by Selland Family Restaurants, which also owns the upscale Ella Dining Room and Bar, the new OBO Italian Table & Bar, and the casual eateries Selland’s Market-Cafe in El Dorado Hills and east Sacramento.
The family eventually reconsidered, and went ahead with a new Selland’s Market-Cafe on Broadway, opting to keep The Kitchen at its current unassuming site at Howe Avenue and Hurley Way.
Bike Dog will continue with its popular West Sacramento location in a 6,000-square-foot industrial space that includes a tasting room and recently expanded brewing operation. Like many bustling breweries, Bike Dog often has a rotating lineup of food trucks on site. That won’t happen on Broadway – the lease prohibits food trucks.
And don’t expect a generic taproom or brewery aesthetic. Bike Dog has enlisted Sacramento’s Popp Littrell Architecture + Interiors to handle the design. Among its clients are Ginger Elizabeth Chocolates, Masullo Pizza and the relocated Magpie Cafe.
The brewery and design teams recently went on a fact-finding trip to the Bay Area, visiting Mikkeller Bar SF, Drake’s Dealership and Temescal Brewing, among others. The taproom will likely draw customers from midtown and downtown neighborhoods, along with Land Park, Curtis Park and beyond.
“We don’t want it to look like a bar or a traditional taproom,” said Smith, noting that plans have yet to be finalized. “We’re going to try to have fun with it. We’re looking to take a chance and do something that people haven’t seen yet in beer.”
The Broadway taproom comes on the heels of the newly opened Fieldwork Brewing taproom in midtown, which has exceeded expectations since it opened a month ago. Based in Berkeley, Fieldwork will also open tasting rooms in Monterey and Napa in the coming weeks.
“We love West Sac. We’re not going to leave West Sac,” Smith said. “But the concern is that as our brewery grows, we’d like to have a taproom in a neighborhood on this side of the river that can accommodate the rest of the people.”Posted 3/30/2016, updated 4/14/2016 with UO’s new $50K payment to Cleavenger’s lawyers.
In February 2014 UO’s lawyers from Harrang, Long, Gary and Rudnick lost the arbitration case against former UOPD officer James Cleavenger. UO had to pay Cleavenger $30K in back wages, $6K for arbitration costs, and an unknown amount to HLGR, who typically bill $315 an hour.
UOPD Chief McDermed and others at UO claimed Cleavenger was dishonest and should be put on the “Brady List”, preventing him from getting another police job. According to K&M, our current Associate GC Doug Park participated in that decision. Cleavenger hired the Kafoury and McDougal law firm to take his First Amendment claim of retaliation and blacklisting to federal court. UO hired Andrea Coit of HLGR to defend it.
In October the jury awarded Cleavenger $755K on the grounds that UOPD Chief McDermed and others had retaliated against Cleavenger because of his exercise of his free-speech rights. His attorneys asked the judge for $500K from UO for fees and costs – in a civil rights case the losing side pays the winner’s lawyers. UO replaced Andrea Coit with HLGR’s Bill Gary to try and convince the judge to set aside the jury’s verdict and reduce UO’s $500K payment to Kafoury and McDougal.
Gary lost his quixotic attempt to get the judge to set aside the jury’s verdict, but did get the judge to knock $50K off Kafoury and McDougal’s bill. UO then forced UOPD Chief Carolyn McDermed into retirement, paying her $46K to leave, as Betsy Hammond of the Oregonian discovered after a public records request to UO.
Yesterday, the judge awarded Kafoury another $50K in fees and costs for successfully defending Cleavenger against Gary’s pleas:
So, net, for this losing plea, UO is out however many additional billable hours Gary and HLGR charged times $315 per hour. The Emerald’s Noah McGraw reported, as of October, that HLGR had billed UO $395K for losing the original case. So maybe they’ve made $500K or so total, if you count their fees for losing the arbitration. Add in UO’s payment to the winning side’s lawyers and the lawyers have made $1M or so, not counting the time of Doug Park et al. But it’s not over. In March UO hired HLGR to appeal the case to the Ninth Circuit, also at $315 an hour, plus expenses.
Does anyone know the last time HLGR’s lawyers actually won a major case?
I’m no behavioral economist, but Danny Kahneman’s “sunk cost fallacy” comes to mind. As does Milton Friedman and “spending other people’s money.” I suppose when you bill $315 an hour you never really lose – even when you mistakenly email a newspaper the files your client is trying to hide. And HLGR is not off to a good start on this appeal:
Whoops. The full docket is here. It looks like HLGR had to pay another $505 to refile the appeal correctly:
Duck PR Flack Tobin Klinger told the Oregonian that the university’s insurance, not tuition money or the individual employees, would pay the damages. That’s not true, and UO now says that these costs will be paid by the PURMIT risk sharing pool, meaning UO will pay about 25%, OSU about 33%, and PSU and the TRU’s the rest, perhaps with some reinsurance. But they don’t want to release the public records that show this.
Regardless of who pays, the bad news is that the UO administration will be spending still more years wallowing in this trough, instead of focusing on the future. The good news it that UOM will have more HLGR antics to report on – such as Andrea Coit’s attempt to convince the judge that Cleavenger was involved in a Masonic blood oath conspiracy.Washington, D.C. — (RT) The Justice Department should allocate more money to help police fight crime rather than spend scarce resources on lawsuits against police departments, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. The DOJ has found much abuse within US policing in recent years.
Speaking before the National Association of Attorneys General winter meeting in Washington, DC, Sessions said his Department of Justice (DOJ) will include a task force that will analyze policing practices in the US in order to fight crime.
The Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety will employ the heads of major federal law enforcement agencies to “look at deficiencies in our current laws that have made them less effective in reducing crime, and propose new legislation.”
Part of the revamped DOJ mission will include reversing the suffering morale of law enforcement, which, “as a whole has been unfairly maligned and blamed for the unacceptable deeds of a few bad actors,” Sessions said.
After calling DOJ Chicago, Ferguson reports “anecdotal,” “not scientific,” Sessions concedes HE NEVER READ THEM. https://t.co/HknculJY0o? — Radley Balko (@radleybalko) February 28, 2017
“[R]ather than dictating to local police how to do their jobs – or spending scarce federal resources to sue them in court – we should use our money, research and expertise to help them figure out what is happening and determine the best ways to fight crime,” the attorney general said.
According to the DOJ’s website, at least 29 law enforcement agencies in the US and its territories have been the subject of a DOJ investigation in recent years. Those investigations encompass a vast range of misdeeds and abusive practices by the likes of the Baltimore and Cleveland police departments, among many others.
Jeff Sessions tells state AGs: people who are here unlawfully who commit crimes are going to be “outta here.” 1st speech as leader of DOJ. — Carrie Johnson (@johnson_carrie) February 28, 2017
In January, the DOJ said that the Chicago Police Department engaged in a systematic pattern civil rights violations and wanton use of deadly force in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.
In 2015, the DOJ found routine constitutional violations by the Ferguson (Mo.) Police Department that severely impacted a “community where deep distrust and hostility often characterized interactions between police and area residents.”
On Monday, Sessions said he has not decided how the DOJ will handle the Chicago probe, nor has he even read DOJ investigative reports on the Chicago Police Department and other police departments.
“I have not read those reports, frankly. We’ve had summaries of them, and some of it was pretty anecdotal, and not so scientifically based,” Sessions said, according to the Huffington Post.
Repeating a familiar theme among Donald Trump administration officials, Sessions said there is a “disturbing rise in violent crime in our nation.” Crime statistics for 2015, the latest year with complete data, showed a 3.9 percent increase from the previous year, according to the FBI.
Yet, violent crime is down about half since the early 1990s and sits at a level not seen since the 1970s. The rise in 2015 came after two decades of decreases. Sessions acknowledged this “context” of decreasing rates of violent crime in the long-term. Nevertheless, he warned the recent increase cannot yet be written off as a “one-year spike.”
“These numbers should trouble all of us,” Sessions said in reference to upticks in murder rates of major US cities. “My worry is that this is not a ‘blip’ or an anomaly, but the start of a dangerous new trend that could reverse the hard-won gains of the past four decades – gains that made America a safer and more prosperous place.”
Referencing America’s “heroin epidemic,” Sessions first blamed Mexican drug cartels and “illegal drugs [that] flood across our southern border.” Heroin overdose deaths, for example, have quadrupled in the last five years, the federal government said last week. Experts on heroin use in the US point out that the drug’s skyrocketing popularity has been fueled by common availability of, and subsequent crackdown on, prescription drugs.
Increasing federal drug and gun prosecutions will be a priority for his DOJ after declining trends for both classes of crime, Sessions said.
He also claimed that law enforcement officers “are becoming more cautious” amid criticism of policing practices in “this age of viral videos and targeted killings of police.”
“Our officers, deputies and troopers believe the political leadership of this country abandoned them,” Sessions said. “Their morale has suffered.”How we are getting Millennials to save (in gold)
Manuel Ho Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 2, 2017
HelloGold was launched with the promise to democratise gold — like so many other start-ups and cryptocurrencies gunning for an ICO…The difference is that we’re really doing it. As in right now. In Malaysia. Day in, day out, for the last 3 months since our public launch.
And how are we faring? It’s still early days but our customer base is already shaping up in a very interesting way…
Our customers are overwhelmingly young and urban
There’s a perception that buying gold is an old-fashioned habit that our grandparents used to have. After all, in the age of structured financial products, robot advisers and ubiquitous plastic money, who wants to buy good old gold for investment? It turns out it’s the young and urban! 41% of our customers are under 30 years old and 39% are between 30 to 40 years old. Overall 80% are less than 40 years old. Geographically 45% of our customers are in the urban states of Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, which is a massive over-representation in these areas. For reference our marketing has been based on email and SMS campaigns sent to a fairly representative customer database across Malaysia, although somewhat overweight in Johor and underweight in Sabah and Sarawak.
They start low but then go high
One of HelloGold’s hero propositions is that you can start buying gold with as little as RM1 — and indeed many do! Customers are obviously testing us out. Once they feel that we are trustworthy balances grow quickly. The average gold balance currently stands at 2.28g (RM450 or roughly US$110 at current prices). 20% of our customers bought more than 1g (c.RM180 at current prices) and 4% of customers have bought more than 10g (c.RM1,800 at current prices). At the top end a few have bought more than 100g in total and the maximum single transaction value so far was RM10,000.
They buy to save
88% of our customers that have bought gold have not sold any. Instead they keep accumulating more, especially when the price dips. This is heart-warming as we see gold as a long term tool to protect savings as opposed to a commodity to speculate and trade frequently.
For most the app is already a part of their daily lives
Our usage stats show that customers on average log in almost once a day (0.8 to be precise). 20% log in more than once a day, and half of these log in more than twice a day. At the extreme scale, our top 1% most engaged customers log in more than 10x per day!
These are great results. There is obviously a lot more to do. We’d like to have more women as customers. More customers from the remote states of Sabah and Sarawak. More families as group, and so on and so forth…It will happen as we release more features and explore broader marketing channels.
In the meantime I feel we’ve taken a big first step in engaging a new segment for gold. Young millennials are notoriously bad savers. And yet we’re managing to bring them onto our gold journey, thanks to a modern app and a very low cost of entry (RM1!). I’d say it’s a good start to our mission to democratise gold. And soon, when we deploy our lending product, we’ll be helping these young customers get access to bank credit, thus promoting financial inclusion. That is something that I’m very much looking forward to.* Member states worried about 500 billion euro cost
* Transport chief says represents fundamental policy shift
BRUSSELS, March 22 (Reuters) - European transport ministers on Thursday drew up a map of rapid road and rail links across the continent, from Sweden to Italy and Portugal to Paris, that would cost 500 billion euro ($660 billion) by 2020 if fully implemented.
Now that transport ministers have agreed a broad plan for a core transport network with a 2030 deadline, it will be further debated by the European Parliament and governments over the coming months.
“We have drawn a new map for Europe for the transport sector,” Henrik Dam Kristensen, transport minister for Denmark, holder of the rotating EU presidency, told reporters at the end of a council meeting in Brussels.
The network includes 10 major transport corridors, connecting 86 main European ports, 37 airports and upgrading 15,000 km of railway to high speed, as well as 35 cross-border projects to reduce bottlenecks.
Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas said he understood member states’ concerns about the cost in the current financial climate, but spending too little could be a false economy.
The 500 billion euros needed by 2020 would be a mixture of Commission, member state government, European Investment Bank and private funding.
Kallas described attempts by member states to slice more and more off the proposals as “salami tactics”.
“Being too conservative might have negative effects and generate additional costs,” he said. “This represents a fundamental shift in European transport policy.”
Green campaigners and members of the European Parliament have been cautious in their response, saying Thursday’s vague words needed to be matched with concrete implementation plans and aligned with other policy measures to reduce greenhouse gases from the transport sector.
“If the EU wants to deliver on its transport emissions reduction targets, it needs to join up its policies, not just join up points on a map,” Nina Renshaw, deputy director at transport and environment campaigners T&E, said. ($1 = 0.7582 euros) (Reporting by Barbara Lewis; Editing by Anthony Barker)Law entitles police in Spain’s African city enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla to hand illegal migrants back to Moroccan police
Spain’s lower house of parliament approved legislation on Thursday that allows for the summary expulsion of migrants entering the country’s north African enclaves illegally and hefty fines for protests outside parliament buildings or strategic installations.
The Public Security Law, approved in a 181-141 vote, entitles police in Spain’s north African city enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla to hand migrants caught trying to storm border fences back to Moroccan police on the other side of the border.
The law has been heavily criticised by opposition parties and rights groups as an attempt by the conservative government to muzzle protests over its handling of the economic crisis.
The measures, which update a 1992 law, also include fines of up to 30,000 euros (£23,650) for disseminating photographs of police officers that endanger them or police operations.
Spanish cities have been the scene of weekly protests, which are mostly peaceful, since the onset of the crisis in 2008.
The bill was passed easily because the conservative Popular party has an absolute majority. Opposition parties have pledged to scrap it if elected to office.
The Popular party, headed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, took office in 2011 and issued a series of austerity measures and cutbacks in health and education. The measures triggered an increase in street protests, including several attempts to encircle parliament, some of which ended up in clashes with police.
The new legislations says organisers of demonstrations outside parliament buildings and key installations that are deemed to be disturbing the peace can be fined up to 600,000 euros. Protesters who prevent authorities from carrying out evictions can be fined up to 30,000 euros while insulting a police officer can earn offenders fines of up to 600 euros.Art galleries are a public cultural benefit. They open their doors to allow anyone to enjoy the art in their exhibitions for free; they are not traditional retail stores with steady sales or ticketed performance venues. The value visitors receive occurs without the exchange of money. What galleries do is create a way for people to walk into a space and have their life changed in an instant by a piece of art that speaks to them.
Oakland Art Murmur was founded as a way to share this experience with as many people as possible. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, we serve all of the art spaces of Oakland. And our city's art spaces are under siege. In the last year, we have lost three art spaces in the Uptown neighborhood due to rising rents. This includes Rock Paper Scissors, one of the founding members of Oakland Art Murmur and the last of the original six galleries to remain in business ten years after its founding. Many art spaces faced 40 to 50 percent rent increases in the last year, and more closures are soon to follow.
Oakland Art Murmur's mission is to strengthen Oakland's diverse visual arts communities by providing access to resources, programming, and experiences. We connect and sustain Oakland's vibrant visual arts culture to engage and enrich the Oakland community. Beginning this year, dues are voluntary so that all art spaces with curated exhibitions can benefit from being a member of Oakland Art Murmur. Our operating budget is $30,000 per year, and our website, print publications, and community outreach are managed by one part-time employee and a dedicated group of volunteers. We have never received money from the City of Oakland in support of our brochures, public walking tours, or our website, which gets nearly 10,000 hits on any given First Friday. Our current membership of more than forty galleries and art exhibition spaces all across Oakland attract hundreds of people from all over the Bay Area every month to enjoy art and spend time in Oakland.
Our city officials need to pay more than just lip service to the arts; if the city doesn't have money to invest in the arts, how can they claim it as a priority? We currently have a city government more interested in giving discretionary funds and tax breaks to bring in new businesses than using those resources to keep our existing businesses and jobs stable. As new business is drawn to our city, the places that have made Oakland so great are starting to fall away.
Also concerning is that from a leadership standpoint, our city has no Cultural Arts Commission; even if the city were to receive foundational funds in support of the arts, there would be no officials qualified to dispense them.
If Oakland is to remain an important, diverse, cultural arts destination, we need your help. Oakland Art Murmur can't do it alone. We urge you to contact your city council representative and tell him or her how much the arts in Oakland mean to you. Tell them that we need city policies that protect, retain, and preserve our cultural art spaces, art galleries, and most of all, our artists.
#SaveOaklandArt
Sincerely,
Oakland Art Murmur Board of Directors
Conrad Meyers, president (director/co-founder, Aggregate Space Gallery)
Dasha Matsuura, vice president and gallery liaison (gallery associate, Chandra Cerrito Contemporary)
Ron Scrivani, treasurer (property owner, Warehouse 416)
Julie Armistead, secretary (independent curator/registrar)
Pamela Mays McDonald, chair of External Relations (Alameda County Arts Commissioner)
Amira K. Richmond, board member (marketing/sales, Thelma Harris Art Gallery)
Sawyer Rose, board member (artist)
Kiffanie Stahle, board member, (founder, Stahle Law)
Marianna Stark, board member-at-large (director of Brand Engagement, GapTech/Gap Inc.)
Claudia Worthington Hess, board member (Hess Art Advisory)The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, spent around £1,000 of public money on scented candles last year, fuelling accusations of extravagance following earlier complaints over his penchant for publicly funded pistachio ice cream and the installation of a double bed on a plane taking the first couple to London.
Netanyahu's expenditure on his three residences – official and private houses in Jerusalem, and a private home in the luxury seaside resort of Caesarea – were disclosed following a freedom of information request.
The prime minister spent more than £571,000 on the houses, a third more than was budgeted. The sums included almost £16,000 on flower arrangements. Israeli taxpayers paid almost £54,000) for cleaning, gardening, maintenance and utilities at the Caesarea residence, where the Netanyahu family spends occasional weekends.
In a response to Israeli media inquiries, Netanyahu's office issued a statement quoting Israeli musician, Arik Einstein, who died last week, from an interview he gave in 1998. Einstein had said: "People are treating Prime Minister Netanyahu with terrible injustice. They're abusing him and I'm just shocked at the level of contempt and hatred they're demonstrating towards him. How much can you suck his blood, how far can you go with the entry to the inner sanctum."
The statement noted that the Netanyahu family paid for expenses relating to the swimming pool at the Caesarea residence "from its own pocket" and that there had been a 42% reduction in expenses incurred at the home. It added: "It bears noting that the official prime minister's residence serves year-round for hosting heads of state, numerous consultations, and multi-participant meetings."
In February, Netanyahu was forced to cancel a taxpayer-funded contract with the Metudela ice-cream parlour in Jerusalem after it was disclosed that around 14kg of the frozen dessert was being delivered each month, mainly in pistachio and vanilla flavours.
Three months later, the prime minister again came under fire after it emerged that a double bed had been installed in a plane taking Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, to London – a flight of less than five hours – for Baroness Thatcher's funeral at a cost of £78,000. The revelation came amid demonstrations against a government austerity budget.
Limor Livnat, Israel's culture and sport minister and a party colleague of Netanyahu's, criticised the "tsunami of attacks" on the prime minister, his wife and their expenditure.
"We have to remember: the prime minister is not only the busiest person in the country, but I would say he is the prime minister of the country hardest to run in the world. And I don't think I'm overstating this," she told Israel Radio on Monday.
"It is round-the-clock work. He works for the country, he has no private life, he can't go anywhere, he can't go out for fun, he can't ride a bike down the street, he needs to have an exercise bike. I know of no other country where there is such persecution."Despite the Syrian opposition’s failure to oust President Bashar al-Assad militarily, Congress hopes that it can use US reconstruction dollars as leverage to force a political transition in Syria by ensuring that funds are only available for rebel-held areas.
Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee unveiled the No Assistance for Assad Act, which would bar the Donald Trump administration from using nonhumanitarian US assistance funds for Syria’s reconstruction in areas held by the Assad regime.
The bill is likely to garner broad bipartisan support and momentum in Congress with two Republican and two Democratic sponsors, including committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., and top Democrat Eliot Engel, D-N.Y. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., also joined the committee’s leadership in drafting the legislation.
Royce referred to the bill as “common-sense legislation to ensure that US aid does not strengthen the Assad regime and its Iranian-backed militias.”
“For nearly seven years now, the Syrian people have been subject to widespread atrocities including chemical attacks,” the chairman added.
After seven years of a highly destructive war that has reduced numerous major population centers to rubble and displaced millions, Congress estimates that the cost of rebuilding Syria could total anywhere between $200 and $350 billion.
“If Americans declined to help with stabilization in government-held areas and other Western governments followed suit, European governments or … the Japanese government or major Arab states … such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE [United Arab Emirates] and Kuwait, that would put a real financing crimp on the ability of the Syrian government to rebuild quickly within 5-10 years,” Robert Ford, the former US ambassador to Syria under President Barack Obama, told Al-Monitor.
To that end, the bill would impose far-reaching restrictions on Syria reconstruction and stabilization funding in Assad-controlled territory between 2018 and 2022 unless the president certifies to Congress that the Assad regime has met a series of stringent criteria.
In order to receive US reconstruction assistance, the Assad regime must begin “organizing free and fair elections” and allow the “safe, unfettered and voluntary return of Syrian refugees and internally displaced persons to their homes” while taking steps to improve its human rights record and establish an independent judiciary. Additionally, the regime must halt attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, minimize its reliance on Iranian military support, halt “the development and deployment of ballistic cruise missiles,” and comply with international norms on chemical weapons.
"Until Assad respects the rights of his people, until they're on the path toward a better future for themselves and until there's “accountability for the regime’s war crimes, the United States shouldn’t spend a dime on reconstruction efforts in areas controlled by the regime,” said Engel.
“Buoyed by his patrons in Moscow and Tehran, the Butcher in Damascus broke Syria,” the congressman added. “We should not support any scenario that leaves him in power to continue his violence and oppression against the Syrian people.”
But hampering the regime’s reconstruction efforts may not be as straightforward as Washington hopes given the fact that Russia and Iran, key Assad allies, are seeking contracts to rebuild Assad-held areas. Tehran, for instance, has already committed to establishing five power plants in Aleppo.
Nonetheless, Ford downplayed Moscow’s and Tehran’s reconstruction commitments.
“A private Russian security firm … has signed a contract that will protect [an] oil facility in return for 25% for the production revenue,” Ford told Al-Monitor. “That’s a huge cut. The Russians aren’t giving aid; they’re actually doing things on a commercial basis.”
However, China also committed to investing $2 billion in Syria’s industrial parks in August after Damascus resumed its first annual trade fair since the beginning of the war.
In addition to bilateral US assistance, the No Assistance for Assad Act also bars multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) from using US dollars in their own reconstruction and stabilization projects in Assad-controlled territory.
“We probably could impede, for quite a long time, IMF and World Bank aid to the Syrian government,” Ford said. Nonetheless, the World Bank and IMF have yet to lay out a formal proposal for Syrian reconstruction.
“The World Bank is looking at it in a very cautious and careful way so far,” Ford noted. “In a normal World Bank program, they would work out a series of loan agreements with the government involved setting out loan terms and possible conditionalities.”
And while Ford praised the bill’s limitations on assistance to the Assad regime, he warned that it would likely not produce any tangible political impact.
“It’s plainly evident that the Bashar al-Assad government that uses chemical weapons and barrel bombs hospitals and civilian units with reckless abandon is not particularly concerned about the welfare of its citizens,” Ford said. “And so the idea that withholding reconstruction aid is going to extract political concessions from Bashar al-Assad when armed opposition does not extract those concessions … is a fallacy.”
That said, Ford argued that providing reconstruction assistance to the Assad regime would be wasteful due to its endemic corruption and pointed to the Syrian government’s habit of siphoning off humanitarian aid funds.
“The corruption inside the government is so rampant that there would be a substantial race involved and it would be very hard for the United States government to verify the accounted use of the money,” said Ford.
Notably however, the No Assistance for Assad Act contains explicit exemptions for local community organizations in Assad-controlled territory as well as for programs providing humanitarian needs such as food, medical services and supplies, clothing, education and demining operations.
Nevertheless, the Assad regime frequently blocks humanitarian aid from reaching opposition-held territory like Eastern Ghouta in the suburbs of Damascus. For instance, the Assad regime did not permit independent aid groups to evacuate critically wounded patients trapped in the besieged suburbs until yesterday.
In order to facilitate greater humanitarian aid access, the UN Security Council voted last week to extend permission for the UN to deliver Syrian aid directly to opposition-held areas from Turkey and Jordan for another year. However, Russia and China both abstained from the vote, raising concerns that Moscow may use its UN veto to block assistance directly to rebel-held areas in the near future.One thing that’s definitely gotten better over time: not as much ritualistic human sacrifice.
But a new study published Monday in Nature revisits the ancient practice to look for fresh insights. The scientists found that, for better or worse (and only worse for the victims, of course), human sacrifice helped create the hierarchies present in many modern societies.
The scientists from the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington, both in New Zealand, found that ritual sacrifice may have spurred the transition of small, egalitarian societies to large, stratified ones. The study examined 93 traditional Austronesian cultures (speakers of a family of languages in parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania).
They looked at whether and how these cultures used ritual sacrifice — 40 of them practiced it — and how it affected social organization. The cultures were then divided into groups: egalitarian, moderately stratified and highly stratified. They were defined by the presence or absence of social hierarchy, and the rate of social mobility.Up to 35,000 people in the UK are affected by spinal injuries with estimates suggesting that up to three new people a day sustain life-changing injuries that leave them wheelchair-bound.
For people with such injuries, research suggests that lifestyle diseases, such as type-2 diabetes and heart disease, are more likely to occur and at an earlier age. Now the researchers want to know more about the links between physical activity and health among this population so that they can inform recommendations which could improve the lives of wheelchair-users around the world.
As part of the study, the researchers from our Centre for DisAbility Sport and Health (DASH) are looking to recruit 24 men and women from all around the UK who would come to Bath to take part in the study. Participants must be aged 18 – 65, and have sustained a spinal cord injury at some point in their lives.
Tom Nightingale, a researcher working on the project, explained: “One of the best ways to reduce the risk of chronic diseases is to become more physically active. However, at present, there is a lack of evidence as to whether or not moderate-intensity exercise has positive effects on metabolic control, body composition – the amount of fat and muscle in the body – and the immune function of individuals with spinal cord injuries.
“Through our study we want to gain a better understanding about why exercise might exert positive effects on a variety of biological functions in the body – particularly in this population.”
Volunteers taking part in the study will be randomly assigned into two groups: a control group and an exercise group. Participants in the control group will be asked to continue with their normal lifestyle patterns, whilst the exercise group will be asked to complete 45 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise four times a week over a 6-week period using an ‘arm crank’ in their own homes. The results will enable the researchers to investigate the impact of home-based exercise programs on markers of health and fitness for people with a spinal cord injury.
Participants will also be asked to spend two mornings in the laboratory (six weeks apart), during which they will be able to read, work, watch television or a DVD. If assigned to the exercise group participants will be provided with an 'arm crank ergometer' to use in their own home, avoiding repeated visits to the University.
Dr Jean-Philippe Walhin, Susan Whorrod Research Fellow also working on the |
pro-life and pro-family politics.”[20] Zmirak calls this suggestion, “suicidal,” for in so doing Christians would effectively be exiling ourselves from the public square, thereby opening up to overt persecution at the hands of those who resent the historic influence of Christianity.[21]
Morality is always embedded in a wider religious context in which it ‘breathes’ and finds its proper environment
No matter how difficult the arguments over disputed moral truths become, Christians must not give up on taking a public stand on these matters, Zmirak writes. As a word of warning to his readership, Zmirak points to a series of recent events (e.g., the Obergefell decision, the attack on the Little Sisters of the Poor, discussions about removing church tax exemptions) as evidence that aggressive secularists will take as much ground as Christians will cede to them. Perhaps these discussions look different in other Christian traditions, but for Catholics our commitment to Christ has always had a public nature. That is to say, Catholics have always understood promoting the common good as integral to the path of discipleship. From a Catholic vantage point, there are no grounds for “withdraw[ing] into apolitical enclaves” that will supposedly keep us and our families safe from the menacing designs of those who are hostile to the Christian faith.[22]
Furthermore, Zmirak argues that taking St. Benedict as our primary inspiration misunderstands the historical moment and the distinctive forms of discipleship that it demands. In Zmirak’s view, St. Benedict himself would find the Benedict Option puzzling. As Zmirak puts it:
That mystical ex-hermit never tried to organize laymen, but monks—men who could live and work together only because they took vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. Benedict drafted his famous Rule to teach monks how better to obey these particular, difficult vows. Married people make very different promises. They don’t obey an abbot but are subject to each other. They’re called to be fertile, not celibate; thrifty and prudent, not poor. The proper virtues of responsible Christian parents are almost the diametrical opposite of monastic communalism.[23]
As an alternative to St. Benedict, Zmirak sets forth the writings and witness of St. Jose Maria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, who “taught ordinary laypersons to live out their faith in the world, taking care of their primary responsibilities first: being good spouses, good parents, good employees or employers.”[24] At a practical level, the vision of Escriva more directly maps onto the specific concerns of the lay, married vocation.
On the one hand, I agree with much of what Zmirak has to say. His latter point closely resembles what I argued above about imposing monastic forms of life onto the married state, and Catholics would be mistaken to abandon the public square. On the other hand, I am not convinced that Dreher is calling for the kind of withdrawal that Zmirak accuses him of advocating. Remember, Dreher looks back to the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, who has argued that “what matters at this stage [of history] is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.”[25] Dreher interprets MacIntyre to mean that “the only way to stand firm against the ‘barbarians’— people who live by feeling, driven by the passions, not right reason, and with no sense of restraint or obligation beyond satisfying their momentary demands — of our dominant culture is to form stronger, thicker communities based on a commitment to virtue.”[26] In my view, this hardly sounds like an apolitical or sectarian mode of withdrawal. Rather, it more closely resembles Timothy O’Malley’s call for a “retreat into Catholic particularity.”[27] From Dreher’s perspective, we have to be careful about trying to fight the world on the world’s terms. Beyond the overt hostility of aggressive secularists, the dominant culture has more subtle ways—i.e., hyper-individualism, consumerism, hedonism, etc.,—of corroding the habits that are integral to discipleship.
One way of meeting Zmirak and Dreher somewhere in the middle would be to reframe the conversation according to Pope Benedict XVI’s vision of the faithful as a “creative minority.” This phrase is taken from a 2006 essay entitled “Europe and Its Discontents,” in which Benedict perceptively diagnoses the cultural malaise that presently plagues European civilization. He observes, first of all, that “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as though they were taking something away from our lives.”[28] This demographic collapse, he goes on to say, is rooted in a more fundamental, spiritual crisis:
The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the Communist economy has been recognized, its moral and religious fallacy has not been addressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original uncertainties about God, himself, and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem, and left untreated, it can lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger.[29]
Faced with such a dire social and cultural situation, the only hope for Europe is to reclaim facets of its historic identity essential for a flourishing social order (i.e., unwavering respect for human rights/dignity, family life rooted in monogamous marriage, and religion). The unique vocation for Catholics to play in the renewal of European culture will not be to seize the reins of power, but to live as a creative minority in service to all of humankind. In Benedict’s words:
We do not know what the future of Europe will be. Here we must agree with [Arnold] Toynbee, that the fate of a society always depends on its creative minorities. Christian believers should look upon themselves as just such a creative minority, helping Europe [and the United States?] to reclaim what is best in its heritage and thereby to place itself at the service of all humankind.[30]
This image of Christians as a creative minority represents a promising device for mining the best aspects of the various Benedict options. With Wilson-Hartgrove and Dreher, Benedict fully recognizes that we are living through a transitional stage in Western history, one that will require Christians to rethink their relationship to the broader culture. In the face of these changes, Benedict—like the other figures we have discussed—calls for a kind of strategic withdrawal. By using the language of “creative minority,” Benedict at the very least signals that, in the years to come, Christians are likely to find themselves on the peripheries of the social order. Considering this fact, Christians can either lament their loss of power, or they can utilize the opportunity to reimagine creative forms of faithfulness in a changed cultural situation.
Benedict’s proposal bears some resemblance to what Wilson-Hartgrove is calling for, but the former offers a more promising path for Catholics, because it does not confuse the married and monastic vocations. Deriving as it did from the writings of a pope, the creative minority approach flows directly out of the Catholic tradition, providing it with a certain coherency that other proposals lack. For example, when considering what “humble submission to Christ’s body” looks like, there is no confusion about which body is in view. This direct relationship to the Catholic Church also increases the likelihood that the movement will persist across generations. Since the gates of hell will not prevail against it, the Church offers a firm foundation for intergenerational continuity. It is not without reason that Protestant communities have been unable to foster the rich monastic heritage that we witness within Roman Catholicism.
Conclusion: A Retreat Into Particularity, for the Life of the World
The creative minority approach also offers a fruitful way for reading and applying Dreher’s Benedict Option. If John Zmirak is right that Dreher’s Benedict Option means that Catholics should abandon their public witness to important truths about marriage and the dignity of every human life, then of course we should not heed Dreher’s charge. But, as I read Dreher, that does not seem to be what he has in mind. In fact, in a blog post written in response to some of his critics, Dreher quoted Ratzinger directly to explain why “meaningful withdrawal” might prove necessary: “In reality, morality is always embedded in a wider religious context in which it ‘breathes’ and finds its proper environment. Outside this environment, morality cannot breathe; it weakens and then dies.”[31] One weakness with recent attempts to resist militant secularism, Dreher suggests, is that we have been attempting to fight anti-Christian ways of life on their own terms. In a certain sense, we have fallen for the Gnostic temptation of thinking that we could somehow out-narrate secularism while remaining securely embedded in the individualistic, hedonistic, and consumerist soil from which it has arisen. The challenge that lies before us is not primarily an intellectual one (though our response cannot be anti-intellectual); rather, it has to do mostly with cultivating renewed forms of discipleship. In Dreher’s words, “We need not Christianity as the affirmation of certain theological principles, but as those principles deeply imbedded in communal practices.”[32]
To borrow from another Catholic theologian, already mentioned, we need to consider what Timothy O’Malley calls a retreat toward engagement. As a model for this kind of strategic retreat, O’Malley points to the historic legacy of Catholic educational institutions here in the United States. Many of these schools were founded as a safe havens within an inhospitable culture, but precisely through this retreat from public life they came to serve the common good. Given recent trends which indicate that “the public sphere is becoming increasingly unfriendly toward a Catholic worldview,” O’Malley wonders if the time has come again “to retreat into Catholic particularity for the sake of deeper engagement with the world.”[33] As he points out—and, in my mind, this is the crucial point—“a retreat of Catholics away from public institutions and the cultural norms that such institutions presume is not a choice between withdrawal or engagement.” Rather, the telos of such a retreat must be to foster Catholic particularity, so that the body of Christ “might be better prepared to offer the fruits of her life for the world.”[34] The Benedict Option, in this light, will involve sailing between the Scylla of resurrecting Christendom through whatever means possible and the Charybdis of retreating into an idealized ghetto in which we can huddle together and wait for the return of Christ, free from any contact with the impurities of a wicked world.
Being Benedictine in this sense will mean developing creative ways of critically engaging the world without giving up the core convictions of the Catholic faith. For married couples it will not mean envisioning themselves to be monastics when they have been called to a different vocation. For all of us, it must mean continued public witness to the truths about marriage, about the dignity of each human life from the moment of conception until natural death, about welcoming the stranger, and so on. Admittedly, neither of these visions—whether of a creative minority or a retreat into particularity—spells out in detail what our next step should be. These are difficult times indeed, and Christians are still finding our sea legs in the face of storms that we did not fully anticipate. Thankfully, as Saint Mother Teresa was fond of pointing out, God has called us not to be successful, but to be faithful. Our hope, therefore, rests ultimately in the promise that our Lord will vindicate those who remain faithful to his Word, regardless of whatever status they attain in the eyes of the world.
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Featured Image: Le Mont Saint-Michel au moment de la marée haute de la « marée du siècle » de l’équinoxe de mars 2015, Author: Édouard Hue; Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 263.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Rod Dreher, “Critics of the Benedict Option,” The American Conservative (July 8, 2015), par. 2, accessed April 15, 2017, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/critics-of-the-benedict-option/.
[4] As Gerald Schlabach observes, “Interestingly, MacIntyrian localism has not aligned neatly with standard left/right polarities.” See Schlabach, “The Virtue of Staying Put: What the ‘Benedict Option’ Forgets About Benedictines,” Commonweal 143, no. 16 (October 7, 2016): 11.
[5] Rod Dreher, “Orthodox Christians Must Now Learn to Live as Exiles in Our Own Country,” Time Magazine, June 26, 2015, accessed April 15, 2017, http://time.com/3938050/orthodox-christians-must-now-learn-to-live-as-exiles-in-our-own-country/.
[6] Ibid., par. 8.
[7] Ibid., par. 2
[8] Ibid., par. 8.
[9] Dreher, “Critics of the Benedict Option,” par. 4.
[10] For a detailed rundown of exemplary Benedict-option communities, see Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2017), 122ff.
[11] Dreher, “Critics of the Benedict Option,” par. 11.
[12] Ibid., par. 14.
[13] Timothy O’Malley, “An Argument: Retreat Toward Engagement,” Our Sunday Visitor (August 5, 2015), par. 4, accessed April 15, 2017, https://www.osv.com/OSVNewsweekly/Story/TabId/2672/ArtMID/13567/ArticleID/ 17987/An-argument-Retreat-toward-engagement.aspx.
[14] Rutba House (Organization), eds. School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2005.
[15] Robin Russel, “Intentional Community: New Monasticism Encourages Disciplined Life,” The United Methodist Reporter (September 9, 2011), par. 8. Quoted in Greg Peters, Reforming the Monastery: Protestant Theologies of the Religious Life (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 15.
[16] Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (New York, NY: Free Press, 2011).
[17] For those who want to tap the wellspring of monastic gifts but have been called to a different vocation, the possibility always exists of becoming a third order, or oblate, attached to a specific religious institute.
[18] James K. A. Smith, “The New Alarmism: How Some Christians are Stoking Fear Rather than Hope,” Washington Post, March 10, 2017, par. 10, accessed April 15, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/ 03/10/the-new-alarmism-how-some-christians-are-stoking-fear-rather-than-hope/?utm_term=.806116031fb3. For a similar, though less strident, critique, see R. R. Reno, “Benedict Option,” First Things no. 273 (May 2017): 63-65.
[19] John Zmirak, “The Benedict Option Isn’t One,” Intercollegiate Review (Summer 2015), par. 2, accessed April 15, 2017, https://home.isi.org/benedict-option-isnt-one.
[20] Ibid., par. 3.
[21] Ibid.
[22] John Zmirak, “The Benedict Option, or Benedict Arnold Option?,” The Stream (June 30, 2015), par. 2, accessed April 15, 2017, https://stream.org/benedict-arnold-option/.
[23] Zmirak, “The Benedict Option Isn’t One,” par. 6.
[24] Ibid., par. 9.
[25] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 263.
[26] Dreher, “Critics of the Benedict Option,” par. 4.
[27] Timothy O’Malley, ““An Argument: Retreat Toward Engagement,” par. 4.
[28] Pope Benedict XI, “Europe and Its Discontents,” First Things (January 2006): 19.
[29] Ibid., 20.
[30] Ibid., 22.
[31] Dreher, “Critics of the Benedict Option,” par. 11.
[32] Ibid., par. 14.
[33] Timothy O’Malley, “An Argument: Retreat Toward Engagement,” par. 1 and 5.
[34] Ibid., par. 4.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Liverpool FC have opened talks with Spanish youngster Suso over a new contract.
The 20-year-old attacker returned to Anfield this summer after spending last season on loan at Almeria in his homeland.
Suso has less than a year to run on his current deal but is keen to stay put.
“We are talking with the club already,” Suso revealed.
“Hopefully I will sign a new contract soon. I want to stay here.”
Suso is determined to use pre-season to show Brendan Rodgers just how much he benefited from his loan spell in La Liga.
“I wanted to go on loan because at my age I felt I needed to play every week and feel important to a club,” he added.
“I played nearly every game and helped Almeria stay up. I was lucky enough to play against Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, but the most important thing is that I learned a lot and became a better player.
WATCH: Markovic and Suso link up in training
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“That was vital as now I'm back fighting for places with the best players in the Premier League.
“It's a good challenge for me to prove I can be here and I can play for this team.
“I probably feel most comfortable in a central role behind the striker but I can also play on the right – I just want to play.”
There are similarities between Suso and Philippe Coutinho, and the youngster has been watching the gifted Brazilian closely.
“Coutinho is like a Spanish type player,” he said.
“He reminds me of Spanish players with the qualities he has. He's so good on the ball and has quick feet.
“It's incredible for me to see him train every day and see how he does things.
“Maybe we are similar with the ball but I know I can learn from him.”
Suso, who didn't feature against Olympiacos in Chicago, is hoping to get some game time when the Reds face Manchester City in New York on Wednesday.
“The tour is a really good experience,” he added.
“Every time you come on these trips and see all the people at the stadiums and watching us train every day you realise what a massive club Liverpool is.
“We are getting fitter and we're playing really competitive games.”
Full-back Jon Flanagan sat out the game against Olympiacos due to a minor knee injury and will be assessed ahead of the City game.
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Photo extra: Liverpool 1 Olympiacos 0 from Chicago
Liverpool 1 Olympiacos 0: what we learned from Reds win in ChicagoBeirut - A Jordanian-Palestinian man told Syrian TV on Saturday that he gave Israeli agents vital information that led to the 2008 assassination of a top Hezbollah military commander in Damascus.
Ayad Youssef Nueim, 35, who is in prison in Syria for allegedly spying for Israel, said the Israeli Mossad spy agency wanted information about an SUV that turned out to belong to Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah commander.
The assassination of Mughniyeh in a car bomb blast in Damascus was one of the biggest blows to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group with strict security and which boasts of being nearly impenetrable to spies.
Hezbollah has blamed Israel for the killing, but Israel never acknowledged involvement.
It was not immediately clear why Syrian TV conducted the interview now, years after the killing. But the regime of President Bashar Assad, facing a 6-month-old uprising, has blamed the unrest on a foreign conspiracy and the hidden hand of archenemy Israel.
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It was also impossible to know if Nueim was speaking freely in the interview, or if he was being coerced into making the statements.
Nueim said he was sent to Syria in 2006 posing as a student. He said Israeli agents asked him for general information about whether weapons were being smuggled into the country and whether militants were gathering.
On Feb. 12, 2006, hours before Mughniyeh was killed, he was dispatched to a specific home in Damascus to look for a Pajero.
“I called and told them about the Pajero and its number then left the area,” he said.
He added: “As I read the news on the Internet the next day I found out that martyr Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated. It was the same Pajero.”
After he heard the news, Nueim said he went to Jordan and then to Jerusalem where he asked the agents to change his telephone number. He was given a French SIM card and returned to Syria, where he continued supplying information to Israel until the Syrians captured him. He did not say when or where he was captured.Two congressmen on Monday sent a letter to NCAA President Mark Emmert, shown here in a file photo as he answers at this year's men's Final Four in Texas, seeking detailed information on how well the NCAA does at meeting the academic needs of student-athletes versus the financial interests of those involved in college athletics. (Photo: David J. Phillip, AP)
Congressional scrutiny of how well the NCAA is meeting the educational needs of student-athletes versus building the business of college athletics will be increasing again Tuesday.
Two members of the House are sending a letter to NCAA President Mark Emmert asking him to respond to more than two dozen questions about NCAA practices and the responsibilities of its schools to "provide rigorous academic opportunities and instruction to its'student-athletes.' "
The letter is being sent by Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.), a member of that committee who last fall introduced legislation that would require colleges with high-revenue sports programs to provide their athletes with a package of benefits, including financial aid when a scholarship is lifted for reasons other than misconduct or academic failure. A copy of the letter was provided to USA TODAY Sports on Monday night by Cárdenas' office.
LETTER: Read what Congress sent to Mark Emmert
Cummings and Cárdenas are seeking details about how the NCAA oversees educational matters, its handling of athletes' health and its finances. They also are requesting the employment agreements for Emmert and other top NCAA executives, "including the specific criteria on which compensation, bonuses, or other financial incentives are awarded, and whether those criteria relate to the academic performance of student-athletes at member institutions."
The letter asks that Emmert and the NCAA to provide the requested information by June 9. That is the scheduled start date of an anti-trust lawsuit against the NCAA regarding the use of college athletes' names and likenesses and the association's limits on what major-college football and men's basketball players can receive for playing sports.
The new correspondence follows not only Cárdenas' bill, but also one co-sponsored by Rep. Charles Dent (R-Penn.) and Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), whose provisions include increased due process for NCAA athletic programs accused of misconduct, and making four-year scholarships mandatory for athletes participating in contact/collision sports.
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CHANGES: Emmert, ADs discuss reforms on the horizon
This month, another House committee held a hearing regarding the efforts of Northwestern scholarship football players to unionize – a session that became a platform for criticism of the NCAA and Division I schools.
In addition, a Senate committee announced plans to hold a hearing on "Promoting the Well-Being and Academic Success of the College Athletes." Three members of that panel – chairman John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Cory Boooker (D-N.J.) – sent a letter to Emmert with a 10-point series of requests, including demands for NCAA rights contracts.
The Cummings-Cárdenas letter touches on a number of recent news reports concerning athletes' academic performance, including findings of academic fraud at North Carolina. It also mentions an NCAA legal filing in a wrongful death suit filed by the family of a football player who died after suffering a head injury during a practice. In that case, the NCAA said it "denies that it has a legal duty to protect student-athletes."
The congressmen ask Emmert to provide "a detailed explanation for the basis of this legal position, including a detailed explanation of who the NCAA believes has the legal duty to protect student-athletes."
The letter states that "the onerous demands of NCAA athletic competition cause many student-athletes to make great sacrifices with respect to their education, while the schools and the NCAA reap huge financial windfalls."
It asks Emmert to provide information from each of the past five years about "all NCAA investigations into the quality of education administered by member institutions and all enforcement or disciplinary actions initiated by the NCAA against member institutions or student-athletes for academic reasons."
The letter also requests, for each of the past five years, a description of all instances in which an NCAA member school has "withdrawn, terminated, or failed to renew a student-athlete's scholarship for non-disciplinary reasons and by whom this decision was made."Market Anarchism Vs. Market Statism
The difference between market anarchism and market statism is profound and far-reaching. Very often, those of a conservative bent like to think of our current society as a free-market economy, with perhaps, a few distortions introduced by the government. Get rid of those and we’d be quite alright. Of course they think that because they’re doing kind of alright now, despite those pesky little taxes, and the occasional annoying regulation.
This is in part because by and large the laws were written by people like them, for people like them, so they seem largely invisible to them. The myriad of hidden costs and barriers to free action don’t really touch them enough to be noticeable. It’s more of a bee-sting than an alligator bite. Wealthy “liberals” think much the same way, only they figure “going from a bee-sting to a hornet-sting is worth it to secure the economy further in a direction we’d like it to go”. This direction is usually more corporatist and authoritarian than they’d normally admit, but hey they’ll set up a nice welfare camp for the people their policies impoverished in the first place. And thus is our political discussion restrained by the skewed view of the ruling class.
The reality from the ground floor is quite different, and alas, often leads to a different sort of skewed view. The truth is, our entire economy is statist, with the market elements distorted all the way through it. The way markets work, every action is dependent on every other action, all demand curves and supply curves interact somewhere… think of how ripples in a pond create interference waves when they meet. Rightists often talk about how markets adapt to the state, implying that markets overcome the state. But this is not so. Markets adapt to the state, but the state does not adapt to markets, except in a minimal way when absolutely forced to.
In every city there is a “parks and recreation department” for example. This department exists for a reason. It’s not like the P&R commissioner just sits around watching porn and drinking all day on the taxpayers’ dime… well actually it often is like that, but his staff doesn’t… or at least they don’t all do that, all the time. In fact a government where no one did any “work” would work out much better for most of us. We could treat that sort of government as a sort of permanent natural disaster, a simple cost of survival. But the reality is much worse. These guys build parks wherever they want, their only limitation being their budget (which is where the market minimally forces a limit on statism) and the remote possibility of angering the public enough to get fired.
In some ways, the will of the people through elections does affect the government, but they do everything in their power to thwart that… not to mention that it’s a highly inefficient expression of the popular will. Demand curves on the other hand are a much better expression of the popular will. In some ways, a real free market is the ultimate in democracy. What the people want, they will get.
But hey, everyone likes parks, right? Well, sure, if they don’t have to sacrifice anything else for them. If people really wanted a park somewhere, they could definitely make it happen under anarchism. Just buy the land, and make a park. If you needed to charge admission to recoup the costs, well, if people really want the park, they’ll be happy to pay. But statist parks on the other hand, take land willy-nilly that could have been used for other things, and in fact, should have been. People wanted something else than a park there, or there would already be one there. And the cost is paid by everyone, even people who don’t like parks, or have no access to the park. And of course, the park closes when the government says it does, and has only the amenities that the government wants to put in there. People like soccer, but the parks commissioner likes baseball? Baseball field.
But it gets even worse. All the money that was used to build and maintain the park is taking money away from other things that people would have spent it on. And it drives up the cost of land in the area, the cost of sod, and the cost of everything else that money is spent on. It distorts the pricing signals of everything related to parks… this ripples through the rest of the economy. This goes on in every city in the world. Of course it’s not just parks, it is roads, bridges, dams, etc. People change their behavioral patterns around this “infrastructure”. For instance, I live in a pocket ghetto created by an intersection of two major government roads. All around me are tire shops, car washes, auto parts stores, etc. Those stores wouldn’t have been built if not for the government roads. But then again, none of this would have, it would have all been different in a free market. It is precisely these “little things” that get taken for granted, like roads and zoning laws and permits and licenses that have the most impact on the economy.
As for the direction these laws tend to go in, well let’s look at a hypothetical example. Let’s say there’s a certain market for widgets. The biggest widget manufacturer, A Corp, has 25% of the market. The next biggest, B Corp, has 15%. C Corp has 10%. Below that about 100 other firms share the other 50%. Now even this is much more oligopolistic than a real free market would be, IMO, but for the sake of simplicity and being fair to the other side we’ll go with it. Now the government proposes a regulation that will make widget manufacturing more expensive and difficult. Well, A Corp’s economists and accountants will sit down and run a cost-benefit analysis, comparing the extra expense of complying with the regulation against the extra market share they will gain after a certain number of firms get knocked out of the market because they can’t absorb the cost. Included in this is the possibility of passing the cost onto the consumer and shrinking the market. If A Corp ends up with 50% of a market that’s 10% smaller, they still win. If they come out ahead, they’ll call up Senator X and say “we will support this legislation”, if not, then they say “we will oppose this legislation tooth and nail”. Now, let’s say the bean counters say “well, we come out 5% ahead if it’s written like X, but if you add clause Y, we’d come out 10% ahead”. Well then they will call up Senator X and say “if you introduce this amendment, we’ll support the bill, but if you don’t, we’ll oppose it”. What do you think is going to happen?
Now, if all of these corporations are traded on the stock market, just proposing the legislation publicly is going to impact them. Some investors are going to guess that the legislation will pass, and will sell their stock in Corp B and C and buy A. A certain number of the smaller firms will have their stock price discounted effectively to 0 and be forced to drop out of the market even before the law is voted on. Perhaps their assets will be bought up by Corps A, B and C if they’re lucky. So now, if A, B and C maybe get together and hash out a different version of that proposed law that works well for all of them, they can all support it together. And there you have it.
This mechanism goes on at every level of government, local, state and federal. In fact it’s often more pernicious and corrupt at the lower levels, because it’s much easier to influence the politicians at that level. On the other hand it’s much easier for the citizens to get together and block laws at the lower levels too, but that’s why there’s so much effort by the ruling class to brainwash people and get them to look the other way and keep their heads down. The news media will make a big deal about state and federal laws that people really have little or no opportunity to influence, but local corruption only gets mentioned when the politicians cross the wrong local businessman.
A study came out that noticed that every industry has basically 3-4 major players, and everyone else is marginal, having little impact on overall supply. However given the above example you can see why. There’s no reason to believe that the pattern would be so oligopolistic in a free market, knowing that basically, the state is constantly acting to shrink the number of firms in the market, and in fact, to shrink markets for the benefit of the 3-4 major players. Of course another side benefit is that this increases unemployment in every industry, driving wages down and increasing the power that employers have over employees. This points to the weakness of Neoclassical or Keynesian economics. The effect of the state cannot be “factored out” in looking at the economy, statistically. It distorts all supply curves, and almost all demand curves. When an economist from this school talks about “the economy” as a noun, they basically mean these top firms from every industry. The impact of labor as producers can largely be factored out these days, thanks to that persistent unemployment. As consumers, we have an effect, which is why whenever academic “economists” talk about the people at large, it is in our role as consumers and how that affects “the economy”. In their view, when we consumers save, we hurt “the economy”, but when we spend, especially if we go into debt to do so, we help “the economy”. It’s like we’re being held hostage at this point. Our interest as producers (which is to spend, because most of us are working for “the economy”) is in conflict with our interest as consumers (which is to save).
Now of course our current financial model has something to do with all of this as well. If there is one aspect of the economy which is thoroughly fascistic through and through, in a way that we can all agree on (except “the economy” and their pet “economists”), it’s the current financial/banking system. “How’s that so-called democracy working out for you guys? Awesome.” This has been going on for a while actually, even though it’s become more deep and blatant since the establishment of worldwide fiat currency and central banking in the World War eras. A good book to read to get the history of it is Rothbard’s “A History of Money and Banking In The United States”. Even if you’re not down with Rothbard on the whole, this was a master work.
One of the things that the bankers and money masters have been doing since forever is trying to rob people of their savings and discourage saving in general. One reason is that this makes people more dependent on steady income, disciplining workers. Another is that it destroys any capital accumulation outside of the class of insiders (“the economy”). If you need to capitalize your business you have to go to a limited group of people with nearly unlimited power to give out money. And the price of capital is kept artificially high. Right now, the old cliché goes, 1 in 10 businesses that start, survive. The main reason given for the failure of the 9 out of 10 is “cash flow”. If your business is operating paycheck to paycheck, you are utterly dependent on the money masters, if something unexpected happens.
But also, we must consider who gets the majority of loans. Of course there are collateralized loans. Those drive up the price of land and transportation, which is only good for those who run the roads and own the vast tracts of land. But outside of those, most loans are made to large businesses to help them expand and compete against other businesses. Banks generally aren’t in business to lose money. They know how the game works. Every time a bank makes a loan with money it doesn’t have, they are stealing from everyone else. The people who first get that money are also stealing from everyone, just a little less. And so on… somewhere down the chain of spending the situation inverts, where prices have already gone up before you got any of that new money. You |
mBan and the Irish Citizen Army, she took part in the Easter Rising in 1916, when Irish republicans attempted to end British rule and establish an Irish Republic. She was sentenced to death but this was reduced on the grounds of her sex. On 28 December 1918, she was the first woman elected to the UK House of Commons,[2] though she did not take her seat and, along with the other Sinn Féin TDs, formed the first Dáil Éireann. She was also one of the first women in the world to hold a cabinet position as Minister for Labour from 1919 to 1922.[a]
Early life [ edit ]
Constance Georgine Gore-Booth was born at Buckingham Gate in London in 1868, the elder daughter of the Arctic explorer and adventurer Sir Henry Gore-Booth, 5th Baronet, an Anglo-Irish landlord who administered a 100 km2 (39 sq mi) estate, and Georgina, Lady Gore-Booth, née Hill. During the famine of 1879–80, Sir Henry provided free food for the tenants on his estate at Lissadell House in the north of County Sligo in the north-west of Ireland. Their father's example inspired in Gore-Booth and her younger sister, Eva Gore-Booth, a deep concern for working people and the poor. The sisters were childhood friends of the poet W. B. Yeats, who frequently visited the family home Lissadell House, and were influenced by his artistic and political ideas. Yeats wrote a poem, "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz", in which he described the sisters as "two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle" (the gazelle being Constance).[3] Eva later became involved in the labour movement and women's suffrage in the UK, although initially, Constance did not share her sister's ideals.
Marriage and early politics [ edit ]
Gore-Booth decided to train as a painter, but at the time only one art school in Dublin accepted women students. In 1892, she went to study at the Slade School of Art in London,[4] where she lived at the Alexandra House for Art Pupils, Kensington Gore, founded five years before by Sir Francis Cook, a fabulously rich great-uncle of Maud Gonne. One of her contemporaries there was Blanche Georgiana Vulliamy.[5] It was at this time that Gore-Booth first became politically active and joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Later she moved to Paris and enrolled at the prestigious Académie Julian where she met her future husband, Casimir Markievicz, an artist from a wealthy Polish family from Ukraine.[6] Markievicz was known in Paris as "Count Markievicz". When Constance's family enquired as to the validity of the title, they were informed through Pyotr Rachkovsky of the Russian Secret Police that he had taken the title "without right", and that there had never been a "Count Markievicz" in Poland.[7] (An online list of counts of the imperial Russian nobility does not include anybody by the name of Markiewicz.)[8] However, the Department of Genealogy in Saint Petersburg said that he was entitled to claim to be a member of the nobility. Markievicz was married, though separated, at the time that they met, but his wife died in 1899 and he and Gore-Booth married in London on 29 September 1900.[10] She was afterwards known as "Countess Markievicz". She gave birth to their daughter, Maeve, at Lissadell in November 1901.[10] The child was raised by her Gore-Booth grandparents and eventually became estranged from her mother. She undertook the role of mother to Stanislas, Casimir's son from his first marriage, who then accompanied the couple to Ireland.
The Markieviczes settled in Dublin in 1903 and moved in artistic and literary circles, with Constance gaining a reputation as a landscape painter.[11] In 1905, along with artists Sarah Purser, Nathaniel Hone, Walter Osborne and John Butler Yeats, she was instrumental in founding the United Arts Club, which was an attempt to bring together all those in Dublin with an artistic and literary bent. This group included the leading figures of the Gaelic League founded by the future first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde. Although formally apolitical and concerned with the preservation of the Irish language and culture, the league brought together many patriots and future political leaders. Sarah Purser, whom the young Gore-Booth sisters first met in 1882, when she was commissioned to paint their portrait, hosted a regular salon where artists, writers and intellectuals on both sides of the nationalist divide gathered. At Purser's house, Markievicz met revolutionary patriots Michael Davitt, John O'Leary and Maud Gonne. In 1907, Markievicz rented a cottage in the countryside near Dublin. The previous tenant, the poet Padraic Colum, had left behind copies of The Peasant and Sinn Féin. These revolutionary journals promoted independence from British rule. Markievicz read these publications and was propelled into action.[12]
Sculpture of Constance Markievicz at the Markievicz Leisure Centre, Dublin
Constance Markievicz with her daughter and stepson
In 1908, Markievicz became actively involved in nationalist politics in Ireland. She joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann ('Daughters of Ireland'), a revolutionary women's movement founded by the actress and activist Maud Gonne, muse of W. B. Yeats. Markievicz came directly to her first meeting from a function at Dublin Castle, the seat of British rule in Ireland, wearing a satin ball-gown and a diamond tiara. Naturally, the members looked upon her with some hostility. This refreshing change from being "kowtowed"-to as a countess only made her more eager to join.[citation needed] She performed with Maud Gonne in several plays at the newly established Abbey Theatre, an institution that played an important part in the rise of cultural nationalism. In the same year, Markievicz played a dramatic role in the women's suffrage campaigners' tactic of opposing Winston Churchill's election to Parliament during the Manchester North West by-election, flamboyantly appearing in the constituency driving an old-fashioned carriage drawn by four white horses to promote the suffragist cause. A male heckler asked her if she could cook a dinner, to which she responded, "Yes. Can you drive a coach and four?" Her sister Eva had moved to Manchester to live with fellow suffragette Esther Roper and they both campaigned against Churchill with her. Churchill lost the election to Conservative candidate William Joynson-Hicks, in part as a result of the suffragists' dedicated opposition.[13]
In 1909 Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson founded Fianna Éireann, a para-military nationalist scouting organisation that instructed teenage boys in the use of firearms. At its first meeting in Camden Street, Dublin, on 16 August 1909, she was almost expelled on the basis that women did not belong in a physical force movement, but Hobson supported her, and she was elected to the committee.[14] She was jailed for the first time in 1911 for speaking at an Irish Republican Brotherhood demonstration attended by 30,000 people, organised to protest against George V's visit to Ireland. During this protest Markievicz handed out leaflets, erected great masts: Dear land thou art not conquered yet., participated in stone-throwing at pictures of the King and Queen and attempted to burn the giant British flag taken from Leinster House, eventually succeeding, but then seeing James McArdle imprisoned for one month for the incident, despite Markievicz testifying in court that she was responsible.[15] Her friend Helena Molony was arrested for her part in the stone-throwing and became the first woman in Ireland to be tried and imprisoned for a political act since the time of the Ladies Land League.[15]
Markievicz also joined James Connolly's socialist Irish Citizen Army (ICA), a small volunteer force formed in response to the lock-out of 1913, to defend the demonstrating workers from the police. Markievicz recruited volunteers to peel potatoes in a basement while she and others worked on distributing the food. As all the food was paid out of her own pocket,[citation needed] Markievicz was forced to take out many loans, at this time, and sold all her jewellery. That same year, with Inghinidhe na hÉireann, she ran a soup kitchen to feed poor school children.
Fashion advice attributed to her was: "Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver."[16]
Easter Rising [ edit ]
Markievicz in uniform with a gun, c.1915
In 1913 Markievicz's husband moved back to Ukraine, and never returned to live in Ireland. However, they did correspond and he was by her side when she died in 1927. As a member of the ICA, Markievicz took part in the 1916 Easter Rising. She was deeply inspired by the founder of the ICA, James Connolly. Markievicz designed the Citizen Army uniform and composed its anthem, based on the tune of a Polish song.[17]
In the Rising, Markievicz fought in St Stephen's Green, where on the first morning—according to one account—she shot a member of the (unarmed) Dublin Metropolitan Police, Constable Lahiff, who subsequently died of his injuries.[18][19] District nurse Geraldine Fitzgerald, recorded in her diary that as she was returning from duty to the nurse’s home, located at the southwest corner of the Green, she saw:
“A lady in a green uniform, the same as the men were wearing (breeches, slouch hat with green feathers etc.) the feathers were the only feminine feature in her appearance, holding a revolver in one hand and a cigarette in the other, was standing on the footpath giving orders to the men. We recognized her as the Countess de Markievicz – such a specimen of womanhood. There were other women, similarly attired, inside the Park, walking about and bringing drinks of water to the men. We had only been looking out a few minutes when we saw a policeman walking down the path from Harcourt Street. He had only gone a short way when we heard a shot and then saw him fall forward on his face. The Countess ran triumphantly into the Green saying “I got him” and some of the rebels shook her by the hand and seemed to congratulate her.” [20]
Other accounts place her at City Hall when the policeman was shot, only arriving at Stephen's Green later.[21] It was long thought that she was second in command to Michael Mallin, but in fact it was Christopher "Kit" Poole who held that position.[23] Markievicz supervised the setting-up of barricades on Easter Monday and was in the middle of the fighting all around Stephen's Green, wounding a British army sniper.[24] Trenches were dug in the Green, sheltered by the front gate; however, after British machine gun and rifle fire from the rooftops of tall buildings on the north side of the Green including the Shelbourne Hotel, the Citizen Army troops withdrew to the Royal College of Surgeons on the west side of the Green.
The Stephen's Green garrison held out for six days, ending the engagement when the British brought them a copy of Pearse's surrender order. The British officer, Captain (later Major) de Courcy Wheeler, who accepted their surrender was married to Markievicz's first cousin.[25][26]
They were taken to Dublin Castle and Markievicz was transported to Kilmainham Gaol. They were jeered by the crowds as they walked through the streets of Dublin. There, she was the only one of 70 women prisoners who was put into solitary confinement. At her court martial on 4 May 1916, Markievicz pleaded not guilty to "taking part in an armed rebellion...for the purpose of assisting the enemy," but pleaded guilty to having attempted "to cause disaffection among the civil population of His Majesty".[27] Markievicz told the court, "I went out to fight for Ireland's freedom and it does not matter what happens to me. I did what I thought was right and I stand by it."[27] She was sentenced to death, but the court recommended mercy "solely and only on account of her sex".[27] The sentence was commuted to life in prison. When told of this, she said to her captors, "I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me".[b][30]
Markievicz was transferred to Mountjoy Prison and then to Aylesbury Prison in England in July 1916. She was released from prison in 1917, along with others involved in the Rising, as the government in London granted a general amnesty for those who had participated in it. It was around this time that Markievicz, born into the Church of Ireland, converted to Catholicism.
First Dáil [ edit ]
Election victory procession led by Markievicz in County Clare
In 1918, she was jailed again for her part in anti-conscription activities. At the 1918 general election, Markievicz was elected for the constituency of Dublin St Patrick's, beating her opponent William Field with 66% of the vote, as one of 73 Sinn Féin MPs. The results were called on 28 December 1918.[2] This made her the first woman elected to the United Kingdom House of Commons. However, in line with Sinn Féin abstentionist policy, she did not take her seat in the House of Commons.[31]
Markievicz was in Holloway prison, when her colleagues assembled in Dublin at the first meeting of the First Dáil, the Parliament of the revolutionary Irish Republic. When her name was called, she was described, like many of those elected, as being "imprisoned by the foreign enemy" (fé ghlas ag Gallaibh).[32] She was re-elected to the Second Dáil in the elections of 1921.[33]
Markievicz served as Minister for Labour from April 1919 to January 1922, in the Second Ministry and the Third Ministry of the Dáil. Holding cabinet rank from April to August 1919, she became both the first Irish female Cabinet Minister and at the same time, only the second female government minister in Europe.[a] She was the only female cabinet minister in Irish history until 1979 when Máire Geoghegan-Quinn was appointed to the cabinet post of Minister for the Gaeltacht for Fianna Fáil.
Civil War and Fianna Fáil [ edit ]
Markievicz left government in January 1922 along with Éamon de Valera and others in opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. She fought actively for the Republican cause in the Irish Civil War helping to defend Moran's Hotel in Dublin. After the War she toured the United States. She was not elected in the 1922 Irish general election but was returned in the 1923 general election for the Dublin South constituency. In common with other Republican candidates, she did not take her seat. However, her staunch republican views led her to being sent to jail again. In prison, she and 92 other female prisoners went on hunger strike. Within a month, she was released.[35]
She left Sinn Fein and joined the new Fianna Fáil party on its foundation in 1926, chairing the inaugural meeting of the new party in La Scala Theatre. In the June 1927 general election, she was re-elected to the 5th Dáil as a candidate for Fianna Fáil, which was pledged to return to Dáil Éireann, but died only five weeks later, before she could take her seat.[36] Her fellow Fianna Fáil TDs signed the Oath of Fidelity to King George V and took their seats in the Dáil on 12 August 1927, less than a month after her death.[37] The party leader Éamon de Valera described the Oath as "an empty political formula".[38]
Death [ edit ]
Markievicz died at the age of 59 on 15 July 1927, of complications related to appendicitis. She had given away the last of her wealth, and died in a public ward "among the poor where she wanted to be".[39][40] One of the doctors attending her was her revolutionary colleague, Kathleen Lynn.[41] Also at her bedside were Casimir and Stanislas Markievicz, Éamon de Valera and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington.[41] Refused a state funeral by the Free State government, she was buried at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, and de Valera gave the funeral oration.[39][42]
Seán O'Casey said of her: "One thing she had in abundance—physical courage; with that she was clothed as with a garment."[43]
Notes [ edit ]
a b Alexandra Kollontai was People's Commissar (Minister) for Social Welfare of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1918. ^ [29] In 1939, 2-Lt William Wylie KC, the prosecutor, published a dissenting account that she "curled up completely", "never stopped moaning" and cried "I am only a woman, and you cannot shoot a woman. You must not shoot a woman."
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Abstract The controversial question of whether machines may ever be conscious must be based on a careful consideration of how consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain. We suggest that the word “consciousness” conflates two different types of information-processing computations in the brain: the selection of information for global broadcasting, thus making it flexibly available for computation and report (C1, consciousness in the first sense), and the self-monitoring of those computations, leading to a subjective sense of certainty or error (C2, consciousness in the second sense). We argue that despite their recent successes, current machines are still mostly implementing computations that reflect unconscious processing (C0) in the human brain. We review the psychological and neural science of unconscious (C0) and conscious computations (C1 and C2) and outline how they may inspire novel machine architectures.
Imagine that you are driving when you suddenly realize that the fuel-tank light is on. What makes you, a complex assembly of neurons, aware of the light? And what makes the car, a sophisticated piece of electronics and engineering, unaware of it? What would it take for the car to be endowed with a consciousness similar to our own? Are those questions scientifically tractable?
Alan Turing and John von Neumann, the founders of the modern science of computation, entertained the possibility that machines would ultimately mimic all of the brain’s abilities, including consciousness. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have revived this goal. Refinements in machine learning, inspired by neurobiology, have led to artificial neural networks that approach or, occasionally, surpass humans (1, 2). Although those networks do not mimic the biophysical properties of actual brains, their design benefitted from several neurobiological insights, including nonlinear input-output functions, layers with converging projections, and modifiable synaptic weights. Advances in computer hardware and training algorithms now allow such networks to operate on complex problems (such as machine translation) with success rates previously thought to be the privilege of real brains. Are they on the verge of consciousness?
We argue that the answer is negative: The computations implemented by current deep-learning networks correspond mostly to nonconscious operations in the human brain. However, much like artificial neural networks took their inspiration from neurobiology, artificial consciousness may progress by investigating the architectures that allow the human brain to generate consciousness, then transferring those insights into computer algorithms. Our aim is to foster such progress by reviewing aspects of the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness that may be pertinent for machines.
Multiple meanings of consciousness The word “consciousness,” like many prescientific terms, is used in widely different senses. In a medical context, it is often used in an intransitive sense (as in, “the patient was no longer conscious”), in the context of assessing vigilance and wakefulness. Elucidating the brain mechanisms of vigilance is an essential scientific goal, with major consequences for our understanding of sleep, anesthesia, coma, or vegetative state. For lack of space, we do not deal with this aspect here, however, because its computational impact seems minimal: Obviously, a machine must be properly turned on for its computations to unfold normally. We suggest that it is useful to distinguish two other essential dimensions of conscious computation. We label them using the terms global availability (C1) and self-monitoring (C2). C1: Global availability This corresponds to the transitive meaning of consciousness (as in “The driver is conscious of the light”). It refers to the relationship between a cognitive system and a specific object of thought, such as a mental representation of “the fuel-tank light.” This object appears to be selected for further processing, including verbal and nonverbal report. Information that is conscious in this sense becomes globally available to the organism; for example, we can recall it, act upon it, and speak about it. This sense is synonymous with “having the information in mind”; among the vast repertoire of thoughts that can become conscious at a given time, only that which is globally available constitutes the content of C1 consciousness. C2: Self-monitoring Another meaning of consciousness is reflexive. It refers to a self-referential relationship in which the cognitive system is able to monitor its own processing and obtain information about itself. Human beings know a lot about themselves, including such diverse information as the layout and position of their body, whether they know or perceive something, or whether they just made an error. This sense of consciousness corresponds to what is commonly called introspection, or what psychologists call “meta-cognition”—the ability to conceive and make use of internal representations of one’s own knowledge and abilities. We propose that C1 and C2 constitute orthogonal dimensions of conscious computations. This is not to say that C1 and C2 do not involve overlapping physical substrates; in fact, as we review below, in the human brain both depend on the prefrontal cortex. But we argue that empirically and conceptually, the two may come apart because there can be C1 without C2, such as when reportable processing is not accompanied by accurate metacognition, or C2 without C1, such as when a self-monitoring operation unfolds without being consciously reportable. As such, it is advantageous to consider these computations separately before we consider their synergy. Furthermore, many computations involve neither C1 nor C2 and therefore are properly called “unconscious” (or C0 for short). It was Turing’s original insight that even sophisticated information processing can be realized by a mindless automaton. Cognitive neuroscience confirms that complex computations such as face or speech recognition, chess-game evaluation, sentence parsing, and meaning extraction occur unconsciously in the human brain—under conditions that yield neither global reportability nor self-monitoring (Table 1). The brain appears to operate, in part, as a juxtaposition of specialized processors or “modules” that operate nonconsciously and, we argue, correspond tightly to the operation of current feedforward deep-learning networks. Table 1 Examples of computations pertaining to information-processing levels C0, C1 and C2 in the human brain. View this table: We next review the experimental evidence for how human and animal brains handle C0-, C1-, and C2-level computations, before returning to machines and how they could benefit from this understanding of brain architecture.
Unconscious processing (C0): Where most of our intelligence lies “We cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of” (3). This truism has deep consequences. Because we are blind to our unconscious processes, we tend to underestimate their role in our mental life. However, cognitive neuroscientists developed various means of presenting images or sounds without inducing any conscious experience (Fig. 1) and then used behavioral and brain imaging to probe their processing depth. Fig. 1 Examples of paradigms probing unconscious processing (C0). (Top) Subliminal view-invariant face recognition (77). On each trial, a prime face is briefly presented (50 ms), surrounded by masks that make it invisible, followed by a visible target face (500 ms). Although subjective perception is identical across conditions, processing is facilitated whenever the two faces represent the same person, in same or different view. At the behavioral level, this view-invariant unconscious priming is reflected in reduced reaction time in recognizing the target face. At the neural level, it is reflected in reduced cortical response to the target face (repetition suppression) in the fusiform face area of the human inferotemporal cortex. (Bottom) Subliminal accumulation of evidence during interocular suppression (16). Presentation of salient moving dots in one eye prevents the conscious perception of paler moving dots in the opposite eye. Despite their invisibility, the gray dots facilitate performance when they moved in the same direction as a subsequent dot display, an effect proportional to their amount of motion coherence. This facilitation only affects a first-order task (judging the direction of motion), not a second-order metacognitive judgement (rating the confidence in the first response). A computational model of evidence accumulation proposes that subliminal motion information gets added to conscious information, thus biasing and shortening the decision. The phenomenon of priming illustrates the remarkable depth of unconscious processing. A highly visible target stimulus, such as the written word “four,” is processed more efficiently when preceded by a related prime stimulus, such as the Arabic digit “4,” even when subjects do not notice the presence of the prime and cannot reliably report its identity. Subliminal digits, words, faces, or objects can be invariantly recognized and influence motor, semantic, and decision levels of processing (Table 1). Neuroimaging methods reveal that the vast majority of brain areas can be activated nonconsciously. Unconscious view-invariance and meaning extraction in the human brain Many of the difficult perceptual computations, such as invariant face recognition or speaker-invariant speech recognition, that were recently addressed by AI correspond to nonconscious computations in the human brain (4–6). For instance, processing someone’s face is facilitated when it is preceded by the subliminal presentation of a totally different view of the same person, indicating unconscious invariant recognition (Fig. 1). Subliminal priming generalizes across visual-auditory modalities (7, 8), revealing that cross-modal computations that remain challenging for AI software (such as extraction of semantic vectors or speech-to-text) also involve unconscious mechanisms. Even the semantic meaning of sensory input can be processed without awareness by the human brain. Compared with related words (for example, animal-dog), semantic violations (for example, furniture-dog) generate a brain response as late as 400 ms after stimulus onset in temporal-lobe language networks, even if one of the two words cannot be consciously detected (9, 10). Unconscious control and decision-making Unconscious processes can reach even deeper levels of the cortical hierarchy. For instance, subliminal primes can influence prefrontal mechanisms of cognitive control involved in the selection of a task (11) or the inhibition of a motor response (12). Neural mechanisms of decision-making involve accumulating sensory evidence that affects the probability of the various choices until a threshold is attained. This accumulation of probabilistic knowledge continues to happen even with subliminal stimuli (13–16). Bayesian inference and evidence accumulation, which are cornerstone computations for AI (2), are basic unconscious mechanisms for humans. Unconscious learning Reinforcement learning algorithms, which capture how humans and animals shape their future actions on the basis of history of past rewards, have excelled in attaining supra-human AI performance in several applications, such as playing Go (1). Remarkably, in humans, such learning appears to proceed even when the cues, reward, or motivation signals are presented below the consciousness threshold (17, 18). Complex unconscious computations and inferences routinely occur in parallel within various brain areas. Many of these C0 computations have now been captured by AI, particularly by using feedforward convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We next consider what additional computations are required for conscious processing.
C1: Global availability of relevant information The need for integration and coordination The organization of the brain into computationally specialized subsystems is efficient, but this architecture also raises a specific computational problem: The organism as a whole cannot stick to a diversity of probabilistic interpretations; it must act and therefore cut through the multiple possibilities and decide in favor of a single course of action. Integrating all of the available evidence to converge toward a single decision is a computational requirement that, we contend, must be faced by any animal or autonomous AI system and corresponds to our first functional definition of consciousness: global availability (C1). For example, elephants, when thirsty, manage to determine the location of the nearest water hole and move straight to it, from a distance of 5 to 50 km (19). Such decision-making requires a sophisticated architecture for (i) efficiently pooling over all available sources of information, including multisensory and memory cues; (ii) considering the available options and selecting the best one on the basis of this large information pool; (iii) sticking to this choice over time; and (iv) coordinating all internal and external processes toward the achievement of that goal. Primitive organisms, such as bacteria, may achieve such decision solely through an unconscious competition of uncoordinated sensorimotor systems. This solution, however, fails as soon as it becomes necessary to bridge over temporal delays and to inhibit short-term tendencies in favor of longer-term winning strategies. Coherent, thoughtful planning required a specific C1 architecture. Consciousness as access to an internal global workspace We hypothesize that consciousness in the first sense (C1) evolved as an information-processing architecture that addresses this information-pooling problem (20–23). In this view, the architecture of C1 evolved to break the modularity and parallelism of unconscious computations. On top of a deep hierarchy of specialized modules, a “global neuronal workspace,” with limited capacity, evolved to select a piece of information, hold it over time, and share it across modules. We call “conscious” whichever representation, at a given time, wins the competition for access to this mental arena and gets selected for global sharing and decision-making. Consciousness is therefore manifested by the temporary dominance of a thought or train of thoughts over mental processes, so that it can guide a broad variety of behaviors. These behaviors include not only physical actions but also mental ones, such as committing information to episodic memory or routing it to other processors. Relation between consciousness and attention William James described attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” (24). This definition is close to what we mean by C1: the selection of a single piece of information for entry into the global workspace. There is, however, a clear-cut distinction between this final step, which corresponds to conscious access, and the previous stages of attentional selection, which can operate unconsciously. Many experiments have established the existence of dedicated mechanisms of attention orienting and shown that, like any other processors, they can operate nonconsciously: (i) In the top-down direction, attention can be oriented toward an object, amplify its processing, and yet fail to bring it to consciousness (25); (ii) in the bottom-up direction, attention can be attracted by a flash, even if this stimulus ultimately remains unconscious (26). What we call attention is a hierarchical system of sieves that operate unconsciously. Such unconscious systems compute with probability distributions, but only a single sample, drawn from this probabilistic distribution, becomes conscious at a given time (27, 28). We may become aware of several alternative interpretations, but only by sampling their unconscious distributions over time (29, 30). Evidence for all-or-none selection in a capacity-limited system The primate brain comprises a conscious bottleneck and can only consciously access a single item at a time (Table 1). For instance, rivaling pictures or ambiguous words are perceived in an all-or-none manner; at any given time, we subjectively perceive only a single interpretation out of many possible ones [even though the others continue to be processed unconsciously (31, 32)]. The serial operation of consciousness is attested by phenomena such as the attentional blink and the psychological refractory period, in which conscious access to a first item A prevents or delays the perception of a second competing item B (9, 27, 30, 33–35). Such interference with the perception of B is triggered by the mere conscious perception of A, even if no task is performed (36). Thus C1 consciousness is causally responsible for a serial information-processing bottleneck. Evidence for integration and broadcasting Brain imaging in humans and neuronal recordings in monkeys indicate that the conscious bottleneck is implemented by a network of neurons that is distributed through the cortex, but with a stronger emphasis on high-level associative areas. Listed in Table 1 are some of the publications that have evidenced an all-or-none “ignition” of this network during conscious perception by using a variety of brain-imaging techniques. Single-cell recordings indicate that each specific conscious percept, such as a person’s face, is encoded by the all-or-none firing of a subset of neurons in high-level temporal and prefrontal cortices, whereas others remain silent (Fig. 2) (31, 32, 37, 38). Fig. 2 Global availability: Consciousness in the first sense (C1). Conscious subjective percepts are encoded by the sudden firing of stimulus-specific neural populations distributed in interconnected, high-level cortical areas, including the lateral prefrontal cortex, anterior temporal cortex, and hippocampus. (Top) During binocular flash suppression, the flashing of a picture to one eye suppresses the conscious perception of a second picture presented to the other eye. As a result, the same physical stimulus can lead to distinct subjective percepts. This example illustrates a prefrontal neuron sensitive to faces and unresponsive to checkers, whose firing shoots up in tight association with the sudden onset of subjective face perception (31). (Bottom) During masking, a flashed image, if brief enough and followed by a longer “mask,” can remain subjectively invisible. Shown is a neuron in the entorhinal cortex firing selectively to the concept of “World Trade Center.” Rasters in red indicate trials in which the subject reported recognizing the picture (blue indicates no recognition). Under masking, when the picture is presented for only 33 ms there is little or no neural activity; but once presentation time is longer than the perceptual threshold (66 ms or larger), the neuron fires substantially only on recognized trials. Overall, even for identical objective input (same duration), spiking activity is higher and more stable for recognized trials (38). Stability as a feature of consciousness Direct contrasts between seen and unseen pictures or words confirm that such ignition occurs only for the conscious percept. As explained earlier, nonconscious stimuli may reach into deep cortical networks and influence higher levels of processing and even central executive functions, but these effects tend to be small, variable, and short-lived [although nonconscious information decays at a slower rate than initially expected (39, 40)]. By contrast, the stable, reproducible representation of high-quality information by a distributed activity pattern in higher cortical areas is a feature of conscious processing (Table 1). Such transient “meta-stability” seems to be necessary for the nervous system to integrate information from a variety of modules and then broadcast it back to them, achieving flexible cross-module routing. C1 consciousness in human and nonhuman animals C1 consciousness is an elementary property that is present in human infants (41) as well as in animals. Nonhuman primates exhibit similar visual illusions (31, 32), attentional blink (42), and central capacity limits (43) as human subjects. The prefrontal cortex appears to act as a central information sharing device and serial bottleneck in both human and nonhuman primates (43). The considerable expansion of the prefrontal cortex in the human lineage may have resulted in a greater capacity for multimodal convergence and integration (44–46). Furthermore, humans possess additional circuits in the inferior prefrontal cortex for verbally formulating and reporting information to others. The capacity to report information through language is universally considered one of the clearest signs of conscious perception because once information has reached this level of representation in humans, it is necessarily available for sharing across mental modules and therefore conscious in the C1 sense. Thus, although language is not required for conscious perception and processing, the emergence of language circuits in humans may have resulted in a considerable increase in the speed, ease, and flexibility of C1-level information sharing.
C2: Self-monitoring Whereas C1 consciousness reflects the capacity to access external information, consciousness in the second sense (C2) is characterized by the ability to reflexively represent oneself (47–50). A substantial amount of research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology has addressed self-monitoring under the term of “metacognition,” which is roughly defined as cognition about cognition or knowing about knowing. Below, we review the mechanisms by which the primate brain monitors itself, while stressing their implications for building self-reflective machines. A probabilistic sense of confidence When making a decision, humans feel more or less confident about their choice. Confidence can be defined as a sense of the probability that a decision or computation is correct (51). Almost anytime the brain perceives or decides, it also estimates its degree of confidence. Learning is also accompanied by a quantitative sense of confidence; humans evaluate how much trust they have in what they have learned and use it to weigh past knowledge versus present evidence (52). Confidence can be assessed nonverbally, either retrospectively, by measuring whether humans persist in their initial choice, or prospectively, by allowing them to opt out from a task without even attempting it. Both measures have been used in nonhuman animals to show that they too possess metacognitive abilities (53). By contrast, most current neural networks lack them: Although they can learn, they generally lack meta-knowledge of the reliability and limits of what has been learned. A noticeable exception is biologically constrained models that rely on Bayesian mechanisms to simulate the integration of multiple probabilistic cues in neural circuits (54). These models have been fruitful in describing how neural populations may automatically compute the probability that a given process is performed successfully. Although these implementations remain rare and have not addressed the same range of computational problems as has traditional AI, they offer a promising venue for incorporating uncertainty monitoring in deep learning networks. Explicit confidence in prefrontal cortex According to Bayesian accounts, each local cortical circuit may represent and combine probability distributions in order to estimate processing uncertainty (54). However, additional neural circuits may be required in order to explicitly extract and manipulate confidence signals. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies in humans and physiological recordings |
thoughts of another when repeated over and over again. Even in school you are taught to write papers this way. You learn to write an intro, write a body, and then write a conclusion that is essentially repeating the intro in a different way. This is because the power of repetition is a very effective tool of persuasion.
Controlling Center Stage
Donald Trump has on the best defensive and offensive strategies when it comes to speaking publicly. He knows how to control the conversation. He rarely gets shot down in mid debate because he doesn’t allow the other person to finish. If you listen to him speak live, you will notice that he is always cutting off his opponents before they get a chance to finish their strike at him. His outgoing and outspoken personality allows him to effectively control center stage and take all of the light away from the others involved. As you see in many debates, he is always in the spotlight, while the majority of the other candidates only get a fraction of center stage time…if he allows them to. This is very similar to how the “loud” kid in high school would always get people to follow him: because he draws attention to himself. This is the same tactic.
Negative Advertising
They say that negative advertising is still advertising, and they are right. Donald Trump has been accused of being an Elite, a Nazi, and a Homophobe among many other things. The mainstream media is trying to portray him as evil and sadistic, even comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What they don’t understand is that by creating such a negative image to the general public, the media is actually creating a hyperdriven sense of obsession with what the crazed candidate is up to. People are watching his debates, his speeches, and analyzing his every move. This sense of negative advertising has actually worked in a positive way, if your goal is to create a “buzz”. People today are not interested in how “good” things are, they are interested in the bad and the ugly. If you watch the news, 85% of all stories are negative compared to the 15% positive. Even in films or TV, people want to see drama and craziness, no one wants to see a movie about a girl who did everything right and lived happily ever after, it just makes for a boring story. Media conditioning is to blame for the success of Negative Advertising.
Talking Down to the World
A great portion of Donald Trump’s success in his presidential campaign is that he knows to communicate with people on a conscious and subconscious level. How does he do this? By talking to his audience like they were children. While the other candidates are rattling off factoids and statistics, Donald Trump is speaking in short sentences comprised of words that would equate to that of a 5th grader’s reading level. He is speaking to his audience on a level that the educated, the uneducated, the poor, the rich, and the middle class can all understand and follow. One of the biggest mistakes we see candidates make is rattling off facts and statistics. The mind cannot subconsciously follow a series of numbers, while it can easily follow general and simplistic speech. Donald Trump is a very educated man, and he can communicate with even the highest of highly educated individuals. He could speak in numbers or use a more complicated vocabulary, but he would lose his audience, and lose them fast. He knows that no one will remember the series of numbers that he as mentioned, but they will remember how he called Rose O’Donnell a fat pig. Genius.
The Whistle-blower
Donald Trump has recently told the general public that if he were to be elected president, that he would let the nation know who was really behind the terrorist attacks on 9-11. By acting as a whistle-blower, he is gaining the audience’s trust that he is not on the side of a tyrannical and corrupt government. By letting the world know that he will expose the truth, he is imposing that there is something that the government is hiding.
Twitter Beef
Donald Trump takes his crazed behavior to social media as well. He is always speaking his mind in public and online. During his campaign, he has managed to obtain thousands upon thousands of new followers and has been “trending” on twitter virtually every time he speaks in public. Donald Trump is one of the few presidential candidates ever to not only create such a stir at his rallies, but online as well. These marketing efforts are aimed at the younger generation (those who use Twitter) to create hype and awareness about himself. This is the same tactic that Kanye West uses to create headlines with his outlandish online behavior.
Big Bad Credentials
In marketing, the most powerful asset any company, brand, or product can have is credentials. Having a series of famous people using your brands is the quickest way to instant spotlight. Donald Trump is always throwing around his business feats, his unremarkable amount of money, and the list of famous people who are supporting him. Having these big time credentials tells people subconsciously that they are “worthy” of their approval because other “approved” celebrities “approve” them. This is how society works, and Donald Trump is all too familiar with how business and social status work. Like they say, you’re only as good as your last job.
Being Outlandish
Being arrogant and outlandish has many negatives as well as many positives. Many of today’s celebrities are prime examples of how being overly arrogant and “out there” can ultimately put you in the spotlight. Kim Kardashian is only one of many celebrities who have been made famous through idiocracy alone. Her deviant and promiscuous behavior has made her an A class celebrity. The media conditions us to draw ourselves to these types of personalities. Although being cocky and outspoken is nothing new to Donald Trump, it is just another factor that plays a huge role in the overall marketing of his presidential campaign.
Final Thoughts
Marketing and Advertising are extremely powerful tools that can push the average person to superstar status. These marketing campaigns are tactically designed to captivate and persuade the conscious and subconscious mind. Every step that Donald Trump takes is planned, it just doesn’t “seem” that way, which is how you know how carefully things are planned out. Commercials, advertisements, TV shows, and movies are not just toys, they are tools designed to move you in one direction or the other. The tricky part is to understand where and why they are trying to push you there. Using these styles of subliminal marketing is extremely effective because it targets the part of the brain that doesn’t use logic or reason, but instead is compulsive. The next time you watch Donald Trump in an interview, a speech, or a debate you will start to see what he is doing to win over the American people.Google is opposing a plan to increase the US government's power to infiltrate computer systems around the world, warning that it will raise a number of "monumental and highly complex" constitutional issues.
In a submission to the Washington committee that is considering the proposed changes, Google said that the amendment would open the door to “government hacking of any facility wherever located”.
Under the current Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41, prosecutors can only search for and seize property in districts where they have obtained a warrant from the district authorities.
However, the proposed amendment would allow a court within a district where a crime has occured to authorise remote access searches of electronic information located outside the district.
In particular, Google warned that this could happen in cases where the location of information has been obscured through technical means – either through encryption or by obscuring their IP addresses.
"This concern is not theoretical," said Google. "The nature of today’s technology is such that warrants issued under the proposed amendment will in many cases end up authorizing the government to conduct searches outside the United States.”
Google's comments have been submitted along with 37 others, as part of a public consultation on the proposed amendment. The comments will be considered by the Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules, which has responsibility over federal rules.
The US Department of Justice claims that the change is necessary, because internet anonymising technologies are making it difficult for prosecutors to identify the location of criminals.
However, Google and others warn that, in using such tactics, the US government risks undermining diplomatic arrangements it has built up with other countries over many years.Maybe he called it his "jack-off lantern."
Edwin Tobergta of Hamilton, Ohio, is now famous as the man caught having sex with a pool raft. His sentencing hearing this week offered a little insight into his proclivities. One thing that stands out: He once pleasured himself with a pumpkin.
Tobergta was sentenced this week to 11 months in prison for defiling the inflatable raft, according to WXIX. He committed the act in June, in front of children.
At an earlier court session, Tobergta plead guilty to public indecency.
This is the second time Tobergta has been caught in flagrante delicto with an inflatable pool toy. The same thing happened in 2011.
But a less reported aspect of Tobergta's checkered history with the law occurred in 2002, when he was arrested for allegedly diddling an inflatable pumpkin that was part of a Halloween display.
At his court hearing on Tuesday, judge Charles Pater called Tobergta's actions "lewd," "obscene," and "something society's not going to tolerate," according to WCPO.
Tobergta apologized in court before being sentenced.The Montreal Canadiens have announced that Gabriel Dumont and Nathan Beaulieu have been cut from the team, and will join the Hamilton Bulldogs' training camp and preseason. Dumont didn't have a great training camp, but his cut still comes as a bit of a surprise as he will have to face waivers, which means that another team could claim him if they desire.
The hope is that Dumont's two-year contract will dissuade possible suitors from claiming him, but who knows?
Beaulieu will be the #1 defenseman for the Bulldogs, the returning team MVP will look for a dominant AHL season while playing big minutes. He's likely the first call-up if there's an injury, unless Magnus Nygren can adjust to North American ice quicker than anticipated.
The real news here though, is that it's now official that Jarred Tinordi has made the Habs, and that Michael Bournival will start the season in Montreal. Bournival may be sent down fairly quickly if Prust and Parros are ready to go, but with the way he's played, don't be surprised if the Canadiens move someone to make room for the speedy, young forward.
And I don't do this often, but I'd just like to say that I was the first person to say Bournival was an NHL-quality player, way back when he was first acquired. Bournival has ranked 12th on the Habs Top 25 Under 25 for three years in a row, but he could see a jump next season with this news.Articles › Photography Tips › Mountain Photography Tips - Part 1 Mountain Photography Tips - Part 1
Like many ‘pros’ out there, I’m a self taught photographer- after all photography itself is not that complicated. Over the years I’ve become a lot more efficient at capturing the outdoors but my style has never changed, and I guess that’s important- everyone has their own style and that’s not something that should be force fed. But underneath every personal taste there are always going to be universal ‘laws’ and tricks that photographers use to make great images. Some may seem basic and others a bit alien but hopefully there is something in here for everyone because at the end of the day these are just tips to shoot what I want to shoot, and you have to adapt them to your vision and your adventure.
Rule of Thirds
Possibly the least exciting thing to start with but also the most important. The Rule of Thirds dictate that you should try and break up your images in to rough thirds- did you ever take a landscape photo with the horizon at mid height (a natural thing to do) only to get home and think it was lacking? Well the Rule of Thirds says that the sky should have only taken up a third of the photo, the background the middle third, and the foreground the lower third. Nowadays digital cameras can help you out a bit and you can select to always see a ‘thirds grid view’ on your view finder- try it it will make all the difference. It will also help you keep that horizon straight.
As you’ll see in the examples below it’s important not to be too anal about it - I’ve purposely included images that don’t follow the exact Rule of Thirds just to show that it’s good to allow yourself a bit of artistic licence.
Sharpness
I’m a stickler for keeping images pin sharp and for that you need to find the sweet spot of your lens. Every lens is going to be different but a simple Google search will tell you what aperture you should be shooting at to get the sharpest images. Don’t get too caught up in this though- the differences are minor. Just try and avoid shooting at either end of the aperture range and you’ll be fine. The image below shows varying F-Stops using a Canon 24-105 F4-22 L lens.
Aperture and Depth of Field
I’m going to be using an imaginary lens of F4-F22 here
It’s important to understand how the aperture works on your camera, but don’t get too obsessed in it. Think of the aperture as being the iris of your lens- confusingly, the lower the ‘F-stop’ number the more open the iris is going to be. So an F Stop of F4 is the most ‘open’ my lens can go and therefore the most light it will allow in, conversely an F-Stop of F22 is the equivalent of the iris going as small as it can go and only letting in a very small amount of light.
Aperture affects two things Sharpness and Depth of Field.
Sharpness
The concept of Sharpness is pretty intuitive. As mentioned above there is a ‘sweet spot’ in every lens where you will achieve pin-sharp images for a certain aperture rating, just Google it. In my case my sweet spot is F8-11. As I move away from those values in either direction (towards F22 or F4) I start to loose sharpness in my images. If you want a visual aid then just open your eyelids as far as they will go and then squint- crude, yes, but you’ll notice that both extremes are not very sharp.
Depth of Field
Depth of Field is a little more complicated and takes experimenting out in the field to fully understand its effects. It is a lot easier to understand if you just call it Depth of Focus - the ability to have all the image in, or out of, focus. Don’t panic, 99% of your shots are always going to be fully focused across the whole image, but when shooting a subject very close up (a meter or so away), or when zoomed in to a subject you’ll notice that the background can be blurred out. You may want to keep that effect but if you want to have all the image in focus (extend the depth of field) then you’ll need to move the F-Stop number towards F22. The exact F-number depends on many factors and the only way to get to grips with it is go shoot outside and see the results.
Using a shallow depth of field forces the opposite look and allows you to blur out the image around the subject you’ve focused on. It’s intuitive that if you need to shoot towards F22 to extend the depth of field, that you need to shoot towards F4 to use a shallow depth of field. Personally I think a shallow depth of field look is wasted in the mountains; you should never be afraid of showing where you are and when I see a very shallow depth of field I always get suspicious and think the photographer is trying to hide something. (Obviously if you are working as a professional and trying to single out a product then it’s a different matter entirely.)
As I said it’s important not to get too bogged down by aperture values, you’ll understand them better over time. Out in the field I always try and shoot as close to the sweet spot of my lens as possible for optimum sharpness - F8-F11 in my example. When I’m shooting in good light then I always prioritise the aperture. In low light situations I may want to give myself a bit more light and therefore I ‘open’ the aperture a bit, or when needed all the way down to F4. However I try and avoid shooting this low for sharpness reasons mentioned above and especially if I’m close to my subject and I risk shooting a shallow depth of field. I only shoot above F11 when I’m close to my subject and want to make sure that all of the image is in focus.
Finally if you want that sun star effect that everyone loves then a high aperture value is what you need. Please note though that for the sun star you need clear skies- even slight haze will ruin the effect.
ISO Film Speed
Back in the days of film this had a lot more importance than it does nowadays. The film speed, in modern terms, sets how sensitive the sensor is to light. The trade off is simple- a low ISO value means you have a smoother image (grain-free) but you also have to let the light hitting the sensor last longer (i.e. a longer shutter speed). If you’re shooting non-moving objects then this isn’t an issue but you can see how a fast shutter speed is necessary for freeze framing movement. Digital sensors get better and better every year now and you can easily get away with an ISO of 400 and above on a DSLR without noticing much difference. I sometimes finding myself trying to shoot as low as possible but really there’s no need- you’re better off in my opinion to shoot at the sweet spot of the lens than lowering the ISO. Obviously in really low light situations this changes completely.
Putting it all together
So you’ve vaguely grasped the ideas of ISO, Aperture, and Film Speed. It takes years to master all three subconsciously and automatically as you shoot so don’t panic if it all seems a bit overwhelming and confusing. However putting it altogether is what makes the very best photo you can take happen.
So where to start? Well this is how I would play things out, in order in my head.
The Alarm goes off
So its 4am at the bivouac and you’re feeling keen. Very keen as most people just want to eat and it’s colder than a witch’s tit- it’s grim so you know it’ll make a great memory. At this stage it’s pitch black but you’ve got a head torch to play with, use it! I’ll whack up the ISO to something like 1000 so I don’t have to worry too much about a blurred picture- after all you’re capturing a moment here not something you’re going to frame on your wall. Aim your head torch at the climber and set the aperture to as low as it will go, make it easy for yourself. Then ask your subject not to move and hold your breath and keep that trigger finger held down- the first one or two will be blurred but at some point in the next 5 seconds you’ll be solid as a rock and that will be enough to get your shot. Remember it’s not just you that’s got to be solid, but your subject as well. So don’t be afraid to take 10 shots in one go.
Pre-Dawn
The stars are out, there’s a full moon in the background, and there’s not a breath of wind. It’s just you and your climbing partner high up on a beautiful alpine ridge; it’s a very special moment, and one you’ll remember forever. But it’s also cold and you don’t want to hang about. How do you get the shot? For this one you’re going to want to rest your camera on something. Don’t think tripod, just think natural features. As you’re climbing up look for rocks that have a good spot to sit the camera on, or if you’re carrying a big pack you can rest it on that. Remember that you want to get the shot done in just a few minutes here - partners have a very finite amount of patience. I tend to find a rock, get my pack off and sit the camera on it. Note that your camera will move as it ‘settles’ in to the soft rucksack and its contents. Stick the ISO as high as it will go- you need to frame the shot first (even through a viewfinder you’ll often find it hard to see in such low light).
Get your partner to stop and shine his head torch on the camera from a few meters away (or wherever he is)- you can then focus quickly on his head torch (much faster than focusing in the dark). Set your camera to manual focus so it doesn’t try and refocus later on when it takes the shot. Take a shot with the aperture at its lowest value- the photo will be terrible but remember you’re just framing here. If you need to angle the camera up then bundling up the camera strap and sticking it under the lens will help- you can use gloves or anything for this. Keep shooting until you find the shot you want. Now comes the trickier part. The easiest way to shoot low light is to choose the lowest aperture setting available and let in the most light- however I find shooting at the lowest setting unacceptably softens the image. Try instead going for an F-stop or two higher than the lowest setting, it will make all the difference.
Play with the ISO and aperture until you’re correctly exposed but be aware that shooting high ISO will result in a lot of noise in these kind of shots as there are a lot of dark spots in these photos. Again this is down to experience and what camera you are using.
Stick the camera on a 10 second timer delay and get ready to run! (Remember to have selected manual focus not automatic by this point). Leg it back to a suitable location within the frame and stand as still as you both can for 30 seconds (this tends to be the maximum cameras will expose for). 30 seconds is a long time but it’s perfectly doable, but remember that still means absolutely still!
Once the shutter has closed go back and zoom in on the image to make sure you are both sharp in the image, if not then repeat the image. With practice you’ll get it right first time every time and it shouldn’t take more than 5 mins to get the shot and be on your way again. Never be afraid to overexpose the image either!
Sunrise
The alpenglow bathes the surrounding peaks and coats your climbing partner in InstaLike colours, only this time it’s not a fake filter and you’re starting to feel like you’re in a Rocky film, but how to capture the immensity of the situation? Well it would seem at this point that given the light from the sun you can shoot away without having to worry about how you’re shooting. Wrong. Sunrise may look bright to you but actually it’s not- you still need to manage your camera to avoid blurred images. I will still want to shoot at my maximum sharpness here or when shooting in to the sun use a starburst effect- so I’m already disabling myself by forcing a relatively high aperture value on my camera. For me the simple solution is just to bump the ISO up- I shouldn’t have any black areas in my shot that would develop noise, and it means that my shutter speed will remain relatively fast which is key. Sometimes I’ll have the ISO up to 600 or above for these moments, better to have a slightly grainy image than to come back with lots of slightly blurred images.
When shooting with a low angled sun in frame try and shoot a higher aperture to create a sunburst affect- you can go as big or small as you want on this one. But be aware if you’re shooting at an aperture of F22 you’ll need to massively over compensate with your ISO setting.
Remember that there are two movements in every photograph. You and your climbing partner. You may be standing still when taking a photograph but ideally you will want to capture your partner ‘in the act’ and that means he’s going to be moving pretty fast for your camera in those low light situations (even if you think he’s moving pretty slow). Don’t be shy - ask him to do the last few steps a couple of times to make sure you’ve got the shot, as well as ask him to walk slower through the motions. This is especially applicable if he is very close to you as movements will be accentuated.
Finally quantity is key here, keep that finger on the shutter button as no matter how experienced you are you’ll still come back with a lot of blurred images…that’s just life. After all you’re trying to push the ISO and aperture as close to the shutter speed limit as you can take pictures in, and that will always result in some throwaways.
Day-Time
The magic hour has been and gone but you’ve got a big shit eating grin on your face as you’ve got shots that would make your own mother weep for joy. You now enter the easy part of the day for photography- there’s so much light up here that you can stick the ISO way down to 100 and shoot at any aperture you want without having to worry about shutter speed. Be aware that in the winter months you can enjoy a relatively nice light all day long whilst in the summer time the sun is very high in the sky around midday and no amount of trickery is going to allow you to come back with stunning images in such harsh lighting. Go nuts, never see a shot and think you’ll get ‘another chance later’ - that literally never happens. Shoot now, you can always delete later.
Sunset
If you’re unlucky enough to still be out on the hill at sunset and the only silver lining to that thought is that you’re about to shoot in the magic hour again, just remember to increase that ISO again and stick to the same rules as you followed at sunrise. Don’t forget that the mountains retain a very subtle light long after the sun has actually set- you can shoot some pretty spectacular images for a long period of time here. Use it and forget about the fact that it’s going to get dark soon and you’re still on the wrong side of the mountain.
Exposure
You’ve made it home in one piece, you ticked the summit, and you’re about to sit down with a cup of tea and take the Instagram world by storm as you upload image after image of alpine-porn. Hell you even think this photography business is easy and might just quit your job as VP at Nestle, move to Chamonix, and do it full time. But as you start to download the images to your laptop you discover a disturbing amount of them are not exposed correctly, as your heart rate starts to rise, and the panic takes over you scan quickly over the thumbnails and discover that all the ones you had earmarked in your mind for front cover of National Geographic are all too dark or too light. Disaster!
Well actually this used to be a disaster but it turns out that technology is once again on hand to see us through our own incompetence and Photoshop is surprisingly good at converting a very badly exposed RAW image into a perfectly correctly exposed one without the image being a complete write off. Nevertheless it’s probably not going to make that front cover you just told your wife about over the phone.
Ideally you’ll get it right first time, or at least very close to right. You’ll notice that there are about a dozen or more exposure configurations on your camera (now that it’s been brought to your attention). You can expose for all the frame, part of the frame, a custom selection of the frame, and just about any combination you can think of- which is all well and good but shooting in the alpine puts us in very contrasting lighting conditions so you need to understand what the camera is doing here for you to understand how to shoot it properly. Sounds like a nightmare, well luckily through years of the above I’ve got a pretty easy workflow.
I select just the exact centre of my frame to expose (which also happens to be my focusing area as well). On my camera it’s a very small single square that only takes up about 1% of the entire frame. In the alpine world there are basically two things you’re looking to expose correctly- one is your partner and the other is the scenery around him. Given that snow is massively reflective, your partner less so, and rock even less, you’ve got to work out in your mind what you think is the ‘middle’ spot.
Personally I just focus on my partner or the very immediate surroundings. Keep it simple. In a nutshell you don’t want your partner to be a black silhouette but conversely you don’t want the snow or mountain scenery around him to be ‘blown out’ (i.e. too bright) so that you can see him.
If my subject is back or side lit, then I’ll expose on a spot on his body where there is sun hitting (a good balance between the bright snowy landscape and the dark sided part of the subject). Look at his helmet that will often have a glint of sun on it- I hover my little red square over that part and half depress the shutter button, that automatically locks in the focus and exposure. Then I can re-frame my shot and shoot away. The beauty of digital is that it allows us to see straight away how we’re doing- take a look at what you just shot. If its too dark then select and area of the frame that is a bit shadier and the image will lighten up- if its too bright then select a snowier area. A general rule is that you should always underexpose rather than overexpose- Photoshop does a better job of bringing out darker areas than it does in brighter ones.
Ideally though, by the time you’ve absorbed this article, you’ll be the next Ansel Adams mixed with Marko Prezelj so it’ll all be second nature anyways….good luck!The history of anti-masonry is almost as old as that of Freemasonry itself. Anti-masonic thought can be grouped into two broad catagories: accusations of anti-Christian or satanic objectives, and accusations of political and social manipulation. Anti-masonic thought today generally turns to the many conspiracy theories currently popular in the media. Historically, Freemasonry has ignored such attacks. The following articles contain the facts.. "Public information campaigns that confront myths with facts, or warn people that a given claim is false, necessarily reiterate the information they want to discredit. This strategy is successful as long as people remember what is true and what is false. Unfortunately, memory for these details fades quickly. When the false claims are encountered again on a later occasion, all that is left may be the vague feeling that 'I heard something like this before.' This sense of familiarity, in turn, will foster the acceptance of statements as true. Once a statement is accepted as true, people are likely to attribute it to a credible source which, ironically, may often be the source that attempted to discredit it lending the statement additional credibility when conveyed to others." - University of Michigan, Norbert Schwarz et al. "Metacognitive Experiences and the Intricacies of Setting People Straight" (Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Volume 39, 2007, pp 127-161)When and how did these talks begin?
Talks that led to a breakthrough interim agreement agreed in November of 2013, known both as the Geneva Accord and the Joint Plan of Action, began in February of that year. Prior to that there had been numerous (unsuccessful) attempts to negotiate a deal with Iran since 2002 when Iranian dissident groups raised the alarm over the country’s nuclear programme by revealing the existence of two facilities that had not been declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog.
Two things have given the current talks real momentum, however. The first was a back channel to Iran opened up by the Obama administration in March 2013 that led to several secret bilateral meetings in Oman. The second was the election in June of 2013 of Hassan Rohani, who 10 years before had served as Iran’s nuclear negotiator, on a platform promising constructive engagement with the international community aimed at lifting harsh economic sanctions and ending Iran's international isolation. The negotiations leading to Thursday’s pact kicked off in March 2014. Several deadlines for a comprehensive agreement were extended. The final deadline has now been set for July 1st of this year, but the White House needed a detailed framework agreement to be in place well before the return of Congress from its Easter break, in order to head off an attempt by Republican critics of any deal with Iran to legislate for new sanctions and thus kill off the talks.
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Who are the P5+1? Why not call it the P6?
The P5+1 are America, France, Britain, China, Russia and Germany. The first five are all permanent members of the UN Security Council. Germany is there because it was part of an EU3 including France and Britain, that held an earlier series of negotiations with Iran. The European Union is also represented at the talks by its foreign affairs supremo. The UN Security Council has passed a series of resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran since 2006 following reports by the IAEA regarding Iran's non-compliance with its safeguards agreement under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Sanctions were first imposed when Iran rejected the Security Council’s demand that Iran suspend all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.
What did they hope to get out of a deal?
In short, the P5+1 wants to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, or at least to stop it from being able to get one either very quickly or clandestinely. To that end the negotiators have compromised over allowing Iran to continue to enrich uranium, concluding that complete dismantling of a huge infrastructure was unrealistic. However, they have sought strict limits on Iran’s enrichment programme, the redesign of a plutonium-producing heavy water reactor under construction and a highly-intrusive inspection regime to prevent cheating. Their aim has been to extend Iran’s “breakout capability”—the key yardstick of the time needed to produce enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon—from the current estimate of a couple of months to at least a year, and to maintain it there for a decade or more.
What did Iran hope to receive?
For Iran, the pressing need is to gain relief from sanctions that have ratcheted up in severity and are having a crippling effect on its resource-dependent economy. In particular, restrictions on its oil and gas exports, its ability to import technology to exploit its energy resources, and being cut off from SWIFT, the financial-messaging system used to transfer money between the world’s banks, have taken an increasing toll. Iran would have liked all sanctions to end from the moment of a deal being signed, but relief will be staged on the basis of good faith implementation of whatever limits on the nuclear programme are finally agreed. Sanctions related to other aspects of Iran’s behaviour, such as human-rights issues, support of terrorism and its ballistic-missile programme will not be affected. Furthermore, Mr Obama can only suspend sanctions that Congress has legislated.
What does the deal actually include?
The agreement announced on Thursday night was more detailed than most expected, but nothing is in place until a formal deal is signed before the July 1st deadline. However, under this statement of intent Iran will reduce its installed enrichment centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,000, only 5,000 of which will be spinning. All of them will be first-generation centrifuges: none of its more advanced models can be used for at least 10 years, and R&D into more efficient designs will have to be based on a plan submitted to the IAEA. Fordow, Iran’s second enrichment facility (its main one is at Natanz) which is buried deep within a mountain and thought to be impregnable to conventional air strikes, will cease all enrichment and be turned into a physics research centre. It will not produce or house any fissile material for at least 15 years. Iran has said it will reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (which can be spun further into weapons-grade material) from 10,000kg to 300kg for the next 15 years. Iran’s alternative plutonium path to a bomb also appears to have been satisfactorily dealt with. The heavy-water reactor at Arak will be redesigned and its original core, which would have produced significant quantities of weapons-grade plutonium, will be removed and destroyed. No other heavy-water reactor will be built for 15 years.
An interactive guide to the Middle East's tangled conflicts
All these undertakings hinge on the assurance that Iran will abide by them. Without a uniquely intrusive inspection and verification regime, sceptics would still be right to question their worth given Iran’s past history of lying and cheating over its nuclear programme. Under the terms of the framework agreement, inspectors from the IAEA will be able to inspect any facility, declared or otherwise, as long as it is deemed to be “suspicious”. The agreement also states that Iran will address the IAEA’s concerns about what it calls the Possible Military Dimensions (PMDs) of its nuclear programme. Such powers for the IAEA, which will remain in place indefinitely, are a lot more sweeping than those it has under the normal safeguard agreements that are part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
What needs to happen by July 1st?
Basically, a lot more of the technical detail needs to be filled in. The exact nature of the inspection and verification regime is especially important as are the penalties for non-compliance (such as automatic snapback of US and EU sanctions and new UN resolutions). Because the framework agreement was so specific, some of the heavy lifting has been done. But the negotiator’s watchword is that until everything is agreed, nothing is agreed.
Who is hoping the deal falls apart? What are the odds they get their wish?
The deal has many strenuous critics. The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has described it in almost apocalyptic terms (although much of Israel’s security establishment is more sanguine about it); Republican hawks in Congress (and even some Democrats) hate the idea of any deal with Iran that does nothing to address its behaviour as a troublemaker in the Middle East and as a sponsor of designated terrorist outfits, such as Hizbullah in Lebanon. The deal is also opposed by hardliners in Tehran who may still be hoping to win over the enigmatic but ailing supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to their point of view. Elements of the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG), who control military sites which the IAEA will have to gain access to if it is to address the vital PMD issues, may be quite happy to find a way of sabotaging the deal. The IRG may even wish to see sanctions remain in place, as they have provided money-making opportunities for many of its leaders.
However, the problem faced by those who would like to see the deal collapse is that they have yet to offer any attractive alternatives. Ordinary Iranians are desperate to get back to having a |
face of increased tourist numbers.
- The case for business growth due to an APD cut appears particularly weak as business flights are driven by need and time pressures rather than price.
- The case for an APD cut encouraging more visits to Scotland for the purposes of international trade and business deals is particularly weak as long haul business flights between the UK and the US and Asia is almost entirely price insensitive.
- If an APD cut results in a transfer of revenue from APD to corporation tax there may be deeper implications for the robustness of the Scottish budget under the devolved tax structure. This will be exacerbated in the case of corporate profits transferred outside of the UK entirely.
- The greater impact on the transport network due to increased traffic as well as the economic imbalances created by the APD cut inducing greater traffic in the Central Belt but little growth elsewhere.
- If the reduction in revenue due to the APD cut is not at least recouped in full then additional cuts in public spending may be required.About
Hello!
I have been intrigue and fascinated by Quantum Mechanics. One of my interests is conducting research on Atom Interferometry and on the most beautiful experiment in Physics, “The Two Slit Experiment." Quantum Physics involves in studying the behavior of energy and matter at the subatomic level. I am conducting research independently on the particles of light which are called photons.
I am hoping to be the first person to discover (base on a logical mathematical equation) to predict the future path of individual photons (where they will hit). I have been conducting this research for over 21 years now and I think I'm about to make a breakthrough and history! I just need your help to fulfill my dream.
The following documents are some of my work:
Some of my complicated equations.
Zooming in on Photons
Integrating three theories into one
Part 1 of Final Stage in plotting future coordinates (Excel File)
Part 2 of Final Stage in comparing numeric values plots and photon plots. (Excel File)
One of my old documents working on Project Photon (10 years old!)
Reference to Reward #2
Equipment I dearly need to complete my Project Photon
Equipment for Interferometry Laboratory
I don't think my wife would appreciate having all this equipment in "her" living room. So helping me to obtain a small laboratory will be absolutely great!!!
What makes me think I can discover anything? Who am I? Nobody. Nobody at all. But the secrets of the Universe don't mind. They reveal themselves to nobodies who care. Albert Einstein elementary school teacher wrote on his file. ”You’ll never amount to anything”. In the 1500’s, Nicolaus Copernicus was probably the only one in the world to introduced the concept of a heliocentric system, in which planets revolve around the Sun. Don’t they have big laboratories in what I am trying to do? The big laboratories spend millions of dollars, and they work slowly and surely, and they get results, BUT NOT THE HUGE STEPS. Those come from the human intellect. Not from the laboratory. Call it inspiration, call them intuition, maybe it's blind luck, maybe its God, saying, "Now's the time".Right-wing pastor Rick Joyner posted a video on his Facebook page on Friday saying that President Trump’s critics are engaging in sedition and declaring that if he is removed from office, martial law will need to be declared.
Insisting again that all of the controversies surrounding the current administration are part of God’s plan to identify and destroy Trump’s enemies because the president “has divine protection,” Joyner warned that America is headed for martial law.
“One day, I have no doubt whatsoever, we’re going to be under martial law in America,” he said. However, Joyner insisted that martial law will actually be a good thing because “it’s going to take that to get this train back on the rails.”
“If the left [is] able to overthrow a legally elected president, it would be unbelievable, I think, what would happen in America,” Joyner said. “I think martial law would have to step in … Like it or not, he was constitutionally elected and those who are trying to overthrow his presidency by all of these devices and lies that they’re putting out—the media and everyone—this is sedition!”Following seven months of negotiations, the Campbell Union High School District board of trustees and the Campbell High School Teachers Association have agreed on a new contract.
The two-year contract was signed earlier this week and features a pay raise for the 2016-17 school year retroactive to Aug. 1. Certified teachers represented by the teachers association and adult education teachers within the district will see a 6 percent salary increase.
“The most valuable asset our district has is its people,” said Superintendent Robert Bravo in a statement released by the district. “It’s my goal to have a positive, collaborative relationship with all bargaining units and employees, and I feel that this is the beginning of a new, positive relationship.”
The Campbell Union High School District educates students from San Jose, Saratoga, Los Gatos and Campbell in five high schools and two alternative programs for children and adults.
In October last year, the district and teachers association’s bargaining teams reached an agreement for a one-year contract after nine months of negotiations. The contract included a salary increases for certified teachers of 5.5 percent and hiring more special education teachers.
The teachers’ union and the district’s administrative team have also agreed to attend joint training on collaborative negotiation techniques in the future, according to the district’s chief human resources officer Meredyth Hudson.
“We’re optimistic and enthusiastic about a more collaborative approach to future negotiations,” said Kim McCarthy, secretary for the teachers’ association and a Prospect High School social science teacher in the district statement.Today is about not just a quest but more of an ongoing mission…
It’s not enough to go out and tweet, post, email, mail, call, etc. yourself. We need to get other people involved, whether they played AC or AC2 or not.
So talk to your family, friends, co-worker, guild or clan mates, anyone who will listen about why the games were important to you. The years you spent playing them, how they made you happy… maybe you made your best friend ever or met the love of your life in these games Explain they weren’t just games but a community of people that spent years together not just playing but getting to know each other.
Ask these people to help by sharing your posts… emailing or even mailing or calling or even better, joining in the boycott to help support our cause.
Hell if your cat has a Twitter account, ask them to tweet along!
Whatever it takes, spread the word and get the support of those you talk to everyday to help us save Asheron’s Call!
Yes, the title of this post and the image used are meant to be ironic…
AdvertisementsANFIELD is a changing. From open spaces to the north, to the south, east and the west, it is visible because of the machine beast that is suspended above it: the truss — a word that Liverpool’s home has taken ownership of.
Anfield’s regeneration is there when you wake up and there when you go to bed. It seeps into your thoughts, an inescapable object.
Get closer and the more incomprehensible it becomes. The Main Stand car park is now a void between two worlds, a shadowy indeterminate place with an emerging edifice on one side and a famous structure being stripped on the other. Ancient buttresses are exposed at the top of the terrace, naked for the first time in more than a century, like the underbelly of an old ship in a Cammell Laird slipway.
Inside Anfield, the trophy room has gone: replaced temporarily by a press area. On match days, the cups, the medals and the pennants are displayed, instead, in a hospitality tent. On Monday night, before Liverpool hosted Bournemouth, I thought about this for a moment, wondering what the new trophy room will look like when restoration is completed this time next year and whether, indeed, there will be an immediate need for one.
Seeing Anfield change is exciting. Fenway Sports Group are in the process of doing something that neither David Moores or Tom Hicks and George Gillett were able to do. It is 15 years too late but Liverpool, at last, are moving into the 21st century.
I remember standing on the Kop as a child and being completely overwhelmed by it. The mass of people was frightening and when a goal went in, everything seemed to go dark. I remember too when the Kop became an all-seater stand and the outrage that followed when a McDonalds was dropped into its bowels. Matchdays smelt different thereafter: the scent of Big Macs and chicken nuggets wafting across the terraces rather than hotdogs, Bovril or urine. This was the future and I didn’t like it. Nobody really liked it. Urine felt comfortable: a reminder of when Liverpool were very good.
Presently, no club in world football is a prisoner of its past as much as Liverpool. Nowhere else has experienced a 50-year cycle where for the first half winning was made to seem as natural as breathing or sex. And then the second half: a build up of frustration, which sharpens as the seasons pass without a league title. We’re at 25 now.
The Liverpool manager’s job is one of the toughest. The mission to achieve success drains on the body and mind. Bill Shankly supposedly died sad and troubled at how his association with Liverpool ended. Bob Paisley developed dementia, which can be triggered by stress. Kenny Dalglish resigned because of pressures, while Graeme Souness and Gerard Houllier had life-threatening heart operations when they were still in charge.
Roy Evans dreaded going out with his wife Mary after defeats even though he had not seen her much during the week — the sense that he’d let everyone down feeling too enormous. Every supporter has an idea of the team they would choose, the philosophies they’d impose, the great man-management skills they’d show but as Evans wisely says, “You might have an opinion but yours will never get put to the test.”
The next manager that wins Liverpool a league title might be awarded the freedom of the city, giving him the opportunity to herd cattle, if he wants, through the streets of L4. There will be calls for a statue to be built in his name outside Anfield.
Yet unless Liverpool are careful there will be an element inside the football world that takes more of a hard-eyed view of the club’s continuing claim to greatness, and there will be a younger generation unmoved by the nostalgic bonds of history.
The theory, in some ways, explains Raheem Sterling’s departure to Manchester City. Yes, Liverpool have won more European Cups than any other English club. But the last one was a decade ago and 30 years have passed since the one before that. That was then and this is now.
Memories of Istanbul will never fade for those who were there, making it always feel like yesterday. But for those who were not — those without an emotional connection to the club — it is someone else’s remarkable story rather than a personal experience.
You could have strapped Sterling to a wooden chair in a padded cell playing from a projector Betamax videos of Liverpool season reviews from the 1970s and 1980s with You’ll Never Walk Alone on repeat in the background for a week but no amount of brainwashing would have changed his mind.
Upon Sterling’s release, he would still have desired a move away. And Sterling is not the first to have angled for a transfer in recent times is he? His ambitions and behaviour is becoming a worrying pattern among Liverpool’s best players.
It is not just the stadium that needs to change.
@Simon_Hughes__
Pics: David Rawcliffe-Propaganda Photo
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Follow us on TwitterQuestions abound over Performance Sports Group
What’s going on at the firm, and what has gone wrong?
By Bob Sanders
On June 20, 2014, Performance Sports Group launched its U.S. IPO is at $15.50 a share, raising $125 million. Davis, center, opens the NYSE.
Everything seemed smooth as ice when then-CEO Kevin Davis glided on to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on June 20, 2014, to ring the opening bell and knock his newly named Exeter-based Performance Sports Group Ltd.’s initial public offering out of the park.
The mixed sports metaphors were all too apt, since that IPO was released just two months after the company (then known as Bauer Performance Sports, a hockey equipment giant) acquired Easton-Bell Sports’ baseball and softball business for $330 million. The acquisition and the IPO signaled the company’s shift both south of the Canadian border and from the hockey rink to the baseball diamond.
“This is the largest and most transformational acquisition in our history because it positions BPS as the No. 1 global leader in ice hockey, roller hockey, baseball and softball,” said Davis at the time of the deal.
But in a little more than two years, that smooth base path is cracking with heavy debt, which could result in a massive loan default by Performance Sports Group. And the company also appears to be sinking under charges of fraud, delayed financial filings, internal and federal investigations in two countries, management turmoil – including Davis’ resignation in March – and a stock price that is just one-tenth of what it was at its peak.
Today, the company is looking to restructure that debt and move forward, and indeed, at deadline, both the New York Post and Reuters were reporting that PSG was closing in on a deal with lenders. (One source told NH Business Review that the company, strapped for cash, is seeking more financing as well, but won’t get it without concessions.)
Class action suit
The 170 people who work at PSG’s Exeter headquarters may keep their jobs, and the company might bounce back, like the 2004 Boston Red Sox. After all, former Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino was on PSG’s board, but he resigned after less than two years.
PSG, in the only comment it would give to this story, prefers to stress the positive.
Bauer Hockey opens OWN THE MOMENT Hockey Experience, a 20,000-squarefoot premium retail store in Burlington, Mass.
“Our brands are some of the most iconic in sports and our commitment to delivering the most innovative products to our retailers and consumers has not changed,” said PSG spokesman Steve Jones in the prepared statement. “Our brands continue to have strong consumer acceptance and we are confident in our ability to drive our brands and our business forward.”
But one of the charges in a consolidated federal class action suit filed in New York is that PSG did not share – indeed even covered up – potentially negative information. It charges that the company’s “record” revenue numbers were inflated by “coercing” retailers by “threatening” to take away discounts, unless they bought more and more, until inventory piled up and retailers simply couldn’t buy anymore, causing revenues to plummet.
Coercion, however, is too strong of a word for Ronald Rugal, president of B&R Sports, a PSG customer based in Detroit with 12 locations in Michigan and around Chicago.
“I’m half to blame,” he said, noting that equipment vendors often use those tactics. “I could have said no, but they did try to jam orders down our throat, to take orders early, to overstock, oversupply, over-inventory us. They said it would all work out, and then things hit a wall.”
Bauer representatives never said that this was done to meet quarterly numbers. “They didn’t need to,” Rugal said. “I follow the market. I know when the quarter ends, when they are going public and then they ask you if you can take it early.”
Retail strategy
But that isn’t why Rugal is “pissed off” about the situation, he said.
He said he was “betrayed” by the company’s announcement in January to open its own “Own the Moment” retail stores, modeled after Apple’s stores.
The company had assured dealers in 2008 that it had no plans to open such stores, Rugal recalled. But two are currently open, one in Burlington, Mass., and another in Minneapolis. Two more are slated to open in Toronto and another is planned “down the street” in Detroit, said Rugal.
PSG’s contention that company stores will increase brand loyalty and therefore result in more sales at his stores “was a bunch of bull,” he said. The comparison to Apple stores was “ridiculous,” since “99 percent of those walking down the street are familiar with Apple products, whereas only 20 percent have any idea what Bauer Hockey is.”
Rugal is expressing his anger with his inventory. About 80 percent of his merchandise had been PSG equipment, he said. Now, with roughly $1 million in Bauer inventory on hand, he is down to as little as half, “and I might get less than that”.
Rugal’s discontent is the reason W. Graeme Roustan, the former chair of PSG and current critic and possible buyer, points to in explaining why the company’s revenues are hurting.
Initial public offerings
Bauer started out in 1927 primarily as a Canadian hockey equipment company, absorbed like so many others, in the Nike conglomerate. It moved its headquarters from Montreal to New Hampshire in 2002. In 2008, Roustan, a hockey tycoon with dual citizenship, got involved when he partnered with Kohlberg & Company, a private investment firm, to buy Bauer from Nike for $200 million.
Roustan became chairman of the board, and it was under his leadership that Bauer first went public on the Toronto stock exchange, raising about $225 million in its first IPO. The company made five acquisitions, including Maverik Lacrosse. Roustan remained chair until 2012, when he stepped down to concentrate on developing a major hockey arena in Toronto. But, he told NH Business Review, “I always hoped to join the board at a later date.”
That has yet to happen. Roustan’s efforts to return to the board have been rebuffed, and he backed off a threatened proxy fight, but he has said he might be interested in taking the company private again.
Two years after he left the board, the company, now known as PSG, acquired Easton for $330 million, followed by a $125 million IPO on the New York Stock Exchange at $15.50 a share.
“I believe that the company overpaid Easton, as evidenced by the $145 million write-down that took place,” Roustan said.
That April 2015 write down, an impairment charge in the baseball/softball division, contributed to a whopping quarterly net loss of $188 million. PSG blamed soft sales in that division.
But it was the announcement of a retail store strategy at the beginning of 2015 that prompted Roustan to act.
After failing to convince the board and Davis to abandon the strategy, he hired Grant Thornton to conduct a survey of major retailers. Shortly afterward, PSG sent Grant Thornton a cease-and-desist letter.
The survey firm completed the survey, but withheld the results. Roustan sued Grant Thornton in January to force release of the results. That litigation is still in the discovery phase.
But Roustan followed up with a Survey Monkey poll of retailers, results of which he said supports his claims that the retail strategy backfired.
Bankruptcies to blame?
The class action suit cites Roustan as saying the surveys also identified channel stuffing and that alleged practice at the heart of the charges against PSG, along with former CEO Davis and former CFO and former acting CEO Amir Rosenthal.
The suit cites three unnamed retailers, including one based in Salem, NH, and an undisclosed employee to back up its charges.
It also charges that PSG’s executive vice president, Edward Kinnaly, challenged the policy of “pulling orders forward” at a board of directors meeting, and was subsequently fired. (Kinnaly, who did leave the company in 2013 and is now the CEO of Flywheel Sports Inc., an indoor cycling chain, declined comment.)
PSG, in its public filings and earnings calls, blames several bankruptcies – especially that of The Sports Authority retail chain – among the reasons behind its financial woes. It also points to a softening of baseball/softball sales as well as an unfavorable Canadian exchange rate.
The class action suit, however, contends that the retailer bankruptcies were a “smokescreen,” since the company’s competitors in both the baseball and hockey markets were doing just fine.
“PSG had caused its own demise by oversupplying its customers with product delivered earlier than the product was needed,” according to the complaint.
Internal investigation
Lawyers in the class action suit, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Ontario Securities Commission are trying to get their hands on the Grant Thornton study as well.
PSG had only acknowledged these inquiries in an SEC filing after its spokesman erroneously denied them to NH Business Review, but it did not disclose the reason for the probes, nor for an internal investigation it said it was conducting.
It is that internal investigation that has delayed the filing of its Form 10-K with the SEC, which in turn could cause the company to default on hundreds of millions in loans. It also prompted the company to postpone its annual shareholder meeting.
It also delayed the seating of Paul Desmarais III, executive chairman of Sagard Capital, on the board of directors. Desmarais would have filled the seat of Sagard’s CEO, Daniel M. Friedberg, who left Sagard for another company. Sagard, a Connecticut-based investment firm is PSG’s largest shareholder.
Sagard’s involvement in PSG is another point of contention for Roustan.
Roustan, in a white paper, has written that Sagard’s representation on the board creates a conflict of interest because Sagard’s parent company, Power Corporation of Canada, has an interest in Adidas, which owns CCM, PSG’s largest competitor, and PSG.
Since CCM and Bauer have “combined global market share of approximately 90 percent,” Roustan also invoked antitrust law. And he has called on his successor, current board chairman Bernard McDonnell, and C. Michael Jacobi, another board member, to resign for allowing the alleged conflict to happen.
Roustan won’t disclose his current stake in the company, but he does have an interest in the outcome. While several sources say PSG has hired Centerview Partners Holdings LLC, as it tries put off default by renegotiating its loan, Roustan said he is talking to Jefferies Group LLC and Canaccord Genuity, two financial firms, about acquiring PSG and taking it private.
“Since September of 2015, I have continually been evaluating the different opportunities, which had included making a tender offer and launching a proxy battle. I remain open to any opportunity in the near future,” said Roustan.
If Roustan does regain control of the company, he said, “on day one, I will reach out to retailers to assure them that I would terminate the company store strategy immediately.”Warface – Art Of War Album Review
It has already been an amazing year so far. So many great Events, releases and of course a lot albums by many great artists. We had fresh euphoric albums by Noisecontrollers, Coone and Brennan Heart. Raw and powerful albums by The Prophet, Minus Militia and Hard Driver. But now it’s time to add another album to your collection.
The Spell Of Sin, the album by Radical Redemption, was released at last year’s event “Raw Op Je Dak” by Art of Dance! Now, at the last edition of “Raw Op Je Dak”, which took place on 8th of November, another artist had the pleasure to release his album on this massive event! You had the chance to grab a copy of it at the official End Of Line Records merchandise shop or you could have let him sign your purchased album.
We are talking about an artist which already had an amazing year – he played at major events such as Decibel, Thrillogy and closed a lot of other festivals together with his buddy’s Delete, Titan, Frequencerz, Dark Pact, Deetox and many more.
His sound has its own unique style and he likes it raw! His Live act is just amazing and people going crazy on the dance floor when he enters the stage – either as his normal act or live act. We are talking about an artist which appears in a soldier suit, soldier helmet and black skull mask – we are talking about Warface and his new album Art Of War!
With Art Of War you get one of the best albums this year, but why?
First of all we really want to mention the cover, it has definitely the best design this year. It perfectly represents Warface’s style and the whole album. Generally the hard copy looks incredibly awesome – not only the cover, also inside the 3-disc album the design suits the energetic, rough beats of Warface!
Let’s take a deeper look into the tracks! As we mentioned before, you get 3 CDs full of madness.
Disc 1 …
… includes eleven tracks, inclusive the name giving track “”. It has powerful female vocals like in “Schizophrenics” and vocals by MC Nolz. The track has Warface typical elements such as a powerful kick and heavy screeches in the intro and anti-climax! The mainpart gives us goosebumps everytime we hear the female voice singing “Art Of War”.
Warface & MC Nolz - Art Of War
It’s definitely not the roughest track on the album but it has a great atmosphere and a bright, screechy lead! We think that Warface has such a unique and fresh style, he brought into the raw-style subgenre! He uses powerful kicks, which will blow your mind away, a large variety of breaks, leads and variations in each of his tracks.
His intros are always full of effects, kick variations, different leads, breaks and surprising elements which makes every track of the album so enjoyable!
Therefore each track is different, he perfectly shows that rawstyle not always has to be dark and mysterious.
He combines different topics and themes in his tracks, but still fitting to his album topic – total destruction! Just to name a few: “Total War” is one of the best tracks on disc one. The kick has a heavy punch and reminds us on “Chaos Reeign”. The screeches are just awesome and that moment when the vocal screams “Total War!” we know there is no way back!
Warface - Total War
With “Chainsaw” we have one of the craziest tracks on his album. Together with Titan he created a hell of a track. The atmosphere draws us into it’s spell since the very first second! But when you hear the mainpart, your thoughts will be “What am i listening to?!” – a dark voice is talking, a woman is screaming “Please Stop” and the massive chainsaw lead gets us every time we listen to this masterpiece!
But also tracks such as “The Rivival” together with Luna, “Leviathan”, “Menace” together with Frequencerz, “Meridian” with Crypsis are just amazing and are perfectly produced tracks.
Warface & Titan - Chainsaw
One of our favourites is “Catalyst” which has such a unique sound design. It combines a strong, gated kick with an acid lead and new raw-style elements! We can’t really describe what makes this track so awesome – you just have to listen to it!
Warface - Catalyst
Disc 2 …
… also includes 11 tracks, but not only new ones. Tracks such as “FTP”, “Schizophrenics” and “Killer itch” are also included! And yes we love these “old” tracks. The first song we ever heard of him was “Schizophrenics”. The female vocals are awesome and he uses a lot of breaks and varieties of kicks and leads in this track, even a break beat part is included and shows us why we love his style and his album!
Warface - Schizophrenics
Warface - FTP!
We guess these are vocals you all know: ”Fuck the police coming straight from the underground!” – FTP! We think we don’t have to say more. Sirens similar screeches, powerful kicks, vocals which creates such a great atmosphere. This is one of the tracks where you can literally feel and hear his creativity!
“Chaos Reeign” is one of those tracks, you can enjoy since the first second. Together with Deetox he created a sort of track where you can’t stay still. It just brings you into mood to dance to what you and of course Warface lives for – Hardstyle! Especially on 160BPM this track is 100% destruction – nothing to add here!
Warface & Deetox - Chaos Reeign
Disc 2 also includes a few remixes. “Bloodshed” in the Solutio remix is one of them. It has a dark atmosphere and nice kick, high screeches and is definitely worth to be on this album! We can also listen to a Delete remix of “Bring it to them raw”. This track just hits you straight in your face. Crazy screeches and a “god-damn-holy” kick define the last track of the album – an end, how it has to be done!
Furthermore we have “Cosmic Sin” in the Artifact remix, “Warmashine” in the Hardcraft Remix, which sadly could have been a little harder as the name suggest it!
Disc 3
… is a mix of all 22 tracks by the creator himself. The mix is nice and never creates boredom due to long breaks or bad mixing. It’s a great third disc and nice to have all the tracks combined in one hell of a mix! In the end it gets even harder and faster and will make you go crazy – we promise!
What else can we say? Nothing left, except that this album is a hell of a ride through a new fresh sound design in the rawstyle scene, a massive range of different themes, topics, styles, elements and producers! Warface did it! He created one of the most wanted albums this year. It’s a must have and should not miss in your collection or your playlist!
We wish Warface all the best on his way to become one of the most energetic and highly appreciated producer and DJ! For all the hardstyle lovers out there, check out this album and one of his performances on stage – especially Warface Live!The Rio Olympics begin on 5 August 2016
Rio can deliver an "outstanding" Olympics according to the International Olympic Committee, following four test events the city can be "proud" of.
But IOC officials have played down concerns over the water quality where the sailing, swimming, rowing and triathlon events will be held in 2016.
The World Health Organisation has suggested the IOC monitor pollution levels in the water.
IOC vice-president Nawal el Moutawakel said athletes' safety is a "priority".
El Moutawakel insisted the issue of water quality is being addressed, so the athletes can "compete in a secure and safe environment".
The international governing bodies of sailing and rowing have called for tests on the water quality.
An independent investigation by the Associated Press found high levels of viruses and, in some cases, bacteria from human sewage in all of Rio's Olympic and Paralympic water venues.
AP says the World Health Organisation (WHO) had advised the IOC to test for viruses, but have now changed their stance and would not issue an official recommendation.
The IOC said it had ruled out viral testing and would stick to WHO guidelines, which recommend only bacterial testing.
Rio has hosted test events for volleyball, triathlon, rowing and equestrian with road cycling on Sunday.
Moutawakel said: "This demonstrates the organisers' capabilities and their capacity to deliver outstanding Olympic Games next year."
But she warned "a tremendous amount of planning work remains to be completed".IdTamer Private First Class Rep 52 Posts 171
Join Date: Jul 2014 Location: NC
1) iTrader: (
Drives: i8 Pure Impulse
Tablet Install - DIY - iDrive Replacement - LOTS of Photos
Ayyyyyyy!
Hello All,
This DIY is for everyone out there who did not have the iDrive option installed at the factory and would rather spend the $2,000 it costs to install it on performance mods/wheels/higher education. Why spend so much on a system that has less processing power and fewer features than a rice cooker? Isn't there a better option?
YES THERE IS!!!
After scouring the internet for information on aftermarket tablet installs on the E89 I found exactly ZERO. There are a few threads out there on installing GPS units, but this is 2014, not 2004. Why have a GPS unit when you can have GPS, your media library, streaming audio services, and all of your music/photos/movies at your fingertips? Enter the Nexus 7 2013, an affordable and powerful tablet that runs the pure android experience. I chose this tablet for a variety of reason, which are detailed in the software section below. To keep this DIY simple it is broken into 3 sections:
1. Hardware
2. Software
3. Installation
In each section I will try to provide as many pictures as possible, so that you do not spend countless hours trying to figure this out for yourself like I had to. I will also provide a detailed shopping list so that you will not be driving to Best Buy and Home Depot 3 times a day. The way I put this together was trial and error, but if anyone has ideas for improvements I would love to hear them. At the end of the day, you will go from this:
To this:
So let's get started.
Hardware
List of Supplies:
*Pictures of most of these items are included in the installation section below
1.
2. USB DAC –
3. USB Powered OTG Cable –
4. 12V to 5V Converter –
5. 12V Extender -
6. Angled Aluminum – from Home Depot (see pictures below) – for Mounting Brackets ($10)
7. Black Vinyl Wrap – any fabric store ($5)
8. 3M 2-sided tape (outdoor strength - $5)
9. 2 paint stirrers (free at Home Depot) – for making mounting base
10. 6 ft 3.5mm Aux Cable – I used a Griffin cable from Best Buy, but any will work ($10)
11. Wire Taps – At Home Depot –
12. Pair of Magnets –
13. Metal to attach to Nexus for Magnets – I used a metal ruler with a high iron content I found at Home Depot (it was originally a rt-angle ruler that I cut to size with my Dremel). Have your magnets and try them at Home Depot to find a ruler or other metal piece they are strongly attracted to.
14. Trim Removal Kit -
15.
16. Copper Wire to extend the Enercell Power Source if needed (see more about this below)
17.
18.
19. Electrical Tape, Gorilla Tape - $10
20.
21.
22. Old Tablet Case for mount (see below). I used an old HP Touchpad Case like
Software
Why am I using the Nexus 7?
Where most tablet installs fail is the software they are running. With this install, I wanted the tablet to automatically turn on when I started the car and then turn off when I removed the key. I also wanted the tablet to be able to remain in the car and keep its charge even if I did not drive the car every day. I also wanted it to charge fast enough that the battery would not deplete even on long trips where I am using GPS, maps, wifi, etc. I also wanted it to sound good, as my primary use for it is music and navigation. For clear audio, it would need to use USB audio rather than the Aux jack on the tablet. I initially tried to use the Aux jack, and there was audible feedback even at low volumes. Also, having everything go through USB cleans up the install and makes it so there are less wires coming from the tablet itself. In order to have USB audio on automatically, and to have a low power state commence when the car was turned off, I had to purchase Timur’s Kernel. Timur’s Kernel is only available for the Nexus 7, which limited my options. However, after trying a 10” Galaxy Pro and an 8.4” Galaxy Pro, I realized that 7 inches was the perfect size for the install and the closest to stock. It also worked flawlessly with the install and Timur provided 1:1 support via email during the installation process. He also included instructions on how to install the Kernel after I purchased it. Just buy it. You will not regret it.
If you know nothing about installing a custom ROM or Kernel on Android I recommend
When it mentions “rooting” - You can Root the Nexus 7 Easily using TowelRoot:
On to the software!
1. Purchase and install Timur’s Kernel N7 2013 Wif/flo. After making a donation you will be sent a link to download it. - $37
https://timur.mobi/timurs-kernel-n7-2013/
2. Install Nova Launcher – This is a custom launcher that works smoothly with the settings in Timur’s Kernel and looks great.
3. Set-Up Interface – I used a set of files I found online and modified them to suit my needs. Here is the
Or you can use mine:
I then used an app called AmazingText FREE to create widgets with no text in them that overlaid the wallpaper. As a result, when you click on the icon on the wallpaper, it launches the appropriate app. It is a really cool effect. Make sure to go into the Nova Launcher setting under Desktop and lock the desktop once you have it the way you want it.
I also used an app called Beautiful Widgets to make the time and weather visible to the left of the BMW icon.
This is how I set mine up, but you can set yours up however you like or use the stock Android interface. Part of the beauty of this install is in the customization.
4. Steering Wheel Controls – While it is possible to use your own steering wheel controls to control the tablet using a Joycon adapter, I decided not to do this for several reasons. I still use the stereo for satellite radio and like being able to control the stations. I also like to be able to use the volume on the steering wheel and this works whether the audio is coming from the tablet or the satellite radio. It would also require some heavy programming and wiring which seemed out of the scope of a DIY. As a result, I decided to use the iSimple Bluetooth adapter. It does not look bad on the steering wheel and is able to skip tracks, pause music playback, adjust volume, and use voice commands. You can buy one
5.
To install with Timur’s kernel, simply download the mp4 video and change the name to “powerdown.mp4 and place it at "/sdcard/powerdown.mp4".
6. Setup Wifi tethering – If you want to use the tablet while on the road for wireless services you will need to tether it to your |
fan a “vitriolic cryptoracist who spends 20 hours a day on the Internet yelling at women.”
The ill-advised late-night tweet was, Jeong admits, provocative and absurd—she even supported Sanders. But what happened next was the kind of backlash that’s all too familiar to women, minorities, and anyone who has a strong opinion online. By the time Jeong went to sleep, a swarm of Sanders supporters were calling her a neoliberal shill. By sunrise, a broader, darker wave of abuse had begun. She received nude photos and links to disturbing videos. One troll promised to “rip each one of [her] hairs out” and “twist her tits clear off.”
The attacks continued for weeks. “I was in crisis mode,” she recalls. So she did what many victims of mass harassment do: She gave up and let her abusers have the last word. Jeong made her tweets private, removing herself from the public conversation for a month. And she took a two-week unpaid leave from her job as a contributor to the tech news site Motherboard.
For years now, on Twitter and practically any other freewheeling public forum, the trolls have been out in force. Just in recent months: Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti quit the service after a horde of misogynist attackers resorted to rape threats against her 5-year-old daughter. “It’s too much,” she For years now, on Twitter and practically any other freewheeling public forum, the trolls have been out in force. Just in recent months: Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters mobbed Jewish public figures with menacing Holocaust “jokes.” Anonymous racists bullied African American comedian Leslie Jones off Twitter temporarily with pictures of apes and Photoshopped images of semen on her face.Guardiancolumnist Jessica Valenti quit the service after a horde of misogynist attackers resorted to rape threats against her 5-year-old daughter. “It’s too much,” she signed off. “I can’t live like this.” Feminist writer Sady Doyle says her experience of mass harassment has induced a kind of permanent self-censorship. “There are things I won’t allow myself to talk about,” she says. “Names I won’t allow myself to say.”
Jigsaw’s Jared Cohen: “I want us to feel the responsibility of the burden we’re shouldering.” Benedict Evans
Mass harassment online has proved so effective that it’s emerging as a weapon of repressive governments. In late 2014, Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro Mass harassment online has proved so effective that it’s emerging as a weapon of repressive governments. In late 2014, Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro reported on Russia’s troll farms, where day laborers regurgitate messages that promote the government’s interests and inundate opponents with vitriol on every possible outlet, including Twitter and Facebook. In turn, she’s been barraged daily by bullies on social media, in the comments of news stories, and via email. They call her a liar, a “NATO skank,” even a drug dealer, after digging up a fine she received 12 years ago for possessing amphetamines. “They want to normalize hate speech, to create chaos and mistrust,” Aro says. “It’s just a way of making people disillusioned.”
All this abuse, in other words, has evolved into a form of censorship, driving people offline, silencing their voices. For years, victims have been calling on—clamoring for—the companies that created these platforms to help slay the monster they brought to life. But their solutions generally have amounted to a Sisyphean game of whack-a-troll.
Now a small subsidiary of Google named Jigsaw is about to release an entirely new type of response: a set of tools called Conversation AI. The software is designed to use machine learning to automatically spot the language of abuse and harassment—with, Jigsaw engineers say, an accuracy far better than any keyword filter and far faster than any team of human moderators. “I want to use the best technology we have at our disposal to begin to take on trolling and other nefarious tactics that give hostile voices disproportionate weight,” says Jigsaw founder and president Jared Cohen. “To do everything we can to level the playing field.”
Jigsaw is applying artificial intelligence to solve the very human problem of making people be nicer on the Internet. —
Conversation AI represents just one of Jigsaw’s wildly ambitious projects. The New York–based think tank and tech incubator aims to build products that use Google’s massive infrastructure and engineering muscle not to advance the best possibilities of the Internet but to fix the worst of it: surveillance, extremist indoctrination, censorship. The group sees its work, in part, as taking on the most intractable jobs in Google’s larger mission to make the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.”
Cohen founded Jigsaw, which now has about 50 staffers (almost half are engineers), after a brief high-profile and controversial career in the US State Department, where he worked to focus American diplomacy on the Internet like never before. One of the moon-shot goals he’s set for Jigsaw is to end censorship within a decade, whether it comes in the form of politically motivated cyberattacks on opposition websites or government strangleholds on Internet service providers. And if that task isn’t daunting enough, Jigsaw is about to unleash Conversation AI on the murky challenge of harassment, where the only way to protect some of the web’s most repressed voices may be to selectively shut up others. If it can find a path through that free-speech paradox, Jigsaw will have pulled off an unlikely coup: applying artificial intelligence to solve the very human problem of making people be nicer on the Internet.
Merjin Hos
Jigsaw is the outgrowth of an earlier effort called Google Ideas, which Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt and Cohen launched in 2010 as a “think/do tank.” But aside from organizing conferences and creating fancy data visualizations, Ideas didn’t actually do much at first. “People would come around and talk a bunch of bullshit for a couple days,” one Google Ideas conference attendee remembers. “Nothing came out of it.”
But slowly, the group’s lofty challenges began to attract engineers, some joining from other parts of Google after volunteering for Cohen’s team. One of their first creations was a tool called uProxy that allows anyone whose Internet access is censored to bounce their traffic through a friend’s connection outside the firewall; it’s now used in more than 100 countries. Another tool, a But slowly, the group’s lofty challenges began to attract engineers, some joining from other parts of Google after volunteering for Cohen’s team. One of their first creations was a tool called uProxy that allows anyone whose Internet access is censored to bounce their traffic through a friend’s connection outside the firewall; it’s now used in more than 100 countries. Another tool, a Chrome add-on called Password Alert, aims to block phishing by warning people when they’re retyping their Gmail password into a malicious look-alike site; the company developed it for Syrian activists targeted by government-friendly hackers, but when it proved effective, it was rolled out to all of Google’s users.
“We are not going to be one of those groups that just imagines what vulnerable populations are experiencing. We’re going to get to know our users.” —
In February, the group was renamed Jigsaw to reflect its focus on building practical products. A program called Montage lets war correspondents and nonprofits In February, the group was renamed Jigsaw to reflect its focus on building practical products. A program called Montage lets war correspondents and nonprofits crowdsource the analysis of YouTube videos to track conflicts and gather evidence of human rights violations. Another free service called Project Shield uses Google’s servers to absorb government-sponsored cyberattacks intended to take down the websites of media, election-monitoring, and human rights organizations. And an initiative, aimed at deradicalizing ISIS recruits, identifies would-be jihadis based on their search terms, then shows them ads redirecting them to videos by former extremists who explain the downsides of joining an ultraviolent, apocalyptic cult. In a pilot project, the anti-ISIS ads were so effective that they were in some cases two to three times more likely to be clicked than typical search advertising campaigns.
The common thread that binds these projects, Cohen says, is a focus on what he calls “vulnerable populations.” To that end, he gives new hires an assignment: Draw a scrap of paper from a baseball cap filled with the names of the world’s most troubled or repressive countries; track down someone under threat there and talk to them about their life online. Then present their stories to other Jigsaw employees.
At one recent meeting, Cohen leans over a conference table as 15 or so Jigsaw recruits—engineers, designers, and foreign policy wonks—prepare to report back from the dark corners of the Internet. “We are not going to be one of those groups that sits in our offices and imagines what vulnerable populations around the world are experiencing,” Cohen says. “We’re going to get to know our users.” He speaks in a fast-forward, geeky patter that contrasts with his blue-eyed, broad-shouldered good looks, like a politician disguised as a Silicon Valley executive or vice versa. “Every single day, I want us to feel the burden of the responsibility we’re shouldering.”
“Jigsaw recruits will hear stories about people being tortured for their passwords or of state-sponsored cyberbullying.” —
We hear about an Albanian LGBT activist who tries to hide his identity on Facebook despite its real-names-only policy, an administrator for a Libyan youth group wary of government infiltrators, a defector’s memories from the digital black hole of North Korea. Many of the T-shirt-and-sandal-wearing Googlers in the room will later be sent to some of those far-flung places to meet their contacts face-to-face.
“They’ll hear stories about people being tortured for their passwords or of state-sponsored cyberbullying,” Cohen tells me later. The purpose of these field trips isn’t simply to get feedback for future products, he says. They’re about creating personal investment in otherwise distant, invisible problems—a sense of investment Cohen says he himself gained in his twenties during his four-year stint in the State Department, and before that during extensive travel in the Middle East and Africa as a student.
Cohen reports directly to Alphabet’s top execs, but in practice, Jigsaw functions as Google’s blue-sky, human-rights-focused skunkworks. At the group’s launch, Schmidt declared its audacious mission to be “tackling the world’s toughest geopolitical problems” and listed some of the challenges within its remit: “money laundering, organized crime, police brutality, human trafficking, and terrorism.” In an interview in Google’s New York office, Schmidt (now chair of Alphabet) summarized them to me as the “problems that bedevil humanity involving information.”
Jigsaw, in other words, has become Google’s Internet justice league, and it represents the notion that the company is no longer content with merely not being evil. It wants—as difficult and even ethically fraught as the impulse may be—to do good.
Yasmin Green, Jigsaw’s head of research and development. Jigsaw
In September of 2015, Yasmin Green, then head of operations and strategy for Google Ideas, the working group that would become Jigsaw, invited 10 women who had been harassment victims to come to the office and discuss their experiences. Some of them had been targeted by members of the antifeminist Gamergate movement. Game developer Zoë Quinn had been threatened repeatedly with rape, and her attackers had dug up and distributed old nude photos of her. Another visitor, Anita Sarkeesian, had moved out of her home temporarily because of numerous death threats.
At the end of the session, Green and a few other Google employees took a photo with the women and posted it to the company’s Twitter account. Almost immediately, the Gamergate trolls turned their ire against Google itself. Over the next 48 hours, tens of thousands of comments on Reddit and Twitter demanded the Googlers be fired for enabling “feminazis.”
“It’s like you walk into Madison Square Garden and you have 50,000 people saying you suck, you’re horrible, die,” Green says. “If you really believe that’s what the universe thinks about you, you certainly shut up. And you might just take your own life.”
To combat trolling, services like Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook have for years depended on users to flag abuse for review by To combat trolling, services like Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook have for years depended on users to flag abuse for review by overworked staffers or an offshore workforce of content moderators in countries like the Philippines. The task is expensive and can be scarring for the employees who spend days on end reviewing loathsome content—yet often it’s still not enough to keep up with the real-time flood of filth. Twitter recently introduced new filters designed to keep users from seeing unwanted tweets, but it’s not yet clear whether the move will tame determined trolls.
The meeting with the Gamergate victims was the genesis for another approach. Lucas Dixon, a wide-eyed Scot with a doctorate in machine learning, and product manager CJ Adams wondered: Could an abuse-detecting AI clean up online conversations by detecting toxic language—with all its idioms and ambiguities—as reliably as humans?
Show millions of vile Internet comments to Google’s self-improving artificial intelligence engine and it can recognize a troll. —
To create a viable tool, Jigsaw first needed to teach its algorithm to tell the difference between harmless banter and harassment. For that, it would need a massive number of examples. So the group partnered with The New York Times, which gave Jigsaw’s engineers 17 million comments from Times stories, along with data about which of those comments were flagged as inappropriate by moderators. Jigsaw also worked with the Wikimedia Foundation to parse 130,000 snippets of discussion around Wikipedia pages. It showed those text strings to panels of 10 people recruited randomly from the CrowdFlower crowdsourcing service and asked whether they found each snippet to represent a “personal attack” or “harassment.” Jigsaw then fed the massive corpus of online conversation and human evaluations into Google’s open source machine learning software, TensorFlow.
Machine learning, a branch of computer science that Google uses to continually improve everything from Google Translate to its core search engine, works something like human learning. Instead of programming an algorithm, Machine learning, a branch of computer science that Google uses to continually improve everything from Google Translate to its core search engine, works something like human learning. Instead of programming an algorithm, you teach it with examples. Show a toddler enough shapes identified as a cat and eventually she can recognize a cat. Show millions of vile Internet comments to Google’s self-improving artificial intelligence engine and it can recognize a troll.
In fact, by some measures Jigsaw has now trained Conversation AI to spot toxic language with impressive accuracy. Feed a string of text into its Wikipedia harassment-detection engine and it can, with what Google describes as more than 92 percent certainty and a 10 percent false-positive rate, come up with a judgment that matches a human test panel as to whether that line represents an attack. For now the tool looks only at the content of that single string of text. But Green says Jigsaw has also looked into detecting methods of mass harassment based on the volume of messages and other long-term patterns.
Wikipedia and the Times will be the first to try out Google’s automated harassment detector on comment threads and article discussion pages. Wikimedia is still considering exactly how it will use the tool, while the Times plans to make Conversation AI the first pass of its website’s comments, blocking any abuse it detects until it can be moderated by a human. Jigsaw will also make its work open source, letting any web forum or social media platform adopt it to automatically flag insults, scold harassers, or even auto-delete toxic language, preventing an intended harassment victim from ever seeing the offending comment. The hope is that “anyone can take these models and run with them,” says Adams, who helped lead the machine learning project.
Adams types in “What’s up, bitch?” and clicks Score. Conversation AI instantly rates it a 63 out of 100 on the attack scale. —
What’s more, some limited evidence suggests that this kind of quick detection can actually help to tame trolling. Conversation AI was inspired in part by an experiment undertaken by Riot Games, the videogame company that runs the world’s biggest multiplayer world, known as League of Legends, with 67 million players. Starting in late 2012, Riot began using machine learning to try to analyze the results of in-game conversations that led to players being banned. It used the resulting algorithm to show players in real time when they had made sexist or abusive remarks. When players saw immediate automated warnings, 92 percent of them changed their behavior for the better, according to a What’s more, some limited evidence suggests that this kind of quick detection can actually help to tame trolling. Conversation AI was inspired in part by an experiment undertaken by Riot Games, the videogame company that runs the world’s biggest multiplayer world, known asLeague of Legends, with 67 million players. Starting in late 2012, Riot began using machine learning to try to analyze the results of in-game conversations that led to players being banned. It used the resulting algorithm to show players in real time when they had made sexist or abusive remarks. When players saw immediate automated warnings, 92 percent of them changed their behavior for the better, according to a report in the science journal Nature
My own hands-on test of Conversation AI comes one summer afternoon in Jigsaw’s office, when the group’s engineers show me a prototype and invite me to come up with a sample of verbal filth for it to analyze. Wincing, I suggest the first ambiguously abusive and misogynist phrase that comes to mind: “What’s up, bitch?” Adams types in the sentence and clicks Score. Conversation AI instantly rates it a 63 out of 100 on the attack scale. Then, for contrast, Adams shows me the results of a more clearly vicious phrase: “You are such a bitch.” It rates a 96.
In fact, Conversation AI’s algorithm goes on to make impressively subtle distinctions. Pluralizing my trashy greeting to “What’s up bitches?” drops the attack score to 45. Add a smiling emoji and it falls to 39. So far, so good.
But later, after I’ve left Google’s office, I open the Conversation AI prototype in the privacy of my apartment and try out the worst phrase that had haunted Sarah Jeong: “I’m going to rip each one of her hairs out and twist her tits clear off.” It rates an attack score of 10, a glaring oversight. Swapping out “her” for “your” boosts it to a 62. Conversation AI likely hasn’t yet been taught that threats don’t have to be addressed directly at a victim to have their intended effect. The algorithm, it seems, still has some lessons to learn.
For a tech executive taking on would-be terrorists, state-sponsored trolls, and tyrannical surveillance regimes, Jigsaw’s creator has a surprisingly sunny outlook on the battle between the people who use the Internet and the authorities that seek to control them. “I have a fundamental belief that technology empowers people,” Jared Cohen says. Between us sits a coffee table covered in souvenirs from his travels: a clay prayer coin from Iraq, a plastic-wrapped nut bar from Syria, a packet of North Korean cigarettes. “It’s hard for me to imagine a world where there’s not a continued cat-and-mouse game. But over time, the mouse might just become bigger than the cat.”
Jigsaw’s Projects The incubator is dedicated to geopolitical moon shots, tackling issues from online censorship to violent extremism. Here are a few of its efforts. —Gregory Barber uProxy A Chrome browser buddy system that lets any censored Internet user route around the firewall by using a friend’s unblocked connection. Project Shield Free protection for media, election monitors, and human rights groups to defend themselves against cyberattacks aimed at taking down websites. Montage Crowdsourced analysis of YouTube videos to help journalists and humanitarian groups document conflict and human rights violations. Password Alert Warns people when they type a Gmail password into a phishing website mocked up to look like one of Google’s. The Redirect Method Identifies would-be jihadis based on search terms and redirects them to anti-ISIS videos featuring former extremists. Conversation AI A filter for online discussion that uses machine learning to automatically detect insults or hate speech. Digital Attack Map A real-time visualization of DDoS cyberattacks around the world, including those where freedom of expression is being limited.
That sense of digital populism, as Cohen tells it, was instilled in him during his travels through Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq in the early 2000s as a Rhodes scholar. His most formative memories from that time are of watching young people use technology— cell phones everywhere, gay-nightclub promoters in Iran sending text messages to strangers via Bluetooth, and satellite TV blanketing the region with otherwise-censored Western culture. He was particularly struck by the time he spent with two Internet-savvy, cell-phone-obsessed young Syrian women in Homs who acted as his hosts, walked in public with him—an American man—and wore makeup and short-sleeved shirts amid the burkas and disapproving stares surrounding them. “Unlike their mothers, these girls know what they’re missing out on,” he’d write in a book about his travels, Children of Jihad. “Society has changed, and technology has opened their eyes in ways that their parents cannot begin to understand.” That sense of digital populism, as Cohen tells it, was instilled in him during his travels through Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq in the early 2000s as a Rhodes scholar. His most formative memories from that time are of watching young people use technology— cell phones everywhere, gay-nightclub promoters in Iran sending text messages to strangers via Bluetooth, and satellite TV blanketing the region with otherwise-censored Western culture. He was particularly struck by the time he spent with two Internet-savvy, cell-phone-obsessed young Syrian women in Homs who acted as his hosts, walked in public with him—an American man—and wore makeup and short-sleeved shirts amid the burkas and disapproving stares surrounding them. “Unlike their mothers, these girls know what they’re missing out on,” he’d write in a book about his travels,. “Society has changed, and technology has opened their eyes in ways that their parents cannot begin to understand.”
When Cohen became the youngest person ever to join the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in 2006, he brought with him a notion that he’d formed from seeing digitally shrewd Middle Eastern youths flout systems of control: that the Internet could be a force for political empowerment and even upheaval. And as Facebook, then YouTube and Twitter, started to evolve into tools of protest and even revolution, that theory earned him access to officials far above his pay grade—all the way up to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and later Hillary Clinton. Rice would describe Cohen in her memoirs as an “inspired” appointment. Former Policy Planning director Anne-Marie Slaughter, his boss under Clinton, remembers him as “ferociously intelligent.”
Many of his ideas had a digital twist. After visiting Afghanistan, Cohen helped create a cell-phone-based payment system for local police, a move that allowed officers to speed up cash transfers to remote family members. And in June of 2009, when Twitter had scheduled downtime for maintenance during a massive Iranian protest against hardliner president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Cohen emailed founder Jack Dorsey and asked him to keep the service online. The unauthorized move, which violated the Obama administration’s noninterference policy with Iran, nearly cost Cohen his job. But when Clinton backed Cohen, it signaled a shift in the State Department’s relationship with both Iran and Silicon Valley.
Around the same time, Cohen began calling up tech CEOs and inviting them on tech delegation trips, or “techdels”—conceived to somehow inspire them to build products that could help people in repressed corners of the world. He asked Google’s Schmidt to visit Iraq, a trip that sparked the relationship that a year later would result in Schmidt’s invitation to Cohen to create Google Ideas. But it was Cohen’s email to Twitter during the Iran protests that most impressed Schmidt. “He wasn’t following a playbook,” Schmidt tells me. “He was inventing the playbook.”
The story Cohen’s critics focus on, however, is his involvement in a notorious piece of software called Haystack, intended to provide online anonymity and circumvent censorship. They say Cohen helped to hype the tool in early 2010 as a potential boon to Iranian dissidents. After the US government fast-tracked it for approval, however, a security researcher revealed it had egregious vulnerabilities that put any dissident who used it in grave danger of detection. Today, Cohen disclaims any responsibility for Haystack, but two former colleagues say he championed the project. His former boss Slaughter describes his time in government more diplomatically: “At State there was a mismatch between the scale of Jared’s ideas and the tools the department had to deliver on them,” she says. “Jigsaw is a much better match.”
But inserting Google into thorny geopolitical problems has led to new questions about the role of a multinational corporation. Some have accused the group of trying to monetize the sensitive issues they’re taking on; the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of international free expression, Jillian York, calls its work “a little bit imperialistic.” For all its altruistic talk, she points out, Jigsaw is part of a for-profit entity. And on that point, Schmidt is clear: Alphabet hopes to someday make money from Jigsaw’s work. “The easiest way to understand it is, better connectivity, better information access, we make more money,” he explains to me. He draws an analogy to the company’s efforts to lay fiber in some developing countries. “Why would we try to wire up Africa?” he asks. “Because eventually there will be advertising markets there.”
“We’re not a government,” Eric Schmidt says slowly and carefully. “We’re not engaged in regime change. We don’t do that stuff.” —
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has accused Cohen of continuing to work as a de facto State Department employee, quietly advancing the government’s foreign policy goals from within Google, and labeled him the company’s “director of regime change.” When I raise that quote with Schmidt, he visibly tenses, then vehemently rejects the notion. “We’re not a government,” he says slowly and carefully. “We’re not engaged in regime change. We don’t do that stuff. But if it turns out that empowering citizens with smartphones and information causes changes in their country … you know, that’s probably a good thing, don’t you think?”
Beyond the issue of Jigsaw’s profit motives or imagined government ties, however, another point nags at Cohen’s optimistic digital interventionism: Technology has unintended consequences. A tool like Haystack that was intended to help Iranians could have put them in danger. Twitter, with all its revolutionary potential, enabled new forms of abuse. And Conversation AI, meant to curb that abuse, could take down its own share of legitimate speech in the process.
During her worst days of being targeted by a gang of misogynists last year, feminist writer Sady Doyle would look down at her phone after an hour and find a hundred new Twitter notifications, many of them crude sexual comments and attacks on her history of mental health issues. But when I present her with the notion of Conversation AI as a solution, she hesitates. “People need to be able to talk in whatever register they talk,” she says. “Imagine what the Internet would be like if you couldn’t say ‘Donald Trump is a moron.’” In fact, when I run the phrase though the Conversation AI prototype, I find that calling someone a moron scores a full 99 out of 100 on its personal attack scale.
The example highlights Conversation AI’s potential for false positives or suppressing the gray areas of speech. After all, even without automated flagging, Twitter and Facebook have been criticized for blocking legitimate, even politically powerful, content: Last year Twitter banned Politwoops, a feed that collected the deleted tweets of political figures to catch damning off-the-cuff statements. Facebook blocked photos of drowned migrant children intended to make Americans more aware of the tragedy of Syria’s refugee crisis.
Sarah Jeong, the Motherboard writer who was silenced by Bernie bros, says she supports the notion of Conversation AI, in theory. “The Internet needs moderation,” she says. But she warns that no one should be foolish enough to let Conversation AI run wild with automated comment deletion: “These are human interactions.” Any fix for the worst of those interactions, she says, will need to be human too. “An automated detection system can open the door to the delete-it-all option,” adds Emma Llansó, director of the Free Expression Project at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, “rather than spending the time and resources to identify false positives.”
My tests of Conversation AI do in fact produce outright false positives. “I shit you not” somehow got an attack score of 98 out of 100, the same as the far more offensive “you are shit.” The rather harmless phrase “you suck all the fun out of life” scored a 98, just a point shy of “you suck.” And most problematic of all, perhaps: “You are a troll”—the go-to response for any troll victim—was flagged with an attack score of 93.
“When you’re looking at curbing online harassment and at free expression, there’s a tension between the two. We don’t claim to have all the answers.” —
Throwing out well-intentioned speech that resembles harassment could be a blow to exactly the open civil society Jigsaw has vowed to protect. When I ask Conversation AI’s inventors about its potential for collateral damage, the engineers argue that its false positive rate will improve over time as the software continues to train itself. But on the question of how its judgments will be enforced, they say that’s up to whoever uses the tool. “We want to let communities have the discussions they want to have,” says Conversation AI cocreator Lucas Dixon. And if that favors a sanitized Internet over a freewheeling one? Better to err on the side of civility. “There are already plenty of nasty places on the Internet. What we can do is create places where people can have better conversations.”
On a muggy morning in June, I join Jared Cohen at one of his favorite spots in New York: the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, an empty, expansive, tomblike dome of worn marble in sleepy Riverside Park. When Cohen arrives, he tells me the place reminds him of the quiet ruins he liked to roam during his travels in rural Syria.
Our meeting is in part to air the criticisms I’ve heard of Conversation AI. But when I mention the possibility of false positives actually censoring speech, he answers with surprising humility. “We’ve been asking these exact questions,” he says. And they apply not just to Conversation AI but to everything Jigsaw builds, he says. “What’s the most dangerous use case for this? Are there risks we haven’t sufficiently stress-tested?”
Jigsaw runs all of its projects by groups of beta testers and asks for input from the same groups it intends to recruit as users, he says. But Cohen admits he never knows if they’re getting enough feedback, or the right kind. Conversation AI in particular, he says, remains an experiment. “When you’re looking at curbing online harassment and at free expression, there’s a tension between the two,” he acknowledges, a far more measured response than what I’d heard from Conversation AI’s developers. “We don’t claim to have all the answers.”
And if that experiment fails, and the tool ends up harming the exact free speech it’s trying to protect, would Jigsaw kill it? “Could be,” Cohen answers without hesitation.
I start to ask another question, but Cohen interrupts, unwilling to drop the notion that Jigsaw’s tools may have unintended consequences. He wants to talk about the people he met while wandering through the Middle East’s most repressive countries, the friends who hosted him and served as his guide, seemingly out of sheer curiosity and hospitality.
It wasn’t until after Cohen returned to the US that he realized how dangerous it had been for them to help him or even to be seen with him, a Jewish American during a peak of anti-Americanism. “My very presence could have put them at risk,” he says, with what sounds like genuine throat-tightening emotion. “To the extent I have a guilt I act on, it’s that. I never want to make that mistake again.”
Cohen still sends some of those friends, particularly ones in the war-torn orbit of Syria and ISIS, an encrypted message almost daily, simply to confirm that they’re alive and well. It’s an exercise, like the one he assigns to new Jigsaw hires but designed as maintenance for his own conscience: a daily check-in to assure himself his interventions in the world have left it better than it was before.
“Ten years from now I’ll look back at where my head is at today too,” he says. “What I got right and what I got wrong.” He hopes he’ll have done good.
This article appears in the October issue.
Grooming by Veronica Velez / Aubri BalkBucket Brigade Map.png
A map shows the approximate locations of the 144 petrochemical incidents in Louisiana in 2016 that were reported to the U.S. Coast Guard's National Response Center. (Image courtesy Louisiana Bucket Brigade/DisasterMap.net)
Citing "catastrophic" problems in Louisiana's oil and gas infrastructure, the head of a New Orleans-based environmental health and justice organization said Tuesday (Jan. 10) that the state should not approve any more pipelines, including the proposed $670 million Bayou Bridge pipeline. The comments from Anne Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, came in conjunction with a new report showing 144 pipeline accidents in the state in 2016.
The Louisiana Bucket Brigade and the mapping website DisasterMap.net published the report from the U.S. Coast Guard's National Response Center data. Most of the leaks, the report says, resulted of corrosion or holes in the pipelines. The authors said the release of oil, gas and chemicals not only poses health risks but also accelerates coastal erosion and contributes to global warming.
"There is no pipeline in Louisiana that is safe," geographer Ezra Boyd of DisasterMap.net said during a conference call with reporters.
Zoom on this map, click on markers for information:
Gifford Briggs, vice president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, has a decidedly different view. He said pipelines are a safer and more efficient way to transport oil and gas than trains, barges and trucks. He said companies have not only gotten better about reporting accidents but also have a financial incentive to fix problems.
"Fifty percent of the fuel that powers this nation comes through that pipeline," he said. "Pipelines are a part of life in an energy-producing state and, yes, we need to make sure we're operating in the safest way possible."
The analysis of the accidents along the almost 50,000 miles of pipeline in Louisiana comes two days before the state Department of Environmental Quality holds a public hearing on the controversial Bayou Bridge pipeline, a planned 162-mile oil pipeline that would cut through the Atchafalaya Basin and 11 parishes, beginning in Calcasieu and ending at an oil terminal in St. James. The public hearing is scheduled Thursday at 6 p.m. in the Oliver Pollock Room of the Galvez Building in Baton Rouge. If built, the pipeline would link refineries in the state to a major Texas hub that connects to larger pipelines across the country.
"Often these meetings are held to satisfy critics but there's really no impact," Rolfes said. "I promise voices will be heard this time."
The Bucket Brigade, along with the Louisiana chapter of the Sierra Club, the Gulf Restoration Network, the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper and other environmental and conservation groups, have asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deny the federal permit necessary to build the pipeline.
Three companies are involved in the proposed joint venture project -- subsidiaries of Phillips 66, Sunoco Logistics and Energy Transfer Partners -- and each also has an interest in the controversial Dakota Access pipeline, which spurred protests in North Dakota. In fact, a key motivator for building the Bayou Bridge pipeline is to move oil efficiently from North Dakota's Bakken Formation to refineries in Louisiana. Right now, much of that oil has moved by rail and barge, initially to Port Manchac in Tangipahoa Parish and then across Lake Ponchartrain to the Phillips 66 refinery at Alliance, in Plaquemines Parish.
"Louisiana has a catastrophic pipeline infrastructure already in place and we can't adequately maintain and protect what we already have," said Rolfes. "There should be no more pipelines."
Briggs, the industry official, acknowledged that the vast network of pipelines in Louisiana requires maintenance and repair. But that's no different than other infrastructure systems, he said.
"You see it with our roads," he said. "It's no different than owning a home; You have to maintain it because there will on occasion be problems. If you have a leaking facet in your house does that mean you should stop building homes?"
Rolfes agreed "with the premise" that the petrochemical industry has a financial interest in maintaining its pipelines. But she wondered whether it's happening. "When does all this get fixed," she asked. "Do these things actually get fixed? The number of incidents and the damage that's being caused as a result does cast doubt."
Of the 144 accidents reported last year, according to the new report, 85 involved oil and 37 involved natural gas. The other spilled substances included ethylene, gasoline and propane. As troubling to Rolfes was that 65 of the incidents occurred at "unspecified" locations, according to research of industry-field accident documents.
Briggs said the petrochemical industry is operating in the "safest way possible" -- and is vitally important to Louisiana's economy. He said much of the criticism of the industry comes from groups that want to see fossil fuels eliminated as a global energy source.
"You can do that, but be prepared to live in a world with no plastics, no computers and no cars just to start the list," Briggs said. "It's hard to find a product we use in our daily lives that isn't derived from the oil and gas industry."
"The oil industry pretty consistently talks about its economic impact," Rolfes countered. "But what it doesn't talk about is the negative impact it has on our waterways, our coast, our environment and on the economic health of many small businesses hurt as |
real estate prices that came with it–created opportunities. And opportunity lures entrepreneurs. The startup types, like Paffendorf. And the ones with lots of money, like Dan Gilbert, the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, the third-largest mortgage provider in the country; he moved 1,700 employees downtown in 2010, giving him 7,000 employees there and making him Detroit’s third-largest landowner (trailing only the city and General Motors). With slicked-back hair and a perpetual poker face, Gilbert has just gotten started on his plan to transform the area. DAN GILBERT: “The lease on our headquarters in the suburbs was due to expire around the end of 2010. Because I was born in Detroit and my father was born in Detroit and my grandfather was born in Detroit, I had this idea that the company could have an impact on the city, help lead the change here once and for all. “So we signed for a space in this building developed by [Compuware cofounder] Peter Karmanos, who moved his employees here before us. We put about $30 million into making the office space cool, and several thousand employees now work here. But we always said to ourselves we’re not going to move down here just because we want comfortable office space. We want to make our mark on the entire area.
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“To do this right, we have to control the real estate, because we need to offer companies a package and a process for moving their employees downtown. Just telling them to go figure it out with a typical broker was not enough. At the time, real estate prices were so low that it was what I’d call a skyscraper sale. We picked up one, a beautiful building that needed a lot of work, for $8 a square foot. That’s ridiculous! In New York, they rent for $90 a foot. Since we needed space, we went on a buying spree. See more pictures of Detroit’s hardest hustlers. “We’re trying to recruit companies and create a downtown retailing experience. Chrysler is here, Twitter has come, Blue Cross Blue Shield has moved several thousand people here. We’ve got lots of interest from restaurants. We’ve got a major New York City coffee shop opening. We’re not doing this in a hodgepodge fashion. “As the commitment to downtown grows larger, everything becomes easier. It’s inch by inch, brick by brick. The more people come in, the more difficult it is for skeptics and pessimists to have a credible position. We offer a lot of internships–600 interns from across the country. You can intern in Chicago or New York and do fine. But if you come here, you have an opportunity to affect the outcome. That is a big selling point for this generation. “Me, I’m approaching my 50th birthday, and I’m in a fortunate position to affect the outcome of my hometown, a city that’s been beat up for decades. I’m not going to be on my deathbed one day thinking, Man, aren’t you happy you just stayed in the suburbs in your asphalt parking lot and didn’t try? You can do good for Detroit and do well at the same time. And that’s what’s happening.” Gilbert has invested $1 billion in downtown so far. His plan, carried out with little help from Detroit’s hapless government, is working. More than 60 companies have moved into his buildings downtown. His gleaming headquarters teem with modern conveniences. Ten floors up you’ll find a glass-enclosed basketball court for employees (Gilbert owns the Cleveland Cavaliers) and commanding views of downtown. Think of it as Gilbert’s Imagination Station. You can see retailers testing the market, young workers lunching in a park, residents jogging and pushing strollers. In June, the city’s first Whole Foods will open a couple of miles away. And every month, Gilbert says, a couple dozen of his employees move to apartments and homes in the city, many along the creative corridor between downtown and Midtown, joining the artists and entrepreneurs, the hipsters who’d be at home in Brooklyn and Austin, the other pioneers who see the opportunity in this broken and complicated city.
