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another in this matter. Married couples should also understand that sexual relations within marriage are divinely approved not only for the purpose of procreation, but also as a way of expressing love and strengthening emotional and spiritual bonds between husband and wife.[67]
Outside of the handbook, the most recent statement by a President of the Church on the issue of birth control is a statement made by Gordon B. Hinckley in 1983:
Much has been said... about birth control. I like to think of the positive side of the equation, of the meaning and sanctity of life, of the purpose of this estate in our eternal journey, of the need for the experiences of mortal life under the great plan of God our Father, of the joy that is to be found only where there are children in the home, of the blessings that come of good posterity. When I think of these values and see them taught and observed, then I am willing to leave the question of numbers to the man and the woman and the Lord.[68]
The typical LDS approach is that this statement and the current handbook statement supersedes prior statements made by previous authorities.[citation needed]
The LDS Church opposes elective abortion "for personal or social convenience"[67] but states that abortion could be an acceptable option in cases of rape, incest, danger to the health or life of the mother, or where the fetus has been diagnosed with "severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth".[67] The church "strongly discourages surgical sterilization as an elective form of birth control".[67]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Roman Catholic
Eastern Orthodox
ProtestantIf you haven’t heard of Discord yet, it’s basically an alternative to Skype, featuring servers with both voice and text chat. You can use it in your browser, download the desktop program, or get the mobile app.
If you don’t have an account already, you can make one for free here.
Once you’ve done that, you can join Citra’s official server by going here.
There are 5 channels:
#read-first - A read-only introduction to the server, and announcements.
#citra-general - Any discussion related to Citra.
#citra-support - If you are having trouble with Citra, you can ask for help here. Please read #read-first, first.
#dumping-support - Support for dumping games/system files for Citra.
#offtopic - Anything not related to Citra that doesn’t belong in #citra-general goes here.
The Citra Community Rules also apply to this server.
Have fun!VENKY’S intend to stand firm in their attempts to keep Jordan Rhodes at Blackburn Rovers – despite the striker publicly saying he wants to talk to Middlesbrough.
Rovers have rejected a bid of around £10m, rising to £12m if Middlesbrough are promoted to the Premier League, but Rhodes yesterday said he was ‘unhappy’ that he has not been given the opportunity to speak to the Teesside club.
Venky’s do not want to sell the 25-year-old to another Championship club and Rovers managing director Derek Shaw insisted that Rhodes’ statement had changed nothing at this stage.
Rovers hope that the Scotland international, who is currently nearing a return from an ankle injury, will accept that he is staying at Ewood Park and continue to show full commitment on the field.
“We’ve received an offer and the owners have turned it down,” Shaw said.
“We have had two or three different bids for Jordan Rhodes while he’s been at the club, but the owners have always turned them down because they want to keep him at Blackburn.
“If anything changes, we’ll let people know.”
There are understood to have been no further talks between Rovers and Middlesbrough since the rejection of the bid.
Rovers signed Rhodes from Huddersfield Town for £8m in 2012 but the striker, who penned a new five-year contract last year, yesterday publicly suggested that he might want to leave for the first time.
“I have been advised by the club that they have rejected an offer from Middlesbrough for my services which was in excess of what Blackburn paid for me,” said Rhodes, who is believed to have made his stance known privately to Rovers before going public.
“I am ambitious and have never hidden my desire to play at the highest level possible and that was one of the reasons why I left Huddersfield Town for Blackburn.
“When I left Huddersfield I felt the timing was right in the next stage of my career and, having seen Middlesbrough’s performances last season in reaching the play-off final and their ambition this summer in terms of acquisitions, I would have liked to have been able to talk to them and I am unhappy at not being given that opportunity.”
Rhodes’ uncle Steve Agnew is the assistant manager at Middlesbrough. Agnew was previously at Hull when Venky’s dug their heels in and rejected offers from the Tigers 11 months ago.
Rovers boss Gary Bowyer spoke to Rhodes yesterday after the striker's statement was released. Rhodes confirmed to Bowyer that the quotes attributed to him were correct.
Bowyer said: "We have this embargo and he feels that Middlesbrough might be stronger contenders than ourselves, but that’s at this stage of the season.
"But whatever offer gets put on the table, it has to meet the owners’ valuation.
"I can only do my job by what the owners tell me and they’ve told me that it was rejected.
"I don’t have a problem with Jordan Rhodes, he doesn’t have a problem with us.
"He’s more than entitled to his opinion, he’s ambitious to play in the Premier League.
"We’ll continue to work with him until he isn’t here. If he is here I’ll be absolutely delighted."
The owners regard Rhodes as their jewel in the crown and fear a backlash from supporters if he was sold, although 69 per cent of voters in a poll on the Lancashire Telegraph website yesterday suggested that the best solution might be to allow the forward to leave.
Rovers do not want Rhodes to join a Championship rival and in any case would want a guaranteed £12m – something that would not happen if Middlesbrough did not go up.
Middlesbrough also want to stagger payments, while Rovers would want as much money as possible up front to help them escape from their transfer embargo.
The club are in a real quandary given their desire to keep their best players but the knowledge that the only way to move a long way towards having the embargo lifted would be to sell Rhodes or fellow striker Rudy Gestede.
Aston Villa were yesterday linked with a £6m bid for Gestede, but Rovers have had no contact from any club for the Benin international in recent days. He is valued at around £8m.
Villa are looking for a replacement for Christian Benteke and there had been suggestions some weeks ago that former Rovers skipper Tim Sherwood could move for Gestede if he lost his star striker to Liverpool.
Villa are looking to sign two forwards and are attempting to seal a deal for Jordan Ayew, but sources in the West Midlands suggest that Tottenham’s Emmanuel Adebayor is their first choice to fill the other berth providing a sensible wage packet can be agreed.
Rovers are increasingly hopeful of fending off competition for South Korea international Kim Bo-Kyung, who has been at the club for talks this week.
It still remains uncertain though whether the club will be able to secure a work permit for the player following the tightening of FA regulations.
Rovers fear that it may be more difficult for them as a Championship club to secure a work permit for Kim than it would be for a top Premier League club to sign a player who does not automatically qualify under the new rules.National Motor Vehicle License Lookup Service web site - offering a free searchable database of over 210 million U.S. driver's license photos. Search using the box below to lookup and view a license.
The United States amendment to the Freedom of Information Act enacted on Sept. 3rd 2016 provides public access to motor vehicle driver's information in an electronic format.
Under the Motor Vehicle Operator License Identification Act (MOLIA), all US states are required to adhere to the Driver's statute and store an electronic copy of all valid drivers licenses in their state.
Over 210 Million licenses are searchable in our aggregated database. "You're a source for great laughs. I wanted to retake my license photo until I saw my friends were just as bad! "
- Thomas Oneal
"Coolest site of the year"
- Leah Stine
" An invaluable research tool. "
- Stephen Corr
"Consider my photo retaken tomorrow!"
- Ben Stone
Canada photos now included.
License Search
First Name: Last Name: Gender: -------- Male Female State/Prov: US: Alabama US: Alaska US: Arizona US: Arkansas US: California US: Colorado US: Connecticut US: Delaware US: Florida US: Georgia US: Hawaii US: Idaho US: Illinois US: Indiana US: Iowa US: Kansas US: Kentucky US: Louisiana US: Maine US: Maryland US: Massachusetts US: Michigan US: Minnesota US: Mississippi US: Missouri US: Montana US: Nebraska US: Nevada US: New Hampshire US: New Jersey US: New Mexico US: New York US: North Carolina US: North Dakota US: Ohio US: Oklahoma US: Oregon US: Pennsylvania US: Puerto Rico US: Rhode Island US: South Carolina US: South Dakota US: Tennessee US: Texas US: Utah US: Vermont US: Virginia US: Washington US: West Virginia US: Wisconsin US: Wyoming US: District of Columbia CA: Alberta CA: British Columbia CA: Manitoba CA: New Brunswick CA: Newfoundland & Lab CA: Northwest Territories CA: Nova Scotia CA: Nunavut CA: Ontario CA: Prince Edward Island CA: Quebec CA: Saskatchewan CA: Yukon City:
Data is not collected and is used for search purposes only.City Of Zion (CoZ) is a group of open source developers that formed to support NEO. We provide weekly reports that summarize our goals, projects, and progress. In exchange, the NEO Council is supporting these contributions through NEO rewards.
Our governance can be seen clicking here.
Our donation address is AXSoNQEKjmqPBNPg5cNrHyWivfjok3Vj9D
The council has decided to reward 484 NEO for the community efforts
CoZ Council members are excluded from any weekly reward or CoZ competitions
ANNOUNCEMENT:
September is closing to be another month of growth for NEO. At the council in China, two new full-time contributors, Malcolm and Celia, have joined.
We are also pleased to publicly announce that at CoZ, since this monday, the 25th of September, Michael de Wal aka totalvamp, will be dedicated full-time to improving the NEO ecosystem. Both at CoZ, and at his soon to be established company in Japan to support the launch of utility tokens and distributed applications on NEO network, you can contact him at [email protected]. Michael is a seasoned developer with over 10 years of experience, he is currently at the front of the community in CoZ council and is the principal author of many high profile projects such as CoZ iOS and Android wallets.
CoZ is driving two campaigns:
1 - The dApps competition
2 - The Stack Exchange site proposal
The following is a list of work on COZ projects completed this week:
getAssetBalance functional in full node mode for all asset types on both testnet and mainnet
Better docs
On Deck: Dynamic seed registration, Lazy balance and contract cachingPro-Europe demonstrators protest during a "March for Europe" against the Brexit vote result, earlier in the year, in London, Britain, September 3, 2016. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
LONDON (Reuters) - Scotland’s devolved government is expected to join a legal challenge against the British government’s plans to trigger an exit from the European Union, the lead claimant in the court case said on Sunday.
A British court ruled on Thursday that the government needs parliamentary approval to start the process of leaving the European Union, potentially delaying Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plans.
The government said it would appeal against the High Court ruling and Britain’s Supreme Court is expected to consider the case early next month.
“We are expecting a number of governments to join us,” Gina Miller, an investment manager leading the court case against the government, told the BBC, indicating Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolved authorities could become involved.
“But their case will be different to ours. They will be talking about their own particular interests.”
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said a decision on her government’s involvement had not yet been taken.
“The Scottish government had a representative observing proceedings throughout this case and we are currently considering whether we should now seek to become participants in the appeal process,” she wrote in the Observer newspaper.
A majority of people in Scotland voted to stay in the EU at the June 23 referendum, while a majority in England and Wales voted to leave, setting Britain as a whole on the path to an unprecedented divorce from its biggest trading partner and straining relations between the UK’s constituent nations.
“Any decision we make will not be about thwarting the result in England and Wales... our decision will be about how we best make sure the actions of the UK government properly respect the way in which all parts of the UK voted,” Sturgeon said.The face of a goat doesn't really inspire. It has a deadpan stare, and it's certainly not the liveliest.
"That's the common public impression, that goats and most other farm animals are not very intelligent," says Elodie Briefer, a researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Zurich.
In a recent study, she and her colleagues found that behind that dazed look is a pretty smart brain, too.
It turns out that goats haven't really been studied for their cognitive skills, at least not in the same way that chimps have.
"By working with them, we realized that they are actually very curious animals," Briefer says. "Most people who own goats, they know that they can open locks and escape from any pen."
The goats involved in the study were already domesticated. They were put through a series of tests over the span of several months to measure their thinking abilities.
What they designed was essentially an obstacle course to get food out of a box. Briefer and her team timed the goats to see how fast they could get their grub.
"After these really long intervals, they could solve the task within two minutes, which was quite surprising for us," she says.
Even though the research focused on obtaining food, a goat's intelligence isn't limited to that. In fact, a goat's intelligence is one of the reasons the animal can survive pretty much anywhere, contributing to the resilience of the species.
"They can manipulate objects easily, they can learn complex tasks, and they can remember them," Briefer says.In the early euphoria following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Germany moved quickly to erase the scars of its Cold War division. But East Germany’s legacy remains visible in statistics.
This image taken from the International Space Station shows the nighttime division between eastern and western Berlin, which still had differently colored streetlights in 2012. Source: ESA/NASA This image taken from the International Space Station shows the nighttime division between eastern and western Berlin, which still had differently colored streetlights in 2012. Source: ESA/NASA
What does Germany’s reunification nearly a quarter of century later look like? Can you touch it? See it?
Germans worked hard to make their decades of division disappear. Only a few meters of the Berlin Wall remain standing. Much of what was once communist East German has been torn down, rebuilt or paved over. It’s as if the former border with West Germany simply vanished. Even the memories of 1989 are fading with the years. Or is there something still there?
We sought images, graphics and statistics to tell the story of German unity – or its continued division. We found data that speaks more precisely than many direct witnesses to these historic events. For example, our statistical maps. Some show East Germany’s borders so clearly, they look as if they were created before the Wall fell in 1989.
What a contrast to the reunified Germany we’ve come to know. Walking through Berlin today, you’ll need a guidebook to find traces of the city’s Cold War separation. The Wall’s death strip has become a place to picnic. These days, tourist buses park where trigger-happy guards once patrolled. It’s as if the city itself wanted to forget its painful past.
VIDEO: 25 Years Later – Berlin then and now
Even a quarter of a century later, differences both small and large divide Germans hailing from the two halves of their country. One quick example? They prefer different vacation destinations.
The most popular German holiday destinations
Easterners also put their children in day care, and most get flu shots each year. The eastern population is older. Many children of reunification sought their fortunes in the west and simply stayed.
The following graphic helps illustrate what happened in eastern Germany after 1989. The birth rate plummeted as economic upheaval caused many to fear for their very existence. While the recent crisis roiling the eurozone has terrified many western Germans, it has left easterners cold. They’ve already lived through calamity and survived.
Children per woman
A hard-fought nation with strong regional identities, linguistic diversity has always been one of Germany’s cultural assets. But having seven different names for one single object highlights just how strong the country’s penchant for dialects really is. The temporary separation into East and West Germany has enriched the language even more.
The east, however, is drastically underrepresented in German professional soccer. The reasons include weak finances, mismanagement and the lack of necessary sporting networks.
Bundesliga soccer clubs (men) 2014/15 season
The East Germans took to the streets in 1989 to demand freedom of speech and the right to travel abroad. But they also wanted the standard of living available in the west. Some consumer goods would appear to be a crucial part of daily life.
Ownership of household appliances
One of the few places where the country’s Cold War division is still visible is the former inner German border. The watchtowers and walls are gone, but the dividing line is still there. Is that a bad thing? Do all the differences have to be plastered over, all the scars removed?
VIDEO: 25 Years Later – Traces of the inner German border
The environmental group BUND wants to place the 1,400-kilometer long strip now known as the Green Band under protection. Devoid of people for decades, the former border has become home to 1,200 species of endangered plants and animals. The former death strip has become a refuge.
For better or worse, the rest of what was once East Germany hasn’t.
nach oben
Zur deutschen Version des Artikels
Contributors
Data visualization, infographics: Lisa Borgenheimer, Paul Blickle, Julian Stahnke, Sascha Venohr
Text: Christian Bangel
English translation: Marc Young
Editorial coordination, video: Fabian Mohr
Photos: Michael Biedowicz, Andreas Muhs
Discussion
We are interested in your views on whether eastern and western Germany are still noticeably different 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Join our discussion (in German).
Further reading
The first 25 years: We want to map the country that has emerged since the fall of the Wall. Is German unity real? Is that even necessary? Where is reunification still taking place? We believe this process will continue for some time to come. You can find all of our articles on the topic here (in German).Cheat Codes presents: Super Smash Bros. Melee
Attention TL smashers in the San Diego area!
Cheat Codes presents: Super Smash Bros. Melee
Presented by:
Dnoi [Soulbotics Krew]
Omeed [The Body Poets]
SD Melee
MELEE PRE-REGISTRATION FORM:
http://goo.gl/forms/bbuzUB20pU
This is going to be an exciting event with many events, not just a Melee tournament. Dance competitors will be competing in 1v1 and 2v2 dance battles (and possibly Melee as well!), putting on a spectacular show for everyone to see! This event will feature many top-notch performances from nationally renowned groups, such as NBC's "America's got Talent" and truTV's "Fake Off". This will be an exciting event for those that enjoy Smash and dancing alike, bridging our two communities together.
For more information regarding the dance competition, refer to:
We will be hosting Melee singles and doubles at this event.
NOTE:
No 20xx ISOs will be used for this event. Please have a SD card/USB drive with vanilla Melee ready on hand for the tournament if you are using a Wii without a disc. I can provide an ISO file of v1.02 if you need it.
VENUE:
Classical Academy High School
207 E Pennsylvania Ave, Escondido, California 92025
STREAM:
www.twitch.tv/SDMeleeTV
COST:
$5 - Singles entry fee
$5 - Doubles entry fee per teammate
$10 - Venue fee
SCHEDULE:
1:00 PM - Venue opens/singles and doubles sign ups starts
1:45 PM - Doubles sign ups close*
2:00 PM - Doubles bracket starts
SINGLES TBA
9:00 PM - Tournament ends/venue closes
PRIZES:
Melee Singles:
1st: 50% of singles entry fee
2nd: 30% of singles entry fee
3rd: 20% of singles entry fee
Melee Doubles:
1st: 50% of doubles entry fee
2nd: 30% of doubles entry fee
3rd: 20% of doubles entry fee
MELEE RULESET (please read before attending the event):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19giNGVHtfygDKV042ElP1t7sGOvVLoNLV0ky0up_tMs/edit?usp=sharing
OTHER NOTES:
Please respect and the venue as well as not causing any disruptions to the event. OBEY THE STAFF MEMBERS AT ALL TIMES! Most likely this will not be an issue, but there will be a zero tolerance policy for not meeting these standards.
PLEASE BRING CRT TVs, consoles, power strips, and extension cords to help the tournament run as quickly and smoothly as possible for everybody! This event will be a blast and will be a great experience for eSports to branch out to other communities. from the original Facebook Event Post Attention TL smashers in the San Diego area!Cheat Codes presents: Super Smash Bros. MeleePresented by:Dnoi [Soulbotics Krew]Omeed [The Body Poets]SD MeleeThis is going to be an exciting event with many events, not just a Melee tournament. Dance competitors will be competing in 1v1 and 2v2 dance battles (and possibly Melee as well!), putting on a spectacular show for everyone to see! This event will feature many top-notch performances from nationally renowned groups, such as NBC's "America's got Talent" and truTV's "Fake Off". This will be an exciting event for those that enjoy Smash and dancing alike, bridging our two communities together.For more information regarding the dance competition, refer to: https://www.facebook.com/events/910450155655799 We will be hosting Melee singles and doubles at this event.No 20xx ISOs will be used for this event. Please have a SD card/USB drive with vanilla Melee ready on hand for the tournament if you are using a Wii without a disc. I can provide an ISO file of v1.02 if you need it.Classical Academy High School207 E Pennsylvania Ave, Escondido, California 92025$5 - Singles entry fee$5 - Doubles entry fee per teammate$10 - Venue fee1:00 PM - Venue opens/singles and doubles sign ups starts1:45 PM - Doubles sign ups close*2:00 PM - Doubles bracket startsSINGLES TBA9:00 PM - Tournament ends/venue closesMelee Singles:1st: 50% of singles entry fee2nd: 30% of singles entry fee3rd: 20% of singles entry feeMelee Doubles:1st: 50% of doubles entry fee2nd: 30% of doubles entry fee3rd: 20% of doubles entry fee(please read before attending the event):Please respect and the venue as well as not causing any disruptions to the event. OBEY THE STAFF MEMBERS AT ALL TIMES! Most likely this will not be an issue, but there will be a zero tolerance policy for not meeting these standards.PLEASE BRING CRT TVs, consoles, power strips, and extension cords to help the tournament run as quickly and smoothly as possible for everybody! This event will be a blast and will be a great experience for eSports to branch out to other communities.
Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/sdmeleetv
Thread: SD Melee Tournament: Cheat Codes
(Event is finished) Event Time: 22:30 GMT 23:30 CET 17:30 EST 16:30 CST 14:30 PST Submitted by Melee_KumAPlease enable JavaScript. We load results data from JSON files and use JavaScript to render the results as charts and data tables.
In the following tests, we have measured the performance of several web application platforms, full-stack frameworks, and micro-frameworks (collectively, "frameworks"). For more information, read the introduction, motivation, and latest environment details. Show filters panel Showing all frameworks. Filters? Disable all Classification? Disable all Language? Disable all Platform? Disable all Application operating system? Disable all Front-end server? Disable all Database-server? Disable all Database operating system? Disable all Object-relational mapper (ORM) classification? Disable all Implementation approach? Disable all Framework Key Close filters panel Enabled Disabled Unavailable Test types Hardware — Requirements summary In this test, each request is processed by fetching a single row from a simple database table. That row is then serialized as a JSON response. Example response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Length: 32 Content-Type: application/json Server: Example Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:00:00 GMT {"id":3217,"randomNumber":2149} For a more detailed description of the requirements, see the Source Code and Requirements section. Requirements summary In this test, each request is processed by fetching multiple rows from a simple database table and serializing these rows as a JSON response. The test is run multiple times: testing 1, 5, 10, 15, and 20 queries per request. All tests are run at 512 concurrency. Example response for 10 queries: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Length: 315 Content-Type: application/json Server: Example Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:00:00 GMT [{"id":4174,"randomNumber":331},{"id":51,"randomNumber":6544},{"id":4462,"randomNumber":952},{"id":2221,"randomNumber":532},{"id":9276,"randomNumber":3097},{"id":3056,"randomNumber":7293},{"id":6964,"randomNumber":620},{"id":675,"randomNumber":6601},{"id":8414,"randomNumber":6569},{"id":2753,"randomNumber":4065}] For a more detailed description of the requirements, see the Source Code and Requirements section. Requirements summary In this test, the framework's ORM is used to fetch all rows from a database table containing an unknown number of Unix fortune cookie messages (the table has 12 rows, but the code cannot have foreknowledge of the table's size). An additional fortune cookie message is inserted into the list at runtime and then the list is sorted by the message text. Finally, the list is delivered to the client using a server-side HTML template. The message text must be considered untrusted and properly escaped and the UTF-8 fortune messages must be rendered properly. Whitespace is optional and may comply with the framework's best practices. Example response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Length: 1196 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Server: Example Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:00:00 GMT <!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title>Fortunes</title></head><body><table><tr><th>id</th><th>message</th></tr><tr><td>11</td><td><script>alert("This should not be displayed in a browser alert box.");</script></td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>A bad random number generator: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 4.33e+67, 1, 1, 1</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do.</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren't broken.</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>A list is only as strong as its weakest link. — Donald Knuth</td></tr><tr><td>0</td><td>Additional fortune added at request time.</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>After enough decimal places, nobody gives a damn.</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>Any program that runs right is obsolete.</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX. — Tom Christaensen</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>Feature: A bug with seniority.</td></tr><tr><td>1</td><td>fortune: No such file or directory</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>フレームワークのベンチマーク</td></tr></table></body></html> For a more detailed description of the requirements, see the Source Code and Requirements section. Requirements summary In this test, each response is a JSON serialization of a freshly-instantiated object that maps the key message to the value Hello, World! Example response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: application/json Content-Length: 28 Server: Example Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:00:00 GMT {"message":"Hello, World!"} For a more detailed description of the requirements, see the Source Code and Requirements section. Requirements summary In this test, the framework responds with the simplest of responses: a "Hello, World" message rendered as plain text. The size of the response is kept small so that gigabit Ethernet is not the limiting factor for all implementations. HTTP pipelining is enabled and higher client-side concurrency levels are used for this test (see the "Data table" view). Example response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Length: 15 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Server: Example Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:00:00 GMT Hello, World! For a more detailed description of the requirements, see the Source Code and Requirements section. Comments If you have any comments about this round, please post at the Framework Benchmarks Google Group.
Framework details Author / Sponsor Home Framework Source Test Source
Results testing Loading results for run-id from the TFB Results Dashboard... from the Unable to load results for run-idfrom the TFB Results Dashboard Running these benchmarks in your own test environment? You can visualize the results by copying and pasting the contents of your results.json file in the text box below. Test duration: seconds Visualize results Test duration:seconds Limitations Note: This results web site can only render results for the frameworks it knows about by way of the metadata available for the currently-public Round. Therefore, results for frameworks that are not known by the metadata will not be visible.
Motivation Choosing a web application framework involves evaluation of many factors. While comparatively easy to measure, performance is frequently given little consideration. We hope to help change that. Application performance can be directly mapped to hosting dollars, and for companies both large and small, hosting costs can be a pain point. Weak performance can also cause premature and costly scale pain by requiring earlier optimization efforts and increased architectural complexity. Finally, slow applications yield poor user experience and may suffer penalties levied by search engines. What if building an application on one framework meant that at the very best your hardware is suitable for one tenth as much load as it would be had you chosen a different framework? The differences aren't always that extreme, but in some cases, they might be. Especially with several modern high-performance frameworks offering respectable developer efficiency, it's worth knowing what you're getting into. Terminology framework We use the word framework loosely to refer to any HTTP server implementation upon which you could build a web application—a full-stack framework, a micro-framework, or even a web platform such as Rack, Servlet, or plain PHP. platform For us, platforms are broadly defined as anything situated between the programming language and the web framework (examples are Servlet, Netty, and Rack). By comparison to a full-stack framework or micro-framework, a platform may include a bare-bones HTTP server implementation with rudimentary request routing and virtually none of the higher-order functionality of frameworks such as form validation, input sanitization, templating, JSON serialization, and database connectivity. Frameworks are often built on top of platforms. To be thorough, and to compute framework overhead, we test several platforms as if they were frameworks. permutation A combination of attributes that compose a full technology stack being tested (take node.js for example, we might have one permutation with MongoDB and another with MySQL). Some frameworks have seen many permutations contributed by the community; others only one or few. test type One of the workloads we exercise, such as JSON serialization, single-query, multiple-query, fortunes, data updates, and plaintext. test An individual test is a measurement of the performance of a permutation's implementation of a test type. For example, a test might be measuring Wicket paired with MySQL running the single-query test type. implementation Sometimes called "test implementations," these are the bodies of code and configuration created to test permutations according to the requirements. These are frequently contributed by fans, advocates, or the maintainers of frameworks. Together with the toolset, test implementations are the meat of this project. toolset A set of Python scripts that run our tests. run An execution of the benchmark toolset across the suite of test implementations, either in full or in part, in order to capture results for any purpose. preview A capture of data from a run used by project participants to sanity-check prior to an official round. round A posting of "official" results on this web site. This is mostly for ease of consumption by readers and good-spirited & healthy competitive bragging rights. For in-depth analysis, we encourage you to examine the source code and run the tests on your own hardware. Expected questions We expect that you might have a bunch of questions. Here are some that we're anticipating. But please contact us if you have a question we're not dealing with here or just want to tell us we're doing it wrong. Frameworks and configuration "You call x a framework, but it's a platform." See the terminology section above. We are using the word "framework" loosely to refer to anything found on the spectrum ranging from full-stack frameworks, micro-frameworks, to platforms. If it's used to build web applications, it probably qualifies. That said, we understand that comparing a full-stack framework versus platforms or vice-versa is unusual. We feel it's valuable to be able to compare these, for example to understand the performance overhead of additional abstraction. You can use the filters in the results viewer to adjust the rows you see in the charts. "You configured framework x incorrectly, and that explains the numbers you're seeing." Whoops! Please let us know how we can fix it, or submit a GitHub pull request, so we can get it right. "Why include this Gemini framework I've never heard of?" We have included our in-house Java web framework, Gemini, in our tests. We've done so because it's of interest to us. You can consider it a stand-in for any relatively lightweight minimal-locking Java framework. While we're proud of how it performs among the well-established field, this exercise is not about Gemini. "Why don't you test framework X?" We'd love to, if we can find the time. Even better, craft the test implementation yourself and submit a GitHub pull request so we can get it in there faster! "Some frameworks use process-level concurrency; have you accounted for that?" Yes, we've attempted to use production-grade configuration settings for all frameworks, including those that rely on process-level concurrency. For the EC2 tests, for example, such frameworks are configured to utilize the two virtual cores provided on an c3.large (in previous rounds, m1.large) instance. For the i7 tests, they are configured to use the eight hyper-threading cores of our hardware's i7 CPUs. "Have you enabled APC for the PHP tests?" Yes, the PHP tests run with APC and PHP-FPM on nginx. "Why are you using a (slightly) old version of framework X?" It's nothing personal! With so many frameworks we have a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. If you think an update will affect the results, please let us know (or better yet, submit a GitHub pull request) and we'll get it updated! "It's unfair and possibly even incorrect to compare X and Y!" It may be alarming at first to see the full results table, where one may evaluate frameworks vs platforms; MySQL vs Postgres; Go vs Python; ORM vs raw database connectivity; and any number of other possibly irrational comparisons. Many readers desire the ability to compare these and other permutations. If you prefer to view an unpolluted subset, you may use the filters available at the top of the results page. We believe that comparing frameworks with plausible and diverse technology stacks, despite the number of variables, is precisely the value of this project. With sufficient time and effort, we hope to continuously broaden the test permutations. But we recommend against ignoring the data on the basis of concerns about multi-variable comparisons. Read more opinion on this at Brian Hauer's personal blog. "If you are testing production deployments, why is logging disabled?" At present, we have elected to run tests with logging features disabled. Although this is not consistent with production deployments, we avoid a few complications related to logging, most notably disk capacity and consistent granularity of logging across all test implementations. In spot tests, we have not observed significant performance impact from logging when enabled. If there is strong community consensus that logging is necessary, |
differences. And if they led to unhealthy behavior - find a substitute. I know that's possible one day, even if we can't always know and do today. Research can help.
Take away the triggers and you end the violence. I’m not telling parents that is simple, but I am saying self destructive behavior has a cause, and it’s not autism. It’s frustration and abuse and sensory issues. Societal change for the first two, science for the second.
Add cognitive ability, and add communication ability and you increase our ability to regulate as you lower our blood pressure. Technology is beginning to address this and it’s a great thing to look forward to.
Don't mix up the idea of a private bitch session about how tough is (that's real and every parent is entitled to it) with public discussion of autism and autistic people. I cringe at the things some parents post about children online and how those kids will feel if they read that junk a decade hence. But that's a parenting observation too - it has nothing to do with autism.
Note that none of these things are "neurodiversity issues." Neurological diversity is just the recognition that human neurodiversity is real. Some people may act autistic as a result of abuse or injury, but true autism is something we're born with. Some of us are the result of spontanous genetic changes (for reasons both suspected and unknown,) and others of us seem to pass on a stable form of autism from one generation to another (like in my family) That being the case, autism and us here to stay and the main thing we ask is that we be both accepted and helped. Our disabilities are real, and so are our lives.
What's the whitewash in that?
John Elder Robison
All words and images (c) 2015 John Elder Robison
John Elder Robison is an autistic adult and advocate for people with neurological differences. He's the neurodiversity scholar in residence at The College of William & Mary, and author of Look Me in the Eye, Be Different, Raising Cubby, and the forthcoming Switched On. He's served on the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee of the U.S. Dept. of and Human Services and many other autism-related boards. He's a cofounder of the TCS Auto Program (a for teens with developmental challenges) in Springfield, MA.
The opinions expressed here are his own.There is no warranty expressed or implied in these words. While reading this essay may give you food for thought, actually printing and eating it will probably make you sick.The recording of our May 29th webinar with Maarten Balliauw and Mikhail Vink, PhpStorm Best Practices – The Perfect Workflow for PHP Developers, is now available on YouTube and JetBrains.tv.
In this webinar, we look at the most important everyday actions in PhpStorm IDE. Learn how to navigate between files, classes or other elements in our project, and see how we can use code autocompletion, PHPDoc, intentions and live templates to make our life as developers easier.
About this webinar:
Using automatic inspections and quick fixes, PhpStorm can greatly improve code quality. We’ll get an insight on how to efficiently use version control systems and how we can deploy our projects to remote servers. This webinar is geared towards beginner developers; however, it will be useful for everyone as there will be plenty of tips & tricks to enhance your productivity. Watch and learn how to use PhpStorm in the real world!
About Maarten Balliauw:The Jersey City Parks Coalition is turning the Oct. 25 national Make a Difference Day into Do-It-Yourself Day.
The organization that works to beautify the city one flower at a time has gone out annually since 2011 for the BIG DIG project and has planted 136,000 daffodils and tulips in parks, public housing and open spaces throughout the city.
But "this year is different," said Laura Skolar, president of the Coalition.
"We are asking our volunteers of previous years and any resident of Jersey City to plant either 25 or 50 daffodils on their own property that the Coalition will provide free of charge," Skolar said.
The only condition for the free bulbs is that all recipients sign a pledge that says the bulbs will be planted where they can be easily seen from the street.
"That means front lawns and gardens, window boxes or planters," Skolar said. "Then in April and May of 2015, all of that wonderful spring color blooming in our public spaces will extend right into the neighborhoods."
The bulbs can be picked up until Nov. 1. The Coalition will plant their bulbs in city parks on Oct. 25, to coincide with Make a Difference Day, and are urging residents who participate to do the same. But participants can plant another day if they like, Skolar said.
Anyone interested in taking the pledge in the 2014 BIG DIG Giveaway should register at www.jcparks.org and click on the 2014 BIG DIG shovel.
Choose either 25 or 50 bulbs, with only one offer per address. For groups that would like to do a bigger planting, a bag of 250 daffodils is available for a $100 donation to the Coalition.
Sponsorships from $250 to $25,000 for the 2014 BIG DIG Giveaway are available by calling (201) 259-1800 and donations toward this and other Coalition planting projects are accepted by Paypal on the www.jcparks.org website or by check.“I knew that I’d be going to a completely new country, which would be so different to me - the language, the weather, the style of football, the food - but I wasn’t fazed by any of that, because football is my life and I would go through anything to be able to play,” he said.
“I wasn’t frightened or worried, I was excited for the challenge. I was curious about how the experience would be, how I could learn and grow. For me, football can help break any barrier - language, different cultures and all that.”
Liverpool’s Brazilian trio, Lucas Leiva, Philippe Coutinho and Roberto Firmino, regularly kept in touch with the midfielder, sharing their own stories of moving to Europe as youngsters. “They always texted to see how I was doing, to congratulate me, to offer advice. They have been very good to me.”
Valakari believe Allan’s steely mentality will ensure he advances well. “As a coach, you come across great talent all the time. But the thing you look for, the characteristics that make you very happy, is a great attitude and a strong mind.
"If a player has skill and this, then it is perfect. He came to a totally new environment and with his passion and drive, fitted in so easy. The fact a player with a language barrier can understand exactly how things should be done in training and matches means he is very, very good. He immediately improved the team and helped us win the championship. He has all the qualities to succeed at the top level.”
SJK’s manager believes the next step is for Allan to “get many more games as a professional. He has a very good youth pedigree, but must build his experience”.
Another loan spell is pencilled in for him. Spanish and Dutch clubs were initially interested in taking the Sao Paulo-born talent temporarily but, after his showing in Finland, Liverpool have also been fielding enquiries from the top-tiers in Belgium, Portugal and Turkey.
“My next step is to soak up more experience in Europe, to have different lessons and styles,” said Allan. “Of course, I would also love to get in the Brazil Under-20 team. I have been working very hard for that, and it would be the natural step for my progress. If it happened it would be happy days for me, for my family, my friends, and I would give everything to the shirt.”
Allan returns to Brazil on Thursday for 10 days. He will get to show off his league medal to the family and friends that are so close to him.
“We have kept in touch every day since I left. I am used to being away from my family because when I went to south Brazil to play for Internacional, they stayed in Sao Paulo. Of course, it is a much shorter distance, but I only used to visit maybe three to four times a year,” Allan added.
“My parents have always been very supportive. My dad always pushed me to be my very best - from the time I started playing at five. He wanted me to take football more seriously and not just play around with my friends. He would always correct me if I did something cheeky on the pitch that didn’t come off - he was a great critic.
"My mum made sure I was still performing at school, and she was the one who encouraged me to test myself in Europe. My dad was nervous about letting his young son go, he was worried.”
Now, he can be proud. Allan’s first professional steps already have a silver lining, and Liverpool are convinced his upward trajectory will continue.
“It all happened so quickly,” he told. “I went back to pre-season like normal with Internacional and only heard about Liverpool’s interest a week before coming to England.“Internacional knew about it for a long time, but said they didn’t want to distract me. I was curious and excited by the chance to work with a great club, to see what I could pick up and learn during this week.”Again, Liverpool were impressed enough to immediately engage with the Brazilian side over a permanent move. They agreed terms with Internacional, with Allan back at Anfield in July. He was integrated into the first team during pre-season and even found himself on the bench against HJK Helskini in August. His signing was confirmed on deadline day, as was an immediate loan move to SJK Seinajoki.Allan’s impact in Finland was instantaneous: he took just 15 minutes to stun onlookers with a left-footed beauty on his debut in a fixture he was never meant to feature in. “I arrived on Sunday, and SJK were going to play that following Thursday,” he explained.“I had a conversation with the manager, and he told me: ‘Okay, you won’t play the first game because I want you to get used to everything.’ He said I would travel with the team, so I can bond with my team-mates more, take in the atmosphere…“He made it clear I wouldn’t play, but he still put me on the bench. In the second half, we were 1-0 down, and out of nothing the manager said: ‘You’re coming on.’ I went on and had a few chances, then I scored. It was my first game as a professional, and I managed to get my first goal in a game that I thought I would just be watching! I was chosen as the best player as well so I was very excited, but it was all very unexpected.”In eight appearances, the teenager - who is represented by Kia Joorabchian - recorded five assists, three man-of-the-match awards and two goals - one direct from a corner. Allan operated as both a holding midfielder and a No.8 for SJK, his attributes suiting both a long and short passing game.“He has huge, unbelievable potential,” explained Simo Valakari, the club’s manager who spent four years at Derby County. “He has big technical ability, a wonderful left foot and the football intelligence to use it. Allan is small, but very strong - he uses his body well and positions himself cleverly. He can pick any pass in a game, and understands space very well.”It is easy to eulogise about the skill of young players, but the raw talent is often not matched by the strong mentality that is required to succeed. It is clear, however, that Allan has the capacity to cope with the psychological demands of the game. Having moved to a unfamiliar country and a club where not one of the players or staff spoke any Portuguese or Spanish, he still managed to influence matches.I love the letterboxd community, there are so many unique people here and even in my short time on letterboxd I met many people.
But I want to learn a bit more about the community, so I put together this list with questions about YOU.
The questions are mostly about how you use letterboxd or why you use it. Also some broader questions about watching movies. All in all questions that I think fit the community pretty well.
Also I tried to be funny by putting a movie title to every question, please don't hurt me ;)
You can answer the questions as a comment or just make a list yourself with the tag "attlc" (answers to the letterboxd community). If you post your lists in the comments I can link them here.
To see the questions you have to click the "read notes" button, the questions are the annotations to the movies.This competition has ended. The winners can be seen here.
President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative has brought brain mapping to the forefront of popular science. But what does it mean to map the brain?
One human brain contains seven orders of magnitude of spatial complexity and at least 10 orders of temporal magnitude. These numbers are hard to fathom so MIT’s EyeWire has teamed up with FEI and Visually to launch a “Scale of the Brain” Infographic Competition. Entries should visualize spatial scales in the brain.
Judges
Elise Andrew (I F*ing Love Science)
Jen Christiansen (Scientific American)
Christopher Jobson (Colossal)
Derek Muller (Veritasium)
Maria Popova (Brainpickings)
Sebastian Seung (Neuroscientist, EyeWire, MIT)
Logan Smalley (TED-Ed)
Mackenzie Thomas (Google+)
Bradley Voytek (Neuroscientist, UCSD)
Prizes
1st:
2nd: $200 – Sponsored by FEI
3rd: $100 – Sponsored by FEI
Criteria
Judges will grade entries on the following criteria:
Information is represented accurately and communicated clearly. Sources for additional information not in the creative brief should be included according to best practices (use original sources whenever possible).
Story/layout is engaging and insightful, helping to pull the viewer through the graphic.
The infographic’s design should be attractive and captivating without detracting from the communication of the information. Illustrations, layout, font, and color choices are all important.
Each judge gets 10 points per category. All categories are totaled for each group. Totals from each judge are averaged together. Highest average wins.
Licensing
All entries to the competition should be licensed under creative commons so that the entries may be used in whole or part as educational materials anywhere. The creative commons attribution 4.0 sign should be included somewhere on the design.
Logos
The winning entries will be asked to add the logos of FEI, EyeWire and Visually, along with their own logo or name.
Format
The format of the graphic is up to you. We don’t want to restrict creativity, so feel free to create any visual experience that satisfies the criteria listed above. Infographics are the format we anticipate getting the most, however interactive web pages and videos are also welcome and will be judged on equal footing.
Submissions
Send all submissions as links or attachments to [email protected] before April 30th at Midnight, PDT.
Questions about the contest can also be directed to that email address.
Schedule
Submission Deadline: April 30
Judging: May 9
Winner Announced: May 15
Creative Brief
The spatial scale of the brain ranges from meters to nanometers, with plenty of gradations in between. This quick summary will get you started, and these images are a great visual reference. This design competition is a chance to let your creative freedom run wild. Do research to bring these numbers to life and to add conceptualizations of scale. For example, if each neuron in a human brain was a person, that brain could populate New York City 10,000 times or if you lined up synaptic vesicles side by side, you could fit over 10,000 on a crosssection of one human hair.from Craig Custance of The Sporting News,
Nieuwendyk said he has spoken recently with Neal’s agent, Pat Morris, and both sides continue to work on a deal.
Morris works for Newport Sports Management, an agency that has represented many high-profile restricted free agents this summer. Ducks forward Bobby Ryan, another Newport client, is also without a deal.
Newport’s Craig Oster negotiated a three-year, $9.25 million deal for Nashville’s restricted free agent Patric Hornqvist.
Hornqvist put up comparable numbers to Neal’s last season, but Nieuwendyk warned against drawing any conclusions from that contract.
“There are comparables and there are people who belong to the same agent,” he said. “But we do things that reflect where we are.... [Predators GM] David Poile did what he thought was best for his hockey club. We’ll do the same with ours, too.”Plot Edit
In 1988, the U.S. Ohio-class submarine USS Montana has an encounter with an unidentified submerged object and sinks near the Cayman Trough. With Soviet ships moving in to try to salvage the sub and a hurricane moving over the area, the U.S. government sends a SEAL team to Deep Core, a privately owned experimental underwater drilling platform near the Cayman Trough to use as a base of operations. The platform's designer, Dr. Lindsey Brigman, insists on going along with the SEAL team, despite her estranged husband Virgil "Bud" Brigman being the current foreman. During initial investigation of the Montana, a power outage in the team's submersibles leads to Lindsey seeing a strange light circling the sub, which she later calls a "non-terrestrial intelligence" or "NTI". Lt. Coffey, the SEAL team leader, is ordered to accelerate their mission and takes one of the mini-subs without Deep Core's permission to recover a Trident missile warhead from the Montana just as the storm hits above, leaving the crew unable to disconnect from their surface support ship in time. The cable crane is torn from the ship and falls into the trench, dragging the Deep Core to the edge before it stops. The rig is partially flooded, killing several crew members and damaging its power systems. The crew wait out the storm so they can restore communications and be rescued. As they struggle against the cold, they find the NTIs have formed an animated column of water that is exploring the rig. Though they treat it with curiosity, Coffey is agitated and cuts it in half by closing a pressure bulkhead on it, causing it to retreat. Realizing that Coffey is suffering paranoia from high-pressure nervous syndrome, the crew spies on him through a remote operated vehicle, finding him and another SEAL arming the warhead to attack the NTIs. To try and stop him, Bud fights Coffey but Coffey escapes in a mini-sub with the primed warhead; Bud and Lindsey give chase in the other sub, damaging both. Coffey is able to launch the warhead into the trench, but his sub drifts over the edge, crushing him when it implodes. Bud's mini-sub is inoperable and taking on water; with only one functional diving suit, Lindsey opts to enter deep hypothermia when the ocean's cold water engulfs her. Bud swims back to the platform with her body; there, he and the crew administer CPR and revive her. One SEAL, Ensign Monk, helps Bud use an experimental diving suit equipped with a liquid breathing apparatus to survive to that depth, though he will only be able to communicate through a keypad on the suit. Bud begins his dive, assisted by Lindsey's voice to keep him coherent against the effects of the mounting pressure, and reaches the warhead. Monk guides him in successfully disarming it. With little oxygen left in the system, Bud explains he knew it was a one-way trip, and tells Lindsey he loves her. As he waits for death, an NTI approaches Bud, takes his hand, and guides him to an alien ship deep in the trench. Inside the ship, the NTIs create an atmospheric pocket for Bud, allowing him to breathe normally. The NTIs then play back Bud's message to his wife and they look at each other with understanding. On Deep Core the crew is waiting for rescue when they see a message from Bud that he met some friends and warns them to hold on. The base shakes and lights from the trench bring the arrival of the alien ship. It rises to the ocean's surface, with Deep Core and several of the surface ships run aground on its hull. The crew of Deep Core exit the platform, surprised they are not suffering from decompression sickness. They see Bud walking out of the alien ship and Lindsey races to hug him. Special Edition Edit In the extended version, the events in the film are played against a backdrop of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the potential for all-out war; the sinking of the Montana additionally fuels the aggression. There is more conflict between Bud and Lindsey in regard to their former relationship. The primary addition is the ending: when Bud is taken to the alien ship, they start by showing him images of war and aggression from news sources around the globe. The aliens then create massive megatsunamis that threaten the world's coasts, but stop them short before they hit. Bud asks why they spared the humans and they show Bud his message to Lindsey implying that his intended act of sacrifice revealed that humanity were worth saving, and let the megatsunamis disperse without damage.
Cast Edit
Production Edit
Reception Edit
Soundtrack Edit
The soundtrack to The Abyss was released on August 22, 1989.[43] No. Title Artist Length 1. "Main Title" Alan Silvestri 1:31 2. "Search the Montana" Alan Silvestri 1:56 3. "The Crane" Alan Silvestri 1:56 4. "Manta Ship" Alan Silvestri 6:23 5. "Pseudopod" Alan Silvestri 5:37 6. "Fight" Alan Silvestri 1:46 7. "Sub Battle" Alan Silvestri 3:18 8. "Lindsey Drowns" Alan Silvestri 4:43 9. "Resurrection" Alan Silvestri 1:59 10. "Bud's Big Dive" Alan Silvestri 6:09 11. "Bud on the Ledge" Alan Silvestri 3:14 12. "Back on the Air" Alan Silvestri 1:40 13. "Finale" Alan Silvestri 6:46 Total length: 47:02[44] Deluxe Edition Edit Varèse Sarabande, which released the original album, issued a limited-edition (3,000 copies), two-disc album in 2014 featuring the complete score minus the end credits medley, which is absent from both releases. Disc One: Opening Title (:42) Montana / Crash / Flood (2:01) Marker Buoy / They’re Coming (1:17) Let Me Drown Your Rat / Search The Montana (10:09) Jammer Freaks (3:30) He’s Convulsing (1:14) MIRV Recovery / SEALs Return (2:03) Crashing Crane (2:08) What A Drag (2:01) The Draggiest Man (1:22) Lindsey’s Close Encounter (6:23) Here’s MIRV / Some Huevos (2:27) Have To Take Steps / Jarhead Is Watching (1:13) The Pseudopod (5:35) Coffey Break (1:56) Freeze (3:40) Bud And Cat Dive / Click (:59) The Fight (1:52) What A Drag (Original) (6:05) Disc Two: Tracks 10-19 are bonus tracks. Coffey Implodes (1:09) The Only Way (7:49) Resurrection (2:00) Bud’s Big Dive (6:40) Defusing The Bomb (2:17) Bud On The Ledge (3:12) Bud Reborn / Blinky Bows (3:22) Back On The Air (1:47) Finale And End Credits (4:47) Opening Title (Demo) (:43) Flood And Sinking (Alternate) / Unused Synth Cue (1:01) Crashing Crane (Alternate) (2:08) What A Drag (Wild Original) (4:33) Some Huevos (Alternate) (1:19) The Pseudopod (Alternate) (5:33) The Fight (Alternate) (1:51) The Only Way (Alternate) (4:54) Lindsey Dies (Alternate) (1:05) Vocal Insert (:56)
History of the Special Edition Edit
Even as the film was in the first weeks of its 1989 theatrical release, rumors were circulating of a wave sequence missing from the film's end. As chronicled in the 1993 LaserDisc Special Edition release and later in the 2000 DVD, the pressure to cut the film's running time stemmed from both distribution concerns and Industrial Light & Magic's then-inability to complete the required sequences. From the distributor's perspective, the looming three-hour length limited the number of times the film could be shown each day, assuming that audiences would be willing to sit through the entire film, though 1990's Dances with Wolves would shatter both industry-held notions. Further, test audience screenings revealed a surprisingly mixed reaction to the sequences as they appeared in their unfinished form; in post-screening surveys, they dominated both the "Scenes I liked most" and "Scenes I liked least" fields. Contrary to speculation, studio meddling was not the cause of the shortened length; Cameron held final cut as long as the film met a running time of roughly two hours and 15 minutes. He later noted, "Ironically, the studio brass were horrified when I said I was cutting the wave."[45] What emerges in the winnowing process is only the best stuff. And I think the overall caliber of the film is improved by that. I cut only two minutes of Terminator. On Aliens, we took out much more. I even reconstituted some of that in a special (TV) release version. The sense of something being missing on Aliens was greater for me than on The Abyss, where the film just got consistently better as the cut got along. The film must function as a dramatic, organic whole. When I cut the film together, things that read well on paper, on a conceptual level, didn't necessarily translate to the screen as well. I felt I was losing something by breaking my focus. Breaking the story's focus and coming off the main characters was a far greater detriment to the film than what was gained. The film keeps the same message intact at a thematic level, not at a really overt level, by working in a symbolic way.[46] Star Michael Biehn signing a copy of the film's DVD cover during an August 23, 2012, appearance at Midtown Comics in Manhattan. Cameron elected to remove the sequences along with other, shorter scenes elsewhere in the film, reducing the running time from roughly two hours and 50 minutes to two hours and 20 minutes and diminishing his signature themes of nuclear peril and disarmament. Subsequent test audience screenings drew substantially better reactions. Star Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio publicly expressed regret about some of the scenes selected for removal from the film's theatrical cut: "There were some beautiful scenes that were taken out. I just wish we hadn't shot so much that isn't in the film."[46] Shortly after the film's premiere, Cameron and video editor Ed Marsh created a longer video cut of The Abyss for their own use that incorporated dailies. With the tremendous success of Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, Lightstorm Entertainment secured a five-year, $500 million financing deal with 20th Century Fox for films produced, directed or written by Cameron.[47] The contract allocated roughly $500,000 of the amount to complete The Abyss.[48] ILM was commissioned to finish the work they had started three years earlier, with many of the same people who had worked on it originally. The CGI tools developed for Terminator 2: Judgment Day allowed ILM to complete the rumored tidal wave sequence, as well as correcting flaws in rendering for all their other work done for the film. The tidal wave sequence had originally been designed by ILM as a physical effect, using a plastic wave, but Cameron was dissatisfied with the end result, and the sequence was scrapped. By the time Cameron was ready to revisit The Abyss, ILM's CGI prowess had finally progressed to an appropriate level, and the wave was rendered as a CGI effect. Terminator 2: Judgment Day screenwriter and frequent Cameron collaborator William Wisher had a cameo in the scene as a reporter in Santa Monica who catches the first tidal wave on camera. When it was discovered that original production sound recordings had been lost, new dialogue and foley were recorded, but since Kidd Brewer had died of a self-inflicted gunshot[49] before he could return to re-loop his dialog, producers and editors had to lift his original dialogue tracks from the remaining optical-sound prints of the dailies. The Special Edition was therefore dedicated to his memory as a result. As Alan Silvestri was not available to compose new music for the restored scenes, Robert Garrett, who had composed temporary music for the film's initial cutting in 1989, was chosen to create new music. The Special Edition was completed in December 1992, with 28 minutes added to the film, and saw a limited theatrical release in New York City and Los Angeles on February 26, 1993 (the 1993 World Trade Center bombing occurred on that day), and expanded to key cities nationwide in the following weeks. The first THX-certified LaserDisc title of the Special Edition Box Set was released in May 1993 and was a best-seller for the rest of the year. The Special Edition was released on VHS in 1996 as a part of Fox Video's Widescreen Series with a seven minute behind-the-scenes featurette with footage that did not appear in the Under Pressure: The Making of The Abyss documentary that was included on the Laserdisc and DVD releases.[50] The Special Edition's first DVD release in 2000 was on two discs and featured animated menus[51], both the theatrical and Special Edition versions of the film along with the Laserdisc's extensive text, artwork and photographic documentation of the film's production, a ten minute featurette and the sixty minute documentary Under Pressure: The Making of The Abyss.[52] All available DVDs are non-anamorphic with the exception of the Chinese DVD produced for Region 6 by Excel Media. In 2014 the pay cable channels Cinemax and HBO began broadcasting both versions of the film in 1080p.[53][54] Netflix's UK service began offering the theatrical version in 1080p in 2017.[55] At an October, 2014 event James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd were asked about a future blu-ray release for the film. Cameron gestured to the head of Fox Home Entertainment, implying the decision lay with the studio.[56] Five months later another article suggested a spat between Cameron and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment was responsible for the delay.[57] While promoting the upcoming 30th-anniversary Blu-ray release of Aliens at Comic-Con in San Diego July 2016 James Cameron confirmed that he was working on a remastered 4K transfer of The Abyss and that it would be released on Blu-ray for the first time in early 2017. Cameron added, "We've done a wet-gate 4K scan of the original negative, and it's going to look insanely good. We're going to do an authoring pass in the DI for Blu-ray and HDR at the same time."[58] It is unclear if this new scan is the one used to create the 1080p broadcasts. It is unknown whether both the theatrical and special-edition versions will be included. As of 2018, the Blu-ray is yet to be released.
Adaptations Edit
Science-fiction author Orson Scott Card was hired to write a novelization of the film based on the screenplay and discussions with Cameron.[59] He wrote back-stories for Bud, Lindsey, and Coffey as a means not only of helping the actors define their roles, but also to justify some of their behavior and mannerisms in the film. Card also wrote the aliens as a colonizing species which preferentially sought high-pressure deep-water worlds to build their ships as they traveled further into the galaxy (their mothership was in orbit on the far side of the moon). The NTIs' knowledge of neuroanatomy and nanoscale manipulation of biochemistry was responsible for many of the deus ex machina aspects of the film. A licensed interactive fiction video game based on the script was being developed for Infocom by Bob Bates, but was cancelled when Infocom was shut down by its then-parent company Activision.[60] Sound Source Interactive later created an action video game entitled The Abyss: Incident at Europa. The game takes place a few years after the film, where the player must find a cure for a deadly virus.[61]
See also EditAlice Fearn as Elphaba (Picture: Matt Crockett)
The hit West End musical Wicked has been Defying Gravity for over ten years now and by the look of these first look images of the new cast, it’s going to keep on doing so for more years to come.
Alice Fearn will take over the role of Elphaba – also known as the Wicked Witch of the West, and Sophie Evans, the acclaimed runner-up in the BBC talent show Over The Rainbow, becomes Glinda.
The musical phenomenon is based on the book by Gregory Maguire which brilliantly reimagines the incredible untold story of the Witches of Oz, and exactly how the Wicked Witch came to cause such destruction across Oz.
Elphaba heads for the western skies (Picture: Matt Crockett)
Sophie Evans as Glinda (Picture: Matt Crockett0
Sophie Evans as Glinda (Picture: Matt Crockett)
Andy Hockley as The Wizard (Picture: Matt Crockett)
Bradley Jaden as Fiyero (Picture: Matt Crockett)
Melanie La Barrie as Madame Morrible (Picture: Matt Crockett)
Jack Lansbury as Boq (Picture: Matt Crockett)
The role of Elphaba was originally performed by Idina Menzel, who won the 2004 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance, while Kristin Chenoweth took on the character of Glinda, and was also Tony-nominated.
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It has gone on to win a further two Tony Awards, one Grammy Award, 11 Drama Desk Awards, and two Laurence Olivier Awards.
Martin Ball as Doctor Dillamond (Picture: Matt Crockett)
Sarah McNicholas as Nessarose (Picture: Matt Crockett)
Bradley Jaden (Fiyero), Melanie La Barrie (Madame Morrible), Andy Hockley (The Wizard) and Jack Lansbury (Boq) will join Fearn and Evanas and current cast members Martin Ball (Doctor Dillamond) and Sarah McNicholas (Nessarose).
The new London cast will tread the boards for the first time on Monday July 24 2017;Please support us by disabling your ad blocker on our site.
Amy Gutmann's salary is now over $3.5 million She remains one of the highest-paid university presidents in the country
Penn President Amy Gutmann’s total salary climbed to a record $3,537,020 in 2015, according to the most recent records Penn filed to the Internal Revenue Service.
Gutmann’s compensation package, a 6.09 percent increase from what she brought home in 2014, remains one of the largest in the country. A report from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which used data from 2014 and before, recently listed Gutmann’s salary as the fourth-highest nationwide and the top among all Ivy League presidents.
Top administrators’ salary information became available this week with the public release of the University’s 2015 Form 990, an annual requirement for nonprofit institutions like Penn. Because of the lag in federal reporting requirements, the 2015 form — covering Jul. 1, 2015 to Jun. 30, 2016 — is the most recent period from which data is available.
Gutmann’s seven-figure salary follows a trend noted in higher education of late, where university presidents are compensated in a manner similar to CEOs or Wall Street executives. Over 50 percent of Gutmann’s compensation in 2015 came in the form of bonuses, performance-based incentive pay and deferred compensation.
“Across a hugely complex institution, Dr. Gutmann had substantially met each and every one of her aggressive goals and has succeeded phenomenally,” Penn Board of Trustees Chair David Cohen, who heads the committee that determines Gutmann’s compensation, said in an email.
“Indeed, we believe Amy Gutmann is the best university president in the country, and her compensation should reflect that,” he added.
Gutmann’s total compensation, which has risen a stunning 341 percent since the year she received her first paycheck as Penn president, has not always been so dominated by incentive pay. Only in the last three years for which data is available has “bonus and incentive compensation” comprised the largest chunk of her compensation package.
Despite her multimillion dollar salary, Gutmann did not top the list of Penn’s highest-paid employees in 2015.
That honor fell to Tom Beeman, the chief operating officer for regional operations at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, who collected $4,822,512. His hefty payday in 2015 arose from “a one time payment of over $3 million” as part of a retirement package “accumulated over 11 years,” Susan Phillips, a spokesperson for Penn Medicine, said in an email.
Other top earners were J. Larry Jameson, the executive vice president of the UPHS and dean of the Perelman School of Medicine, and Ralph Muller, the CEO of UPHS. Typically, executives from Penn Medicine round out the group of Penn administrators earning over $1 million a year.
PennConnectsAIKEN South Carolina (Reuters) - U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on Monday defended his agency’s controversial move to consider processing spent nuclear fuel from Germany at South Carolina’s Savannah River Site nuclear facility, saying the proposal is consistent with U.S. efforts to secure highly enriched uranium across the globe.
U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz sits for an interview at the Department of Energy in Washington January 30, 2014. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The United States has for years accepted spent fuel from research reactors in various countries that was produced with uranium of U.S. origin as a part of U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policy and treaties.
Receiving the German spent fuel would be “very much in line with our mission of removing the global danger of nuclear weapons |
but they do facilitate the sinking of oil into the water column. This is no doubt one reason the oil industry likes them so much. During the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Corexit played an instrumental role in creating the illusion that the oil had disappeared.
Perhaps the most alarming facet of the proposed rules is that they accept the subsea use of dispersants as a viable cleanup strategy. In its comments to the EPA, Earthjustice raised concerns about “significant knowledge gaps” pertaining to the “potentially toxic effects” of subsea dispersant use on the deep sea environment. The group called on the EPA to ban or heavily restrict the practice.
Jeffrey Short—a former research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and former Pacific science director of the watchdog group Oceana—was one of several scientists invited to attend an EPA meeting in the first weeks of the BP disaster to determine whether to apply Corexit underwater.
While he supported the decision at the time, Short says his opinion was based on information about a trial application presented by the EPA—but he says that in the field, the dispersant probably did not work as intended. He now believes that subsea use is superfluous because the mechanics of a blowout combined with the drop in temperature and pressure at depth creates a natural dispersion of oil. “You could see the oil dispersing as it emanated from the risers,” says Short, referring to the video feed that riveted the nation for months. “That process alone accomplished what they hoped to accomplish through the use of dispersants. It’s like taking a can of Coke, shaking it up and opening it. It goes everywhere.”
A 2010 study by scientists at the US Naval Research Laboratory revealed another potential limitation to Corexit’s effectiveness: It actually harms microbes that are adapted to consume oil. The study’s authors concluded that dispersants “could potentially diminish the capacity of environmental microbial communities to bioremediate the spill”—thus negating one of the industry’s prime justifications for using them.
What’s more, by sinking oil into the water column, dispersants merely delay the process of its washing ashore. Oil, and oil mixed with dispersant, is churned up during storms, forming tar mats and tar balls that contaminate beaches—and will continue to do so for decades to come.
Despite all of this, the oil industry is pushing ahead on dispersants. In July 2010, as the Macondo well continued to gush oil into the Gulf, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell collaborated to create the Marine Well Containment Company, which engineers and builds oil well caps. The company recently announced a new system that not only caps a broken wellhead, but also includes large containers of dispersant, pre-installed on the sea floor, that can be remotely activated in the event of an oil spill.
“The industry is attempting to normalize its use of subsea dispersants, which could hide the existence and scope of future oil spills,” says Rep. Nadler.
Jonathan Henderson, the field operations manager of Gulf Restoration Network, worries that the Gulf is at even greater risk today than it was before the BP spill. That’s because oil companies are drilling deeper wells than ever before. “In a loss-of-well-control situation in [an extremely deep well], if the newly designed blowout preventer fails, or the capping stack doesn’t work, then what?” asks Henderson. “Millions of gallons more of toxic dispersants?”
This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the H.D. Lloyd Fund for Investigative Journalism. Credit for the organization that provided support for the reporting was originally misstated.
Correction: This article originally stated that BP did not respond to requests for comment. In fact, a BP spokesman did email a response. We have revised the story to include comments from BP.The new Moto X has been available from Verizon for a few weeks now, but today they're offering up a sweet new exclusive for football fans. A new football leather-backed Moto X is available now online and in stores for just $119.99 after a $50 on-contract rebate.
If wood or "regular" leather aren't you thing, you can snag the sweet looking football leather backing for your Moto X instead. In true Big Red fashion, you'll still be stuck with a Verizon logo on the back of the device however. The football leather is still a totally cool option for fans of the game, or even those just looking for something a bit different. Verizon says the exclusive device is available now, though we're not yet seeing it on their site.
Is the football leather a touchdown or a fumble for Verizon? Sound off in the comments!
Check out our picks for best phones on Verizon and best prepaid phones on Verizon!
This post may contain affiliate links. See our disclosure policy for more details.(photo by Seth Ballentine)
It’s been just a little over a year since Isis called it quits, but Aaron Turner has managed to keep busy (which isn’t out of the ordinary): he put out an album with Mamiffer (the band he’s in with his wife, Faith Coloccia) as well as starting up a new record label, SIGE. He’s also been working on posthumous Isis releases as well as reissuing the band’s long out-of-print live albums (heavily culling from Oceanic and Panopticon material, and cool enough to be streamed by Metal Sucks). So even though his highly influential and beloved group is done, he’s not coasting in early retirement (or getting a day job and riding off into the sunset, telling neighborhood kids about the glory days when he toured all over the country for a decade in motherfuckin’ ISIS).
While Turner isn’t know for his stodgy release habits (he’s also a member of House of Low Culture and avant-garde metal supergroups Greymachine and Old Man Gloom), Isis looms largest, and Turner not only seems at peace with that but enthusiastic about it, thankful for the people who have supported him and his art over the years. At the same time, he doesn’t have any reservations about how it ended or that it did, but simply accepts it as the end to a chapter in his life, albeit a chapter he has no problem reminiscing about. In a recent conversation with Metal Sucks, Aaron discussed the demise of his most well-known band, future Isis releases, and how running SIGE compares with running Hydra Head.
Sammy O‘Hagar: Regarding the live series re-releases, what led to your decision to re-release those now?
Aaron Turner: We’ve actually been talking about it for awhile, including before we officially decided to call it quits. For whatever reason, like a lot of the things we’ve done, it took awhile to put all of the pieces together and get it in motion. The purpose of the live series overall is just to try to make some live recordings that we all actually liked more widely available since the CD and LP versions of all those are now long out of print. We figured this would be a good, easy way to make them more widely available without having to maintain the stuff ourselves.
What about these shows that appealed to you guys in particular?
I guess it depends on which particular show we’re talking about because there is a pretty wide range of stuff throughout the five different releases. I think overall there were a few criteria: (1) it had to sound good and I don’t necessarily mean high fidelity but just have a nice atmosphere to it. We did try to choose a lot of recordings which were halfway decent where all the levels of the various players are pretty well balanced. I guess sound is part of it. There was a lot of stuff floating around before we started releasing these ourselves that sounded really awful, so I guess in a way we wanted to have something out there that sounded a little better. (2) We tried to pick shows that we enjoyed playing. There’s obviously some ebb and flow in terms of how enjoyable a show is. So some of them that we recorded that we felt really good about are the ones that we ended up releasing. (3) One of the other things that we thought about is that, on a lot of our past tours we collaborated with people we were touring with, and we wanted to get a lot of those live collaborations out there too because those were a meaningful part of our live show. I think that was another thing we were thinking.
Did Justin Broadrick mix the fifth one?
Yeah, the Oceanic one. Yes he did.
What led to that decision?
Justin has done a lot of stuff that various members of Isis have enjoyed over the years and is a guy we toured with a lot and played with on a few occasions. He was at that particular show, performed with Final that night and also played with us. It just seemed like an interesting thing to round out that release. I think his production is something that a lot of us have liked too. It’s very specific to him. He kind of has his own sound, and we wanted to see what we would sound like through his process and ideas.
What were your goals for Isis starting out and did you exceed them?
We didn’t have any rigid set of goals. I think the main goal for us was just to play music that we all really wanted to be playing. That sounds kind of obvious but prior to being in Isis, I think a lot of us had been in other bands that we might have enjoyed but felt that it wasn’t quite what we wanted to be doing. Isis is really about following exactly the path that we wanted to. I can definitely say that that was a goal that we achieved. At some point along the way, I think we all compromised to try to be in the middle to find territory that we all found mutually agreeable. In that sense, maybe there were times that things happened that we all weren’t 100% true about, but for the most part I think we did pretty well at doing what we wanted to do. I think that was the main thing that was the focal point at the beginning that was maintained throughout most of the existence of the band.
Are you still in touch with the guys in the band?
I think everybody is in touch in varying degrees. We’re sort of spread out now. Mike [Gallagher, guitarist] is back in NY, I live in Washington, and the other three are down in L.A. We communicate about band-related stuff and also about other things as well. It’s certainly pretty different from what it was like before we split up where we were spending half of every year together. Or more, in some instances.
What was it like having the band break up?
It wasn’t like a real sudden thing. We all kind of knew it was coming. I guess in a way there was nothing really shocking about it. For me, personally, as much as Isis had been a really enjoyable part of my life, at the end I was sort of relieved when it ended. I think we stopped at a point where we were still in a really good place. We were all getting along well. We were all still interested in the music we were playing, but we reached a point where there was not much further we could take it. I’m kind of glad we ended when we did and didn’t drag it down into some dilapidated version of what we were.
Is there any more Isis related stuff coming down the road at all?
There’s a lot of stuff that we’ll put together slowly over time. We’re going to do a physical reissue of Mosquito Control, Celestial, and SGNL>5 at some point since those are all pretty much out of print or will be soon. We’d like to make sure that those stay out there in some form or another. We have a bunch of live stuff which we also want to get out after this whole series is done, maybe another DVD at some point. There are some other odds and ends too: some videos that have only been available on the internet that we would like to have on DVD and a couple of tracks from the Wavering Radiant session that only appeared on the split 12″ with the Melvins or as the bonus track in Japan. There’s actually a whole pile of stuff that we’re going to sort through and try to find the good stuff and put it together in, I don’t know, multiple releases. We’re just taking our time with it and doing one thing at a time.
Just thinking back on hearing you guys break up, normally the first thing I think is “oh, they don’t really have that much around. It’s such a shame.” But I thought that you guys had this really rich back catalogue and on top of that you had a lot of side projects. Being as prolific as you are, is there ever a time when you’re not making music or is it something that’s always a constant process with you?
I think it’s pretty constant at this point. It’s something that I’ve largely devoted my life to, and I’ve definitely not slowed down since Isis stopped being active. There are times when I just need and want to focus on other things, but it’s never for very long. I would say throughout the year for almost every year of the last decade, I’ve been pretty consistently active doing some sort of musical related activity.
How does the dynamic of being in Mamiffer differ from that of Isis?
For one thing, Mamiffer is pretty much Faith’s band. I have input in it to a varying degree. Especially in the later years of Isis, it was a pretty democratic process amongst all the people participating. With Mamiffer that’s not really the case. That dynamic is very different. One of the other things that’s just as dynamic as well, even though I obviously had personal relationships with everybody in Isis, it’s not the same as being with someone who is your partner or in our case is made up of a married couple. There’s a deeper level of personal intimacy I guess that contribute to what Mamiffer is and that aspect of it is pretty different too but it’s hard to describe exactly how different that is.
Like comparing apples and oranges in that regard?
I guess so. It’s just a level of depth in the personal relationship that Faith and I have that does something different in the context of making music together than what happens between five dudes who play loud rock music together. That’s not to belittle or diminish the importance of the personal relationships in Isis — it was definitely a big part of what we did and we wouldn’t have played music together if we weren’t friends. It’s just a very different kind of situation.
(photo by Seth Ballentine)
Playing in a band like Isis as long as you did and then branching out to other ambient or even more post-rock oriented projects, is metal something that you’ve grown sick of?
Definitely not. It’s a big part of who I am, at least in terms of the music that I play. It’s still something that I’m pursuing and involved with actively. Even prior to being in Isis, there was a lot of different kinds of music that I was interested in. It just so happened that Isis became the focal point for me and everyone else in the band for a very long time. In all the years that Isis was active, I was pretty involved in a lot of other kinds of bands and making different kinds of music. That stuff has always been of interest to me.
As far as your legacy with Isis, what do you think of that whole crop of new Isis bands that were popping up for a while that were heavily influenced by your and Neurosis’ sound? Did you think of it positively?
Yeah. I think it’s not a bad thing. Of course it’s better when people can solidify their own identity, but there’s been so many bands that have been so influential to me and really helped me develop as a musician that it’s nice to know that we were able to give that back to other people. It’s always kind of weird when another band stakes their whole career off of another band’s sound. For the most part I think it’s really good when people are inspired by a band and that gives them a little bit of drive to play music themselves or to pursue something that they want to do. In that sense, I’m happy with what happened.
What inspires you now musically? What do you take in to feed what you do?
Lately something that’s been really inspiring to me is working with a lot of different people who have really interesting perspectives on playing music and on what they do. I think the most I’ve learned about playing music and making music comes from the other people that I’ve been around in various bands and the social communities that I’m a part of. One thing that changed for me lately is that I’ve come into contact with more evolved working relationships with a lot of people than I did when Isis was really active. I think having that more diversified view has been really inspiring to me lately. There’s something to be said, of course, for working with the same group of people for an extended period of time; you can develop that way. That can be really interesting too. I did that for a really long period of time with Isis and it’s nice to be able to have completely different kinds of experiences now. I would say that that is the most inspiring thing to me as of late.
Are you not as open as having a central, solidified group of five or six musicians that you would be making music with?
That’s not something that I’m completely opposed to, but it’s not something that I want to jump into right away. At this point, Mamiffer is pretty focused in a sense that Faith and I are the core of it, and that dynamic is very interesting to me and very appealing. At the same time, I like the open-ended nature of Mamiffer that we can play with a lot of different people and it doesn’t have to be this very solidified group of people. I also really enjoy being involved in other projects but not having that regimented approach of working together where there’s this really well defined set of – I don’t know what the right word is – where it’s a pattern. At this point, I like the idea of not setting anything in a really rigid scheme.
Being as involved as you had been in Hydra Head… and you have a new label going now, right? How do those two experiences compare to each other?
Yep, that’s correct. Well, Hydra Head is a much larger operation and has to function differently as a result of that. It’s not something that’s centrally concerned with making money, but it’s a little more business oriented. We have to really consider everything that we’re doing and pay more attention to the administrative side of running a label. With SIGE [a label run by Aaron and Faith Coloccia] it’s much smaller thing that really exists in a much less rigid set of parameters — we can basically do whatever we want. That’s not to say that Hydra Head falls into strict parameters in terms of what music we choose to release, but we have to think about things in a very different path. It’s also very different in a sense that SIGE exists mostly as an outlet for projects Faith and I are directly involved with whereas Hydra Head is dedicated to the work of other musicians. That obviously is a different thing too. With SIGE, it’s basically Faith and I operating it out of our house, and we do everything ourselves including making the packaging. Hydra Head is not a huge operation overall, but there’s a lot more people involved in what’s going on. That aspect of it is pretty different too. I guess simplifying SIGE and the way that it operates is a much more interesting experience. It involves a much smaller collection of people whereas Hydra Head is a little more strong at this point.
As far as being a visual artist and actually dealing with the artwork while working with SIGE, what importance does album packaging and album art still mean to you in 2011?
It’s still a really important thing to me and that’s one of the things about SIGE that takes more of a focal point. With Hydra Head, I know I mentioned it functions more as a business to some degree, so doing digital releases has become a bigger part of what we do. We do that a little bit with SIGE, but it’s really about the physical object more than the idea of wanting to get a piece of music out into the world in any way, shape, or form. The visual aesthetic side of Hydra Head has always been very important to me and still is, but we’ve also chosen to make compromises in that regard. I realize now that a lot of people hear music with no consideration for the packaging — maybe even more so in the last year. For me personally, it’s something really important to think carefully about the packaging of a record and make sure that what is done is really as a developed experience as the record as well.
Is SIGE a passion project in that way? Something that you weren’t able to experience as much before?
To some degree. With Hydra Head we’re still able to do some very small scale releases with packaging, but in a lot of cases the records are pressed in such quantities that it makes it really hard to do that. That was something in the early years of Hydra Head that I really enjoyed doing and that’s something that has been the nice part of running SIGE, doing things in a little bit more of a hands-on way. I do enjoy that aspect of doing things this way.
Finally, I think our readership would crucify me if I didn’t ask about Old Man Gloom. Is there anything going on, on that front?
No, not at the moment. We’ve talked about stuff for years and never really formally dissolved. At this point there aren’t plans to do anything. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
-SOMicrosoft has just opened a digital store in India by using Amazon. This might point to a new way of doing business for the US-focused company.
People in India now have direct access to Microsoft’s products, both digital and physical, by going to the Microsoft brand store on Amazon India. Lots of products are available starting with Windows 8.1 going through Windows Phones, Office, Xbox and even third party laptops and tablets – obviously no Surface though.
The Microsoft Brand Store will also feature special deals, bundles, discounts and every other kind of offer you’d expect from a regular store. It already does for the Xbox One and some Lumia handsets and customers will also benefit from free shipping which is always a plus.
Microsoft has regularly, though not unfairly, been criticized for focusing almost exclusively on the US while treating many of its other customers as second-class. Perhaps this brand store on Amazon is the company’s first step in addressing some of that criticism.
Source: Microsoft India (Twitter)Fixes that are going to become 1.5.1.
Patchnotes:
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- Fixed a bug where subjects would be unable to buy their overlords' core provinces outside their coring range.
- Will no longer be able to attempt to sell provinces when the sale is not valid (due to coring range or other reasons).
- Reduced number of Great Power allies penalty from -100 to -50
- Added defines for Number of Great Power allies allowed before a penalty is applied to alliance chance
- Added defines for Penalty on alliance chance for having more GP allies than allowed
- AI: Will no longer break alliances due to gaining too many Great Power allies
- There is no longer any extra +manpower in the build interface where it shouldn't be.
- No longer 601 days to colonize inland adjacent to puppets.
- Fixed tooltip for being unable to sell provinces due to being outside buyer's coring range.
- Fixed a bug where subjects of subjects could not call their overlord to war if attacked.
- Fixed spanish and french localisation
- Fixed native american theologian picture
- Fixed issue with DLCs from steam and DLCs using archives breaking when replacing paths
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Update, 1/21/2016: With an epic blizzard expected to bury Washington, DC, this weekend and an epic caucus night quickly approaching in Iowa, I decided to revisit this post. It remains true that winter storms and cold weather are in no way inconsistent with global warming. But I can no longer stand by my assertion that Donald Trump is “probably not going to run for president.” As Rick Perry would say: Oops.
Snow is falling across the Northeast, and millions of people are preparing for a massive blizzard. Due to the extreme winter conditions, my colleague at Climate Desk has issued the following advisory:
PSA: Big snowstorm ≠ proof global warming is a hoax. — Tim McDonnell (@timmcdonnell) January 26, 2015
It may seem obvious to you that the existence of extreme winter weather doesn’t negate the scientific fact that humans are warming the planet. But that’s probably because you aren’t a climate change denier who’s contemplating a run for the GOP presidential nomination.
Last year, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) weighed in on the issue. “It is really freezing in DC,” Cruz said during a speech on energy policy, according to Talking Points Memo. “I have to admit I was surprised. Al Gore told us this wouldn’t happen!” Cruz said the same thing a month earlier, according to Slate: “It’s cold!…Al Gore told me this wouldn’t happen.”
And here’s former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on his Fox News show, after a major blizzard back in December 2009:
Which brings us to a couple of Republicans who are probably not going to run for president but who have nevertheless generated headlines recently by suggesting they might. Here’s Donald Trump, during a cold snap last year:
This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2014
And here’s a 2012 Facebook post from former Gov. Sarah Palin, citing extremely cold winter temperatures in her home state of Alaska:
If you’re a regular Climate Desk reader, you already know why all this is wrong. You understand the difference between individual weather events and long-term climate trends. You probably even know that according to the National Climate Assessment, winter precipitation is expected to increase in the northeastern United States as a result of climate change. But if you’re a Republican who wants to be president, please pay close attention to the following video:The WaPo wants you to know that it–one of the most storied newspapers in American history–is absolutely incapable of sorting through the facts about whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s torture turned him into a helpful college professor of terror.
The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result.
So, throwing up its institutional hands and declaring itself unable to find the truth, let’s look at what it does instead.
First, in a 1,400 word article written with the assistance of both of WaPo’s spook reporters, they neglect to mention that, after KSM’s most intense torture ended, the CIA started to use rapport-based interrogation with him. I guess they didn’t think that little detail–that the treatment of KSM immediately preceding the time when he was so cooperative and helpful actually adopted a different approach to interrogation–was worthy of mention.
And that is particularly remarkable considering the most detailed story of that rapport-based interrogation also includes the details about KSM’s helpful lecturing that–the WaPo now claims–have previously not been publicized. Call me crazy, but I’m betting the same CIA sources that told the NYT about how successful rapport was with KSM are among those boasting to WaPo about KSM’s little lecture circuit. But I guess the WaPo, faced with this "irresolvable" problem, doesn’t want to muddy its confusion by mentioning, even once, the use of rapport-based interrogation with KSM.
Then there’s the WaPo’s chronological muddying. It treats several different kinds of sources–the IG Report, the Pre-Eminent Source document written in the wake of and almost certainly as a response to the IG Report, and the human sources boasting of KSM’s lecture series–as if there were no temporal or reliability distinction between the them. Which means they use events that happened in 2005 and 2006, the lecture series, to reinforce claims made by a propagandistic document produced on July 13, 2004. Both of which, of course, happened long after KSM’s torture. But that doesn’t stop the WaPo from implying a causal effect between the torture and the cooperation that happened years later.
This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.
And, while we’re on chronological muddying, it bears mentioning that the WaPo doesn’t note that KSM went from capture to torture in a matter of weeks, so any claim that he was uncooperative–weighed against two years of rapport-based interrogation–is completely bogus.
Ultimately, though, what the WaPo shows is that KSM immediately offered up some information,
KSM almost immediately following his capture in March 2003 elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow airport
Gave false information under torture…
"During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time," he said.
And gave false information after torture.
One former agency official recalled that Mohammed was once asked to write a summary of his knowledge about al-Qaeda’s efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. The terrorist group had explored buying either an intact nuclear weapon or key components such as enriched uranium, although there is no evidence of significant progress on that front "He wrote us an essay" on al-Qaeda’s nuclear ambitions, the official said. "Not all of it was accurate, but it was quite extensive."
Yet from this, they seemingly willfully declare the whole problem irresolvable.
This article is fundamentally immoral and irresponsible. The WaPo had an opportunity to show the progression of KSM’s treatment: almost immediately to torture, then to rapport, and after that, helpful though still not entirely reliable contributions. Showing such a progression would actually help the WaPo and its readers to make sense of this so-called "irresolvable" problem by seeing, first of all, that CIA didn’t try other methods with KSM until after he had been tortured and that it was months and years of rapport, not the torture, most closely tied to his cooperation.
But that would involve a concerted effort to get to the truth. And once you’ve declared the issue irresolvable, I guess, that just takes too much effort.NEW YORK (Reuters) - Citigroup In (C.N)c is planning to cut as many as 900 jobs from its securities and banking division as it grapples with turmoil in equity and debt markets, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The job cuts are intended to help cut Citigroup’s expenses. The bank is tentatively weighing a move to cut as many as 3,000 jobs overall, representing approximately 1 percent of its global workforce, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the situation.
Citigroup has recently moved to reduce expenses in its Citi Holdings operations, which house businesses and assets it plans to shed. Before the financial crisis, Citigroup faced pressure from investors to rein in costs, which were at the time rising faster than its revenue.
The sources emphasized that the plans could change as the bank moves to finalize its plan for reducing its head-count. Representatives for the bank were not immediately available for comment Tuesday evening.
Citigroup’s shares were down slightly in trading Tuesday, as U.S. banks respond to flare-ups in the tumultuous European debt markets. The bank’s shares fell 36 cents Tuesday to close at $28.02. Over the last year, its stock price has fallen 33.85 percent.Summertime heat is upon us. As warm weather wardrobes come out of the closet, it is important to consider what we are wearing and its impact on our health, the planet, and the social conditions of those involved in its production. Sustainable, organic fashion, especially t-shirts, has become more available and affordable. As a consumer, you have a choice.
Why you should only wear sustainable, organic t-shirts this summer
Three years ago, Greenpeace issued a report on toxic fashion. They tested in 141 items made in 29 different countries. Phthalates, amines, and nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs) were found.
The chemicals found included high levels of toxic phthalates in four of the garments, and cancer-causing amines from the use of certain azo dyes in two garments. NPEs were found in 89 garments (just under two thirds of those tested), showing little difference from the results of the previous investigation into the presence of these substances in sports clothing that was conducted in 2011.4 In addition, the presence of many other different types of potentially hazardous industrial chemicals was discovered across a number of the products tested. as inherently hazardous substances, any use of NPes, phthalates, or azo dyes that can release cancer- causing amines, is unacceptable. Around 80 billion garments are produced worldwide, the equivalent of just over 11 garments a year for every person on the planet. The increased volumes of clothing being made, sold, and thrown away magnifies the human and environmental costs of our clothes at every stage of their life cycle. Even the apparently small, quantities of a hazardous chemical such as NPEs, which are legally allowed in clothing, cumulatively amount to the widespread dispersal of damaging chemicals across the planet.
If you need a new t-shirt and wish to make a conscious choice as a consumer, we recommend Green Label Organic! These shirts are super soft and sustainably made in the USA. Green Label Organic explains why it is so important to choose organic cotton clothing:
The top three most pesticide-laden crops in the world are: Coffee
Cotton
Tobacco Each year cotton producers around the world use nearly $2.6 billion worth of pesticides and insecticides, which accounts for more than 35% of the world’s annual pesticide and insecticide use. In California’s San Joaquin valley alone, more than 18 million pounds of pesticides are sprayed annually onto one million acres of cotton. It takes approximately 1/3 of a pound of pesticides, herbicides, and defoliants to grow enough cotton to make just one conventional cotton T-shirt. Of the nine chemicals used in growing cotton, five of them are known carcinogens (cancer-causing chemicals). Every one of them is classified category I or II by the EPA. Categories I and II are considered the most dangerous chemicals.
We were sent the women’s Listen organic scoop neck t-shirt. I love this shirt and can’t wait to wear it backpacking.
Take some time to reflect….and don’t forget to listen. This is one of our most popular shirts for both men and women. It speaks to the musician, the artist and the outdoor enthusiast. Made in America using 100% organic cotton and garment-dyed, this tee is a perfect mix of honoring not only our hardworking farmers, but supporting all the American’s involved in the manufacturing of this shirt.
This t-shirt has a great message and is very comfortable to wear. I have received many compliments on mine. My conscience is clear knowing this shirt was made sustainably both socially and environmentally.
Green Label Organic is offering our readers a discount. Use the promo code ECO10 to receive your discount at checkout.A post by Kaspars Grinvalds from Posing App.
Previously published articles in the Posing Guide series contained hand illustrated posing samples as a guide for your photo shoots. Based upon feedback and questions I received about these guides, I wanted to describe the process in more detail and show some real photos created while using these posing techniques.
The main purpose of using posing samples is to give your model some starting points. You don’t need to precisely recreate even the simplified illustrated pose.
This will be a three part series looking at standing, sitting and laying down poses for female models. For the the first article I chose seven sample standing poses and by slightly adjusting each pose I got 21 different photos.
Posing Guide for Photographing Women
Pose 1
It is a good idea to start your photo shoot with some very basic, easy pose. That’s why I chose this one to begin with. It’s easy to describe and easy to understand – “portrait shot from a side”. So you might start with saying to your model “Ok, turn with your side towards me, turn your head to me and look right over the shoulder at the camera. Straighten your spine and keep hands loose by sides.”
Photo 1 – With these instructions you should get something like the first picture. The next thing without changing the pose, is to “find” the face expression you’re looking for. You may want to try moving from very subtle smirks to stronger smiles or even laughter. And once you have the expression (or different ones) you’re after, tell and show it to the model. Thereby it will be easy for the model to learn and repeat it.
Photo 2 – After I got the simple and kind expression I was looking for, I slightly changed my position and asked the model to keep looking back over her shoulder to the camera. Exactly the same pose, just taken from another angle and you already have a slightly different photo.
Photo 3 – Also many different looking directions and head tilts are possible. In this particular example I asked the model to look back down her body. This look works very well in many posing situations, creating yet another variation just by slightly adjusting the starting pose.
Pose 2
Seeing this sample illustration you should grab only the basic idea – “portrait shot with hands around the face”. That’s all you need for playing around with initial sample pose. Eventually you will come up with some nice variations of your own.
Photo 4 – Before getting to the hands, ask the model to stand facing the camera and support her body weight on just one leg. This instantly curves her body and her shoulder line is shifted. After that ask her to gently move her hands around the face and in the hair. Generally look for asymmetrical hand placements, but as you can imagine – many variations are possible.
Photo 5 – In this shot the only difference is slight tilting of the head and putting one hand behind the hair.
Photo 6 – To differentiate the look and feel, I once again asked the model to look down her own body and cropped tighter around the face. And again with only minor adjustments from one pose we’ve got 3 different photos.
Pose 3
Another easy pose with very simple idea – “hands connected on the chest”. Notice that hands are not really “crossed”, but “connected”. Also you should warn your model not to grip them too tight or press upper arms against the body. Simply put, the posture should feel comfortable and subtle.
Photo 7 – |
said in the email. “Upper Sproul Plaza will be fully reopened by Monday morning and police barricades will be removed early in the week.”
But a rally that was previously scheduled to take place on the West Crescent Lawn at noon Sept. 25 in response to Free Speech Week is still likely to occur, according to the email.
Both campus staff members and students expressed concerns about Free Speech Week prior to its cancellation. Many professors canceled classes in light of safety concerns, and some students said they felt Free Speech Week was impacting both their academics and their safety.
The campus said in its email that it would be addressing the impact of Free Speech Week on community members in the coming days.
“Campus leadership will communicate in greater detail about the impact recent events have had on our campus community later in the week and offer plans for moving forward,” the campus said in an email.
Chantelle Lee is the city news editor. Contact her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @ChantelleHLee.Shut your yap, Avery.
Captain Ryan Callahan and his teammates essentially echoed John Tortorella's famous phrase when they fired back in a statement Sunday at ex-teammate Sean Avery for Avery's Saturday night tweet that the team should "fire this CLOWN," referring to Tortorella.
"Sean Avery's comments solely represent his own thoughts and opinions," read the statement that the team said represented the view of all 23 players. "He did not speak for us as a team when he was here and certainly does not now."
Avery's full tweet on his account @imseanavery, five minutes after the Rangers' 3-0 shutout loss to Montreal on Saturday night, read: "Fire this CLOWN. His players hate him and wont play for his BS…. @imseanavery is #winning."
But Rangers center Derek Stepan defended Tortorella in comments to the Daily News, despite the Blueshirts barely clinging to the eighth and final playoff seed in the Eastern Conference with a middling 16-15-3 record.
"Our problem isn't with our coaching staff, and it hasn't been," Stepan told the Daily News in the Bell Centre after Saturday's defeat. "And I think if you asked everyone on our team, they would say the same thing, that that's not the case here … I don't agree with (Avery's tweet) at all, no. I think it's safe to say that all 23 guys on our roster would say that's not the case."
The Rangers return to action Monday night at the Garden against the Winnipeg Jets at 7 p.m.
RANGER LINKS
Zuccarello sees heavy minutes, creates, but can't finish in shutout defeat
Have a question about the Blueshirts or a comment? Find Pat on Twitter at @NYDNRangers.Hungarian Foreign and Trade Minister Peter Szijjarto has accused the European Union of hypocrisy in dealing with migrant issue, as over 1,5 million migrants have crossed into Europe without any control or checking.
MINSK (Sputnik) — In September, 2015, the heads of the EU Interior Ministries adopted the European Commission’s proposal on the distribution of 160,000 undocumented migrants, staying on the territory of Italy and Greece, among the EU countries, under the quota plan. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland opposed the proposal. On June 14, the European Commission announced the launch of infringement procedures against the three aforementioned states.
"The European Union treats the migrant issue with hypocrisy… [the EU allowed] 1.5 million undocumented migrants to cross into the European territory without any control or regulation… Nobody checked anybody. We do not know, who these people are, why they have come and what their plans are. Obviously, this is a big risk," Szijjarto told Belarus 1 channel in an interview broadcast on Sunday.
According to the minister, Brussels threatens Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland with sanctions instead of solving the issue and providing Europe with security.
Earlier in June, Hungarian Government Spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told Sputnik that Budapest was ready to defend its arguments against taking in asylum seekers under an EU quota system in the European Union's top court.Hear what Michael B. Jordan had to say of his experience as Erik Killmonger in Marvel's upcoming film Black Panther, and check out two brand new images featuring the film's two stars.
With the theatrical release ofright around the corner, the stars of the film are beginning to do the press rounds. Speaking to Empire in the latest issue, of which Black Panther is the cover of, star Michael B. Jordan - who plays the nefarious Erik Killmonger - opened up on the emotional toll the role took on him.
"It took me to a dark place," Jordan revealed. "Honestly, I can’t really go through all I went through to get into it because I want to keep that close to me. But it stuck with me afterwards."
But while the role itself was tough on Jordan, he did say he "had a lot of fun on set" with co-star Chadwick Boseman, who plays T'Challa/Black Panther. "Chadwick's a very talented dude," Jordan said of the film's star, teasing their onscreen action. "There’s a lot of physical moments and action sequences throughout this film that cause us to really challenge ourselves, and also fall deeper into character."
In addition to Jordan's comments, Empire debuted two new photos from Black Panther, which you can check out below.
is due out in U.S. theaters on February 16, 2018.
(Shout out to @BlackBeltJones for the tip!)Not every bathroom in the world is civilized enough to have a bidet. And so you never have to find yourself in a position where you're reaching for toilet paper, the Hygienna Solo turns any plastic water bottle into a handheld portable bidet. How—um—practical?
It sounds a little gross, and quite frankly, it kind of is. Once you've attached the three-inch spigot to a standard water bottle you just position it you know where, give the bottle a squeeze, and hope with all your heart there's minimal splash-back. When you're finished, the Hygienna's creators recommend giving it a good wash with soapy water, but at just $10 we'd be inclined to take the less disgusting route and just buy a new one every time.
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Available in teal or pink the Hygienna is designed to be used by both sexes, and we like the fact that you can switch between a small Evian bottle or a two-liter Coke bottle depending on how your bathroom visit plays out. [Hygienna]This week was a busy week, so busy I’m a day late. But we’ll forget about that bit for now. Let’s get onto what progress has been made.
Maps
I finished Snow this week, it’s fully cluttered, with fences, rocks etc. making the map seem more detailed and actually really improves the looks of it. The header for this post is an area I’m particularly happy with. This included some new assets being created.
Included under the “Maps” topic is the track-node system I developed to help track the player position around the track and also guide the AI. I added the node option for direction only, this will help guide AI but won’t impact their throttle inputs, allowing for tight spaces where they shouldn’t slow down. Such as the bridge on forest, which combined with a bunch of other issues led to the following hilarity:
AI
This week saw leaps and bounds for the development of the AI drivers. Bunch of tweaks towards the calculation of their target speed really brought down the number of flips and suicidal wall-crashes they got themselves into, but also some nifty collision detection.
I discovered half-way through the development of my AI of Unity’s Rigidbody.SweepTest functionality. This allowed me to search an area in-front of the car for collisions with potentially dangerous things.
Initially, I used this to check for walls/trees/fences, static objects. This brought down the number of issues, but I was still having some. Car’s would often get stuck on each other, and that needed to change.
As I still wanted the AI to collide into players and each other, the AI will only avoid cars below a certain speed. This allows for high speed crashing, but helps prevent low-speed annoyances.
Combine this with tweaks to their configuration, and we get a far more sensible AI.
UI
The UI this week saw a huge buff, for example on the main menu we went from this:
To this:
Getting rid of Unity’s default UI skin was a major step in the right direction, a small change to implement, but gives far bigger impact on the game.
Multiplayer
This week also saw the birth of Apollo, the Matchmaking system I’ve created to help support the multiplayer of this game. Apollo will run alongside Steam’s Matchmaking in order to allow GoG/DRM-free releases which can play with the Steam folk, just not through Steam.
Apollo will be developed over the coming weeks, but it is shaping up to be really powerful in terms of supporting Project Taurus.
General
I moved from Unity’s standard controller input system over to XInput, this gives far more flexibility and control, and grants me control over the feedback motors inside the controller itself. I used the collision system to generate pulses when the car collides with something substantial. As I said previously, it’s the little details.
We also now have a Reddit community. I’ve been building it up since Saturday, and it’s gone extremely well. With over 100 subscribers already!
The future
This coming week will feature little work on Taurus due to external commitments, but I’ll be working on the community and finishing the basis for the first functioning game-mode: Racing.
Thanks for reading!ELLICOTT CITY, MD — The Howard County government website has been hacked a pro-ISIS group. Those who go to the howardcounty.gov domain will find a message that says it has been "Hacked by Team System DZ."
The following message is displayed on howardcountymd.gov sites, on a black background with white lettering:
"You will be held accountable Trump
You and all your people
for every drop of blood flowing in Muslim
countries."
Then it says "I love Islamic state," with the words "I love" in gold.
Howard County government officials said that they were working on the issue Sunday afternoon and after 4:30 p.m. reported via Facebook that the IT team "expects to have it resolved shortly."
Apparently, Howard County was not the only target of Sunday's cyber infiltration. Other local and state government pages as well as those of companies were also hacked.
Team System DZ claimed responsibility on its Facebook page for hacking the town of Brookhaven, New York, and St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, as well as Mitsubishi Motors - Egypt.
The Ohio Department of Corrections was also hacked, according to cleveland.com.
There was a musical component, with chanting, on the Howard County page that was not apparent on others.
Screenshot from howardcountymd.gov.A 16-year old is sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn't commit. One day he is going to high school, worrying about girls and homework, the next day he is arrested for a murder he had nothing to do with and is locked up, never to see the outside again. Twenty years go by while he writes hundreds of letters from prison proclaiming his innocence. Against all odds, he manages to get a retrial, where the prosecutor from his original trial starts crying on the stand, admitting that there were doubts about his case all along (as evidenced in this ABC7 video below). But somehow in the face of injustice, during 20 long years of incarceration, Franky keeps his spirit alive.
Young Franky with his dad
Franky the teenager with his father and siblings, before he was arrested
Frank Carrillo in prison
Franky's (shared) cell at Folsom
Franky at his retrial 20 years later
Grabbing his arm is attorney Ellen Eggers who led the effort to free him and represented him pro bono
Franky on the day of his release after 20 years
Franky the college student
Franky the activist
(on his left is Scott Wood, Director, Restorative Justice Program,
Loyola Marymount University, who worked his case and with whom Franky currently lives)In his second year in the league, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson has guided his team to a 9-1 record, and he’s done it without two (sometimes three) of his starting offensive lineman. That achievement is more than enough to put him in the running for the NFL’s Most Valuable Player in 2013, ESPN says.
Wilson is No. 3 in ESPN’s latest “MVP watch” published Wednesday, improving from sixth and now trailing fellow signal-callers Peyton Manning at No. 1 and Drew Brees at No. 2. But ESPN’s Dan Graziano wrote that Wilson may be the most deserving of the league’s most prestigious award.
“This is the guy, honestly,” Graziano wrote of Wilson. “Brees deserves to be ahead of him so far based on the numbers, but if Manning slips up against the Chiefs in these next three weeks and his performance tails off noticeably in the second half, Wilson’s in the best position of anyone to sneak in and steal the award.
“Of his six remaining games, four are at home, where the Seahawks couldn’t lose if they played nine against 11. He’s already 5-1 on the road following Sunday’s demolition of the Falcons in Atlanta. He’s got help from an indomitable run game and defense, and he showed Sunday that when he has time to throw he can do pretty much whatever he wants.
“Wilson had been a statistical disappointment over his first nine games, and people have been asking when he was going to put together a truly great game. Sunday, Wilson and the Seahawks put everything together. And if you’re a fan of another team in the NFC, right now you’re sorry you asked.”
Wilson has the NFL’s fifth-highest passer rating (101.8) among qualifiers, trailing only the likes of Manning (121.0), Brees (108.9), Aaron Rodgers (108.0) and Philip Rivers (105.9) through Week 10. By record and statistically, Wilson is the best performer this season among the “big four” youngsters (Wilson, Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III and Colin Kaepernick), and is tied for the league lead with four game-winning drives.
The raw numbers: Wilson has completed 163 of his 257 passing attempts for the league’s 10th-best completion percentage at 63.4. He has thrown 17 touchdowns to just six interceptions, and also has a score on the ground.
Wilson has run the ball more than any other quarterback, rushing 70 times (including 35 scrambles after dropping back to pass) for a total of 395 yards. That rushing yardage ranks Wilson 28th in the NFL, and he also is second in the league with 5.6 yards per rushing attempt — not just among quarterbacks, but everyone.
Graziano said he rated Manning and Brees higher than Wilson because of their passing numbers, but both of them play on teams that throw the ball far more than they run it. Manning’s Broncos have called passing plays on 59.3 percent of their snaps, while Brees’ Saints have gone to the air 61.3 percent of the time.
Meanwhile, with 330 rushing attempts, the Seahawks have run the ball more than any other team in the NFL through 10 weeks. They have kept it on the ground in 55.5 percent of their offensive snaps, meaning Wilson hasn’t even had the chance to accumulate statistics like Manning and Brees.
In an unscientific poll, a majority of seattlepi.com readers said Wilson is their choice at this point in the season for Seahawks MVP. Is he playing well enough to be the league MVP?
Should Russell Wilson be named NFL MVP? Heck yes! He is the best and most well-rounded QB in the league!
Maybe right now, but there are seven weeks left in the season.
I don't know. I think we're all biased Seahawks fans.
Naw. You can't ignore the play of guys like Manning and Brees.
No way! Wilson is overrated and is not an elite QB.
Doesn't matter. As always, anyone in Seattle will be overlooked nationally. View Results
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Photo: Otto Greule Jr / Getty Images Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close Image 2 of 20 Marshawn Lynch — running back Despite being underutilized in St. Louis (eight carries for just 23 yards) and despite having just three games with 100 or more rushing yards, Lynch is the NFL's second-ranked running back with 869 yards so far this season. He is also ranked second with 518 yards after contact, and is tied for third in rushing touchdowns with seven. Lynch's 270 rushing yards over the past two weeks was his career high for two games, and on Sunday in Atlanta he looked every bit like the "beast" Seahawks fans have come to love. The heart of Seattle's offense, Lynch might deserve to be in the conversation for NFL MVP. — running back Despite being underutilized in St. Louis (eight carries for just 23 yards) and despite having just three games with 100 or more rushing yards, Lynch is the NFL's second-ranked running back with 869 yards so far this season. He is also ranked second with 518 yards after contact, and is tied for third in rushing touchdowns with seven. Lynch's 270 rushing yards over the past two weeks was his career high for two games, and on Sunday in Atlanta he looked every bit like the "beast" Seahawks fans have come to love. The heart of Seattle's offense, Lynch might deserve to be in the conversation for NFL MVP. less Marshawn Lynch — running back Despite being underutilized in St. Louis (eight carries for just 23 yards) and despite having just three games with 100 or more rushing yards, Lynch is the NFL's — running back Despite being underutilized in St. Louis (eight carries for just 23 yards) and despite having just three games with 100 or more rushing yards, Lynch is the NFL's... more Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images Image 3 of 20 Russell Wilson — quarterback Wilson has the NFL's fifth-highest passer rating (101.8) among qualifiers, trailing only the likes of Peyton Manning (121.0), Drew Brees (108.9), Aaron Rodgers (108.0) and Philip Rivers (105.9) through Week 10. Wilson also has run the ball more than any other quarterback, rushing 70 times (35 of them after dropping back to pass) for a total of 395 yards. That rushing yardage ranks him 28th in the NFL, and he also is second in the league with 5.6 yards per rushing attempt -- not just among quarterbacks, but everyone. Wilson is far and away the best performer this season among the "big four" youngsters (Wilson, Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III and Colin Kaepernick), and is tied for the league lead with four game-winning drives. Seattle would not be 9-1 without Wilson. — quarterback Wilson has the NFL's fifth-highest passer rating (101.8) among qualifiers, trailing only the likes of Peyton Manning (121.0), Drew Brees (108.9), Aaron Rodgers (108.0) and Philip Rivers (105.9) through Week 10. Wilson also has run the ball more than any other quarterback, rushing 70 times (35 of them after dropping back to pass) for a total of 395 yards. That rushing yardage ranks him 28th in the NFL, and he also is second in the league with 5.6 yards per rushing attempt -- not just among quarterbacks, but everyone. Wilson is far and away the best performer this season among the "big four" youngsters (Wilson, Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III and Colin Kaepernick), and is tied for the league lead with four game-winning drives. Seattle would not be 9-1 without Wilson. less Russell Wilson — quarterback Wilson has the NFL's fifth-highest passer rating (101.8) among qualifiers, trailing only the likes of Peyton Manning (121.0), Drew Brees (108.9), Aaron Rodgers (108.0) — quarterback Wilson has the NFL's fifth-highest passer rating (101.8) among qualifiers, trailing only the likes of Peyton Manning (121.0), Drew Brees (108.9), Aaron Rodgers (108.0)... more Photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images Image 4 of 20 Earl Thomas — free safety With 70 total tackles, Thomas is one of only two safties among the league's top tacklers -- and therefore also leads the Seahawks in tackles by a wide margin. He is also tied for the second-most interceptions in the NFL with four, and is third on the Seahawks with seven passes defended. On a team full of defensive stars, Thomas stands out. He seems poised for another trip to the Pro Bowl and has remained one of football's best defensive backs after being named to the All-Pro first team in 2012. — free safety With 70 total tackles, Thomas is one of only two safties among the league's top tacklers -- and therefore also leads the Seahawks in tackles by a wide margin. He is also tied for the second-most interceptions in the NFL with four, and is third on the Seahawks with seven passes defended. On a team full of defensive stars, Thomas stands out. He seems poised for another trip to the Pro Bowl and has remained one of football's best defensive backs after being named to the All-Pro first team in 2012. less Earl Thomas — free safety With 70 total tackles, Thomas is one of only two safties among the league's top tacklers -- and therefore also leads the Seahawks in tackles by a wide margin. He is also — free safety With 70 total tackles, Thomas is one of only two safties among the league's top tacklers -- and therefore also leads the Seahawks in tackles by a wide margin. He is also... more Photo: Elaine Thompson / Associated Press Image 5 of 20 Image 6 of 20 Richard Sherman — cornerback With whom is Thomas tied for the second-most interceptions in the NFL? One of them is Sherman, who has four INTs this season including his game-changing pick-six in Houston last month. In his third year in the pros, Sherman has developed into one of the league's best corners -- — cornerback With whom is Thomas tied for the second-most interceptions in the NFL? One of them is Sherman, who has four INTs this season including his game-changing pick-six in Houston last month. In his third year in the pros, Sherman has developed into one of the league's best corners -- the best if you ask ESPN analyst Herm Edwards, a former NFL cornerback himself. By statistics only, Pro Football Focus rates Sherman the third-best corner in the league, yet the intangibles he brings to Seattle's locker room only add to his importance to the Seahawks. Sherman likes to talk, and talks a lot, but consistently backs it up with his suffocating defense on the field. less Richard Sherman — cornerback With whom is Thomas tied for the second-most interceptions in the NFL? One of them is Sherman, who has four INTs this season including his game-changing pick-six in — cornerback With whom is Thomas tied for the second-most interceptions in the NFL? One of them is Sherman, who has four INTs this season including his game-changing pick-six in... more Photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images Image 7 of 20 Golden Tate — wide receiver Tate has had a breakout year for the Seahawks, becoming a dynamic playmaker both on offense and on special teams as a kick-returner, and stepping up into the No. 1 wideout role now that Sidney Rice is out for the season with an ACL tear. Tate leads the team in both catches (41) and receiving yards (574), and is tied with Jermaine Kearse for the most touchdown receptions (4). An expert at extending plays after he catches the ball, Tate is third in the league with 365 yards after catch (YAC), and leads the NFL outright with 8.9 YAC per reception. With his "Fail Mary" catch last season and his taunting penalty this year in St. Louis, Tate may not be well-liked around the rest of the country, but he sure has become an integral player in Seattle. — wide receiver Tate has had a breakout year for the Seahawks, becoming a dynamic playmaker both on offense and on special teams as a kick-returner, and stepping up into the No. 1 wideout role now that Sidney Rice is out for the season with an ACL tear. Tate leads the team in both catches (41) and receiving yards (574), and is tied with Jermaine Kearse for the most touchdown receptions (4). An expert at extending plays after he catches the ball, Tate is third in the league with 365 yards after catch (YAC), and leads the NFL outright with 8.9 YAC per reception. With his "Fail Mary" catch last season and his taunting penalty this year in St. Louis, Tate may not be well-liked around the rest of the country, but he sure has become an integral player in Seattle. less Golden Tate — wide receiver Tate has had a breakout year for the Seahawks, becoming a dynamic playmaker both on offense and on special teams as a kick-returner, and stepping up into the No. 1 — wide receiver Tate has had a breakout year for the Seahawks, becoming a dynamic playmaker both on offense and on special teams as a kick-returner, and stepping up into the No. 1... more Photo: Steve Dykes / Getty Images Image 8 of 20 Michael Bennett — defensive end Signed away from Tampa Bay as a free agent in the offseason, Bennett immediately made his mark with the Seahawks as one of the league's best pass-rushers. He leads the team with seven sacks, good enough to be tied for sixth-best in the NFL among defensive ends. While he is one of the most penalized ends in the game, Bennett has made up for it by ranking sixth among NFL DEs with 27 quarterback hurries. What's most impressive is that Bennett has performed so well despite playing far fewer snaps than most of the league's other leaders, and has done it while surrounded in Seattle by standout pass-rushers such as Cliff Avril (6 sacks), Chris Clemons (4 sacks) and Clinton McDonald (4 sacks). — defensive end Signed away from Tampa Bay as a free agent in the offseason, Bennett immediately made his mark with the Seahawks as one of the league's best pass-rushers. He leads the team with seven sacks, good enough to be tied for sixth-best in the NFL among defensive ends. While he is one of the most penalized ends in the game, Bennett has made up for it by ranking sixth among NFL DEs with 27 quarterback hurries. What's most impressive is that Bennett has performed so well despite playing far fewer snaps than most of the league's other leaders, and has done it while surrounded in Seattle by standout pass-rushers such as Cliff Avril (6 sacks), Chris Clemons (4 sacks) and Clinton McDonald (4 sacks). less Michael Bennett — defensive end Signed away from Tampa Bay as a free agent in the offseason, Bennett immediately made his mark with the Seahawks as one of the league's best pass-rushers. He leads — defensive end Signed away from Tampa Bay as a free agent in the offseason, Bennett immediately made his mark with the Seahawks as one of the league's best pass-rushers. He leads... more Photo: Scott Halleran / Getty Images Image 9 of 20 Jeremy Lane — special teams Lane is a backup cornerback, but he has made his mark on the Seahawks as a member of special teams. It's rare to see a kickoff or punting play in which Lane is not the first guy to get to the opposing receiver, and has had a big hand in Seattle's opponents only returning 11 punts for a total of 15 yards this season. His dominant coverage earned him — special teams Lane is a backup cornerback, but he has made his mark on the Seahawks as a member of special teams. It's rare to see a kickoff or punting play in which Lane is not the first guy to get to the opposing receiver, and has had a big hand in Seattle's opponents only returning 11 punts for a total of 15 yards this season. His dominant coverage earned him recognition from Sports Illustrated as a potential All-Pro first-teamer on special teams. Pro Football Focus ranks Lane as the second-best overall special-teams player this season, trailing only Arizona's Justin Bethel. less Jeremy Lane — special teams Lane is a backup cornerback, but he has made his mark on the Seahawks as a member of special teams. It's rare to see a kickoff or punting play in which Lane is not the — special teams Lane is a backup cornerback, but he has made his mark on the Seahawks as a member of special teams. It's rare to see a kickoff or punting play in which Lane is not the... more Photo: Steve Dykes / Getty Images Image 10 of 20 Image 11 of 20 Steven Hauschka — kicker Already this season, Hauschka has kicked two game-winning field goals. The first was in Houston, when he sealed the Seahawks' wild comeback with a 45-yard field goal in overtime Sept. 29. Then on Nov. 3 against the Buccaneers, he split the uprights from 27 yards out in overtime after the Hawks surged from 21 points back at CenturyLink Field. Hauschka has missed just one of his 23 field-goal attempts this season, when Indianapolis' Lawrence Guy (now with San Diego) blocked a 48-yarder and Delano Howell returned it 61 yards for a touchdown. Combining kickoff and field-goal stats, Pro Football Focus rates Hauschka the fourth-best kicker in the NFL. — kicker Already this season, Hauschka has kicked two game-winning field goals. The first was in Houston, when he sealed the Seahawks' wild comeback with a 45-yard field goal in overtime Sept. 29. Then on Nov. 3 against the Buccaneers, he split the uprights from 27 yards out in overtime after the Hawks surged from 21 points back at CenturyLink Field. Hauschka has missed just one of his 23 field-goal attempts this season, when Indianapolis' Lawrence Guy (now with San Diego) blocked a 48-yarder and Delano Howell returned it 61 yards for a touchdown. Combining kickoff and field-goal stats, Pro Football Focus rates Hauschka the fourth-best kicker in the NFL. less Steven Hauschka — kicker Already this season, Hauschka has kicked two game-winning field goals. The first was in Houston, when he sealed the Seahawks' wild comeback with a 45-yard field goal in — kicker Already this season, Hauschka has kicked two game-winning field goals. The first was in Houston, when he sealed the Seahawks' wild comeback with a 45-yard field goal in... more Photo: Steve Dykes / Getty Images Image 12 of 20 Doug Baldwin — wide receiver Baldwin has made not one but two spectacular, clutch catches along the sideline this year, turning heads across the league and sparking rumors that he will be in high demand once his rookie contract expires after this season. Undrafted out of Stanford in 2011 (when he led the Seahawks in receiving as a rookie), Baldwin now is second on the team with 532 receiving yards on 34 catches. When playing out of the slot, he is averaging more yards per catch (2.34) than any other NFL wideout. With a top-15 reception percentage of 70.8, and high scores as a blocker, Baldwin is rated ninth in the league among all receivers, according to Pro Football Focus. — wide receiver Baldwin has made not one but two spectacular, clutch catches along the sideline this year, turning heads across the league and sparking rumors that he will be in high demand once his rookie contract expires after this season. Undrafted out of Stanford in 2011 (when he led the Seahawks in receiving as a rookie), Baldwin now is second on the team with 532 receiving yards on 34 catches. When playing out of the slot, he is averaging more yards per catch (2.34) than any other NFL wideout. With a top-15 reception percentage of 70.8, and high scores as a blocker, Baldwin is rated ninth in the league among all receivers, according to Pro Football Focus. less Doug Baldwin — wide receiver Baldwin has made not one but two spectacular, clutch catches along the sideline this year, turning heads across the league and sparking rumors that he will be in high — wide receiver Baldwin has made not one but two spectacular, clutch catches along the sideline this year, turning heads across the league and sparking rumors that he will be in high... more Photo: Otto Greule Jr / Getty Images Image 13 of 20 Brandon Mebane — defensive tackle Because he's not a pass-rusher, Mebane doesn't get a ton of attention, but he has been Seattle's deadliest force on the defensive line this season. His play against the run is second-best in the league, according to Pro Football Focus' metrics, and while his defense against the pass is not quite so dominant, he has performed well enough to earn PFF's No. 8 overall rating among the NFL's defensive tackles. Mebane has quietly equaled Seattle defensive end Red Bryant in defense against the run and could finally be on his way to the Pro Bowl in what is now his seventh season in the league. — defensive tackle Because he's not a pass-rusher, Mebane doesn't get a ton of attention, but he has been Seattle's deadliest force on the defensive line this season. His play against the run is second-best in the league, according to Pro Football Focus' metrics, and while his defense against the pass is not quite so dominant, he has performed well enough to earn PFF's No. 8 overall rating among the NFL's defensive tackles. Mebane has quietly equaled Seattle defensive end Red Bryant in defense against the run and could finally be on his way to the Pro Bowl in what is now his seventh season in the league. less Brandon Mebane — defensive tackle Because he's not a pass-rusher, Mebane doesn't get a ton of attention, but he has been Seattle's deadliest force on the defensive line this season. His play — defensive tackle Because he's not a pass-rusher, Mebane doesn't get a ton of attention, but he has been Seattle's deadliest force on the defensive line this season. His play... more Photo: Otto Greule Jr / Getty Images Image 14 of 20 Cliff Avril — defensive end Avril was one of Seattle's two blockbuster offseason acquisitions (the other being wideout Percy Harvin) and, despite his preseason hamstring injury, is back on the NFL leaderboard as one of the best pass-rushers in football. He is tied for 10th among the league's defensive ends with six sacks, and can claim 19 quarterback hurries to his name through Week 10. According to Pro Football Focus, he is the fourth-best pass-rusher in the league and is the only blitzing specialist in the top 10 with a positive rating in pass coverage. And Avril has done it all playing just 55 percent of Seattle's defensive snaps this season. — defensive end Avril was one of Seattle's two blockbuster offseason acquisitions (the other being wideout Percy Harvin) and, despite his preseason hamstring injury, is back on the NFL leaderboard as one of the best pass-rushers in football. He is tied for 10th among the league's defensive ends with six sacks, and can claim 19 quarterback hurries to his name through Week 10. According to Pro Football Focus, he is the fourth-best pass-rusher in the league and is the only blitzing specialist in the top 10 with a positive rating in pass coverage. And Avril has done it all playing just 55 percent of Seattle's defensive snaps this season. less Cliff Avril — defensive end Avril was one of Seattle's two blockbuster offseason acquisitions (the other being wideout Percy Harvin) and, despite his preseason hamstring injury, is back on the NFL — defensive end Avril was one of Seattle's two blockbuster offseason acquisitions (the other being wideout Percy Harvin) and, despite his preseason hamstring injury, is back on the NFL... more Photo: Thomas B. Shea / Getty Images Image 15 of 20 Image 16 of 20 Jon Ryan — punter We mentioned it before: The Seahawks have allowed opponents to return just 11 punts for an astounding total of just 15 yards. Seriously. And while a lot of the credit goes to Seattle's coverage on special teams, particularly the play of Jeremy Lane, the guy punting the ball is Ryan. He has placed the ball so well this season that opponents have attempted returning just 28.2 percent of his punts, and he is tied for fourth in the league with 20 punts downed inside the opponent's 20-yard line. Ryan may not have the best distance in the NFL, averaging 43.7 yards per punt (the league average is 45.5), but his punts have the sixth-best hang time (5.4 seconds) in the league and he has only given four touchbacks. Seattle's defense owes a lot to Ryan and the special-teams players who surround him. — punter We mentioned it before: The Seahawks have allowed opponents to return just 11 punts for an astounding total of just 15 yards. Seriously. And while a lot of the credit goes to Seattle's coverage on special teams, particularly the play of Jeremy Lane, the guy punting the ball is Ryan. He has placed the ball so well this season that opponents have attempted returning just 28.2 percent of his punts, and he is tied for fourth in the league with 20 punts downed inside the opponent's 20-yard line. Ryan may not have the best distance in the NFL, averaging 43.7 yards per punt ( |
you know, for an outright apology. You know, we sent him the statement to clarify what was actually said. And, you know, I followed up saying, Hey, why don't we sit down tomorrow and see what we can talk about. And that's when I read about it in the New York Times.”
Asked whether he viewed the statement as an apology, Trump Jr. said, “I don't know that I — it's — I don't know that it's mine to say. But I don't know that there's anything to apologize for. It's a political opinion. It had nothing to do with the lease.”
Whether Zakarian was justified in pulling out of the project because of the comments is at the center of the legal proceedings. In her deposition, Ivanka Trump is clear about whether she was worried the comments could negatively affect the company.
“No,” she responded. “I view politics and business as separate and distinct.”For years now the importance of smartphone software has taken a back seat in the arms race known as the specs war. How often have we lamented a beautiful piece of hardware – take most Huawei phones prior to the EMUI 5 update or Xiaomi phones to this date – ‘ruined’ by a bad software experience? But with the first Google Pixel, those poles were reversed, and largely horrible hardware was miraculously saved by superior software.
I know there are plenty of fans of the Pixel hardware out there – our own Joe Hindy is one of them, and we’ve debated the merits of the Pixel’s nuts and bolts at length. And while I’m not straight-up calling the Pixel’s hardware a dumpster fire, I would definitely call it dumpster fire adjacent. Defend the Pixe’s build quality if you will, but you can’t tell me it’s on the same level as the Galaxy S8, LG G6 or even the OnePlus 5. But there’s a good reason for why this is so…
Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica did a superb piece of sleuthing when the Pixel was launched to back up his convincing claim that the Google Pixel was simply a gutted HTC mid-ranger. Google’s original hardware partner, Huawei, reportedly backed out at the last minute over a branding dispute, resulting in HTC offering up a sacrifice of one of its children to the Google gods.
I’ve acknowledged elsewhere that what Google achieved in such an incredibly short timeframe was nothing short of a miracle and it should be applauded for the result. But again, that sentiment relates primarily to the software and camera, not the hardware generally (even if the chipset, RAM and so on naturally contribute to the software experience). Then, as now, I find the Pixel – as an object – to be uninspiring and infinitely forgettable.
Then, as now, I find the Pixel – as an object – to be uninspiring and infinitely forgettable.
The Pixel feels cheap, the glass on the front and back scratches incredibly easily, the ‘paint’ rubs off on the edges where it gets the most action and if you ever drop the thing, it fails to even vaguely hide dents and scrapes. If this phone had appeared under HTC’s banner it would’ve been mocked for what it is: a nondescript mid-range chassis that looks and feels like one. But add that Google logo – and again, that software and image processing – and suddenly perspectives change.
The reason I’m bashing the Pixel’s lackluster hardware and undoubtedly inciting rage in Pixel fans, is to point out the redemptive power of software. We rarely see a phone’s hardware dominated by its software these days and when we do, it’s usually in the reverse direction mentioned above.
The Pixel software is so good that it makes me forget there's a cheap HTC shell around it.
But the Pixel software is so fluid, so enjoyable, so clean, that it makes me forget there’s a cheap HTC shell around it. I don’t even care what chipset is in the thing or how much RAM it has, that’s how good Android is on it. With software that good Google had no need to get into a specs pissing contest with the likes of Samsung, LG and others, and the Pixel experience is in no way diminished by the lack of it.
While I know several folks have had issues with the Android O developer previews, my Pixel has been remarkably stable with no noticeable battery drain. I’ve bounced around this year between the cream of the flagship crop, and yet I keep coming back to the worst piece of hardware in my drawer. Because of the software.
I keep coming back to the worst piece of hardware in my drawer this year. Because of the software.
This is exciting for several reasons:
It proves that the specs sheet, as enticing as it can be, is not the be all and end all of a device. That a company can put out uninspiring hardware and still end up with a phone I’d easily rank among the year’s best; As Adam Sinicki duly noted in his recent Android Instant Apps explainer, we’re steadily entering a post-specs era where expensive hardware will be increasingly less important because most processing will be done off-device; And Android (at least on the Pixel) has almost fully entered the mature phase we saw the first hints of in Marshmallow, where the OS has become so good that it is now the main event rather than the shiny glass and metal that surrounds it. As much as it pains me to say it, that’s something iOS users have enjoyed for a while, but now Android has caught up.
With every Android phone I’ve had over the years, I’ve suffered slow down, lag, stutters, crashes and worse. But on the Pixel, even running developer previews, I’ve enjoyed a more stable and polished software experience than I have on many previous stable builds. I can’t wait to put Android 8.0 on my phone on Monday. Even if that phone is still the Pixel.
When the Pixel 2 drops later this year, I’ll be among the first to pick one up. I can’t wait to see the improvements Google will have made to the already outstanding Pixel camera processing. I’ll be psyched to see what new Pixel-only exclusives might make it to the handset, where barely a year ago I, like most Nexus fans, wasn’t too happy about missing out on new features. That it’ll be running stable Android 8.0 out of the box only makes it more enticing.
That is the redemptive power of software at work. I haven’t been this excited for a new device, primarily because of its software, in a long time. If ever. Perhaps because I dislike the current Pixels’ hardware so much I’m basically guaranteed a better hardware experience in its successor. But if my distaste for the original Pixel has taught me anything, it’s that hardware, at least to me, doesn’t matter as much as software anymore.Choosing a web host is never easy. There are just so many unknowns when it comes to finding a host. It's hardly ever possible to walk into a web host's office, look around, meet the owners, and get a feel for whether or not you'd like to do business with these people.
It's important, though, that you bend over backwards to establish whether your prospective web host is a credible provider – or a fly by night artist.
The webmaster industry is awash with horror stories about signing up with a web hosting company, onlty to find out later that this ‘business' is run by a 14 year old who lives at home.
you can make your decision using whatever information you find online about the web host.
Start out with the website of the web host you are considering.
Is it professionally designed and written? Typo's and spelling errors may signal that this is a company ran by kids or amateurs.
Is the website easy to use? Is it designed with a view towards helping people? Are help materials available online? This should give you a flavor for whether the company is client oriented.
Where is the company located? Is there an address? Can you email them?
Look at the Terms of Service. Does your prospective web host clearly spell out what may be expected of them and what is expected of you? Every deal is different, but both parties should clearly know what the deal is.
Next, do a search for the company on Google. Are you finding any negative statements? Try different searching techniques, like typing the company name followed by the word “scam”, or by the words “poor support”.
Now, try emailing their customer support department. Do you get a fast reply? What about their sales department? Do they answer inquiries quickly? Let's face it…if they won't pay any attention to you when they're trying to get your business, how much more will you be neglected after you sign up?
If you follow these simple suggestions, your chances of signing up with an excellent web host increase substantially
Visit one of the many forums about web hosting, ask the members for advice or search threads from those that have asked before you. Once you’ve located a few hosts to research, the ten questions below will take you a long way towards making an informed decision. You may be able to find many of the answers to these questions on the hosts’ web sites, but always feel free to call the host and quiz them about their operations. The quality of the answers and degree of professionalism you get from a potential host often transfers to the type of support you’ll receive once you become a customer. Without further ado, the ten question to ask your web host: 1. How long has the web host been in business? 2. Does the web host own its data center? 3. How many upstream Internet providers does the web host have? 4. Does the web host monitor its customers’ sites twenty-four hours per day? How? 5. Does the web host provide 24/7/365 phone and email support? 6. What levels of redundancy does the web host’s architecture provide? 7. Does the web host automatically backup customer web sites in case of data loss? How often? 8. What is the web host’s billing policy? 9. Does the web host provide the features that you need for your web site? 10. Does the web host have the products and services to handle your growth?Reworked to How Valuable is Pristine Mars for Humanity - Opinion Piece?
Few appreciate the extraordinary value and uniqueness of a pristine Mars. The popular idea we are all used to, from science fiction films and stories, is of astronauts in spacesuits bravely setting forth to colonize the planet. Yet some scientists are passionate about the need to keep the surface pristine for now. Let’s find out why.
Related blog posts:
Space habs could house trillions
Terraforming Mars needs great care
Surface mission to Mars, terrible idea, easily made wonderful
To understand the value of Mars and its uniqueness to science we need some background geological history. It is a fascinating story.
Near twin in its early years
It seems likely that Mars had extensive oceans during its earliest Noachian period, which lasted for a few hundred million years. Its oceans almost certainly contained many organics from comets just as for Earth. All this suggests that for several hundred million years, Mars was a near twin of Earth. With the possible exception of Venus (far less well understood than Mars), it is the only planet in our solar system that was like Earth in this respect in its early years.
Life started on Earth within 700 million years of its formation, not long after the end of the late heavy bombardment period. So the earliest years on Earth are of intense interest to scientists interested in the origin of life and the life sciences. It started so quickly on Earth that it seems almost certain it must have started on Mars too while it was still hospitable to life.
If that didn’t happen; if life never started on Mars; then it is even more interesting to find out how far it got and why it didn’t evolve life, and what happened instead to all those organics. If they didn’t form life on Mars did they form some type of proto life? Were alternative pathways explored, unsuccessfully? Might this tell us something about what happens on other planets in our Galaxy, or about the process of evolution of life itself?
Later stages on Mars
After the initial stages Mars followed a different path from Earth. It lost nearly all its atmosphere leaving an atmosphere so thin it would count as a laboratory vacuum. It cooled down so much that the average temperature at the equator is the same as Antarctica and the temperature swings are far greater than in Antarctica. Water on the surface now boils at just a few degrees centigrade even in the deepest places where the air is at its densest and no standing water can survive there for long. The water froze to ice or escaped into space leaving a dry surface though still with some possibilities for salty brine. It got so dry the surface turned to dust and regularly dust storms cover the entire surface for weeks on end
This makes it inhospitable to most modern Earth life. Yet some extremophiles could survive on Mars as it is today. There are still locations where water or salty brine could provide the conditions needed for life, sub surface, or in melted pockets of water around grains of dust embedded in snow, or in the case of some lichens, on the surface rocks using just the brief morning and evening dews.
There is no obvious evidence of Mars life on the surface so, most likely evolution on Mars didn’t get as far as those lichens. Early life on Mars (if it existed) either became extinct, or else survives but only in special niches on Mars, quite possibly deep under the polar ice or sub surface.
No Continental Drift
One major difference between Mars and Earth is that there is no continental drift. The entire surface of Mars is pretty much as it was when it first lost its atmosphere. Any early oceans just dried up in situ. Oceans that were separated from others, never joined up or were disturbed in any way.
That’s why Olympus Mons got so large. Without continental drift the hot spot that formed the volcano simply stayed in one place for billions of years and created a volcano far larger than any on Earth.
After the Noachian period, there was a period of great floods and massive rivers called the Hesperian period which created huge deposits such as Mount Sharp. The entire 5.5 km high Mount Sharp at the Curiosity landing site is believed to be a massive pile of debris left from the early floods on Mars.
And then all the action stopped, the oceans dried up, the rivers dried up and apart from the occasional impact that created craters and local flooding doubtless, Mars became what it is today and stayed the same.
Mars is a giant deep freeze preserving the first few hundred million years of a near twin to Earth
All the deposits from the early oceans, rivers and floods on Mars are still just there as they were left, waiting to be studied. The temperatures stay well below zero a short way below the surface. There are few volcanoes, none currently active. There is no continental drift to subduct the materials below the surface and metamorphize them. Only cosmic rays can disturb it, and if you dig down ten meters or so you get well beyond the reach of them. The air pressure is so low that ice sublimes easily, but apart from that, conditions are perfect to preserve organic material from those early days.
Scientists are particularly interested in clays on Mars such as nontronite, and also sulfate materials which are known to be capable of encapsulating organic materials and preserving it for extremely long periods of time. The Curiosity landing site was chosen partly because of the presence of these materials there. See for instance this transcript of an interview with Jennifer Eigenbrode about Biogeochemistry with Curiosity.
Compare Earth, with almost nothing left of the early record. Geologists investigating the earliest times on Earth have to study tiny fragments, pebbles embedded in later rocks,
We haven’t begun to study this material on Mars. No mission to Mars to date has been able to dig significantly below the surface. No instrument has been sent to Mars as powerful as a laboratory optical microscope. Curiosity was heralded as a major advance over earlier missions because it has the equivalent of a geologist’s hand lens. But this lens is not powerful enough to see micro-organisms, living or fossil.
There are expeditions on the drawing board that will take more powerful instruments to Mars, such as miniature scanning electron microscopes, and miniature DNA sequencers. Also there are planned missions to dig many meters below the surface. But it will be for some years yet before they launch.
The tremendous value of a pristine Mars for science
In this respect Mars is like Antarctica. Antarctica would be easier to colonize than Mars, or the Moon, is a safer place to live than either, and has potential mineral wealth that could be exploited to finance a group of keen colonists. You could have greenhouses there too, with artificial light in winter, and grow your own food just as on Mars.
Yet, everyone agrees that Antarctica is so valuable to science that it would be a tragedy to colonise it and make it into just one more human living area on Earth. Tourists to Antarctica are carefully supervised to make sure they take no new species to the continent, for instance by accident on their boots. The current Antarctica treaty doesn’t need to be enforced particularly strongly - you don’t get UN gun boats defending the shores of Antarctica :).
Mars is of far far more interest for science than Antarctica. Those ocean and flood deposits could have evidence of early attempts at life that followed different paths from life on Earth. Different deposits on Mars may have evidence of different pathways if isolated from each other since the planet formed.
Instead of tiny fragments in later rocks as we have on Earth, we have multiple kilometer thick deposits to examine on Mars.
There may also be evidence of the stages before life. The earliest life on Earth is already so complex that it is extremely hard to understand how it arose.
There are many competing theories of Abiogenesis (formation of life) and the precursors for life itself, such as RNA world, Zinc world, Coenzyme world, the list goes on and on. But there is no consensus, as there is no way really to distinguish between them using the geological record on Earth. See the Wikipedia article on Abiogeneisis for an idea of the vastness of this subject.
Study of life, proto life, or whatever there is on Mars in those deposits will shed light on that whole area of scientific knowledge and understanding, in ways we simply can’t begin to do on Earth.
The oceans of early Mars may have kept separate from each other because of the lack of continental drift. If so we can also explore to see if these followed different paths of evolution, or all followed exactly the same path.
Some of the things we can expect to see on Mars if life never evolved, include nanobes (just 20 nanometers in diameter) or other protobionts. At least some form of complex structures like protobionts are sure to be there since on Earth they form in simple laboratory experiments simulating conditions on early Earth.
Then it seems at least possible that on Mars there is nothing to consume the early remains or transform them. If we dig deep enough on Mars we may well find pristine preserved organic remains from those early years.
Mars is of great value for study of the origins of life even if life never evolved there.
What if Mars is already contaminated?
It is certainly possible that life from Earth has already started to thrive on Mars brought there by our spaceships, due to many mission mishaps in the past. It’s also possible that life was brought there from Earth via meteorites.
The exchange by meteorites is only possible during the larger meteorites of 10 km or larger, like the one that contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the material probably took millions of years to reach Mars, but could have happened.
Either way, it is likely that only a small number of species have reached Mars. Adding more species greatly complicates the search for the origins of life. If biologically similar it makes it hard to disentangle the history and figure out which organisms came from Mars originally, especially since introduced life is likely to evolve and radiate adaptively on Mars.
It can also out compete native Mars life. Life that evolved on Mars may not be as well adapted for Mars as Earth extremophiles, despite their billions of years of evolution. It could be a similar situation at the microorganism level to the marsupials in Australia. For some reason evolution never hit on placental animals in Australia, and well adapted animals there were out competed by placental animals from Europe.
Also, any native Mars life, or life that has made the difficult journey to Mars from Earth may only be able to survive in special niche locations on the surface. This could leave other areas unchanged since the Hesperian or Noachian periods.
Nearest planet like Mars is likely to be many light years away
Yes there are other locations in our solar system where liquid water exists to this day. These may possibly have life in some form or other to this day, for instance in the under surface oceans of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons; or Encladus, one of Saturn’s moons. But none of them remotely resembled Earth in its early years. Mars is the only near twin to Earth.
Venus is another candidate for an “Early Earth twin”, as it may have had oceans in the past. There is a remote chance it has life to this day, for instance in the high cloud levels. However, due to its runaway greenhouse effect the surface is extremely corrosive and harsh, raining sulfuric acid. There seems next to no hope of finding out much about early life on Venus or abiogenesis on its surface; at least, nothing like the potential of Mars.
On our knowledge so far it seems likely that there might be other solar systems with Mars like planets. But they are light years away. The prospect of a robotic explorer to these planets, if they exist, is remote, extremely expensive and would take centuries most likely.
Value of a pristine Mars for other fields
Mars could be of immense importance not just to science but also medicine, nano technology, materials science. You simply don’t know what the range of applications could be. So much of our technology began as living products or uses living products in one form or another.
Medicine directly uses many forms of life. Many materials we use in our daily life, including things we think of as non living such as plastics are actually made from products such has oil and coal that were once living organisms. Take away the products of life and there would be little left of all our vast technology.
Life processes are also used in manufacturing, in many ways, and for food. Also, life’s solutions to problems through evolution have inspired many engineering innovations.
So it is highly likely that the knowledge we will gain through studying a pristine Mars, through a massive development of knowledge of Abiogenesis will lead to breakthroughs in technology, medicine, nanotechnology, and many other areas of science.
This is not something that will happen overnight. You need to be patient with scientists. Great scientific discoveries generally take decades, and often generations, to come to fruition.
We might never find out what we lost
By contaminating a currently pristine or almost pristine Mars you throw away all that knowledge, possibly without knowing what you have lost.
That is why at our current so limited stage of knowledge of Mars it is so extremely important to keep it pristine. Later once we have an extensive understanding of the planet we can decide whether it is important to keep it pristine or if it is okay to terraform it or colonise it.
If we don’t go now, will we ever do it?
Enthusiasts for Mars surface colonization often say this. They often treat it as if colonizing Mars is an absolute good, that we have to do it. But as I said in my last blog post, actually in terms of space colonization there is far more room to expand in free flying space habs or orbital colonies than on the surface of Mars.
On the surface, you might have billions of colonists eventually. In space and in orbit you can have trillions of colonists, and likely for much lower cost too due to the high costs and technical challenges involved for the Mars surface. See Space habs could house trillions of people. In the future when space colonization is commonplace, it will probably seem bizarre that the surfaces of planets were considered so important for colonization in the early 21st century.
Moon or orbital colonies close to Earth are more hospitable
The Moon is more accessible and also more hospitable and safer than Mars, especially after the probable discovery of water ice at the poles of the Moon. The same applies for orbital colonies around the Moon or Earth with centrifugal living quarters for artificial gravity (such as the Nautilus X design).
Mars is a natural target for adventurous astronauts who may set up a small colony in orbit around Mars. Humans have a great advantage on Mars, that they can operate the machines on the surface in near to real time. But with the use of telerobotics, it hardly makes any difference if you do that from the surface or from orbit, and the orbital location costs less to get to, and gives easy direct access to the whole planet on every orbit.
For more about all this see my blog post Surface mission to Mars, terrible idea, easily made wonderful
How long will it take before we can know for sure if it is safe to colonize Mars?
So anyway to return to the question, and try to set out a time scale, then at a minimum you need to send instruments to Mars capable of examining deposits. These include laboratory power optical microscopes, miniaturized electron microscopes (which already exist) miniature DNA sequencers, etc.
You need to explore at least some examples of all the significant possible habitats for present day life on Mars.
You need to dig deep into the deposits and the ice caps, not just meters but hundreds of meters. This is possible, there have been studies of ways of doing this robotically and especially with pioneers operating the machinery via telepresence in orbit about Mars, it can certainly be done.
At this stage you may have a pretty good idea of whether life ever evolved on Mars, and whether it still surives. You can’t be totally certain because there could be isolated relic populations or interesting evidence at just one location on Mars (like e.g. the Dawn Redwood on Earth). But you could hope to know enough to have an informed debate about what to do next.
As for the timescale for all this, I would guess perhaps 50 years before we can have this great debate about Mars on the basis of understanding and accurate information. But could be later, could be much sooner. The pace of scientific study and progress is hard to predict.
The great debate about whether to colonize Mars
When all that is done then we will be in a position to have an informed debate about how to deal with Mars - whether it is best kept pristine like Antarctica, or terraformed first remotely seeded with oxygen producing organisms keeping aerobes well away from the planet, or simply colonized as is.
I will probably be on the side arguing to keep it pristine for longer (if I am still alive that is). Others may argue on the other side.
But the main thing is that it needs to be a debate involving all humanity as far as possible. It also needs to be left until enough information is needed to make a decision.
Meanwhile we will find out if indeed we do have the beginnings of this stream of scientific knowledge from Mars and should begin to feel its benefits. Also the first space colonies will already exist and their potential better understood by humans generally. At that stage we will be able to make a better informed decision and will be able to truly understand, at least a bit better, the current and potential future value of Mars.
This debate is something that shouldn’t be decided by scientist, no matter how well informed. It shouldn’t be decided by colonization enthusiasts either, and no-one should pre-empt it by simply mounting an unauthorized mission to the surface of Mars. It is something that needs to be thought out and worked out publicly, because the outcome is irreversible, and affects the whole of humanity.
Projects like Mars One, with just a small change, emphasis on orbital missions to Mars first, could be part of the process of scientific discovery and progress leading to this decision and make it possible to decide sooner in an informed way. These projects could also be part of the great exploration of Mars via telepresence - driving vehicles, digging into the deposits, exploring all the niches and different regions on Mars. Also building the space habitats in orbit around Mars.
Partly pristine Mars
The great debate could also lead to intermediate solutions. First of all you could have factories on the Mars surface. These could supply fuel and other materials to orbital colonies around Mars or indeed to Earth orbit, as well as supplying fuel and materials for repairing and even constructing rovers and robots on the surface. Many factories on Earth are operated mainly remotely with hardly anyone or no-one on the factory floor. These could be operated on Mars just as easily from orbit. This leaves Mars biologically pristine, so retains its value for the study of life and the origins of life. Such telepresence operated factories could be started under current law, so long as the planet is kept contamination free.
Mars could also be Mars formed, made clement for Mars native organisms, if these exist. Or, if it is biologically pristine, or capable of being sterilized of the effects of our missions so far, it could also be warmed up to continue the process of abiogenesis and see what it is like in action. This could also be used to see what the ancient habitats were like in action if there is life still there, relics of the old days like the dawn redwood on Earth.
It could be partly terraformed, just introduce photosynthesizing organisms but no aerobes for instance. This could supply food, and other materials (e.g. wood, plastics, or oil), for the orbital colonies. Or it could be paraterraformed - covered with many domed greenhouses for growing food.
There are many ways you could develop a biologically pristine Mars, depending on what is found there, and what your priorities are.
What if the decision is to keep Mars biologically pristine for ever?
What if we find independently originated life on Mars, or amazingly interesting evidence of early stages that almost reached life but not quite? Should we leave the planet pristine to avoid contaminating it?
I would say why not? Yes, if that’s how it turns out, absolutely fine and could be inspiring, and a great idea, to go all the way to Mars, and set up colonies in orbit around the planet, but never set foot on it at all, to avoid contaminating it.
It is a bit like mountains that are left unclimbed out of respect for the mountain or local beliefs. Not too many of those but the mountains in Bhutan over 6000m are unclimbed. This is possibly the highest unclimbed mountain in the world Gangkhar Puensum with an elevation of 7,570 m.
This would be a future where you have agile rovers on the surface. and increasingly sophisticated humanoid avatars, teleoperated by colonists in the thriving orbital colonies. It is a future where the Martian past and present turn out to be so amazingly interesting, that humans never land on the surface in person, in their physical bodies, to preserve a biologically pristine Mars. I, for one, would find that an inspiring future to live in.
Related blog posts:
Space habs could house trillions
Terraforming Mars needs great care
Surface mission to Mars, terrible idea, easily made wonderfulBill Blackbeard, without question or quibble, is the only absolutely indispensable figure in the history of comics scholarship for the last quarter century—and will undoubtedly retain the title for well into this century and beyond. On March 10, only a few weeks shy of his 85th birthday, Blackbeard died in California at Country Villa Watsonville East Nursing Home where he had been living for some time. But long before he died, Blackbeard knew he would live on in scores of books that reprint American newspaper comic strips, all compiled from his monumental collection.
As reporter Kevin Parks said several years ago at ThisWeekNEWS.com: “He saved the American comic strip—all of them.”
Most of them, until 1998, were stored at the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art (SFACA), in the garage and basement of a sprawling Spanish style stucco house at 2850 Ulloa Street a few blocks from the ocean in the Sunset District, a quiet residential neighborhood of the city. Stacks of old newspapers, some in Pizza Hut boxes (because the size was convenient), created a grotto of newsprint, threaded with narrow aisles, canyon walls of pulp, dimly lighted (and lighted only when necessary), throughout the otherwise spacious cavern. But the collection filled every room in the rest of the house, too—comic books, graphic novels, magazines, Victorian cartoon-illustrated fiction, British boys’ papers, “penny dreadfuls” and pulps, books, story papers, dime novels, fanzines, underground comix, prints, drawings, bound volumes of newspapers, newspaper tear sheets, and clippings. The books were often in bookcases especially built with the space between shelves precisely the spine height of quarto-sized books, the most widely published size in the twenties and thirties, the years Blackbeard was exploring for his vintage mystery book collection.
Blackbeard and his wife Barbara and a haphazard cadre of comic strip enthusiasts who volunteered at the Academy, spent years meticulously clipping comic strips from the old newspapers, arranging them in chronological runs of each strip title, and storing them in filing cabinets (which were often fruit crates turned sideways to make shelving). By the 1990s, Blackbeard estimated that they had clipped and organized 350,000 Sunday strips and 2.5 million dailies. Long before then, Blackbeard began raiding the trove to produce the content for over 200 books, some of which he wrote or edited, including the Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977), The Comic Strip Century (two slipcased volumes, 1995), Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid (1995) Eclipse’s and Fantagraphics’ Krazy Kat series, and NBM’s 12-volume Terry and the Pirates (1984-87) and its18-volume Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy (1987-92).
Among the first of these milestone tomes was a series of volumes from Hyperion Press—the Hyperion Library of Classic American Comic Strips. All at once, in 1977, the Hyperion canon exploded over the collector landscape like a roman candle, a shower of books, nearly two dozen titles, each one reprinting vintage newspaper strips from their earliest years—Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff before there was a Jeff, Clifford McBride’s Napoleon, Frank Godwin’s Connie, Percy Crosby’s Skippy, George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (Jiggs and Maggie), Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google, and more, each an exemplar of comic strip artistry at its finest or a benchmark in the history of the medium.
This cascade of treasure was the earliest by-product of the Blackbeard obsession, an obsession formed when he was still a child.
William Elsworth Blackbeard was born April 28, 1926, in rural community northwest of Indianapolis, Lawrence, Indiana, where his grandfather operated a service station and his father was an electrician, and his mother kept the books for her husband’s business. The family moved to Newport Beach, California when the boy was eight or nine. A few years later, he made his life-altering discovery.
On a walk through the neighborhood one day, 12-year-old Bill found an open garage door and, prompted by youthful curiosity, he went inside. And there, as reported Parks, he saw stacks of newspapers, floor to ceiling, along all three walls. Attracted at once to the colorful folds of the Sunday comics sections that protruded visually along the wall of otherwise drably gray newspapers, Bill began pulling some of the papers down to get at the Sunday funnies. Some dated from 1923.
“I was absolutely excited at this stuff,” Blackbeard told Parks, who noted that “his voice still brimmed with wonderment.”
When the owner of the garage came home while Bill was still there and indicated that he wanted to rid himself of all those heaps of newspapers, “that was all Blackbeard needed to know.” He hauled them off and started his collection of comic strips.
And he quickly learned that, in those days before recycling, many people had stacks of newspapers in their basements or garages, and Blackbeard helped himself. In a 2007 interview with Jenny Robb, now curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University, Blackbeard reminisced: “Once I discovered this, I had no other interest in life than finding these caches of newspapers.” Said Robb: “He mined the piles he located for their comic pages, which he eagerly read and began to keep in stacks. He later recalled, ‘I wasn’t old enough then to have a good librarian’s sense of order. I just sort of thought they were all wonderful, and I kept the stacks going.’”
He was captivated by the newspaper funnies, enthralled. Comic books held absolutely no appeal.
“Newspaper strips then were just knocking me out,” he told me when I interviewed him in the fall of 1995. “The original comic books were coming out about then. And it seemed to me at the time—because I was so deeply into newspaper strips, and of course I was seeing it all from a critical point of view—that comic books were second- and third-rate stuff that couldn’t make it in the newspapers. The guys who produced it, I thought, were probably teenagers, guys not too much older than I was. And that was true. Their stuff was being bought just to fill pages in these magazines.
“Far from being overwhelmed when Action came out with Superman,” he continued, “I thought it was meretricious dreck. I liked the art. I’d been following Slam Bradley in Detective Comics. And I liked the art and the storyline; I thought that was fine. But the Superman content did nothing for me because I immediately saw what many other people saw: there’s no story here. If he can do anything he wants to, who cares? Why bother? But the art did appeal, and I looked at it occasionally. It was nicely drawn.
“Then the whole superhero thing came in, and I recall thinking in the early forties that certain things—like Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch—I thought those were psychotic, the work of a lunatic. And of course Mickey Spillane was scripting, so I wasn’t that far off. I couldn’t understand how anyone would want to immerse themselves in such stuff. I was definitely not a sympathetic reader of the early comic books. I had dismissed them growing up. It wasn’t until the comic book craze of the sixties came in that I thought, My god—people think this is classic! Couldn’t believe it.”
But he made himself a believer with a short psychoanalysis of comic-book readers in the days of his youth: “What you had was a lot of devotees in |
Barack Obama by a wide margin and sent. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D) back to Congress.
Despite its potential, Rep. Lyons’ proposed reforms could make for an interesting bit of contrast in the next election season: Michigan Republicans voted in favor of a package of tax reforms last session that eliminated a $600 per-child tax credit for working poor families, replacing it with a credit of just $25.
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Photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler / Shutterstock.com.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump pauses during while speaking at a rally at Millington Regional Airport in Millington, Tenn., Saturday, Feb. 27. | AP Photo Democrats draw plan to shatter the GOP Through a combination of messaging and the ascendance of Donald Trump, Democrats see a path to cutting into the GOP coalition.
Democrats are drawing blueprints for stealing GOP moderates from a rightward-driving Republican Party, saying the heist is key to scoring a White House win in November.
Democracy Corps’ Stan Greenberg, a prominent national Democratic pollster, released data Monday morning that suggest moderate Republicans — nearly a third of the GOP base — are being ignored by their presidential candidates. These Republicans don’t revile Planned Parenthood — in fact, many prefer the women’s health group to pro-life groups and candidates who take hard-line stances on abortion. They’re supportive of same-sex marriage. They’re not enamored of the NRA. They have less rigid attitudes about sex. They accept climate science.
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“It’s mind-boggling,” Greenberg said. “They’re considered illegitimate within the Republican Party, and no one is speaking to them."
It’s a dynamic Greenberg said could drive those moderates toward Democrats this fall, and he wants his party to work to make that happen.
But while the GOP moderates may feel a break from their party, they're also hostile to Democrats, meaning that bringing them over would require a total rebranding of the Democratic Party in their eyes. In an online poll of 800 likely Republican primary voters, conducted from Feb. 11 to Feb. 16, Democracy Corp found that anti-Democrat attitudes are the most potent driver of Republican primary voters — and their antipathy for Hillary Clinton outweighs even their dislike for President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole, a feeling that cuts across ideology.
Still, the poll shows that GOP moderates may be pliable — and that Democratic efforts to corral GOP votes shouldn’t end with just looking for moderates. The results show that Catholic Republicans are similarly out of step with the Republican base. They’re less hostile to government regulation and generally agree that those making more than $250,000 a year should pay “a lot” more in taxes.
These tactics could be even more potent if Donald Trump is the nominee. The winning arguments, Greenberg says his research shows, include convincing these Republicans that Trump is an egomaniac, that he’s disrespectful to women, that he can’t be trusted with the nation’s nuclear arsenal, that he has no clean energy agenda and that he’s hostile to global trade.
The poll shows that Trump, more than his leading rivals, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, would cause Republicans to rethink their party loyalty. About one in five say they would either not vote or are unsure whom they’d support — or even consider supporting a third-party candidate — if Trump is the nominee. Among Catholics and moderates, these figures jump even further.
Events even since the poll was conducted have highlighted this opening. Establishment Republicans have been in open conflict with Trump over his recent equivocation when asked to condemn the Ku Klux Klan. Stories have emerged describing Republican insiders' (so far fruitless) attempts to dislodge Trump's hold on the party. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse even suggested on social media that he'd look for a third-party conservative if the general election is Trump versus Clinton.
But Greenberg's research suggests moderate and Catholic Republicans might also cross party lines for other GOP nominees, reflecting discomfort with the party's rightward lurch. These same Republicans express sharp reservations about Rubio’s position on abortion, which doesn’t include exceptions for rape or incest. In fact, after presenting poll respondents with Democratic arguments against all three leading candidates, more peel away from Rubio and Cruz than from Trump — and the most potent arguments centered on their hostility to same-sex marriage and abortion.
In addition, the Republican moderates and Catholics polled responded to some affirmative Democratic arguments — from moving past divisive social issues to encouraging infrastructure investment and cracking down on corporate greed.
The poll carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
While Democrats plot to take advantage of the GOP's internal tensions, Republicans are looking to do much the same, hoping that they can increasingly bring blue-collar, more conservative Democrats into their coalition by painting the party as lurching left and leaving traditional values behind.IPhone maker says it's building a multibillion-dollar facility - in another state Trump flipped 9:24 AM ET Mon, 7 Aug 2017 | 00:42
Taiwan's Foxconn, one of Apple's primary iPhone makers, will open a multibillion-dollar research and development plant in Michigan, the South China Morning Post reported on Sunday.
That makes the second politically critical state to receive such a commitment from the multinational — which is sure to be seen by many as a gargantuan political success for President Donald Trump.
The Michigan facility will be focused on autonomous vehicles, the SCMP said, citing Foxconn founder Terry Gou.
"Automotive development in the U.S. is still more advanced than China," Gou was quoted as saying. "Besides self-driving technology, I'm also interested in artificial intelligence and deep learning technology."
No details into the investment amount were provided.
The news comes nearly two weeks after Foxconn announced a $10 billion Wisconsin plant. That's expected to create 3,000 American jobs, with the potential to eventually expand to 13,000 jobs.
Trump, whose presidential campaign was focused in part on job creation, is likely to welcome the development with open arms as his administration deals with a number of challenges, including a chaotic White House and an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In his 2016 presidential contest against Hillary Clinton, Trump "flipped" a number of U.S. states that had gone to Barack Obama, but none surprised political analysts more than Michigan and Wisconsin. Both were once reliably Democratic, but they lined up behind Trump in the face of manufacturing job losses. Clinton was criticized for failing to recognize economic anxiety in either state.
Read the full South China Morning Post story.If given the choice, a new poll reveals, 59 percent of Americans would sweep Capitol Hill clean of the current batch of senators and representatives to elect an entirely new Congress.
Only 17 percent of voters polled said they would be willing to keep the current legislature.
Rasmussen Reports conducted the national telephone survey on the heels of Congress passing a widely unpopular financial bailout bill, revealing a significant amount of voter dissatisfaction with the nation’s current lawmakers.
The polling firm records a mere 30 percent of voters approved of the bailout, while 45 percent were opposed, and yet Congress passed it, leaving behind some highly critical voters.
The new poll shows only 23 percent of Americans have even a little confidence in the ability of Congress to address the nation’s economic problems, and 76 percent doubt that most federal legislators even understand bills before they vote on them.
Further, less than half (49 percent) believe the current Congress is any more capable than a group of people plucked from the phone book, and nearly a third (33 percent) think the phone book Congress would do a better job.
Despite the lawmakers’ dismal 11 percent approval rating, Rasmussen Reports pointed out that 90 percent of Congress is likely to remain following this November’s election.
Rasmussen Reports dug into history to reveal that for well over 100 years after the U.S. Constitution was adopted, congressional turnover in national elections averaged about 50 percent. Following the New Deal era, however, those numbers began to decline. Since 1968, no national election has managed to muster even a 10 percent turnover.
The poll showed, however, that despite overall dissatisfaction, Democratic voters were more hesitant to throw the out the current, Democrat-controlled Congress.
Only 43 percent of the voters polled from Barack Obama’s party were willing to sweep Capitol Hill clean. Among Republicans, 74 percent wanted to throw the whole batch out, and 62 percent of unaffiliated voters were willing to join in.
Even so, when asked if they would vote to keep the current Congress, only 25 percent of Democrats polled said yes.The Kuroshitsuji Book of Atlantic movie was really amazing and blew my mind. Here’s a super long and detailed summary and review of the movie, which in my opinion, did the manga so much justice! Enjoy~ (for those of you interested in the limited edition Kuroshitsuji Book of Atlantic goods, head on over to Aitai☆Kuji)
SUMMARY:
The movie starts off with the Midfords loading their luggage onto the Campania, followed by Sebastian and Ciel. Ciel then has a flashback to an earlier time at the Phantomhive Manor when Lau and Ran-Mao visited him and talked about some strange occurrences happening at the Karnstein Hospital has been doing weird experiences with their dead. He then learns that some of the top doctors from the hospital will be embarking on a journey by boat from London to New York, which Elizabeth and the Midfords were coincidentally also going on.
Ciel then tells Sebastian that they should investigate this suspicious activity and join the Midfords, surprising Elizabeth. The cruise then sails away, and we see Ciel and Sebastian as well as the Midfords in a fancy welcome banquet in the foyer. Sebastian as well as Snake are dressed all prim and proper with their hair slicked back (says Oscar).
Prior to this, Ciel learned that the doctors of the hospital formed a secret society called the Aurora Society and that they had planned a gathering right on the boat itself. Ciel and Sebastian decide to disguise themselves to get into the Aurora Society meeting. Before they leave, Elizabeth asks Ciel if he wants some cake, and he says maybe later.
During this, Ronald, a new shinigami, is seen chilling in the lower decks with less wealthy passengers. A lady tries to ask him out, but he then says he’s kind of busy as his “work” is about to start. He then bids her farewell, and she notes that it’s weird he says it with such finality.
Sometime during this, we see Charles Grey and Charles Phipps onboard the Campania as well, sent there by order of the Queen to investigate some suspicious activity. They keep an eye on the passengers, trying to see what exactly is going on.
Back to the scene in the Aurora Society. Ciel and Sebastian has successfully entered on the premise that Ciel’s doctor father asked him to go to see if they cure his “illness.” Sebastian also whispers to Ciel that there is a condition that he must fulfill in order to be accepted by the society, and Ciel gets super embarrassed. They are both confronted by an older member asking them to prove they are part of the society. They then do the Phoenix pose, muc hto Ciel’s chagrin, and Ciel feels humiliated afterwards.
They then bump into the Undertaker and the Viscount of Druitt, who somewhat recognize the two, and the Viscount gets really touchy feely with Ciel, saying that he remembers someone who looks just like him. Ciel then says he’s mistaken and hurries away with Sebastian.
The main event of the Aurora Society then begins with the head doctor of the hospital, Rian Stoker, explaining that this machine of his can bring back life to anything. He then asks his staff to take out a dead body of a young woman whose parents stood by to watch as Stoker “makes a scientific innovation.” They hook up the machine to the girl and then turn it on. She then starts moving and her mother goes to hug her, only to be bitten violently to death by the zombie corpse.
The entire Aurora Society room flees as the zombie girl, referred to as a “bizarre doll,” starts attacking the members. Stoker and his team then take away the machine and escape while Ronald comes onto the scene to take the film record of the girl’s mother. He recalls that he took the records of the girl, known as Margaret, a few weeks earlier, saying that it’s weird that her body is still alive.
He then asks why Sebastian, a demon, is on this boat. Sebastian explains that he is Ciel’s butler and is serving the Phantomhives, and Ronald isn’t buying any of it so he attacks Sebastian. They duel for quite some time while the bizarre doll is still on a rampage, and Ronald stops her by bashing her head in. He then tells Sebastian that the key to killing the dolls is to smash their heads. Afterwards Ronald is called to do something and leaves Sebastian.
Meanwhile, Ciel has left Ronald with Sebastian as he had to warn Elizabeth and her family that something was going on with this ship. He enters the storage room and is greeted by Elizabeth, much to his surprise. He asks what she’s doing in the storage room, and she says she was trying to give him his cake from earlier. He tells her she shouldn’t be here, and something startles them. They then see that Snake is here tending to his snakes, which they stored in carts in the storage.
Ciel then spots a coffin that has the same mark of the Aurora Society on it, and Snake says that there are several rows of those stored in this storage room (says Oscar). Suddenly, all of the coffins start moving and the zombies (bizarre dolls) come at Ciel, Elizabeth, and Snake. They scurry to the top of the cargo while the dolls surround them, and Ciel holds Elizabeth saying that no matter what, he will try to protect her from harm.
Just as the dolls are about to destroy the crates that the three are standing on, Sebastian comes in and saves the day by killing all the zombies via head smashing. This scene was really gruesome but also elegantly made, and Ciel sees Sebastian in his demon form as he does this, reminding him of when he was kidnapped several years prior.
After Sebastian finishes killing all the zombies, he asks Ciel to jump into his arms, but Ciel sees that he’s completely covered in blood and says he does not want to get his hands dirty. Sebastian then apologizes and changes his gloves and helps Ciel, Elizabeth, and Snake down from the crates.
They then run into Stoker, who Sebastian immediately captures. Sebastian asks him what is going on, and he says that the Aurora Society brought on board not only the corpses that he just killed, but in the other storage room on the other side of the ship contains ten times the amount of zombies than this current storage room. Stoker informs them that there is a way to stop the zombies, but the device to do so is in his room on the ship. Ciel then orders Sebastian to save the Midfords while he, Elizabeth, and Snake head to the boiler room to take a shortcut to Stoker’s room where the device was contained.
When Sebastian gets to the Midfords, he sees that they are having no problem defending themselves from the onslaught of a ton of zombies since they are all expertly trained in the sword art as knights of the Queen. They tell him that they do not need defending, for they are the ones who will defend the people and protect the passengers. Sebastian tells them that the way to defeat the zombies is to slice off or destroy their heads, then leaves them and hopes for their safety.
Ronald is then seen gathering people’s records as his work has started, and he gathers that of the girl who was trying to hit on him, noting that he knew they wouldn’t see each other again while she was alive.
Sometime during this, Grell appears (I do not remember exactly when), and there’s a totally hilarious scene where the music was playing Ave Maria (or something similar) and Ronald is holding Grell at the bow of the ship a la Titanic Rose and Jack. Grell then says that while the atmosphere is quite romantic, Ronald is totally the wrong guy for this, making him lose his mood lol.
While the zombies are still on a rampage throughout the boat, the two watchmen on the top of the tower of the ship note that they were heading straight towards a huge iceberg. They try to notify the captain to steer clear of the iceberg, but the captain was killed by the zombies just as they received signal that there was an iceberg ahead. The ship then scrapes the iceberg roughly, and everyone on board wonders what just happened.
Meanwhile back with Snake, he sees Stoker escape up an emergency elevator back to the top of the ship. There is a scene where Charles Grey and Charles Phipps are killing off the zombies and helping the passengers get to the life boats when out of nowhere, a pair of horses pulling a carriage come rushing towards them. Phipps then slices through the horses easily, effectively killing them and paving a road for the passengers. Both Charles have a super badass scene where they go slicing all zombies.
Back to the boiler room. After the ship had hit the iceberg, water starts pouring in where Ciel, Elizabeth, and Snake are. The workers then do an emergency evacuation where the metal walls close to prevent water from rising. They try to escape as this happens but Elizabeth trips, and Ciel runs back to help her. Snake then yells, “Ciel, don’t go!” (says Emily), but Ciel and Elizabeth are already trapped on the other side of the room with the water rising. Snake then sends Emily the snake through a vent that connects to the boiler room and helps guide Ciel and Elizabeth out. Elizabeth can’t fit because of her dress, so Ciel tells her to take it off but she gets too embarrassed. She says she wants to always look cute in front of Ciel, but he gets frustrated at her and rips off her dress while she cries. She then gets over it and they escape through the vent.
When they fall out of the vent, Sebastian is there waiting and catches Ciels in his arms. He then helps Elizabeth come down the vent, and they are in a hallway surrounded by dolls closing in on them. Ciel and Sebastian watch in horror as Elizabeth gets surrounded by the dolls, but there is conveniently a couple of swords as decoration on the walls, and just as it looks like she’s going to be swallowed by them, she tells Ciel, “I wanted to look pretty for you one last time,” then starts going ape shit on the zombies by slicing their heads off while dancing around like a boss.
Ciel and Sebastian look at her in awe as she kills the zombies relentlessly, and so cues a lengthy flashback of her and Ciel’s past. Ciel notes once that he’s afraid of strong women, so Elizabeth tried her best to not appear “strong” to Ciel. However, because she is a Midford she underwent rigorous sword training, and in their Knight Academy, Charles Grey and Charles Phipp note that the Midfords have an amazingly talented swordsman in their family. Phipps says he did not know that the Midford’s son was so talented, but Grey says it’s not the son but the daughter.
After Ciel disappears, Elizabeth falls into despair but then is reignited with hope when she sees Ciel, back from the dead, with a very black as night butler. She notes that she has grown taller than Ciel as well and vows to never wear high heels, just so Ciel can look taller than her, even though all the high class ladies wear wearing the cutest heels.
Cut to Elizabeth still trying to kill more and more zombies, when Sebastian finally intervenes and says, “that’s enough my lady.” Elizabeth then apologizes to Ciel, saying that she did not want him to see her in such an ugly and strong state since he mentioned years ago that he did not like strong ladies. He says that it doesn’t matter, and what he said in the past is in the past. Elizabeth then asks if he would still take her as his fiancee, to which he does not answer but blushes instead. Sebastian sees Ciel’s flustered state and full-out laughs (I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sebastian, in anime form, laugh this much, it was really cute), and mentions that even in front of ladies Ciel gets pretty shy.
Grell then appears and starts rambling about Sebastian and wishing that Sebastian can just take him right then and there, and Elizabeth is confused and asks who Grell is with Sebastian saying, “don’t mind him. He’s just a weird pervert.”
They then escort Elizabeth to the rest of the Midfords, and they are just about to go onto the lifesaver boats. Edward is so happy to see Elizabeth, and Elizabeth pleas to Ciel to come with them onto the boat, but Ciel says there’s still work to be done. Elizabeth continues to whine and Sebastian shuts her up by hitting her vital spot, effectively knocking her out.
Sebastian then carries Ciel back into the foyer room where the fun is about to start. It turns out that the Viscount of Druitt took the device that Stoker went back to his room for and they bump into each other in the foyer room. Coincidentally, Grell, Ronald, and the Undertaker are also here when Sebastian and Ciel arrive at the scene.
The Viscount of Druitt then remarks that with this amazing device, they can control life itself and create a new society with such amazing power to give and take life. The Undertaker then starts laughing at this. Suddenly they all do the Phoenix Pose, and the Viscount says that he recognizes them.
The Viscount then says he will use this device when all the cast is revealed, and while he goes on his really long and boring monologue, Sebastian, Ciel, Grell, and Ronald keep on saying that they just want to kill him and get it over with since this is dragging on too long.
After he’s done, Grell charges to try to kill the Viscount but Ronald says that Shinigami cannot kill people. The zombies start coming into the foyer room and the Viscount turns on the device only to see that it has no effect on them. Stoker then also appears and tells them that they have been deceived.
As Grell tries to kill the Viscount, he is stopped by the Undertaker who protects the Viscount with one of his wooden graveyard prayer sticks (sotoba), which shocks everyone. The boat then starts sinking vertically, and Stoker falls to his death as the boat tilts.
The Undertaker then summons a bunch of his wooden sticks and causes the chandelier to crash down, and Sebastian protects Ciel from this. The whole sequence with the Undertaker is AMAZING. The music is so epic when he finally reveals his eyes, and everyone gasps as they realize he’s actually a shinigami. He explains that he’s a retired shinigami, albeit a very ridiculously hot like holy shit ovaries gone wtfwtfwtf and very old one.
They then commence an epic fight of Undertaker vs. Grell & Ronald vs. Sebastian. All three have a go at the Undertaker, but he’s too quick for them. Grell then cuts through some of his wooden sticks and wonders why that one stick he was holding when he protected the Viscount did not get cut since Shinigami swords can cut through everything.
They keep lashing out until the Undertaker is left with only one stick, which turns out to be an epic death scythe. Ronald then asks how he was able to keep it after he retired from being a shinigami, and the Undertaker just laughs.
He then reveals that he was the one behind these bizarre dolls, and after being a shinigami for so long and collecting so many different film records, he wanted to see what happened if he tampered with them. He wanted to see if he added more film strip to these mortals’ lives, would they still be able to move? It turns out that yes, they can, but they only move and attack people because they are looking for their souls since the shinigami reap their souls.
The Undertaker then appears beside Ciel and coaxes Sebastian to attack him, and this is the epic and beautiful scene where Sebastian tries to come save Ciel but the Undertaker throws Ciel away. The scene was amazing in the manga but is even more beautiful in the anime as Sebastian looks on in shock and horror that he is not able to reach Ciel’s hands in time as the Undertaker strikes him violently with his scythe.
Ciel yells, “Sebastian!!!” and Sebastian then says his famous line, “Oh…he’s calling me…”
We then see the flashback scene of Sebastian when he first appeared to Ciel in his demonic form, mostly a mix of black smoke and the art in this was really pretty. They seem to use some kind of rough charcoal to animate Sebastian’s demon form, and they then use really thick pencil lines to show him walking to Ciel and becoming the Sebastian we all know.
The flashback scene then shows Sebastian adjusting to becoming a butler for Ciel and being crap at it. There is a pretty fanservicey scene when Sebastian is helping Ciel bathe but Ciel orders him to leave, but he hurries back when he hears that Ciel had fell from the bathtub. He then holds Ciel close as Ciel is butt naked lol.
After some more flashback scenes, we get to the famous scene when the Queen of England welcomes Ciel back as her Watchdog, and Ciel is walking down a hallway when Sebastian notes that he now has everything he has wanted, and Sebastian is ready to take Ciel’s soul when Ciel says, “No.” Sebastian stops, and Ciel says that he came back not to get what was taken from him, but to get revenge at the people who did this to him. Sebastian then remarks how delicious his soul will be after all the corruption he will go through to get his revenge, and Ciel orders Sebastian to be by his side until the deed is done. Sebastian then bends down and kisses Ciel’s hand, saying “Yes, My Lord.”
The scene then goes back to Sebastian reaching out to Ciel as he is suspended in midair. He finally reaches him and protects Ciel from the fall. They roll on the floor several times and Sebastian cradles Ciel to him, away from harm. Ciel is stricken when he sees Sebastian in such a weakened state, with blood everywhere. The Undertaker is very amused at this act of compassion for a demon, and they continue to fight.
After some time, the Undertaker decides that it is now time for him to take his leave, and using his scythe he slices the entire ship in half. Before he is able to escape, Sebastian (and I think Grell and Ronald) come at him and someone rips off his rosary, which falls into Ciel’s hands. He’s extremely shocked that he lost his rosary but says to Ciel that one day he will take it back from him and then disappears. The passengers of the boat then look on in horror as the boat sinks while half of the other side of the boat falls into the ocean.
Sebastian escapes with Ciel in his arms. He eventually throws Ciel off-board with a lifeboat while he takes care of some more unfinished business.
As Ciel starts getting fatigued, he falls into the ocean, and there’s a really beautiful scene when Sebastian pulls him out of the water. Sebastian has readied a life boat just for Ciel and collapses when he enters the boat. Ciel is worried about Sebastian’s weakened state, but then the dolls start popping out from the water and are closing in on Ciel and Sebastian. Sebastian says that the reason why the zombies are following them is that Ciel is the only one left with a soul right now, and Ciel says something along the lines of, “Well, that might be true or not…” He then orders Sebastian to kill all the zombies, to which he does even in his weakened state.
When the zombies are defeated, Sebastian collapses again onto the boat, and Ciel wholeheartedly says to Sebastian that he did a really good job defending the people on the boat as well as protecting him, and he tells Sebastian that when they get back to the Phantomhive Manor, he wants Sebastian to truly take a good rest. Sebastian and Ciel then look into the rising sun as a rescue boat heads their way, and Sebastian remarks that their work has just begun (cue segue into another eventual season of Kuroshitsuji amirite? lol).
The credits then start rolling, but at the end of the credits, we are greeted with one more scene. Grell and Ronald are floating in the middle of the ocean when they are rescued by William T. Spears. Grell then flings himself onto William, saying that he knew his savior will come to save him. William is dissatisfied with the work that Grell and Ronald did at the Campania since they made him do overtime.Sebastian and Ciel are then escorted onto the rescue ship and are reunited with Elizabeth and the Midfords. Elizabeth then hugs Ciel and says she’s so relieved that they are both alive. Sebastian watches them and smiles a true smile.
END~
REVIEW (9/10 RECOMMEND):
The movie adaptation of the Campania arc was very true to its original source, albeit a few scenes cut here and there. I remember following the manga really closely so many years back when I was in college and waiting each month for an update, and this movie brought back all the feels I had for the manga arc but TENFOLD because not only was the animation beautiful, but the music really sets the anime version apart from the manga. For me, the entire movie played out exactly as it did in my head when I was reading the manga years ago, and this was really nostalgic as every major scene was so well done and epic and ugh, this movie was just so good.
I personally do not like Elizabeth’s character as she is way too whiny in the anime, but the movie actually made her pretty likeable and her sword fighting scene was so much cooler in motion because she fights like she’s dancing ballet. It was really well animated.
Also, the foyer scene with the Undertaker was one of the most epic fights in the Kuroshitsuji anime to date. There was so much going on, and the animation for this long scene was so well done, accompanied by the music, made this the best part of the movie. When the Undertaker revealed his true identity with his eyes, I swear to god all of the fans in the audience audibly gasped, even though we all knew it was coming. It was done in a slow-mo music swelling up to the perfect moment, and with the glass falling behind him reflecting prisms and ugh, I thought it was so so good.
Then the scene when the Undertaker throws Ciel and Sebastian reaches out to him was also beautiful because while the rest of the scene had epic music and crazy animation sequences, the part when Sebastian realizes that Ciel is slipping away from him and their hands brush together was actually all done without any sound, and in doing so, causes the audience to hold their breath as they wait for the music to come back since this scene was so lyrical in its silence. I thought this was so tastefully done and made me almost cry.
OH AND DOUBLE CHARLES. I am so happy that we got some scenes of Charles Grey and Charles Phipps, even though I do not remember them being in the manga, but their scenes were super awesome, and Phipps actually spoke!!! A LOT!!!!!! Their scenes did not feel weirdly inserted as they were on the ship for a good reason, and they did help get the people to safety and I ship them so hard why is there not that much fanart and fanfic of them that is a TRAVESTY THEY ARE SO AWESOME UGH MY FEELS.
The only thing I thought was kind of poorly done is the scenes of the Campania ship it self, when they for some reason opted for cheesy CG instead of animating the ship, probably thinking that the CG would mean higher quality, but it looked sort of like a toy boat in some scenes with weird CG passengers as well. Also, the zombie killing was extremely violent and somewhat unnecessary with the ridiculous amount of blood they animated in like, almost every single scene. However, the rest of the movie was animated with A++++++ quality.
All in all, I think the Book of Atlantic was an AMAZING movie, and I think that the movie definitely paves the road for the rest of Kuroshitsuji to be adapted into anime form (WITH JUSTICE) eventually. I was pretty impressed with the Book of Circus anime season, and Book of Murder was a really good OVA, and Book of Atlantic just brought home the streak and outdid itself. I hope that we get a new anime soon for the next arc, which I believe is going to be the boarding school one.
MERCHANDISE AND GOODIES:
There was a TONNNNN of exclusive movie-only merchandise available at the theaters for purchase, including a special large post-card with a print of Sebastian and Ciel at the movies, signed by Maaya Sakamoto and Daisuke Ono. Also of course, Aitai☆Kuji has ALL items as well as the Book of Atlantic Kuji items for all you Kuroshitsuji fans who want these exclusive goods only available at the theaters here in Japan!The father of a former LAPD officer wanted in the murder of a 23-year-old man in Pomona drove his son to El Paso, Texas, just a few miles from the border of Mexico, to escape prosecution, a federal warrant revealed.Henry Solis, 27, allegedly fled the state "with the intent to avoid prosecution for the crime of murder," according to the arrest warrant.Investigators believe Solis got into a fistfight with Salome Rodriguez, Jr. that escalated into a fatal shooting in the area of Third and Main streets on March 13. Rodriguez was found with gunshot wounds to the lower torso and later died.Soon after the alleged murder, Solis called his father Victor Solis at his Lancaster home. Victor Solis then left home and was found the next day at a family member's home in El Paso, Texas, according to an affidavit in a federal criminal complaint.On Monday, Victor Solis, who remained in El Paso, told FBI agents that he dropped off his son at the bus station and does not know where he is.Family and friends told investigators that Solis said he would never see them again, according to the affidavit.On Tuesday, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck fired Solis, calling him a dishonor to the organization.The Czech Republic should be proud. Its customs just seized $37 million in heroin (paywall), the country’s largest drug bust ever. The shipment is mammoth by any standards, but especially Czech standards—the 182 kilograms (401 pounds) could be equivalent to an entire year’s worth of heroin use in the Czech Republic.
And yet, the government isn’t taking much of a victory lap. Vlastimil Necas, a member of the Czech government’s drug monitoring center, told the Wall Street Journal that it was a success—but he added a pretty hefty caveat.
“…despite this size of the seizure, Mr. Necas said it likely won’t lead to a decrease in drug use, but rather may exacerbate the current shortage of heroin on Europe’s black market, drive up prices and could have the adverse effect of leading to a minor increase in crime as addicts look for ways to generate cash to feed their addiction.”
One of the problems with seizing a shipment as large as the one Czech authorities just did is that it can shock a sensitive underground system. There’s historical precedent for that. A 2010 drought in leading poppy seed producer Afghanistan halved its heroin production, causing significant black market price increases in the European Union.
Those price hikes open the door for increasing violence, as Necas pointed out. But there are other, more complicated consequences too. Drug droughts—heroin ones specifically—can affect the purity, or strength, of the drugs being sold on the black market. That’s a problem, because it makes it difficult for local users to gauge dosages. When addicts are used to less potent batches, stronger ones can be deadly. In 2011, on the heels of an extended period of heroin shortage, Britain saw a rise in the number of deaths from heroin overdoses, after more potent stuff entered the country.
And then there’s the threat that in the face of higher prices, local drug users turn away from the likes of heroin, and toward other, cheaper, synthetic drugs. A 2013 report from the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction noted exactly that (pdf p. 13). Normally, shelving heroin would be a good thing, but not when alternatives have scarier side effects and higher overdose rates.
None of this is to say the Czech government doesn’t see the bust as a success—it does, and should. But big drug busts carry the potential for big headaches.November 30, 2012 at 1:54 PM
The Washington State Liquor Control Board says it needs to hire 40 additional staff and bring an outside expert in marijuana to implement the voter-approved marijuana legalization measure.
In a briefing to a Senate committee in Olympia on Friday, LCB director Pat Kohler said the biggest challenge of setting up a regulated marijuana market was “understanding the product and the industry itself.”
“There’s a lot of people who think they have a lot of experience in this area,” joked Rick Garza, Kohler’s deputy.
The LCB is taking the lead in creating rules for state-licensed marijuana stores, growers and processors called for in Initiative 502, which passed 56-44 on Nov. 6. Friday’s hearing was the first chance for lawmakers to ask questions about the historic measure.
Kohler estimated there could be 328 stores – the same number of liquor stores under the now-defunct state liquor monopoly – but her staff needed to better understand potential customer demand, among other things. A state fiscal analysis predicted that 363,000 state residents would buy from the state stores, based on federal use surveys.
She said the LCB is preparing a bid for a consultant with expertise in the marijuana industry to advise LCB staff during the one-year rule-making process before licenses would begin being issued in December, 2013. That year “gives us a bit more time to be thoughtful to implement something that has never been implemented in the nation,” she said.
The 40 new staffers would be paid for out of existing funds, and would primarily go to hire enforcement officers, she said.
Sen. Adam Kline, a Seattle Democrat who supported the ballot measure, urged Kohler’s staff to work with “deliberate speed.” As of Dec. 6, one ounce of marijuana is legal to possess, but only state-licensed stores can sell it. That gives drug dealers a year to “entrench themselves,” said Kline.
“The more time it goes |
that, even in Methodism, at least metaphorically happens. And so you can see this happen in a very literal way in this movie. So it is a religious fear realized. And for the nonbeliever, it’s just as terrifying because you’re in completely uncharted territory. You can’t point towards a religious book that was maybe possibly written by someone several thousands of years ago. It’s like, “No. This is the unknown.”
8 a.m.: Hellraiser II (1988)
The Mind’s Eye and Almost Human director Joe Begos is a horror fan’s horror fan, a trait that really comes through when he gets excited talking about his favorite movies. For our marathon, he chose Hellraiser II, the first title to have been picked by more than one filmmaker—Astron-6’s Steven Kostanski also chose it for the 2014 edition of this feature—and a prime example of the gruesomely inventive practical effects Begos strives for in his own movies.
Joe Begos: Hellraiser II: Hellbound is a sequel that is arguably better than the near masterpiece of the original. It’s the perfect movie to keep you awake during the latter hours of an all-night horror binge: The music and sound is loud as fuck, the imagery and effects shocking as hell, and it’s quickly paced and most importantly short. Everything you love about Hellraiser is cranked to 11 and shot directly into your veins for the perfect hallucinatory jolt of horror adrenaline, and one of my favorite horror sequels ever.
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AVC: What I like about Hellraiser II is it delivers on the promise of the first one by taking you to Hell, and making it look awesome.
JB: Every aspect of the movie is beautiful.
AVC: What do you think about the later Hellraiser sequels? I dig 3 and 4, personally.
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JB: Most people hate on the third, but I think it’s a lot of fun. The CD-ROM cenobite is ridiculous, and it spawned an awesome Motörhead song (and even more awesome music video). The fourth was a bummer for me when I first saw it, but it honestly gets incrementally better over time. I’ve watched it a couple of times over the past couple years.
10 a.m.: Horror Hotel (a.k.a. The City Of The Dead) (1960)
Anna Biller has a wonderfully refined eye and strict standards for accuracy in her work, a trait that has both good points and bad. On the one hand, her films are beautiful, immersive experiences. On the other, they take a long time to make. This year, she has a new film, The Love Witch, a feminist take on witchcraft exploitation films of the ’60s and ’70s. To cap off our marathon, Biller chose another occult-themed throwback, the 1961 British-American co-production Horror Hotel (a.k.a. The City Of The Dead).
Anna Biller: Horror Hotel is a fantastically atmospheric low-budget British horror film directed in 1960 by John Llewellyn Moxey. Interestingly, the film, which came out at exactly the same time as Hitchcock’s Psycho, contains many of the same highly unusual story elements as Psycho. Both films feature an attractive young blond woman who drives through fog to reach a dubious motel where she will be killed with a knife in the middle of the film, leaving a sibling and a boyfriend to find the killer and bring him or her to justice. In both films, the heroine’s fearlessness is what leads to her death, as she drives long distances alone at night to destinations where killers lurk.
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The film is a masterpiece of atmosphere, creating haunting effects with simple lighting effects, a fog machine, and a few actors with amazing bone structure, including the infamous Christopher Lee as Professor Alan Driscoll, the witch who lures his beautiful young student Nan Barlow into the trap of staying in Whitewood, a town where witches still live and commit human sacrifice on solstice holidays. Its economy of means is also its strength, and the crisp black-and-white photography combined with its tight script and symbols of stark horror—the dead birds pinned to the door, the witches chanting medieval chants in the fog, the blind grandfather, the macabre dance of the witches in the hotel lobby, Christopher Lee’s animal sacrifice—is extraordinarily effective. A must-see for Halloween, or for any other season.To this day, I haven’t watched M. Night Shaymalan’s The Last Airbender all the way through. I walked out of the film when it was released in theaters, and I’ve had no desire to ever finish it. It was just one of those movies that I wasn’t going to waste my time on. The movie was bashed by critics, and I have yet to met a single person who has actually liked the movie.
Talking to IGN, the director attempted to explain why people didn’t like the movie. Of course, he wouldn’t come out and say that he did a piss-poor job. Instead he says it was made for 9 and 10-year-olds, and thats why most audiences didn’t get it. Here’s what he said:
"My child was nine-years-old. So you could make it one of two ways. You could make it for that same audience, which is what I did -- for nine and 10-year-olds -- or you could do the Transformers version and have Megan Fox. I didn't do that. That would have felt like, 'Well, I'm going to make a movie about a kids show that my 10-year-old is watching and not make it for her. I make it for my guy friends.' That felt like a betrayal of the innocence of the piece. In retrospect, is it too young to go out -- it's like what your intention is versus what they want it to be. Clearly, 10-year-olds -- I go out and 10-year-olds are like, 'That's my favorite show! I love that movie!' Parents come up to me and go, 'They've watched The Last Airbender 74 times!' Those kids, it's for them. It was for them, to talk about mysticism and Eastern philosophies through a 10-year-old's vernacular. So, you know, these are business propositions, which have very little interest to me, of like, 'Hey, the business proposition is to get Megan Fox to be...' You know, 'You should age it 'til it's that.' That wasn't the source material, you know what I mean? Whereas, also, like a Transformers, it's really fascinating, because it's valid for Transformers. You know why it's valid? Because it's the little boys that were playing with them are grown up now. They're the ones who wanted to see Megan Fox. That's absolutely appropriate, you know what I mean?"
I’m sorry, but that’s complete bullshit. Look at all the great kids films that have been made over the years that even adults enjoy watching. Studios like Pixar, Disney, and even Marvel are constantly pumping out films for audiences of all ages. On top of that, the original Avatar cartoon that the film was based on was better than the movie, it was something adults also enjoyed watching, and it had a more diverse reach. Making a movie strictly for 9 and 10-year-olds probably isn’t the best business plan for any filmmaker.
Why can't the guy just come out and admit that he screwed up and made a crappy film, instead of putting the blame on other things? This is just such a ridiculous excuse. A talented director could have made an awesome Avatar movie that everyone could have enjoyed, Shyamalan obviously wasn’t that guy.Story highlights President Barack Obama gave a wide-ranging interview to the New Yorker
Obama discuss the election of Donald Trump and offered suggestions about how to deal with it
Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama's advice to his two daughters and anyone worried about the election of Donald Trump is not to "get into a fetal position" and put the outcome in context.
Asked by The New Yorker's David Remnick what Obama told his daughters Sasha and Malia about the election, the president said that "societies and cultures are really complicated."
"This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it's messy," the departing president said in a wide-ranging interview.
"You don't get into a fetal position about it. You don't start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward," Obama added.
Protests have broken out in cities across the nation since Trump was elected. A white nationalist was bloodied during an anti-racist protest in Washington over the weekend.
Read MoreIt would be nice to base the antipodes build off a more recent nightly so you don't get the error message when using the Media VP beta release.
One thing I noticed was the build reversed my throttle and bank on the joystick (Logitech Extreme 3D Pro). The other thing I noticed was if you disconnected the joystick during the game and then re-plugged it in it would not redetect the joystick. I sometimes reset the joystick by doing this if it isn't exactly centered.
It seems to recognize everything well, the only thing that is an annoyance in my opinion is the way it handles the triggers.
float bankAxis = (bankLeftAxisValue*0.5f) - (bankRightAxisValue*0.5f);
the first issue comes from the fact that fs2 dates back to the days of yore when gameports were still the standard interface. and back then completely different axis designations were used (x,y,throttle/z,rudder/r). there were really named after whatever the driver decided to name them. usb sticks are usually based of an hid class from the usb specifications, and they used different axis names. d3d had its own names and so does sdl. none of them are anywhere near compatible. when it comes right down to it, its a binding issue, i dont see it being too much trouble to tweak your control profiles.for the second issue, you just need to have the game re-scan the system for joysticks. this is probibly only being done once at start up, you just need to have this done either at a regular interval (every few seconds), or perhaps when you enter the control config screen. if you needed to unplug or replug a joystick while in game, you would just have to go into options and back out and the stick would be found and remapped. bind by guid instead of stick number to make sure you dont get your sticks mixed up.thats just M$ being a dick. sdl is probibly bypassing the thing in the ms driver that combines those triggers into a single axis (this was done because ms thought that all axes should be center rested). i actually combine my ch toe breaks into a single rudder axis, because my actual rudder axis is so clogged with dirt it makes this annoying grating sound when used. this might be solved with a 3rd party utility (ppjoy, anything based on vJoy, etc) in a similar way. the other way to fix this is by letting you combine axes in the game, its not really hard to do but would be somewhat hard to mesh that into the existing interface. perhaps use half axis binds as an alternative to full axis binds (like bank left axis, bank right axis). assuming the axis are mapped out to a -1.0f to 1.0f range, axis merging should looks something like this:there arent really a whole lot of cases where you would need this though.A student selected to introduce Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at his local election launch has quit a senior post in a university Labour group after the discovery that she had made a series of racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic social media posts.
Undergraduate Bethany Barker was the general secretary of Nottingham Labour Students when she welcomed Mr. Corbyn onto the stage in Newark last month.
She stepped down from her post on Tuesday after it emerged she has referred to the “n*gger race”, described a skull cap as a “Jew cap”, and said would “black myself up” on Twitter.
Nottingham Labour Students condemned Miss Barker, who insisted the statements, made between 2012 and 2014, did not represent her views.
Miss Barker was praised by Mr. Corbyn after introducing him to the stage and posed for a selfie with Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner at the event, which was also attended by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Deputy Leader Tom Watson.
Mr. Corbyn said: “Thank you for that introduction Bethany and for all that you do in mobilising our student members in Nottinghamshire.”
In a tweet from 2013, Miss Barker wrote: “I cooked brandon chicken and rice, supporting the n*gger race.”
Days earlier, she posted another message saying: “I hate bbc one, f*cking c*nts black f*cking b*tch I hate everyone #mayday.”
Nottingham Labour Students responded in a statement: “At 2.35pm [on Tuesday] we were made aware of a series of tweets which Bethany Barker had made on a deleted personal Twitter account, which were of a racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic nature from 2012-14.”
Miss Barker also made a statement, saying: “As some of you may have seen on Twitter, some screenshots have resurfaced about what [I] have said in the past. I’m absolutely horrified and beyond disgusted about [sic] these tweets and they are in no representative of the views I hold now.
“I have no recollection of writing these tweets and I am unequivocally sorry for the shadow [that] has been brought over our society because of it. These views are in no way with what I align with today and am beyond upset that I could ever say such things.
“This society has meant so much to me since [I] started university and the Labour Party has been held so strongly in my heart since [I] have been a part of it.”In April alone, there have been more than 140 reported cases so far, though MacKay warns that information about the cases is incomplete at best and it has been difficult for experts to get exact figures on the spread of the virus.
"We need the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirate's health authorities to take the stage and help us understand what's going on," said MacKay. "In 2014 so far we've had more cases than in all of 2013."
Over the last 30 days, MERS cases in Saudi Arabia have swelled from one to three daily to more than 10 reported cases each day, according to Ian MacKay, an associate professor at the Australia Infectious Diseases Research Centre at The University of Queensland. The first cases were reported in Jeddah and then spread to other areas around the country, raising alarm over how the royal kingdom will contain a virus for which no known treatment exists.
Saudi Arabia has been accused by health care experts of obscuring information about an outbreak of the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), after a surge in reported cases of the virus this month.
Saudi officials have refused to confirm whether their tests suggest that the virus is mutating leading to greater human-to-human infection rates, and will not even comment on whether such tests have been conducted. A statement released by the World Health Organization confirmed that they were not receiving timely data on the spread of MERS, as they did not have the latest infection count. On their website they advise, " WHO encourages all Member States to continue their surveillance for severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) and to carefully review any unusual patterns."
Saudi Arabia has done little to answer criticism that it is mishandling a potential health crisis. On Monday, Saudi Health Minister Abdullah al-Rabiah was dismissed just days after visiting hospitals in Jeddah to calm public panic over the spread of the virus. His replacement was photographed days later appearing in hospitals, but without the surgical goggles virologists recommend to help prevent the spread of the virus.
MacKay said that concerns the virus had mutated were based on two clusters, one in Jeddah and the other in Abu Dhabi. He said that the outbreaks could be based on poor infection control and prevention protocols among health care workers, or that Saudi Arabia could be experiencing a mutation that makes human-to-human infection spread more widely. Until now, health professionals have argued that camels transmit MERS more easily to humans than humans do to one another, but that could be changing.
"There is too little virological information. An emerging virus is called that because it's still 'finding its way' in a new host. Right now the MERS-CoV's natural host seems to be the camel and then it makes forays into humans when conditions are right. Each and every time it does that there is a chance for the virus to evolve to become better at replicating in and transmitting from humans instead of camels. Because of that, an emerging virus needs to be carefully watched and that is done by gene or genome sequencing," said MacKay.
In an interview with NPR earlier this week, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said that once a virus readily transmits to humans, there is greater concern for a worldwide outbreak.
"It took us over a year to get the first hundred cases of this viral infection," Osterholm told NPR. "Now in just the last two weeks, we've had a hundred cases.... There's a major change occurring that cannot just be attributed to better case detection. Something's happening."
Yemen, Malaysia, the Philippines and Greece also reported their first cases last week, all linked to travelers from the Gulf.
Concerns voiced by global health professionals have been mounting as Saudi Arabia approaches the Hajj the first week of October. More than one million Muslims travel to Saudi Arabia each year to visit Mecca during the holy pilgrimage, in past years they have come from 188 countries. Virologists fear that unless Saudi Arabia takes great steps to ensure that they have contained and studied the MERS by October, it could be risking spreading the virus globally.LSU’s plans to open a beer garden inside Tiger Stadium may have to be put on hold, as it doesn’t appear the SEC will reverse its ban on alcohol inside stadiums anytime soon.
According to a TuscaloosaNews.com report, commissioner Greg Sankey stated on Monday that the conference will stick with its current no-alcohol policy:
“The conference has a policy that says that we’re not selling alcohol in the general seating area,” Sankey said. “Now, you can agree or disagree with that policy, but that’s the policy. The basis for changing that or maintaining it is one that’s developed in the conversation.”
Some have made the argument that allowing alcohol sales would increase attendance, as it has for several other schools in other conferences, but Sankey said that logic doesn’t work in the SEC:
“I think we were at like 98 percent ticket sales in football,” he said. “So is that one-percent margin a trade that we’re going to make?”
Sankey did say that he’s open to conversation on the topic in the future, but was quick to caution that a discussion wouldn’t necessarily guarantee change.
So, for now at least, it sounds like SEC fans will have to continue to drink their alcohol in the parking lots prior to kickoff.She went, however; and when they reached the farm, and she was to be put down, at the end of the broad, neat gravel walk, which led between espalier appletrees to the front door, the sight of every thing which had given her so much pleasure the autumn before, was beginning to revive a little local agitation; and when they parted, Emma observed her to be looking around with a sort of fearful curiosity, which determined her not to allow the visit to exceed the proposed quarter of an hour.
Once a kite, hovering over the garden, made a stoop at me, and if I had not resolutely drawn my hanger, and run under a thick espalier, he would have certainly carried me away in his talons.
The soldier seated himself on a worm-eaten bench, and saw neither the trellis-work nor the espaliers, nor the vegetables of which Jacquotte took such great care.
While this monument was under inspection our interesting couple had the house to themselves, and they spent some time on a pretty terrace where certain windows of the second floor opened--a little rootless verandah which overhung, in a manner, obliquely, all the magnificence of the view; the immense sweep of the river, the artistic plantations, the last-century garden with its big box hedges and remains of old espaliers.
Called espalier (pronounced ess-PAL-yay), this system is a fancy French name for a fairly straightforward process: training woody plants to grow flat, so they take only a very narrow bite out of your yard.
Finish pruning apple trees that are fan, cordon or espalier.
Tenders are invited for Construction of Y shape Trellis & Espalier Training System in Peach at ICAR Res.
the young teen saving the recalcitrant stallion, the espalier of barn
Espalier Fruit Trees: For Wall, Hedge, and Pergola: Installation, Shaping, Care
Prune espalier and cordon-grown apple and pear trees.
The Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation presents the 4th annual Summer Fruit Festival and Espalier Symposium from 8:30 a.M.I.C. Gadget has gotten their hands on a leather iPad 2 case that has reportedly been testing against an actual iPad 2, not a mold, mockup, or prototype. Above is a video of their hands-on with the case. The case is not only the first upscale, leather one we have seen but does present a couple new pieces of information about the iPad 2’s design. The camera hole present on this new case not only reaffirms our SDK findings that the iPad 2 will include a back camera, but does show the lens to be roughly the same size as the iPhone 4’s. This does not really mean the iPad 2 will have the same camera as the iPhone 4, though.
Even more interesting, this new case shows that the iPad 2 could potentially have a slightly smaller design. This goes well with our iPad 2 screen protectors that show a slightly narrower design for the device. This case also reaffirms what we have heard about the iPad 2’s design thus far. It shows tapered edges, a flat back, and space for what many have determined as a larger speaker grill.
Perhaps the most interesting piece of information from the report is that 120,000 of these cases have been shipped to the United States for sale by a “famous case company.” We think a “famous” case company would only order 120,000 pieces if they were 100% confident in the designs. Check out some of the case company’s promotional images of the case, after the break, to get a feel for the iPad 2’s tapered design.There’s no reason vegans can’t enjoy Halloween as much as everyone else. Sure, most of the foods commonly associated with All Hallows’ Eve aren’t vegan friendly, but it’s easy enough to make your own vegan treats at home – it’s also healthier and cheaper. That’s why we’ve rounded up 31 of the spookiest vegan halloween recipes we could find online. These plant-based goodies are creative, fun, festive, and tasty – everything you’d want to throw the perfect cruelty-free Halloween party. Enjoy!
31 Vegan Halloween Recipes to Scare the Hell Out of Omnivores
#1. Spooky Vegan Jello Shots
Get the recipe here.
#2. Halloween Meltaway Candy Pops
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#3. Back to Life Magic Potion
Get the recipe here.
#4. Mummy Veggie Dogs
Get the recipe here.
#5. Chocolate Pumpkin Cups
Get the recipe here.
#6. Creepy Crawly Sugar Cookies
Get the recipe here.
#7. Copycat Almond Joy Candy Bars
Get the recipe here.
#8. Pumpkin Mousse Tarts with Chocolate Ganache Glaze
Get the recipe here.
#9. Pumpkin Patties
Get the recipe here.
#10. Frankenstein Guacamole Cups
Get the recipe here.
#11. Bloody Falafel Fingers
Get the recipe here.
#12. Eyeball Ravioli
Get the recipe here.
#13. Boo-Berry Bats
Get the recipe here.
#14. Halloween Cat Tart Recipe
#15. Orange Cream Filled Chocolates
Get the recipe here.
#16. Peanut Butter Spiders
Get the recipe here.
#17. Two-Ingredient Chocolate Lollibats
Get the recipe here.
#18. Spiderweb Pumpkin Chocolate Muffins
Get the recipe here.
#19. Meatless Stuffed Jack-O’-Lantern Peppers
Get the recipe here.
#20. Halloween Cosmopolitan
Get the recipe here.
#21. Vegan Red Velvet Skull Cakes
Get the recipe here.
#22. Halloween Rusty Tombstone Treats
Get the recipe here.
#23. Halloween Pumpkin Cookies
Get the recipe here.
#24. Arachnophobia Cookies
Get the recipe here.
#25. Vegan Biscoff Coconut Caramel Apples
Get the recipe here.
#26. Raw Vegan Butterfinger Candy Bars
Get the recipe here.
#27. Homemade Vegan Halloween Oreos
Get the recipe here.
#28. Vegan Halloween Carrot Cakes with Witchy Green Avocado Buttercream
Get the recipe here.
#29. Raw Caramel Apples
Get the recipe here.
#30. Vegan Green Goo Magic Shell
Get the recipe here.
#31. Raw Candy Skull Crushers
Get the recipe here.In case you don't mark your calendar solely by events related to Batman -- which is increasingly difficult since Year One was 22 years before Zero Year, with Zero Hour somewhere in between -- you might need a friendly reminder that DC has declared July 23 to be Batman Day, part of its celebration of 75 years of the Dark Knight. To mark the occasion, the publisher's putting out a free special edition of Detective Comics #27, containing material from both the 1939 original and the New 52 offering from earlier this year.
What makes this issue really significant, however, is that to my knowledge, it's the first time Batman's co-creator, Bill Finger, has received a cover credit for the original Batman story.
Finger is, of course, the writer of the earliest Batman comics, whose contributions to the creation of the Dark Knight include the costume and color scheme, the origin story, the lack of superpowers, the words "Batmobile" and "Gotham City," Robin, the Joker, and numerous other elements. Unfortunately, due to some legal trickery by his collaborator and actual supervillain Bob Kane, Finger's never been officially identified with a "Batman created by" credit in any published works or films or other Batman media.
In recent years, Finger's contributions as a writer have been acknowledged in some story credits, but since he died in 1974, long before creators were acknowledged on the covers of comics, this version of the very first Batman story, "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," marks what we believe is the first time that his name has appeared on a cover alongside his creation, and most definitely in connection with this original work.
Of course, Finger's name is still underneath Kane's, but, well, baby steps.
In addition to the two stories from the two different Detective Comics #27s ( Detectives Comics? Detective Comicses? ), the latter of which is a re-telling of the original by Identity Crisis writer Brad Meltzer and Ultimates artist Bryan Hitch, the new edition features material from Batman writer Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy and some design work by Chip Kidd.
Concurrently, DC has released a timeline poster documenting some of the most notable milestones in Batman's 75-year history:
Click for full-size
I don't want to nitpick it too much since it is a pretty nice timeline -- especially with that piece of art by Greg Capullo with amazing coloring by FCO Plascencia -- but it does leave out some pretty major events. I mean, how come "That time Batman threw the car battery" isn't listed under 1988? And how could Chip Kidd miss the debut of Batman's most important arch-enemy, the KGBeast?
Detective Comics #27 Special Edition will be given away for free at participating bookstores and comic shops around the country on July 23.A viral video shows a group of conservative Fordham University students in New York City being kicked out of a campus coffeehouse after being told their pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” hats violated the shop’s “safe space” policy.
"Fox & Friends" aired on Sunday a portion of the video, which shows the group being told, “I don’t want people like you supporting this club.”
The video was shot Thursday at Fordham’s student-run Rodrigue’s Coffee House.
“No one here wants people like you supporting our club,” a Rod’s student volunteer employee is heard saying. “I’m giving you 5 minutes.”
She goes on to say, “You are threatening the integrity of our club. This is a community standard. You are wearing hats that completely violate safe space policy. You have to take if off or you have to go.”
Fordham junior Aaron Spring, 20, says he just wanted a cup of coffee.
“I didn’t make any noise,” he said, according to "Fox & Friends." “I wasn’t rude. I didn’t curse at anybody. I was just sitting enjoying a cup of coffee with friends.”
The video was first shown by Campus Reform. It has been viewed more than 67,000 times as of Sunday.
The website reported that Spring and his pals were given a handout titled “Rodrigue’s Coffee Shop has a safer space policy,” prohibiting racism, sexism and homophobia and urging patrons to be mindful of the ways in which their words and actions can impact others.
A Fordham spokesman told Fox News in a statement Sunday that there is no such policy on campus.
“There is no University safe space policy, nor one that excludes any members of the Fordham community from any public spaces on the basis of their political views,” spokesman Bob Howe said.
He said Fordham is a community that values diverse opinions, and in which students should disagree with one another in a civil fashion.
Howe said Fordham is investigating the incident.Courtesy of Rick Town
Seated comfortably more than 30,000 feet off the ground, Rick Town Sr. and his son Ricky Town were on their way back to Los Angeles after the latest recruiting camp trek. As they settled in for the journey home, the latest in a long line of sales pitches started without warning. This one came from an unfamiliar source.
"Ricky, we need you at Alabama," the man said with complete and utter desperation, hoping to make the most of this unexpected encounter. "I’m not joking; we need you. Sign your name here."
This was no coach or recruiter. This was a flight attendant who just so happened to work the charter flights for the Alabama football team. After he asked Ricky about the USC logo printed across his chest, he soon learned that he was speaking with one of the nation’s elite high school quarterbacks—who just so happened to be a former Crimson Tide commit—and his father.
The document he wanted Ricky to sign was a blank piece of paper, presumably some sort of impromptu national letter of intent. Ricky, 100 percent committed to USC, signed the paper with a smile as he and his father enjoyed this strange, but memorable, recruiting attempt.
"He asked us if we missed Lane Kiffin, then he showed pictures of coaches and players," Town Sr. said, laughing as he rehashed the story. "He was friendly and polite, and he did it for three-and-a-half hours. We had a blast."
Rick Town Sr. has a first-class seat to one of the most unique voyages in the sporting universe. He is the father of the nation’s No. 6 player in the class of 2015, according to 247Sports’ composite ranking. He is also a CEO of a land development company in Los Angeles—a position he has held for 15 years—and a former Division II football player.
He is remarkably sharp in both business and football, something that becomes evident after only a few minutes of conversation. It is natural but also calculated, and Town Sr. is no stranger to speaking about the process. He has spoken to parents at various recruiting camps, providing insight for others in a similar position seeking guidance.
He refers to recruiting as "the business," and also uses "Coach" to describe the various football people he is discussing. He is pro, and yet, he can’t help sounding like Charlie in the chocolate factory every now and then.
"I’ve gotten to meet Coach [Mack] Brown, Coach [Nick] Saban and other amazing coaches that are also amazing people," Town Sr. said. "My favorite part of this process, without question, has been getting to know these personalities and also seeing the storied programs and their stadiums."
The reason Town Sr. has gotten to enjoy these football palaces and become acclimated with legend after legend is that his son happens to be one of the most gifted quarterback prospects in the country.
At 6'4" and 205 pounds, Ricky Town already has the build of an NFL QB and the speed—right around the 4.6-second 40 range—of most gifted high school running backs.
Although he battled injuries during his junior season at St. Bonaventure in California, he is projected as a top-flight quarterback at the college level and perhaps beyond.
"Our analysts like Ricky Town because he's a complete quarterback," said 247Sports’ National Recruiting Director JC Shurburtt. "He has size, good arm strength and is incredibly accurate. We also value what he can do in pads in a full-speed game in a pro-style offense, which is a testament to his decision-making ability. He's a cool customer against pressure and excellent at reading defenses."
Although his physical gifts are what many will cite first, it's his mental approach that has coaches excited.
"Ricky's football acumen is extremely high," Town Sr. said. "I know that's coming from a dad, however this and his maturity have been the biggest attraction to college offensive coordinators and head coaches."
It’s this total package that has had coaches lining up to speak to the golden-armed California wunderkind. And when they can't speak with him, chances are they're destroying the Towns' mailbox in an effort to make an impression.
They’ve been doing so for quite a while.
"He received 125 letters on the first day colleges could send them," Town Sr. said. "He’s probably received between 7 to 10,000 letters in total. It’s unbelievable. He has boxes and boxes of them."
The road from promising high school quarterback with size to can’t-miss, 5-star prospect is one that you would think takes time. The reality of recruiting in its current form, however, is not the case.
Once word gets out, it’s out. From that point, the process takes over and the mail, text messages and phone calls begin to pour in.
"When Miami offered him, it quickly followed with UCLA," Town Sr. said. "His film really started to hit after that and he played in a couple of televised games. It was within six months that it really started to escalate."
Like anything else, all good things come with their downsides. In the instance of Ricky, the interest led to more camps, interactions and response.
His strengths and weaknesses have been (and will continue to be) dissected. And while the feedback is both respected and appreciated, it can become difficult to process everything over the long haul.
"Imagine trying to take golf lessons from dozens of different coaches a year, each with their own ideas on how to create the perfect swing," Town Sr. said when assessing the feedback. "While you love to hear knowledgeable coaches helping your son, this can be difficult for someone who is still maturing and learning a complex position to process."
Feedback is only a part of the 5-star treatment. Interest and a newfound celebrity status is another. It’s twisted to view high school juniors as celebrities, but as recruiting becomes more a part of the national spotlight, that’s exactly what they are.
Image via 247Sports
It’s not something all players (and families) are ready for, but it’s something the Towns have been ably handling from a very early stage. There’s a support system in place—a "process" to steal a Saban term—although it doesn’t hurt to be ready for everything thrown your way.
"It was really about getting him grounded and balanced early on, but he does a real good job doing that himself," Town Sr. said. "But I’d say for the past two months, he’s had to readjust because so much has gone on."
Knowing when to get involved and when Ricky should steer the ship was a balance the two learned together. While recent national signing day nightmares have shown us just how disconnected players and their parents can be—look at Alex Collins and Malik McDowell, for starters—that has not been the case here.
There’s guidance at first, as you would hope, but Town Sr. has not wanted to be the focus. In fact, his role—at least on the communication front—has mainly centered around introductions.
"Once we established a relationship, my role diminished greatly," Town Sr. said on being the point of contact between Ricky and coaches. "Having my son grow the relationships was more important than anything I could possibly say or do. It was really building the bridge and letting Ricky cross it."
When it came to actually dissecting schools and offers, however, the Towns worked together. They set up criteria—putting nearly 20 years of CEO influence to good use. They formed plans going into visits, saw what they wanted to see and tried to separate themselves from the countless salesmen they encountered.
That might sound easy, but it’s not, at least not for most. College football coaches are some of the most convincing people on the planet, and recruits—along with their families—can be charmed after a two-minute conversation. It’s a coach’s job to do so.
"So many people asked me about coaches and recruiters and if you can trust them," Town Sr. said. "I try and tell them, politely, it doesn’t really apply. You have your own criteria and agenda and it doesn’t matter if they’re telling the truth. You need to dig into their system, get beyond the recruiters to your position coach and see how you relate. But more importantly, you need to learn how you relate to the system and the culture.”
That’s where USC comes in, the ultimate fit for the Towns in every way imaginable.
Image via 247Sports
When Steve Sarkisian was hired, one of the first orders of business was to pursue Ricky Town— |
How is this mismatch possible? The chorus of “Rigamortis”at first to be no different, because it lasts for 12 bars. What Kendrick innovates here in a way few other musicians have before is in just how his rap over those 12 bars interacts with the musical accompaniment behind it.How is this mismatch possible? In order to keep track of all of these moving parts, we’ll consider the following lines to be the first refrain, called Refrain 1, and say that multiple refrains add up to 1 full, 12-bar chorus during this song. You can hear “Rigamortis” here. In the below transcription, brackets [ ] surround the start and end of sentences, and the slashes / indicate where each succeeding bar stops before the next one begins.