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“I tell people, if you are not needed where you are right now, you are needed in Detroit. But before you show up, you need to know that it ain’t damn Disneyland for hipsters.” –Josh McManus, Little Things Labs Detroit, which was rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1805, is once again like a forest after a fire, in such ruin that anything is possible. That’s what makes it a magnet for folks like Andy Didorosi. Growing up in the suburbs, Didorosi, who favors black T-shirts and aqua sneakers, thought Detroit was dead. But now, at age 26, he finds it irresistible–the only place where he could have created something like his truly unusual business, the Detroit Bus Co. When a much-touted light-rail project stalled, 26-year-old Andy Didorosi stepped in: “We’re
the other option, all of us scrappy folks.” ANDY DIDOROSI: “Transit in Detroit is bad. It’s very underfunded; the city is gigantic; and a lot of people can’t afford to get around. But there was a proposal for something called M-1 Rail, a train down Woodward Avenue, the most important street in Detroit. It was the first paved road in the world. The train was finally going to connect parts of the city in a way that made sense. But opponents said it was too expensive and there wasn’t demand. Even so, it seemed there was money for it, from the federal government. We were all waiting on it. “But then one morning in January [2012], I saw the headline in The Detroit News online: light rail is dead. And unlike the old days, when you’re mad and you throw your newspaper down, I couldn’t because in Detroit the paper only gets delivered three days a week; so I scrolled down real hard. I was furious. This train wasn’t going to fix everything, but it was going to be the symbol of a new era in Detroit. I thought, I need to do something myself. But what can I afford? I bought some old school buses. “I approached the business the way a 6-year-old would. What would people like on the buses? Well, people would like music. So we put good sound systems in. And the buses couldn’t stay yellow, so I paid Detroit artists to paint them. And I thought people would like to know where the buses were at any moment, so we found some free apps that allow you to see where the bus is. And finally we asked where would people like buses, and we thought, Woodward Avenue–we’ll drive buses up and down Woodward. “Then, I looked into it: What is it going to take for me to start a bus company? I called up the Michigan Department of Transportation, and they’re like, ‘What? You want to start a public bus company yourself?’ They didn’t even know that I was 25. ‘Well, you need insurance,’ they told me.
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“So I called the insurance company, and they’re like, ‘You want to do what?’ They said, ‘Okay, insurance is going to be $90,000 a bus.’ I was defeated. My buses cost $2,000. Why is the insurance that much? “So I called them back. This time I tell them, ‘I want to create a private bus system that just goes from one bar to another bar. And they’re like, ‘Oh, no problem, we do that all the time.’ So then I had a bus company. “Now we’re going after new services. There’s no public option to the airport, so we’re working on that. We’re tackling some really serious stuff in a commonsense way.” Didorosi’s buses stop at hip bars and restaurants in gentrifying neighborhoods, and pack in riders for tours of “hidden” Detroit. In three years, he’s become one of the city’s most prolific hip-trepreneurs (there’s no other word for it). In addition to the buses, he has an incubator, a liquidation business, a Wi-Fi service, and a motorcycle-race series at an abandoned velodrome. (He restored the track with the Detroit Mower Gang, which mows abandoned parks on their own–“reverse vandalism,” he calls it.) All this is cool and fun. But it’s fair to ask how it and some of the other startups will mesh with the city. Detroit is 83% African-American, and its poverty, crime, and education failures hit hardest there. Didorosi, like so many of the young entrepreneurs and artists who have descended on the city in the last few years, is white, which heightens the undercurrent of racial tension. And given the city’s track record on education, the typical resident lacks the skills for any new high-tech job. “It doesn’t feel good for minority populations,” says Carla Walker-Miller, a prominent African-American CEO based in TechTown, Detroit’s largest business accelerator. “To some people who have been here the whole time, it feels like a takeover, not a renaissance. They see people getting hired, but they didn’t get the announcement that there were opportunities.”
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“Detroit hustles harder. Have you heard that? It’s like our slogan. You can’t be afraid of failure here. A lot of us don’t have a lot to lose.” –Margarita Barry, Entrepreneur For people in neighborhoods like Brightmoor, a long-neglected area on the city’s outer edge plagued by high crime and poverty, where humble single-family houses sit alongside graffiti-covered, burned-out shells, the entrepreneurially flush downtown can seem more like a mirage than a real hope. In Brightmoor, just about the best thing that can happen is that a huge hole in the ground appears on your block. The hole means that an abandoned building has been scrapped, demolished–often by the not-for-profit Motor City Blight Busters, a fixture run by the enterprising John George. When Dave Bing became mayor, he vowed to tear down 10,000 empty houses within four years. To date, the city has taken down nearly 7,000. About 45,000 remain. This is Alicia George’s neighborhood. Alicia and John George faced down financial hardship and endless bureaucracy to create the only
coffee shop for miles. ALICIA GEORGE: “For many years I had worked with John George and Blight Busters. The organization demolishes abandoned houses, but when a house can be saved, we renovate it and sell it or rent it to the community. “And I had a personal dream, which was to open a coffee shop. It would be a place that would also contribute to economic development on the northwest side of Detroit. Nowhere in Brightmoor was there a cafe, a gallery, an artists’ market. I wanted to offer open-mike poetry night, jazz, art shows, galleries, a little bit of everything. There’s a lot going on in downtown, in Midtown, in the Corktown area, but I wanted to be the person who brought that to my corner of the city. “I didn’t have experience owning a business. But I had worked for Marriott and learned hospitality, and I took college courses, I went to roasting plants, I visited every coffee shop that I possibly could. I talked to folks in the restaurant business. And John and I tried to figure out how we were going to finance this coffee shop. We rented out a space and sold candy, dinners, water–whatever it took to raise the dollars. “The first place we found was an abandoned Victorian home, very cute, very nice. It was going to be cozy and comfortable, a place where everybody can hang out. We were all set to do the landscaping. But a lot of things happen in Detroit, and shortly after we discovered this place, it burned to the ground, and I was just devastated. I had worked so hard. But I couldn’t give up. God had placed that vision and that dream in me, and we were going to make it a reality.
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“It took 10 years, but we finally found our space. We spent about a quarter of a million dollars in total. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into this place. We opened the Motor City Java House on Angels’ Night in 2010. It’s part of something we call the Artist Village Detroit. It has a courtyard, a studio, two apartments, and a community garden. There have been payless paydays, and the city once made a permit mistake and shut us down for 23 days. But since we opened, a dozen businesses have started up nearby. “I married John last September. He helped build the Java House, with hardwood floors recycled from abandoned houses. A lot were drug havens, just negative energy. But those floors helped revitalize and stabilize our neighborhood.” These may sound like small-scale ventures, but there’s big money behind Detroit’s bet on entrepreneurs as well: not from the government, and not from the auto manufacturers, even as they recover from their near-death experiences. In 2008, the Ford, Kresge, Kellogg, and Knight foundations, along with six others, stepped up with a combined $100 million investment. But after 18 months, the coalition had made just seven grants. “We didn’t know what to do to transform the economy,” admits David Egner, the president and CEO of the Hudson-Webber Foundation. After taking over the reins of the New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan, he steered the investment toward grants for entrepreneurs, helping create 425 companies and 6,900 jobs–half in Detroit. Egner brought in Josh McManus. Six-foot-four with a soft Georgia drawl that belies his bluntness, McManus, 35, had helped engineer a turnaround in the industrial town of Chattanooga, Tennessee, founding an innovation outfit called Little Things Labs and directing a program that incubated 300 enterprises. He came to Detroit looking for the next big challenge. “My interest,” he tells me over sandwiches one night at Slows Bar BQ, which is flourishing on a dreary stretch of Michigan Avenue, “has been, and remains, that this is possibly an unsolvable problem.” JOSH MCMANUS: “I can remember the look on people’s faces when I said, ‘I’m gonna move to Detroit.’ It was sorta like when I was 19 years old, coming from a rural southern conservative family; I looked at my dad and said, ‘I’m gonna be in nonprofits.’ The first day I got here, I was interviewed for an article back home, and I called Detroit ‘the Wild West of social entrepreneurship.’ Some local people took offense. But I stand by that statement. “Where everything’s broken, anything’s possible. Like the owner of this restaurant, a barbecue entrepreneur who took over a 30,000-square-foot building nearby for $100,000 and has people there doing everything from sewing jeans and coats for homeless people to doing metalwork and building furniture.
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“Thomas Edison supposedly said that opportunity is missed by most because it’s usually dressed in overalls and looks like work. As I think back through the history of innovation, and look at people such as Charles and Ray Eames and Frank Lloyd Wright and Edison and all the others who broke into a space that we had not seen before, they worked in transitional places. That’s why I think opportunity looks like Detroit. “I tell people, if you are not needed where you are right now, you are needed in Detroit. But before you show up, you need to know that it ain’t damn Disneyland for hipsters. It’s a very real place. When I say ‘Wild West,’ I mean it. I mean it in that when I walk to certain places I stick a pistol in my boot. And because the first time that I ever called the police in Detroit, it took them 57 minutes to arrive. “So there’s a cost to opportunity, but it’s balanced by unlimited potential. An emerging entrepreneur can’t have a 100,000-square-foot building in San Francisco, unless he’s got a trust fund. For most of us, it just couldn’t ever happen. It can happen in Detroit.” At 62, Bill McGraw is trim and boyish, brimming with stories and wry commentary. He’s like a walking Detroit almanac for good reason: He co-edited a book by that name. During 32 years as a reporter and editor at the Detroit Free Press, he heard every mayor, business leader, and civic cheerleader promise that his hometown is coming back. He’d like to believe them. He can wax on about the gilded art deco Fisher building–“the most beautiful building between Chicago and Philadelphia”–and about how Sunday morning bike rides in the summer are sublime; there’s little traffic, a happy by-product of a smaller population. Yet Detroit breaks his heart every day. “I’m tempted to write a story called ‘What If Detroit Doesn’t Get Any Better?’ Because I’m not sure Detroit has reached bottom yet. The city may be bankrupt by the time your article runs.” –Bill McGraw, Deadline Detroit
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On his commute, the transition from Dearborn, a prosperous western suburb, to Detroit is startling. With Ford world headquarters barely in his rearview mirror, McGraw crosses the city boundary and sees the businesses suddenly drop off, the buildings crumbling and defeated. Prostitutes linger on street corners. He passes an antiques store on Michigan Avenue where last year a robber killed its longtime owner with a baseball bat. He drives by burned-out stores, a vacant hospital, and then the granddaddy of them all, Michigan Central Station. His commute ends downtown at the Compuware building, where he now runs Deadline Detroit, an online news site he started last year. He chronicles the contradiction that is Detroit a few floors from Gilbert and his basketball court. The building is the most impressive place McGraw has ever worked, with a cafeteria, health club, day care, and a 14-story water sculpture in the atrium. “If Detroit had 10 other buildings like this, you wouldn’t be writing this story,” he tells me. When I talked to McGraw in November, the city was on the verge of running out of cash, and the mayor and city council were locked in a stalemate, freezing up $30 million generated through bond sales. That sum wouldn’t come close to making Detroit solvent. In a city desperate for dynamic leadership, Detroit has Mayor Bing–at least until the fall election. “He’s been totally overwhelmed,” McGraw says. “He’s probably the worst mayor politically and technically in my lifetime.” That’s saying a lot, considering that one of Bing’s predecessors is Kwame Kilpatrick, who resigned in 2008 amid a sexting scandal, went to jail, and was convicted in March of fraud, bribery, and racketeering. McGraw runs a Doomsday Clock at Deadline Detroit to track how close the city is to going bust. After Moody’s downgraded the city’s bond rating late last year, McGraw ticked the minute hand forward–a little bit closer to what would be the largest city bankruptcy in U.S. history. BILL MCGRAW: “I’ve lived in this city for all but five years of my life. Not for love; for family reasons. And if you’re into journalism, this is one of the five or six great news towns in the country. “Detroit’s been going downhill my whole life. I did one project, where I looked back at the 1951 Yellow Pages. There were 120 movie theaters in Detroit; now there are 2, I think. There were 120 bowling alleys; now there are 3 or 4. There were 3,000 bars; now there are 800. In every statistical way, it’s gotten worse, if not every successive year, then certainly decade by decade. “Even today while there’s a really impressive number of people who are doing things to help Detroit, the city continues to decline. The most recent decade saw one of the worst declines. In 2007, I did a project called ‘Driving Detroit,’ where over four months I drove every street in the city–2,700 miles. And now, when I go back into those neighborhoods I don’t get to often, I’m shocked at how much they have declined in five years.
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“Gilbert is the third in a line of guys going back over 20 years who have done interesting things downtown. [The first two were Mike Ilitch, the owner of Little Caesars and the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings, and Pete Karmanos, who stepped down in March as executive chairman of Compuware.] Gilbert may be able to tip downtown. He has an emotional connection to the city, and he’s an obsessive entrepreneur. But that’s 3% or 4% of the 139 square miles of Detroit. As you move away from downtown, some areas are so overgrown and desolate and destitute they’re like Appalachia. “I don’t know how things are going to turn out. Sometimes I’m tempted to write a story called ‘What If Detroit Doesn’t Get Any Better?’ Because I’m not sure Detroit has reached bottom yet. The city may be bankrupt by the time your article runs. I am struck by what Gilbert’s doing, though. And hey, we’ve added two more employees at Deadline Detroit. Traffic’s up. We’re a little Detroit business that’s growing. In that way, I’m happy to help keep the wolves at bay.” McGraw is right. Despite the recent positive national attention, despite the goodwill, despite the good intentions of Mayor Bing and Governor Snyder, things are getting worse in Detroit every day. The best reason to hope that this new group of entrepreneurs can help is that they are dispersed, not gathered into any one-shot save-the-city effort directed by a single organization. This is grassroots entrepreneurship filling in for the failures of established institutions. Margarita Barry is another of these entrepreneurs at work on several fronts. She operates a retail shop in D:hive, the welcome center and training hub that McManus opened for creative types and new arrivals. Barry’s shop consists of clothes and knickknacks by local designers–an example of entrepreneurs buying goods from other entrepreneurs, feeding the new economic machine. Barry, 28, also runs “I Am Young Detroit,” a website on which she profiles up-and-comers like Paffendorf and Didorosi. She celebrates the sort of success stories she never heard growing up in Detroit, as if she’s rewriting the narrative of Detroit herself. In addition to her retail shop, Margarita Barry runs a design business and a website for young
entrepreneurs. MARGARITA BARRY: “I bought a house recently on an eBay-style auction. I used Jerry’s [Paffendorf] site to check it out. I decided to move out of Midtown. It’s more of a challenge to live in a different neighborhood, somewhere that’s not trendy. Maybe if I move here, and people come to events and parties at my house, I’m exposing them to other neighborhoods. “The auction was exhilarating. I paid under $10,000. I know the neighborhood–you don’t see that much blight. The house doesn’t need that much–plumbing, some paint, refinished floors. I’ll put in another $10,000.
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“I have been touched personally by crime, but I don’t want to go into it. That’s not helping things progress. Sometimes it feels as if all this positive stuff can get negated by the violence, by the crime. I dealt with a break-in at my house, but then they broke into the D:hive. That felt like something else–it was terrible. This place is a special grassroots place. It’s not a big corporate place making tons of money. “You have to find a way to get through that feeling of frustration. You have to harness it, ask what can I do to make the situation better? Everyone in the city is coming together now, and I want to help. It’s not just tech. It’s Dan Gilbert, who’s doing incredible things, and it’s Brightmoor. “Detroit hustles harder. Have you heard that? It’s like our slogan. You can’t be afraid of failure here. A lot of us don’t have a lot to lose.” More. Detroit always needs more, like a hole in the ground that can’t be filled. More big investments in downtown and in neighborhoods. More cool software and startups. More stories like Alicia George’s. More stubborn optimists declaring, “It’s okay.” Despite the setbacks, Barry finds it in herself to keep believing and to keep giving. After all, she’s not just doing it for herself. She’s improving Detroit for others. Fellow entrepreneurs. Neighbors. Longtime residents. Newcomers. Like the beautiful brown-eyed Detroiter who arrived in her life last October–a baby girl. Posey. This is her city now too. [Photos by Corine Vermeulen]AMSTERDAM – The agent for Julian Green has reiterated the player's preference to persevere for a squad place at Bayern Munich, despite a torrent of enquiries about his future from both sides of the Atlantic.
On Wednesday, Green spoke to local daily TZ from preseason training camp, telling the newspaper that he wanted to battle for a spot with the German champs even though they would rather send him on loan for the second straight season. According to his agent, Bayern would have plenty of takers from both MLS and Europe lining up.
"There have been different requests from clubs in Germany and the US, asking for his plans, but we have not discussed concrete loan or transfer offers," Green representative Katharina Schrott told MLSsoccer.com. "Julian's first choice is Bayern, so he is fully focusing on preseason."
Green spent last season on loan to Bundesliga side Hamburg, only to struggle through injuries and a manager change for all of five league appearances, and none past November. The Tampa-born player is currently with Pep Guardiola's first team in China, hoping to take advantage in the absences of Bayern stars Franck Ribery and Arjen Robben during a three-game tour that kicks off against Valencia on Saturday.Image: CNET/CBS Interactive
The European Parliament is expected to call for the "unbundling" of Google's search business from the rest of its commercial operations.
The move is aimed at reducing the search giant's search and advertising monopoly in the 28 member state bloc, amid concerns spanning more than three years over the company's business practices.
Read this Incoming EU antitrust chief: Google probe won't end overnight The new European antitrust chief needs time to evaluate the case, calling the stakes having a "big potential impact" on those involved — and not just the search giant. Read More
Draft documents seen by The Financial Times show the European People's Party (EPP) and the European Socialists & Democrats (S&D), the largest parties by seats in the European Parliament with more than half the votes, backing a motion that calls for the search giant to split up.
"Unbundling [of] search engines from other commercial services" could appease those concerned by Google's dominance in the European market, the publication cited the motion as saying.
The draft motion is the most far-reaching of all proposals to date.
Although the motion, if passed, would not force Google to split up, it would pressure the European Commission, which is accountable to the European Parliament, to seek resolution from Google.
Failing that, Google could be barred from operating certain services in the region.
The European Commission declined to comment.
Google, which has about 90 percent of the search market share in the European Union, has come under heavy fire from European parliamentarians and regulators alike for its alleged business practices.
Those allegations, detailed in a May 2012 letter to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, include copying content from competing search engines, and restricting the portability of data out of its advertising platform to competing services.
The leak of the draft motion comes less than two weeks after Europe's new antitrust and competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said it would take time to consider the next step in the ongoing probe.
The probe as it stands is currently in hiatus as Vestager evaluates the European Commission's next move.
"The issues at stake in our investigations have a big potential impact on many players; they are multifaceted and complex. I will therefore need some time to decide on the next steps," Vestager told members of the European Parliament in a hearing in Brussels.
Despite three rounds of concessions, her predecessor Joaquin Almunia ultimately rejected the third and final offer, leaving Vestager to handle the Mountain View, Calif.-based technology giant.
Should Google be found in breach of Europe's antitrust or competition rules, it could be fined up to 10 percent of its global revenue for the infringing years.
A vote in the European Parliament is expected on Thursday, according to the FT.What's
Download
Forum NSA - NoScript Anywhere NoScript Mobile Multiprocessing / Android Porting Project
Dec 2017, IMPORTANT: NoScript 10 "Quantum" on Android!
On Firefox 57 and above there's only one NoScript, i.e. NoScript 10 "Quantum" which you can download here.
NSA is now considered a "legacy" add-on, just like NoScript 5.x "Classic" on desktop, but now NoScript is in an even better position than before on Android, because of the finally unified code-base ensuring the same support level both on desktop and mobile devices :)
This website will be kept for its historical archive value.
What's
NoScript Anywhere (NSA) is the nickname for the next major iteration of the NoScript security add-on (NoScript 3.x), whose guts have been turned upside down in order to match Mozilla's Electrolysis multiprocessing architecture and implement a porting for Firefox Mobile, available on Android smartphones and tablets.
This open source (GPL) effort has started in the very beginning of 2011, and has been partially funded by the NLnet Foundation.
NoScript 3 alpha, available on Firefox 4 Mobile for the Android and Maemo operating systems, offers all the the major security features of "classic" NoScript:
* Fully implemented on the first NSA (Firefox 4 Mobile); recent (2012) subfeatures and the warnning dialog still need to be ported in NSA++ (Android-native Firefox).
** Fully implemented on the first NSA (Firefox 4 Mobile); partially working on NSA++ (Android-native Firefox) but needs bug fixing, testing and the Sync functionality to be restored for being usable beyond the basic default LAN protection (which already works).
NoScript 3.x's UI is greatly simplified and optimized for touch devices, featuring a brand new page permission editing UI, specifically redesigned for smartphone usage and easily accessible by tapping on a floating finger-friendly icon.
Once installed (with no need to restart the browser), it blocks every script and other potentially dangerous active content unless the loading resource is whitelisted.
NoScript 3.x also introduces convenient Permissions Presets, which are offered for choice on first run and can be switched at any time:
Easy Blacklist (you pick untrusted sites where JavaScript and plugins must be blocked)
(you pick untrusted sites where JavaScript and plugins must be blocked) Click To Play (plugins are blocked until you click)
(plugins are blocked until you click) Classic Whitelist (you pick trusted sites where JavaScript and plugins can run)
(you pick trusted sites where JavaScript and plugins can run) Full Protection (like "Classic Whitelist", but all the embedded content is blocked until you click, even on trusted sites)
NSA++, the new Android Native NoScript porting In late 2011, Mozilla abandoned the Electrolysis/XUL architecture of its mobile Firefox and rebuilt it as a Gecko renderer embedded inside a native Android application, achieving a huge performance and responsiveness boost.
Unfortunately, this change made the original NSA incompatible almost overnight, and required yet another massive NoScript rewrite to bring it back on mobile devices.
This effort is still ongoing, but experimental 3.5 alpha builds compatible with the Android Native Firefox can be downloaded here for testing purposes, even if they're not as complete as the legacy (Firefox 4 Mobile) version.
At this moment:
Script blocking and the XSS filter are fully functional.
ClearClick and ABE are partially working but have no UI yet (they do silently block "tapjacking" attempts and cross-zone CSRF respectively, though).
Remote synchronization (Sync) is still completely missing, but is a priority as well.
The long-term goal is to reach feature parity with the stable desktop version and replace it with NSA's more modern, clean and future-proof (e.g. multiprocessing-aware) code. Unfortunately the need to keep "traditional" NoScript 2.x up-to-date for its millions of users makes this process painful and slow, especially because the project's current financial resources can fairly support the active development of one single codebase, but are insufficient for two divergent ones to be kept in sync. Therefore Donations, sponsorships, partnerships, grants and other funding proposals to keep NoScript really Anywhere are extremely welcome!
DownloadsWritten by: Dave Owen
If you’ve ever attended a football match, travelled on the subway, or wound up at a poorly organised swinger’s night, then you’ll know the feeling of being trapped in a confined space with a disconcerting abundance of male genitalia. But if they weren’t amputated and languishing in jars of formaldehyde like sexually-disenfranchised offal then you probably haven’t been to the Iceland Penis Museum.
This upstanding institution in Reykjavik contains, at time of writing, 282 penises.
“To my knowledge this is the only place in the world that houses all the penises of all the mammals found in a single country,” says Hjortur Gisli Sigurdsson, curator & director of the museum. “It’s a unique collection.” A visit will leave you positively engorged with pulsing knowledge.
1. Phallology is a real science, apparently
As documented for centuries by art, sports cars, and the Burj Khalifa, men are obsessed with our dangling hitchhikers. “Phallology is a relatively new science,” says Sigurdsson. “In fact it was my father, the founder of the museum, who coined the phrase when he started the collection back in 1974.” So it’s in no way at all made up. It’s also unclear what it’s contributed to the world, other than a pervasive awareness that phalluses are weird and icky.
2. You can see a real Moby Dick
Whale junk juts from the walls of the museum like fleshy fortifications, or stands tall and proud in the middle of the exhibition like Cyclops soldiers. Aptly many of these specimens originate from sperm whales, the largest looming some 6 feet tall. You can also view the tip of a blue whale penis, measuring in at 67 inches long; the complete appendage would be 16ft long and weigh a hefty 400kg.
3. Humans are not so well-hung
Bad news, fellas, we don’t rank too highly on the global scale of trouser tentage (official unit of measurement). The museum displays a handy comparison chart, ably demonstrating that man is bested by dogs, horses, and porpoises. The lone human specimen on display during my visit so resembled a melancholy cat foetus that I walked away quite resenting my own gender.
4. You can legally donate your penis
I don’t know quite how this works. I declined to enquire further for fear of finding myself pinned to the front counter while a rusty cleaver was sharpened. However the museum boasts that it has received “three legally-certified gift tokens for future specimens belonging to Homo Sapiens” (as per the leaflet handed to me while I jealously guarded my crotch). It’s a way “to be immortalised,” insists Sigurdsson. “A part of them is going to be around for a long time after their death for future generations to admire.” Anyone who donates a penis becomes an Honorary *ahem* Member of the museum (seriously).
5. Not all athletes are created equal
Another display immortalises the titanic achievement of Iceland’s 2008 Olympic silver medal winning handball team by casting their triumphant dongs in silver. Their hands and balls remain unaccounted for. It’s a gobsmacking tribute, though some reach a little higher on the podium than others.
6. You can make lampshades from animal scrotums
The decor of the museum might not be to your personal taste, but you have to admire its dedication to its theme. Dotted around the place are penis-shaped telephones, hip flasks, kitchen utensils and, most impressively, lampshades fashioned from anonymous animal scrotums. They bathe the bizarre and wonderful Iceland Penis Museum in a romantic, milky glow.
“My hopes are that the museum will continue to grow in every sense of the word,” concludes Sigurdsson. Cheeky scamp.Canoe Timetable RIO 2016 Olympics
My Time*
Rio Time 08-07-2016
Sunday
12:30 - 16:15
08-07-2016Sunday Venue Whitewater Stadium
Deodoro
Rio de Janeiro
Canoe Slalom Men's Canoe Single (C1) - Heats 1st Run
Men's Kayak (K1) - Heats 1st Run
Men's Canoe Single (C1) - Heats 2nd Run
Men's Kayak (K1) - Heats 2nd Run Venue Whitewater Stadium
Deodoro
Rio de Janeiro
My Time*
Rio Time 08-08-2016
Monday
12:30 - 16:00
08-08-2016Monday Venue Whitewater Stadium
Deodoro
Rio de Janeiro
Canoe Slalom Men's Canoe Double (C2) - Heats 1st Run
Women's Kayak (K1) - Heats 1st Run
Men's Canoe Double (C2) - Heats 2nd Run
Women's Kayak (K1) - Heats 2nd Run Venue Whitewater Stadium
Deodoro
Rio de Janeiro
My Time*
Rio Time 08-09-2016
Tuesday
13:30 - 15:55
08-09-2016Tuesday Venue Whitewater Stadium
Deodoro
Rio de Janeiro
Canoe Slalom Men's Canoe Single (C1) - Semifinal
Men's Canoe Single (C1) - Final
Men's Canoe Single (C1) - Victory Ceremony Venue Whitewater Stadium
Deodoro
Rio de Janeiro
My Time*
Rio Time 08-10-2016
Wednesday
13:30 - 16:10
08-10-2016Wednesday Venue Whitewater Stadium
De |
their supposedly male preserve. Hell, the comments section of this blog if full of them, many of them aficionados of RPGs and obscure interesting indie titles I’ve never heard of.
As Misha wrote in the comments to a recent post here, addressing one of the many gamebros out there incensed that non-dudes are invading a gaming world he sees as rightfully his,
Newsflash: It is not YOUR hobby, OR the hobby of your hapless diversity-hating gamebros. The individuals who want to see games evolve beyond depictions of harmful cultural stereotypes and tired sexist tropes also, wait for it, Play. Games. I play games. I am so excited by the recent footage released for FFXV that I could puke. You do not own them, and you do not speak for me.
Me neither.
Another commenter in the same thread noted that women have been playing video games from the beginning:
What I find so ridiculous is the fact that these guys act as though women playing/creating games is a new thing. I’m 3-freaking-6 years old. I’ve been gaming since the Atari 2600. I OWNED a copy of the ET game – yeah, that same one that most of those putzes only got to read about being discovered in a landfill in whereverthehell. I’ve been a part of gaming allllll this time. Just because they didn’t want to recognize that or acknowledge my existence or the fact that I was right there, the entire time, playing in the WoW beta, playing in the Guild Wars beta, playing in the City of Heroes beta — that’s not my damn problem. They were the ones living in their own happy little penis-centric, he-man girl-gamer-haters club while I was over here, doing my own thing and having fun. Their obliviousness is nobody’s fault but their own.
Buttercup Q. Skullpants added:
I’ve been gaming since the days of Pong, ELIZA, Merlin, Space Invaders, and Pac Man. Back then it was something both boys and girls did after school. It wasn’t seen as nerdy – in fact, the arcades were where the delinquent kids hung out. It seems like today’s crop of misogynist gamers have their core identity way too wrapped up in being the coveted marketing demographic. They want to be pandered to and flattered with hypermasculine characters and alpha storylines. It’s kind of hilarious that they’re treating this whole thing like it’s a RL video game, complete with black ops, sockpuppeting “missions”, evil shadowy enemies, rallying cries of threats to individual liberty, and an anything-goes mentality of inflicting maximum damage on opponents. Except the consequences of stalking and harassment are real, and permanent. In their imaginations they’re a group of beleaguered rebels taking a brave stand for freedom, but they’re actually the bad guys. They’re fighting against social justice and ruining a lot of people’s lives in the process. It’s just a hobby, fercrissakes. I can’t imagine, say, model railroad enthusiasts getting all bent out of shape about more people taking up their hobby, and embarking on a hate campaign to define it as for old people ONLY. These guys really need to grow up and get some perspective.
Amen.
Elsewhere in the thread, M. the Social Justice Ranger described her experience,
I haven’t been gaming for quite as long as some of the other women here, but I first picked up a keyboard in 1989 and a controller in 1990, so it’s certainly been a while. Sure, I prefer single-player to multiplayer, Nintendo to PlayStation or Xbox and platformers, RPGs, pet sims and puzzle games to shooters, but I do consider my hobby to be a large part of my identity, so other gamers are usually (not always, but usually) willing to count me as one of their own… … Until they discover that not only have I committed the cardinal sin of being born with a vagina, but I’m only interested in others who’ve committed the same sin. Then all of that flies out the window for rape threat after rape threat after rape threat. Sigh. I don’t want to destroy their hobby, I just want to enjoy our shared hobby…
#GamerGaters, is this really that hard to understand?
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Like this: Like Loading...In a historic letter on January 21, Imam Khamenei asked Western youths to try to gain a direct and firsthand knowledge of Islam in reaction to the flood of prejudgments and disinformation campaigns.
Here is what the she said of her views on the letter:
Tasnim: Regarding the recent letter from Iran’s Supreme Leader to the youth of Europe and North America, how could it be (more) effective in attracting those youth to authentic Islam?
Hidaya: Firstly, I believe the Sayed (Ayatollah Khamenei) must be commended for writing such an eloquent letter. In terms of its effectiveness, I think you will be more inclined to research the authentic Islam because you are being challenged to do so in a non-coercive way. He wrote it respectfully and his word choice shows he is not at all undermining the intelligence of his audience in the least. With the existence of this letter, the youth living in the West are given one of two choices: either they stay willfully ignorant or they learn more about the true Islam. Those who stay willfully ignorant, cannot blame Islam for the horrendous acts of a few, because Ayatollah Khamenei, like many before him, stated that Islam condones nothing but peace.
Tasnim: How capable is the message in preventing or at least reducing the ongoing Islamophobia in the West?
Hidaya: In my experience, people are divided into two when it comes to Islam: those who have already made up their minds that anything pertaining to this beautiful religion is evil, and those who haven’t. Some of those who have made up their minds would not be convinced even if the Prophet (PBUH) came and spoke to them. I don’t think the letter will do much for those people. However, the vast majority of Western youth have a thirst for Islam, as evidenced by the fact that it’s one of the fastest growing religions in the world. A lot of them fear it, and this letter makes it clear that they have nothing to fear except mainstream media that is feeding them these misconceptions. This letter is perhaps the most capable thing we’ve had to reduce Islamophobia in years. It is our responsibility to make sure it reaches the audience it’s meant for so that it can have the most impact. If this letter reaches the right audience, Muslims and non-Muslims alike can combat Islamophobia together.
Tasnim: Do you think America’s mainstream media is interested in publishing the Supreme Leader’s letter?
Hidaya: No, I don’t believe the mainstream media is interested in publishing this letter. There are a lot of forces at play in order to make sure that people fear Islam. The mainstream media for the most part is not a friend t Islam or Muslims, so I don’t see them publishing a letter like this or anything else that puts Islam in a positive light.
Tasnim: How do you evaluate the content of the letter?
Hidaya: The contents of this letter are powerful and inspirational. I think Muslims and non-Muslims alike will be motivated to gain more knowledge about Islam and what it means to be a true Muslim.
Tasnim: In your opinion, could this letter be a new chapter in the European attitude towards Islam?
Hidaya: I definitely think it could be the start of a new chapter for Islam in the West. My only concern is that the enemies of Islam will get their hands on it and twist and bend his words. Even if that were to happen though, I am confident that this letter will affect at least one person to change their perception of Islam and as we all know, change begins with one individual or idea.
Tasnim: Can this letter show the differences between authentic Islam and the one that ISIL and other terrorist’s groups have made?
Hidaya: I definitely think that this letter does show the difference between true Muslims and the likes of ISIS. ISIS wants you to believe that Islam is a religion of the sword. This letter shows that Islam is the religion of intellect and logic and kindness. Islam only cares about the intellectual sword and how you wield it.
Tasnim: If the letter reached the hands of the youth of Europe and North America and then they study the authentic sources of Islam, will it change anything special?
Hidaya: I think that could change everything. Right now, most of the people fighting Islamophobia and injustices against Muslims in the West are other Muslims. If we are able to get more American/European youth to learn more about the true Islam, even if they choose not to accept it as their religion, they will correct their peers when they have misconceptions about Islam. I think it is more powerful for non-Muslims to correct one another’s misconceptions than it is for a Muslim to do so.
Tasnim: In your opinion, what is the next step in order to enlighten the youth in the West on introducing real Islam?By Larry Kummer, from the Fabius Maximus website
Summary: Obama journeys to Alaska and says things. Our journalist-stenographers reprint this as news. They do not consult local experts, and so miss an important part of the story. This post gives you the rest of the news.
From the Alaska Climate Research Center.
The great oddity of the climate change campaign is the disinterest of journalists in reporting it well. Stories about our certain doom often omit vital context (e.g., burning off the world’s fossil fuels means the 21st century relies on coal for energy, like the 19thC), forget to mention the IPCC when it disagrees with alarmists (e.g., about the danger of a methane apocalypse), and ignore the host of research facilities studying relevant aspects of our changing world.
We see that last factor at work in journalists’ reporting about Obama’s climate campaign tour of Alaska. Google News shows no stories in the mainstream news mentioning the findings of the Alaska Climate Research Center. I have posted their work in response to previous panicky stories about Alaska melting in 2009, in 2013, and again here.
Here is their Temperature Changes in Alaska page (updated annually; red emphasis added). It’s quite clear.
“This page features the trends in mean annual and seasonal temperatures for Alaska’s first-order observing stations since 1949, the time period for which the most reliable meteorological data are available. The temperature change varies from one climatic zone to another as well as for different seasons. If a linear trend is taken through mean annual temperatures, the average change over the last 6 decades is 3.0°F.
“… Considering just a linear trend can mask some important variability characteristics in the time series. The figure at right shows clearly that this trend is non-linear: a linear trend might have been expected from the fairly steady observed increase of CO2 during this time period. The figure shows the temperature departure from the long-term mean (1949-2009) for all stations. It can be seen that there are large variations from year to year and the 5-year moving average demonstrates large increase in 1976.
“The period 1949 to 1975 was substantially colder than the period from 1977 to 2009, however since 1977 little additional warming has occurred in Alaska with the exception of Barrow and a few other locations. The stepwise shift appearing in the temperature data in 1976 corresponds to a phase shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from a negative phase to a positive phase. Synoptic conditions with the positive phase tend to consist of increased southerly flow and warm air advection into Alaska during the winter, resulting in positive temperature anomalies.”
Being scientists, they published their research in a peer-reviewed journal: “The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska“, G. Wendler, L. Chen and B. Moore, Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2012 — Abstract (red emphasis added):
“During the first decade of the 21st century most of Alaska experienced a cooling shift, modifying the long-term warming trend, which has been about twice the global change up to this time. All of Alaska cooled with the exception of Northern Regions. This trend was caused by a change in sign of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which became dominantly negative, weakening the Aleutian Low. This weakening results in less relatively warm air being advected from the Northern Pacific.
“This transport is especially important in winter when the solar radiation is weak. It is during this period that the strongest cooling was observed. In addition, the cooling was especially pronounced in Western Alaska, closest to the area of the center of the Aleutian Low. The changes seen in the reanalyzed data were confirmed from surface observations, both in the decrease of the North-South atmospheric pressure gradient, as well as the decrease in the mean wind speeds for stations located in the Bering Sea area.”
The price paid for this sloppy or biased reporting
Journalists pay for this in lost credulity. Publishers of the news pay in lost credibility. We all pay, as these repeated cries of “wolf“ diminish our ability to respond to serious warnings.
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RedditI wrote earlier about the upgrade of the lighting distribution system for Pote theatre as part of the recent lighting upgrade that included scrapping our 48-dimmers and 48-dimmer/242-circuit patch bay. A major portion of that initiative was to replace the de-rated 3-prong pin-out twistlock sockets with 3-pin stage plugs (which are arguably the de-facto standard in the U.S. for single-circuit lighting distribution.)
In the process, we replaced the dedicated lighting battens and the associated circuit raceways, with drop-cables from the grid via multi-circuit cables, terminating in 6-circuit breakout “splays”. The “splays” attach to the multi-cable via a Socapex connector. The cables are managed in a sort of old school manner with manual dead-hung spot lines attached to Kellum grips partway down each cable.
We had a learning experience several weeks ago when after circuiting and “ringing out” one of the battens on stage, the electricians lifted the electric out to trim, but did not make the effort to take the journey to the grid required to lift the multi out high enough to clear the batten. The unfortunate result of this oversight was that the multi rested against one of the Q-lites that we use as worklights. Even lamped at 500 watts these fixtures get very hot, hot enough to melt the multi-cable when it rested against the fixture for long enough.
The repair of this incident required the replacement of a 70’ length of multi-cable. Once again, my friend Jerry Onik of Heartland Stage of Omaha supplied me with the necessary length of cable. He suggested that I re-use the Socapex connector. While I have been familiar with the Socapex connector as a user, I had never had the need or opportunity to work on one, so I was cautiously optimistic that I could perform the task.
My first challenge was figuring out how to take the connector apart. I was thwarted in my first attempt to break it open. After a nearly useless web search, a couple of emails (one to the Stagecraft Mailing list) and some experimentation I found the following steps necessary to remove the plug:
Attach the male plug from one of the splays to the female that you want to remove.
Grip the body of the male and the female firmly. (I used pipe wrenches but rubber-jawed arc-joint pliers would probably be preferable)
Turn the body of the Male plug CLOCKWISE (which is the opposite of the direction that you would expect) to unscrew the body of the male plug from the terminal end.
Turn this outer body until it unthreads from the contact holder core.
Removing the contacts from each of the 14 conductors was pretty simple. The 25 watt soldering iron that I use for repairing microphone cable was just sufficient to the task of heating the solder in each of the solder cups to the melting point.
However, when it came to attaching the old connector to the new leads, I ran into problems. The little 25-watt iron just couldn’t bring the 12-gauge wire to an adequate temperature to “silver” the leads, not to mention heating the wire the solder and the solder cup to the
temperature necessary to create an adequate electro-mechanical connection. After some further experimentation, I found a 40-watt version of a soldering iron that was barely adequate to the task. Even so, the tedious process took about 3 hours of soldering altogether (spread over 3 sessions). Following are a few things to consider when doing so:
Make sure that the shell of the connector shell is installed on the cable before beginning to solder leads to the contacts.
Slide the shrink-tube over the lead before soldering each lead to the contact and prevent shrink-tube from receiving too much heat from the soldering process so that it will slide over the solder cup and bared lead to insulate the lead from a possible short-circuit with a neighboring lead or the connector shell.
Take pains to connect the correct leads to the correct contacts. Each contact has a certain function (see the next two points)
Begin by soldering the 2 ground leads from the multi-cable to pins 17 & 18 and connect pins 13 through 18 by connecting them with a ring of solder.
Solder the outer ring of contacts as follows:
Pin 1-Circuit 1 Live (Hot)
Pin 2-Circuit 1 Neutral
Pin 3- Circuit 2 Live (Hot)
Pin 4-Circuit 2 Neutral
Pin 5-Circuit 3 Live (Hot)
Pin 6-Circuit 3 Neutral
Pin 7-Circuit 4 Live (Hot)
Pin 8-Circuit 4 Neutral
Pin 9-Circuit 5 Live (Hot)
Pin 10-Circuit 5 Neutral
Pin 11-Circuit 6 Live (Hot)
Pin 12-Circuit 6 Neutral
Once I completed the soldering, I heat-shrinked the shrink-tube insulation and closed the connector up by reversing the process used to dismantle it in the first place. Before making up the electro-mechanical connections in the junction box on the grid, I tested each circuit for continuity with the other end of itself. I also tested for continuity between each pin and all of its neighbors. identifying continuity would have contraindicated completing the re-installation until it had been removed since that would have indicated a later short-circuit and probable damage to the connected dimmers.
After completing the connection I “rang out” each circuit by connecting each one to a fixture and bringing up the associated dimmer on the Unison touch-pad. Fortunately, all circuits functioned properly.
That’s all for now.
Have fun. But be safe!
SJM
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Harvey Weinstein’s troubles could cause a deep cut to his wife’s fashion business.
With the revelation of a string of sexual-harassment allegations against the movie mogul, and the news that he is stepping down from his film company, insiders are predicting it could hurt his wife Georgina Chapman’s successful Marchesa line.
“He’s going to get ostracized in the [fashion] business — at least for a while — and Marchesa could suffer, too,” one fashion exec said. “Then I wonder if she’ll still back him up... if she’ll even stay with him.”
Chapman, 41, has certainly benefited from her 65-year-old husband’s power.
Since the two met at a Manhattan party in 2004, the mogul, famed for aggressively promoting his films, has done for Chapman what he does best: He used his influence to get what he wanted.
“Georgina always had a hard time pushing herself. For Harvey, promotion’s in his blood,” a fashion insider said. “[He] wasn’t exactly subtle about asking Miramax’s female stars to wear Marchesa on the red carpet. And if the studio chief of your movie, and potential movies, asked you to wear a certain designer, wouldn’t you want to accommodate him?”
Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry, Emma Watson, Renee Zellweger, Blake Lively and Kate Hudson all starred in projects produced by one of Weinstein’s companies, and all wore Marchesa on the red carpet.
And after Weinstein bought the fashion label Halston in 2007, he hired influential stylist Rachel Zoe as a consultant and creative director. She, in turn, regularly put clients, such as Keira Knightley and Nicole Richie, in Marchesa gowns.
“Georgina would never have met so many celebrities without being Harvey’s significant other,” said a top New York film publicist. “She’s lovely — as are her gowns — but that’s true of several designers.”
Weinstein is also an executive producer of TV’s “Project Runway.” Chapman became a judge on the show in Season 12.
Today, Chapman, with whom Weinstein has son, Dashiell, 4, and daughter, India, 7, is said to be worth $30 million.BLACKFOOT, Idaho - Former Blackfoot Police Department Officer Paul Hardwicke has been charged with two counts of felony possession of a controlled substance, oxycodone and morphine. Both charges carry a maximum sentence of up to seven years and/or a $15,000 fine.
Bingham County Prosecutor Cleve Colson said Hardwicke was also charged with two misdemeanor counts of possession of a controlled substance, tramadol and "legend" or prescription drug. The misdemeanor charges both carry a maximum sentence of up to one year and/or a $1,000 fine.
He said all of the incidents occurred on May 28th when Hardwicke was an officer with the Blackfoot Police Department and a school resource officer at the Blackfoot High School during the time of the alleged crime.
Colson said the school district was notified when the criminal conduct was discovered. Hardwicke was immediately removed from his position as a School Resource Officer and placed on administrative leave by the police department.
The Pocatello Police Department completed the investigation.
According to Colson, Hardwicke is no longer employed by the Blackfoot Police Department. In addition, the prosecution will be assigned to the Bannock County Prosecuting Attorney's Office as a Special Prosecutor.On March 20, 2003, bombs thundered down on Baghdad, Iraq, filling the dark sky with lights of sublime terror and a reverberating roar. Explosion clouds formed figurative smokestacks wafting upward in the early morning as ceaseless flak fire echoed throughout the Iraqi capital.
The United States-led invasion of Iraq was underway.
A little before noon in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il watched news footage of this shock and awe campaign with a grave realization: the George W. Bush administration was actually following through on its preemptive strike doctrine; the United States had almost unilaterally invaded an “Axis of Evil” country, a club in which North Korea held full membership.
[youtube id=”T0kcaziP-0o” width=”620″ height=”360″]
Hearing reports that the opening salvo of the war was an assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein, the North Korean leader’s elite security team almost certainly rushed him to an underground compound.
Kim Jong Il took refuge in an impregnable mountain fortress, called Cheol Bong Li, a little under ten miles from central Pyongyang. There, he hurried past tank units of the Korean People’s Army, descending down a lengthy underground corridor, deep beneath Guk Sa Bong mountain. The command compound that awaited him—designed to withstand a nuclear strike—consisted of two sprawling floors, including a series of war rooms that would enable Kim to control the military during a foreign attack.
Nervously monitoring the Korean peninsula, the North Korean leader watched the stunning destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime unfold.
The implications were sobering. If the Bush administration would invade and occupy Iraq—dismissing the possibility of a bloody insurgency—would they risk millions of Korean lives and strike nuclear sites in the DPRK…or even the Dear Leader himself?
Kim couldn’t be certain.
In the weeks before the war, the U.S. had deployed 24 B-1 and B-52 bombers to Guam as a warning to Pyongyang. In early 2002, the Pentagon had also publicly acknowledged nuclear strike plans for hitting seven countries, including North Korea, “in the event of surprising military developments” or in response to a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. That same report, called the Nuclear Posture Review, recommended new miniaturized nuclear weapons for the American arsenal.
As those plans were revealed, President Bush traveled to South Korea in February 2002, offering mixed messages. Bush met with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and said: “We’re peaceful people. We have no intention of invading North Korea,” while reiterating: “…America will not allow North Korea…to threaten freedom with weapons of mass destruction.”
Bush’s personal animosity for the North Korean leader—whom he once called a “pygmy”—was well known; “I loathe Kim Jong Il!” the 43rd President of the United States told Bob Woodward in 2002. “They tell me,” Bush stated in that interview, “we don’t need to move too fast, because the financial burdens on people will be so immense if we try to—if this guy were to topple…I just don’t buy that.”
In early October 2002, tensions heightened after U.S. officials traveled to the North Korean capital and challenged Foreign Ministry officials with evidence that Pyongyang had cheated on the 1994 Agreed Framework. The North Koreans responded brusquely, arguing that the DPRK had the right to nuclear weapons regardless of those accusations. Somewhere in that heated conversation, U.S. translators allegedly misinterpreted the Chosŏn dialect (조선어) of the North and came away believing that Kim Jong Il’s government had admitted to a uranium enrichment program.
Thereafter, U.S. officials, believing the Agreed Framework all but dead, cut heavy oil shipments to the DPRK.
In December 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned North Korea as America took steps towards invading Iraq: “We are capable of fighting two major regional conflicts. We’re capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the case of the other. And let there be no doubt about it.”
The Bush administration offered new negotiations in January 2003 but insisted North Korea uphold its prior agreements as a starting point. Pyongyang, however, demanded security guarantees upfront. Stalemated ensued, leading North Korea to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty on January 10. Thereafter, Bush declared in his State of the Union Address in 2003:
…the North Korean regime is using its nuclear program to incite fear and seek concessions. America and the world will not be blackmailed…The North Korean regime will find respect in the world and revival for its people only when it turns away from its nuclear ambitions.
Despite those comments, many American officials, convinced that the North Korean state would soon fall apart, sought one overarching goal: regime change. As a result, Pyongyang complained that the U.S. negotiating position was “virtually a demand that we yield. Yielding means death.”
As the bombs fell on Iraq two months later, only one weapon—Kim Jong Il understood—could prevent the chance of a foreign attack on North Korea.That was the scene Monday night on Highway 35 when a truck carrying 2,200 piglets overturned, killing 1,000 animals and leaving the remaining piggies on the loose.
The little Babes made a run for it down the highway, some into the woods, and what followed was a wild pig chase.
The scene was manic as officials spent hours near the crash site trying to round up the little guys and taking them to safety with local farmers bringing in trailers to help with the chase and containment.
"There are quite a few pigs that got out and ran from the accident. They’re in the woods. I don’t think we’ll ever get all of them, I really, really don’t," Dean Fox, the fire chief told the Guardian. "We’ll try as hard as we can to retrieve all of them, but we probably won’t retrieve all of them," Fox said at the time.
However, it had later been reported that out of those who survived the crash, all were taken to their final destination.
© Provided by W Dish
The crash occured after the driver, travelling from South Carolina, lost control of his vehicle and slammed into a guardrail. He was not hurt and his passenger had sustained only minor injuries.
Press like if this is your favourite story of the week! Pigs=Bliss.[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Bentonville, Arkansas - April 20, 2017 - Mustin Enterprises is pleased to announce that the two-part Psychokinetic musical tribute to Nintendo's beloved MOTHER series is now available to audiences worldwide. Originally produced as a part of the hugely successful You Are Now EarthBound Kickstarter campaign run by Fangamer, the album is now available separately for the first time. Even more, a limited number of physical copies produced for the campaign are still available, housing both Part 1 and Part 2 of the digital collection in a sleek DVD case alongside a booklet containing credits and track commentary. Psychokinetic Part 1 and Psychokinetic Part 2 are now available worldwide via most digital retailers: Psychokinetic Part 1 on Bandcamp Psychokinetic Part 1 on Spotify Psychokinetic Part 2 on Bandcamp Psychokinetic Part 2 on Spotify Psychokinetic physical edition from Mustin Enterprises Psychokinetic features the talents of the remixing group the Bad Dudes who serve up a diverse range of offerings, from chillout and vocal ballad to swingin' jazz and industrial. The track list includes fan favorites from across the MOTHER series, with many selections being chosen by backers from the Kickstarter campaign. The full track list for Psychokinetic is as follows: Psychokinetic Part 1 01. Pollyanna Bounce (I Believe In You) [EarthBound] 02. Twoson Hometown Show (Theme of Twoson) [EarthBound] 03. Jon Bon Voyage, Amigo (Bon Voyage, Amigo) [MOTHER 3] 04. Find Your Happy Place (Memory of Tazmily) [MOTHER 3] 05. Door to Door Happiness (Monkey's Delivery Service) [MOTHER 3] 06. wE FeEL GRoOVE! (Saturn Valley) [EarthBound]* 07. Show Me What You Got (Save the Miners!) [EarthBound] 08. Checkout is at Eleven (Enjoy Your Stay) [EarthBound] 09. Funny Dawg (Humoresque of a Little Dog) [EarthBound] 10. Home Again Again (Pollyanna) [EarthBound] 11. Reminiscing No. 1 (Onett) [EarthBound] 12. Geognosis (Wisdom of the World) [MOTHER] Psychokinetic Part 2 01. Paula (Paula's Theme) [EarthBound] 02. DRGN (Fight with Mecha Drago) [MOTHER 3] 03. Bag of Pork Chips (His Highness' Theme) [MOTHER 3]* 04. mom's cookies (We Miss You - Theme of Love) [MOTHER 3] 05. Steppin' in the Rain (Gentle Rain) [MOTHER 3] 06. This August Will Be Different (Summers) [EarthBound] 07. Thank You For Remembering Me (Snowman) [EarthBound] 08. Magicant Gamelan (Magicant) [MOTHER] 09. There is No Turning Back Now (Crossing Space&Time/The Place) [EarthBound] 10. Master P (Pokey Means Business!/Cease to Exist) [EarthBound] 11. Exit Music (For A Game) (The Heroes Return) [EarthBound] 12. The Power and the Glory (Eight Melodies) [MOTHER] * Tracks are included on the limited physical edition only "Fangamer's Kickstarter aimed to deliver the ultimate EarthBound fan's dream package - a guidebook for the game, a documentary about the effects of EarthBound in the United States, a fan zine, lots of collectible knick-knacks, and our album," reflects producer and The Bad Dudes founder Mustin. "Backer Emile Rosales challenged me by requesting two pieces of short, ambient music from EarthBound to arrange: 'Crossing Space and Time' and 'The Place.' I drew from my experience playing the game and applying my senses of both wonder and terror as you learn the true nature of this cave and what it means for your party: that the estranged father of one of your team mates will have to turn you kids into robots in order to send you back in time to save the world. I made new sounds and used new tools I've never used before - there are even cow sounds peppered into the track for bizarre effects. It is the work I am most proud of to date." About Mustin Mustin is a composer/producer/arranger hailing from Northwest Arkansas. He is co-founder of one of the longest running videogame music cover bands, The OneUps, has produced for nerdcore rappers MC Lars, Mega Ran, and Beefy, and has been featured on CNN and MSNBC. Mustin's styles of music range from funk to bossa nova and gangster rap to piano solos. He is currently working to launch a new original music project with long time collaborator, William Reyes. Learn more: https://www.mustinenterprises.com Follow Mustin on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and SoundCloud About the Bad Dudes In September of 2006, Mustin assembled the best of the best bedroom producers who had worked on previous Mustin Enterprises (formerly OneUp Studios) releases to form the "A-Team" of videogame remixers, dubbed Bad Dudes. "Not a re-creation of the Bad Dudes video game soundtrack," according to Mustin, "but a reminder that we're all Bad Dudes and we've gotta put it down." To date, the Dudes have released several free EPs, and in 2009 received critical acclaim for their first official album, CHRONOTORIOUS, a collection of arrangements from the SNES classic Chrono Trigger. They have since released the Metroid Arrange 25th Anniversary Album of Metroid music, making Psychokinetic their third CD release. Learn more: http://baddudesmusic.com Follow the Bad Dudes on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube Media Contact Jayson Napolitano, Scarlet Moon Promotions [email protected]Oh Hillary Clinton, always trying to get in with the cool kids. Nobody likes a try hard or, worse yet, a poser, which is why meme-makers, hip young “influencers” and many of our coolest celebs opt to #FeelTheBern.
Meanwhile, Hillary has tried everything to get young voters on her side: she’s dabbed on Ellen, made memes of her own and she may or may not have purchased a Thrasher sweatshirt (note: I’m speculating on that last one). Her attempts have been futile at best and embarrassing at worst.
People call Hillary disingenuous. Unrelatable. That she’ll say and do anything to win people’s votes. Well, friends, this clip of the presidential hopeful proves otherwise. In this moment, Hillary Clinton is all of us:
It takes Hillary (or Hil, as I now feel entitled to call her) five swipes of her MetroCard to make it through the turnstile at Yankee Stadium. Her blunder is all the more embarrassing as entering the subway was staged as a photo op specifically to attack effortlessly cool guy Bernie.
“I’m proud to be a New Yorker, we don’t use tokens on the subway,” she boasted, mocking the fact that Bernie was outed for thinking we still use tokens earlier this week.
And any New Yorker knows that when the pressure is on to nail it in one swipe, you often choke. Maybe your train is coming, it’s the morning rush and you don’t want to piss off a bunch of already pissed off commuters. Perhaps you’re on a date and you just wanna look smooth or, in Hil’s case, you’re praying that, for the love of god, you look like a woman of the people for once in your life. And, of course, she chokes, accidentally creating the most (and only?) relatable moment of her campaign.
Then she gets on the subway with her security detail and camera crew, just like the rest of us.A declining sense of smell could be the first sign of Alzheimer’s, not memory loss, according to new research.
Researchers at Masachusetts General Hospital in the US have developed a method which can identify a person’s risk for the disease on the basis of their ability to recognise and recall odours.
While this isn’t the first time smell has been explored as a symptom, it does provide the most conclusive evidence yet.
Lead investigator Dr Mark Albers even goes as far to say that a hindered sense of smell caused by Alzheimer’s could be detected a decade before patients start to experience memory loss.
"There is increasing evidence that the neurodegeneration behind Alzheimer's disease starts at least 10 years before the onset of memory symptoms," he says.
The study of 183 patients deemed to have an increased risk of developing the disease found that those with early signs of Alzheimer’s were less likely to be able to identify or easily recognise smells.
First, they were tested for how well they could identify smells by being presented with 10 scents: menthol, clove, leather, strawberry, lilac, pineapple, smoke, soap, grape or lemon.
Shape Created with Sketch. Autumn/Winter 2016's best fragrances Show all 9 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Autumn/Winter 2016's best fragrances 1/9 Calvin Klein Deep Euphoria 30ml £34 superdrug.com 2/9 Prada La Femme 50ml £69 selfridges.com 3/9 Viktor & Rolf Bonbon Couture 30ml £50 boots.com 4/9 Paco Rabanne Lady Million Prive 30ml £ |
$null, $null, 3) | Out-Null } # end :: try/catch } # End :: Install-Task
For more information on Task Scheduler options, check the MSDN Technet documentation.
That was working beautifully until I realized I needed some concurrency control. Of course my “There can be only one” code would kill the competitors but I needed something more elegant and Mutexes came to my mind. Added a code for that also:
# Wait for mutex [bool] $MutexWasCreated = $false $BabadookMutex = New-Object System.Threading.Mutex($true, $BabadookMutexName, [ref] $MutexWasCreated) if (!$MutexWasCreated) { Log "Babadook Mutex found, waiting release..." $BabadookMutex.WaitOne() | Out-Null Log "Babadook Mutex acquired" } else { Log "Babadook Mutex installed" } # end :: if #... code... # Release Mutex Log "Releasing Babadook Mutex" $BabadookMutex.ReleaseMutex(); $BabadookMutex.Close();
And of course I needed to prevent them from opening the “Scheduled Tasks” dialog. Since a Stop-Process to the mmc process was giving me “Access Denied” (it runs in some kind of UAC), I needed to take the.NET approach. Modified my “IF” to consider that:
if ($WindowText -eq "Run" -Or $WindowText.Contains( "Properties" ) -Or $WindowText.Contains( "Task Scheduler" )) { [void][apifuncs] ::SendMessage($ForegroundWindow, [apifuncs] ::WM_SYSCOMMAND, [apifuncs] ::SC_CLOSE, 0) } # end :: if
Recap
So far we got:
Connection-less command execution (full powershell language incl..NET extensions + system()-like with Start-Process )
) Watchdog / Userkit (userland “root”kit)
Persistence
Concurrency control
And that worked well enough for me :)
It’s not about the money
So if you read until here you might probably been wondering: “Did you really skipped those lunches just to mess up your colleagues?”
Well, kinda. It was a great learning and they surely got the message. No one now leaves their session unlocked. :)
When the news hit my team leader (how they called the Boss at the company) he saw this was a good way to show upper management and the other teams the dangers of an insider, how basic malware works and escalated the Babadook as a truly internal awareness program, so it turned out to be a great deal for everyone (except for a few really pissed off teammates).
Code
As always, you can get the Babadook source at my github.All 90 people aboard an Ethiopian Airlines plane were feared dead after it plunged into the Mediterranean, minutes after taking off from Beirut in a thunderstorm today.
Flight ET409, a Boeing 737-800, heading for Addis Ababa, disappeared off the radar some five minutes after taking off at 2:37 a.m. (0037 GMT).
The Lebanese army said the plane had broken up in the air before plummeting into rough seas. Witnesses described the impact as a "flash that lit up the whole sea" and a "ball of fire".
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
A UK Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "We can confirm that one British national and one dual national were on board Ethiopian Air flight number ET 409 departing from Beirut to Ethiopia, that crashed into the sea off the coast of Lebanon early this morning.
"A British Royal Air Force helicopter, based in Cyprus, has joined the Lebanese authorities' search and rescue operation. Our thoughts are with the families of all those involved in this tragedy."
Also on board was the wife of the French ambassador to Lebanon, according to a French embassy official.
Lebanese President Michel Suleiman said he did not think the plane had been brought down deliberately, emphasising "a sabotage attack is unlikely".
Defence Minister Elias el-Murr also said there was no evidence of a terrorist attack and that weather was "in principle" to blame for the crash.
Ethiopian Airlines CEO Girma Wake said he had spoken with Lebanese authorities who had no word of survivors.
Eighty-three passengers and seven crew were on the flight, Lebanese Transport Minister Ghazi al-Aridi said at the airport.
Twenty-four bodies, including those of two toddlers, have so far been recovered. At least six bodies were of Ethiopian origin, officials said. Some of the bodies were so unrecognisable from the impact of the crash that DNA testing would be needed to identify them.
The remains of mangled aircraft seats and luggage washed up on the shore south of Beirut where the airport's main runway is located. Lebanese army patrol boats, helicopters and divers searched an area off Na'ameh, 10 km (six miles) south of the capital.
Fifty-four of those on board were Lebanese, 22 were Ethiopian, two were British and there were also Canadian, Russian, French, Iraqi, Syrian, and Turkish nationals.
Marla Pietton, wife of the French ambassador to Lebanon Denis Pietton, was on the plane, the French embassy said.
The Lebanese government declared a day of mourning. Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri visited the airport to meet distraught relatives waiting for news of survivors, some of whom were angry that the plane was allowed to take off in bad weather.
"They should have delayed the flight for an hour or two to protect the passengers. There had been strong lightning bolts and we hear that lightning strikes at planes especially during take-offs," a relative of one of the passengers told a local television station.
Girma said he did not think the crew would have taken off in dangerous weather conditions.
"There was bad weather. How bad it is, I will not be able to say. But, from what I see, probably it was manageable weather otherwise the crew would not have taken off," he told reporters in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
A 14-strong investigation team from Ethiopia including Ethiopian Airlines officials arrived by plane in Beirut to help probe the causes of the crash.
Boeing said it was coordinating with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board to assist Lebanese authorities in the investigation.
U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon, Cypriot police, the British military stationed in Cyprus and the U.S. navy provided helicopters, ships and divers to aid search and rescue.
State-owned Ethiopian Airlines has positioned itself as a major player in international air traffic in Africa and has recently expanded its Asian network.
Girma said the plane, built in 2002, last underwent a maintenance check on Dec. 25 and no technical problems were found. The plane had been leased from a division of U.S. financing company CIT Group.
Ethiopian airlines has regular flights to Lebanon, catering for business clients and the thousands of Ethiopians who work there as domestic helpers. Lebanese aviation sources said some of the passengers had been en route to Angola and other African countries.
Last Friday the airline announced an order for 10 of Boeing's Next-Generation 737-800s for a total price of $767 million.
The last incident involving Ethiopian Airlines was in Nov. 1996 when 125 of the 175 passengers and crew died after a hijacked Boeing 767 crashed off the Comoros Islands.
The crash is the fifth incident involving the loss of a Boeing 737-800, according to the Flight Safety Foundation.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowInfluenza-like illnesses (ILIs) are caused by several respiratory pathogens. These pathogens show weak to strong seasonal activity implying seasonality in ILI consultations. In this paper, the contribution of pathogens to seasonality of ILI consultations was statistically modelled. Virological count data were first smoothed using modulation models for seasonal time series. Second, Poisson regression was used regressing ILI consultation counts on the smoothed time series. Using ratios of the estimated regression parameters, relative measures of the underreporting of pathogens were obtained. Influenza viruses A and B, parainfluenza virus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) significantly contributed to explain the seasonal variation in ILI consultations. We also found that RSV was the least and influenza virus A is the most underreported pathogen in Belgian laboratory surveillance. The proposed methods and results are helpful in interpreting the data of clinical and laboratory surveillance, which are the essential parts of influenza surveillance.
In this study, the pathogens’ contribution to seasonal variation in ILI was statistically modelled, using data from two independent surveillance systems in Belgium. Data from both clinical sentinel surveillance [ 17 ], and laboratory sentinel surveillance were used in monitoring trends of different respiratory pathogens [ 18 ]. The pathogens’ contribution to the seasonality of ILI was estimated using smooth modulation models for seasonal time series [ 19 ] and Poisson models regressing the number of ILI consultations in the number of laboratory reports for various respiratory pathogens. Epidemiological interpretations in terms of relative measures of underreported pathogens were obtained by using ratios of estimated Poisson regression parameters.
Respiratory pathogens other than influenza are generally not monitored by combined influenza surveillance [ 5, 6 ]. However, such pathogens might also cause ILI, resulting in poor to moderate positive predictive values of ILI diagnoses of laboratory-confirmed influenza infections [ 10 – 12 ]. In particular, along with influenza viruses A and B, parainfluenza virus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), adenovirus and Mycoplasma pneumoniae are regarded as other important respiratory pathogens with the potential to cause ILI. For most of these respiratory pathogens seasonality has been consistently observed, although the driving mechanisms are still poorly understood [ 13 ]. A typical example of a seasonal infectious disease is influenza. Annual influenza epidemics commonly occur during the winter season in temperate regions of the world with varying onset, duration and severity [ 14 ]. Moreover, the incidence of RSV varies conspicuously by season, showing distinct seasonal patterns in different countries [ 15, 16 ]. Such seasonality in pathogen activity naturally implies seasonality in ILI consultations.
Influenza surveillance is implemented by many national and international authorities throughout the world [ 5, 6 ]. The World Health Organization (WHO) stresses the importance of influenza surveillance activities for the annual determination of influenza vaccine content and as an indispensable tool for pandemic preparedness [ 7 ]. A standard tool for monitoring influenza activity is the combination of virological and clinical surveillance by a network of sentinel practitioners [ 5, 6 ]. As a tool for detection of the first circulating viruses, virological surveillance allows the characterization of strains by monitoring the rates of influenza virus positivity. Clinical surveillance is based on consultations for influenza-like illness (ILI), which is a clinical diagnosis of a set of common aspecific symptoms. These symptoms include typical clinical features of influenza, although heterogeneous case definitions are used [ 8 ]. The combination of virological and clinical surveillance is generally considered to be the most accurate tool for monitoring influenza activity [ 9 ].
Influenza is a common infectious disease, which has an important impact on society each year [ 1 ]. The typical clinical features of influenza disease include fever, respiratory symptoms, headache, muscle ache and fatigue [ 2 ]. In most cases, the influenza disease is self-limiting but it can evolve to life-threatening medical complications [ 3 ]. Recently, influenza has been identified as one of the three infectious diseases causing the highest burden in Europe, along with HIV infection and tuberculosis [ 4 ]. Moreover, genetic reassortments and mutations of influenza viruses might lead to the emergence of pandemics during which the rates of morbidity and mortality increase further.
where 1/π inflA ≡ ϕ inflA is the factor needed to correct for underreporting of diseases due to influenza A and similarly, 1/π RSV ≡ ϕ RSV is the factor needed to correct for underreporting of diseases due to RSV. Hence, Φ inflA should be interpreted as the factor needed to correct for underreporting of influenza A diseases relative to the factor needed to correct for underreporting of RSV.
where, π ILI /π inflA ≡ α inflA, π ILI /π inflB ≡ α inflB, etc. It should be noted that equation ( 4 ) is of the same form as equation ( 1 ), implying that the parameters α can be estimated as explained above. The additivity of the model given in equation ( 4 ) also explains the choice of the identity link. Indeed, using the identity link in Poisson regression gives rise to an additive interpretation of the parameters α whereas the commonly used log-link gives rise to a multiplicative interpretation [ 22 ].
However, the total number of cases N(t) in a given population is typically unknown as a result of underreporting. Instead, the number of reported cases R(t) is observed. Assuming that the reporting probability π is constant over time, it follows that R(t) = πN(t). Hence, rewriting equation ( 2 ) in terms of the number of reported cases R(t) assuming disease- or pathogen-specific reporting probabilities gives
Introducing some notation, we allow N(t) ILI to denote the total number of ILI cases in a given population as a function of time t. Similarly, we denote the total number of illness cases due to influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza virus, RSV and M. pneumoniae as N(t) inflA, N(t) inflB, N(t) para, N(t) RSV and N(t) myco, respectively. Then, assuming that no other pathogens are causing ILI, it immediately follows that
Second, the ILI consultation counts X were linearly regressed on the smoothed predictions of the five respiratory pathogens, Y 1, Y 2, …, Y 5, to assess the pathogens’ contribution to the seasonal variation in ILI. To this end, the Poisson quasi-likelihood with deviance-based correction for overdispersion and identity link was used, as it had the expected ILI counts
The clinical and five virological time series were first smoothed, with the aim of revealing the essential (non-parametric) patterns while suppressing excessive variations. Smoothing techniques are increasingly popular because they provide a statistical tool to graphically explore the data and allow modelling of the data when classical parametric models fail [ 21 ]. Because the virological and clinical time series exhibit irregular seasonal variation, the time trends were smoothed using modulation models for seasonal time series [ 19 ]. In these models, the overall time trend is modelled using an intercept and the periodicity is modelled using sine and cosine regressors. The coefficients of the intercept, sine and cosine regressors are allowed to vary smoothly over time. This permits the modelling of global time trends and varying onset, duration and severity of incidence peaks over time (for details, see Eilers et al. [ 19 ]). Because the clinical data X is a time series of counts exhibiting overdispersion, the Poisson quasi-likelihood with log-link and deviance-based correction for overdispersion was used [ 19 ]. In particular, the Poisson expectation was modelled as a smooth function of time t using a basis of 30 B splines of third degree for the intercept, sine and cosine regressors and second-order smoothness penalties. The optimal smoothness parameters were selected using quasi-Akaike's Information Criteria [ 19 ]. For each of the five respiratory pathogens, smooth functions Y i with i = 1, 2, …, 5 were obtained similarly.
Data on all pathogens available that potentially cause ILI were extracted from the Belgian sentinel laboratory surveillance database. In particular, data on the weekly number of samples that tested positive for influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza, RSV and M. pneumoniae were obtained for the period from January 2004 to December 2008, resulting in 260 measurement points for each of the five pathogens as the time series are complete.
The sentinel laboratory network, coordinated by WIV-ISP, has collected data on about 40 infectious diseases since 1983 [ 18 ]. In 2009, 100 laboratories, representing 58% of all Belgian laboratories, participated to the surveillance system on a voluntary basis. The participating private or hospital laboratories are evenly distributed over 33 out of 43 administrative districts in Belgium. These laboratories receive biological samples from routine diagnostic testing at GP practices, hospitals, care homes, etc. On a weekly basis, the laboratories send anonymized data to WIV-ISP using an electronic system (Epi-Lab), internet application or registration form. The incidence of different infections, which includes respiratory infections, is monitored using this surveillance system, allowing for the detection of changes in time or geographical trends.
The counts of ILI consultations were extrapolated to the whole Belgian population to adjust for changes in the size of the represented patient population as a result of changes in the number of GPs reporting over time. In total, data for 214 measurements were available. For the years preceding 2007, ILI consultations were not monitored outside the influenza season, resulting in incomplete time series.
The clinical data on ILI consultations from January 2004 to December 2008 were extracted from the General Practitioners (GPs) influenza surveillance database, which is obtained through a weekly registration network of GPs coordinated by the Belgian Scientific Institute of Public Health (WIV-ISP) [ 17 ]. This database contains, among others, weekly information on the number of ILI consultations with the case definition for ILI being sudden onset of illness, associated with fever, respiratory and general symptoms. Since October 2007, data have been collected by the Belgian sentinel GPs network, in which about 180 GPs participate. The participating GPs cover 1.75% of the total Belgian patient population and are representative of the profile of family physicians in Belgium in terms of age, sex and geographical location [ 20 ]. Before October 2007, data were collected by a smaller network of 40–80 GPs.
gives a graphical representation of the Poisson regression model given in equation ( 4 ). The smoothed time series of the respiratory pathogens, Y i (i = 1, 2, …, 5), are jointly presented in a. To predict the ILI consultations, the smoothed time series are first rescaled using regression weights α i ( b). Then these rescaled time series α i Y i are summed to predict the ILI consultation counts. The predicted curve and its 95% confidence interval are presented by the dark grey area in c. As can be seen from (b, c), the peaks in ILI consultations are mainly explained by influenza virus A and, to a lesser extent, by influenza virus B. Furthermore, (b, c) suggests that the excess in ILI consultations before the onset of the influenza epidemic is mainly explained by RSV. By means of comparison, the smoothed time series of ILI consultations is also presented in c (light grey area). As can be seen, both the smoothed ILI curve as well as the ILI curve, as predicted based on the smoothed time series of the respiratory pathogens, are nicely overlapping. This observation is well in line with the obtained pseudo-R 2 value for the overdispersed Poisson regression model [ 24 ], i.e. R 2 = 0·82, indicating that ILI seasonality is well predicted by the seasonality of the respiratory pathogens.
The results of the multiple Poisson model regressing the ILI consultation counts on the smoothed time series of influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza, RSV and M. pneumoniae are given in. As can be seen, all respiratory pathogens except M. pneumoniae, significantly contribute in explaining the seasonal variation in ILI consultations. The results for the ratios Φ of factors correcting for underreporting with RSV as reference are given in the last two columns. The 95% confidence intervals are obtained using Fieller's method [ 23 ]. The ratios Φ indicate that diseases due to RSV were the least underreported by Belgian laboratory surveillance whereas diseases due to influenza viruses A and B were the most underreported.
From the laboratory reports, RSV (54·42%) was the most commonly reported pathogen during 2004–2008, consecutively followed by M. pneumoniae (31·52%), influenza virus A (7·10%), parainfluenza virus (4·79%) and influenza virus B (2·20%). (a–e) presents the weekly number of laboratory reports of influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza virus, RSV, and M. pneumoniae, respectively, together with the smoothed time series and 95% confidence intervals. Clearly, strong seasonality can be observed for influenza virus A, influenza virus B and RSV with the RSV peaks preceding those of influenza viruses A and B. Weaker seasonality can be observed for parainfluenza and M. pneumoniae with the latter showing a clearly decreasing trend over time. f presents the weekly number of ILI consultations, also showing strong seasonality, that most closely coincides with the seasonal patterns of the influenza viruses.
DISCUSSION
In this study, the contribution of respiratory pathogens to the seasonal variation in ILI consultations was statistically modelled using data from the Belgian clinical and laboratory sentinel surveillance systems, which are two independent surveillance systems. The statistical methods were smooth modulation models for seasonal time series and Poisson regression with correction for overdispersion.
Methods regressing syndromic incidence data on the number of laboratory reports have been used previously. Linear regression methods have been used, among others, to assess the burden of influenza in terms of general practice consultations, hospital admissions and deaths [25], in order to estimate the contribution of different respiratory pathogens to the seasonality of NHS Direct respiratory calls [26] and to validate other syndromic surveillance systems (e.g. absenteeism, pharmacy sales, laboratory submissions) for their capability of capturing respiratory pathogen activity [27]. More evolved regression methods have been used recently by Yang et al. [28], who used wavelet analysis to investigate the synchrony of clinical and laboratory surveillance in Hong Kong. The method we propose has the advantage of providing solid epidemiological interpretations. By using ratios of the estimated regression parameters, relative factors of disease underreporting by laboratory surveillance were obtained. Furthermore, the method allows interesting and interpretable visualizations of the model results.
The model results indicate that, in line with previous research, significant contributions were found for influenza viruses A and B, parainfluenza virus and RSV [12]. The contribution of M. pneumoniae was not found to be significant. The peaks of ILI consultations were mainly explained by influenza virus A and, to a lesser extent, by influenza virus B, whereas the excess in ILI consultations prior to the onset of the influenza epidemic was explained by RSV. A significant year round contribution was found for parainfluenza. By using ratios of the estimated regression parameters, we found that diseases due to RSV and M. pneumoniae were the least underreported by Belgian laboratory surveillance whereas diseases due to influenza viruses A and B were the most underreported. These large differences in relative measures of underreporting are due to case ascertainment bias and can be interpreted as a reflection of medical practice in Belgium. For instance, causes of childhood diseases are frequently tested, as a cautious principle of sampling is often adopted for young patients. RSV is such a childhood disease. Furthermore, the costs of RSV testing for children aged <2 years are reimbursed by compulsory Belgian medical insurance, explaining the (relatively) small amount of RSV underreporting. On the other hand, as ILI is a clinically based diagnosis with a symptom-related treatment, its causes are rarely tested during the influenza season, which explains the (relatively) large amount of underreporting for influenza viruses A and B. Causes of respiratory infections outside the influenza season could be more frequently tested, explaining the (relatively) small amount of underreporting for M. pneumoniae, being a non-seasonal virus circulating throughout the year.
The proposed regression model provides a good fit, indicating that ILI seasonality is well predicted by the seasonality of respiratory pathogens. This can also be regarded as a mutual validation of the independent clinical and laboratory surveillance systems. The model relies on two important assumptions. First, it is assumed that the pathogen-specific reporting probabilities are constant over time. This assumption seems epidemiologically plausible and, moreover, is hard to relax as it could lead to non-identifiable regression models. The second assumption that all ILI cases are caused by a limited set of respiratory pathogens (i.e. influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza virus, RSV, M. pneumoniae) is obviously not correct. However, other pathogens with the potential to cause ILI are not monitored by Belgian laboratory surveillance and hence, could not be included in the regression model. Instead, an intercept might be included to implicitly account for the pathogens for which no or only limited information is available. However, this assumes that the contribution of these unknown or missing pathogens to ILI consultations is constant over time, which is clearly not the case. By excluding the intercept, as done in the current study, the model predictions are likely to locally underestimate the observed number of ILI consultations. These underestimations are informative, suggesting the activity of an unknown or missing pathogen. Future research might attempt to discover an explanation for the observed underestimation using other databases or published studies. For the Belgian data, such an underestimation was observed prior to the influenza epidemic of 2008 (see c), but could not be explained.
To conclude, the seasonality of ILI is well predicted by the seasonality of influenza viruses A and B, parainfluenza and RSV. In addition, relative factors of underreporting of respiratory pathogens in laboratory surveillance have been obtained indicating that RSV is the least and influenza A is the most underreported pathogen in Belgian laboratory surveillance. The results of this study are helpful in interpreting the data of clinical and laboratory surveillance, which are the essential parts of influenza sentinel surveillance. The proposed methods provide interesting epidemiological interpretations and are versatile. Future research might include an extension of the current analysis by including additional covariate information such as age and geographical location. Furthermore, although not explicitly investigated in this paper, the smooth modulation models for seasonal time series [19] allow the modelling of varying onset, duration and severity of the incidence peaks over time. Such an approach would yield interesting insights into the temporal variation in viral agents [29] and disease dynamics.India Ends Animal Testing for Household Products
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India is bringing in the “2” on a “1-2 punch” against animal testing. Last year India put an end to animal testing for cosmetics and now they’ve announced that there will be no more use of animals for the sake of household products.
The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) made the decision after some input from PETA India’s science policy adviser, Dr. Chaitanya Koduri, the only animal rights rep to sit in on the committee.
The committee decided to end the skin sensitization test that consists of rubbing harsh chemicals into a guinea pig’s shaved skin. Instead, “non-animal testing methods” will be used, as well as skin patch tests on humans. That certainly makes more sense since it’s humans using household cleaning products, not guinea pigs.
India now joins Israel as the only nations in the world to end animal testing on both cosmetics and household cleaning products. Way to go, India! And big thanks to PETA India for their work in this matter. Their next goal is to urge India to ban the sale of all cosmetics and household cleaners tested on animals.
Related on Ecorazzi:
+Sao Paulo, Brazil Bans Animal Testing with Hefty Fines
+India Bans Animal Testing for Cosmetic Products
+Brazilian Activists Liberate 200 Lab Beagles
Photo credit: Shutterstock.comHi,I tried googling my answer, and some said it was related to encryption, but my drives are not encrypted so the jails should be able to auto reload to my limited understanding. When setting it up I followed this guide here:My goal was to just create a FreeNAS server to host my plex media server from. So after a few hours I had more or less everything working, I was able to access all the plugins I needed externally, things were auto DLing and copying over but when I was adding a password to headphones I put the external IP address in and it wouldn't turn back on after the service shut off. A few hours later after my data transfer finished and I tried restarting the whole server. When I restarted the server now none of my previously installed plugins will boot. When I try to enable a service it says "Some error occured" and just won't turn on. At the end, I would like to to be able to reboot and auto enable these jails since I do not plan on keeping this server somewhere I can easily access it, so I want to get it configured than be more or less hands off.Thanks for the help!Bad news comes from the set of The Maze Runner: The Death Cure today as franchise star Dylan O’Brien was injured during production on the sequel bring directed by Wes Ball in British Columbia. Production has been halted after O’Brien was taken to the hospital to be treated, but there are conflicting reports as to the extent of his injuries and how they came to be.
Find out more about the Dylan O’Brien injury on The Maze Runner set after the jump.
TMZ was first to report news of Dylan O’Brien getting injured, saying that the actor was run over by a car during a stunt scene that went wrong. The gossip site said O’Brien was severely injured, saying that he had several broken bones. However, an official statement says that O’Brien was injured yesterday during production without citing specific details:
“Dylan O’Brien was injured yesterday while filming Maze Runner: The Death Cure in Vancouver, Canada. He was immediately transferred to a local hospital for observation and treatment. Production on the film will be shut down while he recovers. Our thoughts go out to Dylan for a full and speedy recovery.”
20th Century Fox doesn’t mention any “severe” injury or broken bones, but the studio probably wouldn’t want to be forthcoming about those kind of details concerning the private health matters of one of their actors.
However, Deadline seems to have heard more specifics on the injury as they say “O’Brien apparently fell off the back of a set that was supposed to look like the back of a train” and that’s how he fractured either his cheekbone or orbital socket. The details on that front are still uncertain. The only thing certain is that the film is on hiatus while O’Brien recovers.
For anyone worried about the well-being of O’Brien, The Maze Runner writer James Dashner posted a couple updates to Twitter to put fans at ease:
I just want to let everyone know that yes, Dylan was hurt, but that he’s going to be okay. Not life threatening in any way. — James Dashner (@jamesdashner) March 18, 2016
Production is postponed but certainly not cancelled. All that matters now is that Dylan recovers. We love you, Dylan!!! — James Dashner (@jamesdashner) March 18, 2016
Just because the injury isn’t life-threatening doesn’t mean it’s not bad news. Surely, O’Brien would rather be back at work rather than getting observed and recovering in a hospital. But we’re just happy to hear that O’Brien is all right and hope he will be back at work soon.
The Maze Runner: The Death Cure had previously been set for a February 17, 2017 release, but it’s not clear if that date will have to be delayed after this setback. As soon as we get more details on the extent of the production delay, we’ll let you know.Father in Turkey’s remote southeast makes model Bosphorus Bridge for curious daughter
HAKKARİ
A father in the southeastern province of Hakkari who could not afford to take his daughter to Istanbul has made a makeshift model of the city’s Bosphorus Bridge for the girl, who has long wanted to see it.Aydın Güder, who lives with his family in the Yüksekova district of Hakkari, built a miniature replica of the Bosphorus Bridge using curtain materials and umbrellas for his daughter Yağmur, also adding lighting and seagull sounds to make the model more realistic.“I cannot take her to Istanbul due to financial difficulties. So I made a model of the Bosphorus Bridge for her, because she said me she wanted to see the bridge and hear the voices of seagulls. It took two-and-a-half days to complete, and it is two meters and ten centimeters long,” Güder said.After news of the model was reported, the Youth and Sports Ministry issued a statement on June 18 saying it would sponsor a trip to bring Yağmur and her classmates to Istanbul, state-run Anadolu Agency has reported.Story highlights U.S. airstrikes destroy 90 targets in Mosul dam fight, Pentagon says
Ridding Iraq of ISIS forces a must for U.S., expert says
ISIS threatens "America will disappear from map"
Dam battle shows Kurdish, Iraqi forces can take the fight to ISIS, President Obama says
U.S. airstrikes helped Kurdish and Iraqi forces take control of Mosul Dam on Monday, fighting back ISIS militants who had seized the dam, President Obama told reporters.
The stakes were huge for the millions of Iraqis who live downstream from the dam, the largest in the country.
"If that dam was breached it could have proven catastrophic, with floods that would have threatened the lives of thousands of civilians and endangered our embassy compound in Baghdad," the President said.
The dam has been the center of an intense battle in northern Iraq between the Islamic extremists and Kurdish forces that had been fighting to retake it since Saturday with U.S. air support.
"The U.S. military used fighters, bombers, attack and unmanned aircraft to conduct 35 strikes, " said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby. "We destroyed over 90 targets including a range of vehicles, equipment and fighting positions," he said.
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Now that the dam is cleared of ISIS militants, Iraqi forces are moving to grow their area of control, the Pentagon said.
"This operation demonstrates that Iraqi and Kurdish forces are capable of working together and taking the fight to ISIS," Obama said. "If they continue to do so, they will have the strong support of the United States of America."
Taking the fight to ISIS
U.S. airstrikes may not be enough to do the job of ridding Iraq of ISIS forces, said retired Col. Cedric Leighton, a former Air Force intelligence officer.
"At the core of the mission is to get rid of ISIS," he said. "The U.S. cannot have a Middle East in which ISIS exists," he said.
The brutal attacks of ISIS militants as they took control of towns and villages in northern Iraq forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee.
"ISIS tells people to pay or convert," said one Christian man who fled ISIS forces.
A Christian village near Mosul Dam is almost deserted. Some of its residents fled just in time to a monastery in the mountains.
Now she said she hopes ISIS fighters won't reach the monastery.
The U.S. strategy in fighting ISIS is "to take out Isis' leadership, to degrade their operational capabilities, to cut off their financing sources," U.S State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Monday.
On several ISIS websites, the group posted a message Monday threatening that "America will disappear from the map soon on the hands of knights of al-Khilafa," a reference to the caliphate ISIS claims it wants to recapture.
Water in war
When ISIS militants seized the dam this month, many feared it could be used as a weapon.
Built in the early 1980s under former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the dam sits on the Tigris River about 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of the city of Mosul. It serves as a key source of electricity, irrigation and flood protection.
ISIS has a track record of attacking its enemies with water.
This year, its fighters opened the gates on the Falluja Dam in central Iraq after seizing it in an effort to stop an Iraqi military advance. The water from the dam flooded a number of villages.
"ISIS has already used other smaller dams to gain control of territory, to pressure Sunnis to support them and to punish the Shiites," Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, told CNN this month.
The 3.2-kilometer-long Mosul Dam holds back as much as 12.5 million cubic meters of water, according to Engineering News-Record, a construction industry website.
If the structure were to give way, it would unleash a wall of water tens of feet tall that would race down the Tigris toward Mosul and its 1.7 million inhabitants. It would also bring flooding to major cities farther downstream, including Baghdad.
'Very poor foundation'
But even if the militant group doesn't try to destroy the dam, concerns remain about its sturdiness.
A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report in 2006 said that what made the dam especially dangerous was the risk of internal erosion of its foundations.
The structure is built on layers of soil that dissolve or erode in water.
The Army Corps said the dam was "constructed on a very poor foundation" that wasn't designed for the conditions.
Seepage has plagued the structure since the reservoir behind it was filled, according to a U.S. government report in 2007, and sinkholes have appeared near the structure, suggesting problems beneath the surface.
During the American military occupation of Iraq, U.S. authorities spent tens of millions of dollars on short-term repairs on the dam.
But with the immense structure now in the midst of a conflict zone, it remains unclear if it will get the maintenance it needs anytime soon.DALTONGANJ: A 25-year-old rape survivor from Palamu on Monday tried to make her point in the court of justice by ending her life.The girl, who was raped in 2011, was at the Palamu civil court for hearing in the case. After the principal district and sessions judge finished listening to her prosecution lawyer |
allo said. (Connery’s suit was equipped with a parachute, though it was not used.)
Although suit design was important, much relied on pilot skill. “You need at least 200 jumps before you can do a wing-suit jump, then at least 200 more wing-suit jumps before you can get this kind of wing suit,” Uragallo said. “It’s nothing like a student wing suit.”
Shortly after watching Connery’s flight on video back in Florida, Uragallo scrambled to buy Champagne for his staff to celebrate their work on the suit.
“I’m as high as a kite,” Uragallo said.
Back in England, Connery gathered with friends at Chocolate Theater Cafe, a coffee shop he and his wife, Vivienne, own. She was on hand Wednesday afternoon and the first to receive a dispatch via walkie-talkie that her husband in the nearby cardboard boxes had landed safely.
Late Wednesday, Connery was already considering his next stunt.
“I do have something else in the pipeline for the future,” he said. “But for now, it’s very secret.”Star Trek: Discovery, debuting this weekend on CBS and CBS All Access, marks the first bit of Star Trek television since Enterprise was canceled in 2005. It also marks a number of milestones for the legendary sci-fi franchise — from prominent firsts like casting a woman of color in the lead role and featuring the first openly gay character in Star Trek history to more subtle tweaks, like having two different captains on the show and a fresh-faced Starfleet cadet in the main cast.
With Sonequa Martin-Green (The Walking Dead) starring as First Officer Michael Burnham, a black woman Starfleet officer who’s poised to have her own command, and Anthony Rapp (the original cast of Rent on Broadway) playing Lt. Paul Stamets, an astromycologist and a gay man who is in a committed long-term relationship with another officer on the ship, Discovery is clearly making an effort to be the most representative Star Trek series in the franchise’s 50-year history. To discuss these landmark developments, Vox spoke to Discovery’s two showrunners, Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts, as well as Rapp, about what to expect.
The following interviews have been combined and edited for length and clarity.
On developing the character of Paul Stamets, who is gay, and casting Rapp in the role
Because no Star Trek TV series has ever featured a gay character, Discovery’s writers devoted extra care to developing Stamets, whom Rapp describes as “caustic.”
Gretchen Berg
[The character is] named after a real person. [The real Paul Stamets is] a mycologist, and our Paul is also an astromycologist, which means he studies mushrooms and fungi, but of the universe. It actually goes all the way back to [original Discovery showrunner] Bryan Fuller, who always leans into the sciences and sci-fi.... The real Paul Stamets has a great TED talk that you can find online if you want to know more about the background of the inspiration for the character.
Actually, we [originally] had Anthony in a different role, and it was a smaller role. And I think when we [were casting that smaller role] we were like, "Oh, we're going to go after Anthony Rapp." And then we got Anthony Rapp. And then [when it was time to cast Stamets] we're like, "Wait a minute. We have Anthony Rapp!"
Aaron Harberts
The thing that was always important was that an out gay actor played this part. Everybody just wanted to stick to their guns in that way. To tell you the truth, Anthony was that, [which made us realize] that he'd be great for Stamets. It's hard to find a lot of out gay male actors.
Anthony Rapp
I got a late-night email. I actually went back and looked at it again just the other day because I was curious. I checked my email before I went to bed, and it was 11:30 New York time, pm. And it was from my manager saying, “Are you interested in being part of the new Star Trek?” And I didn't even know there was a new Star Trek. So that made my head explode. It was an offer, which almost never happens in my experience in television — at least for me. I was like, “Of course!” In that case, it was a small role, but I was like, “Yeah! I'll do anything! I'd love to be part of this. That'd be really exciting.”
So that was it. I was super thrilled. I had to sign an NDA [nondisclosure agreement] just to look at the material, and the material was also transmitted to me in an app that self-destructed within 24 to 48 hours. Not the app, but the material self-destructed.
And I couldn't tell anybody either. Obviously I could tell my boyfriend, but that was it.
Then it was another four weeks. [Then one day] my phone rings, and it's my agent, Sarah, and she's like, “They want to upgrade you and make you a regular.”
I never auditioned! It's so insane. And it was thrilling, but the whole thing dropped out of the sky. It has completely transformed my life already. I got a peak experience a little over 20 years ago with Rent. Truly, as an actor, it was everything I would've dreamed, everything I would've wanted to been a part of. And now this has come along, and it absolutely is rivaling it in all sorts of ways. And the fact that it came so unexpectedly feels kinda like a showbiz miracle.
Aaron Harberts
Literally the second we started thinking about it, thinking, "We've got an out gay actor. Why not let him carry the torch for the gay community?" And then hiring Wilson [Cruz] to play [Stamets’s] partner was also really great for us because it allowed two gay men to do what many gay men aren't able to do, which is play a gay. Often those roles are given to straight guys.
On the importance of portraying Stamets as very “normal” and giving him a boyfriend who appears onscreen
Wilson Cruz plays the role of Dr. Hugh Culber, a medical officer on the Discovery who’s also in a romantic relationship with Stamets.
Aaron Harberts
Well, for me, I'm a gay man, and I grew up on television during my coming-out period, which was actually high school, in the late '80s, early '90s. And I remember there was not a lot of visibility. Gay characters tended to be either dying of AIDS or were sort of a punchline, or were portrayed in a way that felt very sexually lascivious, perhaps. There wasn't a lot of visibility in terms of a stable relationship that, frankly, was boring. You know? And that changed a lot later into the '90s, but even in, like, 1995 or '96, before Will & Grace, there's still wasn't a lot of visibility. I remember when Ellen came out. That wasn't that long ago.
I guess, and I'm just speaking from my own experience, what has always been important to me when we do develop gay characters is that they feel like they are just as normal as anybody else. [Stamets and Culber are in] a long-term relationship. We think they've been together for at least three years when we find them. They cohabitate on the ship. We introduce them as people first, and then as a couple. There's not a big drop in terms of, "They're out. They're gay."
Gretchen Berg
It's not some sort of defining characteristic of either of them. Just like many times in life, you're out in the world and you meet people in your sphere. Then as you get to know the personal details of their life, that's one of the things that comes out, pardon the pun. To me, what's nice about it is they're just so woven into the fabric of the community, the crew of the Starfleet ship. Aaron used the word "boring"; we use that in such a loving way, but it's true. They're just like everybody else.
Aaron Harberts
What's fun is that we meet them the way you would meet any couple, which is brushing their teeth. That's how we establish they're a couple. They're living in the same quarters, and they're brushing their teeth. To me, who can't relate to that? They're just like anybody else. But where we take the relationship, it just transcends the boundaries of space and time. And I think for young gay kids who are looking for representation, I'm really proud by what we've pulled off. Because it's not anything more than just a gay relationship that has the same status as any other relationship.
Anthony Rapp
So back in the day in Rent, I was the last of the principals to leave the original cast on Broadway. In the meantime, Wilson was in the second national tour, and I had met him then because I went out and I attended a rehearsal. I was already familiar with his work from my circle. But then toward the end of my run in Rent, he replaced Wilson Jermaine Heredia, the original Angel, who left three or four weeks before I left, so we shared the stage of Rent on Broadway for about two or three or four weeks, something like that.
The gift of being able to do scenes with Wilson — I've known him for 20 years, so we didn't have to do any homework to find a comfort with each other. It was just so easy to play these scenes with him.
On why there’s a cadet character in Star Trek: Discovery’s main cast, and how she serves as “the soul of [the] show”
Sylvia Tilly, played by Mary Wiseman, will be the first cadet character in Star Trek history to be part of the main cast. She’s also the first cadet to play a major role on a Star Trek series since Nog, a recurring character on Deep Space Nine.
Gretchen Berg
Well, I think just going back to that whole idea of we really wanted to represent everybody on this show. This is somebody who is fresh out of graduating from Starfleet Academy, and she has stars in her eyes, and we wanted that person at the very bottom of this ladder to be represented. She also plays a part in the fact that we wanted somebody who will also play a protégé and really start them on their journey. One of her characteristics is that she's the most optimistic. She has the biggest heart, I think, of anybody that you'll meet on the series. We're never playing her as a dopey innocent. I think that's where she is in her life, and I think that's also who she will continue to be as a character and as a human being. Mary Wiseman, who plays her, is a delight.
Aaron Harberts
The story for our main character, Michael Burnham, is that she thought her life was going one way and she makes a choice and her life is taken way off course. We also really like the idea that, ironically enough, this first officer in Starfleet has to get schooled in what it means to be a human. [Burnham is a human, but she was raised on Vulcan by Sarek, Spock’s father, after her parents died.] So we have this cadet character who you think Burnham will be teaching everything to, but Tilly — she's sort of the soul of our show in a lot of ways. She's got a lot to teach Burnham, and Burnham has a lot to teach her. It's a best friendship that is, I don't want to say they're different generations, but it's a great representation of a friendship, of two people who are in different stages of their lives.
On Star Trek: Discovery’s female friendships
In the past, Star Trek series have placed far greater emphasis on male friendships: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in The Original Series; Data and Geordi in The Next Generation; Bashir and O’Brien in Deep Space Nine; Harry and Tom in Voyager; and Trip and Archer in Enterprise. Berg and Harberts say that will be a change with Discovery.
Gretchen Berg
At the core of the show there are many female friendships.
Aaron Harberts
It's so important for us, the relationship between [Captain Philippa Georgiou, played by Michelle Yeoh], who would be at the top as a captain, Sonequa's character Michael, who's in the middle, and then Cadet Tilly, who's at the bottom. That is definitely a friendship structure that has always been important to us. They're great characters, and I think everybody is going to really enjoy watching them. I think anyone will enjoy the friendship. I don't think you have to be a woman to like it. But I think it's very cool that these female characters really have each other's backs.
On why Discovery’s lead character isn’t starting the show as a captain
While Sonequa Martin-Green’s Michael Burnham will be the first woman of color to lead a Star Trek show, this will be the second time a Star Trek show has had its main character start as a commander instead of a captain. (Deep Space Nine’s Benjamin Sisko, played by Avery Brooks, in Deep Space Nine was the first.)
Gretchen Berg
For us, it had to do with being a serialized show. In the past, we felt like when you met a lot of the people on the bridge, they were kinda fully baked and we know who they were right off the top. We wanted to take our lead character on a journey, and so in order to take her on a journey, she couldn't have already achieved all her goals and finished all the wants and needs in her life. We wanted everybody to go on a journey with her, quite frankly.
Aaron Harberts
The Discovery title is really thematic for us. As we were saying earlier, Michael thought she knew what she wanted and what she was gonna get, and now she doesn't, and she has a place to go. As Gretchen was saying, having Discovery be serialized, you really get to watch that journey.
On why the Klingon character L’Rell (Mary Chieffo) may get more development than any other female Klingon in Star Trek history
So far, all signs point to the Klingons being Discovery’s main antagonists. Historically, the most prominent Klingon characters have all been male.
Gretchen Berg
One of the things we wanted to do was to not play the Klingons as the thugs of the universe. When you start watching, L'Rell goes on this fascinating journey from — I almost just blurted out her entire storyline. I'm not going to do that. But she is somebody to watch. The character is somebody that we're very, very proud of, and we wanted to show that there's a lot of duality that's going on. Both sides are represented. What it means to be proud in being in Starfleet and what it means to be proud in being a Klingon, L'Rell is the poster child for that.
Aaron Harberts
You don't see a lot of development for female Klingons. She is really going to go on a journey. I feel like we've got such great actors and such great representation, as Gretchen was saying, on both sides. We dig as much into the Klingons as we do in Starfleet in a lot of ways.
On how Discovery's two different captains will embody humanity’s different reactions to war
When we first meet Burnham, she’s serving on a different ship, the Shenzhou, as first officer under Captain Georgiou. It’s unclear how she’ll ultimately end up serving aboard the Discovery under Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), or what Georgiou’s specific role will be on the show when that happens. But both captains will be major influences on Burnham’s life.
Gretchen Berg
One of the backdrops of the show this season is war. And what we have in these two captains are two people who both have experienced war and know it and lived it firsthand and haven't just studied it in books. And they both have very different attitudes about it. Georgiou, for us, is a person who has seen all the atrocities in life, and she's made the decision that she's still going to see the sunshine and light and goodness in the universe.
Lorca, on the other hand, in the heat of battle, you'll see that he has a practicality of somebody who is able to have a little more of a black-and-white attitude: "In order to survive [war], we have to do drastic things."
War is horrible and it's awful. Our focus was that it's not that easy to handle a situation like this. And we're living in those times right now. [It was just in the news] that people in Japan were taking cover because there were missiles [being fired] from North Korea. It's terrifying. It brings out a different version of ourselves when you're staring in the face of that kind of world-changing event.
Aaron Harberts
Not only are we taking our characters on a journey, but we're taking Starfleet on a journey of discovery. I think that Georgiou represents the Starfleet that we all know and love and are comfortable with. That is, as Gretchen said, hopeful and optimistic. And Lorca represents a more mysterious, complicated version of a Starfleet captain who can almost only exist during a time of war. So they're both allegories or metaphors for how people and institutions act in times of conflict and desperation.
Star Trek: Discovery debuts Sunday, September 24, on both CBS and the network’s subscription-based streaming service, CBS All Access. The show will then air exclusively on CBS All Access beginning October 1.One woman learned the hard way that the quest for beauty can come at a high cost.
Apryl Brown, 47, lost her arms, legs, and the flesh around her buttocks after injecting fillers into her posterior in an effort to get rid of her flat butt.
In 2004, Brown was a successful hairstylist and happy mother of two. But despite living the good life, the 47-year-old still had an itch to fix the one “flaw” she was teased about as a child – her butt. So when a client walked in one day offering her a silicon injection for cheap, she jumped at the idea.
Brown received her first four injections a week later. Unfortunately, after her second appointment, Brown was already regretting her decision. “A voice just came to me like, 'What are you doing? Are you serious? You are going to allow somebody to inject something into your body and you have no idea what it is.’”
After her moment of self-doubt, Brown stopped doing the treatments and never went back. Sadly, the consequences of her actions were felt a few years down the road.
“[My buttocks] started to get hard, and then they started to get discoloured,” she explained to The Daily Mail. “By 2006, it was starting to itch and by 2007, the pain started. One thing about pain is that you can't turn it off. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I couldn't even concentrate.”
Turns out Brown was injected with an industrial grade silicone most commonly used in bathroom sealant. As a result, in 2010, the cosmetologist was rushed to the hospital with a staph infection. The silicone injections were causing her limbs to turn black and curl. The mother of two even had visible signs of necrosis, which is when there is not enough blood flowing through the body tissue.
Despite her severe condition, doctors were able to miraculously save Brown’s life by amputating her hands, legs, and flesh around her hips and buttocks in 27 surgeries.
While this is just one case of plastic surgery gone terribly wrong, Dr. Richard Glogau, of the University of California in San Francisco, says he’s seen a disturbing trend in patients only turning to plastic surgeons to reverse botched filler injections.
This is happening because Botox and fillers are so readily available online and at cheaper costs, which makes it harder for people to walk away. Despite this, Glogau advises that these can’t always be trusted. The only way to truly know what is being injected in you is to have your surgery done by a doctor.
“People assume that it’s just as easy as getting your hair coloured,” Glogau said in regards to injections found online. “But at the end of the day it’s a medical procedure.”
After Brown’s entire ordeal, she remarkably isn’t looking for your sympathy. Instead, she’s using her story to warn people to do their research before making a decision as big as this.
“All I would ask them to do is, when you have that first thought, make sure they have a second thought about it and do a little research,” she said. “And if they still want to do it, go for it. They won't be blind sighted, saying, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea that a simple procedure like that can leave me with no hands, no feet and no butt cheeks.’”
Brown says she has learned her lesson and is spreading her new mantra in regards to cosmetic surgery. “We are enough,” she says, “and we were made to be enough.”
Also on HuffPostIt took 11 long years, but it looks like a majority of states are finally committing to addressing the problem of prison rape.
As of May 20, a majority of states plan to comply with the prison rape rules
Back in 2003, Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act — a bill to address a problem that, at the time, was little understood. But after that… nothing much seemed to happen for a while.
The federal government spent six years studying the problem — discovering that prison rape was shockingly widespread — and then took another three years writing rules to prevent prison rape that it hoped states might adopt.
The pivotal deadline, at last, came on May 15 of this year — the day that states had to either adopt the new regulations or promise to enact them. And for a while it looked like few states would actually do anything. Texas, for one, had already flatly refused to adopt the new rules. Other states griped that they were being asked to move too quickly. Things didn't look good.
In the end, though, the results were surprising: As of May 20, a majority of states have told the federal government they'll either comply with the prison-rape regulations or work toward compliance in the future, Vox has learned. That's according to Just Detention International, an advocacy group working with the government on the issue. (The Department of Justice has not released final numbers and has not yet responded for comment.)
The country is still a long way from curtailing the problem of prison rape. But as of this week a majority of states have agreed to three important things: prison rape is a serious problem; it's the responsibility of states and the federal government to fix it; and they can be held accountable for not doing what is in their power to do.
The prison rape problem
One of the longtime difficulties in talking about prison rape in the United States was that, historically, there hasn't been enough data to understand the problem. Back in 2003, the head of the American State Correctional Association could claim that "sexual assault in prison is greatly exaggerated" — and while Congress didn't find his claim persuasive, no one could offer numbers to rebut him.
4% of state and federal inmates reported being sexually victimized in 2011
Only after Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003 — which was intended to solve the problem of prison rape in state and federal prisons — did the government start collecting data that depicted how big the problem was to begin with.
The most recent federal survey found that 4 percent of all state and federal prison inmates reported being sexually victimized by another inmate or a staff member in 2011 — which comes out to over 87,000 victims of sexual assault in a single year.
Meanwhile, 2.2 percent of prison inmates and 1.7 percent of jail inmates reported that they were the victims of either a nonconsensual sexual act with another inmate, or unwanted sexual content with a staff member, in 2011. (For comparison, according to the FBI, the rate of "forcible rape" against all women in the United States was about.05 percent.)
The federal government's data shows that a little under half of all sexual assault was the result of abuse by staff. That's disturbing in that it shows widespread abuse of power in prisons — but it also means it might be easier for the government to fix the problem. After all, prison administrators have much more control over their own staff than they do over inmates themselves.
Why it took so long to come up with regulations
The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 didn't put specific requirements on prisons. Instead, it created a National Prison Rape Elimination Commission to figure out what sort of policies on prison rape prisons should implement — then told the federal government to turn those policies into regulations.
the rules to prevent prison rape moved forward at a glacial pace
The bill also made 5 percent of federal funding for state prisons conditional on whether they implemented onto those regulations or not.
The process sounds slow. In practice, it was glacial. The commission didn't even publish its recommendations until June 2009 — six years and one presidential administration after the law was passed.
Part of this was just bureaucratic slowness and foot-dragging. But part of it was that the commission had a difficult task. No one even knew how big a problem prison rape was in 2003 — let alone how to solve it. So the commission had to gather testimony from survivors, prison administrators and experts before publishing their report; the federal government then gathered input from state prison officials when formulating regulations.
The new policies to address prison rape
The commission had a few broad suggestions that formed the basis of the new regulations:
1) Inmate education. The new regulations require all prisons and jails to tell inmates when they arrive that they have a right to be free of sexual abuse, and let them know how they can report it if something does happen.
'People used to joke about sexual abuse in the yard — they don't anymore'
According to Jesse Lerner-Kinglake of Just Detention International, prison administrators recognize the value of this once they start doing it.
Prisons have also found that inmates themselves can be the best educators. One peer educator who led a series of workshops in California said, "People used to joke about sexual abuse in the yard. They don't do that anymore." Another told advocates, "It meant a lot more when I was telling them they had a right to be free from sexual abuse."
2) Support services. The proposed new principle for support services, according to Lerner-Kinglake, is that "the level of standards in prison" for victim services "should be the same as the level of standards in the community."
The easiest way to make sure that survivors in prison are getting cared for just as well as anyone else is to have the same organization responsible for both. That entails having prisons partner with rape crisis centers or similar organizations in their communities, so crisis center staffers can come into the prisons and work with inmates.
3) Limits on cross-gender patdowns and viewing. When the commission looked into some of the worst prisons for sexual abuse — including several Michigan women's prisons that were sued for sexual abuse in the 1990s — they found that the prisons required guards to pat down a certain number of inmates every day.
Because most prison guards have historically been men, this resulted in a lot of cross-gender physical contact, creating plenty of opportunities for abuse. In recent years, as the share of female prison guards has increased, there's also more risk of cross-gender touching for male prisoners.
The regulations also set strict limits on when a guard can see a prisoner of the opposite sex naked at all — which some prison administrators worry is going to be hard to do without discriminating against female guards in hiring.
4) Special protections for vulnerable populations — especially LGBT inmates. Lerner-Kinglake paints this as a simple matter of common sense. One of the members of a Just Detention International advisory group, he says, is "a gay man who was raped by his cellmate…who had a history of raping gay inmates. It should have been clear to staff that they should not have been housed together."
Transgender inmates can also be especially vulnerable in single-sex facilities — the commission's report makes it very clear that guards shouldn't be in the business of examining the genitals of transgender inmates unless they genuinely don't know the inmate's physical sex.
Why states took so long to comply
The final federal regulations were published in June 2012. At that point, states could figure out whether or not they'd be able to implement those regulations — and they had until May 15, 2014 to say whether they were planning on doing so. (Alternatively, they could reject the regulations and see a cut in federal funding.)
Until recently, it looked like many states wouldn't meet the may 15 deadline
Until very recently, it looked like many states weren't going to be ready to meet the May 15 deadline — even just to promise the feds that they'd be working to put the regulations in place.
One reason: the regulations required states to start auditing their prisons starting in August 2013, and to audit a third of all prisons each year — but the government didn't finish developing auditing forms auditors until this past April. (It's not clear how many prisons have been audited so far — only one facility, a juvenile detention center in Idaho, has published its audit results.)
Many states, for their part, felt that they were being ordered to approve regulations before they had any idea how close their prisons were to complying. In Texas, Governor Rick Perry complained that the Department of Justice hadn't listened to the states — despite the fact that his own state's department of criminal justice had worked very closely with the DOJ to develop the regulations. (Gov. Perry wrote a new letter last week, which reiterated that his state wouldn't be complying, but dropped the confrontational tone.)
Ultimately, though, states ended up complying. Today, Just Detention International reported that a majority of states have either certified that they're already complying, or promised to comply in future.
It's still not clear exactly how many states fall into each of those categories. But even if most states are just making the promise, that means that the question of how to stop prison rape is no longer simply academic. It's now something that states will be expected to know, and be working to stop.
Correction: This article originally attributed a comment advocates had received from a peer inmate educator as being from a prison administrator. The quote is now properly attributed.At age twenty-seven, Cassie De Pecol accomplished something remarkable. She became the first woman on record to travel to every country on Earth, and did it faster than anyone in history, male or female. She was inspired by her experiences on the Discovery Channel's Naked and Afraid: both the three weeks she spent in the Panamanian wilderness and the cyberbullying she endured after the show. And it opened her eyes to the need for women to make a difference in the world.
In Expedition 196, Cassie shares the secrets behind her personal triumphs and miraculous achievements. It's the story of a dreamer and a doer who went from restless college dropout to fearless adventurer to philanthropist and humanitarian activist dedicated to female empowerment and global sustainability.
Thrilling, inspiring, and unforgettable, Expedition 196 views the world through the eyes of one extraordinary young woman whose heart took her farther than most people can even imagine.CLOSE Armstrong was the last mayor of the city of Louisville, prior to the merged city and county governments. He strived to make Louisville a vibrant place “to live, work, and play.” Wochit
2003 - Former Louisville Mayor David Armstrong. (Photo: Sam Upshaw Jr.)
The Mary Byron Project Inc., fostering innovations and strategies to end domestic violence, expresses its deepest sympathy to Carol Armstrong, and all the family of the Honorable David L. Armstrong.
Of all the accomplishments rightly attributed to Armstrong, the greatest will be the role he played in one of the biggest victims’ rights milestones in our nation’s history.
His commitment to serving victims of crime was a cornerstone of his long career in public service. As Kentucky Attorney General from 1984 to 1988, his door was always open to victims’ groups, and he became attuned to the issues associated with being a victim of crime. He was responsible for the Kentucky General Assembly’s passage of the Victims’ Bill of Rights during his term, long before most other states recognized victims as being a pivotal part of the criminal justice system.
More: Former Mayor, Judge-Executive Dave Armstrong's career spanned more than four decades
More: Dave Armstrong, last mayor of the old City of Louisville, dies at 75
When Armstrong was elected Jefferson County Judge/Executive in 1990, he committed to first righting the county’s finances. His next effort was to open Kentucky’s first Office for Women in 1991. At that time Jefferson County’s elected officers were exclusively men. The mission of this office was to improve the status of women in the county, and its main focus was ensuring that women could be safe at home. The Office for Women Advisory Council formed with community leaders from diverse fields who met monthly with Armstrong to try to ensure a better safety net for families and victims of domestic violence.
Because of his leadership, policies were written, legislation passed, information shared and trust built among groups dealing with this epidemic crime.
But in 1993, it became apparent that there was a hole in the safety net. Mary Byron was murdered as she left work on her 21st birthday. Her killer was an ex-boyfriend who had been released from jail days earlier, even though he faced trial on charges of kidnapping and raping her a few weeks earlier. Mary and her family asked to be notified of his release, but that request went unheeded. Many of us remained haunted by the news footage of Mary’s car filled with balloons given to her by co-workers that night.
The community was outraged, and out of that outrage grew the legacy of Mary Byron and David Armstrong.
Armstrong something needed to change. And realizing that domestic violence victims were most at risk when their perpetrator was released from jail, a system was needed to notify victims.
A year to the day after Mary’s murder, he announced that the county, along with a private company now called Appriss, had developed VINE — Victim Notification and Information Everyday. VINE delivers updates on the whereabouts and release of offenders in the criminal justice system.
“I will always remember the kindness of David Armstrong,” says Pat Byron, Mary’s mother. “During the year that we were dealing with Mary’s death and the trial of her murderer, David kept us informed about the progress of VINE. He was determined that her death would not be in vain.”
More: Reaction to the death of former Mayor Dave Armstrong
Today, VINE remains the nation’s number one victim notification network, used in 48 states and delivering more than 20 million notifications each year. “While we were working with Jefferson County staff to develop VINE, David Armstrong always made it clear that this was one of his top priorities,” says Michael Davis, co-founder, and CEO of Appriss.
Because of Armstrong’s courage and determination to ensure safety for victims, millions of people throughout the U.S. now have the ability to find peace of mind and safety. He was one in a million and he will be missed.
Marcia Roth served as the first director of the Jefferson County Office for Women and is the founding and current Executive Director of the Mary Byron Project, a national non-profit that cultivates and supports efforts that extend beyond crisis management to attack the root causes of the domestic violence epidemic and help build safer healthier communities. To date, the Mary Byron Project has contributed more than $1 million to domestic violence intervention and prevention programs across the country.
Read or Share this story: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2017/06/16/armstrong-leaves-national-legacy-marcia-roth/403505001/Step inside the minds of the most innovative designers in a variety of disciplines and learn how design impacts every aspect of life.
1. Christoph Niemann: Illustration 47m From New Yorker covers to Instagram sketches, illustrator Christoph Niemann plays with abstraction and interactivity -- and questions authenticity.
2. Tinker Hatfield: Footwear Design 42m Tinker Hatfield's background in architecture and athletics sparked his game-changing shoe designs for Nike, including the iconic Air Jordan series.
3. Es Devlin: Stage Design 43m Stage designer Es Devlin crafts evocative sets for concerts, operas, plays and runway shows using light, film, sculpture -- and even rain.
4. Bjarke Ingels: Architecture 45m Architect Bjarke Ingels unites function, fantasy and sustainability in “pragmatic utopian” designs like a clean power plant topped with a ski slope.
5. Ralph Gilles: Automotive Design 48m As Fiat Chrysler’s global head of design, Ralph Gilles steers the brand into the future with sleek new sports cars and a self-driving electric van.
6. Paula Scher: Graphic Design 41m Graphic designer Paula Scher paints with words, developing the visual language of iconic brands and institutions around the world.
7. Platon: Photography 44m Platon’s fearless portraits capture the souls of world leaders and ordinary people. A shoot with Gen. Colin Powell provides a window into his process.Thermal and thermo-mechanical properties
The thermal and thermo-mechanical properties of the proposed cooling material are essential for investigating the integration of numerous optical parameters of an optical cooler. The DSC traces recorded on the 30SiO 2 -15Al 2 O 3 -(29-x)CdF 2 -22PbF 2 -4YF 3 -xYbF 3 (mol%) glasses for various Yb3+ ion concentrations are shown in Fig. 2(a). The glass transition temperature (T g, ±2 °C), the onset temperature of crystallization (T x, ±2 °C) and peak crystallization temperature (T p, ±1 °C) were determined from the thermograms as well as the corresponding glass thermal stability against crystallization criterion (ΔT = T x − T g, ±4 °C). Among the Yb3+-doped samples, a slight increase of their glass characteristic temperatures T g, T x and T p is observed in Fig. 2(a,b) with increasing Yb3+ concentration. First, the increase of glass transition temperature (from 412 to 445 °C) with increasing Yb3+ content ( |
scene. University of Vermont Rescue also responded to the scene to provide emergency medical services during the incident.
Buy Photo The Office of the Burlington Fire Marshal determined a fire on Henry Street started in the enclosed staircase shown on Tuesday. (Photo: ELIZABETH MURRAY/FREE PRESS)
This story was first posted on July 5, 2016. Contact Elizabeth Murray at 651-4835 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/LizMurraySMC.
Do you have a breaking news tip? Call us at 802-660-6500 or send us a post on Facebook or Twitter using #BFPTips.
Read or Share this story: http://bfpne.ws/29uBeGKGoogle Crashes Facebook Home’s Easy Updating Party, Now Requires All Play Apps To Be Updated Through The Play Store
Android apps are no longer allowed to push updates, even beta updates, without going through the Play Store — this includes Facebook Home. This change abruptly closes a loophole previously utilized most famously by Facebook to push beta updates to a limited amount of users through Home itself.
Now, with the latest change to the Play Store’s terms and conditions, Google specifically spelled out any update to Play Store apps must be served through the Play Store itself.
Under the Dangerous Products section,
An app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play’s update mechanism.
This is the same section of the t&c that prohibits the transmission of “viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses, malware, or any other items that may introduce security vulnerabilities to or harm user devices, applications, or personal data.” Google is closing this loophole with force.
Facebook Home’s previous update scheme allowed the company to push updates, labeled as beta by the way, without going through Google. This was clearly within the rules, but the tactic that clearly didn’t sit well with Google.
The change in terms of service likely wasn’t to target Facebook Home but rather prevent malicious apps from using this loophole. Android already has a slight malware problem and Google needs to take every step possible to ensure its users apps downloaded from the Play Store are safe. Facebook Home just happened to get caught in the roundup.Available 24 hours a day, Mintel's global public relations team is pleased to provide accredited journalists with access to our research, arrange interviews with our expert analysts and share the latest insights across categories and countries. Food and Drink
While most of the nation will be firing up their barbecues and putting their drinks on ice in anticipation of Australia Day this Thursday (26th January), new research from Mintel reveals that many Aussies will be foregoing tradition by grilling vegan steaks while enjoying a gluten-free beer in celebration of the day.
Indeed, over the past few years the number of veggie and vegan foods available in Australia has soared. According to Mintel Global New Products Database (GNPD), between 2014 and 2016 there was a 92% increase in the number of food products launched in Australia carrying a vegan claim, and an 8% increase in the number of products launched carrying a vegetarian claim.
As many as one in eight (12%) food products launched in Australia in 2016 carried a vegetarian claim, while 6% held a vegan claim. The soar in veggie and vegan friendly launches comes as many Australian consumers have a growing appetite for meat-free foods. In fact, one in seven (14%) said that they avoided or intended to avoid red meat in 2016.
Laura Jones, Trend and Innovation Consultant at Mintel, said:
“Although Australia is still one of the largest meat eating populations globally, health and environmental concerns, along with cost have changed Australians’ attitudes when it comes to meat consumption. Australians have become more mindful in recent years of the amount of meat and the frequency of which they eat meat.”
But it’s not just the barbecue that is receiving a health kick, it seems the bottle shops too are showcasing an increasing number of alcoholic drinks with healthy attributes. While just 2% of alcoholic drinks launched in Australia in 2015 held a low, no or reduced sugar claim, this increased to 7% of alcohol launches in 2016. In the same time period, the proportion of these drinks launched with a low, no or reduced carb claim rose from 1% to 4%, while the proportion holding a gluten-free claim rose from 1% to 3%.
But while there are more healthy alternatives available, many drinkers in Australia are choosing to cut-down on the grog altogether. Mintel’s Consumer Metro Study 2016 showed that only 11% of Australians aged 18 and over are spending more on alcohol at home compared to a year ago, compared to 27% who are spending less. This trend is more exaggerated when going out, with 7% spending more compared to 35% spending less.
As a result, it seems beer sales are falling flat with Mintel Market Sizes data revealing that beer sales have been in decline in Australia from as far back as 2009. Volume consumption per capita is forecast to fall to 48.09 litres in 2017, down from 60.73 litres in 2009.
“Beer consumption is continuing on a long-term downward trend in Australia as consumers drink less alcohol generally, challenging brands to look for new ways to boost market value.” Laura adds.
While meat and regular alcoholic drinks may be off the menu for some this Australia Day, the hottest drink trend in Australia this summer is kombucha. Australia played host to the second highest number of kombucha drink launches globally in 2016, just behind the USA, according to Mintel GNPD.
And it seems these drinks are showcasing their health-enhancing credentials. More than three in four (78%) launches of these drinks in 2016 featured an organic claim, with half (51%) claiming to be gluten-free and 16% featuring a low, no or reduced sugar formulation.
Jodie Minotto, Senior Global Food Trends Analyst at Mintel, said:
“Kombucha is proving to be far more than a fad and its popularity is gradually spreading amongst health-conscious consumers globally. The Australian market is notable for the high profile of recent launches in the lead up to the summer season of 2016/2017. Kombucha is proving to be a beverage that defies definition and will ultimately compete with other functional and probiotic beverages. While, in essence, it is a tea drink, many brands use fruit juices and superfoods to enhance health credentials. Expansion into other fermented beverages such as kefir and drinking vinegar is emerging as an innovation pathway for kombucha brands looking for growth.”
Press review copies of the research and interviews with Laura Jones and Jodie Minotto are available on request from the press office.After the Layoffs Sony is Now Working on Hiring Again; Insider Explains What Happened
Giuseppe Nelva March 27, 2014 5:16:04 PM EST
It’s no mystery that multiple studios within Sony Computer Entertainment have undergone a thinning process lately, with multiple rounds of layoffs, and hiring has slowed down as well, with very few development-related career opportunity ads posted on SCEA’s and SCEE’s website.
Yet, it looks like Sony Computer Entertainment of America is now at the beginning of the upwards phase of the recruiting cycle again, and the company posted two new career opportunity ads seeking a recruiter and a recruiting coordinator.
Within the duties listed there is, of course, “Developing and administering staffing/employment/recruiting programs,” and it’s very interesting for two positions of this kind to be staffed at the same time, probably meaning that Sony either wants to restructure or expand its recruiting department.
Major Update: Col Rodgers posted on NeoGAF to correct Pete Dodd’s report of his departure from Sony Computer Entertainment and Evolution Studios. His post is reported below in its entirety.
______________________
Hello, all.
This is my first post on NeoGAF, and whilst I’m not generally one to deal in internet speculation, I have to put the record straight with regard to Pete Dodd’s comments above.
Everything he has said with regard to myself and Driveclub is incorrect. It’s also libellous.
As Putty (who is a personal friend of mine, and has been for about 25 years) suggests, I left Evo in February for personal reasons. The personal reasons being that my son, who is 4 years old, has been diagnosed with Nephrotic Syndrome, which is a potentially life threatening condition. I live 220 miles (4 hours drive) away from Evolution Studios, and was away from home 5.5 days a week. Given the circumstances, I could not continue to work there.
Driveclub is a great game, and the direction hasn’t changed since my departure. This has been confirmed by SONY in various press releases over recent days.
I have no problem in dealing with very large projects, as I’ve been working in the games industry for the last 19 years, and have worked on some very prestigious titles, so there is genuinely no truth to anything posted by Mr Dodds at all. My departure (and indeed the setup of my ‘indie’ operation, BigRedSwitch) is 100% driven by family necessity, not some professional failing on my part.
I left SONY on very good terms. There is no animosity there, and I was absolutely nothing to do with the recent redundancies – in fact, the news of those redundancies was probably linked on here before I knew about them.
The games industry is a tough place at the moment. My circumstances with my son mean that I’ve had to leave secure work in order to try to make my own way in the world. This may entail getting another job. With people who obviously know nothing about the situation blackening my reputation for the sake of internet ‘fame’, this could be made much more difficult. It’s nothing less than trolling.
I’ve contacted Mr. Dodd on his email address on his site. Due to the factual inaccuracy of his statements, I’ve informed him that he needs to remove the statements and apologise for the damage they have caused, as posting incorrect information and claiming it’s true is quite simply libel.
I’m sure you can all appreciate just how difficult things are for myself and my family at the moment. I’d genuinely appreciate it if you can take my statements as word from the origin, and realise that there has been no big cover-up when it comes to my departure from SONY/Evo.
Thanks, all.
______________________
Pete Dodd himself apologized for the faulty reporting, and while the correct report by Rodgers matches the vision that there’s no big disruption at Sony Computer Entertainment we apologize ourselves to Mr. Rodgers and our readers for relaying incorrect information on Rodgers’ departure.
I have talked to Col Rodgers personally and his side of the story is vastly different than what I posted yesterday on gaf. I apologize. I shouldn’t have gone there. Office gossip isn’t news. Col is a good and talented guy who left on his own accord.
The original statements by Dodd have been removed, as Rodgers’ take on the issue casts doubt on Dodd’s whole report. The rest of the article can be found below:
______________________
Another industry insider, Ahsan Rasheed, also added his take on what’s happening at SCEE on Twitter.
What I can say is- Europe is having a reset button pushed and the entire spectrum from top to bottom is being reshuffled for efficiency. The London Studio is known mostly for Singstar and various casual things, so I imagine things aren’t too surprising on that front.
On the other hand, NeoGAF user DemonNite, who is known to work at Sony, also mentioned that he isn’t worried.
Things change indeed. I’m not worried either and see things from the inside.
Update: there seems to be a discrepancy on Driveclub director Col Rodgers leaving the company, as mentioned by user Putty, that allegedly knows Rodgers personally. We included it below as there are almost always two or more sides to something as complex as someone leaving a company, depending on who you ask to:
Mort, Col Rodgers left Evo for personal reasons in Feb, he wasn’t pushed, he left on his own terms, and certainly wasn’t replaced and let go. I know this because he’s a friend of mine, so please be sure next time of the accuracy of your information.
While we should always take what is said by insiders with the proverbial grain of salt, the job opportunities posted today offer further solidity to Dodd’s post, as it’s quite evident that Sony Computer Entertainment is simply taking part in the natural cycle of layoffs and hiring.
It’s always disheartening to see people leave or lose their jobs, but people move around and it happens in every industry. Other industries simply don’t have hungry press hounding companies in order to create stories that often are made bigger than what they are.How many of the top hitters and pitchers at the end of the year were actually drafted? How many of the top hitters and pitchers were not drafted and were picked up during the season? Were hitters or pitchers drafted more accurately? What is the dollar value earned by the players that were picked up during the season? Is there a position of hitter that’s more reliable than other positions?
Have you ever asked yourself draft analysis questions like these?
What follows is a five year analysis (with colorful graphs and an enormous Excel file!) of how accurately our projections in the preseason depict what has actually happened at the end of the season. How well we drafted. What positions yield the best returns. What positions offer the most free loot. And more.
Assumptions You Should Know
A number of the graphs depend on dollar value earnings for the “top 168” projected hitters or “top 108” projected pitchers. The dollar values are calculated using the approach documented in “Using Standings Gain Points to Rank and Value Fantasy Baseball Players” assuming a 12-team league, $260 team budget, 14 hitters (C, C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, CI, MI, OF, OF, OF, OF, OF, UTIL), 9 pitchers, and a 70%-30% hitter-to-pitcher allocation. That’s a total of 168 hitters and 108 pitchers.
These top projected players in the preseason were determined using Steamer’s preseason projections for that season (I downloaded the historical projections here).
I suppose using ADP results or expert rankings from the given year might give a better picture of the players that were actually drafted, but then you get into the question of what’s good ADP data, where to get it, what experts to use, league differences, lineup differences, etc.
To Be Clear… The Goal of this Study
The goal of this is not to measure the accuracy of particular experts. It is to determine which positions can we draft and get the most return on our investment. To some extent this is a review of Steamer’s accuracy, but that’s also not my intent. It’s my understanding (tell me if I’m wrong) that there are not significant differences between the top projections systems. So whether we were looking at PECOTA, Steamer, or Marcel projections, we would see similar results.
How Much of a Return Do We Get For Drafting HItters vs. Pitchers?
People have long been telling us to, “Load up on hitters early in the draft”.
“Don’t overspend on pitching.”
“Wait on pitching until most teams already have one.”
I’ve always heard these things. They sounded right. But I can’t say I’ve ever seen the data to support it.
In looking at the chart below it is very clear that we are much better at identifying the top hitters than the top pitchers. The top 168 hitters in the preseason provide about 70% of the dollars earned at the end of the season. For pitchers, it’s more in the neighborhood of 40%.
With results like that it’s very easy to see why the hitter-pitcher split is not 50-50.
Hitters are safer investments than pitchers. We’ve always been told this, but now you can see it. And things have not changed in the new era of pitching that we’ve been seeing the last few years. If anything, the gap seems to have widened.
If you’re curious about the math on this, read this paragraph. Otherwise, skip on over this one. Going back to our assumption of a 12-team league where each team has a $260 budget, that gives the league $3,120 to work with. If 70% of that is earmarked for hitters, that means $2,184 of value is allocated to the pool of 168 hitters and $936 is designated for the 108 pitchers. The 70% return on hitters means that we projected who the top 168 hitters would be in the preseason and by the end of the season those same 168 hitters were worth about $1,530 ($2,184 * 70%). So about $654 of value came from hitters that were not drafted.
Why Does That Chart Say “(includes losses)” In The Title?
The calculations above were done in a “draft and hold” scenario, meaning if Cliff Lee is projected as a $20 player prior to the 2014 season and his end of season earnings are a negative $9, he returned a value of -$29. These “losses” can really affect the calculations.
You’re probably thinking, “But not all pitchers (perhaps none) are held on a roster when they’re having a really bad season”. And if a pitcher suffers a season ending injury, they would be cut immediately and also would not end with negative earnings for the season.
A bit further down you’ll see charts for scenarios where losses are eliminated. So instead of negative $9 Lee comes in with just a $0 return.
This scenario of Lee breaking even is a little too optimistic. If a pitcher is struggling and on his way to a negative earning season, it can take weeks or months for us to make that determination. As that time goes by you’ll be accumulating some of those negative earnings on your team.
The true return lies somewhere in between the “no losses” and “includes losses” lines.
How Much of a Return Do We Get at Each Position of Hitters Vs. Pitchers?
We’ve seen that hitters as a group are a greater investment than pitchers. But what about the individual hitter positions?
There’s a lot going on here, but it’s very clear that any position of hitter is a safer investment than a pitcher. Outfield appears to be a very consistent producing position. Rarely the highest in a given season, but steady. SS and 3B fluctuate wildly.
1B might be the overall lowest returning position of all. Prince Fielder, Joey Votto, Chris Davis, Paul Goldschmidt, Billy Butler, Eric Hosmer, Brandon Belt, Mitch Moreland, Kendrys Morales, and Adam Lind really dragged the return down in 2014, while Albert Pujols, Adrian Gonzalez, Joey Votto, Mike Napoli, and Lance Berkman disappointed in 2012.
We’re a long ways from the glory days of Todd Helton, Jason Giambi, Jim Thome, Carlos Lee, Paul Konerko days when 1B seemed like a lock every season.
But We Don’t Have To Draft and Hold.
As I mentioned above, very few of us play in draft and hold leagues. We can replace struggling or injured players that appear to be negative earners.
There’s no way to measure exactly when a player will be dropped. The best we can do is to remove the possibility of a player returning negative earnings. A replacement level player would have earnings of $0.00. So assigning a value of $0 to players that would otherwise have negative earnings makes some sense. If a struggling player is performing at about the same level as available free agents, we would probably hold on to them and hope they can turn it around.
When we remove the possibility of losses, the gap closes. Pitchers come much closer to the results from hitters.
Splitting all hitters into separate positions, pitchers are not usually the worst performing position in any given year. But unfortunately pitchers do look like the worst performing investment
The Truth Lies Somewhere in the Middle
We don’t play in draft and hold leagues and there’s not a magic fairy that tells us exactly when to drop a player before he starts earning us negative return. The actual return we can earn for a hitter lies somewhere between the blue lines below. The actual return for a pitcher lies somewhere between the red lines.
How Much of the End of Season Earnings Were Acquired During the Draft?
Let’s shift gears a bit. Of all the earnings for each position at the end of the year, how much of them were obtained through the draft?
You can see in the chart below that we’re very efficient at drafting all of the earnings from 1B and C. My guess is that’s not a function of us being better at projecting 1B and C. It’s more due to the fact that these positions have a greater percentage of MLB starters drafted than other positions. In a two-catcher league, 24 out of the 30 starting catchers are drafted. First base is similar in that players are drafted to player first 1B, corner infield, or the utility spot.
So even though we saw above that 1B provides a pretty low return (when we allow for negative earnings), we still end up drafting nearly 90% of the value at 1B. This implies that there are not a lot of valuable free agent pickups that come along at 1B.
How Many of the Top Earning Hitters and Pitchers Were Drafted?
Forget about earnings and dollars for a minute. How many of the top 168 hitters at season’s end were drafted? How many of the top 108 pitchers?
It’s starting to look like any way you slice it, hitters are a more sound investment.
How Many of the Top Position Players and Pitchers Were Drafted?
Let’s break hitters apart into different positions.
This does support the theory I presented above that we draft more 1B and C than other positions so we have a greater chance of getting more of the top players at the position right. The more times you toss a coin, the more heads you’re going to land on.
Another thing that jumps out at me is the significant dip for 3B in 2012. That year we actually did a good job of identifying 3B in the preseason. Miguel Cabrera, Adrian Beltre, David Wright, and Ryan Zimmerman all earned more than projected. Chase Headley was pegged as the 11th best 3B and we caught lighting in a bottle when he earned $27. But we did not see Mark Trumbo, David Freese, Kyle Seager, Pedro Alvarez, Chris Johnson, or Todd Frazier coming.
It’s finally dawned on me why the OF line is so stable in all of these graphs. It’s simply a numbers game. When we draft 60-70 OF each season, that denominator stabilizes because of the larger sample of players at that position. If we were only drafting 14-18 like at 3B, SS, and 2B, the lines would be subject to much greater fluctuation.
How Many Valuable Players Come Into The League Each Season?
This graph is the exact inverse of the “% of Final Top 168/108 Players Drafted” chart above, but I think it’s helpful to view it from a different perspective. Instead of thinking, “How good at we are identifying the good players in the preseason?”, we might flip it around and wonder, “How many good players are going to be available through free agency once the season starts?”.
This is the concept of “free loot” that I learned of from Peter Kreutzer’s Rotomansguide website (which I highly recommend checking out if you like thinking of the concepts in this post).
No surprises here. More pitchers become available through free agency.
Take a serious minute to think about what these numbers mean. Of the nine pitchers you draft, four of them you’ll be completely wrong on. They are not even going to be in the top 108 pitchers at seasons end. Five right. Four wrong.
Of the 14 hitters on your team, you’ll probably only be wrong on four of those too. Ten right. Four wrong.
Percentages can be deceiving at times. So how about the actual number of undrafted players that end up in the top earners.
And by position.
I’m not sure there is much to take from this. But I figure I’ll show it to you anyways. I think this is largely due to the function of us drafting 108 pitchers, 60-70 OF, and 14-20 players at other positions.
The Data
Unfortunately the Excel file is so large that I can’t post it for you to view online, but you can download the file here (SGP Reliability Research for Download.xlsx). There are tabs for projections and actual stats for hitters and pitchers for each season from 2010-2014. The “SGP Charts and Summarized Data” tab summarizes the returns for each position, each year, and also contains all the graphs above. The “Historical SGP Results” tabs summarize the projection and actual results for each hitter from 2010-2014.
Conclusions and Takeaways
There is a lot of information to take away from this. But I now have very easy to understand visual proof as to why you are best off delaying on drafting pitchers.
There’s also no truth to the rumor that because pitching has become more dominating in recent years that you need to draft it any earlier. Pitching comes out below hitting in nearly every measure in every season. Even in the “pitcher’s era” we find ourselves in now.
I also realize I need to treat hitters and pitchers with different levels of patience in the season. Looking back, I’ve found myself trying to practice high levels of patience with underperforming pitchers. Given the higher level of turnover in the top 108 pitchers than the top 168 hitters, it’s fine to be less patient with pitchers and more patient with struggling hitters. We’re wrong about four out of every nine pitchers!
Why It’s Important to View Things in Terms of Dollar Values
We don’t all play in auction leagues, but there is still value in converting player statistics into dollar values. If we don’t convert player statistics into some singular number to rank players, the analysis above is not possible. We could just use each player’s standings gain points, but there’s something more meaningful about using dollars. And over time we’ve come to have an understanding of what a $30 or $40 season means.
What Is Left To Be Done?
I’ve answered a lot of questions above. But this has led me to more questions. So the return on ALL hitters is about 70% and the return on ALL pitchers is in the neighborhood of 40%. What’s the return on all $30, $20, and $10 hitters? Pitchers? What about $20 1B versus $20 OF? How does the typical $10 SS pan out when compared to the $10 pitcher? What about 30 year old hitters versus 27 year old hitters?
I’ll get there some day…
What Did I Miss?
Did you see something interesting in the charts above that I didn’t point out or comment on? Let me know in the comments below.
What Do You Want To Know?
What questions were popping up in your head as you read this? Let me know in the comments and I’ll attempt to find the answers.
Thanks for reading. Stay smart.Illinois State Representative Brandon Phelps has sponsored a bill which would repeal the ban on silencers in the Land of Lincoln and allow them to be used while hunting, to boot. What are the odds that Democrat Phelps’ bill will pass, allowing more people access to a bit of common sense firearm safety equipment? Hard to say, but probably less than the chances that a news outlet could run a story on the subject without including some feckless non-sequitur from an anti-rights organization...
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Brandon Phelps, D-Harrisburg, said gun owners want silencers for a simple reason: to avoid hearing loss. “There are a lot of veterans, a lot of hunters and shooters, who have suffered hearing loss,” Phelps said…. Mark Walsh, campaign director for the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, said Illinois has about 1,000 deaths annually from gunshots, including homicides and suicides. “Adding silencers to that mix, I think is a bad policy,” Walsh said. “It’s a bill that we would be opposed to.”
For the life of me, I can’t imagine why anyone has a serious objection to the ownership of silencers. In notorously gun-squeamish places like continental Europe or the UK, silencers are considered to be…good manners.
This Democrat from Illinois has a good idea, said not many people ever in the history of the world. I’m sure this bill can use all the calls to Land o’ Lincoln legislators it can get in order to get it on Governor Rauner’s desk for a signature.Linux malware includes viruses, Trojans, worms and other types of malware that affect the Linux operating system. Linux, Unix and other Unix-like computer operating systems are generally regarded as very well-protected against, but not immune to, computer viruses.[1][2]
As of 2018 there had not yet been a single widespread Linux virus or malware infection of the type that is common on Microsoft Windows; this is attributable generally to the malware's lack of root access and fast updates to most Linux vulnerabilities.[2]
Linux vulnerability [ edit ]
Like Unix systems, Linux implements a multi-user environment where users are granted specific privileges and there is some form of access control implemented. To gain control over a Linux system or to cause any serious consequences to the system itself, the malware would have to gain root access to the system.[2]
In the past, it has been suggested that Linux had so little malware because its low market share made it a less profitable target. Rick Moen, an experienced Linux system administrator, counters that:
[That argument] ignores Unix's dominance in a number of non-desktop specialties, including Web servers and scientific workstations. A virus/trojan/worm author who successfully targeted specifically Apache httpd Linux/x86 Web servers would both have an extremely target-rich environment and instantly earn lasting fame, and yet it doesn't happen.[3]
In 2008 the quantity of malware targeting Linux was noted as increasing. Shane Coursen, a senior technical consultant with Kaspersky Lab, said at the time, "The growth in Linux malware is simply due to its increasing popularity, particularly as a desktop operating system... The use of an operating system is directly correlated to the interest by the malware writers to develop malware for that OS."[4]
Tom Ferris, a researcher with Security Protocols, commented on one of Kaspersky's reports, stating, "In people's minds, if it's non-Windows, it's secure, and that's not the case. They think nobody writes malware for Linux or Mac OS X. But that's not necessarily true."[4]
Some Linux users do run Linux-based anti-virus software to scan insecure documents and email which comes from or is going to Windows users. SecurityFocus's Scott Granneman stated:
...some Linux machines definitely need anti-virus software. Samba or NFS servers, for instance, may store documents in undocumented, vulnerable Microsoft formats, such as Word and Excel, that contain and propagate viruses. Linux mail servers should run AV software in order to neutralize viruses before they show up in the mailboxes of Outlook and Outlook Express users.[1]
Because they are predominantly used on mail servers which may send mail to computers running other operating systems, Linux virus scanners generally use definitions for, and scan for, all known viruses for all computer platforms. For example, the open source ClamAV "Detects... viruses, worms and trojans, including Microsoft Office macro viruses, mobile malware, and other threats."[5]
Viruses and trojan horses [ edit ]
The viruses listed below pose a potential, although minimal, threat to Linux systems. If an infected binary containing one of the viruses were run, the system would be temporarily infected, as the Linux kernel is memory resident and read-only. Any infection level would depend on which user with what privileges ran the binary. A binary run under the root account would be able to infect the entire system. Privilege escalation vulnerabilities may permit malware running under a limited account to infect the entire system.
It is worth noting that this is true for any malicious program that is run without special steps taken to limit its privileges. It is trivial to add a code snippet to any program that a user may download and let this additional code download a modified login server, an open mail relay, or similar program, and make this additional component run any time the user logs in. No special malware writing skills are needed for this. Special skill may be needed for tricking the user to run the (trojan) program in the first place.
The use of software repositories significantly reduces any threat of installation of malware, as the software repositories are checked by maintainers, who try to ensure that their repository is malware-free. Subsequently, to ensure safe distribution of the software, checksums are made available. These make it possible to reveal modified versions that may have been introduced by e.g. hijacking of communications using a man-in-the-middle attack or via a redirection attack such as ARP or DNS poisoning. Careful use of these digital signatures provides an additional line of defense, which limits the scope of attacks to include only the original authors, package and release maintainers and possibly others with suitable administrative access, depending on how the keys and checksums are handled.
Worms and targeted attacks [ edit ]
The classical threat to Unix-like systems are vulnerabilities in network daemons, such as SSH and web servers. These can be used by worms or for attacks against specific targets. As servers are patched quite quickly when a vulnerability is found, there have been only a few widespread worms of this kind. As specific targets can be attacked through a vulnerability that is not publicly known there is no guarantee that a certain installation is secure. Also servers without such vulnerabilities can be successfully attacked through weak passwords.
Web scripts [ edit ]
Linux servers may also be used by malware without any attack against the system itself, where e.g. web content and scripts are insufficiently restricted or checked and used by malware to attack visitors. Some attacks use complicated malware to attack Linux servers, but when most get full root access then hackers are able to attack by[6] modifying anything like replacing binaries or injecting modules. This may allow the redirection of users to different content on the web.[7] Typically, a CGI script meant for leaving comments, could, by mistake, allow inclusion of code exploiting vulnerabilities in the web browser.
Buffer overruns [ edit ]
Older Linux distributions were relatively sensitive to buffer overrun attacks: if the program did not care about the size of the buffer itself, the kernel provided only limited protection, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code under the rights of the vulnerable application under attack. Programs that gain root access even when launched by a non-root user (via the setuid bit) were particularly attractive to attack. However, as of 2009 most of the kernels include address space layout randomization (ASLR), enhanced memory protection and other extensions making such attacks much more difficult to arrange.
Cross-platform viruses [ edit ]
An area of concern identified in 2007 is that of cross-platform viruses, driven by the popularity of cross-platform applications. This was brought to the forefront of malware awareness by the distribution of an OpenOffice.org virus called Badbunny.
Stuart Smith of Symantec wrote the following:
What makes this virus worth mentioning is that it illustrates how easily scripting platforms, extensibility, plug-ins, ActiveX, etc, can be abused. All too often, this is forgotten in the pursuit to match features with another vendor... The ability for malware to survive in a cross-platform, cross-application environment has particular relevance as more and more malware is pushed out via Web sites. How long until someone uses something like this to drop a JavaScript infecter on a Web server, regardless of platform?[8]
Social engineering [ edit ]
As is the case with any operating system, Linux is vulnerable to malware that tricks the user into installing it through social engineering. In December 2009 a malicious waterfall screensaver that contained a script that used the infected Linux PC in denial-of-service attacks was discovered.[9]
Anti-virus applications [ edit ]
The ClamTk GUI for ClamAV running a scan on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
There are a number of anti-virus applications available which will run under the Linux operating system. Most of these applications are looking for exploits which could affect users of Microsoft Windows.
For Microsoft Windows-specific threats [ edit ]
These applications are useful for computers (typically, servers) which will pass on files to MS Windows users. They do not look for Linux-specific threats.
For Linux-specific threats [ edit ]
These applications look for actual threats to the Linux computers on which they are running.
Linux malware can also be detected (and analyzed) using memory forensics tools, such as the following.
Forcepoint (proprietary) [33]
Volatility[34] (free and open source software)[35]
Threats [ edit ]
The following is a partial list of known Linux malware. However, few if any are in the wild, and most have been rendered obsolete by Linux updates or were never a threat. Known malware is not the only or even the most important threat: new malware or attacks directed to specific sites can use vulnerabilities previously unknown to the community or unused by malware.
Botnets [ edit ]
Mayhem - 32/64-bit Linux/FreeBSD multifunctional botnet [36]
Linux.Remaiten - A threat targeting the Internet of Things. [37] [38] [39]
Mirai (malware) - A DDoS botnet spreads through telnet service and designed to infect Internet of Things (IoT). [40] [41] [42] [43] [44]
GafGyt/BASHLITE/Qbot - A DDoS botnet spreads through SSH and Telnet service weak passwords, firstly discovered during bash Shellshock vulnerability. [45]
LuaBot - A botnet coded with modules component in Lua programming language, cross-compiled in C wrapper with LibC, it aims for Internet of Things in ARM, MIPS and PPC architectures, with the usage to DDoS, spreads Mirai (malware) or selling proxy access to the cyber crime. [46] [47]
Hydra, [48] Aidra, [49] LightAidra [50] and NewAidra [51] - Another form of a powerful IRC botnet that infects Linux boxes.
Aidra, LightAidra and NewAidra - Another form of a powerful IRC botnet that infects Linux boxes. EnergyMech 2.8 overkill mod (Linux/Overkill) - A long last botnet designed to infect servers with its bot and operated through IRC protocol for the DDoS and spreading purpose.[52]
Ransomware [ edit ]
Rootkits [ edit ]
Snakso-A - 64-bit Linux webserver rootkit[55]
Trojans [ edit ]
Effusion - 32/64-bit injector for Apache |
stealer in baseball swiping bags due to his ability to read or anticipate the pitcher's move to the plate. Hooker not only anticipates throws to his area -- he displays a fearless nature that could make him a 10-pick guy at the next level. With Hooker also showing strong hands and exceptional ball skills, he could quickly become a league leader in interceptions for a team that allows the free safety to aggressively hunt the football from the middle of the field.
As a run defender, Hooker is still a work in progress, but he shows the instincts, awareness and desire to be a factor within the box. He quickly reads and diagnoses plays in the backfield, then flies up to get into the mix. Hooker doesn't show any hesitation taking on running backs in the hole, but he needs to become a more consistent tackler at the point of attack. He is a "striker" prone to cut tackle at the knees instead of wrapping up and corralling runners in the open field. As the last line of defense, Hooker can't allow runners to sneak past him by taking a poor angle or ducking his head on a tackle. He has to be more conservative in his approach to make sure that he makes solid contact and a secure tackle. It might take him some time to master this skill, but he certainly can become a B+ tackler in the back end with proper instruction and plenty of reps.
Hooker flashes impressive instincts and athleticism as a pass rusher on blitzes. He has a terrific feel for slipping past blockers, and his crafty style makes him an effective extra rusher from the second level. Although blitzing prevents Hooker from doing what he does best (roaming the deep middle), his ability to get home off the edge speaks volumes about his versatility, athleticism and potential as an impact defender.
Overall, I believe Hooker has all of the tools to be a perennial all-star as a center-field safety for a defense that features a lot of single-high-safety coverage. He displays rare range, athleticism, instincts and playmaking ability at the position, which makes him a lock to be listed among the blue-chip prospects on most boards. Considering how ballhawks and turnover producers are valued at a premium, I expect Hooker to come off the board quickly as an impact player with the potential to start from Day 1.
NFL comp: Reggie Nelson
Hooker is one of the most natural playmakers to enter the league in some time. Hooker's unique takeaway talents could make him an Ed Reed-like playmaker as a pro, but I believe his game is eerily similar to two-time Pro Bowl safety Reggie Nelson at this stage of his career. Nelson has enjoyed a standout career with 35 interceptions in 10 seasons, including a league-leading eight picks in 2015, while blossoming into one of the best center-field safeties in the game. Hooker not only shares a similar body type (Nelson measures in at 5-11, 210 pounds, compared to Hooker's 6-foot-1, 206-pound frame) and comparable athleticism to the veteran safety, but he flashes a similar "striker" mentality, as well. If he can refine his game, particularly as a run defender, Hooker could quickly become the new standard at the position.
Where he should be picked
Despite concerns over his tackling and run defense, Hooker ranks as one of the top-10 talents in the 2017 draft class. He is a turnover machine between the hashes with an extraordinary combination of instincts, anticipation and ball skills as a center fielder. Considering the impact of turnovers on the outcome of games, I believe Hooker's value as a ballhawk will make him a possible candidate to come off the board anywhere from pick No. 2 (San Francisco 49ers) to pick No. 18 (Tennessee Titans). If I could select a few perfect fits, I would point to the Titans at No. 5 overall (it'd be a gamble for Tennessee to wait until the 18th pick) and the Los Angeles Chargers (No. 7 overall). With the Titans, Hooker would have the opportunity to learn the game under Hall of Fame inductee Dick LeBeau. The legendary coach has groomed plenty of all-star defensive backs and placed them in ideal situations to make plays based on their skill sets. With the Bolts, Hooker would fill the void created by Eric Weddle's departure a couple of seasons ago. He would play as the center fielder (Earl Thomas' role) in the middle of Gus Bradley's single-high-safety defense and allow the Chargers' cover corners to be more aggressive at the line of scrimmage.
Follow Bucky Brooks on Twitter @BuckyBrooks.Many credit card companies urge their consumers to consider buying credit card payment protection. This type of insurance can put your payments and interest accrual on hold should you become unemployed (for up to 24 months in some cases). In the event of your death, payment protection can pay off the remainder of your credit card balance. The question to ask is if it is a wise use of your money. Consider my parents' own example.
An Example Of Utilization Of Payment Protection
At the end of 1985, my mom and dad were 36 and 37, respectively. They had just gotten on their feet again financially because my dad had finally been able to obtain a job after two years of unemployment. They had $10,000 in credit card debt (mainly because they used credit to help float them through the long stretch of unemployment). In today’s dollars, that is $20,000 in credit card debt.
They had not taken out individual, private life insurance policies because they thought they couldn’t afford them. What they did have were two small life insurance policies, one from my dad’s employer that covered him automatically, and one from the credit union that they paid a small amount for monthly. His total life insurance protection was less than 2 times his annual income, and he was the primary breadwinner. They also had credit card payment protection on their cards.
Six months later, my dad passed away; he was diagnosed with colon cancer in late January and passed away by early May. My mom was very grateful for the credit card payment protection as the balances were paid in full upon my father’s death, and she used the little bit of life insurance to pay off their house.
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Why Credit Card Payment Protection Is Not A Wise Investment
Based on this experience, one might expect me to endorse credit card payment protection plans, but I do not. Most plans require that the user pay an amount per hundred dollars owed on the card, usually.89 to.95 per $100. In today’s dollars, getting payment protection on my parents’ credit card debt of $20,000 would cost them an average of $178 a month in payment protection alone. To make matters worse, many cards offer a maximum payout amount, ranging from as low as $5,000 up to $25,000.
Most term life insurance policies cost far less than the amount someone $20,000 in credit card debt would pay on payment protection coverage. For example, my husband and I each took out 20 year term life insurance equal to 10x our income when we were 31 and 33 respectively. My husband’s policy costs us $32 a month, which is far cheaper than the $178 a month required for payment protection to cover $20,000 of credit card debt. I would love to go back in time and tell my parents to forgo the credit card payment protection and to instead buy term life insurance policies for each of them.
While the credit card debt was wiped out upon my father’s death and the house was paid off, because they were underinsured, my mom only had a small amount of money to live off for the first year after my dad’s death. She had been a homemaker and an in-home child care provider for the 15 years they were married; she had no college education, and yet she found herself having to enter the workforce. The term life insurance policy, had they purchased one, would have provided her with enough money to pay off the credit cards and her home and still have money to invest and live off, giving her time to pursue her education so she could have found a career she enjoyed.
Even if life insurance policies were more costly 25 years ago, it still would have made more sense to buy a term life insurance policy instead of payment protection as it provides much greater security. Instead of paying for credit card payment protection, calculate how much it would cost you monthly and use that money to invest in a term life insurance policy. Use the remainder, if you have a remainder, to pay down your debt so you don’t need to worry about payment protection.FOURTH St. Louis cop suspended: Officer who compared protesters to 'rabid dogs' pulled as racist officer who pushed CNN anchor is yanked off the streets
St.Louis police Officer Mathew Pappert suspended on Friday after racially charged comments on Facebook
Pappert called on protestors to be put down like 'rabid dogs' and even wished them dead in a suicide bombing
Becomes the third officer to be suspended in St. Louis in the aftermath of Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown
Also on Friday, St Louis County police officer Dan Page was suspended after a video of him giving a hate-filled speech to far-right group surfaced
Page was seen on CNN on Monday pushing anchor Don Lemon as he reported live from Ferguson
Page spews vitriol about black people, gay people, President Obama, Muslims and more
His extreme views include that the government is trying to indoctrinate children to spy on their parents at public schools
Suspended: Glendale Police Officer Matthew Pappert is pictured here. H has been suspended from his job for making aggressive and inappropriate comments towards the protestors at Ferguson
Another police officer has been suspended in St. Louis in the aftermath of Michael Brown's shooting, this time for incendiary comments online demanding protestors be 'put down like rabid dogs'.
Mathew Pappert, an award-winning officer with the Glendale Police Department was put on paid leave on Friday after a series of Facebook posts came to light in which he made racially charged comments and wished the Ferguson protestors dead in a suicide bomb attack.
Pappert, who becomes the third St. Louis cop to be suspended since Officer Darren Wilson himself was put on paid leave after Brown's shooting on August 9, made his controversial comments on August 17, at the height of the troubles.
'I'm sick of these protestors. You are a burden on society and a blight on the community,' wrote an irate Pappert.
In a comment attached to his initial post, Pappert then writes, 'These protestors should have been put down like a rabid dog the first night.'
In another comment, Pappert is told that the Ku Klux Klan are arriving to Ferguson.
Displaying a glimmer of common sense he refers to them as 'white trash' but then sullies this by referring to the protestors at Ferguson as 'thugs.'
Opinion: Officer Pappert posted this to Facebook on August 17 and could have claimed he was entitled to his own views
However: He then followed it up with his comment which took his opinion in an entirely inappropriate direction
He then wishes harm on all of them by asking, 'Where is a Muslim with a back pack when you need them?', presumably asking for a suicide bomber to kill them.
Pappert then extended his ignorance towards Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson according to the Daily Caller.
Johnson who received praise in the media for momentarily diffusing the situation in Ferguson was photographed with a protestors making a hand signal that Pappert claimed was a gang sign.
In fact it was a sign of Kappa Alpha Psi, a black fraternity.
Pappert is unsurprisingly a huge supporter of Officer Darren Wilson and posted his thoughts to Facebook on this.
Wishing death: Officer Pappert then took to Facebook to wish the Ferguson protestors and the Ku Klux Klan dead in a an Islamist suicide bomb attack
Wrong: Officer Pappert thought that Missouri State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson was giving a gang sign in this picture with a Ferguson protestor. He wasn't. It is the hand signal for a black college fraternity
'What do you want to bet after the smoke clears from the attack on Officer Wilson (notice I did not say the Brown shooting as Wilson is the true victim), they will roll out some new, expensive and ridiculous program making the job of law enforcement harder....' wrote Pappert.
Officer Pappert is a firearms instructor with the Glendale police and was suspended by Glendale Police Chief Jeffrey Beaton on Friday.
'The views or opinions that were posted on that post, if they were by our officer, are absolutely not the opinions or views of the Glendale Police Department or the city of Glendale,' said Chief Beaton.
This latest suspension followed that of officer Dan Page, who was pulled from duty after disturbing video emerged of him referring to black people as 'little perverts' and President Obama as an illegal immigrant.
Controversial: His support for Officer Darren Wilson is clear and strong in this Facebook post
Page, who was caught live on CNN News earlier this week pushing the network's anchor Don Lemon and threatening to arrest him, made the hate-filled speech in April of this year during an Oath Keepers of St Louis/St Charles meeting.
His offensive remarks weren't limited to black people - he also had vitriol to spew about Muslims, women who have abortions, gay people and people who suffer domestic violence.
The raving speech goes on for more than an hour as Page, brandishing a bible, enlightens his audience with his unique views.
Page is the second St Louis county police officer to have been relieved of his duties during the Ferguson protests.
Lieutenant Ray Albers, 46, was caught on camera screaming, 'I will f***ing kill you!' and pointing his rifle at civilians.
An investigation is underway and he has been placed on indefinite unpaid leave.
Hate-filled rant: Officer Dan Page spoke for more than an hour at an Oath Keepers meeting in April airing his ignorant views on black people, domestic violence, homosexuals, President Obama and Muslims, among others
Excessive force: CNN's Don Lemon was repeatedly pushed and threatened with arrest by Page during a live cross for the network on Monday
The incidents have highlighted the racial divide in Ferguson, a largely black town where the police force and local politicians are almost all white. Civil rights activists say Brown's death was the culmination of years of police unfairly targeting blacks.
Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, were muted for a third straight evening on Friday as the National Guard began withdrawing from the St. Louis suburb racked by racial turmoil after a white police officer shot dead an unarmed black teenager.
Hundreds of protesters marched in the hot summer night near the site of the August 9 slaying of 18-year-old Michael Brown, chanting 'Hands up, don't shoot,' while police vehicles observed the demonstration, without intervening.
Clergy volunteers wearing bright orange T-shirts discouraged protesters who wanted to defy police orders to keep moving, while live singing and drums boomed out from a flat-bed truck.
Muted: People march down St. Louis Street to the NOPD First District station to protest the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer on August 22, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri
Continuing protests: Police reportedly let protesters march unimpeded in Ferguson in further demonstrations which have drawn attention to the police force in the area
The St Louis County Police released a statement saying the Police Chief Jon Belmar was 'disturbed' by the content of Page's speech.
'We hold our officers to a high standard of honor both on and off duty. While we as a department do not have an issue with officers expressing themselves, this was disturbing and unacceptable,' it reads.
'The officer is a 35 year veteran of this department and has been deployed numerous times in military service. He had passed the evaluations upon returning from deployment and there was no indication of this attitude.'
Early in the video, Page tells his audience that the bible is the foundation of the Constitution and that you cannot have one without the other, saying, 'I don’t know what them black little perverts don’t understand down there. But they need me to talk to them. I’ll square them away for you. Take me about a minute.
To the letter: Page brandishes the bible in his right hand, which he believes is the basis of the Constitution, which he holds in his left
Offensive: Don Lemon described Page's speech as 'wide-ranging inflammatory remarks'
He reads from the Constitution, stumbling over several words, the meanings of which clearly elude him.
He rages against hate-crime laws, saying there are 'four sodomites on the Supreme Court' and describing himself as being 'into diversity - I kill everybody!'
'And I’m real good with a rifle. My best shot is 1,875 meters, I got me a gold star on that one. You run from me you’re gonna die tired,' he rants.
Page claims to be a Vietnam War Vet and a sergeant major in the U.S. Army who took retirement two years early in 2012 because he didn't want to take orders from President Obama.
He refers to the president as an 'illegal alien' and claims to have flown a plane to Kenya to see where'my undocumented president lives at.'
Police Chief Jon Belmar says that while Page has never been involved in an 'officer-involved shooting,' his attitude and description of himself as an 'indiscriminate killer' was extremely concerning.
Smiling on the other side of his face: Page has been suspended pending an investigation after the speech was shown to St Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar
'I personally believe in Jesus Christ as my lord savior, but I'm also a killer. I’ve killed a lot. And if I need to, I'll kill a whole bunch more,' Page tells the OathKeepers.
'If you don't want to get killed, don't show up in front of me, it's that simple. I have no problem with it. God did not raise me to be a coward,' he said before launching into a rant about the government indoctrinating children to spy on their parents in public schools.
The OathKeepers is an association of former and present military personnel, police officers and first reponders who 'defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.'
Don Lemon, who was repeatedly pushed by Page during a live report from Ferguson Monday, described the video: 'It’s wide-ranging inflammatory remarks about a lot of people, about women, about gay people,' he said.
'[Page] talks about the president of the United States. He speaks out against affirmative action, women in the military and on and on.'
Following his interaction with Page in Ferguson, Lemon told audiences, 'We’re on national television, so imagine what they’re doing to people when you don’t see it on national television, people who don’t have a voice like we do.'In The Baffler, liberal John Ganz discusses the life and thought of pioneer paleolibertarian Murray Rothbard, whom Ganz sees as a “philosophical harbinger of Trump and the alt-right” (“The Forgotten Man”).
Here’s a nice Rothbard quote from the piece:
And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.
Ganz then intones:
Rothbard’s name is not widely known. It’s not likely to be found in bibliography of a contemporary economist’s paper, but you will find it scrawled on the seamy underbelly of the web, in the message boards of the alt-right, where fewer voices are more in the air than Rothbard’s. One can look at the recent profiles of neo-fascists to find the name Rothbard, and that of his favorite pupil and protégé, Hans Hermann-Hoppe, again and again. In The New Yorker’s piece on Mike Enoch, the founder of the “Daily Shoah” podcast, Enoch notes that his path to the alt-right began with reading Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises. When asked how he began to move “so far right,” Tony Hovater, the Indiana Nazi from the infamous New York Times profile, “name-drops Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.” Chris Cantwell, the crying Nazi of Vice News notoriety, says he was a “big fan of Murray Rothbard” and then went on to “read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed.” Trump backer Peter Thiel’s essay, “The Education of a Libertarian,” shows the clear influence of Rothbard’s apostle Hoppe, who invited Thiel to a conference that also hosted American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor and VDARE’s Peter Brimelow. For a time before his death, Rothbard had the ear of Pat Buchanan. Paul Gottfried, the erstwhile ally of Richard Spencer, who is sometimes credited with coining the term “alternative right,” was a friend and admirer of Rothbard, and he also delivered the Murray N. Rothbard Memorial lectures at the Mises Institute.
A Rothbard quote on Jews:
Influential Jews and Jewish organizations helped agitate for war, and helped also to put economic pressure upon opponents of the war. This very fact of course served to embitter many isolationists against the Jews, and again create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy; this resentment was intensified by the hysterical treatment accorded to any isolationist who dared so much as mention these activities by Jews.
Of Rothbard’s careful and deep analyses of intellectual vanguardism, which included his admiration (ala Steve Bannon) of Vladimir Lenin’s tactics:
In early 1977, he distributed a highly confidential 178-page memo, meant only for the inner circle of Cato, called Toward A Strategy for Libertarian Social Change. Within is a deeper elaboration and analysis of Leninist strategy and tactics, again calling for professionalized, hard-core libertarian cadres and “purity of principle, combined with entrepreneurial flexibility of tactics.” Following the course of Bolshevik revolution, he believed the best course of action was to follow the “centrist” path. That is, they were to stay radical, but also stay practical: don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal by getting mired in reformist coalitions, but don’t isolate the “party” of dedicated anti-statists by making hopeless quixotic stands either. To the example of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Rothbard now adds Hitler and the Nazis, who had the tactical advantage, he wrote, of a “clear two-group, ‘good-guy vs. bad guy’ dichotomy.” He also discusses with interest the Italian Futurists’ corrosive contempt for the mores of old society as an avant-garde paving the way for the triumph of the fascist movement. He felt libertarians could benefit from the lesson of the fascists’ use of emotionally stirring propaganda and spectacles, as well as their enlistment of youth in the cause. He believed that supreme willpower was the quality most needed in a political leader. But he cautions, the movement has to be straight in its appearance, “radical in content, conservative in form”; not too much shocking of the bourgeoisie, and no shaggy hair cuts: libertarian cadres must appear “respectable.”A DEAL to sign Wolverhampton Wanderers winger Rajiv van la Parra has collapsed, The Bolton News understands.
Neil Lennon had teed up the Dutchman to sign until Christmas but was forced to back out of the move yesterday.
The Wanderers boss had already delayed the deal until the end of the international break so that the club could get maximum value from the loan but with an away game at Reading on the horizon, it now appears unlikely he will add to his squad before the weekend.
Sources in the Midlands claim “financial issues” at the Macron Stadium were to blame for Van la Parra staying put at Wolves.
It is bound to come as a major blow to Lennon, who had looked to the former Heerenveen attacker to add some pace to a side that has scored just once in its last six outings and had been struggling badly for creativity.
“It’s an absolute priority to get some more quality in the final third,” he told The Bolton News after the goalless draw with Bristol City.
“We need someone who’s going to make a difference and that’s not being disrespectful to the players I have got – they have given me everything.
“But it’s been apparent for the last six to 10 games that we need something more in the final third of the pitch.
“It’s difficult to moan because we’ve played well but missing chances is costing us badly and you, me and the crowd can’t put the ball in the net for them (the players). Someone needs to make the difference when we’re on top or else we’re going to struggle to win games.”
The collapse of the move at this late stage is bound to raise questions about whether the ongoing takeover situation has been a factor. Money is unlikely to be released by either party as due diligence is done – although there has been no confirmation from Wanderers nor the Shields Sports Consortium that the negotiations have reached that advanced stage.
It has also been suggested that one of Lennon’s fringe players was due to leave on loan, opening up space in the budget, only for that move to fall down.
Either way, Lennon’s ability to change results in the short term is sure to be tested with a squad already missing star attacking talent such as Zach Clough and Wellington Silva.Wales Interactive and Prologue Games have today confirmed that their episodic adventure ‘Knee Deep’ will raise its curtains this February on Xbox One, just a few days after its initial PS4 showing.
Arriving come Jan 31st on PS4, Knee Deep will then take the Xbox One stage on Feb 3rd 2017. Priced at £11.99/$14.99, the episodic adventure sees you investigate three distinct characters as you delve deep into the crime thriller focusing on the death of a washed up actor. You’ll need to utilise your skills of observation, deduction, and cleverness, pulling back the curtain and revealing the true story behind the swampland conspiracy within.
It promises to let you experience a magical reality where characters are transported among scenes, set pieces moved into place, and hear music wafts from the orchestra pit. Knee Deep is, in its simplest form, all about characters, storytelling, and the melodrama of swampland Florida.
Accompanying its announcement is also the news that you can get your pre-order for Knee Deep on Xbox One in right now, dropping the cash prior to its release and ensuring that you’ll be one of the first to check it out upon launch. If you fancy getting your ticket to the show early, then the Xbox Games Store provides all the entertainment, and popcorn, that you need. Okay, maybe not the popcorn but you should be giving it a visit pronto.
Colin Dwan, Founder and MD of Prologue Games, says “We always wanted Knee Deep to end up on consoles but knew that it would take the right partner to help us navigate the waters of submission, marketing, and distribution. When we met Wales Interactive, we realized they were a perfect choice. Their track record of strong platform relationships, commitment to great content, and tenacious marketing put us at ease. We’re thrilled to be working with the team and can’t wait to bring Knee Deep to the console world!” David Banner, Founder and CEO of Wales Interactive added “Knee Deep first caught my eye when it was being demoed on a neighbouring stand at London’s Rezzed 2015. That’s when I first met Colin and we discussed the potential of a Welsh/American collaboration to bring the game to console. The relationship has built from there and with our ethos of Indies helping Indies it’s great to work with such a talented forward thinking studio like Prologue Games who really see the value in teaming up to help get Knee Deep to a wider audience”.
Features include:
Uncover a swampland conspiracy — Use your skills of observation, deduction, and cleverness to pull back the curtain and reveal the true story behind this backwater community.
Dynamic storytelling spotlights choice and consequence — Engage in realistic conversations that evolve based on your choices, but beware as critical decisions could lead to a breakthrough…or someone getting hurt.
Gaming goes to the theatre — Vivid voice acting, imaginative set transitions, and melodrama specifically designed for the digital stage.
No fail-state: You can’t lose Knee Deep. No matter what choices you make, the story unfolds until it reaches the finale.
Atmospheric musical soundtrack: A mix of bluegrass and blues, the soundtrack by SkewSound adds another amazing dimension to the story of Knee Deep.
Full voice cast: You’ll meet more than 30 fully voiced characters during the show.
As always, we’ll be sure to let you know when Knee Deep arrives.Flying fungi Meet the red-cockaded woodpecker, a black and white bird with a real knack for making holes in living pine trees. Read on to learn of its incredible relationship with a shelf fungus that eats the heartwood of those same pines. February 3, 2019 February 3, 2019 1 Comment
Connecting the Rusts Rust fungi have complex lives that can involve two different plants and five kinds of spores. Who figured that out?
An unlikely delicacy: the basket stinkhorn Who dares speak of food and stinkhorns in the same breath? We're brave.
Twinkly earthstars Beautiful, animated earthstars and their hidden diversity.
Ladybug Fungi Three cheers for ladybugs? No, three fungi.
A deadly Russula An Asian Russula that can kill! A post by Ben Hoffman.
Learning fungi JH Petersen's book 'The Kingdom of Fungi' is a great intro to a little-known part of our world.Kaya Jones Speaks About Being In A Prostitution Ring
It’s been a while sing the Pussycat Dolls have been in the spotlight, but due to all of the allegations coming out in Hollywood about executive abuse of power, one of the former members is speaking out about the truth of the group. Kaya Jones sent out tweets alleging that she “wasn’t in a girl group,” but rather a prostitution ring. She also calls out the “den mother from hell” and asks her to confess why another girl from one of her groups has committed suicide.
My truth.I wasn’t in a girl group. I was in a prostitution ring.Oh & we happened to sing & be famous. While everyone who owned us made the $ — KAYA (@KayaJones) October 13, 2017
I want the den mother from hell to confess why another 1 of her girl group girls committed suicide?Tell the public how you mentally broke us — KAYA (@KayaJones) October 13, 2017
Of course if this is all true, the “den mother from hell” would be Robin Antin, who was the choreographer for the Pussycat Dolls. The suicide Kaya mentions in the next tweet is in reference to Simone Battle, who was a member of another Robin Antin group, G.R.L. Battle hanged herself and was found dead on September 5th–she was said to have suffered depression due to “financial issues.”
Kaya elaborated on the story further saying that much like other Hollywood victims describe, her and the other members of the group had to choose either leaving the group and abandoning their dreams, or sticking through it to hopefully make it big.
How bad was it?people ask-bad enough that I walked away from my dreams,bandmates&a 13 million dollar record deal.We knew we were going to#1 — KAYA (@KayaJones) October 13, 2017
The children you messed with that survived the abuse, we are adults now.Are you ready old ones to fight?Cause you all are looking mighty old — KAYA (@KayaJones) October 13, 2017
Tried to silence us,made us stronger.Tried to drug us,but we were wide awake.Tried to blacklist us,but fans followed.We arent kids anymore — KAYA (@KayaJones) October 13, 2017
Jones claims to have tried coming out with this same information multiple times before, but nobody listened or did anything about it. She’s hoping that with the current state of the news and Hollywood coming undone, people will actually hear her story this time.Many over the counter painkillers are the same ingredients under different brand names. Others are cocktails of ingredients in slightly different amounts. We’re going to take a few moments to dissect the different brand names and show the basic building blocks of pain medication. Using this, you can update your first aid kid so you have variety instead of redundancy.
Before we go any further, we want to reiterate that none of us are doctors, and we are simply sharing common information found on labels. We do not advocate self medicating or experimenting with medications without consulting your doctor. This information is to be taken at face value only and does not provide medical advice or endorsements.
Now that all that is out of the way, let’s get to dissecting what is actually in all of these different brand name drugs..
Single Ingredient Painkillers
Most big brand names simple take one ingredient, pack it up in a pill or capsule, and then justify some markup with a little marketing. Here are what the most common pain relievers contain. All of these are available in generic label versions, just called by the actual ingredient.
Advil, Motrin, Nuprin = 200 mg Ibuprofen, low strength
Naproxen, Aleve = 220mg Naproxen Sodium, medium strength
Excedrin, Tylenol = 500 mg Acetaminophen, low strength
Bayer = 325mg Aspirin, very low strength
Acetaminophen overdose is the number one reason for calls to poison control centers. Just 25% more than the daily dose can cause liver damage if taken over a prolonged period. Only four times the daily dose limit can be lethal. Knowing the strengths and dangers of even over the counter medications is important.
“Cocktail” Multi-Ingredient Painkillers
A few brands bundle up a few ingredients and make a mixture as a product. The mixtures are sometimes more effective, but can also be limiting for those sensitive to any of the ingredients. Even those that are not sensitive may have certain ingredients not be as effective as others. This limits the number of people that can use these pre-mixed “cocktail” drugs.
Goody’s Powder = 260 Acetaminophen, 520 mg Aspirin, 32.5 mg Caffeine
BC Powder = 845 mg Aspirin, 65 mg Caffeine
Excedrin = 250 mg Aspirin, 250 mg Acetaminophen, 65 mg Caffeine
Vanquish = 194 mg Acetaminophen, 227 mg Aspirin, 33 mg Caffeine
One ingredient you may have noticed each one adds is caffeine. It works great for these brands, so why not add some caffeine as a stand alone supplement to your first aid kit? The uses for caffeine are numerous, and we go into a little more detail on this later.
To Use Name Brands or Not to Use Name Brands?
That is the question. Name brand painkillers are not more or less effective than generic. The specifically regulated ingredients and amounts make it so there is no variation between them. The delivery methods may vary though, since name brands may come with a ‘quick dissolve’ capsule or other features generics may not have. Either way, we don’t find brand name painkillers to be worth the extra money, especially when considering single ingredient painkillers.
The Optimal Painkiller Stockpile
Even with all those names we listed above, you can skim the list down to five basic ingredients. Using these simple ingredients, you can treat pain the same way any of these name brands do- even cocktails. Here are the ingredients that cover each and every brand name:
Aspirin – Low strength for minor aches and pains. It is an NSAID (Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug) and is commonly used to combat heart attacks and conditions.
Ibuprofen – Scaleable strength based on dose size, it is often prescribed for cramps, migraines, and arthritis. Scaling the dose all the way up to 800mg makes it prescription strength, but more dangerous for livers and kidneys. It too is an NSAID. Certain NSAIDs are more effective for various people, so having multiple is not a bad idea.
Acetaminophen – Used for treating mild and moderate pain, it can treat both pain and fever. It is commonly used in cold and flu remedies.
Naproxen Sodium – Naproxen is and NSAID and in the same class as ibuprofen, but is regarded as one of the better inflammation fighters. The downside is stomach ulcer risk, which requires naproxen sodium to usually be accompanied with proton-pump inhibitors.
Caffeine – Caffeine is a hell of a drug that does more than wake you up. It is actually classified as a stimulant psychoactive drug. We all know it prevents drowsiness and improves cognitive performance. Pain can slow you down and cloud your thoughts, and a little caffeine can be just the thing to keep you going. At TruePrepper, we believe this is one of the most overlooked drugs you can stockpile (along with anti-diarrhea medicine).
This simple list should let you recreate any OTC brand with accuracy and versatility. Having the ingredients separate for the cocktail type medicines can be especially useful if you or the people you treat are sensitive to any of these. Having caffeine pills separate can be great if you need a boost to stay awake, or need to mix with acetaminophen or aspirin to recreate a ‘cocktail’ painkiller.
The Final Word
Being crippled from pain is not something that will help you out in a disaster or when SHTF. Having the right OTC painkillers stocked up in your first aid kit will be your first defense when you encounter this situation. Take the time to make sure you have a good mix and all of the essentials. Keep exploring, stay prepared, and be safe.
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and will preserve the existence of such a State even though the ruling power should be grossly inefficient. When a State is composed of a homogeneous population, the natural inertia of such a population will hold the Stage together and maintain its existence through astonishingly long periods of misgovernment and maladministration.
[...]
But the situation is utterly different in a country where the population is not homogeneous, where there is no bond of common blood but only that of one ruling hand. Should the ruling hand show signs of weakness in such a State the result will not be to cause a kind of hibernation of the State but rather to awaken the individualist instincts which are slumbering in the ethnological groups. These instincts do not make themselves felt as long as these groups are dominated by a strong central will-to-govern. The danger which exists in these slumbering separatist instincts can be rendered more or less innocuous only through centuries of common education, common traditions and common interests. The younger such States are, the more their existence will depend on the ability and strength of the central government. If their foundation was due only to the work of a strong personality or a leader who is a man of genius, in many cases they will break up as soon as the founder disappears; because, though great, he stood alone. But even after centuries of a common education and experiences these separatist instincts I have spoken of are not always completely overcome. They may be only dormant and may suddenly awaken when the central government shows weakness and the force of a common education as well as the prestige of a common tradition prove unable to withstand the vital energies of separatist nationalities forging ahead towards the shaping of their own individual existence. Mein Kampf
The fate of the German element in the Austrian State depended on its position in Parliament. Up to the time that universal suffrage by secret ballot was introduced the German representatives had a majority in the Parliament, though that majority was not a very substantial one. This situation gave cause for anxiety because the Social-Democratic fraction of the German element could not be relied upon when national questions were at stake. In matters that were of critical concern for the German element, the Social-Democrats always took up an anti-German stand because they were afraid of losing their followers among the other national groups. Already at that time--before the introduction of universal suffrage--the Social-Democratic Party could no longer be considered as a German Party. The introduction of universal suffrage put an end even to the purely numerical predominance of the German element. The way was now clear for the further 'de-Germanization' of the Austrian State. Mein Kampf 70
Our clever'statesmen' were greatly amazed at this change of feeling. They never understood that as soon as man is called upon to struggle for purely material causes he will avoid death as best he can; for death and the enjoyment of the material fruits of a victory are quite incompatible concepts. The frailest woman will become a heroine when the life of her own child is at stake. And only the will to save the race and native land or the State, which offers protection to the race, has in all ages been the urge which has forced men to face the weapons of their enemies. Mein Kampf
Modern City
Everything that our modern age has contributed to the civilization of our great cities is absolutely deficient. All our towns are living on the glory and the treasures of the past. If we take away from the Munich of to-day everything that was created under Ludwig II we should be horror-stricken to see how meagre has been the output of important artistic creations since that time. One might say much the same of Berlin and most of our other great towns.
But the following is the essential thing to be noticed: Our great modem cities have no outstanding monuments that dominate the general aspect of the city and could be pointed to as the symbols of a whole epoch. Yet almost every ancient town had a monument erected to its glory. It was not in private dwellings that the characteristic art of ancient cities was displayed but in the public monuments, which were not meant to have a transitory interest but an enduring one. And this was because they did not represent the wealth of some individual citizen but the greatness and importance of the community. It was under this inspiration that those monuments arose which bound the individual inhabitants to their own town in a manner that is often almost incomprehensible to us to-day. What struck the eye of the individual citizen was not a number of mediocre private buildings, but imposing structures that belonged to the whole community. In contradistinction to these, private dwellings were of only very secondary importance indeed Mein Kampf
In our great modern cities the proletariat does not show much attachment to the place where it lives. This feeling results from the fact that their dwelling-place is nothing but an accidental abode, and that feeling is also partly due to the frequent change of residence which is forced upon them by social conditions. There is no time for the growth of any attachment to the town in which they live. But another reason lies in the cultural barrenness and superficiality of our modern cities. At the time of the German Wars of Liberation our German towns and cities were not only small in number but also very modest in size. The few that could really be called great cities were mostly the residential cities of princes; as such they had almost always a definite cultural value and also a definite cultural aspect. Those few towns which had more than fifty thousand inhabitants were, in comparison with modern cities of the same size, rich in scientific and artistic treasures. At the time when Munich had not more than sixty thousand souls it was already well on the way to become one of the first German centres of art. Nowadays almost every industrial town has a population at least as large as that, without having anything of real value to call its own. They are agglomerations of tenement houses and congested dwelling barracks, and nothing else. It would be a miracle if anybody should grow sentimentally attached to such a meaningless place. Nobody can grow attached to a place which offers only just as much or as little as any other place would offer, which has no character of its own and where obviously pains have been taken to avoid everything that might have any resemblance to an artistic appearance. Mein Kampf 219
The dimensions and quality of our public buildings to-day are in deplorable contrast to the edifices that represent private interests. If a similar fate should befall Berlin as befell Rome future generations might gaze upon the ruins of some Jewish department stores or joint-stock hotels and think that these were the characteristic expressions of the culture of our time. In Berlin itself, compare the shameful disproportion between the buildings which belong to the REICH and those which have been erected for the accommodation of trade and finance.
The credits that are voted for public buildings are in most cases inadequate and really ridiculous. They are not built as structures that were meant to last but mostly for the purpose of answering the need of the moment. No higher idea influenced those who commissioned such buildings. Mein Kampf 221
The community as such is not the dominant characteristic of our contemporary cities, and therefore it is not to be wondered at if the community does not find itself architecturally represented. Thus we must eventually arrive at a veritable civic desert which will at last be reflected in the total indifference of the individual citizen towards his own country.
This is also a sign of our cultural decay and general break-up. Our era is entirely preoccupied with little things which are to no purpose, or rather it is entirely preoccupied in the service of money. Therefore it is not to be wondered at if, with the worship of such an idol, the sense of heroism should entirely disappear. But the present is only reaping what the past has sown. Mein Kampf 221
Propaganda of the Press
It is not considered part of the purpose of this Press to inspire its readers with ideals which might help them to lift their minds above the sordid conditions of their daily lives; but, on the contrary, it panders to their lowest instincts. Among the lazy-minded and self-seeking sections of the masses this kind of speculation turns out lucrative. Mein Kampf
Whatever definition we may give of the term 'public opinion', only a very small part of it originates from personal experience or individual insight. The greater portion of it results from the manner in which public matters have been presented to the people through an overwhelmingly impressive and persistent system of 'information'. Mein Kampf
The more I became acquainted with the external forms of Social Democracy, the greater became my desire to understand the inner nature of its doctrines.
For this purpose the official literature of the Party could not help very much. In discussing economic questions its statements were false and its proofs unsound. In treating of political aims its attitude was insincere. Furthermore, its modern methods of chicanery in the presentation of its arguments were profoundly repugnant to me. Its flamboyant sentences, its obscure and incomprehensible phrases, pretended to contain great thoughts, but they were devoid of thought, and meaningless. One would have to be a decadent Bohemian in one of our modern cities in order to feel at home in that labyrinth of mental aberration, so that he might discover 'intimate experiences' amid the stinking fumes of this literary Dadism. These writers were obviously counting on the proverbial humility of a certain section of our people, who believe that a person who is incomprehensible must be profoundly wise. 48
These journalists were real virtuosos in the art of twisting facts and presenting them in a deceptive form. The theoretical literature was intended for the simpletons of the soi-disant intellectuals belonging to the middle and, naturally, the upper classes. The newspaper propaganda was intended for the masses.
This probing into books and newspapers and studying the teachings of Social Democracy reawakened my love for my own people. And thus what at first seemed an impassable chasm became the occasion of a closer affection.
Having once understood the working of the colossal system for poisoning the popular mind, only a fool could blame the victims of it. 41
Yet all this had its good side; because the more I came to know the individual leaders, or at least the propagandists, of Social Democracy, my love for my own people increased correspondingly. Considering the Satanic skill which these evil counsellors displayed, how could their unfortunate victims be blamed? 58
Urged by my own daily experiences, I now began to investigate more thoroughly the sources of the Marxist teaching itself. Its effects were well known to me in detail. As a result of careful observation, its daily progress had become obvious to me. And one needed only a little imagination in order to be able to forecast the consequences which must result from it. The only question now was: Did the founders foresee the effects of their work in the form which those effects have shown themselves to-day, or were the founders themselves the victims of an error? To my mind both alternatives were possible.
If the second question must be answered in the affirmative, then it was the duty of every thinking person to oppose this sinister movement with a view to preventing it from producing its worst results. But if the first question must be answered in the affirmative, then it must be admitted that the original authors of this evil which has infected the nations were devils incarnate. For only in the brain of a monster, and not that of a man, could the plan of this organization take shape whose workings must finally bring about the collapse of human civilization and turn this world into a desert waste.
Such being the case the only alternative left was to fight, and in that fight to employ all the weapons which the human spirit and intellect and will could furnish leaving it to Fate to decide in whose favour the balance should fall. 58
But what sort of pabulum was it that the German Press served up for the consumption of its readers in pre-War days? Was it not the worst virulent poison imaginable? Was not pacifism in its worst form inoculated into our people at a time when others were preparing slowly but surely to pounce upon Germany? Did not this self-same Press of ours in peace time already instil into the public mind a doubt as to the sovereign rights of the State itself, thereby already handicapping the State in choosing its means of defence? Was it not the German Press that under stood how to make all the nonsensical talk about 'Western democracy' palatable to our people, until an exuberant public was eventually prepared to entrust its future to the League of Nations? Was not this Press instrumental in bringing in a state of moral degradation among our people? Were not morals and public decency made to look ridiculous and classed as out-of-date and banal, until finally our people also became modernized?
[...]
The function of the so-called liberal Press was to dig the grave for the German people and REICH. No mention need be made of the lying Marxist Press. To them the spreading of falsehood is as much a vital necessity as the mouse is to a cat. Their sole task is to break the national backbone of the people, thus preparing the nation to become the slaves of international finance and its masters, the Jews.
And what measures did the State take to counteract this wholesale poisoning of the public mind? None, absolutely nothing at all. By this policy it was hoped to win the favour of this pest--by means of flattery, by a recognition of the 'value' of the Press, its 'importance', its 'educative mission' and similar nonsense. The Jews acknowledged all this with a knowing smile and returned thanks. Mein Kampf 204
Politics and Democracy
Generally speaking, the work of politicians is without significance for the following generation, because their temporary success was based on the expediency of avoiding all really great decisive problems and ideas which would be valid also for future generations.
To pursue ideals which will still be of value and significance for the future is generally not a very profitable undertaking and he who follows such a course is only very rarely understood by the mass of the people, who find beer and milk a more persuasive index of political values than far-sighted plans for the future, the realization of which can only take place later on and the advantages of which can be reaped only by posterity. Mein Kampf 180
Must not our parliamentary principle of government by numerical majority necessarily lead to the destruction of the principle of leadership?
Does anybody honestly believe that human progress originates in the composite brain of the majority and not in the brain of the individual personality?
[...]
The parliamentary principle of vesting legislative power in the decision of the majority rejects the authority of the individual and puts a numerical quota of anonymous heads in its place. In doing so it contradicts the aristrocratic principle, which is a fundamental law of nature 74
Philosophy of NSDAP Movement
The problem of restoring Germany's power is not a question of how can we manufacture arms but rather a question of how we can produce that spirit which enables a people to bear arms. Once this spirit prevails among a people then it will find a thousand ways, each of which leads to the necessary armament. But a coward will not fire even a single shot when attacked though he may be armed with ten pistols. For him they are of less value than a blackthorn in the hands of a man of courage. 277
It is the lack of will-power, and not the lack of arms, which renders us incapable of offering any serious resistance to-day. This defect is found everywhere among our people and prevents decisive action wherever risks have to be taken, as if any great action can be taken without also taking the risk. Quite unsuspectingly, a German General found a formula for this lamentable lack of the will-to-act when he said: "I act only when I can count on a 51 per cent probability of success." In that '51 per cent probability' we find the very root of the German collapse. The man who demands from Fate a guarantee of his success deliberately denies the significance of an heroic act. For this significance consists in the very fact that, in the definite knowledge that the situation in question is fraught with mortal danger, an action is undertaken which may lead to success. A patient suffering from cancer and who knows that his death is certain if he does not undergo an operation, needs no 51 per cent probability of a cure before facing the operation. And if the operation promises only half of one per cent probability of success a man of courage will risk it and would not whine if it turned out unsuccessful. 344
The People's State will have to fight for its existence. It will not gain or secure this existence by signing documents like that of the Dawes Plan. But for its existence and defence it will need precisely those things which our present system believes can be repudiated. The more worthy its form and its inner national being. the greater will be the envy and opposition of its adversaries. The best defence will not be in the arms it possesses but in its citizens. Bastions of fortresses will not save it, but the living wall of its men and women, filled with an ardent love for their country and a passionate spirit of national patriotism. 350
Ideas and philosophical systems as well as movements grounded on a definite spiritual foundation, whether true or not, can never be broken by the use of force after a certain stage, except on one condition: namely, that this use of force is in the service of a new idea or WELTANSCHAUUNG which burns with a new flame. Mein Kampf 147
The Pan-German Movement could hope for success only if the leaders realized from the very first moment that here there was no question so much of a new Party as of a new WELTANSCHAUUNG (world view). This alone could arouse the inner moral forces that were necessary for such a gigantic struggle. And for this struggle the leaders must be men of first-class brains and indomitable courage. If the struggle on behalf of a WELTANSCHAUUNG is not conducted by men of heroic spirit who are ready to sacrifice, everything, within a short while it will become impossible to find real fighting followers who are ready to lay down their lives for the cause. A man who fights only for his own existence has not much left over for the service of the community. 93
The broad masses of a nation are not made up of professors and diplomats. Since these masses have only a poor acquaintance with abstract ideas, their reactions lie more in the domain of the feelings, where the roots of their positive as well as their negative attitudes are implanted. They are susceptible only to a manifestation of strength which comes definitely either from the positive or negative side, but they are never susceptible to any half-hearted attitude that wavers between one pole and the other. The emotional grounds of their attitude furnish the reason for their extraordinary stability. It is always more difficult to fight successfully against Faith than against knowledge. Love is less subject to change than respect. Hatred is more lasting than mere aversion. And the driving force which has brought about the most tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific teaching which has gained power over the masses, but always a devotion which has inspired them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged them to action.
Whoever wishes to win over the masses must know the key that will open the door to their hearts. It is not objectivity, which is a feckless attitude, but a determined will, backed up by force, when necessary. 281
The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader's following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies.
As soon as the vacillating masses find themselves facing an opposition that is made up of different groups of enemies their sense of objectivity will be aroused and they will ask how is it that all the others can be in the wrong and they themselves, and their movement, alone in the right.
Such a feeling would be the first step towards a paralysis of their fighting vigour. Where there are various enemies who are split up into divergent groups it will be necessary to block them all together as forming one solid front, so that the mass of followers in a popular movement may see only one common enemy against whom they have to fight. Such uniformity intensifies their belief in the justice of their own cause and strengthens their feeling of hostility towards the opponent.
The Pan-German Movement was unsuccessful because the leaders did not grasp the significance of that truth. They saw the goal clearly and their intentions were right; but they took the wrong road. Their action may be compared to that of an Alpine climber who never loses sight of the peak he wants to reach, who has set out with the greatest determination and energy, but pays no attention to the road beneath his feet. With his eye always fixed firmly on the goal he does not think over or notice the nature of the ascent and finally he fails. Mein Kampf 105
The greatness of every powerful organization which embodies a creative idea lies in the spirit of religious devotion and intolerance with which it stands out against all others, because it has an ardent faith in its own right. If an idea is right in itself and, furnished with the fighting weapons I have mentioned, wages war on this earth, then it is invincible and persecution will only add to its internal strength.
The greatness of Christianity did not arise from attempts to make compromises with those philosophical opinions of the ancient world which had some resemblance to its own doctrine, but in the unrelenting and fanatical proclamation and defence of its own teaching.
...
The man who is not opposed and vilified and slandered in the Jewish Press is not a staunch German and not a true National Socialist. The best rule whereby the sincerity of his convictions, his character and strength of will, can be measured is the hostility which his name arouses among the mortal enemies of our people. Mein Kampf 292
Philosophy of National Socialism
Any idea may be a source of danger if it be looked upon as an end in itself, when really it is only the means to an end. For me and for all genuine National-Socialists there is only one doctrine. PEOPLE AND FATHERLAND.
What we have to fight for is the necessary security for the existence and increase of our race and people, the subsistence of its children and the maintenance of our racial stock unmixed, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland; so that our people may be enabled to fulfil the mission assigned to it by the Creator.
All ideas and ideals, all teaching and all knowledge, must serve these ends. It is from this standpoint that everything must be examined and turned to practical uses or else discarded. Thus a theory can never become a mere dead dogma since everything will have to serve the practical ends of everyday life. Mein Kampf 182
The spectacled theorist would have given his life for his doctrine rather than for his people.
Because man has made laws he subsequently comes to think that he exists for the sake of the laws.
A great service rendered by the pan-German movement then was that it abolished all such nonsense, though the doctrinaire theorists and other fetish worshippers were shocked. 86
During my struggle for existence in Vienna I perceived very clearly that the aim of all social activity must never be merely charitable relief, which is ridiculous and useless, but it must rather be a means to find a way of eliminating the fundamental deficiencies in our economic and cultural life--deficiencies which necessarily bring about the degradation of the individual or at least lead him towards such degradation. Mein Kampf 32
The question of 'nationalizing' a people is first and foremost one of establishing healthy social conditions which will furnish the grounds that are necessary for the education of the individual. For only when family upbringing and school education have inculcated in the individual a knowledge of the cultural and economic and, above all, the political greatness of his own country--then, and then only, will it be possible for him to feel proud of being a citizen of such a country. I can fight only for something that I love. I can love only what I respect. And in order to respect a thing I must at least have some knowledge of it. Mein Kampf 35
What did universal suffrage matter to us? Is this what we had been fighting for during four years? It was a dastardly piece of robbery thus to filch from the graves of our heroes the ideals for which they had fallen. It was not to the slogan, 'Long Live Universal Suffrage,' that our troops in Flanders once faced certain death but with the cry, 'DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES IN DER WELT' (Germany, Germany above all else, above all else in the world).... And the majority of those who were shouting for this suffrage were absent when it came to fighting for it. All this political rabble were strangers to us at the front. During those days only a fraction of these parliamentarian gentry were to be seen where honest Germans foregathered. Mein Kampf 171
Surely nobody believes that these chosen representatives of the nation are the choice spirits or first-class intellects. Nobody, I hope, is foolish enough to pretend that hundreds of statesmen can emerge from papers placed in the ballot box by electors who are anything else but averagely intelligent. The absurd notion that men of genius are born out of universal suffrage cannot be too strongly repudiated. In the first place, those times may be really called blessed when one genuine statesman makes his appearance among a people. Such statesmen do not appear all at once in hundreds or more. Secondly, among the broad masses there is instinctively a definite antipathy towards every outstanding genius. There is a better chance of seeing a camel pass through the eye of a needle than of seeing a really great man 'discovered' through an election. 79
The teaching should be so orientated that the boy or girl, after leaving school, will not be a semi-pacifist, a democrat or of something else of that kind, but a whole-hearted German. So that this national feeling be sincere from the very beginning, and not a mere pretence, the following fundamental and inflexible principle should be impressed on the young brain while it is yet malleable: The man who loves his nation can prove the sincerity of this sentiment only by being ready to make sacrifices for the nation's welfare. There is no such thing as a national sentiment which is directed towards personal interests. And there is no such thing as a nationalism that embraces only certain classes. Hurrahing proves nothing and does not confer the right to call oneself national if behind that shout there is no sincere preoccupation for the conservation of the nation's well-being. Mein Kampf
Here is another educative work that is waiting for the People's State to do. It will not be its task to assure a dominant influence to a certain social class already existing, but it will be its duty to attract the most competent brains in the total mass of the nation and promote them to place and honour. It is not merely the duty of the State to give to the average child a certain definite education in the primary school, but it is also its duty to open the road to talent in the proper direction. And above all, it must open the doors of the higher schools under the State to talent of every sort, no matter in what social class it may appear. This is an imperative necessity; for thus alone will it be possible to develop a talented body of public leaders from the class which represents learning that in itself is only a dead mass.
There is still another reason why the State should provide for this situation. Our intellectual class, particularly in Germany, is so shut up in itself and fossilized that it lacks living contact with the classes beneath it. Two evil consequences result from this: First, the intellectual class neither understands nor sympathizes with the broad masses. It has been so long cut off from all connection with them that it cannot now have the necessary psychological ties that would enable it to understand them. It has become estranged from the people. Secondly, the intellectual class lacks the necessary will-power; for this faculty is always weaker in cultivated circles, which live in seclusion, than among the primitive masses of the people. God knows we Germans have never been lacking in abundant scientific culture, but we have always had a considerable lack of will-power and the capacity for making decisions. For example, the more 'intellectual' our statesmen have been the more lacking they have been, for the most part, in practical achievement. Our political preparation and our technical equipment for the world war were defective, certainly not because the brains governing the nation were too little educated, but because the men who directed our public affairs were over-educated, filled to over-flowing with knowledge and intelligence, yet without any sound instinct and simply without energy, or any spirit of daring. It was our nation's tragedy to have to fight for its existence under a Chancellor who was a dillydallying philosopher.
[...]
Here the Catholic Church presents an instructive example. Clerical celibacy forces the Church to recruit its priests not from their own ranks but progressively from the masses of the people. Yet there are not many who recognize the significance of celibacy in this relation. But therein lies the cause of the inexhaustible vigour which characterizes that ancient institution. For by thus unceasingly recruiting the ecclesiastical dignitaries from the lower classes of the people, the Church is enabled not only to maintain the contact of instinctive understanding with the masses of the population but also to assure itself of always being able to draw upon that fund of energy which is present in this form only among the popular masses. Hence the surprising youthfulness of that gigantic organism, its mental flexibility and its iron will-power. 355
The individual will have to be valued, not by the class of work he does but by the way in which he does it and by its usefulness to the community. This statement may sound monstrous in an epoch when the most brainless columnist on a newspaper staff is more esteemed than the most expert mechanic, merely because the former pushes a pen. But, as I have said, this false valuation does not correspond to the nature of things. It has been artificially introduced, and there was a time when it did not exist at all. The present unnatural state of affairs is one of those general morbid phenomena that have arisen from our materialistic epoch. Fundamentally every kind of work has a double value; the one material, the other ideal. The material value depends on the practical importance of the work to the life of the community. The greater the number of the population who benefit from the work, directly or indirectly, the higher will be its material value. This evaluation is expressed in the material recompense which the individual receives for his labour. In contradistinction to this purely material value there is the ideal value. Here the work performed is not judged by its material importance but by the degree to which it answers a necessity. Certainly the material utility of an invention may be greater than that of the service rendered by an everyday workman; but it is also certain that the community needs each of those small daily services just as much as the greater services. From the material point of view a distinction can be made in the evaluation of different kinds of work according to their utility to the community, and this distinction is expressed by the differentiation in the scale of recompense; but on the ideal or abstract plans all workmen become equal the moment each strives to do his best in his own field, no matter what that field may be. It is on this that a man's value must be estimated, and not on the amount of recompense received.
[...]
For the work which the individual performs is not the purpose of his existence, but only a means. His real purpose in life is to better himself and raise himself to a higher level as a human being; but this he can only do in and through the community whose cultural life he shares. And this community must always exist on the foundations on which the State is based. He ought to contribute to the conservation of those foundations. Nature determines the form of this contribution. It is the duty of the individual to return to the community, zealously and honestly, what the community has given him. He who does this deserves the highest respect and esteem. Material remuneration may be given to him whose work has a corresponding utility for the community; but the ideal recompense must lie in the esteem to which everybody has a claim who serves his people with whatever powers Nature has bestowed upon him and which have been developed by the training he has received from the national community. Then it will no longer be dishonourable to be an honest craftsman; but it will be a cause of disgrace to be an inefficient State official, wasting God's day and filching daily bread from an honest public. 356
The present epoch is working out its own ruin. It introduces universal suffrage, chatters about equal rights but can find no foundation for this equality. It considers the material wage as the expression of a man's value and thus destroys the basis of the noblest kind of equality that can exist. For equality cannot and does not depend on the work a man does, but only on the manner in which each one does the particular work allotted to him. Thus alone will mere natural chance be set aside in determining the work of a man and thus only does the individual become the artificer of his own social worth.
At the present time, when whole groups of people estimate each other's value only by the size of the salaries which they respectively receive, there will be no understanding of all this. But that is no reason why we should cease to champion those ideas.... Of course the objection will be made that in general it is difficult to differentiate between the material and ideal values of work and that the lower prestige which is attached to physical labour is due to the fact that smaller wages are paid for that kind of work. It will be said that the lower wage is in its turn the reason why the manual worker has less chance to participate in the culture of the nation; so that the ideal side of human culture is less open to him because it has nothing to do with his daily activities. It may be added that the reluctance to do physical work is justified by the fact that, on account of the small income, the cultural level of manual labourers must naturally be low, and that this in turn is a justification for the lower estimation in which manual labour is generally held.
There is quite a good deal of truth in all this. But that is the very reason why we ought to see that in the future there should not be such a wide difference in the scale of remuneration. Don't say that under such conditions poorer work would be done. It would be the saddest symptom of decadence if finer intellectual work could be obtained only through the stimulus of higher payment. If that point of view had ruled the world up to now humanity would never have acquired its greatest scientific and cultural heritage. For all the greatest inventions, the greatest discoveries, the most profoundly revolutionary scientific work, and the most magnificent monuments of human culture, were never given to the world under the impulse or compulsion of money. Quite the contrary: not rarely was their origin associated with a renunciation of the worldly pleasures that wealth can purchase.
It may be that money has become the one power that governs life to-day. Yet a time will come when men will again bow to higher gods. Much that we have to-day owes its existence to the desire for money and property; but there is very little among all this which would leave the world poorer by its lack. Mein Kampf 357
Marriage is not an end in itself but must serve the greater end, which is that of increasing and maintaining the human species and the race. This is its only meaning and purpose. Mein Kampf
It shall be a greater honour to be a citizen of this REICH, even as a street-sweeper, than to be the King of a foreign State. Mein Kampf
Purpose of a nation state
The triumphant progress of technical science in Germany and the marvellous development of German industries and commerce led us to forget that a powerful State had been the necessary pre-requisite of that success. On the contrary, certain circles went even so far as to give vent to the theory that the State owed its very existence to these phenomena; that it was, above all, an economic institution and should be constituted in accordance with economic interests. Therefore, it was held, the State was dependent on the economic structure. This condition of things was looked upon and glorified as the soundest and most normal arrangement.
Now, the truth is that the State in itself has nothing whatsoever to do with any definite economic concept or a definite economic development. It does not arise from a compact made between contracting parties, within a certain delimited territory, for the purpose of serving economic ends. The State is a community of living beings who have kindred physical and spiritual natures, organized for the purpose of assuring the conservation of their own kind and to help towards fulfilling those ends which Providence has assigned to that particular race or racial branch. Therein, and therein alone, lie the purpose and meaning of a State. Economic activity is one of the many auxiliary means which are necessary for the attainment of those aims. But economic activity is never the origin or purpose of a State, except where a State has been originally founded on a false and unnatural basis. And this alone explains why a State as such does not necessarily need a certain delimited territory as a condition of its establishment.
[...]
The instinct for the preservation of one's own species is the primary cause that leads to the formation of human communities. Hence the State is a racial organism, and not an economic organization. The difference between the two is so great as to be incomprehensible to our contemporary so-called'statesmen'. That is why they like to believe that the State may be constituted as an economic structure, whereas the truth is that it has always resulted from the exercise of those qualities which are part of the will to preserve the species and the race. But these qualities always exist and operate through the heroic virtues and have nothing to do with commercial egoism; for the conservation of the species always presupposes that the individual is ready to sacrifice himself. Mein Kampf 131
It is specially difficult to understand how the belief that the State is brought into being and preserved by economic forces could gain currency in a country which has given proof of the opposite in every phase of its history. The history of Prussia shows in a manner particularly clear and distinct, that it is out of the moral virtues of the people and not from their economic circumstances that a State is formed. It is only under the protection of those virtues that economic activities can be developed and the latter will continue to flourish until a time comes when the creative political capacity declines. Therewith the economic structure will also break down, a phenomenon which is now happening in an alarming manner before our eyes. The material interest of mankind can prosper only in the shade of the heroic virtues. The moment they become the primary considerations of life they wreck the basis of their own existence. Mein Kamp |
straight
out again. It’s not a fighter. It’s a bomb truck.
The guys at Lockheed
let that cat out of the bag. The Russians already know that all they have to do to counter the F-35 is force it to manoeuvre and then it’s dead meat.
The Russians have also figured out that because the F-35 has no rear aspect stealth cloaking and because it lacks supercruise it will be easy to run down and kill as it attempts to egress hostile airspace.
Stealth technology is “perishable.” That assessment by American and Israeli defence planners appeared in Aviation Week last year. They maintained it would be countered within five years. Given the advances the Russians have made in sensor technology in both their aircraft and BVR missiles that’s probably accurate.
As General Hostage admits, the F-35 is ‘irrelevant’ without the F-22 to furnish air cover. The RAND Corporation concluded the F-35 could not out turn, out climb or out run any of the opposing fighters it might meet in hostile airspace, including the Su-30 family.
For all of these reasons it is probably a good idea to heavily discount the F-35’s stealth advantage. The question then becomes how does it stack up against Rafale, Eurofighter, Super Hornet or even the Gripen? That’s the sort of question that can be readily answered in a fly-off competition. Get them all up to Cold Lake and put them through their paces, day in and day
out. Give them intercept missions, strike missions, close air support, patrol and air superiority missions? Max them out. See which fighters are
capable of generating three sorties a day and which can’t handle more than one sortie every other day.
Let’s examine the CF-18 records. How many engine-out incidents were encountered. In how many of those was the CF-18 able to return to base?
How many engine-out incidents – bird strikes, foreign object ingestion, mechanical failures – can we expect with the F-35 and what will be our attrition rate? What is it going to cost to keep a paltry 65-light bomber
force intact?
Finally, what does it mean when your warplane, your light bomber, needs that other country’s air superiority fighter to survive in hostile airspace? It suggests that, when you equip with the F-35 you’re enlisting in America’s Aerial Foreign Legion. America will furnish not only the F-22 guardians
but also the tankers, AWACS and JSTARs the F-35 needs to work its magic in hostile territory, the raison d’etre of a stealth light attack bomber.
American generals want the F-35, calling it their “kick in the front door” weapon. It’s a first strike weapon. Filling your hangars with F-35s is essentially outsourcing a good bit of your foreign policy to the Pentagon and in 21st century America diplomacy has yielded to military violence as the preferred instrument of foreign policy. Do we really need to go there?By Ken Steif
Authors: Ken Steif & Simon Kassel
I constantly preach to my students that no matter how policy relevant your work is, if it cannot be conveyed to a non-technical decision maker, it isn’t useful. This underlies why data visualization is such an important tool for data scientists.
Because so much public policy has spatial implications, much of the data visualization we produce at Urban Spatial is geographic in nature.
My colleague Simon and I recently worked together on a machine learning model of gentrification using Census data throughout the U.S. In that piece we discuss the importance of parcel level data.
We thought we’d revisit the subject here using higher resolution data and report on our findings by way of data visualization.
Given our mutual interest in making maps in R, in this piece, we share our code in an effort to get others interested in mapping with ggplot and associated packages.
Our data consists of 17,527 single family home sales in San Francisco between 2009 and 2015. The data have been cleaned and each sale has been associated with a neighborhood.
In this tutorial we’ll explore the rapid neighborhood change that has occurred in San Francisco in recent years by constructing time series plots as well as point and polygon maps.
To begin, open up a new R script, set your workspace and a couple selection options and install/load the following libraries
Setup # Set a working directory on your local machine setwd("") # Turn off scientific notation options(scipen = "999") # Ensure strings come in as character types options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE) # Install packages # Note: you must have installed each of these packages before loading them # Note 2: There may be some versioning issues with ggplot & ggmap. # Check out this stackoverflow thread http://bit.ly/2lXHRFJ library(ggplot2) library(ggmap) library(maptools) library(ggthemes) library(rgeos) library(broom) library(dplyr) library(plyr) library(grid) library(gridExtra) library(reshape2) library(scales) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 # Set a working directory on your local machine setwd ( "" ) # Turn off scientific notation options ( scipen = "999" ) # Ensure strings come in as character types options ( stringsAsFactors = FALSE ) # Install packages # Note: you must have installed each of these packages before loading them # Note 2: There may be some versioning issues with ggplot & ggmap. # Check out this stackoverflow thread http://bit.ly/2lXHRFJ library ( ggplot2 ) library ( ggmap ) library ( maptools ) library ( ggthemes ) library ( rgeos ) library ( broom ) library ( dplyr ) library ( plyr ) library ( grid ) library ( gridExtra ) library ( reshape2 ) library ( scales )
Next, we’re going to define two themes that will tell ggplot how to construct both maps and plots. Defining our themes up front ensures that we don’t have to repeat this code over and again for every plot we generate below.
We’ll also define some color palettes. Check out the ‘Zonum Solutions’ Color Ramp Generator for defining custom color ramps.
We’ll create several separate ramps depending on how many colors we are going to need for a given plot.
Set themes # Define one that we will use for plots plotTheme <- function(base_size = 12) { theme( text = element_text( color = "black"), plot.title = element_text(size = 18,colour = "black"), plot.subtitle = element_text(face="italic"), plot.caption = element_text(hjust=0), axis.ticks = element_blank(), panel.background = element_blank(), panel.grid.major = element_line("grey80", size = 0.1), panel.grid.minor = element_blank(), strip.background = element_rect(fill = "grey80", color = "white"), strip.text = element_text(size=12), axis.title = element_text(size=8), axis.text = element_text(size=8), axis.title.x = element_text(hjust=1), axis.title.y = element_text(hjust=1), plot.background = element_blank(), legend.background = element_blank(), legend.title = element_text(colour = "black", face = "italic"), legend.text = element_text(colour = "black", face = "italic")) } # And another that we will use for maps mapTheme <- function(base_size = 12) { theme( text = element_text( color = "black"), plot.title = element_text(size = 18,colour = "black"), plot.subtitle=element_text(face="italic"), plot.caption=element_text(hjust=0), axis.ticks = element_blank(), panel.background = element_blank(), panel.grid.major = element_line("grey80", size = 0.1), strip.text = element_text(size=12), axis.title = element_blank(), axis.text = element_blank(), axis.title.x = element_blank(), axis.title.y = element_blank(), panel.grid.minor = element_blank(), strip.background = element_rect(fill = "grey80", color = "white"), plot.background = element_blank(), legend.background = element_blank(), legend.title = element_text(colour = "black", face = "italic"), legend.text = element_text(colour = "black", face = "italic")) } # Define some palettes palette_9_colors <- c("#0DA3A0","#2999A9","#458FB2","#6285BB","#7E7CC4","#9A72CD","#B768D6","#D35EDF","#F055E9") palette_8_colors <- c("#0DA3A0","#2D97AA","#4D8CB4","#6E81BF","#8E76C9","#AF6BD4","#CF60DE","#F055E9") palette_7_colors <- c("#2D97AA","#4D8CB4","#6E81BF","#8E76C9","#AF6BD4","#CF60DE","#F055E9") palette_1_colors <- c("#0DA3A0") 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 # Define one that we will use for plots plotTheme < - function ( base_size = 12 ) { theme ( text = element_text ( color = "black" ), plot. title = element_text ( size = 18, colour = "black" ), plot. subtitle = element_text ( face = "italic" ), plot. caption = element_text ( hjust = 0 ), axis. ticks = element_blank ( ), panel. background = element_blank ( ), panel. grid. major = element_line ( "grey80", size = 0.1 ), panel. grid. minor = element_blank ( ), strip. background = element_rect ( fill = "grey80", color = "white" ), strip. text = element_text ( size = 12 ), axis. title = element_text ( size = 8 ), axis. text = element_text ( size = 8 ), axis. title. x = element_text ( hjust = 1 ), axis. title. y = element_text ( hjust = 1 ), plot. background = element_blank ( ), legend. background = element_blank ( ), legend. title = element_text ( colour = "black", face = "italic" ), legend. text = element_text ( colour = "black", face = "italic" ) ) } # And another that we will use for maps mapTheme < - function ( base_size = 12 ) { theme ( text = element_text ( color = "black" ), plot. title = element_text ( size = 18, colour = "black" ), plot. subtitle = element_text ( face = "italic" ), plot. caption = element_text ( hjust = 0 ), axis. ticks = element_blank ( ), panel. background = element_blank ( ), panel. grid. major = element_line ( "grey80", size = 0.1 ), strip. text = element_text ( size = 12 ), axis. title = element_blank ( ), axis. text = element_blank ( ), axis. title. x = element_blank ( ), axis. title. y = element_blank ( ), panel. grid. minor = element_blank ( ), strip. background = element_rect ( fill = "grey80", color = "white" ), plot. background = element_blank ( ), legend. background = element_blank ( ), legend. title = element_text ( colour = "black", face = "italic" ), legend. text = element_text ( colour = "black", face = "italic" ) ) } # Define some palettes palette_9_colors < - c ( "#0DA3A0", "#2999A9", "#458FB2", "#6285BB", "#7E7CC4", "#9A72CD", "#B768D6", "#D35EDF", "#F055E9" ) palette_8_colors < - c ( "#0DA3A0", "#2D97AA", "#4D8CB4", "#6E81BF", "#8E76C9", "#AF6BD4", "#CF60DE", "#F055E9" ) palette_7_colors < - c ( "#2D97AA", "#4D8CB4", "#6E81BF", "#8E76C9", "#AF6BD4", "#CF60DE", "#F055E9" ) palette_1_colors < - c ( "#0DA3A0" )
Next we’ll retrieve the data. First the home price data:
Read the home price data # Read in a csv of home sale transactions directly from github. sf <- read.csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonkassel/Visualizing_SF_home_prices_R/master/Data/SF_home_sales_demo_data.csv") # We will need to consider Sale Year as a categorical variable so we convert it from a numeric variable to a factor sf$SaleYr <- as.factor(sf$SaleYr) 1 2 3 4 5 # Read in a csv of home sale transactions directly from github. sf < - read. csv ( "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonkassel/Visualizing_SF_home_prices_R/master/Data/SF_home_sales_demo_data.csv" ) # We will need to consider Sale Year as a categorical variable so we convert it from a numeric variable to a factor sf $ SaleYr < - as. factor ( sf $ SaleYr )
We’ll also download and unzip a shapefile of neighborhoods in San Francisco.
Read shapefile # Define the URL of the zipped shapefile URL <- "https://github.com/simonkassel/Visualizing_SF_home_prices_R/raw/master/Data/SF_neighborhoods.zip" # Download the shapefile to your working directory and unzip it. download.file(URL, "SF_neighborhoods.zip") unzip("SF_neighborhoods.zip") # Read it into R as a spatial polygons data frame & plot neighb <- readShapePoly("SF_neighborhoods") plot(neighb) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 # Define the URL of the zipped shapefile URL < - "https://github.com/simonkassel/Visualizing_SF_home_prices_R/raw/master/Data/SF_neighborhoods.zip" # Download the shapefile to your working directory and unzip it. download. file ( URL, "SF_neighborhoods.zip" ) unzip ( "SF_neighborhoods.zip" ) # Read it into R as a spatial polygons data frame & plot neighb < - readShapePoly ( "SF_neighborhoods" ) plot ( neighb )
Let’s build some plots. First off, let’s check out the distribution of home prices for the entire dataset.
Histogram of prices home_value_hist <- ggplot(sf, aes(SalePrice)) + geom_histogram(fill=palette_1_colors) + xlab("Sale Price($)") + ylab("Count") + scale_fill_manual(values=palette_1_colors) + plotTheme() + labs(x="Sale Price($)", y="Count", title="Distribution of San Francisco home prices", subtitle="Nominal prices (2009 - 2015)", caption="Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel") + scale_x_continuous(labels = comma) + scale_y_continuous(labels = comma) # Plotting it: home_value_hist # And saving it to the working directory: ggsave("plot1_histogram.png", home_value_hist, width = 8, height = 4, device = "png") 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 home_value_hist < - ggplot ( sf, aes ( SalePrice ) ) + geom_histogram ( fill = palette_1_colors ) + xlab ( "Sale Price($)" ) + ylab ( "Count" ) + scale_fill_manual ( values = palette_1_colors ) + plotTheme ( ) + labs ( x = "Sale Price($)", y = "Count", title = "Distribution of San Francisco home prices", subtitle = "Nominal prices (2009 - 2015)", caption = "Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel" ) + scale_x_continuous ( labels = comma ) + scale_y_continuous ( labels = comma ) # Plotting it: home_value_hist # And saving it to the working directory: ggsave ( "plot1_histogram.png", home_value_hist, width = 8, height = 4, device = "png" )
(Higher resolution)
It seems as though there may be some outliers. We’ll remove anything greater than 2.5 standard deviations from the mean.
Outliers sf <- sf[which(sf$SalePrice < mean(sf$SalePrice) + (2.5 * sd(sf$SalePrice))), ] 1 sf < - sf [ which ( sf $ SalePrice < mean ( sf $ SalePrice ) + ( 2.5 * sd ( sf $ SalePrice ) ) ), ]
Next, we’ll check out the distribution of prices for each year using a violin plot.
Violin plot home_value_violin <- ggplot(sf, aes(x=SaleYr, y=SalePrice, fill=SaleYr)) + geom_violin(color = "grey50") + xlab("Sale Price($)") + ylab("Count") + scale_fill_manual(values=palette_7_colors) + stat_summary(fun.y=mean, geom="point", size=2, colour="white") + plotTheme() + theme(legend.position="none") + scale_y_continuous(labels = comma) + labs(x="Year",y="Sale Price($)",title="Distribution of San Francisco home prices", subtitle="Nominal prices (2009 - 2015); Sale price means visualized as points", caption="Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel") home_value_violin ggsave("plot2_violin.png", home_value_violin, width = 8, height = 4, device = "png") 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 home_value_violin < - ggplot ( sf, aes ( x = SaleYr, y = SalePrice, fill = SaleYr ) ) + geom_violin ( color = "grey50" ) + xlab ( "Sale Price($)" ) + ylab ( "Count" ) + scale_fill_manual ( values = palette_7_colors ) + stat_summary ( fun. y = mean, geom = "point", size = 2, colour = "white" ) + plotTheme ( ) + theme ( legend. position = "none" ) + scale_y_continuous ( labels = comma ) + labs ( x = "Year", y = "Sale Price($)", title = "Distribution of San Francisco home prices", subtitle = "Nominal prices (2009 - 2015); Sale price means visualized as points", caption = "Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel" ) home_value_violin ggsave ( "plot2_violin.png", home_value_violin, width = 8, height = 4, device = "png" )
(Higher resolution)
The white circles denote sale price means for each year. Not only do prices increase over time, but by the end of the time series, there far fewer sales under the $1 million mark and many more above it.
Let’s make some maps. Our first step is to download a basemap using the fantastic ggmap package (PDF). We’ll create a bounding box delineated by the neighborhood shapefile and then download the basemap.
Get basemap # Define the bounding box bbox <- neighb@bbox # Manipulate these values slightly so that we get some padding on our basemap between the edge of the data and the edge of the map sf_bbox <- c(left = bbox[1, 1] -.01, bottom = bbox[2, 1] -.005, right = bbox[1, 2] +.01, top = bbox[2, 2] +.005) # Download the basemap basemap <- get_stamenmap( bbox = sf_bbox, zoom = 13, maptype = "toner-lite") # Map it bmMap <- ggmap(basemap) + mapTheme() + labs(title="San Francisco basemap") bmMap 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 # Define the bounding box bbox < - neighb @ bbox # Manipulate these values slightly so that we get some padding on our basemap between the edge of the data and the edge of the map sf_bbox < - c ( left = bbox [ 1, 1 ] -. 01, bottom = bbox [ 2, 1 ] -. 005, right = bbox [ 1, 2 ] +. 01, top = bbox [ 2, 2 ] +. 005 ) # Download the basemap basemap < - get_stamenmap ( bbox = sf_bbox, zoom = 13, maptype = "toner-lite" ) # Map it bmMap < - ggmap ( basemap ) + mapTheme ( ) + labs ( title = "San Francisco basemap" ) bmMap
Let’s put this basemap to work using it to create a small multiple plot of prices by year. The ‘facet’ command in ggplot (line 4 below) makes this possible. Note that here we are calling the map theme created above.
Small multiple of sale points prices_mapped_by_year <- ggmap(basemap) + geom_point(data = sf, aes(x = long, y = lat, color = SalePrice), size =.25, alpha = 0.6) + facet_wrap(~SaleYr, scales = "fixed", ncol = 4) + coord_map() + mapTheme() + theme(legend.position = c(.85,.25)) + scale_color_gradientn("Sale Price", colors = palette_8_colors, labels = scales::dollar_format(prefix = "$")) + labs(title="Distribution of San Francisco home prices", subtitle="Nominal prices (2009 - 2015)", caption="Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel") prices_mapped_by_year 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 prices_mapped_by_year < - ggmap ( basemap ) + geom_point ( data = sf, aes ( x = long, y = lat, color = SalePrice ), size =. 25, alpha = 0.6 ) + facet_wrap ( ~ SaleYr, scales = "fixed", ncol = 4 ) + coord_map ( ) + mapTheme ( ) + theme ( legend. position = c (. 85,. 25 ) ) + scale_color_gradientn ( "Sale Price", colors = palette_8_colors, labels = scales :: dollar_format ( prefix = "$" ) ) + labs ( title = "Distribution of San Francisco home prices", subtitle = "Nominal prices (2009 - 2015)", caption = "Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel" ) prices_mapped_by_year
(Higher resolution)
The movement of prices at $2 million and above move out across the landscape, almost with a contagion effect. By 2015, these highest priced sale abut Interstate 280 in the southern section of the city.
To see the full extent of the change, it may be easier to look only at the first and last years of the time series. Let’s use the ‘subset’ command to pull out just the first and last years.
2009 & 2015 prices We'll stack the two maps and increase the point size. prices_mapped_2009_2015 <- ggmap(basemap) + geom_point(data = subset(sf, sf$SaleYr == 2015 | sf$SaleYr == 2009), aes(x = long, y = lat, color = SalePrice), size = 1, alpha = 0.75) + facet_wrap(~SaleYr, scales = "fixed", ncol = 1) + coord_map() + mapTheme() + scale_color_gradientn("Sale Price", colors = palette_8_colors, labels = scales::dollar_format(prefix = "$")) + labs(title="Distribution of San Francisco home prices", subtitle="Nominal prices (2009 & 2015)", caption="Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel") prices_mapped_2009_2015 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 We'll stack the two maps and increase the point size. prices_mapped_2009_2015 < - ggmap ( basemap ) + geom_point ( data = subset ( sf, sf $ SaleYr == 2015 | sf $ SaleYr == 2009 ), aes ( x = long, y = lat, color = SalePrice ), size = 1, alpha = 0.75 ) + facet_wrap ( ~ SaleYr, scales = "fixed", ncol = 1 ) + coord_map ( ) + mapTheme ( ) + scale_color_gradientn ( "Sale Price", colors = palette_8_colors, labels = scales :: dollar_format ( prefix = "$" ) ) + labs ( title = "Distribution of San Francisco home prices", subtitle = "Nominal prices (2009 & 2015)", caption = "Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel" ) prices_mapped_2009_2015
(Higher resolution)
The price appreciation is readily apparent. Let’s zoom into just one neighborhood in the Mission District, where economic and cultural change are reported almost daily. First we’ll create a new data frame of just sales in the ‘Inner Mission Neighborhood’ and readjust the basemap. Then we’ll build a facetted time series map of sales.
Mission map #Subset sales for the "Inner Mission neighborhood" missionSales <- sf[which(sf$Neighborhood == "Inner Mission"), ] #Create a new basemap at the appropriate scale centroid_lon <- median(missionSales$long) centroid_lat <- median(missionSales$lat) missionBasemap <- get_map(location = c(lon = centroid_lon, lat = centroid_lat), source = "stamen",maptype = "toner-lite", zoom = 15) #Create a facet map by year mission_mapped_by_year <- ggmap(missionBasemap) + geom_point(data = missionSales, aes(x = long, y = lat, color = SalePrice), size = 2) + facet_wrap(~SaleYr, scales = "fixed", ncol = 4) + coord_map() + mapTheme() + theme(legend.position = c(.85,.25)) + scale_color_gradientn("Sale Price", colors = palette_8_colors, labels = scales::dollar_format(prefix = "$")) + labs(title="Distribution of Mission District home prices", subtitle="Nominal prices (2009 - 2015)", caption="Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel") mission_mapped_by_year 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 #Subset sales for the "Inner Mission neighborhood" missionSales < - sf [ which ( sf $ Neighborhood == "Inner Mission" ), ] #Create a new basemap at the appropriate scale centroid_lon < - median ( missionSales $ long ) centroid_lat < - median ( missionSales $ lat ) missionBasemap < - get_map ( location = c ( lon = centroid_lon, lat = centroid_lat ), source = "stamen", maptype = "toner-lite", zoom = 15 ) #Create a facet map by year mission_mapped_by_year < - ggmap ( missionBasemap ) + geom_point ( data = missionSales, aes ( x = long, y = lat, color = SalePrice ), size = 2 ) + facet_wrap ( ~ SaleYr, scales = "fixed", ncol = 4 ) + coord_map ( ) + mapTheme ( ) + theme ( legend. position = c (. 85,. 25 ) ) + scale_color_gradientn ( "Sale Price", colors = palette_8_colors, labels = scales :: dollar_format ( prefix = "$" ) ) + labs ( title = "Distribution of Mission District home prices", subtitle = "Nominal prices (2009 - 2015)", caption = "Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel" ) mission_mapped_by_year
(Higher resolution)
2015 appears to have been a watershed year for the Inner District but what about the other neighborhoods in San Francisco? To display neighborhood level trends, we’ll move from point maps to polygon maps. To begin, we need to do a bit of data wrangling – generating a new data frame with median, standard deviation, sale count, percent change and other statistics by neighborhood and time. We’ll then output our new data frame in a format suitable for mapping.
Data wrangling # We'll start by summarizing our existing sales data frame sf.summarized <- ddply(sf, c("Neighborhood", "SaleYr"), summarise, medianPrice = median(SalePrice), saleCount = length(SaleYr), sdPrice = sd(SalePrice), minusSd = medianPrice - sdPrice, plusSD = medianPrice + sdPrice,.progress = "text") head(sf.summarized, 10) # Now we'll calculate the average annual home sale count for each neighborhood yearly_sales <- ddply(sf.summarized, ~Neighborhood, summarise, avg.yearly.sales = mean(saleCount)) # Then we will use a left join to join the average sale count data frame to the original summarized data frame. sf.summarized <- left_join(sf.summarized, yearly_sales, by = "Neighborhood") # Next, we'll calculate the % change in neighborhood median home value. In order to do this we will need to reshape the data # again using the dcast function in the package reshape2. medByYear <- dcast(sf.summarized, Neighborhood ~ SaleYr, value.var = "medianPrice") # Check out the reshaped data frame head(medByYear) # We now have a data frame in which each row is a neighborhood, each column is a year and the values are the corresponding median prices. # Now we can easily calculate the % change from 2009 to 2015. medByYear$pctChange <- (medByYear$`2015` - medByYear$`2009`) / medByYear$`2009` # And join it back to our sf.summarized dataset sf.summarized <- left_join(sf.summarized, medByYear[,c("Neighborhood", "pctChange")], by = "Neighborhood") # Some neighborhoods have very low annual sale counts. # We will remove these neighborhoods from the dataset by converting them to NA. sf.summarized$pctChange <- ifelse(sf.summarized$avg.yearly.sales < 10, NA, sf.summarized$pctChange) # Remember the neighborhood shapefile we imported at the beginning? We must now convert it to a format that ggplot understands. neighb.tidy <- tidy(neighb, region = c('nbrhood')) # Look at the resulting data frame to see how it has been transformed head(neighb.tidy) # Create an identical field to 'id' but with a name that will allow us to join the data frame to our summarized price data neighb.tidy$Neighborhood <- neighb.tidy$id # Now we're going to join these data frames together so that when we map the neighborhood polygons we can symbolize them using the summary # stats we created sf.summarized_tidy <- join(sf.summarized, neighb.tidy, by = "Neighborhood", match = "all") 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 # We'll start by summarizing our existing sales data frame sf. summarized < - ddply ( sf, c ( "Neighborhood", "SaleYr" ), summarise, medianPrice = median ( SalePrice ), saleCount = length ( SaleYr ), sdPrice = sd ( SalePrice ), minusSd = medianPrice - sdPrice, plusSD = medianPrice + sdPrice,. progress = "text" ) head ( sf. summarized, 10 ) # Now we'll calculate the average annual home sale count for each neighborhood yearly_sales < - ddply ( sf. summarized, ~ Neighborhood, summarise, avg. yearly. sales = mean ( saleCount ) ) # Then we will use a left join to join the average sale count data frame to the original summarized data frame. sf. summarized < - left_join ( sf. summarized, yearly_sales, by = "Neighborhood" ) # Next, we'll calculate the % change in neighborhood median home value. In order to do this we will need to reshape the data # again using the dcast function in the package reshape2. medByYear < - dcast ( sf. summarized, Neighborhood ~ SaleYr, value. var = "medianPrice" ) # Check out the reshaped data frame head ( medByYear ) # We now have a data frame in which each row is a neighborhood, each column is a year and the values are the corresponding median prices. # Now we can easily calculate the % change from 2009 to 2015. medByYear $ pctChange < - ( medByYear $ ` 2015 ` - medByYear $ ` 2009 ` ) / medByYear $ ` 2009 ` # And join it back to our sf.summarized dataset sf. summarized < - left_join ( sf. summarized, medByYear [, c ( "Neighborhood", "pctChange" ) ], by = "Neighborhood" ) # Some neighborhoods have very low annual sale counts. # We will remove these neighborhoods from the dataset by converting them to NA. sf. summarized $ pctChange < - ifelse ( sf. summarized $ avg. yearly. sales < 10, NA, sf. summarized $ pctChange ) # Remember the neighborhood shapefile we imported at the beginning? We must now convert it to a format that ggplot understands. neighb. tidy < - tidy ( neighb, region = c ( 'nbrhood' ) ) # Look at the resulting data frame to see how it has been transformed head ( neighb. tidy ) # Create an identical field to 'id' but with a name that will allow us to join the data frame to our summarized price data neighb. tidy $ Neighborhood < - neighb. tidy $ id # Now we're going to join these data frames together so that when we map the neighborhood polygons we can symbolize them using the summary # stats we created sf. summarized_tidy < - join ( sf. summarized, neighb. tidy, by = "Neighborhood", match = "all" )
Now we’re ready to build some neighborhoods maps. First we’ll map median home price.
Median price by neighborhood neighb_map <- ggmap(basemap) + geom_polygon(data = sf.summarized_tidy, aes(x = long, y = lat, group = group, fill = medianPrice), colour = "white", alpha = 0.75, size = 0.25) + scale_fill_gradientn("Neighborhood
Median
Sale Price", colors = palette_8_colors, labels = scales::dollar_format(prefix = "$")) + mapTheme() + theme(legend.position = c(.85,.25)) + coord_map() + facet_wrap(~SaleYr, nrow = 2) + labs(title="Median home price by neighborhood, San Francisco ", subtitle="Nominal prices (2009 - 2015)", caption="Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel") neighb_map 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 neighb_map < - ggmap ( basemap ) + geom_polygon ( data = sf. summarized_tidy, aes ( x = long, y = lat, group = group, fill = medianPrice ), colour = "white", alpha = 0.75, size = 0.25 ) + scale_fill_gradientn ( "Neighborhood
Median
Sale Price", colors = palette_8_colors, labels = scales :: dollar_format ( prefix = "$" ) ) + mapTheme ( ) + theme ( legend. position = c (. 85,. 25 ) ) + coord_map ( ) + facet_wrap ( ~ SaleYr, nrow = 2 ) + labs ( title = "Median home price by neighborhood, San Francisco ", subtitle = "Nominal prices (2009 - 2015)", caption = "Source: San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder
@KenSteif & @SimonKassel" |
like Jonathan Chait, who compared that desire to the Iraq War, despite having supported the Iraq War. For all the silliness and limitations of predicating a political movement on its rude cultural output, there is an irreducible value in giving permission and form to everyone who has ever found these options lacking.
The real trouble is in what comes next. Dominance politics apologists have staked their fight on historical grounds — civility, after all, is just a tool of power, and no less a force than the present incarnation of the GOP rose to power through domination and fury. I don’t have any objection to that argument, but in practice it is worth remembering that the GOP had an infrastructure and an army to take over. What does the American left have? Nothing but its rage.
This week, the Democratic Socialists of America will host their largest convention of all time in Chicago, the largest official gathering of anti-capitalists that the United States has seen in decades. Its membership is just short of 25,000 people, and its revenue is around $1,000,000 per year. That’s smaller than the average check our plutocrats cut every year to each one of far more than their 25,000 pawns. The American left holds few offices and less power. It has no accomplishments to point to, despite the fact that many of its members are not socialists at all — they only want a better welfare state, and that’s easier to come by than the collective ownerships of the means of production. Rage can be useful. Ending the discursive stranglehold of the serious and sober is a good in its own right. But dominance requires more than a leading edge. It requires weapons that the left does not yet have.
Elite politics is built on civility among thieves.
I don’t say any of this because I believe the cause of socialism in the U.S. is doomed. These are hopeful times for all their darkness. But it will take years and possible decades for any party like the DSA to build a bite commensurate to its bark. It will require long, tedious, and thankless organizing in cities and towns across the country, building infrastructure and community ties and winning city council seats and county board positions, building up from 25,000 members to 250,000 members to 25,000,000 members before it can begin to compete in earnest.
Most of this work will not get written up in the papers. Most of it will not be cool or fun. All of it will take places while the whole world wraps its mouth around the barrel of a gun and wonders whether to pull the trigger for ecological catastrophe or nuclear war. I believe that all the work the left has before it is possible, but a debate over the usefulness of an angry culture misses the point. The culture is here and it has proven its usefulness already. The point is to see where that usefulness ends and to see what else must be done to fulfill the promises that all this heat and noise has made already.
I raise all of this because when I say that these are hopeful times, I do not only mean that they have seen the beginnings of politics that would have been unimaginable just six or seven years ago. I mean they are hopeful because the country is in crisis, and it is only in this crisis that citizens raised in the heart of our empire have become the least bit amenable to radical solutions.
It is only in this crisis that the dull centrists have let slip their total monopoly on the possible, and admitted that more radical solutions exist at all. Don’t mistake what all these cluck-clucking takes mean: they mean that our rulers and their dupe-servants have taken notice of the left, and for the moment, while everything around them is not normal, they’re willing to countenance the left’s existence. Even then, they barely tolerate it at all. When Trump is gone and the ghouls come back, the whole bourgeoisie alliance will turn its full power on the left. Anger won’t be enough then. We’ll need power. But we don’t have power yet, and we’re running out of time.
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Is any of us completely happy with our physical body or our mental capacity? We sometimes curse our plight when we can’t seem to reach beyond the boundaries set by our birth. There is a reason for this. Learn why we require living with certain limitations.
We Live on an Expiatory Planet
According to the Doctrine of Spiritism, we are on the planet earth to learn to become better spirits. We aren’t here to frolic in constant bliss. Instead, we are granted life in our physical bodies so we may pay for our past wrongs and gain new knowledge. We do both by the trials set for us by the spirit world in concert with our quest for improvement, while we resided in the spiritual plane.
In the book, And Life Goes On, psychographed by Francisco (Chico) C. Xavier, a spirit tells us about the type of people who have passed through the Lower Zones and came to be assisted by spirit helpers to recuperate enough to journey once again to the surface of our world to mold their character in the correct manner.
These are the poor souls who mostly did not ascend straight to a heavenly city after separating from their bodies, but due to failings in their lives had to spend some time in a less pleasant location, where they experienced suffering, until they discovered the need to open their hearts and minds to the necessity of love and forgiveness.
These are the spirits who roam the earth for a period of time until they decide to seek help. When they are ready to change their behavior and ask for Divine assistance, spirit helpers come and allow them to recover in a safe environment.
Whereupon they realize their need to return and truly absorb the lessons they require in order to rise immediately after death to a celestial city and start up the ladder to be a pure spirit. We are told about these souls who strive for improvement:
“When they receive the loan of a new body, they are usually born alongside those who were their accomplices in the follies of the past, or those who are attuned to them through the same kinds of debts and resultant repayments. These candidates for expiatory recapitulation of the past beg for measures against themselves, either in a home environment that does not match their ideals or in the formation of the future body they will use. Many times they want some of its functions to be blocked, thus wisely inhibiting beforehand the inferior tendencies that led to their downfall in the past.”[1]
We are being told that many spirits deliberately chose to block potential avenues to commit offenses and to force a lesson they so sorely need. It’s hard to imagine, for us here on earth, why souls would sabotage their potential happiness on our planet to insure their spiritual growth.
The only answer is that the price is worth it. Learning a valuable lesson must have tangible rewards. The prize of improvement must be greater than any momentary pain while in a physical body on earth for a short time.
A spirit who wishes to learn more about this process, asks does this mean that spirits who are determined to perform better their next time on earth ask for built-in disadvantages. He is told:
“Yes, indeed. That is why there are great talents, who are frustrated regarding the direction they would like their lives to take; astute minds that are barred from any academic accolades early on, forcing then to work as obscure artisans or to carry out simpler tasks in a lengthy and painful condition of subalternity, where they learn humility, balance, peace and moderation; artists who are frustrated regarding their highest aspirations, dragging around physical defects and other limitation that temporarily prevent the manifestation of their talents, but under which they will reeducate their impulses with necessary respect for the sentiments of others; women with an enormous capacity for love shackled to unsightly bodies, learning through terrible afflictions of the soul the pain of having deserted home and having despised the commitments of motherhood; dynamic and energetic men bearing insidious and hidden frustrations that keep them from organic pleasures in the physical realm so that they can work on the spirit of understanding and charity in the core of their souls.”[2]
This is one of the most powerful and revealing paragraphs I have read. It explains so much about so many people. What was said explains the daily tragedies of genius unrecognized, talent unappreciated and frustrated. Why some of our friends and family are forced to live with a disability that so limits their opportunities.
One example of a disability of a man of artistic genius is the famous painter Toulouse-Lautrec. Born with obvious disabilities, designed to hinder his ability to shine, he nevertheless eventually, in his own manner was able to demonstrate his talents to the world.
That which we used to our advantage to act in a dishonorable manner towards others is removed. Like a child who plays with a dangerous tool has it taken out of his or her hands, because they don’t yet possess the maturity to correctly manipulate it.
As we affected others so shall we be treated. Our capacity to harm will be curtailed and will stay that way until we learn the lessons assigned and take to heart the way to ascend is to love and be kind to all.
Examine your life and look at your limitations to determine what message was sent to your benefit. I think back of my childhood and my goal of one day becoming a fighter pilot. I had the grades and the opportunity to be able to apply to the Air Force, but in my senior year in high school my eyes lost their perfect 20/20 sight. That avenue had been irretrievably blocked. Only decades later had eye correction surgery was developed.
This wasn’t the only hurdle, when I was young roller coasters and other rides were fun, therefore I thought being in a jet would pose no problem. Years later when I visited Disney World with my family and rode on a pretty advanced simulator type ride, I left the ride sweating and disoriented. My wife and children looked at me and laughed, they had never seen me in that condition before. Now I know that even if by some miracle I was able to fly, as soon as I started any type of strenuous training, I would have been washed out immediately. Like a youngster wishing to be a doctor, but can’t stand the sight of blood, I was destined to never be what I so deeply desired.
What had I done in a past to merit the blocking of my military career? What harm did I inflict on others? Dwelling on the past does me no good, but analyzing why I can’t perform to my wishes in the present does allow me to appreciate where I am today and to review my life lessons I have been taught.
That what I couldn’t do, was denied me for a reason, in order for me to concentrate of what I require to accumulate in this life. Looking back I am grateful to be directed by the spirit world to where I need to be and have been.
If you desire to learn more about the spirit world, from where we come from, how we take part in planning our future trials and our bodies, to how we are guided on during our trials on earth, read my book, The Case for Reincarnation – Your Path to Perfection. It will inform you of what the Doctrine of Spiritism has revealed to us through the works of many mediums.
Author:
Brian Foster has a BSCS degree and a MBA. He has worked in R&D for medical device corporations and in IT for large financial institutions. Brian Foster has a blog at www.nwspiritism.com.
Works Cited
Xavier, F. C. (2009). And Life Goes On. Brasilia (DF), Brasil: International Spiritist Council.
[[1]] Xavier, Francisco C, And Life Goes On, EDICEI, p. 104
[[2]] Xavier, Francisco C, And Life Goes On, EDICEI, p. 1050 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
It is beyond refute that the United States is a world leader, and exceptional, in several categories, although not in those that portray the richest nation in the world in a favorable light. Oh, it is true that America’s military is without peer, American corporations pay some of the lowest tax rates in the world, and the wealthy elite holding most of the nation’s wealth pay minimal taxes compared to most other countries. However, the United States also leads the world in the number of citizens incarcerated, number of guns in the population, number of gun-related homicides, lowest median income in the developed world, most decrepit infrastructure among industrialized nations, and myriad other categories that should humiliate Americans. One area the United States claims to be a leader in is its human rights record that gives it the purview to condemn other nations for human rights abuses (except, of course Israel). But that too, is a claim that is not borne out by the facts according to the findings of yet another United Nations human rights report released on Friday.
After a thorough examination of America’s pathetic record of disparate treatment of minorities, a United Nations watchdog reported what people of color, particularly African Americans, have known first hand and all too well for decades. “Racial and ethnic discrimination remains a serious and persistent problem in all areas of life from de facto school segregation, access to health care, and housing.” That was part of the conclusion of Noureddine Amir, vice chairman of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) reported during a news briefing in Geneva Switzerland. The U.N. racism watchdog called on the United States to halt the excessive police force used after a white Ferguson police officer murdered unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown. The overall gist of the report was that minorities, especially African Americans, are victims of racial disparities in the exceptional nation that regularly condemns human rights violations of other countries.
The United Nations was already examining America’s pathetic racial inequity before the Ferguson murder “shone a global spotlight on the state of race relations in America.” What most African Americans already know, and that many white people support, is that “The excessive use of force by law enforcement officials against racial and ethnic minorities is an ongoing issue of concern and particularly in light of the shooting of Michael Brown,” according to Amir, an expert on racism from Algeria.
A panel of 18 independent experts leveled some hard questions on a senior U.S. delegation about why there is persistent racial discrimination against African-Americans and other minorities; including within the nation’s allegedly ‘colorblind’ criminal justice system.
The American Ambassador, Keith Harper boasted, likely with a straight face, that America has made “great strides toward eliminating racial discrimination,” but admitted that “we have much left to do.” The panel reminded Harper that Michael Brown’s cold-blooded murder was “not an isolated event and illustrates a bigger problem in the United States, such as racial bias among law enforcement officials, the lack of proper implementation of rules and regulations governing the use of force, and the inadequacy of training of law enforcement officials.” The committee urged America to conduct investigations into what they accurately noted was the despicable “practice of racial profiling of racial or ethnic minorities by law enforcement officials, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Transportation Security Administration, border enforcement officials and local police.”
It was not lost on the U.N. committee that over the course of less than two weeks, four unarmed African Americans were shot dead by law enforcement officers including two that were face down on the ground. In fact, the committee also called for this exceptional nation to begin addressing deliberately erected “obstacles faced by minorities to exercise their right to vote effectively.” The 18-member panel noted the Republican obstacles to disenfranchise people of color “was due to restrictive voter identification laws, district gerrymandering, and state-level laws that disenfranchise people convicted of felonies.”
The committee also concluded that America had a human rights obligation to review the National Rifle Association (NRA) and American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) “Stand Your Ground” laws that allow white people to shoot unarmed African Americans under the guise of “self defense” in 22 states. The panel said America should examine and “remove far-reaching immunity and ensure strict adherence to principles of necessity and proportionality when deadly force is used for self-defense.”
The CERD committee heard testimony from the father of Jordan Davis, the unarmed African American teenager murdered in “Stand Your Ground” Florida by a white man who did not approve of rap music. The man was convicted of discharging a firearm into a vehicle, but acquitted in the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed African American boy. Trayvon Martin, another unarmed African American teenager shot and killed by George Zimmerman, was represented by his mother who testified before the panel and urged them to call for America to put an end to wanton killing of unarmed African Americans with impunity.
A representative of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Jamil Dakwar, said the recommendations by the United Nations “highlighted the shortcomings on racial equality that we are seeing play out today on our streets, at our borders, and in the voting booth. When it comes to human rights, the United States must practice at home what it preaches abroad.” But is that not what a hypocritically “exceptional world leader” does as a matter of course? Regularly identify and condemn human rights violations while turning a blind eye to its own pathetic record on the human rights of its own citizens.
This most recent U.N. criticism follows on the heels of two other condemnations within two months for America’s mistreatment of its poor, and the violation of a basic human right to clean water and sanitation after Detroit officials cut off water to hundreds-of-thousands of its residents. The United Nations has done its due diligence in monitoring American compliance with a treaty it ratified along with 177 other nations, many of whom America condemns as human rights violators.
It is a sad, sad commentary when people of color have to depend on the United Nation’s human rights watchdog to call for their own government to address racial disparity that has existed since the nation’s founding. Conservative pundits claim there is no such thing as “white privilege” in America, but it is certain that men like Bill O’Reilly has never been stopped and frisked, pulled over while driving, or followed around by store employees because he is white. African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities regularly face perpetual subtle, and often blatant, discrimination that their own government is reluctant to address because claiming America has a race problem is the quickest way to be labeled a racist.
Thankfully, the United Nations disregards the unspoken American “race card” statute. Although Republicans will not support, or allow, a review of this exceptional world leaders’ racal disparity, at least the rest of the world acknowledges America is still a racist nation; a source of great pride for the “angry white men” in the Republican Party.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:"Employee morale was low and because we were so wrapped in a production-first mentality, we didn't realize just how bad things had gotten."
By Challen Stephens and Brian Lawson
ATHENS, Alabama – For more than two years, the largest nuclear plant in Alabama operated without a fully functioning failsafe system.
A massive cooling pump didn't work. Bearings were installed backwards. Emergency cooling lines sat blocked and unnoticed for years. The last was a safety lapse so dire Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Athens received the federal notice of a "red finding" – the final warning before being forced to shut down.
Now a TVA engineer tells The Huntsville Times/AL.com that both the mechanical and managerial shortcomings were worse than what has been reported by federal regulators. Joni Johnson, a 52-year-old who's been a TVA engineer for half her life, contends that a worst-case scenario – overlapping failures of a broken line and a rapid loss of coolant in Unit 1 – could have led to a meltdown.
What federal regulators have said in recent years: • Browns Ferry received a red finding, the federal government’s most serious warning before shutdown. • Browns Ferry failed to notice a blocked low-pressure cooling line. • Inspectors discovered wider problems with safety culture at Browns Ferry. What a search of TVA and Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents also shows: • The backup low-pressure line also malfunctioned. • The high-pressure core spray was installed incorrectly. • The Unit 1 reactor operated for years with overlapping, malfunctioning emergency cooling systems. What a whistleblower alleges, and paperwork supports: • TVA ignored or obscured failing safety tests for malfunctioning equipment. • TVA hurried to install equipment based on managerial bonuses. What TVA acknowledges in their own paperwork: • The plant operated for years with a bias toward power production over safety.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency says the danger from a nuclear accident is public exposure to radiation caused by the release of radioactive material from the plant.
Johnson points to managerial bonuses for rapid installation of equipment. She also blames an emphasis on continuous running of three boiling water reactors, which need to be shut down to allow for major repairs. But Browns Ferry generates about $1 billion a year, or about 10 percent of TVA's annual revenue, and maintenance shutdowns cost money.
For the past two months, a 23-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspection team has been poring over records at Browns Ferry. Federal scrutiny in 2011 over one blocked failsafe line soon led to concerns about TVA's broader safety culture, prompting the NRC to expand its investigation from Unit 1 to all three reactors at the Athens plant.
TVA, in preparing for federal inspections, acknowledged shortcomings.
Nuclear, perhaps more than any other industry, is built around a vocabulary of safety. Yet, in a recent newsletter preparing employees for the NRC visit, Keith Polson, site vice president at Browns Ferry, is quoted in large bold letters saying Browns Ferry had slipped.
"Our performance declined," Polson said. "Employee morale was low and because we were so wrapped in a production-first mentality, we didn't realize just how bad things had gotten. Even when outside experts told us we needed to get better, we really didn't listen."
Whistleblower
Johnson, who is trained to conduct a "root cause analysis" of plant malfunctions, said she's speaking out now to restore the focus on safety. She said initial concerns voiced at the plant drew retaliation, that she was labeled a "man-hater," pulled from assignments and given poor performance reviews.
She has since engaged in a failed mediation with TVA. She alleges she was discriminated against for raising safety concerns. Regulators with the NRC wrote her a letter in October saying her case met the standards for a federal investigation. Johnson said she has met with NRC investigators on multiple occasions.
TVA and the NRC won't discuss legal matters or an ongoing investigation.
Johnson said the basis for her complaints was that TVA officials attempted to manipulate her team's findings related to equipment failures and how those findings pointed to organizational failures. A report by TVA's own inspector general backs up Johnson's equipment concerns about overlapping failures in the emergency cooling system.
The discrimination investigation remains open.
"You retaliate enough and people aren't going to come forward, and that's the real safety significance," said Johnson, who declined to be photographed for this report.
Slot machine
It's not that Browns Ferry experienced an accident, explains David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. It's that Browns Ferry had reduced the odds the plant could avoid an accident.
Imagine a slot machine, he says. You sit down to find that three cherries are already up. Five cherries win a million. You pull the arm.
With that head start, you get to watch just two dials spin.
That was Browns Ferry for three years, running with faults in three of five emergency cooling systems.
Worst-case scenario
In 2007, TVA restarted Unit 1 at Browns Ferry. It was a massive undertaking. The reactor had gone online in the early 1970s, but had sat dormant since the mid-1980s after being shut down for safety reasons.
The five-year restart cost $1.9 billion and was completed in May 2007. President George W. Bush visited Browns Ferry in June 2007 to mark the recovery. But problems surfaced almost immediately, and the plant had five emergency shutdowns in six months in 2007.
Three years later, a blocked cooling line would result in the costly federal probe and bring to light other equipment failures.
During a shutdown cooling in October of 2010, a 600-pound steel angle-wedge valve in Loop Two failed to open. Water could not reach the core. But safety calls for redundancy. Operators turned to the back-up low-pressure system, Loop One.
The NRC report in February of 2011 states that the residual heat removal pump in Loop One "had been in service for shutdown cooling for approximately 94 hours prior to experiencing a catastrophic failure of the motor on October 27" of 2010.
Redundant malfunctions
Johnson was on a team that studied the pump failure in the backup loop. She wrote the root cause analysis report.
TVA and NRC have said the second system was considered to have been functional up until the pump died.
But Johnson's team found the pump could never have cooled the core for its mission time of 30 days, that the van-sized motor had been installed hurriedly and incorrectly. The rotor was rubbing against a stationary part of the motor.
Again, nuclear safety relies on redundancy. There are two massive pumps in each loop. When the first one burned up, that left just one working pump in one back-up loop.
Polson at first said one pump would work. It was enough to complete shutdown. But one pump could not move enough water to control temperatures in a worst-case scenario.
Both pumps in a system must operate for containment cooling, according to Emergency Core Cooling specifications for Browns Ferry. Some of the worst scenarios, such as recirculation suction breaks, call for four working pumps.
Polson later acknowledged he was not talking about a worst-case scenario when commenting on the adequacy of one pump.
Backwards bearings
In addition to the low-pressure loops, there is also a high-pressure system, which can inject water into the core while it is under pressure. But during the restart, the bearings had been installed backwards in a turbine.
TVA officials say the high-pressure system would have worked. Polson said the high-pressure spray met its mission time of 14 hours after the April 27, 2011, tornado severed external power lines and forced the plant into shutdown. But Johnson said mission-time cooling is not as long as required for emergency cooling and the spray wouldn't have lasted long enough in a worst-case scenario.
Polson said the plant has since stripped the high-pressure system and replaced all parts.
"Safety is the number-one priority," he said on the phone last month. Polson, who started at Browns Ferry in 2009, said perhaps TVA underestimated the extra work necessary to restart Unit 1, that the recovery took "a big toll on the trust of the people."
"I think the trust has been improved," he said, alluding to internal surveys that show improvements in morale last year. "Are we perfect? No, we're not perfect."
Three cherries up
Catastrophe is just that, a plane crash, an earthquake, an EF-5 tornado like the one that just barely missed the Athens plant in 2011. A tsunami. The plant loses external power. Fire burns up control cables. The largest coolant pipe to the reactor breaks, requiring continuous operation of the low-pressure loops.
Nuclear plants are designed around such scenarios.
"It's not one broken pipe or one power outage away from disaster. It takes a lot of steps," said Lochbaum with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Catastrophe assumes failure of the normal cooling system. Beyond the three problematic failsafe systems at Unit 1, there is also a pressure relief system, basically a steam release system. There is also a last-ditch, smaller core spray system.
But malfunctions in the high-pressure and both low-pressure failsafe systems represent an alarming drop in what the industry calls "safety margins." That's the three cherries up. And that invites federal scrutiny.
Winning performance
The inspector general for TVA, in a report requested by The Times/AL.com, backs up Johnson's mechanical concerns, as well as finding the same "unrealistic timetables" for installation.
The inspector general wrote that the pump in Loop One was installed in 2005 just one week before the deadline for a "winning performance" bonus. That was despite "dangerously high" readings on vibration tests, Johnson said. And that was despite the fact the pump wasn't needed for nearly two more years.
"Some personnel involved did not agree with the direction or findings of the root-cause analysis team," noted the TVA inspector general of Johnson's work, finding that Browns Ferry in general quickly reacts to broken equipment but "fails to perform the causal analysis necessary to understand why the problem occurred and how to prevent it."
NRC inspectors last month told reporters that the pump failure in Loop One is not considered overlapping with the original blockage in Loop Two.
But NRC in its own lengthy 2011 inspection paperwork writes that the pump was required to be able to run for 720 hours to fulfill its safety role, and that the pump "had been incapable of meeting its required mission time, and thereby considered inoperable, since at least November 2007."
But that's not why the plant was given the costly red finding.
Bad bet
In the event of a fire or some unforeseen disaster, NRC inspectors say, TVA planned to kill power to other systems and flood the core using Loop Two. That means Browns Ferry would have, at least during crucial early steps, bet everything on a failsafe system that was blocked. That's why the red finding.
TVA at first said the valve had separated from its stem due to poorly manufactured metal threads and undersized welds. TVA argued it couldn't be held accountable for a manufacturing defect. It also argued that, when needed, vibrations from massive amounts of water would have forced the valve to become unstuck.
NRC didn't buy any of what it labeled TVA's poor methodology and "unvalidated assumptions and calculations." Instead, NRC in a "final significance determination" in May of 2011 said TVA was at fault for inadequate testing of its own equipment. It also concluded the valve would never have opened. Johnson said it took two men with a jack hammer two days to free the valve.
Bill Baker, manager of the Browns Ferry Integrated Improvement Plan, spoke at length in the same employee newsletter ahead of the current NRC visit. The article says that, as Baker delved into historical data around the undetected valve failure, he came to a realization. "He needed to stop justifying continued operation and start putting nuclear safety first," reads the employee newsletter.
Polson said eliminating "production bias" has been a priority in reshaping TVA's culture, and "that's changed 100 percent now."
But in April 2012, TVA seemed to remain focused on production, announcing that all three units at Browns Ferry had set records for continuous running without an outage.
With Unit 1 operating for 114 days, Unit 2 for 302 days and Unit 3 for 188 days, the site's record for continuous operation of all three units was three days longer than the previous best set in 2011, TVA said in a news release last year. Polson said at the time that the record reflected the overall health of the plant.
"Browns Ferry is a big plant. We account for about 10 percent of all TVA revenue," Polson told reporters last month. According to SEC filings, TVA grossed about $11.1 billion from selling power in 2012.
"They call it the cash cow," said Johnson of Browns Ferry.
As for the blocked line, Johnson said they didn't find it sooner because plant managers didn't do adequate testing. When testing the pump motor, according to the TVA inspector general, the vibration and oil tests didn't match expectations. "So they reset the set points," said Johnson.
Other equipment tests were not conducted, Johnson said. "You are encouraged to make it look better than it is," she said. "It's institutional bullying."
Selling power
On May 15, the NRC spoke to the press at Browns Ferry. It was not a flattering account. They said TVA initially challenged the findings related to the faulty angle-wedge valve.
Federal regulators began to probe "overall issues," said Bill Jones with NRC, and those "were broader than we originally put down." NRC expanded its investigation from Unit 1 to the entire plant. "The more we looked, the more type of problems that were revealed."
Browns Ferry remains in Column 4 on the federal watch list. "Column 4 is as far to the right as you can get without being shut down," said Joey Ledford with NRC.
However, Jones appeared to disagree with Johnson's warnings, even though her charges are supported by some of the NRC paperwork. "Everything else was working. It was just that one valve," Jones said. "But that valve was important."
Jones also acknowledged that the high-pressure system was malfunctioning due to backwards bearings.
"They are in business to sell power. It's not here for us," reminded Jones of the plant. He said it's the duty of NRC to ask cultural questions: "Do you run the plant even though it's compromised? What kind of tone does management set?"
In the end, despite the red finding and poor testing of failsafe equipment, Jones said: "Bottom line is even with the event that occurred, the plant is being operated safely." He explained: "What we've seen are challenges to that margin of safety."
NRC is expected to release the results of its inspection during a public meeting on July 11.
For Johnson, speaking out has had consequences, as she said she ran up substantial legal bills without expectation of a resolution with TVA. But she became more concerned about the costs of not speaking out.
"I found myself in the position of becoming a whistleblower when TVA management altered root cause reports I authored to subdue their findings," she said last week. "I hope that bringing this story to public light will force TVA to address the safety significance of altering the findings of teams of engineers and experts for the sake of protecting production and their own bonuses."Almost a year after the first fateful reports of the flame-happy Galaxy Note7, the Samsung Galaxy Note “Fan Edition” has just made its redux debut. And in case you were wondering—no, there isn’t a tiny fan in there to help prevent battery fires. (We checked.)
The reissued Fan Edition phone is a response to the outcry over the forced recall of these well-reviewed (if dangerous) phones. Before they started exploding, people really liked the Note7. And lots of owners didn’t want to settle for pen-less phone alternatives. Environmental activists, like Greenpeace, also decried the idea of millions of brand-new phones (along with all the energy and resources it took to make them) being destroyed as part of the recall—and they put pressure on Samsung to deal with the recalled phones responsibly.
In response to one—or both—of these groups, Samsung refurbished and reissued the 2016 Note under the Fan Edition (FE) branding (conspicuously leaving the Note7 name out of promotion and labeling). Naturally, we got our hands on one and tore it down.
Salvaging the Note7
The “Fan Edition” is only available in South Korea so far—though it could be poised for a larger comeback. But only if Samsung has truly ironed out the issues that doomed the Note7 to its explosively short shelf life.
In the case of the Note7’s exploding battery, the problem was two-fold and occurred in two separately-sourced batches of batteries. Wired’s Tim Moynihan explains:
In the case of batteries sourced from Samsung SDI, there wasn’t enough room between the heat-sealed protective pouch around the battery and its internals. In the worst scenarios, that caused electrodes inside each battery to crimp, weaken the separator between the electrodes, and cause short circuiting. In the case of batteries sourced from Amperex Technology Limited, some cells were missing insulation tape, and some batteries had sharp protrusions inside the cell that led to damage to the separator between the anode and cathode. The batteries also had thin separators in general, which increased the risks of separator damage and short circuiting.
If you’ll recall, Samsung actually recalled the phone twice—first recalling the 2.5 million-or-so phones with the Samsung-made battery. But when the safe, replacement phones started exploding, too … then the batteries really hit the fan. The limited recall escalated into a worldwide recall, complete with flameproof boxes for shipping the phones back to Samsung.
The episode shook consumer confidence in Samsung. It’s also my professional assessment that Samsung would strongly prefer the re-skinned, re-batteried Galaxy Note Fan Edition to not spontaneously explode.
So, what’d they do to keep that from happening?
Tearing Down the Note Fan Edition
Now, we knew this was going to be a refurbished version of the old phone, but we held out hope that maybe, just maybe, the glass/glue battery sandwich design may have changed just bit. However, after an arduous heating and prying session, the rear glass comes away just as stubbornly as before, again revealing the antenna assembly.
The astute viewer may note the only real difference here is the antenna design, but that’s not really a difference per se. Since the FE was only available in Korea, it has the appropriate Korea-compatible antennas, while our Note7 was built for North America (note the KOR vs N2).
But let’s get down to brass tacks—or rather, silver batteries. The batteries look fairly identical—but there are some important differences. The FE has a brand new battery. The one in our unit was dated June 20, so it’s pretty much fresh out of the factory. And the refurbed phone’s battery capacity is indeed smaller, clocking in at 12.32 Wh compared to the OG Note7’s 13.48 Wh whopper. The Fan Edition’s battery is still glued down in a well with slim margins. No easy pull-to-remove adhesive tabs in sight—which feels like a misstep. A non-removable battery made the Note7 recall particularly messy. So, why double down and lacquer your replacement battery into the phone again? But, I digress.
After a lengthy extraction process, we get the numbers that reveal a physical size change, not just a capacity difference. At 45.4 g, the new battery weighs 2.3 grams less than the original, and measures in at 37.4 mm x 97.2 mm x ~5.0 mm compared with the Note7’s 37.9 mm x 97.8 mm x 4.9 mm. The FE has indeed lost some mass (more insulation=less battery=lighter), and the volume seems smaller as well. The changes may well be within the tolerances of past Note7 batteries, but in theory, Samsung has adjusted their curve.
A note about manufacturing variance: Not every battery a manufacturer makes can hit every design spec dead on; there |
port is centered on the bottom with the 3.5mm headset jack positioned over to the right side of the bottom. There is nothing on the top of the Nexus 5X The power and volume buttons are positioned on the right side and are smooth black plastic. The SIM card slot is found on the upper left side.
There is a split around the edges about two-thirds of the way down from the top where the two halves of the Nexus 5X are put together. The bottom piece is where you will find the different color back panel.
The flash and laser auto-focus sensor are positioned to the left of the camera on the upper back. Much like the HTC One X, the camera rises above the back with a smooth white slope leading up to the flat camera lens cover. I think it looks good, but it also means the phone rests on the raised camera area when placed down on a table.
The fingerprint scanner is positioned on the center upper back. The white model I have contains a silver ring around the fingerprint sensor. Nexus and LG names are etched into the device on the back as well.
The 12.3 megapixel rear camera doesn't have optical image stabilization, but does have large pixels and IR laser-assisted auto-focus for quick photo capture. I have a pretty steady hand, but still find OIS helps me capture clearer photos. You can launch the camera at any time by quickly double pressing the power button, another good reason there is tactile texturing on the power button.
Compared to something like my Note 5, the Google Camera software is pretty basic. For example, you cannot capture a still photo while recording video and there are no fun filters in the camera software. However, since the majority of people use auto mode it is the results that matter more than the software. There is no RAW capture or manual mode on the Nexus 5X so look to the LG G4 or Samsung Galaxy 6/Note 6 line for this functionality.
DxOMark recently tested out the Nexus 6P in more detail than I ever could and gave it a very high rating. The Nexus 5X has the exact same rear camera as the Nexus 6P, which currently sits in third place. This is very impressive given that the iPhone 6s is in 10th and the Nexus 6 down at 14th.
Check out my Flickr album for a comparison of full resolution images from the Note 5, iPhone 6s Plus, and Nexus 6P (same as the 5X). In my opinion, the two Android phones best the iPhone in these photos. I look forward to hearing which photos and phone you like best.
Android 6.0 Marshmallow
A few updates that come with Android 6.0 Marshmallow are hardware related and the Nexus 5X includes these in an attempt to show what Marshmallow can offer you. The fingerprint scanner and USB Type-C support are part of this version of Android and are welcome additions I have been enjoying on the 5X.
For enterprise users who want to use Android, the Nexus devices are a great choice as they will receive the latest security updates in a timely manner. The Google Imprint fingerprint scanner also makes it a device that is easy to secure, making it much more likely that your employees will actually use some form of security on their devices.
In terms of security, Android Marshmallow also improves security control at the application level. Now when you first launch an application that is trying to access data on your device, a pop-up appears to clearly inform you what data is trying to be accessed and gives you the option to allow this or not.
I am particularly excited about the promise of the Doze battery management software. When I go to bed with my iPhone 6s Plus off the charger, I only see a loss of 2 to 3 percent throughout the night. I've never seen such good standby performance on an Android smartphone so look forward to further testing the ability of the Nexus 5X to help me get through more than a day.
One of the most significant software enhancements in Android Marshmallow is Google Now On Tap. In the past you could launch the Google Now cards interface with a long press or press and slide action. Now when you press and hold on the home button Now On Tap appears over the top of the app you are currently using and then presents information related to what is shown on your screen. With Now On Tap you can easily make reservations or find directions to a restaurant that someone mentions in a text, watch a trailer for a movie that your friend is talking about on Facebook, or get quick links to more information about all those football players on your Fantasy Football team that you aren't familiar with. Like 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s, Now On Tap could change the way you use your Android smartphone.
At first I was a bit frustrated by the control over the status bar and quick actions. I then found this Android Central post that lets you enable the System UI Tuner. Once this is enabled, then you can have the battery status percentage remaining appear on the battery icon, customize the quick actions that appear in the drop-down menus, and select what icons appear in the status bar.
Pricing and competition
The Google Nexus 5X is available now for $379 and $429 for 16GB and 32GB storage capacity models. By comparison, the Apple iPhone 6s is available for $649 and $749 for 16GB and 64GB models. As you can see, the Nexus 5X is $270 less.
Looking at other comparable mid-range smartphones we see the Moto X Pure Edition with 16GB priced at $399.99 and with 32GB priced at $449.99. The ZTE Axon Pro, with 32GB, is priced at $449.98 and the OnePlus 2 16GB model is $329 as we see the battle for sub-$450 smartphones continue to heat up.
As long as size is not that important to you, I would personally choose the 32GB Google Nexus 6P for $70 more to gain the higher end specifications over the Nexus 5X. However, the 5X is definitely easier to carry being 12mm shorter and 5.4 mm narrower than the 6P. The 5X is also 42 grams lighter than the Nexus 6P.
You can also finance the Nexus 5X if you sign up for Project Fi. Payments are interest-free and spread over 24 months.
Accessories
There are a number of cases and cables available for the Nexus 5X. A Speck CandyShell Grip case was included with my evaluation unit. It is white with black highlights and priced at $34.99. The raised rubber black ridges offer a much better grip than carrying the device naked, but the plastic feels so good on the Nexus 5X that I might have a hard time using a case.
You can also find cases from Adopted and Google. Google also has two official Nexus 5X cases available for $34.99 and $39.99.
If you order your Nexus 5X soon you will also receive a $50 Google Play credit and 90 days of free Google Play Music ($9.99/month value). These bonuses are worth about $80, but if you are already a Google Play Music subscriber then you won't get the free months of Play Music.
Daily usage experiences and conclusion
I don't mind using a big phone, but it's much easier to slip a phone into my front jeans pocket on a daily basis. The Nexus 5X offers a lot for the price and has performed very well over the last few days.
Phone calls over the Project Fi network have been good, the single front facing speaker is loud, the camera is on par with the other great smartphones today, the battery has been lasting me through the day (more extended testing is still required), and I am having fun learning the ins and outs of Android Marshmallow.
In the past, it was rare for a non-carrier phone to work with T-Mobile's WiFi Calling. Thanks to the Project Fi support and use of T-Mobile as one of the carriers, Sprint is the other, WiFi Calling works perfectly fine on the Nexus 6P. WiFi Calling was one reason I usually purchased T-Mobile branded devices so this is a nice benefit.
If you are looking for an excellent mid-range device that you can count on for future Android updates, then the Google Nexus 5X is definitely one of the best. The 32GB internal storage may be an issue for power users, but then again power users should pick up the bigger Nexus 6P.eso1514 — Science Release
First Signs of Self-interacting Dark Matter?
Dark matter may not be completely dark after all
For the first time dark matter may have been observed interacting with other dark matter in a way other than through the force of gravity. Observations of colliding galaxies made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have picked up the first intriguing hints about the nature of this mysterious component of the Universe.
Using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s VLT in Chile, along with images from Hubble in orbit, a team of astronomers studied the simultaneous collision of four galaxies in the galaxy cluster Abell 3827. The team could trace out where the mass lies within the system and compare the distribution of the dark matter with the positions of the luminous galaxies.
Although dark matter cannot be seen, the team could deduce its location using a technique called gravitational lensing. The collision happened to take place directly in front of a much more distant, unrelated source. The mass of dark matter around the colliding galaxies severely distorted spacetime, deviating the path of light rays coming from the distant background galaxy — and distorting its image into characteristic arc shapes.
Our current understanding is that all galaxies exist inside clumps of dark matter. Without the constraining effect of dark matter’s gravity, galaxies like the Milky Way would fling themselves apart as they rotate. In order to prevent this, 85 percent of the Universe’s mass [1] must exist as dark matter, and yet its true nature remains a mystery.
In this study, the researchers observed the four colliding galaxies and found that one dark matter clump appeared to be lagging behind the galaxy it surrounds. The dark matter is currently 5000 light-years (50 000 million million kilometres) behind the galaxy — it would take NASA’s Voyager spacecraft 90 million years to travel that far.
A lag between dark matter and its associated galaxy is predicted during collisions if dark matter interacts with itself, even very slightly, through forces other than gravity [2]. Dark matter has never before been observed interacting in any way other than through the force of gravity.
Lead author Richard Massey at Durham University, explains: “We used to think that dark matter just sits around, minding its own business, except for its gravitational pull. But if dark matter were being slowed down during this collision, it could be the first evidence for rich physics in the dark sector — the hidden Universe all around us.”
The researchers note that more investigation will be needed into other effects that could also produce a lag. Similar observations of more galaxies, and computer simulations of galaxy collisions will need to be made.
Team member Liliya Williams of the University of Minnesota adds: “We know that dark matter exists because of the way that it interacts gravitationally, helping to shape the Universe, but we still know embarrassingly little about what dark matter actually is. Our observation suggests that dark matter might interact with forces other than gravity, meaning we could rule out some key theories about what dark matter might be.”
This result follows on from a recent result from the team which observed 72 collisions between galaxy clusters [3] and found that dark matter interacts very little with itself. The new work however concerns the motion of individual galaxies, rather than clusters of galaxies. Researchers say that the collision between these galaxies could have lasted longer than the collisions observed in the previous study — allowing the effects of even a tiny frictional force to build up over time and create a measurable lag [4].
Taken together, the two results bracket the behaviour of dark matter for the first time. Dark matter interacts more than this, but less than that. Massey added: “We are finally homing in on dark matter from above and below — squeezing our knowledge from two directions.”
Notes
[1] Astronomers have found that the total mass/energy content of the Universe is split in the proportions 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and 5% “normal” matter. So the 85% figure relates to the fraction of “matter” that is dark.
[2] Computer simulations show that the extra friction from the collision would make the dark matter slow down. The nature of that interaction is unknown; it could be caused by well-known effects or some exotic unknown force. All that can be said at this point is that it is not gravity.
All four galaxies might have been separated from their dark matter. But we happen to have a very good measurement from only one galaxy, because it is by chance aligned so well with the background, gravitationally lensed object. With the other three galaxies, the lensed images are further away, so the constraints on the location of their dark matter too loose to draw statistically significant conclusions.
[3] Galaxy clusters contain up to a thousand individual galaxies.
[4] The main uncertainty in the result is the timespan for the collision: the friction that slowed the dark matter could have been a very weak force acting over about a billion years, or a relatively stronger force acting for “only” 100 million years.
More information
This research was presented in a paper entitled “The behaviour of dark matter associated with 4 bright cluster galaxies located in the 10 kpc core of Abell 3827” to appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on 15 April 2015.
The team is composed of R. Massey (Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, Durham, UK), L. Williams (School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA), R. Smit (Institute for Computational Cosmology, UK), M. Swinbank (Institute for Computational Cosmology, UK), T. D. Kitching (Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London, Dorking, Surrey, UK), D. Harvey (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Observatoire de Sauverny, Versoix, Switzerland), H. Israel (Institute for Computational Cosmology, UK), M. Jauzac (Institute for Computational Cosmology, UK; Astrophysics and Cosmology Research Unit, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa), D. Clowe (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA), A. Edge (Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, UK), M. Hilton (Astrophysics and Cosmology Research Unit, South Africa), E. Jullo (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, Université d’Aix-Marseille, Marseille, France), A. Leonard (University College London, London, UK), J. Liesenborgs (Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, Belgium), J. Merten (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA; California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA), I. Mohammed (Physik-Institüt, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland), D. Nagai (Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA), J. Richard (Observatoire de Lyon, Université Lyon, Saint Genis Laval, France), A. Robertson (Institute for Computational Cosmology, UK), P. Saha (Physik-Institüt, Switzerland), R. Santana (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA), J. Stott (Department of Physics, Durham, UK) and E. Tittley (Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, UK).
ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.
Links
Contacts
Richard Massey
Institute for Computational Cosmology
Durham University, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 7740 648080
Email: [email protected]
Richard Hook
ESO, Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: [email protected]
Connect with ESO on social mediaA heart-shaped wreath with photos of the 49 victims of the Pulse shooting is on display at Orlando City Hall. (John Raoux/Associated Press)
The Orlando hospitals that treated dozens of people injured in the Pulse nightclub shooting said Wednesday that they would not bill the survivors.
One hospital said it would not bill for any treatment it provided Pulse victims, while Orlando Regional Medical Center, the hospital that treated most of the survivors, said it would seek payment from other resources such as insurance plans and a victims fund set up by city officials. Authorities there said they expect the “total unreimbursed costs” could top $5 million.
“Orlando Health has not sent any hospital or medical bills directly to Pulse patients and we don’t intend to pursue reimbursement of medical costs from them,” said Orlando Health, the nonprofit health-care network that operates Orlando Regional, in a statement Wednesday night.
Emotional community members gathered at a vigil in Orlando, Fla., to write wishes and say prayers for victims, friends and families of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. (McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)
The majority of people wounded at Pulse who survived the massacre were taken to Orlando Regional, a trauma center half a mile from the club. A gunman stormed Pulse and opened fire in the early hours of June 12, an attack that left 49 people dead. The gunman, who went on to pledge loyalty to the Islamic State, held hostages in the club’s bathrooms for hours before dying in a shootout with police.
[‘They took too damn long’: Inside the police response to the Orlando shooting]
Authorities are still investigating the handling of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, including how police responded as the event transitioned into a lengthy hostage standoff. In an interview last month, Orlando Police Chief John Mina said officials do not know how many of the victims who were alive during the standoff later died in the bathrooms or how many had survivable gunshot wounds.
Nine people wounded at the club died at Orlando Regional. After the shooting, doctors recalled patients who arrived “by the truckload,” riddled with bullets and gunshot wounds. The hospital treated 44 people, some of whom would remain in critical condition for days.
The Orlando Sentinel first reported the news Wednesday about the decisions by both hospitals not to bill survivors.
Florida Hospital, which treated 12 survivors of the shooting, would not bill for any of its services in this case, a hospital spokeswoman said.
“It was incredible to see how our community came together in the wake of the senseless Pulse shooting,” Daryl Tol, president and chief executive of Florida Hospital and Adventist Health System’s Central Florida Region, said in a statement. “We hope this gesture can add to the heart and goodwill that defines Orlando.”
49 people were killed at a nightclub in Orlando when a gunman who pledged loyalty to the Islamic State opened fire and took hostages. Here are the victims. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)
Orlando Health said that its officials were “exploring numerous options to help the victims of the Pulse nightclub tragedy address immediate and ongoing medical costs.” In addition to private insurance and the victims fund, these options will include state and federal funds, disability insurance, charity care and a state program that compensates crime victims.
Authorities continue to investigate the shooting at Pulse. The FBI director and the U.S. Attorney General have described it as both a hate crime and an act of terrorism.
The Justice Department, at the Orlando Police Department’s request, is reviewing the law enforcement response to Pulse. Similar reviews have been carried out after mass shootings at movie theaters, government installations and schools, and are used to help inform how law enforcement agencies try to prepare to react to future attacks.
Further reading:
Orlando gunman exchanged text messages with wife, searched Facebook during standoff
‘How did I walk away alive?’ The Orlando shooting through a survivor’s eyes.
The attacker said he carried out the shooting to get ‘Americans to stop bombing his country,’ witness says
This story, first published at 9:46 p.m., has been updated with the statement from Florida Hospital.If you're like pretty much no one else in the universe, the first thing you thought when Rafiki held up Simba at the beginning of "The Lion King" was, "I wonder what that adorable lion cub would taste like smothered in barbeque sauce?"
But lion is what was for dinner at Mokutanya, a Japanese restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Burlingame. However, after public outcry and alleged death threats, the restaurant has taken it off the menu.
Owner Jason Li, who said he purchased the lion meat from a facility where the animal was raised in Illinois, told ABC San Francisco that he was deluged with calls and emails from animal rights activists after posting on Facebook about his intention to serve $70 lion skewers.
"Some of them [sic] is really nice and peaceful like 'oh, can you stop selling lion meat?'" Li explained. "And some of them is like saying 'oh, I going to come in and rape you and kill you.'"
Mokutanya also briefly offered lion meat last year and it proved so popular that the restaurant sold out of its one-time order in less than a week.
Meat from African lions is legal to consume in the United States because the species is listed as threatened rather than endangered, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people from getting offended at the idea of chowing down on the king of the jungle.
"Whether the lion was raised on a farm in Illinois or shot in the Serengeti and immediately put on ice and shipped to the United States, we think it sucks," the Peninsula Humane Society's Ken White told the San Mateo County Times. "These are animals that we need to treasure."
Similarly, a Mexican restaurant in Tampa, Fla. took lion meat tacos off of its menu earlier this month after employees started receiving bomb threats and the location's general manager was assaulted by one particularly incensed animal lover.
The number of lions in the wild has decreased by over 50 percent in the past two decades and there's been a push to get the big cats put on the endangered species list. Additionally, a bill recently introduced in the Illinois legislature would ban the sale of lion meat in the state.
But, the question remains: what does lion meat taste like?Please enable Javascript to watch this video
DUNKIRK, Ohio -- Four members and supporters of a high-profile Richmond-area firearms rights group were killed in an early morning crash Friday near Dunkirk, Ohio.
Among those who died when their car collided with a tractor-trailer was Jason Spitzer III, the founder of The Right To Bear Arms RVA, a grass-roots group of Second Amendment supporters who are known for openly carrying their rifles and other firearms in neighborhoods and shopping districts. Stephen Kim and Jimmy Higgins were also killed in the crash, according to the Kenton Times. The Hardin County Sheriff’s office has not released the identity of the fourth crash victim.
The crash occurred shortly after 7 a.m. on U.S. Route 68. Preliminary reports from the sheriff’s office indicate the northbound car carrying the Virginians collided with the southbound truck. One of the car’s occupants was taken to a Lima hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The rest died at the scene. The trucker was not seriously injured.
Members of The Right To Bears Arms RVA told us the four were on their way to Detroit, Michigan, to march through the city with their firearms with a brother group called the Hell’s Saints.
Spitzer posted a YouTube video last month, inviting others to join him and showing the route they were taking to make sure they didn’t violate any other state’s firearm laws.
Because Spitzer’s car was carrying a number of rifles, federal authorities got involved after the crash to find out what they were all about. These young firearms-rights activists have said they openly carry rifles (some of which are similar in appearance to ones the military uses) to make their point. Opponents have said they frighten people with their tactics.
Member Reggie Bowles said he had a message from Spitzer on the road saying everything was fine. The next thing they heard, they had been in a crash.
Scott Royale, a member of the group who has made news reports with Spitzer, said he got a call from a WTVR CBS 6 reporter who told him off the crash. Royale said the news almost literally floored him. He and Bowles said they will be joining other friends and Second Amendment supporters to help the families of all the victims.
Friends and members of the Richmond group are stunned and heartbroken. Spitzer is being recalled as passionate, hard-working, honorable and one who loved to teach others about firearms safety and rights. He started marching through the city with his long gun and others followed, said one friend.
Even opponents to the group posted condolences on Facebook. “Death has a way of bringing people together,” Royale said.
On Sunday, Spitzer posted on Facebook that he had started a relationship with a wonderful woman – that they had a bright future and he praised God for it. He was also getting ready for a mission trip to Japan.
The crash remains under investigation.New York has always been one of the most fearsome states for small time marijuana consumers, with an obsessive focus on penalizing dime bag smokers and occasional tokers. Yet, the New York marijuana community is beginning to feel the progressive comfort and individual security that arrived with the nationwide trend towards legalization. It’s already been a few years since Mayor Bill De Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton implemented a no arrest policy for possession of under 25 grams of marijuana, and New York’s medical marijuana has been on the books for quite some time now.
Despite the proliferation of weed in New York, traditionally harsh political entities which took so much pride in huge incarceration rates (especially during the enforcement of the Rockefeller drug laws) often seem unclear in their intentions. However, it seems that no amount of abusive police policy or city intervention can stop the nation’s urge to adopt marijuana into the mainstream, and all signals show that New York is starting to fall in line. The state has already expanded it’s medical marijuana program, opening of one of the largest potential marijuana markets in the country.
New Yorkers are always one step ahead in these kind of things, and they have proven their entrepreneurship by turning to the tech company whose free anonymous marijuana networking app has taken the nation by storm. Leafedin.org is a cannabis networking app that is free for all and as anonymous as you want it to be. It serves all participants in the marijuana industry and community: not just large entities or business, but individuals and small time mom and pop operations. It allows its users to access a real-time map and messaging services to instantly find local marijuana vendors, buyers, workers, and employers.
Signing up is free, and it only takes a few seconds. If you’re a medical marijuana patient in New York looking for better quality medicine, hop on and see the hundreds of available options in your area. Trying to get into the legal marijuana employment market? Access the map to find cannabis employers next door or across the country. Plus, there is a state of the art review system for all users, as Leafedin.org promises to legitimize to the marijuana community and remove it from the grey economy.
Leafedin.org works on any device, desktop or mobile. Need inspiration? Just look at your neighbors in Washington, D.C., who have recently adopted the Leafedin.org weed app. So sign up for free on Leafedin.org, and become a part of this innovative revolution.
Click here to sign up for Leafedin’s email newsletter, and connect on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
This post is brought to you by Oho Herer, founder of LeafedIn.org.Before Modremoth rised in the Maguuma Jungle another Tree as the Pale Tree was born. The awakening was during the afternoon she remembers. What was her dream? She forgot, or better say, she can't interpret it well. She saw only other sylvari in another land where they lived in peace. Many as her had smile in their faces. Many of them seemed talk with a mysterious bright figure, a queen maybe? she didn't know. Then a dazzling light come to her face and the dream dissolved.She's a druid, she loves the nature as many others of her race. She learned to stay in the jungle. Once Modremoth awoke, her mother tree became silent, more silent then before. Her sisters and brothers at Modremoth's call couldn't resist. All of them went to serve the dragon. She didn't want go. She saw what the dragon did to the pact, what all of his army did to all the creatures in the jungle. She was afraid. The only friend she had was her sylvari wolf that was so sweet and good with her. He inspires Brenny to stay what she really is.'' I will not go to the dragon till i have you Yucca, don't worry. ''Now she travel away from the jungle, searching how the big world is and in search of aswers.____________________________________________________________________hello guys :)was time to change my ranger look. As you see the pieces are not so original, i focused everything on the dye scheme here. I wanted to do that since a lot of time! I had inspiration to other 2 creations that really have enlightened me, wich are:Hipa creation for sylvari glow: http://gw2style.com/look.php?id=2922 Hylek creation too!: http://gw2style.com/look.php?id=6253 Also when i was having fun to match some colours at beginning, i tried Cyan Dye on her suit and it was amazing! this colour on a suit gives an amount of shades i never see before! The dye impressed me so much that i took it as challenge for myself. i tough, okei, let's see if i can match those colours! and finally there she is :)After i did the big job to buy all of these dyes and weapon skins (ouch, my poor money *sigh*) i discovered she seems a Bird Paradise Flower (a tropical flower) wich i love! (i posted it as last picture)well let's not extend this description more xD i hope you guys like her :)Illustration: Shaye Anderson
The first thing people tell you about Judge Rodney Gilstrap is that he's not from Marshall. In the small Texas city (population 24,000) east of Dallas where he presides as a US district court judge, where you're from matters, and the 59-year-old Gilstrap was actually born in Pensacola, Florida. But because he earned both his BA and his law degree at Baylor University (three hours away in Waco, Texas), has practiced law in Marshall since the 80s, and married a local girl whose family owns the town funeral home, most folks forgive Gilstrap this blight.
They also probably cut him some slack because of how he's run his court for the last five years.
Since taking the bench in 2011—moving literally across the street from his law office into the district courthouse—Gilstrap has become one of the most influential patent litigation judges in the country. In 2015, there were 5,819 new patent cases filed in the US; 1,686 of those ended up in front of Judge Gilstrap. That's more than a quarter of all cases in the country; twice as many as the next most active patent judge.
These include some of the most contentious and headline-grabbing patent disputes in the US. There's the 2013 case where a jury awarded a patent troll $2.3 million, a decision Gilstrap later overturned. There was also the $533 million patent troll win in a case against Apple, a decision Gilstrap has now stayed to allow for appeal.
This busy patent docket didn't blossom overnight, and it's not some strange coincidence. Due to some unique rules around intellectual property filings, patent holders can often file their lawsuits at any district court in the country, even if neither the plaintiff nor the defendant is based there. By introducing a list of standing court orders and local regulations, the Eastern District of Texas (and, in particular, Gilstrap's division of Marshall) has become the court of choice for many plaintiffs, especially non-practicing entities, or NPEs.
"There's not a jail here. Less than 10 percent of the cases in Marshall are criminal cases, which is very unusual for a district court."
NPEs, better known as patent trolls, don't produce anything. Rather, they buy up patents for the sole purpose of suing other companies for infringement. In the 80s and 90s, as computer technology rapidly developed, the US Patent and Trademark Office became inundated with requests for software patents, which it overwhelmingly approved, even though many of these were broad and vague.
By the 2000s, NPEs were regularly scooping up old, fuzzy patents for things like "methods and systems for gathering information from units of a commodity across a network," and launching multiple lawsuits against every digital company under the sun that could maybe, sort of fall under the category of their vague patent.
These lawsuits waste time, cost billions, and hurt innovation. It's estimated that patent troll suits alone cost American companies $29 billion a year (that's based on a figure from 2011, so it's likely higher than that now). The whole point of the patent system is to protect ideas and encourage innovation, not to provide an industry where shell companies that do nothing are able to extort millions from companies that actually create things, provide jobs, and add (some kind of) value to society.
But that's exactly what patent trolls do. And they overwhelmingly choose to do it in the Eastern District of Texas.
The district courthouse in Marshall, Texas. Image: WikiMedia Commons
Some of the proverbial scaffolding propping up this troll-luring system was inherited by Judge Gilstrap, while some of it was his design, and he's been happily maintaining this unintentional specialized court for half a decade. It's a boon to the town, where visiting litigators bring in money and perks, from lawyers ordering catered lunches at the local restaurant, to Samsung sponsoring an outdoor skating rink downtown.
But as the number of patent cases continues to grow, scrutiny over the way the system is currently set up grows along with it. Politicians, law experts, and advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been highly critical of the fact that patent holders get to choose their court and often, by extension, their judge. There are multiple legislative proposals to reform the way patent cases are filed in the US and, if passed, they would effectively end Marshall's heyday as a hotspot for IP trials.
In the meantime, the Eastern District of Texas remains the most active patent court system in the country, and Gilstrap is its poster boy.
***
The Eastern District of Texas wasn't always a magnet for patent cases. Spanning 44 counties along the northeast corner of the state, the district was historically a pretty sleepy jurisdiction. But throughout the 90s and early 2000s, a series of events created a perfect storm to transform parts of the district like Marshall into a hive of IP litigation.
It all started with Texas Instruments, which you might remember as the company that made your high school graphing calculator. By the late 80s, making school supplies, processors, and data converters was becoming a less lucrative business, so TI started to leverage the stack of patent rights it held, padding its bottom line with settlements from suing other companies for infringement. Since the company headquarters are in Dallas, it naturally filed its cases there.
The Eastern District of Texas. Image: usmarshals.gov
But here's another weird thing about patent cases: they can get bumped. In the court system, criminal cases take priority, and with a major city like Dallas, TI's cases kept getting knocked down the list. So the company went poking around in nearby districts to see if there was a quieter docket.
"Marshall doesn't have a criminal docket to speak of," said Michael Smith, an attorney in Marshall who runs a blog about the district court. "Because it's a rural division, there's not a US attorney's office here. There's not a jail here. Less than 10 percent of the cases in Marshall are criminal cases, which is very unusual for a district court, and that is why the patent docket started here 23 years ago."
TI soon started filing its cases in Marshall and some of the surrounding divisions. By 1999, when Judge T. John Ward—who was replaced by Gilstrap upon retirement—took the bench, the patent cases were starting to pile up and they were immediately all transferred to Ward's docket. Before his first case, Judge Ward spent hours preparing to debate terms that were in dispute, only to have both the plaintiff and defendant quickly come to agreement once in the courthouse, Ward told me. It turned out the parties hadn't even discussed the items beforehand. Frustrated at having wasted so much time, Ward looked for ways to more efficiently deal with the patent cases.
As it so happens, one year before he took the bench, Ward had served as a local counsel on a TI patent case, according to a column he penned for a magazine distributed by the State Bar of Texas. His co-counsels from San Francisco frequently lamented the fact that the Eastern District of Texas didn't have the same court rules they enjoyed back in California, Ward wrote. So he read up on the Northern District of California's patent rules, made some adjustments, |
, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan.
Multilateral and International development agencies including International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Islamic Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, UNDP, Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), USAID, DFID of UK, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Trade Organisation also participated in the meeting.
Published in Dawn October 27th, 2016We’re rapidly approaching the point of no return when it comes to spoilers for George R.R. Martin’s series, A Song Of Ice And Fire. Beginning this season, Game Of Thrones will begin making major deviations from the books, killing off characters who have thus far survived in the books, and eventually spoiling the end of the story before Martin gets to it. And while many fans of the show used to be nervous about having readers of the series spoil upcoming plot twists for them, now it seems the reverse will be true. But Martin thinks this is all no big deal, and he is happy to expound on it, at length, until he’s sure that he’s exhausted all possible angles.
In an interview with The Verge during the red carpet for Game Of Thrones’ season five premiere, the author launched into a tirade about spoilers, essentially arguing that everyone needs to stop caring so much about not learning the outcome of stories before they see them.
This whole concept of spoilers is one that I’ve never gotten. Yes, there’s a pleasure when you’re reading a book, or watching a television show—What will happen next? Who will win? Who will lose? But that is by no means the only reason to watch a movie or a television show. It’s not the only reason to read a book.
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After making this eminently reasonable point, the average fan could be forgiven for assuming that Martin was done, having used an appropriate number of words to concisely convey a particular idea. But no, Martin was just getting warmed up, with much more to say about this single item that you already felt had been thoroughly addressed, and didn’t need a bunch more extraneous verbiage. With a dedication he usually only shows to overly long books in a still-unfinished series, Martin continued:
I read a lot of historical fiction, you know? I know who won the Civil War—it’s not a spoiler to me. But I can still enjoy Gettysburg, even though I know how the battle came out. I can still enjoy historical fiction about the Wars of the Roses, even though I know who won the Wars of the Roses. And for that matter, I still enjoy watching Citizen Kane every few years even though I know ‘Rosebud’ is the sled. So there—I just gave a terrible spoiler to all the people who haven’t seen Citizen Kane. Rosebud is the sled, but nonetheless, you should still watch Citizen Kane, because it’s incredible!
At this point, Martin likely paused, gathering his thoughts, before going into a detailed history of the concept of the spoiler: tracing the etymology of the term, elaborating on the various slang that appropriates the root, and proffering theories on how it could evolve from its present assignation. He then presented a chart tracing the whole origin of his Citizen Kane example, which the interviewer read carefully for the first few pages, then started to flip through more and more rapidly, eventually just wanting it to be done.Sure, the president of the United States called the Internal Revenue Service targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups "intolerable and inexcusable," but that hasn't stopped an army of commentators from claiming loudly and proudly that there's no there there. Just do a Google News search on "so-called scandal," and here's part of what comes up:
Elizabeth Drew, New York Review of Books:
References to Watergate, impeachment, even Richard Nixon, are being tossed around these days as if they were analogous to the current so-called scandals.
David Horsey, Los Angeles Times:
Sadly, after this so-called scandal has blown over and enough heads have rolled, the cowed IRS will be even more timid in denying tax-exempt designation to any front organization run by partisan political operatives and funded by corporate moneymen who want to keep their names out of the news.
Thom Hartmann, Truthout:
The fact is, while the GOP obsesses about so-called scandal, the pressing issues facing our nation are being ignored.
Nelson Graves, The News Virginian:
Admittedly, errors in judgment were made in regards to the Benghazi and IRS so-called scandals. But the DOJ was completely within its rights to protect American security.
And so on.
But the real party comes when you search on "the real scandal." So much to choose from!
There's "child poverty" (Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun-Times), "political gridlock" (Ned Barnett, Charlotte News & Observer), "the Republican party's devotion to grandstanding over governance and its preference for slime over substance" (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Huffington Post), "secret money influencing US elections" (Ari Berman, The Nation), "that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way" (Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker), that "they let General Electric not pay any taxes" (Michael Moore, HuffPost Live), sex abuse in the military (Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post), and even "the IRS itself" (John Tamny, Forbes).
Note that we're talking just about "the real/so-called scandal" as regards the IRS business here; there's an entire media ecosystem devoted to pointing and laughing at the rubes and conspiracists who persist in being troubled by the administration's duplicitous handling of Benghazi. Here's TPM’s Josh Marshall from earlier today:
That's often why people are so surprised when something like the 'Benghazi scandal' has such persistent juice behind it even after it's not even clear from a reality-based point of view what the pretended'scandal' is even about.
Bolding mine, for the nostalgia/irony factor of "reality-based."
Two related pieces from me: "Benghazi Hall of Shame: Remembering the officials and commentators who inaccurately blamed a murderous attack at least in part on an obscure YouTube trailer," and "The 'Truth' Hurts: How the fact-checking press gives the president a pass."An entrance to the Rivergreen gated community in Bowling Green, Ky. (Luke Sharrett/For The Washington Post)
Rand Paul was on the verge of becoming a powerful senator and the nation's leading libertarian. His neighbor was a successful doctor and Kennedy-style Democrat who favored nationalized medicine.
They might have sparred over health care or taxes, but an acquaintance of both said they stood in their yards roughly a decade ago shouting at each other over the grass clippings that Paul's lawn mower had shot onto Rene Boucher's property.
" 'I ask him, I tell him and he won't pay attention,' " the acquaintance, Bill Goodwin, recalls Boucher saying after the argument. " 'One of these days.' "
That day might have come last month, when Boucher's attorney said in an interview that his client attacked Paul over long-simmering disagreements between the two about the care of grass, trees and other landscaping on their adjacent properties in a gated community.
The account marks the first time either side has offered a reason for one of the nation's most talked-about political mysteries: What sparked the worst attack on a sitting senator in decades?
The assault left Paul, 54, with six cracked ribs and a case of pneumonia, and it briefly sidelined the Republican senator during a crucial debate over a tax overhaul in Washington. Boucher, 59, has pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge in the case and could yet face more serious consequences.
Federal prosecutors said they are investigating the case. Boucher could be charged under several federal statutes, including one rarely used provision that bars assaults on members of Congress and other high-ranking government officials.
Intrigue has deepened in the weeks since the Nov. 3 assault as Paul and Boucher have remained largely quiet about what prompted it. Neither would comment for this article.
Into the vacuum, competing theories for the assault have been floated, like so many Washington trial balloons. They range from the mundane, such as bad blood over spoiled views of a lake, to the outlandish — an antifa plot.
Some conservative media outlets have suggested that the attack might have been motivated by Boucher's liberal politics. Paul appeared to endorse that idea by retweeting links to the articles. Boucher, a registered Democrat, was critical of President Trump on his now-deleted Facebook page.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) emerges from the Senate dining room on Nov. 14. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Paul, who gave his first television interview about the attack last week on Fox News, said he had not talked to Boucher in 10 years but did not say what caused the assault. He said it was beside the point.
"After my ribs were broken, then he said things to me to try to indicate why he was unhappy, but I think the — I guess, to me, the bottom line is it isn't so important. If someone mugs you, is it really justified for any reason?" Paul said.
Kelley Paul, the senator's wife, also wrote an op-ed for CNN, casting doubt on the idea that landscaping or anything else Paul did had prompted the attack. She said any dispute existed only in Boucher's "troubled mind."
"It is incredibly hurtful that some news outlets have victimized Rand a second time as he struggles to recover," Kelley Paul wrote.
But so far, interviews with friends and area residents who would talk — and a review of court files and police records that have been made public — reveal only the type of small-time neighborly conflict that has vexed many a suburban relationship.
"There is absolutely no political motivation behind this," said Boucher's attorney Matthew J. Baker. "It all stems from maintenance, or lack of it, at these two neighboring properties."
Boucher, who employed professional landscapers, didn't see eye-to-eye with the senator, who delighted in doing his own yard work and had an independent streak about the care of his property, in keeping with his libertarian beliefs.
"Rene is meticulous about a lot of items in life. He's neat. It's the doctor in him. Everything had to be just right. The yard was one of them," Goodwin said. "It's been a running feud."
The office of Sen. Rand Paul in Bowling Green, Ky. (Luke Sharrett/For The Washington Post)
Inside Rivergreen's gates
For more than a month, the heavy wrought-iron gates of the Rivergreen community have concealed the bizarre saga. With a buzz, they slowly swung open on a recent Sunday.
Despite calls to dozens of residents, just one was interested in taking a reporter near the scene of the assault. Jim Skaggs, the co-developer of Rivergreen and a local Republican politico, said the attack has divided residents and left them scratching their heads.
"I'm dumbfounded," Skaggs said, echoing the sentiments of others in the neighborhood. "You have two wealthy, very accomplished doctors. It's difficult to understand this level of action arising from a property dispute."
As Skaggs talked, he steered his SUV past the large custom homes of doctors, lawyers and bankers. The properties are nestled on rolling green lots around a sparkling, 16-acre man-made lake.
Skaggs came to a stop between Boucher's and Paul's homes. Boucher, a retired and divorced anesthesiologist, and Paul, an ophthalmologist, have been neighbors for 17 years and once worked at the same hospital.
Boucher's gabled home sits on a corner lot across a sloping expanse of grass and trees from Paul's redbrick Colonial. It was in that territory that Kentucky State Police said the assault occurred.
Baker said the old tensions over landscaping were triggered Nov. 3 by a fresh incident that he declined to go into detail about.
Attorney Matthew J. Baker, from left, and his client, Rene Boucher appear in court for an arraignment hearing Nov. 9 at the Warren County Justice Center in Bowling Green, Ky. (Austin Anthony/AP)
In his interview with Fox News, Paul said he was blindsided by the attack.
"I was working in my yard with my earmuffs on — you know, to protect my hearing from the mower — and I had gotten off the mower, facing downhill, and the attacker came running full blown," Paul said. "I never saw him, I never had conversation — in fact, the weird thing is, I haven't talked to him in 10 years."
Kentucky State Police said they were called to the scene shortly after 3:20 p.m., according to a police report. Authorities said Boucher admitted going onto Paul's property and tackling him.
After an investigator interviewed both men and left the scene to consult with a prosecutor, Boucher was charged with fourth-degree assault after 8 that night, Baker said.
Police said that Paul initially refused medical care, thinking the injuries were minor, but he eventually was treated as the extent of the damage done by the tackle became more apparent.
"He is profoundly regretful," Baker said of Boucher. "He wishes this had never happened."
Friends and neighbors said both men were similarly driven and devoted to medicine, but with one crucial difference.
Skaggs said Boucher was exacting about the standards for his yard — landscaping bags filled with waste were a common sight on his property. Neighbors said Paul had a reputation for a more relaxed style that some felt didn't always jibe with a community that features gas lamps, Greek statuary and a 13-page packet of rules.
The senator had a pumpkin patch, compost and unraked leaves beneath some of his trees. Goodwin said it annoyed Boucher that Paul did not consistently cut his grass to the same height, and leaves from Paul's trees blew on his property.
Baker, Boucher's attorney, said Paul and his client had stopped speaking for a number of years because of these landscaping issues. He described the silence as a cold war of sorts.
Friends of Paul in the neighborhood said the story rings hollow and that such petty issues would never justify an assault on the senator.
Several said they were unaware of any such problems and said Paul carefully maintained his property. If Boucher had problems with Paul, several current and former representatives of the homeowner's association said, he had not brought them to the board in recent years.
"They're just good neighbors," Gayla Warner said of the Pauls. "We never knew of any conflict."
The downtown square in Bowling Green, Ky. (Luke Sharrett/For The Washington Post)
A difficult time
But Boucher has had disputes over his property before.
Rivergreen residents said Boucher's family had previously had a disagreement with another neighbor over the fate of a tree near the border of their properties. The Bouchers wanted to keep the tree, but the neighbor wanted it removed to clear the way for a house project.
And in 2012, Boucher sued the prospective buyers of his home after they pulled out of a contract, according to court records.
Boucher sued the couple for breach of contract and slander, saying they had spread false stories that Boucher was "untruthful and is engaging in unscrupulous acts" to sell his home. Boucher was worried the comments would affect his reputation as a doctor.
The couple denied the allegations, and the suit was eventually settled. None of the parties involved responded to requests for comment.
The rancor capped a decade or so of difficulty for Boucher.
In 2005, Boucher suffered a severe accident while bicycling that left him unable to work, according to court records. During his recovery, Boucher developed a rice-filled "Therm-a-Vest" that could be heated to help ease neck and back pain. It was sold on the cable TV shopping network QVC and in stores.
Three years later, his wife of 22 years filed for divorce, saying the couple's marriage was "irretrievably broken," according to court records. The pair had two adult children, and divorce records indicate that Boucher was left alone in the family's large home, which he was attempting to sell then as well. Boucher's family members did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite the issues, there was little to presage the violent attack on Paul.
Boucher has no criminal record, and call records from the Warren County Sheriff's Office and Kentucky State Police do not indicate that authorities were previously called to deal with disputes between the senator and his neighbor.
The historic Capital Arts Center on the downtown square in Bowling Green, Ky. (Luke Sharrett/For The Washington Post)
Kentucky State Police are wrapping up their investigation into the incident. State prosecutors will then determine whether the assault rises to the level of a felony charge in Kentucky.
Skaggs said the assault would probably never have occurred if Boucher had his way. Boucher had been trying to sell his home to move closer to his children, Skaggs said. They are out of state.
Danny Renshaw, another neighbor, said the case should give anyone with neighbors pause.
"We never know what our neighbors are thinking — none of us," Renshaw said. "You see stuff that happens in New York or L.A. or Florida and think, that would never happen in our neighborhood. But you just never know what someone will do or what is going on in their mind."
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As new details of Rand Paul's beating emerge, let's recall the violent history of lawn maintenanceAlthough John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, laudably sent a recent letter to President Barack Obama suggesting the possibility of a violation of the War Powers Resolution in the attack on Libya, he was 90 days too late. Obamas violation did not occur this past weekend, but when the first American aircraft attacked Libya.
The War Powers Resolution (WPR)passed in 1973 to rein in Richard Nixons executive excesses in war-making and reassert the primacy of congressional war powers as stipulated in the U.S. Constitutionhas a requirement that the president withdraw U.S. forces from hostilities within 60 days (90 days if the president certifies that troop safety is at risk) unless Congress has declared war or has specifically authorized by law U.S. participation in the conflict. This provision has been argued over by the Obama administration, Boehner, other members of Congress, and the media. The problem is that this provision of the WPR doesnt apply to the attack on Libya.
Right up front in the WPR is a provision titled Presidential executive power as commander-in-chief; limitation, which is very clear:
The constitutional powers of the president as commander in chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only [authors emphasis] pursuant to: (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.
Thus, since the 60/90-day sunset period only applies when no prior congressional declaration of war or statutory authorization for U.S. participation in a conflict has been passed, it must apply only when there has been an attack on the United States or its armed forces. The WPR is merely trying to implement the clear intent of the Constitutions framers at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. They allowed for executive war-making only when the nation was under imminent threat of attack; even in these cases of emergency self-defense, the framers expected the president to ask Congress for a declaration of war at the earliest practical time. For all other military actionsthat is, for offensive attacks not involving self-defensea declaration of war was required before initiating hostilities. As a constitutional law professor, Obama clearly knows the founders intent, and, before becoming president, he made statements to that effect. As a candidate for president in 2007, Obama got it right: The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation. How times have changed!
The framers intent was largely followed until President Harry S. Truman called the Korean War a police action and violated the Constitution by not asking Congress for a declaration of war. Since then, by allowing the president to usurp their war powers, members of Congress have found that they dont have to take politically perilous stances on whether the United States should be letting its sons and daughters die in foreign wars.
So the 60/90-day sunset provision only applies when the president commits forces for self-defense during a national emergencyfor example, after the 9/11 attacks, had the Congress not authorized military action against al-Qaeda and those that harbored the group, the sunset provision would have applied to U.S. military actions in the war on terror. In the assault on Libya, not only did Libya not first attack the United States, it was not even a threat to the U.S. or its vital interests.
By focusing on the 60/90-day sunset provision, however, the Republicans have painted themselves into a corner. Obama has said that this provision does not apply because current operations in Libya dont rise to the level of hostilitiesthat is, the U.S., after leading the dangerous portion of the mission, the destruction of Libyan air defenses, has now turned the turkey shoot on Libyan ground targets over to the NATO allies and is now merely acting in a support role. (Even this excuse is ridiculous, because the U.S. is still striking with drones to help its allies attack ground targets.)
It would be much more difficult for Obama to argue that the war, in its most intense initial phase, didnt rise to the level of hostilities. But the Republicans have forfeited the stronger argument that any offensive attack on Libya needed prior congressional authorization and have put all of their marbles on the aforementioned inapplicable sunset provision. Thus, the Republican critique of the president has no legal basis. This bungling will undoubtedly help perpetuate the fiction that the president, absent an attack on U.S. territory or forces, has the power to create a fait accompli by introducing troops into a foreign country for 60 to 90 days without congressional approval.
More important, in a republic, constitutionally enumerated legislative war powers and restrictive laws such as the WPR are about preventing leaders from tyrannically conducting wars of aggrandizement without approval by the peoples houses rather than about keeping armed forces away from dangerous hostilities. It is clear that the framers and Congress, respectively, wanted congressional approval of military action even under conditions of limited violence. For example, the WPR applies to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.... It then defines introduction of United States Armed Forces to include the assignment of members of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of any foreign country or government when such military forces are engaged, or there exists an imminent threat that such forces will become engaged, in hostilities. In Libya, even in their reduced supporting role, U.S. forces are clearly coordinating with and accompanying the forces of NATO allies in violation of the WPR.
Yet, Obamathe hypocritical law professor and expert in legal legerdemain, who went against the opinions of the top lawyers at the Department of Defense and the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel on whether he needed to get congressional approval for the Libyan missionis unlikely to be reined in by timid Republican bunglers who cannot, or choose not, to read the plain meaning of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. In conclusion, the Republicans should revamp and strengthen their legal objection to Obamas war in Libya and vote to cut off funding for the adventure.We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re finally coming out…with a blog. We know we’re a decade or so behind schedule, but it took Y-Love and Anderson Cooper a little longer, too. Right? Right!
So, let’s get started. Featuring bloggers from many different parts of the resplendent world of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Jews and our straight allies, the Keshet blog will bring you a rich cross-section of ideas, narratives, arts and culture reviews, current events, and much more.
Here’s what you can expect:
• We’ll share a queer take on the weekly Torah portion in preparation for Shabbat, some taken from
Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible
, some from other authors.
• We’ll spotlight synagogues and other Jewish institutions with best practices for LGBT inclusion. We’ll offer DIY queer Jewish events to bring to your own community.
• We’ll bring you fresh commentaries on Jewish holidays, as well as LGBT community holidays. Expect new resources and special readings for Pride month, National Coming Out Day, Transgender Day of Awareness, and for important dates on the queer calendar.
• We’ll invite activists, authors, and musicians to sound-off on the latest queer Jewish happenings in pop culture and the arts.
• We’ll feature posts on coming out, being LGBT and Orthodox, parenting an LGBT child, trans issues in the Jewish world, being in an LGBT interfaith relationship, marriage equality, queer clergy—plus lots more!
Know someone who would be a fabulous blog interviewee? Found a kosher bakery that sells rainbow challah? Have an exclusive scoop on Rachel Berry’s bat mitzvah? Discovered a trans connection to the Dead Sea Scrolls? We’re all ears and can’t wait to share new content. Shoot us an email to [email protected]. And if you’re interested in writing a blog post yourself, let us know!
Happy reading!
B’Shalom,
Idit Klein
Executive Director
kosher Your browser does not support the audio element. Pronounced: KOH-sher, Origin: Hebrew, adhering to kashrut, the traditional Jewish dietary laws.
Torah Your browser does not support the audio element. Pronunced: TORE-uh, Origin: Hebrew, the Five Books of Moses.Activist Post
The risk of being thrown in a cage for possessing a relatively benign plant that makes us happy forces responsible pot smokers to rely on shady drug dealers to get weed. Not anymore.
With two states, Colorado and Washington, legalizing cannabis for recreational use, more civilized ways to get weed are finally emerging. However, for those who don’t live within “legalized” borders, buying weed online is the next safest route.
UPDATE:
Due to the recent FBI seizure of dark web drug markets, we feel that this article was causing readers more harm than good. So we have removed the detailed instructions on how to buy weed online. Take into consideration that using a cannabis vaporizer is more discrete than smoking weed (check this website for best dry herb vaporizer).
If you are still willing to take the risk, the basic steps are: 1. Get Tor browser, 2. Get Bitcoin, 3. Google current dark market sites. That method still works, but you may want to research privacy tools that can give you more anonymity.
It is clear the FBI, by attacking peaceful voluntary exchanges, is actively providing a protection racket for violent drug cartels and the status quo of the failed drug war.
Thankfully, at least the war on marijuana is slowly coming to an end. For now, it appears dark web drug markets cannot be trusted. We’ll be updating this article shortly with ways to purchase legal weed online as well as any new innovations in the dark web space.“You like me, you really like me!”—George Bush or Al Gore, Nov. 7, 2000
George W. Bush has always been able to charm people; Al Gore has always been able to leave them a little uncomfortable. This, until the last few weeks, has been the underlying selling point of the Bush presidential campaign. But now Bush’s strategy to love-bomb America is fading in the face of the most unexpected surge in Gore likability. (“Mr. Bush’s advisers say that he can no longer count on questions of personality and character to carry him into the White House.”—the New York Times, Sept. 16, 2000. “In July, fewer than half—45 percent—of voters surveyed said Gore had ‘an appealing personality.’ Today, 55 percent see Gore that way.”—the Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2000.)
Since who has a better personality is a key issue of the campaign, and we’re talking about the president of the United States, shouldn’t some rigor be applied to our selection of Mr. Congeniality? So, I have applied some. Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which categorizes people into one of 16 distinct personality types, I have assessed the personalities of the two candidates. (This is journalism—I don’t have to ask their permission or be qualified to perform the analysis.) Each is an exemplar of their particular type—and let’s just say they’d hate each other even if they weren’t opponents.
The Myers-Briggs test was devised by a mother-daughter team, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, to create a practical application of psychiatrist Carl Jung’s belief that personality is composed of four poles of preferences—the most famous being extravert (E) and introvert (I). (Click here for a detailed explanation of the preferences.) The test is widely given by corporations (including Microsoft), schools, and governments—the U.S. military loves it. It’s used for everything from helping employees and students gain self-insight to putting together complementary and effective teams. Given Gore’s personality type, which loves theories and systems, he’s undoubtedly taken it. Any system to categorize people can be dismissed as little better than astrology, and Bush, whose personality type loathes introspection, would probably call it that. But for decades people have been surprised how well the Myers-Briggs nails them.
Psychologist David Keirsey has refined the model and come up with his own version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which he calls the Temperament Sorter. He defines the four poles this way:
Expressive (E) or Reserved (I)
Observant (S) or Introspective (N)
Tough-Minded (T) or Friendly (F)
Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) (probing here means looking for alternatives)
In his book Please Understand Me II, he writes that temperament is the traits we were born with, character is the way we use those traits, and intelligence is how well we use them. To find your personality type, take Keirsey’s 70-item quiz at keirsey.com. The quiz asks questions such as: “Are you inclined to be a. easy to approach; b. somewhat reserved.” (You don’t need to have been on the campaign bus to know that Bush would answer a. and Gore b.) “In most situations are you more a. deliberate than spontaneous; b. spontaneous than deliberate.” (Gore a, Bush b.) “Facts a. speak for themselves; b. illustrate principles.” (Bush a, Gore b.) Using Keirsey’s system, Bush is Expressive/Observant/Tough-Minded/Probing, an ESTP. Is he ever. They are charming seekers of excitement who are easily bored, have little tolerance for theory or self-examination, who want to have impact, and can confidently make swift decisions. They are a familiar type because, Keirsey says, they are about 10 percent of the population. The Bush advisers weren’t wrong when they decided to sell their guy’s personality. People like ESTPs. Americans like to elect them president. According to Keirsey, there were four of them in the last century: Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.
They can be “charismatic political leaders,” according to Please Understand Me II, which calls the ESTP “The Promoter.” (The book also says his type would enjoy “working the oil fields.”) Here’s a description of the ESTP: “[T]hey are extremely attentive to others and smooth in social circles, knowing many, many people by name, and knowing how to say just the right thing to most everyone they meet. None are as socially sophisticated as they … and none such master manipulators of the people around them … they are uncanny at reading people’s faces and observing their body language, hypersensitive to the tiniest nonverbal cues that give away the other’s attitudes.” Now compare the generic ESTP with this take on Bush by Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker: “What Bush does with people is establish a direct, personal connection—a vector of just-you-and-me. … [H]e was almost glowing with the pleasure of being down in the room with his folks; pulling his face close to other faces, draping his arms across shoulders, kissing old ladies … remembering the names of people who hadn’t expected to have their names remembered. … He made you feel drawn to him without feeling so strongly drawn to him that it was frightening.”
Type Talk, by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen, gives “The Ultimate Realist” rubric to ESTP. Here’s their description: “This heavily action-oriented type, more than any other type, lives for the moment.” Bush on Bush: “I live in the moment.”—Time, Aug. 7, 2000. Type Talk: “[T]heir fearlessness in trying anything at least once, and their keen sense of competition, makes ESTPs doers, problem-solvers.” Bush on Bush: “I’m a doer. I’m a problem-solver.”—New York Times, June 19, 2000. Bush’s lack of self-reflection actually reflects a certain self-understanding. From Please Understand Me II: “No high-flown speculation … no deep meaning or introspection.” Bush on Bush: “Now that we’ve gotten into the kind of psychoanalyst world of trying to figure me out, I think it’s—I say that sarcastically because, you know, this is not the way I am.”—New York Times, June 19, 2000.
Every type has strengths and weaknesses—which are usually flip sides of each other. As Please Understand Me II explains of Bush’s type: “Oblivious to the past and future, they can concentrate all their powers on a clear and present opportunity. And so more often than not they win. However, there’s a price to pay for living so intently in the moment. Since [they] do not reflect very much on their errors or analyze their mistakes to any great extent, it is difficult for them to learn from their errors, and so they can become caught in a loop, repeating their mistakes.” And according to Type Talk, “Their need for center stage can, at times, make them appear abrasive to other types, as can their impatience with theory or even with long explanations.”
Speaking of theory and long explanations: Presenting Albert Gore Jr. Gore is an INTP. He is what Keirsey calls “The Architect.” Here’s a description: “[T]he world exists primarily to be analyzed, understood, and explained. … What is important is that the underlying structures of the universe be uncovered and articulated. … Architects prize intelligence in themselves and in others, and seem constantly on the lookout for the technological principles and natural laws upon which the real world is structured. … [They] work well with systems … and aspire to be wizards of science and technology.” Earth in the Balance, anyone? How about reinventing government, global warming, arms control, the information superhighway? Here is The New Yorker’s Lemann on Gore: “What he has done … is to develop an intellectual quality that is rare in a politician, a tendency to understand the world in terms of abstract systems. … [H]e reaches a realm of cosmic understanding of the larger forces against which our petty affairs are played out. … ‘The world is a system, not a collection of individuals,’ I heard him say … [his college thesis] is a work of technological determinism, in which systems are more powerful than people.”
Given Gore’s personality type, it’s not strange that after eight years as vice president Gore is only now coming into focus. First of all, there aren’t many INTPs. Keirsey says they are only 1 percent of the population. When encountered, most other types find them a little odd. Here’s Keirsey: “Unfortunately, their pride in their ingenuity can, at times, generate hostility and defensive maneuvers on the part of others. … It is difficult for an INTP to listen to nonsense, even in casual conversation … and this makes communication with them an uncomfortable experience for many. … [T]heir reserve is difficult to penetrate. … They prefer to work quietly, without interruption, and often alone. … INTPs are often seen as difficult to know, and are seldom perceived at their true level of competency.” Here’s Lemann: “He seemed to be straining to connect. … He is incapable of making small talk. … [His] excessively controlled presentation … [makes people] conclude that he’s condescending, or not paying attention, or even being actively hostile. … Gore likes being alone, sitting in his office in front of the computer screen, sipping herbal tea. … [H]e took on for the disorganized Clinton the management of big, complex, unglamorous tasks, the kind that involve great draughts of bureaucratic work without much political payoff.”
But INTPs’ distance and skill at analysis can have benefits. Writes Keirsey: “INTPs are devastating in debate or any form of adversarial discussion, their skill in differential analysis giving them an enormous advantage in discrediting their opponents’ arguments and in structuring their own.” Or as James Fallows writes in the Atlantic Monthly of Gore’s development of his debating skills, “Over the course of the 1990s, so gradually and methodically that it was not fully appreciated, Gore emerged as America’s most lethally effective practitioner of high-stakes political debate.” The title of Fallows’ piece is “An Acquired Taste,” a nice description of most people’s feelings about INTPs.
But Americans aren’t against putting an INTP in the White House; they just haven’t done it for more than a century. Given their minuscule numbers in the population, INTPs have made a good presidential showing. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln were all INTPs, according to Keirsey. (In a paean to Gore in the New Republic, Martin Peretz explicitly compares him to Jefferson.)
So how has our current INTP candidate suddenly started to become likable? For one thing, INTPs are not machines. Keirsey writes they “take their mating relationship seriously and are faithful and devoted |
million.
"It is divine providence that the comic was found and I am hopeful that the heirloom will be returned to my family," said Cage. The other stolen comics are yet to be found.
Cage is believed to have purchased the issue Action Comics #1 whilst preparing for the role of Superman in director Tim Burton’s proposed film during the 1990s. The film was never made, and in 2000 the theft, in which two of his other more valuable comics were also stolen, persuaded Cage to sell his collection at auction.
Describing the theft, the actor said:
“Three of my best comics were robbed – Action One, Detective 27 and Detective 14.”
” “Those books today would be worth, I don’t know how much, more than the whole collection itself was at the time. It occurred to me that I didn’t want that in my house anymore because I didn’t want that sort of temptation for people to do that, so I sold everything.”"
A 9.0 graded copy of the comic, believed to be the same copy, was sold at auction by ComicConnect in November 2011 for a World Record price of $2.16 million.
Other collections
Cage is noted as a passionate collector in several other areas, including classic cars. Amongst the many cars Cage has owned over the years are:
A 1955 Jaguar D-Type (which was displayed in the billiard room of his Bel Air mansion)
A 1989 Porsche Sportster
A 1973 Triumph Spitfire
A Lamborghini Miura SVJ, originally built for Prince Ali-Reza Pahlavi, the Shan of Iran and confiscated from the Imperial garage in the 1979 revolution. Cage bought the car in 1997 for $500,000 and kept it until 2004.
Cage also spent $276,000 on a dinosaur skull at auction in 2007 (after a heated bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio).
The actor has also known to a fan of collecting autographs. Most notably, upon proposing to his future wife Patricia Arquette in the mid-1980s he was given a list of items to find by her with to prove his love. This included the signature of writer and legendary recluse J.D Salinger, which he indeed managed to find, although the pair were not to marry for a further eight years.WASHINGTON — Bolstered by coalition air-power, Kurdish forces in Syria have entered the second week of fighting to seize the city of Raqqa, where nearly 2,000 ISIS fighters are battling to maintain control of their de facto capital in a bloody street-by-street battle.
The fighting has slowed down inside of Raqqa, where just a week ago Kurdish fighters advanced rapidly to reach the historic walls of the Old City, a fortified area built in the eighth century by the Abbasid Caliphate.
But as that battle rages on, Syrian regime forces supported by Iranian militias have penetrated east, just south of Tabqa city, toward one of ISIS' last bastions, the city of Deir ez-Zor and the small collection of Sunni majority villages along the Euphrates river.
As ISIS rapidly loses territory, the U.S. and its partner forces in the region have come into increasing conflict with Syrian regime and Iranian-backed militias in a competition to control the strategically important Euphrates River Valley.
The river valley and city of Deir ez-Zor are strategically important to the goals of the U.S., Syria, Iran and Russia. For the U.S. it has been the scene of more than 360 airstrikes since March, and its location and demographics are important to U.S. strategy in Syria and Iraq. Deir ez-Zor is "where IS will survive, with Anbar on the other side of the border, unless it's rooted out," said Kyle Orton, a senior fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank.
The Sunni majority population in the Euphrates River Valley could complicate the U.S. goal of eradicating ISIS from the region. Analysts note that ISIS sympathies run deep in the region, and its proximity to the Iraqi border could become a destabilizing factor in rebuilding the war-devastated region and quelling any Sunni insurgency in a post-ISIS environment inside Iraq.
"Many of the important Sunni towns are located in the valley" said James Phillips, a senior research fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at The Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington.
In recent months, many ISIS leaders have fled Raqqa and Mosul for safe haven in the Euphrates valley. According to officials in Baghdad, the Euphrates valley is home to approximately 5,000-10,000 ISIS fighters. "Deir ez-Zor is another ISIS capital" and ISIS’ external operations center is located in the area, where it was once centered in Raqqa, said Jennifer Cafarella, an expert on the conflict in Syria for the Institute for the Study of War.
For Syria, "the Euphrates Valley is a very important communications and transportation vector," and control of the area will be vital for Syria to rebuild in a post-ISIS environment, Phillips said.
× Fear of missing out? Fear no longer. Be the first to hear about breaking news, as it happens. You'll get alerts delivered directly to your inbox each time something noteworthy happens in the Military community. Thanks for signing up. By giving us your email, you are opting in to our Newsletter: Sign up for the Early Bird Brief
The Syrian regime "has an ideological fixation on restoring total control" over Deir Ez-Zor, "and it is also the site of resources that can help make a reconstituted Assad state viable," said Orton.
For Iran, it "needs eastern Syria to shore-up its hold on Iraq, its access to Hezbollah, and above all to prevent the Americans laying down anchor and disrupting this quasi-imperial design," he added.
The shooting down of a Syrian-regime Su-22 by a U.S. fighter jet over the weekend was the latest escalation of hostilities between the U.S. and Syrian-regime forces and its Iranian proxies. On Sunday, Syrian forces seized control of the town of Resafa, an important junction on the road on the road to Deir ez-Zor, just 40 km south of Raqqa, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The collapse of the ISIS militants holding the town followed clashes between the Syrian regime and U.S. Kurdish allies at a nearby village. A U.S. jet shot down the Su-22 in response to the hostile actions.
It is the fourth major confrontation between Syrian and pro-regime militias over the past several weeks, and the second aircraft downed by coalition fighters. (U.S. aircraft shot down a pro-Syrian regime drone June 8.)
The downing of the Syrian jet has added a new layer of complexity as the major sides in the conflict jostle for control over territory that has been held by ISIS.
In response to the shoot-down of the manned Syrian aircraft, Syria’s ally in the civil-war, Russia, decided to cut off the deconfliction line — a communications hotline established by Russia and the U.S. to avoid mid-air collisions over the congested airspace in Syria — and warned it would track all U.S. and coalition aircraft with its air defense systems.
"All flying objects, including planes and drones of the international coalition, detected west of the Euphrates, will be followed by Russian air defense systems as targets," the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement, as reported by The New York Times.
U.S. Central Command officials say they would welcome the Russians back.
"The Coalition has not closed the deconfliction line and is always available to deconflict with the Russians to ensure the safety of Coalition aircrews and operations," CENTCOM officials wrote in an email to Military Times. "The deconfliction line has proven effective at mitigating strategic miscalculations and de-escalating tense situations."
This is not the first time Russia has decided to cut the deconfliction time. Russia temporarily halted the hotline in April after the U.S. launched a cruise missile barrage against the Syrian Shayrat airbase in response to a chemical weapons attack allegedly orchestrated by the Assad regime.
However, the hotline in recent weeks has become more important than ever to aid in decongesting the tight airspace over Raqqa, and has grown to include deconflicting military ground maneuvers between Syrian regime forces and its proxy elements, and the U.S. government's Syrian allies in and around the Euphrates river valley.
On multiple occasions, the U.S. has used the line to warn pro-Syrian regime forces to stay at arm’s length from U.S. and partner forces operating near Raqqa and Tabqa cities, as well as those operating near a U.S. training facility for anti-ISIS forces in Tanf, on the border with Iraq in southeastern Syria.
Some of those warnings were not heeded, and have resulted in U.S. airstrikes against pro-regime militias, including the downing of the Iranian Shaheed-129 drone and the Syrian Su-22 on Sunday. In both instances, U.S. officials in Baghdad contend they have used the deconfliction line with Russia in an attempt to end threatening activities being carried out by pro-Syrian regime forces.
The major parties to the conflict, to include Syria and Iran, U.S. Kurdish partners and Free Syrian Army members, are inching toward conflict day by day as each side competes for territory lost by ISIS without any means of deconfliction, said Fabrice Balanche, a fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
"Assad and his allies think the U.S. wants to stay in eastern Syria," he said. "That is why they want to expel U.S. forces."
With few means to deconflict operations and intentions, the possibility of open hostilities increases.
CENTCOM officials continue to emphasize that the mission in Syria is solely to fight ISIS.State Senate plan would eliminate new soccer stadium Copyright by WISH - All rights reserved (WISH Photo) [ + - ] Video
Jim Shella - INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) -- There will be no new soccer stadium in downtown Indianapolis under a plan unveiled Friday in the state Senate.
However, there will be a place for the Indy Eleven to play.
A state Senate committee will vote on Tuesday on the plan that calls for a $25 million renovation of Carroll Stadium on the IUPUI campus, where the Indy Eleven currently play their games.
Hopes for a shiny, new soccer stadium dimmed Thursday when Senate GOP Leader David Long said he was looking for alternatives.
"Senator Hershman has been assigned the job of working on it and he has some ideas," Long said.
The main idea from Brandt Hershman is to renovate Carroll Stadium, where the Indy Eleven played its first season, to both expand and improve it.
He released an amendment Friday that calls for $20 million in state funding and $5 million in city funding to turn it into an 18,000 seat facility.
"It's a reduced cost to the taxpayer (and) reduced risk," Hershman said. "It increases the flexibility for use of the facility by a variety of entities."
And it guarantees state ownership, something that will alleviate fears from lawmakers in both parties who had doubts about a new stadium.
"We're gonna have to look at it sensibly and the taxpayers deserve to know that they're gonna get a return on their investment," said House Minority Leader Scott Pelath. "We may not quite be there yet."
At a Thursday rally at the Statehouse, Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir said he would consider other options.
"We're open to discussions and alternatives basically that make sense," he said.
But it now appears that Carroll Stadium may be the only option available.
The bottom line is that Hershman is proposing an 18,000 seat stadium for $25 million compared to the $82 million the Indy Eleven proposed.
It will be sold as a plan that is good for soccer fans and for taxpayers.
A committee vote is expected Tuesday.A gang of cyber fraudsters were arrested this morning after allegedly making tens of thousands of pounds by buying their own records from Apple iTunes and Amazon using stolen credit cards.
Nine people are currently being held in custody following arrests at addresses in London and the West Midlands earlier today.
The Metropolitan Police said in a statement that the arrests were the result of a parallel international probe carried out with the FBI that kicked off in February 2009.
The police units found that between September 2008 and January this year, a criminal gang allegedly provided music via an unnamed US web firm that uploaded the tracks to iTunes and Amazon.com for sale.
The Met claimed the network pulled in sales of approximately $750,000 (£468,750) using 1,500 compromised UK and USA credit cards, that slipped under the radar of both Apple and Amazon.
The two internet giants were hoodwinked into coughing up royalties totalling $300,000 (£187,500) to the gang, said the Met.
"This investigation, with its national and international dimension, exemplifies why we have set up this national response to e-crime. It shows the success that can be achieved through our close working relationship with the FBI," said the Met's e-Crime unit spokesman DCI Terry Wilson.
"We are now making it more risky for criminals who seek to exploit the internet and commit e-crime across national borders. We are working hard through partnership with industry and law enforcement to combat e-crime and are committed to pursuing those responsible."
Some 60 UK officers from the Met and West Midlands police took part in this morning's raids in London, Birmingham, Kent and Wolverhampton, where six men and three women between the ages of 22 and 46 were arrested.
The Met confirmed that the nine alleged fraudsters remained in custody in a number of London and Midlands police stations on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering. ®AUSTIN, Texas – Texas Sheriffs, the Lieutenant Governor, and experts in immigration related issues met at the State Capitol on Wednesday to discuss the federal government’s creation of a sanctuary state for criminal aliens through its Priority Enforcement Program (PEP).
Jackson County Sheriff Aj (Andy) Louderback, immediate past president of the Sheriff’s Association of Texas, told Breitbart Texas that the federal government’s PEP program “has created a sanctuary state for criminal aliens because it has gutted the immigration system.”
A press conference was held on the crisis facing Texas that was created by the new immigration policies of the federal government. The sheriffs complained that aliens are being brought into the criminal justice system in Texas but are being released into the community because of the federal policies.
In the past, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) could place a 48-hour hold on illegal immigrants when they were wanted on immigration related issues. The PEP program replaced the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Secure Communities plan and now that is no longer possible.
The policy was released by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson in November, 2014. In January, the program went into effect and Breitbart Texas Managing Director Brandon Darby exclusively reported leaked training documents detailing how the program would be implemented. Darby dubbed the program, “Catch and Release 2.0.”
Breitbart Texas has reported many examples of criminal illegal aliens who have been previously deported many times only to come back and commit even more serious crimes.
In July, Breitbart California’s Michelle Moons reported on the murder of Katheryn Steinle. She was killed by an illegal alien who was released by the San Francisco sheriff despite an ICE detainer in effect. Her killer had been deported several times.
The same week as Steinle’s murder, Darby reported on the murder in Laredo, Texas, of a woman who was killed by her criminal illegal alien husband. He had been deported four times. Despite numerous domestic violence calls to the Laredo Police Department, he was allowed to remain in Laredo until he finally killed her.
There have been many other such reports in the past month about violent criminal illegal aliens who commit more heinous crimes after returning from being deported.
The lieutenant governor, Texas sheriffs, and the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies spoke at the press conference in Austin, Texas. Their message – the federal government has placed the public in danger through its policies, and these policies have essentially tied the hands of Texas law enforcement.
Sheriff Louderback told Breitbart Texas, “This federal program (PEP) replaced a Congress-mandated program and replaced it with a program that now prioritizes criminal behavior and is excluding thousands of criminal aliens.” He says the program is forcing Texas sheriffs to sometimes release even violent offenders.
Louderback said that criminal aliens know that law enforcement officials in Texas have their hands tied because of these new federal policies. They know they can come into the country illegally and stay here with impunity.
He said illegal aliens cannot be held until after there is a final conviction. He said, “These criminals bond out and disappear into the country.”
These policies, say the immediate past sheriff’s association president, “mean that local jurisdictions have to deal with the costs.”
Victoria County Sheriff Michael O’Connor said criminal aliens are traversing over the border and coming in throughout the country. He said that the sheriffs intend to “connect, communicate, and collaborate with community stakeholders” to deal with the problem.
Victoria County, Texas, is located about halfway between Houston and the Mexico/Texas border. He said his county is a “fatal tunnel between Harris County and the rest of the U.S.”
Sheriff Hawthorne told Breitbart Texas, “This is about a secure community program.” He said in 2008, law enforcement were able to do that. He said, “PEP is, and will be, a failure by this [federal] administration.”
Lt. Gov. Patrick promised that the senate would pass legislation to deal with the problems of sanctuary cities in the next legislative session. He said that he was confident that the senate now has the votes to deal with this issue. Sanctuary cities legislation was a contentious topic in the senate this past session.
Louderback spent 20 weeks in Austin during the 2015 legislative session in the Lone Star state and will be heading up legislative duties for the sheriff’s association.
Note, this article has been updated with additional information.
Lana Shadwick is a contributing writer and legal analyst for Breitbart Texas. She has served as a prosecutor and an associate family court judge. Follow her on Twitter@LanaShadwick2In principle, Hervé Mallet supports the idea of a $15 minimum wage.
[np_storybar title=”Labour market hot for restaurant workers despite sluggish overall job growth” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/labour-market-hot-for-restaurant-workers-despite-sluggish-overall-job-growth”%5D
The global stock market was in turmoil and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was headed for a drop so steep market watchers would dub it “Black Monday,” but Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. had some good news
Read more
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“My employees deserve to have $15, they probably deserve to have $20,” said the Bathurst, N.B.-based owner of a St-Hubert Express chicken franchise. “But can I raise my prices by 40 per cent? No friggin’ way.”
Mallet has about 40 staff, 75 per cent of whom make minimum wage. If he was suddenly mandated to give them all a 40 per cent raise, Mallet said it’s equivalent to $90,000 in additional costs per year — a sum that would plunge him into the red for virtually every month of the year.
Financially, it’s “suicide,” he said.
Seattle did it. New York is thinking about it. Alberta is doing it. And now, with a federal election in full swing, the push is on for all Canada to adopt the new brass ring of the labour movement: a universal $15 minimum wage.
I’d pass it on to the consumer, and if the consumer didn’t like it, I’d shut my doors, carry on and do something else
To unions and labour activists, it will vanquish poverty, spur local economies and is “only fair.” But to a worried cadre of business owners and economists, it is a looming nightmare. On the Day After $15, they say, Canada will be wracked by inflation, wayward youths, unemployment, bland hamburgers and robots taking our jobs.
“You would be paying 47 per cent more for everything I sold you,” said Tom Morris, general manager of the Kindersley Inn, a hotel and restaurant in the 5,000-person town of Kindersley, Sask.
Roughly 30 per cent of his hotel staff make the Saskatchewan minimum wage of $10.20, and 80 per cent of his workers make less than $15 an hour.
He won’t suddenly be selling more hotel rooms.
Morris, who is also president of the local chamber of commerce, won’t be slashing maintenance or staffing levels. And, after going to the trouble of opening a hotel, he said he has no intention of taking a permanent hit to its profits.
“I’d pass it on to the consumer, and if the consumer didn’t like it, I’d shut my doors, carry on and do something else,” he said.
The small businesses were responding to “what if” questions from the National Post, and to be fair, no major party is proposing a Canada-wide rise to the minimum wage.
The NDP is touting a “national minimum wage” of $15, but it would only apply to federally regulated industries such as banks, airlines and uranium mines — few of which are paying their workers in the $10-$15 range.
Nevertheless, the idea is to lead the way toward similar wage hikes at the provincial level. “We think it’s important to send a signal,” NDP leader Thomas Mulcair said last September, when the policy was first proposed.
If Canada woke up tomorrow to a labour market in which nobody was allowed to make less than $15/hour, the first consequence, say critics, would be a lot of angry cooks and store managers.
A franchise owner in Atlantic Canada contacted by the National Post said he already has senior staff making close to $15 an hour. Under any across-the-board salary raise, those managers would suddenly be making the same as their underlings.
“You take away any opportunity to reward staff for good work. Everyone gets paid the same,” he said. That, or there’s a “domino effect” of wage increases.
From 2005 to 2014, Newfoundland saw a dramatic rise in the province’s minimum wage from $6.25 per hour to $10.25.
Brenda O’Reilly owns O’Reilly’s Irish Pub and Yellowbelly Brewery — both located in St. John’s — and despite Newfoundland’s economy swelling with oil wealth before the recent commodity crash, she said the period was the “most challenging time I’ve ever managed.”
Labour is 40 per cent of her expenditures — her largest single cost. If the minimum shot up still further to $15, along with the accompanying EI, CPP and workers’ compensation charges, she’d be forced to undergo a dramatic triage of layoffs and cost-cutting, she said.
“You might roll back hours; you might close two days a week; instead of opening for breakfast you just open for lunch and dinner,” she said. “It would be devastating.”
Other restaurants suppose they’d start skimping on quality. That is, if they couldn’t convince consumers to get used to $20 hamburgers.
“The impact on the consumer is poor service, less made from scratch and more processed foods … we can’t afford to do it the right way,” said a B.C. restaurateur. In a province where recent polls showed 68 per cent in favour of a $15/hour wage hike, he spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of driving away customers.
There are wide geographic consequences to a nationwide $15 wage. In low-earning Atlantic Canada, the wage rise would represent a seismic shift to local labour markets, but in parts of the country a $15 minimum wage wouldn’t do much of anything at all.
In Alberta, the introduction of a $15 minimum — which will kick in by 2018 — was relatively uncontroversial for the precise reason that years of oil boom and labour shortages had hiked wages already. According to the most recent statistics, the average 15- to 24-year-old Albertan already earns $17.54 an hour. In New Brunswick, by contrast, the figure is $12.56.
In the United States this month, the Pew Research Centre has been circulating a data table hinting that a “one size fits all” minimum wage may not work for the United States, given the wide regional differences in cost of living. The food, rent and haircuts that US$15 would buy in New York, for instance, could be had for as little as US$10.43 in rural Alabama.
And then there are the robots.
Just last week, during a phone update with investors, Wendy’s Co. chief financial officer Todd Penegor said the fast-food giant was going to use technology to offset “future wage inflation.”
Self-order kiosks in the front, and automated hamburger flippers in the back.
In high-wage Europe, McDonald’s has already slimmed payrolls by installing more than 7,000 touchscreen kiosks in its restaurants.
Economists have never been fond of the minimum wage either.
In the 1990s, the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton was mulling a “modest” rise to the federal minimum wage. In response, a committee of U.S. Senate Republicans cited more than 50 years of economic studies and drafted an apocalyptic report declaring that the minimum wage “hurts the poor,” “hurts blacks,” drives teenagers to crime and was, apparently, a tool of apartheid repression.
“The minimum wage helped South African whites at the expense of blacks,” it read.
These days, critics aren’t quite so dramatic.
The rhetoric was cooled down significantly by a landmark 1994 study that gauged the effects on fast-food restaurants after New Jersey hiked its minimum wage from US$4.25 to US$5.05. The US$4.25 wage remained in place across the border in Pennsylvania. Despite the raise, New Jersey’s fast-food employment rose.
And Seattle, which began phasing in a $15/hour minimum wage in April, has avoided any apparent signs of economic ruin. Ivar’s Seafood Restaurants, for one, raised their menu prices by 21 per cent, told customers they didn’t need to tip, and saw revenue soar under the new system.
But what spooks Canadian critics is the sheer magnitude of a $15 increase — and the fact that it would hit plenty of regions with less money to spare than Seattle.
Lately, Canadian defenders of a $15 wage have been leaning on a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Published earlier this month by UBC economist David Green, the report has no new research, but draws on existing studies to predict that a $15 hike wouldn’t result in the “massive job losses” portended by other economists.
But Green acknowledges that even in high-wage B.C., a $15 hike to the minimum wage would need to be accompanied by programs to cope with new ranks of unemployed.
Of those currently making between $10 and $15 an hour, he wrote, roughly 7.6 per cent would lose their jobs — and that’s in the unlikely scenario that all other economic factors remain constant.
Applying that number solely to the one million Canadians earning minimum wage, that’s 76,000 jobs lost.
Yellowbelly Brewery’s O’Reilly is not an anti-minimum wage radical.
She supports the concept and even supports regular annual increases to the rate, as long as they “can be managed and planned for.”
An overnight hike of $4.75 to the minimum wage could potentially be managed with creativity and sacrifice, but “I don’t think I’d have the energy for it, to be honest,” she said.
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PEUT-ÊTRE avez-vous vu, il y a quelques années, cette série de photographies prises par l’artiste américain Chris Jordan lors du tournage de son film Midway Journey, ces cadavres d’albatros dont la décomposition laissait apparaître le contenu : les oiseaux étaient morts gavés, mais gavés d’une myriade de petits objets en plastique. Tourné sur l’atoll Midway, dans le Pacifique, ce documentaire soulignait la place incroyable prise dans l’océan par les objets en plastique, matériau non biodégradable et pour ainsi dire indestructible aux échelles de temps courtes. Reste une question : pourquoi les albatros mangent-ils ces objets non comestibles?
A en croire une étude américaine publiée dans Science Advances du 2 novembre, cela pourrait bien être une histoire d’odeur. Chercheurs de l’université de Californie à Davis, les auteurs de ce travail sont partis d’un constat simple : oiseaux hauturiers qui parcourent de longues distances au-dessus de l’océan dont ils sondent la surface à la recherche de nourriture et notamment de plancton animal, les albatros et leurs cousins pétrels ou puffins se servent de leur odorat pour détecter ce qui fera leurs repas. Un de leurs indices olfactifs préférés provient d’une molécule, le sulfure de diméthyle (ou diméthylsulfure, DMS) qui, avec son parfum de chou cuit, constitue un des composants de la fameuse « odeur de la mer ». Si ces grands oiseaux marins affectionnent l’odeur du DMS, c’est parce qu’elle leur signale de la nourriture. Le sulfure de diméthyle est en effet produit par la décomposition du plancton végétal lorsque le plancton animal vient le « brouter ».
Mais quel est le lien avec le plastique puisqu’il ne contient pas de DMS? La réponse est subtile et, pour l’obtenir, les auteurs de l’étude ont concocté une petite expérience. Ils ont placé de petites perles de plastique de 4 à 6 millimètres de diamètre dans des filets à mailles très fines (pour empêcher lesdites perles de se sauver) et ont attaché le tout à des bouées océanographiques au large des côtes californiennes. Pendant trois semaines, les filets et leur contenu ont donc fait trempette dans l’océan.
« Encrassement biologique »
Au bout de ce laps de temps, les perles ont été récupérées et les odeurs qu’elles émettaient alors ont été extraites et analysées à l’institut de… viticulture et d’œnologie de l’université de Davis – les spécialistes du vin s’y connaissent en arômes. Résultat : si, avant l’expérience, les perles de polyéthylène ou de polypropylène ne dégageaient pas de DMS, elles en étaient toutes chargées, sans exception, après leur séjour dans l’océan. Pourquoi? Parce que le plastique constitue un excellent support pour ce que l’on nomme l’ « encrassement biologique » : c’est un matériau sur lequel se forme aisément une pellicule biologique d’êtres vivants microscopiques. Et qui en l’occurrence émet du DMS dans une concentration aisément détectable pour un oiseau marin. Le plastique ne se mange pas mais il sent la nourriture. Il se comporte comme une espèce d’appât, de leurre, pour les albatros et leurs cousins.
Pour le confirmer, les chercheurs ont analysé les données de 55 études consacrées aux oiseaux marins avalant du plastique (au total 13 000 individus de 25 espèces différentes). Et ils se sont aperçus que plus une espèce était sensible au DMS, plus l’ingestion de plastique était fréquente chez elle. Alors qu’il était jusqu’ici communément admis que les oiseaux marins gobaient des débris de plastique parce qu’ils les confondaient visuellement avec leurs proies, les résultats de ce travail suggèrent que la composante olfactive joue un rôle au moins aussi important dans cette confusion. Ce qui amène bien sûr à se demander si d’autres espèces animales (poissons, manchots, tortues, baleines, etc.) vivant dans l’océan et sensibles au DMS peuvent aussi tomber dans ce piège chimique. Pour mémoire, une étude publiée en 2014 estimait qu’il y avait plus de 5 000 milliards de morceaux de plastique flottant dans tous les océans du monde.
Pierre Barthélémy (suivez-moi ici sur Twitter ou bien là sur Facebook)
Signaler ce contenu comme inappropriéThe big news coming out of the Iran negotiations at the end of last week was that France took an unexpectedly rejectionist stance in the talks and refused a deal that was all but agreed upon.
One of the reasons this was a huge deal is that the P5+1 and Iran really did seem to be on the cusp of a first-stage agreement. Secretary of State John Kerry canceled his travel plans and went to Geneva, presumably to be there to announce the historic deal.
Additionally, the negotiations were, quite literally, in a race against time, as hardliners in Congress, Israel, and back in Iran tried to derail any possible deal.
But France, strangely enough, beat them to it. And it may be terribly consequential, running the risk of putting the U.S. back on the war path to Tehran. As Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told FP, “if months from now diplomacy has fallen apart and conflict appears more likely, the French could go down in infamy.”
This earned France some unlikely admirers in the two most militant figures in the U.S. Senate: Lindsey Graham told CNN “Thank God for France,” and John McCain tweeted the following.
#France had the courage to prevent a bad nuclear agreement with #Iran. Vive la France! — John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) November 10, 2013
So why did France do this? It’s hard to say with any certainty, given the fact that the talks are held in complete secrecy. But here are a few of the ideas floating around:
1. Currying favor with Saudi Arabia and Israel: America’s closest allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Israel, have been pissed off as of late, complaining that Washington hasn’t been hawkish enough on their two regional enemies, Syria and Iran.
Saudi Arabia has been frustrated at the Obama administration’s reluctance to topple the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, either by bombing or by more direct support for the rebels. And both the Saudis and the Israelis hate the fact that diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran has begun in earnest. An easing of tensions between the U.S. and Iran is viewed by our “allies” as a net loss for their own regional dominance.
France is reported to have dramatically increased its weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, and in August the two signed a $1.34 billion defense contract. And President François Hollande is due to visit Israel next week.
It’s incredibly cynical and Machiavellian to think France scuttled a possible deal with Iran just to swoop in and curry favor with America’s dissatisfied allies, but I wouldn’t put it past them. States naturally aim to benefit their own interests at the expense of other states, even allies.
Here’s what Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, tweeted:
2 q's: Was Fabius borrowing from Talleyrand's playbook at Concert of Europe, playing spoiler to get major role? And did he collude w/ Bibi? — Strobe Talbott (@strobetalbott) November 11, 2013
2. Getting back at the U.S. for backing out of Syria war: In recent years, France has been drunk on the “humanitarian intervention” Kool-Aid. They were one of the driving forces behind NATO’s intervention in Libya and they’ve been much more inclined to direct military intervention in Syria than Washington. Colum Lynch and Yochi Dreazen report in FP that there may be “an element of personal pique in the French position.”
In September, when the Obama administration began publicly threatening military strikes against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after his regime used chemical weapons against his own people, France was the only American ally that promised to take part. Hollande told Le Monde at the time that the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus “must not go unpunished” and that France was “prepared to punish” Assad for the incident. That made it all the more embarrassing for the French leader when Obama quickly dropped his plans for an American military intervention into Syria and instead cut a chemical weapons deal with the Syrian strongman. The White House move left France isolated when it didn’t want to be. France is alone again, but this time it’s very much by choice.
3. The French are hawks now: Hollande is supposedly a socialist, but his foreign policy has taken a sharp rightward turn. Since his election, France has been decidedly pro-military intervention on Libya, Mali, and Syria. Apparently, they want to be hawkish on Iran now too. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said he backed out of the impending deal last week because the West hadn’t demanded that Iran stop construction on the Arak heavy water reactor, which may produce plutonium in the future.
To add an even stranger mix to all this, Secretary Kerry has refused to criticize France and even claimed the failure to get a deal on Friday was Iran’s fault, a narrative that runs contrary to every other story leaked out of the meetings.
Parties are expected to meet again to hash out a deal later this month. But if this delay provides enough time for Congress to slap on additional sanctions or for hardliners in Iran to call off negotiations, France will shoulder the blame for potentially setting the U.S. and Iran back on the war path.Time Team's Sir Tony digs in to save archaeology A-level
Sir Tony Robinson has backed a campaign to try to save A-level archaeology.
Sir Tony, who fronts Channel 4's Time Team programme, urged his online followers to sign a petition "against the axing |
ly. What did you learn?”
“Something very important to me. And very difficult to test ethically.”
“Oh?”
“My water bottle is over on the bench. Care to go get it for me?”
“Why? I don’t want to…” He trailed off, and she listened as his mind raced. "Oh, that was slick,“ he said finally. "I never got a hint. Are you suppressing my danger sense somehow?”
“Not a bit. You aren’t in any danger.”
“It’s still a little scary. Is there anyone else out there who could manage what you just did?”
“I doubt it. Until just now, I wasn’t sure I could. Certainly not anyone who isn’t a full telepath and has to rely on verbal commands. I’m being very careful not to tell you to do anything you aren’t already inclined to do, or prevent you from doing anything you consider important. And if I hadn’t planned that–your danger sense would have gone off first.”
“Huh. It feels… worryingly pleasant, if that makes sense.”
“Oh yeah. So. Using your other power, the one you have issues testing on people–how do you get free from mind control?”
“From you? I wait. You might monologue for a while, but eventually you’ll just let me go.”
“Hmm. Any faster way?”
He was quiet for a moment. "Nothing I’m willing to try. You have some kind of multiple personality vulnerability, but it’s definitely dangerous to look closer. How many of you are in there, anyway?“
"Heh. Four at the moment–it should only be three, but, well…”
“Yeah. Not something I’m willing to stir up for practice. I don’t get to see all the consequences–just the right place to poke.”
Breakpoint’s other power, the one that gave him his name, was weakness detection. Like his danger sense, it was a limited form of precognition. For inanimate objects, it told him the precise spot to strike to break or disable them. For people, it was messier–and more dangerous. Yiskah was sure it had more versatility than he’d demonstrated publicly, but he was reluctant to test it because of the risks.
“That’s fine. You’ve already given me several valuable insights. So I’ll let you go now. In a way, it did work. There.” She turned to face him again as he stepped back.
“Okay, what next?” he asked.
“I’d like to see how comfortable you are with my telepresence–in case you’re doing fieldwork and want my help in a hurry…”
The next twenty minutes weren’t as physically tiring as the sparring, but they were still a workout–just a less visible one.
“All right. Formal tests over,” said Yiskah, after they finished the last one.
“Whoo. Now that was mind-expanding,” he said, as he sat back down on the bench.
“Fun, too.” She stretched, enjoying his reaction as he watched.
“Okay. I got a little background danger spike, but it went away quick. Now what are you doing?”
“Just what you see. And mind scan. You aren’t as good at hiding your surface thoughts when we aren’t physically sparring.”
“I stopped trying–because you have to be doing that on purpose. But I have no intent to offend.”
“You aren’t offending me. At all.” Yiskah chuckled. "Now… there’s an interesting theory about how you could use your danger sense. You know the one. And why people find it so interesting.“
He shook his head. "It doesn’t work like that. It’s not like mind-reading or telepathy. It doesn’t let me find the right thing to do. Or even avoid the wrong thing–just the dangerous thing. So it won’t help with–”
“It could. With someone capable of being dangerous to you. And a lot of self-discipline, or at least self-awareness. And who you are interested in, and trust. Not a lot of people in that club. But it’s not empty. Is it?”
“Ah… I’m not sure–”
“I’m sure it’s worth trying. You aren’t because you don’t know me well enough yet. We can fix that.” She smiled. "And then you won’t have to wonder anymore. We can test it. Perfectly safely.“
"Except for the dangerous part.”
“Just like the rest of the tests. What do you think of…?”
She sent a projection of a possibility–and felt him react.
“Um,” he said.
“Is that an 'um, no’ or an 'um, yes’? Any danger?”
“No danger, but… right here?”
“Room is sealed, monitors are privacy locked, mat is padded. And life is too short.”
“Whoo. Were you planning this from the beginning?”
“Oh yeah. You have danger sense and I can read your mind. We can skip past all the BS. And I don’t have to be careful every. Damned. Second. Do you have any idea how much that turns me on? So how about it?”
He stared back at her for a moment, looking for any sign of deception–and finding none. "Sure.“
It didn’t go quite how she had foreseen. But he found a path that worked, for both of them, in a wordless exchange of desire and intent, balance and consent. And pleasure. She was content.
The contentment stayed. It was a rare feeling for Yiskah. She knew to take such times as gifts, even when she knew how they would end. She luxuriated in it as she dressed again, outside the shower. Breakpoint had already finished his, so they spoke telepathically.
"I understand your caution,” she sent. “I think your danger sense and weakness detection are part of a continuum rather than separate, just like my mind scan and mind probes. But your perfectionism was a little frustrating. I was like 'I’m ready, already, go go go!’” She sent her laughter along with the words.
“Danger sense only helps if I listen to it. Carefully.”
“Fair enough.”
She returned to the main room. He had changed back into his street clothes after his own shower, and was sitting on the bench, hands clasped in front of him. He had the slightly wary expression of someone who thought everything had gone too well and was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“So,” she said, and sat down beside him. She put an arm around his waist and leaned against him. "Let’s talk about your real worry.“
He looked down at his hands. "I’m sorry that I–”
“Not the shift in who you were thinking about. That’s not under conscious control–and I wouldn’t expect or want you to hide it, even if you could. It won’t bother her, and it sure didn’t bother me.” Yiskah smiled. "When I was nine, Jumping Spider was who I wanted to be when I grew up.“
"Ah.” More wariness.
“I’m talking about why you haven’t done this with her. Or anything other than fieldwork. Yet.”
“We’ve… considered it. Twice. And both times my danger sense went off.”
Yiskah nodded slowly. "Did you explain?“
"Yeah. And the second time, it was clear it wasn’t an outside problem. She seemed pretty frustrated. The warnings I get for social stuff aren’t like the spikes I use to dodge physical threats–they can be really vague. I didn’t get what was wrong or how to bypass it. But I’m not willing to ignore them.” He looked down again. "Made that mistake before. Not going to make it again.“
"Any ideas why?”
“Yeah. I really like her. And it sure seems to be mutual. But I’ve already started thinking about the long term. Lots of ways that could go wrong. I don’t want it to. And I don’t want to jeopardize our work–we’re going after Tabula Rasa, and I’m covering early warning for both of us. I can’t afford to lose my center in the field.”
“Is there a reason you haven’t just sat down to talk it over with her?”
“We haven’t had the chance–we’ve been busy. Covering for Doc, finding out what was up with Donner, and then the assassination attempt and Tabula Rasa. Sure, we’ve had a little time here and there. Enough time to have some fun, as she put it. But not to start a talk that might help us figure out why it isn’t safe–that could go anywhere. I just don’t know.”
“Well, I can tell her to make the time. This is not an issue that’s going to get better on–”
“Stop!” said Breakpoint.
Yiskah had already picked up the warning from his mind, and changed her intent to contact Jumping Spider telepathically. She frowned and checked with Prime instead.
“Ah. Flicker crashed their meeting and… Okay, that definitely qualifies as dangerous. I’m not going to joggle her elbow when she just called Flicker a bloodthirsty spoiled brat to her face.”
“Still dangerous, not as bad,” he said.
“Yeah. Sounds like Flicker is getting briefed–and deciding whether to do something… excessive. In the next ninety seconds or so. Because of an old promise Doc made. Prime–Stella–is talking to her.”
As they waited, Breakpoint suddenly grinned. "Do you begin to see the problem?“
"Oh yeah. Same kind of one I had with Doc. We aren’t together anymore because he refused to take the time. Jumping Spider understands the priorities better–she pounced on my idea of a sparring match. And Prime and I owed her a favor for breaking a key link in her lead trail.”
“Heh. I wasn’t sure quite what she– Okay, danger level just dropped.”
Yiskah checked in with Prime again and listened. "Yeah,“ she said to Breakpoint. "Flicker made up her mind. So now I can…” She sent a mental contact request to Jumping Spider.
“Hel-lo,” came the reply. “Been having fun? Do you like spending time with him?”
“Yes. One thing I am sure of now; his difficulty isn’t primarily sexual. That was just the context that made the warning clear. What’s the real reason you haven’t made time to talk?”
“I stalled, because if his danger sense went off for a talk before I determined how to deal with the problem, we’d be SOL.”
“Thought so. I can work with or around his danger sense–but I cannot directly fool it. And neither can you. That includes planning to change his mind about something he’d object to now. If you might succeed–that’s dangerous. If it worked any other way, it would leave him vulnerable to manipulation. I’m not sure if that’s the driver, but–”
A mental sigh. “It’s not causing the problem, but if I can’t fool him, there’s no good way out. So much for fun. Could you check if he’s triggered?”
Yiskah glanced over at Breakpoint. "Jumping Spider wants to know if your danger sense is going off.“
He was outwardly calm, but she could sense his tension. "Bad news incoming. Not anything I can do about it.”
Yiskah switched back to Jumping Spider. “Something wicked this way comes. And it’s you. I don’t like what I’m picking up of your planning.”