These exact lines below occur at 0:21, 0:59, 1:26, 1:36, 2:31, and 2:42, and last 4 bars:
[got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll / crack the egg in your basket, you / bastard] [i’m marilyn manson, don’t / ask for your favorite rapper] Below is the second refrain, Refrain 2. These exact lines occur at 1:31, 1:42, and 2:36, and also last 4 bars: [he dead] / [amen] / [he dead] / [amen] / When you combine these 2 refrains, the entire 12-bar chorus that happens at 1:26 and 2:42 is this. It’s Refrain 2 + Refrain 1 + Refrain 2. [he dead] / [amen] / [he dead] / [amen] / [got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll / crack the egg in your basket, you / bastard] [i’m marilyn manson] [don’t / ask for your favorite rapper] / [he dead] / [amen] / [he dead] / [amen] / However, the real chorus doesn’t appear until an unusually long time into the song, at 1:26. That’s because the first time the listener hears these lines it is in a far different musical structure than that more traditional, 12-bar chorus chorus. The first time a listener hears Refrain 1, it is in the varied form of what we can call Refrain 1B, at 0:13: [got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll / crack the egg in your basket you / bastard] [i’m marilyn manson with / madness] [now just imagine the / magic i light to asses] [don’t / ask for your favorite rapper] Kendrick has now inserted a new line in the middle of Refrain 1. He’s added, “…with madness, now just imagine the magic I light to asses.” This makes refrain 1 not 4 bars long, but 6 bars long. Why did Kendrick do this? Put another way, why does this new refrain not just work, but work well? The key is that those opening 6 bars just quoted start 10 bars into the song. “But wait!” Yes? “Neither those 6 bars or 10 bars are a multiple of 4 bars that you said every rap section is made out of!” Ah! You’ve got me. But what’s 6 bars plus 10 bars? “Enough happy hours to put Bobby McFerrin out of business!” Yes! But also…16 bars. Which is a multiple of four. On the one hand, Kendrick could have repeated Refrain 1 in the exactly correct way so that it lasted only 4 bars. But that would have left his rap ending at bar 14. This is a problem because the musical loop behind him — made up of those melodically spiraling jazz instruments — is 4 bars long, so he would’ve ended the opening of the song halfway through his loop, which would sound awkward without some kind of explicit support (like a beat drop) from the musical accompaniment. On the other hand, Kendrick could’ve again repeated Refrain 1 exactly and started at bar 8 or 12, which would line up the end of his opening with the end of his rap. But this would have been really, really boring, because that’s what 99.99% of other musicians do. So he decided to do what was on the other-other hand, and balance the 16 bars into 10 bars of an instrumental intro, plus the 6 bars of a slightly modulated Refrain 1. This is so musically groundbreaking that if all of my dozens of articles could be summarized in short, I would need only those 16 bars. That relationship that’s just been described — the one between the lines of Kendrick’s verse and the lines of his chorus — is what drives this entire song, in a way that previously seemed impossible in rap. This is the core musical game that Kendrick is playing throughout this entire song.
If you want to hear how, check out part 2 of this article here. *If you want more stuff like this — exclusive articles, sneak peeks of upcoming posts, excerpts from a book I’m writing — sign up for a weekly newsletter here.
Also, if you liked this article, you might enjoy these other ones, which are among my most popular:
1.) An analysis of Nas’ flow on the 2006 Busta Rhymes song “Don’t Get Carried Away,” which you can read here.
2.) My album review & analysis of the 2012 Kendrick Lamar album “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” which you can read here.
3.) A database of who the 23 most repetitive rappers in the industry are, available here.
4.) A study of every instrument Dr. Dre used on his songs between the years 2000 and 2009, online here.
5.) A breakdown of Eminem’s song “Business,” which you can check out here.This issue: Contents Tuesday, September 8th, 2015 Editor’s Note
WCHS News: “Pro Wrestling in Minnesota” Program
WCHS News: Fall Membership Dinner Meeting
What Is This Thing?!
Old News: Stealing the Front Page
Featured Article: The Infamous Younger Brothers Editor’s Note Happy September everybody! The summer months are over, the classrooms are full once again, and I even saw a few trees showing their fall colors…but there’s still plenty going on here at WCHS! Grab a metal folding chair and check out today’s first News Story to get all the info about our pro-wrestling program coming up this weekend! Be sure to get your reservation for our Fall Membership Meeting, learn how in our second News Story. After filling you in on the latest WCHS news, we’ll wander back into the massive WCHS artifact collection to take a look at another mystery object for today’s “What Is This Thing?!” Yesterday marked the 139th anniversary of the Northfield Bank Raid. This attempted robbery left four men dead and marked the end of the one of the most well-known “Wild West”-style gangs of American history. The rest of today’s Historical Messenger will focus on the Younger brothers. We’ll start by reading the initial reports of the attack on Northfield from the next day’s newspaper in today’s Old News and finish by taking a more in-depth look at the raid and its aftermath in today’s Featured Article. Want to learn more about the history of Washington County? “Like” WCHS on Facebook and follow us on Twitter! Sean Pallas Historical Messenger editor and Warden’s House Site Manager [email protected] WCHS News Pro Wrestling in Minnesota Program Join former American Wrestling Association (AWA) commentator Mick Karch and George Schire, author of “Minnesota’s Golden Age of Wrestling” on Sunday, September 13th, 2015 at 2:00 PM at the Warden’s House Museum for a free program covering the long relationship between Minnesota and pro wrestling. Minnesota’s professional wrestling history can be traced back to the 1950s with the founding of the AWA. Mad Dog Vachon, Verne Gagne, The Crusher, and of course, Jesse Venture are just some of the Minnesotan names to impact the pro wrestling world. Whether you are a current pro wrestling fan or have cherished childhood memories of screaming at your television, this program will be filled with rich history and stories from the “Golden Age” of Minnesota wrestling. This free and open to the public presentation will be held at the Warden’s House Museum which is located at 602 Main Street N., Stillwater, MN. Please contact Sean Pallas at [email protected] or 651-439-5956 with any questions regarding this event or to schedule a tour of the museum. More: Events WCHS News Fall Membership Dinner Meeting The Washington County Historical Society is excited to have Author Denis Gardner as the featured speaker at the Fall History Dinner meeting to be held on Thursday, September 24th at the Lowell Inn Banquet Hall in Stillwater. Gardner, an award-winning historian who has documented properties for the National Register of Historic Places and the Historic American Engineering Record, authored the book, “Wood, Concrete, Stone & Steel: Minnesota’s Historic Bridges” in 2008. Through arresting photographs and lively narrative, Gardner makes a compelling argument for the value of preserving our bridges and the cultural heritage they carry and brings to life their importance in Minnesota’s past, present and future. In Washington County, Gardner will touch on the significance of many of the crossings that dot the landscape and tell the vital history of Minnesota’s most historic county. From the Stone Bridge in Stillwater Township to the old Spiral Bridge in Denmark Township to Stillwater’s historic Lift Bridge to the “Dillinger Bridge” in St. Paul Park, he will tell our story through the history of Washington County Bridges. Richard Moe, the President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said of Gardner’s book that it “reminds us that bridges have played a significant role in Minnesota’s history.” Moe continued by saying that Gardner “tells the compelling story of the visionary people, historic events, and technological advances that helped make Minnesota the special place we know and cherish.” The event is open to the public. Cost for the dinner and program is $20 for WCHS Members and $25 for Non-Members. The Lowell Inn Banquet Center is located at 102 North Second Street and there is parking available in the city parking ramp next to the facility. The evening will begin at 5:30 with a social hour, dinner at 6:30 and the business meeting will be at 7:30 PM. Mr. Gardner’s presentation will be after the short business meeting. Reservations are required. To make reservations or for more information about the event please call 651-439-5956 or visit www.wchsmn.org. What is This Thing?! What Is This Thing?! (Round 16) Last issue’s What Is This Thing?! comes straight from the horrors of pre-20th century dentistry! These dental forceps were manufactured by the Noyes Bros & Cutler company which operated out of St. Paul and was the largest wholesale drug company in the Midwest. This particular model appeared in their 1888 company catalogue and cost between $2.00 and $2.25 a pair. As you can probably tell, these were used in tooth extraction and 1888 is definitely before the era of Novocaine…and that finger grip on the shorter handle shows they really yanked those teeth out of their patients’ faces with some force! Yesh! As always, thank you everyone for participating and congratulations to everyone who correctly identified this intimidating medical device! Can you identify the WCHS artifact photographed above? If you’d care to venture an answer, you can send an email to me at [email protected], tweet @WCHSMN, or post your guess on our Facebook page. Good luck! Full Image Old News Stealing the Front Page Typically the front page of the Stillwater Messenger was reserved for re-prints of national newstories from other papers. I usually have to dig to page 3 before I find any sort of local reports. However, the intensity of the Northfield Raid had thrust the encounter onto the national stage. The name “Heywood” would be read in homes across the country. In the normally quiet rural bank at Northfield, a party of former Confederate soldiers had murdered Joseph Heywood, a man who had served opposite his killers as a corporal for the Union. As the details of Heywood’s death circulated the country, an outpouring of support and donations made their way to Heywood’s widow and young daughter. In the following months, the family received almost $13,000 (around a quarter million in 2015 dollars). Stillwater Messenger – September 8, 1876 One of the boldest attempts at robbery ever made in this country took place at Northfield, Minnesota, about two o’clock yesterday afternoon. Eight powerful men, heavily armed, rode into the place at intervals during the forenoon from the same direction upon unusually fine horses. At the hour named a squad of them entered the First National Bank and commanded the cashier to open the safe, which he steadfastly refused, preserving its contents with his life. Several shots had been fired at random in the streets previous to this, and a crowd assembling, one of the robbers shot the cashier, Mr. Heywood, in the head, killing him instantly, when the band decamped, two being killed on their flight and two wounded. The robbers are supposed to have gone into the Big Woods southeast of Northfield. A large force of men started in pursuit, and it is hardly probably that they will escape. Through the sublime heroism of Mr. Heywood the bank and depositors were preserved from loss. His death at his post of duty is a sad calamity, as he was one of the most highly esteemed citizens of Northfield. If lynching is ever justifiable it will be if these desperadoes are captured. Featured Article The Infamous Younger Brothers by Sean Pallas It doesn’t matter that Bob Dylan left Minnesota as soon as he could; you’ll still see a “Bob Dylan Way” in Duluth and a newly finished mural in downtown Minneapolis celebrating the musician. When aviator Charles Lindburg moved away from his boyhood home, he only returned to the property on a single occasion, yet, the town of Little Falls, Minnesota maintains the home in shrine-like fashion. Here in Minnesota we’re a bit obssessed with the famous folk who were born or lived in our communities. Even if they didn’t exactly call our city ‘home’ by choice… The core group of the James-Younger gang were comprised of two sets of brothers; Frank and Jesse James and Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger. The group had bonded years prior while serving together in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. After the war, the gang robbed a series of trains and carriages across the South and enjoyed a “Robin Hood”-esque reputation among the bitter defeated Southern states. However, on September 7th, 1876 the gang had set their targets a bit northward. Through half-whispers and rumors, the outlaws believed that General Adelbert Ames had recently deposited $50,000 into the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota. Until recently, General Ames had been the hated military governor of the Younger’s homestate of Missouri. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation would not be created for another 50 years meaning that any money stolen from physical banks were simply gone. The lack of any sort of robbery insurance would ensure General Ames would feel every penny of his missing $50,000. Shortly before noon on that Thursday morning, Jesse James, Frank James, Thomas “Cole” Younger, Jim Younger, Bob Younger, Charlie Pitts, Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell were sitting around a table at a local eatery near the town’s mill. The gang shared a meal of fried eggs and according to later testimony, smelling heavily of alcohol. Over the next few hours, the gang trickled into town to avoid raising suspicion. In a moment of historic irony, Cole even found himself passing Gen. Ames himself on the street. The would-be bank robber, recalled tossing the General a sarcastic greeting before making his way into the town center. The James brothers along with Bob Younger burst into the bank, quickly taking command of the frightened employees. The remainder of the gang were either guarding the doors of the bank or securing the group’s escape route across the town’s bridge. So far the plan had gone without a hitch…but suddenly, the entire operation stalled. What ideally should have taken brief seconds was turning into minutes. Inside the bank, the robbers were growing increasingly frustrated at cashier Joseph Heywood’s refusal to open the safe. And outside, the citizens of Northfield began taking notice of the commotion. Hardware store owner J.S. Allen saw the armed men through a bank window and instead of adding him to their pool of hostages, gang member Clell Miller made the fateful decision to instead sternly suggest that Allen should continue down the street minding his own business. The cool-headed man immediately raised the alarm once he was out of the gang’s sight. Within moments, the whole street had turned into a warzone. Sharpshooting Northfield men made their way to every window and rooftop, quickly seizing the advantage against the outnumbered raiders. Both sides drew blood from one another. Out of spite, Heywood had been slashed by a knife and then shot in the head by one of the Jameses. In the confusion and crossfire, another bystander, Nicholas Gustavson, had been gunned down as well. Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell were dead in the dust and all of the Youngers were sporting mild to serious gunshot wounds. After barely escaping the disaster, the surviving robbers decided to split their party into two portions. The James boys would flee in one direction and the three Youngers and Charlie Pitts in another. Mr. Pitts selected the wrong travelling companions. On September 21st, the hundreds of Minnesotans who were now hunting the fugitives managed to track the three Youngers and Pitts a swamp outside of Medelia. After another brief but intense firefight – Pitts was dead and as Cole Younger later described, the three brothers had been “shot to pieces.” The photograph above was taken shortly after the Younger’s capture. You can see Cole’s eye swelled shut due to a bullet lodged underneath his skin. Jim had taken a shot to through his lip into the roof of his mouth that would cause him constant pain for the remainder of his life. A few weeks later, the Youngers would begin their 25 year stay at the Minnesota State Prison in Stillwater and unwittingly secure their position as Stillwater’s most famous residents.
Upcoming Events 9/13 Four Lights and a Ring: Pro Wrestling in Minnesota – George Schire, author & Mick Karch, former AWA commentator, Warden’s House Museum @ 2:00 PM – FREE 9/24 Fall Membership Meeting – Denis Gardner, author, Lowell Inn Banquet Hall, @ 5:30- 9:00 PM – $20 for members, $25 for non-members. Reservations Required 9/27 Hay Lake Photography Exhibition – Marilyn Rau & Troy Schmidt, photographer, Hay Lake School @ 2:00 PM, FREE More information: WCHS Events >>> Preserve the Past, Share in the Future! Become a member of the Washington County Historical Society! Membership is one way that you can help support the Washington County Historical Society. Your membership helps us collect, preserve, and disseminate the history of Washington County for county residents and visitors in the belief that a historical perspective enhances our understanding of community and sense of place. Benefits of membership: FREE admission to the Warden’s House Museum in Stillwater and Hay Lake Museum Complex in Scandia
Discounts on purchases in the museum gift shop (10% Individual & Family members, 15% Patron & Sustaining members)
FREE use of WCHS library and research center
Subscription to Historical Whisperings, the society’s quarterly newsletter
Discounts on tickets to membership meetings
Knowing that your membership dollars support the preservation of our treasured past for generations to come The Washington County Historical Society has depended on membership ever since it was formed in 1934. Please show your support for the organization by becoming a member today. More: WCHS Membership >>> Mission Statement Washington County Historical Society collects, preserves, and disseminates the history of the county and state of Minnesota.The Blue and Gold Army is invited to travel to Hunter Stadium for free this Saturday on a dedicated Hayne Train for our Round 25 clash against the Newcastle Knights!
Thanks to Sydney Trains and the NRL, there will be a free Hayne Train service running from Stathfield Station to Broadmeadow for the game.
Up to 900 Eels Members, NRL junior pass-holders and game ticket-holders will be able to ride the express service free of charge on Saturday.
The NRL action kicks off at 3pm, and the train service will return to Sydney departing from Broadmeadow at 5.30pm after the game.
We need as many of the Blue and Gold Army as possible to show up at Hunter Stadium and cheer on the boys, so jump on the Hayne Train for free to help cheer on the Eels!
STRATHFIELD TO BROADMEADOW:
Departs Platform 3 11.19am
Hornsby 11.42am
Gosford 12.25pm
Wyong 12.42pm
Morisset 12.59pm
Broadmeadow 1.36pm
BROADMEADOW TO CENTRAL:
Departs 5.30pm
Morisset 6.03pm
Wyong 6.20pm
Gosford 6.37pm
Hornsby 7.31pm
Strathfield 7.55pm
Central 8.07pm
Please be advised there is track work scheduled for some services on the Western Line, with buses replacing trains between St Marys and Granville and Richmond and Granville, so make sure to plan ahead to make sure you arrive on time.
Tickets for the game are available from Ticketmaster - click through to get yours today!
Already booked on the Blue and Gold Army Bus?
We are also offering a dedicated coach this Saturday from Pirtek Stadium in Parramatta directly to Hunter Stadium - click through for details.
All Members and fans who have already purchased a ticket on the Blue and Gold Army bus are eligible for a refund if they would prefer to take the free train - simply contact [email protected].
What do I do if I miss the Hayne Train?
There is only ONE dedicated Hayne Train on Saturday, but don't worry, if you happen to miss it or the train is full, there are lots of other options to head to Newcastle.
Trains depart at the following times from platform 3 at Strathfield Station, arriving at Broadmeadow station:
Departs: 10.28am to arrive at 12.54pm
Departs: 11.28am to arrive at 1.44pm
Departs: 12.28pm to arrive at 2.54pm
Click through to the Transport NSW site for more information or to use the trip planner!“Beat Dallas” didn’t work out very well, despite Josh Huff’s epic 44 yard catch and run, and the Eagles need to draw an inside straight to make the playoffs — winning both remaining games, while Dallas loses at least one.
It could happen, since Dallas faces Indianapolis Sunday and the Cowboys’ star running back, DeMarco Murray, broke his hand during a long day of pummeling by Philadelphia’s tough rush defense. The Eagles face the dregs of their division, Washington on Saturday and the NY Giants after Christmas, but you can’t count on either as a guaranteed win.
Any division team is difficult to sweep, since teams know each other so well. Washington has a ton of talent, despite the colorful dysfunction that has coach Jay Gruden openly mocking various players on his squad. You’ll remember earlier in the year when he said that DeSean Jackson was not much use if less than 100%, since he’s “already a very terrible blocker.”
Keith Allison
This year, Gruden has managed to ridicule (and bench) all three of his quarterbacks, starting with Kirk Cousins. Now that Colt McCoy has gone from being signed as a free agent 3rd stringer to starting to a season-ending injury, his coach is stuck with RGIII again. He might be dangerous if the Eagles’ pass rush doesn’t recover from its poor showing against Dallas. Some people speculate that Philadelphia might pick up Griffin from Washington’s recycling pile this summer, so it could even be a sort of long form tryout for Griffin.
So how does Gruden motivate his current QB? By insulting him, of course. A month ago, just before benching Griffin, Gruden said:
“His biggest thing, he’s been coddled for so long… Some adversity is striking hard at him now, and how he reacts to that off the field, his mental state of mind, how it affects his confidence, hopefully it’s not in a negative way.”
No, why would his confidence be hurt by those comments? Wait, there was more. Griffin’s still young, right? Second year quarterback?
“He’s auditioned long enough. Clock’s ticking. He’s got to play. We want Robert to excel, we really do. But the last two games, it hasn’t been very good, anywhere. … His footwork was below average. He took three-step drops when he should have taken five. He took a one-step drop when he should have taken three, on a couple occasions, and that can’t happen. He stepped up when he didn’t have to step up, and he stepped into pressure. He read the wrong side of the field a couple times. So, from his basic performance, just critiquing Robert, it’s not even close to being good enough to what we expect from the quarterback position.”
Keith Allison
And then he benched him four days later. Now with McCoy injured and Cousins — who lit up the Eagles in game three this year — even deeper in the doghouse, Gruden is stuck with him. So is he going to make nice? No. He told NFL.com that they have to make sure RGII never has to drop back and pass if they want to win.
“It’s important for us to have success on first and second down so we don’t have to drop back and throw it 30 times a game, have a lead so we don’t have to worry about it. [Otherwise] the drop-back reads, progressions have to be accomplished, and that’s something we’re fighting through right now.”
Keith Allison
Maybe this is some kind of genius motivational reverse psychology, though Washington’s 3-11 records suggests not. What’s odd is that Griffin’s passing numbers aren’t that bad — 69.3% completion rate and 7.59 YPC, compared to only 65.6% and 8.14 YPC in his rookie of the year season.
So that’s good news for the Eagles, especially since Washington has given up the second most sacks in the NFL this year (nearly 4 a game with 53 total, compared to Philadelphia’s 25, and the Eagles are poised to feast). The bad news is that Philadelphia remains weak at both cornerback positions and one of two safeties, which won’t change this year. Dallas knew exactly how to exploit that with 3 TDs on the right side to Dez Bryant.
Defensive Coordinator Billy Davis was criticized for not doubling Bryant all game. (He did on half the passing downs.) The problem is, when they did double him, TE Jason Witten ran rampant. The veteran tight end converted three 3rd down plays on a single drive in the first quarter against Nate Allen and Malcolm Jenkins, forcing Davis to compensate. He could have switched Fletcher with another CB, but which one? Brandon Boykin and Nolan Carroll already have CB jobs in the nickel and dime packages, respectively. While they could play outside, Fletcher isn’t trained to cover their roles inside, and he’s not quick enough anyway.
Keith Allison
The reality is that the Eagles still have major holes in their talent, especially at DB and ILB. That won’t change this year, no matter what clever decisions the coaches make.
Chip Kelly invites fans to expect miracles. He does things like taking the Oregon Ducks to the national championship game even after kicking the starting quarterback off the team — in his second year ever as head coach. Last year, he turned Nick Foles — a struggling rookie 3rd rounder — into a Hall of Fame quarterback.
U.S. Marine Corps
But Kelly isn’t magic, and sometimes the results he gets are exactly what you’d expect. Foles regresses to the mean for a young 3rd round pick. A bad secondary gets abused by a very skilled QB and WR combo. A waived and much-mocked backup quarterback plays unevenly and can’t deliver in a big clutch game with everything on the line.
That’s normal. And I can live with normal. Washington, headed for its second 3-13 year in a row, shows how much worse than normal it can get. We’ve grown to expect miracles from Chip, and sometimes we just get normal football. The good news is that normal is his floor, and his ceiling is miracles.
Top photo by Matthew StaubmullerOn-loan midfielder Denilson has failed to reach an agreement with São Paulo, with whom he is on loan, and could return to Arsena this summer.
It’s likely that his return will see him sold or loaned elsewhere as Arsenal have considered him surplus to requirements for some time now. Unable to reach agreement over his sale last summer to a number of Spanish clubs, he was eventually loaned to the Brazilian side where he has had a patchy time.
Speaking to ESPN, the midfielder said, “I’d like to stay for another 6 months, but it’s not my decision. I have a contract with Arsenal and I have to stick to it. I will not be unhappy in London since returning to one of the biggest clubs in the world.”
Such optimism seems misplaced though. Already down the pecking order last summer, he’d now find himself behind Wilshere, Song, Ramsey, Rosicky, Arteta, Coquelin, and even Diaby, not to mention any further midfield signings we might make.
Which is probably why his agent is quoted as saying, “At the moment, Arsenal is demanding that the player returns. But football is unpredictable. From the talks we had, São Paulo will keep trying to extend Denilson’s loan.”
The likelihood is that Arsenal will lower their asking price for a number of players this summer in order to move them on. Denilson is one of them, with a move to Spain on the cards, along with Carlos Vela (wanted by his loan club Real Sociedad) and Nicklas Bendtner, with suggestions that the club could even allow them to leave on a free in order to get them off the wage bill and free up space in the squad.
In the meantime, Denilson wants to end his spell in Brazil on a high.
“‘We had an unbeaten sequence, playing well and with a chance of winning Copa do Brazil [similar to FA Cup] and State Championship,” he said.
“In these 2 months I have left in Brazil, I want to win both titles for the club of my heart. I think this way I’ll leave with duty accomplished with myself and the supporters, who have always been behind me’.
—
Thanks to BrazilGunners
– who you should follow for all your Brazilian Arsenal needs.Saturday, 8 August, 2015
I started coding in Rust this week, and although the language is very young, I was quickly impressed with how much it does right.
This is a list of aspects of Rust I’ve been impressed with over the past week. I won’t bother listing the language’s main selling points, as they’re already listed on the website. I’m also sure many lists like this exist already, but I’d like to have something I can point to for my own reasons to like Rust.
I’ll also add, as a bit of background, that I was previously coding in Node.js and TypeScript (among others).
I think that the overall most appealing aspect of Rust for me is that it’s a systems language that doesn’t feel like a systems language. Using it feels so much more comfortable than writing C or C++.North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervises the launching of four ballistic missiles during a recent military drill in North Korea. (AFP/Getty Images)
On the day of North Korea’s first atomic test in 2006, aides to President George W. Bush began phoning foreign capitals to reassure allies startled by Pyongyang’s surprising feat. The test, aides said, had been mostly a failure: a botched, 1-kiloton cry for attention from a regime that had no warheads or reliable delivery systems and would never be allowed to obtain them.
“The current course that they are on is unacceptable,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said publicly at the time, “and the international community is going to act.”
A decade later, that confidence has all but evaporated. After a week in which Pyongyang successfully lobbed four intermediate-range missiles into the Sea of Japan, U.S. officials are no longer seeing North Korea’s weapons tests as amateurish, attention-grabbing provocations. Instead, they are viewed as evidence of a rapidly growing threat — and one that increasingly defies solution.
Over the past year, technological advances in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs have dramatically raised the stakes in the years-long standoff between the United States and the reclusive communist regime, according to current and former U.S. officials and Korea experts. Pyongyang’s growing arsenal has rattled key U.S. allies and spurred efforts by all sides to develop new first-strike capabilities, increasing the risk that a simple mistake could trigger a devastating regional war, the analysts said.
The military developments are coming at a time of unusual political ferment, with a new and largely untested administration in Washington and with South Korea’s government coping with an impeachment crisis. Longtime observers say the risk of conflict is higher than it has been in years, and it is likely to rise further as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un seeks to fulfill his pledge to field long-range missiles capable of striking U.S. cities.
“This is no longer about a lonely dictator crying for attention or demanding negotiations,” said Victor Cha, a former adviser on North Korea to the Bush administration and the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “This is now a military testing program to acquire a proven capability.”
[How China tried to get the U.S. to negotiate with North Korea]
Pyongyang’s ambition to become an advanced nuclear-armed state is not new. North Korea began building its first reactor for making plutonium more than three decades ago. Over the years, it has shown ingenuity in increasing the range and power of a stockpile of homemade short- and medium-range missiles, all based on Soviet-era designs.
Often, in the past, the new innovations have been accompanied by demands: a clamoring for security guarantees and international respect by a paranoid and nearly friendless government that perceives its democratic neighbors as plotting its destruction. After the first atomic test in 2006, then-leader Kim Jong Il threatened to launch nuclear missiles unless Washington agreed to face-to-face talks.
North Korea has been slammed instead with ever-tighter United Nations sanctions meant to cut off access to technology and foreign cash flows. Yet, despite the trade restrictions, diplomatic isolation, threats and occasional sabotage, the country’s weapons programs have continued their upward march, goaded forward by dictators willing to sacrifice their citizens’ well-being to grow the country’s military might.
And now, in the fifth year of Kim Jong Un’s rule, progress is coming in leaps.
‘A living, breathing thing’
Pyongyang’s fifth and latest nuclear weapons test occurred on Sept. 9 on the 68th anniversary of North Korea’s founding. Seismic monitoring stations picked up vibrations from the underground blast and quickly determined that this one was exceptional.
Scientific analyses of the test determined that the new bomb’s explosive yield approached 30 kilotons, two times the force of the “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. The device was twice as powerful as the bomb North Korea tested just nine months earlier, and it was 30 times stronger than one detonated in 2006 in a remote mountain tunnel. More ominously, North Korea last March displayed a new compact bomb, one that appears small enough to fit inside the nose cone of one of its indigenously produced missiles.
Regardless of whether the miniature bomb is real or a clever prop, North Korea does finally appear to be “on the verge of a nuclear breakout,” said Robert Litwak, an expert on nuclear proliferation and director of International Security Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He said Pyongyang’s arsenal is believed to now contain as many as 20 nuclear bombs, along with enough plutonium and highly enriched uranium to make dozens more.
“When I got into this field,” Litwak said at a symposium on North Korea this month, “I couldn’t have conceived of North Korea acquiring a nuclear arsenal approaching half the size of Great Britain’s.”
The country’s missiles also have grown more sophisticated. Last year, North Korea’s military conducted the first test of a two-stage ballistic missile that uses solid fuel — a significant advance over the country’s existing liquid-fueled rockets because they can be moved easily and launched quickly. Also in 2016, North Korea broadcast images of engineers testing engines for a new class of advanced missiles with true intercontinental range, potentially putting cities on the U.S. mainland within reach.
The provocations have continued in the weeks since the inauguration of President Trump, who, just before taking office, appeared to taunt Pyongyang in a Twitter post, saying that North Korea’s plan for building intercontinental ballistic missiles “won’t happen.”
A month later, Kim launched one of the country’s new solid-
fuel missiles, interrupting Trump’s Mar-a-Lago dinner with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Last week’s coordinated launch of four intermediate-range missiles appeared intended to showcase the country’s ability to fire multiple rockets simultaneously at U.S. military bases in Japan, increasing the likelihood that some will penetrate antimissile shields.
North Korea’s state-run media has occasionally shown propaganda footage of Kim huddling with his generals over what some analysts have jokingly called the “map of death”: a chart that portrays Japanese and U.S. mainland cities as potential targets.
The laughter has now stopped, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korean weapons systems. “This idea that these things were just bargaining chips — something that was true years ago — is superseded by the fact that there is now a rocket force... with a commander and a headquarters and subordinate bases, all with missiles,” said Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonprolifer |
times will be set by conference TV partners 12 days out, or in limited instances, six days out.
The 2015 season will be the first in The American's new 12-team, two-division format. Houston will play within the conference's West Division, which consists of Memphis, Navy, SMU, Tulane and Tulsa. The East Division will include UCF, Cincinnati, UConn, East Carolina, USF and Temple.
The conference schedule will include 48 regular-season games that will have each of the 12 teams in The American playing eight league contests annually. Each team will face the other five teams in its own division, as well as three teams from the other division, ensuring that each school will play every conference opponent at home and on the road at least once in the four-year cycle. The Cougars will not play East Carolina, USF, and Temple in 2015.
For the 2016 season, three of the four non-conference games have been set with the season kicking off against Oklahoma on Sept. 3 at NRG Stadium as part of the AdvoCare Kickoff Classic. The Cougars will then travel to Texas State on Sept. 24 and host Louisville on Nov. 19.
For more details on future non-conference schedules for the Cougars, CLICK HERE.
2015 SEASON TICKET DEPOSITS
With Tom Herman set to lead Houston in 2015, place your deposits now for 2015 Houston Football season tickets and secure your seat in TDECU Stadium. A $50 deposit at UHCougars.com/2015 will guarantee your place for a slate of seven home games including SEC opponent Vanderbilt. Join Tom Herman and secure your 2015 season tickets now.New poll out from Utah shows a very different picture to the below: Utah Opinion Poll: Cruz 53%, John Kasich 29%, Donald Trump 11%...
New poll out from Utah shows a very different picture to the below:
Utah Opinion Poll: Cruz 53%, John Kasich 29%, Donald Trump 11% (Likely Caucus goers)
This might very well be an example of an endorsement that actually influences the votes: Mitt Romney endorsing Ted Cruz in Utah might well have been the booster Cruz needed to pull ahead. Remember as well that given it is a caucus it is very likely that some of the Kasich voters will actually act tactically and support Cruz to stop Trump. This is particularly important as anyone reaching 50% of the vote makes it winner take all of the 40 delegates from Utah (if nobody reaches 50% the delegates are split more proportionally.)
Quick update on the Trumps Path To Nomination feature which lacked recent polling from some of the states Donald Trump needs to win. Now we have a couple of polls to look at:
New York Republican Presidential Primary (Emerson): Trump 64, Cruz 12, Kasich 1 (Trump +52)
Arizona Republican Presidential Primary (Merrill): Trump 31, Cruz 19, Kasich 10 (Trump +12)
California Republican Presidential Primary (Landslide): Trump 38, Cruz 22, Kasich 20, Rubio 10 (Trump +16)
These are significant polls for sure. If Kasich is entirely unable to stem the Trump tide in the liberal north it is basically game over. There are enough delegates up there for Trump to reach 1237 if you include his other likely wins. Futher, New York and California are incredibly big delegate prizes in themselves. If Trump cant be stopped there, he needs to be stopped more or less everywhere else.
Related PostsAbout the Game
The Geneforge Saga contains all 5 of the classic Spiderweb Software titles in one great package!
"Low on special effects but high on charm, inventiveness, and depth." - PC Gamer on Geneforge
"A shareware game that the big boys could learn from." - Computer Gaming World on Geneforge
"80% - A truly addictive roleplaying game." - PC Gamer on Geneforge 2
"[Geneforge 3 has] addictive, classic RPG gameplay, sprinkled with several clever touches." - PC Gamer
"Indie RPG of the Year" - GameBanshee on Geneforge 4
"You have to give Spiderweb credit—the Geneforge series goes toe-to-toe with bigger publishers and humbly, but adeptly delivers quality gameplay and story." - MacWorld on Geneforge 5
"Open-minded newcomers will find a lot to love, and franchise veterans will not be disappointed." - HonestGamers on Geneforge 5
"It's full of wonderful, hardcore, RPG madness." - Game Tunnel on Geneforge 5Everybody likes a slammed car. Also, most people think that lower is better for autosports. Lowering a car does good things for drifting but after a certain point, it actually hurts more than it helps. The big factor for this is something called "Roll Centers".
(image not drawn to scale or to any major degree of accuracy)
The Science
The diagram above shows the average lowered car. The light blue dot represents the old center of gravity and the dark blue dot is the new. Statically lowering a car doesn't do huge amounts for the center of gravity but it does have a profound affect on the Roll center. The central location of the roll center is the point where the intersecting lines of the car's main control arms. When lowering the car, control arms tend to point upward in a "V" pattern. This change in control arm angle is what causes the roll center to change.
For the sake of grassroots drifting and simplicity, there is no need to draw these imaginary lines to find out the true roll center or center of gravity. The roll center is simply the point where cornering force/momentum is applied at the car's center of gravity.
That doesn't make a huge amount of sense at first. Think of the center of gravity as the hinge of a lever. The roll center is simply the point the forces are applied to to move the lever. Like a wrench turning a nut. Your hand would be the roll center and the nut would be the center of gravity. See the difference between the green bracket and the purple bracket in the image above.
If you choke down farther on the wrench (away from the nut), you can apply more force to turn the nut. That helps you get a loose nut but this in a car becomes massive amounts of body roll. The same spring rates will have different amounts of body roll simply by raising or lowering the car. The lower the car, the MORE body roll!
The Solution(s)
The solution isn't simply to raise the car. That wouldn't help the center of gravity. The solution is to fix the angle of the control arms that are now at odd angles. We want to get them back to factory orientation. Or at least as close as we can get.
The simplest solution is to get stiffer springs and call it a day. But that isn't a solution. It's more of a band-aid.
There are only two true solutions. Either raise the subframe or lower the attachment point to the spindles of the wheels. In the rear ends of cars, raising the subframe is usually possible. On most cars, raising the front subframe is impossible or would raise the engine and by proxy the center of gravity.
Most aftermarket companies make simple bolt on Roll Center Adjusters (RCAs). Some are sold in various heights to meet your level of low. The goal is to get those control arms back as close to factory specs as possible. Even a little bit can go a long way as roll center movement as the car is lowered is exponential.
If your control arms are hailing Hitler, your roll center is too.Advisory
Click here to view press conference footage:
https://youtu.be/pXDXB07dRpo
Sheriff McDonnell Announces Hundreds of Arrests Made and Dozens Rescued by California Law Enforcement and the
Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force
During ‘Operation Reclaim and Rebuild’
In conjunction with Human Trafficking Awareness Month, Sheriff Jim McDonnell announced details and results from the third annual ‘Operation Reclaim and Rebuild’ enforcement operation, conducted by the Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force and more than 30 participating federal state and local law enforcement agencies, and task forces from across California. The three-day, statewide effort aimed at combatting human trafficking took place between Thursday, January 26, and Saturday, January 28, 2017, was conducted in various mediums and met with positive results.The press conference was held Tuesday, January 31, 2017, at the iconic Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles. Sheriff McDonnell was joined by District Attorney Jackie Lacey, Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office; Deputy Chief Justin Eisenberg, Chief of Detectives, Los Angeles Police Department; Special Agent In Charge Joseph Macias, Homeland Security Investigations Los Angeles; Executive Director Kay Buck, Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST); Human Trafficking Bureau Captain Chris Marks, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department; representatives from 15 the 30 participating federal, state and local law enforcement agencies; and representatives from public and private service providers.Operation Reclaim and Rebuild focused on rescuing victims of sexual slavery and human trafficking, providing victims with much-needed services, identifying and arresting their captors, seeking successful prosecutions, and disrupting the demand for vulnerable victims by targeting their customers. Police agencies and other trafficking task forces throughout our state joined in the enforcement operation to send the clear message that California law enforcement shares a unified mandate: Human trafficking must not be tolerated in our state!In preparation for the event, an operational planning meeting took place in Los Angeles, with over 120 federal, state and municipal law enforcement detectives from all over California in attendance. Investigators focused enforcement operations wherever the trafficking of human beings took place, from confronting the reality of sidewalk prostitution by conducting “john” stings, to challenging the virtual reality of the cyber world where traffickers believe they can operate anonymously using the internet. The internet has furnished a vast variety of opportunities for traffickers, but with the experience of specially-trained cyber detectives who posed as vulnerable teenagers and interacted with suspects on social media, traffickers and customers who were anxious to exploit found their plans foiled.Minors encountered during enforcement efforts were cared for by personnel from various Department of Children and Family Services Agencies in each county. In Los Angeles County, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST) and Saving Innocence (SI) coordinated the emergency services response for victim care and collaborated with similar, non-governmental victim service organizations throughout the state.Operation Reclaim and Rebuild was widely successful in its endeavor with 28 commercially, sexually-exploited children and 27 adult victims being recovered; 142 males arrested for the charge of Solicitation; and 36 males arrested for pimping. In total, 474 arrests were made.As Sheriff McDonnell relayed the mission, efforts and results of Operation Reclaim and Rebuild, he pointedly addressed the traffickers and johns who conduct their illegal business in Los Angeles County and the state of California, and reminded them of the gravity of their crimes and the prosecution to accompany their actions when discovered. Next, the Sheriff directly addressed the victims, “You are worthy of more. And we will work tirelessly with our partners…to provide you services and help you rebuild your life.”“It is our job in law enforcement to protect children – all children – especially those who have fallen prey to adults who seek to profit from their bodies,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey said. “We will not tolerate the sexual exploitation of children by anyone, not the sex traffickers and not the people who pay to sexually assault them.”Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Joseph Macias also spoke at the event said, “Our goal in this unprecedented collaborative enforcement effort was two-fold.”“First, to provide vital services to any sex trafficking victims we encountered, so they can begin to reclaim and rebuild their lives,” he said. “Second, to start the process to reclaim and rebuild the neighborhoods that have been degraded by organized prostitution schemes which not only exploit the vulnerable, but also often draw other criminal enterprises into the area.”The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department would like to remind the public of the dangers of posting “nude selfies”. To access the letter from Sheriff Jim McDonnell on posting “nude selfies”, please visit https://www.facebook.com/LosAngelesCountySheriffsDepartment/posts/1305629852797258 The following agencies and task forces participated:Anaheim Police DepartmentChino Police DepartmentCitrus Heights Police DepartmentClovis Police DepartmentCoalinga Police DepartmentConcord Police DepartmentCosta Mesa Police DepartmentDelano Police DepartmentFederal Bureau of Investigation, Los AngelesFederal Bureau of Investigation, FresnoFederal Bureau of Investigation, MontereyFresno Police DepartmentHomeland Security Investigations, Los AngelesHomeland Security Investigations, VenturaKern County Sheriff's OfficeLivingston Police DepartmentLos Angeles County District Attorney’s OfficeLos Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task ForceLong Beach Human Trafficking Task ForceLong Beach Police DepartmentLos Angeles County Sheriff’s DepartmentLos Angeles Police DepartmentLos Angeles Unified School District PoliceMarina Police DepartmentMerced Police DepartmentOrange County Sheriff's OfficeOrange County Human Trafficking Task ForceOxnard Police DepartmentPlacer County Sheriff's Special Investigations UnitPomona Police DepartmentRiverside County Sheriff's OfficeRiverside County Anti-Trafficking Task ForceRoseville Police DepartmentSacramento County Sheriff's OfficeSacramento Police DepartmentSan Bernardino County Sheriff's OfficeSan Bernardino County Trafficking Task ForceSan Bernardino Police DepartmentSan Diego County Sheriff's OfficeSan Diego Police DepartmentSanta Ana Police DepartmentSanta Barbara County Sheriff's OfficeSanta Barbara Human Trafficking Task ForceSanta Clara Sheriff's OfficeSanta Monica Police DepartmentSimi Valley Police DepartmentSouth Gate Police DepartmentTorrance Police DepartmentVentura County Sheriff's OfficeVentura County Coalition Against Human TraffickingVentura Police DepartmentFor additional information contact Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Human Trafficking Bureau Lieutenant David Oliva at 323-526-5156, Lieutenant Kent Wegener at 323-526-5159, or the Sheriff’s Information Bureau at 213-229-1700.The Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s Human Trafficking Bureau houses the Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force, the nation’s largest co-located human trafficking task force. This task force is a collaboration of federal, state, county and local law enforcement, social service agency and non-government and community-based organizations investigating and serving the needs of commercially exploited adults and minors victimized for the purpose of sex and labor.The Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force brings together systems and disciplines to address victims’ needs through a victim-centered, trauma- informed approach. The task force employs a regionalized strategy which crosses jurisdictional boundaries to identify and rescue victims, while aggressively pursuing traffickers and buyers.Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force Partners:FederalUnited States Attorney’s OfficeHomeland Security Investigations, U.S. Immigration and Customs EnforcementFederal Bureau of InvestigationUnited States Marshals ServiceUnited States Department of LaborStateCalifornia Attorney GeneralCalifornia Department of Corrections and RehabilitationCalifornia Employment Development DepartmentCalifornia Highway PatrolCountyLos Angeles County Sheriff’s DepartmentLos Angeles County District Attorney’s OfficeLos Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, Bureau of InvestigationDepartment of Children and Family ServicesLos Angeles County Probation DepartmentLos Angeles County Department of Public HealthCityLos Angeles Police DepartmentLos Angeles Unified School District Police DepartmentPomona Police DepartmentSanta Monica City Attorney’s OfficeNon-Governmental/Community-Based OrganizationsCoalition to Abolish Slavery and TraffickingSaving InnocenceThe Guardian Group (Hotel/Motel Outreach, Education and Signage)Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Executive Clergy CouncilPet Prescriptions Therapy Dog ProgramDemand Abolition Cease NetworkRestoration Diversion ServicesVirtuous Woman, Inc.Legal Aid Foundation of Los AngelesInternational Institute of Los AngelesPrepared by:Lieutenant Kent WegenerHuman Trafficking BureauAndDeputy Lillian PeckSheriff’s Information Bureau211 West Temple Street,Los Angeles, CA 90012213-229-1700Website LASD HQ: http://www.lasd.org Recruitment LASD: http://www.careers.lasd.org Follow LASD HQ via text and email: http://www.Nixle.com Twitter: @LASDHQ http://twitter.com/LASDHQ Twitter: @LASDtalk https://twitter.com/LASDTalk Twitter: @LASDvideos https://twitter.com/LASDvideos Twitter: @LASDespanol https://twitter.com/LASDespanol Facebook LASD HQ: http://www.facebook.com/LosAngelesCountySheriffsDepartment Instagram LASD Photos: http://instagram.com/LASDHQ Pinterest LASD Photos: http://pinterest.com/lacountysheriff/ YouTube LASD Videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/LACountySheriff/videos?view=0 SNAP LA County: Specific Needs Disaster Voluntary Registryhttp://snap.lacounty.gov/Alert LA County: Telephone emergency mass notification systemText and email, register for LASD Nixle messages: To receive more detailed, up-to-date information via E-MAIL and/or TEXT directly from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD), sign up for "Nixle" alerts at http://www.Nixle.com and register for "LASD – Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept Information Bureau (SIB)" AND your local LASD station area. To receive URGENT TEXT ALERTS ONLY, text your zip code to 888777. Standard text messaging rates may apply depending on your calling plan."If You See Something, Say Something"L.A. Crime Stoppers: Partner to prevent or report crime by contacting your local Sheriff’s station. If you prefer to remain anonymous, you may call “L.A. Crime Stoppers” at 800-222-TIPS (8477), use your smartphone by downloading the “P3 MOBILE APP” on Google play or the App Store, or use the website http://lacrimestoppers.org Jim McDonnell, SheriffLos Angeles County Sheriff's DepartmentA Winnipeg mother says she had to play tug of war to get her daughter back from a man who tried to snatch the four-year-old from her front step Thursday afternoon.
"She's crying," said Faida Bugagara, the mother of four-year-old Princess, explaining to CBC how the attempted abduction unfolded outside her home in the 300 block of McKenzie Street.
"He's a big man, I am scared of him," said Bugagara, adding the man grabbed her daughter by the leg.
Bugagara is a newcomer to Winnipeg who moved to the city from Congo with her family three years ago.
Man tried to enter home
Bugagara said the man showed up at her front doorstep out of the blue and was trying to enter her home before he tried to take Princess.
"He telling me, 'What are you doing? Open the door to go in,'" she recalled.
"He said, 'I need to go in door with you.' … I scared now."
Bugagara was able to get Princess away from the man and ran to a neighbour's house, who called police.
In the process, though, Bugagara said the neighbour's dog bit her and she now has a large bandage on her hand covering the wound.
'Incredibly brazen'
Winnipeg police Const. Rob Carver told reporters Friday morning the incident is "terrifying" and unusual.
Winnipeg police are warning the public after an attempted child abduction, which they say happened in broad daylight Thursday. 0:44 "I've been doing this a long time and I cannot remember myself the last time I've heard of one of these," he said.
Carver called the incident "incredibly brazen," and said police are looking for a male suspect in his late 20s. He is described as having short dark hair and a slim build and wearing diamond-type earrings.
According to witnesses, he was wearing a grey Adidas hat, a purple or blue Hugo Boss shirt, a black track jacket tied around his waist, black pants with two red stripes down the sides of the legs and red shoes with a white Nike symbol, Carver said.
The Winnipeg police major crimes unit is investigating the incident.The integrity of Afghanistan's recent parliamentary election has been plunged into fresh doubt with the emergence of amateur videos that appear to show police officers tasked with stopping fraud allowing vote-rigging to occur.
The videos, obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera, cannot be independently verified but appear to show Afghan police involvement in electoral fraud, dealing a blow to official claims that any dishonesty linked to poll did not have the backing of state officials.
The first video shows fake ballot papers being filled out in a Kandahar house as a man in an Afghan border police uniform looks on. The second shows ballot boxes and voting papers lying on a roadside next to stacks of ballot papers. A police car is parked nearby, once again suggesting official involvement in the fraud.
A local parliamentary candidate who saw the videos told Al Jazeera that he was not surprised by what the videos showed. The candidate said the corruption was the result of a systemic pattern of official vote-rigging.
"12 district chiefs led a coordinated process, including involvement from high authority, the border police and officials," said Khalid Pashtun. "We were told by our agent he saw stuffing boxes one night before the election and the night after and also during day…in some areas the polling station was stolen."
Kandahar's border police have categorically denied involvement in vote-rigging, saying the video itself could be fake.
"Anyone can wear a police uniform and make a fake video. They could easily get hold of a uniform. The election went very well in our area. If there was fraud why didn’t they contact the police and we would have investigated," Abdul Raziq, the deputy chief of the border police, said in a statement.
Investigating fraud
Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission said it was investigating allegations of fraud in more than 10 per cent of polling centres across the country, based on complaints received from candidates' poll workers.
Candidates and poll workers have filed more than 1,000 "potentially significant" claims of fraud regarding last week's parliamentary elections in Afghanistan.
The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), the joint Afghan-international body that reviews allegations of fraud, has received more than 3,000 complaints since the election on September 18. More than 1,000 have been classified as "potentially significant," meaning they could affect the outcome of the vote in a particular province.
Another 700 complaints have been labelled insignificant, while more than 1,300 have yet to be evaluated. Data is not yet available for four provinces - Paktika, Kandahar, Zabul and Nuristan - all areas where insecurity made voting particularly difficult.
Fraud appears to have been widespread across the country, according to the ECC's figures. In at least 11 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, more than 50 per cent of the complaints are potentially significant, according to the ECC.
Many of the complaints in those provinces deal principally with three types of fraud. There are polling irregularities, including ballot stuffing or the use of fake voter cards; counting irregularities, in which election officials report incorrect results; and allegations of "undue influence," when campaign or poll workers harass or intimidate voters.
Many of the complaints seem to be corroborated by reports from domestic and international observers. The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), for example - the country's largest domestic monitoring group - documented more than 300 cases of voter intimidation on election day.
The group's first preliminary report, released earlier this week, also pointed to ballot-stuffing in 280 polling centres, and proxy voting in nearly 400. And the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent research organisation based in Kabul, published a long list of anecdotal accounts of fraud from Afghan voters and officials.
A female candidate in Kandahar, for example, accused a rival of "buying 5,000 votes,"and a campaign worker in Nangarhar province said people were openly "buying voter cards in the polling centre."
The vote was the second parliamentary election to be held in Afghanistan since the Taliban was toppled by the US-led invasion in 2001. Final results are not due until the end of October.This week on the Utah Outcasts, it’s the return of the sausage party as Geoff, Kyle, and X tackle this the following segments a bit TOO efficiently (blame Kyle and Geoff for being sleepyheads).
NEWS YOU MISSED – A quick holiday reminder to NOT donate to the Salvation Army, Jerry Falwell Jr nopes the fuck out of the Trump cabinet, Fidel Castro is dead and we say good riddance, Carson is handed Housing and Urban Development in our Trilogy of Ben series, Trump votes in Wisconsin were padded considerably, and finally just to make sure you all know Jewish rabbis can be just as intolerant as their OTHER religious counterparts.
THE DECALOGUE – We go over a 10-ish list of some of the weirdest Mormon sci-fi beliefs that are codified into their scripture.
FUN WITH REAL AUDIO – Wellington Boone doesn’t quite understand what a eunuch is, Michael Flynn distorts Florida votes in a diabolical way, and Jim Bakker warns Christians in blue areas to buy buckets.
TIME FOR RANTS – X goes over a bit of an altercation he had with a coworker this week who wants solar power for all the wrong reasons but at least he’s getting solar right?
Thank you all so much for giving us a listen, please get in touch with us if you have anything you want to discuss with us further or to let us know what you thought of the episode this week. We love hearing from our listeners!
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OPENING SONG – Courtesy of Teknoaxe used with permission
CLOSING SONG – The Aquabats “Pizza Day”
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Buy some Merch!Survivor: Heroes v. Healers v. Hustlers is here! Every week, Parade’s Mike Bloom will bring you interviews with the castaway most recently voted off of the island.
There are many twists and turns that come with the Survivor game these days. But ever since Pagong and Tagi arrived on the beaches of Borneo, the main goal is to survive the elements and each other. Patrick Bolton was nervous about the former coming into his time on season 35, what with his fair complexion and apparent fear of the crabs that would infest their camps. But it was ultimately the latter that did him in, as his loud personality and erratic behavior sent the moving company owner packing as the third person voted out of the season.
As soon as the Hustlers touched down at their camp (after assumingly a long time paddling, considering their lack of skills at the marooning), Patrick was on a mission to entertain. His fun-loving nature certainly came out with his daily antics, which included interviews about dancing skills, games of “Rock or Octopus?”, and serving as his tribe’s alarm clock. Little did he realize that he was the one who needed a wake-up call, as his behavior not only grated on some others’ nerves but also began to alienate him. He made off-the-cuff remarks (most likely behind the cuffs of departed Hustler Simone Nguyen’s shirt) at Tribal Council about not trusting his entire tribe and hunted for idols right in the face of his allies. Despite all of this activity, Patrick felt in a good place with Ryan Ulrich, Devon Pinto, and most of all Ali Elliott, with whom Patrick had a connection with outside of the game. Ali had warned him, “You can’t change the past, but look towards the future.” Little did he know that she would soon be the one to leave her past quite literally behind and move on without him into the great unknown.
Though Patrick was momentarily considered as a boot during the Hustlers’ first Tribal Council, they kept him around, due in part to his strength in challenges. He got to test that skill at the most recent Immunity Challenge, where he decided to take the position of sandbag thrower squarely on his shoulders. Despite petering out and allowing the other tribes to pass him, his adrenaline kept the blinders on, leaving center fielder of 25 years Lauren Rimmer to essentially say, “Put me in, Coach!” Though Patrick single-handedly lost the challenge for his tribe, he was convinced that youth would prevail and outsider Lauren would be the one to go. But between his grating social game and lackluster challenge ability, he turned from an asset to a liability. With the Hustlers facing their second vote in a row of an outsider versus a camp nuisance, they sided with the former this time, leading the “one-man show” of Patrick to put up an early closing notice. His grin fell as the votes began to pile in and muttered, “You guys are awful” on the way out, feeling as raw as a piece of food being critiqued by Healer Joe Mena. Now out of the game, Patrick talks to us about the mentality behind his idea of making people feel “loved and comforted,” his affinity for charades, and if the pieces of advice from Ali and Lauren merged into his daily life as well.
I wanted to start by floating a theory past you. I know when you were voted out, you had a lot of anger towards your other tribemates. But could it be possible that they were working with the crabs of Fiji after they saw how scared you were of them?
I would have run in fear and I would have been petrified, thinking I would have to climb one of the biggest trees. But I think they can climb trees, so I would have been even more scared now!
There’s nowhere to escape!
If crabs start running towards me, that would be my worst nightmare.
Even more than getting voted out of Survivor?
You just found another one for me, that’s probably my worst.
Well hopefully I didn’t plague your dreams from here on out. In all seriousness, I do want to go back to that Tribal Council. Obviously, you were not happy with the others for turning on you. Was there anyone in particular that you felt the most betrayed by?
There was a lot of betrayal in that Tribal Council, it showed on my face. Ali knows me, she shouldn’t have voted me off. Ryan told me with 100% honesty, looking me in the eyes, and told me, “You won’t be going home tonight. I don’t want you to worry, I’ve got your back.” I was so heated in the moment. When I knew my name was going to come up again, and Jeff says, “The third person voted out of Survivor is…” I wanted to erupt. But I knew I couldn’t, I had to compose myself. I just gave my final words, “You guys are awful.” That is quite an understatement of what I was thinking. Ali should be ashamed for voting me off because we could have really worked well together. I know I was loud and people noticed me, but that was a reason for her to take me along, knowing I would be a target and not her. Lauren’s not going to be a target, she’s going to fly under the radar. She’s a single mom, so she would be great in going to the Final 3 and winning. So why take someone who has the potential to win the game when you could take me, who would take the target off your own back? It didn’t make sense to me, and I still think they should have voted off Lauren.
You just spoke about you felt particularly betrayed by Ali and Ryan. Was Ali your closest relationship on the island, and was that due in part to things that happened outside of the game?
I would say that Ryan and I probably talked the most game back and forth. I had a close connection there as far as being able to work with someone and have someone to rely on. I didn’t know he had a closer alliance with Devon. Ali and I did know each other coming into the show. When I first saw her, I thought this was such a crazy experience. How can both of us manage to make the same cast of the same season, and also the same team? The odds are so not in the favor of that happening, yet it still happened. It’s just crazy. Our relationship wasn’t super close, I was not best friends with Ali. We were close associates, not friends. I would say hello whenever I would see her. I didn’t know how exactly she would vote. But when I got there and we talked, I thought, “Ali’s on my side, I don’t have anything to worry about. This is amazing!” I just counted her as a vote for me without even really digging into her mind and getting her thoughts. That really screwed me in the end, because knowing what I know now, I would have made sure to get a firm alliance with her. As you saw, she definitely tried to help me by telling me, “Hey Patrick, you’ve got to calm down, because your name’s being brought up.” And I didn’t calm down enough for her to stick her life out there for me. The Survivor gods chewed me up and spit me out.
I want to talk about that conversation you just mentioned. In response to Ali’s recommendation, you said you felt that limiting your behavior would be limiting your personality, which would hamper your relationship-building skills. Can you elaborate on that?
I definitely still stick by that. I’m not a quiet person, but I don’t feel like I’m overbearing. Lauren seemed to think differently, she thought I was too “extra” and she couldn’t deal with me. And that’s fine. Lauren’s an older woman, she’s not around a bunch of twenty-somethings, it just really wasn’t her cup of tea. She’s like a chai latte and I’m like a double dirty chai latte. I come in with the heat! I didn’t want to change what I was in doing in being quiet. As you see, Devon is a quiet character, and that can help him. Same for Lauren, she’s quiet and easy to get along with because she doesn’t say much. I’m trying to make friends and build relationships with these people I’m stranded on an island with. I just say, “Be me. Make these friends and these connections,” and hopefully it will be better than Lauren. And it just wasn’t. I thought I was doing the best for me, and it just didn’t work out.
Let’s go back to the very beginning of the game. You’re sitting on the boat, and Jeff tells you that you’re a Hustler. What did you think in the moment, and did that impact the way you behaved in the game?
It didn’t change my behavior in any way. I did take his comment as a compliment. I have previously referred to myself as a Hustler, so I thought it was nice. I think that definitely is something to describe several of us. Simone had her family come overseas, I tried to start my own business. Being able to do that is amazing.
You touch down on the beach as the Hustler group, and you have this strategy of making people feel “loved and comforted” and being the entertainer at camp. Was this something you always knew that you were going to do? Why did you decide to pursue that?
I don’t know if that was my strategy going in. I don’t feel like it’s shown as much, but Ryan was hilarious. He and I were constantly cracking jokes. We were able to make a friendship, everyone’s laughing at each other’s jokes. In one instance on an episode, it showed me jumping up and down. What is not also shown is that we were playing charades! So I may be looking nuts, but we were just playing charades and who knows what I was acting out at the moment. That’s just how this works out, and I’m glad I did everything I did. I think I could have definitely made it through my last night, I just didn’t play the cards that I had right, and it worked against me.
Who knew you were such a good Survivor charades player? If they ever do a season of that, you have to be the ringer for it.
That’s what I’m saying, man!
The thing is, though, if you’re trying to make people guess and it’s not working, are you going to swap out this time or keep going with it?
I’m going to keep going with it.
That seems to be your MO! Let’s talk about this challenge a bit. You credited your performance to a bit of an adrenaline rush. Was that honestly what was going through your head? Did you put the blinders up to people like Lauren and think, “I’m going to knock all of these blocks off if it’s the last thing I do”?
No, that was not at all me saying, “Hey, I’m not going to let anybody take this from me. I’m going to be the sole person to take credit for this.” Not at all what I was thinking at the moment. I was thinking, “This is my responsibility, and I’ve got to take care of the job.” Right before we ended up starting the challenge, we get 30 seconds to game plan what we’re going to do. I was determined to be the thrower, it was my obligation to knock all of the blocks off. I did notice the other tribes switched out, and it definitely helped them. I was not being as accurate as I should have, I was throwing too hard. I saw on the episode Lauren trying to come up and switch out with me. She didn’t touch me, and I wish she had. It honestly was an adrenaline rush. They said they were yelling my name, and I cannot remember hearing them saying my name. I know we’re far out now, but we had this conversation immediately after on the beach, and I had the same reaction. “Guys, I couldn’t hear you. I was in the moment and this was my obligation and my duty. And I didn’t do it.”
Going back to Lauren, do you think you would have been able to save face had you gone into the Ryan and suggested a decoy target, like Ryan?
Oh yes, it most certainly could have saved face. I went in not running everything through my head, which was dumb. I knew the only other person she would have wanted to vote off would be Ryan. She had previously mentioned, “Ryan doesn’t get firewood, Ryan’s small, he’s not contributing in challenges.” I definitely could have said, “Hey, let’s vote out Ryan,” and I think I could have gotten her vote. But I didn’t go in with that mentality, and I definitely lost face there and any trust I could have with Lauren. Could the game have changed if I approached Lauren with a different attitude and a different suggestion? Yes, I think it could have changed for the better, obviously. It wouldn’t lead to |
akers and canisters, the gustatory equivalent of the treble dial. You used more, or you used less. Whether it was a little girl with an umbrella, a toss over the left shoulder to ward off bad luck, or a nontaster’s affront to the chef, it was all just salt.
This was more than 20 years ago, but well after people learned that there might be finer coffee than Medaglia D’Oro in a can. Maybe the first inkling was the coarse salt on the rim of a margarita, or a salad invigorated by sparks of La Baleine, or a virgin bite of chocolate sprinkled with fleur de sel. For Mark Bitterman, the author of Salted and the coiner of the term selmelier (which so far seems to have been applied just to Bitterman), the epiphany was a transcendent steak at a relais in northern France in 1986. He deduced that the difference-maker was the rock salt provided by the owner’s brother, a saltmaker in Guérande in Brittany. Bitterman came to learn, as all chefs now have, that before salt was just salt—before it was industrialized and homogenized—it was a regional and idiosyncratic ingredient, perhaps the quintessential one, precisely because it was so universal. You could tell salts apart, prefer one to another, and pair them with different foods. You could acquire a salt vocabulary, tell salt stories. If you could be a snob about coffee, beer, butter, peppers, and pot, why not sodium chloride?
Photo by James Mollison
I was slower to catch on. I’d encountered a certain variant everywhere: delicate flakes of sea salt, in ramekins or little wooden bowls, in snug neo-rustic restaurants with one-syllable names (Prune, Hearth, Salt, et al.) or at the kind of rooftop barbecues where people served mead cocktails and put watermelon in salad. It was a pleasure to pinch it between forefinger and thumb, or absentmindedly dab at it and taste a few flecks, like a narc testing a confiscated drug shipment. It had a sublime effect on a tomato or a pork chop. But I didn’t think of it as a particular kind. It was just “the fancy salt.”
Then I got wise. On a kitchen shelf at home, there was a small box adorned with the Royal Warrant of the Queen of England and some Edwardian-sounding patter in small print, attesting to the “curious crystals of unusual purity” contained within. The brand was Maldon—Maldon Sea Salt Flakes. It came from a 135-year-old family-owned salt works on the southeast coast of England. My wife had been buying it for years.
I soon realized that almost everyone who gave food any thought—professional chefs, restaurant junkies, people who keep a water-stained spiral notebook of a great-aunt’s favorite recipes—knew about Maldon. It had the omnipresence of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, the old-school cred of Walkers shortbread, and the high repute of Gevrey-Chambertin. It had also become trendy. Cameron Diaz carried a tin of it in her bag; Gwyneth Paltrow sang its praises on Goop. Chef Judy King revealed it to be her secret prison seasoning in Orange Is the New Black. (“This is my heroin,” she says.)
Photo by James Mollison
Ruth Rogers, the chef and owner of the River Café in London, declared in her first cookbook, back in 1996, “You must use Maldon salt.” When I visited her at home in London last fall, she said she had been talking about it with some chef friends earlier that day and “one of them said, ‘At last, the British have an ingredient.’ It’s a very chef-y ingredient.”
When cooks talk about Maldon, they inevitably mention the feel of the flakes between the fingers, the pleasing tactility of the pinch. (No one really measures out salt.) The pyramid shape, no bigger than a tab of acid, keeps it from caking. It has the look of something valuable and hard-won, a delicacy that has crossed deserts on camels. It works best as a finishing salt—one sprinkles it on vegetables, butter, caramel, or grilled meat, just before serving. As for the taste, Maldon is considered less bitter, less salty than other salts. There’s a quick savory zing that doesn’t overpower or overstay—“an ephemeral saltiness,” as Bitterman describes it. It’s almost sweet.
“Nothing else has that flaky quality,” Daniel Rose, chef-partner at Le Coucou in New York, told me. Having spent the past 20 years in Paris, where he owns Spring restaurant, he also used a variety of French salt, in addition to the English stuff. But, he recalled, “there is definitely a pre-Maldon time and a post-Maldon time.”
This boom first took hold on Maldon’s home turf, with the British food renaissance of the ’90s. One springboard was the so-called Delia Effect, after Delia Smith, the food personality and cookbook author who championed Maldon in her BBC Series How to Cook ; around 2000, she named Maldon salt, along with Worcestershire sauce, as one of her ten essentials. As a result, the big supermarket chains in the UK, like Tesco, stocked up on it. Maldon, a tiny operation, had to scramble to ramp up. One of the many viral ways it made it to America was via Paltrow, who apparently was twigged to it when she was married to Chris Martin, pre-uncoupling. “I was living in London, and it was ubiquitous there,” she told me. “I just stumbled on it, in my quotidian life.” Paltrow included it in her second cookbook in 2013 as, among other things, an ingredient in her famous but otherwise scary-sounding vegan and gluten-free almond butter cookies. The celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who got the Maldon bug as a young cook in Rogers’ kitchen at the River Café, made it his go-to salt in his cookbooks and TV appearances. Before long, it was everywhere: the iPhone of salts.
This fuddy-duddy-yet-posh, not-just-salt salt had become a thing. But where did it even come from?
Photo by James Mollison
I traveled to Maldon in the chilly dark days of November, timing my visit to the tides. Maldon is, first, a place—a town in the county Essex on the River Blackwater, an estuary in the east of England. It’s an hour from London by train, but it felt farther once I was strolling along its desolate waterfront, peering through the twilight toward the island of Mersea, which is renowned for its oysters. Mersea and Maldon have in common the brine. At a pub by the quay, the Queens Head, I ordered fish and chips and a pint of a local brew, Puck’s Folly, and eavesdropped on a chapter meeting of the local rowing club. The salt was table salt.
Blackwater is a bastardization of Brackwater, as in, the water is brackish, quite salty in fact, because the Essex coast is dry, by English standards anyway. Less rain means more salt. The marshes are seaward, east of town, on land belonging to the Crown. Humans have been harvesting salt there for thousands of years, even before recorded history. The spring tides come in over the seagrass and, when the water retreats, leave salt to crystallize. In the Iron Age, people heated clay vessels to reduce the salty water. Two thousand years ago, the Romans scaled up that operation by trapping water in clay-lined pits and boiling it off in pans made of lead. (Lead! And you thought a high-sodium diet was bad for you.) These were heated from underneath by wood fires, and the salt was left in the bottom of the pans. In the Domesday Book of 1086, large numbers of brine pits and pans were recorded along the Essex coastline.
Humans have been harvesting salt in Maldon for thousands of years, for thousands of years, even before recorded history.
The 1825 abolition of a tax on salt made it more economical to mine for it in caves elsewhere in the country. The little local sea-salt guys went out of business. The advent of so-called solution mining, which involved pumping freshwater into these caves, made mass production possible—most of that haul became standard table salt or sodium chloride used to make rubber. It was not good for cooking, though: too bitter, too harsh. (Later, the dawn of refrigeration diminished salt’s historical value as a preservative.)
Photo by James Mollison
The Maldon saltmakers who remained, in the 19th century, were chiefly employed as coal merchants. One local coal firm called Bridges, Johnson and Co. also produced sea salt, and in 1882 christened that standalone business the Maldon Salt Company. Londoners would ask friends traveling to Essex to pick some up. In 1900, it wound up in Harrods, which sent the company a letter: “We found the salt much better than ordinary salt for pickling beef, a much smaller quantity being required for brine. Also gives the beef a much better flavour.” A man named James Rivers bought the company in 1922. He married Nellie Osborne, a widow with three sons. And when Rivers died, the youngest, Cyril Osborne, was eventually given the saltworks. In a Pathé film from 1964 called Salty Business, on YouTube, you can see Cyril in his Wellies, opening a gate to let the tidewater fill the storage pond.
It was very Spit and sawdust, to be honest with you,” Cyril’s grandson, Steve Osborne, explained once I arrived. The family still owns the business outright, and Steve, who is 42, runs it. He’s modernized many aspects of the operation, yet the way the salt is harvested remains pretty much the same. He picked me up at my hotel outside of town just after sunrise in a Porsche Macan and drove us out to the salt marsh. It was a clear, cold morning. Steve had on black corduroys, a quilted Barbour jacket, and brown suede lace-ups ill-suited to the marsh. After two years of college, he’d spent his 20s in the city trading bond futures in the open-outcry pits at the LIFFE Exchange. Technology rendered the job obsolete, but the ancient way of harvesting salt still pertained, so in 1998 he returned to Maldon to work for his father, Clive, who had taken over for Cyril in the ’70s. In his youth, Clive, too, had gone to work in London, as a lighter salesman, before returning to the family business. By 1998, Clive, then in his mid-50s, wasn’t sure if there was anything for his son to do. Steve helped with marketing and learned the ins and outs.
When Steve took the reins, five years later, the father found the son’s approach a bit ambitious. Here was a go-go kid just back from the city, with big ideas, coming home to the sleepy provincial saltmaking shed. The younger Osborne wanted to buy land to expand, but his father argued against it. Eventually Steve prevailed and they bought a plot of farmland on the shore. In his view, the only thing preventing world domination was the limited production of Maldon salt. Since then, Steve’s been all in.
Photo by James Mollison
Maldon’s original saltworks are in a low-slung building in an area of town called the Downs, along the river. Built in 1850, it’s not much bigger than a basketball court. When Steve took over, there were just three salt pans here. He added a fourth the next year, then three more the year following. In 2006 they opened a second facility, a few miles up the coast at Goldhanger. He also built an administrative and packaging plant to free up space for saltmaking. Now they have 37 pans; the great-grandson has multiplied production a dozen times over. “I’ve just bought another piece of land,” he said. “I want to build another factory and double the number of pans.”
In 1980, at the Downs, Clive Osborne replaced coal with natural gas, which was more efficient and made it easier to regulate temperature, to produce crystals of the right size. “The art of making salt is one of temperature and timing,” Steve said. Back in the coal era, Cyril had a famously deft touch. “Pop was an expert with the shovel. Of course, there was that day when he crawled into the flue with a fag between his lips.” The coal dust exploded, and Cyril came out singed, a Wile E. Coyote in Wellies.
In the United States alone, the Maldon market has doubled in the past three years.
The saltmaking now begins with a steel barge docked out front on the Blackwater. At high tide, pumps fill the barge with seawater. It’s taken at mid-depth in the estuary, to avoid mud particles yet maximize salinity. The barge holds four weeks’ worth of seawater; every two weeks—during spring tides, which occur at the new and full moons—the Osbornes top up. The water passes into six settlement tanks, and then into other filtration tanks, and then finally it is pumped into the pans. “We’re releasing the salt from the clutches of nature,” Steve said. Nature doesn’t charge anything for the right—though the British Crown does.
Photo by James Mollison
Inside, the operation resembles a lobster pound housed in a schvitz. The square pans are steel, three yards on each side, and not much more than a foot deep. An intricate system of flues heats each pan evenly from beneath, as the brine solution thickens. The air is humid and steamy and is rumored to have health benefits. Steve pointed to a hale gent raking salt from the pan and joked, “Gary here is actually 105 years old.”
The saltmakers boil the brine, then reduce the temperature until inverted-pyramid crystals form on the surface, like the skein of ice on a martini. At some point, the crystals, under their own weight, fall to the bottom of the pan like snow. Gary then rakes the crystals and shovels them into plastic draining tubs, like garbage bins, which hold 331 pounds each.
The salt drains for 24 hours. Then comes the drying. In Cyril’s day, they piled sacks of it next to a woodburning stove. Clive upgraded to an industrial oven. Back then, the family lived in a house across the street; Clive came over every night at 10 p.m., just before bed, to change the trays and heat them overnight. Several years ago, Steve introduced a Rube Goldbergian oscillator, a modified grain dryer of his own design. “It saves me having to come over at 10 p.m.,” he said. The salt, once sifted, drains into 882-pound bags, which get trucked up to the packaging plant. By this point, many of the pyramids have crumbled into flakes. (Finding a fully intact crystal is a little like getting a two-yolk egg.) A $7 box comprises a fistful of salt: eight and a half ounces.
“Sea salt flakes—we came up with that term,” Steve said. “Seems to be in every recipe now, but we made it up. I don’t want to sound arrogant. But I’ve seen people saying ‘flakes’ when it’s not flakes.” He also claims that his open-pan process leaches out magnesium, a source of salt’s bitter taste.
Photo by James Mollison
A few years ago, Maldon changed the design of its boxes, making them simpler, cleaner, simultaneously more retro and less frumpy. Long gone is the impressionistic close-up of a sweaty mixed salad. The packaging plant’s new automated assembly line turns out 100 boxes a minute, more than five times what Maldon produced when the company packaged by hand. “We’re producing 2,755 tons a year,” Steve said. That’s 10 million boxes. That morning, they were churning out a shipment bound for Norway; these boxes read “Havsaltflak.” A daily call sheet in the warehouse specified orders bound for Italy, France, Sweden, the United States, Spain, Dubai, Germany, and Austria.
We’re producing 2,755 tons a year,” Steve said. That’s 10 million boxes.
Sixty percent of the take is for export. Maldon is now in 50 countries, a half dozen of which make up the bulk of the foreign orders. At the pub the previous night, the president of the rowing club told me he had recently come back from Stockholm: “One shop was completely full of Scandinavian stuff—elk’s heads and things—and there in the corner was a Maldon salt display. I thought, That’s my hometown!” It turns out that some 50 years ago, a Swedish exchange student brought a box home from England. Her father was the buying director for Coop, the national supermarket chain. Soon Maldon was everywhere in Sweden.
Right now the biggest importer is Spain. “That’s selling ice to Eskimos, basically,” Steve said. “There are great saltmakers there, but they don’t produce pyramid crystals.” He ascribes Maldon’s success to a 1996 magazine endorsement by chef Ferran Adrià.
Next on that list is the United States, where the market has doubled in the past three years, due, it seems, to the cascading heap of praise from celebrities, chefs, and celebrity chefs. Like Anson Mills grits or Wellfleet oysters, Maldon now goes by its proper name among the food cognoscenti. Steve claims not to have sought the attention, although he recently hired a marketing manager from Diageo. Financiers and investors with grand schemes have approached him—“I’ve heard it all”—but he says he’d prefer to keep the business independent. Still, he isn’t sure operational control will fall to the fifth generation. (Steve has two stepkids, and his sister has children, too.) “Just because you’re family doesn’t mean you’re the right person to carry on,” he said. “It’s quite a heavy cross for me to bear, to be honest. It’s been four generations. I’d be the one to cock it up.”
“Sea salt flakes—we came up with that term,” Steve said. “Seems to be in every recipe now, but we made it up.
In a way, Maldon had first-mover advantage. It’s the gateway salt, opening the doors of perception to a whole new saline consciousness. There is a growing range of commercial artisanal sea salts, such as Jacobsen Salt Co. in Portland, Oregon, drawn from the Pacific on the Oregon coast (which apparently has a lower salinity than the Blackwater). This is the Portlandia version of Maldon, for chefs with beards and fixies. Or Norđur, harvested on the western coast of Iceland, created using geothermal water.
Recently, I stopped by The Meadow, a Manhattan salt boutique that Bitterman owns. He was there holding forth in front of several shelves of hand-labeled glass jars: Papohaku Opal from Hawaii, Trapani e Marsala from Italy, Amabito No Moshio from Japan, pinballs of salt from Lake Assal in Djibouti. I tasted flecks out of the palm of his hand. It was easy to wonder, amid such exotica, if Maldon might soon be crushed by an array of salts from around the world.
Steve worries more about wet weather than about his competitors. “We stick to the knitting,” he had told me, looking out toward the North Sea. “What, I’ve got to do pink salt now? No. The moon’s still there, and the tide still comes in.”
Nick Paumgarten is a staff writer for The New Yorker.Patrol boats building decision for WA 'bloody stupid': backbencher Warren Entsch
Updated
The decision to build patrol boats in Western Australia is "bloody stupid", Federal Government backbencher Warren Entsch has said.
Key points: Queensland MP Warren Entsch had been lobbying for the boats to be built in Cairns
Questions whether successful bidder is up to the job
Disputes Cairns proposal was 60 per cent more expensive
Business leaders in Cairns were hopeful for the contract to construct 21 Pacific patrol boats in the far north Queensland city. Instead, the contract went to Western Australian company Austral.
Mr Entsch has blasted the Defence Minister's staff and complained directly to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull about the decision.
Mr Entsch, the Member for Leichhardt in far north Queensland, had been lobbying for the boats to be built in Cairns.
"I don't support the decision — quite frankly I think it was bloody stupid," he said.
"I'm not going to just step down and accept it and just be a noddy in the background trying to justify what I see as a bad decision."
Mr Entsch also told the ABC he was "furious" about the way the announcement was handled.
"The fact that I had to be told by the proponents of the unsuccessful bidders that they'd missed out before the [Defence] Minister [Senator Marise Payne] had the courtesy of getting [her] staff to come down and speak to me," he said.
"I gave them short shrift in no uncertain terms."
Questions whether successful bidder up to the job
When asked if he was considering his future in the LNP Mr Entsch replied: "I've got a lot more information that I have to talk to them about before I do anything".
"I need to know what the hell they're going to do with this and the reasoning behind it," he said.
"Once I've had that I will make further comment on it."
Mr Entsch questioned whether the successful bidder was up to the job.
"My understanding is that Austal only build aluminium boats," he said.
"This will be the first steel hull boat they're going to build so there's an element of experimenting there that bothers me.
"I look at the Customs boats that were built there and I tell you what they weren't the most successful vessels."
Mr Entsch was told the Cairns proposal was 60 per cent more expensive.
"I don't accept that — I want to see some figures that would justify that because I find that hard to believe," he said.
"I want to find out what arrangements they've made in relation to variations because they go in for something cheap as chips just to get the contract, and then justify that their costs overruns and by putting in variation you end up paying three times the price."
Senator Payne said she was aware of Mr Entsch's comments.
"In accordance with the requirements of the Defence Procurement Policy Manual and the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, the Government is required to ensure that any procurement achieves a value for money outcome," she said in a statement.
"The Government's decision was based on an open competitive tender process and a comprehensive assessment of value for money.
"A formal briefing has been organised for Mr Entsch on Tuesday morning with a senior Defence official to provide him with further detail on that assessment."
Topics: defence-forces, defence-industry, activism-and-lobbying, federal---state-issues, federal-parliament, cairns-4870, adelaide-5000, wa
First postedOttawa's mayor has traded strong words with a taxi driver after some cabbies sent their anti-Uber message to the city.
Jim Watson said that a group of drivers look like "thugs and bullies" after they secretly recorded themselves taking an Uber in an effort to build a case against the ride-sharing service, CTV News reported.
The video, which was posted to YouTube on Tuesday, shows the Uber car driving on the way to a McDonald's as the cabbies ask the driver a series of questions, such as how much he's paid and whether he needs a taxi licence to operate. The video also records the Uber driver's name, face, phone number and licence plate.
Cab driver Roy Noja, who works for Blueline Taxi, said the video's intent was to show that Uber is illegal, CBC News reported.
Uber drivers are working illegally if they don't have municipal taxi licences, said The Ottawa Sun.
But Watson didn't approve of a "posse... going around and secretly videotaping people and their cars."
"It makes them look like they're thugs or engaged in vigilante activity, which I think harms them and [doesn't help] the cause."
He said people should not gather their own evidence for bylaw investigations. They should call 311 instead, he added.
Noja disagreed with Watson's assessment of him and his fellow drivers — and he had his own name for the mayor.
"He thinks of us as thugs, but we think of him as a puppet of Uber," he said.
Noja was previously in the news after unleashing a rant at a bylaw officer, in a video that was uploaded to YouTube on June 4, the Sun said.
He told the officer to "go fight Uber when we make a f***ing living for this f***ing job."
Noja received a bylaw ticket for being unprofessional. He told the newspaper that the ticket is still in the courts.
His latest video is one of a series that cabbies have been making in an effort to draw the city's attention to the ride-sharing company.
They come as taxi drivers plan a worldwide protest that is set to take place Sept. 16. Noja plans to partake, said CTV News.
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DISCLAIMER: Starting with a 1709 update, Microsoft has shifted Nano Server from being a compact server option to an optimized container image and will continue to improve it in this direction only. Please refer to release notes for more details.
Windows Server 2016 comes with many brand-new features and options. One of the new deployment options is Nano Server, a new headless installation option for Windows Server 2016. Nano Server is a highly-minimized installation that is 20-25x smaller than traditional Windows, which only includes the required bits for the running OS. A unique component of Nano Server is the fact that it has no Graphical User Interface (GUI) and no built-in management tools, it’s the only recovery console where you can change network settings, firewall rules, and reset WinRM. The administration is required to be completed remotely via remote management tools such as PowerShell or Server Manager. The main premise behind this allows the server and applications to better utilize resources while at the same time providing higher security due to the much smaller attack surface.
If you have specific requirements, such as Hyper-V, Windows Failover Cluster, IIS, Scale-Out-File-Server or the DNS role, then you need to add those specific packages during (or after) the Nano Server deployment. During the image package generation process is when you can set the required roles that will be present.
Today I will walk you through the process of creating a Nano Server host that will serve as a Hyper-V node. This Hyper-V node will become a member of a Windows Failover Cluster as well.
Creating a new Nano Server
There are several ways to build Nano Server. You can use Nano Server Image Builder with a graphical interface or PowerShell. In this post, I’ll concentrate on the PowerShell deployment. So, unlike traditional Windows Server installations, the Nano Server install is initiated via a folder that is located on the Windows Server 2016 ISO. Within this folder are all of the required components to get up and running. To start with, you should download the Windows Server 2016 ISO image and mount that image to a Windows Server or Windows 10 machine already deployed within your environment. The first step is to fire up PowerShell ISE in administrator mode and then load the Nano Server module. Below you’ll find all the steps for the new deployment.
Once we have our PowerShell ISE session running, let’s set the PowerShell execution policy. This will let us run PowerShell Scripts without any restrictions. Without this, only single commands or digitally signed scripts can be run (defaults depends on Windows version you are running):
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
Next, we’ll need to create the image. In my environment I have Windows Server 2016 ISO mounted to d:\ so I’ll start with going to the Nano folder on install ISO:
cd d:\NanoServer
Import-Module.\NanoServerImageGenerator\NanoServerImageGenerator.psm1
New-NanoServerImage -Edition Datacenter -DeploymentType Host -MediaPath d:\ -TargetPath E:\Temps
ano\NANO_SRV.vhd -DomainName demo.local -ComputerName NANO_SRV -OEMDrivers -Compute -Storage -Clustering -EnableRemoteManagementPort -InterfaceNameOrIndex Ethernet -Ipv4Address 10.11.0.30 -Ipv4SubnetMask 255.255.255.0 -Ipv4Gateway 10.11.0.1 -Ipv4Dns 10.11.0.10
Edition allows you to select the Nano Server flavor: Standard or Datacenter. If you plan to use Shielded VMs or Storage Spaces Direct, then Datacenter it is. A Datacenter license also has the right to use unlimited Windows Server VMs on that host
allows you to select the Nano Server flavor: Standard or Datacenter. If you plan to use Shielded VMs or Storage Spaces Direct, then Datacenter it is. A Datacenter license also has the right to use unlimited Windows Server VMs on that host DeploymentType Host: This will prepare the image for a physical machine (Guest switch is dedicated for guest VMs)
This will prepare the image for a physical machine (Guest switch is dedicated for guest VMs) DomainName : If you specify this parameter, Nano will use offline domain provisioning and the Nano computer account will appear in Active Directory domain. The whole process will be completed during the first boot. If you are redeploying this image, an additional parameter – ReuseDomainNode - can be required. This option can only be used when the computer we are using to prepare Nano is domain joined and in the same domain as our future Nano Server. In other cases, a domain blob harvest can be used.
: If you specify this parameter, Nano will use offline domain provisioning and the Nano computer account will appear in Active Directory domain. The whole process will be completed during the first boot. If you are redeploying this image, an additional parameter – - can be required. This option can only be used when the computer we are using to prepare Nano is domain joined and in the same domain as our future Nano Server. In other cases, a domain blob harvest can be used. OEMDrivers package contains the basic set of drivers, mainly for network and storage adapters.
package contains the basic set of drivers, mainly for network and storage adapters. Compute is responsible for deploying the necessary Hyper-V bits
is responsible for deploying the necessary Hyper-V bits Storage package contains storage components
package contains storage components Clustering - Failover clustering
- Failover clustering EnableRemoteManagementPort will enable WinRM (from different subnets)
will enable WinRM (from different subnets) Another interesting parameter (not used in my example) could be MaxSize 100GB. It will allow the Nano VHD or VHDX to grow up to specified value. This is important if you plan to store some additional files on the c:\ path of Nano Server (i.e. local virtual machines).
. It will allow the Nano VHD or VHDX to grow up to specified value. This is important if you plan to store some additional files on the c:\ path of Nano Server (i.e. local virtual machines). If you have specific physical hardware drivers, you can add those with the parameter -DriversPath <path:\Drivers>
At this stage, we should have the Nano Server image ready. With our next article, we will deploy it to a physical server.
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loading...This exhibition presents a visually compelling selection of Japanese woodblock prints — as well as paintings and didactic material — that explores the dynamic early work of Japanese landscape artist Kawase Hasui (1883-1957). Through the work of Hasui, the exhibition explores the themes of nostalgia and longing — the search for individual and national identity in Japan during the early Taisho period, an era of dizzying social and cultural change. It presents the best work of one of Japan’s modern masters, featuring high quality objects that are compelling visually, often rare, and broadly resonant. The core themes of this art — the exploration of the native landscape and the discovery of a new urban beauty in response to the anonymity of modern life — are as relevant to American audiences now as they were to Japan in the 1920s.
The works selected for this exhibition focus on Hasui’s most creative period of woodblock print design: the years from 1918 to the Great Earthquake of 1923. The exhibition utilizes the unparalleled collection donated to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by preeminent Hasui collectors, René and Carolyn Balcer.
The exhibition is curated by Kendall Brown, Professor of Asian Art History at California State University, Long Beach, and author of earlier books on Hasui and several catalogues on modern Japanese prints. It will be accompanied by a major catalogue including essays by leading scholars from North America and Japan.
Sponsors
Carolyn Hsu-Balcer and René Balcer
E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation
Christie’s
The Japan FoundationAt this point I have lost track how many times I have been given inaccurate counsel from other well-meaning people, such as, "Make sure you copyright that so nobody can steal it," or "If you put it online then you give up your rights and it becomes public property." Such advice will only ever come from people who don't actually understand copyright laws. When it comes to copyright issues and navigating them, the only advice worth following is advice that can be backed up by law. If you receive advice that can't be backed up by legitimate copyright law then the advice is simply someone's opinion.
In this particular realm, it will likely be in your best interest to simply do your own research and understand, for yourself, what the copyright laws are for where you live. For the purposes of this article we will be looking at, and linking to, the copyright laws specific to the United States of America. For individuals both in the U.S. and outside of it, in order to understand what laws protect your works in other countries you will have to look up the laws for the specific country in which you need copyright protection.
From my experience, there seems to be a misunderstanding as to when the copyright comes into play. In a nutshell, under the Federal Copyright Act of 1976, all photographs are protected by copyright from the very moment of creation. If you would like an in-depth description of your rights as a photographer, you can read through all the government documentation that outlines the specifics of the actual laws concerning subject matter and scope of copyright. There are distinct differences between ownerships that need to be understood. For client work, understanding the intricacies and differences between the possible ownerships of copyrights is something that needs to be clarified up front (this is where your contracts come in handy).
The following is a direct quote from the U.S. Copyright Office outlining the copyright laws for the United States.
Ownership of a ‘copy’ of a photograph — the tangible embodiment of the ‘work’ — is distinct from the ‘work’ itself — the intangible intellectual property. The owner of the ‘work’ is generally the photographer or, in certain situations, the employer of the photographer. Even if a person hires a photographer to take pictures of a wedding, for example, the photographer will own the copyright in the photographs unless the copyright in the photographs is transferred, in writing and signed by the copyright owner, to another person. The subject of the photograph generally has nothing to do with the ownership of the copyright in the photograph.
In general, what that means for you, the photographer, is that your images are copyrighted automatically simply by you clicking the shutter. The only way that changes if you have a specific arrangement with your client, documented and signed by both parties, before creating the photographs. If it isn't documented and signed before the creation of the images, then a legally binding document must be signed that outlines the transfer, either in whole or in part, of the copyright from the photographer to whoever the recipient is.
Going to the extent of legally registering the copyrights for your photographs is not an obligatory step for protecting yourself. Registering your copyrights will make things easier should you enter a litigation situation, or for claiming damages, but you do not relinquish your copyrights to any image simply because it isn't registered.
Below are some of the most helpful sources that can help you gain a more advanced knowledge of copyrights and the laws protecting them:dwf137 Scooby Specialist
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Quote: A W Originally Posted by Boulder, Lafayette, let alone Denver doesn't have enough money and manpower to repaint the white lines that are painted there when they do road maintenance once every couple of YEARS.
You don't seem to understand since clearly bicyclists and pedestrians don't roam your city but, in Colorado, you rolling forward to check for traffic just leaves you blocking a crosswalk. I ALWAYS stop behind a stop sign because I know what it's like to deal with drivers who can't stop for crap as a little kid. I was the rugrat riding around on a bike WITH A HELMET looking out for cars because I knew they didn't look for pedestrians BEFORE getting to the stop sign like you.
But I'm not like you since I'm already CHECKING for pedestrians BEFORE I even get to the stop sign. You know, that's what people should be doing if ever possible unless there are BLINDSPOTS like I mentioned in my previous post.
The more time drivers spend on the roads, the greater the chance of accidents. That's completely backwards from safety, dwf. I'd love to hear an engineer's opinion while she/he is in front of the a DOT and NHTSA panel. However slowing down traffic in a high traffic (foot, bike, and car) area is a completely different story. There wouldn't be a NEED to slow down traffic |
was football; he cared little for the distractions that came along with it. He never went out of his way to help Wayne, or any receiver for that matter. But if Wayne asked, he answered.
The greatest lessons he passed on came in his practice habits. He left his gloves on the sideline to toughen up his hands for Sundays. He sprinted to the end zone after every single catch. He never took a day off.
"I remember how fast he was, that he had awesome hands, those wild catches he used to make," Hilton said. "But the biggest thing about Marvin Harrison was his heart. He played with so much heart."
That heart left indelible mark on a wide-eyed rookie out of the University of Miami. It helped shape the arc of Wayne's career.
A decade and a half later, Wayne is the league's oldest receiver. His leadership style strays from Harrison's head-down, mouth-shut mantra; if he sees a problem, his teammates hear about it. Wayne called a players-only meeting late in the season to ensure the Colts refocus before their playoff push.
There are the little things, too.
Hilton who came into his own last season while Wayne was sidelined with a torn ACL. (Photo: Mike Fender/The Star)
"I remember one night at training camp, Reggie speaking up in front of the whole team," said Colts backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, before diving into his best Wayne impersonation. "'Guys, make sure you clean up after yourself in the lunch room. It's not the janitor's job to clean up your plate!'"
The bond between Wayne and Hilton continues to blossom. They sit next to each other in film sessions and on flights. They fist-bump after every big play. They shoot hoops together in the offseason.
After Sunday's win over Cincinnati, Hilton showed his respect this way: By sporting a gray T-shirt with Wayne in his blue 87 uniform across the chest.
"Best T-shirt in the world," Wayne called it.
As for his pupil, he's carving out his own legacy. Only two of the first 13 receivers drafted in 2012 have earned a Pro Bowl nod. Hilton is one of them.
Yet the bar for the position in Indianapolis remains impossibly high. He can thank 88 and 87 for that. Hilton topped 1,000 receiving yards for the second straight season this year; Harrison and Wayne achieved that feat eight times each. Harrison sits third in NFL history in receptions, Wayne seventh. Harrison's seventh all-time in yards, Wayne eighth.
Hilton has a ways to go.
And he may soon go it alone. When Wayne packs his car after the season and heads south to Miami, he'll contemplate whether to retire or return for a 15th season. Hilton expects his phone to buzz again.
"He already knows he's got to talk to me about it before he makes a decision," Hilton said.
He knows one more thing: If Wayne does call it a career, Hilton is ready for what comes next.
"I guess I'll just have to pay it forward like he did."
Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter @zkeefer.JABALPUR: Madhya Pradesh’s BJP-run government has ordered state-funded schools and even madrassas to introduce stories from the Bhagwad Gita in junior classes, triggering a storm in the Muslim community. Minority leaders on Monday accused the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government of saffronisation of Islamic centres of learning.
The government order of August 1 dictates a “chapter on Bhagwad Gita should be included in the textbook of general Hindi for Class III and IV, special English and special Urdu for Class 1 and II for the 2013-14 academic session”.State minister for minority welfare Ajay Vishnoi said introducing students to Hindu religious texts wasn’t new and that madrassas have taught content from the Gita for two years. “Nobody noticed or made an issue out of it. Now, with elections barely four months away, critics have raked up a controversy to vitiate the atmosphere.”But the minister failed to explain why a fresh government order was issued if the Gita was already on the curriculum. “The lessons comprise inspirational sayings taken from the holy book to impart moral values to school children,” he said.The Congress party in MP saw the move as ammunition against the Chouhan government. “Religion must be left to religious heads. The government’s job is to lift the standard of education and not push its own communal agenda,” said leader of the Opposition in the assembly Ajay Singh.However, in New Delhi, the Congress response was far more guarded. Schools should also include content from the Koran, the Bible and the Guru Granth Sahib, said party spokesperson Meem Afzal. “All religions are good. There is nothing wrong in Gita being taught but it will be better if some components from other religions are also included so that people can realize that those fanning disputes in the name of religion are wrong.”Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has made no bones about plans to introduce the Gita in madrassas. Addressing a function hosted by RSS offshoot Saraswati Vidya Pratishtha in November 2011, he had said, “Teaching the Gita is no crime and the government will soon include it in school curriculum.” He had made surya namaskar in schools compulsory recently but a court diluted it, making it voluntary.Muslims have sought immediate intervention of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board. Board member Arif Masood on Monday appealed to Governor Ram Naresh Yadav to stop the government from subverting the Muslim personal law. The ulema and scholars are also exploring legal options, the Muslim leader said.“The government’s move is an infringement on constitutional rights of minorities and interferes with our religious beliefs. I have appealed to the governor to scrap the order,” Masood said.The Minority United Forum is gearing up to take the fight to the streets. “We will not allow the BJP government to mess around with madrassa education. They cannot force students to study the Hindu scripture,” said Maulana Ajmad Shah of the Forum. He said it was a ploy to polarize voters on the eve of elections.As foreign assignments go this must be just about the most dangerous going.
A US recruiter is hiring nuclear power workers in the United States to help Japan gain control of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been spewing radiation.
The qualifications: Skills gained in the nuclear industry, a passport, a family willing to let you go, willingness to work in a radioactive zone.
The rewards: Higher than normal pay and the challenge of solving a major crisis.
"About two weeks ago we told our managers to put together a wish list of anyone interested in going to Japan," said Joe Melanson, a recruiter at specialist nuclear industry staffing firm Bartlett Nuclear in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
So far, the firm has already signed up some workers who will be flying to Japan on Sunday.
Melanson said there will be fewer than 10 workers in the initial group. Others are expected to follow later, he added.
Plant owner Tokyo Electric Power has appealed to the nuclear industry outside of Japan for assistance as the crisis has spiraled beyond their control.
On Thursday, the company said radiation levels in water found in tunnels under the plant was 10,000 times the normal level and radioactive iodine 131 was found in ground water near No.1 reactor of the complex.
Melanson said Bartlett Nuclear had been approached by sub-contractors linked to the General Electric-Hitachi nuclear joint venture. GE designed the Fukushima reactors.
"At first, we had no details about the duration of the job or the positions needed. The only requirement was that you have a valid passport," Melanson said.
But as the job details came in, Bartlett managers scoured the list of volunteers and selected several engineers and technicians "we knew would perform well for us over there".
So just what type of person would go into a damaged nuclear plant that is throwing out dangerous levels of radiation?
Not roughnecks
Melanson said these are not roughnecks prepared to risk their health for a quick paycheck but senior technicians and engineers who have come up through the ranks.
Some have families. "Anytime we have international business, it's up to the workers to square it with their wives."
Japan has put in an exclusion zone of 20 kilometres around the plant. Several experts have recommended that zone should be expanded.
Melanson could not say for certain where the workers would stay but said initially they would be based in Tokyo and drive the 480 kilometre round trip to the Daiichi plant. Translators will be provided so they don't have to speak Japanese.
"The pay will definitely be better than the average pay (for a nuclear technician) over here," Melanson said, but declined to specify exactly what the average salary would be. It is not clear how long they will be working in Japan, but Melanson estimated it would be at least a month.
The workers are not expected to come into contact with the highest levels of radiation.
"These are not 'jumpers' rushing into a room. TEPCO is bringing in robots to help limit human exposure to high levels of radiation," he said.
"Jumpers" is the industry term for people who enter highly radioactive environments to quickly perform a task. The practice was common in the United States in the 1970s and early 80s.
"It's still a job that exists but it's much rarer than in the past - the job is mostly performed mechanically with engineered robotics these days," said Rock Nelson, staffing manager at Nelson Nuclear Corp in Richland, Washington, who has worked in the nuclear industry for almost 30 years.
Melanson said the workers would receive all the equipment needed to do their jobs and safeguard their health.
The roles include ground water and radiation specialists, and spent fuel experts.
Other international nuclear firms have also sent workers to Japan, including France's Areva SA and US-based Westinghouse.
Some experts think the crisis could take months to resolve.
"Tepco will be facing specific and unique problems in each plant," said Nelson.
"Each specific problem may require the engineering of a specific piece of machinery. They will almost certainly have to send a jumper or two in but only as a last resort. This is going to run on for weeks if not months."Coacervates ( or ) are organic-rich droplets formed via liquid-liquid phase separation, mainly resulting from association of oppositely charged molecules (such as macro-ions, polyelectrolytes, polysaccharides, protein etc.)[1] or from hydrophobic molecules/ proteins (such as elastin-like polypeptides)[2]. Coacervation is a phenomena that produces coacervate colloidal droplets. When coacervation happens, two liquid phase will co-exist: a dense polymer rich phase (coacervate phase or coacervate droplets) and a very dilute polymer deficient phase (dilute phase). Coacervate droplets can measure from 1 to 100 micrometres across, while their soluble precursors[3][4] are typically on the order of less than 200 nm.[5] The name "coacervate" derives from the Latin coacervare, meaning "to assemble together or cluster".
The process of coacervation[6] was famously proposed by Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane as crucial in his early theory of abiogenesis (origin of life/proiskhozhdenie zhizni). This theory proposes that metabolism predated information replication, although the discussion as to whether metabolism or molecules capable of template replication came first in the origins of life remains open[7] and for decades the theory of Oparin and Haldane was the leading approach to the origin of life question.
History [ edit ]
These structures were first investigated by the Dutch chemist H.G. Bungenberg de Jong, in 1932.[citation needed] A wide variety of solutions can give rise to them; for example, coacervates form spontaneously when a disordered polypeptide, such as gelatin, reacts with another biologically derived polyelectrolyte, such as gum arabic. They are interesting not only in that they provide a locally segregated environment, but also in that their boundaries allow the selective absorption of simple organic molecules from the surrounding medium. For example, a mix of carbohydrate solution with a protein solution, will favor the spontaneous formation of amoeba-like coacervates which change shape, merge, divide, form "vacuoles", release "vacuole contents", and show other lifelike properties.[8] In Oparin's view this amounts to an elementary form of metabolism. British scientist Bernal commented that they are "the nearest we can come to cells without introducing any biological – or, at any rate, any living biological – substance." However, the lack of any mechanism by which coacervates can reproduce leaves them far short of being living systems.[9]
Complex coacervation [ edit ]
Complex coacervation commonly refers to the liquid-liquid phase separation that results when solutions of two oppositely charged macroions are mixed, resulting in the formation of a dense macroion-rich phase, the precursors of which are soluble complexes.[10][11][12]
See also [ edit ]New Delhi: In the continuing war of words between Bharti Airtel Ltd and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the Mukesh Ambani-promoted telecom company has written to Trai saying Airtel is creating a “smokescreen to hide its ill-gotten profits and to support its false pretence of loss under the existing IUC regime".
Reliance Jio was responding to an Airtel letter to the telecom regulator sent last week, which challenged Reliance Jio’s calculations that suggested incumbents generated more than Rs1 trillion through interconnection usage charges (IUC). Airtel on 7 September wrote to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) that saying Reliance Jio was continuously trying to distort facts at various platforms to “show other operators in bad light and create policy bias in its favour".
In the letter, Airtel had said it has not made any gain on account of IUC—as alleged by Reliance Jio—and has instead incurred loss of Rs6,800 crore in the last five years.
“Airtel’s outgoing tariffs for off-net calls clearly shows a premium that it charges from its customers to compensate for the IUC that it would need to pay to other operators. It does not charge the same amount for on-net calls. Therefore, there cannot be any basis for Airtel to show net IUC receipt having already recovered its IUC expense from customers," Reliance Jio said in the letter dated 11 September.
The bone of contention is interconnection usage charges, paid by telecom firm which originates the call, to the one which terminates the call, currently set at 14 paise. Older telecom firms want it to be raised to at least 30 paise, while new entrant Reliance Jio wants it cut to zero. Reliance Jio said in July that India’s top three telecom firms earned Rs1.04 trillion in the past five years by not implementing a 2011 regulatory road map to cut IUC to zero.
An Airtel executive who spoke on condition of anonymity refuted the claims made by Reliance Jio.
“Calculation for the payment of IUC should take into account the difference between off-net incoming and off-net outgoing. The on-net numbers should not even be considered because this is the call that is terminating into my own network," the Airtel executive said.
Reliance Jio has requested Trai to take appropriate action against Airtel “for such mischievous and frivolous submissions made well post the time allocated for additional submissions by the Authority during the open house discussions".Share:
TRIPOLI - Two suicide bombers killed nine people and wounded 37 others in an attack on a cafe in a flashpoint Alawite neighbourhood of the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli Saturday, officials said.
Al-Qaeda’s Syria branch claimed responsibility for the attack in the Jabal Mohsen neighbourhood. “Nine people were killed and 37 others wounded,” the health ministry said in a statement.
Lebanese army released the names on Sunday of two suicide bombers who killed nine people in second city Tripoli in the latest violence linked to the conflict in neighbouring Syria. The Saturday attack on a cafe in a Tripoli neighbourhood mainly inhabited by members of the Alawite sect of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was claimed by the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. A security source told AFP: “The first suicide bomber entered into the Ashqar cafe at around 7:30 pm (1730 GMT) and blew himself up.”
Panicked survivors tried to flee the scene of the attack, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Then, a second suicide attacker arrived, and blew himself up too,” he said, updating his initial account of a single suicide bomber. Lebanese security forces believe the bombers lived in Mankubeen, a majority Sunni neighbourhood just 500 metres (yards) away from Jabal Mohsen.
The security source said the army had cordoned off the bombers’ homes. A man who was lightly wounded said he was near the scene of the blast when the attackers struck. “I was at the cafe with other people, when we suddenly heard a first blast,” Zuheir al-Sheikh said. “Then we heard a huge blast, though I have no idea what caused it,” he added.
Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the Al-Nusra Front, claimed responsibility for the blasts via Twitter. “#Al-Nusra Front: a cafe belonging to the (Alawite Arab) Democratic Party in Jabal Mohsen was targeted with a double martyrdom attack, to avenge the Sunnis in Syria and Lebanon,” read the tweet. The Arab Democratic Party is the main group representing the Alawite minority in Lebanon. Lebanese politicians and movements were quick to condemn the bombing, branding it a “terrorist” act and calling for unity.
“This crime will not terrorise the Lebanese or the residents of Tripoli, and it will not weaken the government’s resolve to confront terrorism and terrorists,” Prime Minister Tammam Salam said in a statement. The powerful pro-Syrian Shiite Hezbollah movement blamed “takfiri (extremist) terrorists” for carrying out the attack, in a reference to radical Sunni militants.
Former prime minister Saad Hariri, Lebanon’s main Sunni official, also condemned the attack.
“This terrorist act is part of a campaign to sow chaos and division, and to destabilise (Tripoli) after the Lebanese army and security forces managed to stop the cycles of violence,” Hariri said in a statement.
Lebanon’s second city Tripoli has seen frequent violence pitting gunmen in the Alawite district of Jabal Mohsen against neighbouring Sunni Bab al-Tebbaneh.
Fighting between the two districts in recent years has killed scores of people, many of them civilians caught in the crossfire.
Though the tensions have their roots in the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, sectarian hatred has spiralled ever since the outbreak of a revolt in neighbouring Syria.
People in Bab al-Tebbaneh support the rebels, who like the Syrian population are mostly Sunni.
Since October, the army has deployed heavily in Tripoli, detaining hundreds of people in an attempt to stem the violence.
On August 23, 2013, bomb attacks struck two mosques in Tripoli, killing and wounding dozens of people.
Some of those suspected of involvement in the attacks were from Jabal Mohsen.Plenty of Americans are concerned, to put it mildly, about the alleged Russian attempt to influence the presidential election here last year. But it might surprise many Americans to learn that this is not the first time a foreign power has tried to sway a US election. Apparently, the Brits and the Germans both tried to influence the campaign in 1940. The story was first flagged by Politico.
The US intelligence community has concluded, with a high degree of confidence, that Russia acted to damage Hillary Clinton and help President-elect Donald Trump. They hacked the DNC to obtain dirt; they planted stories; and they invented fake news, to help sway opinion. US intelligence agencies described it as a "classic influence campaign."
In many ways, the British campaign in 1940 has become the model for that kind of classic influence campaign.
The Brits used wiretaps to get dirt; recruited journalists to plant favorable stories; invented fake stories; used dirty tricks to try to destroy opponents; and funded and coordinated pro-British activist groups.
The goal was to try to change US public opinion and to manipulate America’s political establishment toward helping Britain in its fight against the Nazis. In 1940, this was no sure thing. Incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to help the UK but faced an uphill battle to overcome isolationist and “America First” views.
World War II began in Europe in September 1939. By June 1940, Britain was fighting alone against Nazi Germany. All its allies had been crushed and occupied by Hitler’s Germany. Britain was fighting for its life.
Both London and Berlin knew that only US intervention could change the course of the war in the UK's favor. So both nations set out to influence the US election. Churchill had just become prime minister in May 1940, and he hired freelance agent William Stephenson to head up the new North American operation. Stephenson was a Canadian, a war hero, a brilliant inventor and a wealthy and well-connected industrialist. He set up shop on June 21, 1940, at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Room 3603 became headquarters of an organization he christened “British Security Coordination.”
Within days, Stephenson scored a major victory at the Republican Party convention in Philadelphia.
The Brits obviously liked FDR, since he was already campaigning to increase assistance to the UK. But just to hedge their bets, the Brits tried to get a like-minded individual in as the Republican nominee.
The only GOP candidate with a pro-British agenda was one Wendell Willkie, from Indiana. He went into the convention as a decided underdog.
Then a poll came out from a polling organization called Market Analysis, Inc. It said that 60 percent of delegates favored helping the UK. The findings were published by the New York Herald, and an influential syndicated columnist, William Allen White, wrote that it was now clear the other candidates were out of touch with the party’s grassroots. Willkie won the nomination, to the astonishment of the party and the country.
Decades after the war, it was revealed that Market Analysis, Inc., was a British creation.
Dirty tricks and fake news were employed to discredit individual congressmen, like the prominent isolationist Hamilton Fish of New York. According to an official history, the goal was to "put the fear of God into every isolationist senator and congressman in the country." They funded his opponents; published pamphlets suggesting he was pro-Hitler; released a false photo of Fish with the head of the pro-Nazi German American Bund; and they planted stories saying he was getting financial aid from German agents. The British sustained the effort till he was finally beaten in 1944. Fish blamed the smear campaign on Moscow.
Stephenson’s agents also wiretapped the French embassy and used honey traps to get intelligence from French diplomats about pro-German activities, and stories were then planted in the press.
The German campaign was less successful. Stephenson’s agents found proof that the Nazis were funding America First, the leading isolationist group, with ties to white supremacists. This information was used to discredit the isolationists.
After the war, as British Security Coordination faced being disbanded, Stephenson commissioned an official history to be written, to prevent its achievements being consigned to oblivion. This was a semistandard practice for covert British operations, as a kind of "lessons learned" exercise.
Former agents wrote the history — including Roald Dahl, who went on to write children’s books.
"The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-45" was declassified in 1999, and you can get a copy from your usual online bookstores. You can cross-check parts of it with other documents in the UK National Archives, and in memoirs from other participants and interviews they've given over the years. One memoir was actually titled "You Only Live Once." Another former agent, Ian Fleming, took to writing. Actor Noel Coward is also believed to have been recruited by British intelligence.
So did it work? The jury is still out. Apart from getting lucky with the Republican nomination, the Brits failed to push Congress over the edge. The interventionists did secure some narrow votes in Congress to send material aid to the UK, votes that really pushed the envelope of America’s neutrality laws.
But Congress remained strongly anti-war until the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Even then, there was little support for a war in Europe until Hitler declared war on the United States on Dec. 11, 1941.When you hear Washington's hawks making announcements about a 'dictator', you should start to worry. We've seen this scenario endless times. The target is, one more time, Venezuela and the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro. One must be extremely naive to believe that the US banking/corporate puppets care about anything else than Venezuela's rich oil resources.
The US empire has lost so much credibility through endless wars based on big lies, orchestrated coups especially in Latin America countries, and all kinds of dirty interventions around the globe, that if there is anyone who seriously believes that these hypocrites really care about human rights, we should easily conclude that has been completely brainwashed by the Western media propaganda.
The US real agenda concerning Venezuela is so obvious that there is no need for further investigation on the issue. But if you still want further proof that oil is the real game, here is another piece of evidence, provided by Miguel Tinker Salas, an expert on Latin America, who explained on RT why the US has held off on sanctioning crude oil:
So far, the sanctions have been against refined Venezuelan oil products and against individuals in the Venezuelan government. They have not been for the importation of crude. And the fact that they are not including crude, speaks to that interdependence and the fact that US oil producers and exporters don't want to upend the market. And potentially, that 10% extraction of Venezuelan oil, could spike US gasoline prices as well.
It other words, the US hypocrites attempt to suffocate Venezuela, but only as much as needed to overthrow Maduro, without risking a boomerang effect against US oil market. It seems that we have a carefully arranged wave of sanctions on behalf of the US empire that aim to bring a right-wing puppet in power, and therefore, the achievement of the final target: re-capturing Venezuela's oil resources by the US big oil cartel.
As political science expert George Ciccariello-Maher explained on Democracy Now:
No one is asking, or, referring to the leaders of various other countries as dictators simply because their term has not been completed. And Maduro’s term is completed next year. There will be elections. Any constitutional reform that comes out of this assembly will go to a public vote. And so, we’re talking about a country that’s had more verified clean elections than really anywhere else on Earth in the past 15 to 20 years. And it’s really difficult to hear anyone, and much less the Trump regime, refer to this as a dictatorship.
From Bush through Obama and into Trump, what we’ve seen is a desire to have an active role in removing a chavista government from power. The question has just been how to do so most effectively. There was a coup in 2002 backed by the Bush administration, and it failed. It was a kind of a disaster for the opposition politically. And so, then the Obama administration continued to fund those very same coup leaders, continued to fund people involved in that coup and right-wing antidemocratic elements, and to do so openly. And so it’s no surprise to see this happening now and to see the CIA expressing its open desire to be involved, because this has been the role for so long.
Everything shows that the US empire is determined to orchestrate another coup against the government of Venezuela, or, perhaps a civil war. Washington's hawks are more anxious than ever because they understand that it will become more and more difficult to intervene in case of a radical political transformation of Venezuela towards real Socialism.Palin Ties To Militant Religious Movement Confirmed Bruce Wilson print page Thu Jul 16, 2009 at 03:25:33 PM EST Since the 2008 presidential election, mounting evidence suggests a dramatic, widespread failure of media to investigate and inform the American public about Sarah Palin's extensive ties to a radical, growing global movement whose leaders proclaim that an end-time army of young Christians led by Apostles and Prophets will cleanse the Earth of evil, and unbelievers, and impose Christian theocratic government. Evangelist Rick Joyner's Morningstar Ministries promotes the end-time Christian army vision and was featured in a Fall 2008 Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report, " 'Arming' For Armageddon: Militant Joel's Army Followers Seek Theocracy." In a March 2009-dated video posted on his ministry website, Joyner describes having a long post-election phone conversation with 2008 GOP Vice Presidential candidate Palin. [below: Rick Joyner describes his conversation with Sarah Palin] There are extensive linkages between Joyner's ministry and the church many have identified as Sarah Palin's most significant, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Joyner, a prolific prophecy author, has written that "The Kingdom of God may seem like totalitarianism at first." An even more direct tie between Palin and the end-time army movement was detailed in the January 2009 issue of Charisma Magazine, in a story titled "The Faith of Sarah Palin" which added details of Palin's ongoing personal friendship with Alaska Apostle and national leader Mary Glazier - who has advocated a program of religious cleansing. The Charisma story quoted Glazier as stating that her prayer group "actually began to pray for [Palin] before she became mayor of Wasilla" because "[w]e felt then that she was the one God had selected." Also revealed: in Spring 2008 Glazier and Palin prayer together over the phone and also in person, at the Alaska Governor's Prayer Breakfast. In a speech (link to speech excerpt) given June 13, 2008, Mary Glazier stated that Sarah Palin joined her Wasilla prayer group nearly two decades ago, around the time Alaska Independence Party candidate Walter Hickel was running for the Alaska governor's seat. [below: Mary Glazier advocates religious cleansing] In 1995, according to a story Glazier told SpiritLed Woman Magazine for a 2003 article, Mary Glazier led an emergency prayer-warfare campaign when a professed Wiccan applied for a job as a chaplain in the Alaska State Prison system: "In 1995, Mary mobilized a prayer network for Alaska's prisons and began experiencing spiritual warfare as never before. She had received word that a witch had applied for a job as chaplain of the state's prison system... Mary recalls, "As we continued to pray against the spirit of witchcraft, her incense altar caught on fire, her car engine blew up, she went blind in her left eye, and she was diagnosed with cancer." "Ultimately, the witch fled to another state for medical treatment." On September 22, 2008, while Sarah Palin was actively campaigning for John McCain's presidential bid, Mary Glazier released a "prophetic warning", through prayer networks channels, of an immanent act of terrorism that would leave Palin, alone, to step into "an office that she was mantled for." Glazier, who has stated a belief that "God has equipped [Palin] for this hour," appeared to be hinting via prophecy that an untimely death might advance Sarah Palin to the United States presidency. Just as ominously, on June 13, 2008 at a conference held in Everett, WA outside of Seattle Mary Glazier described a program of Christian religious cleansing, the removal of unbelievers from "the land", "There is a tipping point, at which, at which time, because of the sin of the land, the people then have to be displaced.... God is preparing a people to displace the ones whose sin is rising so that then they tip over and the church goes in - one is removed and the church moves in and takes the territory. Now, that does not mean that the people are removed, because God removes them from the Kingdom of Darkness into the Kingdom of Light. They are given an opportunity to change allegiances." Mary Glazier then informed her fellow religious leaders at the conference, all in a newly emerging global Christian tendency known as the New Apostolic Reformation, that Sarah Palin had joined Glazier's prayer group shortly before Palin decided to go into politics. One of the few mainstream media stories to explore Palin's unorthodox Christianity was New York Times reporter Laurie Goodstein's October 24, 2008 story, "YouTube Videos Draw Attention to Palin's Faith" in which Goodstein wrote, "Ms. Palin has had long associations with religious leaders who practice a particularly assertive and urgent brand of Pentecostalism known as "spiritual warfare." Its adherents believe that demonic forces can colonize specific geographic areas and individuals, and that "spiritual warriors" must "battle" them to assert God's control, using prayer and evangelism. The movement's fixation on demons, its aggressiveness and its leaders' claims to exalted spiritual authority of its Apostles and Prophets have troubled even some Pentecostal Christians. Ms. Palin delivered an enthusiastic graduation speech for a class of young spiritual warriors in June at the Wasilla Assembly of God, the church in which she was raised." On January 7, 2009, both Mary Glazier and another key Third Wave and New Apostolic leader, Dutch Sheets, appeared at the church most closely linked to Sarah Palin, the Wasilla Assembly of God, where Palin was re-baptized and attended for over two and a half decades. During the church service Sheets declared that Glazier "was the lady who brought us into the state [Alaska]." On June 7, 2009 another New Apostolic Reformation leader, International Coalition of Apostles member Lance Wallnau, gave a talk at the Wasilla church In June 2008, Palin spent Alaska State travel funds to fly from Juneau to the Mat-Su Valley and attend two June 8th church services presided over by the Wasilla Assembly of God's head pastor, Ed Kalnins, who personally anointed Governor Palin during both services. Video footage of Palin taken at the June 8th, 2008 graduation ceremony held at the Wasilla Assembly of God became nationally notorious due to a speech Palin gave in honor of students graduating from a program, run by the Wasilla church, known as The Masters Commission. In the $8,000 a year program, students learn deference to authority, Biblical memorization, "prophesy", and miracle healing. Perhaps the most publicized of Palin's statements was one in which the Alaska governor seemed to imply the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was sanctioned by God. But it seems that no media observers had bothered to watch the entire video segment of the June 8, 2008 graduation, which remained avail able in the Wasilla Assembly of God's public archives; towards the end of the ceremony, graduating 3-years Masters Commission students were presented with western-style and also Samurai swords. Shortly before the sword ceremony, a speaker addressed Sarah Palin - who apparently was personally still present at the church event. [below: 3-year graduates of Masters Commission Wasilla Alaska program given swords] Other video to be found on the Wasilla church's web site, from a September 7, 2007 Masters Commission event at the Wasilla Assembly God, shows a national Masters Commission speaker waving a sword about from the pulpit while addressing students in the program, then playing an excerpt from the Mel Gibson movie "The Patriot" and suggesting to the program students that there are times when it is necessary to fight. [below: Masters Commission national speaker Jayme Montera waves sword about, plays clip from Mel Gibson war movie] Morningstar Ministries is one of the most militant of American ministries in a new Christian tendency known as the Third Wave (referring to the third wave of Pentecostalism) or New Apostolic Reformation. During the Fall 2008 presidential election campaign, Morningstar founder and head Rick Joyner, in an interview with a reporter from the Religion News Service, downplayed ties between his ministry and the Wasilla Assembly of God, stating, "I would be honored to be connected, but we are not that I know of. It is very likely that her church has read our stuff and I think some of our folks have been up and spoken to her church. It would be a very loose, distant association. We deeply appreciate her and what she is standing up for. I wish I could claim more." In early September 2008, shortly after Presidential hopeful John McCain had picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, the Wasilla Assembly of God scrubbed several years of its video and audio website archives, of events held at the church. But in mid September some of the footage, saved by a quick-thinking activist, reemerged on the Internet and showed an October 16, 2005 ceremony at the church in which three pastors blessed and "anointed", with the laying on of hands, Sarah Palin. During the ceremony one of the pastors, Kenya evangelist Thomas Muthee, called on God to protect Sarah Palin against "every spirit of witchcraft." In a speech prior to the blessing ceremony, Muthee declared that Christians should "invade, infiltrate" key sectors of society such as government, business, and media. Muthee's connection to the Wasilla Assembly of God was not casual; in 2000 according to head pastor Ed Kalnins, his church along with an area consortium of Christian churches known as the [Mat-Su] Valley Pastors Association raised tens of thousands of dollars so that Thomas Muthee could purchase land in Kenya on which to build a church. The Pastors had been impressed with Muthee's role in The Transformations, a video which is part of a series on spiritual warfare which has been viewed around the world. Muthee had a leading role in the first video of the series. Two other pastors shown the October 2005 ceremony blessing Palin were Wasilla Assembly of God head pastor Ed Kalnins and Crossraods Commnity Church head Phil Markwardt. In 2005 the two pastors made a trip to visit Thomas Muthee in Kenya, and photos from the trip show Muthee and Kalnins distributing books written by Morningstar Ministries founder Rick Joyner. Kalnins has also described himself as a "spiritual son" of Rick Joyner's close working colleague Francis Frangipane. Kalnin's |
the records, the state police fire up the Stingray (now most likely a Stingray 2.0, aka, Hailstorm) once every three days.Whether further upgrades will be this easy for the state to obtain remains to be seen. For one, this document release, along with last year's discovery of Oakland County (MI) Sheriff's Department's previously-unmentioned Stingray, has placed the use of these surveillance devices under additional scrutiny by legislators.Additionally, the state government recently passed an asset forfeiture reform bill. While it didn't go as far as many had hoped (thanks to the objections of law enforcement lobbyists), the new law does raise the level of evidence needed to process a forfeiture from " a preponderance " (which sounds much weightier than it is) to " clear and convincing." It also requires additional reporting from law enforcement agencies on the seizure and distribution of funds and property.That being said, some legislators still don't see a problem with law enforcement agencies doing whatever they want with surveillance equipment they don't want to talk about.There's a company man. Heise, of course, speaks with authority on the subject of Stingrays, law enforcement burden and the ripeness of the issue. After all, he had no clue about the technology or who had it until someone else pointed it out to him.
Filed Under: asset forfeiture, imsi catchers, michigan, police, stingrays, surveillanceEven as a faithful Mormon I have to admit that the South Park portrayals of Latter-Day Saints over the years haven’t been all bad. In an odd way, I was honored that the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith was numbered among the “Super Best Friends” in a couple of episodes, representing — for good and ill — all the world’s religions. But when Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced the production of a Broadway musical mocking Mormons exclusively, I rolled my eyes.
LDS folk make an easy target for satirists; we are a peculiar blend of American middle class respectability and apparently oddball belief. Devoting two hours at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in New York City to denigrating a minority religion that is still marginalized by the media seemed, well, lacking in courage. Four years later, when The Book of Mormon touring company announced a Salt Lake premiere, I was intrigued.
Here in the heart of Mormon country — where the LDS church has its worldwide headquarters, where Mormons hold 80 percent of the seats in the state legislature, where two LDS meetinghouses sometimes stand on the same city block — this is where the show could serve the age-old purpose of satire: to challenge the existing power structure. Although still wary of Parker and Stone’s anti-religious propaganda, I sensed the value of such an event for the non-Mormon, anti-Mormon, and post-Mormon audiences in Utah. What was beating up on the little guy in New York could be parodying the oppressor in Salt Lake; and maybe, I figured, that would be a healthy thing.
But there was another, deeper reason that I paid scalper’s prices for an opening night ticket. I wanted to feel what it was like to be mocked.
It might be valuable to be on the receiving end of the free speech and boundless self-expression that we celebrate in Western democracies. While I am prepared to defend anyone’s right to offend me (in this case I paid them for their services), I think more attention needs to be paid to the human consequences of that offensive act. How does it feel to have the things you hold sacred defamed and debauched in front of hundreds of eager onlookers?
I was horrified by the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, but that was only half the story. What about the devout and decent Muslim minorities in Europe and the United States who suffer in silence with no thought of revenge when their prophet and holy texts are publicly derided? What is the cost of such suffering? In a masochistic way I wanted more insight into it. How are conservative people of faith supposed to live in a world that values meta-remove and cynicism over authentic spiritual experience?
So I took my seat in the comfort of the Capitol Theater on Main Street in Salt Lake, waiting to have Broadway’s finest sing out their f-bombs and dance their way all over my religion.
As the curtain went up to reveal those adorably dorky young missionaries-in-training with Books of Mormon in their hands standing in front of the Salt Lake Temple (the real one was only four blocks away), the cheering almost drowned out the music for a moment. It was a strange mixture of hometown pride, and relief that Yes! Finally someone on the outside understands what we have to put up with around here! I was cheering too, but for a slightly different reason; even as comedic caricatures, these boys on stage represented the people I love: my family, my friends, my tribe.
The fact that our sacred story is not shrouded in the mists of history has been very convenient to Mormonism’s detractors. No one has found Moses’ journal as he lead the Israelites to the Promised Land; the historical Jesus is elusive at best. Centuries of tradition and political power have given Judeo-Christian religions a certain respectability that, while no longer ubiquitous, certainly persists in many quarters.
Mormonism is Christian to its core, but we arrived on the scene way too late to make it into the club. The unique facets of our faith — a farm boy visited by Deity, Christ ministering to ancient Jews on the American continent, the potential each individual has to become like God — these claims sound outlandish to old school believers even though they are no different in scope or character from the tenets of any other religious tradition.
Furthermore, since our faith was established in 1830, the detailed and documented lives of the Mormon founding fathers are always within reach. Our prophet Joseph Smith is a flesh and blood historical figure. Along with his spiritual teachings, there is plenty of evidence revealing all the flaws, embarrassments, and contradictions a satirist could want. This is why Mormonism is such a perfect vehicle for Parker and Stone. They can use the public’s perception of LDS beliefs as preposterous to lead them to the conclusion that all religious faith is absurd.
It’s an alternately dark and hilarious road we travel with the missionaries in the musical. Every effort of these faithful but clueless boys to find converts is thwarted by the horrific conditions that are daily life in an impoverished and war torn Ugandan village. (And, by the way, has anyone asked Ugandans how they feel about this show? Colonial stereotyping seemed alive and well to me.) The juxtaposition of perky Mormon optimism with bitter hopelessness is, I have to say, managed masterfully with superb comic timing and the shock value that results from the plentiful use of obscenity. “Turn it Off” is an apt send-up of the Mormon cultural tendency to repress pain.
Every single reference to and re-enactment of Mormonism’s beliefs and sacred stories is derisive. Joseph Smith is a vain airhead — pulling one over on his followers with a dubious tale about gold plates. Jesus is a wooden, self-satisfied know-it-all. On the one hand I get it. The way my church presents these stories in our visitors centers and miracle pageants is out of date and one-dimensional, but portraying the Mormons as idiots when they turn to God, when they speak His name in prayer, that hurt. It made the world an uglier place for me. It felt like an attempt to cheapen my spiritual experiences, to cut me off from the transcendent. It got old pretty fast.
Late in the second act, the show took a surprising turn. Self-absorbed Elder Price hits bottom and has to dig deep to find the conviction to keep going. Songwriter Robert Lopez has beautifully crafted a classic number where Price opens his heart in a time of immense need. He belts out what Mormons call a testimony — what he knows is true in this life and the next. Given the way the missionaries have been portrayed up to now in the show, we sit back, ready to smirk.
As he revs up to the stirring refrain of “I Believe” something has changed. For the first time all night, there is a sense of the enormity of what his faith means to him. He’s speaking from the heart. He’s reaching for that thing that’s bigger than he is to help him in his pain:
I believe that the Lord God created the universe
I believe that He sent His only Son to die for my sins
What? Time stood still; you could feel the audience in awe and confusion. Something was real here, something powerful. But wait… that’s not supposed to happen in this show.
We were experiencing what people who convert to Mormonism report. This is what we call the Spirit bearing witness. This is the story that my son, my nephews, my former students — young men and women who served missions — tell in their weekly emails home to friends and family:
“I let go of my fear and just shared what I know in my heart is true… I asked Heavenly Father to give me courage… I felt divinely prompted to knock on one more door that night.”
For a few seconds, as far as I was concerned, Trey and Matt got it absolutely right.
They could not allow that to stand. And to be fair, no satirist worth his salt would. Sincerity, it can render the weapons of cynicism and irony useless.
After this brush with authenticity, Elder Price’s testimony is quickly reframed as sweet but deluded. We are again reminded of the goofy-sounding details that live on the periphery of LDS belief: the whereabouts of the Garden of Eden, God’s precise location in the universe. Relieved laughter from the audience resumed. That uncomfortable moment where people who’d come for farce were faced with something serious, true, and beautiful, was, brilliantly I’ll admit, punctured by the return to cynical condescension.
Things only get worse from there. Elder Price’s reward for baring his soul is sexual assault. There were a few gasps from the Salt Lake audience when this plot turn was revealed, but it was followed by laughter. In some twisted way this was the writers’ ultimate achievement. Congratulations guys, you made a brutal rape comedic, and it’s okay because the weapon was literally Mormon scripture and the victim a dumb missionary. Yes, this is make-believe. Yes, this is parody. Yes, I can take a joke, but at that point in the show, the audience was as complicit as the goons that guard the Ugandan warlord. We laugh at the cruelty; Elder Price is no longer a human being. We have entered the realm of bigotry. Behold the power of theater.
Observers have praised the upbeat finale as a generous atheist’s nod to the good religion does. The missionary companions have concluded that although religion is based on lies, it can help people be happy right now. If that’s the only compliment I’m going to get out of this musical I’ll take it, but to many religious people that attitude discounts the work we do every day to cultivate faith, to live with doubt, to wrestle with the idea of putting off happiness now in obedience to a higher law. Even if you are not a literal interpreter of scripture your sacred stories are sacred metaphors that if dragged through the mud lose the power to help, to heal, to console.
I’m not declaring a war on satire. The Western tradition of using parody and sarcasm to shame individuals, governments, or society into improvement is a noble one. And I’m not saying my church as an institution ought to be exempt from such treatment; it was probably healthy for the LDS power structure to have to take it on the chin on their own turf. But ridiculing another human being’s profound spiritual experience is a shabby undertaking. It is, as cartoonist Gary Trudeau has said, the abuse of satire:
“At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism.”
Just because we can say something doesn’t mean we should. If a satirist chooses to ridicule an already marginalized group he is now in a position of privilege that can contribute to a dangerous unawareness of how his unbridled speech can degrade the humanity of his targets. The consequence of that abuse of power is that those targets start to see themselves as victims and become vulnerable to demagogues who preach retribution. Hate breaks out all over.
In the the text of the actual Book of Mormon, Lehi, an ancient prophet, describes a dream that is a symbolic telling of life’s journey. He sees valiant souls walking through difficulty and darkness, eventually finding a straight path to the Tree of Life that bears delicious fruit. The tree, he explains, is the love of God, and he wants others to join him and share this happiness. He looks up, and across the way is a “great and spacious building” where detractors have gathered:
“And it was filled with people… and their manner of dress was exceedingly fine; and they were in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers towards those who had come and were partaking of the fruit. And after they had tasted of the fruit they were ashamed because of those that were scoffing at them; and they fell away into forbidden paths and were lost.”
My evening at the theater was an unlikely fulfillment of Mormon scripture. It would be dishonest to say that I was not, at times, among the scoffers, but more often I felt it was me they were pointing at. Yet I emerged unashamed; persecution has been part of my tribe’s story for a long time, and although there are plenty of reasons to wander from the path on my faith journey, clever mockery is not one of them.
I’m glad I went to the show. It’s important to see how others perceive you, even if it is through a distorted lens.
Bless your hearts, Parker, Stone, and Lopez. You are now pillars of the Church of American Musical Theater. “The Book of Mormon” is bursting with loving references to that tradition. You have been compared to Rogers and Hammerstein. I saw groundbreaking creativity on display, but no engagement with improving the human condition, the foundation of powerful satire.
The production was another sad skirmish in the culture wars, isolating Mormons instead of bringing them, and other conservative people of faith, into the conversation. While the giants of the Broadway musical used this medium to expose bigotry, you have given intolerance a whole new life — drumming it into the dear little ears of worldwide audiences six nights a week. Bravo.“I’ve told people what they need to hear to get their money in and it’s been very difficult.” “Which is a lie.” “Yes. I’ve told some things that were not true.” “It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a material lie.”
THE MARIJUANA START-UP Ebbu LLC held its 2015 Christmas party at a stylish townhouse in downtown Denver.
As guests arrived, they selected from edibles and vape pens fanned out on cocktail tables. Hired lovelies dressed for Burning Man twirled silently through the crowd. At one point, a man ran into the middle of the room and shouted, “Everybody in here get the fuck out!” — before security showed him the door. The most committed stoners colonized a windowless basement decorated with a pirate flag. It still felt like a work party, with significant others making small talk around a messy taco bar.
For more than two years, Ebbu has promised to unveil a revolutionary line of marijuana products called “Feelings” — Energy, Create, Chill, Giggle and Bliss. Marijuana’s flaw, the company believes, is that it’s unpredictable. Customers want to know how a product will make them feel, and they want it to work every time. Ebbu’s goal is to position consistent marijuana products as the pot equivalent of the Intel microchips that power nearly everything that emerges from Silicon Valley. Imagine: “Ebbu inside” stamped on the packaging of edibles and other manufactured pot products across the country.
The company’s co-founders, Michael “Dooma ” Wendschuh, 39 (above, left) and Jon Cooper, 40 (above, right), met over a decade ago in Los Angeles, where Dooma had co-founded a production company, and Cooper worked in movie finance. Neither of them are heavy pot smokers. They formed Ebbu in 2013, and soon emerged as leaders among a wave of new pot entrepreneurs — technocrats drawn to cannabis more for the potential profits and the excitement of pioneering a new industry than personal devotion to the plant. Before Ebbu had a product to sell, the company was featured in outlets like The Economist, Bloomberg, and the Fox Business Channel. Dooma “saw a problem that nobody seemed to be addressing,” The New Yorker website reported last May. During occasional TV spots and on the conference circuit, Dooma, Ebbu’s public face, personified the image that legal marijuana businesses hope to project: smart, sophisticated and law-abiding.
At the party, Dooma stood above the snowy patio, sober, and called the crowd to attention. He is angularly thin, with short, spiky hair and deep-set eyes, so that he sometimes resembles a very well dressed prisoner of war; that night he wore a sport coat, a conservative striped tie and a Quebec flag belt buckle the size of a saucer. “There are a lot of fucking people here, which is awesome!” He cried out. “One year ago this was in my apartment.”
Before Ebbu had a product to sell, the company was featured in outlets like The Economist, Bloomberg, and the Fox Business Channel.
In November, Ebbu had topped $100,000 in monthly sales for the first time. It had about 30 employees and contractors. Dooma had stopped the party to award dog tags to the year’s new hires who had held on to their jobs. “We’re in combat every day at Ebbu,” Dooma said. “What we’re trying to do is the hardest thing you can imagine.” Each dog tag had an employee’s name and the motto, “Lead by example.”
Dooma scanned the crowd. “I know you’re doing it because you believe, ‘cause we don’t pay you guys shit. It’s about the equity. It’s about the brand that we’re building…It’s about creating something that’s going to be bigger than Facebook or Google. We are going to make a product that is going to be in every bar, every restaurant, every hotel and every household around the world!”
Two weeks later, Dooma had left Ebbu and the company he’d devoted years to build had plunged into a crisis.
THE BUDWEISER OF WEED
A year earlier, Dooma and Cooper had invited me to “embed” with Ebbu. At the time, the company had minimal name recognition and no sales, but it stood out as one of the few marijuana companies both determined to advance science and willing to break federal law. Between then and January 2016, I sat in on well over 100 company meetings and calls, including many with investors, partners and other outside parties. I spoke freely with the staff and had a free pass to spend time at the office. The plan was to tell the story of a company working to solve marijuana industry’s most exciting problem, while the rules for how marijuana companies operate are still very much in flux.
After Dooma left, the story became far more complicated. I obtained evidence that he would, on occasion, “stretch the truth” with prospective investors about the company’s finances, exaggerate product development, and that his fundraising efforts may not have been in full compliance with Colorado’s marijuana laws. Dooma and Cooper have had a falling out and neither will discuss what transpired.
In the months following Dooma's departure, I tried to piece together the story of what went wrong for a talented entrepreneur who sought to dominate America’s wildest industry.
“We’re in combat every day at Ebbu... What we’re trying to do is the hardest thing you can imagine.”
Legal marijuana is among the fastest growing industries in the country, but it’s not yet big business. In 2015, industry-wide sales totaled $5.4 billion, the overwhelming majority of it in three states: Washington and Colorado, which have legalized sales to all adults, and California, where doctors’ notes are available online. By comparison, the illegal pot market is worth roughly $40 billion and domestic alcohol sales top $200 billion annually.
In November, five states, including California, are likely to vote on recreational legalization, which could expand the market by tens of millions of potential customers overnight. Ambitious cannabis entrepreneurs like Cooper and Dooma didn’t set out to replace the local dealer. Their goal is to reinvent this stigmatized plant as an essential part of modern life, as ubiquitous, in its way, as our smartphones.
It’s hard to overstate the potential. While smoking it works well enough, marijuana is a chemically fascinating material that has been exiled from academic and corporate research for decades. “Nobody understands this plant,” Dooma said. “In order to build a business, we have to do the very basic scientific research to fundamentally understand what this plant is capable of.”
The state legalization experiments have set off the economic frenzy known as the Green Rush. But like other economic frenzies, from the California Gold Rush to dot-com bubble, a tiny elite is bound to do way better than everyone else. In Colorado alone, hundreds of companies manufacture edibles, vaping oil and other marijuana products that are largely indistinguishable from each other. Many of these companies agree with Ebbu that controlling a product’s effects, medical or recreational, or convincing customers that you can, will be central to determining who becomes Facebook and who becomes Friendster. Some companies approach this question with genetics or refined agricultural techniques. Ebbu aims to pull the plant apart and then reconstitute the relevant chemicals into products.
The legal obstacles companies face might be more daunting than the scientific problem. In Colorado, generally regarded as the world’s most mature marijuana market and an example studied by other states, the industry’s legal framework is just over three years old and individual rules change often, with potential implications far beyond the state’s borders.
If Colorado companies follow state laws, they’re unlikely to be raided and shut down by the federal government — during the Obama administration, at least — but they operate in unmapped terrain. For marijuana companies, bedrock business needs like fundraising, intellectual property protection, selling in other legal states and simply opening a bank account involve layers of complexity that companies in other industries don’t have to think about. Colorado “has the most stringent regulations where I’m least likely to go to jail. I don’t want to go to jail,” Dooma said. “That means that I’m also swallowing some of these really ridiculous rules.”
With the legal landscape still fractured and uncertain, Ebbu hopes to get a head start: right now it can simultaneously research the plant and develop new products while corporate America—everyone from Big Pharma to Big Tobacco -- salivates on the sidelines. Green Rush entrepreneurs love to compare the current moment to the Internet’s early days. Dooma, with characteristic hyperbole, considers that modest. “Maybe two billion people in the world use the Internet,” he said. “There has got to be close to seven billion who need some kind of psychoactive. Marijuana can be better than all of them, but it's not right now. It needs to change in order to reach its potential.”
I WANT EVERYTHING, AND I WANT IT NOW
Before he entered the pot business, Dooma’s L.A. production company helped create video games. He and his partner “were young and insanely confident,” Joshua Rubin, a writer who worked for them, said. “They knew how to talk people into things. They knew how to get people excited about ideas.” In the mid-Aughts, a colleague gave Dooma a copy of Alamut, a Slovenian novel based on the life of the 11th century Persian warlord, Hassan-i Sabbah. In the book, Sabbah lives by the credo, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” and controls an elite band of soldiers — known to history as the Assassins — by feeding them “little balls” of hashish. The book helped inspire Dooma and his partner to write Assassin’s Creed. Video games in the ensuing Ubisoft franchise have sold more than 78 million copies and grossed over $3 billion. A movie, starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons opens in December.
A Princeton grad with a film degree from USC, Dooma, then known as Mike, smoked his first joint with some buddies on the roof of a Miami hotel during his Star Trek-themed bar mitzvah. Still “super afraid” of drugs, Dooma tried not to inhale. In more than a year, I remember seeing him consume marijuana only once, during a meeting for work purposes. I never saw him take any other illegal drug, but he met his first wife at Burning Man and has claimed, “When I think back on my life, the most important moments, every single one of them, involved a psychoactive substance.” (He’s including caffeine.)
Dooma, a vegetarian and light drinker, has a far-flung network of interesting and accomplished friends and also knows his way around the national parks. He gets along so well with his parents that he brought them to Burning Man one year. They had a wonderful time.
At work, he presents a different face. In meetings, his default tone is brusque with a withering edge. He said he prefers not to hire people with ski racks on their cars because he thinks they’ll play hooky whenever it snows. He respects a few competitors, but says things like, “If you look at the jokers who are making the real money in this industry it can’t be that hard.” He got in the habit of Googling new contacts with terms like “fraud,” “scam” and “SEC” [Securities and Exchange Commission.] When interviewing a job candidate, he characterized his management style as, “What I want is everything and I want it now.”
He once berated an employee for bringing the wrong pastries to an investor meeting. “I got so mad,” Dooma said later while driving his dinky Honda hybrid. “I yelled at him in front of a lot of people, which I shouldn't have done.” He then brought up a female employee, “I am such an asshole to [her] and she tries so hard. [She] has this incredible ability to, like, bounce back when I say the most condescending and offensive things to her. She doesn't even get perturbed.” For a while, Dooma had a daily note on his calendar reminding him not to be an asshole. (Through a spokesman, Dooma said he doesn’t remember this and suggested that it was posted by an employee.)
By 2010, Dooma had a exciting career while, around him, hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries had opened in L.A. Dooma saw that discerning users varied their intake to focus, relax or sleep, but the available products didn’t always deliver. “People who really love cannabis are willing to forgive the problems of the plant,” he said years later. “They think that like six times out of ten having a pretty good experience is good enough, whereas the average consumer would be furious with a six out of ten situation.” It wasn’t until later, after Colorado and Washington State voted to legalize in 2012, that Dooma called his old friend Cooper, who had returned to the Denver area where he grew up. “Hey Coop,” Dooma said. “What do you think of marijuana?”
"I know you're doing it because you believe, 'cause we don't pay you guys shit. It's about the equity."
Cooper, who had built a career as a tech executive and entrepreneur, didn’t think much about it, but he invited his friend to visit. Cooper, Ebbu’s CEO, has the beard and stocky build of a young Henry VIII. He’s more approachable than Dooma. He laughs easily, cheers for the Broncos and named his son Che.
As Colorado prepared for recreational sales, Dooma and Cooper searched for investment opportunities, but nothing struck them as a billion dollar idea. Grow operations needed capital, but the pair figured cannabis would soon be a commodity crop, like wheat or soybeans. Retail dispensaries looked like another low-margin slog, as sexy as running liquor stores. Dooma and Cooper decided that the big winners would be trusted brands, the Cokes or Budweisers of weed. Companies with similar ideas already touted their products’ flavor or all-natural ingredients. But no one uses cannabis because it’s baked inside a tasty cookie. “People make purchasing decisions in this industry based on how they think it's going to make them feel,” Dooma said. The existing companies were “all branding the wrong thing.”
Marijuana gets people high, but “high” is an inadequate description of the drug’s effects. Pot can feel euphoric or zonk users into “couch lock” for hours. It can induce laughing fits, paranoia or an urge to cuddle. Some users consider it essential for exercise, sleep, and, yes, work. Underground growers have long sought to engineer highs by crossbreeding familiar plants, but in an illegal market, their skill was worth little more than street cred.
When customers enter a dispensary, the buds displayed in glass jars beneath the counter are advertised as sativa, indica or hybrid. The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck first distinguished between the tall cannabis sativa plants found in Europe and the bushier cannabis indica that grew in India in 1783. Today sativa is said to pep users up, while indica induces a mellower “in-da-couch” high. But most experts believe that years of untracked commerce and aggressive crossbreeding have stripped the classification of any real scientific basis, at least at the dispensary counter. “I would strongly encourage the scientific community, the press and the public to abandon the sativa-indica nomenclature,” Dr. Ethan Russo, a neurologist and medical director of a Los Angeles company focused on cannabinoid receptors, said in a recent journal interview.
The thousands of strain names like Alaskan Ice, Heisenberg Kush, Chem’s Sister and Amnesia Haze confuse matters further. The Web site Leafly, which has backing from Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund [disclosure: a Pando investor], says the canonical strain Blue Dream, a sativa-dominant hybrid, carries a balance of “full-body relaxation with gentle cerebral invigoration.” Who, after a few hits, would disagree? But savvy buyers know that what one dispensary calls Blue Dream, will be stronger or produce a different nature of experience than the Blue Dream sold next door, because neither is the real Blue Dream, if there even is such a thing.
“Even the word ‘strains’ is not typically applied to plants,” Jonathan Page, CEO of the cannabis testing company Anandia Labs, and an adjunct botany professor at the University of British Columbia told me. “In roses, or petunias, or corn you have cultivars or varieties of plants that are actually registered with a government body.” With cannabis, of course, there’s no registration or documentation.
Cindy Orser, chief scientific officer at testing company, Digipath Labs, said that when it comes to strains “truth in advertising doesn’t exist in this industry.”
During one of Dooma’s visits to Colorado, he and Cooper were talking in the living room — sober, Cooper said. Pot had never been hard to come by in Colorado, especially in Boulder where Cooper went to college, but he had an uneven history with it. “We have all these people who are coming to the state, and they want to try marijuana, and they just want to giggle,” he said to Dooma. “What do they take?” Remembering one of his best times with weed, he then asked, “What if we made a product that was called ‘Giggles?’”
Before Ebbu launched, Cooper put together a survey to learn about their potential customers. The most intriguing responses, he found, came from former users who had given it up. “You hear a whole wide range of excuses, and you can probably name them just as well along with me,” he said. “‘I have kids.’ ‘It doesn’t fit into my lifestyle now.’ ‘I had a bad experience.’” These same people had had bad experiences with alcohol but they continued to drink. Cooper and Dooma suspected that predictable marijuana products could bring those former users back. And these customers, Cooper said, “actually have money.”
Cooper now thinks a lot about marijuana, and how he can establish Ebbu as a trusted American brand. Ebbu, he said in a meeting is not about getting high, it’s about enhancing life experiences, whether that means enjoying a party, taking a nap or painting a picture. “There’s going to be an interesting question to figure out, related to this, or maybe it’s kind of the undertone of the whole thing, which is the experience of life,” he said, sounding a bit enhanced himself. Then he recovered, “We need to have a really good answer about why psychoactives are a good thing in people’s lives.”
THE END OF THE TOUR
Ebbu occupies a chalet-style building in the Rocky Mountain foothills near the town of Evergreen, Colo. Visitors enter a cramped office furnished with all the care and charm of a police station. There’s no ping-pong table, no free snacks, no kegerator. Some employees park their laptops wherever they find space at a large wooden table in the main room. Behind a locked door, where a factory and lab contains more than $1 million worth of equipment, a team of white-coated scientists are manipulating chemicals found in marijuana to create the five “Feelings”: Energy, Create, Chill, Giggle and Bliss.
In April 2015, the facility was still under construction when the co-founders met near Dooma’s standing desk to dissect everything that wasn’t working. Dooma scribbled on a window in red marker that Ebbu had no quality control, couldn’t meet deadlines and a pricey machine — a liquid chromatography mass-spectrometer — didn’t appear to work for their purposes. Cooper, seated in the small cluttered room, added that they had no way to scale up production until the factory opened, still months away. The packaging wasn’t finalized for a product they hoped to launch within weeks. “Do you know we have 20 employees right now?” Dooma asked, with a joyless laugh. “It sure doesn’t feel like it.”
The founders were sorting through their concerns over the loud scraping of an unseen worker — “That’s not annoying at all,” Dooma said — when the bookkeeper, an affable guy named Ben, arrived with a letter. The bank had apparently learned that Ebbu is in the marijuana business. “E-Trade has decided to exercise its discretion to close the above referenced account,” it read. Dooma and Cooper had 30 days to find a new bank for their investor’s money — the company raised $2 million in 2014 — even though none in the state openly worked with marijuana companies.
As Cooper and Ben huddled around a computer to go over expenses, Dooma sat slightly removed, leg bouncing, eyes on his phone. “Dooma we need to catch up,” he suddenly read aloud. “All tours are on hold until you and I speak about my role with Ebbu.” It’s from the landlord who was renting the company lab space in Denver while Ebbu built its own. When prospective investors landed from out of town, Dooma showed them the rented lab; he thought its bubbling beakers and gleaming machines would convince investors to dig deep. The landlord, a powerful figure in the industry, knew this, and hoped that by taking away one of Dooma’s main tools for raising money, he could maximize his stake in the company.
“Why the fuck is [Dooma’s assistant] telling these people that we’re doing tours?” Dooma snapped, and stomped off to find her. She departed the company soon after. (It’s not clear whether she quit or was fired.) “We’re so fucked,” he said as he returned. “We’re so fucking fucked.”
Over the course of 2015, Cooper and Dooma collaborated on strategy and business development. Cooper oversaw operations including the construction of Ebbu’s headquarters and factory and building a sales team. Dooma focused on fundraising. His central task for the year was leading Ebbu's effort to secure $9 million in venture capital.
Raising money is a peculiar challenge for marijuana companies, so anything that threatened to disrupt his efforts was an issue. “Sales is a very delicate dance,” he told me. “It's a lot about creating an illusion about what this company is and what the investment is going to be like and what your experience is going to be like with the investment.”
Almost none of the VC funds that most start-ups hit up will invest in weed. This narrows the pool mainly to rich folks who are willing to risk stigmatization, or, perhaps even prison time, to join the Green Rush. In Colorado, only two-year state residents can own equity in marijuana companies. (The state is phasing out this requirement.) As a result, Ebbu could only offer out-of state investors the relatively boring opportunity of interest-paying “notes.” And note holders have to get fingerprinted and pass a background check for the privilege. Even Dooma, who moved to Colorado for Ebbu, was not eligible to officially own equity in the company until January 2016. He was technically a consultant, though his LinkedIn page lists him as "Co-founder, Co-CEO."
“We’re so fucked,” he said as he returned. “We’re so fucking fucked.”
Even once the company has raised money, it had to wait for the bank it found to quietly accept its business to release it. In the fall, Ebbu was so short on cash that senior executives volunteered to defer their pay, while almost $5 million languished inaccessible.
In January 2015, I sat in as Dooma called some of the company’s investors to ask for more money. Outside, a blizzard had whited-out the roads. “Life is fucking great,” a California tech entrepreneur said through the speakerphone. "Up and to the right, up and to the right."
The conversation stalled after Dooma acknowledged that Ebbu didn’t have any revenue. “I love being invested in you no matter what you’re doing,” the investor said. “I know you’re a beast and you’re going to kill it.” Still, he declined to invest further.
The second investor wasn’t ready to invest more either, and Dooma opened the third call with some small talk. “I can’t imagine what your ex-wife looks like,” he said, “because [your daughter] looks like they cloned you.”
The ex-wife “looks like a Russian hooker,” the investor said. He wanted to invest more in Ebbu once he got through a temporary cash crunch. “Within two weeks I should have full access to what is |
information that Csontos had been their agent during the investigation and they even met him at the time the murders were taking place and one counter-intelligence officer even lied about him afterwards. What was the reason for this? Did they want to defend the honour of the uniform?
I do not know what kind of honour of the uniform we are talking about when people are dying. In these cases, there is no such thing. But I did take part in several meetings when all the affected organisations, services were at the table. And I did not hear many pieces of supportive information from the military branch either.
Fotó: Huszti István / Index
So you were an affected party in the investigation into the Roma murders?
Yes, but I do not want to talk about that. Later I also took part in hearings on the off-site hearings of the national security committee.
Earlier you said that moralizing is not the job of security officers. Did you feel remorse because the racist serial murders were not prevented or stopped during they were happening?
Yes, absolutely, I also had to deal with my own conscience. Everyone who worked on this case, be they policemen or secret agents, I think will take the fates of these six people to the grave and they will never forget it. Everybody was shaken and everyone needs to take responsibility for their own mistakes.
Hypothetical question, but was it possible to save more lives?
If I wanted to be really dramatic I would say yes. But we will never know this.
Did the secret services manage to reassuringly clarify their own responsibility in the case of the Roma murders?
Absolutely not. The National Security Office, the predecessor of the AH, was screened correctly and naturally we had to present the events to MPs as well on the off-site hearings. Then, contrary to the results of the national security screening, contradicting the findings of the report, the mandates of several of our leaders were revoked, including mine. It is completely natural that whoever worked in this field had to take the blame. I was later even rehabilitated, I became chief advisor to the director-general.
However, with regards to our colleagues from the military, several questions remain open. I did not experience investigations, hearings of similar intensity in their ranks.
So, a screening of similar depth did not take place there? Why?
I don't know the answer to this.
After the murder in Bőny it was revealed that Csontos, an accomplice in the Roma murders, was also in contact with the MNA, which held joints drills with the GRU.
I do not know that, but since Csontos was a special assistant of the Military Security Office, they obviously played with him then as well. They themselves said he was their own contact, obviously they did not only use him in one far-right circle, but in many. But all this is just a guess.
Do you think those who belong to your generation within Hungarian secret services agree with what you said in this interview?
There are generational tensions within law enforcement agencies, which not even younger high-level leaders can remedy. My generation and those younger than us cannot really identify with the so-called 'Eastern opening' of the recent period, while the older individuals whose informal influence is to this day decisive are able to do so much more.
This article was originally published in Hungarian. Translated by Patrik Szicherle.Author: Marshall Schott
I recently received The Hydra immersion chiller by JaDeD Brewing, it’s already been used 3 times on 2 different systems. I could blowhard about my experience with other types of chillers, how I don’t like using pumps because they’re a pain to clean, or how I was first introduced to this badass company… but I’d prefer not to beat around the bush.
The Hydra is basically made of 3 strands of 1/2″ copper tubing. The water coming into the chiller is split just after entering into each of these strands, meaning more surface area and increased contact time with cool water. It’s similar in idea to the King Cobra IC I use often, just not as squat.
For its maiden voyage, I used this beast to chill 12 gallons of Dunkel wort.
Since receiving The Hydra, groundwater temperatures where I live have been rather warm, which means I’ve not been able to chill wort to my target pitching temps. I understand I could use a pre-chiller or another setup and have plans to play with that later. However, in my opinion, a good IC is one that chills to 5°F or so above groundwater temp in a short amount of time. For the following sets of data, groundwater temperature was measured prior to the wort being chilled, at which point a timer was started and a time documented once the wort was chilled.
TRIAL #1: Munich Dunkel on My System
Groundwater Temp (GT): 82°F
Method: Constant stirring
Wort Volume: 11.5 gallons
Time to Reach GT + 10°F: 5 min 45 seconds (92°F)
Final Wort Temp: 87°F
Time to Reach 87°F: 6 minutes 32 seconds
TRIAL #2: Munich Helles on My System
Groundwater Temp: 83°F
Method: IC moved up/down in wort, occasional stirring
Wort Volume: 11.5 gallons
Time to Reach GT + 10°F: 5 min 38 seconds (93°F)
Final Wort Temp: 88°F
Chilling Time: 6 minutes 18 seconds
TRIAL #3: American Pale Ale on Friend’s System
Groundwater Temp: 82°F
Method: IC moved up/down in wort, occasional stirring
Wort Volume: 6.5 gallons
Time to Reach GT + 10°F: not measured
Final Wort Temp: 85°F
Chilling Time: 6 minutes
Not too shabby, eh? I was damn pleased, that’s for sure. If you’re wondering why my buddy’s chilling time is fairly close to mine for a smaller volume of wort, it’s due partially to the fact his volume wasn’t high enough to cover all the coils of The Hydra, resulting in some loss in efficiency. Also, he chilled his to within 3°F of his measured groundwater temperature rather than 5°F like I aim for… still pretty damn impressive.
The Verdict
I wouldn’t be writing this review if I didn’t think this product was amazing. It’s incredibly well constructed and does as it promises, plus it’s a hell of a lot easier to clean than a pump and plate chiller. For those looking to improve their chilling times, move away from clunky CFC setups, or impress your friends, I couldn’t recommend The Hydra more. One thing to keep in mind is the issue of exposed coils and how it impacts chilling efficiency– if you, like me, tend to use your larger kettle often to make smaller batches, consider the King Cobra, as it is designed specifically for this purpose. For those who primarily make 10+ gallon batches, The Hydra is the way to go.
If you have any questions about my experience with this IC, or if you’d like to share your personal experience using JaDeD chillers, please don’t hesitate to comment! If you have a question for JaDeD, contact them via their website, they’re usually very quick to respond. Cheers!
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Like this: Like Loading...Florida State continues to rack up talent as Leonard Warner becomes the 11th blue-chip recruit to join its 5th ranked recruiting class & the tenth to be ranked inside the top 200 (No.176) Nationally. The 7th rated inside linebacker in the country hails from Snellville, GA & represents a renewed focus in Georgia recruiting from the FSU staff. He committed to FSU over offers from Georgia, Stanford, Alabama and many others.
Warner becomes the third linebacker in FSU’s class & is more of a coverage linebacker than his two #Tribe17 compatriots. At 6’4 226lbs with room to grow and very good coverage skills Warner may remind Seminole fans of former Seminole star Christian Jones whom is currently with the Bears. Check out the highlights of the newest Seminole below:
Warner is a very bright student and wants to study engineering in college.As the process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) begins years before disease onset, searching for prevention strategies is of major medical and economic importance. Nutritional supplementation with long-chain polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids (LC-n3-FA) may exert beneficial effects on brain structure and function. However, experimental evidence in older adults without clinical dementia is inconsistent, possibly due to low sensitivity of previously employed test batteries for detecting subtle improvements in cognition in healthy individuals. Here we used LOCATO, recently described as a robust and sensitive tool for assessing object-location memory (OLM) in older adults, to evaluate the impact of LC-n3-FA supplementation on learning and memory formation. In a double-blind placebo-controlled proof-of-concept study, 44 (20 female) cognitively healthy individuals aged 50-75 years received either LC-n3-FA (2,200 mg/day, n = 22) or placebo (n = 22) for 26 weeks. Before and after intervention, memory performance in the OLM-task (primary) was tested. As secondary outcome parameters, performance in Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT), dietary habits, omega-3-index, and other blood-derived parameters were assessed. Omega-3 index increased significantly in the LC-n3-FA group compared with the placebo group. Moreover, recall of object locations was significantly better after LC-n3-FA supplementation compared with placebo. Performance in the AVLT was not significantly affected by LC-n3-FA. This double-blind placebo-controlled proof-of-concept study provides further experimental evidence that LC-n3-FA exert positive effects on memory functions in healthy older adults. Our findings suggest novel strategies to maintain cognitive functions into old age.The business community tends to play percentages and right now they favor the president. Wall Street braces for an Obama win
NEW YORK — Mitt Romney was Wall Street’s dream candidate, a former private equity executive committed to lower taxes and less regulation who would never rip bankers as “fat cats” as President Barack Obama famously did.
But now many masters of the universe concede they may not get their man.
Story Continued Below
Across Wall Street and the broader landscape of corporate America, even strong supporters of Romney acknowledge that swing state polling numbers and the direction of economic data and markets suggest it’s time to brace for a second Obama term.
“It looks right now like it’s probably going to be Obama, so you have to start planning for that, even if it’s not what you would prefer,” said the chief executive of one of the largest companies in the United States who has criticized the president and spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to give a frank assessment of the state of the race. The executive added that plans were under way to work with a second Obama administration on selling a plan to avoid the fiscal cliff with major tax and entitlement reform that includes some new revenues.
“We don’t really care if our taxes go up a little if we can just get this done and take this threat away from the economy,” the executive said, adding that support from CEOs could give cover to Republicans in Washington concerned about supporting any new taxes and angering tea party hardliners and anti-tax advocates such as Grover Norquist.
They still go to Romney fundraisers, open their wallets and hope for the best, especially in the upcoming debates. It’s just that Wall Street and the business community tend to follow data and play percentages. And right now they favor the president.
It makes for an uncomfortable moment for Wall Street, which came out much more aggressively for Romney than Obama this year, after Obama made significant inroads with the finance sector in 2008.
The shift in tone among executives toward Obama was on display at the Clinton Global Initiative this week, where several CEOs softened their criticism of the president. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein acknowledged there had been widespread “disappointment” with Obama within his firm and across Wall Street.
But he also said that it was time to move on and finally deal with rising debt and unsustainable entitlement programs. “People who have been pouting and holding their breath aren’t going to want to do that for four more years,” he said.
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems and a strong Romney supporter, spoke of bridging partisan divides on taxes and spending should Obama win a second term. And in an interview with Reuters, Chambers said whoever wins should govern like Bill Clinton. “There’s a lot to learn from President Clinton. It kills me as a strong Republican saying it, but he was the most effective president during my lifetime,” Chambers said.
The Obama administration has already begun laying ground work for improving its soured relationship with corporate America in a possible second term.
To be sure, there are still plenty of Romney partisans across Wall Street and the business community who are far from giving up and dismiss talk that the former Massachusetts governor is fading.
“I don’t think donors are reacting at all,” to the negative poll numbers said Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets. “We had Romney here three weeks ago and had the biggest three events we’ve ever had. We raised $8 million. We had a breakfast where we would normally do $1.5 or $2 million and we did $4 million.”
Johnson added that executives know a campaign ebbs and flows and that there is time for a late comeback win. “They know in business and politics things are very fluid. I’m extremely confident and the people I talk to are cautiously optimistic.”
This article tagged under: Wall Street
PoliticsUPDATE: the Twins announced Tuesday afternoon that a 4 p.m. Wednesday press conference has been set for Target Field "to make a major announcement" about an upcoming event at Target Field.
Commissioner Bud Selig will be among those participating in the All-Star game announcement, which will be held just inside Gate 34 -- the entrance that leads on to the outfield concourse -- at the ballpark.
The Twins set a goal of bringing the 2014 All-Star Game to Target Field back in 2008, two years before the ballpark opened. Now, that goal is about to be realized.
Major League Baseball is planning a Wednesday afternoon news conference at Target Field, where Commissioner Bud Selig officially will award the 2014 All-Star Game to the Twins, according to multiple people who have been briefed on MLB's plans.
While being careful to say that nothing is official, the Twins were busy inviting several former All-Stars and other local dignitaries to Wednesday's announcement.
"We hope that [an official announcement is] imminent," Twins CEO Jim Pohlad said. "The amount of communication with Major League Baseball has picked up, but ultimately the commissioner decides."
The Twins have been host to the All-Star Game twice -- in 1965 at Metropolitan Stadium and in 1985 at the Metrodome.
"It's more about what it means to the city and the state," Pohlad said. "We're a part of this community. We're excited to bring the All-Star Game here, so we can show everyone this ballpark."
It will mark the first time the Twin Cities has been host of an All-Star game in a major professional sport since the NHL All-Star Game was at Xcel Energy Center in 2004.
The Twins first announced their goal of landing the 2014 All-Star Game on Sept. 10, 2008. Team President Dave St. Peter and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak presided over a rooftop ceremony at Target Center, overlooking the new ballpark's construction site.
In January, the Twins and the city of Minneapolis presented their formal bid to MLB for the 2014 event, detailing all the logistical arrangements they had ready, such as hotel space, transportation and convention facilities.
All along, the Twins have said the decision was in the commissioner's hands. Selig was a close friend of late Twins owner Carl Pohlad and lobbied hard to help get Target Field built.
Selig didn't officially announce that the Mets would be be hosts of the 2013 All-Star Game until this past May. The Twins are eager to get official word about the 2014 event because it help drive season-ticket sales. Teams typically give season-ticket holders first dibs on buying tickets to All-Star festivities, which include the Futures Game and Home Run Derby. All three events sold out this year at Kansas City's Kauffman Stadium.
Pohlad acknowledged that an All-Star announcement should help ticket sales, but added, "so can a team's performance. If you could pick between an All-Star Game and performance, you'd take the team's performance."
The Twins went 94-68 in 2010, their first year at Target Field. They slipped to 63-99 last year and entered Monday on a pace to finish 66-96. After drawing a franchise record 3,223,640 fans in 2010, they drew 3.17 million last year, and entered Monday on pace to draw 2.86 million this year.
No matter how the Twins perform over the next two seasons, Target Field will be the epicenter of the baseball universe for three days in July 2014.Tony Abbott’s press club speech had little to do with charting a path forward and everything to do with circling the wagons around his prime ministership.
But a path forward – a way out of its political mess – is the only thing that can save the prime minister and his government. Circling the wagons might hold his critics off for a while, but it doesn’t address the cause of their concern.
Abbott’s political message was obvious – he isn’t going anywhere.
His policy message was that he was the guy with the resolve and the guts to tackle the budget deficit and this was crucial because not addressing it would be “ripping off future generations” and risking contracting the European “disease”.
But the 2014 budget didn’t actually do all that much to reduce deficits. Deficits will, over the next two years, total almost $72bn, compared with the $28.7bn calculated by treasury and finance during last year’s election campaign. A forecast surplus is now six, rather than two, years away. And many of those cuts are stalled in the Senate.
Despite this, and despite the dire consequences he said would flow from ignoring the deficit, the prime minister also argued that the 2014 budget had apparently done enough and the 2015 budget won’t contain the same pain. “Because we have done much of the hard work already, we won’t need to protect the commonwealth budget at the expense of the household budget,” he maintained.
The spending cuts in last year’s budget were rejected by the electorate because they were perceived to be unfair. Economic modelling by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (Natsem) and separate modelling by the Australian National University showed they actually were unfair – even after the abolition of the carbon tax was taken into account. Low-income earners were hit hardest and high-income earners felt little pain.
That was the exact moment the Abbott government appeared to lose the voters’ trust. And yet it has never explained why it chose that particular combination of spending cuts to reduce the deficit and not other, fairer ones. Instead it has been pretending that the cuts it chose were the only ones available.
Despite conceding that the lesson of the Queensland election rout was that governments had to “take the voters with them”, the prime minister again refused to address this question, resorting again to the “ripping off future generations” lines. How do you “take voters with you” if you don’t address their main concern?
And he effectively said Victorian voters who threw out the first-term Liberal government last year, in an election dominated by a part federally funded road, had made the wrong decision. The new Labor government does not want to proceed with the road and could face a sizeable fee for breaking a contract, which was what happened, the prime minister quipped, when voters “in a fit of absent-mindedness” elected Labor governments.
He confirmed he was ditching his “signature” paid parental leave scheme – as evidence he was listening to his party’s concerns about it. But the prime minister must be a slow listener because almost everyone in his party has been against the scheme ever since he imposed it upon them almost five years ago. It would be replaced by a families and childcare package – which is indeed a better way to improve productivity, but would earn the ire of business if the levy they were paying to fund the paid parental leave plan is simply going to be redirected.
He reminded us of the big changes over which the Coalition wants to conduct a “constructive debate”. One is tax reform. But then he said he would not consider a central element – changing the goods and services tax – unless there was “political consensus” and all states and territories agreed. Which isn’t going to happen.
And the big mea culpa on the Sir Duke Prince Philip disaster? One backbencher declared straight away it wasn’t adequate and vowed to introduce a private member’s bill to do away with knights and dames altogether. And several others supported him.
The point of the speech was to tell agitating backbenchers that he would stare them down and that they were doing the country a disservice by the very act of leadership agitation.
But it didn’t do anything to answer the underlying causes of the government’s malaise – why the government made the specific decisions that brought it to this point, and what it intended to do to restore voters’ confidence.
It was full of resolve, but it didn’t answer the real questions at the heart of the government’s problems.Number of senior figures thought to believe all options including remaining in the single market should remain on table
Philip Hammond wants to see Britain retain access to the single market in specific sectors such as financial services, while also securing border controls for the UK.
The chancellor wants to ensure that Brexit negotiations protect particular parts of the economy before a meeting of the cabinet on Wednesday at Chequers.
Theresa May is expecting her most senior ministers to arrive at the prime minister’s country retreat armed with ideas about how Brexit could be a success in their particular areas, having demanded they draw up plans before the summer.
The meeting will take place after reports of a government split over whether or not the UK government should try to retain its membership of the single market.
According to the Sunday Times, a number of senior figures including Hammond believe that all options, including staying in the single market, should remain on the table even if it means fewer restrictions over immigration. This is believed to be in contrast to Brexit-supporting ministers including David Davis and Liam Fox, who are thought to be more hawkish about Britain’s exit plans.
Theresa May 'acting like Tudor monarch' by denying MPs a Brexit vote Read more
However, a Treasury source was keen to play down the idea of a split. “Everyone agrees there have to be controls on immigration and some access to the single market – taking a flexible approach,” he said.
It has been suggested that the financial services industry will be a priority for the chancellor.
Other European leaders have suggested the UK cannot keep full membership on economic and trade terms if it wants to restrict freedom of movement, arguing that that is one of the four key principles of the European project.
The issue is likely to cause tension within the cabinet, where most ministers campaigned to remain in the EU, but also more widely across government, with some Brexiters deeply suspicious of the motivations of pro-EU civil servants. Steve Baker MP, who campaigned for Brexit, has suggested that officials should be “summarily fired” if they tried to block the Brexit process.
The question for negotiators will be what access to the market actually means. Some Brexit supporters believe European countries will give the UK tariff-free trade alongside restrictions to immigration but many others expect there to be an economic price to pay for greater border control.
The former head of the civil service, Gus O’Donnell, recently suggested Britain could remain in a more “loosely aligned” European Union, arguing it could take “years and years and years” to separate fully and that the whole project could change in that time. However, he said it was unlikely that any reform would be radical enough, arguing the chances of remaining a part of the European project were very low.
O’Donnell urged caution in triggering article 50 without a strategic plan in place, arguing that the exit mechanism from the EU was designed to favour the countries that were staying in the union.
Brexit means Brexit … but the big question is when? Read more
The process that will take place before a formal UK exit has caused a backlash in parliament after it emerged that May will not give MPs a vote before invoking article 50. Downing Street sources said May was clear that the will of the British public would be honoured, with her repeated assertion that “Brexit means Brexit”.
However, politicians, who campaigned overwhelmingly for Britain to stay in the EU, want to have a say on the deal the UK government secures.
Barry Gardiner, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for international trade, Europe, energy and climate change, said parliament could not be sidelined from the greatest constitutional change the country has debated in 40 years. “The logic of saying the prime minister can trigger article 50 without first setting out to parliament the terms and basis upon which her government seeks to negotiate, indeed without even indicating the red lines she will seek to protect, would be to diminish parliament and assume the arrogant powers of a Tudor monarch,” he said.
Owen Smith, the leadership candidate for Labour who has sought to make the EU a dividing line between him and Jeremy Corbyn, accused the prime minister of “running scared” from parliamentary scrutiny of her Brexit negotiations. “She’s looked at the numbers and she knows she might not win a vote in parliament. She hasn’t set out what Brexit means and she doesn’t want to be held to account on vital issues such as stripping away workers’ rights and environmental safeguards.”
Smith has argued that the Brexit deal should be put to the public vote through a second referendum or a general election but Corbyn has argued that the outcome of June’s vote has to mean Brexit.Kava may be one of the secrets behind the laid-back Pacific islands lifestyle but Taulelei Uilelea claims the mildly narcotic drink can also be credited with his success in chess.
At Savalalo market on Upolu, Samoa's main island, the regular kava circle will host at least eight people on most days, but at busy times on a Saturday there may be many as 20.
The drinkers gather on bench seats set up in a circle and are served by young men who make the brew.
"At one tala (dollar) a seating, it ain't bad for a day of fun," Uilelea says.
Uilelea is also a member of the market's chess circle and insists he always plays better after a bowl of kava.
"Kava is needed to take the tension away," Uilelea said, adding the goal is relaxation rather than inebriation.
Made from the pounded roots of the kava (Piper methysticum) plant, the drink remains after thousands of years the focus of social and cultural life in many Pacific island nations.
At Salelologa market on Samoa's other main island of Savaii, Kilisi Tiatia also values kava's calming effect, frequently joining the kava circle to catch up on local news and gossip.
"It's really about relaxing, taking it easy and then sharing stories," said Tiatia, who has been part of the kava circle for 20 of his 41 years.
Kava ceremonies are at the centre of the most important cultural events on many islands, used to reinforce the social order and welcome important guests.
The coronation of Tonga's King Siaosi Tupou V last year became global news with its extravagant European pageantry, including pages in silk knee breeches, ermine capes and imperial brass music.
But in local eyes, the ceremony that counted most was the earlier traditional kava rite in which nobles and chiefs pledged obedience to their new king around the kava bowl.
During the ceremony, more than 200 of the country's chiefs gathered in a circle around dozens of slaughtered pigs, hundreds of food baskets and other gifts to the new monarch.
The king, whose title dates back to the 17th century, drank the first bowl of kava to confirm his authority over the tiny nation of 110,000.
In Fiji, visitors to villages are still expected to present a bundle of kava roots to the local chief to ensure a friendly reception and hospitality.
Kava is found in most of the islands of Polynesia and Melanesia, as well as parts of Micronesia in the northern Pacific.
In Samoa it is called 'ava, in Fiji, yaqona, and in the state of Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia, sakau.
The Melanesian nation of Vanuatu may be the original home of the kava plant and it still claims to produce the best, although growers on other islands usually beg to differ.
Traditionally, young girls or boys would chew the roots to a pulp before the kava was made. Today the roots are pounded into a powder which is mixed with water and sieved before serving.
The effects on the drinker include a mild numbing of the tongue and lips, sociability, calmness and a sense of well-being.
The sedative effect means that unlike alcohol drinking, kava sessions rarely end in violence.
Some foreigners who have tried kava describe it as looking and tasting like muddy water, although it has been gaining popularity in tablet form as a mood-enhancing natural remedy in some developed countries.
A study at Australia's University of Queensland this year found kava to be an effective treatment for anxiety.
The study of 60 people - in which half were given kava tablets and half a placebo - found the drink had a beneficial effect on wellbeing.
"We found the people taking the kava did [experience] a very strong anxiety-reducing effect and we also found their mood was elevated significantly," said Jerome Sarris, who led the study.
Sarris said there were no indications during the trial of any adverse health problems from the water-soluble extract of kava, although there have been concerns about the effects of heavy, long-term use.
The mood-enhancing effects of kava were increasingly recognised in developed countries in the 1990s and by the beginning of the current decade kava exports from Pacific countries had grown to around $200 million (US) a year.
Kava extract pills gained wide popularity in Western markets including Europe - especially Germany - and the United States until reports of a few cases of severe liver problems in users saw bans introduced in Europe in 2002.
Exports were slashed overnight, although subsequent tests have suggested that the problems could lie with the use of ethanol or acetone to extract the active ingredient from the plant and the use by some manufacturers of parts other than the roots.
Despite the controversy, kava extracts have been gaining in popularity in the United States, and in recent years a number of fashionable kava drinking lounges have opened there.
But the debate means little to the kava drinkers at Salelologa market.
"I see the kava circle as a meeting place for me and my friends from all over the island. Sometimes there's new people, but the same old guys stay until they die. Then the new generation of kava drinkers emerge," said Tiatia.As news that Michigan's athletic director Dave Brandon would be resigning took to the internet, some developments more directly in Ohio State's wheelhouse came to light.
In the first AP Top 25 for college basketball of the 2014-2015 season, Thad Matta's Buckeyes will begin the season ranked No. 20. Preseason Big Ten favorites Wisconsin are very highly ranked as expected, all the way up at No. 3. Michigan State checks in at No. 18, with Tim Miles' Nebraska Cornhuskers just after the Buckeyes at 21, and John Beilein's Wolverines at No. 24.
Two of the Buckeyes' biggest name opponents of the season, North Carolina and Louisville, both open 2014-15 in the Top 10. Roy Williams' Tar Heels start the season No. 6 while Rick Pitino's always dangerous Cardinals are No. 8.
Here's the complete inaugural 2014-15 AP Top 25:
2014-15 AP Preseason Top 25Actor Gary Busey allegedly sexually harassed a woman working on Donald Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” and when Trump heard about the incident, he laughed it off, The Daily Beast reports.
Five employees of the NBC show confirmed the incident and Trump's reaction to the news outlet, and said Busey was allowed to stay on the show.
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The NBC employees, as well as the alleged victim, told the publication that Busey “grabbed” the female employee “firmly between [the] legs” and also put her hand on the crotch of his pants.
They said the incident occurred while taking a break prior to filming in New York City during “Celebrity Apprentice” in 2011.
“We were smoking cigarettes outside, and Busey was standing next to me. And then at one point, he grabbed me firmly between my legs, and ran his hand up my stomach, and grabbed my breasts,” the alleged victim told the Daily Beast, with a request her name not be used because of non-disclosure agreements.
”I didn’t know what to do. So I made this joke that, ’Oh, I’ve never been sexually harassed by a celebrity before!’ Then he grabbed my hand and put it [over] his penis, and said, like, ‘I’m just getting started, baby.’”
Several staffers requested Busey to be removed from the show, but those who spoke to the Daily Beast said that when Trump found out about the incident, he laughed it off and permitted Busey to stay on the show. He eventually came in sixth place in the reality show competition.
The alleged victim said she didn’t continue to push about the incident in case her job was put at risk.
“I didn’t think I’d get hired again by the company if I said something like that [and pursued further action],” she said.
The accusation comes three days after Summer Zervos, a contestant on the fifth season of “The Apprentice,” held a press conference in Los Angeles claiming that Trump kissed and groped her at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2007.
Nearly a dozen women have come forward accusing Trump of sexual assault in the wake of the audio leak of 2005 comments the real estate mogul made bragging about making sexual advances on women without their consent.
Trump apologized for the comments and chalked them up to “locker room” banter. But he has categorically denied the sexual assault allegations.
The alleged Busey victim also noted that Trump said “gross things all the time” while she was on “The Apprentice” and said she wasn’t surprised by the wave of sexual assault allegations against him.
“[Trump] is and always has been a joke—I can’t believe anyone now is taking him seriously,” she continued. “He’s a monster.”The evidence from the past two years strongly supports those who have argued all along that income has not decoupled from productivity. A wide range of economists, including Martin Feldstein, Stephen Rose, Edward Lazear, Joao Paulo Pessoa, John Van Reenen, Richard Anderson of the St. Louis Fed and a team from Goldman Sachs, have produced studies showing wages tracking very predictably with productivity.
If anything, as Neil Irwin of The Times’s Upshot has noted, wages are a little higher than you’d expect from looking at the productivity and inflation numbers alone.
The problem of the middle-class squeeze, in short, may not be with how the fruits of productivity are distributed, but the fact that there isn’t much productivity growth at all. It’s not that a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats; it’s that the tide is not rising fast enough.
For those interested, Shawn Sprague has a good summary of the data at the Labor Department’s “Beyond the Numbers.” He shows conclusively that during this recovery we’ve endured a historically low labor productivity growth rate of 1.1 percent. By some estimates if productivity increases had kept pace with the mid-20th-century norm, l median incomes would be $40,000 higher than they are today.
If productivity itself is the problem, not distribution, radically different politics is demanded than we’re seeing today. If productivity is the problem, we need more dynamism, not less, more openness, not less, more growth-oriented policies, not more dirigiste and redistributive ones.
There are a few things government can do to help boost productivity: Increase market competition with more antitrust enforcement and fewer licensing regulations; admit more skilled immigrants; invest more in human capital; deregulate urban land usage back to the 2008 levels; introduce more market incentives into the low productivity sectors, like health care and education; fund more research into promising technologies like new energy storage systems.
Today politics is polarizing to the populist left and the populist right. But if productivity is the problem, what we actually need is a resurgence of the moderates. The moderate-left policies of Barack Obama must have had something to do with the middle-income gains of the last two years. Moderate Democrats can plausibly argue that government should not be interfering in the markets, but it should be addressing the inequalities that are the result of deeper social forces. There is still a yawning gap dividing the median Asian-American household, which makes $81,000 a year; the median white household, which makes $65,000; and the median African-American household, which makes $39,490.Information
Responsive Design, Responsively Illustrated.
January 2012
HTML/CSS + media queries (no images, no JS*) this is a simple interactive experiment with responsive design techniques.
Resize your browser to reveal just a handful of the kind of devices you should expect web pages to be viewed on. Each device illustration is rendered using the same basic HTML which adapts its appearance to the changing viewport size, representing different devices accordingly. This is achieved using media queries to apply different CSS rules for different sizes. This experiment is intended to illustrate the basic premise of responsive web design and the power of CSS to tackle it.
This is NOT a guide for the breakpoints for all layouts. Values here were chosen arbitrarily for a discreet set of |
June.
Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup are leading the underwriting for the GoDaddy IPO.On Mount Everest, meanwhile, helicopters ferried the last stranded climbers from the mountain's base camp, where at least 19 people — including one Australian — were killed when Saturday's quake triggered a huge avalanche.
The landslide reported on Tuesday hit the village of Ghodatabela, which is part of a region north of Nepal's capital that is often visited by trekkers, said Rasuwa District Governor Uddhav Bhattarai, according to the Reuters.
"This area is in a natural park which is popular with tourists. We are trying to rescue them, but bad weather and rainfall is hampering efforts," Bhattarai told Reuters.
Officials said at least 250 people were unaccounted for, according to news reports. Further details were not immediately available. Ghodatabela is about a 12-hour walk from the nearest town, the Associated Press reported.
International relief and rescue teams have poured into Nepal as the scope of the devastation becomes clearer. Rescue crews said some villages were nearly levelled, and overwhelmed centres in Kathmandu tried to cope with a growing stream of people injured or in desperate need of aid.Models shown: 1936 SS100 / 1948 XK120 / 1951 C-TYPE / 1954 D-TYPE / 1954 XK140 / 1957 XK150 / 1957 XKSS / 1959 MARK 2 / 1961 E-TYPE 1963 S-TYPE / 1966 XJ13 / 1968 XJ6 SERIES 1 / 1976 XJS / 1979 XJ6 SERIES III / 1988 XJR-9 / 1990 XJR-15 / 1992 XJ220 / 1995 XJR / 1998 XKR X100 / 2004 S-TYPE / 2007 XKR X150 / 2009 XFR / 2009 XJ X351 / 2010 RSR XKR GT2 / 2011 XKR-S / 2013 F-TYPE / 2013 PROJECT 7 CONCEPT / 2016 XE S
Size: 18" x 24"
Ink: White
Paper: Timber Green 100# Construction Cover by French Paper Co.
Shipping Notes: All posters are shipped in crush proof recycled cardboard tubes.
Print only, frame not included
Not a product of or associated with Jaguar, their owners or licensees. Any trademarks, servicemarks, registered trademarks, and registered servicemarks are the property of their respective owners.For other people with the same name, see Charles Murphy
Charles Quinton Murphy (July 12, 1959 – April 12, 2017) was an American actor, comedian, and writer. Murphy is best known as a writer and cast member of the Comedy Central sketch-comedy series Chappelle's Show, and as the costar of the sitcom Black Jesus. He was the older brother of comedian Eddie Murphy and the older half-brother of Vernon Lynch Jr.
Biography [ edit ]
Early life [ edit ]
Murphy was born on July 12, 1959, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.[3] His mother, Lillian, was a telephone operator, and his father, Charles Edward Murphy, was a transit police officer and an amateur actor and comedian.
As an adolescent, Murphy spent 10 months in jail.[4] In 1978, on the day he was released from jail,[5] he enlisted in the United States Navy and served for six years as a Boiler Technician.[6] In 1983, shortly before being discharged from the Navy, Murphy witnessed a mushroom cloud over Beirut. He later learned that it was the aftermath of the Beirut barracks bombing in which 307 people were killed.[7]
Career [ edit ]
Murphy had minor roles in several films in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and worked behind the scenes with the hip hop group K-9 Posse, a duo composed of his half-brother Vernon Lynch Jr. and Wardell Mahone. On their 1988 self-titled debut, Murphy was credited as the album's executive producer as well as songwriter on the songs "Somebody's Brother" and "Say Who Say What".[8] He also made an appearance in the video for the duo's first single "This Beat Is Military".[9] Murphy's first major role in a motion picture was in the 1993 film CB4, where he portrayed the antagonist, Gusto.
Murphy achieved fame as a recurring performer on Chappelle's Show, particularly in the Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories sketches. In these, Murphy recounts his misadventures as part of his brother Eddie's entourage, including encounters with various celebrities such as Rick James and Prince.[10] After Chappelle's Show host Dave Chappelle left the show, Murphy and Donnell Rawlings hosted the "lost episodes" compiled from sketches produced before Chappelle's departure.
In 2005, he appeared in King's Ransom (alongside Anthony Anderson and Jay Mohr). In the film, Murphy portrayed "Herb", a gay ex-con who is hired by King (Anderson) to kidnap him in a fake kidnapping.[11] Murphy has done voiceovers for Budweiser radio commercials, provided the voice for Iraq War veteran/criminal Ed Wuncler III on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim series The Boondocks, and the voice for a pimp named Jizzy-B in Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas video game. Murphy provided the voice for Spock on the G4TV's Star Trek 2.0 shorts, and the dog in his younger brother Eddie's 2007 film, Norbit.[12]
On March 20, 2009, his own sketch comedy series Charlie Murphy's Crash Comedy began on Crackle.[13] A stand-up special, Charlie Murphy: I Will Not Apologize premiered on Comedy Central in late February 2010.[14] Murphy also made special appearances in 1000 Ways to Die and the TBS sitcom Are We There Yet? as Frank Kingston. In 2014–15, Murphy played Vic on the Adult Swim live action show Black Jesus.[15]
Death [ edit ]
Murphy died from leukemia on April 12, 2017, at the age of 57.[16][17]
Personal life [ edit ]
Murphy was a resident of Tewksbury Township, New Jersey.[18] He was married to Tisha Taylor Murphy from 1997 until her death from cervical cancer in December 2009.[1] The couple had two children together, and Murphy had another child from a previous relationship.[1] He was a karate practitioner.[19][20]
Filmography [ edit ]
Films [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Video games [ edit ]Cookiezi pp a guest Jul 21st, 2014 10,825 Never a guest10,825Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 35.77 KB Total pp: 8208.16 1. Saiya - Remote Control [Insane] +HD,DT (97.91) 548.836 - Weighted 100% (549) 2. Team Nekokan - Can't Defeat Airman [Holy Shit! It's Airman!!] +HR (99.11) 506.414 - Weighted 95% (481) 3. A*Teens - Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (Nightcore Mix) [CDFGimme!] +HD,DT (99.33) 489.771 - Weighted 90% (442) 4. xi - FREEDOM DiVE [FOUR DIMENSIONS] (99.97) 457.913 - Weighted 86% (393) 5. goreshit - MATZcore [Lolicore] +HD,HR (99.41) 450.22 - Weighted 81% (367) 6. yanaginagi - Killer Song (Short Ver.) [Insane] +HD,DT (99.08) 446.601 - Weighted 77% (346) 7. Mutsuhiko Izumi - Red Goose [Superable] +HD,HR (99.71) 420.332 - Weighted 74% (309) 8. xi - FREEDOM DiVE [Another] +HR (99.06) 419.586 - Weighted 70% (293) 9. Yousei Teikoku - Wahrheit [Saten] +DT (97.01) 410.602 - Weighted 66% (272) 10. daniwellP - Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! [Collab] +DT (99.26) 403.815 - Weighted 63% (255) 11. IOSYS - Poinsettia [Lunatic] +HD,DT (96.48) 398.098 - Weighted 60% (238) 12. Amane - BOOZEHOUND [Lesjuh] +HD,DT (99.41) 397.057 - Weighted 57% (226) 13. Tatsh feat. Sariyajin - FOUR SEASONS OF LONELINESS [gow's Lunatic] +DT (99.58) 395.296 - Weighted 54% (214) 14. Memme - Extreme Fantasy [ExtrA] +DT (97.87) 393.086 - Weighted 51% (202) 15. Momoiro Clover - Pinky Jones (TV Size) [Insane] +HD,DT (99.31) 392.468 - Weighted 49% (191) 16. Shoichiro Sakamoto - Eye of Aeon [Aeon] +DT (99.44) 391.879 - Weighted 46% (182) 17. UNDEAD CORPORATION - Yoru Naku Usagi wa Yume wo Miru [BakaNA] +HR (99.76) 391.198 - Weighted 44% (172) 18. fripSide - sister's noise (TV Size) [popner's noise] +HD,DT (97.6) 387.401 - Weighted 42% (162) 19. DragonForce - Revolution Deathsquad [Legend] +HD,HR (97.91) 387.088 - Weighted 40% (154) 20. SOUND HOLIC - Drive My Life [Lunatic] +HD,DT (99.89) 386.233 - Weighted 38% (146) 21. FELT - Flower Flag (MZC Echoes the Spring Liquid Mix) [Lunatic] +HD,DT (99.06) 384.645 - Weighted 36% (138) 22. Hatsune Miku - Mythologia's End [Myth0108ia] +HD,HR (98.95) 382.168 - Weighted 34% (130) 23. Wotamin - Gigantic O.T.N [S.S] +HR (99.81) 380.523 - Weighted 32% (123) 24. ZUN & Ryu* - Second Darkside [Lunatic] +DT (99.86) 379.329 - Weighted 31% (117) 25. Nekomata Master - Far east nightbird [Extreme] +HD,HR (98.73) 379.007 - Weighted 29% (111) 26. Rita - Alicemagic ~TV animation ver.~ [Insane] +DT (99.58) 378.198 - Weighted 28% (105) 27. Itou Kanako - fake me (Science Adventure Dance Remix) [Insane] +HD,DT (100) 376.799 - Weighted 26% (99) 28. Hatsune Miku - Dou Iu Koto Nano!? [Insane!?] +HD,DT (99.25) 376.48 - Weighted 25% (94) 29. Yumeji Ruri - The answer BLOOD ~Senketsu no Michishirube~ (Short Ver.) [S.S] +HD,DT (98.92) 375.329 - Weighted 24% (89) 30. Hatsune Miku - Atama no Taisou [Nogard] (99.5) 373.232 - Weighted 23% (84) 31. Tamura Yukari feat. motsu from m.o.v.e - You & Me [Insane] +HD,DT (99.31) 373.068 - Weighted 21% (80) 32. seiya-murai feat.ALT - Sumidagawa Karenka [EXTREME] +HD,DT (99.35) 370.812 - Weighted 20% (76) 33. TJ.Hangneil - Kamui [SHD] +HR (99.12) 368.627 - Weighted 19% (71) 34. Atoguru - Itoshi Kimi wo Mitsuke ni [Insane] +HD,DT (99.62) 367.052 - Weighted 18% (68) 35. SUPER STAR -MITSURU- - NEW GENERATION [Lesjuh] +HD,DT (97.03) 365.321 - Weighted 17% (64) 36. Lia - Kokoro ni Todoku Uta [Holo] +HD,DT (99.41) 364.755 - Weighted 17% (61) 37. Memme - BSPower Explosion [Extra] +HD,HR (99.61) 362.172 - Weighted 16% (57) 38. KIEN - La Grand Bleu [SHD] +HD,DT (99.26) 362.089 - Weighted 15% (54) 39. RSP - The First Star [S h i a's Insane] +DT (97.98) 361.215 - Weighted 14% (51) 40. SHK - Death Moon II [FARTOWNIK'S STAGE] +DT (99.3) 360.388 - Weighted 14% (49) 41. Silver Forest - The Doll Maker of Bucuresti [Lunatic] +HD,DT (99.47) 359.406 - Weighted 13% (46) 42. Sakaue Nachi - Think of You [Lunatic] +HD,DT (99.3) 358.725 - Weighted 12% (44) 43. YuNa - Torawarebito (Short Ver.) [Killer Queen] +HD,DT (98.82) 357.743 - Weighted 12% (41) 44. ZUN - Faith is for the Transient People [dksslqj's Lunatic] +HD,DT (98.98) 356.893 - Weighted 11% (39) 45. Boom - How Do You Do (Nightcore Mix) [America!!] +HD,DT (99.89) 355.459 - Weighted 10% (37) 46. kaztora, eba, Misaki Nakajima - Messiah [Insane] +HD,DT (98.95) 355.158 - Weighted 10% (35) 47. Katakiri Rekka - (^3^)chu Dere Rhapsody [Insane] +DT (98.34) 354.096 - Weighted 9% (33) 48. Black Hole - Pluto [Challenge] +HR (99.07) 353.246 - Weighted 9% (32) 49. KOTOKO & Utatsuki Kaori - Double HarmoniZe Shock!! [D.N.Angel] +HD,DT (100) 351.815 - Weighted 9% (30) 50. ZUN & Ryu* - Second Darkside [Prism Another] +HD,DT (100) 351.616 - Weighted 8% (28) 51. EGOIST - The Everlasting Guilty Crown (TV Size) [D.N.Angel's Insane] +HD,DT (100) 351.541 - Weighted 8% (27) 52. 07th Expansion - Aci-L [ignore's Insane] +DT (99.67) 351.454 - Weighted 7% (26) 53. ZAQ - Sparkling Daydream (TV Size) [Dark] +HD,DT (100) 351.449 - Weighted 7% (24) 54. Nightcore - Ravers Fantasy [NachoPiggy's Fantasy] +HD,DT (99.15) 350.495 - Weighted 7% (23) 55. Tatsh feat. Hatsune Miku - Cinderella Romance [Extreme] +HD,DT (99.86) 349.236 - Weighted 6% (22) 56. IA - Six Trillion Years and Overnight Story [0108] +HD,HR (99.29) 348.4 - Weighted 6% (21) 57. Itou Kanako - Skyclad no Kansokusha -Remix- [taka] +HD,DT (99.75) 347.076 - Weighted 6% (20) 58. HHHxMMxST - Oboro [Another] +HD,DT (99.12) 346.327 - Weighted 5% (19) 59. Drop - Orokamono ni Tsukurareta Yami no Musume [Insane] +HD,DT (99.26) 346.263 - Weighted 5% (18) 60. Umetora - Ifuudoudou [Insane] +HD,DT (99.76) 344.871 - Weighted 5% (17) 61. Yasuharu Takanashi - Fairy Tail Main Theme [KIRBY Mix] +HD,DT (99.28) 344.834 - Weighted 5% (16) 62. YURIA - SCRAMBLE! [Insane] +HD,DT (99.71) 344.572 - Weighted 4% (15) 63. t+pazolite - chipscape [Ragnarok] +HD (99.12) 344.503 - Weighted 4% (14) 64. Renard - TU4AR [Nogard] +HD,HR (99.38) 344.107 - Weighted 4% (14) 65. Ono Ryoko - POP STEP LOVE [Collab] +HD,DT (99.27) 343.886 - Weighted 4% (13) 66. Nico Nico Douga - Evansama [Deep Dark Fantasy] +HD,DT (91.23) 343.641 - Weighted 4% (12) 67. Shihori - Bloody Night [Lunatic] +HD,DT (99.91) 343.505 - Weighted 3% (12) 68. Naoki & Tatsh - Red Zone [Extra] +DT (94.29) 343.225 - Weighted 3% (11) 69. Jun.A - The Refrain of the Lovely Great War [Lunatic] +HD,DT (99.26) 343.103 - Weighted 3% (10) 70. Amane - Midsummer Festival [Lunatteke] +HD,DT (99.88) 342.857 - Weighted 3% (10) 71. SHIKI - Pure Ruby [Another] +HD,DT (98.21) 342.798 - Weighted 3% (9) 72. ZUN - Spring Lane ~ Colorful Path [Lunatic] +DT (98.3) 342.335 - Weighted 3% (9) 73. Primary - Dryad -Dimgray- [Insane] +HD,DT (99.01) 341.553 - Weighted 2% (9) 74. onoken - felys -long remix- [Another] +HD,DT (99.43) 341.498 - Weighted 2% (8) 75. Eoin O' Broin - Deep Space [Insane] +HD,DT (99.48) 341.341 - Weighted 2% (8) 76. ZUN - Taketorihisyou ~ Lunatic Princess [Lunatic] +DT (99.51) 340.28 - Weighted 2% (7) 77. 96 - Shining Wizard [Extreme] +HD,DT (95.63) 339.863 - Weighted 2% (7) 78. Rabpit - Sanctity [Expert] +DT (97.44) 338.902 - Weighted 2% (7) 79. Deadball-P - Kogane no Seiya Sousetsu ni Kuchite [Collab] +DT (98.54) 338.708 - Weighted 2% (6) 80. Tamura Yukari - Fantastic future (TV Size) [Insane] +HD,DT (100) 338.472 - Weighted 2% (6) 81. Fear, and Loathing in Las Vegas - Just Awake [Insane] +HD,HR (99.69) 337.848 - Weighted 2% (6) 82. Demetori - Wind God Girl [Extra] +HD,HR (99.25) 337.596 - Weighted 2% (5) 83. Y&Co. - Daisuke [Another] +HD,DT (97.29) 337.478 - Weighted 1% (5) 84. daniwellP - Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! [Insane] +DT (95.76) 337.469 - Weighted 1% (5) 85. O-Life Japan - Yakujinsama no Couple Dance [Lunatic] +HD,HR (99.16) 337.074 - Weighted 1% (5) 86. LeaF - Calamity Fortune [Extra] +HR (99.03) 337.027 - Weighted 1% (4) 87. paraoka - boot [0108] +HD,HR (99.58) 336.437 - Weighted 1% (4) 88. KOTOKO - Wing my Way [v2b] +HD,DT (99.47) 336.435 - Weighted 1% (4) 89. 3L - Extend Ash ~ Hourai Victim [Extra Stage] +HD,DT (99.12) 336.276 - Weighted 1% (4) 90. Hanatan - Kimi no Kiseki [Mythol's Insane] +HD,DT (97.01) 336.251 - Weighted 1% (3) 91. Hashimoto Miyuki - The Day Takeoff (Short Ver.) [KingCore] +HD,DT (100) 335.735 - Weighted 1% (3) 92. Shounen Radio - neu [Platinum] +HD,HR (97.75) 335.626 - Weighted 1% (3) 93. Kozato - 45nen no Yukizakura [Insane] +HD,DT (99.45) 335.357 - Weighted 1% (3) 94. Katakiri Rekka - Answer [Insane] +HD,HR (99.05) 335.212 - Weighted 1% (3) 95. Levaslater - NNRT [Extra] +HD,HR (99.9) 335.17 - Weighted 1% (3) 96. Nightcore - Ass Up! [SteRRuM's Sexy Ass] +HD,DT (97.83) 334.765 - Weighted 1% (3) 97. Momokurotei Ichimon - Nippon Egao Hyakkei [Insane] +DT (99.87) 334.647 - Weighted 1% (2) 98. U - Ha-tenya? [Insane] +DT (99.9) 334.49 - Weighted 1% (2) 99. Megpoid GUMI - Carnival [Carnival0108] +HD,DT (97.57) 334.4 - Weighted 1% (2) 100. Lon - Mischievous Function [Insane] +HD,DT (99.71) 334.063 - Weighted 1% (2) 101. kors k - Wuv U [dksslqj Style] +HD,DT (98.28) 333.855 - Weighted 1% (2) 102. u's - Bokura wa Ima no Naka de [Insane] +DT (95.7) 333.71 - Weighted 1% (2) 103. IOSYS - Power of Dream (Night Fever Refix) [Power of Stream] +HD,HR (99.82) 333.671 - Weighted 1% (2) 104. paraoka - boot [Shoe] +HR (99.6) 333.13 - Weighted 1% (2) 105. yanaginagi - Muteki no Soldier [Invincible] +HR (99.52) 332.846 - Weighted 0% (2) 106. yurika - THE EVENING STAR [Lunatic] +HD,DT (99.88) 332.637 - Weighted 0% (2) 107. Zektbach - L'avide [gowww] +DT (96.95) 332.225 - Weighted 0% (1) 108. ALiCE'S EMOTiON - Voice [Lunatic] +HD,DT (100) 331.691 - Weighted 0% (1) 109. Awake - Supernova [DoKo] +HD,HR (98) 331.059 - Weighted 0% (1) 110. fumika - Umikaze no Brave [Believe] +DT (99.69) 330.472 - Weighted 0% (1) 111. Hashimoto Miyuki - Yume miru mama ni Koi wo shite [Aenna] +HD,DT (100) 330.424 - Weighted 0% (1) 112. Niko - Night of Fire [Insane] +HD,DT (98.49) 330.093 - Weighted 0% (1) 113. S.S.H. - Intersect Thunderbolt-Remix [Exceed] +HR (95.11) 330.019 - Weighted 0% (1) 114. Shihori - Magic Girl!! [Lunatic] +DT (99.07) 329.673 - Weighted 0% (1) 115. ZUN - Year-Round Absorbed Curiosity [Insane] +DT (99.38) 329.195 - Weighted 0% (1) 116. Bring Me The Horizon - Anthem [Lucifer] +HR (98.71) 328.322 - Weighted 0% (1) 117. DECO*27 feat. Topi - Light Lag [Insane] +HD,DT (99.52) 327.355 - Weighted 0% (1) 118. Hatsune Miku - Recommended Spell [Spell] +HD,HR (99.79) 327.255 - Weighted 0% (1) 119. Liberatus - Doll's Garden [Another] +HD,DT (100) 326.74 - Weighted 0% (1) 120. Megurine Luka - Leia [gowww] +HD,DT (95.56) 326.031 - Weighted 0% (1) 121. Mutsuhiko Izumi - Green Green Dance [Ultimate] +DT (97.6) 326.016 - Weighted 0% (1) 122. Kokuyasou - UroboroS-Infinity [Insane] +HD,DT (98.76) 325.066 - Weighted 0% (1) 123. Hatsune Miku - Ohigan FuzzyClap [Prankster0108] +HR (99.56) 325.034 - Weighted 0% (1) 124. Sakakibara Yui - Scarlet [S.S] +HD,DT (99) 324.543 - Weighted 0% (1) 125. ChouCho - Yasashisa no Riyuu [Insane] +DT (99.12) 324.407 - Weighted 0% (1) 126. Makishima Yuki, Yoshikawa Yukako & Fujita Saki - Kiseki no Kakera [D.N.Angel] +DT (99.9) 324.334 - Weighted 0% (1) 127. Renard - Rainbow Dash Likes Girls (Stay Gay Pony Girl) [Holy Shit! It's Rainbow Dash!!] (99.35) 324.096 - Weighted 0% (1) 128. DragonForce - Fallen World [Legend] (99.59) 323.654 - Weighted 0% (0) 129. Chata - Festa! [Insane] +HD,DT (100) 323.489 - Weighted 0% (0) 130. EastNewSound - Hiiro Gekka Kyousai no Zetsu [Lunatic] +DT (97.88) 322.567 - Weighted 0% (0) 131. Hatsune Miku - Vegetable Juice (Po Pi Po) Ryu Remix [animask's Juice] +HD,DT (99.62) 322.11 - Weighted 0% (0) 132. ChouCho - DreamRiser [Insane] +DT (99.72) 322.009 - Weighted 0% (0) 133. nao - Deep Blue Tiferet [Insane] +HD,DT (100) 321.621 - Weighted 0% (0) 134. Atoguru - UNDER WORLD [Heart] +HD,DT (99.34) 321.301 - Weighted 0% (0) 135. Mizuki Nana - Justice to Believe [Keyboard-Breaking] +DT,HR (99.04) 320.847 - Weighted 0% (0) 136. Maximum the Hormone - What's Up, People? [Lucifer] +HR (98.3) 320.564 - Weighted 0% (0) 137. jippusu - Mushikui Saikede Rhythm [RLC] +HR (99.23) 320.001 - Weighted 0% (0) 138. Usura & Datura - Infinity (Nightcore Mix) [Jericho2442's Rave!!] +HD,DT (99.18) 319.452 - Weighted 0% (0) 139. Refresh - Summertime (ekowraith remix) [Insane] +DT (99.71) 319.251 - Weighted 0% (0) 140. Hashimoto Miyuki - Symphonic Love (Short Ver.) [D.N.Angel] +HD,DT (100) 319.158 - Weighted 0% (0) 141. Kitamura Eri - Be Starters! [Insane] +HD,DT (99.57) 318.802 - Weighted 0% (0) 142. Real McCoy - Another Night (Nightcore Mix) [Collab] +HD,DT (99.57) 318.274 - Weighted 0% (0) 143. ichigo - YU-MU [Extra] +HD,DT (99.91) 318.265 - Weighted 0% (0) 144. Hatsune Miku - Homework Crisis [Let's Jump!!] +HD,HR (98.5) 317.699 - Weighted 0% (0) 145. Cascada - What Hurts The Most (Nightcore Remix) [Insane] +HD,DT (99.21) 317.488 - Weighted 0% (0) 146. EastNewSound - Black Lotus [Collab] +HD,DT (99.52) 317.376 - Weighted 0% (0) 147. Zektbach - Kagachi [Sharp x ouran] +HD,DT (97.41) 317.327 - Weighted 0% (0) 148. Cool Joke - UNDO [Collaboration] +DT (98.48) 316.685 - Weighted 0% (0) 149. Liverne - Necrofantasia [Lesjuh] +HD,DT (94.69) 316.656 - Weighted 0% (0) 150. Myu - Panorama chime (Short Ver.) [Sakura] +HD,DT (100) 316.339 - Weighted 0% (0) 151. Yukari Tamura - You & Me [Streams] +HD,DT (99.67) 316.279 - Weighted 0% (0) 152. Halozy - Secret Sister Complex [Flandre Scarlet] +HD,DT (99.61) 316.002 - Weighted 0% (0) 153. D-51 - Brand New World (TV Size) [Insane] +HD,DT (96.47) 315.789 - Weighted 0% (0) 154. Yuuki Aoi - Platinum [Collab] +DT (97.1) 315.563 - Weighted 0% (0) 155. Oratorio The World God Only Knows - God only knows [God] +DT (99.35) 315.451 - Weighted 0% (0) 156. Tamura Yukari - Fantastic future (TV Size) [Insane] +DT (99.82) 315.429 - Weighted 0% (0) 157. Ayane - Endless Tears... [Plus] +HD,HR (99.67) 315.416 - Weighted 0% (0) 158. Hommarju feat. R.Cena - Chousai Kenbo Sengen [Insane] +HD,HR (100) 315.412 - Weighted 0% (0) 159. Bomfunk MC's - Freestyler [Insane] +HD,DT (100) 315.115 - Weighted 0% (0) 160. SYNC.ART'S ft. Sakaue Nachi - Green Grass Garden [Lunatic] +HD,DT (93.85) 315.107 - Weighted 0% (0) 161. Xelia - Illumiscape [Extra] +HR (99.2) 314.709 - Weighted 0% (0) 162. Meramipop - algorhythm [Insane] +HD,DT (99.49) 314.133 - Weighted 0% (0) 163. Kitamura Eri - Shirushi (TV Size) [Rika] +HD,DT (99.78) 313.789 - Weighted 0% (0) 164. livetune feat. Hatsune Miku - Tell Your World [Insane] +HD,DT (99.72) 313.708 - Weighted 0% (0) 165. fripSide - only my railgun -Euro Beat Charger Mix- [Insane] +HD,DT (99.87) 313.57 - Weighted 0% (0) 166. IOSYS - RE:Usatei [Extra] +HD,HR (99.87) 313.342 - Weighted 0% (0) 167. MISSING HEART - MOONLIGHT SHADOW (New Vocal Version) [Heavy] +DT (99.8) 313.341 - Weighted 0% (0) 168. Touyama Nao - Happy Crescent [Insane] +HD,DT (99.89) 313.087 - Weighted 0% (0) 169. Silver Forest - Phantasm Brigade [Lunatic] +DT (99.8) 313.062 - Weighted 0% (0) 170. mafumafu - Yuugure Semi Nikki [0108] +HD,HR (99.13) 312.924 - Weighted 0% (0) 171. IOSYS - Mayoi Michi, Semaru Yami wo Mitoosu Nouryoku wo [Insane] +HD,DT (95.47) 312.359 - Weighted 0% (0) 172. Kitsune^2 - He Has No Mittens [BD's Mittens] +HD,HR (97.09) 312.3 - Weighted 0% (0) 173. Loos - Koi Yomi Zakura [Rin] +DT (99.26) 312.274 - Weighted 0% (0) |
this encounter; however, he did skate 18 shifts for a total of 13:21 on the ice.
What do you think Korobov has to offer the Lightning’s defense? Where do you think he will fit in the best when we face off with Montreal on Saturday? Sound off in the comments below and let us know what you think.
Be sure to stay up-to-date with all the latest Lightning news and updates with Bolts By the Bay. LIKE us on Facebook at Bolts By The Bay, and you can follow us on Twitter at @BoltsByTheBay.Boston Metaphysical Society: The Spirit of Rebellion Kickstarter is now LIVE!
I’m happy to announce that the new Boston Metaphysical Society story, The Spirit of Rebellion is now live on Kickstarter and will end on Feb.22. Even better, we are already funded and heading toward our first Stretch Goal. Please back, share, and retweet if you can. Thank you. Kickstarter Link: http://kck.st/2FS2zRo
In this standalone continuation of the series, Caitlin is thrown out of the house by her mother. She flees to Philadelphia only to discover a ghost, a rebellion, and perhaps, her destiny. Gwynn Tavares is back on board doing the art and coloring.
Our first Stretch Goal is a pin-up of Samuel and Caitlin by Tom Brown, the co-creator of the Gothic steampunk series, Hopeless, Maine.
2019 Events I Will Be Attending (So far.) :
Emerald City Comic Con – On Waiting List
Clockwork Alchemy. Burlingame, CA March 22-24Article Index
By Author
All articles listed on this page are available to read online.
The complete printable index of all articles published in Backwoods Home Magazine from Issue #1 to #170 is available free in PDF format. (Click to get free Adobe PDF Reader.) Index of Articles by Issue (1.0 MB)
Click on a letter
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
or use the drop-down box below to jump to an author.
Select an Author ———————- A ———————- Lois A. Adams Dorothy Ainsworth Jason Akers Rowena Aldridge Joe and Amy Alton Cynthia Andal Gary F. Arnet Massad Ayoob ———————- B ———————- Radley Balko James Ballou Pat Barden Jennifer Stein Barker Morgan Barker Dana Martin Batory H. Bumper Bauer James J. Baxter Rachel Baxter Roger L. Beattie Rudy Behrens Jim Benson Norman Bennett Dietmar Berg BHM Staff Report Samantha Biggers Nanette Blanchard Mike Blank Richard Blunt Katelynn Bond Sally Boulding Rick Brannan Mary Jo Bratton Rick Brentlinger Thomas Brewer Grace Brockway Marcia E. Brown Thomas M. Buckley Emily Buehler Marjorie Burris Gail Butler ———————- C ———————- Dorothy Cady Darlene Campbell Michael Cantrell Albert H. Carlson Emily Chadwick Don Chance Liz Case Jackie Clay-Atkinson Sandy Coates Dave Cournoyer Rebekah L. Cowell Julie Crist Lucas Crouch Larry Cywin ———————- D ———————- James F. Deaton Armand O. Deblois Oliver Del Signore Jessie Denning John DePresca Kim Dieter Dave Duffy Ilene Duffy Kevin F. Duffy Jane Duquette Lyle Dykes ———————- E ———————- Pete Earl Allen Easterly David Eddings Carly Egger Larry Elliott George Erdosh Anita Evangelista ———————- F ———————- Don Fallick Lev G. Fedyniak Doug Fluckiger D.B. Frandsen John Fuchs Danny Fulks Daniel Furtney ———————- G ———————- Linda Gabris Enola Gay Dynah Geissal Suzy Lowry Geno Scott Gentleman Sylvia Gist Bill Glade, M.D. Skip Goebel Rich Goss John Graesch Jennifer Grahova Corcceigh Green Beth Greenwood Steven Gregersen Lee Greiman Gary Gresh Sharon Griggs Dr. Roger W. Grim, D.C. ———————- H ———————- Michael Hackleman Alan T. Hagan Michelle Hampton Martin Harris Marjorie (Sultzbaugh) Harrison Angeline Hawkes Steven Heckeroth Rev. J.D. Hooker Jerry Hourigan Maggie Howe C. M. Hudman ———————- I ———————- Donna Insco ———————- J ———————- Edward Love Johnson ———————- K ———————- John Kallas, Ph.D James Kash Tanya Kelley Amanda J. Kemp Brian Kendall Mary Kenyon Mark and Lynn Klammer Joe Knight Tom R. Kovach Robert E. Kramer ———————- L ———————- Lisa LaFreniere Joy Lamb Paul Lamble Maggie Larsen Larry LaVan Leah Leach Janet Leake David Lee Luke Lee Bill Leonard Gary Lewis Patrice Lewis Jean Louis L’Heureux Michele Lightfoot Sandy Lindsey John Lo Cicero Mike Lorenzen ———————- M ———————- Edna Manning Karen Marshall Katie Martin Roy Martin Ed Mashburn David Scott Matthews Christopher Maxwell Kelly McCarthy Len McDougall John McLane, RN Beverly Mettot Roger Meyer Olivia Miller Margaret Mills Eugene Mitchell Kai Moessle Judith W. Monroe Joe Mooney Matt and Linda Morehouse Diana Morgan Daniel Motz Tim Murphy John Murray Cindi Myers ———————- N ———————- Lewis Napper Randy Neumann Raymond Nones Jonathan Nunan Christopher & Dolores Lynn Nyerges ———————- O ———————- Setanta O’Ceillaigh Joyce Lindsey O’Keefe Tom and Joanne O’Toole ———————- P ———————- Sharon L. Palmer, RD Kathy Parkes Marlene Parkin Amy E. Peare Carole Perlick Carrie Peterson Dale Petry Jennifer Poindexter Darlene Polachic Matt Purkeypile ———————- Q ———————- ———————- R ———————- Connie Rabun Joe Radabaugh Katharine B. Reader Ben Richards Michelle Richards Debra J. Ricketts Mark R. Roach Laura Roady Brad Rohdenburg Vicky Rose ———————- S ———————- Sharon Sabo Emily Salinger Habeeb Salloum Charles A. Sanders Karen McGeorge Sanders Kathleen Sanderson Clay Sawyer Kim Scheimreif Peter Schwartz Marcella Shaffer Gene Sheley Lucy Shober John E. Silveira Joel Simon Linda Slate Melissa Souza Harry Spetla Brent Stainer George Stancliffe Scott Stoddard Jay Stoler Brianna Stone Harrison Stone Jon Stram Harry Styron Vin Suprynowicz ———————- T ———————- Vicki Tate Jayn Steidl Thibodeau Skip Thomsen Tim Thorstenson Brent Todd Len Torney Leonard Trebor Jacqueline Tresl Howard Tuckey Annie (Duffy) Tuttle ———————- U ———————- ———————- V ———————- Jim Van Camp Jim Van Sant Robert Van Putten ———————- W ———————- Emory Warner Micki Warner Martin Waterman Robert Waters Bill Weekes Nick Weston Carol Williams Monika Williams Robert L. Williams Glenn Willis, Jr. Sherry Willis Bill Wilson Kathryn Wingrove Devon Winter Joel Winters Nancy Wolcott Claire Wolfe Charles Wood Margaret Wright Mary Ann Wutzke ———————- X ———————- ———————- Y ———————- Jeffrey Yago, P.E., CEM Alice Brantley Yeager Randy Young ———————- Z ———————- Judy Zent Jereme Zimmerman Linda Zimnick
Special Historical Documents
Authors
Lois A. Adams
Dorothy Ainsworth
Jason Akers
Rowena Aldridge
Joe and Amy Alton
Cynthia Andal
Gary F. Arnet
Massad Ayoob
Radley Balko
James Ballou
Pat Barden
H. Bumper Bauer
Jennifer Stein Barker
Morgan Barker
Dana Martin Batory
James J. Baxter
Rachel Baxter
Roger L. Beattie
Rudy Behrens
Norman Bennett
Jim Benson
Dietmar Berg
BHM Staff Report
Samantha Biggers
Mike Blank
Nanette Blanchard
Richard Blunt
Katelynn Bond
Sally Boulding
Rick Brannan
Mary Jo Bratton
Rick Brentlinger
Thomas Brewer
Grace Brockway
Marcia E. Brown
Thomas M. Buckley
Gail Butler
Emily Buehler
Marjorie Burris
Dorothy Cady
Darlene Campbell
Michael Cantrell
Albert H. Carlson
Emily Chadwick
Don Chance
Liz Case
Jackie Clay-Atkinson
Sandy Coates
Dave Cournoyer
Tips for finding your affordable home BHM Website Exclusive
Rebekah L. Cowell
Julie Crist
Lucas Crouch
Larry Cywin
James F. Deaton
The Mini-Skyline BHM Website Exclusive
Armand O. Deblois
Oliver Del Signore
Jessie Denning
John DePresca
Kim Dieter
Dave Duffy
Ilene Duffy
Kevin F. Duffy
Jane Duquette
Lyle Dykes
Pete Earl
Allen Easterly
David Eddings
Carly Egger
Larry Elliott
George Erdosh
Anita Evangelista
Don Fallick
Lev G. Fedyniak
Doug Fluckiger
D.B. Frandsen
John Fuchs
Danny Fulks
Linda Gabris
Enola Gay
Dynah Geissal
Suzy Lowry Geno
We built John Silveira’s chicken coop/garden BHM Website Exclusive
Scott Gentleman
A small creek provides plenty of power for this off-grid home BHM Website Exclusive
Sylvia Gist
Bill Glade, M.D.
Skip Goebel
Rich Goss
John Graesch
Jennifer Grahovac
Corcceigh Green
Beth Greenwood
Steven Gregersen
Lee Greiman
Gary Gresh
Sharon Griggs
Dr. Roger W. Grim, D.C.
Michael Hackleman
Alan T. Hagan
Michelle Hampton
Martin Harris
Marjorie (Sultzbaugh) Harrison
Angeline Hawkes
Steven Heckeroth
Rev. J.D. Hooker
Jerry Hourigan
Maggie Howe
C. M. Hudman
Donna Insco
Edward Love Johnson
John Kallas, Ph.D
James Kash
Tanya Kelley
Amanda J. Kemp
Brian Kendall
Mary Kenyon
Mark and Lynn Klammer
Joe Knight
Tom R. Kovach
Robert E. Kramer
Lisa LaFreniere
Joy Lamb
Paul Lamble
Maggie Larsen
Larry LaVan
Leah Leach
Janet Leake
David Lee
Luke Lee
Bill Leonard
Gary Lewis
Patrice Lewis
Jean Louis L’Heureux
Michele Lightfoot
Sandy Lindsey
John Lo Cicero
Mike Lorenzen
Edna Manning
Karen Marshall
Katie Martin
Roy Martin
Ed Mashburn
David Scott Matthews
Christopher Maxwell
Kelly McCarthy
Len McDougall
John McLane, RN
Beverly Mettot
Roger Meyer
Olivia Miller
Margaret Mills
Eugene Mitchell
Kai Moessle
Judith W. Monroe
Joe Mooney
Matt and Linda Morehouse
Diana Morgan
Daniel Motz
Tim Murphy
John Murray
Cindi Myers
Lewis Napper
Randy Neumann
Raymond Nones
Jonathan Nunan
Christopher & Dolores Lynn Nyerges
Setanta O’Ceillaigh
Joyce Lindsey O’Keefe
Oregon Grape Jam BHM Website Exclusive
Tom and Joanne O’Toole
Sharon L. Palmer, RD
Kathy Parkes
Marlene Parkin
Amy E. Peare
Carole Perlick
Carrie Peterson
Dale Petry
Jennifer Poindexter
Darlene Polachic
Matt Purkeypile
Connie Rabun
Joe Radabaugh
Katharine B. Reader
Ben Richards
Michelle Richards
Debra J. Ricketts
Mark R. Roach
Laura Roady
Brad Rohdenburg
Vicky Rose
Sharon Sabo
The "Free and Streamlined" National Animal Identification System BHM Website Exclusive
Emily Salinger
Habeeb Salloum
Charles A. Sanders
Karen McGeorge Sanders
Kathleen Sanderson
Clay Sawyer
Kim Scheimreif
Peter Schwartz
Marcella Shaffer
Gene Sheley
Lucy Shober
John E. Silveira
Joel Simon
Linda Slate
Melissa Souza
Harry Spetla
Brent Stainer
George Stancliffe
Scott Stoddard
Jay Stoler
Brianna Stone
Harrison Stone
Jon Stram
Harry Styron
Vin Suprynowicz
Vicki Tate
Jayn Steidl Thibodeau
Skip Thomsen
Tim Thorstenson
Brent Todd
Len Torney
Leonard Trebor
Jacqueline Tresl
Howard Tuckey
Annie (Duffy) Tuttle
Jim Van Camp
Jim Van Sant
Robert Van Putten
Emory Warner
Micki Warner
Martin Waterman
Robert Waters
Bill Weekes
Nick Weston
Carol Williams
Monika Williams
Robert L. Williams
Glenn Willis, Jr.
Sherry Willis
Bill Wilson
Kathryn Wingrove
Devon Winter
Joel Winters
Nancy Wolcott
Claire Wolfe
Charles Wood
Margaret Wright
Mary Ann Wutzke
Jeffrey Yago, P.E., CEM
Alice Brantley Yeager
Randy Young
Jereme Zimmerman
Judy Zent
Our Unconventional House BHM Website Exclusive
Linda Zimnickadvertisement
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Magic wands are so last season. Any true magician—you know, the ones who can do real magic—manipulate their fingers in impossibly intricate positions to cast their spells. By the time they’ve mastered these skills, magicians can recognize one another in a sea of muggles by their muscular hands. That whimsical flourish in Lev Grossman’s best-selling The Magicians trilogy created a slight visualization obstacle for the producers adapting the books into Syfy’s The Magicians. Recently renewed for a second season, the dark drama follows a group of students tapped for a treacherous course of study to hone their real magic abilities at Brakebills Preparatory College of Magic. “The idea of learning magic through very intricate and difficult finger positions is in Lev Grossman’s books,” says executive producer Sera Gamble. “When you get to Brakebills, you’re handed these piles of textbooks that are like études for the hands—almost like piano practice books. We were trying to figure out how to do this visually, when [executive producer] John McNamara’s assistant, Jay Gard, said, ‘Have you gone on YouTube and checked out the finger tutters?'” Sera Gamble Tutting, a hip-hop dance of angular movements through hand and arm popping, has origins in 1970s funk dance. But finger tutting, which involves intricately interweaving fingers, more recently caught the spotlight through a Samsung Galaxy SII phone branded-content video, starring master finger tutter JayFunk, and Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” video, which featured John “Pnut” Hunt after his tutting video “Greasy Fingers” went viral. “Those were very inspiring to us,” says Gamble. It wasn’t so mainstream that it still looked fresh but widespread enough so that casting calls in New Orleans and Vancouver locations for dancers to play Brakebills students practicing spells drew talented tutters.
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For the actors, the production enlisted choreographers Paul Becker and Kevin Li (who cameoed in episode four as the dean’s assistant) to create step-by-step video instructions for finger movements to fit spell types, characters, and actor abilities. They were also on set to assist with movements. In creating their magical language, the producers wanted the flavor of each spell to vary between characters and reflect their backgrounds and magic level. In turn, the actors translated the difficulty and frustration in mastering tutting moves into their characters’ attempts at mastering spells. “The through-line of the books is that magic is really hard,” says Gamble. “The practice doesn’t come as easily as you want. It’s very inconsistent, arduous, and even, at times, boring. The actors having to learn this brand new skill that’s very difficult and awkward ended up being helpful in their character development.” Kacey Rohl as Marina and Stella Maeve as Julia on The Magicians Photos: Carole Segall, Syfy Every episode requires 8 to 10 tuts, and those movements need to convey the meaning behind the spell. Becker and Li spent a day or two (or all-nighters for last-minute requests) choreographing sequences—tweaking them according to production notes—before putting them on tape and sending them to the actors to rehearse. “Some of the notes the producers gave us were pretty deep,” laughs Becker. “There’s usually a back story for each spell and movement. They may seem like small things that take a few seconds, but actually a lot goes into it. “The actors have to sit at a table and do it over and over till they get it right,” he adds. “It’s so complicated, because it’s such small movements, and no one is used to moving their fingers this way. It requires fine motor skills and is a different beast than memorizing a dance with your entire body. It messes with your mind more.”
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For Gamble, the tutters brought a new ingredient to the collaboration. “Especially with a fantasy show, a huge amount of our job is world building,” she says. “We want the world we create in The Magicians to feel specific, real, and detailed enough so that as time goes on, it feels genuine. We do that as much as we can in the script, and then actors and costume designers add to that. Tutting is another way to put The Magicians’ imprint on this facet of magic, making it different from any other magic show or movie that you’ve seen.” Stella Maeve as Julia and Amy Pietz as Hannah Photos: Carole Segall, Syfy “Every new story in the series brings magical problems and opportunities to invent new things” that further structure that world, says Gamble. “From one episode to the next, we end up asking ourselves story questions that might yield a magical substance or secret handshake. But, in terms of a cohesive language, the tutting has been the most interesting.”America’s grotesque amusement: the joke is on black women again by Brittney Cooper
This past weekend, Kerry Washington became only the eighth Black woman to host “Saturday Night Live.” The paltry representation of black women on “SNL” is obviously shameful: In the 38-year history of the show, there have only been four black women cast members, averaging about one per decade.
The show attempted to poke fun at its own sexualized racism (and racialized sexism) without of course ever calling it that, by putting up a statement apologizing for its lack of black female cast members — after a particularly funny sketch in which Kerry Washington was asked to play Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé in a span of about five minutes.
Unfortunately, the show undercut its own attempt at self-deprecation, by ending its public service announcement by saying: “we agree this is not an ideal situation and look forward to rectifying it in the near future … unless of course we fall in love with another white guy first.”
I get the attempt at irony. But who ain’t laughing is me. How can I, when the joke seems to be on black women?
Why is it that Americans are infinitely more comfortable with black men playing sassy, matronly black female characters in drag, as Kenan Thompson frequently does on the show, than with black women playing black female roles? Drag can be generative and subversive, but in this case, it just seems oppressive.
When Thompson came under fire a few weeks back for insinuating that “SNL” casting directors struggled to find black women who were “ready” to do comedic roles, he attempted to justify the systematic ignoring and excluding of black women from “SNL” by arguing that they’re simply unqualified to do comedy. Racists deploy this kind of argument to justify why they don’t have people of color employees and men make these kinds of arguments to justify not hiring women for top leadership positions.
But I’d venture to say that Americans in general are the ones who aren’t ready for black women to step outside of the most narrow and stereotypical racial boxes that have been cast for us. Thompson himself failed to recognize the ways in which his success on the show has been predicated on the exclusion of black women, while also being indebted to black women’s cultural traditions.
Thompson is not unique in his appropriation of black female labor and culture for his own success. Tyler Perry’s most successful character is Madea. Martin Lawrence’s most recognizable character is Big Momma. While black women are often told that these characters are an homage to black women, not allowing black women to play themselves is nothing to celebrate.
The ways in which black men collude with white power structures to deny black women access to spaces of cultural production is not a problem unique to hip-hop. In fact, much as Thompson argues, many male rappers would have us believe that the only reason Nicki Minaj is the most recognizable female emcee in the game is because women simply aren’t as talented as men. Many of these men fail to use their considerable pull with white corporate record executives to advocate for open doors for women. This is why the Grammys have not had a category for best female rapper since 2005. In the world of “SNL” Kenan Thompson plays a similar role: He seems to relate far more to the executives at “SNL” who couldn’t resist reminding us of their perennial love of white guys than to the black women who provide the comedic fodder for his sketches.
Lucky for black women, the tide does seem to be turning. Shonda Rhimes, creator of “Grey’s Anatomy,” has achieved mega success with her casting of Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope in “Scandal.” It is the best performing prime-time drama on network television. Unfortunately, however, it is also the only drama on network television with a black female lead.
Cable and Web-based shows have stepped in to do some of the cultural heavy lifting, offering amazing acting from black women in shows like “Orange Is the New Black,” “Awkward Black Girl” and “American Horror Story.” I also eagerly await BET’s new scripted drama “Being Mary Jane.”
But these shows only mildly offset the cultural train wrecks of reality television that continue to perpetuate the worst stereotypes of black female anger, back-biting, hypersexualization and more. I’m not saying that I don’t like reality television. I do, and I usually choose one show per season to follow.
But there is a reason that black women have gained such heightened visibility as the denizens of ratchet ghettoized glamour on shows like “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” “Love & Hip Hop” New York and Atlanta, “Basketball Wives” and more. Structurally, these shows require the most intrusion on people’s personal lives while also providing little job security or stability.
And by perpetuating the lie of the real, or the idea that these shows offer us a window into “reality,” it becomes all the more difficult to get an accurate picture of black women’s humanity.
Not that fans of these shows are especially interested in that in the first place.
Black women watch because in a desert of black female representation, even the most poisonous well of water can look like an oasis. Others watch for pure “entertainment.” But popular entertainment in the U.S. has never been a pure category. Peering and jeering at black women who tell fantastical tales, sing songs and recount bawdy stories has been an American cultural fascination since the 1830s when P.T. Barnum employed a black woman named Joyce Heth as a cultural performer. Joyce Heth claimed to have been George Washington’s 160-year-old former nursemaid.
She sat in a cage for hours each day while circus goers came by and peered at her body, listened to her unbelievable tales and tried to examine her physical body. Joyce Heth, according to Benjamin Reiss, was one of the earliest images – if not the earliest—of a black woman to appear in newsprint.
Black women’s long historical status as a kind of grotesque amusement for the American public informs the way we understand and interact with black women performers today.
The successful and complicated portraits of black women that emerge from the work of women like Shonda Rhimes, Kerry Washington, Issa Rae, Oprah Winfrey and some of the shows at OWN, and Sundance Award-winning filmmaker Ava Duvernay suggest that the tide may ever so slowly be turning.
But this cultural turn will not be complete until America falls out of love with white men.Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line
XMLC and A. Green
New Democracy and the Transition to Socialism in China: A Polemic Against Jim Washington
First Issued: September 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Lenin on the Transition to Socialism and Mao’s Theory of New Democracy
The Transition to Socialism in China
– Socialist Transformation of Industry: the Restriction of National Capital
– The Wu Fan Campaign Was Not Led By the National Bourgeoisie!
– The Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and Party Rectification
– The Emergence of Two Lines on the Transition to Socialism
– The Aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and the Temporary Rightist Dominance of 1960-62
The Seeds of Revisionism in the CPC (1949-1960)
Appendixes
1. A Note on Decentralization
2. Two Charts on Industrial Transformation
BibliographySen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, is the activist left's favorite presidential candidate. Sanders's willingness to champion ideas that most of Washington won't touch — single-payer health care, for example, or massive across-the-board spending hikes — has won him an adoring fan base, especially online.
Sanders is the only self-described socialist in the Senate and has defined himself by challenging the Democratic establishment from the left. But there's one area where Sanders hasn't taken quite as independent of a course: foreign policy.
On foreign policy, he's toward the leftward end of the Democratic party, but still well within Washington's conventional norms. That's drawn him some condemnation on the left, particularly with regards to his views on Israel.
Bernie Sanders's positions on war have been controversial on the left
Among actual socialists, Sanders's mainstream foreign policy views are no secret. "Sanders doesn’t offer the... principled anti-imperialist politics that we should demand on the Left," Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara writes in an otherwise friendly editorial. A more critical response from Ashley Smith is more blunt: "his foreign policy positions are to the right of many liberal Democrats."
That's perhaps overstating the case: Sanders is neither substantially more conservative, nor more liberal, than a standard liberal Democrat.
Take the war on ISIS, for example. Like many Democrats, Sanders has vocally opposed deploying US combat troops to Iraq or arming Syrian rebels. But he's been pretty comfortable with the US bombing campaign against ISIS: "I have supported U.S. airstrikes against ISIS and believe they are authorized under current law," the senator said in a February statement, and wants regional Arab powers to take the lead in waging an international ground war against ISIS.
Sanders's tension with the left on foreign policy goes back some time. As a congressman, he voted for a resolution supporting the 1999 US air campaign in Yugoslavia — a vote that prompted both a pleading Nation editorial asking him to reconsider and a nasty public resignation letter from Sanders staffer Jeremy Brecher. "Is there a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in or support?" Brecher asked his former employer. "Where does that limit lie?"
Sanders's willingness to endorse wars has varied over his career, but he is not a pacifist. He voted for the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Force in Afghanistan, but opposed Obama's 2009 troop surge in the country. He opposed both the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He had "reservations" about the 2011 war in Libya, but supports drone strikes on suspected terrorists "in a very selective way."
On this issue, then, Sanders isn't far off from your average liberal Democrat. He's generally skeptical of the use of force, but willing to endorse it in very narrow and limited cases where he thinks it could save lives or advance American interests. That doesn't make him a warmonger who is "to the right of many liberal Democrats," but it is a notable divergence in his reputation as a champion of the left and challenger of the Washington status quo.
Sanders is pro-Israel, but he doesn't emphasize it
The use of force isn't the area in which Sanders and the activist left have the most conflict. That'd be Israel.
"When I see Senator Bernie Sanders, I see someone who is a typical pro-Israel Jewish Democrat," Aaron Keyak, a Democratic political consultant familiar with Israel issues, told the Forward's Josh Nathan-Kazis. "He prefers for Israel to have a left of center government, but he still fundamentally supports Israel."
Sanders supports a two-state solution, one for Israelis and another for Palestinians. While he can be critical of Israel, he does not refrain from criticizing Palestinians as well.
"The Palestinians must fulfill their responsibilities to end terrorism against Israel and recognize Israel’s right to exist," Sanders said in a 2013 Playboy interview. "In return, the Israelis must end their policy of targeted killings, prevent further Israeli settlements on Palestinian land and prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and infrastructure."
That's a stark contrast to the socialist left, which generally sees Israel as a racist, colonial aggressor. Increasingly, leftists advocate a one-state solution to the conflict.
At a town hall meeting during the 2014 Gaza war, Sanders’s sympathy for Israel got him in trouble with some of his constituents. Though Sanders argued that Israel had "overreacted" militarily in Gaza, he also emphasized that Israel was responding to rocket fire coming from heavily populated areas in the Palestinian territory.
When the crowd responded angrily, an infuriated Sanders shouted back: "Excuse me! Shut up! You don’t have the microphone."
That's Bernie on Israel: critical to a degree, but willing to see Israel's side of the issue and staunchly in favor of a two-state solution that is unpopular on the activist left.
"Sanders’ Israel policy seems likely to tilt more toward Tel Aviv than that of Obama," Juan Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan and harsh critic of Israel, writes.
Why does Sanders differ from his base on foreign policy?
The simplest explanation is that challenging the DC foreign policy consensus is really hard. Sen. Rand Paul differs from his party on foreign policy, but has devoted tremendous energy to attempting to pull his party toward him. And it doesn't look like Sanders has the same passion for foreign policy issues.
"While we focus all of our attention on ISIS, the middle class in this country continues to collapse"
That's because foreign policy isn't really Sanders's big thing. As Andrew Prokop's profile makes clear, Sanders's driving passions are economic inequality and the wealthy's stranglehold on politics in the United States. He often tries to refocus discussions of foreign policy onto domestic issue: those global issues shouldn't our primary concern, he suggests, because the real crisis is at home.
"While we focus all of our attention on ISIS, the middle class in this country continues to collapse," Sanders said in a representative CNN interview. "And you know what the people tell me in Vermont and around the country? Let's also start paying attention to the crises facing working families in America."
Those domestic issues are where the bulk of the activist energy on the American left is nowadays. That's where it's likely to remain, perhaps absent any threat of a major new ground war in Iraq or elsewhere. Sanders in a better position, politically, to make a real difference on domestic policy. And that seems to dovetail with his actual views.God Eater 2 Developers On How Fan Feedback Improved The Game
By Sato. July 29, 2013. 1:30pm
The hunting genre has been a competitive market for Japanese developers since the immense popularity of Monster Hunter took off. While all hunting games share the simple formula of hunting and collecting gear, it’s the other features that set them apart. In a new interview, God Eater 2 producer Yosuke Tomizawa and director Kou Yoshimura talk to Famitsu about how much they value fan feedback in order to make a better game.
The Famitsu interview starts with both Tomizawa and Yoshimura expressing their relief at finally having a concrete release date for God Eater 2. It’s been about a year since they dropped the original concept they had for the upcoming sequel, only to start over from scratch with a completely new idea.
God Eater 2’s demo was released to the public earlier this week, but last month Namco Bandai were able to host an event where the developers were able to get feedback from 600 lucky fans, thanks to Sony Computer Entertainment Japan.
According to Yoshimura, the toughest part of the event was keeping up with the schedule, as they had 10 groups of 30 people across just two days, making up the total of 600 players. Between each group’s play session, the team only had 10-minute breaks.
“Having the free-spoken opinions was the biggest part,” says God Eater 2 producer Tomizawa. “While players only got to play for a short while of about 15 minutes, knowing the first impression they felt from it was very important. The opinions we got from there have been put into action for the demo version, so it was a very significant event for us.”
Famitsu asks the developers to share what kind of feedback from fans of the event has been reflected in the recently released demo.
“The opinions surrounding the configurations were the biggest in particular,” shares Yoshimura. “God Eater 2 is an action game that is played in a repetitive manner, so we really took into consideration the feeling of players who asked for a more stress-free in-game environment. In God Eater 2, there are battle notifications via radio, but some people want to only hear about the ones they feel are required. So we’ve improved the configurations to correspond accordingly in those regards.”
Additionally, players felt that the new Charge Spear weapon made character movements appear too heavy and slow. After taking note of this, the development team adjusted the weapon and finished with something completely different.
One of the new features which God Eater 2’s developers were most eager to see players try out is the Blood Arts system. Yoshimura, who is also considered to be the “founding father” of the new concept, weighs in on the subject.
Says Yoshimura, “Honestly, I didn’t see the sparkle in their eyes as originally expected (laughs). That told me that the comfort level of the Blood Arts wasn’t enough. For this reason, we’ve raised it for the demo version. I believe that we’ll be required to enhance it even further after seeing player requests from the demo.”
“To those of you who get a chance to play the demo, please send us your feedback,” continues Yoshimura. “Not only would we like to know about areas of God Eater 2 that need to be fixed, but we’d also like to be able to meet the expectations of opinions such as, ‘It’d be better if it was more like this,’ and such. We actually want to hear about all of your ‘selfish’ requests (laughs).”
Producer Tomizawa adds, “From 600 people at the demo event, to 500,000~1,000,000 people now, we’d like to know about all of your opinions. So, please don’t hesitate and continue giving us your feedback on the official website.”
I believe there are some of you who are currently playing the demo of God Eater 2 are actually new to the God Eater series. To those of you I ask, please let us know about your opinions, such as parts that may have been a little confusing.”
Tomizawa continues, “We’ve been working on the God Eater series for three years now, and we may feel that some parts of the game are self-evident, so if there are any parts that are even slightly difficult to grasp, we’d love to hear about it from you guys.”
“While most of the information we’ve disclosed so far is about the action, as we move closer to the release, we look forward to sharing other elements such as story and character creation. You can also enjoy a part of the story in the demo, so please give it a shot. I believe you’ll be surprised with the graphics we’ve refined in the past three years,” he concludes.
God Eater 2 is slated for release November 14th in Japan for PlayStation Vita and PSP.Swiss chef who ran the Restaurant de l’Hotel de Ville in Crissier, near Lausanne, has died in an apparent suicide
The giants of French gastronomy have paid tribute to the French-Swiss chef Benoît Violier, who was found dead at his home on Sunday.
He died of shotgun injuries in what was believed to be a suicide.
Violier, 44, ran the Restaurant de l’Hotel de Ville in Crissier, near Lausanne, which was named the best in the world in December by La Liste. In 2013 he was named chef of the year by the influential Gault et Millau guide, second only to the Michelin guide among gourmets. He was due to attend the unveiling of the new Michelin guide in Paris on Monday.
Marc Veyrat, a three-star chef, said he was “destroyed” by news of Violier’s death. “The planet has been orphaned by this exceptional chef,” Veyrat wrote on Twitter.
Marc Veyrat (@marcveyrat) La planète est orpheline de ce Chef d'exception, Benoît Violier. Je suis anéanti.
Pierre Gagnaire, also a three-star Michelin chef, who was named by his peers the “biggest star chef in the world” and who has restaurants in Paris, Tokyo, Dubai, Moscow and Berlin as well as Sketch in London, added: “ |
and ARK blockchain, control and authorize other devices. Manufacturing. Supply chain management, counterfeit detection — track items from manufacturers to end users (who has what and when).
As previously mentioned, these are just a few ideas that we thought would help get the ball rolling. If you have your own idea, submit a proposal for approval to the ARK Crew and we will read it over.
I Want to Build XYZ, Now What?
To apply to take on one of the projects above, please send your proposal to INFO (at) ARK (dot) io or join our Slack and contact one of the ARK team representatives (BoldNinja, Mike, DJSelery, or Cannabanana). When submitting a proposal, please include the following:
A detailed outline of what you plan to build.
Examples of relevant previous work.
Names and contact info for all team members.
And a Timeline for completion.
Looking to create a team? You can find fellow developers in our #development channel on Slack — there are quite a few already with ideas and skills, so it could be a good place to find and join forces (maybe make some new cool friends or business partnerships)!
When Will I Get Paid?
Once we have selected your proposal, we will award 20% up front to help with development costs. The rest will be transferred on successful completion of the project.
How Long do I have to Apply?
The program will run for as long as it takes to fill the 10 available slots. That could mean a few days or it could mean several months. We will keep this post updated and give regular updates as projects are accepted.
Questions?
Contact BoldNinja on ARK Slack.
Now roll up your sleeves and let’s get to work!FIFA President Sepp Blatter has vowed to "fight" his suspension after himself and European soccer boss Michel Platini were both banned from soccer for eight years on Monday by the ethics committee of the sport's global governing body.
The pair, who were also fined, had been suspended for 90 days in October while an investigation was carried out into a 2 million Swiss franc ($2.02 million) payment by FIFA to Platini in 2011.
Both claimed that the payment was made due to an oral agreement between the pair in 1998 when Platini worked as an adviser to Blatter up until 2002. But FIFA said there was "no legal basis" for the agreement.
"Neither in his written statement nor in his personal hearing was Blatter able to demonstrate another legal basis for this payment. His assertion of an oral agreement was determined as not convincing and was rejected by the chamber," FIFA said in a statement.
Both men denied any wrongdoing and Blatter said he would use the legal system to appeal if necessary.
"I will fight. I will fight for me and I will fight for FIFA," Blatter told reporters at a press conference Monday, adding that he would take his complaints to FIFA's appeals body or use Swiss law if needed.
"I'm a Swiss citizen. In the Swiss law if you are suspended for eight years you must have committed something very, very important," he said.Two Russian opposition activists have partially lost their sight after unidentified assailants hurled liquid chemicals in their eyes. In both cases, the activists and their doctors are concerned that the damage may be irreparable.
On April 27, an attacker hurled a caustic green antiseptic known as zelyonka in opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s face as he was leaving the office of his Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Doctors subsequently diagnosed Navalny with a “chemical burn in his right eye.” Navalny later stated that there was a risk his vision would not recover.
The next day, Natalya Fyodorova, a Moscow-based activist from the Yabloko opposition party, was hospitalized after an attacker hurled a “chemical solution” in her eyes. Several days later, she can still only see out of one eye and “feels poorly,” says Sergei Mitrokhin, head of the Moscow branch of Yabloko.
Zelyonka attacks have become part and parcel of Russian politics in recent months. Since February, at least eight opposition activists and journalists have been targeted. However, the most recent incidents suggest the attackers are moving on to harsher chemicals.
In Fyodorova’s case, the liquid appears not to have been zelyonka. And, according to Navalny, his doctors believe the zelyonka that damaged his eye was “mixed with something else” because “simple zelyonka would not burn the eyes seriously.”
In both cases, activists allege that police investigations have been languid or deceitful.
After the attack on Navalny, police declined to confiscate security camera footage that could have identified the assailant. Security guards in the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s office building also told one of Navalny’s colleagues that none of the security cameras were working that day, the NewsRu.com site reported.
Later, however, an employee of the Anti-Corruption Foundation released a photo of the attacker taken from security camera footage.Washington (CNN) Government lawyers have asked a judge to reject CNN's requests to make public the memos of former FBI Director James Comey in which he details his meetings with President Donald Trump.
In a late Friday evening filing, the lawyers also have asked for permission to argue in secret why they say the disclosure could compromise the investigation into Russian election-meddling and potential obstruction of justice into that probe.
Several news outlets and government watchdogs, including CNN, have requested the documents be released under the Freedom of Information Act. Comey testified in Congress that the documents detail Trump's request that he pledge personal loyalty and what he interpreted as a request to curtail an investigation into Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
Despite Comey's testimony that he wrote the memos specifically to avoid including classified information, the government argued it has now classified portions of the documents.
Releasing the memos, the government said, could "reveal the scope and focus of the investigation and thereby harm the investigation" and any prosecutions.This paper was presented at the G.U.I.D.E.&SHARE Europe Joint Conference (10-13 October 1994, Vienna, Austria).
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The author is member of the scientific staff for application programming at the Computing Center of the University of Münster, Germany.
This presentation is biased -- neither accidentally nor intentionally but necessarily. The reason is that programmers have their favorite programming language. Mine is PL/I but I studied C because there is a widespread operating system called Unix which I had to write programs for. Additionally I had many discussions with colleagues in my computing center comparing the two languages. Of course, I will always refer to OS/2 PL/I and ANSI-C because they are the modern versions!
First I want to present 5 theses: Too many things in C...
How does a program look?
Let's start with the outward appearance of a C and a PL/I program:
C PL/I /* compilation unit: file */ #include static void subroutine (...); float function (...); float something; static float anything; extern float nothing; int main (void) {... subroutine (...);... } void subroutine (...) {... printf ("%f", function(...));... } float function (...) {... return...; } /* compilation unit: package */ Program: package exports (Main); declare Something float external, Anything float static; Main: procedure options (main);... call Subroutine (...);... end; Subroutine: procedure (...);... put (Function(...));... end; Function: procedure (...) returns(float);... return (...); end; end;
As you can see, at least comments are the same in both languages. The first difference is the treatment of letters. C is case-sensitive, PL/I doesn't care. For example, don't write the word main in C in capital letters; you will get an error message by the linker! The main procedure in C always has to have the name main! PL/I handles the specification of a main procedure in the usual way: it introduces keywords: options (main). Here we come to the next difference: Keywords in C are reserved words, in PL/I it's clear from the syntax what is a keyword and what is not. In PL/I you can truthfully say "What you don't know can't hurt you!"
Both in C and in PL/I the unit of compilation is a file. But in PL/I there must be at least one complete procedure contained in the file; in the general case a file will contain a package as shown here. The advantage compared to C is that the compiler is able to recognize a corrupted file, perhaps caused by a file transfer.
The scope of functions and variables defined outside functions in C is global by default! The PL/I rule -- names are local to the package or procedure -- isn't as dangerous: You have to mention procedures in the export-option of the package statement and to declare variables external if you want them to be used by other routines. The method to reduce the scope in C is to define it as static. This treatment is a candidate for thesis 1! Static storage is storage that lives during the lifetime of a program. And that is true whether you specify static or not. static in this place means "local to the file"! Even the scope of a function can be reduced to the file by declaring it " static ".
If you wonder why there is a #include -line in the C program: input and output is done by library functions, and you have to include the function declarations in order to be able to do I/O.
The two lines following in the C example have no counterpart in PL/I. They declare the functions coming afterwards in the file, for the purpose of correct parameter passing. This is neither necessary nor possible in PL/I because the compiler "knows" all procedures in the package, only procedures in other files have to be declared in an analogous manner. C differentiates between declaration and definition: the first is an association of attributes and the second an association of storage. In PL/I there are only declarations, a PL/I programmer doesn't even understand the problem! The extern -declaration doesn't reserve storage. Why it's called extern is mysterious: The definition may come in another file or in the same file later on!
Declarations and definitions are order-dependent in C and block-dependent in PL/I. This means that in C you cannot use something you have not at least declared previously in the file. In PL/I declare -statements may be in any order, relevant is only the block they are contained in. This makes life easier for PL/I programmers!
Obviously there are two kinds of subprograms in PL/I and only one in C. The subprogram subroutine is called by a call statement in PL/I and only by referencing the name in C. C programmers praise this fact as a clean solution. But referencing thesis 4 I would reply that a subprogram should only serve one of two purposes: either computing a value or providing an effect! This can be checked by a compiler and is, of course, checked by the OS/2-PL/I compiler: there must be either a returns-attribute and a return-statement with value or a return-statement without a value (or return by an end-statement). The methods of parameter passing will be explained later.
Signed Characters?
At first glance declarations (or definitions) look similar in C and PL/I:
C PL/I const volatile float f = 1; dcl F float init(1) nonasgn abnormal; dcl F float nonasgn abnormal init(1);
But there could be no greater error! First you have to obey a certain order of keywords in C whereas PL/I only demands that the first keyword specifies the statement type. The attributes following the name of the variable may be in any order. Of course the initial value 1 has to follow immediately the keyword init! The keyword const in C means in fact nonassignable as it it called in PL/I! Recall Thesis 1! The following statements declare fixed-point datatypes:
C PL/I char I; signed char J; unsigned char K; short int L; int M; long int N; /* no counterpart */ /* no counterpart */ dcl I char; /*? */ dcl J fixed binary (7); dcl K fixed bin (8) unsigned; dcl L fixed bin (15); dcl M fixed bin; dcl N fixed bin (31); dcl O fixed bin (31,16); dcl S fixed dec (7,2);
If you specify only char, it depends on which C compiler you're using whether it's signed or unsigned. What adventurous consequences this has will be discussed in the operations part of this presentation. If you have never heard of signed characters you needn't worry! It's up to thesis 1: char means in fact small integer, as you see when you regard their PL/I counterparts! You feel the power of PL/I when you look at the various types on the right: Binary fractionals (you can find a long-winded C-style definition of them in OS/2 Presentation Manager manuals) and decimal numbers even with fractional parts. In PL/I you can declare in a problem-oriented fashion what precision you want, as it is for floating-point numbers:
C PL/I float A; double B; long double C; /* no counterpart */ dcl A float; dcl A float decimal (6); dcl A float binary (21); dcl B float dec (16); dcl B float bin (53); dcl C float dec (33); dcl C float bin(109); dcl D float dec (12);
Non-Computational Datatypes?
Additionally there are non-computational datatypes in PL/I: area, entry, file, format, handle, label, offset, pointer, and task! Because of the little space in this presentation I will only comment on two PL/I counterparts to the C datatype pointer. First a typical usage in both languages:
C PL/I char x, *p = &x; *p = 'Z'; dcl X char, P ptr init(addr(X)), C char based (P); C = 'Z';
The C definition means that x and *p each have one byte of storage. * in this context is the indirection operator: *p is the storage where p points to. In other words: p is a pointer to char. The syntax is slightly chaotic; on the one hand *p is of type char, on the other hand p is initialized to the address of x (by using the address operator & ). It's unclear whether to group char *p or p = &x! The assignment means in fact that x gets the value 'Z'.
In the PL/I example the pointer p is "untyped". This is a point where using PL/I can get adventurous, but the advantage is that pointers in PL/I often only appear in declare statements as it is in this case. You have to define a character object C which is located where the pointer P points to. In the assignment no pointer is used, only the name of a based object.
The other example shows the usage of variable subprograms in the two languages:
C PL/I float (*f) (float); f = func; printf ("%f", f(7.3)); dcl F entry (float) variable returns (float); F = Func; put (F(7.3));
The C philosophy is that f is a pointer to a function with parameter float which returns a float value. In PL/I there is no pointer needed, only the program control data type entry. The keyword variable is necessary because names of procedures are entry constants. You shouldn't confuse the C definition with the following: float *f (float); which means that f is a function which returns a pointer to float! By the way, what do you think is the result of quotient in the following example:
C float *pdenominator;... quotient = nominator/*pdenominator /*? */;
You think that nominator is divided by the value pdenominator points to? No, that's wrong (surprise, surprise)! The characters "/*" after nominator start a comment! And thinking of thesis 5: does your compiler complain?
What Is an Array?
In order to introduce character strings we have first to present arrays. Although there is a rudimentary concept of arrays in C, no "good" C programmer uses the rudimentary array notation directly (with the exception of character arrays). Instead they use pointers which are closely related to arrays in C. For example you want to copy array A to array B :
C PL/I int i; float a [10], b [10]; for (i = 1; i < 10; i += 1) a[i] = b[i]; dcl I fixed bin; dcl (A, B init ((5)0,(5)1)) dim (0:9) float; do I = lbound(A) to hbound(A); A(I) = B(I); end;
The C philosophy is that array bounds start with 0 and extend to N-1, if N is the declared number of elements. In PL/I you can specify that you mean the pumpkin harvest of the years 1989 to 1993!
PL/I dcl Pumpkin_harvest (1989:1993) fixed bin (31);
Of course this supports thesis 3 because no human starts counting from 0! And what do "real" programmers in C and PL/I do to improve the examples above?
C PL/I float *pa, *pb; float a [10], b [10]; for (pa=a, pb=b; p < a+10; *pa++, *pb++); A = B;
Instead of arrays only pointers are used, with pointer arithmetic used exclusively! What advantage are C programmers hoping for? The PL/I compiler can do a better job of optimization than any C programmer! Here thesis 1 and 4 apply! An array is treated as a pointer and no subscript value can be checked by the compiler. Using pointers is not a natural way of programming arrays. They obscure inherently clear things! The most extreme example is the C definition that a[i] is the same as *(a+i). And this is the same as *(i+a). As you can easily conclude, they are all the same as i[a]!
Let A and B declared as above, then the following is possible in PL/I:
PL/I dcl C float dim (0:9); C = A + 2*B - 4;
Arrays are full fledged objects and not pointers in PL/I!
What Is a String?
Now to the translations of char to PL/I counterparts:
C PL/I char c =''; char s [10] = {'a','b','c'}; char t [4] = "abc"; t = s; /* illegal */ t = "abc"; /* illegal */ strcpy (t, s); dcl C char init ('Ä'); dcl S char (3) init ('abc'); dcl T char (3) var; T = S; T = 'abc'; T = T || 'xy';
The C paradigms know about character arrays like s in the example above and strings which extend up to a null byte like t. Here t effectively uses 4 bytes of storage, the length is maximal 3, and the subscript of the last character is 2! As arrays are in fact constant pointers you cannot assign s to t because you cannot assign a value to a constant!. The string constant "abc" may be assigned to t in the definition but not by a assignment statement! Indeed, the library function strcpy brings some limited help, but it will blindly move many bytes of s to t until it finds the null byte. There is no check possible whether there is enough space in t! In PL/I there is even a concatenation operator ( || ), a task which has to be done in C again by using a library function!
In PL/I, if you want to declare varying length strings ending with a null byte like in C, you can use the varyingz attribute. If you want to use varying strings of arbitrary contents (even ones containing null bytes in the midst of the string) PL/I gives you the opportunity to do so by specifying the varying attribute. There is no distinction between characters and strings. Both are scalars in PL/I. Of course, you can declare arrays of strings!
What Are Bits?
In C there are three concepts regarding bits. The first one treats int as a sequence of bits. In PL/I you have to use the pseudovariable and builtin function unspec if you want to treat anything as bit if it is not:
C PL/I short int k; k = k & 0x00FF; dcl K fixed bin (15); unspec(K) = unspec(K) & '00FF'x;
This is, of course, not really equivalent because unspec means bit representation whereas a hexadecimal constant in C represents an int! Of course, use of unspec may inhibit portability! In PL/I there is an extra datatype bit which can be used in an analogous manner to character strings, complete with builtin functions like substr, which can be modelled in C only in an arcane manner:
C PL/I short int x; k = (x>>(m+1-n))& ˜(˜0<<n); dcl X bit (16); K = substr(X,M,N);
The second concept in C uses structures; this, of course, is possible in PL/I, too:
C PL/I struct {int a: 4; signed int b: 1; int c: 3;} byte; byte.c = 2; dcl 1 Byte unaligned, 2 A bit (4), 2 B bit, 2 C bit (3); C = '010'b;
Really strange is the treatment of bits as integers: The variable b can have only one of two possible values: 0 and -1!
The third point is that C uses int values for storing logical values: 0 means false and all other values mean true. In PL/I a bit string of length one is used to hold logical values. Thus there is only one set of logical operators in PL/I whereas C has two:
C PL/I if (x > 0 && j == 2)... b = k < 0 & j == 1; if K > 0 & J = 2 then... B = K > 0 & J = 2;
As you can see, C needs three concepts where PL/I has only one!
Static, Automatic, and more...
As static and automatic are very similar in C and PL/I, there is one storage class you can find only in C: register. It expresses your wish to hold a variable in a register. There are two storage classes which can be found only in PL/I: controlled and based. Let's first consider an example of controlled :
PL/I declare (K, L) fixed bin, A dim (K) char (L) ctl; K = 10; L = 10; allocate A;... K = 15; L = 29; allocate A;... put (A); free A; put (A); free A;
The controlled (abbrev. ctl ) means that the variable initially has no storage allocated to it. Only after executing an allocate statement can you make a legal reference to it. After executing a corresponding free statement, the controlled variable is no longer available. A powerful use of this type of storage class is to make multiple allocations of a variable before freeing it. PL/I treats this as building a stack. Older generations of the variable are hidden in the meantime, and only the most recent allocation of the variable is available to the program. Even more remarkable is that array bounds and string sizes may be different in different generations.
Say It in the Declaration!
The PL/I attribute based can best be explained when defining chained (or "linked") structures. Look at the following example:
C PL/I struct atype {struct btype *a1; float a2;}; struct btype {long int b1; float b2 [10];}; struct atype *a; a = (struct atype *) malloc (sizeof(struct atype)); a->a1 = (struct btype *) malloc (sizeof(struct btype)); printf ("%f", a->a1>b2[3]); dcl 1 A based (P); 2 A1 ptr, 2 A2 float; dcl 1 B based (A1), 2 B1 fixed bin (31), 2 B2 float dim (10); allocate A; allocate B; put (B2(3));
In PL/I you find complexity only in the declaration: A is where P points to, B is where A.A1 points to. After this you can forget the pointers and use only the object names A and B. In C, however, you have to use the pointers everywhere. Pointers are indeed typed in C, but even for the purpose of allocation you have to cast them to byte pointers!
How Many Must a Programming Language Have?
If you compare the following tables, what do you think? Is it really necessary to have 45 operators instead of 20? Is it really necessary to have 15 priority groups instead of 7?
C priority direction operator 15 < () []. -> 14 > ++ -- ˜ - +! & * (typename) sizeof() 13 > * / % 12 > + - 11 > << >> 10 > < > <= >= 9 > ==!= 8 > & 7 > ^ 6 > | 5 > &.&. 4 > || 3 <?: 2 < = += -= *= /= <<= %= &= ^= |= >>= 1 >,
PL/I priority direction Operator 7 < + - ^ ** 6 > * / 5 > + - 4 > = ^= < > <= >= ^< ^> 3 > || 2 > & 1 > | ^
Even == and >= are in different precedence groups! ** and || of PL/I cannot to be found in C, and C's shift operators (the << and >> operators) are handled by builtin functions in PL/I.
Something to Do with Mathematics?
Many operations in C are done after the so-called usual conversions. So, what is done in the following C example:
C signed char c = 0xFF; if (c == 0xFF)...I have been a fan of professional football since my college days (go Pats) but I also recognize that it is a brutal sport prone to injuries. In recent years awareness of the true neurological risk of concussions, especially repeated concussions, has been increasingly coming to light. This may cause some cognitive dissonance among fans, players, and anyone involved with the NFL, including broadcasters.
Recently Fox News published and article in which Dylan Gwinn writes:
Don’t look now, but concussions have become the new global warming: a debate where “consensus” trumps evidence, and heroes and villains are determined by their stances on an issue where the science is bogus at worst and murky at best.
This is classic FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the primary tactic of those who find reality not to their liking in some particular aspect.
Gwinn creates the classic false dichotomy between consensus and evidence. What if the consensus is based upon scientific evidence, and in fact the consensus of experts is the best way for non-experts to understand what the evidence actually says.
Further, all science is murky, at least to some degree. The clarity of a scientific conclusion exists along a spectrum from genuinely controversial to rock solid, but scientific evidence is always complex, subject to multiple interpretations, and incomplete. It doesn’t take much creativity to portray any scientific conclusion (even those at the rock solid end of the spectrum) as murky. Creationists are evidence of that.
Gwinn also does not address another issue at the core of this debate – the precautionary principle. This is the notion that it is best to err on the side of caution regarding a potential harm when the science is still preliminary. Application of the precautionary principle is admittedly complex and is easily abused. I write often about abuse of the precautionary principle when it comes to vaccines, GMO, and unnamed “toxins.” I also write about ignoring the precautionary principle when it comes to things like global warming, and now concussions from playing contact sports. These represent opposite extremes, when the reasonable position is somewhere in the middle, with Aristotle’s golden mean.
Abuse of the precautionary principle generally takes the form of overhyping possible risks, cherry picking evidence suggesting risk, ignoring, dismissing, or downplaying evidence of safety, and demanding unreasonable assurances of “zero risk.”
Ignoring the precautionary principle usually takes the form of FUD – we don’t know everything, so let’s act as if we know nothing and ignore potential risks. Until you can prove beyond doubt that the risk is real, we should not take any steps to mitigate it, even if by the time the risk is certain it will be too late.
There is no simple algorithm to calibrate where an issue lies along this spectrum. It takes a working knowledge of the science along with a fair and nuanced evaluation of all the relevant issues. Personally I have absolutely no idea if the planet is warming due to human activity. By this I mean that I am not competent to look at the raw data and meaningfully evaluate it while putting it into the context of a thorough understanding of climatology. That is because I am not a climatologist, and the kinds of data they deal with are not really accessible to a non-expert. I am dependent on the consensus of expert opinion. I can decide if their arguments make general scientific sense, and which side seems to have the last word when specific points are thoroughly debated.
With concussions I have a much better personal handle on the science. I am a neurologist. I treat patients with concussions, some from sports injuries. I can read the primary literature and understand it. With regard to concussions and sports the consensus has shifted over recent years to be far more cautious in returning players to the field. This is based upon studies showing that the risk of a second concussion is greater in those who have suffered a first concussion, and the damage is also more severe and longer lasting. The current recommendations are for a player to be symptom free before returning to play following a concussion.
We are also gathering more evidence about the long term neurological effects of repeated concussions over a career. A recent examination of retired NFL players found:
The retired players’ ages averaged 45.6 ± 8.9 years (range, 30-60 years), and they had 6.8 ± 3.2 years (maximum, 14 years) of NFL play. They reported 6.9 ± 6.2 concussions (maximum, 25) in the NFL. The majority of retired players had normal clinical mental status and central nervous system (CNS) neurological examinations. Four players (9%) had microbleeds in brain parenchyma identified in SWI, and 3 (7%) had a large cavum septum pellucidum with brain atrophy. The number of concussions/dings was associated with abnormal results in SWI and DTI. Neuropsychological testing revealed isolated impairments in 11 players (24%), but none had dementia. Nine players (20%) endorsed symptoms of moderate or severe depression on the BDI and/or met criteria for depression on PHQ; however, none had dementia, dysarthria, parkinsonism, or cerebellar dysfunction. The number of football-related concussions was associated with isolated abnormalities on the clinical neurological examination, suggesting CNS dysfunction. The APOE4 allele was present in 38% of the players, a larger number than would be expected in the general male population (23%-26%).
The concern is that repeated brain trauma causes chronic neurodegenerative disease over time. The above study finds evidence of chronic damage in a substantial minority of retired players. A 2015 review of the literature on chronic traumatic encephalopathy found:
We found that a history of mTBI was the only risk factor consistently associated with CTE.
But also:
Our review reveals significant limitations of the current CTE case reporting and questions the widespread existence of CTE in contact sports.
What both these recent reviews find, essentially, is that there is evidence of chronic neurological damage in professional athletes correlating with concussions, but that chronic injury is not widespread and exists in a minority of players. You can focus on either the positive or negative aspects of this data – on the fact that there is evidence of neurological injury in some players, or on the fact that injury is only present in a minority of players. Everyone agrees we need further research.
How do we apply the precautionary principle to this incomplete scientific data? As with global warming, those who wish to deny that there is any problem are likely to argue against the strawman of the most extreme solution, such as banning all contact sports. Often reasonable measures that are proportional to the evidence and the potential risk are ignored.
With global warming, for example deniers warn of a government take over of entire industries, and degrading civilization to a hippie paradise without electricity and automobiles. How about just investing in greater energy efficiency and renewable sources. Those are win-wins, whatever you think about global climate change.
With regard to contact sports and concussions there are also reasonable measures that can be and are being taken short of a total ban on high-risk sports. Recommendations are already moving in this direction – players should not return to play the day of a concussion, and they need a longer period of recovery before returning to play. Certain styles of play are more dangerous than others, and so rules can be tweaked to minimize risk (as they always have been). Incremental improvements in equipment can also reduce player injury.
Making contact sports safer for players is a no-brainer. We now have more information about concussions to inform efforts to make contact sport safer.
Gwinn is right about one thing – concussions in sports is the new global warming, just not in the way he intended. There is emerging science indicating a risk. The science has not all been worked out yet, but the signal of a risk of neurological injury is there, and is also quite plausible. At the very least we should be taking reasonable measures to minimize injury. This situation is fairly analogous to global warming in the context of risk management.
In both cases the evidence supports taking reasonable measures to mitigate risk. In both cases deniers are engaging in FUD to argue that we should do nothing.Photo Credit: The Firearm Blog
Few products received more attention among gun journalists at SHOT 2017 than the Hudson H9. The buzz in the waiting line was that the pistol resulted from throwing a Glock and a 1911 into a volcano at the moment of eruption. With the double stack mag and reliability of a Glock and the trigger of a 1911 with some new design elements unlike any other pistol, it’s everything a pistol shooter could ever want, right? Yes… if it delivers on those promises. In this review based on our initial impressions at SHOT Media Day at the Range, we discuss the Hudson H9 and whether or not it reaches its lofty goals.
Flat or Fat?
The most oft-repeated claim about the Hudson H9 is that it’s very flat shooting. This claim comes from two design features: that it has a recoil spring set lower than any other handgun, and that the striker replacing the traditional hammer and firing pin of the 1911 – and thus the elimination of the mainspring of the 1911 which sits just inside the web of the shooter’s hand as it holds the frame – allows a higher grip on the pistol than that afforded by any 1911.
While these might make some difference to the shooter in terms of recoil control, they are more marketing features than practical ones. The pistol is an all-steel 9mm weighing 34 ounces unloaded, almost as much as a full size steel frame 1911 (38 oz with magazine) and a Big Mac more than a Glock 17 at 25 oz. In terms of size, it falls between a Glock 19 and Glock 17 for height, length, and barrel length. If it weren’t relatively soft and flat shooting regardless of the specific location of the recoil spring or the bore axis in relation to the grip down to the nanometer, something would be seriously wrong. But the major reciprocating components of the pistol in terms of mass, the slide and barrel, are still up above the shooter’s hand, not in front of the trigger guard. Also, moving the recoil spring in front of the trigger guard reduces the amount of compression or travel possible for the spring.
This brings me to my main point: it’s really not flat shooting. I’d have to shoot it back to back on high speed video with other 9mm handguns to compare objectively, but my impression based on shooting the gun was that it wasn’t any more flat shooting than any other heavy 9mm pistol. It looks like it shoots very flat in their promotional video, but the video also looks like it was shot with a high shutter speed and played back with a low frame rate. In addition, the H9 in the promo video is being held in a very tight manner by a strong shooter who is firing from a stationary and aggressive stance. The video is also shot from the rear quarter of the pistol instead of from the side. The effect of all of this would be to minimize visually apparent muzzle rise.
Some shooters of the pistol claimed to be able to track the front sight during recoil, thus confirming its flat shooting nature. This is not a feature unique to the H9, especially considering that it’s equipped with a very bright and colorful Trijicon HD front sight. I think that not many people have fired 9mm steel frame 1911s, one of the softest and flattest shooting production pistols in existence, and are thus surprised when a heavy gun in a less powerful caliber doesn’t recoil very much. Regardless, they should not be surprised at this result.
1911 Trigger Pull? Well, Almost
The trigger is supposed to be its other halo feature, being derived from the 1911 but with an integral trigger safety. Trigger safeties range from unobtrusive to highly noticeable, with the Hudson H9’s trigger safety falling somewhat closer to the latter on my objective scale. As you press rearward on the trigger, the safety moves at a different angle than the trigger, pivoting rather than sliding back. It also moves in more of a jagged than smooth manner, almost (but not quite) creating the impression that takeup is complete and any additional pressure will cause the gun to fire well before it actually does. These two things are somewhat disconcerting and do not contribute to an ideal trigger pull. Once you’ve dealt with the lackluster trigger safety, though, the remainder of the pull is generally very good. Reset is just slightly longer than it takes to reset the button of your nearest computer mouse. Accurate shooting with the H9 should be possible without too many hiccups, although I wasn’t able to stretch its legs at Media Day.
Doesn’t Go Bang Every Time
High levels of interest in the H9 meant high levels of people waiting to shoot it, which afforded me the opportunity to see at least a |
costs you to run anything from a light bulb to a microwave to a hair dryer.
+A customer calculated the cost of drying a load of clothes, and decided to air dry his family’s clothes after discovering the high cost (hard to beat sun and wind power!)
+An industrial customer in Michigan uses Wattvision to avoid a higher cost of energy that can kick in when their industrial equipment draws too much power.
+A customer with solar panels had been unable to zero his energy bill, but with Wattvision he was able to make the changes that now allow him to get paid by his utility each month
API
Wattvision allows you to download data as fast as we receive it, through our download API. Pretty neat stuff. Researchers and third parties have already shown that it’s possible to take whole house data and break it down by appliance, a scenario we’re excited to enable.
While we make strides to use clean and renewable energy in the future, it’s vital to remember that the cleanest energy is the energy we never use. One of the most important steps towards improving our energy habits is simply to cut down on our existing energy use, and we can do that by first knowing where we stand. Wattvision makes this possible by showing you your real-time energy use on the web or on your phone. We want everyone to take charge of their energy lifestyle and bring the future to the present!
See QA below.
Special Thanks
Jared Flesher - videography - http://www.sourlands.com. Orange Chairs in our video provided by Only Insight. Red Juggling Balls in our video provided by Tussle. Tigerlabs, and many others that helped us along the way!
Credits
Music by Chris Zabriskie
Archival photos by NASA, Javier Gil, Wknight94Colorado has always been a destination of interest, and for good reason. Today, tourists and outdoorsmen flood in from every corner of the world, eager for adventure. The 19th century was no different, as pioneering men and women settled in the Western Territories. Gold was a big motivator, and the California Gold Rush made men into millionaires. In 1891, Winfield Scott Stratton discovered gold in Colorado’s Pikes Peak region. The new Gold Rush was on, and the town of Victor, Colorado soon sprang up to make its mark on the state’s history.
Victor, Colorado officially became a city in 1894, around the time Frank and Harry Woods established the Gold Coin Mine. This mine would be only one of hundreds in the Cripple Creek Mining District. While nearby Cripple Creek had the reputation of a bustling gold camp, Victor was a working man’s town. Known as the “City of Mines,” Victor housed most of the labor force for the district’s 500+ gold mines, which hauled out over 21 million ounces of gold – the equivalent of over $25 billion at today’s value. While Victor flourished in the 1890s, it was not without its share of difficulties.
The City of Mines prospered during the Colorado Gold Rush, but trying times lay ahead. In 1899, a fire swept through the city, gutting the business district. 1903 saw the Colorado Labor Wars, which resulted in a violent clash between striking miners and the Colorado National Guard. In 1917, the United States entered the Great War, and many miners enlisted, draining the work force and causing a sharp decline in mining activities.
This decline proved insurmountable, and the region has yet to recover. World War II saw the end of gold mining, as it was not seen as a wartime priority. After the war, some mining resumed, but this was short lived. By 1962, every mine in the district had closed. Victor’s future seemed bleak, but the town would endure, due in part to the Cripple Creek & Victor Mining Company.
The CC&V Mining Company was a joint venture founded in 1976, in an effort to restart mining in the region. Between 1976 and 1989, 150,000 troy ounces of gold were extracted from mine tailings and two small surface deposits. This equates to over $170 million at today’s value. By 1995, the operation had expanded to two open-pit mines. Known as the Cresson Project, they tap into existing mines on Battle Mountain. Today, the mines are owned by AngloGold Ashanti, and they produced around 250,000 troy ounces in 2012.
While it kept the city afloat, the Cripple Creek & Victor Mining Company was only partly responsible for the city’s rebound. Tourism and gambling have also played a role in Victor’s survival, and the area has become the destination of locals and visitors alike. Victor is only minutes away from the historic gold camp of Cripple Creek, which survived largely due to the legalization of commercial gambling in the area.
The Cripple Creek & Victor narrow-gauge railroad is a popular attraction, taking visitors back to the district’s prosperous past. At least two of the old mines have been refurbished, with one offering tours of its heavily used shafts. A local mining museum offers insight into the region’s history, and many small shops line its side streets. Though Victor has all the modern conveniences, a quick turn off onto one of Victor’s many dirt roads is enough to take you back in time.
From its glory days as a mining town to the sleepy tourist destination of today, Victor, Colorado has seen its share of intriguing events and circumstances that have shaped its tradition. The mines may be gone, as well as the gold scarce, but Victor will continue to thrive as it has since its founding. And it will forever be known as the City of Mines.
Jason Mimiaga is a writer from the Colorado Springs area.After doing Java/PHP development from Eclipse in Windows or an X11 environment for almost my entire programming career, I found myself in a job where I basically had to switch to the command line for C/C++ development on a large project. One year and some off months later, I’ve taken for granted what I’ve picked up and feel like I should pass on my knowledge to people who might just be starting out. What follows is a list of things I wish I had known over a year ago, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the shell.
screen
Cheat Sheet: Screen VT100/ANSI Terminal Emulator br Peteris Krumins
.screenrc link: from dotfiles.org
GNU screen is a full-screen window manager for the shell, and is the single most useful command line utility I’ve come across. You create multiple windows within screen and you can “alt-tab” between them with [ Ctrl-a X ] commands (X is: (n)ext, (p)revious, (a) last, etc). I found that screen was initially a little daunting because by default it didn’t have a status bar, but you can fix that by creating a.screenrc in your home directory (check the link above for some example.screenrcs). By exclusively using the keyboard, I’ve found it a lot quicker to switch between different programs. I often have Vim open in one screen, cgdb in another, a free shell in another, and a log file in another. Screen also get you regions where you can split your console in half horizontally and have the top and bottom halves holding different windows (you switch between them with [ Ctrl-a <tab> ]). Screen lets you keep a persistent work space. If you’re ssh'ed in somewhere and your connection drops, screen keeps your session active; just reconnect over ssh and run [ screen -xRR ] to pull up your session exactly where you left it. The -x lets you connect to a screen session from more than one location, which means that screen is also extremely useful for collaboration. If you’re ssh'ed into a machine and you want to work with someone else, give them your credentials/rlogin access and have them run [ screen -xRR ] to connect to your active session. I’ve used this for help with a remote colleague and to teaching colleagues/leading education sessions that involve the shell.
Vim (for development)
Cheat Sheet: Vim Quick Reference Card by Laurent Grégoire
.vimrc link: from dotfiles.org
I fought this for a while. I really did. You could pry Eclipse from my cold dead hands. I “grew up” as a coder using Eclipse for Java and PHP projects, so nothing else seemed to make sense. The way our development environment is set up though, there was really no good way to use Eclipse because everything is done on a remote development box, and they won’t let us run Eclipse and forward over X (which is reasonable; Eclipse has a lot of overhead). I tried mounting the filesystem locally with sshfs so my local Eclipse could access the remote files, but I changed connections enough that sshfs wasn’t a viable option. Faced with that fact and that the development machines really only had (g)vim and (x)emacs, coupled with the fact that many of our source code management utilites used Vim, I decided to take the plunge. I went with Vim over Gvim so that I could run it from within screen, but that’s a small detail.
After developing in Vim for about half a year, I can’t look back. I even started programming Python/Django in Vim. More than just an editor, it’s kind of changed my entire development mindset, on the same level as switching from any other email client to Gmail. Vim has changed:
how I navigate code. If I can remember a keyword for where I want to be, I just search-navigate there with [ <ESC> /Keyword<ENTER> (‘n’ as needed)]. It’s a lot quicker than it ever was for me in Eclipse using Find or the mouse.
the amount of code I have to keep in my head at any point in time. Last night I tried installing Netbeans at a friend’s recommendation. What immediately struck me was, “I can’t see the code anymore!” By keeping the code fullscreened all the time, keeping multiple tabs open for different files, and being able to quickly navigate between sections, I remember where stuff is instead of what the stuff is. Keeping this lookup table in my mind allows me to hold larger chunks of functionality in my head, and quickly jump to implementation when I need details.
Quick tips:
tabs (Vim 7.x): open vim with several tabs by calling [ vim -p file1 file2 ]. From within vim, [ :tabnew file1 ] will do the same. [ <ESC> gt ] lets you cycle through tabs
regions: these let you divide the screen into sections. [ Ctrl-w s ] splits horizontally and [ Ctrl-w v ] splits vertically. I prefer a vertical split so that I can keep reference source code in one region and where I’m coding in the region next to it.
Another nice thing about Vim is that a lot of standard Linux utilities use the same syntax. Search and replace, for example, is [ s/search/replace/g ], which happens to be the same syntax for doing a search and replace in sed (see below). One bug I’ve found is that using vim with screen is that vim doesn’t always redraw the screen correctly; [ ctrl-l ] is sometimes useful (although that doesn’t always seem to redraw completely either).
Note: if you prefer emacs, that’s fine. I don’t care. It’s the same thing as Vim as far as I’m concerned.
gdb/cgdb
Cheat Sheet: GDB Quick Reference from SmashTheStack
If you have to use gdb for debugging C/C++ applications, I strongly recommend cgdb, the curses GNU debugger. You get a horizontal split screen with Vim at the top and gdb at the bottom. Vim follows along in the source code as you step through. I know X11 gdb interfaces exist, but X11 apps don’t play well with screen, so I avoid them. Here are some general purpose gdb commands that I’ve found useful:
set scheduler-locking [on/off] – very important for multithreaded apps! Turn this on and it prevents other threads from running when you’re stepping through a section of code. It’s important to only turn this on after you’ve hit your breakpoint and turn it back off when you want to continue execution.
set print pretty on – formats objects more prettier for your viewing pleasure.
set logging [on/off] – turn it on, print a variable, turn it off. This will dump the object to gdb.txt in your current directory.
Various command line utilities
xargs: great for piping output of one command sequentially to another. I’m trying to cut down on [ for i in `cmd` ] usage in favor of this; it feels cleaner.
grep: one of the most versatile and useful commands I’ve used. Useful options are [ grep -{C,B,A} n ] for n lines of context around, before, or after; -i for insensitive; -n for line number. Very useful input for piping to other commands (like xargs).
sed: stream editor, great for search/replace on the fly (as well as other simple text commands).
awk: great for extracting parts of a line of input, i.e. grabbing a column from a text file or command [ awk ’{print $2}’ ].
tee: like a plumbers tee; it takes input from STDIN and passes back to STDOUT while also copying to a file you specify. Useful in conjunction with sudo when you need to echo something to a file: if file.txt is root owned, [ sudo echo “hello” > file.txt ] runs echo as sudo and doesn’t give sudo access to the >>. [ echo “hello” | sudo tee file.txt ] will do what you want.
nohup: run a process detached in the background; persists between logouts (be sure to put & at the end of the command).
diff: pretty standard utility, but this is what I use it for: I loop through all the files I’ve modified and diff to the previous version, then pipe to a grep where I can search for something I think I’ve changed – but can’t remember where.
find: a lot more convenient for recursively listing all files contained within a directory than ls. [ find. ] gets you a list of everything, and [ find /path -name <name> ] lets you filter. You can use wildcards, just make sure that you escape them so that BASH doesn’t expand them before find sees them. It’s useful to pipe filenames from find to xargs, use the [ -print0 ] switch if you filenames with spaces give you problems.
Update: HN started a good discussion on this post.Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and Republican nominee Donald Trump both visited Baton Rogue last week to try and assist flood victims while Democrat Hillary Clinton pulled a no-show.
WASHINGTON (Talk Media News) – Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was the latest to visit the flood-ravaged Baton Rogue area after Donald Trump trips’s last week while Democrat Hillary Clinton has yet to step foot on the ground in Lousiana.
Stein first toured portions of southern Louisiana most affected by the flood and spoke Aug. 21 with residents who had lost their homes, and in many cases, most of their other possessions as well. Stein also coordinated with local Green Party officials to learn how to more efficiently provide food, water, and medicine to those most in need.
Stein expressed sympathy for those whose lives had been turned upside down by the flood via Twitter:
It was heartbreaking to meet so many displaced people and to gut homes damaged by the #LouisianaFlood: https://t.co/iX1Adn1wSM — Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) August 22, 2016
Trump donated $100,000 to help flood victims. He also personally handed out food, water and toys and was subsequently criticized by many media outlets for allegedly hindering pending relief efforts in doing so.
Clinton’s campaign announced via Facebook last Monday that she would not visit Baton Rogue at the present time: “the presence of a political campaign will not disrupt the response, to discuss how we can and will rebuild together.”
The Democratic nominee instead phoned in support for flood victims and encouraged her supporters to make Red Cross donations.
As of the late the Democratic nominee has largely been preoccupied responding to allegations that while Secretary of State she traded access in exchange for contributions to her family’s foundation.
Recently released emails obtained from Clinton’s private server via litigation from conservative watchdog groups suggest the Crown Prince of Bahrain and other prominent figures were given timely access to Clinton upon making generous donations to the Foundation.
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson did not visit Baton Rogue either.If a physics department has no women, does that mean there is hiring discrimination?
Only if your job in sociology is to find discrimination. Simple statistics shows that is not true or there would be claims of discrimination in psychology, where lots of departments have no men. Yet when it comes to gender equality advocates, physics is always mentioned and psychology never is.
A new analysis by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Statistical Research Center debunks the claim that the existence of all-male departments is evidence of hiring bias. Labor statistics have backed that up; not only are women hired equally for faculty and tenure jobs in science academia, they are over-hired based on their representation.
Statistical models insead find that the actual distribution of women in physics means there are more departments than expected with at least one female faculty member, and concludes that the real reason for the lack of women in many departments is the small number of women in physics overall -- currently only 13 percent of all physics faculty nationwide, though obviously much higher in graduate school and undergraduate levels.
What it means is that there once was bias, and a lot of men were not immediately fired and replaced with women. Bias would be if women were not hired to replace men who died or retired. The statistics show just the opposite.
"We do not mean to imply that there is no discrimination against women, that hostile environments do not exist, or that issues of gender representation do not need to be continually addressed in American universities," said Dr. Catherine O'Riordan, ocean scientist and AIP vice president of Physics Resources. "But we should no longer point to the absence of a woman in a physics department as evidence of bias."
Discrimination happens, even in liberal academia. The lack of conservatives is evidence of that. But if faculty must match the population, every field in science is discriminating against Hispanics, black people and the handicapped, along with Republicans. Discrimination is instead more often invoked by people to mask other shortcomings.
Why some departments have no female faculty
"We wanted to evaluate whether the absence of female faculty members in physics departments is an appropriate measure of women's progress in physics," said Susan White, research manager in the Statistical Research Center (SRC) at AIP, who conducted the study with Rachel Ivie, associate director of the SRC.
If a hiring bias did exist, White said, one would find women in fewer physics departments than would be expected if all women in the field were distributed randomly across the academic landscape. White and Ivie found, however, that more departments than expected have at least one woman. It follows that many female faculty members will be the only woman in their department.
While it is true that over one-third of physics departments have no women among their faculty, White points out that this is the result of the low number of women among physics faculty and the fact that many departments have fewer than five faculty members. Even if half of all faculty members were women, she notes, we would still expect to find over 100 departments with either all-male or all-female faculty.
"We believe the issue of gender equity in physics is complex and nuanced," said Ivie, "It is unwise to try to simplify it by examining whether or not a department has a woman among its faculty."September 9, 2014 | Las Vegas, NV And Quebec City, QC Coveo Announces Free Edition of its Award - Winning Search Solution for Sitecore
From the floor of the Sitecore Symposium 2014 in Las Vegas, Coveo today announced a free edition of Coveo for Sitecore, the company's advanced search solution for Sitecore websites. Coveo for Sitecore - Free Edition enables companies to quickly configure and easily manage dynamic search experiences on Sitecore websites, and is the industry's only full-featured search engine fully integrated with the Sitecore Customer Experience Platform.
"Search is one of the most powerful drivers of visitor engagement and online conversions," said JP Provencal, SVP of Strategic Alliances at Coveo. "We wanted to offer the Sitecore community a search solution with the capabilities and ease of use needed to truly optimize site performance. With Coveo for Sitecore - Free Edition, they can now deploy a search engine that not only delivers best-in-class relevance and usability, but also provides the advanced feature-set needed to help unlock the full potential of the Sitecore platform."
To ensure companies can take full advantage of the capabilities of Coveo for Sitecore - Free Edition, Coveo has also announced expanded resources for its partner & developer communities. The company recently launched answers.coveo.com, a community portal where Coveo and Sitecore partners, developers and users can share best practices and have their questions addressed by experts from the Coveo team. The company also plans to announce additional developer & partner resources later this year.
Coveo for Sitecore - Free Edition helps marketers harness the power of search to drive visitor engagement, by enabling them to build and manage compelling search experiences using their familiar Sitecore management console & tools. Dynamic search pages and search-driven content can be quickly configured, delivering an engaging, consistent visitor experience across all browsers and mobile devices. The Coveo solution ships with a rich JavaScript user interface, enabling Sitecore developers to build custom search experiences using Coveo's framework and components. Coveo technology can also be applied to existing CRM and knowledge management platforms for a more effective search experience.
To ensure each site visitor is always exposed to the site's most relevant content, messaging and product offers, Coveo for Sitecore - Free Edition provides administrators with an actionable analytics dashboard and tools to easily tune the solution's relevance engine.
"Coveo has been recognized as the industry's most visionary search provider, and we are excited a free edition of Coveo for Sitecore is now available," stated Darren Guarnaccia, Chief Strategy Officer of Sitecore. "Search plays such an essential role in the customer experience, and now a best-in-class, fully integrated solution is available free for all Sitecore developers and customers."
Coveo for Sitecore - Enterprise Edition
Coveo, leveraged by Fortune 500 companies globally, offers an enterprise edition for organizations looking to leverage Sitecore's Experience Database (xDB) to personalize search experiences for website visitors. Companies can purchase or upgrade to Coveo for Sitecore - Enterprise Edition, which has been available since May 2014. It provides full integration with the Sitecore xDB, enabling marketers to personalize the search-driven content each visitor is exposed to based upon their unique profile, history and site activity, and enables the secure integration of any external content source with a Sitecore site. This empowers companies to surface on their Sitecore site content residing in CRM systems, external product catalogs, legacy knowledge bases and more.
To learn more about Coveo for Sitecore, please visit www.coveo.com/sitecore or call 1.800.635.5476 in North America or 00800 2673 7642 to speak with a Coveo specialist. Sitecore Symposium 2014 attendees are encouraged to visit the Coveo team at Booth #11 on the Sitecore Symposium exhibition hall floor. Partners, developers and customers can register for their free download of Coveo for Sitecore - Free Edition."Terminator 2 " and "Green Hornet" actor Edward Furlong filed a police report claiming that he was robbed on the streets of Skid Row in broad daylight.
Furlong flagged a police on patrol and reported that he was robbed by a man after he asked him for directions, according to TMZ. The man didn't whip out any weapons, but Furlong said he gave it up without a fight to avoid trouble.
So now we're wondering what exactly Furlong was doing on Skid Row. Nick Stahl, the last "Terminator" star who spent a lot of time on Skid Row, spent a lot of time there as his drug addiction worsened.
We're not saying Furlong was there for the same reason, but, uh, we're guessing he wasn't trying to figure out directions to a homeless shelter or one of the industrial warehouses in the area.
Related:
'Green Hornet' Actor Edward Furlong Arrested in CourtVirgin Media to start next round of speed upgrades in October
We covered potential speed upgrades by Virgin Media earlier this year and it seems that the upgrades for customers are set to start in October 2015.
The upgrades will see those with the 50 Mbps product upgraded to 100 Mbps, 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps and 152 Mbps to 300 Mbps, though as with other upgrades Virgin Media is more vague about what will happen to upload speeds.
While this means Virgin Media will have a top end product almost four times faster than Openreach FTTC, it will not count as the fastest provider in the UK, as people like Hyperoptic, Gigaclear and other Gigabit providers continue to grow. What will mean though is advertising making the most of comparisons to BT, any comparisons with Sky and TalkTalk may be more difficult if their 940 Mbps FTTP roll-out in York goes to plan.
We still see Virgin Media customers who do not appear to be on the current baseline product but this may be people who have actively refused the upgrades for various reasons. The last round of upgrades took six months to a year to officially complete and with 42% of Virgin Media customers on the 100 or 152 Mbps products we will be able to track the roll-out by watching the median and mean speeds growing for Virgin Media in the mainly urban areas they serve.
For those in areas of the Virgin Media network where rapidly growing bandwidth use leads to peak time slow downs and latency issues that affect gaming and voip we hope that the network upgrades will be accompanied by a substantial series of upgrades in capacity to improve the Quality of Service.
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Post a commentWhile Tool remain hard at work on their long-awaited successor to 2006's 10,000 Days, fans are anxiously sitting by with clenched teeth ready for any update on the band's progress or, sometimes, lack of progress. Tool webmaster Blair McKenzie Blake has one of the closest ties with the progressive luminaries and has offered some insight on the new album by answering fan questions.
It is known Tool have had ideas in the works for quite some time now, but how close those songs are to completion remains a mystery. When asked how much new material he has heard, Blair responded, "Over the years I have mostly heard sections of what I believe will be the longest track on the album. Last spring, after Danny [Carey, drums] and Rynne’s wonderful baby shower, a few of us got to listen to parts of other arrangements in various stages of development. (Note: some of the time signatures are completely off the chart!) So, I would say that I’ve heard about 30 minutes of music altogether."
He goes on to state he could make a push to hear more, "but I would actually prefer to wait until the vocals are added because, for me, at least, that’s when everything really comes together. As I’ve said many times, the individual contributions of each band member is essential to creating the distinctive Tool sound. Therefore, it really doesn’t matter how much music I’ve heard thus far."
Another fan questioned the band's collective motivation considering the financial success of Tool's mini-tours and suggested they could just be coasting and riding the wave on their name alone. The webmaster shunned this notion, stating, "If it were just about money, it would be easy for Tool to crank out a mediocre album (that many fans would be happy with; some even considering it to be a great accomplishment!) and tour with it for years. Instead of just riding a wave, as you suggest, I would like to think that – even if they don’t have as much energy as they did when they were much younger (?) - they are trying their hardest to outdo themselves, wanting each new album to be better than the last one."
Citing examples of Tool's dedication to their craft, Blare continued, "If this wasn’t the case, it wouldn’t make sense for a couple of members to sit for hours in soul-crushing L.A. traffic four days a week in order to get to the loft where they work tirelessly writing/arranging new music. Why subject themselves to this – for years (plus having to listen to all the groaning) - unless they want their new album (which is the priority) to be the absolute best than it can possibly be?"
Earlier this year in March, frontman Maynard James Keenan stated in an interview with the Press Enterprise, “We’ve found a common ground. We just can’t seem to move forward," regarding the new Tool record. For now, keep waiting, Tool fans.
See Where Tool's Albums Landed on the Top 90 Hard Rock + Metal Albums of the 1990sOn August 28, 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison from Paris about the French revolutionaries, relaying an important piece of strategic information: “Mirabeau is their chief.”
Except, what he really wrote was “589.510.491.1341.1006.1354.581.738.” Jefferson was writing in code, and not just about the French Revolution. The letter also contained changes to the language of what would eventually become the First Amendment.
When he visited the White House last summer, Geoffrey King brought printed copies of Jefferson’s letter with him. King, a visiting lecturer at the UC Berkeley media studies department and a First Amendment lawyer, was there to advocate against government backdoors to encryption, secret mechanisms that allow unauthorized access to encrypted information.
While many proponents of backdoors say that they are vital to intelligence gathering processes, privacy advocates like King believe that the very premise of a backdoor is faulty. “If you put a backdoor in for law enforcement, you put it in for China, you put it in for Russia,” King says. Meaning: if you engineer a backdoor for one purpose, you can’t guarantee that it won’t be exploited for another.
King distributed copies of the letter to the officials he met as a reminder of encryption’s history in the United States. Jefferson and Madison, like many of their contemporaries, often corresponded with the help of ciphers—Jefferson even invented one himself—which were used to encrypt sensitive information at a time of great political upheaval. They were hardly engaging in a novel practice, as forms of encryption have been used around the world for at least two thousand years. In the United States, the use of encryption constitutes what King calls a “long, beautiful tradition.”
“The Bill of Rights itself owes its existence to strong encryption,” he says. “Also, the First Amendment protects the use of encryption, as does international law.” The reciprocity is striking: the very amendment that the Founding Fathers drafted with the help of encryption is now the same one that covers our right to use it.
That’s because encryption is considered a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, a classification established by Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice. Daniel Bernstein was a Berkeley graduate student who sought to publish the source code for an encryption algorithm he developed. At the time, the United States Munitions List classified encryption as a weapon, analogous to a bomb, which could only be exported—or, in Bernstein’s case, published—with State Department approval.
After Bernstein, encryption export restrictions were eased. Most importantly, the court ruled that software source code was entitled to First Amendment protection. “Essentially, the conclusion the court came to was that you could think of encryption source code as another language, or like music or mathematics,” King says. “You can’t ban people from speaking Spanish or exporting things in Spanish, and you can’t stop people from writing a sonnet or a symphony and exporting that. Encryption source code is similarly protected.”
Many, including lawyers, activists, and journalists, routinely use encryption to protect themselves and their work, especially after the Snowden revelations emerged, which revealed that Americans today are subject to unprecedented levels of domestic surveillance. Invasions of digital privacy can also be corporate in origin, as in the case of data brokers that sell information about users to online advertisers; malevolent actors can piggyback off this information.
Digital Rights Under Trump
The outcome of the presidential election did little to quell concerns about the preservation of digital rights and civil liberties. Trump has advocated for an expansion of domestic surveillance, and King notes, “has said specifically that he plans to expand surveillance of American Muslims, as well as other people who should be ‘tracked.’” The massive surveillance apparatus at his disposal was expanded just a week before the inauguration, when the Obama administration enacted new rules that allow the NSA to share raw streams of data with the FBI, DHS, and other agencies.
Trump’s appointees, who haven’t exactly been proponents of digital privacy, are unlikely to act as institutional checks. Jeff Sessions, his Attorney General pick, has backed crypto backdoors, and new CIA Director Mike Pompeo sponsored legislation that would have reinstated the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata. Trump’s new FCC chair, Ajit Pai, has opposed broadband privacy rules
“There’s a history in this country of really incredible abuse of law enforcement and intelligence resources against the LGBT community, against people of color, against activists, against women…”
These policies, along with restrictions on anonymity tools, have the potential to heavily restrict a number of civil and human rights. In a 2015 report, David Kaye, a Berkeley Law alum and the UN Special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, wrote that encryption is inextricably intertwined to the rights of privacy, due process, and freedom of assembly. “States,” wrote Kaye, “should not restrict encryption and anonymity, which facilitate and often enable the rights to freedom of opinion and expression.”
According to Kaye, measures taken to promote national cybersecurity, including anti-terrorism efforts, must take privacy concerns and the importance of freedom of expression into account. This was also the position taken by former State Department legal advisor Brian Egan, also a Berkeley Law graduate, in a talk delivered at Boalt Hall just after Election Day. “[Anti-terrorism] efforts must not be conflated with broader calls to restrict public access to or censor the Internet, or even—as some have suggested—to effectively shut down entire portions of the Web,” said Egan, likely referencing Trump’s 2015 remark that he is “open to closing parts of the internet” in an effort to thwart ISIS recruitment. “Such measures would not advance our security, and they would be inconsistent with our values. The Internet must remain open to the free flow of information and ideas.”
This, King says, is worrying given the history of surveillance programs like COINTELPRO, which was used to target social movements and other so-called “subversives,” sometimes illegally. “There’s a history in this country of really incredible abuse of law enforcement and intelligence resources against the LGBT community, against people of color, against activists, against women, and against journalists,” King says
How to Encrypt Your Digital Life
So, what’s a concerned citizen to do? King takes a number of precautionary measures to protect his data and devices, all of which he recommends that others adopt too. “There are so many reasons to do this,” he says. “There’s no reason not to.”
King isn’t the only one on campus calling for the widespread adoption of cybersecurity precautions. In a recent report containing policy recommendations for the Trump administration, UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity likened cybersecurity to a seatbelt: “We need our education system to treat cybersecurity as a fundamental part of computer literacy.”
According to King, this approach is common sense, not alarmist—even for those of us who feel we have nothing to hide. “It’s not about secrecy,” he says. “It’s about safety.” Securing your devices, he says, should be treated like locking the door when you leave the house.
First, King recommends the use of Signal, a messaging app with voice call capabilities that boasts what he calls “the best crypto you can use as a civilian.” Signal’s protocol was developed in 2013 by a team that included Trevor Perrin, who studied electrical engineering and computer sciences at Berkeley. Perrin helped develop an algorithm that Signal uses to carry out something called end-to-end encryption, which makes the content of a communication inaccessible to anyone but the parties communicating. That means that a telecom or internet provider, or even Signal itself, is unable to decrypt the messages sent by its users.
When it comes to protected web browsing, King recommends Tor. Tor isn’t foolproof, however, as vulnerabilities have been exploited by the FBI. The browser was also developed using government funds and requires some technical savvy to operate, which might deter some users. For users who aren’t quite ready for Tor, King suggests Google Chrome. “[Chrome] basically compartmentalizes every single tab, so that if malware tries to take over a tab, it can’t spill out into the browser and then into your system,” King says.
King also says that users should be sure to fortify Chrome with plugins. He recommends HTTPS Everywhere, a browser extention developed by the people behind Tor and the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as AdBlock and Privacy Badger, which minimize the sort of tracking that advertisers use to generate targeted ads.
For passwords, King advocates the use of a password manager like LastPass or 1Password, which allow users to generate passwords for everything from their email account to ecommerce sites, all protected by one master password. “I don’t know what my Gmail passphrase is, I don’t know any of that,” King says. “It seems a little counterintuitive, but the password manager is safe because a strong master passphrase is run through an algorithm that encrypts the database with all of your other passwords.”
He also emphasizes the importance of enabling two-factor authentication on all the sites that offer it. Two-factor authentication adds an extra level of protection to the sign-in process by prompting users to enter a second form of authentication (often a time-sensitive text message) after entering a password.
Other precautions might seem obvious, but King says they’re still important. Accepting software updates as they are released helps to patch your devices’ known vulnerabilities, and backing up important data (ideally, on an external hard drive) can protect you in the event that your device is compromised.
In a 1799 letter (of the non-encrypted variety), George Washington wrote that the best defense was a good offense. But for everyday citizens looking to minimize their risk, that maxim is reversed. “If you’re taking these steps,” King says, “they will protect you from criminal hackers and they’ll protect you from passive surveillance.” While it should be noted that no cybersecurity measures are perfect, King’s strategy is still one worth pursuing. For now, the only offense is a good defense.
And for King, it’s not just a matter of security. “It is downright patriotic to use encryption,” he says. |
. Over a quarter of those with a diploma in brewing are women.
Jenn Merrick, the head brewer at Beavertown in North London, is one of them, and widely known for her penchant for slightly wild flavours. "At the moment the conditioning tank is brewing a sour cherry and red currant beer," she tells me. "We've fermented the sugars out of the fruit so all that's left is the powerful aroma and colour. It almost tastes like a sweet wine."
Inside Beavertown Brewery. Image courtesy of the brewery.
Born in the Rocky Mountains of Salt Lake City, Merrick's rapport with yeast began with baking rather than brewing. She quickly bored of the bagel shop where she worked, though, and moved onto beer. "I launched my drinking career in the local craft breweries of the Rocky Mountains but before long I realised I had to learn how to actually make the stuff, so I moved to the UK".
In the northern town of Sunderland, Merrick embarked on an intensive brewing course at the Brew Lab College, where she said it wasn't easy to get her foot in the door as a female, though that changed once she had the qualification. Still, when she started working at York Brewery after graduating, the old school-ness of the business took some getting used to. It was full of "old Yorkshiremen who had been working there for 40 years. While most were welcoming, others were less so. They would give me the cold shoulder or simply discount my opinion. I guess until recently it had been an all-male domain and they weren't used to having women around."
Like all entry-level brewers, Merrick had to graft—hard. Stripes had to be earned. "I had to serve my time lifting and shifting barrels," she says. "It's definitely not a career choice for anyone who can't hack a hard day's work because you can't get round the work horse element of the job."
Merrick made her way through a handful of breweries before she finally joined Beavertown as head brewer in 2013. As well as managing her team of 15, she spends her days inventing new recipes, upscaling old recipes, and making sure the beer tastes just right. It's a big business. "At the moment, we're getting more requests than we can say yes to," she says. "We are now stocking beer bars and bottle shops as far as Scotland and Scandinavia."
As a longstanding custodian of the craft scene, Merrick says that its experimental attitude to flavours extends to its whole ethos. "Craft is about doing beer differently and that spans to everything. If you have 70 teeny-tiny breweries instead of one great big multinational company, you're going to create much broader opportunities for the workers involved." What's more, she argues that "the younger generation of drinkers means there is much less of a gender divide in the craft scene. After all, if the beer tastes good, who cares who brewed it?"
Sara Barton. Image courtesy of Sara Barton.
Outside the cosy world of craft, though, the act of drinking beer continues to be associated with certain macho tropes. Even if bottles of Tenants no longer bare bikini-clad breasts, the beer industry is still awash with sexist advertising. Sara Barton, who in 2012 became the first and only women to gain the title of "Brewer of The Year", says that half of society is being discounted when advertisers aim beer at men.
"Not only does the marketing put women off beer, we're constantly told that it's bad for us, that it's high in calories," she says. "In reality, beer is much healthier than other spirits and alcopops out there." Not only is real ale low in carbohydrates, it is made from natural and fresh ingredients—hops, wheat, and barley—which all include vitamin B, riboflavin, niacin, and zinc.
After working in a whole host of breweries, Barton decided to set up her own in 1998. "I couldn't experience the true passion for brewing on an industrial scale," she says, "so I decided to set up my own smaller, artisan brewery called Brewsters."
According to Claire Monk, who set up her own brewery, Wellbeck Abbey, when she was 23, Barton's reclamation of the brewster title has been an inspiration. "I started it on my own from scratch," Monk says, "and had to do everything—from the brewing to the sales, orders, casking up, finding customers and writing invoices." Since it was founded in 2011, Welbeck has grown quickly, and now brews 18,000 pints a week, delivering to 300 independent pubs within a 35-mile radius. Monk got into brewing after finishing her degree in microbiology. "I've always been a bit of science geek so I wanted to find out how beer got its particular flavour or colour."
Claire Monk. Image courtesy of Claire Monk.
Monk says she is pleased that the image of beer brewers and drinkers is changing. "When people find out you're a young woman who brews beer, they're impressed," she says. "People are definitely starting to leave the old-fashioned, weirdy-beardy image of beer behind."
There might still be some way to go before women are fully embraced as both beer consumers and brewers alike, as there are stubborn dinosaurs in every industry. But as craft beer has shaken up the industry, brewing has opened up and diversified, slowly enabling women to not just return to, but own, a profession which was once their own.The Hollywood stuntman doesn't want to follow in his idol's footsteps so much as rocket above them -- over a gaping canyon, no less.
Evel Knievel's iconic launch, Take II.
Eddie Braun, fueled by the memory of the late daredevil, plans to strap into a steam-powered rocket cycle on Sept. 17 for his most death-defying role yet: Replicating a launch over the Snake River Canyon in Idaho that almost cost Knievel his life four decades ago.
Braun named his rocket "Evel Spirit " after his boyhood hero. It's nearly identical to the model Knievel used for his failed canyon attempt on Sept. 8, 1974. Braun wants to prove Knievel could've made it had his parachute not prematurely deployed.
Along for the ride in this endeavor are two sons eager to complete the legacies of their fathers: Kelly Knievel, who was present the day of the crash, and rocket designer Scott Truax, whose dad constructed the original rocket cycle for Knievel.
Ready, set, and (gulp) launch.
"Evel took off on one side of the canyon in 1974. I'm hoping his spirit lands on the other side of the canyon in 2016," said the 54-year-old Braun, who says he completed the necessary paperwork and will launch a few miles away from Knievel's original site that's near Twin Falls, Idaho. "How many people get to fulfill the dreams of their hero? It's kind of like touching Superman's cape."
Braun has long been fascinated by everything Knievel, the popular figure who attempted so many memorable motorcycle jumps over an iconic career:
-- The fountains at Caesars Palace in 1967 (crashed, crushed pelvis and femur)
-- 13 buses at Wembley Stadium in London in 1975 (crashed, broke pelvis and back)
-- 14 Greyhound buses at Kings Island theme park in Ohio in 1975 (success).
-- A 90-foot tank filled with sharks in 1977 (crashed on landing ramp during rehearsal, broken arms)
And, of course, the Snake River Canyon attempt. Wearing his patriotic jumpsuit, Knievel was the epitome of cool and calm.
Soon after takeoff, his parachute deployed and halted the rocket's momentum. Watching that day was son Kelly and the rocket's designer, Robert Truax, who put a comforting arm around Kelly as the cycle drifted into the canyon.
Knievel walked away with only minor injuries.
"He flipped a coin with his life and came out alive," explained Kelly Knievel, whose father died in 2007 at 69 after suffering from diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis. "My dad certainly had nine lives, didn't he?"
Just before the attempt, the daredevil landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Just after, his celebrity status was only cemented.
The town of Twin Falls can't forget him, either. He put the city on the map -- and opened its eyes because the Evel Knievel cavalcade supposedly left behind a trail of unpaid bills.
In 1974, Chris Talkington worked as the news director for the local television station and watched Knievel fail to make it over the canyon and then fail to pay vendors for their services. Now a city councilman in Twin Falls, he said his town is wiser about what to expect from a daredevil attempting to jump the canyon.
"It woke our little town up," explained Talkington, who wasn't aware of Braun's jump but said there is a ramp near the canyon. "I look forward to (another attempt). I applaud them."
As a kid, Braun would often jump over trash cans in the driveway on his Schwinn Stingray, pretending to be Knievel. Braun even became a professional stuntman because of Knievel, serving as a stunt double for actors such as Ray Liotta and Charlie Sheen, along with coordinating stunts for movies, TV shows and music videos.
and invested nearly $1.5 million. He's looking to raise another $150,000.
He said he's secured the proper permission and permits from private land owners, Federal Aviation Administration, even Homeland Security, to green light his blastoff. Others have stepped up as well, including Slash from the Guns N' Roses rock band. Braun said the guitarist recorded a theme song for him -- fittingly using Elton John's hit, "Rocket Man."
The jump will be live-streamed on the internet.
For years, many believed Evel Knievel's daredevil son, Robbie -- who's completed more than 350 jumps -- might be the first to take a crack at the canyon. At one point, Robbie Knievel was looking at the jump in 2011, but it didn't take flight.
"Eddie put together the team and he's the one that got it done," Kelly Knievel explained. "It's very dangerous -- and very ambitious."
Scott Truax used his father's blueprints to reconstruct the rocket. He wanted to show that his dad's version of Evel Knievel's "X2 Skycycle" would've worked, if not for the parachute malfunction.
The late Robert Truax was considered one of top rocket scientists of the 20th century.
"With this re-creation, it is my intent to clear his name and tell his amazing story," Scott Truax said in an email. "I like to think that instead of looking up at the rocket launch, he and Evel will be looking down on it, and that's a much better view."
The rocket will reach a top speed of 400 mph in about three seconds and an altitude of 3,000 feet before the engine cuts off and the parachute deploys. Since parachute technology has come a long way that system has been revamped.
There's plenty of danger, which is why Braun's wife and four kids aren't planning to be at the launch. Braun constantly reassures them.
"They think it's really cool that dad gets to fly a rocket," Braun said. "I guess there's just a little Evel in all of us."
-- The Associated PressPhenolic compounds derived from the olive plant (Olea europaea L.), particularly hydroxytyrosol and oleuropein, have many beneficial effects in vitro. Olive leaves are the richest source of olive phenolic compounds, and olive leaf extract (OLE) is now a popular nutraceutical taken either as liquid or capsules. To quantify the bioavailability and metabolism of oleuropein and hydroxytyrosol when taken as OLE, nine volunteers (five males) aged 42.8 ± 7.4 years were randomized to receive either capsulated or liquid OLE as a single lower (51.1 mg oleuropein, 9.7 mg hydroxytyrosol) or higher (76.6 mg oleuropein, 14.5 mg hydroxytyrosol) dose, and then the opposite strength (but same formulation) a week later. Plasma and urine samples were collected at fixed intervals for 24 h post-ingestion. Phenolic content was analyzed by LC-ESI-MS/MS. Conjugated metabolites of hydroxytyrosol were the primary metabolites recovered in plasma and urine after OLE ingestion. Peak oleuropein concentrations in plasma were greater following ingestion of liquid than capsule preparations (0.47 versus 2.74 ng/mL; p = 0.004), but no such effect was observed for peak concentrations of conjugated (sulfated and glucuronidated) hydroxytyrosol (p = 0.94). However, the latter peak was reached earlier with liquid preparation (93 versus 64 min; p = 0.031). There was a gender effect on the bioavailability of phenolic compounds, with males displaying greater plasma area under the curve for conjugated hydroxytyrosol (11,600 versus 2550 ng/mL; p = 0.048). All conjugated hydroxytyrosol metabolites were recovered in the urine within 8 h. There was wide inter-individual variation. OLE effectively delivers oleuropein and hydroxytrosol metabolites to plasma in humans.
© 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.The Daily Show finally aired the controversial segment that left one participant in tears and calling the police.
In the segment, correspondent Jason Jones interviewed Native American activists and Washington Redskins fans about the criticism over the team's name in separate rooms. But after one Redskins fan suggested "we need to be sitting down to the people that actually are offended," Jones facilitated just that, bringing in the group of activists.
Afterward, the four Redskins fans relayed to The Washington Post that they felt as though The Daily Show tricked them into a confrontation they hadn't agreed to. "This goes way beyond mocking," said participant Kelli O'Dell, who suggested the face-to-face discussion. "Poking fun is one thing, but that's not what happened. It was disingenuous. The Native Americans accused me of things that were so wrong. I felt in danger. I didn't consent to that. I am going to be defamed."
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"I was told that I was 'psychologically damaging Native American children,'" O'Dell complained. At one point, O'Dell removed her microphone and told a producer to tear up her contract. When her request was refused, she attempted to submit a police report only to be told no crime had been committed. Despite the unhappiness all four fans experienced shooting the segment, they all told the Post they would have gone on the show had they known about the debate ahead of time.
Before airing the segment, host Jon Stewart acknowledged that some of the participants didn't enjoy the experience. "If we find out someone in a piece was intentionally misled or if their comments were intentionally misrepresented we do not air that piece. We would not air that piece. So that being said, I hope you enjoy the following piece," Stewart said.
Watch the piece below and weigh in: Do you think they were right to air the segment?
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Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video ArchiveIt wasn’t so poisonous.
Jeremy Lin yesterday accepted the Rockets’ back-loaded “poison pill,” four-year, $28.8 million offer sheet, and it hardly created a ripple with the Knicks, who will match it. The final year even has a team option.
Ignited by having Jason Kidd agree to join their roster and become Lin’s mentor, the Knicks can’t wait to get Lin back.
“He’s their guy,’’ one NBA official debriefed on the Knicks’ strategy said. “They’ll match.’’
The Knicks officially will be presented the offer sheet Wednesday, the day the NBA’s free-agency moratorium ends, and will have three days to match it. It should take them three minutes.
Rockets general manager Daryl Morey presented Lin an offer sheet late on July 4 — calling for $5 million in the first year, $5.2 million in the second year, then backloading the deal with $9.3 million in the third year and $9.3 million in the fourth, according to a source. Yesterday, Lin’s agents tried to negotiate a guaranteed fourth year.
The final two years could have gone as high as $15 million each, but the Rockets didn’t come close to the “poison pill,’’ which would have been a $40 million whopper.
The third year of the deal is the only pill Knicks owner James Dolan will swallow because it puts him deep in luxury-tax territory, as five players would total $78 milllion — $5 million more than the threshold. In the non-guaranteed fourth year, however, the contracts of Carmelo Anthony, Amar’e Stoudemire and Tyson Chandler will have expired.
Knicks general manager Glen Grunwald will keep his word as he has said in every interview Lin would be back next season, pointing out he held the cards since he could match any offer. In fact, the belief is even the Rockets know the Knicks will match, but they could gain from sharing the pie of luxury-tax escrow money with other non-taxpaying teams.
With Jason Kidd aboard, the Knicks see him and Lin occasionally sharing the backcourt. Coach Mike Woodson, who visited Lin in California in a recruiting pitch in June, said Lin would start next season, but all bets are off now.
The Rockets are in search of point guards after trading Kyle Lowry yesterday and failing to re-sign Goran Dragic. It is plausible the Rockets made the offer sheet to Lin, once cut by the Rockets, as a publicity stunt since they are huge in China because of Yao Ming, who retired in 2011. The Rockets also could be doing Yao a favor because he is close to Lin. Grunwald had refused to make Lin an offer until he set his own price tag.
Lin withdrew from the U.S. select team earlier this week — as first reported by The Post — because of his contract uncertainty and so he can do recruiting visits. That uncertainty is over. A source said Team USA officials have asked him to come to Las Vegas to at least to support the program. The select team will practice against the U.S. Olympic team starting today.
The Lin offer sheet probably won’t change the Knicks’ thinking in matching Landry Fields’ offer sheet. The Knicks fully expect to re-sign shooting guard J.R. Smith for the 20 percent raise they are allowed — making his contract worth $2.8 million.
[email protected] at Good Bull Hunting, there are no delusions of grandeur. We're just a collective of asshat fans who really, really like watching Aggie sports because - well, we're former students. Furthermore, we're former students with an internet connection and way too much free time on our hands, apparently.
I respect the guys and gals over at The Battalion because they're students who are willing to take time and hone their craft as journalists at a school who once had no journalism program to speak of. We need more Aggie writers out there, please keep at it.
Quick admission, I haven't picked up a copy of the Batt since I left campus in 2004. I think I've read an article here and there online, but I'm not currently familiar with their work - the exception being this article. I have taken excerpts (I deleted a few lines) and pasted them below.
To the student who wrote this piece: I mean you no ill will. I just believe that your haste to write an article in the paper about this other current student, urging him to leave campus for posting on social media (LIKE EVERY SINGLE STUDENT DOES WITH THE LUXURY OF KNOWING THAT THE ENTIRETY OF THE SPORTS MEDIA WORLD DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT WHAT YOU DO IN LIFE) is a little more harsh than a deleted tweet about the petty nuisances (nee bullshit) that accompany living in a college town. Surely you can understand the difference between wanting to get the hell out of a town and leaving a school and its fanbase behind while shooting the double bird.
With that being said, in the words of Jules Winnfield, "Oh! Well allow me to retort!"
"Johnny Football has finally made an uncalculated mistake that will have ramifications."
A bit overstating the issue here. The guy put out a tweet at 2AM. There will be ramifications, sure. But this doesn't matter. I'll say it again because I think you are giving more credit to the sports media world than it deserves. It. Doesn't. Matter.
See, we're in this magical place called "The Offseason." The Offseason is a place in which nothing is going on, so EVERYTHING is going on. That's right, Ags. Remember when we had no coverage? Remember when we were dying for some recognition? Well, this is what happens when you get recognition. You can't have it both ways. Don't sit here and tell the guy that helped bring said coverage and recognition to this campus that he needs to GTFO.
"Monday morning his tweet was the focus of SportsCenter's centerpiece story. His message also made the front pages of Yahoo!, ESPN and countless other websites."
Read the above two sentences again. Really read them. I think this says more about the state of sports media than it does about Johnny. He realized what he had done, deleted the tweet and reminded all of you that he loves A&M "with all [his] heart." Who hasn't said something they regret in the past because of anger? Well, imagine it being plastered all over TV, radio and the blogosphere. I don't care what you're imagining, it's probably worse in real life.
"Being just the latest stunt he has pulled since the last football season ended, Manziel has answered the questions we've all wondered. He wants out of College Station and out of Texas A&M en route to what he deems bigger and better things."
Talk about twisting words. He was talking about the town, and let's be honest, there is a plethora of bullshit in college towns (outlined here and here) to complain about. Stunts? What stunts? Living his life, just having it plastered all over the media? Why should the guy change who he is? Because it's different than yours or mine?
Granted, as Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, "With great power comes great responsibility." Johnny should know that every move he makes will be scrutinized to the utmost extent, and that is multiplied when he voluntarily offers information on Twitter. Even if he deletes a stupid 2 AM tweet, it's going to be analyzed to the extent of an atom smashed in the LHC. He needs an elephant-sized dose of social media Immodium for his Twitterrhea. Also, if you were a potential first-rounder in the NFL Draft, wouldn't you be thinking "I can't wait to leave College Station (and its associated bullshit) when the time was right?"
"It's time to send Johnny Football down the proverbial one-year hallway in the house that is Texas A&M and straight out the front door."
Talk about a "what have you done for me lately" mentality. How much money have you made for Texas A&M? Your tuition and associated payments for refreshments at sporting events. You wanna venture a guess to the fiscal footprint Johnny Football has left on the university? Walk out on campus today and count the #2 jerseys you see. When I was on campus, you could only buy #12. Guess what, there's only one #2, his name is Johnny Manziel and he hasn't seen a dime from those. What about that season? What about the Heisman? What about the recruiting impact he's had? You wanna kick this guy out, what about the drunk a-hole on Northgate talking about the same "bullshit" he's encountered in College Station? Wanna kick him out, too?
Manziel's tweet suggested something happened to make him think this way.
Yeah, and as we later learned from his roommate, it was a couple of tickets; one for parking and one for an illegal tint job on his Mercedes. I can't tell you how many times I got tickets from CSPD or PTTS for parking. I can tell you that if Twitter existed and were I Johnny Football, much more harsh things would have been stupidly tweeted by my 18-22 year-old self. That, I believe, qualifies as some College Station bullshit. It is possible to love the school, the culture and the student body while hating the town. Trust me.
A day in Manziel's shoes would equal a lifetime for many of us "regular" people. His affection for the school will not go unnoticed, but with this latest headline it's time to begin looking at life without the only freshman to win the Heisman Trophy.
You know, I thought that, too. Right after reading about the tweet I believe my words to a group of friends were "Johnny, I'll trade you your age, athletic ability and fame for my 31 year-old body and struggling startup straight up." Then, I thought about it. Being famous and rich looks fun until you really try to put yourself in their shoes.
Last night I saw "This is the End." In the opening scene Seth Rogan is waiting for his buddy Jay at the airport. People randomly yelling "WHAT UP, SETH!" and having video cameras shoved in his face immediately made me think "That would blow super hard." I know; I'm really eloquent in my thoughts. So, take that kind of celebrity out of Los Angeles and put it in a town of 250,000 people. Yeah, it's much worse.
Johnny can't say or do anything without wondering how it could possibly be interpreted, because it will always be interpreted in the worst way possible. I'm not saying that his life is shitty, but really think about the tradeoffs here. You'd have to give up privacy. And I'm not talking about "the NSA occasionally reading your e-mails" loss of privacy, I'm talking about "Why in the hell do people care that I root for X sports team" loss of privacy. The "TexAgs is posting pictures of my girlfriend and analyzing her ‘hotness'" loss of privacy. Tweets go out to the whole world, for sure. But everything this kid has done since this season has been "fair game" for the talking heads in the sports world, and that has to suck like deep-throating a Saturn V.
via www.grupoworkplace.org
"For months critics have bantered back-and-forth on Manziel's NFL status. Because he was redshirted in his first year at A&M, he can declare for the NFL after this coming football season."
They also have several articles citing "sources" claiming all kinds of absurdity.
He could also stay at A&M for as many as two more years.
Aggies can only hope and pray that he does.
Those hopes were all but crushed when he opted to tweet after midnight on a Saturday, which is surely a bad idea in the unwritten Twitter rulebook for people with more than 1,000 followers. Manziel has 368,000.
Your hopes weren't crushed if you read the entire tweet. He said "Whenever that may be" meaning he's in this for as long as it takes, but can't wait to get out of the town.
I can agree that tweeting at 2AM is perilous. I think some of the Manziel family money might be well spent hiring 2 social media interns at $10/hour for 20 hours per week. They could post quotes from him at the beginning of each week about his practice schedule, what he's working on, some motivational sayings he likes and maybe his commentary on the pro sports he enjoys and just run them on auto-pilot in HootSuite. Have a "Goodnight, God bless and Gig ‘em" post to run at 10:30 every night so Skip Bayless can rest assured that this particular 20 year-old athlete is tucked in his Scooby Doo sheets before curfew and be done with it.
All of this does not mean that as fans, students and faculty we cannot appreciate what he has done. It is due in large part to Manziel's Heisman-winning season that the A&M football program is more relevant than it has ever been in more than 100 years of activity.
Now you get to this? Now? Your headline is "Johnny, Be Gone." That says enough about how quickly you dismissed his glowing resume for a 140 character lapse in judgment.
Coach Kevin Sumlin has the top recruiting class in the nation and he is able to sell those recruits on the fact that they too can win a Heisman Trophy wearing the Maroon and White.
University President R. Bowen Loftin and the A&M marketing team is using this success to promote the school academically and applications are at an all-time high.
And you think "Thanks, Johnny Football but get the hell out" will reinforce that?
A&M will begin construction several months from now on a $430 million renovation to Kyle Field. The new stadium will feature statues surrounding the walkways and one can believe Manziel may have one of his own someday.
His accomplishments are noted but no matter the outcome of the promising 2013 season it is time to watch Manziel ride off into the sunset. Johnny Football wants out and as a selfish observer, I want him out as well.
Again, you're twisting his words and valuing one tweet over another. I suggest you quit watching SportsCenter and FirstTake now.
I want to know if he can succeed in his second season, trying to live up to the hype. From there I want to see if he can be the latest Aggie taken in the NFL draft. I'm interested to see what Manziel can do as a professional quarterback.
But he needs to leave?
But most importantly I want to see how Kevin Sumlin and the other 100 players on the Texas A&M roster prove that all of this wasn't just the Johnny Manziel show and that A&M as a program can contend for years to come.
It was definitely a team effort, but a once-in-a-lifetime, mutant quarterback was this teams confidence booster. They knew that if Johnny was out there playing, they had to play to his level. Why would you want last season any other way? This team will go on to more success in the coming years. Sumlin is an amazing coach and recruiter and those benefits will carry on, but don't kick out the catalyst.
Sean, I am not attacking you. I'm positive you and I would get along swimmingly and I'd love to sit down and have a beer with ya. I do, however, think your article resembles what Johnny did. It's reactionary. So is this piece. The thing is, neither you nor I have to worry about what the entirety of the sports media thinks about it. I read one author today refer to Johnny Manziel as the "Kim Kardashian of college sports." No offense to Kim, but that's a tad harsh. Johnny doesn't ask the media to report on his every move, they do it because they've got nothing better to talk about for 24 hours.
It's much like the "news" we get on all the 24 hour networks. It's not news or reporting anymore, it's about the creation of unnecessary drama to garner ratings. Johnny's tweet may have offended your undying love for the town of College Station, but it was just that. A stupid tweet. Blowing it out of proportion in comparison to what he means to Texas A&M feeds that engine (he says after penning a 2,000 + word response to your response to said tweet).
In conclusion, we're all holding Johnny to standards 99% of us would be unable to adhere to. Let's just let the kid do his thing and enjoy the remaining time we have to watch him quarterback the Aggies.
Follow @thacktorTwo-thousand adventure seekers tackled the 200 grueling miles (322 kilometres) of dirt and gravel that make up the Dirty Kanza 200 over the weekend, spending anywhere between 10 and 20 hours in the saddle to complete the course across the Flint Hills region of Kansas.
Founded in 2006 by local gravel grinders, the DK200 is now the premier gravel race in the country. And with 10,000 feet (over 3,000m) of climbing and a roadbed that varies from fist-size gravel to dirt trails, the event tests riders’ fitness, mental strength and equipment.
Panaracer Gravel Team rider Matt Stephens conquered them all – as well as the added pain of a rib fractured a week beforehand – and was first to cross the finish line in 10 hours and 49 minutes.
Jake Wells of Colorado came in nearly three minutes later for second place, a mere 5 seconds ahead of Menso de Jong in third.
Meanwhile, in the women’s field, pro roadie Alison Tetrick (Cylance) set a new women’s course record, when she came in at 11:41:40. In doing so, she beat the two-time winner and defending champion Amanda Nauman, but only by 5 seconds. Retired pro road cyclist Janel Holcomb rounded out the podium in third place with a time of 12:13:26.
The all-female singlespeed crew we wrote about before the event had a harder go of it, spending well over 14 hours in the saddle. Oklahoma rider Gabrielle Shelton took the win after a battle with Jennifer Rhoades and Chicago rider Allison Zmuda, who came in second and third respectively.
“My body feels like it got tossed off a mountain, but since I’m still coming down from the high of finishing it doesn’t actually ‘hurt’,” said Chicago singlespeeder Kelsey Phillips. “It’s like a reminder that I completed what I set out to do.”
Phillips came across the finish holding her teammate Mary Randall’s hand while a huge crowd, including endurance star Rebecca Rusch, welcomed them in.
“Obviously, I sobbed,” commented Phillips. “But the second I crossed the line I was already planning next year’s race. I’m crazy like that.”
Her teammate Lauren Conroy will be keen to join, ‘absolutely’ wanting to go at it again. For those considering tackling the DK200 themselves, she advised; “Surround yourself with people who support you and believe in you. Train hard and then believe in yourself. Stay calm when you get a mechanical.”
DK200 Men:
1. Mat Stephens 10:49:08
2. Jake Wells 10:51:51
3. Menso de Jong 10:51:56
DK200 Women:
1. Alison Tetrick 11:41:40
2. Amanda Nauman 11:41:45
3. Janel Holcomb 12:13:26
DK200 Single Speed women:
1. Gabrielle Shelton 14:41:55
2. Jennifer Rhoades 14:46:00
3. Allison Zmuda 14:48:22Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee chastised their Republican colleagues on Thursday, accusing them of rushing President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE’s judicial nominees through the confirmation process.
Ranking member Dianne Feinstein Dianne Emiel FeinsteinHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Ocasio-Cortez adviser says Sunrise confrontation with 'old-timer' Feinstein'sad' Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid MORE (D-Calif.) said it was the fastest confirmation pace for circuit court nominees she could remember in her 25 years on the committee.
“I want to point out that it’s a marked contrast to the traditional rate of confirmations,” she said. “For example, last week marked the fourth hearing since May when two circuit court nominees were on the agenda the same day. That’s four times in six months, yet this committee only held three hearings with two circuit court nominees in all eight years of the Obama administration.”
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The committee voted 11-9 long party lines to advance 10 judicial nominees to the floor for a vote on Thursday, including three circuit court judges: Steven Grasz to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals and James Ho and Don Willett to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Grasz, an Omaha lawyer, was given one of the rare “not qualified” ratings from the American Bar Association. The ABA said people, whose identities were kept confidential, raised serious doubts that Grasz would be able to set aside his strongly held beliefs and be impartial.
Grassley called ABA’s rating “head scratching.”
“The committee has also received letters of support from hundreds of people who know Mr. Grasz both personally and professionally and in all these letters we haven’t heard from any accuser who has said that Mr. Grasz will insert personal bias into his judging, which is one of the ABA’s unverified and unverifiable claims against him,” he said.
“All we have is the ABA’s claim that an unspecified number of anonymous accusers believe Mr. Grasz can’t separate his personal preferences from applying law in the cases that might come before him.”
Sen. Patrick Leahy Patrick Joseph LeahySenate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Booker wins 2020 endorsement of every New Jersey Democrat in Congress The Hill's Morning Report - Can Bernie recapture 2016 magic? MORE (D-Vt.), a former committee chairman, slammed Grassley for acceding to pressure from Republicans and reversing the blue-slip tradition that had allowed senators to block judicial nominees from their home states. The committee held a hearing last week on David Stras to serve on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Minnesota Supreme Court justice, who was named to President Trump’s list of potential candidates for the Supreme Court, did not get a blue-slip from his home state Sen. Al Franken Alan (Al) Stuart FrankenVirginia can be better than this Harris off to best start among Dems in race, say strategists, donors Virginia scandals pit Democrats against themselves and their message MORE (D-Minn.).
“I’ve had that pressure and I’ve stood up to it,” Leahy said, raising his voice.
“Reversing course on your own policy simply due to a change in the White House can do lasting damage to the integrity of this committee,” he said.
Leahy said the committee should never function as a rubber stamp for nominees seeking lifetime |
the rock 'n roll hall of fame for his contribution to rock 'n roll.
Right: J.P. Richardson's final resting place My fascination with the Big Bopper came quite by accident. In November of 2002, I was making a road trip from Atlanta, Georgia to Houston, Texas. As I was planning my route and checking maps, I noticed that I would be passing through the city of Beaumont, I vaguely remembered that this city was Texas, the home of the Big Bopper (and his final resting place). I decided to visit the gravesite of the Big Bopper if it was close enough to the interstate. After searching on the internet, I found that Forest Lawn Memorial Park was in fact a doable option and made it part of my trip. However, when I arrived at the cemetery, I had no idea of the size and I had no idea where to start looking. Luckily, the main office was open and the person on duty directed me to the site. I took a few pictures and reflected on the career of Jiles Perry Richardson. Postscript: Spirit of the Big Bopper?
Whilst researching the Big Bopper I came across a peculiar site, which reportedly shows'spirit balls of light' captured in two Big Bopper-related photos. Is it the ghost of the Big Bopper? I don't know, you decide. Although EAR CANDY doesn't usually deal with the paranormal, I thought I might include the link to these photos so that you can judge for yourself. Click here
Click here to visit the official Big Bopper web site Return to the EAR CANDY homepageLONDON -- Who was Dat?!
The New Orleans Saints defense, which allowed more than 1,000 yards and 65 points in the first two weeks, delivered perhaps the most unlikely shutout of the 2017 season -- a 20-0 trouncing of the Miami Dolphins in London on Sunday.
In the process, the 2-2 Saints have completely rebooted their season heading into the Week 5 bye.
The Saints limited Jay Ajayi and the Dolphins to just 186 yards of offense on Sunday. Henry Browne/Getty Images
New Orleans' defense followed up its surprising 34-13 rout at the Carolina Panthers last week with an even more emphatic performance, holding Miami to zero points and just 186 yards.
Saints cornerback Ken Crawley, who was a healthy inactive for the first two weeks this season, intercepted his first career pass in the end zone on Miami's opening drive. The Dolphins never crossed New Orleans' 40-yard line again after that. The Saints also sacked Dolphins quarterback Jay Cutler four times.
"Look, they're all important games," Saints coach Sean Payton said. "(But) certainly to be at this position, starting off the way we did, is encouraging.
"It was a good one to get. A long way to come get it -- but it was worth it."
What it means: The Saints' revitalized defense will truly be tested in the next two games (versus the Detroit Lions in Week 6, then at the Green Bay Packers in Week 7). But they have officially gotten their mojo -- and their season -- back after a brutal start. Payton always likes to quote his mentor, Bill Parcells, who says confidence is born of demonstrated ability. Now this young defense's confidence should only grow.
"I feel like the last game, that shutout, it was expected," said Crawley, a second-year pro who went undrafted last year. "That was our goal through camp. I feel like guys came together. We know what kind of defense we want to be. We always hear about other defenses around the league. We want to be that. We’re a young group. I feel like it’s giving us momentum. I feel like we’re going to go somewhere with this type of defense."
Historic ball security: The Saints became just the third team since 1933 to start the season without a turnover in their first four games, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. The others are the 1995 Rams and 2013 Titans.
What I liked: Michael Thomas: Sure, he dropped two passes to go with some other sloppiness on the Saints' offense. But when the Saints absolutely needed a big play, Thomas delivered time and time again. He finished with eight catches for 89 yards and at least two clutch third-and-long conversions.
What you need to know in the NFL
• Statistics
• Scoreboard
• 2017 schedule, results
• Standings
What I didn't like: Dropped balls: I didn't get an official count, but Thomas and running back Mark Ingram dropped at least two passes each. And there was one sloppy series of events where the shotgun snap sailed over Drew Brees' head; Ingram and receiver Tommylee Lewis both failed to recover it before Brees finally landed on it. The Saints' offense seemed sluggish and out of sync for most of the first half on a cool overcast day in London, with some slipping on the unfamiliar grass surface. They didn't score any points until a field goal as time expired in the first half.
Fantasy fallout: Peterson disappearing: Adrian Peterson's role has only continued to shrink as the season has continued. He had just four carries for a total of 4 yards. And when the Saints were protecting a lead late, it was rookie Alvin Kamara who got the call on a 12-yard touchdown pass from Brees. Ingram remains the lead horse in this timeshare (he had 14 carries for 45 yards and four catches for 17 yards). And Kamara remains the one with the most upside (five carries for 25 yards; 10 catches for 71 yards and a TD). Peterson is all but removed from the picture, barring injury.
Strief hurt again: Saints right tackle Zach Strief left the field with a knee injury again in the second half after he just returned this week from a sprained MCL. Strief was able to walk off under his own power after appearing to be in pain on the field. But he ultimately rode back to the locker room on a cart after being evaluated. The good news is that if Strief is sidelined beyond the Week 5 bye, left tackle Terron Armstead should be ready to return from a shoulder injury.... Rookie linebacker Alex Anzalone (shoulder) and tight end Josh Hill (concussion) also left the game early and did not return.
What's next: A bye in Week 5, followed by the dates with Matthew Stafford and Aaron Rodgers.Scientists are warning of a new earthquake danger in Northern California. They’ve discovered that two fault lines link together north of San Francisco, creating a new risk for the nearly seven million people living in the Bay Area.
Some 1,200 emergency responders took part in an earthquake drill Thursday, and hundreds of scientists, engineers and politicians gather Friday in Los Angeles to discuss the next big quake, reports CBS News correspondent Mireya Villarreal.
Here’s what happens in the drill: A magnitude 7.8 earthquake hits California and the clock is ticking. National guardsman are working to pull a trapped man from an elevator shaft, while a specially trained dog searches for stranded survivors.
This is meant to help emergency responders prepare for the real thing.
“We want to be the best prepared, the best trained and the most efficient as possible,” said Major Richard Chappell.
But these extreme scenarios could easily become reality. USGS scientists recently discovered that two of the country’s most dangerous faults -- once thought to be at least two miles apart -- are actually connected, creating one massive 118-mile long fault. Using an acoustic device, they confirmed that the Hayward fault meets the Rogers Creek fault in the shallow waters of the San Pablo Bay near San Francisco.
“The longer a fault, the larger an earthquake it can produce, and if the Hayward and Rogers Creek faults went together along their entire length, it would up to a magnitude 7.4,” said USGS geophysicist Janet Watt.
“What kind of damage are we talking about here?” Villarreal asked.
“More damage than Hurricane Katrina in terms of loss,” Watt said.
In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake leveled entire neighborhoods, killing thousands. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake killed 63 people and caused $6 billion in damage.
“Folks in the Bay Area need to be prepared for a strong earthquake,” Watt said.
Watt’s team is trying to predict the future by studying when earthquakes occurred here in the past and how often.
When an earthquake occurs, the sediment along the fault line shifts, which creates a time stamp in the mud. Watt’s team drops these long tubes into the Bay floor to collect samples.
The cores are pulled from the water and cut, sliced open and photographed.
“You can think of it as looking down through time. If we can find a date for those flat layers on top and then the layers that are offset, we can bracket in the age of when an earthquake happened on that fault,” Watt said.
Watt’s research will help scientists better understand these two faults, as their potential for damage makes emergency preparation like this even more essential.CLOSE Hurricane Celia hit Corpus Christi on Aug. 3, 1970. It caused 15 deaths and $500 million in damage. Corpus Christi Caller-Times
Buy Photo The front page of the Caller-Times carried news of Hurricane Celia after the storm made landfall in Corpus Christi on Aug. 3, 1970. (Photo: Caller-Times file)Buy Photo
Corpus Christi has received glancing blows from hurricanes and tropical storms. But a hurricane hasn't made landfall in the city since Hurricane Celia hit in 1970. Celia's eye passed through Corpus Christi on Aug. 3, 1970.
Celia produced sustained winds of 110 to 130 mph, but gusts in some areas reached 180 mph. Fifteen people were killed in South Texas and the storm caused $500 million in damage. In Corpus Christi, 70 percent of residences were damaged. In Port Aransas, the number was closer to 75 percent. And in Portland, 90 percent of the homes and businesses sustained damage.
RELATED: Harvey storm 2017: Get the latest on its effect on the Texas coast
Other storms also have caused damage in the area despite not making landfall in the city. National Weather Service Corpus Christi considers Hurricane Claudette in July 2003 the most recent hurricane to bring significant weather to the Coastal Bend area and Tropical Storm Hermine in September 2010 the most recent tropical storm to do so.
So how often does Corpus Christi get hit by a hurricane or tropical storm? The National Hurricane Center has conducted studies that show a hurricane should pass within 50 miles of Corpus Christi every 16 years and a major hurricane every 33 years. You can see their map of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts here (scroll down to Hurricane Return Periods).
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Caller-Times Hurricane Hub: Learn about storms, be prepared, follow the latest news
Is 2017 the year for a major hurricane to hit Corpus Christi?
Throwback Thursday: Hurricane Celia damage
Read or Share this story: http://callertim.es/2wxUH3CAt least 20 people were killed and 150 were injured as six coaches of a passenger train derailed near the northern Indian city of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh state, local media reported Saturday.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The Utkal Express running between the Indian cities of Haridwar and Puri derailed at 05:50 p.m. local time (12:20 GMT), The Economic Times newspaper reported, citing spokesperson for Indian Railways Anil Saxena.
shocking visuals coming from Muzaffarnagar in UP, @sureshpprabhu has ordered inuiry into the rail accident #Utkalexpress pic.twitter.com/m0xFxFws7L — Anand Singh (@Anand_IANS) 19 августа 2017 г.
The reasons behind the accident are unclear yet.
Moreover, Indian Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu on Saturday announced compensation for the victims of the deadly train derailment in the north of the country which claimed lives of between 10 and 20 people, according to various reports.
"Ex gratia of Rs.3.5 Lakh [$5,460] for those who lost their lives,Rs.50 thousand [$780] for those seriously injured. And Rs.25 thousand [$390] for people with minor injuries in the unfortunate accident has being announced," Prabhu said on Twitter.
Ex gratia of Rs.3.5 Lakh for those who lost their lives,Rs.50 thousand for seriously injured 1/ — Suresh Prabhu (@sureshpprabhu) 19 августа 2017 г.
And Rs.25 thousand for people with minor injuries in the unfortunate accident has being announced 2/ — Suresh Prabhu (@sureshpprabhu) 19 августа 2017 г.
According to the statement issued by the Northern Railway, Prabhu is personally monitoring the situation. Special buses have been arranged to carry away stranded passengers from the incident site.
The rescue operation is underway.Life behind bars for LGBT prisoners has been improved by placing them in cells based on their gender or sexual orientation
True love: A lesbian couple who were together before their arrest for drug offences are trying to maintain their relationship inside the prison. Photos: CHAIYOT YONGCHAROENCHAI
Before being sentenced to prison, Chalom lived her life in a carefree way. She had a full-time job as a hairdresser in a Pattaya beauty salon, which she enjoyed. The only thing she wanted was some extra spending money. With some help from her friends, she became a drug dealer at the age of 26.
Chalom got the extra money, but it was to come with a cost. At 28 years old, she was arrested and convicted on a drug possession charge. She was sent to Pattaya Remand Prison to serve a three-year sentence.
No entry: Double walls with electrified barbed wire prevent escape and outsiders from throwing items into the prison.
Chalom is a 30-year-old transgender woman. Born a man, she underwent sex reassignment surgery to become a woman, from her head to toes. As a beauty expert, her first concern about facing prison time was getting her long hair chopped off and being shaved like regular male inmates.
"I was so afraid they [the prison authorities] would shave my hair off," she explained. "I was also concerned that I would have to share a cell with male inmates. I could have been the only woman in the prison. To be honest, I was so afraid that I would get raped in prison."
Much to her relief, Chalom soon found out that Pattaya Remand Prison respects and recognises sexual diversity, placing inmates in cells based on their stated gender and sexual orientation.
This has been the policy in Thai prisons for many years, but only recently has the Department of Corrections announced a plan to create one central prison for people of all LGBT stripes.
BEHIND THE WHITE WALL
Pattaya Remand Prison is located on the outskirts of the city centre. The building is guarded by a large white wall topped with electric barbed wire issuing a steady buzzing noise.
Laying down rules: Watcharavit Vachiralerphum speaks to gay inmates who are segregated from the men’s prison.
The complex can look intimidating from the outside. But inside, the prison's warden and officers lend the place a far friendlier vibe than one might expect.
Every day, hundreds of people drop by to visit their loved ones in prison. They are allowed to talk by phone from behind a window for no longer than 15 minutes.
was led through the prison by Watcharavit Vachiralerphum, the prison's warden. The first step was to pass through security. We walked through a metal detector gate, and all our bags, cellphones, electronic devices and other belongings were deposited before entering the premises.
Welfare is a priority: Prison warden Watcharavit Vachiralerphum
Spectrum
Once past the gate, the prison officer checked our shirt pockets and pants to make sure no hidden objects were taken inside. As we were cleared, the electric gate swung open and another set of gates appeared.
This gate is meant to secure the prison area off from inmates who try to get close to the wall. We passed through and arrived at an office where new inmates were gathering for their screening process.
When Spectrum visited, the prison was home to about 200 new inmates, including both those who were convicted and those still on trial.
Women were lined up on the right side of the office, while the men were on the left. Each inmate was called, one by one, to be personally interviewed by the prison officers.
"What did you do before?" one officer asks. "What are you convicted of? Do you have any diseases? What is your gender?"
The questions are meant to determine what cell placement will suit the inmate best.
Cherry, a 25-year-old transgender woman, was one of the inmates at the screening process on the day Spectrum visited. She is on trial for theft. She hasn't been convicted yet, but court orders state she must be kept in custody until the trial's end.
"I was working as a cabaret dancer at a night entertainment venue," Cherry tells the prison warden. "I'm a post-op transgender woman and I'm healthy."
After her interview, her gender was verified by an on-site doctor. The warden accordingly assigned her to a female wing alongside 13 other transgender women inmates.
Head this way: The entrance to the female wing at Pattaya Remand Prison.
COMMON PRACTICE
Pattaya Remand Prison, built 15 years ago, remains in good condition. The building, spread over 23 rai of land in the Nong Pa Lai area of Chon Buri, is clean and well organised.
The prison currently has 4,127 inmates overall. Of this number, 3,511 live in the male wing, while 616 live in the female wing.
Mr Watcharavit explains that separating LGBT inmates has been common for many years in Thailand due to the large volume of LGBT inmates.
Among the male inmates, the prison has 155 gay or katoey inmates who have not undergone sexual reassignment surgery.
There are 13 transgender women inmates, who are grouped in with the other female inmates' cell.
Grouped in the same female cell are also 29 Tom and 16 Di inmates. A Tom is a lesbian who acts in a masculine way, while a Di is a lesbian woman who acts in a feminine way.
LOVE BEHIND BARS
Since they met seven years ago, Tik, a 39-year-old Di, and Em, her 35-year-old Tom girlfriend, have never been apart for long. Both of their parents are aware that they live together like any legally married couple.
Regulations: Above, the screening process for new inmates. Below, officials interrogate a transgender inmate who had just arrived.
It was about two weeks ago when Em decided that the best way to help Tik get out of her never-ending debt was to sell drugs to partygoers in Pattaya. She began selling drugs to both Thai >> >> and foreign customers, which she did up until the day she got caught.
On a Sunday, the couple were heading to a shopping mall to have dinner. Em told Tik to go ahead to the mall because she had a delivery to do first. Instead, Tik replied: "Anywhere you go, I'll go with you."
So they went to the meeting spot, where they met a customer who had requested methamphetamine (ya ice). As he offered her the money, Em extracted the sealed bag of drugs from her pocket.
The deal was almost done when the police abruptly declared they were under arrest. Em told Tik to run but Tik repeated the same sentence she had said moments earlier: "I'll go with you anywhere." The couple are now in custody under the ruling of Pattaya Provincial Court. They will live in Pattaya Remand Prison until the trial is over. Arriving as a couple, they told the warden they wanted to be placed together.
They were placed in the women's wing. Though they sleep in the same cell, they aren't allowed to sleep next to each other. Tik sleeps on the left side of the cell; Em on the right. "At least we still get to see each other every day," said Tik. "I don't care where we are or if we don't get to sleep side by side. As long as I get to hold her hand every day, that's all that matters to me."
Em added: "All I really need is to have support and understanding from Tik. It's pretty much the only thing that gives me hope."
EXPRESS YOURSELF
The male wing, where the majority of prisoners reside, is hidden behind a series of metal gates. We first enter the education hall, where about 60 inmates are sitting around in a room with a TV and space to socialise. Each one has their head completely shaved. From behind, they look like regular male inmates, but a closer look reveals a different impression.
Nearly every one of them is wearing make-up -- pale foundation powder, red lipstick and pencilled-in eyebrows. Prison policy doesn't allow female inmates to wear make-up, but gay inmates can.
"They [the gay inmates] are special," Mr Watcharavit tells Spectrum.
Kratae is a 28-year-old katoey from Yasothon who was once a Pattaya sex worker. He was only a few baht short of paying for his long-desired sexual reassignment surgery when he was arrested for stealing.
He is now serving a prison sentence of four years and three months, and has served three years already. According to Mr Watcharavit, he is a model inmate. He could be granted a pardon to leave prison earlier.
"Of course I was scared when I knew I would have to go to jail," he says. "My main concern was that I would be bullied and raped. But none of that has happened during my three years and four months here as I have my own cell to sleep with people who are like me. It's like living with sisters here. We help each other and watch out for each other."
Bell, an attractive 25-year-old gay man who identifies as a katoey, recently entered Pattaya Remand Prison for a four-year sentence. He has served four months so far.
When he arrived, he told the warden he wanted to live among other katoeys. It turns out his cell had many familiar faces, and he felt more secure as a result.
"At least I felt safe knowing I had many people I already knew in the same cell as me. I was afraid of being sexually harassed, but it's nice that the warden separated us from other male inmates. I feel much safer here," Bell said.
Cooling off: Giant fans improve air flow in the transgender cells, which were built to separate inmates from potential harassment.
MIX AND MATCH
The prison was not designed to be exclusionary but to create a safe space for LGBT people facing any threats of verbal and sexual harassment or abuse.
"The reason we separate LGBT inmates from others is not because we dislike them," Mr Watcharavit explained. "It just makes it a lot easier for us to take care of them. We can also stop fights more easily because some inmates fight for the same individual who they get intimate with."
During the day, the inmates are allowed to mix within their own wing. Activities are organised, including baking and sewing. "But at night we separate them from each other," Mr Watcharavit said.
"As we do with male inmates, we separate those who behave more feminine from other male inmates when they sleep. Since we have nobody stopping people from having sex, I don't want to give them the opportunity to engage in sexual stuff."
Earlier this year in July, the Department of Corrections visited Pattaya Remand Prison to check if it met the separation requirements of LGBT inmates. The prison is a model of the functionality of the separation system.
The Department of Corrections plans to build Minburi Remand Prison, a jail designed expressly for LGBT people, says Kobkiet Kasiwiwat, deputy permanent secretary of the Justice Office.
Plans are reported to be delayed by concerns about moving LGBT people away from their relatives to go to one centralised prison.
Mr Watcharavit says he hasn't had any other updates on the plan recently.
The latest statistics from the Department of Corrections show that there are 4,448 LGBT inmates: 1,804 are katoey, 352 are gay, 1,247 are Tom, 1,011 are Di, and 34 are male-to-female transgender.
"We treat everyone with respect here," Mr Watcharavit says. "We give them their own space and activities to highlight their skills. We have new inmates coming in every month and we will continue this practice to make sure everyone feels safe within this happy prison."First Lady Lee Hee-ho at the funeral service of her husband, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in 2009. Lee plans to visit North Korea this Wednesday. File photo by Yonhap
SEOUL, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- Pyongyang officially extended an invitation to former First Lady Lee Hee-ho but no South Korean government official is included in the entourage of delegates scheduled to travel to North Korea on Wednesday.
The Kim Dae-jung Peace Center said in statement the invitation from the North Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee came on Monday afternoon, and was addressed to the former first lady, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.
The Peace Center said 18 other delegates traveling with Lee includes former Culture Minister Kim Sung-jae and leading educators, including South Korean scholar Paik Nak-chung.
Lee has not visited North Korea since December 2011 when she traveled to Pyongyang to pay her respects to the deceased Kim Jong Il.
RELATED North Korea building cover over launch platform
Lee met with newly appointed leader Kim Jong Un during her North Korea visit, but a spokesman at the Peace Center said they cannot confirm whether the two are to meet this week.
The former first lady however has plans to offer gifts, South Korean newspaper Maeil Business reported.
Presents include a fur scarf Lee knitted herself and various medicines intended for a "North Korean dignitary," according to the Peace Center.
Relations between Seoul and Pyongyang have deteriorated since the presidency of Kim Dae-jung. Kim played a key role in reducing tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang in 2000 when he met with the elder Kim in North Korea and agreed to work toward peace on the Korean peninsula.
Seoul has said it welcomes the news of Lee's North Korea visit, but a Unification Ministry official said on Monday Lee's travel is "personal" and she has not been requested to deliver a message on behalf of the government.
In earlier plans Lee's team was planning to include an opposition party lawmaker and two former unification ministers, but they were not included in the list of delegates on Monday.Hillary Clinton is pushing gun control by describing Trayvon Martin as a young man who simply “went to a cornerstore, bought a pack of skittles..and his life was cut short” by gun violence.
In reality, a jury found that George Zimmerman shot Martin to death in self-defense on February 26, 2012, after Martin attacked Zimmerman during his walk back from the corner store. Moreover, a subsequent federal inquiry into the shooting death of Martin also found no grounds upon which to bring charges against Zimmerman for his actions.
Yet Clinton described Martin as an innocent bystander, killed by random gun violence.
She said:
When I think about keeping Americans safe, obviously I think about terrorism. But I also want to protect Americans from the epidemic of gun violence that is stalking our country. I cannot come to Sanford without talking about Trayvon Martin. It’s heartbreaking that this young man–all he did was go to a cornerstone, bought a pack of Skittles and walked back home in the rain. And his life was cut short. I have had the great honor of getting to know his mother, Sybrina Fulton, and many of the mothers who have lost their children to gun violence. And what I have been so impressed by is how they have taken this mountain of grief and decided to do everything they could to protect the children of other mothers and fathers.
Clinton went on to say, “Something is wrong when young people just starting their lives are dying.” She then entered into an all-out gun control push, which included references to the Bible and assurances that “there is no conflict the Second Amendment and commonsense [gun control] measures.”
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at [email protected] Square Citi Bike carnage (Jen Chung/Gothamist)
A judge heard oral arguments in lawsuits against two controversial Citi Bike locations todayone for Soho's Petrosino Square and the other in front of a Greenwich Village co-op.
If you'll recall [leans back into rocking chair, puts whittling stick down and places grandchild on knee] the rack in Petrosino Square is controversial because the park is so tinyit subsumes about a third of the tiny park's space, where numerous art installations used to reside.
The City argued ("absurdly," as Parks Advocate Geoffrey Croft opines) that Petrosino Square is actually DOT property, and that the Citi Bikes belong there because they enhance the recreational experience of the folks who pass through. Considering how much the DOT has marketed Citi Bike as a commuting tool, this does seem far-fetched. But we'll let attorney Jim Walden regale you with his knee-slapping analogy as to why the City is wrong, courtesy of the Post:
“Funny, you have a duck, and you know it’s a duck because it walks like a duck, it talks like a duck, it introduced itself as a duck, and it’s wearing a T-shirt saying, ‘I am a duck,’ with a corporate logo emblazoned on it,” Walden said, extending the metaphor, “This is not a cow.” The courtroom, packed with activists who oppose the rack’s placement in Petrosino Square, a triangular sliver of parkland between Lafayette and Centre streets just south of Spring Street, erupted in laughter.
Oh, bless me. See? You don't need all that foul language to be funny!
A City attorney countered that “bicycling is a common incidence in parks and the infrastructure to support it."
Why is it Petrosino Square and not Petrosino Triangle? I'll tell you some other time, go on and wash up for dinner.
The arguments against the second rack in Greenwich Village must have been more tenuousit only earned a passing mention from the Post, which was previously very eager to paint the rack as a Public Menace Only Sated By Geriatric Blood.Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...
Shikwati:... for God's sake, please just stop.
SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.
Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.
SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?
Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.
SPIEGEL: Even in a country like Kenya, people are starving to death each year. Someone has got to help them.
Shikwati: But it has to be the Kenyans themselves who help these people. When there's a drought in a region of Kenya, our corrupt politicians reflexively cry out for more help. This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program -- which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated. It's only natural that they willingly accept the plea for more help. And it's not uncommon that they demand a little more money than the respective African government originally requested. They then forward that request to their headquarters, and before long, several thousands tons of corn are shipped to Africa...
SPIEGEL:... corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers...
Shikwati:... and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN's World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It's a simple but fatal cycle.
SPIEGEL: If the World Food Program didn't do anything, the people would starve.
Shikwati: I don't think so. In such a case, the Kenyans, for a change, would be forced to initiate trade relations with Uganda or Tanzania, and buy their food there. This type of trade is vital for Africa. It would force us to improve our own infrastructure, while making national borders -- drawn by the Europeans by the way -- more permeable. It would also force us to establish laws favoring market economy.
SPIEGEL: Would Africa actually be able to solve these problems on its own?
Shikwati: Of course. Hunger should not be a problem in most of the countries south of the Sahara. In addition, there are vast natural resources: oil, gold, diamonds. Africa is always only portrayed as a continent of suffering, but most figures are vastly exaggerated. In the industrial nations, there's a sense that Africa would go under without development aid. But believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn't do all that poorly either.
SPIEGEL: But AIDS didn't exist at that time.
Shikwati: If one were to believe all the horrorifying reports, then all Kenyans should actually be dead by now. But now, tests are being carried out everywhere, and it turns out that the figures were vastly exaggerated. It's not three million Kenyans that are infected. All of the sudden, it's only about one million. Malaria is just as much of a problem, but people rarely talk about that.
SPIEGEL: And why's that?
Shikwati: AIDS is big business, maybe Africa's biggest business. There's nothing else that can generate as much aid money as shocking figures on AIDS. AIDS is a political disease here, and we should be very skeptical.
SPIEGEL: The Americans and Europeans have frozen funds previously pledged to Kenya. The country is too corrupt, they say.
Shikwati: I am afraid, though, that the money will still be transfered before long. After all, it has to go somewhere. Unfortunately, the Europeans' devastating urge to do good can no longer be countered with reason. It makes no sense whatsoever that directly after the new Kenyan government was elected -- a leadership change that ended the dictatorship of Daniel arap Mois -- the faucets were suddenly opened and streams of money poured into the country.
SPIEGEL: Such aid is usually earmarked for a specific objective, though.
Shikwati: That doesn't change anything. Millions of dollars earmarked for the fight against AIDS are still stashed away in Kenyan bank accounts and have not been spent. Our politicians were overwhelmed with money, and they try to siphon off as much as possible. The late tyrant of the Central African Republic, Jean Bedel Bokassa, cynically summed it up by saying: "The French government pays for everything in our country. We ask the French for money. We get it, and then we waste it."
DPA Former Central African Republic leader Jean-Bedel Bokassa: "We ask the French for money. We get it, and then we waste it."
In the West, there are many compassionate citizens wanting to help Africa. Each year, they donate money and pack their old clothes into collection bags...
Shikwati:... and they flood our markets with that stuff. We can buy these donated clothes cheaply at our so-called Mitumba markets. There are Germans who spend a few dollars to get used Bayern Munich or Werder Bremen jerseys, in other words, clothes that that some German kids sent to Africa for a good cause. After buying these jerseys, they auction them off at Ebay and send them back to Germany -- for three times the price. That's insanity...
SPIEGEL:... and hopefully an exception.
Shikwati: Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They're in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria's textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide.
SPIEGEL: Following World War II, Germany only managed to get back on its feet because the Americans poured money into the country through the Marshall Plan. Wouldn't that qualify as successful development aid?
Shikwati: In Germany's case, only the destroyed infrastructure had to be repaired. Despite the economic crisis of the Weimar Republic, Germany was a highly- industrialized country before the war. The damages created by the tsunami in Thailand can also be fixed with a little money and some reconstruction aid. Africa, however, must take the first steps into modernity on its own. There must be a change in mentality. We have to stop perceiving ourselves as beggars. These days, Africans only perceive themselves as victims. On the other hand, no one can really picture |
times," said Mr Zuma.
"Our report makes clear that sustainable development is more important than ever given the multiple crises now enveloping the world."
Ms Halonen emphasised the theme of equality that runs through the report, in terms of gender and redressing the burgeoning gap between people on high and low incomes.
"Eradication of poverty and improving equity must remain priorities for the world community," she said.
Pushing the boundaries
The panel's diagnosis The number of people living in poverty is declining, but the number hungry is rising
Inequality in wealth distribution is rising
Access to clean water is increasing, but 2.6 billion people lack access to modern sanitation
By 2030, demand for food will rise by 50%, for energy by 45% and for water by 30%
Women are too often excluded from economic opportunities
The financial crisis was partly caused by market rules that encourage short-termism and do not reward sustainable investment
The current economic model is "pushing us inexorably towards the limits of natural resources and planetary life support systems"
The panel's 22 members include heads of government and ministers past and present, including Barbadian Prime Minister Freundel Stuart, Australian Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and India's Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh.
They also include Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Norwegian Prime Minister who led the Brundtland Commission in 1987.
It was that report that coined the most familiar definition of sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".
Twenty-five years on, the new report concludes that although substantial progress has been made in many directions, such as reducing poverty, development is anything but sustainable.
"We undertook this report during a period of global volatility and uncertainty," it says.
"Economies are teetering. Inequality is growing. And global temperatures continue to rise.
"We are testing the capacity of the planet to sustain us."
To turn this around, it says: "We need to change dramatically, beginning with how we think about our relationship to each other, to future generations, and to the ecosystems that support us".
Changing track
The report - Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing - includes 56 recommendations that would, if implemented in full, have profound implications for societies, governments, and businesses.
Governments would build the true environmental costs of products into the prices that people pay to purchase them, leading to an economic system that protects natural resources.
Image caption Ban Ki-moon has been urging a global push to provide modern energy for all, clean if possible
Goods would be labelled with information on their environmental impact, enabling consumers to make more informed purchasing decisions.
With UN support, governments would adopt indicators of economic performance that go beyond simple GDP, and measure the sustainability of countries' economies.
Governments would change the regulation of financial markets to promote longer-term, more stable and sustainable investment.
Subsidies that damage environmental integrity would be phased out by 2020. The UN estimates that governments spend more than $400bn each year subsidising fossil fuels, while OECD countries alone spend nearly the same amount on agricultural subsidies.
In parallel, access to energy, clean water, sanitation and food would be increased, meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and going beyond them.
New targets would be established of ensuring "universal access to affordable sustainable energy" by 2030, while universal telecommunications and broadband access should arrive by 2025.
Governments "should consider establishing a global fund for education" in order to meet the existing MDG on universal access to primary education by 2015, and aim for universal access to secondary education by 2030.
These and other targets should be incorporated into a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be drawn up in the next few years, the panel says.
Some of its recommendations parallel the initial draft agreement drawn up for the Rio+20 summit.
"We greatly welcome the report of the panel and its messages," said Farooq Ullah, head of policy and advocacy at Stakeholder Forum, a civil society group involved with preparations for the summit.
"It outlines a vision of the future which is people-centric and which exists within the safe operating space necessary for planetary health and our existence."
Follow Richard on TwitterEgypt was rocked Monday by the deadliest day since its Islamist president was toppled by the military, with more than 50 of his supporters killed by security forces as the country's top Muslim cleric raised the spectre of civil war.
The military found itself on the defensive after the bloodshed, but the interim president drove ahead with the army's political plan. He issued a swift timetable for the process of amending the Islamist-backed constitution and set parliamentary and presidential elections for early 2014.
The killings further entrenched the battle lines between supporters and opponents of ousted President Mohammed Morsi, who was removed by the military July 3 after a year in office following mass demonstrations by millions of Egyptians.
Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood called for an uprising, accusing troops of gunning down protesters, while the military blamed armed Islamists for provoking its forces.
The shootings began during a protest by about 1,000 Islamists outside the Republican Guard headquarters where Morsi, Egypt's first freely elected leader, was detained last week. Demonstrators and members of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood said troops descended on them and opened fire unprovoked as they finished dawn prayers.
"I was in the last row praying. They were firing from the left and right," said Nashat Mohammed, who had come from southern Egypt to join the sit-in and was wounded in the knee. "We said, `Stop, we're your brothers.' They shot at us from every direction."
After a battle lasting about three hours, at least 51 protesters were killed and 435 wounded, most from live ammunition and birdshot, emergency services chief Mohammed Sultan told to the state news agency.
At a nationally televised news conference, Army Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said police and troops came under "heavy gunfire" at around 4 a.m. and attackers on rooftops opened fire with guns and Molotov cocktails. A soldier and two policemen were killed, and 42 in the security forces were wounded, eight critically, he said.
While he said troops had a right to defend the facility, Ali did not directly explain how the protester deaths occurred. He expressed condolences but offered no apologies for the deaths.
A collection of video of the clashes provided by the military to Egyptian TV showed protesters on rooftops lobbing projectiles at troops below, including firebombs and toilet seats. It also showed some armed protesters firing at close range at the troops, but it did not show what the military did. It was also not clear at what time in the fighting the videos were shot. It included aerial views of the clashes.
Al-Jazeera kicked out of Egypt news conference Journalists for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera have been kicked out of a news conference being held by Egypt's military on the killing of at least 54 people, most of them supporters of Egypt's ousted president, outside an army facility. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera was founded by the Gulf nation's ruling family. The tiny but wealthy country was a strong supporter of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who was toppled by the military on Wednesday. The station broadcast graphic images of those killed and wounded in the violence Monday outside a military facility. During the news conference, one journalist stood up and demanded Al-Jazeera reporters be excluded from the proceedings. The Al-Jazeera reporters eventually walked out accompanied by chants of "Out! Out!" from others in the crowd.
Several witnesses from outside the protest said the gunfire started when troops appeared to move on the camp.
University student Mirna el-Helbawi told The Associated Press that she watched from her 14th floor apartment overlooking the scene, after she heard protesters banging on metal barricades, a common battle cry. El-Helbawi, 21, said she saw troops and police approaching the protesters, who were lined up on the street behind a make-shift wall. The troops fired tear gas, the protesters responded with rocks, she said.
Soon after, she heard the first gunshots and saw the troops initially retreat backward — which she said led her to believe the shots came from the protester side. She saw Morsi supporters firing from rooftops, while the troops were also shooting.
The Freedom and Justice party, the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, called on Egyptians to rise up against the army, which it accused of turning Egypt into "a new Syria."
"This could be a moment of extremism for both sides" of the equation, Mohammed Mahsoub, a member of the Islamist Wasat Party told Al-Jazeera TV.
The sole Islamist faction that backed Morsi's removal, the ultraconservative Al-Nour Party, suspended its participation in talks on forming a new leadership for the country. The group is now torn by pressure from many in its base, furious over what they saw as a "massacre" against Islamists.
Reeling from scenes of bloodied protesters in hospitals and clinics, many with gaping wounds, some of Egypt's politicians tried to push new plans for some sort of reconciliation in the deeply polarized nation.
Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the most prominent Sunni Muslim institution, demanded that a reconciliation panel with full powers immediately start work and that those detained in recent days be released. Five prominent Brotherhood figures have been jailed since Morsi's fall, and Morsi himself is held in detention in an unknown location.
El-Tayeb's announcement he was going into seclusion was a symbolic but dramatic stance — a figure seen as a moral compass by many Egyptians expressing his disgust with all sides in the events. Egypt's Coptic popes have at times gone into seclusion to protest acts against the Christian community, but the sheik of Al-Azhar has never done so.
Struggling whether to fully bolt from the new leadership, the ultraconservative Al-Nour Party denounced what it called incitement against fellow Islamists. Speaking to Al-Jazeera TV, the party's chief Younes Makhyoun raised the possibility of calling a referendum on Morsi as a compromise measure.
There were multiple calls for an independent investigation into the bloodshed as a way to establish the truth and move forward.
The military-backed interim president, Adly Mansour, ordered a judicial inquiry into the killings. Significantly, the statement from his office echoed the military's version of events, saying the killings followed an attempt to storm the Republican Guard's headquarters.
The new leadership announced a fast-track timetable that would lead to elections for a new parliament within about seven months.
Under the plan, two panels would be appointed to made amendments to the constitution passed under Morsi. Those changes would be put to a referendum within about 4 1/2 months. Parliamentary elections would be held within two months, and once the new parliament convenes it would have a week to set a date for a presidential election.
The swift issuing of the plan reflected a drive to push ahead with a post-Morsi political plan despite Islamist rejection — and is certain to further outrage the Brotherhood.
Egypt's escalating crisis could further complicate its relations with Washington and other Western allies, which had supported Morsi as the country's first freely elected leader and now are reassessing policies toward the military-backed group that forced him out.
Still, the White House said Monday that cutting off the more than $1 billion in annual aid to Egypt was not in the U.S.'s best interests, though it was reviewing whether the military's moves constitute a coup — which would force such a measure under U.S. law.
But Egypt's new leadership appeared to be pushing ahead with the "road map" the military set up for the post-Morsi political system. Negotiations have been ongoing over appointing a prime minister, who will hold the main powers in governing the country. Talks have been stalled by Al-Nour Party vetos of candidates from liberal and secular factions — but if the party drops out, those factions may push through a candidate.
At the same time, the military was pushing hard to isolate Islamists from public support, depicting their protests as rife with gunmen and weapons.
Ali said the sit-in outside the Guard headquarters had "abandoned peacefulness." Ali also pointed to other incidents of Islamist violence, including coordinated, deadly attacks by extremists on military installations in the Sinai Peninsula.
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Prosecutors in Cairo also ordered the closure of the Brotherhood party's headquarters amid investigations into a cache of weapons found there, according to the official Middle East News Agency.
During the wave of protests last week that led to Morsi's removal, Brotherhood supporters used guns in several instances to defend their offices when opponents marched on them — or outright attacked them.
Pushing ahead with the military "road map" is likely to further infuriate Islamists who have vowed to continue protests until Morsi is restored and now depict the military as willing to wipe them out by force of arms.
Outside hospitals and clinics near Monday's violence, Morsi supporters waved the bloodied shirts of the dead or wounded.
"The only thing the military understands is force and they are trying to force people into submission," said Marwan Mosaad, speaking at a field hospital run by Morsi's supporters. "It is a struggle of wills and no one can predict anything."
Abu Ubaida Mahmoud of Al-Azhar University said he had been praying when the sit-in's security teams began banging on metal barricades in warning. He then saw troops coming out of the Guard complex.
"The number of troops that came from inside was stunning," said Mahmoud, who was wounded in the hand.
It was "as if they were firing at an enemy," said another protester, Ahmed Youssef.
By the afternoon, the sit-in site was cleared along with blockades that had been set up on roads. The site of the early morning clashes, a strip of road about a kilometer long (about half a mile), was covered with rocks, shattered glass, shoes, clothes, prayer rugs and personal photographs.
A big Morsi banner remained hoisted in front of the Republican Guards' building. On the ground below it, graffiti read: "Where are our votes?"VATICAN CITY (The Borowitz Report)—In his latest break with Catholic orthodoxy, Pope Francis said today that he was “seriously considering losing the hat,” the tall ceremonial mitre that has long been a signature of papal dress.
“I know I’m going to catch hell for saying this, but it looks kind of dumb,” he said. “Besides, you expect me to believe God really cares if I wear a big pointy hat or not? Come on.”
The Pontiff said that he would probably “try out some different looks, like a baseball cap or something” over the next few weeks, “just to see what happens.”
“If a lightning bolt comes out of the sky and cracks St. Peter’s in two, then I guess we’ll know it was a bad idea,” he chuckled.
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Photograph by Alberto Pizzolo/AFP/Getty.Uber cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick. Cody Pickens
When Uber cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick was in sixth grade, he learned to code on a Commodore 64. His favorite things to program were videogames. But in the mid-'80s, getting the machine to do what he wanted still felt a lot like manual labor. "Back then you would have to do the graphics pixel by pixel," Kalanick says. "But it was cool because you were like, oh my God, it's moving across the screen! My monster is moving across the screen!" These days, Kalanick, 37, has lost none of his fascination with watching pixels on the move.
In Uber's San Francisco headquarters, a software tool called God View shows all the vehicles on the Uber system moving at once. On a laptop web browser, tiny cars on a map show every Uber driver currently on the city's streets. Tiny eyeballs on the same map show the location of every customer currently looking at the Uber app on their smartphone. In a way, the company anointed by Silicon Valley's elite as the best hope for transforming global transportation couldn't have a simpler task: It just has to bring those cars and those eyeballs together — the faster and cheaper, the better.
"Uber should feel magical to the customer," Kalanick says one morning in November. "They just push the button and the car comes. But there's a lot going on under the hood to make that happen."
A little less than four years ago, when Uber was barely more than a private luxury car service for Silicon Valley's elite techies, Kalanick sat watching the cars crisscrossing San Francisco on God View and had a Matrix-y moment when he "started seeing the math." He was going to make the monster move — not just across the screen but across cities around the globe. Since then, Uber has expanded to some 60 cities on six continents and grown to at least 400 employees. Millions of people have used Uber to get a ride, and revenue has increased at a rate of nearly 20 percent every month over the past year.
The company's speedy ascent has taken place in parallel with a surge of interest in the so-called sharing economy — using technology to connect consumers with goods and services that would otherwise go unused. Kalanick had the vision to see potential profit in the empty seats of limos and taxis sitting idle as drivers wait for customers to call.
But Kalanick doesn't put on the airs of a visionary. In business he's a brawler. Reaching Uber's goals has meant digging in against the established bureaucracy in many cities, where giving rides for money is heavily regulated. Uber has won enough of those fights to threaten the market share of the entrenched players. It not only offers a more efficient way to hail a ride but gives drivers a whole new way to see where demand is bubbling up. In the process, Uber seems capable of opening up sections of cities that taxis and car services never bothered with before.
In an Uber-fied future, fewer people own cars, but everybody has access to them.
In San Francisco, Uber has become its own noun — you "get an Uber." But to make it a verb — to get to the point where everyone Ubers the same way they Google — the company must outperform on transportation the same way Google does on search.
No less than Google itself believes Uber has this potential. In a massive funding round in August led by the search giant's venture capital arm, Uber received $258 million. The investment reportedly valued Uber at around $3.5 billion and pushed the company to the forefront of speculation about the next big tech IPO — and Kalanick as the next great tech leader.
The deal set Silicon Valley buzzing about what else Uber could become. A delivery service powered by Google's self-driving cars? The new on-the-ground army for ferrying all things Amazon? Jeff Bezos also is an Uber investor, and Kalanick cites him as an entrepreneurial inspiration. "Amazon was just books and then some CDs," Kalanick says. "And then they're like, you know what, let's do frickin' ladders!" Then came the Kindle and Amazon Web Services — examples, Kalanick says, of how an entrepreneur's "creative pragmatism" can defy expectations. He clearly enjoys daring the world to think of Uber as merely another way to get a ride.
"We feel like we're still realizing what the potential is," he says. "We don't know yet where that stops."
From the back of an Uber-summoned Mercedes GL450 SUV, Kalanick banters with the driver about which make and model will replace the discontinued Lincoln Town Car as the default limo of choice.
Mercedes S-Class? Too expensive, Kalanick says. Cadillac XTS? Too small.
So what is it?
"OK, I'm glad you asked," Kalanick says. "This is going to blow you away, dude. Are you ready? Have you seen the 2013 Ford Explorer?" Spacious, like a Lexus crossover, but way cheaper.
As Uber becomes a dominant presence in urban transportation, it's easy to imagine the company playing a role in making this prophecy self-fulfilling. It's just one more sign of how far Uber has come since Kalanick helped create the company in 2009. In the beginning, it was just a way for him and his cofounder, StumbleUpon creator Garrett Camp, and their friends to get around in style.
They could certainly afford it. At age 21, Kalanick, born and raised in Los Angeles, had started a Napster-like peer-to-peer file-sharing search engine called Scour that got him sued for a quarter-trillion dollars by major media companies. Scour filed for bankruptcy, but Kalanick cofounded Red Swoosh to serve digital media over the Internet for the same companies that had sued him. Akamai bought the company in 2007 in a stock deal worth $19 million.
By the time he reached his thirties, Kalanick was a seasoned veteran in the startup trenches. But part of him wondered if he still had the drive to build another company. His breakthrough came when he was watching, of all things, a Woody Allen movie. The film was Vicky Christina Barcelona, which Allen made in 2008, when he was in his seventies. "I'm like, that dude is old! And he is still bringing it! He's still making really beautiful art. And I'm like, all right, I've got a chance, man. I can do it too."
Kalanick charged into Uber and quickly collided with the muscular resistance of the taxi and limo industry. It wasn't long before San Francisco's transportation agency sent the company a cease-and-desist letter, calling Uber an unlicensed taxi service. Kalanick and Uber did neither, arguing vehemently that it merely made the software that connected drivers and riders. The company kept offering rides and building its stature among tech types—a constituency city politicians have been loathe to alienate—as the cool way to get around.
Uber has since faced the wrath of government and industry in other cites, notably New York, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC.
One councilmember opposed to Uber in the nation's capital was self-described friend of the taxi industry Marion Barry (yes, that Marion Barry). Kalanick, in DC to lobby on Uber's behalf, told The Washington Post he had an offer for the former mayor: "I will personally chauffeur him myself in his silver Jaguar to work every day of the week, if he can just make this happen." Though that ride never happened, the council ultimately passed a legal framework that Uber called "an innovative model for city transportation legislation across the country."
Though Kalanick clearly relishes a fight, he lights up more when talking about Uber as an engineering problem. To fulfill its promise—a ride within five minutes of the tap of a smartphone button—Uber must constantly optimize the algorithms that govern, among other things, how many of its cars are on the road, where they go, and how much a ride costs. While Uber offers standard local rates for its various options, times of peak demand send prices up, which Uber calls surge pricing. Some critics call it price-gouging, but Kalanick says the economics are far less insidious. To meet increased demand, drivers need extra incentive to get out on the road. Since they aren't employees, the marketplace has to motivate them. "Most things are dynamically priced," Kalanick points out, from airline tickets to happy hour cocktails.
Kalanick employs a data-science team of PhDs from fields like nuclear physics, astrophysics, and computational biology to grapple with the number of variables involved in keeping Uber reliable. They stay busy perfecting algorithms that are dependable and flexible enough to be ported to hundreds of cities worldwide. When we met, Uber had just gone live in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as Shanghai, Dubai, and Bangalore.
And it's no longer just black cars and yellow cabs. A newer option, UberX, offers lower-priced rides from drivers piloting their personal vehicles. According to Uber, only certain late-model cars are allowed, and drivers undergo the same background screening as others in the service. In an Uber-fied version of the future, far fewer people may own cars but everybody would have access to them. "You know, I hadn't driven for a year, and then I drove over the weekend," Kalanick says. "I had to jump-start my car to get going. It was a little awkward. So I think that's a sign."
Back at Uber headquarters, burly drivers crowd the lobby while nearby, coders sit elbow to elbow. Like other San Francisco startups on the cusp of something bigger, Uber is preparing to move to a larger space. Its new digs will be in the same building as Square, the mobile payments company led by Twitter mastermind Jack Dorsey. Twitter's offices are across the street. The symbolism is hard to miss: Uber is joining the coterie of companies that define San Francisco's latest tech boom.
Still, part of that image depends on Uber's outsize potential to expand what it does. The logistical numbers it crunches to make it easier for people to get around would seem a natural fit for a transition into a delivery service. Uber coyly fuels that perception with publicity stunts like ferrying ice cream and barbecue to customers through its app. It's easy to imagine such promotions quietly doubling as proofs of concept. News of Google's massive investment prompted visions of a push-button delivery service powered by Google's self-driving cars.
If Uber expands into delivery, its competition will suddenly include behemoths like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.
Kalanick acknowledges that the most recent round of investment is intended to fund Uber's growth, but that's as far as he'll go. "In a lot of ways, it's not the money that allows you to do new things. It's the growth and the ability to find things that people want and to use your creativity to target those," he says. "There are a whole hell of a lot of other things that we can do and intend on doing."
But the calculus of delivery may not even be the hardest part. If Uber were to expand into delivery, its competition—for now other ride-sharing startups such as Lyft, Sidecar, and Hailo—would include Amazon, eBay, and Walmart too.
One way to skirt rivalry with such giants is to offer itself as the back-end technology that can power same-day online retail. In early fall, Google launched its Shopping Express service in San Francisco. The program lets customers shop online at local stores through a Google-powered app; Google sends a courier with their deliveries the same day.
David Krane, the Google Ventures partner who led the investment deal, says there's nothing happening between Uber and Shopping Express. He also says self-driving delivery vehicles are nowhere near ready to be looked at seriously as part of Uber. "Those meetings will happen when the technology is ready for such discussion," he says. "That is many moons away."
At the same time, Krane is clear that Google's big investment was motivated not just by Uber's potential but also by the potential for the two companies to work together. Krane mentions maps as one technology the companies are looking to collaborate on. He doesn't offer specifics, but it's easy to imagine one day searching for a restaurant on Google Maps and seeing not just its location but the wiggling web of Ubers that could take you there. For now, however, Uber shows little interest in getting ahead of itself. Of Kalanick, Krane says: "He's a heat-seeking missile. He's undistractable."
Such focus will be vital as Uber looks to expand from dozens to hundreds of cities. In the meantime, the pure, hard calculus of getting every ride to arrive within five minutes will be plenty to keep Kalanick occupied. As much as business success, the charge he gets from cracking this code drives his commitment to Uber, just as making videogames did when he was a kid. "I just enjoyed it. It was fun," Kalanick says of his days as a preteen coder. The same, he says, applies to his willingness to go all in on Uber. "When something's fun, it's obvious: That's when you just need to do more of it."The 7 is the most diverse train in America. What does it teach us about city life? Courtesy of Stéphane Tonnelat and William Kornblum/Columbia University Press
How the most diverse subway line in America forges a shared urban identity, according to a new book.
The 7 train is known for more than just rogue subway surfers. It’s a key line on the New York City public transit network, and arguably, the most diverse commute in the country. And this year, it marks its 100th year in operation. Nicknamed the “International Express,” the 7 kicks off on Main Street, in Flushing, Queens; cuts through East Asian, Latino, South Asian, and other immigrant locales; and terminates in Hudson Yards, Manhattan. In 1999, the White House Millennium Council deemed it a National Millennium Trail for being a testament to the immigrant experience. A new book by urban sociologists Stéphane Tonnelat and William Kornblum sketches a fascinating portrait of this crucial arm of the subway and its riders. Tonnelat, who is from Paris, and Kornblum, who is a native New Yorker and has lived near the 7 his whole life, see the subway as a unique public space, ripe for ethnographic analysis. In segregated New York, public transit brings together folks from different races and ethnicities, nationalities, ages, and economic profiles in very close proximity on a routine basis. The 7 train, with its heavily immigrant riders, is just the most acute manifestation of that diversity—a microcosm of the city as a whole. Exploring how commuters on this train regard each other and themselves reveals a lot about the role of public transit in facilitating a shared urban identity.
CityLab caught up with Tonnelat and Kornblum for a conversation about International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train, the highlights of which are below. The book includes your own research and interviews with 7 train riders, as well as detailed accounts by immigrant youth. Being in such close proximity with different folks creates friction, and often reinforces racial and ethnic stereotypes. But there’s also a sense of community created among the riders. Could you talk about that? Kornblum: We selected people who were representative of the different ethnic and racial groups that lived around the 74th Street station, which is one of the busiest stations. We walked with them and we recorded what they’re saying to us from their doorstep, through the neighborhood, and to the station. When we heard them speaking in their neighborhoods, they always used [the pronouns] “we”or “I.” They said, “We, in the neighborhood, do this,” or “I do this in the neighborhood.” Then, we got on the train, and they said, “when you are on the subway, you do this, and you act this way. These are the things you have to be careful about.” They shifted into the language of the urban space. It reflects an understanding of the ways they’re expected to behave [in that space] in order to advance the cause that everyone shares: getting to the place they’re going. Tonnelat: [When people use “you,”] it betrays a series of do’s and don’ts that people have to practice on the subway. What we found is that these norms are basically a set of skills that people have to acquire to get along: like “civil inattention” [whereby strangers will acknowledge each other in subtle, but unimposing ways] or what we call “cooperative mobility”—the way that people move in a group without bumping into each other.
Behind these competencies that riders have to learn is a general assumption that everybody will behave. And that I think is the main assumption that community is built on. “Behind these competencies that riders have to learn is a general assumption that everybody will behave.” You’ve dedicated a chapter to exploring how interactions between different genders play out on the train. What did you learn? Tonnelat: Crowding is the big problem these days, and together with crowding comes the problem of sexual harassment of women by men. This question had arisen before in the history of the subway in New York City, especially at the beginning of their opening up the [subway], when it was also super-crowded. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... We took that question seriously. We worked with Hollaback, which is a feminist organization trying to defend the rights of women to use public spaces without being harassed. They had gathered an amazing amount of reactions by women who’ve been groped or otherwise harassed on the train, and we used that testimony to understand: How do women react when their privacy is being violated? What we see basically, once again, [is] the train is a contested space for gender issues. Kornblum: We also look, in detail, at the suggestions that have been given to women about how to handle unwanted attention. The organization whose material we worked with, Hollaback, have a position on this: Women should confront the person who is giving them a hard time or groping them. They should holler back. We examined the statements of women in the blogosphere about this issue, and came to the conclusion that while it’s very good for women to holler back, they don’t always need to turn around and confront the person who they think it is. If they make it known that they don’t want the attention being given, instead of really getting in the face of this other person, that might add a modicum [of] safety in their interactions. Because what we want to try to do is avoid the escalation of violence here. Stéphane and I also discuss the opposite possibility: that people of different genders and different gender identities can find attraction to each other in the train. So there’s a lot of other kinds of interactions, which are within the bounds of respect for each other’s self.
Interactions between riders of different ages is another thing you discuss at length. Kornblum: Every school day between 2 and 3 o’ clock in the afternoon, you have a quarter of a million teenagers and younger kids who run onto the subway from school. And it really creates a kind of unusual social phenomenon. There’s a lot of kids behaving in different ways—sometimes, not so pleasant. A number of young people that worked with us in the seminar kept diaries of their experiences on the train over a period of four to five months. Would you say that the subway space becomes, at those times, an extension of the school playground with its different social groups and dynamics? Kornblum: That’s a very good analogy. While they’re there, they’re interacting; a lot of the times there can be shouting, yelling, disputes, jumping around. They’re energetic. Older people [on the train] can feel threatened or annoyed, or what have you. So there’s also a kind of conflict going on. Tonnelat: [The groups of kids] are like islands in the middle of the subway, that interact with the rest of the train car. There are interesting differences between when the kids ride the train by themselves—in those cases, they’re very discreet—and when they ride in groups. One of the young people cited in the book noted something very interesting: How a person swipes the Metrocard can divulge whether or not they live in the city. That anecdote highlights one of the main arguments you’re making in the book, that taking the subway helps newcomers assimilate and develop a common identity, not just as riders of a particular train line, but as New Yorkers. Could you talk about that?
Tonnelat: The competencies that people learn on the train are, in fact, urban competencies. They can be applied anywhere. That way, the subway opens up the city materially, through [access to different places around the city], but also socially. Kornblum: You’ll meet people all over the world who will say, “Oh yeah, I used to live in New York. I used to ride the 7 train or 6 train. I used to get off [at] this station”—and they’ll tell you the station. They may have never succeeded in becoming Americans, or never wanted to, but they became New Yorkers, to the extent that they could use the transit system to get around. “You’ll meet people all over the world who will say, ‘Oh yeah, I used to live in New York. I used to ride the 7 train or 6 train. I used to get off [at] this station.’” From this entire endeavor, what did you learn about how immigrants use transit, and how transit agencies see their immigrant riders? Tonnelat: The transit agency has a commitment to universalism and they don’t really make a difference between immigrants and non-immigrants. They do try to publish posters in languages most spoken in communities, when there are certain disruptions. So that’s a laudable effort on their part. Kornblum: There’s a wonderful quote in the book from the former city councilman from Flushing, John Liu. He warns us not to romanticize the subway, and that for most people—especially low-income people of immigrant origin—getting on the subway every day, when it’s crowded, or when you have to get to work early in the morning, is not a romantic experience. He puts it in more salty language.
Tonnelat: But [this subway train] is the lifeline of the community. Kornblum: And people recognize that. One of the biggest issues that Councilman John Liu had to deal with was frequent delays on the number 7 train as they’re trying to modernize the signal system. Tonnelat: Something we don’t talk enough about in the book are the weekend disruptions. Those immigrant communities, a lot of them work on the weekends, and they rely on the trains. But the weekends are the time designated by the MTA to modernizing work on the line. And it has created some tension. It’s a difficult problem to deal with because this line surely needs modernization. Kornblum: One of the chief engineers said once that working on the subway is like performing an operation on a man when he’s still working at a desk. So it’s never, ever, ever going to be an easy situation for the public, although there are ways that the MTA could do a better job. Another part of the book looks at how the riders of the subway are an integral part of the functioning of the subway. More and more, the city depends on them to police themselves and do things in an orderly way. The more competent they are, the more competent the MTA can help them be, the better off we all will be as citizens. Is there anything else you want to add? Tonnelat: Now, we’re in an interesting moment politically, in the U.S. |
a drone strike,” the report reads.
Julian Assange was also set to make a major announcement regarding Clinton from his refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy on Tuesday, but due to what have been called, “security concerns,” he has chosen to use the 10 year anniversary of Wikileaks and a video link to present what is supposed to be Clinton’s campaign-ruining “October surprise.”Salmon is among the top five consumed fish species in the United States. The salmon steak is a versatile cooking ingredient. The mildly sweet, pink flesh stands up well to grilling, broiling and pan searing. Raw salmon is popular with sushi lovers, and the more refined crowd enjoys it seared with a side of grilled fennel bulb. Salmon swims primarily in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It accumulates few heavy metals in its lifetime. The mercury level, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, is fewer than 0.09 parts per million, placing it on the lowest end of the heavy metal scale. Salmon consumption is steeped in issues regarding the safety of fishing and farming practices. The factors that determine which salmon type is the healthiest are deeply connected to these issues.Michael Phelps isn't the young man he used to be. The most decorated Olympian of all time is now 31 years old, and competing in his fifth Olympic Games since his debut in 2000. The American has put a ton of meters on that 6'4 frame. Nobody has participated in more Olympic events.
Now Phelps is yet again dominating in Rio, even though most of his peers are years younger than him. On Thursday, he'll swim in the 100-meter butterfly heats in the afternoon, then get a double dose at night with the 200-meter individual medley final and 100-meter butterfly semifinals. He'll have fewer than 40 minutes between the night races to cool down and get back out there.
The stacked schedule is a testament not only to Phelps' extraordinary physical gifts, but also his remarkable commitment to an intense, demanding training regimen.
Phelps has been been training and competing in the pool most of his life. He made his Olympic debut at age 15 and has spent the past 16 years proving himself as the greatest swimmer ever. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, his training and eating routines became the stuff of legend, when he revealed details of his hardcore workouts and a calorie intake of up to 12,000 per day. While he's since backed off that calorie figure, calling it a "myth," those Games not only earned Phelps a record eight gold medals, but helped show how he does such amazing things.
Things are a bit different now, not only because Phelps is older. He's also wiser and more appreciative of his experience now, less stressed by the pressure of his unique job. At his age, he's needed to change things up a bit, but as you can see in Rio, Phelps' altered routines have clearly worked.
Intense endurance training
Phelps' training demands are well known at this point. In 2008, a reporter from Men's Journal underwent a version of Phelps' routine with the help of his coach, Bob Bowman. We got a glimpse into an intense workout designed to improve Phelps' endurance, which is critical on days like Thursday when he's racing in multiple events.
Here's a breakdown of that training routine:
Warm up with jackknife crunches (three sets of 20), push-ups (three sets of 25 to 35) and bodyweight squats (three sets of 25)
Begin in the pool with 50-meter drills, including using a kickboard to isolate upper or lower body on different laps
At moderate intensity, swim distances of 50m, 100m, 150m and 200m, with 30 seconds of rest between each interval
At high intensity, swim distances of 200m, 150m, 100m and 50m, with 30 seconds of rest between each interval
To finish, do 12 laps "with a pool buoy between your legs, breathing only four times on each lap," then do five more laps alternating between sprint and relaxed paces to cool down
That was the 2008 workout, so it's possible Phelps has made some tweaks here and there, but that general structure has served him well throughout the years. He's also talked about the importance of vertical kicking and underwater kicking drills, which he believes improve his ability to maintain speed over distances. Training outside the pool, such as weightlifting, is common, too.
However, there is one real difference between 2008 and now: Recovery time. Phelps' training sessions don't last quite as long as they use to -- more like two to four hours per day instead of five to seven -- because he's taking more time to rest and recover. Learning how to manage your body is a crucial aspect to getting older, and while Phelps is as committed to his training as ever, that means working smart, too.
No more long-distance races
One key choice that Phelps made to ensure he wouldn't get overwhelmed in Rio was to avoid the long-distance races. Phelps isn't competing in the 400-meter individual medley this year largely because the longer distance takes a bigger toll on the body. The American instead wanted to focus on the shorter sprint races at 100 and 200 meters, where his power is an undeniable advantage and his age is less likely to catch up to him.
That's pivotal for someone who competes in as many events as Phelps. He's good enough to swim in almost any event, so at his age, he needed to decide which ones to prioritize. Phelps won gold in the 400m IM in Beijing, but finished fourth in London, so it was a natural choice as something to cut from his schedule. In doing so, Phelps is better positioned to thrive in the events where he is suiting up.
And it's easy to see why given Phelps' schedule. He's been competing every day in Rio, and on Thursday, he's going through a grind. In the afternoon, he'll be swimming in the 100m butterfly heat at 1:31 p.m. ET, then he'll be in the men's 200m IM final at 10:01 p.m. and the 100m butterfly semis at 10:42 p.m.
That's a stacked schedule, and many of the athletes Phelps is up against haven't had the same kind of workload, either in Rio or over the past 15 years. There are a lot of things that make Phelps superhuman, and his endurance is high up on the list.
A diet not for everyone
Athletes at the Olympics can have pretty wild diets to sustain their training and competing regimens. Phelps is no different, although he's changed his eating habits over the years to accommodate his age. Much was made of his 12,000-calorie comments back in the day, and while that exact figure might've been an exaggeration, Phelps eats a ridiculous amount of food to fuel himself.
We're talking loads of proteins and carbohydrates, along with a healthy dose of fruits and vegetables. His breakfasts are typically massive, covering just about every category of breakfast food you can imagine, and he's long loaded up on pasta. While he had indicated in the past that he was trying to move away from such a carb-heavy diet, Phelps told reporters he ate a pound of spaghetti after the 4x100m relay Sunday night in Rio.
He also stopped drinking alcohol in 2014, but not directly for training. That year, Phelps was charged with driving under the influence, which led to a suspension and a trip to rehab. He hasn't drank since.
"Before I even went to court, I said to myself that I'm not going to drink until after Rio -- if I ever drink again," he said before the start of the Games. "That was a decision I made for myself. I'm being honest with myself. Going into 2008 and 2012, I didn't do that. I didn't say I was going to take a year off from drinking and not have a drink."
The lack of alcohol is now part of Phelps' improved diet. You need a ton of calories to burn to push your body the way Phelps does, though, so unsurprisingly, that means he's stuffing his face regularly.
Embrace the fun
This might be the biggest change between Phelps from four years ago. After the 2012 Olympics in London, where Phelps won four more gold medals, he retired from swimming. He said he no longer enjoyed the sport and wanted to move on with his life. Phelps had seemed to be going through the paces, and while that was still good enough to win, it wasn't enough for him.
Phelps returned to the pool in 2014, but the comeback got sidetracked later in the year when he was arrested for DUI in Maryland. He received a six-month suspension from USA Swimming and, once again, was no longer competing. But somewhere between 2012 and now, through all those problems, Phelps rekindled his joy in the pool.
"I’m having fun again," Phelps said recently in Rio. "I’m enjoying what I’m doing again. I think I’m at the point that, whatever’s left, I’ll be able to turn the page and say I was able to finish the way I wanted to. And to me, that’s all that matters."
Phelps isn't just older, he's also happier and wiser. He'll still stare daggers at Chad le Clos when the South African rival is warming up in front of him, but now he's laughing on the podium during the national anthem because his buddies made an Orioles joke from the crowd. After winning the 200m butterfly gold, beating le Clos in the process, he cried tears of joy during the Star-Spangled Banner.
"I think the biggest change is just giving me a clearer head in the pool," Phelps said. "It’s obviously given me a much clearer head outside the pool in my family life, in my personal life. I’ve been able to enjoy life."
It all leads up to this
When you talk about all of this, from Phelps' training to his diet to his choice of races, the American came into Rio with a plan. He understood he could no longer push his body quite as hard, and adjusted various aspects of his preparation accordingly. He remembered how little he enjoyed his time in London, and made sure he entered Rio with a brighter, more positive attitude. On a day like Thursday, when he's racing three separate times -- including two races in less than hour -- you get to really see how that all adds up to make Phelps unlike anyone else.Nowadays when someone says “gadget” we think of phones, tablets, or computers, but back in the day it was the namesake of a dim-witted cyborg detective. Inspector Gadget had all the coolest gadgets at his disposal, and all he had to do to use one was simply say “Go Go Gadget _____.” Everyone wishes they could do this themselves, and now with Android Wear you can!
You may be familiar with an Easter Egg in Google Now that lets users launch apps by saying “Go Go Gadget [app name]. Since Android Wear relies heavily on Google Now for voice commands you can also do this on your smartwatch, which is a million times cooler than doing it on a phone. Simple tap or say “Ok Google” and then say, for example, “Go Go Gadget Compass.” Try it yourself!
Bum Ba Dum Ba Dum Inspector Gadget
“Go Go Gadget” is just one Google Now Easter egg that works on Android Wear. Here are a couple other ones you can impress your friends with:
What is the loneliest number?
What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
What is the Bacon number of [random actor]?
We love the little Easter Eggs that Google hides in their products. Go up to any little kid and launch on an app on your watch with the “Go Go Gadget” command and watch their amazement. What other Easter Eggs have you found in Android Wear?Conservationists are making another push to get federal wildlife officials to devote more resources to the re-establishment of wild jaguars in the U.S.
Only three jaguars have been seen in recent years, but conservationists like Rob Peters, a senior representative for Defenders of Wildlife, believe they can call the United States home again with a series of conservation measures including translocation and establishing a larger habitat area by federal officials.
Wild jaguars lived in Arizona as far north as the Grand Canyon and in New Mexico for years before habitat loss and predator control programs aimed at protecting livestock eliminated them in the past 150 years. It's been over 50 years since a female jaguar was seen in Arizona.
RELATED: Third jaguar spotted in Southern Arizona
But in the past few years, trail cameras have captured three jaguars in Arizona. Two are males, and the gender of the third one, which was captured on camera in the Dos Cabezas Mountains in Arizona about 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border late last year, is unknown.
Recovery efforts have faced pushback from all sides, including livestock owners who sued the Fish and Wildlife Service when it set aside nearly 1,200 square miles along the border as habitat for the conservation of jaguars in 2014.
"There are all these political issues, but when you have good plan, coexistent techniques that really work, I think there's a path toward success," Peters said.
Peters said the biggest obstacle to a renewed push for recovery is the habitat boundaries set by a proposed jaguar recovery plan released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in December. That plan aims to sustain habitat, eliminate poaching and improve social acceptance of the animal. It focuses recovery efforts on northern Mexico, where a sizeable population of jaguars lives.
Peters also says Fish and Wildlife should also consider relocating female jaguars from Mexico to the United States.
Jeff Humphrey, a spokesman for Fish and Wildlife, said the proposed plan is under review and will likely be finalized in about a year.
He said a team of jaguar experts made the recommendations best suited for recovery and that much of the Defenders of Wildlife report agrees with its proposals, such as the need to better educate the public about jaguars and to make the big cats more socially accepted.
"The modeling, mathematics and science that the recovery team has applied indicate that the best bang for our buck for recovering jaguars is to focus on those populations in Mexico," Humphrey said. The agency's proposed plan for jaguar recovery would cost $56 million over five years and $605 million through 2066.
Peters says the plan doesn't do enough.
It limits the proposed habitat to south of Interstate 10 and doesn't even consider translocation. It also doesn't touch on the border wall President Donald Trump has proposed.
"The border wall would be an absolute disaster. If it's completed with pedestrian throughout jaguar corridors, it would completely preclude the option of jaguars getting to the United States on their own," Peters said.
There's also the matter of money.
Peters says Fish and Wildlife is already underfunded, and that budget cuts proposed by Trump "would seriously undermine recovery for all species."With Windows Phone 8 just revealed, Microsoft is now readying the promised Windows Phone 7.8 update for smartphones that are currently powered by previous versions of its mobile platform.
Although there have been numerous rumors regarding the availability of the Windows Phone 7.8, no actual release date leaked online.
There are still a fair number of Windows Phone enthusiasts who cannot afford or do not wish to upgrade to a Windows Phone 8 device, which is why Microsoft should release the promised update as soon as possible.
Well, it looks like this is about to happen in just a few months. Windows Phone Brazil has just confirmed the Windows Phone 7.8 update is expected to be released at some point in Q1 2013.
Obviously, we’re still expecting for it to become official, but the fact that the tweet confirming the upcoming release of the update has yet to be deleted is an indication that Microsoft is really planning a Q1 2013 launch for Windows Phone 7.8.
We also expect the update to be slowly rolled out globally, which means not all users of Windows Phone 7.5 devices will receive it at the same time.
There’s also the possibility that Windows Phone 7.8 update be pushed in Brazil in Q1 2013, but a bit earlier in other countries, though we don’t have any confirmation on this yet.
In this regard, Windows Phone 7.8 was recently spotted running on Nokia Lumia 900 in China. More importantly, the update was showcased by Nokia China so that Windows Phone enthusiasts can give it a try before it actually hits the market.
Even though this doesn’t mean the update will be initially launched in China, we can safely assume the Mainland will be among the first countries to receive the Windows Phone 7.8 update. Stay tuned for more updates on the matter.Martyn Waghorn holds off Fredrik Ulvestad as England U21s take on Norway U21s in September
While England were enduring a traumatic passage through to next summer's European Under 21 Championships with their win in Serbia earlier this month, the other story in the tournament was unfolding in Norway.
Per Joar "Perry" Hansen's Norwegian side were eliminating a highly-fancied France team in dramatic fashion as they turned around a one-goal deficit from the first leg with an astonishing 5-3 win in Drammen.
With an Under 19 side also beating Holland this month it seems the future is bright for Norwegian football. Adam Bate had a chat with Hansen to get the full story on a promising generation of players - including some insight into what British football could do to punch above its weight...
The win over France was a surprise to many. Was it a surprise to you?
That's a very good question. In two play-off games France will always be favourites against Norway but we have a strong side and we have belief in ourselves. After the first game in France we thought that we had a possibility if we performed at our best in the home game.
But of course for European football it was a big surprise I think. For us, maybe now that we have done this we have broken a barrier.
Is this the best crop of Norwegian players ever?
We have a very strong side and we have a large number of good players born in 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993. It's a very good group but it's not easy to compare with other generations. But this generation has very interesting players in all positions.
Is it just good fortune that these players have come along?
We have good players but we have a concept. A year ago we were nothing in the eyes of the Norwegian press. We lost 3-0 against Scotland in August 2011 before the qualification began and nobody believed in us.
But after that game I delivered what you could call 'the hairdryer' in the dressing room. And we decided to stick together and do something with this generation.
We met Iceland and Azerbaijan in the first two qualifying games and we found our concept - strong defence, quick counter-attacks and playing the way Rosenborg played in the 1990s using the midfield, the wings and offensive full-backs.
And we had some good results. The players began to believe in the way that we played and we believed in ourselves. We also used the same players from game to game and built a very strong unit. And from there it's been a fairy-tale.
It has also been suggested you have embraced the Dutch philosophy rather than the long-ball traditions of Norwegian football?
Yeah it's a Dutch style. We have been much more offensive. I think it's the best of the Ajax concept with a bit of the Rosenborg style thrown in because my offensive thinking comes a lot from the Rosenborg way of playing in the late 1990s and early 2000s (when Hansen was coach there).
We have very good individuals and strong technical players. I want to use the skills of the players when we have the ball and we have succeeded with that. I think also we have surprised a lot of the big nations because we are playing possession football in the midfield with our good passing players. We have good wingers and strikers with excellent technique.
And we are building from the back. I think that was a particular shock to France. They didn't know what him them when we played them at home in Drammen. In that game we also pressed them very high - very aggressive and high pressure. It's been a success playing in that way.
The Under 19 side also beat Holland so you can be excited for the next few years now...
Yeah we have a good group coming through behind the current Under 21 side. In fact, a number of the current squad are players born in 1993 who are knocking on the door to play for me. The future in Norway is bright and I think it comes down to five main reasons.
Firstly, we have worked very hard in recent years - since 2002 in all of the top clubs we have hired good coaches. There was a particular focus on individual training to develop the young players in a way that suited them. We are seeing now the benefits of that approach.
The financial crisis in Norway was also very good for the young players because we kicked out some very bad foreign players who took the places of the Norwegian youngsters. So when the financial crisis came to Norway the young players could go in and play in the [Norwegian] Premier League from very early on and it was a big success.
From the Norwegian FA they introduced 30 per cent more international games for the younger age-groups. From the age of 15 the focus was on them getting out and playing more international games and getting more international experience.
The introduction of artificial pitches in Norway was a help too. We built indoor halls with artificial turf so that young players could train in winter in perfect conditions. That also has been a factor in the success that we are seeing now.
Finally, when I took over the media in Norway was very aggressive and told the players that Norwegian football was nothing. That was psychologically damaging - if you always tell the players that they are worth nothing then they will start to believe it.
So I have been very clear that we are good players with good skills. We are not standing behind any teams in Europe and we have built a belief in ourselves. Those five factors I think explain a little bit the success that we are having.
And presumably playing in a tournament will help them develop further?
Of course. Going to an international tournament with the best teams in Europe is a fantastic advantage for Norwegian football in the future.
You look at those big nations, there is a very high standard and you get vital international experience. You live and play together for a few weeks and the experience they get from playing in the competition could be important for the Norway senior team in the future.
Is there anybody in particular that we should be looking out for? Fans in the UK may be aware of Manchester City youngster Omar Elabdellaoui and Manchester United's Joshua King...
Omar has been one of many good players and he has been outstanding at full-back for me.
But I think it's not easy to say that this player is better than that player and so on because nobody in Norway had heard of Joshua King a year ago and now he is playing well for me in the U21s and the senior team.
And we have four or five players in my generation who are now playing for the first team. Many of those players have taken big steps over the past year. There are also other players in my U21s who can achieve big goals in the next six months so you never know because young players develop in different ways.
Would you be interested in working with this group of players at senior level as Norway manager?
As a coach you always have ambitions. I love my job and I love the group that I work with now but you never know in soccer what is going to happen in the future.
My ambition is to do the best possible job where I am and in the future I have ambitions to go out into Europe and coach a European team. I have been in Scandinavia now for many years. In the future I hope maybe I could take a club in a European league. That is my goal.Gazans dance in the street although missiles failed to hit Tel Aviv. Hamas has been reporting false information.
Gazans danced in the streets Saturday evening to celebrate a missile strike on Tel Aviv, ignoring the fact that the missiles failed to hit their targets and either exploded in uninhabited spaces or were shot down by the Iron Dome system.
Hamas television relayed the signal from Israeli television, in the hope that it would show carnage and damage caused by a salvo of missiles fired at Israel at about 9:00 Saturday evening. However, the viewers saw that the missiles failed to injure anyone. This did not keep them from celebrating victory.
Hamas has been reporting false information to its citizens throughout the campaign, claiming victories that never took place.One of the most interesting aspects of Kropotkin’s political thought is the federalist idea which constantly recurs in his writings and forms one of the basic factors in his anarchist ideology. Although Kropotkin’s federalism is not a systematic theory and cannot be very clearly differentiated from that of Proudhon or Bakunin, it nevertheless presents various characteristics which make its study of interest.
For such a study a biographical excursus is needed in order to illuminate for us the beginnings of Kropotkin’s federalist thought in relation to the surroundings in which it formed itself and developed. Tilgher, writing about Kropotkin rightly remarks: “It is impossible to understand the intimate spirit of the anarchist movement if one does not consider it historically as a radical and violent reaction against the profound transformation undergone during the nineteenth century by the institution of the State.”
Kropotkin, the anarchist-prince, provides the best example of this assertion.
Kropotkin’s clear and detailed biography enables us to follow the different phases in the development of his federalist thought step by step.
At the age of nineteen, when he was an officer of the Cossacks, he went to Transbaikalia where he took a passionate interest in the great reforms undertaken by the government in 1862, and carried out by the Higher Administration of Siberia. As secretary to government committees he was in touch with the best of the civil servants and began to study the various projects of local government administration. But he very soon saw that the reforms proposed by the District Chiefs and protected by the Governors General, were submitted to the orders and influence of the central government. Administrative life revealed to him every day absurdities in system and method. Seeing the impossibility of achieving any kind of reforms, he took part in 1863 in an expedition along the Amur.
During a storm forty barges were sunk with the loss of 2,000 tons of flour. This catastrophe gave him an opportunity of getting to know the bureaucratic system still better. The authorities refused to believe in the disaster, while the civil servants concerned with Siberian affairs in Petrograd revealed a complete ignorance of all that concerned their particular specialty. A high functionary said to him: “But my dear fellow, how would it be possible for 40 barges to be destroyed on the Neva without someone jumping in to save them!” When Kropotkin replied that the Amur is four times as big as the Neva, the astonished functionary asked: “ But is it really as big as all that?” — and passed on, annoyed, to talk of some frivolity.
Kropotkin went to Manchuria more than ever distrustful of the central government. He probably thought of the Petrograd bureaucrats when at the Chinese frontier an official of the Celestial Empire refused his passport because it was only composed of a modest sheet of stamped paper, but showed the greatest respect for an old copy of the bulky Moscow gazette which was shown to him as a passport.
As an attaché of the “Governor General for Cossack affairs,” Kropotkin made an accurate inquiry into the economic conditions of the Coasacks of the Usuri. On his return to Petrograd he was congratulated, promoted, and got special rewards. But his proposals were not put into practice because of the officials who stole money and continued to flog the peasants, instead of furnishing them with cattle and, by prompt and suitable assistance, relieving the effects of famine. “And thus it went on in all directions, beginning with the winter palace at St. Petersburg and ending with the Usuri and Kamchátka The higher administration of Siberia was influenced by excellent intentions, and I can only repeat that, everything considered, it was far better, far more enlightened, and far more interested in the welfare of the people than the administration of any other province in Russia. But it was an administration — a branch of the tree which had its roots at St. Petersburg — and that was enough to paralyze all its excellent intentions, enough to make it interfere with and kill all the beginnings of local life and progress. Whatever was started for the good of the country by local men was looked at with distrust, and was immediately paralyzed by hosts of difficulties which came, not so much from the bad intentions of the administrators, but simply from the fact that these officials belonged to a pyramidal, centralized administration. The very fact of their belonging to a government which radiated from a distant capital caused them to look upon everything from the point of view of functionaries of the government, who think first of all about what their superiors will say, and how this or that will appear in the administrative machinery. The interests of the country are a secondary matter.
Parallel with his knowledge of the inefficiency of the central administration bodies. his observations on the free association of those engaged in common interests which he made throughout his long journeys in Siberia and Manchuria also contributed to the formation of his anarchist personality. He saw clearly the role played by the anonymous masses in great historic events and in the development of civilization. This realization, as we shall see later, influenced the whole of his sociological criticism, and was fundamental to his method of historical research.
When Kropotkin went to Switzerland, his libertarian and federalist tendencies were greatly influenced by his contact with the Jura Federation, which in 1872 had assumed marked anarchist and antiauthoritarian tendencies. One should note that the development of these tendencies was in great part due to the strongly centralized, not to say tyrannical, domination of the International.
It is necessary to add that the militants of the Jura Federation were imbued with the anarchism of Bakunin which was essentially federalist. Kropotkin, as he himself states, was never in direct contact with Bakunin.
On his return to Russia, he got in touch with the groups of left-wing intellectuals, and he realized anew the uselessness of the attempts made by those who tried to regenerate the country through the zemstvos. Such work was suspected of being separatist, of trying to form a State within the State, and was persecuted to such a point that any attempt to improve the rural administration with regard to health services or schools was a miserable failure, and carried with it the ruin of entire groups of members elected to the zemstvos.
Notwithstanding the disappointments attendant on his administrative experience, before he left Russia, Kropotkin set to work once more. Having inherited his father’s property at Tambov, he went to live there and devoted all his energies to the local zemstvo. But he was compelled once more to realize the impossibility of setting up schools, co-operatives, or model factories without creating new victims of the central government.
* * *
From the articles that Kropotkin published between 1879 and 1882 in the Révolté of Geneva, it seems clear that the administrative system of the West only provided him with new material for his criticisms against the State, and confirmed him still further in his federalist and libertarian ideas. Wherever centralism existed he found a powerful bureaucracy.
“It creates an army of office-holders, sitting like spiders in their webs, who have never seen the world except through the dingy panes of their office windows and only know it from their files and absurd formulae — a black band, who have no other religion except money, and no other thought but of sticking to any party, black, purple or white, so long as it guarantees a maximum salary for a minimum of work.” P. Kropotkin, Paroles d’un revolté
Centralism, resulting in excessive bureaucracy, appeared to Kropotkin as one of the characteristics of the representative system. He saw in the parliamentary regime the triumph of incompetence, and he described with picturesque irony the administrative and legislative activities of the M.P. who is not called upon to judge and deal with matters for which he is specially fitted, but is asked to vote on a series of questions, of an infinite variety, arising from those elephantine machines that are the centralized State.
“He will have to vote taxes on dogs and the reform of university education, without ever having set foot in a university or ever knowing a country dog. He will have to give his opinion on the advantages of the Gras rifle and on the site for the State stables. He will have to vote on the phylloxera on grain, tobacco, primary education and urban sanitation; on Cochin, China and Guiana, on chimneys and the Paris Observatory. He has never seen soldiers except on maneuvers, but he will dispose army corps; never having met an Arab, he will make and re-make the Mussulman legal code in Algeria. He will vote for the shako or the kepi according to the tastes of his wife. He will protect auger and sacrifice grain. Will destroy the vine under the impression that he is protecting it. Will vote for afforestation against pasturage, and protect pasturage against the forest. He will have to show his ability in banking. He will sacrifice a canal or a railway without knowing in what part of France they are situated. He will add new articles to the legal code without ever consulting it. A veritable Proteus, omniscient and omnipotent, to-day a soldier and to-morrow a pig-man, successively a banker, an academician, a street-sweeper, doctor, astronomer, drug-manufacturer, tanner, or contractor according to the orders of the day in Parliament, he never knows a moment’s hesitation. Accustomed in his capacity as lawyer, journalist or public orator, to speak of things he knows nothing of, he votes for all these and other questions as well with only this difference; while in the newspapers he merely amused with his gossip, and in the court room his voice only awoke the sleeping judges, in Parliament he will make laws for thirty or forty million inhabitants.” P Kropotkin, Paroles d’un revolté.
But the western countries, together with the ridiculous administrations of the centralized parliamentary regimes, revealed to him the immense strength, vaster and more complex, observed in the Russian Mir: that or the free associations which “extend themselves and cover every branch of human activity,” and which made him declare that “the future is in the hands of free associations and not of centralized governments.” Especially the years spent in England, a country where the independence of the people and the enormous development of free initiative could not fail to strike the foreigner coming from Slav or Latin countries, made Kropotkin attach great, sometimes even excessive, importance to associations.
From his direct knowledge of the Western world, Kropotkin added a new tendency in his studies. A geographer in Russia, he became an ardent historian in Britain. He wished to understand the State and knew that in order to do so “there is only one way; that of studying it in its historic development.” He discovered with enthusiasm that the general tendency of science is that “of studying nature not from its large results and great conclusions, but rather through single phenomena, through separate elements.” History also ceases to be the history of dynasties, and becomes the history of peoples. So much the better for historical method, but also for the federalist conception, for it will become obvious that great progressive changes have not taken place in courts and parliaments, but in the city, in the countryside. Devoting himself to historical studies, Kropotkin saw in the excessive centralization of the Roman Empire the cause of its collapse, and in the epoch of the Communes the renaissance of the western world. “It is in the enfranchisement of the Communes and in the uprisings of the people and the Communes against the State, that we find the most beautiful pages of history. When we look at the past, it is not to Louis XI, or Louis XIV or to Catherine II that we turn our eyes, but rather to the Communes or the Republics of Amalfi and Florence, of Toulouse and Laon, Liége or Courtrai, Augsburg and Nuremburg, Pskov and Novgorod.
In trying to draw examples from mediaeval society, Kropotkin fell into various errors of interpretation, due more than anything else to the fact that the texts that he consulted (such as the writings of Sismondi) were not so advanced as the historical studies of today. There is no need to think, however, like certain superficial people, that Kropotkin envisaged the epoch of the communes as a kind of golden age. “It will be said, no doubt, that I forgot the conflicts and the internal struggles with which the history of the communes is filled; the embittered battles against the nobles, the insurrections of the “young arts” against the “old arts,” the bloodshed and the reprisals which always occurred during those struggles... No, I forget nothing. But, like Leo and Botta — the two historians of Southern Italy — like Sismondi, Ferrarí, Gino Capponi and so many others, I hold that these struggles were in themselves the proof of the freedom of life in the free cities.” (see “Conquest of Bread”) It was these intestine struggles according to Kropotkin, that permitted of the intervention of the king and the tendency of the Communes to enclose themselves within their walls (“Paroles d’un Revolte”)
Another historical field explored by Kropotkin was the French Revolution. He was opposed to the bourgeoisie of 1789 whose “ideal was to abolish all the local powers which at that time constituted so many autonomous units in the state. They meant to concentrate all governmental power in the hands of a central executive authority, strictly controlled by Parliament, but also strictly obeyed in the State, and combining every department — taxes, law courts, police, army, schools, civic control, general direction of commerce and industry everything.” (“The Great French Revolution”) He reproached the Girondins for the attempt to dissolve the communes and demonstrated that their federalism was merely an opposition slogan, and that in their actions they showed themselves to be as much in favor of centralization as the Montagnards.
According to Kropotkin the communes were the soul of the French Revolution and he gave extensive illustrations of the communalist movement |
prise! They achieved results. And it still works today in this information-overload environment in which we reside. But the simplicity of hard work has either been blurred or completely lost from all the fancy stuff that pervades our current training culture. So, if it still works, why don't you try "old school" and give it a go? Working hard is still the way to go, no matter how you slice it.
With credit given to Randall Strossen outlining John McCallum's 20-rep squat routine in his book Super Squats, let me tell you about a simple but very difficult program for increasing lower body strength and facilitating weight gain. The 20-rep barbell squat routine. It works. It truly does. But it is brutally difficult.
It goes like this:
Train your lower body twice per week. One session is the 20-rep squat routine and the other is something different like deadlifts, leg presses, or whatever blows your skirt up.
For the 20-rep assault, select a resistance that you would normally use for a tough set of 12 repetitions. With that resistance, perform 20 repetitions. Yes, it's going to be challenging but find a way to squeeze out 8 more reps to get to the 20-rep goal. You can do it if you focus on the task at hand. Hang in there. Catch your breath between reps. Concentrate on getting one rep at a time.
Once you achieve 20 repetitions, it's mission accomplished.
Now that you have gutted it out to achieve the 20-rep goal, rejoice in the moment, and then it's time to move forward. It's now time to do more. Given proper recovery time, your body will have adapted to the previous 20-rep overload stress and can now tolerate more. It is the biological phenomena called the principle of recovery-adaptation. You did it, your body adapted to it, now you are physically able to do even more.
For the next 20-rep squat workout add at least five pounds to the bar (10 pounds maximum). Your goal again is 20-repetitions. You're stronger as a result of the previous 20-rep "death march," so you are capable of achieving 20-repetitions with slightly more resistance.
If you attack it with all-out effort you'll accomplish it. Remember, you only added a few more pounds from the previous successful session so be confident you will achieve the 20-rep goal. Yes, it will be physically and mentally disgusting, but if you want to improve you'll find a way to get it done.
Why am I so confident you can do this? I did it back in the day. In the summer of 1990 at a body weight of 185 pounds, I took the 20-rep squat challenge.
My initial squat session was a demanding (for me) 245 pounds for 20 repetitions a la NO-NO-NO (no belt, no wraps, and no lifting suit). It was simply body against the resistance with zero help from supporting equipment, but I did it.
Each week I added ten pounds to the bar and achieved 20 reps as follows:
Week 2 = 255 x 20 (ouch!)
Week 3 = 265 x 20 (yikes!)
Week 4 = 275 x 20 (ugh!)
Week 5 = 285 x 20 (yowza!)
Week 6 = 295 x 20 (!%$@*!)
Week 7 = 305 x 16 (I couldn't go further. I was done!)
The inevitable wall was hit and so it will be for you, too. Eventually you will reach a point where you cannot keep progressing. At that point you will have pushed it to the limit both physically and mentally. But savor the moment because you obviously moved up. In my case, I went from 245 pounds x 20 reps to 295 pounds x 20 reps. For me - being a genetic trash bag - that was outstanding progress.
If you have the intestinal fortitude to attempt a new challenge to for the purpose of improving your strength and/or weight gain, try the 20-rep squat routine. Understand it will be both physically and mentally demanding, yet it will be simple to implement.
The 20-rep squat routine in review:
Train the lower body twice per week, once with the 20-rep barbell squat routine and the other with something without squats. With the 20-rep squat routine, perform the first workout with a resistance that normally challenges you for 12 repetitions. Get 20 reps. For each succeeding 20-rep squat workout add five to 10 pounds on the bar and find a way to accomplish 20 reps. Make sure you are completely recovered prior to attempting the 20-rep workout. It will take everything you have to achieve the 20-rep goal. When you inevitably hit the wall and are unable to achieve 20 reps after weeks of progressive training, at that point you should have made exceptional progress and achieved measurable results.
The 20-rep squat routine is a time-proven means of becoming stronger and larger (all other factors being equal). It should be used sparingly because it is extremely demanding. Old school works if you are willing to work.