“Neither do I. He’s been a good partner. But he won’t stay one if he wrecks himself–and I can’t stop that. Don’t interrupt, but you’ll have to pick up the pieces. Are you ready?”
“I am. You’re doing a complete break?”
“Yes. Fieldwork safety just went away, and a slow amputation is no kindness. I’d let him explain the details at his own pace. I know I don’t have the whole picture.”
“Okay. Any other advice?”
“Don’t assume. He’s too good at hiding things, for the same reason he’s so good at undercover work. When he warns you how risky it is to use his weakness detection on people, listen. And be aware that his danger sense is far more of a two-edged sword than most people realize.”
“I’ve already seen signs of that. All right.”
Breakpoint had been waiting patiently. Yiskah met his eyes. "I’m sorry,“ she said.
"About what? You haven’t–” He broke off as his phone rang.
“Hey.” He paused to listen. "Yeah, I kind of figured. We can just go back to–what?“
Yiskah watched as the color drained out of his face. "But how are we going to catch–” Another pause to listen. "So you’ll be working with DASI?“ He stared down at the floor. "I can try the fieldwork on my own, but you’re better at tracing leads, so– Yeah. No. No, I didn’t.”
Breakpoint glanced at Yiskah. "It went fine, but–“ More listening. "There’s another way. I can alter how I–” He clenched his fist–the first sign of frustration from him Yiskah had ever seen. "It does work. I’ve done it.“
His hand relaxed. "Oh.” He seemed to deflate and his voice became calm and quiet. "Yes, I understand. It’s been a privilege and an honor to work with you. Thank you.“ A final pause. "You too. Bye.”
He ended the call and stared down at his phone. Yiskah picked up a short pulse of anger, followed quickly by a pulse from his danger sense, which turned the anger into bleak depression. He put the phone away, moving slowly, then looked up at her wordlessly.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
He started to open his mouth, then closed it again. Instead of speaking he reached out with his hand and tapped her on the left shoulder. He was in shock–but his reflexes still worked.
Yiskah had plenty of questions, but they could wait. She put an arm around her sparring partner, and waited with him.
Next: Part 2(Rachel Orr/The Washington Post)
"Fascist" is often used as a cheap, meaningless insult in U.S. politics. But recently, it's become a serious charge that "Fascist" is often used as a cheap, meaningless insult in U.S. politics. But recently, it's become a serious charge that elected officials, political operatives and pundits on both sides of the aisle have lobbed at GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump.
After Trump to violence committed by his supporters, CNN commentator Sally Kohn said on Wednesday, “There’s a word for this: fascism.” After Trump suggested he'd back a federal registry for Muslims residents, Wall Street Journal conservative columnist Bret Stephens called the idea "fascism, plain and simple." Recounting Trump’s passive responses
Max Boot, a scholar of foreign affairs who is advising Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was more direct:
Some of Trump's rhetoric does invoke the tyrannical speeches of fascist leaders of the past. Asked about his plans to track American Muslims,, "Certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country." Some of Trump's rhetoric does invoke the tyrannical speeches of fascist leaders of the past. Asked about his plans to track American Muslims, Trump ominously told Yahoo News last month
But the key aspects of fascism are at odds with Trump's persona and his message. For all his bluster, a President Trump wouldn't pursue the authoritarian, collectivist agenda that characterized Germany's Nazi Party and Italy's Benito Mussolini, at least not according to what he's said so far about his political views. Calling Trump a fascist risks misleading voters about his agenda, which is not that much different from that of his rivals for the GOP presidential nod.
These are just a few of the major differences between Trump and the fascists of history:
1. Trump’s message is individualist
One common characteristic of fascist regimes was their insistence on collective rather than individual identity. Fascist leaders believed the life of the nation as a whole took precedence over the lives of the people who made it up, imposing a brutal uniformity on the lives of their citizens.
"The Italian nation is an organism, having aims, life and means of action superior to those of the single or grouped individuals who compose it," stated Mussolini's "The Italian nation is an organism, having aims, life and means of action superior to those of the single or grouped individuals who compose it," stated Mussolini's Labor Charter in 1927.
That vision of a unified state conflicted with the complicated reality of European countries, which diverse religious, racial and ethnic communities called home. Fascist leaders tried to eliminate these differences. Members of disfavored groups lost their legal identities, rights and citizenship — if not their lives. Even favored groups were subjected to oppressive discipline.
Under Mussolini, for instance, every Italian schoolchild was required to join a youth organization where they imbibed fascist propaganda and militaristic training. Teachers swore an oath to the fascist regime. The party took over sports, such as bocce, which were transformed from a form of casual recreation into a means for the Italian nation to improve and excel.
Like Trump, these leaders gained followers by giving long, angry speeches that blamed the country's problems on foreigners. They addressed their rhetoric to a frustrated middle class, describing them as victims of internal and external enemies.
In this way, some of the conditions that allow fascist ideology to take hold exist in the United States, said Robert Paxton, a leading American scholar of fascism. Americans' belief that hard work brings material rewards has prevented radical movements and politicians from taking power, he said. For the past 15 years, however, In this way, some of the conditions that allow fascist ideology to take hold exist in the United States, said Robert Paxton, a leading American scholar of fascism. Americans' belief that hard work brings material rewards has prevented radical movements and politicians from taking power, he said. For the past 15 years, however, income for the typical household has declined, leading some Americans to lose confidence in the existing political system.
"A sense of victimhood is absolutely essential" to the rise of fascism, Paxton said, "and I think that's very strong in America today."
Trump, though, is not a fascist, according to Paxton. The candidate's message lacks the collectivist element that was common to many fascist regimes. Individual ambition is a crucial part of the story he tells voters about himself as a successful, self-interested businessman.
2. Trump doesn’t oppose democracy
Trump also does not oppose constitutional government and representative democracy, another crucial trait of historical fascists. The militaristic societies they formed couldn’t tolerate dissent and debate. Differences of opinion contradict the fascist idea of a collective identity.
The Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt, for instance, The Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt, for instance, contended that parliaments couldn't truly represent the will of a united people, only various opposed factions. Instead, Schmitt wrote, a dictator would speak on the people's behalf with one voice.
Fascist leaders threw out existing national constitutions, replacing representative government with dictatorships that brutally suppressed dissent. They used paramilitary organizations to intimidate their political opponents.
Trump recently defended the behavior of supporters who assaulted a protester at one of his rallies, saying “ Trump recently defended the behavior of supporters who assaulted a protester at one of his rallies, saying “ Maybe he should have been roughed up.” But that’s still a far cry from the mass suppression of dissent typical of fascist movements and regimes. Trump isn’t supporting a systematic campaign of intimidation. And he hasn't called for suspending the U.S. Constitution or pledged to arrogate legislative power to himself if he wins the presidency.
3. Trump doesn't support a fascist welfare state
The platforms of fascist parties were fiercely anti-capitalist. In 1920, the Nazi Party's The platforms of fascist parties were fiercely anti-capitalist. In 1920, the Nazi Party's Twenty-Five Points, for instance called for the confiscation of income from capital gains, the nationalization of industries and "an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare."
Once in power, fascists typically collaborated with the economic elite to achieve their military aims, and they banned unions independent of the party. But their written principles certainly would have affronted Trump’s capitalist ideals.
Trump is somewhat more liberal on economic issues than some of his competitors for the GOP nod. He opposes reductions in Social Security, for example. In general, though, Trump boasts about being a wealthy businessman, and his tax proposals Trump is somewhat more liberal on economic issues than some of his competitors for the GOP nod. He opposes reductions in Social Security, for example. In general, though, Trump boasts about being a wealthy businessman, and his tax proposals are typical of the Republican Party — he'd substantially reduce taxes for the rich.
4. Trump’s positions are similar to other GOP candidates
Trump's rhetoric is extreme and colorful, but on taxes and other issues, his platform is similar in substance to those of his GOP rivals and in accord with the opinions of rank-and-file Republicans. Calling Trump a fascist suggests there's something special about him that distinguishes him from the rest of the party.
For example, many of the GOP candidates For example, many of the GOP candidates criticized Trump for proposing a registry for Muslims, but fellow candidate Ben Carson's proposal went even further : a database that would not discriminate against Muslims explicitly but would instead include every single person in the country.
Likewise, when Trump suggested that law enforcement should close certain mosques to prevent Islamist terrorism, Rubio suggested that Trump's proposal wasn't broad enough. "It's not about closing down mosques. It's about closing down any place, whether it's a cafe, a diner, an Internet site, any place where radicals are being inspired," he Likewise, when Trump suggested that law enforcement should close certain mosques to prevent Islamist terrorism, Rubio suggested that Trump's proposal wasn't broad enough. "It's not about closing down mosques. It's about closing down any place, whether it's a cafe, a diner, an Internet site, any place where radicals are being inspired," he told Megyn Kelly of Fox News
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On other issues, such as On other issues, such as abortion, climate change, and monetary policy, Trump's opinions are also in line with his party. While his presentation may be unusual for a U.S. presidential candidate, his policies are not. Trump is a Republican, not a fascist.
More from Wonkblog:FACEIT has revealed the on-air talent lineup for the offline finals of the third Esports Championship Series (ECS) season.
The third edition of the ECS league, hosted by FACEIT together with Youtube, will come to a close with the offline finals at the SSE Arena, in London, on June 23-25.
The top eight teams of the online portion of the ECS season - four from North America and four from Europe - will be facing off for their share of a $660,000 prize pool, with the winner taking home $250,000.
Rachel Quirico will be the stage host in London
Rachel "Seltzer" Quirico and Alex "Machine" Richardson will be the stage and desk hosts, respectively, with a large team narrating and breaking down all the matches on site.
Below you can find the full English-language broadcast team for the ECS Season 3 finals:It has already been well-documented that the Pentagon spent a substantial amount of money on propaganda during the occupation of Iraq, running pro-occupation commercials and also covertly getting pro-occupation news stories into the media around the region. It turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg.
It has now been revealed that there was a third program ongoing, in which a London-based PR agency was paid $540 million to make fake al-Qaeda propaganda videos for Pentagon use. The videos were intended to use existing al-Qaeda footage, and to be in RealMedia format, and burned onto CDs.
Then, during the many US military raids going on during the occupation, a few of the fake propaganda CDs were scattered around here or there in the wreckage of smashed-up houses and compounds. Officially, the goal was for al-Qaeda sympathizers to get ahold of them.
Which is why RealMedia format was used, as the player for the proprietary format would automatically connect to the Internet. The video was linked to a Google Analytics account, through which the Pentagon could get the IP address of every computer that watched the fake propaganda.
It’s unclear what this ultimately amounted to, but those involved in the project praised the effort as collecting a substantial list of IP addresses, including some that ended up in other countries like Iran, Syria, and even the United States.
Unspoken within the reports as they’ve emerged so far, having “al-Qaeda propaganda” laying around in the wreckage of US raid targets was likely also an end unto itself, as anyone who came to investigate after the fact would see them and assume the raid was on an actual al-Qaeda target, never suspecting the US troops were planting the discs.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzSAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – The recent expansion of the Ford GoBike bicycle-sharing program is not going over well in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Over the weekend, one of the bicycles was stripped of its parts and hung up a tree. A picture of the stripped-down bicycle was posted on social media, which drew cheers among local residents.
Erick Arguello serves on the 24th street neighborhood council and opposes the Ford bike-pods.
“They’re collecting that data to let Ford know where to place their Chariot shuttle busses,” Arguello said.
While he doesn’t support the vandalism, he has seen this photo, and the long thread of cheers it is now drawing on social media. A bike stripping celebrated as a strike against a vehicle of gentrification.
“I’m sure a lot of people are saying, ‘See? This is what could happen when that kind of company tries to come into this neighborhood.'”
And it’s not just that bike hanging from the tree. At Dolores Park, every single one of the Ford Go bikes has had the back tire flattened.
“We actually rented one, realized it was flat, clipped it in and then noticed that the entire line was down,” said Luis Fernandez, who lives in the Mission District.
Ani Rivera, who runs the Galeria de la Raza, said the frustration comes from the long simmering brew of neighborhood frustrations – everything from evictions – to traffic control.
“We’re just sort of fed up, this is kind of like, this is it,” Rivera said. ” This is a larger issue around accountability and transparency from the folks that are making these decisions. That’s what we’re asking, to be transparent.”
Fernandez said, “In general I agree with that. But if you can only have 1,000 bikeshares without some sort of sponsorship, and then you can get 7,000 with some sponsorship, I think the benefit outweighs the cost.”
Like new homes and new restaurants, the latest change to the Mission landscape sparks another debate. Judging by the number of flat tires, these bikes may be in for some tough peddling.
“I think it’s a shame actually. I think promoting responsible transportation using bicycles is a priority for any city,” Fernandez said.
When asked for comment, the company that manages the GoBike program described this kind of neighborhood resistance as unusual and disappointing. They also think most residents support the program.Incase the original Half-Life wasn’t gory enough, ‘ Brutal Half-Life ‘ is an upcoming Goldsrc mod which attempts to add even more blood, gore and gibs to Gordon’s quest through Black Mesa.
Inspired by the award-winning Doom modification ‘Brutal Doom‘, the community developed Half-Life mod was released as a first beta (version 0.1).
As the name suggests, the mod attempts to brutalize the experience of the original Half-Life by adding details such as:
Increased enemy dismemberment
New death animations
Custom gibs
Better blood sprites and decals
Enhanced effects, such as explosions, smoke, light effects, etc
Improved AI
New weapon sound effects
The mod also incorporates new gameplay features such as a kick melee, secondary weapon attack ability and a damage skills system.
So far the mod has received a 10/10 rating on ModDB and has seen some positive attention from the Doom and Half-Life communities alike. So if you are in the mood for some gore intensified Half-Life, or just wanting to unleash your inner psychopath, this could be the mod for you.
You can download Brutal Half-Life and find more about the beta release over on ModDB.
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Steve Bruce is stepping up his bid to make Tottenham’s Danny Rose his fourth summer signing for Hull.
The Tigers boss wants to take his close-season spending spree to £22million by rescuing former England Under-21 international left-back Rose from his White Hart Lane nightmare.
Rose, 24, has racked-up just 57 appearances for Spurs since joining from Leeds for £1m seven years ago.
And the Doncaster-born defender knows he faces being out in the cold again next season if he stays with the North London giants.
Mauricio Pochettino made the signing of a left-back his priority after being named as Tottenham’s new manager at the end of last term.
He lost out to Manchester United in the battle to snare Luke Shaw from his old side Southampton, but is set to complete the £8m capture of Swansea’s Welsh international Ben Davies in the next few days.
And Pochettino knows he can claw back the bulk of that outlay by selling Rose to Hull for £6m.
Rose has two years remaining on his contract at Spurs, but a source revealed: "His future there is looking bleak. At best, he’s going to be a bit-part player, and that’s not what Danny wants at this stage of his career. He needs to be with a club who can give him regular first-team football.
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“Danny’s progress has been affected by loan moves and a number of niggling injuries, and now Pochettino has come in and highlighted the left-back position as one that needs to be urgently addressed.
“A move back to his native Yorkshire could be just the job for Danny - and it would be a perfect fit for Hull. If Steve Bruce wants to play a flat back-four, Danny can perform as an orthodox left-back. If he wants to utilise a 3-5-2 system, then Danny is equally comfortable as a wing-back.”
Bruce, who is looking for a successor to the ageing Maynor Figueroa, snapped-up midfielder Tom Huddlestone from Tottenham for £5.25m a year ago.
Last month, he handed the north Londoners another £8m for fellow midfielder Jake Livermore following the England star’s hugely successful season on loan with the Yorkshire outfit.
And Bruce followed that up by forking out another £8m to bring in Robert Snodgrass from relegated Norwich and nabbing the Scot's fellow winger Tom Ince at the end of his contract with the Championship side Blackpool.While I was doing maintenance for my OS X, using the Maintenance app, the app told me that my disk partition needs to be repaired. So, as usual, I reboot OS X and held Cmd + R to access the Disk Utilty in OS X Recovery to fix it.
However, instead of coming to Disk Recovery Assistant, I was directed to the Internet Recovery, which was unusual. I later on figured out that this happened because the Recovery partition is missing somehow. To verify this, I ran diskutil list in Terminal but I can’t find the Recovery HD partition.
Internet Recovery is a feature addition since OS X. It lets us perform the disk recovery, then fix and reinstall OS X from Apple’s server. But, it requires an Internet connection, so you are out of luck if you have poor or unreliable Internet connection.
Here’s how I sorted out this issue without Internet Recovery, and it’s not as complicated as I first thought.
How to Create Recovery Partition
To begin with, you will need the OS X installer from the App Store (be it Mavericks, or Yosemite or others) and you will also need the Recovery Partition Creator (RPC), an AppleScript that enables us to create the partition in a friendly way.
To create the partition HD, follow these steps.
Launch the Recovery Partition script. You will be prompted to create a backup, and I encourage you to do so using Time Machine, just in case something goes wrong. In addition, the script will prompt you with the OS X version you are currently using. Click OK, then select the primary disk partition where the OS X install resides, from the selection before you. Click OK. You may select an external disk if you have one. This way you will have to connect the disk to your Mac everytime you run Disk Recovery Assistant. Select the OS X installer which you should have obtained from the App Store. Once you clicked OK, you will be prompted to check the drives in case of errors, before the script creates the partition. Click Continue. Click OK to let the script creating the Recovery partition with the OS X of your choice.
This process may take up to 5 minutes or more. Once the process is done, run the diskutil list again, and you should now be able to see this on the list: Apple_Boot Recovery HD.
The script is really handy; it enables us to have the Recovery partition back in only a few clicks away.
Now, we are able to repair disks with the Disk Recovery Assistant instead of through Internet Recovery; I personally think this method is more convenient. I hope you find this little tip useful and got the issue solved.Mexican migration to U.S. at standstill
Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Mexican migration to U.S. at standstill 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
SAN ANTONIO - The decades-long march of Mexican immigrants into the U.S., the greatest influx in this country's history, has apparently ground to a halt.
For the first time since the 1930s, the number of Mexican immigrants - legal and illegal - coming to the U.S. from 2005 to 2010 was less than the number leaving, according to a report released Monday by the Pew Hispanic Center.
In the five-year period, 1.37 million people from Mexico moved to the U.S. while 1.39 million Mexicans and their U.S.-born children living here moved back to Mexico.
"This is an historic wave, which at least over the last five years has come to a standstill," said Paul Taylor, director at the center, a nonpartisan research group based in Washington, D.C. "And considering how important immigration has been and will continue to be for this country, that seems quite significant."
At 12 million, this country's Mexican population outstrips any other immigrant group. Slightly more than half are here illegally.
"Indeed the United States has more immigrants from Mexico alone than any other country in the world has from all the countries of the world," Taylor said.
Crime, border security
The report, based on Mexican and U.S. government sources, including census reports, didn't analyze what caused Mexican migration to the U.S. to hit a plateau.
The authors speculated that factors such as increased U.S. border security - as well as the growing danger posed by organized crime along the border - lower fertility rates and an improved economic outlook in Mexico might be factors.
The study found that the number of Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. illegally fell to 6.1 million from its peak of 7 million in 2007, while the number coming here legally increased from about 5.6 million in 2007 to 5.8 million in 2011. Pew reported last year that the total number of legal immigrants in the country had fallen, but the number living in Texas had increased from 2007 to 2010.
The study also found that attitudes about entering the country illegally had changed.
"There's been a change in the intentions of people when they get back to Mexico, what they're going to do," said Jeffery Passel, the center's senior demographer. "Around 2005, '06 and '07, about 80 percent of those people who were sent back said they were going to try to get back into the U.S. in a week. By 2010, that had dropped to about 60 percent."
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a record number of illegal immigrants, about 397,000, were deported last year. And the Border Patrol reported detaining a record-low number of people entering the country illegally, about 340,000.
Because they believe economic factors played a part in the slowdown of Mexican immigration, the study's authors said they don't know what will happen as the U.S. economy recovers.
"We don't know whether the wave will resume, but we do know that the current standstill is more than just a temporary pause," Taylor said.
Not missed, for now
Increased security on the border makes it unlikely the U.S. will experience an influx of workers from Mexico, said Pia Orrenius, an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. For the time being, those workers aren't missed, Orrenius said.
"Right now there's not a great need for these workers. It's actually having a beneficial effect because the labor market's been so weak," she said "The problem is going to be in the medium to long-term, when there will be a recovery in construction" and with it a demand for cheap labor.
[email protected] D.C.—
The Senate’s Republican “skinny repeal” bill to cancel Obamacare failed on Friday morning, and the no-votes by women senators Lisa Murksowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine reminded conservatives why they think politics should be left to men.
“This country has been going downhill since the 19th Amendment let women vote,” said Senator Albert Shrinkman (R—GA). “They have to vote based on their feelings [emphasis his] and emotions, and focus on kids with cancer rather than vote with their brains. Case in point, women politicians are too weak-willed to do the hard, dirty work of kicking tens of millions of people off their healthcare.”
Other Republican senators were more overtly sexist.
“Why couldn’t one of them just got their periods and missed the vote?” asked Senator Tom Holtz (R—MS). “Or broken a nail? Women will just never understand complicated issues like healthcare or economics because they’re so busy |
cups.service failed. See 'journalctl -xn' for details. > invoke-rc.d: initscript cups, action "start" failed. I expect the cups maintainers are going to need more information here. Please look in the journal (or syslog) to see what went wrong, and quote it on the bug. Useful commands might include "journalctl", "less /var/log/syslog", "journalctl -xn", "systemctl -a status cups.service", "systemctl list-units". cups works fine on my systemd laptop, so there must be some local state/configuration involved here, rather than a simple "doesn't work on systemd". The rest of the failures you quoted look like a cascade of failed dependencies from cups-daemon failing to configure. (I am not a cups maintainer, I just saw this bug on apt-listbugs and thought I'd get start the process of getting enough information that the cups maintainers can do something about it.) S
Changed Bug title to 'cups-daemon+systemd: A dependency job for cups.service failed' from '[cups-daemon] Doesn't work with systemd' Request was from Simon McVittie <[email protected]> to [email protected]. (Mon, 05 May 2014 12:03:18 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Added tag(s) moreinfo. Request was from Simon McVittie <[email protected]> to [email protected]. (Mon, 05 May 2014 12:03:19 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Information forwarded to [email protected], Debian Printing Team <[email protected]> :
Bug#747073 ; Package cups-daemon. (Mon, 05 May 2014 12:30:09 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Acknowledgement sent to BogDan Vatra <[email protected]> :
Extra info received and forwarded to list. Copy sent to Debian Printing Team <[email protected]>. (Mon, 05 May 2014 12:30:09 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Message #19 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):
From: BogDan Vatra <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Bug#747073: [cups-daemon] Doesn't work with systemd Date: Mon, 05 May 2014 15:19:30 +0300
[..] > > I expect the cups maintainers are going to need more information here. > Please look in the journal (or syslog) to see what went wrong, and quote > it on the bug. > > Useful commands might include "journalctl", "less /var/log/syslog", > "journalctl -xn", "systemctl -a status cups.service", "systemctl > list-units". Here we go: journalctl:.... mai 05 15:07:25 zmeu sudo[2830]: bogdan : TTY=pts/3 ; PWD=/home/bogdan ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/bash mai 05 15:07:25 zmeu sudo[2830]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by bogdan(uid=0) mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Reloading. mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Starting CUPS Printing Service Sockets. mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: cups.socket failed to listen on sockets: Cannot assign requested address mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Failed to listen on CUPS Printing Service Sockets. mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Dependency failed for CUPS Printing Service. ============================================ less /var/log/syslog:...... May 5 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Reloading. May 5 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Starting CUPS Printing Service Sockets. May 5 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: cups.socket failed to listen on sockets: Cannot assign requested address May 5 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Failed to listen on CUPS Printing Service Sockets. May 5 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Dependency failed for CUPS Printing Service. ============================================ journalctl -xn:..... May 05 15:07:25 zmeu sudo[2830]: bogdan : TTY=pts/3 ; PWD=/home/bogdan ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/bash May 05 15:07:25 zmeu sudo[2830]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by bogdan(uid=0) May 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Reloading. May 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Starting CUPS Printing Service Sockets. -- Subject: Unit cups.socket has begun with start-up -- Defined-By: systemd -- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel -- -- Unit cups.socket has begun starting up. May 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: cups.socket failed to listen on sockets: Cannot assign requested address May 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Failed to listen on CUPS Printing Service Sockets. -- Subject: Unit cups.socket has failed -- Defined-By: systemd -- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel -- Documentation: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/catalog/be02cf6855d2428ba40df7e9d022f03d -- -- Unit cups.socket has failed. -- -- The result is failed. May 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Dependency failed for CUPS Printing Service. -- Subject: Unit cups.service has failed -- Defined-By: systemd -- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel -- Documentation: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/catalog/be02cf6855d2428ba40df7e9d022f03d -- -- Unit cups.service has failed. -- -- The result is dependency. ============================================ systemctl -a status cups.service: cups.service - CUPS Printing Service Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/cups.service; enabled) Active: inactive (dead) Docs: man:cupsd(8) man:cupsd.conf(5) May 05 14:41:19 zmeu systemd[1]: Dependency failed for CUPS Printing Service. May 05 14:41:39 zmeu systemd[1]: Dependency failed for CUPS Printing Service. May 05 14:42:27 zmeu systemd[1]: Dependency failed for CUPS Printing Service. May 05 14:45:33 zmeu systemd[1]: Dependency failed for CUPS Printing Service. May 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Dependency failed for CUPS Printing Service. ============================================ systemctl list-units: UNIT LOAD ACTIVE SUB DESCRIPTION proc-sys-fs-binfmt_misc.automount loaded active running Arbitrary Executable File Formats File System Automount Poi sys-devices-pci0000:00-0000:00:16.3-tty-ttyS1.device loaded active plugged Lynx Point KT Controller sys-devices-pci0000:00-0000:00:19.0-net-eth0.device loaded active plugged Ethernet Connection I217-LM sys-devices-pci0000:00-0000:00:1b.0-sound-card0.device loaded active plugged Lynx Point High Definition Audio Controller sys-devices-pci0000...0:1c.1-0000:02:00.0-net-wlan0.device loaded active plugged Centrino Advanced-N 6235 AGN sys-devices-pci0000...1c.4-0000:05:00.1-sound-card1.device loaded active plugged GK107 HDMI Audio Controller sys-devices-pci0000...t0:0:0-0:0:0:0-block-sda-sda1.device loaded active plugged WDC_WD20EZRX-00D8PB0 sys-devices-pci0000...t0:0:0-0:0:0:0-block-sda-sda2.device loaded active plugged WDC_WD20EZRX-00D8PB0 sys-devices-pci0000...target0:0:0-0:0:0:0-block-sda.device loaded active plugged WDC_WD20EZRX-00D8PB0 sys-devices-pci0000...t1:0:0-1:0:0:0-block-sdb-sdb1.device loaded active plugged ST1000DM003-1CH162 sys-devices-pci0000...t1:0:0-1:0:0:0-block-sdb-sdb2.device loaded active plugged ST1000DM003-1CH162 sys-devices-pci0000...t1:0:0-1:0:0:0-block-sdb-sdb3.device loaded active plugged ST1000DM003-1CH162 sys-devices-pci0000...t1:0:0-1:0:0:0-block-sdb-sdb4.device loaded active plugged ST1000DM003-1CH162 sys-devices-pci0000...t1:0:0-1:0:0:0-block-sdb-sdb5.device loaded active plugged ST1000DM003-1CH162 sys-devices-pci0000...t1:0:0-1:0:0:0-block-sdb-sdb6.device loaded active plugged ST1000DM003-1CH162 sys-devices-pci0000...t1:0:0-1:0:0:0-block-sdb-sdb7.device loaded active plugged ST1000DM003-1CH162 sys-devices-pci0000...target1:0:0-1:0:0:0-block-sdb.device loaded active plugged ST1000DM003-1CH162 sys-devices-pci0000...target3:0:0-3:0:0:0-block-sr0.device loaded active plugged PLDS_DVD-RW_DH16ACSH sys-devices-platform-serial8250-tty-ttyS2.device loaded active plugged /sys/devices/platform/serial8250/tty/ttyS2 sys-devices-platform-serial8250-tty-ttyS3.device loaded active plugged /sys/devices/platform/serial8250/tty/ttyS3 sys-devices-pnp0-00:0a-tty-ttyS0.device loaded active plugged /sys/devices/pnp0/00:0a/tty/ttyS0 sys-devices-virtual-net-vmnet1.device loaded active plugged /sys/devices/virtual/net/vmnet1 sys-devices-virtual-net-vmnet8.device loaded active plugged /sys/devices/virtual/net/vmnet8 sys-module-fuse.device loaded active plugged /sys/module/fuse sys-subsystem-net-devices-eth0.device loaded active plugged Ethernet Connection I217-LM sys-subsystem-net-devices-vmnet1.device loaded active plugged /sys/subsystem/net/devices/vmnet1 sys-subsystem-net-devices-vmnet8.device loaded active plugged /sys/subsystem/net/devices/vmnet8 sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan0.device loaded active plugged Centrino Advanced-N 6235 AGN -.mount loaded active mounted / dev-hugepages.mount loaded active mounted Huge Pages File System dev-mqueue.mount loaded active mounted POSIX Message Queue File System home.mount loaded active mounted /home mnt-sda1.mount loaded active mounted /mnt/sda1 proc-sys-fs-binfmt_misc.mount loaded active mounted Arbitrary Executable File Formats File System run-lock.mount loaded active mounted Lock Directory run-user.mount loaded active mounted User Runtime Directory run-vmblock\x2dfuse.mount loaded active mounted /run/vmblock-fuse sys-fs-fuse-connections.mount loaded active mounted FUSE Control File System sys-kernel-debug.mount loaded active mounted Debug File System systemd-ask-password-console.path loaded active waiting Dispatch Password Requests to Console Directory Watch systemd-ask-password-wall.path loaded active waiting Forward Password Requests to Wall Directory Watch acpid.service loaded active running ACPI event daemon atd.service loaded active running Deferred execution scheduler avahi-daemon.service loaded active running Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack binfmt-support.service loaded active exited Enable support for additional executable binary formats bitlbee.service loaded active running LSB: Start and stop BitlBee IRC to other chat networks gate bootlogs.service loaded active exited LSB: Log file handling to be done during bootup. console-kit-daemon.service loaded active running Console Manager console-kit-log-system-start.service loaded active exited Console System Startup Logging console-setup.service loaded active exited LSB: Set console font and keymap cron.service loaded active running LSB: Regular background program processing daemon dbus.service loaded active running D-Bus System Message Bus [email protected] loaded active running Getty on tty1 hdparm.service loaded active exited LSB: Tune IDE hard disks [email protected] loaded active exited ifup for eth0 [email protected] loaded active exited ifup for vmnet1 [email protected] loaded active exited ifup for vmnet8 [email protected] loaded active exited ifup for wlan0 kbd.service loaded active exited LSB: Prepare console kdm.service loaded active running LSB: X display manager for KDE keyboard-setup.service loaded active exited LSB: Set preliminary keymap minissdpd.service loaded active running LSB: keep memory of all UPnP devices that announced themsel ModemManager.service loaded active running Modem Manager motd.service loaded active exited LSB: Create dynamic part of /etc/motd networking.service loaded active exited LSB: Raise network interfaces. NetworkManager.service loaded active running Network Manager nvidia-kernel.service loaded active exited LSB: create NVIDIA device nodes openvpn.service loaded active exited LSB: Openvpn VPN service qemu-system-x86.service loaded active exited LSB: QEMU KVM module loading script rc-local.service loaded active exited /etc/rc.local Compatibility rsyslog.service loaded active running System Logging Service saned.service loaded active exited LSB: SANE network scanner server ssh.service loaded active running OpenBSD Secure Shell server systemd-journald.service loaded active running Journal Service systemd-logind.service loaded active running Login Service systemd-modules-load.service loaded active exited Load Kernel Modules systemd-remount-fs.service loaded active exited Remount Root and Kernel File Systems systemd-sysctl.service loaded active exited Apply Kernel Variables systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service loaded active exited Create static device nodes in /dev systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service loaded active exited Recreate Volatile Files and Directories systemd-udev-trigger.service loaded active exited udev Coldplug all Devices systemd-udevd.service loaded active running udev Kernel Device Manager systemd-user-sessions.service loaded active exited Permit User Sessions transmission-daemon.service loaded failed failed Transmission BitTorrent Daemon udev-finish.service loaded active exited Copy rules generated while the root was ro udisks2.service loaded active running Disk Manager upower.service loaded active running Daemon for power management vmamqpd.service loaded failed failed LSB: This service starts and stops vmamqpd vmware-USBArbitrator.service loaded active running LSB: This services starts and stops the USB Arbitrator. vmware.service loaded active running LSB: This service starts and stops VMware services acpid.socket loaded active running ACPID Listen Socket avahi-daemon.socket loaded active listening Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack Activation Socket cups.socket loaded failed failed CUPS Printing Service Sockets dbus.socket loaded active running D-Bus System Message Bus Socket syslog.socket loaded active running Syslog Socket systemd-initctl.socket loaded active listening /dev/initctl Compatibility Named Pipe systemd-journald.socket loaded active running Journal Socket systemd-shutdownd.socket loaded active listening Delayed Shutdown Socket systemd-udevd-control.socket loaded active running udev Control Socket systemd-udevd-kernel.socket loaded active running udev Kernel Socket dev-sdb6.swap loaded active active /dev/sdb6 basic.target loaded active active Basic System cryptsetup.target loaded active active Encrypted Volumes getty.target loaded active active Login Prompts graphical.target loaded active active Graphical Interface local-fs-pre.target loaded active active Local File Systems (Pre) local-fs.target loaded active active Local File Systems multi-user.target loaded active active Multi-User System network.target loaded active active Network nss-lookup.target loaded active active Host and Network Name Lookups paths.target loaded active active Paths remote-fs-pre.target loaded active active Remote File Systems (Pre) remote-fs.target loaded active active Remote File Systems sockets.target loaded active active Sockets sound.target loaded active active Sound Card swap.target loaded active active Swap sysinit.target loaded active active System Initialization syslog.target loaded active active Syslog timers.target loaded active active Timers x-display-manager.target loaded active active X11 Display Manager systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer loaded active waiting Daily Cleanup of Temporary Directories LOAD = Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded. ACTIVE = The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB. SUB = The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type. 121 loaded units listed. Pass --all to see loaded but inactive units, too. To show all installed unit files use'systemctl list-unit-files'. >cups works fine on my systemd laptop, so there must be some > local > state/configuration involved here, rather than a simple "doesn't work on > systemd". > Well, cups worked perfectly for me before I SID replaced sysvinit with systemd. Because I was sure that some people will say "it works for me", I removed them, and I tried to install them again. The result is the same, so for me is just a simple "doesn't work on systemd". :) [...] > > (I am not a cups maintainer, I just saw this bug on apt-listbugs and > thought I'd get start the process of getting enough information that the > cups maintainers can do something about it.) > Thanks! BogDan.
Information forwarded to [email protected], Debian Printing Team <[email protected]> :
Bug#747073 ; Package cups-daemon. (Mon, 05 May 2014 15:45:09 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Acknowledgement sent to "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> :
Extra info received and forwarded to list. Copy sent to Debian Printing Team <[email protected]>. (Mon, 05 May 2014 15:45:09 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Message #24 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):
From: "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> To: BogDan Vatra <[email protected]>, [email protected] Subject: Re: Bug#747073: [cups-daemon] Doesn't work with systemd Date: Mon, 05 May 2014 17:43:45 +0200
Le lundi, 5 mai 2014, 15.19:30 BogDan Vatra a écrit : > > I expect the cups maintainers are going to need more information > > here. Please look in the journal (or syslog) to see what went > > wrong, and quote it on the bug. Yay, thanks for the initial response. > > Useful commands might include "journalctl", "less /var/log/syslog", > > "journalctl -xn", "systemctl -a status cups.service", "systemctl > > list-units". > > Here we go: > > journalctl: >.... > mai 05 15:07:25 zmeu sudo[2830]: bogdan : TTY=pts/3 ; PWD=/home/bogdan > ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/bash > mai 05 15:07:25 zmeu sudo[2830]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session > opened for user root by bogdan(uid=0) > mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Reloading. > mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Starting CUPS Printing Service > Sockets. mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: cups.socket failed to > listen on sockets: Cannot assign requested address Hmm. Can you attach the content of all files and symlinks in /etc/systemd/system/cups.socket.d? Could you also attach the output of `systemctl show cups.socket`? Do you happen to have a specific IPv6 setup on this machine? Kernel module unloaded or not built? > Well, cups worked perfectly for me before I SID replaced sysvinit with > systemd. Because I was sure that some people will say "it works for > me", I removed them, and I tried to install them again. The result is > the same, so for me is just a simple "doesn't work on systemd". :) Did you upgrade all your system to sid? What is the install status of cups-browsed? Thanks in advance, cheers, OdyX
Information forwarded to [email protected], Debian Printing Team <[email protected]> :
Bug#747073 ; Package cups-daemon. (Mon, 05 May 2014 15:51:04 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Acknowledgement sent to "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> :
Extra info received and forwarded to list. Copy sent to Debian Printing Team <[email protected]>. (Mon, 05 May 2014 15:51:04 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Message #29 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):
From: "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> To: BogDan Vatra <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: Bug#747073: [cups-daemon] Doesn't work with systemd Date: Mon, 05 May 2014 17:46:58 +0200
Le lundi, 5 mai 2014, 17.43:45 Didier 'OdyX' Raboud a écrit : > Hmm. Can you attach the content of all files and symlinks in > /etc/systemd/system/cups.socket.d? Please also attach the output of the following command: sudo netstat -lnptu | grep 631 Cheers, OdyX
Information forwarded to [email protected], Debian Printing Team <[email protected]> :
Bug#747073 ; Package cups-daemon. (Tue, 06 May 2014 07:12:04 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Acknowledgement sent to BogDan Vatra <[email protected]> :
Extra info received and forwarded to list. Copy sent to Debian Printing Team <[email protected]>. (Tue, 06 May 2014 07:12:04 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Message #34 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):
From: BogDan Vatra <[email protected]> To: Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: Bug#747073: [cups-daemon] Doesn't work with systemd Date: Tue, 06 May 2014 10:09:04 +0300
On Monday 05 May 2014 17:43:45 Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: > Le lundi, 5 mai 2014, 15.19:30 BogDan Vatra a écrit : > > > I expect the cups maintainers are going to need more information > > > here. Please look in the journal (or syslog) to see what went > > > wrong, and quote it on the bug. > > Yay, thanks for the initial response. > > > > Useful commands might include "journalctl", "less /var/log/syslog", > > > "journalctl -xn", "systemctl -a status cups.service", "systemctl > > > list-units". > > > > Here we go: > > > > journalctl: > >.... > > mai 05 15:07:25 zmeu sudo[2830]: bogdan : TTY=pts/3 ; PWD=/home/bogdan > > ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/bash > > mai 05 15:07:25 zmeu sudo[2830]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session > > opened for user root by bogdan(uid=0) > > mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Reloading. > > mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: Starting CUPS Printing Service > > Sockets. mai 05 15:07:37 zmeu systemd[1]: cups.socket failed to > > listen on sockets: Cannot assign requested address > > Hmm. Can you attach the content of all files and symlinks in > /etc/systemd/system/cups.socket.d? > Check cups.socket.d.output.txt > Could you also attach the output of `systemctl show cups.socket`? > Check systemctl_show_cups.socket_output.txt > Do you happen to have a specific IPv6 setup on this machine? Kernel > module unloaded or not built? > Yes, I disabled IPv6. # cat /etc/sysctl.d/disableipv6.conf net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1 It seems this is the reason why it doesn't work, I comment "ListenStream=[::1]:631" and it works fine. > > Well, cups worked perfectly for me before I SID replaced sysvinit with > > systemd. Because I was sure that some people will say "it works for > > me", I removed them, and I tried to install them again. The result is > > the same, so for me is just a simple "doesn't work on systemd". :) > > Did you upgrade all your system to sid? No, I didn't upgrade to sid, I upgrade my existing sid installation. > What is the install status of > cups-browsed? > Is working. Thanks.
Information forwarded to [email protected], Debian Printing Team <[email protected]> :
Bug#747073 ; Package cups-daemon. (Tue, 06 May 2014 07:12:07 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Acknowledgement sent to BogDan Vatra <[email protected]> :
Extra info received and forwarded to list. Copy sent to Debian Printing Team <[email protected]>. (Tue, 06 May 2014 07:12:08 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Message #39 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):
From: BogDan Vatra <[email protected]> To: Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: Bug#747073: [cups-daemon] Doesn't work with systemd Date: Tue, 06 May 2014 10:10:15 +0300
On Monday 05 May 2014 17:46:58 Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: > Le lundi, 5 mai 2014, 17.43:45 Didier 'OdyX' Raboud a écrit : > > Hmm. Can you attach the content of all files and symlinks in > > /etc/systemd/system/cups.socket.d? > > Please also attach the output of the following command: > > sudo netstat -lnptu | grep 631 > # netstat -lnptu | grep 631 tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:631 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1/init udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:631 0.0.0.0:* 843/cups-browsed BogDan.
Information forwarded to [email protected], Debian Printing Team <[email protected]> :
Bug#747073 ; Package cups-daemon. (Tue, 06 May 2014 07:24:05 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Acknowledgement sent to "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> :
Extra info received and forwarded to list. Copy sent to Debian Printing Team <[email protected]>. (Tue, 06 May 2014 07:24:05 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Message #44 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):
From: "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> To: BogDan Vatra <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], [email protected] Subject: Re: Bug#747073: [cups-daemon] Doesn't work with systemd Date: Tue, 06 May 2014 09:21:41 +0200
Control: reassign -1 systemd Control: retitle -1 [systemd] ListenStream=[::1]:631 makes socket fail if ipv6 module is not loaded Hi again BogDan, Le mardi, 6 mai 2014, 10.09:04 BogDan Vatra a écrit : > On Monday 05 May 2014 17:43:45 Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: > > Do you happen to have a specific IPv6 setup on this machine? Kernel > > module unloaded or not built? > > Yes, I disabled IPv6. > # cat /etc/sysctl.d/disableipv6.conf > net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1 > > It seems this is the reason why it doesn't work, I comment > "ListenStream=[::1]:631" and it works fine. Given that I don't think it's CUPS's responsibility to check for ipv6 availability, I'm hereby reassigning this bug to systemd. systemd maintainers: I think Listen*=[::1]:$port stanzas shouldn't make the.socket-file loading fail if the ipv6 module is not loaded. It should certainly spit out a warning though. Cheers, OdyX
Bug reassigned from package 'cups-daemon' to'systemd'. Request was from "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> to [email protected]. (Tue, 06 May 2014 07:24:05 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
No longer marked as found in versions cups/1.7.2-3. Request was from "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> to [email protected]. (Tue, 06 May 2014 07:24:06 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Changed Bug title to '[systemd] ListenStream=[::1]:631 makes socket fail if ipv6 module is not loaded' from 'cups-daemon+systemd: A dependency job for cups.service failed' Request was from "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> to [email protected]. (Tue, 06 May 2014 07:24:07 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Added tag(s) sid and jessie. Request was from Holger Levsen <[email protected]> to [email protected]. (Tue, 06 May 2014 22:03:10 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Severity set to 'normal' from 'grave' Request was from Michael Biebl <[email protected]> to [email protected]. (Wed, 07 May 2014 11:27:04 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Added indication that 747073 affects cups-daemon Request was from Didier Raboud <[email protected]> to [email protected]. (Sun, 03 Aug 2014 09:57:08 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Information forwarded to [email protected], Debian systemd Maintainers <[email protected]> :
Bug#747073 ; Package systemd. (Sun, 03 Aug 2014 10:15:04 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Acknowledgement sent to [email protected] (Marco d'Itri) :
Extra info received and forwarded to list. Copy sent to Debian systemd Maintainers <[email protected]>. (Sun, 03 Aug 2014 10:15:04 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Message #61 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):
From: [email protected] (Marco d'Itri) To: Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <[email protected]>, [email protected] Cc: BogDan Vatra <[email protected]>, [email protected] Subject: Re: Bug#747073: [cups-daemon] Doesn't work with systemd Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2014 12:11:58 +0200
reassign 747073 cups-daemon thanks On May 06, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <[email protected]> wrote: > Given that I don't think it's CUPS's responsibility to check for ipv6 > availability, I'm hereby reassigning this bug to systemd. Sure it is: the CUPS maintainer script is explicitly instructing systemd to open an IPv6 socket and systemd tries to do it. > systemd maintainers: I think Listen*=[::1]:$port stanzas shouldn't make > the.socket-file loading fail if the ipv6 module is not loaded. It should > certainly spit out a warning though. There is no magic "we do not care if it does not work" address family: if a unit is configured to open a socket but this fails then the unit must fail. -- ciao, Marco
Bug reassigned from package'systemd' to 'cups-daemon'. Request was from [email protected] (Marco d'Itri) to [email protected]. (Sun, 03 Aug 2014 10:15:14 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Information forwarded to [email protected], Debian Printing Team <[email protected]> :
Bug#747073 ; Package cups-daemon. (Sun, 03 Aug 2014 12:09:11 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Acknowledgement sent to "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> :
Extra info received and forwarded to list. Copy sent to Debian Printing Team <[email protected]>. (Sun, 03 Aug 2014 12:09:11 GMT) (full text, mbox, link).
Message #68 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):
From: "Didier 'OdyX' Raboud" <[email protected]> To: "Marco d'Itri" <[email protected]>, Debian systemd Maintainers <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: Bug#747073: [cups-daemon] Doesn't work with systemd Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 14:06:10 +0200
Hi Marco, hi all, Le dimanche, 3 août 2014, 12.11:58 Marco d'Itri a écrit : > > systemd maintainers: I think Listen*=[::1]:$port stanzas shouldn't > > make the.socket-file loading fail if the ipv6 module is not > > loaded. It should certainly spit out a warning though. > > There is no magic "we do not care if it does not work" address family: > if a unit is configured to open a socket but this fails then the unit > must fail. Fair enough. Assuming there's no good way to make this work within systemd, I see three ways forward to fix this in cups: a) declare that ipv6 is mandatory these days, document this in README.Debian, let users cope with it. Pros: it works for most, ipv6 is coming anyway Cons: changes done through cups would break the user override every time. b) Detect whether there's a local ipv6 address both in the cups-daemon.preinst and in the cups code through cupsd-write-systemd-Port.patch. Pros: would work for everyone Cons: wouldn't make cups work over ipv6 if the latter is enabled after cups is installed; more fault-potential os-specific code. c) Replace address-based ListenStream stanzas with a combination of BindIPv6Only and FreeBind to configure systemd to bind only local or all available interfaces. The problem with that is that CUPS does address-based checking to verify that its bound addresses are really local. That could be patched out or corrected though. Pros: Probably the cleanest solution Cons: Needs good C-fu which I'm not sure to have Will imply extensive testing to fix a setup that currently works for |
."[29] Historian Fritz Trautz went so far as to write: "The silly fairytale, which to this day moves many pens and has found much belief, was fully disproved in Otto Mittelstädt's book."[30] Furthermore, letters of the Grand Duke's mother, published in 1951, give detailed accounts of the child's birth, illness and death, corroborating the evidence against the alleged switch of babies.[31]
Differing DNA analyses [ edit ]
In November 1996, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported an attempt to match genetically a blood sample from underwear assumed to have been Hauser's. This analysis was made in laboratories of Forensic Science Service in Birmingham and in the LMU Institute of Legal Medicine at the University of Munich. Comparisons with descendants of the princely family proved that the blood examined could not possibly stem from the hereditary prince of Baden.[32][33]
In 2002, the Institute for Forensic Medicine of the University of Münster analyzed hair and body cells from locks of hair and items of clothing that also belonged to Kaspar Hauser. The analysts took from the items used in the test six different DNA samples, all of which turned out to be identical, but they differed substantially from the blood sample examined in 1996, the authenticity of which was therefore questioned. The new DNA samples were compared to a DNA segment from Astrid von Medinger, a descendant in the female line of Stéphanie de Beauharnais. The sequences were not identical but the deviation observed is not large enough to exclude a relationship as the difference could be caused by a mutation. (The mitochondrial DNA which was examined is passed only through the female line and thus cannot change except through mutation.) On the other hand, the relatively high similarity by no means proves the alleged relationship, as the "Hauser samples" showed a pattern that is common among the German population.[34]
The House of Baden does not allow any medical examination of the remains of Stéphanie de Beauharnais or of the child that was buried as her son in the family vault at the Pforzheimer Schlosskirche.
Cultural references [ edit ]
Kaspar Hauser fits into the contemporary European image of the "wolf child" (despite the fact that he almost certainly was not one), and he became possibly the best-known example of the genre. As a result, his story inspired numerous works.
Literature [ edit ]
Works centering on Hauser [ edit ]
Kaspar Hauser inspired the French poet Paul Verlaine to write the poem "Gaspard Hauser chante", published in his book Sagesse (1880).
Perhaps the most influential fictional treatment of Kasper Hauser was Jakob Wassermann's 1908 novel Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens (Caspar Hauser or the Inertia of the Heart), which was largely responsible for its popularization in Germany.
In 1913, Georg Trakl wrote the poem "Kaspar Hauser Lied".[35] It alludes to the works by Verlaine and Wassermann, and has been called the "most striking" expression of a literary trope in which Kaspar Hauser "stood for the natural, poetic genius lost in a strange world, lacking a home, a sense of origin and attachment, and fearing a violent but uncertain future."[36] Martin Heidegger cited this poem in his essay on poetry and language, Unterwegs zur Sprache.[37]
In 1963, Marianne Hauser gave a fictional account of Kaspar Hauser's life in her novel Prince Ishmael. In 1967, the Austrian playwright Peter Handke published his play Kaspar.
In 1994 the English poet David Constantine explored the story and its personae in Caspar Hauser: A Poem in Nine Cantos.[38]
Canadian artist Diane Obomsawin tells the story of Kaspar Hauser in her 2007 graphic novel Kaspar and later adapted it into an animated short film of the same title in 2012[39].
Incidental mentions [ edit ]
Kaspar Hauser is referred to in Herman Melville's unfinished novella Billy Budd (begun in 1886), as well as in his novels, both Pierre: or, The Ambiguities and The Confidence-Man. He is also referenced in the Hans Christian Andersen story "Beauty of Form and Beauty of Mind" or "Beautiful".
Kaspar Hauser was mentioned in a work of 1897 by Leo Tolstoy entitled What Is Art? (chap. 5).
The French novelist Georges Perec identified strongly with the orphan Kaspar,[40] as depicted in Paul Verlaine's poem,[41] and centered several of his works on characters named Gaspard,[42] referencing the name as Verlaine wrote it in his poem. His first novel, which he believed lost, but was found and published after his death under the title "Portrait of a Man Known as Il Condottiere,"[43] was originally titled "Gaspard" and then "Gaspard not Dead"[44]. In W, or the Memory of Childhood, Perec alternates autobiographical memories with a retelling of a story he invented as a teenager, centered on a character again named Gaspard.[45] His "MICRO-TRADUCTIONS, 15 variations discrètes sur un poème connu,"(1973)[46] is a work entirely composed of creative variations on Verlaine's poem. And in his most famous work, Life: A User's Manual, Perec again uses the character Gaspard Winkler as a central figure in the story[47].
In the mid-20th century, Kaspar Hauser was referred to in several works of science fiction or fantasy literature: Eric Frank Russell, in his 1943 novel Sinister Barrier, described Kaspar Hauser as a person who originated from a non-human laboratory. Fredric Brown, in his 1949 short story "Come and Go Mad", offered another theory about Kaspar Hauser. In Henry Kuttner's 1954 "The Portal in the Picture", the author suggests Hauser is from Malesco, a parallel world where science is treated as a religion and its secrets are hidden from the ordinary citizen. Robert A. Heinlein, in his 1963 Glory Road, refers to "Kaspar Hausers" as an analogue to persons popping in and out of metaphysical planes. Harlan Ellison, in his 1967 story "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World", suggested that Hauser had been plucked out of time and later murdered by a female sadist named Juliette.
Edward D. Hoch's "The Man From Nowhere," first published in the June 1956 issue of Famous Detective Stories, makes reference to Hauser. Paul Auster, in his 1985 novel City of Glass, compares the situation of one of its characters to that of Kaspar Hauser.
Kaspar Hauser is also referred to in Jonathan Lethem's 1997 novel As She Climbed Across the Table, Katherine Neville's novel The Magic Circle (1998), in Steven Millhauser's short story "Kaspar Hauser Speaks" (published in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, 1998), in Ted Chiang's short stories "Catching Crumbs from the Table" and "The Evolution of Human Science" (published in the journal Nature, 2000), Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex (2002), Maggie Nelson's poem "Kaspar Hauser" (2003, itself a probable reference to the Werner Herzog film), and Lucie Brock-Broido's poem "Self-Portrait as Kaspar Hauser" (published in Trouble in Mind, 2004). He is also referred to in Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (2009). Kaspar Hauser serves as the namesake and inspiration for a character in Dan Abnett's Horus Heresy novel Prospero Burns (2010). The protagonist, "Kasper Hawser", shares a similar mysterious origin and childhood as attributed to Hauser, including his only toy being a wooden horse.[48]
Film and television [ edit ]
Productions centering on Hauser [ edit ]
In 1974, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog made Hauser's story into the film, Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle ("Every Man for Himself and God Against All"). In English, the film was either known by that translation, or by the title The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. The film includes the main known features of Hauser's life, though it omits most of his changes of location and career. It does not question his veracity.
In 1993, the German-Austrian co-production Kaspar Hauser – Verbrechen am Seelenleben eines Menschen ("Kaspar Hauser – Crimes against a man's soul"), directed by Peter de Sehr, espoused the "Prince of Baden" theory.
La leggenda di Kaspar Hauser (2012, Davide Manuli) is a surreal drama based on "the legend" of Kaspar Hauser. In this modern western-like re-interpretation featuring Vincent Gallo, a music-obsessive Kaspar washes up on a Mediterranean beach, where half a dozen protagonists try to make sense of who he is.
Incidental appearances or mentions [ edit ]
Michael Landon played Casper Hauser in an episode of the television series Telephone Time in 1956.
In the 1966 film Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist Guy Montag discreetly puts a copy of a book entitled Gaspard Hauser into his bag before the rest of the books in that residence are torched.
In the TV series Smallville, in the episode "Stray" (2002) Martha Kent runs over a boy who does not remember who he was or where he came from, except his name. Chloe refers to the boy as a "modern-day Kaspar Hauser."
In the Japanese horror movie Marebito (2004), the protagonist Masuoka refers to a girl he found chained up underground as his "little Kaspar Hauser".
Music [ edit ]
In music Kaspar Hauser was the subject of an "Epitaph for Kaspar Hauser" (1997) by the composer Claus Kühnl, a "meditation on a day in the life of Kaspar Hauser towards the end of his prison term" for an organist, a registrant and two ad hoc Player.
Kaspar Hauser's story has inspired numerous musical references. There have been at least two operas named Kasper Hauser, a 2007 work by American composer Elizabeth Swados and a 2010 work by British composer Rory Boyle.
Subterranea, a 1997 concept album by British progressive rock band IQ (1997), was loosely inspired by Hauser's story. Italian artists Reinhold Giovanett and Josef Oberhollenzer put out a CD titled Kaspar Hauser in 1999.
Numerous bands and musicians have released songs titled "Kaspar Hauser", including the German band Dschinghis Khan, the Detroit band Trial, and the Sun City Girls. Colonian-dialect rock band BAP and German singer-songwriter Reinhard Mey[49] have released songs called "Kaspar". French singer-songwriter Georges Moustaki put out a song titled "Gaspard", based on Paul Verlaine's poem. Suzanne Vega included "Wooden Horse (Caspar Hauser's Song)" on her 1987 album Solitude Standing.
In 1984, Polish poet and musician Grzegorz Ciechowski has written a song titled "Kaspar Hauser", which is a part of long play "Obywatel G.C.".
Kaspar Hauser was taken as the name of an alternative rock band based in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the early 1980s, as well as an experimental musician from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England. Haüser is the name of an independent recording artist/songwriter from Northern Ireland who has released several EPs since 2001 and is currently recording new material scheduled for release in late 2012.The Hauser Project is a musical project created in 2011 whose name was inspired by Kaspar Hauser.
In 1994, Birgit Scherzer, then director and choreographer of the Saarbrücken Staatstheater Ballet in Germany, used the Hauser story as the basis for a ballet Kasper Hauser which she presented at the Saarbrücken Staatstheater.[50]
In 2012, the American mathcore band Exotic Animal Petting Zoo included a song titled "Kaspar Hauser Could See the Stars in the Daytime" in its second album Tree of Tongues.
In 2013, The Swedish singer-songwriter Håkan Hellström made a reference to Kaspar Hauser in the song "Fri till slut" (Finally free) on his album Det kommer aldrig va över för mig.
In 2015, Scottish-born singer-songwriter Momus referenced the loneliness Kaspar Hauser in his song System of Usher, the second track on his album Turpsycore.
The German gothic metal band Pyogenesis released a song called Every Man For Himself...And God Against All on their 2017 album A Kingdom to Disappear based on the story of Kaspar Hauser and the film of the same name.
In his later years, Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach took a deep interest in the fate of Kaspar Hauser. He was the first to publish a critical summary of the ascertained facts, under the title of Kaspar Hauser, ein Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben (1832).
There was a January 1861 Atlantic Monthly unsigned article on Kaspar Hauser. Circulated among the American intellectual establishment of the time, it provides a sense of perspective on many of the issues firing the debate about "Who was Kaspar Hauser?" which continues to this day.
A brief discussion of Kaspar Hauser appears in the "Physiology" chapter of the editions of Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health (published 1875-1910).
Anthroposophists have written several books on Kaspar Hauser. One in particular, a detailed work by Peter Tradowsky, addresses the mysteries surrounding Kaspar Hauser's life from the anthroposophical point of view. His analysis delves into the occult significance of the individuality he sees as incarnated in Kaspar Hauser.
In 1996 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson wrote Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1996).[51]
Medical writers have referred to psychosocial short stature as "Kaspar Hauser syndrome."[52]
In a "Kaspar Hauser experiment", an animal is reared isolated from members of its own species, in an attempt at determining which behaviors are innate.[53]
References [ edit ]
Bondeson, Jan. The Great Pretenders: The True Stories Behind Famous Historical Mysteries. ISBN 978-0-39332-644-4.The latest approval marks another windfall for plane maker Boeing and other large US defence manufacturers, although it may face opposition from critics of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates' controversial role in Yemen's ongoing civil war.
Among the biggest agreement announced by the US State Department was for the $3.51 billion sale to the Saudi kingdom - which is leading the coalition in Yemen - of 48 CH-47F Chinook cargo helicopters with spare engines and machine guns.
Boeing and Honeywell Aerospace will be the main contractors, while up to 60 Americans - both private and government employees - will work in Saudi Arabia to maintain the aircraft.
Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates spent $3.5 billion on 27 AH-64E Apache attack helicopters plus support equipment, made by Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Qatar has requested eight C-17 military cargo jets and spare engines in a pair of contracts totalling $781 million.
Washington also approved a contract to sell Morocco 1,200 TOW 2A anti-tank missiles made by US arms giant Raytheon for $108 million.
Although the State Department has approved the sales, after consultation with the Pentagon, Congress could still block them in theory due to widespread criticism of the Saudi-led coalition war on Yemen which has killed more than 10,000 since it began.
All four Arab countries involved are US allies and have made major arms purchases in the past, meaning the contracts are expected to be approved without problem.Police in the Chinese city of Xi'an launched an investigation after a woman’s body was discovered last week inside an elevator at the apartment complex where she lived.
According to local reports, the woman’s corpse was found a month after two maintenance workers “improperly” shut off power to the elevator. The 43-year-old woman, identified only as “Wu,” reportedly starved to death while trapped inside.
A woman in #China starved to death after being trapped in an elevator for a month. https://t.co/CeXKxRtPTK pic.twitter.com/PtPu9ISlxt — Jim Roberts (@nycjim) March 7, 2016
In a statement, the Gaoling district government said the malfunctioning elevator was first deactivated on January 30. However, the building’s maintenance crew did not return to repair the machine until March 1, which was when the woman’s body was found.
“The scene [in the elevator] was inhumane,” said Xiaolin, a tenant in the building, per the Shanghaiist. “We think she starved to death in there.”
Another tenant said the woman left scratch marks on the walls of the elevator.
“The paramedics told us that when they found the body, her hand had already begun to deform,” the neighbor, referred to only as “Wang,” said. “It’s just too horrible.”
The maintenance workers' “gross negligence” likely caused the woman's death, police said. As CCTV News noted, the workers were required to open the elevator door before shutting the power off. Instead, the crew reportedly “called out once” to check if anyone was inside.
Two people -- both staff members at the maintenance company -- were arrested and will reportedly face charges of involuntary manslaughter. It's unclear if these two people were the workers involved or management at the company.It seems Hit-Girl has fought her last battle. As for Chloë Grace Moretz? Not so much.
In an interview with Digital Spy, Moretz reportedly revealed that she won’t return to the beloved character. “Sadly, I think I’m done with the character,” Moretz said. “Hit-Girl was a very cool character, but I don’t think there will be any more movies. You make these movies for the fanboys, but nowadays everyone seems to pirate them rather than watch them in the movie theater.”
She continued: “Kick-Ass 2 was one of the number-one pirated movies of the year, but that doesn’t help us because we need box office figures. We need to prove to the distributors that we can make money from a third and a fourth movie—but because it didn’t do so well, we can’t make another one. If you want more than one movie, everyone has to go and see movies at the cinema. It’s all about the numbers in the theater.”
And on the subject of things she’d like to change, she also expressed disappointment in Hollywood’s treatment of female superheroes. “Whenenever there’s a female superhero, it’s always a more sexual plotline rather than seeing an actual character on screen,” she said. “I don’t think that’s cool. I think it’s rather sad.”
Despite the fact that she’s no longer Hit-Girl, Moretz would still love to have a hand in changing things for female superheroes. “I would love to change that,” she said. “Hopefully, there will be some cool female superhero movies in the future. I hear there’s a Wonder Woman movie coming up. Hopefully they won’t sexualise Wonder Woman, too.”
Wonder what she’d have to say about that Spider-Woman cover.Over the last 20 years various international media have several times issued a sensational report: The North Korean leader, they say, is a fan of Adolf Hitler. The most recent report of this kind came from the outlet New Focus. New Focus asserted that Kim Jong Un had distributed a limited print of Hitler’s Mein Kampf amongst the political elite and that Choe Pu Il – the general leading the Ministry of People’s Security – said to his subordinates: “Stop focusing on ways of making money in the markets, and mold yourselves after the Gestapo. In the Kim Jong Un era, the Ministry of People’s Security is the most powerful section – be proud.”
This – along with all similar reports – looks like a hoax to me. Apart from the idea of the head of the criminal investigation agency wanting his subordinates to resemble the Gestapo – and not the Kriminalpolizei, its analogue in Nazi Germany – there are several more reasons not to trust the message of Hitler being loved by the North Korean elite.
WORST OF THE WORST
First, the image of Hitler in North Korea was initially copied from the Soviet Union, and Moscow’s view of the Führer was almost identical to that of the West: Hitler was a brutal and extremely malevolent dictator, responsible for World War II and the deaths of millions. The only difference was that the Holocaust was presented as just another crime of the Nazi regime, while in the West it is generally viewed as the central crime.
No attempts to whitewash Hitler’s regime were made by the North Korean media – ever
Soviet war films were and are shown in the DPRK; for example, recently the North Koreans bought the new colorized version of the famous Soviet series Seventeen Moments of Spring and broadcast it in the country. No attempts to whitewash Hitler’s regime were made by the North Korean media – ever. Moreover, in December 2014 the Rodong Sinmun showed photos of a South Korean anti-government demonstration, in which the current South Korean president was compared to Hitler. Of course, should Hitler be a positive figure, such photos would be impossible to find at any of the DPRK’s sites.
Some people assert that Kim Jong Il was a secret fan of Hitler, reading Mein Kampf in his palace, but never manifesting this in public. However, Song Hye Rang, Kim Jong Il’s sister-in-law, said in her memoirs that nothing like this was ever hinted at – and she, being the mother of a son murdered by North Korean intelligence agents, had no incentive to whitewash the regime.
True, nationalism has indeed become a part of North Korean ideology and the DPRK media do assert the “primacy of the Korean nation” from time to time. First, however, nationalism is not necessary racism, and the DPRK never uses the expression “Korean race” or “our race” in its nationalistic propaganda. Second, let us look at how the North Koreans justify their nationalism. When Kim Jong Il published his work “Let Us Strengthen the Spirit of Primacy of the Korean Nation” in 1989, he specifically stated that the nationalism he is talking about was not a biological one. Further, he dismissed biological racism as “reactionary” and “bourgeois.” According to Kim Jong Il, the Korean nation is, indeed, a superior one – but not because it is biologically better – but because it had the honor of venerating the Great Leader Kim Il Sung – the unsurpassed great man, who created a socialist paradise for the people.
There have some statements in North Korean media that can be viewed as racist. For example, on April 27, 2006, the Rodong Sinmun asserted that “the concept of the multinational and multiracial society is the concept of national destruction,” and attacked the xenophilic policies of the South Korean government. However, this thesis never became mainstream and has not been actively used by the DPRK ever since. This continues under Kim Jong Un.
The second argument is simple – but is strangely avoided in all discussions. Hitler was not just a racist – he was a man who believed in the supremacy of one particular race, Germans. Why then should a Korean nationalist support him? It makes as much sense as a black supremacist suddenly becoming a fan of the KKK. Furthermore, the Neo-Nazi community is unlikely to accept a “Mongoloid fan of the Führer” as their brother and hailing Hitler would likely cause the ultra-left supporters of Pyongyang to review their point of view towards the regime.
JUSTIFYING A LIE
Let us now suppose that the story of the Kims loving Hitler is a fabrication – and suddenly everything becomes very logical. Who is the icon of evil in the modern world? It is neither Pol Pot, nor Leopold II of Belgium – it is Hitler. Many different propagandists say that someone “loves Hitler” and comparisons to Hitler are so common that they have even given birth to the Internet meme of Godwin’s Law. It would be logical to assume that these recent publications fall under this category. Usually false news about North Korea comes from misunderstandings, or rumors being presented as facts, but sometimes we should not rule out the possibility of direct falsifications as well.
Quite a few people in the world think that when they attacking such an oppressive autocracy as the Kim dynasty, all measures are justified
And here we come to a rather delicate problem. Quite a few people in the world think that when they attack such an oppressive autocracy as the Kim dynasty, all measures are justified. Tell people that Kim loves Hitler, that Jang Song Thaek was eaten alive by a horde of hungry dogs, that Kim Jong Un’s wife Ri Sol Ju worked as a porn star – anything to bring down the horrible dictatorship. I would like to address these people with a simple message: don’t. What you are doing does not weaken the regime, it strengthens it.
Anti-regime lies will almost certainly be exposed as such – and the regime’s supporters will use them to weaken the message of the victims. Look at Holocaust deniers. What is their usual line of reasoning? They find some relatively non-credible point in testimonies of Holocaust victims or in Holocaust-related research – and then proceed with describing the Holocaust as “a conspiracy by Jews.” The result of lies directed against the Kims would be exactly the same. You will hear that since Jang Song Thaek was not eaten alive, therefore no one is tortured in North Korea, and because none of the Kims loved Hitler, therefore the North Korean regime is a welfare-oriented democracy for the people. And there would be some people who will believe them – just as some people believe the Holocaust deniers. Is that the effect you desire?
Picture: Fyodor TertitskyLAHORE (Web Desk) – Local court on Saturday granted bail to Indian cricketer Virat Kohli’s fan umer Daraz who has been behind bars for over a month. He was arrested on Jan 25 for hoisting an Indian flag on the
LAHORE (Web Desk) – Local court on Saturday granted bail to Indian cricketer Virat Kohli’s fan umer Daraz who has been behind bars for over a month.
He was arrested on Jan 25 for hoisting an Indian flag on the rooftop of his house in 54-2L village of Okara. On Feb 18, local magistrate Aneeq Anwer had rejected his bail plea, Dawn News reported.
Later, advocates Rizwan and Muhammad Yousaf applied for his bail with the court of Additional District and Sessions Judge Asadullah Siraj.
On Friday, after examining police and judicial case files and hearing arguments of both sides, the court admitted Daraz’s bail plea and ordered him to furnish a surety bond worth Rs50,000.
By the time the hearing finished, the court time had ended so Daraz will submit the bond on Saturday and get bail.
He had been charged with violating public order and “sovereignty of Pakistan” laws.
Daraz’s arrest came weeks before Indian student leader Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested on a controversial sedition charge in a case that has sparked a major row over freedom of expression.
Nuclear-armed neighbours Pakistan and India have a long history of animosity dating back to independence from Britain in 1947, and have fought three wars.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate could vote this week on the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be the next attorney general, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday, ending a month-long partisan impasse on an unrelated human trafficking bill that threatened to stall her confirmation indefinitely.
Loretta Lynch testifies during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to become U.S. attorney general on Capitol Hill in Washington January 28, 2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
The vote on Lynch, an accomplished career prosecutor nominated by President Barack Obama in November, could come now that there is a deal between Republicans and Democrats on the legislation aimed at cracking down on domestic human trafficking, said McConnell.
“As soon as we finish the trafficking bill... we’ll move to the president’s nominee for attorney general, hopefully in the next day or so,” said McConnell, who heads the Republican-led chamber.
Lynch, 55, would be the first black woman to become the country’s top law enforcement official. She is expected to be confirmed in the Senate by a narrow margin.
Democrats had held up passage of the bipartisan trafficking bill because of anti-abortion language Republicans inserted into the measure.
McConnell retaliated by not allowing a Senate vote on Lynch, who would replace Attorney General Eric Holder, until the trafficking bill passed the Senate.
The compromise on the bill would apply abortion restrictions only to funds appropriated by Congress for healthcare and medical services for victims and would not apply to funds used for victims’ aid not related to healthcare, such as legal aid and law enforcement, according to a Senate Republican aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Lynch has faced a protracted process since her nomination. Her wait for approval has been longer than the last seven attorney generals combined.
Despite the delay, she is viewed as less controversial than Holder, who frequently clashed with Republicans. She has said she aims to smooth the Department of Justice’s ties with Congress.
That may prove tricky. Many Senate Republicans have already said they will vote against her to protest her support for an executive order by the Obama administration that would shield an estimated 4.7 million illegal immigrants from deportation.
Lynch has twice served as U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, most recently since 2010.Clattering sounds resonated from inside a white building along Jl. Amat, Depok, West Java, where a pair of college students played table tennis, while several others gathered around waiting for a turn.
In another room located inside a mosque, several other students were occupied in front of their computers.
It was a typical Saturday afternoon scene, as students spent their time waiting for their next class at the Kulliyatul Qur’an Al-Hikam college and boarding house, which was founded by cleric Hasyim Muzadi, former chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) – the country’s largest Muslim organization.
Although it appears like any other Islamic higher education institute, the Al-Hikam, established in 2011, shoulders a huge task in helping to turn the tide against rising trends of radicalism and religious intolerance.
Since August last year, the institute counte...CHICAGO -- Chris Bosh's agent has told the Toronto Raptors that he's narrowed his list of preferred teams to five, two sources told ESPN.com's Chad Ford at the NBA draft camp.
The list of five teams -- Toronto plus the Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, Miami Heat and New York Knicks, sources said -- was given to Toronto management in case the Raptors want to construct a sign-and-trade deal (assuming Bosh doesn't re-sign with Toronto).
Bosh likes that option, sources told Ford, because he'd get one more year on his contract and could make more money.
"It has been narrowed down to a handful of teams, including us," Raptors general manager Bryan Colangelo told the Toronto Star without providing more detail.
Sources said the Raptors prefer a sign-and-trade if Bosh is intent on leaving as well. They likely would want a big man to replace the 6-10, 230-pound Bosh in the lineup.
One source said Bosh's decision hinges on where LeBron James signs.
"If LeBron decides to go to either New York or Chicago, I think that's where you'll see Chris land," the source told Ford. "If LeBron stays in Cleveland, I think the process is more wide open."
Bosh, 26, is an unrestricted free agent. He averaged 24 points per game last season and has averaged 20.2 points per game for his career.September 24, 2017
One of the most outrageous abuses of the Obama presidency was a scheme by which fines for corporate misbehavior by the biggest Wall Street banks were channeled into the hands of radical leftist groups that are now vehemently opposing the policies of President Trump. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars that ought to have gone to the federal treasury, but instead became a slush fund for the left.
One of the most outrageous abuses of the Obama presidency was a scheme by which fines for corporate misbehavior by the biggest Wall Street banks were channeled into the hands of radical leftist groups that are now vehemently opposing the policies of President Trump. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars that ought to have gone to the federal treasury, but instead became a slush fund for the left.
One of the most outrageous abuses of the Obama presidency was a scheme by which fines for corporate misbehavior by the biggest Wall Street banks were channeled into the hands of radical leftist groups that are now vehemently opposing the policies of President Trump. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars that ought to have gone to the federal treasury, but instead became a slush fund for the left.
Wall Street might be shocked to learn it is helping bankroll the anti-Trump “resistance” movement that’s aggressively fighting policies it favors — including corporate tax cuts and the repeal of Obama-era banking and health-care regulations. The Obama administration’s massive shakedown of Big Banks over the mortgage crisis included unprecedented back-door funding for dozens of Democratic activist groups who were not even victims of the crisis. At least three liberal nonprofit organizations the Justice Department approved to receive funds from multibillion-dollar mortgage settlements were instrumental in killing the ObamaCare repeal bill and are now lobbying against GOP tax reform, as well as efforts to rein in illegal immigration. An estimated $640 million has been diverted into what critics say is an improper, if not unconstitutional, “slush fund” fed from government settlements with JPMorgan Chase and Co., Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., according to congressional sources. The payola is potentially earmarked for third-party interest groups approved by the Justice Department and HUD without requiring any proof of how the funds will be spent. Many of the recipients so far are radical leftist organizations who solicited the settlement cash from the administration even though they were not parties to the lawsuits, records show.
This should never have happened, and conservatives ( including AT ) were aghast at the time. Imagine if President Trump were to try to funnel fines for corporate misbehavior to the NRA or the Family Research Council. The din of complaints from every MSM outlet in the country would endanger our national hearing. Sperry lists three radical left groups that are conducting anti-Trump activities that are funded by money belonging to taxpayers.
THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA The Hispanic-rights group strenuously protested the Republican-led “skinny” repeal of the Affordable Care Act after receiving at least $1.5 million from the Obama regime’s bank settlement funds, congressional researchers say. The notoriously radical organization, which advocates on behalf of illegal immigrants, argued the Trump proposal would have a “harmful impact” on the Hispanic community, including stripping potentially “8 million Latinos” of medical coverage.
Note that this group, originally funded by the Ford Foundation, has recently rebranded itself, because people started realizing that an explicitly race-based advocacy organization looks bad in a race-obsessed leftist universe. Now, they are transitioning to the brand of Unidos.
And
NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE After receiving at least $1.2 million from the bank-settlement slush fund, the African-American advocacy group solicited its supporters to oppose efforts to repeal ObamaCare by signing a letter to senators arguing “African-Americans stand to be disproportionately impacted.” It claimed more than 5 million black people would lose coverage under repeal legislation.
And:
NATIONAL COMMUNITY REINVESTMENT COALITION Since hauling in at least $2.6 million in funds under settlement in the Obama-era mortgage suits, the liberal housing-rights group has slammed tax-reform proposals by the Trump administration as unfair, while trying to block efforts to privatize mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, claiming doing so would “deepen the racial wealth gap.” NCRC is also actively lobbying against regulatory repeal of many provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
I presume that since the fines were converted into donations, they were mad tax-deductible. Id that is so, then taxpayers were doubly hosed: loss of the $640 million dollars that belonged to the Treasury, and then the corporate income taxes that were not paid on the taxable income, thanks to deductions. If this was at the corporate rate of 35%, it amounts to another $224 million, or a total of 864 million dollar given away by the executive branch, with no authorization from Congress.
I don’t know who might have standing to sue on behalf of taxpayers over the unjust enrichment of left wing political groups, but in my dreams the courts would use the legal mechanisms to “claw back” the funds misappropriated.Venture capitalist and businessman Kevin O’Leary expressed frustration over the minimum wage debate on Feb. 26 during a “Squawk Box” interview.
O’Leary, the co-host of ABC’s “Shark Tank,” argued on CNBC that the very debate over wage hikes is already hurting job creation by discouraging small businesses from hiring.
(video after break)
Closing his eyes and waving a fist, O’Leary said, “I don’t know why people are debating this issue. This is sheer insanity. It’s sheer insanity. There is no metric that makes sense on this.”
“[B]y just keeping this debate alive we are actually compressing job growth,” he continued.
O’Leary explained that the debate was creating uncertainty among small businesses, citing a business in Massachusetts that he had been working with.
That business, according to O’Leary, wanted to hire more employees but “they can’t do that until they know with certainty whether they are paying them $10 or $14 dollars an hour.”
He said that minimum wage hikes increase wages for “your already existing base of employees, so that changes your business model in perpetuity. Then it retards you from the incremental new job.”
Even “Squawk Box” co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin |
/09/comey-timeline-everything-that-led-up-to-his-firing/?utm_term=.1d521047582b 100 05/17/17 DOJ names Robert Mueller special counsel to investigate Russian influence on election NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/robert-mueller-special-counsel-russia-investigation.html 101 06/15/17 Former DHS head Jeh Johnson tells Congress that the DNC refused to turn over its server so it could throughly investigate "hack" Times https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/5/dnc-email-server-most-wanted-evidence-for-russia-i/ 102 06/24/17 Wife of Fusion GPS founder Simpson, Mary Jacoby, writes on Facebook that her husband deserves the credit for "Russia-gate" Tablet http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/251897/obama-steele-dossier-russiagate 103 07/07/17 Comey asserts "Dossier" was "salacious and unverified", but was important because media was prepared to report it CNS https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/comey-even-though-it-was-salacious-and-unverified-we-knew-media-was-about 104 07/13/17 CNN reports Strzok is working for Mueller's special counsel investgiation CNN http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/13/politics/peter-strzok-special-counsel-russia-fbi/index.html 105 07/20/17 DOJ Inspector General receives compromising texts of Mueller investigator Peter Strzok from FBI DC http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/13/new-details-emerge-about-discovery-of-fbi-agents-anti-trump-texts/ 106 07/24/17 Consortium of Intelligence Professionals (VIPS) reports that there is no evidence that Russians hacked DNC VIPS https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/ 107 07/27/17 DOJ Inspector General meets with Mueller and Rosenstein to inform them of Strzok's text messages DC http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/13/new-details-emerge-about-discovery-of-fbi-agents-anti-trump-texts/ 108 08/09/17 The Nation reports evidence that DNC insiders, not Russian hackers, compromised Democrat IT systems The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/ 109 08/10/17 DOJ Inspector General requests all communications between Strzok and Page DC http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/13/new-details-emerge-about-discovery-of-fbi-agents-anti-trump-texts/ 110 08/22/17 Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson meets with Senate committee for 10 hours, but refuses to divulge who funded "Dossier" DC http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/28/finally-a-definitive-timeline-showing-when-clinton-dnc-started-the-russian-dossier/ 111 08/24/17 House Intel Chair Nunes subpoenas DOJ and FBI for documents related to "Dossier", which Strzok is believed to be behind DC http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/13/politics/peter-strzok-special-counsel-russia-fbi/index.html 112 09/14/17 Susan Rice admits she surveilled Trump administration after the election and later unmasked the identities of key aides Times https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/14/susan-rice-reveals-why-she-unmasked-trump-campaign/ 113 10/18/17 Two Fusion GPS officials plead the Fifth Amendment during House Intelligence Committee interviews DC http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/18/fusion-gps-partners-plead-the-fifth-during-house-intel-appearance/ 114 10/24/17 Washington Post reveals Clinton campaign and DNC funded Fusion GPS and Russian "Dossier" TPM http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/trump-dossier-timeline-whats-known 115 10/29/17 NBC's Delanian reports upon an illegal leak from the Mueller investigation that the first indictment will be issued Monday NBC https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/grand-jury-approves-first-charges-mueller-s-russia-probe-report-n815246 116 10/30/17 Manafort and Gates indicted as part of Mueller's investigation NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/us/politics/special-counsel-indictments.html 117 10/31/17 FBI refuses House Intel Committee (chaired by Nunez) request to interview Strzok DC http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/14/strzoks-texts-and-the-clinton-trump-investigations-a-definitive-timeline/ 118 11/30/17 Flynn signs please agreeement with special counsel, admitting he lied about sanctions conversations NPR https://www.npr.org/2017/12/05/568319589/the-10-events-you-need-to-know-to-understand-the-michael-flynn-story 119 12/02/17 Washington Post reveals existence of incriminating messages between Peter Strzok revealing anti-Trump biases WaPo https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/two-senior-fbi-officials-on-clinton-trump-probes-exchanged-politically-charged-texts-disparaging-trump/2017/12/02/9846421c-d707-11e7-a986-d0a9770d9a3e_story.html?utm_term=.2fa2cb13cf0c 120 12/04/17 CNN reveals Strzok changed wording of Clinton investigation to avoid criminal charges CNN http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/politics/peter-strzok-james-comey/index.html?sr=twCNNp120417peter-strzok-james-comey0420PMStory&CNNPolitics=Tw 121 12/06/17 DOJ executive Bruce Ohr demoted after revelations he secretly met with Fusion GPS, which had secretly employed his wife Nellie Fox http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/07/top-doj-official-demoted-amid-probe-contacts-with-trump-dossier-firm.html 122 12/06/17 Rep. Adam Schiff accused of leaking privileged notes of meeting between Trump. Jr and House Intelligence Committee to CNN Hill http://thehill.com/homenews/house/365470-republicans-call-for-an-inquiry-into-house-intel-panel-russia-investigation 123 12/07/17 Fox News reveals Ohr was in contact with Fusion GPS at the same time the FISA application was submitted and granted Fox http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/07/top-doj-official-demoted-amid-probe-contacts-with-trump-dossier-firm.html 124 12/07/17 Rep. Jim Jordan grills FBI director Wray: was Dossier used to secure FISA warrant? Wray refuses to answer RCP https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/12/07/rep_jim_jordan_grills_fbi_director_wray_about_peter_strzok.html 125 12/07/17 Judge presiding over Michael Flynn criminal case, Rudolph Contreras, is recused, according to court statement for reasons unknown Reuters https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-flynn/judge-presiding-over-michael-flynn-criminal-case-is-recused-court-idUSKBN1E202V 126 12/11/17 Fox News reveals Ohr's wife was hired by Fusion GPS to create opposition research against Trump Fox http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/11/wife-demoted-doj-official-worked-for-firm-behind-anti-trump-dossier.html 127 12/12/17 375 text messages between Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page are released CNN https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/12/12/politics/peter-strzok-texts-released/index.html?__twitter_impression=true 128 12/12/17 Deputy FBI director Anrew McCabe cancels testimony before Congress after revelations about Nellie and Bruce Ohr are released Breitbart http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/12/deputy-fbi-director-delays-testimony-after-report-reveals-fusion-gps-paid-officials-wife/ 129 12/13/17 Deputy A.G. Rosenstein refuses to tell Congress whether the FBI paid for the Fusion GPS "Dossier" DC http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/13/deputy-ag-wont-say-whether-the-fbi-paid-for-dossier/ 130 12/14/17 Rep. Jim Jordan states DOJ/FBI leadership attempted to fix the presidential election by inventing a "Russian Collusion" narrative Fox http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/12/boom-gop-rep-jim-jordan-proof-fbi-worked-republican-party-election-video/ 131 12/18/17 Demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr fails to appear before Congress FoxBiz http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/12/just-incredible-tom-fitton-stunned-bruce-ohr-ditches-senate-intel-committee-hearing-video/ 132 12/18/17 GOP lawmakers call for investigation into leaks of privileged interview between Trump Jr. and House Intelligence Committee Hill http://thehill.com/homenews/house/365470-republicans-call-for-an-inquiry-into-house-intel-panel-russia-investigation 133 12/18/17 Senate Judiciary Chair Grassley called for the firing of FBI's McCabe Fox http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/19/fbi-s-mccabe-faces-gop-calls-for-ouster-ahead-closed-door-testimony.html 134 12/19/17 FBI's McCabe testifies in private to House Intel Commitee a day after and is unable to answer questions about the "Dossier" Exam http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-frustrated-lawmakers-pressed-fbis-mccabe-for-answers-on-trump-dossier-they-got-nothing/article/2644225 135 12/21/17 A longtime Comey ally and the FBI's top General Counsel -- Andrew A. Baker -- is reassigned by FBI Director Wray WaPo https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbis-top-lawyer-said-to-be-reassigned/2017/12/21/2ac76640-e6b5-11e7-833f-155031558ff4_story.html?utm_term=.418ee85e094cTCU head football coach Gary Patterson answers questions at a breakout session during the Big 12 Conference Football Media Days at the Omni Dallas, July 16, 2016. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News)
"I wish everybody would quit talking about the Big 12 and SEC. It was TCU and Arkansas. We went on the road and beat Arkansas. We've got to go on the road and do it again next week."
TCU earned its first road victory of the season Saturday with a 28-7 win over Arkansas. Here's some things you might have missed postgame from head coach Gary Patterson:
On TCU's defense:
"You have to play hard on first down and third down. You've got to get three-and-outs and takeaways."
"We rotated eight to nine guys. That's why it was important to us. We knew that on every three plays we would rotate all four defensive linemen at a time."
"You're going to have to play in red zone in our league. We worked hard on that in the offseason and two-a-days, and that's one of things we did good [Saturday]. We didn't panic, and we got off the field."
On quarterback Kenny Hill:
"I've got to watch the film, but any time you win on the road, you come closer to having a complete [team]. There are a lot of different areas [of the team] that made the difference [Saturday]."
On TCU's matchup with SMU next week:
"We're going to get ready for SMU and we're going to go on with our lives. They have good players. And that's always a tough ballgame."
Twitter: @ReeceKelleyG******
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74 years ago, in the waning days of November, the Western world wrote off the USSR. The Wehrmacht was in Moscow Oblast, in the Podmoskovie (Moscow suburbs)… all the pundits said that it was only a matter of time before the Germans held their victory parade on Red Square. Why didn’t it happen? Well… for one thing, the heroism of countless millions of courageous people like Z A Kosmodemyanskaya. She died, but she didn’t submit to the rightwing fascist scum.
Look at those who call themselves “conservatives”… their economic and social programmes are almost identical to those of the Nazis… that’s why they excused the Nazi excesses. The Nazis “made the trains run on time”, crushed the unions, and wanted to keep “subhumans” (Slavs, Greeks, and Jews) in subjection. American Republicans applauded that until Pearl Harbor… after all, they wanted to do the same themselves… crush the unions, keep “subhumans” in their place (Mexicans, blacks, Muslims), and to destroy every vestige of the New Deal (including Social Security).
You may support the fascist mindset of the Nazis and Republicans… or you can take on the courage of Zoya and fight them. I’ve chosen the latter… I’m not alone…
BMDThe protest claimed by Indivisible San Pedro (Photo via Indivisible San Pedro's Facebook page)
Revenue at Donald Trump's Southern California golf course has dropped by 13% since Trump entered the presidential race in June 2015, according to the Washington Post. The Post received the figures from the city government.
Located on Pacific cliffs in Rancho Palos Verdes, the Trump National Golf Club is about 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Trump reopened the course in 2006 after purchasing it for a reported $27 million.
The property has been a target for a number of anti-Trump actions, including a group of Black Lives Matter protesters who interrupted brunch at the club's restaurant on Christmas Eve. Environmental activists vandalized the course in March, and a flash mob used their bodies to spell out "resist" in May.
According to the Post's extensive research, it's not just golfers who are side-stepping the once busy club. There hasn't been a single wedding held at the club since November (before the president began his political career, the club averaged 17 weddings a year) and city-issued permits for filming there have also seen a substantial decline.
"That was absolutely one of the responses we were hoping for, we'd like to see all of his businesses completely shut down," Black Lives Matter Los Angeles chapter organizer Melina Abdullah told LAist. "He's making money off this presidency, and we'd like to see him hurt financially because of his policies."
The Post reached out to four Trump Organization officials with questions about the club; only the president's son responded.
“David [Fahrenthold]— please stop reaching out to me. Thank you,” Eric Trump wrote in an email.Hereford United face a winding-up order in court in London on Monday morning after failing to reach an agreement with former manager Martin Foyle.
Club officials have been trying to negotiate a settlement with Foyle, for money owed when he left in March.
But the two parties were unable to reach an agreement, leaving the Bulls hoping for an adjournment at the Royal Courts of Justice.
"This latest development will have come as a nasty shock to most Bulls supporters, who will be anxious over the next couple of days. "As I understand it, the hearing will definitely happen. They are now at the mercy of the courts and will have to fight their corner. The club's lawyers will be seeking an adjournment in the hope of coming to an agreement. "Of course, any court appearance will also incur legal costs so this is another expense the club can ill afford at the moment but in that regard they are between a rock and a hard place. "Clearly a winding-up hearing is not great for any company but, under Section 125 of The Insolvency Act 1986, the Court has the power on hearing a winding-up petition against a limited company to dismiss it, adjourn the hearing or make an interim order. "But one thing is clear. If a winding-up order is made, all power is taken away from the directors of the company. The financial and other affairs of your company are then placed into the hands of the Official Receiver." BBC Hereford and Worcester sports editor Trevor Owens
It is the third time in four months that they have faced being wound up.
In both previous cases, brought by Revenue and Customs (HMRC) over unpaid tax bills, the club found the funds to avert being taken to court.
But this time no agreement has been reached with 51-year-old Foyle, now the manager of Hereford's Conference Premier rivals Southport, who brought the action over not only unpaid wages but other monies that he claims he is owed.
The hearing is due to take place at the Royal Courts of Justice in The Strand on Monday, 2 June.
Chester City were the last club to be wound up there in February 2010.
Chester FC, who were formed following City's liquidation, went down instead of Hereford on a dramatic final day of the Conference Premier season just over a month ago.
The Blues will now be interested spectators on Monday morning as, until the Conference have held their Annual General Meeting on Saturday, 7 June, the 2013-14 season is not officially over - and any punishments handed out could still involve an automatic penalty for going into administration and potential automatic relegation for the Bulls.
Hereford United Supporters' Trust, who made an offer to buy the club a month ago, say they are extremely worried about the position that the club finds itself in.
Bulls chairman David Keyte is reported to have been in talks with three different rival bidders regarding a takeover.
But, although a statement was released on Thursday saying that the consortium of investors involved in trying to take over at Edgar Street had begun the process of payments to the Bulls' football creditors, including their playing staff, nothing has been resolved. And the club are also overdue with their latest PAYE tax demand.Michael Kroger is the Victorian Liberal Party's current president. Credit:Justin McManus He has since removed himself from the two registers but remains on the register in South Australia where he has confirmed assisting Bechtel in discussions with the SA government about nuclear waste. But he has not ruled out a continued commercial arrangement with some of his clients. Some inside the Liberal Party are warning that the internal battle could be damaging for Opposition Leader Matthew Guy because of the factional fallout and the potential for a WorkChoices-style political campaign from Labor and unions. Mr Reith's record as an industrial relations warrior and the Fair Work Commission's decision to lower penalty rates for some workers on Sundays have raised fear among his opponents that Labor will run a tough campaign against Mr Guy during next year's state poll. "The state election will now be full of balaclavas, Alsatians, WorkChoices and children overboard," a senior Liberal said. "It is going to be a disaster. God help us."
Many, including some federal MPs, are critical of Mr Kroger for failing to stop membership recruiter Marcus Bastiaan on his campaign for party renewal, with many viewing the 27-year old Brighton man as a branch stacker. Another big criticism of Mr Kroger has been over his standoff with the Cormack Foundation, a major donor for the Liberal Party, which is withholding half-a-million dollars needed to run the branch over concerns that internal governance issues were not fixed after the Damien Mantach scandal. Mr Mantach embezzled $1.5 million from party coffers during his term as state director, and was sentenced to five years' jail in July. Mr Kroger continues to defy the demands of the Cormack Foundation, which includes business heavy-hitters Hugh Morgan, Rupert Murdoch's brother-in-law John Calvert-Jones and former ANZ chairman Charles Goode. The foundation wants the roles of president and chair of the finance committee to be separated – both positions are held by Mr Kroger.
Former premier Jeff Kennett is backing Mr Reith, saying it is time for a change and pointing out that the financial interests of the party had suffered in recent years. "If Michael were to continue I think our financial situation would get worse," he said. "In the interests of the party it is time for a change." On Thursday Mr Reith confirmed having helped arranged meetings for his clients with both sides of politics in Canberra and Victoria, including on defence and corrections issues. Such meetings included discussions with Coalition corrections spokesman, Ed O'Donohue. He told Fairfax Media it would be inappropriate to continue as a lobbyist "when and if" he were to become party president. He said he had legal advice that he should cease his lobbying activities. "I've bought to an end my activities as a lobbyist," he said.Apparently, attempts are underway to open a new front in the supposed "war on religion" in my home state of Louisiana as it takes center stage in the presidential primary season. Truth be told, from what I have seen lately, those claiming there is a war on religion are the ones most guilty of waging that assault.
With sadness and disbelief, last weekend I watched as Greenwell Springs Baptist Church pastor Dennis Terry introduced presidential candidate Rick Santorum at his church. Terry believes -- incorrectly -- that America was founded as a Christian nation and that those who don't agree with him should "get out." I have been a Baptist my entire life, and I have been a minister for more than 50 years -- the last 20 in a church in Monroe, LA. I can tell you without question that Pastor Terry's perspective is not authentic to the historic Baptist tradition. Indeed, I fail to see how it is consistent with the teachings of Jesus who invited all people into his presence.
The reality is that Pastor Terry's perspective, though terribly troubling, is not unique to him. Unfortunately, such vicious and exclusionary rhetoric has become widespread across the more conservative branches of Christianity. Equally disturbing is the fact that a candidate seeking the Republican presidential nomination would embrace this point of view. No doubt Rick Santorum is a conservative Republican who relies much more on religious rhetoric than I would like any candidate for public office to do, but until now I had not seen him associate himself with a perspective that tells people who do not hold his view on religion to "get out" of the country. Whether or not Mr. Santorum knew what message Pastor Terry would convey in his introduction, he in the end provided a platform for a discriminatory and close-minded perspective inappropriate for anyone wanting to serve as president for all Americans.
The Republican Party has long claimed to be a big-tent party with room for all and an appreciation for different points of view. It is an idea that many have been suspicious of for a while, for good reason. But this week I was reminded of what none other than Senator Barry Goldwater had to say in 1981: "I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A,B,C, and D. Just who do they think they are?"
No one will ever confuse Goldwater with a liberal. He was, in many ways, the father of the modern conservative movement, and yet he understood the danger of applying a religious test to public office. Where are the leaders of today who are willing to stand up and say: "I am a person of faith, but I will not dictate what yours should be. I am a national leader, but I will not use my office to codify my religious doctrine and further divide this nation."
I have learned by personal experience lessons that motivated the founders of our nation to make a provision of religious freedom a part of the United States Constitution. Historically, institutional entanglements between religion and government have hurt both, though religion typically has been hurt much more than government. Religious people do not need the government telling them how to manage their faith any more than governments need religious people attempting to use the machinery of democracy to advance their particular sectarian theology or morality.
Let's move past the idea that opposing the imposition of one set of religious doctrines on the rest of society is a war on religion. Let's move past the idea that asking people to follow the laws of our democratically elected government is somehow a challenge to religious freedom. Let's move past the idea that the fact that a majority of Americans are Christians somehow makes this a Christian nation. Instead, let's celebrate the diverse nature of faith in this country that has thrived in large part because of the religious freedom guarantees in the First Amendment.You may have heard that Gareth Bale has been whistled by the Real Madrid fans recently. You might have heard it a little less if you had actually been at the Santiago Bernabéu. At the stadium where they whistled Alfredo Di Stéfano and where they whistled Zinedine Zidane they have whistled the Welshman too but not as loudly, as incessantly or as unanimously as you may have heard.
“I don’t think Gareth heard whistles,” Carlo Ancelotti insisted this week and he was probably right too. The noise from the supporters has not been as deafening as the debate that has emerged, a debate that at times seems plain bizarre.
“Still awaiting Bale” ran one headline this week of the man who in a single year has won the European Cup, the Copa del Rey, the European Super Cup and the World Club Cup, scoring in three of the four finals and providing an assist in the one in which he did not score. “The fans are annoyed,” wrote the editor of one sports daily. Not nearly as annoyed as some appear to be making out.
It all started during Real Madrid’s 3-0 victory over Espanyol three weeks ago. Bale had produced a brilliant pass for the first goal and scored the second with a superb free-kick. But late in the second half he was sent running through only to put the ball wide. Alongside him Cristiano Ronaldo was calling for the ball and when he did not get it the response from the Portuguese was furious, raising his arms and his voice, the anger externalised for all to see.
Atlético Madrid v Real Madrid: which players make our combined XI? Read more
The previous week in Valencia Bale had taken a shot when he could have passed to Karim Benzema. The word they would start using was chupón, greedy. The whistles from the stands started. How many joined in is impossible to estimate with any real accuracy but the numbers were reasonably significant and when some fans chanted his name soon afterwards as a gesture of support, others replied with more whistles. And so it began. In subsequent games, if passes went astray or shots were taken on, a noise went round. More a murmur than a whistle, a handful rather than a stand full, but a hint of reproach.
Bale had done little to warrant criticism. On both occasions it was not just that he was entitled to shoot, it was that he was right to do so: frankly, passing would have been the wrong option. But that is the way of the crowd at Madrid. It is just how they are; Di Stéfano talked about how even in the 1950s when things were not perfect “it was bitter”.
“Bale probably feels stupefaction at the Latin character,” Juanma Trueba wrote in the sports daily AS. “He was whistled during one of his most complete games. The first goal was born of a long, fabulous pass from him, like a golf swing. He scored the second with an extraordinary free-kick. And between them there were gallops, good movement and measured crosses, even with his right foot. Not enough, according to part of the Bernabéu.”
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Others were less charitable. Two weeks later, with Ronaldo sent off and Madrid seconds away from a damaging draw at Córdoba, Bale produced the run that drew the foul that earned the free-kick that he took that drew the handball that won the penalty that he scored that rescued the team. He had scored again and he kept on scoring, kept on assisting too. The move that set up Benzema against Real Sociedad last week was wonderful.
And yet … and yet the debates continued and some seemed almost willing the fans to whistle, straining to hear it and record it. Before Madrid’s midweek game against Sevilla, the first three questions in the pre-match press conference were about Bale and all carried the whiff of accusation. There is something slightly false about the debate: a fleeting frustration from fans, real enough, repackaged as rejection. It is not.
A foreigner who does not understand, he is an easy target. The most expensive player ever can expect to demand greater scrutiny and raise higher expectations. There is a particular football palate and it even took Ronaldo a long time to win over the supporters. It is true that Bale can sometimes appear removed from the collective functioning of the team, that on the right he can sometimes turn into traffic and that the sensations do not always match the stats exactly. But he has repeatedly proven decisive and some of the accusations are absurd.
Gareth Bale scores the winner in the Copa del Rey final
It is as if he has been a failure when in fact it is hard to recall a player arriving and being such a success. Four trophies in his first year and that winning goal in the cup final: 59 metres in 7.04 seconds. In his first start he got two goals and two assists and he has carried on in the same manner since: 22 goals and 19 assists in 44 games last season, 14 goals and eight assists in 30 games so far this. “Relax, Bale is playing well: he is having a fantastic season,” Ancelotti said.
Ancelotti also said that if they are fit, Bale, Benzema and Ronaldo will always play. That includes Saturday afternoon against Atlético, another chance to win over the fans who will be mourning the loss of their favourite Sergio Ramos who has suffered a hamstring tear that could keep him out for up to six weeks. It won’t be easy: you have to go back six derbies for the last time Atlético lost to Real. But then that was the European Cup final, the night Madrid won the décima after a 12-year wait that felt like an eternity. Oh, and when the winning goal was scored by Gareth Bale.Today I am sharing with you the video from the Christmas lolita meet-up that was held on Saturday in Prague and also my outfit that could not be seen in the video because I was holding the camera ;).
My outfit was inspired by a story about Marie Antoinette. It is said that in snowy winter 1776 she and her friend the Princesse de Lamballe caused an outrage because the two of them rode in the Bois de Bologne in a sleigh, they were clad in white dresses and furs and covered with diamonds and their hair aranged in high poufs was powdered. It was considered distasteful by the poor starving people, which might be true, especially because the flour used for the hairdos by aristocrats was the same flour normal people would use to bake bread to eat and there was a shortage of flour. Although maybe considered thoughtless by the then Frenchmen I love this scene. It must have looked amazing! (You can read about this story and many more fashion excesses in the book I am holding in the photo: The Queen of Fashion by Caroline Weber.)
Therefore I went for a white dress this Christmas and was happy to finish them in time. I paired the dress with a white blouse that I also made and a set of "silver" earrings and bracelet with snowflakes and "diamonds". I did my hair in my havourite rope braid with the help of Kanekalon hair extension and put a "silver" brooch in it. Although people in these days connect this hairdo with the politician Tymošenková that donns a similar updo, I actually have another personality in my mind - the empress Sisi. My original plan was actually to adorn the rope braid with a few so called Sisi stars but I had no time to create them, maybe next year (this project is actually taking a few years now, lol, I really should make myself to do it finally)? The green "emerald" pendant also has its own story. It has been a few years since I read The Witching Hour by Anne Rice and from the moment I read about the flapper girl witch dancing charleston in her 1920s dress with the Mayfair family emerald pendant the idea stuck in my head and I had to have one too (thank you Swarovski for your broad selection of gems). The Mayfair family jewels actually have a little dark secret that I will not spoil for you.
| white dress: handmade | white blouse: handmade |
Look at my Christmas outfits from previous years:A recent study linking a component of vaccines to signs of autism in mice is set for retraction after scientists thoroughly demolished the study’s design, methods, and analysis—and then, for good measure, spotted faked data.
The original study, led by Christopher Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic of the University of British Columbia, suggested that aluminum in vaccines can alter immune responses and trigger the development of autism. (Aluminum adjuvants are used in some vaccines to boost protective immune responses.) The study is just the latest in a long line of publications from the researchers who appear unwavering in their effort to reveal supposed neurotoxic effects of aluminum in vaccines even though dozens of studies have found no evidence of such toxicity.
This isn’t the first time their work has drawn sharp criticism and a retraction; in fact, the researchers have been roundly criticized by peers, experts, and even the World Health Organization. In 2012, the WHO made the unusual effort to specifically call out two of Shaw and Tomljenovic’s publications, calling them “ seriously flawed.” The WHO laid out specific failings of the work and noted an assessment by the Food and Drug Administration that reinforced the safety of aluminum in vaccines, which is backed by clinical trial and epidemiological evidence.
In 2015, criticism erupted again, including a hammering from David Juurlink, head of the division of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. “The lines of reasoning used to support their various assertions are exceedingly thin, and in several instances, they draw inferences from their data that no objective reader could possibly draw,” he told The Globe and Mail at the time. UBC defended Shaw and Tomljenovic, citing academic freedom.
Last year, another study by the pair was pulled, then fully retracted from the journal Vaccine, according to Retraction Watch. The study claimed that aluminum adjuvants in the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil caused behavioral changes in mice. According to Vaccine, the study was retracted due to “serious concerns regarding the scientific soundness of the article.” (The study was republished later that year in the journal Immunologic Research, after revisions.)
Controversy booster
Scientists had similar complaints about the researchers' new mouse study, which was published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry. In a series of blogs and forum posts, scientists pointed out flaws and weaknesses throughout the study, including, but not limited to:
Injecting aluminum under the rodent’s skin, rather than into muscles, which is how vaccines are delivered
Using dosing regimens that make incorrect assumptions about the development of mice and do not mimic vaccine schedules in children
Studying genes based on outdated literature
Using an outdated and inaccurate method to assess gene activity
Using inappropriate statistical tests
“Clear and deliberate” removal of control data
Being funded by private foundations that question the safety of vaccines, which is noted in the study. (A report in 2015 noted that it had received nearly $900,000 in grants from the foundations).
An online journal club, PubPeer, hosted a discussion where scientists quickly spotted that data on gene activity (semi-quantitative RT-PCR results) and protein amounts (Western blots) had been manipulated, duplicated, and re-labeled.
Science blogger The Mad Virologist did an independent analysis, concluding:
There are irregularities in both the semi-quantitative RT-PCR and Western blot data that strongly suggest that these images were fabricated. This is probably the most damning thing about the paper. If the data were manipulated and images fabricated, then the paper needs to be retracted and UBC needs to do an investigation into research misconduct by the Shaw lab.
Similarly, David Gorski, an oncology professor and surgeon at Wayne State University who blogs under the name Orac, called the study “anti-vaccine pseudoscience.” Dr. Gorski concluded:
Not only do we have poorly done and analyzed experiments, but we also have self-plagiarism and, quite possibly, scientific fraud.
John Dawson, the editor of the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, told Retraction Watch that “the paper by Shaw and co-workers is being retracted jointly by the authors and the editor.” A statement on the retraction is forthcoming. Ars reached out to Dawson about the study's overall quality and will update this story with his response.
In e-mail comments to Ars, Shaw acknowledged problems with the data but took no blame.
We don’t know how some images in the manuscript came to be altered. We investigated when the first suggestions came out in Pubpeer and confirmed that some of the images had indeed been manipulated. We don’t know by whom or why. The first author, Dr. Dan Li, denies doing anything wrong, but has not provided any information about this in spite of repeated questions from us. We are continuing to pursue these questions, but as she is now at another institution, we can’t force her to comply.
Ars made several efforts to get in touch with Li but has received no response. Shaw said she left the lab in 2015 and took the data with her. But she was still listed as being at UBC on the study, which was submitted in January 2017. Shaw said this |
their Gurkha regiments fought. He will see the end of that tradition.”
Avis’s mother had then mumbled feebly and said it was a little kid’s passing fancy. “He is not like the other boys, I know, but he will be fine. I will ask Priscilla’s brother to take him for the football games they play at the school ground.” The boys, forever on the lookout for new recruits, promptly allowed him into their club. At 4 pm, after Avi had been given the evening tea with four glucose biscuits, the other kids would holler, “Avi, aaija. Come quick.” He would pick up his canvas shoes and trudge along, always volunteering to be the goalkeeper. It allowed him to escape the rough tackles and spend time by himself beneath the goalpost.
That went on for a couple of years. In fact, Avi got so good at it that he became the team’s official goalkeeper. They would play football on weekends with boys from the other neighbourhoods, collecting Rs 2 from each player in the team for a bet of Rs 22. The winners took home Rs 44, splurging on dokaan ko chiya (special tea sold in sweetmeat shops), singara and piro aloo (spicy potatoes cooked with arbol chili powder).
The next few years passed by in a blur. His younger sister Shristi was born, studies at school turned hectic and it became non-negotiable for the boys to miss the football sessions. The bets were getting larger by the year and they had begun to play for Rs 110 per team. That meant the after-win parties were now a sumptuous affair, consisting of steaming plates of momo, thukpa, shyafale and fried meat. Some of the bigger kids in the team would slyly order tongba, the fermented millet-based alcoholic drink that comes in a bamboo container and has to be sipped hot or warm using a wooden straw. The headiness that followed would render them useless for the rest of the evening.
After classes finished in the afternoon, Avi would rush home and wait for his maths tutor at 3 pm for private lessons that would go on till 4. That one hour was the worst of the day. He hated Mr Pradhan, whose dirty-brown moustache dipped in the tea cup whenever he drank from it. Sometimes when Avi was unable to get to the root of a tricky equation, Mr Pradhan would place a pencil between Avi’s index and middle finger and press the two hard against each other, making him wince in pain.
The free time that he got, Avi spent with Shristi, watching her eat, burp, throw up, eat again. When she began to make sounds that resembled words, Avi thought the first name that she would call out would be his. But like everyone else, she said Ama.
Avinash doesn’t remember clearly now, but he thinks it was the day after their ICSE results came out that changed his life forever. He was 15, fair even by pahari standards, his straight black hair crowding his forehead in a messy fringe. No one who visited their house ever failed to compliment him on his delicate good looks, especially his complexion. Some of them would wink and tell his father, “Avi would have been such a pretty daughter, daju.” His father ignored these remarks, an unspoken fear growing in his heart.
That year, everyone barring Pasang in Avi’s group had passed the 10th boards. But because Pasang’s parents were away in Gangtok to attend a relative’s wedding, it was decided that the celebrations would be held at his place. Pasang didn’t mind much either. “Who cares about my results,” he said. Waving his right hand up and down in a quick chopping gesture, he exclaimed with dramatic flourish, “I’ll be a butcher like my father.”
There were 14 of them that night and they had pooled in money to buy wafers, two small cakes, packets of bhuja and a few bars of Dairy Milk. They had also packed enough plates of chowmein for dinner. Talking about that incident, Avinash would later tell me, “No one knows who, but somebody had sneaked in two bottles of Sikkim XXX rum. I think that did it.”
As the rest of the raucous band went off to bed, tired from all that head-banging and air-guitaring to Thin Lizzy and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the alcohol acting as a catalyst, Avi caught himself looking more than once at Dinesh, the captain of the school football team. Avi had known Dinesh for a while now. Many years ago when Avi had gone with Priscilla’s brother Norbert for the first ever football game of his life at the small ground next to the gumba, Dinesh was there trying to bounce the ball off the goal post’s side bar. He had soon noticed how all the kids went to Dinesh with their problems, with their squabbles, asking him to solve, mediate, intervene, lead. Avi had liked Dinesh instantly. Years later, when they were 13 and had gone to Mirik for an excursion from school, Dinesh had held Avi’s hand as they trekked up from the Samendu lake to eat at Tshering Bhutia’s restaurant.
The memories had come crashing back into Avi’s head. Overwhelmed, he emptied the remaining bit of his share of Sikkim XXX into Paljor’s glass and slid into Dinesh’s sleeping bag.
About a week after that ICSE party, four boys from the neighbourhood, all senior by a few years to Avi, invited him for a get-together at Lhendup’s bungalow. Avi had never interacted much with Lhendup, who had dropped out of school in his 9th and instead helped his father in their flourishing auto repair business. But he knew Lhendup to be Dinesh’s friend. He agreed when one of the four boys smiled and said, “Dinesh has said he will come too.”
When Avi reached Lhendup’s house at about 7 pm, there were six boys there. But there was no trace of Dinesh even at 9. By this time the group had finished the first bottle of Honey Bee brandy and polished off nearly half of the second. Binay, who Avi had been introduced to that evening, was rolling a joint of hash. “So, is Dinesh coming?” Avi asked Lhendup, getting a little impatient. “If he’s not, I think I will leave.”
Avi still remembers Binay’s voice as he poked his head from an inside room and said, “No, you won’t. We called you here for a reason.” It was as if everyone was waiting for the cue. Suddenly someone ran to the main door and latched it shut. The next thing Avi remembers is two of the boys pinning him to the ground and Binay slowly staggering towards him. “You sissy,” Binay spat. “Dinesh told us everything.”
For a month after that incident, Avi didn’t step out of his house, often barely leaving his room. Every night he would wait for Shristi, his father and mother to go off to bed. After he was sure they were asleep, he would switch off the lights in his room and quietly cry for hours.
That didn’t stop the boys, some of them total strangers, from coming right up to his house and asking his mother, “Aunty, where is Avi these days? We thought maybe he could come for a picnic with us?” Some would say it was a birthday or a cousin’s wedding. She wondered why he didn’t go for the football anymore, why he refused to meet even Norbert and Pasang, his best friends, and why he simply stopped talking about Dinesh, his favourite person in the world.
One day at breakfast, Avi announced to his parents that he had decided to go to Kolkata for his senior secondary, and that he would stay with uncle Kisan and his wife Ketaki at their New Alipore house. Avi hadn’t done too badly in his ICSE, managing a decent 82%. It was possible to get a seat in a good school in Kolkata. Moreover, Kisan uncle, who was in the police, could use some departmental influence to help him out.
Avinash didn’t like Kolkata very much and soon moved to Delhi for his BA, graduating from one of the best colleges in the city with honours in English. Unwilling to study any further, Avi first tried his hand at PR, hated it, and quickly shifted to the publishing industry. A year into that, he changed course to work with an NGO in the field of animal rights. He got so fanatical about it that for a year in 2001, he lived with four dogs and an equal number of cats in his Patparganj flat. It went on until his landlord threw out both Avi and the strays.
It was the next year, October of 2002, when stopping by JNU to meet a friend of mine who was doing his Ph.D in Social Medicine that I had my first meeting with Avi. They were nursing their third large peg of Old Monk when I landed at my friend’s room in Jhelum hostel with another bottle of rum. After the introductions were made and we settled down to talk about the Gujarat riots, Avi turned to me and asked, “But you guys never write about the persecution of gays in this country. About their tragedy. We are a minority, too. I guess it is convenient for the media not to talk about us.”
He continued to speak in a voice that was soft but seemed to come from somewhere deep in his gut. “Will you write if I tell you that just last week when a bunch of men from the apartment I live in threatened to beat me up for being a homosexual, the officer in the thana instead of noting my complaint demanded oral sex from me? Blackmail is routine. It is rampant. Like the sword over the king’s head, it never goes away. We have to pay, one way or the other, to hide from the world our truth. From our colleagues, acquaintances, relatives, parents, landlords, policemen, teachers, courts and everyone else the fact that we are gay. It comes with a cost.”
With my friend peering into his glass as if to find something sensible to say, and me, a guilt-wracked representative of the bullying half, shielding myself with silence, the only weapon at my disposal, Avi went on, “Do you know, it’s a myth that straight men have sex only with women? They rape gays all the time. And for some reason that doesn’t make them homosexuals. It merely makes them macho. They take advantage of the fact that our sexual orientation immediately makes us vulnerable. We must be the only minority that feels safe absolutely nowhere in this country, unlike some who can still take refuge in their ghettos.”
Avi was leaving for Mumbai the next day. There was an interview with an NGO lined up and he was sure he would crack it. His monologue finally wore him out and at about 1 am, much to the relief of the two of us, he suddenly changed the subject and said, “It’s a group that works with children. I love kids. I think they will see that. If I get the job and I like the city, I will pack up from here for good.”
He has been in Mumbai ever since and we have remained in touch, mostly through texts and emails.
Three years after he shifted to Mumbai, taking up a two-bedroom flat in Borivali, he texted me one Sunday of September 2005. “Dude? Free? Can I call?” I was in Kolkata and had just got my parents to join me for a month at my rented Jodhpur Park house. Remembering his verbal assault in that fungal JNU room, made worse by the smell of stale mess food, I dithered for a moment. Then, thinking Avi might have something important to tell, I acquiesced.
The weekend before that, as Avi and Mithilesh, the guy he had started sharing the apartment with, were watching a video at home and wondering whether to call for beer or whisky, there was a knock on the door. Two men, both in their mid-20s, were standing outside. They had come to collect the Rs 250 that the local cable company charged from its customers. Mithilesh went to them with the money and to make polite conversation said casually that he hadn’t seen them before. “Where is Arvind bhai?” he asked. “You guys new here?” The one who took the money and jotted down something in a fraying notebook said this was their first month and that they had taken up Arvind’s job.
The other chap, quiet till now, began to smile. It was obvious he wanted to talk. Thinking it would be rude to ignore him, Mithilesh extended his hand and said hello. Introducing himself as Chandan, the man began without any preamble, “We’ve heard storied about you two. Some day we’ll have a few drinks and chat. I will get some of those videos and we can have fun.” Mithilesh pretended he didn’t understand anything of what Chandan was saying and turned around to shut the door. He was shivering with rage and humiliation.
“We moved out of that apartment after a couple of weeks,” Avi said on the phone. “Puritan Mumbai is as bad as the rest of Puritan India. And everywhere we are the outcastes. Treated like whores and freaks. Or both. You asked me if I will ever come out. I will, perhaps. I can. I am ready for it. For the risks that will accompany the decision. But is our society ready for me? Will I get a flat if I tell them I don’t have a wife because I am gay? Will I be able to say Mithilesh is not really a cousin? Can I ask Shristi to stop lying about me to her boyfriend? What will Baba and Ama say when I tell them that they should stop expecting me to be ‘cured’ and that no magic potion, whichever dhami and jhaankri they go to, will make me have kids of my own? That this is how I am and it doesn’t make me a lesser son or a brother?”
Avi was silent for a while. “That night in JNU, you must have thought I was ranting, and must have wished you hadn’t met me in your friend’s room. But I wanted to convince you about my story. About what we go through. Just in case you decide to put together some of the things I have told you and keep telling you.”A day after the Supreme Court held that Section 377 of the IPC does not suffer from the vice of unconstitutionality, unwittingly exposing homosexuals to blackmail or the risk of spending a lifetime in jail for the offence – the verdict also confused and terrorized them as some had actually begun to live together after the Delhi high court decriminalized same-sex relationships four years ago – Avi sent me another short text. “Will you write my story now?”
(Some names have been changed for this article to protect their identity. And despite Avinash’s insistence, I have decided not to use his last name.)- Though most agree the sinking houseboat is an eyesore, those involved are now arguing over who’s responsible for getting it out of the water.
The boat went down on Dec. 11, 2016, and it’s remained on the Mississippi River in St. Paul ever since.
“It was my home, and I just wish it never happened,” said owner Cynthia Rapacz. “I loved it, I loved the people there.”
Rapacz said the yacht club forced her to move, and the new boat slip was too short. She said this is the reason her boat was pulled under by chunks of ice.
“The yacht club moved the boat, and they didn't have enough dock pieces,” she said. “I think if we had had enough dock pieces, it wouldn't have sunk; our boat didn’t fit.”
But, the yacht club said the slip was plenty long and that the boat had been leaking for weeks. The club said it was just a matter of time before the river would take it down.
“They had a duty to keep this vessel seaworthy,” said Brian Toder, attorney for the yacht club. “Water got in, and it kept coming in, and it sunk.”
Rapacz argues that the boat was not sinking.
There has been a lot of finger-pointing that Ramsey County is responsible. However, the county attorney's office said it's an issue between the boat owner and the yacht club, and secondarily, the city’s since the city has a lease agreement with the yacht club.
The city, though, said the signed agreement frees them from any responsibility.
So, ultimately, it's unclear who will end up paying for it.
“I don't want the burden to go on any taxpayers,” Rapacz said. “I don't want the burden to be on anyone. “
The yacht club did file a lawsuit holding Rapacz responsible for lost revenue and repair.
“Every day this vessel sits here it is more and more and more expensive for the yacht club who really has nothing to do with getting this thing out of the water,” Toder said.
The yacht club attorney said he will meet with the county, city and possibly the insurance company later this week to possibly come up with some sort of solution.The art of Alexey Egorov is both fantastical and surreal with a heavy touch of the otherworldly. Alexy Egorov lives in Yakutsk, Russia where he works as a digital artist. As you know, I run a twin weekly series called “Art of Fantasy” and early last year I featured Alexey’s fantasy art. However, Alexey has some amazing science fiction art and I want to showcase that today.
Below is a sampling of his awesome work. Enjoy!
As with my previous attempt, I could find no information about Alexey, not in English anyway. His art, on the other hand, speaks volumes. We have weird alien worlds that suck you into a microcosm of cellular-like activity and makes you question what you see. Strange, almost organic-looking tech and a weird post-apocalyptic future where the skeletal remains of giant robotic creatures waste away and serve as gloomy beacons for wayward travelers.
And that is all from me for this week. May this week be at your mercy.
Cheers!The ICC have today released a code of conduct for backyard cricket…
1. GENERAL RULES
1a. Can’t Get Out First Ball: Curious rule introduced to give the token unco
dickhead a reprieve. Smart-ar*e batsmen use it to hone their reverse sweep;
which becomes interesting when smart-ar*e bowlers use it to hone their beamer.
1b. Caught Behind (auto wikky): Since no one has the desire or the reflexes to
stand in the slips cordon, an edge onto the back fence constitutes instant
dismissal. Has signalled the death of the late cut.
1c. One Hand, One Bounce: This popular innovation (When a fielder can dismiss a
batsman by catching the ball in one hand on the first bounce) is essential to
the very fabric of the sport. Importantly, it means a game can be organised
with a minimum of players. Note that this rule only applies when the fielder is
holding a beer in their other hand.
1d. No LBW: When no umpires are available (or trustworthy), the only option is
to can the LBW rule altogether, ensuring cagey batsmen shuffle across the
crease as is test driving a Zimmer frame.
1e. Six And Out (Then Fetch It): Introduced to combat space and energy
restrictions. It’s rumoured to have been initiated by a hapless bowler living
alongside a pack of Rottweilers.
1f. Standard Over: All veteran backyard bowlers know that the standard length
of an over in backyard cricket ranges from anything between 10-12 balls. You
only relinquish the bowling duties when questioned by any fielders or opposing
team members. But only after the standard response of “Two to go” or “Get
F*cked”.
2. ESSENTIAL ITEMS
2a. Esky: Strategically placed at the bowler’s end, the esky is the shrine, the
fuel, the Richie Benaud of backyard cricket – because it holds the beer.
2b. Balls: A minimum of 3 tennis balls is advised, as there’s always some
smart-ar*e who delights in tonking them over the fence (see rule 1e).
Advanced exponents use electrical tape around half the ball to give it more
swing than Austin Powers.
2c. Dog: Preferable of Kelpie or Heeler extraction, so it can field every ball,
including those that disappear under the house or thorny bushes. The downside is
that they produce more slobber than a 14 year old male Penthouse reader. The
upside is the dog will sleep for 3 days straight afterwards.
2d. Rubbish Bin: It would be nice to think you can clean up your own mess, but
in reality the bin makes a perfect set of stumps.
2e. Bat: Boasting multiple scratches and dents, and no grip left on the handle,
it’s usually of 1980′s vintage with a single scoop, with a fake signature of
Allan Border or Merv Hughes providing added backyard cult status.
3. CODE OF ETHICS
3a. Stumps: The game draws to a close when,
i) Your host finally cooks the snags after the barbie has run out of gas,
ii) Macca hits the last ball onto the road and it disappears down the drain
(not withstanding rules 1e and 2c),
iii) You can’t get that batsman out with any type of bowling pace or spin, or
iv) Your girlfriend cracks the sh*ts and wants to go home because you “become a
f*cking idiot” when you hang around with your mates.
3b. Flower Damage: Any respectful male will cringe and help hide the fact that
you have just topped your girlfriend’s petunias. Somehow, the universal threat
of a week-long drought bonds the male species.
3c. Spilt Beer: Ideally, the offending batsman should apologise profusely and
offer to replace the vanquished stubbie. Fat Chance. The feat prompts sh*tloads
of laughter, and the usually triumphant “Get me one while you’re at it you
f*cking retard!”
3d. No Running Between Wickets: Every backyard cricket specialist should know
this phrase, “The words fun and run don’t go together.” Just ask Arjuna
Ranatunga. Besides, how the hell are you supposed to run in thongs?
3e. Courtesy Call: Always invite the chicks to have a bat. They usually say no,
but on the odd occasion, they do take a grip of the willow. You can bowl a
couple of dollies to her so she can hit before ending this freakish sideshow
with a yorker. Most chicks hold a bat as if they’re chopping wood, and they
bowl as if throwing left-handed. And they can’t handle yorkers.
Still, someone has to make the salad.
Thanks to Tim for the emailOn Tuesday evening, in what appeared to be a well-calibrated hit piece against President-Elect Donald Trump on the day before his pre-inauguration press conference, CNN ran a story about how both Trump and President Obama had been briefed on an unverified intelligence report alleging corrupt ties between Trump and the Russian government. BuzzFeed quickly jumped on that lead to dump the entire report, which apparently had been circulating in journalistic circles for months, but which could not be verified.
There are two major questions here.
1. Is The Report True? This, of course, is the question everybody’s asking. But there’s no way of knowing. BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith said himself that the allegations were “potentially unverifiable.” The allegations look plainly ridiculous on their surface, particularly the over-the-top description of Trump renting a hotel room in which the Obamas had stayed and then hiring Russian prostitutes to engage in a mass “golden shower” party. That sounds like something out of David Brock’s sickest fantasies. And Trump’s people, including Trump himself, have denied all of it. Lawyer Michael Cohen, who supposedly brokered anti-Hillary material with the Russians in Prague, has denied ever having visited Prague. With that said, as LawfareBlog points out:
The President and President-elect do not get briefed on material that the intelligence community does not believe to be at least of some credibility. The individual who generated them is apparently a person whose work intelligence professionals take seriously. And at a personal level, we can attest that we have had a lot of conversations with a lot of different people about the material in this document. While nobody has confirmed any of the allegations, both inside government and in the press, it is clear to us that they are the subject of serious attention.
And nobody has yet answered satisfactorily why Trump seems so adamant about his pro-Russia stance even in the face of aggression.
2. Why Did BuzzFeed Run The Report? A few years ago, I ran an unverified rumor about Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel that I had obtained from a high-ranking Senate source. The piece itself noted that the information had not been verified. The rumor turned out not to be true, and I was rightly ripped for reporting the rumor without verifying it. Among those leading the charge: BuzzFeed. I learned a hard lesson, but a good one.
BuzzFeed didn’t, apparently.
Today, BuzzFeed ran an unverified rumor piece of precisely the type they decried when it came to Secretary Hagel. Here was Smith’s full (and weak) explanation:
Here's the note I sent to @buzzfeednews staff this evening pic.twitter.com/OcAloWzVzb — Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) January 11, 2017
Pretty much everybody on the left side of the journalistic aisle had seen this unverified report. Julia Ioffe tweeted, “Okay, fellow journalists, raise your hand if you too were approached with this story. (I was.).” None of these journalists were able to verify the details in the report, and so they didn’t run them. BuzzFeed did. That’s not coincidental. Here were just some of the BuzzFeed reporters weeping over Barack Obama’s exit speech on Tuesday night:
BuzzFeed editors are having a hard time right now pic.twitter.com/8F9qIlKO6K — Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 11, 2017
We’ll have to wait to see whether any of the information in the report is true. But the questions it raises about media credibility are just as serious as any evidence-free questions it raises about Donald Trump.More than 50 activists protesting the detention of two Cambodian men and the targeting of thousands of other Southeast Asians for deportation from the U.S. rallied outside the White House in Washington on Wednesday, a statement from the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (Searac) said.
More than 560 Cambodians have been deported from the U.S. to Cambodia under a 2002 agreement that allows for the repatriation of non-U.S. citizens who have been convicted of felony crimes. The last seven arrived last month.
Wednesday’s protesters highlighted the cases of Chamroeun Phan and Sameth Nhean, two members of a high-profile group of eight Cambodians from Minnesota—all refugees who have lived in the U.S. since they were young children, the statement said. They were all detained by U.S. immigration authorities in August.
Since then, five of the “Minnesota 8” have been deported to Cambodia and one was released in February. Mr. Phan and Mr. Nhean, still detained, avoided deportation in March when immigration judges issued emergency stays of removal. Last month, a judge granted Mr. Phan relief from his removal order because of the “extreme hardship” his deportation would cause his wife, daughter and elderly parents, who are U.S. citizens, according to Mr. Phan’s sister, Montha Chum.
“Chamroeun and Sameth are both deeply loved and missed by their families and their communities,” Ms. Chum said in the statement. “We will continue organizing and fighting until they are released.”
Mr. Nhean is awaiting a hearing and Mr. Phan is awaiting a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals on the Department of Homeland Security’s appeal of the judge’s relief ruling, said Searac’s immigration policy manager, Katrina Dizon Mariategue, in an email.
Correction: The article has been clarified to note the activists protested the targeting of thousands of Southeast Asians for deportation.
[email protected]
© 2017, The Cambodia Daily. All rights reserved No part of this article may be reproduced in print, electronically, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without written permission.As the line of windy squalls passed out over Lake Michigan that hot June morning 40 years ago, Joseph Pecararo assumed the worst of the day's weather was over.
The sky was clear and the lake was still by the time the 24-year-old lifeguard captain arrived for work at North Avenue beach.
With temperatures expected to climb to nearly 100, he expected a big Saturday crowd.
But so far the beach was deserted, except for a pair of fishermen out on the hook-shaped pier and a line of rowboats stored in front of the beachhouse, ready for use in an emergency.
They turned out to be of no use at all against the silent killer racing toward the beach from the southeast that morning: a freakish, 10-foot-high inland tidal wave that would sweep eight anglers to death and pound the Lake Michigan shoreline all the way from the Chicago River to Wilmette on its way into the history books.
"The water came up suddenly and our boats began to float," remembers Pecararo, now general superintendent of beaches for the Chicago Park District.
"We ran out and went to pull the boats up and when we did, there was a wave."
The wall of water crashed over the lifeguards without warning, knocking them from their feet. When they surfaced, "we laughed, we thought it was kind of funny," he remembers.
"But seconds later a person came running over and said there was a fisherman swept off the pier," Pecararo said. John Jaworski, fishing with his 18-year-old son Joseph, had disappeared.
Jaworski was just the first of the victims of one of Lake Michigan's most unusual phenomena: the seiche.
Such potentially deadly waves, the worst of which hit Chicago on June 26, 1954, are formed when a squall line with high winds drives water across the lake, in the same way that blowing on a hot cup of coffee pushes the liquid toward the far rim. The winds then pass off the lake, but the water sloshes back across, producing damaging waves with no storm to warn of their impending arrival.
That morning, the seiche-producing storm started in LaCrosse, Wis., and moved southeasterly through Madison, Rockford and Milwaukee. At 7:30 a.m. it crossed over Chicago and blew out onto Lake Michigan at nearly 55 miles an hour.
At 8:10 a.m. it hit Michigan City, pushing a 5-foot wall of water over the breakwater and onto the shore. It then reflected back and began racing toward Chicago, where it crashed with terrifying fury an hour and 20 minutes later.
Unlike anglers in Michigan City, who fled the squall for higher ground, the Chicago fishermen had no storm to warn them of the deadly wave racing their way.
The only warning Herbert Riederer, then a 24-year-old state conservation officer, had of the impending wave was a wet shoe. He'd just finished writing a ticket to a fisherman without a license when water suddenly rose onto the Montrose Harbor breakwater where he was standing.
"I stepped up to higher ground," he remembers. "As I did, I heard a rush of water, and when I looked back, I saw people being washed off the pier."
"It's not something you can forget," he said. "I can still see that woman, she was riding the crest of this huge wave into the harbor mouth, then she disappeared."
Mae Gabriel, 48, and her husband, Edward, 49, were later found drowned.
Riederer, who had no radio, raced for help to a nearby roadway, where he "commandeered the first car I saw and had him drive me to the bait shop" a half-mile away, where the nearest phone was located.
Soon Montrose Harbor was crawling with divers, including the lifeguards from North Avenue Beach. They had just managed to recover Jaworski's body in the rough water by forming a line and pushing it in toward the shore when a squad car rolled up with the news: "Dozens down at Montrose!"
"We jumped in the squad car. It was a wild ride," Pecararo remembers.
Three bodies were pulled from the harbor that morning; four more were recovered later. One was Theodore Stempinski, the man Riederer, who is no longer with the conservation service, had issued the ticket. He had apparently stopped to pick up his fishing gear before fleeing the pier.
The deadly seiche triggered a flurry of scientific study into the phenomenon that quickly saved lives: Just weeks later, on July 6, 1954, a similar storm passed over Chicago, prompting the local weather service to issue a seiche warning.
When the seiche hit, waters rushed into the Loyola beach parking lot and up the steps of the North Avenue beachhouse, then raced away. But the beaches had been cleared and no one was hurt.
Since the 1954 disaster so-called seiche fences have been installed on many breakwaters. The simple metal cables and posts anchored in concrete are intended to provide a handhold in the event of a sudden wave.
Large seiches remain relatively rare. Over the last 100 years, weather watchers have recorded about 10 major ones on Lake Michigan. Last year three seiche warnings were issued for Chicago, none for waves approaching the size of those in 1954, Pecararo said.
"We never saw anything like that," Pecararo remembers. "I thought the end of the world was coming."Working Hard And Getting Nowhere
Picture this–You are 20 lbs overweight. You go on a strict diet, you kill yourself in the gym, and it seem like you are actually gaining more weight instead of losing. You lose motivation and confidence when you work hard on a goal and get nowhere. Did you know that working too hard can actually kill your confidence? People tell you that hard work pays off, but what if it doesn’t? People don’t realize how important progress is when you set out to achieve a big goal. If you work hard, you should get what you put in, right?
Work Smarter, Not Harder
Hard work pays off is a myth. You could dig for buried treasure and work really hard, but what if the treasure is on the other side of the island? What if your map is wrong? What if you could use better excavating equipment that makes the job almost effortless, but get better results. Hard work is not necessary when it comes to success. The results is what matters. If you do work hard, work harder to make things easier for you in the future.
At one point in time there was no such thing as a remote control. Then one day a person came up with the idea of changing the channel from their seat, 10 feet away from the TV. It may have been hard work to come up with that idea, but after the remote was invented, people don’t walk up to the TV to change the channel anymore. This person worked hard once so things could be easier later on down the line.
Effortless Success
If you’re one of those people who work hard and get nowhere, that may be a sign that you’re not doing things right. It’s not honorable to struggle. This is why the wealthy hire people to run their business, to make it easier for them to make more money. If they did everything themselves, they would not be as wealthy as they are. Don’t be afraid to learn a better way of doing things. It’s not cheating if a difficult task becomes easy. There is a lot of untapped information that has the key to your success. This site is a good start. Click the link below to learn more.
Click here to get started…Task Spooler
As in freshmeat.net:
task spooler is a Unix batch system where the tasks spooled run one after the other. The amount of jobs to run at once can be set at any time. Each user in each system has his own job queue. The tasks are run in the correct context (that of enqueue) from any shell/process, and its output/results can be easily watched. It is very useful when you know that your commands depend on a lot of RAM, a lot of disk use, give a lot of output, or for whatever reason it's better not to run them all at the same time, while you want to keep your resources busy for maximum benfit. Its interface allows using it easily in scripts.
For your first contact, you can read an article at linux.com, which I like as overview, guide and examples (original url). On more advanced usage, don't neglect the TRICKS file in the package.
Features
I wrote Task Spooler because I didn't have any comfortable way of running batch jobs in my linux computer. I wanted to:
Queue jobs from different terminals.
Use it locally in my machine (not as in network queues).
Have a good way of seeing the output of the processes (tail, errorlevels,...).
Easy use: almost no configuration.
Easy to use in scripts.
At the end, after some time using and developing ts, it can do something more:
It works in most systems I use and some others, like GNU/Linux, Darwin, Cygwin, and FreeBSD.
No configuration at all for a simple queue.
Good integration with renice, kill, etc. (through `ts -p` and process groups).
and process groups). Have any amount of queues identified by name, writting a simple wrapper script for each (I use ts2, tsio, tsprint, etc).
Control how many jobs may run at once in any queue (taking profit of multicores).
It never removes the result files, so they can be reached even after we |
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Google Scholar Crossref | ISITeething gets a bad rap. It always has (apparently, for thousands of years), from parents and healthcare providers alike. In fact, I’m fairly confident that there isn’t a single pediatric symptom that hasn’t, at some point, been ascribed to teething. I’ve always been skeptical, partially because it’s my nature, and partially because it just didn’t make sense that this totally normal process would be responsible for so many seemingly unrelated symptoms. I wondered which, if any, of these symptoms could actually be caused by teething; and which, if any, of the common treatments for teething actually work. So I started digging…and it’s absolutely fascinating how much we have (and haven’t) learned.
One of the earliest physicians to write about the hazards of teething was none other than Hippocrates himself. In the 4th century BC, the “Father of Western Medicine,” whose oath (albeit, in a heavily-modified form) remains part of a physician’s indoctrination today, noted that “teething children suffer from itching of the gums, fever, convulsions, diarrhoea, especially when they cut their eye teeth.” This theory persisted and permeated the field of pediatrics throughout much of modern history; until relatively recently, nobody bothered to challenge it.
But while it’s certainly good for a physician to recognize the symptoms Hippocrates described, the scientific mind soon begins to wonder: just what is it about teething that causes these sundry symptoms? It took a while to come up with an answer, but by the late-19th century, we were getting close. It had something to do with the nervous system. In 1887, J. W. White explained, “The nervous perturbation occasioned by the eruption of teeth increases the susceptibility and lessens the resistive power of the child.” Sounds science-y enough. I’d buy it.
So we’ve defined a disease; now we need a treatment (otherwise, there would be no need for doctors, and that’s bad for business). Only a few hundred years after Hippocrates wrote of the perils of teething, Soranus of Ephesus developed one of the earliest recorded treatments for teething—which was fortunate, considering the severity of the symptoms this common process could cause. It was pretty simple: kill a rabbit, cut out his brain, rub it on your kiddo’s gums. Can’t get much easier than that. This practice remained the standard of care for several hundred years; it was published in the medical literature of the time: “If they are in pain, smear the gums with dog’s milk or hare’s brain; this works also if eaten.”
Aetios of Amida, a physician in the 6th century AD, evidently hailed from an area where rabbits were hard to come by; he suggested that if a hare’s brain were difficult to obtain, a lamb’s brain would work equally well, “for by its nature it assists.” You can’t ask for a more scientific explanation than that. He also recommended another practice, which I found quite intriguing: “Root of colocynth hung on the child in a gold or silver case, or bramble root, or the tooth of a viper, especially a male viper, set in gold or green jasper, suspended on the neck.” What do you know? A teething necklace. I’ll come back to this.
Necklaces or amulets for teething remained quite popular for some time—we’re talking centuries. They usually involved a tooth, bone, stone, or root suspended around the infant’s neck in some manner or another. In 1668, François Mauriceau, a French midwife, discussed the use of “Silver Coral,” “small Bells,” or a “Wolfs tooth,” adding that “one must not however believe that these things have any peculiar property, as many Women imagine; but if they are helpful in this case it is because of their solidity, evenness and smoothness.” Silly women and their imaginations.
In 1682, the British philosopher and physician John Locke wrote of “convulsion fits” (seizures) that were attributed to teething. His recommended remedy: diacodium (a syrup made from poppies—essentially, opium), sweet oil of almonds, and, “if the child be vigorous and a year old,” bloodletting. A little bloodletting never hurt anybody.
Now, I understand that, for a parent, seizures can be really scary. But it’s not just the seizures you have to worry about. Dr. J. W. Holman authored a book on caring for children that was widely read by mothers in the 1840’s. It was the What to Expect of the mid-19th century. In it, he warns of some pretty serious complications: “Beside the general febrile symptoms attendant upon the teething of children, many other troublesome and sometimes fatal complaints follow.” Yes, “fatal.” Teething could kill your kid. His solution was to alter your child’s diet to carefully titrate the consistency of his stool. I’m not sure how this helped.
Now, death by teething sounds pretty severe—it can’t be that common, right? Au contraire. Dr. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) was a British physician that served as the personal physician for Queen Anne, so you have to assume he knew his stuff. According to his records, “above a tenth part of Infants die in Teething.” Yep—if your baby girl gets teeth, there’s a better than 10 percent chance that she will die. (The follow-up study showed that over the next 70 years, the death rate from teething increased to nearly 100 percent…just kidding, but you can see how statistics can be misleading.)
Well, I thought 10 percent sounded high, so I kept searching, thinking that perhaps Dr. Arbuthnot wasn’t the best pick for the Royal Doctor job. Maybe someone else’s outcomes looked better. I was wrong. In 1894, a dentist with a killer last name (Thrasher) reported even higher numbers: “So deadly has teething become, that one third of the Human family die before the twenty deciduous teeth have fully appeared.” I suppose I’ve been lucky so far; I have 2 kids, both of whom have teeth and neither of whom has died yet. Better not push my luck with number 3. But seriously, this is getting out of control—we have to do something.
Fortunately, while teething carried a 25% mortality rate, there were treatments (even beyond hare’s brains and necklaces). One of the mainstays of teething therapy was known as gum-lancing. It appears to have been developed by a French surgeon, Ambriose Pare, in 1575. He serendipitously discovered the value of this treatment during a child’s autopsy: “We diligently sought for the cause of his death, we could impute it to nothing else than the contumacious hardness of the gums…when we cut the gums with a knife we found all the teeth appearing…if it had been done when he lived, doubtless he would have been preserved.” No doubt.
Once it was established (without a doubt) that slicing open a kid’s gums would save his life, the procedure really caught on. But, as with any medical procedure, we have keep in mind our oath to “do no harm.” We need to be sure the benefits outweigh the risks. Dr. John Darwall laid these fears to rest in 1830, when he wrote: “With respect to the gums, the moment they become red and inflamed they should be lanced, nor can any harm result from this practice, if the lancet be clean.” OK, cool. So make sure your scalpel is clean, and you should be good. And, according to him, there was really no other option. “It will be in vain to administer medicines until the gums have been lanced.”
So we’ve seen that gum-lancing is effective and safe; it was also reported to be painless, as long as you use the right instrument. François Mauriceau, who we’ve already met, advised the following: “Let the Gums be cut with a Lancet where the teeth are ready; Nurses use to do it with their nails but ’tis better to be done with a Lancet because ’tis not painful.”
Some, however, seemed to disagree with Mauriceau’s assessment. It turns out that, while “’tis not painful” for the physician, gum-lancing wasn’t the most well-tolerated procedure for the babies (or their over-protective mothers). In 1862, Dr. Harrison explained, “I think all well educated medical men, in this country, are advocates for lancing the gums…Mothers, however, not unfrequently object; they think it a pity to hurt the little darling.” An article published around the same time discussed this issue as well: “The terrors of the mother and the restlessness of the infant, frequently render it by no means an easy operation.” I would imagine so.
But despite the protests of the “little darling” and his mother, a doc’s gotta do what a doc’s gotta do. We’re saving lives here. Dr. Marshall Hall emphasized this point when he wrote that he “would rather lance a child’s gums 199 times unnecessarily than omit it once if necessary.” I get it–you don’t want to miss something. And, besides, it’s not like the procedure wasn’t proven to be effective. In 1908, Dr. John Lovett Morse documented the impressive benefits of gum-lancing in one of his patients: “A boy, 17 months old, began to be fussy and a little feverish the night of April 14…The next evening the temperature was 103°F.” After Dr. Morse’s skillfully-performed procedure: “the next day 100°F. in the evening.” So there you go—undeniable scientific proof that gum-lancing works.
An even more impressive (and equally well-documented) fact about gum-lancing, is that if a child hasn’t been dead all that long, you might just be able to bring him back. David Francis Condie described such an event in his book, A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Children, which was published in 1850. “A child, having suffered greatly from difficult dentition, apparently died and was laid out for internment. M. Lemonnier was desirous of ascertaining the condition of the alveola. He accordingly made a free incision through the gums but on preparing to persue further his examination, he perceived the child to open his eyes and give other indications of life. He immediately called for assistance; the shroud was removed from the body and by careful and persevering attention, the child’s life was saved. In due time the teeth made their appearance and the child’s health was fully restored.” As far as I can tell, this was the first (and possibly, the only) recorded dental miracle.
There was a lot of back-and-forth about whose technique was the best, but the one thing you didn’t do was to deny that gum-lancing was the appropriate treatment. (It was, as you just read, scientifically-proven). In 1857, the Southern Journal of Medicine and Physical Science published the following: “The principal thing in the treatment of these cases, is to lance the gums freely. A superficial incision will be of no avail; the gums must be cut down until the lancet impinges on the approaching tooth.” The author went on to scathingly criticize opponents of this view: “The prejudices of former writers against this invaluable operation scarcely require comment; but…we still find a few, and we are happy to say a very few individuals, who retain a bigoted faith in the absurd dogmata of their forefathers,” who evidently felt that gum-lancing might not be all that beneficial.
Perhaps the dissenting forefathers would have been convinced if they had given gum-lancing another shot, this time with an adjunct treatment. In 1764, Dr. John Theobald wrote: “The cure must begin by applying a leach behind each ear, and when the swelling of the gum shows it is time to cut it…it should be cut quite down to the tooth, with a penknife.” Pure genius. How could placing leeches behind a child’s ears and then cutting his gums with a pocketknife not be helpful? In 1825, Dr. James Kennedy clarified the whole leech thing. Turns out, you can’t use just any leech. “When the leech is of the right or medicinal kind, its body has a blackish brown colour, marked on the back with six yellow spots, and edged with a yellow line on each side.” Just be careful picking one out–if in doubt, ask your pharmacist.
Fortunately, for those who—despite the overwhelming body of scientific evidence supporting this procedure—just couldn’t be convinced, there was an alternative therapy available. Dr. Valentine Mott wrote a chapter in an infant care handbook in 1844, in which he advised the following (slightly less invasive) treatment: “When a child, pent up in the confined and impure atmosphere of our cities, has become emaciated by teething…it is surprising to see with what rapidity he is restored, on removal to the pure air of the country…Accordingly, all our writers on diseases of children, recommend this as an indispensable, and the only remedy, almost, which is needed. We have been in the habit, for the last twenty years, of recommending to those who dwell in the city of New York, a daily trip, across the river to Hoboken, during the summer months, for children undergoing the process of teething, and we have found, where this has been practiced, that dentition has, in a very large majority of cases, been attended with little or no inconvenience.” It’s amazing what a little fresh air can do.
But teething is a tough disease to treat, and doctors aren’t perfect. Sometimes a physician’s best efforts just aren’t enough. Nathaniel Hawthorne (the 19th-Century American author, perhaps best known for writing The Scarlet Letter) had a wife, Sophia, who was totally incapacitated by teething—for 31 years. “Sophia had been a very sick child on account of teething, and was made a life-long invalid by the heroic system of medicine which was then in vogue.” She suffered from “among other things…an acute nervous headache which lasted uninterruptedly from her twelfth to her thirty-first year, and of course, shortened her life by an unknown quantity.” Heck of a headache. Her doctors were stumped: “The Boston physicians…tried their hands at curing her, and she went through courses of their poisons, each one bringing her to death’s door, and leaving her less able to cope with the pain they did not reach.” They tried everything: “mercury, arsenic, opium, hyoscyamus, and all.” They were bringing out the big guns. Teething was really kicking this lady’s butt. But, alas, she got better: “When Sophia Peabody became Sophia Hawthorne in 1842, she was, for the first time since infancy, in perfect health; nor did she ever afterwards relapse into her previous condition of invalidism.” So the honeymoon fixed her…maybe Nate’s talents weren’t limited to using his pen.Is that what I’m hearing?
I found all of these accounts to be fascinating and exceedingly entertaining. But, as a physician, reading these articles is humbling. These guys weren’t idiots. They were the most intelligent and respected thinkers of their day, doing the best they could with the information they had available. And you see how ridiculous they sounded. That makes me wonder: how much of what we “know” now will sound ridiculous in 10, 50, or 300 years? Probably a lot of it. But then, I’m reminded of a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannonballs, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.” So, in my next post, with the acknowledgement that everything I say may be proven wrong in the future, and based on the best medical evidence available, I’ll tell you what I think. Today.
Acknowledgements:
Without the prior work of T.E.C., Jr. and Martin Ashley, both of whom I have cited extensively above, writing this post would have fallen somewhere between difficult and impossible. Thanks for your efforts and your shared fascination with this topic.
The Disease and Cause of Death images are taken from http://www.antiquusmorbus.com/English/Periodontal.htm.A church in Greensburg just east of Columbus is receiving criticism after a cell phone video was posted anonymously on YouTube showing a boy singing an anti-gay song during a recent Sunday service. Members of the community came out to protest the church Sunday morning, saying the church’s actions were not representative of their town.
Greensburg residents gathered outside the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle on Sunday holding signs that read, “Thou shalt not judge” and “what happened to love thy neighbor.”
A video was posted online last week that shows the church’s members cheering and laughing as a 4-year-old boy sang a song that included the line “ain’t no homo gonna make it to heaven.” That spurred 20-year-old Lucas Hartwell to organize Sunday’s protest via Facebook.
“When I saw the video I immediately decided that we should organize a protest and get this church to get the message that we are not these type of people in this town,” he says. “We are the type of people that are accepting and we’re facing toward progression. And we’re not that backwards town that everyone just looks at as we’re just corn folk from Indiana.”
This isn’t the first time the town has dealt with similar issues. Last year a high school boy committed suicide. Some students who knew him say he wasn’t homosexual, but was bullied and called gay.
Protestor Abby Wainscott says she hoped the rally would show support for gay teens and discourage bullying. “If one teenager that goes to this church sees us standing out here today and realizes, hey, maybe there is another way to think about this, maybe I don’t have to hate those people,” she says. “Even if we just plant a seed of doubt in one kid’s head today by standing here, then I think we possibly made a major difference.”
No one from the church would comment at the protest, but the church has posted a statement on its website saying the pastor and its members do not condone the hate of any person for any reason.Steam
Watch out, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony: Apple is coming to take you down.
Speaking recently to a class at the University of Texas' LBJ School of Public Affairs, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said that he believes the console market's greatest "threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market share, and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room with their platform."
"I think that there's a scenario where we see sort of a dumbed down living room platform emerging -- I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily," Newell told the class, according to Polygon, which published a transcript of the lecture yesterday. "The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to establish ourselves there, and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile before Apple takes over the living room?"
Newell has a vested interest in handicapping the console space. His company has shown off the Steam Box, an open-source console that will attempt to bring PC games to the living room through the service's Big Picture mode. The Steam Box could finally pit console titles against PC games to determine dominance in the living room.
That is, of course, unless Apple finds a way to change the industry entirely. As Newell points out, Steam Box's "biggest challenge is that Apple moves on the living room before the PC industry sort of gets its act together."
Apple has not expressed any interest in entering the home-gaming space. However, the company's iOS is increasingly becoming a go-to gaming platform. Major publishers and developers are now including iOS (and Android) versions of titles when they release their console counterparts.
Newell ostensibly believes that the next logical step for Apple is to bring its gaming platform to the television. Several reports over the years suggesting Apple was planning to make that jump pointed to its Apple TV as the device it would use to deliver games.
Whether Newell should so easily cast aside the threat that console makers Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft can present, however, is up for debate. Those companies have been effectively competing in the console market for years, and have enjoyed varying degrees of success. As game history has shown, jumping into the console market and establishing a foothold isn't necessarily that easy.People, can't we just get along?
A fight Saturday afternoon at the Big Pine Flea Market led to the arrest of David Leon Maxwell, a 56-year-old Big Pine Key man for aggravated battery, according to a news release from the Monroe County Sheriff's Office.
A 71-year-old Cudjoe Key man, who was a vendor at the flea market, told deputies he had been working his booth when Maxwell became agitated, walking up and down in front of his booth calling him a "cheap Jew," the release stated.
Maxwell reportedly walked through the man's booth twice while repeating the insult until the vendor said that he finally told him not to enter the booth again.
According to the vendor and witnesses, the alleged flea market bully then pushed the senior twice; the vendor then struck Maxwell in the face.
When Maxwell again pushed the man, the vendor's wife began to scream, which alerted two off-duty Key West cops who happened to be at the flea market, according to the report.
The cops held Maxwell down until deputies arrived and arrested Maxwell, charging him with aggravated battery of an elderly person, battery, showing evidence of prejudice in the commission of a crime and resisting arrest.
More FloriDUHPortugal is on ‘super red alert’, warns birth-watch specialist
The coordinator of a team dedicated to Portugal’s birth-rate has warned that, by the end of this century, the country’s population could drop to as low as seven million inhabitants and risk becoming unsustainable.
University professor Joaquim Azevedo, the coordinator of a work team dedicated to researching issues related to the dwindling national birth-rate, has warned that Portugal is on ‘super red alert’ when it comes to new births.
“We will have to work for at least another 20 years if we want to reverse the tendency. But first we have to stabilise it”, the specialist said, speaking in Viseu during a PSD social democratic conference.
He further warned of the danger that the number of Portuguese could “quickly” drop to figures resembling the “middle ages” if the dropping birth-rate is not stopped.
The professor was recently appointed by Portugal’s Prime Minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, to head up the work group dedicated to birth matters and which will come up with proposals for the government.
“We are losing our population, as we know. These matters are crystal clear”, he stressed, suggesting “birth-friendly policies” in terms of fiscal and employment issues to try and reverse the situation.
“We are faced with a reality that, as it stands, doesn’t have much of a subjacent ideology. It is a reality, facts are facts and that is what is happening.”
Joaqium Azevedo also predicts that by the end of this century Portugal will have in the region of seven million inhabitants and will therefore become an “unsustainable” country.
“If that is the country we want, then that is the country we are building”, he cautioned.
Meanwhile, in related news, it has emerged that Portugal has the second greatest rate of contraception use in the world, second to Norway, and its abortion rate is lower than the European average, a “success” which, according to the Association for Family Planning (AFP), is due to sex education and family planning laws approved more than 30 years ago.
The AFP has also said it is pleased with a drop in teenage births, from 3.75 percent in 1984 to 1.22 percent in 2012.
These “clearly positive” results were addressed by Duarte Vilar, executive director of the AFP, who warned that Portugal is at risk of “going backwards” due to the “significant cuts” expected for this year to contraception methods distributed in health centres.
Mr. Vilar recalls that Law 3/84 – “the right to sexual education and family planning” – was approved in a context of great debates and controversy during which the topic of abortion was also discussed as well as the right for young people to have family planning consultations.
Regarding family planning, the head of the AFP stressed that “the law was promptly applied, the obstacles between young people and contraception were overcome, and the law made for a point of reference that led to the quick and quality development of family planning services within the National Health Service.”
“The result is very good; we are the country with the second greatest contraception coverage [87 percent of sexually-active women use contraception in Portugal], after Norway, but it’s very close, and we have
an abortion rate that is lower than the European average”, he explained.A New Jersey man died Monday evening after been diagnosed with Lassa fever — a frightening infectious disease from West Africa that is rarely seen in the United States, a federal health official said. Michael George reports. (Published Tuesday, May 26, 2015)
A New Jersey man died Monday evening after been diagnosed with Lassa fever — a frightening infectious disease from West Africa that is rarely seen in the United States, a federal health official said.
The man recently returned from Liberia, arriving at New York City's JFK International Airport on May 17. He grew critically ill after his return, suffering from multiple organ failure, said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Health officials said they don't think the case is cause for public alarm. Lassa fever is not spread through casual contact. About a half dozen other cases have been diagnosed in travelers from West Africa in the past, and none of them ever spread the illness person-to-person, Frieden said.
But as a precaution, the CDC and New Jersey health officials are trying to track down and monitor anyone the man was in contact with during the past week, including health workers at two New Jersey hospitals and people who sat close to him on his recent flight from Morocco to New York.
The illness is commonly seen in West Africa, in some of the same countries struck by the recent Ebola epidemic. This last confirmed case of Lassa fever seen in a traveler returning to the United States was in Minnesota last year. The one before that was in Pennsylvania in 2010.
Generally speaking, Lassa fever is far less likely to be fatal than Ebola and less likely to be spread from person to person. About 80 percent of cases are mild. But in severe cases, patients can suffer fever, vomiting, organ failure, shock and even bleeding from the eyes, nose and gums. It's fatal in about 1 percent of cases. Sometimes, those who survive are deaf for the rest of their lives.
Like Ebola, it can spread through contact with blood, feces or vomit of an infected person. In West Africa, Lassa virus is carried by rodents and transmitted to humans through contact with urine or droppings of infected rodents.
CDC officials declined to give the name or identifying information about the man, other than to say he frequently traveled to Liberia on business and had worked in the mining industry. CDC officials on Monday also declined to name the New Jersey hospital where the man first went for care, or to a second New Jersey hospital where he was to have been treated with ribavirin, an antiviral medication given intravenously. But officials say the patient died before he could receive the ribavirin, noting the hospital was securing the medication at the time of the man's death.
The patient had no symptoms during the flight, but a day later went to a New Jersey hospital suffering from a sore throat and lethargy.
Hospital officials said they had asked the man about his travel history and that he did not say he had recently been to West Africa, CDC officials said.
Three days later he had returned to the hospital with more severe symptoms. He was transferred to the second hospital Saturday. On Monday, CDC lab tests of the patient's blood confirmed Lassa fever.
The CDC plans to send a special response team including a Lassa fever expert and specialists in occupational safety and waste management to the second hospital Tuesday.
Health officials regularly note that exotic illnesses are only a plane ride away.
"We expect to see Lassa fever and other infections like this. Because of Ebola, we're now better prepared |
tunnels -- visibility permitting.
So, though we may not be living the life aquatic just yet, we can certainly dip our toes in the water to see whether it really is better, as Sebastian suggested, under the sea.The Centre on Tuesday submitted before the Supreme Court a list of 26 names and documents of account holders of the Liechtenstein Bank in Germany in a sealed cover, a week after facing rebuke for not disclosing over three years details of persons being probed for stashing away black money.
Solicitor General Mohan Parasaran submitted before a three-judge bench, presided by Justice H L Dattu, that the information relating to these 26 individuals had been received from the German Tax department in 2009.
Of the 26 names, investigation against 18 individuals were over and prosecution had been launched against 17 by the Income Tax department, while one person had expired, he said.
Parasaran added that in the remaining eight cases, no evidence of tax evasion or wrongdoing had been found, and hence no action was being contemplated.
Among those against whom prosecution has been launched are Mohan Manoj Dhupelia, Ambrish Manoj Dhupelia, Bhavya Manoj Dhupelia, Manoj Dhupelia and Rupal Dhupelia—all from the Ambrunova Trust and Marline Management.
While revealing the information after the court’s rap on the last date, the Solicitor General pointed out that there could be a problem in getting information from foreign authorities in future as they were meant only for taxation purposes.
Senior advocate Anil Divan, who appeared for PIL petitioner advocate Ram Jethmalani submitted that the government was obligated to share all other details regarding the bank accounts with them. The bench said it would discuss the content of the documents and decide the issue regarding the disclosure of details on May 1.
Making a brief interjection, Jethmalani himself submitted that he could state on an affidavit the names of those who have bank accounts in Switzerland and were involved in money-laundering. He said reports suggested Indians alone have parked around Rs 19 lakh crore black money abroad.
Others who faced prosecution for having account in Germany are four members of the Manichi Trust—Hasmuk Ishwarlal Gandhi, Chintan Hasmukh Gandhi, Madhu Hasmukh Gandhi and the late Mirav Hasmukh Gandhi.
The government said prosecution has been initiated against Chandrakant Ishwarlal Gandhi, Rajesh Chandrakant Gandhi, Viraj Chandrakant Gandhi and Dhanalaxmi Chandrakant Gandhi from the Ruvisha Trust.
The names of Arunkumar Ramniklal Mehta and Harshad Ramnikal Mehta from the Dainese Stiftung and Dryade Satiftunf Trust were also mentioned in the list.
K M Mammen from Webster Foundation, Arun Kochhar from Urvashi Foundation and Ashok Jaipuria from Raj Foundation also face charges.SYDNEY, Australia — The new government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says it will apologize for past mistreatment of Australia’s Aboriginal minority when Parliament convenes next month, addressing an issue that has blighted race relations in the country for years.
In a measure of the importance Mr. Rudd attaches to the issue, the apology will be the first item of business for the new government when Parliament meets on Feb. 13, Jenny Macklin, the federal minister for indigenous affairs, said Wednesday.
She said that it was not clear what form the apology would take but that the government would not bow to demands for a fund to compensate those damaged by the policies of past governments.
The history of relations between Australia’s Aboriginal population and the broader population is one of brutality and neglect. Tens of thousands of Aborigines died from disease, war and dispossession in the years after European settlement began in the late 18th century. Aboriginal people were not permitted to vote in national elections until 1962.
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But a policy of placing Aboriginal children with white families or in state institutions to assimilate them is blamed for the most lasting damage.During the last few years I’ve been studying buddhism with increasing curiosity. And for the last two years I’ve also applied many buddhist concepts in my day to day life. Looking back, I realize that the most profound changes in my life were more or less influenced by these practices.
What follows is a very short list of some key concepts in buddhism, as I understand and apply them today. The main goal of this article is to share something that worked for me. And also to give guidance to those who are interested in learning more about this discipline.
Before diving in, I want to clarify a few things. Buddhism is a very complex and diverse phenomenon. On a very simplified approach, it comprises 3 main areas: the philosophy, the lay practice and the monastic practice. I’m not going to talk about the monastic practice, because I’m not interested in it. What attracted me was the philosophy, or the way Buddhism describes what we call “reality”. It’s important to understand the difference between the philosophy and the monastic practice. One can agree with all the Buddhism concepts and not engage in a monastic practice, while still implementing the key concepts. That’s a fundamental difference between Buddhism and other religious or systems.
1. Karma Is Compulsion
I’ve been traversing many definitions and understandings of karma in my life. The most common, I guess, was the “fate karma”: it’s been written somewhere in the stars, so it must happen. Another one was that we carry inside us something that we cannot modify and we are subject to that burden no matter what.
But now I understand that karma is simply the compulsion to do something or act in a certain way. That compulsion, or the inability to resist the urge, is at the core of karma. The fact that we feel compelled to do it.
We’re built in such a way that we tend to multiply or to repeat the actions that yield results. And one of the results we’re seeking in this life is pleasure, or satisfaction. The more satisfaction we get form something, the more we want to do it.
That’s how karma works. It’s a circle of attachment. We do something, we get satisfaction and the urge for repeating that thing is born. And next time we feel compelled to do the same thing, we’re actually subject to karma. The moment we understand this and we focus towards the compulsion, we start to break free from the karma.
Enjoying life and getting satisfaction is not bad at all. On the contrary, I think this is one of the things we should seek in this existence. But clinging to it, becoming prisoners of our own compulsive patterns, that is destructive. It makes us lose control and creates an upward spiraling circle of consequences that will end up making us the prisoners of a limited time-space continuum (also known as “samsara”).
2. We Operate On Limited Hardware
One of the consequences of being prisoners to karma is that we operate on a limited hardware. It’s our body. It’s going to end at some point and it’s also very, very limited in terms of performance.
I like the comparison of our body with the hardware of a computer because it describes very well the difference between the subject who is experiencing life, and the tools that he or she uses. It’s like a computer: it needs hardware to function, but without software, it’s completely useless. It doesn’t really exist, without software. The mind continuum that drives our body is like the software in a computer.
Our continuous clinging to things that are giving us transitory pleasure creates a limited hardware. Because of the karmic compulsion, we’re always looking for the next stimuli and so our hardware is wired to look up and experience only that kind of stimuli.
When we think of “reaching Nirvana” or becoming “illuminate” we project our own internal representations of these concepts, based on what we learned to consider pleasurable. But the truth is that reaching Nirvana or becoming illuminated is just overcoming a limited hardware.
If you will ask me how this will look and feel, well, I have no idea. I’m still operating on the same level like you. With the only probable difference that now I understand my own limitations and the possibility of overcoming them.
3. Everything Depends On Something Else
Nothing is set in stone. Nothing exists in and by itself. This is one of the biggest illusions we’re constantly creating with our minds. Everything has a cause for its existence, whether or not we’re aware of it.
For instance, this blog post depends on the device that you’re using right now for reading. Otherwise you couldn’t read it. It wouldn’t exist without this cause. Another cause will be the fact that there is a server that serves my blog content right now. And that server depends on electricity. And it also depends on silicon or germanium and complex technological processes to assemble its board.
We carry around an illusion of stability because of our limited hardware. We don’t have the ability to process everything and to have an immediate and complete understanding of our environment (I suspect having this understanding comes also as a perk of becoming illuminated) so we stack static images of reality on top of each other. And we call this reality.
But this reality is subject to causes and it changes constantly. I think it’s ok to create snapshots of reality in order to understand some processes, but what is not ok is to cling on these snapshots as being eternal and unchangeable.
4. Everything Has Consequences
As everything depends on causes, also every action we perform we’ll have consequences. Every action. I repeat: every single action.
Try to combine this with the constant changes based on previous causes and conditions and you get a pretty hot soup. We live in this hot soup. It’s a very uncomfortable place.
But the fact that everything has consequences is also very powerful. If we understand this and we are ready to embrace this, we can influence the outcome. The consequences are neutral, they are just consequences. But we have insight and we can drive the consequences of our actions in the direction we want.
But be aware that just the bare understanding of this won’t change the soup. It will still be hot. What changes the soup is action. Because consequences are rooted in actions. If we understand that a giant rock is rolling towards us, but we don’t take any action, the understanding won’t prevent us from being crushed.
5. You’re Te Only One Responsible
Like many western civilizations citizens, I come from a cultural background where an external actor was always empowered. Being it a redemption giver, like Jesus, or a judge that will impart justice, there was always somebody “outside”. It’s so engrained in our culture that it gets buried deep down in our subconscious from a very early age.
It was difficult for me to internalize the fact that I am the only one responsible for what happens to me. It’s not that Jesus didn’t exist, or that a conventional justice can’t exist. But these are external factors, and external factors are always changing. Even more, we cannot control the actions of other people, hence, we can’t influence the consequences of their actions.
The only thing we can influence is our reactions to what happens to us. And from those reactions we create the causes for what will happen in the future. Hence, we are the only ones responsible for our lives.
6. Reality Changes With You
That’s both freaking awesome and terrifying. When you start to practice the insights above and when you start seeing the links between your actions and the consequences of them, when you get enough self-control to dodge the karma compulsions (like Neo dodging bullets in Matrix) well, something fabulous will happen: reality, the very fabric of reality, will change with you.
I’m not talking about serendipituous encounters, or about lucky shots. I’m talking about consistent changing of your entire surroundings. For instance, if you start to control your compulsion for bad health habits (like smoking or eating bad) you’re not only become healthier yourself, but you’ll be surrounded by more health: people around you will be healthy, the surroundings will be less polluted, and so on.
And here comes the terrifying part: if you don’t dodge the bullets of karma, there is 100% chance that you will be hit. For instance, if you can’t control your anger, the very fabric of reality will rearrange in some way that you will be surrounded by angry people, by anger generating contexts or by frustrating activities.
Both are coming from you.
7. Meditation Works
As with karma, I had many understandings of mediation along the way. Some understandings were about “stopping the mind”. Others were about “relaxing the body”.
Right now I see meditation like a tool for the mind. I know that I am 100% responsible for what happens to me. But I don’t always have the presence, the awareness, the mindfulness to control my reactions for creating better causes for me. And that’s because I still operate on past causes. I still have past karmic behaviors or urges.
And that’s where meditation helps. Meditation is training for the mind. It trains my mind so when some destructive urge appears, the mind will be prepared and will dodge it (again, like Neo dodging bullets). That’s the main purpose of meditation and that’s why meditation should contain thoughts and concepts (it’s not emptying your mind and chanting things you don’t understand). If you constantly train your mind with these concepts, it will eventually internalize them and the destructive autopilot behavior will be gradually replaced with the constructive autopilot behavior.
And yes, meditation, in this form, really works. The more you train the mind, the easier it becomes.
8. Discipline Is Fundamental
And the last thing I want to share about my experience studying Buddhism is that discipline, bare discipline, is fundamental.
Discipline means doing things you planned to do even if you don’t like doing them in the moment. Of course you may not like doing that thing anymore. Things are constantly changing so it may feel more appealing to go out and have a drink than being of service to the persons you committed to. That’s the nature of our limited hardware and ever changing reality called “samsara”. It changes, it’s unstable, it’s fleeting.
So, the bare discipline of training is fundamental. You can’t relay on external conditions to improve your life. You are the only one responsible.
So, if you understood that there is a giant rock rolling towards you, and that giant rock is getting closer second by second, you’d better hone your discipline skills and learn how to run faster than the rock, or at least learn how to avoid it until you become stronger than it.
So, that was it. If you want to know more about Buddhism there are many resources on the web, but not all of them are updated, correct or well intended (depending on your karmic seeds, so to speak, you will encounter many of these).
What seemed to work best for me when it comes about studying Buddhism is a place called http://studybuddhism.com. Formerly known as berzinarchives.com this is a site maintained by professor Alexander Berzin. I had the opportunity to meet professor Berzin face to face and to host a real event with him, so all my assumptions are already verified. He is a very reliable source, has a huge experience (spent 29 years in India studying Buddhism) and, coming from a linguistic expertise, has a very clear way of explaining complex concepts.
Please take your time to read through and don’t believe me.
I’m not responsible for your life.
But you are.A new report urges "extreme caution" in using seismic airguns to explore for fossil fuels underwater, saying it is "indisputable" that the practice has adverse impacts on Arctic marine life, especially whales.
Seismic testing involves a vessel towing an array of airguns that continuously blast loud, low frequency sound waves down through the water column and into the seabed with intervals as short as ten seconds. The operations can go on for weeks on end, depending on the size of area designated for the survey.
"This new study shows how destructive seismic blasting can be for whales yet they continue with their pursuit for oil with no regard for environmental impacts and Inuit rights."
—Jerry Natanine, Clyde River mayor
"It is clear that noise from seismic activity has an impact on whales as it can damage their hearing, ability to communicate and also displace animals, affecting diving behavior, feeding and migration patterns," said report author Oliver Boisseau, senior research scientist at Marine Conservation Research, which conducted the study (pdf) for Greenpeace Nordic.
"There are increasing indications that this could cause serious injury," he said, "and may also disrupt reproductive success and increase the risk of strandings and ice entrapments."
Narwhals in particular, the report states, have a tendency to "freeze and sink" in response to a threat such as noise, rather than fleeing the area. This means narwhals—an at-risk species shown to be one of the most vulnerable Arctic marine mammals to climate change—are more susceptible to damage from airgun blasts as they are not inclined to avoid regions impacted by noise. In turn, they experience increased stress hormones as well as entrapments as a result of disrupted migration patterns.
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The report acknowledges a "massive research gap in this field," yet as Ethan Cox writes for Ricochet, it is sure to have implications in Canada, where the Inuit community of Clyde River has gone to court to prevent seismic blasting up and down the length of Baffin Island in the Davis Strait.
Last week, Canada's Federal Court of Appeal denied the hamlet's request for a judicial review of a testing permit issued by the National Energy Board. Clyde River Mayor Jerry Natanine immediately vowed to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, and on Monday he told Ricochet that the Greenpeace study only backed up Clyde River's case.
"One would hope for a limit on the greed of oil companies," Natanine said. "This new study shows how destructive seismic blasting can be for whales yet they continue with their pursuit for oil with no regard for environmental impacts and Inuit rights."
Indeed, added Boisseau: "It is alarming to consider the vast amount of seismic activity being planned and conducted in the High Arctic, given the fragile nature of the ecosystem and the potential for disturbance and harm to whales. It seems justified to urge for extreme caution given both the lack of data and the limited understanding of the short and long term impact of seismic noise on sensitive Arctic species, especially the narwhal."After a campaign spurred by talk-radio host Michael Savage, a wounded Army soldier was reunited after 16 months with the Czech German shepherd who helped him hunt buried explosives in Afghanistan.
The Army admitted it had mistakenly allowed the dog, Matty, to be given up for adoption instead of being turned over to his handler, Spc. Brent Grommet. The two were trained in the military’s Tactical Explosive Detection Dog program.
Grommet and Matty were together in Afghanistan when an IED exploded nearby, seriously wounding Grommet, who suffered a spinal injury, hearing loss and post-traumatic stress.
Grommet, 23, had last seen Matty in July 2013 after arriving in New Jersey, where the dog was taken away for processing.
On Friday, Grommet’s father, Don Grommet of DeSoto, Missouri, picked up Matty in South Carolina, where the dog had been adopted, and took him to the soldier’s home base, Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
In an interview Monday with Savage, Don Grommet described the happy reunion.
“He knew Brent immediately. It was just so great, to watch that dog jump all over that young man.”
Don Grommet said his son’s demeanor has brightened since the dog returned, and a limp from his injuries even seems less pronounced.
“My son is laughing, smiling, talking more than he has since he came back from Afghanistan,” Grommet told Savage.
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Savage noted Grommet slept on the dog’s crate when they flew back to the U.S. from service in Afghanistan.
Savage described the story as worthy of a movie.
“This dog, Matty, this big, beautiful Czech shepherd, tried to bite his way out of a metal cage. He’s so attached to this man.”
Listen to Michael Savage’s interview with Don Grommet:
‘No villains here, only heroes’
When they landed at an airbase in New Jersey, Brent Grommet knew that he had to give up the dog for processing before getting him back.
He had filed the required paperwork to own Matty under the federal Robby’s Law, which allows a wounded dog handler to have the first option on adoption.
The Clinton-era law eliminated the practice of putting down the animals after they completed their service.
After not hearing from the Army regarding the adoption, the soldier and his father began searching for Matty and traced the dog to an Army veterinary clinic at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
See the entire collection of Savage bestsellers in the WND Superstore.
Grommet refiled the adoption application in January, and he was assured he would receive a response within a few weeks. But no one contacted him until an officer at Fort Bragg informed his father that Matty had been adopted.
Matty had been removed from the military after being diagnosed with a subchondral bone cyst. The Army acknowledged that former handlers have the first option to adopt but said Grommet’s request was not forwarded to the Army’s Office of the Provost Marshall General, which manages the program.
In a petition to the White House, supporters of Grommet urged President Obama to intervene.
The petition said: “His family likened Grommet and Matty’s relationship to that of brothers, and said the soldier needs his combat buddy for a healthy recovery. He’s desperately sought Matty since their separation, and has begged the new owner to consider a purchase or barter for the dog.”
Savage called the reunion the result of a collective effort, but he said a radio show has a reach that other media don’t. He urged listeners to contact Army officials and lawmakers. And he noted there were callers to his Veteran’s Day show spotlighting the case who wouldn’t go on the radio but privately told the call screener they had connections and were so angry they were going to call the brigadier general.
“I think that behind the scenes, that is why the dog was reunited,” Savage said.
But he emphasized “there are no villains here, only heroes.”
On the Free Republic news-forum website, readers credited Savage, including one who called him “instrumental in getting this accomplished.”
Others said:
“Indeed. He got his own lawyer to work on the case, and has devoted entire programs to it since it came to light.”
“Yes, Savage was going to spare no expense or unturned rock to get this dog back for this young country defender. Facebook and Twitter got people involved too.”
“When I heard Savage say Brent slept on top of Matty’s crate during the flight home, my heart was broken. Some of you can sneer, but there is a SPECIAL BOND people have with their dogs. PRAISE GOD! I’m so happy.”
“Michael Savage took the story and made it national. He hired his law firm to investigate. I think caused the perps to reconsider.”
Want more of the news not covered by the “mainstream media”? Get the best stories delivered free to your inbox as soon as they break!Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price suggested Sunday that the nation’s health insurance system ought to operate as it did before the Affordable Care Act was passed.
During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Price was asked to respond to a blistering criticism of the Senate Republicans’ health care proposal by two major groups representing the U.S. health insurance industry. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) earlier this week, the groups called the latest version of the bill “simply unworkable in any form” and warned that it would cause “widespread terminations of coverage” to people with serious medical problems.
“It’s really perplexing, especially from the insurance companies, because all they have to do is dust off how they did business before Obamacare,” Price said, referring to an amendment proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that would allow insurers to resume sales of policies that leave out key benefits, such as prescription drugs or mental health treatment.
“A single risk pool, which is what they’re objecting to, is exactly the kind of process that was ― that has been utilized for decades to care for individuals,” he added.
America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association of America, the two groups who wrote the letter, oppose the latest draft of the legislation. They say it would allow insurance companies to discriminate among customers based on medical status ― essentially causing insurance premiums for people with pre-existing conditions to skyrocket.
In discussing their health care plan, Republicans do not usually speak as candidly as Price about returning the nation’s health care system to its pre-Obamacare period, a period marked by egregious insurance company abuses. Protections for pre-existing conditions remain highly popular around the country, and GOP lawmakers are loath to admit their policies would weaken them.
Prior to Obamacare, 79 million — more than one in four Americans — either lacked health insurance or were underinsured. The poor, especially, lacked adequate coverage.
In his appearance on “This Week,” Price countered by arguing that the Trump administration would be taking further administrative actions on health care and that the Senate health care bill is “not the entire plan.”"Us little guys need to stick together!"
Former mayor Bellwether sure sticked to her words and arranged serval attacks on Zootopian predator citizens, forcing them to go savage after they got in contact with the now identified night howler serum. Once the serum got it's full effect on it's victims, not even the TC-Devices could manage to stop them, being manipulated beforehand. Even the not TCD obligated Emmett Otterton fell victim to the attacks, questioning all classification regulations for prior "harmless" predator mammals.
After serval incidents of seriously injured prey citizens Bellwether was close at spreading perfect panic in the streets and forcing the last remaining ten percent of predator mammals to leave the city once and for all. The last remains of trust between both prey and predator animals were close to fall apart.
In the end Bellwether was arrested just in time in the Natural History Museum of Zootopia by Chief Bogo himself after Judy and Nick gathered enough evidence to bring her to court. Her lawsuit went on for only 3 months, shortened by the fact that Doug Ramses gave wide evidence in order to ensure himself a chance for release after serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Bellwether in the other hand was found guilty of twenty-eight charges for attempted murder including serval more criminal acts.
The jury deliberated for more than two hours before they returned with their verdict for Bellwether: she was sentenced to life imprisonment without a chance of any release in the future, serving the rest of her days in Sahara Square's in Big Horn high security prison.
Now she's forced to wear a TCD herself, bringing her closer to those mammals who she tried to get rid off in the first place.
Her motivation for her crimes were never finally revealed, even though experts speculated about massive misconducts by her family in her younger years.
*************************************
Wow, writing this text took a LONG time, and I'm afraid it's full of grammatical errors.
Tried to draw more detailed with this one - getting back on my more old routes before starting the comic and getting used to a bit more simpler style.
I drew this to establish a bit more information about the latest history of my AU Zootopia. This is canon in the someday upcoming HBB followup "Starzo!".An Egyptian soldier keeps guard on the border between Egypt and southern Gaza Strip September 12, 2013. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
CAIRO (Reuters) - People who dig and use cross-border tunnels in Egypt could face a maximum penalty of life in jail, state news agency MENA said on Sunday, citing amendments to the penal code targeting activity in the frontier area near the Gaza Strip.
Egypt declared a state of emergency in the border area last year after at least 33 security personnel were killed in attacks in the Sinai Peninsula, a remote but strategic region bordering Israel, Gaza and the Suez Canal.
There were several militant attacks in the Sinai on Sunday.
The amendments to the penal code were passed by presidential decree, MENA said.
It also said people who used illegal crossings to transfer goods or equipment could also face a life sentence, as well as people with knowledge of them who failed to report them to the authorities.
It said the government had the right seize buildings on top of the tunnels or any of the tools used to make them.
Residents of Sinai, who complain they have long been neglected by the state, say they rely on smuggling trade through tunnels for their living. Egyptian authorities see the tunnels as a threat and regularly destroy them.
In November Egypt said it would deepen its buffer zone with Gaza after finding local tunnels, a move which stoked local resentment.Looking for news you can trust?