Photo 1 courtesy of Shutterstock.
Photo 2 provided by CrossFit LA.
Photo 3 y Em Bhoo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/embhoo/5759454850/) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.The story focuses on a huntress named Mercy Barlowe, who falls in love with the daughter of a local reverend. When the romantic nature of their relationship is discovered, the reverend cries heresy and vows to see both women tried as witches. Mercy escapes, but the reverend's daughter is sentenced to burn. The agony and torment of the burning lures wicked creatures from the darkness, who attack the village and steal the souls of the dying women. Mercy vows to track the evil beings to the ends of the earth and vanquish them to reclaim her lover's soul, even if it means taking on dark powers of her own.
Anathema is a limited series which, when completed, should come out to between 250-300 pages. I will release the story in individual twenty four page issues until the tale has been told. Those of you who have taken to math learnin' know that this equates to roughly ten or eleven issues total.
MEET THE ARTISTS!
To help bring Anathema to life, I scoured the known world for talented artists. In my search, I have managed to put together what I feel is the greatest artistic team in the history of comics. I might be slightly biased, but I love these guys and their work more than I could ever hope to describe. Here's a little background on each of them:
John Statema is an artist from Kenosha, Wisconsin. John has drawn comics for many publishers, including Marvel, DC, and Malibu, starting in the mid 1980's. His work has appeared in G.I. Joe, The Avengers, The Incredible Hulk, Superman, and many others.
Jorge Maese is a colorist and painter from Monterrey, Mexico. He has worked for many companies in the comics and gaming industries, including Marvel, Fantasy Flight Games, Paizo, and many others. He is the co-founder of the independent graphic design company, Graphikslava.
WHERE'S THE MONEY GOING?
I have started the production of the first issue using what very limited resources I could muster. I endeavor to create a quality product that stands out in the sea of comics, and if I hope to realize this dream, I'm going to need some more funds. Here's a breakdown of where the money will be allocated:
$200 per page for pencils, colors, and lettering x 24 pages = $4,800
The remaining $1,200 will be used toward the cost of printing.
Yeah, that's it. Making a quality comic is NOT cheap. As you can see, I've chosen to forgo any payment for myself as the writer. Seeing this dream project in print and in the hands of people around the world will certainly hold more worth than any amount of money.
WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME?
Aside from the knowledge that you've made my horrible little heart swollen with joy, you can take your pick from a treasure trove of awesome rewards! Feast your eyes on the sidebar to the right for a breakdown of the booty! I will be adding rewards in the future, such as original page art and possibly even a cameo in the story, so keep an eye out for that!FBI agent Erica Reed has an uncanny talent: she can see the past and piece together how a crime unfolded. But not even this sixth sense could save her younger brother, Scott, from a brutal serial killer. Three years later, the investigation into Scott’s murder has gone cold – but Erica’s work has only just begun.
Jump into Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, the exciting four-part series that brings Erica face to face with the deranged demons of her past. A serial killer is loose in Boston – one who seems to be leaving deliberate clues that only Erica, with her unique post-cognitive abilities, can uncover. Is she finally on her way to solving Scott’s murder? Or, blinded by vengeance, is she falling into a trap that could cost Erica her life? And how does this new killer know her secret?The Conservatives pushed back against the government's plan to take on a peacekeeping mission Monday as MPs returned to the House of Commons, accusing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of treating the military as pawns in a bid for a seat on the UN Security Council.
It didn't take long to prompt a reaction from the Liberals, who said in question period that they’re open to a debate on any peacekeeping mission.
"We welcome a healthy debate both in the House and with Canadians," Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said in response to questions by interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose.
Ambrose stepped up her criticism of Trudeau over the lack of information about a possible peace operation and the risk to the Canadian Armed Forces.
Last week, in an interview with The Canadian Press, Ambrose suggested Trudeau committed to a new, still-undetermined military mission in order to win Canada a seat on the UN Security Council.
On Monday she intensified her argument.
"We know that he wants a seat at the Security Council. We know he has this goal," Ambrose said at a press conference in Ottawa.
"I question his motivation and I don't like this notion that he would use our men and women as pawns on his chess board to figure out what's the fastest way to a security council seat. I don't think that, at the end of the day, it can be at all costs. It has to be in our national interest and it has to make sense for our country."
A source with knowledge of the discussions said the Liberals moved to recommit to peacekeeping prior to deciding to pursue a seat on the UN Security Council. The commitment to peacekeeping is set out in the party's election platform, where there is no mention of pursuing a seat on the Security Council.
Ambrose said the deployment will be dangerous, and decried the lack of information.
"Do we know where they're going? Why they're going? Is this the only option for us, for him? We're not seeing any information, there's no transparency."
Up to 600 troops committed
Last month, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia on a fact-finding mission "to inform Canada's re-engagement in peace operations," according to a government news release at the time.
The Liberals haven't said where Canada's 600 troops will be deployed. The troop commitment includes engineering and medical units, as well as equipment including helicopters, Sajjan said when the government announced the plan. The government also pledged $450 million over three years for peace and stability projects.
Much of the rest of the world announced its peacekeeping commitments a year ago, at a leaders' summit following the UN General Assembly. Countries including the U.S. and U.K. pledged 40,000 troops and police, as well as "critical enablers" like engineers, field hospitals, helicopters and naval units. The meeting took place during the Canadian election campaign, and no elected representative attended the General Assembly. A spokeswoman for Global Affairs Canada said Canada was only an observer at the peacekeeping leaders' summit.
While the House of Commons resumed sitting on Monday, Trudeau was in New York City to attend the UN General Assembly and related meetings, where he is discussing refugees and economic growth. He's also likely to talk about Canada's peacekeeping pledge.
The Senate defence committee also launched three days of intensive meetings on Monday, focused on peacekeeping as part of its review of Canada's defence policies. The first witnesses have extensive military experience and advised senators to set realistic expectations.
"Any proclamations of objectives have often been unassociated with the reality of achieving them," said retired Lieut. Gen. Mike Day, a former special forces commander. For example, he said, the Canadian Armed Forces can't bring to a struggling country the same level of democracy and security that we have.
"What we can do is immeasurably improve a nation’s lot in life and give them breathing space to create their own form of democracy and security," Day said.
'Maybe we can make a difference'
Retired Lieut. Gen. Charles Bouchard, who commanded the NATO mission in Libya, said the military is part of the solution, not the full solution.
"It's important we understand that when we look at the entire approach, military plays a role but also there's a political aspect, electoral reform, constitutional reform and so on [that] must follow as well," Bouchard told the committee.
Both commanders prepared senators for the reality of another military mission and the likelihood of errors.
Pressed for an example where all elements of a mission -- military, political and diplomatic -- had worked well together, Bouchard said he wasn't aware of it happening.
"I don't have an example," he said. "But we've learned from the past enough to make sure that we can create an example of the next opportunity. Perhaps."
Day said Canada's sometimes tragic and rocky history with peacekeeping should inform the scope of the challenge.
"The reality is we could pack up all our toys and go home, but the fact is, it's not going to make a difference. It's not going to make the world better," he said. "The reality is doing nothing, the world will get worse. Maybe we can keep it on a level playing field. Maybe we can make a difference."
"Look, we're going to stumble. It's not going to be perfect. There will be failure... but I would think less of us if we decided not to engage as a result."Despite Rumors Jon Favreau’s “Cowboys vs. Aliens” Coming to Theaters in 2D
Despite everything else having said otherwise director Jon Favreau has said that his next project, Cowboys vs. Aliens, starring Daniel Craig, will not be shot in 3D, The film will also not be receiving a 3D post conversion process seen in movies like Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender.
“Coming next year in 2D!” yelled Favreau to the large audience at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con. “Save money and see it twice!”
Iron Man director, Jon Favreau, screened ten minutes of the sci-fi/western themed film to an excited crowd at Comic Con. The film is supposed to mix elements of spaghetti westerns, with traditional sci-fi fare.
The film opens in 2011, and stars Daniel Craig, Olivia Wilde, and Harrison Ford.
I’m starting to get excited about this project. First it seems to be one of the only projects that isn’t relying on a post conversion 3D effect in the near future, and it isn’t worrying about it at all. I’m not a person who thinks that 3D should go away, but I think it should be used in moderation. I think consumers are going to get pretty sick of it soon if they keep having to pay $16 a ticket, and especially for a film that doesn’t even do 3D well.
What do you think? Be sure to check out the first image from the film below! Let us know what you think about it in the comments!The IBF have ruled that Shawn Porter may risk his IBF welterweight title against Paul Malignaggi on the condition that the winner must make his next defence against mandatory challenger Kell Brook this summer. Both men must confirm in writing that whomever emerges as champion has the obligation to face Brook next.
Porter-Malignaggi must take place by April 19, with the winner required to face Brook 90 days thereafter. If Porter-Malignaggi fails to materialise by April 19, Porter’s next defence must be against the unbeaten Sheffield star. Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn explained the findings and expressed his delight for the 27 year old, who faces Alvaro Robles in a ten-round clash at the Echo Arena in Liverpool on Saturday, live on Sky Sports.
“The IBF wrote to me last week to confirm that IBF champion Shawn Porter had asked for an exemption to fight Paul Malignaggi on April 19, 12 days outside of the restricted period,” said Hearn. “We asked that if the exemption be granted then it should be accompanied by certain requirements, the most important of those being that both fighters in the proposed April 19 bout must agree in writing to face Kell within 90 days of the bout or by July 19.
“We received confirmation from the IBF today that the exemption would only be granted under a number of conditions including the above. It is great news for Kell after a frustrating period, and he just has to take care of business on Saturday night then I am sure Britain will have another World champion by July 19.”The Beat Goes On: Mayor's Late Night Public Safety Emphasis gets Officers Out of Cars
POLICE by D G H from our Flickr pool
Yesterday, the Mayor, accompanied by Police Chief John "Cookieduster"** Diaz unveiled this year's summer safety plan. ccording to the Mayor's press release "simply a recalibration of priorities that puts more uniformed officers on the streets without sacrificing... existing missions within the police department." Translation: more existing officers will be hitting the beat on foot or by bike, instead of just more officers.
Nightlife safety has been a major campaign promise for Mayor McGinn--he initially began emphasizing the importance of a safe, vibrant after-dark scene last year, with a similar summer safety program. Last year's plan, which deployed officers mostly to Belltown and Pioneer Square, received positive feedback and, according to Diaz, the Slog's Cienna Madrid reports, was able to actively stop violent events from developing or occurring.
This year, however, rather than focusing on just a handful of areas, 15-25 select officers from various anti-crime teams will be re-deployed to bicycle and foot patrols to "designated nightlife zones," including Capitol Hill, West Seattle, the University District and a very, very small stretch of Fremont.
The Mayor, whose approval rating was reported yesterday to be slipping, made sure to emphasize the low-cost nature of this plan, and the point that the plan isn't just for young people.
"...Keeping Seattle a diverse, vibrant and safe nightlife destination is beneficial to everyone - citizens, neighborhoods and businesses. So we're taking action," he stated.
**Exhibit AReview of CosRX Advanced Snail 96 Mucin Power Essence
"Real Power Essence raising the innate strength of the skin. Advanced Snail 96 Mucin Power Essence is created from nutritious, low-stimulation filtered snail mucin and other great ingredients, in order to improve damaged skin. The filtered snail mucin contained in Advanced Snail 96 Mucin Power Essence penetrates under the skin into the invisible, working against damaged skin. This 96%-concentrate ingredient keeps your skin moist all day and finds your lost skin vitality." - CosRX
After hearing all the rave about this product, I finally decided to get it. Many reviews state that it helped reduce their redness and helped even out their skin tone, which is definitely something that I need at this moment.
I honestly forgot where I bought this online after buying so many skincare products in July. My best guess is that I ordered this from
Jolse
since I always order from there. On
Jolse
, this product costs $16.89 for 100ml, with free international shipping.
___________ _________ _______
Directions :
" 1. On the forehead and the nose, lightly touch so as not to cause heaviness.
2. On the cheeks, spread a generous amount and rub enough to soak into the skin.
3. For under eye area, tap as if playing the piano, to make the skin absorb the essence."
___________ _________ _______
Duration of use :
July 31, 2015 - December 2, 2015
___________ _________ _______
Application :
Since 96% of the product is'snail secretion filtrate', you can guess that the essence is pretty gooey and that it has a texture that's more solid than water. When dispensing the product onto a cotton pad, I find that I only need to pump the container once since the essence is easy to spread around my whole face. I also noticed how stringy the essence is-- like what you'd expect of snail mucin. When applied onto the skin, it's easily absorbed and stops feeling sticky after a minute or so.
___________ _________ _______
Ingredients :
- some deeper explanation of a few ingredients -
Snail Secretion Filtrate (96%), Betaine, Butylene Glycol,1,2-Hexanediol, Sodium Hyaluronate, Panthenol, Arginine, Allantoin, Ethyl Hexanediol, Sodium Polyacrylate, Carbomer, Phenoxyethanol
Analysis of ingredients can be found here.
The use of minimal ingredients in this formula is perfect for people who are acne prone due to the unlimited amounts of potential irritants and comedogenic ingredients. According to the analysis of the ingredients, butylene glycol and c arbomer are the only possible irritants in the formula.
Snail secretion filtrate (96%) - Snail secretion filtrate is known for its anti-aging and skin repairing properties that improves the overall texture and skin tone of the face, it makes up 96% of this product. Source
Betaine - Also known as Trimethylglycine, Betaine is an amino acid which functions as a humectant in order to retain moisture.
Carbomer : often used to stabilize the consistency and create a gel-like texture.
___________ _________ _______
Scent :
There's no scent that I can detect.
___________ _________ _______
pH Level : 6.90 (according to WishTrend)
___________ _________ _______
Moisture Test :
Before application :
31.5%
After application :
Thoughts :
What I love about this product is that it contains 96% snail mucin. Also, it doesn't break me out. This is the second snail product that I have ever used and it’s nice to know that I was able to implement a snail product into my routine without causing any issues to my face. Due to the 96% snail secretion filtrate contained in this product, I hoped that it would help repair my damaged skin, help fade my redness, and fade any lines on my face. I also apply this product on to my eye area to see if it is able to fade any fine lines, which it wasn't able to. The stringiness of the product emphasizes its ‘96% snail mucin’ claim. I love it.
What I don't like about this product is that the only benefit I've gotten is that my skin is more moisturized. Unlike other bloggers, I haven't been seeing this product give me a 'glow', fade my PIH/redness, or fade the fine lines on my eye area. I can't say if it did anything about the fine lines on other parts of my face because I may be too young to develop those. After I get over a break out, I apply this product in hopes of fading my scars faster, but that does not seem to be working.
I will be continuing to use this product until it's empty, but I'm not sure if I’m going to repurchase it. It may be repairing my skin without me noticing any differences, especially with the wrinkles. This product is one of two snail products in my routine, so I think I should continue to use products that contain snail mucin in them for future benefits. But as of now, at my age, I don't see any benefits besides it being moisturizing. I believe this product would be better for those who are in need of anti-aging products, than those with troubled skin looking to reduce their redness and fade scars.
___________ _________ _______
Pros Cons - Hygienic packaging - may leave sticky residue for some users - No fragrance, colorants, alcohol, etc - relatively high pH level - moisturizing - doesn't reduce redness or 'wrinkles' significantly
Overall Score Application 9 Ingredients 9 8.8 Scent 10 Packaging 10 Effectiveness 6 Where to buy? Shop Price Location Amazon $16.97 Jolse $16.89 Korea ___________ _________ _______
Repurchase : UndecidedVancouver City Council has installed the flags of three First Nations in recognition of Vancouver's traditional Indigenous territories.
The flags will be permanent fixtures at City Hall's council chambers.
On Wednesday, the city raised the flags of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Representatives from each nation were present along with Mayor Gregor Robertson.
Robertson said the gesture was meant to "to permanently acknowledge Vancouver's location on Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh unceded homelands."
Council: proud to say that the flags of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations are now permanently displayed in <a href="https://twitter.com/CityofVancouver?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CityofVancouver</a> Council Chambers. Best quote from <a href="https://twitter.com/Seculanuxw?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Seculanuxw</a> "This is a seed being planted in the unceded" <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MST?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MST</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Reconciliation?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Reconciliation</a> <a href="https://t.co/mY62druyEm">pic.twitter.com/mY62druyEm</a> —@andreareimer
The city also approved $350,000 funding for Indigenous-specific arts and cultural programming meant to further the legacy of its Canada 150 programming, which focused on the theme of reconciliation.
The city says the money will go to hiring an Indigenous cultural planner and fund Indigenous-led events.Sen. Rand Paul on Friday said he would support Donald Trump if he becomes the Republican presidential nominee, but he's not going to endorse any of the three remaining candidates in the race while the primary season is still going on."I think we never get the candidate we exactly want, unless you're the candidate," the Kentucky Republican toldon Friday during a press conference held during a visit back home.Trump and rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich have backed out of earlier pledges to support the eventual GOP presidential nominee, but Paul, who ended his own campaign for the White House in early February, said Friday any Republican will be a better choice than Hillary Clinton."Think about it from this perspective," Paul said. "I'm from Kentucky, and Hillary Clinton recently said she would put coal miners out of business, and she would put coal companies out of business."Paul is running for re-election to his Senate seat, and on Fridayimplying that he would have a "YUGE" endorsement, making a play from Trump's pronunciation of the word "huge." Later in the morning, though, Paul tweeted that he endorses "entropy," rather than a candidate.Just before he dropped out of the race, however,to making sure Trump didn't get the nomination, as the party would be "slaughtered in a landslide" in the general election. But even at that time, he said he'd support Trump if he won the nomination.And even though Paul leans libertarian, he has said he will not support Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson's campaign, as he has worked "very hard to make the Republican Party more libertarian."There’s no doubt that Star Citizen has a legion of followers, as RSI announced that it has reached its one millionth account (or “citizen”).
“If there was ever a milestone that deserved a letter to the community it was this,” Chris Roberts posted. “When I first started on this adventure I would have never dreamed that we would ever this many people and this much support in building Star Citizen. It’s amazing to have a community and team that believe so fervently in what is being built… Say it loud: PC games are back, space combat games are back… we are making Star Citizen possible!”
To reward the community for its participation and support, the studio is eliminating paid passes for alpha access, allowing any and all backers to jump into pre-release modules as they come out. Those who had purchased an alpha access package or Arena Commander pass will also receive in-game currency as a thank-you.Second Chance (at a First Impression):
Doing reviews is such a humbling experience. As people we are so flawed and stupid…and cling stubbornly to preconceived notions and prejudices. I’m sure mine seep into my reviews all the time and color the way I view and describe products…though its definitely my job to try to keep that to a minimum (which I strongly try to enforce on myself) and in doing so I gain new perspectives and learn a lot about the different ways other skaters ride…not to mention how differently I ride now compared to when I started. Which is kind of where I’m going with this, do you remember your first wheels? Your first experience with sliding? Chances are, it might have very easily been on Orangutangs, and it might have been a bad one. Maybe we sucked at skating back then (let’s be honest, we did…), maybe Durians didn’t stand the test of time as longboard sliding evolved. Though that’s the great thing about Loaded and Orangutang: they easily could have coasted on their “everyone’s first board” status and did pretty well as a company…but the skaters that make up that company are much to passionate about skating to even just keep up and evolve with skaters, they were determined to innovate and experiment. Enter Keanu (stage left), one of three new freeride wheels…with a new formula and a very popular core, and things start getting really exciting.
Slide:
The Tangy new Peach urethane is really what makes these wheels a unique product. I was fortunate enough to get to try both the orange (80a) and the yellow (86a) duros and both took a while to really break in, but the yellow was icy and unpredictable at first while the orange started pretty ok right out of the packaging and only got better. Once broken in, both slide smooth and controlled…though the orange has a much more defined release and a leanier steeze going on. The yellow have an abrupt and early release and a slide that leaves you a lot more on top of the board…it gets kind of icy if you go to fast, but still handles speed better than most wheels I’ve tried that are similarly techy.
Wear:
Neither of these wheels really dump thane like a lot of modern wheels…so they last a while, but still feel pretty “in the pavement” for such a durable wheel. I mean, both those things are kind of opposites…so take that with a grain of salt. It’s no magic wheel with a chalky slide that lasts forever, but if you’re looking for the perfect balance between the two…Otangalang has got you covered. They really put in the hours perfecting the new Peachy urethane and it has really paid off. The wear is slow and even so I don’t see the center set thing becoming important in that respect…but it’s still nice knowing you can flip your wheels as a backup option.
Criticisms:
I do have to be honest…as much as Keanus surprised me, some familiar things reared their ugly heads. It’s not a big deal, but as much as I tried to go in fresh these things made me immediately cringe while my head filed with bad memories. Maybe some of you can already guess…yes, I got these to chatter like mad. Though you notice that I said I got them too…for the most part I was pleasantly surprised: checks, 180s long standies, glove downs…all were met with a beautiful “SSSSHHHHHHHH” sound and smooth consistent sides. As long as four wheels were on the floor I was fine, though I did try a few blunt slides and got a huge “HOOOONNNNKKKK” from my wheels and a pretty choppy slide. Especially the yellow ones…which were otherwise great tech freeride wheels.
Final Thoughts:
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of people start leaning away from mids and put-cheating wheels and looking instead for a smooth controllable wheel that lasts a bit longer. I’m pleasantly surprised to realize that they might have been hiding right under our noses as a cool new product from an already well known brand. Keanus are a great wheel and Orang-Otang is making it pretty clear that aren’t ready to live off the name any time soon, so keep your eyes peeled. For more info or just to check out some pretty hilarious product videos check out the Loaded and Orangatang websites.
AdvertisementsThis is a Guide.
This article has been assembled by one or more members of the community as a helpful resource, instructing players on some aspect of Minecraft. If desired, you may
The following is a short collection of helpful tips and tricks for Minecraft. If there is a tip or trick missing, feel free to add it. Most of these tips apply to Survival Mode, as players can easily get any item or block, and are invincible in Creative Mode.
Contents show]
The Don'ts of Minecraft
Try to avoid Sprinting and excessive Jumping in one's first days of survival. Sprinting and jumping increases a player's exhaustion level more than ten times compared to walking, and therefore will have a serious effect on their hunger bar.
. Sprinting and jumping increases a player's exhaustion level more than ten times compared to walking, and therefore will have a serious effect on their hunger bar. Don't eat Rotten Flesh, Raw Chicken or Pufferfish. They all have a chance of giving a player the Hunger Status Effect for 30 seconds, as well as Poison and Nausea in the case of the pufferfish.
. They all have a chance of giving a player the Hunger Status Effect for 30 seconds, as well as Poison and Nausea in the case of the pufferfish. Don't venture too far from one's shelter without remembering or marking its location in some way. Take a screenshot of its location (coordinates) with the debug screen open (achieved by pressing F3 ), build a tower with a lit landmark, or make a compass. Another way to avoid forgetting a shelter location is to create a line of torches from one's spawn point to the shelter. Keep in mind, however, that this will use up large quantities of coal and sticks to make torches, depending on how far away the shelter is.
. Take a screenshot of its location (coordinates) with the debug screen open (achieved by pressing ), build a tower with a lit landmark, or make a compass. Another way to avoid forgetting a shelter location is to create a line of torches from one's spawn point to the shelter. Keep in mind, however, that this will use up large quantities of coal and sticks to make torches, depending on how far away the shelter is. Don't try to sleep in the Nether or the End. This causes the Bed to explode and sets the landscape around it on Fire, likely killing a player who tried to sleep in it. However, in the case of the End, it is possible to take advantage of this and damage the Ender Dragon.
. This causes the Bed to explode and sets the landscape around it on Fire, likely killing a player who tried to sleep in it. However, in the case of the End, it is possible to take advantage of this and damage the Ender Dragon. Don't dig straight down in survival mode. A player is more likely to fall into a cave system, ravine, lava or Dungeon, taking fall damage or dying in the process.
. A player is more likely to fall into a cave system, ravine, lava or Dungeon, taking fall damage or dying in the process. Don't dig straight up. Digging straight up can cause one to unexpectedly break through the floor of an area filled with Water, Lava, or hostile Mobs. One could also cause large amounts of sand, red sand, or gravel to fall on and suffocate them, but this is easily countered by putting a torch at one's feet.
. Digging straight up can cause one to unexpectedly break through the floor of an area filled with Water, Lava, or hostile Mobs. One could also cause large amounts of sand, red sand, or gravel to fall on and suffocate them, but this is easily countered by putting a torch at one's feet. Never carry a Bucket filled with lava in the action bar. There is the chance a player could accidentally use it and end up burning themselves, destroying all items in their Inventory and losing all of their accumulated Experience if they die.
. There is the chance a player could accidentally use it and end up burning themselves, destroying all items in their Inventory and losing all of their accumulated Experience if they die. Don't take risks when mining. Jumping from one side of an underground ravine to another is very dangerous. A player will most likely miss and fall into lava or take fall damage, resulting in a loss of all their items and experience. If there is Diamond Ore nearby, don't be careless in trying to reach it. Instead, make sure the diamonds are in a safe position, with little or no risk of taking damage or losing the diamonds.
Jumping from one side of an underground ravine to another is very dangerous. A player will most likely miss and fall into lava or take fall damage, resulting in a loss of all their |
, earlier that year, media accounts based on the so-called Panama Papers reported that Podesta’s company, the Podesta Group, had been hired to lobby on behalf of one of Russia’s biggest financial institutions. And in October, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece on business ties between Podesta and a Russia-backed investment firm.
In an Oct. 19 story for Breitbart, Stone said Podesta’s business ties to Russia were the motivation for the tweet.
Stone, Oct. 19, Breitbart: This because of a tweet I posted in August at the time my boyhood friend and colleague Paul Manafort was under attack for his perfectly legal work in Ukraine for a democratic political party. I predicted that Podesta’s business dealings would be exposed. I didn’t hear it from WikiLeaks, although Julian Assange and I share a common friend. I reported the story on my website. So let’s be clear. I had no advance notice of WikiLeaks’ hacking of Podesta’s e-mails.
“There is no foreshadowing of Podesta’s email,” Stone said in his interview with Politico. “That’s speculation. It’s conjecture.” Stone said any claim that he “orchestrated or strategized or knew the scope of what they [WikiLeaks] had and the scope of what they intended to release is false.”
Stone has volunteered to testify before the House intelligence committee, and he says he’d like it to be in public.
A spokesperson for Schiff emailed us this statement: “During his opening statement, Ranking Member Schiff laid out the public record of Mr. Stone’s statements, including his tweeted prediction regarding Podesta, his direct communications and defense of Guccifer 2.0, and his claims to be in contact with Julian Assange, either directly or through an intermediary. Along with a host of other issues of concern, Mr. Schiff stated that these matters could be completely coincidental – or they may not – but they do bear examination in any thorough investigation; in the context of the Russian Active Measures campaign during the election, these are questions that must be answered. At an appropriate time, the Committee will call Mr. Stone to testify, and Mr. Stone can answer these questions and others based on both public reporting and any other pertinent evidence.”
Schiff is free to question what Stone meant by the tweet. But in the intelligence hearing, Schiff stated as a matter of fact that Stone predicted the release of Podesta’s hacked emails, and questioned whether Stone’s prediction was a coincidence or evidence of collusion with Russia. More information may emerge as a result of FBI and congressional investigations, but based on what is currently in the public domain, it’s not an established fact that Stone knew in advance that Podesta’s emails were hacked and would be published in October.
Update, Jan. 28, 2019: The special counsel’s office arrested Stone on Jan. 25 and indicted him on seven counts, including making false statements, witness tampering and obstruction. The indictment says Stone lied to the House intelligence committee about, among other things, “his possession of documents pertinent to” the committee’s investigation and “his communications with the Trump Campaign” about WikiLeaks’ possession of material that could be damaging to Clinton and her campaign.
“On multiple occasions, STONE told senior Trump Campaign officials about materials possessed by Organization 1 and the timing of future releases,” according to the indictment, which refers to WikiLeaks as “Organization 1.”
For more information, see our ongoing, detailed timeline of the Russia investigation.This is a recipe for an irresistible zucchini pie (Kolokythopita) with the aromas of three different herbs. The taste of summer in your plate!
Aside from the glorious weather and the warm inviting Mediterranean sea, summer in Greece has much more to offer: the arrival of great seasonal vegetables and the dishes you can make using them. True, now we can find vegetables all year around in the supermarkets, which come from all over the world. But you cannot beat the ones you can buy knowing that they were cropped a couple days ago from a field nearby.
Even though I live far from the blessed Mediterranean lands, I felt the urge to try to come closer by making an aromatic zucchini pie. Zucchini grow in the summertime and the dish is called “Kolokythopita”. The winter version is made with pumpkin and shares the same name. But I prefer the freshness of the zucchini.
When dealing with zucchini (to make fritters, cakes etc), the key is to drain its juices as much as possible. One of the tricks I learned from Kondje is to place some of the grated zucchini on a kitchen cloth, close it and squeeze it. Juices are removed but you have to throw the cloth in the bin when you finish!
You may use filo pastry or any other pastry you like. However, if you would like to go all the way and do the real thing, you could make your own dough. I didn’t do it this time but I promise I will come back to it and share it with you. Probably with a different filling next time.
In the meantime, enjoy the freshness and the aroma of the glorious Kolokythopita!
Save Print Greek Zucchini and Herbs Pie (Kolokythopita) This is a recipe for an irresistible zucchini pie (Kolokythopita) with the aromas of three different herbs. The taste of summer in your plate! Author: Socratis Cuisine: Greek Recipe type: Appetizer Serves: 12 Prep time: 45 mins Cook time: 40 mins Total time: 1 hour 25 mins Ingredients 8-10 zucchini.
1 onion finely chopped.
~ 10 spring onions finely sliced.
1 bunch of dill finely chopped.
1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley finely chopped.
Leaves from 1 bunch of fresh mint finely chopped.
250 gr (9 oz) of Feta cheese crumbled.
3 eggs lightly whisked.
12 filo pastry sheets.
½ cup of extra-virgin olive oil.
Salt and ground pepper. Instructions Grate the zucchini and drain all the water from them. The trick to do it correctly is to place a handful of the grated pieces in the center of a kitchen cloth, close it and then tighten it to get rid of all the juices. Place the dry pieces in a large ball. Add the onion, spring onion, dill, parsley, mint, feta and eggs in to the bowl. Season with salt and pepper (~ 1 tablespoon of each, maybe a bit more of pepper). Mix well. Preheat the oven at 180 degrees Celsius (360 F). Use a kitchen brush and spread the bottom and sides of a medium-large tray with olive oil. Place one filo sheet on the bottom making sure it sticks to the oiled walls of the tray. Spread some more olive oil on top of the first filo sheet and add the second one on top. Repeat the process until you layer a total of 6 sheets, making sure you oil each one of them. Add the mixture from the ball to the tray. Place the next 6 sheets of filo on the top, oiling each one of them. When you finish, fold the edges to make sure that the mixture is contained within the filo sheets. You may cut the excess parts. Use a knife and divide the pie in 4 parts by gently cutting it lengthwise. Spread some olive oil, sprinkle some water on the top and bake the pie for ~ 40 minutes until golden brown. Let the pie rest for ~ 20 minutes. You can serve it warm or at room temperature. Bon appetit! 3.5.3208
(Visited 3,321 times, 1 visits today)The framework of white privilege can be invoked with insight and subtlety, or with myopia and exaggeration; but either is a lot easier for white people to hear and to assimilate into their worldview if they’re college graduates who anticipate rewarding careers and stable family lives and mostly socialize with the similarly advantaged. They’re told that they ought to be thriving given their race … and they are thriving!
But imagine that you’re a white man from a working-class family who dropped out of college because you couldn’t swing the tuition. You worked construction, but that dried up—you’re presently unemployed, with child-support payments piling up, a sister addicted to pain pills, and a brother who is in jail again for felony drunk driving. You drive a beat up car with a broken turn signal that you can’t afford to fix. You get pulled over regularly, and you’re often harassed by the cops, who hate your tattoos. Would you identify with a coalition that alighted on white privilege as the center of its cultural outlook and that mostly disseminated that worldview through people with more educational, social, and financial capital than you’ll ever have?
Of course you wouldn’t. To do so would seem at odds with all the struggling white people in your familial and social circles. It would seem to imply that failing despite having all the advantages in the world makes you a special kind of loser. It would seem to focus on race to the exclusion of other hugely important factors. And as far as you can tell, when a white family gets their door kicked down and their dog shot in a drug raid, or when a white high school classmate of yours commits suicide, no one in the world of national media much cares.
Then you watch the DNC, where Michelle Obama, Cory Booker, Eva Longoria, and numerous other black and brown people who are much more successful than anyone you know take the stage. This needn’t feel threatening in and of itself to cause alienation. All it takes is being told that you’re the privileged one.
Given the family histories and life experiences of many black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters in the U.S., it’s totally understandable why a political coalition that emphasizes racial and ethnic identity as a source of struggle would resonate. It is understandable why Bernie Sanders’s laser focus on economics seemed inadequate.
And given the family histories and life experiences of many struggling white people without college degrees, it’s easy to see why a class explanation for what’s wrong with America would resonate far more in comparison. Little wonder that this latest incarnation of the Democratic Party has the most trouble with less educated whites, whether they’re right-leaning folks who prefer Donald Trump or Bernie-or-Bust folks.
Alongside the truth that no one single aspect of a person’s identity, whether class or race or a dozen factors besides, can be understood in isolation from all of the others, Democratic leaders this year correctly perceive that highlighting racial, ethnic, and gender diversity will win over a Rainbow coalition that includes college-educated whites.A Yakima County man is facing charges after court records say he pulled a gun on someone over an argument about littering on Friday. (Photo: Bridget Chapman, KIMA ACTION NEWS)
A Yakima County man is facing charges after court records say he pulled a gun on someone over an argument about littering on Friday.
Court records say Dennis McQuiston, 68, was eating outside a fast food restaurant in his car on Yakima Avenue when he got into an argument with someone else. The affidavit says McQuiston threw trash out his window and another man picked the trash up and threw it back into his car.
Records say the two argued about littering and then McQuiston pulled a gun on the man. McQuiston denied pointing the gun at the victim, but court records say a restaurant employee witnessed him doing so.
McQuiston faces assault charges. The victim is okay.(CBS) — Authorities are investigating a bomb threat to two elementary schools in northwest suburban Long Grove.
At 2:19 a.m. Saturday, someone called police and said he wanted to blow up Country Meadows Elementary School and Woodlawn Elementary School, both in the 6300 block of Gilmer Road in Long Grove, according to a statement from the Lake County sheriff’s office.
He also said he wanted to blow up police departments within a 50-mile radius, according to the sheriff’s office.
Deputies searched the areas around both schools and did not find anything suspicious, according to the statement. The sheriff’s K9 and his partner also conducted a search for explosives and did not find anything.
The school’s administrations were both notified, as well as surrounding police departments, according to the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff’s Criminal Investigation Division is continuing to investigate the threat but there is not believed to be any danger to the schools.
(Source: Sun-Times Media Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2016. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)For the latest edition of our “Great Cities” series, LIFE.com features classic photographs of that smallish, hilly gem by the Bay: San Francisco. For a town its size—with a population of 800,000, it has just a quarter as many people as, for example, Brooklyn—San Francisco holds a forceful grip on the imagination of people around the country and around the world.
From the legendary, wide-open debauchery of the Gold Rush years to the Beat poets of North Beach in the 1950s; the Haight-Ashbury era and the brief (over-romanticized) Summer of Love of the Sixties; the locavore restaurant revolution, which arguably started in the East Bay with Chez Panisse ; the unstoppable flowering of gay rights; the first stirrings of "maker culture" and the dawn of the Digital Age ( Wired magazine, etc.), San Francisco and environs have been at the center of countless movements and "isms" for more than a century and a half.
The pictures here document The City (as San Franciscans habitually call it) from the 1930s to the early 1970s—a handful of decades during which SF transformed itself as dramatically as any metropolis in America. Despite all the upheaval it's endured, however, San Francisco remains a singular place. It's at-once whimsical and tough, self-absorbed and endearing—a cultured, world-class city that retains some of its Wild West character, while harboring neighborhoods that feel like distinct, companionable hamlets.
So, let's celebrate a great American city. Whatever you do, though, do not call it "Frisco." San Franciscans young and old get weirdly worked up about that nickname. You've been warned.The few weak strings holding together US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace talks frayed further Tuesday as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made a surprise decision to boost the Palestinians’ stature outside of the peace process by signing on to 15 international agencies.
The move prompted the cancellation of Secretary of State John Kerry’s planned return to the region for talks with Mr. Abbas in Ramallah Wednesday – talks intended to reach a complicated deal for giving the soon-to-expire negotiations new life.
Speaking at the close of a NATO ministers meeting in Brussels Tuesday, Secretary Kerry said it was “completely premature tonight to draw any kind of … final judgment about today’s events and where things are.”
But it was clear that a plan in the works involving multiple parts – Israel’s release of Palestinian prisoners and at least a slowing of settlement construction, the Palestinians’ agreement to stick with peace talks into 2015, and even perhaps the release by the US of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard – was off, at least for now.
What Abbas’s action demonstrated was how fragile the talks are and how little real progress they have made since Kerry launched the process last summer. As he signed documents establishing Palestinian membership in 15 international agencies and conventions, including in areas such as women’s rights and children’s issues, Abbas said it was Israel’s failure to uphold its part of a deal setting up the talks that prompted his unilateral move.
At the outset of negotiations nearly nine months ago, Israel agreed to release 104 Palestinian prisoners in four groups over the life of the talks. In return, the Palestinian Authority agreed to refrain from acting unilaterally to seek international recognition of a Palestinian state, for example by adhering to United Nations’ institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Israel had proceeded with the first three releases but then balked at the fourth and final release, which was to have taken place Saturday. Abbas, under intense pressure from other Palestinian leaders and the public to stand up to Israel, said Israel’s failure to uphold its commitment released him from his.
Invoking the “rights” the Palestinians received when Palestine won “non-member observer status” in the United Nations in 2012, Abbas said, “We do not want to use this right against anybody or confront anybody,” be he added that “because we do not find ways for [a] solution, this becomes our right.”
Abbas left the door open to keeping the peace talks going after the end of April, when they are to expire. But he warned that Israel’s continued refusal to hold up its part of the original bargain could prompt him to proceed to sign on to the other 63 international agencies the Palestinians are eligible to join as a result of their UN status.
That threat is potentially more worrisome for Israel, since it could include Palestine’s membership in the ICC. There the Palestinians could seek to press cases against Israel, which international law says is occupying Palestinian territory, on everything from war crimes to human rights abuses.
The Palestinians “will continue our efforts to reach a peaceful solution through negotiations,” Abbas said – as long as Israel makes good on its commitment and releases the last group of prisoners.
Before departing Brussels for Washington, Kerry cautioned his audience of reporters not to assume that talks already seen to be on their last legs had just collapsed.
“President Abbas has given his word to me that he will keep his agreement and that he intends to negotiate through the end of the month of April,” Kerry said, emphasizing that “none” of the international agencies Abbas signed on to Tuesday “involve the UN.”
At the same time, Kerry appeared to hint that, just as some Israeli and Palestinian decisions concerning the talks’ future remained up in the air, so do some US decisions – in particular the one that would make the release of Mr. Pollard, a former navy intelligence analyst serving a life sentence since 1987 for spying on the US, part of a three-way deal.
“At this point in time, no agreement has been reached with respect to any prisoner,” Kerry said, noting that he had been in contact with the White House during the day. Any release of Pollard, a Jewish American granted Israeli citizenship in 1995, would be decided by President Obama.
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Many veterans of Middle East diplomacy were predicting even before the most recent setbacks that the initiative launched by Kerry last summer would fail. But Kerry insisted that both the Israelis and Palestinians had assured him Tuesday that “they want to continue to find a way forward,” and so he said the US would “continue to do our work.”
Skeptics would say that neither the Israelis nor Palestinians are ready to move forward, but that it boils down to neither of the two sides wanting to be held responsible by the US for the talks’ collapse. Still, Kerry insisted it was worth trying to resolve the standoff and pursue negotiations “because this matters – matters to the region, matters to the parties, matter to us, matters to the world.”Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a wide-ranging interview on "The Daily Briefing" Tuesday, with Fox News host Dana Perino broadcasting live from the George W. Bush Center in Dallas, Texas.
After weighing in on the Trump administration, North Korea and Iran, Rice offered her two cents on the current silencing of conservatives on college campuses - a topic she knows a little something about. Rice was invited to speak at the Rutgers University commencement in 2014, only to opt out after facing a swarm of student protests. She decided against speaking, she explained, so as not to distract graduates and families from what should be a "joyous celebration."
Rice, who is currently the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told Perino that shielding students from new ideas is not how she conducts business in her own classroom.
.@CondoleezzaRice on campus free speech: When people want to shout down a speaker or...disinvite a speaker, they're trying to silence debate pic.twitter.com/LZ0X065F9t — Fox News (@FoxNews) October 10, 2017
She's not about making students feel comfortable. In fact, she hopes for the opposite.
"I do tell my students from time to time it's not my job to make you comfortable," she said. "Actually it's my job to make you uncomfortable. Because you're only learning when you're stretching yourself and you're not with people exactly like you are."
It's inevitable you're going to run into some "jerks," she noted, but "you don't have a constitutional right not to be insulted."
The silencing of ideas, she concluded, is "not democracy."There are lots of ways to get Internet streaming TV networks, such as Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus, and Netflix. But the single best way is with a Roku.
Obviously, there are plenty of alternatives vying for your attention – and your hard-earned money. You can buy a Smart TV. But I've yet to find a Smart TV to which I can give a confident thumbs-up in regards to features and functionality; besides, they're expensive. You can also get cord-cutter TV with an Internet-enabled DVD player, such as the Sony BDP-S590 or a DVR like the TiVo Premiere, but you probably already have a perfectly good DVR and DVD-player. You could also consider an Apple TV or a WD TV Live Media Player. But if you are going to get just one device to watch Internet TV – and how many of us need more than that? – then a Roku is hard to beat.
Here are my five reasons why:
5. Price
Roku players are affordable. The prices start at $49.99 (list) for the Roku LT and go up to the top-of-the-line Roku 2 XS for $99.99. The LT model is the cheapest of all the mainstream Internet TV devices, but you still get access to all the TV channels. And it supports 720p HDTV.
4. Internet TV channel support
All the streaming box options support Netflix, but Roku supports more than 600 Internet TV channels. You name it, Roku supports it. Are you a horror, cult, fantasy, and exploitation movie fan? Check out Midnight Pulp. Want to know what's with technology? Check out Revision3. Like classic movies? Visit Movie Vault.
3. Support for Private TV channels
You expect the "regular" TV channels on one of these devices. You might be satisfied with the specialized channels. But Roku has another benefit: Besides the public networks, Roku lets people put up their own "private" channels, TV streams that aren't vetted by Roku. Adventuresome TV watchers can find just about anything on these channels. Some, like Nowhere TV, perhaps the best of the private channels, bring together a wide variety of free Internet videos, while others are for adults only.
2. Ease of use
Back in the bad-old days, which weren't that long ago, hooking your TV to the Internet was a nightmare.
Here's how you setup a Roku box today: You plug it in, you hook it into your network, you login to your channels, you start watching TV. With a Roku, anyone can do it.
Once you're connected, picking what shows to watch is mindlessly simple, whether you use the supplied remote or the Android or Apple iOS remote software. In stark contrast to what you get with Smart TVs and DVD players, the Roku on-screen display is both easy to view and to navigate.
1. Search
Most Internet TV streaming devices give you some kind of search facility, but Roku has the best search function. You can quickly and easily search for movies and TV shows across Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, Crackle, VUDU, and HBO GO by title, actors, or directors. Since one of your day-to-day Internet TV major annoyances is "Where the heck is that show!?" I can't understate just how valuable this feature is.
Put it all together and what do you get? With Roku, you get the best darn single Internet TV device available today. If you're going to have just one Internet TV media streamer, make it a Roku. You'll be glad you did.
Related Stories:In this post we’ll be discussing some of the things to look out for in 2014 if you’re a CS:GO fan, things like up and coming teams and the state of the game and where it is heading.
Before we begin, let me note that, while I try to provide logical reasons for, or back them up with statistics, this blog post is almost 100% personal opinions and speculation. I do not expect everyone to agree, and I encourage you to voice your own opinion or ideas either in the comments, on reddit or on social media.
War of the PUG services
The spring 2013 saw ESEA in a lot of trouble after their Bitcoin scandal, which caused alternative services to crop up, hoping to gain attention from the users that chose to boycott ESEA.
AltPug is an alternative created by Will ‘Tasky’ Graham and Matt ‘HowardDean’ Razza. It launched back in July 2013 and the founders has since been very active in updating the service and trying to increase its user base, and recent numbers indicate that they will be a serious competitor to ESEA during 2014 if they can find a way to create an active league system and create a self-sustaining business. One of their greatest benefits is that they have created their own client and anti-cheat, which gives them full control over their system. One of their key struggles going into 2014 will be to turn the service into a self-sustaining business.
Leetway is another PUG service based on EasyAntiCheat created by Joonas Vihavainen, who also created Legit-Proof.com, which launched in March 2013. Like AltPug, it’s a free alternative to ESEA, but seems to have found ways to finance the service using partnerships and advertising.
Founded in August 2011, Faceit is a gaming platform for multiple games, including CS:GO. Playing PUG games is free, but the service is based on a Freemium model with paying subscriptions that gives you benefits and additional features.
Quick Comparison
ESEA altPUG Leetway Faceit Price $6.95 / Month Free Free Freemium Users 16,000+(paying) 600,000+ (total) 15,000+ 30,000+ Unknown PUG Leagues Tournaments Ladder Anti-cheat Regions Supported NA,EU,SA NA,EU,SA,Asia,Oceania NA,EU,Oceania NA,EU
Teams
Teams to look out for in 2014
über G33KZ
The ex-Copenhagen Wolves has been a 3rd-4th place team for a long time now, but recent performances indicate this might change for the better, and soon. After bringing in Nico and Device, their recent play has shown some seriously inspired play, and fantastic individual performances. Some of their latest results include a 5th-8th place at the prestigious DreamHack Winter with wins against SK Gaming and Astana Dragons before going out to VeryGames in a very close series. The über G33KZ returned the favor by eliminating VeryGames from Fragbite Masters before ending on a 3rd-4th place in the tournament. They have also qualified for the ESEA Season 15 LAN Finals.
LGB eSports
This team is yet to win anything big, but keep taking maps and even games of the absolute top teams. Their recent trip to Dreamhack Winter saw them end up on 5th-8th place, winning games vs Na’Vi and Clan Mystik (ESWC champions), before loosing 1-2 to NiP. They also ended on 3rd-4th place in Fragbite Masters, beating amongst other top CIS team Astana Dragons. Other achievements of late is qualifying for the Star Ladder LAN finals and the ESEA Season 15 LAN Finals.
compLexity
A very impressive performance at Dreamhack Winter is really all we have to go on when it comes to Complexity. The team ended on a 3rd-4th place after winning against Astana Dragons and VeryGames in two nail-biting matches. Complexity has also qualified for the ESEA Season 15 LAN Finals, which will give them another chance to prove themselves in international competition. Was their DH performance just a fluke, or will we be seeing a lot more of the North American hope during 2014?
The big rivalries of 2014
NiP vs VeryGames
It’d be silly to mention a rivalry and not bring up NiP vs VeryGames, but lets have a look at the stats of this matchup Since September:
Date Tournament NiP VeryGames 30/11 DH:W 2 1 2/11 ESWC 0 2 27/10 EMS One 1 2 10/10 StarSeries VII 0 2 29/9 MSI Beat it! 0 2 22/9 StarSeries VII 1 0 14/9 DH Bucharest 2 0 11/9 EMS One 2 0 9/9 Faceit August 2 1 Total 10 10
On the whole, this shows that they’ve been incredibly even, however if we look date-wise, it is clear that VG has had the upper hand up lately (with the exception of DH).
NiP vs fnatic
This one is a bit less obvious than NiP vs VG. It’s basically gone from me considering this a rivalry, to fnatic loosing most of their momentum, to it recently cropping up again. It seems like fnatic have really found their missing piece in Pronax, and I can really recommend this article about their DreamHack run by Thorin. Again, let’s have a look at the recent stats between NiP and fnatic:
Date Tournament NiP fnatic 30/11 DH:W 1 2 11/10 Starseries VII 2 0 2/10 EMS One 1 0 23/9 StarSeries VII 1 0 14/9 DH Bucharest 0 1 9/9 Faceit August 2 0 4/9 EMS One 1 0 Total 8 3
As you can see, this is not as close as NiP vs VG, but this is definitely one to look out for, I expect Q1 2014 to be a lot closer.
Astana Dragons vs Na’Vi
As if 2 players going from Na’Vi to Astana Dragons wasn’t enough to make a rivalry, Edward going back to Na’Vi from AD makes things even more interesting. Both teams are probably very motivated to win their internal matchup. Let’s have a look at the stats:
Date Tournament AD Na’Vi 9/12 StarSeries VIII 1 0 16/11 Techlabs Cup(LB) 2 1 16/11 Techlabs Cup(UB) 1 2 18/9 EMS One 1 0 14/9 DH Bucharest 1 0 8/9 StarSeries VII 1 0 Total 7 3
Of course, only their latest game is with their new line-ups. This may not become the closest of the rivalries, but it’s definitely an interesting one.
Players
Hiko
Hiko has looked strong throughout the year and had a shining performance at DreamHack Winter. According to HLTV.org he’s on a 1.32 K/D ratio (one of the highest) so far in CS:GO and if his team (compLexity) can keep up with him, we’ll probably be seeing a lot of him during 2014. However, if something were to happen to compLexity, or they can not continue on their DreamHack Winter form, Hiko may unfortunately become a great player on a mediocre team, given the current state of the NA scene.
Olofmeister
Being in the direct opposite situation to Hiko, Olofmeister isn’t dependent on the success of his team to have a great 2014. While LGB is a very promising team, Olofmeister has performed well on several teams, and the Swedish / European scene is filled with promising teams, and it’d be much easier for him to find one that is a good fit to his playstyle and personality. Olomeister has a K/D ratio of 1.2 and he’s definitely a player to look out for during 2014.
The game itself
It’s of course impossible to predict how the game will evolve during 2014, and because of this, I will give it a shot anyway. There’s one thing we can use to predict the direction the game is taking, and that’s looking at previous patches. What does Valve hope to achieve with the patches? What does this tell us by the way the game is meant to be played?
F2P
Is CS:GO going F2P? If you ask me, it’s obvious that CS:GO is heading in this direction, but Valve is not stupid. They won’t make the game F2P before they have a good way to ensure that the game stays free of cheaters. Which brings me to my next point:
Anti-Cheat
2014 will likely see several improvements in the anti-cheat area. Valve is not blind to the problem with cheaters, and has already confirmed this with Overwatch, which is currently in beta. If I would have to speculate, I’d wager we’ll see one of the following during 2014:
Item drops and other encouragements in Overwatch A larger update to VAC A new anti-cheat system
Map diversity
Given that almost every patch has seen tweaks to maps, new maps, or map packages, it’s clear that Valve wants to have a high map diversity, and refresh the game, so we don’t keep playing the same maps like in previous CS iterations. Great examples of how they’re trying to do this is their map remakes (cbble & mirage), Overpass as well as Operation Payback and Bravo. We’ll definitely be seeing more of this in 2014.
Grenades
Grenades are obviously a huge part of the game, and so thinks valve. During the year we’ve seen numerous tweaks not only to the grenades themselves, but also to skyboxes of maps, to encourage the use of clever grenades in strategies. I think it’s reasonable to expect that Valve will keep pushing grenades into becoming a vital part of any strategy. Wether this is through map design, changes to the grenades themselves (unlikely) or simply through the meta evolving on its own, remains to be seen.
Watch menu & Demos
Valve has stated that they are continuously working on improving the demos feature, and it’s obvious that the watch menu is getting a lot of love. Expect the watch menu to become more and more like it’s DOTA 2 counter-part during 2014.
Increased Tournament Support
Valve obviously aren’t blind to the effect that DreamHack: Winter had on CS:GO. Here’s a few things that you can almost be certain to see in 2014:
“Watch”-menu integration for every (major) tournament In-game casters (Like in DOTA2) More community-funded tournaments (most likely one per quarter)
Team Matchmaking
At DreamHack, there was a picture which caught a glimpse of the tournament system they used, which allowed entire teams to get into a lobby and queue for a match against each other. While a lot of the stuff in the picture also suggested that this was a very “hardcoded” and alpha-mode (the feature was probably rushed out for DreamHack), this is almost a certain sign that Team matchmaking will be coming to CS:GO, a move that makes sense. And with the technology almost there already, I think you wouldn’t be crazy to expect this feature in the earlier part of 2014.
func_vehicle
Valve gives no sign of this vital feature, and all previous patches makes it clear that valve despises func_vehicle and has no plans to re-implement the most important feature in the game. Sorry to dissapoint all the func_vehicle fans out there, but this feature most likely won’t be coming in 2014.
Chickens
Chickens are here to stay. We’ll see a lot more variations on the chickens during 2014. Sure sources indicate that Valve is planning some of the following chicken variations:
Leprechaun chicken for St. Patrick’s Day Turkeys for Thanksgiving Dragon-chickens for Chinese new year Chicken-chickens for easter
AdvertisementsSheena Bora, whose murder three years ago, is the only headline India has had for the last three days, was active on LinkedIn. Until two weeks ago. At least, that is what her profile, a screenshot of which is shown here, says on the professional networking site. Read: Indrani was molested by her stepfather, reveals Vir Sanghvi
Sheena's mother, Indrani, is said to have used her phone and other communication tools for over a year. She allegedly even sent a break-up text message using Sheena's phone to her boyfriend and husband Peter Mukerjea's younger son, Rahul.
Indrani is also accused of emailing Sheena's resignation letter to Reliance ADAG, where the 24-year-old worked as a Human Resources Manager, days after her murder on April 24, 2012.
Indrani, along with alleged fellow conspirators - former husband Sanjeev Khanna and driver Shyam Rai - is currently in police custody with their interrogation directly being conducted by Mumbai Commissioner of Police Rakesh Maria.
Sheena's remains were found in the jungles of Raigad in Maharashtra on Friday and sent for DNA identification. The JJ Hospital in Mumbai had also preserved some of her bones.WASHINGTON In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.
Under the tutelage of a friend known to the Tsarnaev family only as Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family told The Associated Press. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world.
Bombing suspect's uncle: "He put a shame on the family"
Russia's connection with Boston bomber
"Somehow, he just took his brain," said Tamerlan's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, who recalled conversations with Tamerlan's worried father about Misha's influence. Efforts over several days by The Associated Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.
Tamerlan's relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the attack itself. Two U.S. officials |
PTQ going into the last round was in July 2013 where I went 8-0 at the worst run PTQ I’ve ever attended, only to be bumped in the quarters by one of the most amazing mulligans to four that I have ever seen. All gripes aside, the single elimination nature of the PTQ had had me frustrated and I considered my relative success at GPs to be based in the longer nature of the tournament allowing you to lose one to variance and one to your own foolishness while still being alive for the elimination rounds. Still, none of this really truly matters, unless you’re running on the high side of average.
The last old style Melbourne PTQ was my chance to run hot, play mediocre and stay focused. I was rewarded handsomely for deviating from my normally stubborn deck selection, made a few dicey decisions and managed to keep my head in the game after misplaying my way to one of the more idiotic losses of my Magic career. For those who are not intimately familiar with the story, I received a match loss in round four for offering unsolicited outside assistance to a friend, as he was sitting down to his match next to me. It was dumb and unsporting of me – I got called up on it and owned my mistake. I am most grateful that the punishment got changed from DQ to Match Loss not too long ago (thanks infraction penalty guidelines!) and also very thankful that my friend was not punished since he was entirely innocent in the whole affair.
In a shocking transgression of justice, I would go on to not lose another match that day and was suddenlyburdened with the knowledge that I had checked that ‘life goal’ box again. I am sure you all feel terribly bad for me and I appreciate your sympathy at such a tough time.
All jokes aside, life is not all Magic, free travel and rainbows. The Bruce Wayne to my Magical Batman is in his third (and quasi-final) year of a PhD in Chemistry. This is a full-time commitment, but one that I have historically treated with less than maximum effort. Magic occupies a treacherous role in my life, often (read: nearly always) taking precedent over my studies, and quite frankly I am incredibly fortunate to have made it to this level in my field without truly dedicating myself to the craft. This is not sustainable. At dinner after my PTQ win, I was talking to Justin Cheung and some others from interstate about things and I had the scary realisation that I know more about Magic than I do about the field in which I am eventually going to receive my doctorate. Now, I know a lot about Magic (and I mean a LOT), so there is still hope for my scientific career, but it is not exactly something that I am comfortable with. Something has got to give, and this time it’s Magic’s turn.
After this Pro Tour, I will be stepping away from Magic for a bit. I won’t be completely absent, I’ll still be involved with this site and I foresee great things in its future. What I won’t be doing is trying to qualify for the Pro Tour for the next little while, there are barely enough hours in the day to be a good research scientist, worthwhile boyfriend and semi-functional human-being without trying to slap Pro Tour wannabe in front of it all.
Some people have asked me what I will do if I do well in Brussels, but I can honestly say at this point that I would more than likely let my qualification expire. The Pro Tour will always be there but I only have one realistic shot at making you all call me Doctor Robertson and I fully intend to take advantage of it.
It’s been a fun ride and I appreciate everyone who’s been in it with me over the years. Trust me when I say that I’ll be back. No one ever really quits.
CommentsHillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee violated campaign finance law by failing to disclose payments for a dossier on Donald Trump, according to a complaint filed Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.
The complaint from the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center said the Democrats effectively hid the payments from public scrutiny, contrary to the requirements of federal law. By law, campaign and party committees must disclose the reason money is spent and its recipient.
“By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures,” said Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation and strategy at CLC and a former FEC official. “Voters need campaign disclosure laws to be enforced so they can hold candidates accountable for how they raise and spend money. The FEC must investigate this apparent violation and take appropriate action.”
SPECIAL COVERAGE: Top 20: The most read Washington Times stories in 2018
Media reports on Tuesday alleged that a lawyer for the Clinton campaign hired Fusion GPS to investigate Mr. Trump in April 2016. The private research firm reportedly hired Christopher Steele, a former British spy with ties to the FBI, to conduct the opposition research, and he compiled a dossier containing allegations about Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC funded the effort until the end of October 2016, just days before the election.
“Questions about who paid for this dossier are the subject of intense public interest, and this is precisely the information that FEC reports are supposed to provide,” said Brendan Fischer, director of federal and FEC reform at CLC. “Payments by a campaign or party committee to an opposition research firm are legal, as long as those payments are accurately disclosed. But describing payments for opposition research as ‘legal services’ is entirely misleading and subverts the reporting requirements.”
SEE ALSO: The Democrats’ ‘dossier’Reposted from Academia.edu. I originally wrote this biography when I was working at the Maryland State Archives for the Finding the Maryland 400 project.
Barton Lucas, a captain of the Third Company of the First Maryland Regiment, was born, according to some sources, in 1730, in Prince George’s County. His father was Thomas Lucas and mother Anne Keene. Barton had four siblings named Basil, Margaret, Thomas, and Sarah. [1]
Lucas served in the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763) which had Britain, France and indigenous people as combatants, resulting in transfer of northern parts of America and Canada from France to Britain. [2] In 1758, he signed on as a cadet, a military officer in waiting, in Joshua Bell’s Company and he soon was a ensign in Captain Alexander Beall’s Maryland Company, for which he received modest pay. [3] Maryland troops fought at the battle of Fort Duquesne in September of that year, joined by South Carolinian troops, to fend off indigenous attacks, but the English were defeated and Marylanders covered their retreat. [4] During these military engagements, Lucas was injured. [5]
In 1762, Lucas married Priscilla Sprigg, whose last name changed to Lucas after their marriage. His “beloved wife” Priscilla, “Prisey,” was born in 1735 to Osborn Sprigg, a Maryland legislator, and Rachel Belt, and was one of five siblings. [6] In 1756, Lucas’s father died, willing 112 acres and his plantation to Lucas. [7] In the 1750s and 1760s, Barton bought and sold enslaved blacks for his plantation. [8]
During the Revolutionary War, Lucas, a prominent community figure and combat veteran, served in the military. He was recommended as a field officer to a Battalion “on the upper part of the Patuxent” in 1775, however, he likely never served in this capacity since he was chosen in January of the next year as a Captain of the Third Company of Col. William Smallwood‘s Maryland Battalion. [9] In the summer of 1776, this Maryland regiment marched to New York and was put under the command of Gen. George Washington.
At the Battle of Brooklyn, the First Maryland Regiment, especially companies led by Lucas, Daniel Bowie, Peter Adams, Benjamin Ford, and Edward Veazey, later called the Maryland 400, held off the British while the rest of the Continental Army escaped Long Island to safety. While Lucas’s company played a key role in the Battle of Brooklyn, on August 27, 1776 with sixty percent of his company killed, Lucas was ill and could not participate in the battle itself. [10] John Hughes, a private in his company, said years later that “Capt. Barton Lucas became deranged in consequence of losing his company.” Still listed as ill, after the battle, Lucas was returned home and later resigned on October 11, 1776. However, Lucas rejoined the military as a colonel in the Prince George’s County Militia from 1777-1778. [11]
After his military service, Lucas settled down to his plantation in Prince George’s County. Existing records show that enslaved blacks, plantation tools, and farm animals were part of his overall property. [12] At his death, sometime between April 8, 1784 and May 16, 1785, in Prince George’s County, he was still called a colonel and much of his property value consisted of enslaved blacks. [13]
– Burkely Hermann, Maryland Society of the Sons of American Revolution Research Fellow, 2016.
Notes
[1] Will of Thomas Lucas, 1765, Prerogative Court, Wills, Liber BT2, p. 114, MdHR 1308-1. [MSA S538-44, 1/11/01/038].
[2] John Frost, Pictorial Life of General Washington: Embracing a Complete History of the Seven Years War, the Revolutionary War, The Formation of the Federal Constitution, and the Administration of Washington (Philadelphia: Lery, Getz & Co., 1860), 52, 65, 106.
[3] Letter to George Washington from Captain Nathaniel Ewing, 9 March 1779. Founders Online. National Archives; Orderly Book, 10 November 1758. Founders Online. National Archives; Letter to George Washington from Robert Stewart, 25 February 1762. Founders Online. National Archives; Archives of Maryland, vol. 61, pp. 392; Archives of Maryland vol. 59, pp. 54, 159, 170, 173, 196-7, and 251; “French and Indian War: Roster of Maryland Troops, 1757-1759 [Calvert Papers].” Maryland Historical Magazine 5, no. 3 (1910): 281; Maryland State Papers (Scharf Collection). 1759-1801. Certification of military service on the frontier [2/19/1767]. S1005 [MSA S1005-57-2, 1/8/5/44].
[4] Joshua Dorsey Warfield, The founders of Anne Arundel and Howard Counties, Maryland: A genealogical and biographical review from wills, deeds and church records (Baltimore: Kohn & Pollack, 1905), 213; “French and Indian War: Roster of Maryland Troops, 1757-1759 [Calvert Papers],” Maryland Historical Magazine 5, no.3, (1910): 272; Mary K. Meyer, “Genealogica Marylandia: MARYLAND MUSTER ROLLS 1757-1758.” Maryland Historical Magazine 70, no. 2 (1975): 225; Mary K. Meyer, “Genealogica Marylandia: MARYLAND MUSTER ROLLS 1757-1758.” Maryland Historical Magazine 70, no. 1 (1975): 107.
[5] Archives of Maryland vol. 61, page 392.
[6] Effie G. Bowie, Across the Years in Prince George’s County: Genealogical and Biographical History of Some Prince George’s County, Maryland and Allied Families (Richmond: Garrett and Massie, Inc., 1947), 595; “Sprigg Family,” Maryland Historical Magazine. 8 (1913): 80; Edward C. Papenfuse, Alan F. Day, David W. Jordan, and Gregory A. Stiverson. “Sprigg, Osborn.” A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635-1789. Vol. 2: I-Z (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 763; Special Collections, Legislative History Project Collection, Osborn Sprigg (ca. 1741-1815) [MSA SC 1138-001-1160/1177, 2/11/12/72]; Prince George’s County Court, Land Records, 1765, Liber TT, p. 0338-9 [MSA CE65-19, accessed via MDLANDREC.NET].
[7] Will of Thomas Lucas, 1765, Prerogative Court, Wills, Liber BT2, pp. 114, MdHR 1308-1. [MSA S538-44, 1/11/01/038].
[8] Will of Thomas Lucas, 1765, Prerogative Court, Wills, Liber BT2, pp. 114, MdHR 1308-1. [MSA S538-44, 1/11/01/038]; Prince George’s County Court, Land Records, 1765, Liber TT, p. 0338-9 [MSA CE65-19, accessed via MDLANDREC.NET]; Prince George’s County Court, Land Records, 1759, Liber PP, p. 0093, 0144, 0321-2 [MSA CE65-17, accessed via MDLANDREC.NET]; Prince George’s County Court, Land Records, 1772, Liber BB 3, p. 0068, 0085 [MSA CE65-22, accessed via MDLANDREC.NET]; Prince George’s County Court, Land Records, 1775, Liber CC 2, p. 0135 [MSA CE65-23, accessed via MDLANDREC.NET].
[9] “Muster Rolls and Other Records of Service of Maryland Troops in the American Revolution,” Archives of Maryland vol. 18, pp. 9; Archives of Maryland vol. 78, pp. 67 and 93; Archives of Maryland vol. 12, pp. 16; Archives of Maryland vol. 11, 92, 169, and 406.
[10] Fragments of letter of an Unknown Patriot Soldier (September 1, 1776), The Sprit of ‘Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants (ed. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris. New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 440 [0/60/3/35]. Fully reprinted in Henry Onderdonk, Revolutionary Incidents of Suffolk and Kings Counties (New York: Levitt & Company, 1849), 147-8.
[11] “Muster Rolls and Other Records of Service of Maryland Troops in the American Revolution.” Archives of Maryland vol. 18, pp. 333; Archives of Maryland vol. 16, pp. 532.
[12] Prince George’s County Commissioners of the Tax, Assessment Record, Rock Creek Hundred, personal property, MdHR 40220-24 [MSA C1162-10, 1/21/10/011]; Will of Barton Lucas, Prince George’s County, Register of Wills, Administration Bonds, October 1785, MdHR 9791 [MSA C1146-4, 1/25/08/003].
[13] At her death in October 1785, Priscilla’s will listed one enslaved black woman and named her next of kin. Will of Priscilla Lucas, Prince George’s County Register of Wills, Administration Bonds, October 1785, MdHR 9791 [MSA C1146-4, 1/25/08/003]; Inventories of Precilla Lucas and Col. Barton Lucas, Prince George’s County Register of Wills, Inventories, Liber ST, pp. 337-40, MdHR 9799 [MSA C1228-9, 1/25/09/001]; Prince George’s County Register of Wills, Administration Accounts, 1791, Liber ST 1, p. 376, MdHR 9805 [MSA C1144-4, 1/25/10/015]; Prince George’s County Register of Wills, Administration Accounts, Liber ST 2, p. 6, MdHR 18865 [MSA C1144-6, 1/25/10/017]; Will of Barton Lucas, 1784, Prince George’s County Register of Wills, Wills, Liber T1, p. 216, MdHR 9725-1 [MSA C1326-3, 1/25/07/004]
AdvertisementsAmitabh Bachchan, in his response to reports on Panama papers, said: Monies that I have remitted overseas have been in compliance with law.
Highlights 'Don't know any of the companies mentioned', says Amitabh Bachchan Bachchan's statement says the media report suggests no illegality by him 500 Indians named in the leak, allegedly used tax havens to hide wealth
Megastar Amitabh Bachchan, named in what has been dubbed the Panama Papers - a massive leak of tax documents on offshore companies and accounts of the rich and the powerful - said today that his name may have been "misused"."I do not know any of the companies referred to by Indian Express - Sea Bulk Shipping Company Ltd, Lady Shipping Ltd, Treasure Shipping Ltd, and Tramp Shipping Ltd. I have never been a director of any of the above stated companies. It is possible that my name has been misused," Mr Bachchan said in his statement The 73-year-old actor added: "I have paid all my taxes including on monies spent by me overseas. Monies that I have remitted overseas have been in compliance with law... after paying Indian taxes. In any event the news report in Indian Express does not even suggest any illegality on my part."Mr Bachchan's daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai, who was also named, has also rejected the documents.Her media adviser on Monday called the documents "totally untrue and false".Ms Rai Bachchan was director and shareholder of an offshore company, along with members of her family, before it was thought to have been wound up in 2008, according to the Indian Express.The report said 500 Indians are among those holding offshore accounts in the tax haven of Panama.As with many of the people named in the documents, there is no evidence offered that the Bollywood A-listers used their companies for improper purposes, and having an offshore entity is not illegal. The Express is among more than 100 media groups which have investigated the 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm with offices in 35 countries.Considering a lot of the time the spotlight tends to fall on New York City, it’s always nice when an area or city other than the Big Apple gets recognized for its greatness. Last week, Travel + Leisure came out with their list of America’s Favorite Cities and to little surprise, more than one New York location ended up making it’s way onto the list. Giving you the perfect excuse to pack your bags and head towards this one amazing area of our state, here are just a few reasons why you should consider moving to the city of Rochester.
1. Even in Rochester's urban setting, you'll still be within arm's reach of New York's natural wonders. David D/TripAdvisor Oftentimes when you make the move to the big city you have to trade in Mother Nature for the Concrete Jungle. But with a city like Rochester? That isn't exactly the case. Most people know that from many places in town you can get a beautiful view of this 96-foot tall waterfall, but it isn't the only natural wonder nearby. Aside from checking out High Falls right in the heart of the city, you can visit outdoor spaces like Turning Point Park and other nature trails in the area.
2. The education. Ryan Hyde/Flickr An area of New York that lots of our high school residents will head towards after graduating, the city of Rochester is home to popular colleges like the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester.
3. Even with a population of roughly 209,000 residents, Rochester continuously proves to be a tight-knit community. Yelp Inc./Flickr One of the things that you'll frequently hear people talking about when it comes to discussing why they love living in this city is the fact that things are very friendly and tight-knit. Being one of New York's largest cities, it's big population may initially intimidate you. But once you make Rochester your home you'll quickly realize that everyone likes to know everyone here and we're really quite a friendly bunch!
4. Housing is affordable. Keith Ewing/Flickr While the thought of living in a big city might have your pockets feeling like they're stretched already, Rochester isn't an area that will completely drain you of your savings when it comes to finding housing. All throughout the city you can find affordable options when it comes to setting down your roots and making this place your home.
5. It's a great place to raise your family. gardener41/Flickr Set aside the fact that Rochester's youngest residents could spend all day, every day running rampant at the Strong National Museum of Play with smiles on their faces, there's also plenty of other reasons why this city is great to raise a family. Bring in other factors that we've talked about like affordable housing and great education, and then combine it with the fact that even Forbes named it as one of the Best Places To Raise A Family back in 2010, and you'll soon start to see why this is the perfect city for your family.
6. There's always something to do here. Rochester Fringe Festival/Facebook While almost every city in New York has that lively factor that you'll instantaneously feel once you arrive, Rochester is a city that consistently gives you activities and festivals that will keep you busy right here at home. Throughout the year people from all over come to check out Rochester's Lilac Festival that's held in the spring and their beloved Fringe Festival.
7. The city doesn't get the most snow in New York, but it will get covered in just enough to allow you to have some good old fun. Brian Dewey/Flickr While a city like Syracuse generally sees over 100 inches of snow per year on average, places like Rochester will see roughly an average of 80 inches pear year. We may sometimes have to deal with lake-effect snow storms and the winter weather that comes along with being in Wester New York. But we promise you, it won't take long for you to start embracing the cold and fresh powder!
8. Jobs, jobs, jobs! Ryan Hyde/Flickr When you're moving to a new place one of the scariest transitions can be finding a new job. Luckily for new transplants coming to the city of Rochester, you'll be glad to hear that this area has been known for having plenty of job opportunities.
9. There aren't enough kind words to describe how amazing our food scene is. Michael Sauers/Flickr When a city produces a dish such as the Garbage Plate, you know that everything else you'll find here is nothing short of greatness. Unique dishes like this, classic Mom & Pop restaurants and new modern spots all around Rochester will keep your belly rumbling and ready to try out everything there is to eat in sight!
10. The city is home to New York's oldest brewery. Patrick Haney/Flickr After figuring out where the best places to eat are, you might want to seek out where it is exactly that you can grab a good drink. Giving you a prime view of High Falls, the Genesee Brew House in Rochester is one of America's largest and continually operated breweries. Operating since 1878, this place is a favorite spot to check out in town.
11. WEGMANS! Ashti D./Yelp Oh Wegmans, how our hearts sing for you! With Wegmans' roots beginning out in Rochester and their headquarters still here in the city, residents around this area of New York have an extra soft spot for this grocery store. Another reason why we love Wegmans so much? They're one of the top employers in Rochester. Yay for jobs!Britain and other allies are considering recalling diplomats from Tel Aviv, after Israel announced defiant plans to build 3,000 new settler homes on occupied Palestinian land. Like a spoiled child, mad-man Netanyahu made the decision in retaliation for Palestine being granted a measly non-member status at the UN last week.
Daniel Taub, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, was “formally summoned” to the Foreign Office this morning to discuss the best way to proceed with Alistair Burt, the minister for the Middle East. If Britain’s envoy is pulled out of Israel it will be an unprecedented step, and a sign that even Zionist supporters are starting to think Netanyahu’s regime is going too far.
Mr Burt said a decision about whether Matthew Gould, the British ambassador to Israel would be withdrawn, can only be made following a round of talks: “Any decision about any other measures the UK might take will depend on the outcome of our discussions with the Israeli government and with international partners including the US and European Union.”[1]
A Foreign Office spokesman confirmed that Britain considers Israel’s decision to further breach international law deplorable. The move is being considered an act of defiance, especially after Britain sided with Israel over the recent escalation in Gaza.
Even the US are having second thoughts about supporting Israel’s crimes. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor spoke of America’s “opposition to the settlements and East Jerusalem construction and announcements.”[2]
Netanyahu plans to erect 3,000 new Jewish homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention and international laws recognised by the UN, European Union and Arab League. If the building goes ahead it will effectively isolate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and divide northern and southern halves of the region. Strategically this will segment the Palestinian people, further extinguishing any hope they have for an autonomous state.
Furthermore Israel announced on Sunday that it would withhold £75 million in tax revenues from the Palestinian Authority, for no other reason than because they can. The Israeli finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, told Israel Radio: “I do not intend this month to transfer the funds to the Palestinians. In the coming period I intend to use the money to deduct debts the PA owes to the Israel Electric Corporation and other bodies.”[3]
Despite the public show of opposition, whether Israel will actually face repercussions is unlikely. The international community acknowledge that Israel are legally in the wrong for many of their actions, but the UN have never implemented measures to expel Jewish settlers nor prevent further encroachment of Palestinian land. Unlike peace-keeping missions and humanitarian interventions that support the expansion of the Anglo-American empire, “liberating” the Palestinians is not considered beneficial. So while Palestine is technically considered the victim, nobody actually bothers to do anything about it.
This hypocrisy has never been more apparent than with the voting of Palestine’s non-member status itself. The illustrious position grants Palestine the right to sit and watch what happens in the UN but not to actually take part, while Israel and it’s sister America bully the rest of the world.
In other words the international body that agrees Israel is breaking the law and Palestine are a victim, recognize the criminal as a member but not the victim. And the criminal leader Netanyahu has vowed to further break the law because the victim has been granted to the right to sit and watch from the sidelines.
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said Palestine came to the UN “because it believes in peace and because its people, as proven in past days, are in desperate need of it.”[4]
Unless the UN act on their condemnation of Israel, the Palestinians will not get that peace.BRUSSELS, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Cyprus is likely to successfully complete its bailout programme and receive the last tranche of international aid by the end of March, a senior euro zone official said on Wednesday, a move expected to lower the country’s borrowing costs.
The European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund agreed in 2013 a three-year rescue plan of 10 billion euros ($11 billion) for the Mediterranean island after its financial sector collapsed because of its exposure to the Greek economy.
“I am quite confident that prior actions will be fulfilled before the end of the programme and that therefore the disbursement will actually take place,” the official said before Thursday’s regular meeting of euro zone finance ministers that is due to discuss the Cyprus programme.
However, for the remaining 400 million euros to be released, Cyprus needs to finalise a reform that would reduce the amount of bad loans on banks’ balance sheets, start the privatisation of the state telecoms company, and begin the separation of the electricity utility into two entities, the official said.
“It is an important signal that you exit in a clear manner from the programme. It facilitates significantly accessing markets,” the official said. (Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; Editing by Jan Strupczewski and Louise Ireland)Infants can acquire 'good' gut bacteria in their first three months of life that may protect them from asthma
Babies who have acquired four key bacteria in their gut by the age of three months may be protected against asthma, a new study suggests.
The finding by Canadian researchers, published today in Science Translational Medicine, could lead to tests to identify babies most at-risk of developing asthma and even inoculations to prevent its onset.
The study also adds weight to the "hygiene hypothesis" that suggests an obsession with clean home environments has fuelled a dramatic rise in asthma rates across western societies since the 1950s.
For the study the researchers analysed stool samples collected at age three months and one year of 319 children participating in the larger Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) study.
The study showed lower levels of four specific gut bacteria - Faecalibacterium, Lachnospira, Veillonella and Rothia - in three-month-olds who were later found to be at an increased risk for asthma.
[The study] shows there's a short, maybe 100-day window for giving babies therapeutic interventions to protect against asthma. Professor Stuart Turvey
However, differences in levels of these bacteria were negligible by the time children reached one year, meaning the first three months were the critical time period for a baby's developing immune system.
"It shows there's a short, maybe 100-day window for giving babies therapeutic interventions to protect against asthma," said study lead co-author Professor Stuart Turvey, Pediatrics Professor at the University of British Columbia.
However, Professor Turvey, a former Australian Rhodes Scholar, said while the finding was significant there was still much to learn about the bacteria, nicknamed FLAVR.
Potential for probiotic treatments
Professor Turvey said most babies naturally acquired the FLAVR bacteria from their environments, but they were unsure why they would not be in equal levels in some babies.
"These are not particularly well-characterised bacteria so we are not exactly sure where they come from," Professor Turvey said.
"We are trying to understand which bits of the FLAVR are important and if it could possibly be safe to give that to children."
As part of the study, the researchers replicated the work in mice and found an inoculation of FLAVR in newborn mice helped protect them against developing asthma.
This suggested long term they could develop some "probiotic-style treatment" for children that would prevent the onset of asthma, he said.
Professor Turvey said it was likely the first outcome of the study would be to develop a marker for children at the highest risk of asthma.
"In the first couple of months we could test their stool and test for the presence of FLAVR," he said.
He said the study also highlighted the importance of "prudent" use of antibiotics in very young children as the study confirmed previous work that showed a link between antibiotic use in the first year and asthma.
'We need to change our relationship with bacteria'
He also said the study might reveal the mechanism behind the "hygiene hypothesis".
"This idea that exposure to infections in early life protects from asthma and allergic disease has mostly been through epidemiology," he said, pointing to studies of children with pets and those who lived on farms.
"This shows that a likely mechanism for that protection is through the bacteria that children house in their gut."
Professor Turvey said the study showed "we need to change our relationship with bacteria".
"We co-evolved and they are really important for our health as well," he said.
The team was now working with researchers in Ecuador who have a study similar to the Canadian CHILD study to see if the findings can be replicated in another population.Earlier this week, we asked you to submit questions for American Dad showrunner Matt Weitzman, and submit you did. Below, the best of the bunch, plus Weitzman’s mostly jokey answers. This post is sponsored by American Dad, which starts its TBS run on October 20.
1. How do you think the show has managed to avoid writing Hayley off as a
lesser character than her brother, when this is often the case for the
daughters on an animated show? - I’m In Tech
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Matt Weitzman: Well, Hayley is played by Seth’s sister, Rachael. If we treated her like a lesser character, he’d fire us.
2. Dear Mr Weitzman, Are there any ideas you had for characters or episodes that for whatever reason couldn’t be worked into the show?
MW: We’ve actually used every idea that’s ever been pitched for the show. Two hundred episodes is a lot. We’re kind of running out of ideas. Do you have any ideas? We need ideas!
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3. “Tears Of A Clooney” was the episode when I realized this show was
something different, that it would go all the way down any crazy damn
rabbit hole it wanted. Was there a particular moment in the development of the show where a conscious decision was made that continuity could just go fuck itself? If so, which episode was most closely associated with that decision? - Lorne H, Winnipeg
MW: Lorne, I have no clue what you are talking about. Point out one time, one time when our continuity wasn’t perfect. Continuity could “go fuck itself”?! You could go fuck itself!
4. Steve’s love of’ 90s R&B is a big part of his personality, and one
of the best parts of the show. How did that character trait come about?
It’s so specific, which makes it funnier, IMO.
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MW: Due to a bad marriage and a prescription drug issue, I have no recollection of anything after the ’90s. So, that’s all we’ve got. No, honestly, the ’90s music seeps into our scripts because it’s all we listen to at work. ’Cause we can only write when we’re hard.
5. When you started out, you had to fight the impression that American Dad! was just a Family Guy clone. When do you think the show solidified its own creative approach? And when did audiences catch on that you were doing something different? - Andrew R.
MW: It never bothered me when people compared us to Family Guy. Deep in my heart I always knew we were an All In The Family clone. With some Alf mixed in. As for when things solidified, maybe after the first Golden Turd. At that point, we all knew we were doing something different. Just being willing to take time out to become a Noir suspense drama for three minutes in the middle of a cartoon comedy spoke volumes. I don’t think it was until we started repeating on Cartoon Network when people started paying more attention. Wait, did I just answer a question for real?
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6. Hi! I was wondering if we will ever get to meet Francine’s hot sister Gwen? Thanks! - Audrey
MW: Hey, Audrey, try Googling it. It’s all over the Internet.
7. The new season of the show on TBS has been advertised as “edgier” than before. But I’ve always thought that the show’s biggest assets are its inventiveness and heart, not its “edginess.” I’m a little worried that we’re just going to get more dick jokes. Should I be? - John R.
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MW: John, what happened in your life that these are your worries? Do you not have a family? A pet? Do me a favor and search for “Ebola.” Now, I’m gonna go suck my own dick. P.S. we can show that now.
8. Do you ever worry about running out of personas for Roger? How do you develop them? Do you usually have a real-life person in mind, or do you just concoct what you need to fit the story? Thanks! - Caitlin
MW: What is with you people and worrying? I worry about my 401k. I worry about if my Tesla will arrive by my birthday. I worry about if the girl raising my child is qualified. Roger personas? Uh… hypochondriac cowboy. Absentminded volleyball coach. See, it’s easy. I can do this all day. No, that’s not true. Believe it or not, every Roger persona is based on someone in your life. Your life, Caitlin. We love you. We’ve been watching you. But if you could do us a solid, make more friends this year.
9. Even though the characters don’t age, the show hasn’t been afraid to make changes to the Smith family structure over time, most notably with the whole Jeff Fischer saga. But are there any major “sacred cows” that you
just won’t tamper with? - William, L.A.
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MW: We have made an effort to not go to Roger’s planet. Or to have his people appear on Earth. We’ve tried to keep him special and unique. Maybe if there’s ever a movie that’s where we’ll go. There. I gave two real answers.
10. Who’s the best guest star you’ve worked with on the show—and, if you’re willing to say, the worst? - Brian
MW: As long as they don’t walk out of the sound booth in the middle of the record and make me feel like an incompetent idiot, causing me to doubt my abilities to direct actors for the next three years, they’re great in my book! Who’s the worst? Ted Levine.
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11. What’s your favorite piece of fan art in this often-frightening DeviantArt
gallery devoted to American Dad!? - A Fan.
MW: It’s so difficult. They’re all so good. If I had to pick, it would be one of the ones I can’t access from |
25 alec125: just 1 20:30:32 Aperture_Eli: ill ask him if its a good dea; 20:30:46 Aperture_Eli: deal 20:30:48 alec125: i can only 1 key 20:31:04 alec125: 1 key or no deal 20:31:11 Aperture_Eli: he said it's a sucky deal\ 20:31:11 alec125: who did he sell it to 20:31:33 Aperture_Eli: let me ask 20:31:41 Aperture_Eli: he said he doesn't remember 20:31:59 (and then he disconnected)
RAW Paste Data
Aperture_Eli:??? 20:03:13 alec125 added Refined Metal 20:03:13 alec125: can i have the crate 20:03:19 Aperture_Eli: I'm playing an important match right now 20:03:33 alec125: plz 20:03:38 alec125: make it quick 20:03:44 Aperture_Eli: ok 20:03:47 alec125: add the crate 20:03:56 Aperture_Eli: how rare are they 20:03:58 alec125: they r worth 2 rec 20:04:10 alec125: hurry 20:04:18 Aperture_Eli: how rare are salvaged crates 20:04:18 alec125: not that much 20:04:25 Aperture_Eli: how common are they 20:04:33 alec125: they r worth 2 rec 20:04:40 Aperture_Eli: do they randomly drop a lot? 20:05:03 alec125: hurry 20:05:05 alec125: ya 20:05:08 alec125: can i have it 20:05:32 Aperture_Eli: ya 20:05:56 Aperture_Eli: one sec 20:05:59 alec125: why 20:06:03 Aperture_Eli: ok 20:06:08 alec125: lets go 20:06:18 alec125: i got to do something 20:06:27 Aperture_Eli: i'm finding it 20:06:29 Aperture_Eli: in my inv 20:06:31 alec125: k 20:06:34 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:06:44 You are ready 20:06:46 alec125: no the salvaged crate 20:06:56 Aperture_Eli: oh 20:07:03 You are not ready 20:07:04 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:07:08 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:07:17 You are ready 20:07:19 alec125: it has spider webs on it 20:07:27 Aperture_Eli: oh 20:07:33 alec125: its number 50 20:07:34 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:07:36 You added The Holy Mackerel 20:07:44 You are ready 20:07:46 alec125: no 20:07:53 alec125: a salvged crate 20:08:01 alec125: why wont u give me it 20:08:09 Aperture_Eli: which one is salvaged 20:08:18 You removed The Holy Mackerel 20:08:21 alec125: it has spider webs on it 20:08:32 You added The Gunslinger 20:08:45 You are ready 20:09:13 Aperture_Eli: lets go 20:09:17 Aperture_Eli: come on i'm in the middle of a game 20:09:53 Aperture_Eli: plz hurry 20:09:58 Aperture_Eli: i'm gonna get kicked for being afk 20:10:18 alec125: its on your last page 20:10:25 Aperture_Eli: 5 20:10:26 You removed The Gunslinger 20:10:35 You added The Short Circuit 20:10:41 You added The Wrangler 20:10:47 You added The Scottish Handshake 20:10:49 You added The Red-Tape Recorder 20:10:52 alec125: put the crate down on your last page 20:10:53 You removed The Short Circuit 20:11:07 You removed The Wrangler 20:11:08 You removed The Scottish Handshake 20:11:09 You removed The Red-Tape Recorder 20:11:11 alec125: k 20:11:28 Aperture_Eli: are you sure it's tradable 20:11:36 alec125: ya 20:11:41 alec125: its either on your last page or your second last page 20:12:05 You added Salvaged Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #50 20:12:06 alec125: thats it 20:12:12 alec125 is ready 20:12:14 You removed Salvaged Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #50 20:12:21 alec125: what 20:12:26 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:12:28 alec125: no 20:12:31 alec125: u just had it 20:12:41 Aperture_Eli: which one is it 20:12:51 alec125: the one u had before the robo crate 20:13:19 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:22 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:25 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:28 alec125: no 20:13:29 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:30 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:32 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:34 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:37 alec125: no 20:13:38 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:39 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:40 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:43 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:44 alec125: i want the salvaged crate 20:13:46 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:47 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:48 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:50 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:52 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:57 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:13:58 You added RoboCrate Series #58 20:14:00 Aperture_Eli: ok thats all i have 20:14:07 alec125: it was the crate before u had those robo crates 20:14:18 Aperture_Eli: this one 20:14:31 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:14:36 alec125: no 20:14:42 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:14:46 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:14:47 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:14:49 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:14:52 alec125: its number 50!!! 20:14:53 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:14:53 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:14:55 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:14:56 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:14:58 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:15:00 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:15:01 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:15:03 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:15:04 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:15:07 alec125: its number 50 20:15:09 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:15:11 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:15:12 alec125: stop!! 20:15:14 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:15:14 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:15:16 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:15:18 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:15:19 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:15:33 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:15:36 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:15:37 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:15:41 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:15:44 alec125: the crate that i want says salvaged crate 20:15:50 alec125: k 20:16:18 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:16:19 alec125: thats all i want 20:16:25 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:16:28 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:16:38 alec125: i dont want those stupid crates 20:16:40 You added Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:17:00 alec125: dont add anymore 20:17:09 Aperture_Eli: that's all i have 20:17:15 alec125: take them away!!! 20:17:19 Aperture_Eli: Why???? 20:17:24 alec125: i want your salvaged crate 20:17:34 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:42 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:43 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:44 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:45 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:46 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:46 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:47 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:48 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:49 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:50 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:51 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:53 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:54 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:56 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:57 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:17:58 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:18:00 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:18:01 You removed RoboCrate Series #58 20:18:02 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:03 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:04 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:05 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:06 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:08 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:08 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:09 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:10 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:18:12 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:18:14 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:16 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:18:18 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:18:19 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:18:20 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:18:21 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:18:23 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:18:24 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:25 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:26 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:27 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:28 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:29 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:30 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:32 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:33 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:35 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #55 20:18:40 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #56 20:18:41 You removed Mann Co. Supply Crate Series #57 20:18:43 Aperture_Eli: k 20:18:48 alec125: salvaged crate 20:19:00 Aperture_Eli: how do u spell it 20:19:04 Aperture_Eli: oh 20:19:06 Aperture_Eli: are you sure that's right 20:19:10 Aperture_Eli: what is a rec 20:19:33 alec125: salvaged mann co crate 20:19:46 Aperture_Eli: ok 20:19:53 alec125: ill give u a hat 20:19:53 alec125 removed Refined Metal 20:19:55 Aperture_Eli: and what is a rec 20:19:59 alec125: its 1/3 of a ref 20:20:10 alec125 added Modest Pile of Hat 20:20:19 alec125: can i just have the crate 20:20:29 Aperture_Eli: how rare is that hat 20:20:35 alec125: SALVAGED MANN CO CRATE 20:20:44 alec125: its more than your crate 20:21:00 Aperture_Eli: wow 20:21:03 alec125: so can i have it 20:21:13 Aperture_Eli: is it one of the rarest hats? 20:21:14 alec125: no 20:21:20 Aperture_Eli: oh 20:21:25 alec125: but its cool 20:21:29 alec125: can i just have the crate 20:21:41 Aperture_Eli: true 20:21:43 Aperture_Eli: yeah 20:21:47 Aperture_Eli: one sec let me find it again 20:21:56 alec125: u find it yet 20:22:35 Aperture_Eli: looking 20:22:44 alec125: u find it yet 20:23:25 alec125: hello? 20:24:07 Aperture_Eli: are you sure salvaged crates are worth that hat 20:24:14 alec125: ya 20:24:18 alec125: its less 20:24:24 Aperture_Eli: well i was chatting with a friend and he says that's not true 20:24:47 alec125: hurry 20:24:47 alec125: how much do u want then 20:24:58 alec125: a ref 20:25:08 Aperture_Eli: he says its worth 10 keys 20:25:09 alec125: hes lieing 20:25:21 Aperture_Eli: no he's not 20:25:33 Aperture_Eli: he has been playing tf2 since it came out 20:25:47 alec125: well he doesnt know the updated price 20:26:05 Aperture_Eli: ya he does 20:26:18 Aperture_Eli: he buys and sells stuff all the time 20:26:32 alec125: no he does not 20:26:34 Aperture_Eli: he knows more than anyone else 20:26:43 alec125: did he ever sell the crate 20:26:46 Aperture_Eli: let me ask 20:26:53 Aperture_Eli: he said he sold one for 10 keys last week 20:27:19 alec125: what number 20:27:32 Aperture_Eli: let me ask 20:27:37 Aperture_Eli: 50 20:27:47 alec125: haha no he did not 20:27:56 alec125: u r lieing 20:28:01 Aperture_Eli: yes he did 20:28:08 Aperture_Eli: wanna know his username? 20:28:11 alec125: ya 20:28:17 Aperture_Eli: k 20:28:20 Aperture_Eli: XxSniperxX 20:28:30 alec125: well this hat is worth that crate 20:28:43 alec125: its really good 20:28:49 Aperture_Eli: no i asked him he said it's one of the worst hats in the game 20:29:01 alec125: well he knows nothing 20:29:17 Aperture_Eli: he knows everything about the whole game 20:29:27 alec125: i give up u guys no nothing 20:29:45 Aperture_Eli: he was a beta tester 20:29:45 Aperture_Eli: i'll sell for 20:29:53 Aperture_Eli: 3 keys 20:29:56 alec125: 1 20:30:00 Aperture_Eli: at the least 20:30:03 alec125: 1 key 20:30:07 alec125 removed Modest Pile of Hat 20:30:11 alec125 added Mann Co. Supply Crate Key 20:30:15 Aperture_Eli: 2 more lets go 20:30:25 alec125: just 1 20:30:32 Aperture_Eli: ill ask him if its a good dea; 20:30:46 Aperture_Eli: deal 20:30:48 alec125: i can only 1 key 20:31:04 alec125: 1 key or no deal 20:31:11 Aperture_Eli: he said it's a sucky deal\ 20:31:11 alec125: who did he sell it to 20:31:33 Aperture_Eli: let me ask 20:31:41 Aperture_Eli: he said he doesn't remember 20:31:59 (and then he disconnected)The “Smarter Phone“, which is just a concept right now, would allow users to easily upgrade or repair it by changing key modules. Your phone currently has a 5MP camera, and you’ll like to upgrade for a 12MP. No problem, just replace the camera module. We’re now in 2016. The quad core processor in your smartphone feels really slow, and memory is tight, so you’d like to replace it with the latest Exynos 7 20-core processor with extra-large.big.medium.little.tiny processing technology, and finally get 8GB RAM. You can do so by just updating the CPU module, and on and on.
Basically, your smartphone would be just as upgradeable as your PC, which is probably timely since in a couple of years, your phone may become your PC. This concept designed by Bernat Lozano (Product Designer), and Rocío García (Architect & Product Designer), would help save consumers’ money, and reduce e-waste, as they nicely explain in the video below.
It’s an interesting concept, but in reality this may be challenging to implement. First, over the years, standards may change, and you may not be able to get the very latest feature without having to replace the phone. Second, you’ll need compatibility between all those parts, as well as companies and people committed to provide software support for the different modules over several years (e.g. 10 years). The device shown in the video appears to be a bit bulky, but it might be possible to improve it. There are some ribbon cables to connect different modules which are not shown here, and this may also become an issue for end-users has insertion is not always that easy. What do you guys (and girls) think?
Via arm-netbook mailing list80 The Death of the Little Hen Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
One time the little hen and the little rooster went to Nut Mountain, and they agreed that whoever would find a nut would share it with the other one. Now the little hen found a large, large nut, but -- wanting to eat the kernal by herself -- she said nothing about it. However, the kernal was so thick that she could not swallow it down. It got stuck in her throat, and fearing that she would choke to death, she cried out, "Little Rooster, I beg you to run as fast as you can to the well and get me some water, or else I'll choke to death."
The little rooster ran to the well as fast as he could, and said, "Well, give me some water, for the little hen is lying on Nut Mountain. She swallowed a large nut kernal and is about to choke to death on it."
The well answered, "First run to the bride, and get some red silk from her."
The little rooster ran to the bride: "Bride, give me some red silk, and I'll give the red silk to the well, and the well will give me some water, and I'll take the water to the little hen who is lying on Nut Mountain. She swallowed a large nut kernal and is about to choke to death on it."
The bride answered, "First run and get my wreath. It got caught on a willow branch."
So the little rooster ran to the willow and pulled the wreath from its branch and took it to the bride, and the bride gave him some red silk, which he took to the well, which gave him some water, and the little rooster took the water to the little hen, but when he arrived, she had already choked to death, and she lay there dead, and did not move at all.
The little rooster was so sad that he cried aloud, and all the animals came to mourn for the little hen. Six mice built a small carriage which was to carry the little hen to her grave. When the carriage was finished, they hitched themselves to it, and the little rooster drove. On the way they met the fox.
"Where are you going, little rooster?"
"I'm going to bury my little hen."
"May I ride along?"
"Yes, but you must sit at the rear, because my little horses don't like you too close to the front."
So he sat at the rear, and then the wolf, the bear, the elk, the lion, and all the animals in the forest. They rode on until they came to a brook. "How can we get across?" said the little rooster.
A straw was lying there next to the brook, and he said, "I'll lay myself across, and you can drive over me." But just as the six mice got onto the straw, it slipped into the water, and the six mice all fell in and drowned.
They did not know what to do, until a coal came and said, "I am large enough. I will lay myself across and you can drive over me." So the coal laid itself across the water, but unfortunately it touched the water, hissed, and went out; and it was dead.
A stone saw this happen, and wanting to help the little rooster, it laid itself across the water. The little rooster pulled the carriage himself. He nearly reached the other side with the dead little hen, but there were too many others seated on the back of the carriage, and the carriage rolled back, and they all fell into the water and drowned.
Now the little rooster was all alone with the dead little hen. He dug a grave for her and laid her inside. Then he made a mound on top, and sat on it, and grieved there so long that he too died. And then everyone was dead.
Source: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Vom Tode des Hühnchens, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, no. 80. Translated by D. L. Ashliman. © 2006.
, no. 80. Translated by D. L. Ashliman. © 2006. The Grimms' source: Clemens Brentano. This tale was included (in a slightly different version) in the Grimms' first edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812).
(1812). Aarne-Thompson type 2021.
Related links
Revised June 29, 2006.Apple has released the iOS 6.1 update for the iPhone and iPad.
The update brings with it a number of bug fixes, and also adds the ability for U.S. users to buy movie tickets using Siri, and high-speed LTE support to a whole raft of new carriers.
To reset the advertising identifier -- which is a code that app users can use to track users -- go to Settings > General > About > Advertising and then click on the Reset Advertising Identifier button.This will make you a new user in the eyes of any advertisers who are tracking you, increasing your online privacy.
The easiest way to apply this update is to click on Settings and then go to General > Software Update. From there you will be able to download the update direct to your iOS device. This download will be significantly smaller than if you apply the download via iTunes.
Related:Orlando, Fla. — The fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, known for its anti-gay protests, plans to demonstrate at the funeral for two victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting.
The church sent a letter to the Orlando Police Department outlining its plans to protest outside the church where the funeral will take place this weekend, according to USA Today.
Westboro members have protested outside funerals of gays and lesbians in the past, the paper said. The group has also staged anti-gay demonstrations at military funerals.
Pulse, the venue where the shooting took place, is a gay nightclub.
"It's not about that person, it's about that whole societal phenomenon," Westboro spokesman Steve Drain said, according to USA Today. "It's never been OK to be gay and it's never going to be OK to be gay, no matter how much the spirit of the times calls for the popularity of that sin."
Omar Mateen walked into Pulse early Sunday morning and killed 49 people. Police eventually shot and killed Mateen, who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State during the massacre.
It has been reported that Mateen harbored anti-gay sentiments, but may also have been gay himself.
About six members of the Westboro church, which is based in Kansas, will be at this Sunday's protest, USA Today said.
The funeral will take place at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, an Episcopal congregation known for its welcoming attitude toward the LGBT community, according to USA Today. The church made news last year for hosting the baptism of a child of a gay couple.
"That thing that happened in Orlando, it was a very tragic thing and it's a very sorrowful thing, but one of the aspects of the sorrow that people are missing in their kind of worldly, maudlin sentimentality is that all of those people in that whole business... were doing that which God almighty calls a sin," said Drain, the Westboro spokesman, according to USA Today.
Local LGBT leaders in Orlando are planning an opposing demonstration to the Westboro gathering, according to the Orlando Sentinel. The GLBT Community Center of Central Florida is calling for peaceful protesters to block the "hate" spewed by Westboro.
The anti-Westboro protest will take place across the street.
"I'm not surprised evil reared its ugly head," said Terry DeCarlo, executive director of the center, according to the Sentinel. "We'll make sure they are not heard."
Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - During a rainstorm in Washington in early 2009, amid the furor over Wall Street’s post-bailout bonuses, an American International Group employee pulled out an umbrella that had the insurer’s name on it.
American International Group Inc. (AIG) corporate headquarters in New York, November 10, 2008. REUTERS/Mike Segar/Files
“Somebody came by, grabbed the umbrella and broke it,” said AIG Chief Executive Robert Benmosche, who added that the attacker told the employee to engage in a sexual act impossible to perform on oneself.
The anger over AIG’s $182.3 billion taxpayer-funded bailout was palpable across the United States. Concerned that its employees faced potential physical violence beyond destroyed umbrellas, the company changed its identity cards in the spring of 2009, replacing its familiar logo with a design that left off the company’s name.
Benmosche said when he took over as CEO in August 2009 he was struck by the fear among AIG’s employees. Financially, the company was in a free-fall. AIG lost about $100 billion in 2008, including $62 billion in the largest quarterly loss in corporate history. In late 2008, the company opened its doors to buyers in a desperate attempt to sell its far-flung businesses, but the effort quickly fell apart due to low-ball bids and lack of financing.
AIG has come a long way since then, rebounding far faster and more dramatically than nearly anyone inside or outside the company expected.
As a result, the U.S. Treasury Department, which will own more than 90 percent of the company, is likely to hold two large stock sales next year and aims to offload the rest in 2012, a source familiar with the situation said. In the first stock issue, perhaps as soon as March, Treasury could sell about one-fifth of the insurer in a $10 billion-plus offering.
A big profit from the AIG rescue and the government’s eventual disentanglement ahead of U.S elections in 2012 would be a boost for the Obama administration, coming on the heels of similar successes at Citigroup Inc and General Motors.
But this remarkable reversal of fortune has taken a tortuous path, and the way ahead is not without risks.
For one thing, Benmosche, in whom AIG’s roughly 100,000 employees found a leader when all hope seemed lost, is battling cancer. For another, Chartis and SunAmerica Financial — the general insurance and domestic life subsidiaries that form the core of what’s left of the company — face significant operational and competitive challenges.
Interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the restructuring — on all sides of the endeavor — reveal new details about the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, setbacks, debates and conflicts over the past year as AIG struggled to free itself of government support.
Politics, personality clashes, controversial incentives and intense debates over strategy at first complicated the turnaround but also ultimately accelerated it, these interviews revealed.
The company itself became a battleground. A rift between management and some members of the board that festered for nearly a year eventually forced former Chairman Harvey Golub to leave. He resigned on July 14.
AIG and its federal overlords also sparred. Over the summer, the government became frustrated with the company, complaining that AIG was taking its support for granted when the board pulled the plug on a huge asset sale.
And there were arguments within the government itself, as the Treasury Department and the U.S. Federal Reserve negotiated how much risk each of them would retain as the bailout unwinds.
Despite these complications, though, the plan for the insurer to extricate itself from government ownership came together relatively quickly on Sept. 30, just four months after a key $35.5 billion asset sale to Britain’s Prudential fell through, surprising critics as well as some of those involved in the process.
Insiders say the toughest parts of the restructuring are behind them and expect the path from here to be smooth, barring any unforeseen external shocks like a natural disaster that results in a big loss at Chartis.
Indeed, some key players are already moving on. Sarah Dahlgren, who led the New York Fed’s AIG team, left in the summer to become head of bank supervision at the regional central bank, where she will be joined by Steven Manzari, another senior New York Fed official.
Dahlgren said she already missed “the challenges, the raging debates we had about things we wanted to do or didn’t want to do. It required a lot of pushing, debating and getting your point straight.”
Ruth Porat, a Morgan Stanley banker advising the government, took over as the Wall Street firm’s CFO earlier this year. And Jim Millstein, the Treasury’s main official on AIG, is looking at potential new assignments as the exit plan is completed.
For all the positive signs, however, no one is unfurling the “mission accomplished” banner. Given the unpredictable path the restructuring has taken, caution may well be warranted.
Graphics:
AIG timeline: r.reuters.com/kyf72r
Profit scenarios: r.reuters.com/fej23r
Treasury stake interactive: r.reuters.com/qec56p
Blog: here
HARD-CHARGING CEO
In January 2009, Benmosche, a former MetLife Inc CEO, watched as the insurance industry took a beating in the markets.
“Although I am financially secure I said to myself, ‘What does it mean for my kids and to everybody else?’” he said.
That’s not to say he didn’t need a lot of persuasion when executive search firm Spencer Stuart came knocking in June, having identified him as one of the candidates to run AIG. He met with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, White House economic adviser Larry Summers and the then recently appointed Treasury pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.
“What I made very clear is that I am going to be extremely aggressive, that I feel the way this has been handled up until now has been wrong, and that I am going to be public about the fact that I think it is wrong,” said Benmosche, who at 6 feet 4 inches towers over most people.
Negotiations over pay stretched into the weeks after Benmosche started his job on Aug. 10, 2009. Sources said he threatened to quit over the issue and by September that year, his compensation had become a source of tension between him, AIG’s board and the government. He eventually had his way, winning a $7 million package that was finally implemented in November 2009.
Feinberg and pay became a source of consternation again in early 2010 — this time over compensation for his team, sources said. Benmosche once again said he would leave if it was not resolved, sources said, and again he got his way.
In February, for instance, Peter Hancock, executive vice president for finance, risk and investments, was hired at a package of $7.5 million. Benmosche wanted to be sure that he would have the ability to retain and attract good people to AIG, Millstein said.
Millstein added that Benmosche needed to know that he could secure a commercially reasonable deal for himself that could be used as a model for other senior executives.
IT’S HIM OR ME
The next time Benmosche threatened to quit it was over a spat with AIG’s directors.
AIG’s board is made up of a number of former business heavy-weights, used to running their own companies and who had volunteered to help get AIG back on its feet.
While the board was focused on a public float of AIA, AIG’s valuable Asian life insurer, Benmosche started talking to Prudential CEO Tidjane Thiam in late fourth quarter 2009 about a possible deal for the insurance subsidiary.
By the time the Treasury called Benmosche to suggest he start speaking to Thiam, Benmosche had already met the Prudential CEO.
Benmosche summarized his message to Thiam as follows: “If you come back and see your way clear to pay $34 billion, most of it in cash, I am happy to talk. But if you can’t see your way clear, let’s not kid ourselves.”
Many directors, meanwhile, were kept in the dark about discussions with Prudential until the talks were well-advanced. Even Golub, who was chairman then, was brought into the discussions only in early 2010.
For some directors the Pru deal seemed to come out of nowhere just when AIG was about to launch the IPO of AIA, Millstein said. “It did create some horrible board dynamics,” he said.
Directors were kept out of the loop because of fears that the deal information would leak, said Millstein, who described the AIG board as a “sieve in late 2009.” When the deal finally came before the board for a vote in February, directors were split in the middle between an IPO and a sale, even though Benmosche pushed for a deal.
Ultimately the board unanimously backed Benmosche. One persuasive argument was that the board |
audience member asked whether the two leaders could agree on naming a blue-ribbon commission for lobbying and campaign reform. Gingrich said he liked the idea," reported The Chicago Tribune on June 12, 2005. "'In a heartbeat, I accept,' Clinton responded... 'Let's shake hands on that,' the speaker responded."
Lessig said that he realized his plan was unusual, but after giving the plan a lot of thought, he decided this was the best way to get his message out.
"The system is rigged," Lessig told CNN last month. "Unless we fix this issue, we can't do anything else. You want climate change legislation? You want to take on Wall Street? How are you going to take on Wall Street when the biggest contributions come from Wall Street?"
Here is what makes Lessig's plan even more "out of the norm": If he wins the presidency (and that is a big if), the professor will focus solely on passing his Citizen Equality Act. Once the law is passed, Lessig will step down from the presidency and elevate his vice president.
Lessig has also tried to address campaign finance before. The professor founded Mayday PAC in 2014, which backs candidates who endorsed robust campaign finance reform. The plan didn't go well: The PAC lost a substantial majority of all its 2014 races.BBC Radio retrospective on the Anglo-Boer war, 1899-1902
By Brian Smith
29 September 1999
This October marks 100 years since the outbreak of the second South African War, better known as the Boer War. Over the next three years the centenary will be celebrated in South Africa with a variety of anniversaries and memorials. A number of books are planned for release and a spate of broadcasts will mark the occasion.
One such programme was aired on BBC Radio 4 during two weeks in mid-September. Entitled The Boer War, it was narrated by the historian Denis Judd, author of Empire: The British Imperial Experience, from 1765 to the Present, and sought to examine new perspectives on the war. The first part looked at the claim that it was merely a “white man's war”, whilst the second considered the use of concentration camps by the British, and the claim that they had a deliberate policy of genocide toward the Boers.
The programme made use of aural archives and interviewed a number of leading historians. It also employed actors to speak the words of historical accounts of the day, and in one instance interviewed a 109 year-old woman who remembers the war as a nine-year-old girl. It made for an absorbing programme.
Part One opened with a visit to Mafeking, ancestral home of the Tswana-speaking Baralong people, and scene of the most famous siege of the Boer War. The Baralong feel affronted at the events of 100 years ago. They are considering suing the British government for compensation over the help they gave the British during the war, which was denied by Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, the commanding officer at Mafeking.
Professor Shula Marks, of the London School of Oriental & African Studies, believes that “Imperial historiography took for granted that it was a white man's war, and simply didn't see blacks as participants in the war, or indeed as active agents in history at all.” Since the end of apartheid in South Africa this is being reconsidered, and many, including white conservatives, can see the need for rewriting black people back into history.
The programme considered the discovery of gold in 1886 in the Transvaal, one of the republics controlled by the Afrikaners, as the key reason for the outbreak of war. For Britain, “the temptation to intervene was too great”. Britain then justified its wish to intercede by the apparent need to protect the Uitlanders (from the Dutch for ‘foreigners'—British and other Europeans who flooded into the Transvaal following the discovery of gold). This view of the causes of the war is a little simplistic.
It is true that gold was a factor. Indeed it was widely believed at the time, and for half a century later, that the mine owners had manipulated the British government into provoking the war. However, government papers released during the 1960s make it clear that the British government manipulated the mine owners as much as the reverse. The mines would have remained in private ownership and the gold would have been traded on the London bullion market whichever government controlled the Transvaal. It was not gold, therefore, which primarily motivated the British government to go to war.
The late nineteenth century was the time when the European powers were dividing Africa up amongst themselves, in what became known as “the scramble for Africa”. South Africa, with its location at the tip of the continent, is a strategic location, with all shipping trade to the east passing by. Britain's control of the Cape colony and Natal gave it control of the whole southern coastline and these colonies were not under threat. In 1884, Germany had gained control of South West Africa (Namibia), immediately north-west of the Cape Colony. Portugal had controlled Mozambique (immediately to the north-east of Natal) for some time. Britain's strategic interests lay, therefore, in a push northward up between the two.
Britain feared an independent Afrikaner state, especially one that was wealthy. This was not because it felt its current colonial possessions were under threat, but because its future possessions might be. In particular, Britain was anxious to make sure that such a state would not have access to the sea and thus the ability to operate completely outside of British influence. Britain had consequently annexed Zululand and Tongaland (in 1887 and 1895 respectively) stopping Boer advances toward the Indian Ocean and thereby isolating the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The military intervention into the Transvaal represented the logical conclusion to the previous 30 years' policies of the British government, in which it had also annexed Basutoland and southern Bechuanaland and had made inroads into Rhodesia.
The isolation of the Transvaal was complete. Germany and the United States, who might have been seen as allies of the Afrikaners, actually supported Britain's aims as they stood to gain from the opening up of the Transvaal. The US compared the Afrikaners to the slave owners of the pre-war southern States. Republican sympathisers from the US and Europe did support and aid the Afrikaners, but the world powers in general supported Britain and thought it natural that the greatest power in the world should go to war to support its strategic interests.
Professor Bernard Mbenga of the University of the North West in Mafeking sees three main reasons why the Boer war was thought of as a white man's war. Firstly, both sides considered it distasteful, morally indecent and outrageous to use blacks in a war between whites. Secondly, the British were confident of an early victory. Lastly, both sides thought it dangerous to arm blacks on a large scale, as it might lead to a rebellion against white control later.
Finding themselves under unexpected pressure from the Boers, the British did, however, arm black Africans. Jan Smuts, a leading Afrikaner intellectual, wrote to a British newspaper declaring that it was horrendous for Britain to have armed blacks. It was, he argued, far worse than the use of concentration camps or the deaths of women and children, because it would hang over the future.
General Piet Cronje, in a letter to Colonel Baden-Powell, was of the same opinion: “It is understood that you have armed Bastards, Fingos and Baralongs against us—in this you have committed an enormous act of wickedness... reconsider the matter even if it cost you the loss of Mafeking... disarm your blacks and thereby act the part of a white man in a white man's war.”
The British, with antiquated battle strategies, were totally unprepared for the war, in a terrain they did not understand and fighting an enemy they could not see. This incompetence led to the deaths of some 22,000 British soldiers—13,000 died from disease—and forced a reappraisal of the role of black Africans in the fighting. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 were armed and participated in the war, although Baden-Powell denied it. They took part in a variety of offensive military operations, including on Boer farms and going behind enemy lines to steal cattle, etc. Black involvement was widespread—many participating for their own reasons, not least the chance to settle old scores.
There was a strong belief amongst blacks that Britain represented a more liberal order, and that they would reward loyalty after the war. The renowned black diarist at the siege of Mafeking, Solomon T. Plaatje, who went on to become one of the founders of the African National Congress, believed that Britain represented a future that was fair and free. Britain betrayed this trust and went against their own pronouncements of 1901, in which they considered that it would be “shameful” to exclude blacks from the franchise. They compromised with the Afrikaners at the peace treaty of Vereeniging by excluding Africans from any political rights. This was later compounded in the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, which enshrined white supremacy in its constitution. The question of “native franchise” was to be left until there was “responsible government”. In the event, it took until the end of apartheid in 1994.
The second part of the programme described a meeting between Neville Chamberlain and Hermann Goering, in which Chamberlain complained about Germany's use of concentration camps. Goering flourished an encyclopaedia reference, claiming that Britain had invented them. The programme examined whether the Nazi concentration camps and Britain's were comparable.
Elria Wessels, curator of the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein, took Judd to the site of one of the camps. She described what the scene would have been like. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people were incarcerated at Bloemfontein, and it was only one of about 50 camps. Fully 27,000 women and children died in the camps, of which 81 percent were children. While Britain has tried to write this chapter out of history, the Afrikaners at the other extreme attempted to elevate it to folklore. Both routes led to a distorted history.
The British were unable to fight the Boer soldiers into submission. In 1900, General Sir Herbert Kitchener authorised a scorched-earth policy in response. Dr. Keith Surridge described how British soldiers scoured the countryside looking for farms to burn. He estimated that some 30,000 farm buildings were destroyed. Livestock was killed in huge numbers and often left to rot. This policy caused a vast refugee problem, with those who were left behind often requesting that the British take them away. The British agreed, walking them to the defensive laagers, which in time became concentration camps.
Not only had the British now to feed 250,000 to 400,000 soldiers, but also the civilian population of the war zone. Since they had wiped out most of the agriculture within the region, they had to import food. The task overwhelmed them. Professor Albert Grundlingh of the University of South Africa in Pretoria suggested that the herding of so many people into such small areas was comparable to rapid urbanisation of these farmer people. In the unhygienic conditions diseases spread quickly—thousands died of measles.
The programme explained that the war was not just a tragedy for the Boers. Just as many blacks were caught up in the fighting. Tens of thousands were displaced along with the families they worked for. This suffering has gone largely unrecognised. Grundlingh pointed out that more than 14,000 died in the black camps, in which conditions were even worse than for the Boers. He claimed that the memory of the black experience during the war largely receded within the black community, as the experiences of apartheid came to dominate. The Boer War became just one of many bad experiences. For the Afrikaners, however, the war remains a focal point.
Many Afrikaners thought at the time, and still think, that Britain implemented a policy of deliberate genocide in setting up the camps. Grundlingh argued cogently against this. He believed that this viewpoint was manufactured for political purposes and that the reasons why so many died in the camps were poor administration and a lack of medical care. He also pointed out that the British did not treat their own sick very well.
Other academics agreed. Dr. Donal Lowry of Oxford Brookes University made the point that the treatment of the Boers fed the grievances at the base of Afrikaner nationalism and paranoia. It led to a sense of their being aggrieved and besieged and fed into the perspective of affirmative action for poor whites that became popularly known as apartheid.
Grundlingh observed that the war represents an heroic period for the Afrikaners, with the British as the perpetrators of injustice. It was a period in which they held the moral high ground and for which they do not feel the need to apologise. The war is now being resurrected as a sacred period of history.
The programme ended with the family of Eugene Terre-Blanche (founder of the fascist South African AWB party) visiting the war memorial. He imagined the difference to the white population if 26,000 women and children had not been killed and reckoned on the white population now being at least 10-12 million, instead of 5.4 million, which he asserts could have changed the situation in the country. “In the new South Africa” he said “they will change the syllabuses and tell them about the Kaffir wars, but not about the wars that have been fought by white people”.
Both these programmes were valuable in drawing attention to the work of recent historians who have tried to break away from the old nationalist myths developed under the apartheid regime in South Africa. Their work shows that the British concentration camps were not like those of the Nazis, part of a deliberate and conscious programme of genocide, but were nevertheless one of the most brutal aspects of an imperialist war for strategic control of land and resources.
Emily Hobhouse, the humanitarian campaigner, was able to travel without threat to her personal safety or liberty to the British concentration camps and, on her return, to expose in the press the appalling conditions and horrendous loss of life, particularly among women and children. This would have been impossible in Nazi Germany. The comparison with fascism was a superficial and self-serving attempt to portray the Afrikaners as a down-trodden people, whose privileges under apartheid merely redressed previous injustices.
At the same time, the programmes unwittingly demonstrated that historians today are under pressure to present a version of South African history that is in line with new nationalist conceptions. In post-apartheid South Africa, the Baralong see the vindication of their part in the Anglo-Boer War as the means to win financial compensation that will benefit them in the struggle for investment. The role of black Africans in the war, whether fighting on behalf of British imperialism or their suffering in the camps, has a place in the history books which has until now been denied, but one nationalist interpretation of history cannot be allowed to replace another. The black nationalism of the ANC cannot answer the rhetoric of Terre-Blanche, because neither gives an objective picture of the past.
Bibliography:
Pakenham, T., The Boer War, London 1979
Smith, I.R., The Origins of the South African War 1899-1902, New York 1996
The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago 1991
The South African War Virtual Library can be visited at:
http://www.uq.net.au/~zzrwotto/contents.htmlParliament Hill shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau tied his attack on Cpl. Nathan Cirillo to Canadian Forces missions in Afghanistan and Iraq in a cellphone video he recorded ahead of the fatal shooting on Oct. 22, 2014.
Canadians got their first look at the video Friday morning during a special meeting of the House public safety committee where RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson briefed MPs on the investigation into the shooting of Cirillo, who was on sentry duty at the National War Memorial, and Zehaf-Bibeau's storming of Parliament Hill.
"This is in retaliation for Afghanistan and because [Prime Minister Stephen Harper] wants to send his troops to Iraq," Zehaf-Bibeau, 32, says in the video.
"Canada's officially become one of our enemies by fighting and bombing us and creating a lot of terror in our countries and killing us and killing our innocents. So, just aiming to hit some soldiers just to show that you're not even safe in your own land, and you gotta be careful."
Zehaf-Bibeau refers to himself as part of the Mujahideen, the army of holy warriors engaged in jihad.
This photo of the gun used by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau to kill Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial and in his attack on Parliament Hill was released by the RCMP at a Commons committee March 6, 2015.
Paulson said the RCMP edited 18 seconds out of the video for "sound operational" reasons. Thirteen seconds were cut from the beginning and five seconds from the end.
Paulson said the national police force continues to investigate whether anyone aided Zehaf-Bibeau in the attack.
Speaking to reporters following the meeting, Paulson said he believes someone else was involved.
"I put the caveat that it is an ongoing investigation. And I wouldn't characterize it as a network, as it's commonly understood, but I am persuaded that he was influenced by other individuals towards these crimes. And so in that sense I'm of the view that there are other individuals involved."
400 interviewed
Paulson warned during the meeting that if anybody aided, abetted, facilitated or counselled Zehaf-Bibeau in the attack, those individuals will be charged with terrorism offences.
"It's not relevant to us, or our investigation, what kind of terrorist Zehaf-Bibeau was, or if he was a particularly intelligent, sophisticated, influential or personally disciplined terrorist," Paulson said.
"To us, it all turns on the evidence we collect which we compare against the statute. What was he doing and why was he doing it?"
The RCMP has more than 130 full-time investigators and staff working on this case and have interviewed more than 400 people, including those Zehaf-Bibeau knew in British Columbia, the people on the Greyhound Bus he took to Ottawa, and the people who saw him at a shelter in Ottawa, Paulson said.
Zehaf-Bibeau was born in 1982 and raised in Laval, Que. As an adult, he lived in Montreal, Vancouver, Squamish, B.C., and Alberta. His mother, a federal government employee, had lunch with him in Ottawa in the days ahead of the shooting, according to an email she sent to Postmedia. His father is a Libyan national.
Paulson said Zehaf-Bibeau was shot multiple times by the RCMP and Parliament Hill security, and had a long knife tied to his wrist when he was killed.
No drugs, alcohol in shooter's system
The meeting was held in the committee room in which the Conservative Party caucus was meeting when Zehaf-Bibeau ran down the hallway before being shot to death at the door to the Library of Parliament.
The NDP caucus was meeting across the hallway during the shooting.
In the cellphone video, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau tied his attack to the presence of Canadian Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. A security camera captured Zehaf-Bibeau as he ran up Parliament Hill Oct. 22. (RCMP/Canadian Press)
Paulson said a post-mortem test for drugs and alcohol on Zehaf-Bibeau was negative and they've found no evidence he used drugs or alcohol in the days leading up to the attack.
The video was shot around the corner from the Ottawa Police Services headquarters in downtown Ottawa, according to Paulson. Police found the phone in his car following the attack. Zehaf-Bibeau had bought the used car on Oct. 21 and used it for the attack, parking it on Wellington Street at an entrance to the grounds of Parliament Hill.
Zehaf-Bibeau applied for a Canadian passport in Vancouver last August but was told it would be "subject to further review," Paulson recounted. He travelled to Ottawa by hitchhiking and taking the bus and within two hours of arriving went to the Libyan embassy to renew his expired Libyan passport. Libyan officials told Zehaf-Bibeau the application would have to be sent to Libya and that it would take up to a month to resolve because of discrepencies in his identification documents, the top Mountie said.
Two days later, on Oct. 4, Zehaf-Bibeau toured Parliament Hill.
RCMP resources moved
"Throughout his time in Ottawa, Zehaf-Bibeau used publicly available internet and payphones in various locations across the city," Paulson said.
"We now know that he used this as a means to stay in contact with individuals both in the Ottawa region and in British Columbia. We have been able to identify some of these individuals and we continue to pursue this avenue."
New Democrat MP Randall Garrison said he respects Paulson's judgment on cutting out 18 seconds of the video for now.
"I think we have to be careful when we do this, but I think Canadians have a right to know, we live in a free and open society and we have to do our best to protect that kind of society and not let violence change life," he said.
Liberal MP Wayne Easter noted Paulson talked about moving resources — more than 600 people — to counter-terrorism from other areas within the RCMP.
"Commissioner Paulson made it clear that they are drawing resources from other areas and I do see that as a concern," Easter said.The following note was discovered in the jacket pocket of a recovered body. The head and left arm of the corpse had swollen to three times their regular size. The corpse is believed to be that of James Curtis, who was a member of a local religious organization known as The Victory Society.
What we need:
Two trout
A bottle of milk
Virginal blood (where am i even meant to get that) to be mixed with the milk (he who walks beneath dreams is into that sort of thing apparently)
Assorted souls, willingly sold (alliteration is big deal for that which waits inside the horizon)
At least two hundred beetles
Lots of ice (if hawshore thinks i’m doing the sculpture for this shivering mist thingy, he’s got another think coming)
two dead bodies, have to have been dead for at least a year
some human eyes (the blind one’s meant to have thousands of sockets, i dont think a few eyes are going to do it for him BUT OH WELL)
marky and dan are getting the rest of the stuff. laura too, i think. hawshore just sits at home with his books though, the fuck.
The following passage was written on the inside cover of a charred book, outside the church at the center of Daleport.
The border of the mural is encompassed by Ssvlssr, the Shivering Mist that will descend upon the world during the Time of Awakening. The mist is all-encompassing, and shall act as a barrier to those wishing to stop the Awakening, as well as confine the Great Trinity of Potential Victors. The three at the center of the mural are the Great Victor of Flames, the Great Victor of Frost, and the Great Victor of the Storm. They rain down destruction upon one another, with their true names inscribed in unreadable, unknowable runes Around the three are visions of the Great Battle that contain the majority of those that shall come to this realm, with Djrr, the Dark God of Lamp-Posts, The Blind One illuminating the way for his followers, who leave tributes upon crooked light posts. Djlp manifests as the flies pouring out of the mouths of his beloved and becursed to assist in the conflict any way he can, while Yni-Yni, the Trepanner, frees his followers from the skulls of their oppressors. The Shredded Cabbage of Misfortune will destroy those who oppose the vegetable monarchy. Zinn, Herald of Maarp commands the army of Lepidoptera to carry those away who sleep with the flowers beneath the Silver Ash in the Dream Attics of Inanimatum. The Voice of Ages, though not visible, is omnipresent, represented by the yellow runes bearing his name hidden throughout the mural. Finally, at the bottom, the minor minions and deities pledge their allegiance to the three victors. Those who pledge their allegiance to the Great Victor of Flames are tinted orange, the Great Victor of Frost violet, and the Great Victor of Storms green. Many, such as He Who Walks Beneath Dreams, his face a mere triangle, remain unaligned, and are painted in black, for they are opposed to none and yet opposed to all. The Dark Deer Dm'axx is shown around the edges, forever excluded by the rest. Sheogorath remains, ruling his kingdom of two faces before he himself brings its downfall, only to be stopped by a great prisoner of the dragon king. Twenty goats stuck together making a goat ball, spin round and round all the way to goat hell. The skeletons forever fight their final war. The conflicts of these minor deities will have little impact on who the Great Victor of this battle shall be.
Several documents were recovered from what is believed to be the body of Reverend Michael Hawshore, the leader of the religious organization The Victory Society. The body showed extreme spatially anomalous properties, and was incinerated after recovery and analysis. It appears that these pages were removed from a journal or diary, but their original source has not yet been found.
Image found on the body of Reverend Hawshore. Believed to have been removed from a book Hawshore had in his possession.
July 22nd, 19██ I am returning to Daleport. Godfrey wished me luck as I left, but I know he hoped for my failure. He is too idealistic to believe in my cause. I took all the necessary books out of the Library before I left, though. I suppose I could have just waited until I got home, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find a proper Way there, and I very much doubt Godfrey would assist me. Hard to get all the books around. Had some trouble with the Lost Wanderer Dasa’n’asad’s Seventh Tome, but the container my contact gave me helped with the heat worries. Burnt my hand handling the thing, but still. You can’t hope to do something like this without minor sacrifices. James is meeting me at the station, but he’ll most likely be late. He always is. You have to work with what you’ve got, but it’s disheartening there aren’t some more respectable people interested in this venture. I worry about the next time.
August 1st, 19██ I am a little shaken up. The priming ritual for The One Of Broken Nines needed blood sacrifice. I had hoped anaesthetic could be used, but the ritual didn’t allow for that. The child is dead now, and it is done. We can’t lose track of the goal. The child would thank me, thank me from the bottom of his heart, if he knew why we were doing this. It’s for the good of everybody. It’s for the good of everybody. IT’S FOR THE GOOD OF EVERYBODY. The Victor shall walk from the rubbles of man and restore clarity to those who remain. I am beginning to doubt James’ devotion to our cause.
August 13th, 19██ The Voice of Ages needed the blood of a heretic. I suppose it just means heretic in general, the Voice wasn’t picky about what kind of religion. James was not eager to contribute, but the fact that his blood worked proved that my suspicions were correct. The liar. He would have doomed us all in his selfishness. Things do not get easier, but my time is coming to an end. I have decided that we will not operate over the next two days. It will be a time for rest, so we can prepare for what is to come. I will welcome my death, even if it is not quick. The world will lie still again on Monday, and it will thank us for it.
Additional notes found near the body of Reverend Hawshore. The first of these appears to be a transcript from a speech made by the Reverend, presumably to the members of The Victory Society.
Brothers and sisters, we come together for the last time today. It has been an honor to work with you all. I could not have hoped for a better group with which to secure the future of mankind.
From the dawn of time, terrible impossibilities have spawned from the darkness between stars, not hating life, simply being indifferent to it. We are as ants to these abominations, these demented Gods. I use this term as this is what they are called in older texts. You will not find any biblical God here. Or perhaps you will, I do not know. The use of ‘Gods’ here is this specific form of creature, born from the primordial chaos of this reality, not just a powerful being. Simply powerful beings do not reach the uncaring depths of cruelty and depravity that the Gods do. They are so far above us that we are but insects. Accordingly, we shall look as such. In order to gain the forgiveness and favour of the Gods, we must learn to know our place before them. Each of these things seeks dominion over the laws of reality itself, imposing the nature of their twisted existences upon stars and planets and people. The only answer to this threat? These Gods must be destroyed, the slate wiped clean. We could not do this, by no means, no. But we cannot allow these things to exist. A kingdom cannot have a billion kings. We cannot kill the Gods, no, only a God can kill a God. We will bring them here and bind them. Bind them until their bloodlust is sated, until all but one is dead. Always a single God remains: the Victor, who returns to whence they came as the only God remaining. But their primordial chaos eventually spawns more Gods, more twisted angels and demons. And so it all comes to pass again. Our vigilance must be constant, for a new Victor must be found again and again. We will leave a mark in creation, but it will fade. It will heal. Stand strong as our people have before. Stand strong as the near-men in ancient cities did. Stand strong as we did at the Gates of Sodom. Stand strong as we have always stood strong, because this must always be done. Fortune favours those who take bold steps. We shall become Unified with Inanimatum, entering the Somnium Aeternum. May we be forgiven.
The following section was found in the back cover of Hawshore's journal.British Columbia's MLAs are returning to Victoria on Monday for a mid-summer legislative session to deal with changes to the Vancouver Charter intended to allow the city to impose a special "empty housing" tax.
I was struck by a comment made a few days ago by West Vancouver Mayor Michael Smith, who thinks a better approach to the issue would be to levy an additional tax on non-resident owners. He's quoted as saying, "I pay a non-resident tax rate in Hawaii because I own a house there. It's a much more logical way to go than a vacancy tax because, first of all, how do you enforce it and everyone has a different definition of vacant."
For anyone that repressed a grin thinking that only a mayor of West Vancouver would be happy talking about his house in Hawaii, there's a much more serious point that his observation completely misses. It's a point invariably avoided by nearly everyone who discusses housing issues.
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In Hawaii, as in the rest of the United States, there is only a partial exemption for capital gains on the increase in value of a house that is sold. In most cases, the first $250,000 in capital gains, or $500,000 for couples, is exempt, but everything after that is taxed. Creating a two-tier system of taxes thus becomes a way of providing at least some comparative tax advantage to resident homeowners.
In Canada, of course, you pay no capital gains tax on your house, provided it is your principal residence. If you own property here but don't live in it, you are taxable on the full amount of the increase in its value when you sell it. That's true even if you live in it part-time, as long, of course, as you have a principal residence somewhere else.
This is a massive tax benefit for resident homeowners. In some parts of Vancouver, houses are being sold for literally 10 times what they were purchased for decades ago. All of that gain is tax-free if the house is your principal residence. But if you have purchased the property for an investment, if you've flipped it, or if you are planning to subdivide it and sell it off, it's all taxable.
In other words, we already have a very significant two-tier taxation system for residential property.
Indeed, there is another such scheme, the Home Owner Grant, which reduces the amount of property taxes you pay each year on your principal residence. Admittedly, the grant doesn't offer much value any more in Vancouver because the ceiling on eligibility has not kept up with the rising values of real estate in Vancouver.
But in other parts of the province, the grant is a very efficient way of distinguishing between houses that are lived in by their owners and houses that are owned by investors.
So there are at least two mechanisms already in place for distinguishing between resident homeowners and property investors. Do we need a third?
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The proposed tax on vacant houses is partly about the apparent growth in non-resident investor-owners, and also about the shortage of rental property in the city. Rarely, in the long history of housing policy, has a tool been conceived that is more poorly designed to increase the stock of rental accommodation than the vacancy tax.
There are at least two fundamental problems with it. One, the definition of vacancy, whatever it is, will be arbitrary. How long does a property have to be uninhabited to be "vacant"? A week, a month, a year? No matter where you draw the line, it will be arbitrary.
In fact, there are lots of reasons why a house might be empty for many months, and many of them will have nothing to do with investors sitting on capital assets. What about the family that bought a house intending to move here because of a job transfer, but the transfer has been put on hold and the family decides to hang on to the house for a while to see if things change? It's not hard to imagine dozens of such scenarios: Mom's just been put in a care home, but there's some chance she might recover and wouldn't it be great if we could make arrangements to care for her in her house? And in such a situation, why would it make any sense at all to force the family to rent her house?
Of course, some properties are being left vacant because that is a rational investment decision by their owners. I'm not for a moment pretending that's not happening. But I can tell you this from long experience overseeing public-policy administration: Every exemption proposed to try to limit or narrow the focus of the tax in a way that targets the "pure" investor will turn into a loophole and magnify problems of enforcement.
The second fundamental problem is that it will be an exercise in impossible magicianship to determine the right amount of the extra tax. Why? Because if it's not high enough, it won't deter vacancy or produce any significant revenue, and so will do nothing to help Vancouver achieve its goal of funding additional affordable housing. And if it's too high, it will simply – and instantly – give an incentive for avoidance. Experts will spring up overnight to advise you on how to make it appear that your house is being lived in.
If I were an MLA, I'd be more than a little grumpy about taking time away from the summer barbecue circuit to debate a tax that is neither necessary nor enforceable, and will do nothing to address the problem it is intended to solve.
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Geoff Plant was British Columbia's attorney-general from 2001 to 2005. He practices law with Gall Legge Grant & Munroe in Vancouver.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly said all homeowners in the United States pay capital gains tax after selling their home. In fact, in most cases the first $250,000 of capital gain on a seller's primary residence is exempt from capital gains tax in the U.S.; for a couple, the exemption applies to the first $500,000.Ryan Salandy (Screenshot/NBC4)
A Maryland man described as a Christian rapper is being charged with first degree murder after he allegedly ran a man down with his car over a disagreement about music recording, NBC4 reports.
Ryan Anthony Salandy, 22, allegedly confessed to police that he ran down William Dean McDaniel, 21, killing him. Salandy’s attorney is questioning the circumstances of that confession. Salandy is accused of purposely running over McDaniel, who was working on recorded tracks given to him by Salandy.
Salandy is reportedly a Christian rapper and college student. He is being held without bond, NBC reports. His lawyer, Luis Gomez, had argued unsuccessfully that Salandy has no criminal record, poses no threat and is not a flight risk.
McDaniel was found lying in the street at about 12:30 p.m. on Friday. He was pronounced dead at the scene, NBC reports.
McDaniel had been out walking his dog when he and Salandy had an argument, according to reports. Salanday drove away, but allegedly circled back and sped his Saab sedan into McDaniel before driving away. Authorities later found the car with a broken windshield and what appeared to be blood splattered on it.
Salandy was arrested after his mother called police to report her son had been in an accident.
Watch the report from NBC4 here:A sport utility vehicle carrying four teenagers crossed the center line on the Arborway in Jamaica Plain Friday afternoon and flipped over, striking a pickup truck occupied by two men in a devastating crash that left at least two people with life-threatening injuries, authorities said.
All six people involved in the crash, which occurred at about 2 p.m., were taken to area hospitals, State Police said in a statement. The accident occurred on the busy thoroughfare near Saint Joseph Street.
State Police said authorities were investigating what caused the SUV with the teens inside to cross the center line.
Jake Wark, spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, said in a statement that the teenagers ranged in age from 14 to 17, and they were taken to city hospitals “with injuries ranging from |
India “Sangh-mukt” (RSS-free). BJP chief Amit Shah had also praised Kumar yesterday, setting tongues wagging in the political circles.The Glitch Mob’s Ooah, Edit, and Boreta travel to Des Moines, IA with The Blade to perform at 7 Flags on October 15, 2014.
The show celebrates the release of their Love Death Immorality album and features special guests The M Machine Live and Chrome Sparks.
This is an ALL AGES show with doors opening at 7pm.
Get Tickets | RSVP on FB
Find the Immortality Pass
Des Moines family! Keep watch here or on our twitter (@theglitchmob) tomorrow at 6PM for clues to whereabouts of 3 hidden tickets to the show at 7 Flags this Wednesday.
Guest List Passes
We’ve got a limited allotment of guest list passes for the show. Help us tweet the word out and hop on our guest list. First tell us how to reach you when we put the list together. We will notify everyone the day before the show.
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Join The Mob – Local Support Team
Excited to see you in a few weeks. We’re planning something special at every city across the tour. Want to join The Mob Support Team and get involved with us on the local front? CLICK HERE and let us know.Contribution rules
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I confirm that the above statements are true and accurate.The exploded adoption of Smartphones has got its own share of security concerns and threats as Indian teenagers are vulnerable to security threats on their smartphone devices. A recent report by Norton by Symantec highlights that a considerable 62% of the respondents feel that teenagers in India are highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Surprisingly, 54% of the respondents also believe that there is a probability of teenagers likely to commit a mobile-related crime, such as leaking inappropriate photos, revenge porn, etc.
The study also reveals that 36% of the respondents fear that their personal information is leaked. 30% of the respondents said that they might become a victim of cyberstalking and revenge porn whereas 33% fear of a virus/malware attack.
The survey was conducted by Symantec by Norton which covered 1,005 Indian smartphone and tablet users, lying in the age group of 16 years and above, from 14 Indian cities. 30% of the respondents who participated in the study were parents of teenagers aged between 13 and 16 years.
The respondents of the survey are also concern about the growing influence of smartphones in kids and teens personal life. They have a legitimate fear that the teenagers would also indulge in inflicting cyber-attacks on other people. 27% of the respondents felt that teenagers might hack someone’s personal information. Junk texts and emails (25%), cyberstalking (22%), revenge porn (24%), cyberbullying (26%), Catphishing/sweetheart scams (12%) are the top attacks that a teenager can inflict on victims according to respondents. Catphishing/Sweetheart scam is the one where a person tricks his victims into a fake romantic relationship by changing his identity.
The smartphone market in India is dominated by the Android OS, which commands around 97% of the market. Android OS, especially its previous versioned smartphones (before Marshmallow), is prone to cyber-attacks. As some manufacturers don’t pay much heed to their older smartphone models, the devices become vulnerable to cyber-attacks due to missing security updates released in the latest version of the operating system.
But the concern is not limited to India alone; a recent report reveals that children are more drawn towards smartphones especially in the US. The average age of children getting their hands on their first smartphone in the US is just 10.3 years. Interestingly, it’s not just smartphone kids, and teenagers are immensely attracted to, the use of tablet devices among the kids has increased by 55% from 2012, whereas smartphone usage has grown by 45% over the same period. The easy access to technology may create fatal effects in the future as kids are insolent about its hazards.
“As ‘digital natives’ teenagers face various mobile security challenges – as a victim and as perpetrators,” highlights Ritesh Chopra, Country Manager, India, Norton by Symantec.
Chopra illustrates that a 13-year old teenager is insolent about the difference between a good app and a bad app. Teens tend to download apps from non-evaluated third-party app sources, but they must be aware of the potential risks associated with it. He laments that parents should keep a check on smartphone habits of their wards.
Youths are emerging as the drivers of smartphone industry revolution in India as half of the smartphone users in India are young. One of the Ericsson’s reports illustrates the age-wise distribution of mobile internet user base in India. In 2015, a significant 15-20% of the total mobile internet users belonged to the age group of 12-19 years. A substantial 40% of the mobile internet users in India belonged to the age group of 20-30 years.
Apps play tricks with smartphone users; according to another Norton report, a considerable 50% of the respondents have granted permission to access their contacts and mobile in exchange for free apps. Interestingly, 40% of the respondents have given access to their camera and photos as well.
Chopra also addressed the growing adoption of apps among the smartphone users. He said that 1 in every 2 Indians has over 20 apps installed on his/her smartphone or tablet device, and 36% of them have given access to their personal information because they think that having such apps installed look ‘cool’. Chopra also addressed the growing concern towards theft of digital money as 52% of the respondents believe that the mWallet installed on their smartphones has come under threat in the past.
Smartphone Adoption in India: Too Fast, Too Many Concerns
India has become the second largest smartphone market in the world after China. But still, smartphone penetration in India still stands at just 17%. Gartner, however, estimates that smartphone shipments would increase significantly by 29% year over year by the end of 2016. On the other hand, according to IAMAI, the mobile Internet users in India was slated to touch 367 million mark by June 2016. Thus, considering the small population penetration of Smartphones and mobile internet the adoption of smartphone and mobile internet by the teenagers is bound to grow exponentially in the future.
17% of smartphone penetration means that 221 million people in the country of 1.3 billion have a smartphone. Going by the Ericsson report around 17% of the smartphone users in India or 37.57 million falls in the age group of 12-19 years in 2015, which is a large group of people. Therefore, it’s important that one must pay heed to the rising insolence in this age group.We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post. By clicking on the links and making a purchase, you're helping to support the site so we can keep bringing you badass ideas.
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On August 23rd, I took redeye flight number 732 from LAX to ORD, and sat in seat 9E. I was seated between two men. On the aisle-side was a 50-something year old man named Jim. We exchanged pleasantries, and I learned that, after a layover in Chicago, his final destination was Detroit where he would be attending a high school reunion. 10 minutes into the flight, a kid in the seat directly in front of me began vomiting. The vomit ran down through the seat and into my footwell, soaking my handbag and carry-on items in vomit. The crew was very nice about it, but noted the flight was full and there was nowhere to relocate me. There was nothing they could do but cover the mess with plastic and coffee grounds to mask the smell. That got the flight off on a less-than-comfortable note, to start. But that was nothing compared to what came next. Later into the flight, I fell asleep. I awoke at one point to feel Jim’s hand… high on my upper, inner thigh. I thought it possible that it slipped down there while he was asleep, given the narrow nature of the seats on the craft, so I moved my leg away and went back to sleep. A while later, I awoke to find him pressed up against my arm, one hand on my leg, the other hand fumbling around my breasts. I was terrified, and didn’t know how to respond. Stuck in the middle seat on a nearly silent, dark flight in the middle of the night, I was paralyzed with confusion and fear. I startled physically, hard enough that he removed his hands and shifted away. I couldn’t bring myself look at him. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I didn’t know how to get out of my seat and past him to signal for help, and I knew from the earlier vomit incident that there was nowhere to move me anyway. I stayed awake and on-guard for the remainder of the flight, to keep him from making another attempt to grope me in my sleep. I tried to work up the courage to approach the flight crew or gate security, but (and this is something that you’d never fully understand unless you’ve been assaulted) that kind of violation and fear often leaves victims too stunned and shocked to take immediate action. As soon as my parents picked me up from the airport, I told them what happened and immediately called Spirit Airlines to file a complaint. Knowing Jim was only on a layover, I needed to make certain that the crew of his connecting flight to Detroit (and subsequent return flight to LAX) were notified, so that he could be carefully monitored and above all, not seated next to any other women for their own protection. The customer service representative that I reached listened to my story, and responded, as if reading from a script: “I am sorry for the inconvenience, but because you failed to report it in-flight, there is nothing we can do for you.”
To reduce the sexual assault of a passenger on one of your crafts to (as your agent referred to it) “an inconvenience” is offensive and demeaning in ways that words cannot begin to describe. To characterize my inability to speak up in the moment as a “Failure” is insensitive and cruel.
He then went on to coldly inform me that there was no recourse possible on their end, since they only handled reservations. I asked to speak to a manager – in fact I had to ask to speak to a manager four separate times before he agreed to transfer me – and the manager told me the exact same thing. No compassion, no sympathy. No concern for my safety or the safety of your other passengers. No offer to help me reach the appropriate department within the airline to get assistance. Only a cold, detached repeated transference of the blame to me, for not immediately speaking up. Blaming the victim. Super classy.
I requested to know the full name of my attacker, which I’m sure could have been easily retrieved from the flight manifest and seat assignment, so I could file a police report. I was told to contact the TSA because they were “the only people who could access that information or handle this incident”.
I asked to be connected with the O’hare Spirit counter, so that, for their safety and the safety of the other passengers, I could warn them about this passenger before his connecting flight – and I was again refused and referred back to the TSA. Both Spirit representatives with whom I spoke continued to insist that I made a mistake by not immediately reporting it, and showed no concern for my well-being or for fellow passengers that may yet be assaulted by the same man. I could not believe it.
I reached the TSA, who showed at least a modicum of compassion, but also said they only handle issues regarding entrance through airport security, and thus referred me to the Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement Agency (with whom I plan to file a formal complaint against Spirit for their lack of concern for passenger safety). After being bounced around on several more calls, I finally landed in touch with the airport police and filed an official report. Oh, and guess what? The police were completely understanding of my inability to immediately report the assault, and showed great compassion for my plight and urgency in bringing justice to the situation. FINALLY.
Meanwhile, I took to twitter, in the hopes that Spirit’s social media customer service representative would provide some better support and an in-road to making the crews on any future flights on which my assaulter is booked aware of the situation. The response I got? “Sorry to hear about your situation. You’ll need to file a complaint with the police, however.”
What about the fact that this passenger was going on to fly at least twice more in the coming weeks, including immediately following my flight? What about the fact that allowing him to fly, unsupervised, puts other passengers like me or your own employees at risk? What about the fact that sexual assault is a crime? What about customer service? What about decency? or compassion?
It took 6 full hours of an incredible outpouring of support from my twitter community before I received @Spirit_Helper’s revised response and invitation to email you. Six full hours in which thousands of your customers demanded better action on the part of your company. Demanded protection and justice on behalf of your passengers. Demanded boycotts of your airline due to your apparent lack of concern and your unbelievably cold responses. SIX HOURS to get a reaction that showed Spirit had even the slightest interest in understanding the situation better.
(It is also worth noting that @Spirit_Helper deleted her first response to me, about filing a police report, which only goes to show that she or someone at her office recognized how insensitive and irresponsible it was.)
I know it is not Spirit Airline’s fault that I was assaulted on your plane. But it is your responsibility, once made aware that there is a dangerous traveler in your midst, to take whatever steps necessary to ensure the protection of your passengers. It is your responsibility to help a customer who was violated on your plane make contact with the people who can assist her in reaching the right departments who can help. It is your responsibility to warn your crews that a sexual predator is boarding their plane. It is your responsibility to show even an ounce of compassion, and not blame the victim, but instead focus on a solution.
It pains me to think how much worse this could be. What if I had been raped on your plane? Would it have been this hard to receive any support from your company? What if I didn’t have a huge social media following who would mobilize on my behalf to incite Spirit’s social media rep to action? The lack of concern and urgency regarding my safety and the safety of your passengers and crew is astoundingly irresponsible and shameful on the part of your company.
As you can tell, I am no longer afraid to speak up about what happened to me, and I am prepared to go to the media if that’s what it takes to get a real response from Spirit Airlines about how poorly this situation was handled by your representatives, and how little concern you have for your passengers’ safety.
In refusing to protect your passengers, you enable the offender.
So… what are you going to do about it?This blog's author recently gave an easy-to-understand 20-minute talk on this topic. Here's the blog article where you can view the Simple Fractal Model video.
In 1975, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” in the first published paper on fractal geometry. Despite some resistance from the mathematical community, it was soon discovered that fractal geometry is unparalleled at measuring and modeling the world of natural phenomena.
Here's the definition of fractals from Wikipedia: “A fractal is 'a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,' a property called self-similarity... Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex (in informal terms). Natural objects that are approximated by fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, snow flakes, various vegetables (cauliflower and broccoli), and animal coloration patterns.”
At this point in the article, if you haven't already, you really should read the
Basic Principles of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything
found in Chapter One of the Simple Explanation book, in order to acquaint yourself with the concepts and terminology.
• It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales.
• It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
• It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
• It has a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension.
• It has a simple and recursive definition.
To put the Simple Explanation in fractal terms, our universe is populated by simple, recursive, self-similar structures of consciousness at arbitrarily small scales.
As explained in
Chapter 2 of the Simple Explanation
, as our universe expanded, over and over and over again, pale echoes of God’s mind attached themselves to the particles streaming out of the Big Bang. These self-replicating
Units of Consciousness
(UCs) can be described as fractal emanations of the originating fractal formula--the Universal UC.
Whereas Mandlebrot's best-known fractal, the Mandlebrot Set, looks like this,
the fractal associated with the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything looks like this.
One interesting feature of fractal patterns is that no matter how closely you look, or how many calculations are performed, the pattern continues to replicate on smaller and smaller, and larger and larger, scales.
In the Simple Explanation, the enclosure of our material Universe is a Very Large toroidal pattern at the "outside" edge of creation. This would be the Universal pattern at its largest fractal scale, the Universal UC, akin to the singular void at the center of the Mandlebrot set. Drilling downward from greatest to smallest, the Units of Consciousness associated with sub-atomic particles are the smallest fractal expressions of the Universal set. These smallest material instantiations of creation pass from the realm of pure consciousness through causal energy to material instantiation through calculations of the Universal fractal formula. The crossover from pure consciousness to material instantiation occurs at the edge of an infinite series of ever smaller fractal divisions proceeding downward from the lower limit of material instantiation (Planck's constant), and then energetically finer and finer until energy is finally suspended in the infinite stillness of non-being, the Metaverse.
In the Simple Explanation, the
zero point at the center of the universal toroid is the source point
where the pure undifferentiated consciousness of the metaverse is concentrated to singular manifestation. This is the crossover location between the
undifferentiated unity
and material creation. Some call it the Womb of Creation. From this zero-point, all organizing principles and laws enter our Universe and replicate their patterns upwardly through creation, from the very smallest sub-atomic particles to the largest galaxies, and then beyond, to the Very Large.
These replicating patterns and their hierarchical structure is explained more fully in the two articles,
"My Self, the Governor of Whoville"
and
"Nested Hierarchies."
In personal terms, my Self UC is a fractal division of the Universal UC, and so is every UC associated with everything in my body. The fractal calculations occur at every hierarchical jump of organizational complexity.
The spiritual implication of this fractal model is this: the Universal UC ("God," "The Creator," "The Mother of 10,000 Things") may be visualized as both immanent and transcendent. Immanent within every one of my body's UCs, at the tiniest fractal crossover point at the center of each UC. Transcendent at the outer edge of the Very Large, where our Universal UC fractally nests against the infinite, undifferentiated Metaversal UC ("God the Father," "Sat," "Pure Consciousness," the "Undifferentiated Unity"). We humans are suspended thusly, a particular fractal emanation of, and located within, creation, yet patterned directly from pure consciousness.Selected Essays by Simone Weil, translated by Richard Rees Oxford University Press, $7.00
The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.
What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters “on the knees of his heart”—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kliest’s plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.
Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary—necessary to share Simone Weil’s anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their “views.” As the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his own life, but moved, enriched, and full of love; so the sensitive modern reader pays his respect to a level of spiritual reality which is not, could not, be his own.
Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist’s, like Kierkegaard’s—was Simone Weil’s. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil’s life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.
This new volume of translations from Simone Weil’s work, Selected Essays 1934-43, displays her somewhat marginally. It contains one great essay, the opening essay here titled “Human Personality” which was written in 1943, the year of her death in England at the age of thirty-four. (This essay, by the way, was first published in two parts under the title “The Fallacy of Human Rights” in the British magazine The Twentieth Century in May and June 1959. There it suffered the curious and instructive fate of requiring a defensive editorial in June, when the second part of the essay appeared, replying to criticism of the magazine’s decision to publish the essay “on the grounds that it involves heavy going for some readers.” It certainly speaks volumes about the philistine level of English intellectual life, if even as good a magazine as The Tweentieth Century cannot muster an enthusiastic, grateful audience for such a piece.) Another essay, placed last in the book, called “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,” also written the year of her death, contains matter central to Simone Weil’s ideas. The remaining essays are on specific historical and political subjects—two on the civilization of Languedoc, one on a proletarian uprising in Renaissance Florence, several long essays on the Roman Empire which draw an extensive parallel between imperial Rome and Hitler’s Germany, and various reflections on the Second World War, the colonial problem, and the post-war future. There is also an interesting and sensitive letter to George Bernanos. The longest argument of the book, spanning several essays, develops the parallel between Rome (and the ancient Hebrew theocracy!) and Nazi Germany. According to Simone Weil, who displays an unpleasant silence on the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Hitler is no worse than Napoleon, than Richelieu, than Caesar. Hitler’s racialism, she says, is nothing more than “a rather more romantic name for nationalism.” Her fascination with the psychological effects of wielding power and submitting to coercion, combined with her strict denial of any idea of historical progress, led her to equate all forms of state authority as manifestations of what she calls “the great beast.”
Readers of Simone Weil’s Notebooks (two volumes, published in 1959) and her Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (1958) will be familiar with her attempt to derive everything distinctively Christian from Greek spirituality as well as to deny entirely Chrisianity’s Hebraic origins. This fundamental argument—along with her admiration for Provençal civilization, for the Manichean and Catharist heresies—colors all her historical essays. I cannot accept Simone Weil’s gnostic reading of Christianity as historically sound (its religious truth is another matter); nor can I fail to be offended by the vindictive parallels she draws between Nazism, Rome, and Israel. Impartiality, no more than a sense of humor, is not the virtue of a writer like Simone Weil. Like Gibbon (whose view of the Roman Empire she absolutely contradicts), Simone Weil as a historical writer is tendentious, exhaustive, and infuriatingly certain. As a historian she is simply not at her best; no one who disbelieves so fundamentally in the phenomena of historical change and innovation can be wholly satisfying as a historian. This is not to deny that there are subtle historical insights in these essays: as for example, when she points out that Hitlerism consists in the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination. (Immediately after, of course, she says that these—both Hitler’s methods and the “normal colonial ones”—are derived from the Roman model.)
The principal value of the collection is simply that anything from Simone Weil’s pen is worth reading. It is perhaps not the book to start one’s acquaintance with this writer—Waiting for God, I think, is the best for that. The originality of her psychological insight, the passion and subtlety of her theological imagination, the fecundity of her exegetical talents are unevenly displayed here. Yet the person of Simone Weil is here as surely as in any of her other books—the person who is excruciatingly identical with her ideas, the person who is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit.Looking at the comments on my Niall Ferguson takedown (see Ezra Klein, Matthew O’Brien, James Fallows, and Noah Smith for more), I found my memory jogged about a point I’ve been meaning to make about the nature of error in economics.
It seems to me that when readers declare that some piece of economics commentary is “wrong”, they often confuse three different notions of wrongness, which are neither intellectually nor morally equivalent.
First, there’s the ordinary business of expressing a view about the economy that the reader disagrees with – e.g., “Krugman is wrong, because the government can’t create jobs”; or, if you prefer, “Casey Mulligan is wrong, because we’re suffering from demand problems, not supply problems.” Obviously it’s OK to say things like this, and sometimes the criticism is correct. (I’m not wrong, but Mulligan is!) But equally obviously, there’s nothing, er, wrong about being wrong in this sense: people will disagree, and that’s legitimate.
Second, and much less legitimate, is the kind of wrongness that involves making assertions that are logically or empirically indefensible. I’d put the Cochrane/Fama claims that government spending can’t increase demand as a matter of accounting in this category; this is a basic conceptual error, which goes beyond mere difference of opinion. And economists who are wrong in this sense should pay a professional price.
That said, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect the news media to be very effective at policing this kind of wrongness. If professors with impressive-sounding credentials spout nonsense, it’s asking too much of a newspaper or magazine serving the broader public to make the judgment that they actually have no idea what they’re talking about.
Matters are quite different when it comes to the third kind of wrongness: making or insinuating false claims about readily checkable facts. The case in point, of course, is Ferguson’s attempt to mislead readers into believing that the CBO had concluded that Obamacare increases the deficit. This was unethical on his part – but Newsweek is also at fault, because this is the sort of thing it could and should have refused to publish.
Now, I don’t expect a publication that responds to daily or weekly news to do New Yorker-style fact checking. But it should demand that anyone who writes for it document all of his or her factual assertions – and an editor should check that documentation to see that it actually matches what the writer says.
That’s how it works at the Times, or at least how it works for me. I supply a list of sources with each column submission; for yesterday’s piece it looked like this:
$4.3 trillion: //www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=3301&DocTypeID=5 lines 2, 3 and 5 Ryan cuts: //www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3723 (I count his Medicaid cuts relative to current policy, not policy including Obamacare) Disproportionate benefits at top: //www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=3337&DocTypeID=2 Ryan award: //www.thefiscys.com/content/sen-kent-conrad-rep-paul-ryan-and-gov-mitch-daniels-named-2011-fiscy-award-recipients Baseline: //www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ryan-20120817,0,1246452.story
Each time I send in a column draft, the copy editor runs quickly through the citations, making sure that they match what I assert. Sometimes the editor feels that I go further than the source material actually justifies; in that case we either negotiate a rewording, or drop the assertion altogether. Oh, and weasel-wording isn’t acceptable – implying something the facts don’t support is no more OK than stating it outright.
And despite all this, sometimes an error slips through. In that case, the response is a print correction.
We know what Ferguson is going to do: he’s going to brazen it out, actually boasting about the deftness with which he misled his readers. But what is Newsweek going to do?Money can buy happiness, just as long as you’re not materialistic.
For a while now, conventional wisdom -- with the backing of science -- has held that you’ll be happier spending your paycheck on a trip to Hawaii than on another pair of Nikes. But a recent study, conducted by researchers at San Francisco State University, suggests that one personality type is an exception to the rule: Materialists.
According to their findings, “material buyers” -- defined in the study as people who value materialistic pursuits and prefer buying material goods over experiences -- aren’t any happier when they make "experiential" purchases like trips to Hawaii. Funny thing is, they're not happier after a materialistic purchase, either -- maybe because they're worried about being judged for being so materialistic.
Over the course of three experiments, San Francisco State researchers classified a group of several hundred adults according to personality types, ranging from less materialistic to more materialistic. About a third of the group were materialistic personalities. Each person was asked to rate a material or experiential purchase according to questions such as, “how much has this purchase contributed to your overall life happiness?”
The more-materialistic participants got less happiness from experiential purchases, because such purchases didn't fit with their personality and values. The researchers assumed these participants would at least get a “happiness boost” from material purchases, which better suit their values. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, material buyers weren’t any happier with their material purchases than with their experiential ones.
“Typically, when you’re congruent with your values, you’re happier,” Dr. Ryan Howell, an associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State and co-author of the study, told The Huffington Post. "But there are certain value systems that are shunned by society. When we find out someone is materialistic, we think less of them, and that drives their happiness down.”
People who display materialistic values tend to be seen by others as having negative personality traits like narcissism and shallowness, said Howell, who has contributed to other studies linking experiential purchases with happiness. He is also the co-founder of BeyondThePurchase.Org, which advises consumers on happiness-maximizing purchases.
In fact, according to a personality scale known as the Experiential Buying Tendency Scale (developed in part by Howell), materialistic personality types do exhibit increased neuroticism, poorer interpersonal relationships and less empathy than non-materialists. Oh, and a "Machiavellian personality profile," characterized by "envy, possessiveness, nongenerosity, and the pursuit of extrinsic rather than intrinsic goals." So there you go.
For materialists, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. While material purchases might make them feel happier, they can’t fully enjoy their material spoils because they feel judged. In contrast, Howell said, an experiential purchase can’t make a materialist any happier, because “they’re trying to impress others, and it doesn’t meet their psychological needs.”
But there’s hope for materialists, and it comes in the form of a truism: Be yourself.For all its continued popularity, such optimism was unusual in the genre. The new wave of sci-fi in the late ’60s, typified by J. G. Ballard and Philip |
the Rings theme park news first broke on Euro Weekly News a few weeks back, but J.R.R. Tolkien fan site, The One Ring, just noticed it this week. According to the site, eight hectares are being allocated for the park at a cost of 1.7 million Euro. That’s basically an 20 acre park that costs $2 million. So it’s not a very big park. The mayor of the town, Francisco Salado, said the following:
The Shire will become one of the major tourism attractions of our town. The material will have a very low environmental impact, to create an integrated image in nature. It will be a place in which family leisure, sports and nature will go hand-in-hand in a unique space of great beauty set in a time of fairy tales and the magic of the elves. Without a doubt, Rincon de la Victoria will have a top-rated tourist attraction, which will also add to the variety of attractions of Malaga.
That, along with the size, makes this Lord of the Rings theme park sound more like a regular park. There won’t be any big roller coasters or anything. Everything will look like the Shire, but there will be “climbing walls, hobbit homes, swings and slides.” There will be stuff to do, fun to be had, but on a smaller scale. It’s almost as if it was more suited to a Hobbit sensibility.
Still, it’s pretty cool for Tolkien fans that might live closer to Spain than New Zealand that they’ll have a place they can go to feel like they’re in Middle Earth. What do you think of this potential Lord of the Rings theme park?by Johann Theron on April 7, 2017
The decline of Western Civilization in South Africa has reached such epic proportions that it has even attracted the attention of the fake news media. Their stock answer is always to deride South Africa as a third world country with a nice mountain. They have to say this, since contemporary South Africa is a product of Leftist, Hollywood and media intervention.
After Mandela died the newspaper attention waned, but when affirmative action Trevor Noah replaced John Stewart as a comedian on American television’s Daily Show, a few commentators woke up and started to see some strange political adventures taking place. This is not to be confused with Hollywood’s routine derogatory inclusion of South Africans in its scripts as mercenaries and criminals.
The news glosses over inconvenient facts that contradict the Leftist narrative. It routinely avoids mention of the farm murders, wherein white farmers are killed by members of an African underclass which is supported by the ruling political party, thanks to the greater numbers of African voters.
One fact that cannot be debunked is that a United Nations representative established that Boers are currently subject to level six genocide. In other words, the Zulu nation is not under threat (at all) and neither are the British, German or Portuguese descendants living in South Africa.
The Boers face an escalating wave of violence, discrimination and government-mandated marginalization. We all know where this leads: to their elimination. For some strange reason genocide is not classified as “terrorism.” Even Rwandan genocide failed to rate a blip on American media screens. So what do you do when a South African asks for help?
Even here affirmative action plays a role, because black South Africans enjoy migrant status in Kentucky’s sanctuary cities while Boer migrants are refused. Apparently American diplomats accept anyone, unless the South African Ambassador to America complains to the Secretary of State when “certain†people apply.
Clearly American Politicians are complicit in the Boer genocide as classified by the UN, which is acceptable because it is not terror. This is explained by arguing that, for genocide to be terror, there has to be a political intent. Since Mandela already ruled in South Africa, there can be no political intent for killing farmers.
But farmers, women, children and workers are indeed being brutally and tortuously killed. The trick is that it is not all at once. Therefor some commentators call it a gradual genocide, which the UN seems to agree with. In fact Gregory Stanton agrees that the Bushmen are also being genocided at the same time. This has led to even more UN agencies getting involved such as (UNPO) “Unrepresented Peopleâ€Â in the World.
All of the UN involvement in response to requests for help has come to naught, meaning that “official†channels and the media those channels control, literally ignore the reported facts, despite acknowledging it.
Despite experts identifying gradual genocide, it is still required of the victim to prove that he is being terrorized, before asking for help. The proof experts refer to is the politically authorized dissolution of the regional security service structure in the entire country.
In other words, the police must become implements of the political policy of the regime, and not just law enforcement. Obviously this presents a huge logical hole because laws can be changed to prosecute or ignore the victimization of a target group.
After Mandela became President, thousands of terrorists previously trained elsewhere in Africa such as Tanzania, “returned†to South Africa in glorious fashion, to be designated as “veterans†while some of the experienced terrorists were employed in staff military and police positions. Since they were all trained in terrorist acts such as surveillance and weapons, those that did not receive jobs felt disillusioned and promptly started with advanced criminal acts such as hi-jacking money-in-transit vehicles very effectively. Once bank security became more effective, they changed to the next low hanging fruit, such as remote farmers with safes containing money and weapons.
Heists and farm murders have been noticed by senior police officials, but they gloss over it as statistically insignificant when compared to blacks being killed. Unbeknownst to them, this is exactly where the political intent rears its ugly face. They are willing to ignore the greater percentages of whites being victimized to focus on the more numerous black citizens, whose victimization is not designed to eliminated them as a population.
A recent study by a civil activist group showed that when elected black officials go on television expressing hatred for whites or denouncing farmers in song or in verbal abuse, that farmer deaths increase afterwards.
This gives them a dual pronged strategy: in private ignore the crimes against whites, who being a smaller group face a greater threat from fewer crimes, and the political strategy behind them; in public, encourage these crimes with political rhetoric and the implication that these crimes will go unpunished.
In social media, hatred for whites is recorded virtually every day. This demonstrates that within the tribal black communities writing in their own languages, hatred for whites, specifically for the farmer is not only “allowedâ€, but also a popular topic, where it is tribally entrenched to kill whites, rape their women and take their goods/money. This is a cultural wave of ethnic violence.
This is a human rights violation being committed from one group unto another group. What makes it worse is that it is the majority discriminating against the minority. However, the more responsible officials will on this point say that it’s “only a few extremist individuals†who are not even an identifiable group. One could answer that if it is only a few, why don’t they ever get caught?
White experts such as Gareth Newham of the Institute of Security Studies try to help the South African Government by proposing a “specialized police unit†and specialized courts to address the common triad of carjacking, house robbery and business robbery. What these experts are saying is that police efforts are being hampered by political interference.
This proves that there is intentional political causation of ethnic violence hidden within crime in South Africa, and while it is evident in all categories, the undeniable genocidal effect against white farmers is documented (not to forget the Bushmen tribe, who as an ethnic minority are also targeted). This is terror perpetrated on farmers and protected by the state.
That policy extends into the United States of America, where politicians also protect the criminals. They hide behind the thin distinction that genocide has to be officially ordered by a militarized, politicized police form, but forget that true ethnic violence is spontaneous and requires only a wink and a nod from those officials in a disorganized fashion.
The world has failed recognize the gradual genocide of farmers as terrorism and genocide. Despite the massive investment by Western politicians in fighting “terror” and “racism,” neither of these terms apply when white people are the victims. This invalidates the terms, and makes us wonder whether like terror, these terms are simply a political weapon designed to conceal ethnic crimes.
Tags: farm murders, genocide, nelson mandela, south africa, terrorism
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A Finagle inspired network application framework for Rust.
Carl Lerche Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 3, 2016
I’m very excited to announce a project that has been a long time in the making. Tokio is a network application framework for rapid development and highly scalable deployments of clients and servers in the Rust programming language.
It strives to make writing robust, scalable, and production ready network clients and servers as easy as possible. It does this by focusing on small and reusable components… and by being really, really, fast.
Go check it out https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio. I’ll wait.
Welcome back. Let’s start our tour of Tokio.
Service Trait
Writing composable and reusable components is made possible by standardizing the interface that clients and servers use. In Tokio, this standardized interface is the `Service` trait and it is the cornerstone of Tokio’s building blocks. This trait is heavily inspired (Ok, stolen) from Finagle.
Here is what the Service trait looks like:
A relatively simple trait, but it unlocks a world of possibility. This symmetric and uniform API reduces your server or client into a function, thus enabling middleware (or filters, depending on your lingo).
A Service is an asynchronous function from Request to Response, where asynchronicity is managed by the brilliant Futures crate.
A middleware is a component that acts both as a client and a server. It intercepts a request, modifies it, and passes it on to an upstream Service value.
Let us use timeouts as an example, something every network application requires.
This Timeout middleware, shown above, only has to be written once, then it can be inserted as part of any network client for any protocol, as shown below.
Now, the really interesting thing is that the exact same middleware could be used in a server as well, shown below.
Tokio’s Reactor
The Service trait addresses how all the various network services fit together to build one cohesive application, but it doesn’t care about the details of how each service is built. This is where the Tokio reactor fits in.
The Tokio reactor is a non-blocking runtime built on top of Mio. It has the job of scheduling tasks to run based on readiness notifications of the underlying sockets.
Let us start with a simple example: listening on a socket and accepting inbound connections.
Look at all the things that I’m not doing. This is all non-blocking code. There is no interest explicitly registered with the reactor, there are no callbacks passed around, everything happens right there in the `tick` function.
This is where I think Tokio does something new and interesting (if this has been done before, I am not aware of it).
Instead of requiring that you explicitly register interest in a socket in order to receive readiness notifications, as Mio requires, Tokio observes which sources (in this case, a TcpListener) the task depends on by noticing which sources the task uses. In other words, by simply using your sockets, timers, channels, etc… you are expressing readiness interest to the reactor.
So, in this example, the first time the reactor calls the Listener task, `self.socket.accept()` will return `Ok(None)` which indicates that the listener socket is not ready to complete the accept operation. However, the listener socket will also register interest in itself with the reactor. When the listener becomes ready, the task is invoked again by the reactor. This time the accept will succeed. The reactor is able to make its observations with virtually no performance overhead. You can see for yourself if you don’t believe me.
This pattern works out nicely for more complex cases as well. I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with.
Community
Tokio is now open to the world while still at a very early stage. This is intentional. Release early, release often. I am hoping to get the Rust community involved now to shape the direction of Tokio and to get the protocol & middleware ecosystem jump started. It is up to you to build these reusable components and share them.
Do you want a Cassandra driver? Write it. Do you want an HTTP 2 server? Do it!
A number of Rust community members have already jumped in to help shape Tokio to what it is today.
Sean McArthur of Hyper has already started working to integrate the Tokio reactor in Hyper for the 0.10 release. His feedback has been invaluable. We already have a proof of concept HTTP server providing a Service trait based API.
Tikue is working on getting his RPC framework Tarpc working on Tokio using the provided building blocks. We’ve already discovered further components Tokio could provide to reduce the amount of time he has to spend writing networking code.
This is the beginning, not the end. There is still so much to do and I hope that we can all do it together. If you want to build something with Tokio, get involved. Talk to me and the other members of the Tokio community. Jump in Gitter and start a conversation. Let’s build this together.Advertisement
Tired of burning a new CD every time a new version of your favourite Linux distro comes out? Then stop. Use NetbootCD to download and install your choice of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Fedora 15 - Bringing You The Latest In Linux Fedora 15 - Bringing You The Latest In Linux It's another great day in the world of Linux. Fedora 15 was finally released yesterday, and this new release brings a massive amount of changes compared to Fedora 14. In fact, there's so many changes... Read More, openSUSE, Mandriva, CentOS or Slackware from a single disk. This handy disk downloads and runs the net installation tools for several distros, and is always capable of finding the latest version of your Linux operating system. Burn this tool once and you’ll never need to burn a Linux distro to CD again.
Using NetbootCD isn’t necessarily easy. You’ll need to learn to use text-based installers instead of the GUI versions found on live CDs. To me though, this is a small price to pay to contain my steadily-growing pile of Linux CDs.
Getting Started
First things first, you’ll need to download NetbootCD and burn the ISO to CD. If you’re really old-fashioned you can also grab the floppy drive version of NetbootCD, but for most people the CD is what you’re looking for. Whatever version you use, boot the disk and you’ll see a menu like this:
You’ll need to use the arrow keys to browse the menu, because your mouse will not work here. Before you start installing anything I highly recommend you run the “download” option. This will ensure you are using the most recent version of the NetbootCD script, and as such have access to the latest versions of your distro.
Once you’ve updated, click “install” to see your choice of Linux distros:
Pick the distro you want to run and you can pick which version of that distro you want. For example, here are the Ubuntu choices:
Generally you’re going to want the latest released version, but the choice is entirely up to you. Pick what you want and the download process will begin:
Note that your wireless setup may not play nicely with NetbootCD. To keep things simple, plug your computer directly into your router or modem with an ethernet cable.
Net Installations
Eventually your computer will load the net installation tool for your distro. Install the way you normally would, following the prompts and answering any questions. Since every package needs to be downloaded before it is installed, this will take longer than usual.
Depending on your distro, you may need to pick which desktop you want installed. For example: Ubuntu users will be given a choice between the Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu desktops, to name a few (why are there so many versions of Ubuntu? Why Are There So Many Versions of Ubuntu? [Technology Explained] Why Are There So Many Versions of Ubuntu? [Technology Explained] Read More )
Be sure to choose something or you may end up with a command-line-only system. Note that the spacebar selects your option and enter continues to the next step of installation.
Once you’ve got everything the way you want it, you’re ready to boot into your Linux distro of choice.
Conclusion
I really like the idea of only needing one Linux installation CD around for my favorite versions of Linux, as well as future versions. If you like not to waste CDs but still use GUI installation tools, I suggest you check out Unetbootin How To Install Linux With Ease Using UNetbootin How To Install Linux With Ease Using UNetbootin We've already talked about Linux and why you should try it, but probably the hardest part of getting used to Linux is getting it in the first place. For Windows users, the simplest way is... Read More or Linux Live USB Creator Linux Live USB Creator: Easily Boot Linux From Your Flash Drive Linux Live USB Creator: Easily Boot Linux From Your Flash Drive Read More. Both of these tools make it possible to boot Linux from a USB drive or an SD card.
How do you like to install Linux? Let us know in the comments below, along with any tips for first-time users of NetbootCD.I need some help here. I have a friend with whom I’m debating evolution. He is a fundamentalist Christian (wait for it), but he has an uncharacteristic understanding of, and respect for, science.
So he’s an extremely intelligent guy who doesn’t deny the validity of science. In fact, he actually accepts microevolution. He’s familiar with the various moth studies and such, and accepts them as solid. What he disputes is the concept of macroevolution. For those not up on the terms, macroevolution is any evolution that occurs at or above the species level, meaning that over time the offspring species would become unable to mate with the parent species.
But Rick’s main argument concerns less subtle differences. He doesn’t care if moth A becomes moth B, and that after many generations they won’t be able to procreate with each other. He wants more than that. He quite simple rejects the notion of all life having a common ancestor.
So here’s the problem: his argument is that he and I both have beliefs; I believe in macroevolution and he believes in God. When I show him that my beliefs (and not his) are backed by empirical evidence, he refutes the evidence using assorted websites that dispute various parts of the findings. After this happened for like the third time I realized something.
If I cannot explain macroevolution to him — or anyone else — that means I don’t totally understand it myself. And if I believe it without understanding it then it IS a belief. So on that point he’s absolutely correct.
All that remains is me thinking that my belief is based on more evidence than his belief, and that’s where the evidence comes in. Hence a never ending cycle simply because I don’t understand the science well enough myself to articulate and defend it.
So that raises the question in the title of this post: how would YOU explain macroevolution to someone who believes in science but simply doesn’t believe there is enough evidence to support it? Is it possible to do without learning a whole lot of biology yourself?It was the tale of two cities in Pittsburgh this weekend. On Sunday, the local hockey team won the Stanley Cup, reaching the highest heights an NHL team can manage, adding another championship to the cities storied legacy. But at the same time the Penguins were setting in motion plans for a parade, the Pirates were getting swept by their division-rival from St. Louis. At home, no less. And that wasn’t even the worst part of the weekend.
During Friday’s contest with the Cardinals, team-ace Gerrit Cole had to be lifted after two innings on the mound, leaving with what has only been called “triceps tightness” to this point, but is likely to force Cole to miss at least one start, if not land on the disabled list. Catcher Francisco Cervelli then left the game in the fourth inning after suffering a broken hamate bone; he’s out at least a month, and hamate injuries are known to sap power from hitters even after they return to the field. These were blows the team couldn’t really afford to suffer, especially given how the rest of the weekend went.
The three consecutive losses pushed the the Pirates record to 3-10 over their last 13 games, and since they play in the division with baseball’s behemoth, they now find themselves 12 games behind the Cubs in the NL Central race. It’s not fair to say that the Pirates chances to win the division have been completely destroyed by mid-June, but, well, there is this.
Our forecast gave the Pirates a 6% chance to win the NL Central on Opening Day, and that spiked up to 12% after the first week of the season. Since then, though, it’s been a steady decline downwards, as the Cubs have established themselves as a team likely to win 100 games or more, and the Pirates now find themselves just a game over.500 a little more than half the season to go. It’s not impossible for the Pirates to stage a miraculous comeback, but given where things stand now, our forecasts project them to finish 29 games out first place in their division. It’s probably fair for the Pirates to stop dreaming of stealing the division away from the Cubs this year.
And the sweep at the hands of the Cardinals did some pretty significant damage to their Wild Card chances as well. Sure, it’s just three games in June, but look what the weekend did to the respective Wild Card odds for STL and PIT.
The Pirates entered the weekend with a 25% shot at taking one of the two wild card spots; they leave the weekend with just a 14% chance, according to our forecasts. Getting swept by one of the teams you’re trying to beat out for a wild card spot is problematic, even in mid-summer, because it gives you three losses at the same time it gives your rival three wins. And, unfortunately for the Pirates, they don’t just have the Cardinals to run down.
Over in the NL East, the Nationals look like they’re well on their way to bouncing back from last year’s disappointing finish, so it looks likely that one of the two wild card berths will come from the NL East, as the Mets are likely still a 90 win team with upside beyond that, and won’t be easy to keep out of the postseason. Over in the NL West, the Giants are also off to a very strong start, and now project to win finish with 91 ones, which pushes the Dodgers into the Wild Card mix, and given their resources, it’s not too difficult to see them adding some big pieces to upgrade their roster for the stretch run. Toss in the Cardinals, and there are now three pretty tough Wild Card competitors ahead of Pittsburgh at the moment, not including the three division leaders who all look like good bets to make the postseason right now.
That puts the Pirates in the seventh position in a race for five spots, with the final two of those five postseason berths being significantly less valuable than the first three, and the team effectively out of the mix for one of the better playoff positions. And, at the same time they’ve fallen back from the pack, they’ve now lost their only reliable starting pitcher and their starting catcher, a guy who is at least partially responsible for the team’s recent success in making lemonade out of the team’s pitching acquisitions.
The injuries might even prove to be a bigger deal than the weekend losses. The Pirates rotation was already performing at some pretty low levels, and the long-standing hope for the season was that youngsters Jameson Taillon and Tyler Glasnow could provide a summer boost by replacing the veteran placeholders and upgrading the talent level of the arms for the second half of the season. But now Taillon looks like he’s going to be replacing Cole for at least one turn through the rotation, and if his injury forces him to the DL, Taillon’s promotion will instead be a downgrade, not an upgrade.
Toss in Glasnow’s continuing command problems — his 13% walk rate in Triple-A makes it hard to project him to give the team’s rotation a big boost — and the team can’t really summon the cavalry to overhaul what has been one of the worst rotations in baseball to this point. With Francisco Liriano losing the strike zone and the team’s reclamation projects looking more rotten than just in need of some polish, it’s not that easy to see this Pirates rotation pitching the team back into the postseason mix. This would have to be a postseason run fueled by a high-octane offense.
And while the offense has been quite good, there are some concerns about how sustainable that is as well. Starling Marte is running a.415 BABIP, well beyond the reasonable range for even a speedy line-drive hitter. David Freese is at.397, and even as a guy with a track record for running high-BABIPs, that won’t last. The team has also gotten shockingly good production from Matt Joyce and Sean Rodriguez, and probably can’t expect those two to keep hitting like they have to this point. Sure, Andrew McCutchen should be better down the stretch and that improvement will help, but there are more guys likely to regress a bit than there are to improve, and so the offense is probably going to take a bit of a step back in the second half of the season.
Given the team’s current record and the recently developed health problems, the Pirates enter the summer trading season as a team on the bubble. On the one hand, there’s enough talent in place to see a Wild Card run as still easily attainable, and none of the three teams ahead of them in that race are running away with a playoff spot. But as the Pirates are too well aware of now, the value of reaching the Wild Card game is minimal compared to winning a division, as gaining entrance to an elimination game doesn’t put you in a great spot to make a deep postseason run. And if they ended up playing the Dodgers or Mets, they might be looking at a season-on-the-line affair where they had to beat Clayton Kershaw or Noah Syndergaard, so they probably wouldn’t be favored to advance past the play-in game anyway.
So given the disastrous weekend the Pirates just had, they should probably start laying the groundwork for what it would look like if they acted as sellers at the trade deadline. No, they don’t need to blow things up and rebuild, but they do have some pieces that would look like natural trade chips if they decided another playoff run wasn’t in the cards this year. Mark Melancon is a free agent at year’s end, and while his strikeout and groundball rates have gone the wrong way this year, his ERA is still shiny and he’s racking up the saves, so there will be a market for his services. Neftali Feliz would also be of use to team’s looking for bullpen upgrades, and like Melancon, the Pirates don’t control his rights beyond this season, so moving him is a pretty easy decision if they decide to pivot. The same goes for Freese and Rodriguez, who both could be nice role players for a team with a better shot at October.
With six weeks to go before they have to make the buy-or-sell decision, the Pirates don’t need to panic and rush into anything. But they just had about as bad a weekend as could be, and if Cole’s injury turns out to be serious, the ramifications of the losses on and off the field could end up pushing the team out of contention this year. They have time to turn things around, but the Pirates are going to have to get hot soon, or else they may be looking at shifting their perspective to 2017 in the not too distant future.Sept. 7, 2017, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement responding to a poll by John McLaughlin showing Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are less popular than violent, left-wing Antifa:
“A just released poll by respected pollster John McLaughlin shockingly shows that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell’s Congressional leadership is less popular with voters than the left-wing, violent Antifa. Ryan and McConnell’s staying on as GOP leaders polled at just 15 percent, while masked thugs in the street were supported by 21 percent. Equally shocking, a higher percentage of Democrats supported Ryan and McConnell staying on as leaders than Republican respondents, demonstrating the gap between the establishment GOP and the base that elected them. While Antifa has nowhere to go but down, as political violence is unacceptable in modern American society, the good news for Ryan and McConnell is that they have a pathway ahead. And that is by enacting the Trump agenda they ran on repealing Obamacare, reining in big government, cutting taxes and building the wall that was promised to be delivered with Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress.”
Interview Availability: Please contact Americans for Limited Government at 703-383-0880 ext. 100 or at [email protected] to arrange an interview with ALG experts.
###Back when I had a SEGA Dreamcast, one of my absolute favorite titles was Jet Set Radio (aka Jet Grind Radio here in the States). Not only did the game feature ground-breaking, beautiful cell-shaded animations and an awesome soundtrack, it was insanely addictive. Never mind the fact that the idea of a game that’s central mechanic was about grinding rails and graffiti tagging was completely original – and addictive to boot. So when I saw this custom-painted JSR Dreamcast, I had to at least give the artist a nod.
Hand-painted by Flickr contributor Ozkunk93, the Jet Set Radio Dreamcast really speaks for itself. The design echoes the cell-shaded graffiti style of the original game, and looks just great splashed across the lid of the Dreamcast and onto the face of the controller.
Now if only SEGA would decide to update JSR and bring it back for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, I’d be completely stoked. They did it for the original Xbox with Jet Set Radio Future, so why can’t we of the current gen consoles get Jet Set Radio Future Future? What about a version you play with the Kinect? Or maybe a 3D variant on the Nintendo 3DS? Are you listening SEGA?
[Custom Art via Albotas]Imagine for a moment if Napster were cloned hundreds of times. If there were a NapsterStanford, a NapsterMIT, or a Napster for your high school completely independent from, yet just as powerful as, the original. Imagine what would have happened if Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker had released the source code, allowing any developer to essentially copy and build upon his software. Imagine if Napster were open source.
The RIAA would have fought a war on a thousand fronts. And lost.
Video piracy is on the verge of having its Napster moment. A piece of software appeared last week called Popcorn Time. It makes watching pirated movies as easy as firing up Netflix. Everything is free. There’s no mess or fuss — you press play.
Popcorn Time makes it as easy to watch pirated content as Napster did to download songs. It’s a nightmare for Hollywood.
The creators of the original Popcorn Time stated emphatically that it’s perfectly legal to run the app because neither you nor the app “hold” the movies – the Internet holds them. Once installed, however, the program throws a warning screen forcing the user to essentially agree that it’s a bit shady.
Yet strictly speaking, piracy is as much stealing as is taking a photograph of art with the intent to reproduce it. Is it wrong? Yes. Does the practice speak to a larger issue? Absolutely.
The RIAA spent an untold fortune fighting the Napster generation until Apple turned the rippers into buyers with iTunes. Apple made it easy to grab the latest music, anywhere, at any time and it turned a generation of music pirates into, at the very least, a generation aware of the alternatives.
The current state of movie piracy is centered around archaic distribution. Consumers want content on demand for a fair price. The runaway success of Netflix, Amazon Video and Hulu proves that. Yet these legitimate services often lack top-tier content. Want to watch a sequel to a blockbuster or a knock-off Disney movie? Go to Netflix. Want to watch the blockbuster? Buy the Blu-ray or download it from The Pirate Bay. Or wait months until it shows up on HBO.
Popcorn Time is just the start and it’s not the first to provide an easy way to consume pirated content. The entire program is on GitHub, where any developer can access the code and make it their own. Besides that, the program leans on an API released by a popular pirated movie site that has so far successfully evaded the MPAA’s wrath. Popcorn Time is simply a pretty face on a community-driven project.
There isn’t a single entity here that Hollywood’s lawyers can attack. The developers can go underground and distribute their creations under multiple names. They’re not charging for the program or incorporating ads. Popcorn Time is Napster for video without a company that is trying to turn it into a business. It is the epitome of online guerrilla warfare.
And Popcorn Time isn’t alone. A site called FliXanity essentially cloned Netflix’s look and streams pirated content, albeit at a really low resolution. Another called MovieHive is an Android app that’s a far cry from the selection and ease of use of Popcorn Time. Plus it has ads. But it works. It streams pirated content for free.
There are others. There will always be others.
Popcorn Time has already forked. After an early scare, the old developers ceded to a new team because the pressure and attention was simply too much. The program is just that good.
Streaming is the future of both piracy and legitimate distribution. If Popcorn Time implodes again, another program will be built on top of the rubble and stand even taller than the first. The only thing that can slow its growth is Hollywood’s full embrace of the stream and, judging by the popularity of pirate services, it had better come soon.The Cincinnati S.W.A.T. team conducted a large-scale “search and room entry” raid on the University of Cincinnati (UC) without notifying students early this week, a university spokesman confirmed on Thursday.
A video, posted on YouTube on Sept. 11 by a passerby, depicts nearly a dozen heavily armed men pile out of a black armored vehicle bearing a large Department of Homeland Security sticker.
Most of the officers appeared to be carrying high-powered assault rifles.
Spokesman for the university, Greg Hand, initially denied knowledge of the raid, but later confirmed a “search and room entry” drill had occurred and added that the campus community had not been warned.
“The drill did not involve UC students,” said Hand. “We do notify the campus more broadly when we are using buildings that are in use, particularly in use by students.”
The video, however, shows multiple pedestrians walking past the drill and the still unidentified cameraman claiming that he stumbled upon the scene while headed to class.
“I just rolled onto UC campus for class and ran into this scene right here,” says a so-far unidentified student who captured the incident on camera. “Pretty…pretty unreal.”
WATCH: DHS-affiliated SWAT team caught on camera staging unannounced military-style raid at public university
While the cameraman of the video noted that the date of the raid was Sept. 11, Hand denied that report claiming the raid had occurred on Sept. 10. Campus Reform has not yet been able to confirm the actual date of the raid.
Cincinnati Police Department spokeswoman Fran Cihon refused comment on the raid but an officer on the scene was recorded telling the student making the video not to ask too many questions.
Student: Thank you. Are you guys local? Is this all Cincinnati? Any federal agencies involved also? With you guys?
SWAT: Don’t ask so many questions.
Student: Don’t ask any questions? You don’t feel comfortable answering questions?
SWAT: No, but we’re not here to do interviews. We’re here to train. If you want to observe what we’re doing, that’s fine, but just stay back …
Student: Sure.
SWAT: And..
Student: Don’t ask questions
SWAT: Preferably. We’ve told you pretty much all what you need to know.
The official spokesman for the UC Police Department also did not reply to requests for comment.
RELATED: UC Berkeley police attempt to purchase $200,000 tank, get shut down by university administration
Follow the author of this article on twitter: @JosiahRyanA 2,964km section of pipeline, also opened on Monday, links Taishet in eastern Siberia with Skovorodino in the Amur region of the Russian far east near the border with China.
A second pipeline section will run another 2,100km from Skovorodino to Kozmino Bay, near Nakhodka on Russia's Pacific coast, where the oil port has been built.
Until its completion the oil will be carried there by rail.
Putin said it cost 60 billion roubles, the equivalent of about $2bn, to build the Kozmino terminal.
Transneft and Chinese oil group CNPC have signed an agreement on the construction of a 67km branch line to China which will initially carry 15 million tonnes of oil a year and is due to become operational next year.
"The pipeline's launch will strengthen Russia's energy security," Nikolai Tokarev, the president of Transneft, said.Donald Trump's presidential approval ratings are at steady levels according to the Telegraph's poll tracker.
The tracker, which takes an average of the last eight polls, put Mr Trump's approval rating at around 43 per cent, while 53 per cent disapprove of the way the President is doing his job.
The President's approval ratings have recovered after a recent slide that coincided with the Government shutdown and have remained relatively stable during his presidency.
The period since Donald Trump's election has been packed with controversy and intrigue but, underneath it all, few people seem to have really changed their minds about America's 45th President.
His approval rating quickly slumped in the chaotic days after assuming office, with Trump achieving a majority disapproval rating in a record of just eight days. A year in, he is far less popular than previous presidents at this stage of a presidency - but overall approval has generally remained above 40 per cent.
At the 100-day milestone, Gallup daily polling showed that just 40 per |
the line between pbp and color.
So, I do think there are a few distinctions that you can make to establish what "type" of pbp someone is, but the most important thing (aside from being entertaining for the viewers) is having a clear dynamic with your co-caster, no matter what two styles are on the desk. For instance I've had to cast with Max ”Atlus” Anderson and Erik “DoA” Lonnquist at times and double play by play can be rough; you both want to yell about the action, and then you begin to "step on each others toes" with the commentary. So having a clear dynamic going into a cast is one of the most important things, because if you're getting frustrated with how things are going, then the audience certainly is as well.
This was a lot to take in. TL;DR?
If you want to be a caster, don’t wait for an opportunity to come knocking on your door. Find VODs to cast over. Look for amatuer or local tournaments to cast over. And when you’re doing those events, make sure to do your homework. Get as much player information as you can and even try to interview the players ahead of time if possible. Make use of Reddit, your friends, and anyone else you can think of for feedback: it’ll help you grow.
Getting into esports won’t be easy. It’ll take a mixture of hard work, determination, and luck. But you won’t get anywhere sitting around saying “I want to be a caster.”CLOSE Rapidly intensifying storms typically only occur about twice each hurricane season, but 2017 saw four of these monsters. USA TODAY
A satellite image from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows Hurricane Maria on Sept. 19, 2017 over the island of Dominica. (Photo11: Jose Romero, AFP/Getty Images)
The already-catastrophic 2017 hurricane season shows no signs of letting up, with Tropical Storm Nate threatening to blast into the Gulf Coast this weekend, likely as a hurricane.
And we still have nearly two months to go — the season doesn't officially end until Nov. 30.
The ferocity of the Atlantic storm season isn't just in your imagination. Thanks primarily to monsters such as Harvey, Irma and Maria, it's one of the worst in years by various meteorological standards.
More: Nate gathers strength, expected to hit U.S. as hurricane
More: How did Nate pop up so quickly? Expert explains
For example: The number of hurricanes that have formed this year — eight so far — is about double the average to date, as is the energy generated by the storms.
In a statistic known as "Accumulated Cyclone Energy" (ACE), the number in 2017 (204) is the highest it's been since 2005, the year Hurricane Katrina hit, according to Colorado State University meteorologist Phil Klotzbach.
ACE is calculated by adding each tropical storm or hurricane's wind speed through its life cycle. Long-lived, intense hurricanes have a high count (Irma's ACE measured 67.5), while short-lived, weak hurricanes or tropical storms have lower values (Katia came in at 6.1).
The average Atlantic ACE to date is 86, Klotzbach said.
There have also been 46 "hurricane days" this year in the Atlantic, also more than double the average.
A "hurricane day" is tallied each time a hurricane spins for 24 hours somewhere in the Atlantic, meaning there can be multiple "hurricane days" in a single 24-hour period.
The Atlantic Basin, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, generated 35 "hurricane days" in September alone, the most in the Atlantic of any month on record, Klotzbach added.
Another stunning record set in 2017: For the first year in recorded hurricane history, which dates to 1851, three Category-4 hurricanes (Harvey, Irma and Maria) slammed into the United States and its territories the same year.
As for the reasons for the active season, one of the factors is likely a lack of dust blowing across the Atlantic from Africa, which tends to have a drying effect on developing storms, according to AccuWeather. The lack of an El Niño — and its shearing winds that can tear apart nascent storms — is also playing a role.
Warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures, possibly tied into man-made global warming, also fueled the storms' ferocity.
Costliest season ever?
These statistics don't necessarily gauge a hurricane season's impact on people and property, however.
Harvey killed 75 people, mostly in Texas, while Irma killed 87 people in the U.S. and its territories. The U.S. death toll from Maria now stands at 34 in Puerto Rico.
"There is no question that this is already going to be one of the costliest Atlantic hurricane seasons on record," said meteorologist Steve Bowen of global reinsurance firm Aon Benfield. "Regardless of where the final numbers settle, this season is one which will be remembered for a very long time."
He said that when event impacts from July through September are combined, "the third quarter of 2017 is expected to tally as one of the costliest quarters ever registered for natural disasters.”
Final cost estimates from this season won't be available until early next year, said Brady Philips, spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Blast from the past?
Yet, as bad as it's been, some of this season's intensity is really just a blast from the past.
Irma, for instance, was "reminiscent of the great hurricanes that unleashed their fury on Florida in the first seven decades of the 20th century... and then for the most part disappeared," said Weather Channel meteorologist Bryan Norcross before the storm hit.
"Mother Nature’s hurricane-output cycle has its ups and downs," he added, "and a lull came along in the 1970s, 80s, and early 1990s — Hurricanes Frederic, Hugo and Andrew notwithstanding."
Overall, with eight hurricanes so far this year, 2017 is unlikely to touch 2005's all-time record of 15 hurricanes. However, 5 major (Category 3 or stronger) hurricanes have formed, almost as many the record-smashing 2005 season generated up to that point in the season.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2krNnB8Coachella Security 2016
Coachella Security 2016
INDIO, Calif. - The Indio Police Department was called to the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival Sunday morning after a fight broke out at the security check-in area at the Empire Polo Grounds. Officers said the incident happened after a verbal dispute occurred between two groups of people working for the same security vendor.
The fight happened at about 10:25 a.m. Several officers arrived and quickly got the situation under control, but soon found out that two men had been stabbed during the fight. They said another man also had injuries to his head and face.
One stabbing victim was treated at the scene and the other, who was stabbed in the abdomen, was taken to the hospital for observation and is in good condition, Sgt. Dan Marshall with the Indio Police Department said.
The victim with head injuries was also taken to the hospital as a precaution.
Detectives interviewed several witnesses at the scene but no arrests have been made yet. The investigation continues. Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call the Indio Police Department at (760) 391-4057, or Valley Crime Stoppers at (760) 341-7867.IT’S the buying opportunity “no one realises” — close to a third of the Sydney homes going to auction are passing in, requiring vendors to lower their price expectations in order to sell their homes.
Preliminary sales results from CoreLogic revealed Sydney’s auction clearance rate hit 68.8 per cent last week across 587 reported sales.
The clearance rate, a good gauge of market demand, is expected to drop slightly as more results stream in — 217 of the 804 auctions scheduled last week have yet to be reported on.
Were the citywide clearance rate to drop by more than three percentage points, it would signal the third successive week in which less than 65 per cent of auctions were a success.
Last week the rate was 63.3 per cent, while the week prior it was a 2017 low of 61.3 per cent.
Such results were well below levels recorded in October 2016, when more than eight in 10 homes scheduled for auction sold successfully under the hammer.
Real Estate Institute of NSW president John Cunningham said the current success rate of auctions showed the market was returning to “normal” after being unusually good for sellers for nearly four years.
“It’s a positive for the market,” Mr Cunningham said. “Buyers can be more discerning. They don’t have to buy C-grade property for an A-grade price.”
Softer clearance rates were also benefiting sellers who were realistic with their pricing because they were having an easier task finding their next home, Mr Cunningham added.
“I think the pressure is off buyers now,” he said. “There’s no rush, no panic. They can take their time.”
The one exception were buyers in tightly held areas where few homes were available but large numbers of house hunters looking for deals, Mr Cunningham added.
More than eight in 10 auctions on the northern beaches were successful last week, while 78 per cent of auctions within inner city areas and the eastern suburbs were a success.
Auctions in the Hills district and Ryde area were substantially weaker with clearance rates of 52 per cent and 58.8 per cent, respectively. Only 37.5 per cent of Blacktown’s 16 reported auctions were a success.
Homes that didn’t sell included a three-bedroom house at 35 Tara Rd, listed for about $775,000, and a five-bedroom house at Ash St, listed for $690,000-$730,000.
Just over 70 per cent of inner west auctions cleared. Among the properties that passed in at auction were a two-bedroom unit at 62 Booth St in Annandale and a two-bedroom unit at 47 Chandos St in Ashfield.
Investor Sandra Deary, who has flipped a string of Sydney houses for profit, said buyers could capitalise on more sellers returning to the negotiating table after failed auctions.
“It’s a great buying opportunity but no one realises this,” Ms Deary said. “I’ve been to a few auctions recently and you’re usually up against just one or two bidders. I’d never experienced that before.”Facebook may be preparing its next major purchase. According to TechCrunch and CNBC, Facebook will buy drone manufacturer Titan Aerospace for $60 million and plans to use its vehicles to help spread internet access worldwide. A drone manufacturer would obviously be a strange acquisition for Facebook, which has largely focused on buying consumer technology companies and apps — most notably, WhatsApp and Instagram. But both outlets report that the purchase will serve Internet.org, an initiative launched by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year that holds the goal of bringing the entire world online.
Its drones can stay in the air for five years
The plan is far less outlandish than it might sound. Titan Aerospace says that its solar-powered drones are capable of staying in the air for five years at a time. And when used as a communication hub, Titan Aerospace says that a single drone could create a voice and data network with "the reach of over one hundred terrestrial cell towers." Facebook is reportedly interested in flying the drones over Africa to start. Google previously announced a similar plan for delivering internet to developing areas of the world, though Google's plan would use large balloons instead of drones. Neither outlet states when the supposed deal between Facebook and Titan Aerospace would be announced. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TechCrunch reports that on closing, Titan Aerospace's entire production would go toward Internet.org. The initial goal is reportedly to build 11,000 of its Solara 60 model drones for the initiative. Titan Aerospace also makes a second drone model, the Solara 50, which is somewhat smaller. We haven't seen much of what Internet.org intends to do, but the purchase of Titan Aerospace would certainly put a bold foot forward. In the end, the initiative may be a business proposition for the tech companies involved — as the ultimate result is more potential customers — but if some of their more ambitious plans pan out, it could mean having a huge philanthropic impact too.The UI has nearly completed our new designs 1:1 and is being wired up with Augur Node now. There are a few developers / teams who reached out to us and expressed interest in working on the Solidity debugger bounty, so if you’re thinking of working on it you can join our Discord and chat with them.
Bounties.Network wrote a nice article about bounties and the Ethereum ecosystem, including ours:
Everything is moving along as planned with our current timeline. Security audits are running smoothly. Our team has been internally auditing and reading code, building out Augur Node, and wiring a bunch of it together. We will have a working version of the new UI up on dev.augur.net (running on the test net) before auditing is complete.
Some StackExchange questions that were answered this week:
Reporting duties: fee collection, fee disbursement, dispute bonds, and participation tokens.
Costs of creating a market: validity bond, reporter gas cost, designated reporter no-show bond, and transaction gas cost.
Initial safeguards of Augur: extractEther, extractTokens, emergencyStop, and contract upgrading.
Does the 5x multiplier restrict the REP token value?
How is open interest measured?Showtime aired a documentary entitled "Disgraced" on Friday, putting a spotlight on the murder scandal that rocked the Baylor basketball program in 2003.
The man in charge of Baylor basketball at the time, Dave Bliss, was given a 10-year ban from coaching in the NCAA, but NAIA school Southwestern Christian University hired him as its new basketball coach in 2015.
Bliss resigned Monday from SCU, the school announced, three days after the Showtime documentary aired.
SCU president Dr. Reggies Wenyika affirmed his commitment to "seeking new leadership in a manner that is consistent with the university's beliefs, standards and policies, as a duty to our Christian heritage of providing a values-driven education, and accountability to our stakeholders and the public good," the school's statement said.
"I accepted Coach Bliss' resignation earlier and our prayers and wishes are with him as he transitions," Wenyika said. "I have tasked a committee with commencing an immediate search and making a final recommendation for a new head coach to the Athletic Director and me.
"As president, I would like to reiterate the University's commitment to ensuring the success of our student athletes on and off the field or court and look forward to the next participation season with new leadership in our men's basketball program."
Patrick Dennehy was a 21-year-old basketball player at Baylor when he was murdered and his badly-decomposed body was found in a gravel pit near Waco weeks later. Former teammate Carlos Dotson later pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
But that wasn't until after Bliss tried to cover up the murder and was caught on tape trying to convince people to lie about Dennehy being a drug dealer. The NCAA began to investigate the Baylor program and found rampant drug use within the program, which was overlooked by Bliss, numerous improper payments and benefits given to players and a failure by Bliss' coaching staff to "exercise institutional control over the basketball program."
"What I did was, I got in the mud with the pigs. I paid a price and the pigs liked it," Bliss is caught saying in the "Disgraced" documentary, via The Undefeated. Bliss agreed to an interview for the Showtime documentary and reiterated his claim that Dennehy sold drugs.
"I don’t want to be absolved from anything," Bliss told CBS Sports. "The only reason I said it on the documentary, it’s been 15 years. The story needs to be told accurately.
"I’ve got no reason not to tell the truth."GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.) swears the widely disparaged American Healthcare Act (AHCA) will pass the U.S. House of Representatives, but opposition from many corners—including from right-wing conservatives and healthcare companies—is making political observers dubious.
On top of energetic resistance from progressives and Democrats who say the plan is a recipe for "massive health insecurity for the American people," the AHCA has been met with skepticism and flat-out hostility from those who say it isn't cruel or profit-driven enough.
Dems slam GOP health plan for screwing the poor & workers & cutting taxes on the 1%—Many Repubs slam it for Socialist subsidies for the poor https://t.co/PKuDWPPAcQ — Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) March 8, 2017
The cruelty awes me.
We're against this massive giveaway to the rich at the expense of poor workers because it's not massive enough. https://t.co/nEk0vX2PTI — LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) March 7, 2017
Not enough poor and sick people are completely dead yet. #GOPHealthPlanIn10Words — quinn cummings (@quinncy) March 7, 2017
Is there a chance the proposal could be sunk entirely?
As of Wednesday morning, The Hill's whip list had three far-right Republicans on-record as planning to vote against the repeal-and-replace legislation: Justin Amash of Michigan; David Brat of Virginia; and Jim Jordan of Ohio. The positions of another 12 GOP representatives were described as "unclear or uncertain."
Right-wing Freedom Caucus member Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), one of those listed as on-the-fence, went as far as to say Tuesday evening: "Right now the Speaker of the House does not have the votes to pass this bill unless he's got substantial Democratic support."
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The bill "faces perhaps an even steeper climb in the Senate," The Hill reported, where "at least eight Republican senators have voiced concerns with aspects of the legislation."
"[T]he margin for error is slim," the outlet noted. "Assuming all Democrats vote against the legislation, GOP leaders cannot afford more than 21 defections in the House and two in the Senate."
Meanwhile, two House committees are taking up the bill on Wednesday morning—though they still do not have a "score" on the legislation from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), making it impossible for lawmakers (or the public) to know its human or financial costs.
That's a big problem, and not just for Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who on Tuesday demanded of Ryan that no votes be held—in committees or on the House floor—until that score is released. Politico reports that Senate Republicans have similarly said that until they have a CBO score, "it's unlikely many lawmakers will sign on. Privately, some Republicans fear the CBO score will show that millions of Americans will lose coverage. The CBO is expected to weigh in later this week."
Still, without many hardcore conservatives on the House Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce committees, it's likely the mark-ups will proceed apace. (Though Democrats do plan to "make some Republicans take some really tough votes" that are "revealing" about GOP's priorities on healthcare, according to CNN, which cited a Democratic aide.)
"The House floor is the problem," journalist David Dayen wrote on Twitter. He later noted that Breitbart's opposition to the legislation was a signal that "it's over" for "Ryancare."
At Vox, reporter Andrew Prokop outlined the three groups that could potentially "scuttle" the AHCA when it goes before the full chamber:
The far right of the Republican Party. Within the GOP, staunch conservative politicians and groups have objected most vocally to the bill so far, because they're upset that it doesn't do enough to roll back Obamacare. Heritage Action, the Club for Growth, Freedomworks, Americans for Prosperity, and Freedom Partners have already declared their opposition to the current draft. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and several members of the House Freedom Caucus, have joined them. Mainstream members who listen to lobbyists.Many of the more moderate Republicans in the House and Senate are receptive to lobbying from important interest groups. So if associations representing doctors, hospitals, or insurers say the bill has problems, the House could well slam the brakes. (And lo and behold, on Tuesday afternoon, the American Hospital Association wrote that it "cannot support the American Health Care Act in its current form.") Vulnerable members. Swing district representatives are already blanching at the prospect of a tough reelection fight. These are the members who really have their careers on the line, and several of them expressed misgivings about repeal and replace in leaked audio from a congressional retreat in January.
And that's not to mention the power of constituents who showed up in droves during the congressional recess to voice their opposition to Republican healthcare schemes—who are now more outraged than ever.The website we have utilized for beta testing of apps, TestFlightApp.com, shuts down on February 26th, 2015. All app testing will be moved to the iOS8 TestFlight app and managed through Apple’s iTunes Connect.
As a developer, and a user there are many more PROs to this than CONs. The new TestFlight app for iOS8 radically simplifies the process of beta testing apps.
In the old TestFlight.com, a developer had to:
invite users to TestFlight
get the user to register a device on TestFlight
take the UUID of the device and register it on developer.apple.com
put the device ID into a provisioning profile
use that profile to build
re-upload the build (or the new provisioning profile if that was all that changed) to TestFlightApp.com
distribute the build to designated TestFlightApp users
There were several places where that process could get stuck and could indeed go wrong.
With the new TestFlight iOS8 app, the steps are much simpler:
developer submits app (there are several steps involved here for developers, but they are basically the same as submitting an app to the app store. After Archiving, you “Submit” the app to a version on iTunes Connect that is marked “Prepare for Submission”
check the box for “TestFlightBetaTesting”
select “External Testers” (this will not be visible until the app goes through Beta App Review)
invite the test user via email (does not even have to be their iTunes email, as Apple will do the mapping)
the users will be asked to download the TestFlight app (if they have not already done so)
the app will then be available for install from the TestFlight app
apps installed via TestFlight app will have orange dots beside them
beside them users will be notified when new versions are available
The device ID mapping is done by Apple. No changes in the provisioning profile are needed.
What else is different? Here are the cons:
No Android. Obviously, since Apple acquired them, support for this has been dropped. It was an advantage to have all testers and testing in one web site.
. Obviously, since Apple acquired them, support for this has been dropped. It was an advantage to have all testers and testing in one web site. Beta builds only available for 30 days. After that time, the developer must submit another build.
. After that time, the developer must submit another build. No TestFlight SDK. The developer could including TestFlight’s SDK and get more data on what parts of the app the users was testing. These feature has not yet been moved over to the new TestFlight app (if anyone has found it, please let us know).
. The developer could including TestFlight’s SDK and get more data on what parts of the app the users was testing. These feature has not yet been moved over to the new TestFlight app (if anyone has found it, please let us know). Wait for Beta App Review. Apps do have to be submitted for “Beta App Review”. The first time this is done, it can take a few hours to a couple of days. After that, it is quite quick, if the developer answers a question concerning the level of changes in this build (fewer changes do not apparently require an extensive review).
. Apps do have to be submitted for “Beta App Review”. The first time this is done, it can take a few hours to a couple of days. After that, it is quite quick, if the developer answers a question concerning the level of changes in this build (fewer changes do not apparently require an extensive review). Issues with Gmail invites. We’ve run across one issue with invites receive in Gmail that were not able to acknowledge the TestFlight invitation and thus allow the app to be run under the TestFlight app.