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In the early 1900s, Lewis Hine left his job as a schoolteacher to work as a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, investigating and documenting child labor in the United States. As a sociologist, Hine was an early believer in the power of photography to document work conditions and help bring about change. He traveled the country, going to fields, factories, and mines—sometimes working undercover—to take pictures of kids as young as four years old being put to work.
Partly as a result of Hine’s work (as well as that of Mary Harris Jones, who Mother Jones is named after), Congress passed the Keating-Owens Child Labor Act in 1916. It established child labor standards, including a a minimum age (14 years old for factories, and 16 years old for mines) and an eight-hour workday. It also barred kids under the age of 16 from working overnight. However, the Keating-Owens Act was later ruled unconstitutional, and lasting reform to federal child labor laws didn’t come until the New Deal.
In 2004, retired social worker Joe Manning set out to see what had happened to as many of the kids in Hine’s photos as he could find. He’s documented his findings—showing the lives of hundreds of subjects—on his website, MorningsOnMapleStreet.com.Michael B. Gerrard, associate faculty chair at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, is the Andrew Sabin professor of professional practice and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
Toward the end of this century, if current trends are not reversed, large parts of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and Vietnam, among other countries, will be under water. Some small island nations, such as Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, will be close to disappearing entirely. Swaths of Africa from Sierra Leone to Ethiopia will be turning into desert. Glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes, on which entire regions depend for drinking water, will be melting away. Many habitable parts of the world will no longer be able to support agriculture or produce clean water.
The people who live there will not sit passively by while they and their children starve to death. Tens or hundreds of millions of people will try very hard to go somewhere they can survive. They will be hungry, thirsty, hot — and desperate. If the search for safety involves piling into perilous boats and enduring miserable and dangerous journeys, they will do it. They will cross borders, regardless of whether they are welcome. And in their desperation, they could become violent: Forced migration can exacerbate ethnic and political tensions. Studies show that more heat tends to increase violence.
The United Nations says the maximum tolerable increase in global average temperatures is 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial conditions. (Small island nations argued for a much lower figure; at 3.6 degrees, they’ll be gone.) But the promises that nations are making ahead of the U.N. climate summit in Paris in December would still, according to the International Energy Agency, lead the average temperature to rise by about 4.7 degrees before the end of the century. Those promises are voluntary and nonbinding, and if they aren’t kept, the thermometer could go much higher. Which means our children and grandchildren will be confronting a humanitarian crisis unlike anything the world has ever faced.
Absent the political will to prevent it, the least we can do is to start planning for it.
Rather than leaving vast numbers of victims of a warmer world stranded, without any place allowing them in, industrialized countries ought to pledge to take on a share of the displaced population equal to how much each nation has historically contributed to emissions of the greenhouse gases that are causing this crisis. According to the World Resources Institute, between 1850 and 2011, the United States was the source of 27 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions; the European Union, 25 percent; China, 11 percent; Russia, 8 percent; and Japan, 4 percent.
To make calculating easy, let’s assume that 100 million people will need new homes outside their own countries by 2050. (That number could be way off in either direction — we won’t know until it happens.) Under a formula based on historic greenhouse gas emissions, the United States would take in 27 million people; Europe, 25 million; and so on. Even as a rough estimate, this gives a sense of the magnitude of the problem: The United States has been granting lawful-permanent-resident status to only about 1 million people a year for several decades.
None of this would be popular, but it would be fair. Climate change results from the cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases all over the world, because the gases stay in the atmosphere for a century or more. International law recognizes that if pollution crosses national borders, the country where it originated is responsible for the damages. That affirms what we all learned in the schoolyard: If you make a mess, you clean it up. The countries that spewed (or allowed or encouraged their corporations to spew) these chemicals into the air, and especially the countries that grew rich while doing so, should take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. If they want to reduce the number of people in need of new homes, they should reduce their emissions.
Finding suitable land for resettlement will be immensely difficult, because it is not only a matter of responsibility or acreage. A population that needs to move may want to go to a place that is geographically similar to where it came from and where it can make the same sort of living as before, such as from fishing, farming or herding. Its members may also wish to go together and re-create their old communities. Yet most of the habitable places on Earth are already inhabited, and moving a sizable population into an area that is already populated is not so easy. The most prominent example of such a movement in modern history is Israel — a project that has not gone smoothly. Technologies such as desalination can make more areas habitable, but they typically take a great deal of money and energy, the very resource we have failed to conserve in the first place.
This problem will also require a new legal solution: Under current law, those displaced by climate change have no recognized legal status. The 1951 Refugee Convention applies only to people who are fleeing because of a well-founded fear of persecution. Nonbinding guidelines have appeared on the treatment of people who cross borders as a result of climate change (the Nansen Principles) and who are displaced internally (the Peninsula Principles), but these have no force of law. A few countries have special arrangements to admit people from certain other countries. They aren’t specifically for climate-change refugees, but they could be used in that situation. For example, the United States has “compacts of free association” with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau to allow their citizens to come here. Australia and New Zealand have very small guest-worker programs. Temporary protected status or humanitarian visas might be available to some people for a limited time.
Assuming that most nations aren’t actually interested in taking in orders of magnitude more migrants than they do now, the vast majority of those who will be displaced by climate change will simply have no place outside their own countries where they can go. The largest number of displaced people is likely to be from Bangladesh, but it is hard to imagine that they will be welcomed in India, which has built a barbed-wire fence along parts of the border.
Just southwest of India is the low-lying island nation of Maldives. Before its president, Mohamed Nasheed, was deposed by a military coup in 2012, he rose to global prominence as a voice of endangered island nations by staging an underwater cabinet meeting to highlight his country’s likely fate. Last year, just before the military imprisoned him again, he told me about his message to developed nations. “You can drastically reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so that the seas do not rise so much,” he said. “Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can let us in. Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can shoot us. You pick.”
Tragically, if today is any foretaste, the most likely outcome is that we will let many of them drown. Witness the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing civil war in Syria and repression in Eritrea; making their way to a country without much of a government, Libya; and there being recruited by unscrupulous traffickers who put them on boats pointed to Italy. Thousands perish on these unsafe, overpacked vessels (whose crews often abandon them), and those who survive the passage are not exactly welcomed with open arms. Europe is in a furor over who will take them in, and anti-immigrant fervor tends to rise with the number of people trying to enter, making a resolution especially difficult.
Likewise, many people fleeing poverty in Bangladesh and oppression in Burma are launching boats to Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, and at least initially were being turned away. Australia — a logical destination for people from the small Pacific islands — intercepts incoming boats and sends their occupants to camps it has established in Papua New Guinea, Nauru and (lately) Cambodia.
Maybe the idea of assigning refugees to the nations that caused the climate to change can spur a less-pessimistic future. If we don’t want millions of people seeking haven here — or dying while they try — then the United States and other industrialized countries need to become far more aggressive in cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. There is still a little time to reduce the damage. If not, it won’t just be environmental; it will be human, too.
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given out about 1,700 tickets for blocking sidewalks throughout the city, but people living in the Camino South neighborhood feel like they’re received more than their fair share of the citations.
John Harris told the news, “I’ve received two in the last six months,” and six others in the neighborhood have received a ticket as well since the beginning of the month. They feel as if they’re being targeted for easy tickets while they’re struggling with not having enough room for multiple vehicles in their driveways.
Janis Clouette said, “I think they need to give us a break. We’re hard-working people. This NASA area has been hit hard by the oil and the problems NASA has had. People are struggling out here…” But ParkHouston officials say they must promote keeping the sidewalks clear for pedestrians and wheelchair users.
A similar issue came up in October 2013. The Houston Chronicle wrote that the HPD gave people tickets for parking in the sidewalk along a street where not even one car could fully fit between the garage and the sidewalk. In this case, it was found that the sidewalks were actually on private property, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Clear Lake.Minister says ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva could rejoin government, putting him out of reach of judge probing alleged Petrobras kickback scheme
Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was charged on Wednesday in a money laundering investigation led by Sao Paulo state prosecutors, intensifying scrutiny of the politician, who was questioned in a separate federal graft probe last week.
A spokesman for the state prosecutors declined to specify the charges, but state investigators have said they suspect Lula’s family owned an undeclared beachfront apartment in the city of Guaruja.
Federal investigators echoed those allegations after they detained Lula for questioning in police custody on Friday, fanning a political crisis that has rattled his successor, President Dilma Rousseff.
Lula has denied any wrongdoing and rejected the idea that he owned the luxury condo in Guaruja built by engineering group OAS, one of the conglomerates snared in a vast corruption scandal tied to state-run oil company Petrobras.
Lula’s lawyer called the charges an attempt by prosecutor Cassio Roberto Conserino to smear the former president.
“Conserino turned two visits to an apartment in Guaruja into concealed ownership,” defense attorney Cristiano Zanin Martins said in a statement calling on the supreme court to decide if state or federal prosecutors had jurisdiction.
The charges may make it more urgent for Lula to accept, if offered, a post in Rousseff’s government.
The minister in charge of legislative affairs, Ricardo Berzoini, said Lula could join the government if he wishes, a move that would give him some protection from prosecution.
Brazilian media reported on Wednesday that members of the ruling Workers party (PT) were pressuring Rousseff to offer Lula a ministerial portfolio in the cabinet that would shield him from possible detention.
Brazil's anti-corruption prosecutor: graft is 'endemic. It has spread like cancer' Read more
If Lula were appointed to a ministry, he could only be tried in the supreme court, placing him out of the reach of the federal judge in Curitiba pursuing the investigation into kickbacks at Petrobras.
“The ball is in his court,” Berzoini told Reuters. “The government is good with it. Which government would not want to have Pele on the field,” he said, comparing Lula to the legendary Brazilian football player.
According to two sources close to the former president, he is reluctant to join the government but pressure from the Workers party is having some effect.
“The best chance that he has is to accept a ministry and for the trial to go to the supreme court so he receives a fair hearing,” said one source close to the former president.
The snowballing scandal puts Rousseff in a tough spot as she promises independence for investigators while trying to contain the political fallout in her Workers’ party.Hello pilots.
My name is CCP Sharq and I‘m a UI designer for EVE Online. I‘m a part of Team Pony Express, that focuses on User Experience for EVE Online.
When looking at and playing EVE one day, looking for what to tackle next for our team, we noticed that the left mouse button is more or less underutilized when interacting with the client. Primary interaction pattern with objects in EVE are through a cascaded contextual menu that is better known to you the players as the “Right Click Menu“. That menu has been bloated with options and submenus upon submenus for the last 10 years and is often hard to find what you’re looking for and navigate to it without doing a lot of reading. The Contextual menu for a ship in your hangar lists out 20 options or more in some cases!
Found this in the backyard…
When researching alternatives to Right Click as a primary interaction, we remembered the Radial Menu that’s available when flying around in space. That control was implemented a long time ago and hasn’t received any love since then so it was time for giving it a second chance. In fact the radial menu UI pattern is going through a bit of a renaissance these days due to touch screen interfaces and it is becoming the weapon of choice for many UI developers both for touch and mouse input interfaces. This fitted perfectly to the plan; We had found our silver bullet.
Prototype, best type
The development of the radial menu was done using rapid prototyping, working closely with UI programmer CCP Karkur. We made a crude radial menu, just to get the look and feel right and then we put it through numerous iterations, mercilessly throwing out ideas that didn’t feel right, and trying out all sorts of different things to tackle the issues we encountered (and sometimes to create new ones). We went through this process without creating any client-quality code so as to keep progress fast. Later we User-tested a more complete version of the menu internally and also at EVE Fanfest, from that process we steadily ironed out kinks and optimized the experience.
How it works
To call up the radial menu you need to hold down the left mouse button on an item for a moment like on the original Action Menu. That works on brackets in space, the overview and on your Targets.
Different from the old radial menu, there is no need to hit the little button to trigger options, with the menu open the screen is divided into segments allowing for quicker interactions using gestures. Your commands can now be made quicker than through the old radial menu or the Right Click menu.
Designing the radial menu using only 8 slices is constraining, yet liberating. We went through numerous iterations on the layout schema and ended up with something we were happy with.
Primary actions are at the 12 o’clock position in the menu. Primary actions are actions we feel are most used or unique to a particular type of object. Some examples:
o Jump for Star gates
o Board for Ships (in space)
o Dock for Stations
o Open Cargo for Containers
You get the picture.
Targeting is always at the 6 o’clock position. That allows us to keep that consistent across the board. We tried having it as the primary actions for some things, like ships, and then it had to be elsewhere for items with other primary actions. It became messy pretty quick.
Show Info is always on the 9 o’clock position for a quick access to vital info.
Plus / More options are at 3 o’clock. There are options like Bookmark and Look at. We made a conscious decision on not going all in on migrating ALL THE OPTIONS into that submenu, some things are better left in right click menu.
Navigation options are placed on the 45 degree axis; Align, Warp To, Keep at Range and Orbit. The range of these options depends on the distance of the mouse pointer from the center of the menu. So all ranges can be set in a single motion, their placement is deliberate to minimize errors.
Radial menu beyond Odyssey
The idea is to implement the radial menu in more places if you guys like it and will use it. Examples: When using the inventory, interacting with your ship in the hangar even for options on your weapons in the ship HUD.
We have also been playing around with a different radial menu to use for navigating celestials within your current system instead of the deep, deep right-click in space menu. Let’s see if we get around doing that.
Just go to Singularity and test the radial menu out!
… And one more thing, Fly safe!
CCP Sharq
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Pakistan has arrested 20 Indian fishermen and seized their boats for allegedly violating its territorial waters off the coast of Arabian Sea, a maritime official said today.The Indian fishermen were arrested by the Maritime Security Agency (MSA) while they were fishing in Pakistani waters of the Arabian Sea, a spokesman for the Pakistan's Maritime Security Agency (PMSA) told reporters.The four boats of the fishermen were also seized."The fishermen have been handed over to the Docks police for further legal process," he said.The arrests come just a week after the PMSA arrested 88 Indian fishermen and seized their 16 boats India and Pakistan had agreed to revive the dialogue process when External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj visited Islamabad for a summit in December, but the same in the month 66 Indian fishermen were arrested by the MSA while last month another 45 were held.Pakistan and India regularly arrest fishermen who venture into each others waters due to poorly marked maritime boundary. Some of them spend years behind bars before being repatriated.In the past, the two nations have released the fishermen as goodwill gestures.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A senior UKIP politician has weighed in to defend a boxer who claimed homosexuals will bring about the apocalypse – by insisting “lots” of people share his views.
Heavyweight boxing champ Tyson Fury has controversially been nominated for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year Award – after claiming that homosexuality and paedophilia will bring about the apocalypse.
Police are currently investigating a hate crime complaint against the boxer – who has also claimed that sex with children was legalised by a fictional ‘Gay Rights Act 1977’.
Members of the UK Independence Party have leapt to the boxer’s defence, with a senior politician insisting that “lots” of people share Fury’s views.
Fury’s comments linking gays and paedophiles were put to Cllr Peter Reeve, UKIP’s Local Government spokesman, during an interview with BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.
He insisted the boxer’s comments should be allowed, adding: “There’s an awful lot of people out there who genuinely believe what Tyson said, because they are fundamental Christians. I respect them for that.
“I don’t necessarily agree with all of those opinions, but I respect them, and I want them to say what their true thought is.
“The reality is lots of people are thinking that, but are terrified to say it in public.”
The Cambridgeshire County Councillor said: “We believe passionately in freedom of speech, where if someone feels something, if they believe it – it’s their opinion, they should be absolutely entitled to say it, no matter what it is or who it offends.
“Equally [feminists] should have the right to debate against it, feel offended and react accordingly.
“We think society would be much healthier if people didn’t quietly close the door and speak amongst friends what their true opinions were – we’d rather they said them, so people could be judged on them.”
A UKIP spokesman said that Mr Reeve was speaking “for himself and not the party” during the interview.
He told PinkNews: “We support Mr Fury’s right to free expression but do not support any thought that homosexuality and paedophiles are in any way linked.”This summer 12 new recruits will report to NASA Johnson Space Center to start a two-year boot camp for “astronaut candidates.” They will train in teamwork, spacewalking and spacecraft operations, as well as learning Russian—a skill they will need to communicate with cosmonauts on joint missions. Yet when and where they will eventually fly is still unclear. The lucky 12 beat out a record 18,300 applicants to become astronauts at a time when the job description is somewhat unspecified. Will they live and work on the International Space Station (ISS) as astronauts do today? Probably, although NASA has not said exactly how long it will continue to operate the station. The agency plans to run it until at least 2024, but could decide to extend its tenure until 2028.* Might they fly to new destinations, like Mars, or revisit the moon? It’s anyone’s guess.
The space agency is still waiting for Pres. Donald Trump to nominate a NASA administrator and signal not just what he wants the U.S. to do in space but also how much he cares one way or the other—which he can demonstrate by pushing (or not) for the funding necessary for any grand plans. In the meantime Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot is left to continue chasing former Pres. Barack Obama’s stated goal of sending humans to Mars, albeit without a firm timetable or a specific plan for getting there. “NASA right now is substantially adrift,” says Robert Zubrin, an engineer and president of The Mars Society, an organization that advocates for human exploration of the Red Planet. “The Trump administration has not appointed a new NASA administrator, so nobody’s in charge.” Indications of the chief executive’s attitude toward space are scant and conflicting. During the March 21 signing of the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, for example, Rep. John Culberson (R–Tex.) suggested Trump could make a name for himself as the “father of the interplanetary highway system.” The president admitted that sounded exciting but said, “First, we want to fix our highways.” On other occasions Trump has been more enthusiastic about space exploration. “The president mentioned in his speech to both houses of Congress that, ‘American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream,’” NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz pointed out. “NASA is already working toward that goal.”
Some space watchers took it as a hopeful sign that Vice Pres. Mike Pence attended the announcement of the new astronaut class and intends to head the National Space Council, a board that will oversee the country’s civilian, military and commercial space activities. The council first formed in 1958 as the National Aeronautics and Space Council, and Pres. George H. W. Bush later reestablished it as the National Space Council in 1989. It disbanded in 1993 but Trump plans to reinstate it. “NASA’s under a major transition that will have repercussions for decades to come,” says Casey Dreier, director of space policy at The Planetary Society. “We have not seen this big of a transition since the end of the Apollo program going into the [space] shuttle. With the decisions they’re making now, there’s a lot of opportunity there to make smart policy and smart decisions and really think of how they want to leverage NASA. The space council could theoretically very much help with that.”
Among the decisions to be made are whether to carry on with the Obama administration’s goal of directly sending humans to Mars by the 2030s or to first fly astronauts back to the moon—a shorter journey with fewer technical challenges. “I suspect the moon will be the focus of near-term human space exploration activity with Mars in the farther distance,” says Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at The George Washington University (GWU), who many expect to be named executive secretary of the newly reinstated council. One signal of a change in direction is the Trump administration’s 2018 budget proposal, which cuts all funding for NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, a proposal to capture a nearby asteroid and drag it close to the moon for astronauts to visit. With that mission out, NASA recently announced plans for a “Deep Space Gateway,” a spaceport to be assembled in lunar orbit in the 2020s. Although the Gateway could serve as a staging ground to test technologies for a Mars mission, it could also indicate a renewed focus on moon exploration. “The Gateway is a means toward different destinations,” says John Logsdon, a space policy expert at GWU. “Until the policy gets changed NASA can’t say much about going back to the moon, but clearly having a place where one can dock spacecraft in lunar orbit is a way of sending spacecraft down to and back up from the moon.”
The Deep Space Gateway is the centerpiece of a set new plans NASA released at the end of March that outline the missions it has in store for the Space Launch System (SLS), its heavy-lift rocket in development, and the Orion spacecraft meant to carry astronauts on deep-space missions. NASA intends to fly Orion–SLS on their first test flight in 2018, and would then begin constructing the Gateway over a series of three launches in the early 2020s. This outpost would be smaller than the ISS and would host astronauts for visits but would not house them continuously as the ISS does. Although the plans finally fill in some missing details about how NASA intends to begin exploring beyond low Earth orbit, they have not yet received the administration’s endorsement, or perhaps even more significantly, congressional funding. “It’s adding clarity to NASA’s direction that they’ve been talking about on their journey to Mars,” Dreier says. “At the same time there’s no money behind it. Absent room in the budget, at the moment it’s just an intention.”
And not everyone agrees that the Deep Space Gateway is even a useful step toward NASA’s larger exploration goals. “Such a station is not necessary to return to the moon, and we do not need such a station to go to Mars,” Zubrin says, “this is a make-work project.” He sees the mission as a way to make use of the SLS and Orion, programs the previous administration tried to cancel but that Congress insisted NASA build anyway, largely to support jobs in states like Florida and Alabama.
Those who would like to see NASA move forward with ambitious deep-space missions say the time is now or never. “The longer they go when they’re not doing anything it’ll become more and more difficult,” says University of Central Florida space policy expert Roger Handberg. “For one thing you’ll stop getting good people entering at the lower levels, and the experience base at the upper levels will be gone. That kind of attrition over time saps the vitality out of the organization.” But to really get going NASA will need a show of support from the White House, an injection of funding from Congress and likely the cooperation of international partners. “My biggest disappointment with the Obama administration is that the White House and the president himself never reached out and asked other countries to work with us in planning future exploration,” Logsdon says. “Given the uncertain character of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, whether that means a unilateralist approach to space exploration or whether they will reach out to other countries to join us in what we’re planning is one of the big open questions.”
With so many unknowns, the new astronaut candidates are embarking on an uncertain future. They seem undaunted, though; after all, exploring a new frontier is what they signed up for. “I think for the future it’s maybe a little unclear,” new astronaut candidate Jonny Kim said during a June 7 news conference regarding destinations they might explore. “We’re just happy to be here, finish our candidate training and venture out into the deep unknown of space and the solar system.”
*Editor's Note (6/15/17): This sentence was added after posting to more precisely state NASA's planned operational tenure for the International Space Station.In southern Dallas, where even basic necessities like grocery stores can be hard to find in some neighborhoods, services for sexual assault victims are scarce.
Some resources have trickled in recently, thanks to a partnership between Methodist Dallas Medical Center and The Turning Point Rape Crisis Center based in Plano. And in January, the two groups are teaming up to open the area's first rape crisis center.
The hospital is opening a satellite Turning Point office at the Golden Cross Academic Clinic in North Oak Cliff that will provide free counseling and immediate advocacy services for victims of sexual violence.
“Methodist Dallas Medical Center, in collaboration with The Turning Point, will have the clinical resources and staffing to care for sexual assault victims beyond the physical exam," said Dr. Martin L. Koonsman, president of Methodist Dallas Medical Center. "With onsite advocacy and counseling services, we will be able to respond to the variety of these patients’ needs."
The hospital first joined forces with The Turning Point in 2014. When called, the crisis center would send trained volunteers from Collin County to help victims in southern Dallas through the daunting rape exam.
Methodist Dallas also introduced the area's only Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program in 2014. The program places specially trained nurses at hospitals to treat sexual assault survivors and collect evidence for investigators.
The new rape crisis office will offer free counseling and allow volunteer advocates to provide immediate help to victims by talking them through the investigation process, bringing them a fresh change of clothes and making sure they know they're not alone.
"Sometimes it's just as simple as saying, 'I believe you, and this isn't your fault'" said Wendy Hanna, executive director of The Turning Point Rape Crisis Center.Second baseman Yunel Escobar (second from right) talks with shortstop Ian Desmond (left), defensive coordinator and advance coach Mark Weidemaier and manager Matt Williams. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
VIERA, Fla. — As it drizzled, rained, slowed, and repeated at Space Coast Stadium Saturday morning, the Nationals opted to cancel their scheduled full-squad workout. Players still hit in the cages, and pitchers played catch on the field. The latter hadn’t been scheduled for bullpen sessions anyway, so the only thing lost was on-field defensive work.
Defense was a concern for the Nationals early last season. By May 12, Washington had committed 34 errors, third most in the majors, and was showing poorly in other defensive metrics, too. The stats pointed to a troublesome conclusion: The Nationals were not only mangling more plays than nearly every other team, but were also getting to fewer balls than almost everyone else.
“I would still say last year’s early two months was an aberration. I told you guys that 100 times,” Nationals manager Matt Williams said Saturday, citing injuries and coincidence for the early inconsistency. “It was an aberration at that point, and I think the rest of the season proved we weren’t that bad a defensive team. Just happened to happen to us all at once. They made great improvements in the second half.”
By season’s end, Washington had committed 100 errors. The Nationals’.984 fielding percentage was the fifth-highest total in the majors. Fangraphs.com compiles a defensive runs saved statistic, and according to it, Washington saved 10 defensive runs above what the average team would have in 2014. That ranked in the top half of all teams. After that slow start, the defense steadied.
“I think there’s factors at play here,” Williams said. “One, newness for them was a factor last year and understanding what our plan was. Any time you have someone different come in and there’s a philosophy that comes along with it, it’s new. It takes awhile to get comfortable. “Secondly, weather plays a lot with it, too. We’re going to play in the Eastern division. It’s going to be cool, it’s going to be wet. Those factors sometimes have something to do with it, too. What we can do now is just make sure that we’re diligent about it. It’s important to us. Everybody knows it’s important to us, so we want to be as good as we can be. So we’re working on that now, and you can see it with all the extra work we’re doing. It’s not saying that we were bad defensively, but there’s always room for improvement, especially early.”
According to defensive coordinator Mark Weidemaier, continuing the defensive improvement does not require an overhaul of the team’s defensive work practices, though Williams and his coaching staff have tweaked things this spring.
“We still do mass infield,” said Weidemaier, who emphasized that even just focusing on starting stronger may prove effective in doing it. “The difference this year is we’re using two fields … You break up corner [infielders] from the middle [infielders] and you get more time. You get to bear down more on those guys. One of the reasons I think mass infield is important, from an infield perspective, because you’ve got multiple balls in play, which makes guys aware of what’s going on in the infield. The more they’re aware they’re better. You’ve gotta be on your toes.”
As teams around them began shifting more and more in 2014, the Nationals opted more often for subtle shading rather than conspicuously non-traditional positioning. According to an article published in the Wall Street Journal in September, Washington had shifted 258 times in 2014 at the time of publication, second-fewest in the majors. Still, according to that data, the Nationals saved more runs with the shift than 10 other teams. Williams said he and his coaches will continue to shift that selectively this season, deferring more to their pitchers and their game plans to determine where fielders should play on a given pitch.
“For the most part, our pitchers will dictate that for us because they understand how they’re going to go about trying to get them out,” Williams said. “That’s constant communication between everyone and the advanced meeting will take care of that. We’ll get a chance to sit down and understand what Zim or Stras or Gio are trying to do. And we’ll play accordingly.”
Williams said part of the lack of shifting results from the kind of pitchers in the rotation. He identifies only Doug Fister as a groundball pitcher, a conclusion supported by the stats: Of 98 starters who threw at least 150 innings last season, Fister was the only National in the top third in terms of the percentage of balls put in play against him that were grounders (48.9 percent). The strikeout- and fly ball-heavy character of the rotation won’t change with the addition of Scherzer: 36.7 percent of balls put in play against him last season were hit on the ground, the ninth-lowest ratio in the majors.
“(The amount that we shift) is a product of how we’re going to go about trying to get the other team out,” Williams said. “Again, the defensive alignments these days, there’s more of them certainly than there has been in the past. But in my opinion, and in our opinion as a staff, it still comes down to playing according to how we’re going to pitch them. We want to be mindful of that. We take our time in our advance meetings to understand that with our pitching staff, and we play accordingly. So yeah, it will happen from time to time, and depending on how we’re going to go about trying to get the opposition out, we’ll make those adjustments int he game. We’ll make it from series to series and certainly pitch to pitch sometimes.”
Williams did not report any new injuries after Saturday’s limited work. Some other notes:
>>> Rich Hill, who the Nationals signed to a minor league deal with an invitation Friday night, had not yet arrived in camp Saturday morning. Hill, 34, is a journeyman left-handed reliever who has pitched in 197 games for six different teams. He split 2014 between the Angels and Yankees, appearing in 16 games and pitching to a 3.38 ERA in 5 1/3 innings.
“He’s been there,” Williams said. “He’s got big league experience. He’s going to be around in the next day or so and get everything checked out, make sure he’s ready to go. He’s just got experience. So we’ll get him in camp and get a good look at him, let him go out and compete.”
— James Wagner contributedThe State of Clojure 2016 survey results have just been published. Last year I wrote an summary of the free text comment portion of the State of Clojure 2015 Survey. I enjoyed writing it, and it was my second most popular post of the year, so I’m repeating the process again.
In his summary, Justin said that 62% of the responses were positive. That number sounded low to me (but was presumably calculated by SurveyMonkey). I would have estimated closer to 80% after reading through them all. A little under one quarter of the 2420 survey respondents left a comment.
I’m reusing most of the same categories from last year so interested readers can compare with last years post. Some comments have been lightly edited for spelling, clarity, brevity, and niceness.
Error messages
Error messages were the biggest pain point for people last year. This year there were still many complaints about error messages and stack traces, but a lot of people are waiting to see what spec brings. There was a lot of discussion about spec error messages several months ago, but it seems to have gone quiet. I’m really hopeful that spec will improve error messages.
This year Figwheel has started providing very sophisticated reporting of compile errors, and configuration problems. It has made a massive difference to my ClojureScript workflow. Thanks Bruce!
Please Please Please can we get better error messages. … ClojureScript has come a long way, but I still encounter errors that are totally perplexing. Better debugging would help enormously. Error messages are very frustrating and it is hard to find where the error occurred and why. Errors coming from underlying Java code are only somehow relevant to the Clojure that produced them. Programming with dynamically typed language rocks when inferred types align with your idea, but when it’s not, things get fuzzy. Please, please, please, please, improve error messages. This would single handedly improve: new user onboarding, community feedback (let’s admit it - it is a small community), rapid iterations, usage of the REPL, usage of spec and testing, and other areas. … I consistently see error messages being the biggest barrier for learners of Clojure, and even more so for ClojureScript I think a concerted focus on improving Clojure’s error reporting & handling would benefit both newcomers to the language and experienced developers alike and would result in considerably less wasted time & effort.
Docs
Last year clojure.org had just been revamped and open sourced. I wrote at the time:
I have high hopes that it will become a central source for high quality, official documentation and ease the pain for newcomers.
clojure.org has had some contributions from the community, but it still doesn’t have the breadth of material needed to be a central source. I would love to see something like Python’s web documentation for Clojure. Renzo Borgatti is writing a mammoth book “The Clojure Standard Library” which will cover the entire Clojure standard library.
… Please improve the documentation. Recently I heard someone describe Clojure documentation as “comically terse”. A simple way to get someone up and running that is a standard for the community would be great. There is nothing more frustrating than telling new people to “Google” for a solution and pick one you like… They never get further than reading the docs. Clojure appeared to be a nice language when I started with it and I do not regret this decision. The flip side is that I had hoped that the poor documentation would have gone away by now — 1.4 was the first version I used and it does not seem to have improved. That’s a shame. Documentation helps new users and really, hinders nobody. Clojure docs are too terse. They assume that the reader already fully understands the concepts being described, and merely needs a refresher. … Clojure’s community is surprisingly small given it’s output. This leaves documentation and tutorials sparse because they require time and effort that is in short supply. … I think both clojure.org and clojurescript.org could use a better “Get Started” experience. It’s our best opportunity at a first impression but we rely too heavily on third party docs. For example, on cljs.org the reference section starts with compiler options. Doesn’t really capture the imagination.
Setup/tooling
Again, Figwheel has been leading the way in improving tooling on the ClojureScript side. Tooling is still a pain point, but seems to be less so than in previous years. For Clojure editors, Cider, Cursive, and vim-fireplace are all used pretty much the same amount as last year, but Atom has entered fourth place, presumably coupled with proto-repl.
One thing we’re used to from C#/Java that would be awesome to have is a better unit testing framework with IDE integration. … The build toolchain for cljs has been a pain. All of my learning has come from cloning public repos and seeing how they do it. A huge thanks to the community for invaluable tools like Leiningen, Parinfer and the various IDE plugins like ProtoREPL or Cursive. And of course huge thanks to the core team for excellent stewardship of Clojure itself. While tooling for Clojure is improving there needs to be a lot more resources devoted to it. I am currently in a Java shop and the only realistic option is Cursive.
Startup time
Startup time was another persistent complaints this year. Unfortunately there wasn’t always enough information about whether startup time was a problem in development or production. There are several good options for avoiding constantly restarting Clojure REPLs in development (and in production), but perhaps for newcomers these are too complicated to setup, or they don’t know about them?
Love Clojure … hate its startup time! Love the language and will keep at it. Primary frustration is with the start up time and tooling. In particular, I’m finding it difficult to quickly test the backend and frontend of my application with Boot. … We love functional programming, but hate Clojure’s long startup times. We do what we can to minimize this (using test-refresh, REPLs, etc.), but it is still very painful, and we find ourselves twiddling our thumbs waiting for a restart several times a day. Similarly, our Clojurescript compiles take ~60 seconds (:simple optimizations) or ~30 seconds (:none optimizations). This slows us down substantially. Coming from Python, where compile and startup times are sub-second, this is the biggest complaint from our team. Clojure would be perfect with faster startup time and a little less memory usage. Seriously I don’t even mind the java stack traces. REPL startup time is all I care about. I use emacs+cider, and it takes an age. Otherwise, I am completely happy with Clojure :)
Marketing/Adoption
Justin specifically mentioned marketing and adoption as a common theme amongst the feedback:
One relatively stronger theme this year was the need for better marketing for the purposes of expanding or introducing Clojure within organizations, which is a great area for contribution from the entire community.
In my opinion, one of the areas where Clojure could improve on marketing is on the main Clojure and ClojureScript websites. I think Scala in particular has done a really good job of this. Elm and Rust also do really well in presenting the main reasons why you would want to use their languages. The community isn’t able to help with this, as contributions to style and templates are not currently wanted.
Last year I mentioned Cognitect’s case studies on Clojure adoption, this year Juxt has done some great work with their case studies of companies using Clojure in Europe.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen fewer people coming along to the Auckland Clojure Meetup than in previous years, although we’re working on a fairly small sample size. I’m not sure what (if anything) to make of that.
I would do 100% of my development in Clojure if the enterprise-y company I worked for allowed it. “Reason for not using Clojure as much as you would like”? Management not on board. I’d love to see more “serious” support for ClojureScript: when I present ClojureScript to colleagues, it looks like a thing supported by several enthusiasts rather than a platform supported by a company. Clojure is very solid. As a frontend developer, a stable build system, DCE and syntax stability are very valuable for me. I failed to convince my CTO on Clojure and instead we stuck to ES6/ES7. The main concern of management was hiring and training people. Although the learning curve for Clojure is easy, people still have a perception that LISP syntax is esoteric and difficult to pick up for someone completely new to the ecosystem. This myth has to be busted on a larger scale. Language is great, community is great, the “marketing” is not that great. You guys have a great language and you are struggling to sell it. [I] would love to see better marketing from Cognitect and other Clojure centric shops. Selling Clojure to a Java shop is not easy. It can and should be easier. (and simple, but I’ll take “easier” here first) As an average developer fluent in Java, I would love to use Clojure more, but the biggest hurdle for me is the lack of peers interested in Clojure. At the local meetup people report the same situation at their organisations. Pity, because Clojure is super cool! Thank you. Love Clojure, really. Can’t convince my peers that it’s worth investing the time to learn it though. The Clojure community needs a “Rails killer,” and only Arachne holds serious promise for that. Clojure/ClojureScript ecosystem could benefit from stronger stewardship from Cognitect to propel it into the mainstream with a focus on a killer app or a industry domain similar to the way Light Bend has been focusing on enterprise and reactive system to promote the Scala ecosystem. … I’m in Shanghai and we barely have full-time Clojure developers in China. We formed online groups, but I guess we need help to push it to the next level.
And the age old developer question:
How can we get management to understand what they don’t understand?
Language Development
Like last year, there are still concerns about the contribution process, and the opaque decision making process for Clojure’s development.
Engagement of community is still sub-optimal, there are talented individuals who could be engaged more and productively so without opening it up to the peanut gallery. I wish that the core Clojure development process was more flexible and friendly. I (and all the Clojure developers I know) have pretty much given up on trying to make suggestions or tickets about Clojure because I usually wind up banging my head against the wall and getting frustrated. The core team are under no obligations to explain themselves or their motivations, but they would save a lot of frustration from new community members wishing to contribute if there was a prominent document outlining the philosophy, and what kinds of changes and suggestions are and aren’t welcome. A more open approach to development and contributing to Clojure would be appreciated. I’d love to contribute to Clojure but the mess of a lot of the code in Clojure and the JIRA-based contribution model is a barrier. I know that |
Topic is Missing Your Voice.The real killer of two men in a hail of gunfire at a stoplight was not former NFL star Aaron Hernandez but rather the government's star witness in his double murder trial, his attorney charged Wednesday in opening statements, revealing the defense strategy for the first time.
Jose Baez, who is known for winning an acquittal for Florida mom Casey Anthony, said prosecutors want to convict his client so badly that they made "a deal with the devil," referring to Hernandez's former friend Alexander Bradley. Bradley has said he was with Hernandez the night of the shooting and is scheduled to testify against him, but Baez counters that Bradley fatally shot Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado over a drug deal.
Prosecutor Patrick Haggan told the jury earlier that Hernandez had a brief encounter with the men involving "a simple bump, a spilled drink and an exchange of looks" at a Boston nightclub in the early morning hours of July 16, 2012. Two hours later, Haggan said, Hernandez opened fire on the men's car as they waited at a stoplight.
Haggan said the encounter to most people would be "simply trivial," but Hernandez misinterpreted it as a sign of disrespect.
Hernandez, a former New England Patriots tight end, is already serving a life sentence after being convicted in the 2013 killing of Odin Lloyd, a semi-professional football player who was dating the sister of Hernandez's fiancee.
Hernandez has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder as well as a charge of witness intimidation. Prosecutors say Hernandez tried to silence Bradley by shooting him in the face in 2013 because he was worried Bradley might implicate him. Bradley survived but lost his right eye.
But Baez countered in his opening statements that police did almost nothing to investigate the killings of de Abreu and Furtado until they zeroed in on Hernandez, whom they saw as a "notch in their belt."
Earlier Wednesday, a juror in Hernandez's case was dismissed after a police officer scheduled to testify told the court they had once coached a football team together.
Hernandez's lawyers were allowed to use a peremptory challenge to dismiss the juror. The case is now being heard by 15 people — 12 regular jurors and three alternates.
Hernandez, now 27, grew up in Connecticut and played for the Patriots from 2010 to 2012. The team released him in June 2013, shortly after he was arrested in Lloyd's killing.
Prosecutors in the double murder case have said that in the months before the killings, Hernandez had become increasingly convinced that people had been "testing, trying or otherwise disrespecting him" when he went to area nightclubs.
De Abreu, 29, and Furtado, 28, were close friends who attended high school and served in the military together in Cape Verde before coming to the United States and settling in Boston.
Baez gained fame during Anthony's 2011 trial on charges that she murdered her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee. The case garnered national media attention after photos showed Anthony partying in the days after her daughter's disappearance.When Amazon acquired Kiva Systems in 2012, other retailers and third-party fulfillment centers panicked. The e-commerce giants took Kiva’s robots off the market, leaving their competitors without an important productivity tool. Lots of newcomers have cropped up to help warehouses keep up with demand since then, but one of the most hotly anticipated robots in this space was under wraps — until today.
Based in Waltham, Mass., 6 River Systems, Inc. is finally making their “collaborative fulfillment system” available for purchase. Founded by former Kiva executives Jerome Dubois and Rylan Hamilton with Mimio’s Christopher Cacioppo, 6RS named its flagship robot Chuck after the Charles River.
Dubois said, “Chuck looks like a pick cart they already use in warehouses. It is autonomous and navigates on its own. And here’s the golden egg, it leads the associate through their work.” In other words, the robots were designed to collaborate alongside humans, not replace them.
Chuck is about 3 feet long, 2 feet wide and stands up to 4 feet tall with a shelf at about 3.5 feet. Height can be adjusted to match what’s comfortable for most workers.
To guide workers to pick items off the shelves quickly, Chuck has an 11-inch touchscreen, which shows them where to find something on a packed, warehouse shelf. The screen displays images of the items a worker is about to pick, the quantity they’ll need to pick and the numeric ID on the item like a SKU or barcode. And it lets workers know which direction they’ll be heading next.
Sensors and software allow Chuck to track data and give feedback to workers, celebrating the moment they achieve a personal best, for example, or alerting them to areas for improvements, Dubois explained.
Dubois said, “From a data perspective, we can also provide information to warehouse operators who today rely on paper and clipboards to make a lot of decisions about staffing. They’ll be able to understand, in real time, how is their warehouse operating. And they’ll see if you have a really hard time in Aisle 5 with these kind of items but do a really great job in Aisle 9 with different inventory.”
The startup will compete with other industrial robot makers, like Locus, Fetch, IAM, Rethink and others. Their robots all take a different form, of course. IAM robots pick items using an arm and a suction cup. Fetch robots are used in pairs, with one robot finding the way and another carting inventory or performing tasks. And Locus Robotics units navigate autonomously, through the aisles of a warehouse, calling nearby workers to put specific items into the carts.
Eclipse Ventures partner Seth Winterroth, who invested in 6RS’s $6 million seed round, said now that the robots are on the market, “I expect 6RS will integrate systems on site with customers, and have those customers experience substantial increases in efficiency from a throughput perspective, then get ready to deploy them in larger volumes.”
Winterroth emphasized that many companies in this space are building intriguing technologies, but the winner in this market will need to focus on what really happens in a warehouse environment and help workers safely increase their pick rates.
The new 6RS robots will be on display at ProMat in Chicago next week, an important trade show for geeks in supply chain, manufacturing and automation.Marco Rubio capitulated to Donald Trump last night and encouraged America to vote for him.
For a few months earlier this year, Sen. Marco Rubio seemed to have actually grown a spine. On the campaign trail, he dished out hard truths about Donald Trump, arguing passionately that Republicans would make a historic mistake by nominating the xenophobic, serially dishonest populist.
Then came Rubio's crushing primary defeat in Florida and his flip-flop jump back into the U.S. Senate race. And last night, West Miami's favorite son showed again why he's an Olympic-level political opportunist. In a video message to the Republican National Convention, he encouraged America to vote for Trump.
"Donald Trump is committed to cut taxes, curb spending, and get our national debt under control," he said. "Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump takes seriously the threats from Islamic radicals and is committed to rebuilding our military."Only Parisian plates ending with an odd number will be permitted on roads in and around France's capital on Monday. Depending on air quality forecasts, the measure could continue Tuesday, in which case only cars with plates ending in an even number would be allowed.
"Our core objective is to ensure public safety because we want to end this pollution," Environment Minister Philippe Martin told a news conference on Sunday, warning that the air quality would likely worsen on Monday.
Scientific research has showed that high smog levels have numerous negative effects on cities and their inhabitants. In February, Chinese scientists found the capital, Beijing, barely suitable for living owing to heightened levels of smog.
A contaminated capital
Over the weekend, Paris allowed riders to travel for free on public transport as a visible haze hung over the city's streets. The recent weeklong spell of unseasonably warm weather has exacerbated the problem.
European Environment Agency figures for last Thursday show 147 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter of air in Paris - compared with 114 in Brussels, 104 in Amsterdam, 81 in Berlin and 79.7 in London. Last fall, the agency found that 88 percent of people in the vicinity of major European cities were exposed to contamination levels above standards set by the United Nations. However, political opponents and car associations have criticized France's regulation, calling it tough to police and accusing the Socialist government of conceding to pressure from its Green coalition partners ahead of local elections in late March.
"This is impossible to enforce, stupid, and an attempt to win votes," Pierre Chasseray, president of the drivers' lobby 40 Millions d'Autombolistes, told French media Sunday.
'Responsibility and civic-mindedness'
Authorities will exempt electric and hybrid vehicles and cars with at least three people aboard. The city plans to deploy about 700 police officers to ensure compliance.
Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has acknowledged the difficulties that the alternate driving plan would cause for commuters, but in a statement added that "this extra measure is necessary," and called on motorists to show a "spirit of responsibility and civic-mindedness."
France introduced its last restricted driving scheme in October 1997 in response to pollution from heavy diesel fumes.
mkg/rc (Reuters, dpa)Enter areas like the Jaguars’ lounge, which is open to any fan in the stadium for no extra charge and offers air-conditioning, fast WiFi connections, video-game stations, comfortable recliners and food and drinks. The field of play is partly visible from the lounge, but that is almost incidental, and last Sunday, the Jaguars’ game was merely one of several on the TVs.
The Jaguars realize that in the fight for fans’ attention and wallets, their competition is not just from college football and other sports, but from fantasy football, social media and the highlights, statistics and online discussion that can sometimes be hard to follow in stadiums but have become an essential part of N.F.L. Sundays.
“The most important thing is to make sure they have a good game-day experience,” said Khan, who, during the game, stopped by the lounge, above the end zone on the stadium’s south side. “Teams like us are looking for every competitive advantage.”
In effect, teams are trying to marry live football with the digital experience. In fantasy football, fans create “teams” with real players and compete to see whose players perform the best statistically in any given week.
“Fans are left in the dark when they go to the stadium because the home experience has improved so dramatically,” said Phil de Picciotto, the president of Octagon, a sports marketing agency. The fantasy lounge in Jacksonville, he said, is “in part life imitating art imitating life and in part, if you can’t beat them, join them.”
It is a far cry from the years when about the only way to see your favorite team was to buy a ticket and the only way to get details of other games while sitting in the stands was to have a transistor radio handy.
Smartphones have helped blend the home and stadium experiences, allowing fans to check their fantasy scores while at games. Yet overloaded networks have made for spotty connections, and the technological advantages of staying home gave fans a reason to do just that. It is one reason that after peaking in 2007, leaguewide attendance has slowly declined. The challenge is especially great for struggling teams like Jacksonville, which finished 2-14 last season.How do you get it?
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However, the files pointed to an end date that was “tentative”, in other words undefined. This might have been a little suspicious, however, when the end date in the game said January 7th, no one gave it a second thought until the extension.
Additionally, a curious statement in the Too much Of A Good Thing questline hinted at another end date.
Dad, I found a loophole. Claus Co gift cards are only good for approximately 5 weeks.
All this credit will be useless before the end of January. Then Springfield will go back to normal.
Gee, it hardly seems worth it murdering anybody over five lousy weeks. Six or seven, sure. But not five.
As you know, the event started on the tenth. Twenty-Eight days later, or four weeks, is January 7th, when the event was supposed to end. However, the dialogue clearly says five weeks, which happens to be, surprise surprise, January 14th, the current end date.
This shows that the extension was going to happen regardless of the DDoS attack, or any other mishaps during the event.Tottenham produced a superb performance to increase the pressure on Sunderland.
The league's bottom side began well when Lee Cattermole punished a defensive error, but Spurs levelled soon after when Emmanuel Adebayor converted Christian Eriksen's cross.
Eriksen then supplied the ball for Harry Kane's tap-in before he got on the scoresheet with a low strike.
Making their mark Emmanuel Adebayor's second goal for Tottenham was the 900th goal scored in the Premier League this season
With his goal and two assists Christian Eriksen has now been involved in the most league goals (13) for Spurs this season - overtaking Roberto Soldado
Adebayor poked in his second after Vito Mannone had saved Kane's shot before Gylfi Sigurdsson smashed in a fifth.
Although Spurs were not undeserving of the 5-1 scoreline, they owed their crushing win to poor Sunderland defending as much as a great attacking display.
A fourth successive defeat for the Black Cats means they remain seven points off safety with only two games in hand over Norwich and one over West Brom, who occupy 17th and 16th respectively.
They now face a huge struggle to survive and the way his side capitulated at White Hart Lane might have led Gus Poyet to doubt his side's chances.
The visitors made a great start on a very wet night in north London thanks to a horrible Spurs error.
Media playback is not supported on this device MM Sherwood
Romanian defender Vlad Chiriches played a one-two with his keeper Hugo Lloris and then elected to play the ball to team-mate Younes Kaboul, unaware Cattermole was lurking.
The Black Cats midfielder, who had not scored in the previous 112 games, pounced on the loose pass and placed the ball just inside the post.
However, Tottenham were level 11 minutes later. Eriksen, arguably the best player on the pitch, delivered a teasing cross from the left that Wes Brown tried to clear only to see it ricochet in off Adebayor.
Kane scored his first Premier League goal after the break. Eriksen was again the supply line, finding the 20-year-old Englishman with an in-swinging ball that was tucked away from close range.
The Dane was pulling the strings in attack and moments later demonstrated his own ability in front of goal with well-placed sidefoot effort past Mannone.
Sunderland were then caught out again in defence, when Brown's attempt to head the ball clear found Kane, whose shot was saved by the Sunderland keeper only for Adebayor to touch in.
And deep into injury time, substitute Sigurdsson extended the advantage with a thumping finish.
Media playback is not supported on this device Tottenham 5-1 Sunderland: Gus Poyet says Sunderland need'miracle' to survive
This huge win will temper the pre-match speculation surrounding Tottenham manager Tim Sherwood's future.
A run of three defeats in the last four league games, reports strongly linking Dutch coach Louis Van Gaal to the job and a club statement released earlier in the day helped intensify that speculation.
But Sherwood dismissed the hullabaloo, stating he was focused on the first of his "six cup finals". Five more similar performances would help his cause.By Brian Boyko
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Ponginator is a robot, and as far as robots go, this one is fairly simple. It plays music, says a few words cribbed from audio files, and shoots ping-pong balls from pressurized air guns.
We’ve been doing a series on crazy inventors with crazy inventions. Vernon Graner and the creation he built with the Austin Robot Group, Ponginator, certainly qualify as crazy.
Of course, what makes Ponginator different is that Ponginator is three stories tall.
A Parallax stamp-based microcontroller in a computer behind the robot controls the robot’s ping-pong balls, which leave the barrel at 170 miles per hour.
We speak with Vernon Graner, one of the inventors of Ponginator, in this next video.
The robot was built to promote the Robot Group and to get people asking questions about robotics in general. If you’re in the Austin area, and think building your own multi-story monstrosity of pingy, pongy death is right up your alley, check out The Robot Group’s site.
They’re the people you want to talk to if you are going to “try this at home.” Otherwise, don’t try this at home.
If you’d like to see the video in full HD resolution, just hit this link, which will take you to the video’s high-def page on YouTube.
Other installments of Crazy Inventions and Crazy Inventors:Coauthored with Shervin Ghaffari, intern in the International Institutions and Global Governance program at the Council on Foreign Relations.
As civil war in Syria inches toward its four-year anniversary, the nation’s humanitarian catastrophe deepens. Some 7.6 million Syrians are now internally displaced, and another 3.3 million have fled to neighboring countries to avoid the complex three-way dogfight among Assad’s forces, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Syrian rebels. In Lebanon the influx of one million refugees is straining the capacities of a country of only 4.4 million. Today, some 12.2 million Syrians, both inside and outside Syria, rely on emergency food aid.
It thus came as a shock when the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) announced on December 1 that a lack of funds was forcing it to suspend aid to help feed and clothe Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt. In fact, the WFP had been signaling for months that its program for Syria was in dire need of a cash injection from international donors. Last week, the United States donated $125 million to prop up the program until the end of the year, but it clearly wasn’t enough. The WFP stated that it needed an additional $64 million for December alone to support its system of prepaid voucher cards, which can be used at local stores to buy food and supplies.
Without this lifeline, refugees will face the impending harsh winter without food, warm clothes, or heat. “This couldn’t come at a worse time," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres. “I urgently appeal to the international community – support WFP now. Don’t let refugees go hungry.” The cutback is projected to hit 1.7 million Syrian refugees. Many have signaled that their best option now may be a journey back to war-torn Syria. Unless funds are found quickly, Syria’s “new level of hopelessness” might rise to new heights.
The suspension of WFP aid to Syrian refugees is symptomatic of broader weaknesses in the current multilateral approach to delivering emergency relief. First, because humanitarian assistance is entirely voluntary, it is vulnerable to shifting attitudes in donor nations, particularly aid fatigue. After years of war and upheaval in the broader Middle East, major international donor governments and their electorates are weary of sending money overseas, particularly given competing domestic demands. Since 2001, donor nations have devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to humanitarian relief and nation-building in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere. The appetite to continue doing so is dwindling, particularly when—as in the case of Syria—it is clear that such aid is a mere palliative, unaccompanied by either a clear political strategy for a negotiated solution or a military effort to ensure the victory of one side. As the Syrian war grinds on interminably, there is bound to be dwindling support for providing endless “emergency” relief that only addresses surface symptoms. In other words, public support for addressing the consequences of war is contingent on there being an end in sight.
Second, the current financial burden of providing humanitarian relief is unevenly shared. The United States has been by far the most generous donor government, having contributed approximately $2 billion to the WFP program, about five times as much as the next biggest donor, the United Kingdom. It is past time for other major donors, both established and emerging, to play their part. Most egregiously, France and China, two of the world’s largest economies, have given less to the WFP than has Ethiopia. The $64 million shortfall that compelled WFP to suspend its program is a “drop in the bucket” for either country. As long as nations like France and China abstain from pulling their weight, other nations will feel justified sitting out.
Third, the humanitarian system is experiencing unprecedented demand on its limited resources. The last time this blog reported on the Syrian refugee crisis, there were three “level-3” emergencies around the world. Today, there are officially four: Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic (CAR)—not to mention the Ebola outbreak affecting West Africa. These simultaneous calamities not only distract attention from Syria, they also divert money. Iraq’s fight against ISIS has displaced approximately 2.1 million Iraqis. The civil war in CAR has led to at least 5,000 deaths and left 2.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. In South Sudan, 1.5 million people have been displaced and more than seven million are at risk of hunger and disease. The Ebola crisis, meanwhile, has claimed approximately 6,000 lives, according to recent reports. These competing crises are taxing the already strained resources of the WPF and other UN agencies. Rigid rules about how institutions can use funds only complicate matters. As Greg Barrow, spokesman for the WFP’s London office, explains, “Because many donations are allocated to specific programs and cannot be used elsewhere, there is a lack of flexibility in the system.” Although the scale of Syria’s crisis dwarfs the others, the WFP has little authority to reprogram the funds at its disposal.
What can to be done to alleviate the humanitarian crisis, both in Syria and globally? The immediate priority is to provide WFP with the stopgap assistance it needs to resume its voucher program. The current suspension, which exposes already vulnerable populations to intolerable suffering, can be alleviated at modest cost. The WFP has embarked on a social media campaign in hopes of plugging the hole left by international donors, hoping that the world’s Twitter followers will mobilize action from derelict governments. The United States needs to complement this grassroots effort with high-level diplomatic muscle. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry should press France, China, and other donors to step up to the plate immediately, to ensure that Syrian refugees survive the impending winter—and that nations that are hosting them in large numbers can sustain this burden.
Simultaneously, the Obama administration must redouble its efforts to bring an end to the Syrian civil war—the only sure way to end the country’s humanitarian catastrophe. The administration has sought for some time to thread the needle in Syria, hoping in vain that a robust moderate opposition would emerge that could somehow triumph over both the Assad regime and ISIS jihadists. This strategy has enjoyed little success. Indeed, the focus on ISIS’ rise has directed U.S. and international attention away from Assad’s atrocities, allowing his campaign against the rebels and the civilian population to remain unchecked. Every airstrike levels buildings, destroys lives, and diminishes any semblance of normality. Without a political solution, which seems unlikely, Syrians will continue to swell in neighboring countries. External actors have sought to soften the blow on those affected, but their efforts are waning.
Finally, the United States must work with other influential nations to place the global humanitarian enterprise on a firmer institutional and financial foundation. The multilateral response to the Syrian crisis suggests that humanitarian aid has an expiration date, that current voluntary funding mechanisms are inadequate, and that the WFP and existing UN organizations are easily overwhelmed by multiple calamities. The World Humanitarian Summit, to be convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2016, will provide a valuable opportunity for the United States to demonstrate its leadership in helping reform systematic and structural flaws in the current international aid regime. More immediately, the Obama administration should push for a special session of the UN Security Council to focus global attention on the disastrous security as well as human consequences of the global humanitarian crisis.SK Gaming is a team with a long history in both competitive League and eSports as a whole.
We will gloss over the days of Ocelote; the story of the current SK started in late 2013. The team was almost entirely rebuilt at this time, with CandyPanda as the lone holdover.
The fledgling team made it back into the LCS by the skin of their teeth, defeating the Supa Hot Crew in a Promotion match 3-2. Off this result, and the weak résumés of their new players, most predicted SK to be a mediocre team in the upcoming Split.
SK initially appeared to fulfill this prophecy, starting off the Season in 4th, but as the weeks went on SK quietly climbed until they eventually stood atop the League. In the Playoffs, they took 2nd.
In the Summer Split SK appeared to slump a bit and many predicted Millenium as the third team to go to Worlds. SK closed strong, however, and gave eventual champions Alliance a hard time before crushing Roccat 3-0 for the 3rd and final Worlds berth.
Top Lane – Simon “fredy122” Payne
The man in SK’s top lane is a consistent player and one willing to adapt to the meta. Fredy didn’t enter the scene with a lot of hype but over time he has quietly earned the respect of his peers as a tricky lane opponent, yet also capable of surprising roams. He doesn’t boast a high KDA but that can be attributed towards a willingness to die for the greater good.
Fredy is one of the players credited as keeping Aatrox in the European meta, having a good understanding of how to bully people with the champion’s unusual power curve. While he primarily focused on lane bullies during the Season, he’s been seen on tanks, Nidalee, and even oddballs like Yorick at times.
Jungle – Dennis “Svenskeren” Johnsen
Svenskeren’s competitive career dates back some time. He played for then-LCS team NiP for some time but left amid a great many roster moves. The Swede (a literal translation in Danish) has competed and held his own against many a fine European jungler. Today, he stands alongside Jankos and Shook as perhaps the best in his region.
Svenskeren stayed mostly within the core jungle meta this past split but in the past he’s branched out and played champions such as Amumu, Shyvana, and the delicate Fiddlesticks. He didn’t play the popular Rengar but even so, should a new jungle champion emerge at Worlds, good money’s that Svenskeren can play it.
Mid Lane – Jesse “Jesiz” Le
Jesiz gets the least credit of any player on SK. Why? The answer is, of course, Incarnation, the coach that SK quietly hides in their closet. In truth Jesiz is a pretty strong player in his own right. In fact, Jesiz actually attained the most kills for a mid laner during the regular season.
Jesiz has been criticized as “just another passive Ziggs player” in the past but over time he’s grown comfortable with more aggressive champions. In the Playoffs he favored the assassin Ahri heavily and at other times he’s favored other pick-oriented play makers, such as Twisted Fate and Kassadin.
Jesiz still isn’t quite the solo threat that some other teams have but he’s grown into a role that works for SK.
AD Carry – Adrian “CandyPanda” Wübbelmann
CandyPanda is the oldest member of SK. There have been interruptions, but his tenure goes all the way back to Season 1. At times he’s had his name in for one of the best AD carries in Europe. The conversation mostly centers on Rekkles and Tabzz these days but CandyPanda would tell you he’s never lost a step to his rivals.
Like most others at his position CandyPanda follows the meta to a T. In today’s game that means Tristana, Kog’Maw and Corki, with just a pinch of Twitch. If a new champion comes in, it gets played until it’s comfortable.
Support – Christoph “nRated” Seitz
SK’s support nRated was the last player to join the current roster and the man with the most reputation at stake. A year ago nRated was unceremoniously kicked from Regional Champions Fnatic and his work ethic disparaged.
He worked as an analyst for some time for both EG and Lemondogs but the competitive fire still burned within him. nRated worked his mechanics back into shape and eventually found a spot on SK.
nRated is commonly known as a calculated game strategist but he likes risk more than you’d think. He’s not afraid to pull out ringers like Gragas, Vel’koz, or even Galio if he sees a use. No matter what champion he’s on, nRated plays with surprising aggression. This sometimes gets him into a little trouble but for the most part nRated fits SK as the initiator and big playmaker.
SK has a reputation for strategic soundness but lets dig a bit deeper.
SK is fundamentally based around team fighting (to my eyes). They generally do not rely heavily on solo-laner split push. When they do, it’s with the goal of generating map pressure rather than individually taking a turret. They’ve focused a little more on pick champions like Ahri, Twisted Fate and Elise as of late but, if anything, they prefer to focus on the sieging aspect of those compositions.
The part of the game where SK shows their strategic prowess is in the early game
This used to be a weakness of SK; they often struggled in the laning phase during the first half of the Season. The early-game meta of lane swaps has subtly evolved over time, and with it SK has developed a sound sense of how to generate early advantages.
SK is also a solid team in picks and bans. Combined with good early-game sense and a strong individual jungler this allows SK to win or break even during lane phase.
The primary weakness of SK is actually just getting out-played in team fights. It’s not frequent but SK does sometimes botch their initiation or get blind-sided late game. While they have good teamwork overall, Jesiz and CandyPanda are also a bit more passive than their teammates and sometimes not quite on the same page (compared to nRated, who, as mentioned, can be reckless at times).
Match-Up Predictions
Many have suggested that SK can tactically out-match TSM. I don’t quite agree due to SK’s predilection towards team fighting. TSM is and has always been great at the 5v5. Many classic TSM victories are born of simply snowballing a Dragon fight.
SK may play the map well and perhaps generate a lead for one of their side lanes early game. It is unlikely, however, that they will gain an advantage in more than one lane. Bjergsen is a fearsome laner 1v1 and while Jesiz is good at breaking even, Svenskeren will probably have to spend at least some time around the mid lane to ensure his farm or protect him from Amazing.
Whatever happens during the laning phase, SK is likely going to give TSM what they want eventually: full on 5v5’s instead of smaller skirmishes. The latter gives them much better odds of actually winning but SK’s team-oriented players prefer grouping up as a matter of comfort.
I would say that could be their downfall. However, despite recent improvement, TSM has sometimes faltered in picks and bans. If SK manages to out-pick TSM, they might negate any real or perceived team-fight advantage and close out the game cleanly. Stylistically, TSM does match up well and is my pick to win, but careful attention should be paid to Champion Select.
The Taipei Assassins are, as always, a mystery to many due to the GPL’s low Western exposure. A perusal of their three Playoff Series would suggest that they are not a serious contender in this Group but, given Season 2 World Championship results, can you ever count them out?
Their jungler Winds has gained some recognition as a Korean solo-queue star and a mechanically proficient player but TPA also hosts two talented mid laners in Morning and Chawy. Both are serious threats and so the largest risk the rest of Group B has in playing against TPA is in the jungle-mid 2v2. SK is no exception and should approach that part of the map with caution.
With that said, TPA’s side lanes are not as impressive. They are competent but most of the kills they get are from plays that Winds or the mid laner makes. Top laner Achie also may have a strange champion pool, having been seen playing Jax several months after the champion was nerfed out of the meta.
SK is a better overall team than TPA. As long as they keep good vision around the center of the map and avoid getting picked, SK should be able to win a side lane and win off smart objective play.
Rumors abound about the relationships within Starhorn Royal Club but, all that aside, SK actually matches up fairly well here. Their aforementioned early game is the key to victory.
SHRC is undoubtedly a team with poor communication in planning and early execution. It’s really just the Insec show. For better or for worse, he goes where he pleases, letting the chips fall where they may.
Barring some misplay early, I think SK will have a field day if they lane swap against SHRC; they will see a mistake and capitalize on it. This also allows them to avoid playing 2v2 with Uzi, which is probably the most threatening potential matchup.
From there it’s about how well SK snowballs. If they generate enough of a lead by the mid game, they’ll probably close it out without trouble.
If they don’t, then they might be in more trouble. If SK misplaces their aggression or fights 5v5 without enough of a lead, SHRC could turn the game. It’s cliche but history has shown that Chinese teams (and LMQ in America) are capable of scraping out comebacks through aggressive and creative skirmishing.
SK shoudn’t necessarily be “afraid” of SHRC’s late game but it’s probably for the best if they carefully and methodically stamp them out early. SK should beat SHRC but they need to play with discipline and not get drawn in by the League equivalent of a drunken brawl.
Group B Predicted Standings
1) TSM
2) SK Gaming
3) SHRC
4) TPA
SK’s relaxed play and clear shot-calling should net them First or SecondThere is something deeply exasperating about the debate, spotlighted Thursday, about whether unlocking an iPhone violates Apple’s copyright on the cellphone’s software. There’s a real issue at stake, but it isn’t fundamentally about copyrights.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a filing with the Copyright Office, argues that the government should allow iPhone owners to circumvent technical barriers meant to keep them from changing the phone’s software, a process called jailbreaking. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act bans people from defeating technical protections for copyrighted materials (such as the encryption on DVDs). The act requires the government to consider exemptions to this ban every three years.
Apple, not surprisingly, filed an objection, saying that jailbreaking a phone indeed violates copyright law |
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Crossposted at juanitajean.comAs a cat lover most of my life I have sponsored numerous cats over the years. As any cat lover knows, you really do not own a cat. Their independent nature seems to always win out. I also like dogs and have had several of them, but cats bring with them a certain mysterious attitude that makes them so special. A dog will listen and do what you tell them, but a cat will sometimes listen to you but will still do what they want.
I have also purchased many books about cats over the years. I recently bought this (How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you by the Oatmeal – Mathew Inman) volume at a bargain price. I found this to be a very amusing and entertaining book by someone who obviously loves, and understands to some degree, the nature of cats.
This book is filled with bits of cat lore and is fully illustrated. Some of the material covered in this text is as follows: 6 ways to tell if your car thinks it’s a mountain lion. How you see your cat and how your car sees you. How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you. Things cats love. Waking the dog VS walking the cat. Proximity to a tuna sandwich. Cat VS internet. The 3 was of dealing with cat litter. If we treated our cats like they treat us, and many other amusing sections.
If you are a cat lover this is the kind of book you will find delightful and amusing.
Rating: 4 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: The Samurai Soul: An old warrior’s poetic tribute).Who wants to see the God of Mischief and the Sorcerer Supreme go head to head in a Marvel film? Tom Hiddleston does, that's who!
After seeing the first Doctor Strange trailer, Hiddleston (Kong: Skull Island) says he's eager to work with his good friend Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock), who he first met on Steven Spielberg’s Warhorse.
“In some hypothetical world, I don’t quite know when, for Loki and Dr. Strange to share the same frame would be very exciting indeed,” he told the Daily News. “Because Benedict Cumberbatch is an old friend. So I would think it would be interesting to see who would get the upperhand.” However, there's still the question of how many more times will Loki appear in the Marvel Cinemaic Universe after Thor: Ragnorak.
“Truthfully, I do actually know at the moment how many more times I’m going to play Loki, but I’m not going to tell you,” he admitted. “It’s not personal it’s just keeping it fresh for all paying customers to enjoy their films. “And also I’m the God of mischief so it’s my predisposition to play games,” he added.
Doctor Strange follows the story of neurosurgeon Doctor Stephen Strange who, after a horrific car accident, discovers the hidden world of magic and alternate dimensions. Derrickson is directing with a cast that includes Cumberbatch as Dr. Stephen Strange, Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Baron Mordo, Rachel McAdams as Christine Palmer, a.k.a. Night Nurse, Benedict Wong as Wong and Mads Mikkelsen is playing an unspecified villain role. Marvel's Dr. Strange will cast a spell on audiences November 4, 2016.Many people are ignorant to the fact that terrorism is a threat we must face every single day, whether it is overseas or on the home front. But these leaked documents from the FBI will make you very aware of just how much it threatens our borders.
Leaked documents from the FBI reveal that around 7,712 terrorist encounters occur in a year in the United States, many of the encounters taking place near the US-Mexico border. These incidents are chronicled as “Known or Suspected Terrorist Encounters,” as per Breitbart.com.
The reported cases near the Mexican border suggest that persons who are known or suspected of terrorism have attempted to sneak into the U.S. across this border.
And liberals still think Trump’s wall is crazy?
Some of the reports include the U.S. entirely, but some focus on Arizona. The documents are unclassified law enforcement sensitive and contain information about the Terrorist Screening Center. It is also known as the “Terror Watch List.”
The states with the highest number of terrorist encounters are all border states including New Mexico, Texas, and California.
Liberals would like to believe we simply want our wall to keep illegals out of this country, and this is true. Come into this country by legal means, so you can pay taxes like the rest of us. Don’t try to cheat the system.
We’re not opposed to immigrants—we’re opposed to illegals and terrorists.
The fact that terrorists come into this country from Mexico and manage to get through is a marvel. Why do we even have a border patrol if they can just get in anyway?
We the People need to vote for Donald Trump, who will not only build a wall, but he will create a new vetting process for immigration that this country so desperately needs. You can’t look at this information or at the sheer number of terrorists who can slip into this country and not acknowledge that we have a problem!
to discuss this story.The union representing professors at the University of Ottawa is asking for a judicial review of raises given to two senior university administrators, raises that the union says contravene Ontario’s public sector wage freeze.
The Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa says it’s making the application in Divisional Court after the university — and Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities Reza Moridi — ignored its complaints about the raises.
“We were so, you could say, ‘insulted’ at the lack of response from the board of governors, and even the minister, that one of the only ways left to get the information we want, and to figure out if this was legal or illegal, was to bring it to the courts,” association president Jennifer Dekker said Friday.
“We’ve read the law. We think it’s illegal.”
In October, the APUO wrote to Moridi urging a “transparent public investigation” into the raises given to vice-president of research Dr. Mona Nemer and to Dr. Jacques Bradwejn, dean of the School of Medicine, the person who approved Nemer’s raise.
Nemer’s pay jumped by $132,304 — or 50 per cent — between 2012 and 2014, pushing her salary to $392,058, according to Ontario’s sunshine salary disclosure list. The association complained about the increase to the university’s board of governors last summer summer.
The university says $120,000 of that increase represents four years’ worth of a $30,000 annual stipend that was paid in a lump sum to Nemer for her work as a cardiovascular scientist and is not related to work as an administrator.
“The salaries provided to our executives remain compliant with provincial law,” university president Allan Rock said in letter to the board of governors last July.
Bradwejn earned $422,572 in 2014, more than Rock earned and $36,000 higher than Bradwejn’s salary in 2012, according to the sunshine list.
“In its application APUO alleges that these raises are illegal under the Broader Public Sector Accountability Act, which the Ontario government passed in 2010,” the association said in a news release. “This law stipulates that compensation paid to senior administrators such as Dr. Nemer and Dr. Bradwejn ‘cannot be increased’.”
The APUO represents 1,250 full-time faculty and librarians at the University of Ottawa. It’s the first time the association has taken the university to court, Dekker said. The university was served with the papers Thursday and the application is expected to be filed in court on Monday, Dekker said.
“The university insists that faculty have to prepare for cuts to programs, teaching assistants, library services and so on — students are also paying among the highest tuition fees in the country,” she said. “So we are reasonably asking why the administrators are awarding themselves massive raises while the province has made it clear that administrators are not to receive pay increases.”
[email protected]
Twitter.com/getBACA Cambridge University College has bowed to pressure to remove a controversial bronze cockerel statue looted during a British colonial expedition in the 19th century after students have asked for it to be repatriated.
A university source confirmed the statue, which has for long held pride in Jesus College’s dining hall – is to be taken down and there will be a debate over its future, including a potential repatriation to Nigeria.
A University spokesperson said: "Jesus College acknowledges the contribution made by students in raising the important but complex question of the rightful location of its Benin Bronze, in response to which it has permanently removed the Okukor from its Hall.
“The College commits to work actively with the wider University and to commit resources to new initiatives with Nigerian heritage and museum authorities to discuss and determine the best future for the Okukor, including the question of repatriation.
The College strongly endorses the inclusion of students from all relevant communities in such discussion."
However, the decision was met with criticism amongst some corner of academia.
Joanna Williams, education editor at Spiked and lecturer in higher education at the University of Kent, said: “I think is cowardly on behalf of Cambridge University to do this and I think students have declared war on the past and this is another example of how students are using history as a morality play to express their own moral superiority in the present.
“They want to demonstrate that they are more enlightened than previous generations of students. It’s easier to fight battles against the past. Instead they come across as they want to eradicate the past or use the past to express their moral superiority in the present.”
Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said: “Students always look for things to protest about and at present universities seem to be making the mistake of taking these protests too seriously.
“We can't be in the business of trying to re-write history. How a cockerel can make some students feel bad amazes me. It's something that they are projecting on to it, not something that it signifies in itself.”
Separately, the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which suffered a blow earlier this year in their efforts to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College because of its links with colonialism, have announced a “mass march for decolonisation”. The tour will go through other buildings in Oxford with colonial links and will demonstrate on Wellington Square, outside the office of the university’s vice-chancellor.
A University of Oxford spokesperson said: “The University supports the right to lawful peaceful protest. We have invited Rhodes Must Fall to discuss a number of issues including the need to address the representation of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students at the University; the on-going process of curriculum development and welfare provision for BME students. We hope they will accept the opportunity to work with staff and other students on creating a more inclusive university community.”Police seek teenage girl in connection with stabbing near Fountain Gate shopping centre in Melbourne
Updated
Police are searching for a teenage girl who is believed to have stabbed another teenager in the neck near Fountain Gate shopping centre in Melbourne's south-east.
A 16-year-old girl from Pakenham was flown to the Alfred Hospital in a serious condition after she was stabbed on a bike path along Magid Drive in Narre Warren just after 2:00pm (AEST) on Friday.
Police are looking for a teenage girl with a solid build and dark-coloured hair who was wearing a flannelette shirt.
She was last seen heading south, and police said she possibly ran into the shopping centre.
Detective Sergeant Shaun Allen said it was not yet clear if the victim and offender knew each other.
"It's just something that shouldn't happen," he said.
"We've got people going about their daily business and we've got a young girl now that's in hospital with serious injuries to her throat."
Police said a thorough search would be done of nearby properties on Friday evening.
Sergeant Allen urged anyone with information to contact Crime Stoppers.
Topics: emergency-incidents, narre-warren-3805
First postedAlas, I've made Katara!The person who adopted Aang expressed their interest for a Katara plushie, so I decided to take on the special commission because I originally wanted to make her, but I thought it'd be too hard to find her a home.The outfit I chose for her is from the finale, during the fight against Azula. She looks ready for battle with the armour on her shins/forearms, plus the extra water pouch... and her hair is pretty when it's down.I just love that balance of warrior and femininity; it makes her such a kickass pro-feminist character!I know a lot of people ship Zutara, but I don't have any Zuko plushies with me to give you fanservice pics. So have some Kataang instead! It's a ship that grows onto you. I must admit, it didn't give me any feels the first time around, I was just sorta indifferent towards it...but with the mixture of seeing them as adults in Legend of Korra, and then watching AtLA a second time... I really grew to love it!But honestly, AtLA gave me the most feels for non-romantic things...particularly Katara & Sokka (maybe it's cuz I have a big bro!), Iroh & Zuko, and...and... AANG & APPA! Ahhhh, I just love Appa!Anyways. Back to the plush. I enjoy Water Tribe clothes a lot. It seems like we'll be getting more WaterTribe characters in the next season of LoK, so I look forward to their clothes~In the quick flip of context, pretty much everything on earth can get gross. Not everyone can get down with gross, but Toledo, Ohio's Equipment (have fun Googling that) doesn't seem to have too much of a problem with it. It's the project of musician Nick Stoup, who expertly weaves pretty real feelings and emotions into good-natured pop-rock. Today, he's premiering the video for "One or Both," which captures this dynamic pretty astutely. Stoup is hanging out in some backyard or garden playing the song, and out of nowhere gets struck repeatedly with paint, water, all kinds of gack. And yet, he's still playing along, totally unfazed by it all. The song is excellent, shades of emo, punk and pop bolstered by extremely honest lyrics. Be excited.
Pre-order Equipment's upcoming EP Chump.A study led by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers suggests that awakening several times throughout the night is more detrimental to people’s positive moods than getting the same shortened amount of sleep without interruption.
As they report in the November 1 issue of the journal Sleep, researchers studied 62 healthy men and women randomly subjected to three sleep experimental conditions in an inpatient clinical research suite: three consecutive nights of either forced awakenings, delayed bedtimes or uninterrupted sleep.
Participants subjected to eight forced awakenings and those with delayed bedtimes showed similar low positive mood and high negative mood after the first night, as measured by a standard mood assessment questionnaire administered before bedtimes. Participants were asked to rate how strongly they felt a variety of positive and negative emotions, such as cheerfulness or anger.
But the researchers say significant differences emerged after the second night: The forced awakening group had a reduction of 31 percent in positive mood, while the delayed bedtime group had a decline of 12 percent compared to the first day. Researchers add they did not find significant differences in negative mood between the two groups on any of the three days, which suggests that sleep fragmentation is especially detrimental to positive mood.
“When your sleep is disrupted throughout the night, you don’t have the opportunity to progress through the sleep stages to get the amount of slow-wave sleep that is key to the feeling of restoration,” says study lead author Patrick Finan, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Although the study was conducted on healthy subjects with generally normal sleep experiences, Finan says the results are likely to apply to those who suffer from insomnia.
Frequent awakenings throughout the night are common among new parents and on-call health care workers, he says. It is also one of the most common symptoms among people with insomnia, who make up an estimated 10 percent of the U.S. adult population. “Many individuals with insomnia achieve sleep in fits and starts throughout the night, and they don’t have the experience of restorative sleep,” Finan says.
Depressed mood is a common symptom of insomnia, Finan says, but the biological reasons for this are poorly understood. To investigate the link, he and his team used a test called polysomnography to monitor certain brain and body functions while subjects were sleeping to assess sleep stages.
Compared with the delayed bedtime group, the forced awakening group had shorter periods of deep, slow-wave sleep. The lack of sufficient slow-wave sleep had a statistically significant association with the subjects’ reduction in positive mood, the researchers say. They also found that interrupted sleep affected different domains of positive mood; it reduced not only energy levels, but also feelings of sympathy and friendliness.
Finan says the study also suggests that the effects of interrupted sleep on positive mood can be cumulative, since the group differences emerged after the second night and continued the day after the third night of the study. “You can imagine the hard time people with chronic sleep disorders have after repeatedly not reaching deep sleep,” Finan says. However, he says, further studies are needed to learn more about sleep stages in people with insomnia and the role played by a night of recovering sleep.— Results from Minneapolis elections are already rolling in as polls close in the city’s third bout with ranked choice voting.
In the race for mayor, City Council Member Jacob Frey is taking an early lead, with 25 percent of first choice votes. Tom Hoch, the former president of the Hennepin Theatre Trust, is just behind with 19 percent. Incumbent Mayor Betsy Hodges is in third with 18 percent and Ray Dehn — a state representative — is in fourth with 17 percent.
Results will likely be tabulated into Wednesday, as the complicated process for distributing voters’ second and third choices continues.
Meanwhile, several candidates for Minneapolis City Council have already secured their seats with more than 50 percent of the vote. In Ward 8, Andrea Jenkins became the first transgender woman elected to a major city council the country. On the same night, Danica Roem, another transgender woman, was elected to the state legislature in Virginia — another first.
Incumbents Lisa Goodman Ward 7, Cam Gordon in Ward 2, Lisa Bender in Ward 10, Andrew Johnson in Ward 12 and Linea Palmisano in Ward 13 sewed up sizable majorities on first choice ballots.
Election officials say the turnout was unusually high, and caused hiccups at several precincts across the city. Several polling places ran out of ballots, but officials promised anyone who was in line by 8 p.m. would be given the chance to vote. Ballots had to be photocopied, then election judges duplicated the information onto official ballot forms — that’s allowed under state law. Then those ballots could be counted.
#ElectionDay Update: Turnout was extremely high tonight. That, along with many spoiled ballots (where voters requested new ballots) has caused precincts to go through their ballot reserves faster than anticipated. — Mpls Elections (@VoteMpls) November 8, 2017
As of 8 p.m., five precincts had no ballots. Election workers there are now photocopying ballots so voters will be able to cast their ballots tonight. — Mpls Elections (@VoteMpls) November 8, 2017
You can view the full results in all Minneapolis races on the Minnesota Secretary of State’s website.
St. Paul election officials initially said results would take longer but a clear winner emerged after the first ballot — former City Council Member Melvin Carter.Ferns, it turns out, are far more sophisticated than you might realize.
As revealed in a new study in Science, Japanese climbing ferns are actually capable of chemically communicating among themselves to ensure the proper ratio of male and female plants. A group of researchers from Japan's Nagoya University found that, within a given group of ferns, early-maturing female plants emit a chemical that's detected by later-maturing plants, causing them to develop into males.
This is only the latest in a spate of recent studies finding that plants can communicate in surprisingly sophisticated ways. Other experiments have shown that thale cress plants can detect the sound of caterpillars munching on them and produce defense chemicals in response, and that searocket plants can determine whether they've been planted with kin or unrelated plants, and grow accordingly.
How ferns "talk" to determine sex ratios
The new Science paper is a particularly interesting illustration of this complexity.
Unlike most flowering plants, individual ferns are either male or female — not both. Their sex doesn't become fixed until after germination, in their early growth stages.
Scientists previously knew that the factor that determines which sex a specific fern will end up as is a hormone called gibberellin. If the hormone is present in large enough quantities as the plant develops, the fern usually becomes a male, and if it isn't, it becomes a female.
What the botanists in this study found is that within a given group of these Japanese climbing ferns — a problematic invasive species in the US — most of the early-germinating plants become female. Inside their cells, their enzymes carry out some of the steps necessary to produce gibberellin — they just don't quite finish the job.
However, as the plants grow, they release the gibberellin precursor out into the environment, where it's detected by the next wave of germinating ferns. These plants absorb it and finish the job, turning it into full-blown gibberellin, which leads them to develop into males. This process ultimately leads to a few females, surrounded by a bunch of males, which is just the right ratio needed to ensure genetic diversity and survival.
Scientists had previously known that inter-plant communication was involved in sex determination in some plant species, but they'd never mapped it out before in such detail.
The other remarkable things plants can do
This experiment is just the latest to uncover a plant's surprisingly complex ability to sense its environment, communicate with other organisms, or make a decision in response to these factors.
We've all seen plants sense light and grow towards it. But they can also detect all sorts of chemicals in the air and water, analogous to our senses of taste and smell. Their sense of touch is especially acute: research has shown that plant roots actually alter their direction of growth before hitting a rock or a toxic substance.
Research also tells us that plants use intricate signaling systems to communicate with each other and respond to threats. Experiments have shown that searocket plants, for instance, can distinguish between kin and unrelated searockets when they're planted together, and grow fewer roots — thereby presenting less competition — when planted with kin.
Many species of plants, scientists have learned, respond to being eaten by insects by releasing chemicals that attract those insects' predators. When they're attacked by mites, for example, lima bean plants emit a chemical that attracts larger predatory mites — but they don't emit that chemical when they're simply damaged by steel wool. Thale cress plants, meanwhile, can detect the characteristic vibrations produced by predatory caterpillars and respond by secreting volatile defense chemicals.
All these discoveries have led to a bit of a controversy in botany. Some botanists call this type of research plant neurobiology. They might argue that the ferns involved in the new study "talked" to each other to determine the right sex ratio, and that the thale cress plants "heard" the caterpillars eating them. Some even suggest that these plants' internal chemical signaling systems are complex enough to merit being described by words like "thought," "decide," and "intelligence" — words we usually only use when talking about animals.
Many other botanists, however, argue that these terms (and the comparison with animal thinking processes) are overstatements — that they inaccurately anthropomorphize chemical reactions.
Either way, though, what's clear is that plant communication and behavior is far more sophisticated and nuanced than most of us long imagined.
Read more: Can plants actually "hear" predators?Guests: Emmy the Great Emmy the Great Guests: Dan Schreiber Dan Schreiber Guests: Anna Ptaszynski Anna Ptaszynski
"Pleading the Fifth" and Swift Justice taped in front of a live audience at the London Podcast Festival at King's Place. We also hear from Dan Schreiber and Anna Ptaszynski, from QI and the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast, with a dispute regarding fact-finding for their own show. Plus, music from Emmy the Great!
For info on Emmy the Great's tour dates, music and more, visit EmmyTheGreat.com! You can catch Dan and Anna's show No Such Thing As A Fish at QI.com/podcast. Keep an eye out for Judge Hodgman's appearance on No Such Thing as a Fish COMING SOON!
EDITED TO ADD: Click here to check out Judge Hodgman's appearance on No Such Thing As A Fish! Or search for No Such Thing as a Fish in your preferred podcast-listening app!
Thank you to Megan Hodgkiss for suggesting this week's title! To suggest a title for a future episode, like Judge John Hodgman on Facebook. We regularly put out a call for submissions.
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SUBSCRIBE TO THIS PODCAST in ITUNES or the RSS FEEDCape Town – Protesters demanding the Marikana report have allegedly stormed a dinner on Friday in Johannesburg where Deputy President Cyril Ramphosa was speaking.
The Deputy Public Protector of the Republic of South Africa Kevin Malunga tweeted: “Protesters just stormed Muslim Civil Society dinner where DP Cyril Ramaphosa is speaking shouting that he is a killer, demand Marikana report.”
According to Malunga the protesters might have gained access through the side doors at Wanderers Club.
Ramaphosa was speaking at the Muslim Civil Society Conference Gala Dinner at the Wanderers Club in Illovo.
He was speaking on the role of civil society in the implementation of the National Development Plan.
Journalist Khadija Patel, who was also at the conference, said protesters were carrying placards saying: "Don't let politicians get away with murder."
She tweeted: "Hearing reports that police acted with a very heavy hand towards the Marikana protesters here at the conference.
"I'm hearing the protesters who disrupted the conference are about to be arrested after being beaten by security attached to the Presidency."
Ramaphosa's spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa told News24 that the deputy president was delivering his speech, but at the time could not confirm the incident.Dear Mr. Cope,
Amongst your many traits as CEO of Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), tenacity, enthusiasm for your trade, and perseverance top the list. Conspicuous in its absence from your letter, however, is your sense of irony.
You begin the “unusual step of writing to all Canadians” (Strange, isn’t it, that “Canada’s Top Communication Company” should find it unusual to communicate with its customers?) with a history lesson, ostensibly in the interest of helping us “understand a critical situation” now facing the wireless industry: the potential entrance of an American company into the Canadian market.
You inform us that, since Parliament granted Bell its charter in 1880, Bell has spent 133 years “investing in delivering world-class communications services to Canadians.” An impressive track record!
You must, however, be aware that Bell’s permission to operate in Canada was initially obtained by agents acting in the interest of the (American) National Bell Telephone Company and that, after securing a favourable charter, three top-level executives from National Bell were appointed to Bell Canada’s board of directors (Babe, 1990, pg 68-69). Or how about how American Bell initially owned 50% of your company, only fully divesting its interest 43 years ago, in 1970 (Winseck, 1998, pg 119)?
Bell began its life in Canada as a branch plant of an American company; in a strange twist of fate, it’s now a descendant of National Bell Telephone – Verizon – which is contemplating (re)entering the Canadian market. And they leveraged this relationship to get an early leg up on the competition – using patents owned by its American parent, Bell quickly monopolized the market for Canadian telephone services, a monopoly it used to funnel profits back to the States. (Smythe, 1981, pg 141)
You suggest that “US giants don’t need special help from the Canadian government,” but that’s exactly how Bell got to where it is today!
That’s all ancient history, however, and in the here and now, BCE is a Canadian company who “welcomes any competitor,” so long as they “compete on a level playing field.” Right?
You’re calling on the Federal government to close “loopholes” that are intended to promote competition in your industry – rules that your company has forced the government to create.
Regarding the three “loopholes” you want closed:
1. “Verizon would be able to buy twice as much of Canada’s airwaves as Canadian companies like Bell can in an upcoming auction of wireless spectrum – the airwaves that carry your calls and data.”
According to a recent article in the Financial Post, BCE currently holds license to 19% of Canadian radio frequencies designated for mobile use – that’s if you include the upcoming blocks of 700MHz in the total – or 29% if you don’t. Bell didn’t get most of that spectrum by paying market price, but through a ‘beauty contest’ – the government licensed mobile spectrum to Rogers, Bell, Telus and other regional providers such as MTS and SaskTel for pennies compared to market value.[1] You might call that “existing spectrum holdings previously subsidized by Canadian taxpayers,” something you’ve got in spades but would deny to your competition.
Even in the unlikely event that you don’t win a block of 700MHz in the upcoming auction, you’ll still be in control of 19% of all available mobile spectrum in Canada – more than twice as much as the set-aside provides for new entrants.[2]
The playing field looks pretty tilted from here.
2. “They get to piggyback on the networks of Canadian carriers wherever they don’t want to invest and build their own.”
At least you won’t have to worry about Verizon piggybacking on your network here in rural Manitoba – because you barely have one. Instead you’ve chosen to only cover the most densely populated (and most profitable) areas of the province while ignoring places like Thompson, Churchill and the Whiteshell – a practice that you reserve exclusively for Verizon. Where you do provide service – Ontario, Quebec, Vancouver, etc. (Winnipeg, Brandon, and immediately surrounding areas in MB) – you’re already sharing a network with TELUS. Since 2009, Bell and TELUS have been sharing their national 3G (HSPA) network infrastructure. You’ve needed help providing your services for years, why should we expect Verizon to go it alone?
Rogers also has similar agreements with regional providers such as MTS. In fact, all three national providers are already sharing their networks with their “competitors,” yet you actively campaign to exclude new entrants such as WIND and Verizon from the club. Not my idea of a level playing field.
3. “Verizon can acquire smaller Canadian competitors – but Bell and other Canadian wireless companies can’t even try.”
You note that “With Ottawa’s help, the new companies [WIND, Mobilicity, Public Mobile] have become part of the vigorously competitive Canadian wireless marketplace”. I have to point out that with your help, one of those companies is facing imminent financial insolvency, while the other two are actively courting buyers. Naguib Sawiris, WIND’s original backer, has frequently and publicly lamented his decision to test your waters. The previous contestants, (Clearnet and Microcell) I would add, met a similar fate when they were bought out by TELUS and Rogers in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Are we supposed to believe that TELUS is competing with Koodo, or Rogers with Fido?
After every challenger contesting your dominance of the wireless market has been bought out or squashed, is it any wonder that the government wants to act to promote real competition?
Mr. Cope, I am Canadian. Like virtually every other Canadian I know, I rely on my mobile phone in my personal life and for my livelihood on a daily basis. The “critical situation” I face comes every month, when I open my wireless bill wondering whether I’ll be able to afford to pay it. Your company, along with Canada’s other major wireless providers, have had 30 years to address this situation. But you’ve failed. Posting huge profits and paying dividends year after year might satisfy your shareholders, but individual Canadians and their families are being hung out to dry. It’s time for a change. Faced with a choice between an American company fighting to gain a foothold in a hostile market or a Canadian one who takes my hard earned money for granted, I’ll pick the lesser of two evils. And if you don’t know which that is by now, I’ll happily send you a copy of my monthly phone bill.
~
[1]According to a report Bell submitted to Industry Canada’s invite-only Wireless Roundtable in 2010, total fees paid by spectrum licensees to IC is $132M per year, your share of which (29%) is $38.28M per year by my estimate. Sounds like a lot, until you consider that you paid nearly that much at auction just to secure AWS spectrum for Toronto alone (Per year cost of winning bid for 10 year license.) It’s fair to say that most of the spectrum you’re holding (and have been for up to 30 years) has cost you significantly less than market value. Why should you have access to public subsidies for spectrum but not your competitors?
[2] This estimate excludes spectrum held by Bell et al for radio and television broadcasting, but includes the BRS spectrum – intended for mobile internet but out of use since early 2012 – currently being hoarded by Inukshuk Wireless, a joint venture between Bell and Rogers. Also, it assumes that Verizon will not have completed acquisition of Wind or other new entrants prior to the auction.
Sources Cited:
Babe, Robert E. Telecommunications in Canada. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. 1990.
Smythe, Dallas. Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada. Ablex Publishing, New Jersey. 1982.
Winseck, Dwayne. Reconvergence: A Political Economy of Telecommunications in Canada. Hampton Press, New Jersey. 1998.
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Thursday August 28, 2014 – 1,000 homes “Knock & Talk” Effort
Beginning in 2013 and continuing through the summer of 2014 members of the Burlington Police Department, the Department of Corrections, the State Attorney’s Office, federal law enforcement partners, and professionals from the health community have continued with the door to door Community Impact Teams “Knock and Talk” initiative City-wide. Since May, over 1,200 homes in neighborhoods throughout the City have been canvassed.
The “Knock and Talk” initiative is a door-to-door outreach effort to the community. During these events we meet with residents and provide them with information regarding major issues that are affecting all of us in the community, focusing on opiate issues, property crime, and quality of life issues. Residents are provided with information as to how they can help their neighbors and the police to make Burlington a vibrant and safe community. Residents are also provided information containing resources and contact information for assistance with issues such as drug addiction and mental health treatment.
The initiative also gives officers and other members of the team a chance to have an open dialog with members of the community to hear their concerns and answer questions they may have.
The next “Knock and Talk” will occur Thursday the 28th from 4 to 6 pm in Burlington’s Hill section, welcoming students back to the neighborhood and talking with full-time residents as the school year begins. In addition to the information provided in the previous events, we will also be focusing on quality of life issues. Quality of life issues, highlighted by noise prevention efforts, remain an important component of community health as we continue working to keep our City vibrant, fun and safe.
In 2013 we made 1,613 contacts with members of the community during this initiative. To date this year we have made 1,208 contacts. In addition to these events, Burlington Police officers and Street Outreach team members have conducted over 1,825 foot patrols in neighborhoods so far in 2014. The goal for Thursday is to canvass 1,000 homes, eclipsing any other single “Knock and Talk” initiative done to date.
If anyone from the media would like to join us this Thursday, please contact Lt. Art Cyr at [email protected] by loki on Tue, 05/04/2010 - 19:48
Welcome and thank you for coming by to find out more about the OpenLuna project.
We invite you to join (click here) the OpenLuna Foundation or donate (click here) to the project.
Membership is normally $50 annually, but you can support our newly formed launch team at a promotional rate of $25. And the senior and student rates are available at the normal membership registration. Your support is greatly appreciated and will help take OpenLuna project where no opensource program has gone before.
Mission 1 "Names in Space" has been combined with the launch team.
What is OpenLuna?
The OpenLuna Foundation's mission is to extend humanity’s reach into space. OpenLuna is embarking on a systematic program of robotic missions combined with extensive public relations, educational, and outreach campaigns. Following the robotic missions, a short series of crewed missions will take place, culminating in the construction of a six to ten person, self-sustaining outpost on the lunar surface. The outpost will be made available for public use.
OpenLuna is part of the rapidly growing new-space industry; companies lead by innovative entrepreneurs and supported by technical staff inspired by NASA, fueled by the information age and communicating on the worldwide web. New-space is one of the few growing industries in the current economy.
OpenLuna is a public outreach, privately funded (sponsors, members, entertainment revenue) program. Membership means having an active participation in this exciting industry for everyone. The program has varied membership levels to accommodate wide participation. If you can be a part of the next manned mission |
so highly regarded for his geriatric medical expertise, that he was frequently called upon by the federal government to testify in nursing home patient-abuse cases, Shiner said in his opening statement.
And the patient with the 20,000 oxycodone pills has credited Schultz with saving his life and helping him cope with devastating pain from severe spinal injuries and surgeries after the man was the victim in a drunken driving crash.
"Dr. Schultz did not commit a crime," Shiner told the jury, contending his client wrote the prescriptions in good faith for reasons of medical necessity. "His whole career is about helping people."
The attorney blasted law enforcement for ensnaring Schultz during a "witch hunt" against doctors who specialized in pain management.
Schultz, whose state license to practice medicine has been suspended, came under investigation in September 2010 after authorities received a complaint from a Lake Worth pharmacy where a patient of Schultz's tried to fill a prescription for a 30-day supply of oxycodone totaling 1,590 pills with a dosage strength of 30 milligrams.
Ken Jerkins, a retired pharmacist who ran the Tru-Valu Drugs store, testified that the prescription raised alarms because of the high number of pills conflicted with the stated instructions to take one tablet every four to six hours as needed.
"I've never seen a prescription for that large a quantity of any drug," Jerkins said, adding that 1,590 pills would be for a nine-month supply, not 30 days.
But prosecutor Godden said these excessive prescriptions were typical for Schultz, according to seized patient records and testimony that will be presented over the course of the expected two-week trial.
At the time of Schultz's arrest in early 2011, authorities noted the practice's drug-dispensing logs revealed approximately 80,350 oxycodone tablets were prescribed, compared to 3,450 pills for other ailments, between March 25 and May 11, 2010.
Schultz, who was based in an office at 13550 Jog Road west of Delray Beach, wrote the illegal prescriptions without having consultations with his patients, Godden said.
The doctor didn't ask about their present conditions, or discuss alternatives such as surgery, or make attempts to wean them off the highly addictive drugs, she said.
Moreover, Schultz also had an "in house pharmacy" in his office, and occasionally sold the pills directly to his patients and collected the profits.
"He would make money off of some prescriptions he wrote," said Godden, who is prosecuting the case with Barbara Burns.
Shiner countered that Schultz actually charged only $1.60 per pill of oxycodone, far cheaper than chain drug stores.
The attorney said Schultz was highly skilled in pain management after treating thousands of patients over the years. Also, he treated some people who were among the 1 percent of the population with a high tolerance for oxycodone so they required larger quantities of pills.
Godden assured the jury the issues at the trial are specific to Schultz and not an attack on the medical industry or particular drugs.
"This case will not be an indictment of all doctors," she promised. "This case will not be an indictment of pain medications."
Before the trial, Schultz rejected a plea offer from the State Attorney's Office that included an unspecified amount of prison time. If convicted of all the counts, he faces a minimum sentence of about 1,850 years.
Circuit Judge Jack Cox told the jury to expect the trial to wrap up on Nov. 10.
In July 2013, Schultz was charged in the overdose death of patient David Tain. Investigators then accused Schultz of prescribing an amount of methadone to Tain in December 2010 that was "excessive to the point of reckless."
On Dec. 8, Schultz is accused of giving Tain a prescription for 270, 10-milligram tablets of methadone, to take three tablets every eight hours. The next day he was taken to Delray Medical Center, where he was treated for an overdose and released.
But two days later, he overdosed again and died in his mother's Delray Beach home, an arrest report states.
Methadone toxicity was listed in an autopsy as the official cause of death.
[email protected], 561-243-6642 or Twitter @MarcJFreemanThe Obama administration wrote a second check for $500 million on Tuesday to the Green Climate Fund, an international organization designed to help the developing world adapt to global warming and deploy more clean energy technologies.
The announcement from the State Department comes less than three days before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. During the campaign, Trump vowed to choke off all U.S. funding for international global warming programs.
The most recent check from the Obama administration now brings total U.S. contributions to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) so far to $1 billion.
The funding for the GCF fulfills a pledge the U.S. first made as part of the U.N. climate talks beginning in 2009, when developed nations committed to spending $100 billion to assist the developing world, which is already reeling from the effects of climate change, like rising sea levels, scorching droughts and deadly floods.
This funding commitment helped make the Paris Climate Agreement — which went into effect in November of last year — possible since the industrialized world is responsible for the majority of human-caused climate change-to-date.
In 2014, the U.S. committed $3 billion toward the fund, but Congress refused to appropriate the money.
However, Congress didn't prevent funds from simply going toward the program, either. So, in a bureaucratic end run, the Obama administration directed money that had been appropriated through other legislation to be used for the Green Climate Fund.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have denounced such spending, alleging the administration is flouting congressional authority.
They will soon have an ally in a Trump administration, which has put forward a nominee for secretary of state, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who says climate change is not a top national security threat to the U.S. and repeatedly refused to commit to keeping the U.S. within the Paris Climate Agreement during his confirmation hearing.Markdown: text-to-html system
Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)... The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
Aaron Swartz and John Gruber have unveiled their seekrit project, "Markdown," a system for marking up ASCII to make it readily convertable to styled html text, without sacrificing the readability and expressiveness of the core text. There's already support for Blosxom, BBEdit and MT, and it looks pretty straightforward to implement in other environments.
Get certified online in machine learning and data science As big companies wrangle an ever-increasing amount of data, the applications for deep learning grow – and so do the job opportunities. If you’ve got a working knowledge of Python, all you need are the tools to start making data work for you. Get up to speed on the science and code behind the field […] READ THE REST
Listen to vinyl anywhere with this extremely portable record player Anyone who really listens to vinyl knows the medium is far from dead. But convincing others of its appeal can be an uphill battle. For one thing, there’s the gear: A quality record player takes up a lot more space than, say, a smartphone packed with thousands of streaming songs at the ready. But here’s […] READ THE RESTHUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- A Huntsville teen who died after being arrested by Huntsville police in a drug sting suffered broken ribs, had a flashlight shoved in his mouth and suffered cardiac arrest while officers sat on him, a federal lawsuit alleges.
The 17-year-old choked, began vomiting and lost consciousness while handcuffed but officers refused to render aid, according to the lawsuit filed by Nancy Smith, the teen's mother. Police told paramedics they thought the teen had overdosed, but the lawsuit said no signs of an overdose have been found.
The officers, who had sent an informer to buy drugs from the teen, held the teen down and inserted two pens and the butt of a flashlight into his mouth searching for contraband. They didn't find any. The boy could not breathe and had turned blue by the time paramedics arrived, according to the complaint.
He died on June 18, 2013, five days after being transported to Huntsville Hospital.
The 6-foot, 130-pound teen had contusions all over his body, the lawsuit alleges.
Huntsville City Attorney Peter Joffrion denied the wrongful death allegations in April shortly after the original lawsuit was filed. Joffrion said it was "very unfortunate" that the teen died, but he was confident police responding at the scene "handled this matter appropriately."
The wrongful death lawsuit was filed in March, but much of it was dismissed in October on technical grounds. The plaintiff was ordered to amend the complaint.
The new complaint was filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Huntsville. It now alleges that a failure to train officers has created a "reputation for excessive force" and a tolerance of improper behavior by officers.
The lawsuit also alleges the two officers involved in the arrest of the teen failed to prevent the other from engaging in excessive force.
The suit alleges the arresting officers caused the teen's death by use of excessive force.
The lawsuit names several defendants including Huntsville Police Chief Lewis Morris, Lt. Lee Trimble, STAC Sgt. DeWayne McCarver, Deputy Chief Kirk Giles, agent Glen Eaves, agent Tesla Hughes, agent Joseph Blake Dean, investigator Charlie Gray and agent Terry Lucas.Attention! This news was published on the old version of the website. There may be some problems with news display in specific browser versions.
The Premium Day!
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From April 7th 06:00 GMT till April 8th 08:00 GMT (April 6th 11 pm PDT - April 8th 1am PDT) every logged-in War Thunder pilot immediately receive 24 hours of Premium account for free! For those pilots, who already use the Premium, the free Premium day simply added to their payed days.
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War Thunder teamMan who shot, killed ex-girlfriend in Mt. Gretna has died, police say
The man who police say shot and killed his ex-girlfriend at a Mt. Gretna ice cream shop on Labor Day has died. Watch Barbara Barr's report Police say Patrick Derr, 47, shot and killed his ex-girlfriend and attempted to kill himself. On Wednesday, the Dauphin County coroner ruled Derr's death a suicide, saying he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.Police say it was 11:30 a.m. Monday when Derr chased his ex-girlfriend, Stacey Pennington, 46, out of the gift shop she owned. Police say Derr shot Pennington twice outside The Emporium, sat on a bench, then shot himself in the head.Pennington, a mother of two, died at the scene.Derr was airlifted to Hershey Medical Center after the incident.Investigators say Pennington had a restraining order against Derr. Cornwall Police say he used a Ruger 357 handgun that was registered to his father, who died in 2012. Derr was not supposed to possess a gun due to a restraining order his former girlfriend had against him. Police say Derr stole his mother's car from her Richland home. She reported it as stolen that day. Officials say they also found more weapons and ammunition in the trunk of the car, a Ford Fusion.Derr was also scheduled to be in court on Wednesday to be sentenced after pleading guilty to simple assault and harassment.Lebanon County Coroner Jeffrey Yocum said Pennington knew a lot of people and touched a lot of lives. "This is going to be a big loss for Mount Gretna," he said.
The man who police say shot and killed his ex-girlfriend at a Mt. Gretna ice cream shop on Labor Day has died.
Watch Barbara Barr's report
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Police say Patrick Derr, 47, shot and killed his ex-girlfriend and attempted to kill himself. On Wednesday, the Dauphin County coroner ruled Derr's death a suicide, saying he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Police say it was 11:30 a.m. Monday when Derr chased his ex-girlfriend, Stacey Pennington, 46, out of the gift shop she owned. Police say Derr shot Pennington twice outside The Emporium, sat on a bench, then shot himself in the head.
Pennington, a mother of two, died at the scene.
Derr was airlifted to Hershey Medical Center after the incident.
Investigators say Pennington had a restraining order against Derr. Cornwall Police say he used a Ruger 357 handgun that was registered to his father, who died in 2012. Derr was not supposed to possess a gun due to a restraining order his former girlfriend had against him.
Police say Derr stole his mother's car from her Richland home. She reported it as stolen that day. Officials say they also found more weapons and ammunition in the trunk of the car, a Ford Fusion.
Derr was also scheduled to be in court on Wednesday to be sentenced after pleading guilty to simple assault and harassment.
Lebanon County Coroner Jeffrey Yocum said Pennington knew a lot of people and touched a lot of lives.
"This is going to be a big loss for Mount Gretna," he said.
AlertMeA Sarajevo Rose is a concrete scar caused by a mortar shell's explosion that was later filled with red resin. Mortar rounds landing on concrete create a unique fragmentation pattern that looks almost floral in arrangement. Because Sarajevo was a site of intense urban warfare and suffered thousands of shell explosions during the Siege of Sarajevo, the marked concrete patterns are a unique feature to the city.
Warfare [ edit ]
As the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo was a central zone of conflict during the Bosnian War. The Bosnian Serb Army deployed troops and artillery in the surrounding hills, and on 2 May 1992 began imposing a blockade on all traffic in and out the city, starting what was to be known as the siege of Sarajevo. The Bosnian Serb Army constantly bombarded the civilian population in the city in an effort to prevent the home army from deploying. It has been estimated that on an average day more than 300 shell rounds were fired into the city.
Memorial [ edit ]
Throughout the city, explosion marks have been filled with red resin to mark where mortar explosions resulted in one or more deaths.[citation needed]
The Sarajevo roses are disappearing as the asphalt is replaced.[citation needed]
Gallery [ edit ]
A Sarajevo Rose in front of Sacred Heart Cathedral
A Rose of Sarajevo 7 June 2015
References [ edit ]
Campbell, Greg. The Road to Kosovo : A Balkan Diary. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8133-3767-4When residents in the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic describe the scene after an oil-train derailed and then exploded there last July, they say the burning petroleum was like a wall of fire, or a river of fire. The blaze, which burned for 36 hours, sent flames and smoke hundreds of feet into the air. At one point, the fire was pulling in so much oxygen that nearby trees were whipping about as if in a tropical storm. Several blocks from the blast site leaves turned an orange-red color from the overwhelming heat. It was early summer, but they looked like autumn foliage.
The explosions and fire destroyed some 40 buildings and killed 47 people, most of whom were enjoying live music at a popular cafe. Wooden homes along the lakeshore burned from the inside out as fire erupted out of water pipes, drains, and sewers. A 48-inch storm pipe that runs from the train yard to the nearby Chaudière River became a conduit for the petroleum, spewing flames and oil more than half a mile into the water. “It looked like a Saturn V rocket,” says Robert Mercier, director of environmental services in Lac-Mégantic. Manhole covers on the Boulevard des Veterans exploded as columns of fire shot into the air.
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By the time the fire had been contained, the soil surrounding the blast site was a layer of grey ash. “It was like being on the moon,” says Sylvaine Perreault, an emergency responder who arrived early Saturday morning. “It was all dust.”
On Friday, July 5, a 79-car train carrying petroleum from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields had been parked for the night on a modest but steady incline in the town of Nantes, seven miles outside of Lac-Mégantic. The sole engineer employed to secure the train and responsible for applying handbrakes in some of the cars left his shift at 11:25 p.m. At 11:30 p.m. a 911 call was made reporting a fire on one of the locomotives. Twelve firefighters from the town of Nantes arrived, along with two track-maintenance employees from Montreal, Maine & Atlantic, the company operating the train. They extinguished the fire and left the scene. Just before 1:00 a.m. the train began to roll down the incline. It eventually reached a speed of more than 60 miles per hour before it careened off the track toward the Musi Café nightclub and exploded.
Rejean Campagna, a 73-year-old Lac-Mégantic native, was awoken by the sound of the train screeching past his apartment and then of steel piling on steel. “As if somebody had a big drum of steel and was hammering on it with a sledgehammer right beside my window,” he told me. The train tracks are a scant 200 feet away from Campagna’s front window, and when he opened the blinds the first thing he saw was a large ball of fire. “It grew and grew and grew and then it mushroomed.”
Campagna and his wife, Claudette Lapointe, grabbed their pillboxes and cell phones and fled. The hood of their car was so hot that he couldn’t touch it. (According to Mercier, the heat could be felt for more than a mile.) From a safe distance, about a quarter-mile away, they watched as the town burned. In the early morning hours a steady rain began to fall. The surface of Campagna’s umbrella was so warm that when the drops of water bounced off it they sent spirals of steam into the night. If not for the rain, Campagna says, the whole town would have been destroyed. “The rain saved us,” he says.
Lapointe lost two cousins. Campagna knew everyone who lived in the homes along the lake, some of whom also died. Roger Paquette, a 61-year-old friend of Campagna’s, could not be awoken in time. “Neighbors tried to wake him up, but the back of his house was already on fire,” he says. “All of these people never had a chance to get out of their homes, so swift was the flow of fire.”
Lac-Mégantic residents had little warning they were in danger. Few residents interviewed for this article knew that millions of gallons of highly flammable light crude oil were passing through their lakeside village nearly every day. When it comes to transporting oil by rail, the railroad industry and oil and gas companies operate in near total secrecy, with little federal oversight or regulation to ensure public safety.
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The oil moving through Lac-Mégantic was mislabeled – classified as packing group III instead of packing group II or I, which refer to more dangerous substances with lower flashpoints. A hazardous-materials inspection team issued safety warnings in 2011 and 2012, but no changes have been made to tank cars since then. Inspections of loading facilities in the Bakken oil fields conducted in October 2011 and June 2012 found that there were shortages of suitable rail cars; those in use were often being overloaded; and, because of the many different companies involved in transferring and shipping the oil, compliance was difficult to enforce. According to those inspection documents, which were obtained by NBC News shortly after the Lac-Mégantic accident, shippers were regularly using tank cars that did not meet industry specifications. “The pressure to ship those cars was more than the risk of failure in transportation or discovery by FRA [Federal Railroad Administration],” the inspectors noted. They also said the oil was extremely flammable and warned truck drivers and inspectors to take special precautions. “Fire retardant clothing, and grounded equipment, truck and rail cars are mandatory due to the high flammability of the crude and possibility of static discharge.”
The criminal investigation into the accident in Lac-Mégantic, which has focused on the question of whether the brakes were properly secured, was completed in late March. Charges had not been issued, though they were anticipated, when this story went to press.
Even as federal regulators discuss new safety measures – updating or retrofitting the standard petroleum tank cars, reducing train speeds near towns, and performing spot inspections of oil trains – oil trains continue to roll through towns and cities across the United States and Canada. In the last six years the quantity of oil being shipped by rail across North America has increased dramatically. Most of that increase comes from the recently tapped shale oil fields in North Dakota. The Bakken formation is now producing more than one million barrels of crude oil a day, and more than 60 percent of that is shipped by rail. According to the American Association of Railroads, there were 9,500 rail cars carrying crude oil in 2008. Last year there were more than 400,000.
“The Bakken shale has gone from close to nothing to a million barrels a day in a very short time,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told an Albany newspaper in February. “And the infrastructure certainly just isn’t there, certainly in terms of pipelines to manage that.” That means more and more shale oil will be shipped by rail in outdated cars, on tracks that are rarely inspected, and through towns and cities ill equipped to deal with a disaster.
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Since the Lac-Mégantic disaster there has been a string of oil train collisions and derailments. Late on the night of November 7, a train carrying at least 2.7 million gallons of Bakken crude derailed near Aliceville, Alabama, resulting in dramatic explosions similar to those seen in Lac-Mégantic. Because the train exploded a few miles outside of Aliceville, no one was injured or killed. On December 30, a train carrying crude collided with another train outside of Casselton, North Dakota, releasing more than 400,000 gallons of oil into the surrounding land. At least half the town’s 2,400 residents were evacuated, though no one was injured. And on April 30, an oil train operated by CSX derailed in the city of Lynchburg, Virginia, sending flames and oil into the James River and forcing the evacuation of more than 300 residents. Last year more oil spilled in rail accidents – 1.15 million gallons – than the previous 35 years combined.
The economic and political pressure to move the oil far exceeds efforts to upgrade the nation’s rail infrastructure and impose new regulations on either the oil or rail industry. Kenton Onstad, a North Dakota legislator who lives just outside New Town, where the train that exploded in Lac-Mégantic originated, says the nation’s oil-by-rail infrastructure needs to be overhauled and that it should have started years ago. According to Onstad, public officials have known since 2009 that the amount of production from the Bakken would be close to what it is today, and yet they did little to prepare for the oil boom. “I think it was economics and profits versus safety,” he says.
“We’ve got all kinds of failings on all sides, inadequacies that are coming to light because trains are blowing up all over the place,” says Fred Millar, a railway safety consultant.
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The worries about basic railroad safety are compounded by concerns over the unique composition of Bakken shale oil. Independent tests obtained by Earth Island Journal suggest that the North Dakota light crude is especially flammable, perhaps because it is being produced at such a breakneck pace that drilling companies aren’t following standard industry practices to separate out volatile gases. Each day millions of gallons of highly combustible oil are moving through major metropolitan areas – yet local residents and public officials are often unaware of the danger, and many first responders are unprepared for a disaster like the one that occurred in Quebec.
“I live in fear of waking up to a bunch of text messages and emails because there’s been a 100-car explosion in Chicago and 300,000 people are vaporized,” says Scott Smith, a researcher at the nonprofit group Water Defense and the inventor of Opflex, a foam sponge that absorbs oil and was used in the Gulf Coast after the BP oil spill. “Unfortunately, that is a very real possibility if something’s not done.”
Two weeks before the Casselton collision, Lynn Helms, the director of North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources and a chemical engineer, boasted that his agency was prepared to draft a white paper on the properties of Bakken crude “to dispel this myth that it is somehow an explosive, really dangerous thing to have traveling up and down rail lines.” Around the same time an agency spokeswoman was quoted as saying, “Crude is crude.”
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Scott Smith knew otherwise. Smith, a citizen-scientist whose work has focused on oil spills, was at home on Cape Cod when he saw images of the fiery explosions in Lac-Mégantic. Having worked on several oil-spill cleanups in the past – including the BP blowout, Italy’s Costa Concordia disaster, and China’s Dalian pipeline explosion in 2010 – he knew this incident was somehow different. According to Smith, when conventional crude oil spills or leaks it rarely goes up in flames. In fact, one method of dealing with offshore oil spills is to try to burn off the oil in the hope that doing so will minimize damage to marine ecosystems. But getting it to burn is often a significant challenge. “Conventional crude on the surface never ever explodes, let alone vaporizes people like Hiroshima,” Smith says. (Five of the 47 people killed in Lac-Mégantic were never found.)
Smith and a pair of colleagues drove up to Lac-Mégantic, where they took samples of the oil from the Chaudiere River. The samples were then tested at an independent lab in Ohio, and later shared with a small group of scientists, including a visiting researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The results showed very high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in the oil. Unsatisfied with the lack of information on the characteristics of Bakken crude – and unable to get answers – Smith took a trip to North Dakota and obtained samples of oil from a landowner with an oil well on his property. As he pumped oil out of the ground, Smith says, he could hear the gases escaping. Smith returned to North Dakota after the train collision outside of Casselton and spent 36 hours documenting the spill and taking samples.
Smith now has conducted detailed analyses of Bakken crude from the three accident sites in Quebec, North Dakota, and Alabama, along with baseline data. He says he is the only outside expert to have done so and has shared those lab results with Earth Island Journal. Even government agencies – including the US Department of Transportation (DOT), which is tasked with regulating oil by rail transport – have been largely kept in the dark about the qualities that make Bakken crude so volatile as well as how it varies throughout the formation. “Despite the energy industry making assurances to DOT more than two months ago, we still lack data we requested and that energy stakeholders agreed to produce,” a Department of Transportation spokesperson told Reuters in March.
All the samples collected and tested by Smith share the same high levels of VOCs and alkane gases in what Smith says are exceptional combinations. According to Smith, 30 to 40 percent of Bakken crude is made up of toxic and explosive gases. Typically these gases are separated out of the crude oil before transport. A recent report by the Pulitzer Prize-winning website Inside Climate News speculates that because of the whirlwind pace of production in North Dakota and the absence of processing facilities, volatile gases like propane are not being removed at the wellhead.
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There’s still a lot we don’t know about Bakken crude, Smith says. This includes the presence of metals, radioactive materials, and gases. Because of the varying depths of the Bakken formation, two wells a mile apart can produce crude oil with very different characteristics. This makes sampling and testing especially tricky. It also makes industry cooperation essential.
Smith still has vials of Bakken crude that he pumped out of the ground nearly a year ago. “When it gets above 80 degrees and you shake them,” he says, “it bends the top of the container. Any form of static electricity will ignite this stuff and blow it up.”
Independent reviews corroborate Smith’s findings. Chemists with California’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response examined Smith’s samples and concluded that the Bakken crude “resembles a typical crude oil that has been mixed with diesel or a diesel/gasoline mix. … Obviously, flammability and volatility are greater concerns with Bakken than with ‘typical’ heavier crudes.” In February The Wall Street Journal, based on its own analysis of data collected by the Capline Pipeline in Louisiana, reported that oil coming from the Bakken has significantly more combustible gases and a higher vapor pressure than oil from other formations. In early March, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB) issued its own findings from oil samples taken from the nine tank cars that did not derail in Lac-Mégantic. While the TSB does not contend, as Smith does, that the Bakken oil is significantly different from other light sweet crudes, the agency also found that oil coming out of the Bakken has a very low flashpoint – which means that it ignites easily or at a relatively low temperature – a level more similar to unleaded gasoline. When the rail cars went off the track in Lac-Mégantic, sending up sparks and static charges, it didn’t take much to set off explosions. “All of the conditions required for ignition to occur were present,” the TSB report concluded.
Yet little, if any, of this information would have been available to local officials or emergency responders in Lac-Mégantic. Material Safety Data Sheets contained contradictory information about the flammability of the oil onboard the train.According to a lawsuit filed by track owner Montreal, Maine & Atlantic, the shipping documents it was given stated that the oil had high flash and boiling points. The company says that if it had known of the oil’s volatility, it “would have implemented safety procedures and protocols that would have prevented the derailment.”
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Even the US government appears to be scrambling to understand precisely what makes the Bakken crude so dangerous. According to The Wall Street Journal, federal regulators seeking information about the flammability of Bakken crude have been rebuffed by the oil industry. When asked to respond to findings that Bakken crude may be especially volatile, a North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources spokeswoman, Alison Ritter, wrote in an email: “We do not have the expertise to analyze Bakken crude. Crude samples are submitted to us for possible third party analysis. It would be up to that independent analysis to make the determination as to the volatility.” Only in late March did the North Dakota Petroleum Council, an industry trade group, announce that it would be doing its own analysis of Bakken crude across 12 sites and six rail depots.
“For some reason this entire rail oil industry, they just fill these rail cars and send them without really knowing what’s in them,” Smith says. “And it’s the only industry I’m aware of that gets away with that.”
A map of the nation’s freight rail network looks like a diagram of the circulatory system, its 140,000 rail miles the blood vessels and capillaries connecting major cities to ports and refineries. At its heart is Chicago, which has more lines of track extending out than any other city. More than 500 freight trains and 800 passenger trains pass through the city every day. From there everything flows. Through Kansas and Oklahoma City to the Gulf Coast, where Kinder Morgan has plans to complete a 210,000-barrel-per-day rail terminal in Houston. Through Cleveland and Buffalo to ports on the Hudson and refineries in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware. North through Montreal to the Irving Oil Refinery in New Brunswick, where the train that leveled Lac-Mégantic was destined. Every day oil trains carrying up to 85,000 barrels of oil arrive in Albany, a city of about 100,000 people. A refinery in Philadelphia receives one-fifth of all oil produced in the Bakken and has plans to expand production and rail capacity. In January, an oil train derailed while crossing a bridge over the Schuylkill River, though no oil spilled. Other trains carrying Bakken crude move west from North Dakota to Washington, Oregon, and California.
For the oil industry the location of the Bakken is a blessing and a curse. It’s close to the Chicago hub, but about as far from ports and refineries as possible. This means the oil has to travel long distances, in some cases thousands of miles, and is subject to fluctuations in temperature and pressure, a factor that Smith says can contribute to its volatility. As temperatures rise, the oil warms and expands. As the rail cars move and shake, volatile compounds like propane and butane can separate from the oil and rise to the surface, collecting in the headspace above the liquid petroleum. A small puncture, leak, or derailment accompanied by a static charge or spark can set off an explosion.
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In the United States freight railroads are privately owned and the companies that operate them are responsible for track maintenance and upkeep. According to the General Accounting Office, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is able to inspect only two-tenths of one percent of the railroads’ operations each year. “So the ability to inspect the track regularly is impossible,” says Larry Mann, a rail safety lawyer who also serves on the FRA’s Rail Safety Advisory Committee. “And some areas of track are probably never inspected.”
In addition, most of the oil being transported from the Bakken is being shipped in DOT 111 tanker cars that have long been acknowledged as inadequate for transporting hazardous materials. A 1991 National Transportation Safety Board report stated: “The inadequacy of the protection provided by DOT 111A tank cars for certain dangerous products has been evident for many years in accidents investigated by the Safety Board.” Sometimes referred to as Pepsi-cans on wheels, the DOT 111 has a very thin shell – between a quarter- and a half-inch thick – and no head shields to prevent the cars from being punctured in case of a derailment. Yet there are still at least 228,000 DOT 111s on the rails; the industry has no choice but to use them or stop shipping Bakken crude. According to Mann, “It’s going to be quite a while before these cars are weeded out.”
Meanwhile, trains carrying Bakken crude continue to pass through major cities, small towns, and national parks. The Chicago-Indiana corridor is one example. Densely populated parts of the Northeast – including Philadelphia, Albany, and Buffalo – are another. “The most essential risk reduction factor of all is distance,” railway safety consultant Fred Millar says. “You don’t put a liquefied natural gas plant in the middle of a city. You don’t put a nuclear plant in the middle of city. In this case they [the railroads] say ‘the hell with it. Our property goes through your city,’ and they bring those risks right into our cities.”
They do so without the public and, in many cases, emergency response teams knowing. Railroads are not required to publicly disclose when and where they ship their freight. (In the wake of recent accidents, some railways have provided limited information to emergency response teams and local officials). They also have vigorously resisted efforts to force them to reroute hazardous material around densely populated areas. In 2005, Washington, DC passed an ordinance forcing CSX to reroute hazardous materials around the downtown. But the rail industry sued, then lobbied for passage of a federal bill that would preempt local control, essentially nullifying the DC ordinance. In 2007, Congress passed and President Bush signed an industry-friendly bill that allows the railroads to make routing decisions without public disclosure.
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“Because of security issues the routing is confidential,” Mann says. “We don’t know the extent to which there is rerouting. And if there is rerouting we don’t know where it’s being rerouted.”
Lack of information regarding the oil itself and its whereabouts can be multiplied across hundreds of towns and cities in North America. Randy Sawyer, the chief environmental health and hazardous materials officer for Contra Costa County in California, says the rail companies haven’t shared any information with his agency about when and where the oil will be moving. In the coming year, California expects to receive at least six oil trains per day, each carrying approximately 2.7 million gallons of crude oil, an increasing amount of it from the Bakken. Much of that could pass through Contra Costa County, which is home to four refineries and more than one million residents.
Sawyer says that, at a minimum, local officials need to know when and how often these trains will be arriving. Asked if his division is prepared to respond to a derailment like the one that occurred in Lac-Mégantic, he said: “I don’t know if anybody’s really prepared for something like that, to tell you the truth. That was a big, big fire.”
On the opposite coast, the mayor of Haverstraw, New York, Mike Kohut, is in a similar situation. About a year ago, CSX, which operates the rail line that passes through some of the Northeast’s most densely populated areas, held a meeting with local officials in Orange County and Rockland County. According to Kohut, CSX employees said they would be upgrading two railroad crossings in downtown Haverstraw to accommodate more train traffic. But they didn’t say why and he doesn’t recall any mention of Bakken crude oil. Since then, Kohut hasn’t received any information from CSX about shipments of Bakken crude. Kohut, who is also a member of the volunteer fire department, says: “Everyone would like to have more information on if it derails and the liquid is |
dent as the head of the car dealer association who covets Joan, he’s too crude to close the deal with her (and later fails basic pimphood by not even knowing how to set up her date with the trick). It falls to Lane to reel Joan in with a far slicker method – but then Lane’s desperate to cover up his embezzlement while Pete’s merely motivated by greed. Taking the advice that Roger had previously offered about how to woo clients, Lane confides to Joan that he just wants her to avoid the mistake he’s made his entire life, which is not to tell the truth when someone asks him what he wants. Appealing to Joan’s ego and need for security as a single mother, he suggests that she skip the $50,000 that he, oops, lets slip will be offered, and ask for a 5 percent partnership instead. “And here I thought you were trying to stop this because you have feelings for me,” Joan observes. Lane claims that’s precisely why he’s looking out for her interests rather than the firm’s, but it’s actually his own that he’s securing, while selling out the one true partner he had at SCDP – ironically, by making her a literal one.
Lane’s behavior may be the most disappointing, but at least he has fear of prison as his motive, while the man who allegedly loves Joan, Roger, continues to see women as mere sexual currency. Saying he won’t oppose it but also won’t pay for it, he takes the coward’s route of plausible deniability while rejecting the opportunity to defend Joan’s honor. Bert merely gives her the right of refusal, which I guess is commendable in an era before “No means no,” but he still observes that “this is a car, you can’t put a dollar figure on its significance” to the firm (although you apparently can on the value of human beings). I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to hear this from a man who said he was raised on the principle, “Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.”
As the hero of the show, it’s up to Don to play one, and he alone opposes the plan, literally slamming the door on the idea but failing to realize that his word isn’t as golden in decision-making as it is in ad campaigns. The man who famously stated that “if you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation” is brusquely informed by Pete that “the conversation doesn’t end just because you leave the room.”
Unlike the other partners playing God (and dog) behind closed doors like powerful men always do, when Don turns up at Joan's apartment, he shows his egalitarian side by identifying himself to her mother merely as Joan’s co-worker. However, Gail’s a traditional woman who submits to authority, and so she tells Joan to hustle herself out to talk to “her boss.” Neither we nor Don know yet that Joan has already hustled herself out to the real boss of the moment, Herb Rennet (a blob of a man whose name suggests a grassy cheese product), because she believed Pete’s lie that all the partners endorsed her doing so. “You’re a good one, aren’t you?” she marvels when Don tells her that Jaguar’s not worth her debasement and besides “who wants to be in business with people like that?” Ah, but you are, Don, you are.
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Don's partnerships continue to be the vexed question at the heart of the season. He deals with his partners’ rapacity by slamming doors and petulantly saying his “no” is final, a tactic that fails both with them and with Megan. Even if Don believes in a woman’s right to say no, he’s still struggling with her right to say yes, and the idea that Megan might have a real career that takes her away from meeting his needs for even a day is something he can’t wrap his slicked-back head around. In that he joins other men of his generation who struggled to adjust to women asserting their own desires, not just in a sexual way (as Megan does in the office one night), but in pursuing careers and self-fulfillment. “This is the way it works -- now you know,” Megan sums up after explaining what it means to be cast in a play, but Don interprets her statement as mere petulance and angrily responds, “Just keep doing whatever the hell you want.”
Illustrating the difference in the generations, Don’s angry judgment is Ginsberg’s excited epiphany, as observing Julia’s wantonness sparks the campaign idea and slogan they’ve failed to conjure for Jaguar despite late nights and lobsters (perhaps it was all the shellfish behavior that was the problem). “She just comes and goes as she pleases,” Ginsberg murmurs in realization, drawing a shocked response from Stan, who can only hear the sexual undertone and not the statement about women’s freedom. “Yeah, I got it,” Ginsberg affirms to himself, a claim that Stan, Don and the other men can’t make. Maladroit in social interactions, Ginsberg nevertheless shares with Peggy an outsider’s ability to observe others, distilling his observations into ads that effectively tap into consumers’ psyches.
As Ted Chaough approvingly says to Peggy, she writes campaigns as if every product was for her, rather than making them formulaic (just as Don, another outsider, pitches that cars aren’t just about function but desire). Quoting Emerson, he asserts that humans must be “a transparent eyeball,” taking in the world and letting it pass through them. Unlike most ad guys (including himself in previous episodes), Chaough is as good as his word, taking in Peggy’s work and worth, truly seeing her, and not just meeting her desires but even raising the ante. Having been seen and valued, it’s not surprising that she makes a decision that (contra Freddy) is about both work and feeling – her feelings about how she wants to be treated at work.
She tenders her resignation to Don at a very tender moment – after he’s realized not only that Joan has prostituted herself to help win Jaguar, but that he may not have won the account on talent at all. It’s hard to tell which would pain Don more: the feeling about Joan, or the work that wasn’t valued. We’d like to think it’s the former, but having said twice that the work will be sufficient to win the account and that he doesn’t want to win it as a result of Joan’s compliance, his ego seems to be in play as well.
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That ego rears its head again as he at first refuses to believe Peggy will really leave and then gives himself credit for “every single good thing that’s happened” to her before finally accepting her explanation that she’s merely doing what he himself would do and granting her that autonomy and equality of ambition. After having barked at her and taken her for granted – like that Buick of a wife that you rely on to get you from here to there – he shows his true feelings at last by bestowing a gentlemanly kiss on her hand. Unsentimentally and without fuss, Peggy slips out of the office, giving the doors she’s passed through one last look before smiling to herself with pleasure at her courage.
Peggy’s quiet triumph of self-determination is a lovely note for the show to end on, one underlined by the Kinks’ classic ode to a woman’s erotic power, “You Really Got Me,” playing over the credits. But while Megan and Peggy assert themselves and seem to gain autonomy, the reality is that their fates still rest in the hands of men who won’t overlook their gender. Megan’s subjected to a humiliating audition that begins with a cold appraisal of her body, and Peggy may soon discover her new agency is even more Chaough-vanistic than SCDP.
But it’s Joan’s story that sadly underlines the circumscribed state of women, circa 1966. Having kept the firm running smoothly for 13 years, she deserves to be made a junior partner on those merits. But instead she must sleep her way into the position, and not even with a powerful man she desires like Roger (who seems never to have considered rewarding her in that fashion) but with a repulsive man who sees her as a pair of breasts between which he symbolically hangs a tiny jeweled chain. “He’s not bad,” Pete reassures her in advance, to which she answers, “He’s doing this, isn’t he?” Having equated what he’s asking Joan to do with a drunken sexual mistake, Pete can’t see the hideousness of either the act or the man that Joan has to indulge.
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But we can see it, as well as the pain on Joan’s face when this man touches her. As powerful as Joan has always been in certain ways, she remains a prisoner of her body, which men fetishize and seek to possess. While her rape by Greg remains perhaps the most shocking and painful moment of the series, seeing Joan allow her body to be used in this fashion is worse because of what it suggests about her character. We’re not long past the time when all women who gained a position of any power were accused of sleeping their way into it. To literalize that degrading accusation in Joan renders her less than we’ve always thought her to be, and makes her better-late-than-never rejection of the hideous Greg seem less of a triumphant turning point. Joan is now in partnership with a group of men who used to respect and even fear her (as Don admitted last week) but who will now always see her as the woman who slept with a repugnant client in order to get ahead. She’s gained a literal promotion only to be demoted in their estimation.
This commodification of women is epitomized by the Jaguar campaign that Ginsberg has hit on and which Don pitches with his trademark dramatic persuasion. As men selling to other men, they take the male perspective, flipping the power equation so that women are the ones holding it, just as beautiful cars have the power to entice and enthrall: “Oh this car, this thing, gentlemen, what price would we pay, what behavior would we forgive? If they weren’t pretty, if they weren’t temperamental, if they weren’t beyond our reach and a little out of our control, would we love them like we do? Jaguar – at last something beautiful you can truly own.”
By the end of the episode, some women walk free while others seem “truly owned,” bound by chains of gold, yet the men remain unchanged. As the one possible exception, Don alternates between being chivalristic and chauvinistic – in the former state, he suggests what women should do, and in the latter he tells them what to do, but he fails to ask them what they want to do, and he doesn't want to hear it when they tell him anyway. This lack of curiosity to know what the other side feels underlies the very different ways the two genders view each other, with the men seeing women as objects of desire and the women seeing the men as obstacles to their desires.
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The freelancers pitch ideas that extol mistresses who do “what wives won’t,” but who does for women what husbands won’t? Pete’s miserable in the “cemetery” of suburbia and wants an escape pad for infidelity in Manhattan, while Trudy wants to make more babies (so much so that she has her jammies on at dinner). Freddy warns Peggy that “car guys are a bunch of creeps,” but she merely responds that “they’re all a bunch of creeps.” (And seeing this episode, who can blame her?) Even the genial Freddy -- whose reappearance in the show feels like a balm after hearing the partners coolly conspire to sell Joan -- encourages Peggy to leave her job while harboring the intention to apply as her replacement.
Herb Rennet tells Pete and Ken that Joan and he “would both like the opportunity to spend the night together” with the confidence of a man whose power has overridden his ugliness so often that he really believes gorgeous women desire him. No wonder Don is trying to cook up an ad campaign in which the Jaguar’s weaknesses are sold as strengths and the (male) Chevalier Blanc client wonders why a woman would give a man anything for Valentine’s Day.
It’s Joan who puts her perfectly manicured finger on these clashing perspectives when Herb makes a laughable attempt to be seductive, calling her Helen of Troy to his sultan of Araby. Diplomatically avoiding the question of how closely each of them resembles those characters, Joan nevertheless quietly observes that “those are two different stories.”
As they always have been, and probably always will be.Re: CHAI fund and advisory board
From:[email protected] To: [email protected], [email protected] CC: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Date: 2012-04-30 16:38 Subject: Re: CHAI fund and advisory board
It's a bit vague in the documents Ira provided. I can't tell if he would make equity/debt investments or just grants, but I got the sense during the Board meeting that he would like the flexibility to make both. ----- I'm a little confused--an investment fund or an innovation fund? Probably both are bad, but they seem different in the pitch and liklihood that people would give $. On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 9:21 PM, Doug Band <[email protected]> wrote: > Great stuff > > It would be hard to imagine a worse idea than ira magaziner running an > investment fund of any kind not to mention one under this scenario > > Good luck with this > > From: Amitabh Desai [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Friday, April 27, 2012 08:03 PM > To: Bruce Lindsey <[email protected]>; Laura Graham > <[email protected]>; Doug Band; Justin Cooper; Dennis Cheng > <[email protected]>; [email protected] > <[email protected]> > Subject: CHAI fund and advisory board > > > You probably already are aware but just to be sure: yesterday in the CHAI > board meeting, Ira discussed the formation of an advisory board for CHAI – > he said he is targeting 10 people to each give $500k per year for 3 years. > He mentioned the names below. He also said he is looking to do a series of > dinners on the west coast, east coast, and overseas to raise money for a > CHAI Innovation Fund that would “invest” in projects / businesses that CHAI > deems worthy. He said the first dinner is on west coast with 30 people and > hosted by Christian Anthony who he said he found via the Brown University > alumni network. Given the enormous range of things that Ira is proposing the > Fund be empowered to invest in, it occurred to me that IF the organization > is comfortable with the creation of such a Fund bearing WJC’s name (via > CHAI), then why not have CF do it, so that CF can decide whether to invest > in CHAI projects or also in other things like a farm in Africa, etc – and > also to give WJC better control of it? The proposed CHAI Innovation Fund > seems poised to go well beyond what we would consider to be the core > traditional work of CHAI on HIV/AIDS, malaria, etc (at least based on the > investment examples in the documents Ira provided) and I therefore just > wondered why we’d cede this to CHAI to do/control. It’s probably safe to > assume that any Fund that bears WJC’s name will attract “investors” or > donors or whatever we call them. Maybe I am over-thinking this, but just > wanted to brainstorm aloud and I’m happy to drop this if it’s not worth > discussing further. Thanks, Ami > > > > NAMES IRA MENTIONED FOR CHAI ADVISORY BOARD (I probably am misspelling > these): > > - Craig Colgate at Pegasus Capital (Ira found via Brown U) > > - Bob Selander (former CEO of Mastercard) > > - Tood Fisher, Chief Admin Officer at KKR (also via Brown U) > > - Bill Shuster at Evercore > > - Bob Mancini, CEO of Cogentics (formerly at Goldman) > > - Jeff Kushner from Blue Mountain Capital in the UKOTTAWA—The Tories are threatening a fall election after Opposition senators stripped contentious provisions from the Harper government’s massive budget implementation bill. Senator Doug Finley, the Tory campaign director, said a fall election is a distinct possibility if senators refuse to pass the bill as is. “Absolutely,” Finley said in an interview moments after opposition members on the Senate finance committee voted to erase four controversial measures from the budget bill. “I can’t think of anything more important than what’s in that budget bill.” The full Senate could vote to overturn the changes made by the finance committee but it’s not certain the Conservatives have the numbers to do that.
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While the Tories now dominate the upper chamber, they do not have an absolute majority. Should the Senate uphold the committee changes, Finley said the amended bill would have to go back to the House of Commons, which would likely return the bill in its original form to the Senate. Finley said he’s hopeful senators will eventually bow to the will of the elected Commons, which has already approved the bill. But if they don’t, he said: “Let’s dance.”
“We’re ready to go to an election if we have to. The buses, the planes, the trains, the money, the boardroom — everything’s ready to rock and roll,” said Finley. “We’re in good shape for an election.” During clause-by-clause examination of the 900-plus-page budget bill, five Liberal senators were joined by Progressive Conservative Senator Lowell Murray to pull four measures. They include provisions to allow for the potential privatization of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) and to end Canada Post’s monopoly on international mail. Opposition senators also rejected measures that would diminish the scope of federal environmental assessments and would allow retroactive changes to some excise taxes. All four measures were defeated on tie votes of 6-6.
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Murray and Liberal senators have strenuously objected that the massive omnibus bill is larded with all sorts of non-budgetary items that should have been presented as stand-alone legislation. Murray told the committee he doesn’t share Liberal concerns about the impact of the bill on Canada Post. But he voted with Liberals to remove the provision because “it doesn’t belong in a budget bill.” He also tried to amend the provision regarding AECL, requiring that the government seek parliamentary approval before proceeding with any plan to sell off all or part of the Crown corporation. When his amendment was rejected, he joined the Liberals in voting to pull the AECL provisions from the bill altogether.
Read more about:Nashville Game Night
Meeple Mountain hosts the largest, and one of the longest running, Game Nights in the city of Nashville on the 3rd Wednesday of every month. Started in 2014, it has grown from 10 or 15 people to more than 100 people every month (with spikes up to 140). Each month we partner with a different publisher to give away copies of some of their hottest titles!
Nashville Game Night has even been featured in an evening news segment on Nashville’s News Channel 5.
Nashville Game Night is open to gamers of all beliefs and backgrounds and our goal is to cultivate a community that can come together over our shared love of board games. Register for Game Night today!
Check out all of our past events, and see if you recognize anyone in our Nashville Game Night photo galleries.
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Meeple Mountain’s Past SponsorsDuring Paris Fashion Week this past June, COMME des GARÇONs HOMME Plus unveiled its first footwear collaboration with Nike. The partnered offering under the Japanese imprint’s Homme Plus line takes on the signature Dunk High silhouette, which is wrapped in a deep black and cream white colorway coupled with transparent PVC panels on the side. In addition, Swoosh branding is embellished on the tongue alongside “CDG” lettering at the heelcap.
According to a recent The New York Times profile of Atlanta rapper Lil Yachty, the pair will apparently cost $320 USD. An official release date for the COMME des GARÇONS HOMME Plus x Nike Dunk has yet to be announced. Nonetheless, get a closer look at the high-top iteration below and let us know if it’s worth the cop.The Honolulu skyline is exploding; it's actually changing as you read this. Where parking lots, warehouses and palm trees once stood, construction cranes are now ready to build 21 condo properties. Most of them are currently in some stage of construction or planning on about 100 acres of near-coastal land from Kakaako to Ala Moana. The projects are expected to take place over the next 15 years, but will probably take longer than that.
The condo units will certainly feature gorgeous views of Honolulu -- from the Koolau mountains on one side, to Ala Moana beach on the other, and Diamond Head, the city's iconic volcano cone, on the east to the west side of Oahu -- but they'll cost you a pretty penny.
Take the 36-story Waiea tower, for example, where prices range from $1.5 million to $20 million per unit, with a two-story Grand Penthouse up for grabs at around $100 million (private swimming pool included), according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
While builders and investors are excited about the developmental gold rush, critics wonder if these are real estate opportunities for Hawaii residents (where most in the middle class are "financially underwater"), or for wealthy entrepreneurs from Asia and elsewhere. And what this will mean for Honolulu's already-fatigued traffic infrastructure.
The height limit for buildings varies in Honolulu, depending on where you build in relation to Diamond Head, but many limits are set to about 350 to 400 feet, because "city planners wanted to ensure that Diamond Head [which is 761 feet] was not hidden or overwhelmed by buildings," architect Scott R. Wilson told Honolulu Magazine.
Still, you can't stop progress, and the renderings of the expansive/expensive views of Honolulu (some of the buildings haven't been built yet) sure make us drool. Below, feel free to live like a billionaire vicariously through them.
Waiea tower:
Overlooking Ala Moana Beach Park, Waiea will reach 36 floors when it's completed in 2016. Its name means "water of life," according to landowner Howard Hughes, and alludes to the freshwater ponds that were in the area in a time before skyscrapers.
Amenities: An ocean-view pool, fitness center with yoga rooms, locker room with a sauna, theater and performance space, indoor golf simulator and library.
Highest price: $100 million for a two-story penthouse with private swimming pool.
ONE Ala Moana:
This two-tower condo unit, disguised as one, is currently being built on top of the world's largest open-air mall, the Ala Moana Shopping Center. Unless you got in early, the 205 units in this 23-story ultra-luxury condo are all taken (having completely sold out within 29 hours).
Amenities: The "amenities deck" offers 27 activities, from a yoga studio and putting green to a library and den for reading, a shopping salon for those meetings with your private shopper, jogging path, infinity swimming pool, dining area, wine-tasting room, and cabanas for barbecues.
Special neighbor: Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and wife, Priscilla Chan, bought several units here earlier this year.The hits keep coming for the Bruins, serving as a harsh reminder of the dangers of the NHL lockout.
Goalie Tuukka Rask recently suffered a groin injury while playing in Europe, and now forward Patrice Bergeron is the latest to be bitten by the injury bug overseas.
NESN's Naoko Funayama reports that Bergeron has an upper-body injury, and he is day-to-day.
Patrice Bergeron (HC Lugano) has upperbody injury. Day-to-day. Missed last game but practiced today. Questionable for tomorrow's game. — Naoko Funayama (@NaokoFunayama) October 25, 2012
It's not expected to be serious, though, as a team source tells Funayama that the injury sounds minor and he could be back as soon as Friday. The game in question Friday also happens to be against HC Davos, which features NHL stars Rick Nash and Joe Thornton.
Bergeron is currently playing with Lugano HC in Switzerland. The 2012 Selke award winner has six goals and five assists in just five games, totaling a plus-13 rating as well.Hollywood star Mel Gibson has reportedly lashed out at a female photographer outside a cinema in Sydney.
The Daily Telegraph claims Gibson, 59, shoved and verbally abused its photographer Kristi Miller after she took his photo outside the Palace Verona Cinema on trendy Oxford Street in Paddington.
Miller, a mother-of-three, said she thought Gibson was going to punch her in the face during the incident.
"He was spitting in my face as he was yelling at me, calling me a dog, saying I'm not even a human being and I will go to hell," Miller told the Telegraph.
"He swore and called me a c---, it was non-stop, he didn't even breath."
The newspaper said Gibson accused the photographer of invading his space and disrespecting him.
Gibson's girlfriend, 24-year-old champion US equestrian vaulter Rosalind Ross, was reportedly forced to intervene and was heard apologising.
The incident has been reported to police but it is unknown if any action will be taken.
Gibson is in Australia ahead of the filming of World War II drama Hacksaw Ridge, which he is set to direct.
Send your photos or video to [email protected]
Mel Gibson in Sydney in July. (AAP) (AAP)
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019In the early days of the cold war, many experts in the US government believed that the Kremlin orchestrated the world's communist movements. The idea was called "monolithic communism", and it turned out to be wrong.
The fallacy was exposed when rivalries emerged between communist regimes in East and South Asia. In 1972 the White House changed course and made one of the most important moves of the cold war: Nixon's visit to China. By then, though, the US had spent years failing to appreciate the real nature of its enemies and the threat they posed.
Today, the US and its allies have a new enemy: the Taliban. As Nato soldiers become bogged down in the hardest close-quarter combat they've seen in years, Afghanistan's insurgents have acquired a familiar characteristic. In both the media and parliament, they are routinely described as though they were a monolithic enemy. This isn't just likely to be counter-productive: it may even harm Nato's war effort.
For one thing, stereotyping the Taliban makes it seem like a larger fighting force than it actually is. As Seth Jones, a US counterinsurgency expert who has advised senior Nato commanders, says: "Reading the newspapers you would think the Taliban is ten feet tall and invincible." The truth is much more complex.
The Taliban has grown in popularity, and it can be tenacious and, at times, extremely effective. But it is increasingly more fragmented, in part because it has accepted fighters with a wide range of motives for joining, from personal profit to vengeance to religious fundamentalism. Although some leaders want restore the Taliban regime of the late 1990s, many others just want to organise their lives around a conservative Islamist creed.
In fact, there are three disparate groups of insurgents fighting in Afghanistan today. There is the "real" Taliban, led by Mullah Omar and organised by the so-called Quetta Shura, a council of insurgency leaders who meet in Baluchistan and, recently, in Karachi. The "real" Taliban operates in the south and has collaborated with drug-smugglers and other criminals for several years.
Then there is the so-called Haqqani network, led by the former mujahideen warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Siraj Haqqani. They fight mainly in the east. Third, there is a collection of insurgent groups which includes al-Qaida. Some analysts estimate that there are only around 1,000 hardcore al-Qaida fighters – a fraction of the 10,000 fighters thought to be part of the overall insurgency.
Although these disparate groups collaborate, they also fight one another. They do not have the same aims, except in the broadest sense of opposing Nato. Nor do they use the same tactics: intelligence reports suggest that Mullah Omar has encouraged his followers to use as little violence as possible towards the local population, to avoid losing popular support.
Acknowledging this political complexity is necessary for the war effort. If all insurgents are seen solely as the Taliban – as a monolithic group of fighters plotting the next 9/11 – there's no option but to fight them to the death using all the force that Nato can muster. They cannot be contained, so they must be eradicated, the argument goes. Such an approach wouldn't require any civilian reconstruction, because if every insurgent is a crazy Islamist hell-bent on anti-western terrorism, then there's little point in improving their lot.
Nor does that approach require any political outreach. After all, who talks to nihilistic terrorists? But it would require an additional 300,000 troops, a figure so high the government would need to reinstate national service. Given that the public is unlikely to bear either such a cost or the necessary slash-and-burn warfare, it would merely be a matter of time before the Nato mission became unsustainable.
However, if the insurgency is seen for what it is – a complex phenomenon that has drawn in a range of actors, including some fanatical Islamists – then it's possible to create a counterinsurgency strategy that relies not only on military means, but also on civilian reconstruction and a political solution.
Such a strategy wouldn't require hundreds of thousands of (non-existent) troops. Nor would it require the complete (and probably impossible) defeat of the insurgents. For both of these reasons, such a strategy is more likely to succeed and win public support.
The White House took far too long to realise that its analysis of communism was flawed. Once it did, it brought about a supremely important shift in the balance of power. Nato leaders need to recognise that the fundamental tenet upon which that shift was based – that the enemy isn't a monolithic bloc – is equally valid in Afghanistan today.
• Daniel Korski's new policy brief, Shaping Europe's Afghan
Surge, is available to download here.Before I delve into the topic, I want to offer a warning. This could be painful to read. It was certainly painful to write and research. I’ll be discussing the psyches of the most openly racist and xenophobic people to ever walk this Earth, and I’ll be using primary sources to do so. For this reason, if you’re easily disturbed, I recommend you read no further. If not, then please continue.
I’ll start by discussing how I collected information. You may have seen VICE’s Elle Reeve reporting (video) from behind the scenes of the Alt-Right in Charlottesville. This paper is basically the less-courageous internet edition of that.
The circle of Alt-Righters that I analyzed can be found on Reddit in a subreddit called “r/DebatetheAltRight.” Since their previous bastion, “r/AltRight,” was banned from Reddit approximately half a year ago for violating the Reddit Terms of Service (info), DebatetheAltRight has become the de facto home of the movement on Reddit. While it claims to be a place for outsiders to question the positions of the Alt-Right, the subreddit realistically functions as a forum for them to converse amongst themselves.
I used Reddit because it is a comfortable habitat for Alt-Righters, and it permits a look at the actual members of the movement, not just the leaders and public faces. Additionally, using Reddit instead of an Alt-Right publication ensured that my research wouldn’t give a cent in revenue to the movement.
One might reason that you can’t judge a group simply by its online presence. In most cases, this is true. However, the Alt-Right describes itself openly as a primarily internet-based group. Geographically, they are spread so thinly that meeting and organizing in-person is infeasible. This is why rallies, especially en masse such as in Charlottesville, are incredibly rare. So yes, for most groups, analyzing online behavior gives a poor representation of what the group actually is, but for the Alt-Right, it is actually most honest.
In displaying my evidence to back up my arguments, I will often use direct quotes from users. I have done the best I can to cite quotes that most strongly echo the views of the entirety of the movement. They aren’t just one person’s opinion. The way I ensured this was by (1) looking for corroborating quotes, and (2) viewing the “scores” the comments gained. (Reddit uses a scoring system that allows users to vote on the quality of content)
So why am I writing this? After all, it is a difficult topic to discuss. It’s exhausting and disturbing, especially when primary sources are used. Additionally, there is the chance that, by giving publicity to these people, I could unintentionally promote their movement. However, I believe writing about the Alt-Right is valuable for two reasons.
One: The boat has sailed on giving them publicity. Accusations of the President being a racist “Alt-Right-enabler” are unlikely to end soon, and the shock and outrage over the violence in Charlottesville is not likely to disappear quickly.
Two: Understanding something is the first step to eliminating fear of it. Because the Alt-Right openly uses fear as a tactic to further their cause, reducing the fear they elicit is a necessary step to curbing their influence.
If you believe that covering this topic was a bad idea, please feel free to constructively express those feelings to me in the comments. I will be sure to consider them.
With that, I will begin my discussion.
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. — Marie Curie
Who are the Alt-Right?
In truth, the Alt-Right is not an entity in and of itself. Rather, it exists as a coalition of Nazis, Confederates, White Nationalists, Klansmen, fascists, and even some simply far-right Republicans. Importantly, not all Nazis are Alt-Righters, and not all Alt-Righters are Nazis. That goes for each of the categories in the coalition.
The one factor that defines this coalition is a belief in the “14 Words,” which are essentially a thesis statement for the movement. The words are “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Taken at face value, the statement is innocent enough. There is no overt reference to violence, or even to racism. These factors only rear their heads in the interpretation of the words.
Here is a screenshot from a Reddit conversation that may add some understanding to how the Alt-Right views the world.
Link To Thread The “Socialist” reference refers to the Original Poster’s Socialist tag.
The yellow-highlighted comment is powerfully representative of what the Alt-Right is. They believe that an ethnically homogeneous society is a good society, and that diversity causes animosity and discord.
Here is another, more thorough description of what the Alt-Right label means, explained by a White Nationalist redditor (with some corrections for typos and grammar).
The Alt Right is simply an umbrella of right wing ideologies that are explicitly pro-white and fight for white ethnic interests. Mainstream conservatives (that is, cuckservatives) won’t touch this issue with a ten-foot pole.
The Alt Right has its share of autistic shitposters, don’t get me wrong, but it’s an intellectual movement with a diverse array of opinion. However, we’re all in agreement on one thing: the need to preserve and protect white people of European descent. This was a no-brainer position that anybody would have held even half a century ago. Now it’s considered grotesquely immoral because the disease of Globalist Leftism has infected our society with to destroy white identity. The Left has efficiently organized every minority group against white interests while simultaneously indoctrinating white racial consciousness out of us through the media and academia, and they’ve been deadly successful. The Alt Right is a pushback against our ethnic dispossession. It’s an attempt to jumpstart white people into fighting for their ethnic interests the same way other races do, because our current policies are a net detriment to whites.
Many will blame Jews for the anti-white policies and rhetoric today, and they’re not entirely wrong. Jews are highly overrepresented in organized efforts to do this, but I do think people tend to get tunnel vision about Jews. Jewish influence wouldn’t be so dangerous if there wasn’t some loss of racial confidence in ourselves, and I think there are many factors for this, two devastating world wars being some of the key culprits here.
The ethnic question is our primary concern. Forms of economics and governance tend to come second to this, as is evident by the wild variation in what Alt Right supporters will support in this regard.
The only absolutely essential position to be Alt Right is to be explicitly pro-white. Everything else is negotiable, even if you do find common threads regarding Jewish influence, ethnostates, a disdain for SJW’s, etc.
So far, this is the most in-depth and honest explanation of what the Alt-Right is from the perspective of an Alt-Righter. It comprehensively illustrates the beliefs Alt-Righters hold — or claim to hold — regarding society.
For a more succinct and official description, I viewed the official purpose statement text on the sidebar of the subreddit. Interestingly, this definition of Alt-Rightism addresses gender relations, however vaguely.
Alt-right is an umbrella term for a variety of ideologies outside of mainstream American conservatism and classical liberalism. It has a deep philosophical and intellectual background and can encompass various economic theories from socialism to libertarianism, and various ideals, from fascism to direct democracy. The alt-right does hold a few essential positions, with the primary being |
the ban has been set as airlines will need time to implement the changes. But the Department for Transport says anyone flying from one of these locations must be prepared for it to be enforced immediately.
Does it just apply to direct flights?
No, it also applies to transfer flights. In other words, those travelling into the UK via one of the banned countries – and those travelling from a banned country via the UK to another destination.
Why is this happening?
The decision follows a similar ban by Donald Trump’s administration. The US ban – which comes into force from Saturday afternoon – applies to ten airports in eight countries, also including Qatar and Kuwait. The US said it was concerned about recent attempts by terrorist groups to circumvent airport security and detonate bombs on planes – including the downing of a plane in Egypt in 2015 – and the armed attacks against airports in Brussels and Istanbul last year. US officials cited the failed attempt to down a plane in Somalia last year when a laptop containing a bomb was passed to a passenger after they had gone through security.
Why these countries?
Those included in the UK ban – all of which have large Muslim populations – are deemed to pose a high terrorist threat. The Government refused to explain why it did not follow the US example and extend the ban to Kuwait and Qatar.
Why is it safer to stow a laptop in the hold?
Security sources say that if a bomb is taken into the cabin, it takes only a minor explosion to blow out a window and bring the plane down. An explosion in the luggage hold is likely to be less catastrophic. It is also much harder for a terrorist to detonate the bomb if it is in the hold. At most airports passengers are told to take out their laptops and electronic devices from hand luggage when they go through security. But terrorists have still found ways to smuggle laptops containing explosive devices through security, without being detected by X-ray scanners.
How many flights are affected?
The Department for Transport said it could not disclose this for security reasons. But it is thought fewer than 200 flights a day travel from these six countries to the UK. Six UK airlines – British Airways, EasyJet, Jet2.com, Monarch, Thomas Cook and Thomson – will be affected, and eight overseas airlines: Turkish Airlines, Pegasus Airways, Atlas-Global Airlines, Middle East Airlines, Egyptair, Royal Jordanian, Tunis Air and Saudia.
How will the ban work?
This is where it becomes more sketchy. The Department for Transport has left it up to the airlines. Government officials have advised passengers who plan to travel to the UK from these countries to check with their airline, and to check the size of their devices. Travellers using check-in desks will be advised whether they need to stow their devices in the hold. Airlines are likely to arm staff with perspex letterbox-style tools to ensure devices do not exceed the size limit. There will also need to be secondary checks at the departure gate for passengers who checked in online. This is where the ban is likely to cause the most trouble – because these passengers will have only hand luggage and will be told they cannot take large devices on board.
What if my electronic device is too big?
This again depends on the airlines, but they appear to have been caught off-guard. BA last night said its flights would continue to operate as normal but urged passengers to check-in in good time and monitor its website for updates.
Should I cancel my flights to these countries?
No. The Department for Transport says it is not advising against flying to these countries. But it has urged those with imminent travel plans to contact their airline for more information.
How long will the ban last?
No timeframe has been given. But – as with the US – the ban is unlikely to be lifted until the threat recedes.
Will I have to pay extra to check a bag in?
Passengers could face extra costs if they want to take these types of devices away with them. Many travellers hoping to save money by choosing hand luggage-only fares now face extra baggage fees.
Will my gadgets still be insured?
Passengers should contact their insurer before putting expensive devices in checked baggage.Hide Transcript Show Transcript
WEBVTT Steve -- it's alleging that the "Ag-Gag" Law is Unconstitutional. The questionat hand here is this:... should people be allowed to lie on a job application --- with thesole purpose of using a hiddencamera to uncover animalcruelty.PETA and three other activist groups are suing the state of Iowa -- over the Ag- Gag law. Itmakes it illegal -- to conductundercover animal cruelty investigations. <THEY JUSTWANT TO COME IN AND TRY TO PIECETOGETHER SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T LOOK GOOD, AND PUT IT IN A BADLIGHT.> Dave Struthers -- speaks on behalf of many farmers... Whenhe says he doesn't want undercover reporters -- working on his farm.<I THINK IT'S ABSOLUTELY WRONG.> Karen andDenny Mckilligan Developnutrional products to help keep animals healthy.<WHAT BUSINESS WOULD WANT SOMEONE INDIRECT OPPOSITION WORKING INTHEIR BUSINESS AS A SECRETAGENT?> But PETA -- disagrees.Take a look at this video --they uncovered -- in an Iowainvestigation.<THE STATE OF IOWA SHOULD BE ASHAMED FORTRYING TO KEEP SECRET THE INHUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS INSLAUGHTER HOUSES AND FACTORYFARMS.> The ACLU -- says this isa first- amendment issue. <HOWIMPORTANT IT IS THAT PEOPLE KNOWWHERE THEIR FOOD IS COMING FROM,HOW WORKERS IN OUR STATES ARE BEING TREATED, WHAT ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS THEREARE, THOSE ARE IMPORTANT THINGS FOR PEOPLE TO KNOW.> Farmersargue the undercover practice --is dishonest. But Fowler and theACLU -- see it differently. <YOU DON'TEVEN HAVE TO DIRECTLY LIE, YOUJUST DON'T HAVE TO TELL THE WHOLE TRUTH.> Farmers likeStruthers argue -- this lawsuit -- is NOT about protectinganimals.<THEY WANT TO CAUSE MORE HASSLES FOR FARMERS. PRIMARILY LIVESTOCK PRODUCERS, ALOT OF THESE GROUPS HAVESOMETHING AGAINST ANIMALPRODUCTION AND ANIMAL CONSUMPTION.> <I THINK IT'S A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY.> Iowa is one of six states topass "Ag-Gag" Laws. Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina are the only ones that still standtoday. Similar laws inIdaho, Utah and Wyoming havebeen struck down. Steve?We continue to follow the story
Advertisement Animal rights, free speech groups sue over 'ag-gag' law Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Animal rights and free speech organizations have sued the state of Iowa over legislation known as the “ag-gag” law, saying it’s unconstitutional. The Animal Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Center for Food Safety and Public Justice filed the lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Des Moines. “They just want to come in and try to piece together something that doesn’t look good and put it in a bad light,” said farmer Dave Struther, former president of the Iowa Pork Association. The lawsuit challenges a 2012 law that made it illegal to get a job at a livestock farm through misrepresentation to conduct an animal cruelty undercover investigation. Karen McKilligan, along with her husband, develops nutritional products to keep animals healthy. “What business would want someone with malicious intent or someone who is in direct opposition working in their business as a secret agent?” McKilligan said. But the groups claim Iowa's law violates their constitutional free speech and equal protection rights. “The state of Iowa should be ashamed for trying to keep secret the inhumane treatment of animals in slaughterhouses and factory farms,” said Jeff Kerr, general counsel to PETA. “How important it is that people know where their food is coming from, how workers in our states are being treated, what environmental concerns there are?” said Veronica Fowler, communications director for the ACLU of Iowa. “Those are important things for people to know.” Farmers argue the undercover practice is dishonest, but the ACLU argues, “you don’t even have to directly lie. You just don’t have to tell the whole truth.” Struthers said the lawsuit is not about protecting animals but rather causing more hassles for farmers, primarily livestock producers. “A lot of these groups have something against animal production and animal consumption,” Struthers said. “I think it’s a waste of time and money.” The lawsuit names the governor, whose spokeswoman didn't immediately respond to a message, and the attorney general, whose spokesman said they haven't seen the lawsuit. Iowa is one of six states to pass such legislation. Federal courts have struck down similar laws in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming.A videogame which allows your character to grow old and die
How much control do players want when it comes to their character’s lives? Sure, we can alter appearances, choose names, and even make decisions that alter reputations. But what if you could play as a character until his last dying breath leaves his body due to old age?
There is an MMO in development that has completed funding on Kickstarter named Chronicles of Elyria. This game is so unique in comparison to traditional MMOs because it allows each player to have a unique story and experience that is tailored to their decisions.
Sure, games such as Fable have allowed players to make decisions that affected how good or evil they were, but Chronicles of Elyria takes decision making to a whole different level of personalization and player engagement.
So many factors contribute to a player’s experience in this game, such as restricted amounts of resources, a fluctuating economy, and non-repeatable quests. Even the environment is affected, unlike typical worlds that players are used to which respawn items within minutes.
There’s also one unique feature that’s bound to generate a lot of noise among the gaming community that the game contains.
Everything is destructible. Everything is immersive. If you pick up an item to move it, it will remain there until you pick it back up or someone else moves it. There are no fast travel options. If you want to get to a specific location, you will have to make your way there the old fashioned way. If it’s too far for a day trip, you can set up camp overnight.
Each time you log in there is a dynamic world waiting for you. Local, regional, and national conflicts are continuously unfolding, giving birth to repeated opportunities for you to change the course of history.
There are so many specific details involved with this game that players would not normally consider when adventuring. Typically, each player has the same quest line that leads them to become a hero. Chronicles of Elyria has no level cap, so there is no “maxing out” your character.
The quest lines different for each person since every decision they make affects the story. Not all players will end up being a hero, king, or warrior.
With limited inventory, hunger and thirst, drowning and fatigue, and dangerous landscapes containing both sweltering heat and frigid cold, a character must be truly heroic to become a hero. The riches are real and adventurers can become the wealthiest and most powerful in the world – if they can survive the harsh environments.
A game this unique is very exciting, because as gamers, we are all accustomed to playing the same story lines as our friends with minimal differences. This game, however, allows everyone to embrace variety and freedom of choice to the fullest extent.
The developers have released a fresh new trailer for the game which really looks promising and although the game made some really high promises, the trailer suggests it might end up delivering on them.
Your fighting techniques and abilities will vary based off your character’s experience and your personal decisions in combat. Even when players are offline, your character’s world is still alive.
Another concept that makes this game so unique is the epic 10 year story line. Your character will age from 15 up to 100 years old over the course of a few real-time months. Seasons will change, your diet will affect your weight, and what you do in the world will determine what the game throws at you next.
Once a character is killed (from a fight, for example), your soul will wander until it finds your body. Deaths do affect your overall lifespan, shortening it each time you die. However, once a character finally passes away from old age, their soul will be reincarnated into a new toon that players can create.
Keep in mind that you also don’t want to waste your character’s life away, because you’ll have to pay for it. Literally. Unlike other MMORGPs that require a monthly paid subscription, you have to pay for each spark of life.
CoE hearkens back to the coin-op arcade model where, for $30, players buy a Spark of Life that grants a soul the opportunity to live for between 10 and 14 months, before establishing your Soul in a new character of your choosing. Note: 1 Spark of Life comes with purchase of the game.
Chronicles of Elyria is a fascinating MMO that fully engages players further than any previous game has accomplished. I am excited to see how well players take to this sort of game, and if it will keep people interested and engaged for many months as other MMOs have done in the past.
You can find out more about the game on its Kickstarter page.Goodness. As the mayor likes to say: enough’s enough. On Thursday I served Rob Ford with a libel notice, the first step in the process of pursuing a defamation lawsuit. I also served Vision TV, which twice broadcast Ford’s vile and defamatory remarks to Conrad Black even though their interview was filmed days before it aired.
Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale. ( TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO )
It had become clear to me that, if I had done nothing, the mayor would make his smears some sort of political talking point. His comments to Black were no one-time slip; they seemed to be the first shots in a bewildering campaign against my good name. At a Tuesday news conference, he pointedly said he stands by “every word.” Today, he repeated many of his false claims on American radio. No matter how much stress a legal battle might add to my personal and professional life, it is, simply, now necessary. As my libel notice says, I’m asking Ford to immediately retract the false insinuation that I am a pedophile and all of his false statements about my conduct on May 2, 2012. I’m also asking Ford and Vision owner ZoomerMedia to apologize immediately “publicly, abjectly, unreservedly and completely.”
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If Ford does not do so, we’ll see if he is willing to repeat his lies under penalty of perjury. I did not want to do this. In fact, I so strongly did not want to do this that I had a whole announcement written about why I was going to take the high road and give Ford a pass for his defamation against me. I was going to make the announcement this morning. I didn’t want to complicate my happy life. I’m a non-confrontational guy, and I just wanted to write articles and go home. I didn’t want to be goaded into a legal battle that could last a long time. The mayor very much deserved to be sued, I knew, but I thought I could do more good for the city by challenging him at city hall on policy than challenging him about me in a courtroom. Ford’s persistence changed my mind. I planned to say in my announcement that I would reconsider my decision if the mayor were to repeat his lies in the future. I woke up this morning to learn that he is already repeating them. On a Washington, D.C. sports radio show, he falsely said:
I was “looking over (his) fence taking pictures.” Never happened. I was “taking pictures in the backyard,” Never happened; if it were true, police Det. Tricia Johnston told me, I would have been charged with a crime. “He got caught. I got his phone. I got his camera. I had everything.” I had no camera, just a phone with a camera function. At my invitation, Det. Johnston went through the phone and found no pictures whatsoever from that night. “He’s saying he wasn’t taking pictures, well, what are you doing in my backyard on cinderblocks...” I never stood on anything but the grass of a public park, never even saw these blocks, was never in the backyard. I was on public land researching a public interest story about the mayor’s unusual application to buy public land. Crucially, Ford added this: “When you’ve got young kids, that freaked me right out.” This isn’t quite as egregious as the comment he made to Black, but it brought renewed attention to his malicious and defamatory insinuation to Black that I have some sort of predatory interest in young children — that I am a pedophile.
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I can’t tolerate it. I won’t tolerate it. With the full support of the Star, I will stay on the city hall beat while pursuing this action. No reasonable person questioned the appropriateness of me continuing to cover Ford after he insinuated I was a pedophile, or after he confronted me menacingly and called police on me for standing in a park; my reporting will be no more ethically compromised by my effort to hold him to account for this insinuation about the incident than it was by the incident or the insinuation itself. If a municipal politician had, hypothetically, clubbed me with a two-by-four, I told the police about it, and they charged him, I don’t think anyone could fairly argue that I needed to give up my job — I would simply be responding calmly and reasonably to unprompted aggression. Similarly, I don’t need to give up my job because I am responding calmly and reasonably to the mayor’s attempt to take a two-by-four to my reputation. I can easily imagine the mayor and his brother attempting to turn the tables on the Star and calling for me to take a leave of absence, as councillors and much of the media had called for the mayor to do. I can easily imagine them accusing me of bias. They will be wrong. I can, and will, continue to cover them with the utmost professionalism. I’m an exceptionally even-keeled person, and I just don’t want to think about this all the time as I go about doing the work I love. I will not let this affect my job. I will not be bullied off of my beat. I can easily imagine the mayor and his brother alleging that this is another example of a Toronto Star vendetta against them. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Star’s most senior leaders made it clear to me from the start that this decision was entirely up to me. They were fully supportive after I emailed them last night to tell them I was going to let the matter drop. One final word. Dozens of people, including people personally harmed by pedophilia, have offered me a total of thousands of dollars in donations for my legal fees. That’s remarkable. I’m fortunate to work for an employer willing to go bat for its employees, and the Star will be covering my costs, so I’m good for cash. Perhaps all that offered money could be donated to an organization that assists victims of child abuse, and we can create some light out of all this dark nonsense? Maybe someone could ask the mayor if he would join us. I donated last night to Boost, which recently opened a pioneering victims’ centre. There are other worthy organizations. Let’s elevate the conversation the mayor wants to stay in the mud.Nobody is “normal.”
Everyone is unique.
That said, long-term illness can change a person; it can change your mind, your emotions, your perspective, your way of thinking… (to say nothing of your body).
And the places in your mind that change can be impossible to perceive; what is caused by the physical (hey come on, literal viruses and bacteria in our brains) or the changes that come from long-term isolation, suffering, frustration, loneliness, abandonment, hopelessness…. (trust me, even with the deepest introspection, lines are blurry).
So when you are in this bubble of misery and feeling desperate, many of us reach that crossroad decision of whether to reach out publicly or not. Now, some do so all the time and some seldom do so. I want to share with you, the healthy person, the “normal” person, what may be going on in our heads and where the need to reach out comes from. Because to you, (sometimes frequent) posts regarding how someone is feeling physically and mentally can come off as:
Desperate
Attention-getting
Overly dramatic
Whiny
Ungrateful
Lacking faith
Hypochondriac
Lacking strength
Emotionally unstable
Or “_____” fill in the blank
And honestly maybe some people with chronic illness are. But I am asking you to consider grace, and here is why:
Imagine you are living a fairly normal active life; you work, you socialize with friends a few times a week, maybe you are also busy with kids. You do stuff! You go out to movies, you eat out at restaurants, you meet friends for coffee, you have a lot of human interaction at work, you sometimes take day trips or mini vacations, and your life may not be perfect or exciting, but it is full.
One day your body starts to betray you. Suddenly all the daily things that were no big deal become as hard as lifting heavy boulders. Your entire body is tired, tired to the point it feels like you have lead in your veins. You swear Earth’s gravity just dialed it up a notch as you struggle to go up the same staircase you have been bounding up the last five years.
You start sleeping a lot more, so much more that you start to feel guilt over your “laziness.” Even after a full night’s sleep your body starts to shut down in the middle of the day and you need to nap. The thing is all this extra sleep doesn’t help and you are just as tired and fatigued when you wake up in the morning as the night before. Even worse, you feel hungover, even without alcohol: toxic, heavy, foggy, headache, basically like sludge.
So of course you pump yourself full of caffeine because you have a life and things to do… only the caffeine is a quick fix that doesn’t last, so you have more. After a few cycles of this you start to blow out your adrenals, and things get worse…. You start to feel like you are letting the people in your life down as you can’t be there for them in the capacity you were only a short while ago. Oh, and did I mention the pain? You are dealing with pain that has no business in your body at your age! You feel old and achy. Joints and tendons, muscles and tissues that you never even “felt” at all before, are making their presence known by infusing non-stop pain.
Along with all of this (and a myriad of other symptoms I could mention) is the fact that your mind and your thinking are as foggy as your body. You know that feeling when it’s past your bedtime and you feel your brain trying to shut down for the night? How everything becomes difficult if you are fighting sleep? Trying to just finish that chapter, watch the last 10 minutes of that movie as your brain wants to sleep… Now it feels like that all the time, all hours of the day as your brain is constantly trying to go down as you are trying to get it to go up. Every waking moment is a battle.
Normal conversations become difficult because it feels like you are fighting through fog to both process what you are hearing while trying to formulate the appropriate response. You never knew until now that it actually takes energy to communicate and be with people. You frustrate yourself as word recollection fails you and you can’t seem to formulate articulate conversation.
As time goes on all this takes a toll and you start saying no to things. The energy it takes even to get ready, drive places, prepare for things… becomes too much, and you start having to pick and choose what you are able to do in a day, or even in a week or month as things get worse.
You start realizing that every activity also requires recovery time, and one afternoon out may mean you need two days in bed afterward.
Your world grows smaller.
As time goes on mentally and emotionally you for through all kinds of cycles that can be up and down and all around. These can swing extremely even over the course of one day from crying to anger to apathy.
At first all the people in your life are supportive, but as time goes on and you don’t get better, and you have seen this specialist, and that specialist and tried every suggestion of every caring friend from acupuncture, to massage, to “this amazing doctor that helped my friend who had the same problem!” you have read every article ever sent to you on any condition that even sounds similar, you have done crazy alternative things you would never have thought you would ever try…
But slowly friends start to drop away, check in less and less, and stop inviting you to things because they know you will just say “no.”
Life moves on without you and as the years go by your world gets smaller and smaller and smaller until you find you are alone most of the time.
You probably at this point have little to no money because it’s been spent trying to figure out what’s wrong with you and/or trying to get better. You also probably either can only work very little or not at all, and if you can work it drains you so much you have nothing left for any semblance of a life.
Remember when I mentioned the muddled place of your mind and your emotions caused by both the physical and psychological? This is where you are now. You may feel desperate and sad and lonely. Since you don’t see people in person so much anymore you might reach out to your friends online; both your real-world friends and your friends who you met in chronic illness forums and such.
So I am speaking to you, “normal” person, who I love and admire. When you see this chronically ill person prolifically posting, “wanting attention,” talking about what they are going through very publicly, and (sometimes) going into TMI territory… know that this did not happen overnight. This is the same person you know and love and they are beyond desperate to be the person they once were.
They may post because:
They want fellowship,
They want friendship,
They want to both hear and be heard,
They need a sounding block,
They want to feel normal,
They don’t want to disappear and be forgotten,
They want to have a glimpse of normalcy and online may be all they have,
They don’t see people much face-to-face so “Face”-book is their life.
Hear me now as I write this for my sick brothers and sisters: Everyone needs people! When you are sick and isolated, online is your people!
I don’t believe we are grand-standers or attention getters (at least not most of us). I think we are people just like you whose lives have changed and been shaped by illness and circumstances. All we want is to be normal and healthy. We may covet the little things that most people take for granted, even just taking a walk on a sunny day.
One more thing I want you to know: Worry about the chronically ill people who don’t post and instead stay quiet. They may be experiencing everything the communicators are but internalizing their pain versus reaching out.
It’s about having an outlet, versus internalizing everything. Isolation, versus reaching out. Honesty, versus putting on a happy face. I have seen too many of the “quiet one’s” obituaries online. Please also know the anxiety a person may go through on what to post and what not to post. It is so hard to judge because (especially) on a bad day, perspectives may be askew… and the reactions from people can also vary greatly.
You get the positive feedback from the chronic illness community: “Thank you so much for sharing, I am not alone.” “So glad to hear another person’s perspective.” “Thank you for being honest and blazing a trail for others that will come behind you.” This community supports you and your difficulties as you support them. And this is a safe and honest place to be raw and real in your times of pain.
But, you also may get the negative reactions of people who think you’re a drama queen, or are sick of hearing about your pain, or… (see list at beginning of post). So you may get the negative feedback, or the stony silence of family members, or the snubs and shuns of people who used to support you.
In closing: why am I posting this? I will tell you it’s not for attention or sympathy. I want to give a voice to the silent struggling ones. I want to advocate for those whose families don’t believe them. I want to open a window into a world (I hope and pray) you will never experience so that you can have a better understanding of your sick friend or family member. So consider grace and understanding first when encountering someone who has been struggling for a long time. We have so much to learn from each other.
We want to hear your story. Become a Mighty contributor here.Stockholm district court concluded on Friday that the eight adults and three children should each be awarded 30,000 kronor ($3654) in damages from the Swedish state, due to the presence of their details on a much-criticized database built by police in Skåne, southern Sweden.
The database, containing information on around 4700 people, was ruled illegal in 2013. Victims were subsequently awarded 5000 kronor ($609) each in damages for invasion of personal privacy. Human rights group Civil Rights Defenders sued for further damages to be awarded to 11 of the victims on the grounds of ethnic discrimination.
“My heart is leaping and my voice is high, this is a victory for me and for the Roma that were on the register,” said Fred Taikon, one of the victims involved in the discrimination case, in comments reported by news agency TT.
The Civil Rights Defenders lawsuit stated that Taikon had never been convicted of a criminal offence, and that he did not know any criminals in either his extended family or network of acquaintances.
In a press release, Stockholm District Court senior judge Lena Egelin commented on the verdict:
“Registering Roma is particularly offensive in light of the history of registering and persecuting Roma in Sweden and the world. In combination with the feelings of fear and discomfort that those who have applied for compensation have spoken of, the district court considers that the requested damages should be awarded”.
It is thought that more lawsuits could now follow the ethnic discrimination ruling.People cart off a dead melon-headed whale, one of about 100 cetaceans that were stranded in a Madagascar lagoon in 2008. (Helene Gallard/AFP/Getty Images)
The mysterious stranding of about 100 melon-headed whales in a shallow Madagascar lagoon in 2008 set off a rapid international response — a few of the eight- to 10-foot marine mammals were rescued, necropsies conducted, a review panel formed.
Did they follow prey into the lagoon? Were they sick? Was it the weather or chemical toxins?
The panel recently gave its best answer, and it is causing ripples of concern. For the first time, a rigorous scientific investigation has associated a mass whale stranding with a kind of sonar that is widely used to map the ocean floor, a finding that has set off alarms among energy companies and others who say the technology is critical to safe navigation of the planet’s waters.
The independent review panel appointed by the International Whaling Commission concluded Sept. 25 that a high-powered, “multi-beam echosounder system” (MBES) was “the most plausible and likely behavioral trigger” for the stranding. About 75 of the animals, which normally inhabit deep ocean waters, died.
A contractor for Exxon Mobil was using the sonar system — which sends “ping” sounds from a vessel toward the ocean floor — in a channel between Mozambique and Madagascar to determine where an oil and gas exploration rig might be safely constructed. Computers use the returning echo from the pulses of sound to map the ocean floor.