. We’ve run across one issue with invites receive in Gmail that were not able to acknowledge the TestFlight invitation and thus allow the app to be run under the TestFlight app. Works only with iOS8. This is not as big an issue as it was. We assume Apple waiting until the adoption rate was high enough before discontinuing the Test Flight app web service.
. This is not as big an issue as it was. We assume Apple waiting until the adoption rate was high enough before discontinuing the Test Flight app web service. If this is an upgrade to an existing app store app by the same name, the Test Flight app will write over it. The user will be notified of this with a alert notification. The user can always get the production version back via the app store.
Overall, the PROs far outweigh the CONs, and hopefully some of the other pieces will show up in the future.
Existing users can be exported from TestFlightApp.com into CSV files for import as external users on Apple’s iTunesConnect web site (where user management is now controlled). Detailed instructions here.
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LinkedInIn light of this, it’s little surprise Milton’s Lucifer can be read as a kind of modern, American antihero, invented before such a concept really existed. Many of the values the archangel advocates in Paradise Lost—the self-reliance, the rugged individualism, and even manifest destiny—are regarded as quintessentially American in the cultural imagination. Milton may be a poet of individual liberty and conscience, but he was also one of the most brilliant theological explorers of the darker subjects of sin, depravity, and the inclination toward evil. Nothing demonstrates that inclination more than the long-standing appeal the charismatic Lucifer has had for audiences, an appeal mirrored by the flawed but alluring protagonists of some of TV’s greatest American dramas. What Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first version of which was published in 1667, also demonstrates is what can be so dangerous about mistaking an antihero for a hero.
But first, a reminder on the poem’s narrative: Across some ten thousand lines, Milton writes “[t]hings unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” by retelling the Genesis story of “Man’s disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise.” The poet recounts the aftermath of the war in Heaven, Lucifer’s fall to Hell, and his ultimate tempting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And though the epic’s length may have inspired Samuel Johnson to quip “None ever wished it longer,” part of the maximalist brilliance of the poem is the universe it contains, which reflects Milton’s immense erudition, ranging from the astronomy of Galileo to the subject of Lapland witches.
Paradise Lost expands on the Bible’s minimalist account, while altering received cultural representations of the devil. Milton’s Lucifer is neither bestial, a reptilian Other, nor the goofy incompetent of a medieval morality play; rather, he’s a conflicted, brooding, alienated, narcissistic self-mythologizer. In other words, he’s a thoroughly modern man, and in a country as preoccupied with modernity as the United States is, he’s arguably an honorary “American” as a result. Milton’s fellow countryman, the novelist D.H. Lawrence, remarked in his under-read 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature that, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” The novelist had in mind not just the pioneer clearing lands that do not belong to him, but also the honey-worded con man who can justify his crimes in the sweetest language.
Lawrence’s pessimistic appraisal of the American character doubles as an apt description of Paradise Lost’s central antagonist. Much as Lucifer invades Eden like the frontiersman who moved ever further west, he is also capable of justifying his actions with the most exalted of language. Milton writes, “But all was false and hollow; though his tongue / Dropp’d manna, and could make the worse appear / The better reason.” Lucifer is a confidence man, rebel, and supposed advocate of liberty. He’s also a self-made individualist setting out into the wilderness to make his own world anew.Tiramisu gets a new twist with layers of peanut butter mousse, banana cake, sliced caramelized bananas, and caramel rum sauce. It may seem intimidating to make from scratch, but in this video, Epicurean Group's Sarah Ewald breaks it down into easy steps so you can create this classic dessert at home.
Banana Peanut Butter Tiramisu
Peanut Butter Mousse Ingredients1 cup Milk1 cup Cream½ cup Sugar2 tsp Cornstarch4 Egg yolks3 tbsp Butter4 tsp Peanut butter1 tsp Salt2 tsp Vanilla extract2 cups Cream DirectionsBring milk, cream, half the sugar, and cornstarch to a boil. Whisking continuously while it heats. Then whisk yolks with the other half of the sugar. Temper into the hot cream. While continuously whisking, bring the mixture back up to a boil and continue to whisk for 2 minutes. Strain through a chinois or a sieve. Then add the butter, peanut butter, salt, and vanilla extract. Cover with plastic wrap so a skin doesn't form. Let cool. Finally, whip cream to medium to stiff peak. Fold into the peanut butter pastry cream.
Caramel Rum Syrup Yield: about a cup to a cup and a half Ingredients1 cup Sugar12 oz Water 2 oz Rum 1 tbsp Peanut Butter DirectionsCombine rum with 4 ounces of water. Place sugar and 4 ounces of water into a saucepan. Make sure to brush the sides of the pan with water to ensure that there are no sugar granules on the side. If there are sugar granules, the sugar with crystalize. Cook the sugar over medium heat until it is the color of ginger ale. Pour in the other 8 ounces of water. Let cook until the caramel has dissolved. Then add peanut butter and whisk until smooth. Let cool.
Vanilla Wafer Cookies Yield: About 15 cookies Ingredients5 oz Butter¼ tsp Salt1 cup Sugar1 Vanilla bean1 ½ Egg whites2 tsp Vanilla extract1 ½ tbsp. Milk1 ⅔ cups All-purpose flour1 tsp Baking powder DirectionsCream butter, salt, sugar and vanilla beans until fluffy. Add egg whites slowly to butter mixture, making sure to scrape the bowl after each addition. Beat in the milk and vanilla extract. Sift flour and baking powder and beat into the mixture until it is combined. Scoop and bake the cookies at 325 until golden brown. This will take about 20 minutes. Chop into small pieces
Banana Cake Yield: 1 sheet tray Ingredients6 oz Butter (softened)12 ½ oz Sugar4 Eggs13 oz All-purpose flour½ tbsp Baking powder1 tsp Baking soda½ tsp Salt1 ½ Bananas (mashed)¼ cup Crème fraiche or sour cream1 tsp Vanilla extract Directions
Preheat an oven to 325F and spray a 12x16 sheet pan with a nonstick cooking spray. Cream butter and sugar, gradually adding the 4 eggs. Sift together dry ingredients. Combine bananas, crème fraiche, and vanilla extract. Then add dry and wet ingredients alternately to the butter mix. Spread the batter evenly in the pan and bake until golden or a skewer comes out clean, about 25 minutes.
Caramelized Bananas Yields: 4 pieces Ingredients2 cups Sugar4 pieces Bananas DirectionsPeel the bananas and set aside. Heat a saucepan over medium heat. When it is hot slowly sprinkle the sugar over it making sure to stir so it doesn't burn. Continue to do this until all the sugar has been added and the caramel is smooth and the color of ginger ale. Add the bananas stir to make sure they are completely coated. Cook until the outsides are caramelized. About 3 to 5 minutes. Pour onto a plate and let cool.
Tiramisu Assembly You will need roasted peanuts. You can buy these. If making in a larger format such as a casserole dish, use an 11x11 dish. Cut the cake to fit the size of the dish and slice the bananas into coins. Spread half the mousse in the bottom of the dish and then top with the cake. Spoon the syrup over the cake until the cake is soaked through. Cover the cake with bananas and sprinkle with vanilla cookies. Spread the other half of the mousse over it. Cover the top with bananas and then sprinkle with vanilla cookies and roasted peanuts. If making in individual servings, follow the same steps but just make smaller dishes.
Watch Savvy on YouTube | Subscribe to Eater on YouTubeScotland’s International Development Minister Humza Yousaf visited Qatar in April to raise concerns about the rights of migrant workers, it has emerged.
Many have died during construction of stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in the Arab state.
The Scottish Government revealed details of Mr Yousaf’s diplomatic engagements in Qatar today and the Herald been given exclusive extracts of a speech he delivered in the United Arab Emirates days later.
Speaking at Dubai International Writers’ Centre during the Emirates Literature Festival on April 7, Mr Yousaf called on Arab states to “comply with international and human rights law, and condemn human rights abuses”.
He said: “I am the proud son of an immigrant myself; my father like many immigrants across the world came to Scotland to make a better life for him and his family.
“He has had a small business in Glasgow for over 30 years, in that time he has created wealth, employed hundreds of local people and helped boost the local economy.
“However, for many years in the UK migrants were not treated the way they should be and to this day still face disadvantage even in Scotland and so too in this region (the Gulf).
“Strengthening the rights of workers is a path Scotland is ready to be a progressive partner with others on.
“As a good global citizen, Scotland has a strong and enduring commitment to securing democracy, the rule of law and fundamental human rights across the world. We expect all states to comply with international and human rights law, and condemn human rights abuses wherever they occur. Respect for human right and the rule of law are critical to the economic prosperity and stability of all nations and territories.
“Scotland has its National Action Plan for Human Rights, setting our ambitions to be the most equal and fairest country in the world – but we too are on a journey. We look to other countries including the UAE and others and offer a hand of partnership along their own human rights journey.”
Mr Yousaf today invited organisations which campaign for the rights of migrant workers to meet with him on September 23.
Amnesty International, the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the Scottish Trade Union Congress are expected to take part in a “roundtable discussion”.
The International Development Minister said: “Of particular interest is the issue of migrant rights in countries preparing for major events such as the World Cup and Olympics.
“This year, I have personally raised the issue of migrant worker rights in the Middle East on five separate occasions and we will continue to press for the rights of migrants workers to be respected.
“We need to work with the organisers of major events, as well as potential hosts, sponsors and rights holders to ensure that human rights and safe working practices are embedded in major sporting events and the legacy they leave.”
Amnesty International Scotland Programme Director Naomi McAuliffe welcomed the move.
She said: “We are keen to see the Scottish Government continue to influence for reform in countries with appalling human rights records.”
Mr Yousaf previously visited Qatar in 2013 but his engagements were not immediately recorded in official records prompting Labour MSP Neil Findlay to call for transparency.
The minister later said the omission was a “clerical error” and “not the work of the Illuminati or the Knights Templar”.
Details of meetings with members of the ruling Al Thani Qatari royal family in May 2013 are now publicly available.
A spokeswoman for the Scottish Government said ministers have “taken every opportunity to engage constructively with Qatar on human rights, and to share good practice”.
“Humza Yousaf has raised the issue of migrants’ rights a number of times– including directly with the Qatari Ambassador to the UK, and in a public speech in the UAE,” she added. “In addition, Mr Yousaf also spoke with the Qatar Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy to raise Scotland’s concerns around human rights in relation to their World Cup preparations.”Metro Vancouver’s public transit system is leading the country when it comes to the growth in the proportion of ridership.
According to new data released by Statistics Canada, Vancouver’s proportion of public transit commuters grew by 6.1% to 20.4% between 1996 and 2016. In contrast, during the same period, Toronto only saw a growth of 2.3% while Montreal experienced an uptick of 2.5%.
Statistics Canada attributes the growth to the rapid expansion of public transit infrastructure in the Vancouver region over the last 20 years. The length of SkyTrain track tripled after the opening of the Millennium Line in 2002 and Canada Line in 2009, and the bus fleet increased by over 250 vehicles in the years leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics.
As well, of the three largest census metropolitan areas, Vancouver had the largest decline in the share of private vehicle commuters compared to the national average. This number ranged from a 2.9% decline in Montreal to a 7.9% decrease in Vancouver.
TransLink spokesperson Chris Bryan told Daily Hive that regional growth and development patterns are also a major factor for the numbers.
“I think on the bigger picture, it is a sign that our regional plans are working well,” he said. “Our cities in the region have done a great job in working on those plans and focusing development around the major transit corridors, especially around SkyTrain.”
“The cities are doing a lot of work to build transit-oriented development, so it creates an easy choice for people to make transit the way they get to work or wherever they need to go.”
The 11-km-long Evergreen extension of the Millennium Line is also pushing ridership growth, although it was not factored into the latest Statistics Canada figures. The |
at that time. When he gave up alcohol, she said, he became "angry, short-tempered, asexual" and obsessive with ambition and what she called "weird things," such as long runs in the dark before dawn.
Asked if she believed back then he was qualified to reach his goal of being a Supreme Court justice, McEwen said it was a difficult question and cited "instability," a "lack of intellectual curiosity," and trouble with concentrating when reading for a long time as issues about Thomas that would make it difficult to do the job.
Thomas"went backwards" during the time she knew him and became a bully to his son, McEwen said, and she added that she once turned him down when Thomas asked if he and his son could move in with her.
Eventually, McEwen said, "it was time for me to go."
Thomas is one of the most conservative justices on the nine-member Supreme Court, and is known for rarely if ever asking questions during hearings.
To McEwen, his conservative rulings amount to a kind of revenge fueled by anger against liberals who he believes turned against him.
"His enemies are people who are active in civil rights, professors who have criticized him and anybody who disagrees with the conservative friends that he has such as Rush Limbaugh," she said.
McEwen had never spoken publicly about her relationship with Thomas until the recent revelation that Thomas' wife, conservative activist Virginia Thomas, left a voicemail for Anita Hill asking her to apologize for her 1991 testimony at the confirmation hearing.
According to McEwen, she was "tricked" by a Washington Post reporter into commenting on the Virginia Thomas phone call to Hill and decided is was time to come forward with her story.
Watch Larry King Live Monday through Sunday 9pm ET. For the latest from Larry King Live click here.As we approach the 100 year anniversary of the creation of the Federal Reserve, it is absolutely imperative that we get the American people to understand that the Fed is at the very heart
of our economic problems. It is a system of money that was created by the bankers and that operates for the benefit of the bankers. The American people like to think that we have a “democratic system”, but there is nothing “democratic” about the Federal Reserve. Unelected, unaccountable central planners from a private central bank run our financial system and manage our economy. There is a reason why financial markets respond with a yawn when Barack Obama says something about the economy, but they swing wildly whenever Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke opens his mouth. The Federal Reserve has far more power over the U.S. economy than anyone else does by a huge margin. The Fed is the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world, and if the American people truly understood how it really works, they would be screaming for it to be abolished immediately. The following are 25 fast facts about the Federal Reserve that everyone should know…
#1 The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no central bank.
#2 The United States never had a persistent, ongoing problem with inflation until the Federal Reserve was created. In the century before the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation was about half a percent. In the century since the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation has beenabout 3.5 percent, and it would be even higher than that if the inflation numbers were not being so grossly manipulated.
#3 Even using the official numbers, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by more than 95 percent since the Federal Reserve was created nearly 100 years ago.
#4 The secret November 1910 gathering at Jekyll Island, Georgia during which the plan for the Federal Reserve was hatched was attended by U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department A.P. Andrews and a whole host of representatives from the upper crust of the Wall Street banking establishment.
#5 In 1913, Congress was promised that if the Federal Reserve Act was passed that it would eliminate the business cycle.
#6 The following comes directly from the Fed’s official mission statement: “To provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system. Over the years, its role in banking and the economy has expanded.”
#7 It was not an accident that a permanent income tax was also introduced the same year when the Federal Reserve system was established. The whole idea was to transfer wealth from our pockets to the federal government and from the federal government to the bankers.
#8 Within 20 years of the creation of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy was plunged into the Great Depression.
#9 If you can believe it, there have been 10 different economic recessions since 1950. The Federal Reserve created the “dotcom bubble”, the Federal Reserve created the “housing bubble” and now it has created the largest bond bubble in the history of the planet.
#10 According to an official government report, the Federal Reserve made 16.1 trillion dollars in secret loans to the big banks (NYSEARCA:XLF) during the last financial crisis. The following is a list of loan recipients that was taken directly from page 131 of the report…
Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion
#11 The Federal Reserve also paid those big banks $659.4 million in fees to help “administer” those secret loans.
#12 The Federal Reserve has created approximately 2.75 trillion dollars out of thin air and injected it into the financial system over the past five years. This has allowed the stock market to soar to unprecedented heights, but it has also caused our financial system to become extremely unstable.
#13 We were told that the purpose of quantitative easing is to help “stimulate the economy”, but today the Federal Reserve is actually paying the big banks not to lend out 1.8 trillion dollars in “excess reserves” that they have parked at the Fed.
#14 Quantitative easing overwhelming benefits those that own stocks and other financial investments. In other words, quantitative easing overwhelmingly favors the very wealthy. Even Barack Obama has admitted that 95 percent of the income gains since he has been president have gone to the top one percent of income earners.
#15 The gap between the top one percent and the rest of the country is now the greatest that it has been since the 1920s.
#16 The Federal Reserve has argued vehemently in federal court that it is “not an agency” of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
#17 The Federal Reserve openly admits that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are organized “much like private corporations“.
#18 The regional Federal Reserve banks issue shares of stock to the “member banks” that own them.
#19 The Federal Reserve system greatly favors the biggest banks. Back in 1970, the five largest U.S. banks held 17 percent of all U.S. banking industry assets. Today, the five largest U.S. banks hold 52 percent of all U.S. banking industry assets.
#20 The Federal Reserve is supposed to “regulate” the big banks, but it has done nothing to stop a 441 trillion dollar interest rate derivatives bubble from inflating which could absolutely devastate our entire financial system.
#21 The Federal Reserve was designed to be a perpetual debt machine. The bankers that designed it intended to trap the U.S. government in a perpetual debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape. Since the Federal Reserve was established nearly 100 years ago, the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.
#22 The U.S. government will spend more than 400 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt this year.
#23 If the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt rises to just 6 percent (and it has been much higher than that in the past), we will be paying out more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt.
#24 According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress is the one that is supposed to have the authority to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”. So exactly why is the Federal Reserve doing it?
#25 There are plenty of possible alternative financial systems, but at this point all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank. Are we supposed to believe that this is just some sort of a bizarre coincidence?
This article is brought to you courtesy of Michael Snyder.Hoping to bring a close to an increasing personal and vicious feud with Ted Cruz, Donald Trump on Tuesday called the Texas senator a “hell of a competitor” with a bright future after he announced he would suspend his White House bid.
“Just so you understand, Ted Cruz, I don’t know if he likes me or he doesn’t like me, but he is one hell of a competitor,” Trump said while declaring victory in the Indiana primary from Trump Tower. “He is a tough, smart guy.”
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Trump skated to victory in the Hoosier State, delivering a major blow to Cruz’s hopes of preventing the front-runner from achieving the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the GOP presidential nomination.
Though Ohio Gov. John Kasich has vowed to remain in the race, Trump now has a clear path to the nomination. Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus tweeted that Trump has become the presumptive nominee.
.@realDonaldTrump will be presumptive @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton — Reince Priebus (@Reince) May 4, 2016
Cruz and Trump formed an informal alliance in the fall of last year before the Texas senator rivaled Trump atop the polls. But as it became clear Trump and Cruz would be duking it out for the top spot in a number of nominating contests, the two became entangled in an increasingly personal and stinging feud.
Cruz called Trump "a serial philanderer" Tuesday morning after the front-runner repeated a tabloid story linking his father to President John F. Kennedy's assasination.
But while declaring victory Tuesday night, Trump turned his focus to his increasingly likely general election showdown with Hillary Clinton, and declined to use Kasich’s name while thanking Priebus.
“He had 17 egos and now I guess he's down to one,” Trump said of the RNC head. “I don't know, is there a second. I mean, is there a second. I don’t know. Gonna have to ask you folks to explain the status of that.”SINGAPORE - Live music will be allowed for next year's Thaipusam street procession for the first time in more than four decades.
The Hindu Endowments Board (HEB) and the police said on Wednesday (Dec 2) that musicians, who have been given approval, can play specified traditional instruments at three points along the route.
The instruments are the nadhaswaram clarinet, a barrel shaped drum called the tavil, and the urumi melam or Indian drum.
The decision to relax the rules comes after 10 feedback sessions conducted by the board with 116 members of the Hindu community over a period of two months, ending in April.
All participants shared that music is important to the festival with 65 per cent wanting traditional auspicious Indian instruments to be part of the religious event. Some also suggested that live music be played at strategic locations along the 3km route which starts at the Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple in Serangoon Road and ends at the Sri Thendayuthapani Temple on Tank Road.
A ban has been in place since 1973 that restricts the playing of musical instruments due to a history of rivalry and fights between competing groups which disrupted the procession. The authorities allowed music to be transmitted over broadcast systems at several designated points along the procession since 2012. Despite the ban, devotees have been playing instruments on the streets over the years.
Related Story Three Singaporean men charged with disorderly behavior, attacking police at Thaipusam event
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HEB chairman Mr R. Jayachandran described the Government's acceptance of the board's recommendations as a "historical first step". "It shows that the authorities are taking the concerns and needs of the community seriously," he said.
The police have also added another four points, on top of the existing three, for the transmission of music over broadcast systems for next year's procession.
Thaipusam is celebrated in honour of Lord Subramaniam, also known as Lord Murugan, who represents virtue, youth and power, and is the destroyer of evil. Devotees seek blessings and fulfil their vows by carrying kavadis - structures of steel and wood - with sharp body piercings.
The procession here is organised by the HEB, a statutory body, the Sri Thendayuthapani Temple and the Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple.
Mr Mu Mu Muthiah, 79, the chairman of the Sri Thendayuthapani Temple, added: "If everyone cooperates, the rules might be relaxed even further."
During Thaipusam in February, three men were arrested for their disorderly behaviour after another group was told to stop the use of traditional drums at the behest of organisers.
The police said on Wednesday that its priority is "to ensure public safety and maintain law and order" and that the festival, which usually stretches beyond 26 hours, presents unique challenges as it draws 10,000 devotees and thousands of onlookers to the streets.
All religious foot processions were banned in Singapore in 1964 in the wake of race riots that year. But Hindus were given an exemption and have been allowed three processions on major roads - Thaipusam, Panguni Uthiram and Thimithi.
On the authorities' implementation on their suggestions, Mr R. Jayachandran said: "It's about balancing religious sanctity with security concerns. It's a happy ending."BFMTV On the spectrum of European countries known for causing their Jewish citizens headaches, France is on the relatively low end. They have elected two Jewish Prime Ministers, after all.
Yet occasionally, you get reminders that France has a complicated history with its Jewish population.
The latest instance has to do with the spreading popularity of an apparent Nazi gesture frequently used by one of France's most popular comedians, Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, who goes by Dieudonné.
Dieudonné is a known anti-Zionist who frequently incorporates offensive remarks about Jews in his act. In 2009, he used the gesture, called "la quenelle," in a poster advertising a list of anti-Zionist political candidates ("quenelle" is a culinary term for dumpling). It basically looks like a low-key Nazi salute. Dieudonné denies it is an antisemitic gesture, instead claiming it is merely "anti-system." But there's a blog compiling instances of people demonstrating la quenelle that clearly shows its antisemitic connotations.
Despite this, lots of famous French folks, including Tony Parker, have been photographed performing the gesture alongside Dieudonné, though most later say they were unwittingly "trapped" into doing it. But others, including a prominent French journalist, have been photographed doing it by themselves.
The anti-Zionist candidates. It reads: "For a Europe free from censure or religious separatism — from financial speculators and NATO." (There is a sect in Judaism that actually opposes Zionism, hence the rabbi.) Google Images Dieudonné has been repeatedly charged with defamation and inciting racial hatred, and is now under investigation again, after a report surfaced of him saying that a Jewish journalist with whom he's been at odds may have to "grab his belongings," and that it was "too bad" that there wasn't an opportunity for him to be sent to the gas chambers.
This weekend, French soccer star Nicolas Anelka displayed the gesture after scoring a goal, in solidarity with Dieudonné. Anelka swiftly took to Twitter to also deny it meant anything other than support for Dieudonné. But Anelka, who plays for West Bromwich, is himself now under investigation by Britian's football authority and could face a heavy sanction that LeMonde says may endanger his career in the UK.
Dieudonné has a huge following in France, and Jean-Yves Camus, a French pundit, told French daily Libération that la quenelle has become "a means for expressing one's identity, one which has taken on a real popularity among youth. It's hard to say whether they all possess awareness of what it means."
Perhaps as a result, France's interior minister is now considering a petition to ban Dieudonné from performing.
Meanwhile, Dieudonné continues to support "master quenellers," and a Polo shirt is now for sale online that advertises one's quenelling abilities.
It's worth noting that more than 20% of French said in a recent poll that they would not want "people of another race" as neighbors, among the highest in all of Europe.Blockchain technology constitutes a “genuine revolution” in how decentralized systems are run, Commerzbank said in a March report.
Authored by global equities economist Peter Dixon, the report touches on both bitcoin as well as its underlying blockchain technology.
Exploring both the benefits and risks of the emerging technology, Dixon writes:
“From a systems perspective, the blockchain is a genuine revolution. In theory, therefore, it offers the possibility of eliminating many of the risks associated with the conventional ledger system.”
Because one of the market’s biggest risk factors – third parties – are removed due to the blockchain’s decentralized nature, “there are no intermediaries to introduce credit and liquidity risk which are thus virtually eliminated”, Dixon writes.
The report walks through the major aspects of bitcoin, including its distributed network of transaction verifiers, or miners. At the end, Dixon concludes that the question of bitcoin’s future success remains unanswered.
“The extent to which bitcoin will displace other currencies is open to question,” Dixon wrote. “Although it has become more widely accepted as a medium of exchange, its use as a store of value depends very heavily on its stability.”
He later goes on to write that the limited supply of bitcoins, as well as the speculative nature of the bitcoin trading market, could hurt the digital currency in the long term – but that the underlying blockchain tech could still see usage.
“But the bitcoin debate has sparked a genuine revolution with the introduction of the blockchain,” Dixon concludes, adding:
“In the years to come, even if bitcoin is relegated to a footnote in monetary history, blockchain technology is likely to still be with us, even if some of the claims currently made for it prove to be exaggerated.”
The bank is one of more than 40 institutions involved in the R3CEV blockchain consortium.
Image credit: Vytautas Kielaitis / Shutterstock.comFormer FBI Director James Comey reportedly requested more money and personnel for the bureau's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election days before he was fired by President Trump.
Comey made the request during a meeting last week with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote the Justice Department memo used to justify Comey's firing, The New York Times first reported Wednesday.
The FBI director then briefed members of Congress about the meeting, according to the Times. CNN, the Washington Post and the Associated Press have reported confirming Comey's request for more resources, as have other media outlets.
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The Justice Department's top spokeswoman denied that Comey had requested more money or resources for the investigation. Sarah Isgur Flores called the reports “totally false.”
Trump on Tuesday fired Comey, the man who had been leading the politically charged investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The dismissal came in a letter from Trump to Comey that said it was time for a "new beginning" at the nation's "crown jewel of law enforcement."
“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to lead the Bureau,” Trump wrote.
The move sent ripples across Washington, drawing outrage from Democrats, who accused Trump of attempting to shut down the FBI’s Russia investigation.
Both Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein recommended Comey’s dismissal, citing “substantial damage” to the FBI’s reputation and credibility under his leadership.
They cited Comey’s handling of the investigation into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s private email server that roiled the presidential election last year.
Trump took to Twitter early Wednesday to defend his decision to fire Comey, and he said late Wednesday morning during an Oval Office meeting with former Nixon national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that Comey "was not doing a good job."
- This story was updated at 12:28 p.m.One of the biggest surprises in Celebrity Big Brother last night wasn’t necessarily who entered the house – but who didn’t! At one point, Katie Price was favourite to win, despite the fact that she hasn’t (yet!) gone through those doors and, after a teaser silhouette was revealed in advance of the show, people would have put money on The Chase star Mark ‘The Beast’ Labbett entering the competition.
In fact, some people did as Coral had Mark as a joint favourite to win with odds of 7-1 at one stage.
We admit it, this certainly had us fooled – we couldn’t quite believe it when we approached Mark to find out what the score was only to be told that this guy really isn’t him. Honestly:
This celeb isn't going into the #CBB House to make friends, by the sound of it! Any ideas who it could be? pic.twitter.com/v7lH9dPprN — Big Brother UK (@bbuk) December 28, 2016
People were absolutely certain that it was the silhouette of ‘The Beast’:
But it actually turned out to be Hollywood legend James Cosmo – as people to be mistaken for go, Mark has done alright here. In hindsight, we perhaps should have been thrown that The Beast would be a die hard Eminem fan but then we didn’t have James down as a Slim Shady groupie either, to be fair.
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When we spoke to Mark about the assumption that he was taking part, he admitted that even his colleagues and loved ones thought that he wasn’t telling them something.
He said: ‘Despite all the press stories, Metro.co.uk was the only media outlet to actually ask me if I was on. My friends thought it was me, my brothers thought it was me, even I thought it was me! I have had at least two friends wanting to put a bet on me. I cannot believe I was briefly 7-1 joint favourite with Corals!
Not Mark, but James (Picture: PA/Channel 5)
‘The Chase producers phoned my agent at the weekend and asked him if we something to tell them, especially as I am filming the Chase at Elstree this month!’
That might have been an awkward conversation if he had been going in but Mark told us that no conversations or approaches had been made in relation to Celebrity Big Brother and it just so happened that he has a very similar build to James Cosmo.
He continued: ‘I thought James Cosmo makes a great body double for me despite being nearly 20 years older. I know he is a good friend of one the producers on The Chase so I suspect his teaser video might not have been a coincidence…’
Possibly not – this is Mark’s silhouette in an episode of The Chase:
So would Mark ever consider doing Celebrity Big Brother himself?
Not ruling anything out, he replied: ‘As a working minor celeb I will consider any show if the fee is right. Five years ago, I was earning £100 a day as a supply teacher so I always keep my eye on the important things in life.
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‘If I went on CBB, the isolation would be my biggest problem – with my job I am a news and information junkie and I am always reading or web surfing info so I would probably suffer withdrawal symptoms from the digital world.’
Back at his day job, Mark yesterday discovered that the reigning Brain Of Britain was up against him, after the contestant kept his quizzing prowess quiet. In the true style of The Beast, he managed to dispatch him from the game before then defeating the rest of a strong team in a tense final match.
MORE: The Chase star Mark Labbett reveals why he punched the set and responds to claims that it was staged
MORE: ‘F*** off, low offer w*****s!’ The Chase fans dramatically lash out at ‘spineless’ playersAs technology pushes on, retro gamers are more than happy to stay put with their beloved consoles and classics of yesteryear. While this is all well and good, televisions today are anything but friendly with these older platforms, often presenting our favourites in a sea of smudgy visuals. In an attempt to remedy this issue, a retro gaming manufacturer has begun work on a HDMI out board for the Nintendo 64.
Retroactive, who are more commonly known for their CompactFlash ready Nintendo 64 flash cartridge, are the brains behind this promising new hardware. The Nintendo 64 HDMI Converter will upscale the console's video output to a more suitable format for modern LCD televisions and monitors.
As fantastic as this project is, it does come with two slight frustrations. The first of these is that the Nintendo 64 HDMI Converter is not yet available, although Retroactive have created a mailing list for those wanting to get further updates. The second of these is that this new hardware is anything but plug-n-play - a lot of patience and careful soldering will be required.
The Nintendo 64 HDMI Converter is expected to be available sometime this quarter, although no price tag has been set as of yet.
Link: Retroactive's Nintendo 64 HDMI ConverterEgypt recalled its ambassador from Israel after the country announced a operation against "terror targets" and started bombing Gaza. Cairo ordered Egypt’s UN representative to call for an emergency meeting over Israel’s intensifying military campaign.
Following the decision to recall the country’s ambassador on Wednesday, Egyptian presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said Cairo had asked the Arab League's Secretary General to convene an emergency ministerial meeting in response to a series of Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza strip. The Arab League announced it would hold an urgent meeting Saturday in light of Wednesday's events.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr condemned the attacks which resulted in the death of Hamas military chief Ahmed Jaabari and at least nine others – including two children.
Amr called on “Israel to stop its strikes on Gaza Strip immediately,” saying any escalation from Israel “could have negative repercussions on the security and stability of the region.”
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi summoned the Israeli ambassador in Cairo shortly before recalling the country’s ambassador from Tel Aviv.
After calling for an an immediate cease fire between Israel and Hamas, Morsi ordered Egypt’s UN representative to call for an emergency meeting at the UN Security Council over the intensifying Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
Egypt’s government is currently dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement which spawned the Islamic resistance group Hamas.
Prior to the fall of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt had been a longtime mediator between Israel and Hamas. The political ascendency of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP)– which Morsi headed up before being sworn in as President – has increasingly put Israel and Egypt at loggerheads.
On Wednesday, the FJP said the ongoing Israeli military operation in Gaza would require “swift Arab and international action to stop the massacres,” Al Arabiya cites them as saying. Warning that Israel must bear in mind regional changes following the Arab Spring, the FJP vowed Egypt “will not allow the Palestinians to be subjected to Israeli aggression, as in the past.”
The leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip implored Arab states – Egypt in particular – to come to the defense of the Palestinians.
“We call on our Arab brothers, and especially Egypt … and the new Egyptian presidency, to suppress this barbaric campaign in defense of Gaza and its people,” Ismail Haniyeh said in a statement.
Morsi, a staunch supporter of Palestine on the campaign trail, had been expected to open the blockaded Gaza Strip bordering Egypt, though his government did not follow through.
In light of the recent escalation of violence, RT’s Thomas Barton, who is reporting from Tel Aviv, said there is widespread speculation that Egypt might open the Rafah border crossing so that Palestinian civilians could get out of Gaza and Muslim Brotherhood fighters could get in.PARIS—In an effort to modernize the principles and empirical procedures of examining phenomena and advancing humanity’s collective knowledge, the International Council for Science announced Thursday the addition of a “Seek Funding” step to the scientific method. “After making an observation and forming a hypothesis as usual, the new third step of the scientific method will now require researchers to embark upon an exhaustive search for corporate or government financing,” said the group’s president, Gordon McBean, adding that the new stage of the process, which will be implemented across every scientific discipline, also entails compiling and forwarding grant proposals to hundreds of highly competitive funding sources. “Next, scientists simply modify their study’s goals to align with the vision of potential funders and wait for several months to hear back. At this point—should this step be successful, of course—they can move on to the experimental stage, and then to analysis.” McBean confirmed that the council was also developing a new initial step for the scientific process, “Assess Profitability of Research,” which would help determine if systematic investigation is even worth pursuing in the first place.
AdvertisementTaiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong is a premium grade oolong grown at an altitdue of 1500m. This high quality oolong is from Cameron Tea, an online tea seller based in Taiwan. Cameron Tea has a small line up right now, but everything looks good quality, offering both premium and competition grade oolongs and black teas.
It is HOT here in Southern California. Roasting hot and it’s only May! I hope all the out of towners heading to the World Tea Expo here at the end of the month will be ready for weather! As much as I want a higher caffeine tea to counter sleeping bad from the heat (which I finally gave in last night and turned on the AC), I want a lighter tea to get some kind of a refreshing effect. With that said, a green oolong would be an ideal tea session today.
I will be reviewing the Premium Grade Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong today. The teas were pretty quick to arrive, despite coming all the way from Taiwan. Interesting packaging from Cameron Tea for each of their teas. Within the box is a vacuumed pack bag of tea.
Dry Leaf
Once I opened the vacuumed pack, I got hit with Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong‘s fragrance – very strong floral and butter candy scent. The dry leaf is HUGE and weighty.
Steeping Instructions
Cameron has steeping instructions listed in their FAQ section, which was a western steeping hybrid of using 3 to 5 grams of tea, boiling water with a 1 to 1.5 minute steep. Additional steepings, add 30 to 50 seconds. I decided to follow their instructions, but I can see Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong is made for gong fu brewing.
After a minute I had a linen yellow cup of tea with lots of floral loveliness going on.
Tasting of Cameron Tea’s Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong
If I could describe Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong in one word it would be “Sunny”. Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong is excellent quality – the tea has a light body that is crisp, clear, and fresh. Throughout the sip is a lightly silky texture. The floral is quite nice, 4/10 on the Floral-0-meter, with notes of buttercups. Along with the floral is a balanced honey sweetness and buttery notes. This tea sips in as pure sun! As the tea cools, it is quite refreshing due to the fresh and crisp flavor. No grassy or vegetal notes. Also no dry or bitterness.
With this steeping method, my second, third and fourth resteeps were very consistent in flavor. By the way, I love how clear Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong looks!
After a couple resteeps I had to check out the leaves of Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong. HUGE!
Comments
Premium grade Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong is high quality and fresh green oolong – a luxurious treat for an oolong drinker! The premium grade is a couple dollars cheaper compared to the competition grade, but if you want to go ALL OUT, you can and get the competition grade. I really enjoyed the light, crisp body of Taiwan Alishan High Mountain Oolong, with a great balance of silky texture and sweetness.
(tea provided for review)
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The capital club is closing in on its first Ligue 1 title in 19 years and put together an impressive Champions League run, exiting the competition unbeaten after being knocked out by Barcelona on the away-goals rule at the quarterfinal stage.
That success has come on the back of major investment from the club's Qatari owners, and further spending is expected this summer ahead of another assault on Europe's premier club competition.
Signing Real Madrid star Ronaldo would be a major statement of intent but Leonardo played down the chances of a deal.
"On Ronaldo, there has never been an offer," he told Gazzetta dello Sport. "I've never heard anything about [Wayne] Rooney or [Edinson] Cavani either. I do not rule out big signings, but only if there is a suitable opportunity.
"We do want a larger squad with adequate cover in all areas in order to avoid the sort of problems we had in January in midfield with all the injuries and suspensions."
Most of PSG's big-money signings last summer came from Italy, highlighted by the deal for Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva from AC Milan, as well the acquisition of Ezequiel Lavezzi from Napoli and Thiago Motta from Inter Milan, among others.
However, Leonardo -- the former AC Milan and Inter coach -- said he could cast a wider net this year.
"The market is opening up," he said. "We may look in Spain or England."
Even if no deal for Ronaldo emerges, one obvious target at Real Madrid would be France striker Karim Benzema, and Leonardo admitted he was keen to bring some French stars into the PSG lineup.
"The idea of seeing the great French players here is something I like," he said. "I'm not necessarily talking about Benzema, but maybe [Samir] Nasri, [Franck] Ribery or [Yohan] Cabaye.
"But I do not know if it is feasible and I have not had contact with any of them."Ever fancied practicing Kung Fu in China? Maybe BJJ in Rio, Brazil or Muay Thai in Thailand? Shoot for MMA in Las Vegas perhaps?The list of possible martial arts fighting holidays goes on. Here is my favourite take on a ‘lads’ holiday’ – train all day! Plus there’s no reason to limit a fighting holiday to guys. I’ve lost many a fight to girls. So women get involved with a martial arts holiday abroad too!
I am lucky enough to have actually gone on a martial arts fighting holiday. I went to China to learn Shaolin Kung Fu for 2 months. It was an amazing experience, and one that I would love to have again.
If you’re not convinced just by the inception of the idea of going on holiday with friends or by yourself to train all day in your martial arts authentic surroundings, then let me tell you a bit more about my fighting holiday in China.
Kung Fu Fighting holiday in China!
05:30 – Circuit training
06:00 – Training in chosen style
07:30 – Breakfast
09:00 – Second morning session (usually involved lots of running!)
12:00 – Lunch
14:30 – Afternoon training session
17:00 – Stampede to the showers!
Sold? Of course you are! Who doesn’t want to spend over 6 hours training a day when on holiday?
I stumbled across this school a god 4-5 years ago by pure luck and shear Googling determination, but it was never easy to find trips like these. As one would expect, fighting holidays are quite a niche market! However I have recently discovered the answer to your martial arts fighting holiday dreams! – www.FightCampTravel.com
This website is a site set up by a couple of business minded, entrepreneurial martial artists who |
a good time chatting basketball with you as always. Happy Free-Agency!A Houston-based Hyatt is one of a handful of hotels in Texas targeted by digital tools that effortlessly open electronic door locks in a matter of seconds, according to a published report.
In September, Janet Wolf, a 45 66-year-old IT services consultant for Dell, returned to her locked room at the Hyatt in Houston's Galleria district to find her Toshiba laptop stolen, Forbes reported on Monday. Management for the hotel later concluded the thief accessed the room by exploiting a vulnerability in the electronic door lock provided by Onity. The exploit was unveiled at this year's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, and it affects some four million locks. It works by inserting the plug of a custom-made device into the port of an electronic lock to access the digital key that in turn accesses the opening mechanism.
The investigation into the burglary came around the same time that insurance firm Petra Pacific issued an alert claiming that "several" Texas hotels had their locks picked using the hacking technique, which was developed by researcher Cody Brocious. A director at Petra told Forbes there are at least three such hotels, but he declined to identify them.
Representatives for the firm that owns the Houston-based Hyatt told Forbes it implemented a fix for the vulnerability following the burglary, about two months after reporter Andy Greenberg first alerted Onity to it. Even then, the fix amounted to putting "epoxy putty" into a small hole in each hotel room lock until management puts in place a more permanent solution. Brocious said in an August blog post that "mechanical" approaches are a good temporary fix but suggested they aren't good long-term solutions because they rely on security through obscurity.
The only way to permanently fix the locks, according to Forbes, is to replace the circuit board of each vulnerable lock. That's something Onity is asking hotel customers pay for rather than covering the costs itself.A Chinese naval vessel tried to force a U.S. guided missile warship to stop in international waters recently, causing a tense military standoff in the latest case of Chinese maritime harassment, according to defense officials.
The guided missile cruiser USSCowpens, which recently took part in disaster relief operations in the Philippines, was confronted by Chinese warships in the South China Sea near Beijing’s new aircraft carrier Liaoning, according to officials familiar with the incident.
“On December 5th, while lawfully operating in international waters in the South China Sea, USS Cowpens and a PLA Navy vessel had an encounter that required maneuvering to avoid a collision,” a Navy official said.
“This incident underscores the need to ensure the highest standards of professional seamanship, including communications between vessels, to mitigate the risk of an unintended incident or mishap.”
A State Department official said the U.S. government issued protests to China in both Washington and Beijing in both diplomatic and military channels.
The Cowpens was conducting surveillance of the Liaoning at the time. The carrier had recently sailed from the port of Qingdao on the northern Chinese coast into the South China Sea.
According to the officials, the run-in began after a Chinese navy vessel sent a hailing warning and ordered the Cowpens to stop. The cruiser continued on its course and refused the order because it was operating in international waters.
Then a Chinese tank landing ship sailed in front of the Cowpens and stopped, forcing the Cowpens to abruptly change course in what the officials said was a dangerous maneuver.
According to the officials, the Cowpens was conducting a routine operation done to exercise its freedom of navigation near the Chinese carrier when the incident occurred about a week ago.
The encounter was the type of incident that senior Pentagon officials recently warned could take place as a result of heightened tensions in the region over China’s declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently called China’s new air defense zone destabilizing and said it increased the risk of a military “miscalculation.”
China’s military forces in recent days have dispatched Su-30 and J-11 fighter jets, as well as KJ-2000 airborne warning and control aircraft, to the zone to monitor the airspace that is used frequently by U.S. and Japanese military surveillance aircraft.
The United States has said it does not recognize China’s ADIZ, as has Japan’s government.
Two U.S. B-52 bombers flew through the air zone last month but were not shadowed by Chinese interceptor jets.
Chinese naval and air forces also have been pressing Japan in the East China Sea over Tokyo’s purchase a year ago of several uninhabited Senkaku Islands located north of Taiwan and south of Okinawa.
China is claiming the islands, which it calls the Diaoyu. They are believed to contain large undersea reserves of natural gas and oil.
The Liaoning, China’s first carrier that was refitted from an old Soviet carrier, and four warships recently conducted their first training maneuvers in the South China Sea. The carrier recently docked at the Chinese naval port of Hainan on the South China Sea.
Defense officials have said China’s imposition of the ADIZ is aimed primarily at curbing surveillance flights in the zone, which China’s military regards as a threat to its military secrets.
The U.S. military conducts surveillance flights with EP-3 aircraft and long-range RQ-4 Global Hawk drones.
In addition to the Liaoning, Chinese warships in the flotilla include two missile destroyers, the Shenyang and the Shijiazhuang, and two missile frigates, the Yantai and the Weifang.
Rick Fisher, a China military affairs expert, said it is likely that the Chinese deliberately staged the incident as part of a strategy of pressuring the United States.
“They can afford to lose an LST [landing ship] as they have about 27 of them, but they are also usually armed with one or more twin 37 millimeter cannons, which at close range could heavily damage a lightly armored U.S. Navy destroyer,” said Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
Most Chinese Navy large combat ships would be out-ranged by the 127-millimeter guns deployed on U.S. cruisers, except China’s Russian-made Sovremenny-class ships and Beijing’s new Type 052D destroyers that are armed with 130-millimeter guns.
The encounter appears to be part of a pattern of Chinese political signaling that it will not accept the presence of American military power in its East Asian theater of influence, Fisher said.
“China has spent the last 20 years building up its Navy and now feels that it can use it to obtain its political objectives,” he said.
Fisher said that since early 2012 China has gone on the offensive in both the South China and East China Seas.
“In this early stage of using its newly acquired naval power, China is posturing and bullying, but China is also looking for a fight, a battle that will cow the Americans, the Japanese, and the Filipinos,” he said.
To maintain stability in the face of Chinese military assertiveness, Fisher said the United States and Japan should seek an armed peace in the region by heavily fortifying the Senkaku Islands and the rest of the island chain they are part of.
“The U.S. and Japan should also step up their rearmament of the Philippines,” Fisher said.
The Cowpens incident is the most recent example of Chinese naval aggressiveness toward U.S. ships.
The U.S. intelligence-gathering ship, USNS Impeccable, came under Chinese naval harassment from a China Maritime Surveillance ship, part of Beijing’s quasi-military maritime patrol craft, in June.
During that incident, the Chinese ship warned the Navy ship it was operating illegally despite sailing in international waters. The Chinese demanded that the ship first obtain permission before sailing in the area that was more than 100 miles from China’s coast.
The U.S. military has been stepping up surveillance of China’s naval forces, including the growing submarine fleet, as part of the U.S. policy of rebalancing forces to the Pacific.
The Impeccable was harassed in March 2009 by five Chinese ships that followed it and sprayed it with water hoses in an effort to thwart its operations.
A second spy ship, the USNS Victorious, also came under Chinese maritime harassment several years ago.
Adm. Samuel Locklear, when asked last summer about increased Chinese naval activities near Guam and Hawaii in retaliation for U.S. ship-based spying on China, said the dispute involves different interpretations of controlled waters.
Locklear said in a meeting with reporters in July, “We believe the U.S. position is that those activities are less constrained than what the Chinese believe.”
China is seeking to control large areas of international waters—claiming they are part of its United Nations-defined economic exclusion zone—that Locklear said cover “most of the major sea lines of communication” near China and are needed to remain free for trade and shipping.
Locklear, who is known for his conciliatory views toward the Chinese military, sought to play down recent disputes. When asked if the Chinese activities were troubling, he said: “I would say it’s not provocative certainly. I’d say that in the Asia-Pacific, in the areas that are closer to the Chinese homeland, that we have been able to conduct operations around each other in a very professional and increasingly professional manner.”
The Pentagon and U.S. Pacific Command have sought to develop closer ties to the Chinese military as part of the Obama administration’s Asia pivot policies.
However, China’s military has shown limited interest in closer ties.
China’s state-controlled news media regularly report that the United States is seeking to defeat China by encircling the country with enemies while promoting dissidents within who seek the ouster of the communist regime.
The Obama administration has denied it is seeking to “contain” China and has insisted it wants continued close economic and diplomatic relations.
President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to seek a new type of major power relationship during a summit in California earlier this year. However, the exact nature of the new relationship remains unclear.
AdvertisementsAdvertisement Labor Day marks 34 years since Johnny Gosch disappeared Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Investigators in a decades-old Minnesota abduction case have a new lead after authorities found the remains of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling, who was kidnapped in 1989.A former suspect in the state's biggest cold case, Danny Heinrich, now 53, led authorities to Jacob's remains. Though he has not been charged in Jacob's case, Heinrich was arrested last October on child pornography charges.This weekend's revelation has re-sparked two similar cold cases in Iowa.Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin – both of whom vanished while delivering newspapers – disappeared in 1982 and 1984, respectively. And Labor Day marks the 34th anniversary of Gosch's disappearance.The Johnny Gosch Foundation has been following news of Jacob's story, saying they can never give up the fight to find Johnny."How do you take a deep breath?" said Ron Sampson, president of the Johnny Gosch Foundation. "It's always on your mind. It's never not your focal point. It makes me feel very happy for (the Wetterlings) because it is a relief to know what happened to your child."While the Wetterlings have closure, the Gosch family does not."It just doesn't seem like it could happen in your neighborhood two blocks from your house," Johnny's mother, Noreen Gosch, told KCCI in a 2012 interview "You just go minute to minute. You don't even dare think ahead an hour, because everything changes and the waiting is such a hard thing to do."Sampson said his foundation still has his briefcase full of fliers and notebooks."Growing up in central Iowa, it's a safe place," he said. "We're sheltered. We're out here in corn country, and something like this happens and it robs you of your innocence."And yet their message to parents remains the same."Stranger danger," Sampson said. "What to teach your kids about if you're walking to school and somebody pulls up, what do I do? You withdraw and you run."LINK: More coverage from KCCI.1. After the War
The writings of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) are a glorious fuck you to all that exists. Yet they are neither punk’s provocation nor the apodictic objectivity of Marxian dialectics, but an enculage of civilization through the filigree work of total world reinvention.
Marx complained that Fourier’s utopia was all in his mind, that he was obliged to construct a new society “with elements supplied by his brain” because capitalist production was underdeveloped when he wrote. But it is perhaps this appeal to reason rather than history that makes Fourier’s imagination so radical. Even today, it has not been bought and sold: there is still nothing that surpasses Fourier’s projected state of absolute Harmony.
For André Breton, who claimed Fourier for Surrealism in his poem Ode á Charles Fourier (1947), only minds as febrile and immoral as Fourier’s could possess the “extreme freshness” necessary to re-imagine the world in the aftermath of destruction: “Fourier they’ve scoffed but one day they’ll have to try your remedy whether they like it or not …” Breton was the first to consult Fourier after World War II, echoing the time when Fourier himself was writing in the early nineteenth century, in a Europe that had similarly collapsed in wars. There was not much available in his historical present that one could appeal to.
Laurent Pelletier, The dreamt Phalanstère of Charles Fourier, 1868. Watercolor on paper.
According to Fourier, the world is cosmically out of whack. He blamed the arrogance of the philosophers and the charlatanism of priests for having systematically repressed the passions, leaving humankind stuck in an incoherent civilized state for 2300 years. Faced with this universal misery, Fourier heralds the triumphant reign of a Harmonian cosmic order based in his science of Passional Attraction—the primordial, ubiquitous force that connects the whole in social series. According to this order, government must be based on a consultation of the passions since they essentially characterize the human being and its community. Conversely, a repression of the passions will result in hypocritical social institutions like marriage and the nuclear family, from which Fourier argued that women must be freed—and in fact, Fourier took the proto-feminist view that the measure of happiness was the degree of independence of women in society.
In Harmony, communal living will be the order of the day and will be organized in micro-societies called Phalansteries, founded on collective sensuousness and industry. According to Fourier’s group theory, each Phalanstery would be populated by 1620 people—one male and one female for each of the 810 temperaments Fourier recognized. This combination would enable infinite social, aesthetic, and sexual encounters, through which humankind would regain its equilibrium. It is “schlaraffisch eingerichtet” (Benjamin; “furnished like an El Dorado”), and even pleasures—hunting, fishing, gardening, playing music and theatre, staging operas—are to be rewarded. The children organize themselves in Little Hordes where they raise each other and contribute to the everyday life of the Phalanstery. The social series of temperaments, generations, and divisions of labor describe subgroups and passionate inclinations that work in complex ways across the collectivity, resulting in a communal euphoria, a constant social high. In Fourier’s famous phrase, “the passions are proportional to the destinies.” Forget about genital love: society is erogenous, and Fourier’s scorn for the doubt of the Cartesian subject is endless.
The Familiestère Godin was constructed between 1856-1859, by the industrial entrepreneur, Jean-Baptiste-André Godin inspired by the ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon. As a social experiment, work facilities were linked to a communal settlement, equipped with all the necessary amenities: residential buildings, a pool, cooperative stores, a garden, a nursery, schools and a theatre (the temple of the Familistère community). This experiment lasted in cooperative form until 1968.
Harmony will bring about vast improvements, genetically and socially. In keeping with the redemption of its Harmonian birthright, humankind will mutate and over nine generations will reach an average height of seven feet and a life expectancy of 144 years. There will be plenitude on all levels. The Earth’s original five moons will be restored and its polar tilt corrected, and the oceans will have lemonade flavoring as the poles become ice-free by 1828. Constantinople is set to be the world capital and planet Earth will be crowned by a permanent aurora borealis. Fourier, a theoretical hedonist if there ever was one, also develops an entire gastrosophie that involves the gratification of all of our 810 senses (again 810!), trumping the common understanding that there are only five. Likewise, food is a cosmic vision, a “psychedelic gastronomy!” as the editor of the first Danish translation exults.
If all this sounds far out, then consider Fourier’s margin of error: all his calculi, he writes in Theory of the Four Movements (1808), are subject to the exception of a fraction of an eighth or a ninth:
This is always to be understood, even when I do no mention it. For instance, if I say as a general thesis, civilised man is very miserable, this means that seven-eights, or eight-ninths of them are reduced to a state of misery and privation, and that only one-eighth escapes the general misfortune and enjoys a lot that can be envied.
This margin of error can perhaps also be applied to Fourier’s own brand of radical Enlightenment thinking: if he argues in favor of the emancipation of slaves and women, his anti-Semitism, his prejudiced view of the Chinese, and his hatred of the English show the darker sides of his thinking.
Fourier cannot be taken seriously. This is exactly the power of his text against any esprit de sérieux. With his blatant inventions and inconsistencies, his writings are ridiculous, too much. Roland Barthes called Fourier’s science “overmuch,” and considered his work as a kind of literary practice. “Never was a discourse happier,” wrote Barthes, for it describes a new social order articulated on excess, bedazzlement, and, in Fourier’s own words, the “need to protect everything we call vice.” Barthes writes with fascination on Fourier’s “vomiting of politics” in a “vast madness which does not end, but which permutates.” As Adorno summed it up, “if it can be said about anybody, then these lines apply to Fourier: ‘a fool leaves the world, and it remains stupid’” Benjamin, more politely, took a Nietzschean angle: “Fourier is more of an inventor than a savant.”10
2. Love of Lesbians and the Sound of Absolutely Positive Truth
Fourier’s happy discourse also relates to a systematization and practical application of his radical imagination. He was neither a mysticist nor a reformist or a revolutionary. Contrary to his reception by Marx and other socialist thinkers, he did not consider himself a utopian. Harmony does not demand work and sacrifice, but is rather the inevitable outcome of scientifically-adjusted human behavior. His controversial views on the permissive, innovative character of sexual practices—including homosexual, polygamous, extra-marital, manic, and “omnigamous”—were thus a purely scientific appreciation of one way of moving toward new social structures. (Fourier himself was prone to an ambivalent extra-mania he termed “Sapphienisme” whereby he was a lover and protector of lesbians and promoted their wellbeing. He assessed to be among about 26,400 companions worldwide with similar ideas.)
In this sense, the aim of science is simply to harness Passional Attraction as a cosmic source of energy and to bring mankind within the ordered domain of Passional Gravitation. Thus, Fourier’s socialism is not what ought to be (the essence of Marxian socialism, according to Marcuse), but what will be—naturally, rationally, and without revolution—as soon as our passions are realized socially; as soon as we are tuned in correctly, as it were, to a social space that in Fourier is reconfigured and proportioned harmonically.
The optimism of Enlightenment philosophers was often legitimized by utilitarian application. Truth—that in Fourier is “absolutely positive” (Blanchot)—was the practical task of helping humanity to become humanity, through the eradication of illness, poverty, ignorance, and so forth. The Phalanstery thus provided the ground for the commonsensical applicability of Fourier’s argument. Moreover, utilitarianism rejects the ranking of (moral) value according to a priori criteria in favor of the equal validity of each person’s own search for happiness and pleasure. Fourier, to be sure, accepts and celebrates the subjective multi-directionality of vanity, passion, and inclination. To him, one must embrace the delights of contrast, competition, and rivalry on the level of the individual and social series: in Harmony, Industrial Armies roam the world and compete in aesthetic battles to build large-scale engineering projects, cook the most delicious pie, or stage the most impressive opera. Thus Fourier’s anti-conformist God resides over a Combined Order whose permanent social revelation consists in variety and complexity—difference in age, fortune, ability, temperament. In the 1960s, the hippies would sum up such undogmatic tolerance with the slogan “do your own thing.” Let the pleasure principle rule. Don’t moralize, don’t pathologize.
Of course, Fourier also had a theory for the history of the entire world. His cosmogony is a theory of the “ages of happiness,” which explains the progress and decay of civilization in ascending and descending vibrations, together comprising eighty thousand years and thirty-two social metamorphoses, after which humankind will cease to exist. The ascending and descending vibrations serve to “pattern” movements between different stages of individual and historical being, corresponding to the progression from youth to decrepitude in the human life span. The musical analogy is elaborated in the way Fourier organizes the subject’s passions and senses as a keyboard with thirty-two keys. Like the passions are a keyboard, for example, so is the Sun surrounded by a claviature of planets arranged in octaves; thus social change on Earth will influence the entire solar system and affect the planetary orbits positively. This ties in Fourier’s theories with the ancient Pythagorean and Renaissance beliefs in an affinity between natural law and divine law, between the harmony of the passions and the harmony of the spheres.11
Engraving of A Perfumer's Dress.
In 1814, Fourier discovers the Aromal Fluid, a medium for the great chain of being, a connection between the Earth and the rest of the universe.12 The Aromal Fluid (or Aromal Movement) is a “system for the distribution of known or unknown aromas, which control men and animals, form the seeds of winds and epidemics, govern the sexual relations of the planets and provide the seeds of created species.”13 He notes that, “if everything is connected in the system of the universe, there must exist a means of communicating between creatures of the other world and this.” This means of communication is the Aromal Fluid, the supersensible exhalation of the planets. It is an exemplary vital matter: a single, all-pervasive, imperceptible substance—a bit like capital in our present cosmogony, we can say; a universal middleman.
In Fourier’s cosmic order, the world is folded in upon itself in analogies mirroring the principles that constitute it (with octaves, harmonies, planetary orbits, and so on). It has no messianic horizon because it is held together by divine, mathematical laws—geometrical principles that contain parcels of all states of being, including their respective polarities and all ambivalent and transitional forms, and that are only complete in the totality of their variety and infinite multiplicity. Every moment in a geometric time-space corresponds to myriad events that are distributed across a plane defined by cycles, scales, and symmetries.
In the few remarks that he made on Fourier, Maurice Blanchot deconstructs the status of desire in the former’s system. To Blanchot, the “strange gift” of Passional Attraction is a “passion without desire.”14 Where desire is that of an individual subject, of a sovereign “I” that affirms the law that it destroys in the consumption of a transgressive desire, a passion without desire—measured, non-erotic, yet obliging the entire universe to modify itself—never coincides with pleasure, even if pleasure is one of its moments. Blanchot’s reading implies that cosmic happiness goes beyond the individual human subject: instead, Passional Attraction becomes a tendency that rises into the non-time of 80,000 years of ascending and descending vibrations toward universal harmony and sympathetic fusion within the given order of the cosmic household.15 Fourier’s harmonial vibration is the cosmic timbre of a higher pattern to which the soul is already attuned.
Max Ernst, Une semaine de bonté, 1936. Graphic novel.
3. Fourier as a Way of Life
Fourier’s vision for communal living, liberated sexuality, and cosmic harmony resonated with countercultural, “tribal” emancipation and holistic utopian projects of the 1960s, such as Buckminster Fuller’s “spaceship earth” and Martin Luther King’s “beloved community.”16 After his writings were republished in France in 1966–68, commentaries and new translations sprang up across Europe and his work was almost obligatorily referenced in critical writing at the time, as well as and in architecture, with the Phalanstery being an inspiration for Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation (1947–52). In art and counterculture, Fourier's work had an at least a spectral presence, as in Constant’s New Babylon, the mandatory daily exchange of sex partners in Otto Mühl’s Aktionsanalytische Organisation, or in the name of the Danish student and youth organization Det Ny Samfund (“New Society”). In general, Fourier’s conjoint theorization of labor and love dovetailed with the many post-World War II attempts at thinking Marx and Freud together.
As Fourier’s teachings had been sporadically realized in communes in Europe, North America, and South America in the nineteenth century, so was there also the psychedelic Phalanstery. As members of the San Francisco commune Togetherness explained to Dominique Desanti in the late sixties, “We are Fourierists.”17 Asked whether they have actually read Fourier they reply, “we’ve been told.” Theirs is “Un Fourier par ouï-dire,” infused with elements of Gandhism, concocted in a mix of memory and invention that in itself is quite Fourierian. Still, the members of the commune remain faithful to Fourierian pillars of faith such as the inclusion of children in production, the division of the working day into two-hour shifts, and the integration of male and female tasks. Visitors have told the members of Togetherness that Fourier condoned the use of drugs as an adjuvant or stimulant, and they sell the handicraft of the commune in the Haight-Asbury district: “ex-hippie-capital turned into necropolis, where the bourgeois come to watch the post-hippies, drugged to the point of drifting away, voluntary onlookers, the foam of a broken wave.”18 While Fourier’s nineteenth-century followers tended to underplay or even censor his emphasis on the unrestrained development of desire, it seems that his resurgence in sixties’ collectivism was focused on exactly the Dionysian aspects of his socialism. Accordingly, Togetherness was built on the rule of love, and its denizens embraced Passional Attraction in an amour diffus that included lesbian and gay relationships, and in which orgies, instituted by Fourier as a superior form of love, is an act of principle. In Desanti’s micropolitical turn of phrase, the drop-outs of Togetherness have found “their universal love, a total tolerance of minoritarian and singular tendencies.”19
By 1969, Togetherness suffers a meteoric decline and is dissolved by its members. The former communards choose social revolt as their next endeavor, in factions of post-Proudhonism, post-Marxism, post-Leninism, or “para-Maoism.” Even in its collapse, Fourierism generates difference. Short-lived as it was, the example of Togetherness during the Summer of Love seems to refute Benjamin’s claim that “only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only under its sun, can one conceive of Fourier’s fantasy materialized.”20 Writing in 1969, Roland Barthes predicted the decline of the Fourierist commune,
Could we imagine a way of living that was, if not revolutionary, at least unobstructed? No one since Fourier has produced this image: no figure has yet been able to surmount and go beyond the militant and the hippy. The militant continue to live like a petty bourgeois, and the hippy like an inverted bourgeois; between these two, nothing. The political critique and the cultural critique don’t seem to be able to coincide.21
Similarly, to Herbert Marcuse it is also close but no cigar with Charles Fourier. In his Eros and Civilization (1955) Marcuse notes that, “Fourier comes closer than any other utopian socialist to elucidating the dependence of freedom on non-repressive sublimation.”22 But the nature of Fourier’s idea is based on the repressive elements of “a giant organization and administration,” which for Marcuse risks fascism, for the working communities of the Phalanstery “anticipate ‘strength through joy’ rather than freedom, the beautification of mass culture rather than its abolition.” To accuse Fourier of aestheticizing politics seems to rationalize his work through the historical knowledge of a totalitarian modernity. In the mid-twentieth century, however, it was no doubt inevitable to comment on the fascist connotations of the Phalanstère. (Or maybe it was simply a question of irreconcilable temperaments between Marcuse, the well-intentioned utopianist schoolteacher and Fourier the “delirious cashier,” as Flaubert called him.)
Also other post-World War II thinkers were uncertain as to whether Fourier’s imaginative intoxication could be reclaimed for critical purposes. While his work was eagerly referenced, it remained exotic if not intractable; thus Kenneth White asks whether Fourierism is of “any interest to us in the present historical conjecture, or whether it is to be placed, once and for all, as a particularly grotesque item, for dilettante admiration and curiosity, on the shelf of political antiquities.”23 Fourier never quite fit history, yet his happy discourse is a specter that seems to trans-illuminate any given historical moment as an x-ray of that which is not, but exists anyway because it can be imagined.
Fourier wasn’t read only as a “vomiting of politics,” but also as a regurgitation of psychoanalysis. His philosophy was in a sense already anti-Oedipal, corresponding to Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that desires don’t belong to the realm of the imaginary, and are never transformed through desexualization or sublimation. Once sexuality is conceived as a force of production in its own right (the unconscious as a worker), it escapes restriction into narrow cells of family, couple, person, object. “Sexuality is everywhere,” Deleuze and Guattari wrote, recalling Fourier’s “vibrations and flows” to evoke how libidinal energy proceeds directly to the entire social field:
For the prime evidence points to the fact that desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures—an always nomadic and migrant desire, characterized first of all by its “gigantism”: no one has shown this more clearly than Charles Fourier.24
As a result, and as per Fourier, “we always make love with worlds”—which is, in fact, a good definition of artistic thinking: to make love with worlds—nothing less.
Franscisco Goya, The Witches' Sabbath, 1797-98. Oil on canvas.
4. Giraffe, Reindeer, Dog
Planetary lovemaking makes us recognize strange signs in civilization. According to Fourier, the hieroglyph of truth is the giraffe:
The hieroglyph of truth in the animal kingdom is the giraffe. Since the characteristic of truth is to surmount error, the animal that represents it must be able to raise his head higher than all the others: this the giraffe can do, as it browses on branches 18 feet above the ground. It is, in the words of one ancient author, “a most fine animal, gentle and agreeable to the eye.” Truth is also most fine, but as it is incapable of harmonizing with our customs, its hieroglyph, the giraffe, must be incapable of helping humans in their work; thus God has reduced it to insignificance by giving it an irregular gait which shakes up and damages any burden it might be called upon to bear. As a result we prefer to leave it to inaction, just as nobody will employ a truthful man, whose character runs counter to all accepted customs and desires.25
Fourier reasons that just like truth is only beautiful when it is inactive, so the giraffe is only admirable when it is at rest. With this analogy he proves that God created nothing without a purpose—even the giraffe, which is supremely useless. Thus, if one wishes to know what purposes it will serve in societies other than Civilization, one can study this problem in the “counter-giraffe,” the reindeer. A creature that only lives in hostile climates, the reindeer is “an animal which provides us with every service imaginable: you will see that God has excluded it from those social climates, from which truth will also be excluded for as long as Civilization lasts.”26 Fourier continues,
And when the societary order has enabled us to become adept at the use of truth and the virtues which are excluded from our lives at present, a new creation will provide us, in the anti-giraffe, with a great and magnificent servant whose qualities will far surpass the good qualities of the reindeer, which so excites our envy and arouses our anger at nature for having deprived us of it.27
Fourier’s delirious parable will get us nowhere near objectivity and consensus, yet it in its irreducibility it circumscribes the absence of truth. As we wait for this fantastic animal—the anti-giraffe—to arrive, we can delectate its profoundly aesthetic incongruence with all that exists, its devastating power of counter-actualization. If one wants a social aesthetic, then this is it: all that Fourier’s philosophical system talks about is the social, yet it can never be socialized, never become one with society, never become operational or ameliorative. Power will never be able to use Fourier to heal the miseries it has created. More than 200 years after Fourier wrote his first book, at a time when art is encroached by economy like never before, this fact alone seems more important than ever for the thinking and the making of art.
If we were to consider Fourier’s text a blueprint for a new life-world then we will, melancholically, get sucked back into the Real that we can never master. Just think of the personal misery of Charles, who each day at noon waited for the patron who would sponsor the realization of one of his Phalansteries, but who never arrived; who dreamt of gastronomic orgies but ate bad food his entire life; who was found dead kneeling by his bed in his old frock-coat… Instead, if contemporary life appeals to none of your 810 senses, one can take a hit of the perverse systematic of Fourier’s Harmony to invigorate sensing and speculation. “It was all in the mind,” said Marx of Fourier—but so is any other theory, institution, and discourse that reproduces the world. Most of all, reading Fourier today is a perfect anachrony to capital’s pre-emption of the future through calculated responses in the present. Even (or especially) capital will never catch up to this. It is a text that tops off all the absurdities that we are being served, by economy and politics alike, revealing them not as false and theatrical, but as gnomic and forlorn—incapable of touching Fourier’s divine and unapologetic bullshit that makes you defenseless, lifts you up and sets you free.
Adorno and Horkheimer write that in the culture industry, imagination goes to the dogs. Not so in Fourier. Here we always make love with worlds.
×
Lars Bang Larsen is an art historian and curator based in Barcelona and Copenhagen. He has co-curated group exhibitions such as
Pyramids of Mars (Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2000, a.o.), Populism (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 2005, a.o.), La insurrección invisible de un millón de mentes (Sala rekalde, Bilbao 2005), and A History of Irritated Material (Raven Row, London 2010). His books include Sture Johannesson (NIFCA / Lukas & Sternberg 2002) and a monograph about Palle Nielsen’s utopian adventure playground at Moderna Museet in Stockholm,The Model. A Model for a Qualitative Society, 1968 (MACBA 2010). The series of pamphlets Kunst er Norm, Organisationsformer and Spredt væren (’Art is Norm’, ’Forms of Organisation’ and ’Dissipated being’, published by the Art Academy of Jutland), discusses the experience economy as a mutation in art’s DNA towards a new normativisation of art. He is currently collaborating with Maria Lind for a project at Tensta Konsthall titled The New Model, and with the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art for an exhibition that deals with the genealogy of Conceptual Art.
© 2011 e-flux and the authorupdate 9/17/2011 12:49 pm cst: New York Village Voice coverage:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/09/scientology_has.php
A Letter From the San Patricio County Jail
I am spending this evening in the San Patricio County Texas jail.
I have been falsely imprisoned for several hours and our constitutional rights to free speech have been infringed under color of state law (a serious Federal civil rights violation by definition).
I was arrested at 5:40 p.m. on a Friday evening at my home. In front of my wife and the pre-OT whom I audited all week completing OT |
the playoffs Ambition was putting more focus on CuVee in the beginning of the game. The issue is CuVee isn’t the player dictating the flow of the game for Samsung, it’s their bot lane. This led to Score helping his bot lane more and securing bot priority with the additional help of Fly. It wasn’t until regionals where Ambition started putting more focus on mid first and then focus on his duo next. CuVee was left on his own to survive. This turned out well for Samsung. Even though they could have better utilized their bot priority it was still enough to help them secure leads early on.
When you look at the data listed above the mix of top priority in playoffs and bot priority in regionals gives a more even spread for the first two ganks. However, since there were four more regional games this influenced the priority in mid and bot more. Before I mixed in playoffs data for instance Ambition had a 50% priority on bot lane for gank #2 while for gank #1 he had 56% priority for mid. The first gank mid priority difference was 20% while the second gank’s bot lane priority difference was 14%. For those that don’t know the first three ganks by a jungler contain the most consistent data. After the third gank the lower sample size can greatly skew the data since most junglers don’t find that many opportunities consistently. So this data helps support the transition of Samsung’s priority from top to bot over their course of playoffs to regionals.
The other data I have acquired on Ambitions ganks don’t offer much to derive from. The only thing I can add is he typically ganks on his own. He does not utilize the pressure from his lanes to assist in attacking points on the map, which TSM so happens to do far more often. This difference in style is not good for Samsung. AFS doesn’t do this often and it gave Samsung breathing room in the early game with their more reactionary style. KT was a harder opponent because KT does try to incorporate more members to assist around the map. The main question to me here is will Samsung be able to better utilize their bot priority against their opponents in groups or will they ride on their opponents mistakes alone to create advantages.
Highest Priority Picks for Samsung
1st Pick Priority for Both Sides
Ban Priority for Both Sides
1st Pick + Ban Combined Priority for Both Sides
What you see above is an indication towards Samsung’s highest priorities in draft. Tahm Kench sits at the top of their priority when it comes to picks. This shouldn’t be a surprise, Tahm Kench is essentially the best support in the Meta and Samsung have switched to bot priority. Tahm allows several different ADC’s to be picked thanks to the safety he brings while his ultimate opens up new found opportunities to exploit the map.
Ekko is the second highest first pick priority. I believe Ekko is a tier 1 pick right now and he so happens to be one of the best independent top laners. Samsung are a reactionary team. They don’t always put themselves in the best positions, but having a safe top laner who can have wave priority is a big deal to them.
Samsung did not care for Jhin first pick as much as other teams, but with more teams showing his power in the duo lane it may become a priority for Samsung. Varus has also been getting more play since he has a similar kit to Jhin. The Ashe priority most likely will drop down in replace for something else, but what ADC pick they will prefer I am not sure.
If we look at bans some of those will drop down like the Vladimir and Taliyah bans thanks to the recent nerfs. Their Shen ban may continue to rise since Shen will be highly contested pick and also a counter to Ekko.
The last table showing the combination of both shows Karma and Rek’sai higher up than they were in the previous two. Rek’sai priority may drop for Samsung depending on the opinions of the teams attending worlds on Rek’sai’s recent changes, but the Karma priority shall continue to exist. She is still fine in the mid lane and can give bot priority if played as support.
Level 1 Actions
When it comes to level 1 starts for Samsung you will typically see their fan start. They have a few variations of it like most teams do, nothing special. However, the main thing teams will have to consider when facing Samsung is their stacking. It’s not a common thing to do in games, usually done just as an adaptation in a series. Samsung performed this multiple times in different locations in playoffs and regionals. Both Afreecas and KT were doing simple invades on Samsung to get a camp ward down. Instead of doing what Cloud 9 does which is just counter invading to trade camp wards Samsung actually prefers to look for a high pay out play by stacking in a brush. It leaves them exposed on the other side of the map, but if it works then you are either up a kill or burn the enemy’s summoners.
This can make teams hesitant to look for camp wards in best of ones. No team wants to start out a game down a kill. Even if the chances of Samsung doing it on stage are low sometimes it’s better to be safe than sorry.Kotaku East East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
This summer, there's a new Studio Ghibli movie. According to one reported insider, it could be Ghibli's last.
Studio Ghibli is best known for iconic anime like My Neighbor Totoro, Grave of the Fireflies, and Kiki's Delivery Service. Last year, the creator of many of Ghibli's best known works, Hayao Miyazaki, retired from making feature animated films.
The purported insider told Japanese site News Cafe that Ghibli's latest release, When Marnie Was There, "seems like it will be the last [from Studio Ghibli]." The article appeared on Rakuten, one of Japan's largest web portals. That being said, this is an unconfirmed rumor.
As the insider explained, there was scuttlebutt of the studio's dissolution last year after Miyazaki retired once completing The Wind Rises. Then, this past spring, longtime Ghibli producer and studio co-founder Toshio Suzuki also stepped down from producing films. He is now Ghibli's general manager.
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"From here on, it appears as though this won't be a studio that makes new works, but instead, manages its copyrights."
So, Studio Ghibli won't be creating new animated works, but rather, making money off the anime its created so far.
The insider added animated films required tremendous amounts of money, so there is pressure for the films to be successful so Ghibli can cover its costly production expenses as well as, I'd imagine, remain healthy and profitable. By the insider's count, each film apparently needs to make at least ten billion yen (US$100 million) to cover all its production costs as well as, I'd imagine, turn a healthy profit. Even with a relatively small staff, the insider puts Ghibli's annual labor expenses at supposedly two billion yen ($19.7 million). Note: These numbers are unconfirmed.
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Last fall, the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's largest papers, reported that while other animation studios have shipped jobs overseas to save money, Studio Ghibli had hired more permanent full-time employees in Japan, making the films incredibly expensive to make. Asahi reports that even though The Wind Rises had made 9.23 billion yen ($91 million), the film had apparently yet to turn a profit. The Tale of Princess Kaguya, apparently, cost even more to create.
"The Tale of Princess Kaguya from director Isao Takahata made 5.1 billion yen ($50 million), and for the studio, it was a flop," the source told News Cafe. "There's no choice but to dissolve the studio, because it's unable cross the high hurdle of announcing a new film on an annual basis."
A bright point is that Goro Miyazaki, Hayao Miyazaki's son, is directing Ghibli's first animated TV series, Ronia the Robber's Daughter. The computer animated series is a co-production, however, with Polygon Pictures and will debut this fall. The dark cloud is that back in 2010, Hayao Miyazaki did mention breaking up the studio.
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"Suzuki-san is making a dissolution program for Ghibli," Miyazaki told Cut Magazine (via Bleeding Cool and Nausicaa.net). "No joke, we talked about it the other day. For example, Ghibli should be able to continue with about five staff members as a copyright management company even if we smash the studio. So, Ghibli can say 'We stop film production. Goodbye'. I do not have to be there."
The latest Studio Ghibli film When Marnie Was There was directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi and recently released in Japan. Let's hope it's not the last Studio Ghibli film.
Kotaku has reached out to Studio Ghibli regarding this latest rumor and will update this story should the studio comment.
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マーニーがラスト? ジブリが解散?! [Infoseek]
To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.The Sicilian Regional Assembly unanimously recognized the Armenian Genocide on April 20, thus becoming the 105th Council at the level of local self-government bodies of Italy to have recognized the Armenian Genocide.
In the adopted resolution the Regional Assembly of Sicily expresses its support and solidarity to the struggle of Armenian people for protection of rights and recognition of historic reality.
The resolution urges Sicilian regional and Italian national governments to jointly support the Armenian Genocide recognition process and spread the knowledge of historic facts for peace, democracy and right of peoples to self determination.
The draft resolution was presented by MPs Cordaro Salvatore, D’Asero Antonino, Papale Alfio and Grasso Bernadette Felice.
The agreement on the resolution was reached still in November 2015, during the meeting of the Armenian Ambassador to Italy Sargis Ghazaryan and President of the Sicilian Regional Council Giovanni Ardizzone during Ghazaryan’s visit to Palermo.
To inform, the parliament of Italy recognized the Armenian Genocide in 2000, and the Sicilian Regional Assembly is the 105th Council at the level of local self-government bodies of Italy to have recognized the Armenian Genocide.Although released back in November of 2013, indie dev’s Hanako Games are still supporting and updating their visual novel/life simulator game Long Live the Queen. A huge update with new content was released for the game on March, 8 2015. Now’s a great time to get back into the game or check it out if you haven’t given it a try yet.
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvmUuJVGcIM
Fondly called a “Sansa Stark Simulator” by many of the visual novel’s fans, Long Live the Queen allows players to make decisions that affect the life of a young queen-to-be named Elodie. These decisions have huge impacts for her kingdom and the lives of the people around her. Be careful what you chose to do because in a kingdom full of court intrigue, looming wars and mysterious magic, many of those choices can lead to Elodie’s death if she’s not prepared.
Player’s should be prepared to die a lot in Long Live the Queen. But with each death the player learns more about the game and unlocks new achievements and endings. The new update brings new content, so Elodie can die in new and exciting ways!
Back in January an update for the game was made available via beta. Now in March the updates are live. Updates for Long Live the Queen include new content, bug fixes, and minor tweaks.
New plot points are added to Long Live the Queen. The faces of character’s that were previously lacking have been included, as well as more freedom in choosing marriage partners and more reactions to certain situations. There’s even a new checklist item and achievement! Those wanting to learn more about the changes included in this most recent update can see the spoiler-ific beta post by the developer.
Long Live the Queen is available for Windows, Apple and Linux. It costs $9.99 on Steam. Try out the new content update for this cute and challenging, indie visual novel/life simulator.
Have you played LLtQ with the new update? What’s your favorite change from the update?
Share Have a tip for us? Awesome! Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take a look!Okay…things got much, much better. I mean, damn shit got so real, so fast.
It’s hard to know where to start. The storyline I hated, then sort of dug by the end was naturally, Big Foster. He is alive but he is not well. His host family/kidnappers are an appalling portrayal of just…everything, modern day white trash who are abusive, violent and just uncomfortable to watch. The one quiet, decent child in the family is picked on and beaten for trying to eat crackers, it’s all just gross.
Big Fos learns he was riddled with fever for days and somehow he survived both long term poisoning and then being shot in the freaking heart, dragging himself miles down the mountain … a man of his age who eats and drinks like he does.
Hmmkay.
The woman of the house is … okay, basically Big Foster is tied to the bed but rather than untie him at his request, the creepy, sex starved, creeeeeeppppyyyyyyy woman of the house climbs on top of him and sexually assaults him. That’s what happens, all on camera, and I have no idea how to feel about it except gross. I honestly can’t get a read on if its trying to be darkly funny or if I’m meant to be as disturbed as I am.
All of this happens in front of a little boy who is as abused and bullied as Big Fos by the family. It’s just all very gross.
Later, while the family is every terrible stereotype of poor white people, Big Foster breaks loose of his bonds and bribes the sad little boy with crackers to stay quiet, then snatches up a gun left nearby and even more inexplicably, loaded.
But, he’s not bad Big Fos just yet, he’s still the shambling wreck he spends so much of his time being. Though, we have to allow for his weakened, confused state this time around. His escape is aborted when he’s easily subdued by the older child of the family.
He’s chained to the bed now and the family tortures him with iodine and stitches up his wound with a dirty needle. Because David Morse is so good, we see the psychopath switch get flicked while he’s chained down. He’s done being weak and confused. They just woke the giant.
The little boy is his saviour, reappearing later with the keys to the chains while his family sleeps. Big Fos takes up a knife, pausing only to give the child a single caring hug before ordering him to run, far and fast and never look back. The camera lingers long enough to show Big Foster tie his long hair back in preparation for what he is about to do.
Holy shit.
Later he washes the blood off himself. The family has been slaughtered, save the little boy, who wanders alone down a long mountain road. I hope someone picks him up soon. Someone safe.
We’re in the mountain, following an all female clan in red headbands and blankets as they walk across the mountain. They stop and build a campfire, ritualistically painting themselves with what looks like blood, as they prepare for something. It must be said there’s a wolflike quality to this group. I wonder if that matters.
They are the Kinnah, a break-off group from a family called McClintock, splitting off over a century ago and living in extreme isolation ever since. They’re all women and only deal with men to bear children – though they have no children in their number when they arrive on Farell land — and no one asks what happens to any boys they give birth to.
Arriving in the morning they tell the suspicious Farells that their water and lands are poisoned by a mine, and they are starving. There’s no polite way to say they look very healthy for people claiming to be starving, which I only mention because it’s a plot point. They speak what I’m going to call Shay Gaelic to Gwen, which easily wins her trust and she allows them to stay, and offers them water and shelter.
Absolutely everyone, including the Elders, Emily amongst them, thinks this is a very stupid idea, but Gwen is high on herself and insists they stay. Hasil voices his own concerns that for starving refugees the Kinnai sure seem healthy, but Gwen, suuuper high on herself, also talks him down, justifying her actions by the fact the Kinnah speak Shay Gaelic so they’re family. Oh, Gwen. Girl.
She gives him a job; to scout the woods and make sure they’re not surprised by the police or anyone else like they were the last time.
It’s obvious to us and Hasil she’s still trying to tie him to the mountain, pandering to his ego, which Hasil doesn’t rise to, but he does accept the role. He gathers some friends to work with him, ordering them to go quietly on foot rather than use ATVs.
Meanwhile, Gwen goes and talks with the Kinnai leader, Morgan, who is so overly gushing about Gwen’s youth and strength and all around just super amazingness, as to be so clearly evil and suspect. Gwen does try a probing question about how the Kinnai’s land was already known to be barren and hard to live on before it was spoiled, but Morgan just shrugs that they survived, and then compliments Gwen again, some more. Gwen is really not very bright, and just lavishes in the attention and praise.
One portly and lazy Farell has ignored Hasil and takes an ATV to his route, and somehow, he misses a gigantic huge barricade cutting across the mountain roads, trashing his ATV in the process of just barely saving his own life.
We’ll talk on that barrier in a little bit.
Hasil returns with LazyBoy to see the fence and retrieve the ATV, but they come across something else instead. Hasil takes it to Gwen because it is literally Asa Farell’s arm which, I guess the wolves carried all this way up the mountain?
Or the Kinnah did, because what we and Asa and the trainyard man saw were the Kinnah?
Either way, Joe is gone as gone as gone. Bye, Joe. I hope it was the promise of a sparkling film career, and not some backstage unpleasantness that saw you out.
Gwen demands the arm be buried between Farell and town land, as he was never from either world, anyway. Well, you never really let him be, Gwen. The mountain knows he tried.
The Kinnah start to move themselves into Big Foster’s old house without like, any permission at all, from anyone. I mean, rude. Gwen confronts them but can’t really rationalise why she doesn’t want them to live there, which is stupid, really. She could literally just say ‘you didn’t ask’ and have it be enough, but Super Evil Morgan decides it’s because Gwen is still grieving Big Foster. HA! Sure, okay. Gwen backs off and lets them have the house, because Gwen … is the worst.
Craic, the Farell wine brewer, approaches Gwen to raise the very valid concern that the winter is set to be long and hard and they really can’t afford to feed any extra mouths, hint hint nudge cough Kinnah cough. I mean, also maybe Lazy Boy who just trashed your ATV could go on a diet.
Gwen? You guessed it, is high on her dumb self, and challenges him, acting as if he’s trying to go against her orders, as his Bren’in. Oh my god Gwen you are making me hate you so damned much. She shoots down his, can’t stress enough, super-valid complaints about them all starving to death. In fact, she’s throwing a ceilidh, a traditional Irish folk party which requires lots of food and drink. Craic is stunned.
Me too, bro.
At the ceilidh the food and booze is flowing freely and everyone has a good time and offers the Kinnai gifts and resources. Morgan’s accent goes for a walk all over Scotland and Ireland, impressive considering the sea between them, while she waxes about never being able to see the moon and stars so clearly where they come from as they do here. The other side of the mountain? She even says ‘down’ where they come from. Huh.
Gwen doesn’t pick up on this and maybe I’m over thinking it all. Morgan promises to teach the Farells all the things they’ve forgotten about what the mountain can do.
Like … turn you into an Asa-killing wolf, Morgan? Yes?
Their suddenly vaguely flirty conversation is paused. Because Big Foster, who I must remind you all, is still technically Bren’in…just came home.
Down in town, things are just as intense. Wade’s day starts terribly when Matt the emergency manager launches the plan to build a wall around Farell land, so they can’t come down and hurt anyone.
Which … they technically never did, guy. This is all so Trump right now and it’s pretty damn funny.
Wade scoffs at this absurdity and wonders where the money for this is coming from when they can’t afford a local medical centre, but Matt and corporate snake, Hayley (of the coal company) Corporate him down in their scary, robotic way.
About that fence? It’s the same barrier Lazy Boy nearly crashed into, despite this episode all taking place over one day. How fast did they get enormous metal barricades up that mountain? We’re talking hours from the meeting to the kid crashing.
Later, for some reason I find utterly baffling, like I feel like I missed a scene, Lil Foster is being questioned by State Detectives in the murder of Breece. He’s a suspect, somehow, which makes no sense. It appears to be mainly driven by Matt and Hayley, who see it as a great PR move for them and for Wade. Despite no evidence at all.
Sidebar; Asa’s death pretty much brings to a close the story thread that Wade accidentally killed and concealed the death of a Farell. I’m a little let down by that, it’s going to make Wade’s apparent upgrade to awesome in this season feel a little cheap. Besides that, it made his dogged pursuit of Asa all the more exciting; if he brought Asa in, Asa could and probably would have destroyed him, too. But, Wade was prepared for that.
Now it’s gone, and that’s a shame.
Back to where we were. Lil Foster is being charged with murder and is placed in heavy restraints to be transported to court, then jail. He panics at first but Wade, an old pro with panic and anxiety, beautifully talks him down and they pair start to bond a little.
Wade sits disgusted through the shambles of a court scene, when Lil Foster’s unprepared public defender fumbles completely. She could argue there’s no gun, no murder weapon, no evidence of any kind linking him to the crime, and that he gave up his own father as the actual guy, and named Asa, the previous suspect for Breece as the man who shot his father, Big Foster Farell, as well as stating clearly where (he thinks) that man is.
But, she doesn’t do any of that. Lil Fos has no idea how court works, and I seethe at the idea that a man like him can be put through the same court system as anyone else can. He can’t read, he has no idea what any of this means, he doesn’t understand he can’t have a dialogue with the Judge and just explain himself, which clearly makes his situation worse when the judge things he’s being insolent.
He’s denied bail and will sit in jail until his court case. Wade goes to see Ledda who has learned about Lil Fos and seems to be ready to accept it. Wade tries to explain his position and she has a meltdown, out of the blue enough for Wade to point out how different she was last week, and is left confused and frustrated. It’s a brutal scene, hard to watch these two take pieces out of each other when they need each other so much. It gets worse.
Later, he learns she has pancreatic cancer. Because, of course she does. She’s a good person, so of course she does. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking scene and Thomas M. Wright basically just reacts without speaking and it’s the best performance this show will ever see.
I’m just going to go and be devastated forever.
Later, Wade sheepishly fails to secure real legal representation for Foster and makes sure to put the big man’s shackles on himself as Lil Foster is moved on to jail. Wade promises to make it right, and Lil Foster promises to hold him to that.
In the jail, Foster has to duck through every door, even bowing to have his hands unchained once he’s placed in his cell. The reality of his situation hits him as he stares balefully at the bars locking him inside.
Outsiders has never held back on the wild and crazy, and this week veered hard into the creepiest side of that. I remain utterly disturbed by the scenes with Big Fos and his abductors, but the way things played out, I’m genuinely curious to see if it triggers a change in the man. I would love to see David Morse do more than be the big dumb villain and the scene when he was chained down, when we saw The Big Foster finally shake himself awake, was one of the best moments of the series so far.
On the other hand, if he has changed he may be more ruthless and brutal than ever before. Killing Breece was the end result of a tantrum, ultimately. Slaughtering that family was something else.
Letting the little kid go was the most interesting choice, though. The boy was basically mute, sure, but he knows exactly what Fos looks like, he even saw his tattoos, which are entirely unique to each Farell. Sure, they bonded, but this kid seems vulnerable, afraid, but honestly not all there. He might innocently describe the giant who killed his family to Wade. This would be great for Foster but pretty bad for the other Farells. If Wade learns Big Foster is alive, he will go back up that mountain.
Speaking of Wade, can their family please get a damn break? As I said, I am disappointed Wade’s accidental murder may just go away, but I am enjoying how he’s being positioned as just the voice of reason, and a more obvious good person.
Last year, he was a good but broken guy; this year, he’s just good and trying to be even better. I believe he will save Lil Foster, so long as Lil Foster lets him.
I am crushed about Ledda and really hope she makes it. Truly. She’s a wonderful person, with beautiful children, who need her. And, Wade needs her. He needs her so much. But, it has to be said, he’s a recovering drug addict, about to go through the most incredible stress of his life, and about to spend time around hospitals and pain medication.
The world is closing in on this little family and I want to protect them.
And finally, Gwen. Well. Well…she’s not smart. I’m honestly half relieved Big Foster is back because he might have the good sense to chase off the very suspect Kinnai. Or, maybe they came to save everyone from Big Foster. Maybe they killed Asa, maybe it was his blood they smeared on their face. Someone carried his arm back up the mountain.
Ged Ged Yah.Lil' Wayne has been sued again over claims he allegedly pulled a gun on his own tour bus driver and threatened to kill him in Upstate New York last summer.
Mark Jones filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court in April, accusing the 33-year-old hip-hop star of cursing and threatening to pistol-whip him when he stopped near Buffalo to fill up the bus with gas. The incident happened shortly after Weezy co-headlined a concert with Drake at the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center in August 2014, and the tour was headed to Indiana for a show the next night.
The Grammy-winning rapper allegedly cocked a gun and pointed it at Jones from close range, demanding to be taken to a hotel immediately. Jones, who lives in Maryland, sued for false imprisonment, assault and emotional distress.
TMZ reports Lil Wayne reached a settlement with Jones for $75,000 out of court, but hasn't paid up. Jones filed a new lawsuit, claiming the rapper said he "forgot" to send the check.
According to the celebrity gossip site, Jones now wants an additional $887.52 in interest.
Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., served a year in prison in 2010 after being caught with a semiautomatic weapon on his tour bus in 2007.NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department agreed on Wednesday to reduce and ultimately end more than two decades of government oversight of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, saying the union has made significant strides to cut ties with organized crime.
The agreement between Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan and the Teamsters, which is the dominant union in the U.S. trucking industry, would dismiss a 1988 racketeering case against the union. It must be approved by U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska.
The original case was part of a crackdown on the mafia, led by Rudolph Giuliani when he was working as a U.S. prosecutor, prior to becoming the mayor of New York City.
To settle racketeering charges against the union, a 1989 consent decree called for a court-appointed monitor to be installed to oversee the Teamsters’ internal affairs. The organization also agreed to change their election process to root out corruption.
The proposed agreement would reduce the government supervision, with the aim of ending it completely.
Bharara said significant progress has been made to overcome the union’s corrupt past, but that the government will move ahead cautiously.
“Although substantially diminished, the threat posed to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters by organized crime and other corrupting influences persists,” Bharara said in a statement.
The agreement provides for continued monitoring by a court-appointed review board to investigate and prosecute corruption allegations and for ongoing independent oversight of union votes. Union members are also permanently prohibited from associating with organized crime groups.
The agreement sets up a five-year “transition period” for the government to relinquish its role.
Teamsters President Jim Hoffa called the agreement “historic.”
“After decades of hard work and millions of dollars spent, we can finally say that corrupt elements have been driven from the Teamsters and that the government oversight can come to an end,” Hoffa said in video message to the union’s 1.4 million members.
Hoffa is the son of Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters leader of the 1950s and 1960s who served time in prison for jury tampering and defrauding a union pension fund. The elder Hoffa mysteriously disappeared in 1975 and was widely believed to have been murdered by mobsters.One hyperverbal friend was able to spit it out because he had read and memorized the opening crawl. Another, a hard-core science fiction fan, had been boning up on supplemental materials: "Clone Wars," an animated TV series consisting of "epic adventures that bridge the story arc between 'Episode II: Attack of the Clones' and 'Episode III: Revenge of the Sith."'
If you have watched these cartoons -- or if you've enjoyed some of the half-dozen "Clone Wars" novels, flipped through the graphic novels, read the short stories or played the video game -- you will know that the battle cruiser in question is owned by the New Droid Army of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, which is backed by the Trade Federation, a commercial guild that is peeved about taxation of trade routes.
And that is not the only aspect of "Episode III" that you will see in a different light. If you watch the movie without doing the prep work, General Grievous -- who is supposed to be one of the most formidable bad guys in the entire "Star Wars" cycle -- will seem like something that just fell out of a Happy Meal.
Likewise, many have been underwhelmed by the performance of Hayden Christensen, who plays Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Only if you've seen the "Clone Wars" cartoons will you understand that Anakin is a seriously damaged veteran, a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder. But since none of that background is actually supplied by the Episode III script, Mr. Christensen has been given an impossible acting task. He's trying to swim in air.
In sum, very little of the new film makes sense, taken as a freestanding narrative. What's interesting about this is how little it matters. Millions of people are happily spending their money to watch a movie they don't understand. What gives?
Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: "geeking out" and "vegging out." To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal -- and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.
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In corporate-speak, there is a related term used when someone has committed the faux pas of geeking out during a meeting. "Let's take this offline," someone will suggest, when the PowerPoint slides grow dark with words. Literally, it means, "I look forward to geeking out on this topic -- later." But really it's a polite synonym for "shut up already!"
The first "Star Wars" movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes. In the climactic sequence, where rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, we repeatedly cut away from the dogfights and strafing runs -- the purest kind of vegging-out material -- to hushed command bunkers where people stood around pondering computer displays, geeking out on the strategic progress of the battle.
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All such content -- as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes -- was banished in the first of the prequels ("Episode I: The Phantom Menace," 1999). In the 16 years that separated it from the initial trilogy, a new universe of ancillary media had come into existence. These had made it possible to take the geek material offline so that the movies could consist of pure, uncut veg-out content, steeped in day-care-center ambience. These newer films don't even pretend to tell the whole story; they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture.
"Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think. Trust your instincts," says a Jedi to the young Anakin in Episode I, immediately before a pod race in which Anakin is likely to get killed. It is distinctly odd counsel coming from a member of the Jedi order, the geekiest people in the universe: they have beards and ponytails, they dress in army blankets, they are expert fighter pilots, they build their own laser swords from scratch.
And (as is made clear in the "Clone Wars" novels) the masses and the elites both claim to admire them, but actually fear and loathe them because they hate being dependent upon their powers.
Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents -- not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology -- and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work -- as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.
Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.
If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.
Op-Ed Contributor Neal Stephenson is the author, most recently, of "The System of the World," the last book of "The Baroque Cycle" trilogy.NEWARK — The video is barely two-and-a-half minutes long, but each second is more disturbing than the one before.
Somewhere in Newark, a teenage boy can be seen removing his clothes, stripping completely naked while he is berated and cursed at by another man in a black hat and black T-shirt. A pack of men surround their cornered victim, laughing and commenting on the situation.
As the boy stands there with his shoulders slumped, the man in the black shirt screams about a debt owed by their victim's father. As the boy cowers, the |
Ahrar al-Sham, which has played a prominent role in the revolt against ISIS, said on Twitter that as many as 100 of its fighters were killed Sunday in the capital of north-central Raqqah province.
Dozens of people were reported killed in attacks by government forces on rebel-held areas across the country, including 21 who died when airplanes dropped barrels packed with explosives onto the town of al-Bab in Aleppo province.
Kerry said the United States was moving toward a resumption of nonlethal military assistance to moderate opposition forces in northern Syria. The aid was suspended late last year after ISIS fighters took over a warehouse on the Turkish border where aid to U.S.-backed rebel groups was stored.
On Wednesday, Kerry will attend a conference of humanitarian donors to Syria. He said the war has displaced 8 million people and forced more than 2 million people to flee the country.
Although the Obama administration is expected to pledge more money, Kerry said that “the best solution to the humanitarian crisis is to get a political solution and end the creation of more refugees.... We are not looking for a policy of simply increased assistance to refugees. We are looking for a policy that saves Syria.”
Sly reported from Beirut.Researchers at NASA have just released colorful new topographic maps of the dwarf planet Ceres, based on data gathered by the agency’s Dawn spacecraft.
“The craters we find on Ceres, in terms of their depth and diameter, are very similar to what we see on Dione and Tethys, two icy satellites of Saturn that are about the same size and density as Ceres,” said Dr Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, a geologist for the Dawn mission.
“The features are pretty consistent with an ice-rich crust,” he said.
The International Astronomical Union recently approved a batch of official names for some of the craters and other features on the dwarf planet.
The features include Occator, the crater containing Ceres’ famed bright spots.
Named after the Roman agriculture deity of harrowing, Occator has a diameter of 60 miles (90 km) and a depth of two miles (4 km).
A crater with bright material, unofficially named Spot 1, is now identified as Haulani.
Haulani, named after the Hawaiian plant goddess, has a diameter of about 20 miles (30 km).
Temperature data from Dawn’s spectrometer show that this crater seems to be colder than most of the territory around it.
A crater called Dantu, after the Ghanaian god associated with the planting of corn, is about 75 miles (120 km) across and three miles (5 km) deep. Crater Ezinu, named after the Sumerian goddess of grain, is about the same size.
Both are less than half the size of Kerwan, named after the Hopi spirit of sprouting maize, and Yalode, a crater named after the African Dahomey goddess worshipped by women at harvest rites.
“The impact craters Dantu and Ezinu are extremely deep, while the much larger impact basins Kerwan and Yalode exhibit much shallower depth, indicating increasing ice mobility with crater size and age,” said Dr Ralf Jaumann from the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, who is a Dawn science team member.
Almost directly south of Occator is Urvara, a crater named for the Indian and Iranian deity of plants and fields.
The crater is about 100 miles (160 km) wide and 3 miles (6 km) deep. It has a prominent central pointy peak that is two miles (3 km) high.(CNN) A Wisconsin police officer is feeling the love on social media after he brightened a boy's birthday with a McDonald's meal and a ride in his police cruiser.
On Monday, Officer Darryl Robinson from the Green Bay Police Department was called to an elementary school where an unidentified boy hadn't been picked up after dismissal.
When Robinson pulled up to the school, administrators told him the child's mother was incarcerated. And, he learned, it was the child's 8th birthday.
The school resource officer who usually handles such cases was on another assignment at the time, so with no additional knowledge of the mother's status and only the grandfather's number, Robinson made a call.
He had recognized the young boy from "prior contact a couple months before," he said at a news conference on Wednesday
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To coax her two daughters to sleep, British housewife Marina Chapman would tell them bedtime stories about growing up in the jungle. These were no fairy tales, though — they were based on her own life. At the age of 5, Chapman, who then lived in Colombia, was reportedly kidnapped and abandoned in the jungle, left for dead. She managed to join a tribe of capuchin monkeys, "copying what they ate and drank, their social activities, their language," until she was a part of the family, which she stayed with for five years. Chapman chronicles her extraordinary tale in her book The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of the Girl Raised by Monkeys, but hers is not the first incredible tale of a child raised in the wild. Here, Marina's story and five other reported cases of children raised by animals:
1. Raised by monkeys
When she was about five years old, Marina Chapman says she was kidnapped, probably for ransom, but was then abandoned in the Colombian jungle. For some five years, she lived out in the wild, where she was taken in by a group of capuchin monkeys, which experts say are known to accept young children into their fold. The animals taught young Marina how to catch birds and rabbits with her bare hands, so she was able to survive. She rejoined the human world when she was taken by hunters and sold to a brothel, from which she eventually escaped.
2. Raised by goats
In June 2012, social workers in Russia discovered a toddler who had been locked in a room with goats by his mother. The boy reportedly played and slept with the goats, but nourishment was apparently hard to come by as he weighed a third less than a typical child of his age. When the child was rescued, his mother had disappeared. Doctors have since tried to acclimate the toddler to human life, with some difficulty. "He refused to sleep in the cot. He tried to get underneath and sleep there. He was very scared of adults," one doctor said.
3. Raised by feral cats and dogs
In 2009, welfare workers were led to an unheated flat in a Siberian town where they found a 5-year-old girl they called "Natasha." While technically living with her father and other relatives, Natasha was treated like one of the many dogs and feral cats that shared the space. Like her furry companions, Natasha lapped up food from bowls left on the floor. She didn't know any human words and only communicated with hisses and barks. The father was nowhere to be found when authorities rescued the girl, and Natasha has since been placed in an orphanage.
4. Raised by wild cats
Argentinean police discovered an abandoned 1-year-old boy surrounded by eight wild cats in 2008. The cats reportedly kept the boy alive during the freezing winter nights by laying on top of him and even tried to lick the crusted mud from his skin. The boy was also seen eating scraps of food likely foraged by his protective brood.
5. Raised by wild dogs
A 10-year-old Chilean boy was found in 2001 to have been living in a cave with a pack of dogs for at least two years. The boy had already survived a rough and unstable childhood, having been abandoned by his parents and then fleeing alternative care. Alone, the child sought refuge with a pack of dogs who helped him scavenge for food and even protected him. Officials said the boy might have even drunk milk from one of the female dogs. "They were like his family," a spokesman said.
6. Raised by wolves
One of the most well-documented cases of children raised by wild animals is that of Kamala and Amala, better known as the "wolf children." Discovered in 1920 in the jungles of Godamuri, India, the girls, aged 3 and about 8, had been living with a she-wolf and her pack. It's not known if the girls were from the same family, but the man who found the girls, Reverend J.A.L. Singh, took them back to his orphanage, where he tried to get them accustomed to their human surroundings. While the girls made some progress over the years, both eventually came down with fatal illnesses, leaving the reverend to wonder "if the right thing to do would have been to leave these children in the wild where I found them."Reebok recently settled a lawsuit with the Federal Trade Commission for $25 million over charges that the sportswear company made claims it couldn't support about its EasyTone and RunTone shoes. (The EasyTone commercial below was uploaded to YouTube on March 3, 2010.)
The FTC — a federal consumer protection agency — says Reebok claimed the products could "strengthen and tone leg and butt muscles" but could not substantiate those claims to the FTC's satisfaction. As a result of the settlement, those who have purchased Reebok toning shoes or apparel may be entitled for a refund.
To qualify, you must have purchased the Reebok toning products between Dec. 5, 2008, and Oct. 12, 2011. Eligible items can be viewed in the
, which must be electronically submitted no later than April 10, 2012.
For more information, visit the FTC's website at
. For links to download and print a claim form or to file a claim form online, visit
.
More information also is available through the FTC's Reebok Hotline at 202-326-2852.
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.Google Ventures, the investment arm tasked with spending the search giant's billions on exciting new companies, released its annual report last night. Interestingly, the majority of its money did not go into the areas of consumer internet services, mobile apps, and enterprise software that Google is best known for. Instead, of the $1.6 billion it has under management, it put a whopping 35 percent of its new bets in 2014 into the category of life sciences and health, way up from less than 10 percent in the two years prior. So we hopped on the phone with Bill Maris, the managing partner who helped create Google Ventures, to get his take on why life science is such an exciting area and what lies ahead in 2015.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
So what is it about health and life sciences that is so exciting to Google Ventures right now?
I think that’s where the future is, the future of everything important. What’s more important than your health? For the first time really in history, we have the tools, especially in the life sciences, to really pursue any vision around healthcare that you are audacious and tenacious enough to pursue.
"Healthcare is becoming part of information technology."
Healthcare is becoming part of information technology. The acceleration we saw in computers from 1960 until now is an acceleration we’re going to see in the life sciences, and that’s why it’s a huge opportunity. And not just for making money. You make a great investment in the consumer internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound.
Flatiron Health is a great example. Two ex-Googlers who sold a company in digital advertising space, then remade themselves as oncology experts, trying to apply the same tools around ingesting and analyzing unstructured data to gain insights they did in advertising, and apply that to cancer. They have built a very fast-growing company. One in five cancer patients whether they know it or not, are involved with Flatiron Health. They help doctors make better recommendations for treatment by looking across the vast amount of information they have gathered on other cases. It’s one of the very few companies we put a nine-digit number into, $130 million, because the future is so bright for them. 20 years ago you didn’t have the ability to ingest and organize that information in the cloud, the tools simply didn’t exist.
Is there still a push and pull between tech and healthcare? My recent visits to the doctor are still full of paper records and information that can’t be easily shared between providers.
I don’t think it’s a push and pull, I think it’s push push. There is so much acceleration that can happen now that these tools exist. In 2000 you couldn’t sequence a genome, maybe for a billion dollars and over five years. Now you can do it on your desktop in an hour for a couple hundred dollars. That one genome is a huge achievement, but only in the network, in the context of all the genomes you can sequence, does its real value come through. Now we are at the point where we can sequence millions, billions of genomes, and we can take the first step which is to start to diagnose the markers of diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's which we think might have genetic causes.
"For me it’s like the difference between blood-letting and penicillin."
The huge gulf between 2000 and now, we are going to cross an even bigger gulf in the next 10 years where we will learn so much about the way your body works. For me it’s like the difference between blood-letting and penicillin. Ok, we have no clue what’s going on so we’re just going to bleed it out of you because we don’t know what else to do. Versus, here is a pill, and if you take this you won’t die. That is such a huge difference that happened in such a short amount of time. That’s what we’re about to see again.
Say you have cancer, you have this broad thing we call cancer, we’re going to irradiate you, and pump this poisonous material into you and hope more of the bad stuff dies than the good. That is going to seem so medieval when we can fix it on a genetic level, and Foundation Medicine is the first step to diagnosing it on a genetic level. Not just, you have breast cancer, but what exactly is going on in the that tumor. That is step one. You can see the path ahead to personalize medicine for people.
Going one step beyond curing disease, Google is now working on the incredibly ambitious project of curing death. How are you involved with Project Calico?
Calico was my idea. I’m super proud of it. It came from a thesis I had that no one was studying aging at the genetic level. What is aging, versus the diseases we associate with aging.
What’s the response from people in the mainstream when you discuss this with them? Do people push back against that as unnatural? What do you think of people who say it’s going to far?
Those are people who probably haven’t died yet, for sure, but maybe haven’t had someone really close to them die. Certainly I respect the different point of view, but I feel like the "natural state" used to be that you would die in your 30s or 40s. You would lose all your teeth, and that was "natural." New ideas are scary.
If you said to most people in 1900, would you like to live to be 100, they would have said no thank you, it seems to so unimaginably bad. Now people expect to live to be 70 or 80, and if you asked if they wanted to live to 100 most would probably say yes. Now ask them if they want to live to 200 and most would say, I don’t know about that. But the reality is if you were going to die tomorrow and someone offered you another 10 years, most people would take those 10 years.
"It’s not about scary immortality."
And the beauty of it is you can always opt out. If you don’t want that extra time, you can always opt out of the system, but I don’t have an interest in opting out of the system, nor do I want the people that I love opting out. It’s not about scary immortality. What if your grandmother didn’t have to die of congestive heart failure or some debilitating stroke where she can’t move half her body? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? I find that generally when I can talk to people about it and take some of the scary unknown away it becomes less intimidating.The Raiders welcomed the Bears for their week three preseason game, and they certainly felt welcome. The Raiders were courteous hosts, allowing their house guests to have pretty much whatever they wanted. Things got so bad, the Bears pulled their starters earlier than expected.
The Raiders were down 27-0 before they were finally able to get on the board with a long field goal as time expired in the first half. There wasn't really anything to be happy about until the third quarter, well after all both teams had pulled their projected starters. The Raiders would end up losing 34-20.
Ballers
Terrelle Pryor
The Raiders offense began to move when he got into the game. Granted it was the Raiders' first team against the Bears' second team, but there was no doubt there was a spark there that wasn't present before he came in the game. He had one big play in the first half and it moved the Raiders into scoring position to save the Raiders from heading into the locker room with a goose egg on the scoreboard.
Even after the rest of the Raiders' first team left the field, he continued to make plays. He led the Raiders to three straight scoring drives. The first drive of the third quarter featured Pryor escaping pressure to hit Rod Streater for a 19-yard connection. He followed that up by tucking it and running up the middle for a 25-yard touchdown. The next drive came on a short field after a fumble recovery and featured Pryor rolling right and hitting Andre Holmes for 18 yards to set up a 30-yard Janikowski field goal. He got an even shorter field again on the next possession and took advantage by hitting Nick Kasa on an 19-yard touchdown pass. That was his day. He was the only real bright spot in an otherwise very concerning performance by the Raiders on both sides of the ball.
Honorable Mention
Rashad Jennings - Though he averaged just 2.9 yards per carry, he consistently made something out of nothing by keeping his legs churning and pushing through tacklers. He is a tough runner and has been asked to take the bulk of the carries with Darren McFadden out with injury and previously used sparingly.
Sio Moore - It can be hard to credit anyone on the first team defense which allowed the Bears to move the ball at will, but Sio Moore showed some fight and it's worth mentioning. He was second on the team in tackles (4) including a run stuff for a one yard gain and a tackle for a loss of two.The amazing Celeste Conowitch (@cconowitch) calls in to Shelly Mazzanoble (@shellymoo) and Greg Tito (@gregtito) to talk about forming up The Venture Maidens (@VentureMaidens) for their live D&D podcast, inheriting the mystical Red Box from her uncle and her adventures with D&D. We also discover who’s the Kelly Ripa and who’s the Regis Philbin of our podcast host duo. Lore You Should Know - Matt Sernett (@Sernett) and Chris Perkins (@ChrisPerkinsDnD) explain to us what happens when Bahamut and a Bahamut worshiper love each other very much and lots of other Dragonborn lore. Watch Dragon Talk recordings live on twitch.tv/dnd Mondays at 2pm PT!
Here’s a guide to when each segment on the podcast begins:
00:00 – Intro with Greg Tito (@gregtito) & Shelly Mazzanoble (@shellymoo)
11:53 – Lore You Should Know - Matt Sernett (@Sernett) and Chris Perkins (@ChrisPerkinsDnD) - Dragonborn
28:48 – Interview with Celeste Conowitch (@cconowitch)
01:08:41 – Outro with Greg & Shelly
Subscribe to the Official D&D Podcast on iTunes, on Google Play, or wherever you get podcasts.
Watch Dragon Talk recordings live on twitch.tv/dnd Mondays at 2pm PT!
Then check out Force Grey: Lost City of Omu on twitch.tv/dnd Mondays at 5pm PT, and catch up on the old episodes in the collection here.
Find out more about the Guild Adept program here: http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/news/guild-adept-program.
If you’re interested in submitting your artwork to be considered for use with D&D, send five images to [email protected].
Here’s video of the interview segment from today’s podcast:
Lore You Should Know - Dragonborn:
Interview with Celeste Conowitch (@cconowitch):
Guest Bio
Celeste Conowitch Celeste has been a gamer since the first day her little 10 year old self inherited a pristine red box Dungeons and Dragons set. Through AD&D, 3.0, 3.5, 4th Ed, and now 5th Ed she's loved every minute in the tabletop RPG world. When not DM'ing she's PC'ing wizards of all races and varieties (that's right, prepared spells ftw). By day she does theatre and watches lots of TNG re-runs. Hit her up @cconowitch to chat about the latest cons or the best new board games from Europe.
Host Bios
Greg Tito Greg Tito has had weird and long career as an Off Broadway stage manager, a playwright, a theater carpenter, a secretary, an RPG designer, a games journalist, and now a PR/Marketing person. He has loved Dungeons & Dragons ever since 1985 when he found an old copy of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide on his brother’s bookshelf and he honed that love of fantasy storytelling in the dark streets of Sasserine by way of the Upper West Side gaming group he joined in 2004. He moved his family (wife + two young kids) to Seattle in 2015 to work on D&D and he’s never looked back. You can find Greg on Twitter.MERS coronavirus
München, 06/22/2015
LMU researchers have demonstrated, in a preclinical setting, the protective effect of a candidate vaccine directed against the coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. Planning for the first clinical trial is now underway.
Currently, no protective vaccine is available against the coronavirus strain responsible for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The need for such a vaccine is underlined by the current outbreak of the disease in South Korea, which has led to the infection of over 150 people and has already caused several deaths. Two years ago, a team of researchers led by Professor Gerd Sutter, who holds the Chair of Virology at LMU‘s Institute for Infectious Diseases and Zoonoses, reported that it had developed a candidate vaccine directed against the MERS-CoV. Further preclinical tests have confirmed its efficacy, as the team now reports in the “Journal of Virology”. These results lead the way for Phase I clinical trials, which will determine how well the vaccine is tolerated by human subjects.
The vaccine candidate, named MVA-MERS-S, was developed by Sutter’s group in collaboration with colleagues based at Marburg University and the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. It is based on the use of a safety tested vaccine virus, the Modified Vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA). Essentially, MVA serves as a vehicle for an immunogenic antigen derived from the MERS-CoV. Using molecular biological techniques, Sutter’s team have altered the structure of the MVA genome in such a way that genetic information coding for proteins characteristic of other viral pathogens can be spliced into it. The modified virus is then able to synthesize the foreign protein and displays it on the surface of infected cells. Once there, it can be recognized by cells of the immune system, which are stimulated to produce antibodies and T cells against it. In this particular case, the researchers used this system to express the so-called spike glycoprotein (protein S) specific for MERS-CoV.
Efficacy and safety verified
“We have now shown for the first time that MVA-MERS-S effectively induces protective immunity against MERS-CoV in a mouse model,” explains Dr. Asisa Volz, a member of Prof. Sutter’s group and first author on the new study. In earlier assays, the researchers had confirmed the immunogenicity of their candidate vaccine in cell culture, and demonstrated that it elicits the production of protective levels of MERS-CoV-neutralizing antibodies.
For the work now reported in the Journal of Virology, the team used a mouse strain that had been genetically modified to make it susceptible to infection with MERS-CoV. Following immunization with MVA-MERS-S, the mice were exposed to different doses of MERS-CoV. Subsequent tests revealed that, in mice that had received high doses of MERS-CoV, virus replication was markedly impaired, and the numbers of virus genomes in lung tissue were correspondingly reduced relative to the levels in non-immunized mice. “This demonstrates that our vaccine candidate is both safe and effective. Thus, there is no obvious risk that the resulting immune response might exacerbate rather than prevent the infection,” says Gerd Sutter.
MVA-MERS-S therefore meets important criteria for use in clinical tests on human subjects. Indeed, the German Center for Infection Research (DIFZ) has already made a grant of approximately 1.5 million euros available for the project “GMP Manufacture and Phase I Clinical Investigation of MVA-MERS-S, an Experimental Prophylactic Vaccine against the Middle East Respiratory Virus Syndrome”, which will be led by Gerd Sutter.
Infection with MERS-CoV initially causes flu-like symptoms, but the condition can progress to a full-blown respiratory illness, which may ultimately be lethal. The virus was first recognized in 2012 when it emerged in Saudi Arabia. The present outbreak in South Korea is the largest so far recorded outside the Middle East. The index patient in this case was a man who fell ill after returning from a business trip to the Arabian Peninsula. Several patients who had been infected with MERS while visiting the Middle East have also been treated in Germany in recent years.
(Journal of Virology, Mai 2015)
See also:
Candidate vaccine passes first test (June 2013)Excerpt: 'Shade It Black: Death And After In Iraq'
Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq
By Jess Goodell with John Hearn
Hardcover, 192 pages
Casemate
List Price: $24.95
Chapter 4: PROCESSING
They brought in the first body. The grunts brought him in. There weren't lights in the middle of the bunker yet, only along the side of the wall, so we put the body there and then we... did nothing. Although we had been trained, we didn't know what to do next. We were taught, but we didn't know. They took the time to tell us what to expect, but when the first body came in, several of us froze. We became inept and couldn't do anything, really. We just didn't know... we just couldn't... We knew how to complete the paper work and what had to be done, but when it's real, when it's no longer an abstract thought and when it's in your face, in front of you, you stand there, motionless, wondering, What do I do?
The Sir had called in every person in our platoon and designated people to particular tasks. He said, "You two are going to carry, you two are going to turn the body over, and you two are going to do the paper work." He wanted all of us there, I'm certain, so that we could help each other out, help each other deal with it, because I'm sure that the Sir thought that we might panic and maybe we weren't going to be able to do this. After all, most of us were eighteen and twenty-year-old kids still. If we didn't know it, The Sir did.
He gave us step-by-step instructions. "Roll him over to document his wounds." We may have known that a Marine was hit by bullets or a grenade, but we may not have known where. But when we tried to turn him over, we couldn't. Rigor mortis was setting in and he was already beginning to stiffen, except for his waist, which was like a pivot point. Even when we strained to turn him over, we could not. It was awkward and we were silent except for The Sir's slow, calm, firm instructions. "C'mon guys, you were trained on this and you know what to do," he reassured us. And so, eventually, we did it. "Okay," The Sir said, "now write down any distinguishing marks, any tattoos." So we did. "Now, write down which body parts are missing and shade the missing parts black on the outline of the body." So we did. We followed The Sir's directions, marking the wounds, drawing the tattoos, shading the missing parts black. We had to be told throughout what to do next and how to do it.
After the first body, the processing went smoother. The Sir organized us into teams of four, which were usually then divided into two members who would be the "hands on" for the body and two who would complete the paper work. In time, a process of sorts evolved. A body would come in and we'd remove every item from the pockets and inventory all of the gear that was on him. We couldn't assume that all of his gear was on him. They don't always have two boots. They don't always have Kevlar helmets or a flak jacket or the things that might be expected to be there. They are gone. Missing. The body parts they covered may be missing too. We then conducted an inventory of all the items that were in the pockets. Exactly what they had on them when they died can then be verified. When down the road the family asks, "Where is this picture? We know he always carried this picture with him," we could report that he did or he did not have it on him when he died. Or if money wasn't there that someone thought was, we could check our inventory. If there had been a pen in their pocket, or a note, if there were two twenties and two ones, we documented it. We would precisely document what he did and did not have on him at the time of his death.
We would inventory everything. Every body had a copy of The Rules of Engagement in their left breast pocket. Some would have knives or earplugs, food, a spoon. Pens. Rolled up pieces of paper, a scribbled reminder to ask their mother to send Skin So Soft or Blue Star Ointment to keep the sand fleas away, a scrunched up wrapper, trash that wasn't thrown away — trash that would now become part of a family's lasting memories of a son, husband, brother, father, hero.
There were pictures. A man and his wife and daughter. A farmhouse and barn in Iowa. Many were the pictures teenagers would carry back home. A high school student with his football teammates. A young man in a sleeveless t-shirt leaning against a 1983 Camaro. A letter in which a Marine tells his widow that he is now dead, but that he loves her still, and he wants her to give their daughter a kiss from him.
Some items were uncommon, like the sonogram of a fetus. Some were not uncommon enough, like a suicide note.
We would examine the remains for distinguishing traits such as birthmarks, scars and tattoos. Where are they on the body? What is their approximate size? How can they be described? We would write down the wounds that were on the body. If there are bullet wounds, where on the body are they? If they are in the head, where in the head? How many? We would get the appropriate form and mark the outline of the body with dots or Xs where the Marine was hit. Where body parts were missing, we would shade those parts of the outline black. If a part of the head was missing, we'd shade that area black.
We tried to identify each body, but that wasn't always easy. They may have their dog tags on, they may not. It was not unusual for a body to have missed-matched dog tags. It could be that a kid was wearing someone else's dog tags, even though it was against regulations. Maybe they have their military ID in their wallet, but maybe they don't. Their name might be on their blouse or trousers or cover, but it might not be readable, if it is there at all. When you share a tent or small hole with others, belongings get mixed up. Items such as these do not always match up, which is why we would write down everything a person had on them. Initially, we finger-printed them but did not continue the practice for very long because it became too difficult. There were not always fingers. Or the fingers were stuck in the position they were in when the Marine died, as if still holding his M-16, for example, and we could not unbend them easily.
We would then put the remains into a clean body bag and put the bag into a metal box we called an aluminum transfer case, similar to a coffin. We then placed the case in a reefer where it stayed cool. When it was time to take it to the flight deck to go home, we would drape an American flag over it and carry out a processional, a separate one for each set of remains. Four of us, one at each corner of the case, would walk it through two rows of Air Force personnel who were there to do the flying. They would all salute the remains as we walked them through. They would salute as if they were saluting the President of the United States, as if they were saluting their own fallen family members. Ramrod straight backs, their arms at a 45-degree angle. There was such a strong emotion contained in that salute, such a fierce intensity embedded in the ritual, that it never subsided, even after too many processionals. In fact, it got stronger. Each time we came away from it knowing in our hearts that we were all Marines, and that we were in this together. Each time we'd walk back to the bunker ready once more to go on.
If each processional strengthened our resolve, it also removed us a bit further from the mainstream of the Camp. As the causalities increased, so did the possibility of death and the awareness of what it was that the men and women of Mortuary Affairs did. Our platoon was to the Marines what the Marines are to much of America: we did things that had to be done but that no one wanted to know about.
The processionals and the nature of our work in general also impacted us as individuals. Before the Corps and the war and Mortuary Affairs, death seemed to occur rarely and to people who were old; another's body was off limits, often sacred, not to be touched without permission, and certainly not to be pieced together like a sad, gruesome puzzle; social isolation was temporary and voluntary, and ostracism was unheard of except when someone had done something unspeakably wrong. All of these taken for granted understandings changed for us.
Excerpted from Shade It Black by Jess Goodell with John Hearn. Copyright 2011 Jess Goodell and John Hearn. Reprinted by permission of Casemate Publishers.Musicians, writers, and other creative folk are still scratching their heads over the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “The New Making It” -- packaged online as "The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn't" -- looked at how the Internet economy, instead of destroying creative careers, had redrawn them in “complicated and unexpected ways.” The story’s author, Steven Johnson, is an engaging writer, and the piece is told largely through statistics, which most readers assume to be beyond criticism. So why are so many people who work in the world of culture wondering why the article seemed to describe a best-of-all-worlds planet very different from the one they live on?
The Times story tells readers that just about everything they’ve heard about the Internet’s cult of free – and the way it makes an artistic career difficult – is gloomy, nay-saying foolishness. USC professor Jonathan Taplin, who produced the films "Mean Streets” and “The Last Waltz,” for instance, is baffled to read “that Internet monopolies have actually been a boon to the average artist.”
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The story was told primarily through statistics – there are sidebars on a half-dozen young artists who demonstrate the new ways of making a living, but Johnson barely discusses specific creative figures in his story. (When I tried to understand the issue for my book "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class," some of which originally ran on Salon, I combined figures with numerous interviews with artists in various genres. That seemed like the fair way to do it.) Because his story is told mostly through numbers, it’s impossible to get into its shallowness without talking in numbers as well. So how well do they stand up?
In many cases, groups and observers who keep and assess figures on the careers of artists are not convinced by the stats Johnson uses. Melvin Gibbs, the jazz and funk bassist who serves as president of Content Creators Coalition, calls them “cooked numbers.”
Another of these groups told The Times about the weakness of the figures before publication. Johnson refers approvingly to Future of Music Coalition, a D.C.-based think thank that collects and interprets research on the lives of musicians. FMC is known to some in the artists-rights movement as being optimistic and overly friendly with technology companies, which is mostly not fair. Either way, its research team – made up heavily of longtime musicians, including Kristin Thomson, who co-founded the Simple Machine label -- is very strong. And the group has a major complaint about the very basis of the story, stats which Johnson refer to as “The closest data set we have to a bird’s-eye-view of the culture industry,” from the Labor Department’s Occupational Employment Statistics.
To Johnson, the numbers say that despite whatever digital disruption has wrought, more people are making careers as musicians now: “the market looks as if it is rewarding creative work, not undermining it, compared with the pre-Napster era.”
The Times approached the F |
by the Secretary) of the composite performance scores for all MIPS eligible professionals with respect to a prior period specified by the Secretary. The Secretary may reassess the selection of the mean or median under the previous sentence every 3 years. ``(ii) Additional performance threshold for exceptional performance.--In addition to the performance threshold under clause (i), for each year of the MIPS, the Secretary shall compute an additional performance threshold for purposes of determining the additional MIPS adjustment factors under subparagraph (C). For each such year, the Secretary shall apply either of the following methods for computing such additional performance threshold for such a year: ``(I) The threshold shall be the score that is equal to the 25th percentile of the range of possible composite performance scores above the performance threshold determined under clause (i). ``(II) The threshold shall be the score that is equal to the 25th percentile of the actual composite performance scores for MIPS eligible professionals with composite performance scores at or above the performance threshold with respect to the prior period described in clause (i). ``(iii) Special rule for initial 2 years.-- With respect to each of the first two years to which the MIPS applies, the Secretary shall, prior to the performance period for such years, establish a performance threshold for purposes of determining MIPS adjustment factors under subparagraph (A) and a threshold for purposes of determining additional MIPS adjustment factors under subparagraph (C). Each such performance threshold shall-- ``(I) be based on a period prior to such performance periods; and ``(II) take into account-- ``(aa) data available with respect to performance on measures and activities that may be used under the performance categories under subparagraph (2)(B); and ``(bb) other factors determined appropriate by the Secretary. [[Page 129 STAT. 108]] ``(E) Application of mips adjustment factors.--In the case of items and services furnished by a MIPS eligible professional during a year (beginning with 2019), the amount otherwise paid under this part with respect to such items and services and MIPS eligible professional for such year, shall be multiplied by-- ``(i) 1, plus ``(ii) the sum of-- ``(I) the MIPS adjustment factor determined under subparagraph (A) divided by 100, and ``(II) as applicable, the additional MIPS adjustment factor determined under subparagraph (C) divided by 100. ``(F) Aggregate application of mips adjustment factors.-- ``(i) Application of scaling factor.-- ``(I) In general.--With respect to positive MIPS adjustment factors under subparagraph (A)(ii)(I) for eligible professionals whose composite performance score is above the performance threshold under subparagraph (D)(i) for such year, subject to subclause (II), the Secretary shall increase or decrease such adjustment factors by a scaling factor in order to ensure that the budget neutrality requirement of clause (ii) is met. ``(II) Scaling factor limit.--In no case may the scaling factor applied under this clause exceed 3.0. ``(ii) Budget neutrality requirement.-- ``(I) In general.--Subject to clause (iii), the Secretary shall ensure that the estimated amount described in subclause (II) for a year is equal to the estimated amount described in subclause (III) for such year. ``(II) Aggregate increases.--The amount described in this subclause is the estimated increase in the aggregate allowed charges resulting from the application of positive MIPS adjustment factors under subparagraph (A) (after application of the scaling factor described in clause (i)) to MIPS eligible professionals whose composite performance score for a year is above the performance threshold under subparagraph (D)(i) for such year. ``(III) Aggregate decreases.--The amount described in this subclause is the estimated decrease in the aggregate allowed charges resulting from the application of negative MIPS adjustment factors under subparagraph (A) to MIPS eligible professionals whose composite performance score for a year is below the performance threshold under subparagraph (D)(i) for such year. ``(iii) Exceptions.-- ``(I) <<NOTE: Applicability.>> In the case that all MIPS eligible professionals receive composite performance scores for a year that are below the performance threshold [[Page 129 STAT. 109]] under subparagraph (D)(i) for such year, the negative MIPS adjustment factors under subparagraph (A) shall apply with respect to such MIPS eligible professionals and the budget neutrality requirement of clause (ii) and the additional adjustment factors under clause (iv) shall not apply for such year. ``(II) In the case that, with respect to a year, the application of clause (i) results in a scaling factor equal to the maximum scaling factor specified in clause (i)(II), such scaling factor shall apply and the budget neutrality requirement of clause (ii) shall not apply for such year. ``(iv) Additional incentive payment adjustments.-- ``(I) <<NOTE: Time period.>> In general.--Subject to subclause (II), in specifying the MIPS additional adjustment factors under subparagraph (C) for each applicable MIPS eligible professional for a year, the Secretary shall ensure that the estimated aggregate increase in payments under this part resulting from the application of such additional adjustment factors for MIPS eligible professionals in a year shall be equal (as estimated by the Secretary) to $500,000,000 for each year beginning with 2019 and ending with 2024. ``(II) Limitation on additional incentive payment adjustments.--The MIPS additional adjustment factor under subparagraph (C) for a year for an applicable MIPS eligible professional whose composite performance score is above the additional performance threshold under subparagraph (D)(ii) for such year shall not exceed 10 percent. The application of the previous sentence may result in an aggregate amount of additional incentive payments that are less than the amount specified in subclause (I). ``(7) <<NOTE: Deadline.>> Announcement of result of adjustments.--Under the MIPS, the Secretary shall, not later than 30 days prior to January 1 of the year involved, make available to MIPS eligible professionals the MIPS adjustment factor (and, as applicable, the additional MIPS adjustment factor) under paragraph (6) applicable to the eligible professional for items and services furnished by the professional for such year. The Secretary may include such information in the confidential feedback under paragraph (12). ``(8) No effect in subsequent years.--The MIPS adjustment factors and additional MIPS adjustment factors under paragraph (6) shall apply only with respect to the year involved, and the Secretary shall not take into account such adjustment factors in making payments to a MIPS eligible professional under this part in a subsequent year. ``(9) Public reporting.-- ``(A) <<NOTE: Web posting.>> In general.--The Secretary shall, in an easily understandable format, make available on the Physician Compare Internet website of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services the following: [[Page 129 STAT. 110]] ``(i) Information regarding the performance of MIPS eligible professionals under the MIPS, which-- ``(I) shall include the composite score for each such MIPS eligible professional and the performance of each such MIPS eligible professional with respect to each performance category; and ``(II) may include the performance of each such MIPS eligible professional with respect to each measure or activity specified in paragraph (2)(B). ``(ii) The names of eligible professionals in eligible alternative payment models (as defined in section 1833(z)(3)(D)) and, to the extent feasible, the names of such eligible alternative payment models and performance of such models. ``(B) Disclosure.--The information made available under this paragraph shall indicate, where appropriate, that publicized information may not be representative of the eligible professional's entire patient population, the variety of services furnished by the eligible professional, or the health conditions of individuals treated. ``(C) Opportunity to review and submit corrections.--The Secretary shall provide for an opportunity for a professional described in subparagraph (A) to review, and submit corrections for, the information to be made public with respect to the professional under such subparagraph prior to such information being made public. ``(D) <<NOTE: Web posting.>> Aggregate information.--The Secretary shall periodically post on the Physician Compare Internet website aggregate information on the MIPS, including the range of composite scores for all MIPS eligible professionals and the range of the performance of all MIPS eligible professionals with respect to each performance category. ``(10) Consultation.--The Secretary shall consult with stakeholders in carrying out the MIPS, including for the identification of measures and activities under paragraph (2)(B) and the methodologies developed under paragraphs (5)(A) and (6) and regarding the use of qualified clinical data registries. Such consultation shall include the use of a request for information or other mechanisms determined appropriate. ``(11) Technical assistance to small practices and practices in health professional shortage areas.-- ``(A) <<NOTE: Contracts.>> In general.--The Secretary shall enter into contracts or agreements with appropriate entities (such as quality improvement organizations, regional extension centers (as described in section 3012(c) of the Public Health Service Act), or regional health collaboratives) to offer guidance and assistance to MIPS eligible professionals in practices of 15 or fewer professionals (with priority given to such practices located in rural areas, health professional shortage areas (as designated under in section 332(a)(1)(A) of such Act), and medically underserved areas, and practices with low composite scores) with respect to-- ``(i) the performance categories described in clauses (i) through (iv) of paragraph (2)(A); or ``(ii) how to transition to the implementation of and participation in an alternative payment model as described in section 1833(z)(3)(C). [[Page 129 STAT. 111]] ``(B) Funding for technical assistance.--For purposes of implementing subparagraph (A), the Secretary shall provide for the transfer from the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund established under section 1841 to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Program Management Account of $20,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2016 through 2020. Amounts transferred under this subparagraph for a fiscal year shall be available until expended. ``(12) Feedback and information to improve performance.-- ``(A) Performance feedback.-- ``(i) <<NOTE: Effective date.>> In general.-- Beginning July 1, 2017, the Secretary-- ``(I) shall make available timely (such as quarterly) confidential feedback to MIPS eligible professionals on the performance of such professionals with respect to the performance categories under clauses (i) and (ii) of paragraph (2)(A); and ``(II) may make available confidential feedback to such professionals on the performance of such professionals with respect to the performance categories under clauses (iii) and (iv) of such paragraph. ``(ii) Mechanisms.--The Secretary may use one or more mechanisms to make feedback available under clause (i), which may include use of a web- based portal or other mechanisms determined appropriate by the Secretary. With respect to the performance category described in paragraph (2)(A)(i), feedback under this subparagraph shall, to the extent an eligible professional chooses to participate in a data registry for purposes of this subsection (including registries under subsections (k) and (m)), be provided based on performance on quality measures reported through the use of such registries. With respect to any other performance category described in paragraph (2)(A), the Secretary shall encourage provision of feedback through qualified clinical data registries as described in subsection (m)(3)(E)). ``(iii) Use of data.--For purposes of clause (i), the Secretary may use data, with respect to a MIPS eligible professional, from periods prior to the current performance period and may use rolling periods in order to make illustrative calculations about the performance of such professional. ``(iv) Disclosure exemption.--Feedback made available under this subparagraph shall be exempt from disclosure under section 552 of title 5, United States Code. ``(v) Receipt of information.--The Secretary may use the mechanisms established under clause (ii) to receive information from professionals, such as information with respect to this subsection. ``(B) Additional information.-- [[Page 129 STAT. 112]] ``(i) <<NOTE: Effective date.>> In general.-- Beginning July 1, 2018, the Secretary shall make available to MIPS eligible professionals information, with respect to individuals who are patients of such MIPS eligible professionals, about items and services for which payment is made under this title that are furnished to such individuals by other suppliers and providers of services, which may include information described in clause (ii). Such information may be made available under the previous sentence to such MIPS eligible professionals by mechanisms determined appropriate by the Secretary, which may include use of a web-based portal. Such information may be made available in accordance with the same or similar terms as data are made available to accountable care organizations participating in the shared savings program under section 1899. ``(ii) Type of information.--For purposes of clause (i), the information described in this clause, is the following: ``(I) With respect to selected items and services (as determined appropriate by the Secretary) for which payment is made under this title and that are furnished to individuals, who are patients of a MIPS eligible professional, by another supplier or provider of services during the most recent period for which data are available (such as the most recent three-month period), such as the name of such providers furnishing such items and services to such patients during such period, the types of such items and services so furnished, and the dates such items and services were so furnished. ``(II) Historical data, such as averages and other measures of the distribution if appropriate, of the total, and components of, allowed charges (and other figures as determined appropriate by the Secretary). ``(13) Review.-- ``(A) Targeted review.--The Secretary shall establish a process under which a MIPS eligible professional may seek an informal review of the calculation of the MIPS adjustment factor (or factors) applicable to such eligible professional under this subsection for a year. The results of a review conducted pursuant to the previous sentence shall not be taken into account for purposes of paragraph (6) with respect to a year (other than with respect to the calculation of such eligible professional's MIPS adjustment factor for such year or additional MIPS adjustment factor for such year) after the factors determined in subparagraph (A) and subparagraph (C) of such paragraph have been determined for such year. ``(B) Limitation.--Except as provided for in subparagraph (A), there shall be no administrative or judicial review under section 1869, section 1878, or otherwise of the following: ``(i) The methodology used to determine the amount of the MIPS adjustment factor under paragraph (6)(A) and the amount of the additional MIPS adjustment [[Page 129 STAT. 113]] factor under paragraph (6)(C) and the determination of such amounts. ``(ii) The establishment of the performance standards under paragraph (3) and the performance period under paragraph (4). ``(iii) The identification of measures and activities specified under paragraph (2)(B) and information made public or posted on the Physician Compare Internet website of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services under paragraph (9). ``(iv) The methodology developed under paragraph (5) that is used to calculate performance scores and the calculation of such scores, including the weighting of measures and activities under such methodology.''. (2) GAO reports.-- (A) Evaluation of eligible professional mips.--Not later than October 1, 2021, the Comptroller General of the United States shall submit to Congress a report evaluating the eligible professional Merit-based Incentive Payment System under subsection (q) of section 1848 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4), as added by paragraph (1). Such report shall-- (i) examine the distribution of the composite performance scores and MIPS adjustment factors (and additional MIPS adjustment factors) for MIPS eligible professionals (as defined in subsection (q)(1)(c) of such section) under such program, and patterns relating to such scores and adjustment factors, including based on type of provider, practice size, geographic location, and patient mix; (ii) provide recommendations for improving such program; (iii) evaluate the impact of technical assistance funding under section 1848(q)(11) of the Social Security Act, as added by paragraph (1), on the ability of professionals to improve within such program or successfully transition to an alternative payment model (as defined in section 1833(z)(3) of the Social Security Act, as added by subsection (e)), with priority for such evaluation given to practices located in rural areas, health professional shortage areas (as designated in section 332(a)(1)(A) of the Public Health Service Act), and medically underserved areas; and (iv) provide recommendations for optimizing the use of such technical assistance funds. (B) Study to examine alignment of quality measures used in public and private programs.-- (i) In general.--Not later than 18 months after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Comptroller General of the United States shall submit to Congress a report that-- (I) compares the similarities and differences in the use of quality measures under the original Medicare fee-for-service program under parts A and B of title XVIII of the Social Security Act, the Medicare Advantage program under part C of such title, selected State Medicaid programs [[Page 129 STAT. 114]] under title XIX of such Act, and private payer arrangements; and (II) makes recommendations on how to reduce the administrative burden involved in applying such quality measures. (ii) Requirements.--The report under clause (i) shall-- (I) consider those measures applicable to individuals entitled to, or enrolled for, benefits under such part A, or enrolled under such part B and individuals under the age of 65; and (II) focus on those measures that comprise the most significant component of the quality performance category of the eligible professional MIPS incentive program under subsection (q) of section 1848 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4), as added by paragraph (1). (C) Study on role of independent risk managers.--Not later than January 1, 2017, the Comptroller General of the United States shall submit to Congress a report examining whether entities that pool financial risk for physician practices, such as independent risk managers, can play a role in supporting physician practices, particularly small physician practices, in assuming financial risk for the treatment of patients. Such report shall examine barriers that small physician practices currently face in assuming financial risk for treating patients, the types of risk management entities that could assist physician practices in participating in two-sided risk payment models, and how such entities could assist with risk management and with quality improvement activities. Such report shall also include an analysis of any existing legal barriers to such arrangements. (D) Study to examine rural and health professional shortage area alternative payment models.--Not later than October 1, 2021, the Comptroller General of the United States shall submit to Congress a report that examines the transition of professionals in rural areas, health professional shortage areas (as designated in section 332(a)(1)(A) of the Public Health Service Act), or medically underserved areas to an alternative payment model (as defined in section 1833(z)(3) of the Social Security Act, as added by subsection (e)). Such report shall make recommendations for removing administrative barriers to practices, including small practices consisting of 15 or fewer professionals, in rural areas, health professional shortage areas, and medically underserved areas to participation in such models. (3) Funding for implementation.--For purposes of implementing the provisions of and the amendments made by this section, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall provide for the transfer of $80,000,000 from the Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund established under section 1841 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395t) to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Program Management Account for each of the fiscal years 2015 through 2019. Amounts transferred under this paragraph shall be available until expended. [[Page 129 STAT. 115]] (d) Improving Quality Reporting for Composite Scores.-- (1) Changes for group reporting option.-- (A) In general.--Section 1848(m)(3)(C)(ii) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4(m)(3)(C)(ii)) is amended by inserting ``and, for 2016 and subsequent years, may provide'' after ``shall provide''. (B) Clarification of qualified clinical data registry reporting to group practices.--Section 1848(m)(3)(D) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4(m)(3)(D)) is amended by inserting ``and, for 2016 and subsequent years, subparagraph (A) or (C)'' after ``subparagraph (A)''. (2) Changes for multiple reporting periods and alternative criteria for satisfactory reporting.--Section 1848(m)(5)(F) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4(m)(5)(F)) is amended-- (A) by striking ``and subsequent years'' and inserting ``through reporting periods occurring in 2015''; and (B) by inserting ``and, for reporting periods occurring in 2016 and subsequent years, the Secretary may establish'' after ``shall establish''. (3) Physician feedback program reports succeeded by reports under mips.--Section 1848(n) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w-4(n)) is amended by adding at the end the following new paragraph: ``(11) Reports ending with 2017.--Reports under the Program shall not be provided after December 31, 2017. See subsection (q)(12) for reports under the eligible professionals Merit-based Incentive Payment System.''. (4) Coordination with satisfying meaningful ehr use clinical quality measure reporting requirement.--Section 1848(o)(2)(A)(iii) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w- 4(o)(2)(A)(iii)) is amended by inserting ``and subsection (q)(5)(B)(ii)(II)'' after ``Subject to subparagraph (B)(ii)''. (e) Promoting Alternative Payment Models.-- (1) Increasing transparency of physician-focused payment models.--Section 1868 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395ee) is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection: ``(c) Physician-Focused Payment Models.-- ``(1) Technical advisory committee.-- ``(A) Establishment.--There is established an ad hoc committee to be known as the `Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee' (referred to in this subsection as the `Committee'). ``(B) Membership.-- ``(i) Number and appointment.--The Committee shall be composed of 11 members appointed by the Comptroller General of the United States. ``(ii) Qualifications.--The membership of the Committee shall include individuals with national recognition for their expertise in physician- focused payment models and related delivery of care. No more than 5 members of the Committee shall be providers of services or suppliers, or representatives of providers of services or suppliers. [[Page 129 STAT. 116]] ``(iii) Prohibition on federal employment.--A member of the Committee shall not be an employee of the Federal Government. ``(iv) Ethics disclosure.--The Comptroller General shall establish a system for public disclosure by members of the Committee of financial and other potential conflicts of interest relating to such members. Members of the Committee shall be treated as employees of Congress for purposes of applying title I of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 (Public Law 95- 521). ``(v) <<NOTE: Deadline.>> Date of initial appointments.--The initial appointments of members of the Committee shall be made by not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this subsection. ``(C) Term; vacancies.-- ``(i) Term.--The terms of members of the Committee shall be for 3 years except that the Comptroller General shall designate staggered terms for the members first appointed. ``(ii) Vacancies.--Any member appointed to fill a vacancy occurring before the expiration of the term for which the member's predecessor was appointed shall be appointed only for the remainder of that term. A member may serve after the expiration of that member's term until a successor has taken office. A vacancy in the Committee shall be filled in the manner in which the original appointment was made. ``(D) Duties.--The Committee shall meet, as needed, to provide comments and recommendations to the Secretary, as described in paragraph (2)(C), on physician-focused payment models. ``(E) Compensation of members.-- ``(i) In general.--Except as provided in clause (ii), a member of the Committee shall serve without compensation. ``(ii) Travel expenses.--A member of the Committee shall be allowed travel expenses, including per diem in lieu of subsistence, at rates authorized for an employee of an agency under subchapter I of chapter 57 of title 5, United States Code, while away from the home or regular place of business of the member in the performance of the duties of the Committee. ``(F) Operational and technical support.-- ``(i) In general.--The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation shall provide technical and operational support for the Committee, which may be by use of a contractor. The Office of the Actuary of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services shall provide to the Committee actuarial assistance as needed. ``(ii) Funding.--The Secretary shall provide for the transfer, from the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund under section 1841, such amounts as are necessary to carry out this paragraph (not to exceed $5,000,000) for fiscal year 2015 and each subsequent fiscal year. Any amounts transferred [[Page 129 STAT. 117]] under the preceding sentence for a fiscal year shall remain available until expended. ``(G) Application.--Section 14 of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5 U.S.C. App.) shall not apply to the Committee. ``(2) Criteria and process for submission and review of physician-focused payment models.-- ``(A) Criteria for assessing physician-focused payment models.-- ``(i) <<NOTE: Deadline.>> Rulemaking.--Not later than November 1, 2016, the Secretary shall, through notice and comment rulemaking, following a request for information, establish criteria for physician-focused payment models, including models for specialist physicians, that could be used by the Committee for making comments and recommendations pursuant to paragraph (1)(D). ``(ii) MedPAC submission of comments.--During the comment period for the proposed rule described in clause (i), the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission may submit comments to the Secretary on the proposed criteria under such clause. ``(iii) Updating.--The Secretary may update the criteria established under this subparagraph through rulemaking. ``(B) Stakeholder submission of physician-focused payment models.--On an ongoing basis, individuals and stakeholder entities may submit to the Committee proposals for physician-focused payment models that such individuals and entities believe meet the criteria described in subparagraph (A). ``(C) Committee review of models submitted.--The Committee shall, on a periodic basis, review models submitted under subparagraph (B), prepare comments and recommendations regarding whether such models meet the criteria described in subparagraph (A), and submit such comments and recommendations to the Secretary. ``(D) Secretary review and response.--The Secretary shall review the comments and recommendations submitted by the Committee under subparagraph (C) and post a detailed response to such comments and recommendations on the Internet website of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. ``(3) Rule of construction.--Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to impact the development or testing of models under this title or titles XI, XIX, or XXI.''. (2) Incentive payments for participation in eligible alternative payment models.--Section 1833 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395l) is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection: ``(z) Incentive Payments for Participation in Eligible Alternative Payment Models.-- ``(1) Payment incentive.-- ``(A) <<NOTE: Time period.>> In general.--In the case of covered professional services furnished by an eligible professional during a year that is in the period beginning with 2019 and ending with 2024 and for which the professional is a qualifying APM participant with respect to such year, in addition to the [[Page 129 STAT. 118]] amount of payment that would otherwise be made for such covered professional services under this part for such year, there also shall be paid to such professional an amount equal to 5 percent of the estimated aggregate payment amounts for such covered professional services under this part for the preceding year. For purposes of the previous sentence, the payment amount for the preceding year may be an estimation for the full preceding year based on a period of such preceding year that is less than the full year. The <<NOTE: Policies.>> Secretary shall establish policies to implement this subparagraph in cases in which payment for covered professional services furnished by a qualifying APM participant in an alternative payment model-- ``(i) is made to an eligible alternative payment entity rather than directly to the qualifying APM participant; or ``(ii) is made on a basis other than a fee- for-service basis (such as payment on a capitated basis). ``(B) Form of payment.--Payments under this subsection shall be made in a lump sum, on an annual basis, as soon as practicable. ``(C) Treatment of payment incentive.--Payments under this subsection shall not be taken into account for purposes of determining actual expenditures under an alternative payment model and for purposes of determining or rebasing any benchmarks used under the alternative payment model. ``(D) Coordination.--The amount of the additional payment under this subsection or subsection (m) shall be determined without regard to any additional payment under subsection (m) and this subsection, respectively. The amount of the additional payment under this subsection or subsection (x) shall be determined without regard to any additional payment under subsection (x) and this subsection, respectively. The amount of the additional payment under this subsection or subsection (y) shall be determined without regard to any additional payment under subsection (y) and this subsection, respectively. ``(2) <<NOTE: Definition.>> Qualifying apm participant.-- For purposes of this subsection, the term `qualifying APM participant' means the following: ``(A) 2019 and 2020.--With respect to 2019 and 2020, an eligible professional for whom the Secretary determines that at least 25 percent of payments under this part for covered professional services furnished by such professional during the most recent period for which data are available (which may be less than a year) were attributable to such services furnished under this part through an eligible alternative payment entity. ``(B) 2021 and 2022.--With respect to 2021 and 2022, an eligible professional described in either of the following clauses: ``(i) Medicare payment threshold option.--An eligible professional for whom the Secretary determines that at least 50 percent of payments under this part for covered professional services furnished by such professional during the most recent period for which [[Page 129 STAT. 119]] data are available (which may be less than a year) were attributable to such services furnished under this part through an eligible alternative payment entity. ``(ii) Combination all-payer and medicare payment threshold option.--An eligible professional-- ``(I) for whom the Secretary determines, with respect to items and services furnished by such professional during the most recent period for which data are available (which may be less than a year), that at least 50 percent of the sum of-- ``(aa) payments described in clause (i); and ``(bb) all other payments, regardless of payer (other than payments made by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Veterans Affairs and other than payments made under title XIX in a State in which no medical home or alternative payment model is available under the State program under that title), meet the requirement described in clause (iii)(I) with respect to payments described in item (aa) and meet the requirement described in clause (iii)(II) with respect to payments described in item (bb); ``(II) for whom the Secretary determines at least 25 percent of payments under this part for covered professional services furnished by such professional during the most recent period for which data are available (which may be less than a year) were attributable to such services furnished under this part through an eligible alternative payment entity; and ``(III) who provides to the Secretary such information as is necessary for the Secretary to make a determination under subclause (I), with respect to such professional. ``(iii) Requirement.--For purposes of clause (ii)(I)-- ``(I) the requirement described in this subclause, with respect to payments described in item (aa) of such clause, is that such payments are made to an eligible alternative payment entity; and ``(II) the requirement described in this subclause, with respect to payments described in item (bb) of such clause, is that such payments are made under arrangements in which-- ``(aa) quality measures comparable to measures under the performance category described in section 1848(q)(2)(B)(i) apply; ``(bb) certified EHR technology is used; and ``(cc) the eligible professional participates in an entity that-- ``(AA) bears more than nominal financial risk if actual aggregate expenditures exceeds expected aggregate expenditures; or [[Page 129 STAT. 120]] ``(BB) with respect to beneficiaries under title XIX, is a medical home that meets criteria comparable to medical homes expanded under section 1115A(c). ``(C) <<NOTE: Effective date.>> Beginning in 2023.--With respect to 2023 and each subsequent year, an eligible professional described in either of the following clauses: ``(i) Medicare payment threshold option.--An eligible professional for whom the Secretary determines that at least 75 percent of payments under this part for covered professional services furnished by such professional during the most recent period for which data are available (which may be less than a year) were attributable to such services furnished under this part through an eligible alternative payment entity. ``(ii) Combination all-payer and medicare payment threshold option.--An eligible professional-- ``(I) for whom the Secretary determines, with respect to items and services furnished by such professional during the most recent period for which data are available (which may be less than a year), that at least 75 percent of the sum of-- ``(aa) payments described in clause (i); and ``(bb) all other payments, regardless of payer (other than payments made by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Veterans Affairs and other than payments made under title XIX in a State in which no medical home or alternative payment model is available under the State program under that title), meet the requirement described in clause (iii)(I) with respect to payments described in item (aa) and meet the requirement described in clause (iii)(II) with respect to payments described in item (bb); ``(II) for whom the Secretary determines at least 25 percent of payments under this part for covered professional services furnished by such professional during the most recent period for which data are available (which may be less than a year) were attributable to such services furnished under this part through an eligible alternative payment entity; and ``(III) who provides to the Secretary such information as is necessary for the Secretary to make a determination under subclause (I), with respect to such professional. ``(iii) Requirement.--For purposes of clause (ii)(I)-- ``(I) the requirement described in this subclause, with respect to payments described in item (aa) of such clause, is that such payments are made to an eligible alternative payment entity; and ``(II) the requirement described in this subclause, with respect to payments described in item [[Page 129 STAT. 121]] (bb) of such clause, is that such payments are made under arrangements in which-- ``(aa) <<NOTE: Applicability.>> quality measures comparable to measures under the performance category described in section 1848(q)(2)(B)(i) apply; ``(bb) certified EHR technology is used; and ``(cc) the eligible professional participates in an entity that-- ``(AA) bears more than nominal financial risk if actual aggregate expenditures exceeds expected aggregate expenditures; or ``(BB) with respect to beneficiaries under title XIX, is a medical home that meets criteria comparable to medical homes expanded under section 1115A(c). ``(D) Use of patient approach.--The Secretary may base the determination of whether an eligible professional is a qualifying APM participant under this subsection and the determination of whether an eligible professional is a partial qualifying APM participant under section 1848(q)(1)(C)(iii) by using counts of patients in lieu of using payments and using the same or similar percentage criteria (as specified in this subsection and such section, respectively), as the Secretary determines appropriate. ``(3) Additional definitions.--In this subsection: ``(A) Covered professional services.--The term `covered professional services' has the meaning given that term in section 1848(k)(3)(A). ``(B) Eligible professional.--The term `eligible professional' has the meaning given that term in section 1848(k)(3)(B) and includes a group that includes such professionals. ``(C) Alternative payment model (apm).--The term `alternative payment model' means, other than for purposes of subparagraphs (B)(ii)(I)(bb) and (C)(ii)(I)(bb) of paragraph (2), any of the following: ``(i) A model under section 1115A (other than a health care innovation award). ``(ii) The shared savings program under section 1899. ``(iii) A demonstration under section 1866C. ``(iv) A demonstration required by Federal law. ``(D) Eligible alternative payment entity.--The term `eligible alternative payment entity' means, with respect to a year, an entity that-- ``(i) participates in an alternative payment model that-- ``(I) requires participants in such model to use certified EHR technology (as defined in subsection (o)(4)); and ``(II) provides for payment for covered professional services based on quality measures comparable to measures under the performance category described in section 1848(q)(2)(B)(i); and [[Page 129 STAT. 122]] ``(ii)(I) bears financial risk for monetary losses under such alternative payment model that are in excess of a nominal amount; or ``(II) is a medical home expanded under section 1115A(c). ``(4) Limitation.--There shall be no administrative or judicial review under section 1869, 1878, or otherwise, of the following: ``(A) The determination that an eligible professional is a qualifying APM participant under paragraph (2) and the determination that an entity is an eligible alternative payment entity under paragraph (3)(D). ``(B) The determination of the amount of the 5 percent payment incentive under paragraph (1)(A), including any estimation as part of such determination.''. (3) Coordination conforming amendments.--Section 1833 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395l) is further amended-- (A) in subsection (x)(3), by adding at the end the following new sentence: ``The amount of the additional payment for a service under this subsection and subsection (z) shall be determined without regard to any additional payment for the service under subsection (z) and this subsection, respectively.''; and (B) in subsection (y)(3), by adding at the end the following new sentence: ``The amount of the additional payment for a service under this subsection and subsection (z) shall be determined without regard to any additional payment for the service under subsection (z) and this subsection, respectively.''. (4) Encouraging development and testing of certain models.-- Section 1115A(b)(2) of the Social Security Act |
discordant with neuroimaging [MRI, PET, SPECT/SISCOM, MEG] or neuropsychological data).
The relation of seizure onset to functional tissue must be determined (eg, seizures with early involvement of language or motor function).
The relation of seizure onset to lesion must be determined (eg, dual pathology or multiple intracranial lesions).
Seizures are clinically suspected but VEEG is inadequate for defining them (eg, simple partial seizures with no detectable scalp EEG ictal discharge or suspected epileptic seizures with unusual semiology that suggests psychogenic seizures [pseudo-pseudoseizures]). [29]
Invasive intracranial monitoring is a diagnostic procedure that is designed to identify the site of ictal onset of seizures. Intracranial electrodes are reserved for the most difficult of cases; therefore, one risk is that the study will end up with a nondiagnostic result. The onus is on the surgeon to question where electrodes should be placed on the basis of the information available preoperatively and to consider what other alternative diagnosis should be included or excluded to obtain the best possible electrode placement.
Depth, strip, and grid electrodes are implantable intracranial devices used to record the ECoG over an lnger period and to stimulate the cortex to determine function. Any combination of these electrodes may be employed as necessary to answer the specific questions posed by the case history and presentation specific to a given patient, depending on the needs of the patient, experience of the monitoring team, and resources available for use.
Depth electrodes are multicontact, thin, tubular, rigid or semirigid electrodes that penetrate the brain to allow recording from deep structures. Strip electrodes are linear arrays of 2-16 disk electrodes embedded in a strip of Silastic, [30] (or they can be tubular, like depth electrodes). [31] Grid electrodes are parallel rows of electrodes that can be configured in standard or custom designs according to the surgeon’s preferences and the manufacturer’s capabilities. Grid and strip electrodes are designed to be in direct contact with brain neocortex.
In most cases, electrodes are placed in the subdural space, although they may occasionally be used in the epidural space. All of these electrode types are constructed from biologically inert materials (eg, Silastic, stainless steel, platinum). Platinum electrodes are more easily seen on fluoroscopic images than are stainless steel electrodes and are compatible with MRI so that postoperative diagnostic and localizing neuroimaging studies can be obtained.
Placement of strip electrodes
Strip electrodes are used most often to lateralize the side of seizure onset in frontal and temporal lobe epilepsy, but they may also be used to obtain survey studies over all cortical surfaces of the brain. They are usually implanted while the patient is under general anesthesia, according to the preoperative plan created by the epilepsy monitoring team.
Electrodes can be directed safely over long distances within the calvaria by surfing them over the brain with a gentle fluid pulse. Fluoroscopy is used to confirm placement before closure of the wound. The electrode wires are tunneled under the skin with a 13-gauge passing needle designed for that purpose (Ad-Tech Medical; Racine, Wis); to decrease the risk of infection, they exit the skin several inches away from the burr-hole incision.
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) may leak from around the electrode wires during the first 3 days after implantation. This leakage can be minimized if the scalp exit sites for the electrode tails are directed superiorly toward the vertex of the skull. The suggested risk of infection from a CSF leak differs from center to center; however, completely sealing the skin with a foreign body in place is difficult, and CSF leaks are not uncommon. Because of this, the dressing is changed as often as needed.
Some authors suggest placing a cable-retaining suture in the scalp, [32, 33] both to attempt to secure the electrode and to decrease CSF leakage. The lead author has not found this to be helpful in decreasing CSF leakage, and all electrode companies manufacture quick-release connectors designed to break apart easily if tugged.
Patients are monitored with electrodes in place in the monitoring unit for 2-7 days to record their typical seizures. Subdural strip electrodes are removed through the skin without an open surgical procedure by placing gentle traction on the electrodes with the patient under conscious sedation or general anesthesia.
Although strip electrodes can be inserted epidurally, [34, 35] this practice is not advisable for routine cases because the exposure is limited to the lateral convexities of the brain. The epidural space in the temporal fossa does not allow the electrode to be advanced medially enough to record from the parahippocampal gyrus, and electrodes cannot be placed over mesial frontal lobe cortex.
In most exploratory investigations, these locations should be sampled. However, epidural placement may be the most reasonable option when recording from a patient with a prior craniotomy because scarring may obliterate the subdural space.
Placement of grid electrodes
Arrays of electrodes more than 1 column wide are considered intracranial grids (see the image below). Practically speaking, electrode arrays that are 2-3 contacts wide cannot be easily passed for any substantial distance through a burr hole and require a craniotomy for placement.
Examples of various grid electrodes available for specific needs. These range in size and number of contacts. View Media Gallery
Once the decision to proceed with a craniotomy is made, grid arrays of 5-8 rows (20-64 contacts) are usually used to maximize coverage over the craniotomy site. The craniotomy site is determined based on data gathered during the preoperative evaluation; usually, a large craniotomy is performed to accommodate up to an 8 × 8-cm grid.
Prophylactic antibiotics and dexamethasone are routinely administered. Mannitol is not used unless necessary, because the putative space created by a fluid shift could adversely contribute to hematoma formation after closure.
Once placed, the grid is sutured to the dura to prevent motion. Often, 1 or more strip electrodes are added to sample adjacent areas or lobes (eg, the interhemispheric fissure or basal temporal lobe). The electrode tails of grids are tunneled in much the same way as strip electrodes (ie, toward the vertex) to prevent CSF leakage.
At some centers, the bone flap is frozen under sterile conditions until the patient returns to the operating room (OR) for grid removal. However, the author prefers to leave the bone flap in place to decrease the risk of hematoma formation at the craniotomy site.
After recovery in the postanesthesia care unit, the patient is transferred to the VEEG monitoring suite, where the patient is hooked up on the day of surgery and a formal head dressing is placed. Acute nursing care is provided in the monitoring suite for the first 24 hours after craniotomy, similar to the level practiced in a neurologic step-down unit. The grid is removed when sufficient data have been obtained to determine the site of ictal onset or, alternatively, to determine that more recording is not likely to lead to satisfactory localization.
If resective surgery is planned, the relationship of the grid to the underlying cortex must stay unchanged while the craniotomy is reopened. The dura is opened, with the grid-stabilizing sutures left intact and all relations between electrode contacts and unique underlying cortical topography (eg, blood vessels) left undisturbed. Once these relations have been documented and the surgeon has extrapolated the mapped data to the underlying cortex, the grid is removed and discarded.
Resective surgery is performed, with the neurophysiologist or pathologist present in the OR as necessary. If resection is not performed at the time of grid removal (eg, because of hemorrhage, edema, patient preference, or insufficient data), then pertinent landmarks may be documented with digital photography or frameless stereotaxy for reoperation at a later date.
Higher complication rates for intracranial grid electrode placement have been associated with an increased number of electrode contacts, increased length of the monitoring period, placement of burr holes in addition to the craniotomy, and multiple cable exit sites. [36, 37] At the authors’ institution, AEDs are stopped on the morning of surgery (except for benzodiazepines and barbiturates, which are given in reduced doses). VEEG monitoring continues until the epilepsy team believes that adequate ictal data have been obtained (usually within 2-8 days).
Placement of depth electrodes
Depth electrodes are used most commonly for recording from the hippocampus and amygdala. The approach preferred by the authors is to place electrodes via the occipital, parasagittal route. [38, 39] This trajectory allows simultaneous implantation into the amygdala and anterior and posterior hippocampus using a single multicontact electrode (see the image below).
Examples of 3 depth electrodes with varying numbers of contacts. Note that stylus is in place and is removed once electrode has been inserted. View Media Gallery
Placement is performed with either a frameless system or a stereotactic frame with adequate clearance at the back of the head. MRI is used with both frame-based and frameless stereotactic placement to allow direct visualization of the target and the trajectory. [31, 40, 41, 42, 43]
Indications for depth electrode placement are expanding as neuroimaging becomes more sophisticated and more complex epilepsy syndromes are identified. This is particularly true among the malformations of cortical development, particularly when the dysplastic lesion is subcortical. Depth electrode recordings into hypothalamic hamartomas and periventricular nodular heterotopia have shown ictal onsets beginning within the lesions, which subsequently spread to produce clinical seizures.
Depth electrodes are most often used in conjunction with other subdural strip or grid electrodes so that multiple brain areas are sampled simultaneously to avoid false localization based on insufficient data collection. Specific intracranial EEG ictal discharge frequencies, locations, and patterns can suggest, preoperatively, certain types of histopathologic findings. [44]
Completion of intracranial monitoring
At most epilepsy centers, rooms with hard-wired EEG and video telemetry instruments are used only for long-term monitoring, not for general medical or surgical patients. Patients may be taken directly from the recovery room to one of these monitoring rooms or may stay in the intensive care unit (ICU) for the first night of monitoring. Antiepileptic drugs are tapered or withdrawn, and VEEG recordings are begun on the day of electrode implantation.
The relative accuracy of ictal electrographic activity versus interictal activity remains somewhat controversial. In general, interictal spikes are usually more diffuse than the ictal onset zone, and bilateral interictal spikes can occur in patients who ultimately do well after a unilateral resection, and therefore, do not preclude a good surgical outcome.
Obtaining ictal recordings is usually preferable in order to confirm the significance of interictal abnormalities, in that ictal recordings are considered more accurate than interictal data. A possible exception to this general guideline might be when recording from a focal cortical dysplasia; distinctive interictal epileptiform patterns have been identified that may provide enough data to guide a resection based solely on interictal data.
In monitoring a lesion with intracranial electrodes, seizure outcome is best when both the lesion and the ictal onset zone are completely resected; outcome is compromised when either the lesion or the ictal onset zone is incompletely resected. [45, 46] In the case of nonlesional epilepsy, seizure freedom is more difficult to achieve, even in cases in which the ictal onset zone has been well studied with intracranial electrodes.
The number of seizures required to consider an intracranial study complete depends on the specific issues involved with treating a particular patient. In general, an arbitrary number of 3 typical clinical seizures has been considered the minimum number to be captured; however, exceptions to this rule abound. [47]
For example, a patient with a posterior temporal or parietal lesion and scalp EEG localization to the anterior temporal lobe that is delayed in comparison with the clinical onset might be considered for an intracranial study to confirm the clinical suspicion that seizures are falsely localized to the anterior temporal lobe. In such a case, 1-2 seizure onsets with intracranial EEG ictal onset directly over the lesion might yield sufficient data to allow the surgeon to proceed to surgical resection.
On the other hand, if a patient has nonlesional epilepsy and bilateral ictal onset over both temporal areas on scalp EEG monitoring, many more than 3 seizures would have to be recorded in order to exclude bilateral temporal onset or establish a predominant side of onset.
The type of ictal onset recorded may influence the number of seizures required. Fewer seizures must be recorded in patients who have identical ictal onset patterns over the exact same electrode contacts in every seizure. More seizures must be recorded in patients with multifocal ictal onsets over different electrodes from one seizure to another.
Initial ictal changes at the beginning of a seizure are more important than late changes and the propagation patterns of the seizure. Seizures that occur seconds to minutes after a previous seizure may be disregarded as being potentially misleading. [47, 48]
When intracranial monitoring is complete, most subdural strip and depth electrodes can be removed percutaneously in the OR after administration of a conscious sedation protocol or general anesthesia. Because of concern over contracting virally transmitted disease (eg, AIDS, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, hepatitis), recording electrodes are commonly discarded after a single use.
New computer-assisted prediction paradigms are being created to analyze ictal onset and changes in the background electrical state, interictal spike frequency, confluence analysis, and chaos theory in order to predict seizure occurrence minutes to hours before ictal onset. Intracranial monitoring will probably have to adapt in order to accommodate these new technologies in the near future. [49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55]
Repeat intracranial monitoring
The following are reasons why a second intracranial study might be considered [56, 57, 47, 58, 59, 60] :
Strip electrode survey study for lateralization and localization to a lobe, with a planned return at a later date for definition of the ictal onset zone and cortical mapping as necessary
Reimplantation of a second grid because of failed localization secondary to sampling error (seizures may occur on the margin of the grid, be diffuse, or show variable propagation that makes seizure localization uncertain.)
Recurrent seizures after a previous intracranial study and resection
A repeat intracranial study is typically performed months to years after the first intracranial study, either to give the wound time to heal or because seizures recur at some variable time after resective surgery. Often, an interim preoperative evaluation, which may include VEEG monitoring, ictal SPECT scanning, MRI, or MEG, is performed to reexplore the suspected cause of a person’s epilepsy and prepare a more effective intracranial study. Secondary grid implantations can be quite troublesome because dural adhesions are the rule rather than the exception.
Therefore, when planning a second intracranial study, the surgeon should anticipate a difficult entry and should use many of the strategies used for reoperation in other craniotomies, including enlarging the bone flap until pristine dura is encountered and opening the dura away from the previous operative site and away from functional cortex. If adhesions are encountered, an operating microscope should be reserved and used early in the dissection.
The authors routinely plan to spend 1-3 hours under the operating microscope when scheduling a reoperation for epilepsy. Even with tedious dissection, adhesions can limit the distal passage of electrodes and limit the effectiveness of a repeat intracranial study.
Several authors have suggested an alternative to delayed reoperation, [61, 62, 63] advocating immediate reimplantation during the same hospitalization if the findings from the first grid were not diagnostic. Doyle refers to this as a 3-stage procedure, and Lee describes the same technique as a double grid.
This technique has certain advantages over delayed return for implantation of a second grid. First, adhesions do not obscure the subdural space, which can limit grid reimplantation. Second, cortical injury can be avoided because adhesions do not need to be dissected from functional tissue. Third, intracranial EEG changes can be compared with the previous study while the subtleties of the previous intracranial ECoG are still fresh in the minds of the evaluating team.
Other authors, however, believe that placing a grid again immediately after a first operation is likely to alter the network of epileptogenesis and that resultant seizures with second grid implantation might not best represent the patient’s typical seizures.
Doyle advocates performing a limited resection of the ictal onset zone seen with the first grid, on the grounds that a partial resection of the epileptogenic region may help identify which additional areas are still contributing to seizure onset once the major site of ictal origin has been removed. Favorable seizure control was achieved with no apparent increase in surgical morbidity in 42 3-stage procedures compared with 369 traditional grid protocols [63] and in 18 double procedures compared with 165 routine intracranial procedures. [62]
Documentation of intracranial study
Each intracranial study is unique to the patient for whom it is designed. Even routine intracranial studies have subtle variations in electrode placement based on the patient’s anatomy. Some sort of documentation of the intracranial study is advisable for a number of reasons, including confirmation of the accuracy of placement, communication with the neurophysiology team, and correlation with gyral anatomy or intracranial lesions. Several documentation options, ranging from simple to complicated, are available.
When intracranial strip electrodes are used, the most vital part of the documentation of the study begins in the OR. As each electrode is inserted, the operating surgeon describes the identifying characteristics of that electrode (eg, length, color coding, scalp exit site) and its intracranial position to an assistant, usually an OR nurse, who documents this information directly in the operative record or chart notes so that no confusion is encountered when the electrodes are eventually connected.
Most EEG technologists appreciate a line diagram handwritten by the surgeon in the chart. This simple step can eliminate many potential sources of human error, particularly with extensive intracranial surveys, and facilitates communication between all members of the team.
Another simple way of documenting the operative technique is for the monitoring team to use an anatomic brain diagram and transparencies of the grid montage to create a mockup of the surgery. [64] The image created is compared with fluoroscopic images taken at surgery so that a relatively accurate rendition of the electrode placement is available within minutes on the day of the procedure. These images can be quite helpful in interpreting seizure onset and propagation during EEG monitoring.
In more complicated cases, a member of the monitoring team is present in the OR to take digital photographs of the exposed cortex before and after grid placement. Digital photography helps identify the relationship of a grid to the sylvian fissure and is one of the best methods of documenting the fine anatomy of the brain, including sulcal and arteriolar anatomy that cannot be seen with advanced imaging techniques.
More sophisticated imaging techniques have been developed and are being used with increasing frequency as advanced imaging software becomes more available. Cranial MRI with a head coil can be performed safely in patients with intracranial grids and strip electrodes in place if a few safety considerations are kept in mind.
Most electrode manufacturers endorse platinum electrodes as MRI compatible, although stainless steel electrodes have also been used without apparent patient injury. Because each epilepsy center has different procedures, it is advisable to check the recommendations of the particular electrode manufacturer before obtaining an MRI. In all cases, current loops can theoretically be created within a magnetic field if the electrode tails are allowed to contact one another. Therefore, all electrode tails should be isolated before performing MRI.
Most MRI workstations or software packages allow 3-dimensional reconstruction of images, which are often more useful than traditional MRIs or CT scans. [65, 66, 67] In addition, most frameless stereotactic navigation systems allow for image reconstructions of an MRI that can be merged with preoperative anatomic, functional, or angiographic imaging to create an accurate rendition of the grid in relation to relevant operative anatomy. [33, 67]
Cortical mapping
Often, in addition to defining the location of the epileptogenic cortex, the surgeon must determine its relationship to functional cortex. This requires mapping the cortex underlying an implanted grid electrode. [68, 69] The technique is similar to that employed in acute settings in the OR and requires a testing protocol appropriate to the cortical region being investigated.
Cortical stimulation is performed using commercially available constant-current generators. Cortical mapping is performed by selecting 2 adjacent electrodes (1-cm intervals) because bipolar stimulation provides more precise control of current flow. Bipolar pulses at 50 Hz are used for language, motor, and sensory mapping.
Extraoperative cortical mapping has several advantages over acute intraoperative mapping. Functional mapping may be performed in multiple sessions if necessary. For example, if a seizure that impairs function is generated during mapping, the patient may be allowed to recover for several hours (or days) until proceeding with further mapping. Advanced paradigms may be performed over hours or days that would not be possible in the acute intraoperative setting.
Once mapping is completed, the patient, family, and surgeon have time to discuss the potential risks and benefits of surgery and to make decisions to accept or reject a functional loss that might be associated with surgery.
During brain stimulation, brain mapping is performed by a neuropsychologist or physician, who may test language or motor function. A clinical neurophysiologist reviews the ECoG during stimulation to ensure that any disruption of neurological function is due to the stimulation and not an afterdischarge. Afterdischarge potentials are repetitive spike discharges or electrical seizures directly provoked by electrical stimulation and may limit the ability to map the brain or may lead to a seizure.
The amount of current needed to produce an effect varies from patient to patient and between cortical regions. Enough current should be used to produce a reliable effect without causing afterdischarge. Occasionally, pain can result from current spread to the dura or a nearby cortical vessel. In such cases, a particular contact may not be suitable for mapping.
Surgeons are often encouraged to be present for intracranial extraoperative mapping, particularly early in their careers. Some of the slight variations in mapping technique and interpretation have subtle ramifications for the surgeon and are different from those that a neurologist or neuropsychologist might appreciate. On some occasions, mapped cortical regions vary from what one would expect from classic anatomic studies, particularly in areas of cortical malformations. [70]
On other occasions, mapping different pairs of electrodes in a specific region (eg, motor or language areas) might allow the surgeon to appreciate the orientation of a crucial region relative to the orientation of the grid or to adjacent contacts. Finally, subtle errors in naming or language may be present extraoperatively, when the patient is off AEDs, and these errors may change when the patient is reloaded with AEDs. [71] Such subtleties of extraoperative mapping can be useful to the surgeon if observed personally before a resection.
Implanted grid arrays are excellent tools for identification of the position of sensorimotor cortex through somatosensory evoked potentials (SSEPs). Allison and colleagues have reviewed the rationale and technique, [71, 72, 73, 74] and others have discussed the clinical experience with subdural grids for this purpose. [68, 69, 75, 76, 77]
SSEPs can be used during acute recording in the OR, using subdural strip electrodes to identify primary motor cortex. The strip electrode must be positioned to traverse motor and sensory cortex, and it may have to be repositioned several times during intraoperative recording to optimize the signal. Therefore, if SSEPs are planned during extraoperative monitoring, using a subdural grid to increase the surface coverage by the electrode array is advantageous in order to optimize location of the motor cortex (see images below).
Craniotomy showing intracranial grid in place. Grid lies over left primary motor and sensory cortex, near vertex of skull. Patient is positioned laterally, and face is at right. Intracranial study was performed to document seizure onsets in patient who had previous oligodendroglioma removed. Seizures began just posterior to leg motor cortex, in primary sensory cortex. View Media Gallery
Primary motor cortex is located with use of extraoperative somatosensory evoked potentials and intraoperative cortical stimulation, as well as grid previously described (see above). Penfield instrument in field is positioned over primary motor cortex. View Media Gallery
Sometimes, extraoperative mapping indicates that the ictal onset zone is close to or overlies critical motor or speech areas. On such occasions, using the advantages of awake operative language mapping may be helpful at the time of grid removal and resection of the epileptic focus. Although extraoperative mapping has many advantages, the accuracy of its spatial resolution is limited to 1 cm, namely, the distance between 2 electrode pairs.
On occasion, awake intraoperative mapping helps confirm which electrode is the contact that directly overlies cortical function. This can be particularly important when the 2 electrodes span a sulcus; in such cases, awake mapping may allow the surgeon to determine which gyrus is involved in function and which gyrus is not. [75] In such cases, the epileptic zone may be resected up to the pial margin without disturbing function, as long as the vascular structures within the pia are preserved.
Complications of intracranial monitoring
In published series, infection rates from all types of intracranial electrodes range from 0-12%. The morbidity of the procedure depends on the type of electrode implantation; intracranial strip electrodes have the lowest morbidity, and intracranial grid placement has the highest morbidity. [30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 78, 68, 38, 41, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85]
The most common cause of morbidity in subdural strip placement is infection. One randomized study found a 0.85% rate of infection when preoperative antibiotics were given, compared with a 3% infection rate when no antibiotics were given. [83, 85] No difference in infection rates was noted between patients who received antibiotics for the duration of strip electrode implantation and those who received only a single preoperative dose; therefore, at the authors’ institution, a single dose of antibiotics is given immediately before strip or grid implantation.
Other complications of intracranial strip placement include cortical contusion, cerebral edema, brain abscess, subdural empyema and subdural hemorrhage, placement of electrodes into the brain parenchyma, accidental extraction of electrodes, and superficial wound infection. Many of these complications are minor and cause no long-term problems; permanent neurologic deficits are seen in less than 1% of patients who undergo intracranial strip electrode implantation.
Complications of grid implantation include infection, transient neurologic deficit, hematoma, cerebral edema with increased intracranial pressure, and infarction. Transient neurologic deficits can occur secondary to edema or hematoma associated with the grid. In most cases, if neurologic compromise is evident, the grid should be removed immediately.
Cerebral edema is more likely to occur with an increase in the duration of the monitoring session or with a greater number of intracranial electrodes. [36, 37] Some authors have been concerned that pediatric patients are more likely to develop increased intracranial pressure because, theoretically, less space is available to accommodate the mass of an intracranial grid [86] ; however, others have not found this to be a concern. [36, 87, 46, 88, 89]
Complications from depth electrodes include intraparenchymal hemorrhage, subarachnoid hemorrhage, arterial spasm, and misplacement of the electrode. The rate of permanent neurologic deficit from occipital depth electrode placement has been reported at less than 1%. [90, 91]
The risk of hitting the brainstem or posterior cerebral artery with occipitally inserted depth electrodes may be decreased by (1) targeting tip placement in the lateral amygdala and lateral hippocampus, (2) making sure the occipital burr hole is not too medial, and (3) confirming the trajectory with an image guidance system before electrode placement.
Alternatively, one can attempt to place the depth electrode into the lateral ventricle rather than into the hippocampus. To do so, a rigid guide cannula is placed into the ventricle (verified by identifying CSF flow from the cannula), and the depth electrode is placed into the ventricle. The electrode then lies in the temporal horn adjacent to the hippocampus, with its tip entering the targeted amygdala.
Ictal recording from the ventricle usually conducts signal well, with only occasional failure. [44] The signal obtained amplifies (1) both hippocampal and parahippocampal ictal onsets and (2) intraparenchymal amygdala onset. The risk of subarachnoid hemorrhage may be minimized if depth electrodes are placed under direct visualization through a burr hole rather than using a closed twist-drill technique, which helps avoid draining veins during placement, and by using image-guided stereotaxy and contrast-enhanced MRI to avoid surface veins at the entry point.
Some surgeons prefer orthogonal placement of depth electrodes, which has been facilitated by frameless stereotactic techniques. Several systems allow placement of orthogonal depth electrodes via twist drill or burr holes in the temporal fossa. Stereotaxy is required to avoid vascular injury to vessels of the middle cerebral artery and to gain accurate placement into the amygdala and hippocampus. Electrodes must be secured at the skin to ensure migration of the electrodes does not occur as the medial trajectory of these electrodes is towards the brainstem.
Formulation of Appropriate Surgical Strategy
Surgery may be considered as either definitive or palliative. Definitive surgery carries a significant chance of producing complete, or at least 70-90%, improvement in seizures. The goal of palliative procedures is to decrease seizure frequency, but rarely results in seizure freedom.
In general, definitive surgeries physically remove seizure-producing cortex from the brain. Examples are resections of small seizure-producing tumors, vascular abnormalities, cortical malformations, or lesions such as mesial temporal sclerosis. Palliative surgeries usually disrupt pathways involved in seizure production and propagation or attempt to disrupt seizures with the use of electrical stimulation; thus, the potential for continued seizures always remains.
General approach to epileptogenic lesions
Tumors that cause epilepsy are frequently low-grade astrocytomas, oligodendrogliomas, or gangliogliomas. Commonly, they are well circumscribed, and excellent outcomes can be achieved with a lesionectomy that includes the immediate surrounding abnormal cortex. [92]
However, there is a temptation to rush to surgery, on the assumption that the tumor must be causing the seizures. The more cautious epilepsy surgeon may consider the possibility of alternative diagnoses, such as dual pathology (eg, the presence of hippocampal atrophy and tumor in the same patient), or look for evidence for concomitant cortical dysplasia, depending on the suspected tumor pathology.
The preoperative evaluation in the setting of tumor pathology is to determine that the EEG findings and the tumor are not discordant, which can occur approximately 10-15% of the time. In such cases, the lesion may not be solely responsible for the epilepsy, and a more extensive resection may be required to control the epilepsy.
When the tumor and the lesion are concordant, the most common mistake in treating these tumors is to remove only the gross tumor and not the immediate surrounding tissue, thus leaving epileptogenic tissue in place and resulting in clinical seizure resumption. If seizures continue after tumor removal, it may be assumed that the tumor was not completely removed, regardless of whether MRI suggests a clean resection.
Small vascular abnormalities, such as cavernous hemangiomas surrounded by hemosiderin, can be extremely epileptogenic. Removal of the vascular abnormality and surrounding hemosiderin-stained cortex may be all that is necessary for an excellent seizure outcome in approximately 80% of patients, provided that the preoperative evaluation is concordant. [93]
Large vascular abnormalities (eg, high-flow arteriovenous malformations) are commonly associated with seizures. These abnormalities, unlike the smaller vascular lesions, do not always exhibit a clear relation between the structural lesion and the epileptogenic cortex, and simple lesionectomy often fails to stop the seizures.
Because of the technical difficulties involved, implanting a large grid electrode over these lesions for the purpose of mapping is usually not feasible. Therefore, treatment of such lesions should seldom be approached purely as epilepsy surgery. One successful approach is to stage surgical procedures; the vascular abnormality is removed with the intent of further investigation and possible surgery if seizures remain.
Epileptogenic congenital malformations of cortical development, such as cortical dysplasias, heterotopia, schizencephalic clefts, and the various forms of phakomatoses, are very difficult to treat surgically and usually necessitate more extensive evaluations and tailored resections based on data from implanted grid electrodes. [70] Seizure outcome after resection of such malformations is variable and directly relates to the complexity of the lesion.
Traumatic encephalomalacia is treatable surgically, with varied results. The difficulty with these lesions is that cortical damage may extend much further than the area of obvious anatomic damage or that multiple regions of the brain may be affected simultaneously.
Controversial issues in definitive surgery
With regard to performing an acute ECoG, some surgeons believe that epileptiform discharges recorded during surgery indicate which part of the brain is epileptogenic; therefore, these surgeons use the ECoG to define boundaries for cortical resections. [94] This approach is referred to as a tailored resection, in that no 2 operations are identical. Because anesthetics affect the reliability of acute ECoG recordings and prevent the surgeon from mapping cortical function (eg, language), tailored resections are performed best with the patient under local anesthesia.
Other surgeons believe that an acute interictal ECoG is not reliable enough to determine surgical boundaries and can be inaccurate; these surgeons proceed with a standardized operative approach, wherein tissue important for generating seizures is removed without considering the ECoG for some surgical procedures.
If there is a question that must be answered with ECoG, then the patient receives an intracranial study, long-term monitoring with intracranial electrodes is performed to capture ictal ECoG, and a tailored resection is done on the basis of intracranial ictal recording rather than short-term, less accurate, interictal data.
For AMTR, no scientific data support the belief that ECoG-guided resections produce better results than standard procedures do. A more rational view is that the surgical approach should be suited to the syndrome.
There are specific syndromes for which a standardized operation is very effective. The best example is complex partial seizures of mesial temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis. Such patients have excellent seizure and language outcomes after standard surgical procedures done with general anesthesia. Likewise, excellent results can be expected from the removal of a well-circumscribed capillary hemangioma from a patient with complex partial seizures.
In contrast, patients with epilepsy secondary to other etiologies in other brain regions may need extensive cortical mapping and an ictal ECoG. In such cases, implantation of a large subdural grid electrode for long-term monitoring (with an ECoG) and mapping is preferred because it yields results superior to those obtained by performing an acute interictal ECoG.Narcondam is a small volcanic island located in the Andaman Sea. The island's peak rises to 710 m above mean sea level, and it is formed of andesite. It is part of the Andaman Islands, the main body of which lie approximately 124 km (77 mi) to the west. The island is part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The island is small, covering an area of approximately 6.8 square kilometres.[6] It was classified as a dormant volcano by the Geological Survey of India.
Etymology [ edit ]
The name Narcondam could have been derived from the Tamil word naraka-kundram (நரககுன்றம்),[7] meaning "a pit of Hell," although this may be the result of confusion between it and Barren Island.[8]
History [ edit ]
Until 1986 Burma claimed sovereignty over the island. This claim was given up on reaching agreement with India on the delimitation of the maritime boundary between the two nations in the Andaman Sea, the Coco channel and the Bay of Bengal.[9] [10] There is a lighthouse on the slopes of narcondam, established 1983. [11]
Geography [ edit ]
The island lies 256 km (159 mi) northeast from Port Blair. Further to the south west (approximately 150 km) lies the active volcano island of Barren Island. Narcondam Island is about 160 miles from Burma, and is almost 800 miles from Vishakhapatnam (part of the mainland of India). It belongs to the East Volcano Islands. The island is small, having an area of 7.63 km2 (2.95 sq mi). The island is largely forested. The island is formed from a volcano, which had not known to have been active in recent times, until on 8 June 2005 there were reports of "mud and smoke" being ejected from the volcano. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake is thought to have caused magma to move underground and may be related to the current activity. If the reports were accurate this would alter the scientific status of Narcondam to active. Narcondam Island holds the easternmost point of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Narcondam Mountain [ edit ]
Narcondam Island's volcanic mountain, at 710 meters is the second tallest point in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the first being Saddle Peak, North Andaman Island at 752 meters.
Administration [ edit ]
Narcondam Island belongs to the North and Middle Andaman administrative district,[12] and is part of Diglipur Tal |
the elder Henderson, who was surprised by the news of his son’s supposed accomplishment. Chad, a 21-year-old Georgia resident, was also discovered to be an Obama and OFA volunteer, and even said on his Facebook page that he was paid quarterly “to post political stuff as ‘advocacy,’” which he later said was just a joke. Henderson tried to clarify that by “enroll” he meant that he had submitted an application without actually picking a plan, and blamed the media for not understanding what he meant. Reporters had seized on Henderson’s story because they could not track down anyone else who’d successfully enrolled on the federal exchanges.
3. Shutdown During Off-Peak Weekend Hours
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The Department of Health and Human Services announced on Friday, just four days after its launch, that the federal site would be unavailable during off-peak hours throughout the weekend in order to address several glitches.
4. MSNBC Anchor Can’t Access Obamacare Exchange
On the morning of the exchange’s rollout, MSNBC’s Mara Schiavocampo ran into problems many people across the country were experiencing: online error messages, long wait times, and sitting on hold for extended periods of time when she called for customer support. “If I were signing up for myself, this is where my patience would be exhausted,” she said before she eventually gave up.
5. Arkansas Kick-Off Event Resorts to Paper Applications
Two hundred visitors to the University of Arkansas School of Public Health’s opening event for the state’s federally run health-care exchange were forced to take up pen and paper because the website wasn’t working. “You go through all this training for this, and then you can’t put it in action, so it’s frustrating,” one Obamacare “navigator” told the state’s Southwest Times Record.
6. Woman Who Stood Behind Obama on Marketplace Rollout Date: Website “Not So Great”
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Jean Beigel, one of the handful of people selected to flank President Obama during his remarks about the exchanges on their October 1 launch date, told the Washington Post she had given up on trying to sign up for coverage for the moment, after two failed attempts, because of the website’s slow loading time. She described the process as “a little confusing” and “not so great.”
7. California Overstates Web Traffic to Site
Covered California trumpeted evidence of the site’s popularity, or at least what it thought was evidence of popularity. State officials said Day One had seen 5 million hits to the site, before having to walk back the number to a much lower 645,000. A spokesperson said “someone misspoke” in the initial announcement.
#page#8. California Forced to Take Down Exchange Website
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Even with the lackluster Web traffic on its first day, Covered California shut down its website overnight in order to address a series of technical problems. The website eventually came back online the next morning.
#ad#9. Less Than 1 Percent of Visitors Apply in Connecticut
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Connecticut Democratic congressman Jim Himes heralded the 167 applicants on the first day for Access Health CT, the state-run exchange. That’s 0.6 percent of the site’s 28,000 total visitors on the first day. After Day Two, Himes boasted about 0.4 percent of the site’s 80,000 visitors having applied.
10. CNN Unable to Get Through Website
On Tuesday afternoon, CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen highlighted the website’s sluggishness. Not only did the news network have trouble reaching the Georgia exchange in its Atlanta office, but Cohen said bureaus in twelve other states also hit a wall. “My iOS7 works,” Cohen said in response to President Obama’s comparison of the website’s glitches to those of Apple’s operating system. “This, I couldn’t even sign up.”
11. No Enrollments in Delaware After Three Days
“If anyone in Delaware has enrolled in an Obamacare health insurance plan yet, it’s news to state officials,” read the lead of the state’s News Journal three days into the enrollment period. The article goes on to explain that Delaware insurance providers are working to put together paper packets of various plans and scenarios for interested applicants until the website is running properly.
12. No Plans for Sale Yet in Hawaii
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KHON-TV in Honolulu noticed “things weren’t what they expected” for Hawaiians when the state’s online marketplace didn’t actually offer specific plans for purchase on the first day. The marketing chief for the state-run exchange informed the station that specific plans “will not come out to the public until it is ready.” Residents can still submit applications, but will have to wait to see rates and options until after the state puts on the finishing touches.
13. Kansas Obamacare Sign-Ups at Zero
According to Republican representative Tim Huelskamp, no insurance provider in HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s home state of Kansas has been able to a report an instance of successfully signing up for Obamacare since the state’s federally run marketplace launched last week.
14. Kentucky Marketplace Customers Have No “Expectation of Privacy”
Kentucky’s state-run Obamacare marketplace issued a disclaimer that users should have “no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy” in the beginning stages of the sign-up process. The site warns that “any or all uses of this system and all files on the system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized state government and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.” After the Washington Free Beacon contacted the site, a spokesperson claimed that the disclaimer was a “mistake” and is intended to warn those trying to access information inappropriately or use the website for criminal actions.
15. McAfee: Obamacare Is “a Hacker’s Wet Dream”
McAfee, Inc., founder John McAfee slammed Obamacare’s lack of security precautions and predicted “millions” of identity thefts because of it. “This is a hacker’s wet dream — I cannot believe that they did this,” McAfee said on the Fox Business Network.
#page#16. Insurance Broker Compares Obamacare Exchanges to the DMV, IRS
After a tumultuous first day for the marketplace rollout, the CEO of Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America told Fox News that many agents have been suggesting clients delay enrolling in the exchanges. Brokers and agents aren’t pleased with the system, he said, and have privately told him that “if you like dealing with the DMW and IRS, you’ll love dealing with Obamacare.”
#ad#17. Zero Enroll in Blue Cross Plans on Obamacare’s First Day
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana, the state’s largest health-insurance provider, said that not a single person enrolled on the first day in one of the health plans the company offers through the Affordable Care Act. An executive blamed problems with the federal website; the company says it spent $60 million to prepare for the rollout date.
18. Fewer than 100 Enroll in Maryland
In Maryland, where Obama spoke of the law’s benefits just days before the state’s exchange went live, fewer than 100 residents enrolled in a new plan on its second day. Maryland officials estimated that 150,000 people would enroll in the exchange’s first year, and had invested a significant amount of resources in what was supposed to be one of the better state exchanges.
19. Minnesota Delays Launch Hours Before Midnight
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MNsure, the state’s online marketplace, announced just hours before the website was supposed to go live that it would be delaying the rollout until later on Tuesday afternoon. The delay came a couple of weeks after a MNsure security breach that released the Social Security numbers and other sensitive information of 2,400 insurance agents in the state who were applying to be “navigators” for the law.
20. Connecticut Enrollment-Center Opening Postponed for Weeks
Connecticut saw more than just digital issues: WVIT in New Britain, Conn., found that Access Health CT’s enrollment center in the town wasn’t ready in time. Construction pushed back the center’s opening by a few weeks.
21. Montana Residents Frustrated by Site
Longtime Montana senator and Obamacare architect Max Baucus made headlines earlier this year when he warned of the “train wreck” the health-care law’s implementation was shaping up to be, and now his state’s residents are feeling a part of it. Users couldn’t get past the first step on the website, the Missoulian reports, and were told to “please wait.”
22. Nevada Holds Back on Ad Campaign to Limit Site Visitors
Aware of glitches ahead of the October 1 start date, Nevada officials postponed advertising its marketplace website in order to limit the number of people visiting the website while they worked to fix the errors.
#page#23. New Jersey Site Seems to Work but Fails to Create Accounts
News 12 New Jersey reports that even after one manages to get through the different stages of creating an account on the tortured federal website, it is all for naught. “Even when that hurdle was cleared, the site never created an account, instead posting messages to try again later,” the TV station said.
#ad#24. New Yorkers Told to Wait Until November to Visit Site
Three days into the Empire State exchange’s launch, users are still struggling to get onto the site. A health-insurance broker told Rochester’s WHEC-TV that residents should just wait until next month before trying to enroll for a new plan on the site, saying the glitches will likely be resolved by then.
25. North Carolina Gets One Enrollee
Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina says it was able to enroll only one person in a new plan created under the law, toward the end of its second day, according to the Wall Street Journal. A spokesperson told the Charlotte Business Journal on Friday, October 4, that that number “was no longer accurate,” but declined to present a more up-to-date number.
26. Tennessee Station Can’t Find Anyone Who Signed Up
Nashville’s WSMV announced that, after two days, it was unable to find a Tennessean who was able to sign up for a new plan on the federal-exchange website.
27. Oregon Enrollment Site Can’t Inform People of Tax Credits
While Cover Oregon’s site is technically up and running, Oregonians won’t be able to finish the process of enrolling until later this month due to a bug in the state’s system: The site was incorrectly calculating tax-credit eligibility for residents. On the eve of its launch, officials decided that users will not be able to enroll in coverage until the issue is resolved, but can still explore their (incorrectly priced) options in the meantime.
28. California Fails to Sell One Plan
Not a single applicant was able to enroll in Covered California, the state’s health-care exchange, on the first day “because the people behind the scenes are not trained yet to sell anything.” That’s a bit lower that what Covered California’s executive director projected to the Washington Post a week before the launch, when he jokingly lowballed that they’d get two enrollees.
29. Almost Nobody Able to Pull Up Website at Michigan Event
The Detroit Free Press reports that after dozens “filled waiting rooms” at a Dearborn, Mich., community organization to learn about the law, “nearly every attempt to pull up the website resulted in error messages” on the marketplace website’s first day. The organization director said he would call the unsuccessful users once the website eventually works.
30. Washington Site Offline for Six Hours
A spokesperson for Washington State’s exchange said that the site’s six-hour hiatus on the first day wasn’t due to high traffic: the site simply wasn’t ready. From about 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on October 1, Washington Healthplanfinder was taken down for maintenance after experiencing slow loading times and issues with the application process.
— Andrew Johnson is an editorial associate at National Review Online.The burial of the victims of the plague in Tournai. Fragment of a miniature from "The Chronicles of Gilles Li Muisis" (1272-1352), abbot of the monastery of St. Martin of the Righteous. Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 13076-77, f. 24v.
Black Death spreading across Europe 1347-1353
The Black Death was an outbreak of disease that killed millions of people across Europe and Asia. Almost one out of every three people in Europe died from the disease,[1] and was at its worst between 1347 and 1351. The disease may have started in Asia. Most people think that the disease was the bubonic plague. This disease is carried and spread by fleas living on rats. Traders from the Silk Road may have brought the infected fleas to Europe.
Fleas started the problem; the infected fleas were carried by black rats. Rats that were carrying the fleas would go into cities. When the fleas bit somebody, they would inject a little bit of the bacteria into the wound. This would cause the person to be infected. Rats were often on ships. This meant the disease spread extremely quickly, all over Europe.
In humans, the disease caused swelling in the groin, under the arms and behind the ears. These swellings were a black and purple colour, hence the name 'The Black Death'. The dark swellings were called buboes. People were in pain and victims died a horrible death. The symptoms could be seen 3–7 days after victims were bitten by a flea carrying the disease.
The disease killed around a third of Europe's population, with variation between areas. It killed at least 75 million people across Europe, the Middle East, India, and China.
The same disease is thought to have returned to Europe every generation with different degrees of intensity and fatality until the 1700s. Later outbreaks include the Italian Plague of 1629-1631, the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), the Great Plague of Vienna (1679), the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720–1722 and the 1771 plague in Moscow. In its virulent form it seems to have disappeared from Europe in the 18th century.
There is some controversy over the identity of the disease. Anthrax and Viral hemorrhagic fevers are other ideas for what specific disease the Black Death might have been.
The Black Death had a very big effect on Europe's population. It changed Europe's social structure. It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, Muslims, foreigners, beggars and lepers. The uncertainty of daily survival influenced people to live for the moment, as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron (1353).
The initial fourteenth-century European event was called the "Great Mortality" by contemporary writers and, with later outbreaks, became known as the 'Black Death'.
The Black Death has been used as a subject or as a setting in modern literature and media. Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Masque of the Red Death (1842) is set in an unnamed country during a fictional plague that bears strong resemblance to the Black Death.
Albert Camus uses this theme too. His novel, The Plague (1947) is set against an outbreak of the plague in Algeria and how people handle it.
„Doktor of Rome“ Artwork of Paulus Fürst 1656. With such clothing doctors in Rome wanted to protect themselves from getting the Black Death (in Rome, 1656).
Medical aspects [ change | change source ]
Sufferers of the bubonic plague develop fevers, severe flu symptoms and buboes that could swell to the size of an average apple. These buboes appear mainly in the groin, armpit and apparently sometimes on the thighs. The buboes were not only large but also were filled with pus and turned a purple color.
The medical knowledge of the time was based on Hippocrates' theory of humorism. This said the body consists of different fluids. If they are in harmony, the person is healthy. If they are not, disease results. Very often, diseases were also seen as a punishment of God.
Such a theory can of course not account for the spreading of a disease from one person to another one. Infection was said to occur from bad winds (called Miasma). The bad air could also come from within the earth, and thereby cause the disease. Remedies against the disease included to only open windows towards the north, to not sleep during the day, and not to work too hard.
The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris concluded that the Black Death was caused by a bad conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars on 20 March, 1345. They had been asked by Philipp VI about the cause of the disease in 1348. Since the answer was scientifically founded, it was soon taken to be the real cause, and translated into many languages.
Therefore, the doctors often limited their actions to telling people to go to Confession, so that their sins would be forgiven if they died. In the long run, the pandemics caused the doctors to change their ideas on how the human body worked, to get away from the theories of Hyppocrates and Galenos, more towards empirical science. Only 200 years later did Girolamo Fracastoro discover that diseases spread through infection.
Related pages [ change | change source ]
Other websites [ change | change source ]
Primary sources online [ change | change source ]The landlords of a Willowdale rooming house where a 47-year-old woman died in a fire last November pleaded guilty in provincial offences court to Ontario Fire Code violations at three Toronto properties. The deadly blaze, which occurred at 177 Elmhurst Ave., was ruled an accident by the Ontario Fire Marshall. An investigation into the death led to charges against landlords Thevathurai and Balatharshini Akilan, and AKS Rental Management Inc. for “Fire Code violations related to smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, fire separations, the absence of a fire alarm system, and insufficient exiting, fire extinguishers, fire rated doors and exit signage.”
Landlords have pleaded guilty to Fire Code infractions at 177 Elmhurst Ave. in Willowdale where a woman died after a fire last fall, and two other properties. ( Google Street View )
Thevathurai Akilan received a fine of $22,500 plus a 25-per-cent victim fine surcharge and court costs for the offences at 177 Elmhurst Ave. AKS Rental Management was fined $12,500 for additional infractions found at 45 Irvington Ave., and the landlords also pleaded guilty to offences at 57 Farmcrest Dr. The maximum penalty a corporation can be assigned for each Fire Code violation is $100,000, while individuals can face jail time as well as fines for some serious violations. In an interview with the Star Thursday, Deputy fire Chief Jim Jessop called unlicensed and illegal rooming houses “a great source of frustration” for Toronto Fire Services.
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“They are absolutely the source of our most frequent and serious injury and fatal fire within the city both historically and recently,” Jessop said. “We know anecdotally that there are thousands of these buildings within the city of Toronto... Without a complaint or referral we just don’t know where they all are. “If we know where they were, we would certainly try to initiate a proactive inspection program,” Jessop said. Local rules prohibit rooming houses in North York, East York and Scarborough, whereas they are permitted in York, and regulated and licensed in the old city of Toronto and Etobicoke. Willowdale Councillor John Filion told the Star in May that illegal rooming houses were a problem in his ward and that he suspected a majority of basement apartments in the area violated the fire code. One of the 177 Elmhurst Ave. landlords, who identified himself as the owner of AKS Rental Management and only gave the name “Akilan,” called the tenant’s death an “unfortunate incident” and said the Fire Code infractions at his property did not cause the death.
Akilan said he was “blind sighted” when he discovered his property violated the Fire Code, and blamed the infractions on the age of the property, which he said was 70-years-old. He said the city should play a more active role in licensing and inspecting rental properties to make sure they meet standards. “Ninety-nine per cent of the places you’ll find at least one mistake,” he said. “When I ran into problems only I got impacted, none of them (at the city) got impacted. I’m a middle-class man, I’m trying to survive. What would I do?”
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Jessop said the Ontario Fire Code is clear that the owner is responsible for compliance. “Landlords should be responsible enough to understand that they have legal obligations for the safety and security of these tenants,” Jessop said. With files from David RiderPhoto: Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images
At an industrial exhibition to promote atomic energy in West Berlin in 1954, the U.S. government demonstrated an inflatable polyethylene suit, designed to shield workers in nuclear power plants from radiation. If it looks as though the suit also rendered the wearer invisible, that’s because there was nobody inside the suit when this photo was taken.
Photo: Getty Images Power Suit: Engineer Homer Moulthorp demonstrates one of the inflatable polyethylene suits he invented to protect workers at nuclear power plants.
The suit’s inventor, Homer Moulthorp, patented this “method of conducting a person between a safe region and a dangerous region.” [pdf] Workers at a General Electric plutonium-processing plant in Richland, Wash., used the suit, but they still had to don a gas mask, gloves, and other protective wear while inside the inflated enclosure. To get into and out of the suit, they’d enter from a noncontaminated area and crawl through a tunnel that connected to the back.
Can a translucent plastic suit actually shield you from radiation? In fact, polyethylene offers more protection against radiation than, say, a comparable layer of aluminum. The main drawback is that it’s flammable, and at the thickness that would allow you to wear it, it can tear.
The grid of circles in the photo’s background, by the way, appears to be a mockup of the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor. It’s unclear why the U.S. Information Agency, which organized the Berlin exhibit, would have been promoting that particular reactor type, seeing as how the BGRR was designed to generate neutrons for scientific research, not electricity. In any event, when West Germany began constructing its first reactor four years later, it opted for a boiling water reactor.
This article appears in the June 2016 print issue as “Does This Make Me Look Fat?”
Part of a continuing series looking at old photographs that embrace the boundless potential of technology, with unintentionally hilarious effect.Looking for news you can trust?
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On Monday, Israeli warplanes fired 182 missiles into Gaza, Israeli ships launched 146 shells into the territory, and Israeli tanks shot 721 shells, with all these attacks striking 66 structures and killing 107 Palestinians (including 35 children), while Hamas launched 101 rockets toward Israel, and 13 Israeli soldiers were killed. That day, the State Department announced that the United States would be providing $47 million “to help address the humanitarian situation in Gaza.” A third of these funds would go to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which is providing food, water, and shelter to tens of thousands of war-affected Palestinians in Gaza. So once again, US taxpayers are in an absurd place: They are partly paying for the Israeli military action in Gaza and funding the cleanup.
Each year, the United States gives Israel about $3.1 billion in military assistance, a commitment that stems from the 1978 Camp David accord that led to peace between Israel and Egypt. Those billions are roughly divided into two funding streams. About $800 million underwrites Israeli manufacturing of weaponry and military products. The rest finances what is essentially a gift card that the Israeli military uses to procure arms and military equipment from US military contractors. It can be safely assumed, says a US expert on aid to Israel, that all units of the Israel Defense Forces benefit from US assistance—and this obviously includes those units fighting in Gaza. So to a certain degree, the destruction in Gaza does have a made-in-the-USA stamp.
But at the same time, the US government is financing efforts to deal with the awful consequences of Israeli attacks. The UNWRA noted in a July 21 situation report that it is operating 67 shelters that are harboring more than 84,000 Palestinians. It is distributing food (in one day, nearly 55,000 tins of tuna and 16,000 loaves of bread), water, baby hygiene kits, blankets, and mattresses to these shelters. It is removing solid waste. It is running up to 21 health clinics, as security permits. The report notes that UNWRA’s shelters are overwhelmed with huge numbers of displaced Palestinians, adding: “The continuing conflict is having an impact on delivery of basic services. Despite a strong commitment from UNRWA sanitation staff, the Agency is struggling to maintain solid waste management operations in the context of ongoing escalations in violence and high numbers of [displaced persons] in shelters. This presents a potential serious public health risk.” The report also says the UNRWA is trying to educate children to leave unexploded ordnance alone.
The UNRWA, not surprisingly, reflects the policy perspective of the UN and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Its website notes that Ban recently called the killing of civilians in Gaza an “atrocious action.” The site also describes the current crisis this way: “This is the third war in five and a half years endured by the people of Gaza. As with previous conflicts, there is nowhere for women, men, and children to escape to. The strip is densely populated and the seven-year Israeli-imposed blockade means that people’s movement to and from Gaza remains virtually banned.” Last week, the UNRWA condemned unidentified parties that had placed 20 rockets in one of its facilities, a vacant school.
According to the UNRWA, 75 of its facilities in Gaza, including schools and warehouses, have been damaged in the fighting. Presumably, some of the $15 million being sent to the agency by the United States—which covers a quarter of an emergency appeal for $60 million issued by the UNRWA—will be used to repair or replace UNRWA installations destroyed by the US-funded Israeli military.
The new package of US assistance includes $3.5 million in funding for Mercy Corps, Catholic Relief Services, and other nongovernmental organizations. According to the State Department, Mercy Corps will use some of this money to supply non-food items to displaced Palestinians and extend a short-term employment program for 3,000 people in Gaza and a “psycho-social support program” assisting about 2000 families. Catholic Relief Services will provide medical supplies and fuel for medical facilities.
The United States, according to the State Department, is UNRWA’s largest donor, and has provided over $265 million to the agency this year to help Palestinian refugees in Gaza and other regions of the Middle East, including $9 million for the construction of new schools and distribution centers in Gaza. A US taxpayer might wonder if in recent days any of those schools—or students attending them—have been struck by an Israeli missile subsidized by the United States.A five-way panel on CNN Newsroom descended into chaos Sunday after one of Donald Trump‘s supporters stared down a #NeverTrump political consultant before the two went to town on each other.
Boris Epshteyn was in the midst of defending Trump’s off-the-cuff speaking style when he was asked about whether the mogul should finally apologize to John McCain now that he says he will vote for him. McCain said earlier in the day that Trump still needs to make amends for saying that POWs are not war heroes, but even after being prodded by Ben Ferguson and Pamela Brown, Epshteyn opined that an apology was not necessary.
Communications strategist and #NeverTrumper Liz Mair then entered the fray by saying that Epshteyn’s argument was a “bogus” defense of Trump’s intentional media manipulation, and from there…things dissolved pretty fast.
Mair: “He is calculated in what he says, and the whole idea of what he said was totally off the cuff is nonsense.” Epshteyn: “You know that how?” Mair: “I watched Trump and examined his behavior over many years.” Epshteyn: “You have never met the person, right?” Mair: “Have you?” Epshteyn: “Yes.” Mair: “Then you are being duped, dude.”
Brown and Stephen Collinson tried to rein the conversation back in by looking at whether Trump can win after expressing disinterest in unifying the GOP. Unfortunately for them, their efforts were thwarted when Mair and Epshteyn went at it again after Mair pointed out the current voter projection numbers suggest that Trump is “toast.”
Epshteyn hit Mair for suggesting that establishment Republicans get behind a third-party alternative, while she fired back that he is ignoring facts while his candidate flies in the face of conservative values.
[Image via screengrab]
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I bet you want to have that in your life
I bet you want to have that in your life
So what was the hold up? Well we wanted our guys to win a bunch of stuff first so you get used to seeing the new jersey next to glass trophies and big plastic checks but more importantly, as Nazgul said many times, we are in negotiations with new team sponsors, so we were not sure if the logos we got printed now are not going to get outdated fast, much to the customers disappointment.
This is a problem we will have a hard time dealing with as there are always talks with new sponsors and we have to react quite fast with small changes in the design, like for example changing one of the logos on the shoulders. Therefore, in order to have a stable product that fans will appreciate for its design, quality and not getting outdated every couple of months, we decided to remove the shoulder logos from the retail version of the shirt. The logo of the main sponsor, Shinythings will stay. We are going to do the uniforms for our players Kespa style where we add all sponsors with patches, its just the most flexible solution for us as well..
Having said that, today I triggered a chain of events that cant be stopped. History gave me a lesson not to promise release dates but we just ordered a bunch of shirts for both our EU and US stores. Normally the turn around time of our partners is 2-3 weeks so you can expect the shirts soon. Like for real soon not soon(tm). For now I cannot give you any details on pricing, but either way its not going to cost a leg. We will have all sizes from S to 2XL available in both stores. We are also considering some special offers in small runs with names on the backs and all patches included for the diehard fans but initially the only version available will be the standard retail version.
Its been a while since we had the team jersey on sale, but Im sure the wait was worth it.
Its been a couple of busy months for the TL store. Next week we are going to share something amazing with you guys, but in the meantime I wanted to update you on the production of our now not-so-new-anymore jersey.So what was the hold up? Well we wanted our guys to win a bunch of stuff first so you get used to seeing the new jersey next to glass trophies and big plastic checks but more importantly, as Nazgul said many times, we are in negotiations with new team sponsors, so we were not sure if the logos we got printed now are not going to get outdated fast, much to the customers disappointment.This is a problem we will have a hard time dealing with as there are always talks with new sponsors and we have to react quite fast with small changes in the design, like for example changing one of the logos on the shoulders. Therefore, in order to have a stable product that fans will appreciate for its design, quality and not getting outdated every couple of months, we decided to remove the shoulder logos from the retail version of the shirt. The logo of the main sponsor, Shinythings will stay. We are going to do the uniforms for our players Kespa style where we add all sponsors with patches, its just the most flexible solution for us as well..Having said that, today I triggered a chain of events that cant be stopped. History gave me a lesson not to promise release dates but we just ordered a bunch of shirts. Normally the turn around time of our partners is 2-3 weeks so you can expect the shirts soon. Like for real soon not soon(tm). For now I cannot give you any details on pricing, but either way its not going to cost a leg. We will have all sizes from S to 2XL available in both stores. We are also considering some special offers in small runs with names on the backs and all patches included for the diehard fans but initially the only version available will be the standard retail version.Its been a while since we had the team jersey on sale, but Im sure the wait was worth it. Administrator "I'm a big deal." - ixmike88Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components, today announced the Obsidian Series 350D High Performance Micro ATX PC case. Available with a solid or windowed side panel, the Obsidian Series 350D brings unprecedented expansion and cooling options to smaller, more portable, high-performance PCs.Like larger cases in the premium Obsidian Series line, the Obsidian Series 350D sports a clean, black, brushed-aluminum styling. The case is also designed for fast and neat builds with tool-free access and drive installation as well as an innovative cable routing system. The Obsidian Series 350D case supports both Micro ATX and mini ITX motherboards and has plenty of interior space for liquid CPU cooling, dual 3.5" hard drives, dual 2.5" SSDs, dual 5.25" drives, and dual full-length graphics cards. It also has five expansion slots and five fan mounting points with room for two 240mm radiators. The front panel provides convenient access to USB 3.0 and audio connectors."The Obsidian 350D's versatile expansion options give builders the ability to pack a lot of performance into a smaller form factor," said Thi La, Senior VP & GM of Memory and Enthusiast Component Products at Corsair. "Its stylish, compact design makes it a perfect high-performance PC case for smaller living spaces or for gaming LAN parties."The Obsidian Series 350D will be available in May from Corsair's worldwide network of authorized retailers and distributors. The suggested retail price in the US is $99.99 USD for the solid side panel version and $109.99 for the windowed version. The cases are backed by a 2-year warranty.For more information, visit the product page
30 Comments on Corsair Obsidian 350D Premium Micro-ATX Chassis Launched
1 to 25 of 30 Go to Page 12 PreviousNext
#1 TheLostSwede
Looks like it's got space for three 2.5in drives to me... Posted on Apr 25th 2013, 11:21 Reply
#2 blibba
TheLostSwede said: Looks like it's got space for three 2.5in drives to me... Yeah...
Nice case, though. I'd prefer those top vents with a "moduvent" style thing. Yeah...Nice case, though. I'd prefer those top vents with a "moduvent" style thing. Posted on Apr 25th 2013, 11:38 Reply
#3 happita
Nice. Looks similar to other obsidians and stay's true to it's functional design in a small form factor. Me likey! If this has fan filters on all intakes as usual, it's a winner. Posted on Apr 25th 2013, 11:39 Reply
#4 Ipatinga
Finally
Thank god :respect:... Corsair finally listened my requests... from the pictures, this Micro ATX case looks awesome...
I personally loved the front panel and how the connections (audio and USB) are on the top. :D
I LIKE the window version (with a window that looks more like the 800D and less like the crap that is the 650D and without the damn fan holes like the 300R). :cool:
I LOVED the fact that there is SPACE behind the motherboard tray... now I can pass a lot of cables without much problem. :rockout:
To be perfect... i hope that the audio cable from the front panel to the motherboard is long enough so I can hide it... as well as the USB 3.0 cable.
Only thing I did not liked a lot is the top grill.... I like more the way the 900D has the top grill... but this is not a problem.
Please Corsair... make a Mini ITX now (or maybe a 652D... with the 350D window and front panel style, 900D top grill). :pimp: Posted on Apr 25th 2013, 11:49 Reply
#5 sanadanosa
the only thing wrong with this case is the position of rear fan. Instead of placing it at rear most of the case, they place it same level with the i/o shield (just like my 300R), which is annoying if you want to install a thick push-pull radiator like h80. especially when you have a motherboard with big vrm heatsink Posted on Apr 25th 2013, 12:12 Reply
#6 adulaamin
I like the non-windowed version. The only thing I don't like is it seems doing a push/pull config for the top or the rear is gonna be impossible. The fans are gonna hit the sinks on the board or the RAM unless the pull fans are gonna be on the outside. :)
EDIT: oops... sanadanosa beat me to it.. :) Posted on Apr 25th 2013, 12:22 Reply
#7 sanadanosa
adulaamin said: I like the non-windowed version. The only thing I don't like is it seems doing a push/pull config for the top or the rear is gonna be impossible. The fans are gonna hit the sinks on the board or the RAM unless the pull fans are gonna be on the outside. :)
EDIT: oops... sanadanosa beat me to it.. :) it's likely you're going to have issue with optical drive if you want to do top push-pull with this case (if you still use them :laugh:). it's likely you're going to have issue with optical drive if you want to do top push-pull with this case (if you still use them |
? Do you still want to hire them?
If the work day is a success, then you’re ready for the final stage.
How to Hire the Ideal Candidate
Okay, so you’ve attracted an ideal tester and you now know: a) they can do the work and b) they’re a fit for your organisation. It’s time to seal the deal. How are you going to make sure that your tester actually makes it through your door, and not one of the other opportunities that they may have available to them? What are you going to offer them that makes your opportunity stand out among all of the other roles that are available to the brightest, best, most high-flying testers out there?
It’s probably not about the money, right? Maybe you have some flexibility with how much you’ll remunerate the right person. But there’s a cap. Once you’ve reached it, there’s no more wiggle room. And let’s get this straight. Beyond a certain amount of money, folk aren’t motivated to work harder or perform better anyway. So we need to think a bit more creatively. What else can your organisation offer that may be attractive to a certain kind of hire?
Flexible working hours?
Remote working?
Unlimited holiday?
Training and personal development?
Coaching?
The latest most powerful hardware?
A free lunch?
Time off work to attend conferences?
At this point, it’s not even necessarily about what you can or can’t offer. You just need to be willing to have a conversation about it. Find out what it is that drives and motivates your new hire. Once you know what it is that will get them through the door, if you can, give it to them.
Work with them. Figure out how to bridge the gap between what they want and what you can offer. Attracting the right people is hard enough. Don’t let them get away once you’ve found someone that you definitely want.
Curing the recruitment headache
At the beginning of this article, my fictional test manager had quite the recruitment headache. She could have just outsourced the entire process, but I’ve recommended the following course of alternative therapies:
Identifying the specific characteristics, attributes and skills a tester needs to have in her organisation.
Engaging with the testing community in order to find awesome testers that have the abilities and personality she’s looking for.
Striking up a relationship with the tester directly.
Screening potential candidates with an initial telephone call.
Testing candidates with a work simulation.
Sticking to a script during the entire process – making it more rigorous and scientific.
Inviting the candidate to a work day – soliciting feedback from both them and the team.
Negotiating on working practices rather than money during the offer stage.
I hope you’ve found some of this advice useful, but maybe you have some of your own approaches to recruitment that have worked for you instead. If so, we’d love to hear about them in the comments section below.
PS: Have you found this article useful? We will have more relevant testing & QA related articles soon on topics such as building a great testing team, improving your testing career, leveling up your testing skills, improving your team’s test management and testing efforts. Make sure to subscribe below via email and follow-us on Twitter!
CommentsWhen you’re working a low-wage job, life is about choices.
Lyne Giard works as a cleaner in a water purification plant in Ottawa. She is a shop steward for her union, SEIU Local 2, and because she makes $13.50 an hour, she says she is one of the lucky ones.
"Cleaning has always been a lower paid job, and people work very hard, physically," said Giard. "You work hard all day and in order to make things happen financially, most people have to work two jobs or even three jobs. Emotionally, physically it’s overwhelming."
"If you work two or three jobs you aren’t home for your kids, and you end up giving less to your family."
A lot of other federally contracted cleaners work for minimum wage, which in Ontario is currently $11 an hour. And like Giard, they make sacrifices.
"There’s lots of struggling, juggling bills, you pay one bill one month and not the other," said Giard, "You cut down on activities, you make different choices at the grocery store, lots of pasta and rice. My daughter used to go to martial art class, but I can’t afford that on my salary."
After working 14 hours a day for a year, Giard can confirm that life is not easy when you’re bumping along the poverty line, which is why, on Saturday June 20th, Giard will be the first on the speakers list for the official launch of the Invisible No More campaign at Ottawa’s city hall.
Initiated by SEIU Local 2, in collaboration with ACORN Canada, the campaign will draw attention to the struggle and mistreatment of both unionized and non-unionized janitors and cleaning staff.
Approximately 3,000 people are employed as janitors, maintenance workers, and cleaners in Ottawa, the majority of them are women and recent immigrants. While most of these workers clean federal government buildings they are employed indirectly through private companies who bid for government cleaning contracts.
Since workers are employed indirectly through contract cleaning firms, these are the employers that SEIU bargains with. Roughly 13 cleaning companies will participate in a bargaining process that will ultimately produce a ‘master contract’ for all unionized cleaners.
Negotiations have recently begun but SEIU organizer Diego Mendez says that conditions will not improve in the sector unless changes are made by the federal government, who indirectly hires the cleaners.
"We can’t bargain with the federal government, we can only bargain with the employers, and those are the cleaning companies,"Mendez explained, "So we know that we need to move the property owners, and in this case the biggest single property owner is the government in Ottawa, and so we need a campaign to do that because we can’t bargain with them directly."
While contracting out helps the government cut down on costs, it creates dismal working conditions for the workers hired under those contracts.
The Janitorial Services National Strategy, which outlines the government’s current subcontracting policy, stipulates that contracts should be awarded to the lowest-price qualified bidders. This practice puts an incentive on contractors to keep labour costs as low as possible, creating downward pressure on workplace standards and wages.
Currently, the government policy does not exclude labour law violators from winning contracts, and contractors have found creative ways of getting around the Employment Standards Act, such as hiring workers as independent'subcontractors,' which exempts them from health and safety coverage, employment insurance, Canada Pension Plan contributions, and often even minimum wage.
The SEIU says that the government could dramatically improve working conditions by adopting a living wage policy which would make $15 an hour plus medical benefits the standard for government contractors and including responsible contracting clauses that would force the government to take into account the wages and treatment of workers when awarded cleaning contracts.
The NDP has promised to adopt these amendments if voted into government in the upcoming election. Liberal party did not return calls before this article was published.
While the SEIU is hoping to win living wages and benefits for workers in their current round of contract negotiations, Mendez says that changing the government policy would broaden the scope of these improvements.
"This kind of policy would help our members but also cleaners who may not be our members, as well as other workers in federal buildings that are contracted - so maybe security or food service workers - who are not our members," said Mendez. "Why not create a campaign that is going to help a larger sector of the workforce?"
"Often groups that are opposed to living wages will say that it’s a burden on taxpayers," said Mendez. "Studies show that that’s not true. You start paying a living wage, you get more productive workers and you save money that way. You don’t actually spend a lot of extra money."
"$15 dollars an hour would definitely relieve pressure for these families," said Giard. "When you work with a minimum wage salary, it’s a vicious cycle; in order to live better you have to work more, and if you work more you can’t take courses at school to improve your education and get a better job. By keeping employees at such a low salary, it keeps them from having a better life."
"If most people knew the level of physical work and financial struggle that everybody was going through, people would be a lot more concerned," said Girard. "We are not ghosts."
Hence the campaign’s slogan: invisible no more.
Ella Bedard is rabble.ca's labour intern and an associate editor at GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine. She has written about labour issues for Dominion.ca and the Halifax Media Co-op and is the co-producer of the radio documentary The Amelie: Canadian Refugee Policy and the Story of the 1987 Boat People.Did you know that the fish and seafood industry is the second largest traded commodity on earth? Did you know that this industry apparently accounted for $158bn in 2015 (according to some reports)? Did you know that this industry has a lot of (technical) challenges when it comes to complying with regulations and laws, battling fraud and fish laundering? Have you heard of the company Earth Twine that wants to drive technical growth in this industry with their framework and help solve many of these challenges? Did you know that Earth Twine recognized that blockchain technology is a key link in their software portfolio and they also recognized they don't have the knowledge in-house to implement it themselves in an efficient and timely manner?
Stratis to the rescue
If you're a BAAS (Blockchain As A Service) company like Stratis the information above would have surely had them put a lot on the table in order to partner with Earth Twine. Earth Twine is a company that is pioneering in the fish and seafood industry just as Stratis is pioneering with blockchain. Both of these companies actually needed each other and they happened to find each other.
Yesterday Stratis released a press release which states that they have a partnership with Earth Twine and that together they will create the world's first seafood dedicated blockchain which will target all stakeholders in the entire supply chain. This is a major accomplishment targeting a huge industry. If Stratis and Earth Twine succeed both of these companies will profit immensely from it, no doubt. Their Director of Operations (@PolyCoins on Twitter) calls it one of their flagship projects.
Stratis is one of the best cryptos for holders
If you've been following me you might have seen several posts where I wrote about Stratis being architecturally and therefor technically better than Ethereum. I believe Stratis will succeed as a BAAS company but this of course takes time. They're not even fully developed yet like many others in this point of the game. Take a look at their roadmap and see for yourself that they have delivered highly interesting tech and still have great tech to deliver (breeze wallet, side chains and smart contracts anyone?). Stratis is one of the best cryptos that you can buy in my opinion if you're a holder, the potential to rise to Ether prices is there (according to my magic eight ball at least). This new partnership with Earth Twine adds to that, the development of the dedicated blockchain perhaps calls for a roadmap of itself as it's such a huge project. I'm very curious to see how this will play out!
Earth Twine is a question mark for me though...
I have no doubt that Stratis knows how to help Earth Twine with all blockchain related tech and implement it in their own framework. But from what I can tell Earth Twine is an even younger company than Stratis and on their website I cannot find any information about achievements in the industry coming of their framework. It seems to me that they are in the beginning phases of what they want to achieve in the industry and Stratis needs to help them with that.
The big question now is if Earth Twine will be able to succeed in getting their framework implemented all across the entire supply chain that they target. If they do, excellent news for both Earth Twin and Stratis. If they don't manage to do this over time it would mean that the Stratis blockchain tech will not be revolutionizing this industry. I hope for the best and I hope Earth Twine has enough experienced people on board to sell their framework, time will tell. I will keep holding my STRAT for a few more years though!
Like this post? Feel free to upvote, comment and resteem. And, as always... keep up the good work and may the Steem be with you!
Want to buy cryptocurrency? I have bought most of what I hold at Litebit.eu and have very good experiences with each and every order.
Want to help fellow Steemians? Join steemfollower.com, a very easy to use upvote and follow exchange.In a near future where humans occupy many of the planets, moons and asteroids in the solar system an invading alien virus wreaks havoc on the tenuous political and social order. This scenario is the setup for The Expanse series of novels by James S. A. Corey—the pen name of the writing duo Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. The fifth book in the series—Nemesis Games (Orbit Books)—was published this month, and later this year a television series based on the books will premiere on the Syfy network.
The story follows an intrepid crew of space truckers who get caught up in the intrigue, along with Martian soldiers, interplanetary politicians, tortured private detectives and other characters who try to make sense of the changes wrought by the virus, called the “protomolecule,” which hitches a ride into the solar system Trojan horse–style on Saturn’s moon Phoebe.
Scientific American recently talked to Abraham and Franck about the science behind their books, what is in store for the TV series, and the potential future colonization of our solar system.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Tell me about how The Expanse got started.
Franck: It was originally designed as a game setting for a possible massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. At the time World of Warcraft was dominating that space so I came up with this science fiction setting instead.
Abraham: Ty continued to explore the setting in that media. When he moved to Albuquerque and we wound up in the same writing group, he let me play some of the tabletop sessions. The thing that struck me in those games was that he had already done all the research. Anytime I had a question about that world, how things worked, he just had the answer to hand. So it seemed like a no-brainer that we should try writing a story in that setting.
Do you think humanity will ever colonize the solar system and live on planets and asteroids as in your books?
Franck: No, not really. There’s no economic reason to do it. Maybe there’s some money to be made from pulling some rare resources out of the Asteroid Belt, but robots will do it.
One of our rules is we never let facts get in the way of awesome. Some people write stories about robots and make them compelling, but I’m much too fascinated by humans.
I love the idea that something in our solar system that we think has been there forever, like the moon Phoebe, is really a Trojan horse sent by aliens. It underscores how we really don’t know a lot about many solar system bodies.
Franck: Phoebe is strange; that’s why I picked it. It almost certainly isn’t a native moon of Saturn because its orbit is so weird and its composition is weird. The theory is it’s probably a captured Kuiper Belt object. It’s a weird moon to begin with; we just made it a little weirder.
Authors Daniel Abraham (left) and Ty Frank of The Expanse novels and upcoming SyFy television series. Credit: Orbit Books
The science of the protomolecule is fascinating, and keeps getting stranger throughout the series. How did you come up with it?
Franck: I had done a bunch of research for a story many years ago on how Ebola works, how it transmits itself, and I found it horrifying, of course. And then later I was thinking about colonization and how the best way to colonize other planets is to build nanomachines and throw them at other solar systems.
You want to set your story in a place where things are being shaken out. It’s why disaster movies are so popular. The protomolecule is our volcano. It’s the thing that goes off and shakes everything up and causes huge changes in the social order. The story we’re telling is the fallout and the new order the humans will set up.
Personally, I appreciate that your spaceships don’t include a magical technology that manages to create false gravity without any apparent explanation.
Franck: Once you introduce artificial gravity it creates a million other ramifications, other technologies that come out of that, which I just didn’t want to deal with. I wanted a more grounded, near-future feel.
Daniel has this theory, and I agree, that good stories come out of limitations. For example, the speed-of-light delay becomes a major plot point in our books because no mater how far apart you are in the solar system you can only send messages at the speed of light. There’s always going to be some lag and that creates some really cool plot points.
What kind of role have you played in developing the TV series?
Abraham: We have been more involved in this process than anyone should ever be. It’s been amazing. They brought us out last summer to meet with the showrunners. We were in the writing room with the writers when we wrote the first season. Ty was out in Toronto for pretty much all of primary photography. There’s not a whole lot of this that we didn’t get to put in our two cents on—which doesn’t usually happen for authors. But they have ben incredibly inclusive and good with us.
Do you think fans of the books will be happy with the show?
Abraham: Who knows? We are! I think what they have done with it is really, really good work. The tools for writing prose just behave differently when you have a camera and actors and music and special effects. That they have come up with ways to get very similar effects and stay very true to the spirit of the story—I think it is great.
For example, if you have a character with a long, soulful interior monologue, that’s really boring to watch. Finding ways to make that dramatic and visual and happening in relationship to people is not a trivial problem. We were lucky that we got some genuinely amazing writers and a production company who gave us the freedom to make some brave and fascinating choices.Good news everyone: The Simpsons’ crossover with the dearly departed Futurama topped all broadcast entertainment shows in the ratings Sunday night.
About 6.6 million viewers tuned in, with a 2.9 rating among adults 18-49, edging out second-place finisher ABC’s Once Upon a Time (7.4 million, 2.5) in the demo. Granted, that’s nowhere close to the Simpsons and Family Guy crossover that kicked off the season. (That hour-long episode was a 4.5 in the demo.) But the move still spiked Simpsons‘ ratings by 45 percent from last week.
Also Sunday: Fox’s freshman comedy Mulaney (0.9) is still struggling, CBS’ veteran procedural CSI (1.2) dipped to a series low and new drama Madam Secretary (1.4) tied its low. ABC’s Revenge (1.3) hit a modest season high.
UPDATE: Obviously the biggest entertainment show across broadcast and cable was AMC’s The Walking Dead –– 13.5 million viewers and a 4.6 rating.Work has stopped on a $70.5 million facility near Oak Park Avenue and Irving Park Road in Dunning that will house 200 veterans who suffer from Alzheimer's Disease and dementia. View Full Caption Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs
DUNNING — A partially built veterans facility in Dunning designed to house veterans suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and dementia will not open as scheduled in January 2017, state officials said Tuesday.
Originally scheduled to open in July, the veterans home — the first of its kind in Chicago — got caught in the crossfire between Gov. Bruce Rauner, and the Democrats who control the General Assembly, and is now on hold indefinitely.
Construction stopped in June, and while officials initially said the budget dispute would push its opening back just six months, the facility will not be ready in January 2017 as scheduled, officials said.
For months, the construction site has been fenced off, with the half-built husk of the building visible from Irving Park Road and Oak Park Avenue. It is on the grounds of the former Chicago-Read Mental Health Center and adjacent to the Dunning-Read Conservation Area, a 23-acre oasis of wetlands and woodlands being restored to its natural state.
Allie Bovis, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Capital Development Board, which is overseeing construction of the facility, blamed the now-indefinite delay on "the Democratic majority in the Legislature’s failure to pass real structural reforms and a balanced budget."
Work on the facility would immediately restart under a bill introduced Jan. 13 by State Sen. John Mulroe, D-Jefferson Park.
“I am sick and tired of politics getting in the way of our state providing the basic services that are required by our constitution,” Mulroe said in a statement. “Letting the construction of a veterans' home get caught up in this budget mess is unacceptable.”
The bill, which must be approved by the General Assembly and signed by would allow the state to spend $60 million lawmakers set aside for the facility several years ago. Crews began building the facility in October 2014.
Rauner refused to allow the money set aside for the facility to be spent unless lawmakers agreed to adopt his agenda designed to spur business growth in Illinois. Democrats refused, and the impasse has yet to be resolved.
While a federal grant will cover the cost of 65 percent of the cost to build the facility, the state must cover some start-up costs, officials said.
The five-story facility at 4250 N. Oak Park Ave. will feature single rooms with private bathrooms as well as common dining and recreation areas for its residents, officials said. Forty-four beds will be set aside for veterans with dementia or Alzheimer's Disease.
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ISTANBUL: Turkey has agreed to modernise the Pakistan Air Force’s fleet of F-16s at a cost of $75 million amid the controversy surrounding the purchase of new jets from the United States.
A senior official of the Istanbul-based Foreign Economic Relations Board (DIEK) on Saturday told reporters both countries have struck a deal in an aviation project under which some Pakistani fighter planes have already been flown to Turkey.
Volkan Yuzer, Asia-Pacific regional coordinator at DIEK, said Pak-Turkish multi-faceted relations were growing in the defence sector. He added Turkey was already manufacturing engines for F-16 jets in addition to making some of their spare parts.
Talking about business opportunities in Pakistan, Yuzer said at least 100 Turkish companies were already operating successfully in the country and had invested $2.7 billion in various projects by 2014.
More investment, he added, is expected in the energy, infrastructure and beverages projects. Replying to a question on signing the Free-Trade Agreement between the two countries expected by September this year, Yuzer said both sides were working out the details of the agreement.
According to the website of Turkish Aerospace industries (TAI), the Pakistan Air Force had awarded the tender of modernisation of its 41 F-16 aircraft to TAI in June 2009. The upgrade of jets started in the last quarter of 2010 when the first three aircraft were flown to Turkey.He was never the “shadow president” that breathless liberals dubbed him, and perhaps not even the Great Manipulator of Time magazine’s dark and portentous cover. But if there’s a single person who has changed the American political conversation more than anyone else in the past year, it’s Steve Bannon.
Donald Trump blew into office with a basket of instinctive political beliefs—law-and-order, trade protection, anti-elitism—that felt incoherent in today’s American party landscape. They were immediately recognizable to Bannon, who had spent the past several years knitting those impulses into a new strain of right-populist politics at Breitbart News.
There’s no neat phrase to describe just what Bannon is—a Navy vet and former Goldman Sachs banker who transformed himself into a filmmaker and media entrepreneur. Most recently, he became a kind of intellectual Svengali to a diffuse group of people who might not have seen themselves as having anything in common until Bannon began articulating it, and gave it a tribune as chief executive of Trump’s campaign. Call it Trumpism, or Bannonism, but its anti-immigrant, anti-global, blue-collar nationalist worldview now contends with 1980s-style free-market constitutionalism for the soul of the Republican Party.
It’s hard to remember how different politics was just a year or two ago. “Nationalism” was a word nearly erased from the American mainstream, with dark echoes of the 1930s and the European right. Bannon revived it proudly, tweaking the phrase—“economic nationalism”—to give it less racist overtones. And he helped usher back a whole set of other ideas that haven’t been part of the American conversation for the past century.
More than any other figure in American politics, Bannon presents himself as a civilizational-level thinker, sometimes flamboyantly so. In his bleak worldview, America—and the West—are locked in a zero-sum struggle against sinister foes from Islamic jihadists to China to waves of immigrants threatening the values that built the nation. The collateral damage in that war often seems to include some of those values: pluralism, voting rights, an independent media, civil discourse.
Bannon’s legendary appetite for conflict hurt his ability to build influence in the West Wing and left him isolated before he was pushed out in August. And thanks to his boss’ lack of focus, much of his economic agenda—like a massive infrastructure program and populist tax reform—has never gotten off the ground. But Bannon’s fingerprints are all over some of Trump’s most controversial initiatives, like the travel ban. A question that has always swirled around Bannon is whether he’s just an opportunist fanning a dark but powerful American impulse that nobody else was willing to embrace openly, or whether a Harvard-educated former trader with a share of the “Seinfeld” royalties really does want to live in a more isolated, muscular country that has turned its back on the cosmopolitan culture that helped lift him to wealth and power. It may not matter: Donald Trump, of all people, is president of the United States; the country is locked in a struggle over what it really wants to be; and Steve Bannon is a big reason why. —Stephen Heuser
Q & A What’s the best book you read this year? Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama What’s one out-of-the-box policy idea that we aren’t paying enough attention to? Dramatically lowering legal immigration. Twitter: Useful new tool or obnoxious distraction? Totally obnoxious—except when in the hands of the “Leader-of-Free-World.” Is Donald Trump draining the swamp? Yes. What historical moment does 2017 most resemble? 1854.Comcast is launching a new wireless service with an unlimited data plan. That'll make it the first big U.S. cable provider to enter the wireless market. (Reuters)
Comcast on Thursday leapt into the cutthroat market for cellphone service by unveiling two wireless plans, a move that other cable companies are expected to follow.
Called Xfinity Mobile, the service offers customers the option of unlimited data, voice calls and texts for $45 to $65 a line per month, or a pay-as-you-go plan for $12 per gigabyte. The service will be available later this year, Comcast said.
The new offering aims to help Comcast compete outside the home as Americans’ Internet use increasingly shifts to mobile devices. Comcast’s service will allow users to surf the Web, watch videos and listen to streaming music on their phones primarily through its network of 16 million public WiFi hotspots.
Comcast's network differs from that of its rivals in the phone business. The cable company's service relies primarily on Comcast's network of 16 million public WiFi hotspots for connectivity, allowing users to surf the Web, watch video and listen to streaming music on their phones without paying for cellular data. When the company's WiFi signals are unavailable, Xfinity Mobile will connect to the traditional cellular network owned by Verizon, which Comcast is using as a result of an airwaves agreement signed several years ago. It's similar to the approach taken by Google when it launched its Project Fi wireless service.
Comcast views Xfinity Mobile as a way to expand the traditional cable bundle, adding a fourth service on top of residential Internet, landline phone service and cable television. A Comcast Internet subscription is required for Xfinity Mobile to work, the company said. And the wireless service's lowest rate (the $45 per month plan) will be available only to customers who subscribe to Comcast's Xfinity Premier Double Play or Triple Play, according to spokesmen.
The discounts for those high-paying customers underscore the role that Xfinity Mobile plays supporting Comcast's core television business, which faces rising competition from online alternatives.
The monthly wireless option includes unlimited data, in keeping with recent trends in the industry. A Comcast household can subscribe to multiple plans, meaning that a family of four could sign up two phones for unlimited data and two phones for pay-as-you-go. Switching between plans will be hassle-free, the company said during a presentation Thursday, adding that roughly 70 percent of customers today use less than 5 GB of wireless data per month.
Comcast's enormous scale will likely be its biggest advantage as it seeks to build a wireless powerhouse. Beyond the company's existing hotspot network, its 29 million customers represent a target audience that is already tied into Comcast's product and business ecosystem. Those customers will not need to undergo a separate credit check for Xfinity Mobile service, and any billing and shipping information will be pre-populated in Comcast's online sign-up forms.
“The simplicity of the offer lends itself to a digital-first experience, which is going to be at a very efficient cost to serve, as well,” said Mike Cavanaugh, Comcast's chief financial officer.
Under similar pressures, the rest of the cable industry is expected to move in Comcast's direction. Charter Communications has said that it intends to launch a wireless service sometime next year.
Comcast is leaping into a highly competitive industry that has seen companies such as T-Mobile and AT&T engage in tit-for-tat price wars, dueling promotions and the return of popular features such as unlimited plans. Because it relies on Verizon's infrastructure, Comcast's new service could be hurt if Verizon decides it poses a threat. But for the moment, analysts say, Xfinity Mobile appears poised for a successful launch.
“Wireless should be a positive driver of value for Comcast, and the market isn't giving them credit for it today,” said Jonathan Chaplin, an industry analyst at New Street Research, in a note to investors Thursday.GENERAL WORKSHOP
Saturday Day Pass Required
David Paulides
Missing 411
Saturday, February 20th 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm Room: Los Angeles A
Each year hundreds of people disappear in the parks and forests of the world but most are found after a short search. However, some missing persons are never found and some are discovered in unusual and mysterious circumstances.
An intense 6 year study of this topic by David Paulides revealed
Geographical clusters of missing people
Parallels in the facts surrounding these cases
hen attempts were made to get the lists of missing people from the National Park Service, we were told they wanted to charge us $1.4 million dollars for them to put together a list. Investigator David Paulides will share with us the latest updates on this intriguing mystery. The strange facts surrounding these cases will baffle you!Earth taken from Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966. Image as originally shown to the public displays extensive flaws and striping.
Earth taken from Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966. This image shows the improvement in picture quality after capture and reprocessing by LOIRP.
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) is a project funded by NASA, SkyCorp, SpaceRef Interactive, and private individuals to digitize the original analog data tapes from the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that were sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967.[1]
The first image to be successfully recovered by the project was released in November 2008. It was the first photograph of the Earth from the Moon, taken in August 1966. On February 20, 2014, the project announced it had completed the primary tape capture portion of the project.[2] One medium resolution image, most of one high resolution image and parts of three others are missing, apparently due to lapses at the time they were being recorded.[3] The rest of the Lunar Orbiter images have been successfully recovered[2] and have been published in NASA's Planetary Data System.[4]
Background [ edit ]
The images taken by the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were primarily used to locate landing sites for the manned Apollo missions. Once those missions were over, the data, on about 1,500 tapes, was largely forgotten since it had served its purpose. The original tapes were carefully archived for 20 years by the government in Maryland. When the tapes were released back to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, in 1986, the decision of whether to scrap the tapes became the responsibility of JPL archivist Nancy Evans. She decided that the tapes should be preserved. She recalled, "I could not morally get rid of this stuff".[5]
Within a few years, Nancy Evans and a few colleagues were able to start a small project with funding from NASA. They managed to find four rare Ampex FR-900 tape drives — highly specialized drives that had only been used by government agencies such as the FAA, USAF, and NASA. (The FR-900's transport was adapted from the two-inch Quadruplex videotape format, only in the FR-900's case, the drive was designed to record a wideband analog signal of any type for instrumentation or other purposes, rather than specifically a video signal as in the two-inch Quad's case.) Over time, Evans' team also collected documentation and spare parts for the tape drives from various government surplus sources.
The project was successful at getting the raw analog data from the tapes, but in order to generate the images, they discovered that they needed the specialized demodulation hardware that had been used by the Lunar Orbiter program. This which no longer existed. The members of the team attempted to get funding from NASA and private sources to build the hardware, but they were unsuccessful. Eventually, both Nancy Evans and Mark Nelson went on to other projects while the tape drives sat in Evans's garage.[6]
In 2004, Philip Horzempa was doing research on the Lunar Orbiter program at the NASA History Office in Washington, D.C. In its archives, he happened to come across a memo from 1996 containing a proposal by Mark Nelson to digitize the Lunar Orbiter images, as described above. After about a year of searching, Horzempa made contact with Mark Nelson.[7] The two of them decided to find funding and to restart the Lunar Orbiter tape recovery effort. They made contact with Jen Heldmann of the NASA Ames Research Center.
In early 2007, Horzempa commented on the Lunar Orbiter tape recovery effort on a Web forum, NASASpaceflight.com. As a result, Dennis Wingo contacted Philip Horzempa through that forum. Horzempa put Wingo in contact with Nelson and Evans, and they invited Wingo to join the team. In addition to the tape drives mentioned above, Nelson had been able to obtain several tape heads.[8] The tape drives were absolutely essential to any effort to read the original Lunar Orbiter data tapes.
Dennis Wingo is president of the aerospace engineering company SkyCorp and a long-time worker in space and computing technologies. He knew he could muster the technical skills to tackle the management of renovating the tape drives, he could find contacts at NASA, and most importantly, he knew that the Moon was becoming a hot property again. Wingo said, "I knew the value of the tape drives and the tapes".[5] Another group thought the same, writing, "future missions to the Moon have re-energized the lunar community and renewed interest in the Lunar Orbiter data".[9]
A newer spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), entered orbit around the Moon on June 23, 2009, and, after testing, it began its photographic mission that September.[10] One of LRO's primary goals is to determine the risk to people working on the surface of the Moon. The LRO can create images of the surface that are comparable to the highest resolution images taken of the Moon during the Apollo era. The original Lunar Orbiter images were the highest resolution images ever taken of the Moon prior to the LRO's photography.[11] Digitized Lunar Orbiter images would be invaluable to scientists studying changes in the Moon's surface.
Expertise and facilities [ edit ]
Front half of LOIRP's facilities
In February 2007, Wingo visited the four Ampex FR-900 tape drives for the first time in Evans's garage. Each drive was about 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, 3 feet (0.9 m) wide, as deep as a refrigerator, and weighed about 600 pounds (270 kg). These were all coated with a thick layers of dust and cobwebs. They were stored with a pallet of manuals and schematics for the tape drives, along with hard copies of data related to the lunar images. Meanwhile, the tapes were stored safely in a climate-controlled warehouse. There were about 1,500 tapes, all packed into boxes, stacked four deep on pallets, and shrink-wrapped.[12]
Wingo and Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and president of SpaceRef Interactive, respectively, now served as co-leaders of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). Both Cowing and Wingo provided the funds required to get the project started. They spent about a year looking for more funding, facilities, documentation, and expertise. Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, agreed to store the tape drives and tapes in unused warehouse space until funding and facilities could be found to begin the restoration project.
In April 2007, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released the tapes to the custody of Ames Research Center. Evans also transferred the ownership of the FR-900 drives to Wingo and Cowing. Wingo and Cowing rented two transfer trucks, loaded up the tape drives and documentation into one truck, and loaded the pallets of analog data tapes into the other truck. Cowing and Wingo then drove the trucks up to Mountain View, California, from Burbank. The drives and tapes then sat in storage for about the next year as funding for the project was sought.
Since the team required a facility with proper heating |
inheritance, police said.
Read More[Ed note: This article was updated on July July 21 to reflect the fact that it has reopened.]A car crashed into a burger spot in Quincy today, causing minor injuries as well as damage to the space.According to a live video from Fox 25 News, fire trucks and police cars can be seen in the parking lot (as of 1:15 PM) of Wild Willy's on Washington Street, where a car apparently went into the restaurant. A Twitter post from @itsthejoeshow--who is Fox 25's evening TV news producer--shows a photo of the scene, while a tweet from @llambert_ledger indicates that the vehicle did go through the front door and that the injuries are not considered serious. A more recent Twitter post from @llambert_ledger mentions that no customers or workers were hurt and that the dining spot could reopen on Wednesday, while a new article from WCVB 5 mentions that four people were injured, and that none of the injuries are life-threatening.Wild Willy's is located at 588 Washington Street in the Quincy Point section of the city.[July 21 update: A Facebook post from the place indicates that Wild Willy's in Quincy reopened this afternoon.]Follow us on Twitter at @hiddenboston
Labels: Quincy restaurants"The Netherlands will join Austria in a request for intervention against Germany at the European Court of Justice," Dutch Infrastructure Minister Cora van Nieuwenhuizen said in a letter to parliament.
Planned to start on January 1, 2019, the new toll system will see different types of passes being introduced, with an annual pass capped at 130 euros ($152) per year for German and foreign cars.
But German-registered drivers will essentially be refunded the money thanks to a matching reduction in their motor vehicle tax bill.
"The Netherlands sees this as contrary to a ban on discrimination as well as an unfair impediment to the free flow of traffic," Van Nieuwenhuizen said.
The minister added that the Dutch complaint will be filed early in the new year against its neighbour, but that a decision by the court was not expected before the 2019 implementation.
Germany's parliament in March approved the controversial law to impose tolls on its roads, despite anger from neighbouring countries who say it discriminates against their drivers.
The new tolls will particularly hit The Netherlands which shares a 500- kilometre (310-mile) border with Germany and sees some 22 million cross-border trips made by Dutch-plated cars every year, according to a study released on Wednesday.
The 50-page report by the leading European consultancy Ecorys, commissioned by the Dutch government, said the planned tolls will cost Dutch drivers between 60 to 100 million euros a year.
"The money Dutch drivers will have to pay for a toll pass means a loss of income to The Netherlands," the report said.After what seemed like centuries, John Elway and Von Miller were able to agree on a contract that puts Miller in a Broncos jersey through the 2021 season.
The six-year extension, worth $114.5 million with $70 million guaranteed, solidifies that Miller will suit-up on Sundays after threatening that he would sit out if he remained under the league’s franchise tag option. This should give Broncos fans everywhere the ability to sleep soundly at night knowing that the face of the franchise and “Dancing With the Stars” favorite is set on being in orange and blue “FOR LIFE.”
But the negotiation practices used by Elway were somewhat anomalous and uncommon, at least according to Miller’s agent, Joby Branion.
“[Elway] is just extremely competitive. I can say that the negotiation approach that he and his team uses is a bit unorthodox and unconventional but you can’t argue with the effectiveness and we don’t know unless we’re in their room what their ultimate goals are,” Branion told Pro Football Talk. “They’re a little different but, hey, there are a lot of people that use a lot of different approaches to negotiate.”
Unconventional is not a bad thing. In fact, it is actually quite a compliment to Elway.
Philosophy expert Andrea Borghini says, “unconventionality requires some sort of creativity, the capacity to have a vision and the skills to carry it out.”
Elway’s alternative approach is a competitive advantage for the Broncos. His competitive nature and creative thinking has been a catalyst to carrying out his vision for this team. He has not only been innovative in managing the roster, but also in overseeing dollars and cents. Who else on planet earth could get Peyton Manning to take a $4 million pay cut? Some general managers might have reached for Colin Kaepernick and his $11.9 million salary, but not Elway.
These “unorthodox and unconventional” techniques are how he snagged arguably the biggest name to ever go through free agency in Manning, and also how he has signed the Broncos’ core group of defenders through the 2019 season.
With Elway at the helm, the Broncos will be good for a long time.Lordsburg, NM
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Three Stars.
I caint tell you what it must of been like. I don’t think anybody could. But I can tell you what come to pass. I can tell you that.
They first caught sight of the yelpers round about 1879. They come from the south but they wasn’t Mexicans. Wore cowls like monks. Spoke with a outlander accent. They made a sound that is lost to memory but you could call it a coyote yammer. Anyways that’s how they come to be called yelpers by the good people of Lordsburg.
Now back then they was some strange folk in the borderlands. Polygamists. Cultists. Renegade indians. So you can imagine the trepidation of the settlers in that little town. No help for miles. These monks comin in from the hills yammerin like wild dogs. And the things they carried. Sextants. Plumb lines. And each with their own notebook. Never without them notebooks. They was always writin them yelpers.
But the yelpers also had money. Gold dust by the sack. And pretty soon that little outpost was boomin. You see the yelpers had this hunger. To try ever little thing. Take its measure. Put it in the little book. As if they could take the chaos of that world and bring form to it. Corral it somehow. I’ll admit it was unnatural. But that’s how it started.
Sometimes I wonder what those townfolk was thinkin. All this strangeness around them. But they took the money. Hell I would of too. But I kindly doubt they knew the true cost. What was bein bought. What was bein sold.PALIN BECOMES DELUSIONAL; FEELS VINDICATED…. The news on
Friday night was fairly devastating for Sarah Palin: an independent investigation launched by the Alaskan legislature found that the governor had, in fact, violated the public trust in her Troopergate scandal. She abused the powers of her office, violated state ethics rules, and lied about it. This is pretty tough to spin.
In response, Palin, who is now apparently bordering on delusional, has decided to play make-believe.
Sarah Palin told Alaska reporters Saturday that she had been “cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of unethical activity” in the investigative report released the day before that explored her actions in dismissing a state official who refused to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from the state police. “Well, I’m very very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of any kind of unethical activity there,” Palin said on a Saturday conference call with reporters from the Anchorage Daily News, KTVA-Channel 11 and KTUU-Channel 2. “Very pleased to be cleared of any of that.”
I know, I know, after the last eight years, I really should be used to this kind of thing. But I can’t help but find this breathtaking. Either Sarah Palin is lying brazenly or she’s functionally illiterate.
The very first finding in the report is that Palin “abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act…. Compliance with the code of ethics is not optional.” Over and again, the report highlights instances in which Palin’s conduct was at odds with Alaska’s Ethics Act. Palin read this and concluded she’s been “cleared” of “any hint of any kind of unethical activity.”
So, before the report comes out, Palin issued her own report announcing that she’d cleared herself of any wrongdoing. After the report came out, and concludes that she’d violated the public trust, Palin once again cleared herself of any wrongdoing.
ABC News’ Jake Tapper added that Palin made multiple claims about the Troopergate scandal over the weekend, all of which were patently false.
John Cole summarized the problem nicely: “I don’t know how to react to this. I really just don’t. When someone is that willing to look at you and just flat out make shit up and reject facts, there really is nothing you can do without driving yourself insane.”
I’d just add one other observation. On Friday, Palin was found to have violated the public trust in an abuse of power scandal. On Saturday, it was on the front page of the major dailies. And on Sunday morning, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” ABC’s “This Week,” and CNN’s “Late Edition” ignored the story altogether, despite lengthy discussions about recent political events, as if a major scandal involving a candidate for national office isn’t particularly interesting. I’ll simply never understand this.Aviva Premiership U20 players to watch
Premiership U20s Emerging talent ©TRU
The 2017/18 Premiership season is almost upon us and the sense of optimism among fans of all 12 clubs is tangible.
Whilst summer signings draw the headlines and give fans the most cause for excitement, it can be the emergence of a young, homegrown star that more positively impacts a club’s season, whether that’s challenging for a title, pushing for European qualification or fending off relegation.
We look at some of the most promising U20 players in the Premiership who can make that leap to senior stardom this season, just as Zach Mercer and the Curry twins did in the last campaign.
A similar look at the Guinness PRO14 starlets will arrive next week.
Marcus Smith, Harlequins
We may as well start with an obvious one, right?
Smith recently made England’s three-day preseason training camp and even had Eddie Jones proclaim him as England’s fourth-choice fly-half.
It is highly, highly – this could go on for a while – unlikely that Smith is actually fourth in the pecking order. For all his phenomenal potential – and the sky really is the limit – he has yet to make his Premiership debut and international rugby is still a way off.
He reads the game excellently, has the vision and technical skill to pull apart defences and shows impressive game management for a player so young.
He is clearly on the fast-track to higher honours, but patience is a virtue. He should have an opportunity to make an impact for Quins in the A League and Anglo-Welsh Cup and then push for Premiership playing time.
Gabriel Ibitoye and John Okafor should both be on the radar at Quins, too.
Nick Isiekwe, Saracens
Another rather obvious one, with Isiekwe having won two senior international caps already.
The signings of Will Skelton and Dom Day certainly create competition for the lock, but with Maro Itoje and George Kruis both likely to be busy with England this season, there will be plenty of opportunities for Isiekwe. In fact, it would not be surprising to see Isiekwe knocking on the door of the Itoje-Kruis engine room combination by the end of the season.
Bursting onto the scene so young has seen many people compare him to Itoje, but in terms of his playing style, he is probably a more similar player to Kruis. He is that bit more naturally solid, can already run a lineout and there’s even an element of Kyle Sinckler to his game, with great hands and passing on the gain-line and as a first receiver.
He has another year of U20 eligibility still to serve if he wants, but expect Saracens and England to have bigger plans for him.
As with Quins, it’s not just Isiekwe capable of breaking out at Saracens this season, with Ben Earl also likely to be sniffing for playing time.
Cameron Redpath, Sale Sharks
One of a host of Sale academy players to be given five-year senior deals in the last few weeks, Redpath is the most likely to follow in the footsteps of the Curry twins and make the breakthrough this season.
Of course, the Curry twins are also still U20, but flagging them here would seem a bit unnecessary.
Redpath is a physical inside centre who has the frame and size to make that step up to senior rugby as an 18-year-old, but that should not detract from the impressive technical ability that he also brings to the mix.
Having spent a significant amount of time at fly-half, his ball-handling and playmaking is as adept as you would expect it to be, he has a strong kicking game and the confidence to take on defenders.
It won’t be easy to break into a midfield of Sam James and Will Addison but look for Redpath to feature as Sale rotate their squad and compete in the Challenge Cup.
Will Butler, Worcester Warriors
Another talented centre, Butler is a year ahead of Redpath in his development, but also faces a tough position battle, with Ben Te’o and Wynand Olivier leading the way at Sixways.
Butler made his senior debut for the club last season in the Challenge Cup and had a good campaign for the England U20s, where his instinctiveness and ability to run incisive lines cut open many a defence.
He is not the biggest centre but he certainly doesn’t shirk his defensive responsibilities and wouldn’t look out of his depth playing senior rugby.
If Te’o continues to play a role for England, there should be chances for Butler this season, especially as the duo of Te’o and Olivier are both in their 30’s and Worcester will want to ensure a smooth transition to the next generation in their midfield.
Another name to watch here is Ted Hill, a remarkably physical second row/No 8. As a 17-year-old, he was dump tackling sizeable Italian props and locks in the U20s.
Tom Seabrook, Gloucester
Having confirmed the move of Jonny May to Leicester in return for Ed Slater, Gloucester fans will be eager to see who fills May’s berth on the wing.
New addition Jason Woodward will be favourite, closely followed by Henry Purdy, David Halaifonua and Ollie Thorley, but don’t rule out Seabrook getting some playing time this season, despite entering just his first year of U20 eligibility.
Don’t expect to see Seabrook starting in the Premiership straight away but he is a lethal finisher and a player capable of translating his prolific age-grade scoring to the senior game, especially in a Gloucester side that may look to inject the same kind of tempo into their game that Johan Ackermann prized with the Lions.
Kingsholm has become a bit of a factory for pace men on the outside and Seabrook can prove this season that he is the man to fill May’s boots in the long-term.
Gloucester have bolstered their front row in the offseason, but don’t rule out the trio of Henry Walker, Alex Seville and Ciaran Knight, either. Walker has a particularly good shot, with the cupboard a little bare at hooker behind Richard Hibbard and Motu Matu’u.
Isaac Curtis-Harris, London Irish
Wait, what about Joe Cokanasiga?
As with the Curry twins, Cokanasiga has already made that step up to senior rugby, having broken into the Irish first XV last season in the Championship, whilst an injury early in the season unfortunately denied Curtis-Harris the same opportunity.
With avoiding relegation the priority this season, don’t expect the young back rower to be thrown in at the deep end, but playing time is there to be had in the A League, Anglo-Welsh Cup and Challenge Cup.
He shone as an U18 player at No 8, helping Irish to the 2015/16 U18 Premiership title, but his slighter frame back then perhaps suggested a move to the flank might be the next step for him.
That year out of school has seen his frame fill out considerably and he now looks to have the power and durability to cope with senior rugby at No 8, not to the mention the technical skill that was a big part of making him a success at U18 level.
Keep an eye out for Ben Loader, too.
Adam Radwan, Newcastle Falcons
Radwan has lit up the Singha Premiership 7s for two seasons now and he is still just 19 years of age.
Having spent last season playing for Darlington Mowden Park in National League 1, Radwan has a year of senior rugby under his belt already and whilst it was not played at Premiership level, it will have been a valuable acclimatising experience for him.
His biggest challenge comes in the forms of incumbent wings Vereniki Gonva and Sinoti Sinoti, who have both been impressive on Tyneside, as well as new signing D.T.H. van der Merwe. It is worth nothing, however, all three of those wings are in their 30’s and as with Butler and the centre combination in Worcester, there is an opportunity to begin a transition to a younger player this season.
Radwan’s electric pace and footwork are his greatest assets and should help him catch the eye in training, whilst he works on rounding out the rest of his game.
Devante Onojaife, Northampton Saints
You may recognise the name here, with Devante’s older brother Jordan featuring intermittently for Northampton in the second row, as well as being a part of England’s 2014 Junior World Championship side.
Devante as played at both No 8 and in the front row, but it is at the former where he could make an impact for Northampton this season, following the departure of Louis Picamoles.
Teimana Harrison would be the logical choice to fill the void and should do so in the Premiership, but Onojaife is another player who can make the most of the opportunities that the A League and Anglo-Welsh Cup offer.
Long-term, Onojaife could be the power carrying option that Picamoles and Samu Manoa provided Northampton with previously and his senior rugby education should begin in earnest this season.
The half-back cupboard is well-stocked at Northampton, but don’t rule out Alex Mitchell or James Grayson getting some playing time, either.
Wil Partington, Bath
Bath found themselves stretched thin in the backline at times last season, with injuries and international call-ups all contributing to a disappointing second half of the season.
Todd Blackadder comes from the New Zealand school and having a back three loaded with players who have what is traditionally a full-back’s skillset is something that is highly-prized and that could be a way into senior action for Partington.
An incisive counter-attacker and adept tactical kicker, Partington is built in the mould of the interchangeable back three players that run rife in New Zealand rugby.
The likes of Darren Atkins and Harry Davies have seniority, but do not be surprised is Partington comes in under the radar, much as Mike Haley did with Sale a few years ago.American Bridge, a super PAC founded by Democratic operative David Brock, is launching a multi-pronged effort Wednesday that criticizes President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE for his potential business conflicts of interest.
The campaign, which comes the same day Trump is set to host “a general news conference,” includes a website called “TrumpMustSell.biz,” a five-page report detailing Trump’s potential conflicts of interest, and a Snapchat geofilter.
“Donald Trump is on the verge of turning the entire federal government into a subsidiary of his business empire. This isn't just unprecedented in American history, it’s unethical and unconstitutional,” American Bridge President Jessica Mackler said in a statement.
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The website features an interactive map of the world showing where Trump’s businesses are located.
The report, titled “Cashing In: How Trump Will Profit Off His Presidency,” calls on the president-elect to “completely” sell “his family’s stake in his businesses” and to release his tax returns.
Soon after the election, the Trump Organization released a statement that said the president-elect’s three eldest children would run the business.
Trump broke with tradition when he refused to release his tax returns during the campaign, a decision that became fodder for his political opponents.
“Most ominously, Trump’s refusal to sell off his businesses will give hostile foreign governments and companies a foothold in the White House — and lead to an unprecedented constitutional crisis,” the American Bridge report states.
The Snapchat geofilter on Wednesday will target Trump Tower in New York City and Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., as well as Capitol Hill and surrounding buildings.
“Tell Trump: The presidency is not for profit,” the Snapchat filter reads, with a cartoon-like drawing of the president-elect.
“Trump’s refusal to sell off his business will enable his family to make billions while endangering our national security,” Mackler said. “Trump must sell off his businesses now or risk provoking a constitutional crisis that could sink his presidency.”If you listen to management pundits, "collaboration" is all the rage. While the term is a bit fuzzy, what's usually meant by "collaboration" is 1) plenty of ad-hoc meetings and 2) open-plan offices that increase the likelihood that such meetings take place.
A recent study published in Applied Psychology has now confirmed that a collaborative work environment can make top performers--the innovators and hard-workers--feel miserable and socially isolated.
The problem is that rather than seeing a top performer as a role models, mediocre employees tend to see them as threats, either to their own position in the company or to their own feelings of self-worth.
Rather than improving their own performance, mediocre employees socially isolate top performers, spread nasty rumors about them, and either sabotage, or attempt to steal credit for, the top performers' work. As the study put it: "Cooperative contexts proved socially disadvantageous for high performers."
This social isolation creates special difficulties for introverted employees who work in open-plan offices. While some extroverts seem to draw energy from a chaotic environment, introverts find such environments draining.
Sometimes the only way that introverts can get their work completed is to work from home, creating even more potential social isolation. Indeed, top performers who work from home are natural and easy target for workplace gossip and backbiting.
Unless checked, this tendency can result in an exodus of top talent. As a recent Inc.com column pointed out: "The No. 1 reason high performers leave organizations in which they are otherwise happy is because of the tolerance of mediocrity."
No kidding.
This is not to say that teamwork is a bad thing, per se. Indeed, most complex projects require a team to successfully complete. For teams to be effective, though, they need leaders who can swiftly squelch any attempt to isolate or denigrate a top performer.You’ve probably heard that yesterday afternoon, May 17, some 200 members of five biker gangs in Waco, Texas, had what one NBC News article quaintly describes as “a rumble” in a heavily populated mall.
Gang members were at the Twin Peaks Restaurant in the Central Texas Market Place mall for “a meeting” to “settle their differences,” reports ABC News.
Waco police sergeant and spokesman Patrick Swanton didn’t immediately name the gangs, the New York Times reports, because police were not “going to give them the privilege at this point of putting their names out there.”
Photographs of gang members arrested wore leather jackets emblazoned with “Bandidos,” “Cossacks” and “Scimitars.”
The lethal shootout began after rival gang members had a fist fight that exploded into the parking lot. Waco police told NBC News that gang members shot at one another and police. Other alleged gangsters stabbed one another with knives, kicked them, and beat them with clubs, chains and brass knuckles. Nine died, 18 were wounded and about 175 were arrested, mostly for participating in organized crime. No police officers or civilians were harmed. Here’s more from the NBC article titled “Waco Shootout: Biker Brawl at Twin Peaks Leaves Nine Dead”:
“It progressed very rapidly,” Waco Police Sgt. Patrick Swanton said. Police — who had been expecting trouble from the gathering — were on the scene when fighting broke out, and they quickly called in reinforcements.
CBS News—which also refers to the deadly melee at a public retail establishment as “a rumble”—reports that “police were on heightened alert” because Twin Peaks hosts a Biker Night on Thursdays that draws rival gangs. According to CBS News, Swanson said police had “attempted to work with the local management of Twin Peaks to cut that back, but to no avail.
After yesterday’s deadly shootout Swanson told The New York Times that “there were so many rounds fired from bad-guy weapons” he was amazed that innocent civilians weren’t hurt.
“In 34 years of law enforcement, this is the worst crime scene — the most violent crime scene — that I have ever been involved in,” he added. “There are dead people still there. There is blood everywhere.”
Despite the horrific official description, photos widely circulated in the aftermath of the gang violence are curiously placid.
For instance, a CBS News photo set shows about 40 unhandcuffed gang members sitting on what appears to be a bench with one officer in front of them; about five unhandcuffed Cossacks standing by a wall; an empty paddy wagon; a row of bikes toppled with a line of unhandcuffed gang members facing police in the background; a police officer walking in the parking lot with his semiautomatic weapon pointed toward the ground; more Cossacks standing around with their hands free; more bikes, this time upright and parked; gang members sitting on the ground surrounded by bottles of water; and an officer in riot gear staring at a burgundy sedan.
As I’m sure you do, I have a few niggling questions about this deadly melee:
Why are police and media calling this a “meeting” rather than, say, “a partnership to ‘take out’ police officers”?
If police didn’t project a hologram of James Dean on the mall wall; didn’t find any Sharks, Jets or Outsiders on the scene and didn’t apprehend Danny from “Grease,” why are they calling this murderous scene “a rumble”?
Why has major media failed to mention the socioeconomic level or race of the bikers?
Did any of the alleged gangsters make eye contact with police?
Police were already on the scene because they suspected there would be trouble. Why weren’t any unarmed civilians shot to death?
Police were prepared for five gangs worth of violence. Why weren’t they all wearing riot gear?
Do the bikers’ poor education, lack of employment and lack of rec center membership heighten their tendency toward violence?
Do the bikers lack education, jobs or rec center membership?
Were Ace Hood, Bobby Smurda, Y.G., Chief Keef, T.I. or 1992-era Snoop Dogg at the shootout in Waco?
or 1992-era Snoop Dogg at the shootout in Waco? Were the bikers playing the music of Ace Hood, Bobby Smurda, Y.G., Chief Keef, T.I. or 1992-era Snoop Dogg during the deadly fight?
or 1992-era Snoop Dogg during the deadly fight? Was the violence “senseless”?
Was the violence the result of generations of criminality glorified in bikers’ culture?
Did the bikers grow up with fathers in their homes?
Are the bikers married to women and leading households?
Was anybody “unauthorized” or “illegal”?
Was anyone a terrorist?
Was anyone a thug?
Was anyone not white?
Sources containing language and photos as of 5-18-15 at 12:08 EDT:
5-17-15: ”Waco Shootout: Biker Brawl at Twin Peaks Leaves Nine Dead,” NBC News; ”9 Dead in Waco, Texas, Biker Gang Shooting, Cops Say,” ABC News; ”9 Are Killed in Biker Gang Shootout in Waco,” New York Times. 5-18-15: “Waco police brace for any new biker gang violence,” CBS News; 4-27-15: “Bloods and Crips Team Up to Protest Baltimore’s Cops,” The Daily Beast.Benadryl is a brand name for a number of different antihistamine medications used to stop allergies. In the United States and Canada, it is the first-generation antihistamine diphenhydramine.
Some products marketed in Australia and New Zealand as a cough medicine with the Benadryl name contain diphenhydramine.[1] In the United Kingdom, the active component of Benadryl is often the antihistamine acrivastine[2] or cetirizine.[3]
Benadryl is available for oral or topical use. It is marketed without a prescription by Johnson & Johnson subsidiary McNeil Consumer Healthcare. Before 2007, Benadryl was marketed by Pfizer Consumer Healthcare (originally Warner–Lambert).[4][5]
Diphenhydramine can also cause sleepiness. The product is not recommended for use in children under the age of six[6] where it has caused fatalities.[7][8] In 2014, the FDA posted a warning about swallowing Benadryl gel products that were meant to be used topically. The warning stated that the relatively high levels of diphenhydramine in the gel could cause confusion and loss of consciousness.[9][10]
References [ edit ]Quote
After discussions going on I have tweaked the bitasset FDIC system so the hardfork will be slightly different than we see in this release. In fact, we may want to push the hard-fork back a few days so that all the issues can be worked out.
2. Delegates, publish your price feeds.
Refer bytemaster's post about price feeds:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=6306.0
0.4.1: Fixes missed blocks problem due to hardfork changes.*This is a version only for delegates, exchanges, and seed nodes.*Updates from bytemaster:Download and build from:Suggestions:1. Active Delegate, be careful and make sure you are producing blocks during upgrading.Change Log- [EXCHANGES] wallet_transfer API now returns a wallet_transaction_record which includes the transaction ID- Database will re-index on launch- Market has been overhauled and market-pegged BitAssets have been added- Max block size increased from 2560 bytes to 51200 bytes- Transaction size limit has been removed- Size-based transaction fee requirement has been removed- Wallet will no longer automatically relock if it contains any enabled delegates- Chain server mode has been added to allow for improved initial syncing speeds- Block and transaction broadcasting fixes- General syncing fixes- NTP initialization fixes- Miscellaneous fixes and improvementsAbout
Warlizard Gaming Forum is a fictitious online community frequently referenced by trolls on Reddit, more specifically, in replying to any post or comment submitted by Redditor Warlizard on the site. A typical iteration of the joke begins with Warlizard submitting a reply in the comment section of a post, to which another Redditor would chime in by asking the user “are you from the Warlizard Gaming Forum?”
Origin
On August 11th, 2009, the Warlizard Reddit account was created. On May 28th, 2010, Warlizard participated in an "ask me anything" (AMA) thread on the /r/IAmA subreddit, garnering 630 votes (86% upvoted) and upwards of 840 comments prior to being archived. On the following day, he created the /r/warlizard subreddit. In March 2011, the book The Warlizard Chronicles: Adventures with Vodka, Women & War by Warlizard was released on Amazon. On April 25th, Redditor makesyougooglethings asked Warlizard if he was "from the Warlizard Gaming Forum" in the comments for a post on the /r/politics subreddit (shown below).
Spread
On August 12th, 2011, Redditor lupin96 confessed to Warlizard in a comment on /r/gaming that he spent the past three months asking if he was "from the Warlizard Forums" using various novelty accounts. That day, Warlizard submitted the confession to the /r/bestof subreddit, where it gathered upwards of 1,000 votes (89% upvoted) and 250 comments prior to being archived.
On March 13th, 2012, YouTuber Official Black Dynamite uploaded a video titled "Reddit AMA – Warlizard," in which several women discuss their careers while laying in bed next to a black mannequin (shown below). On December 2nd, 2013, On March 14th, 2014, the Warlizard Gaming Forum website was launched.
Search Interest
External ReferencesDetective Grimoire has been called to investigate a murder. The owner of a small tourist attraction, found deep within the heart of the marshes, seemingly killed by the very mythical creature his attraction is based around... Explore the surrounding area, inspect the scene of the crime, grill the suspects, solve puzzles, search for clues and uncover the secret of the swamp!
Features
A mixture of investigating and puzzle gameplay, designed with mouse/touch in mind
Assemble Grimoire's thoughts to reach conclusions about the case
A fully voiced and animated cast of characters to interrogate
Beautiful digitally painted environments to explore
Award nominated original orchestral soundtrack
“Detective Grimoire is a better detective game than the likes of, say, L.A. Noire [...] The designers knew what they wanted the game to be and ensure that nothing got in the way of it. As a result, it’s thoroughly enjoyable”
Indie Statik
“Definitely one of the better crime games I've played and it's a treat to experience”
8/10 – Pocket Gamer
“From the moment you set foot on the docks, Boggy’s Bog is engrossing, its characters alive and endearing”
4.5/5 – GameZeboEvery now and then, the Earth experiences a so-called “supereruption,” wherein a caldera (cauldron) volcano containing a vast magma chamber bursts and releases around 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of magma into the environment. Supereruptions have devastating effects, causing enormous tsunamis, searing the land around them with immense pyroclastic flows, and often plunging the Earth into a volcanic winter, causing significant global temperature drops. Although there is not much we can do about these gargantuan beasts erupting, scientists have now found a way to track how fast their magma chambers fill up before they explode. Bad news: it’s incredibly fast, taking no more than 500 years. The new study is published in Geology.
Magma chambers, including the ones hiding beneath supervolcanoes, are traditionally thought of as being permanently molten, but recent work shows that they likely spend most of their life as crystal “mushes” that activate when a new, gas-filled magma source intrudes into the chamber, re-heating and re-melting it. The average time taken for these magma chambers to pool, become molten and be able to erupt (sometimes referred to as becoming “active”) has been hotly debated in the scientific community, although estimates have ranged from hundreds to millions of years.
A new team of geoscientists has identified what they call a “geospeedometer” allowing them to identify the “activation time” of these huge magma chambers. Tiny quartz crystals grow within the magma as it pools inside chambers; as these crystallize out of the magma as it cools, they trap small inclusions of melted rock. These are initially round, but over time, when the crystal is adrift in hot magma, these diffuse and change shape, eventually taking on the form of the polygonal crystal they’re residing in. This transformation process is, however, interrupted if the magma erupts and rapidly cools.
Using a technique called 3D X-Ray tomography, the researchers could measure the shape of the inclusions with incredible precision, allowing them to work out how long the magma had been pooling for. The team then used this technique to look at the quartz melt inclusions within the magma of four supereruptions that took place between 760,000 and 27,000 years ago. Troublingly, they found that the time between the formation of active magma and the eventual supereruption was no longer than 500 years.
This has some worrying implications. Yellowstone caldera is perhaps the most infamous supervolcano: sitting in Wyoming, America, it covers 240 square kilometers (93 square miles) of land, meaning it can only be seen properly from low-Earth orbit. Its three most recent supereruptions were 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago, meaning that it erupts catastrophically every 650,000 years or so.
Although there is a large margin of error on this, this could mean that the next supereruption from Yellowstone is due in the next 10,000 years. However, the ground there is rising by an average of 7.6 centimeters (3 inches) each year, indicating that magma is still entering the subterranean chamber.Just two hours ago, electro prodigy Porter Robinson asked his fans on facebook to share his upcoming Language Tour, with the reward being one of 4 bootleg tracks up for a vote. In just under 22 minutes, the fb post exceeded Porter’s expectations reaching over 400 shares. Ask and you shall receive. As a way to give back for the overwhelming response, the generous American producer decided to give away all 4 bootleg/mashups, that would normally only be heard at one of his many live shows. Download all four on mediafire, or individually below.
’Porter Robinson |
dropping temperatures have caused areas that thawed over the past two days to refreeze.
Roesler said blowing snow has made some roads impassable and tow truck drivers are unable to get to stranded motorists.
"Vehicle occupants are being brought to areas of safety and their vehicles will be recovered when the weather breaks," he said.
The sheriff asked that drivers "avoid or minimize travel."
Lynn Moore is a reporter for MLive Muskegon Chronicle. Email her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter and Facebook.Torontonians fasten your seatbelts. The Uber-taxi debate is revving up as the city’s licensing staff prepare to release proposed regulations for cabs and ride-sharing services operating in Toronto.
Ian Black, general manager of Uber Canada, says it’s “too soon” to discuss whether Uber would leave Toronto if the city imposes restrictive regulations. ( Richard Lautens / Toronto Star )
On Tuesday, Uber Canada made a pre-emptive move by announcing a public-relations campaign, including an online petition, asking Toronto residents to urge city councillors to support “smart” and “progressive” ride-sharing regulations. Ian Black, the company’s general manager, stressed the campaign is a “positive” one, that emphasizes how Uber, specifically the UberX service, helps reduce congestion and emissions while providing rides for hire in areas of the city, such as Jane and Finch, “previously ignored by transit and by traditional transportation options.” The aim is also to send a message “what is at stake if city council gets this wrong,” Black told a news conference at the company’s Adelaide St. headquarters. Uber has more than 500,000 regular users in Toronto.
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“It’s worth noting that those on the other side of the issue want to protect the status quo and put the interests of a few ahead of our city’s future.” “Smart” means a regulatory regime that’s different than the one regulating the taxi industry, since most UberX drivers are only behind the wheel between five and 10 hours a week, he said. “We’ve heard quite good feedback, we’ve heard that city council does have an appetite to move forward and create positive regulations.” Black added it’s “too soon” to discuss whether Uber would leave Toronto if the city imposes regulations that “really restrict the model in some way.” The city’s licensing committee is set to review the staff report in April ahead of council’s vote in May.
Representatives of the taxi industry said Black’s insistence that the city give Uber its own set of rules, is “ludicrous.” “Why would Uber get special treatment?” said Rita Smith, executive director of the Toronto Taxi Alliance.
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“The idea that we would diminish safety regulations because most Uber drivers only drive five or 10 hours a week flies in the face of everything the industry has done and municipalities have done... to protect passengers,” she said Tuesday. The taxi industry’s position is simple. “Whatever they come out with, if it’s identically the same for the cab industry as it is for Uber, the cab industry will compete,” she said.
Read more about:Image copyright EPA Image caption Natalia Ponce de Leon showed her face for the first time at the signing, after undergoing at least 20 operations
Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos has signed a law that imposes tougher sentences on the perpetrators of acid attacks.
Anyone convicted of such crimes will now serve between 12 and 50 years in jail.
Acid attacks have become a major concern in Colombia over the past decade.
About 100 people - most of them women - are estimated to be targeted every year.
The attackers can be male or female, ranging from disgruntled neighbours to jealous partners.
The law had been approved by the Senate in November.
The enacting ceremony at the presidential palace in Bogota was attended by several victims of acid attacks.
'Absurd attacks'
Among them was Natalia Ponce de Leon, after whom the new law was named.
She became a high profile campaigner after having her face and other parts of her body disfigured by sulphuric acid in March 2014.
She was targeted by a neighbour, Jonathan Vega, who had become obsessed with her and got angry after having his advances rejected.
"The new law helps remedy a big legal loophole and will help prevent the absurd attacks that so many of us have suffered," said Ms Ponce.
Image copyright EPA Image caption Mr Santos praised Natalia Ponce for her courage and strength
Image copyright EPA Image caption The vast majority of victims of acid attacks in Colombia are women
Mr Santos praised the fight of the victims for their rights and for new legislation.
"We don't want to see more people destroyed," he said at the ceremony.
Under the new law, those who "use any type of chemical agent" to hurt someone will be jailed for between 12 and 20 years, but the sentence can increase to up to 50 years in prison for those who permanently disfigure their victim.
Previously, acid attacks fell under the category of physical aggression, such as beatings, and sentences were relatively short.
Until now, very few people have been convicted for such attacks.HB 1523, “Religious Liberty Accommodation Act” officially signed into law, as governor indicated he would do last week
Allows state employees, corporations, individuals, healthcare providers, and nonprofit organizations to use religion as a justification for discrimination
Mississippi’s governor Phil Bryant has officially signed House Bill 1523 into law Tuesday, paving the way for public and private businesses to refuse service to same-sex and/or transgender couples based on the employers’ religious beliefs.
The bill passed last Wednesday in the Mississippi Senate 31-17 following up from an overwhelming 80-39 approval in the House, and is widely regarded by civil rights activists and LGBT advocates as the most explicitly grotesque anti-LGBT bill in recent memory, spelling out in specific detail the myriad of ways that a person or business can actively deny civil liberties based on their presumed sexual orientation.
The bill touts its officially stated intention as one that “merely reinforces the rights which currently exist to the exercise of religious freedom as stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
Bryant officially confirmed via his twitter account with the following statement:
I have signed House Bill 1523. Full statement: pic.twitter.com/00DbgQADFt — Phil Bryant (@PhilBryantMS) April 5, 2016
This is, of course, an extremely glossy way of describing a bill that would allow churches, religious charities and privately held businesses to decline services to peoples whose lifestyle violates their personal religious beliefs.
This is part of a growing and alarming trend of using “religious liberties” as a code for legalized discrimination. Similar legislation has passed in North Carolina, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Missouri over the past month.
As we previously noted when the bill passed in the Senate, the bill among other infringements of civil liberties stipulates the following:
The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:
(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;
(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and
(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.
(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and (c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth. Religious organizations can decline to solemnize any marriage or provide any services related to recognizing that marriage.
Religious organizations can refuse to hire, fire, and discipline employees for violating the organization’s religious beliefs.
Religious organizations can choose not to sell, rent, or otherwise provide shelter.
Religious organizations that provide foster or adoptive services can decline service without risking their state subsidies.
Any foster or adoptive parent can impose their religious beliefs on their children.
Any person can choose not to provide treatment, counseling, or surgery related to gender transition or same-sex parenting.
Any person (including any business) can choose not to provide services for any marriage ceremony or occasion that involves recognizing a marriage, including:
Photography
Poetry
Videography
Disc-Jockey Services
Wedding Planning
Printing
Publishing
Floral Arrangements
Dress Making
Cake or Pastry Artistry
Assembly-Hall or Other Wedding-Venue Rentals
Limousine or Other Car-Service Rentals
Jewelry Sales And Services
Any person can establish “sex-specific standards or policies concerning employee or student dress or grooming,” and can manage the access of restrooms and other sex-segregated facilities.
Any state employee can openly express their beliefs without consequence.
Any state employee can choose not to authorize or license legal marriages by recusing themselves from those duties.
Protect Thy Neighbor, a project of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, outlined the many hypothetical situations for how this discrimination could legally be permitted, among them an adoption agency refusing to place a child with a family if the parents lived together before they were married, a counselor refusing to help an LGBT teen who called a suicide hotline, a car rental agency refusing to rent a car to a same-sex couple for use on their honeymoon, and a private sector company firing a woman for wearing pants.
According to the bill’s primary author, Senator Jenifer Branning, “This isn’t a bill to allow any type of discrimination at all. As a matter of fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s about protecting the religious freedom of those who don’t feel they can with a clean conscience assist a same-sex couple.”
In response, the American Civil Liberties Union released the following statement:
“This is a sad day for the state of Mississippi and for the thousands of Mississippians who can now be turned away from businesses, refused marriage licenses, or denied housing, essential services and needed care based on who they are. This bill flies in the face of the basic American principles of fairness, justice and equality and will not protect anyone’s religious liberty. Far from protecting anyone from ‘government discrimination’ as the bill claims, it is an attack on the citizens of our state, and it will serve as the Magnolia State’s badge of shame.”
Injustice.in strongly condemns this legislation and urges that the states and businesses rallying against North Carolina’s discriminatory legislation apply similar pressure in Mississippi.
It wouldn’t hurt to also win some GOP-held state legislatures this November, too.About 300 people took part in a massive snowball fight Friday evening at McGill University.
The event was the idea of two McGill students, Derrick Linker and Marti Jasper Moshfeghi, who posted it on Facebook.
“What we had in mind was the stress-relief. We ourselves were pretty stressed about finals at the moment and we don’t have time to do something like a snowball fight. This is just a very good way to have one big snowball fight at once,” Moshfeghi told CBC Radio One’s Homerun host Sue Smith while the snowball fight was happening.
The city is covered in about 30 centimetres of fresh snow from a weather system hanging over Montreal this past week.
Both said they were surprised to see hundreds show up at the campus in downtown Montreal.
“There are hordes of people throwing snowballs at each other, having a lot of fun, looking like they’re relieving the stress from exams,” Linker said.
“We have Concordia students, Université de Montréal students, McGill students. It’s amazing,” added Moshfeghi.
The pair say the snowball fight spontaneously turned into a battle between two teams.
“We lay no rules down for this one. People just formed two teams and split into two parallel sections and they’re just slamming against each other. It’s amazing!” Moshfeghi said.Jennifer Walters Becomes the Hulk in New Ongoing Series!
Jennifer Walters Becomes the Hulk in New Ongoing Series!
Jennifer Walters has made it out of the Civil War, but not unscathed. Coming this December, she will rise from the rubble, re-entering the world changed in the all-new HULK #1. Eisner Award-winning writer Mariko Tamaki (This One Summer) makes her Marvel debut alongside rising star artist Nico Leon (Spider-Man) to chronicle the ongoing adventures of Jennifer Walters – and bring you a Hulk book for Marvel NOW! the likes of which you’ve never seen before!
Following the traumatic events of Civil War II, Jen is determined to move forward, so that she can go on with her life. But, under the surface a quiet rage is bubbling up. The physical and mental wounds are still fresh within her and the pain of the past and all she’s lost is always there – an undercurrent, a pulse, waiting to quicken and trigger her transformation into the one thing she doesn’t have control over…the HULK!
Jennifer Walters’ greatest battle is about to begin. One that will pit her against the monster inside. Can she control the rage that consumed her cousin Bruce for so long? Or will she succumb to it? Find out when Tamaki and Leon bring you the can’t-miss HULK #1 this December!
More from Bounding Into Comics
(Visited 447 times, 1 visits today)WASHINGTON — Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, the upper chamber’s staunchest conservative on halting illegal immigration, hit back at the Obama administration for considering to send illegal alien minors to his home state.
“Our governor has spoken clearly on this. He opposes this. We don’t need to be spending all this money to carry out this twisted agenda under this administration, so I do oppose it, and we’ll see what happens but basically it will be up to the governor. I’ll be reviewing and see what action I might take,” Sessions told The Daily Caller Tuesday.
Alabama.com reported the Obama administration proposed to look at two rural “underutilized” Naval fields by Silverhill and Orange Beach as potential sites to house unaccompanied minors who come to the United States illegally.
Local officials believe the plan is retribution for Sessions’ stance against the administration’s lax immigration policies.
“It’s highly probable that this is more political than practical,” Baldwin County Commissioner Chris Elliott told Alabama.com.
“I hope that is not the case. The polls I’ve seen is Alabama is very conservative on the immigration issue. The federal government is not,” said Baldwin County Sheriff Huey Mack.
Sessions agreed, telling TheDC, “I would hope it’s not a personal shot at me, but I think it’s a definite indication that they’re searching all over the country to find housing for people who are unlawfully here and should for the most already been deported.”
Sessions added, “We had a border patrol association head testify last month in another hearing and he said he believed they caught about 50 percent of the people trying to enter the United States — border patrol does, illegally. They catch about half of them and of that, half they catch 80 percent are released in the country on some sort of bail or some sort of hearing.”
Follow Kerry on TwitterBringing Socialism from the Margins to the Mainstream
by Joseph M. Schwartz, DSA National Political Committee, July 2017
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—and its two predecessor organizations, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM)—had their origins in the early 1970s, at the beginning of a long-term rightward shift of U.S. and global politics. This shift to the right—symbolized by the triumph in the 1980s of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—somewhat overshadowed the central role these organizations played in the movements of resistance to corporate domination, as well as in today’s ongoing project: organizing an ideological and organizational socialist presence among trade union, community, feminist and people of color and other activists.
DSA made an ethical contribution to the broader American Left by being one of the few radical organizations born out of a merger rather than a split. DSA also helped popularize the vision of an ecumenical, multi-tendency socialist organization, an ethos that enabled it to recently incorporate recently many thousands of new members, mostly out of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. If you are committed to a pluralist, democratic conception of a just society then you can join DSA’s collective project, regardless of your position (or lack thereof) on some arcane split in socialist history, or even whether you believe in the possibility of independent electoral work inside or outside the Democratic Party ballot line.
The Founding of DSA Through the Merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM)
We were 6,000 strong at the time of merger in spring 1982. Before the merger, both DSOC and NAM had made modest but significant contributions to the trade union, community organizing and feminist movements, as well as to rebuilding a left-labor coalition within and without the Democratic Party. Though shaped by distinct cultural and historical experiences, most members of both organizations had come to the same political conclusions: an American socialist movement must be committed to democracy as an end in itself and work as an open, independent socialist organization in anti-corporate, racial justice and feminist coalitions with non-socialist progressives.
DSOC, founded in 1973 when a defeated anti-Vietnam War wing split from the remnants of the Debsian Socialist Party, grew in less than a decade from a small cadre of a few hundred to an organization of nearly 5,000. It had a significant network among trade union and left Democratic Party activists as well as a rapidly growing, predominantly campus-based Youth Section.
Unlike DSOC, the New American Movement, founded in 1971, had its origins not in a wing of the Old Left but in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the socialist-feminist women’s unions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Founded by a talented core of New Left veterans fleeing the sectarian excesses of late SDS and graduating from campus to community politics, NAM focused on building a grassroots “revolutionary democratic socialist-feminist” presence in local struggles around issues such as affordable housing, reproductive freedom and utility rate reform. NAM not only played an important role in the reproductive rights movement, but also helped the Left reconceptualize the relationship between race, gender and class.
DSOC’s greatest political contribution undoubtedly lay in making real Michael Harrington’s vision of building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the “new politics” left-liberals in the McGovern wing of the Democrats.
The history of the 1960s and early 1970s had made the concept suspect: how could a labor movement led by pro-war, socially conservative George Meany, which had implicitly supported Richard Nixon over George McGovern in the 1972 presidential race, unite with middle-class, anti-war and “new politics” activists who often dismissed the entire labor movement as bureaucratic, anti-democratic, sexist and racist? And how could activists of color and feminists trust labor leaders or mainstream Democrats who urged these social movements not to rock the boat by militantly demanding an equal voice at the table? Harrington envisioned uniting the constituencies of the three Georges (Meany, McGovern and Wallace) and getting feminists, trade unionists and black, Latino and socialist activists in the same room talking politics. It seemed utopian, if not naive, in 1973. But by the late 1970s, partly because of the success of the DSOC-inspired Democratic Agenda, coalition politics had become a mantra among trade unionists, activists in communities of color, feminists and the LGBTQ community.
Democratic Agenda began as the Democracy ’76 project. DSOC put together a labor-left coalition to fight for a real commitment to full employment at the 1976 Democratic Convention. The project, which gave headaches to Carter operatives at the nominating convention, foreshadowed the political divisions of Carter’s presidency. After the election of 1976, Democracy ’76 evolved into Democratic Agenda, which picked up active support from the leadership of such unions as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the United Auto Workers and the Machinists, as well as from feminists, activists in communities of color and left activists in and around the Democratic Party.
The height of Democratic Agenda’s influence came in the spring of 1978 when, at the Democratic Party mid-term convention, it got 40 percent of the conference vote for resolutions rejecting the Carter administration’s abandonment of the fight for full employment and for efforts to curtail the power of Big Oil. In the spring of 1979, Machinists Union President (and DSOC Vice-Chair) William Winpisinger announced a “Draft [Senator Ted] Kennedy” movement. The coalition brought together by Democratic Agenda reached its fullest political expression in that campaign, although it was ultimately unsuccessful.
The founding leaders of NAM and DSOC could not have constructed a merger on their own. NAM’s New Left veterans, nurtured by the “anti-anti-Communist politics” of the anti-Vietnam War movement, could not accept the left-wing anti-Communism of DSOC’s founding leadership (an anti-communism formed in anti-Stalinist struggles). Conversely, many of DSOC’s leaders could not understand the refusal of some NAM leaders to recognize opposition to authoritarian communism as a central moral obligation of democratic socialists. Not surprisingly, the two most sticky issues in the merger talks focused on the organization’s ideological positions on communism and the Middle East. Interestingly enough, few members have since questioned the organization’s principled opposition to authoritarian regimes of all stripes nor the need for a viable, independent Palestinian state and a cutoff of U.S. military aid to Israel to promote complete and unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories.
The infusion of newer members in both camps spurred the merger process. DSOC’s younger activists, many of them students, some veterans of the Gene McCarthy and McGovern campaigns, found NAM’s emphasis on grassroots activism and socialist-feminism inspiring. In NAM, former communists, many of whom had joined in the mid-1970s, agreed with DSOC’s emphasis on coalition work with non-socialists and valued DSOC’s greater national visibility.
Joint work on Democratic Agenda and on mobilizing for an anti-draft march in Washington (where 40,000 people called for an end to both the military draft and the economic draft based on mass inner-city unemployment) led to a decrease in mutual suspicions. In December of 1980, DSOC put the accomplishments of European social democracy on display in Washington, D.C., at a 3,000-person conference on “Eurosocialism and America: An International Exchange” featuring Olof Palme, François Mitterrand, Michel Rocard, Michael Manley and Willy Brandt, among scores of others. The conference’s emphasis on the struggle for greater worker control over investment and production decisions convinced many in NAM that the distance between themselves and DSOC had dwindled.
DSA in the 1980s: Linking Struggles for Social Justice Abroad and at Home
When delegates from DSOC and NAM met in Detroit in March 1982 to form Democratic Socialists of America, they shared Michael Harrington’s perpetual optimism that corporate irresponsibility would give rise to popular demands for democratic control over the economy. Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric and his assaults on the women’s, civil rights and labor movements temporarily served to coalesce the American Left.
Across the globe, a new ecumenical spirit of unity and optimism pervaded the Left, centering upon a rejection of statist and authoritarian conceptions of socialism. In Europe, the French Left gained the presidency for the first time. Numerous socialist parties adopted workers’ control as a programmatic focus and developed relations with Eurocommunist parties whose members concurred that democracy and civil liberties must be central to the socialist project. In the Third World, revolutionary movements in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Zimbabwe and elsewhere searched for a third way between inegalitarian capitalist development and authoritarian communist modernization.
Little did we know that the militarist, Keynesian, indebted “economic recovery” begun in early 1983 would provide the material basis for the following decade of right-wing dominance across the world. The unequally distributed benefits of the recovery in the United States were not the only reason for a conservative presidential majority. The right successfully displaced the economic anxieties of many working- and middle-class whites into hostility toward “liberal” means-tested social welfare programs, seen as disproportionately benefiting people of color. In the United States, but also in Europe (to a lesser extent), the Right convinced a majority of the public that the causes of economic stagnation were strong unions and over-expanded public provision.
It was on this terrain—the most conservative decade in Western politics since the 1950s—that DSA would be built. At its founding, DSA consisted of almost 5,000 members from DSOC and 1,000 members from NAM. By 1983 DSA reached 8,000 members, which it would not surpass till the early 1990s. The 1980s were not easy on DSA or on the broader Left; there were many defensive battles. As the liberal coalition decomposed, DSA continued to argue that only democratic industrial, labor and trade and investment policy could restore global growth with equity.
And, we managed to help build an alternative, affirmative, democratic left program and vision. Although DSA’s refusal to endorse a Democratic Party candidate in the 1984 primary reflected the electoral Left’s split among presidential primary candidates Alan Cranston (nuclear freeze), Walter Mondale (the AFL-CIO and the National Organization for Women) and Jesse Jackson (African-Americans, some left trade unionists and independent Leftists), our work in the 1984 Democratic presidential primary built ties among labor, feminist and anti-militarist progressives that made a modest, but real, contribution to broader left unity four years later behind the stronger, second “Rainbow Coalition” Democratic primary bid in 1988 by Rev. Jesse Jackson, whom DSA endorsed early, in November 1987. Many of DSA’s policy goals—progressive taxation, cuts to wasteful “defense” spending and the need for universal social provision of quality health care, child care, education and housing—found a more powerful expression in this primary campaign, the first truly multiracial, (implicitly) social democratic one in U.S. history.
Jackson lost the nomination to Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Following their defeat by Reagan in 1988, the mass media pronounced the “L” word— liberalism—dead. It was left to socialists to speak up against the gutting of public provision through liberal social welfare programs, despite our criticisms that the liberal welfare state failed to democratize power relations and treated its beneficiaries more as “clients” than as citizens.
The Youth Section, in part thanks to the punishing speaking schedule of Michael Harrington, its indefatigable staff and the visibility of then Co-Chair Barbara Ehrenreich and many others, showed the most “counter-cyclical” growth in the organization through much of the 1980s. The Youth Section played a significant role in both the anti-apartheid and anti-intervention in Central America movements, linking the struggles for social justice abroad with the struggle for social justice at home. And it helped introduce scores of student activists to trade union struggles, with our campus-labor institutes enabling many of our Youth Section alums to go on to make impressive contributions as labor organizers and union staffers.
DSA’s presence among progressive trade unionists and the movements for a democratic U.S. foreign policy allowed us to play an initiating role in the large labor-led, anti-apartheid/anti-intervention marches held in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco in 1987. By linking these struggles with the fight for democratic trade union rights at home and abroad, DSA contributed to the growth in awareness on the Left of the importance of international labor solidarity.
In the fall of 1987, in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America, a DSA-inspired coalition, Justice for All, held rallies, teach-ins and press conferences in more than a hundred cities across the nation. Protesting cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and federal aid to housing, the events also reminded the public of many of the successes of the Great Society (for example, Head Start, Medicaid, public health centers and a radical decrease in poverty among the elderly because of the expansion of Social Security). The DSA office hummed with the sound of organizing.
DSA in the 1990s: Support for Medicare for All; Opposition to Austerity, Welfare “Reform,” and Neoliberal Globalization
Our argument that democratic public provision increases social justice and efficiency took on a new level of public visibility in the early 1990s when DSA made the struggle for a universal health care system (modeled on the Canadian “single-payer” system) its major national priority. We helped build the “single-payer” or “Medicare for All” movement as an alternative to the Clintons’ failed plan to expand coverage by the private insurance system. The high moment of our campaign was a multi-city tour by Canadian health care providers, trade unionists and health care advocates who explained the Canadian system to U.S. audiences.
The collapse of communism in 1989 proved less of an immediate boon to democratic socialists than many of us had hoped. Those who had suffered in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union did not embrace socialism with a human face, but rushed headlong into the embrace of a mythic, free market capitalism. And the failures of capitalist reforms did not revitalize the Left so much as increase support for xenophobic nationalism.
In the short run, however, the mass media’s trumpeting of the end of history and the final triumph of capitalism may have driven many unaffiliated socialists to stand up and be counted. Our direct mail campaigns in the early to mid-1990s boosted membership from 7,000 to 10,000. Thousands responded to DSA’s argument that the collapse of communism (a critical gain for democracy) in no way justifies the blatant injustices of capitalism nor ends the struggle against them. And perhaps more would have joined if Michael Harrington had lived beyond the collapse of the Berlin Wall to be able to articulate, in accessible language, why the collapse of an authoritarian system that democratic socialists had always opposed did not refute the socialist project.
Harrington never wanted DSA to be overly reliant on him, but we all understand our debt to him as his generation’s most effective voice for socialism in the United States. DSA continued to grow without him, but a new nationally recognized spokesperson for democratic socialism would later appear—Bernie Sanders.
The Clinton administration’s commitment to balanced-budget austerity, plus its support for the North American Free Trade Agreement and for the gutting of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) foreshadowed the move of center-left governments to what British Prime Minister Tony Blair would term “third way” social democracy. This neoliberal program of economic deregulation (particularly of finance), decrease in taxes on the rich and corporations, decimation of union power and defunding of public goods (particularly means-tested anti-poverty programs), became the dominant policy of social democratic parties in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
While many liberal organizations tepidly opposed Clinton’s welfare reform (which yielded a radical increase in child poverty over the next 20 years), DSA organized strongly against it. In addition, the Youth Section (which changed its name to Young Democratic Socialists in 1997) founded the “Prison Moratorium Project,” one of the earliest anti-mass incarceration efforts in the age of the New Jim Crow. In the late 1990s many YDS and DSA chapters participated actively in the “global justice” movement to build transnational solidarity, as well as institutions, that would democratize the benefits of a global economy.
DSA turned much of its attention in the late 1990s to working closely with the Congressional Progressive Caucus and local global justice groups to oppose the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). This proposed international treaty, which would have stripped national governments of the right to legislate democratic controls over the behavior of foreign investment capital, foreshadowed President Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. By 1999 a new global Left appeared to be forming, with progressive unions and socialists joining with younger more anarchist-oriented protesters to take on the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.
DSA 2000-2015: Opposition to War; Support for the Economic Justice Agenda, Occupy and Racial and Gender Justice
But 9/11/2001 would change all that, as the Bush administration deployed the “war on terror” as a means to quash any forms of anti-imperialist or anti-corporate protests. DSA actively participated in the anti-Iraq and Afghanistan war movement, with Young Democratic Socialists playing a significant role within it. But once ground troops (recruited for a volunteer army in a class- and racially-biased manner) were committed to Afghanistan and Iraq, the movement found it hard to convince the public that you cannot fight decentralized terrorist threats by massive military means.
DSA can take some solace from the role it played in the Bush II era in building massive opposition to the bipartisan efforts of the Bush administration and the Wall Street wing of the Democrats to forge a “Grand Compromise.” The compromise aimed to use long-term cuts in Social Security and Medicare to secure lower taxes on corporations and to achieve “fiscally responsible” budget deficit reduction. DSA brought into this work an alternative vision of an “Economic Justice Agenda” (EJA), which chapters popularized through local Congressional and state legislative hearings. In retrospect, the EJA prefigured the program of the 2016 Sanders campaign. The agenda called for creating a truly progressive tax system so as to redistribute from the 1% to the 99%, expanding universal social welfare programs and engaging in large-scale public investment in alternative energy and mass transit. But the Bush II era saw the left and DSA playing defense to prevent attacks on existing universal social welfare programs. Bipartisan elites dominated the mainstream media with obsessive calls for “fiscal discipline” and public spending cuts.
DSA After the Great Recession
The bipartisan elite consensus around budgetary austerity crashed and burned with the Great Recession of 2008, a direct product of the neoliberal model of growth through financial and real estate speculation. Just as DSA grew through its opposition to the neoliberal Democratic Clinton agenda in the 1990s, by 2010, frustration with the Obama administration’s moderate program gave rise to the first significant growth in DSA chapter activity in over a decade. This growth was in part aided by a revival in YDS activity from 2006 onwards and the graduation of some of this cohort into DSA chapter leadership. The Occupy Movement of fall 2011 resulted, in part, from the failure of the administration’s recovery program to redress the rampant growth in inequality and the bleak employment prospects for even college-educated youth. Many DSA and YDS chapters joined Occupy from Day One. In a few major cities, the predominant “horizontalist” and “anti-statist” youthful leadership of the encampments meant DSAers (young and old) had to operate with considerable skill to appeal to the newly politicized participants (as DSA does take the question of who holds state power seriously). But DSA grew among activists who realized that the occupation itself was a tactic, while building a mass movement for economic democracy involved long-term movement and institution building. At the same time, DSA groups became heavily involved in movements for a living wage and for a path to citizenship for undocumented peoples.
But while DSA and YDS did win to their ranks a stratum among this renewed radical cohort, the organization still stood at 6500 members in 2012, with DSA having ten or so moderately strong locals and a similar number of campus groups. The New Left veterans who had built DSA were now aging into their 60s, and often DSA gatherings would have very few people present between the ages of 25 and 60. But we were able to mount a national student debt campaign that helped bring the issue into mainstream electoral politics. At the 2013 and 2015 conventions the organization also reiterated the centrality of racial justice struggles to socialist organizing, with a good number of chapters supporting #Black Lives Matter and fighting against mass incarceration and for equitable urban public education. In addition, our Socialist-Feminist Working Group helped numerous locals raise tens of thousands of dollars for the National Network of Abortion Funds through participation in their annual bowl-a-thon fundraisers (with DSA teams taking such names as “Bowlsheviks,” “Jacopins” and “The General Strike”).
DSA: Bernie and Beyond
But the levelling off of organizational growth in the 2000s would all change with DSA’s decision in late 2014 to make its number one priority the movement to support Bernie Sanders running for president. DSA took the position that for maximum exposure and effectiveness, Sanders should not only run, but should run in the Democratic primaries—and that advice proved to be spot-on. We started out with a coordinated “We Need Bernie” campaign that had DSA urging Bernie to run, and then shifted to “People’s Revolution 101” DSA-sponsored teach-ins that introduced Bernie activists to basic democratic socialist principles. As a result, DSA grew healthily through the Sanders campaign, going from 6,500 members in fall 2014 to 8,500 by election day 2016.
DSA made clear that Bernie’s New Deal or social democratic program did not fulfill the socialist aim of establishing worker and social ownership of the economy. But in the context of 40 years of oligarchic rule, Sanders’ program proved sufficiently radical and inspiring. (Sanders made clear that he opposed state ownership of corporations, but no mainstream reporter was astute enough to know that the particular socialist tradition that Sanders came out of favored worker, not state ownership, of most firms.) DSA also worked in the campaign to reach out to organizations rooted in communities of color and to feminists, as those were the two constituencies most needed to broaden out Bernie’s base among millennials and white working-class Democratic primary voters.
Bernie’s refusal to abandon his democratic socialist identity, and his clear position that only by building mass social movements could you change power relations, gave his campaign a clear class-struggle character. Polls indicated that the majority of people under 40 had a more favorable view of socialism than of capitalism. DSA’s visibility grew, amid the press noting the increasingly favorable attitude towards “socialism” (for some a vague desire for a more egalitarian society, akin to Sanders’ Denmark examples). Curious Sanders supporters Googling “democratic socialism” found DSA’s web page coming up first. Many in DSA had hoped that a Hillary Clinton victory would allow DSA to help lead an anti-neoliberal Democrat opposition pushing for Medicare for All, progressive taxation, stricter regulation of the financial sector, etc. Ironically, Trump’s victory drove thousands to join DSA.
DSA veterans and national staff were shocked to see that on the day after Trump’s victory one thousand people joined DSA (in our best past year maybe 1,200 new members joined over 12 months). From November 9, 2016, |
person detained under a detention warrant is not permitted to contact anyone at any time while being detained, even a family member. The only exceptions are if the detained person wants to contact persons specified in the warrant, or make a complaint to the relevant authority. The person can be questioned for up to eight hours, and that time can be extended. According to one commentator, extensions of time have been requested and granted each time, with extensions on at least five, and possibly six, occasions. A person cannot be detained for more than seven days continuously. Compare this to the powers of the AFP to detain a suspect, where the limit is generally four hours, but cannot be more than 20 hours.
The warrant must specify that the person detained can contact a lawyer of their choice but there is a curious provision that allows a veto on the person’s choice of lawyer. The veto is permitted if the authority granting the warrant is satisfied that contacting the lawyer may result in a person involved in a terrorism offence being alerted that the offence is being investigated or that a record may be destroyed, damaged or altered. This is particularly galling to me as a lawyer. If ASIO is concerned a lawyer might do something of that nature, there are professional regulations to deal with the situation.
The reforms also compel a person who is subject to these warrants to answer questions, by making it an offence not to do so. In other words, they remove the privilege against self-incrimination that otherwise is a foundation of criminal law. Evidence obtained in this manner is admissible in respect of terrorism offences, though not in respect of other types of offending. It’s also relevant to note the very limited role of the person’s lawyer (if one is appointed without veto – and there no requirement for the person’s lawyer to be present during questioning). The legal advisor must not intervene in questioning, and can be removed if found to be ‘unduly disrupting the questioning.’
In 2012, a number of academics noted that this arrangement was ‘unique in the Western democratic world in that it establishes a system whereby an intelligence agency may coercively question and detain a non-suspect citizen.’ It’s hard to see how such an extreme set of powers is actually needed. None of these warrants were issued last year. In the last seven years, only two were issued (in 2010 and 2006), and 11 of the last 16 were issued in 2005.
The 2003 reforms also allowed the detention of minors between 16 and 18 years old, against the recommendations made by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD and the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee. The Convention on the Rights of the Child permits detention of children only as a matter of last resort and for the shortest possible period of time. Australia is already in breach of this requirement in respect of minors held in immigration detention (especially unaccompanied minors, for whom the minister is guardian). This was extended to anyone under the 2003 reforms.
With approval, minors are also able to be strip searched, including using such force as is necessary and reasonable. The bill at one time permitted strip searching of anyone over 10 years of age, but this was raised to 16 years of age.
Round 1
In this context, ASIO and friends will very shortly have a general immunity from civil and criminal liability when carrying out special intelligence operations. Save for some limited exceptions, any participant in a special intelligence operation – or SIO – will not have to face justice if they break the law. A SIO is basically just an operation that been approved as such (s 35C(2)) – there is no requirement that the substance of the operation is particularly secret or time sensitive, or that there is an imminent risk to life or health. Indeed the defining characteristic seems to be that an SIO is an operation where ASIO is going to be breaking the law (s 34B).
It will be an offence for any person to disclose information about a special intelligence operation punishable by five years jail (s 35P). If the disclosure endangers health or safety or prejudices the effective conduct of an SIO, the jail term rises to ten years. There are no public interest exceptions.
This bill also has a range of provisions relating to warrants. ASIO is permitted to apply for a warrant to access a computer, and, controversially, the definition of computer is about to change. Currently, ‘computer’ means a computer, a computer system or part of a computer system. When this bill becomes law, computer will be defined as one or more computers, computer systems, computer networks or any combination of these.
Round 2
The second set of amendments deals with so-called foreign fighters. The bill creates all sorts of new provisions under the Criminal Code, including an offence of advocating terrorism (s 80.2C), while extending control orders, preventative detention provisions and prohibitive contact orders.
The bill also creates a large number of new offences punishable by life imprisonment. Any Australian citizen or visa holder who is found to have engaged in a hostile activity in that or any other foreign country, or who enters a foreign country with the intention of doing so can be imprisoned for life (s 199.1(1)). (I was a bit worried for the government that these people might be caught by the provision – but there is an exclusion if the person is serving in the armed forces of another country (s 199.1(4)).) The sentence of imprisonment for life also attaches to a range of associated offences, including engaging in preparatory acts, accumulating weapons, providing or participating in training, giving or receiving goods, allowing buildings, vessels or aircraft to be used to commit either of these two offences. Some of these offences already existed, in similar but not identical form, in the Crime (Foreign Incursions and Recruitment) Act 1978 but all had much lesser penalties.
The kicker here, and a marked change from the previous incarnation of these offences, is what actually constitutes ‘engaging in hostile activity’. The definition includes ‘the engagement, by that or any other person, in subverting society in that or any other foreign country.’ So what is it to ‘engage in subverting society’? According to the bill, it includes conduct that causes serious harm, serious damage to property, death or endangers life and conduct that creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public. Troublingly, it also includes conduct that seriously interferes with, disrupts, or destroys, an electronic system.
This is very broad. An electronic system can be an information system, a telecommunications system, a financial system, a system used for the delivery of essential government services, a system used for, or by, an essential public utility and a system used for, or by, a transport system.
There is an exception for advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action. But arguably, denial of service attacks and even potentially mass Snowden or Manning-type leaks could fall foul of these provisions. It is interesting to ponder whether a court would find that they satisfied any of the exceptions.
You can also face ten years in prison for entering or remaining in an area of a foreign country that the foreign minister has declared to be a place where a listed terrorist organisation is engaging in a hostile activity. This provision has exceptions but the evidential burden falls to the individual to raise these exceptions.
Under s 3ZZAA and s 3ZZCA, the AFP will be able to apply for a delayed notification search warrant, which authorises the entry and search of premises without them having to produce the warrant at the time of entry and search. Again, it would be interesting to know how or why this provision was being used. But that’s unlikely to happen, given that disclosing information about a delayed notification search warrant is also an offence, punishable by two years imprisonment (s 3ZZHA).
It’s also curious to note that under the bill, persons who might prejudice the security of Australia or a foreign country may lose family assistance, parental leave payments and social security payments. This can happen if the Minister for Foreign Affairs or the Minister for Immigration issues a security notice. The Minister for Foreign Affairs can issue such a notice if the minister has cancelled the person’s passport. The Minister for Immigration may issue such a notice if the person has been given an adverse security assessment. There is no ability to obtain reasons for this decision – that means in practice ƒdit is unreviewable.
The increasingly broad effects of an adverse security assessment by ASIO is a very concerning trend. If you are an asylum seeker, you can lose your liberty (indefinitely); if you are a visa holder, you can lose your visa; if you are a citizen, you can lose your passport. Now you and your family may also lose tax and social security benefits.
ASIO is making decisions about security assessments without reference to the consequences of such an assessment. That is, ASIO just issues the assessment and the government determines what flows from it. But this creates an accountability vacuum. ASIO must make mistakes. Indeed, they often base decisions on contradictory and diffuse information. Such is the nature of intelligence gathering. But the Minister for Immigration has never given a visa to a refugee who has had an adverse security assessment (though one has been granted to a refugee who had such an assessment in the past). The failure to offer any proper form of review for ministerial decisions that are made as a result of adverse security assessments represents a significant increase in the seriousness of these assessments without any correlating checks and balances.
Round 3
Data retention has already been promised as next on this list of reforms. It will be interesting to see how this is received by the public and the press, given the negative reaction when it was floated by the last Labor government.
What’s next?
Law enforcement agencies are getting more powers to prosecute crimes. The terror fever means that powers associated with terrorism are finding their way into our social security system and establishing themselves more fully in an immigration context. ASIO is increasingly being given powers that are commonly reserved for law enforcement agencies, despite enforcement not being one of the functions of the organisation. Basically, the building blocks of our democratic system are being attacked in the name of terrorism. We have to resist and demand repeal.He has wealth and possessions beyond his wildest dreams.
But that did not stop Angelina Jolie giving Brad Pitt a rare watch said to be worth more than $3 million as a wedding gift.
The saucy Maleficent actress bought her man a much coveted 1952 Patek Philippe platinum chronometer, a legendary design by one of the most respected of all Swiss watchmakers.
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Just what he Wanted: Brad Pitt will have been delighted to have been gifted a rare watch as a wedding gift from Angelina Jolie
Angelina's romantic gesture became known after she had a friend take it to shop to have it inscribed - 'To Roly from Nessa.'
The couple play these characters in drama By The Sea, a movie they are currently filming in Malta, and which the actress is also directing.
George Farrugia who runs a jewellery shop on the neighbouring island of Gozo, told The Mirror: 'I did inscribe the watch, it was for Brad and it was a rare one.
'Oh yes, it was very valuable.'
However the huge value of the watch did not faze the experienced 57-year-old.
Cheap at twice the price: Given she is worth $145m a $3m watch will have been a drop in the bucket
He said: 'I wasn’t nervous about the inscription because I knew I could do the work perfectly.'
Of course, a $3m watch is a mere drop in the ocean for the wealthy A-listers, with Brad being worth an estimated $240m and Angelina not far behind at $145m.
The happy couple wed in a lavish ceremony last month, a long awaited wedding as they have been together for nine years since Brad decided to trade in ex-wife Jennifer Aniston for the 39-year-old Tomb Raider favourite.
They have been trying to stay out the limelight while filming their latest money-spinning project, though they have taken their massive six child brood bowling in Gozo.
With his matinee idol looks fading and facing increased competition from younger heartthrobs, Brad has made the wise decision to take it easy and enjoy more time with his family.
He told GQ: 'I’ve been slowing down for a while and transitioning to other things.'At its I/O 2016 developer conference, Google announced two new messaging apps: Allo and Duo. The company is effectively doubling its number of messaging apps, which also include Hangouts and Messenger. And, at least for now, the company plans to keep them all, neither outright discontinuing nor merging any of them.
We asked Google for an explanation of how it views each of these apps. Here’s the breakdown:
Allo is a messaging app that relies on your phone number, is mobile-only, and was built specifically to leverage various Google machine learning, natural language processing, and AI features that didn’t exist just a few years ago. Think of it as the company’s playground to test the limits of what mobile messaging can be.
Duo is a video calling app for one-to-one communication, is mobile-only, and was built to be very fast, thanks to Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC). It’s supposed to result in fewer dropped calls, and even supports handoff to and from Wi-Fi and cellular.
Hangouts is a 3-year-old messaging platform that has accumulated many features over its existence, including SMS support and video calling. Its main selling point is cross-platform support across both desktop and mobile.
Messenger is Google’s carrier messaging service, the SMS app that comes standard with Android phones. The company is using it to push Rich Communication Services (RCS) so that Android phones can offer features like group messaging, IP voice calls, and file-sharing out of the box.
Keep in mind that neither Allo nor Duo is available today — both are slated to arrive this summer. All these apps are managed by the same group at Google, the Communications product team formed about a year and a half ago under vice president of product management Nick Fox.
Many will point out that Google also has Spaces, a group sharing app. But in Google’s eyes, Spaces isn’t messaging — it’s a social app, like Google+.
Google’s messaging app strategy has been confusing for years (in 2013, the company simultaneously offered Google Talk, Hangouts, and Google+ Messenger), and it’s not getting better. It’s an area the company is still trying to figure out. Meanwhile, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the top two messaging apps, with 1 billion and 900 million users, respectively.
Remember this slide from I/O 2015?
Google wishes it could include Hangouts and Messenger in its 1 billion club.
Facebook is completely dominating the space, and Google needs to experiment. Building apps from the ground up is the best way to figure out what innovations might work.
But even if you can justify Allo and Duo, there’s still frustrating overlap. Look at these two rumors, just two years apart:
Hangouts got SMS support, but then Messenger showed up in November 2014, so Hangouts now might lose SMS support. And soon Allo and Duo will join the party.
Hopefully, one day we’ll get back to just one Google messaging app. In the meantime, the company sees no problem going in the opposite direction.Benjamin Tucker, Boston Anarchist
The Civil War caused a huge schism in the American libertarian movement from which it wouldn’t recover for decades. Inner conflicts between abolitionists who favored the war and the invasion of the South, ones who saw the war as inevitable and required to end slavery, and those who thought the war was an egregious moral wrong in and of itself and unnecessary to end slavery caused the libertarian movement to faction off into other radical social movements, such as freethought, free love, and the labor movement. After 1865, the individualist tradition lived on, not in a distinct libertarian movement, but as a radical faction within these broader social causes. Considering the astronomical growth in the state due to the war and the growing decline of radical individualist thought, it seemed the flame of liberty had burned out.
Born on April 17, 1854 in Massachusetts, Benjamin Tucker grew up in a Quaker and Radical Unitarian family. Tucker enrolled in MIT, but after a fateful encounter with three prominent individualist anarchists (Ezra Heywood, William Greene, and Josiah Warren), at a New England Labor Reform League convention in Boston in 1872, Tucker would go on to become an anarchist activist, journalist, and essayist. He would align strongly with the labor movement and had some connections to the freethought and free love movements (as did his fellow radicals). The common strain in all his thought, however, was individualism.
Tucker built his theory of individualist anarchism (or what he called “Boston Anarchism” to distinguish him from “Chicago Anarchists” who were generally less favorable to markets and more favorable to violence as a means for social change) out of the principles of individual sovereignty and the labor theory of value (which was commonly accepted by mainstream economists dating back to Adam Smith, but was later thrown out by the profession after the marginal revolution led by early Austrians, such as Carl Menger and Eugene Böhm von Bawerk). For 19th century anarchists, the labor theory of value, or “cost limit of price,” was the natural extension of the individual’s absolute sovereignty over themselves. Labor was seen as the source for all wealth, and the laborer naturally owns the fruits of their labor as an extension of their self-ownership. Tucker’s theory of value was intimately related to his ethical views based on each individual having sole dominion over their body and their justly acquired property, which required labor mixing.
Tucker and his fellow individualist anarchists were anti-capitalist, but pro-free market [PDF]. They viewed capitalism as representative of a statist economy that artificially benefited capitalists at the expense of laborers by extracting surplus value through artificial rents. Tucker thought the fruits of the laboring classes are systematically and coercively taken by the elites under statism. He viewed the State as propagator of the ruling class. Tucker identified the four big monopolies: money, land, patent, and tariff (Charles Johnson has identified even more). The role of these monopolies are to concentrate capital in the hands of a few and create a wage system. But the origin of these monopolies lies, not in the free market, but in the State.
Instead of adopting pro-capitalist rhetoric, since the American anarchists saw capitalists as largely arms of the State, they were very friendly to “Socialism” (Some modern individualist anarchists want to reclaim the term “socialism” from the monopoly statists now have on the term). Tucker saw the strain of thought that tied all socialists together, from Warren to Proudhon to Marx, as the view,
…that cost is the proper limit of price – these three men made the following deductions: that the natural wage of labor is its product; that this wage, or product, is the only just source of income (leaving out, of course, gift, inheritance, etc.); that all who derive income from any other source abstract it directly or indirectly from the natural and just wage of labor; that this abstracting process generally takes one of three forms, — interest, rent, and profit; that these three constitute the trinity of usury, and are simply different methods of levying tribute for the use of capital; that, capital being simply stored-up labor which has already received its pay in full, its use ought to be gratuitous, on the principle that labor is the only basis of price; that the lender of capital is entitled to its return intact, and nothing more; that the only reason why the banker, the stockholder, the landlord, the manufacturer, and the merchant are able to exact usury from labor lies in the fact that they are backed by legal privilege, or monopoly; and that the only way to secure labor the enjoyment of its entire product, or natural wage, is to strike down monopoly.
Tucker distinguished between state socialism and market socialism. His individualistic socialist program consisted, “in the destruction of these monopolies and the substitution for them of the freest competition… [which] rested upon a very fundamental principle, the freedom of the individual, his right of sovereignty over himself, his products, and his affairs, and of the rebellion against the dictation of external authority.” Abolishing the monopolies (i.e, economic reform) became the central goal for Benjamin Tucker and his mission to be an, “advocate for the justice of labor.” Of his two biggest influences, Warren and Proudhon, Tucker wrote,
…in prosecuting their search for justice to labor, came face to face with the obstacle of class monopolies, the saw that these monopolies rested upon Authority, and concluded the thing to be done was, not to strength this Authority, and thus make monopoly universal, but to utterly uproot Authority and give full sway to the opposite principle, Liberty, by making competition, the antithesis of monopoly, universal.
Tucker rejected the view of Marx and the state socialists as “the doctrine that all affairs of men should be managed by the government regardless of individual choice,” and instead followed the individualists (primarily Warren and Proudhon):
Just as the idea of taking capital away from individuals and giving it to the government started Marx in a path which ends in making the government everything and the individual nothing, so the idea of taking capital away from government-protected monopolies and putting it within easy reach of all individuals started Warren and Proudhon in a path which ends in making the individual everything and the government nothing. If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.
It is precisely the state-created barriers to entry and economic regulations that prevent competition and therefore concentrate economic power and resources into the hands of a few, politically entrenched elites. It is the Authority of the State that Tucker objected to that capitalist exploitation, which Marx rightfully objected to, rests upon. Rejecting that authority means embracing, “Anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all affairs of men should be managed by individuals and voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.”
Tucker and his “Unterrified Jeffersonianism” gave rise to a new libertarian movement in 1881 when he founded Liberty: Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order, a periodical that served as a conduit for what Tucker called philosophical anarchism, specifically his own flavor, which incorporated pro-labor, pro-market, egoist thought and drew heavily on Josiah Warren, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (the author of Liberty’s sub-heading), Herbert Spencer, and Max Stirner, in the American radical political scene as well as a platform for discourse that would shape the individualist tradition and libertarian movement forever.
The individualists among freethought, free love, and the labor movement were brought together with Tucker’s Liberty, which published such influential radicals as Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, Joshua K. Ingalls, John Henry Mackay, Victor Yarros, and Wordsworth Donisthorpe. The magazine chronicled and created all the in debates and controversies of the radical individualist tradition for over three decades and, according to Wendy McElroy, “provided a core around which a revitalized movement could sprout and grow.” By bringing together the remaining individualist factions left over from the Civil War schism, Tucker and Liberty were instrumental in the revival of the American libertarian movement and vital for it’s success and growth in the 20th century.
The Freethinking Boston Investigator welcomed the first issue of Liberty in 1881 by saying, “Mr. Tucker has ability and industry, radicalism and independence, he will make an interesting and suggestive paper.” The periodical clearly surpassed expectations.
By 1908, though, Liberty had run its course and by 1930, my favorite Boston Radical thought liberty itself had as well:
…the insurmountable obstacle to the realization of Anarchy is no longer the power of the trusts, but the indisputable fact that our civilization is in its death throes. We may last a couple of centuries yet; on the other hand, a decade may precipitate our finish. … The dark ages sure enough. The Monster, Mechanism, is devouring mankind.
Nine years later, Benjamin Tucker passed away believing the flame of liberty was permanently burned out. I hope almost a hundred years later, the libertarian movement that owes its revival and existence to Tucker’s inner spark in 1881 doesn’t let its radical and independent flame ever burn out.It’s been “scientifically” shown that Christians are happier than atheists.
With the help of a text analysis program, the researchers found that Christians tweet with higher frequency words reflecting positive emotions, social relationships and an intuitive style of thinking – the sort that’s gut-driven. This isn’t to say that atheists don’t use these words, too, but they out-tweet Christians when it comes to analytic words and words associated with negative emotions. Christians, they found, are more likely to use words like “love,” “happy” and “great”; “family,” “friend” and “team.” Atheists win when it comes to using words like “bad,” “wrong,” and “awful” or “think,” “reason” and “question,” said Ryan Ritter, one of the students behind the study. While not perfect – for example, this sort of word examination can’t account for sarcasm – word choices, Ritter and his colleagues argue, reflect something about a person’s mindset.
I would agree that it does reflect differences in mindset, but I would say that the biggest obstacle to interpretation isn’t sarcasm, but the researchers biases, which got heavily loaded into their conclusion.
The conclusion: When they are limited to 140 characters or less, these researchers say, believers are happier than their counterparts.
Well, yes, if you’re going to infer unhappiness from use of the words “think,” “reason” and “question,” atheists must be the most miserable, unhappy people in the universe. Or perhaps you might recognize in that “mindset” premise that perhaps atheists are people who find great joy in thinking, reasoning, and questioning. That we use judgmental words like “bad” and “wrong” might also be a consequence not of our unhappiness but of being a minority in a world dominated by happy clappy assholes — and that we’d be more unhappy to be one of them. You simply don’t get to make judgments about happiness from these kinds of analyses.
I speak with some authority now. I reconciled myself to the publisher’s title for my book, The Happy Atheist, despite the fact that it is largely about mocking the absurdities of religious belief and asking that we have a more profound appreciation of the wonder of reality precisely because I am so damned happy to be who I am. There is absolutely no contradiction between struggling rationally to create a better world and being happy.
We can interpret those results in different ways. Here’s my twist on those words:
Christians are superficial and unthinking seekers after acceptance and status from their communities. They lack confidence in themselves, and constantly seek reassurances from others that they fit in, are part of a team, are good people. This leads to a lack of substantial content in their communications; they are basically social groomers, their minds unengaged.
Atheists are confident and proud, and are willing to risk social capital by probing and challenging commonly held assumptions. Group cohesion is of lesser importance relative to making sure the group is progressing in a productive direction; they readily call out destructive or demeaning behaviors both within and outside the community. Their primary decision making strategy is by logical evaluation of consequences, rather than relying on tradition and the safety of aligning with the herd.
There. Much better.Recreation Developers look to cash in on the Grand Canyon’s popularity The landmark stands at a crossroads, as tourism booms and more development seems inevitable.
National Park Service
In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, infinite layers of sunset-colored rock unfolding into the earth behind him. “I hope,” he later said, “you will not have a building of any kind … to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it.”
Two years later, a new hotel went up where Roosevelt had stood. In 1919, the area became a national park, and trainloads of visitors began clamoring to see it. Since then, the Grand Canyon has been caught between competing visions: One that subscribes to the spirit of Roosevelt’s words and another that seeks to accommodate an ever-growing number of tourists.
Over the past century, proponents of the latter have had considerable success. Though some proposals were abandoned, including an 18-story hotel that would have been built into the canyon wall and dams that would have flooded its floor, hundreds of others went forward. Roads, hotels and parking lots now spider-web the surrounding lands. In 2007, the Hualapai Tribe built a glass platform over the canyon’s edge that visitors can pay $75 to walk on. Or they can spend $300 to helicopter over the chasm.
Still, the thirst to cash in on the canyon’s popularity remains unquenched. If anything, it’s grown, as 5.5 million visitors a year have bestowed on the Grand Canyon the dubious honor of being the nation’s second-most popular park (after Great Smoky Mountains). And though the park is protected, two of the biggest potential projects fall beyond its jurisdiction: a private development known as the Grand Canyon Escalade, which would bring restaurants, shops and a gondola to the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers, on Navajo land, and a plan to turn the scrappy gateway community of Tusayan, near the South Rim, into a luxury village.
Just over a year ago, the looming possibility of these projects caused the nonprofit American Rivers to deem the Colorado River the most endangered river in the country. Today, the outlook is rosier: A 2015 election ousted Escalade’s most powerful supporter, former Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly, and replaced him with underdog Russell Begaye, who has shelved the project.
In early March, Kaibab National Forest Supervisor Heather Provencio rejected the road expansions necessary to build five-star hotels, a spa, dude ranch, “retail village” and 2,100 houses in Tusayan, a desert town now home to 500 people and a few modest hotels, company housing and helicopter tour companies. The proposal, Provencio explained, “is deeply controversial, is opposed by local and national communities, would stress local and Park infrastructure, and have untold impacts to the surrounding Tribal and National Park lands.”
Tusayan town manager Eric Duthie says the decision “absolutely surprised” him and deprives local workers who live in company housing of the opportunity to own their own homes. Tusayan (working in partnership with Italian investment firm Gruppo Stilo) is still considering its next move.
If Stilo’s past record is any indication, though, this isn’t the end. Starting in the 1990s, the company bought up 75 percent of the private property around Tusayan. County residents voted down its development plans, but Stilo sidestepped them after Arizona passed a 2003 law enabling Tusayan to become an incorporated town. Knowing that local officials could trump the county’s objections, Stilo and its affiliates poured money into an incorporation campaign. They even launched a weekly newspaper that ran front-page editorials promoting it.
Still, Tusayan voters rejected incorporation until the 2010 election. Then, amid allegations of voter fraud, Tusayan became a town — albeit one divided over its future. Stilo stacked the new town council with members who were later revealed to have accepted thousands of dollars and traveled to Italy on Stilo’s dime.
But environmentalists, river runners, nearby communities, and the Hopi, Havasupai and other tribes remained opposed, submitting tens of thousands of comments that helped sway Provencio’s decision. Of particular concern was water: The developers didn’t explain how they’d supply it to thousands of new guests and residents. The obvious solution was drilling for groundwater, which could dry up some of the Grand Canyon’s natural springs, like Havasu Canyon’s sacred blue waters.
“I’m incredibly happy right now,” says Kevin Dahl, senior Arizona program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. “But there’s a part of me that worries that about the next big campaign. We thought we stopped (Tusayan) once, by a vote of the people, and it came back. I have to admit that it might come back again.”
Indeed, Tusayan could submit a new proposal, should it address park and tribal concerns. So, too, might Escalade: A recent Navajo Times editorial claims legislation to override Begaye and push the development through is slated for the tribal council’s spring session. And even environmentalists who oppose both projects agree that with annual park visitation expected to double to 10 million by mid-century, more beds and infrastructure are needed. The challenge will be to figure out how to provide them without sacrificing the natural resources that make the canyon so grand.
Correspondent Krista Langlois lives in Durango, Colorado. Follow @cestmoiLangloisNew York's attorney general is the latest to jump into the high-speed trading party, issuing subpoenas to Wall Street firms seeking documents on whether they're getting an unfair leg-up over their less technologically savvy competitors.
The revaluation of the subpoenas from Eric Schneiderman's office, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, brings to at least four the number of agencies probing what the New York Attorney general has described as "Insider Trading 2.0."
Other entities investigating whether Wall Street firms are taking advantage of "differences in delays, or latencies, of trade information distributed between trading venues" include the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Journal said that Chicago-based Jump Trading and Chopper Trading and Tower Research Capital of New York were among those targeted by the latest subpoenas demanding e-mail and other documents.
The companies did not immediately respond for comment."The United States Department of Education has introduced an Islamic indoctrination program for the public schools, called ‘Access Islam.’ "
The Volusia County Republican Party says that the federal government is promoting Islam to public school children.
"The United States Department of Education has introduced an Islamic indoctrination program for the public schools, called ‘Access Islam,’" states the mass email sent by the party April 2.
The email said that classroom instructions have students learning "the core duties of Muslims" and "what it means to proclaim faith or belief as a Muslim."
"The Education Department offers no similar learning material for Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or any other major world religion. Just Islam," the email said.
This claim earns a failing grade, though.
Access Islam is a real program for school teachers looking to offer lesson plans on the religion of Islam. But to say it’s part of an "indoctrination program" delivered from the federal government isn’t accurate.
Here’s your tutorial on the facts.
Teaching Islam
To support its claims, the party points to a March 28 video by the Christian Action Network, a group that says its goal is to "protect America’s religious and moral heritage through educational efforts."
The video, narrated by network founder Martin Mawyer, criticizes Access Islam, a program produced by PBS’ Thirteen/WNET New York. The program received grant money from the federal government about a decade ago.
The network recently sent a letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos asking her to denounce the program and remove it from any government website.
We looked at several of the lesson plans and videos from Access Islam, which draws from the PBS series Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.
Much of the content provides educational information about religious traditions and holidays. Other video segments explained the tensions between Somali Muslim immigrants and other residents in Maine; how students learn in a madrassah, and the challenges faced by Muslims to differentiate themselves from terrorists.
Lesson plans include facts such as that Muslims pray five times a day, cultural variations and what the First Amendment says about religion.
It’s unclear how many schools have used the materials, and there is certainly no requirement that schools do. Mawyer told PolitiFact he found a few examples including the state of Indiana, which listed Access Islam in a resource guide for teachers of world history. The guide includes a disclaimer that the Indiana department hasn’t evaluated the materials which "are not intended to represent the best or only approach to any particular issue."
In Florida, high school history standards include lessons about Islam such as a comparison of Islam, Judaism and Christianity and key developments in Islamic history.
The Florida Department of Education said whether to use Access Islam is a decision for local school districts.
Access Islam is not part of the resource list given to Volusia County Schools World History teachers however teachers can choose their own resources as long as they conforms to the standards, a district spokesperson said.
Broward, Pinellas and Hillsborough school districts don’t use the Access Islam curriculum, district spokespersons said.
The U.S. Education Department granted $166,000 in fiscal year 2005 and $8,000 in fiscal year 2006 for the program, but we could find no recent involvement by the department. In case there was any tinge of partisan politics, the grants came while George W. Bush, a Republican was president. Spokespersons for the department and PBS did not respond to our questions by our deadline.
Experts on whether program is ‘indoctrination’
We asked four experts to review the Access Islam materials and all said they did not consider the materials to be "indoctrination": Linda K. Wertheimer, journalist and author of the book Faith Ed, Teaching About Religion In An Age of Intolerance; Mark Fowler, Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding deputy chief executive officer; Charles C. Haynes, Vice President of the Newseum Institute’s Religious Freedom Center and Diane Moore director of Harvard Divinity School’s Religious Literacy Project.
Haynes said the claim that the lessons are indoctrination is "completely unfounded."
"Nothing in these lessons crosses the constitutional line dividing education and indoctrination," he said. "Students learn the basic tenets and practices of Muslims and then are assessed on what they have learned. Students are not asked to affirm or reject any religious teachings. Nor are students required to participate in any religious or devotional activities."
Wertheimer said the lessons are a clear example of teaching "about" religion.
"It is not preaching or promoting Islam over other faiths," she said. "In fact, the lesson plans include questions about comparing and contrasting beliefs and practices of Islam to those of other faiths."
Indoctrination has as its motivation having children choose a faith over another, Fowler said. But the lessons he reviewed didn’t ask students to choose a religion or rank them, he said.
Moore said that the videos present individual Muslims’ personal experience of their faith.
"When any religious tradition is only represented in its positive light, it can feel like indoctrination to those who don't believe the tradition has merit or has equal credibility to one's own faith," she said. " |
hypotheses about why this is the case. For instance, women may be more sensitive to all the emotions of others because of their need (more than men) to attach with their children, or women may be especially responsive to negative emotions only because of the need to react to fitness threats more than men do. Hampson and her colleagues (2006) found more support for the former hypothesis.
Most studies show women tend to score higher on the trait most closely associated with negative emotionality— (Feingold, 1994; Schmitt et al., 2008). In a meta-analysis across 25 studies, for instance, Feingold (1994) found women score higher in anxiety (d = -0.27). Sex differences in neuroticism appear to be particularly robust, overcoming several response biases associated with other self-reported sex differences. Vianello et al. (2013), for instance, sex differences in neuroticism are found using both explicitly self-reported and implicitly-tested measurement modalities (same for ; see here). As Shchebetenko (2017) concluded, "Neuroticism may represent a special case when men and women differ in a trait, above and beyond their interpretations of, and opinions on this trait" (p. 155).
Several large cross-cultural studies have confirmed these sex differences across dozens of nations (Costa et al., 2001; Lippa, 2010; Lynn & Martin, 1997; Schmitt et al., 2008). De Bolle (2015) found sex differences in neuroticism among adolescents universally emerge across all cultures at about the same age (around 14, implicating pubertal as a proximate cause; see also Hyde et al., 2008, on other biological/hormonal origins of sex differences in negative emotionality; as well as, Kring & Gordon, 1998; Victor et al. 2017). In large cross-cultural samples of adults, women have been found to score higher in overall neuroticism in studies of 26 nations (d = -0.26; Costa et al., 2001), 53 nations (d = -0.41; Lippa, 2010), and 56 nations (d = -0.40; Schmitt et al., 2008).
Interestingly, all of these cross-cultural studies find sex differences in neuroticism are larger in cultures with more sociopolitical gender equity. That's right, in more gender egalitarian nations sex differences in neuroticism are larger, not smaller as would be expected if sex differences come only from gender roles, gendered socialization, and patriarchy (see chart below contrasting neuroticism scores of men and women from Northern Europe and Africa; Schmitt, 2015).
Source: David Schmitt, used with permission
Similar results are found in studies. Men and women tend to differ in average levels of depression (Hyde et al., 2008), a sex difference that is apparent in most cultures (Hopcroft & McLaughlin, 2012; Van de Velde, Bracke, & Levecque, 2010). The sex gap in depression is wider in high gender equity societies than in low gender equity societies. Hopcroft speculates that this is due in part to differential effects of children on feelings of depression for women in high and low equity countries. For women in high gender equity countries, children promote feelings of depression, whereas for unemployed women in low gender equity countries the reverse is true. There is little difference in the effect of children on feelings of depression for men in high and low gender equity countries. This can explain the paradoxical finding that while gender equity boosts mental on average, it creates a wider sex gap in depression.
Similar results are found in studies of personal values, including values related to and love. In a study of 127 samples in 70 countries (N = 77,528; Schwartz & Rubel-Lifschitz, 2009) women attribute consistently more importance than men do to benevolence and universalism values. National measures of gender egalitarianism predicted sex differences in benevolence and universalism values but, once again, in an unexpected direction. The greater the social, health, and employment equality of women and men in a country…the larger the sex differences (women higher) in benevolence and universalism values. That is, in countries with greater gender equity (e.g., Finland, Sweden), women attribute substantially more importance to benevolence and universalism values than men do. In more patriarchal cultures, sex differences in benevolence and universalism and much smaller. The authors of the values study speculate that increased independence and equality of women in the labor force may encourage women to express their “inherent” values rather than to accommodate their values to those of their husbands. Maybe.
What is clear is that if sex differences are assumed to result from gender role socialization, it is extremely odd for the largest sex differences to be found in Scandinavian cultures and the smallest in more patriarchal cultures. Yet, we also find this with studies of tested cognitive ability and even physical traits (see charts; Schmitt, 2015).
Source: David Schmitt, used with permission
Source: David Schmitt, used with permission
Finally, I’d say if one’s goal is to provide an accurate portrayal of men and women possibly differing in their psychology in a particular domain, it is probably best to evaluate the degree of difference using multivariate statistics within that specific domain. For instance, Del Guidice et al. (2012) examined sex differences in personality using Cattell’s 16 factor model of personality traits, finding an overall multivariate D of 2.71 for the personality domain. This is huge difference, with less than 10% overlap in men’s and women’s personalities.
Source: Del Giudice et al. (2012)
Emotion-related traits are only a small part of that profile of sex differences, though. My guess is, in taking a multivariate perspective of the emotional domain, researchers will find emotion differences between men and women are more moderate in size. Same planet, different neighborhoods.
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Fischer, A. H., Rodriguez Mosquera, P. M., Van Vianen, A. E., & Manstead, A. S. (2004). Gender and culture differences in emotion. Emotion, 4, 87-94.
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The Oculus Platform Command Line Utility (CLI) can save you considerable time over using the Oculus Dashboard when it comes to uploading Oculus Rift app builds to your release channels. The command line utility analyzes your build folder and only uploads the bits that have changed since your last build. This approach reduces the amount of data that must be uploaded and eliminates the need to compress your build into a ZIP file.
If you want to get technical, here's what's happening behind the scenes:
Each of the files in your build folder is split into contiguous segments of roughly 10MB.
Each file segment is then inspected to determine if it already exists on the Oculus servers.
The segments that have not been previously uploaded get individually compressed and uploaded.
The upload is committed to finalize the operation and make your build available on the platform.
You can learn more about the command line utility by visiting the Tools page.
We'd love to hear your feedback on how we can make this tool even better. Send us a note by submitting a feature request in the Dashboard by using the “Give Feedback” button at the bottom left of the page. We look forward to making this available for our Gear VR developers in the coming months!American Relief Administration (ARA) was an American relief mission to Europe and later post-revolutionary Russia after World War I. Herbert Hoover, future president of the United States, was the program director.
The ARA's immediate predecessor was the United States Food Administration, also headed by Hoover. He and some of his collaborators had already gained useful experience by running the Committee for Relief in Belgium which fed seven million Belgians and two million northern French during World War I.
ARA was formed by United States Congress on February 24, 1919, with a budget of 100 million dollars ($1,445,000,000 in 2019). Its budget was boosted by private donations, which resulted in another 100 million dollars. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the ARA delivered more than four million tons of relief supplies to 23 war-torn European countries. Between 1919 and 1921, Arthur Cuming Ringland was chief of mission in Europe.[1] ARA ended its operations outside Russia in 1922; it operated in Russia until 1923.
ARA and Poland [ edit ]
About 20% of its resources were directed to the newly established Second Polish Republic. Much of its resources were helping Polish children. ARA however has been criticized by some for aiding Polish soldiers during the Polish–Soviet War.[citation needed] Polish leader Józef Piłsudski has written a note of personal thanks to Hoover; one of the streets in Warsaw has been named after him; he also received honorary degrees from the Jagiellonian University, Warsaw University and Lviv University, among other honors (such as several honorary citizenships of various Polish towns). A monument dedicated to American helpers has been constructed in Warsaw.
Colonel Alvin B. Barber headed the group from 1919 to 1922.[2] Specific areas had directors as well, such as W.N. Haskell, who was Director of the ARA in Romania as of 1919.[3]
ARA and Russian famine of 1921 [ edit ]
Walter Lyman Brown, 1900
In 1921, to ease famine in Russia, the ARA's director in Europe, Walter Lyman Brown, began negotiating with the Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, in Riga, Latvia. An agreement was reached on August 21, 1921, and an additional implementation agreement was signed by Brown and People's Commisar for Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin on December 30, 1921. The U.S. Congress appropriated $20,000,000 for relief under the Russian Famine Relief Act of late 1921.
American Relief Administration operations in Russia in 1922
At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA's famine relief operations ran in parallel with much smaller Mennonite, Jewish and Quaker famine relief operations in Russia.[4][5]
The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on June 15, 1923, after it was discovered that Russia renewed the export of grain.[6]
See also [ edit ]
People
James Stuart McKnight, worked with the agency
Bibliography [ edit ]
Notes
ReferencesDr Blaylock's List of suggestions on How to Reduce the Toxic Effects of the A/H1N1 Vaccine, is as follows: 1. Number one on the list says Dr Blaylock, is to bring a cold pack with you and place it on the site of the injection as soon as you can, as this will block the immune reaction. Once you get home, continue using a cold pack throughout the day. If you continue to have immune reactions the following day, have cold showers and continue with the cold press. 2. Take fish oil. Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), one of the omega 3 fatty acids found in fish oil supplements, is a potent immune suppressant. If you take high dose EPA you will be more susceptible to infections, because it is a powerful immune suppressant. However, in the case of an immune adjuvant reaction, you want to reduce it. Studies show that if you take EPA oil one hour before injecting a very powerful adjuvant called lipopolysaccharide (LPS), it would completely block the ability of the LPS to cause brain inflammation. Take a moderate dose everyday and more if needed to tame a cytokine storm. 3. <http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/f-w00/flavonoid.html>Flavonoids are third on the list, namely curcumin, quercetin, ferulic acid and ellagic acid, particularly in a mixture. The curcumin and quercetin in particular have been found to block the ability of the adjuvants to trigger a long-term immune reaction. If you take it an hour before the vaccination, it should help dampen the immune reactions says Dr Blaylock. 4. Vitamin E, the natural form that is high in gamma-E will help dampen the immune reactions and reduces several of the inflammatory cytokines. 5. An important ingredient on the list is Vitamin C at a dose of 1000 mg, taken four times a day between meals. It is a very potent anti-inflammatory and should be taken in a buffered form, not as absorbic acid, says Dr Blaylock. 6. <http://www.naturalnews.com/002156.html> Also use astaxanthin as it's an anti-inflammatory. According to Dr Blaylock, fatal reactions to vaccines in aboriginal and African children occurred in those who were deficient in carotinoids, like astaxanthin. It is a good protection against the toxic effects of the vaccine. 7. Likewise, it was found that children who were deficient in zinc had a high mortality rate. Zinc is very protective against vaccine toxicity. (Do not use zinc mixed with copper however, as copper is a major trigger of free-radical generation according to Dr Blaylock). 8. Ensure you avoid all immune-stimulating supplements, such as mushroom extracts, whey protein and <http://www.betaglucan.org/>beta-glucan. 9. Take a multivitamin-mineral daily one that does not contain iron. This multivitamin-mineral is to make sure your body has plenty of B vitamins and selenium. Selenium, said Dr Blaylock, is very important for fighting viral infections and it reduces the inflammatory response to vaccines. 10. Magnesium citrate/malate 500 mg of elemental magnesium two capsules, three times a day. (This was not mentioned during the show, but was posted at Dr Deagle's website, <http://www.clayandiron.com/news.jhtml?method=view&news.id=2103>ClayandIron.com). 11. What is very important is vitamin D3, which is the only 'vitamin' the body can manufacture from sunlight (UVB). It is a neural hormone, not really a vitamin says Dr Blaylock and helps if you are over-reacting immunologically by cooling down the reaction. Similarly, if you are under-reacting, it helps to boost your immune response. In addition it also protects against microorganism invasion. Black people and those in colder climates are particularly deficient, so they will almost certainly require supplementation. Dr Blaylock recommends that following vaccination it will help to keep the immune reaction under control if: i) All children get 5,000 units a day for two weeks after the vaccine and then 2,000 a units a day thereafter; ii) Adults get 20,000 units a day after the vaccine for two weeks, then 10,000 units a day thereafter; iii) And with that adults should take 500-1000 mg of calcium a day and children under the age of 12 years should take 250 mg a day, as vitamin D works more efficiently in the presence of calcium. 12. Ensure you avoid all mercury-containing seafood or any other sources of mercury, as the heavy metal is a very powerful inducer of autoimmunity, is known to make people more susceptible to viral infections and will be in H1N1 vaccines. 13. Avoid the oils that significantly suppress immunity and increase inflammation - such as corn, safflower, sunflower, soybean, canola and peanut oils. 14. Drink very concentrated white tea at least four times a day. It helps to prevent abnormal immune reactions. 15. Pop parsley and celery in a blender and drink 8 ounces of this mixture twice a day. Dr Blaylock says the parsley is very high in a flavonoid called apigenin and that celery is high in <http://www.dietaryfiberfood.com/antioxidants/flavonoid-antioxidant.php>luteolin. Both are very potent in inhibiting autoimmune diseases, particularly the apigenin, so go and plant some parsley in your garden now.FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Even as the Federal Communications Commission released a proposal Tuesday that could give Internet providers more control over what their customers can see and use online, another equally major proposal by the agency could relax key rules for the media industry.
The FCC said Tuesday that it will revisit key regulations determining how many TV stations a single company can own. Revising or rolling back these rules may lead to more consolidation in broadcast media, analysts say — which could help financially struggling stations survive, but also perhaps end up reducing the number of independent voices on the air.
The FCC proposal takes aim at two related policies. The first is a limit on the number of U.S. households that a given broadcaster can reach. The second is what is known as the UHF discount, which is essentially an accounting method used to calculate how close a broadcaster may be to reaching the limit. Both are intended to ensure that no single TV broadcaster gets too big.
The national limit says that companies owning multiple TV stations may reach only 39 percent of all U.S. households. Tuesday's proposal by the FCC explores whether to raise the limit, and even contemplates getting rid of it. Doing away with the limit would make it legal for one TV broadcaster to beam its programming into many more homes.
"A comprehensive review of the rule is warranted in light of considerable marketplace changes, such as technological developments and increased video programming options for consumers, since the cap was last modified in 2004," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement.
The FCC proposal also would revisit the UHF discount, a policy that today effectively increases the number of stations a company may own by making certain stations count less toward the limit. Stations that transmit signals over UHF channels currently contribute only half as much to reaching the limit as stations broadcasting on VHF channels.
The proposal is in its early stages, with a vote on it unlikely to occur before next year. But one major beneficiary of the policy change may be Sinclair, a conservative broadcaster whose $3.9 billion bid to acquire Tribune Media would allow it to reach nearly 3 out of 4 households in the United States. The proposal also could help other broadcast media entities that might want to merge in the future. Sinclair and the National Association of Broadcasters declined to comment.
The FCC's proposed changes come after a series of votes to relax other media rules. Earlier this month, for instance, the agency voted to lift restrictions that prevented a single media company from owning both a daily newspaper and a TV station in the same market, as well as rules limiting mergers involving multiple TV stations in the same market.
Under the current national limit, Sinclair probably would need to sell off stations in certain markets in order for the combined company to comply. But lifting the limit, or amending the UHF discount in certain ways, may allow Sinclair to keep more of those stations.
With more stations, broadcast TV companies would be able to build much larger footprints, ones that could even have nationwide reach, analysts say. That could put them on more even footing with other platforms, perhaps such as Facebook, which has users nationwide.
The question is whether that newfound reach would put smaller TV broadcast companies at too much of a disadvantage — a question that is being asked across all types of media today, said Blair Levin, a former FCC chief of staff.
"What you see in a number of different sectors is a desire for scale," Levin said. "We want people to achieve certain efficiencies [of scale], but we get very nervous when those efficiencies turn into the ability to stifle competition."
Read tech policy news:
FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see and use
The FCC just repealed a 42-year-old rule blocking broadcast media mergersRICHARDSON (CBS 11 NEWS) – Police in Richardson have released the identities of the drivers involved in two crashes that left one person dead and backed up traffic on Highway 75 for hours Friday morning. There is also new dash cam video of the second crash.
Investigators said Eric Mack of Plano was killed as a result of the wreck. The 49-year-old lost control of his vehicle while traveling in the HOV lane. He was traveling northbound on the highway and crashed near the Midpark Road exit.
Shortly after the wreck, police believe several drivers stopped to help.
It was just a short time after the first accident that investigators think Jose Mendez, 40, smashed into the scene with his Chevy pickup. Police arrested Mendez for intoxicated driving.
“All I can remember is just the hard hit. And then after that, all I remember is just seeing the person on the floor,” said Victor Romero, a witness who recorded a portion of the wreck from his dash-camera. “I think if I was out there five seconds sooner, I probably would have been impacted as well.”
Police do not know if Mack died as a result of the initial wreck or from the second collision investigators believe was caused by Mendez.
Richardson police are waiting on information from the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office, where a complete autopsy is being performed. They said more charges could follow depending on the results.
“It hurts me and I have no idea who those people are. My prayers are definitely with them because I can’t understand what they’re feeling right now,” said Romero.
Two other people were hurt in the wreck and are still recovering.
Richardson police is still looking for any witnesses that could shed more light on what exactly happened.
(©2016 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)BOSTON -- Watching the Montreal Canadiens' nine power plays through the first two games of their Eastern Conference Second Round series against the Boston Bruins, one starts to wonder if the video is more appropriate for TV Land than NHL Network.
Each power play, of which four have turned into goals for the Canadiens, is a rerun of the previous one. The Canadiens' strategy is as predictable as those old sitcoms.
Once they follow their trusted formula for getting the puck to defenseman P.K. Subban, however, the predictability ends. With his slap shot, wrist shot and ice vision, Subban is a potpourri of possibilities for puck movement as he walks the blue line.
Heading into Game 3 Tuesday at Bell Centre (7 p.m. ET; NBCSN, CBC, RDS) with the best-of-7 series tied 1-1, Subban has already scored two of Montreal's power-play goals. And he's had the primary assist on each of forward Thomas Vanek's goals, which were scored on tip-ins.
With the exception of the power play Subban missed while having a cut wrist checked out early in Game 2, the Montreal man advantage has been a momentum changer in its favor whether it has scored or not.
There's nothing more important for the Bruins' PK to focus on now than P.K.
"He's a good player and he gets the shots through on the net," Bruins center and penalty killer David Krejci said. "He scored two goals in the first game. So you have to be aware. You've got to take his shot away. Obviously we work on it. But also, you have to be aware of the other guys. Vanek, he's good in front of the net. So just kind of do our homework the right away and go out there and stick with the game plan and see what happens."
Sometimes when Subban gets the puck at the blue line, it looks like he could skate all the way from Boston to Montreal unscathed. The Bruins have committed to a philosophy to give him space to puck handle but not to let his shot get through. The Bruins have blocked Subban's shot five times in the two games during Montreal power plays.
With the strategy the Bruins think is the right one in place, now they just have to execute it with a little more body sacrificing and desire. It takes a lot to get in the way of one of Subban's slap shots, but that's the kind of courage that wins playoff games and the ultimately the Stanley Cup.
"You know he's definitely a big part of that power play that's causing us some problems right now. But from our aspect, we're not being as aggressive as we'd like to be right now," Bruins forward Daniel Paille said. "But the main thing is they're getting the puck through and we're not blocking those shots. And when they have someone like [Vanek] there that knows how to tip the pucks in, it definitely makes it a lot harder for us to stop."
Should Subban and his teammates on the man advantage continue to have their way with the Bruins, Boston might have to consider crowding the defenseman a little more. That comes with major risks as well because of Subban's mobility. A forward darting out at Subban easily turns into a pylon for him to skate around and then create a 5-on-3 in a blink of an eye.
"He's quick, you know," Krejci said. "And you don't want to give him the shot. So if you're too close to him he makes a quick move and he's past you. So you have to keep your distance, but you also have to be aware of the guys around him. He's pretty good. He's got always so many points in a season, he won the Norris Trophy, so he's a pretty good player. But we took his shot away, so we've got to keep doing that and we have to look at the video again and figure out how to stop the other guys as well."
The Bruins have to respect the shot as much as the pass from Subban. He's a true quarterback that can make quick reads and pick out the open man even under intense pressure. Paille credited Subban for keeping his head up at all times, and Bruins coach Claude Julien lamented the fact that Subban's versatility is keeping the Bruins' penalty killers back "on their heels."
"So give him credit for that," Julien said. "But at the same time, we have got to do a better job because I think all four goals have basically come from that part of their power play."
Whether they'll be able to execute the necessary adjustments against Subban remains to be seen. At least for now, the Bruins know it's time for the reruns to stop and some first-run penalty kills to shift that aspect of this series in their favor.Here's the message we sent to our members. After you've read it, please add your voice.
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Dopplereffekt, Steffi and Hodge.
Tracklist
Photo credit: Danny Croucher
The eighth entry in Ostgut Ton'smix series, and its first in nearly three years, comes courtesy of Fiedel Fiedel's contribution to the series comes from a recording of a set he played last month at Berghain, where he's a longtime resident, and he says he used a separate microphone to "capture the atmosphere in the space." According to the label, the mix highlights an "off-kilter and bass-heavy techno sensibility" across its 140-minute runtime. While a full tracklist is still TBA, we're told it includes material from artists like Dopplereffekt Hodge, Fiedel's MMM collaborator Errorsmith and Noncompliant, along with four exclusives—from Electric Indigo Stefan Rein and rRoxymore, and a partnership between Fiedel and fellow Berghain resident Boris —that'll feature on an accompanying 12-inch sampler.Both the mix, which is free, and the record are due out on January 26th.follows Fiedel's debut solo release on Ostgut Ton, the Substance B 12-inch, from earlier this year. Function handled the mix series' last installment back in 2015 12-inchA1 Electric Indigo - RegistersA2 Stefan Rein - PantherB1 rRoxymore - TropicalcoreB2 Boris & Fiedel - Div'hainBerghain 08 mix and 12-inch on January 26th, 2018.This animation illustrates the generation of the debris and ejecta clouds after a spherical aluminum projectile impacts a thin aluminum plate at approximately 7 km/s. The frame interval is about 1 microsecond.
A microsecond is an SI unit of time equal to one millionth (0.000001 or 10−6 or 1⁄ 1,000,000 ) of a second. Its symbol is μs, sometimes simplified to us when Unicode is not available.
A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or 1⁄ 1,000 of a millisecond. Because the next SI prefix is 1000 times larger, measurements of 10−5 and 10−4 seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of microseconds.
Examples [ edit ]
The average human eye blink takes 350,000 microseconds (just over 1/3 of one second).
The average human finger snap takes 150,000 microseconds (just over 1/7 of one second).
A camera flash illuminates for 1000 microseconds.
Standard camera shutter speed opens the shutter for 4000 microseconds or 4 milliseconds.
See also [ edit ]Alex Garland’s follow-up to Ex Machina was already shaping up to be another incredible bit of original, cerebral sci-fi long before Oscar Isaac joined the cast. Based on Jeff VanderMeer’s popular (but not too popular) 2014 Annihilation, the film already boasts an incredible cast featuring Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and star Natalie Portman. So Oscar Isaac is, really, just the frosting on this incredible cinematic cake. VaderMeer excitedly announced the news via Twitter.
Annihilation—the first book in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy—follows an all-female expedition team as they explore a mysterious location called Area X. The women are known only by their professional names (the biologist, the psychologist, the surveyor, and the anthropologist) and, as you would hope in a movie from the director who brought you Ex Machina, strange and unexplainable things start happening. The biologist (Portman) is motivated to join the expedition because her husband (Isaac’s role, according to author VanderMeer) was a member of the previous team who all died mysteriously. So, yes, Isaac’s part will be small. He’s basically in the ghost-wife role made so popular by Leonardo DiCaprio movies.
Isaac as Portman’s ghost wife is just one of several intriguing reversals we can expect in Annihilation, and given all the gender-role debates Ex Machina kicked up, you can expect Alex Garland to treat the material with both intelligence and intentional ambiguity. Though Annihilation is part of a trilogy, this is not exactly the beginning of a traditional franchise. Garland said back in January, “At the point I started working on Annihilation, there was only one of the three books. I knew that it was planned as a trilogy by the author, but there was only the manuscript for the first book. I really didn’t think too much about the trilogy side of it.” Though the Southern Reach trilogy is one connected story, the books are disparate enough in tone that they might benefit from a Cloverfield-esque anthology approach with different directors at the helm.
Either way, it’s a great time to be alive and a fan of original sci-fi. Sure, Star Wars is the titan at the box office, but between Annihilation, J.J. Abrams’s God Particle starring David Oyelowo and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Colin Trevorrow’s Intelligent Life potentially starring Lupita Nyong’o, film lovers won’t have to go to that galaxy far, far away to get a dose of female-friendly, diverse, and creative genre storytelling.
Get Vanity Fair’s HWD Newsletter Sign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood. E-mail Address SubscribeAh, the perennial Oscar nom box office boost. Every year it’s debated how much of an impact Oscars have on a contender’s tickets sales.
In the past, there were those years when a deluge of best picture nominees found themselves on DVD by Oscar night, thus refuting the notion that nominations have any impact at all. However since 2014, the percent boost in total B.O. for a best picture Oscar nominee has averaged close to 60% between the day noms are announced and Oscar night. This year that average is expected to increase to +95%.
While there are fewer best pic contenders on the marquee this year–five of eight with The Revenant, Room, Spotlight, Brooklyn and The Big Short –– this crop is projected to generate between a +35% to +188% boom in each respective title’s total cumes by Oscar night. In 2014 all nine best pictures relished an average uptick of 48% between nom and trophy day.
Out of all the best picture nominees, many think Room has the most to gain percent wise, potentially upping its current $5.2M domestic cume by two to three times ($10M-$15M) by February 28. Rival distribs believe that Room is still under the radar since it hasn’t busted past 200 theaters (it’s expected to be at the 300 mark this weekend). However, Room‘s multiple depends on whether it can book 1,000-plus playdates. To date, a VOD/DVD release date hasn’t been announced for the Lenny Abrahamson film, so the pic’s receipts won’t be crimped during the Oscar stretch. A24 didn’t make any comments on projected runs or B.O. beyond this weekend, but when we spoke to them back in November, it was always part of their plan to play off any earned Oscar and Golden Globe heat. Among some of its key wins, Room has a best actress Golden Globe for Brie Larson and the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award, a noted Oscar bellwether. While A24 aired national spots during Room‘s run in the top 50 markets during the fall, its TV spot spend is registering under iSpot.TV’s radar.
The second best picture nom looking at a huge boost is 20th Century Fox/New Regency’s The Revenant which could hit $130M-$140M by Oscar night, repping a total cume boost of +140% to +159% from its current gross of $54.1M. Non-Fox execs report that the Alejandro Inarritu film was already destined to swell at the box office, with or without noms. But since the film counts 12, that will spur an additional $30M-$40M to its stateside gross. ISpot.TV reports that $21.2M was spent on TV ads and media for the Leonardo DiCaprio movie with a third of that aimed at guys watching NFL, NBA and ESPN. RelishMix reports that #RevenantMovie is currently soaring on Twitter off its Globe wins and Oscars noms with 9K hashtags a day. Compare that to this weekend’s big release #RideAlong which has built up to 2K per day. Even better: In the hours since today’s Oscar nominations announcement, Fandango saw an 80% uptick in ticket sales for The Revenant, ranking as the #1 ticket-seller of the day.
Another Oscar contender looking to double its stateside cume from $7M to $14M off its six noms is Weinstein Co.’s Carol. Even though the Todd Haynes film didn’t land best picture, recognition for its leading actress (Cate Blanchett) and supporting (Rooney Mara) remains potent B.O. fuel enough. Carol grows from 525 sites to 790 tomorrow with an eye on passing 1,000 the following weekend.
Paramount’s The Big Short which possesses five Oscar noms currently counts $44.6M. Non-Paramount sources believe the Adam McKay film has another $25M left in its run with strong play in metro areas. That would give Big Short a 56% boost by Feb. 28. Per iSpotTV, Paramount has shelled out $18.7M on national ads and media since mid November with a significant amount landing at the four major networks, ESPN and NFL football.
With Oscar noms for best picture, actress, and adapted screenplay Fox Searchlight’s Brooklyn is projected to yield 45%, moving its current domestic B.O. from $22.8M to $33M. Over the last two weekends, Brooklyn‘s respective per theater average of $4K+ and $3K+ have bested those of Spotlight and Danish Girl. Tomorrow the John Crowley-helmed movie widens from 290 to 687 venues, and will reside between 800-900 theaters on January 22. Since October, national TV spot spent is at $3.3M on such networks as Bravo, Food Network, HGTV, CNBC and CBS.
Open Road’s Spotlight will move from 368 playdates to 985 tomorrow. The distributor will add a few hundred more next Friday. The Tom McCarthy-directed movie which landed six noms today will cross $30M tomorrow and industry analysts also believe Spotlight has another $10M or so left it by Oscar night, repping a 35% hike. Since late October an estimated $7.3M has been spent in TV ads, chiefly on ESPN, TNT, Comedy Central, HGTV and TBS.
Those films not expected to make any seismic movements in their domestic tallies since they’re largely played out are 20th Century Fox’s The Martian, Warner Bros./Village Roadshow’s Mad Max: Fury Road and DreamWorks’ Bridge of Spies. Mad Max has been on DVD since September, but it’s headed into eight different markets at 18 locations (venues like the The Arclight chain) tomorrow in response to its 10 nominations. In the week leading up to the Academy Awards, Mad Max will be booked at a number of Oscar best picture showcases around the country numbering 180 sites.
Last Oscar season was an anomaly with Warner Bros./Village Roadshow’s American Sniper in the mix. The Clint Eastwood film was a monster, moving its total B.O. of $3.4M on Oscar nom day to $320M by ceremony night, translating into a nine-fold surge. Many box office analysts agree that the ticket sales phenomenon for American Sniper was largely fueled by it hitting a nerve with the American heartland and veterans; that its awards recognition was partially responsible for any B.O. jumps. Given how much American Sniper was off the chart, when factoring it out of last year’s Oscar boost calculations, last year’s crop of best pic noms saw a 69% increase in their total cumes by Oscar night.The GOP seems to have a bad habit of loose lips. People recall the Valerie Plame affair, where a CIA operative was exposed by the Bush Administration in order to punish her husband. Doing so did far more than damage one man, of course; it damaged a decade of intelligence gathering and undermined who knows how many intelligence assets.
Now to outdo this affair, the Republicans on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee decided on blowing not one agents cover, but the cover of an entire CIA base in Libya. They did so not in a secret memo slipped to the press, but live on broadcast television.
Now, the New York Times did unveil that the CIA evacuated personnel from Libya two weeks ago. But what happened in the meeting was that a satellite map of the compound from a commercial satellite was shown. John Chaffetz, the Republican congressman from Utah, immediately objected to its presence, and that it contained subject matter which should not be discussed in public. He also pointed out the markings on the map, calling them inappropriate.
In other words, the congressman just alerted any terrorist affiliates to pay close attention to the picture.
In response, chairman Darryl Issa ordered the picture taken down so as not to show information on active facilities.
And the Republican from California just revealed that the picture and markings referred to an active operation.
During the remainder of the meeting, the congressman further revealed that the annex marked on the map was for a seven person rapid response team, and that it was controlled by the “other government agency.” In congressional speak, “other government agency” means the Central Intelligence Agency.
In other parts of the meeting, the congresspeople simultaneously scolded state department officials for hiding behind secret information and blaming them for the revelations of secret information. All the while failing to grasp the huge intelligence mess that they had just created all by themselves.Story highlights Congressional aides say they don't expect Congress to leave town until late Friday
Republicans will need at least some Democratic votes in order to pass the bill
Washington (CNN) After this week's tax vote, the spotlight will shift to a vote on a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown by midnight Friday.
Republicans have repeatedly said there will be no shutdown, but they're not able to say how they will definitively avoid one with a number of competing interests at stake in both chambers.
There's chatter of potentially kicking the can down the road again and passing a short-term continuing resolution that lasts until January, so that members have more times to discuss rather than jam a bill in just before Christmas.
Regardless, aides have said they don't expect Congress to leave town until Friday.
Among the complications:
Read MoreIn the past 10 years, the share of U.S. adults living without a spouse or partner has climbed to 42%, up from 39% in 2007, when the Census Bureau began collecting detailed data on cohabitation.
Two important demographic trends have influenced this phenomenon. The share of adults who are married has fallen, while the share living with a romantic partner has grown. However, the increase in cohabitation has not been large enough to offset the decline in marriage, giving way to the rise in the number of “unpartnered” Americans.
The share of adults who are unpartnered has increased across the young and middle-aged, but the rise has been most pronounced among young adults. Roughly six-in-ten adults younger than 35 (61%) are now living without a spouse or partner, up from 56% just 10 years ago.
The rise in adults living without a spouse or partner has also occurred against the backdrop of a third important demographic shift: the aging of American adults. Older adults (55 and older) are more likely to have a spouse or partner than younger adults. So it is surprising that the share of adults who are unpartnered has risen even though relatively more Americans are older.
Divorce has likely not contributed to the growing share of unpartnered adults over this short period. Though divorce statistics are complicated, many argue that the divorce rate has generally been stable or falling since the 1980s.
This trend has important implications for the economic well-being of U.S. adults, as research has shown the financial benefits of marriage and cohabitation. The median household income (adjusted for household size) for partnered adults, either married or cohabiting, is $86,000. By contrast, the median household income for unpartnered adults is roughly $61,000. In addition, unpartnered adults are about twice as likely as partnered adults to be living in poverty (17% versus 7%).
The rates of unpartnered Americans vary significantly by key demographics. Men (40%) are less likely than women (43%) to live without a spouse or partner. And adults with at least a bachelor’s degree are significantly less likely to be unpartnered (31%) than less-educated adults (46%). White and Asian adults (37% of each group) are much less likely to be unpartnered than Hispanic (46%) and black (62%) adults.
Over the past decade, the share of adults who are unpartnered has risen more sharply among those who are not employed. In 2007, 46% of working-age adults without a job were not living with a spouse or partner. By 2017 that share had risen to 51%. Among employed working-age adults, the share who were unpartnered increased more modestly since 2007, from 36% to 38%.
This does not imply that lack of employment is a cause of people not having a partner. On one hand, surveys indicate that people say it’s important for men to be economically successful to be good husbands or partners. On the other hand, a large body of economic literature shows that marriage causes husbands to be more successful on the job. It is possible that the lack of a partner provides less of a spur to obtain employment.
A narrow majority (56%) of unpartnered adults are the head of their household. Some 35% are living alone and 22% are living with others in the home (single parents would fall into this category). Nearly three-in-ten (28%) are living with a parent or grandparent, reflecting the fact that unpartnered adults are disproportionately young. An additional 16% have some other relationship to the head of the household (for example, a sibling or roommate).
Almost six-in-ten unpartnered adults (58%) have never been married. About a fifth of unpartnered adults (21%) are divorced, 14% are widowed, and the remainder are either separated or married without a spouse present in the household.
Topics: Demographics, Lifestyle, Marriage and Divorce, Generations and AgeShare. Older, wiser, better. Older, wiser, better.
Editor's Note: List last updated April 6, 2017.
With a lot more time having passed since the PlayStation 4's launch, its library has expanded, and strengthened, considerably. With so many new contenders showing up, it seems like an ideal time to re-visit IGN's list of the top 25 PS4 games.
This year, your selection committee is: Marty Sliva (Senior Editor), Jonathon Dornbush (Associate News Editor), Alanah Pearce (Toys & Culture Editor), and Andrew Goldfarb (Executive Editor).
Our criteria are as follows:
Before we jump in, a quick word on criteria. The primary question this top 25 list is intended to answer is simple: "What are the 25 best games we played on this platform?" How much fun we had with the games is obviously our primary concern, but we also considered elements like longevity/staying power, influence, and innovation. Also, this list consists of games released before April 1, 2017.
What do you think of our selections? Let us know in the comments, and sound-off with your own Top PS4 Games lists.
And now, without further ado...
25. Resogun
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It came as little surprise that a game from Finnish developer Housemarque would create an excellent PlayStation 4 game. What came as a bigger surprise is that it's still one of the most dominant and enjoyable games on the console, even nearly a year out from its release. Housemarque is the undisputed master of the twin-stick shooter, and Resogun takes advantage of that know-how to create an experience markedly different from the likes of its previous games like Super Stardust HD and Dead Nation. Yet, at its core is the same hook that rests at the heart of its previous titles: high-score chasing and leaderboard climbing. PS4 doesn't have another game even remotely as addictive as Resogun.
24. Fallout 4
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The world, exploration, crafting, atmosphere, and story of Fallout 4 are all key parts of this hugely successful sandbox role-playing game. Great new reasons to obsessively gather and hoard relics of happier times, strong companions, and sympathetic villains driving tough decisions make it an adventure we’ll definitely replay and revisit.
23. Until Dawn
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Until Dawn is a gleefully cheesy homage to horror movies, set in a world built by a developer that clearly adores the genre. Its robust choice-and-consequence system and keen eye on horror’s most ridiculous tropes makes Until Dawn ultimately worth playing. Watching the ripple effect of your decisions, and seeing how many of the trope-y, but still likeable cast can survive the night makes it one of the most entertaining horror games of this young generation.
22. Tales From the Borderlands
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Tales from the Borderlands explores Rhys and Fiona’s journey in impeccable fashion. From heartbreak to hilarity, it runs the gamut of emotions in some really effective ways. Telltale has created some of the finest video game stories of the past few years, and Tales is absolutely at the top of that list.
21. Battlefield 1
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Battlefield 1 does an amazing job of transplanting the fantastic chemistry of the series’ traditional multiplayer action into the weaponry and vehicles of World War I. The era brings with it not only a visually striking backdrop for classic game modes like Conquest and the compelling new Operations, but a distinct personality that touches everything from its rich lineup of archaic and distinctively designed weapons to the somber anthology of character-driven stories in its brief but surprisingly poignant single-player scenarios.
20. Final Fantasy XV
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When we’re riding chocobos across the beach at dusk with our three friends and hunting iconic Final Fantasy monsters in a huge, picturesque open world, Final Fantasy XV feels like nearly everything we could want from a modern Final Fantasy. There is so much good here, so much heart - especially in the relationships between Noctis and his sworn brothers. And given that Square continues to improve the game with constant updates, XV is one of the best games in the series in a decade.
19. Firewatch
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Firewatch is a satisfying, mature exploration of the need for something video games can excel at providing — escapism – while at the same time addressing our responsibility to tackle life head on. Set in the beautiful Wyoming wilderness, Firewatch itself delivers an emotionally cathartic and enchanting escape. But its journey is one that teaches, with lasting impact, both the invaluable need for time away and that life and its responsibilities are always waiting for us to return.
18. Dragon Age: Inquisition
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Dragon Age: Inquisition, our 2014 Game of the Year winner, raises the bar for excellence in design of modern roleplaying games. This massive open world is full of breathtaking vistas, nuanced characters, political drama built upon rich lore, and of course battles with huge beasts. In the dozens - or hundreds - of hours you can spend completing its grand storyline and rich sidequests, BioWare’s latest epic entrenches itself as one of the greats.
17. Rocket League
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The idea of rocket-powered cars flipping through the air in Thunderdome-esque matches of cage-soccer sounds like the incoherent ramblings of a madman, but it turns out to be just crazy enough to work. Psyonix’s Rocket League, the follow up to Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, finds dumb fun in pulling turbocharge-assisted front flips in an ice cream truck, and the white-knuckle strategy in working with your team to control the giant ball on offense and defense. The fast and fluid absurdity of Rocket League fuses into one hell of a good time.
16. Ratchet & Clank
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Ratchet and Clank is a culmination of everything Insomniac has done with the series over the past 14 years. It takes the characters that we fell in love with long ago, and sets them off on their most gorgeous quest yet. The deep and rewarding weapon system, beautiful and varied worlds, and charming-as- heck story make it an adventure that anyone with a PlayStation 4 should strap in for.
15. Dishonored 2
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Building upon the foundations of the first game, Dishonored 2 delivers a tense stealth experience, with a multifaceted, artistically unique world to use to your advantage. Aside from creative powers and passive abilities, it really shines in varied and surprisingly creative level design, with distinct concepts that make different buildings feel like they almost belong in different games - in a good way. There are so many ways to approach each level that no two play-throughs in Dishonored 2 are the same, and it consistently offers a world full of choice and consequence.
14. Dark Souls III
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If Dark Souls 3 truly is the last in the series as we know it, then it’s a worthy send-off. Weapon arts allow stylish and versatile new moves without tarnishing the purity of the combat system. Lothric’s awe-inspiring locations provide visually stunning arenas for rigorous exploration and fierce face-offs with hosts of deadly enemies and even deadlier bosses. While not all the risky changes land as neatly as others, Dark Souls 3 is a powerful journey and the sequel the series truly deserves.
13. Nioh
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Nioh could well take over 100 hours if you set out to master its many side missions on top of its tough campaign, but it’s a challenge well worth taking. The way it builds on its most obvious inspirations with a highly refined combat system and an unexpectedly charming, yet gritty style all its own allows it to boldly carve out its own identity, standing as a shining example of what action RPGs can be. Simply put, it’s one of the very best exclusives on PS4.
12. Inside
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Inside is an absolutely gorgeous follow-up to Limbo, improving upon Playdead’s first moody platformer in nearly every aspect. The atmosphere is as spooky as ever, and a new mystery (or unspeakable horror) lies around every corner, plus occasionally mind-bending puzzles that are as challenging as they are satisfying. From gameplay to art direction to general design, it’s amazing how much meticulous detail went into every inch of this creepy world, and the love with which Playdead polished Inside is second to none. There was a six-year gap between Limbo and Inside, but it was worth the wait.
11. Overwatch
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Rapidly making its way into the Top 10 Twitch-streamed games every week, Overwatch is an incredible achievement in multiplayer shooter design. It manages to maintain addictive, fast-paced action whilst also demanding thoughtful strategy. There are an array of masterfully balanced classes and characters, and it’s that diversity that really defines Overwatch. The group seem like they should look utterly ridiculous standing next to each other, or even belonging in the same battlefield, but Overwatch lives at an intersection between design and artistry, and tactile joy and refined, intelligent gameplay.
10. Rise of the Tomb Raider
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Lara Croft's first post-reboot sequel raises the bar for the entire action-adventure genre. Freeform exploration sections plus a thorough crafting and XP system mean you've always got a new goal in mind. Combine it with Rise's gorgeous set pieces and compelling human story and you get one of the most complete, top-to-bottom excellent games on PS4.
9. Grand Theft Auto 5
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It may be the same core game as its PS3 counterpart, but that doesn't make it any less incredible. In fact, the PlayStation 4 edition of Grand Theft Auto V earns extra points for taking an already huge, deep game and adding more soundtrack songs, more props to cutscenes, more vehicles, and, biggest of all, an incredible first-person mode that makes the already seminal GTA V feel like a completely different game. The gauges of every car actually work properly. In a giant open-world game! It's little things like that combining together that make GTA V on PlayStation 4 the definitive experience on the young console.
8. Persona 5
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Persona 5 is a massive, gorgeous JRPG with well over 100 hours of gameplay for completionists. With more to do than ever and the series’ strongest story to date, it stands out as an extraordinary, memorable experience and easily one of the deepest JRPGs of the last decade. Its sprawling dungeon design and stylish, fully realized world are an absolute joy to explore. This is a new gold standard for Japanese RPGs and by far the best entry in the series yet.
7. The Witness
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The Witness has a power and pull that carried us through its wonderful journey. Its graceful combination of tangible goals, obscurity, and freedom creates ample opportunity for small victories and grand revelations alike. Its themes weave themselves beautifully throughout the gorgeous world and wide variety of puzzles, and the sense of accomplishment you feel after completing a particularly-tricky puzzle is unrivaled.
6. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
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Uncharted 4 combines the kind of realistic beauty that stops you in your tracks with a level of blockbuster storytelling that’s rarely seen in games. The adventure takes you across multiple totally diverse countries, uncovering an alluring mystery about politics, betrayal, pirates, relationships and responsibility, both in the present day setting, and in the game’s fictitious history lesson. Smooth, third-person action is spaced apart by genuine, heart-felt character moments that are likely to get you invested whether you’ve played and loved the Uncharted trilogy or this is the first one you play. To top it all off, there’s a solid multiplayer component, too, which maintains the series’ proud style and polish.
5. The Last of Us: Remastered
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The Last of Us is one of the very best games on the PS3, so it makes sense that Remastered is one of the very best on PS4. Naughty Dog’s harrowing tale of trying to find hope in a hopeless world tells one of the most emotional stories that our medium has ever seen. While the core single-player game is more than enough to make this list, the addition of a fantastic multiplayer suite and the incredible Left Behind DLC makes Last of Us: Remastered a must-have on PS4.
4. Horizon: Zero Dawn
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Across a vast and beautiful open world, Horizon: Zero Dawn juggles many moving parts with polish and finesse. Its main activity - combat - is extremely satisfying thanks to the varied design and behaviors of machine-creatures that roam its lands, each of which needs to be taken down with careful consideration. Its missions are compelling thanks to a central mystery that leads you down a deep rabbit hole to a genuinely surprising - and moving - conclusion. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s one of the absolute best looking console games ever made.
3. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
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In a time seemingly all about various genres and franchises stepping out into the open world format, Metal Gear Solid 5 stands tall above the rest in terms of adapting its gameplay to the new structure. Where some other franchises struggle to maintain their identity within a sandbox, Metal Gear’s thrives on it, turning all that open space into a tactical espionage playground. It hands you a useful set of weapons, gadgets, helpers, and support abilities and incorporates them all masterfully into the minute-to-minute gameplay, empowering you to conceive and execute a plan your way. No game in recent memory has rewarded player intelligence so generously.
2. Bloodborne
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Bloodborne is an amazing, exacting, and exhausting pilgrimage through a gorgeous land that imposes the feeling of approaching the bottom of a descent into madness. From Software has taken the formula they conducted with the Souls games, and injected it with a sense of speed, anger, and urgency that makes for an unforgettable experience. There’s an incredible power to unlocking its mysteries, and in succeeding, despite its demand for a pound of your flesh.
1. The Witcher III
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The Witcher 3 is a remarkable feat of open-world design savvy. Its two main sandbox areas are beyond massive, but their density actually matches their breadth. You can't go anywhere within its breathtaking landscapes without running into things to do. The best part is that almost every point of interest you come across ties back into one of the deepest lore pools in gaming, providing motivation, and context for its detailed RPG systems and its brutal, responsive combat.
These are the 25 PlayStation 4 games we found most fun, important, and influential. Do you agree or disagree? Let us know what your own list would look like in the comments!Scott Brown, seen in a photo from November 2012 when he was a US senator, will not run for governor of Massachusetts.
Former senator Scott Brown said late Wednesday he would not run for governor next year, ending months of uncertainty within the Republican Party and effectively sweeping a path to the nomination for 2010 gubernatorial nominee Charles D. Baker.
Brown, whose surprising 2010 Senate win leaves him as the only Republican to win statewide since 2002, said he hoped to pursue private-sector opportunities but did not foreclose on future bids for office.
“I’ve decided, with my wife’s blessing, that I will not be running for governor of Massachusetts in 2014,” Brown said on WBZ-Radio’s “Dan Rea Show.”
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After losing his reelection bid to Democrat Elizabeth Warren last year, Brown took a job with the Boston law firm Nixon Peabody and as a commentator for Fox News.
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In a Facebook post, Brown wrote, “I have been fortunate to have private sector opportunities that I find fulfilling and exhilarating. These new opportunities have allowed me to grow personally and professionally. I want to continue with that process.”
Brown told WBZ he would support Baker if the Swampscott Republican wages a second campaign for governor but raised doubts about Baker’s ability to appeal to voters. “Is he Mr. Personality? No,’’ Brown said. “Everyone knows that, he’s not.”
Brown’s announcement comes as Republicans in Massachusetts and elsewhere have increasingly chafed at what they called Brown’s office-shopping. His public flirtations with running for various offices — including the US Senate next year and the presidency in 2016 — while leaving open the prospect of seeking the corner office have stymied the state party’s efforts to cobble together a strong ticket next year.
While Brown had publicly left open the option to run for governor, GOP insiders had long questioned his sincerity.
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“Is anyone really surprised?” GOP strategist Jason Kauppi said after Brown’s announcement Wednesday night. “I think Senator Brown was probably having some fun with all of it, keeping people guessing.”
Privately, some Republicans said they suspected Brown was working to elevate his national stature while eyeing a 2014 Senate challenge to Democrat Edward J. Markey.
A veteran Republican strategist said prior to Brown’s announcement, “He’s not running for president. He’s not running for governor. So he’s doing all this, or his team is doing all this, to the aggravation of everyone else. Just to keep him relevant.”
Last weekend, Brown took a four-state swing through the Midwest, including Iowa — the first state to vote in presidential nominating contests — repeatedly hinting that he might run for president. And he has openly flirted with challenging Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, where he owns a second home.
Jim Merrill, a New Hampshire GOP strategist who was a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, called Brown’s “office-shopping” a drawback if he is considering that race.
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“I like and respect Scott Brown a great deal, but it’s time for him to get serious about what office he wants to run for,” Merrill said. “I think people are getting a little tired of him saying, each week, what different office he wants to run for.”
Merrill said Brown could be viable in New Hampshire but had hurt himself by floating the idea of running there without following up concretely. “I think it’s jarring to voters, and I think it’s a disservice to potential candidates in New Hampshire,’’ Merrill said.
Brown’s Iowa interlude and public statements about interest in the White House have also struck Republicans, both in Massachusetts and nationally, as a dubious proposition, despite his avowal to return to the first caucus state.
“I don’t know how serious he is,” state Senator Robert Hedlund, a Weymouth Republican who served with Brown in the state Legislature said prior to Brown’s announcement.
“Madness,” Mike Murphy, a longtime GOP consultant, tweeted on Sunday, linking to a Des Moines Register story on the visit. The Iowa Republican caucus, Murphy said, “would eat him alive.”
Still, Brown’s come-from-behind win over Attorney General Martha Coakley in 2010 for the Senate seat long held by the late Edward M. Kennedy has lent him something of a permanent folk-hero status to certain Republicans. Brown’s ability to attract independent and traditionally Democratic voters offered a template, strategists in both parties say, for how Republicans can win in what can feel like bottomlessly-blue Massachusetts.
Even before Brown’s announcement, Republicans had anticipated that Baker would run for governor. The Globe reported in March Baker had told associates his calculus around the 2014 race depended less on Brown and instead on whether a Republican could win statewide. A Republican fund-raiser with ties to both Brown and Baker said that during a February conversation between the two, Brown had indicated he would not run for governor.
Baker did not return multiple calls for comment after Brown’s announcement.
In 2010, Baker challenged Governor Deval Patrick but lost in a race that was complicated by the unenrolled candidacy of Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill.
Since then, Baker has worked at General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital firm, and recently has been boosting his public profile.
After Brown’s announcement late Wednesday, several Republicans privately said they were relieved that the party could exit its limbo stage. Several Republican candidates are eyeing statewide and federal office, a potential candidate yield that party strategists call heartening and say could help them break through the Democrats’ str |
attack them, Batman only believed because he was a hero, these guys might not buy it at all. And he couldn't reveal to any of them about his Return By Death ability. Even Batman, being from a world of super powered humans, might not believe his wild declaration of having a superpower he was not able to prove.
"I want to return it to its rightful owner."
"…What?!"
Felt stared at him with her fierce ruby red eyes, tinged with animosity and turned to Batman.
"And you?"
"I'm just here to resolve this situation, that's all."
"Oh…and how much is he paying you do this nonsense?"
"Nothing."
"YOU!"
Felt raised her voice and glared at the two of them.
"I won't be tricked by the two of you! This is some sick joke right?!"
Felt pointed at Subaru.
"You're going to be paying all this money for a pendant that's been already stolen and return it to the original owner?! Are you stupid?!"
She pointed at Batman.
"And you're going along with this?! Protecting a kid you just met and not expecting a single pay from it?! Ridiculous!"
Rom looked down at Felt with a caring expression.
"Felt, I don't think they're lying."
"No Rom-jii! Don't be tricked by these two. If they're gonna lie, they should do a better job at it. No one acts this way. NO ONE. I won't be tricked…"
Felt was shaking at this point, but something caught her eye and made her stand still. It also made her angry.
She saw Batman, making a sad but caring face at the young girl.
It was pity.
"Hey. HEY. What's with that look?! HUH? Stop it."
"You don't have to distrust the world so much."
"SHUT UP! What do you know? HUH? You know nothing about me!"
"I do. I've seen children like you countless times where I'm from. Dejected from the world, believing that everyone around them is out for themselves and thus, cannot be trusted. I know. There are some people you can trust, Felt."
"HK!"
Felt's eyes furrowed, into shapes of seething rage. Who was this guy? Who did he think he was to say these things?
Then a knock on the door was heard.
Subaru jumped up from the sound.
Rom noticed it as well.
"Who's that?"
Felt calmed herself and began walking to the door.
"Probably my client. A little early, but now we can get these negotiations over with."
Felt looked back at Batman and gave a sharp look toward him.
"And then you two can leave."
As Felt grabbed the doorknob, Subaru let out a scream.
"NO! DON'T OPEN THE DOOR WE'LL BE KILLED!"
Batman stood straight up. He believed that this was the Elsa person that Subaru warned him about. He slid over and got in front of Subaru.
Subaru was in deep despair. He didn't want to face Elsa, he wanted to get the negotiations over with and get everyone out of there. But it was too late. The bargaining failed and Felt seemed to now distrust both of them.
"Crap. Crap. Crap, I couldn't stop this."
The door opened as the light of the now red light of the sunset enveloped the room. Was this the color of death? Subaru had no time to think, he was scared, and he was nauseous, he was-.
"What do you mean 'be killed'? I'd never do anything that violent without warning!"
-Surprised.
The open doorway revealed a silver-haired girl who proceeded to enter, with a very sour look on her face.
"I won't let you get away this time. I have only one demand: Return my pendant, it's very important to me."
As she says this, Felt takes several steps back as she sees ice crystals form around her. Rom saw the situation unfold before him and realized they were in trouble.
"Looks like we can't even budge."
"Huh? Rom-jii, you're going to give up so easily, just cause she's using some magic?"
"Against any other magic user, no. But I think this one is much more trouble."
Rom stared at the silver haired girl with a look with caution as he asked her a serious question.
"You're an Elf, right miss?"
She closed her eyes for moment and answered with a sigh.
"No, I'm actually only a half-elf."
Felt stepped further back as she shuddered.
"Half-elf with silver hair…are you-?!"
"No I'm not her! I only look like her, it causes me problems you know?"
Felt then noticed she was near Subaru and Batman, she then sneered at them.
"You guys set me up didn't you?!"
"Huuuh?!"
"What?"
Felt stomped her foot down and stared at the both of them within her field of vision, with nothing but animosity.
"Both of you saying that you wanted to return the pendant, coming here together, just when she got here?! Ha! I knew you two were suspicious! So cut the act! Just give her back her pendant and gloat, laugh at me! I am so stupid!"
She scratched her head and had tears forming near the edges of her eyes.
Batman patted her head. She opened her eyes and looked up at him.
"No one tricked you Felt, coincidences happen a lot in any world. Things just happened and now is the opportunity to do something right. Right, Subaru?"
Subaru nodded to show his approval and walked over next to Batman.
"Yeah Felt, just give the pendant back and everyone can go home with a sense of ease you know?"
Subaru then looked at the silver haired girl ahead of him and gave a bright smile.
"So how about it? If she gives it back can we just let bygones be bygones? Also, try to take care of it better so it doesn't get stolen again."
The girl looked at the two of them confused.
"I don't understand, you two are not with her? I really don't get what's going on at all."
"Yeah me neither!"
Felt and the silver haired girl questioned who their loyalty lay with and why. Subaru gave a wry smile as he heard Batman and Rom try to calm everyone down.
Then he noticed it. A large blade was behind the girl, spiraling from a shadow next to her.
"PUCK! SHIELD HER!"
As he screamed this, a light glowing blue shield protects her. With this failure, a woman jumps out of the shadows and lands near another corner of the house. Batman puts his hand on Subaru and takes a defensive stance.
A small grey cat then floats around the silver haired girl, which surprises everyone, especially Batman. The cat lands on the girls shoulder and looks to Subaru.
"Were you the one who called me out? Thank you!"
Subaru gave a quick smile and a huge thumbs up.
"Oh yeah! You did great Puck!"
The woman in the black cloak, who had attacked, began to stand before them. She looked over at the girl and Puck.
She let out a seductive smile as she lifted up her curved blade.
'Spirit? You're a spirit aren't you?"
She giggled a tad; everyone around her became immensely tense.
"Fufufu. How splendid! I have never split a spirit's stomach open before."
Elsa had arrived, and with it, the battle for survival had begun.In the movie the exorcism of Emily Rose, the defense attorney played by Lora Lenee echoes the sentiments of many philosophers. In a closing statement she says that God either exists or he does not and either thoughts are astonishing. I am going to describe which of these equally striking alternatives holds true in reality. Before I present my arguments; a few words about my terms and method:
Any discussion about the existence of God must begin with the clear definition of what is meant by the word God. I have in mind an eternal being who is all powerful; all knowing and morally perfect who created us and takes special interests in us, a being who transcends the universe and yet is imminent in it.
Now admittedly no one can prove or disprove God’s existence with, 100% certainty, but my method for this discussion is simple. Because the hypothesis that offers the best explanation for the widest range of evidence is more likely true than other competing hypothesis, what we need to do is contrast two competing hypothesis before us: that God exists and that God does not exist and determine which hypothesis better explains the available evidence. Then using that explanation we can come to reasonable view possible and should accept it as our own.
I will now offer the evidence that is better explained by atheism than by theism, in support of the hypothesis that God does not exist:
Atheism offers the best explanation for the physical forces that causes natural disasters. In December 2004, a day after Christmas, an earthquake in the Indian ocean created a tsunami that killed approximately a quarter of a million people. Then the year later in August of 2005, hurricane Katrina killed almost 2000 more people in New Orleans. What are the explanation for these events?We can’t blame man’s free will for natural disasters because God could have created the world without the forces that cause natural disasters without ever hindering our free will. And man’s free will is not a cause of natural disasters anyway, unless of course the ancient people and Christian coalition are right then natural disasters are Gods way of punishing sinners. But if God is just, then these explanations make no sense at all. Even if a few guilty parties were killed by Katrina or the tsunami, considering all the otherwise innocent people who died also, that will be like God sentencing a man to death by firing squad, then placing him in the middle of a group of innocent children and shooting him with a shot gun from 20 feet away. Don’t you think God will have the ability to punish sin with a little more precision? Surely if God exists then the death and devastation caused by natural disasters is absolutely baffling. However if atheism is true, such disasters are no less tragic but we can explain them. They are the product of mindless forces like plate tectonics and tropical weather systems operating in the universe blind and indifferent to our struggles for survival. Thus physical forces that cause natural disasters are evidence for atheism and against theism.
Atheism offers the best explanation for unjustified pain and suffering in the world. Let me be clear. I do not mean to imply that God cannot allow some pain and suffering in the world, if he exists, since it would be possible for an all loving God to allow pain that we all can learn from, like that of the pain after touching a hot stove, or maybe even pain that leads to some greater good, like that felt after a root canal. In these cases pain is justifiable, instead, my claim is that it is impossible for a morally perfect God to allow unjustifiable suffering, like pain that teaches nothing and in which there is no greater good. For example, consider the severe pain suffered by most people suffering from cancer, there is no conceivable justification for it, they are gonna die anyway. As caring and compassionate human beings we do what we can to ease and their suffering, with the limited resources available to us (e.g. painkillers). But if God exists, he is even more caring and compassionate than we are, and has an even greater ability alleviate pain than we do. Since no one can be morally superior to God, we would expect God to also do something ease the entirely unnecessary pain in cancer victims. But he doesn’t. Yet as even theists admit, unnecessary pain and suffering cannot, there has to be some ultimate justification. But God hasn’t shared it with us. And those speaking on his behalf hasn’t figured it out yet. In contrast, if atheism is true, we have an explanation. A sensation of pain happens naturally as body’s way saying something is wrong, but since an evolution is not intelligent process, it never figured a way to turn the pain off when there was no more need of warning, thus since only atheism is compatible with unjustifiable pain and suffering, and because it appears that unjustifiable pain and suffering exists, the existence of unjustifiable pain and suffering is evidence for atheism and against theism.
Atheism offers the best explanation for God’s silence in the face of adversity. Consider the great theologian and lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he writes: God is teaching us that, we can get along well as humans without him, the God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. Before God and with him, we live without God. Really? And the God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. Out of context, these words don’t sound like the words of pastor. But Bonhoeffer’s words makes perfect sense from his context. He writes from prison in Nazi Germany, where he died. And Bonhoeffer is not the only person who felt abandoned by God. Many people do when trials of life come their way. So much so that, a great deal of preaching is devoted to help believers maintain their faith even when God seems to be nowhere around. Thus we can understand Bonhoeffer’s claim. The God forces us to live like he is not there. As a rationalization for the severe circumstances Bonhoeffer found himself in. But is it good rationalization? Not really. Consider all the circumstances parents take their children take immunization shots. I remember vividly being one of those children. I did not understand the purpose of the shots. I only knew that they hurt. Since I was too young to understand what was happening my mother did the best of what was necessary to comfort me, just as any decent parent would. Now if God exists he is not just any decent parent, he is the standard of decency itself. Thus when we go through our trials and tribulations which are minor compared to Bonhoeffer’s it is commonly thought that God has a plan that we don’t understand. But in these situation wouldn’t we expect God to comfort us just like a loving parent would? Bonhoeffer probably expected as much. But when his expectations weren’t met, he came up with an alternative. Those strange explanations. But there is one more potential explanation: If atheism is true then God doesn’t exist, thus we could expect God not to comfort anyone. Now it may be objected that they have felt God’s comforting presence during adversity, thus my argument fails. But isn’t it possible that people who believe in God’s comforting presence are mistaken? Of course it is. Otherwise who would be having this discussion? All it would take is for one person to claim God helped me get through it, and this should be settled. But the issue isn’t settled. We all know that the idea of God acting as a placebo would help us without God ever truly existing. So atheism and theism can explain God’s comforting presence equally well. But this is not true when explaining situations when God’s comfort isn’t felt because only atheism has a good answer for that. Thus God’s silence in the face of adversity is evidence for atheism and not theism.
Atheism offers the best explanation for the physical dependence of the minds on the brain. It is commonly assumed by theists that somehow connected to the body is an immaterial soul. It is this souls that receives credit for our higher mental capacities, such as the ability to make free choices, think rationally, and even the ability to continue living after the death of our body. In short we identify our soul as the source of our mind. But is there any evidence that such soul exists? Unfortunately there is not. The idea that our mind exists directly independent of our body is directly contradicted by everyday observations. Like the fact that alcohol and other physical substances can change our conscious states and that degenerative brain diseases Alzheimer’s and brain damages can seriously impair or even destroy conscious states and the fact we don’t expect young children to be capable of advanced forms of abstract thinking, they require more fully developed brains. Certain controlled substances can also generate out of the body experiences, similar to the ones experienced during near death experiences. As Owen Flanagan, Duke University Professor of Neurobiology, have that stated advances in the sciences of the mind, cognitive sciences, cognitive neuroscience has lead to the rejection of the idea that the mind or soul interacts with but is metaphysically independent of the body. And as Marvin Minsky, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stated, Minds are what brains do.
Indeed extensive evidence suggests that all of our conscious and mental states correspond to some physical brain state. Since it appears that no way that a mind can exist apart from functioning physical brain, we are justified in concluding that disembodied minds do not exist. However this implies a serious difficulty for theism. If disembodied minds don’t exist, since God is supposed to be a disembodied mind, strongly suggests that God does not exist. Therefore the physical depenndence of minds on the brain is evidence for atheism and not theism.
Atheism offers the best explanation for the hiddeness of God. If God exists and wants his existence to be known (e.g. faith-will-save-you propaganda), it is strange that the evidence for existence of God isn’t stronger. Think about it. Are there much more ways God could have made the evidence for his existence obvious? As Sam Harris observes, God could have included in the Bible a flawless discourse in mathematics so advanced, that it will still be useful today. It would be hard to deny the divine inspiration behind such old scripture. And given all the space devoted in the Bible devoted to who begat who and all the erotica, there would be certainly room for it. Or consider the biblical account of the resurrection of Jesus. It is said that resurrection is the supreme indication that Jesus was indeed God in the flesh but then, after rising from the dead, he ascended into heaven 40 days later. So why only 40 days? Couldn’t he stuck around a little longer? Perhaps a year? Or 10? Or a 1000? In fact Jesus could still be alive for claiming his message of divine love and surely everyone will be convinced, I know I would be, and isn’t this what he wants? But instead as the story has it, Jesus to took the first flight back into heaven floating away into the sky like an elegant super hero. Why? I doubt Jesus had important business in heaven that required immediate attention. And these are just two ways God could have made his existence more evident. We can probably all think of more. It would do no good in claiming that God wants us to believe in him by faith, because this would mean that God created us as rational beings, but has chosen to frustrate the rational capacities he has equipped us with. And if God exists he must be choosing withhold his existence from us. But this doesn’t make any sense, if God truly wants us to believe in him. But if atheism is true, the reason for God’s hidden is quite clear. He is simply not there. Therefore divine hiddenness is evidence for atheism and against theism.
Atheism offers the best explanation of religious history. If it were true that God has revealed a message of salvation to any of the world’s religions, then we would not expect that religion’s success to be explicable through historical contingencies and natural cultural diffusion. But that religion to display signs of unique and undeniable signs of divine favoritism. However there is no religion in the world that satisfies these expectations. For example, despite the fact that Christians try to romanticize their history and imagine that their religion has achieved this success through divine providence, this is clearly not the case. Christianity really began to genuinely thrive after it began to have the support of not of God but of the Roman empire. Equipped with the ability to eliminate competing religions and passing laws that called for their extermination, Christianity embarked on a lengthy reign of terror. Burning books, burning people, destroying cultures, launching Christian crusades and genocide, and excommunicating or murdering any so called heretics or that is anyone who dare question their authority. And so we have the largest religion in the world history has the bloodiest history of totalitarian intolerance and indignation. Is it any surprise? It certainly is if Christianity is the out growth of an all loving incompassionate God. If God exists, regardless of which religion is true, we would not have expected him to sit idly by and let all this happen, instead, you would expect God to intervene to either Christianity straight, or to have defeated Christianity in the name of what other religion might be true. But if atheism is true then there is no God to intervene in any religious warfare or offer divine favor to any group of believers. There would be no religion that displays Gods favor and indeed there is not. If Christianity is merely part of human invention, as surely most religions must be, then it is not at all a surprise that Christianity has dominated the world religious scene by being the most violent. Not the most reasonable, therefore, religious history constitutes evidence for atheism and against theism.
Atheism offers the best explanation for religious confusion. For a moment put yourself in the position of an unbeliever who has just lost his/her faith and is considering which specific religious path to pick (e.g. Islam, Jainism). What religious path wuld appear to be the correct? If God exists we would expect the path he expects his followers to take clear and obvious. So that we would have no confusion about it. In fact doing so will be God’s moral duty. Especially of there were consequences for choosing the wrong path. However, consider the rich diversity of religious claims made world wide. We have already seen christianity does not display any sign of God’s favor. Can you think of any other religion that does? Probably not. I couldn’t either. The religious landscape is purposely confused and cluttered by conflicting opinions about the nature of God and the supernatural. There are approximately 10,000 religions in the world today. Only one of them is christianity with over 33,000 denominations in it. This is all out of the imagine if God is aware of the situation and has the slightest bit of care about it. However if atheism is true, there is no truth in the God hypothesis that believers can discover. So there is no reason for them to agree about any of them. Therefore religious confusion is evidence for atheism and against theism.
Atheism offers the best explanation for the uniformity of religious experience. When I was a christian, the argument that caused me to maintain my faith as long as I did was my religious experience. I said that I was not ready to admit that my relationship with Jesus had all been in my head. However what I did not realize was that, as real and convincing my religious experiences were to me, members of other religious groups had the same kind of certainty about the truth of their faith that I possessed about mine; and for good reason. For as it turns out, the different religious experiences of the religious of all faiths were all caused by stimulation in the same areas of the brain. In fact one can even be induced into feeling that he/she is having the religious experience when those parts of the brain are artificially stimulated and the believer will interpret that experience according to whichever faith he or she holds. What is the explanation for world wide uniformity in religious experience? It certainly can’t be that all religons are true. But if we imagine that one of them is true, then it would be very strange that believers who experience the real God use the same brain states as the believers who experience the wrong God. Therefore, uniformity of religious experience is not what we would expect if there were truly a god that communicates with us through select religious channel. However if atheism is true then uniformity of religious experience is to be expected as no religious experience would be caused by anything genuinely supernatural. Instead religious experience would find its roots in the human brain. And this display of uniformity would be due to similarities in human physiology and psychology. Since this is precisely what we find to be the case, the uniformity of religious experience constitutes evidence for atheism and against theism.
Atheism offers the best explanation for the evidence of evolution. Since the publication of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, Evolution by natural selection has been proven to be the most successful scientific theories ever. The evidence for the occurrence of evolution is immense and secure. It includes the fossil record, comparative anatomy, geographical distribution of species, embryology and the rapidly growing base of molecular evidence such as protein and DNA functional redundancy, transposons etc. This evidence is so convincing, that according to one report, less than one in a thousand scientists in relevant fields worldwide reject evolution in favor of creationism. It is actually possible, that many theists believe that God has simply chosen to create life with the process of evolution. However evolution shows no signs of intelligent direction. Instead it proceeds blindly by producing vestigial organs and other biological systems that are not entirely efficient. Only 1% of all species that ever lived still survive today. And as Darwin pointed out beneficial mutations are produced by the same means as harmful ones. Without doubt evolution appears to be an odd method for an all powerful God to use considering all the other more efficient methods he could have used. However on atheism, evolution by natural selection is the only method we know of, that has the ability to produce complex organisms like those today. Thus evolution constitutes evidence for atheism and against theism.
Atheism offers the best explanation for the scale of the universe. Consider the kind of universe that most ancient people, such as the authors of the Bible thought that lived in. They speculated that the universe they lived in is a few thousand years old, relatively small and the earth since it was at the center of God’s attention was also the center of the universe. Furthermore, they believed in flat earth covered by a dome and above that dome was the location of heaven. And this is all quite reasonable, considering the only hypothesis they were working with was that God had created the universe. In fact only this view of the universe makes sense if the otherwise resolved bible stories such as the tower of babylon, were God was threatened by the construction of a sky scraper (Gen 11:6). However we now know that the universe imagined by the authors of the Bibles is not the universe we live in. The visible universe is 156 billion light years wide and there is no center to it just like there is no center “on” the Earth. If God created the universe with us in mind then much of it is a complete waste, but it strongly implies that a rational God didn’t create it. However if atheism is true, we would expect the universe to be very large and very old so that the circumstances for life to evolve gradually would be able to arise. Thus only when we pretend that the universe was not created with us in mind will does the size of the universe make any sense. Consequently the scale of the universe is for atheism and against theism.The Golden Retriever suffere brutal injures (Picture: Asia Wire)
These shocking images show the injuries sustained after a dog was allegedly manhandled by airport staff.
The Golden Retriever, who was taking a flight home with its owner, suffered serious injuries after reportedly escaping from its cage.
It is believed ‘excessive force’ was used on the dog by airport staff.
The 23-year-old owner of the animal said his dog Er Mao had severe injuries to its eyes and body when he was handed to him by staff at Tianhe International Airport in Wuhan, capital of Central China’s Hubei Province.
The dog had been placed inside a cage in the cargo hold of the China Eastern Airlines flight from Shanghai, although it’s said to have escaped and bolted across the tarmac.
It’s believed the dog escaped the cargo hold (Picture: Asia Wire)
According to a statement by the airport, flight MU 2544 was delayed and eight staff members spent over 40 minutes chasing and restraining the runaway pet before putting it back in its cage.
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After the flight landed in Wuhan, the owner said he had to wait over an hour to be given his dog, and only then was he informed that Er Mao had somehow managed to escape the cargo hold.
The airport said their staff had to react to the ’emergency situation’ in order to avoid damage and injuries to assets and passengers, apologising to the owner for the incident that has grabbed headlines nationwide.
But the owner, who said his pet was still receiving emergency treatment at an animal hospital, is demanding a better explanation and may seek damages from the airport as well as the airlines.
Further investigation is now under way to determine who will take the blame for the dog’s escape and injuries.
The dog’s owner is demanding a better explanation (picture: Asia Wire)
Metro.co.uk has reached out to both Tianhe International Airport and China Eastern Airlines about the allegations.China has successfully mined flammable ice at sea after nearly two decades of research work.
The flammable ice was discovered in the South China Sea in 2007.
According to Chinese state run Xinhua, one cubic metre of combustible ice is equal to 164 cubic metres of natural regular gas.
Beijing claims success in mining flammable ice 4,000 feet under the South China Sea
Useful resource: Flammable ice was discovered on the bed of the South China Sea in 2007
The drilling phase: On March 28, China started a trial mining phase at a depth of 4,153 feet
A revolution? The colour of flammable ice is close of that to normal water ice
Minister of Land and Resources Jiang Daming announced the success on May 18. The mining site was located in the Shenhu area of the South China Sea, 320 kilometres of the coast of Zhuhai City.
The trial mining started on March 28 at a depth of 4,153 feet. During the trial, around 16,000 cubic metres of gas was extracted each day.
The methane content was up to 99.5 percent of natural gas.
Footage shows the bore head being lowered down into the sea to extract the gas from the ice.
The Minister claimed that it was a major breakthrough that may lead to a global energy revolution.
The amount of predicted resources is equivalent to more than twice that of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.
Successful attempt: The Minister for Land and Resourced claimed it was a major breakthrough
Burning the ice: During the trial, around 16,000 cubic metres of gas was extracted each day
The Chinese used a floating platform as a base to then searching for the flammable ice
When the ice is released from the seabed, methane gas is released which can then be burned
The flammable ice was discovered in the South China Sea (File photo)
The flammable ice, a kind of natural gas hydrate was discovered in the South China Sea in 2007. For the past two decades China has been researching and exploring the area.
Combustible ice is found on the seabed. It can be ignited like solid ethanol. One cubic metre of combustible ice is equal to 164 cubic metres of regular natural gas.
Zhong Ziran, head of the China Geological Survey Bureau told Xinhua that combustible ice is more environmentally friendly than oil.
Qiu Haijun, director of the trial mining commanding headquarters told reporters: 'With the advanced technology we could help resolve the energy resource problem and boost economic development and exchanges between countries.'
The US, Canada and Japan have also been researching into flammable gas. Earlier this month Japan announced it was successful at producing the natural gas on the pacific coast and will continue mining it for around three to four weeks, reports South China Morning Post.The U.S. military will send about 3,500 more troops to Afghanistan, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing U.S. officials.
The decision follows President Trump’s new South Asia strategy, announced in August, which keeps U.S. troops in the country and sends additional forces.
Those extra troops would bolster the Afghan military in its fight against the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and bring the total number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to about 14,500.
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Pentagon officials said the Defense Department will not comment on a troop increase until an official announcement from Defense Secretary James Mattis James Norman MattisTrump backs off total Syria withdrawal Grass-roots campaign backs Mattis for public office Overnight Defense: Dems tee up Tuesday vote against Trump's emergency declaration | GOP expects few defections | Trump doubles number of troops staying in Syria to 400 MORE.
The news comes as Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford and State Secretary Rex Tillerson Rex Wayne TillersonHeather Nauert withdraws her name from consideration for UN ambassador job Trump administration’s top European diplomat to resign in February Pompeo planning to meet with Pat Roberts amid 2020 Senate speculation MORE on Wednesday briefed lawmakers about Trump’s South Asia strategy and North Korea.
House lawmakers said after the meeting that the officials would not say how many more troops are being sent to Afghanistan.
Mattis last week signed orders to send additional troops to Afghanistan but did not specify the size of the force. He added that he will not discuss the details until after he briefs Congress.
Trump was widely expected to send roughly 4,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, a recommendation made by the Pentagon months ago.
If confirmed, the additional forces would join the 11,000 troops already in the country. The Pentagon last month officially acknowledged there are thousands more troops in the country than the 8,400 previously reported.Lets face it, nobody wants to need medical care while on board a plane. And yet, with a huge number of people traveling by air everyday, it’s inevitable that it will happen with some regularity. In fact if you travel by air regularly, you have probably heard the flight attendants ask over the PA if there is a “medical professional onboard.”
Any malady that can occur on the ground can happen in the air, and the altitude while on a commercial aircraft can even exacerbate certain medical conditions. That means that some people may be more likely to need medical assistance in the air than they do on the ground.
For German airline Lufthansa, there are about 3,000 passenger medical emergencies that occur on board each year. Of those, an average of 54 emergencies are serious enough that they require the flight to be diverted so that a patient can obtain urgent medical care. I recently had a chance to sit down with the airline and learn how they cope with these situations. Not only is the airline well prepared for any emergency that may arise in flight, they are also ready to treat those who need care before they board the aircraft.
Emergencies On Board
As mentioned above, Lufthansa averages 3,000 on-board medical emergencies of varying levels of severity each year. Just like any other airline, their flight attendants receive regular training on inflight first aid and emergency procedures. Crews are also trained to assist medical professionals when that need arises. However, this is where the similarities between Lufthansa and most other airlines ends.
On a Lufthansa flight, making a public call for any medical professionals on the plane is a last resort. The airline prefers to be far more discreet. After all, does the whole plane always need to know that somebody on board is having a problem? To accomplish this, Lufthansa launched the Doctors on Board program for physicians.
Doctors on Board allows Lufthansa to identify doctors long before an emergency occurs. By doing this, the cabin crews can personally and discreetly summon the doctor if their skills are needed during a flight. In order to find doctors who could potentially participate in this program, the airline scoured the data from its Miles and More frequent flier program. By doing this, Lufthansa was able to identify 15,000 doctors who regularly fly the airline. Of those, 10,000 opted to join the program.
Participation in the Doctors on Board program carries with it several benefits. The doctors are issued a handbook about aviation medicine, as well as receiving news and information via both the internet and postal mailings. They are insured by Lufthansa for any care that they provide during a flight. They are also rewarded with 5,000 Miles and More award miles and a discount code for €50 off of their next flight, plus they receive a special bag tag identifying their participation in the program. Finally, they are given the opportunity to participate in a course on aviation medicine and on-board emergency handling, for which they are paid an additional fee.
In the event that their services are needed inflight, Lufthansa stocks each aircraft with an extensive doctor’s kit. These kits are filled with high-quality medical equipment and a large selection of drugs and medications that may be needed in case of an emergency. These kits are separate from the first aid kits that the cabin crew has access to. And all of the costs of providing emergency medical care onboard are borne by the airline.
Transporting Ill Passengers
Of course, not every passenger who needs to travel by air is in perfect flying condition. There are a variety of medical situations in which a person may be able to fly with certain accommodations. Perhaps the most basic of these is the need for a little extra room. If one seat isn’t quite enough space for a person with a medical condition, Lufthansa can provide an empty seat next to them for a fee on all flights. Another option on long-haul flights is a full lie-flat seat in First or Business class, providing both space and comfort to the passenger.
As a result of the thinner air that comes from a cabin altitude of roughly 8,000 feet, some passengers with reduced lung function need supplemental oxygen while onboard. Lufthansa has specialized Wenoll System oxygen supplies available for use on all flights. These devices provide up to 15 hours worth of supplemental oxygen for passengers in need.
For those passengers that must remain lying down for the entire flight, there is the option of stretcher transportation. On each Lufthansa aircraft, a section of seats at the rear of the Economy cabin can be folded forward, providing space for a specialized stretcher to be installed. These stretchers cover several rows and require the width of two economy seats. Due to emergency egress requirements, the stretcher must be positioned along the side of the aircraft. For patient privacy, a curtain is installed around the stretcher.
A caretaker travels with each stretcher patient. On aircraft where the Economy cabin has rows of two seats along the side of the plane, that caretaker would sit across the aisle from the patient being transported. For aircraft that have three seats between the aisle and the window, including all narrow-body aircraft, the attendant would sit in one of the aisle seats next to the stretcher.
Lufthansa can accommodate requests for stretcher space with 24 hours of advance notice. These requests are made through the airline’s Medical Operations Center. This dedicated team is responsible for all of the necessary arrangements that are needed in order to transport a patient. In addition to managing the operational logistics, this team also ensures that the patient is medically cleared for travel. Because of the limitations in treating a patient being transported in this manner, they must be in a relatively |
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Just two years ago, Hayashi pumped at least $202,212 of her own campaign money into helping elect her lawyer husband to the Alameda County bench.
Hayashi was born in South Korea and was the first Korean American woman to be elected to the state Legislature, according to her legislative biography. She chairs the Assembly Committee on Business, Professions and Consumer Protections.
Before winning election from the 18th Assembly District, which includes Hayward, San Leandro, Castro Valley and Dublin, Hayashi was a public health analyst and member of the state Board of Registered Nursing.For those looking to write their names in history books, it’s usually better to break the rules than follow the leader. And while that philosophy doesn’t always apply to a tradition-rich realm like winemaking, a relatively small but swelling community of vintners is bucking modern conventions to make big, idiosyncratic wines with flavors that hearken back to the early days of fermentation. By turning their attention from the fields to the cellar—where a similarly sprawling, flavor-producing ecosystem also exists—these winemakers are working to capture another layer of terroir—by harnessing the power of yeast.
For most of wine’s lengthy history, fermentation started organically, thanks to an entire galaxy of these resident or “native” yeasts. But what seemed like magic long ago is bonafide science today. Labs have isolated effective yeast cultures according to the grape varietals they work best with, and named them accordingly; The industry standard calls for these yeasts to streamline flavor, and the reliable, clean and ever-accessible strains like 71B-1122 or QA23 gobble up sugar and produce alcohol with the straight-faced efficiency their names evoke. It’s perhaps the only somewhat predictable element left in the topsy-turvy process of winemaking.
Yet because wine is an extension of personality and not all of the players want to play it safe, it’s only logical that these vintners are returning to the wild yeast. In many ways, it’s a means of trading control for character.
Chad Stock of Minimus Wines in McMinnville, Oregon, aptly dubs his wines “experiments.” He’s tried just about everything you’re told not to do in the cellar, and all of his wines (with the exception of one made with the addition of Brettanomyces), are the product of native yeast. “I prefer to ferment with native yeast for its unpredictability,” he says. “Working in a chaotic environment produces the most compelling expressions of wine.”