The panel of five scientists “systematically excluded or deemed highly unlikely” nearly every other possibility before settling on the use of the MBES, which previously was considered relatively benign, according to the group’s report.
“The evidence seems clear to us that [the MBES] was pretty likely” the cause, said Brandon L. Southall, the panel’s chairman and a marine biologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He said he hopes the report will cause governments, regulatory agencies and private companies to “realize that some of the types of mapping sonars have the potential to cause reactions in marine mammals that can be detrimental.”
Exxon Mobil, which helped select the panel and partly funded the rescue of some of the whales in 2008, rejects the conclusion, contending that the evidence is too flimsy for a determination that could have a far-reaching impact.
“While Exxon Mobil is not accepting responsibility for the stranding in light of the uncertainties in the report, we did cooperate and provide funding for the response effort in 2008 and the review panel because we are working in Madagascar,” spokesman Patrick McGinn said.
Another skeptic is Larry Mayer, a professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. “From my reading of that report, it’s not clear how they could have come to that conclusion,” Mayer said. “Any of the other possible conclusions are just as likely.”
The report could have significant consequences for U.S. government agencies and others around the world that use the MBES to map ocean floors. “If it endangers the ability to use these sort of systems... it could lead to all kinds of dangerous downstream consequences,” Mayer said.
And Joseph Geraci, an adjunct professor of comparative medicine at the University of Maryland who has studied cetacean strandings for 40 years, said he was troubled by the strength of the language in the panel report.
“I’m not sure on the basis of a single event where there are two activities that the words ‘most plausible cause’ are the right ones,” he said. “It’s only those three words that made me pay attention.”
But Howard Rosenbaum, director of the Ocean Giants program of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, hailed the panel for pushing the envelope on possible factors in the strandings and deaths of marine mammals.
“I think what we would like to see is the most effective regulations that will minimize the risk [of mass strandings] to sensitive whales and dolphins,” Rosenbaum said.
U.S. Navy sonar has been implicated in harm to whales and dolphins, environmental groups contend. A federal judge last month ordered federal biologists to reconsider permits that could allow the Navy to kill or disrupt marine mammals during antisubmarine warfare exercises off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.
But in 2008, the Supreme Court allowed similar drills off Southern California to be held without protections for marine mammals.
Other environmental groups are skirmishing with energy companies over the use of “seismic air guns,” devices that send much louder blasts of compressed air toward the ocean floor to help find oil and gas trapped below.
The noise from an MBES is better compared with an industrial-size version of the fish-finders widely used by recreational anglers, Southall said. That is part of the reason his panel’s finding is so controversial: the pinging sound is used so widely around the globe, in so many forms, that most involved have considered it relatively harmless.
But it may be time to adjust that thinking, Southall said. He acknowledged that no study of whale strandings will achieve the kind of certainty that Exxon Mobil and others would like but said that this one provided a rare opportunity to consider a wide range of possibilities and disprove them.
Because the Wildlife Conservation Society has a presence in Madagascar, it was able to quickly respond to the stranding, rescuing some of the whales and conducting necropsies on the dead, Rosenbaum said. And because regulators, conservation groups and energy companies were together at a conference in Chile at the time, they were able to put together a coordinated rescue response and later work together to form the review panel.
“It seemed to be a very uncommon event,” Southall said, “and we were able to go through almost all the factors that we looked at and rule almost everything else out.”
A 2009 coup and later unrest in Madagascar, an island nation in the Indian Ocean that is off the southeastern coast of Africa, delayed the study, which was resumed in 2012 and released late last month.
Exxon Mobil contends, among its other objections, that the stranding began before its contract vessel arrived off the shores of northwest Madagascar. The company has provided satellite photographs of objects on other nearby beaches before the melon-headed whales fled into Loza Lagoon, but the panel concluded that they most probably were small fishing boats.
Nevertheless, Exxon Mobil has changed its practices to prohibit the use of an MBES near an underwater cliff face, because the panel raised the possibility that the sound pulses echoed off one in this case and had an unusual effect on the whales, McGinn said. Southall said the whales already were in unusually shallow water for unknown reasons.
The bottom line for the company, McGinn said, is that “our contract vessel happened to be there in that time frame, but there are so many uncertainties in the area that we’re not sure it’s us.”Family Research Council president Tony Perkins has been broadcasting his “Washington Watch” radio program from Israel this week, where he is helping to lead an FRC tour group. Also on the tour is former Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who joined Perkins on the program on Wednesday to share her view that biblical prophecy is being fulfilled all around her and that it is more urgent than ever to convert as many people as possible — including Jews — to Christianity to prepare for the imminent return of Christ.
“Almost every article in the paper” has to do with conflicts in Israel, Bachmann said, “and it ties with so much biblical prophecy. This week really was about biblical prophecy in many ways. And we’re seeing as events are speeding up, events are speeding up so quickly right now, and we see how relevant the Bible is, and we’re reading our newspaper, at the same time we’re learning about these biblical events, and it’s literally day by day by day, we’re seeing the fulfillment of scripture right in front of our eyes, even while we’re on the ground.”
“We recognize the shortness of the hour,” she said, “and that’s why we as a remnant want to be faithful in these days and do what it is that the Holy Spirit is speaking to each one of us, to be faithful in the Kingdom and to help bring in as many as we can — even among the Jews — share Jesus Christ with everyone that we possibly can because, again, He’s coming soon.”ABOARD THE USS TYPHOON, Persian Gulf — One can walk from the bow of the ship to the stern in under a minute |
your friends on a board game, in which you can perform certain minimizations or mini-games that you can play and so, laugh a lot. The player with the most stars at the end of it wins.
With these 6 games, we assure you that your party will be lit and the guests will spend a fun and entertaining game day.Albuquerque gun collector suing after federal agents raided his home Copyright by KRQE - All rights reserved Video
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) - An Albuquerque gun collector is suing the Department of Homeland Security after the feds raided his home.
Three years ago agents raided Robert Adams' northeast Albuquerque home saying he was suspected of smuggling guns into the U.S. They said it was part of a scheme to get around tax laws. However, the feds later acknowledged Adams was a licensed gun supplier.
According to the lawsuit, during the raid his home and personal belongings along with some his guns were damaged. It says he is also still missing one valuable firearm.
"They damaged them. They broke them…scraped them. They took them apart," said Adams' attorney.
The lawsuit also claims his business of buying and selling guns suffered.We are all aware of the global pollution problem, but hardly anyone realizes just how much trash we produce daily. Gregg Segal, a photographer from California, aims to show this problem through powerful imagery, photographing people lying in their weekly load of trash. His ongoing project cleverly called “7 Days of Garbage” tries to portray people from different social backgrounds to reach largest audience possible.
Segal decided to photograph the participants in front of naturalistic backgrounds to show that the garbage produced by us is effecting it directly. “Obviously, the series is guiding people toward a confrontation with the excess that’s part of their lives. I’m hoping they recognize a lot of the garbage they produce is unnecessary”, he said to Slate.
Some of the participants were too ashamed of how much garbage they produced weekly, so they edited their garbage bags. Others showed everything just the way it was resulting in nasty and very strong images, which you can see here.
More info: Website | Facebook (h/t: Slate)
Alfie, Kirsten, Miles, and Elly
Milt
Till and Nicholas
Dana
Elias, Jessica, Azai, and Ri-karlo
Sam and Jane
James
Michael, Jason, Annie, and Olivia
John
Lya, Whitney, and Kathrin
Marsha and Steven
SusanDisclaimer: Our articles may contain affiliate links. See end of article for more details.
Wondering what to do in Bulgaria?
We have handpicked some of the best places to visit in Bulgaria, including the main Bulgarian cities; starting with the nation’s capital, Sofia. Each has something different to offer, but all have one thing in common- they are great destinations in any season.
Best Places to Visit with Things to do in Bulgaria – Quick Guide Sofia – The Capital of Bulgaria
Belogradchik Rocks – Famous Bulgarian Landmark & Fortress
Sozopol Beach – Beach Resort on the Black Sea
Ruse – Second largest city and gateway to Romania
The Rock-hewn Churches of Ivanovo
Veliko Tarnovo – Historic Town & Fortress
Plovdiv – The Bulgarian Capital of Culture
Bansko – Hiking & Skiing
Smolyan – Main Town of Rhodope Mountains
Pamporovo – Hiking & Skiing
The Rhodope Mountains – Hiking & Skiing
Devin – Hiking and Thermal Spa’s
Lovech – Old Town, Waterfalls & Caves
The Troyan Monastery
The Seven Rila Lakes & Rila Monastery Read on for details
Whether you only have a short visit or are planning an extended holiday in Bulgaria, you will, without a doubt, find this Balkan country fascinating.
These cities and towns offer a diverse and wonderful insight into this beautiful and intriguing country, and some might be just a little off the tourist trail.
The Capital of Bulgaria – Sofia
Often overlooked in favour of heading to the beach or hitting the slopes, it is worth a day or two in the capital Sofia. If fo nothing else than to understand the colourful history of this charming Balkan nation. A history rooted in Ottoman tradition and Socialist struggle, Sofia sheds light on the friction, grit and perseverance that has shaped Bulgaria.
The second oldest settlement in Europe, Sofia may be no grand city but certainly shines in cultural richness with a plethora of galleries, museums, parks and nightlife.
Sprinkled with onion-domed churches, Ottoman mosques, Red Army monuments and a treasure trove of 2000-year-old Roman ruins, the modern and youthful city feels somewhat eclectic with a dash of the exotic.
Wide boulevards lined with alfresco cafes, spacious parks and manicured gardens make Sofia a pleasant city experience.
Enjoy Skiing and Hiking Near Sofia
Want a reprieve from the city? Only a short bus ride from the centre, you can hike the trails of Mt Vitosha taking in the panoramic views of Sofia. Or, you can be on the slopes in Borovets in just over an hour. Bulgaria’smost famous ski resort renowned for its world-class skiing.
You can find out more about Bulgaria’s very budget friendly skiing here.
Take a Sofia Walking Tour
We can highly recommend a walking tour of Sofia when you first arrive. On our first trip to Sofia, of which there have been many, we did a city walking tour in minus 20°C.
While we all nearly froze to death, it was a fantastic introduction to Sofia and the history of Bulgaria. It also helped us get our bearings for visits to come thanks to some local insight on the best places to eat and drink.
Sample Traditional Bulgarian Food
Bulgarian’s are very hospitable especially when it comes to dining. Bulgarian food is homely, fresh and plentiful so do take time to sample some traditional Bulgarian fare while in Sofia.
Being quite a modern city, Sofia has an exciting new cafe, restaurant and bar scene emerging which is reshaping the city centre and putting a new spin on Balkan cuisine. As a result, there are now some fabulous food and wine tours available from Sofia which is a great way to experience both the traditional and modern aspects of Bulgarian culture.
Experience a full day history tour with wine tasting and lunch or for the night owl, a pub crawl of Sofia’s hidden bars.
Where to Stay in Sofia
There are plenty of great hotels in Sofia ranging from high end to excellent value.
Sofia Place Hotel
When we stay in Sofia, we often choose to stay at the Sofia Place Hotel in the middle of the city. It’s a lovely boutique hotel, with large, comfortable rooms and an excellent breakfast. In addition to an excellent on-site casual restaurant, there are many good restaurants nestled in the back streets nearby. A perfect opportunity to explore some of Sofia’s new dining scene.
Hotel Jasmine
If you are planning on renting a car for your holiday in Bulgaria, as we often do, we find the Hotel Jasmine is perfect for a no hassle stay where parking is required. Situated at the foot of the Vitosha Mountain in one of Sofia’s most prestigious suburbs is the Hotel Jasmine.
The hotel has large comfortable rooms and a very nice restaurant on the premises. It is also excellent value for money. We recommend booking in advance as it can often be booked out.
Belogradchik Rocks
On the western slopes of the Balkan Mountains, a stunning landscape of rocks sculptured through millennia hides a medieval fortress with a history dating back to Roman times through to the Bulgarian tsars and Ottomans.
Declared a Natural Landmark by the Bulgarian government, the scene is vaguely reminiscent of the whimsical landscape of Cappadocia in Turkey. The spectacular rock formations of the Belogradchik Fortress are nearly as impressive as the view from the top.
The rocks, primarily sandstone form a mystical landscape that has given rise to many local legends. Many of the stones have earnt the titles of things they are thought to resemble, such as The School Girl, The Bear, The Madonna, The Pine Stone etc. legends local guides will be eager to share with you.
You can read more about the legends of the Belogradchik Rocks here. It is easy to see why the Belogradchik Rocks are quickly becoming one of Bulgaria’s top natural tourist attractions.
Getting to the Belogradchik Fortress
Belogradchik is in northwestern Bulgaria in the Vidin Province. A 2.5 – 3-hour drive from the capital, day tours to Belogradchik from Sofia are entirely possible.
If you prefer to stay in Vidin on the banks of the Danube, 50km’s to the north; regular buses run all day between Belogradchik and Vidin.
Trip time is approx. 1 hour from Vidin to Belogradchik.
Belogradchik Rocks and Fortress Opening Hours:
1 April – 30 September: Daily from 9.00 am – 6.00 pm
1 October – 30 March: Daily 9:00 am – 5:00 pm Belogradchik Entry: Adults: 4 Lev
Students & Seniors: 2 Lev
Guided tours: 5 Lev
Sozopol Beach
Sozopol Beach is a beautiful ancient fishing village on a narrow peninsula 35 km south of Burgas on the Black Sea coast. Bulgaria has some popular, highly commercial coastal resort towns such as Sunny Beach or Varna.
Sozopol, on the other hand, appeals to the more discerning beachgoer with it’s laid back atmosphere and picturesque setting.
Discover Antique Sozopol
Sozopol is brimming with natural and historic beauty. In addition to clean stretches of white sand and crystal clear water, the town has been declared an architectural and archaeological sanctuary – a museum-reserve.
“Antique Sozopol” is a meandering maze of picturesque cobbled streets lined with the 18th century Bulgarian Revival houses declared monuments of culture.
The remains of the 5th-century fortification on the southeastern end of the peninsula have been restored to serve as a lovely clifftop boardwalk along the seafront. Historical monuments, restaurants and boutique accommodation houses are tastefully incorporated into the length of the historic wall.
Sozopol’s Greek Heritage
In the 7th century, Sozopol was a Greek fishing village by the name of Antheia, then shortly after, renamed Apollo. The town is now famous for the Apollonia arts and film festival named after its Greek heritage.
Throughout the summer months, May to September, Sozopol is alive with tourists from around the world who come to enjoy the sandy beaches, history and culture, the Mediterranean, Balkan fusion cuisine, and most of all – the atmosphere.
You can read our complete article on Sozopol here.
Ruse
Ruse is Bulgaria’s fifth largest city. Roughly 300km north-east of Sofia on the banks of the Danube River, just 75 km’s south of Bucharest, Romania. Often referred to as Little Vienna, this is one of Bulgaria’s most elegant cities.
Imposing 19th and 20th-century Neo-Baroque or belle époque architecture gives Ruse a sense of grandeur unlike any other city in Bulgaria. Leafy streets, promenades and squares play second fiddle to the cities grand centre, Plaza Svoboda.
The striking central feature, an enormous Monument to Freedom is set against the backdrop of the glorious Viennese designed building known as The Profit Yeilding Building.
Around 18 streets radiate from the central square which is where you will find all of Ruse’s points of interest making this city very easy to explore.
Day Trips to Bucharest from Ruse
The Danube bridge crosses in Ruse making this an easy transit point for those wishing to visit Romania, even for a day trip.
If you wish to cross by car via the bridge expect ~ 4 Bulgarian Lev (~€2) from Ruse and 13 Romanian Lei (~€3) from Giurgiu on the Romanian side.
The bridge can get very busy with trucks, especially from the Romanian side so anticipate delays.
Travel time from Ruse to Bucharest is approx. 1 h 20 min.
If coming from Romania, there are day trips from Bucharest to Bulgaria perfect for those short on time or without a car. You can find out more about these here.
Visit the Rock-hewn Churches of Ivanovo
Ruse’s other big draw card is less than a half hour drive from the city centre. The UNESCO listed rock-hewn churches of Ivanovo and the Basarbova Rock Monastery.
These incredible 13th-century churches are carved into rock faces and cliffs with some of the most impressive frescoes we have seen anywhere in the world.
Opening Hours for the Rock-hewn Churches of Ivanovo
Daily from 09.00 – 18.00
Entrance Fee:
Adults: 5 Lev
Students: 2 Lev
Groups over five persons: 4 Lev pp
Where to Stay in Ruse
Being so cosmopolitan, you will find an abundance of good quality hotels and restaurants in Ruse. Some have been awarded the best in the country and like the rest of Bulgaria, are very reasonably priced like the Grand Hotel Riga.
We found it to be exceptional value for money, especially the hotels Panorama Restaurant. Awarded one of the best restaurants in the country, it offers outstanding fine dining at incredibly low prices. The hotel also offers free parking and some of the most spectacular views of the Danube, especially at sunset.
You can check rates and availability of more hotels in Ruse here.
Veliko Tarnovo
200km’s to the east of Sofia, the historical capital of the second Bulgarian Empire; Veliko Tarnovo is Bulgaria’s oldest city.
The approach to this medieval town is a sight you will not soon forget when you first glimpse the medieval fortress, Tsarevets.
Visit Tsarevets Fortress
Tsarevets is surrounded on three sides by the winding Yantra River, with the Patriarchal Cathedral perched high on the hill. Your first impression is of a lone castle on an island. Within the walled city was where nobility and the Patriarchate resided.
It will take a good few hours to work your way around all the sites within the walls of Tsarevets fortress so make sure you allocate enough time.
Tsarevets Fortress Opening Hours:
November – March: Daily from 9 am to 5 pm
April – October: Daily from 8 to 19 pm
Tsarevets Fortress Entry Fee:
Adults – 6 lv.
Students – 2 lv.
Family (up to 3 children) – 6 lv.
See the Tsarevets Light Show
At night, the Tsaravets fortress is lit up in a light and sound spectacular usually starting from around 6.00pm depending on the season.
Explore the Varosha Quarter
Wind your way into town to the Varosha quarter and more importantly, Gurko Street. Traditional Bulgarian homes cascade down the hillside towards the river with winding, cobblestone streets and narrow stairways leading up, and down the hill. The old town of Veliko Tarnovo is a perfectly quaint display of terracotta roofs, potted geraniums and little hotels and tavernas tucked away in quiet corners.
Retaining the original facade; Gurko street is the oldest and most picturesque street in town. It is the street you want to stay in to soak up the gorgeous atmosphere of Veliko Tarnovo.
Enjoy the Lively Atmosphere of Veliko Tarnovo
Don’t think for a minute Veliko Tarnovo is just ancient walled cities and history. Home to one of Bulgaria’s most prestigious universities and a major stop on the Bucharest – Istanbul train route, Veliko Tarnovo has a youthful vibrancy and is a favourite stop with the backpacking scene.
It is also a favourite romantic getaway for Bulgarian’s. So expect a mix of lively nightlife to rival the bigger cities and a good offering of chic boutiques, classy hotels, cafes and restaurants.
Veliko Tarnovo is an all-around crowd pleaser and a “must do” on any Bulgarian itinerary.
Where to Stay in Veliko Tarnovo
As you would expect from a historic university town that attracts both backpackers and the more sophisticated traveller, Veliko Tarnovo has a good offering of accommodation options to suit all budgets.
While there is plenty of hostel style accommodation starting at around €10 per night, such as the popular Hostel Mostel, you will also find some very reasonably priced boutique style accommodation.
Our picks for accommodation in Veliko Tarnovo are Boutique Hotel Tsarevets, Hotel Studio and finally, our favourite, Gurko Hotel.
All of these hotels are great value for money, very well located and offer wonderful views. Hotel Studio, in particular, offers views of Tsarevets from some rooms and the roof terrace. Perfect for viewing the nightly light spectacular.
You can search more accommodation options for Veliko Tarnovo here.
Plovdiv
Less than 150kms south of Sofia, Bulgaria’s European Capital For Culture is an easy day trip or weekend away from the capital.
Plovdiv Old Town is where the cities main appeal lies. Vibrant cafe’s, bars and restaurants buzz alongside Byzantine, Roman and Bulgarian antiquities including; the most impressive Roman amphitheatre in the Balkans; still in use today.
Winding cobbled streets reveal museums and galleries where eminent artists are still in residence. We fell in love with Plovdiv and its lively and infectious atmosphere of creativity mixed with laid-back, youthful confidence.
You can read our complete article on Plovdiv; Bulgaria’s second-biggest city Here.
Things to do in Plovdiv Bulgaria
Bansko
Bansko is primarily known as one of Bulgaria’s premier ski resort at the foot of the Pirin Mountains in the Pirin National Park, southwest Bulgaria.
Bansko’s budget-friendly skiing at altitudes ranging from 900m to 2600m attracts an increasing number of Bulgarians, Brits and Europeans, mostly Russians each year. It is one of Bulgaria’s hottest destinations in winter.
You can read our complete article about skiing in Bulgaria here.
Hiking in Bansko
It is not just skiing that makes Bansko one the best places to visit in Bulgaria. Bansko doesn’t shut down after the winter crowds have left which makes it the perfect base to explore the pristine Pirin National Park.
A stunning alpine landscape with forested ridges and stunning glacial lakes, home to bears and wolves.
Explore Bansko Old Town
Away from the main ski resort, the cobblestoned old town delights with 19th-century National Revival mansions and museums. The stone-and-timber houses once supported by fortress-style walls with hidden escape routes to protect the inhabitants from the Turks.
The old town of Bansko rivals those of Sozopol or Veliko Tarnovo.
Getting to Bansko
Bansko is 160km’s south of Sofia.
Buses leave daily from the capital.
Bansko Shuttle Service that runs from Sofia Airport to your accommodation in Bansko for approx €20 pp. There is also athat runs from Sofia Airport to your accommodation in Bansko for approx €20 pp.
Expected travel time 2.5 – 3 hours.
Smolyan
Close to the border of Greece, 240kms south of Sofia is the town of Smolyan. Nestled in the Rhodope Mountains, it is the highest in Bulgaria. Smolyan is where Bulgarians come to escape, summer or winter.
An amalgamation of four villages, there is nothing overly endearing about the town of Smolyan itself, but what surrounds the town is well worth coming for.
Skiing and Hiking Near Smolyan
Pamporovo
15 km’s from the centre of Smolyan is the village of Pamporovo, Bulgaria’s premium ski resort. One of the best known in Southeastern Europe.
Rhodope Mountains
The Rhodope Mountains surrounding the town offer pristine hiking trails, small villages, lakes, caves and an endless vista of unspoilt woodlands.
When you say to Bulgarians you are going to Smolyan, more often than not they will whisper “ahh, paradise“. The perfect all season getaway for nature lovers, hikers and skiers.
Smolyan is also the perfect gateway for exploring surrounding villages such as the very pretty Shiroka Laka en route to our next town, Devin.
here. You can search for accommodation in the Smolyan & Pamporovo area
Devin
Still within the Smolyan Province, just over an hour from the centre of Smolyan or, 200kms from Sofia, is Bulgaria’s best spa town – Devin.
Set against the beautiful Rhodope Mountains, Devin has several mineral water springs with temperatures around 44 °c and higher. Devin is where the upper echelon of Sofia come to take the waters in luxury spa resorts.
You can also enjoy these mineral thermal springs inexpensively at outdoor establishments.
Hiking & Trekking in Devin
Devin is not just known for its spa qualities; it is also a base for some of Bulgaria’s best hiking and exploring. On the outskirts of town, next to the thermal pools, is the Devin Eco Walk, a beautiful 7 km trail running along the river past waterfalls and through gorges.
The Trigrad Gorge, Devils Throat Cave, the Haramiyska Cave and the rock formation called The Elephant are just some of the natural attractions that bring outdoor enthusiasts from all over the world to this region.
There are a number of tour operators in Devin offering guided hikes, fishing tours and even bear watching from designated hides.
Lovech
Only 150kms northeast of Sofia is the town of Lovech.
The Lovech region has a lot to offer but none more than the town itself. The most prominent feature of Lovech is its famous covered wooden bridge across the Osam river.
Originally built in 1874 and rebuilt three times, the Lovech bridge is one of only a handful of bridges in the world to have shops across its full span on both sides.
This charmingly restored town has so much to offer for a full day. Explore the Varosha quarter, visit the Hisarya fortress overlooking the town, the historical museum or the interestingly restored old Turkish bathhouse.
Once you have walked the town, settle down for lunch in one of the lovely restaurants that occupy the gorgeous candy-coloured buildings with views over the river and central square of the old town.
Visit the Troyan Monastery
Another reason to head to the Lovech region, other than some notable waterfalls and caves, is the Troyan Monastery. Only a half hour south of Lovech the Troyan Monastery is a truly tranquil place.
Said to be founded in 1600, this beautiful monastery also offers accommodation to tourists, but book in advance as this beautiful place of pilgrimage is very popular.
Day Tours to Lovech
You will find day to tours to Lovech available from both Sofia and Bucharest, Romania.
In addition to exploring Lovech Old Town and Hisarya Fortress, most tours will include Krushuna, an area famed for its beautiful waterfalls and caves and The Devetashka cave, Bulgaria’s deepest cave.
Expect upwards of €150 pp for a Day Trip to Lovech with Waterfalls and Caves from Bucharest
and prices starting from €50 pp for a Lovech Full Day Tour from Sofia
The Seven Rila Lakes & Rila Monastery
The undisputed natural wonder and most iconic attractions in Bulgaria is the Seven Rila Lakes.
Located in the northwest of the highest mountain range on the Balkan Peninsula – the Rila Mountains, the area, has fascinated mountaineers for over a hundred years. It has even inspired The Universal White Brotherhood religious cult whose followers gather there every year in mid-August.
Only 1.5 hours drive from Sofia the area is popular with hikers and day tourists. Previously, The Seven Rila Lakes was only accessible by a steep 2-hour hike from Pionerska Hut near Panichishte. Now, a chairlift leading from the asphalt road near Pionerska Hut directly to the lakes provides easy access for the less enthusiastic hiker.
Seven Rila Lakes Chairlift
Expect around 10 Lev one way / 18 Lev return (~€6 / ~€9).
Getting to Seven Rila Lakes
The best way to get to Seven Rila Lakes is either to drive or take an organised tour.
While there is no direct bus to Rila, there is a shared shuttle service from Sofia.
from Sofia. If you are planning on visiting or booking an organised tour, check seasonal availability as some tours or services may not operate throughout winter.
Accommodation at Seven Rila Lakes
If you are planning to spend more than a day at Seven Rila Lakes make sure you book in advance. While the area is a hiking mecca, camping is forbidden.
The Rilski Ezera Hut and Malka Yurta Hut are most conveniently located next to chairlift.
Make sure you book in advance, especially in August when the White Brotherhood New Year’s celebrations can see crowds of several thousand descend on the area.
Rila Monastery
The Rila Monastery or Monastery of Saint Ivan of Rila is considered one of the most important cultural, historical and architectural monuments in Bulgaria.
So much so it is depicted on the 1 Lev note. It is also one of Bulgaria’s most popular tourist attractions receiving nearly one million visitors each year. Situated in the southwestern Rila Mountains, 117 km south of the capital Sofia the monastery houses around 60 monks.
Staying at Rila Monastery
There is also the possibility of overnight accommodation at the Monastery but make sure you enquire in advance.
Getting to Rila Monastery
Even though the Rila Monastery is one of Bulgaria’s most famous tourist attractions, it’s not that easy to get to.
Bus to Rila Monastery
There is only one direct bus daily from Sofia leaving mid-morning which may or may not be reliable as is the way with public transport in Bulgaria. There is, however, a Rila Monastery shuttle service which costs around €19 per adult.
Hike to Rila Monastery
You can also hike to the Rila Monastery from the Seven Rila Lakes but expect anywhere upwards of six hours hiking.
Drive or Day Tour to Rila Monastery
Probably the most efficient and possibly cost-effective method, if you want to incorporate both Rila Monastery and the Seven Rila Lakes, is either by car or with an organised tour.
You can find full day tours to the Rila Mountains starting €50
starting €50 One-day car rental from Sofia between €40 – €50 depending on the season. You can check up to date car rental rates here.
Books to Read Before You Visit BulgariaDPRK Ambassador to Sweden Recalled to Pyongyang
Pak Kwang Chol (Pak Kwang-ch’o’l), the DPRK Ambassador to Sweden and nonresident to Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Latvia and Lithuania, has been recalled to Pyongyang. According to Yonhap, Pak and his wife, “escorted by North Korean officials,” were observed boarding an Air Koryo flight bound for Pyongyang. Pak is the second confirmed DPRK ambassador to be recalled to his home country following the dismissal and execution of Jang Song Taek, former Vice Chairman of the National Defense Commission and Director of the Korean Workers’ Party [KWP] Administration Department. Pak was appointed the DPRK’s representative to Sweden on 19 September 2012. During 2013, Pak presented his diplomatic credentials (letter of credence) in Finland (January), Lithuania (March), Norway (March), Denmark (June) and Iceland (October). After presenting his letter of credence in Lithuania in March 2013, Pak was part of a minor dispute between Lithuania and the DPRK when a KCNA account of his meeting misrepresented the remarks of the Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė.
AdvertisementsGem Mines, Crystal Peak Area, Colorado
Amazonite and smoky quartz from Colorado. Jeff Starr Collection. Joe Budd Photo.
Nestled high up in the Colorado Rockies near Crystal Peak is a mining area known for its fabulous teal blue Amazonite and smoky quartz crystal combinations. The Gem Mines are part of a larger region of Colorado that has been actively producing superb mineral specimens for over 100 years. The finest of these pieces have been stars within world famous mineral collections adding flash of striking color, contrasting lusters, and dynamic shape.
HISTORY
A miner-cowboy by the name of Albert E. Whitmore moved to the area in 1908 and staked out the Gem Mines claims, which were established by the Crystal Peak Gem Company. During his mining years, Whitmore sold his bounty in a small store near his log cabin. After 1933, sharply pointed Smoky Quartz prisms and stocky green Amazonite crystals were the specimens most commonly yielded by the mine - one smoky quartz crystal even measured 31 by 18 cm and weighed 24 kilograms! Whitmore’s cabin was remarkably still standing 70 years later until the Hayman Fire, one of the largest wildfires in Colorado State History, burned through the area in 2002. The area is currently under a commercial operation and continues to produce excellent fine mineral specimens.
GEOLOGY
The Gem Mines are a series of pegmatite dikes that can produce a wide variety of minerals. Specimens have been found both through excavation and as exposed “float”, which are crystals exposed due to weathering. Finding where float rocks come from is the most common method of finding pockets and dikes for more aggressive mining techniques. The first record of minerals being collected from this region dates back to the 1870s when A.E. Foote - a prominent Philadelphia mineral dealer - sent skilled prospectors to the area in an attempt to recover fine crystal specimens. The Crystal Peak region benefits from the fact that there are no major ore bodies or metal deposits for large mining companies to exploit, so the collection is left to rock hounds and specimen-focused mining operations.
MINERALS
The most common minerals to come out of the region are:
Fine Amazonite Crystals is what makes the Gem Mines famous. This teal-blue microcline - color coming from small amounts of inter-structural lead - is commonly complimented by contrasting deep brown smoky quartz. About 80% of the Amazonite crystals also have ‘white caps’, where the terminations are coated with a white to beige colored overgrowth of microcline, adding further contrast and flare. Amazonite crystals are typically in the 3 to 5 cm range, and sometimes form in interesting twin law habits such as Baveno twins - crystals with a contact plane on the {021} plane. Amazonite is what made the Gem Mines famous, because they have produced some of the best aesthetic examples of the species.
A goethite crystal from Colorado
Another species of note at the Gem Mine is Goethite. While normally a rather dull and non-descript species, this locality has yielded gleaming, lustrous brown to black sprays., The fluorite comes in blue, white, purple, or, rarely, green cubes and octahedrons, though few have excellent luster. Occasionally, this fluorite combines with Amazonite to form specimen-worthy assemblages. Cassiterite twin crystals to 3 cm long have also been recovered.
REFERENCES
Bancroft, P. (1984). Gem & Crystal Treasures. Western Enterprises Mineralogical Record.
Crystal Peak, Colorado Area: Amazonite, Smoky Quartz, Topaz. Buena Vista Gem Works (2004, March 1). Retrieved January 4, 2015Farr grew up in a family of teachers in central Texas. When he graduated from the University of Texas, in 1993, he had a philosophy degree and an acceptance letter to Yale Law School, neither of which felt quite right. So he deferred law school and joined a new, floundering outfit, Teach for America.
After a little more than a month of somewhat uneven training, Farr walked into Donna High School in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas—a place he’d never been. Many of the three dozen kids in his classroom were the children of migrant workers; they would disappear for weeks at a time as their families followed the harvests.
Talking to Farr about those two years feels a little like talking to a war veteran. You and he both know that you can never understand what it was like, and the clichés come marching in. “It was the hardest, proudest, all of that,” he says, his voice drifting away. Then: “I was not the teacher I want our teachers to be.”
Farr lived with three other Teach for America teachers, in a house that had been confiscated by U.S. Marshals in a drug raid. He taught English and English as a Second Language. Texas required that students pass a standardized test before they graduate, and as test day approached, Farr felt a mixture of anxiety and resentment.
About a month afterward, he got the news: 76 percent of his students had passed; 24 percent were told they didn’t yet have the skills to graduate. Even though many were only sophomores, some of them dropped out as a result. The principal congratulated him on his scores, but Farr cried into his pillow that night. “Some of those kids did not pass because I was not as effective as I needed to be.”
After his two years were up, Farr went to law school, as planned. He came back to Teach for America in 2001—this time in charge of training and support. By then, the organization’s founder, Wendy Kopp, had begun to notice something puzzling when she visited classrooms: many Teach for America teachers were doing good work. But a small number were getting phenomenal results—and it was not clear why.
Farr was tasked with finding out. Starting in 2002, Teach for America began using student test-score progress data to put teachers into one of three categories: those who move their students one and a half or more years ahead in one year; those who achieve one to one and a half years of growth; and those who yield less than one year of gains. In the beginning, reliable data was hard to come by, and many teachers could not be put into any category. Moreover, the data could never capture the entire story of a teacher’s impact, Farr acknowledges. But in desperately failing schools, where most kids lack basic skills, the only way to bushwhack a path out of the darkness is with a good, solid measuring stick.
As Teach for America began to identify exceptional teachers using this data, Farr began to watch them. He observed their classes, read their lesson plans, and talked to them about their teaching methods and beliefs. He and his colleagues surveyed Teach for America teachers at least four times a year to find out what they were doing and what kinds of training had helped them the most.MCALLEN, Texas — A Texas border police detective who worked narcotics cases is facing federal charges after an undercover sting caught him allegedly helping to steal what he thought were 8 kilos of cocaine from the a Mexican cartel. The drugs didn’t belong to the Gulf Cartel, which is the dominant criminal organization in the area, but in fact were planted by federal agents with U.S. Homeland Security Investigations as part of the operation in an effort to capture the detective and his alleged accomplice, court records obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed (see document attached below).
Noel Pena a police officer with the Rio Grande City Police Department who had been assigned to a county drug trafficking enforcement task force and Hector Salinas Jr. both went before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dorina Ramos in McAllen who formally charged them and ordered they be held without bond pending a detention hearing at a later date.
The case against Pena began on April 9 when an undercover agent with HSI met with Salinas to talk about a drug rip off, court records obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed. The agent told Salinas that he had 2 kilos of cocaine belonging to a Mexican cartel. He said he needed help stealing the drugs but making it seem like the drugs were seized by police.
Salinas allegedly told the agent that he had a guy (Pena) who was a narcotics investigator that could help with that for a fee. The agent said he ended up meeting with Pena and Salinas and all agreed to stage the seizure of two kilos of cocaine so the undercover agent could keep 8 kilos and split the proceeds with Salinas and Pena.
The agent left two kilos in a car for Pena to seize and then expected the border cop to provide documentation making it seem like the seizure had been in fact 10 kilos.
Follow Ildefonso Ortiz on Twitter and on Facebook.
Texas Border Cop Drug StingA disabled account in Windows’ network does not take effect immediately, according to Aorato. In fact, due to design considerations disabled accounts – and the same goes for deleted, expired and locked-out accounts – effectively remain valid up to 10 hours after they had supposedly been revoked.
As a consequence, so-called disabled accounts expose the corporation to advanced attackers seeking to gain access to the corporate network. Leaving employees who have had their user account disabled can also potentially continue and gain access to corporate data.
With 95% of Fortune 1000 companies running a Windows based network, this flaw affects enterprises across industries. Organizations seeking to comply with the PCI Data Security Standards, will find that this authentication flaw makes the requirement of the immediate revocation of any terminated user, a requirement that in reality cannot be met.
The problem lies in the Kerberos authentication protocol which is based on an organizational “ticket”. The ticket eliminates the need for employees to re-supply their username / password each time they access a system. However, the fact that authentication and authorization rely solely on the ticket, and not on the user’s credentials, means that disabling the user’s account has no effect on the employees’ ability to access data and services.
“Unfortunately, Windows’s fails to solve this authentication flaw. Worse yet, Windows’ Kerberos implementation does not externalize the ticket information through logs and events, and so exploitation of the flaw cannot be mitigated through traditional log and SIEM measures. A required solution needs to both enforce the termination of disabled user accounts as well as have visibility into the relevant information,” said Tal Be’ery, VP Research at Aorato.
To mitigate, organization should monitor network traffic to Windows authentication servers in order to:Hillary Fences Out Reporters Behind Vine Covered Chain Link Fence
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton held a fundraiser in Provincetown, Massachusetts Sunday afternoon attended by a reported 1000 supporters that featured celebrities Cher and Billie Jean King as well as current and former elected officials including Sen. Ed Markey and former Rep. Barney Frank. The event was held at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum.
One would think the Clinton campaign would want the press to broadcast such star-powered backing for Hillary’s presidential bid.
Instead, the press was kept behind a vine covered chain link fence. A photo posted to Twitter by the AP’s Lisa Lerer demonstrates the Clinton campaign’s commitment to transparency.
Press view of Clinton’s fundraiser in Provincetown MA with Cher. |
, the ads proclaim. As if there was any way to prevent it.
"It's all exactly what I projected for myself years ago," says RuPaul, calling from his record company's New York offices. "At five years old, I realized I was a superstar trapped in a five-year-old's body. And I had to do something about that! I would achieve this by any means necessary -- if it meant donning a gorilla outfit or dressing up as an inanimate object, so be it."
A native of San Diego who grew up in Atlanta, RuPaul says he was always encouraged to be whatever he wanted to be by his mother, Miss Ernestine Charles, who died of cancer earlier this year, shortly before RuPaul finished the video for "Back to My Roots." A bodacious tribute to black hair styles as cultural expression, it begins with an affectionate "shout-out" to the woman who named him RuPaul 28 years ago.
"My mother got the name out of Ebony magazine," RuPaul says. "It was spelled Ripoll, but she's Creole, so she made it into this saucy, Frenchy concoction. I always teased her that with a name like RuPaul Andre Charles, I could have either gotten into show business or become a hairdresser. So I chose both," he says, and laughs, a deep, fierce-but-friendly sound.
"My mother was my first inspiration; she was totally a drag queen," says RuPaul, meaning highest praise. "Her personality was larger than life, she had great comic timing and a sense of style and self. I've just been realizing she was such a rebel, and would do what she needed to do, regardless of what everyone else was doing. She taught me strength and how to be my own self."
And what exactly might that be?
"The character is part of it, that's an extension of my frivolous side," RuPaul says. "See, I'm yin-yang, the whole shebang. I grew up in a house full of girls -- my mother, my three sisters and me. My two older sisters turned me on to pop culture -- records and dancing and fashion and fun. But on the other side, I'm Scorpio, and very intense and heavy, too, so it sort of balances it out. Being a resident alien, I've been up against opposition all my life, and rather than turn it into something negative, I've always tried to turn it into good energy. I understood people's insecurities and why they behaved the way they did. I couldn't exactly hide, you know -- I was six foot tall at 16 years old."
Still larger than life, RuPaul proves he's more than a novelty act or one-hit wonder, working out on a variety of R&B and dance styles on his album "Supermodel of the World."
"I listen to it all the time, and that's the real test," RuPaul says. "The first records I bought when I was a kid were disco records. So I wanted to have that fun and frivolousness of disco records, and also talk about things, not too heavy, but about the life and being different. Like the song 'Stinky Dinky' is about how it doesn't matter what you do, just as long as you're fierce and you feel good about yourself. In fact, a lot of the things society puts down about you are the best things about you.
"Going out and doing what I'm doing is a sign to everyone who is an individual, who has feelings of wanting to do something -- not necessarily dressing in drag or whatever -- but anyone who has an idea or a feeling should just stand up and go for it," RuPaul says. "I'm a living example that, hey, it can be done. You can be successful at it."
Just this morning RuPaul signed the lease on a new apartment, "a bright and sunny place on a tree-lined street in the West Village where I can get a cab really quickly," says RuPaul. "And lots of closet space."
"This is where I'm going to write my book," he says. "It's about my life as a supermodel -- it's sort of 'factional,' where fiction and fact are mixed together. My story from the early years -- the terrible catalogue work years -- with a lot of my philosophy, beauty tips, everything."
You go, girl: RuPaul just finished recording "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" with Elton John. "I did, of course, the Kiki Dee part," RuPaul laughs, "I was just in hog heaven." To top it all off, Donna Summer's longtime disco producer Giorgio Moroder produced the track, which will be released in December. RuPaul will sing Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" on the "Find a Cure: Red Hot + Disco" AIDS benefit album due out in January. And on Oct. 8, RuPaul will roast Whoopi Goldberg at a Friar's Club banquet, and he's doing a Christmas special for British TV -- he's already recorded "The Little Drummer Boy."
RuPaul describes his live show as "Ziegfield's Las Vegas extravaganza in a half an hour. I grew up on the Cher show and Diana Ross in Vegas, and I have costume changes, standup comedy, songs, runway modeling, questions from the audience, a little something for everyone."
By the way, what does one wear to a RuPaul show?
"I think you should dress comfortably, because you're gonna dance and you're gonna sweat," RuPaul says. "So I think you should wear something loose and sexy. And waterproof makeup. I have a little Supermodel contest in the show, and I pull people up on the stage who I see in the audience who really got it going on. So if you want to be a Supermodel, you have to wear something that will catch my eye."
RUPAUL -- Appearing Friday with Robin S and the Gangsta Queens With Attitude at the UDC Van Ness campus gymnasium, Connecticut and Van Ness NW. Call 202/432-7328. To hear a Sound Bite from RuPaul's "Supermodel of the World," call 202/334-9000 and press 8121.The Game Rival Rapper KNOCKED Out... By Game's Manager
The Game's Manager KNOCKS OUT Rival Rapper
Exclusive Video
One of The Game's rivals is gonna need some stitches after getting KO'd outside a Miami Beach nightclub... by Game's manager, according to witnesses.
The rapper's name happens to be Stitches (appropriate)... and he's had beef with Game for a few months now. Things boiled over in front of Story Nightclub Thursday night when Stitches couldn't get in... he claims Game told security to block him.
Stitches waited outside -- which he documented on social media -- and when Game came out, it was on.
The video tells and shows the whole story. After Game's manager, Wack 100, popped Stitches... it appears with one punch -- cops showed up and tased Wack. Both Stitches and Wack got arrested.Considering the level of pre-match hype, this was a disappointingly flat contest lacking intensity or technical quality. But then that was precisely what José Mourinho wanted: Liverpool had created chances and scored goals at a staggering rate this season, and United blunted the home team impressively for long periods. Mourinho has been doing this in away matches at big clubs for much of the past 12 years, and while legitimate questions have been asked of his attacking blueprint, defensively he remains a fine coach.
José Mourinho criticises ‘cautious’ Liverpool after bore draw at Anfield Read more
There was little complex about Mourinho’s approach, and United’s primary strategy was ensuring they did not pass their way into trouble. David de Gea always kicked long, throw-ins were chucked down the line, and the centre-backs barely ever had the ball. Eric Bailly played just 14 passes, Chris Smalling only seven – whereas the Liverpool centre-back duo, Dejan Lovren and Joël Matip, played 92 and 70 respectively.
United were desperate to prevent their duo being caught on the ball, or their passes being intercepted – they did not want to remotely encourage Liverpool’s pressing. In fact, if anything, United’s pressing high up the pitch was more successful than Liverpool’s, as the home side’s goalkeeper Loris Karius experienced a couple of nervy moments with the ball at his feet.
Once United had cooled the tempo they started to frustrate Liverpool with their possession play, too. Marouane Fellaini and Ander Herrera were not pressed aggressively by Liverpool’s midfielders, and were happy to play sideways passes without attempting much penetration.
United’s attacking approach was basic, with few signs of genuinely dangerous possession play, and depended largely upon Paul Pogba, in a more advanced role than he has been accustomed to at the top of the midfield trio, pushing forward to link up with Zlatan Ibrahimovic. That combination created the game’s first clear-cut chance, 10 minutes into the second half, when Pogba’s cross was met with a curiously misjudged header from the Swede.
Manchester United’s Paul Pogba fails to live up to price tag in draw at Liverpool Read more
Liverpool were more purposeful in possession, particularly with the positioning of their full-backs. Nathaniel Clyne and James Milner attacked, which meant Marcus Rashford and Ashley Young were pushed backwards, at times meaning United often looked like they were deploying a back six. This allowed the full-backs, Antonio Valencia and Daley Blind, to stick tight to their opponents, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mané.
Daniel Sturridge was quiet in the first half, miscontrolling one long ball in behind, and lurking on the outside of United’s centre‑backs without directly influencing play. Worryingly for Sturridge, Liverpool looked brighter after his departure on the hour. Adam Lallana replaced him and played in the centre‑left midfield role, with Coutinho pushing forward to the left flank and Firmino moving upfront.
There was suddenly excitement down the left: clever movement inside from Coutinho, quick passing from Lallana, Firmino making sudden movements towards the ball to drag the centre-backs out of position. There had been a growing feeling that Sturridge simply does not suit Jürgen Klopp’s system, both with and without the ball, and this underlined that impression. For their next big game it would be a surprise to see him in the starting XI.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest David de Gea denies Roberto Firmino. Photograph: Peter Powell/EPA
Despite an underwhelming contest there were plenty of good performers here, particularly for United. Herrera was outstanding in a screening midfield role: anticipating the play well, making crucial interceptions and making 12 tackles, the most of any player. Young perfected the ‘defensive winger’ role Mourinho wants in big games, winning all six of his tackles, and it would not be a surprise to see him become a regular in games when Mourinho wants to shut down attacking full-backs.
David de Gea ensures Manchester United hold Liverpool in stalemate Read more
Bailly continues to impress with his reading of the game and covers behind his fellow defenders excellently, while Valencia’s last-ditch tackle on Firmino in the closing stages underlined his improvement in his relatively new position of right-back. De Gea, meanwhile, made two outstanding second-half saves.
Of course the fact all these players were in defensive positions, or performing defensive roles, rather summarised United’s display – this game will not live long in the memory.When Filip Zadina was deciding whether to leave his home of Pardubice, Czech Republic, to come play for the Halifax Mooseheads, it didn't turn out to be a difficult decision for the 17-year-old.
Before this year's import draft in which the Mooseheads took Zadina with the 10th pick, the forward had a chat with the team's general manager, Cam Russell, who told him about the team and its recent success with import picks. Nico Hischier was drafted first overall by the New Jersey Devils this year and Zadina's fellow countryman, Martin Frk, was drafted by the Detroit Red Wings in 2012.
"Now, they're in the NHL. It's a very good organization, so I said, 'Yeah, I'll play for Halifax because I believe they will help me pursue my dream,'" said Zadina.
Zadina's decision was in contrast to the year before, when he was taken fourth overall by the Vancouver Giants of the WHL in the 2016 CHL import draft — but chose to stay in the Czech Republic.
Players to watch
Zadina's decision appears to be paying off. On Tuesday, NHL Central Scouting released its list of players to watch for the 2018 NHL draft and he was one of four Mooseheads who made the list.
Jared McIsaac from Truro, N.S., is a projected first-round draft pick in the 2018 NHL entry draft. (David Chan/Halifax Mooseheads.ca)
Zadina, Benoit-Olivier Groulx from Gatineau, Que., and Jared McIsaac from Truro, N.S., were all given A rankings, meaning they are projected to be drafted in the first round. Goalie Alex Gravel was given a B and is pegged to go in the second or third round.
This isn't the first time the Mooseheads have found themselves with an arsenal of potential high-round draft picks. When the Mooseheads won the Memorial Cup in 2013, the team was led by forwards Nathan MacKinnon and Jonathan Drouin, who were later drafted first and third overall in that year's NHL draft, and goalie Zach Fucale, who was drafted in the second round.
The Mooseheads are off to a promising start this season, winning four of five games, but neither their start nor the Central Scouting draft projections are getting to their heads.
The Halifax Mooseheads won the 2013 Memorial Cup with a team led by some highly-touted NHL draft prospects. (Liam Richards/The Canadian Press)
"You always need to work on little things, little details of your game. For me, I need to improve my skating, my shooting, my skills," said Groulx.
Zadina said he needs to work on his defence, forechecking and shooting, but believes the team is already helping him become a better player.
Tight bonds among prospects
The four prospects are all 17 and close friends who attend the same school.
"It makes it even more special knowing that we're all together and we have each other's backs, on and off the ice," said Groulx.
While the prospects are focused on becoming better hockey players, they're also looking to enjoy the moment, as would any other 17-year-old.
"I want to have a good season, have fun and we'll see what it's going to be like after the season," said Zadina.DailyFX.com -
Talking Points
- EUR/USD has rallied moderately thus far today after steep declines over the past three weeks around the US Presidential election.
- Euro-Zone political risk remains in focus, with a second French Republican party primary taking place this weekend.
- However, French consumer confidence remained steady at a nine-year high in November as political concerns have yet to spill over into the broader economy.
EUR/USD is rallying moderately Friday after its steep fall from 1.1026 on November 8, the day of the US Presidential election, to a recent low of 1.0515 just yesterday - a drop of just under 5% in just under three weeks. Now, as attention has started to shift away from the US, EUR/USD finds itself trading at just under 1.06 00, despite evolving political risk in Europe that has been one of t he major factors undermining the exchange rate in recent days
While the prospect of a rate hike by the Federal Reserve next month (December 14) coupled with the continuation of loose monetary from the European Central Bank (December 8) has been the principal driver of EUR/USD weakness - look no further than 2-year yield spreads between US and Germany - a serie s of upcoming national votes across Europe have started to undermine sentiment too. While much attention has been rightly paid to the upcoming Italian constitutional referendum on December 4, traders shouldn't look past this weekend's French Republican Party primary after last week's surprising results.
On Sunday, two former French Prime Ministers will compete to be France's center -right Republican Party's candidate in the Presidential election next spring, with François Fillon favored to win the run-off against Alain Juppé. In the first round last Sunday, Fillon took 44% of the vote, compared with 29% for Juppé. With France's Socialists in disarray (sitting French President Francois Hollande, of the Socialist Party, is currently polling as low as 4%), that could mean the election becomes a straight fight between Fillon and the far-right National Front's Marine Le Pen. Le Pen, France's version of Nigel Farage or Donald Trump, has pledged to hold a referendum on whether or not France would stay in the European Union and thus implicitly, the Euro.
Earlier, despite the political developments in France over the past several weeks, data showed that French consumer sentiment remained at a nine-year high this month. An index calculated by French statistics agency INSEE stayed at 98, as expected, as job concerns faded. W ith few important dat a releases due Friday, inspiration for EUR/USD's rally may also be coming from a report that the European Central Bank could delay any extension of its monetary-easing policy from its December meeting to the next one in January.
Chart 1: EUR/USD 5-Minute Chart (November 24 to 25, 2016 Intraday)
For now, EUR/USD is rallying in thin post-Thanksgiving trading amid a sparse economic calendar. The pair was last seen trading at 1.0588, but had rallied as high as 1.0615 earlier in today's session. With SIFMA's recommended closure for US bond markets, today's session, barring any unforeseen news across the wires, market activity should begin to quiet down some once we get past the goalpost for today's minor US economic data due out at 8:30 EDT/12:30 GMT.
Read more: Dollar Extends Rally into Holiday Liquidity Drain
--- Written by Martin Essex, MSTA, Analyst and Editor
To contact Martin, email him at [email protected]
DailyFX provides forex news and technical analysis on the trends that influence the global currency markets.
Learn forex trading with a free practice account and trading charts from IG.CAIRO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Women’s rights activists hailed the Egyptian government on Monday for advocating increased prison sentences for perpetrators of female genital mutilation (FGM) but warned that a new law could shroud the practice in greater secrecy.
A counsellor holds up cards used to educate women about female genital mutilation (FGM) in Minia June 13, 2006.
Egypt’s cabinet on Sunday approved a bill, which must be passed by parliament to become law, imposing jail terms of up to seven years for people who perform FGM and up to three years for those who escort a girl or woman to undergo the practice.
It is currently punishable in Egypt by between three months and two years in prison under a 2008 law, which was enacted after an 11-year-old girl died following an FGM procedure.
The drive for tougher sentences follows the recent death of a 17-year-old girl of complications during an FGM operation in a private hospital in Suez province.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), a Cairo-based rights group, welcomed the bill but said it may not deter people from performing FGM and could drive it further underground.
“It will also decrease the rate of reporting FGM cases, as imposing a punishment on whoever escorts a girl to have the operation will make families fear reporting cases,” Dalia Abd El-Hameed of the EIPR told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
FGM affects an estimated 140 million girls and women across a swathe of Africa and parts of the Middle East and Asia and is seen as a gateway to marriage and a way of preserving a girl’s purity. It causes numerous health problems that can be fatal.
WIDELY PRACTICED
More than nine in 10 women and girls aged 15 to 49 have undergone FGM in Egypt, and some 80 percent of the procedures are carried out by medical professionals, according to the United Nations.
Yet the proportion of girls aged 15 to 17 in Egypt who have been cut dropped to about six in 10 as of 2014, down from three quarters in 2008, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) said.
“We have seen some reduction in FGM in Egypt, but at the same time health professionals and others are still not being held to account for carrying it out,” said Suad Abu-Dayyeh of the London-based human rights group Equality Now.
In January 2015, Dr. Raslan Fadl was convicted of manslaughter in Egypt’s first FGM trial after a 13-year-old girl died in a botched procedure. While Fadl was sentenced to more than two years in prison, he has not yet served his jail term.
Rights groups say the current law has not been enforced and that society is permissive of FGM, which is widely practiced among Muslims as well as Christians in the mostly Muslim nation.
“Many people still link the idea of honor with female circumcision, so it is not about stiffening the law as much as addressing people’s mindsets,” said Reda al-Danbouki of the Egyptian group Women’s Centre for Guidance and Legal Awareness.The vice chairman of Egypts top secular party told the Washington Times in an interview last week that the September 11 terror attacks, the Holocaust and Anne Franks diary are all historical fabrications.
The Holocaust is a lie, Ahmed Ezz El-Arab, Wafd Party leader told the Washington Times in Budapest where he was attending the Conference on Democracy and Human Rights.
A man in Cairo holds a sketch portraying Hosni Mubarak with a Star of David on his forehead, January 30, 2011. The caption reads: '30 years of devastation and treason,' referring to Israel-Egypt peace AFP
He went on to explain that it was factually impossible to claim that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, saying the Jews under German occupation were 2.4 million. So if they were all exterminated, where does the remaining 3.6 million come from?
The Egyptian politician acknowledged that the Nazis may have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, but discounted the plausibility of gas chambers and skinning Jews alive, calling them fanciful stories.
El-Arabs Holocaust denial did not stop there, and the Egyptian politician went on to attack the authenticity of Anne Franks diary, the memoirs of a teenage girl who hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam, only to be discovered and die in a concentration camp.
The Wafd leader recalled studying the novel that is one of the most widely distributed publications to date as a doctoral student in Stockholm. I could swear to God its a fake, he said. The girl was there, but the memoirs are a fake.
El-Arab concurred with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejads denial of the Holocaust – but discredited his motives.
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Hes a hateful character, so whatever he says can be criticized, he told the Washington Times, adding what he says about the Holocaust is true, but he doesnt say it because its true. He says it out of hatred to the Israeli state.
When asked about future peace with Israel, El-Arab attempted to assuage fears that a new Egyptian government would cancel the 1979 treaty.
The Egyptian politician told the Washington Times that there is no chance at all that would happen, adding Egypt will not go to war unless its attacked, he said.
El-Arabs historical revision was not reserved for the Holocaust alone, and he also shared his theories on the September 11 attacks and their perpetrators with the Washington Times.
The Wafd leader denied that Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader who was recently killed in an American raid on his compound in Pakistan, was behind the attacks.
He could not have the know-how or the ability to do it, El-Arab said, calling the dead al-Qaida leader an American agent.
The Egyptian politician added if he had the ability, one plane only landing on the Knesset would give more effect.
El-Arab blamed the CIA, Israels Mossad and the military-industrial complex.
Despite his Holocaust-denying views, it seems as though El-Arabs overall opinion on the Jewish people is favorable, telling the Washington Time that he believes that there was once a Jewish temple in Jerusalem, entitling the Jews to a historical claim on Israels capital.
The Jews are there, he said. Good or bad, they are there. However, he made sure to follow up with the clarification: You cannot as a human being think of exterminating 6 million or 5 million or whatever. Thats crazy.DAVAO CITY – All released consultants of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) are in the country and are protected from rearrest.
According to Fidel Agcaoili, chairperson of the NDFP negotiating panel, the consultants are covered by the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG), which has been in effect since 1995.
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“All 17 NDFP consultants released from detention last August 2016 are in the Philipppines and are not in hiding. Those who took part in the third round of formal talks in Rome from 19 to 25 January 2017 have returned to the country as of 31 January. They are all protected from rearrest in accordance with the JASIG,” Agcaoili said in a statement Sunday afternoon.
Agcaoili explained that the consultants have been placed under the jurisdiction of courts after they were released on bail.
“These consultants have been put under the effective jurisdiction of GRP (Government of the Republic of the Philippines) courts because they were released only on bail and only for a six-month period,” Agcaoili said.
The NDFP peace negotiator added that all the travels of the consultants have been allowed by the courts.
“They have been required to secure court permission every time they went abroad to participate in the last three rounds of talks. Their bail renewal is due this month and, as reflected in the Rome Joint Statement of 25 January 2017, both their lawyers and the GRP have agreed to cooperate in this regard,” Agcaoili said.
President Duterte on Saturday suspended the negotiations with the NDFP and demanded that all released prisoners return to jails.
“Those who were released by the government, they should, on their own volition, return here and go back to prison,” Duterte said.
Duterte also directed intelligence units to monitor the locations of the peace consultants.
“I’m alerting all the intelligence communities to keep track of where they are now. Walang pardon. Walang amnesty. Wala lahat (No pardon. No amnesty. Nothing),” he said
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Duterte also threatened to cancel their passports.
The NDFP debunked claims that the government has been spending taxpayer’s money for the consultants of the revolutionary movement, divulging that the Norwegian government has been paying for all of their expenses.
“The Royal Norwegian Government in its capacity as Third Party Facilitator in the peace talks has been providing for the travel expenses and accommodation of the NDFP delegation in formal and informal peace talks since the beginning,” Agcaoili said.
Meanwhile, Agcaoili said that the revolutionary movement has been waiting for the formal notice of the government peace panel as agreed upon in JASIG.
Agcaoili clarified that despite the setbacks, the NDFP was and would remain committed to continuing the peace negotiations and finding a common solution for the root causes of the conflict.
“The NDFP stands firm in its commitment to struggle for a just and lasting peace in the country in accordance with the national and democratic aspirations of the Filipino people,” Agcaoili said. SFM
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MOST READThey actually have charged and run ads saying that President Obama wants to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill I signed that moved millions of people from welfare to work. Wait. You need to know, here's what happened.
Nobody ever tells you what really happened. Here's what happened. When some Republican governors asked if they could have waivers to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama administration listened, because we all know it's hard for even people with good work histories to get jobs today, so moving folks from welfare to work is a real challenge. And the administration agreed to give waivers to those governors and others only if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20 percent and they could keep the waivers only if they did increase employment.
Now, did -- did I make myself clear? The requirement was for more work, not less. [...]
But I am telling you, the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform's work requirement is just not true. But they keep on running ads claiming it.
You want to know why? Their campaign pollster said, "We are not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."
Now, finally I can say: That is true. I -- I -- I couldn't have said it better myself. [...]Carefully place the deck into the TAP bag. One way of doing this is to open the bag fully by blowing air into it with a vacuum cleaner. While standing on a chair, carefully lower your project from above into the bag which the other person holds open.
Keep your hands clean during this step. Do not get epoxy on the sealing tape or close to the opening of the TAP bag as the sealing tape will not stick properly if even a small amount of epoxy gets on it. Use plain white vinegar to clean your hands (not the bag), it removes epoxy really well!
Seal your TAP bag using the manual pump to pull the remaining air out of the bag. Be sure to position the valve off the deck, but over the breather ply right beside the deck. This ensures that the air can get out but will not make a mark on the top of your smooth carbon area.
*This is what's called an Offset Valve, which can be requested on any 20"x70" TAP Bag from Roarockit.
In a couple of minutes, check to see if the vacuum is still holding tightly. If any air has leaked in, check by re-pressing the sealing tape first and re-pumping the bag.
The epoxy will start to harden in a couple of hours. Leave your project in the bag for at least 8 hours.Wear and tear. When we originally ordered our car I'd asked for a simple P85 with the smooth-riding tall-sidewall tires and sans the sunroof. A response soon arrived from Elon Musk's secretary. "Elon read your request and is sending a P85+ with a sunroof." Their fastest car. Hey, who am I to argue with Tony Stark?
The repercussions were twofold. On one hand, the car's lightening reflexes rendered my fellow road-goers bugs in amber, and me a laser-beam pinball through them (sorry, everybody). Did its sizzle translate to the track? We lapped it twice at Laguna Seca and once at Streets of Willow, and each time the car lost power toward lap's end as the software stepped in to protect the battery from rising temperatures -- even defying my comical attempt to pre-freeze it with 17 ice bags stuffed underneath. (At least it felt pretty "cool" for 9/10 of a lap.) The engine's double whammy of instant power and lift-throttle regen wore the rear tires quite quickly, though not out of line for such a powerful, heavy sedan, according to our friends at Tire Rack. On top of that, the slim-profile Michelins left the wide rims fairly whacked up, for which I was as guilty as anybody.
View 29 Photos
Traveling. Almost everywhere I wanted to go proved to be supercharger-reachable: to the Monterey, California, area six times, to the little mountain town of Julian, California, for its planet-famous apple pie, and on our last grand voyage, from Willow Springs Raceway to Phoenix. Unlike gas-car road-going, Tesla travel is closer to hopscotching between sparse landing strips in a light plane. You absolutely have to put it down at specific spots (for about 20 minutes of zero-cost juicing before the next jump) and then make the best you can of the pause. There's a Zen-like quality to the repeated pattern, though. In the early days (hah, I love saying that!) drivers would jump out of their cars and greet one another like cousins who'd never met. Now, with lots more cars showing up, they warily eye each other's charging progress or bury their noses in books. On the other hand, you should see the route calculations filling my notebooks for every time I strayed from the charging network. Note to Tesla: Don't even think about selling the Model X (let alone the 3) without some Apple-slick trip planning software. Over its 38,000-mile stay, the car's battery showed little appreciable degradation; its everyday range (in my hands) (driving it aggressively) was 175 miles (212 if I was conservative), its fully charged range averaged about 203 miles (238, if conservative), and I never ran out of juice. (Only once was I worried, when Jonny didn't plug it in before I needed it to get to Willow Springs Jonny!)
View 29 Photos
Oh, and Alec Brooks' verdict after his week behind its wheel? "Very impressed. I didn't think I'd like the big screen, but its size really helps in targeting buttons, and wow, the nav map is great." Then the total technoid emerges: "I really appreciate how data is displayed in the gauges -- you can tell they were created by engineers. In retrospect, the car I was originally arguing for was cheaper, smaller, less powerful and with a little less range -- actually, what sounds more like the Model 3!"
My verdict? As the Great Wallenda of the modern technological tightrope, the spotlight has rightfully been on Musk as his audience gasps and cheers with his every step. In 12 short years, tiny Tesla has accomplished the near-impossible, and our 17 months in the car have been nothing less than an everyday reminder that it springs from the imagination of a guy whose tightrope leads all the way to Mars.
More on our long-term 2013 Tesla Model S P85+:
Our Car SERVICE LIFE 17 mo / 38,054 mi BASE PRICE $94,900 OPTIONS +' suspension, wheel and tire upgrade ($6500), tech package ($4250), 3rd row seats, ($2500) air suspension ($2250), dual charger ($2000) PRICE AS TESTED $112,400 AVG ECON 86.2 mpge PROBLEM AREAS motor replacement, steering knuckle replacement MAINTENANCE COST $0 NORMAL-WEAR COST $1760 (new tires) 3-YEAR RESIDUAL VALUE* est $53,307 RECALLS None *based on Tesla resale price guaranteeGet ready for more Narnia content. How much more? It appears to be a lot more than we were getting before. Netflix developing series and films Netflix will develop new series and film projects based […]
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impressive and should have had black women on the fence. Though, when challenged on how his policies would specifically help black people in prime-time moments, he faltered. Badly.
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During a campaign stop at an economic forum in Minneapolis in February of 2016, a black American woman confronted Sanders on his inability to address anti-blackness and economics. The question focused on a garbage incinerator in the city causing health problems for local residents. Felicia Perry said that her son has asthma and the incinerator was making him sick.
Given that black children are twice as likely to suffer from asthma, it made perfect sense for her to ask the “political revolutionary” what his plans were to address environmental racism. In her question, she also took on what she felt was his refusal to address anti-blackness head on:
My black son. I know you’re scared to say black, I know you’re scared to say reparations. But it seems like every time we try to talk about black people and us getting something for the systematic reparations and the exploitation of our people, we have to include every other person of color.... Can you please talk about specifically black people and reparations?
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That was a perfect opportunity to display empathy for the specific plight of black mothers who have to raise children in unsafe areas plagued by environmental racism. But, in typical Sanders fashion, he got defensive and refused to take on her challenge that he lacks a racial analysis:
What I just indicated in my view is that when you have... you and I may have disagreements because it’s not just black, it is Latino; there are areas of America, in poor rural areas, where it’s white.
That exchange pretty much convinced me that Sanders wasn’t ready for prime time. If you can’t tell a black woman raising a black kid with asthma how your policies will combat environmental racism, you can’t claim to be a political revolutionary. By the way, if you want to see how a real politician connects with a black female voter, watch Bill Clinton’s home run on this debate question back in 1992:
(Note: Yes, I know about the 1994 crime bill and Hillary Clinton’s support of it, so don’t raid my mentions about it. That didn’t stop black people from backing her in 2008 and 2016. That’s a complicated story for another post. I’m talking directly about empathy in this example.)
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I’m not saying that Sanders doesn’t have black female backers. I arranged for Erica Garner to write an op-ed in the Washington Post to express her support for Sanders. I wrote about Flint, Mich., native Danielle Green’s backing of Sanders after he visited the city to address the water crisis there. I also covered former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and Trayvon Martin lawyer Natalie Jackson’s endorsements of Sanders.
I know black women backed Sanders, so spare me.
Another problem Sanders backers aren’t considering is that the 2020 Democratic primary will likely be much tougher than 2016. Possibly competing with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) will be no cakewalk. McAuliffe has a very strong criminal-justice history in Virginia and can display real examples of challenging voter disenfranchisement in Virginia, his home state, which will be a premium selling point for black voters. And if Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) runs, I have a hard time believing that Sanders or any other candidate will take black female votes from her.
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Most importantly, a vast majority of Democratic primary voters backed Hillary Clinton by millions of votes. Like it or not, there are many people who aren’t sold on Sanders’ political revolution. If he wants to take over the party, he’ll have to earn the respect of Clintonites and make them believe that they would be active beneficiaries of his presidency.
That means winning over black voters who are not in his far-left, “Democratic socialist” camp. Indeed, as Collier Meyerson correctly outlined in the New Yorker last year, the black vote is not monolithic and requires as much nuanced consideration as any other demographic. Harvard professor Leah Wright Rigueur echoed the same sentiment in a New York Times article in which she pointed out that 43 percent of black voters under age 30 backed Sanders during the primaries as of March 1. That is nothing to stick your nose up at. But Sanders all but gave up on the South, where most black Americans live. This, to me, proved that Sanders had little interest in truly getting down in the trenches and fighting for black votes.
If he doesn’t want to fight tooth and nail for black votes in the primary, why should they believe he’ll apply his revolutionary fervor to black issues once inside the White House?
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All of this said, Sanders does have a shot. Donald Trump’s horrid presidency is fueling the “resistance,” and black women are leading the charge. Sanders would do himself a favor by acknowledging this—just as he voiced his sympathy for white working-class voters. Clinton won’t be on the ticket, and the Democratic National Committee has new leadership, so he and his supporters shouldn’t have any “Bernie would have won” excuses in 2020.
Sanders’ main challenge is connecting to black women, the Democratic Party’s most important voting demographic. If he wins them over, he has a shot. As much as people think I hate Sanders, I really do believe that he is a dynamic candidate. He deserves respect. In return, Sanders needs to respect and honor the fact that black women can lead his assent, just as they did for Obama. Or, they can hand him his second L in 2020, just as they did when he didn’t take their votes seriously in 2016.– Par Claude Marcil –
René Lévesque écrivait en 1947 :
(….) Ils (les Robin) étaient actifs et sans scrupules. Ils inventèrent un avantageux système de troc et une comptabilité encore plus avantageuse ; et, jusqu’à ces dernières années, ils parvinrent ainsi à garder sous leur coupe, dans un véritable servage, des générations entières de pêcheurs, hommes simples pour qui les chiffres étaient une magie noire d’où ne sortaient jamais rien que des dettes. »
La compagnie Robin a été l’une des plus rapaces de l’histoire du Canada. Fondée après la conquête anglaise par le Britannique Charles Robin, l’empereur de la morue, elle a exploité les pêcheurs gaspésiens pendant deux siècles tout en étendant ses tentacules en Grande-Bretagne, en Méditerranée, dans les Antilles et même en Amérique du Sud. Il faudra un siècle pour la briser, un autre siècle pour l’abattre. À ce moment il sera trop tard.
En 1954, Hawthorne Daniel et Francis Minot publiaient « La mer inépuisable :« L’histoire excitante de la mer et de ses ressources infinies ». On se répétait la même rengaine depuis 400 ans: les réserves de morues étaient inépuisables. Pourtant, pendant les quarante ans qui vont suivre la publication du livre, grâce à beaucoup d’aveuglement, de pensées magiques, de politiciens obtus, l’affaire sera réglée et bien réglée : il n’y a plus de morues ni dans l’Atlantique, ni en Gaspésie.
Quand ils s’en vont à la d’rive vers les deux heures du matin
Pour aller pêcher du squidd(e) pour la boëtte du lendemain
Hé! Youppe Youppe! Hé! Youppe mon gars! ça mord-tu dans ces coins-là?
Hé! Youppe Youppe! Hé! Youppe mon gars! ça mord-tu ou ça mord pas?
(La Gaspésienne de La Bolduc)
Carte des bancs
Au large de l’Amérique du Nord, du Labrador à Cape Cod au Massachusetts, des montagnes s’élèvent sous l’océan Atlantique jusqu’à 200 mètres de la surface. Ces zones peu profondes sont appelées des « bancs ». Le plus vaste s’étend au large de Terre-Neuve. À la fin du Moyen âge, des pêcheurs européens découvrent que la morue y prolifère par millions. Si les explorateurs proclament leurs découvertes, les pêcheurs ne révèlent jamais les leurs. Pendant des décennies, ils gardent jalousement le secret. Puis, par hasard, l’explorateur John Cabot arrive en 1497 sur les bancs de Terre-Neuve.
La Terre Promise de la mer
Il y avait tellement de morues, racontera Cabot que l’équipage les ramassait tout simplement en descendant une chaudière le long du bateau. Cabot vient de découvrir le plus fantastique lieu de pêche que le monde n’avait jamais vu, l’équivalent maritime de la Terre Promise. Le secret des pêcheurs est éventé.
Les Portugais, les Basques, les Français, les Espagnols, les Anglais, tous se précipitent sur les bancs de Terre-Neuve puis dans le golfe Saint-Laurent. Cinquante ans après la découverte de Cabot, on signale 128 bateaux sur les bancs de Terre-Neuve. Soixante ans après, 350 navires; en 1580, 300 à 400 navires uniquement pour les Français. Plus de 10.000 pêcheurs d’Espagne, de France ou d’Angleterre sillonnent la zone en quête de morue qui représente désormais 60% de tout le poisson consommé en Europe.
Séchée ou salée, la morue se conserve indéfiniment, une considération importante à cette époque sans réfrigération. Moins coûteuse que le boeuf, le porc ou l’agneau, la morue devient la principale source de protéines des Européens et un mets apprécié des catholiques qui doivent se priver de viande pendant les 166 jours de jeûne obligatoire de l’année. Pour approvisionner l’Europe, des centaines voire des milliers de navires se rendent chaque année sur les Bancs de Terre-Neuve pêcher une morue qui atteint facilement Près de deux mètres! (1,997) ( plus de six pieds) et environ 91 kilos (90,7) ( environ 200 livres) (moyenne aujourd’hui, six livres). La recherche des morues se poursuit au-delà de Terre-Neuve et le long de la côte atlantique, du Groenland au Maine en passant par le golfe du Saint-Laurent, partout où il y a des bancs et donc des morues.
De l’Acadie à la Côte Nord, les eaux du golfe sont françaises. Champlain, dans son mémoire de 1618, évalue qu’on pourrait pêcher chaque année un million de morues en Nouvelle-France. Il exagère. Toutefois, en 1747, le père Charlevoix signale dans le golfe 564 vaisseaux français, 27, 500 pêcheurs. À Percé, à Gaspé, cinquante navires pêchent le long de la côte. Les pêcheurs de la Gaspésie ont repéré des bancs riches en morue à proximité des rives, dont un en face de Mont-Louis un autre pratiquement à l’embouchure de la baie de Gaspé.
À la fin du régime français, quelque 500 pêcheurs vivent en permanence dans la région. Chaque printemps, lorsque débute la saison de la pêche qui s’étend de la mi-mai à la mi-septembre, 400 Français viennent les rejoindre à Gaspé et Percé surtout, mais aussi à Grande-Rivière, Pabos et Mont-Louis.
Les marchands britanniques installés à Terre-Neuve et le long de la côte américaine convoitent depuis de nombreuses années les eaux du golfe, poissonneuses mais françaises. Ils attendent avec impatience l’inévitable guerre entre la France et l’Angleterre.
Premier bon signe, même si ce n’est encore la guerre : en 1755, pour assurer leurs arrières, les Britanniques déportent 7000 à 8000 Acadiens. Certains se réfugient au fond de la Baie-des-Chaleurs. Un an plus tard, la guerre éclate enfin.
En 1758, l’armée anglaise, dirigée par James Wolfe, fait sauter le verrou du golfe, la forteresse de Louisbourg sur l’île du Cap Breton. Durant l’été elle ratisse l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard et la vide de ses colons français. Puis, en septembre, Wolfe débarque à Gaspé à la tête de sept vaisseaux de guerre et de 1300 hommes. Pendant deux semaines, les Anglais détruisent les postes de pêche de Gaspé, Grande-Rivière, Pabos et Mont-Louis, brûlent les maisons, détruisent les bateaux, les chaloupes et les gréements de pêche. Lorsqu’ils quittent la péninsule le 27 septembre, vers Québec, vers la victoire, ils ne laissent que des ruines.
La majorité des Gaspésiens a quitté la région. Il ne reste que quelques centaines de personnes entre Gaspé et le fond de la Baie-des-Chaleurs.
Le temps des Britanniques
En 1763, la France et la Grande-Bretagne signent la paix. La France cède tout, sauf Saint-Pierre et Miquelon et le droit de pêcher dans cette région. La Gaspésie et l’île du Cap Breton sont donc ouvertes à tous les Britanniques; de Terre-Neuve, de la Nouvelle-Écosse, de la côte est américaine, les compagnies de pêche s’y précipitent. Les premiers en tête viennent de Jersey, une des étranges îles anglo-normandes.
Île de Jersey
Société Jersiaise
Île de Jersey (histoire)
Aujourd’hui encore, sur les enseignes des commerces, dans l’annuaire du téléphone, partout en Gaspésie, en Acadie, sur la Côte Nord, des noms comme Rehel, LeGrand, LeGros, LeMesurier et LeTouzel témoignent de la présence des îles anglo-normandes en Gaspésie.
La plus grande est Jersey située à22 kilomètres au nord des côtes de la Normandie en face de St-Malo. Elle ne mesure que 14 par 8 kilomètres, soit un tiers de l’île de Montréal. Ses habitants sont britanniques, protestants et, à l’époque, parlent français.
Saint-Brelade
Charles Robin naît sur cette île, à Saint-Brelade, le 30 octobre 1743. Son père est boutiquier. Charles Robin perd son père à l’âge de onze ans et sa famille le prend probablement en charge avec ses deux frères. Tous reçoivent, en effet, une bonne éducation et parviennent à bien s’établir dans la vie. L’aîné, Philip, est un haut fonctionnaire de l’île, le second, John, est capitaine d’un navire de pêche à Terre-Neuve. Il n’est pas le seul Jersiais.
En 1765, alors que la Nouvelle-France est devenue britannique, les 943 pêcheurs des îles anglo-normandes représentent 10 pour cent du nombre total des pêcheurs.
Saint-Aubin
En 1765, les trois frères Robin s’associent à d’autres Jersiais pour fonder à Saint-Aubin une compagnie de pêche, la Robin, Pipon and Company. La même année, Philip Robin le nouveau directeur, envoie un navire à l’île du Cap-Breton pour évaluer les possibilités de pêche. Le rapport est favorable; son frère John ouvre alors un poste de pêche au sud de l’île, à Arichat. Ils ont 13 vaisseaux, 300 employés.
La baie des Chaleurs
La compagnie veut s’étendre et, un an plus tard, envoie Charles en éclaireur en Gaspésie. Dans la baie des Chaleurs, il fait une constatation cruciale: la morue est plus petite entre (quatre kilos et demi et neuf kilos) que celles des Grands Bancs de Terre-Neuve où leur grande taille oblige à les saler. De plus, le climat, paisible et sans bruine, facilite son séchage. Il prend un premier contact avec les pêcheurs acadiens.
Il repère aussi un petit port naturel idéal pour mouiller ses navires à l’abri, avec une grande plage de galets pour sécher la morue: Paspébiac.
Charles Robin fait un rapport enthousiaste à ses frères.
L’année suivante, Charles Robin revient à Paspébiac. Deux heures après son arrivée, il part en chaloupe pour Bonaventure, négocie toute la nuit avec les pêcheurs l’échange de sel contre de la morue, repart à l’aube vers Paspébiac, charge sa chaloupe avec des marchandises, traverse la baie vers Caraquet, négocie encore, retourne à Paspébiac. Le lendemain il se dirige vers Carleton. Cette activité trépidante sera la grande caractéristique de Charles Robin. Il retourne au Cap Breton avec 1200 quintaux ( un quintal = 55 kilos) de morue sèche. La compagnie est convaincue et décided’ouvrir un poste dans la Baie des chaleurs.
Pour Charles Robin, le principal problème est la concurrence de marchands venus de la Nouvelle-Écosse, de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, ou de Québec comme Hugh Montgomery et William Smyth. Mais Robin a un atout majeur dans son jeu :
Alors que ses rivaux, unilingues anglophones, sont considérés par les pêcheurs comme des conquérants, Robin parle français.
Il revient les années suivantes, commerce avec les Acadiens, gagne leur confiance.Il leur vend le nécessaire pour la pêche, des agrès, des lignes, des voiles et de la nourriture : pois, porc, farine, et même de l’alcool. Les Acadiens le paient en saumons ou en morues.
À cette époque, les marchands de poisson sont itinérants. Ils naviguent le long de la baie à la rencontre des pêcheurs. La concurrence est féroce et ruineuse. Charles, le premier, décide dès 1770, de passer l’hiver à Paspébiac. Il y installe un poste de pêche permanent ouvert à longueur d’année. Personne ne pourra acheter les premières morues du printemps avant lui. Mais son principal problème, comme celui de tous ses rivaux est le manque de pêcheurs.
La main d’œuvre
Il y a alors moins de deux cents familles dans la Baie des Chaleurs, seize familles à Paspébiac. Même en ajoutant les Acadiens, ce n’est pas assez. D’autant plus qu’il faut préparer la morue. Cette dernière doit être évidée, étêtée et désossée puis enduite de sel et séchée au soleil.
Il faut aussi des commis, des artisans, des marins etc.
Déportés en Angleterre en 1755, des Acadiens avaient été ensuite libérés et vivotaient dans tous les ports de l’Europe dont celui de St-Malo, juste en face de Jersey. Robin les rapatrie. Au printemps 1774, trois goélettes de la Robin abordent à Paspébiac. À bord, 81 Acadiens qui vont maintenant pêcher pour la compagnie.
Un à un, ses concurrents abandonnent la partie, Robin prospère. Ses pêcheries opèrent chaque année avec une douzaine de vaisseaux. Percé est le principal poste morutier et 400 employés saisonniers y pêchent l’été dans la centaine de petits bateaux que possèdent alors les chefs de famille.
Puis, en 1776, les Américains se révoltent contre la Grande-Bretagne.
Mal protégé par la marine britannique, le golfe Saint-Laurent est vulnérable. Des navires américains détruisent, dès l’été, toutes les installations de la Robin au Cap Breton.
À la mi-juin 1778, deux goélettes américaines attaquent Paspébiac, pillent les magasins de la Robin, transbordent la morue sur son propre navire et brûlent le reste!
Charles Robin leur échappe de justesse en fuyant dans les bois. Il prend le chemin de Jersey durant l’automne, et pendant cinq longues années, il attend le retour de la paix.
En 1783, les Etats-Unis obtiennent leur indépendance.
Dès le mois de juillet, Robin est de retour dans la Baie des Chaleurs. Cette fois a la tête de sa propre compagnie, la Charles Robin and Company. ll rebâtit sans délai les magasins, les quais et les logements de Paspébiac. La pêche reprend.
S’il n’a plus à se préoccuper des Américains désormais interdits en Gaspésie, il doit affronter une douzaine de nouveaux rivaux, énergiques et souvent riches. Le combat est inégal; ce sont des amateurs alors que Robin connaît à fond le commerce de la morue qu’il a peaufiné pendant des années. Il sait où se trouvent les plus riches pêcheries et les meilleures grèves pour le séchage. Il entretient de bonnes relations aussi bien avec les pêcheurs acadiens que les grands acheteurs internationaux de morue de l’Espagne et du Portugal. Tous les Nord-Américains se sont plantés sur ce marché, sauf Robin. Les Portugais et les Espagnols, consommateurs difficiles, préfèrent une morue séchée et légèrement salée.
Contrairement à ses concurrents, de simples administrateurs qui doivent attendre, pendant des semaines ou des mois, les ordres et les autorisations de Québec ou de Londres, Charles Robin est sur place et il est le boss. Sa première décision est de régler le côté volage de la morue.
Un réseau de comptoirs
Acheter de la morue est éprouvant pour les nerfs des commerçants. La morue est un poisson imprévisible; certaines années, elle est abondante dans un secteur de la baie que, rare dans un autre ou l’inverse. Une seule mauvaise année de pêche et c’est la faillite. Robin a une idée audacieuse: créer une chaîne de comptoirs pour acheter la morue où qu’elle soit. Dès 1783, il ouvre un deuxième poste à Percé.
Rapidement, Robin devient le roi et maître des pêcheries les plus importantes de la péninsule, celles de la Baie-des-Chaleurs et de la côte jusqu’à Percé, la frontière économique fixée avec ses rivaux. Cette frontière, Charles Robin ne la franchit pas. L’est de Percé jusqu’à l’extrémité de la Gaspésie et son versant nord est réservé aux autres marchands de Jersey et de Guernesey. Les marchands anglo-normands s’assurent, et pour longtemps, du contrôle total de la pêche en Gaspésie.
Robin veut contrôler la pêche de A à Z : certains de ses employés pêchent une certaine quantité de morue. il fournit aussi à des pêcheurs les barges et les agrès de pêches; dans ce cas, certains sont payés selon la quantité de morue, d’autres reçoivent la moitié de leurs prises. Mais l’essentiel de la morue vient des pêcheurs indépendants qui vendent leurs prises aux caboteurs des marchands qui font la navette tout le long du littoral de la baie des Chaleurs jusqu’à Percé pour la collecter. Comment s’assurer que les pêcheurs lui vendent toutes leurs morues, à lui seul, et à bas prix?
Pognés à la gorge
De mémoire de pêcheur gaspésien, il n’a jamais été possible d’avoir en poche, avant la saison de la pêche, l’argent pour acheter la nourriture, les agrès de pêche, le tissu pour vêtir les enfants et le peu qu’il faut pour survivre, lui et sa famille, jusqu’à l’automne.
Comme tous les autres marchants, Charles Robinfait crédit et se fait rembourser à la fin de la saison de pêche.
Le prix de la morue n’est pas fixé à mesure que le pêcheur les remet au commis de la Robin; celui-ci se contente de les enregistrer. Le prix de la morue n’est fixé qu’à la toute fin de la saison de pêche. Par Robin. À ce moment-là seulement, Robin et le pêcheur font leurs comptes
« ils parvinrent ainsi à garder sous leur coupe, dans un véritable servage, des générations entières de pêcheurs, hommes simples pour qui les chiffres étaient une magie noire d’où ne sortaient jamais rien que des dettes. » (René Lévesque)
Comme Robin augmente le prix de ses marchandises et baisse celui de la morue comme il le veut quand il le veut, le pêcheur se retrouve généralement endetté et il doit s’endetter encore plus pour passer l’hiver.
« Le pêcheur devait par conséquent continuer à faire la pêche et vendre son poisson à Robin puisqu’il n’avait nulle part ailleurs où le vendre et, de plus, il devait s’en remettre à lui pour les avances d’hiver. » (P. 65, Gaspésie rebelle et insoumise, Sylvain Rivière, Lanctôt éditeur, 2000)
Si, exceptionnellement, c’est Robin qui doit de l’argent au pêcheur, il le paie avec des marchandises de son magasin.
Comme le pêcheur ne reçoit pas d’argent, il ne peut pas par exemple acheter sa farine chez les caboteurs qui la vendent quatre fois moins cher que Robin.
Une fois endettés, les pêcheurs sont à toutes fins pratiques incapables de rembourser leurs dettes, et Robin est enfin assuré d’une main-d’œuvre captive, stable et misérable. Charles écrit à son agent en 1790 que les pêcheurs devaient:
« to live in poor miserable huts, which would make you shudder did you but see them. »
Utiliser les politiciens 101
Avec l’appui du lieutenant-gouverneur de la Gaspésie Nicholas Cox, un ami qui lui doit une fortune, le gouvernement émet en 1788 une ordonnance qui empêche quiconque, sauf Robin, d’acquérir de grandes étendues de rivages sans même, privilège inouï, se réserver les plages comme c’est l’usage pour un État.
Bref Robin a donc ses grèves privées, ses terres à bois, et peut utiliser toutes les autres qui sont publiques. Robin peut donc bâtir tout ce qu’il veut.
La même année, Robin est nommé juge de paix. Justement, sa compagnie est une des seules à avoir recours aux tribunaux car la plupart des procès portent sur des recouvrements de dettes entre pêcheurs et commerçants.
Petite inquiétude toutefois lorsque le gouvernement se décide à concéder des terres en Gaspésie. Et si les pêcheurs se lançaient dans l’agriculture?
Mais Charles Robin est nommé adjudicateur des terres, ce qui veut dire que c’est lui qui remet le lopin de terre au pêcheur qui voudrait devenir cultivateur.
M. Charles Robin, exposa aux pêcheurs qu’il leur serait plus avantageux de n’avoir qu’un lopin de dix arpents, parce que la culture en grand les détournerait de la pêche. (Abbé Ferland, 1836 )
(…)il n’avait pas été long à comprendre que s’il remettait au pêcheur un lopin minuscule, celui-ci, même avec la meilleure volonté du monde, ne pourrait gagner sa vie uniquement des fruits de sa terre, quand on connaît les sols rocailleux de la Gaspésie. (P. 65. Gaspésie rebelle et insoumise, Sylvain Rivière, Lanctôt éditeur, 2000)
Ils se laissèrent persuader, et maintenant, ils regrettent leur folie. Ces petits terrains, ne fournissent qu’un peu de pacage (..). (Abbé Ferland)
Pour les pêcheurs, il n’y a plus d’alternatives à Robin.
Protégé de tous les côtés, Robin peut compter sur l’indifférence totale du gouvernement et bâtir tranquillement, sur les reins des pêcheurs, ce qui va devenir la plus importante compagnie de pêche en Amérique.
Les affaires de la famille Robin baignent dans l’huile; de Jersey, son frère Philip s’occupe consciencieusement de la partie européenne; Il lui trouve des clients et lui procure sans défaillance les marchandises nécessaires à ses magasins.
En 1790, Il envoie quelque 740 000 kilos de morue en Espagne et au Portugal où sa morue est devenue légendaire.
La capture et la transformation d’une morue de 25 livres en poisson séché-salé demandent un personnel nombreux. Il faut suivre rigoureusement les étapes pour obtenir la meilleure qualité.
Les pêcheurs
La façon de pêcher la morue n’a pas changé depuis le Régime français. Les pêcheurs gagnent les bancs à la voile ou à la rame dès les trois heures du matin pour en ramener les morues vers les quatre heures de l’après-midi.
Ils pêchent la morue une à une avec la ligne à main. Deux pêcheurs utilisent chacun deux lignes placées de chaque côté de la barque.
Un pêcheur peut prendre entre 350 et 400 morues par jour ce qui représente à la fin de la saison 150 et 300 quintaux ( 112 livres ou 55 kilos le quintal). Ils reviennent rapidement à terre afin que la morue puisse être tranchée et salée tout de suite, c’est-à-dire avant qu’elle n’ait eu le temps de s’échauffer et de ramollir. Sur la grève, des travailleurs que ses agents à Montmagny lui envoient chaque été, reçoivent les morues. (350 hommes en 1828 par exemple.)
…
On tranche le cou de la morue, on lui ouvre le ventre jusqu’au nombril. On la vide de ses viscères, en prenant soin de récupérer le foie et les œufs. Ceci étant fait, on retourne la morue sur le ventre, on lui détache la tête du corps et on enlève l’arrête dorsale à l’aide d’un couteau.Une fois éviscérée, la morue est apportée derrière l’étal où on l’étend en plusieurs couches. On saupoudre chacune d’elles de sel afin de lui faire perdre son eau, ni trop, pour ne pas la brûler, ni trop peu pour qu’elle ne se gâte pas. Deux à huit jours plus tard, on lave la morue afin de la débarrasser de ce sel, puis on l’étend sur la plage de galets pour la faire sécher au soleil. Il faut surveiller attentivement les conditions d’humidité et le vent. Après une quinzaine de jours, la morue est à point; ensuite on fait des piles en attendant de l’embarquer à bord du navire.
…
Grâce aux esclaves, Robin réussit à vendre ses morues bas de gamme. Pour travailler dans les plantations de cannes à sucre sous le soleil de plomb des Antilles, les esclaves ont besoin de sel et de protéines.
Or, ce n’est pas payant pour les propriétaires de faire pousser de la nourriture sur des terres idéales pour la canne à sucre. Aussi les Antilles ne produisent pas de nourriture. La morue salée est parfaite.
Le très conservateur Robin est un excellent planificateur. Prudent en affaires, il évite de prendre des risques et ne cherche pas à réaliser absolument de gros profits. Pour lui, il est plus important que ses exportations croissent lentement mais sûrement et que les acheteurs de morue en Europe se fient à la qualité de son poisson.
Une autre guerre
En 1792, premières élections au Québec; 3 000 Gaspésiens ont le droit d’élire un député. Mais le seul bureau de vote est à Gaspé. Cinq citoyens viennent voter, à main levé. Son ami Edward O’Hara est élu, le premier d’une longue série de députés de la Gaspésie totalement dévoués à la Robin qui le leur rend bien. Robin a alors des postes à Cascapédia, Bonaventure, Paspébiac, Grande-Rivière et Percé, la frontière de l’empire.En 1793 Robin fait construire un premier bateau à Paspébiac, le Fiott. Cette année-là, la guerre éclate entre la France et l’Angleterre. Elle va durer, à toutes fins pratiques, un quart de siècle.
C’est une période tumultueuse; L’empereur Napoléon interdit à l’Europe de commercer avec l’Angleterre et ses colonies puis envahit l’Espagne et le Portugal, fermant ainsi à Robin ses plus importants débouchés. Mais Robin réussit à vendre de la morue en Nouvelle-Angleterre, au Québec et dans les Antilles anglaises. En fait, il maintient ses exportations aux niveaux d’avant-guerre et exporte rarement moins de 715 000 kilos de morue par année.
La retraite
Célibataire, n’ayant aucun ami, Robin mène une existence frugale et ordonnée. La seule passion de Charles Robin est la Charles Robin Company. Il y consacre tout son temps, toute son habileté, toutes ses forces. Entre 1783 et 1802 il ne quitte qu’une fois la baie des Chaleurs; ce fut pour se rendre à pied, en plein hiver jusqu’à Québec, 600 milles aller-retour, afin |
hope resides with the one most unlikely person imaginable to save the kingdom and restore peace to the realm: Ceville, the realm's former despotic ruler...CevilleThe ancient ruler of Faeryanis and spare-time tyrant, is dreaming up evil plans to exact his revenge on his former counsellor and servant Basilus, who betrayed him.AmbrosiusThe noble and somewhat self-important knight Ambrosius is Ceville's would-be-nemesis. He constantly attempts to capture Ceville — but usually with little success. Will they both team up to fight a greater evil?LillyThe gentle and kind girl Lilly is rather an improbable choice to team up with Ceville. Never the less she helps him to escape for the good of the realm (at least that's what SHE thinks!)This game will give you an impression of what happens, when you mix up the setting and humour of Shrek, Discworld and the Monkey Island series.Dec 28, 2014; Atlanta, GA, USA; Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan (2) drops back to pass against the Carolina Panthers in the third quarter at the Georgia Dome. The Panthers defeated the Falcons 34-3. Mandatory Credit: Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports
Let’s take a step back from all the free agency, NFL Draft, and re-signing talk. Let’s talk the jerseys of the Atlanta Falcons.
After asking Twitter whether the Falcons should get a uniform change or not, fans instantly replied in less than 5 minuets with a clear answer.
Should the Atlanta Falcons get a Uniform Change? Yes? No? — Blogging Dirty (@BloggingDirty) February 11, 2015
@BloggingDirty black jerseys grey pants please! — Chapman Maddox (@chapmadd) February 11, 2015
Personally, I think the Atlanta Falcons should hold off on the jersey swap until they move into their brand new state-of-the-art stadium. That would provide a whole new look for the fans in every single way possible.
But it would also make sense just swapping the Dirty Bird colors to something with more…..swag? After all, Mike Smith is gone and it seems as if the Falcons are headed into a new generation with Stone Cold Dan Quinn coming in to save the day.
Something simple would do it. @100K_Jay (#Quinning) had a good idea of simply swapping out the white pants with black pants. That would look great with the black helmet and red jerseys. Tell the world below in the comments on what you think the Atlanta Falcons should do, and don’t forget to vote in the poll!
Should the Atlanta Falcons Get a Uniform Change? Yes NOW!
Yes, but not until we get the new stadium
No, it looks fine View ResultsOver the last few years some new stats terms have crept into the footy fan's lexicon. It's unlikely at the start of the decade you would have given much thought to how many "rebound 50s" a defender has, or who in the competition has the most "metres gained". The usefulness of these new numbers vary, but one stat I do think has the potential to change the way we think about footy, due in part to its usefulness but also its simplicity, is the number of Score Involvements each player has.
I've written about Score Involvements a couple of times before. Basically, a player earns a Score Involvement any time they are directly involved in a play which leads to a score for their team. This could be anything from a handball in the back 50 which is eventually worked up the other end for a behind or actually kicking a goal yourself.
Players in high scoring teams naturally rack up more Score Involvements than players in struggling sides. It's perhaps unsurprising that 3 of the top-6 players in the comp this year were Crows players. If your team is the highest scoring side in the comp, you may only need to make a few routine passes each week to finish with a healthy ScoInv total.
That's why, instead of looking at raw Score Involvement figures, it turns out to be a little more interesting to look at the percentage of a team's total scores each player was involved in. For example, in the 24 games Patrick Dangerfield played last year, he was, on average, involved in 32% of all Geelong scores. Roughly 1 out of every 3 Cats scores had Danger's hand in it somewhere. The next most involved Cat was Tom Hawkins who was in an average of around 29% of all scoring plays in the 23 games he played.
When we compare different teams in the comp we begin to see a few unique scoring "styles" emerge. Some teams rely on players in certain positions much more than others. Some have a "key" player involved in many of their scores whereas others have more balanced and even avenues to goal. There's a lot more we can go into with this, but as a starting point I've identified 4 basic styles of scoring that seem to describe how most of the teams go about it.
1. A Dominant Key Forward
The single player with the biggest proportion of their team's Score Involvements in the AFL is Gold Coast's Tom Lynch. Lynch was involved in around 40% of all Suns scores this year, almost twice the involvement of the next best forward. Here's a breakdown of all those involvements:
As you can see, the bulk of these Score Involvements come as shots. He is the "complete package" stay at home key forward, working well anywhere in the 50 and making chances out of most of what comes his way. Lynch is the Suns' most popular route to goal by a fair margin.
Other clubs using this style: Sydney, Richmond
2. A Multifaceted Forward Line
Adelaide's top Score Involvement player is also a forward named Tom Lynch. But in stark contrast to the Suns man who was involved in 40% of Gold Coast scores, Crow Tom Lynch had a hand in only 30% of the Crows'. However, as Adelaide were such a high scoring team and played finals, he still managed to rack up a few more Involvements in real terms. Here's how he got them:
Whilst still getting in the scoring himself, Lynch's true value lies in his ability to get up the ground and sweep the ball down the wings. Pair this with the unique talents of Betts and Jenkins as well as Tex Walker roaming up he centre and slingshotting the ball with a 60m+ boot and you can see that there are many strings to the Adelaide bow. Their advantage lies in their variety of talented forwards.
Other clubs using this style: Hawthorn, West Coast, Melbourne, St Kilda, Fremantle, North Melbourne
3. One (or two) Lone Midfield Monster(s)
As we saw earlier, Dangerfield (along with a bit of help from Selwood) are the dominant midfielders behind the bulk of Geelong's scoring. Bryce Gibbs (along with Patrick Cripps) play the same role at Carlton; chipping in with the odd goal, but setting up many more.
Involved in around 5% more scores a game than his next best teammate, it's unsurprising the Carlton were very reluctant to give up Gibbs this trade period. Those long orange lines show how many shots he sets up directly off his own boot while the grey involvements show a player working all around the ground.
Other clubs using this style: Geelong, Port Adelaide, Collingwood, Brisbane
4. A Well-Oiled Midfield Machine
One of the surprising things about this year's premiers, was the lack of a genuine star, standout player. Sure, Bontempelli has the potential to be that and Tom Boyd may yet live up to his hype (and pricetag), but you couldn't point to one player and say that they would be lost without them in 2016. In a year ravaged by injuries, this was a critical element to their success. Their best midfielder, Bont himself, was only involved in around 5% more scoring plays each game played than their tenth best midfielder, Liam Picken.
Quick hands through the middle and a dangerous boot up front make Bontempelli the Bulldog's most important important scoring player, but he has a lot of friends in that regard.
Other clubs using this style: No other club has quite the same setup as the Dogs. Sydney and GWS have similarly even, skilled midfields but both have a more influential forward dominating their Score Involvements.
Which Style is Best?
I'm not sure this question has a definitive answer. There were genuinely good teams playing each of the four styles last year.
I would say that the styles relying on one or two individual stars are highest risk as they are clearly the most susceptible to injury. However, that's not to say these teams shouldn't be utilising their star players to the best of their ability. It's also not to say that they wouldn't be able to switch into another style if such an injury did hit.
If Sydney lost Buddy they still may be able to find success by spreading the load around in a different way. But while he is fit, it only makes sense to take advantage of his freakish ability by getting the ball to him as much as possible.
We also need to consider the flipside to your own scoring. That is, how well you limit your opponent scoring. Adelaide have a well rounded forward line, but this means resources (cap space etc.) are moved away from their midfield and defense. Perhaps for this reason an army of talented midfielders is the right way to go. It certainly worked for the Dogs.Thomas Piketty, a French economist and academic, has become an overnight sensation thanks to his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, a bestseller that has sparked debate on all sides for its detailed analysis of inequality under capitalism, with elation and praise from the reformist left, and horror and fright from the free-market right.
With his clear and simple explanation of the inequalities within capitalism, it is clear why Thomas Piketty has become a worldwide “rock-star economist”. Backed up by his own painstaking and meticulous studies of centuries of historical data on wealth and income from a variety of countries, Piketty draws an unequivocal conclusion: that growing inequality between rich and poor – between the owners of capital and the rest of society – is the normal state of affairs under capitalism; periods of decreasing inequality, such as during the post-war boom, Piketty asserts, are the exception, not the rule.
Conditions create consciousness
Piketty’s success, however, is not merely down to his own personal rigour and genius, nor because of the eloquence and clarity of his writing, but is largely a reflection of the times we are living in – an era of deep capitalist crisis where economic stagnation and rising inequality have become the new normality. As The Economist (3rd May 2014) notes:
“The book’s success has a lot to do with being about the right subject at the right time. Inequality has suddenly become a fevered topic, especially in America...Americans, stung by the excesses of Wall Street, are suddenly talking about the rich and redistribution. Hence the attraction of a book which argues that growing wealth concentration is inherent to capitalism and recommends a global tax on wealth as the progressive solution.”
As Andrew Hussey in The Observer (13th April 2014) commented, “The singular significance of his book is that it proves ‘scientifically’ that this intuition is correct...it says what many people have already been thinking.”
The author himself has admitted as such, recognising that “some of the success of the book” is due to “concern with rising inequality”:
“There is a sense that inequality and wealth in the United States have been widening. People are wondering whether this will continue forever. When you have relatively low growth, 1 percent, 2 percent growth, people are concerned for the future. People are thinking about inequality.” (New Statesman, 6th May 2014)
Six years of capitalist crisis, in which the bankers and bosses have carried on making record profits whilst the rest of us are asked to pay for the crisis through austerity and cuts, have convinced the vast majority in society that we most certainty are not “all in this together”. This increasing sense of injustice in capitalism has been reflected in a multitude of ways in the recent period, from the reports by the charity Oxfam, which revealed that 85 billionaires own as much as the bottom half of the world’s population, to studies indicating that the share of the wealth in society going to workers in the form of wages has decreased in all countries over the past few decades. Others, meanwhile, have noted that mankind is increasingly in a race against the machines – that the technologies society has created have led to an accumulation of profits at one end, and to low wages and mass unemployment at the other.
Above all, this growing realisation of the inherent inequality within capitalism is demonstrated by the mass movements that have sprung up throughout the world, and most notably by the now universally famous slogan of “We are the 99%”. Talk of inequality, therefore, is not a new phenomena that Piketty has helped to create, but is the zeitgeist of our age – an age of seemingly permanent crisis and austerity.
Piketty the Marxist?
With his main message – that the inner dynamics of unregulated capitalism will tend to create inequality, not reduce it – and, of course, with his choice of the title “Capital”, Piketty has unsurprisingly drawn comparisons with the author of the nineteenth century “Capital”, Karl Marx.
Piketty’s focus on the question of capital – i.e. on the ownership of accumulated wealth – rather than simply on income, as many other previous discourses on inequality concentrate on, does indeed bare a similarity to Marx’s own analysis, as does the modern day French economist’s conclusion that inequality is a fundamental symptom of the laws of capitalism, something inherent to the system, rather than just an unfortunate and occasional accident. As Marx noted long ago in his magnum opus:
“[I]n proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse...It makes accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”
It is at this point, however, that any similarity between the two authors ends.
Piketty’s own theory is based fundamentally upon the distribution of wealth in society, which, the author hypothesises, is down to two key variables: r, the general rate of return on capital – i.e. the average rate of profit; and g, the rate of economic growth in society. Where r is greater than g, that is where the rate of profit is greater than the rate of growth, capital – the accumulated wealth of the rich – will increase faster than the economy as a whole, which means an increasing share of the pie goes to Capital and a decreasing share going to Labour – thus, inequality increases.
According to Piketty’s own empirical studies, this trend was the historic norm in nineteenth century Britain and France. Only with the destruction of large amounts of capital during two world wars, strong policies of taxation and regulation, and an exceptional period of economic growth following WWII, was there any reverse of this yawning inequality in the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, however, when growth has been persistently sluggish, and when profits have continued to grow, the long term trend of rising inequality has been back with a vengeance.
Marxism, however, does not merely see inequality as the result of distributions in wealth, but as an inevitable result of the production of wealth under capitalism. All wealth in society is the product of labour, created by the physical and mental efforts of the working class. Profits – the return on capital – are, as Marx explained, nothing more than the unpaid labour of the working class; the difference between the value of that produced and the value that accrues back to workers in the form of wages. A growing rate of profit, therefore, merely implies a growing exploitation of the working class, which necessarily means a larger share of the wealth in society accumulating in the hands of the capitalists – a tiny elite of exploiters.
Marx demonstrated in his three volumes of Capital how, through various means, the capitalists could squeeze greater profits out of the working class: by extending the working day; through an intensification of work within a given time; by increasing the efficiency and productivity of workers; by replacing labour with machinery, etc. Ultimately this amounted to one thing: an increasing exploitation of the working class – that is, an increasing ratio of unpaid labour relative to the total labour of the working class.
This exploitation is also, however, the source of an inherent contradiction within capitalism. If workers are not paid back the full value of their product – which is necessarily the case in a system of private ownership and production for profit – then how can they ever buy back all the goods that they produce? This contradiction of overproduction – which has historically been overcome for temporary periods through investment, the use of credit, and the expansion of world trade, etc. – is what leads to periodic crises under capitalism, including the deep organic crisis that we are experiencing today, in which all the accumulated contradictions in the system are unravelling before our eyes.
Marx, however, never saw the capitalist economy simply in terms of abstract variables, but as a dialectical system of contradictory and interconnected processes, and ultimately as a struggle between living forces – a class struggle between the capitalists and workers for the surplus produced in society. Through the means described above, the capitalists can attempt to increase their profits at the expense of the working class; but where the working class is organised, united, and willing to fight, reforms can be won and workers can gain a greater share of the pie.
The difference between Marx and Piketty, therefore, is not simply one of conclusion, but of approach: the difference between the dialectical materialist and revolutionary analysis of capitalism of Marx and the dry, empirical academic approach of Piketty. As Paul Mason writes in The Guardian (28th April 2014):
“Is Piketty the new Karl Marx? Anybody who has read the latter will know he is not...Where Marx saw social relationships – between labour and managers, factory owners and the landed aristocracy – Piketty sees only social categories: wealth and income. Marxist economics lives in a world where the inner tendencies of capitalism are belied by its surface experience. Piketty’s world is of concrete historical data only. So the charges of soft Marxism are completely misplaced.”
Reformist “manna from heaven”
Piketty, however, has still felt it necessary to go to great lengths to reassure the world that he is not a Marxist, stating categorically his belief that, “we need private property and market institutions, not just for economic efficiency but for personal freedom,” (New York Times, 19th April 2014) and affirming that, “I am defender of the free market and private property,” whilst providing a social democratic caveat that, “there are limits to what markets can do.” (The Guardian, 2nd May 2014)
Elsewhere in interviews, meanwhile, Piketty has stated that Marx’s Capital “was not very influential” on him and the he “never managed to read it”. Nevertheless, our learned academic still feels himself to be in a position to criticise Marx for his lack of empirical data – despite the fact that Capital is filled with qualitative reports and quantitative data from a multitude of sources!
For the reformist left, therefore, Piketty’s is a godsend: a man who provides a theoretical explanation for the causes of inequality, alongside academic justification for radical sounding social democratic policies of high taxation on income and wealth, whilst simultaneously distancing himself from the revolutionary ideas of Marxism. As Paul Mason comments (28th April 2014), Piketty provides a programme that, whilst appearing radical, sticks firms within the confines of capitalism:
“Piketty’s Capital, unlike Marx’s Capital, contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself: the 15% tax on capital, the 80% tax on high incomes, enforced transparency for all bank transactions, overt use of inflation to redistribute wealth downwards.”
Len McCluskey, leader of Unite the Union, the largest trade union in Britain, described Piketty’s acclaimed work as “manna from heaven”, whilst Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist and academic darling of modern day Keynesianism, has described Piketty’s Capital as “a tour de force”, a “masterly diagnosis” that has “transformed our economic discourse” by providing “a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame.”
Like all other reformists, Piketty ultimately has no confidence in the power of the working class to transform society. Unlike such reformists, however, he sees no return to a post-war era of economic boom and Keynesian policies either. As Mason comments, “[for] Piketty, a repeat of the Keynesian era is unlikely: labour is too weak, technological innovation too slow, the global power of capital too great.” (28th April 2014)
On this point, Piketty is correct. The post-war boom was indeed an anomaly of capitalism; an exception in history that was made possible by a confluence of factors, as explained by Ted Grant in his analysis Will There be a Slump?, which included: the massive destruction of the means of production during the Second World War; the hugely strengthened position of the USA following the war, and its ability to preside over a vast expansion of world trade; the development and implementation of new technologies and production techniques due to nationalised research and development programmes during the war; and the political betrayals of the Stalinists and reformists at the end of the war. Such an exceptional situation of growth is not on the cards today; instead we have the perspective only of “permanent slump”, “secular stagnation”, and endless austerity.
The solution for Piketty, then, is merely to appeal to the politicians to try and plaster over the gaping wound of inequality that capitalism has created – to patch up the system and keep it running. In this respect, the problem for Piketty is not inequality per se, but the fact that this creates anger and injustice in society, threatening the system itself: “It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such extreme inequality.” (New York Times, 19th April 2014) Piketty concerns are echoed by the words of the reformist leaders of the labour movement, such as McCluskey, who stated that, “if the gap between the super-rich and the rest of us continues to grow, it can only bring social unrest. This could manifest itself in a variety of ways, none of them good.” (28th April 2014).
Far from calling for the socialist transformation of society, therefore, the reformists – with their new theoretical leader in the shape of Thomas Piketty – cling to the cadaver of capitalism at the very time that the system is dying on its feet, warning the ruling class of the dangers of revolution if the issue of inequality isn’t addressed.
Piketty, therefore, is not a strongly principled ideologue, but just another liberal economist who wishes, as John Maynard Keynes did before him with his General Theory, written at the time of the Great Depression, to highlight the worst excesses of capitalism in the hope of allowing the system to carry on going as before. “I have no problem with inequality,” Piketty has stated, “as long as it is in the common interest.” (New York Times, 19th April 2014)
Pragmatist or utopian?
Like so many others in academia, Piketty tries to paint himself as a neutral observer, standing above the petty world of ordinary politics. Neither a revolutionary anti-capitalist nor a free-market fundamentalist himself, Piketty hopes to persuade the politicians of the world to act through reasoned arguments and by appealing to the facts.
Firstly, however, whilst considering himself a “pragmatist” – a practical man of science and empirical evidence – Piketty is nevertheless clearly constrained by the ideas of the ruling class and the prejudices of bourgeois society. As Keynes correctly noted in his General Theory, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Piketty, ironically, is a slave to Keynes himself; yet another economist who thought he could reform and regulate capitalism to get rid of the worst excesses whilst allowing the system as a whole to trundle along.
Secondly, far from being a “pragmatist”, Piketty is clearly one of the most deluded utopians of the all. To give him credit, Piketty has described some of his own policy suggestions as “utopian”. Nevertheless, he maintains – like so many other reformists – that all that is needed is “political will”: “If we are able to send one million troops to Kuwait in a few months to return the oil,” Piketty questioned, “presumably we can do something about tax havens.” (New York Times, 19th April 2014)
Such logic, however, glosses over all political reality and purposefully confuses and conflates the class interests in society: imperialist invasions in Kuwait, Iraq, or Afghanistan are conducting by the ruling class for the sake of increased profits, expanded markets, and extended spheres of influence – that is, for the benefit of the capitalists; doing “something” about tax havens, if it is to be a “something” that reduces inequality, could only mean taking on the interests of capital and damaging these same profits. As Paul Mason comments: "[Piketty] calls some of [his solutions] utopian and he is right. It is easier to imagine capitalism collapsing than the elite consenting to them." (28th April 2014) And as The Observer (13th April 2014) notes:
"...it is hard, almost impossible, to imagine that the cure he proposes - tax and more tax - will ever be implemented in a world where, from Beijing to Moscow to Washington, money, and those who have more of it than anyone else, still calls the shots."
Like all the reformist leaders and intellectuals before him, therefore, Piketty believes that the capitalist state can be used against the interests of the capitalists themselves. Whilst our academic rock star may pride himself on his use of historical data in his economic studies, it seems that he is willing to ignore all the lessons of history when it comes to this political question of the state and the potential for reforming capitalism.
Where reforms have been won under capitalism, it has always been on the basis of class struggle and the threat to the capitalists of potentially losing far more. Piketty acknowledged as much in an interview with the Huffington Post (1st May 2014), explaining that the danger of revolution and the example of the planned economy in the Soviet Union helped to convince the capitalists to part with some of the profits:
“The existence of a counter model [the Soviet Union] was one of the reasons that a number of reforms or policies were accepted. "In France, it's very striking to see that in 1920, the political majorities adopted steeply progressive taxation. Exactly the same people refused the income tax in 1914 with a 2 percent tax rate. And in between, the Bolshevik revolution made them feel, after all, that progressive taxation is not so dangerous as revolution."
“The history of all hitherto existing society,” Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto, “is the history of class struggles.” Where reformist leaders, such as Allende in Chile in 1973, have attempted to gradually reform capitalism in the interests of the majority of society, they have always been met with resistance, sabotage, and even violence by the existing ruling class of capitalists and landlords.
One does not even need to go so far back as 1973 to demonstrate this; rather we can go closer to Piketty’s own time and country, and look at the miserable example of François Hollande, the “socialist” President of France, who won a sweeping victory in May 2012 with a programme to tax the rich. Within his first year in office, however, President Hollande saw his flagship policy of a 75% tax on the top incomes shot down by the French courts – that is, by the bourgeois state. Now two years since election, and Hollande has reneged on all his election promises and – under the pressure of big business and their threats to withdraw investment from the country– is carrying out a programme of austerity to “restore competitiveness” to the French economy – i.e. to cut labour costs and increase profits.
Far from being a practical and “realistic” man, Piketty, as with all other reformist leaders, is himself deeply utopian. The only realistic solution is the revolutionary socialist transformation of society – to put an end to the capitalist system and put the wealth and technology in society under a rational and democratic plan of production.
The fright of the right
More interesting that the enchantment of the reformist left with Piketty is the fury of those most fervently in support of capitalism, who are horrified at the popularity of a man who calls for large increases in taxes on the rich. Despite clearly stating his opposition to revolutionary ideas, the ardent advocates of the free market understand that Piketty, by providing a theoretical criticism of the capitalism system, shining a spotlight on the issue of inequality, and reviving a discussion about the merits of Marx’s own analysis, has opened up a potential Pandora’s box of radicalisation amongst the masses.
The bourgeois mouthpieces calmly –and correctly – trot out the problems facing Piketty’s reformist suggestions: “higher taxes on income and wealth put off entrepreneurs and risk taking...” (The Economist, 3rd May 2014) – in other words, taxing the rich leads to a strike of investment and a flight of capital. The problem the capitalist apologists face, however, is that Piketty’s empirical historical analysis of inequality is fairly water-tight.
The result is an inability of the free market fanatics to answer Piketty’s criticisms with any solid analysis of their own; instead they simply stick the label of “Marxist” onto him instead. Whilst his method and theoretical explanation are clearly not Marxist, and whilst they can palm off his policy recommendations as “utopian” (which they are), the most solid defenders of the capitalist system are having trouble arguing against the facts that Piketty presents in his magnum opus.
Keynesian economist Paul Krugman has boasted that, “the right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis,” (New York Times, 24th April 2014) going on to highlight the worries of the bourgeois ideologues:
“Mr. Piketty is hardly the first economist to point out that we are experiencing a sharp rise in inequality, or even to emphasize the contrast between slow income growth for most of the population and soaring incomes at the top. It’s true that Mr. Piketty and his colleagues have added a great deal of historical depth to our knowledge, demonstrating that we really are living in a new Gilded Age. But we’ve known that for a while. “No, what’s really new about ‘Capital’ is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved. “For the past couple of decades, the conservative response to attempts to make soaring incomes at the top into a political issue has involved two lines of defence: first, denial that the rich are actually doing as well and the rest as badly as they are, but when denial fails, claims that those soaring incomes at the top are a justified reward for services rendered. Don’t call them the 1 percent, or the wealthy; call them ‘job creators.’ “But how do you make that defence if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?”
Capitalism, and the ruling class that defends it, rely greatly on the accumulated weight of past prejudices, “public opinion”, and “common sense”, which they help to propagate and consolidate through their control of the state, the media, education system, etc. But conditions create consciousness, and facts can be stubborn things. On the basis of big events, and from their own experience, therefore, the masses become acutely aware of the injustices and inequalities within society, which in turn leads to a questioning that was not there before, creating a fertile ground for more radical ideas to take hold in the minds of the masses.
Hence the concerns of the bourgeoisie today, who feel intensely threatened by an academic who brings their – previously sacrosanct – system in to question, and who can feel their control and intellectual authority slipping away. Commenting on Piketty’s work and its analogy to the General Theory of Keynes, which provided the academic framework for the reformist “post-war consensus” of Keynesian economic policies and demand-side management, James Pethokoukis, writing in the National Review Online, implores the pro-capitalist economists to find a more convincing argument for the free market today:
“The soft Marxism in [Piketty’s] Capital, if unchallenged, will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged. We’ve seen this movie before...Who will make the intellectual case for economic freedom today?”
Allister Heath, editor of City AM, a reliable voice of the bankers and financiers in London, who only last year warned his fellow capitalists that, “There is sadly mass support for nationalisation and price controls,” and that, “Supporters of a market economy have a very big problem. Unless they address the concerns of the public, they will be annihilated,” now honestly expresses his deep concerns again regarding the waning popularity of the exploitative system that he defends:
“Last but not least, supporters of capitalism need to get their act together. They are being slaughtered on the intellectual battlefield by opponents who are finding sexy new justifications for their old arguments. We need more and better defences of the free enterprise system, and we need them now.” (Allister Heath, The Telegraph, 29th April 2014)
These words accurately express the worries of the ruling class who understand that years of crisis and cuts are having an enormous impact on the consciousness of the masses, and who can see that anti-capitalist rhetoric and radical ideas are increasingly popular amongst workers and youth. As Larry Elliott notes in The Guardian (The Guardian, 2nd May 2014):
“[Piketty’s] Capital speaks to the Occupy movement; it speaks to the under-25s in Britain whose real wages are 15% lower than at the end of the 1990s; it speaks to Generation Rent.”
Elliott, however, points out the contradiction in the whole situation:
“Admiring the analysis is one thing; accepting the policy prescriptions quite another. Labour will steer clear of some of Piketty’s more radical suggestions.”
In other words, whilst calls for taxing the rich are enormously popular, the leaders of the Labour movement refuse to carry them out and instead promise only a continuation of the Tory programme of austerity. As ever, “the historical crisis of mankind,” as Trotsky noted, “is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”
Piketty’s suggestions to tax the rich are indeed a utopian dream in a globalised capitalist world market where capital is fluid and dynamic. Nevertheless, the response to his book – enthusiasm from those looking for an explanation for and a solution to the inequalities of capitalism; horror and fright from those who defend the senile, decaying capitalist system – accurately reflect the growing understanding in society that capitalism has reached an impasse, offering no future to the vast majority other than the “accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation.”
It is time to put an end to the inequalities and injustices of capitalism. It is time for a revolutionary socialist transformation of society to take the enormous quantity of wealth in society out of the hands of the 1% and place it under a rational and democratic plan of production in the interests of the 99%. It is time to sweep this decrepit system into the dustbin of history where it belongs.
Source: Piketty’s Capital and the spectre of inequalityUPDATE – WINK control code found in the Google Glass Kernel
Google has released the kernel source code of Google Glass and we have an other hint that winking to Google Glass is a real feature.
You can find the following source code in the glasshub.c file:
What it looks like from a bystanders perspective
Google Glass wink control in the code
A reddit user dug deep into the code of the Google Glass companion app MyGlass Android and found hint for a wonderful future feature. It is possible that Google Glass will be controlled by a wink. For example to trigger taking a photo rather by a wink than by talking to yourself.
This feature will be optional as the code suggest “enabled” and “disabled”. Wink detection will not work for everyone out of the box and will need some calibration to trigger only if you really meant it to. It will react to winks that are unusually longer then the ordinary everyday blinks.
EYE_GESTURES_WINK_ENABLED
EYE_GESTURES_WINK_DISABLED
EYE_GESTURES_WINK_CALIBRATION_SUCCESS
EYE_GESTURES_WINK_CALIBRATION_FAILURE
EYE_GESTURES_WINK_TAKE_PHOTO
Google Glass wink control hardware
An other Google Glass enthusiast was curious to ask the question about the little (camera?) sensor on the inner side of google glass and got the answer that it is a proximity detector that checks if the glass is on your head to power up google glasses as soon as you put them on. It is possible that this proximity detector can also work as the wink detector if properly calibrated.
Google Glass wink control official info
Official statement by Google on the Google Glass inner sensor
With On-Head Detection enabled, Glass activates when you put it on. The touchpad is activated, notifications and head gestures are working, the display is reactive, calls can be received, and you can otherwise interact with your device.
When enabled, put Glass on and you’ll hear a rising chime. The touchpad is on, notifications chime, the display turns on, phone calls can be picked up, and you can otherwise interact with your device.
Take Glass off and you’ll hear a falling chime. Glass will deactivate. It’s still powered on, but the touchpad and display won’t operate, no chimes will sound, and Glass won’t pick up incoming phone calls. For those fleeting photo opportunities, the camera button will still work while inactive.
Conclusion on Google Glass wink control
The code and the hardware suggest that a wink cotrol is very likely to be a feature of google glass. It is uncertain if it’s already possible with the current Google Glass prototype or will be added in future versions. It is not clear yet if this |
due to her appearance, who bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity.”
He laid out the clear and present danger posed by Trump. “He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”
Beyond Trump’s unfitness for office was his coarsening effect on the culture. “Now, imagine your children and your grandchildren acting the way he does. Would you welcome that? Haven’t we seen before what happens when people in prominent positions fail the basic responsibility of honorable conduct? We have. And it always injures our families and our country.”
At stake was the future of our democracy, the former nominee said, citing John Adams. “Remember, democracy never lasts long; it soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
That was March 3, 2016, and the speaker was Mitt Romney. As extraordinary as his indictment was, it had little discernible effect on Trump’s march toward the Republican nomination. But the speech underlines a central reality of our politics: the GOP knew what it was embracing; it was all there and Republicans were warned. They may have been deluded, but they were not uninformed.
Like so many of his fellow Republicans, Romney would eventually make his peace with Trump, even entertaining over a dinner of frogs’ legs the possibility of becoming his secretary of state. Nearly a year after Trump’s election, congressional Republicans and the president find themselves locked in a relationship of morbid co-dependency, but it is not one based on misunderstanding. There was no mystery, no hidden knowledge, about who or what Donald Trump was, or what it would mean to invest him with the royal purple of the presidency. Republicans gave it to him knowingly.
More than eighteen months after Romney’s speech, his indictment was echoed in a series of remarks from another former GOP nominee, John McCain, and former President George W. Bush. In turn, their denunciations of Trumpism were amplified by Republican Senator Bob Corker, who questioned Trump’s fitness, and Senator Jeff Flake, who denounced Trump in a speech on the floor of the Senate as he announced that he would not seek re-election.
“We must never regard as ‘normal’ the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals,” Flake said. “We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country—the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.”
But the reality is that the GOP has, in fact, accepted the Trump New Normal. Even though other Republicans shared Flake’s views, few were willing to speak out, and the Republican Party’s surrender seems complete.
Less than a year into his presidency, we hear the same question again and again: What will it take? What has to happen for Republicans to break with their Mad King?
The honest answer is: Who knows? Whatever people have said has to happen has, in fact, already happened, over and over again, and the GOP has swallowed it anyway. A year ago, Speaker Paul Ryan called Trump’s attacks on a Mexican-American judge a “textbook definition” of racism, but today Ryan is one of Trump’s most reliable and chirpy cheerleaders. Every line has already been crossed, every norm broken, every standard of decency shattered and yet four out of five GOP voters still back him.
Even as Robert Mueller’s investigation accelerates, there are few signs that the party has any will to resist him. In the last year and a half, Trump has succeeded in moving the window of acceptability in our politics, especially on the right. The collaborators rationalize their response thus: if they did not go along, then power would shift to even worse actors. As the former presidential aide Steve Bannon plots a populist revanchist rebellion, some Republicans tell themselves that it is better to be a Vichy Republican, a quiescent enabler, than one of the denizens of Bannon’s Crazytown.
Even the Trumpists, though, sense that they cannot control the forces they have unleashed. They nurtured an alligator in the bathtub; now it is grown and loose and still quite angry. Republicans are now competing with one another for who is to be eaten last.
Republicans knew that this could happen, of course, but they decided to make their Faustian bargain anyway. Surrender to Trump meant accepting the unacceptable, but they reasoned it would be worth it if they got conservative judges, tax cuts, and the repeal of Obamacare. The question they must grapple with is: What is the butcher’s bill for this bargain? So far, they’ve been willing to pay it in a series of escalating self-humiliations.
Meanwhile, the pressures on Republicans to conform are intensifying. If you can bear it, turn on Fox News for a few minutes today to get a small sense of how far the right is willing to go to rationalize, defend, and deflect Trump’s behavior. Rather than holding Trump accountable, the conservative media seems more intent on purging conservatives who have not yet submitted.
Last year, as he gave the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, the newspaper columnist Bret Stephens (then with The Wall Street Journal) sought to explain the capitulation of the conservative movement by citing the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, whose book, The Captive Mind, described the process of how Milosz’s colleagues willingly submitted to Stalinism.
“They wanted to believe,” Stephens said. “They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries.”
Today, a year into the Trump era, that description feels hauntingly familiar. Whatever their protestations to the contrary, Republicans find themselves in what has become Trump’s party, and they risk being permanently tainted by both his character and his anti-immigrant, America First policies. More than a year and half ago, Romney said the party faced a “time for choosing.” Apparently, the GOP has chosen. As a result, both moderates and principled conservatives find themselves cast out from a party many of them no longer recognize. Maybe it’s time to move on.
This essay is part of a series reflecting on the first year since Donald Trump’s election as president.Polls have closed in Catalonia in a snap election that could pave the way for Spain's largest region to seek statehood.
Artur Mas, the Catalan president, has promised 5.4 million voters he will hold a referendum on self-determination if he wins a renewed mandate.
Four hours after voting began, Catalan government figures showed voter participation at a 24-year high for this point in the election: 29.35 per cent, compared with 24.79 percent in 2010.
Exit polls suggest CiU loses some seats in regional vote
Mas' alliance could take 60 to 64 of the 135 seats in parliament, not far from the 62 it now holds, the latest opinion polls showed.
Initial exit polls suggested that Mas' centre-right Catalan Nationalist Coalition (CiU) will emerge from the vote as the largest party, but without the absolute parliamentary majority it had sought.
However, those leftist groups in favour of an independence referendum also appear to have performed well, suggesting such a vote will remain on the cards in the future.
As votes are being counted, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's Popular Party and the opposition Socialists are fighting for second place.
Al Jazeera's Tim Friend, reporting from Barcelona, said Sunday's vote "could be a step into the unknown" and that the crisis in Spain's economy was pushing the Catalans to seek self-determination.
He said a huge march was held in September to mark Catalonia's national day and that Catalans signalled they were ready to secede from Spain.
Mas called the poll two years early after failing to negotiate a new financial deal with Madrid, which would have given officials greater autonomy over taxation.
"This decision [is] for our self determination, our freedom and, I hope, our own state within the free nations of Europe and the rest of the world," Mas said.
"This decision, and this is the great compromise, will be taken by the Catalan people during the next four years."
Referendum promised
With 135 parliamentary seats available in Sunday's regional elections, Mas' centre-right Catalan Nationalist Coalition (CiU) was ahead in pre-election polls.
Some in Catalonia feel that the weak national economy is having a negative effect on the northeastern region's financial stability.
The CiU has made independence from Spain a central issue and Mas' rallies have bristled with European Union flags, with the 56-year-old politician expressing optimism that an independent Catalonia would be swiftly embraced by the 27-nation bloc.
"It will be convenient for the European Union, because from day one of membership Catalonia would be a net contributor," said journalist and political consultant Antoni Maria Pique.
"It is a good deal for the European Union. I think that in Brussels they would try to persuade Spain it should not block the development of the European Union over issues of pride and nationalism."
Nationhood
Some of Catalonia's 7.5 million people already see it as a separate nation, with its own language and culture.
Economics drive Catalans to polls
"We sold on September 11 (Catalonia's national day) more than we had sold during the previous eight years," said textile shop owner Margarita Bascompte.
"We sold a lot. An awful lot. We sold to order. And our fabric supplier collapsed because of so many orders. He had to manufacture a lot more to cope with the demand."
But not everyone in the region, which already holds a degree of autonomy under Spain's federal system of governance, agrees with the move for further independence.
Albert Rivera, a candidate representing Ciutadan, a Spanish nationalist party opposed to Catalan independence, said "co-existence" should be defended.
"People from the pro-independence side say that those of us who defend the union with Spain within the European Union give a speech of fear," he said.
"And of course we do, because we feel fear. [Fear about] a president that has said he will ignore the constitution and any legal ruling and that nobody will stop him. All this in a democratic country obviously will cause you fear. We want to defend co-existence and we will try to avoid the Catalan citizenship being divided in two classes. We don't want Catalonia to slip away from the rest of Spain. We want to build bridges, not raise fences."
EU membership
Catalonians say they contribute $21bn more to the Spanish exchequer than they get back, yet infrastructure spending from Madrid goes to poorer regions, while projects such as the Mediterranean rail corridor are left unfunded.
Opponents say that prosperity will fade if - as is possible - Spain were to veto any EU membership application by an independent Catalonia and the uncertainty will drive out many businesses.
A survey published by El Pais newspaper this month showed that nearly half of Catalans support independence, but the number falls to 37 per cent if it means dropping out of the EU.
Sunday's poll comes as Spain's armed Basque separatist group ETA said it was ready to discuss disbanding with the French and Spanish authorities if certain conditions were met.
The group, which last year said it had abandoned violence after a four-decade campaign for an independent homeland in southern France and northern Spain resulted in the deaths of more than 800 lives, said one outstanding issue was the transfer of Basque prisoners to jails closer to home.Children of the Corn (advertised as Stephen King's Children of the Corn) is a 1984 American horror film based upon Stephen King’s 1977 short story of the same name. Directed by Fritz Kiersch, the film's cast consists of Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, John Franklin, Courtney Gains, Robby Kiger, Anne Marie McEvoy, Julie Maddalena and R. G. Armstrong. Set in the fictitious rural town of Gatlin, Nebraska, the film tells the story of a malevolent entity referred to as "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" which entices the children of the town to ritually murder all the adults in town and a couple driving across country, to ensure a successful corn harvest.
King wrote the original draft of the screenplay, which focused more on the characters of Burt and Vicky and depicted more history on the uprising of the children in Gatlin. This script was disregarded in favor of George Goldsmith's screenplay, which featured more violence and a more conventional narrative structure. Filming took place mainly in Iowa, but also in California. Eight sequels have since been produced, and it has gained a cult following.
Plot [ edit ]
The film is set in the fictional town of Gatlin, Nebraska, an agricultural community surrounded by huge cornfields. In 1980, The town appears to be neglected, except for the church, and residents choose Biblical names over more modern ones. When the corn crop fails one year, the townsfolk turn to prayer to ensure a successful harvest. However, 12-year-old (he was 9 in the book on which this film is based) Isaac Chroner takes all of the children in Gatlin into the cornfields and indoctrinates them into a religious cult based around a bloodthirsty deity called “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”. Isaac and his subordinate, 18-year-old Malachai, lead the children in a revolution, murdering all of the adults (ages 19 and up, since 18-year-olds are seen as halfway between teenager and adult) in town as human sacrifices. Only Job and his sister Sarah refuse to participate, as they can see visions of the future, drawing them on paper.
Three years later in October 31, 1983, Vicky and her boyfriend Burt travel through rural Nebraska for Seattle, where Burt will start working as a physician. Elsewhere, a young boy named Joseph tries to flee Gatlin, but is attacked in the corn, stumbling out into the road, and is run over by Burt's car. However, Burt discovers his throat has been cut beforehand. They place the boy and his suitcase in the trunk and search for a phone to call for help. They come across an elderly mechanic, the last adult in Gatlin, but he refuses them service. The mechanic is actually in an agreement to supply the children with fuel in exchange for his life. However, the merciless Malachai breaks the pact and murders him, against Isaac's wishes.
Vicky and Burt explore the abandoned town, finding Sarah alone in a house. Burt searches the town, while Vicky stays with Sarah. Malachai and his followers appear, capturing Vicky and taking her to the cornfield, where they place her on a cross to be sacrificed. Burt enters a church where a congregation of children, led by a girl named Rachel, are performing a cultural birthday ritual for her boyfriend Amos by drinking his blood, made by a cut on his body in the shape of a pentagram. Since Amos has turned 19, he is now considered old enough to be killed. Burt scolds the children for participating in a blood cult, enraging Rachel, and is chased by Malachai and the others. Job rescues Burt and they hide in a fallout shelter with Sarah, learning Vicky was captured.
The zealous Isaac scolds Malachai for his treachery, only for Malachai to grow tired of Isaac's preaching and he takes over, ordering Isaac's sacrifice instead of Vicky. Isaac warns Malachai that sacrificing him will break their pact with He Who Walks Behind the Rows and the children will be severely punished. At night, Burt sneaks into the cornfield to rescue Vicky. During Isaac's sacrifice, a supernatural light appears and devours the screaming Isaac. Burt emerges and fights Malachai, but Isaac suddenly reappears, revived by He Who Walks Behind the Rows, tells Malachai that he wants him too, and seizes and kills the terrified Malachai by breaking his neck.
A storm appears over the cornfield, and Burt and Vicky shelter the children in a barn. They read a passage in the Bible that implies the cornfield must be destroyed to stop the false god. Burt sprays the cornfield with gasohol and tosses a Molotov cocktail into the field, setting it alight and destroying the demon along with Isaac. Vicky, Burt, Job, and Sarah return to their car to leave Gatlin, only to find it disabled. Rachel attacks Burt, but he knocks her out with the car door. Just before the survivors set out on foot, Vicky quips that they should all send Rachel a get-well card from Seattle, with Burt and Vicky ostensibly deciding to adopt Job and Sarah.
Cast [ edit ]
Adults [ edit ]
Children [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
Film rights were originally optioned by Hal Roach Studios, and Stephen King wrote a script based on his own short story. Hal Roach executives did not want to use King's script and George Goldsmith was hired to rewrite it. Goldsmith says King's script started with 35 pages of Burt and Vicky arguing in a car, so he decided to tell the story visually through the eyes of two new characters, children Job and Sarah. King was unhappy with the changes but Hal Roach went with Goldsmith. Hal Roach eventually sold the project to New World Pictures who decided to go with Goldsmith's script, although they tried to remove his name from the credits in favor of King.[2]
Reception [ edit ]
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 36% based on 25 reviews, with a weighted average rating of 4/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Children of the Corn's strong premise and beginning gets shucked away for a kiddie thriller that runs in circles."[3] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 45 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[4]
Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun Times awarded the film 1/4 stars, writing, "By the end of Children of the Corn, the only thing moving behind the rows is the audience, fleeing to the exits."[5] Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote, "As such movies go, Children of the Corn is fairly entertaining, if you can stomach the gore and the sound of child actors trying to talk in something that might be called farmbelt biblical. "[6] Ian Nathan from Empire Magazine gave the film 3/5 stars, commending the film's originality, but criticized the film's obvious budgetary constraints, poor effects, and "ludicrous monster movie denouement".[7] TV Guide awarded the film 1/5 stars, calling it "lame" and criticized the film's "gratuitous visual style".[8] Rolling Stone ranked the film at #7 in their list of "Top 30 Stephen King Movies", calling it "a lean, brutally tense slasher film".[9]
Television remake [ edit ]
In June 2008, it was confirmed that Donald P. Borchers would begin writing and directing a TV remake of the first film, which would premiere on the Syfy channel. Production began in August, filming in Davenport, Iowa;[10] however, it was later moved to Lost Nation, Iowa.[11]
The cast included David Anders, Kandyse McClure, Preston Bailey, Daniel Newman and Alexa Nikolas. The movie aired on September 26, 2009, and the DVD was released on October 6, 2009, by Anchor Bay.[12] The television remake closely follows the original storyline present in the short story, and not that of the original film.[citation needed]
Pop culture reference [ edit ]
An audio clip of the character Isaac yelling "Don't you sit there, seize him, punish him, cut him down! I command you!" is used at the end of the song "Scream for Silence" in Children of Bodom's 2013 album Halo of Blood.
See also [ edit ]Aside from the common vernacular of ‘broken arrow‘ referencing a loss of a nuclear weapon it also means:
“a code phrase that a ground unit is facing imminent destruction from enemy attack and all available air forces within range are to provide air support immediately.”
In essence, with enemy completely overwhelming a position – a military commander calls in direct fire upon themselves in a last-ditch effort to at least retain some of their own forces in the aftermath.
For the sake of this discussion do not consider the reference ‘federal politicians’ (ie. DC congress and Senate); but rather consider the term “broken arrow” a metaphor for the totality of the past eight years and the collapse of the Democrat political apparatus in state House seats and state Senate seats.
Currently:
State House Majority Control: 38 states Republican / 12 states Democrat
State Senate Majority Control: 37 states Republican / 17 states Democrat / 1 state tied.
State Governors: 34 Republican / 15 Democrat / 1 Independent
If you put a blue marble on a table for each of the Democrat politicians in state office and a red marble on the table for each of the Republican politicians in state office the table would be roughly 65% red marbles and 35% blue marbles.
If you are DNC Chairman Tom Perez the challenge is daunting. However, one rather extreme strategy would be to call in a “broken arrow” sledgehammer on the entire table. If your attack smashed a quarter of the total marbles, the majority of the marbles smashed would be red. Yes you would lose some blue marbles that way but your losses would be less than your opponent simply because you have less marbles on the table.
Still with me?
OK. Now, think of that sledgehammer as “Sexual Harassment Claims”.
See the strategy?
Your political enemy has twice the exposure to risk. Hollywood starts the narrative, and the Media can be counted upon to assist the strategy by over emphasizing the scale of the enemy losses and downplaying the scale of the friendly losses.
If you started with a total of 1,000 marbles (650 red, 350 blue) and lost 25% in the strike, the end result would be 250 casualties (163 red, 87 blue). You would have killed off twice as many state/national republicans as you would state/national democrats.
It’s an extreme strategy; it’s a desperate strategy; but it’s a strategy nonetheless. This is DNC Chairman Tom Perez we are talking about. Former head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division (CRS); before becoming Obama’s head of the Department of Labor.
Perez is a life-long fellow Alinsky traveler inside the cause; and was ‘installed’ as DNC Chair the same way Hillary Clinton was installed as candidate in 2016.
Democrats, the institutional system that is constructed of people, are pretty good political strategists but their modern Achilles heel is their lack of patience. The system supporting the ideological hand of Perez is demanding immediacy – they’re desperate.
The 2010 (“shellacking” of Obama) through 2014 gains were all Tea Party. The 2016 gains, including the presidency, was MAGA; the evolution of the exact same people. The Trump MAGA Team in 2016/2017 was the Tea Party Team in 2009/2010. The commonality was/is ‘cold anger‘. Strategic. Purposeful. Resolute. Deliberate. Long-term and sequential.
Current 2017 Democrat anger is hot. It’s reactionary; easily provoked to act to spite itself. That anger is fueling stupid…. It thrashes. Look around, it’s childish.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Try stupid strategy, win stupid consequences.
AdvertisementsGiada De Laurentiis, opened her first restaurant on June 3, 2014, at The Cromwell in Las Vegas. (Photo11: Caesars Entertainment)
Celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis is sharing personal news on her Facebook page. The Food Network star says she is splitting from fashion designer Todd Thompson, her husband of 11 years.
"After an amicable separation since July, Todd and I have decided to end our marriage," she writes.
"Although our decision to separate comes with a great deal of sadness, our focus on the future and overwhelming desire for our family's happiness has given us the strength to move forward on separate, yet always connected paths."
De Laurentiis, 44, and Thompson, who married in May 2003, have one daughter, Jade Marie, 6.
"Todd and I share a beautiful daughter and a lifetime of great memories that we both treasure more than anything. We are so thankful for our friends and family, and really appreciate the support in this time of change."
In 2011, the star chef shared some insights into her marriage, especially when it came to her fame, in a Redbook interview.
"I think it can be hard for any man to sometimes be upstaged by his wife. So when I'm home, I work very hard to be Todd's wife and Jade's mother. I have no problem going back to those traditional roles. I try to be Giada, the young girl that he met 20 years ago and fell in love with. All men want to be treated like kings in a relationship, and I think if women don't indulge that sometimes, their men are likely to stray and look for someone who can give that to them. It's simple. It's not brain surgery."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1ztnY5iEntrepreneur facilitators Fownders opened their incubator space in April last year at 48 Norfolk Street in Newark. The company, which aims to nurture successful startup businesses through an accelerator program, was created by Gerard Adams, who co-founded popular news site Elite Daily. Adams, who grew up in Belleville, sold Elite Daily back in 2015 for $50 million and returned to his Jersey roots for his latest venture.
Fownders needed a place to hang their hat and wanted to be ingrained in the Newark community, so Adams partnered with Gomes Real Estate to handle the development side and build their current outpost. Formerly a vacant lot, it now features 20,000-square feet of work space, 18 apartments, and a Munchies by Antonio Venezuelan café.
Gomes Group CEO Pedro Gomes says his company has big plans for the area, starting with Fownders’ new headquarters at 140-142 Sussex Avenue. Designed by Newark’s own Comito & Associates and aiming to open August 1st, the 10,000-square foot development will feature a visual production studio, gym, and café, plus 20 market-rate apartments.
The neighborhood surrounding the property is almost completely residential and includes Baxter Park, a modern low-income housing complex that Gomes Group just opened an art gallery in earlier this month. Gomes says the company embraces the community’s ethos and is looking to fit themselves into the area, not the other way around.
“When redevelopment happens, the goal should be to integrate the existing community, not push them out,” says Gomes, who grew up in the city’s Ironbound section.
Gomes Real Estate has another project in the works at Sussex Avenue and Dey Streets that will adaptively reuse an old industrial building. It will transform it into approximately 50 boarding house style living spaces that will feature common areas and shared kitchens, plus a rooftop lounge. Gomes tells Jersey Digs his company is also commissioning local artist Sebastian Ferreira to paint murals on the sides of all their properties in the hopes of creating a miniature version of the Wynwood District in Miami.
But the next project in Gomes Group’s pipeline is directly next to the new Fownders headquarters. A modest former auto mechanic at the site will soon be transformed into a Biergarten sporting a long backyard with outdoor seating. It will operate under the Porto by Antonio restaurant umbrella and hopes to bring what Gomes dubs a “live, work and play” dynamic to the area.
“Anybody can put up a building, but bringing in culture and creating a vibrancy is key to enticing people to stay,” says Gomes. He says the Biergarten should be open on September 1st.
What exactly to call the neighborhood Fownders is transforming should be hammered out soon. The area, which is right next to University Heights and just a few blocks away from Branch Brook Park’s southern entrance, is steps from the Norfolk Street Light Rail station but lacks a firm label.
But Gomes says the district is being renamed ‘Silicon City’ in an effort by Newark to brand the neighborhood. He says there were some skeptics among city officials about the vision Gomes and Fownders had at first, but they are now on board with the new name after seeing with their own eyes the transformation that’s occurring.
“People in the neighborhood thank us for being here,” Gomes says, beaming with pride over the diverse crowd Fownders’ incubator space draws that he says includes everyone from 46-year old attorneys to 18-year old kids.
In terms of their contribution to the evolving Silicon City, Gomes says he hopes to have two or three more developments completed by 2018, with the goal of building out all the land by 2019.Labour MP Mike Gapes calls for prince to 'abdicate and stand for election' if he wants to make controversial statements
Prince Charles is facing a call for his abdication and a frosty response in Moscow after reportedly comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler over Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Charles blundered into the international crisis over Russia's actions in Ukraine during a tour of Canada, when he spoke to a woman who fled the Nazis and lost family members during the Holocaust.
According to the Daily Mail, the prince compared the Russian president to the Nazi leader when talking to Marienne Ferguson, a museum volunteer who moved to Canada with her Jewish family when she was just 13. "Now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler," Charles is reported to have said.
Charles's remarks have been criticised across the political spectrum in Britain: the Labour MP Mike Gapes called for his abdication, while the outspoken Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, said the prince was wrong to get involved.
Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, pointedly refused to discuss the issue when approached by journalists. But the popular Russian daily Moskovskij Komsomolets (MK) said Charles's remarks risked "triggering an international scandal".
MK said Charles's comments risked complicating already "clouded" UK-Russian relations.
Peskov initially said he knew nothing about the comments, according to Sky News. He later told the BBC's Moscow correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, the Kremlin was "not commenting right now" on the story.
Anti-Russia activists in Ukraine praised Charles's remarks. "Good old Charley," commented one contributor to the Facebook page of Euromaidan, which helped organise the protests in the Ukrainian capital Kiev that led to the ousting of the pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych.
Labour MP Gapes, a current member and former chairman of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said the prince should have kept his views private. The Ilford South MP tweeted: "If Prince Charles wants to make controversial statements on national or international issues, he should abdicate and stand for election.
Ukip's Farage is reported to have said: "There are times when it might be better for Prince Charles not to get involved in things like this."
Britain's former ambassador to Russia, Sir Tony Brenton, said it was a "grotesque exaggeration" to compare Russia's actions in Crimea with those of the Nazis. But he said Charles' intervention could help Russia reconsider its policy in Ukraine.
Speaking to BBC News, Brenton said: "It will be picked up in public circles in Russia.. The Russians have taken over Crimea, they are debating with themselves about where to go next. The fact that they have generated the impression in some minds that they are behaving a bit as Hitler behaved, while I think is a false judgement, will help [them] to reconsider a little bit."
Brenton added: "Hitler is the ultimate ogre in Russian public opinion... The fact that Russian policy is generating these sort of reactions ought to have a calming effect there."
Brenton who served as ambassador to Moscow between 2004 and 2008 added: "Russia is having quite a nationalist moment, but the judgment that Putin is behaving like Hitler, is very mistaken. The annexation of Crimea was entirely illegal and wrong but to say that that leads us in the direction of a revanchist Russia - the bear being on the prowl again - is a grotesque exaggeration."
Deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said Charles was "free to express himself".
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Clegg said: "I have never been of this view that if you are a member of the royal family somehow you have to enter into some Trappist vow of silence. I think he is entitled to his views. But I don't know whether those were his views because I just don't think providing a running commentary on what were private conversations is useful to anybody.
"I don't know exactly what he did or didn't say in that conversation because he thought it was a private conversation," Clegg added.
Asked if he agreed there were parallels to be drawn, he said: "I'm not going to start comparing one period of European history to another.
"People can make different comparisons from different periods of history if they wish. All I would say is that right now I think the behaviour of Putin is not only menacing to Ukraine but it is very destabilising for Europe more generally.
"That is why we continue to say to the Russians, continue to say to Vladimir Putin: step back, de-escalate. It's not in Russia's interests, let alone anybody else's, to continue ratcheting up this tension."
The Conservative party chairman, Grant Shapps, told BBC Radio Berkshire that it was not the convention for politicians to comment on remarks made by the royal family. "There's a long-held convention that royals have the opportunity to comment and they do. Usually politicians don't comment on what the royals are saying. People can hear what someone has said; it stands on its own."
He added: "It is not for ministers to comment on what our royals say. They can perfectly well express their opinions, as Prince Charles has done in this case. One of the important lesson from the second world war is to make sure that there is a proper response to what happens."
A spokesperson for Clarence House said: "We would not comment on private conversations. It was a private conversation at a reception for war veterans."
The Daily Mail reported that Ferguson said: "'I had finished showing him the exhibit and talked with him about my own family background and how I came to Canada. The prince then said 'And now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler'."
"I must say that I agree with him and am sure a lot of people do. I was very surprised that he made the comment as I know they [members of the royal family] aren't meant to say these things but it was very heartfelt and honest."
The comments came just over a fortnight before Charles is due to meet Putin at the commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy on 6 June. He and the duchess are currently on a four-day tour of Canada.
A recent visit to Estonia by the prince's youngest son, Harry, was viewed by many commentators as a sign of western support amid fears of a resurgent Russia; the region has seen a rise in tensions since the crisis in Ukraine. Harry also met with Estonian, British and US service personnel involved a major Nato training exercise.Christopher Dorner, the ex-LAPD cop who allegedly killed three people has been on the run, successfully evading police, for over a week. To finally track him down, it seems that law enforcement is pulling out all the stops. According to the Express, Dorner is now a target for drones, among the first ever on U.S. soil.
The Express quotes a "senior police source" as having said:
The thermal imaging cameras the drones use may be our only hope of finding him. On the ground, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
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Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz, a joint leader of the force tasked with finding Dorner, has confirmed—though not explicitly—and is quoted as saying "We are using all the tools at our disposal." And a third, vague conformation comes from Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Ralph DeSio who is quoted as saying the agency is on the "forefront of domestic use of drones by law enforcement," while declining to elaborate further.
It wouldn't be the first time drones have ever been involved in a law enforcement operation in the U.S. As early as 2011 there was an incident in which Predator drones hunted down fugitives and directly lead to their ultimate arrest. Still, the practice is far from widespread. Presumably, the drones looking for Dorner's heat signature are unarmed. Presumably.
Should armed drones actually be authorized to fire on Dorner, then it would be a first, and frankly a terrifying precedent. And considering all the collateral damage that's already happened, adding drone fire to the mix would be a horrible idea. Unmanned eyes in the sky could be the ticket to ending the week-long search, but you can't unset a precedent. [The Express via Matt Novak, Adam Pash]CREVE COEUR, MO (AP) – Fifty-one years ago, Arthur Lampitt of Granite City, Illinois, smashed his 1963 Thunderbird into a truck. This week during surgery in suburban St. Louis, a 7-inch turn signal lever from that T-Bird was removed from his left arm.
Dr. Timothy Lang removed the lever Wednesday during a 45-minute operation. Lampitt, now 75, is recovering at home.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the accident broke Lampitt’s hip, drawing attention away from the arm, which healed. A decade or so ago, his arm set off a courthouse metal detector. An X-ray showed a pencil-sized object, but since it caused no pain or hardship, Lampitt let it be.
He was moving concrete blocks a few weeks ago when the arm began to hurt for the first time, prompting surgery.
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exposure settings that were used.
But if you didn't see these two images side by side, it might not have been too easy to "read" the lighting and exposure settings in the second image photographed with ND filter. If you miss the fact that a strobe was used in this photo, you may very well mistakenly assume that the aperture was wide open while the shutter speed was fast enough to get the correct exposure.
However, if you take another moment to inspect the lighting in the scene you will be able to "read" it based on the subtle additional cues:
The direction and length of the shadows on the faces suggest that the light source is on the side and slightly above the eye level of the couple, whereas sunlight on a summer day like this would be coming from much higher above. The shadows and highlights in the foliage behind the couple confirm that. You can also see the tiny catchlights in the bride's eyes, which confirm the main light's placement as well, and indirectly show that it wasn't the sun that was used as the main light. It is normally very difficult to get a human being comfortably pose with direct sunlight shining into their eyes on a summer afternoon. The consistency and "cleanness" of the light on the faces and upper bodies suggest the use of controlled light. The intensity of the sunlight spot on the dress shows that the sunlight is still more powerful than the controlled light used to illuminate the faces. So, now that we are convinced a strobe was used in this photo, we know that the shutter speed should be somewhere around 1/125 - 1/250 (regular sync speed). With such slow shutter speed the aperture should be quite small on a sunny day like this to avoid overexposure, but the shallow depth of field in the image suggests that the aperture was, in fact, wide open (smaller F-numbers). And the conclusion at the end of such a line of thought may very well be: the photographer might have used an ND filter.
Linus Peterson, the author of these examples, has also kindly shared this behind-the-scenes shot with us, so we can better understand the lighting setup in the images above.
Now, since you've learned a little bit about what ND filters are used for, you can put this knowledge into practice and shoot with them to get shallower depth of field in the light conditions where higher F-stop numbers would normally be used.
EXERCISE
And before I sign off today, let's do one more little exercise together and then you can start practicing "reading" lighting and camera settings on your own.
Here's how you could "read" lighting setup in this photo:
The softness of the shadows on the model’s face suggests slightly diffused light, most likely a reflector. The directions of the shadows in the background suggest that the photo was taken in the late afternoon or early summer evening: the sunlight is not very intense and the reflected light is even weaker. So, the reflector must have been brought up closer to the face, just outside of the frame. The catchlights in the eyes are pretty small, considering that the reflector was placed close to the face. So, a small reflector must have been used in this setup. The orange color of the reflected light also suggests that it could have been a golden reflector, not silver. The model’s hands and legs are not lit as well as the face, which confirms our guess about the size of the reflector and the low intensity of the reflected sunlight. I am showing you both the before and after pictures, so you can also see that the lighting in retouched images can be a little deceiving and harder to read correctly, so keep that in mind and rely on the more pronounced cues.
Conclusion:
The rim light in this picture was created by the sunlight, and a small golden reflector was used to illuminate the model's face in this setup.
I hope you enjoyed this article and I also hope that it helped you to understand how you can learn and train yourself to dissect lighting and camera settings in other photographers' images.
From now on try paying attention to the mentioned above details in the photos you see in magazines, online and anywhere else you look for inspiration. The more you train your eyes and practice breaking down lighting in photos, the easier it will be for you to understand how to achieve the lighting you like or the lighting you are asked to create by your clients.
Check out more examples in my other article on the topic: 8 Tips On How To “Read” Light in Photography.
Have fun!What does the party’s future look like? Test #7 was: what does the votes:seats ratio look like? This ratio shows how good, or not, the party is at bucking the national trend by effective target seat campaigning. This time the ratio was back up to 1.6, an increase from 2015 although still lower than the 1997-2010 era. That it rose at all is a tribute to the target seat campaign which this time – unlike in 2010 – managed to match the concentration by other parties, especially the Conservatives, of national campaign items (such as direct mail which doesn’t name the candidate) in specific target seats. This activity is a result of the broken election expenses regime which tightly restricts campaigning that names candidates but gives in effect unlimited sums to spend on campaigning in target seats which doesn’t name candidates. This puts the Liberal Democrats at a huge disadvantage, so any improvement in being able to buck the national trend in target seats is impressive. There will certainly be lessons to learn, such as over how accurate the party’s tracking was of different seats on polling day. But overall the still relatively new in post Director of Campaigns and Elections, Shaun Roberts, and his team had a good election. We will need more data to come in before being able to properly judge test #8: are there signs of a new core vote for the party forming? Early signs are a tentative yes, however, in that there was significant churn in the party’s vote from 2015 with a shift towards a more pro-European, socially liberal and internationalist base for it, as seen in both national polling and the pattern of constituency results. One area of debate during the election was whether the pool of Remain supporters the Liberal Democrats were fishing in was large enough given that the majority of voters either voted for Brexit or wanted to get on with it. However, the proportion of people who still wanted a political party to argue over Brexit, and from a pro-European position, was – depending on which polling question was used to measure it – between a quarter and a third of the electorate. That was a big enough pool to have supported a significant increase in the Lib Dem vote. The problem wasn’t the size of the pool, it was the party’s ability to capitalise on it. And if the party had capitalised better on it, then that pool could have grown as well. This will be a key area for the party’s election post-mortems. Then there is test #9: how do Tim Farron’s ratings fare by the end of the campaign? There was some progress, with for example on the YouGov figures the percentage saying they have a favourable opinion of him rising from 14% early in the year to 20% late in the campaign. The unfavourable figure, however, also rose – from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties. Similarly, MORI’s figures, which are much more volatile, show progress early in the year but then a fading in the last two months with a final net dissatisfied rating only slightly better than Nick Clegg’s in 2015. More detailed data from the British Election Survey later this year will help pin down the details of the trends and hence the likely causes, in particular the question of how much of an impact there was from the round of interviews which focused on his religious beliefs. I suspect this will turn out to have been a significant factor, both because it deprived the party of momentum and also because it contributed to a very confused picture of the party cutting through to ordinary voters who don’t pay much attention to politics. Focus groups such as those for Britain Thinks show that what voters noticed about the Lib Dems was Tim Farron, legalising cannabis (which received an enormous volume of local and regional media) and Europe. Being in favour of legalising cannabis can be a useful high profile signal of being a modern, socially liberal party. But when contrasted with the questioning over Tim Farron’s religious beliefs, it was more a picture of confusion than of a consistent worldview that came over to voters judging by that focus group evidence. However much many Liberal Democrat activists may be angered by some of the questioning over Tim Farron’s beliefs, it would be foolish to close our collective eyes and hope it won’t ever happen again. Just as we might greatly dislike first past the post but know we need a strategy for the next election which can deal with it, so too Tim Farron and the party will need an approach to the next election that can deal with Andrew Neil or another journalist’s opening question in the first big set piece interview being, “So Mr Farron, now that you’ve had another few months/years [delete according to speed of next election] to think about it, do you think abortion is wrong?” Unfair question perhaps, but also likely. And finally to end on a more positive note with test #10: does the new Parliamentary Party look more or less like the electorate than the current one? In short, yes – one-third female and including both an MP with a disability and one from a minority background, not to mention Tim Farron’s own working class roots. Very much a work in progress, but progress made.Honest Tea just finished testing Denver's honesty. On Tuesday, two mysterious kiosks on the
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(see above) were stocked with bottles of cold tea, along with a sign asking hot and thirsty mall-walkers to put a dollar in the cash box if they wanted to enjoy some tea. Nobody was watching the kiosks...or were they?
Honest Tea representatives were indeed looking on, working undercover to analyze Denver's honesty. Although the data isn't in, it seemed that the kiosk by the World Trade Center was doing a big business in both tea and honesty. A second kiosk was put up at 16th and Arapahoe streets later in the day.
See also: - Honest Tea will test Denver's honesty - Slyderman: the new comic-book food truck - Photos: The Book of Mormon opening night
Honest Tea started its "Honesty Index" two years ago, testing a dozen cities. This year the campaign is hitting thirty cities, hoping to get a more accurate sampling of the nation's honesty. "We're trying to find places that are true to the city for a good mix to really represent what the city is," explains Honest Tea regional marketing manager Olivia Shjeflo. The World Trade Center site attracted Denver's more buttoned-up business crew, while the one at 16th and Arapahoe streets attracted a less formal crowd.
Using an iPad app, Honest Tea workers noted every observation they could make about the curious (and thirsty) tea drinkers -- gender, appearance, age. After they're done visiting cities and taking notes, Honest Tea will make their findings public...and interactive!
"People can log onto nationalhonestyindex.com and look at different cities and compare them to each other," explains Shjeflo. "We track it on the iPad so each time a new person comes up," Once the data is released on August 20, you'll be able to determine if blonds or brunettes are more honest, and whether people with dogs pony up. "People have been really honest in general," notes Shjeflo. Last year the nation overall scored 88 percent honesty, with Chicago leading the way at 99 percent.
But Denver may give Chicago a run for its money; while watching the kiosk for an hour, I saw only one person take a bottle of tea without paying. Honest truth.Private altar of a practitioner in the Czech Republic, with a statue representing Thoth featured prominently
Kemetism (also Kemeticism; both from the Egyptian kmt, usually voweled Kemet, the native name of Ancient Egypt), also sometimes referred to as Neterism (from nṯr (Coptic ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ noute) "deity"), or Egyptian Neopaganism, is the contemporary revival of Ancient Egyptian religion and related expressions of religion in classical and late antiquity, emerging during the 1970s. A Kemetic is one who follows Kemetism.[1]
There are several main groups, each of which take a different approach to their beliefs, ranging from eclectic to reconstructionistic. However, all of these can be identified as belonging to three strains, including reconstructed Orthodox Kemetism (adopting a philological approach, also Kemetic Orthodoxy).[2]
Worship [ edit ]
Followers of Kemetism generally worship a few gods (Maat, Bast, Anubis, or Thoth, among others), but recognize the existence of every god. This worship generally takes the form of prayer and setting up altars, but there are no set guidelines for worship.[3] Altars can contain items such as candles, offerings, or statues.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]NORTHVALE, N.J., July 15, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Elite Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ("Elite" or the “Company") (OTCBB:ELTP) today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (the “FDA”) has issued a Complete Response Letter (the “CRL”) regarding the New Drug Application (the “NDA”) for SequestOx™ (oxycodone hydrochloride and naltrexone hydrochloride), Elite’s investigational abuse-deterrent opioid candidate for the management of moderate to severe acute pain where the use of an opioid analgesic is appropriate.
The FDA issues CRLs to indicate that the Agency considers the review cycle for an application is complete and whether the application is ready for approval in its present form. CRLs often include guidance that describes deficiencies that the FDA has identified in the application. When possible, the FDA recommends actions that the applicant may take to place the application in condition for approval. The CRL determined that the NDA was not ready for approval in its present form.
“We are evaluating the CRL received and hope to meet as soon as possible with the FDA to discuss how to address their concerns. We will work closely with the FDA to determine the appropriate next steps and path forward for the NDA,” said Nasrat Hakim, President and CEO of Elite.
After the Company has met with the FDA and the Agency is able to provide greater clarity to the issues raised in the CRL, Elite will host a conference call to discuss the pathway forward for SequestOx™.
About Elite Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Elite Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a specialty pharmaceutical company which is developing a pipeline of proprietary pharmacological abuse-deterrent opioid products as well as niche generic products. Elite specializes in oral sustained and controlled release drug products which have high barriers to entry. Elite owns generic and OTC products which have been licensed to TAGI Pharma, Epic Pharma and Valeant Pharmaceuticals International. Elite currently has eight commercial products being sold, additional approved products pending manufacturing site transfer and the NDA for SequestOx™, for which it just received the CRL from the FDA. Elite’s lead pipeline products include abuse-deterrent opioids which utilize the Company’s patented proprietary technology and a once-daily opioid. These products include sustained release oral formulations of opioids for the treatment of chronic pain. These formulations are intended to address two major limitations of existing oral opioids: the provision of consistent relief of baseline pain levels and deterrence of potential opioid abuse. Elite also provides contract manufacturing for Ascend Laboratories (a subsidiary of Alkem Laboratories Ltd.). Elite operates a GMP and DEA registered facility for research, development, and manufacturing located in Northvale, NJ. Learn more at www.elitepharma.com.
This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Including those related to the effects, if any, on future results, performance or other expectations that may have some correlation to the subject matter of this press release, readers are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties including, without limitation, Elite’s ability to obtain FDA approval of the transfers of the ANDAs or the timing of such approval process, delays, uncertainties, inability to obtain necessary ingredients and other factors not under the control of Elite, which may cause actual results, performance or achievements of Elite to be materially different from the results, performance or other expectations that may be implied by these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements may include statements regarding the expected timing of approval, if at all, of SequestOx™ by the FDA, the steps Elite may take as a result of the CRL, the results of an End of Review Meeting and what actions the FDA may require of Elite in order to obtain approval of the NDA. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future action or performance. These risks and other factors, including, without limitation, Elite’s ability to obtain sufficient funding under the LPC Agreement or from other sources, the timing or results of pending and future clinical trials, regulatory reviews and approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory authorities, intellectual property protections and defenses, and the Elite’s ability to operate as a going concern, are discussed in Elite's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its reports on forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K. Elite is under no obligation to update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Elite Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Dianne Will, Investor Relations 518-398-6222 [email protected] an article published in the journal Environment International, researchers from Inserm (Inserm Unit 1085 -- IRSET, the Institute of Research in Environmental and Occupational Health, Rennes), in association with the Laboratory for Developmental and Educational Psychology, LPDE (Rennes 2 University), provide new evidence of neurotoxicity in humans from pyrethroid insecticides, which are found in a wide variety of products and uses. An increase in the urinary levels of two pyrethroid metabolites (3-PBA and cis-DBCA) in children is associated with a significant decrease in their cognitive performances, particularly verbal comprehension and working memory. This study was carried out on nearly 300 mother and child pairs from the PELAGIE cohort (Brittany).
Pyrethroid exposure
Pyrethroids constitute a family of insecticides widely used in a variety of sectors: agriculture (various crops), veterinary (antiparasitics) and domestic (lice shampoo, mosquito products). Their mode of action involves blocking neurotransmission in insects, leading to paralysis. Because of their efficacy and relative safety for humans and mammals, they have replaced older compounds (organochorides, organophosphates, carbamate) considered more toxic.
Exposure of children to pyrethroids is common. It is different to adult exposure, due to the closer proximity of children to ground-level dust (which stores pollutants), more frequent hand-to-mouth contact, lice shampoos, etc. In children, pyrethroids are mainly absorbed via the digestive system, but are also absorbed through the skin. They are rapidly metabolised in the liver, and mainly eliminated in the urine as metabolites within 48 hours.
Given these elements and the mode of action (neurotoxicity) of pyrethroid insecticides, the researchers proposed the hypothesis of a possible effect of these contaminants on the nervous system and its development in children.
Contribution of the PELAGIE mother-child cohort
Pregnancy is also an important period of life for the future health of the child. For this reason, the researchers studied the PELAGIE mother-child cohort established between 2002 and 2006, which monitors 3,500 mother-child pairs. This cohort simultaneously considers exposure to pyrethroid insecticides during fetal life and childhood.
A total of 287 women, randomly selected from the PELAGIE cohort and contacted successfully on their child's sixth birthday, agreed to participate in this study.
Two psychologists visited them at home. One assessed the child's neurocognitive performances using the WISC scale (verbal comprehension index, VCI, and working memory index, WMI). The other psychologist characterised the family environment and stimuli that might have had a role on the child's intellectual development, collected a urine sample from the child, and collected dust samples.
Exposure to pyrethroid insecticides was estimated by measuring levels of five metabolites (3-PBA, 4-F-3-PBA, cis-DCCA, trans-DCCA and cis-DBCA) in urine from the mother (collected between the 6th and 19th weeks of pregnancy) and from the child (collected on his/her 6th birthday).
A decrease observed in child cognitive performances
Results show that an increase in children's urinary levels of two metabolites (3 PBA and cis-DBCA) was associated with a significant decrease in cognitive performances, whereas no association was observed for the other three metabolites (4-F-3-PBA, cis-DCCA and trans-DCCA). With respect to metabolite concentrations during pregnancy, there was no demonstrable association with neurocognitive scores.
"Although these observations must be reproduced in further studies in order to draw definite conclusions, they indicate the potential responsibility of low doses of deltamethrine in particular (since the metabolite cis-DBCA is its main metabolite, and selective for it), and pyrethroid insecticides in general (since the metabolite 3-BPA is a degradation product of some twenty of these insecticides)," explains Cécile Chevrier, Inserm Research Fellow, the main author of this work.
"The consequences of a cognitive deficit in children for their learning ability and social development constitute a handicap for the individual and for society. The research effort needs to be pursued in order to identify causes that could be targeted by preventive measures," emphasises Jean-François Viel, a co-author of this work.Dario Balca, CTVNews.ca
Music festivals across Canada are banning visitors from wearing aboriginal headdresses out of respect for First Nations cultures.
“At this time of greater awareness, (we) would like to ask our patrons to respect First Nations cultures,” organizers of the Edmonton Folk Music Festival said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “Such headdresses have a sacred, cultural meaning and we ask that you respect and honour that by not using them as a fashion accessory.”
These items, the post added, would be confiscated by security if seen on festival grounds.
The Osheaga Music and Arts Festival in Montreal has also banned headdresses, asking fans and artists to respect the “spiritual and cultural” significance of the item. The Bass Music Festival in British Columbia and the Winnipeg Folk Festival have put in place similar policies.
The Calgary Folk Festival and Winnipeg Folk Festival said they would not impose an official ban, but they are asking patrons to avoid wearing headdresses.
Aboriginal leaders say the ban is a welcomed, but long overdue change in the way Canadian society treats indigenous cultures.
“I think it’s very disrespectful for people to be donning a headdress or what looks like a headdress,” said Manitoba’s Grand Chief Derek Nepinak. “It’s almost a passive form of violence against indigenous people and an insult towards and ceremonies and our history.”
“If it would come down to it I would support rules and regulations against this but it’s too bad we have to get to that stage,” he said.
In recent years, the fashion industry has been trying to capitalize on headdresses with celebrities such as Jessica Simpson, Pharrell Williams, Gwen Stefani, and Susan Boyle donning imitations of the cultural symbol in videos and runway appearances.
Demand for the item has grown as a result. Headdresses have become especially popular accessories at music and arts festivals.
“They want to wear them,” said Teekca Spencer who runs an aboriginal boutique in Winnipeg. “They ask if they can try them on and get some pictures and we say no because it’s not appropriate. It’s a really sacred and restricted item.”
This isn’t the first time the fashion industry’s use of headdresses has caused controversy.
In 2013, clothing retailer H&M removed faux headdresses from its Canadian stores after widespread criticism from aboriginal groups and indigenous rights activists who said the practice was disrespectful towards First Nations cultures.
Nepinak said a headdress shouldn’t be something that can be bought.
“(A headdress) is acquired through sacred and ceremonial processes that are beyond the material culture that exists in broader Canadian society,” he said.
And while imitation headdress has become an almost ubiquitous fashion accessory at many outdoor music festivals, it looks like this year, many festivalgoers will have to find alternative headwear.The Fall season is a month old now, and quite a number of shows are currently in play on the Hit List. But it is still pretty early and several of these shows have only aired one or two episodes thus far, so there could be a fair amount of movement between now and the next Hit List which I will post in mid-November. This list stack ranks all the currently airing and returning shows based on how likely they are to continue for another season and it also includes the most recent cancellations. I have comments on the shows in the category sections below and you can also click on the links in the table to go to the show pages to see season to date ratings and status updates. You can see the prior Hit Lists at this link.
The Cancellation Watch Hit List October 2016:
Cancelled/Ending: After CBS made fans wait for several months, Braindead has now landed in this category as expected with the recent announcement. The Vampire Diaries moves into this category as it heads into its final season starting this Friday (you can see the listings for the week at this link). And HBO’s The Leftovers will be on its last season when it returns in early 2017.
Cancellation Likely: FOX’s The Exorcist starts out on the Hit List in this category as it is currently one of that network’s lowest rated shows. They may give it some time to prove itself, but what it really needs is a scheduling change to a better night. Short of that, I’m thinking this show will be one-season-and-done.
On the Bubble: A lot of shows are starting here this Fall because ratings for sci fi & fantasy entries have definitely been on the low side thus far. Agents of SHIELD is right on the edge of Cancellation Likely and will move there next time around if its ratings remain low. Falling Water may be too soon for this category after only one episode, but since it started at the bottom of the Scorecard, I feel obliged to put it here. The premiere episode was released early online, so perhaps that explains its low linear viewing, but it needs to get its numbers up starting with its second episode. Frequency is looking very low even for a CW show, and fans should hope that the first season story arc has a planned conclusion, because a second year is not looking likely at this point. The Last Man on Earth lives On the Bubble and has survived to a third season so far, so maybe its luck will hold. Scream Queens on the over hand is another of FOX’s lowest rated shows and looks unlikely to survive for another year. Wayward Pines is still hanging around from Summer, but I expect to hear word on it at anytime (its Season 2 renewal came about this time last year).
Renewal Possible: Quite a number of shows are in this category because they are not Bubble entries just yet, but I also don’t feel good enough about them to bump them into the Renewal Likely bucket either. Aftermath is looking good considering that Van Helsing just got the renewal nod at around the same ratings level and it also has the partnership with the Canadian Space Channel to prop it up. The Facebook Page for Netflix’s Between seems to suggest that it will be coming back for a third season, but no official announcement yet. I was tempted to put Syfy’s Channel Zero in the Renewal Likely category, but it only has one episode so far so I will see how it tracks. Freakish is one of those streaming shows that I have no data on, but I would give it a decent chance of a second season on Hulu. From Dusk Till Dawn is another show I have no data on because the El Rey channel’s numbers are not widely reported. But it is in its third season and low to moderate rated cable shows tend to shoot for a binge-worthy four to five season run once they have reached that point. NBC’s The Good Place is kind of hard to make a call on at this point. It’s numbers are well below the network average as the Scorecard shows, but it is performing in line with that network’s other Thursday shows. It is probably an expensive series to produce because of its special effects and name brand cast, though, so I am not certain if the network is expecting better performance from this one. Legends of Tomorrow started pretty low for The CW compared to where it was last year. But it will get a boost when the upcoming cross-over episodes hit, so expect to see its numbers rise a bit. Lucifer looks okay at this point compared to other FOX shows, but it doesn’t have too much room for slippage. MacGyver started strong for CBS but has since dropped notably. It did just get a full season pickup, so at least it has until May to prove itself. Once Upon A Time is definitely down from last season, but it is ABC’s best performing show on Sundays. It will stick around as long as Disney wants to keep cranking its stock of characters through the storylines. Slasher is still awaiting on word from Chiller and the Canadian Super Channel, but I think it’s chances of a second season are decent. Son of Zorn continues to benefit from NFL bleed-over into Sunday nights and that may carry it to a full season order at least. Supergirl should probably be in the Renewal Likely category, but I want to see numbers from a few more episodes without a Superman cross-over to make that call. NBC’s Timeless is not looking great after three episodes. It is losing a fair amount of its lead-in from The Voice and if that keeps up it could get shuffled to a different timeslot if the network feels it is wasting key Prime Time real estate.
Renewal Likely: Arrow drops from the Unassailable ranks to this category to start the season. I still believe there is a very high likelihood that the show will get renewed for another season, but I won’t say it is guaranteed like in the past with its numbers currently at all-time lows. It’s not impossible that The CW could switch one of more of that show’s leads over to Legends of Tomorrow next season to better leverage its DC characters. Gotham‘s numbers don’t look great thus far in its third season, but since it is in the syndication stretch it is almost guaranteed to return for a fourth year (more on the almost at this link). Luke Cage is part of the Netflix Defenders series, and both Daredevil and Jessica Jones have earned renewals so I expect the same for the latest entry. Star Wars Rebels continues to pull low linear viewing with the 18-49 demographic, but it is younger-skewing and relies as much on its merchandising. Plus, another season gets it at or beyond the sixty-five episode mark preferred for a syndication run of an animated series. Supernatural bowed for its twelfth season with decent numbers for a CW show and I’m guessing a thirteenth is a good bet for this one. I would move it to unassailable, but a renewal is also contingent on the actors’ willingness to return for another year. Westworld has pulled decent numbers for HBO thus far, and I am expecting a renewal nod at any time now. And FOX still hasn’t made an official announcement on another season of the X-Files revival, but I expect we will see that in the 2017-18 season.
Renewed But Struggling: Two shows have joined this category since the last Hit List: MTV’s Scream and Freeform’s Stitchers. The former show just heard its renewal announcement, but only for a six-episode third season. MTV has not confirmed if that will be its last. And Stitchers also received a recent renewal despite its low numbers during its second season. Whether it will manage to stick around for the binge-worthy four to five season run we have been seeing from low to moderate rated cable shows that survive three years remains to be seen.
Renewed: Joining this list since the last time around is FX’s American Horror Story and The Strain, Starz’s Ash vs. Evil Dead, and Syfy’s Van Helsing. None of those renewals was a huge surprise, but The Strain will be heading into its final season next year.
Unassailable: The number of shows in this category continues to shrink as the Too-Much-TV-Era makes it more difficult to survive with all the competition out there. American Horror Story dropped out previously and I have now moved Fear the Walking Dead out because the zombie rot appears to be setting in. Both of those shows still have very good odds of surviving for more seasons, but they are also at ratings levels that could bring about a final year announcement along with a renewal. As mentioned above, The CW’s Arrow has also dropped out of this category due to its declining ratings this season. Among those left, The Walking Dead justified its inclusion by getting renewed for and eighth season before its seventh season has even begun. And The Flash will assuredly continue to race forward into a fourth season. Game of Thrones is set through its eighth season when it will wrap up its story. And Outlander has been renewed through a fourth season.
Metric Definitions:
Hit List Status: Category indicating the show’s cancellation/renewal prospects.
Cancelled/Ending: This includes cancelled shows from the current season as shows that are in or headed into their final seasons. Mini-series that have wrapped their runs will be included here as well.
Cancellation Likely: These shows have seriously underperformed in their current season and appear surely headed to cancellation.
On the Bubble: These shows have delivered moderately low numbers which could put their renewal chances in jeopardy.
Renewal Possible: These shows may not be top performers, but are currently doing well enough that renewal looks like a decent possibility.
Renewal Likely: These shows have performed well enough so far in their current season that a renewal seems almost assured.
Renewed but Struggling: This category captures those shows that have received a renewal notice, but they struggled in their current seasons and could likely be facing cancellation when they return.
Renewed: These shows performed well enough in their latest season to receive the renewal nod and should continue for another season if they hold steady.
Unassailable: These are the shows that face no chance of cancellation in their current/upcoming season and likely beyond that as well.
Cancellation Alert: My prediction of the likelihood that a show will get cancelled (which are more granular than theHit List Status above). From least to most likely the statuses are Low, Moderate, Medium, Elevated, and High.
StD Rating: Season to date average for the rating metric tracked above.
Net Bench: (Network Benchmark) For the broadcast networks, this is the net’s season to date average rating based on the overnights for the 18-49 demographic for non-sports, non-special, non-repeat broadcasts (for FOX, Empire is also excluded because it counts as an outlier). For the cable channels, this is the lowest level at which a show is typically renewed by that network if there are enough genre entries on that channel to provide a decent sample.