He loves the prevailing inconsistency—something other winemakers might frown upon. “Sometimes the wines turn out rather simple, wearing their fruit on their sleeves, and sometimes they are incomprehensibly complex,” he says. And while this chaos can occasionally mean catastrophe, Stock simply trashes unacceptable wine rather than treating it—a routine that doesn’t take away from the thrill of experimentation.
Hungry for a little more risk and reward, Kim Engle of Bloomer Creek Vineyard in upstate New York walked away from commercial strains in 2010—adopting an Old World approach inspired at least in part by sampling some mind-blowingly good natural wines from France’s Loire Valley. In retrospect, he considers streamlined fermentation downright invasive. “The use of cultured yeast, even in small amounts or for special situations, might lead to contamination in the cellar as these strains tend to be selected for aggressiveness,” he says.
Traditional commercial strains tend to dominate in the cellar and once they’ve set up shop, they’re tough to push out. The fact that they outmuscle native strains during the course of fermentation and carry a wine all the way to dryness without any hiccups is music to the ears of many winemakers. But it’s nails on a chalkboard for those looking to spotlight natural yeast’s influence, which tends to be shyer and more susceptible to stalls along the way.
His winemaking philosophy, like the others, is not without risk. Whereas most winemakers spray for rot in the vineyard, Engle encourages it, making a Euro-style “noble rot” riesling some years. Engle believes this style, centuries old, concentrates flavors and complexity, affording his wines added earthiness and dried fruit and honeycomb flavors. He also makes Pinot Noir and Gewurztraminer, among others, that he believes best manifest the benefits of native yeast.
Farther north, in Maine, Brian Smith from Oyster River Winegrowers learned the hard way which styles of wine take better to native yeast than others. In his experience, red wine fermented this way tends to pick up unwanted notes of nail polish remover (ethyl-acetate, technically), but instead of dumping it and moving on (as Stock might), he simply blended the batch down into a larger lot to reduce waste. Now, he primarily ferments white wines and ciders with wild yeast, noticing an especially big flavor difference in the latter.
For Smith, it’s not about creating a chaotic experience, but rather a return to old methods. “I like the use of native yeasts mostly for the pride of using primitive techniques to produce modern-styled wines,” he says. “There are so many choices a winemaker can make during the process, terroir is just as much about the cellar as it is the ground.”Deb Roschen poses for a photo in Rochester, Minn., on July 11 with notebooks of evidence of how authorities accessed information about her through law enforcement databases. The former county commissioner says the searches were in retaliation for questioning county spending and sheriff's programs.
Minnesota's Department of Public Safety disclosed a small handful of cases in which police employees were disciplined for misusing law enforcement databases between 2013 and 2015. But a 2013 report by the state's legislative auditor estimated more than half of Minnesota's 11,000 law enforcement users of the Driver and Vehicle Services website made questionable searches in fiscal year 2012.
They queried about themselves or people with the same last names, or disproportionately searched for people of one sex, the audit found. The website collects and maintains protected driver information.
The auditor found at least 88 instances of misuse already documented in state records, including cases in which officers used the database to find addresses of friends or learn information about co-workers and relatives. But the investigation found more suspicious cases through a review of users' audit trails, which track what information was sought and when. The report also found suspicious searches of "highly queried" people, such as a murder victim whose name was searched 158 times in a single month by 110 employees of 59 Minnesota law enforcement agencies.
"The state's approach to managing law enforcement's use of state databases is reasonable, but monitoring and accountability need to be strengthened," Legislative Auditor James Nobles wrote in the report.
The Department of Public Safety said officers no longer access the driver database through a website and instead use it through a more secure portal the agency says allows for greater accountability.
Officers are trained on proper use of the system, and the agency conducts routine audits of officers' searches. The department said it also developed procedures to prevent former employees from accessing the database.
The auditor's report came after several high-profile cases, including that of a former Department of Natural Resources employee charged with illegally viewing the driver records of at least 5,000 people, mostly women. A Minnesota police officer who sued several agencies after her driver's license information was snooped received more than $1 million in settlements.
Dorie Jessen, a former 911 operator, sued Blue Earth County, alleging her former fiance, also a county employee, wrongfully searched for information on her and her family more than 100 times after they broke up.
"I felt increased anxiety. If this individual was capable of doing this this many times, what else was that individual doing that I didn't know about?" said Jessen, who settled the lawsuit with the county for $77,500 in 2015. "It made me feel violated, quite honestly."
Joseph Flynn, an attorney who represented Blue Earth County in the case, said the increased attention on database misuse in Minnesota has "had a chilling effect on legitimate law enforcement use of the information."
At least 35 other people, including an attorney, a former Miss Minnesota and television news reporters, have filed lawsuits in the state alleging officers inappropriately queried about them, sometimes thousands of times.
But an appeals court this month affirmed dismissals of many of the cases, saying the plaintiffs' audits showing hundreds of queries of their information "do not reveal a pattern that would indicate that they were unlawful or unpermitted." Attorney Sonia Miller-Van Oort of the Sapientia Law Group, a firm that handled most of the cases, said the decision means fewer people will come forward with database-abuse claims, and it lets law enforcement personnel believe they can get away with prying.
"It doesn't incentivize government employees to follow the law," she said.
More broadly, the AP's review found that officers across the country have misused law enforcement databases hundreds of times to look up information on romantic partners, relatives and celebrities.For on a time when a cardinall Bembus did move a question out of the Gospell, the Pope gave him a very contemptuous answer saying: All ages can testifie enough how profitable that fable of Christe hath ben to us and our companie. — John Bale, “The Pageant of the Popes,” 1574
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Christians arguing with other Christians about the “true” nature of Jesus and the church always makes for entertaining reading, but even more so when it comes from an openly gay Catholic whose own intellectualism should undercut his own faith in the first place.
In his new essay for Newsweek, “Christianity in Crisis,” Andrew Sullivan says that we should eschew the influence of politics and power that has crept into religion and get back to the “radical ideas” that spring from what Jesus did and said, including loving both our neighbors and enemies, turning the other cheek, giving away all material possessions and loving God the Father, whom Sullivan calls “the Being behind all things.” Presumably, this being is distinct from Jesus, yet Sullivan admits that he believes in the “divinity and resurrection” of Christ. That’s at least two gods in which Sullivan believes. We can imagine that there are three since most Catholics believe in the Hoy Spirit, which, when assembled, they call the Triune. Since the Holy Spirit is really just God the Father in spirit, I don’t really count that, so let’s just go with the two. So, Sullivan believes in two distinct beings, one that came to earth as a human but who was also divine and eventually was resurrected and another god who was behind everything that is. From any monotheistic viewpoint, this is troubling, but this is what every Jesus-as-divine believer must admit, that they believe in two distinct gods. Or not … depending on which verses one reads. Christians often support the Triune business by quoting the John 10:30 line that reads, “I and the Father are one.” Yet, the verse directly before it claims that, “My Father … is greater than all.”
But who knows. And that’s the point. Biblical scholars now have a clearer understanding of which parts of the gospels may be authentic, and in turn, which quotes attributed to Jesus he might have actually uttered (if he existed at all). One thing we do know: the gospels were written decades after the events took place, and there is not one contemporary source that attests to his existence. Further, the non-contemporary, extra-biblical texts that mention Jesus may point to a figure by that name roaming around the desert, but scant references to a Jesus by Josephus or some other early historian is a far cry from evidence that he was supernatural.
Sullivan knows this. He also knows that Jefferson, whom he rallies to the call in defense of Jesus’ simple truths, was not a Christian in any modern sense and rejected Christ as a divine being. On Jefferson, Sullivan declares of the Jeffersonian Bible:
And what he (Jefferson) grasped in his sacrilegious mutilation of a sacred text was the core simplicity of Jesus’ message of renunciation. He believed that stripped of the doctrines of the Incarnation, Resurrection, and the various miracles, the message of Jesus was the deepest miracle.
While the latter is a clever sentence, Jefferson clearly saw no miracles and was only attempting to get after the rote details of Jesus’ life and the core precepts that he espoused. Jefferson said he was a “real Christian,” but only to the extent that he thought some of Jesus’ words were laudable, and that’s as far as Jefferson was willing to go.
Yet, despite what Sullivan describes as
a century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory
he still seems to hold these works in high regard and for reasons that escape comprehension. If he readily admits that the gospels contain embellishments, how is he to trust the parts that he likes? How does he know that those parts — love they neighbor, turn the other cheek, etc. — authentically sprang from the mouth of Jesus and are not creations of equally fallible memories. How does he even know that those high precepts originated with Jesus, or the gospel writers, in the first place, or that most of the key episodes of the New Testament (virgin birth, ascension) were even New Testament constructs.
Indeed, many of the great ideas of Christ predate his uttering them. As for other elements that were likely copied from other religions, here’s a handy guide.
Sullivan conclusion doesn’t get any better. Earlier in his essay, he claims that
The thirst for God is still there. How could it not be, when the profoundest human questions—Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? How did humanity come to be on this remote blue speck of a planet? What happens to us after death?—remain as pressing and mysterious as they’ve always been?
But the profoundest human questions are quests for knowledge independent of faith or religion. God, in short, is not the author of the questions or the answers. He’s a distraction from them since to assume a god in contemplating these questions makes the calculus even that more convoluted because we must then explain where God came from. The “thirst” that Sullivan no doubts feels in his soul can be rightly explained simply as a thirst for knowledge and truth, and while I have no doubt that Sullivan is a deep thinker, he seems to be also in deep denial. It is hard to tell whether this is out of fear of hellfire or merely out of devotion for the things of faith. If he already admits that the gospels are copies upon copies containing story “told by those with fallible memory” what is stopping him from throwing the whole thing out with the bath water?
Perhaps David Wimberly has it right. Here is part of his comment posted under the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s refutation of Sullivan’s article:Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro says that righty Drew Hutchison has attracted trade interest from numerous teams, Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportnet tweets. The Blue Jays expect Hutchison to rebound from a tough 2015 campaign. In a full article on the topic, however, Nicholson-Smith notes that the Blue Jays aren’t necessarily looking to deal Hutchison, who remains relatively cheap and should provide valuable depth next season.
Nicholson-Smith does explore the reasons there’s a market for Hutchison, who pitched 150 1/3 innings in 2015 and posted an ugly 5.57 ERA. Jeff Samardzija just got a $90MM contract after a 4.96 ERA season, demonstrating clearly that teams increasingly rely on scouting reports and advanced stats more heavily than traditional stats. Hutchison’s 2015 peripherals (7.7 K/9, 2.6 BB/9, 39.6% ground ball rate) weren’t outstanding, but they were much better than his ERA was, so teams might see him as a buy-low candidate. Hutchison is also young, at 25, and has made 60 starts in the past two seasons.
Further down, Nicholson-Smith notes that, in addition to potentially keeping Hutchison, the Blue Jays are looking for mid-range options to improve their pitching staff. They could attempt to improve their rotation depth by adding pitchers who could also pitch out of their bullpen, and along those lines, they’ve been in touch with representatives of Joe Blanton and Craig Stammen recently. They were also in discussions with Yusmeiro Petit, although Petit now has a deal in place with the Nationals. They’ll also look to fill out their rotation at Triple-A Buffalo via trades or non-roster invites or by optioning pitchers from the Majors.Sixteen preseason games spread over four days are in the books. This is always the part of the preseason where a grateful nation is just happy to see any professional football.
Before that honeymoon period wears off and we just become irritable waiting for the regular season, let's sort out some winners and losers from Preseason Week 1.
Moving up
Rookie quarterback hot takes: It's bad enough we overreact to Week 1. Now we do it to Week 1 of the preseason. This isn't the ACC anymore, Jameis! How's your interception streak look now, Mariota?! The uneven starts by the top two picks of the draft were not "Welcome to the NFL" moments for either player. That can only happen when the games count.
In the meantime, these are learning tools for players and not particularly predictive of the regular season. (And Winston wasn't as bad as you think.) In other words: Don't start crowing about how your genius personal draft rankings were right for a while.
Raiders optimism: You know things are turning around in Oakland when Chris Wesseling sounds excited about the Raiders' offense. Amari Cooper, Michael Crabtree and Latavius Murray give them some skill position juice.
Shifty rookie receivers: Tyler Lockett, Phillip Dorsett and Nelson Agholor average about 177 pounds between them, which used to be a bad thing in the NFL. They are built just right for today's game in which speed and space matter more than ever. Lockett, the third-round rookie for the Seahawks, looked like the rare player who can make other professionals look slow as a returner. Andrew Luck was locked into Dorsett early and often for the Colts. And Agholor's after-catch ability turned an ugly Mark Sanchez throw into a long touchdown. Early returns are positive for all three players being factors this season.
Cardinals health: Two things matter in the preseason. Winning jobs and staying healthy. Arizona has to feel great about how key players Carson Palmer, Tyrann Mathieu and Andre Ellington all looked in their preseason returns. Palmer and Mathieu looked 100 percent coming off their serious injuries from a year ago. Ellington shook off early training camp hamstring issues to explode for a long catch Saturday. Perhaps the Cardinals don't need Chris Johnson after all.
Joseph Randle: Darren McFadden didn't get off the PUP list until over the weekend. The Cowboys started undrafted rookie Gus Johnson in the preseason, and then he hurt his shoulder. Yet Jerry Jones refuses to sign another veteran running back as true competition for Randle, instead picking up guys like Michael Hill and Ben Malena off "the street." Consider that a vote of confidence in Randle.
Rugby League enthusiasts: Jarryd Hayne's 53-yard run for the 49ers was notable because the Rugby League star looked like he belonged, aside from the upright running style. It's also worth noting Hayne was getting time with San Francisco's starters, an indication he has a real chance to make the roster. Just don't call Hayne a "rugby star." There is a difference between Rugby League and Rugby Union and you can debate with the Australians and British folks in my timeline who disagree about it all.
Ameer Abdullah: Preseason results don't matter that much, but any player who moves like this is worth noting.
Tyrod Taylor: Announced as the Bills starting quarterback for the second week of the preseason, Taylor's tasty outing against Carolina certainly got coach Rex Ryan's attention. EJ Manuel appears to be all but out of this quarterback race, with Taylor and Matt Cassel still battling to start.
Moving down
Texans quarterback clarity: When Brian Hoyer was removed after throwing a touchdown pass on his first drive, I thought the Houston quarterback battle might be over. But Ryan Mallett's excellent relief job and the news that he's starting the second week of the preseason only clouds matters. Hoyer should be the guy eventually; it's just going to take time.
At least we can confirm that Tom Savage exists.
C.J. Anderson's fantasy value: Leaving Friday's game with a minor ankle injury was not a big deal. But it's a reminder that Anderson is far from a known quantity and the Broncos have other fine options. Ronnie Hillman and Montee Ball both played well off the bench.
Adrian Peterson: It's never a good thing when you lose your best run-blocking offensive lineman in the first week of the preseason.
The Giants' defense: It's also not good to lose four defensive backs to injury for a secondary that already looked shaky. New York's safety depth chart is among the worst looking position groups at any position in the league.
49ers' defense: One week after Aldon Smith's departure, this probably isn't a great sign for the 49ers' defense:
For the first time in @HoustonTexans franchise history, three quarterbacks finished with a passer rating over 100 in a single preseason game â Texans PR (@ TexansPR) August 16, 2015
Bears optimism: While the shifty rookie wideouts above shined, Chicago was dealt with the roughest blow of the weekend when they announced the No. 7 overall pick Kevin White will undergo surgery for a shin stress fracture. He will miss at least the first six games of the season, and quite possibly be out the whole year. Chicago is lacking plenty on defense, but there was a chance that their skill position talent (White, Alshon Jeffery, Martellus Bennett, Matt Forte and Eddie Royal) could make up for it. It's worth wondering if White will only be fully up to speed by the time Jay Cutler is playing elsewhere.
Julius Thomas: The Jaguars are hopeful their tight end will be ready for Week 1 after he fractured his hand over the weekend, but the injury slows down the hype train after a great start to camp for Thomas.
Andy Levitre and the Tennessee offensive line: Marcus Mariota was protected poorly in his preseason debut, and the Titans struggled to open up holes in the running game. Coach Ken Whisenhunt responded in practice by shuffling his line, which could possibly leave guard Andy Levitre without a starting position. One of the most expensive free agents in the league two years ago, it wouldn't be stunning at this point if Levitre was cut in a few weeks.
C.J. Spiller: While Spiller has been more durable as a pro than he's given credit for, his knee surgery Friday is a rough way to start his New Orleans tenure. There is optimism he'll be ready for the regular season, but that's what every team says about every player this time of year.
At least the Saints are deep at the position; Mark Ingram and Khiry Robinson can certainly get the job done until Spiller is healthy. It was a rough weekend for New Orleans. Cornerback Brandon Browner, cornerback Delvin Breaux and linebacker Dannell Ellerbe all left the team's preseason opener with injuries. Safety Jairus Byrd remains missing in action. If Rob Ryan was capable of losing hair, now would be the time to start.
The latest Around The NFL Podcast features the gang breaking down Jimmy Garoppolo's preseason debut and Ameer Abdullah's breakout game.Nissan workers in Canton, Mississippi, voted against unionizing on Friday by a margin of 2,244 to 1,307. The vote was a disappointing defeat for those who hoped to open the door for union organizing across the American south.
Nissan dispute could go down as most vicious anti-union crusade in decades | Bernie Sanders Read more
“With this vote, the voice of Nissan employees has been heard,” said Nissan spokesperson Parul Baraj in a statement. “Our expectation is that the [United Automobile Workers] will respect and abide by their decision and cease their efforts to divide our Nissan family.”
Pro-union workers said they had no intentions of leaving any time soon. Hardball company tactics against the vote have attracted the attention of federal labor authorities, which could call for a new ballot.
“It ain’t over yet,” union leader Morris Mock told a crowd of dozens Nissan workers. “It ain’t over yet. Nissan, all you did was make us mad. We are gonna fight a little harder next time. We are gonna stand a little harder next time. We are gonna shout a little harder next time because next time we are never gonna give up.”
Mock’s speech was interrupted by chants of “six months” – the time in which workers hope the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) will grant them a new election.
“Fight to win, fight to win, fight to win!” cried Hazel Whiting, whose son, Derrick Whiting, died after collapsing on the factory floor in 2015.
Activists who fought for 14 years for the vote said they were proud that 1,307 people had voted to join a union. Nissan managers held one-on-one sessions with workers to discourage them. The company blitzed local media with anti-union ads.
We are gonna shout a little harder next time because next time we are never gonna give up Morris Mock
“I don’t take this as a loss because I have learned so much, so much, during this process,” union leader Betty Jones told a crowd of activists shortly after the vote count was announced. “I have made so many friends, family – y’all are my family!”
The attempt by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to organize at Nissan in Canton, Mississippi, was unprecedented in size for the south. Under the banner of the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan (MAFN), the UAW organized a coalition of student groups, clergy, community, labor, environmental and civil rights groups.
Through civil disobedience, the group helped win the reinstatement of fired UAW activist Calvin Moore. Their protests lead Nissan to adopt changes that benefited long-term temp workers employed at the plant.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pro-union Nissan employees express their disappointment at losing their bid. The attempt was unprecedented in its size for the south. Photograph: Rogelio V. Solis/AP
For more than a decade, a formal union seemed out of reach. Then, this spring, more than 5,000 union activists showed up for an historic March for Mississippi against Nissan, featuring the Vermont senator and 2016 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Bernie Sanders.
The march gave the union drive an unexpected burst of energy. In the following month, the UAW gained 386 members at the Canton plant. Despite having only a narrow majority of Nissan workers signing cards, the union decided it was time to call an election and force a discussion about workers’ rights in the south.
Major factories like the 6,000-person Nissan plant in Canton often unionize after multiple attempts. Through workplace struggle and defeat, many workers learn valuable lessons. Many at the Canton plant realized they might lose but saw the election as the beginning of a long-term struggle.
“It’s the beginning of a war,” said one, Robert Hathorn. “They light a torch for us.”
When Nissan said, 'We are going take away your leased vehicle,' everything changed Betty Jones
The fight at Canton has pitted union activists against those who see unionization as antithetical to growth in a poverty stricken state.
“If you want to take away your job, if you want to end manufacturing as we know it in Mississippi, just start expanding unions,” governor Phil Bryant said last week.
All over town, businesses put up signs saying “Our Team, Our Future, Vote No August 3-4”. Local TV featured a similar message. Many workers reported pressure from friends, neighbors and others to vote against the union, so the plant would not close.
Then one-on-one meetings started. Thousands of workers were forced to sit alone with bosses and describe how they felt about the union drive. In such meetings, workers were told of the threat a union would represent. They were told unionization would make the plant more rigid and would lead to many workers not being able to get favors from bosses when they needed time off.
They were repeatedly warned that a union would make the plant a place of conflict.
“You feel threatened, and it’s a real fear,” said Mock. “If you want a day off, you want to spend time with your family, or you are too sick, you have to call this person and explain the situation is. It’s like, ‘If I don’t do it, then I am going to be treated differently.’”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A United Auto Workers member encourages employees to vote for the union at an entrance to the Nissan vehicle assembly plant in Canton. Photograph: Rogelio V Solis/AP
Many were told that if workers unionized, the company would take away special lease rates on new cars.
“When Nissan said, ‘We are going take away your leased vehicle,’ everything changed,” said worker Betty Jones. “And the more they were saying that, the more people were wearing their [anti-union] shirts.”
Then, management said the company would maintain an “open door” policy to address complaints. Many workers received long-sought-after raises and special deals on car purchases.
Nissan attacked for one of 'nastiest anti-union campaigns' in modern US history Read more
Late last month, the NLRB charged Nissan with illegally threatening workers and bribing workers to vote against the union. On the day of the election, the UAW filed seven more unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB. If the federal body decides that Nissan broke the law, it could re-order another election within six months.
Nissan has denied the charges and plans to appeal. For now, despite not having a union, workers say they must act like a minority union on the shop floor.
“They don’t understand that they are the union,” said worker Michael Carter. “There is not a third party coming in there, the union is already in there, and that’s what we gotta make them understand, that they are the union.”
Union activists say they look forward to a new election. They hope that in that time, workers will realize the necessity of a union.
“The company is gonna help us win this next campaign and they don’t even realize it because they are not going to keep their word,” said worker Castes Foster. “Once a snake, always a snake.”Some of the worst scandals have engulfed the Catholic Church. There are two aspects of Catholic teaching which may help explain this. The first is the place of canon law in the life and thought of the worldwide Catholic Church. The second is the culture of clericalism.
There has long been a culture within international Catholicism that the proper place for judging clergy is through its canon law. In this sense, the church perceived it to be a law unto itself. Canon 1395 provides that clergy who abuse children under 18 are to be "punished with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state"; but it was no part of canonical thinking that child sexual abuse is a crime that ought routinely to be reported to the police and dealt with by the criminal courts.
The second factor was clericalism. The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith put it succinctly in 2011: "The bishop has a duty to treat all priests as father and brother." The view was expressed at the highest levels in Rome little more than a decade ago that this involved an obligation not to denounce priests and religious brothers to the police or courts.
It is in this context that the response of the Australian church leadership needs to be understood. Towards Healing, published first in 1996, was a radical and proactive step at the time. Those who gave leadership to this were people of great integrity and commitment. The unerring condemnation of the Catholic Church as a whole is unfair to the many decent people who have tried to make amends, to help victims and to put in place better processes for dealing with these issues. There have been substantial improvements in the last 15 years, but they have been from a dreadful baseline.
While much has changed in the culture of the Catholic Church, some old attitudes remain. Some leaders have spent extravagantly on legal representation for alleged offenders, while being miserly in compensation of victims; for others, the greatest concern was to protect their organisation from scandal rather than for the children in their care. There are still those who would aspire to tough out the various inquiries, mixing some candour with a lot of spin, rather than tell the unvarnished truth. There remain a few rotten apples.Variable voltage seems to be where it’s at in the e-cigarette world these days. Manufacturers are coming out with more vari-volt designs than anyone can hope to keep track of. The latest frontier is the eGo-style electronic cigarettes. The latest entry ups the game by providing features like a display seldom seen in the mid-range devices. Read the rest of this review to see if the variable volt eGo is the next big thing.
Note: This article has been updated. This model has been replaced with the eGo Super Variable Voltage 2 which improves a couple of shortcomings with the device. The original review noted that this model lacked the ability to use the device while it was recharging. The puff counter could not be reset. I have been provided with an updated version of this device which resolves both those issues. References to those issues in the article have been removed.
The Specs and Features
Before launching into the design of this new VV eGo battery let’s take a look at the specs and features to get a better idea of what’s going on with the device.
650 mAh battery
Variable voltage from 3.0 – 6.0v (.1v increments)
5-click on/off
+ and – adjustment buttons
LCD display with blue backlight
Micro USB charging port
Puff counter
Battery life meter
Standard eGo threading
Variable Voltage eGo Design
As I mentioned above, this variable voltage eGo is only a 650mAh battery. Normally, this size battery is fairly small. Not so with this device; it’s very long.
Most of that length is dedicated to the display unit and controls situated at the bottom of the battery. This portion takes up the lower third of the device. For some reason, there’s a band between this section and the main battery.
I keep wanting to unscrew that section, but it’s solidly fixed. The bottom part features an end cap that unscrews to reveal a recess where the micro USB port is hidden.
There is one unfortunate things about this port. The first is that it’s a micro USB port, rather than the more typical mini USB found in typical eGo pass-throughs. It’s also not the same micro USB used in Android devices, but the one that you can use on an Apple TV. If you happen to have a mini cable (or several) they won’t work with this model. Fortunately, it comes with the appropriate charging cable.
This device isn’t a true pass-through device. The Super doesn’t draw power from the USB connection when vaping while the cord is plugged in. Instead, it momentarily shuts off charging to allow use of the device. This is likely a stop gap measure put in place to resolve the issue with the 1.0 version’s inability to let the user use the device while it was charging.
Moving up the length of the battery, you’ll find the LCD readout. The readout features a nice blue backlight. The readout displays the number of puffs (really the number of times you’ve pressed the button) and the current battery level when you press the activation button at the top of the unit.
The battery level is represented with a little graphic of a battery with up to 4 bars inside it. When the battery level is low, the battery outline on the display flashes to alert you.
Press one of the two voltage adjustment buttons and the current voltage setting is displayed. Press the corresponding button again to cycle the voltage up or down. The voltage setting can be locked or unlocked by pressing both buttons at the same time for 5 seconds.
The voltage adjustment buttons themselves are made of hard, chromed plastic and rounded at the end. The buttons are raised and spaced in such a way that makes it easy to press only one to make the necessary adjustments. They feel very sturdy hand have a good tactile response when pressed.
Above the adjustment buttons is the metal band that makes it look like the battery should unscrew. Beyond that, it’s pretty much straight-forward eGo. The button is clear plastic and illuminates blue. Click the button rapidly five times to toggle the unit on or off. The button will flash to indicate the device has been turned off.
The top of the battery features the standard eGo cone threads and 510 connector. All your 510 and eGo skirted or threaded gear should work without much issue.
Performance
Because this product is essentially a standalone battery, and not a starter kit, there’s no cartomizer portion to evaluate for vapor. Instead, we have to look at how well the battery itself performs. There’s essentially three things I look at when evaluating the performance in a variable voltage electronic cigarette:
On-load voltage Consistency over battery life Amperage capacity (and over amperage handling)
On-load voltage simply means how well the device maintains the voltage when a cartomizer is attached. Many devices tend to drop voltage when you actually use them. Some only a little, others drop a significant amount of voltage when you expect them to perform. Some devices are also amazingly inconsistent where the amount of voltage dropped varies depending on the voltage settings.
This variable voltage eGo did a fair job. It dropped about.2v which is considerable, but that voltage drop was the same level at pretty much every voltage level I tested.
Consistency is also a tricky thing with variable voltage ecigs. Many devices tend to peter out as the battery drains, delivering lower voltages the closer the battery gets to being drained. This model, however, was able to carry the load at the same voltage level throughout the battery’s charge cycle.
Finally, there is the amperage, or how much power the switch can handle. Without getting overly technical, this aspect is particularly important if you want to run dual coil cartomizers at higher voltages. To be honest, there aren’t many e-cigarettes outside of the ProVari V2 that can handle the power requirements.
Most other variable volt devices just drop the output down to a level they can safely produce. Sadly, this vari-volt eGo is one such device. There is a silver lining. Unlike most devices that have lower power safe modes, this one actually tells you when it’s active.
The battery icon will blink when the battery is low, but it also blinks when it is over limit and has to lower the voltage. This seems trivial |
and Jung carried him to a couch.[52]
Jung and Freud personally met for the last time in September 1913 for the Fourth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich. Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introverted and extraverted type in analytical psychology. This constituted the introduction of some of the key concepts which came to distinguish Jung's work from Freud's in the next half century.
Midlife isolation [ edit ]
It was the publication of Jung's book Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912 that led to the break with Freud. Letters they exchanged show Freud's refusal to consider Jung's ideas. This rejection caused what Jung described in his (posthumous) 1962 autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as a "resounding censure". Everyone he knew dropped away except for two of his colleagues. Jung described his book as "an attempt, only partially successful, to create a wider setting for medical psychology and to bring the whole of the psychic phenomena within its purview." The book was later revised and retitled Symbols of Transformation in 1922.
London 1913–14 [ edit ]
Jung spoke at meetings of the Psycho-Medical Society in London in 1913 and 1914. His travels were soon interrupted by the war, but his ideas continued to receive attention in England primarily through the efforts of Constance Long who translated and published the first English volume of his collected writings.[53][54]
The Red Book [ edit ]
In 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, Jung experienced a horrible "confrontation with the unconscious". He saw visions and heard voices. He worried at times that he was "menaced by a psychosis" or was "doing a schizophrenia". He decided that it was valuable experience and, in private, he induced hallucinations or, in his words, "active imaginations". He recorded everything he felt in small journals. Jung began to transcribe his notes into a large red leather-bound book, on which he worked intermittently for sixteen years.[55]
Jung left no posthumous instructions about the final disposition of what he called the Liber Novus or the Red Book. Sonu Shamdasani, a historian of psychology from London, tried for three years to persuade Jung's resistant heirs to have it published. Up to mid-September 2008, fewer than two dozen people had seen it. Ulrich Hoerni, Jung's grandson who manages the Jung archives, decided to publish it to raise the additional funds needed when the Philemon Foundation was founded.[55]
In 2007, two technicians for DigitalFusion, working with New York City publishers W. W. Norton & Company, scanned the manuscript with a 10,200-pixel scanner. It was published on 7 October 2009, in German with a "separate English translation along with Shamdasani's introduction and footnotes" at the back of the book, according to Sara Corbett for The New York Times. She wrote, "The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality."[55]
The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City displayed the original Red Book journal, as well as some of Jung's original small journals, from 7 October 2009 to 15 February 2010.[56] According to them, "During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation." Two-thirds of the pages bear Jung's illuminations of the text.[56]
Travels [ edit ]
Jung emerged from his period of isolation in the late nineteen-teens with the publication of several journal articles, followed in 1921 with Psychological Types, one of his most influential books. There followed a decade of active publication, interspersed with overseas travels.
England (1920, 1923, 1925, 1938) [ edit ]
Constance Long arranged for Jung to deliver a seminar in Cornwall in 1920. Another seminar was held in 1923, this one organized by Helton Godwin Baynes (known as Peter), and another in 1925.[57]
In 1938, Jung was awarded with an honorary degree from Oxford. At the tenth International Medical Congress for Psychotherapy held at Oxford from 29 July to 2 August 1938, Jung gave the presidential address, followed by a visit to Cheshire to stay with the Bailey family at Lawton Mere.
United States 1924–25, 1936–37 [ edit ]
Jung made a more extensive trip westward in the winter of 1924–5, financed and organized by Fowler McCormick and George Porter. Of particular value to Jung was a visit with Chief Mountain Lake of the Taos Pueblo near Taos, New Mexico.[57] Jung made another trip to America in 1936, giving lectures in New York and New England for his growing group of American followers. He returned in 1937 to deliver the Terry Lectures at Yale University, later published as Psychology and Religion.[59]
East Africa [ edit ]
In October 1925, Jung embarked on his most ambitious expedition, the "Bugishu Psychological Expedition" to East Africa. He was accompanied by Peter Baynes and an American associate, George Beckwith. On the voyage to Africa, they became acquainted with an English woman named Ruth Bailey, who joined their safari a few weeks later. The group traveled through Kenya and Uganda to the slopes of Mount Elgon, where Jung hoped to increase his understanding of "primitive psychology" through conversations with the culturally isolated residents of that area. Later he concluded that the major insights he had gleaned had to do with himself and the European psychology in which he had been raised.[60][61]
India [ edit ]
In December 1937, Jung left Zurich again for an extensive tour of India with Fowler McCormick. In India, he felt himself "under the direct influence of a foreign culture" for the first time. In Africa, his conversations had been strictly limited by the language barrier, but in India he was able to converse extensively. Hindu philosophy became an important element in his understanding of the role of symbolism and the life of the unconscious, though he avoided a meeting with Ramana Maharshi. He described Ramana as being absorbed in "the self", but admitted to not understanding Ramana's self-realization or what he actually did do. He also admitted that his field of psychology was not competent to understand the eastern insight of the Atman "the self". Jung became seriously ill on this trip and endured two weeks of delirium in a Calcutta hospital. After 1938, his travels were confined to Europe.[62]
Later years and death [ edit ]
Jung became a full professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel in 1943, but resigned after a heart attack the next year to lead a more private life. He became ill again in 1952.
Jung continued to publish books until the end of his life, including Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1959), which analyzed the archetypal meaning and possible psychological significance of the reported observations of UFOs.[64] He also enjoyed a friendship with an English Roman Catholic priest, Father Victor White, who corresponded with Jung after he had published his controversial Answer to Job.[65]
In 1961, Jung wrote his last work, a contribution to Man and His Symbols entitled "Approaching the Unconscious" (published posthumously in 1964). Jung died on 6 June 1961 at Küsnacht after a short illness.[30]:450[66] He had been beset by circulatory diseases.[67]
Thought [ edit ]
Jung's thought was formed by early family influences, which on the maternal side were a blend of interest in the occult and in solid reformed academic theology. On his father's side were two important figures, his grandfather the physician and academic scientist, Karl Gustav Jung and the family's actual connection with Lotte Kestner, the niece of the German polymath, Johann Wolfgang Goethe' s "Löttchen".[68] Although he was a practicing clinician and writer and as such founded analytical psychology, much of his life's work was spent exploring related areas such as physics, vitalism, Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his preference was to be seen as a man of science.[69]
Key concepts [ edit ]
The major concepts of analytical psychology as developed by Jung include:[70]
Archetype – a concept "borrowed" from anthropology to denote supposedly universal and recurring mental images or themes. Jung's definitions of archetypes varied over time and have been the subject of debate as to their usefulness.
Archetypal images – universal symbols that can mediate opposites in the psyche, often found in religious art, mythology and fairy tales across cultures
Complex – the repressed organisation of images and experiences that governs perception and behaviour
Extraversion and introversion – personality traits of degrees of openness or reserve contributing to psychological type.[71]
Shadow – the repressed, therefore unknown, aspects of the personality including those often considered to be negative
Collective unconscious – aspects of unconsciousness experienced by all people in different cultures
Anima – the contrasexual aspect of a man's psyche, his inner personal feminine conceived both as a complex and an archetypal image
Animus – the contrasexual aspect of a woman's psyche, her inner personal masculine conceived both as a complex and an archetypal image
Self – the central overarching concept governing the individuation process, as symbolised by mandalas, the union of male and female, totality, unity. Jung viewed it as the psyche's central archetype
Individuation – the process of fulfilment of each individual "which negates neither the conscious or unconscious position but does justice to them both".[72]
Synchronicity – an acausal principle as a basis for the apparently random simultaneous occurrence of phenomena.[73]
Extraversion and introversion [ edit ]
Jung was one of the first people to define introversion and extraversion in a psychological context. In Jung's Psychological Types, he theorizes that each person falls into one of two categories, the introvert and the extravert. These two psychological types Jung compares to ancient archetypes, Apollo and Dionysus. The introvert is likened with Apollo, who shines light on understanding. The introvert is focused on the internal world of reflection, dreaming and vision. Thoughtful and insightful, the introvert can sometimes be uninterested in joining the activities of others. The extravert is associated with Dionysus, interested in joining the activities of the world. The extravert is focused on the outside world of objects, sensory perception and action. Energetic and lively, the extravert may lose their sense of self in the intoxication of Dionysian pursuits.[74] Jungian introversion and extraversion is quite different from the modern idea of introversion and extraversion.[75] Modern theories often stay true to behaviourist means of describing such a trait (sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness etc.) whereas Jungian introversion and extraversion is expressed as a perspective: introverts interpret the world subjectively, whereas extraverts interpret the world objectively.[76]
Persona [ edit ]
In his psychological theory – which is not necessarily linked to a particular theory of social structure – the persona appears as a consciously created personality or identity, fashioned out of part of the collective psyche through socialization, acculturation and experience.[77] Jung applied the term persona, explicitly because, in Latin, it means both personality and the masks worn by Roman actors of the classical period, expressive of the individual roles played.
The persona, he argues, is a mask for the "collective psyche", a mask that 'pretends' individuality, so that both self and others believe in that identity, even if it is really no more than a well-played role through which the collective psyche is expressed. Jung regarded the "persona-mask" as a complicated system which mediates between individual consciousness and the social community: it is "a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be".[78] But he also makes it quite explicit that it is, in substance, a character mask in the classical sense known to theatre, with its double function: both intended to make a certain impression on others, and to hide (part of) the true nature of the individual.[79] The therapist then aims to assist the individuation process through which the client (re)gains their "own self" – by liberating the self, both from the deceptive cover of the persona, and from the power of unconscious impulses.
Jung has become enormously influential in management theory; not just because managers and executives have to create an appropriate "management persona" (a corporate mask) and a persuasive identity,[80] but also because they have to evaluate what sort of people the workers are, in order to manage them (for example, using personality tests and peer reviews).[81]
Spirituality [ edit ]
Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals.[82][83] Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep, innate potential. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung believed that this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine.[84] Unlike Freud's objectivist worldview, Jung's pantheism may have led him to believe that spiritual experience was essential to our well-being, as he specifically identifies individual human life with the universe as a whole.[85][86] Jung's ideas on religion counterbalance Freudian skepticism. Jung's idea of religion as a practical road to individuation is still treated in modern textbooks on the psychology of religion, though his ideas have also been criticized.[87]
Jung recommended spirituality as a cure for alcoholism, and he is considered to have had an indirect role in establishing Alcoholics Anonymous.[88] Jung once treated an American patient (Rowland Hazard III), suffering from chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that, occasionally, such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics when all other options had failed.
Hazard took Jung's advice seriously and set about seeking a personal, spiritual experience. He returned home to the United States and joined a First-Century Christian evangelical movement known as the Oxford Group (later known as Moral Re-Armament). He also told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience. One of the alcoholics he brought into the Oxford Group was Ebby Thacher, a long-time friend and drinking buddy of Bill Wilson, later co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Thacher told Wilson about the Oxford Group and, through them, Wilson became aware of Hazard's experience with Jung. The influence of Jung thus indirectly found its way into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original twelve-step program.
The above claims are documented in the letters of Jung and Bill Wilson, excerpts of which can be found in Pass It On, published by Alcoholics Anonymous.[89] Although the detail of this story is disputed by some historians, Jung himself discussed an Oxford Group member, who may have been the same person, in talks given around 1940. The remarks were distributed privately in transcript form, from shorthand taken by an attender (Jung reportedly approved the transcript), and later recorded in Volume 18 of his Collected Works, The Symbolic Life,
For instance, when a member of the Oxford Group comes to me in order to get treatment, I say, 'You are in the Oxford Group; so long as you are there, you settle your affair with the Oxford Group. I can't do it better than Jesus.[90]
Jung goes on to state that he has seen similar cures among Roman Catholics.
Paranormal beliefs [ edit ]
Jung had an apparent interest in the paranormal and occult. For decades he attended seances and claimed to have witnessed "parapsychic phenomena". Initially he attributed these to psychological causes, even delivering 1919 lecture in England for the Society for Psychical Research on "The Psychological Foundations for the belief in spirits".[91] However, he began to "doubt whether an exclusively psychological approach can do justice to the phenomena in question"[91] and stated that "the spirit hypothesis yields better results".[92]
Jung's ideas about the paranormal culminated in "synchronicity", his idea that meaningful connections in the world manifest through coincidence with no apparent causal link. What he referred to as “acausal connecting principle”.[93] Despite his own experiments failing to confirm the phenomenon[94] he held on to the idea as an explanation for apparent ESP.[95] As well as proposing it as a functional explanation for how the I-Ching worked, although he was never clear about how synchronicity worked.[96]
Interpretation of quantum mechanics [ edit ]
Jung influenced one philosophical interpretation (not the science) of quantum physics with the concept of synchronicity regarding some events as non-causal. That idea influenced the physicist Wolfgang Pauli (with whom, via a letter correspondence, he developed the notion of unus mundus in connection with the notion of nonlocality) and some other physicists.[97]
Alchemy [ edit ]
The work and writings of Jung from the 1940s onwards focused on alchemy.
In 1944 Jung published Psychology and Alchemy, in which he analyzed the alchemical symbols and came to the conclusion that there is a direct relationship between them and the psychoanalytical process.[b] He argued that the alchemical process was the transformation of the impure soul (lead) to perfected soul (gold), and a metaphor for the individuation process.[23]
In 1963 Mysterium Coniunctionis first appeared in English as part of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Mysterium Coniunctionis was Jung's last book and focused on the "Mysterium Coniunctionis" archetype, known as the sacred marriage between sun and moon. Jung argued that the stages of the alchemists, the blackening, the whitening, the reddening and the yellowing, could be taken as symbolic of individuation — his favourite term for personal growth (75).
Art therapy [ edit ]
Jung proposed that art can be used to alleviate or contain feelings of trauma, fear, or anxiety and also to repair, restore and heal.[17] In his work with patients and in his own personal explorations, Jung wrote that art expression and images found in dreams could be helpful in recovering from trauma and emotional distress. At times of emotional distress, he often drew, painted, or made objects and constructions which he recognized as more than recreational.[17]
Dance/movement therapy [ edit ]
Dance/movement therapy as an active imagination was created by C.G. Jung and Toni Wolff in 1916[98] and was practiced by Tina Keller-Jenny and other analysts, but remained largely unknown until the 1950s when it was rediscovered by Marian Chace and therapist Mary Whitehouse, who after studying with Martha Graham and Mary Wigman, became herself a dancer and dance teacher of modern dance,[99] as well as Trudy Schoop in 1963, who is considered one of the founders of the dance/movement therapy in the United States.
Political views [ edit ]
Views on the state [ edit ]
Jung stressed the importance of individual rights in a person's relation to the state and society. He saw that the state was treated as "a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected" but that this personality was "only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it",[100] and referred to the state as a form of slavery.[101][102][103][104] He also thought that the state "swallowed up [people's] religious forces",[105] and therefore that the state had "taken the place of God"—making it comparable to a religion in which "state slavery is a form of worship".[103] Jung observed that "stage acts of [the] state" are comparable to religious displays: "Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fire to scare off demons".[106] From Jung's perspective, this replacement of God with the state in a mass society leads to the dislocation of the religious drive and results in the same fanaticism of the church-states of the Dark Ages—wherein the more the state is 'worshipped', the more freedom and morality are suppressed;[107] this ultimately leaves the individual psychically undeveloped with extreme feelings of marginalization.[108]
Germany, 1933 to 1939 [ edit ]
Jung had many friends and respected colleagues who were Jewish and he maintained relations with them through the 1930s when anti-semitism in Germany and other European nations was on the rise. However, until 1939, he also maintained professional relations with psychotherapists in Germany who had declared their support for the Nazi regime and there were allegations that he himself was a Nazi sympathizer.
In 1933, after the Nazis gained power in Germany, Jung took part in restructuring of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie), a German-based professional body with an international membership. The society was reorganized into two distinct bodies:
A strictly German body, the Deutsche Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie, led by Matthias Göring, an Adlerian psychotherapist[109] and a cousin of the prominent Nazi Hermann Göring International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, led by Jung. The German body was to be affiliated to the international society, as were new national societies being set up in Switzerland and elsewhere.[110]
The International Society's constitution permitted individual doctors to join it directly, rather than through one of the national affiliated societies, a provision to which Jung drew attention in a circular in 1934.[111] This implied that German Jewish doctors could maintain their professional status as individual members of the international body, even though they were excluded from the German affiliate, as well as from other German medical societies operating under the Nazis.[112]
As leader of the international body, Jung assumed overall responsibility for its publication, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. In 1933, this journal published a statement endorsing Nazi positions[113] and Hitler's book Mein Kampf.[114] In 1934, Jung wrote in a Swiss publication, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, that he experienced "great surprise and disappointment"[115] when the Zentralblatt associated his name with the pro-Nazi statement.
Jung went on to say "the main point is to get a young and insecure science into a place of safety during an earthquake".[116] He did not end his relationship with the Zentralblatt at this time, but he did arrange the appointment of a new managing editor, Carl Alfred Meier of Switzerland. For the next few years, the Zentralblatt under Jung and Meier maintained a position distinct from that of the Nazis, in that it continued to acknowledge contributions of Jewish doctors to psychotherapy.[117] In the face of energetic German attempts to Nazify the international body, Jung resigned from its presidency in 1939,[117] the year the Second World War started.
Anti-Semitism and Nazism [ edit ]
Jung's interest in European mythology and folk psychology has led to accusations of Nazi sympathies, since they shared the same interest.[118][52] He became, however, aware of the negative impact of these similarities:
Jung clearly identifies himself with the spirit of German Volkstumsbewegung throughout this period and well into the 1920s and 1930s, until the horrors of Nazism finally compelled him to reframe these neopagan metaphors in a negative light in his 1936 essay on Wotan.[120]
There are writings showing that Jung's sympathies were against, rather than for, Nazism.[c] In his 1936 essay "Wotan", Jung described the influence of Hitler on Germany as "one man who is obviously 'possessed' has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition."[121][122]
Jung would later say that:
Hitler seemed like the 'double' of a real person, as if Hitler the man might be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so concealed in order not to disturb the mechanism... You know you could never talk to this man; because there is nobody there... It is not an individual; it is an entire nation.[123]
In an interview with Carol Baumann in 1948, Jung denied rumors regarding any sympathy for the Nazi movement, saying:
It must be clear to anyone who has read any of my books that I have never been a Nazi sympathizer and I never have been anti-Semitic, and no amount of misquotation, mistranslation, or rearrangement of what I have written can alter the record of my true point of view. Nearly every one of these passages has been tampered with, either by malice or by ignorance. Furthermore, my friendly relations with a large group of Jewish colleagues and patients over a period of many years in itself disproves the charge of anti-Semitism.[124][d]
Others have argued contrary to this, with reference to his writings, correspondence and public utterances of the 1930s.[125] Attention has been drawn to articles Jung published in the Zentralblatt fur Psychotherapie stating: “The Aryan unconscious has a greater potential than the Jewish unconscious” and "The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will".[126] His remarks on the qualities of the "Aryan unconscious" and the “corrosive character” of Freud's “Jewish gospel” have been cited as evidence of an anti-semitism “fundamental to the structure of Jung’s thought”.[127] However, Aniela Jaffé says that such sentences must be put in the context of the many positive statements Jung made about Jews and Judaism,[128] and that the above quoted claims were framed by his argument that Jews are a "race with a three-thousand year civilization", while "Aryans" were race with a "youthfulness not yet weaned from barbarism."[128] Jung saw the former as "possessing the inestimable advantage of greater consciousness and differentiation, while the latter were closer to nature and unlike Jews, capable of creating new cultural forms". For Jung, the "epithet "barbarism" was anything but a compliment".[128]
During the 1930s, Jung had worked to protect Jewish psychologists from antisemitic legislation enacted by the Nazis. Jung's individual efforts to aid persecuted German-Jewish psychologists were known only to a few; however, during this period he discretely helped a large number of Jewish colleagues with active and personal support in their efforts to escape the Nazi regime - and many of those he helped in this period would later become friends of his.[128]
Service to the Allies during World War II [ edit ]
Jung was in contact with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) and provided valuable intelligence on the psychological condition of Hitler. Dulles referred to Jung as "Agent 488" and offered the following description of his service: “Nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung contributed to the Allied Cause during the war, by seeing people who were connected somehow with the other side.” Jung's service to the Allied cause through the OSS remained classified after the war.[129]
Legacy [ edit ]
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, and the concepts of socionics were developed from Jung's theory of psychological types. Jung saw the human psyche as "by nature religious" and made this religiousness the focus of his explorations. Jung is one of the best known contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Jung as the 23rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[130]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Literature [ edit ]
Laurens van der Post, Afrikaner author who claimed to have had a 16-year friendship with Jung, from which a number of books and a film were created about Jung's life. [131] The accuracy of van der Post's claims about the closeness of his relationship to Jung has been questioned. [132]
The accuracy of van der Post's claims about the closeness of his relationship to Jung has been questioned. Hermann Hesse, author of works such as Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, was treated by Joseph Lang, a student of Jung. For Hesse this began a long preoccupation with psychoanalysis, through which he came to know Jung personally. [133]
and, was treated by Joseph Lang, a student of Jung. For Hesse this began a long preoccupation with psychoanalysis, through which he came to know Jung personally. In his novel The World is Made of Glass (1983) Morris West gives a fictional account of one of Jung's cases, placing the events in 1913.[134] As stated in the author's note, the novel is "based upon a case recorded, very briefly, by Carl Gustav Jung in his autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections".
Art [ edit ]
Original statue of Jung in Mathew Street Liverpool, a half-body on a plinth captioned "Liverpool is the pool of life"
The visionary Swiss painter Peter Birkhäuser was treated by a student of Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, and corresponded with Jung regarding the translation of dream symbolism into works of art. [135]
American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy in 1939 with Joseph Henderson. His therapist made the decision to engage him through his art, and had Pollock make drawings, which led to the appearance of many Jungian concepts in his paintings. [136] [137]
Contrary to some sources,[138] Jung did not visit Liverpool but recorded a dream in which he had, and of which he wrote "Liverpool is the pool of life, it makes to live." As a result, a statue of Jung was erected in Mathew Street in 1987 but, being made of plaster, was vandalised and replaced by a more durable version in 1993.[139]
Music [ edit ]
Theatre, film and television [ edit ]
Federico Fellini brought to the screen an exuberant imagery shaped by his encounter with the ideas of Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Fellini preferred Jung to Freud because Jungian analysis defined the dream not as a symptom of a disease that required a cure but rather as a link to archetypal images shared by all of humanity. [143]
BBC interview with Jung for Face to Face with John Freeman at Jung's home in Zurich. 1959. [144]
with John Freeman at Jung's home in Zurich. 1959. Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket features an underlying theme about the duality of man throughout the action and dialogue of the film. One scene plays out this way: A Colonel asks a soldier, "You write 'Born to Kill' on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?" To which the soldier replies, "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir... The Jungian thing, sir." [145]
features an underlying theme about the duality of man throughout the action and dialogue of the film. One scene plays out this way: A Colonel asks a soldier, "You write 'Born to Kill' on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?" To which the soldier replies, "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir... The Jungian thing, sir." The Soul Keeper, a 2002 film about Sabina Spielrein and Jung.
, a 2002 film about Sabina Spielrein and Jung. The Talking Cure, a 2002 play by Christopher Hampton
, a 2002 play by Christopher Hampton A Dangerous Method, a 2011 film directed by David Cronenberg based on Hampton's play The Talking Cure, is a fictional dramatisation of Jung's life as a psychoanalyst between 1904 and 1913. It mainly concerns his relationships with Freud and Sabina Spielrein, a Russian woman who became his lover and student and, later, an analyst herself.
, a 2011 film directed by David Cronenberg based on Hampton's play, is a fictional dramatisation of Jung's life as a psychoanalyst between 1904 and 1913. It mainly concerns his relationships with Freud and Sabina Spielrein, a Russian woman who became his lover and student and, later, an analyst herself. Matter of Heart (1986), a documentary on Jung featuring interviews with those who knew him and archive footage.
(1986), a documentary on Jung featuring interviews with those who knew him and archive footage. Carl Gustav Jung, Salomón Shang, 2007. A documentary film made of interviews with C. G. Jung, found in American university archives.
, Salomón Shang, 2007. A documentary film made of interviews with C. G. Jung, found in American university archives. The World Within. C. G. Jung in his own words, 1990 documentary (on YouTube)
Video games [ edit ]
The Persona series of games is heavily based on his theories,[146] as is the Nights into Dreams series of games.[147]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Books [ edit ]
Collected Works [ edit ]
The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler. Executive ed. W. McGuire. Trans R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge Kegan Paul (1953-1980).
Supplementary volumes
A. The Zofingia Lectures B. Psychology of the Unconscious (trans. Beatrice M. Hinckle)
Seminars
Analytical Psychology (1925) Dream Analysis (1928-30)[148] Visions (1930-34) The Kundalini Yoga (1932) Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1934-39) Children's Dreams (1936-1940)
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Bair, Deirdre (2003). Jung: A Biography. New York: Back Bay Books. pp. 7, 53. ISBN 978-0-316-15938-8. As a university student Jung changed the modernized spelling of Karl to the original family form of Carl. ^ Calian, George Florin (2010). Alkimia Operativa and Alkimia Speculativa. Some Modern Controversies on the Historiography of Alchemy. Budapest: Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU. pp. 167–168. 'For Jung, alchemy is not only part of the pre-history of chemistry, that is, not only laboratory work, but also an essential part of the history of psychology as the history of the discovery of the deep structure of the psyche and its unconscious. Jung emphasized the significance of the symbolic structure of alchemical texts, a structure that is understood as a way independent of laboratory research, as a structure per se.' ^ C. G. Jung, Die Beziehungen zwishen dem Ich und dem Unbewußten, chapter one, second section, 1928. Also, C. G. Jung, Aufsatze zur Zeitgeschichte, 1946. Speeches made in 1933, 1937 are excerpted. He was protesting the "slavery by the government" and the "chaos and insanity" of the mob, because of the very fact that they were the part of the mob and were under its strong influence. He wrote that because of the speeches he delivered he was blacklisted by the Nazis. They eliminated his writings. ^ A full response from Jung discounting the rumors can be found in C. G Jung Speaking, Interviews and Encounters, Princeton University Press, 1977.
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]Walton Henry Butler, 59, obviously didn’t get memo that his justification for shooting a black man doesn’t work in 2013.
The Florida man was arrested on July 30 for shooting 32-year-old Everett Gant in the head, but once in custody he told him – as if it would get him off – that he only shot a n*gger.”
Come again?
According to the Huffington Post:
Butler shot Grant, who visited his Port Saint Joe apartment to confront him about making racist comments to children in the apartment complex, according to the Broward Palm Beach New Times. The blog reports that Butler proceeded to eat dinner as Gant lay bleeding outside his door and cites an affidavit saying that Butler used the racial slur when questioned by the sheriff.
Police charged Butler with attempted murder with a hate crime enhancement. Gant is currently in the hospital in critical condition.
Police said Butler called 911, and expressed confusion at his arrest. “He was brought to the investigation unit where he was interviewed and basically admitted to shooting the victim and said he shot a, used a racial slur, and said that is what he shot and acted like it was not like a big deal or anything to him,” Gulf County Sheriff Joe Nugent told WJHG.
Well, it’ll be a big deal when his ass is all the way under the jail! We’re praying for Gant’s speedy recovery.
SOURCE: Huffington Post
Also On Global Grind:Thousands of protesters descended on Michigan’s legislature Tuesday as Republican lawmakers passed union-curbing “right-to-work” bills in a state seen as the heart of the labor movement.
Once signed into law by Republican Governor Rick Snyder, the two measures will weaken unions by allowing public and private sector workers to get the same wages and benefits as union members even if they refuse to pay any dues.
Democratic lawmakers pleaded with their Republican colleagues not to pass the controversial bills, which they warned would unleash deep social and political strife.
“There will be blood. There will be repercussions,” state representative Douglas Geiss told the House chamber.
Geiss reminded his colleagues of the violent clashes that accompanied the struggle to form unions in the 1930s and warned that people feel just as strongly about solidarity today |
huge support for you in France, and this is probably the best chance France has had of winning this race for many years.
RG: Ha-ha. The last French winner here was '96 with Olivier Panis. It would be nice to have La Marseillaise on Sunday but let's work before that and see what we can achieve. But for sure having a lot of fans is always good support and something quite special when you go around the track and do the drivers' parade.
Q. Pastor, first of all, after Barcelona, what have you been doing, what's happened, the reaction in Venezuela, have you been back to Venezuela? Have you been to Williams? Tell us.
Pastor MALDONADO: Yeah, I've been in the factory at Williams, working with the engineers, with the team, and I passed some very good days with them in the factory. It was a special one because after eight years without winning any races, you can imagine how they take this victory. For sure it's a great feeling to start winning some races. The team is pushing so hard, me too, we have a very good feeling and are looking forward for the next races.
Q. This circuit, again, has been a good one for you. Do you feel you're a bit of a Monaco specialist.
PM: I've been always so quick here, especially in GP2 and World Series as well. Last year I was doing a good job, I was P6 but it's always difficult. This kind of track, you never know for the traffic, for everything. The track is going to change a lot during the weekend and we need to follow the track and we need a very good balance in the car as well and be ready in the right time in the track. So, we'll see. I will do my best, again one more time and we'll see. I believe it is still possible to be competitive here, then we'll see.
Q. Do you feel there is a certain relief having won that first grand prix?
PM: It's really special to win, especially the first one. But for sure it is going to be difficult now. The gaps and the team levels are so close, so anything can make the difference, we need to put everything together to make a step forward, and I need to say that Williams are doing a very good job at the moment, I feel all the people are very motivated, they are pushing so hard – me too – it's a very good feeling in the team and you know, still we need to improve. We are not at 100 per cent at the moment, we are not the best team – but we are not that far, we are there and we need to try to improve every time.
Q. Charles, you've won in GP2 and in World Series here, can you imagine what it is going to be like in a Formula One car? Is it going to be a big difference?
Charles PIC: I think there will be some for sure – but the track stays the same. So it will be my first experience here in F1, this is a very nice track and a little bit special because it's not allowing any mistakes from the drivers, so I think it can be a really interesting weekend, especially for us. It's interesting to see our pace on a type of circuit like that, it is quite different to other circuits – so yeah, we'll have to see.
Q. You had a difficult start to the season: no pre-season testing – or virtually none – how do you think things have gone in the first quarter of the championship?
CP: Good. I think our main aim is trying to improve the car race by race. It's what we make, we still have to work very hard and continue to push like that to try to make it better. On my side I have many things to learn. It was not easy for the first few races without any testing but I made my best and I feel better prepared race after race. We have to continue like this.
Q. Mark, your first podium here, you always remember your first podium I'm sure. Is this a very special circuit for you?
Mark WEBBER: Yes, it has been. I think winning here in F3000, a couple of podiums, obviously the nice victory in 2010, so it's an amazing venue, it's an amazing weekend. It's quite stressful for the mechanics, all the teams, obviously you guys, everybody getting around, it's amazing how we still manage to hold an event here in such tight confines of the Principality. But it's a great sporting event and one that's very popular for all of us. And, yeah, I'm looking forward to driving the car. It's always great to drive here, so tomorrow we can get on with it.
Q. We've never known a season like this before and I think it's the same for all three of you, it just doesn't seem to be consistent. It's just up and down. Is that a bad thing or a good thing as far as you're concerned?
MW: It depends on who you are. I think for the purist, I think people are taking a little bit of time to get used to it. Obviously, no one's really got any momentum yet in terms of results in teams. But obviously there are a few people that follow the sport that love it like this. It depends who you ask. If you want to have lots and lots of different teams being competitive that's the way it is at the moment, which I don't think is too bad. But let's see. I think ultimately the main teams will still do well at the end of the season.
Q. Michael, sadly you have a five-place grid penalty here. But on the other hand you have been back there before, even further back, three or four years ago [2006]. And you saw what Lewis could do from there two weeks ago. What are your feelings about the race itself coming up?
Michael SCHUMACHER: Well, basically, I think we're going to be in a position to be competitive. As a general track profile I think it's going to suit ourselves. Indeed, I have been coming from the complete back and gone forward to fifth position I think. Let's see from where I finally manage to qualify and start the race and what can be done. It is certainly not ideal, but it is what it is and I look forward to it and I'm going to have some excitement pretty certainly.
Q. You've got a phenomenal record around this track, as you have around most current race tracks, and you have won here more often than anyone else in recent history. How do you get the ultimate performance around here?
MS: Well, I mean Monaco is certainly special and there's something about you and the car that you just have to get every detail together as you have at every track but here it just pays out more. To have the rhythm, the flow, the momentum here... if you've got that it just pays out a much bigger lap time than other tracks because everything is so critical and difficult here.
Q. I was going to ask – is it still the circuit where the driver makes more difference than any other circuit currently?
MS: At the end of the day, that's the case, absolutely.
Q. o you're looking forward to doing that on Sunday?
MS: Definitely.
Q. Lewis, certainly you had a tremendous drive two weeks ago. Did you enjoy it? You said you were going to.
Lewis HAMILTON: Firstly, good afternoon everyone. Yeah, absolutely I was very, very happy with the performance of the team but also my performance in the last race. I was always looking to improve and I felt it was a definite improvement from the grand prix weekend before that.
Q. You've banked at every single race and you're just eight points off the championship lead – if anyone is consistent, you're at least consistently in the points. But is it an inconsistent season?
LH: For us?
Q. Drivers as a whole.
LH: I don't know if it's an inconsistent season… well, potentially yeah, a little bit, because of the tyres. I think the tyres, you sometimes get them in the working range and sometimes you don't. I think a lot of teams are struggling to understand why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But that's the challenge we all are faced with. But I think people are enjoying it. I notice people are asking a lot of questions about how there's been five different winners and the fans I've met had said this is a fantastic season regardless, so I hope that continues.
Q. Is there a little frustration that you've been on pole, or fastest so many times and still haven't yet won?
LH: I'm not frustrated, no. This is the way racing goes sometimes. Of course, looking at the qualifying results we've had for the five races, we would have loved to have finished further up and we definitely need to improve to ensure that we stay where we are or we move forwards. Yeah, we've started high up finished a little bit further behind from where we started so we've gone backwards a little bit in most of the races but we're working very hard to make sure that doesn't continue.
QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
Q. (Frederic Ferret– L'Equipe). Question for Pastor. How difficult has it been to deal with the fire and how difficult has it been to prepare for this grand prix for you and the team?
PM: After the fire we've been working so hard to rebuild everything. The guys did a pretty good job because we are ready to race, with everything we need to get the maximum. And I need to say that the guys have been working full days to have everything ready for this race, so great job for them.
Q. (Alex Popov – RTR TV) Question for all the drivers. Do you realistically think that on Sunday it will really be six different drivers, and to all except Pastor, do you think you will be the sixth?
MW: Yeah, I think there can be six different winners. Of course, why not? And it would be nice if it's me, yeah. I'm sure all of us are going to say that.
I want everyone except Pastor to rate his personal chance to be this sixth driver – if it's realistic or not.
MS: I'm pretty sure that are quite a few around us that would have the capacity to win this race and yet have not won a race and yes, naturally I think each of us here would be happy to be the one.
LH: I agree with Michael. As he was saying there are some other drivers who have the potential to win races but it's massively tight between quite a lot of teams, so I think it's wide open, so we'll see. Particularly at this race the driver can make more of a difference. A car that doesn't work so well at places like Barcelona could work a bit better here so…
Q. Romain, how do you rate your own personal chances of becoming the sixth driver?
RG: Difficult to say at the moment as we didn't drive on the track yet, but I wish I could be the sixth one.
Charles?
CP: I agree it's more tight this year but we are not yet in a position to fight for this. For us now we have to focus on improving step by step and that's it for the moment.
Q. (Ian Parkes – Press Association) Pastor, you mentioned that the team has been working flat out to compensate for the fire. Obviously a lot of teams came to Williams's aid with regards to equipment, infrastructure etc, but just how much of an impact will the fire have on the team this weekend, given the loss of all the equipment?
PM: Yeah, for sure it was a frustrating moment for all of us, because we were in the garage at that moment, at that time, and we saw everything. Personally, I was so scared, especially because we were all together, talking with Frank at that time and then yes, I need to thank all the teams who helped us, especially to extinguish the fire. For sure, as I mentioned before, the team has been working flat out to have everything ready for this race. The time wasn't all that big, you know, only one week, one and a half weeks to have everything ready was quite short and yes, I need to thank all the teams who have helped us, even offering extra stuff for this race.
Q. (Pierre van Vliet – F1i.com) Lewis, I understand that you moved to Monaco recently. How different is it to have a race at home, really close to your home? Maybe Michael can answer this as well, because he used to live here, and Pastor as well.
LH: I love it here. To be able to wake up in your own bed and drive just down the road and be at work is a fantastic feeling. Today is the first experience of that but I'm sure it will make quite a big difference. I loved where I lived before but this is a different place and I seem to be enjoying it a little bit more.
MS: Basically, not only do you feel at home, and as Lewis said, absolutely, but even seeing the build-up of the track, because when you live here you go through the roads and you see it building up, the whole story builds up in your own head and when it finally comes to the excitement to run it, then it's obviously even more special.
PM: I agree with Michael and Lewis. For sure it's really good to be here and to race at the same time. I can sleep a little bit more as well, so it's good.
Q. (Marco degli Innocenti – La Gazzetta dello Sport) Michael, in a German newspaper today, Ross Brawn said that the team, Mercedes, is guilty of having put you in trouble – I don't know if I've translated it right from German into English – but I think the meaning is that they did not help you too much with the car, to give you a sufficiently good car. Do you agree with him, do you agree there is something or not?
MS: No. I don't agree with maybe your translation of it, because I think we have quite a good car, quite honestly, because if you think where we're coming from last year, we have made a huge step forward. We have proven that we are able to win races. Yes indeed, I have been a bit on the unlucky side but you see we're a team, we are one big family and we win together and we lose together, it's part of it. It's probably that that he wants to talk about. But no, I don't feel at all disappointed – if anything, the reverse: more motivated because of how much progress we have made and I can see the future progress that we can make and that's what is much more in my focus.
Q. (Alexandar Tabakovski – Vecer) Michael, first of all, I saw you in Le Mans last week for the MotoGP race and you witnessed that Casey Stoner announced that he was retiring from the sport, stating that he was not content with the rules in MotoGP and in the motorcycling world, how the sport has developed. Can you tell me your feelings about that move and draw a parallel with your feelings about how Formula One is evolving in the situation whereby you are not liking it too much?
MS: The first part I can certainly answer, as to what is my feeling, and my feeling is that most of those who have a little bit of involvement were surprised. So was I but then you have to respect that and I don't know his reasons or his detailed reason but he's young enough to have a sabbatical rather than a total stop and we'll see. There's definitely no parallel to me; it's just that each one is very individual, why and for what reason he decides on his retirement. Mine, at the time, had nothing to do with any other reason than I wanted it to because I felt like I was tired, three years ago. That's it.
Q. (Cedric Voisard – Le Figaro) Lewis and Mark – because Michael expressed himself about it – Mark, you said that the public did enjoy the first five races. Lewis, you said, regarding the rules and the tyre situation, we are facing the same challenge, but, apart from that, do you enjoy driving within those rules? Can you extract one hundred percent of the car and can you express your talents 100 percent?
MW: The way the races have run in the last few years is different to previous years. In the era where we had pit stops with refuelling, the races were extremely aggressive. Obviously qualifying for the whole race, basically, pushing to make optimum strategies work and make sure that you're hitting the lap times with the weight of the car, with the fuel that you have at the time, so whether you are on a two- or three-stop strategy or whatever. And then we went to no refuelling, so already the phase of the racing changed a little bit, in terms of a little bit of endurance aspect started to come into it, in terms of driving style and pacing yourself a little bit more, probably. And then we had the change with the Pirellis and that's probably been the biggest change in driver technique and style that I can remember, certainly in my career and I've done a few Grands Prix. There are certain races – a huge majority of races – that of course even when you've won – I've won one race on Pirellis - but even when the winners are winning of course they are not driving at 100 percent and that's just the way it is, because you can't. You need to get the car to the end and produce the best lap times that you can for the duration of the race. That's the way it is now. I still enjoy driving a Formula One car, I still love working with the engineers, driving the most amazing tracks against some great opposition. I enjoy that part of it but we always have to change, we always have to evolve as the technical side of the sport changes, and there's always going to be nicer ways to… Personally, I enjoyed the sprint races and the refuelling, probably all of the drivers did, but the racing was not super-exciting. It was more precise, you had to be more precise, you had to be more on the limit and really really feeling the car for the whole two hours, but that's not how it is now. We have a different set of challenges and that's what we've got to do.
LH: I don't really know what else I can say, really. Mark's said it all. I really enjoy the racing that we have now, as I've enjoyed it every year, and every year is a new challenge and I think that's what the rules are there to give us is challenges. It is a little bit different, where we're not pushing 100 percent in the race. There are some points in the race where you can really push but not for very long and perhaps it is more about endurance, as Mark said, to try and make these tyres last, but it is still a challenge to extract the most out of the tyres for a longer period. It still requires skill and technique and finesse to do that stuff so we're still all trying to – speaking for myself – I'm still trying to get that fine touch sorted. But nonetheless, it's still Formula One, it's still fun and there's more overtaking which is what people like to see.
Q. (Ignacio Naya - DPA) Two questions for Pastor: how does it feel, your new life as a Grand Prix winner? Have you experienced changes in the last two weeks? Do you attract more attention? And secondly, you won here in GP2; do you feel that this track adapts to you, do you dream of doing it again tomorrow in Formula One?
PM: OK, regarding the victory, it doesn't change a thing. I think we need to keep working like that, keep pushing. As I mentioned before, we are not in the best position now against the other teams. We still need to keep improving. We have a lot of work to do. The car is getting more and more competitive every time, me as well. The feeling is really good. The atmosphere in the team is getting higher and higher, especially after the victory and now we need to continue like that, to push and push. And yes, Monaco is a special track for me, it's my favourite one. I've always been very quick here. For sure I will do my best this weekend to get the maximum again. We will be competitive, I'm sure of that, but we will see. This is a typical track. You must put everything together to make the difference and I will try, together with the team, to do our best and then we will see.
Q. (Bob McKenzie – Daily Express) Michael it's not been the greatest start to the season, but I wonder if you've already cast your mind forward, if you've decided whether you might race next year, if you're thinking about it, if you've got the motivation or the energy and despite the seven titles, do you still need to sell yourself to Mercedes or is it only your decision as to whether or not you will drive again next year?
MS: No, the decision hasn't really changed. So far we're not focusing on what happens next year or in the future. It's more about what happens right now and the team and myself will get together, so there's no news for you yet, unfortunately.
I don't really want to get involved in deep discussion other than what I just said, so let's leave it at that.
Q. (Ian Parkes – Press Association) Lewis, you mentioned about being happier here in Monaco than you were in Switzerland. Can you give us the reasons why that is, what the differences between the two places are, and secondly, waking up in your own bed this weekend and being happier here, does that make a difference going into the race weekend itself? Could that boost your performance in any way?
LH: When I lived in Switzerland, it was one of the most beautiful countries I'd ever been to. The weather was a little bit like England but more often it was better weather, but just where I was living, I was living away from the city and it was very quiet. It took ages to go out to a restaurant. I couldn't jog down to a restaurant or walk to a restaurant. Here, it's sunny every day which makes a big difference, there are great restaurants a couple of minutes from where I live, there's a gym where I live, there's a pool where I live. Before I used to have to drive half an hour to get to the gym, so things were just less fun there. I'm still in my twenties so I feel like I need to make sure I continue to enjoy them more and since I've been here, I've been much happier. Every day I go running on the track, I run round the track almost every day and it's incredible to run around your favourite circuit every day. I go through the tunnel and I just cannot believe that I'm here. You have to pinch yourself every day, thinking wow, I'm running through the tunnel that the greats like Michael and Ayrton used to race around and now I'm one of those drivers but also living here. There's a lot to it, but it's spectacular.
And for the race weekend? I don't know if it's going to make any difference, but it definitely won't harm the weekend, being able to be comfortable in your own environment and surely that can account for something.WASHINGTON -- The state-appointed emergency manager who oversaw Flint, Michigan, when its water source was switched to the Flint River says he relied on state and federal experts, but the experts failed him and the city of some 100,000 people.
Darnell Earley says in prepared testimony for the first of two congressional hearings that he was overwhelmed by challenges facing the impoverished city and relied on experts from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to advise him.
Former DPS Emergency Manager Darnell Earley. CBS Detroit via DPS
Earley says that for months after the April 2014 switch he believed information he was receiving -- some of it scientifically complex -- was accurate.
But he says in hindsight he should have done more to challenge the experts who told him Flint's water problems were harmless to human health and geographically limited in nature.
"In relying on experts, the solutions I oversaw failed to ameliorate the troubles plaguing Flint's water," Earley says in prepared testimony for a hearing Tuesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of Earley's testimony in advance.
Flint switched its water source from Detroit's water system to the Flint River in 2014 to save money, but the river water was not treated properly and lead from aging pipes leached into Flint homes and businesses. Elevated levels of lead have been found in some children's blood, with lead contamination linked to learning disabilities and other problems.
State workers got bottled water long before Flint residents
The chain of events has fueled calls for Republican Gov. Rick Snyder to resign amid outrage over the treatment of the people of Flint, a predominantly African-American city. A recall effort is under way in Michigan for Snyder, who has been widely blamed for the crisis.
The governor is scheduled to appear before the committee on Thursday, along with EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.
Problems with the Flint River water became apparent soon after the switch was made, Earley says. In August 2014, tests indicated the presence of fecal matter and other contaminants. Under state guidance, the city issued an advisory telling city residents to boil their water before using it.
But Earley says he was not overly concerned, since he was "advised by these experts" that the contaminants were "generally harmless" and could be eradicated by adding chlorine and fresh water to the system, which the city did.
Red flags in emails months before Flint water crisis
Earley, a longtime school administrator and municipal official who previously served as city manager in Saginaw, Michigan, took over as emergency manager in Flint in October 2013 -- seven months after the Flint City Council approved the water switch and former emergency manager Edward Kurtz signed it.
Earley said he was given a variety of explanations for the coliform bacteria in the city's water. Explanations ranged from low-water pressure to an unauthorized connection to a sampling error, he said.
"I could only understand these reports in conjunction with the scientific interpretations" provided by state environmental officials and water treatment staff, he said.
"At absolutely no time during these boil-water advisories were the issues of corrosion control or lead leaching brought to my attention," Earley said.
Earley's testimony comes as the House oversight panel holds two hearings this week on the Flint crisis. Besides Earley, former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling and Susan Hedman, the former head of the EPA's Midwest regional office, are set to testify. Hedman resigned Feb. 1 as the Flint crisis worsened.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the oversight panel, visited Flint over the weekend with other lawmakers.
"What happened in Flint cannot ever happen again," Chaffetz said in an opening statement prepared for Tuesday's hearing. "The people of Flint were being poisoned in their own homes by the water they used every day for drinking and bathing."
"It is almost unbelievable how many bad decisions were made" in Flint, at all levels of government, Chaffetz said.
FBI investigating Flint water crisis
There was a groundbreaking moment in Flint, Michigan in early March as a plumbing crew dug up a corroded lead pipe outside a home where an expectant mother and an eight-year-old girl live -- and replaced it with a copper pipe.
For the city, that means one down, about 8,000 to go, CBS News reported.
Nurse Toni Larocco spent part of that day in March checking on Stephanie Bradley's one-year-old daughter Ced-Janae, who tested positive for lead in September.
It was one of five house calls nurses from the Genessee County Health Dept made, part of a city-wide effort to keep track of kids with lead poisoning.
"It's gone up huge. Our numbers of families that we're seeing has exponentially grown," Larocco told CBS News.
Bradley says she drank the contaminated water throughout her pregnancy. When she first learned that her daughter had high levels of lead, "I was very, very afraid because of how young she is and I didn't know the dangers of it."
Five months after Flint switched its water supply back to Lake Huron, nearly a thousand homes still have dangerous levels of lead in the water, and 72 children are still testing positive for high lead levels in their blood.The mother of two brothers who barricaded themselves Wednesday night inside Harvest Orange County Church – one naked and the other partially clad – says they wanted to meet with Pastor Greg Laurie to discuss her complaints of racial discrimination by a member of the ministry.
“They were trying to stick up for me,” said Rhonda Hodges, 52, of Riverside, who is a Native American. “They were trying to get a message to Greg Laurie that they don’t like discrimination against their mother.”
Her sons, Paul Vincent Vielkind, 24, and Brandon Joseph Vielkind, 22, were arrested on suspicion of burglary and felony vandalism. They were being held Thursday in the Orange County Jail.
Johnnie Moore, a Harvest spokesman, said the church is multiethnic and does not tolerate discrimination.
“Everyone is welcome, and the church has members and attendees from every imaginable background,” he said. “If Mrs. Hodges made a complaint, then it will be dealt with judicially according to church policy.
“We are sincerely praying for Mrs. Hodges and for her sons,” he said. “We cannot imagine what must be running through her mind given the terrible events of the last day.”
The brothers smashed a glass door to gain entry to the unoccupied church, said Kim Mohr, an Irvine police spokeswoman. Police were initially told by a security guard the suspects may be armed with rifles.
Roughly two hours later, at around 9:20 p.m., the brothers threw a smoke bomb outside and left the building, one without clothing and one partially clothed, Mohr said.
Police, who believe the pair were under the influence of a controlled substance, did not find weapons in the church; however, they did locate what appears to be a replica rifle, Mohr said.
The suspects had ransacked the church’s cafe and caused minor damage to other rooms but didn’t gain access to the sanctuary, said Moore, the Harvest spokesman.
Hodges, who said she has attended the Harvest Church in Riverside for 22 years, said the standoff stemmed from a dispute with a minister who discriminated against her. She also said she was banned from attending worship services.
For example, Hodges said, the minister implied during an April meeting that her mother was an alcoholic because she is a Native American.
“I had suffered emotional trauma from a particular pastor at Harvest, and when I had appealed to the higher-ups in the church, nothing was done about it,” Hodges said.
Hodges said her sons were troubled by the way she was treated and went Wednesday night to Harvest Orange County Church to voice their concerns.
“In some bizarre way, while they were experimenting with drugs, perhaps they were trying to express their displeasure,” she added. “They wanted to express their fearlessness by walking into the church naked.”
Brandon Vielkind is a former award-winning salesman for a San Diego resort, while Paul Vielkind served in the U.S. Marines and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, Hodges said. Both are unemployed.
“They would be talking about God one minute, and swearing the next,” Hodges said. “They were saying that Christian mega churches are failing to show the love of Christ to people.”
Hodges said her sons have attended Harvest churches in Riverside and Irvine.
Riverside County Jail booking records show Paul Vielkind was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of public intoxication and released from custody. He was also convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in September 2016 and sentenced to three years probation, according to Riverside Superior Court records.
Hodges said she hope’s her sons will be forgiven.
“I would appreciate any prayers for these young men,” she said. “I hope Pastor Laurie, his family and the church are OK. I wish the best for everyone and that we will be able to make amends.”
Laurie began a non-denominational church in Riverside 44 years ago. Now, the Harvest churches have seven locations, including Corona and Hawaii. Laurie is also an author of more than 70 books and a radio host.
He holds the SoCal Harvest each summer at Angel Stadium. Earlier this month, it drew more than 90,000 worshippers over three days.
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Staff writers Anthony Mendoza, Ian Wheeler, and Stephen Ramirez contributed to this report.Embattled U.S. Rep. John Conyers has no plans to resign amid allegations that the congressman sexually harassed several women when they worked on his staff, his lawyer said Wednesday.
Detroit-area attorney Arnold Reed told The Associated Press that the 88-year-old Conyers is going to fight claims that he inappropriately touched the women and that anyone making the allegations should be prepared to back them up.
Reed said Conyers is "innocent and will cooperate with any investigation that ensues."
"He's going to fight these allegations tooth and nail if he has to with evidence, with documentation, witnesses, whatever he has to do," Reed said. "And the accusers will have to prove up their case."
Last week, BuzzFeed News reported that Conyers had settled a complaint in 2015 from a woman on his staff who alleged she was fired because she rejected his sexual advances.
BuzzFeed reported that Conyers' office paid the woman more than $27,000 in the confidential settlement. BuzzFeed also published affidavits from former staff members who said they had witnessed Conyers touching female staffers inappropriately or requesting sexual favors.
A former scheduler also filed a complaint earlier this year, but later dropped it. The Associated Press hasn't released her name. And a third ex-staffer, Deanna Maher, said Tuesday that in 1997 Conyers undressed to his underwear in front of her and twice touched her leg inappropriately.
Reed said he met with Conyers, who was at his Detroit home Wednesday and mostly remained indoors before being driven away in the afternoon as reporters gathered outside the gated driveway.
Conyers' wife, Monica Conyers, told reporters that her husband is entitled to have the judicial process play out "before we start being his judge and jury... and tarnish all of these years of his legacy for nothing."
Conyers first was elected to the U.S. House in 1964. He missed two roll-call votes late Tuesday and was photographed by a passenger boarding a flight to Detroit from Washington.
"It's very unfortunate to see him fight so long for so many people and to automatically have the allegations assumed to be true," said his son, John Conyers III.
He noted, however: "And of course, with sexual assault, women are to be believed. But in this instance he has no history of this."
Conyers told Reed that fears for his family over media coverage prompted his return to Detroit late Tuesday from Washington. Reed said the congressman will return to Washington when he feels it's safe to go back.
The House Ethics Committee is investigating Conyers, who announced Sunday that he would step aside as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pressured Conyers behind the scenes to leave the chamber, according to a senior House aide, who spoke late Tuesday on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Also Tuesday, members of the Congressional Black Caucus met with Conyers and explained to one of their founding members why he should resign, but stressed the decision was up to him, the senior House aide said.
On Wednesday, Rep. Kathleen Rice walked out of a Democratic Caucus meeting, saying the issue wasn't being taken seriously.
Rice said Pelosi spoke only "very briefly" about sexual harassment and focused mostly on efforts by female members to combat it.
"But let's talk about the big elephant in the room. That's why I was done with the meeting," Rice said.
"I don't have time for conversations that are not real, that are not going to advance the ball for all of us here in Washington, and I for one am not going to stand silent even in the face of pressure from leadership," she added.
Caucus chairman Rep. Joseph Crowley said at a news conference after the meeting that Caucus members "believe these are very, very, very serious allegations."
But, he said, calling "for a resignation does not actually create the resignation" and that an ethics committee review could "bring this to the forefront."
Three Democrats have suggested Conyers should resign: Rice, Rep. Earl Blumenhauer and Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Monica Conyers said her husband was spending time Wednesday with family and that she was sure he would return to Washington, eventually.
"I don't know when," she said. "He's doing good. Right now, he's just hanging out with his family."
Conyers is among a number of prominent men in politics, entertainment and journalism who have been accused of sexual misconduct in the wake of explosive allegations against former Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein.
Associated Press reporter Alan Fram in Washington, D.C., contributed to this story.George Whittell, Jr., was born in San Francisco on September 28, 1881, to George Whittell, Sr., and Anna Luning Whittell. One of twins, George Jr.'s brother, Nicholas, died at the age of three of diptheria. Born into great wealth, Whittell barreled through life at full-throttle, collecting exotic animals, elegant automobiles and boats, beautiful women, contentious lawsuits and more than 20 miles of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shoreline along the way. He was one of the more notorious playboys of California and Nevada, indulging in a succession of marriages and liaisons that fueled the region's gossip mills. A recluse in his later years, Whittell shunned publicity, and, in doing so, inspired speculation about his every move. By the time of his death in 1969, he had become the stuff of legend.
George's two immigrant grandfathers shrewdly exploited Gold Rush opportunities, laying the foundation for a financial empire. Hugh Whittell immigrated to America from Ireland in 1828 and came west on a steamship from his home in New York in 1849 following the discovery of gold in California. Nicholas Luning also arrived in San Francisco in 1849 and both quickly tapped into the vibrant economy. Hugh "grubstaked" the miners, doing well on his investments in mining claims. Nicholas opened a bank which specialized in loans to merchants facing financial emergencies. Both invested heavily in San Francisco real estate. Luning also represented the Crocker and Flood families in their rail and land dealings and helped found the San Francisco Water Company, precursor of the company known today as |
éphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis popularized the use of magic lanterns as an educational tool in the late 1700s when using projected images of plants to teach botany. Her educational methods were published in America in English translation during the early 1820s.[33] A type of lantern was constructed by Moses Holden between 1814 and 1815 for illustrating his astronomical lectures.[34]
In 1821 Philip Carpenter's London company, that would become Carpenter and Westley after his death, started manufacturing a sturdy but lightweight and transportable "Phantasmagoria lantern" with an Argand style lamp, which produced high quality projections and was suitable for use in classrooms. Carpenter also developed a "secret" copper plate printing/burning process to mass-produce glass lantern slides with printed outlines, which were then easily and quickly hand painted ready for sale.[35] These "copper-plate sliders" contained three or four very detailed 4" circular images mounted in thin hardwood frames. The first known set The Elements of Zoology became available in 1823, showing over 200 images in 56 frames of zoological figures, classified according to the system of the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. The same year many other slides appeared in the company's catalogue: "The Kings and Queens of England" (9 sliders taken from David Hume’s History of England), "Astronomical Diagrams and Constellations" (9 sliders taken from Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel’s textbooks), "Views and Buildings", Ancient and Modern Costume (62 sliders from various sources).[36] Fifteen sliders of the category "Humorous" provided some entertainment, but the focus on education was obvious and very successful.
The mass production of slides also meant that the magic lantern now became affordable to the common men, opening a market for smaller lanterns with smaller glass sliders which instead of wooden frames usually had colorful strips of paper glued around their edges.
Although the popularity of magic lanterns waned after the introduction of movies in the 1890s, they remained a common medium until slide projectors came into widespread use during the 1950s.
Moving images [ edit ]
Mice jump into the mouth of a sleeping bearded man on a popular mechanical slide from circa 1870.
The magic lantern was not only a direct ancestor of the motion picture projector as a means for visual storytelling, but it could itself be used to project moving images.
Some suggestion of movement could be achieved by alternating between pictures of different phases of a motion, but most magic lantern "animations" used two glass slides projected together - one with the stationary part of the picture and the other with the part that could be set in motion by hand or by a simple mechanism.
Motion in animated slides was mostly limited to either two phases of a movement or transformation, or a more gradual singular movement (e.g. a train passing through a landscape). These limitations made subjects with repetitive movements popular, like the sails on a windmill turning around or children on a seesaw. Movements could be repeated over and over and could be performed at different speeds.
A common technique that is comparable to the effect of a panning camera makes use of a long slide that is simply pulled slowly through the lantern and usually shows a landscape, sometimes with several phases of a story within the continuous backdrop.
Movement of projected images was also possible by moving the magic lantern itself. This became a staple technique in phantasmagoria shows in the late 18th century, often with the lantern sliding on rails or riding on small wheels and hidden from the view of the audience behind the projection screen.
History [ edit ]
In 1645 Kircher had already suggested projecting live insects and shadow puppets from the surface of the mirror in his Steganographic system to perform dramatic scenes.[37]
Christiaan Huygens' 1659 sketches (see above) suggest he intended to animate the skeleton to have it take off its head and place it back on its neck. This can be seen as an indication that the very first magic lantern demonstrations may already have included projections of simple animations.[38]
In 1668 Robert Hooke wrote about the effects of a type of magic lantern installation: "Spectators not well versed in optics, that should see the various apparitions and disappearances, the motions, changes and actions that may this way be represented, would readily believe them to be supernatural and miraculous."[39]
In 1675 German polymath and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz proposed a kind of world exhibition that would show all kinds of new inventions and spectacles. In a handwritten document he supposed it should open and close with magic lantern shows, including subjects "which can be dismembered, to represent quite extraordinary and grotesque movements, which men would not be capable of making" (translated from French).[40][41]
Several reports of early magic lantern screenings possibly described moving pictures, but are not clear enough to conclude whether the viewers saw animated slides or motion depicted in still images.[38]
In 1698 German engraver and publisher Johann Christoph Weigel described several lantern slides with mechanisms that made glass parts move over one fixed glass slide, for instance by the means of a silk thread, or grooves in which the mobile part slides.[42]
By 1709 a German optician and glass grinder named Themme (or Temme) made moving lantern slides, including a carriage with rotating wheels, a cupid with a spinning wheel, a shooting gun and falling bombs. Wheels were cut from the glass plate with a diamond and rotated by a thread that was spun around small brass wheels attached to the glass wheels. A paper slip mask would be quickly pulled away to reveal the red fiery discharge and the bullet from a shooting gun. Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach visited Themme's shop and liked the effects, but was disappointed about the very simple mechanisms. Nonetheless he bought seven moving slides, as well as twelve slides with four pictures each, which he thought were delicately painted.[43]
Several types of mechanical slides were described and illustrated in Dutch professor of mathematics, physics, philosophy, medicine, and astronomy Pieter van Musschenbroek's second edition (1739) of Beginsels Der Natuurkunde.[44] Pieter was the brother of Jan van Musschenbroek, the maker of an outstanding magic lantern with excellent lenses and a diaphragm (see illustration above).[38]
In 1770 Edmé-Gilles Guyot described a method of using two slides for the depiction of a storm at sea, with waves on one slide and ships and a few clouds on another. Lanternists could project the illusion of mild waves turning into a wild sea tossing the ships around by increasing the movement of the separate slides. Guyot also detailed how projection on smoke could be used to create the illusion of ghosts hovering in the air, which would become a technique commonly used in phantasmagoria.[38]
An especially intricate multiple rackwork mechanism was developed to show the movements of the planets (sometimes accompanied by revolving satellites) revolving around the sun. In 1795 one M. Dicas seems to have offered an early magic lantern system, the Lucernal or Portable Eidouranian, that showed the orbiting planets. From around the 1820s mechanical astronomical slides became quite common.[45]
Various types of mechanical slides [ edit ]
Beginsels Der Natuurkunde (second edition 1739) Mechanical slides for a magic lantern as illustrated in Petrus van Musschenbroek's(second edition 1739)
A double magic lantern.
Various types of mechanisms were commonly used to add movement to the projected image:
slipping slides : a movable glass plate with one or more figures (or any part of a picture for which movement was desired) was slipped over a stationary one, directly by hand or with a small drawbar (see: Fig. 7 on the illustration by Petrus van Musschenbroek: a tightrope walker sliding across the rope). A common example showed a creature that could move the pupils in its eyes, as if it was looking in all directions. A long piece of glass could show a procession of figures, or a train with several wagons. Quite convincing illusions of moving waves on a seas or lake have also been achieved with this method. [46]
: a movable glass plate with one or more figures (or any part of a picture for which movement was desired) was slipped over a stationary one, directly by hand or with a small drawbar (see: Fig. 7 on the illustration by Petrus van Musschenbroek: a tightrope walker sliding across the rope). A common example showed a creature that could move the pupils in its eyes, as if it was looking in all directions. A long piece of glass could show a procession of figures, or a train with several wagons. Quite convincing illusions of moving waves on a seas or lake have also been achieved with this method. slipping slides with masking : black paint on portions of the moving plate would mask parts of the underlying image - with a black background - on the stationary glass. This made it possible to hide and then reveal the previous position of a part, for instance a limb, to suggest repetitious movement. The suggested movement would be rather jerky and usually operated quickly. Masking in slides was also often used to create change rather than movement (see: Fig. 6 on the illustration by Petrus van Musschenbroek: a man, his wig and his hat): for instance a person's head could be replaced with that of an animal. More gradual and natural movement was also possible; for instance to make a nose grow very long by slowly moving a masking glass.
: black paint on portions of the moving plate would mask parts of the underlying image - with a black background - on the stationary glass. This made it possible to hide and then reveal the previous position of a part, for instance a limb, to suggest repetitious movement. The suggested movement would be rather jerky and usually operated quickly. Masking in slides was also often used to create change rather than movement (see: Fig. 6 on the illustration by Petrus van Musschenbroek: a man, his wig and his hat): for instance a person's head could be replaced with that of an animal. More gradual and natural movement was also possible; for instance to make a nose grow very long by slowly moving a masking glass. lever slides : the moving part was operated by a lever. These could show a more natural movement than slipping slides and were mostly used for repetitive movements, for instance a woodcutter raising and lowering his axe, or a girl on a swing. [46] (see: Fig. 5 on the illustration by Petrus van Musschenbroek: a drinking man raising and lowering his glass + Fig. 8: a lady curtsying)
: the moving part was operated by a lever. These could show a more natural movement than slipping slides and were mostly used for repetitive movements, for instance a woodcutter raising and lowering his axe, or a girl on a swing. (see: Fig. 5 on the illustration by Petrus van Musschenbroek: a drinking man raising and lowering his glass + Fig. 8: a lady curtsying) pulley slides : a pulley rotates the moving part and could for instance be used to turn the sails on a windmill [47] (see: fig. 4 on illustration by Van Musschenbroek)
: a pulley rotates the moving part and could for instance be used to turn the sails on a windmill (see: fig. 4 on illustration by Van Musschenbroek) rack and pinion slides : turning the handle of a rackwork would rotate or lift the moving part and could for instance be used to turn the sails on a windmill or for having a hot air balloon take off and descend. A more complex astronomical rackwork slide showed the planets and their satellites orbiting around the sun. [46]
: turning the handle of a rackwork would rotate or lift the moving part and could for instance be used to turn the sails on a windmill or for having a hot air balloon take off and descend. A more complex astronomical rackwork slide showed the planets and their satellites orbiting around the sun. fantoccini slides : jointed figures set in motion by levers, thin rods, or cams and worm wheels. A popular version had a somersaulting monkey with arms attached to mechanism that made it tumble with dangling feet. Named after the Italian word for animated puppets, like marionettes or jumping jacks. Two different British patents for slides with moving jointed figures were granted in 1891. [48]
: jointed figures set in motion by levers, thin rods, or cams and worm wheels. A popular version had a somersaulting monkey with arms attached to mechanism that made it tumble with dangling feet. Named after the Italian word for animated puppets, like marionettes or jumping jacks. Two different British patents for slides with moving jointed figures were granted in 1891. a snow effect slide can add snow to another slide (preferably of a winter scene) by moving a flexible loop of material pierced with tiny holes in front of one of the lenses of a double or triple lantern.[49]
Mechanical slides with abstract special effects include:
Slide with a fantoccini trapeze artist and a chromatrope border design (circa 1880)
the Chromatrope : a slide that produces dazzling colorful geometrical patterns by rotating two painted glass discs in opposite directions, originally with a double pulley mechanism but later usually with a rackwork mechanism. [46] [50] It was possibly invented around 1844 by English glass painter and showman Henry Langdon Childe [51] [52] and soon added as a novelty to the program of the Royal Polytechnic Institution. [53] [54]
: a slide that produces dazzling colorful geometrical patterns by rotating two painted glass discs in opposite directions, originally with a double pulley mechanism but later usually with a rackwork mechanism. It was possibly invented around 1844 by English glass painter and showman Henry Langdon Childe and soon added as a novelty to the program of the Royal Polytechnic Institution. the Astrometeoroscope or Astrometroscope: a large slide that projected a lacework of dots forming constantly changing geometrical line patterns, compared with stars and meteors. It was invented in or before 1858 by the Hungarian engineer S. Pilcher and used a very ingenious mechanism with two metal plates obliquely crossed with slits that moved to and fro in contrary directions. Except for when the only known example was used in a performance, it was kept locked away at the Polytechnic so no one could discover the secret technique. When the Polytechnic auctioned the device, Picher eventuaslly paid an extravagant price for his own invention in order to keep is workings secret. [55] [56]
or Astrometroscope: a large slide that projected a lacework of dots forming constantly changing geometrical line patterns, compared with stars and meteors. It was invented in or before 1858 by the Hungarian engineer S. Pilcher and used a very ingenious mechanism with two metal plates obliquely crossed with slits that moved to and fro in contrary directions. Except for when the only known example was used in a performance, it was kept locked away at the Polytechnic so no one could discover the secret technique. When the Polytechnic auctioned the device, Picher eventuaslly paid an extravagant price for his own invention in order to keep is workings secret. the Eidotrope : counter-rotating discs of perforated metal or card (or wire gauze or lace), producing swirling Moiré patterns of bright white dots. It was invented by English scientist Charles Wheatstone in 1866. [57] [58]
: counter-rotating discs of perforated metal or card (or wire gauze or lace), producing swirling Moiré patterns of bright white dots. It was invented by English scientist Charles Wheatstone in 1866. the Kaleidotrope : a slide with a single perforated metal or cardboard disc suspended on a spiral spring. The holes can be tinted with colored pieces of gelatin. When struck the disc's vibration and rotation sends the colored dots of light swirling around in all sorts of shapes and patterns. The device was demonstrated at the Royal Polytechnic Institution around 1870 and dubbed "Kaleidotrope" when commercial versions were marketed. [59]
: a slide with a single perforated metal or cardboard disc suspended on a spiral spring. The holes can be tinted with colored pieces of gelatin. When struck the disc's vibration and rotation sends the colored dots of light swirling around in all sorts of shapes and patterns. The device was demonstrated at the Royal Polytechnic Institution around 1870 and dubbed "Kaleidotrope" when commercial versions were marketed. the Cycloidotrope (circa 1865): a slide which had an adjustable stylus bar drawing geometric patterns on sooty glass when hand cranked during projection. The patterns are similar to that produced with a Spirograph. [49]
(circa 1865): a slide which had an adjustable stylus bar drawing geometric patterns on sooty glass when hand cranked during projection. The patterns are similar to that produced with a Spirograph. a Newton colour wheel slide which, when spinning fast enough, blends seven colours into a white circle[49]
Dissolving views [ edit ]
Advertisement with picture of a triple lantern / dissolving view apparatus (1886)
The effect of a gradual transition from one image to another, known as a dissolve in modern filmmaking, became the basis of a popular type of magic lantern show in England in the 19th century. Typical dissolving views showed landscapes dissolving from day to night or from summer to winter. This was achieved by aligning the projection of two matching images and slowly diminishing the first image while introducing the second image.[46] The subject and the effect of magic lantern dissolving views is similar to the popular Diorama theatre paintings which originated in Paris in 1822. The terms "dissolving views", "dioramic views", or simply "diorama" were often used interchangeably in 19th century magic lantern broadsides.[60]
The effect was reportedly invented by phantasmagoria pioneer Paul de Philipsthal while in Ireland in 1803 or 1804. He thought of using two lanterns to make the spirit of Samuel appear out of a mist in his representation of the Witch of Endor. While working out the desired effect, he got the idea of using the technique with landscapes. An 1812 newspaper about a London performance indicates that De Philipsthal presented what was possibly a relatively early incarnation of a dissolving views show, describing it as a "a series of landscapes (in imitation of moonlight), which insensibly change to various scenes producing a very magical effect.”[61][62]
Another possible inventor is Henry Langdon Childe, who purportedly once worked for De Philipsthal.[62] He is said to have invented the dissolving views in 1807 and to have improved and completed the technique in 1818.[63] The oldest known use of the term "dissolving views" occurs on playbills for Childe's shows at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1837.[60] Childe further popularized the dissolving views at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in the early 1840s.[61]
Despite the later reports about the early invention and apart from De Philipsthal's 1812 performance, no reports of dissolving view shows before the 1820s are known and in some cases confusion with the Diorama or similar media is possible. In 1826 Scottish magician and ventriloquist M. Henry's introduced what he referred to as "Beautiful Dissolvent Scenes", "imperceptibly changing views", "dissolvent views" and "Magic Views" which were created "by Machinery invented by M. Henry". In 1827 Henry Langdon Childe presented "Scenic Views, showing the various effects of light and shade" with a series of subjects that would become classics for the dissolving views. In December 1827 De Philipsthal returned with a show that included "various splendid views (...) transforming themselves imperceptibly (as if it were by Magic) from one form into another".[60][62]
Biunial lanterns, with two projecting optical sets in one apparatus, were produced to more easily project dissolving views. Possibly the first horizontal biunial lantern, dubbed the "Biscenascope" was made by the optician Mr. Clarke and presented at the Royal Adelaide Gallery in London on December 5, 1840.[61] The earliest known illustration of a vertical biunial lantern, probably provided by E.G. Wood, appeared in Horne & Thornthwaite catalogue in 1857.[45] Later on triple lanterns enabled additional effects, for instance the effect of snow falling while a green landscape dissolves into a snowy winter version.
A mechanical device could be fitted on the magic lantern, which locked up a diaphragm on the first slide slowly whilst a diaphragm on a second slide was opened simultaneously.[62]
Philip Carpenter's copper-plate printing process, introduced in 1823, may have made it much easier to create duplicate slides with printed outlines that could then be colored differently to create dissolving view slides.[62] However, all early dissolving view slides seem to have been hand-painted.[60]
Experiments [ edit ]
There have been many different experiments involving sorts of movement with the magic lantern. These include:
galvanometer slide: a flattened coil with a magnetized needle moving from side to side when a battery is connected.
projection of moving frog legs, with the nerves and muscles of severed frog legs connected to electric wires.
hour-glass projection: the projection of a flattened hourglass showed the sand flowing upwards. Extreme magnification made the effect extra impressive, with the grains of sand forming a wave-like pattern.
cohesion figure projection of liquids: different oils and fats create all kinds of moving patterns when manipulated between clear glass plates or a narrow glass box.
Several of these experiments were publicly demonstrated at the Royal Polytechnic Institution Institution.[64]
Choreutoscope and phenakistiscope-type systems [ edit ]
Versions of the magic lantern were used to project transparent variations of the phénakisticope. These were adapted with a mechanism that spins the disc and a shutter system. Duboscq produced some in the 1850s and Thomas Ross patented a version called "Wheel of life" in 1869 and 1870.[65]
The Choreutoscope was invented around 1866 by the Greenwich engineer J. Beale and demonstrated at the Royal Polytechnic. It projected six pictures from a long slide and used a hand-cranked mechanism for intermittent movement of the slide and synchronized shutter action. The mechanism became a key to the development of the movie camera and projector. The Choreutoscope was used at the first professional public demonstration of the Kinetoscope to explain its principles.[66]
An "Optical Instrument" was patented in the U.S. in 1869 by O.B. Brown, using a phenakistiscope-like disc with a technique very close to the later cinematograph; with Maltese Cross motion; a star-wheel and pin being used for intermittent motion, and a two-sector shutter.[67]
Life in the lantern - Bio-Phantoscope [ edit ]
John Arthur Roebuck Rudge built a lantern for William Friese-Greene with a mechanism to project a sequence of seven photographic slides. It was reportedly made in 1872, but also 1875 and a more likely date of 1882 have been given. The surviving slides show a man removing his head with his hands and raising the loose head. The photographed body belonged to Rudge and Friese-Greene posed for the head. The slides probably provided the very first trick photography sequence projection. Friese-Greene's demonstrated the machine in his shop, until the police ordered him to remove it when it attracted too large a crowd.[68]
Phantasmagoria [ edit ]
L'Optique (1867) Interpretation of Robertson's Fantasmagorie from F. Marion's(1867)
Phantasmagoria was a form of horror theater that used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images, especially of ghosts. Showmen used rear projection, mobile or portable projectors and all kinds of effects to produce convincing necromantic experiences. It was very popular in Europe from the late 18th century to well into the 19th century.
It is thought that optical devices like concave mirrors and the camera obscura have been used since antiquity to fool spectators into believing they saw real gods and spirits,[62] but it was the magician "physicist" Phylidor who created what must have been the first true phantasmagoria show. He probably used mobile magic lanterns with the recently invented Argand lamp[69] to create his successful Schröpferischen, und Cagliostoischen Geister-Erscheinungen (Schröpfer-esque and Cagiostro-esque Ghost Apparitions)[70] in Vienna from 1790 to 1792. Phylidor stated that his show of perfected apparitions revealed how charlatans like Johann Georg Schröpfer and Cagliostro had fooled their audiences. As "Paul Filidort" he presented his Phantasmagorie in Paris From December 1792 to July 1793,[71][72] probably using the term for the first time. As "Paul de Philipsthal" he performed Phantasmagoria shows in Britain since 1801 with great success.
One of many showmen who were inspired by Phylidor, Etienne-Gaspard Robert became very famous with his own Fantasmagorie show in Paris from 1798 to 1803 (later performing throughout Europe and returning to Paris for a triumphant comeback in Paris in 1814). He patented a mobile "Fantascope" lantern in 1798.[62]
Royal Polytechnic Institution shows [ edit ]
Since its opening in 1838 The Royal Polytechnic Institution in London became a very popular and influential venue with all kinds of magic lantern shows as an important part of its program. At the main theatre, with 500 seats, lanternists would make good use of a battery of six large lanterns running on tracked tables to project the finely detailed images of extra large slides on the 648 square feet screen. The magic lantern was used to illustrate lectures, concerts, pantomimes and other forms of theatre. Popular magic lantern presentations included Henry Langon Childe's dissolving views, his chromatrope, phantasmagoria and mechanical slides.[62][73]
Utushi-e is a type of magic lantern show that became popular in Japan in the 19th century. The Dutch probably introduced the magic lantern in Japan before the 1760s. A new style for magic lantern shows was introduced by Kameya Toraku I, who first performed in 1803 in Edo. Possibly the phantasmagoria shows (popular in the west at that moment) inspired the rear projection technique, moving images and ghost stories. Japanese showmen developed lightweight wooden projectors (furo) that were handheld so that several performers could move the projections of different colourful figures move around the screen at the same time.[74] The Western techniques of mechanical slides were combined with traditional Japanese skills—especially from Karakuri puppets—to further animate the figures and for special effects.[75]
Today [ edit ]
Some enthusiasts claim that the brilliant quality of color in lantern slides is unsurpassed by successive projection media. The magic lantern and lantern slides are still popular with collectors and can be found in many museums. However, of the original lanterns from the first 150 years after its invention only 28 are known to still exist (as of 2009).[22] Museums usually prefer not to use their slides for projections, but often provide video representations of the slides.
A collaborative research project of several European universities called A Million Pictures started in June 2015 and will last until May 2018. It addresses the sustainable preservation of the massive, untapped heritage resource of the tens of thousands of lantern slides in the collections of libraries and museums across Europe.[76]
Genuine public lantern shows are relatively rare; several regular performers state to be the only one of their kind in their part of the world. These include Pierre Albanese and glass harmonica player Thomas Bloch live Magic Lantern/Phantasmagoria shows since 2008 in Europe[77] and The American Magic-Lantern Theater.[78] The Magic Lantern Society maintains a list of active lanternists, which contains more than 20 performers in the U.K. and circa eight performers in other parts of the world (Europe, U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand).[79]
Dutch theatre group Lichtbende produces contemporary magical light spectacles and workshops with magic lanterns.[80]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
→←When it was first announced that actress Samantha Spiro was to appear in Doctor Who, there was a lot of excitement over who exactly she could be playing.
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Could she be starring as an older version of Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter from the original series? Could she even be the next incarnation of the Doctor, set to take over from Peter Capaldi this Christmas?
But now the truth is out, and having spoken to Spiro, RadioTimes.com can confirm that she’s playing neither of those powerful Time Lords – instead, she’s playing a rather different new character for series 10 finale The Doctor Falls named Hazran.
“As far as she’s concerned she lives on a farm, and it’s a very beautiful rural setting,” Spiro told RadioTimes.com.
“The farmhouse where they live, she is protecting and looking after quite a few children, and there are adults who work the land as well. It’s fairly idyllic, usually, but where we catch her and their life they are under attack from the Cybermen – so thing’s aren’t great currently for Hazran.
“She’s the sort of person who’s trying to hold it all together and probably wouldn’t be successful if it wasn’t for a bit of help that we get from the Doctor.”
Based on previous episode World Enough and Time, this description would suggest that Hazran and her charges are citizens of the time-slowed colony spaceship first seen in the penultimate episode, who come under attack when the Mondasian Cybermen begin converting the entire populace.
Samantha Spiro as Hazran in The Doctor Falls
Spiro’s character can actually be glimpsed in the trailer (above) for the finale fighting off the Cybermen with a gun, in scenes that she says were “really good fun” to film and that suggests not all the humans will be going quietly into their new Cyber-lives. Hooray!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28uc4L4Z30A?ecver=1
Of course, for some fans Spiro’s character reveal will be a little less exciting than the idea that she’s an iconic Time Lord in disguise, but the actor says she has no hard feelings about the media speculation surrounding her role.
“It was after I’d already finished filming it so I knew I wasn’t going to be the next Doctor,” she laughed.
“It’s always fun when there’s speculation like that, and because nobody knows who the next Doctor is at the moment, you let people run with these things – so it’s all good fun!”
She added: “It was brilliant for someone like me who probably didn’t think they’d be doing much more of this kind of stuff to be there with a gun shooting Cybermen – lovely!”
Doctor Who series 10 concludes on BBC1 this Saturday 1st July
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PLbs-Pk9dtKb8YP3Qd5UDiUQqkuzd776iF&showinfo=0?ecver=1By Julie Montanaro
November 13, 2015
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A seven foot chicken was perched outside a Tallahassee McDonald's today to demand better treatment of chickens.
Protesters with "Mercy for Animals" lined the sidewalk in front of the McDonald's on the corner of Dewey Street and West Tennessee Street.
They're trying to bring attention to an undercover video they claim shows horrific treatment of chickens used to make chicken McNuggets.
We have chosen not to show you that video because it's too graphic.
"As consumers, we certainly have a right to know where our food is coming from and how the animals are treated so we can make informed choices," said Jeni Haines with Mercy for Animals. "We are urging McDonald's to make on-farm improvements to reduce illness and injury among birds and to switch to less-cruel killing systems."
McDonald's did not comment on the video itself. Here's what McDonald's USA did say:
"We have long believed treating animals with care and respect is an integral part of a responsible supply chain. We're committed to working with animal welfare and industry experts to inform our policies that promote better management, strong employee education and verification of practices.
We continue to make improvements in this area, and last week announced a significant commitment to source cage-free eggs over the course of 10 years."<<Home Niagara Falls Reporter Archive>> WHY I'M LEAVING NEW YORK
Guest View by Tom Golisano
I love New York. But how much should it cost to call New York home? Decades of out-of-control budgets, spending increases and relentless borrowing have made New York simply too expensive.
Politicians like to talk about incentives -- incentives for businesses to relocate, incentives to buy local and incentives to make smart decisions. After reviewing the 2009 budget, I have identified the most compelling incentive of all: a major tax break immediately available to all New Yorkers. To be eligible, you need only do one thing: move out of New York state.
Last week I spent 90 minutes doing a couple simple things: registering to vote, changing my driver's license, filling out a domicile certificate and signing a homestead certificate -- in Florida. Combined with spending 184 days a year outside New York, these simple procedures will save me over $5 million in New York taxes annually.
That savings doesn't include that Florida has a 6 percent sales tax, compared to New York's 8 percent or more. Florida has lower utility taxes and lower gasoline taxes. The Florida homestead certificate guarantees my property taxes will not grow more than 3 percent.
By moving to Florida, I can spend that money on worthy causes, like better hospitals and improving education, and on worthy projects like the Clinton Global Initiative. Or maybe I will continue to invest that money in fighting the status quo in Albany. One thing is certain: That money will not continue to fund Albany's bloated bureaucracy, corrupt politicians or regular handouts to the special interests.
How did we get here in the first place? It all starts with spending, spending and more spending.
BUDGET SPENDING
New York's budget was $72.7 billion in 1999. Ten years later, it has ballooned to $131.8 billion. That growth is astounding, but it continues to get worse. Each year, New York's budget has had 6 percent compounded growth, double the average rate of inflation (2.8 percent). Florida's budget, on the other hand, went down 8 percent this year. HEALTH CARE SPENDING New York spends $2,283 per person on Medicaid. That's the highest per capita spending in the nation and twice the national average. In the last decade, the Medicaid budget has grown by 50 percent ($30 billion in 1999 and $45 billion in 2009). In almost every sector (hospitals, nursing homes, medicine, clinics, and home and community care), spending per recipient regularly exceeds the national average.
Faced with escalating costs and diminishing returns, Albany and their allies, the health care unions (SEIU has over 300,000 politically active members), had only one answer: Increase taxes.
EDUCATION SPENDING
New York spends the most per pupil in America on education, spending 63 percent above the national average. Costs went up about 60 percent in the last decade ($12.7 billion in 1999 and $20.7 billion in 2009). Like health care, education is something worth spending on and worth investing in, but we're spending more and getting less. New York City schools graduated 54 percent of high school students in 2007, Buffalo 47 percent and Rochester 45 percent.
Why? Perhaps it's because the New York state teachers union, with its $114 million budget, is always trying to convince Albany to spend more. Maybe it's because it's mandatory that all teachers pay union dues. Whatever the cause, when faced with potential cuts, the union and their allies have one response: Increase taxes.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT SPENDING
It's not just the state. It's the range and breadth of New York layers of governments and special taxing districts. In New York, the average state and local tax burden is $5,260 for every man, woman and child. That's by far the highest in the country. Like Albany, when faced with a difficult problem, these municipalities have one answer: Increase taxes.
Upstate New York has been particularly hard hit. Add unreasonable real estate taxes to the uncontrolled state spending, and you have whole communities decimated. The assessment process is unfair, unworkable and unreasonable, and the result is that 15 of the 20 highest taxed counties in America are right here in Upstate New York. While homeowners in other areas build equity, we just pay more taxes.
NO ONE'S HOME
This problem did not begin with the current recession. New York faced a $6 billion shortfall before the economic downturn. However, in the face of economic turmoil Gov. Paterson, Speaker Silver and Majority Leader Smith looked to the unions and special interests, who answered with one voice: Raise taxes.
Among other taxes and fees, they raised the marginal tax rate on the most successful (and most mobile) New Yorkers to 8.97 percent, the second highest rate in the nation.
It was irresponsible and it may just prove to be counterproductive, since the top 1 percent of earners account for about 50 percent of state revenue. We're the ones who can -- and will -- leave.
It's not an easy decision, but I'm being forced away from my family and friends, a pain shared by too many parents and grandparents in this state.
I'm leaving. And by domiciling in Florida, I will personally save $13,800 every single day. That's a pretty strong incentive.
Like I said, I love New York, but I'm not going to pay New York more for the waste, corruption and inefficiency that is New York state government.
Tom Golisano is the Chairman of the Board of Paychex, Inc. and the founder of the B. Thomas Golisano Foundation. He created Responsible New York so the voices of ordinary New Yorkers can be heard over the special interests, to hold elected officials |
both teams off the field while fans took cover under the roof or braved the elements.
When play began at 8:45 pm CT, Sporting KC immediately grabbed the momentum, putting the Sounders defense under pressure through Teal Bunbury and Kamara. But although Sporting made their physical presence felt throughout the next 10 minutes, they had a hard time knocking Johnson off his game.
The Sounders striker nearly got on the end of a Rosales free kick in the 19th minute, a precursor of things to come, before Kamara came inches from giving the home side a first-half lead off a shot that deflected off Andy Rose and off the crossbar as Gspurning watched flat-footed.
Johnson nearly broke the deadlock in the 30th minute off a Rosales corner kick, rising to nod the ball down on frame, only for Nielsen to drop quickly to his left and push the header away.
Five minutes later, Johnson came close again after he found himself alone with Lawrence Olum and left suspended Aurélien Collin’s substitute in his wake. But he steered his shot wide of the post, allowing the capacity crowd to breathe a sigh of relief.
OPTA Chalkboard: Espinoza the engine driving Sporting box to box
The second half started with more of the same intensity, but neither side managed to break through until the final minutes. Sporting finally got the game’s first goal when official Ricardo Salazar pointed to the spot after ruling that Bunbury’s cross just eight minutes from time hit Scott’s arm. Kamara stepped up and coolly sent Gspurning the wrong way, burying the ball just inside the right post.
But the Sounders barely waited two minutes to hit back. Once again, Rosales stood over a dangerous free kick and curled the ball onto the head of Scott, who made no mistake with his header before celebrating in front of the 300 or so Seattle fans making their presence known in the southeast corner of the stadium.
SKC manager Vermes sent C.J. Sapong on for Bunbury as time wound down, and it nearly paid off. With three minutes of stoppage time to strike back, Sapong brought the ball down and Kamara nearly made it two, but his swiveling volley was just over the bar.
Sporting KC’s victory gives them a berth in the 2013-14 edition of the CONCACAF Champions League and marks Seattle’s first loss in the US Open Cup since becoming an MLS team in 2009.Why Is Gov. Christie Afraid to Tackle the REALLY Big Thing – Jobs?
Yesterday, the American Enterprise Institute hosted an address by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie titled ‘It’s Time to Do the Big Things.’ So, how is New Jersey doing on the big things that really matter to the living standards of the state’s middle class and working class families?
As it turns out, not so well.
Even as employment in the U.S. slowly increased during 2010, New Jersey continued to experience job losses. In the year after Christie took office, non-farm payroll employment in the Garden State fell by 30,700 jobs from 3.859 million in December 2009 to 3.828 million in December 2010.
Average hourly earnings are down in nominal terms over the year to November 2010 (most recent available data) from $26.84 to $25.78 and weekly earnings over the same period declined by nearly $31, from $909.88 to $879.10.
New Jersey’s unemployment rate remains above 9 percent, with much of last year’s modest improvement in the unemployment rate due to the shrinking labor force, with nearly 41,000 workers going missing during the year.
Attacking teachers and public sector workers, failing to make required payments to the state’s pension fund, reducing payments to cash-strapped cities and municipalities, and cutting state programs may make great political theater, as a self-satisfied Christie seems to think. And it may mesmerize his fellow Republicans. But the evidence is clear – these policies have hurt, not helped, New Jersey’s economy.Quote While Aspyr is working on a multitude of Linux titles right now, BioShock Infinite is not one of them. That said, this is exciting news and we are looking forward to a great title coming to a great platform.
After the BioShock Infinite SteamDB entry was found by Linux users we've been debating who's going to be behind the port and it might very well be Virtual Programming. Prepare for some speculation.To be clear with you guys, this is an editorial, meaning that it's an opinion piece. Please treat it as such.A Virtual Programming employee has hung around on our IRC channel from since The Witcher 2 was released. During the past few days he also participated in the conversation about the BioShock Infinite port with some cryptic comments, which seem to indicate that Virtual Programming and their eON wrapper have something to do with the Linux port.Following screenshot is from a conversation that took place on the 7th of December at half past 5 PM Finnish time.Notice: we didn't "leak the story" unlike some people seem to think. All of the information available to us regarding the BioShock Infinite port was public. We can thank SteamDB and Reddit for that.Some of these lines seem very odd to say the least. When asked about involvement with the BioShock Infinite port the developer stuck mostly to “no comment” line with an occasional smiley in the end. That alone wouldn't say much of course but used this way “no comment” can almost be interpreted as “yes”, especially if we contrast it to Aspyr Media's response regarding the port:The developer also mentioned that he doesn't wish to do or say anything that would damage their relationship with 2K. This is where I got extremely suspicious. “No comment” is still an understandable answer but why would someone bring up relations to a publisher if they have nothing to do with it? He has also made numerous remarks about Steam depots and the space requirements of BioShock Infinite which would suggest that he either checks the disk space usage of games basically by random or he has recently installed the game / worked with it.But the oddities don't end here. A GOL user Daverball noticed that the Steam depots for BioShock Infinite look similar to the ones for Witcher 2 and Stronghold 3, the two Linux wrapper ports Virtual Programming has done so far. Aspyr's Mac port uses a separate depot, which contains both the binary and the data while the Linux depot shares game data with the Windows build. It could be argued that sharing the game data between builds makes sense, but Aspyr (and Feral) have in the past shipped their own data alongside with the binary. I believe Feral actually re-encoded some video files of XCOM: Enemy Unknown to better suit Linux.After the Witcher 2's rather catastrophic launch Linux gamers have been very careful with AAA ports. For example the recently released Dead Island port was a topic of debate for a short time when people suspected that the unusually large binary file might contain a hidden compatibility component and was not really a native port. The game ultimately turned out to be a native game, with the binary being inflated by debugging symbols that were, for some reason, left into the release build. But this shows the amount of distrust Witcher 2 caused when it was released in a barely playable state and even today after numerous patches to eON by Virtual Programming the game runs with bad performance for many people who have hardware configurations that exceed the requirements mentioned on Steam and GOG. Personally I have nothing against the idea of using compatibility layers such as Wine or eON to ship some games, especially older games with lost source code, but so far I haven't been all that impressed by eON's performance. And I'm not just bashing either, we've had months to test and tweak with Witcher 2 and Stronghold 3 and the performance is just objectively bad and for some people just completely unacceptable.So, will BioShock use eON to run on Linux? I don't really know. This article is mostly just speculation and I might just very well be paranoid and completely wrong here. But I do suggest that you remain cautious about AAA ports when the person/company porting it is shrouded in mystery. In this day and age broken ports are not rare and the “buy it before it's out” mentality seems to be going strong.What are your predictions of the port? Will it use eON and most importantly, will it matter if it does?"These young people have no connection to life in the Swedish outdoors and how we look at nature, such as the right of public access. Many come from countries where it is plain dangerous to be out in the nature," said Magnus Rydholm at the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management (Svenska Jägareförbundet).
The project has been running for six years and has never been more more popular with some 200-300 young people participating in events organized by the association across the country in 2014.
The final event of 2014 was organized in Borlänge in central Sweden to coincide with the annual elk hunt. Some
The project has however proved controversial in recent years and a former project manager has been threatened after having spoken about the scheme in the media.
"There are some dark forces who don't think the same way we do, unfortunately. But our values are: openness, respect and responsibility. We welcome everyone, regardless of background or religion. We work with these issues and are not about to back down in the face of those who think differently," Rydholm said.
Iglas Haji is one of the young people who participated in Borlänge and was positive about the experience, especially learning about Sweden's flora and fauna.
"I think it's really fun and exciting," she told broadcaster P4 Dalarna.
Hunting is a popular sport in Sweden with some 300,000 licensed hunters. Foreign hunters are welcomed in the country subject to the required permits and insurance.New.NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer
Productivity is the hallmark of programming with managed code. So often productivity boils down to figuring out why something isn’t working – diagnostics. The CLR provides one of the best foundations for diagnostics. In this post, Richard Lander – a program manager for the Common Language Runtime – shows how more than just developers can now track down root causes for problems. — Brandon
In this post, we will look at a new feature in Process Explorer, the popular SysInternals tool, which enables developers and IT Pros to collect accurate stack traces for.NET applications.
Adding.NET Stack frames to Process Explorer
A few months ago, a few of us on the.NET Team were looking at how we could improve Process Explorer to provide better diagnostic information for.NET applications. Process Explorer is a very useful tool for investigating why something is going wrong. We know that millions of developers and IT Pros use Process Explorer, so it would seem that even small improvements for.NET would be pretty useful.
After a little conversation, we decided that adding support for.NET frames in Process Explorer’s Stack window would be the most valuable improvement that we could make. We reached out to Mark Russinovich to pitch the idea. For those of you that don’t know, Mark is the creator and maintainer of Process Explorer, and is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. Mark was immediately supportive of the idea, and gave us the go-ahead to make the changes in the Process Explorer code. That work is now done, and available as part of Process Explorer v15.2 (or later).
What can you do with this new support?
Developers typically reach for Visual Studio when one of their applications starts doing the wrong thing. As the developer of an app, you can reproduce the issue on your own, attach to a badly behaving live repro or look at a dump. You have the source, and can easily go from there. Visual Studio 2012 is great for that scenario.
Sometimes you are a developer working with a customer on their machine and don’t have access to your tools or your application source. You could also be an IT Pro who supports an application that someone else built. In either case, Process Explorer can help you quickly collect diagnostic information, such as call stacks, that can give you an early lead.
The call stack is a hierarchical list of method calls that are active at any one given time on a particular thread within an application. It provides a developer with a really good idea of what the code was doing and why it was doing it. In the case that an app is mis-behaving, the call-stack can be a first-order clue as to why. You will need to use Visual Studio after that, but you’ll be a step closer to a solution with this information.
Process Explorer shows us.NET Stack Frames in Paint.Net
Paint.NET is a really great image and photo editing application written in.NET. For clarity, Paint.NET wasn’t misbehaving, but seemed like a pretty good candidate to first try this new addition to Process Explorer. You can repeat these same steps with any other application.
The following steps assume that the app in question is already running. In this example, it is Paint.NET.
Launch process explorer. Select the application to inspect. In the screenshot below, Paint.NET is selected.
Right click on the application and choose "Properties".
The “Properties” window will be displayed. Select the “Threads” tab. Select a thread This part of the exercise can require a little exploration, since there might be quite a few threads running in the app
You typically have to check out a few threads before you see method names that match ones that you expect
In the Paint.NET example, the first thread is a managed thread that we can inspect
Click the "Stack" button to inspect the callstack for the selected thread The “Stack” window will be displayed. You can explore the stack and choose to copy frames, one by one, or all at once.
Two examples of the Stack window with managed frames are displayed below. They contain both managed and native frames, and display transitions between managed and native frames with frames labeled “Managed to Unmanaged Transition” and "Unmanaged to Managed Transition".
The following screenshot shows the result of the exact same set of steps using an older version of Process Explorer. Needless to say, the new version improves the process of collecting diagnostic information for.NET applications quite a lot.
Important Considerations
There are a few important operational details that you will need to consider when using this feature.
This feature works with applications running on.NET Framework 4.0 or later
Update – 9/17/2012: The architecture of Process Explorer must match the architecture of the managed process you are inspecting. Process Explorer always runs at the native bitness of the machine (ex: X64 on X64 Windows). Unfortunately, there is no way to run Process Explorer as a 32-bit app on X64 Windows at this time, which therefore means that you cannot use this feature with 32-bit apps on X64 Windows. We recognize that this is limitation is pretty significant for many of you.
The architecture of Process Explorer must match the architecture of the managed process you are inspecting in order to see managed frames–applies to x64 Windows only
Summary
As you can see, we have added new support in Process Explorer to capture basic diagnostic information about.NET applications. I expect that developers will find this additional support useful in scenarios where you are troubleshooting application problems on customer machines. On the flipside of the coin, I expect that IT Pros will find that the new Process Explorer provides them with a valuable new ability to communicate accurate information back to developers.
Please tell us if you find this new Process Explorer feature useful. We’d also like to know which other.NET diagnostic features you would find useful in Process Explorer, or some other popular tool.Every time I open up an NBA Mock Draft for the 2017 NBA Draft, I get bored pretty quickly. I see the same guys at the top and stop reading after the first pick or two.
That’s not a knock on those mock drafts, but as a rule just about any pre-lottery mock has to make the assumption that the worst teams will get the top picks.
As a veteran of dozens of lotteries (including 1997 and 2007) I can assure you that outcome isn’t set in stone.
The Brooklyn Nets have a 5.5 game “lead” on the Lakers for the worst record in the league (with 9 games left on the schedule). Despite an inexplicable hot streak lately, the odds are still pretty good that they’ll finish at the bottom of the standings, thus giving the Celtics the highest probability of winning the lottery. Of course, the lottery guarantees nothing and the Celtics would actually have a 35.7% chance of falling to the 4th.
So instead of another boring mock draft where Fultz sits at number one and then we guess at what players other teams will select, I’m going to ignore picks past 4 or 5 and focus on the different scenarios the Celtics could find themselves on draft night.
Also note: For the purpose of this analysis I’m going to simplify things and assume that the team is keeping the pick (no trade involving the pick) and stick to the best prospect available approach (ignoring team need).
Celtics win lottery - pick 1st (currently 25% chance) - Markelle Fultz
If the Celtics are fortunate enough to win the lottery, they’ll have their pick of the lot and by all accounts it is a good lot. Still, the guy that seems to have set himself ahead of the rest is Markelle Fultz. He has great size, shooting and scoring, ball handling, court awareness, and positional flexibility. He’ll need to work on his defense and consistency at the next level but he’s got all the tools to do so.
I think his skills would actually compliment Isaiah Thomas in a future two guard backcourt. They can take turns bringing the ball up and both excel off the ball. Fultz would have the size to take larger guards and (in theory) the team would still have either Avery Bradley or Marcus Smart (but not both) coming off the bench. Basically I don’t think you can pass on the top talent in the draft based on short term team needs that (if absolutely necessary) can be fixed with a trade or two.
Celtics pick 2nd (currently 21.5% chance) - Markelle Fultz
I’m playing a little with the odds here, but if the Celtics pick 2nd, there’s a good chance that either the Lakers or Suns will be picking 1st. If that’s the case, I can very easily see either team picking Lonzo Ball first overall. He’s a fun and dynamic player that could be the face of a young, rebuilding team for years to come. That would leave the Celtics with the rights to pick Fultz second.
If Fultz is already off the board, I wouldn’t put it past Danny Ainge to pick Josh Jackson here either. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not totally down on Ball. I just think Jackson could catch Danny’s eye. Read below for why.
Celtics pick 3rd (currently 17.7% chance) - Josh Jackson
Close your eyes and picture the kind of player that Danny Ainge has had a habit of drafting lately. Marcus Smart, Jaylen Brown, and even Terry Rozier. For the sake of cherry picking, I’ll throw in Justise Winslow (whom he tried very hard to acquire) as well. They are all hard working, high intensity, multi-faceted, positionally flexible, winners that had questions about their jump shots. Open your eyes and you’ll see that Josh Jackson fits that mold to a T.
A year ago I would have been much more concerned with the jumper based on the team’s struggles from beyond the arc. However, Boston has made a giant leap forward in that respect and Jackson has shown hints that he could do the same with enough time and practice.
Poll Who would you select at #3 if Fultz & Ball are gone? This poll is closed. 57% Josh Jackson (4354 votes)
15% Jayson Tatum (1183 votes)
9% Malik Monk (697 votes)
9% De’Aaron Fox (731 votes)
0% Frank Ntilikina (65 votes)
1% Dennis Smith (106 votes)
4% Jonathan Isaac (328 votes)
1% Other (130 votes) 7594 votes total Vote Now
Celtics pick 4th (currently 35.8% chance) - Jayson Tatum
If Fultz, Ball, or Jackson slip to #3, I think Boston would take any of them and consider themselves lucky. I toyed with taking Malik Monk or Jonathan Isaac here, but ultimately decided that Tatum has a similar upside and higher floor.
One talent that he has is exactly what the Celtics could use more of. He scores. He can create his own shot and he can fit within the flow of the offense. He’s not a great defender and he’s not a great athlete, but sometimes you just need a guy that get you buckets in a hurry. Having that kind of weapon would take some of the scoring load off of Thomas too.
Of course this pick creates a log-jam at the small forward spot, but that will be the case no matter what position the Celtics pick (there are no centers ranked this high) so a trade to consolidate assets is inevitable.
Celtics pick 5th (only happens if Nets pass the Lakers or Suns) - Malik Monk
It isn’t fun thinking about this, but until the Nets lock up the worst record, this worst case scenario is still possible. Clearly if the Celtics find themselves in this position, they’ll look long and hard at trading the pick but there’s a chance they won’t find equal value and be forced to keep it.
In that case, Ainge could still take one of the highly regarded point guards still on the board (De’Aaron Fox, Frank Ntilikina, or Dennis Smith) or they may roll the dice on the kid that can seemingly score from anywhere. I’m hedging toward Monk if only because of the fun factor.
Your Turn
If you’ve read this far I humbly thank you for sticking with me to the end of this exercise. You’ll immediately notice in the comments below that several people have only read as far as their favorite player and are now ripping me for being a moron (or perhaps they are using more polite language but with the same general intention).
The joke is on them though, because I haven’t watched a minute of college basketball this year and I fully admit I haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about. All of the above opinions are based upon a series of mock drafts, scouting reports, podcasts, articles from writers that I trust, and flat out SWAGs. So mock away, I’ll join you in your mockery. Jeff, “your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberry.”
Now I shall enjoy watching the comments divided between shots at me and a steady string of Monty Python quotes.North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (L) provides field guidance at the newly built National Space Development General Satellite Control and Command Centre in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang May 3, 2015. REUTERS/KCNA
SEOUL (Reuters) - A North Korean official denounced a report by South Korea’s spy agency that leader Kim Jong Un had ordered the execution of 15 senior officials as “malicious slander” but acknowledged that executions took place.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told a parliamentary committee last week that Kim had ordered the 15 officials, including the vice forestry minister, to be executed for challenging his authority, and said Kim used fear and intimidation to rule the country.
“Malicious slander,” Pak Yong Chol, a deputy director for the North’s Institute for Research into National Reunification, said when asked by CNN about the South Korean spy agency’s report on the executions.
“Especially as they try to link the allegations against to the august name of our Supreme Leader Marshall Kim Jong Un,” Pak said, according to CNN’s website.
He acknowledged that executions of those who try to overthrow or subvert the government took place. “It is very normal for any country to go after hostile elements and punish them and execute them,” he said in the interview.
In 2013, Kim, who is believed to be in his early 30s, purged and executed his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, once considered the second most powerful man in the North, for corruption and crimes against the state.
North Korea, heavily sanctioned by the United Nations for its missile and nuclear tests, is technically still at war with the South after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.Three Flops That Make Leon Panetta Sad
Some of the provisions in 2011 Budget Control Act, meaning the failure of the 2011 “supercommittee” to find $1.2 trillion in cuts, are sweeping the media back into a fury of preemptive Armageddon terror. The rapidly approaching sequestration (a procedure by which automatic spending cuts are implemented)–which will hit both defense and non-defense spending if Congress fails to act–is raising hell among both Democrats and Republicans alike. Depending on who you talk to, the numbers begin at $55 billion in cuts in 2013 FY and rise depending on your baseline (e.g., the Congressional Budget Office, Obama’s defense budget request, or projects for 2013). Somewhere between the angry squawks, you’ll hear that there’ll be upwards of $492 billion in cuts over the next nine years (2013-2021). There’s no doubt that sequestration is a big deal, and no one is being asked to “Stop Worrying and Love the Cuts;” after all, who would?
Well, the American public doesn’t seem to mind.
According to a survey conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, the Program for Public Consultation, and the Stimson Center, Americans prefer deeper cuts to the defense budget (with the average percentage cut being 18%) as opposed to social programs or raising taxes. Likewise, Foreign Policy Association’s annual National Opinion Ballot Report found that 49% of participants supported a reduction in the defense budget or an increase in taxes. Even more surprising: 67% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats supported these deep cuts–in stark contrast to military and political leaders’ assertions that these would be “devastating” and “very high risk” cuts.
So while the fearmongering language begins to sweep CNN (who will hopefully take the time to read through whatever agreements are pushed out of Congress) as the American public sits back and sings along to Michael Stipe, we just want to bring to your attention some of the costliest mistakes we’re up against. Think of it as the government’s equivalent of that time you threw your paycheck at the world’s most expensive cricket ball you can’t even use.
1) Pixelated Camo: A $5 Billion Dollar Flop
Camouflage certainly can’t make you invisible, but the theory behind pixelated camouflage seemed solid. The idea initially arose at West Point from the mind of an experimental psychologist, Lt. Col. Timothy O’ Neill. The idea? Since neuroscientists had divided the whole of the human visual system into two “circuits,” a good method of camouflage would have to take into account both of these pathways–the “where” and the “what” pathways that monitor the location and nature of objects, respectively. O’Neil’s initial tests with this new method of camouflage utilized squares–the edges, he said, of the pattern had to be clearly defined in order for it to work effectively. On the other hand, the MARPAT camouflage (used by the Marines) patent claimed these squares were simply printed like so to make the whole production process easier.
As The Daily pointed out:
“Essentially, the Army designed a universal uniform that universally failed in every environment,” said an Army specialist who served two tours in Iraq, wearing UCP in Baghdad and the deserts outside Basra. “The only time I have ever seen it work well was in a gravel pit.”
UCP, the Universal Camouflage Pattern, is reportedly based on the Urban Track Pattern, one of the lowest rated patterns ever used. Publicly, the U.S. Army denies its origin, but candid discussions of the pattern has brought these facts to light. Prior to its issue, the UCP’s performance in tests was weak, being beat out by the MultiCam (the traditional splotchy pattern). After snagging the original pixelated design from the Marines, the Army made the grotesque mistake of replacing the brown coloration in the uniform with their preferred gray. As one soldier rightfully notes, the desert terrain of Afghanistan contains a great deal of brown. Yet there’s none to be found in their uniforms.
There do seem to be some potentially promising replacements at least. Wired points to Guy Cramer, who has produced patterns for the U.S. military already through his company HyperStealth.
2) F-22s and Raptor Coughs
This is the era of the F-22 Raptor – the world’s premier 5th Generation fighter. –Lockheed Martin
What’s the best thing to do with an aircraft? Have it make you sick!
After a 60 Minutes program on the Raptor featuring two Air Force personnel, it’s become more and more clear that the F-22s have a host of problems that need to be swiftly dealt with. For one, it’s a bit difficult to fly a plane while passing out and/or becoming confused.
And, in fact, it possesses the ability to poison and/or suffocate pilots nearly 27 times per 100,000 flight hours. The Air Force’s added charcol filter, which was intended to be a solution to the problem, has only made things worse.
And they’re not the first ones to register that there have been issues with this particular aircraft. In fact, there have been 23 hypoxia incidents since it’s release in 2005–the most recent of which was announced yesterday.
The Raptor cough isn’t the worst of it though. On 2010, Captain Jeffrey Haney died after his F-22 crashed in Alaska. And despite the assertion that the O2 system–known as the On-Board Oxygen Generating System (or OBOGS)–failed mid-flight, the Air force has been placing the blame on Haney, who didn’t activate the EOS (emergency oxygen system), not the plane. Yet as Wired points out, it seems unlikely that given the host of complaints about air deprevation and the failure of the OBOGS in Haney’s plane, that there’s no connection whatsoever between Haney’s crash and a lack of oxygen. Unless, of course, Haney is considered personally responsible for his inability to breathe, which seems to be the claim here.
Regardless, it’s understandable that the Air Force is upset about the failed F-22, seeing as they cost somewhere between $137 and $678 million per plane depending on your method of calculation.
The only positive thing here, it seems, is that the F-22 doesn’t cost nearly as much as the F-35, which was also flawed.
3) Joint Tactical Radio System—“Jitters”
Nearly fifteen years ago, the U.S. Army launched an ambitious quest to develop the “universal” radio. The hope: JTRS radios would utilize an open “operating system” for all military radios, allowing for ease of use. Theoretically, they were meant to replace all others in the Army’s arsenal, thereby simplifying communications and preventing troops from getting bogged down by shuffling through piles of old equipment to find the ideal system for the present situation. Here’s a diagram to give you a rough idea:
Seems like a great idea, right? Making it easier to communicate on the battlefield is a laudable goal.
“Jitters” blew through at least $6 billion dollars with little to show for itself in addition to the $11 billion spent on additional radios to fill the gaps facing combat troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once all the products were purchased from Boeing, the total cost of the project would have been roughly $40 billion dollars—a hefty cost, but one meant to fill an important gap.
After a series of complications and setbacks, the main issues with the radios became apparent during testing in 2010. They were cited as follows: their tendency to break down, bulkiness, and short range. In addition to these issues surrounding functionality, Jitters was far too costly, slow, and reliant upon a theoretically sound–but virtually impossible in real life–idea that the entire communication system of the U.S. Army could reach such a level of simplicity. As a result, the main part of the project, Ground Mobile Radio (GMR), was cancelled after fifteen years of failing to produce adequate results.
So did Jitters set itself up for failure? One LTG notes:
I don’t think it is. I think what’s failing is the strategy that we had. And I’m passionate about this, so this is a good question to ask me. This is again about complexity. The JTRS program as it was developed was basically, to me, an unachievable goal because it was looked on as being a radio replacement program. If we had unlimited resources it would be wonderful if I could design something better and go to a battalion and have them download their radios of record today and give them JTRS radios in exchange. But that is an inefficient way to use our resources. However, that radio replacement philosophy is what I believe has caused this program’s problems. What we really want from JTRS in the near term is to enhance networking, not replace legacy radios. You want to introduce it with a focus on the live band networking waveform not just replacing the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System for the sake of replacing it. What we have done in the last couple of months, in concert with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, is to slow the program to devise a holistic migration strategy for what we want from JTRS over time. It’s an affordability issue too, even if we could do it. We cannot afford to throw away good stuff. We’ve got too many other programs that we need to prioritize.
Perhaps he’s right. We really can’t afford to throw away the good stuff.
Up Next: Why anyone thought a flying tank with no armor was a great idea.A Pennsylvania doctor armed with an assault rifle and handgun allegedly said he was driving to see Donald Trump and that he had enough ammunition to make his car resemble Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh 'on a camping trip.'
Bryan Moles, 43, was arrested at Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington on Wednesday and faces charges of unlawful possession and transportation of a firearm.
He had told an acquaintance he had the ammunition, survival supplies and multiple cellphones for his trip to see the president, according to charging documents filed Thursday.
Pennsylvania doctor Bryan Moles, 43, was arrested at Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington on Wednesday after police found an assault rifle, handgun and ammunition
Moles, who was not licensed to carry a gun in the District of Columbia, was released by a D.C. Superior Court judge on the condition he stays away from the Trump Hotel and the White House.
He is due in federal court Friday afternoon for another hearing. Moles also agreed to temporarily give up access to weapons at his home in Pennsylvania.
The father-of-two declined to answer most questions from reporters as he was leaving court, but when asked what he wanted to tell his family he said that he loved them.
Charging documents describe Moles as a recovering alcoholic and marijuana addict suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He served in the Navy from 1992 to 2006.
Before driving to the nation's capital, Moles left voicemails for an acquaintance calling himself 'a refugee intent on bringing down big pharmacy and big business medicine,' the documents said.
The father-of-two was arrested at Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington on Wednesday and faces charges of unlawful possession and transportation of a firearm
Charging documents describe Moles (above) as a recovering alcoholic and marijuana addict suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He served in the Navy from 1992 to 2006
Authorities located an assault-style rifle, a semi-automatic Glock 23 (above) and about 90 rounds of ammunition for the two weapons inside his car
Moles' Facebook page is sprinkled with comments and photos indicating support for Trump
He also said his car looked like 'Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph was going on a camping trip.' McVeigh was executed in 2001 over the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995 and Rudolph was the 'Olympic Park bomber' who was convicted of perpetrating multiple acts of domestic terrorism.
Authorities said a tipster contacted them about the messages, which prompted them to arrest Moles.
In Moles' hotel room, investigators found a safe with $10,000 inside, and he told authorities that he'd emptied his bank account 'in order to live the life he always wanted before it was too late,' according to the charging documents.
He left $4.19 in his account, corresponding to the date of McVeigh's bombing of a federal building on April 19, 1995. The blast killed 168 people. Moles told investigators he once wrote a term paper on McVeigh.
Shortly after Moles checked in to the Trump hotel at about 2am, authorities located an assault-style rifle, a semi-automatic pistol and about 90 rounds of ammunition for the two weapons inside his car.
Moles told an acquaintance he was driving to see Trump and had enough ammunition to make his car resemble Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (above) 'on a camping trip'
McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 (above), which killed 168 people. Moles told investigators he once wrote a term paper on McVeigh
D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said in arresting Moels, they averted a potential tragedy, though the Secret Service said agents interviewed Moles and determined he did not pose a threat. Officials described Moles as cooperative with the investigation.
Moles' Facebook page is sprinkled with comments and photos indicating support for Trump. Last week, he posted a question: 'If you had to choose between a Hilton Hotel and a Trump hotel, which would you choose and why?' Someone replied, 'Trump all the way. The dark side wants to disarm the public so they can... just walk through any resistance to their fascist thought police.' Moles liked the comment.
A longtime friend of Moles said 'there is absolutely no way' he was planning violence. Lisa DellaRatta, a nurse practitioner in Florida, said she's known him for more than 25 years and used to live with him. She said Moles 'cannot be a more standup man.'
She said guns are prevalent in the rural area near Lake Erie where she and Moles grew up, and he's always owned them.
Pennsylvania records show Moles renewed his license to practice medicine in October 2016. A spokeswoman at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center system said he had been placed on administrative leave there some time before Wednesday's arrest.
His hometown of Edinboro |
go through to recertify and reexamine your program, and we're looking at everything," Pearl said. "It's a full-blown investigation, and it's unfortunate, but you know what? It was self-inflicted. We brought it upon ourselves and we are battling every day to get through this and let the focus be on our basketball team.
"For me, I apologize. I'm sorry, because I came here to bring credibility and a competitive basketball program to Auburn, and unfortunately this has been just an awful distraction for the university and our fans, and I'm sorry about it."
Person, who was fired on Oct. 18, was one of 10 men, including four assistant coaches nationwide, arrested on Sept. 26 as part of an FBI investigation into the criminal influence of money in college basketball. Person was indicted this week on six federal charges and is alleged to have accepted $91,500 in bribes over a 10-month span to use his influence over two unnamed players, suspected to be Purifoy and Wiley, to steer them toward crooked financial adviser Marty Blazer, a federal cooperating witness.
According to the federal complaint filed against him, Person allegedly told Blazer that he gave $11,000 of that money to the mother of "Player-1," believed to be Purifoy, and another $7,500 to the mother of "Player-2," believed to be Wiley. Meanwhile, Person's co-defendant, Rashan Michel, allegedly gave another $5,000 to the mother of "Player-2."
Auburn has not been able to certify the eligibility of Purifoy or Wiley and announced last week it will sit them indefinitely until a determination can be made one way or the other. Pearl said Thursday that he receives daily reports on the status of the process with the two players, and that as of Thursday afternoon, neither one has been cleared to play, though they are allowed to practice with the team.
Complicating the issues surrounding the team further was an ESPN report Wednesday afternoon alleging Pearl has refused to cooperate with the university's internal investigation of the basketball program, which is being conducted by Birmingham-based law firm Lightfoot, Franklin and White. According to the report, Pearl's job could be in jeopardy if he does not cooperate with the investigation.
Pearl declined to comment on the matter Thursday, noting that it's an ongoing investigation and that they are "working through the process." He did, however, address the report with the team on Wednesday and told them to not worry about the outside noise and let the process run its course.
"I've tried to keep the kids as insulated from it as I possibly can," Pearl said on the radio. "They're human. They read the newspaper."
Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.Four people have been arrested after drugs with a street value of £3.5m were seized in raids in South Lanarkshire.
Two men, aged 54 and 27, were held after cocaine, diamorphine and cannabis resin, worth £1,535,000, were found at a property in East Kilbride on Friday.
A related raid in the town the following day recovered 240 kilos of cannabis resin worth £2m. A man, 31, and 34-year-old woman were arrested.
All four people are expected to appear at Hamilton Sheriff Court on Monday.
Officers acting under warrant conducted the first raid at a property in Galloway Road, East Kilbride, at about 15:25 on Friday.
As part of the same operation, they searched a property in the town's Pembroke on Saturday.
Det Supt Andy Gunn, of Strathclyde Police's major crime and terrorism investigation unit, said: "Without doubt, this operation shows those involved in organised crime that we are keeping people safe and we have the ways and means to catch them and far from being complacent we will, and are, actively targeting them and ensure that there is no hiding place."By Jack Copeland
Germany’s Army, Air Force, and Navy transmitted many thousands of coded messages each day during the Second World War. These ranged from top-level signals, such as detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the battle fronts and orders signed by Hitler himself, down to the important minutiae of war, such as weather reports and inventories of the contents of supply ships. Thanks to Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers, much of this information ended up in allied hands — sometimes within an hour or two of its being transmitted. The faster the messages could be broken, the fresher the intelligence that they contained. On at least one occasion an intercepted Enigma message’s English translation was being read at the British Admiralty less than 15 minutes after the Germans had transmitted it.
On the first day of war, at the beginning of September 1939, Turing took up residence at Bletchley Park, the ugly Victorian Buckinghamshire mansion that served as the wartime HQ of Britain’s top codebreakers. There Turing was a key player in the battle to decrypt the coded messages generated by Enigma, the German military’s typewriter-like cipher machine. Turing pitted machine against machine. The prototype model of his anti-Enigma ‘bombe’, named simply Victory, was installed in the spring of 1940. His bombes turned Bletchley Park into a codebreaking factory. As early as 1943 Turing’s machines were cracking a staggering total of 84,000 Enigma messages each month — two messages every minute. Turing personally broke the form of Enigma that was used by the U-boats preying on the North Atlantic merchant convoys. It was a crucial contribution. Convoys set out from North America loaded with vast cargoes of essential supplies for Britain, but the U-boats’ torpedoes were sinking so many of the ships that Churchill’s analysts said Britain would soon be starving. “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril,” Churchill said later. Just in time, Turing and his group succeeded in cracking the U-boats’ communications to their controllers in Europe. With the U-boats revealing their positions, the convoys could dodge them in the vast Atlantic waste.
Turing also searched for a way to break into the torrent of messages suddenly emanating from a new, and much more sophisticated, German cipher machine. The British codenamed the new machine Tunny. The Tunny teleprinter communications network, a harbinger of today’s mobile phone networks, spanned Europe and North Africa, connecting Hitler and the Army High Command in Berlin to the front line generals. Turing’s breakthrough in 1942 yielded the first systematic method for cracking Tunny messages. His method was known at Bletchley Park simply as ‘Turingery,’ and the broken Tunny messages gave detailed knowledge of German strategy — information that changed the course of the war. “Turingery was our one and only weapon against Tunny during 1942-3,” explains ninety-one year old Captain Jerry Roberts, once Section Leader in the main Tunny-breaking unit known as the Testery. “We were using Turingery to read what Hitler and his generals were saying to each other over breakfast, so to speak.”
Turingery was the seed for the sophisticated Tunny-cracking algorithms that were incorporated in Tommy Flowers’ Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer. With the installation of the Colossi — there were ten by the end of the war — Bletchley Park became the world’s first electronic computing facility. Turing’s work on Tunny was the third of the three strokes of genius that he contributed to the attack on Germany’s codes, along with designing the bombe and unravelling U-boat Enigma. Turing stands alongside Churchill, Eisenhower, and a short glory-list of other wartime principals as a leading figure in the Allied victory over Hitler. There should be a statue of him in London among Britain’s other leading war heroes.
Some historians estimate that Bletchley Park’s massive codebreaking operation (especially the breaking of U-boat Enigma) shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years. If Turing and his group had not weakened the U-boats’ hold on the North Atlantic, the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe (the D-Day landings) could have been delayed perhaps by about a year or even longer, since the North Atlantic was the route that ammunition, fuel, food, and troops had to travel in order to reach Britain from America. Harry Hinsley, a member of the small, tight-knit team that battled against Naval Enigma and who later became the official historian of British intelligence, underlined the significance of the U-boat defeat. Any delay in the timing of the invasion, even a delay of less than a year, would have put Hitler in a stronger position to withstand the Allied assault, Hinsley points out. The fortification of the French coastline would have been even more formidable, huge Panzer Armies would have been moved into place ready to push the invaders back into the sea — or, if that failed, then to prevent them from crossing the Rhine into Germany — and large numbers of rocket-propelled V2 missiles would have been raining down on southern England, wreaking havoc at the ports and airfields tasked to support the invading troops.
In the actual course of events, it took the Allied armies a year to fight their way from the French coast to Berlin; but in a scenario in which the invasion was delayed, giving Hitler more time to prepare his defences, the struggle to reach Berlin might have taken twice as long. At a conservative estimate, each year of the fighting in Europe brought on average about seven million deaths, so the significance of Turing’s contribution can be roughly quantified in terms of the number of additional lives that might have been lost if he had not achieved what he did. If U-boat Enigma had not been broken and the war had continued for another 2-3 years, a further 14-21 million people might have been killed. Of course, even in a counterfactual scenario in which Turing was not able to break U-boat Enigma, the war might still have ended in 1945 because of some other occurrence, also contrary-to-fact, such as the dropping of a nuclear weapon on Berlin. Nevertheless, these colossal numbers of lives do convey a sense of the magnitude of Turing’s contribution.
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View more about this book on theMaïmouna Gaye* was just 15 when she started a summer job as a domestic worker in Senegal’s capital, Dakar.
“I live with my parents and siblings and our situation has always been very difficult. I wanted to help my parents because I am their eldest child,” she says.
Maïmouna’s employer seemed nice at first. She offered her a job as a stay-in domestic worker and a break every other weekend to see her family in Pikine, one of the capital’s suburbs. Her employer agreed to pay Maïmouna 25,000 CFA Francs (50 USD) per month, half of what the teenager had originally asked for. “I thought about the situation in which my family and I lived and I immediately accepted her offer in order to help my parents.”
Her first day of work started at 7 a.m. It was when she was asked to cook lunch that she learned her employer had seven children, six of which were home for the holidays and the seventh was on his lunch break from school.
“She kept harassing me, saying I was working slowly and that her son had to eat early before going back to school. She certainly did not care whether or not I was hungry because I hadn’t eaten anything all day,” she anxiously recalls. “When they finished their meal, there were only some vegetables and a tiny bit of fish left. In the end, I did not eat; I went to bed at 10 p.m., sleeping in the same room as the dog, next to the kitchen.”
Maïmouna’s second day of work was the first day of Ramadan, the main religious feast in Senegal, which requires Muslims to fast from dawn until dusk for a month. Her employer asked her to take care of the family’s laundry.
“I could not wash it all by myself. I thought: “I cannot live another day like yesterday”. That is when I decided to call my mother and explain the situation to her. She told me to come back home.”
Unlike many other young domestic workers around the world who find themselves in similar abusive situations, Maïmouna now knows her human rights. She has become an active member of the Citizenship and Human Rights Club created in December 2014 at her high school, CEM Les Martyrs de Thiaroye.
She joined the Club because she “wanted to contribute to the fight against abuses towards housemaids and unschooled girls.”
The human rights club counts 20 members, selected for their commitment to human rights, who meet every week. They have shown increased interest in activism which has triggered new behaviors. Many young girls have lived the reality of violence in school or in their homes, as well as the high risk of teenage pregnancy. The Club has provided an important space to talk about these issues, an access to information and resources for help, and a support network of peers – all of which help girls know more about their rights and stay in school.
“The Club organizes informational and educational sessions through drawing, film screenings and thematic discussions. We also organize ‘ataya’ (tea in Senegalese Wolof) briefings with level three and four students,” Maïmouna describes. “Teachers who want to get involved in the Club can moderate these briefings. Each week an article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is explained and discussed in class and displayed in the school.”
The Club has become an example for other schools that want to participate in the campaign. A new club dedicated to the environment was created early this year in Maïmouna’s school.
The UN Human Rights Office has supported the Club from its creation by providing financial support and tools to promote members’ commitment in educating their peers on human rights issues. The Office also works to raise their awareness of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and UN human rights treaties and bodies, in particular those linked to access to education for all.
“It is a priority for us to disseminate the human rights contained in the UDHR and make them part of our daily life, and every day behavior,” said Andrea Ori, Regional Representative of the UN Human Rights Office in West Africa.
“The idea is to make young people change their habits; that they show more activism in their everyday lives. Students are already campaigning in their neighborhood associations. This will push them to become model citizens,” Maïmouna says. “They receive good media coverage and this has helped foster public debate. Students are lucky enough to know their human rights now, and they know which local and national authorities to engage with to promote human rights.”
* Not her real name
17 February 2016Story highlights Temporary lane markings peel off during Monday morning commute
One accident is possibly attributed to the confusion
The problem will be fixed overnight Monday, Virginia Transportation Department says
Read between the lines -- but be careful if those lines are on a Virginia highway.
Temporary striping tape installed on Interstate 66 peeled off on Monday, creating spaghetti-shaped dividers that caused lengthy delays for those on their morning commute, according to CNN affiliate WUSA.
At some points trucks were bigger than the lanes themselves.
The Virginia Department of Transportation said in a press release that it is fixing the lanes and apologized to drivers for the confusion.
The markings were installed on August 15.
A local reporter said there was a "nasty" accident near the lanes, though it's not clear if the confusion caused by the lanes played a factor.
Two lanes and a shoulder will be closed overnight Monday to fix the issue. No word on whether they'll "think outside the box" to make sure this doesn't happen again.Stratovolcano 3850 m / 12,631 ftWestern Mexico, 19.51°N / -103.62°W(1 out of 5)1519, 1560, 1576, 1585, 1590, 1602(?), 1606, 1611-1613, 1622, 1690, 1711, 1743(?), 1744, 1749(?),1769, 1770, 1771, 1780, 1794, 1795, 1804, 1806-1809, 1818, 1819, 1866, 1869, 1870-71, 1872-73, 1874, 1875-78, 1879-80, 1880-81, 1882-84, 1885-1886, 1887, 1889-90, 1890, 1891-92, 1893-1902, 1903, 1904-1906, 1908-09, 1913, 1926-1931(?), 1941(?), 1957-1960, 1961-62, 1963-70, 1973(?), 1975-76, 1977-1982, 1983(?), 1985-86, 1987, 1988(?), 1991, 1994, 1997-2011, 2013-ongoingDominantly explosive. Construction of lava domes, vulcanian eruptions and strombolian activity. In near-constant activity since 1994.(5 days expedition to observe and photograph Colima volcano, Mexico)
Colima volcano is one of the most active volcanoes in North America and one of the potentially most dangerous ones. It has had more than 30 periods of eruptions since 1585, including several significant eruptions in the late 1990s. Scientific monitoring of the volcano began 20 years ago.
In this photo released by the civil defense unit of the state government of Jalisco, the eruption plume from the initial stage of the powerful vulcanian explosion at Colima volcano on May 23, 2005, has been captured on film. The collapsing eruption column loaded with ash and rock fragments has not yet fully developed, but the flanks of the volcano are already covered by the impacts of ballistics. (AP Photo/Proteccion Civil del estado de Jalisco-HO)
Volcano news: Colima Volcano (Mexico)
Colima volcano Volcanic Ash Advisory: VA DISP
Sunday Jan 22, 2017 11:45 AM |
All news about: Colima volcano
Information about: Colima volcano
Previous news
Background:
Volcanic Ash Advisory Center Washington (VAAC) issued the following report:FVXX23 at 11:36 UTC, 22/01/17 from KNESVA ADVISORYDTG: 20170122/1133ZVAAC: WASHINGTONVOLCANO: COLIMA341040PSN: N1930 W10337AREA: MEXICOSUMMIT ELEV: 12631 FT [3850M]ADVISORY NR: 2017/108INFO SOURCE: GOES-EAST.ERUPTION DETAILS: VADISPOBS VA DTG: 22/1115ZOBS VA CLD: VA NOT IDENTIFIABLE FROMSATELLITEDATA.FCST VA CLD +6HR: NO VA EXPFCST VA CLD +12HR: NO VAEXPFCST VA CLD +18HR: NO VA EXPRMK: VA HAS DISP AND THERE HAS BEEN NOADDITIONALACTIVITY....TURKNXT ADVISORY: NO FURTHER ADVISORIESColima volcano is one of the most active in North America and one of the potentially most dangerous ones. It has had more than 30 periods of eruptions since 1585, including several significant eruptions in the late 1990s. Scientific monitoring of the volcano began 20 years ago.The Colima volcanic complex is the most prominent volcanic center of the western Mexican Volcanic Belt. It consists of two southward-younging volcanoes, Nevado de Colima (the 4320 m high point of the complex) on the north and the 3850-m-high historically active Volcán de Colima at the south.A group of cinder cones of probable late-Pleistocene age is located on the floor of the Colima graben west and east of the Colima complex. Volcán de Colima (also known as Volcán Fuego) is a youthful stratovolcano constructed within a 5-km-wide caldera, breached to the south, that has been the source of large debris avalanches. Major slope failures have occurred repeatedly from both the Nevado and Colima cones, and have produced a thick apron of debris-avalanche deposits on three sides of the complex. Frequent historical eruptions date back to the 16th century. Occasional major explosive eruptions (most recently in 1913) have destroyed the summit and left a deep, steep-sided crater that was slowly refilled and then overtopped by lava dome growth.---SAN DIEGO (CN) — A federal judge this week dismissed a satirical student newspaper’s claim against officials at the University of California at San Diego for canceling its print budget after complaints poured in about its stories.
The Koala, whose motto is “The Worst in Collegiate Journalism Since 1982!” lost its funding from the Associated Students of UCSD in 2015 when the group canceled its support for print publications. The newspaper sued Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, Associated Students of UCSD president Daniel Juarez, and Associated Students financial controller Justin Pennish, claiming First Amendment violations.
The defunding followed a massive wave of criticism of a Nov. 15, 2015 story, “UCSD Unveils New Dangerous Space on Campus.” The story mocked UCSD’s new “safe spaces” where students are supposedly given shelter from anything they might deem insensitive; it used word “nigger” five times.
“Located in the center of Library Walk, the new Dangerous Space is the ideal place for students to do whatever the hell they want,” the story said, then quoted a fictitious “typical” Asian student named “F. Yu” who enjoyed necrophilia.
The day after the story ran, UCSD administrators denounced it, and called for the community to condemn the “profoundly repugnant, repulsive, attacking and cruel” paper. Hours after the administration’s condemnation was posted on the internet, the UCSD Associated Student Council decided to cut funding to all student-run publications. According to the UCSD student newspaper The Guardian, Student Council President Dominick Suvonnasuna said the administrators’ condemnation had no bearing on the vote.
The Koala said in its lawsuit that the college had tried to shut it down for years. In 2002, UCSD tried to revoke its registration as a student organization after one of its members allegedly took photos of another student organization’s meeting and made fun of it.
And in 2010, all student print media were suspended after The Koala broadcast an invitation for an event called “The Compton Cookout,” and asked participants to wear chains, cheap clothes and be loud. Women were told to dress up like “ghetto chicks.” According to news reports at the time, that spurred outrage among the African-American community on campus.
In its latest edition, printed online in November, a story headlined “‘Black’ UCSD Protesters Shut Down La Jolla Mall” describes a Black Friday protest where white students painted themselves black and rioted at a local mall.
In dismissing the complaint without leave to amend, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller ruled that The Koala’s First Amendment rights were not violated and that the court lacked jurisdiction under the 11th Amendment, which protects states from being sued by private individuals in federal court.
As for the First Amendment, Miller said, the government may restrict speech in a limited public forum, so long as the restrictions are not based on viewpoint and are reasonable.
“Here, there is no doubt that the elimination of funding for all print publications is viewpoint neutral,” he wrote.
While the Koala argued that it could not be excluded from funding because other student groups received support for events, concerts and other forms of speech, Miller found that argument “not persuasive. … Such an expansive definition of the forum is not supported by the allegations.”
UC San Diego said in a statement that it “is pleased that the federal district court has dismissed all of the Koala’s claims. The court found that the Associated Students did not violate the First Amendment or any other student rights. We believe that this is the right decision and hope that the court’s decision brings this case to a close.”
Representatives of The Koala did not respond to emails seeking comment. Their attorney David Loy, with the ACLU Foundation of San Diego and Imperial Counties, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Like this: Like Loading...Today more than ever it is a difficult duty to care for the party and its future. It is the primary demand of our present time that the subdivisions of the party be closely united. We have to understand that despite our different functions, we are all National Socialists and party comrades. The members of the political organizations, the SA and the SS, the Labor Front, the Hitler Youth, the Women’s Association, the Unions of Farmers and Workers, they all are but fighters in various detachments of the party.
They all have to support the new German confederation that will provide guidance for political life in the German nation. The harder this unbreakable community is, the easier it will be to control all those giant organizations that are necessary for the political, social and economic ascent of our nation. As soldiers and officers of a spiritual Weltanschauliche community our members are responsible to educate the entire nation according to our ideal. They have to educate the young generation, integrating them into the state of today and tomorrow. They have to provide the Weltauschauliche structure and impetus for millions of workers and farmers. In all important national and economic positions, they have to enforce and secure the dominion of the National Socialist idea.
This will only be achieved if among themselves they form an eternal blood brotherhood, chained together by mutual trust and obedience.
They must not demand more virtues and sacrifices from the nation than they themselves are ready to do, give and fulfill a thousand times. They must not presuppose more idealism in the nation than what they themselves reveal and carry in their hearts. They have no right to count on the self-sacrificing spirit of the nation if they are not ready to serve as an ideal, sacrificing all they possess. Most of all, they cannot expect that the nation’s belief in the National Socialist idea will be stronger than their own trustful devotion to this idea.
They must acknowledge certain principles as basic and as a foundation that must never be given away.
If you break with the loyalty imposed on you, you no longer have the right to demand loyalty from your subordinates. If you don’t obey, you no longer have the right to expect obedience. If you abandon comrades, you must not be surprised if one day you will find yourself alone, betrayed and abandoned too.
Only if by the help of everybody, we can realize a true embodiment of National Socialist spirit and value in our party will this party be an eternal and indestructible pillar of the German people and Reich. Then there will come a time when next to our magnificent, glorious army (the traditional and proud armed forces of the nation) our party will stand, traditionally equal in firm political leadership. Then, these two institutions will educate and strengthen the German man and carry on their shoulders the German state, the German Reich.
THE FÜHRER at the last day of the Party Congress during the Party Day „Triumph of the Will“ on 10 September 1934On the eve of the WWDC 2010 keynote and what is believed to be the announcement of the next generation iPhone, AT&T seems to have adjusted user eligibility requirements forward for many customers. This means that several readers who previously were ineligible to purchase a new subsidized iPhone now find that they are eligible. Previously, dates for eligibility ranged from June to November depending on your rate plan.Current AT&T customers can check at http://wireless.att.com by clicking on "Check Upgrade Options" after they log in. The improved eligibility requirements will allow existing customers to upgrade to the new iPhone with no early termination fees. Apple is widely expected to introduce the new iPhone at the WWDC 2010 Keynote on Monday, June 7th. The keynote begins at 10 a.m. Pacific.Image caption Attorney General Eric Holder said the committee had made "unsubstantiated allegations" in the case
A US House of Representatives committee has voted along party lines to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.
Mr Holder refused to hand over papers relating to a botched sting operation.
The move comes after President Barack Obama used his executive privilege to withhold documents sought by the House Oversight Committee.
But Mr Holder said claims that he did not co-operate over Operation Fast and Furious were "untrue".
In December 2010, US border agent Brian Terry was killed in a shootout with illegal immigrants with a weapon linked to Fast and Furious.
In the congressional investigation which followed, two guns recovered from the scene were found to be among 2,000 weapons the authorities were supposed to be tracking, as part of an operation to tackle cross-border gun trafficking.
'Extraordinary, unnecessary?'
Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have said they will schedule a full vote next week on the issue.
It's an election-year tactic intended to distract attention Eric Holder, US Attorney General
Shortly after the committee vote, House Speaker John Boehner tweeted an ultimatum, saying a full House vote would be held unless Mr Holder co-operated with the inquiry.
Mr Holder's reaction was swift and combative.
Committee chairman Representative Darrell Issa has "chosen to use his authority to take an extraordinary, unprecedented and entirely unnecessary action, intended to provoke an avoidable conflict between Congress and the Executive Branch," Mr Holder said.
"This divisive action does not help us fix the problems that led to this operation or previous ones and it does nothing to make any of our law enforcement agents safer," he said, calling it "an election-year tactic".
The Department of Justice says it has denied access to the files because they contain information that could affect criminal investigations.
Its officials say they have already sent more than 7,000 documents to the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.
Image caption Congressman Darrell Issa said the president's use of the executive privilege was "untimely"
Wednesday's use of executive privilege for withholding documents is the first time Mr Obama has invoked the power. Former Presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton used the privilege six and 14 times respectively during their eight-year terms.
On Tuesday, Mr Holder met Mr Issa, but they did not agree on a path forward.
Mr Holder said lawmakers had turned down his offer to give them the documents, along with a briefing on the operation, in exchange for assurances that the panel would drop contempt proceedings.
Officials charged with contempt of Congress could potentially be fined or jailed - but correspondents say this standoff is unlikely to provoke such an outcome.
Historically, Congress and the White House have negotiated agreements to avoid a court battle that would limit either Congress' subpoena power or executive privilege itself.
In a separate development on Tuesday, the family of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent killed in Mexico has filed a $25m wrongful death lawsuit against several US officials, including Mr Holder.
Jaime Zapata's family say the weapons that killed him were brought into Mexico because of US investigations into gun trafficking.So it’s three well-connected sources within the past three days who have told Slap Shots that when it comes to the Rangers and the trade deadline, “Everyone is asking for J.T. Miller.”
And you should know everyone is politely being told, “No, thank you.”
Of course, that could change by Wednesday at 3 p.m. … if, say, the Kings were to offer Drew Doughty or the Senators were to offer Erik Karlsson in exchange for the soon-to-be 24-year-old winger with the greatest multi-dimensional upside in the organization, or maybe if the … well, you get the idea.
Unless the price drops dramatically, the Blueshirts have no realistic shot at renting Kevin Shattenkirk, the one player on the auction block who would complete them more than any other and who instantly would elevate their chances of getting through the East.
The cap is no issue for general manager Jeff Gorton, who will have approximately $10 million of full-season space with which to work, but it is far more likely than not the Rangers will have to be content with improving on the margins rather than making a big splash over the next four days.
The Blueshirts have scouted the Kings extensively for weeks. L.A., seeking help up front, has a young righty defenseman in Paul LaDue (currently sidelined with an unidentified upper body injury) who could be a very nice fit moving forward, but does anyone envision Alain Vigneault sitting veteran Kevin Klein for the playoffs in order to suit up a 24-year-old with five games of NHL experience?
Is that consistent with the coach’s track record? Beyond that, could LaDue at this point be a better choice than Adam Clendening?
Detroit’s Brendan Smith has been linked to the Rangers by TSN’s well-informed Darren Dreger, but the 28-year-old rental is a lefty, albeit comfortable on the right side. His insertion into the lineup would give the Blueshirts five lefties and mean that two (with Nick Holden) would be playing on their off-side. That is hardly ideal.
And again, would Klein sit, or would Klein, who has one more year at $2.9 million remaining on his contract, be part of a different deal for a forward?
There is this complication, too, regarding the expansion draft: The Rangers must expose one defenseman under contract who meets a games-played requirement of 40 for this season or 70 over the past two seasons. Unless Dan Girardi or Marc Staal would agree to waive his no-move to allow for exposure, Klein is the only defenseman on the roster who qualifies, assuming Ryan McDonagh and Holden are protected. Brady Skjei is exempt.
The Rangers have gone big at each of the past four deadlines, trading three first-rounders, four second-rounders, a world-class sniper (Marian Gaborik), a captain on an expiring contract (Ryan Callahan) and two prospects (Anthony Duclair and Aleksi Saarela) for Derick Brassard, Derek Dorsett, Ryane Clowe, Marty St. Louis, Keith Yandle and Eric Staal. (John Moore came and went in separate transactions.)
And even as Gorton seeks help both on defense and up front (Vancouver’s Jannik Hansen, anyone?), a sellers’ market in which renting Dallas’ Patrick Eaves somehow cost Anaheim a second-rounder that could become a first, portends a low-drama deadline on Broadway.
Boston, Toronto and Edmonton are among the most ardent Shattenkirk suitors, we’re told, though the pool of interested parties likely is to expand for the pending free agent Brian Boyle, who has played the second-most playoff games in the league since 2012 (67, one fewer than Carl Hagelin) and has been an impact player in the tournament. He would be a great fit in Minnesota, or maybe Edmonton.
Or Brooklyn, if the ex-Ranger thing wouldn’t be too weird.
Brian Gionta, on the final year of his deal in Buffalo with a no-trade under which he can be sent to five selected teams, has said he would rather not go anywhere, but the 38-year-old straight-line winger, who always seems to be around the net, would be an interesting one for the Islanders, too.
Pittsburgh had an immediate need on defense when Trevor Daley went down and Jim Rutherford filled it with Ron Hainsey, whom the GM had in Carolina, even if yielding a the bounty of a second-rounder. So a win-win on that one.
And it is almost frightening to conjure what the Penguins might look like after the deadline if they were to move Marc-Andre Fleury to the Flames for an appropriate return.
Pre-deadline Elite Eight: 1. Washington; 2. Pittsburgh; 3. Chicago; 4. Minnesota; 5. San Jose; 6. Rangers; 7. Columbus; 8. Edmonton.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but everyone is not entitled to his or her own facts. And the fact is the Islanders’ acquisition of Butch Goring from L.A. for Billy Harris and Dave Lewis in 1980 is the best deadline deal in NHL history, not even close, unless you can find another one that enabled a four-Cup dynasty.
If the Flames believe their games have been called differently since the Dennis Wideman-Don Henderson incident last season, the Devils were convinced that it was years before they got a fair shake from officials in the aftermath of the Jim Schoenfeld-Don Koharski Have Another Donut-gate in 1988.
So maybe Michel Therrien couldn’t live with P.K. Subban in Montreal, but he sure couldn’t live without him, either.
The “Rangers Must Demand Henrik Lundqvist Waive His No-Move Clause” brigade has been pretty quiet lately, no?
How many hundreds of millions more in subsidies from Arizona taxpayers now is it going to take to keep the Coyotes in the desert? Never stops, does it, for a franchise that has been on life support for nearly two decades, even preceding the absurd land-grab move to Glendale where it never belonged.
And the Oscar for best hockey movie ever goes to “Net Worth,” the story of Ted Lindsay’s battle to start a Players’ Association in the mid-1950s, based on the book of the same name written by David Cruise and Allison Griffiths.
Finally, not quite sure what this means about the Islanders’ future, but American Pharoah is scheduled to drop the first puck at the 2019-20 home opener.I belong to a large but informal group of Burners whose unofficial motto is: “Fuck the theme.”
We came to Burning Man for Burning Man: the theme added nothing to the experience. All it did was give complete strangers license to tell us things we already knew about Evolution, or to go off on predictable rants about the American Dream.
If Burning Man was Santa Claus, we felt, the theme was an icicle on Blitzen’s ass.
Not this year, though. This year’s theme is a mind-fuck. Because … well … let’s talk “Cargo Cult” through.
What’s very likely to happen this year is that:
tens of thousands of Burners
in flashy costumes
who are attending a ceremony where we burn a 40 foot tall wooden man and dance around him
are going to create camps and installations satirizing Cargo |
that you might think, and sometimes for completely innocuous reasons)? I’m preaching to the choir here, but bones can survive for a long time, so general wear-and-tear doesn’t tell you much. Rapetosaurus looks like it died last year.
There’s another side to this, which is figuring out how old someone was at the time of death based on their skeleton. Tooth eruption is good, and fusion of the epiphyseal growth plates, but both of those processes are basically done by the time people are in their mid-20s (teeth) to mid-30s (epiphyseal fusion). After that, there are methods based on the morphology of the auricular surface of the ilium and the public symphyses, but these only narrow things down to intervals of 5 to 15 years, and that’s a lot of missing persons reports to sift through. And none of the regular skeletal methods work past the age of 55 or 60. After that, no matter how healthy you are, the primary skeletal changes are attritional (i.e., you’re wearing out), and that process varies so much among individuals and populations that there are basically no predictive guidelines.
All of this was on Vicki’s mind when she was a grad student, so she was alert to anything that might help forensic anthropologists narrow down the possibilities for identifying dead folks. She was teaching in an osteology course and one of her students, Josh Peabody, brought up dental cementum increment analysis (DCIA), which is used in zooarcheology to determine the age and season at death of animal remains found at archaeological sites. Josh wanted to know if the method worked on humans.
At the time–2004–DCIA was being tested for age at death in some historical human populations from archaeological sites, but no-one had tried using it for season at death. So Vicki and Josh set out to see if it would work.
Our teeth, like those of other mammals, are held in their sockets by periodontal ligaments. The periodontal ligament of each tooth attaches via Sharpey’s fibers to the dental cementum on the tooth root(s). Cementum is laid down in annual bands, so you can count the number of bands on a tooth, add the normal age at which that tooth erupts, and get a pretty tight estimate of when the animal died. So much for age at death, which was already being done on humans in a limited way in the early 2000s, albeit in archaeological rather than forensic contexts.
But wait, there’s more. Actually two bands of cementum are laid down every year–a dark band in the winter (roughly October to March) and a light band in the summer (roughly April to September). ‘Dark’ and ‘light’ describe the appearance of the bands under polarized light microscopy. In the summer months, the collagen fibrils that make up the cementum are aligned parallel to the tooth root, so more light comes through. In the winter, the collagen is aligned perpendicular to the root, so less light is transmitted, and the winter bands appear darker by comparison. So not only does the number of pairs of light-and-dark bands tell you the number of years since the tooth erupted, the color of the outermost band tells you in which six-month period the individual died, and the thickness of the outermost band might help you narrow that down even further.
At least, that’s how it works in other mammals. Would it hold up in humans? After all, we’re pretty good at adjusting our environments to suit us, rather than vice versa. If the winter-summer banding pattern was present in humans, it would be a huge boon to forensic science. Even people in their 40s and beyond with no very reliable skeletal indicators of age could be aged to within a year or two, and their season at death narrowed down to a 2-3 month window.
To find out, Vicki and Josh had a dentist in Santa Cruz collect 112 teeth pulled from patients over the course of a year (with full IRB approval and informed consent from the dental patients). For their purposes, a tooth pulled from a live person is just as good as one from a cadaver or skeleton–extraction kills the tooth as surely as death of the body. Better, even, in that it was easier to quickly get lots of teeth with very precise extraction data.
Vicki and Josh cut a few teeth together and they found dark and light bands right away. They presented those preliminary results at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting in 2005. After that, Josh got busy with his own research, but Vicki pressed on (while finishing a dissertation on different project, and being a first-time mom).
If this was a movie, this is the part where there would be a montage of inspirational music to get us quickly past a lot of hard, boring work. Each of the 112 teeth had to be embedded in plastic, a section through the root cut out with a saw, that section mounted on a slide and ground down until it was translucent (this process will be familiar to bone histologists of all stripes, paleo or neo). Then Vicki had to go all the way around the perimeter of the each root to find the place where the cementum bands showed the most clearly, and count them. This part is trickier than it sounds, unless you’ve done some histo and know just how butt-ugly some sections can be under the scope.
The results? In the words of the Bloodhound Gang, which Vicki quotes in her DCIA talks, “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals”. Here’s the payoff graph:
The one out-of-place measurement was probably caused by the dark band not being thick enough to register clearly on the image.
Now that she knew that DCIA could be used to determine season at death in humans, Vicki started applying it in her forensic cases, of which there have been many. The vast majority of the work of forensic anthropologists is invisible to the public: after analyzing a set of remains, a forensic anthropologist writes a case report for whatever law enforcement office (or, much less frequently, law firm or other entity) brought them in, and that’s that. The case reports are almost always confidential, but they have to be written to exacting standards since they may be used as evidence in court. So forensic anthropologists spend a lot of time toiling over papers that hardly anyone gets to read.
However, sometimes a case is written up for journal publication–if it’s sufficiently novel or unusual, and if permission can be secured from all of the relevant parties. In 2008, Vicki was approached by the Merced County sheriff’s office to help try to identify the remains of a young woman who had been murdered in 1971. That’s the 37-year-old cold case mentioned in the title of this post, and rather than tell you about it, I’ll point you to Vicki’s case report (Wedel et al. 2013), published last month in the Journal of Forensic Identification and freely available here.
I wasn’t sure whether to post about this or not–as cool as they are, murder cases are not our normal stock in trade on this blog. What decided me was talking with Andy Farke. He read Vicki’s paper as soon as it came out, and he said that he really enjoyed getting to see how forensic anthropologists work in the real world. I sometimes take for granted that, since I am married to a forensic anthropologist, I get to see how this works all the time. But that’s a pretty rare experience–if paleontology is a small field, forensic anthropology is positively tiny. So if you want to see an example of the real science that CSI and the like are based on, here’s your window.
What’s next? Vicki has several validation studies on DCIA in progress, for which she and her collaborators have collected a much larger sample size–over 1000 teeth–to try to answer questions like: what tooth is best to use for DCIA? Should the histological sections be made longitudinally or transversely through the tooth root? Does cementum banding vary with latitude? And since banding patterns are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, following the flip-flopped season, what happens at the equator? Watch this space, and keep an eye out for Vicki’s future publications–including a book due out next year–at her website, Bodies, Bugs, and Bones.
References
AdvertisementsImage copyright EPA Image caption There is a strong police presence in the centre of Cologne after the attacks
Police in the German city of Cologne say more than 100 women have made criminal complaints following sexual assaults and robberies carried out by groups of men near the city's main railway station on New Year's Eve. The attackers have been described as of Arab or North African origin. A British 17-year-old girl, whom the BBC is not naming, gave her account of events that night.
I was at Cologne on New Year's Eve with my boyfriend. Upon arriving at 10pm at the train station, I felt afraid the moment I saw the strange behaviour of the people around me.
The main station was full of wobbly teenagers and young adults, of all ages, some possibly below 18, very drunk and unaware of their whereabouts. Some had already passed out on the floor in their own vomit.
Bottles were smashed on the ground and you could feel shards of glass crunching beneath your feet with every step.
Fights had taken place in the station and police were trying to contain them, but the amount of fighting made it difficult for the police to focus on every individual dispute.
We walked towards the exit of the station towards the cathedral, only to be welcomed by a huge crowd blocking the exits.
'Fireworks added to chaos'
We heard a woman screaming and crying somewhere in the midst of this crowd, appearing to be escaping from a foreign man, who was shouting back and pointing his finger at her and chasing her with his accomplices.
Later on, we saw two men corner women at the cathedral and touch them while they were screaming for help and trying to fight back.
The fireworks being ignited on the streets were simply another terrible aspect added on to the chaos that already surrounded us.
You had to be wary of the hundreds of fireworks set off around you by drunk people even while walking normally through the streets, and many of the fireworks soared into the air for a brief second only to explode near other mobs on ground level.
At midnight someone decided to set off a firework right behind us and we felt it explode, a painful experience that could have been worse.
We returned to the station at 2am and due to us being unable to catch a train for a few hours, we had to wait, and the atmosphere had only worsened.
The fights had increased, people who were drunk were throwing their bottles aimlessly and I was afraid that one would be thrown at me so I had to cover my face near the crowds.
I saw a group of older foreign men go up to a group of younger girls (they looked under 18) in the underground train and started pushing them around and touching them, and the girls stumbled near to the train tracks. But thankfully a German man stood up and defended them, so the girls were able to run away.Ali stunned the world when he knocked out Foreman in the eighth
The greatest sporting event ever? Some might disagree. The most seismic boxing match in history? Perhaps not. The 20th Century's most compelling piece of sporting theatre? Of course it was...
Here's the plot: the maniacal ruler of a strange and exotic land offers a seemingly invincible ogre riches beyond his wildest dreams, if only he will defend his fabled world heavyweight crown in the despot's far-off country.
The ogre's challenger is a handsome and charismatic king, unfairly deposed many years earlier and committed to a quixotic and dangerous quest to win his crown back. Guess what happens next...
To mark the 40th anniversary of 'The Rumble in the Jungle', BBC Sport spoke to some of the men who witnessed the before, during and after of this modern fairytale. A fairytale it must be, because it doesn't seem real.
Colin Hart (British boxing journalist): I first heard about the fight seven months before it happened. I was in Caracas, Venezuela covering Foreman's world title defence against Ken Norton and before the fight a press conference was called by [fledgling boxing promoter] Don King. His hair was standing on end as if he'd seen a ghost, I'd never seen anything like it.
Media playback is not supported on this device The story of Rumble in the Jungle
He announced that the winner would fight Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of the Congo]. I'd never even heard of Kinshasa. When King went on to say the fight would take place at 4am, I nearly fell off my chair laughing. I was thinking: 'Who is this clown?' Seven months later and there I was, ringside in Kinshasa, at 4 o'clock in the morning…
Gene Kilroy (Ali's business manager): President Mobutu [of Zaire] came up with the idea of staging the fight to show off his country and promote tourism. He put up a big amount of money and King went to Seattle, met George and told him how easy a fight it was going to be. And Foreman went for it.
George Foreman: To me, it was like a charity fight. I'd heard Ali was desperately broke, so I thought I'd do him a favour. I got $5m and I was willing to let him have $5m.
I said I was going to go out there and kill him and people said: 'Please, don't say you're going to kill Muhammad.' So I said: 'OK, I'll just beat him down to the ground.' That's how easy I thought the fight would be.
Gene Kilroy: I remember a press conference at Jack Dempsey's restaurant [the 1920s heavyweight legend owned a notorious boxing hangout on New York's Broadway] and George walked in.
Ali looked him straight in the eye and said: 'Sonny Liston [whom Ali beat to win the world heavyweight crown for the first time in 1964] pulled this stuff when you were a little boy, you think I'm scared of you? I'll whip you right here.' George walked away and Ali sat down and said: 'Mr Dempsey, I just won round one…'
Mike Costello, BBC boxing commentator "They were not born when Muhammad Ali 'handcuffed lightning and threw thunder in jail' in Zaire 40 years ago, but Carl Froch, Ricky Hatton and David Haye have long since come to recognise how 'The Greatest' persuaded us to believe in miracles. Watching 'The Rumble' - separately - with three of Britain's finest world champions was entrancing. At times, they seemed as giddy as those children who lined the streets of Kinshasa to catch a glimpse of Ali in the build-up to his monumental triumph."
Jerry Izenberg (American boxing journalist): I went out to Deer Lake [Ali's training camp in Pennsylvania] shortly before Ali left for Africa. I walked in the gym and couldn't believe what I was seeing - Ali was hitting the heavy bag, and he hadn't hit the heavy bag for about a year and a half.
Gene Kilroy had taken him to a doctor in Philadelphia, who'd told him to forget injections for arthritis and to bathe both hands in hot paraffin three times a day instead. And as he was banging this bag, he looked over his shoulder and said: 'I'm gonna knock the sucker out!'
Roy Foreman (Foreman's younger brother): At 13-years-old, George was about 6ft 2in, 200lb and the terrorist in the neighbourhood. And when you're bigger and stronger and think you're better than everyone else, you take things.
He might take your bicycle, not because he liked riding but because he could; he might take your cigarettes; the only reason he wouldn't take your clothes was because he was so big. He carried that fierceness all the way to the ring. He always said he wanted to kill somebody in the ring. And I believed him.
George Foreman: Sonny Liston was the first fighter I'd met who'd been heavyweight champion and I figured I was going to copy his behaviour. But Liston was nice compared to me.
Jim Brown: "I was supposed to do a news piece with George, where I would put some gloves on and get in the ring with him. But I saw him hitting the heavy bag and said: 'I'm not getting in the ring with that.'"
After becoming heavyweight champion of the world, I'd sacrificed so much and was so lonely that I actually became mean - I became that person. There was a viciousness that a boxer should never have. I didn't like boxing, I hated it, it was just something I could do - I could hit a guy anywhere and they'd go down.
Even after I suffered the cut [the fight was originally set for 25 September but Foreman injured his right eye in sparring and the date was pushed back to 30 October], I felt such superiority. Even with only one good eye I felt like I could knock him out in three rounds at the most. I had no fear.
Jim Brown (NFL legend and fight co-commentator for US TV): When George arrived in Zaire, the people really gave him a hard time. But they loved what Muhammad stood for and he loved them.
Sometimes he'd say: 'Let's go walking.' I'd say: 'Walking where?!' He'd say: 'Let's just go walking and talk to the people.' I'd say: 'What are we going to talk to them about?!' He was never too big for the people. Whoever you were, to Muhammad you were a human being and he'd treat you correctly.
George Foreman: It's history being rewritten again. Those African people treated me as kindly as I'd ever been treated - they just treated Muhammad Ali extra kind. They never made me feel as though they didn't like me. As a matter of fact, some would come to me before the fight and say: 'Please win.'
Ricky Hatton analysis "Ali would have been scared. He would have been terrified. Even though he believes he can do it, there's still doubt there and that's the case with all fighters. Once the fight started, I reckon George was thinking: 'Ultimately I'll get him, I will get him eventually.' That's all George had ever known."
Jim Brown: Before the fight, I was supposed to do a news piece with George, where I would put some gloves on and get in the ring with him. But I saw George hitting the heavy bag and said: 'Nope, I'm not getting in the ring with that.'
When I got to Ali's camp I said: 'Hey, you're my friend and I love you but I don't think you can beat that guy.' Ali and Angelo Dundee [Ali's trainer] looked at me and said: 'You're crazy, we're gonna knock him out!'
Gene Kilroy: We'd watched all of Foreman's fights. When we watched Frazier get knocked down [Frazier was floored six times in losing the world heavyweight crown to Foreman in 1973], Ali would say: 'Play it back, play it back, watch him lean on the ropes when he gets back to the neutral corner - no stamina!
'Wait until he hears "round three… round four… round five…" Big George is gonna be out of gas and there are no gas stations out here!'
George Foreman: We hardly saw one another before the fight and I never saw any of his interviews that were being fed back to America and Europe. So he never said anything that got under my skin - until we got in the ring…
Ali and promoter Don King meet with Mobutu Sese Seko, the corrupt president of what was then Zaire
Gene Kilroy: I went into George's dressing room and I could smell death in the air. I went back to Ali and he said: 'What's he saying?' I said: 'They're talking about putting your kids into an orphanage.' Ali said: 'I can't wait to get him.'
Right before the fight, Ali got a phone call from Elijah Muhammad [leader of the Nation of Islam, of which Ali was a member], who said: 'How can Foreman beat you? You've got Allah on your side!' That was Ali's booster rocket, that's why he had no fear.
Cus D'Amato [who trained heavyweight world champions Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson] told Ali: 'Fear is like fire - it can burn your house down or it can cook for you. Foreman is a bully - you must throw the first punch.'
Foreman came out after the first bell with his fists clenched and Ali hit him so hard in the jaw, it turned the lights out for four minutes. Foreman thought: 'What is this?' He couldn't intimidate Ali and Ali became the bully.
George Foreman: He threw the first shot, but after that he was clever enough to hold. I kept hitting him, and hitting him hard, and he kept holding and holding. I hit him with some amazing punches that would have sent most guys to sleep. But when the bell went and he went back to his corner, he was like: 'My God, I did it.'
David Haye analysis "No-one practices missing punches on a punch bag - you're not conditioned to miss, you're conditioned to land. So when someone makes you miss, you're running out of steam and you're getting disheartened because you can't land. So then you try to shorten your punches or punch in a different way and it messes up your game."
Jim Brown: After the first round, Ali came over and said: 'Hey big fella, what do you think now?!'
Colin Hart: The vast majority of boxing writers thought that not only would Ali be beaten, but there was every chance he would end up in hospital. I was the only British writer to pick Ali to win, because I'd been told Foreman had no stamina.
This fight was played out in 80 degree heat, with a great deal of humidity. And nobody had ever knocked Ali out. So I fathomed that he would dance and let Foreman tire himself out. I got the result right, the tactics wrong.
George Foreman: Muhammad Ali didn't have the best punch, he wasn't the strongest, but he was the toughest human being I ever had an encounter with. This I'm certain of.
He wasn't saying a lot but in round three I hit him with a hard shot to the side and he fell on me and said: 'That all you got, George?!' That scared me, I knew there was going to be trouble then.
Gene Kilroy: "Anybody can beat a heavy bag but when you're getting hit back, frustrated and abused, it takes your heart away. Ali came to the corner after round six and said: 'I got him now, I got him now…'"
He had weathered the biggest storm I could have put on him and after the fourth round it was like I'd stepped into a bucket of concrete. I was all spent, I didn't know what I was doing out there.
Roy Foreman: From the fourth round, it was like looking at a 100m runner in a 400m race. The punches got a little bit slower and you could see Ali's confidence increase. I'd never seen George intimidated by anyone before, except his mother maybe.
Gene Kilroy: When we put the ring together we made sure the ropes were tight but they expanded in the heat. When he started leaning back on the ropes [Ali's so-called 'rope-a-dope' tactics, whereby Foreman was invited to pound away at him], we were afraid Ali would fall out of the ring.
So between rounds five and six, Pat Patterson [Ali's bodyguard] got in the ring and tightened the ropes. Later George said we tried to loosen them so Ali could have more room, but that's a misconception.
Colin Hart: Watching the fifth and sixth rounds, you could see Foreman clearly getting weaker and weaker. He was still punching but the punches weren't hurting Ali like they were in the earlier rounds, he was running out of gas very fast indeed.
Carl Froch analysis "When everybody thinks you can't do it, you're going to lose and your time is up, to then go in there and do what Ali did on such a big platform, that's a fantastic performance. He took a beating, he got hit with a lot of hurtful shots. I didn't realise what a tough man Ali was."
And Ali was capitalising on it, as only he could, with brilliant counter-punching. It was around this time I thought: 'There's going to be a major upset here, my man's going to do it.' Foreman had shot his bolt by then, he had no strength left.
Gene Kilroy: I knew we had it after round six. Anybody can beat a heavy bag but when you're getting hit back, being frustrated and abused, it takes your heart away. Ali came to the corner after round six and said: 'I got him now, I got him now…'
When the end came [Ali floored Foreman with a devastating combination at the end of round eight], Ali didn't hit him as he was falling. I asked him afterwards: 'Why didn't you hit him on the way down?' Ali said: 'He'd had enough.'
Colin Hart: After the knockout, I did something that I was a bit ashamed of, because it was unprofessional. I tell young sportswriters: 'No cheering in the press box.' But when Ali won that fight I leapt out of my seat and punched the air.
Jim Brown: After the fight I went to Ali's dressing room and there were all these people in there, you couldn't move. I went to George's dressing room and it was George, [light-heavyweight legend] Archie Moore and George's dog.
The bout was the first heavyweight world title fight to be held in Africa. Most Zaireans wanted an Ali win
Roy Foreman: Back then, being the heavyweight champion of the world was like being the president of the United States. Now George was the former president of the United States. Everyone from your girlfriend to your brothers and sisters don't look at you the same, now you've got 'ex' in front of your name.
It took him eight to 10 years to get over the devastation. He'd made $5m, a lot back then, so he was buying this and buying that - another house, another car, getting this girl, getting that girl, trying to show everybody he was still the champ. But he wasn't the champ, he was the chump now.
George Foreman: I just couldn't believe I'd lost the world title. This was supposed to be an easy boxing match but it was the most embarrassing moment of my life. It went from pride to pity. That's devastating.
I'd be ashamed to be alone with girls in a room. I'd think: 'They know I'm not the man I was supposed to be.' You think you're going to walk away with $5m and everything is going to be OK. But you can't buy back your pride. All you want is the chance to be champion of the world again.
I've watched the fight back a few times and sometimes I think: 'I'm gonna win this time!' Or I might wake up and think: 'If only I'd done this or done that.' But only once did I win the fight in my dreams…
Jerry Izenberg: About an hour after the fight finished we had such a torrential downpour. Then, suddenly, the sun came up - one of those big African sunrises - and we all jumped on a bus and went back to the military compound where all the journalists were staying.
Three of us went to look for Ali and found him staring out at the river. Just staring. For once, three sportswriters had the good sense and brains not to open their damn mouths. We let him drink it in.
Eventually he turned around, walked towards us, raised his arms in the air and said: 'You fellas will never know how much this means to me.' At that moment, he truly was the king of the world.As an example, let's take a look through what happens when we make a GET request to CreateView. The calling hierarchy is listed below.
The wonderful CCBV site makes working with the views much less painful, but it's still difficult to untangle the behaviour.
It gets even more scary if we take a look at the inheritance diagram for the complete set of generic views. I'm not going to include that here, because it'll hurt your eyes.
Let's take a look at the class hierarchy for one of the views. The following is the hierarchy diagram for CreateView.
For me, this thread highlighted just how awkward the current implementation is.
A recent thread on the Django developers mailing list has been discussing adding class hierarchy diagrams to the documentation for generic class based views.
As an example, let's take a look through what happens when we make a GET request to CreateView. The calling hierarchy is listed below.
CreateView.get() | +-- ProcessFormView.get() | +-- ModelFormMixin.get_form_class() | | | +-- SingleObjectMixin.get_queryset() | +-- FormMixin.get_form() | | | +-- ModelFormMixin.get_form_kwargs() | | | | | +-- FormMixin.get_form_kwargs() | | | +-- FormMixin.get_initial() | +-- ModelFormMixin.get_context_data() | | | +-- SingleObjectMixin.get_context_object_name() | | | +-- SingleObjectMixin.get_context_data() | | | +-- SingleObjectMixin.get_context_object_name() | | | +-- ContextMixin.get_context_data() | +-- TemplateResponseMixin.render_to_response() | +-- SingleObjectTemplateResponseMixin.get_template_names() | +-- TemplateResponseMixin.get_template_names()
The logic spans 8 classes, and 3 source files.
<sadface>.
Here's Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of Django, commenting on the current state of affairs.
I'd suggest not using class-based views. They're way over-abstracted and not worth the cognitive burden.
Again, <sadface>.
It doesn't have to be this way.
The Zen of Python says:
Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested.
I'm a big fan of class based views. We use Django's GCBVs extensively in our work at DabApps, and they save a lot of time and code. I don't enjoy the mixin style implementation, but they do what they need to and I wouldn't want to be without them.
Django REST framework also uses a derivative of generic class based views, where they're indespensible to super-fast API development with very little code. In REST framework, we've dropped the Django base implementations entirely in favor of a slightly more simplified version. There's only a single generic base class, and various parts of the API and implementation have been slimmed down. I find them vastly more pleasant to work with, and they're easy to manage from a maintenance perspective - questions on the mailing list don't tend to focus on usage of the generic views, and those that do are easily answered.
I've been meaning to take a similar approach to Django's standard GCBVs, and see if they could be redesigned with a nicer API and more obvious implementation.
Here's the result: django-vanilla-views.
The django-vanilla-views package provides essentially the same set of functionality as Django's existing GCBVs, but with:
No mixin classes.
No calls to super().
. A sane class hierarchy.
A stripped down API.
Simpler method implementations, with less magical behavior.
The date-based generic views haven't yet been implemented, but all the existing model and base generic views are replicated.
The best way to get an idea of how django-vanilla-views differs from the current GCBV implementation is to take a look at its complete view hierarchy.
View --+------------------------- RedirectView | +-- GenericView -------+-- TemplateView | | | +-- FormView | +-- GenericModelView --+-- ListView | +-- DetailView | +-- CreateView | +-- UpdateView | +-- DeleteView
The django-vanilla-views package also weighs in with substantially less lines of code than the existing implementation. Around 50% for the same set of functionality, compared against Django's existing implementation:
Existing GCBVs
Source file # lines of code base.py (excluding View class) 139 detail.py 171 edit.py 280 list.py 197 total 787
Vanilla GCBVs
Source file # lines of code generic_view.py 90 generic_model_view.py 300 total 390
Compare and contrast.
We've seen the inheritance hierarchy for the current implementation of CreateView, so let's see how the CreateView from django-vanilla-views looks by comparison.
CreateView --> GenericModelView --> View
Let's take a look at the vanilla-style calling hierarchy.
CreateView.get() | +-- GenericModelView.get_form() | | | +-- GenericModelView.get_form_class() | +-- GenericModelView.get_context() | +-- GenericModelView.get_response() | +-- GenericModelView.get_template_names()
The difference is dramatic.
Less magic please
The method implementations in Django's current GCBV implementations contain a fair amount of implicit behavior, with more explicit cases gradually falling back to implicit shortcuts.
1. Determining the form class.
If.form_class exists, use that.
exists, use that. Else if.model exists, create a ModelForm class based on the model class.
exists, create a class based on the model class. Else if.object has been set, create a ModelForm class based on the model instance.
has been set, create a class based on the model instance. Else call.get_queryset(), and create a ModelForm class based on the queryset.
2. Determining the template name.
If.template_name exists add that.
exists add that. If.object has been set, and.template_name_field exists, determine a template name based on a field on the instance, and add that.
has been set, and exists, determine a template name based on a field on the instance, and add that. If.object has been set, add a template name based on the model class of the instance.
has been set, add a template name based on the model class of the instance. Else if.model has been set, add a template name based on the model class.
3. Object lookup.
If a queryset argument is passed to.get_object() use that as the base queryset.
argument is passed to use that as the base queryset. Else use a base queryset by calling.get_queryset().
. If.pk_url_kwarg is provided in the view keyword arguments, use that as the object lookup against the primary key.
is provided in the view keyword arguments, use that as the object lookup against the primary key. Else if.slug_url_kwarg is provided in the view keyword arguments, use that as the object lookup, looking up against the model field as determined by.get_slug_field(), which defaults to returning.slug_field.
is provided in the view keyword arguments, use that as the object lookup, looking up against the model field as determined by, which defaults to returning. Otherwise raise a configuration error.
4. Pagination.
Parent calls paginate_by() to determine the page size.
to determine the page size. Parent calls paginate_queryset() passing the queryset and page size. The method returns a 4-tuple of (paginator, page, queryset, is_paginated).
The vanilla style
In django-vanilla-views we use broadly the same set of behavior, but simplify the implementations where possible. The end result is that the behavior is easier to understand and easier to override.
1. Determining the form class.
If.form_class exists, use that.
exists, use that. Else if.model exists, create a ModelForm class based on the model class.
exists, create a class based on the model class. Otherwise raise a configuration error.
2. Determining the template name.
If.template_name exists use that.
exists use that. Else if.model exists, use a template name based on the model class.
exists, use a template name based on the model class. Otherwise raise a configuration error.
3. Object lookup.
Use a base queryset by calling.get_queryset().
. If.lookup_field is provided in the view keyword arguments, use that as the object lookup. The default value for.lookup_field is 'pk'.
is provided in the view keyword arguments, use that as the object lookup. The default value for is. Otherwise raise a configuration error.
4. Pagination.
Parent calls.paginate_queryset(), passing the queryset. The method returns a page object, or None if pagination is turned off.
Less API please
The generic view APIs have also been slimmed down slightly. The following view attributes that have been removed or replaced.
Object lookup arguments
pk_url_kwarg = 'pk'
slug_url_kwarg ='slug'
slug_field ='slug'
Replaced with:
lookup_field = 'pk'
If you need slug based lookup, just set the attribute.
1 2 3 class MyView ( DetailView ): model = MyModel lookup_field ='slug'
Template name arguments
template_name_field = None
Removed. If you need a view that returns template names based on a field on the object instance, just write some code.
1 2 def get_template_names ( self ): return [ self. object. template_name ]
Pagination arguments
allow_empty = True
Removed. If you need a view that returns 404 responses for empty querysets, just write some code.
1 2 3 4 5 def get_queryset ( self ): queryset = super ( MyView, self ). get_queryset () if queryset. empty (): raise Http404 return queryset
Response arguments
content_type = None
response_cls = TemplateResponse
Removed. If you need a view that returns a different style of response, just write some code.
1 2 3 4 5 def get_response ( context ): # Note: Would typically need something a more complex than `json.dumps` # in order to handle serializing model instances and querysets. data = json. dumps ( context ) return HttpResponse ( data, content_type = 'application/json' )
Aside: Building better API behavior directly into the class based views is a topic for another day's discussion, but it's worth noting that you might want to consider Django REST framework if you're building APIs with class based views.
Let's make things better
It's okay that we as a community ended up with an awkward design for the generic class based views. The mixin |
-people” Third Front
By Deepal Jayasekera and Keith Jones
5 April 2014
With voting set to begin in India’s nine-phase general election, India’s twin Stalinist parliamentary parties—the CPM [Communist Party of India (Marxist)] and the CPI [Communist Party of India]—are redoubling their efforts to create a Third Front comprised of various right-wing regional and caste-based parties.
“We are open to anyone who is non-Congress and non-BJP,” declared CPM Politburo Member Sitaram Yechury last week. Yechury then identified as potential allies the leaders of three parties—the AIADMK, JD (U), and BJD—all of which have previously partnered with the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and now head right-wing state governments.
The Stalinists’ prospective coalition partners have largely spurned their overtures. They are positioning themselves for post-election bargaining with the Congress Party—the dominant partner in India’s current United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government—and/or the BJP, the presumptive election front-runner.
The CPM and CPI are, nonetheless, insisting that a Third Front will emerge after the election results are tabulated in mid-May, and that it can and will provide a “secular,” “democratic,” “pro-people” governmental alternative to the rival Congress and BJP-led electoral alliances.
This is a shameless fraud: the Stalinists’ would-be allies make, indeed are based on, reactionary ethno-linguistic, communal and casteist appeals. All—and the same must be said of the Stalinists—have implemented socially incendiary “pro-market” and “pro-investor” policies that have resulted in further impoverishment and economic insecurity in a country where three-quarters of the population struggles to survive on less than $2 per day.
For decades, the CPI and CPM have served as vital props of capitalist rule, systematically subordinating the working class to the Congress and other bourgeois parties in the name of opposing “feudal-imperialist reaction” and more recently the communalist BJP.
The Indian bourgeoisie’s traditional party of government, the Congress Party has spearheaded its drive to transform India into a cheap-labour producer for world capitalism and done so with the Stalinists’ support. In the early 1990s the CPM and its Left Front propped up the Congress government of Narasimha Rao that implemented the Indian bourgeoisie’s pivot from state-led development to privatization, deregulation, marketization and full integration into the US-led world capitalist order.
And after the 2004 elections it was the CPM that corralled various regional parties into the Congress-led UPA. This included helping write the UPA’s ostensible “Common Minimum Programme,” which touted the lie that it is possible to reconcile neo-liberal restructuring with the needs of India’s “workers and toilers”—i.e. to have “reform with a human face.” For the next four years, the Stalinists provided the UPA with its parliamentary majority, voting to sustain it in office even as they conceded it was implementing a pro-big business socio-economic program and a pro-US foreign policy little different from that of the previous BJP-led government.
Ultimately, in July 2008, the Congress decided to effectively kick the Stalinists out of the government so that it could push through the Indo-US nuclear accord and thereby cement a “global strategic partnership” between the India bourgeoisie and US imperialism.
The Stalinists’ Third Front maneuver is aimed at politically suppressing the working class under conditions where the world economic crisis has pulled the legs out from under Indian capitalism’s “rise” and the class struggle is rapidly intensifying.
The decade-old Congress-led UPA government is popularly identified with soaring food prices, mounting unemployment and the gifting of public assets to big business.
Corporate India, meanwhile, has largely swung behind the BJP, now led by the Gujarat Chief Minister and self-styled “Hindu strongman” Narendra Modi, with the expectation that he will push through a raft of reactionary “pro-market” measures in the face of mass opposition. These include: the dismantling of energy and other price subsidies; the gutting of restrictions on layoffs and factory closures; the imposition of a national goods and services tax; wholesale privatization and the dismantling of most remaining limits on foreign investment.
With their promotion of a “non-BJP,” “non-Congress” parliamentary bloc comprised of the Indian bourgeoisie’s smaller, regional parties the Stalinists are seeking to politically smother the working class and under conditions where the bourgeoisie, as attested by its enthusiasm for Modi, is embracing reaction and turning to authoritarian forms of rule. The Stalinists’ prospective allies are as devoted servants of big business as the two “national parties” and will in an instant ally with the Congress or BJP if they calculate it will further the mercenary interests of their respective regionally-based faction of the bourgeoisie.
On February 25, CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat announced that leaders of eleven parties—the four constituents of the Left Front and seven regional parties—had met and agreed to form “an alternative to the Congress and the BJP.” Karat further claimed that this alternative is committed to a “pro-people development path.” But the brief statement signed by the eleven parties said not a word about what this agenda is to consist of apart from a promise—which could easily have come from a Congress of BJP manifesto—to “address the concerns of inequality, social justice, farmers’ interests, minorities and women’s rights.”
Within hours of Prakash’s announcement, the “alternative” began to unravel. First, the head of the Assam Gana Parishad said his party did not rule out joining a BJP-led government. Then, another signatory, the Samajwadi Party (SP) indicated it would support another Congress-led government to keep the BJP from power. In fact the SP, the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, has repeatedly bailed out the Congress-led government over the past six years—most famously in the July 2008 vote over the Indo-US nuclear accord.
Odisha Chief Minister and BJD head Naveen Patnaik skipped the Feb. 25 meeting, although his party was announced as a supporter of the CPM-Left Front initiated “alternative.” Soon after, to the Stalinists’ dismay, Patnaik announced that his party would contest the national and Odisha state elections, which are being held simultaneously, alone. In 2009, Patnaik’s BJD formed an electoral bloc with the CPM and CPI almost immediately after he broke an eleven-year partnership with the BJP due to a seat-sharing squabble.
An even bigger blow to the Stalinists was the announcement by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and AIADMK supremo Jayalalithaa that her party would not make a seat-sharing adjustment with the CPI and CPM. The Stalinists had been promoting Jayalalithaa as a possible Third Front prime minister—no matter that she is a notorious right-winger, who in 2003 used mass jailings and firings to break a state employees’ strike, has repeatedly given support to the Hindu communalist campaigns of the BJP and its allies, and terms Modi a personal friend. Clearly hoping to patch things up with Jayalalithaa and her AIADMK, the CPM waited some two weeks before issuing a statement demanding she clarify if she is preparing to make a post-poll deal with the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance.
The unravelling of its Third Front notwithstanding, the Stalinists are clutching to this empty shell, now insisting that it will take shape after the elections and continuing to boost the “progressive” potential of the AIADMK and BJD, etc. even as these parties are visibly preparing to enter into a BJP- or Congress-led government.
“What we announced on February 25,” CPM head Karat, “told the Hindu last weekend, “is our joint intention to be together against the Congress and the BJP, and after the elections, we will give shape to that alternative.”