Live+3 Rtg: The season to date average rating based on the Live+3 delayed viewing numbers for the days that data is available.Beirut - Last week, Saudi writer and journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, wrote a piece in the London-based al-Hayat newspaper in which he argued that "Sunnis" were targeted as a group and called on them to 'defend themselves as a sect'.
Such flawed, reductionist and ill-informed analysis contributes to little more than reminding us that sectarianism is actually a fait accompli.
Sectarianism is real. It is neither a myth, nor an illusion. It is real in its implications and its revelations in our everyday life. In many countries in the Middle East and beyond, sectarianism is experienced as a tool for identification, political organisation, discrimination, othering or alienation.
It operates at the social level as a form of everyday identity marker; but, more importantly, it also operates at the political and economic level and becomes a tool for party recruitment and mobilisation, as we are witnessing today in many parts of the Arab world.
Sectarianism, as a constructed phenomenon, had - and still has - a real impact in shaping societies and organising social and political life.
A brief history of sectarianism
However, sectarianism has not always existed. It is not an ancient phenomenon, and it surely does not have its roots in age-old feuds, as many analysts try to explain today. In fact, sectarianism is modern. It infiltrated the Arab region in the early 19th century with the development of capitalism and the rise of nation states.
At that time, the Ottoman Empire and western colonisers played a crucial role in the creation of sectarianism through their use of divide-and-rule identity politics and the institutionalisation of sectarianism through state institutions.
For example, the French colonisers had clearly favoured the Christian leaders in Lebanon and have played a crucial role in shaping the country's power-sharing system on terms that are advantageous to their "Christian" allies.
In fact, whereas religious and sectarian identities were numerous in the Arab region before the 19th century, their relevance remained at the social level in terms of differences in rituals and traditions.
It was only later that these identities became politicised - and institutionalised - giving birth to the phenomenon now referred to as "sectarianism". In this sense, sectarianism, as a constructed phenomenon, had - and still has - a real impact in shaping societies and organising social and political life.
Since its inception, sectarianism has been consciously devised and used by local political leaders and regional powers to either maintain their positions of power or to access more power. Equally, sectarianism has also been used by ordinary people to access goods and services through systems of clientelism that quickly flourish in the absence of state-provided welfare.
Thus, far from being a question of emotions or fixed cultural identities, sectarianism is a rational phenomenon that functions to the benefit of its adopters, however irrational that might appear.
Sectarianism without sects?
Is the war in Syria today really one between the 'Alawis' and the 'Sunnis'? Or is it between the Assad regime and its regional and international backers, and the various opposition groups and their backers? Is ISIL not targeting 'Sunnis'? Is the Assad regime not targeting some Alawis? How did we get to reduce the world so much, and in such inaccurate ways, in our analysis?
Therefore, although constructed and historically malle |
attack the creature. This reaction attack uses the same ability modifier as the primary weapon for the attack roll but deals 1d4 + your Intelligence modifier in damage. At 7th level and again at 15th level, damage dice increases by 1d4.
Prerequisites: Tinker's tools, a dagger, and a melee weapon with a hilt or handle that does not have the light property.
Bow Stabilizer: 4th Level
You can spend 4d4 + 4 hours and 50 gp attaching a stabilizer to your bow and calibrating it. When making an attack with the stabilized bow, you can choose to spend one activation point to double the proficiency bonus added to that attack roll.
Prerequisites: Woodcarver's tools and one of longbow, shortbow, crossbow, or hand crossbow.
Flaming Weapon: 5th Level
You develop a highly flammable oil that can coat a weapon made of metal. You can spend 5 minutes coating a weapon in flammable oil that lasts for 24 hours. Alternatively, you can spend 5d4 + 5 hours and 77 gp constructing a scabbard designed to keep a blade oiled. As an action, you can choose to spend two activation points to ignite the oiled weapon. If a target is hit by an attack made with the weapon while it is ignited, it takes an additional 1d6 fire damage. The weapon is extinguished after 1 minute or by using a bonus action. While the weapon is ignited you cannot sheath it and the improvement is considered active. Once the oil has burned out, the weapon cannot be ignited again until it is polished and more oil is applied. At 11th level and again at 17th level, you make your concoction burn hotter, increasing the additional fire damage by 1d6.
Prerequisites: Alchemist's supplies, oil, a cloth, flint, and a melee weapon, provided it is constructed of metal.
Antirequisites: Cold Weapon, Anticoagulant Solution
Napalm Shot: 5th Level
You develop a highly flammable oil that is placed in a special glass arrowhead with a flint impact trigger. By spending 5 hours and 7 gp near a glassblower's furnace, you can construct three napalm arrows/bolts. When making a ranged attack with a napalm arrow/bolt, you must spend one activation point. The effective range of the weapon decreases by 1/2 for that attack. If the attack hits, the target takes an additional 1d6 fire damage and must make a successful Constitution saving throw against your effect DC at the beginning of its next turn or take an additional 1d4 fire damage. This ammunition is nonrecoverable. At 13th level and again at 20th level, the number of additional damage dice doubles.
Prerequisites: Glassblower's tools, oil, flint, three empty vials, three arrows/bolts.
Antirequisites: Serrated Shot, Cryo Shot, Lightning Shot
Concussive Slam: 6th Level
You begin dabbling in explosive powders and develop a method for attaching packets of explosives onto bludgeoning weapons to increase their concussive effects. By spending 2 hours and 4 gp, you attach an impact-triggered explosive to the head of a weapon. If a target is hit by a melee attack with this weapon, you must spend two activation points. The target then takes an additional 1d8 bludgeoning damage. In addition, each creature within 5 feet of the impact, including the target, must make a Constitution saving throw against your effect DC. On a failed save, the creature suffers 2d8 thunder damage, and is deafened for 1 minute. On a successful save, the creature takes half as much damage and is not deafened. You must also make a Constitution saving throw with advantage against your spell effect DC. The explosion destroys the weapon. At 12th level and again at 18th level, the additional thunder damage is doubled and the effect range is increased by 5 feet.
Prerequisites: Tinker's tools, sulfur, charcoal, saltpeter, and a melee weapon that deals bludgeoning damage.
Antirequisites: Advanced Concussive Slam
Serrated Edge: 6th Level
You develop a specialized serrated pattern that causes bleeding upon hitting the target. By spending 6 hours and 10 gp near a furnace, you can construct three serrated arrows/bolts or for 6d4 +6 hours and 115 gp, improve one melee weapon. When making an attack with a serrated edge, you must spend one activation point. If the attack hits, and the creature has blood, the creature must make a successful Constitution saving throw against your effect DC or it takes 1d4 bleed damage at the start of each of the its turns. The creature can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns. If the creature receives any healing or successfully makes the saving throw, the bleed effect is ended. Any bleed damage inflicted in this way can compound. At 10th level and again at 14th, 18th, and 20th level, the bleed damage die increases by one increment up to 1d12 at 20th level.
Prerequisites: Blacksmith's tools and three arrows/bolts or a melee weapon that deals slashing or piercing damage.
Antirequisites: Napalm Shot, Cryo Shot
Compound Cams: 7th Level
You can spend 7d4 + 7 hours near a furnace and 170 gp constructing a compound bow or compound crossbow. Compound cams achieve more efficient torque so that the resulting weapon is permanently improved and is considered a +1 nonmagical ranged weapon. Any magical properties that the weapon previously had are destroyed by this improvement. As an action, you can choose to spend two activation points to make a powerful Line Shot attack by triggering a special mechanism built into the compound cams. The attack targets all creatures in a line originating from you within the range of the weapon. A separate attack roll is made for each creature. The first creature in the line that is hit takes an additional 2d4 piercing damage, the second creature in the line that is hit takes an additional 1d4 piercing damage, the third creature in the line that is hit takes no additional damage. The attack automatically misses all creatures behind the third creature that is hit. The mechanism cannot be used again until it is reset. Reseting the mechanism takes 1 minute or a bonus action by spending one activation point. Any improvements activated simultaneously with the Line Shot attack only apply their additional effect to the first creature hit.
Prerequisites: Woodcarver's and Blacksmith's tools, steel ingot, reenforced bowstring, one of regular longbow or crossbow.
Antirequisites: Advanced Compound Cams
Cold Weapon: 7th Level
You can spend 7d4 + 7 hours and 170 gp constructing a cryostatic scabbard that refrigerates a weapon to extremely cold temperatures. Using a bonus action, you can spend two activation points to draw the cold weapon from the scabbard. If a target is hit by an attack made with the cold weapon, it takes an additional 1d6 cold damage. The weapon thermalizes after 1 minute. While the weapon is drawn and cold, the improvement is considered active. At 13th level and again at 19th level, the additional cold damage increases by 1d6.
Prerequisites: Alchemist's supplies and Tinker's tools, one melee weapon constructed of metal.
Antirequisites: Flaming Weapon, Anticoagulant Solution
Cryo Shot: 8th Level
You develop a cryogenic fluid that is placed in a special glass arrowhead that shatters upon impact, rapidly cooling the target area. You can spend 8 hours near a glassblower's furnace and 19 gp constructing three cryogenic arrows/bolts. When making a ranged attack with a cryogenic arrow or bolt, you must spend one activation point. The effective range of the weapon decreases by 1/2 for that attack. If the attack hits, the target creature takes an additional 1d8 cold damage and must make a successful Constitution saving throw against your effect DC at the beginning of its next turn or immediately suffer one temporary level of exhaustion. The creature can repeat the saving throw at the beginning of each of its turns. Temporary levels of exhaustion can compound causing the same effects as regular exhaustion with the exception that 6 levels of exhaustion cause the creature to fall to zero hit points. One temporary level of exhaustion is removed if the affected creature successfully makes the saving throw, receives any healing, or 1 minute passes. This ammunition is nonrecoverable. At 13th level the additional cold damage increases to 2d8.
Prerequisites: Alchemist's supplies and Glassblower's tools, three empty vials, three arrows or bolts.
Antirequisites: Napalm Shot, Anticoagulant Solution, Lightning Shot
Anticoagulant Solution: 8th Level
You develop a solution that causes blood to thin rapidly. By spending 8 hours and 19 gp, you can coat three arrows/bolts or one melee weapon with this solution. Alternatively, by spending 8d4 + 8 hours and 246 gp, you can construct a scabbard/quiver that keeps ammunition or a weapon coated in this way. When making an attack with ammunition coated in this way, you must spend one activation point and the coating is lost. If a creature is hit by a melee weapon coated with this solution, you must spend one activation point and the coating is lost. If hit, the creature must make a Constitution saving throw against your effect DC. On a failure, any damage the creature takes from a bleed effect is doubled for the next 10 minutes. This effect cannot be applied more than once.
Prerequisites: Alchemist's supplies, a cloth, and three arrows/bolts or a melee weapon that deals slashing or piercing damage.
Antirequisites: Napalm Shot, Cryo Shot, Flaming Weapon, Cold Weapon
Advanced Concussive Slam: 9th Level
You develop a way to more accurately control the impact explosion and quickly reset the mechanism of a Concussive Slam improved weapon. By spending 9d4 + 9 hours and 351 gp, you can improve a bludgeoning weapon made of metal that has the Concussive Slam improvement. Whenever a target is hit with the improved weapon, a focused explosion causes an additional +2 thunder damage. In addition, when an attack hits, you can choose to spend two activation points to trigger the Concussive Slam effect without destroying the weapon. However, the mechanism cannot be used again until it is reset. Reseting the mechanism takes 1 minute or a bonus action by spending one activation point.
Prerequisites: Blacksmith's tools and Tinker's tools, sulfur, charcoal, saltpeter, and a metal melee weapon that has the Concussive Slam improvement.
Archery Sight: 9th Level
By spending 9d4+9 hours near a glassblower's furnace and 351 gp, you can construct a sight to attach to a bow or a crossbow, permanently increasing the weapon's range by 25%. In addition, when you make an attack using this weapon, you can choose to spend one activation point to add your Intelligence modifier to the attack roll.
Prerequisites: Blacksmith's tools and Tinker's tools, a bow or crossbow.
Antirequisites: Archery Scope
Alloy Forging: 10th Level
You dabble in metallurgy and experiment with forging various alloys. By spending 5d8+10 hours near a blacksmith's furnace and 494 gp, you can reforge one melee weapon constructed primarily of metal. Any reforged weapon loses all magical properties it had. The resulting weapon is considered a +1 nonmagical melee weapon. In addition, you can add or remove one property of the original weapon, provided the new properties do not conflict. For example, Light cannot be added if the weapon is Heavy and Versatile cannot be added if the weapon is Two-handed. When the Versatile property is added, it takes the damage die from the base weapon damage to one increment higher up to a maximum of d12. When the Thrown property is added, the range is 20/60. Special properties cannot be removed or added.
Prerequisites: Alchemist's supplies and Blacksmith's tools, one melee weapon construct primarily of metal.
Repeating Weapon: 10th Level
You design a mechanism that feeds bolts to a crossbow. By spending 5d8 + 10 hours in a workshop and 494 gp, you can improve a crossbow. The improved crossbow does not have the loading property. When wielding this crossbow, as an action you can choose to spend two activation points to activate a special mechanism that allows you to make three attacks with the weapon. The weapon improvement is considered active for these three attacks. The mechanism cannot be used again until it is reset. Reseting the mechanism takes 1 minute or a bonus action by spending one activation point.
Prerequisites: Tinker's tools and Woodcarver's tools, steel ingot, one crossbow.
Lightning Weapons: 11th Level
You can harness the power of chemical potential and focus it into two weapons to deal massive damage to a single enemy. By spending 5d8 + 10 hours near a furnace and 494 gp, you manage to convert two weapons into electrodes by attaching them to a rudimentary battery. When either weapon hits a target, the target takes an additional +2 lightning damage. Also, when wielding both weapons and you successfully hit one target with both weapons in the same turn, you can choose to spend two activation points to unleash the full current. When done, the target takes an additional 5d8 lightning damage. If the target is a creature, it must make a Constitution saving throw against your effect DC or be stunned for its next turn. If both weapon attacks were critical hits, the number of additional lightning damage dice doubles. The improvement cannot be used again until it is reset. Resetting the improvement takes 1 minute or a bonus action by spending one activation point. At 20th level, the additional damage dice increases to 10d8.
Prerequisites: Alchemist's supplies and Blacksmith's tools, copper wire, rubber gloves, two metal melee slashing/piercing weapons with the light property.
Lightning Shot: 12th Level
You build special ammunition that splits into two projectiles when fired, dealing damage to a single enemy when both hit. By spending 11 hours and 48 gp, you can construct three of these specialized arrows/bolts. When making an attack with one of these shots, you must spend one activation point. You can then make two attack rolls against the target. If both attack rolls are successful, the target takes regular weapon damage plus an additional 2d8 lightning damage. If only one attack roll is successful, the target takes regular weapon damage. This ammunition is nonrecoverable. At 17th level, the additional damage increases to 3d8.
Prerequisites: Alchemist's supplies and Blacksmith's tools, copper wire, three arrows/bolts.
Antirequisites: Napalm Shot, Cryo Shot
Polearm Extension: 12th Level
You develop a mechanism that can suddenly extend and counterbalance the reach of a polearm in battle. By spending 5d8 + 11 hours and 690 gp, you can improve a polearm to have a permanent reach of 15 feet and a permanent +1 nonmagical bonus to attack and damage rolls. In addition, while wielding this weapon, as an action you can choose to spend two activation points to trigger a sweeping attack that targets all creatures within 10 feet. Each creature must make a successful Dexterity saving throw against your effect DC or take 5d12 slashing damage and be knocked prone. On a success, the creature takes half as much damage but is knocked back 5 feet. The improvement cannot be used again until it is reset. Resetting the improvement takes 1 minute or a bonus action by spending one activation point.
Prerequisites: Tinker's tools and Woodcarver's tools, a polearm.
Advanced Compound Cams: 13th Level
You can spend 6d8 + 13 hours and 1308 gp improving the cams on a compound bow or compound crossbow. Each creature hit by the Line Shot attack takes an additional 1d4 piercing damage. In addition, the attack can hit a fourth creature in the line, which takes no additional damage. This improvement replaces the Compound Cams improvement.
Prerequisites: Tinker's tools and Blacksmith's tools, one of compound bow or compound crossbow.
Archery Scope: 15th Level
Your expertise extends into the realm of fine optics as you become able to craft scopes. By spending 7d8+15 hours near a glassblower's furnace and 2407 gp, you can construct a scope to replace the sight attached to a bow or a crossbow, permanently increasing the weapon's range bonus from 25% to 50%. When wielding this weapon, you have advantage on perception checks relying on sight. In addition, when you make an attack using this weapon, you can choose to spend one activation point to add your Intelligence modifier to the attack roll. This improvement replaces Archery Sight improvement.
Prerequisites: Glassblower's tools and Tinker's tools, optical glass, one bow or crossbow that has the Archery Scope improvement.
Advanced Alloy Forging: 17th Level
You master the skills and knowledge required to forge various alloys and perfectly control metallic proportions for the benefit of your craft. By spending 8d8+17 hours near a blacksmith's furnace and 4321 gp, you can reforge one melee weapon constructed primarily of metal. Any reforged weapon loses all magical properties it had. The resulting weapon is considered a +2 nonmagical melee weapon. In addition, you can add or remove up to two properties of the original weapon, provided the new properties do not conflict. For example, Heavy must be removed before Light can be added and Two-handed must be removed before Versatile can be added. When the Versatile property is added, it takes one of the damage dice from the base weapon damage to one increment higher up to a maximum of d12. When the Thrown property is added, the range is 20/60. Special properties cannot be removed or added.
Prerequisites: Alchemist's supplies and Blacksmith's tools, one melee weapon construct primarily of metal.
Multiclassing [ edit ]
Prerequisites. To qualify for multiclassing into the Inventor class, you must meet these prerequisites: Intelligence, and Constitution of 18 or higher, and Level 10 or higher..
Proficiencies. When you multiclass into the Inventor class, you gain the following proficiencies: Light armor, medium armor, shields, all simple and martial weapons. You also gain Expertise in one Artesian Tool from Alchemist's supplies, Glassblower's tools, Smith's tools, Tinker's tools, or Woodcarver's tools.
Back to Main Page → 5e Homebrew → ClassesVANCOUVER, Wash. -- A bank robbery suspect shot by police Monday afternoon has died, police said Tuesday.
He was identified as Kenneth Allen Pointer, 43, of Portland.
He was taken to the hospital after being shot. Police did not specify a time of death.
Pointer allegedly robbed a U.S. Bank near Mill Plain Boulevard just before 2 p.m. A teller was able to track the bag of stolen cash, leading police to the suspect.
Police stopped Pointer's vehicle with a PIT maneuver near the Battle Ground exit on Interstate 5. Sky8 video showed cash strewn across the ground.
Noticing a lot of cash on the ground near blue SUV's back tire. pic.twitter.com/Q9EIUzPwWd — Katherine Cook (@KCookKGW) June 13, 2016
A Clark County Sheriff's Office deputy shot Pointer, police told KGW's Katherine Cook. Police have not yet said whether Pointer had a gun. No officers were hurt.Libertarian stalwart and tea party godfather Congressman Ron Paul of Texas has endorsed Dr. Ted Yoho, Republican nominee for North Central Floridas 3rdCongressional District. Ted Yoho is one of 11 House candidates across the United States to be endorsed by Paul.
I endorse Ted Yoho for Floridas 3rdDistrict. His commitment to the Constitution and individual liberties is exactly what we need more of in the House, said Congressman Paul.
Yoho thanked Dr. Paul for his support.
Im incredibly humbled that the leader of the modern liberty movement and strong conservative leader, Congressman Ron Paul, is backing our campaign. I admire Congressman Paul for his relentless pursuit of conservative values and his passion for our Constitution and our great Republic. Yoho said. I hope that I can continue to champion Dr. Pauls efforts to audit the Fed, protect states rights and getting our nation back on track.
Yoho is a businessman and large-animal veterinarian who has lived in North Central Florida for the last 35 years. The seat Dr. Yoho is seeking is the newly created Congressional District 3 which encompasses the following counties: Alachua, Gilchrist, Levy, Dixie, Lafayette, Suwannee, Columbia, Bradford, Union, Hamilton, Clay, the eastern portion of Madison and the north western portion of Marion County.
Sunshine State News was the first news source in the nation to highlight the libertarian leanings of the Republican rising star, in an exclusive interview with Yoho back in August.
Yoho rose to national prominence Aug. 14 after scoring a very narrow victory over 12-term congressman Cliff Stearns, R-Ocala, in one of the year's most hotly contested primary races.Yoho's win was hailed in many quarters as one of the biggest upsets in that month's primary election season, and quite possibly one of the greatest congressional upsets in Florida history.
Paul does not endorse candidates lightly; on Friday, he pointedly declined to to back GOP candidate Mitt Romney for the presidency.Conservative darling Ben Carson argued Monday that the military shouldn’t have to worry about being prosecuted over what’s politically correct in fighting against the Islamic State.
Carson made the comments on Monday in an interview with Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” host Bill Hemmer. Carson suggested there shouldn’t be any rules in fighting ISIL.
“Our military needs to know that they’re not going be prosecuted when they come back, because somebody has said, ‘You did something that was politically incorrect,'” Carson said on Fox News. “There is no such thing as a politically correct war. We need to grow up, we need to mature. If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win.”
Carson’s comments come as Congress debates President Barack Obama’s proposed authorization for using military force against ISIL. The Congressional Progressive Caucus recently came out against Obama’s proposal.
Watch Carson’s comments below:
(H/t: Mediate)In an interview published by European newspapers on Monday, French President Francois Hollande said he believed French voters "will not succumb" to the extreme right in presidential elections next month.
"The far-right is stronger today than it's been in 30 years. But France will not give in," Hollande said. "We know this vote will not only decide the fate of our own country, but also the future of Europe."
Polls suggest Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front (FN), could well win the first round of the presidential election on April 23. According to most current surveys, the top two candidates, Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, would then meet in a decisive second round on May 7.
French election: The major players Emmanuel Macron Macron quit as economy minister in August and launched his independent presidential bid in November. The 39-year-old centrist formed his own political movement, En Marche (Forward), and is seen as a reformer. Despite having never held elected office, polls have predicted his win in the final round of voting in May. He's voiced admiration for German Chancellor Angela Merkel's refugee policy.
French election: The major players Marine Le Pen The National Front leader has adopted a more moderate tone than her anti-Semitic father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. But she still takes a hard line on immigration, saying children of irregular migrants should not have access to public education. She also wants France to withdraw from the eurozone and have a referendum on EU membership. It's predicted she'll advance to the second round.
French election: The major players Francois Fillon A surprise winner of the right-wing Republicans primaries, the socially conservative Fillon is seen to represent the interests of France's Catholic middle class. An admirer of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he supports a liberal economic policy. Though Penelopegate and other scandals have marred Fillon's campaign, he has professed no wrongdoing and vowed to fight on.
French election: The major players Benoit Hamon In a runoff against former French PM Manuel Valls in the Socialist primary, Hamon was the more left-wing choice of the two politicians. The 49-year-old supports a universal basic income and wants to shorten the traditional work week. He has also spoken in support of increased investment in renewable energy. He faces an uphill battle as many socialist politicians have voiced support for Macron.
French election: The major players Jean-Luc Melenchon The Left Party's candidate landed fourth in the 2012 presidential elections. Melenchon, a current European Parliament member, believes the bloc's economic liberalism has stifled France. He hopes to profit from the center-left's disarray, but may split votes with socialist Hamon. Supported by the French Communist party, Melenchon advocates a shorter work week and climate protection. Author: Samantha Early
'A future of borders'
Hollande warned that a Le Pen victory could lead to France's immediate exit from the eurozone and the European Union.
"That's the goal of all populists: to leave Europe, close themselves off from the world and to imagine a future of barriers and borders defended by watch towers," he added, alluding to US President Donald Trump's pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border.
"My ultimate duty is to make sure that France is not won over by such a program, and that France does not bear such a heavy responsibility," Hollande said. The outgoing leader's approval ratings have dived in the polls over the past several months. He is currently regarded as the most unpopular president of the Fifth Republic.
Hollande's interview was published by six daily newspapers, including Germany's "Süddeutsche Zeitung," hours before heads of state from Germany, France, Italy and Spain were due to attend a mini-summit in Paris.
Challenges facing the EU
Hollande told the newspapers it was inevitable that the European Union would have countries progressing at "different speeds," and warned that "Europe will explode" if that idea isn't accepted. He also expressed frustration over sluggish decision-making by the bloc and what he called a return to "national egoism," with European countries pursuing individual goals without common ambition.
Hollande acknowledged that the recent victory of Donald Trump in the United States had emboldened populists across Europe, but said this had also presented progressive Europeans with an opportunity to present their projects more clearly. He also advocated better coordination of a European defense policy and the integration of armed forces, and added that sanctions could be a possibility for bloc members that don't respect EU principles.
nm/se (Reuters, AFP)Our political leaders are basically telling us that this kind of terrorism, random and deadly, is the price we have to pay for their policies of multiculturalism and political correctness.
As if on cue, in the wake of Saturday’s terrorist attack in London political leaders are trotting out the usual treacly lines that have become so rote. But the words they pretend will provide comfort to anyone but the most naïve are borderline worthless. Worse, they’re an insult to the families who have had to experience the shocking pain of the sudden loss of a family member or friend at the hands of a terrorist.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, called Saturday’s attack “deliberate and cowardly,” and asked “all Londoners to remain calm and vigilant today and in the days ahead.” Most notably, he said: “You will see an increased police presence today, including armed officers and uniformed officers. There is no reason to be alarmed by this. We are the safest global city in the world.”
What a thing to say at a time like this. Shouldn’t Britons be alarmed? Isn’t Saturday’s attack in London, coming as it did on the heels of the Manchester bombing, deeply disturbing? Why isn’t Khan more concerned about the threats that are so obviously at the doorstep, or better put, in Britain’s streets? Does anyone really take comfort from being told about swift police response times after yet another terrorist attack?
Our Politicians Can’t Handle the Truth
The sad truth, and getting sadder with every attack, is that the political class has little interest in doing what would really be necessary to combat Islamist terrorism, let alone talk about it. They don’t want to talk about how Britain’s lax immigration policies over decades led to hundreds of thousands of immigrants entering the country with varying degrees of willingness to assimilate and adopt Western values. They don’t want to openly criticize the blatant problems with the multiculturalism the UK has pursued for years and the obvious impact it has had on the immigrant population.
Oh no. This would cost them too much. It would shatter the façade of political correctness that’s been constructed over our “civilized” western world, and destroy the illusion, so vital to the political class, that Western values are universal.
The politicians are only willing to give speeches about how united we are and how terrorists cannot tear us apart. But the truth—so clear and obvious—is that with every attack the West becomes more and more divided. We are not united, not by a long shot. Before the bodies of the poor souls who were killed Saturday by radical Islamists were even identified, the Left and Right were at one another’s throats. On that score, the terrorists emerge victorious every time.
Yes, there are beautiful and touching scenes of strangers helping one another, opening their homes, offering free rides. This is a reminder of the goodness that still exists as part of our shared humanity. But such gestures don’t, ultimately, unite us. Neither do candlelight vigils and marches through the streets of Paris—or tearful pop concerts in Manchester.
The Intellectually Weak Attack Anyone More Courageous
There’s little to no tolerance in polite society for the kind of honesty for which many in the West are hungry. The Washington Post ran a headline Sunday that read, “World Leaders Call For Unity After London Attack. Trump tweets the complete opposite.” The article chastises President Trump for not joining in the fake condolences and platitudes of the political elite, and praises those elites for their messages of hope. But what, exactly, are they saying we should be hopeful for?
Trump, who is often wrong, was correct in tweeting Sunday that, “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people.” A growing number of those people are scared, and sick of turning on the news to hear of yet another heartbreaking attack then hearing the same meaningless bromides from their leaders.
They want a leader who doesn’t just try to inure them to this kind of random violence but stands up and says that we’re not going to take it, that this isn’t an acceptable status quo. Whether Trump is that leader is highly debatable, but at least he’s making a nod toward it.
But whenever political leaders do dare to talk candidly about some of these problems, there’s intense pushback and outrage. Take Trump’s travel ban. Like it or hate it, the ban was aimed at curbing immigration from countries that are de facto failed states. These are places where a terrorist could easily go unnoticed by whatever remnant of a security service remains and fly to the United States undetected. When Trump unveiled his travel ban earlier this year, America practically devoured itself with protests at airports, counter-protests, and a wave of lawsuits. The reaction robbed us of any real chance of having a conversation about the ways in which we might need to reconsider our immigration policies for the sake of national security.
The Real Message: Get Used to It
British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Sunday that “enough is enough” and that Britain can’t “pretend that things can remain the same.” Is she just campaigning? Parliamentary elections are, after all, next week. Or is she finally saying what needs to be said? If things cannot remain the same, will May come out and say what exactly needs to change?
Even if she does mean it, and even if she does spell out what must change, she won’t be able to do anything significant in Parliament because most of the political class will remain opposed to any drastic policy changes.
Our political leaders are basically telling us that this kind of terrorism, random and deadly, is the price we have to pay for their policies of multiculturalism and political correctness. They know that their weak platitudes can’t stop terrorism, and so do the people. They might as well come out and say what they mean: get used to the new normal.The Snart family is getting a little bigger.
The CW's The Flash has cast veteran actor Michael Ironside as Lewis Snart, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. He is the estranged, abusive father of villains Leonard Snart/Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller) and Lisa Snart/Golden Glider (Peyton List).
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as Lewis is described as a cold-blooded, ruthless career criminal. Recently released from prison, he returns to Central City with a plan that will endanger both of his children. In the comics, not much is known about the Snart patriarch other than the fact that he was so abusive to his son — the future Captain Cold — that the boy spent more time with his grandfather who ran an ice truck.
See more 'The Flash': Every Major DC Character on The CW Series
Ironside will guest-star in episode 203, entitled "Family of Rogues." Miller and List will also be in the episode as their villainous alter egos.
Ironside is recognizable from numerous film credits, including Top Gun, Starship Troopers and Total Recall. He's also stepped into the comic book world before, voicing characters in animated versions of Batman, Superman, Justice League and Wolverine and the X-Men. He also played Lois Lane's father in three episodes of Smallville.
The Flash is poised to introduce a world's worth of heroes and villains in season two, which will delve into the mythos of DC Comics' Earth-Two — an alternate world featuring different characters. Miller's Captain Cold will appear in Arrow/The Flash spinoff Legends of Tomorrow, which is set to premiere early next year. At Comic-Con, the producers said the first few episodes of Arrow and The Flash this season would help put the characters from the spinoff in play to make them available for Legends.
Ironside is repped by Abrams Artists Agency and Insight.
The Flash returns for season two Oct. 6 on The CW at 8 p.m.Excellent piece on accelerationism by Nick Land has been published by Urbanomics, “A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism.”
I think Land’s article is a “must read’ if you want to understand the thinking behind the idea of accelerationism. But more than this, I think Land makes a good case for why you have to be familiar with his ideas if you call yourself a communist.
Accelerationism is not a term accelerationists gave their ideas. Rather, it was a derogatory name given to them by their critics, like the name, “Nigger”, was given to black people by their slave-owners. In place of the term “accelerationists”, you can simply substitute the term, “niggers”, and thus treat them in the fashion Noys intended.
But to understand the thinking behind accelerationism, I would suggest you substitute the term, “capital”, for the term accelerationism. Once you do this, you realize almost immediately why, as Land asserts, there is no such thing as Right or Left accelerationism. Capital has no political identity; rather, it determines all political relations within bourgeois society. As an idea separate from capital itself, accelerationism is simply a description of the characteristics of capital.
I hope to show why this is true by taking several statements Land makes in his article and restating them as in terms familiar to those who have read Marx. You may find more appropriate passages from Marx that agree or contradict Land’s argument.
Please do not hesitate to post them in the comments.
*****
Accelerating accumulation as the definition of capital
LAND STATEMENT 1:
“Among [accelerationism’s] predictions is the expectation that you’ll be too slow to deal with it coherently.”
MARX:
“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, …” Communist Manifesto
*****
Capital as a process headed to a final crisis
LAND STATEMENT 2:
“[The] deep problem of acceleration is transcendental [that] describes an absolute horizon – and one that is closing in.”
MARX:
“As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.” Grundrisse.
*****
Capital cannot be controlled
LAND STATEMENT 3:
“[Events] increasingly just happen. They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic extent.”
MARX:
“This is law for capitalist production, imposed by incessant revolutions in the methods of production themselves, by the depreciation of existing capital always bound up with them, by the general competitive struggle and the need to improve production and expand its scale merely as a means of self-preservation and under penalty of ruin. The market must, therefore, be continually extended, so that its interrelations and the conditions regulating them assume more and more the form of a natural law working independently of the producer, and become ever more uncontrollable.” Capital, v3, ch15
*****
Capital as destructive of all existing social relations
LAND STATEMENT 4:
“Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable |
it be recalled by the General Assembly. He suggested that the phrase ''acts of God'' be changed to ''natural disasters.''
The House of Representatives refused today to remove the offending phrase, but added the words, ''or natural disasters'' after the words ''acts of God.''
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Mr. Huckabee was away from the capital, but his press secretary, Rex Nelson, said the Governor would not decide whether to accept the amended version until the Senate had considered the language.Control of Virginia’s House of Delegates turns on the outcome of three tight races. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
The morning after an Election Day that left control of Virginia's House of Delegates in doubt, the U.S. Postal Service delivered 55 absentee ballots to Stafford County Registrar Greg Riddlemoser.
The ballots, which arrived at 10 a.m. on Nov. 8, were 15 hours too late. Under state law, they needed to arrive by 7 the night before — the hour polls closed — to be counted in a tight delegate race that could determine whether Republicans hang on to power in the lower chamber.
But Riddlemoser, whose office checked in with the post office hourly until polls closed, was convinced something had gone wrong when 55 landed all at once.
"There is no possible way in my military mind that these ballots should not have been available to us on Election Day before close-of-polls," the retired Air Force colonel wrote in an email to Virginia Elections Commissioner Edgardo Cortés. "How can there be zero, zero, zero — all afternoon and evening and then suddenly 55? We have a BOS [Board of Supervisors] race with a tiny delta. We have a HOD race with a very small delta. Maybe 55 would have swung one or both?"
[Potential chaos ahead as control of House of Delegates hangs in the balance]
Despite those concerns, Riddlemoser said the votes could not be counted without violating state law. By a 2-to-1 vote, Stafford's electoral board agreed on Tuesday not to count them.
Now Riddlemoser's email — suggesting that the post office somehow mishandled the ballots — has literally become Exhibit A in a federal lawsuit. Democrats filed it late Tuesday to challenge the outcome in the race for the District 28 seat being vacated by retiring House speaker William J. Howell (R-Stafford). As it stands now, Republican Robert Thomas leads Democrat Joshua Cole by 82 votes.
"Virginians should not be disenfranchised by errors made by government officials," said Marc Elias, the lawyer for the Virginia House Democratic Caucus, which filed the suit on Cole's behalf in federal court in Alexandria. It seeks to have the 55 ballots counted.
A spokesman for House Majority Leader M. Kirkland Cox (R- Colonial Heights), who is in line to become speaker if the GOP holds its majority, called the lawsuit "unnecessary" given that Democrats acknowledge that the absentee ballots arrived after the state deadline.
"The law on absentee ballots is clear and was applied fairly by a Democrat-controlled Electoral Board," said Parker Slaybaugh, Cox's spokesman. "You don't get to pick and choose which late ballots to count; otherwise you will have chaos across the entire state."
The Postal Service is aware of the matter and is looking into it, spokeswoman Darleen Reid said.
View Graphic Virginia general election guide
In a letter to state elections officials, Elias also asserted that 668 people eligible to vote in District 28 were given ballots for the wrong House race.
He said the claim was based on vote totals posted on the state elections website. The site indicates that two Fredericksburg precincts that are entirely within District 28 erroneously operated as a split precinct, with some voters given ballots for the District 88 race and others for the District 28 contest, Elias said. A total of 354 voters in Precinct 402 and 314 voters in Precinct 201 cast ballots in the District 88 race, a four-way contest that Del. Mark Cole (R-Fredericksburg) won with 14,022 votes over Democrat Steve Aycock (9,918 votes) and two distant third-party contenders.
"Obviously it is not a tolerable situation for 668 voters to be disenfranchised," Elias said.
He has called on the state Board of Elections to exclude votes cast in the two precincts from the District 88 totals, decline to certify a winner in District 28, and take other, unspecified steps to ensure all Virginians had the opportunity to vote for the delegate who represents them in Richmond.
The Fredericksburg Electoral Board issued a statement Wednesday acknowledging that the board and registrar received complaints "regarding House Districts 28 and 88." The board conveyed those complaints to Cortés, who advised them to seek counsel from the Fredericksburg city attorney. "The City Attorney advised the Electoral Board to proceed with the election," the statement said.
Cortés said Fredericksburg officials called his office late in the afternoon on Election Day, saying, "We may have an issue here."
He said the call came after a voter in one of the two precincts questioned whether he or she had been given the proper ballot.
"Somebody thought they should be in a different district than what they got the ballot for," said Cortés, who said the problem arose in an area that borders both District 88 and District 28. Cortés said the question could not be immediately resolved, but his office has offered to help Fredericksburg sort it out.
Republicans also were investigating.
"We are aware the Democrats believe there is an issue and are looking into it as well," Slaybaugh said.
[Democrats make significant gains in House in historic sweep]
Slaybaugh said Democrats had "misled people about the types of ballots at issue" in Stafford.
Democratic Party leaders initially asserted that the 55 absentee ballots were from active-duty members of the military. They held a conference call to highlight the matter on Veterans Day, assembling legislators with military backgrounds to speak on the issue.
But Stafford officials said the ballots came from absentee voters of all stripes.
On Wednesday, Democrats said they had based that claim on information that had come from people "on the ground" in Stafford. Elias said the lawsuit does not claim the ballots were "all military," although some may be.
"Whether military or civilian, the right to vote is equal in all cases," he said.
The District 28 race is one of three likely headed for a state-funded recount after the Nov. 7 election, in which Democrats made huge gains in the House and swept statewide offices for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.
Before the election, Republicans boasted a 66-to-34 majority in Richmond's lower chamber. Now, the count is 49 Democrats and 51 Republicans, putting Democrats within striking distance of taking control. They need one more victory to force a power-sharing deal with Republicans and two more to take the reins of the chamber for the first time since 2000. Republicans hold narrow leads in the Thomas-Cole contest and two other contested races. In those, Del. Timothy D. Hugo (R-Fairfax) has a 106-vote lead over Democrat Donte Tanner, while Del. David E. Yancey (R-Newport News) is up just 10 votes over Democrat Shelly Simonds.A few weeks ago I’ve seen an interesting flock of tweets initiated by this question:
Is my hatred of having http endpoints with the same path but different behaviors based on the verb totally irrational? Because I HATE it — Camille Fournier (@skamille) April 16, 2015
This question and the tweets that followed put my brain on quite an animated discussion…
After this internal discussion, I realized that this question (and all the tweet debate that follows it) could help me highlight a dark corner of my librainry: why should I considered REST’s request style (resource oriented) better than RPC’s (operation oriented)? Is RPC’s request style so evil? Is REST’s the panacea?
What RPC’s and REST’s requests styles look like
Before comparing the two request styles let’s see what they look like.
The HTTP request
Both RPC and REST use HTTP protocol which is a request/response protocol.
A basic HTTP request consists of:
A verb (or method)
A resource (or endpoint)
Each HTTP verb:
Has a meaning
Is idempotent or not: A request method is considered “idempotent” if the intended effect on the server of multiple identical requests with that method is the same as the effect for a single such request (see RFC7231: Idempotent methods).
Is safe or not: Request methods are considered “safe” if their defined semantics are essentially read-only (see RFC7231: Safe methods).
Is cacheable or not
Verb Meaning Idempotent Safe Cacheable GET Reads a resource Yes Yes Yes POST Creates a resource or triggers a data-handling process No No Only cacheable if response contains explicit freshness information PUT Fully updates (replaces) an existing resource or create a resource Yes No No PATCH Partially updates a resources No No Only cacheable if response contains explicit freshness information DELETE Deletes a resource Yes No No
The table above shows only the HTTP verbs used commonly by RPC and REST APIs.
RPC: The operation request style
The RPC acronym has many meanings and Remote Procedure Call has many forms.
In this post, when I talk about RPC I talk about WYGOPIAO: What You GET Or POST Is An Operation.
With this type of RPC, you expose operations to manipulate data through HTTP as a transport protocol.
As far as I know, there are no particular rules for this style but generally:
The endpoint contains the name of the operation you want to invoke.
This type of API generally only uses GET and POST HTTP verbs.
GET /someoperation?data=anId POST /anotheroperation { "data":"anId"; "anotherdata":"another value" }
How do people choose between GET and POST?
For those who care a little about HTTP protocol this type of API tends to use GET for operations that don’t modify anything and POST for other cases.
For those who don’t care much about HTTP protocol, this type of API tends to use GET for operations that don’t need too much parameters and POST for other cases.
Those who really don’t care or who don’t even think about it choose between GET and POST on a random basis or always use POST.
REST: The resource request style
I will not explain in detail what REST is, you can read Roy Fielding’s dissertation and The REST cookbook for more details.
To make it short and focus on the matter of this post, with a REST API you expose data as resources that you manipulate through HTTP protocol using the right HTTP verb :
The endpoint contains the resource you manipulate.
Many use the CRUD analogy to explain REST requests principles. The HTTP verb indicates what you want to do (Create/Read/Update/Delete) with that resource as defined earlier in this post and by RFC7231 (Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content) and RFC5789 (PATCH Method for HTTP).
GET /someresources/anId PUT /someresources/anId {"anotherdata":"another value"}
Examples
Here are some of my CarBoN API requests presented in RPC and REST ways:
Operation RPC (operation) REST (resource) Signup POST /signup POST /persons Resign POST /resign DELETE /persons/1234 Read a person GET /readPerson?personid=1234 GET /persons/1234 Read a person’s items list GET /readUsersItemsList?userid=1234 GET /persons/1234/items Add an item to a person’s list POST /addItemToUsersItemsList POST /persons/1234/items Update an item POST /modifyItem PUT /items/456 Delete an item POST /removeItem?itemId=456 DELETE /items/456
Comparing RPC’s and REST’s requests styles
I’ve selected some items to compare RPC’s and REST’s requests styles:
Beauty
Designability
API definition language
Predictability and semantic
Hypermediability
Cacheability
Usability
Beauty
Even if this item is irrelevant, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, both styles can produce beautiful API as they can produce ugly ones.
Operation RPC REST Read a person pretty version GET /readPerson?personid=1234 GET /persons/1234 Read a person ugly version GET /rdXbzv01?i=1234 GET /xbzv01/1234
So that’s a draw for this one.
Designability
Is it easier to design RPC ou REST endpoints?
Designing a RPC API may seem easier:
when you have to deal with an existing system as it is generally operation oriented but you’ll have to simplify and clean this vision to expose it.
when you deal mainly with processes and operations (as transform them into REST resources is not always trivial).
The design of an RPC API needs the designers to be strict to achieve a consistant API as you do not really have constraints.
Designing a REST API may seem easier when you deal mainly with data.
But even if in some certain case, designing a REST API seems a little harder than an RPC one, it gives you a frame that let you achieve more easily a consistent API.
And in both case you’ll have to deal with naming consistency.
Both style have pros and cons depending on the context but I don’t find that one style is more easier to design than the other. As I don’t really see a winner, that’s another draw.
API definition languages
You can perfectly describe both styles with API definition languages like Swagger, RAML or blueprint.
So that’s a draw, again.
Predictability and semantic
With RPC the semantic relies (mostly) on the endpoint and there are no global shared understanding of its meaning. For example, to delete an item you could have:
GET (or POST) /deleteItem?itemId=456
GET (or POST) /removeIt?itemId=456
GET (or POST) /trash?itemId=456
To resign from the service you could have:
POST (or GET) /resign
POST (or GET) /goodbye
POST (or GET) /seeya
With RPC you rely on your human interpretation of the endpoint’s meaning to understand what it does but you can therefore have a fine human readable description of what is happening when you call this endpoint.
With REST the semantic relies (mostly) on the HTTP verb. The verb’s semantic is globally shared. The only way to delete an item is:
DELETE /items/456
If a user want to stop using your service, you’ll do this (not so obvious) call:
DELETE /users/1234
REST is more predictable than RPC as it relies on the shared semantic of HTTP verbs. You don’t know what happen exactly but you have a general idea of what you do.
REST wins (but shortly).
Hypermediability
In both style you end making HTTP request, so there is no problem do design an hypermedia API with any of these styles.
This is a draw.
Cacheability
I’ve often seen (http) caching used as a killer reason to choose REST over RPC.
But after reading HTTP RFCs, I do not agree with this argument (maybe I missed something). Of course if your RPC API only use POST for all requests, caching may be a little tricky to handle (but not impossible). If you use GET and POST wisely, your RPC API will be able to obtain the same level of cacheability as a REST API.
This is a draw.
Usability
From a developer point of view both styles are using HTTP protocol so there’s basically no difference between RPC and REST request. No difference on the documentation (machine of human readable) level too.
This is a draw.
Totalling points
Item Who wins? Beauty Draw Designability Draw API definition language Draw Predictability and semantic REST Hypermediability Draw Cachability Draw Usability Draw
Do REST really wins?
REST wins thanks to the predictability and semantic item.
So, is the resource approach better than the operation one?
No.
RPC and REST are only different approaches with pros and cons and both are valueable depending on the context. You can even mix these two approaches in a single API.
The context, that’s the key. There are no panacea solution, don’t follow fashion blindly, you always have to think within a context and must be pragmatic when choosing a solution.
At least, I know now why I like the resource approach: its predictability and the frame given by the full use of HTTP protocol. What about you?
One last word to leave you with food for thought: in this time of advent of functionnal programming, having operation request style could make sense…
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.J. D. Heyes
Natural News
Nov 5, 2012
The surveillance society continues to grow unabated, as the city of Baltimore becomes the latest governmental entity to trample civil rights in the name of “public safety.”
According to the Baltimore Sun, city officials have now authorized the recording of private conversations on public buses “to investigate crimes, accidents and poor customer service.”
Marked with signs to alert passengers that open mics are picking up every word they say, the first 10 buses with the new surveillance equipment began operation towards the end of October. Eventually, officials say they will expand the program to 340 buses, or about half the fleet, by next summer.
‘We want to make people feel safe…’
The paper said the audio surveillance will be incorporated into the video surveillance systems already on board the buses (no plausible explanations on how an audio capability is supposed to enhance video surveillance, either).
“We want to make sure people feel safe, and this builds up our arsenal of tools to keep our patrons safe,” said Ralign Wells, the Maryland Transit Administration chief. “The audio completes the information package for investigators and responders.”
At this point, it’s appropriate to remind readers that “public safety” is the excuse of choice for authoritarians who no longer feel constrained by the Constitution. But then, why would they, considering they are being enabled by a federal court system that, time and again, upholds such blatant violations as “reasonable?” The MTA said it first checked with the state Attorney General’s office on the legality of adding audio surveillance; the AG’s office said it was, based on a 2000 appeals court decision, in which a panel ruled such surveillance did not violate state wiretapping laws (no word on how public eavesdropping applies to a law regulating wiretapping, but the use of tortured logic to implement unconstitutional measures is not a new tactic to authoritarians).
The American Civil Liberties Union does not always come down on the right side of the Constitution either, but in this case, the organization has it right.
David Rocah, a staff attorney with the Maryland chapter of the ACLU, said he was “flabbergasted” by the plan, which he says is being implemented under the guise of a pilot program after a similar proposal was rejected by the state’s highest-ranking transportation official and the General Assembly three times in 2009.
“People don’t want or need to have their private conversations recorded by MTA as a condition of riding a bus,” Rocah told the paper. “A significant number of people have no viable alternative to riding a bus, and they should not be forced to give up their privacy rights.”
MTA police dispatchers say they receive anywhere from 45 to 100 calls daily from bus drivers reporting everything from unruly passengers to criminal activity. Capt. Burna McCollum, commander of the MTA police technical services division, said that while video is a very useful tool in helping to solve crimes, the audio is needed because, essentially, he wants to take away a witnesses’ choice not to get involved.
State senate willing to get involved?
As reported by the Sun, “Video is a critical tool for investigators sorting out the details of an incident, but when witnesses walk away, are reluctant to cooperate or give conflicting accounts, an audio recording can fill in missing information,” McCollum said.
Translation: Police will now be able to force city residents to get involved in criminal investigations, even if they would otherwise choose not to for, say, personal safety reasons (no word on whether police are prepared to provide such unwilling witnesses 24/7 protection for as long as necessary).
Other area transportation systems have chosen the correct constitutional route and have decided against audio surveillance, the paper said.
“It’s an end run and ripe for a court challenge,” Sen. James Brochin, a Baltimore County Democrat and member of the state Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. “They have absolutely no grounds to do this. If we can’t get them to listen and change their minds, we’ll deal with this … and make them defend what’s indefensible.”
Here’s hoping that isn’t just bluster.
Sources:
http://www.usatoday.com
http://www.baltimoresun.com
http://www.naturalnews.comUK Using Anti-Terror Laws To Harass And Intimidate Human Rights And Democracy Activists
from the shameful dept
Baraa Shiban, a respected human rights activist who works in Yemen as a project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve and was travelling to London to speak at an event, said he was held for an hour on Monday night and questioned about his work and political views.
He was detained under schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act, the same legislation used last month at Heathrow to detain David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has written about mass internet surveillance by the US National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ.
Shiban is a member of Yemen's National Dialogue – the body tasked with mapping out the country's democratic future
Shiban said: "I was stunned when the border agent said I was being held simply because I came from Yemen. It was even more shocking when he spent the entire time asking me about my human rights work and about Reprieve, the charity I work for.
"Is the UK the kind of place that human rights activists are fair game for detention, intimidation and interrogation?"
A spokesman said: "He was referred to Sussex police by Border Force officials. He spoke with officers for around half an hour and was then free to continue his journey. We are satisfied that our actions were legitimate, justified and proportionate and were carried out in accordance with the act."
You may recall that, last month, Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was detained at Heathrow for nearly 9 hours for helping Greenwald do journalism. There were many problems with this detention, not the least of which that officials used anlaw, called Schedule 7, for the detention. The author of Schedule 7, Charles Falconer, specifically has said that the law wasn't intended for such purposes. And yet, it appears that the UK authorities aren't backing down from abusing Schedule 7 to intimidate people having nothing to do with terrorism.The latest is using Schedule 7 to detain and intimidate a human rights and democracy activist from Yemen. Let me repeat it: this is someone advocating, and they're being detained and harassed. Something is seriously screwed up here.Shiban was going to the UK to give a speech on, of all things, "security, diplomacy and aid." He may want to edit the planned remarks slightly. Shiban further pointed out that the detention was focused on his human rights activities. Remember this is under a law that is supposed to only be used to stop terrorists.The excuse given by Sussex police is especially pathetic:Remember, the act is supposed tobe used in investigating possible terrorist activity. These are the kinds of activities that we used to associate with authoritarian non-democratic countries. And now we're regularly seeing such abuse in the US and the UK.
Filed Under: activism, anti-terror, baraa shiban, human rights, schedule 7, terrorism, uk, yemenStory highlights Van carrying Ric Saldivar's parents and their four great-grandchildren sinks in bayou
Saldivar says his brother, the driver, escaped and clung to a branch as van sank
(CNN) As his brother tells it, Sammy Saldivar tried his best to maneuver around Harvey's floodwaters.
Sammy packed his elderly parents and their four great-grandchildren into a van as water rose around their northeast Houston home on Sunday.
He wanted to turn around as he approached a waterlogged bridge over Greens Bayou. But his father yelled at him to keep going, his brother, Ric Saldivar, said. Even at 84, patriarch Manuel Saldivar was still demanding. The way they were raised, "Dad tells you to do something, you do it," Ric Saldivar said.
Belia and Manuel Saldivar
Sammy made it across the bridge only to encounter a dip in the road on the other side, Ric Saldivar said, recalling what his brother told him. Sammy lost control and the van went nose-first into the bayou with his parents and the four children, ages 6 to 16, trapped inside.
Sammy managed to wriggle out of his seat belt and through the driver's side window. He made his way to a branch in the rushing water and held on for his life.
Read MoreAhead of the September news conference, Sony has cut production of PlayStation 4 to adjust inventory, people familiar with the matter said. Several major e-commerce websites in Japan, including Sonys own e-commerce site, said the PlayStation 4 was out of stock.
PlayStation 4 sales have been weaker in Japan than in the U.S. Data from videogame magazine publisher Famitsu showed sales of the console in Japan have been declining slightly in recent weeks. Nevertheless, stocks of the device are likely to run out as the company limits production.
The white model was gone two weeks ago and we just sold our last black model in stock, said the chief of the videogame floor at a major electronics store in Tokyo. Our central purchasing department warned us we wouldnt get any for now because the item is simply not in distribution channels.Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Joe Raedle/Getty Images Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida introduced a pair of amendments aimed at stripping White House senior adviser Jared Kushner of his security clearance into a 2018 appropriations bill that were voted down Thursday.
The amendments came as Kushner found himself under renewed scrutiny after his participation in a June 2016 meeting that involved Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower was revealed.
Wasserman Schultz's amendments, which did not make it through the Republican-controlled Appropriations Committee, received 22 yes votes and 30 no tallies. The text of the amendments was provided to Business Insider prior to their introduction.
"None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to issue, renew, or maintain a security clearance for any individual in a position in the Executive Office of the President who is under a criminal investigation by a federal law enforcement agency for aiding a foreign government," read the first amendment from Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee.
"None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to issue, renew, or maintain a security clearance for any individual in a position in the Executive Office of the President who deliberately fails, as determined by the issuing department or agency, to disclose in the Standard Form 86 [the security clearance form] of such individual a meeting with a foreign national if such disclosure is required for such form," read the second.
While discussing the second amendment, Wasserman Schultz pointed to Kushner having had to make multiple revisions to his security clearance form.
"Mr. Kushner didn't only leave out a couple of meetings, he's had to amend his form three times, with over 100 meetings with foreign nationals," Wasserman Schultz said, adding that some of those individuals "were with the state of Russia, an enemy state. Specifically designed to aid his father-in-law's campaign and assist him in being elected president of the United States."
Republican Rep. John Culberson of Texas called the amendments "utterly unnecessary" and a "political stunt" after they were introduced.
"We have to leave these decisions in the hands of security professionals, who make these decisions on a case-by-case basis," he said. "There are guidelines in place that make it clear that an individual is ineligible for a security clearance if they meet any one of 13 guidelines. These are used by all federal agencies already, including the FBI, which does security clearances for everyone in the government, including the White House."
A handful of Democrats spoke up to push for the Wasserman Schultz amendments.
Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California said the amendments were especially pertinent after the Trump Tower meeting was revealed.
"At a minimum, White House staff who are under investigation should not have access to classified information," she said.
Wasserman Schultz introduced the amendments to the 2018 Commerce, Justice, Science, and Financial Services Appropriations Bills.
Kushner is the only current White House staffer who was present for the meeting with the Kremlin-connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Emails released Tuesday showed Trump Jr. was promised dirt on Hillary Clinton that he claimed was never actually presented.
Trump Jr. posted emails that were forwarded to Kushner and Trump's campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, setting up that meeting. Democrats and Republicans have subsequently questioned why Kushner still has a security clearance.
The deputy White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders,did not tell reporters at Wednesday's off-camera briefing whether Kushner still held that clearance, saying Democrats "are trying to play political games" by calling for it to be revoked.
Jared Kushner. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
It's not the first time Kushner's security clearance has come under question.
Kushner had to revise his security clearance form after he failed to disclose meetings with the Russian ambassador to the US and a Russian banker, which led to The New York Times' discovery of the Trump Tower meeting involving Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort, and the Russian lawyer. Additionally, the House and Senate intelligence committees and Department of Justice investigators are looking into whether the Kushner-led Trump campaign digital operation assisted Russia's attacks on Clinton during the 2016 election cycle.
Though Veselnitskaya told NBC News that Kushner "left the meeting after seven to 10 minutes of the 20- to 30-minute meeting," these incidents — with the Trump Jr. meeting now at center stage — have led to calls for Kushner to be stripped of the clearance.
Trump Jr.'s "preemptive release of the emails that led to the meeting with the Russian operative puts Jared Kushner in legal peril," Rick Tyler, the communications director for Republican Sen. Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign who is now an MSNBC contributor, told Business Insider in an email. "He has consistently failed to make mandatory discloses of meetings with foreign nationals including this one which is a felony."
"Jared should, at a minimum, have his clearances rescinded making his utility as an advisor, which itself is suspect, impractical," he continued.
The email disclosure revealed that Kushner was copied on Trump Jr.'s email chain with Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist who represented a Russian pop star with ties to President Donald Trump and was tasked with arranging the June meeting. The email chain was titled "Russia — Clinton — private and confidential" and said a Russian official had "offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to" Trump.
Goldstone described the information as being "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump," something that prompted Trump Jr. to respond, "If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer."
The fact that Kushner had the email chain available to him seemed to contradict an earlier statement from Trump Jr., who said over the weekend that Kushner and Manafort were told "nothing of the substance" of the meeting when he asked them to attend.
"Mr. Kushner's decision to take this meeting raises significant questions about his judgment and his respect for the very principles that our democracy was founded on — that our elections should be sacred and free of interference from a foreign adversary," Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democratic member of the House oversight committee, told Business Insider in an email.
He added: "His reported failure to disclose this meeting — and numerous others with Russians — when he submitted his security clearance application compounds the problem and is deeply concerning."FBI Director James Comey testified Wednesday during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on FBI oversight. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
A Silicon Valley congresswoman grilled FBI Director James Comey about his agency’s development of a facial recognition database Wednesday – but came up short on absolute assurances that ordinary Americans won’t be swept into the system.
The back-and-forth focused on the FBI’s Next Generation Identification program, which aspires to identify suspects with biometric technology, including facial recognition.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., peppered Comey with questions about the program's budding image database during a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
Among her raft of inquires, Lofgren pointedly asked if drivers license photographs would be included in the database, currently being built and tested.
“I don’t think so, the Next Gen Identification, as I understand it, is about mug shots,” Comey said. “I think there is some circumstances in which when states send us records, they’ll send us pictures of people who are getting special driving licenses to transport children or explosive materials or something – but as I understand it those are not part of the searchable Next Generation Identification database.”
He volunteered to correct the record if that’s not the case.
Comey was somewhat fuzzy about other details.
Lofgren asked if it’s true that images of 52 million people will be in the face database by 2015, a number asserted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in April, which also said millions of civil images would be included, based on FBI documents the group acquired.
Comey said he doesn't know if the 52 million figure is accurate.
“I saw some of the same media,” he said, “and that’s what led me to ask my folks: So what’s the deal with this? And the explanation to me was the pilot is mug shots, because those are repeatable, we can count on the quality of them, and they’re tied to criminal conduct, clearly, and so there was not a plan and there is not at present where we are going to add other non-mug shot photos. But again, if I’ve got that wrong I'll fix it with you.”
Lofgren pressed further.
“It’s my understanding that the contractor who is building this Next Generation database, a company called MorphoTrust, also built the State Department facial recognition database, which contains 244 million faces," she said. "Will your Next Generation Identification system be capable of importing the State Department records or searching the State Department records?”
Comey wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know, I have not heard of that as either a current capability or an intended capability – I’ll get back to you,” he said.
American police made 12,196,959 arrests in 2012, one every two seconds, according to FBI data released in September 2013, meaning mug shot-driven database growth alone could be significant.
The amicable FBI director, who began his 10-year term in 2013, smiled and calmly answered questions throughout the committee hearing. In his opening statement he said he believes it’s good to be skeptical of what the government is doing.When it comes to comics, Brazilian artist and graphic designer Rafael Grampá doesn't settle for thinking locally - he creates globally. From his trucker thriller release through Dark Horse, "Mesmo Delivery" (actually the book's second go around in America) to he and Daniel Pellizzari's upcoming "Furry Water and the Sons of Insurrection," the creator has gained the attention from fans and creators worldwide. We contacted Grampá for his take on cinematic storytelling and what it means to create new comic book worlds for an international audience.
ComicsAlliance: Can you tell us a little about the conception of "Mesmo Delivery?" What drew you toward the seedy world of brawling truckers?
Rafael Grampa: This is simple. I mixed some references of my childhood, like trucker tales and "The Twilight Zone" series episodes with my experience as art director of animation and motion graphics. When I was a kid - like 4 years old - my father used to be a trucker and my favorite movie was Sam Peckinpah's "Convoy" and "The Twilight Zone" episodes had blown my mind. Ok, it's not so simple because when some artist is creating his debut, [there] exists a lot of other things to care about. When I started to write "Mesmo Delivery," I didn't know if I really could tell a story and be understood, so I went deep in research to create something interesting not just for me, but for the readers too. The new Dark Horse re-print of "Mesmo Delivery" has 20 pages of extras and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of "Mesmo Delivery" where I explain some of my choices and concepts for the story. CA: You've mentioned artists like Moebius as influences in the past, but what creators (from any medium) do you think have most influenced the way you approach storytelling in your comics?
RG: I always say that Sergio Leone is my storytelling guru. My storytelling approach is very cinematic and I use to study movies scripts and movies script theories when I'm writing and because of that I'm sure that it is imprinted in my work. But also I try to listen my instincts to create some new stuff. I'm a learner but also I have the intention of being a creator to propose new ways to tell a story.
CA: In addition to comics, you've got a pretty extensive design background. What about that background do you feel gives you an advantage as a comic book creator?
RG: I try to make a page with a lot of different visual communication aspects and I hope my pages could be read by a lot of different layers, like the iconic way, the symbolic way, sometimes - or always - applying the Gestalt theory on my work, knowing that a panel is not just a panel and a page is not just a single page, because a comic book needs to be an intense addition of visual elements - like colors, characters, letters, etc - to be understood as a unique thing. Maybe the advantage is understanding that the art direction of a comic book is a really important thing, a solid language.
CA: Are there any areas within art that you haven't worked in directly that you think might bolster your own opinion of your work?
RG: Yes, I love to play music and I would like to direct movies soon - already have some proposals - but I think my own opinion about my work will always be that the next work needs to be better than the last one, doesn't matter what I'm doing. Sounds cliché but it's totally true.
CA: "Mesmo Deilvery" is home to some very interesting characters. What's your character creating process like? Do you design around an idea or create a design before fleshing out its characteristics with personality traits and other background details?
RG: My character creating process is very chaotic and strange, I don't have any form to do it, I just go with the flow of the ideas that are pleasing me at the |
apparently convinced the German government representatives of the merits of his reasonable approach to the problem. Muelert endorsed Ter Meer’s “cooperative” stall and General Loeb even indicated that he might agree to Ter Meer’s proposal to consider initiation of negotiations in the United States for the fall of 1938. In line with the decision reached at this conference, Ter Meer wrote on April 9, 1938, to Howard. After thanking him for “the detailed information” about Butyl, he reported on his meeting with Loeb and Muelert.
In accordance with our arrangements in Berlin, I have meanwhile taken up negotiations with the competent authorities in order to obtain the necessary freedom of action in the U.S.A. with regard to rubber-like products. As anticipated, those negotiations have proved to be rather difficult and the respective discussions are expected to take several months before the desired result is obtained. I will not fail to inform you about the result in due course. 12
Howard replied on April 20, wishing Ter Meer “early success in your negotiations” with the German government. Howard hoped, however, that without waiting for final conclusions on all the questions involved, you may be able to grant us the authority to proceed in a preliminary way with the rather lengthy discussions here which must be had with the various interested rubber companies preparatory to organizing them into a cooperative group.... My view is that we cannot safely delay the definite steps looking toward the organization of our business in the United States... beyond next fall—and even to obtain this much delay may not be too easy. 13 In the spring of 1938, the Goodyear Rubber Company and the Dow Chemical Company, intent on developing a synthetic rubber capacity, pressed Standard for licenses under I.G.’s Buna patents. Standard, unable to get I.G.’s permission, resorted to the same stalling technique with the American rubber companies that I.G. was using with Standard. Standard was not yet in a position to give licenses but at the same time did not want to force the companies to strike out on their own. As Howard wrote to Friedrich H. Bedford, Jr., an important, long-time Standard Oil director and the president of a Standard subsidiary that sold rubber products, “Our primary objective in our talk with the Goodyear and Dow people was to convince them of our good faith and our willingness to cooperate with them in order to avoid having them proceed prematurely with an independent development [emphasis in original].” At the bottom of Standard’s rubber problems, of course, was I.G.’s failure to act: “The thing that is really holding us up,” explained Howard, “is... the inability of our partners [I.G.] to obtain permission of their government to proceed with the development in the United States. Until they obtain this permission, it is not possible for us to make any commitment at all.” 14 A few days later Howard wrote to Bedford assuring him that he would continue to press I.G. for permission at least to hold informal talks with the rubber industry about synthetic rubber.
Until we have this permission, however, there is absolutely nothing we can do, and we must be especially careful not to make any move whatever, even on a purely informal, personal, or friendly basis, without the consent of our friends. We know some of the difficulties they have, both from business complications and interrelations with the rubber and chemical trades in the United States, and from a national standpoint in Germany, but we do not know the whole situation—and since under the agreement they have full control over the exploitation of this process, the only thing we can do is to continue to press for authority to act, but in the meantime loyally preserve the restrictions they have put on us [emphasis added]. 15 The first week in October 1938, immediately after Germany invaded the Sudetenland and war was another step closer, Howard was again in Berlin to negotiate with Ter Meer about synthetic rubber. Ter Meer promised to proceed to the United States as soon as he was free; first, however, he would have to finish several important matters concerning “the expansion” of I.G., a reference to the newly acquired Sudeten properties. A few days later he wrote Carl Duisberg’s son Walter in New York that it would probably be the middle of November before he could get to the United States. The annexation of the Sudetenland brings up certain new problems for us.... If you explain it to [Standard] in the right manner, I am convinced that our American friends who are counting on my coming to the United States will understand the situation, especially if you mention that I am even prepared to sacrifice Christmas in Germany in order to place a Buna tire under the American Christmas tree. 16 At last, on Thanksgiving Day of 1938, Ter Meer arrived in the United States. At a high level conference, he and Howard met with the executive committee of Standard.
Since Ter Meer had not yet obtained permission from his government to resolve the Buna problem, it was agreed that Ter Meer, rather than Standard, would deal with the five leading American tire companies (U.S. Rubber, Firestone, Goodyear, Goodrich, and General). According to the committee memorandum on the meeting, “The Committee felt that [Ter Meer] should contact the tire companies on Jersey’s behalf as sponsor for the process, it being intimated to the tire companies that negotiations between I.G. and Jersey Company have not yet been crystallized, but that they are in process of development.” 17 Nothing would be said about the Nazi government’s refusal to grant permission. Ter Meer then made his tour of the five rubber companies and advised them that negotiations between I.G. and Standard would soon be completed although he could not give a specific date. The stall continued. By August 1939 it was obvious that war in Europe could not be averted. Should the conflict lead to war between the United States and Germany, the consequences to Standard and I.G. could be serious. The I.G. interest in both the Standard-I.G. Company and in Jasco would surely be seized by the U.S. alien property custodian as enemy owned assets. With this concern in mind Walter Duisberg, after returning from conferences with I.G. in Germany, suggested to Walter Teagle that action be taken to dispose of I.G.’s ownership in both of the jointly owned companies to American citizens. 18 Teagle agreed and suggested to some of Standard’s top officials that “in view of the unsettled conditions” it might be desirable for Standard itself to acquire the I.G. interest. Negotiations, he added, would have to be conducted with Duisberg since he was now “the German I.G.’s sole representative in the country.” 19 The pressure of events in Europe moved negotiations to a swift conclusion. Within days, Standard agreed to purchase I.G.’s twenty percent interest in the Standard-I.G. Company for $20,000 and Duisberg himself, now a naturalized American citizen, acquired I.G.’s fifty percent share of Jasco for a mere $4000. The Standard negotiators expressed no concern that Duisberg, the son of the founder of I.G., was a peculiar choice to immunize I.G.’s property from possible seizure by an alien property custodian. To the contrary, they pointed out naively that Duisberg’s purchase of I.G.’s Jasco shares would “prevent their being seized by an Alien Property Custodian because [Duisberg] is an American citizen and prepared to purchase the shares with his own funds.” They noted further that when Duisberg bought the stock, it was planned that he would execute an option in favor of Jasco “so as to insure that these shares will not fall into unfriendly hands in the event of his death.” 20 The next day, September 1, just as Germany was invading Poland and World War II had officially begun, the executive committee of Standard met hurriedly to approve the action of its negotiators. The negotiators, in their report to the committee, were quite candid: “Of course, what we have in mind is protecting this minority interest in the event of war between ourselves and Germany, as it would certainly be very undesirable to have this twenty percent in Standard-I.G. pass to an Alien Property Custodian who might sell it to an unfriendly interest.” 21 As soon as the executive committee voted approval, a cable was sent to the I.G. Berlin office offering to buy I.G.’s stock interest in Standard-I.G. for $20,000. 22 I.G. immediately cabled its acceptance. Two unresolved questions still remained in the relationship between Standard and I.G. The first concerned the critical problem of how to protect the worldwide patent holdings of I.G. to which the Standard-I.G. Company and Jasco had rights but which remained in I.G.’s name. The second was Standard’s repeated and almost desperate request to I.G.
for the rights to the Buna rubber patents and the know-how to use them. The outbreak of war seriously complicated the possibility of an affirmative answer. When war erupted on September 1, Howard was in France. This would probably be the last opportunity to work out a solution to the problem of transferring I.G.’s foreign patents to the Standard-I.G. Company and Jasco and to get the Buna know-how. Howard cabled William Farish, Teagle’s successor as president of Standard, suggesting that he be permitted to delay his return to the United States in order to meet with I.G. officials. 23 Since the state of war between France and Germany prevented Howard from communicating directly with I.G., he arranged for the New York Standard office to set up a meeting in neutral Holland. 24 Knieriem assigned Fritz Ringer, a young engineer familiar with the patent problem, to confer with Howard at The Hague. Before Ringer could negotiate such a matter, however, permission had to be obtained from the proper German authorities, in this case the High Command because military products were involved. Buetefisch conferred on the matter with the officials of the High Command on September 13. He advised them of Standard’s proposal by which I.G. would transfer its foreign patents to the Standard-I.G. Company and Jasco. These patents, he warned, were in imminent danger of being seized by enemy governments if ownership remained in I.G.’s name. I.G., he explained, anticipated “substantial advantages from a speedy transfer” and he assured the High Command that “German interests would not be prejudiced.” Finally, Buetefisch gave assurances that I.G. “would be able to resume at any time, without hindrance, the relationships existing now.” 25 For these reasons Buetefisch urged that I.G. be granted permission to proceed with these transactions. It was simply a matter of camouflaging I.G.’s interest for the duration of the war. At the close of the conference, the High Command officials present gave I.G. the go-ahead for the proposed meeting at The Hague. Relying on this verbal assurance, I.G. got word to Howard, who was waiting in England, that Ringer would meet him at The Hague on September 22, bringing the patent assignments.
While waiting in England, Howard had second thoughts and called at the American Embassy to inquire about the legality of meeting with an I.G. representative in Holland.
Herschel V. Johnson, then counselor at the American Embassy, expressed serious doubts as to the propriety or wisdom of an American citizen’s going to Holland from England to talk to England’s enemies. 26 Howard tried to convince Johnson that the English and the Americans had much to gain if the patent rights to valuable processes that had originated in Germany could be transferred to Standard. As matters stood, only the Germans could derive any military benefit from this situation. A doubtful Johnson referred Howard to the Ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy. Unlike his counselor, Ambassador Kennedy saw nothing questionable in Howard’s proposal, nor any reason for the British to object. He promptly secured for Howard the necessary clearance from the British Foreign Office. 27
The meeting having been cleared by their respective governments, the two men met at The Hague on September 22. Almost three weeks had passed since the outbreak of war, an uncomfortable fact that dominated the conference. Ringer arrived at the meeting with blank assignments for approximately 2000 patents that I.G. was prepared to turn over to Jasco and the Standard-I.G. Company, presumably all the foreign patents covering the products and processes within the fields of operation of each of these concerns. There was one significant omission. Howard noted with disappointment that the Buna patents were not included. With the war now under way in Europe, it would only be a matter of time before the United States became aware that the spread of the conflict to the Pacific would make its supply of natural rubber vulnerable. Without the Buna patents or know-how, Standard was being placed in a very uncomfortable position. It is understandable that Howard pressed Ringer hard on the subject of Buna. The United States government at any moment might take a jaundiced view of the I.G.-Standard arrangement. Ringer replied that although he did not have the Buna patents with him, he could assure Howard that I.G. fully intended to adhere to its unwritten commitment to include the Buna patents in the new Jasco arrangement.
In discussing the change with regard to I.G.’s interest in Jasco, both men were appalled by the sale to Duisberg, agreeing that the transfer was a first-class blunder. Ringer assured Howard that this would be rectified and that Duisberg would follow whatever course I.G. asked him to take. 28 Duisberg did exactly as I.G. wished. He sold the fifty percent interest in Jasco to Standard at the same price he paid I.G. 29 At their meeting Howard and Ringer then got down to the business of accommodating the relations of Standard and I.G. to the new circumstances caused by the war. Broadly stated, they agreed that Standard would receive U.S. and Allied countries as exclusive territory for the exploitation of the products and processes covered by the Jasco patents, with the rest of the world reserved for I.G. 30 Iraq was included in the territory assigned to Standard on the mistaken assumption that it had declared war on Germany. 31 To keep matters flexible, if the workings of the agreement should result in an unfair financial distribution, the basic division of territory could be recast at any time in the future. To Howard’s partial satisfaction, the new agreement gave Jasco rights to I.G.’s Buna patents. But the patents were only part of the story. The know-how, which I.G. did not include, was even more important to Standard. Just as the final meeting between the two men was coming to a close, Howard brought up the subject of Buna again. Was there any chance, he asked, that I.G. would provide Standard with the know-how for making Buna? Without this technical information, Standard would be at a great disadvantage. Ringer, of course, did not have the authority to give an answer. In his report back to I.G., however, Ringer noted that Howard anticipated a refusal “since in the event of war, the United States would be dependent on the importation of crude rubber.” 32 Therefore, Ringer concluded, Howard did not condition Standard’s approval of the revised Jasco agreement on I.G.’s furnishing the know-how. In Ringer’s view, Howard did not expect the German government to permit the know-how on Buna to be made available to a potential enemy who might need it in case it lost access to natural rubber, such as might happen in a war with Japan, Germany’s Axis partner.
On September 25, Ringer and Howard finished their business and departed for home, each carrying a copy of the “Hague memorandum,” a draft agreement for the consideration and approval of their respective companies. I.G.’s problem now was to get the approval of the German government. Ter Meer and Buetefisch paid a visit to General Thomas of the High Command and Ministerial Director Muelert of the Ministry of Economics to present I.G.’s application for government permission to sign the Jasco readjustment agreement. Ter Meer again stressed the compelling need to get the foreign Buna patents out of I.G.’s name as quickly as possible in order to avoid possible enemy seizure. With the assignment to Jasco, they would be under the control of Standard, a concern that I.G. could trust to resume friendly relations after the war. Thomas and Muelert were agreeable but made it plain that they would grant permission to I.G. to make the transfer only on the condition that there would be no transmission of Buna know-how. Ter Meer and Buetefisch assured them that this prohibition would be respected absolutely. 33 By October 12 both the German High Command and the Ministry of Economics had given I.G. written permission for the assignment of the Buna patents to Standard. With all the necessary government permits in order, I.G. cabled the Standard Oil Development Company on October 16 that it agreed in principle with the Jasco arrangement outlined in the Hague memorandum. The wording of the cable was identical with that in the draft tentatively prepared three weeks before except for one additional sentence: “Re article two of the Hague Memorandum we ask that Jasco assign also Iraq to I.G.” 34 This was designed to correct the mistake Ringer had made when he allocated Iraq to Standard under the incorrect assumption that Iraq was at war with Germany. Obviously, I.G. did not intend to relinquish any territory it did not have to.
I.G. also sent a second cable to Standard Development, settling the Buna question: “As agreed we will assign Buna patents for Jasco field. Documents are being prepared.... Referring to your question with respect to technical information about Buna we have to inform you that under present conditions we will not be able to give such information.” 35 Upon receipt of the two cables from I.G., Howard immediately wrote a memorandum for the executive committee of the Standard board explaining the reason for the Jasco arrangement. After noting the basic outlines of the Hague agreement, he commented: I believe this arrangement, when coupled with the provision for future readjustments, is entirely equitable, and that without regard to the possibility of legally enforcing the readjustment provision, it should be satisfactory in substance to us, as it is to the I.G. An attempt to put this provision in a form which would be fully legally enforceable might result in many difficulties, and (speaking for myself and the I.G. negotiators) it was not our intention to provide any legally enforceable clause of this character in our arrangements. He added one note of caution.
We will probably have some legal difficulties in both England and France in connection with establishing our right to these I.G. inventions, but since we believe we can establish an equitable title antedating the war (and in any case we certainly have all the technical information, without which it would be difficult to proceed), this situation is not too bad. 36
On the morning of October 18, the executive committee, with Howard present, approved the Jasco readjustment and Howard then cabled I.G. in Berlin agreeing “in principle to arrangement outlined in your cable October 16.” In December an afterthought struck Howard. He proposed to I.G. that the Jasco agreement be dated retroactively to September 1, 1939, 37 two days before Great Britain and France officially declared war on Germany. Technically, the new date made the Hague memorandum into a prewar document.
By the summer of 1940, the last of the Buna patents, about fifty assignments, were officially transferred by I.G. to Jasco. However, as understood by the parties, the know-how was not turned over. And by the end of 1941 this lack proved a personal tragedy for Howard, Teagle, and Farish and a corporate disaster for Standard. Worst of all, it was a major military setback for the United States.
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States was suddenly faced with a monumental rubber crisis. It was blocked from its main source of natural rubber in Southeast Asia—just as Germany had been blocked from its source of saltpeter in Chile during World War I. Desperate measures were called for, and rubber was soon tightly rationed. A campaign was started by patriotic citizens to collect rubber goods of all kinds for possible recycling into tires. It was a futile if laudable enterprise. These enthusiasts learned, to their dismay, that rubber bathmats could generally be turned into new rubber bathmats but not into tires. The United States would have to rely on synthetic rubber for tires. However, the American rubber and chemical companies were completely unprepared to mass-produce a synthetic.
While feverish work was going on among the rubber and chemical companies to develop a synthetic rubber out of which to make tires, there seemed to be no prospect for immediate success as far as Buna was concerned. I.G. had successfully kept the know-how for its production from reaching the United States. For the United States and for Standard the results were calamitous.
Since early 1941, the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice had been investigating the I.G.-Standard cartel, and by the end of the year, spurred by the attack at Pearl Harbor, the government was getting ready to indict the Standard Oil companies, I.G. Farben, and their principal officers for a conspiracy to restrain trade and commerce in the oil and chemical industries throughout the world, including synthetic rubber and synthetic gasoline.
Standard protested to the War Department that the defense of such a lawsuit would divert the energies of many of its executives from the war effort. The War Department, more concerned with war production than prosecution under the antitrust laws, agreed.
However, the Department of Justice, with the backing of several powerful senators and administration officials, insisted that the only effective way to eliminate the restrictions of the I.G.-Standard cartel and open up the development and manufacture of synthetic rubber was by enforcement of the antitrust laws. On March 20, 1942 Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold, Attorney General Biddle, Secretary of War Stimson, and Secretary of the Navy Knox signed a memorandum to President Roosevelt recommending suspension of pending antitrust investigations and lawsuits that might interfere with the war effort. They argued that lengthy court actions would “unavoidably consume the time of executives and employees of those corporations which are engaged in war work.” 38 Roosevelt approved this policy, but as a concession to Arnold and his Antitrust Division staff he agreed to ask for congressional action to extend the statute of limitations on the antitrust cases affected so that postwar prosecution would be possible. 39
It was generally recognized that the I.G.-Standard antitrust case precipitated the change of policy. However, Standard did not elect to postpone resolution of the case until after the war. Instead, the parties agreed that Antitrust would file criminal charges against Standard and its principal officers and that all the Standard defendants would plead nolo contendere (no contest). It was also agreed that the Justice Department would file a civil complaint, to which Standard would enter a consent decree agreeing to abandon all contracts and practices to which the government objected. When the parties met on March 24 in Assistant Attorney General Arnold’s office to forge a formal agreement, one problem remained. Arnold wanted the court to assess fines totaling over $1.5 million, one of the largest financial penalties in the history of antitrust actions. The fine would be divided among a large number of defendants—Standard Oil (New Jersey), several Standard subsidiaries, and all the directors of the parent company. John W. Davis, counsel for Standard, rejected this suggestion as absolutely unacceptable. Such a huge fine would call into question the patriotism of Standard. Instead, he made a counteroffer: fines totaling $50,000 to be divided among the defendants any way Arnold chose. Arnold retorted that equal division of a fine that small would mean individual fines of only $600 to $700, an absurd figure in view of the serious nature of the charges. With the papers due to be filed in court the next day—and it was already approaching midnight—Arnold finally capitulated, at least for the time being. The number of defendants was reduced to ten so that the individual fines amounted to $5000.
As the meeting was breaking up, Arnold made a brief statement to the opposing counsel and some of the proposed defendants who were present: “Of course, you understand that I am under subpoena to appear the day after tomorrow before the Truman Committee [the U.S. Senate War Investigating Committee] to tell them all the facts about the case.” Davis replied wearily, “Mr. Arnold, that is a matter of utter indifference to us.”
The next day, March 25, 1942, was a black one for Standard Oil. What Standard and I.G. had been frantically trying to avoid since they first realized that war was inevitable had happened. The new U.S. alien property custodian, Leo T. Crowley, issued his first vesting order, seizing the interests of I.G. Farben, “an enemy corporation,” in the stock, patents, and contracts of Jasco and Standard Catalytic Company. (In the fall of 1940, the Standard-I.G. Company had been changed to the Standard pany whose name bore the I.G. initials.) [NOTE: there seems to be a typo in the original; Soil and Health Library.]
Two hours after Crowley had vested the alleged interest of I.G. Farben in Jasco and Standard Catalytic, the Department of Justice filed a massive action against the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), six subsidiaries, and Walter C. Teagle, William S. Farish, and Frank A. Howard. I.G. Farbenindustrie was named an unindicted co-conspirator. 40 According to the compromise worked out two nights earlier, the ten defendants in the criminal action pleaded no contest and were fined $5,000 each. The antitrust complaint detailed the history of Standard’s relations with I.G. Farben. The section that gained the most careful attention by the press, quite naturally, concerned synthetic rubber. The complaint implied that the current rubber crisis could be traced, at least in part, to the I.G.-Standard cartel.
To remedy matters, the consent decree required Standard to sever all relations with I.G. and to make available to all United States applicants all patents by which Standard and I.G. had monopolized trade in the chemical and petroleum fields, furnishing technical know-how as well. As an interesting sidelight, the alien property custodian joined in the case as the legal representative of I.G.’s interests. His primary role was to provide Standard with a defense in case I.G. Farben brought suit in the future for nonperformance under the agreements.
Arnold, who traditionally issued lively public statements, put out a brief and uninformative press release: “Because members of the Antitrust Division have been subpoenaed to appear before the Truman Committee tomorrow to present a detailed explanation of both the complaint and the decree, such details are omitted from this announcement.” 41 Standard Oil also issued a press release, mainly to explain why it chose not to contest the case.
The company realizes that to obtain a vindication by trying the issues in the courts would involve months of time and energy of most of its officers and many of its employees. Its war work is more important than court vindication. Nor has the company any desire to remain in a position which the Department of Justice considers in any way questionable. 42 The release pointed out that agreements between Standard and I.G. had actually advanced the progress of American industry and its ability to meet the war emergency. The next day Thurman Arnold appeared before the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, headed by Harry S. Truman. Arnold set forth in full detail the history of Standard Oil’s relations with I.G. Farben before and during Hitler’s regime. All the facts were supported by documents from Standard Oil’s own files. The effect on the senators and press was electrifying. Scripps-Howard’s Thomas L. Stokes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, described the atmosphere in the committee room.
Members of the Senate Defense Committee sat grim and visibly shocked as Thurman Arnold... testified.... [Truman] was particularly indignant about a memorandum by Frank Howard... made at The Hague, Netherlands, October 12, 1939, after the outbreak of war, in which Mr. Howard said, “representatives of I.G. Farbenindustrie delivered to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents and we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which would operate through the term of the war whether or not the U.S. came in.”... That last phrase sent a shudder through the committee room.
Stokes went on to discuss the evidence on which Arnold’s testimony was based: 40,000 documents reviewed by the Department of Justice investigators. Thurman Arnold dumped exhibit after exhibit on the committee table as he went through his prepared statement of twenty-seven pages to prove his underlying contention that the use of buna rubber was delayed in this country “because the Hitler government did not wish to have this rubber exploited here for military reasons.” 43 Farish and Howard testified before the committee a few days later. Farish told the committee, I wish to assert with conviction that whether the several contracts made with I.G. did or did not fall within the borders set by the Sherman Act, they did inure greatly to the advance of American industry and more than any other thing they have made possible our present war activities in aviation gasoline, toluol and explosives and in synthetic rubber itself. 44 He then presented letters from the War and Navy departments confirming Standard’s contribution to the war effort.
Standard’s ordeal in Congress did not end with the Truman committee hearings on the rubber crisis. On April 13, the Senate Committee on Patents, under the chairmanship of Senator Homer T. Bone, began hearings on the role of patents in the national defense program. Hardly had the committee convened when Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin embarked on an attack on international cartels generally and the I.G.-Standard arrangement specifically.
Recently, Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G. Farben... of Germany. I.G. Farben, through its maze of international patent agreements, is the spear-head of Nazi economic warfare. By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil of New Jersey, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing any substantial amount of synthetic rubber. The penalty administered on Standard Oil for its part in this obstructionist arrangement was a court “consent decree” which provided a $50,000 fine and a temporary—strictly temporary—and only partial suspension of the monopoly patent privileges which stopped full United States use of granted patents....
It seems to me that the Standard Oil of New Jersey consent decree is a real victory for Standard Oil Co.... All the consent decree does... is to guarantee that Standard Oil will hold those patents for I.G. Farben... until the day when Standard Oil can render an accounting to I.G. Farben, and return the patents. 45
The adverse effect of congressional inquiries and the escalation of bad publicity convinced the Standard board that the situation was critical. The matter soon reached such serious proportions that it engaged the attention of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the largest stockholder in Standard. Rockefeller was particularly disturbed by a series of open letters addressed to him by I. F. Stone in the newspaper PM. The letters called for Rockefeller to use his influence in forcing the dismissal of Teagle, Farish, and Howard. After the teapot dome scandal, you stepped in and forced the resignation of Col. Robert Stewart as Chairman of the Board of Standard Oil Company of Indiana.... We think you owe it to your good name and your company and your country to take similar action at the scandal which has broken around the parent Standard Oil Company itself. You bear an inescapable personal responsibility for Standard Oil policies.... Whatever the intentions which lay behind these policies, the effect was to make Standard Oil an ally of Hitler, an economic enemy agent within the U.S.A.... We think it your duty to remove Walter C. Teagle as Chairman of the Board and William S. Farish as President and Frank A. Howard as Vice President of the Standard Oil Company and radically to change the policies which put them in the position of acting as international economic collaborators of the Third Reich. 46 After the appearance of these letters, Rockefeller emphatically challenged the board of directors to improve Standard’s image with the public. 47 Robert T. Haslam was chosen by the board to seek a solution to the problem. He had been serving as general manager of the ESSO Marketeers and had recently warned the board that his organization could not deliver a satisfactory sales performance unless something were done to improve Standard’s public image. Standard hired Elmo Roper’s organization to survey public opinion. Roper’s conclusion was that the company was currently suffering from the effects of an acute attack of Arnolditis and that the public believed that Standard had let Germany best it in business. 48 The board of directors decided to assert tighter control over Standard’s affairs. They declared that too often in the past critical decisions had been made and acted upon without the board’s being informed. For example, in the many years during which Frank Howard had conducted negotiations with I.G. Farben, he had frequently informed the Standard board only after action had been taken. In the future the board was determined to take charge itself.
Howard remained with the Standard Oil Development Company for two more years, but the board’s action left him with only a shadow of his former influence and authority. In November 1942, the two other Standard officials named as defendants in the antitrust case, Teagle and Farish, disappeared from the Standard picture. Teagle resigned from the board, and less than a week later Farish died of a heart attack. Back to ContentsBLADE RUNNER Screenplay by HAMPTON FANCHER July 24, 1980 Brighton Productions Inc. 1420 No. Beachwood Drive Hollywood, Calif. 90028 **************** INT. TYRELL CORPORATION LOCKER ROOM - DAY 1 THE EYE 2 It's magnified and deeply revealed. Flecks of green and yellow in a field of milky blue. Icy filaments surround the undulating center. The eye is brown in a tiny screen. On the metallic surface below, the words VOIGHT-KAMPFF are finely etched. There's a touch-light panel across the top and on the side of the screen, a dial that registers fluctuations of the iris. The instrument is no bigger than a music box and sits on a table between two men. The man talking is big, looks like an over-stuffed kid. "LEON" it says on his breast pocket. He's dressed in a warehouseman's uniform and his pudgy hands are folded expectantly in his lap. Despite the obvious heat, he looks very cool. The man facing him is lean, hollow cheeked and dressed in gray. Detached and efficient, he looks like a cop or an accountant. His name is HOLDEN and he's all business, except for the sweat on his face. The room is large and humid. Rows of salvaged junk are stacked neatly against the walls. Two large fans whir above their heads. LEON Okay if I talk? Holden doesn't answer. He's centering Leon's eye on the machine. LEON I kinda get nervous when I take tests. HOLDEN Don't move. LEON Sorry. He tries not to move but finally his lips can't help a sheepish smile. LEON Already had I.Q. test this year -- but I don't think I never had a... HOLDEN (cutting in) Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Answer quickly as you can. Leon compresses his lips and nods his big head eagerly. Holden's voice is cold, geared to intimidate and evoke response. HOLDEN You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a... LEON What one? It was a timid interruption, hardly audible. HOLDEN What? LEON What desert? HOLDEN Doesn't make any difference what desert -- it's completely hypothetical. LEON But how come I'd be there? HOLDEN Maybe you're fed up, maybe you want to be by yourself -- who knows. So you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling towards you... LEON A tortoise. What's that? HOLDEN Know what a turtle is? LEON Of course. HOLDEN Same thing. LEON I never seen a turtle. He sees Holden's patience is wearing thin. LEON But I understand what you mean. HOLDEN You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back, Leon. Keeping an eye on his subject, Holden notes the dials in the Voight-Kampff. One of the needles quivers slightly. LEON You make these questions, Mr. Holden, or they write 'em down for you? Disregarding the question, Holden continues, picking up the pace. HOLDEN The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Leon's upper lip is quivering. LEON Whatcha mean, I'm not helping? HOLDEN I mean you're not helping! Why is that, Leon? Leon looks shocked, surprised. But the needles in the computer barely move. Holden goes for the inside of his coat. But big Leon is faster. His LASER BURNS a hole the size of a nickel through Holden's stomach. Unlike a bullet, a laser causes no impact. It goes through Holden's spine and comes out his back, clean as a whistle. Like a rag doll he falls back off the bench from the waist up. By the time he hits the floor, big slow Leon is already walking away. But he stops, turns and with a little smile of satisfaction, FIRES at the machine on the table. There's a flash and a puff of smoke. The Voight-Kampff is hit dead center, crippled but not destroyed; as Leon walks out of the room, one of its lights begins to blink, faint but steady. EXT. DESERT - NIGHT 3 The horizon marked by a thin copper line that maybe the end, of the beginning of a day. The train that follows, cuts through the night at 400 miles an hour. INT. TRAIN - NIGHT 4 No clickitty-clack of track-bound noise, it's a long, insulated Pullman of contoured seats and low-keyed lighting, coloured to soothe,and empty, except for the passenger half way down. His eyes closed, head rested against the glass. Ten years ago, DECKARD might have been an athlete, a track man or a welter-weight. The body looks it, but the face has seen some time -- not all of it good. INT. TRAIN - REFRESHMENT DISPENSER - NIGHT 5 Deckard comes down the aisle, slips a coin into the mechanism, receives a beer and returns to his seat. INT. TRAIN - NIGHT 6 Tired of the program, he takes off the headset and drops it next to three empty beer bottles and a sandwich wrapper, adjusts his position and winds up staring at his reflection in the window. Runs a hand over his face, it could use a shave. He leans closer and peers through the glass. Out there in the black a sign flashes past: SAN ANGELES, |
Bourne Ultimatum.”
But sources now say both Greengrass and Damon are changing their tune and are in early talks to return to the franchise.
Universal is already developing an untitled film set in the Bourne world with Justin Lin directing and Jeremy Renner returning to play Aaron Cross. That film was slotted to bow on July 16, 2016 and its unknown if that film will stay there or if the new “Bourne” film will take it place.
Damon’s three Bourne movies, which began in 2002 and ended in 2007, grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide at the box office.
The WME-repped Damon is about to start filming “The Martian” for Fox and Greengrass last directed “Captain Phillips.” He is repped by CAA.
Universal had no comment on this story.
Deadline Hollywood first reported the news.Frontier Secure to bring 500 jobs to Wise
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Frontier Secure is planning to open a customer care center in Wise County, creating up to 500 new jobs.
Frontier Secure is a division of Stamford, Conn.-based Frontier Communications Corp., which provides communications services to customers in 29 states. Frontier Secure helps home and small business customers with a variety of digital communications services, including high-tech products, identity protection, computer security and new applications for the “Internet of Things.”
The customer care center will provide customer and technical support for its clients.
Virginia competed against Connecticut, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia for the project.
The Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority approved a $5.6 million loan to the Wise County Industrial Development Authority to secure the deal. The Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission approved $2 million for the deal.
The center will be located at 10431 Pinnacle Drive, and the company's first training class will begin August 14 with 50 employees.Bengaluru: Thirteen years after the winds of liberalization first swept across the Indian economy, Thomas Friedman took a Lufthansa flight to Bengaluru where he visited the offices of Infosys Ltd to discover that the world is flat.
Beside a giant flat screen at the headquarters of what was then India’s technology bellwether, Nandan Nilekani, then chief executive officer (CEO) of Infosys Ltd, told the American author: “Tom, the playing field is being levelled."
In his best-selling The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century published the next year, Friedman marvelled at the many quiet revolutions beneath this tectonic shift. Among them: Outsourcing, in-sourcing and offshoring.
Thirteen more years later, in May 2017, another CEO of Infosys addressed the company’s annual sales conference in San Francisco. The tone was sombre: “If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk, then crawl; but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward," Vishal Sikka quoted US civil rights activist Martin Luther King in his speech. Most Infosys engineers were merely crawling, the company’s first non-founder CEO did not fail to mention.
When it comes to delivering high-value services to clients, Infosys has lagged. It’s not alone. With anaemic growth and declining profitability (see table 1), India’s information technology (IT) industry is in the doldrums. Flat now recalls the growth of India’s $150-billion IT industry, rather than a new-world topography.
Crunch
For the first time since 2009-10, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), Infosys and Wipro Ltd, which make up a quarter of the IT industry’s total business, grew slower than the industry’s 8.6% growth in constant currency terms in 2016-17. Constant currency eliminates the effect of currency movements.
Profitability, too, took a hit at the largest IT companies, which employed 3.9 million people as at the end of March 2017, lobby group National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) said in May.
ALSO READ: Indian IT industry’s growth to remain flat in 2017-18: Nasscom forecast
Consequently, the technology sector is in the midst of its biggest retrenchment season. Seven of India’s biggest software services firms are planning to ask at least 56,000 engineers to go this year—a number that could grow if more bad news comes in.
The expansion of the Internet in the past decade has led to wider adoption of artificial intelligence, allowing companies to lease computing power by the hour. This has upended Indian IT’s model of deploying armies of engineers in low-wage countries to write software codes and manage technology infrastructure for their clients in the US and Europe. The latest challenge is protectionism in the US, which has squeezed work visas for low-wage Indian IT engineers working with clients in that country.
As uncertainties rose, investors shunned IT: In 2016, shares of TCS fell 3.2%, Infosys by 8.5% and Wipro by 15.33% even as the BSE Sensex rose 2%.
“Indian IT firms started out as custom software houses. They created a unique delivery model where 75% of the work could be done in India using low-cost but highly skilled computer scientists. This task is increasingly done by machines using artificial intelligence (AI), thereby not requiring the high volume of engineers," said Vijay Govindarajan, Coxe distinguished professor at Tuck Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.
“Big is no longer beautiful," added Phil Fersht, CEO of US-based HfS Research, an outsourcing research firm. “What required 50 programmers, analysts or accountants five years ago can be done by a handful of smart thinkers and much smarter systems. If I were Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, I would be very concerned that a whole workforce generation needs reorienting to address work activities that are growing in demand."
New brooms
As Indian IT goes through one of its most challenging times, almost all the largest companies have seen new managements at the top.
Save for Tech Mahindra Ltd and Nasdaq-listed Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., almost all IT companies are now led by recently-appointed CEOs. Five companies—TCS, Wipro, HCL Technologies Ltd, Mindtree Ltd and Zensar Technologies Ltd—appointed a new CEO only in the past 15 months, while Infosys and L&T Infotech Ltd appointed a new boss in August 2014 and August 2015, respectively. At Cognizant, 11 of the 18 senior-most executives took charge only in the past 15 months.
“A new management at the top means each of these companies can approach this change sweeping the industry with a new mindset, new ideas," said a senior TCS executive on condition on anonymity. “We have to give time to each of these leaders to see how they steer their respective companies."
To be sure, the change of guard has provided some early glimpses of possible changes from the way these firms have traditionally worked.
At Wipro, Rishad Premji, chief strategy officer and director, oversees the $100-million Wipro Ventures with the mandate to pick stakes in start-ups focused on disruptive technologies. Since setting up the corporate venture fund, Wipro Ventures has spent $25 million to pick minority stakes in nine start-ups, helping parent Wipro offer new-age technology solutions in areas of data analytics and artificial intelligence technology work in more than 60 engagements to some of its 1,300 customers.
In the past two years, most Indian IT firms have been building a platform-led approach, while avoiding the people-led model. Some are retraining existing workforce using innovative methods like the user-centric approach of design thinking and have been investing in digital technologies, partnering with cloud computing firms and building automation platforms.
Everyone swears by digital, a word which means different things to different people. All firms are building solutions in areas such as data analytics, thereby seeing a scorching growth in “digital". The true value of digital is still in question as many analysts believe home-grown IT firms earn little from offering next-generation solutions, while the bulk of the digital revenues are simply re-badged traditional work.
“Take for example a classic work like ERP (enterprise resource planning) upgrade to support a subscription billing model. Now that project to any IT services vendor worth their salt is being classified as digital revenue. Is this really digital?" asked Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research, a technology research and advisory firm.
At the heart of the problem is a fundamental change in the business model that Indian IT companies are wrestling with in the digital area. The traditional business of writing software codes and managing the IT infrastructure of clients based in the US and UK still makes up the bulk of sales for these companies.
Indian IT owes its success to the largest Fortune 1000 clients, as they are the biggest spends on technology. However, newer firms such as Facebook, Uber, Airbnb are fast disrupting the business of incumbents. Photo: Hindustan Times
“Digital revenue is still less than one-fourth of traditional business. Meanwhile, traditional business is slowing. All of us have to re-look at the existing talent pool to make sure it is aligned to future needs," said one of the human resource (HR) heads at a large Bengaluru-based IT company.
Winds of change
And herein lies the most daunting challenge for Indian IT firms: embracing the change brought in by newer technologies, while maintaining growth and profitability. Take cloud computing. Hosted servers offered by Amazon Web Services means Fortune 1000 clients no longer need armies of engineers from Indian IT firms to manage their core applications at in-house data centres. This torpedoes Indian IT’s model of generating more revenue from more people. At the same time, companies are increasingly embracing automation-led platforms, which is further squeezing revenue, as most savings go to the clients.
“In some projects, introduction of cloud computing means we are seeing at least 50% reduction in FTE (full-time equivalent or the hours worked by one employee on a full-time basis)," said a senior executive at Infosys.
“The second big source of revenue for Indian IT firms is in managing the data servers of global clients like GE. This business is fast eroding as well since companies use their own servers less and less and store data in the Cloud," said professor Govindarajan.
Understandably, most IT companies are seeing a decline in their revenue per employee, an important metric of gauging if the firm is able to deliver more value-added work to clients (see table 2).
The only solution before these large companies to tide over the challenges is to make themselves future-ready faster. Homegrown IT firms, especially TCS, need to step up investments in new technologies, and the managements need to shed their “invented here" approach.
TCS has stubbornly avoided acquisitions; the management says it can build new technologies in-house. When companies across the globe are struggling for growth, small acquisitions can not only help bring in technology and talent but also growth. Accenture Plc, a company twice the size of TCS, has made acquisitions in slow-growth years. The company saw its 15 acquisitions account for 2 percentage points of its overall 10.5% constant currency growth in its September-August fiscal year.
Partners for progress
Still, Indian IT firms’ ability to survive and thrive will eventually be judged on how quickly they can shed their image of back-office IT vendors and become strategic partners to their customers.
Indian IT owes its success to the largest Fortune 1000 clients, as they are the biggest spends on technology. However, newer companies such as Facebook, Uber, Airbnb are fast disrupting the business of incumbents.
Eighty-nine per cent of companies from the Fortune 500 list of 2014 did not even exist in 1955.
The inability of most Indian IT companies to work with these disruptive companies even as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb account for at least $1 billion of Accenture’s $32.9 billion in revenue for the year ended August 2016 shows how homegrown IT companies have not been able to step up to the new challenges.
“The biggest opportunity for IT firms is to help global companies re-imagine their industry using digital technologies. The problem for Marriott, for instance, is less about digitizing manual processes, the core of the business for Indian IT firms in the past. Instead, Marriott has to create Airbnb. Note that Airbnb is not a hotel using technologies but it is technology business that redefines hospitality. If Indian IT firms have to help Marriott, they must become strategy consultants first and IT consultants next," said Professor Govindarajan.
Bringing about change in a large organization isn’t easy, either. Until now, Sikka’s 33-months record at Infosys and Abidali Neemuchwala’s one year at Wipro have been patchy at best. TCS has a new boss in Rajesh Gopinathan, who took over as CEO and managing director after N. Chandrasekaran became chairman of Tata Sons Ltd in February. The rest of this year will test the mettle of the three leaders in an IT era when change promises to be the only constant.
Homegrown technology companies need to accelerate change and address internal structural issues if they want this industry, which at the turn of the century put India on the global software services map to emerge as the largest job creator in the organized sector, remain future-proof.
Or as Professor Govindarajan said, only time will tell which companies emerge as winnersContents:
Introduction
What is vitamin D and how does it affect the body?
What do the studies show about vitamin D deficiency and lupus show?
What are the symptoms for vitamin D deficiency?
How is a vitamin D deficiency diagnosed?
What is considered a good level for vitamin D?
Are certain people more likely to develop a vitamin D deficiency?
Where can you get more vitamin D?
In Conclusion
Introduction
Over the past several years, the scientific and medical communities have begun to make a connection between Vitamin D (25-hydroxyvitamin D or [25(OH)D]) levels and the body’s immune response. We are writing this blog not to promote the use of vitamin D as a lupus treatment, but rather to help inform you as to some of the important research and information that is currently available on vitamin d deficiency and its role in lupus. Some studies have shown that as many as 67% (and even a higher percentage in other studies) of patients with SLE (see below for definition) are vitamin D deficient which makes this research all the more relevant to gaining more understanding about the connection between vitamin D levels and lupus disease activity. Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a very long name for a very complicated disease that is more commonly known as lupus. Lupus is a widespread and chronic (lifelong) autoimmune disease that, for unknown reasons, causes the immune system to attack the body’s own tissue and organs, including the joints, kidneys, heart, lungs, brain, blood, or skin. SLE can affect nearly every organ system in the body. At times lupus patients may have periods with few to no symptoms, and at other times the patient may have high disease activity which often includes unpredictable and debilitating bouts with symptoms of the disease. These periods of increased disease activity are called flares. Back to top
What is vitamin D and how does it affect the body?
What is vitamin D?
It is the only vitamin that the body can produce on its own. Your body needs to get all other vitamins from the foods you eat or by taking supplements. Once your body gets vitamin D, it turns it into a hormone (called either activated vitamin D or calcitriol). It is the ONLY vitamin that does this.
Here are some of the systems and processes that vitamin D effects:
It is essential for strong bones because it helps the body use calcium from dietary intake
It is essential for strong bones because it helps the body use calcium from dietary intake Muscle function
Cellular growth and changes
Circulatory/Cardiovascular system
Respiratory system
Brain development
Anti-cancer effects
The immune system’s T-cells and dendritic cells. Dendritic cells play an important role in protective immunity.
Vitamin D is also thought to have antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties
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What do the studies about vitamin D deficiency and lupus show?
Many studies have now shown that there is a link between vitamin D and lupus. Here are some fast facts based on studies of vitamin D and lupus:
People with lupus are more likely to have low levels of vitamin D.
Lupus patients with higher levels of vitamin D tend to have fewer lupus symptoms.
The risk factors for heart disease in lupus patients increases if D levels are low. A higher body mass index (BMI) may also increase a risk for heart disease.
The risk for high blood pressure and elevated lipids is higher in SLE patients with a vitamin D deficiency.
Some studies have shown that giving vitamin D supplements to lupus patients can reduce the chances and occurrences of flares.
Adding vitamin D in vitro (test tube experiments performed with cells or biological molecules) has been shown to reverse abnormalities in the immune system characteristic of SLE.
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What are the symptoms for vitamin D deficiency?
The symptoms for vitamin D deficiency can be very subtle but can include fatigue, general aches and pains or frequent infections. Some people may have no noticeable symptoms at all. If you have pain in your bones or weakness that causes mobility issues (this can be a symptom of severe vitamin D deficiency), please seek medical attention immediately. Back to top
How is a vitamin D deficiency diagnosed?
According to the Vitamin D council, a blood test is the only accurate way to test for a vitamin D deficiency. There are three ways that you can have your vitamin D tested:
Asking for the test at a doctor’s office: Ask your doctor to specifically give you the 25(OH)D blood test. There is another test called the 1,25(OH) 2 D test but the 25(OH)D is the only way to test whether or not you are getting enough vitamin D. You may want to check with your insurance to see if you are covered for this test prior to going in.
Ordering an at-home blood test: The Vitamin D council has very good information, as well as an at home test that you can purchase and take in the privacy and comfort of your home. In-home tests are easy to use and involve you pricking your finger to get a small blood sample. You then send your test to a laboratory for results. One kit costs $50 USD and a test kit with 4 tests costs $180 USD. There are several other sources for order-at-home tests as well. ZRT labs, New Century Diagnostics (sells through a website called Home Health Testing), and City Assays (based in the UK but tests are only around $48USD or £25 and take approximately 10 days to ship to the US).
Ordering a test from a website and have your bloodwork done at a lab: There are a few websites recommended by the Vitamin D council where you can bypass your physician and go straight to a testing lab: mymedlab.com, healthcheckusa.com, and privatemedlabs.com. All of these companies sell the 25(OH)D test. The price of these is a bit higher than the order-at-home blood test.
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What is considered a good level for vitamin D?
According to Dr. Thomas, author of The Lupus Encyclopedia, a good level for vitamin D is 30ng/ml if on steroids, although he states that a Johns Hopkins study suggests around 40ng/ml. Here is a chart with information taken from The Vitamin D Council showing the recommended levels of vitamin D from other various organizations: *To reach and maintain the Vitamin D Council’s recommended levels of 50 ng/ml, a daily dosage of 5,000 IU/day of vitamin D supplement would be needed. To reach and stay above the 30ng/ml level recommended by the Endocrine Society, a supplement of around 2,000 IU/day would be advised. To read more on this and other guidelines for reaching certain levels of vitamin D, please visit this link. IMPORTANT NOTE: Nobody with lupus should attempt to take high doses of vitamin D to control their disease activity, and as always, please speak with your treating physician before starting or stopping any medication or supplement. There is no study as to the long term effects of high dosages of vitamin D. Currently the recommended daily allowance is 600IU a day until age 70, please consult with your physician before taking more than the recommended daily allowance.
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Are certain people more likely to develop a vitamin D deficiency?
The answer is yes. Here are a several groups of people who are more likely to develop this deficiency:
People with darker skin tones: Melanin protects the skin from UV rays. People with darker skin have more melanin and therefore absorb fewer UV rays. This means that people with more melanin make vitamin D much more slowly than those with lighter skin after sun exposure.
Melanin protects the skin from UV rays. People with darker skin have more melanin and therefore absorb fewer UV rays. This means that people with more melanin make vitamin D much more slowly than those with lighter skin after sun exposure. People who spend a lot of time indoors during the day: Naturally, these people will have the least amount of UV exposure.
Naturally, these people will have the least amount of UV exposure. The elderly: With thinner skin, the ability to produce vitamin D is reduced.
With thinner skin, the ability to produce vitamin D is reduced. Infants who are breastfed and not given a vitamin D supplement: If the mother takes a supplement, this can help.
If the mother takes a supplement, this can help. People who cover their skin all of the time or wear sunscreen to block out UV rays: This often includes many lupus patients who suffer from photosensitivity and need to avoid UV rays. Wearing sunscreen is still recommended but can limit your body’s ability to produce vitamin D.
This often includes many lupus patients who suffer from photosensitivity and need to avoid UV rays. Wearing sunscreen is still recommended but can limit your body’s ability to produce vitamin D. People who live in the Northern US, Canada or other locations in the upper Northern hemisphere: This has to do with the reduced number of hours of sunlight as you get further from the equator.
This has to do with the reduced number of hours of sunlight as you get further from the equator. During times of year where there is less sunlight (winter, for example): Interestingly, lupus patients often suffer higher incidence of flares during these months as well.
Interestingly, lupus patients often suffer higher incidence of flares during these months as well. Women who are pregnant
People who are very overweight or obese
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Where can you get more vitamin D?
There are only three ways to get vitamin D:
By exposing the bare skin to the sun By taking supplements Dietary intake
Vitamin D has long been known as the “sunshine vitamin” because it is produced by the body in response to ultraviolet light exposure from the sun. Therefore, exposure to sunlight is one way to get more vitamin D, with 20-25 minutes per day being a helpful amount to affect your vitamin D levels positively. If you have photosensitivity or live in a climate with less available sunshine, this may not be an option for you. Ultraviolet lamps and bulbs are also available for indoor use. Vitamin D supplements are commonly prescribed to raise vitamin D levels. With supplements dosage can be controlled to meet the individual’s needs. Please speak with your doctor about finding the right dosage of vitamin D supplements for you. And do not begin taking any supplements without first speaking to your physician. If you are taking too much vitamin D you may get hypercalcemia and begin experience feeling sick, loss of appetite, being thirsty, frequent urination, pain in the abdomen, muscle pain or weakness, fatigue and/or confusion. Special care should be taken when taking vitamin D supplements for those who have the following conditions:
Kidney disease
Kidney stones
Liver disease
High blood calcium levels
Hyperparathyroidism
Hodgkin’s or non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma
Granulomatous disease
Hormonal disease
If you are taking certain medications: This can include high blood pressure medications, medications for irregular heartbeat, and other drugs that may interfere with vitamin D and may require more than the usual dosage of vitamin D.
Let your doctor know all medications and supplements that you are currently taking.
Vitamin D can also be found in certain foods as well. Some foods that contain high amounts of vitamin D are fatty fish (such as mackerel, trout, salmon, tuna and eel) and fish oils, egg yolks, cheese, fortified– meaning vitamin D has been added- cow’s milk (contains 100 IU’s in one 8 ounce glass), fortified cereals, fortified orange juice, and beef liver. Back to top
In Conclusion
While the research is certainly interesting and even promising, there is no conclusive research that shows that low vitamin D levels cause lupus nor can the physiological and clinical significance be confirmed. It is also difficult for researchers to determine whether low levels of vitamin D cause lupus or whether the lupus causes the low levels of vitamin D. Overall, more research and experimentation is needed to determine a more clear answer about the helpfulness of vitamin D to help manage and treat lupus. What we do know is that, given its relative safety in combination with the beneficial effects on the immune system, there is optimism that correcting a vitamin D deficiency in patients with SLE may lead to better outcomes for those patients. We will keep reading and watching for any developing studies and information on this topic and, as always, keep you informed. Back to top
*All images unless otherwise noted are property of and were created by Kaleidoscope Fighting Lupus. To use one of these images, please contact us at [email protected] for written permission; image credit and link-back must be given to Kaleidoscope Fighting Lupus. **All resources provided by us are for informational purposes only and should be used as a guide or for supplemental information, not to replace the advice of a medical professional. The personal views do not necessarily encompass the views of the organization, but the information has been vetted as a relevant resource. We encourage you to be your strongest advocate and always contact your medical provider with any specific questions or concerns.By Madina Toure
Traditions Pub, a Jamaica Hills bar that elected officials and community leaders contend has frequently violated liquor laws and been the site of underage drinking, has been shut down by the state Liquor Authority.
The SLA held a special full board meeting June 9 where it ordered an emergency suspension of the license of the bar, at 84-28 164th St., which is a popular watering spot for St. John’s University students.
New Traditions Inc. has an alcoholic beverage license originally issued May 3, 2012 that is scheduled to expire April 30, 2018, according to an SLA document. There are also pending charges against New Traditions.
An SLA spokesman said the bar is entitled to an expedited hearing before an administrative law judge. In March, the NYPD closed the bar three times due to window obstructions, fire exit issues and overcrowding, and in the past year, the Health Department has shut it down twice, according to Councilman Rory Lancman (D-Hillcrest).
Lancman also cited incidents such as an 18-year-old found unconscious in the bar, an individual treated at Queens Hospital Center for intoxication, people visiting family at the Margaret Tietz Nursing & Rehabilitation Center across the street being harassed by bar patrons and one being robbed by people hanging out in front of the bar.
The councilman said he does not expect the bar to reopen, given that there are 24 allegations against the owners.
“It seems very unlikely that they would win an appeal,” Lancman said. “Their conduct was quite egregious.”
Lancman and state Assemblyman David Weprin (D-Fresh Meadows) each wrote separate letters to SLA Chairman Vincent Bradley and SLA Commissioner Kevin Kim in mid-April, asking them to revoke the bar’s license.
Weprin said the bar had a “tradition of problems” and that the SLA finally realized it.
“I think (the letters) led to the suspension eventually, but at that particular time, they did not take our advice of not renewing their license,” he said.
At a Community Board 8 liquor license committee meeting April 12 where members voted 13-0 against renewing the bar’s license along with one abstention, Michael Hannibal said the bar owner was supposed to work with the 107th Precinct and St. John’s University to ensure the safety of the students and customers and cited incidents such as public urination, choking, criminal mischief, marijuana smoking and sex abuse.
At the meeting, New Traditions’ Kirk Johnston, the bar’s co-owner and operator, said he thought too many issues were thrown at him at once and that he tried to work with St. John’s but that the school was not responsive, the meeting minutes said.
Johnston also said several NYPD undercover operations have come into the bar and tried to buy liquor, but all came back saying the bar did not sell to underage patrons.
But at the meeting, Carolann Foley, president of the precinct’s community council, said the bar had been caught selling to underage clients.
New Traditions’ attorney, Argilio Rodriguez, referred to the incidents as allegations.
Paul Lazauskas, St. Johns’ associate director for community relations, said the school met with Johnston and 107th Precinct’s Community Affairs around April 2014 and discussed building code violations, increasing lighting, having additional bouncers at the bar’s entrance and having ID scanners.
Lazauskas said there were promotional fliers for the bar going up on campus, which is prohibited, and that Johnston said he was not aware they were being posted.
The university sent out an email to students about an incident that took place in the vicinity of the school, which he said Johnston erroneously interpreted as saying that it occurred at his bar.
“He took offense to that and from that point forward that’s when the communication really just broke down,” Lazauskas said.Shareholder proposals companies don't want you to see
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Once a year, public companies have to throw open their boardroom doors and meet with their investors. Those annual meetings give small stockholders a chance to bend the ear of corporate bigwigs, and put their own proposals up for a shareholder vote.
But this year, investors in dozens of major companies won't be voting on more than 150 proposals that shareholders tried to put on their ballots. For the past few months, companies have been flooding the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with petitions to kill off hundreds of proposals.
"Some of the proposals are pretty off-the-wall," says Ted Allen, governance counsel for shareholder advisory firm ISS Governance. "Others are legitimate. But companies don't want 20 shareholder requests cluttering up their proxies."
It's an annual rite of spring for companies with activist shareholders. Confronted with proposals they don't want on their ballots, they petition the SEC for what's called a "no action" letter -- a written affirmation that the regulatory agency won't take enforcement action if the proposal never sees the light of day.
The SEC employs about 20 staffers who wade through hundreds of these no-action requests per year. The agency grants companies many of their requests, Allen says, because the shareholder proposals "relate to a company's ordinary business." That is, companies don't have to put up for a vote shareholders' suggestions about their day-to-day workings.
"GE used to get proposals about canceling 'The Rachel Maddow Show,'" Allen says. "That's a clear-cut example of the type of thing the SEC doesn't let shareholders get their hands in."
Only a few major companies receive double-digit shareholder proposals annually: Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Exxon-Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500) and Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500), to name a few.
But tech companies are consistently targets.
"Telecoms get a lot of proposals because of their history of unionized employees," Allen says. "And Net neutrality proposals have been big recently, though companies have usually been able to classify that as 'day-to-day business' or 'not a top policy priority.'"
Most companies end up letting their shareholders vote on just two or three issues. A few topics frequently make it through the gauntlet to land on ballots. One of the most common proposals suggests giving shareholders the power to call special meetings. Other frequent propositions call for giving shareholders the ability to remove directors, or elect new ones, without waiting for a special meeting.
But most petitions die quietly, before shareholders ever get a peek at them. Here's a look at some of the more noteworthy proposals tech companies have tried to quash this year.
Nuns, the Beastie Boys and AT&T: The Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica filed a shareholder proposal in November asking AT&T (T, Fortune 500) to "publicly commit to operate its wireless broadband network consistent with Internet network neutrality principles."
It turns out that the St. Scholastica Monastery in Kansas owns more than $7,400 worth of AT&T stock. Other Catholic monasteries around the country joined the cause, filing their own requests.
A few individuals also petitioned AT&T, including "Mike D" of Beastie Boys fame. AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.
Jonas Kron, a vice president at Trillium Asset Management, served as the contact person for the proposal.
So why do nuns care about such a geeky issue?
"Net neutrality can greatly affect underserved communities that have limited access to the Internet. We need to alleviate those social inequalities," Kron said, noting that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has published an open letter supporting Net neutrality.
Unfortunately for the nuns and Mike D, the SEC granted a no-action letter on the basis that net neutrality is not "a significant policy issue." Kron called the decision "shocking" and said the group "vigorously disagrees."
Down with Yahoo China: In January, a Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) investor named Jing Zhao proposed that the company adopt a code of human rights principles.
His "Human Rights Impacts of Yahoo Business" would mandate that "no information technology products or technologies will be sold, and no assistance will be provided to authorities in China and other repressive countries."
Zhao, who was born in China, told CNNMoney that he has had "major concerns about U.S. business' dealings" with the nation for years. He has attended the annual Yahoo shareholder meeting annually since 2005, and he's made similar human rights proposals to Yahoo every year.
In response, Yahoo requested to block the proposal from its proxy based on several exceptions. But this time, the SEC replied that it was "unable to concur" -- which means the proposal should appear in the proxy statement Yahoo will send to shareholders in advance of its annual meeting.
"I was really shocked," Zhao said. "It's a wonderful year for me."
He also said that a Yahoo rep contacted him recently to apologize for trying to fight the proposal. Yahoo declined to comment.
Church against gender identity discrimination: The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations asked Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) in November to "amend its written equal employment opportunity policy to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or expression."
The UUA, which calls itself "a faith community of more than 1,000 self-governing congregations," noted in its proposal that nearly 70% of Fortune 100 companies have policies prohibiting gender identity discrimination. It also pointed out that a similar policy suggestion filed at last year's annual meeting drew support from those casting the votes for 34% of Verizon's outstanding shares.
Tim Brennan, the UUA's treasurer and chief financial officer, said that "affirming the value of all people" is a major part of the group's religious views. The UUA has successfully petitioned Home Depot, Dr. Pepper and Traveler's Insurance to change their human rights policies.
But the SEC nixed UUA's proposal on a technicality: The group failed to provide proof of its eligible shareholder status within a required 14-day window. Verizon declined to comment.
Brennan is undeterred. "I'm planning to write to a bunch of their executives and ask if they'll talk to me about it," he said. "I'm open to any dialogue, and we're not giving up."Last year we announced that the team worked together with Microsoft on creating a Microsoft Store version of Kodi using their Desktop Bridge (Project Centennial) project. Taking this opportunity to reach millions of Windows 10 users has proven quite successful and since the official launch of Kodi v17 it has become one of the most popular apps in store. Due to this success and growing popularity of Kodi in Windows Store one of our two attending developers will be holding a presentation at the Build 2017 event in Seattle. During this he will highlight some of the steps it took us to enter the Store and further highlight some of the main features that makes Kodi a great project.
Presentation time
You will be able to watch the stream live at https://channel9.msdn.com/ or watch the recording afterwards:
If you are attending the event be sure to visit one of the talks if you can. During this three day event the two attending developers will probably wear their Kodi shirts so if you see them walking around be sure to say hi.
We certainly want to thank Microsoft for giving us this opportunity to do a presentation about our open source project on such a big event. Doing so might inspire some developers to join in improving our volunteer project which is enjoyed by millions.The former Ukip leader challenged the assertions of Prime Minister Theresa May and London Mayor Sadiq Khan that Britain stands united in the face of the London terror attack, insisting that the people in fact want "answers" about what they are going to do. Nigel Farage said that the attack bolstered President Donald Trump's case for tougher vetting of migrants from some Muslim nations, claiming that countries which open their door to immigration from the Middle East are "inviting in terrorism". Speaking on US TV network Fox News, the Ukip MEP said: "The idea that this whole country is united, which is what we are hearing from our leaders, I'm not sure is true.
GETTY/EPA Nigel Farage has said the London terror attack was because of 'failed multicuralism'
The problem with multiculturalism is that it leads to divided communities Nigel Farage
"I think the British people want some answers from our leaders as to what they are now going to do." And he added: "I do actually think that the moment has come for us to actually point the blame. What these politicians have done in the space of just 15 years may well affect the way we live in this country over the next 100 years." Discussing the causes of Wednesday's attack with presenter Sean Hannity, Mr Farage - himself a commentator on the channel |
why he's known as "Earth's Mightiest Mortal." Not only was Zonuz defeated, the villain is now forced to bestow his power to Billy as the sixth member of the new Team Shazam. We wonder how Darkseid would feel about his dad helping out the enemy.
Maybe we'll find out before The Darkseid War is over. Given that this huge storyline is named for the iconic DC villain, it seems hard to believe we've really seen the last of the Lord of Apokolips. If Darkseid does return, having Yuga Khan at his beck and call may just give Shazam the edge he needs in battle.
For the record, the final page of this issue spells out exactly which gods combine to form the power of the all-new Shazam. Our hero has lost his speed and flight, but he's gained some interesting new abilities in their place:
In case you missed it, this week's other Darkseid War tie-in chronicled a startling transformation for Green Lantern.
Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.What defines a professional software engineer?
There isn’t a simple answer to that question, but after reading several books on the subject I identified some tips that I have found useful.
Which ones do you like? Which ones don’t you like? What do you think is still missing in this list?
Planning/Deadlines
Before figuring out how to do something, ask why this needs to be done in first place. Challenge assumptions. Try to find an easier solution. Before committing to large projects, validate that they will work. Invested time in the validation will save wasted effort if the project is not realistic. Do not rewrite from scratch if a system can be improved incrementally. Define clear goals. It will show if you fall behind and you need to update your estimate. Incur technical debt when it’s necessary to meet a deadline. Then gradually pay it off. Stick to the proven tools that are right for the job. Trendy technologies might be fun to explore, but they lack support, and expertise, and often require reinventing a wheel. Say no to any unrealistic requests when the stakes are at their highest. Instead, suggest more feasible solutions, such as reducing scope. Regularly measure your progress against goals. Estimate using three fact-based dates: best case, normal case, and worst case. Ensure there is no ambiguity in requirements.
Productivity
Do not overwork. It is inefficient and decreases productivity. Overwork leads to mistakes that need to be corrected later. Focus on the 20 percent of tasks that deliver 80 percent of the value (80/20 principle). Question every activity to determine if it can be done faster, produce more value, or if there is another activity that delivers a higher impact. Measure effectiveness by the number of new subscriptions, new users, new features, sales, or improved core business metrics -- not by lines of code, long hours, meetings, reports, or completed tasks. Proactively schedule time to deal with distractions so that they won’t interrupt your get-stuff-done time. Do not try to eliminate all distractions as it won’t help build trust. When you are in a hole - stop digging. Have the courage to back out from a solution that isn’t working out, even though you’ve invested a lot of time into it. Do not agree to work overtime!
Professional development
Ship products that users love, launch features that customers pay for, build tools that boost productivity, deploy systems that help companies scale. Study existing code in your company, study all material available internally, master your programming languages, send your code review to the harshest critics, and jump fearlessly into code you don’t know. Define effective ways for others to deliver results. Make the organization’s goals your goals. Earn trust and respect through demonstration of ability. Improve your writing: use Twitter, add documentation, blog. Lead by demonstrating expertise and professionalism. Guide everyone to the common goal. Make everyone around you succeed. Do not succumb to the pressure of a deadline or an authority. You are paid for your expertise. Your company relies on you to act professionally. If you run a team, understand issues that the team exists to solve. Familiarize yourself with the following: Design patterns
Design principles - SOLID, Component
Methods - XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Waterfall, Structured Analysis, and Structured Design
Disciplines - TDD, OOP, Structured programming, CI, Pair programming
Artifacts - UML, DFD, Structure charts, Petri nets, State transition, flowcharts, decision tables
Quality/Tests/Troubleshooting
Balance your code reviews. Rigorous process impedes velocity. Lack of code reviews allows bugs to slip through. Abstract APIs in a way that makes them easy to learn, easy to use, hard to misuse, easy to extend, and appropriate to the audience. Automate unit tests to save time in the long run. Invest time to produce an elegant solution which will benefit the system in the long run. The initial solution is generally more complex, fragile, and hard to understand. Build systems that fail fast and visibly. It makes them robust, easier to fix, and less buggy. Automate mechanics (repetitive tasks) first. Then automate decision making. Approach coding problems as follows: Understand the problem.
Write a failing test.
Solve the problem as fast as you can.
Tidy up your code and make sure the test passes.
Commit changes. Do not over-engineer. Add flexibility, abstraction, and layers only when they are absolutely necessary, and not because they would be “cool” to have. Over-engineered code is hard to comprehend, test, change, and maintain. Establish coding guides and conventions but do not enforce them with rigor. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Build your application in a way that it can be monitored and supported. Do not refactor for potential future benefit - “You ain’t gonna need it.” Do not refactor just to “clean it up.” Refactor when you know that it will have an economical effect. Do not break discipline (even under pressure) as it will slow you down. The code must be clean and tested. Correct the design early-on when it is moving in an unmaintainable direction. Ignoring this can drive the system into a swamp from which it may never escape. Ask the 5 Whys. Monitor and instrument your systems.
The booksThe 2016 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Sports Awards were on Thursday night, and even though the show doesn’t air until Sunday, we’ve already seen lots of great highlights. Kobe Bryant was covered in gold slime, which made for amazing photos. Derrick Rose and his son wore matching shirts to the orange carpet. Now, there is also video of the show that surfaced on Twitter.
Ciara and Rob Gronkowski had a dance-off. It looks like Ciara predictably won, but both did a great job overall. This is so much fun.
Ciara and Gronk dance off pic.twitter.com/AlXTxQ5sM9 — Love is Love (@RussCi4Ever) July 15, 2016
It doesn’t end there. Ciara’s husband, Russell Wilson, joined them on stage … dressed like an old lady. And Wilson, who was the host, started dancing and talking in a high-pitched voice before revealing his true identity.
Russell dressed up as a old woman and twerking even has the voice to go with it 😂😂😂 #KidsChoiceSports pic.twitter.com/V4iKaRhkDF — Love is Love (@RussCi4Ever) July 15, 2016
Definitely did not see that coming. Here are the moments described and shown above in photos.
Cue Wilson’s entrance.
Ciara congratulated her husband for doing such a great job afterwards on Instagram: “Proud Of My Baby @DangeRussWilson. Hosted and Killt His Second Year Hosting The @kidschoicesports2016 Awards. Tune In Sunday #Cheeesssee ☺️ #KCA”Plans for a Chick-fil-A location at the Denver International Airport have been placed on hold after members of the city council last week objected to anti-gay views of the chain’s owner.
Robin Kniech, the first openly gay member on the Denver City Council, was the first to protest a Chick-fil-A location at the airport during the council’s Business Development Committee meeting on Tuesday, the Denver Post reported. She said she was concerned that the airport location would add to “corporate profits used to fund and fuel discrimination.”
Councilman Paul Lopez also opposed opening a franchise of the chain, calling it a “really, truly a moral issue on the city,” according to the Denver Post. Ten of the 13 committee members attended the meeting on Tuesday, and none of them spoke to defend Chick-fil-A, according to the Post.
The fried chicken chain previously occupied a concession in the Denver airport about 10 years ago. Mike De La Rosa, the president of Delarosa, one of the companies in charge of the concession location at the airport, said that Delarosa, along with another company, was in charge of hiring for the concession and that Chick-fil-A would get seven percent of royalties from the location.
“We have a long history of diversity, all those kind of things, between both companies. These would not be issues,” De La Rosa said, according to the Denver Post.
Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-A is known for his opposition to same-sex marriage. He published a tweet in 2013 scolding the Supreme Court for expanding federal recognition of gay marriage, calling it a “sad day for our nation.” Foundations associated with the company have also made donations to anti-gay groups.
Cathy in 2014 said that while he still opposes gay marriage, he planned to no longer discuss politics. The foundations linked to Chick-fil-A also reduced their donations to groups opposed to LGBT rights in 2012, according to a 2014 ThinkProgress report.
In a statement to The Denver Channel, Chick-fil-A said the company is “focused on serving great food and providing remarkable service to every single customer.”
The Denver City Council’s Business Development Committee will discuss the contract for the airport concession and Chick-fil-A again on Sept. 1, where the city’s attorneys may speak to the members about the legal issues surrounding the contract, according to The Denver Post.This isn't a new reaction from Hawk, but it's still fun. With a man on second and two outs in the ninth, the White Sox coughed up a one-run lead against the Mets Tuesday night, sending Hawk spiraling down to the bad place.
Daniel Murphy popped up the first pitch he saw for what looked like an easy third out. But for some reason, Gordon Beckham was hauling ass to the spot where Conor Gillaspie had already set up, tripped over Addison Reed and crashed into Gillaspie at roughly the same time the ball arrived. It fell softly to ground. David Wright, running on contact, scored easily.
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Tie game. Low, guttural noises from Hawk.* Silence. Nonsensical murmuring. A half-hearted update on the count and then "You have got to be KIDDING ME" into the break.
Hawk was all smiles in the home-half, however, when the Sox walked-off on Alexei Ramirez's single to left.
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<Boo-fucking-hoo
If you watched Vice News’ chilling, terrifying “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” episode, you’ll recognize Christopher Cantwell, lead Nazi and shit talker in the lead-up to the Charlottesville hate rally. If you haven’t seen the segment, watch it below. it is 1000 percent-required watching for all Americans, providing shocking insight into the minds of the white nationalists who marched in Virginia.
Much of the Vice episode focused on Cantwell, a white nationalist leader and one of the rally organizers. He can be seen in the video pouring milk over his face after he was maced and telling Elle Reeve of Vice News, “We’re not non-violent. We’ll fucking kill these people if we have to.”
Only a short time later, James Fields Jr. did kill one of those people when he plowed his car into counter-protesters, injuring nearly two dozen more.
Cantwell later told Reeves, “The fact that nobody on our side died, I’d call that points for us” and said he believed “a lot more people are going to die here.”
Fast forward to today, and what does tough guy and white nationalist Christopher Cantwell have to say now? Upon hearing the news that the police are looking for him, he released a tear-filled video, pleading for America to understand he was only talking shit before! He didn’t really mean it. Sure he was carrying a small arsenal of guns and told Vice he has been preparing and training for violence, but now? It was all locker room talk, right guys?
Watch it below.Immigrant displacement of American workers has reached an all-time high—right as Congress returns from its August recess and, incredibly, is looking at passing some version of the Eight Gangsters’ Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill.
Employers added 169,000 jobs in August, slightly below expectations. The unemployment rate fell to 7.3%, mainly because people dropped out of the labor force and were no longer counted as unemployed. Labor force participation—the share of the working-age population that is either working or looking for work—has been dropping since the economy collapsed in late 2008, but is now at its lowest level since 1978.
The MSM and the Wall Street crowd played this as another ho-hum report. The numbers were good enough to keep current GDP growth projections intact but disappointing enough to forestall serious monetary tightening in the near term—a relief to Wall Street, which likes low interest rates.
But none of the chattering class commentary focused on the “other” employment report—of households rather than businesses. Total employment fell by 115,000 according to the Household Survey. Our analysis of BLS data finds native-born workers suffered more than 100% of the loss, while foreign-born enjoyed a big job gain.
In August:
Total employment fell by 115,000, or by -0.08%
Native-born employment fell by 338,000, or by -0.28%
by 338,000, or by -0.28% Foreign-born employment rose by 223,000, or by +0.95%
August is a month when seasonal factors—the change in car model years, the start of school, summer job terminations—can swamp long term economic trends. Even so, this August seems to be one for the record books. The immigrant share of U.S. employment—16.49%—was a new high for any August during the Obama years:
Foreign-born Share of Total Employment (%) July August % chg. 2009 15.50% 15.49% -0.06% 2010 15.88% 16.02% 0.88% 2011 15.96% 15.89% -0.44% 2012 16.22% 16.19% -0.18% 2013 16.33% 16.49% 0.98% Source: Author's analysis of BLS unseasonalized data.
From August 2009 to August 2013 the immigrant share of total employment rose by 1 percentage point—from 15.49% to 16.49%. Had the immigrant share remained at its August 2009 level, 1.44 million more native-born Americans would have been employed this August, and the native-born unemployment rate would have been 6.4% instead of the 7.5% reported by BLS.
The displacement of native-born Americans by immigrants reached an Obama-era peak in August. This is made clear in our New VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index (NVDAWDI). It tracks native-born and foreign-born employment growth for every month since the start of the Obama Administration:
Native-born employment growth is the blue line, immigrant employment growth is in pink, and NVAWDI—the ratio of immigrant to native-born job growth—is yellow. The graphic starts at 100.0 for both native-born and immigrant employment in January 2009, and tracks their growth since that month.
From January 2009 to August 2013:
Foreign-born employment increased by 2.130 million, or by +9.8%. The immigrant employment index rose from 100.0 to 109.8.
Native-born employment declined by 181,000 or by -0.15%. The native-born employment index in August 2013 was 99.8, or slightly below the level of January 2009.
NVDAWDI (the ratio of immigrant to native-born employment growth indexes) rose from 100.0 to a record 110.0 (100X(109.8/99.8)
A more detailed picture of American worker displacement over the past year is seen in figures published in the BLS monthly job report:
Employment Status by Nativity, Aug.2012- Aug.2013 (numbers in 1000s; not seasonally adjusted) Aug.2012 Aug.2013 Change % Change Foreign born, 16 years and older Civilian population 37,847 38,197 350 0.9% Civilian labor force 24,998 25,540 542 2.2% Participation rate (%) 66.1% 66.9% 0.8% pts. 1.2% Employed 23,080 23,833 753 3.3% Employment/population % 61.0% 62.4% 1.4% pts. 2.3% Unemployed 1,918 1,707 -211 -11.0% Unemployment rate (%) 7.7% 6.7% -1.0% pts. -13.0% Not in labor force 12,849 12,658 -191 -1.5% Native-born, 16 years and older Civilian population 205,719 207,762 2,043 1.0% Civilian labor force 130,257 130,431 174 0.1% Participation rate (%) 63.3% 62.8% -0.5% pts. -0.8% Employed 119,479 120,676 1,197 1.0% Employment/population % 58.1% 58.1% 0.0% pts. 0.0% Unemployed 10,778 9,765 -1,013 -9.4% Unemployment rate (%) 8.3% 7.5% -0.8% pts. -9.6% Not in labor force 75,462 77,331 1,869 2.5% Source: BLS, The Employment Situation - August 2013, September 6, 2013. Table A-7. PDF
Over the past 12 months:
Immigrants gained 753,000 jobs, a 3.3% increase; native-born American workers gained 1,197,000 positions, a 1.0% increase. ADVANTAGE IMMIGRANTS
753,000 jobs, a 3.3% increase; native-born American workers 1,197,000 positions, a 1.0% increase. The unemployment rate for immigrants fell by 1.0 percentage point – or by 13.0%; the native-born American unemployment rate fell by 0.8 percentage points—a 9.6% decline. ADVANTAGE IMMIGRANTS
by 1.0 percentage point – or by 13.0%; the native-born American unemployment rate by 0.8 percentage points—a 9.6% decline The number of immigrants “not in the labor force”—i.e., neither working nor looking for work, fell by 191,000, or by 1.5%; the number of native-born Americans not in the labor force rose by 1.869 million, or by 2.5%. ADVANTAGE IMMIGRANTS ; AS A RESULT:
by 1.869 million, or by 2.5%. ; The labor force participation rate—a measure of worker confidence—declined for the native-born and rose smartly for immigrants. At 66.9%, the immigrant participation rate in August 2013 was 4.1% points above the native rate.
While many Americans have lost jobs to competing immigrants, all American workers have lost at least some income. By increasing the supply of labor, immigration over a recent twenty-year period reduced average income of native-born American males by $1,700, or 4%, according to Professor George Borjas. [Increasing the Supply of Labor Through Immigration: Measuring the Impact on Native-born Workers, By George Borjas, April 2004]
Larger percentage losses are indicated for native-born American high-school dropouts, Blacks, and Hispanics.
Bottom line: both the quantity and the quality of jobs held by native-born Americans has declined during the Obama years.
This is the economic environment into which the (bipartisan) Gang of Eight want to amnesty an unknown number of illegal aliens—and double or triple legal immigration.
Edwin S. Rubenstein (email him) is President of ESR Research Economic Consultants.Via Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Tulsi Gabbard has continued to impress ever since she came on the national scene last year with her courageous and very public support for Bernie Sanders in the rigged Democratic primary.
Most recently, she continued to demonstrate her knowledge of geopolitics and willingness to stand up to America’s unelected government, aka the Deep State, in a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Taper.
Note, the clip is about a month old, but important to watch if you haven’t.
If the Democrats have any hope of becoming a decent opposition party which not only resists the worst of Trump, but also rejects the perverted neoliberal/Deep State ideology currently embraced by establishment Dems, Tulsi Gabbard will have to play a key role.
As I highlighted in last February’s post, It’s Not Just the GOP – The Democratic Party is Also Imploding:
A rising star within the Democratic ranks, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, cut herself off from the party’s establishment by resigning from her post as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and endorsing Bernie Sanders for president. Her position with the DNC required her to stay neutral in the primaries, but she said that “the stakes are too high.” She announced her decision on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and made a video where she explained her reasoning. Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran, said she knows the cost of war firsthand. “I know how important it is that our commander-in-chief has the sound judgment required to know when to use America’s military power—and when not to use that power.”
The importance of this move cannot be understated. In no uncertain terms, this gesture publicly exposes the weakness of the “Clinton brand.” She clearly isn’t afraid of Hillary or of any repercussions from the Democratic Party elite, a fact that is underscored by the fact she came out with her endorsement after he got pummeled in South Carolina.
But let’s take a step back and think about this in the even bigger picture. You don’t get to Congress by being a political imbecile. On the surface, this move looks like career suicide, particularly since Hillary is probably about to clinch the nomination. Recall, Rep. Gabbard didn’t merely endorse Sanders after a bruising loss in South Carolina, she stepped down from her official position with the DNC to do so. This isn’t merely a statement, it’s the equivalent of dropping a neutron bomb on the Democratic establishment. So why did she do it?
While I think she genuinely agrees with Sanders on key issues, the reason she came out so aggressively is because she sees the writing on the wall. She’s playing the long game, and in the long game, Hillary Clinton represents a discredited and failed status quo, while Bernie Sanders represents a push toward the paradigm level change that will define the future.
When it comes to the Democrats, we need to see a lot less Pelosi and Schumer, and a lot more Gabbard.National Geographic film on wildlife, nature comes to introduce Turkey to world
A center focused on saving southeastern Turkey's wilderness areas released 10 rare birds to their natural habitat Tuesday.
The Gölpınar Wilderness Rescue and Rehab Center in Turkey's southeastern Şanlıurfa province has been treating the birds – including an Egyptian vulture, barn owl and hawk – for around four months after they were found injured in the woods.
Israfil Erdoğan, a local official of Turkey's General Directorate of Nature Conservation and National Parks, told Anadolu Agency the center has been operating for around five years and has treated hundreds of birds so far.
The center cares for dozens of local mammal, bird and reptile species, including the Indian crested porcupine, jungle cat, striped hyena, red fox, gray heron, black kite and kestrel.
Erdoğan said the center aims to "provide better living conditions for the animals that share nature with us."
"Our teams at the center take a close interest in animals. We release the animals to their natural environment after completion of treatment," he said.
"We [also] look after some animals for a lifetime whose natural habitats no longer exist," he added.
Veterinarian Reşat Ektiren said the center has released hundreds of animals back into the wild following their rehabilitation.
The ancient province of Şanlıurfa has a Mediterranean climate, characterized by hot, dry summers and rainy winters. Its terrain includes rocky semi-desert and pine forests. Located 80 kilometers east of the Euphrates, Şanlıurfa is home to some of the world's oldest preserved settlements including Göbekli Tepe Neolithic temple, and is believed to be the site of ancient Ur Kasdim, hometown of the patriarch Abraham.Varun Gandhi (born 13 March 1980) is an Indian politician. He is a member of Parliament for Lok Sabha from the Sultanpur constituency. He is also member of Bharatiya Janata Party and was inducted into Rajnath Singh's team in March 2012 as General Secretary.[7] Varun Gandhi is a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family.
Early life and education [ edit ]
Varun Gandhi was born in Delhi on 13 March 1980 to Sanjay Gandhi and Maneka Gandhi. He is the grandson of former Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi and the great-grandson of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Varun was born soon after Indira Gandhi regained power in the 1980 general elections. Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash when Varun was three months old in June 1980. Indira was assassinated when Varun was four years old on 31 October 1984. Before his death Sanjay Gandhi had expressed his interest in raising his children in accordance to his Zoroastrian religion.[8] Varun attended Rishi Valley School and Modern School C.P. New Delhi and the British School, New Delhi, where he ran for a position on the student council.[9]
Varun earned Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Economics from University of London.[1][2][3][4][5]
Early political career [ edit ]
Varun Gandhi was first introduced to the Pilibhit constituency by his mother during the 1999 election campaigning.[10] Maneka had been a part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) since earlier but she and Varun formally joined BJP in 2004.[11] Varun Gandhi campaigned for the party in the 2004 elections, covering over 40 constituencies.[12]
In an interview to Stephen Sackur in BBC's HARDTALK in October 2005, Gandhi answered questions about the reasons behind his political affiliation and defended his father as someone who had helped revive the industrialisation of India by starting Maruti Udyog and whose strategy helped the Congress party's comeback after the first ever non-Congress Janata Party government following an electoral routing for the Indira Gandhi-government after Emergency, among many other things.[13]
As a Member of Parliament [ edit ]
In the 2009 general election, the BJP decided to field Varun Gandhi as its candidate from the Pilibhit constituency instead of his mother Maneka Gandhi.[14] He won the seat by receiving 419,539 votes and defeated his nearest contending candidate, V.M. Singh, by a margin of 281,501 votes.[15][16][17][18][19] The victory was the strongest of any of the four Gandhi family candidates in the election: his mother Maneka Gandhi, aunt Sonia Gandhi and first cousin Rahul Gandhi. The security deposits of all other candidates, including those of V.M. Singh of the Indian National Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party candidate Ganga Charan Rajput were forfeited.[20] A case was filed against Gandhi for allegedly making a provocative speech about Muslims, at a meeting at Dalchand Mohalla area of Pilibhit, however he was acquitted by in court in the matter.[21][22] On 5 March 2013, a Pilibhit court acquitted Gandhi in the second hate speech case registered against him during the 2009 Lok Sabha election campaign.[23]
In March 2013, Rajnath Singh appointed Varun Gandhi as the national general secretary of the BJP. He became the youngest ever general secretary of the party. In May 2013, Varun Gandhi was made in-charge of the BJP's affairs in West Bengal. In June 2013, Gandhi requested Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar to call an emergency all party meeting in view of the calamity in Uttarakhand in which thousands of people had died. He suggested a number of step like contribution from MPLADs fund, forgoing of three months salary by MPs and tax incentives for corporate and individuals for help. He has said that he spoke to many MPs and all of them were ready to contribute. He said that the Speaker should act as a catalyst and coordinate the action plan.[24]
In July 2013, Gandhi handed over a cheque of Rs 1 lakh from his salary account to family members of former Jan Sangh Member of Legislative Assembly late Bhagwati Prasad, who died at a government hospital after prolonged illness and age-related complications. The former MLA had to spend over an hour on the floor of an emergency ward before doctors at the hospital realised he was an ex-MLA and was subsequently given medical attention. His family didn't even have money to perform the last rites after his death. Varun said he came to know about Prasad only after his death. Describing the late MLA as a model of honesty, he said it was hard to find an honest leader like him.[25]
In August 2013, newspapers reported that Gandhi was the only MP in the country who had spent cent per cent of his MP Local Area Development Fund (MPLAD) before stipulated time. According to official sources, Varun Gandhi used his funds for the development in education, health and infrastructure activities. His proposals were worth more than the entire MPLAD fund thus ensuring the entire amount of `25 crore was spent during his tenure as a Member of Parliament. His political aides stated that he submitted the proposals on time and also employed his personal team to monitor the use of money.[26]
In September 2013, Varun Gandhi accused the Samajwadi Party-led Uttar Pradesh government of pursuing the politics of appeasement, and said that its mistakes would lead to its collapse, after it denied permission to Varun Gandhi's rally in Agra just two days before it was scheduled to take place.[27]
He denounced Rahul Gandhi's infamous outburst against the controversial ordinance against convicted lawmakers, and said that it was an insult to the Prime Minister, who was abroad at the time, and therefore also disgraceful to the nation.[28] He also said that if the Prime Minister had any dignity left, he should resign immediately upon his return to the country, on the day of Rahul Gandhi's outburst.[29] In March 2014, he said that he holds no ill-will against Rahul Gandhi and won't campaign against him during Lok Sabha Election.[30]
In February 2014, Gandhi kickstarted his campaign for election 2014 in Sultanpur. He gave an emotional speech to an enthusiastic crowd in Kadipur, and said that he had come to Sultanpur to fulfill his father's dreams.[31]
In May 2014, Gandhi defeated Amita Singh from Sultanpur in Lok Sabha 2014 elections.[32]
In March 2016, he introduced the Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill, 2016 in Lok Sabha.[33]
Jan Lokpal Bill [ edit ]
In August 2011, Varun Gandhi strongly pitched for the Jan Lokpal Bill. Gandhi offered his official residence to Hazare to hold his fast, after Hazare was denied permission by the government.[34] When Hazare was jailed, Gandhi offered to table the Jan Lokpal Bill in Parliament.[35] On 24 August, he went to Ramlila Maidan as a common man to support the cause of Anna Hazare, becoming the first politician to openly support the anti-corruption cause.[36]
Columnist [ edit ]
Writes articles and policy papers for several national dailies and magazines in India, such as The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The Asian Age, The Hindu, Outlook among others. Writes the largest syndicated column in the country covering 21 newspapers – including Malayala Manorama, Lokmat, Hindustan Times, Rajasthan Patrika, Punjab Kesari, Amar Ujala, Sandesh, Bartaman, Sakshi – reaching more than 200 million readers.
Author and poet [ edit ]
Gandhi wrote his first volume of poems, titled The Otherness of Self, at the age of 20, in 2000. His second volume of poems, titled Stillness was published by HarperCollins in April 2015. The book became the bestselling non-fiction book, selling over 10,000 copies in the first two days of its release.[37]
In 2018, he released his book on the Indian rural economy titled The Rural Manifesto: Realising India's Future through her Villages. The book sold over 30,000 copies in ten days of its release. [38]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Please enable Javascript to watch this video
KENT COUNTY, Mich. – Public works officials in Kent County say we're running out of room in our landfills.
Kent County has over 600,000 residents generating nearly 1.8 million cubic yards of trash each year according to Darwin Baas, Director of the Department of Public Works. It’s a growing rate of garbage he says can’t be sustained for long.
“It’s seasonal, but we usually see a couple hundred trucks a day and the waste is anything from residential food waste, construction debris,” said Baas. “It’s material that we have to do a better job sorting out before it ever comes here.”
The Michigan Municipal Solid Waste Characterization Evaluation Project conducted by the county in 2015 found: between standard recycling and compostable food and yard waste, nearly 75 percent of waste dumped in the Kent County landfill should have been reduced, reused or recycled. These findings estimate the landfill will run out of room for trash in roughly 10 years.
“Instead of it going for scrap or something it’s ending up here and we’re burying it, and we’re never going to go back again and find it,” Baas said
Daniel Schoomaker, Executive Director of West Michigan’s Sustainable Business Forum said there’s not only environmental implications but economical ones as well.
“The damage economically is we’re throwing away nearly $400 million worth of material every year [state wide],” Schoonmaker said.
That’s roughly $52 million thrown into the trash right here in West Michigan, which eliminates nearly 370 jobs, according to the study.
So why aren’t we recycling and what can we do about this problem?
“The easiest answer is inconvenience,” said Schoonmaker. “People as a culture don’t seem to prioritize recycling as much as you think they would. People don’t like to put in extra effort or pay the extra money.”
Schoonmaker says it’s up to residents and business owners to make a commitment to reduce, reuse and recycle. The goal is to eliminate as many materials from the waste stream as possible.
The Kent Country Department of Public Works is now asking residents to partner with them by making a pledge to recycle smarter. The 'Imagine Trash' campaign seeks to reduce waste going into landfills by 20 percent by 2020 and by 90 percent by 2030.
“It’s no longer acceptable to bury 1.3 million tons of waste in landfills every year,” said Baas. “I have conversations with manufacturers and retailers and residents saying, ‘Yes, we want to reduce our waste but we don’t know where to begin.’ There is broad community interest to move the pendulum the other way and, as a community, we’re going to transform the way we manage waste. We need to change.”
For more information on the role you can play, take the pledge at www.imaginetrash.org....................................................................................................................................................................................
Sam Logwood, the Lobos’ leading scorer and rebounder, is taking “personal leave” from the program to contemplate his future, including whether he will continue playing for the University of New Mexico men’s basketball team.
The 6-foot-7 senior forward and team captain from Indianapolis, who is expected to graduate next week from UNM, is not expected to play Saturday night for the struggling Lobos (3-6), who host rival New Mexico State University in Dreamsytle Arena.
Lobos coach Paul Weir said Logwood’s decision to “collect himself” and take time away from the team was a mutual decision between the two, but came after multiple conversations in which the senior forward had expressed frustration. During a conversation Wednesday prior to the Lobos’ loss at Colorado, the conversation turned from just frustration to maybe moving on.
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“He realized at that point maybe it was becoming a bit of a problem, not only for him, but maybe the team,” Weir said.
The Lobos coach would not get into specific details about what is bothering Logwood, but a source with the program told the Journal he is not in academic, legal or NCAA-related trouble.
The Journal has asked to talk with Logwood, who has not yet chosen to do so. Weir said the senior told his teammates on Friday afternoon.
“He basically told them that he has a lot on his mind and he needed a little bit of time away,” |
• N.J. students, teachers gather in Nutley to kick off Week of Respect to combat bullying
• More Education newsSome Turkish and Iraqi businessmen have been involved in financing the Daesh terrorist group by buying oil from it in the black market, a senior Turkish politician says.
Some Turkish and Iraqi businessmen have been involved in financing the Daesh terrorist group by buying oil from it in the black market, a senior Turkish politician says.
“There is information that 27 Turkish and Iraqi businessmen are directly involved in this trade. Iraq's central government has taken a number of measures” to prevent it, Russia's Sputnik news agency quoted Mehmet Ali Ediboğlu, the former deputy of the Turkish opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), as saying on Monday.
Ediboğlu added that the businessmen include people close to Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
Back in 2014, David Cohen, the then US Treasury under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said middlemen from Turkey and the KRG purchased oil from Daesh terrorists.
According to Ediboğlu, Daesh’s main source of income is the sale of oil extracted from the fields it has captured since last year. Reports say the Takfiris control nearly a dozen oil fields in northern Iraq as well as Syria’s Raqqa province.
The oil is transferred to the Mediterranean Sea from Turkey and then transported to the other parts of the world, the former Turkish lawmaker noted.
“There is evidence that the oil revenues amounted to USD 800 million [per year], later this amount increased to 1-2 billion dollars,” he said.
Ediboğlu also stressed that the Turkish government indirectly assists Daesh terrorists by selling weapons to Syria’s militant groups which Ankara deems'reasonable'.
According to the politician, these groups are later forced by Daesh to sell their arms to the extremists.
/257New York State Police troopers busted more than a dozen Hudson Valley motorists over the weekend for allegedly driving while intoxicated on drugs or alcohol.
During a stretch between Friday, Dec. 8 and Monday, Dec. 11, state police arrested 15 people for drinking and driving, and another three for drug possession throughout the Hudson Valley.
Among those facing charges:
On Dec. 8, troopers from Wappinger arrested Wappingers Falls resident Robert Himics, 61, in Fishkill after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the stop, it was determined that Himics was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 8, troopers from Wappinger arrested Wappingers Falls resident Eric Bulinski, 30, in Wappinger after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. Further investigation determined that he was impaired by drugs and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated.
On Dec. 8, troopers from Rhinebeck arrested Poughkeepsie resident John Thomas, 48, in Poughkeepsie after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the stop, it was determined that Thomas was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 8, troopers from Cortlandt arrested Cortlandt resident Patricia Reda, 53, in Cortlandt after she committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the stop, it was determined that Reda was impaired by alcohol and she was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 8, troopers from Poughkeepsie arrested Poughkeepsie resident Justin Cardascia, 29, on Route 379 after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the stop, it was determined that Cardascia was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 9, troopers from Hawthorne arrested Wappingers Falls resident Carlos Peguero, 37, on Route 9 in Croton-on-Hudson after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the stop, it was determined that Peguero was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
A Danbury, Conn. man was busted for DWI and drug possession on I-84 in Putnam County.
On Dec. 9, troopers from Poughkeepsie arrested a woman from Virginia after she was busted drinking and driving in the city.
On Dec. 9, troopers from Cortlandt arrested Buchanan resident Lance Perlmutter, 22, on Route 6 in Cortlandt after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the stop, it was determined that Perlmutter was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 9, troopers from Hawthorne arrested Cortlandt resident Edison Vele, 27, in Cortlandt after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the stop, it was determined that Vele was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
Brooklyn resident Akita Ashley, 25, was arrested for driving while intoxicated after being involved in a motor vehicle crash on I-684 in Bedford.
On Dec. 9, troopers from LaGrange arrested Pleasant Valley resident Robert Schultz, 59, in LaGrange after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the stop, it was determined that Schultz was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 10, troopers from Hawthorne arrested Putnam Valley resident Daniel Kaufmann, 48, in Putnam Valley after he was involved in a motor vehicle crash. During the investigation, it was determined that Kaufmann was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 10, troopers from Brewster arrested Dover resident Kevin Moore, 28, on Route 22 in Patterson after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the investigation, it was determined that Moore was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 10, troopers from Wappinger arrested Beekman resident Jorge Ozuna Palma, 31, on in Wappinger after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the investigation, it was determined that Palma was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 10, troopers from LaGrange arrested Poughkeepsie resident Anthony Hewitt, 34, in LaGrange after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the investigation, it was determined that Hewitt was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 11, troopers from Brewster arrested North Salem resident Juan Acosta-Ramos, 23, on Route 6 in Southeast after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the investigation, it was determined that Acosta-Ramos was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
On Dec. 11, troopers from Poguhkeepsie arrested Poughkeepsie resident Marco Incovaia, 45, in Poughkeepsie after he committed a vehicle and traffic violation. During the investigation, it was determined that Incorvaia was impaired by alcohol and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated, a misdemeanor.
Each person arrested for driving while intoxicated are due back in court later this year to answer the charges.
Click here to sign up for Daily Voice's free daily emails and news alerts.In February, Mozilla announced its plans to develop a version of its Firefox web browser that would run on the Metro interface in Windows 8. At the time, Mozilla indicated that making a Metro version of Firefox would be much harder than making a normal desktop version, saying, "Metro is an entirely new environment and requires a new Firefox front end and system integration points."
Now Mozilla Firefox programmer Asa Dotzler has written a post on his own blog site with some more information on Mozilla's plans for Firefox running on Windows 8 Metro. One thing that Dotzler states is that Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 10 web browser in Metro isn't a 100 percent Metro app. He states, "It is actually sort of a hybrid program that bridges both the Classic and Metro environments and is built using both the WinRT and win32 APIs."
Dotzler believes that third party web browsers such as Firefox should also be developed in the same way as IE 10 in Metro. He also hopes that Mozilla will be able to offer both the Metro version and the classic desktop version of Firefox as one download file where the browser would be installed for both versions of Windows 8's user interface. He adds, "We'll, of course, have a Metro-specific front-end that fits in with the new environment, but we will not have to deploy two completely different browsers."
As we have reported before, Mozilla hopes to have alpha and beta versions of Firefox for Windows 8 released sometime in the second half of 2012.The Japanese invented reliable automobiles, robots that look like dogs and most of the more interesting sex acts on the web. But how well do they do costumes? To find out we strapped on our favorite web browser and scoured what the online Japanese costume world had to offer. We were not disapointed.
Full Body Costumes
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From the world famous "Party Costume" line of party costumes, we have here a bodysuit patterned with what appears to be one of those Magic Eye things. "Don't focus on my ass. Focus through it."We feel the need to point out that we didn't photoshop this, although clearly, this is exactly the kind of thing we'd photoshop were we inclined to create a monkey costume with an obscenely large sack and a tiny penis.On a related note, if any of our readers work for a charitable organization, we'd be willing to bet that the "monkey with an enormous ball sack and tiny penis costume" might just be the hot new successor to those rubber Livestrong bracelets.Translation: "I eat and live in your poo!"Nothing says "I love the US of A!" and "man camel toe" like an American Flag bodysuit.If you ever wanted to connect your head to your penis like some insane M.C. Escher drawing, this Halloween, consider the Mobius Giraffe.Here' a giraffe, wearing a nice yellow collared shirt. Plaid too. Guess he couldn't afford the bottom half of the giraffe costume, so he wore the yellowiest thing he could find.The closer you look at the way the mouth is hanging open like that, the more you have to wonder if we've stumbled upon an outfit for an unusually specialized type of fetish.This might be the most racist thing we've ever seen.This is either a Japanese version of Homer Simpson or a brave samurai warrior, battling his most dangerous opponent yet: jaundice.This is sort of what we'd imagine a holiday film by Quentin Tarantino would look like.Dasher: "Have you ever given a guy a foot massage?"Blitzen: "Fuck You."Translation: "We have won a Super Baseball Tournament! Now to celebrate with a ritualized act of group sex!"One, it' a tail, not an enormous ropy piece of poo. So get your mind out of the gutter. Also note the lack of massive testicles, making this statistically the most wholesome monkey costume in this article.Translation: "Rub me against women!"This eggplant clearly has somewhere to be, so we won't keep him.In Japan, Spiderman wears black, not red, and his great powers inspire no great responsibility within him. Actually, he spends most of his time using his incredible abilities to molest women on commuter trains.We were a little torn about whether to use this picture or not, as the model is clearly not Japanese. We decided to include it, and a few others, simply because they were too ridiculous to pass up. Our favorite part of this one is the cocksure look on the guy' face. "Yes, that is the lower body of a swan ballerina, thank you for noticing. My skull is an enigmatic and magical being, and has a complicated back-story and creation mythology. I would be happy to explain it to you over coffee, or perhaps a drink sometime."The next logical step after a swan ballerina on your head is of course a swan ballerina around your crotch, here inexplicably modeled by a 13 year-old boy. It' been awhile since we were that age, but we can't imagine this costume doing a kid any favors if any of his friends saw him in it. As we've seen time and again, 13 can be a pretty tough age for a boy, especially when you have legs like a goddamned woman.And finally, we have the last costume from Japan. And we don't mean the last costume in this article, or the last costume wefound. We mean the last costume ever. The Omega Costume. Over the course of researching this article, we discovered that the huge amount of heroically retarded costumes we saw were only incremental steps of the development process of the Japanese Costume industry. Incremental steps that led to this, the greatest costume to ever exist:Chris Bucholz is a Contributing Editor at Cracked Magazine, and writer of the hilarious blog Robotman!HAMISH MACDONALD: So the argument goes that young Aussies are spending way too much of money on expensive avocado on toast and that's why we can't afford to buy a house. But in truth, we all know it is much more complicated than that. Whether you're young or old, retired or working, borrowing for the first time or already up to your ears in debt that old Aussie dream of owning your own home now seems harder to achieve than ever. Don't even bother turning up here unless you've got a couple of spare million rattling around in your pocket. But the point is Australia is not alone. We're now part of a global phenomenon, where housing affordability is reaching crisis point. So, tonight we're taking you on a journey, a global journey in search of some solutions.
TITLE: THE HOME SHOW
HAMISH MACDONALD: We all know there's a problem. What we can't agree on is exactly what causes it, or how to fix it.
JAMES MURRAY: "There's no silver bullet".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Tonight, hopefully, some answers from around the world.
JAMES MURRAY: "But there isn't a simple fix".
HAMISH MACDONALD: How are people overseas confronting the challenge of housing affordability?
JAMES MURRAY: "And there isn't a quick fix either".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Okay, okay we get it.
JAMES MURRAY: "There's no magic answer which will fix everything".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Tonight we ask, do Aussie politicians really have all the ideas or are there bigger, bolder options out there?"
KIM LOUDRUP: "Forget the politicians! Forget them!"
HAMISH MACDONALD: We're lining up some surprising solutions from the Big Apple, patrolling the beat with Barcelona's property cops, and in Britain, we'll explore a property market with some real bite. From the Japanese, to those clever Scandinavians, we'll look to the future of housing and ask: Can we afford it? And I promise, living in a floating shipping container probably isn't as bad as you think!
KIM LOUDRUP: "It's one of the solutions, it's not the solution".
HAMISH MACDONALD: The world's mega-cities are growing. The race to buy property in them is fierce and if you think you don't get much for your money in Australian property, well we're about to visit a place that might put things in perspective. Advertised as "the smallest house in London", it's real estate speak for sure, but 20 Britten Street ain't big.
"Robyn!"
ROBIN SWAILES: "Hi Hamish, how are you?"
HAMISH MACDONALD: "Very nice to meet you! So this is it?"
ROBIN SWAILES: "This is it. This is my littlest bolthole".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "It's not a lot more than that".
ROBIN SWAILES: "It shouldn't take too long to look around".
HAMISH MACDONALD: For 26 square metres Robin Swailes forked out �700,000 - that's a little over 1.2 million Aussie.
ROBIN SWAILES: "We paid well �2.50 per square centimetre".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "So for... (shows size)".
ROBIN SWAILES: "For yeah, a square centimetre, �2.50. About that yeah, about that!" (laughs).
HAMISH MACDONALD: "For this space, what have you, what have you paid?"
ROBIN SWAILES: "I think the, I think the shower room alone is $60,000 Aussie dollars, yeah".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "Right. Wow".
ROBIN SWAILES: "Yeah it's frightening, isn't it!"
HAMISH MACDONALD: Don't worry though, it's not a total rip off. There's an upstairs.
(walking up the small staircase) "You have to breathe in, to get up here. (looking out the window) It's a nice view, for a small place it's got a big view".
ROBIN SWAILES: "It is kind of tiny but this is... it's lovely".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "You like small houses. You're kind of obsessed with them".
ROBIN SWAILES: "Yeah I like the management of space. I like doing really clever things in small spaces".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Lovely as the view here is, it's expensive. People working in the key sectors can't afford the rent and can't get the deposit together to buy. They're being priced out of London.
Home to almost 8.7 million people, 300 different languages are spoken in local schools here. This is the very definition of a 'global city'. And here in the east end, things are changing. Once working class suburbs are now populated by hipsters, and high income families. These days most ordinary Londoners don't have a hope of buying into the places you'd find on the old Monopoly board. They're being pushed further out of the centre and for many, the situation is so desperate, they're being pushed off dry land altogether.
Canal boat living has more than doubled in London in the past five years. So I'm on my way out to meet Miila and her charming pet Doberman.
"Hi Miila, are you there?" (dog frightens Hamish)
MIILA: (pumping water) "Ooh la la. Works like magic".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Today is a cleaning day on deck. Miila Only recently moved on to the canal.
MIILA: "About a month, a month and a half. So everything is a bit of a chaos. Oh yeah guys, it's working!"
HAMISH MACDONALD: The engine bay needs cleaning out.
MIILA: "My dad was an engineer. It's really dirty and you want to get it out, but you don't want to get it in the river so you get a bottle and a bucket".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Life on the water does take some adjustment, but it has its advantages.
MIILA: "If you really hate your neighbour you don't have to complain, you just go".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Canal boating is more a symptom of London's housing crisis than a solution. Most need to move moorings every fortnight, but compared with escalating rental costs, the price here is right.
MIILA: "A grand and a half".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "Oh wow that's really cheap".
MIILA: "The same size as that one and that's twenty six".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "That's a bargain!"
MIILA: "I know".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "A lot cheaper than a flat down the road".
MIILA: "For a month and I've got it for life, hey you can't beat that!"
HAMISH MACDONALD: Much like in Australia, people in this city are giving up on home ownership. The canal boats offer an alternative.
MIILA: "It's marvellous. I'm a property owner".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "First time?"
MIILA: "First time in my life".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "And how does that feel?"
MIILA: "Amazing. A little bit scary. I'm turning into a posh person now".
HAMISH MACDONALD: So, just how big is the problem here? And how are they trying to solve it? Interestingly, Labour controlled London and the Conservative run national government are working together to find and fund solutions. I'm going to City Hall, 'The Beehive' as it's known or as one mayor called it, 'the Glass Gonad'. James Murray is the man responsible. 3.1 billion pounds has been pledged - that's around 5.2 billion Australian dollars. By 2021 they will have started building 90,000 new affordable homes in this city alone.
"Is there a simple fix?"
JAMES MURRAY: "No (laughs) and I think that's the one thing everyone agrees on, that there isn't a simple fix and there isn't a quick fix either. There's no silver bullet and there's nothing that's going to fix the housing crisis overnight. Now what we need to do is start moving in a better direction. We need to turn the, turn the ship round and start point it in a better direction".
HAMISH MACDONALD: And that, of course, means boosting supply.
JAMES MURRAY: "The only solution to London's housing crisis is building a lot more homes. And when we say building more homes is important, not only do we mean the overall number is important, but in order to get to that number we need to build all sorts of different homes. And that means you can have big home builders, small home builders, institutional investors, market level, affordable housing, buying, renting, everything needs to come on stream".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Supply is the catch-cry for Australia's government too.
JAMES MURRAY: "There's a huge amount of capacity in East London to build out there".
HAMISH MACDONALD: New rules in London mean that if a developer meets a target of 35% affordable housing within a new development they're promised a fast track approval process. London gets more new homes quickly and developers get less red tape.
Housing is a huge problem and a huge political issue here too. What does stand out though is that at local and national level there is at least some collaboration across party lines.
"Is that needed though, some degree of consensus in order to fix this housing problem?"
JAMES MURRAY: "I think you need consensus and stability to help try and fix the housing crisis. I think when you talk to the development industry, what they crave is stability and certainty to try and make long term goals".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Australia like much of the world is grappling with this issue. So, what exactly does 'housing affordability' mean? In our two biggest cities prices jumped as much as 19% in the last year alone. We earn nearly 10 times more than we did 40 years ago, but house prices are now nearly 30 times higher than they were back then. Economists though are divided on whether soaring prices are the problem or interest rates. Back in 1990 interest rates were 17% compared to just over 4% now which makes it much cheaper for us to service that debt currently. That is of course until interest rates go up!
The cost of housing is an issue in many countries, but Australia is a stand out. We've overtaken Britain, America, Canada and most of Europe in a race to the bottom on affordable housing. In London, just like in Australia, often the big challenge is getting a deposit together.
ALEX BELL: "It felt like every time I got to a point where, oh maybe just another few months and I'll be able to do it, the prices went up. And it kept going further and further".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Alex Bell is 32. She moved here from Australia just over a decade ago. She's a qualified accountant, works in a hedge-fund and earns a decent, above average wage and saves. Even still, buying wasn't easy.
ALEX BELL: "You've got to be able to get a deposit together and this is while you're also paying rent, which... rent is expensive and it's getting more and more expensive".
(at her new home) "Hey!"
HAMISH MACDONALD: "Hi Alex, how are you?"
ALEX BELL: "Good. How are you? Come in".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "Nice to see you. Thank you very much. I'm very excited about seeing your place".
Alex didn't have enough deposit to purchase this home outright, but she managed to buy it anyway, using a financial structure you won't find in Australia.
ALEX BELL: "So this is the kitchen and living room".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "This is pretty big.
ALEX BELL: "It's very big".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "It's big for a London flat".
ALEX BELL: "It's big for a London flat actually. I love it. I love the area".
HAMISH MACDONALD: It's called shared ownership. Alex had enough deposit to buy 60% of this flat. The Housing Association, effectively a not for profit developer often with government subsidies, retained ownership of the remaining 40% which Alex then rented from them at a discounted rate. Initially, the mortgage was �800 a month, the rent �400 a month, with a service charge on top.
ALEX BELL: "If you look at a two-bedroom in this area and you think about what you'd be paying on rent for that alone, it's just a no brainer that you would want to live in a nice home, you know with lots of space, that's all mine!"
HAMISH MACDONALD: That was for the first 3 years but Brixton prices have gone up and so too the value of Alex's share which means the bank let her borrow more to buy outright.
ALEX BELL: "It's worked out very well for me and if you think that if I hadn't done that, you know, I would have missed out on that 30% growth on the equity that I did own, and that's helped me buy the rest of it".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Shared ownership has its critics too - and it comes with strings attached - including a salary cap to qualify. But it does deal with an acute issue for young people - getting enough deposit together while prices continue rising. It's meant Alex has done something most of her friends haven't yet managed.
ALEX BELL: "I would say, you know, the only one who has done it - maybe because of my accountancy background I've always been very focused on saving and I've also been...".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "So you're a penny pincher?"
ALEX BELL: "Yeah I am! I am. I like to call it frugal rather than tight. I don't know how anyone else will do it without help from family or you know being as frugal as I am so".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "Would you be annoying at the pub?"
ALEX BELL: "I always get the rounds in. Too much actually. I'll show you my receipts". (laughing)
HAMISH MACDONALD: So what exactly drives prices up in Australia? For many negative gearing is the chief culprit - the tax incentive offered to property investors. If they pay more on the loan than they get in rent, the difference is taken off their income so they pay less tax. This means that many young Australians are competing, and often losing, against these cashed up investors when they try to buy their first property.
But other countries without negative gearing, like the UK, also have housing affordability problems. So the federal government says this isn't actually to blame. Instead, they reckon it's supply. We should just build more housing. Lots of new properties to flood the market, ease demand and put a lid on price growth.
Realistically, there are other factors too like the discounts offered on capital gains tax, there's foreign investment and demographic trends. All of which means there is no simple solution. But if supply is the big thing, how does that work in practice?
RACHEL MEALEY (ABC Reporter, Tokyo): Japan's capital Tokyo is a city of extremes, but extreme house prices is one thing it doesn't have.
ROBIN HARDING: "There's a constant supply of housing in the centre of Tokyo and it expands every year. In fact there's more housing starts in the city of Tokyo in the average year than there are in the entire country of England".
RACHEL MEALEY: Robin Harding is a former banker turned journalist. He's lived here for 15 years. Tokyo real estate is one of his pet subjects.
ROBIN HARDING: "Tokyo is a great example of a city where people are allowed to build".
RACHEL MEALEY: When the 80's property bubble burst in Japan, major banks were left holding bad debt and developers had unwanted office buildings. So the government eased planning regulations in commercial districts to allow the land to be used for any purpose. And the result was a steady supply of new homes.
ROBIN HARDING: "The nature of the Japanese system means that each plot of land is treated just like that, it's a plot of land. There's no planning, no one says, you know, the street should look like this and all the houses should have this kind of windows and they should be this high, which is what you get in London".
RACHEL MEALEY: While the rest of Japan's population is declining, Tokyo is bucking the trend, the city's now nudging 35 million. But despite this growth, there hasn't been the upward pressure on prices experienced by other big cities.
ROBIN HARDING: "Tokyo is the biggest, one of the most densely populated cities on earth. So it's not cheap, it's never going to be cheap, there's a limited amount of land for 35 million people. What you haven't seen in the last 20 or 30 years is any of the price increases that you've seen in cities like San Francisco, in London, in Sydney, where supply is much more constrained. So personally I think there's very little doubt that the higher supply in Tokyo has kept a lid on prices".
RACHEL MEALEY: (walking down street) "This street is a good example of the sometimes crazy mix of buildings you can find on any one street. We've got some apartment blocks, next to that is a family home, next to that is a building someone's decided to paint pink and next to that is a castle!"
Some Aussies might see their home as their castle, but in Japan there isn't an emphasis on owning at all costs.
ROBIN HARDING: "They don't feel this pressure, that pressure that you feel in a city like London or Sydney, 'I must buy now or my life will be blighted'. You just don't get that. House prices are not a subject at dinner party conversation in Tokyo because they just don't change very much. I think that's great!"
RACHEL MEALEY: "What are people talking about if not the property prices?"
ROBIN HARDING: "North Korea".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Still to come tonight, a country where they do things very differently.
KIM LAUDRUP: "This is a 25 square metre student apartment with a sea view".
HAMISH MACDONALD: Where there are more bikes than cars and some very big ideas.
TEASER END
HAMISH MACDONALD: One of the big questions about housing affordability is who's responsible for fixing it? Is it government, is it developers? This is a pocket house in central London. Basically it's aimed at young people who fall in the gap. They earn too much for social housing, but too little to buy their own home. They pay 20% less than the market average for a flat that's 20% smaller.
"Why on earth are you not just sort of making these and selling them for as much money as you can get to whoever wants it?"
LUCIEN SMITHERS: "It's certainly harder than any other form of housing because you don't have the margin, you don't have the upside".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "So why do it?"
LUCIEN SMITHERS: "We think that it's a lower margin product that is going to serve a certain segment of the audience and it could be a global product".
HAMISH MACDONALD: "So, if some developers are willing to help solve this problem, what then is the role of government? In some countries they're reluctant to get too involved, but in other places there's a radically interventionist approach".
It's one of the world's most popular cities, a magnet for tourists, expats and retirees. With its sun-drenched beaches, stunning architecture, world famous food and never ending festivals, Barcelona is hard to beat. Who wouldn't want to come here? And that's the problem.
ERIC CAMPBELL: (standing in square) "Well this is what used to be called 'the off season'. But these days it doesn't matter if it's the height of summer or the depths of winter, every day the centre of Barcelona is under occupation by foreign visitors or as the locals call them, 'guiris'. And what does that have to do with housing? Well, if you're a landlord in Barcelona you're not going to want to rent or even sell your apartment to poor locals, if you can make much more money out of 'guiris'."
Residents are paying more and more to compete with tourists, expats and foreign investors. But Barcelona is fighting back. The mayor, Ada Colau is a former housing activist. She's directed the council to clamp down on foreign rental sites like Airbnb. She's even sending out inspectors to hunt down illegal rentals.
APARTMENT OCCUPANT: (loud door knocking) "Who is it?"
HOME INSPECTOR: "Inspector from Barcelona City Council".
ERIC CAMPBELL: More on what happens behind the door later. Visit any public square and it looks like locals are living the good life. I've come here to meet two old friends, Anita and Jordi. They've always been proud of Barcelona's reputation as Spain's most international city. But it's wearing thin.
ANITA: "Yes, way too international".
JORDI: "I consider tourism a kind of um.... pollution".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Food and wine might still be cheap, but Spanish wages just can't match what foreigners pay for housing.
JORDI: "It's a city full of old people who have lived here all their lives and have a flat - and tourists".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "So what's it like for young people here? What's their future?"
JORDI: "Their future is spending a period of their life sharing a room with other flatmates and afterwards they move 20 kilometres, 50 kilometres, from the city centre".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Moving 20 kilometres away might not sound much by Sydney or Melbourne standards, but Barcelona is not a suburban city. People live on top of each other in neighbourhoods, with their own schools, corner stores, bars and cafes. Leaving your neighbourhood means losing your community. And right now entire buildings are being emptied to make way for foreigners. Santi Mas De Xaxas has just learned his three year lease won't be renewed.
SANTI MAS DE XAXAS: "Right now I am facing the problem that all these buildings are being turned now to apartments for tourists. So they are not renewing... not renewing any longer the lease to the.... to our tenants so I have already been told that we have to leave the apartment".
ERIC CAMPBELL: His one bedroom flat will be renovated for short term tourist stays.
SANTI MAS DE XAXAS: "I'm paying 600. There's no way I can afford this anywhere in the area. I'm going to have to move further out of Barcelona or to a farther away neighbourhood from the centre".
ERIC CAMPBELL: Critics blame the so-called'sharing economy' for fuelling the crisis. Online reservation sites like Airbnb allow tourists to book rooms in apartments. The number has exploded since 2008 and these are just the ones the city council knows about. Thousands more operate without a licence. Many of them have become illegal hotels run by agents where the tourists never even meet the owner. But they might just meet these women - Barcelona Council's home inspectors. Don't let the mild manners fool you, they're the city's secret weapon against illegal renting.
HOME INSPECTOR: "We've got a list of flats that we have to check because we suspect they are illegal apartments, tourist apartments".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "Carolina Perez and Ivette Hidalgo can inspect dozens of apartments a day. For each area, they cross check a list of licensed rental properties with what's being advertised.
HOME INSPECTOR: "50% of of the apartments are illegal now.
ERIC CAMPBELL: "50% are illegal?"
HOME INSPECTOR: "Or more, yeah, yeah, yeah".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "Wow".
HOME INSPECTOR: "Yeah, it's amazing".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "That's a huge problem".
HOME INSPECTOR: "Exactly, so we have to stop it".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "And what's that doing to rents here?"
HOME INSPECTOR: "The rent prices go up.... in two years 50% more".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "Wow in this... in this touristy area here, yeah".
HOME INSPECTOR: "Yes. It's crazy".
ERIC CAMPBELL: "So we foreigners are ruining Barcelona, are we?"
HOME INSPECTOR: "Hmm, hmmm (laughs)
ERIC CAMPBELL: To prove an illegal rental, they simply buzz on the door and talk their way in. Then it's a matter of seeing who is in the apartment and who they're paying.
HOME INSPECTOR: "It's very weird, no? Suddenly you have having holidays and someone knock on the door |
do so with the army you want to build. We’ll be previewing some of our favourite Regimental Doctrines all week, starting with the legendary Catachans.
Catachan armies have a two-part Regimental Doctrine designed to reflect the impressive strength of the jungle fighters:
The first part of Brutal Strength is fairly handy, and can allow your infantry to press the advantage in melee against weaker foes like Fire Warriors. Where this ability really comes into its own is with the second part; Catachan tanks are going to be among the deadliest in the game thanks to their reliability. Using a Wyvern and want to make the most of the quad stormshard mortar’s 4D6 shots? Love the Leman Russ but wish the battle cannon was more reliable? Want to ensure the Shadowsword’s volcano cannon puts down a pesky Renegade Knight? Pick the Catachans for your regiment.
Best Units
There are all sorts of uses for Brutal Strength, and nearly all of them are more sensible than using the Deathstrike – but none are quite so fun, or quite so Catachan. After all, what is the deathstrike missile but the tank-based equivalent of an enormous bicep? With each hit causing a mortal wound, every single shot counts – Brutal Strength makes sure the deathstrike missile lives up to its name. When you really, truly want an enemy dead, the Vortex Missile Stratagem should all but guarantee that your target is obliterated:
Of course, if you like infantry-based Catachan armies, they’re still a solid choice, with Catachan Command Squads being a particularly powerful option. Equip yours with a heavy flamer and four flamers, and you’ll have a devastating close assault unit, bolstered considerably by the unique Catachan order, Burn Them Out!
If anyone charges you, they’ll have to walk through a wall of flame, and then, if you’ve got a command point to spare, suffer some deadly mortal wounds from Vicious Traps.
Whether you’re looking to create a particularly devastating armoured column, or just really, really like flamers, there’s a lot to love about the Catachans. Tomorrow, we’ll be going from the shirtless to the suited-and-booted with the Mordian Iron Guard, a regiment designed to excel at defensive order – and equipped with a unique order that’ll spell doom for any enemy looking to exploit the seeming safety of characters.My Stats:
Height: 6’2
Weight: 180 Lbs
Build: Athletic, broad shoulders but on skinny side
Ralph Lauren White Swim Suit
Price: 30 Yuan
Size:XL
Weight: 172g
Dimensions(CM):
W2C
Review: 8/10
This suit looks really nice with decent quality, the logo looks fantastic aw well. The only drawback is this doesn’t have the same weight and feel at the retail one. For price this is an awesome piece and wont get you called out but if you’re looking for that 1:1 this isnt the piece. I am a big fan of it though and will wear it all summer.
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Fresh Prince of Bel-Air/ Bel Air Academy Will Smith Swingman Jersey
Price:54 Yuan
Size:L
Weight: 256g
W2C
Review: 10/10
Well for starters there is clearly no retail of this item but if you were a fan of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air as a kid this is a must buy. The quality is amazing and have gotten so many complements on it. It runs TTS and material is exactly the same as a retail swingman. This is tied for best of my haul with the Bape shirt.
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Bape Glow in Dark T-Shirt
Price: 95 Yuan
Size:XL
Weight: 224g
W2C
Review: 10/10 MUST COP
This shirt is thick nice quality with on point tags and stitching. I can’t find a single thing wrong with it. It also glows in the dark at night on the shoulders and sleeves and looks awesome. I went a size up to XL based on other users and that was a great call. I think if i went TTS Large it would have been too tight. So if you want a really snug fit got TTS if not size up one.
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Adidas Red Wine Track Pants
Price: 99 Yuan
Size: XXL
Weight: 402g
Dimensions(CM):33.0*28.0*6.0
W2C
Review: 5/10
So i took a big L on these. The XXL is still sort of snug si you can likely go up 3 sizes for a TTS fit. The ankles are also really tight, I have been wearing them over my calves hoping to stretch them out a little but beware when you first get them they will be tight. These are call outable and would only recommend these if you are looking for decent chill pants. If you want to wear these out people will instantly know they are reps and ones that don’t even have the Adidas logo anywhere on them. The material is even different than retails. These are almost shiny and dont have the same feel as retails. I plan to just wear them to the gym and around the house. If you want a really cheap pair and dont care about the issues id snag a pair to fill out a haul 2 to 3 sizes up.
Measurement pictures are also towards the end of the slideshow as well.
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Please follow and like us:“We, uh, use Ann sparingly right now so that people don’t get tired of her,” was another queasy comment Mitt Romney made at his now-infamous Florida fundraiser. Judging from Ann Romney's interview last night with a Colorado television station, she's the one getting tired. Trotted out to make the pitch, once again, to women voters, she was also wearily obliged to defend him -- and not very convincingly -- on comments that suggested he's written off the vast majority of women in this country.
"More and more people are falling into poverty -- more, in particular, women are falling into poverty," Ann recited dutifully. "There is a concern on his part, which is why he's running -- is that, he wants to make sure to bring better economic opportunity for women. I know the guy, I know him really well, I know he cares, and that's why we're running."
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This is Ann Romney's sell on her husband in a nutshell -- I know and love Mitt, and that's why you, especially you ladies, should just trust him. But this week, it's never been less convincing, precisely because so many of those women fall into the mythical 47 percent that Mitt dismissed as unreachable.
No one has crunched the data yet on what percentage of those 47 percent of tax units who don't pay federal income tax are women (though I did ask), but we can get a pretty good idea by looking at the demographics of the groups whose income and deductions put them in that category. According to the Tax Policy Center, 44 percent of them are eligible for elderly tax benefits, 30.4 percent of them are getting credits for children and as working poor, and another 5.6 percent of them are getting education credits.
Let's start with the elderly. Women make up 57 percent of all Social Security beneficiaries 62 and older, and 68 percent of those 65 and older. They're likely to rely more heavily on Social Security income at the same time that they get less of it -- thanks to lower lifetime earnings and being less likely to have other income, such as a pension drawn from having been in the full-time paid workforce. According to the Social Security Administration, in 2010, the average income received by women 65 and over was $11,794 a year, while the average income for a man was $15,231. Half of these women relied on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income.
Meanwhile, those child tax credits and earned income tax credits were championed by conservatives partly to get low-income mothers into the workforce. And it worked: economists Nada Eissa and Hilary Hoynes of the University of California, Davis, have noted that "the overwhelming finding of the empirical literature is that EITC has been especially successful at encouraging the employment of single parents, especially mothers." These are women (and children) who are far more likely to live in poverty. As the National Women's Law Center points out, "the poverty rate for female-headed families with children was 40.9 percent, compared to 21.9 percent for male-headed families with children." As for education credits, women have for some time made up the majority at almost every level of post-secondary education.
That same NWLC report made plain what's at stake when we're talking about that 47 percent who aren't paying federal income tax (a limited and arbitrary measure in itself): "Whether policy makers choose to maintain and strengthen programs that bolster the recovery and protect the most vulnerable – or cut those programs while expanding tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations – will play a crucial role in determining whether more women and families are lifted out of, or sink into, poverty in the years to come."
But all of this assumes that the Romney campaign is substantively interested in whether those women and families live in poverty or not. Sure, with Ann at the forefront, it's been nominally addressing those women, seeking to imply with no evidence that Obama has somehow willfully driven then into poverty or dependency. But ultimately, they aren't the ones the campaign is after at all, judging from both their policies and their messaging.
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Indeed, judging from "Dear Daughter," the campaign video released this week, the Romney campaign has a pretty good (and plausible) idea of the women who might vote for him -- white, married women like the soft-focus blond mom with a cuddly infant who stars in it. Sure, there's a nod toward female unemployment, but the real crux of the thing is the idea of inheriting the national debt, which women care about because they give birth to children. Slash and burn away. That's consistent with the message pushed by Ann in the interview last night and elsewhere: "If they are mothers, they are worried about their children." Single mothers whose most urgent worry is not the national debt -- and who tend not to turn out anyway -- need not apply.
Ann also said, "Speaking from the perspective from a wife and a mother, the things that I know that I care about, I want to know what motivates the guy -- the person that I would be voting for. And I would say what motivates Mitt is that he cares." She cited the heartbreaking individual stories told at the Republican National Convention -- relegated to non-prime time thanks to a preference for Clint Eastwood -- by people who had been helped or counseled by her husband. That model of individual charity is, of course, the preferred alternative of people like Mitt Romney (or at least, the kind of person he is currently presenting as). But for women, that model offers a mixed blessing.
At the RNC, fellow member of the Mormon leadership Grant Bennett spoke of how "Mitt prayed with and counseled church members seeking spiritual direction, single mothers raising children, couples with marital problems, youth with addictions, immigrants separated from their families, and individuals whose heat had been shut off." He didn't mention the woman he tried to talk out of having a lifesaving abortion, or the single mother he sought to convince to give up her baby for adoption, or the Mormon feminists whom he alternately tolerated and called "not my kind of Mormon."
Those women were nowhere to be found -- probably because in all of this percentage-crunching, they just didn't count.Jerome Arps, 58, began his sickening obsession with forcing himself on women as a teenager when he participated in the gang raping of a 14-year-old girl. Decades later, in 2006, after multiple other rapes, this monster’s addiction to forced sex was so compelling that he grabbed a woman in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and publicly raped her on the church’s steps.
By: Matt Agorist
This article first appeared at FreeThoughtProject
One would think that in today’s society, such a vile serial rapist like Arps would never see the light of day after being apprehended. However, one would be wrong.
Because of the overcrowding of prisons in America, states like New York have revamped their rules. Sickos like Arps, cannot be held unless they are shown to have a mental disability, more serious than just a personality disorder — that causes him to repeatedly rape women.
The Court of Appeals for New York ruled in 2014 that the state has to prove that predators like Arps won’t be able to control themselves once they are released back into society.
“Mr. Arp’s psychiatric condition makes him strongly predisposed to commit future sex offenses,” said state psychiatrist Dr. Frances Charder in court papers. “Mr. Arp’s ASPD along with his very high level of psychopathy have combined to produce a predisposition to gratify sexual urges in an illegal and deviant manner, without regard for the rights of others,” she said.
However, thanks to the ridiculous nature of the Court of Appeals ruling, Arps, whose been raping women for decades, will likely be released this year. According to the Post, this ruling affects about 300 violent offenders in the state of New York alone.
Meet John Knock, Paul Free, Leopoldo Hernandez-Miranda, Antonio Bascaro, Kenny Kubinski, Larry Duke, Billy Dekle, Craig Cesal, Jeff Mizanskey, and Fred Cundiff.
What do all these people have in common? They have all been sentenced to life in prison. Were they publicly raping women on the steps of a downtown cathedral? No. Instead, they were caught in possession of a plant the state has deemed as illegal.
All of these men have served far more time in jail than Arps ever will, and their “crimes” have no victim.
Thanks to the state’s insane and immoral war on drugs, prisons are full of non-violent drug offenders. Thanks to sentencing laws, like the three strikes rule, anyone caught with drugs three times has to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for at least 25 years.
According to the California Department of Corrections, there were 5,887 persons serving “Three Strikes” sentences at the end of 2010, in California alone. More than 19% of them had been sentenced for drug crimes, including 32 people sentenced to life for marijuana violations. All of this is in a state where medical marijuana is legal.
As tens of thousands of non-violent drug offenders rot in jail cells from coast to coast, monsters like Jerome Arps benefit from the drug war by being let out to make room for druggies.
Kidnapping and locking people in cages for their personal choice to possess a substance is immoral. However, releasing violent criminals to make room for the non-violent drug offenders is downright preposterous and evil.
When will Americans wake up to the war on drugs?
As police apologists are spreading the myth that there is a war on cops, they are missing the entire point. If they really cared about Blue lives, then they would call for an end to the drug war. Most police-to-citizen interactions are due to the war on drugs. Most criminals are created due to the war on drugs. Most gang violence is due to the war on drugs.
The system knows that making substances illegal creates a black market monopoly and allows these elite criminal gang units to flourish as they control the supply. They also know that they will get constant funding and loads of new military toys for perpetuating this war, so they refuse to end it.
When the criminals and the state agree that drugs should be illegal, the line between who the actual criminals are becomes blurred.
Is the criminal the 19-year-old kid who tries to sell a little pot to make some extra cash or the cop who would deprive a young man of his future by kidnapping, caging or killing him over a plant?
As the fingers in D.C. continue to point across the aisle to lay blame for an increase in violent crime and overcrowded prisons, the misinformed taxpayer funded circus can’t see the giant pink elephant in their ranks.
As long as politicians and their enforcers continue down this hellish path of prohibition, we can expect things to get much worse.
It is well past the time that we end the war on drugs.
Share this article with your friends and family to show them how the war on drugs leads to violents rapists being set free while peaceful individuals rot in jail for a plant.
This article first appeared at FreeThoughtProjectJesse Wright defends his facial tattoos after being stopped from entering a bar on his birthday because of them.
An artist was refused entry to a bar because of his facial tattoos, despite offering to hide them with makeup.
Jesse Wright said he felt "degraded" by his treatment. He is considering making a complaint to the Human Rights Commission.
The 22-year-old was with a group of about 30 friends when he tried to enter The Rockpool pool hall on Hereford St, Christchurch, about 9pm on Friday.
Wright, who was celebrating his birthday, said he was singled out by bouncers, who had concerns about tattoos on his face. They thought he might have gang affiliations.
He offered to hide them with a friend's makeup but was refused entry.
Wright said the bouncers asked him to explain the meaning of some of his tattoos, including the number 75 on his cheek. It is a reference to the year his mother was born.
DEAN KOZANIC/FAIRFAX NZ Jesse Wright was refused admission to The Rockpool bar on his 22nd birthday because of his facial tattoos.
He said one of them responded with a derogatory remark about her.
Wright has hundreds of tattoos covering about 50 per cent of his body, including his eyelids.
Those on his face meant the most, he said. Several were linked to his family.
Wright said he had never been refused entry to a bar in Christchurch because of his tattoos.
READ MORE: Opinion: 'Bars can have whatever dress code they want'
"I find it highly offensive. You don't judge a book by its cover," he said.
"None of my tattoos are gang affiliated whatsoever – they all have high meaning to me."
He wanted The Rockpool to change its policy.
"I know I'm not the only one out there with face tattoos and if we want to go out... why should we be turned down because of what we look like?
"It's really, really insulting and it's hurt me deep down."
The Rockpool owner Peter Whittaker said people with visible facial or neck tattoos were not welcome at his bar.
"Not everyone is automatically excluded but we don't want that profile of person there."
He declined to comment further.
The Rockpool only recently reopened.
Liquor Licence Protection began supplying bouncers to the bar about a fortnight ago.
The company's director, Tarquyn Read, said a strict door policy was being enforced by his staff.
"They are doing a really good job... we've made it a safer place."
Read said he would make enquiries about any comments made by his staff relating to Wright's mother.
It is understood Vinnie Paul, the co-founder and former drummer of US heavy metal band Pantera, was denied entry to The Rockpool at the weekend because he refused to remove a bandanna he was wearing.
His new band, Hellyeah, played at The Bedford on Saturday.
Hospitality Association chief executive Bruce Robertson said bars and restaurants needed to be mindful of a person's human rights.
He was unable to say how many bars in New Zealand had door policies relating to tattoos but if a tattoo was considered offensive, it could be grounds for refusing them entry.
"The problem here is all these things are relatively subjective so individual operators need to make a call on what's in front of them."
Human Rights Commission chief mediator Pele Walker said from "time to time" the commission received complaints about services being denied to people because of their tattoos.
A policy banning tattoos might not in itself be unlawful, Walker said. If the tattoo was of religious or ethnic significance, a complaint of indirect discrimination could be made under the Human Rights Act.In what became an emblematic scene, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), faced a hostile crowd at a packed health care town hall in Michigan on Thursday. Dingell, a major sponsor of health care reform legislation, was repeatedly shouted down. At one point, a man named Mike Sola wheeled his son to the front of the room and engaged in a YouTube-bound shouting match (see below) with Dingell before being escorted out by police.
But who was actually populating this angry mob? Although town-hall meetings are intended for constituents of congressional members' districts, some if not a majority of attendees seemed to have come from further away.
Members of Congress routinely ask constituents to sign in when they attend town halls so they can contact them later and gauge where people are coming from. Dingell spokesman Adam Benson estimated that at least 500 people showed up for the meeting, and half didn't sign in at all. Of the 262 who did, 80 listed addresses inside Dingell's district; 100 listed addresses outside the district; and 82 didn't put down an address at all. Sign-in sheet breakdowns provided to the Huffington Post in two other congressional districts indicated a similar pattern of outside agitation.
In short, the sign-in sheets lend credence to the accusation that the protests are the product of Washington-based "Astroturf" organizations, rather than evidence of a groundswell of popular resistance to health care reform.
The anger, though, is undeniable. Sola, for instance, told Dingell that his legislation was a "fraud" and would not cover his son, who has cerebral palsy. But did Sola's charges have any merit?
Sola was offered a meeting with the congressman but declined. His son would presumably be eligible for Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicaid, or some other government run health program -- but he didn't return a phone call from the Huffington Post to get more details of his situation. His story and a photo of the altercation ran on the front page of the conservative Washington Times on Monday, and that night Sola appeared on Fox News to say that Democratic leaders had sent "thugs" to his house in the middle of the night in retribution for his comments.
At another now-famous town hall meeting a week ago, in Rep. Gene Green's district, the Texas Democrat became a YouTube celebrity after an angry voter asked the crowd of roughly 150 to declare whether they wanted the government to keep its hands off their health care.
Green quickly followed up by asking how many in the crowd were on Medicare -- which, for those unaware, is a government program. Many hands were raised.
At that event, according to Green's office, of the 121 people who signed in, 60 did not list addresses in the district. Eleven of those listed either Texas or USA but nothing more specific; the rest left addresses outside the district.
As the town halls dominate the national news cycle, Green's office says the out-of-district element appears to have increased. "It's only gotten worse since, as far as folks not from the district," said spokeswoman Brenda Arredondo. At some of the events since then, she said, sign-in sheets indicate as many as eight of ten members of the audience were from outside the district.
Rep. Steve Kagen (D-Wis.) hosted a town hall that featured protestations from Heather Blish who described herself as "just a mom from a few blocks away" who was "not affiliated with any political party." It turned out she was the former vice chair of the Republican Party of Kewaunee County until last year and had also worked for John Gard, a Republican challenger who Kagan defeated last year.
A Kagen spokesman refused to release details from the event's sign-in sheet, but said that of the 200 to 300 people present, about 30 percent of the attendants were from out of district.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, another Texas Democrat, was the target of protesters who seemed to be from out of district, but sign-in sheets "were woefully incomplete," his spokeswoman, Sarah Dohl said, "and didn't account for nearly the amount of people that were actually there."
Doggett had little doubt most of the attendees were from out of the area. "Most of the well organized protesters with their Doggett tombstone and devil posters at the Neighborhood Office Hours in Southwest Austin were not from the neighborhoods invited to participate," said a statement to HuffPost released by his office.
"This was a well planned bit of political theater with the actors invited by the Chair of the Travis County Republican Party, who participated as one of the protesters. Afterwards, on her website, she thanked the 'liberty warriors' for their good work. All of this was recorded by Republican cameras and quickly spoonfed to the local media.
"By showing on YouTube only the Congressman's departure after an hour of taunt-filled discussion and only after cries of 'just say no!' prevented those not associated with the protest from speaking, Republicans created the illusion that they had prevented any meeting. One YouTube video of the event proudly proclaims that it was produced by the Republican Party of Texas. Naturally, Republicans denied to the local media that they organized this allegedly 'grassroots' event. Additionally, local health insurance representatives have been active in encouraging protests."
Jeff Muskus and Laura Dean contributed reporting to this story.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Hollywood A-lister Brad Pitt is rumoured to be going to Anfield tomorrow to watch Liverpool FC’s clash against Chelsea.
Pitt is said to be making an appearance at Anfield with his children, but it’s not yet known whether his wife Angelina Jolie will be joining them.
The actor has been a huge Reds fan since the couple’s son Maddox was taken to Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, after falling ill whilst Angelina was filming Tomb Raider in North Wales back in 2002.
Fury star Pitt is set to be back in the city after a media source let it slip that he and his children would be in the stands to watch Liverpool FC.
When asked about his favourite team, action hero Pitt said, “I have some friends who are very close to Liverpool, so if I went another way I might be disowned.”
The superstar couple have strong links to the city with Angelina’s friend and stunt double for many of her films, Eunice Huthart coming from Liverpool.
Following Maddox’s three day visit to Alder Hey, the couple also donated a staggering £50,000 to the children’s hospital to help them build a new cancer unit.
Maleficent star Angelina has also visited the city some years ago to attend a gig on Matthew Street with her ex-husband Billy Bob Thornton, who is another huge Liverpool FC fan.
They join a growing list of Liverpool celebrity fans including Pulp Fiction’s Samuel L Jackson, Liverpool-born Sex And The City actress Kim Cattrall and Mike Myers of Austin Powers fame.
With his two parents hailing from Liverpool, Myers revealed his childhood home in Toronto was a shrine to the club and the city, and last visited Anfield last season and saw Liverpool defeat Fulham.
“I’m so thrilled to be here, I cannot even believe it,” said Myers of his first visit to Anfield.
“I’m normally really chatty but I’m speechless right now. I’m even starstruck by Anfield, the pitch. I didn’t even want to look at it - I was a little afraid.”
Another unlikely celebrity Kopite is sultry singer Lana Del Rey.
Speaking about the Reds she said “I was introduced to Liverpool FC by my manager, Ben, whose mood is dependent on the team’s results.”RIVERVIEW — Authorities released the names of two people found dead in a town home early Monday but no details yet about what was behind the fatal shootings.
Zoltan Ambrus, 63, shot his son Tamas Ambrus, 41, once and then shot himself, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office said Tuesday.
Deputies were called to Zoltan Ambrus's home at 4663 Pond Ridge Drive, in the Valhalla community, about 4:45 a.m. on Monday. They discovered the father's body in the garage and the son's body in the house, in an area between the living room and dining room. Both men died from a single gunshot wound to the head.
Tamas Ambrus lives in Fort Pierce, according to the Sheriff's Office. Reached by phone Tuesday, his wife Monika Ambrus declined to comment.
County records show Zoltan Ambrus and his wife Noemi, 41, bought the home in 2005. Noemi Ambrus also declined to comment.
"This is a difficult time right now," she said.
Deputies were at the home eight days earlier for a domestic violence call.
About noon on April 2, Zoltan Ambrus punched Noemi in nose with a closed fist during an argument, leaving a red mark on her nose, according to an arrest report. Ambrus was charged with misdemeanor battery, booked into the Hillsborough County jail and released the next day after posting $500 bail, records show.
Major C. Jones, who lives two doors down from the Ambruses, woke up Monday to find the street in the well-kept community filled with patrol cars.
Jones said Zoltan Ambrus worked as a handyman. He described him as a friendly neighbor who jump-started Jones' car a couple of times, made some repairs in his house and fed the ducks with Jones' two sons in the pond behind their homes.
"All I've ever known them to be is very good people," Jones said. "He's always been nice to my sons."Want a photo with Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh and his tucked-in Allen Iverson jersey? Sorry, but the NCAA says "no dice."
Effective immediately, the NCAA has placed a ban on all photos and autographs at satellite camps. "The NCAA made a rule 10 minutes ago saying I couldn't (autograph)," Harbaugh said (via 247Sports).
None of the 300+ campers were allowed to have their picture taken with Harbaugh or @CoachTaggart due to new NCAA rule effective today. — Joey Knight (@TBTimes_Bulls) June 4, 2016
Who says the NCAA doesn't work with a quickness?
While the NCAA ultimately opted to allow satellite camps, the reality is they're tough on compliance departments for reasons like this. In the NCAA's mind, it's easier to ban anything that could turn into an issue later down the road, which is partially why the NCAA briefly voted to ban satellite camps to begin with.
Satellite camps can be big events, and any photo opportunity, no matter how innocent it looks, can be ripe for profiting. Your point of view dictates whether you think that's a big deal, but the NCAA certainly thinks so.Cross Posted from Psychology Today
by Peter Gray in Freedom to Learn
I’m taking a little break from my series on “The Human Nature of Teaching” in order to respond to questions about hunter-gatherer life in general, which were raised by my last post. As regular readers of this blog know, I have in previous posts commented on hunter-gatherers’ playfulness; their playful religious practices; their playful approach toward productive work; their non-directive childrearing methods; and their children’s playful ways of educating themselves. In all of those posts I emphasized the egalitarian, non-hierarchical nature of hunter-gatherer society. In today’s post I present three theories as to how hunter-gatherers maintained the egalitarian ethos for which they are justly famous. I think all three of the theories are correct. They are complementary theories, not competing ones; and they are all theories about culture, not about genes.
First, before I get to the three theories, I must address this question: Is it true that hunter-gatherers were peaceful egalitarians? The answer is yes.
First, before I get to the three theories, I must address this question: Is it true that hunter-gatherers were peaceful egalitarians? The answer is yes.
During the twentieth century, anthropologists discovered and studied dozens of different hunter-gatherer societies, in various remote parts of the world, who had been nearly untouched by modern influences. Wherever they were found–in Africa, Asia, South America, or elsewhere; in deserts or in jungles–these societies had many characteristics in common. The people lived in small bands, of about 20 to 50 persons (including children) per band, who moved from camp to camp within a relatively circumscribed area to follow the available game and edible vegetation. The people had friends and relatives in neighboring bands and maintained peaceful relationships with neighboring bands. Warfare was unknown to most of these societies, and where it was known it was the result of interactions with warlike groups of people who were not hunter-gatherers. In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals.
We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close that of hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared. It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions. It meant that even parents didn’t have the right to order their children around; hence the non-directive childrearing methods that I have discussed in previous posts. It meant that group decisions had to be made by consensus; hence no boss, “big man,” or chief.
If just one anthropologist had reported all this, we might assume that he or she was a starry-eyed romantic who was seeing things that weren’t really there, or was a liar. But many anthropologists, of all political stripes, regarding many different hunter-gatherer cultures, have told the same general story. There are some variations from culture to culture, of course, and not all of the cultures are quite as peaceful and fully egalitarian as others, but the generalities are the same. One anthropologist after another has been amazed by the degree of equality, individual autonomy, indulgent treatment of children, cooperation, and sharing in the hunter-gatherer culture that he or she studied. When you read about “warlike primitive tribes,” or about indigenous people who held slaves, or about tribal cultures with gross inequalities between men and women, you are not reading about band hunter-gatherers.
Even today some people who should know better confuse primitive agricultural societies with hunter-gatherer societies and argue, from such confused evidence, that hunter-gatherers were violent and warlike. For example, one society often referred to in this mistaken way is that of the Yanomami, of South America’s Amazon, made famous by Napoleon Chagnon in his book subtitled The fierce people. Chagnon tried to portray the Yanomami as representative of our pre-agricultural ancestors. But Chagnon knew well that the Yanomami were not hunter-gatherers and had not been for centuries. They did some hunting and gathering, but got the great majority of their calories from bananas and plantains, which they planted, cultivated, and harvested. Moreover, far from being untouched by modern cultures, these people had been repeatedly subjected to slave raids and genocide at the hands of truly vicious Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese invaders.[1] No wonder they had become a bit “fierce” themselves.
The hunter-gatherer way of life, unlike the agricultural way of life that followed it, apparently depended on intense cooperation and sharing, backed up by a strong egalitarian ethos; so, hunter-gatherers everywhere found ways to maintain a strong egalitarian ethos. Now, back to the main question of this post. How did hunter-gatherers maintain their egalitarian ways? Here are the three theories, which I think are complementary to one another and all correct.
Theory 1: Hunter-gatherers practiced a system of “reverse dominance” that prevented anyone from assuming power over others.
The writings of anthropologists make it clear that hunter-gatherers were not passively egalitarian; they were actively so. Indeed, in the words of anthropologist Richard Lee, they were fiercely egalitarian.[2] They would not tolerate anyone’s boasting, or putting on airs, or trying to lord it over others. Their first line of defense was ridicule. If anyone–especially if some young man–attempted to act better than others or failed to show proper humility in daily life, the rest of the group, especially the elders, would make fun of that person until proper humility was shown.
One regular practice of the group that Lee studied was that of “insulting the meat.” Whenever a hunter brought back a fat antelope or other prized game item to be shared with the band, the hunter had to express proper humility by talking about how skinny and worthless it was. If he failed to do that (which happened rarely), others would do it for him and make fun of him in the process. When Lee asked one of the elders of the group about this practice, the response he received was the following: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.“
On the basis of such observations, Christopher Boehm proposed the theory that hunter-gatherers maintained equality through a practice that he labeled reverse dominance. In a standard dominance hierarchy–as can be seen in all of our ape relatives (yes, even in bonobos)–a few individuals dominate the many. In a system of reverse dominance, however, the many act in unison to deflate the ego of anyone who tries, even in an incipient way, to dominate them.
According to Boehm, hunter-gatherers are continuously vigilant to transgressions against the egalitarian ethos. Someone who boasts, or fails to share, or in any way seems to think that he (orshe, but usually it’s a he) is better than others is put in his place through teasing, which stops once the person stops the offensive behavior. If teasing doesn’t work, the next step is shunning. The band acts as if the offending person doesn’t exist. That almost always |
as much."
If significantly fewer fans tune in, he said, it's likely Rogers will offer discounted ad space, while companies that have already purchased slots may try to re-negotiate the terms of their contracts.
It's quite possible, of course, that Canadian hockey fans will still watch the playoffs in significant numbers despite the absence of a Canadian team.
Rogers could help spur further interest in Canadian fans by highlighting homegrown talent playing for U.S. teams, said Ryder. Canada's golden boy Sidney Crosby, for example, may duke it out in the playoffs with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
But regardless of how the company positions the post-season, it's unlikely to replicate the ratings when Canadian teams compete for the cup, Ryder said.
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Others point out that the rights acquisition was hardly a bad investment for Rogers. The company is only a few seasons into a 12-year deal that's likely to have good performance over the long-term.
Zwick compares Rogers's investment to a portfolio that's likely to have some bumps over the years, but should lead to a strong profit overall.
Rogers can also hope that the poor performance of Canadian teams this season will position them favourably to make early picks at June's NHL draft. The teams could beef up their rosters and become more fierce competitors next season, said Ryder.
But if the low Canadian dollar weakens the ability of Canadian franchises to attract top talent, Ryder added, Rogers could be facing the same problem next year.
"If it became a new trend that suddenly this once-in-40-years is now the new standard... then I'd be very worried about the rights I've acquired."Hello people!
Apple just approved version 1.2.4 of Junk Jack that removes the Chrismas theme (finally we’d say) and brings some minor fixes and some stuff for St Valentine!
New Features:
Removed Christmas theme and mobs
New St. Valentine bunny!
New rare St. Valentine Chest
New St. Valentine Bow
New St. Valentine Arrows
Tiny consumable St Valentine hearts can be found in the world
New rare Spider statue
New rare Stone Golem statue
New rare Worm statue
New rare Mummy Pharaoh statue
Bug Fixes:
Falling on blocks will make the correct block sound
The inventory outline for the cactus is now correct
It’s possible to hold on an item in a craftbook page to open its craft page (if it’s craftable)
It’s possible to hold on an addon label in a craftbook page to open its craft page
Player doesn’t get stuck inside blocks anymore when placing blocks on him
Wrapped ribbon decoration can now be placed on blocks adjacent to player
Jungle tree now makes the right sound when hit
As you can see this update is minor compared to the huge updates we did so far, this because we’re so busy building the foundations for the sequel of Junk Jack that we simply couldn’t do better than this. We hope you understand that 🙂
Now go and update the game on your devices, have fun with Junk Jack!The Fraser River winds through the valley. The lush, forest-covered mountains tower in the background. This is what some Sto:lo boys saw the last time they were at home with their families.
In 1858, the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush brought the first influx of non-Indigenous people, or Xwelitem, to the area around Fort Hope, now known as Hope, B.C.
When the rush was over, most of the miners returned to the United States with their bounty. However, at least a few of them took something more precious than gold back home with them.
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No one knows just how many Sto:lo boys were taken. Some were abandoned further downstream, but most of them ended up in California. New research by a Canadian professor has discovered that while Sto:lo families worked desperately to find their sons, the boys were removed with the apparent legal blessing of American officials who had passed a law allowing miners to take Indigenous boys from their families to use them for labour.
The view from what is now the Telte-Yet campsite on the banks of the Fraser would be their last sight of Hope. On Aug. 19, a memorial pole, currently being carved by Chief Terry Horne of Yakweakwioose First Nation, will be erected there in their honour.
"It's where [some of] the boys last touched Sto:lo territory," says Chief Horne.
The story is not well-known even among the Sto:lo community, but details are surfacing now thanks to the efforts of Dr. Keith Carlson, a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
His continuing research is part of the Canada 150-funded Lost Stories Project based at Concordia University, and will be featured as part of a larger work on the history of abducted Coast Salish children.
"I didn't know anything about it until I was told about the memorial project. It was almost hard to believe. Even my grandfather didn't know about it," says Chief Horne.
Records from the era are scant, but Dr. Carlson discovered some correspondence between colonial officials and a distraught Sto:lo man named Sokolowictz. He was seeking assistance in getting his son back from a Californian miner named George Crum.
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"Crum got on a steamboat and left [Fort Hope], and an hour or so later, Sokolowictz couldn't find his son," says Dr. Carlson.
"Someone told him, 'He got on the boat with that white guy.' So the family jumped in their canoes, paddling downriver to try and catch up but they couldn't make it."
Sokolowictz approached the Hudson's Bay Company and colonial officials for help.
For the next four years, he kept coming back, desperate for any information about his son. The post officer at the mouth of the Harrison River began corresponding with Mr. Crum, who claimed to be insulted by the abduction charge, instead reporting that Sokolowictz had repeatedly asked him to take the boy even though he did not wish to.
Mr. Crum wrote that he had since come to love the boy, adopting him as his own and giving him the name Charles.
The correspondence continued. Sokolowictz informed officials that not only had he been beaten by Mr. Crum, but that Mr. Crum previously had another Indigenous boy with him who died "in his service."
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Then, in a letter to the Harrison River post officer dated Jan. 31, 1863, Mr. Crum wrote "I must inform you that Charley died about the 29th of April last year and was buried decently in the Sacramento City Cemetery on my own family lot … his name is recorded on the register of that cemetery as Charles Crum. I consider him my son by adoption."
The death was confirmed by the British Council in San Francisco. On behalf of Sokolowictz, they tried to have the boy's remains repatriated but Mr. Crum would not allow it.
Almost 150 years later, Dr. Carlson was in California and attempted to locate the Crum family plot in Sacramento's old pioneer cemetery.
He found "Charley Crum, Indian Boy, Washington Territory" listed as buried in an unmarked grave within the Crum family plot.
This discovery has ignited a drive to have the boy's remains returned to B.C.
"My hope for the project is that by spreading knowledge of this, the boy will be repatriated back to our territory," says Chief Horne.
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A recent discovery by Dr. Carlson has now revealed a possible motivation behind the abductions.
"Most of the miners who came to B.C. at that time were veterans of the California Gold Rush about 10 years earlier," he explains. "Down there, they actually passed a law that gave miners the right to take young Indigenous boys from their families and employ them as indentured servants. I'm just getting into these records now and it's creepy."
Dr. Carlson believes that the miners continued this practice when they came to Canada. It could explain why Mr. Crum was reported to have another Indigenous boy with him before "Charles."
Dr. Carlson is now continuing to work with the Sto:lo community with the goal of finding the boys' relatives. So far, only one mention of them has been found since the last correspondence in 1863.
An article in the Chilliwack Progress dating back to 1904 mentions: "A great many boys were stolen away by these vicious white men" and that two of them were remarkably able to return to the Fraser Valley decades later as adults. At the time of the article, one of them was reported to still be alive and living at Chilliwack Landing.
Community leaders, with the help of Dr. Carlson, are hoping to determine the identity of this man and his family.
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"We're hoping that the memorial will get the community talking and someone will remember something about an old great-uncle or something like that," says Dr. Carlson.
The memorial is a red cedar, Coast-Salish-style house-post. "It has two figures on it, a father and a son, and their hands are reaching into the middle, kind of holding on to each other but at the same time letting go," explains Chief Horne, who has done some of the carving at Chilliwack Secondary School and Hope Secondary School.
"The hands in the middle represent them coming apart when the son was kidnapped, but they're also not touching so it represents them coming back together at the same time."Getty Image
Kyrie Irving is a member of the Boston Celtics now, in case you have been completely ignoring all NBA news for the past week and a half, and on Friday he was introduced officially to the Boston media. In his press conference, that was held along with free agent signing Gordon Hayward, Irving revealed that he hadn’t spoken with LeBron James since his trade request, and the two joked about how LeBron’s return squashed Hayward potentially signing in Cleveland in 2014.
After the press conference ended, Irving wasn’t done with the media, as he had some TV responsibilities to take care of with CSN New England. Former Celtic and fan favorite Brian Scalabrine was one of those handling Irving’s TV interview, and the two shared a funny moment prior to going live on air.
While getting settled in, with a camera rolling, Irving politely asked Scalabrine, “am I allowed to call you what everyone else calls you?” Scalabrine told him he can call him the White Mamba or Scal or whatever else in a pretty funny moment, as the two laughed at how ridiculous the legend of the White Mamba has become. The Facebook Live video, which was on CSN New England’s Facebook (which is where the pre-air camera roll was broadcast with the interaction), has since been removed.Clegg rejects suggestion by leader of the Liverpool Liberal Democrats to'sever ties' with the Conservatives
Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, has rejected a call from a senior Liberal Democrat councillor to pull out of the coalition government.
Warren Bradley, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Liverpool, said he was "tired of defending the indefensible" and urged Clegg to act "before we disappear into the annals of history".
In a private email to Clegg, leaked to the Liverpool Echo, Bradley said long-serving Lib Dem councillors in Liverpool were going to lose their seats in the 5 May elections "not because of their record, but because of your record and the perception of what we as Liberal Democrats now are".
Bradley, who was council leader until last year's election, warned the party leader: "Unfortunately the boil is about to come to a head and burst (probably on election night) when we lose some very well respected and experienced colleagues from Liverpool city council."
Bradley said the Lib Dems needed to "reconsider what and who we are before we disappear into the annals of history as a political party who promised so much hope, yet failed because they wanted control and power".
The party had "deserted their followers", he said.
He told Clegg: "I hope you take this in the spirit it is meant, liberal principles have to shine through, we have to be independent and we have to sever ties from the coalition; if we fail to do this, we have only our parliamentarians to blame."
But Clegg said Bradley was wrong. The Lib Dem leader told ITV's Daybreak: "These are very difficult times, and I'm not denying we're having to make controversial decisions, as anybody would who had come into power after the election last May, because we're cleaning up a terrible mess that was left behind.
"I think actually, Warren Bradley and everyone in Liverpool knows what it's like to clean up the mess left by Labour, that's exactly what Liberal Democrats in Liverpool had to do."
A Lib Dem spokesman said Bradley's email "simply does not reflect the views of the wider Liberal Democrat membership".
He said: "Moving from a party of protest to a party of power has brought with it some very difficult decisions but we cannot hide from the fact the country is borrowing an extra £400m every single day – the cost of a new primary school every 20 minutes."
He added: "Liberal Democrats are proud to be fighting, as always, on our strong record in local government and now for the first time in 65 years, on delivering in national government.
"Despite these very difficult times, the Liberal Democrats are delivering on proposals to help people in Liverpool and across the whole of the north-west."
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Vince Cable, the business secretary, said digging the country out of the "enormous economic hole" would take time but the government would succeed, including in cities such as Liverpool.
"That's a long-term project, it's going to take the five years of this parliament," he said.
"We've got to show stamina, this is a marathon not a sprint and I would recommend to Warren Bradley, who is an admirable Liberal Democrat, that he concentrates on the excellent record of the Liberal Democrats of restoring Liverpool after the terrible mess it was in.
"They should really concentrate on that and the mistakes made by the Labour council and not give up because this is a long-term project but we will turn the British economy around, and the Liberal Democrats in Liverpool and everywhere else will benefit from that."SCP-2845
Item #: SCP-2845
Threat Level: Black
Containment Class: Keter
Special Containment Procedures: Use of outsourced containment resources and consultants has been authorized for the containment of SCP-2845. Consultants are to be considered Level 2 personnel, and are at no time permitted to leave Site-100. If at any time an outside consultant must be removed from containment of SCP-2845, Class-A amnestics are to be applied before release.
A minimum of thirty trained individuals and an unhindered supply of untrained subjects is required for proper containment of SCP-2845. Forty-eight trained personnel are currently assigned to active containment of SCP-2845, split into eight teams of six, with a further twenty-four individuals available as replacements. An allowance of five D-class per week has been authorized for the containment of SCP-2845.
Site-100 has been constructed to the following specifications:
Site-100 consists of nine concentric circular bands, designated Ring-A through Ring-I, with a gap located between Ring-C and Ring-D, designated as Gap-1. Six circular chambers are located at 0, 60, 120, 180, 240, and 300 degrees within each Ring and Gap. The chambers located at 0 degrees are aligned with geographic north.
Two additional circular chambers are located outside of Ring-I, located at 120 and 240 degrees.
The floor of each circular chamber contains an unobstructed lead hexagram.
The central chamber, containing SCP-2845 and 216 instances of SCP-2845-1, is to contain an atmosphere of 96.3% hydrogen, 3.25% helium, and.45% ammonia maintained at -110°C and a pressure of 2.3 bar.
The following procedures are all to be carried out in a repeating cycle of 63 hours 54 minutes. Each procedure is to last 39 minutes, with 10 hours between each procedure. Each procedure must be carried out by six individuals. The location of each procedure is denoted in parentheses. At the beginning of each new cycle, containment procedures will be carried out in the next ring closest to the containment chamber.
Ceremonial recitations for all procedures and descriptions of all variant costumes may be found in Document 2845-C-EXP.
Procedure 410-Constantin: (60°) Containment specialists are presented with masks (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Apathy, Fear, and Foolishness) and act out ceremony Constantin-A. Ceremony Constanin-A is a farcical comedy of errors and exchange of insults between the six individuals, culminating in Foolishness outwitting the group in a game of riddles and declaring himself king. The conclusion of ceremony Constantin-A is followed by a game of dice. The winner of the game is irrelevant to the procedure.
Procedure 420-Perinaldo: (120°) Performance of a musical piece for flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn, timpani, and bass drum. The piece is accompanied by specific somatic and vocal components carried out by the players throughout the performance, designated ceremony Perinaldo-A. The performance must be live; recordings of the piece have no effect.
Procedure 430-Epimetheus: (180°) Gifts are exchanged among containment specialists. Content of gifts is irrelevant to the procedure, but each gift must not exceed 4.28 USD in worth. Each gift is accompanied by recitation of ceremony Epimetheus-A in its entirety and the scattering of grain around the containment chamber.
Procedure 440-Cassiel: (240°) Ceremony Cassiel-A is recited as containment specialists bind their feet with wool and consume.5 liters of olive oil. They then will break apart a rock weighing at least 200 kilograms with hammers. Ceremony Cassiel-B is recited throughout.
Procedure 450-Cairo: (300°) A D-class subject is prepared by painting a symbol (ring surrounding a dot, with an arrow pointing upwards at the 90 degree point) on the stomach with a platinum-based solution, and presented with a blue cloak, crown, and scepter. D-class subject is then restrained in a chair, and ceremony Cairo-A is recited. After recitation of the ceremony Cairo-A, the D-class subject is to be castrated by use of a hand sickle by a containment specialist. The testes are then to be disposed of in a bowl of salt water as Ceremony Cairo-B is recited.
Procedure 460-Omphalos: (0°) Ceremony Omphalos-A is to be recited before roasting of a child of no more than three months of age. Ceremony Omphalos-B is to be recited before consumption. After consumption of the child, ceremony Omphalos-C is to be recited over the gastroliths, which are then swallowed. Vomiting is then induced, and ceremony Omphalos-D is recited, signaling the beginning of a new cycle.
In the case of containment breach, Site-100’s nuclear device is to be detonated, followed by lockdown of all Foundation facilities, and activation of Protocol 2845-XK1 “Strike Down the Moon.”
+ A message from containment consultant ██████ ████████ to Site Director Dell, 1/31/12 - TOWERING KADATH, MY HOME. I have been approached several times already in regards to the containment procedures and their complexity. I have been asked if all of the procedures are truly necessary, if they could not be cut down or edited for simplicity, and at least one claim that they were “patently ridiculous”. This is my response, and I expect that it will be seen by all of the Foundation staff working on this project. I will not repeat myself, and I find it sickening that after all the struggle to contain this creature, pencil-pushing bureaucrats are still seeking to cut corners where they cannot be afforded to be cut. The answer is no: The ritual will remain as it is, and will not be changed in any way. It cannot be cut down further, nor can it be added to. It has been set in place, and now that it has begun any deviation at all could very easily be catastrophic. Rituals do not work because of some underlying laws, such as those that science operates on. Rituals work because they are rituals. They work because an arbitrary set of criteria has been met with exacting care. Belief that meeting these arbitrary criteria achieves a certain end assigns power to the ritual. The actions that were once meaningless now have been assigned Meaning through their repetition and application. This is how one seals away a god, and this is a god. I know that the Foundation does not approve of using the term, but it is still the case. The Stag is a god, and it is not a petty local god. It is not one of the mild gods of Earth, or some weaker spirit that is bound by the strength of man’s belief. We have, for the time being, fooled it into thinking that we have overpowered it. It does not understand that we do so falsely: it is a god. For gods, words have Power. Ritual and belief hold greater power over a god than all the laws of science. However, it must be kept in mind that the Stag could escape, right now, if it so chose. With a thought, this entire facility could turn into a puff of hydrogen. If at any point the Stag thought to escape, it would, and we would be powerless to stop it. However, it will not think to escape, or even to change its strategy. The idea will not even pass through its mind. It cannot comprehend the concept. It does not think in the way we think. Truth be told, I would not say that it thinks at all. This is an old god, it does not dabble in decisions. Decisions are for creatures who may act erratically, variably, or out of line. A god of this strength simply Is. It is an absolute. It acts as a force. In building this ritual, we have shifted its being the slightest bit, and now it is locked into a pattern of behavior: it struggles against us, we struggle against it, and we are locked together in an eternal dance so long as the ritual remains intact. If one thing goes awry, the entirety is lost, and the deadlock is broken. Unstoppable force without an immovable object. The rituals might seem to be nonsense, but they are what I divined to be the best course of action. There are powerful symbols there, and whether or not you or I think they are appropriate to the situation is irrelevant. I have listened to the converted, and I have listened to the echoes of the Stag in their songs. They are not suffering, but they are no longer human. They are changed utterly. The ritual remains as it is.
Description: SCP-2845 is a quadruped entity, measuring 2.9 meters in height at the shoulder and weighing 815 kilograms. A sinuous neck, generally held in an upright position, extends a further.5 m, terminating in a head with humanoid facial features. SCP-2845 possesses antlers, measuring 4.8 meters across: Antlers are white with black marbling in coloration, and have not been observed to shed. SCP-2845 is covered in hair with an average length of 10 cm, with the exception of the face, which is hairless. SCP-2845’s coloration is primarily a pastel green, with a stripe of cream on the underside of the neck and belly.
A ring of ice particles is suspended 15 cm behind SCP-2845’s skull, measuring 1.7 m in diameter, with a ring thickness of 35 cm. This ring is interrupted at regular intervals by seven spheres consisting of metallic hydrogen and metallic helium, each measuring 15 cm in diameter. The ring and spheres rotate clockwise at a speed of 1.6 rpm. The force maintaining the movement of the ring, the physical state of the spheres, and the means by which SCP-2845 is capable of supporting its head under the weight of its antlers are unknown.
SCP-2845 is capable of instantaneous transmutation and reconstruction of matter. No matter is created or destroyed during this process. This property is manifested at will, with an observed range extending to targets within eyesight: maximum range of this ability is unknown. Transmuted matter will remain stable despite the lack of other factors: for example, metallic hydrogen and helium are common results, which will remain in either solid or liquid form despite the surrounding temperature. Altered atmosphere will not mix with unaltered regions, maintaining chemical consistency. The most common transmutation results are the solid or liquid forms of hydrogen, and helium, the conversion of atmosphere into a hydrogen/helium/ammonia mix, and the transmutation of plant life into metalloid-based organisms. SCP-2845 will typically surround itself with a transmuted area with a radius of approximately five meters at all times. SCP-2845 has proven itself completely resistant to physical damage.
The most common forms of offensive transmutation used by SCP-2845 are a column measuring five to seven meters in diameter and sixty to eighty meters in height, or a horizontal cone measuring between one hundred and one hundred and fifty meters in length and ten to thirty meters in width at the furthest end. However, SCP-2845 has been observed to attack single targets at distances of up to 10 kilometers. Early observation of SCP-2845 during recovery indicated that it will generally ignore non-combatants, focusing on retaliation against attackers. However, SCP-2845 was not seen to make any attempts to spare non-combatants within the area of effect of its transmutations, and later recovery accounts indicate pre-emptive attacks against both military and civilian targets.
SCP-2845-1 designates human beings that have been modified by SCP-2845. Instances of SCP-2845-1 are hexagonal columns measuring 2.4 meters in height, with rubbery yellow-green skin. SCP-2845-1 instances do not have any outward sense organs, and autopsy has shown that internal organs are likewise absent, save the brain, which now takes up the entirety of the column and contains the reconstituted mass of the other organs and some additional outside materials. It is unknown how SCP-2845-1 instances derive nutrients, or if any nutrition is required.
Neuroimaging of SCP-2845-1 specimens has revealed that the brain is in a constant state of high activity. Analysis of multiple specimens indicates patterns of call and response, so some form of remote communication between SCP-2845-1 specimens is presumed.
Motile variants of SCP-2845-1 have been reported, but have evaded capture and study.
Addendum-01: An abridged timeline of SCP-2845 from initial discovery to containment is as follows:Download a pdf of "Cheap Labor as Cultural Exchange"
View the Table of Contents
Jerry Kammer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
In the summer of 1969, after graduating from Wellesley College and before entering Yale Law School, a young woman from Illinois named Hillary Rodham scooped the innards from salmon at a cold, wet processing plant in Valdez, Alaska. “I slimed fish,” she recalled during a visit to Anchorage as First Lady in 1994. “I was handed a spoon, some hip boots and a raincoat, and I think it was the best preparation for living in Washington.” Her husband, President Bill Clinton, quipped that, “in Washington you have to trade the spoon in for a shovel.”1
For decades, summer jobs in Alaska have beckoned to American college students eager to earn good money and revel in the state’s natural wonders. But in 2011 about 2,000 of these jobs – at fish processing plants, national parks, and other locations – were filled by young foreigners who come to the United States under a “cultural exchange” program administered by the State Department, which is directed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
They are participants in the Summer Work Travel program (SWT). Every year SWT provides J-1 visas to more than 100,000 college students from around the world, allowing them to work for three months and take an additional month to travel. Because they pay an average of about $1,100 in fees to the private organizations that sponsor their participation in the program, the program generates well over $100 million in annual revenues for those organizations. They pay many millions more in visa fees to the State Department and in travel expenses to and from the U.S.2
The J-1 students, as they are sometimes known, can be found at national parks and beach resorts; amusement parks and neighborhood swimming pools; seafood processing plants and farms; upscale restaurants and fast food franchises; convenience stores, toy stores, and candy shops; roadside vegetable stands; factories, warehouses and moving companies. All in the name of cultural exchange.
“The sky is really the limit,” says the website of a Singapore travel agency that promotes the program through its affiliation with U.S. organizations designated by the State Department to sponsor SWT participants. The website declares that “there are thousands of cities and towns throughout America that can offer you a totally unique Work and Travel USA experience.”3
There are hundreds of such agencies that promote SWT around the world. Their websites buzz with too-good-to-be true astonishment at the program’s benefits for employers and workers alike.
“Sounds like a scam?” a Russian agency asks on its website, which notes that employers of SWT participants are exempt from Social Security, Medicare, and federal unemployment taxes. Then it answers the question: “It’s not. This is Work and Travel USA program, designed by the U.S. Dept. of state to promote intercultural friendship.”4
Critics claim that the State Department office responsible for administering the program has provided such lax regulation and permissive oversight that it has spun out of control and – in some cases – into the hands of abusive employers, unscrupulous sponsors, and predatory third-party agencies overseas.
The list of specific criticisms is long, including claims that the SWT program:
has become a cheap-labor program under the guise of cultural exchange;
has monetized a foreign policy initiative, creating a multi-million dollar SWT industry that generates enormous profits under the mantle of public diplomacy and presses for continual expansion around globe;
is so dominated by the State Department’s concerns about international relations that it has become blind to the negative effects at home;
displaces young Americans from the workplace at a time of record levels of youth unemployment;
provides incentives for employers to bypass American workers by exempting SWT employers from taxes that apply to employment of Americans. Employers also don’t have to worry about providing health insurance, since SWT students are required to buy it for themselves;
puts downward pressure on wages because it gives employers access to workers from poor countries who are eager to come to the United States, not just to earn money but also to travel within the country and burnish their resumes by learning English;
depends upon young foreigners who must spend several thousand dollars in fees, travel costs, and health insurance. As a result, many are virtually indentured to U.S. employers and are therefore unable to challenge low pay and poor working and housing conditions;
is not truly an exchange program because it lacks reciprocity since a negligible number of young Americans find overseas employment through the SWT sponsoring agencies;
has become a gateway for illegal immigration by SWT participants who overstay their visas; and
has been exploited by criminals. For instance, in 2009, a State Department cable noted an ongoing investigation of “a Eurasian Organized Crime group operating in Colorado and Nevada that is suspected of using 28 Summer Work and Travel exchange program students … to participate in financial fraud schemes.”5
* * *
In the spring of 2011, State acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security “has reported an increase in incidents involving criminal conduct (e.g. money laundering, identity theft, prostitution)” among SWT participants.6 That acknowledgement came as State issued new regulations intended to curb abuse of the program and require sponsors to fulfill their duty to monitor and advise their young customers.
State, which is supposed to oversee and regulate the sponsors, admitted that some of them had been so detached from their responsibilities that they became “mere purveyors of J-1 visas, leaving the actual program administration to third parties.”7
In the fall of 2011, as criticism mounted and Ann Stock, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, made a series of personnel moves, she quietly pushed Stanley S. Colvin out of his job as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Private Sector Exchange. Colvin, who is challenging the move as a violation of his rights, has been assigned to the job of “strategic adviser” to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Colvin had been involved in managing the program since the 1990s, when he was assistant general counsel at the United States Information Agency. The USIA administered SWT until 1999, when it was absorbed into the State Department.
In November of 2011, State announced the first-ever numerical restriction on the size of the program, freezing it at the 2011 level in response to what it called “unacceptably high” numbers of complaints about program abuses.8
That move was a sharp departure from State’s previous policy of promoting the growth of SWT – and other exchange programs – around the world.
For years, State has spread the news of exchanges with a missionary intensity. Dina Habib Powell, a State Department official in the administration of George W. Bush, called exchanges “a strategic pillar of our nation’s public diplomacy.”9 In 2009, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale said exchanges are “the single most important and valuable thing we do.”10
State’s Dual Relationship with SWT Partners
The exchange structure was established in 1961, when Congress passed the Mutual Education and Cultural Exchange Act. The legislation sought to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”11
Propelled by successive administrations, SWT grew dramatically. Its ranks of young participants swelled from about 20,000 in 1996, to 56,000 in 2000, and 88,500 in 2005. Participation peaked in 2008 at nearly 153,000 before the recession caused it to sag – to 132,000 in 2010 and 103,000 in 2011.
While State has the responsibility regulate SWT, the day-to-day administration of the program is the work of some 55 organizations designated by the State Department as SWT sponsors. Many are nonprofit organizations that administer a variety of exchange programs and enjoy tax-exempt status. Some have grown rapidly because of the SWT boom.
The relationship between the sponsors and the State Department is characterized by unusual duality that at times seems schizophrenic.
On the one hand, as the regulator of the SWT program, State oversees the sponsors and must be willing to discipline them when appropriate. On the other hand, State Department officials regard the relationship as a partnership. In 2010 Assistant Secretary of State Ann Stock called the sponsors “our key partner on the front lines of international engagement.”12
Stock made that observation at the 2010 meeting of the Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange, a trade association that lobbies Congress and the State Department for the sponsors, who themselves have a dual approach to their work. They declare an idealistic commitment to building exchanges for the sake of world peace. But they also rake in tens of millions of dollars in fees from the foreign students they bring into the SWT program.
Sponsors’ income has soared in the past decade as the SWT program has grown rapidly and spread around the world. The Alliance’s executive director, Michael McCarry, has said that one of his responsibilities is to lobby for federal “regulations that are permissive and allow people to come to the United States, in a responsible way.”13 McCarry coordinates the sponsors’ work with congressional offices, where they advocate not just for SWT, but for many other exchange programs, including those for high school students, au pairs, camp counselors, teachers, professionals, and others.
In the SWT program the State-sponsor relationship is complicated by the fact that State has allowed the sponsors to outsource much of their work – the screening and selecting of SWT participants and their orientation to life in the United States – to partner agencies in foreign countries that are not under State’s jurisdiction.
Problems with Foreign Partners
In some instances, sponsors have done little more than collect students’ fees as they outsourced much of their work to their foreign partners. And in some instances the foreign partners have proved to be unscrupulous or even criminal.
In 2009, for example, the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg highlighted the poor screening of a Russian agency by describing one SWT applicant who, “when questioned about why she was not attending university, admitted that she works in St. Petersburg at an erotic services salon.” The consulate found that another agency was using its relationship with a U.S. sponsor to provide job offers “at U.S. companies that no longer existed.”14
Such negligence and fraud were the target of new regulations adopted by the State Department in 2011. Those regulations require that sponsors vet and monitor their sponsors more carefully. Critics have called them “vague” and “toothless.”
Striving to Be “Customer Centric”
As we will see, the sponsoring organizations and their partners have mounted elaborate campaigns to recruit both SWT participants and U.S. employers. Meanwhile, the State Department has complemented their efforts with a spirited boosterism of a sort more commonly associated with the Chamber of Commerce.
A month after State adopted the new regulations to control SWT, it rolled out its new J-1 visa website. In a 2011 webchat with foreign reporters, an official hailed the move as the “first step to revamping our entire Bureau’s web presence to be more customer centric and user friendly.”15
State was enthusiastic about the prospects for further growth and globalization of SWT. In the same webchat, one official noted its blossoming potential in some of the world’s most populous countries with this excited assessment: “Brazil is a very big sending country. A lot of the Eastern and Western European countries are top sending countries. China is definitely growing. India is growing.” SWT is open to the world. Yet the officials assured the foreign audience that the size of the SWT program is determined largely by the marketplace of young foreigners who wanted to participate.
State’s abrupt decision in November 2011 to freeze the number of SWT participants signaled at least a tentative recognition that the program needs also to balance other concerns, including unemployment rates within the United States, the appropriateness of some SWT jobs for a cultural exchange, and the ability of sponsors to do their work responsibly.
At the same time, State announced that it was suspending designation of new sponsors for the program. Nevertheless, more than a month later, State was still declaring on its J-1 website that it “welcomes and encourages new organizations to become sponsors of exchange |
, the utilities lobby is proposing to change depreciation rules that would allow them to recoup their investment more quickly than they do now, and hit consumers with the extra costs. The alternative, they say, is to charge all users for the grid even if they are not connected. Even the utilities lobby admits this is not practical, and not fair.
Seba goes on: “Utilities may not like distributed solar, but they will sure try to make money from this exponentially growing market without investing a single dime. Solar taxes, anyone?”
Hey presto, that is what is happening now. In Spain, it is flagrant, in Australia slightly more subtle – extra network charges for households with solar being just the start.
The problem comes down to the inability of these massive businesses to deal with a new business model. Like the arrival of digital photography, established businesses don’t know how to react when the marginal cost of production is zero.
Kodak found this a decade ago. It failed not because it did not develop digital photography, it did. As Yonts notes, Kodak got killed because it didn’t realise the marginal cost of digital imaging was zero, and they wanted to grab a slice of each photo – but that was a slice of zero.
The new (digital imaging) paradigm required new business models. So does energy generation, because the marginal cost of generating electricity from solar and wind turbines is also, effectively, zero.
Like the digital camera, and PCs and mobile phones, established technologies are being “disrupted from below” by products that were once dismissed as toys, but have improved at a fast rate.Creating wearable electronics that are functional and not overly bulky is very, very hard. [Zak], though, makes it look easy. He started his DIY digital wrist watch to see how much he could cram into a watch-sized device. The finished product is really incredible, and one of the most amazing DIY watches we’ve ever seen.
The electronics for the watch include an ATMega328p, a DS3231M Real Time Clock, a Microchip battery charger, and a few resistors and caps. The display is an OLED, 1.3″ wide and only 1.5 mm thick, contributing to the crazy 10mm overall thickness of the watch.
The software is where this watch really shines. Along with the standard time and date functions, [Zak] included everything and more a wrist watch should have. There is an interface to set up to ten alarms on different days of the week, a Breakout and ‘Car Dodge’ game, a flashlight with integrated ‘rave’ mode, and a stopwatch. On top of this, [Zak] included some great animations very similar to the CRT-like animations found in Android.
It’s a fabulous piece of kit, and if any project were deserving of being made into an actual product, this is it.
You can check out [Zak]’s demo of all the functions of his watch below.People who drive for ride-sharing company Uber frequently ignore a key traffic law that impacts bicycle access on major streets. And when called out for doing so the drivers have a tendency to lash out at — and in some cases physically assault and/or harrass — other road users.
We now know of three such incidents in the past ten weeks.
This morning we received an email from a reader who came upon an Uber driver who was parked on the new raised bike lane on NE Couch as it enters the Burnside Bridge. When the bicycle rider confronted the person inside the car and attempted to photograph the vehicle, he claims he was verbally threatened. “He got out of his vehicle, got face-to-face with me, and threatened to asssault me.” Not wanting the situation to escalate, the man on the bicycle says he stood down and let the driver vent. That tactic didn’t prevent the driver from forcibly grabbing his bike and throwing it aside.
On October 19th another Portlander tried to document illegal and dangerous parking by someone who drives for Uber (and Lyft). He said the driver got mad, stepped out of the car, and grabbed his phone. He captured it on Twitter…
After telling @Uber @lyft driver she was parked in a bike lane & getting refusal to admit it, tried to take pic of her-SHE GRABBED MY PHONE! pic.twitter.com/3ipw36gejN — dudeluna (@dudeluna) October 19, 2016
And on August 27th, we reported about another case where a person who appeared to be driving for Uber assaulted a bicycle rider. In that case the woman was later arrested thanks in part because the bicycle rider had documented proof of the altercation and the driver bragged about the incident online.
These are just the incidents we’ve heard about.
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I have personally seen several people with Uber and/or Lyft stickers in their cars, staring at their phones while parked in bicycling-only lanes. It seems to be yet another dangerous nuisance people on bikes have to deal with on a daily basis.
So far Uber has been responsive when contacted about the problem. Jon Isaacs, their public affairs manager for Oregon, told us the woman in the August 27th incident was immediately “suspended from accessing the Uber platform.” That phrase (which the company calls “Deactivation”) is strategic because Uber says people who drive for them are only “independent driver-partners” and not full-fledged employees who can be “fired” or “suspended”. Isaacs also told us that, “rider and pedestrian safety continue to be our top priority” and that, “We have a zero tolerance policy for any reckless or dangerous actions by drivers or riders.”
Uber’s current policy states that any driver who receives “several or serious complaints of poor, unsafe or distracted driving while using the Uber app” will face deactivation. Once they can no longer access the app, people can re-enlist as an Uber driver by showing the company they’ve “taken steps to improve” such as taking a “quality improvement course.”
It’s hard enough for traditional transportation agencies to educate and police the behaviors of their drivers. So can we really expect much improvement from a company that considers their drivers nothing more than “independent partners”? These behaviors are happening with too much frequency for a company to rely only on legal fine print to keep their drivers in check.
We’ve asked Isaacs to comment on this recent incident (they’ve responded to the victim and have started an investigation) and will update this post if/when we hear back.
For now, since this trend is likely to continue, here’s what to do if you would like to file a complaint with an Uber or Lyft driver: Email Isaacs at [email protected] and fill out the complaint form on the Portland Bureau of Transportation website. If you have been assaulted, file a report with the police online or call the PPB non-emergency line at (503) 823-3333.
— Jonathan Maus, (503) 706-8804 – [email protected]
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uberDW: Can the US-Russian backed UN draft resolution achieve its goal of destroying the Syrian regime's chemical weapons arsenal?
Dr. Joshua Landis: It's much more likely to achieve it than American bombing. An American strike on Syria would have blown up some buildings and killed some Syrian soldiers and others, but it wouldn't have done anything to destroy chemical weapons. It might have deterred Assad for sometime.
But this process deters Assad for at least one year, one would assume, from using his weapons. And it holds out the promise of Russian pressure on Assad to cough up the weapons. Now, Russia may have to pay Assad with more conventional weapons to get the things out.
But it's a net positive over what the alternatives were. Otherwise, Obama was going to do this all by himself with no support from the international community or from his own people, which was a very precarious political position to be in. At least now, he has international support to root out these weapons.
Where does that leave the Syrian rebels? It leaves them in a better position because Assad is less likely to use chemical weapons for the next year at least, and probably forever, which means they don't get killed by chemical weapons, which is better than before. It neutralizes a big element of his arsenal.
By jointly backing the UN resolution, the United States and Russia appear to be on the same side of the Syrian conflict for the first time. Will this cooperation bring any political progress in Syria?
I don't think so. It depends on what kind of progress you're looking for. If you're looking for the division of Syria and a possible cease-fire along present lines, then it brings us closer. If you're looking for a Sunni win over the Assad government, it does not.
If you're looking for the end of a refugee crisis and so forth through the division of Syria - into a regime Syria and a rebel-run Syria - this could actually bring us closer because America is less likely to encourage the rebels to go for a win, and that is already taking the wind out of the rebel effort.
Dr. Joshua Landis
So basically, the rebels in Syria understand that Obama is more interested in chemical weapons than in helping the rebels. In fact, what this whole effort is saying to them is that the only thing that Obama considers worse than Assad having chemical weapons is the rebels having chemical weapons.
Does that mean, in private, the US position is actually closer to the Russian position than stated publicly?
Yes, it always had been. That's why America has been turning to Russia since the beginning for a resolution in the UN instead of just bombing Syria. We could do an Iraq on Syria. In Iraq, it took us three weeks to destroy Saddam. But we could probably destroy Assad in much less than that. But we don't want to because we don't like what the rebels offer us.
The Russians have been telling us [the United States] since Afghanistan that what we're doing in the Middle East is not bringing democracy; it's bringing failed states and more Islamism and terrorism.
I think the United States has come around to the Russian thinking on this, which is why you're hearing so little about democracy promotion from Obama, and you're hearing a lot about containment and managing conflict – patchwork security. These are the code words for "we don't trust Arabs to be democratic."
The draft resolution says that if Syria doesn't comply and destroy its chemical weapons, then the Security Council may take Chapter VII measures. But a second resolution has to be adopted for that. Will Russia change its position toward sanctions and the use of force, if Syria doesn't comply?
We don't know what Russia will exactly do. Obviously this is weak. Lots of Americans are apoplectic at [Secretary of State John] Kerry: That he's been outmaneuvered by Russia; that [Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov is the wily fox and knows the UN; that Russia owns the UN. We're hearing all of these sweet phrases out of very angry American right-wingers. And some not so right-wingers, some liberal hawks [too].
But the fact of the matter is America has a very weak hand here. We don't want to own Syria. Obama doesn't want to open the money spigot on the Syrian problem. He has no faith that America can fix the Syria problem. We basically had an infinite amount of money to spend on Iraq and couldn't fix anything. And the same in Afghanistan. So the Russians have a strong hand – we're telling the Russians: You fix this problem.
We're not going to get the UN to sign a Chapter VII. At any rate, the only people who would bomb Syria on a Chapter VII are America. We don't need a Chapter VII to bomb them – Obama can fly his jets over there anytime he wants, and he'll be all alone. And he will be [alone] even if the UN signs a Chapter VII, because I'm sure Germany isn't going to send any jets over there to bomb Syria. Nor is France for that matter, even if they talk big. And England has already made clear that they're not going to do it. Chapter VII or no Chapter VII, it all adds up to the same thing: If Obama wants to police this, he can bomb them.
Now what Obama got out of the UN is better because it gives the Russians leverage over the Syrians. The Russians can say they're holding back the Americans. And the Americans are going to be sitting there with a magnifying glass trying to point out everywhere Syrians are cheating. Ultimately, will they get every chemical weapon? I doubt it. But will they get a lot? They probably will, because Assad doesn't want to get bombed.
Are Assad and Russia serious about destroying the chemical weapons, or is this a way to buy time for the regime?
The regime looks at it as a way to buy time. America looks at it as a serious way to destroy the weapons. And Russia isn't quite sure. What we had three weeks ago is America was going to unilaterally destroy a Russian client, which was going to make Russia look weak. Today, America is sitting down with Russia and letting Russia manage this affair. It's much better for Russia; it's much better for Assad; but it's also better for America. It's a win, win, win.
We have to remember – America has no strategic interests in Syria, very few. We've had sanctions on Syria since the seventies; we have no trade with the country; we don't talk to them diplomatically about anything except for stopping terrorism and support for Hamas and Hezbollah. And today, Syria doesn't support either group with any money or any arms because it's too busy supporting itself. In fact, Syria is a net drain for both those groups.
So Syria is actually doing the right thing from the point of view of American interests by eating up its military machine and destroying itself. Now of course, there's potential spillover in the region, and destabilizing Jordan and Lebanon, but so far it's pretty good. Those countries have not collapsed. Turkey is weaker than it was. The situation is not bad for America if you want to look at it cold hearted.
Sure it puts stress and it's creating a big al Qaeda problem. Obama wanted to declare victory over al Qaeda once he killed Bin Laden and say that he had attrited and destroyed two-thirds of the al Qaeda leadership. The problem is that what we're watching in Syria and Iraq is the resurrection of an al Qaeda two. And it's much bigger and much more numerous than it ever was in Afghanistan. There are thousands of jihadists getting front line training and actually developing an Islamic state, because Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant owns big swathes of Syria.
Assad's strategy is to help turn the rebel-owned north of Syria into Kandahar and then to offer his services to America and Russia as the person who can help them solve their al Qaeda problem. That's what he's telling America and the world every time he gets on TV.
Dr. Joshua Landis is director of the Center for Middle East Studies and associate professor at the University of Oklahoma's College of International Studies. He is also the president of the Syrian Studies Association and the webmaster of syriacomment.com.Leia Organa, the politician and revolutionary who led the defeat of the Galactic Empire, died after a short illness. She was 60 years old. Hers was a life laced with controversy concerning everything from her tactics to her very ancestry, but her intelligence, commitment to the Republican cause, and place at the heart of the Rebellion, and later the Resistance against Neo-Imperialism, remains the indisputable core of her legacy.
Early Life in the Rebellion
Organa was born Leia Amidala Skywalker, and the name presaged the uncertainty with which she would be viewed, even before her parentage became a matter of public record. Her mother, Padme Amidala, organized the Delegation of 2000 which resisted the foundation of the Palpatinian New Order, yet her father, Anakin Skywalker, would become better known as the Imperial war criminal, Darth Vader. Leia’s twin brother Luke Skywalker would be separated from her and taught the Jedi legacy by members of its hidden diaspora, but Leia was adopted by Delegation of 2000’s Senator of Alderaan, Bail Organa, who never told her about her true ancestry.
Yet he freely shared other secrets, including the networks, irregular forces and war materiel he and other anti-Imperial leaders organized to resist the New Order. By her early teens, Leia Organa demonstrated talents ranging from logistics to sapient asset intelligence analysis. Even as she helped him build the nascent Alliance to Restore the Republic, she found herself drawn to a different aspect of the broad front’s efforts. Her critical materialist analysis of the Rebellion drew from Gererrist radical pragmatism and (not knowing the author was her biological mother) Amidala’s Interspecies Discourse on Naboo, a text banned throughout the Empire due to COMPNOR’s human supremacist policies.
While Leia Organa’s letters, doctrines and later, command directives formed the ideological-strategic core of the Alliance, she avoided the leadership roles assumed by her father and Mon Mothma. Indeed, she used the courtesy title Princess (afforded by her adopted parents, as elected officials in Alderaan’s post-monarchic democracy) sparingly, and purely for political effect. She became a field operative instead, managing diverse intelligence assets under the cover of diplomatic and sapient-relief travel. Before the Battle of Scarif, her missions shared intelligence with numerous Alliance cells. Her uncanny ability to predict the actions of enemies and allies alike made her essential, but the Alliance treated her warily, concerned she might manipulate its forces for her own ends.
These worries may have been justified when Organa prevented Yavin IV Flight Command from properly securing arms and spacecraft related to the extraction of Jyn Erso. She correctly predicted Erso and the Andor faction would act on their own, and made a shuttle, droid and weapons conveniently available. Operation Rogue One remains controversial; critics note that Organa sacrificed the entire volunteer cadre, hundreds of troops and much of the Alliance fleet to acquire Designation Stardust intelligence, and that its ultimate success owed itself to her activation of a Jedi asset, Obi-Wan Kenobi, as she was captured by Imperial forces. Indeed, the coincidences behind her subsequent escape and organization of the defense of Yavin IV have been ascribed to the Force, singular tactical genius or pure luck – all ideologically fraught options.
The Organa Doctrine
Most historians now see the Stardust/DS-class superweapons as relatively minor parts of the Empire’s war machine (The Imperial-class Star Destroyer remained the primary engine of its force-projection capabilities), but Organa demonstrated the importance of stymieing these and similar efforts through her landmark analysis of the Empire’s ideology and political economy. Later published as The Head of Clay: Elitism, Warlordism and Weakness in the Galactic Empire, her papers proved that as competition for political prestige motivated the Empire’s factions, they would necessarily centralize power, organizing capital in progressively less efficient “superprojects:” initiatives a clique could explain to the Emperor and his inner circle in simple, direct terms, and control through a centralized command structure. Superprojects caught the eye of the inner circle, while more complex proposals (such as Holonet infrastructure improvements) and those requiring cross-clique cooperation (such as maintaining Clone Wars era advanced military technologies) fell by the wayside.
The superprojects trend began during the Palpatinian Republic (and possibly earlier, if GAOR clone forces could be considered one of them), reaching an early peak in Stardust/DS-1 itself, a massive undertaking that consumed 1% of GaDP over nearly two decades. Alliance attacks on superprojects inflicted devastating economic damage and often led to the death and capture of key Imperial influencers, who preferred to personally supervise their work in case a competitor attempted to sabotage or seize control of it. Each attack made the Empire more reliant on successor superprojects to recoup losses and keep systems dependent on its common economy, but each failure prompted peripheral worlds to secede and escape the fallout. Although it would later become famous as a verse in Interstellar People’s War, Organa first explained her doctrine’s essence to Wilhuf Tarkin himself: “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” Yet the Empire remained locked into the cycle, to the point where the Emperor personally commanded a successor to Stardust/DS-1 in the hope that this economic necessity would at least create a viable terror weapon.
The Organa Doctrine is widely believed to have won the Galactic Civil War. According to Admiral Gial Ackbar (Ret.):
“It was impossible to defeat the massed Imperial Starfleet, so the question was always one of choosing the most effective targets. The Sienar and Kuat combines possessed redundant facilities to the extent that we could barely put a dent in ship production. The Organa Doctrine identified the Empire’s critical weakness and through rigorous materialist analysis, showed us where to hit the hardest, and hurt them the most. And as one faction fell with its project, another took its place, eager to please the Emperor with some new, grand mission. It was their trap – inescapable, embedded within their political praxis.”
Covert Operations, Victory and Controversy
The Organa Doctrine identified the path to victory, but the woman herself remained on the front line, rarely pausing for conferences with Alliance intelligence droids. This may have contributed to the ambiguous reception she received in the post-Imperial era, as she didn’t emerge with the political influence accorded leaders like Mon Mothma. While they directed large scale operations (often per Organa’s theories and recommendations) she led covert operations on numerous worlds. She worked under deep cover as the bounty hunter Boussh, and during Galactic Concordance negotiations at the end of the war, admitted that during this period, she personally assassinated Hutt leader Jabba Desilijic Tiure.
She was also revealed to be Darth Vader’s daughter, contributing to further marginalization not because of her ancestry per se, but in the context of an operation where she authorized Luke Skywalker (her collaborator in the killing of Jabba) to infiltrate DS-2, turn Vader into an Alliance asset, and kill the Emperor. Representatives raised questions about her objectivity, her use of political killing as a tool of warfare, the possibility that she might have granted Vader immunity from war crimes prosecution, and her indifference to risk, given that she was willing to sacrifice the last known Jedi in multiple operations. Organa was unrepentant.
Resistance Against Neo-Imperialism
Yet the Galactic Concordance relied on her analysis, though she argued that it had been misinterpreted. By shifting the New Republic capital periodically, leaders hoped to prevent clique formation, and through demilitarization, they planned to prevent future superproject fiascoes. Organa maintained that without a strong de-Imperialization program, these measures would fail. In her address to the first session of the restored New Republic Senate, she said:
“After the transition from Sith Empire feudalism to the Reformation and Republican capitalism, Sith ideology transformed from a system of promises in kind to an absolutism eager to step in during crises: a Rule of Two for inner leadership, and an array of industrial, military and social cliques with ambiguous positions, hoping to enter the realm of the Two. That was the Empire. Sithism and the Dark Side have always been politically and economically engaged ideologies – and necessarily so, because the Force gives ideological mastery direct, material consequences. We can’t live in a galaxy with Republic and Imperial ideologies, since the latter exists to subvert the former. Neo-Sithism and Neo-Imperialism are the same ideology, and must be destroyed through the ongoing liberation of worlds into a Republic hardened against crisis through social programs. As for disarmament: The last blaster bolt can only be eliminated by shooting it at the last Stormtrooper.”
It was an unpopular position; the Old Republic aristocrats who controlled the Alliance’s resources were tired of war, and concerned that the New Republic would spring into being utterly impoverished. Some Imperial remnant forces seemed ready to fight to the last. The Galactic Concordance denied Leia Organa the opportunity to finish off the Empire, but it furnished her with the New Republic’s militarized deep state. Alliance factions maintained independent militias and arms they weren’t willing to contribute to the New Republic, but could be found through the intelligence channels she’d developed over decades. These were primarily Gererrist columns situated in the Outer Rim, who had never been well served by the Old Republic, and whose worlds the Empire exploited for labor and natural resources. Organa was popular among them not for political theories, but as the hardened guerrilla who’d broken the Hutt slave labor cartel, and as a quasi-religious figure attuned to the Force. She took overall command of this combined irregular force: The Resistance.
The Problem of a Personal Life
Leia Organa was hardly one to maintain a strict separation between her political and personal life. She was willing to discuss her upbringing and family background when it was relevant, but did not bring up her lovers and contemporary family for public consumption. Rumored lover Lando Calrissian only came up as an Alliance officer and elected official; Han Solo was a pilot, a fellow operative and a fleet commander. Although personal motives likely drove certain operations late in the war – Solo was a Jabba’s captive – she responded to critics by noting that she was willing to bring her closest associates into the thick of the most dangerous missions. Nevertheless, son Ben Solo must be considered as a possible inspiration for her hard line against Neo-Imperialism due to his membership in the First Order.
If Organa must bear some responsibility for her son’s defection, it might ultimately stem from the operation that sent Luke Skywalker to DS-2, where he allegedly attempted to recruit Darth Vader. By suggesting Vader might be redeemed not through formal justice but by reawakening a familial bond, she might have recast him as a romantic, tragic figure, and not the mass murderer attested to by countless sources. Indeed, she allowed Skywalker to give Vader an ad hoc Jedi funeral. Of course, this was Skywalker’s choice, and he subsequently trained Ben Solo, so the “last Jedi” may bear greater blame than either his mother or oft-absent father.
Ultimately, the best way to judge Leia Organa might be through the same materialist critical analysis that drove her to revolutionary action. Before Leia Organa, the Empire destroyed civilizations to power a war machine for the glory of its elites. Because of her, galactic civilization doesn’t consist of thousands of starving worlds, whose inhabitants gaze into skies swarming with Death Stars built from their stolen productivity. The ideology of the Dark Side never rests, and it might return to reap capital from oppressed planets, but for now, many worlds enjoy a certain amount of peace and freedom.
About the Author
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My brother, who lives in New York, sent my six month-old a Christmas present that arrived on our front door on Saturday. It's a toy that takes hollow plastic balls and flings them into the air before they fall down a slide into a "pool" that funnels them into a chamber that ignites the whole process all over again.
My daughter is in love with this toy. It brings her the kind of joy that nothing else can, presenting a controlled chaos that sends her into a laughter-filled frenzy that would make you melt if you witnessed it. I could watch that little girl laugh for hours and be almost as entertained by her as she is by the toy.
I watched her watch this toy do its thing for about an hour yesterday morning. I watched as her wonder-filled eyes followed every ball, and I laughed every time a newly-released ball sent her into a guffaw.
And then I left to go to the Bengals game.
That's not entirely true. I met friends for pregame beers, and I enjoyed their company immensely before trudging with my layers of Bengals logo-ed clothing into Paul Brown Stadium. From there I watched the home team get slaughtered by an opponent that stopped playing for anything meaningful before Halloween. I saw a depleted team go through the motions as a coaching staff that's hopefully on its way out stood helplessly on the sideline as the season slipped away.
About ten blocks from where I sat, my kid giggled as she watched balls being flung into the air.
I have been a Bengals season ticket holder since 1998, with my dad owning our account until 2009 and me taking it over when he passed. With four exceptions, I've been to every Bengals game played at Paul Brown Stadium since the park opened, dutifully being there for every team PBS has housed, always aligning myself with the home team, faithfully cheering on both the best and worst of times, exulting in wins and often being crushed by losses.
I've been there when times were good. I've been there when times were bad. I was there when Paul Brown Stadium was THE place to be. I've been there when no one else wanted to go. I've been there when the city was swept up in what was happening at PBS. I've been there when no one cared about what was happening there.
I've been there when certain front office figures openly wished I wasn't, even though I was wearing their team's colors, hoping the guys wearing orange and black would find a way to win.
I was there yesterday.
As my kid sat at home playing with her new toy.
I watched the Bengals get trounced by the Bears, suffering a defeat that seemed almost preordained while going through the motions against a team that had even less to play for than they did. I'd walked into PBS hoping against hope that I'd maybe see a desperate team sell itself out in an effort to both cling to relevance and save its coach's job. Instead, I watched them lay down like wounded animals, waiting for their carcass to be picked apart.
A short walk away, my kid chuckled as balls got flung into the air.
Physically, I was at Paul Brown Stadium. Emotionally, I was on my living room carpet, watching my infant daughter laugh, oblivious to the football follies taking place just a short stroller ride away. I enjoyed great company, shared a few laughs, and spat out opinions on what was happening before us, but what was before us wasn't nearly as compelling as what my brother had sent my kid, and the fun she was having with it.
So as a dismal season crawls to a close, and as the Marvin Lewis era hopefully comes to an end, here's one of the challenges the Bengals face...
Get me off my living room carpet.
This isn't the hot take of someone who really couldn't care less about how well the Bengals play. Nor is it the lament of someone who rarely passes through Paul Brown Stadium's gates. It's the portrait of a lifelong fan at a crossroads, someone who's spent their entire life making the Bengals a priority who now needs a reason to keep them front and center, both with his free time and his discretionary income.
I need a reason to think that what I've watched this season won't be what I torture myself with next year. I need something to suggest that the half-assed effort against Chicago yesterday won't be repeated. I need a reason to get up and leave when my daughter is having the time of her life.
I need a new head coach. I need a team that looks like it gives a shit. I need something to convince me that I should peel myself away from my little girl and whatever it is that's making her laugh at that moment to go watch a football game. I need something that makes me want to invest money and time in a team that's more fun to watch than my daughter laughing at a plastic balls sliding down a slide.
I've been a Bengals fan since I was a little kid, having revolved entire weekends around their games since I was old enough to know what football is. There's never been any question about what I was doing on my fall Sundays. As long as the Bengals were playing, no matter how good or bad they were, I was watching.
And if they were home, I was there.
But now they've got competition. And it's not the Steelers. Or the Ravens. Or the utterly dreadful Bears team that just rolled them by 26 points. They've got someone more deserving of my time and of my money.
They've got a plastic toy that flings balls in the air, and a little girl who's infatuated by it.
I'm interested in knowing what they've got that's better.Deputy Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri says in view of the information and news presented and published by the influential people and organizations in the US about Iran’s defensive power, it can be inferred that their military and intelligence organizations and agencies cannot understand the depth of the Islamic Republic’s defensive capabilities.
According a report by IFP, he acknowledged that foreigners and enemies, particularly the US, have partial access to information about Iran’s defensive might, and even this limited amount of data has bewildered them and acted as a deterrent against their invasion of the Iranian territory.
Jazayeri said the Islamic Republic’s deterrence power is based on active deterrence, which means the country will not let go of aggressors until it either annihilates them or forces them to surrender.
He further noted that war and military invasion have failed to cast their shadow on Iran for several years, as the country has developed active deterrence power.
Jazayeri warned that this, however, does not imply that Iran can slow down or stop its progress in defensive fields, saying the country will absolutely continue increasing its defensive capabilities given the evil enemies it has.
He stressed that the enemy fails to understand the power and impact of the strong and wholehearted backing provided by Iran’s huge number of human armed forces, adding these forces are among the important factors contributing to the country’s increased military capabilities.
“[Bringing about lasting] Peace and [ensuring greater] stability in Western Asia require the enemies to exit the vast and strategic land. Today, the moves and plots by the US, Zionist regime as well as the corrupt and reactionary regional governments are the main cause of all the evildoing, wars and bloodshed witnessed in this region.”
Jazayeri added nonetheless, even if the Americans increase their military budget a hundredfold to dominate the region, they will fail to achieve their evil goal.Anti-China witch-hunt in Australia escalates
By Peter Symonds
11 December 2017
A front-page article in Saturday’s Australian ramped up the ongoing xenophobic campaign against “Chinese influence” in Australia. It reported that the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) had “identified 10 political candidates at state and local government elections whom it believes have close ties to Chinese intelligence services.”
The article, headlined “Security agencies flag Chinese Manchurian candidates,” is a crude beat-up. No-one is named, no evidence is provided and ASIO’s unsubstantiated allegations are treated as good coin without any questioning of its motives. What the article does demonstrate is that the anti-China witch-hunt is being driven by the Australian intelligence agencies—backed to the hilt by Washington—amid the growing danger of a US-led war against North Korea and China.
Ross Babbage, a former intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments, told the Australian that Chinese security agencies were engaged in a far-reaching campaign “to recruit and insert and encourage, and to some extent fund, agents of influence.” He is currently a senior fellow at a prominent US think tank—the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Babbage added: “We have not seen this type of activity in Australia since the Cold War.” The reference to the “Cold War” is significant as it is precisely a McCarthyite climate of fear and intimidation that the media and political establishment is seeking to whip up. By relaying ASIO’s “concerns” about unnamed political figures, all politicians are being placed on notice that they could come under scrutiny as “agents of influence” if they step out of line.
ASIO was notorious for its skulduggery during the Cold War and persecution of anyone alleged to have communist or socialist affiliations or sympathies.
The Australian article came just two days after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced plans for sweeping new laws to criminalise “unlawful foreign influence,” create a registry of “foreign agents” and ban all foreign funding of political activities. The expanded treason and espionage legislation will carry draconian penalties of up to life imprisonment.
That the directives are coming from Washington was underscored by the comments of the Australian ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, last week. “It’s being very closely watched [in Washington],” he said. “It is a really serious issue and it represents a threat to what many Australians fought and died for and that is a free and transparent and open democracy.”
In reality, the opposite is the case. After more than a decade of attacking basic democratic rights under the rubric of the bogus “war on terror,” the country is being put on a war footing that will create the conditions for the round-up of anyone deemed to be aiding the enemy—namely China.
The government announcement provoked condemnation from the Chinese embassy in Canberra and the foreign ministry in Beijing. Foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on Friday that he was “shocked” by Turnbull’s allegations against China. “We have expressed strong dissatisfaction at this and have already lodged solemn representations with the Australian side,” he stated.
Turnbull hit back on Saturday, declaring: “There has been foreign influence in Australian politics, plainly.” He again lashed out at Labor senator Sam Dastyari as “a clear case of somebody who has literally taken money from people closely associated with the Chinese government and, in return for that, has delivered essentially Chinese policy statements.”
Dastyari has been the whipping boy for the anti-China campaign extending over more than a year. Just prior to last week’s announcement of the new legislation, lurid allegations concerning the Labor senator hit the headlines. His allegedly pro-China comments consisted of suggesting that Australia should not join the United States in its provocative challenges to Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Dastyari is a right-wing Labor powerbroker and money raiser, who has always supported Australia’s military alliance with the US and its involvement in Washington’s criminal wars in Afghanistan, Libya and the Middle East. Yet he was targeted last year for his association with Chinese property developer Huang Xiangmo, who has donated not only to Labor, but also to the Liberal-National Coalition.
Among the latest allegations against Dastyari is that he offered “counter-surveillance advice” to Huang—suggesting during a meeting that the two leave their mobile phones in another room to prevent anyone listening in. Clearly someone was listening in—in all probability ASIO, which by its own admissions to the Australian is extensively monitoring politicians, and undoubtedly many other individuals.
The persecution of Dastyari continues unabated, with Immigration Minister Peter Dutton telling Sky News over the weekend that “a lot more is to come.” He continued: “He’s a shady figure. If he’s |
and not just for her athletic skills. Amy is a pig.
Amid the barking of corgis, collies and Labradors, visitors will sometimes hear a snort. And there's Amy, jumping through the hoop, balancing on the teeter-totter, retrieving the dumbbell and zipping through the play tunnel.
Lori Stock owns 5-month-old Amy and says her indoor pig is a quick learner and very motivated by food rewards.
KOMO reports that Amy has already graduated from puppy manners class and has moved on to agility and obedience at the Family Dog Training Center in Kent.
Training center president Kathy Lang says that's a first, though she recalls a pygmy goat did attend several training classes.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1DmNi29Abott Lawrence Lowell openly discriminated against Jews. Wikipedia Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were both sued last month for allegedly discriminating against Asian-American students in their undergraduate-admissions policies.
The lawsuits, filed by newly formed nonprofit group Students for Fair Admissions, claim Harvard and UNC's race-based affirmative-action policies hurt the admissions chances of Asian-American students. Notably, the lawsuit against Harvard argues that the Ivy League university "is using racial classifications to engage in the same brand of invidious discrimination against Asian Americans that it formerly used to limit the number of Jewish students in its student body."
University of California, Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel details this discrimination against Jewish students in his acclaimed book "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton." In one chapter, Karabel highlights the controversial actions of A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's president from 1909-1933, who very publically attempted to limit the number of Jewish students admitted to the university.
At one point, Lowell wrote to a Harvard philosophy professor to explain that enrolling a high number of Jewish students would "ruin the college" by causing elite Protestant students to attend other schools, according to Karabel's book. Harvard would be ruined "not because Jews of bad character have come; but the result follows from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body," Lowell wrote in the letter.
The only way to prevent this, Lowell argued, was to impose strict quotas and restrictions. Ideally, Lowell wanted to cap Harvard's Jewish population at 15% of the student body, according to Karabel. The size of the Jewish student body had quickly risen from 7% of freshmen in 1900 to 10% in 1909, 15% in 1915, 21.5% in 1922, and 27.6% in 1925.
Below, Karabel expands on Lowell's desire to limit Harvard's Jewish student population, using "a covert attempt to impose a quota" in 1922:
Left to his own devices, the authoritarian Lowell would have been more than willing to impose his own solution to the "Jewish problem." Indeed, that is precisely what he tried to do when he asked the Committee on Admission to admit as transfers only those "Hebrews... possessed of extraordinary intellectual capacity together with character above criticism" and to impose a higher standard for admission to the freshman class on members of the "Hebrew race."
The plan was ultimately rejected by the Committee on Admissions — who Karabel writes were "reluctant to publically endorse a policy of discrimination" — but it reveals the explicit motivation for changing how Harvard chose its incoming students.
By 1926, Harvard moved away from admissions based strictly on academics to evaluating potential students on a number of qualifiers meant to reveal their "character." A report released that year by an admissions committee endorsed a limit of 1,000 freshman per class — allowing a shift in policy, as Harvard could no longer admit every student who achieved a certain academic cutoff.
Here's how Karabel sums up the new changes approved in 1926, which would effectively allow the Harvard administration to limit its Jewish student population:
The committee decisively rejected an admissions policy based on scholarship alone, stating that "it is neither feasible nor desirable to raise the standards of the College so high that none but brilliant scholars can enter" while stipulating that "the standards ought never to be so high for serious and ambitious students of average intelligence."
When the faculty formally approved the report eight days later, Lowell was further elated, for they also approved measures making the admissions process even more subjective. In particular, the faculty called on [Committee on Admissions chairman Henry Pennypacker] to interview as many applicants as possible to gather additional information on "character and fitness and the promise of the greatest usefulness in the future as a result of a Harvard education." Henceforth, declared the faculty, a passport-sized photo would be "required as an essential part of the application for admissions."
Elite colleges also began to use legacy admissions during this period — giving preference to children of alumni — in order to maintain a predominantly Protestant student body, Karabel explains.
These policies eventually died out in the 1950s, as World War II veterans began to enter college on the GI Bill, bringing with them a more serious outlook to their studies that re-emphasized academic rigor. As David Brooks writes in his 2005 New York Times review of Karabel's book:
By the 1960's, a new elite was displacing the Protestant Establishment across American society. And the elite university presidents behaved like "intellectual investment bankers," in the words of Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of "The Guardians," a book about Yale. They realized, as Karabel writes, that they would profit in the long run if they dumped "stocks that showed signs of slipping" - the old Protestant bluebloods - and invested "in an array of newer stocks that, while perhaps riskier, promised higher rates of return": the rising meritocrats.
The SAT scores of incoming freshmen shot up, the old toffs were rejected and eggheads from around the country were admitted. Academic culture changed as well. Meritocratic values, first embodied by the striving Jews from New York public high schools, now dominated. Harvard, Yale and Princeton retained their status atop the American educational system by shifting the constituencies they served.
We've reached out to Harvard for any comment about these purportedly discriminatory policies. Here's the university's statement about the allegations that it currently discriminates against Asian-American applicants:
In his seminal opinion in Regents of University of California v. Bakke, Justice Powell specially cited to the Harvard College admissions plan in describing a legally sound approach to admissions. Then and now, the College considers each applicant though an individualized, holistic review having the goal of creating a vibrant academic community that exposes students to a wide-range of differences: background, ideas, experiences, talents and aspirations. The University's admissions processes remain fully compliant with all legal requirements and are essential to the pedagogical objectives that underlie Harvard's educational mission.
For more information on the this controversial shift in admissions policies, you can buy Karabel's book here >>
NOW WATCH: Here Are 5 Big Things Paul Krugman Says He Got Wrong Over The YearsGive Justin Trudeau high marks for boldness, at the very least. With one stroke, he has changed the dynamics of this long election campaign. More importantly, he has challenged the prevailing economic assumption that government’s main role is to get out of the way and let the private sector work its magic. Instead, the Liberal leader has declared unapologetically that a government led by his party will run “modest” deficits of up to $10 billion a year for the next three years in order to finance the most ambitious infrastructure program the country has ever seen. As he said on Thursday: “These investments have been put off for far too long.”
Liberal leader Justin Trudeau greets apprentices while touring a crane operator training facility on Thursday in Oakville, Ont. ( Paul Chiasson / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
Predictably, this was greeted with derision from Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, who has managed to make deficit-fighting the holy grail of his economic policy – even while running massive deficits of his own year after year. And it contrasts sharply with NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s pledge to balance the federal budget in the first year of a New Democrat government. Judging just by the numbers, Trudeau’s plan is actually modest. In a national economy of almost $2 trillion, a deficit of even $10 billion amounts to just half of one per cent of economic output. Even compared to federal spending of about $289 billion a year, it is hardly seismic. But restraining the size and ambition of government has become such an obsession over the past couple of decades that Trudeau’s frank talk about actually building up public assets that everyone agrees are needed comes as a shock – albeit a welcome one.
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He would essentially double planned federal spending on infrastructure – everything from transit projects to public housing and green energy projects. It would add up to $125 billion, almost exactly the amount of the national “infrastructure deficit” that the country has accumulated by failing to maintain public projects properly for the past 60 years. Put like that, it amounts to little more than common sense: why build a house and then fail to replace the roof when it wears out? But the reigning conservative orthodoxy of small government, a shrinking public sector and ever-lower taxes makes it seem practically revolutionary. It shouldn’t be, and the Liberal plan may serve as a rallying cry for those hoping for a more assertive role for government in doing the things we can only accomplish together. Of course, Trudeau’s thinking on deficits would be more persuasive if he had been making it consistently for many months. It’s no accident that it comes from a party running third and in need of something bold to change the dynamic of the campaign. One can also fairly question how effective infrastructure spending will be to counter a short-term slowdown. Many of the most worthwhile undertakings (such as major transit projects in the Toronto area) would take years to get underway. And while interest rates may be at record lows now, we shouldn’t pile up debt on the assumption they will stay there forever. It would be also be good to see a frank debate about other ways to stem the erosion of government’s ability to accomplish collective goals – including the constant drive to cut taxes. Running deficits is one way to build badly needed infrastructure; it would be wiser to pay for at least some of it as we go through the tax system. Still, our national political debate has been frozen for so long by neo-liberal thinking that it is heartening to see a major leader break from the pack. Trudeau deserves credit for challenging the orthodoxy.
Read more about:Masked Scheduler's Ratings Smackdown
Happy 420!
Some questions from the Masked Mailbox. First, CD writes:
I've often wondered how the four major broadcast networks feel about shows like "The Walking Dead," "Love & Hip Hop," "Real Housewives," "Flip Or Flop," "Chrisley Knows Best" and others scoring blockbuster ratings that should make any of them envious. Why don't any of them try to make a run at any of these shows with instant built-in audiences? Surely they all have more money than any of their cable counterparts. Couldn't NBC easily move "Chrisley Knows Best" over from USA? How do you think these shows would fare on broadcast television? Not as good -- or even bigger?
Good question. First, several of these shows are on channels owned by the parent company of the broadcast network, and the show is more valuable on its current channel in terms of subscriber fees.
Second, there are often standards and sales issues that a network has to deal with that a cable channel does not. Remember a network is made up of local stations. Also the ratings for many of these cable hits are still below those of the broadcast networks. They just get more attention.
Having said that, the broadcast networks often air episodes of cable shows to help promote those shows. When I was at FOX I aired episodes of "It's Always Sunny…" and I pitched airing "The Shield" over the summer.
***
Here’s one from MVH:
With cancellation rumors spreading for shows with deep back-stories like "Blindspot" and
"The Blacklist," I'm curious about the level of concern that networks have for not leaving viewers hanging. For instance, "Lost" definitely got to plan their finale, but "Revolution" abruptly ended, even though the final moment foreshadowed bigger things to come. Do the "suits" even consider viewers when making decisions?
Yes we do, and we often tell the showrunner not to leave the season finale so open-ended for that very reason. This is especially true of freshman series. This is the risk we take with highly serialized shows. To be honest, a showrunner may purposely leave the finale open-ended in order to pressure a network to renew a show.
Every show is somebody's favorite, so we will always be disappointing some segment of the audience but don't feel we were happy doing it.
***
Finally I was asked if I would ever be a cord-cutter.
Well, I subscribe to Hulu, Netflix and the WWE Network, but I still have DirecTV which I need for authentication. I am still not convinced that cord cutting will reduce my TV consumption bill but would love to be proven wrong. I still believe we are moving to an app-based world.
Keep those cards and letters coming in on Twitter @maskedscheduler and email [email protected]
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Yesterday's sked:
- "Smackdown" (USA, L+SD)
- "Better Call Saul" (AMC, L+2)
- "Riverdale" (CW L+7) why I don’t know
- "Fresh Off the Boat" (ABC, L+1)MIAMI (Reuters) - Health workers violated medical ethics when they helped interrogate terrorism suspects who were tortured at secret CIA prisons overseas, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
A would-be immigrant casts his shadow on a Red Cross tent upon arriving at Arguineguin port in the Canary Islands of Gran Canaria early December 7, 2008. REUTERS/Borja Suarez
The medical workers, thought to be doctors and psychologists, monitored prisoners while they were mistreated at CIA prisons and advised interrogators whether to continue, adjust or halt the abuse, the ICRC said in a report based on interviews with 14 prisoners in 2007.
One prisoner alleged that medical personnel monitored his blood oxygen levels while he was subjected to waterboarding, a simulated drowning designed to induce panic and widely considered to be torture, the ICRC said.
Other prisoners said that as they stood shackled with their arms chained above their heads, a doctor regularly measured the swelling in their legs and signaled when they should be allowed to sit down.
The ICRC interviewed 14 men who had been held in secret CIA prisons overseas before being sent to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006.
The 14 are considered by the United States to be “high-value” al Qaeda suspects who plotted or carried out mass murders, including the September 11 attacks and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings. They had been held by the CIA, most for more than three years, in extreme isolation and had not been allowed contact with each other when the ICRC interviewed them at Guantanamo in November 2007.
The ICRC said their claims had credence because they gave similar accounts of their treatment, including the actions of medical monitors whose names they never learned.
The ICRC monitors compliance with the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war captives and keeps its reports secret, sharing them only with the detaining government.
The report, written in 2007, was posted on the New York Review of Books website on Monday night by journalist Mark Danner, who has not said publicly how he obtained it.
“VIOLATED ETHICAL DUTY”
He first published excerpts last month, including a portion in which the ICRC concluded the al Qaeda captives’ treatment in the CIA prisons “constituted torture” and violated international law.
The report alleges collars were placed around some prisoners’ necks and used to slam their heads against the walls, and that they were forced to stand with their arms shackled above them for two or three days and left to urinate or defecate on themselves.
The prisoners told the ICRC they were beaten and kicked, left naked for long periods, subjected to sleep deprivation, loud music, cold temperatures, rape threats and forced shaving. Some said they were denied solid food unless they cooperated with interrogators and one said he was confined in a crouching position in a box too short to stand in.
A previously undisclosed portion of the report concluded that medical workers who monitored or took part in the interrogations had violated their ethical duty to do no harm, preserve dignity and act in patients’ best interest.
The ICRC said “any interrogation process that requires a health professional to either pronounce on the subject’s fitness to withstand such a procedure, or which requires a health professional to monitor the actual procedure, must have inherent health risks.”
“As such, the interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics,” the ICRC concluded.
The “high-value” captives quoted in the report are still at the Guantanamo prison, which President Barack Obama has ordered shut down by January 2010, and debate continues over what should be done with them.
A military judge released a statement last month in which some of them bragged that they were “terrorists to the bone”.
Bush administration officials have said the “enhanced interrogation” of those prisoners produced information that helped thwart attacks but have never provided specifics.Martin Shkreli hasn't changed.
If anything, the provocative pharmaceutical CEO — who became "the most hated man in America" earlier this year — thinks he didn’t go far enough when he hiked the price of Daraprim by more than 5,000% overnight.
"I would have raised prices higher," Shkreli vowed on Thursday, after being asked how he would re-do the past three months. "That's my duty."
Shkreli spoke at the Forbes Healthcare Summit during a 25-minute interview that was at turns fascinating, horrifying, and utterly compelling.
In rapid succession, Shkreli explained why he'd abandoned his previous pledge to cut the price of Daraprim, claimed that companies were still "begging" for his business, and argued that he was being railroaded by politicians. Shkreli also reiterated that his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, was forced to hike the price of Daraprim because of the distribution model.
Shkreli was interviewed on stage by Forbes reporter Matthew Herper, who in September authored a fascinating piece that implied Shkreli wasn't necessarily malevolent — but misunderstood. That Shkreli was a bright guy who had been caricatured by the media.
But at Thursday's summit, Shkreli was painfully clear: His job isn't making patients better. It's making the most dollars.
"My shareholders expect me to make the most profit," Shkreli said, a theme that he returned to again and again. "That's the ugly, dirty truth."
"I'm going to maximize profits," Shkreli added later. "That's what people [in healthcare] are afraid to say."
Herper pushed Shkreli on whether his actions and outspoken nature had cost his company business. Express Scripts recently dropped Daraprim from its formulary in favor of a competitor, for instance.
But Shkreli didn't think so. "Hasn't hurt us one bit," he said, suggesting that Turing is working on a deal with a major pharmaceutical company to acquire a new drug.
And although the company eventually went with Turing's competitor, "Express Scripts emailed me the other day, begging for our business," Shkreli added.
(An Express Scripts executive in the crowd disagreed with Shkreli's recounting of events.)
Although Shkreli stressed his duty to his shareholders, he also was repeatedly asked about his responsibility to the public, too. Do patients still have access to Daraprim? And what about all those lawsuits and government scrutiny?
"Politicians love to beat up on guys that are seen to be public enemies, if you will," Shkreli countered. "That's a great way to get elected."
--
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From the archives:PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – A Philadelphia police officer accused of rape has turned himself in for arrest.
Eyewitness News captured exclusive video of Officer Keith Corley leaving Internal Affairs in handcuffs. The District Attorney’s office charged the officer with Rape, Involuntary Deviant Sexual Intercourse, Sexual Assault, Indecent Assault, Indecent Exposure and Official Oppression.
Authorities say Corley, assigned to the 18th Police District, was on duty, in uniform and in a marked police car when he assaulted a woman.
Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said, “We are committed to rooting out those individuals who would violate the trust of the public.”
The criminal investigation against the 27-year-old officer began on August 11th after a 32-year-old woman alleged he sexually assaulted her.
The woman told police, she was trying to get home after work, was waiting for a bus that never showed at 52nd and Market Streets. She then spotted officer Corley in his patrol car. She flagged him down and asked for a ride. She says he agreed then took her to an area in Cobbs Creek and forced her to perform a sex act in the back seat of the squad car. The woman told investigators, the officer then dropped her off at the 69th Street Terminal, as agreed, after the attack.
Ramsey added, “The police lab did an excellent job on this in fact it wasn’t easy to get the evidence they needed to get. They followed through, didn’t give up until they got what they needed to present to the D.A.”
Commissioner Ramsey says DNA evidence was analyzed, the incident investigated and this is the end result: Officer Corley under arrest.
“Obviously, it’s something of great concern. It’s another, you know, black mark against the Department but again it doesn’t represent everyone on the Department. None of this is tolerable and we’ll take whatever action we need to take to rid our ranks of them,” Ramsey said.
Sources say Officer Corley was suspended for 30 days with the intent to dismiss.
The 27-year-old officer had been on the force for four years. Corley has not yet spoken publicly to tell his side of the story.
Reported by Elizabeth Hur, CBS 3If Massachusetts legalizes recreational marijuana in the fall, weed could be as easy to buy as a six-pack of beer. But there’s no breathalyzer that can say when someone’s too high to drive.
Enter the drug recognition officers, or DREs, a group of cops and troopers trained to figure out whether drivers are impaired and what drug — or drugs — they’re on.
DREs aren’t new. But as more states legalize recreational marijuana, these specially-trained officers will fill the gap where technology lacks, said Chuck Hayes, the national DRE program training coordinator and project manager at the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
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“Even if you have on-site roadside testing devices … you still have to prove the driver is impaired and that’s where the DRE comes in,” he said.
DREs are called in post-arrest, when an officer who makes the stop suspects that the driver is impaired, but not sure by what drug. He or she will call the closest available DRE and that starts the 12-step process to figure out what the impairment is and if it’s caused by a drug or a medical issue.
Massachusetts’ DRE program began 20 years ago, with just two officers. Now there are more than 100 DREs, with more coming after they complete two more trainings this year, said Don Decker, a retired sergeant from Marblehead and the statewide DRE coordinator.
With legalization possibly on the horizon, Decker said they aren’t doing anything different, other than adding more DREs.
“You’re going to do the same process and same thing,” he said.
Last year, nationwide, cannabis was the top drug category that DREs confirmed through their evaluations, Hayes said. Massachusetts DREs, meanwhile, performed about 400 evaluations and most often detected “narcotic analgesics,” also known as opiates.
Not all are bullish on the DRE program, like defense attorneys, who think the evaluations are more guesswork than science.
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“The whole DRE protocol isn’t scientifically reliable,” said defense attorney Michael DelSignore, who specializes in OUI cases. “It’s never been tested scientifically and the officers aren’t qualified to make the assessments they’re making. All they’re doing is checking the person’s pulse, testing their blood pressure. They’re not doctors.”
DelSignore said he’s had fewer than 10 cases involving a DRE evaluation in his decade of private practice. Sometimes, a DRE isn’t available after a driver is arrested, or more often, the person refuses the evaluation. Unlike refusing the breathalyzer, which leads to an automatic license suspension, there’s no penalty in Massachusetts for refusing a DRE evaluation.
Colorado, which started selling legal marijuana in 2014, has a legal limit for cannabis intoxication: 5 nanograms of THC in a person’s blood. Juries are told that at that level, they can “infer” that a person is impaired. But having a DRE testify abut a driver’s impairment is crucial, said Carol Gould, Colorado’s DRE coordinator.
“The DREs are the best resource for identifying a marijuana-impaired driver,” she said.
Even with legal marijuana, the level of cannabis impairment in Colorado has dropped a bit. Last year, about 15 percent of people charged with operating under the influence were high on cannabis, a 1.3 percent drop from 2014.
Tax revenue from marijuana sales has funded more DRE schools in Colorado. Since legalization, there have been five training schools, Gould said, bringing the number of DREs to 262 in 83 agencies.
In addition to training more DREs, Massachusetts and other states are doing a more basic training — called advanced roadside impaired driving enforcement — that gives officers a step up over their typical field sobriety training. In states that could see recreational pot, they’re emphasizing the signs of cannabis impairment, Hayes said.
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Hayes is based in Oregon, which began sales of recreational marijuana last year. The state is still gathering data, he said, but Hayes said they’re starting to see an increase in cannabis-impaired drivers. That means more bloodshot eyes, issues with balance and coordination, dilated pupils, and issues understanding instructions and concentrating.The Ashes build-up has started in earnest but construction work in Perth is yet to finish, with Cricket Australia still mulling the venue for this summer’s third Test. The third match in the five-Test series between Australia and England will be in Perth but the venue is yet to be finalised.
Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland remains upbeat it will be the first major event at Perth’s new 60,000-capacity stadium. A conflicting report claimed last month the Waca Ground will host the much-anticipated contest because the $1.2bn ground at Burswood will not be ready in time.
Selection battle shows England can win Champions Trophy, says Jonny Bairstow Read more
Sutherland is heading to Perth this week for further talks with stadium officials and the state government. A final call is likely to be made later this month.
“The completion dates for the stadium actually work pretty well for us,” Sutherland said in Melbourne on Monday, when tickets for the other four Ashes Tests went on sale to the public. “But... there’s little room for things to go wrong in terms of teething problems that are in some ways perhaps inevitable.
“We’re really optimistic and positive about the way in which the event could be staged in the new stadium... we’re looking towards the end of this month to make a decision.”
CA could host the Test at the new venue even if grandstands are yet to be fully completed. That was the case during the 2013 Ashes Test at the redeveloped Adelaide Oval.
Australia and England will square off in an ODI at Edgbaston during next month’s Champions Trophy but the Ashes is already at the back of many players’ minds.
“Both teams have got a fair amount of cricket between the Champions Trophy and the Ashes but it’s always important to beat the Poms,” Mitchell Starc recently said. “Hopefully we can create a bit of doubt or open up a few old wounds; or find a few extra weaknesses heading into the summer back here.”
Joe Root, who will lead England following captain Alastair Cook’s resignation, joked vice-captain Ben Stokes would be on a reconnaissance mission during the Indian Premier League. Stokes is playing under Steve Smith at Rising Pune Supergiant.
“The one thing Stokesy can do for us is make sure he finds a little weakness in Steve Smith’s armoury,” Root said. “If he can.”
Meanwhile, Sutherland confirmed Australia were set to travel to Bangladesh for a two-Test tour later this year. “There’s still some things we need to work through, just to lock down on security but... we’re confident the tour will take place,” he said.The Hillary Clinton mope tour, which should have reached a high water mark, has gone global. It entails drumming up her credentials (immaculate, we are told, but unnoticed), and pouring upon the man who beat her to the White house (a danger to the world). The latter is the fundamental point: Donald Trump would not have won, not because of Clinton’s flaws but because of what others did.
One of those big others remains WikiLeaks. The other, supposedly, is its Russian ally – no, employer, sponsor, even, there one say it peering into that dark mind of hers, director-in-chief. Forget Assange, claims Clinton – the Kremlin is running the operation.
On the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners programme, Clinton reiterated a range of views that have become dangerously presumed, mirrors, in fact, of the very man she detests, the world view she supposedly eschews. In a post-truth world, anything goes, including Clintonian mendacity and delusion. Blended with US patriotism and sour grapes, she becomes the ultimate embittered narcissist who cannot admit to deficiency.
According to Clinton, Assange had “become a kind of nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator”. Even more to the point, and here, the facts start to become puffs and fluffs,
“WikiLeaks is unfortunately now practically a fully owned subsidiary of Russian intelligence.”
No evidence is offered. For Clinton, nothing needs to be tested, her defeat obviously the result, not of an appalling election team (remember that slave to the algorithm, Robby Mook?) and her own woes as a candidate, but to the role played by information marshalled against her.
“There was a concerted operation between WikiLeaks and Russia and most likely people in the United States to, as I say, weaponize information, to make up stories, outlandish, often terrible stories that had no basis in fact, no basis even in the emails themselves, but which were used to denigrate me, my campaign people who supported me, and to help (Donald) Trump.”
Furthermore, Clinton, with a sense of supreme self-worth, insisted that she had been a direct target of the Kremlin.
“I think their intention, coming from the very top with Putin, was to hurt me and to help Trump.”
These observations beggar belief. Bricks cannot be made without straw, and there was ample straw in the Podesta emails, not to mention the general trove of DNC material that revealed the tactics, methods and philosophies of the entitled.
Clinton’s method is one of permanent deflection and, when necessary, denial. What the emails revealed on her approach to security, or her sympathy for Wall Street, was not to be taken seriously. It all had to do with that nasty business of “weaponized” information. To assist her, she had the intelligence community, the vast complex of the establishment to boost her points.
Lapsing into electoral mode, and reflecting on her record, she claimed that,
“Our intelligence community and other observers of Russia and [Mr] Putin have said he held a grudge against me because, as secretary of state, I stood up against some of his actions.”
Noble warrior, indeed.
If there is one golden thread that runs through conspiracy, linking up with false causality, the grand design must be one of them. The grand design assumes a puppet master and watch maker. It also presumes standard impact and worth.
“I lost the electoral college by about 77,000, and what we’re finding out is that there had to be some very sophisticated help provided to WikiLeaks… to know how to target both their messages of suppression and their negative messages to affect voters.”
When a political figure is found out, blame the idiot voter.
This tactic ignores the ways and follies of the idiot politician, who can, in effect, lose against a figure such as Trump. This is the most bruising of all, the most damning. The Clinton campaign’s own efforts at information warfare were paltry, presuming that the self-evident grotesquery of Trump would sway voters.
When the Washington Post published the 2005 Access Hollywood record of Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” remark, the effect of that revelation, argues Clinton, was shrouded by the release of over 2,000 emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
For the Clintons, the Podestas and the Mooks, the White House was in the bag of ambition and worth, and neither Bernie Sanders nor Trump was going to get their paws on it. This was meant to be an establishment show – till the establishment was shown up.
As for Assange, the return volleys soon came. Clinton was, in his view, a heartless defective.
“It is not just her constant lying. It is not just that she throws off menacing glares and seethes thwarted entitlement. Something much darker rides along with it. A cold creepiness rarely seen.”
It was the sort of creepiness that had been spotted before. Britain’s current foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, took unusually faultless aim at it in 2007 in the Daily Telegraph.
“She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.”
By all means, he insisted, vote for Clinton, if only to return her husband to the White House.
“If Bill can deal with Hillary, he can surely deal with any global crisis.”
While it is entirely true that Trump readily traffics in hypocrisy and seems to be a comic monstrosity on various levels, a Clinton White House would have also made the world safe for hypocrisy. There would have been usual American brashness, military interventions, toughness poorly dressed in silk and padded by soft power. There would have also been graft, self-aggrandizement and the lying industrial complex.
To scold and condemn WikiLeaks in this affair is no better than dismissing the person who spots the fire as the arsonist gets away. Citing the efforts of the Kremlin, information bots, and fake news, can only go so far. The building still burns.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMITUniversity, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
NotesUntitled a guest Jun 6th, 2013 2,121 Never a guest2,121Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint C++ 6.74 KB /* Parsnip Parser Libary http://parsnip-parser.sf.net Copyright 2007 Alex Rubinsteyn ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This file is part of Parsnip. Parsnip is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Parsnip is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Parsnip. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. */ /* July 25th: renamed to Vector Modified by Alex Rubinsteyn ([email protected]) on May 16th, 2007 for use in the Parsnip parser combinator library. - changed size_t and int to unsigned - removed assertions - dropped inclusion of std namespace - wrapped vec in Parsnip namespace - added operator+ for combining vecs */ /* _______ __ / ___/ / ___ __ _ / / ___ / /__/ _ \/ _ \/ V \/ _ \/ _ \ \___/_//_/\___/_/_/_/_.__/\___/ */ // CHOMBO Copyright (c) 2000-2004, The Regents of the University of // California, through Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (subject to // receipt of any required approvals from U.S. Dept. of Energy). All // rights reserved. // // Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without // modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: // // (1) Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright // notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. // (2) Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright // notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the // documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. // (3) Neither the name of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U.S. // Dept. of Energy nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse // or promote products derived from this software without specific prior // written permission. // // THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS // "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED // TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A // PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER // OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, // EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, // PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR // PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF // LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING // NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS // SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. // // You are under no obligation whatsoever to provide any bug fixes, // patches, or upgrades to the features, functionality or performance of // the source code ("Enhancements") to anyone; however, if you choose to // make your Enhancements available either publicly, or directly to // Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, without imposing a separate // written license agreement for such Enhancements, then you hereby grant // the following license: a non-exclusive, royalty-free perpetual license // to install, use, modify, prepare |
air and land face down on the floor during the scene.
John and Will have had a long-standing working relationship – having previously worked together on Stepbrothers in 2008 and Talladega Nights in 2006.
Fame Flynet 20 Sherlock looks like he'll be getting into more trouble in Holmes and Watson
Fame Flynet 20 The Holmes and Watson film will be released in 2018
Fame Flynet 20 Sacha Baron Cohen was originally meant to star alongside Will but he pulled out
The pair will be joined by a host of English A-Listers for the new film, including Trainspotting’s Kelly McDonald as faithful housemaid Mrs Hudson, Rebecca Hall as Dr. Grace Hart, and Gavin and Stacey’s Rob Brydon as Inspector Lestrade.
Sacha Baron Cohen was originally pencilled in as Will Ferrell’s right hand man, but he later pulled out.
Fame Flynet 20 John C Reilly and his stunt double were spotted rehearsing a scene in London
Fame Flynet 20 The production team turned back time in London to the 1920s for the shoot
LATEST FROM TV AND SHOWBIZ 'VERY ODD' Emma Thompson quits film after executive accused of harassment brought on board HER SIDE Jordyn Woods set to come clean about cheating scandal on Jada Pinkett Smith's show 'TELL STACEY' EastEnders fans beg Jean to tell Stacey she has ovarian cancer as she CRAWLING INTO BED DJ Chris Evans and wife Natasha horrified to find MAGGOTS in their bed ANGE'S SIX-PACK Angelina Jolie makes rare public appearance with all six of her children MADGE'S BUST NEW PAL Madonna's new music partner Anitta shares her love of risky outfits TALKING COBBLE-RS Coronation Street's Tracy splits the UK by using the word'mingebag' HE'S IN THE PASTA Gemma eats spaghetti after Arg's 'fat jibes' as she films Real Housewives Ex-factor Megan McKenna sobs as she reveals heartbreaking reason for Mike Thalassitis split 'AWFUL LITTLE GIRL' Georgia Steel hits back at 'fake' Mario Falcone after THAT tweet
Fame Flynet 20 Will is most known as the stubborn news host Ron Burgundy
The latest incarnation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famed creation, due to be released in 2018, will be the fourth interpretation of Sherlock in the past ten years.
In the U.S, Jonny Lee Miller takes on the role of the drug addicted smart-alec in a reinterpretation of the show that relocates the detective to New York and John Watson is renamed Joan Watson and played by Lucy Liu.
Fame Flynet 20 John C Reilly's version of Watson follows Martin Freeman, Jude Law and Lucy Liu in the role
Fame Flynet 20 It appears Watson and Holmes aren't getting along as well in this world as they do in others
Fame Flynet 20 Sherlock still appears to be as quirky as he's always seen
Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law also took on the roles of Holmes and Watson respectively in two Guy Ritchie-directed blockbuster films that were hits in 2009 and 2011.
However, most notably, the BBC version of the show, created by Steven Moffatt, launched the career of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman into the mainstream.
Sherlock has just started its fourth season to mixed reviews from fans – and left viewers shocked with an expected death of a main character that threatens the dynamic of the rest of the group.
Fame Flynet 20 Will looks dapper in his Sherlock costume - complete with wavy hair
Fame Flynet 20 John is once again playing Will's faithful sidekick
Fame Flynet 20 The star will bring Sherlock to the silver screen in 2018
Talking to TV Magazine, Martin Freeman, who plays John Watson in the BBC interpretation, said: “There were a couple of times with this series that I’ve been walking round the kitchen an hour after reading the script, I’ll put the kettle on and just think: ‘F***ing hell!’”
He added: “I’ve been in a daze from reading a script so good that I can’t quite believe it.”
20 The normally bubbly actor looked downcast as he prepared to shoot
Fame Flynet 20 The pair will be joined by a pair of famed English actors
“I can’t wait for you all to see it,” beams Amanda Abbington, who plays Martin’s on-screen wife, Mary Watson.
“I hope Benedict and Martin are bigging up this series as much as I am because it is really, really good. Sherlock fans will be floored.”
Benedict, 40, does his best to keep a lid on things in a professional way and avoids leaking any spoilers, but even he can barely contain his excitement.
“I’m allowed to tell you that there are a huge number of pay-offs,” he hints.
The new series continues on BBC1, 9pm on Sunday.
Got a story? email [email protected] or call us direct on 0207 782 4220Karlesha Thurman wasn't looking for controversy when she posted a picture of herself breastfeeding at her graduation ceremony on Facebook. "I found out I was pregnant [in] my last year of college," the 25-year-old American wrote. "She was my motivation to keep going, so me receiving my BA was OUR moment."
Nevertheless after the image went viral, Thurman faced an onslaught of sexist criticism. Commenters bemoaned her "inappropriate" behaviour; others indulged in some misogynistic name-calling. "Nobody told her to hoe around in 3rd period She should've been doing her work & maybe she wouldn't be breastfeeding during her graduation", offered one charming Twitter user.
Thurman's online abuse is the latest in a seemingly never-ending stream of mother-shaming media stories. From Instagram guidelines that censor breastfeeding images to UK-wide "nurse-ins" responding to a mother being called a "tramp", there is barely a week that goes by without a story of someone being told to breastfeed in the toilets.
For some, the media are simply getting their nursing bras in a knot over nothing. Emma Pickett of the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers thinks that for the vast majority, breastfeeding in public is nothing unusual: "Most people see a photo like Karlesha's and think, 'lovely' or nothing at all, and look at the cat picture that comes next on their feed."
I breastfed my eight-month-old son in a cafe while writing this piece and received only positive comments about my capacity to multitask. While I accept that most people don't suffer serious abuse for breastfeeding, there are strong arguments for why stories like Thurman's shouldn't be brushed aside. As Marcia Lord, vice-chair of Doula UK, explains: "If we tolerate this we are perpetuating the myth that women using their breasts for something other than the male gaze is somehow disgusting. Women are increasingly looking for their breastfeeding support online but often come across stigma and condemnation instead."
This has to be bad news for new mothers, the majority of whom want to breastfeed. Yet with UK rates falling for the first time in 10 years, confusion about whether it's OK to feed your baby outside of a toilet stall cannot be helping matters. This is particularly true for young mothers for whom social pressures contribute to low breastfeeding rates. African American women such as Thurman are also less likely to breastfeed, though in the UK statistics suggest that black and Asian mothers have the highest breastfeeding rates.
Damaging as this might be for breastfeeding, the issue goes far beyond the frankly boring-by-now breastfeeding debate. It really doesn't matter to me how a woman chooses to feed her baby as long as she is well informed, well supported and happy with her decision, which sadly we know many women are not.
The shaming and abuse of women on and offline, the ridiculing of their choices, the commentary on their bodies and the infringement of their basic human rights is, of course, a much bigger problem. That breastfeeding mothers, simply going about their daily business with a hungry infant in tow, can be at the sharp end of this is indicative of the scale of this wider issue.
It is for this very reason that Twitter-user @ish_chel polices the social networking site engaging with those who mother-shame. While reading her conversations isn't good for the blood pressure, she is compelled to stand up for those invisible mothers, as she believes "women need to feel that they won't be attacked when they are responding to their baby's most basic needs".
This isn't a breastfeeding problem. It is an issue that feminists need to take up, especially those who haven't yet engaged with the inequalities women face when they become mothers.
In the meantime, I am about to feed my baby in public again. It's not quite a Talullah Willis-style topless demonstration, but while there are still people who don't get the irony in Sparrow Folk's Ruin Your Day With Tits, I reckon I can add protester to my CV.Looking for news you can trust?
Subscribe to our free newsletters.
Every few months, my friend Brendan disappears into the wilderness to track wolves. The wolves are tagged with radio collars as part of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, which has been observing the animals in their natural environments in an effort to help protect them since 1995. Brendan’s work as a volunteer is to follow the wolf packs (from a safe distance) and record their behavioral, social, and predation habits. Sometimes he’ll go a day without spotting a wolf, just sitting in sub-freezing snow fields and staring through a scope. Other times, he and his partners will stumble across the juicy meat of the job—a wolf howling atop a boulder, a pack devouring a weakened elk—and the biting, windy wait will all be worth it.
Wolves entered the national limelight this week when Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) slipped a measure into the budget deal to strip gray wolves of their Endangered Species Act protections in most of the Northern Rockies—the first time a species has been removed from the list for political reasons, rather than scientific ones. The lawmakers argue that the bill alleviates stress on big-game herds and helps out ranchers and farmers, whose livestock fall victim to the predators. The bill would lift protections for wolves in five Western states and allow wolf hunting to resume in Montana and Idaho. Environmentalists worry that removing wolves from the ESA list could open the doors to allow other endangered species to be delisted as well.
Whether wolves have a negative impact on the Northern Rockies remains a contentious issue. Here’s how Brendan sees it: “Gray wolves and elk have been coexisting for 10,000 years. The problems really stem from people, who are contributing to habitat degradation and forest fire suppression.” Studies show that wolves play vital roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems, and could even help stave off some of the effects of climate change. Scroll through to find out how.
Reason #1: Without wolves and other large predators, ecosystems can go haywire. A 2001 study (PDF) found that when wolves went extinct in Yellowstone, for example, the moose population ballooned to five times its normal size and demolished woody vegetation where birds nested. As a result, several bird species were eliminated in the park.
Reason #2: Scavengers thrive when wolves are around. The species that help themselves to wolves’ leftovers include (PDF) ravens, magpies, wolverines, bald eagles, golden eagles, three weasel species, mink, lynx, cougar, grizzly bear, chickadees, masked shrew, great gray owl, and more than 445 species of beetle.
Reason #3: Wolf kills are also good for the soil. A 2009 study in Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park found that wolf-killed elk carcasses dramatically enhanced levels of nitrogen and other nutrients.
Reason #4: Wolf kills feed more animals than hunting by humans, since wolves scatter their carrion over the landscape. Wolf kills benefit (PDF) three times more species than human hunting kills. The carcass above was a bull elk killed by a pack of eight wolves in Agate Creek, Yellowstone. The skeleton was picked clean by wolves and scavengers in less than five days.
Reason #5: When wolves disappeared from Yellowstone, coyotes preyed on pronghorn almost to the point of no return. But since wolves have returned, the pronghorn have come back. In fact, pronghorns tend to give birth near wolf dens, since coyotes steer clear of those areas.
Reason #6: Deer and elk congregate in smaller groups (PDF) when wolves are around. This helps reduce the transmission of illnesses like Chronic Wasting Disease.
Reason #7: Chronic Wasting Disease is a major threat to elk and deer in the West. Wolves can help by reducing sick animals’ lifespans, in turn limiting the amount of time they can spread infections.
Reason #8: Yellowstone elk are less likely to overgraze near rivers and streams—damaging fragile ecosystems—when wolves are in the neighborhood.
Reason #9: Wolves help protect against climate change. A 2005 UC Berkeley study in Yellowstone concluded that milder winters, a product of climate change, have led to fewer elk deaths. This left scavengers like coyotes and ravens scrambling for food, but the problem was far less pervasive in areas where wolves were around to hunt elk.
Reason #10: Wolf tourism is an economic boon (PDF). Restoration of wolves in Yellowstone has cost about $30 million, but it’s brought in $35.5 million annual net benefit to the area surrounding the park. Photo shows a Yellowstone Wolf Project biologist securing a VHF (very high frequency) tracking collar on a sedated wolf.
Thanks to Defenders of Wildlife and Norman A. Bishop for their help with this slideshow.The rich have already created their own country. Are they about to create their own species?
Futurologist Paul Saffo says rapid advances in biotechnology will enable people to grow their own replacement organs, take specially tailored drugs and use robots and artificial limbs to live longer.
But, he says, the advances will be affordable only by the super-rich. That raises the prospect of a new, biological divide between the classes, with the “rich evolving into a different species entirely, leaving his not-so-rich counterpart behind.”
“I sometimes wonder if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.”
This is, of course, a disturbing and somewhat shocking prospect. Our wealth divide could become a health divide, which would further increase the wealth divide.
But is it realistic?
For one, we already have a health divide, where the wealthy receive (on the whole) much better care and technological benefits than the nonwealthy. Indeed, they have enjoyed better health care for centuries, and they have yet to form a race of super-rich cyborgs–-in part because the wealthy in America is a fluid and rapidly changing group.
What is more, advances in health care have tended to spread rapidly from the rich to everyone else. Just like computers, gadgets or cars, health-care technology that at first is priced solely for the wealthy is quickly scaled to larger markets and sold en masse.
Still, we have never seen the potential for bio-tech advancements like we see today — coupled of course with growing global inequality.
Do you think the rich will create their own super-race? And what would it look like?By Alex Jensen / Anadolu Agency
SEOUL: South Korea is struggling to send eight rescued North Korean fishermen back home, but Seoul also revealed the grisly tale behind their story Thursday.
The crew claimed several of their fellow sailors had starved to death when they were found adrift off the South’s east coast earlier this week, although none of the dead were recovered according to Seoul’s Unification Ministry spokesperson Jeong Joon-hee.
It was a tragic reminder of the North Korean boats that washed up in Japan last year carrying 27 corpses in total.
In this latest case, Jeong said the surviving fishermen were discovered aboard three vessels that had been at sea for weeks -- two of which had malfunctioned while the other is believed to have collided with a Chinese boat.
All the rescued crew members apparently want to go back to their reclusive homeland, citing family concerns among their reasons.
North Korea’s regime is notorious for severely punishing the relatives of defectors, who are welcomed in the South -- however, past reports have suggested even fishermen deciding to return have been harshly dealt with.
Seoul has so far been unable to get a response from Pyongyang amid a total breakdown in inter-Korean communication in recent months due to tensions over the North’s nuclear weapon ambitions.
“We plan to send them back home on Monday,” Jeong told reporters -- but the South has been reduced to using a loudspeaker at their heavily guarded border.
Jeong added that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un could be endangering fishermen through an all-out push to acquire valuable resources for his sanctioned nation.
“[Kim] has made a rare order to spur the fishery sector in the winter time,” he said. “North Korea's fishery industry is also the main source of hard currency.”
Coincidentally, North Korea’s state-run media carried a feature Thursday of a visit by the country’s leader to a fishery in celebration of an “unprecedented” haul of fish along with sufficient stores to feed his troops until next September.By Jeff Simons
It was quite interesting to read the perspectives of the Browman Development Group and city of Davis officials regarding the empty downtown storefronts. As a 20-year tenant in downtown, I offer a different account of the past year in hopes that the community will gain a better understanding of what actually transpired and why so many long-standing, quintessentially Davis businesses have opted to close or move.
I was shocked and saddened when Watermelon Music received notice from John Brinley in August of 2015 that he would be selling off all of his downtown properties. I began exploring the possibility of purchasing the building that we are in and learned that the estimated value of the property almost certainly would be well beyond my means.
Other tenants (including Dick Luna) met early on to explore similar options, and discussed pooling resources and seeking local investors to purchase all four buildings, hoping to keep the independent and vibrant downtown community intact, but again the numbers were not realistic. Some very knowledgeable local professionals were able to give us predictions of what the properties likely would sell for, and what this probably would mean for us in terms of occupancy costs in the future.
Upon learning that the Browman Development Group had entered escrow on the properties, tenants scrambled to learn whatever we could about the group and their business history, and were dismayed to see how they represent themselves on their website.
They proudly develop and operate the enormous, generic, beige big-box retail sites that exist up and down major highways, each filled with a seemingly identical mix of Targets, Walmarts, Safeways, Walgreens, McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc. — a type of retail and development that runs completely counter to the locally owned and operated, uniquely independent businesses in the Brinley buildings.
I have met with nearly all of the Brinley tenants, and believe that Watermelon Music was the only tenant approached by Jim Stephens and the Browman Group before escrow closed. We were told that they wanted us to stay, and were given an opportunity to let them know “what it would take” to keep us.
I thought long and hard about it, and gave them a maximum amount that I believed could work for Watermelon Music in the long term. I also indicated that I did not want to be the only independent left in downtown and needed some way out of a long-term lease if other merchants could not or would not stay. The only response I received was a “thank you for this, it helps our decision.”
I learned that escrow closed on Feb. 19. Stephens approached me later with an offer that was significantly higher than the maximum amount that I had indicated, and told me it was a particularly special deal, and that I would not be able to share the details with any other tenants, as they would not be receiving any special deals. Having few other options, I told him I would consider it.
Meanwhile, I learned that a suitable building in West Davis was coming on the market for sale and it looked like a potential good fit for my store. I entered into escrow and am preparing to move when our lease downtown comes up at the end of this year. Stephens was not happy to learn of our moving, as we occupy (I believe) the largest space in the portfolio.
In early July of this year, five months after the sale of the buildings, tenants received a letter indicating that the Browman Group “was pleased to inform us” that they had finished calculating our new common area maintenance charges. Under our existing lease, tenants are expected to pay, in addition to the price-per-square-foot rent, our portion of the property taxes, property insurance and building maintenance.
Under John Brinley, this amount was about $400 per month for Watermelon Music. The letter from Browman indicated that our new charge would be more than $4,200 per month. There was no breakdown or explanation of these new charges. Adding insult to injury, the letter also told us that we owed more than $18,000 in retroactive charges, for the period from Feb. 19 to July 1, and that we had until the end of our lease or the end of the year (whichever comes first) to pay them back.
When we called to get an accounting of these seemingly ridiculous new charges, we were informed that the property manager who signed and sent the letters out had just left for vacation. Being a college town, Davis slows way down in the summer months, and sending tenants an unexpected $20,000 bill right as we begin our slowest retail season is not a great way to instill confidence or loyalty.
When we finally (about four weeks later) received an accounting of the new fees, it was clear why they did not want to send them with the initial letter. Contrary to the impression given recently by Stephens and accepted as fact by city staff, property taxes and insurance account for less than 50 percent of the 10-fold increase to the tenants. The rest is boilerplate “maintenance” assessments for things like pest control, steam cleaning, landscaping, exterior lighting repair, etc.
Since Feb. 19, the only “maintenance” I’m aware that Browman has done for our building was to replace a faulty lock in our garbage area, and that took six weeks, three phone calls and two emails to get done. We now clean our own roof, sweep our own sidewalk and maintain the property as best we can. In essence, we are asked to pay 10 times the cost to get less than 1/10 the service we received under Brinley.
I would encourage local residents to speak with other tenants and get accurate information about what has happened. Not a single tenant had plans to move or shut down prior to the announcement that the buildings were being sold. Aaron Patella of Davis Sport Shop tried multiple times over several months to find out from Browman whether he could extend and renew his lease, finally receiving a response after 6 p.m. on the day his lease expired. Unsurprisingly, he had already made other plans.
Jenny Decker of Outdoor Davis told me multiple times that she could not get her calls and emails returned, and finally opted to shut down, as any kind of negotiation to renew or extend her lease seemed futile. Dick Luna did not want to retire at the end of 2015 — he wanted his legacy to endure, and hoped to put another couple of years in before passing on the operation to his employees.
I am glad that Stephens and the Browman Group seem to finally be reaching out and actively communicating with the remaining tenants. I sincerely hope that remaining businesses will be able to negotiate terms and rates that enable them to succeed for many more years.
Our funky, independent downtown is what convinced me to stay in Davis after I graduated from UC Davis, and I would be devastated if it were all lost in a single $20 million real estate transaction. I look forward to forging new relationships and partnerships with businesses in West Davis, and hope that people from all over town will come visit us in our new location once it opens in November or December.
— Jeff Simons is owner of Watermelon Music at 207 E St. in downtown Davis.Statistics Canada will once again start collecting and publishing data on unfounded criminal cases after a Globe and Mail investigation revealed one out of every five sexual assault allegations goes undocumented because police have dismissed the reports as baseless.
The agency expects the first results will be available by July, 2018. At that point, it will have been 15 years since Statscan stopped publishing unfounded numbers over concerns that police either were not always using the code correctly – the unfounded designation means no crime occurred or was attempted – or were not reporting the cases to the agency at all.
On Wednesday, Statscan will announce it has developed a standardized process with the help of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police that will address the previous data-quality concerns.
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Unfounded: How police and politicians have responded to The Globe's investigation so far
"The collaboration between Statistics Canada and its policing partners is an important first step in restoring public confidence that data on unfounded criminal incidents, including sexual assaults, will be collected and recorded in a consistent manner," Navdeep Bains, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, which is responsible for the statistics agency, although Statscan itself is arms-length from government, said in a release obtained by The Globe.
Also as part of the Wednesday announcement, The Department of Justice will pledge nearly $100,000 to the National Judicial Institute to develop gender-based violence training – including around sexual assault – for federally and provincially appointed judges.
In March, the Liberal government committed more than $100-million over five years to create a national strategy to prevent gender-based violence, citing The Globe's Unfounded series.
As part of a 20-month investigation, The Globe obtained unfounded statistics for both sexual and physical assault from 873 police jurisdictions over a five-year period ending in 2014.
The results showed that on average, sexual-assault complaints were nearly twice as likely to be dismissed as unfounded compared with regular assault.
The Globe's data revealed that sexual assault rates varied dramatically across the country, with some cities posting unfounded rates that top 50 per cent. In total, 115 communities were classifying at least one-third of sex-assault complaints as unfounded.
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Once an investigation is closed in this way, it essentially disappears from the public record. Unfounded cases are not reflected in local or national statistics, and it has been that way since 2003, the last year Statscan made unfounded data available. The agency continued to collect – but not release – the figures until 2006, when the Police Information and Statistics (POLIS) committee, a subcommittee of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, recommended that practice stop as well.
After The Globe's investigation, CACP president Mario Harel announced he had asked the POLIS committee to "examine how statistics are recorded and reported to Statistics Canada and make recommendations on how reliable and consistent statistical information may best be collected."
Researcher Linda Light, who was one of the most vocal critics of Statscan's decision to stop publishing unfounded data, said she was thrilled to learn the agency had reconsidered.
In 2006, Ms. Light and Gisela Ruebsaat were in the final stages of releasing a groundbreaking study of unfounded sexual assault cases, which had been funded in part by the federal Department of Justice and the British Columbia ministries of community services and public safety.
The pair was given access to full police files from four British Columbia police jurisdictions to help them try to identify commonalities among cases that wound up unfounded and ones that did not.
After reviewing 148 cases from 2002 and 2003, the researchers uncovered evidence to suggest the closer a complainant conformed to the debunked stereotypes about how true victims behave, the more likely it was the case would be deemed "founded," meaning the officer believed a crime had occurred. In files where it was noted that the complainant fought back, said "no," did not know the suspect, appeared visibly upset when discussing the incident, and did not present any mental health issues (including alcohol or drug abuse), the odds were higher that the case did not end up in the unfounded pile.
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The study is one of the most comprehensive and often-cited reports on unfounded cases in the country – but it was actually never published. A short summary of the findings was included in a Justice Department publication in 2007, but Ms. Light says around the time the report was to be released, Stephen Harper became prime minister and the publication was cancelled for reasons that were never fully explained.
It was also then that Ms. Light learned Statscan was going to stop collecting the data.
"I'm sorry that it took 10 years for it to [resume]. We were saying these same things 10 years ago and no one was listening. … We were screaming as loud as we were able to," Ms. Light said.
"I don't even like to think if the issue had got the attention it needed 10 years ago and more research might have built on the research we did, who knows what might have happened? … But better late than never."We all know about vampires and werewolves, or at least we think we do. The legends and myths that inspired these monsters are sometimes surprisingly different, but no less chilling. In this series of posts, Monster Monday, we’ll investigate the monsters that have informed our modern notions, as well as some lesser known monsters. Today, we talk about the Aufhocker.
In German folklore, an aufhocker is a shapeshifting creature that attacks lone travelers at night, especially at crossroads. It often appears as a large black dog, but can also appear as a helpless old woman in order to coax its victim to let their guard down or a horse that lures its victim into riding it to their death. In addition, in some stories it appears as a corpse or a spirit or a kind of goblin. Because of its nature it has been called a kind of vampire.
The name aufhocker comes from German meaning “to leap upon,” and its preferred method of attack in to jump on the back of its victim. In some stories, it becomes bigger and heavier once it attacks so that its victim can’t throw it off. In others it first appears small but gradually grows until it is tall enough to rip out its victim’s throat.
It can be defeated by daylight or the sound of church bells or devout prayer. In some stories it can also be driven away by swearing.IT IS not often that an elderly couple would make up their son's bed with satin sheets and spread rose petals in readiness for a visit by a sex worker.
But this is no ordinary birthday celebration for Mark, who has cerebral palsy and yearns for an intimate relationship. Mark is confined to a wheelchair and speaks via an electronic communication board but his eyes light up at the prospect of an overnight liaison with Rachel Wotton, a Sydney sex worker of 17 years.
The liberating, unexpectedly romantic encounter features in independent director Catherine Scott's latest documentary Scarlet Road, which is among the films vying for the $10,000 Foxtel Australian Documentary Prize at this year's Sydney Film Festival.
The full program will be announced today by the festival director, Clare Stewart, and will include many Australian premieres, including films fresh from the Cannes film festival, which begins today.August 08, 2012 July is Over: The Horrid Heat Numbers are in
By By Anthony Sagliani, Meteorologist August 08, 2012, 2:54:58 PM EDT
From New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and Phoenix, July has been a month of blistering heat and relentless drought across much of the county. Now that the month is over, what do the numbers reveal?
Preliminarily, 4,313 record high temperatures were reached across the country for the month of July, according to NOAA and the National Climatic Data Center.
Two hundred ninety-nine of these record highs were the warmest temperatures ever observed for the entire month and an incredible 171 records were the all-time highest temperatures ever observed.
Temperatures during the night were also among the highest ever observed, with a sweaty 3,545 record warmest nights over the course of the month.
According to Meteorologist and Climatologist Jim Rourke, "It was the hottest July on record in St. Louis, Denver and Indianapolis."
The record is based on an average of high and low temperatures throughout the month.
"In St. Louis, July averaged 88.0 degrees breaking the old record of 87.4 degrees set in 1901," Rourke said.
Meanwhile, temperature records set during the blistering Dust Bowl Era were broken.
"In Denver, this July averaged 78.9 degrees breaking the old record of 77.8 degrees set in 1934. Indianapolis averaged 84.0 degrees, breaking their old record of 82.8 degrees set in 1936," Rourke added.
Spotty rainfall and the associated lower temperatures during the last week or so of the month kept the cities of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. from setting an all-time record warm July in 2012.
Records in many of these cities date back to the early 1900s or late 1800s.
The reason for this incredible heat has been the location of the jet stream, a thin river of air miles high that guides the path of potential storms.
Unusually strong high pressure developed over much of the central part of the nation, an area where crops have been withering for months.
This high pressure pushed the jet stream much farther north than usual, and there was virtually no chance of rain.
Additionally, since there was no rain and less moisture for the sun's energy to evaporate, most of the power went into heating the ground, and the result was weeks of searing heat.
The first few days of August look to be no different across the nation's Heartland.
Temperatures on Wednesday will poke above 110 degrees from Oklahoma City to Wichita, and many more records are likely to fall by the end of the week.
Stay with us here at AccuWeather.com for all the latest on the extreme heat. Keep checking back as more incredible numbers on this record hot July come in today.
Report a TypoImage caption BT and Talk Talk say the Digital Economy Act risks infringing user privacy
BT and Talk Talk have lost an appeal over controversial measures to tackle copyright infringement online.
The internet service providers (ISPs) had argued the UK's Digital Economy Act was incompatible with EU law.
The Act will mean ISPs will have to send warning letters to alleged illegal file downloaders, as well as potentially cutting users off.
The creative industry argues that piracy costs £400m a year in lost revenue.
The firms' lawyers said the stricter measures could result in an invasion of privacy and run up disproportionate costs for both ISPs and consumers.
In a statement, Talk Talk said it was now "considering our options".
"We're disappointed that our appeal was unsuccessful though we welcome the additional legal clarity that has been provided for all parties," the company said.
"Though we have lost this appeal, we will continue fighting to defend our customers' rights against this ill-judged legislation."
A spokesman for BT said: "We have been seeking clarification from the courts that the DEA is consistent with European law, and legally robust in the UK, so that everyone can be confident in how it is implemented.
"Now that the court has made its decision, we will look at the judgment carefully to understand its implications and consider our next steps."
It wouldn't be surprising to see a lot more public outcry Adam Rendle, Copyright lawyer
'Stop fighting'
The decision was welcomed by copyright advocates.
Christine Payne, general secretary of the Actors' union Equity, called on the ISPs to "stop fighting and start obeying the law".
"Once again the court is on the side of the almost two million workers in the creative industries whose livelihoods are put at risk because creative content is stolen on a daily basis," she said.
However Loz Kaye, the leader of the UK Pirate Party, argued there was no proof the measures outlined in the Act - such as cutting off users - aided the fight against illegal file-sharing.
"This decision brings the draconian Digital Economy Act another step closer," he said.
"The coalition government must be clear now once and for all on whether it supports this anti-internet piece of legislation.
"No-one has proved that the Act will help the creative industries financially, that is just lobbyists' spin.
"A recent study on a similar system in France suggests that there is no benefit for music sales. Threats to chuck entire households off the web will be bad for the economy, bad for society - and for us as a creative nation too."
'Proper scrutiny'
Adam Rendle, a copyright specialist at international law firm Taylor Wessing, said he expected BT and Talk Talk to now appeal to the UK's Supreme Court.
He added that it was also likely the companies would step up lobbying efforts, perhaps harnessing support from groups recently protesting against the US Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the EU's proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta).
"We know how keen internet users are to protect what they see as freedom of speech," Mr Rendle told the BBC.
"When the Digital Economy Act itself was passed in the dying stages of the Labour government, there was a huge amount of disquiet that this kind of important legislation was being introduced without proper scrutiny.
"That kind of disquiet didn't result in the kind of action we've seen against Acta and Sopa. It wouldn't be surprising to see a lot more public outcry than there was when the Act was first passed."Portland Trail Blazers power forward Cliff Alexander suffered a bone bruise in his left knee, according to Casey Holdahl. Coach Terry Stotts indicated that he would miss "a couple weeks". Stotts did say that Alexander could still make the team despite the injury.
Cliff Alexander will be out a "couple of weeks" with a bone bruise, confirmed by an MRI according to Stotts. — Erik Gundersen (@blazerbanter) October 3, 2015
The bone bruise for Alexander is on his left knee. Stotts said he had been playing well. But he will be shut down for a few weeks. — Erik Gundersen (@blazerbanter) October 3, 2015
Stotts said it's unclear when and how Alexander injured his knee, but a Friday MRI revealed that the ailment is a bone bruise. — Joe Freeman (@BlazerFreeman) October 3, 2015
When asked if a guy like Cliff Alexander can make the team despite missing 2 |
for the truly exogenous gifts that they are.
When we listen to “Runaway,” as when we listen to any of Kanye’s work, we should be careful to draw the right distinctions. I am certainly not suggesting that we overlook faults, minimize grave scandal or immorality, or regard even his overtly Christian efforts as fully earnest striving towards truth.
While West is deeply flawed and badly imperfect, however, he does seem to persist in trying to know Christ. This is certainly more than we can say for countless celebrities. To the extent that we join him in that common journey, we can listen to his beautiful music and hear echoes of a familiar oscillation between consolation and desolation, between overblown confidence and utter humiliation. And we can hear the twang of the tightrope that separates joy from despair.I've had several people request a tutorial for the Dungeons and Dragons dice mold that I created. So, here's my step-by-step tutorial for how to make this:
So that you can make these:
Before we begin, some disclaimers. First and foremost: This is about as complicated and expensive (net cost: $100 + shipping) a mold as you're likely to get, for anything reasonably sized. (Well, unless you want molded daleks complete with little plunger-arms or something else that is fundamentally not a convex shape.) That's because it has a lot of little, tiny, fiddly pieces, and it's a two-piece mold meant to create solid 3D shapes with no flat back. And the little fiddly pieces are of variable depth so you need way more silicone than you would if, say, you were just molding your favorite buttons. Chances are, your mold doesn't need to be this insane. But that's fine! You can still use this tutorial, just skip the pieces that are clearly irrelevant.
Second: I learned how to do this from MakeYourOwnMolds.com. Not only do they sell all of the materials you need for food-safe custom molds, but they have excellent YouTube tutorials. If you decide to do a project like this, I do encourage you to go look around their site. That goes double if you're doing a one-piece mold of a single object; they have other products that are much easier to use than the liquid stuff for simple projects.
How do make your own D&D chocolate dice mold
Materials:
7 sets D&D dice
5 lbs two-part liquid molding silicone (NOT latex)
4-5 lbs food-safe modeling clay (you can get away with less, but I'm not that good)
Food-safe wax ("Release-Dit" is the silly brand name)
A handful of simple 3D objects to make the mold alignment slots/tabs. (I used the flat-bottomed oblong glass marbles we use for counters in board games.)
Disposable containers for mixing the silicone in (large Chinese soup containers are great)
Sturdy disposable stirrers for stirring the silicone
A flat container at least as deep as a standard baking dish, large enough to hold all of your dice spread out; or, more modelling clay, parchment paper, and patience. (Note: you will be shoving modeling clay into said flat container. A smart person would probably not have put modelling clay directly into her good baking dish. Not being a smart person, I can tell you that it's a bitch to clean; you might want to use a disposable container if you can find one that's big enough. You definitely want something with smooth walls, though, because the silicone will ooze into everything.)
A kitchen scale, or measuring cups you don't care about (improvised will do, as long as you can evaluate equal amounts of two liquids)
A natural bristle paintbrush that you don't mind throwing away when you're done. (Two if you're making a very detailed two-part mold.)
We're going to be molding this in two halves, so that we can separate the halves, fill them, empty them, all that good stuff. However, silicone is thick stuff; we can't just stick the dice in a layer of it (which would be the easy approach), because they'll float rather than staying at the level we want. So instead, we're going to mold from the top down.
PART ONE:
STEP ONE:
You'll want to put a layer of clay into your container that's deep enough to hold all of your dice to the level you want one half of your mold to be. (For everything except d4s, that's "halfway." For d4s, you're basically going to have the entire volume of the die in one half, and just enough depth to mold the numbers in the other half.) Get the surface reasonably flat and smooth; this will become the model for your mold's dividing surface, and it'll be easier to clean if it's not rough.
STEP TWO:
Push your alignment markers into the clay, making sure that you have at least one per corner. (I ended up doing five, so that I couldn't accidentally rotate one half of the mold; in this picture, you see six because I wasn't yet sure how much of the clay base I'd need for the dice.)
STEP THREE:
Then, begin inserting your dice one by one to their dividing line. Make sure to leave at least a quarter inch of space between them at the narrowest spots; any less than that and the silicone may be too wobbly to get a good shape.
You will notice shortly — probably when you get to the d10s — that many dice do not actually have a simple horizontal dividing line between the "top" and "bottom" halves. Instead, they have a jagged edge where the faces meet. This is rather inconvenient, since silicone will creep under any exposed surfaces and create molds that have a little inward divot. We'll just have to live with some of that — after all, that's the shape we're trying to create — but we want to have as little of those fragile lips as possible. (Remember how I said that less than 1/4" of silicone isn't reliably stable?) So when putting dice in, I found it helpful to use a little extra clay to fill in some of those hollows, just a little bit.
Remember, it's not the end of the world if the final mold surface isn't perfectly flat; we just want it smooth enough to easily scrape/scrub clean.
STEP FOUR:
Once all the dice are inserted, you may discover that your container is too big for your dice after all. If so, build yourself a little clay wall, like so:
This will make sure you only use the silicone you need, and don't waste it filling unnecessary space. Note how the clay there is actually rubbed up to meet the wall of the dish: the silicone is liquid, and *will* get into cracks if you leave any. And then your mold will have little stringy bits, and you'll have to cut them off, and that will just be annoying. So be sure to smooth your edges together.
So you should now have a final "master," that looks something like this:
(As an aside: Note how mine is crooked and tilts slowly up as it goes left? Yeah, the final mold ended up lopsided too. It's usable, but annoying. Don't do that. Silly me didn't think to look from the side when deciding whether the clay was flat.)
STEP FIVE:
Next, we're going to mix the silicone. With the stuff I used, it's a 50-50 mixture. I did an initial volume estimate in water, divided that in two, and used that to measure the amount of silicone I'd need. Note that I used my good measuring cups for this, figuring that stainless steel would be easy to clean. Unmixed silicone is sticky. Very sticky. Also not water-soluble, and soap is only of limited use. Don't make my mistake; you'll regret it for the next three weeks of scrubbing. Use, say, smaller Chinese soup containers instead. Or use a kitchen scale to get 50-50 weight ratios; it'll be more accurate anyway. Also note that when combining silicone, it is really important to get it well-mixed. If you think it is well-mixed, it's not; scrape out the bottom and sides some more. This stuff is thick and sticky.
STEP SIX:
You'll want to mix an initial small batch, using a subset of your final volume. This will be used to brush into the cracks and fine details in your master: in this case, to highlight all the numbers on the dice. You'll also want to use it to get a thin coat of silicone around the final surface of the mold: all of the major edges, the top, etc. This is to prevent annoyingly-located bubbles from causing problems with the final casting. (It isn't critical that you get to the edges of the dish; after all, that's just aesthetic.)
STEP SEVEN:
Next, mix the rest of the silicone for this half, and pour it in, as far from the critical components as you can without splashing. Make sure to fill to a depth of at least 1/4" beyond your tallest object; make a note on the side of the container before pouring if you need to. You'll end up with something that looks (with my silicone, anyway) disturbingly like a casserole dish full of Velveeta.
STEP EIGHT:
Let it sit for at least four hours, or whatever it says with the instructions for your silicone. Overnight works great. When it's done, it should be solid, not even a little bit sticky, and if you press it with something thin like a coin, it'll just spring immediately back into shape without leaving even a temporary dent. In other words, it'll look and feel like solid silicone. Remove it from your container; don't worry about prying a bit, it's tough. Peel off any clay that's stuck to it, and voila:
You've got half of your mold! If you want something with flat bottoms — say, you want to decorate your cake with half-dice, or whatever — you can stop now. Otherwise, on to Part Two!
PART TWO:
STEP ONE:
First, liberally coat your shiny new mold with your Release-Dit or other handy-dandy wax. Wipe off the excess; you just need enough that the next batch of silicone won't stick to itself, not so much that you get lumps where the wax was. And then go through and put all of those dice back into the mold, being sure to align the numbers correctly. (You may need to rub them down in paper towels to clean the excess clay off; remember, you want those numbers clear!) Do NOT put your alignment components back in: the whole idea is that you'll have a raised piece of silicone in the other half of the mold that you can slot in when you're creating your real objects.
STEP TWO:
Put the mold back into the container, once you've removed the clay; or, if the container didn't have straight sides so your mold won't fit, or if you forgot to put plastic wrap at the bottom of the container so you get fed up trying to get the clay back out (oops), put the mold on a piece of parchment paper big enough to protect your table from leaks and splashes, and use that extra clay to build a wall around it on all four sides, remembering to smooth the clay to prevent leaks. (Sorry, didn't get a work-in-progress photo of this one.)
STEP THREE:
Use the same technique as before to mix a little silicone and cover the surfaces and details, then a large batch to fill in. Let set, and voila:
STEP FOUR:
Remove the dice, clean off clay and wax with a quick scrub in the sink (non-scratching sponges only!), and you're ready to go. You may see a few flimsy little raised edges in the new half, from where silicone leaked under dice without the clay barrier; you can use an X-acto knife or small sharp scissors to cut those off, but small firmly attached ones won't do you any harm.
And there you have it: one 3D mold for D&D chocolate dice.
And if you end up deciding that this is way too insane, but you desperately want D&D dice anyway, drop me a line. After all, I already have the mold!The Moto X is on its way. The long-anticipated Android phone — expected to be the first truly Google-influenced product from Motorola since Google acquired the company back in 2012 — is due to be unveiled in New York City on August 1st. Already, the physical design and basically all of the phone’s technical details have leaked. But there’s one aspect of the phone that Motorola was promoting months ahead of the leaks: that it’s made in America.
"the first smartphone ever assembled domestically."
"Available this summer, every Moto X sold in the USA will be assembled in Fort Worth, Texas, making it the first smartphone ever assembled domestically," wrote Motorola spokesperson Danielle McNally in May, following comments made to similar effect by Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside at the 2013 All Things D conference. In fact, Motorola’s assembly partner for the phone, a contract manufacturing company called Flextronics, said it planned to create 2,000 new jobs in the Fort Worth area. Even leaked images of the Moto X appear to contain a Texas flag design as the default wallpaper.
But while the Moto X purports to be the first smartphone assembled in the US, Google and Motorola are hardly the only big-name brands in tech using patriotism to move product these days. Apple CEO Tim Cook made headlines last December when he announced in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that Apple would be making a product in the US this year. That product turned out to be the bold, new, trashcan-shaped Mac Pro, first unveiled at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June.
Apple's new American-made Mac Pro was unveiled at WWDC 2013.
"There’s no doubt that ‘Made in America’ advertising is effective."
In fact, Apple kicked off WWDC with an emotional animated video that ended with the phrase "designed by Apple in California," which has appeared on Apple devices for years. But the company is clearly emphasizing its home state more now than ever before. Going forward, new versions of Apple's Mac OS X operating system will take the names of places in California, beginning with the latest, 10.9 Mavericks, due to hit this fall. And "designed by Apple in California" is now the leading slogan for a new marketing campaign used in Apple video and print ads.
Not to be left out, even PC maker Lenovo is getting on the made in America bandwagon, opening a new ThinkPad manufacturing facility in North Carolina earlier this year, which it said will create over 100 new local jobs. Clearly, something is driving some of the most important companies in consumer tech to promote their affiliations with the US more today than they have in decades. But what? "There’s no doubt that ‘Made in America’ advertising is effective," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), a nonprofit trade group founded in 2007 to represent steelworkers and other US industrial laborers. "It’s not limited to tech gadgets."
To his point, a recent survey by the Boston Consulting Group found that 80 percent of 5,000 consumers were willing to pay more for products made in America, including electronics. The same study found Chinese consumers were also willing to pay more for American-made products. "You can certainly move a product off the shelf with that kind of advertising," Paul said. "You can also generate more support from politicians, because if you are building products and hiring workers in communities in the US, the public officials in those areas will be more invested in your outcome as well."
"I don’t think Google, Apple and Lenovo would be doing this if it weren’t in the interest of their shareholders."
While he acknowledges the political and PR benefits that tech companies can achieve by moving some production back to the US, Paul doesn’t think Apple and Google’s recent moves are just cynical marketing ploys. "I don’t think Google, Apple and Lenovo would be doing this — shifting hi-tech manufacturing back to the United States — if it weren’t in the interest of their shareholders. They have to have a reason to believe it will be successful and profitable." Paul pointed to several factors at work that are making China, currently the world's largest manufacturer, decidedly less attractive for the purposes of consumer tech assembly: rapidly rising worker wages, the fact that the Chinese workforce is declining relative to the overall size of the the population, and the slow but inevitable increase in the value of its currency.
Two other trends in the US are also making it into a more attractive electronics manufacturing hub: a depressed labor market and faltering worker wages. "You have to think that these companies [Apple, Google] are looking down the road and saying, ‘The first year we do this, we might lose money’, but five years down the road, ‘We made right call.’" Paul explained.
A graph showing manufacturing costs by country as percentages of average US manufacturing costs over time. (Credit: AlixPartners).
by 2015, manufacturing costs in China will be on par with the US, one study suggests
It’s true that for now, manufacturing in the US is more expensive than going abroad. But the situation is rapidly changing, and if current trends continue, by 2015, manufacturing costs in China will be on par with the US, according to one forecast by AlixPartners, a global business advisory firm. Still, in the nearer term, the higher manufacturing costs of American-made products often get passed on to the consumer. See Google Glass, also assembled in California, with a $1,500 price tag, and Google’s failed Nexus Q media computer which went on sale in the summer of 2012 for $299. Those were both products designed for niche audiences, meaning that Google could justify the additional manufacturing costs on its end, and higher prices for consumers. While the Mac Pro certainly falls into that category, Google’s Moto X does not. In order to find success with a mass audience, it will need to come in at a price that the average consumer can swallow.
Google's failed Nexus Q streamer, repurposed as a doorstop.
Other trade analysts don’t think Google's and Apple's new American-made products amount to much in terms of actual global economic impact. "There are no indications that these two announcements [Moto X and Mac Pro] are more than simply one-off cases," said Ron Hira, associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the author of the 2008 book Outsourcing America: The True Cost of Shipping Jobs Overseas and What Can Be Done About It. "If these were part of a real trend we’d be seeing it show up in the trade data," Hira noted. "It hasn't... this is more PR than anything else."
"CEOs and owners have no stake in America."
Hira added that the situation with tech companies today differs substantially from back in the 1980s, the last time the "made in America" label was used to promote big US industries — namely automobiles, steel, and semiconductors. Hira said because tech companies have spent years converting their supply chains to overseas operations, predominantly in Asia, that "the CEOs and owners have no stake in America," Hira argued. "Their interests are not aligned with America’s interests."
Google Glass: Explorer Edition.
Hira said it was also an open question just how much of each device — Mac Pro and Moto X — would actually be made in the US. But there is a legal limit on that, at least: in 1997, the US Federal Trade Commission codified that for a product to be fairly advertised as "Made in America" or "Made in the USA," it must be "all or virtually all" created here. As the FTC explains: "‘All or virtually all’" means that all significant parts and processing that go into the product must be of US origin. That is, the product should contain no — or negligible — foreign content."
"The question in my mind is whether consumers will really care."
Even if Google and Apple’s quest to associate their brands with America is primarily an advertising ploy, as Hira suggests, the question remains to what extent that might help buoy product sales above a more geographically neutral advertising campaign. "The question in my mind is whether consumers will really care," said Gary Pisano, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the co-author of the 2012 book Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance.
"Will American consumers like Apple products more because they are ‘made in America’?" Pisano asked. "[I‘m] not sure American consumers (or any others) are looking at the back of their electronic devices to see where they are made and making a choice based on that." Pisano pointed out that for some product categories, nationalistic associations do make a difference to consumers: fashionable clothes and shoes from Italy and cars from Germany, for example. When it comes to consumer electronics, Pisano notes that Japan, and more broadly, Asia as a continent already has a fairly strong reputation for making quality products. "I would not advise companies to manufacture those kind of products in America just for the branding," he told The Verge. "I would do it to be close to the market and close to the company's design centers."
"It doesn’t matter if it was manufactured in China or on the moon, if it doesn't have the right functionality, it's not going to sell."
A photograph of the American flag planted on the moon by NASA Apollo 11 astronauts. (Credit: NASA)
Merely slapping a "made in America" label on something doesn’t guarantee it will be a hit, of course. The association didn’t stop American automakers from falling behind Japanese competitors in the 1980s. When it comes to the new tech patriotism, Apple’s own "Designed by Apple in California" video ad tested poorly in a recent consumer survey, at least compared to other previous Apple ad campaigns. And lest we forget, Google's American-made Nexus Q media computer released in 2012 has not only sold poorly, but has basically become a paperweight thanks to a recent update. Acknowledging the failure of the Nexus Q, AAM president Scott Paul told The Verge: "It doesn’t matter if it was manufactured in China or on the moon, if it doesn’t have the right functionality, it’s not going to sell."
Graphic design by T.C. Sottek.Kevin Smith has wrapped production on “Hollyweed,” a half-hour comedy produced by FremantleMedia North America and StarStream Media, Variety has learned.
The project, written, directed by and starring Smith, is set in a Los Angeles cannabis dispensary. It follows two potheads, played by Smith and Donnell Rawlings (“Chappelle’s Show”), who battle a neighboring cookie magnate played by Kristin Bauer van Straten (“True Blood”) and enlist the help of a charming porn star played by Frankie Shaw (“Mr. Robot”), to help them navigate the ups and downs of managing a small business in their quest for profits and the perfect bud.
The half-hour episode was shot on spec with financing from FremantleMedia and five firms with ties to the booming cannabis industry: Weedmaps.com, a social media community for medicinal marijuana users; G-Pen (Grenco Science), a manufacturer of portable vaporizers; DNA Genetics, a pot seed company; ACME Elixirs, an organic cannabis oil company; and RAW, maker of RAW Natural Rolling Papers.
Smith and FremantleMedia opted to shoot the project on spec because there are a number of pot-based projects in the works at present. The partners intend to shop the completed episode to TV buyers in the near future. It may be sold as a one-off or as a pilot for a potential series, depending on the level of interest. The sponsor financing gives FremantleMedia some flexibility in that regard. It’s not entirely clear how active the cannabis firms will be in the production going forward should the project land a mainstream TV home as a series.
Related Stan Lee Remembered at Hollywood Tribute: His 'Greatest Creation Was Himself' Saban Films Buys Kevin Smith's 'Jay and Silent Bob Reboot'
The unconventional path to production for “Hollyweed” is in keeping with Smith’s reputation as a showbiz maverick.
“When I wrote ‘Clerks,’ I wrote the role of Randal to play myself. But as we got close to shooting, I got scared and chickened out of trying to act with dialogue, opting to play Silent Bob instead,” Smith said. “Two decades later, the universe, StarStream and FremantleMedia are giving me the chance to play a clerk with dialogue that I wrote. The fact that it’s a dispensary instead of a convenience store makes it even better.”
The show also features appearances by Adam Brody, Chloe Dworkin, Jason Mewes, Hina Abdullah, Ralph Garman and Pete Pietrangeli, as well as Smith’s daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, who plays his character’s daughter.
“Hollyweed” exec producers include Smith, StarStream’s Pietrangeli, Kim Leadford and Dan McCarney, as well as Jana Edelbaum and Rachel Cohen. Liz Destro and Jordan Monsanto headed up production.
The growing world of legal marijuana is becoming fertile ground for TV series. Among the other pot-centric laffers in the pipeline:Story highlights A Canadian team has begun searching for cluster balloonist Jonathan Trappe
Trappe aimed to cross the Atlantic Ocean suspended from 370 helium-filled balloons
He was just 12 hours and about 470 miles into the journey, his Facebook page says
He touched down in darkness near a provincial park in the Newfoundland wilderness
Jonathan Trappe, the American who aimed to cross the Atlantic Ocean suspended from 370 helium-filled balloons, has aborted his mission just 12 hours and about 470 miles into the journey, his Facebook page says.
The 39-year-old IT project manager from Raleigh, North Carolina, was forced to make an early landing in a remote part of Newfoundland, Canada, because of a technical issue.
"Hmm, this doesn't look like France," Trappe posted to his Facebook page late Thursday, along with the coordinates of his landing.
Via his messaging system, Trappe spoke to Barcroft Media, a British company he partnered with. He said he feared he might die as he attempted to crash-land his balloon contraption.
"Honestly did not know if I would survive that landing!" Trappe said of touching down in pitch darkness near Blow Me Down Provincial Park in the wilderness of Newfoundland.
JUST WATCHED What goes up must come down Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH What goes up must come down 01:02
He then messaged, "Situation stable. Have 60l water 38L. Gatorade 60,000 cal food. Have shelter and exposure gear."
Trappe said he would stay the night at his landing site before grabbing what gear he could -- including footage he took of the shorter-than-planned trip -- and making his way home.
Canadian teams have begun searching the forest where Trappe crash-landed. If the patrol is unsuccessful, Trappe, who has confirmed he is safe and well on Facebook, is prepared to spend another night in the mountainous region, which is populated by black bears and moose, said Sgt. Richard White of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
If the teams can't find him, or if he can't get a commercial team to extract him, he plans to make his way out of the mountainous forest on foot and head to a local community.
Fans followed the adventurer's movements on a website that showed his longitude and latitude along the journey via a satellite tracker he took with him.
Trappe took off from Caribou, Maine, early Thursday with 370 balloons.
"Nobody has ever made a flight like this, using only small helium balloons -- in manned flight -- across the ocean," Trappe wrote on his website, clusterballoon.com, after the style of ballooning used in his attempt to across the Atlantic.
In 2010, he was the first person to cross the English Channel using a balloon cluster.
Five people have died trying to cross the Atlantic with balloons. Trappe spent two years preparing for the transatlantic flight, and his trip to Europe was supposed to take about a week.
"While disappointing that he had to cut his quest across the Atlantic short, I know Jonathan thanks everyone for their support and encouragement," said Trappe's friend, Kevin Knapp, who monitored the trip from a command center on the ground.Reunited and it feels so good! Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton spent time together at Kardashian’s mom Kris Jenner’s Christmas Eve party in Los Angeles December 24.
The former reality star BFFs turned famous frenemies posed for a photo from inside the star-studded bash.
“Lovely evening celebrating the holidays with @KimKardashian,” Hilton wrote on Instagram. In the snap, Kardashian looked chic in a gold dress while Hilton opted for a black lace number.
Their photo op marks the first time the duo have been seen together since Riccardo Tisci’s star-studded birthday party in Ibiza two years ago, when Kardashian shocked fans by posting a black-and-white photo with Hilton to her Instagram with the caption: “Reminiscing about the 1st time we went to Ibiza in 2006! @parishilton it was so good to see you & catch up!! Loves it lol.”
The duo had a long history together, before their famous falling out. The Selfish author made her first-ever reality show appearance on Hilton’s show, The Simple Life. As fans well remember, the now–social media maven appeared as Hilton’s assistant, organizing her closet during the episode.
They were often seen hitting up every club in Los Angeles and carrying matching Louis Vuitton purses, but the heiress and Kardashian grew apart as the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star rose to fame. During a 2008 interview with Chet Buchanan and the Morning Zoo Show, Hilton bashed Kardashian, describing her famous butt as “cottage cheese inside a big trash bag” and later crediting herself for making Kardashian famous.
However, during an interview with Howard Stern in 2009 Kardashian revealed that Hilton later apologized to her for the public diss.
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Known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, this critical phase "occurs in intervals throughout the night, and is characterized by more dreaming and rapid eye movements," explained study author Matthew Pase. He is a senior research fellow with Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, and a visiting researcher in the department of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine.
"We found that persons experiencing less REM sleep over the course of a night displayed an increased risk of developing dementia in the future," Pase said. He noted that for every 1 percent drop in REM sleep, the seniors in his study saw their dementia and Alzheimer's disease risk go up by about 9 percent.
While prior research has pointed to this REM-dementia link, the current investigation is the first to link less REM sleep to a higher risk for developing dementia up to 18 years down the road. And that, said Pase, means that "changes in REM sleep may not simply be a consequence of dementia," but rather potentially a contributing cause.
Sleep moves through five distinct phases each night: light sleep; a pre-deep sleep preparatory phase; two subsequent stages of deep sleep; and finally REM sleep.
It is during REM -- which repeats itself several times over the course of a typical night -- that the eyes move quickly. REM is also characterized by greater brain activity, quicker breathing and pulse, and a relatively higher body temperature.
Pase's study focused on 321 men and women aged 60 and up (average age of 67) who had participated in the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) between 1995 and 1998. The FHS is a long-term study that includes residents of Framingham, Mass.
The research team first tracked the sleep cycle of the men and women over the course of a single night. All the patients were then tracked for signs of dementia for up to 19 years (12 years, on average). Ultimately, 32 participants developed dementia. Twenty-four of those people developed Alzheimer's.
The investigators concluded that deep sleep patterns had no bearing on dementia risk. But REM patterns did.
Specifically, those for whom REM comprised 20 percent of their total sleep did not go on to develop dementia. But that number fell to 17 percent of overall sleep among those who did develop dementia.
And even after adjusting for other factors -- including heart disease risk, depression and medication routines -- the team concluded that those who spent less time in REM and/or took longer to actually enter into the REM phase, faced a greater risk for dementia.
That said, Pase stressed that "our results do not test a cause-and-effect relationship," but rather show an association.
As to what might explain the link between REM and dementia, he noted that "more REM sleep may help protect connections in the brain, which become damaged with dementia."
However, "On the other hand," he added, "lower REM sleep may result from other factors like chronic stress or undiagnosed sleep disorders, which may independently increase risk for dementia."
The findings were published online Aug. 23 in the journal Neurology.
Dr. Yvette Sheline, director of the Center for Neuromodulation in Depression and Stress at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine in Philadelphia, pointed to prior animal research that indicated mice that are deliberately disturbed during sleep have greater deposits of amyloid plaque in their brains. Such deposits are believed to boost Alzheimer's risk.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ricardo Osorio, a research assistant professor of psychiatry with the Center for Brain Health at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, noted that part of the difficulty with trying to better understand REM's influence on dementia risk "is that we don't have a good explanation of why we have REM sleep."
According to Osorio, "We know that [REM sleep] is important for the survival of most mammalian and avian species" and also appears to help facilitate memory function and infant brain development. "But that is about it," he added.
Still, he stressed that most sleep-dementia research has focused on the role of deep sleep rather than REM sleep.
"So, in my opinion, this study brings back REM sleep as a sleep stage that is important for brain function, and that neural activity occurring specifically during REM might be critical for normal memory consolidation and protective against Alzheimer's," Osorio said.
Visit the National Sleep Foundation for more on sleep and the elderly.
Copyright © 2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Google is preparing to roll out special "buy" buttons alongside some of its search ads, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The move, which the report says is expected in the coming weeks, is the latest sign of Google's ambitions to expand its search engine from being a mere provider of Web links to a one-stop shop where consumers can directly buy whatever strikes their fancy.
It could also be a strong counter against Amazon's pull as a online destination for all things retail, which threatens Google's most lucrative source of search advertising money.
The buy buttons will initially be available only on mobile searches, according to the report. And the feature will appear alongside paid search ads, but not "organic" search results.
Google is reportedly in talks with a small number of retailers, including Macy's.
Here's how it will work, according to the Journal's anonymous sources: Click on a buy button, and you'll go to a special Google page (rather than to, say, Macy's website) where all the regular purchase options can be filled out (size, color, shipping options, etc). Consumers will give their payment information directly to Google, which will pass along the order and the money to the retailer.
Google has said for years now that it sees itself as more than a place for consumers to get "ten blue links." But the need to do this has become increasingly important as mobile apps that let consumers do everything from order food to cabs, increasingly compete with Google for consumers' attention.
Earlier this month Google announced a feature that lets US consumers order restaurant f ood directly from its search results, thanks to a partnership with six companies including GrubHub and MyPizza.com.
And with Google expanding its same-day delivery service, Google Express, some believe it's just a matter of time until Google search results all have a one-click option to have something delivered to straight your doorstep, courtesy of Google."On Sight" is a song by American rapper Kanye West from his sixth solo studio album, Yeezus (2013). It was produced by West, Daft Punk, Benji B and Mike Dean. Daft Punk were the first people West became involved with for the album. The song itself was first heard when performed live by West at the Governors Ball Music Festival in 2013.
"On Sight" contains a studio recreation of "Sermon (He'll Give Us What We Really Need)" by Holy Name of Mary Choral Family, sung by a choir. Lyrics by West about Parkinson's disease drew in a controversial response from the American Parkinson Disease Association. Music critics positively received the song. It charted on both the US Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 and US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts at number 10 and 38 respectively in 2013.
Background [ edit ]
"On Sight" was first heard when West performed it live at the Governors Ball Music Festival on June 9, 2013.[1] At the listening party for Yeezus on June 10, West said in a brief speech after playback that he worked with Daft Punk on three or four of the songs, but "Black Skinhead" was the only one the public knew at the time that they had been involved with and the duo are among the album's major producers.[2][3] Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk revealed in a July 2013 interview that they were the first people West came to during the creation of Yeezus.[4]
Composition [ edit ]
The song includes an electronic sound, which was mostly crafted by the producers Daft Punk.[5] The production of its opening moments left people polarized upon first listen of the introductory track, which was confirmed by Rick Rubin as intentional.[6] When describing the song's sound, Noah Goldstein was quoted as saying:
"On Sight" sets a new bar. Nobody's doing that. There's no chance in hell that anybody's gonna put that on and be like, 'Oh, that's J. Cole'-- not to diss J. Cole. But there's only one person who can do that kind of shit.[7]
The song contains a studio recreation of "Sermon |
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