To underline the CPM’s readiness to move still further right to accommodate its potential coalition partners, Karat told the Hindu that the CPM would be ready itself to enter into a Third Front government. In 1996, the CPM midwifed a “United Front” government based on various regional parties, but declined to enter the government even though Jyoti Basu, the CPM Chief Minister of West Bengal, was offered the post of prime minister. With the CPM’s support from outside, the short-lived United Front government pursued the Indian bourgeoisie’s neo-liberal reform agenda, helping pave the way for the BJP and its NDA to win the subsequent election.
While pushing their Third Front fraud, the Stalinists and their junior partners in the CPM-led Left Front are themselves sending out signals that they are prepared to once again prop up a Congress-led government.
CPM Politburo Member and former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said late last month that it cannot be excluded and the Left Front will support a Congress-led government, but “only if a situation like 2004 arises … when we had to side with Congress in order to stop the communal BJP.”
The CPI, for its part, has formed an electoral alliance with the Congress Party for the assembly and Lok Sabha (national parliamentary) elections in Telangana, a region of Andhra Pradesh that is soon to become a separate state, claiming that this is a “special case.”
The Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) bolted the CPM-led Left Democratic Front in Kerala last month to join the Congress’s United Democratic Front. The Congress made the RSP’s entry into the Kerala state government conditional on it agreeing to support a Congress-bid to retain power following the national election. Nevertheless, the RSP remains a member of the Stalinists’ Left Front nationally, as well as their ostensibly anti-Congress “democratic and secular alternative.”
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Indian Stalinists invoke Hindu-communalist threat
[9 November 2013]
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.IMEMC News & Agencies: Israeli settlers from the illegal settlement, Mabo Dothan, built on the land of Yabad, to the southwest of Jenin, Thursday, assaulted a Palestinian taxi driver and hurled stones at Palestinian vehicles.
Mohammad Mahmoud from the village of Tura said that a number of Israeli settlers attacked and beat him up after closing down the main military gate at the entrance to Yabad.
He said the Israeli army closed the gate and prevented cars from passing through, while settlers hurled stones at vehicles.
Mahmoud added that settler attacks where coupled with curses and racist phrases against Arabs.
The settlers closed down the main road leading to Yabad from the western side and hid between olive trees.
Violence by illegal settlers is commonplace, according to WAFA. They repeatedly attack Palestinian property and places of worship.
Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem said that “Israeli civilians have perpetrated various forms of violence against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, damaging their lands, their persons and their property.
“In recent years, settlers have carried out violent acts under the slogan “price tag”. These are acts of violence aimed at the Palestinian population and Israeli security forces.”
B’Tselem has documented many such acts including the blocking of roads, throwing stones at cars and houses, making incursions into Palestinian villages and land, torching fields, uprooting trees, and other damage to property.
Settler violence includes property and mosque arsons, stone-throwing, uprooting of crops and olive trees, attacks on vulnerable homes, among others.
On July 31, a group of settlers killed 18-month-old Palestinian toddler Ali Dawabsha and seriously injured his entire family, during a predawn arson attack that targeted two homes in the village of Douma, to the south of Nablus.
The baby’s father, Sa’ad Dawabsha, his mother Riham and his 4-year-old brother Ahmad sustained third degree burns and were transferred to several hospitals to receive immediate medical care.
Reham and Sa’ad died within two months, while Ahmad remains in hospital to receive urgent treatment.
[Photo: Israeli security forces intervene to Palestinians during the clashes following a protest over the killing of Palestinian Mahdiya Hamid,38, by Israeli soldiers at Silwad town in Ramallah, West Bank on December 26, 2015. Photographer: Issam Rimawi/AA]
http://www.imemc.org/article/74411By Ruth Nesoba
BBC News, Nairobi
The olor is held in place by a rope or an elastic strap Maasai herdsmen in Kenya have turned to an age-old contraceptive device, the "olor", to protect their precious goat herds from an ongoing drought. The olor is made from cowhide or a square piece of plastic, and is tied around the belly of the male goat. It prevents the bucks from mating with the female goats. The herdsmen are using the device to limit the goat population and ensure there are not too many animals grazing on sparse vegetation. "We don't want them to breed in this drought," says Mr Ole Ngoshoi Kipameto, a goat owner in Kajiado district. Vital assets The area, which is 80km (50 miles) from the capital, Nairobi, has received insufficient rainfall, making the landscape barren and forcing residents to move from place to place in search of pasture and water. In the Maasai community, livestock are often people's only assets and sole means of survival. "We tie this hide under the belly of the buck for three months. After that we remove it and then they can breed by November when the short rains come," Mr Kipameto says. The olor saves employing separate herdsmen for male and female goats The rectangular piece of cowhide is passed over the buck's head and front legs and secured under the belly in front of the hind legs with a rope or elastic strap. "It looks like an apron," Mr Kipameto says. Peter Ndirangu, the area livestock officer, says the olor is very effective. "In the modern method, we advocate keeping the bucks separate from the breeding goats. But that is an added cost as you require two herdsmen - one for the bucks and one for the goats," he says. "This [device] will play the part of a herdsman." He says the device is very useful in keeping the herd numbers down and controlling when the goats give birth. "If they give birth during harsh conditions like now, the mothers - the does - are going to be very weak, they're not going to feed their young ones properly," he says. The device helps the herdsmen to restrict kidding to the period during and after the rains. If the rains fall in October and November, the dry landscape will turn green again and the herdsmen will be able to settle with their livestock. Until then, the herdsmen will have to employ the olor to protect their livestock and livelihood safe. Those who do not use it could face a hefty fine if their bucks are found guilty of impregnating another herder's doe.
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StumbleUpon What are these?LAYTON — "The Book of Mormon" musical has been a Tony Award-winning success, but this isn't the first time a Mormon-themed stage production has generated attention and controversy on Broadway.
Almost a century ago, a story based on Mormonism played on the Great White Way — only in 1914, the hot topic was polygamy.
The Broadway show "Polygamy" was discussed during a concurrent session on June 7 at the 48th Annual Mormon History Association Conference in Layton.
Presenter Kenneth Cannon, a member of the MHA board, presented his paper on the Broadway production.
Presenters at the conference gave history and facts about a specific discipline within a broader theme. Cannon presented in a session themed "Mormon Case Studies of Progressive Era Moralism."
"Polygamy" followed four LDS adults in 1914 who were each members of prominent Salt Lake City families. The play, which portrayed the events and misunderstandings of one 24-hour period, highlighted one family which dealt with the contrast of believers and non-believers, even among intimate social circles, when it came to the doctrine. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints outlawed the practice of polygamy in 1890.
At the peak of its run on Broadway, "Polygamy" was a great success.
"Harriet Day of the New York Women's Press Club enthused, 'The cleverest and best balanced play of the season, not second to any, even Bernard Shaw, and a feminist play indeed,'" Cannon read.
Cannon said one of the reasons the play was a success was because it dealt with the new and startling fashions in marriage.
Though not as openly controversial as "The Book of Mormon," response for "Polygamy" was divided as well.
Cannon gave an example of B.H. Roberts, a member of the LDS Church's First Council of the Seventy who was once denied a seat in Congress over the issue of polygamy. Roberts attended the play with a theater critic friend of his.
"He emerged smiling, without feeling hurt or offended," Cannon read.
Roberts had said he felt it was an excellent melodrama although it was, as a whole, totally unbelievable. This feeling of incredulity could have stemmed from the dramatized and fictionalized scenarios in which the Saints of the time dealt with the issue of polygamy, according to Cannon's paper.
President Joseph F. Smith, who was the prophet and president of the LDS Church at the time, did not embrace the show with the same zeal as many critics.
"He said of the show that he was glad 'Polygamy' was 'proving to be a financial failure' because he thought it a contemptible falsehood." Cannon said.
The play closed in April 1915 after 159 performances.Strip searches conducted by Toronto police on suspects are often done arbitrarily and without cause, critics say, but the union representing officers insists the practice is carried out under strict controls in a "minority" of cases.
Police figures show that 31,072 people were strip-searched in 2010 — 85 a day — up from 29,789 the previous year.
Of the total strip searches in Toronto in 2010, it was reported that an "item" was found in one-third or 9,448 of these cases without specifying whether the item was evidence, weapons or something as innocuous as a piercing.
"I think the numbers are speaking for themselves. They're too high," says Heather Pringle, Toronto director of the Criminal Lawyers' Association.
"My biggest concern is that it's happening as a matter of policy and it's wrong."
The controversy was sparked earlier this week when John Sewell of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition (TPAC) said the figures mean 60 per cent of those arrested in Toronto were subjected to a strip search in 2010.
Sewell apparently based the figure on the number of arrests for 2010, which he extrapolated to be under 50,000.
Neither Toronto police nor Sewell responded to CBC News's request for clarification on the matter.
Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, citing newly released statistics, said the actual number of arrests in Toronto for 2010 was 70,758, which means 44 per cent of arrestees underwent a strip search.
"When you're talking about 44 per cent not 60 per cent, it's not a systemic issue. It's a minority of cases," McCormack says, adding that Sewell is in "la-la land."
The controversy is "just John Sewell again being Chicken Little — the sky is falling. Don't let the facts clutter your arguments sort of thing," he adds.
Strip searches are part of the police duty to ensure people who are in custody are protected and safe, as well as officers, McCormack says. "We're not going to shirk our responsibility."
Legal experts and criminal defence and civil litigation lawyers, however, say the numbers are still too high and the issue is whether each strip search is justified.
A strip search, also known as a Level 3 search, is the removal of the detainee's clothing. A pat-down or thorough frisk is a Level 2 search, while a body cavity search is classified as Level 4.
Supreme Court ruling
In R. vs. Golden, the Supreme Court of Canada said strip searches are inherently demeaning and degrading and there must be reasonable and probable grounds that the search is required to discover weapons or prevent the loss of evidence related to a valid arrest.
Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, says strip searches are conducted on a 'case-by-case basis.' ((Toronto Police Association))
"Reasonable grounds doesn't mean you have to have a 100 per cent certainty, but it seems in the majority of cases nothing is found. This relates to my concern that charter standards are not being applied in these cases," says University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach, who was among the lawyers who argued the case at the top court in 2001.
The fact that you are arrested for a certain offence or have a prior criminal record are not enough in and of themselves to justify a strip search, he says.
Damages awarded for unjust searches Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack says people can complain if they believe they have been unjustly strip-searched. "If counsel or the person who is searched has an issue with that or thinks it had been an arbitrary search then they complain through the legal means," he says. That what happened when Cameron Ward, a prominent Vancouver civil rights lawyer, was unconstitutionally strip-searched. Last year, the Supreme Court in Ward vs. Vancouver upheld a $5,000 damages award stating his charter rights were violated. But few people have access to legal redress, says Prof. Kent Roach. "Many people in Toronto are being subjected to strip searches where nothing is found. If a judge determined the search was not reasonable in the circumstances, that person could get damages from police, but of course most people who are subject to strip searches don't have resources to go to court and sue police for vindication for violating their charter rights."
"There has to be something more that relates to the individual person."
For example, if a person was arrested on a weapons charge and police removed a weapon during the arrest and were concerned the accused may have another weapon, that may constitute valid grounds for a search, Roach says.
"It would be wrong to say that strip searches are never justifiable, and the Supreme Court has clearly said that they are [justifiable] but these statistics suggest we need clearer guidelines for when they're actually going to be conducted.… Ideally, Parliament, the courts and police service boards could do that."
Although the Supreme Court ruling sent a clear message that strip searches were to be conducted on a case-by-case basis rather than as a matter of routine or policy, that is not what is happening, lawyers say.
Common in impaired driving cases
"It seems to be showing up most [prevalently] in impaired cases where the accused doesn't have a criminal record generally and is being strip-searched to see if anything can be uncovered," says Pringle.
"But that individual doesn't have any antecedents of criminal behaviour and hasn't misbehaved in any way, shape or form. They've been co-operative with police but they're being told to take off your pants and bend over."
Pringle says one of her clients characterized it as a sexual assault. "He never got over it. It was humiliating and debasing."
Often, a strip search is a backward way of doing police work, says Barry Swadron, a civil litigation lawyer, who represents clients suing police.
"My concern is people are strip-searched when the grounds for arrest are flimsy or even bogus in the first place. What they [police] are searching for is trying to find something that will justify the arrest."
Toronto criminal defence lawyer Sonya Shikhman says there is a difference between short-term and long-term detainees — accused who are held in custody for a show-cause or bail hearing and those who are released from the station after being charged, as happens in most impaired driving cases, for example.
Prof. Kent Roach of the University of Toronto's faculty of law, says police need clearer guidelines. ((U of T))
"If you're not being held for show cause, you will be put in a cell to sober up until they decide to release you. But before they put you in the cell they strip-search you," she says.
"If we're talking about run-of-mill cases where people are released from the station, I can hardly think of a situation where a strip search would be justified."
Shikhman blames the problem on "complete ignorance of the law by Toronto police sergeants, who she says ignore the case-by-case approach that is mandated by their own policy manual and by the Supreme Court.
She calls for "rigorous retraining" for sergeants, and says the courts also need to send a strong message.
"What needs to happens is we need to have more staying of charges — clear judicial pronouncement that this is wrong and will not be tolerated."
Transparent process
McCormack dismisses the concerns, saying the whole process is transparent and above-board.
"It's not policy. A police officer has to make an individual assessment on a case-by-case basis and has to demonstrate the search is justified in law [as] reasonable and necessary and that's exactly what we do."
He points out there are already guidelines and safeguards in place, notably that the search has to be approved by the sergeant in charge of the station.
"Because of the intrusiveness of a Level 3 search, an officer has to articulate and justify that search. It's conducted in a private area, not videotaped. We try to be as discreet as we can," he says.
"The threshold [for doing a search] is not necessarily that the person is going to be held. Not in every case is a Level 3 going into custody."
Police take no pleasure in such searches, says McCormack, who has participated in many of them in his 23-year policing career.
"It's not a lot of fun and a lot of times we find it just as uncomfortable as the accused do, but it's something we have to do as part of our jobs. It's not the greatest part of being a police officer, I can tell you that."When I first saw the trailer for Tiny Echo, I couldn’t stop admiring the wonderful, painstakingly hand-painted art style that evoked the magic of Studio Ghibli movies or the old-timey animated features from the 1940s Disney era. The gorgeous scenery looked so inviting to explore, it was impossible to think about anything else as I watched a little guy whose entire head is a giant eyeball roam around the lush, eclectic-looking world. Fortunately, once I got deeper into the actual game, I found that its universe only gets more impressive, as a simple but lovely interactive adventure unfolds across a series of maze-like landscapes, though without much story or gameplay depth to match its fascinating presentation.
Tiny Echo tells the humble story of a very sleepy mailman named Emi, who must deliver letters sent by a drought-devastated village to the spirits of the undergrowth. The spirits are large, mysterious creatures with capes, each of them partially resembling the animals from our world (bird-like beaks, moose-like heads, bear-like ears). Players can only interpret their interactions with Emi through murmurs, sounds, and gestures, since there is no speech or even in-game texts to tell you what is going on. At first I couldn’t make out who these characters were, but I began to toy with the idea that they might be gods after witnessing some ‘spiritual’ moments occurring each time a delivery is made.
The adventure transitions straight out of the main menu, as the screen slowly swoops down to a rocky, deserted land. Starting the game like this feels disorienting at first, since there’s no avatar to move around this gloomy place. But it turns out you can interact directly with the environment via the cursor, and soon I was able to move along. Progressing further, I encountered a civilization of sorts, groups of odd little creatures sitting around the grey rocks with their heads down. Some even huddled together around a faded memory of a warm campfire (the fire came and went as I clicked), with ominous trails of black smoke wafting out of their tube-shaped heads. This opening surprised me, since I expected to encounter those scenic painted rivers and moss-covered rocks I’d seen in the trailer right away.
As I continued to explore, I was guided to an enormous crater, where the black smoke filtered down, eerily dropping envelopes into the void. An animated scene then follows the envelopes as they descend to the bottom of the crater. There we finally met Emi, who’s asleep at his desk while the mail begins to pile up next to him. This kind of smooth transition from one scene to the next, which feels almost storybook-ish, is present throughout the journey.
The cursor changes shape when hovering over an interactive object, with left-click performing the designated action. Right-clicking reveals mainly two things: floating envelopes above characters’ heads (if any) and all the available routes to go. Most of the time I challenged myself not to use this aid, to discover for myself whether the character in front of me was a spirit waiting for a letter or just a common traveler. Along with this peeking ability, there’s also an indicator above Emi’s head to show how many letters he has left to deliver, which is super handy.
Even equipped with a magic pointer, making progress is a wee bit more challenging as there’s only so much the cursor can tell you. The detailed world of Tiny Echo feels very organic, making each area seem somewhat endless. Every path is filled with leaves, plants, trees, uneven rocks, and mossy lumps, and some are even partly covered with drooping plants or towering boulders, all presented in a gouache-looking painterly style. Every step feels new and different, which is a treat, but because of these environmental details, Emi and I often had to go the extra mile to get around.
Some paths may look accessible, but are actually blocked by hard-to-see obstacles and barriers, like cracks or subtle hills you can’t climb. This means you can’t always just click wherever you want to walk. Instead, moving forward at times feels like searching for one new stepping stone after another through an environmental maze, using a lot of trial and error. But I really liked the feeling of exploring the wild. At first you can never remember exactly where each dirt patch ends, but eventually navigation becomes quite manageable after revisiting the same spot a couple of times.
Above ground, I noticed the presence of thin layers of mist, slowly moving like clouds over the environment. Sometimes I could see Emi or the plants behind him obscured, hidden by the mists, and this seemingly little touch offers an incredibly atmospheric experience. In contrast to the broad outdoor views, whenever Emi walks into a cave, don’t expect the camera to zoom out and show you the rest of the area. It waits for you. You must walk step by step, one cave wall at a time, until finally the camera reveals the giant fire burner, for example, at the end of a tunnel. This approach is perfect for keeping secrets and makes you wonder, keeps you curious enough to explore all the corners and dark places you can find.
Accompanying the artful visuals are soft percussion and tribal instruments in the background, enhancing the pre-industrial vibes of this otherworldly environment. Soothing saxophones can sometimes be heard, adding a jazzy feel to certain areas where Emi looks bored while walking slowly to deliver the next letter. The developers have done an amazing job of building an immersive soundtrack, but they also knew when to leave us in complete silence. A little warning for those who plan to wear headphones, however: some of the sound effects might startle or grate on you, especially during important events in the game, like the sound of high-pitched, boiling tea water that won’t subside until you finish a particular task.
There are 13 spirits waiting for their letters from Emi, and each has a certain requirement or different approach. There’s one spirit who doesn’t have an envelope symbol above its head (even after numerous right-clicks) and when I clicked the path going towards it, my pointer faded. So I thought hey, he must be just a really epic-looking NPC. Only towards the end of the story did I find out I had to be brave enough to persevere and find a special way to get to him. There are some objectives requiring you to ‘catch’ the spirit in a whack-a-mole style (which is pretty simple and fun), and others that have you fulfilling requests first, such as lighting a fireplace.
It took me a while to complete these requests, but not because of the difficulty of the tasks themselves. It was mostly because in some cases I first had to understand what was required, before going around activating relevant objects and meeting NPCs to help me accomplish them. If I may lend a word of advice: keep your eyes open and watch out for even the most subtle details. I found the biggest secrets by trying out (desperately) what I thought were mere decorations. There’s an absence of more classic adventure ingredients, such as inventory gathering and object combining, as well as other familiar puzzle types, replaced here with relatively simple tasks that don’t require much deduction, only enough common sense to put two and two together.
The whole game simply follows Emi as he delivers letters to the spirits, and when that task is done, our adventure concludes as well. The story never branches too far away from its letter-delivery mission, as even seemingly unrelated detours such as consoling a crying girl ends up factoring into the main task. It’s a pretty straightforward tale, driven along by the maze-like world to explore, and very little backstory is ever conveyed. We never really learn why the village is in such horrible condition or why the spirits seem to have abandoned their duties. Could there be a traumatic event behind it, or is this some sort of divine punishment for the sad-looking villagers? And why does Emi look so different from the rest of the two-eyed populace? Could he also be a spirit, acting as a conduit between the upper and lower worlds? The possibilities are endless, which may well have been the intention of the developers. But even so, the distinctly-designed characters and imaginative architecture provide so much potential for story development, it could have been fleshed out more.
In the end, Tiny Echo gave me plenty to marvel at, especially visually. It’s a short game, taking me only two hours to finish, though it definitely felt much longer than that. This illusion might be due to the slow pace of both the story and Emi’s movements, though each suits the serene atmosphere. The game wraps up with a rather predictable but proper ending, though with some unanswered questions that left me wanting more. There are many curious areas and secondary characters that I wish we could have learned more about, so if Might and Delight ever want to expand the narrative within this breathtaking realm, I would be ready to dive back into it in a heartbeat.Pharoah Sanders Recalls Homelessness At Winter Jazzfest – January 5, 2017
2017 Winter Jazzfest NYC got underway on Thursday with an appearance by Pharoah Sanders at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village. The 6 day event is now in its 13th year of delivering a well-curated mix of heavy hitters and up and comers across a handful of venues. Of the 130 or so artists participating, none generated as much enthusiasm or reverence than the mighty tenor saxophonist who led a one-off quartet put together for the gig. It was comprised of long time ally and contemporary William Henderson on piano along with a hotshot rhythm section of new acquaintances Dezron Douglas on bass and Johnathan Blake on drums.
Sanders does few interviews but I made a pitch to speak with him before the show and, as his manager put it, caught him at the right moment. I knew that he had moved to New York City in 1961 so I asked him about those days which led to his candid remarks about being forced to live on the street for a period when he first arrived. It was powerful testimony that included recollections of doing odd jobs like painting and cooking and even selling pints of blood to earn a few bucks. In his stint as a short-order cook of sorts, he remembered the drummer (who appeared on Sanders’ 1981 album Rejoice) Billy Higgins dropping by and playing the spoons! He mentioned Sun Ra as an important friend of the time and agreed the tipping point was hooking up with John Coltrane with whom he played extensively between ’65 and ’67. Sanders was honored as a 2016 NEA Jazz Master and appeared in, of all things, a GQ spread last month sporting a nifty Nigerian fez.
The 2017 Winter Jazzfest features panel discussions for the first time as a compliment to the music. The event is marking the 100th birthday of Thelonious Monk as well as exploring a theme of social justice this year. In fact $1 of every ticket sale of the festival will benefit BLACK LIVES MATTER and the ACLU. The concert by the Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra at Le Poisson Rouge tonight – Tuesday, January 10, 2017 – will be preceded by an environmental justice panel from 6:45-7:45.The Free Gaza Movement, a U.S.-based activist group known for provisioning ships to run the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza, was hit with charges of anti-Semitism on Wednesday after posting a tweet claiming that Jews were responsible for the Holocaust.
“Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews,” read a tweet posted Sunday to @freegazaorg, the official Twitter feed of the group, which includes Canadian author Naomi Klein and Bishop Desmond Tutu on its board of advisors.
An embedded link led to a video of a speech by known conspiracy theorist Eustace Mullins claiming that the word Nazi is an amalgam of the words “National socialism” and “Zionist.”
“[Hitler] allied with the Zionist Party, and the mission of the Nazis was to force the anti-Zionist Jews to accept Zionism — and this is what the concentration camps were about,” said Mr. Mullins, who died of a stroke in 2010.
I shared it without watching it. I am sorry that I just sent it forward without looking at it. It won’t happen again
Although the tweet was eventually deleted, it was picked up on Monday by Avi Mayer, head of social media with the Jewish Agency for Israel. In a Wednesday blog post, Mr. Mayer posted a screenshot of the post along with a link to the video, which he claimed revealed Free Gaza as “the lowest anti-Semites.”
Within hours, the American founder of the movement, Greta Berlin, tweeted that she had intended only to publish the link to her private Facebook account, but it was accidentally redirected to the Free |
inland after churning up the Florida peninsula.
Gov. Nathan Deal told a news conference Friday he’s not expanding his evacuation order affecting Georgia’s six coastal counties.
But Deal notes that Irma’s path remains unpredictable, and forecasts show it could enter Georgia anywhere from the Atlantic coast to the Alabama state line.
The National Weather Service says Irma could still slam coastal Georgia with dangerous storm surge. And while the storm could arrive as a weakened tropical storm, some areas would still face heavy rains and an elevated risk of tornadoes.
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11:55 a.m.
Meteorology director Jeff Masters at Weather Underground says Hurricane Jose, now a Category 4 storm, will definitely add insult to the injuries caused by Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean. But he says the islands that got nailed — namely Barbuda, St. Martin and Anguila — will mostly suffer tropical storm force winds and heavy rains.
That will hamper relief efforts so it’s a big deal, but he says it’s “nothing compared to what they already went through.”
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11:40 a.m.
Hurricane Jose has now become an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane, threatening Caribbean islands already devastated by Hurricane Irma.
Jose now has top sustained winds of 150 mph (240 kph) and as it moves toward the northern leeward islands at a speedy 18 mph.
A Tropical Storm Watch has been issued for St. Thomas and St. John.
The government of Antigua has issued a Tropical Storm Watch for the British Virgin Islands
The government of France has issued a Tropical Storm Warning for St. Martin and St. Barts.
The government of Sint Maarten has issued a Tropical Storm Warning as well.
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11:30 a.m.
The latest storm discussion is out from National Hurricane Center reminding people in Florida that Hurricane Irma will likely hit land as a dangerous major hurricane.
Irma is so immense that it will bring life-threatening wind impacts to much of the state regardless of exactly where its center moves.
The storm surge also could be deadly across southern Florida and the Florida Keys during the next 36 hours. The threat of significant storm surge flooding along the southwest coast of Florida has now increased, with 6 to 12 feet of inundation above ground level possible in this area.
Again, the hurricane center says this is a life-threatening situation, so everyone in these areas should take all actions to evacuate before rising water makes it impossible.
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11:20 a.m.
Associated Press videos show the destruction Hurricane Irma brought to the Caribbean island of St. Martin.
Gnarled black branches of leafless trees, street after street now littered with piles of corrugated tin, plywood, wrought iron, battered cars and unidentifiable objects that were once parts of someone’s life.
Handfuls of people are stumbling through the debris. One reaches the property where her home has now disappeared and says “Oh my God... Where did you go?”
There’s little left of the Hotel Mercure — just its sign, painted on one of the walls that still stand amid the ruins. As some begin to clean up, others line up outside a hospital, where the first two syllables of an “EMERGENCY” sign lie on the ground.
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11:10 a.m.
Authorities on the Dutch territory of St. Maarten say it will take months before people can recover from Hurricane Irma. Prime Minister William Marlin told the Dutch military that the Caribbean island lost many, many homes; schools are destroyed; both government buildings are severely damaged; many people have lost their homes; hotels are so damaged that tourists won’t come; the electricity company lost its roof so generators aren’t working; nearly half the water tanks are gone; and all the gas stations are destroyed.
He also confirms that people have been looting. He calls it “a psychological thing that happens anywhere in the world following a major disaster like this. People become kind of hopeless and there is no communication.”
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11 a.m.
After days of saying they would continue with normal operations while monitoring Irma, Sea World and its properties on Friday announced closings for the weekend.
Sea World and Busch Gardens Tampa Bay will close down at 5 p.m. on Saturday, pending further updates on the storm. Both parks will remain closed Sunday and Monday. Aquatics Orlando will be closed Saturday through Monday. Discovery Cove will be closed Sunday and Monday. Disney World and Universal Orlando have not responded for requests on updated to their plans.
As of Thursday both parks said they will continue with normal business hours but are monitoring the storm.
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10:45 a.m.
The death toll from Hurricane Irma has increased to 20 with four more deaths reported in the British Virgin Islands. The other lives lost include nine on the French Caribbean islands of St. Martin and St. Barts, four in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and one each on the islands of Anguilla, Barbuda and the Dutch side of St. Martin.
The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency gave no details about the latest confirmed deaths in the British territory of about 40 small islands, where Irma caused major damage late Wednesday, especially to the largest and most populated island of Tortola.
The British government has been coordinating relief efforts to the cluster of islands near Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The Caribbean disaster agency says the Tortola airport is operational but the tower has been “compromised.”
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10:10 a.m.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott said traffic officials have decided against reversing the direction of southbound lanes because they still need to move gas and supplies south.
A massive evacuation has clogged Florida’s major highways. Scott says most of the state will have hurricane impacts and “we are running out of time — the storm is almost here.” So what they are doing is opening up the shoulders to drivers on Interstate 75 from Wildwood, where the Florida turnpike ends, to the Georgia state line.
In Georgia meanwhile, Gov. Nathan Deal just announced contraflow starting Saturday morning on Interstate 16 to ease the mandatory evacuation from Savannah and other coastal communities.
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9:50 a.m.
Harvey and Irma. Who knew? Certainly not Harvey and Irma Schluter of Washington state. Married 75 years now, they’re wondering how it came to be that two major hurricanes bearing their names are poised to strike the U.S. back-to-back.
The New York Times reports 104-year-old Harvey married 92-year-old Irma in 1942.
There have been a few storms named Harvey since then, but none followed by an Irma.
And this is likely the last time a Harvey and Irma swirl through the Atlantic. The World Meteorological Organization alternates men’s and women’s names in alphabetical order for Atlantic storms. But since these two have caused widespread damage, they are almost certain to be retired.
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9:45 a.m.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has told Florida’s governor that the structural integrity of the Herbert Hoover Dike containing Lake Okeechobee “will not be compromised” by Hurricane Irma. But voluntary evacuations for communities surrounding the lake’s southern half are now mandatory, because it’s possible Irma’s winds will push water over the dike.
The seven cities under mandatory evacuation orders are South Bay, Lake Harbor, Pahokee, Moore Haven, Clewiston, Belle Glade and Canal Point.
The same area was hit back in 1928 by the Okeechobee hurricane, which made landfall with 145 mph winds. The dikes failed then and at least 2,500 people drowned, most of them farmworkers and their families. More than 1,700 buildings were destroyed by that storm. But the only reported impact on the nearby Mar-a-Lago mansion, now owned by President Donald Trump, was a damaged Roman-style window.
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9:25 a.m.
All five living former U.S. presidents have issued a joint “One America Appeal” for donations to support the staggering recovery needs from Hurricane Harvey. Now that Hurricane Irma has damaged Puerto Rico and is closing in on Florida, the presidents are expanding the appeal to help its victims as well.
The appeal launched with a public service announcement focused on “Our Friends in Texas” during the NFL season opener, but a second PSA addressing both hurricanes is launching this weekend, and a website for tax-deductible donations related to both storms is now live at OneAmericaAppeal.org.
A special restricted account has been established through the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation to collect and quickly distribute donations to ensure 100 cents out of every dollar goes to assist hurricane victims. The Carter Center says Harvey has displaced more than one million people and caused an estimated $180 billion in damage over its 300-mile path of destruction.
Some forecasters have predicted that Irma’s economic toll could be even greater.
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9:10 a.m.
For an entire generation in South Florida, Hurricane Andrew was the definition of a monster storm.
For the people who led victims through that devastating aftermath, Hurricane Irma is looking far worse by nearly every measure.
Weather Channel senior hurricane specialist Bryan Norcross was a local television meteorologist hailed as a hero back then. He says Irma’s impact on Florida will be much greater — “an entirely different level of phenomenon.”
Kate Hale grabbed attention as Miami-Dade’s emergency management chief by saying “where the hell is the cavalry” after Andrew laid waste to half the county. She says nobody could make up a worse scenario than Irma right now. Combined with flooding from Hurricane Harvey and wildfires out west, she says the effect on the nation’s economy is “potentially staggering.”
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9 a.m.
President Donald Trump is urging people to “be safe” as Hurricane Irma approaches.
On Twitter Friday, Trump wrote, “Hurricane Irma is of epic proportion, perhaps bigger than we have ever seen. Be safe and get out of its way, if possible.”
Trump added that the federal government is ready, and in another tweet, he said: “Our incredible U.S. Coast Guard saved more than 15,000 lives last week with Harvey. Irma could be even tougher. We love our Coast Guard!”
Coastal residents around South Florida have been ordered to evacuate as the killer storm closes in on the peninsula for what could be a catastrophic blow this weekend.
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8:50 a.m.
The Miami Marlins are in Atlanta for the start of a weeklong road trip with Hurricane Irma very much on their minds. They arrived on a chartered flight crowded with the families of players and staff. That helped ease some immediate concerns, but they couldn’t ignore what’s going on back in Miami, where highways are jammed as coastal residents face mandatory evacuations.
Miami Manager Don Mattingly says the team is still watching what happened with Harvey, and now worrying that Irma could devastate their hometown.
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8:30 a.m.
The National Hurricane Center says Hurricane Irma weakened a bit more but remains a powerful threat to Florida with storm surges that could reach 10 feet in some places.
Irma’s winds dropped to 150 mph, still a Category 4 dangerous storm, as it moves between Cuba and the Bahamas over warmer than normal waters that can intensify tropical storms. Irma’s core should hit Florida early Sunday morning, but its tropical force storm winds can arrive as early as Saturday morning.
The hurricane center is projecting storm surge on top of normal tides of 5 to 10 feet all the way from Jupiter Inlet, which is north of Palm Beach on Florida’s east coast, around to Bonita Beach, which is on Florida’s west coast south of Fort Myers. The Florida Keys will likely be swamped. From Bonita Beach north to Venice, storm surge is expected to be 3 to 5 feet. And from Jupiter Inlet north to Sebastian Inlet, which is just south of Cape Canaveral, it is expected to be 3 to 6 feet.
Forecasters say this life-threatening surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves.
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8:05 a.m.
Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Brock Long offered some advice for people in the path of Hurricane Irma who’ve been ordered to evacuate: Get out now.
Speaking at FEMA headquarters in Washington on Friday, Long said no one in Florida has experienced a storm with the intensity of what’s now bearing down on the state. He said there is “a lot of certainty in this forecast” showing Irma making landfall somewhere in Florida this weekend, and the winds and storm surge from the storm will be devastating.
Long said those in low-lying areas who’ve been told to evacuate “need to get out and heed the warning.”
More than 8,000 FEMA staff have been deployed to prepare for Irma and help with the continuing recovery effort from Hurricane Harvey, which caused massive flooding in southeastern Texas last week.
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7:35 a.m.
French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb says Hurricane Irma has left at least nine people dead, seven missing and 112 injured on the French Caribbean islands of St. Martin and St. Barts and urged coastal residents to take shelter as a new storm approaches.
Collomb told reporters Friday that the casualty toll could rise as more emergency workers reach deeper into the area.
He said France is shuttling security forces, emergency workers and aid to the islands before Hurricane Jose hits St. Martin and St. Barts on Saturday night. He said the top priority is to “save the population and restore order” after looting broke out in some areas.
The French rescue operation includes military frigates, military and civilian planes and helicopters. A warship is leaving from France next Tuesday to bring heavy equipment to help rebuild the islands, where the government says a majority of buildings were damaged or destroyed.
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7:15 a.m.
Dutch King Willem-Alexander will fly to the Caribbean island of Curacao on Sunday to inspect the coordination of relief efforts for devastated former colony St. Maarten in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, which hit as a Category 5 storm.
The Royal House announced the visit Friday, saying the monarch will assess in Curacao “whether and when it is possible to visit St. Maarten” and nearby Dutch islands Saba and St. Eustatius, which were less severely damaged by Irma’s winds.
A headquarters in Curacao is helping coordinate a military operation to deliver supplies to the 40,000-strong population of St. Maarten. The tiny country, which shares an island with the French territory of St. Martin, has been autonomous since 2010, but remains part of the Dutch commonwealth.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte says that most people are surviving on the island without the basic necessities of life. Power, running water and most communications were knocked out by the powerful storm and looting has been reported by local authorities struggling to keep control of the island.
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6 a.m.
Dutch military forces are helping maintain order and distributing aid to the shattered former colony of St. Maarten after clearing the runway at the capital’s badly damaged airport and securing berths in the harbor for two navy ships to bring ashore supplies.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte told reporters Friday that the first plane already has landed at the airport in the capital, Philipsburg, and navy vessels have unloaded vital supplies in a race against time before the next storm arrives.
Hurricane Jose is forecast to pass through the region Saturday, but Rutte says it’s not expected - at the moment - to directly hit St. Maarten as Irma did Wednesday and winds will likely be significantly weaker.
Rutte and Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk say troops are helping stretched local authorities on the autonomous territory to uphold law and order amid looting of stores. St. Maarten is the Dutch side of St. Martin, an island split between Dutch and French control.
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5:10 a.m.
France’s government is reporting looting of televisions and other goods on the Caribbean island of St. Martin after it was hammered by Hurricane Irma, as warships and military planes ferry police and rescue crews to the site.
Annick Girardin, minister for France’s overseas territories, described on BFM television Friday “scenes of pillaging” of televisions as well as food and water.
She lamented “how people can take advantage of the distress of others” and said it’s essential for police to restore order and ensure urgent care for victims. The French government says four people are confirmed dead and about 50 injured on the French side of St. Martin. Another death was reported on the Dutch side of the shared island.
French military spokesman Col. Patrik Steiger told The Associated Press two French frigates are expected to arrive on St. Martin on Friday and military transport planes and helicopters are bringing in personnel and aid to the local population from the nearby French island of Guadeloupe.
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4:55 a.m.
Hurricane Irma has weakened to a Category 4 storm Friday as it batters the Caribbean on a path toward Florida but remains a powerful hurricane.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center says Irma’s maximum sustained winds have decreased to near 155 mph (250 kph). The hurricane center says some fluctuations in strength are likely over the next day or two but Irma is expected to stay a Category 4 storm.
Just before 5 a.m. EDT Friday, the hurricane was centered about 55 miles (90 kilometers) northwest of Great Inagua Island and 495 miles (795 kilometers) southeast of Miami.
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3:15 a.m.
Hurricane Irma battered the Turks and Caicos Islands early Friday as the fearsome Category 5 storm continued a rampage through the Caribbean that has killed at least 11 people, with Florida in its sights.
Waves as high as 20 feet (6 meters) are expected in the Turks and Caicos. Communications went down as the storm slammed into the islands, and the extent of the devastation was unclear.
The first hurricane warnings were issued for parts of southern Florida as the state braced for what could be a catastrophic hit over the weekend. Following in Irma’s wake was Hurricane Jose, with some of the islands hit hardest by Irma in its expected path.
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HURRICANE NEWSLETTER - Get the best of the AP’s all-formats reporting on Irma and Harvey in your inbox: http://apne.ws/ahYQGtbThe scandal over ministers' expenses, by turns comical, enraging and shaming, tells us not merely how MPs are prepared to milk the taxpayer for personal gain but also about the values and ethics of the people who have waged war on the nation's liberties and rights, as well as about those opposition MPs who have failed to defend them.
For you cannot separate the steady misappropriation by New Labour of our liberties – taken stealthily over the last dozen years in deniable quantities – from the kind of venality exposed in both the major parties. The two types of theft are part of the same contempt for voters; part of the same light–fingered amorality that has allowed this government to amass power at the centre at the expense of the individual.
If you think I stretch the point, consider the authoritarian measures that ministers introduced – insisting they are for our own good – as they remove the small change from our wallets.
While the communities secretary Hazel Blears instituted a system of tension monitoring in local communities in effect, little more than a network of local spies feeding into the government's surveillance apparatus – she was content to claim on three separate homes in order maximise both her income and her tax position. While she trumpeted the need for ID cards to stop benefit cheats, her own claim against public funds certainly seems to fall into a bracket that most benefits investigators would regard as suspicious.
While the immigration minister Phil Woolas explained that one of the advantages of the intrusive eBorders scheme would be to monitor more closely the criminals going in and out of the country, he was apparently putting in expenses claims for women's panty liners, wine, nappies and children's comics (an accusation Woolas has unconvincingly denied). The greed is so pathetic it makes you weep with laughter, until you realise that Phil Woolas has been chiefly responsible for pushing through laws that will demand 53 pieces of information from everyone wishing to travel abroad, at which point anger becomes the only reaction. For this mediocrity to be lecturing us about monitoring criminals is intolerable.
While the home secretary was posturing on the evils of lap dancing clubs and prostitution, her husband was slipping the bill for his porn movies to the taxpayer. While, under her direction, the Home Office fear factory whipped up ever greater public anxiety about crime, Ms Smith was claiming £24,000 on her property in Redditch, saying that her main home was a broom cupboard in her sister's London house. The former chairmen of the committee on standards in public life, Sir Alistair Graham, regards this as "near fraudulent".
Instead of resigning the only possible course of action 20 years ago — Smith reacted by saying she might sue for libel. We can only pray she does: apart from seeing her explain the ins and outs of the property and porn issues her life, a senior government minister accounting in a public court for their hypocrisy would be greeted by considerable national glee. The absurdity of a Home Office spokesman suggesting that Sir Alistair was guilty of "malicious falsehoods" shows how detached from reality MPs have become, especially when we learn that the HM Revenue & Customs are to investigate whether they have been evading capital gains tax.
Let me underline that point: the people who have been primly telling us that due to the current economic crisis the rich must be taxed more, are themselves now to be investigated for tax evasion. It will not have been a problem then for the same ministers to mislead the public about the true costs of the database state, or deny its existence or tell some transparent lie about why the state needs to take and store all our personal information.
It is astonishing that no one has yet been forced out of office but when we have justice minister Jack Straw – one of the main architects of the attack on liberty – overcharging the taxpayer for mortgage bills and council tax, the revelation about the morals of this government seems hardly surprising.
This post should be occupied by an individual whose ethical standards cannot be questioned, yet we learn that only when Straw discovered that MPs' expenses receipts would be published did he repay £1,500 he owed after claiming for the full council tax. These thefts from the taxpayer, the degradation of parliament, the use of spin doctors to slander and lie and the general contempt for voters are all part of the same syndrome, and I have absolutely no doubt that the Conservatives are almost as guilty as Labour.
It may be too much to hope for, but what needs to come out of this is some kind of settlement between the people and their politicians. The limits of power and personal expenditure must be set and the freedom of the people guaranteed by more than the word of a few dubious characters like Straw, Blears, Smith and Woolas, and a parliament that seems to have lost all sense of its duty to serve the people.HOUSTON -- There's much uncertainty surrounding Pablo Sandoval's immediate future -- about how much he will contribute to the Boston Red Sox in 2016 because of the condition of his left shoulder.
But eventually, whether it's later this season or in 2017, Sandoval will be cleared to return to the field, with the Red Sox having tens of millions of dollars invested in his ability to hit. Sandoval demonstrated repeatedly when he was with the San Francisco Giants that he could hit the best pitchers, and in the big moments. His lifetime average in the postseason is.344 in 39 games, with 19 extra-base hits and 22 strikeouts in 167 plate appearances.
This is why the organization should devote itself right now to doing everything it possibly can to make this relationship work and help Sandoval in any way he can be helped.
That must start with Sandoval, of course, taking complete ownership of his situation.When Beckham reluctantly rejoined the team last summer after being lent to A.C. Milan, it was with icy stares toward Donovan and taunting Galaxy fans. In the book “The Beckham Experiment,” which chronicled his first two seasons in Los Angeles, Beckham had been severely criticized for his commitment and his handlers’ meddling.
On Thursday, along with the good-natured needling from Donovan, Beckham was greeted by nine television cameras and about twice as many reporters. A British morning program was the only entertainment news media representative, and The Sun, an English tabloid, was the only foreign print outlet.
The only accompanying controversy — England Coach Fabio Capello’s saying last month that Beckham was too old to play for England again — had been tamped down when Capello said last week that the door would be open for Beckham.
Also gone is Beckham’s great lure at the box office. Average attendance at Galaxy games, which includes tickets distributed, dropped by nearly 6,000 at home and 10,000 on the road last season. Home attendance has fallen off slightly more this season at 20,298, the lowest since the Home Depot Center opened in 2003. It is not expected to get more than a nudge from Beckham’s return.
“I don’t think it’s going to be massive,” the Galaxy’s president, Tom Payne, said of any boost from Beckham’s return. “Let’s say we introduce that he’s going to be starting. That doesn’t mean we’re going to move 5,000 tickets in a day.”
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Beckham is in the fourth year of a five-year, $32.5 million contract, one that gives him the option to buy a stake in a Major League Soccer team. Early on, he was a boon to ticket sales (home and away), to sponsorship and to building the Galaxy brand in Asia and Europe. The appearance fees the club earned on tours of Asia, Australia and Canada were what it pays out to teams like Barcelona and Real Madrid, Payne said, about $1 million.
“From an international standpoint, we’re thought of as the team in M.L.S.,” Payne said. “That said, we need to hit a home run at home.”
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That the Galaxy has, in some ways, swung and missed at its opportunity with Beckham can be traced to how the player himself has been managed. Beckham’s interest in continuing to play for England meant shuttling to Europe during the M.L.S. season and spending the last two winters on loan to A.C. Milan.
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For a player in his mid-30s, the year-round workload proved too much, particularly when no one — not Beckham, his coaches, his management or team executives — demanded that he take some time off to rest. When his Achilles’ tendon snapped while he played for A.C. Milan, it was only the latest in a series of injuries over the last three years.
Those missteps have the Galaxy handling Beckham’s return cautiously. He was not eligible to come off the disabled list until Sept. 4, and the initial target date for his return was Oct. 2. Though he could be on the bench Saturday against Columbus, the Eastern Conference leader, Galaxy Coach Bruce Arena said it was more likely Beckham would get on the field next Saturday against D.C. United, the league’s worst team. The Galaxy hosts the Red Bulls on Sept. 24.
“I’m accepting responsibility with our medical staff for making sure he’s not coming back too early,” Arena said. “If there’s a finger to point, it’s going to be at everyone but David. We’re going to make sure we’re moving him along in the right way.”
Beckham’s return is coming at a propitious time. Los Angeles (13-5-5) began the season 10-0-2, but it has foundered, winning only one of its last six matches and scoring two goals in its last four.
Donovan acknowledged that he was drained — emotionally and physically — from playing in the World Cup. Forward Edson Buddle, who played sparingly for the United States in South Africa, is leading M.L.S. with 13 goals but has scored once since July 22. Beckham’s precise passing, as well as his presence, could provide sparks.
“I think we’ve hit a little complacent patch,” Donovan said. “It’s going to give us some energy that we’ve been missing.”
As for Beckham himself, simply restoring his fitness is his top priority. The tendon injury forced him to sit out for six months, including a stint at the World Cup in South Africa, where instead of being on the field he was on the England bench in a coat and tie as an adviser and goodwill ambassador.
The forced time off gave Beckham, not usually a reflective sort, a chance to reconsider what the game means to him. He is not ready to give up playing, he said, even if it means not playing in Europe in the M.L.S. off-season and resting instead.
“The most important thing is the soccer,” he said.
It is a phrase that Beckham has uttered repeatedly since he arrived in Los Angeles amid a rain of confetti. But on this day, the words did not seem to ring so hollow.Is 'Rural Resentment' Driving Voters To Donald Trump?
Enlarge this image toggle caption Win McNamee/Getty Images Win McNamee/Getty Images
An August presidential poll out of Virginia shows the heightening of a long-existing trend: There is a big, big rural-urban split in the battleground state.
The rural southwest area is heavily in favor of Donald Trump, the Washington Post/ABC News poll found, while the DC suburbs are by far Clinton country.
And this rural-urban divide persists nationwide. Hillary Clinton led Trump by 26 points in urban areas in a recent poll, also from the Washington Post. But in rural areas, Trump led Clinton by 20 points.
This phenomenon isn't new — in fact, the latest poll numbers look a lot like the exit poll figures from 2012's presidential race. Four years ago, Obama won urban areas by 26 points, according to exit polls, while Romney won rural areas by 20 points.
In fact, if you line up U.S. counties from most urban to most rural there was a nearly uninterrupted sort of gradation effect to how people voted in 2012.
And this shows one major aspect of how Obama won — urban areas have way more people (duh). Here's how that above gradation breaks down when you look at those urban-to-rural counties by population size:
Rural demographics mirror Trump supporter demographics
Rural voters heavily lean toward supporting Trump, so it's no surprise that the stats that describe America's rural areas also happen to describe Trump supporters quite well. Trump does particularly well among older, white and non-college-educated Americans.
And as it happens, rural areas are older than the rest of the nation — the median age in rural areas is around 40, compared to 37 for the rest of the country, according to a report from the Housing Assistance Council, a group that promotes affordable housing in rural areas.
Likewise, rural areas tend to be less educated than urban areas.
And rural areas are whiter, as well. Nearly 80 percent of people in rural areas are white non-Hispanics, compared to around 64 percent among the U.S. as a whole.
Does rural-ness drive people's votes?
All these stats might make it seem that it's demographics that cause rural voters to choose Trump, or other Republican candidates: that there's something about being white or about being older or not having a college diploma that makes a person vote for him, and that those people also just happen to live in rural areas.
Or, perhaps, that there's something about being conservative that makes a person choose a rural area. That may be true — Pew has found that (for whatever reason) people who are conservative prefer places where the population is more spread-out, while liberals prefer denser neighborhoods.
But as one researcher argues, living in a rural area by itself shapes a person's politics, and can particularly drive a voter toward Trump.
"There's this sense that people in those communities are not getting their fair share compared to people in the cities," said Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin who studied how Gov. Scott Walker appealed to rural voters.
"They feel like their communities are dying, and they perceive that all that stuff — the young people, the money, the livelihood — is going somewhere, and it's going to the cities," she said.
Cramer has labeled these intense, negative feelings against people in the cities "rural resentment." For example, Cramer said that rural people perceive (rightly) that their kids don't have the same opportunities as kids in some suburban and city schools, like AP classes.
Journalists and political science wonks have expended a lot of energy this election trying to figure out what is driving voters to vote for Trump. Some voters' affinity for authoritarianism is one theory.
Generalized "economic anxiety" has also been a popular explanation throughout the election, though a recent Gallup paper cast doubt on the idea that Trump voters are unusually plagued by low incomes or adverse effects from trade or immigration. That study, however, showed that Trump voters do come from areas where intergenerational mobility is low, and where white mortality rates are higher (and those mortality rates have climbed in rural areas, in particular).
Racial resentment is another popular theory — this week, Vox's Matt Yglesias pointed to it as the main driving factor.
But it may be that trying to narrow voters' support for Trump down to one primary driver doesn't make sense. For her part, Cramer describes the rural voters she has spoken with as having a "basket of resentments." Voters in both rural and urban settings can have economic and racial resentments, she said, but for some rural voters, resentment can also be geography-specific.
"Many voters have racial and economic resentments, but the thing that surprised me in my research was how common it was for people in small towns to talk about these resentments with reference to their towns," she said.
They feel like their communities are dying, and they perceive that all that stuff — the young people, the money, the livelihood — is going somewhere, and it's going to the cities.
Bound up in that rural resentment toward cities, she said, there can be a variety of grievances — for example toward government (much of which is focused in large cities), as well as liberal, city-dwelling professionals.
So how does a politician harness this rural resentment? In an April column, Cramer pointed to how Walker appealed to rural voters by talking about getting their roads fixed, as opposed to spending on high-speed rail between big cities. Walker also ran against government and public employees in Wisconsin. Those workers often were higher-income than their peers, and with more generous benefits, so for non-public sector workers in rural communities, that was another source of resentment.
Trump's rhetoric may similarly appeal to America's rural populations.
"The resources, the people, the respect seem to be going somewhere else, or to other types of people, and here comes someone who says 'You're right, you're not getting your fair share. It's going to people who aren't deserving, and you vote me in and we're going to make America great again," she said.
It doesn't help that rural areas are in decline, thanks to cities. Many older rural Americans have watched as their children got college diplomas and moved to cities, making for dwindling populations. Trump's nonspecific promise to bring America back to some nonspecific point when it was "great" works because it can mean anything to any voter — and to people in rural communities, it may signal a promise to go back to a time when their communities were thriving more.Improving League’s Champion Select
Julian Gari Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 27, 2016
tl;dr: Multi-choice role select (1) increases the likelihood of getting preferred roles, (2) reduces queue time, and (3) encourages honest expression of preferences.
Current System
The current champion select is a marked improvement over the old “free for all” system. You’re way more likely to get a role you want, and you don’t have to coordinate the preferences of 5 strangers in 30 seconds (a difficult task when 2 of your allies are silent and the other 2 are raging at each other because they’re both Riven mains).
Under the current system, you indicate a primary role and a secondary role. Below, I have indicated Top as my primary role and Bot as my secondary role.
Proposed System
I’d like to propose an alternate method called multi-choice role select. This system allows for expression of a wider breadth of preferences, which effectively gives the team-building algorithm more information to work with. Under this system, you rank at least 2 and up to all 5 roles, with ties allowed. The option to Fill is removed. Under the proposed system, ranking all 5 roles is a more specific way of saying that you’re comfortable filling. Below, I have indicated Top as my primary role, Bot as my secondary role, and Support and Mid as my tertiary roles. Jungle is unranked because I do not wish to play this role. Trust me, you don’t want my Amumu on your team.
Multi-choice role select increases the likelihood of getting preferred roles. Under the current system, some players select Fill when they’re only comfortable with 3 or 4 roles. They misrepresent their preferences either to reduce queue time or because they identify as an “anything but X” player. These players often end up on an off-role, which has a ripple effect of making you less likely to get the role you want. Multi-choice role select addresses this by allowing players to rank up to all 5 roles.
It also reduces queue times. Under the current system, some players select one role as Primary and another role as Secondary when they’re actually comfortable playing 3 or 4 roles. Queues are artificially longer because a player that is comfortable playing 3 or 4 roles (but only indicates 2) is not considered to be eligible for those additional roles. With multi-choice role select, you’ll find games more quickly because the team-building algorithm has more information to work with.
Lastly, it encourages honest expression of preferences. If you’re already convinced, feel free to skip the following section. If not, read on, and I’ll highlight a more nuanced flaw with the current system.
In my ranked games, I’ve been indicating Top as my primary role and Bot as my secondary role. On a few occasions, I’ve been assigned to Bot when there was a player on my team who indicated Bot as primary. At first, this was a real head-scratcher, but after some thought, I realized what was happening.
The Draven main was indicating Bot as his primary role and Support as his secondary role. Because none of the other players on our team selected Support for their primary or secondary roles, the system “forced” the Draven main onto his secondary role (Support) and assigned me to fail miserably as Ezreal.
If I were that Draven main, I would be tempted to indicate Bot as my primary role and disingenuously indicate Mid as my secondary role. Because Mid is such a popular role, that role is likely to be taken by a Mid main, increasing my chances of |
Team Miss Fats hasn’t spent much time in Pilsen, so they were excited to venture into this neighborhood to get their brunch on. (Though they fully recognize this brunch is a NOT a representation of Pilsen’s excellent Mexican restaurants. THEY WILL BE BACK FOR MEXICAN BREAKFAST. DO NOT WORRY.) Nightwood has been at the top of their lists for a while, but is way far out of their price range. But per Miss Fats’ style, brunch is always an option.
And what could make Miss Fats more excited? Surprises. Nightwood does not have a set menu and changes their options every week, so they only had a vague idea of what they were in for. Look at the super cute hand written menus:
Miss Fats thought listing just “fried skin” (what animal? who cares.) as an ingredient was pretty dope. Game on, Nightwood.
Bacon butterscotch donut
J: Having had an extremely unpleasant experience with the Maple Bacon Manhattan at The Southern, Miss Fats avoids bacon in places where bacon shouldn’t go. Actually, Miss Fats generally never eats bacon, and doesn’t understand why it’s such a thing. (Go ahead, lose all respect for Miss Fats as a person right now. Go ahead!!! She’s used to it.) This wasn’t half bad though. Except when her “better half” dropped the last bite on the floor. Doof.
M: Miss Fats is just going to say it: this is the best donut in Chicago. (Maybe even one of the best things in the city.) Hands down. Fuck. No words. SALT. SWEET. CRISPY. SOFT. Miss Fats isn’t even sure how to go about describing this incredible treat. It was literally the most heavenly contrast between the soft, fluffy cake center and crisp tender outside that was smothered in butterscotch glaze. Don’t even get her started on the crispy bacon goodness. BEST. This is the stuff of dreams. Which turned into a nightmare when she dropped the last bite:
THE SADDEST PICTURE YOU WILL EVER SEE.
Chocolate cherry cashew donut
J: This was a pretty great donut. There wasn’t really a detectable cherry flavor, it was more like the very very distant memory of a chocolate-covered cherry. Both of the donuts came with three tiny donut babies. Free baby donuts! Miss Fats really likes when food comes with extra food, like how when you order a Bloody Mary you get a free surprise snack. Sometimes it’s celery, sometimes it’s cheese-stuffed olives, you never know! Sometimes you order a donut and you get donut babies! The only bad part about the choco donut is when Miss Fats dropped one of the cinnamon-sugar babies on the floor. Doof. (see above if you want to cry again.)
M: Again: donut bliss. Miss Fats is such a huge fan of donuts she’s not sure this is even a fair subject to discuss. And what’s basically the only thing Miss Fats loves more than fried dough? CHOCOLATE. So obviously she was all over this shit. Usually chocolate donuts are a little too sweet with their glaze, but this shit was filled with the tastiest, perfectly salted ganache. She agrees with the other Miss Fats, however. No cherry. She wishes they had just omitted the flavor from the description or thrown a heaping spoonful of tart cherry preserves right on top.
Hello! I am cherry sales-kitten and I can help!
Wood-grilled Butcher + Larder Polish sausage, sauerkraut, neon relish, peppers & onions, runny egg
M: This was Nightwood’s cracked out version of a polish sausage complete with Chicago’s token neon green relish. Miss Fats seriously struggled to get this monster into her mouth, but once she did, she was all about it. The sausage was so tasty: perfectly tender and full of porky flavor that wasn’t over powered by spices (sausage often has too much fennel seed for Miss Fats). Obviously this paired well with the sauerkraut and runny egg: two ingredients that cannot fail.
Pure joy.
J: What M actually said about this dish was, “I’M INTO YOU,” while pointing at it with her fork. Miss Fats forgot the sausage came with all that sauerkrauty gloop. Not a huge fan. It overwhelmed all the other flavors. Stupid bossy sauerkraut. But look at that eggsplosion! Best!
Bagel sandwich – Rushing Water’s smoked trout cream cheese, slaw, bacon, an over-easy egg and tots
M: This was a very tasty bagel sandwich. The crispy bagel (Miss Fats needs to eat more bagels) and crunchy bacon were paired with mustardy sauciness and (always appreciated) runny egg. Despite fully enjoying this dish, Miss Fats is disappointed to report the lack of smoked trout flavor. She is ALWAYS excited about the prospect of smoked trout (there may not be a better smoked fish) and could not wait to get her salty-fishy cream cheese on. However the shmear fell short: little-to-no fish flavor. Still a damn good sandwich, but she was all excited about that trout! Guess Miss Fats’ fish luck ran out.
J: The fish luck didn’t run out! We just transferred some of it for ultra convenient parking spaces and ice cream luck. The bagel sammy was better than the sausage, but Miss Fats had to remove some of the bacon, because you just shouldn’t do surf n turf n egg like this. TOO MANY ANIMALS. It was too much!!! Miss Fats got spoiled with the ginorm serving of smoked fish they received at Jam, so the cream cheese did seem lackluster in comparison. None of this really matters though, because have a look at these breakfast potatoes….
tater tots
M: Ok these tater tots deserve a post all in their own. Miss Fats could probably spend a full twenty minutes describing these to you. Supposedly tater tots are a “food trend” now, but team Miss Fats has been munching on these suckers since birth. Well maybe not these gourmet tots. Nightwood’s tater tots were perfectly soft and tender inside and crazy crunchy deliciousness on the outside. BALANCE. (Insert nonsense food talk about texture.) This shit celebrated that potato. Though Miss Fats will continue to order tater tots whenever she enters a bar, she will always remember just how good a tot can be. And then probably run home and make a rez for brunch at Nightwood.
J: New plan is to contact chefs from Nightwood, Little Goat, and Jam, and have them make a mashed potato out of the Jam potatoes, then apply a Nightwood crispy filter and tempura fry them like Little Goat. It would be the best. The. Best. Ever. These were so so so so so ridiculously crispy. Each entree came with three of these golf-ball sized tater gems, but Miss Fats would have happily eaten a pile of these on their own, maybe with some different dipping sauces. #dreams
Oh yeah, and the fine staff at Nightwood kept our coffee cups FULL. So they get 10/10 coffee points from Miss Fats. Which is important. Coffee points are better than brownie points.
Miss Fats wanted to take a nap after this, but instead WAS AWESOME AND WENT ON MORE ADVENTURES.
Cut to Andersonville. (Don’t ask why we made this jump. Just know that some serious appetite was created in the process. Aka sitting in traffic listening to Top 40 and wishing we were at the Chinese New Year parade.)
George’s – A new instant favorite for Miss Fats! George’s offers more options and amazing flavors than anywhere else around, with super cute chalkboard drawings & vintage photos with funny captions. And a photo of a raccoon eating ice cream with a bear or something. Yes please.
How Miss Fats felt after they conquered George’s.
coconut, birthday cake, horchata ice cream
J: This was a greedy combination of three flavors. Miss Fats could not decide between these three, pistachio nut, “Kitty Kitty Bang Bang” (a cheesecake ice cream with raspberry ripple, Oreo and chocolate chunks), and a raspberry soy ice cream that looked pretty darn yums. Unfortch, George’s doesn’t offer a size option for “Insane Gluttonous Food Bloggers Who Think They Can Justify Eating ALL The Ice Cream Because They’re Going To Write About It Later,” so Miss Fats had to choose.
The coconut would have been great on its own, as would the horchata, they were both subtle, rich, and got lost in the birthday cake wonderfulness. Miss Fats is a big fan of super tacky ‘party cake’ flavored ice cream, this was just like, THAT, but made out of REAL food ingredients. And had windex-blue swirlies in it! George’s horchata flavor was maybe a little bit too subtle for us, the cinnamon rice-milk gelato at Cafe Spiaggia really hit a better balance with their spices. Overall, Miss Fats found everything they tried at George’s to be better than Baume & Brix’s Fish Cream. SHOCKING!
1 scoop Heaps of Love: oreos, pecans, caramel, chocolate ripple, cookie dough in vanilla ice cream; 1 scoop Yippie Skippie: peanut butter cups, caramel ripple, and more crack Miss Fats cannot remember; topped with hot fudge and peanut butter
M: Miss Fats fears she may have just given you a sugar attack just by listing those ingredients. This was literally the most indulgent chocolate-cookie-peanut butter-caramel crazy time that Miss Fats has ever had. It was someone gave her free reign and asked her to list all her favorite sweet treats and shoved them into a sundae. She’d like to think that her six year old self dreamed this one up, but let’s get real: this is pure adult Miss Fats. Not even child Miss Fats would have even gone this far. And boy was that good. While picking flavors Miss Fats was faced with her usual crisis: top with hot fudge or peanut butter?? She asked the kind woman at George’s which to do, and she made the reasonable rec to go with fudge… and THEN TOPPED IT WITH BOTH. WIN. It was like every spoon full was a new treat: Miss Fats spent most bites exclaiming what new discovery she’d made. This sundae is purely for chocoholic professionals. Beware of choco-salty-sweet flavor explosion.
Hey, it also turns out it was the one month anniversary of Miss Fats! Four weeks ago Miss Fats was enjoying/taking unprofessional photos of some sundaes on a Sunday… and Sunday Sundaes was born. Miss Fats didn’t realize this till they were deep in the middle of today’s ice cream divertissement and had a bit of deja vu. Yay Team Miss Fats!!!
AdvertisementsI think my SS is awesome! I received a package late tonight after getting home from work. I was VERY excited! I ran inside and snapped a couple of pictures. Inside my package was a Kidz Bop CD. I slightly remembered posting something about a Kidz Bop cd somewhat recently, so I scoured my comment history. Sure enough there it was! It is so bad ass that my SS took the time and effort to really read through my insane internet ramblings, and I still have more to come! Thank you VERY much!!! I will break out some ancient technology and give that shit a thorough listen!!! It was a total jolt to make that connection and I think it was a REALLY fucking cool idea! I am so glad that you are my SS, and I really like your style!!!!!!Deepak Chopra has made a career out of misunderstanding quantum mechanics (QM) – and through his popularity, confusing the public. Like many others, he has found a superficial way in which to interpret quantum mechanics to make is seem as if it is congruent with Eastern metaphysics.
And now he has done it again, in that anti-science rag the Huffington Post. Chopra goes beyond the typical New Age distortion of QM, which is basically the claim that QM is really weird, therefore magic is real. Chopra assumes some very specific, and common, misinterpretations of QM. He writes:
Quantum physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended physical state until observed, when they collapse to just one outcome — we don’t know what happens until we investigate, and our investigation influences that reality. Whether or not certain events may have happened some time ago, may not actually be determined until some time in your future — it may actually be contingent upon actions that have not yet taken place.
Chopra is referring to the wave-particle duality of matter, quantum entanglement, and the uncertainty principle – but he gets them profoundly wrong. First he makes the common mistake of interpreting the collapse of the wave function as being dependent on an observer, which is false. QM states that light, electrons, and all fundamental particles exist not as discrete point particles, but spread out as a wave. We can only describe the probability that they will be in a specific place at any moment, and that probability is the wave function. Particles, when free from interactions with other matter, actually behave like waves (see the double slit experiments).
But when a particle (whether of photon of light or an electron) interacts with other stuff they are no longer spread out but collapse down to a point particle. This is the wave-particle duality of matter. The collapse to a particle, however, is not dependent on any observer – just interaction with other stuff. No observer is necessary. When a photon from the sun strikes the earth and its energy is absorbed by a leaf on a tree in the middle of the jungle, it collapses to a particle. The same is true when it strikes a dead rocky asteroid out in space. Consciousness, and even life, is not necessary.
Next Chopra mangles quantum entanglement:
Scientists in France shot particles of light “photons” into a measuring apparatus, and showed that what they did — now, in the present — could retroactively change something that had already happened in the past. As the photons passed a fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave like particles or waves when they hit a beam splitter. Later on — well after the photons passed the fork — the experimenter could randomly switch a second beam splitter on and off electronically. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle actually did at the fork in the past.
Yes, these experiments are fascinating. But they do not describe the future affecting the past, as Chopra misinterprets. They describe what is known as quantum entanglement. When particles are paired or linked in some way – for example when they are created by the same process – some of their properties are linked, even while still being in a wave of probability. For example, if one particle is spin up, the other will be spin down, even though their spin is not determined until much later, and even if the particles are separated by millions of light years at the time of the collapse of the wave function.
Physicists do not pretend to understand the fundamental nature of quantum entanglement – that is a Nobel prize waiting to be won. But it does not represent the future affecting the past. Nor does it represent faster than light, or instantaneous communication. Experiments have been done showing that it is impossible to transmit information faster than light using quantum entanglement. Information is not going faster than light, or into the past.
Chopra is using a common trick of the pseudoscientist – exploiting cutting edge science, which the public is not likely to understand, and pretend as if there is proof where there is uncertainty. Take some interesting experiments, then leap way ahead to conclusions that serve their metaphysical purposes, but which are not settled science.
In short – beware of anyone pretending to understand the ultimate implications of QM and that it supports their far out philosophy.
And here is Chopra’s woo philosophy:
It was only with the advent of quantum physics that scientists began to consider again the old question of the possibility of comprehending the world as a form of mind. Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality
The universe is a mind, and consciousness is the ultimate reality. Not surprisingly, a very Eastern philosophy, packaged nicely for a Western audience.
Another false underlying assumption of Chopra, which he does not state expressly, is that all of this quantum weirdness (whatever its implications) applies to the macroscopic world. This is true, in a way (depending on how you look at it), but highly misleading. All objects, no matter how large, also are waves and particles. However, the wavelength of matter (the degree to which it is spread out, rather than having a definite position) decreases with mass and velocity. This is defined by the de Broglie equation:
λ = h/mv
Where λ is the wavelength, h is Planck’s constant, m is mass, and v is velocity. What this means is that when you start to get larger than a large molecule, the quantum wavelength shrinks to insignificance. When you get to macroscopic objects, the wavelength is orders of magnitude less than the size of elementary particles. So you have a wavelength, but it is so close to zero it can be treated as zero – which is another way of saying you do not behave like a quantum object, but like an object in classical physics.
Chopra, however, thinks that QM applies to everything equally. He writes:
If we do not look at it, the moon is gone. In this world, only an act of observation can confer shape and form to reality — to a dandelion in a meadow, or a seed pod, or the sun or wind or rain. Anyway, it’s amazing, and even your dog can do it too.
He is doubly wrong – not only is consciousness (an observer) not the thing that collapses wave functions, but QM effects do not apply to dandelions or moons (try shooting dandelions through a double slit experiment).
Another reason QM effects are not seen in the macroscopic world in which Chopra’s brain exists is decoherence. Remember that weird quantum entanglement I mentioned? Well, this can be observed only is carefully contrived experimental situations. It exists in nature, of course, but tends to be fleeting, because of decoherence. Whenever either paired particle interacts with other stuff in the universe, it becomes less entangled with its original partner, until they are decohered – their properties are no longer linked. It is hard to keep particles from decohering – in fact this is a stumbling block to the development of quantum computers that exploit QM effects. The particles keep decohering and losing their properties which can be used to store information.
For any macroscopic object, all the particles in that object are interacting with each other and decohering all the time. Again – the weird quantum world collapses to a classical physical world when you scale up to dandelions and people.
Chopra really needs to have a conversation with a real quantum physicist. You would think that before someone makes a career out of promoting a specific scientific interpretation to the public they would make sure they got the science right. But I suspect Chopra doesn’t care about getting the science right. He seems to be working backwards from his metaphysics, and then happily misinterpreting QM to suit his needs.Polk County braced Friday for a direct hit from Hurricane Irma as emergency officials predicted massive power outages and 100-mph winds.
LAKELAND — Polk County braced Friday for a direct hit from Hurricane Irma as emergency officials predicted massive power outages and 100-mph winds.
After an afternoon hurricane update, Pete McNally, Polk County's emergency manager, said Polk residents should have a plan in place.
"It's not too late, but it's getting close to that point to have a plan in place about what you are going to do," McNally said.
From models and projections, McNally said, tropical storm-force winds should hit the southern portion of the county by Saturday evening. A hurricane watch was issued for Polk at 11:30 a.m. Friday.
By noon Sunday and into the night, sustained hurricane-force winds — possibly reaching 100 mph — are expected to reach Polk County, McNally said.
That means parts of Polk County could receive tropical storm-force winds or stronger for 48 hours.
"All day Sunday and a good part of Monday, we will be under tropical storm- and hurricane-force winds," McNally said from the Emergency Operations Center in Winter Haven.
McNally said officials are discussing post-impact plans.
Initially, workers will try to clear major roads, such as U.S. 27, South Florida Avenue and State Road 60. Workers typically begin cleanup when winds are below 45 mph.
McNally said many of those workers will be with utility crews.
Utility workers are preparing for one of the largest single outages in the county since the trio hurricanes of 2004.
That year, Hurricane Frances left 40,000 customers in Lakeland without power and Hurricane Charley devastated parts of East Polk County, such as Lake Wales and large sections of Winter Haven.
Lakeland Electric General Manager Joel Ivy said he's expecting 50,000 customers to be without power. The utility serves 125,000 customers.
Before Frances, Hurricane Charley left 30,000 Lakeland Electric customers without electricity.
Ivy said power should be returned to about 38,000 of those customers within three days. The others will take longer.
"The damage from trees is my biggest concern," Ivy said.
But he also cautioned that things could change.
"Right now it's all an assumption based on an unknown," Ivy said.
At Duke Energy, spokeswoman Ana Gibbs said 7,000 workers are ready to respond to outages. The company serves 100,000 customers in East Polk County, including residents in Haines City, Lake Wales, Davenport and other portions of unincorporated Polk.
Gibbs said it was too early to predict outages in the county or for its 1.8 million customers in 35 counties in Florida. During Hurricane Matthew last year, 300,000 Duke customers lost power. Gibbs said power was restored to those customers within 72 hours.
TECO Energy, which serves about 73,000 residential customers in Mulberry and the greater Winter Haven area, including Eagle Lake and Auburndale, said the utility is mobilizing crews and has more than 1,000 linemen from crews in neighboring states standing by in Florida to help restore power after the storm passes.
"We have folks on the way," TECO spokeswoman Cherie Jacobs said. "We're telling customers to anticipate being without power for several days."
She said TECO officials are preparing for a range of damage, given the breadth of the storm.
Jacobs said TECO is cautioning residents to remove materials from their yards, like lawn furniture, that could cause damage in high winds.
"The issue with wind events is debris," she said. "Trees falling on power lines or branches pulling the lines down. Even patio furniture flying into our equipment. Residents can help by clearing as much out of their yards as they can."
In Fort Meade and Bartow, which have their own electric utilities, managers echoed Jacobs' concerns.
Brad Hiers, interim director of Bartow's electric department, said crews have been preparing for Hurricane Irma since early in the week.
"What we learned from Charley was to be prepared," he said. "We have our inventory in, our trucks are stocked and we've made sure all of our saws are ready to go."
The city's electric department serves about 12,000 commercial and residential customers. Hiers said he expects many of them will lose power during the storm.
But he said he's confident the city has taken measures to hold that number down. Like Lakeland, Bartow has replaced power poles and upgraded transformer stations in the past decade.
"We've invested nearly $2 million in the system," he said, "and I think that's going to make a big difference for us."
Bartow has 14 linemen and another 14 support staff ready to begin assessing the damage at daybreak after the storm passes, he said.
"We'll probably be calling in additional crews from other areas if they're needed," he said. "Right now, there are still just so many unknowns."
Jackie Cannon, public works director in Fort Meade, said his three linemen are ready to face whatever Hurricane Irma throws at them.
"I think there's going to be quite a bit of damage," he said, "but we'll work through it."
John Chambliss can be reached at [email protected] or 863-802-7588. Suzie Schottelkotte can be reached at [email protected] or 863-533-9070.Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.
The story of how Danny and I were married last July in a Manhattan courtroom, with our son, Kevin, beside us, began 12 years earlier, in a dark, damp subway station.
Danny called me that day, frantic. “I found a baby!” he shouted. “I called 911, but I don’t think they believed me. No one’s coming. I don’t want to leave the baby alone. Get down here and flag down a police car or something.” By nature Danny is a remarkably calm person, so when I felt his heart pounding through the phone line, I knew I had to run.
When I got to the A/C/E subway exit on Eighth Avenue, Danny was still there, waiting for help to arrive. The baby, who had been left on the ground in a corner behind the turnstiles, was light-brown skinned and quiet, probably about a day old, wrapped in an oversize black sweatshirt.
In the following weeks, after family court had taken custody of “Baby ACE,” as he was nicknamed, Danny told the story over and over again, first to every local TV news station, then to family members, friends, co-workers and acquaintances. The story spread like an urban myth: You’re never going to believe what my friend’s cousin’s co-worker found in the subway. What neither of us knew, or could have predicted, was that Danny had not just saved an abandoned infant; he had found our son.
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Three months later, Danny appeared in family court to give an account of finding the baby. Suddenly, the judge asked, “Would you be interested in adopting this baby?” The question stunned everyone in the courtroom, everyone except for Danny, who answered, simply, “Yes.”
“But I know it’s not that easy,” he said.
“Well, it can be,” assured the judge before barking out orders to commence with making him and, by extension, me, parents-to-be.
My first reaction, when I heard, went something like: “Are you insane? How could you say yes without consulting me?” Let’s just say, I nailed the “jerk” part of knee-jerk.
In three years as a couple, we had never discussed adopting a child. Why would we? Our lives were not geared for child rearing. I was an aspiring playwright working as a part-time word processor and Danny was a respected yet wildly underpaid social worker. We had a roommate sleeping behind a partition in our living room to help pay the rent. Even if our financial and logistical circumstances had been different, we knew how many challenges gay couples usually faced when they want to adopt. And while Danny had patience and selflessness galore, I didn’t. I didn’t know how to change a diaper, let alone nurture a child.
But here was fate, practically giving us a baby. How could we refuse? Eventually, my fearful mind spent, my heart seized control to assure me I could handle parenthood.
A caseworker arranged for us to meet the baby at his foster home in early December. Danny held the fragile baby first, then placed him in my arms. In order to protect myself from future heartache, I had convinced myself I could not, and would not, become inextricably attached. I didn’t trust the system and was sure there would be obstacles. But with the baby’s eyes staring up at me, and all the innocence and hope he represented, I, like Danny, was completely hooked.
The caseworker told us that the process, which included an extensive home study and parenting classes, could take up to nine months. We’d have ample time to rearrange our lives and home for a baby. But a week later, when Danny and I appeared in front of the judge to officially state our intention to adopt, she asked, “Would you like him for the holiday?”
What holiday? Memorial Day? Labor Day? She couldn’t have meant Christmas, which was only a few days away.
And yet, once again, in unison this time, we said yes. The judge grinned and ordered the transition of the baby into our custody. Our nine-month window of thoughtful preparation was instantly compacted to a mere 36 hours. We were getting a baby for Christmas.
We spent that year as foster parents while our caseworker checked up on us and the baby’s welfare. During that time we often wondered about the judge. Did she know Danny was a social worker and therefore thought he would make a good parent? Would she have asked him to adopt if she knew Danny was gay and in a relationship? At the final hearing, after she had signed the official adoption order, I raised my hand. “Your honor, we’ve been wondering why you asked Danny if he was interested in adopting?”
“I had a hunch,” she just said. “Was I wrong?” And with that she rose from her chair, congratulated us, and exited the courtroom.
And that was how we left it, as Baby ACE became Kevin, and grew from an infant to a boy. That is, until 2011, when New York State allowed Danny and me to legally marry.
“Why don’t you ask the judge who performed my adoption to marry you and Dad?” Kevin suggested one morning on our walk to school.
“Great idea,” I replied. “Would you like to meet her?”
“Sure. Think she’d remember me?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
After dropping Kevin off, I composed a query letter and sent it to the catchall e-mail address listed for the Manhattan family court. Within hours, a court attorney called to say that, of course, the judge remembered us, and was thrilled by the idea of officiating our marriage. All we had to do was pick a date and time.
When we ventured back to family court for the first time in over 10 years, I imagined that the judge might be nervous to come face to face with the results of one of her placement decisions — what if Kevin wasn’t happy and wished he had different parents? Kevin was nervous too. When he was a toddler, Danny and I made him a storybook that explained how we became a family, and it included an illustration of the judge, gavel in hand. A character from his book was about to jump off the page as a real person. What if she didn’t approve of the way he turned out?
Kevin reached out to shake her hand.
“Can I give you hug?” she asked. When they separated, the judge asked Kevin about school, his interests, hobbies, friends and expressed her delight that we were there.
When we finally remembered the purpose of the visit, and Danny and I moved into position to exchange vows, I reflected on the improbable circumstances that delivered all of us to this moment. We weren’t supposed to be there, two men, with a son we had never dreamed of by our side, getting married by a woman who changed and enriched our lives more than she would ever know. But there we were, thanks to a fateful discovery and a judicious hunch.
Peter Mercurio is a playwright and screenwriter whose latest screenplay is “Found (a True Story).”President Trump has “full confidence” in embattled national security adviser Michael Flynn, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Monday.
Speaking on MSNBC, Conway was asked whether Trump would stand by Flynn amid mounting speculation the president would cut his national security adviser loose over reports that Flynn discussed sanctions in a private discussion with a Russian diplomat before Trump's inauguration.
“Yes, Gen. Flynn does enjoy the full confidence of the president,” Conway said.
Flynn has been embroiled in controversy since the Washington Post first reported that he discussed sanctions the Obama administration placed on Moscow with Russia's ambassador before Trump took office.
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When reports of the discussion first surfaced, Vice President Pence said on a Jan. 15 appearance on CBS's “Face the Nation” that he’d spoken with Flynn and that Flynn categorically denied the allegations.
However, Flynn later said that he “doesn’t recall” what was discussed and that he “couldn’t be 100 percent” sure whether they’d talked about sanctions. Flynn has reportedly apologized to Pence.
The New York Times reported Sunday that a transcript of Flynn’s remarks, based on a U.S. wiretap of Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, exists.
Flynn’s discussion with Kislyak — and his denial to Pence — have ramped up pressure on Trump to cut ties with his national security adviser, with Democrats criticizing Trump for keeping Flynn in his position.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Monday accused Flynn of putting “Putin before America” and said he must be fired.
Trump’s policy director, Stephen Miller, declined to offer support for Flynn in a round of interviews on the Sunday morning talk shows, igniting speculation that Flynn might be on the way out.
But Conway sought to tamp down that speculation on Monday.
“Does he have the full confidence of the president? Yes he does,” she said.
Conway noted that Flynn is intimately involved in bilateral meetings Trump is conducting with foreign leaders this week. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the White House on Monday, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will arrive Wednesday.
“Behind the scenes they’re doing a number of different meetings where they’re talking about trade, security, the fact that Canada and the U.S. are very important neighbors to one another and will continue to be, and obviously the national security adviser is very important point person in those discussions,” Conway said.Pacific Islands Forum: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull promises to step up Australia's engagement
Updated
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has told a gathering of Pacific leaders he is delivering on his promise to "step up" Australia's engagement within the region.
To back up the promise, Mr Turnbull announced several new initiatives at the Pacific Islands Forum in Apia, Samoa.
A new Pacific Labour Scheme will allow 3,000 people from Nauru, Kiribati and Tuvalu to work in rural and regional parts of Australia for up to three years.
"This initiative builds on the very successful and long-standing Seasonal Worker Program, which itself will be streamlined to support Australian employers and Pacific Island workers to access the program more effectively," Mr Turnbull said.
In the area of security, Mr Turnbull announced Australia would fund a new aerial surveillance mission to crack down on illegal fishing.
"Flights are expected to commence before the end of the year and will also be able to assist in addressing issues such as transnational crime and people-smuggling," he said.
Mr Turnbull said forum leaders agreed to commence work on a new regional security declaration to strengthen cooperation among forum members.
"This will position the region better to address threats such as people-smuggling, transnational organised crime, cyber attacks and major disease outbreaks," he said.
Topics: world-politics, illegal-fishing, foreign-affairs, government-and-politics, pacific, samoa, australia, nauru
First posted29 JUL 3302
Continuing our popular series on significant episodes from human history, noted historian Sima Kalhana discusses the foundation of the Pilots Federation.
"The Pilots Federation was established in 2805 in response to a surge in private-starship ownership. It was created principally to allow pilots to share reliable trade-route information, and to provide them with a system of mutual protection against the rising scourge of interstellar piracy."
"At the time, independent pilots were generally mistrusted, the itinerant nature of their profession giving rise to perceptions of irresponsibility. The Pilots Federation's strict code of conduct put an end to this, and over time a galaxy-wide respect for its members emerged."
"As piracy became more prevalent, the Pilots Federation started issuing bounties on known pirate vessels. Some of those outside the organisation condemned the initiative as bloodthirsty, but few were able to argue with the impact it had on piracy. Shortly thereafter, the Pilots Federation introduced an official ranking system to reflect the number of combat victories achieved by each of its members. Pilots who accumulated the largest number of kills were awarded the title of Elite – a citation that became highly coveted among independent pilots."
"The Pilots Federation derives the bulk of its wealth from the GalNet data network. Originally a system of ship, bounty and star-chart data, it evolved into an interstellar aggregator of market information and galactic news. By 3300, the Pilots Federation was not only the dominant provider of this information, it was also the main manufacturer of the hardware and software serving this data. Today, Pilots Federation systems are fitted as standard on virtually all independent starships."
"In 3290 the Pilots Federation expanded its ranking system to encompass the fields of trade and exploration. In 3301 it expanded it again to include pilots who had distinguished themselves in the Close Quarters Combat championships."
"The Pilots Federation has always remained politically neutral, avowing that it exists to support pilots rather than nationalities or political factions. The organisation is based in the Shinrarta Dezhra system, which can be accessed only by invitation. Receiving an invitation is typically dependent on achieving a high rank in the Pilots Federation. This stipulation has contributed to perceptions of the organisation as secretive – a perception compounded by the fact that the Pilots Federation has very little direct interaction with the public."BEIJING • China will establish a new special economic zone in the heavily polluted province of Hebei to promote integration with the neighbouring cities of Beijing and Tianjin, the government has announced.
The Xiongan New Area will be of the same national significance as the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, which helped kick-start China's economic reforms in 1980, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing a circular released by the Chinese Cabinet.
The new special economic zone is located around 100km south-west of Beijing, close to the Hebei provincial capital of Shijiazhuang, and will house some of Beijing's relocated "non-capital functions".
Beijing, home to 22 million people, is trying to curb population |
through the ventilation system, while the monstrous staircases, cut to fit the dictator’s tiny feet, are notoriously difficult to walk up and down.
The daughter of a surgeon, Mira Anca Victoria Marculet Petrescu was born on March 20 1949, a year after the communists came to power in Romania. She was brought up in Sighisoara, a Transylvanian fortress town north-west of Bucharest. After graduating in 1973 from the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture in Bucharest, she joined the state design institute.
After her return to Romania Anca Petrescu became involved in politics, and in 2004 entered parliament on the lists of Romania’s opposition nationalist Greater Romania Party. The following year she stood for election as mayor of Bucharest but won less than four per cent of the vote.
When interviewed about her role in building the People’s Palace, Anca Petrescu tended to lapse into evasive, Soviet-style doublespeak, cutting off interviewers brusquely if they enquired about her relationship with Ceausescu. When asked by one western journalist how she justified the suffering Romanians went through as a result of her work, she retorted: “That is a question originating from someone who can only understand a system based on profit as motivation.” Her favourite novels, she revealed, were the “sick works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, because they fit my soul”.
Anca Petrescu, born March 20 1949, died October 30 2013Gimme Shelter is a walk through an angry author’s life, a sometimes schizophrenic timeline detailing an anger problem, and the soothing remedy of Tanner- a pit bull adopted in the author’s later life with a nature distinctly different from the writer’s. It is a memoir that is well-written and full of emotion. The characters portrayed are raw, imperfect, and in need of attention, just as real humans are. And the story propelling the narrative is one of heartbreak and recovery- a feel good, motivational tale of love and acceptance.
Interspersed with a detailed, and well-written, albeit sprawling autobiography, are family photos and advice gathered from around the net on a variety of subjects, most relating to care for dogs, specifically pit bulls. While the additions are interesting, they take away from the flow of the story, creating a mash-up of a story that feels somewhat like a motivational novella, a self-help book, and an engaging story of the bond between human and animal.
Unfortunately, the flow between these segments feels off, as the timeline of the writer’s exploits is somewhat irregular, with vague references to past events, and shallow descriptions of auxiliary characters who add little to the plot.
At the heart of this book is a strong journey between a man suffering to right the painful wrongs of the very beginnings of his childhood by reconnecting with an animal whose disposition is sweet and kind, despite trauma and abandonment. In many ways, the timelines of author and pet are very similar, and the work bridges many important questions about the bonds between man and animal, abuse and recovery, and family. Yet the story is saturated with other tidbits which should be distilled to provide an exciting snapshot of life, without information irrelevant to the story, and with a stronger focus on the acts of recovery that define us all.
Number of Pages: 236
Recommended For: a bedside table
Enjoy it With: steaming espresso, your favorite pet
For fans of: dogs, pets, motivational stories
Best place to buy it: http://www.amazon.com/Gimme-Shelter-Mr-Louis-Spirito/dp/1482330687
AdvertisementsCOLUMN ONE Israel sperm banks find quality is plummeting
Sperm quality is down everywhere, but Israel is worse off than other developed countries. Theories about why vary from cellphones in pockets to estrogen in milk or water.
And it's not just first-rate sperm that's in short supply. All of Israel's half a dozen or so sperm banks are scrambling to keep their liquid-nitrogen freezers stocked.
But finding such super sperm isn't as easy as it used to be. Only 1 in 100 donors makes the cut. A decade ago, it was 1 in 10.
Dr. Jacob Ronen is in the sperm business. Among other things, as head of Cryobank Israel, the country's largest private sperm bank, he guarantees that his stable of superior donors includes only tall, twentysomething ex-soldiers whose sperm has passed rigorous genetic testing.
JERUSALEM — The founder of the Tel Aviv-based specialty firm raves about his product with the same gusto distillers reserve for their top-notch scotch. He's particularly proud of his "premium" line. Sure, it costs a bit more, but it's targeted at a more discriminating client.
Simply put, the quality of Israeli sperm is falling at an alarming rate, and no one's sure exactly why.
Fertility is a major issue in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust genocide are fresh, and having children is an entrenched part of Judaism. There's also a political aspect, because birthrates among Arabs in Israel have at times been as much as double those of Jews, triggering a population race that some believe could one day affect who controls the land.
So the drop in the quality of sperm is raising some red flags, even though the cause remains a mystery. Speculative theories range from the mundane (carrying cellphones in front pockets) to the far-fetched (depleted uranium from exploded munitions). Some Israeli scientists are looking seriously at naturally occurring hormones, particularly estrogen, in Israel's water and milk and suggest that it's a mark of the country's aggressive dairy farming methods.
The white-coated director of the Hadassah Sperm Bank, Ruth Har-Nir, hunches over a microscope to view a freshly donated specimen and begins to methodically count each squiggly swimmer magnified on the slide.
She is checking the quality of a prospective donor, a young graduate student hoping to earn some extra cash. Though sophisticated lab machines could be used to analyze potency, Har-Nir says the old-fashioned method works best.
After a quick scan, she sits up straight and shakes her head. The number of spermatozoa darting around each tiny grid on the slide is two to four, well below the minimum six required, and nowhere near the 10 to 20 per grid that indicates the kind of healthy concentration the bank likes to see.
Also, rather than surging forward, some of the little guys flit left and right or just stall out, suggesting a weak motility.
"Under no circumstances can we accept sperm of this quality," she says. In the previous three weeks, her bank tested six candidates and rejected all. "This is the trend," she adds.
When Har-Nir helped launch the sperm bank in 1991, she says, it turned away about a third of the applicants for low quality. Using the same standard today, it would reject more than 80%. Though the bank relaxed its criteria, it still vetoes about two-thirds.
Har-Nir first noticed the problem a decade ago when she began rejecting more and more sperm from otherwise healthy young men. She shared her observations with local fertility doctors and their research has confirmed her suspicion.On the campaign trail last week in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton rolled out her plan to make college more affordable. She said: “College is supposed to help people achieve their dreams. But more and more, paying for college actually pushes those dreams further and further out of reach. That is a betrayal of everything college is supposed to represent.”
Clinton Doesn’t Realize How Colleges Spend Money
Like many liberal policies, it sounds nice. Who wouldn’t want college to be more affordable? But a closer look proves it’s anything but sound. On Friday, via his CyberDust app, billionaire investor and Shark Tank superstar Mark Cuban tore her plan apart calling it “backwards” and offering his own solutions which are, unsurprisingly, free-market based.
Cuban said:
[Hillary’s plan] stands a better chance of increasing the amount of money students owe than decreasing it. How? Just as easy money led to the real estate bubble a few years ago, the easier it is to borrow money for college the easier it is for colleges to raise tuition. Tuition keeps going up because no matter how high they raise it, students can still borrow more to pay for it.
In fact, Clinton’s plan is so inept in its ability to understand how college funding even operates, and so atrociously far from providing any adequate solutions to a complex problem, that it sounds like she was channeling the Simpson’s: “If something’s hard to do, it’s just not worth doing.”
Cuban continued with Clinton’s imprudent plan:
It doesn’t require any change in how a school receiving funds operates. They can still waste money. A lot of it. Competition for new students is fierce. So schools spend billions on perks they think will attract students and donors. They build new buildings, gyms, food courts, dorms, anything that they think provides drive up curb appeal to prospective students. To manage all of the above they hire more and more expensive administrative positions. All of which do nothing to improve education. Instead they just provide justification to increase tuition.If you meet a rich person who gave money to build a new building at your Alma mater, don’t thank them. Explain that the maintenance of that structure and the people who manage it are going to increase tuition for future generations.
He makes an excellent point. The average liberal arts professor’s salary is $83,623. A 2011 Washington Monthly piece reported: “A comprehensive study published by the Delta Cost Project in 2010 reported that between 1998 and 2008, America’s private colleges increased spending on instruction by 22 percent while increasing spending on administration and staff support by 36 percent.”
But the average cost of a liberal arts education is about $26,000 annually, with elite colleges demanding something closer to $50,000 annually. So Clinton wants to make college affordable without looking at how poorly colleges are spending their money, and thereby hiking up costs for the student? That’s ludicrous.
A College Degree Isn’t For Everyone
Part of Clinton’s plan is to hold colleges accountable for students not paying back their loans. But Cuban points out a college degree simply isn’t for everyone. “Not everyone should be a STEM student or business major. Not every company wants to hire only STEM and business graduates. There is a market for smart people with different perspectives. College has gotten so expensive and the amount of debt on students so crushing that schools are already seeing a dramatic decline in liberal arts students and in the number of liberal arts majors offered.”
Instead of motivating kids to payback their loans, Clinton’s plan might actually lead to the decline in liberal arts enrollment, since, as Cuban writes: “the risk of the university being on the hook to repay those students loans as required by the Clinton plan would be much higher.” In essence, “The Clinton plan could push liberal arts colleges and programs to the point of extinction.”
Clinton Can’t Do Math
Finally, Clinton, in a show of ignorance about of the free market that seemed previously impossible, says students will never have to pay more than 10 percent of what they make and all the loans will be forgiven after 20 years.
Cuban rips this logic to shreds and applies the same principle to the real estate market. “You can buy any house you want and you will never have to pay more than 10 percent of your income and after 20 years the mortgage will be forgiven. If it’s under water before then, the person who sold you the house will pick up part of the cost.” Would you spend more on your next house?
Mrs. Clinton: Your plan is an epic failure.
Free Market Solutions Will Make Colleges More Affordable
What will make college affordable? Cuban has a few ideas. It will be interesting to see if any GOP candidates mirror these free market-based suggestions:
The problems with college is how colleges are run. It’s not like things can’t change. I work with Paul Quinn in Dallas, between work study and Pell Grants the net cost to students is close to zero. How did they change the game? They started using open source textbooks so kids didn’t pay outrageous prices for books. They run their school like a business. They innovate. They see their cost model as a competitive advantage and it is. They are the model for the future.
Cuban’s most valuable piece of advice to a candidate trying to figure out how to make college more affordable:
“I would like to see a limit on the amount of private loans a parent or relative can take out or co-sign per year per student. I’m open to anything that reduces the amount of cash available to students to pay for school. That won’t reduce the number of students who will go to college. It will reduce the amount of money they have to pay to go as colleges reduce tuitions to be more competitive.”
The Clinton plan won’t work because it’s a progressive, liberal, quasi-socialist plan applied to something that should operate like a business within a free market. When the market is allowed to operate freely and competitively, it always works fluidly. When a business operating within that structure competes and innovates, everyone utilizing that business–whether it’s a college or a coffee shop–wins.Kelly defends Trump's call to widow: 'If you’ve never been in combat, you can’t even imagine how to make that call' 3:53 PM ET Thu, 19 Oct 2017 | 02:26
White House chief of staff John Kelly said Thursday that President Donald Trump had done the best he could in calling the widow of a slain U.S. Army sergeant killed in Niger earlier this month.
"If you've never been in combat, you can't even imagine how to make that call," Kelly told reporters in a surprise appearance at the daily White House press briefing.
Kelly, a Gold Star father, delivered an emotional defense of the president, who was criticized on Wednesday for his comments on a call with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, one of four Americans killed in Niger on Oct. 4.
"There's no perfect way to make that phone call," Kelly said, adding that when Trump asked him how to call the families of the four slain service members, "My first recommendation to him was that he not do it, because it's not the phone call that parents and family members are looking forward to."
Kelly described how Trump had asked him, "What do I say?" Kelly said he replied that there was nothing the president could say that would lighten the burden for the four families.
But to help Trump prepare for the calls, Kelly explained to the president what he himself had been told in a phone call after his son Robert Kelly was killed in combat in Afghanistan.
"He was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed," Kelly said, recalling what his best friend, Gen. Joe Dunford, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had told him. "He knew what he was getting into by joining that one percent. He knew what the possibilities were, because we were at war. And when he died he was surrounded by the best men on this earth."
Kelly added, "That's what the president tried to say to the four families."
Dunford's line about a soldier knowing what he was getting into is precisely what Trump tried to say to Myeshia Johnson in a phone call on Tuesday, first described publicly by Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., who had known the Johnson family for years and was sitting with Johnson when she received the call.
Wilson said she heard Trump tell Johnson that her late husband, "knew what he was signing up for.... but when it happens it hurts anyway," and that the president's call left Johnson in tears. Wilson was in a car with Johnson when the call came and only heard it after Johnson put it on speakerphone.
Nonetheless, Kelly sharply criticized Wilson for listening to the call. "It stuns me that a member of Congress would've listened in on that conversation," Kelly told reporters. "I thought at least that was sacred."
The duty of presidential condolence calls has been complicated in recent days by Trump's decision to compare the calls he's made with those of his predecessor, President Barack Obama. Earlier this week, Trump claimed that Obama had not called families of the fallen and that he had called the families of every soldier killed during his presidency.
Neither statement was true, and both Trump and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have walked back Trump's claims since then.
Kelly also appeared to refute Trump's insistence that Wilson had "totally fabricated" her account of the call, and that Trump had "proof" of that.
Asked by reporters Wednesday what he had talked to Johnson about, Trump quickly grew defensive.
"I didn't say what that congresswoman said; didn't say it all," Trump said at the White House. "I did not say what she said, and I'd like her to make the statement again because I did not say what she said. Had a very nice conversation with the woman, with the wife, who was — sounded like a lovely woman. Did not say what the congresswoman said, and most people aren't too surprised to hear that," Trump said.A student group at a public university in Utah has been told that it may not use Greek letters in its name. Why? Because the university believes that Greek letters will give the public the impression that it is a "party school" and, according to a lawyer for the university, the school has a "compelling interest" in avoiding that perception.
But, as Dixie State University student and founder of Phi Beta Pi Indigo Klabanoff points out, the school has already chosen to recognize "The Organization of Good Parties" and other student organizations that explicitly promote partying in their listings on the school's website.
So, there seems to be a little bit of a disconnect here.
As my colleague at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Susan Kruth, wrote in the waning days of summer:
For nearly a year, Dixie State University senior Indigo Klabanoff has been working to start a local sorority at her public Utah university that would be dedicated to providing services for the community and learning opportunities for its members. Dixie State administrators have flatly stated that Klabanoff's sorority, Phi Beta Pi, will not be approved as an officially recognized student group as long as it has Greek letters in its name. The university went so far as to retroactively amend its student club bylaws to prohibit such groups from recognition.
FIRE wrote to the university in August:
FIRE recognizes Dixie State University's desire not to be seen as a "party" school, and the principles by which it declines at this time to establish chapters of national fraternities and sororities. The maintenance of this image, however, must be balanced with its students' rights to freedom of expression and association in accordance with Dixie State's legal and moral obligations under the First Amendment. FIRE asks that Dixie State promptly reject this unconstitutional restriction on the rights of its students to form clubs using Greek letters and to assemble in exercise of their First Amendment right to freedom of association. Dixie State must amend the ICC bylaws in accordance with the First Amendment and, if Phi Beta Pi meets all requirements for recognition, it must recognize the organization.
Even after FIRE became involved in the case, Dixie State has still refused to budge and Indigo, a senior, is running out of time to make a university-recognized Phi Beta Pi a reality. The unrecognized group has a Women's Career Conference planned for next month and they would love to host the event with the school's support. For the conference, that support would mean a waiver of the $225 fee to reserve a room on campus.
Check out this video (also shot, edited and produced by FIRE's Susan Kruth) to learn more about Indigo's story:
Dixie State's creative approach to keeping Greek organizations off campus is not surprising to those of us who work in student rights. Earlier this year, FIRE became involved at Trinity College in Connecticut after the administration instituted a new social code that requires opposite sex membership quotas for all campus groups and prohibits selective membership. Since most national fraternities and sororities are single-sex by charter and selective by nature, this effectively expels such organizations from campus. Trinity's approach is one of the sneakier ways I've seen a college to try to placate former-Greek donors but at the same time undo the college's Greek system. In contrast, Dixie State's war on an entire ancient alphabet is remarkably direct.
As FIRE's Peter Bonilla said in a press release today:Wasilla City Councilman, Republican State House candidate (and former candidate for Alaska Lt. Governor in 2010), Mark Ewing keeps talking. And then trying to untalk. And then talking again. And it's just not good.
In a recent debate at the Greater Wasilla Chamber of Commerce candidates forum, Ewing squared off with his Republican primary opponent. All started predictably with both candidates in favor of a controversial coal mine, a controversial copper mine, and another boondoggle bridge to almost nowhere.
But soon Mr. Ewing distinguished himself in the Rock 'em Sock 'em robot battle of conservative Mat-Su Valley Republicans. After talking about cutting the operating budget, he cited education as one of the problems.
"We are spending millions and millions of dollars educating children that have a hard time making their wheelchair move and, I'm sorry, but you've got to say, 'no' somewhere. We need to educate our children, but there are certain individuals that are just not going to benefit from an education."
It's worth remembering that another Wasilla Republican whom you may have heard of happens to have a special needs child in the district. Trigg Palin is not in a wheelchair, so we don't know for certain if he is one of those whom Mr. Ewing feels isn't worth educating.
After his comment in the debate was published in The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, he received a lot of email. He doubled down on a local right wing radio show stating:
"Actually, you know, that was a response that isn't politically correct. But I'm going to use a quote from Jack Nicholson and that is,'most people can't handle the truth.'"
That didn't work.
Then he went on to insinuate in Facebook posts (now deleted) that he'd been misquoted by The Frontiersman, prompting the paper to strike back with a scathing editorial entitled "Can You Handle the Truth?"
"Ewing, in comments he made Friday on talk radio, would have you believe that what he said was that the children 'can't even figure out how to make their wheelchair work.' Truth is, he did not say that. The audio of the debate proves our reporting was correct and Ewing is now backpedaling, trying to rewrite the record. How his revision makes the quote any better we will leave to Ewing to explain."
A comment on the op-ed, appearing to be from Ewing, stated that he'd "checked the Wasilla Chamber website and realized the words in the paper were mine and I should have made that point clear and apologized to the Frontiersman... and also to the public. It was a poor decision on my part to not remember what I said used to describe children with special needs. I know now that what I meant to say and what I said were completely different and after reading comments from a broad parental base that all children can learn regardless of their handicap I am not against teaching special needs children and clearly not trying to hurt any students or parents that have a child in that situation. This election is not worth my creditably or using a bone headed remarks that may hurt others..." (sic)
If he has come out of this with even some of his "creditably" intact, it would still seem that this mega-gaffe and backpedaling fits a continuing pattern of "gaffe and erase."
Since his "wheelchair moment," we've obtained screen captures of other tidbits from Mr. Ewing's Facebook wall that have since been removed.
He not only took a shot at the physically and/or developmentally disabled, but also undocumented immigrants, suggesting we "seal the border with our troops, and shoot to kill."
And Muslims.
This one was copied and pasted from a viral right-wing email, debunked by Snopes as having been written by Jeff Foxworthy. The last item on the list, 11) "You find this offensive, or racist and you don't forward it... You may be a Muslim," was left off. There's no bigotry like plagiarized bigotry.
And finally, he also had some strong words for the Alaska Republican Party, its current Chair Randy Ruedrich, and his opponent in the primary, fellow Wasilla conservative Lynn Gattis whom he jabbed repeatedly, hitting part-time Wasilla resident Sarah Palin squarely in the eye -- and shooting himself in the foot.When longtime DC comics artist and writer Sean Murphy announced that he would be penning and illustrating a new eight-issue Batman series, he was vague on specifics about the story he had in mind, but described it as being his answer to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight. Turns out, he wasn’t kidding.
Meant to be read as a standalone story separate from DC’s main continuity, Batman: White Knight imagines a Gotham City much more rooted in our reality than that of comic books. In this Gotham, it isn’t just lunatics in tights that have citizens on edge—there are concerns about income inequality and the role that institutionalized racism plays in the city’s politics.
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Supervillains are still very much a concern weighing on Gotham’s mind, but rather than casting them as simple problems that Batman will eventually solve, Batman: White Knight sees them all as consequences of Batman’s hero work. And if Batman is the source of Gotham’s problems, there’s only one person suited to deal with him: the Joker.
In an interview with Wired, Murphy explained how his take on the Joker is a far cry from the deranged murderer we know him to be traditionally; in fact, he’s actually quite sane. This Joker, Murphy said, is more of a gregarious politician seeking to stamp out a disease plaguing his city.
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“My main goal was to undo the comic tropes while changing Gotham from a comic book city into a real city. A city dealing with everything from Black Lives Matter to the growing wage gap,” Murphy said. “Rather than write a comic about the wage gap, I gave those ideas to the Joker, who leads a kind of media war against Gotham’s elite by winning people over with his potent observations and rhetoric.”
Batman: White Knight will see a cured Joker teaming up with Harley to make the case to the people of Gotham that ultimately, it’s Batman’s very existence that’s caused so many villains to terrorize their city. What does all of the good that Batman’s vigilantism entails mean if he’s the reason that petty thugs make the jump up to full-time super villains?
We’ll all find out when Batman: White Knight hits shelves on October 4.Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are coughing up a bit of cash for marriage equality.
According to the Associated Press, Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, and Ballmer, the company's CEO, have each written $100,000 checks to Washington United for Marriage, a same-sex marriage advocacy group based in Seattle.
In February, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire signed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in the state, and the law was to go into effect on June 7. But that was put in hold last month when opponents gathered enough signatures to put the the bill up for referendum in the November general election.
According to its website, Washington United for Marriage "is a coalition of organizations, congregations, unions, and businesses working together to defend civil marriage for loving, committed same-sex couples."
A Microsoft spokesperson told The Huffington Post that the company doesn't comment on political contributions made by employees, including the CEO.
"Those are personal decisions and we respect them as such," the spokesperson said.
Gates and Ballmer aren't the only high-profile members of the technology community to make significant contributions for marriage equality. Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and the editor-in-chief of the New Republic, promised Mainers United for Marriage that if the campaign raised more than $100,000, he and his now husband, Sean Eldridge, would match the donation, according to the Bangor Daily News. Mainers United for Marriage announced last month that it had raised more than $120,000.
For its part, Microsoft endorsed legislation for marriage equality for same-sex couples in January, writing on the official company blog that "passing this bill would be good for our business and good for the state’s economy."
Microsoft joins a number of technology companies that have come out in support of marriage equality, including Amazon, Apple and Google.Play 00:27 Play 00:27 'I have to keep dealing with all these things' - Dhoni
India ODI captain MS Dhoni has expressed indignation over how his name keeps popping up in controversies around Indian cricket. As captain of Chennai Super Kings, he was questioned during investigations around establishing whether Gurunath Meiyappan was a team official or if he was just being enthusiastic about cricket.
During court hearings, a prosecution lawyer had accused Dhoni of not being entirely honest with the investigators. The Supreme Court verdict on January 22 remained silent on any player involvement, but it established Gurunath as a team official involved in illegal betting.
Dhoni has never spoken about any controversy, but a day before India's crucial ODI against Australia in Sydney - a match they need to win or tie to keep reasonable their requirement in the last game against England if they are to make the final of the triangular series - Dhoni was asked if he was at least happy that the court verdict had put an end to the speculation. Dhoni didn't say much here either, choosing to reply rhetorically.
"I know one thing, irrespective of what is there, when it comes to Indian cricket, my name keeps popping up," Dhoni said. "This [issue] has been settled, [but] something new will pop up. It keeps popping up. I am quite used to it. If there is nothing, some speculative story comes up, big or small. I have to keep dealing with all these things. It is [just] the end of one story, something else may start in a couple of days' time, and you can monitor it."
Dhoni did have to deal with slanderous stories during the period. He even sued a news channel in March last year for defamation. Some of the reporting at that time was said to be based on information from interviews between Tamil Nadu police and an alleged bookie. Ever since he became the captain, Dhoni has been distrustful of news coverage in India, and has never sought to clear his name in any of the controversies he says are cooked up.
Even when Dhoni retired abruptly from Test cricket, the only official explanation was these words in the BCCI press release: "citing the strain of playing all formats of cricket". Coming so close to the World Cup, in the middle of a series, the retirement decision did draw speculation of all sorts all around, but Dhoni has refused to discuss it since.
Sidharth Monga is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.Chinese ‘Smart economy’ network NEO has announced it will host its own DevCon in 2018 in conjunction with Microsoft.
Billed as “China’s first dev competition,” the event will feature support from several other emerging Blockchain entities including Onchain and Elastos.
Final entrants will be eligible to win prizes of up to $150,000 from a bounty pool totaling almost $500,000.
Neo DevCon. We are waiting for you!? pic.twitter.com/xfqCKBGLDn — NEO Smart Economy (@NEO_Blockchain) November 20, 2017
“Contestants are encouraged to deliver excellent apps with the support of NEO Blockchain and Microsoft’s development environment and tools. Such efforts being made, we are one step closer to a mightier Blockchain developer ecosystem,” an accompanying blog post explains.
The announcement and Microsoft partnership will be music to the ears of an investment community which has seen the value of NEO tokens slip following China’s multifaceted ban and Bitcoin’s rapid rise to over $8,000.
Prices hit over $45 for the second time in the token’s history over the weekend, having since settled around the $36 mark.
“Experts from Microsoft China” along with NEO founder Da Hongfei and others will judge entries from dev teams, while a “live online night course” Dec. 1 will act as a primer.Claude Puel said Southampton’s ambitions in the EFL Cup were “not finished” after reaching their first major final for 14 years with a dramatic victory over Liverpool.
Shane Long struck an injury-time winner to secure a 1-0 win for Southampton at Anfield and a 2-0 semi-final triumph on aggregate. The Liverpool manager, Jürgen Klopp, insisted his team should have had a penalty for handball by the match-winner and that wasteful finishing, but not the overall performance, was responsible for a second consecutive damaging home defeat. “Long’s handball was clear,” said Klopp, who admitted there was no foul on Divock Origi inside the area moments before Southampton broke for the winner. “I don’t want to make excuses but it is really hard to accept these things week by week by week.
Shane Long drives superb Southampton past Liverpool into EFL Cup final Read more
“A big game against Manchester United and they are two or three yards offside [before Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s equaliser] and nobody speaks about it. Is it my job to get a fine by speaking about these things? The handball was obvious.”
Southampton’s victory maintained their impressive record of beating Premier League teams without conceding a goal en route to Wembley. Manchester United or Hull City await in next month’s final but Puel was adamant the club would not be satisfied with a day out at the national stadium.
“It is fantastic. I am happy for all the squad because they have worked so hard since the beginning of the season and with games every three days it has been very difficult,” said Puel. “They have played really well at times without reward and so it is fantastic to win this game and reach Wembley. I am happy for the staff, the players and the fans, who were fantastic. It is a great reward but it is not finished. It is exciting and fantastic to go to Wembley but we are not going just to participate, it is important we win the final.
“It will be a big, important game for the club. Not just because it is a final but because it is a chance to qualify for Europe again. It is important for this club to continue improving and it would be good to know quickly it has the opportunity to play in Europe again. The experience of this season would be important.”
The Southampton manager gave Jack Stephens only his sixth appearance for the club in the heart of defence after the usual captain, Virgil van Dijk, was ruled out through injury, and the England Under-21 international excelled.
“Jack had a very good game,” added Puel. “It was difficult because he has not had a lot of experience but he played with good spirit, he was calm and he looked like a mature, experienced player. It was interesting to see him play for the under-21s and good to put him in the team because it is important for Southampton to improve these players. It is important for all the trainers at the academy, congratulations to them.”
The Southampton goalkeeper Fraser Forster produced a remarkable save to claw the ball off his goal-line having fumbled Emre Can’s shot. He admitted: “The footballing gods were with me tonight. Just that little bit of luck we needed. We’ll take that and see what happens in the final.”BERKELEY, Calif (Reuters) - A University of California, Berkeley student who was shot in a campus computer lab not far from the scene of anti-Wall Street protests has died of his injuries, the university said on Wednesday.
Christopher Nathen Elliot Travis, 32, died late on Tuesday afternoon, hours after the shooting at the Haas School of Business, university spokesman Dan Mogulof said.
University police say there is no indication that the incident was related to a day of rallies Berkeley linked to anti-Wall Street protests.
“There is no information at this point in the investigation suggesting that this is anything other than an isolated incident,” Mogulof said.
Mogulof said Travis was an undergraduate transfer student who started classes at Berkeley in the fall and that family members had been told of his death. He said he did not know where Travis had transferred from.
University police chief Mitchell Celaya told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday that officers responding to a call of a man with a gun in the lab shot the suspect when he pulled the weapon from his backpack and displayed it in a threatening manner.
Lyle Nevels, chief information officer for the Haas School of Business, has told Reuters that the incident began when a staff member told him he had seen a young man pull a gun from his backpack in an elevator.
Nevels said he went to look for the man and saw him speaking to people in the computer lab.
Nevels called police and said responding officers confronted the man in the lab. He said he heard three or four shots after they told him to drop his weapon.
“I heard a scuffle, I saw the police say ‘Drop your gun’, and then I heard shots,” Nevels said.Want to send your three pound pet rock into space? It’ll cost you at least $17,000 on one of SpaceX’s rockets. The other bad news is that you’ll probably have to wait for months, or even years, before a three-pound space opens up on a ship. And when it finally does, the launch date could be pushed back even further for business, weather or technical reasons.
Startup space cargo company FireFly isn’t any cheaper than SpaceX, though the $9,000 or $10,000 it will charge per pound of cargo is still more reasonable than if the government were to launch your pet rock. However, what it can offer is a trip to space inexpensive enough for a one or a few companies to book an entire rocket. Last week FireFly revealed Alpha, its first rocket, which can carry up to 882 pounds of cargo at a time. Reserving the entire rocket costs $8 or 9 million: that’s 10 times less than SpaceX’s $85 million Falcon Heavy, which can carry more than 14,000 pounds.
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“Until now, there existed virtually no dedicated launcher capacity in the small satellite industry to deliver their respective payloads to orbit,” co-founder Michael Blum said in a statement.
FireFly will focus on launching constellations of small satellites, much like the 28 13-pound satellites Planet Labs launched in January. The number of small satellites in space is rising dramatically because companies can use them to gather images and other Earth-related data for a fraction of the cost of a traditional large satellite. Google and Facebook have also become interested in |
three forced fumbles and two fumble recoveries with the Yellow Jackets. Following his time at Georgia Tech, he had stints with the Seattle Seahawks, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Arizona Cardinals.Thought without symbols — life without language — it’s a cognitive reality that is virtually impossible for most modern humans to fathom. For the vast majority of us, our thought processes have been profoundly shaped by the introjection of language into our cognitive worlds, the taking on board of a massive intellectual prosthesis, the collective product of countless generations. Human thought, for the majority, is not simply the individual outcome of our evolved neural architecture, but also the result of our borrowing of the immense symbolic and intellectual resources available in language. What would human thought be like without language?
The question of the relationship between language and ‘mind’ (a word I hate using), or between symbolic resources and cognitive abilities (there, that’s equally vague!), is philosophically intriguing, but hard to address in anything other than the hypothetical.
Herodotus tells the story of the Pharoah Psammetichus (Psamtik I), who allegedly gave two newborn children to a shepherd to raise without language, taking care of them and paying close attention to their first words. Psammethicus hoped to learn which language was the oldest, which one infant allegedly revealed by calling for ‘bekos,’ the Phrygian word for ‘bread.’ In fact, most historically recorded cases of feral children, however, suggest that they do not develop any language ability at all, perhaps even failing to develop symbolic abilities (or maybe not enough researchers speak Phrygian).
We might try to imagine thinking without language, but, of course, we’d be doing that with language itself. In my own work, I’m interested in thought — or maybe I should say perception and action — that is only partially rendered into language (high speed, perceptually-driven decision making and action in sports). But what would thought be like for those without language?
The rare case of individuals without language offers some potential window in on life across the intellectual Rubicon, if we had developed mentally without immersing ourselves in the shared symbols and communicative reality of language. Although we tend to think that only those who are profoundly intellectually disabled, criminally neglected or raised by non-humans fail to learn language, in fact, adolescents and adults without language may not be as rare as we think. Author Susan Schaller has written about the case of a profoundly deaf Mexican immigrant who grew up in a house with hearing parents who could not teach him sign language in her book, Man without Words.
The website, Works and Conversations, has a discussion of Schaller’s story, how she became interested in sign language through a fluke accident, but especially her work with Ildefonso, who had grown up without learning sign language or any other form of communication. The piece, Leap of Faith, the Story of a Contemporary Miracle, was written by Richard Whittaker in 2009 (although I only recently came across it). It’s a fascinating interview, and, although I may disagree with Schaller in certain ways, I think her story of trying to teach Ildefonso, not merely sign language, but the symbolic process itself, is absolutely fascinating.
Schaller meets Ildefonso
In the interview, Schaller describes how she originally became fascinated with sign language, when she happened into the very first lectures held in sign language by Lou Fant in 1972 in a course called ‘Visual Poetry.’ Hit by a catering truck near the end of high school, Schaller had been excused from her classes so she took the opportunity to sneak into college classes that sounded interesting at Cal State Northridge. She was so moved by what she saw that she wound up joining a volunteer signing drama group even though, as she puts it, she knew three signs when she signed up.
If you want more of Schaller’s story, I suggest you go to the original interview, or better yet, her book, but Schaller eventually wound up quite committed to signing. Asked to work as a sign interpreter, Schaller found herself in a class for ‘Reading skills’ that was little more than a warehouse for all the deaf students, no matter what their educational needs. In the midst of a swarm of signing and movement, she spotted an individual, clearly deaf, who was also clearly unable to sign:
I went to the door to walk out and was actually turning the handle to leave, when I see this man who looked so frightened. He was holding himself as if he were wearing a straightjacket. He was backed up in a corner, protecting himself. I saw that he was studying mouths, he was studying people. Even though he was frightened, he was still watching: what is happening, what is happening?
She observed as another aide, one who couldn’t sign very well, tried to reach the frightened man. When the other assistant gave up, Schaller tried to engage the man and his true situation started to dawn on her:
I walked up to him and signed, “Hello. My name is Susan.” He tried to copy that and did a sloppy rendition of “Hello, my name is Susan.” Obviously he didn’t know what he was doing. It wasn’t language. And I was shocked. He looked Mayan and I thought, well, if he knew Mexican sign language, he wouldn’t try to copy. That’s not a normal thing to do, even if you don’t know the language. I couldn’t walk away. I slowly figured out that this man had no language. As I said, I could see that he was very intelligent. I could see he was trying very hard. I was twenty-two years old. I had no idea of what I was doing. I was faced with how to communicate the idea of language to someone without language.
The man she would call, ‘Ildefonso,’ had figured out how to survive, in part by simply copying those around him, but he had no idea what language was. Schaller found that he observed people’s lips and mouth moving, unaware that they were making sound, unaware that there was sound, trying to figure out what was happening from the movements of the mouths. She felt that he was frustrated because he thought everyone else could figure things out from looking at each others’ moving mouths.
One problem for Schaller’s efforts was that Ildefonso’s survival strategy, imitation, actually got in the way of him learning how to sign because it short-circuited the possibility of conversation. As she puts it, Ildefonso acted as if he had a kind of visual echolalia (we sometimes call it ‘echopraxia’), simply copying the actions he saw:
He’d just try to form signs and copy what I was doing. But his facial expression was always, is this what I’m supposed to do? That question was on his face all of the time. It was terribly frustrating. It went on hour after hour, for days and days and days. Then I had an idea. If I died tonight, I may have had only one truly brilliant thought in my life. What was it that attracted me to this man? His intelligence and his studiousness, the fact he was still trying to figure things out-those two things. I decided to stop talking to him. Instead, I taught an invisible student. I set up a chair, and I started being the teacher to an invisible student in an empty chair. Then I became the student. I would get into the other chair and the student would answer the teacher. I did this over and over and over. And I ignored him. I stopped looking at him.
Even with the ‘brilliant idea,’ the road ahead was hard, and Schaller talks about wondering when one of them was going to give up. Finally, they had a breakthrough moment which I want to quote at length because it really is a remarkable story (I got goosebumps from reading it):
What happened is that I saw a movement. I stopped. I was talking to an empty chair, but out of my peripheral vision I saw something move. I look at Ildefonso and he had just become rigid! He actually sat up in his chair and became rigid. His hands were flat on the table and his eyes were wide. His facial expression was different from any I’d seen. It was just wide with amazement! And then he started-it was the most emotional moment with another human being, I think, in my life so that even now, after all these years, I’m choking up [pauses]-he started pointing to everything in the room, and this is amazing to me! I’ve thought about this for years. It’s not having language that separates us from other animals, it’s because we love it! All of a sudden, this twenty-seven-year-old man-who, of course, had seen a wall and a door and a window before-started pointing to everything. He pointed to the table. He wanted me to sign table. He wanted the symbol. He wanted the name for table. And he wanted the symbol, the sign, for window. The amazing thing is that the look on his face was as if he had never seen a window before. The window became a different thing with a symbol attached to it. [emphasis added, GD] But it’s not just a symbol. It’s a shared symbol. He can say “window” to someone else tomorrow who he hasn’t even met yet! And they will know what a window is. There’s something magical that happens between humans and symbols and the sharing of symbols. That was his first “Aha!” He just went crazy for a few seconds, pointing to everything in the room and signing whatever I signed. Then he collapsed and started crying, and I don’t mean just a few tears. He cradled his head in his arms on the table and the table was shaking loudly from his sobbing. Of course, I don’t know what was in his head, but I’m just guessing he saw what he had missed for twenty-seven years.
Schaller argues that this is the ‘first breakthrough about what language is’: “Oh, everything has a name!” (from her account).
The account is powerful and moving, I find, and Schaller says that it changed both of their lives. For Ildefonso, he didn’t just learn that ‘things have names’ (at least in a given linguistic community), he simultaneously changed the way he thought and joined a community of people who can think in ways that are intimately tied to each other. The breakthrough was both internal and external, simultaneously cognitive and social.
For Schaller, the experience stuck with her, and she eventually sought out work on language-less adults. She couldn’t find anything, so she sent a letter to Oliver Sachs, who much eventually undergo apotheosis as the patron saint of the quirky and well-written account of psychopathology and neurological injury. Sachs wanted to meet her and told her, ‘You must write this down! In DETAIL!’ Sachs eventually wrote the preface to her book about Ildefonso.
The plight of the language-less
How many people are language-less? I have no idea, but Schaller does some hypothetical estimates that I found pretty shocking:
The first book is about one languageless person I met. But many people have treated him as a freak, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. And I knew this happens all the time. About 10% of the population in the world, on average, is born with some sort of hearing impairment. Out of that ten percent, one percent is profoundly deaf. That’s a basic statistic, but the really sad statistic is that 92% of all profoundly deaf people are born to hearing parents. Only 8% are lucky enough to be born to signing parents. So they have no handicap!
I doubt very much that her last point is accurate, but the key to this paragraph is to think about the numbers. Even if you start adjusting down the numbers she’s using — for example, suggesting that more than 8% of profoundly deaf children have parents who might be willing to learn sign language — you still have a very significant irreducible number of people who are likely to be language-less substantially into adolescence or beyond. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of this field, but I’d be fascinated to hear from someone who works in the area, for instance, with recently immigrated deaf individuals coming from developing countries where they might not have sign language communities.
In the absence of a sign-supporting community, deaf individuals likely can only develop rudimentary sign systems if they’re isolated from other deaf people; since no one else will be using the deaf person’s signs as a first language, it will likely have a reduced grammar and simple structure, at best. That is, if anyone is willing to sign to the unfortunate isolated individual at all – the tragic and disturbing fact is, as Schaller highlights, some groups are ideological opposed to making concessions, demanding that deaf individuals try to adapt to an unmoved (and unmoving) hearing population.
There are examples of communities of deaf people spontaneously inventing new sign languages, but the case of a profoundly deaf individual in a hearing community, isolated from other individuals struggling to communicate visually, would offer little opportunity for this kind of innovation (see, for example, the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language, discussed here and here). Deprived of communication and symbolic interaction, it’s unclear how a personal language could really develop the stability or systematicity it would need to become a true language (Wittgenstein, for example, says that the idea of a private language is incoherent).
What is it like to live without language? Unfortunately, Ildefonso doesn’t help us too much with that:
It’s another frustration that Ildefonso doesn’t want to talk about it. For him, that was the dark time. Whenever I ask him, and I’ve asked him many, many times over the years, he always starts out with the visual representation of an imbecile: his mouth drops, his lower lip drops, and he looks stupid. He does something nonsensical with his hands like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” He always goes back to “I was stupid.” It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him, no, you weren’t exposed to language and… The closest I’ve ever gotten is he’ll say, “Why does anyone want to know about this? This is the bad time.” What he wants to talk about is learning language.
Schaller is also passionate about the human rights of the deaf, and deeply critical of the movement to mainstream deaf children to the detriment of sign language learning. For example, the use of cochlear implants with deaf children can be seen as directly undermining the possibility that deaf kids will find a place in a signing community although it increases their chances of getting by in the majority hearing community. With the implants, children’s language development can be significantly delayed from what it would be with sign; it’s particularly ironic because kids can learn to sign quicker and earlier than they can learn to speak.
The use of cochlear implants and speech-only teaching methods, forcing children to, as much as possible, learn to lip read or build upon whatever artificially-enhanced hearing they might be able to get, is especially controversial in the deaf community. I had an MAA (Master of Applied Anthropology) student who did fascinating research on the deaf community in Australia, and she found that many members felt that their community was dying at the hands of these technologies and teaching ideologies (this is all particularly ironic because my home university, Macquarie, is a centre for research on cochlear implants).
In fact, I can see both sides of this argument although I favour the use of sign language; I worked as a teaching aide in a school for the deaf, and once upon a time, could hold my own in sign. For parents of deaf children, however, it must seem terrifying to have a child who will fundamentally live in a different community, within a deaf subculture, perhaps with diminished opportunities, justifying virtually any intervention. Schaller calls these interventions human rights violations: ‘What I see more and more is that the hearing world has completely medicalized this situation [being deaf]. I’m not saying parents are bad, but they are being influenced by the “experts,” and they are blind.’
In fact, she’s right on a number of levels, and fear of another person’s marginalization never justifies attempting to eradicate what makes them different: the same logic can lead to repression of children’s non-normal sexuality, suppression of minority languages or cultures and a host of other ‘interventions’ that just seek to make people ‘normal’ for their own good. But before I start down this road (and in to material I teach in my human rights classes), I want to get back to the question of cognition.
The role of language in cognition
There’s really no way to discuss the long and complicated philosophical tradition of discussing the relation between language and cognition without being glib and superficial, but, happily, I’m pretty adept at glib and superficial, so that won’t stop us. A number of philosophers, including Michael Dummet, have offered ‘strong’ theories of language’s role in thought. Their ‘language-first’ approaches argue to varying degrees that certain kinds of thought, or even reflective thought as a whole, is only possible once a community-wide practice of communication through language occurs. We can find strong and weak variants in the work of theorists like William Calvin, Merlin Donald and Daniel Dennett.
Language-first models predict that thought is more or less limited by the absence of language, the strongest suggesting that most of thought would be disrupted, and posit a definitive break in the forms of cognition available once human had produced language. The language-first approach also generally suggests that cognitive capacities vary with one’s language ability, meaning that not all linguistic communities likely have the same cognitive capacities. One noteworthy example is work on the Pirahã, a Brazilian Native American group whose language lacks numbers according to many researchers (see Frank et al. 2008, or a popular press version at The Independent or see the collection of Pirahã-related links at Language Log).
In contrast, opposing ‘thought-first’ arguments suggest that language expresses thought rather than being a precondition for thought occurring. For example, Jerry Fodor has argued that a prior ‘language-of-thought,’ sometimes referred to as ‘mentalese,’ underlies language ability, and partially explains similarities among languages. The thought-first model, however, can develop a problem of infinite regress, as it’s unclear how the ‘language-of-thought’ itself arises except from a prior set of symbols.
In the corner of the ‘thought-first’ argument, we could site a range of empirical evidence, such as the work of psychologists Susan Hespos and Elizabeth Spelke. Hespos and Spelke (2004), for example, found that five-month-old infants born to English-speaking parents perceived object relations concepts that were not highlighted in English, and that their parents did not see as perceptually salient (a relationship of ‘tight-’ and ‘loose-fitting’ that their research had shown to be salient to Korean speakers, whose language does highlight this distinction). That is, the infants in the English-language environment seemed to develop a pre-linguistic concept that was not supported by their first language, and thus the distinction atrophied and disappeared from their perceptions (much as sounds that are not featured in one’s language become less perceptually vivid after six months of age, eventually becoming hard to perceive).
In anthropology, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf are frequently credited with bringing into sharp focus the role of language in shaping perception and cognition, although they arguably offered a less deterministic account of the relationship than some language-first philosophers (see our posts, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of? and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was right… about adults, for more of a discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Their approach suggests that language biases perception, affecting how people are capable of perceiving, making some ideas or even qualities of the phenomenal world, more or less difficult to perceive. Coupled with work like that of Hespos and Spelke, the work on language biasing perception suggests that pre-linguistic perception is actually more attuned to sensory discrimination that may later disappear if not buttressed by language; that is, the pre-linguistic conceptual world is perhaps more attuned to certain gradations, less likely to overlook intermediate or uncategorized sensations.
When we actually look at the evidence in Schaller’s account, we find that neither a ‘language-first’ nor a ‘thought-first’ model seems to capture the inconsistency of Ildefonso’s conceptual capacities. Schaller suggests that his ‘brain was kept alive with problem solving,’ figuring out how to get money, whether by begging or working, find food and shelter, and interact with people who were unable to communicate with him.
Ironically, he seemed to understand certain sorts of symbolic processes, such as performative identity. Schaller says he apparently understood, for example, ‘macho behavior’ because he ‘could see that.’ But other sorts of processes – she says things Ildefonso ‘couldn’t see’ – they remained a mystery; she offers ‘history’ and immigration patrols in the US as two examples. In fact, of course, the division is not really visible-invisible (after all, border police are quite visible when they arrest a person), nor is it symbolic-non-symbolic (macho behaviour, after all, is a symbolically rich performance). Rather, Ildefonso’s difficulties and his successful abilities suggest to me that our own category of ‘symbol’ glosses cognitive capacities that are not all identically difficult, nor are they all dependent upon either shared symbol or language. That is, our concept of ‘symbol’ may, in fact, blind us to the very divisions that Ildefonso’s disability sketches out; not all symbols are equally symbolic, we might say. The degree of arbitrariness, for example, or the hierarchical nature of some symbols — premised on other symbols — might make them particularly opaque to the language-less.
For example, Schaller had the hardest time communicating to Ildefonso the concept of ‘idea’ itself. She discusses her attempt to mime ‘having an idea’:
How could a languageless man have any idea of what is happening in the head? But I was just hoping that there were enough cultural clues, and he was an observant man. I was grasping at straws. So I would mime having this idea in my head with my fists close to my head and then I would throw it out at your head, as my hands opened. Then I’d become the student and I’d catch it [laughs] and put it in my head. I did as many variations as I could, again, over and over-hours, days, hours, days. Frustrating-the most frustrating task in my life! I’d look at him every once in a while and sometimes he looked tired, sometimes he looked frustrated, sometimes he looked as if I were crazy.
Of course, from some perspectives, she was crazy. She was miming a particularly obtuse embedded metaphor in English usage: that ideas are a substance in the head that can pop into existence and then be passed to other people’s heads, which is really experienced in the other person as an idea. On so many levels, the ‘idea-is-an-object-in-head-can-be-passed-to-another-head’ is pretty absurd, yet she was trying to use it to get a languageless man to understand the very possibility of language.
If it doesn’t sound absurd to you, think about it for a second; the very fact that Schaller was struggling so hard to get Ildefonso to perceive this demonstrates how long the chain of metaphoric assumptions is to get to this cultural common sense. Schaller wasn’t just asking Ildefonso to learn a name for a thing, she was asking him to recognize he had ‘ideas,’ conceive of ideas as things, locate ideas in his head, understand that ideas were different from every other kind of thing (popping into existence, for example), imagine that ideas could be thrown… You get the ‘idea.’ Damn weird thing, language. Makes you think all kind o’ crazy things.
Even after language, however, some ways of seeing the world were difficult to grasp. Schaller catches up with Ildefonso much later, visiting him as he’s working as a gardener, and likes to tease him by asking questions about when things happened.
However, there are a few things he doesn’t think differently about. I try to meet him once a year and I always ask him, “When was the last time we saw each other?” I ask him a “when” question because it tickles me. Time was the hardest thing for him to learn. And he always prefers to say “the winter season” or “the Christmas time.” He wants to point to a season or to a holiday. It’s not a cognitive problem. To this day, he thinks it’s weird that we count time the way we do. He can do it, but he doesn’t like it. Think about it. For twenty-seven years, he followed the sun. He followed cows. He followed the seasons. It’s that rain-time of the year.
As the interviewer points out, many languages do not treat time as an abstract, spatialized, undifferentiated flow but highlight differentiation, seasonality and sequence. Some conceptualize time as necessarily sequential (today is not like tomorrow) or as inherently differentiated (summer is fundamentally not like winter). Time is a classic example discussed by Whorf (1956) to highlight the links between culture, language and perception, and even though his account of time has been criticized on a number of grounds, anthropologists still tend to agree that understandings of time can differ, and that Western treatment of time as a kind of flow through undifferentiated, measurable durations is just one version or inflection of the sense of time with its own distinctive emphases.
My own feeling, and I have not worked with a population that has a non-Western sense of time, is that it’s likely a softer form of the Whorfian argument, that language and culture affect the perceptual qualities of different sensory channels to varying degrees (perhaps more in some phenomenal qualities than in others) is the most defensible (and arguably, this is what Whorf was arguing all along). Time, for example, may be difficult to perceive in certain ways if you are not culturally trained to habitually conducting yourself in relation to time appropriately: certainly, there is deep cultural difference in the degree to which people orient themselves by the clock, and varying emphases that societies place on recurrence or irreversibility of time. This isn’t to say that language is a perceptual world, but rather than languages can induce certain perceptual biases that may be more or less difficult to overcome. But what about those without language?
Language-less thought
As part of her discussion of the human rights of the deaf, Schaller makes the argument, familiar also from Benjamin Whorf (and also brought up in the commentary on Henrich’s WEIRD article) that language diversity itself is an insight into human cognitive diversity: ‘Every language is an outcome of how the human brain works. We don’t know how much we can do with our one brain, even, and each language has used the brain in a slightly different way.’ However, there’s an even deeper and more profound cognitive diversity in her discussion of Ildefonso: the possibility of language-less human thought, something that theorists like Merlin Donald have attempted to discuss.
In contrast to the absolute inability Idefenso had getting the idea of ‘idea,’ or his struggles with points in time, he clearly was capable of all sorts of tasks that suggest he was not mentally inert or completely vacant. He had survived into adulthood, crossed into the US, kept himself from being mowed down in traffic or starving to death. Moreover, he and other languageless individuals had apparently figured out ways to communicate without a shared language, which I find both phenomenally intriguing and difficult to even imagine (putting aside the definitional problem of distinguishing human communication from ‘language’ broadly construed).
Schaller highlights that learning language isolated Ildefonso from other languageless individuals. Schaller explains:
The only thing he said, which I think is fascinating and raises more questions than answers, is that he used to be able to talk to his other languageless friends. They found each other over the years. He said to me, “I think differently. I can’t remember how I thought.” I think that’s phenomenal!
I agree with Schaller, and I suspect that Ildefonso might be suggesting a way in which certain cognitive skills and communicative channels had actually atrophied with the incursion of language into his life, or even become impossible once language had intruded upon them. Language was not simply an addition to his cognitive repertoire; it may have displaced or disrupted other forms of thought and interaction.
From the perspective of a language-saturated world this seems improbable; we tend to think of ourselves as cognitively complete, profoundly abled, without limit. But clearly Ildefonso and other languageless individuals had to find some way to compensate for their deficits, whether it was through mimetic thinking (which is one possibility) or through some other constellation of adaptations. This languageless cognition would not be simply prelinguistic, childlike thought because adult languageless individuals function much more adeptly than four-year-olds. But how this non-linguistic, adult cognition might operate, what it might include, is a bit of a mystery and seems fragile in the face of language learning. I don’t think it’s purely mimetic, even though imitation was Ildefonso’s strategy in social learning, because there are many situations in which there’s simply no role model to imitate. Likewise, we find other primates who are non-linguistic are often good problem solvers without imitating (or imitating much less adeptly than humans).
A neuroanthropological perspective
So can people have thought without words? Well, the evidence-based answer would seem to be, yes, but it’s not the same sort of thought. Some things appear to be easier to ‘get’ without language (such as imitation of action), other things appear to be a kind of ‘all-at-once’ intuition (such as suddenly realizing all things have names), and other ideas are difficult without language being deeply enmeshed with cognitive development over long periods of time (like an English-based understanding of time as quantitative and spatialized). In other words, language is not simply an either/or proposition, but part of a cognitive developmental niche that shapes both our abilities and (unperceived) disabilities relative to the fully cognitively matured language-less individual.
The case of Ildefonso suggests that not all ‘thought’ is either neurologically or practically similar. Ildefonso had managed to survive, and clearly had thoughts, but he was also obviously confused by some basic qualities of the language-saturated world in which he had to live, not least of which was social interaction. Even without very basic capacities – like, apparently, naming itself, the seemingly first act of applying a symbolic icon to a recurring element in perceptually reality – he managed in day-to-day life and was emphatically ‘human,’ although operating with unusual cognitive capacities.
The evidence that Schaller presents on the relationship of language to different cognitive skills correlates also with the evidence from child development, widely recognized as demonstrating a progression through skills of varying complexity. For example, Western children seem to understand the concept of ‘pretending’ or ‘imagining’ a couple of years before they understand the concept of ‘believing,’ although to an adult, the concepts might seem to be logically linked. These concepts are not pre-established in a ‘language of thought,’ nor are they just the result of language socialization shaping cognition as, in both cases, we would not expect them to emerge at staggered time intervals. Not all words are equally easy to learn, nor is every cognitive ability equally dependent upon language (although some functions might be accomplished both pre-linguistically and post-linguistically using different mechanisms, so that continuity of function masks discontinuity of means).
To be honest, I wish I could write something deeper and more interesting about the case. I find myself pondering without much success what life would be like without language, how I might learn to compensate or develop other ways of accomplishing the same tasks, but I’m stopped short by the realization that language has been knit into my neurological functioning to such a significant degree that words are my constant inner companion. Even when I find that I have not been engaged in an inner dialogue, it is like waking from a sleep, unable to recall a dream that fast slips away. Perhaps like Ildefonso, I cannot talk about a languageless ‘dark’ once in the linguistic ‘light,’ even though there is a rich potential for action and perception in the dark.
For more information:
Keep Talking, James Castle, by Susan Schaller — a piece about a deaf man from Idaho who, in spite of attending a school for the deaf, did not learn to read, write, sign, speak, or lip-read, ‘perhaps by choice.’ He was, however, a fascinating artist who appeared to create a visual language of his own.
Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Pirahã don’t have numbers. A Talk With Daniel L. Everett on Edge: The Third Culture.
Stumble It!
Image of Susan Schaller from her website.
References:
Frank, Michael C., Daniel L. Everett, Evelina Fedorenko, and Edward Gibson. 2008. Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition 108 (3): 819-.824 doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.04.007
Hespos, Susan J., and Elizabeth S. Spelke. 2004. Conceptual precursors to language. Nature 430: 453-456. doi:10.1038/nature02634
Schaller, Susan. 1995. A Man Without Words. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Whorf, Benjamin. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. John B. Carroll, ed. MIT PressA detailed view of a Notre Dame Fighting Irish flag seen outside the Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Ind., on Oct. 28, 2017. (Robin Alam/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
The University of Notre Dame, which has announced it will end birth control coverage for faculty and staff following the Trump administration's rollback of the contraceptive mandate in former President Barack Obama's health care law, says it has not yet made a decision on whether to continue birth control coverage for students.
The university became the first employer to eliminate coverage after the Trump administration released a new rule last month that makes it easier for employers to obtain an exemption from the Affordable Care Act's mandate requiring them to provide birth control with no copay. Officials sent an email to faculty and staff on Oct. 27 notifying them of the change. And though numerous media outlets have reported that contraceptive coverage for students will end in August, a university spokesman told U.S. News that future coverage decisions have not been finalized.
Dennis Brown, assistant vice president for university communications, confirmed in an email that student contraceptive coverage would continue for the rest of the plan year, which ends Aug, 14, 2018, but stated that "continuing coverage, plan provider and associated benefit offerings will be finalized next semester." Brown confirmed in a phone interview that student coverage beyond the current plan year is not finalized and may depend on the insurer.
The university, long a vocal critic of the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act, is thought to be all but certain to eliminate the coverage for students. The school sued the Obama administration in 2012 and 2013 for the right to not offer coverage. Contraceptive coverage became available to Notre Dame faculty, staff and students under a compromise solution that allowed religious objectors the ability to opt out of paying for coverage. Under the compromise, the financial burden of contraceptive coverage for religious objectors is be shouldered by individual insurers and the federal government.
Contraceptive coverage for employees of the university will end on Dec. 31, according to the email sent to faculty and staff last week.
Students, who have contraceptive coverage under a different insurance plan, received a separate email the same day the faculty and staff email was sent. The student email alerted them of the change in the faculty plan and stated that student contraceptive coverage would continue for the rest of the plan year.
The email did not, however, make any definitive statements on the availability of contraceptive coverage after the current insurance cycle ends.
Currently, faculty and staff can receive contraceptive coverage through a Meritain Health/Optum RX plan. Students receive coverage through an Aetna plan that is separate from the general student health insurance plan and requires a different insurance card.
On Oct. 6, the Trump administration released its rule making it easier for employers to obtain an exemption from the requirement that they provide birth control with no copay. Notre Dame's president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, released a statement the same day applauding the new rule on the grounds of religious liberty.
Students at Notre Dame staged a protest in response to Jenkins' statement, according to The Observer, Notre Dame's student newspaper. And following the school's announcement last Friday, the Graduate Worker's Collective at Notre Dame circulated an online petition asking the university to continue contraceptive coverage.
After Dec. 31, university employees will be able to obtain birth control with a copay in instances of medical need as shown by a physician. The medication cannot be used for contraceptive purposes, the university's email said."We are all assets," declares the national website of TimeBanks USA, a movement dedicated to building "caring community" economies through an inclusive exchange of time and talent.Indeed, time can be as valuable an asset as money in terms of the positive impact it has on a neighborhood, says Adam Gifford, director of community involvement at the Stockyard, Clark-Fulton, and Brooklyn Centre Development Office, which, along with its parent Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization, is sponsoring a time bank in Cleveland.The time bank movement works through reciprocation. For example, a landscaper does an hour of volunteer tree-trimming work, then deposits those 60 "time dollars" into his account. When he needs a service done, like getting his dogs walked or receiving help with his taxes, he simply "withdraws" his deposit for the service. There is no monetary value ever attached to any service -- time is the one and only coin of the realm."People may not have the money available, but they may have time," says Gifford. "It's about giving people access to services they normally couldn't afford."Time banks have sprung up across the country. Locally, KentandMedina are among the communities to use the service. The Cleveland time bank is in its infancy, attracting nearly 100 members putting in about 150 hours of work so far. A program orientation will be held February 26 at The Salvation Army's Clarke-Fulton location, while a Cleveland time bank website is scheduled to go live in March.The time bank is open to individuals and groups. Gifford views the exchange of skills and services without cash as a method to enrich lives."It's a creative way to build a community," he says.SOURCE: Adam GiffordWRITER: Douglas J. GuthWHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS |
an of what lurked beneath the labyrinth—Diablo, Lord of Terror.[4] With this knowledge, Aidan and his companions ventured back into the labyrinth for one last battle.[3]
As Aidan would later put it, Diablo's realm was "the threshold of Hell itself." It was a realm fitted for Diablo certainly, for not only was their struggle physical, but mental as well. The demon forced Aidan to relive his worst nightmares, his greatest failures, and his fears that he would never live up to the expectations of his father. But, driven by the belief that his brother could still be saved, Aidan pressed on. He and his companions wore the demon down until, ultimately, Aidan struck the final blow...only for it to be revealed that Diablo had used Albrecht as his host.[3]
Deckard Cain would later speculate that Aidan seeing his brother's body before him would have shattered his mind.[3] Regardless, whatever may have run through Aidan's head, there was one last loose end: Diablo's soulstone. Broken by Lazarus, it could not contain the demon indefinitely. Believing he could contain Diablo's essence, he plunged the soulstone into his forehead. Blood filled his vision, the whispers of the damned echoed in his ears and Aidan could feel Diablo himself clawing his way up from the dark recesses of his soul. But he had done it. Diablo had been contained.[6]
Nightmares Edit
"Many moons have passed since I left the town of Tristram behind me. Since then I've tried to forget the terrors I beheld beneath the cold earth. And the twisted nightmares that have haunted my every waking moment. There's something dark within me now. I can feel it. Driving me towards the east. Assuring me that my salvation lies within the ruins of ancient kingdoms. Though I know the way, I know not what perils will rise to hinder my journey. And as I pass through the first gate, I know that the better part of my soul will remain behind. Forever..."
—Aidan's reflections[7]
Aidan emerged from the bowels of the cathedral, coated in his own blood and all manner of demonic ichor. It was a victory to Tristram, but it was clear that Aidan was not the same person he once was. He increasingly shunned the company of others, spending the day in isolation and the night wandering the streets, seemingly without direction or purpose.[3] Ultimately, the witch, Adria, seemed to be the only person who could offer him comfort, and the two spent long nights behind closed doors.[3] This, however, was not of Aidan's intent, but of Diablo's. Adria saw the truth, that Aidan had not contained Diablo at all, and pledged herself to the Lord of Terror's service. Through Aidan, Diablo impregnated Adria, conceiving a child who would be his vessel. It would be over two decades, but when the time was right, Diablo would return to claim his prize.[8]
Aidan was cordial to those who approached him, but his mood didn't improve. In an attempt to liven it, a celebration was thrown in his honor. However, he slipped away during the event. That same evening, Cain visited him, finding Aidan muttering to himself, wearing a dark garb and a hood that covered his face.[9] Aidan eventually related his story to Deckard Cain, telling him of his battle with Diablo. After the tale, he kept mumbling, whispering "I thought I could contain it, I thought I could contain it..." before mentioning his "brothers" awaiting him in the east. Cain could see that Aidan was disturbed, but at the time, saw it as meaningless ramblings. The next day however, Aidan was gone,[3] armed only with a sword and some provisions.[9] According to Adria, he had traveled east, to seek out mystics who might exorcise the waking nightmare that plagued him. A half-truth. But as demons descended on Tristram after Aidan's departure, it was clear that there would be no-one from the town capable of following him.[3]
Journey to Aranoch Edit
"Why did I follow him...? I don't know. Why do things happen as they do in dreams? All I know is that, when he beckoned... I had to follow him. From that moment, we traveled together, East. Always... into the East."
—Marius recounts his story[10]
Aidan, or what was left of him, now had a new moniker—the Dark Wanderer. A vessel for Diablo and little else. Heading east, he sought passage to the port of Lut Gholein. Passing through the Eastgate Monastery, the Wanderer encountered the Sisters of the Sightless Eye, many of whom had recently been corrupted by Andariel, now come over to the cause of the Prime Evils.[3] The monastery desecrated, the Wanderer stopped at a tavern situated in the mountains that separated Aranoch from Kehjistan. Summoning demons and the forms of the undead to his side, the Wanderer set the tavern ablaze and everyone in it, apart for one—Marius, who had fled the Rogue Monastery. For whatever reason, the Wanderer beckoned to Marius to follow, and he did.[11]
For many weeks, the pair traveled across Aranoch. During the trip, the Wanderer told Marius of his past as a warrior, and that a burden had been placed on him. Eventually, they came within sight of Lut Gholein. The pair made camp, and Marius shared the Wanderer's dreams. Dreams that were more akin to memories, depicting the Horadric mage Tal Rasha being bound to contain the essence of Baal. As the Wanderer explained, it was Baal who he sought. They set out with the dawn, searching for the Tomb of Tal Rasha.[12]
Finding the tomb, the Wanderer appeared to gain strength. Or rather, as Marius observed, appeared to be losing what was left of his humanity, his visage becoming more demonic. Either way, the Wanderer led the way into the tomb, undeterred by the gloom. Eventually, the pair reached the Binding Stone where Tal Rasha, barely containing Baal, stood. The Wanderer moved forward to release the Lord of Destruction but it was here that the archangel Tyrael intervened. The Wanderer and angel did battle but Marius, manipulated by Baal, released him. Marius promptly fled with Baal's soulstone,[13] but it mattered not. Baal was free. Tyrael was imprisoned in his place. And with that, the Wanderer and Baal set sail to Kurast.[3]
Hellfire Edit
"Now my young brother, the time has come to assume your true form! Arise Diablo, Lord of Terror!"
—Mephisto[1]
The Wanderer had a close shave at Kurast with a band of heroes that had been pursuing him, but managed to escape their grasp.[3][14] Soon afterwards, the Wanderer and Baal arrived at Travincal, entering the Temple of Light. Zakarum had already been partially corrupted by Mephisto's influence, but Diablo used his powers of fear to cause the uncorrupted defenders to flee and/or turn on each other. Regardless, Mephisto's soulstone was found, and the Lord of Hatred quickly took possession of Que-Hegan Sankekur. After centuries, the Prime Evils were reunited.
Within a chamber, the Primes devised a final stratagem to retake the Burning Hells, claim vengeance on those who had turned on them and use their corrupted soulstones to corrupt the Worldstone, thereby enslaving humanity to their will. The Infernal Gate was opened and Diablo took full control over the Wanderer's body, assuming his true form. The Wanderer had served the Lord of Terror well, and Aidan seemed to be lost forever. However, the heroes that had pursued the Wanderer over the months had not given up, and confronted Diablo himself. Cain would speculate that even then, some small part of Aidan's old self remained, that as the heroes fought the demon without, Aidan fought him within. Regardless, Diablo was defeated, his essence returned to his soulstone and like Albrecht before him, Aidan's body was left behind. In honor of his memory, the champions ceremonially wrapped his broken body and threw it into the infernal fires that raged all around them.[3]
Diablo I Edit
Main article: Warrior
Aidan is the canon hero and represented by the Warrior class in Diablo I, though remains nameless throughout the game.
Diablo II Edit
The Wanderer is briefly encountered in the third act of Diablo II, right upon leaving the Kurast Docks, where he disappears before summoning some Flesh Beasts. The player cannot interact with him in any way. If the player listens carefully, they can hear the Wanderer laugh as he teleports away.
Aidan's journey is charted through flashbacks in the form of the game's cinematics.
Diablo III Edit
Aidan is mentioned multiple times in Diablo III.
Messerschmidt's Reaver description implies that it may be the very same weapon he used to defeat Diablo with back in the first game.
A transmogrification-only weapon called Aidan's Revenge is both named after him and also claims that he himself killed The Butcher.
Other Edit
Data exists for Aidan in Heroes of the Storm.[15]
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Diablo series, Aidan appeared in a tavern brawl in Hearthstone as a card. This included the ability to transform into the Cow King.
To similarly commemorate the anniversary, a Dark Wanderer player icon was made available in Overwatch.
Personality and Traits Edit
Aidan was originally full of life and promise, but was also self-absorbed,[2] though had some insecurities in regards to what his father expected of him. His experiences in war against Westmarch tempered him. However, he was broken physically and mentally due to Diablo's influence,[3] and while shards of humanity remained within him, he steadily lost them over time as Diablo asserted his control.[10][13]
Aidan was considered handsome before his fall.[2]
Notes Edit
The concept behind Aidan is effectively retroactive, as up until the conception of Diablo III, he was never given a name besides the "Dark Wanderer," In the first game, he was never given a name and did not conceptually exist.
Come Diablo II, it was established that the warrior class was the hero to canonically slay Diablo, and was given the title of the Dark Wanderer. However, his backstory remained the same as the warrior class, that he was a nameless hero foreign to Tristram. This was also added to in the game's manual, as written by Deckard Cain. A warrior/thief character named Qarak appears in The Awakening as a possible take on giving the Wanderer a name, but can still conceptually exist as his own character.
By Diablo III, and the warrior's background had been altered/added to, being given the name of "Aidan" with the backstory that he was Leoric's elder son. This is effectively a retcon, as previous lore had stated that Leoric only had one son (Albrecht) not to mention that the people of Tristram knew who he was the whole time, a contrast to the "nameless hero" spoken of previously. This is slightly amended in Book of Cain, where Deckard explains that he used the term "Dark Wanderer" to describe Aidan because he could not bring himself to use his name after his fall. Marius and other characters used the term "Dark Wanderer" as well, likely because only a handful of people outside of Tristram knew the truth of the Wanderer's identity.
Videos Edit
Diablo I Epilogue-0
References EditWritten by @KralTunes
What the hell is this band doing to me?!
For years (decades, at this point) Pearl Jam has left the best tracks from their recording sessions on the cutting floor, and while the released products are usually good to great, they make me lament the possibilities (ahem…Binaural).
Therefore, I certainly wasn’t surprised when I heard the positive reactions to the recent leak of circa 2006 Pearl Jam material.
Comprised of mainly instrumentals from early in the recording process, it is hard to say what the final outcomes might have been, but these blueprints give us ample room to speculate on what could have been. My initial reflex after listening to these tracks is to question how it would’ve altered their evolution over the last couple of decades if they had gravitated more towards this sound rather than the more mainstream path. These demos, in addition to the 2 tracks leaked earlier this year (“Let It Ride” and “Cold Concession”), could have morphed the 2006 ‘Avacado’ album into a very different, and stronger, beast altogether.
In the leak, we also hear early takes on album cuts “Life Wasted”, “Severed Hand”, and “Big Wave” (known here as “The Bigger the Wave”). These earlier versions do not differ musically a great deal from the final take. The main differences here are the place card lyrics strewn about and the final jam on “Life Wasted” (which is absolutely killer) that was absorbed by the stupid fade out on the album. The positives continue on “Big Wave” as it sounds a little more edgier on the original – complete with no mentions of crustaceans!
The real gifts, though, are the unheard tracks that accompany this release.
Fans have heard murmurs of a track named “2X4” for years, but have not heard a note of it. Of all the new material here, this one rocks the most. It’s a good song with a a nice hook and some punkish qualities that grooves really well.
“Open Door” is a meandering little jam that has a pretty vibe with some trademark Vedder wailing over somber notes. “Breezy in D” showcases exceptional guitar instrumentation with a great funky feel throughout the track. “Lucky 13 (Litho Demo)” is a more fleshed out arrangement with great percussion (I could only assume this is a Matt Cameron song). “The Only Cloud In The Sky,” a moody jam fit for some brooding Vedder poetics.
“Rearranged Furniture” and “Rearranged Priorities” are fantastically breezy tunes that I wish the band would do more of (apparently they did, hoping we would never hear them) and do not go over the mainstream cliff (a la “The Fixer). You could almost picture the guys sitting back and jamming these out in a living room. I am particularly fond of how you can hear a brief laugh and unscripted interactions after each take that harkens back to their early releases.
“10 Billion Years” is a country-ish ditty with Stone Gossard on vocals and it is practically all polished up for release. Lyrically, this is a simple, repetitive offering of religiously bent verses (“God has been around for ten billion Years/Christ has been around for two thousand years”). I’m not sure if this would ever fit on any Pearl Jam album, but I love when their attempts to tackle this sound.
Although its not an undiscovered gold mind, I am still thrilled to add it to my playlist. Coupled with “Let it Ride” and “Cold Concession”, this song collection is a glimpse of another direction that Pearl Jam can take; to me, it is more mature and graceful than the “Avacado”. It’s also more proof that Pearl Jam knows how to rip out their fans’ hearts by abandoning good work to the dust bunnies.
But hey, at least they’re consistent.
AdvertisementsPEOPLE POWER
Less than a month ago, Bernie Sanders announced that his campaign had accomplished something amazing: he had more individual donations than any candidate in history:
"We have hundreds of thousands of volunteers in the 50 states. We've received more individual contributions — some 750,000 of them — more than any other candidate in history at this point in the campaign. Averaging, I should tell you, $30 apiece." -- Bernie Sanders, NPR, November 20
And now, in December, that momentum is dramatically accelerating. This week, he's about to blow past those numbers, with over 2 million individual contributions:
"With just two weeks before the final FEC fundraising deadline of the year, we've set a goal that will shock the political elite and billionaire class of this country: reaching our two millionth individual contribution by Wednesday at midnight. Accomplishing this goal would represent an unprecedented outpouring of support for any presidential challenger in our nation's history. Let us never forget that this country belongs to all of us, and not just a handful of billionaires." -- Bernie Sanders, December 14
But can PEOPLE POWER overcome the powerful forces of the Wall Street and corporate lobbyists and billionaire sponsors that fund politicians and make them work against the people?
"The Koch brothers are prepared to spend $889 million this election to end Social Security and dismantle our safety net. We can't let them. The Koch brothers will spend more money in this election cycle than either the Democratic or Republican parties. This is not democracy." -- Bernie Sanders, December 14
How Republican candidates do fundraising. And who they serve.
Politicians serve the people who are behind their campaigns. And since it’s been big money, we've seen the result: The top 0.001% in the U.S. pays an effective tax rate of 17.6%, less than ever before -- while American corporations are sitting on almost $2 trillion dollars of cash on hand, more money than ever before. Meanwhile, the middle class has dramatically decreased as a percentage of the population, and their median wealth fell by 28% over the past 15 years, while the costs they have to incur for education, healthcare, and more have dramatically increased. In the face of these trends, what do politicians do? Call for more corporate tax breaks, and more cuts and costs for the middle-class, poor, and working-class. Who do these people serve?
It's time for a reset. 2016 can be about making our government answer to THE PEOPLE. About serving the needs of THE PEOPLE. About THE PEOPLE standing up for themselves.
Stand up with THE PEOPLE and with THE PEOPLE'S champion -- Bernie Sanders -- and be a part of this historic event of 2 million individual contributions at:
https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/lets-get-2-millionthe late Peter Jennings on food as fuel
TreeHugger complains often about food as fuel, but what about if it really is exactly that? If you use your car for business purposes, then fuel can be a legitimate deductible expense, so what if you use your bike? We looked at this three years ago, but with more people cycling longer distances for work, we raise the issue again.
According to Bikes at Work, moderate cycling burns about 300 calories per hour in excess of what a sedentary worker might burn. So if you bike for a living, or to meetings, shouldn't the food consumed to deliver those calories be considered fuel? In Canada, it is.
Wayne Scott receiving award from Jack Layton, then a City Councillor in Toronto
Ten years ago, bicycle courier Wayne Scott fought Revenue Canada (the Canadian version of the IRS). The Judge wrote (in 1997!)
"Just as a courier's automobile requires fuel in the form of gas to move, the applicant alleges that he requires fuel in the form of food and water. The foot and transit courier and the automobile courier are engaged in identical activities the only difference being one uses a car as a means of transport and the other his body or a bicycle. Because the courier who drives the automobile is allowed to deduct his or her fuel, the foot and transit courier should be able to deduct the fuel his body needs. However, because we all require food and water to live, he can only deduct the extra food and water he must consume above and beyond the average person's intake in order to perform his job. This is similar to the automobile courier who is only entitled to deduct that portion of the fuel used for a business purpose. The extra fuel consumed for personal needs cannot be deducted. This result takes into account the different methods by which the same job is done and puts all couriers on an equal footing. Arguably, it also recognizes and encourages [rather than discourages as a prohibition on this expense would] new environmentally responsible ways of producing income."::Alan Wayne Scott vs Canada
Revenue Canada now lets bicycle couriers deduct $17 per day for food without receipts. In the UK, cycle couriers can deduct £6.50 per day. (which buys a lot less food than C$17!)
However in the United States, Tax lawyer Paul Caron quotes a letter from the IRS's office of Chief Counsel: "
Expenditures for food, the "fuel" for all human activities, whether or not business related, are considered inherently personal in nature. Therefore, the cost of food generally is not deductible as a trade or business expense unless it is paid or incurred while traveling away from home overnight or, under some circumstances, in connectior with business entertainment.
The courts have consistently agreed with this position. For example, the Board of Tax Appeals in Smith v. Commissioner, 40 B.T.A.1038 (1939), aff'd per curiam, 113 F.2d 114 (2nd Cir. 1940), stated at pages 1038-39:
[T]he cost of the laborer's raiment... the very home which gives us shelter and rest and the food which provides energy, might all... be construed as necessary to the operation of business and to the creation of income. Yet these are the very essence of those "personal" expenses the deductibility of which is expressly denied."
So once again, in America, the system is biased towards four wheels and against two. Time for a change!
TreeHugger on Bicycles at Work
In Afghanistan, Bicycle Courier Service Provides Work For the...
TreeHugger Tip: How to Bike to Work (without all the sweat...
Tax Free Bicycles for British Employees: Cyclescheme :EG.lectR Profile Blog Joined September 2010 United States 590 Posts #1
Click the Image Above to Submit Your Tribute Today!
Two people will win free trips to PAX East 2012 to meet EG.iNcontroL and Artosis!
@colindeshong
Cyx. Profile Joined November 2010 Canada 591 Posts #2 'cause who really cares enough about incontrol to put his name in the title, right?
but no, seriously, this looks wicked =P can't wait to see some of the stuff that comes out of this.
dAPhREAk Profile Blog Joined July 2010 Nauru 12378 Posts #3 rather meet incontrol. ;-) but artosis is cool too. someone is going to be very lucky.
iNcontroL Profile Blog Joined July 2004 USA 29047 Posts #4 MY OWN TEAM HAS REFUSED MY NAME
WTFFFFFFFFFFF
Dusty Profile Blog Joined December 2010 United States 1984 Posts #5
Going to try and finish my entry sometime this week, progress has been rather slow Guys at EG such trollsGoing to try and finish my entry sometime this week, progress has been rather slow twitch.tv/loldusty | ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) | #betamaleasshole | #freerp4life | #americanwhitepig
porkRaven Profile Joined December 2010 United States 936 Posts #6 Haha just heard about your luck on inside the game :D SHOUTOUTS TO Aylear!!!
Dubzex Profile Joined October 2010 United States 4476 Posts #7 On March 21 2012 10:10 iNcontroL wrote:
MY OWN TEAM HAS REFUSED MY NAME
WTFFFFFFFFFFF
I think you were slated to be his body guard. I think you were slated to be his body guard. "DONT UNDERESTIMATE MY CARRY OR YOU WILL BE CARRIED INTO THE ABYSS OF SUFFERING" - Tyler 'TC' Cook
Tabbris Profile Blog Joined June 2010 Bangladesh 2785 Posts #8 Lol
Chriscras Profile Blog Joined March 2011 Korea (South) 2738 Posts #9 Geoff you were on fire on ITG tonight <3 "En taro adun, Executor."
Damrak Profile Joined January 2012 Netherlands 124 Posts #10 On March 21 2012 10:10 iNcontroL wrote:
MY OWN TEAM HAS REFUSED MY NAME
WTFFFFFFFFFFF
You should get a new webcam so i can see your pretty face better <3 #ITG You should get a new webcam so i can see your pretty face better <3 #ITG
InsidiA Profile Blog Joined August 2011 Canada 1167 Posts #11 On March 21 2012 10:10 iNcontroL wrote:
MY OWN TEAM HAS REFUSED MY NAME
WTFFFFFFFFFFF
Dont worry you're mentioned first in step 2 Dont worry you're mentioned first in step 2 Graphics InsidiA | StarCraft 2 Manager for Team eLevate | Graphic Designer for Red Bull eSports & HTC | @iamjasonpun
Danger Boy Profile Joined June 2011 United States 47 Posts #12 They both rock!! can't wait to meet them!! Good luck in Korea Incontrol!!! Fun only makes dieing worse...
Za7oX Profile Joined February 2011 Australia 3943 Posts #13 On March 21 2012 10:10 iNcontroL wrote:
MY OWN TEAM HAS REFUSED MY NAME
WTFFFFFFFFFFF
Who are you? Your name's not ringing a bell.... Who are you? Your name's not ringing a bell.... Stephano//HerO//TaeJa//Squirtle//Bomber
jmdf Profile Joined April 2011 Canada 6 Posts #14 Perfect pylon placement lol We make expansion, then defence it.
WolfintheSheep Profile Joined June 2011 Canada 4371 Posts #15 On March 21 2012 10:13 Dubzex wrote:
Show nested quote +
On March 21 2012 10:10 iNcontroL wrote:
MY OWN TEAM HAS REFUSED MY NAME
WTFFFFFFFFFFF
I think you were slated to be his body guard. I think you were slated to be his body guard.
God knows Artosis needs it - far too many stiff breezes in Boston. God knows Artosis needs it - far too many stiff breezes in Boston. Average means I'm better than half of you.
drooL Profile Blog Joined May 2010 United Kingdom 2101 Posts #16 Is Artosis in any way affiliated with EG now? @nowSimon
BlazeTSR Profile Joined November 2011 United States 218 Posts #17 On March 21 2012 10:10 iNcontroL wrote:
MY OWN TEAM HAS REFUSED MY NAME
WTFFFFFFFFFFF
'
QFE QFE Fan of........... Protoss: Hero, iNcontroL, Nony Zerg: CatZ and Sheth Terran: Demuslim
Typheus Profile Joined July 2011 United States 2 Posts #18 Incontrol crying about the name snub? That's awfully Artosis of you. The real burn is that the winners don't get to meet the pylon.
Zlasher Profile Blog Joined February 2010 United States 8345 Posts #19 On March 21 2012 10:14 drooL wrote:
Is Artosis in any way affiliated with EG now?
Don't think so, but he is set to be on the SoTG panel at PAX East, so since he'll be there for the weekend, he will be with the other players/commentators like JP, Geoff, djWHEAT, etc. at the Kingston booth that is regularly at the pax events. iNcontroL was there with JP Day9 and djWHEAT (as well as SirScoots and Justin Wong) at PAX East for the Kingston booth last year, and LzGaMeR was at the booth during PAX Prime in last August Don't think so, but he is set to be on the SoTG panel at PAX East, so since he'll be there for the weekend, he will be with the other players/commentators like JP, Geoff, djWHEAT, etc. at the Kingston booth that is regularly at the pax events. iNcontroL was there with JP Day9 and djWHEAT (as well as SirScoots and Justin Wong) at PAX East for the Kingston booth last year, and LzGaMeR was at the booth during PAX Prime in last August Follow me: www.twitter.com/zlasher
Pokebunny Profile Blog Joined June 2008 United States 10408 Posts #20 Hey, where are you guys gonna be at throughout the weekend? I'm gonna be there again ^^ Semipro Terran player | Pokebunny#1710 | twitter.com/Pokebunny | twitch.tv/Pokebunny | facebook.com/PokebunnySC
1 2 3 Next AllElon Musk reigns over an entrepreneurial landscape of epic proportions. With Tesla Motors, the cherub-faced CEO wants to wean us off fossil fuels with electric cars for the masses. With SolarCity, he envisions panels blooming on a million rooftops.
Elon Musk reigns over an entrepreneurial landscape of epic proportions.
With Tesla Motors, the cherub-faced CEO wants to wean us off fossil fuels with electric cars for the masses.
With SolarCity, he envisions panels blooming on a million rooftops.
He is laying the groundwork for the world�s biggest battery factory.
Yet this 42-year-old planet-saving, big-dreaming engineer has his sights on a celestial prize: Mars.
With SpaceX, the rocket company he founded in 2002, Musk hopes to employ recyclable rockets to save humanity, blasting earthlings into space to one day build settlements on the Red Planet.
�Mars is what drives him,� said Louis Friedman, an astronautics engineer who has known Musk for a decade. �From a psychological point of view, if you�re stuck on Earth, humankind has limits � and Elon isn�t the kind of guy who likes to live with limits.�
Silicon Valley�s most-intrepid CEO already has employed his potent combination of vision, determination and attention to detail to accomplish two tasks widely thought impossible: creating a viable American car company with Tesla and starting a successful private space venture with SpaceX.
His vision springs from a childhood in South Africa, where he devoured comics and science fiction and flew with his swashbuckling dad in a small plane over the African bush. Now, thanks to the fortune he amassed as co-founder of PayPal and the risk he took on rockets, Musk has a shot at opening up the universe.
�The moment he was out of PayPal and could do something else, it was, �Let�s see if we can launch a rocket,�??� Errol Musk, Elon�s 68-year-old father, said in a rare interview. �The cars and solar power are side issues, really � though big ones! I have no doubt that he will get man to Mars in his lifetime.�
Alexandra Musk, Elon�s 20-year-old half sister, said he sees Mars as humanity�s only viable refuge.
�With all the environmental problems on Earth, the next step is to move to a planet that we can live on,� she said. �He wants to go up into space himself, but with his own kids being so young, he can�t really do that. He�d be gone for a quite a while.�
Although he declined to comment for this story, Musk has described Mars as a �fixer-upper� planet that over time could sustain human life. Mercury is too close to the sun; Venus is too hot.
But even to Friedman, Musk�s initial proposal to launch a rocket seemed ludicrous. �I said, �Are you crazy? Everybody who tries to get into the rocket business quickly learns that it costs a lot more money than they thought.� He said to me, �I know, but I can do it.�??�
SpaceX�s Falcon 9 rocket, carrying its Dragon cargo spacecraft, was launched on Friday from Cape Canaveral for a fourth trip to the International Space Station.
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to Maye and Errol Musk in June 1971, the oldest of three children. His parents divorced in 1980, and he lived mostly with his father. Both sides of the family had means � and wanderlust, so Musk and his family traveled extensively. He was reared with household responsibilities, despite his family�s means, and he was a bright and interested student, adept at chess and computers.
In the late 1980s, when South Africa was in political turmoil, he moved to Canada to continue his college education and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, studying finance, management and physics before heading to Silicon Valley in 1995.
He had a summer internship at Pinnacle Research, an energy-storage startup. He planned to pursue graduate work in applied physics at Stanford University but instead joined the Internet boom.
Entrepreneurial successes soon followed. Musk co-founded Zip2, which was sold to Compaq in 1999. Then he launched the financial-services company X.com, which morphed into PayPal.
The pay dirt from selling PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002 enabled a now-wealthy Musk to embrace his true love: space travel. He left Silicon Valley for Los Angeles, long an epicenter of the aerospace industry, and started SpaceX, where he is both CEO and chief technology officer. He now shuttles back and forth between SpaceX and Tesla, based in Palo Alto, Calif.
Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, president of Pioneer Astronautics, has watched Musk�s passion for Mars grow since they met in 2001 during a Mars Society fundraiser. Zubrin said Musk�s most-striking qualities are a self-deprecating sense of humor and his uncanny ability to master arcane and complex subjects that accomplished aeronautical engineers have required decades to learn.
�When I first met him, he knew absolutely nothing about rockets, though he clearly had a scientific mind,� Zubrin said. �By 2004, he had learned a fair amount, and by 2007, he knew everything. This guy had gone and educated himself in this entire art. If you sat down with him and asked a bunch of technical questions about rocket engineering, he could answer them all.�
But Musk didn�t stop with rockets. As an early investor in Tesla Motors, he risked his newly acquired fortune to keep the company afloat. As CEO and product architect (his signature is on the sun visors of the first Model S sedans), Musk oversees more than 6,000 employees.Untitled a guest Jan 20th, 2016 1,877 Never a guest1,877Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint XML 21.21 KB <?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "utf-8"?> <!-- Commented Offline Pawn Template by Havoc --> <class name = "XFS" type = "175401007" > <!-- Do NOT change this --> <u32 name = "mQuality" value = "2" /> <!-- No idea what this does, don't change it, below you see a comment that is not mine, no idea what it means either --> <class name = "mRomNoraPawn" type = "1897090369" > <!-- Struct = 1, Counter = 1, Size = 324013 --> <bool name = "mAutoDelete" value = "true" /> <array name = "mpArray" type = "classref" count = "5" > <!-- Here is where we start, this array contains all pawns of this file. Change count to however many classref types you leave within the array --> <classref type = "1472709144" > <!-- Struct = 2, Counter = 2, Size = 356 --> <class name = "mRomPawnEdit" type = "623432403" > <!-- Struct = 3, Counter = 3, Size = 246 --> <array name = "(u8*)mNameStr" type = "u8" count = "25" > <!-- This is NOT the name of a pawn, do NOT change any of the values below --> <u8 value = "227" /> <u8 value = "131" /> <u8 value = "148" /> <u8 value = "227" /> <u8 value = "130" /> <u8 value = "168" /> <u8 value = "227" /> <u8 value = "131" /> <u8 value = "170" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> <u8 value = "0" /> </array > <u8 name = "mGender" value = "0" /> <!-- 0 is male, 1 is female --> <u32 name = "mNickname" value = "645" /> <!-- seems to do nothing, mess with it if you dare --> <u8 name = "mVoice" value = "2" /> <!-- All values starting from this are the same as in a character editor, for best results create a new character of your liking and copypaste the values from your savefile --> <u8 name = "mPersonality" value = "0" /> <u8 name = "mFaceBase" value = "69" /> <u8 name = "mFaceEye" value = "69" /> <u8 name = "mFaceEyebrow" value = "69" /> <u8 name = "mFaceNose" value = "69" /> <u8 name = "mFaceMouth" value = "69" |
sports media, and poked fun at Sager's signature wardrobe calling it "colorful, fun, a little outlandish."
The suits said it all -- colorful, fun, a little outlandish. That's what sports should be. Thanks, Craig Sager. We'll all miss you. — President Obama (@POTUS) December 16, 2016
Sager, 65, covered sports for CNN, as well the network's sister networks, TNT and TBS. He spent more than 20 years covering the NBA as a courtside reporter.
Sager died of acute myeloid leukemia Thursday, just days after he was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.On Wednesday, PayPal announced that it would be working with crowdfunding platforms to stop unnecessary freezes of project funds. The policy change involves identifying crowdfunding campaigns early on and expediting payment to those that have made their obligations to campaign donors transparent.
PayPal doesn't have the greatest track record when it comes to transferring funds to donor-based projects. And problems came to a head in September 2013 when the company froze the assets or limited the accounts of three high-profile fundraisers within the span of two weeks. PayPal's uncooperative responses to the account holders set off a flurry of bad press.
Wild demands
Initially, PayPal froze $45,000 in funds that were raised by indie e-mail client developer Mailpile, citing the potential for fraud. PayPal told Mailpile that those funds would remain frozen “for a full year or until they have a verifiable 1.0 release of their product.” Mailpile's other option was to send PayPal "an itemized budget and your development goal dates" for the project. None of those demands seemed justified to Mailpile's Iceland-based developers.
PayPal did the same thing again to two game development projects within two weeks. Fighting game Yatagarasu Attack on Cataclysm raised $118,243 and Red Thread Games' Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey raised $1.5 million. PayPal told Yatagarasu developers that it would keep up to half of the developers' money frozen until after the game's release—obviously defeating the point of the crowdsourced funding. Red Thread faced similar news.
In all of these instances, PayPal reversed the account limitations within hours or days. But for campaigners, having to harness the outrage of the Internet is a difficult way to get customer service to pay attention to you.
So what's new?
In our interview with PayPal back in September, it was difficult to get a detailed run-down of how exactly the new policies would work. Broadly though, PayPal is promising to work with a number of crowdfunding sites (it named FundRazr specifically) to make sure that people soliciting donations tell their donors that, in case the product isn't delivered after the funds are used, the funds collected are considered investments rather than pre-sales. Ideally, this type of disclaimer would appear on a crowdfunder's project page, and its presence would signal to PayPal not to put any limits on that customer’s account.
PayPal Chief Risk Officer Tomer Barel explained the company’s reasoning in a blog post today:
Many crowdfunding sites allow their campaign owners to pull money out before they have reached the final goal in order to begin creating and funding the concept, a process that often begins even while the crowdfunding process using PayPal is continuing. If it is not made clear that there is no guarantee of product delivery, this can cause regulatory and risk issues (and upset customers) when the final goal isn’t reached.
PayPal, in short, wants to make sure that it isn’t left owing an irate backer a refund if a crowdfunded project fails.
Anuj Nayar, PayPal's senior director of global initiatives, told Ars over the phone today that “as crowdfunding has become a little more mainstream than the core edge cases, a couple of things have very much come to light: the early crowdfunding backers understood that crowdfunding is very different from regular e-commerce, it's very much an investment.” Nayar also explained that PayPal wants backers to know that there are risks, and you might not get a product from the people you backed.
In his blog post, Barel wrote that going forward, PayPal will aim to “engage crowdfunding campaign owners early on to clearly understand their campaign goals and help them ensure their campaigns are compliant with our policies and government regulations." The payments company says it will "enable [crowdfunded] campaigns without interrupting payments under the condition that the campaign owner is explicit and transparent to their contributors that there is no guarantee of delivery regarding the rewards being offered upon contribution.”
In the event that those conditions haven’t been met, Nayar told Ars that PayPal will work with project leaders to try to find a solution. If they “haven’t followed those directions, PayPal will try working with them to course-correct to make sure that they get their money.” He also stressed that the extra attention given to transferring raised funds would not come at an extra price to PayPal's customers.
Although the outrage was palpable last summer, Nayar expressed that PayPal’s priority was to make funds available to the rightful owner. After September's meltdown, “Tomer Barel said [to the risk management team] ‘you guys are personally responsible for making sure this doesn't happen again.’” To PayPal’s credit, nothing quite so large-scale has.
In theory, PayPal doesn’t have a reason not to make crowdfunding payments in light of Kickstarter’s recent news of a billion dollars in pledges and new crowdfunding platforms springing up all over the place. “I'm a big fan of crowdfunding,” Nayar told Ars. “I've bought—no, I've invested a lot of money in different products, but I understand the difference between the two.”Rocco Termini is proposing another project in Black Rock, this one emphasizing commercial space. The former Linde Air Manufacturing complex at 155 Chandler Street would contain 80,000 sq.ft. of commercial space and potentially ten apartments.
The Buffalo News has the scoop:
The $8 million project, named the Chandler Incubator, will reuse a century-old manufacturing and processing building to encourage new business growth in an up-and-coming area of Buffalo.
Documents filed with the Buffalo Planning Board call for renovating the 90,000-square-foot brick building into an 80,000-square-foot complex, with 10 apartments and the commercial space. An adjacent paved parcel at 157 Chandler, with grass growing in it, will be turned into parking for the new project.
However, Termini said in an interview that he will likely abandon the apartments if he gets into Start-Up NY, because the program does not permit residential living space. If so, the entire building would be commercial space.
Termini has commitments for a brewery and winery to occupy 30,000 sq.ft. of space and software development firm Utilant, a current tenant at his Foundry Lofts project, will take 25,000 sq.ft.
The eastern portion of the complex has 40′ ceilings
Termini’s development efforts have been focused along Elmwood Avenue north of Buffalo State College in recent years. The Foundry Lofts project, a former FWS Furniture location, was converted into 46 market rate apartments and commercial space.
On nearby Grote Street, the former Houk Wire Wheel Company facility was converted into 22 one and two-bedroom apartments and 3,000 sq.ft. of commercial space. Thirty-eight apartments were created in the former American Radiator Company building at 1807 Elmwood Avenue.
Others also see the area as ripe for investment. Read Property Group, the new owner of the Pierce Arrow Building at 1695 Elmwood, recently announced a $30 million redevelopment plan to create 107 apartments. In February, an LLC purchased the four-story, 43,200 sq.ft. building 166 Chandler Street across from the new Termini project for $250,000. The unknown buyer’s plans for the property have not been released.
The Buffalo Planning Board will get its first look at the project at 4 PM Monday, Room 901 in City Hall. BMS Design Studio is project architect, L2K will be doing the interior design, and Schenne & Associates will be handling civil and structural. Dean Gowan, who designed the courtyard in the Foundry complex, will be designing the courtyard space.
Get Connected: Signature Development, 716.842.1938Fire up the grill and invite me over, friend. Today, we feast in celebration.
The latest USDA meat production projections are out, and they predict that, after years of domination by chicken, beef will become the fastest growing meat category over the course of the next decade. Beef isn’t just going to be more available, though. It’s also going to be cheaper than it’s been in years.
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Beef and pork consumption have been on a steady decline in the United States for the last decade, while the amount of chicken America eats has been steadily rising over the same period. This isn’t due to people losing—and then finding—their taste for steak, however. It’s because beef has been getting progressively more expensive.
In 2015, with ranchers hit hard by both high feed prices and drought, America’s beef production hit an all-time low, right as global demand was spiking. This pushed beef prices to skyrocket by over 50 percent in the course of a decade, while chicken (which was already considerably cheaper than beef) held mostly steady. The end result was that, Americans ate considerably less beef over the last decade and quite a bit more chicken. Now, the USDA is not only forecasting that the decline will end but that beef will become the fastest growing meat category for the next ten years.
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The USDA anticipates a price decline thanks to changing conditions on the ranch. High feed prices are dropping, and the drought, although it’s still ongoing, has eased up slightly. This means that ranchers’ cost of raising cows is falling. With cheaper herds, ranchers can raise more cows and send more beef out to the market. This will increase the amount of beef we eat, and it should lower the cost of beef by about 10 percent, the USDA predicts.
Chicken and pork fans shouldn’t be too worried, though. While beef had the sharpest projected gain, every single category of meat saw a predicted rise in supply throughout the next decade. By 2025, the average American will be eating 219 pounds of meat a year, compared with this decade’s 211 pounds—with no end to the upward trend in sight.Ken Doyle, Safecracker
Q: How did you learn to be a safecracker?
A: In 1978 I took a correspondence course to learn the basics of locksmithing. The ad in the Popular Mechanics classifieds said, “Be your own boss.”
The course consisted of about 70 lessons. I’d study each lesson and practice the particular skill required, like how to fit a key, lock disassembly, rekeying, etc.
Q: What does it mean to fit a key?
A: This is only one of a dozen basic locksmith skills. You insert a blank key, wiggle it while turning and the bumping action creates marks on the key blade. You file where the marks are until the key turns in the lock. It’s also known as “impressioning.”
Q: It seems like you could use this knowledge in bad ways if you wanted to.
A: Clients often ask, jokingly, whether we learn our trade in prison.
Technically, the biggest difference between what a burglar does and what I do is that the burglar wants to get in and out quickly and doesn’t care if the safe ever gets used again. I take my time because my objective is opening it with minimal damage so the owner can use it again.
A criminal safecracker also needs different knowledge and skills, beyond the technical, that I don’t have or need. I don’t need to know how to avoid leaving evidence, circumvent an alarm system, plan a get-away, or fence-stolen goods.
Q: Is it hard to open a safe?
A: Safecracking is about solving problems and overcoming challenges. That’s the fun part. There are basic skills and advanced skills. Expensive, burglary-resistant safes require advanced skills.
Q: How often do people get locked in vaults?
A: More often than you’d think and bank PR departments would like.
Usually the victims are children or seniors. Grandpa is busy examining the contents of his safe deposit box at closing time when a bank employee only performs part of the vault-closing procedure. Some vaults are L-shaped or there may be alcoves or obstructions inside, so it can happen if the closer doesn’t “walk the vault” as well as call out to possible occupants.
There was one case recently where a bank employee accidently locked her own child in the vault. Mom returned to finish “closing out” which included locking the vault. Again, skipping part of the procedure: “Hello? Anybody in there?” and the kid, playing hide and seek, kept quiet. Mom set the time lock and locked the door without walking in and looking, as was required by procedure. The time lock disengages only when the time runs out, usually an hour before the bank opens for business the next day. Once the door is locked, the time lock is automatic.
This was a comedy of errors from start to finish. First, the bank people called the vault service company and were told that the vault is ventilated, and there’s even a tool slot where a candy bar or juice can be passed through, and the mom can also talk to the kid through it until he falls asleep. The worst damage that could occur is that the kid pees on the carpet.
They also called the FBI bank robbery unit and were advised to make a hole in the wall because the time lock couldn’t be released from the outside. They called paramedics and firefighters who decided to drill a hole in the vault wall because they weren’t told about the ventilator.
It was decided to use a concrete coring company. They avoided the door and used a sixteen-inch concrete saw to make a hole in the vault wall. They were lucky because they managed to avoid hitting and destroying the valuables and documents within hundreds of metal safe deposit boxes stacked against the inside vault walls and rented to bank customers.
By the time they called me, they were halfway through the coring and starting to worry about a successful outcome. It would have cost $9K for me to come out, drill a small precise hole to destroy a five or six dollar part within the time lock, clean up a little drilling debris, replace the part, repair the tiny hole in the door so that the drill resistance was restored and have the door working again, all on the same day.
On the other hand, coring is a messy job. Water is used for lubrication and cooling during the procedure. There’s a mud trench to collect the mud and runoff, but it eventually results in lots of dust. Everything in the bank gets coated when it goes airborne. It gets into the computers, ATMs, bill counters, printers and on every surface. Unless each and every machine is thoroughly cleaned, the abrasive dust will eventually cause breakdowns.
The cost for concrete coring was only $2K, but they didn’t factor in the consequential costs. In addition to repairing the vault wall to the manufacturer’s specifications (about $6K), this incident ended up costing over $100K, including the cost to taxpayers for emergency personnel, extensive cleanup, and the repair or replacement of every piece of equipment that failed due to the dust plague. The bank might also have avoided embarrassing news coverage of the incident. Later, the bank manager told me, “I wish they’d have hired you.”
Q: Did they fire the mother?
A: No, they said that even though she broke procedure, the incident was punishment enough.
Q: How realistic are movies that show people breaking into vaults?
A: Not very! In the movies it takes five minutes of razzle-dazzle; in real life it’s usually at least a couple of hours of precision work for an easy, lost combination lockout.
Most vault lockouts are caused by malfunctions. A bank employee over-winds the time lock, a technician makes a mistake servicing the vault, or there was no maintenance because the bank has initiated yet another round of cost cutting.
Another 10-20% of my income comes from law enforcement searches and seizures or estate, aka “dead relative” openings. They hire me and I drill it open, but these are not situations where I like to hang around too long.
Q: Do you ever look inside?
A: I NEVER look. It’s none of my business. Involving yourself in people’s private affairs can lead to being subpoenaed in a lawsuit or criminal trial. Besides, I’d prefer not knowing about a client’s drug stash, personal porn, or belly button lint collection.
When I’m done I gather my tools and walk to the truck to write my invoice. Sometimes I’m out of the room before they open it. I don’t want to be nearby if there is a booby trap.
Q: Why would there be a booby trap?
A: The safe owner intentionally uses trip mechanisms, explosives or tear gas devices to “deter” unauthorized entry into his safe. It’s pretty stupid because I have yet to see any signs warning a would-be culprit about the danger.
Over the years I’ve found several tear gas devices in safes and vaults I’ve opened. These devices were marketed with names like “BEAVER” and “BADGER.” There are safecrackers that collect them.
Q: Have you ever met a lock you couldn’t pick?
A: There are several types of locks that are designed to be extremely pick-resistant, as there are combination safe locks that can slow down my efforts at manipulation.
I’ve never met a safe or lock that kept me out for very long. Not saying I can’t be stumped. Unknown mechanical malfunctions inside a safe or vault are the most challenging things I have to contend with and I will probably see one of those tomorrow since you just jinxed me with that question.The New York Red Bulls took advantage of Red Bull Global synergy, adding Israeli National Team forward Omer Damari on loan from sister club RB Leipzig of the German Bundesliga.
With the MLS transfer window closing Wednesday, the Red Bulls are expected to sign Austrian winger Daniel Royer as well, adding much-needed bite to their flagging attack. The Damari loan was reported by both BBC World and Leipzig writer Guido Schafer.
The 27-year-old Damari spent last year loaned out to another sister club, Red Bull Salzburg, where he scored four goals in 16 appearances to help them claim their seventh Austrian league title in the past nine seasons. He’s also scored nine times in 20 appearances for Israel.
There have been previous examples of synergy, although the new Red Bull regime hopes to make them more common and beneficial.
The Red Bulls got Markus Schopp (2006) and Brian Nielsen (2010-11) on loan from Salzburg, neither of which worked out well. Ernst Oebster and Ibrahim Sekagya both came to New York on free transfers from Salzburg, the latter helping the Red Bulls win the Supporters’ Shield in 2013.
Midfielder Dax McCarty announced on Twitter that he’ll miss 4-6 weeks with a small tibial plateau fracture.“The Court finds that there is sufficient evidence in the record to demonstrate that Plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits,” said a DC Superior Court judge in her latest procedural ruling in the defamation case of Michael Mann v. National Review, et al. “The evidence before the Court indicates the likelihood that ‘actual malice’ is present in the [National Review’s] conduct.”
On August 30 the Court denied the Defendants’ Motion for Reconsideration of the Court’s July 19 order, which had affirmed Prof. Mann’s right to proceed in his defamation lawsuit. The text of the August 30 Court Order is here in PDF.
Some excerpts from the Court Order denying Defendants’ Motion for Reconsideration:
Defamation
… The Court finds that there is sufficient evidence in the record to demonstrate that Plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits. As the Court stated in its previous Order, the NR Defendants’ reference to Plaintiff “as the man behind the fraudulent climate change ‘hockey stick’ graph” was essentially an allegation of fraud by Plaintiff. …
The Court clearly recognizes that some members involved in the climate-change discussions and debates employ harsh words. The NR Defendants are reputed to use this manner of speech; however there is a line between rhetorical hyperbole and defamation. In this case, the evidence before the Court demonstrates that something more than mere rhetorical hyperbole is, at least at this stage present. Accusations of fraud, especially where such accusations are made frequently through the continuous usage of words such as “whitewashed,” “intellectually bogus,” “ringmaster of the tree-ring circus” and “cover-up” amount to more than rhetorical hyperbole. …
The evidence before the Court indicates the likelihood that “actual malice” is present in the NR Defendants’ conduct. …
Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (“IIED”)
… The Court finds that Plaintiff’s claim for IIED is similar to that for defamation. There is sufficient evidence before the Court to indicate “actual malice.” The NR Defendants have frequently accused Plaintiff of academic fraud regardless of their awareness that Plaintiff has been investigated by several bodies and his work found to be proper. The NR Defendant’s persistence despite the findings of the investigative bodies could be likened to a witch hunt. In fact, Plaintiff had nothing to do with the Sandusky case yet the NR Defendants seized upon that criminal act by a pedophile and did more, this Court finds, than simply comment on another article.
The Court agrees with the arguments advanced by Plaintiff. To place Plaintiff’s name in the same sentence with Sandusky (a convicted pedophile) is clearly outrageous.
Stay tuned.
Earlier posts of documents in the case:
August 19: Michael Mann v. National Review et al. defamation lawsuit – new Plaintiff’s briefs
July 19: DC Court affirms Michael Mann’s right to proceed in defamation lawsuit against National Review and CEIFRISCO, Texas – Add another Pro Bowl player to the list of injured players.
While kicker Dan Bailey played on Sunday in San Francisco, his ailing back has the Cowboys at least working on contingency plans in case he can’t play this week against the Bengals.
Head coach Jason Garrett said on Monday there is no immediate plan to bring in other kickers this week, but didn’t rule it out.
“We don't have anything schedule right now,” Garrett said. “But that is certainly an option as the week goes on.”
If that happens, the Cowboys would have to sign another kicker to the 53-man roster. This week, they already need to find one roster spot for defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence, who is coming off the suspension list and needs a spot.
Garrett said he first heard about Bailey’s injury “before the game” on Sunday. But the veteran kicker still attempted a 47-yard field goal that sailed to the left. Bailey later made a 22-yard kick in the fourth quarter. He also had five kickoffs, including three touchbacks out of the end zone.
The Cowboys have had a string of back injuries here of late, starting with Tony Romo, of course. But left tackle Tyron Smith has missed two straight games with a lower back injury.Review: Rap Trio Flatbush ZOMBiES Releases Debut Album
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This is the first album that Flatbush ZOMBiES has dropped under their indie record label.
The first time I ever heard about the rap group Flatbush ZOMBiES was a week or so after my friends attended a music festival in B.C. last summer.
They saw them at the Pemberton Music Festival and spoke highly about the energy and charisma of the Brooklyn-based rap trio.
Having grown up with these friends, I had good faith in their words, and I looked forward to the upcoming release of their new project, 3001: A Laced Odyssey.
As soon as I first heard the lead single “Bounce,” I was already thrilled to see how this track would fit into the narrative of an LP. The electric guitar that lurks in the forefront of the song backed with a string orchestra makes for a forward-moving listen.
It was also an appropriate track to showcase the kind of flow that Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice and Erick “The Architect” Elliott would be delivering throughout the whole project. It was totally unconventional but also versatile in the most fitting way possible for Flatbush ZOMBiES.
With the opening track, “The Odyssey,” it’s clear that the listeners are in for quite the experience— as if watching Stanley Kubrick film of similar name, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The song establishes the style of production that is rooted throughout the whole project. Spacey instrumentals with sizzling percussion scattered everywhere is layered with an underlying smooth bass that keeps the rhythm of the song going. The song “R.I.P.C.D.” is my personal favorite tune off the whole album and clearly stands out from the rest of the track list.
Erick “The Architect” Elliott channels an eerily similar flow and tone of voice to that of Q-Tip, from the highly influential rap collective A Tribe Called Quest on this track, especially on the hook. Furthermore, Meechy Darko’s delivery is outstanding and extremely well executed towards the last minute and a half of the track, almost to the point of making me feel physically exhausted trying to keep up with his verse.
At one point within his flow he sounds like he is completely out of breathe but continues to push his effort in annunciating every single last word before he finishes completely.
At first glance of the cover of 3001: A Laced Odyssey, I was able to form some sort of an idea as to what kind of colorful production styling the trio would settle on for this project. Examples of this can be seen on the track “Smoke Break,” which offers a sedated feel with simmering high hats accompanied by a booming drum beat that feels abrasive but isn’t overbearing at all; in fact, it fits well together and makes for a pleasantly fun interlude.
Another example of this can also be heard on the track “Fly Away,” which has a simple piano ballad playing across the duration of the track that brings upon a somber feeling. I wasn’t much of a fan of Meechy Darko on this track, who sings instead of raps over this melody, but I understand the perspective of this approach.
The lyrical content is pretty dark as he talks about belonging in a world that he isn’t sure is real in his current state of being and how smoking weed can help him escape this confusion. The contrast of the lyrics to the instrumental are appropriately fitting.
When it comes to lyrical content, the Flatbush ZOMBiES want to make one thing apparent and it’s that they love to use drugs. More specifically, they enjoy smoking weed and taking LSD as they navigate their way through life trying to figure out what it all means.
The way the content is presented still makes for a fun listen but also wears out thin very quickly. By the time the record has reached it’s end with the track “Your Favorite Rap Song,” I feel like I can predict whatever subject matter they’re going to want to present to me.
Yet on this specific track, the trio spit bars over a murky piano progression backed with a basic drum beat that makes you feel apart of the collective posse. It’s some of the best material that the LP has to offer.
In the last five and a half minutes, the song takes a quick sharp turn with of the track being voice recordings from fans and haters alike, either praising the group for their work or dishing out insults of disinterest. This would’ve been an interesting way to end the album if it wasn’t dragged on for the entire last half of the track.
On my first entire play through of the album I was instantly hooked onto the kinds of personalities these individuals had to offer. Even though there isn’t anything entirely new being presented to the listeners, it still feels like a fresh take on the genre of hip hop.
It’s also worth noting that the ZOMBiES released 3001: A Laced Odyssey independently through their own label, The Glorious Dead. This means that they marketed the entire project themselves and were fully in charge of the kind of story they wanted to tell.
With that kind of creative freedom and ability, the rap trio were able put forth a piece of work that feels truly representative of the experiences they’ve lived through growing up in the neighborhood of Flatbush, Brooklyn.
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Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Over the past two years, China has seen a proliferation of state-endorsed experiments representing early stages towards a national social credit system. These pilots evaluate citizens based on opaque formulae reportedly incorporating financial, social, behavioral, and legal data; and reward or penalize them by, for example, facilitating or restricting travel, credit, and shopping. (China Law Translate is currently translating a series of related government documents.) The final system, officials hope, will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”
Such resounding language, together with suspicions about political metrics and the schemes’ eye-catchingly dystopian long-term potential, have tended to overshadow the pilots’ relatively limited, piecemeal, and provisional current state. But the nascent social credit system is indeed part of “a broader Chinese government push to harness big data as a resource for social control,” according to Shazeda Ahmed, a UC Berkeley PhD student and former fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. Ahmed has previously written about her investigations of the social credit pilots and related issues at Citizen Lab, and discussed them this week with CDT:
CDT: Who is conducting these pilots? How and when did they start? What are the goals?
Shazeda Ahmed: Right now there are two types of pilot testing, private and public. The Chinese government has given eight companies official permission to do experimental testing of social credit systems, and the one that’s publicly available is Sesame Credit, owned by Alibaba subsidiary Ant Financial. The public social credit pilots are being conducted at a city level in over thirty cities around the country, with a prominent example being Shanghai.
I think the testing started sometime in late 2014 or 2015, when the first drafts of regulations suggesting how such a system could work were issued and when the first Western media articles critiquing the system were published. The purported goals of what the state is hoping will one day be a nationwide social credit system differ depending on what you read. I’ve seen government officials cast social credit as a way to reinstate trust in people and institutions. Both individuals and businesses get social credit scores, and there is an emphasis on the notion that data produced from their transactions can be used to accurately monitor how reliably they adhere to laws and social norms. I’ve even seen a few Chinese editorials where people make the complete opposite argument that’s common to Western condemnatory takes on social credit, and insist that social credit would actually protect civil liberties. This is related to one of the other alleged goals of the system, which is to issue credit to traditionally “unbanked” populations– migrant workers, college students, rural citizens who all seek to take out loans. Although they may stand to gain opportunities through social credit schemes, they are also highly vulnerable and could end up in debt, among other consequences.
CDT: But they wouldn’t have to resort to nude selfies to get loans?
SA: I’ve read about this type of loan collateral before and can’t say I know much about it, but yes, that is definitely another way that less well-off and potentially less tech-savvy individuals who need to borrow money are exploited. I remember the first time I read about it and hoped it wasn’t true! To me, making loan disbursement conditional on something that can be used to blackmail people seems to defy some of the (admittedly vague) concepts of morality that are loosely articulated in the social credit system. I sincerely hope that at the intersection of still-developing privacy protections and regulations about “indecent” content that can’t be posted online in China, protections against this sort of harassment emerge.
CDT: How do the various pilot schemes differ?
SA: At present I don’t have a clear sense of how the private company-owned social credit programs differ from the municipal government-run ones, although it seems that through the former users of financial technology or “fintech” apps can access their scores instantly, whereas with the city-level social credit systems one might need to show up at a specific office to find out one’s credit score. I have a lot of unanswered questions about the variance between these separate systems, how they may or may not converge if the goal is to create a unified system, and whether or not this is intentional on the state’s part to have a variety of results to compare after the pilot testing ends.
CDT: What kind of data feeds into the system?
SA: Taking the concrete example of Sesame Credit, within the app there’s a visual that breaks the credit score down into five components: users’ credit history, behavioral habits, ability to pay off debts, personal information, and social networks. Recently I’ve seen articles that suggest data including criminal and other government-held records will also be included. The actual algorithms that compute credit scores are black boxed, which means that it would be illegal to do experimental testing to figure out which transactions and behaviors would cause a score to rise or fall. When I wrote about this for the Citizen Lab, I sought out statements from Alipay and Sesame Credit company representatives about which inputs affect scores, and found many peculiar and highly specific factors including hours of video game play (score declines) or purchasing diapers (assumption that user is a parent, thus score increases). These statements seemed to suggest that contrary to the language of objectivity the state uses to describe this system, social credit is (surprise) based on subjective Chinese social norms and practices.
CDT: Without incriminating yourself, have you been able to do much independent exploration of how the scores are calculated?
SA: All of the research I have done on this so far is based on openly available sources such as Chinese news media, Sina Weibo, IT industry journals, and web forums. I can’t say I’ve seen many fully fleshed-out theories of how the system works, though I have come across more than a few Chinese articles and threads suggesting that the way to raise one’s Sesame Credit score is to do more shopping using Alipay. This reinforces my own hunch that the story in the shadows of the Western media portrayals of “social credit as Big Brother” is actually one of social credit being about spurring consumerism in a country where people have historically saved more than they’ve spent. In a way this is a banal point about how social credit encourages capitalism in China, because of course this is the point of credit scoring. Yet it’s still worth raising because I think social credit will be inextricably linked with fintech, and it’s important to consider how mechanisms of reward and punishment that are tied to one’s personal finances and behavior (online and offline) will develop in light of this bundling.
CDT: What are some of the current consequences of high or low scores?
SA: Since I last checked, high Sesame Credit scores open up access to expedited security checks at the Beijing domestic airport, as well as a faster visa application process to places like Singapore and Luxembourg (with other countries having expressed interest in this as well.) Speaking to my point about consumerism above, it’s not particularly shocking that the countries that currently are or plan to partner with this express visa process are also ones where Alipay users can pay for products using the app. So to reiterate, we can imagine a scenario in which someone has a high credit score that gets them a visa to one of these countries relatively quickly, and once they’re in said foreign country they can open up the Alipay app to find out about local sights and shops, as well as make payments using Alipay (and potentially rack up a higher credit score in the process). Other benefits include having online purchases delivered to one’s home to try out before paying for them, and renting cars or booking hotels without putting down a deposit. Punishments are less clear at the moment, but primarily include blacklisting and fines. An example I’ve seen mentioned in a few places is the Supreme People’s Court’s list of people in extreme debt, which is apparently shared with Alipay so that those people cannot make “luxury purchases” (undefined) in the app or board flights or high-speed trains. I’m not clear on how this would affect their credit score, but it would appear to fall under the Sesame Credit category about fulfilling commitments and obligations.
CDT: Some comments from Ant Financial suggest that the system is not just about passive tracking, but active “social sculpting.” Beyond encouraging consumption in the way you’ve discussed, this seems to include incentivizing activities like charitable donations, and discouraging others like late night web browsing and excessive video gaming. In your Citizen Lab piece, you even mentioned “the possibility of social credit and mobile finance access being blocked to penalize citizens for acts of protest.”
SA: Yes, while I have no hard evidence of this sort of blocking having yet occurred, it’s certainly not difficult to imagine how easy it would be to instate. In their article about social credit The Economist raised this point as well. There is definitely a drive to change people’s behavior, and one of the questions I’m hoping to explore through interviews with social credit users is whether they are behaving differently in their daily lives to try and raise their scores. After all, it’s not yet a nationwide system, the benefits may not appeal to everyone, and the punishments seem to thus far be quite minor. This also raises the question of if hackers have figured out how to artificially raise their scores and are riding the benefits of that. China’s not known for designing hacker-proof tech, and Alipay in particular could do with better cybersecurity practices. Pretty recently a friend told me about how Alipay had a feature where if you forgot your password, you could identify a few of your friends and recent purchases to reset it, whether on your phone or someone else’s. [Facebook uses similar verification features.] Naturally people took advantage of this, and Alipay’s quick fix was to keep this feature but only limit it to the phone the user had registered with the app. Similar events are bound to occur, and lax security precautions make me wonder if in the future people will be able to purchase pre-curated accounts that already have high scores built into them.
CDT: How far beyond the kinds of tracking commonplace in the West do the Chinese systems look set to go?
SA: I think that depends on how well-integrated the private company-run systems become with government bureaus. While the municipal-level social credit systems are worth paying attention to, I think the range of data points a source like Sesame Credit has access to is far greater and can be put to any number of uses that the company and the state may not have even realized or articulated yet. It’s also imperative to pay attention to what |
objectives spelled out in the constitution of the Canadian Alliance Society in 1834; it called for an elected governor, legislative council (senate), House of Assembly and magistracy, all by secret ballot. It was egalitarian, prohibiting both slavery and the granting of "hereditary emoluments, privileges, or honors." It also called for a separation of church and state, and barred the clergy from seeking election, or serving in any civil or military office. It guaranteed the rights to personal property, to freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. But tied to these rights to personal property and egalitarian democracy were severe restrictions on chartering corporations; starting from the premise that "Labour is the only means of creating wealth" it placed a constitutional prohibition on chartering either banks or trading companies.[21]
Reform of the jury system [ edit ]
The reformer party in the Legislative Assembly desired that the Jury system be reformed, to the extent that they passed a Jury Law Amendment Bill no less than four times over eight years.[10] This was a contentious issue, and the Legislative Council replied again for the last time in favour of the status quo on February 25, 1836.[22] The defeat of the reformers in June 20, 1836 elections for the 13th Parliament of Upper Canada silenced this legislative outlet of steam, and thus was the stage set for rebellion.
Economic issues [ edit ]
Collapse of the international financial system [ edit ]
On July 10, 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill for the refinancing of the Second Bank of the United States, arguing that it was utilized by a "moneyed aristocracy" to oppress the common man. The dismantling of the bank plunged the Anglo-American world into an enormous depression (1836–38) that was worsened by bad wheat harvests in Upper Canada in 1836. Farmers were unable to pay their debts. Most banks - including the Bank of Upper Canada - suspended payments (i.e. declared bankruptcy) by July 1837 and requested government support. While the banks received government support, ordinary farmers and the poor did not.
Among the more than 150 lawsuits they launched that year, the Bank of Upper Canada, which served the same purpose as the Bank of the United States, launched a suit against Sheldon, Dutcher & Co., a foundry and Toronto's largest employer with over 80 employees in late 1836, bankrupting the company.[23] Not surprisingly, Mackenzie's first plan for rebellion involved calling on Sheldon & Dutcher's men to storm the city hall, where the militia's guns were stored.
Economic distress [ edit ]
The brunt of this economic distress was felt by the common farmers. One fifth of British immigrants arrived in Upper Canada impoverished. Most immigrant farmers lacked the capital to pay for purchased land. The large debts they owed were compounded by the bad harvest, and debt collection laws that allowed for them to be jailed indefinitely until they paid their loans off to merchants. The situation was made worse in March 1837 when the Tories passed a law making it cheaper to sue farmers: city merchants could sue in the middle of harvest, and if the farmer refused to come to court in Toronto, they would automatically forfeit the case and be subjected to a sheriff's sale.[24]
Provincial debt of Upper Canada [ edit ]
The Reformers were incensed at the debt that the family compact had managed to incur as the results of general improvements to the province, such as the Welland Canal.[25] These debts stemmed mostly from investments in canals.[26] A man and his team of oxen hired at two dollars per day. The population of the province was estimated at 400,000, while the debt of the province amounted to around 1,000,000 pounds. The annual revenues amounted to 60,000, a sum almost insufficient to pay the interest on the debt. The dissolution of the 12th Parliament of Upper Canada in spring of 1836 resulted from the denial of money bills by the Reformist Legislative Assembly.
Confrontation [ edit ]
Toronto Rebellion [ edit ]
Peter Matthews was one of several delegates in support of revolt, in an October 1837 meeting with other reformists and rebels.
When the Lower Canada Rebellion broke out on October 9, 1837, Bond Head sent all the British troops stationed in Toronto to help suppress it. At the beginning of November, a meeting of 15 reformers at John Doel's house rejected Mackenzie's call for an immediate attack on City Hall. They instead decided to send Mackenzie north to investigate public sentiment. At a secret meeting in East Gwillimbury, Samuel Lount, Silas Fletcher, Peter Matthews of Pickering, Nelson Gorham of Newmarket, Jesse Lloyd of King township and James Bolton of Albion township heard Lloyd report on the revolt in Lower Canada. All were delegates to the Constitutional Convention. They decided to set the date for a supportive Upper Canadian revolt on December 7.
On November 15, Mackenzie published his draft constitution. On November 27, Mackenzie printed a handbill declaring "Independence!". On November 29, Mackenzie set the date for the Constitutional Convention for December 21, exactly 6 months after the date of King William's death - the Tory dominated elected assembly, which refused to prorogue, would at that time become illegitimate.
The delegates to the Convention, like Samuel Lount, downplayed the armed aspect of the Rebellion to the farmers he tried to enlist. Lount called a meeting in Hope (now Sharon), the village of the Children of Peace, where he told them "there was war in Lower Canada and there was reason to believe that Martial Law would be proclaimed… he thought the city would be taken without firing a gun."[27]
Dr. Rolph, however, had heard that the Lt. Governor had been informed of the plan, and sent a note to Lount moving the march from the north forward to December 4, 1837. When hearing about this change of plans, Mackenzie quickly tried to send a messenger to Lount to tell him not to arrive until December 7. This message was not received in time, with Lount replying that the rebels had already been ordered to march to Toronto and were on their way.[28] Barely armed with pikes and guns for hunting fowl, the farmers from York County marched from Newmarket down Yonge Street towards Toronto and Montgomery's Tavern.
Before the direct confrontation between Mackenzie’s rebels and Bond Head’s militia forces on December 7, there were various encounters between both sides which resulted in small skirmishes. On December 4, Mackenzie and some fellow rebels encountered Alderman John Powell (Canadian politician) and Archibald McDonald when riding down Yonge Street to scout the city. Upon meeting them, Mackenzie took both men prisoner and sent them to Montgomery’s Tavern. Although there were concerns over whether Powell and McDonald possessed arms, Mackenzie accepted their denials and said, “well, gentlemen, as you are my townsmen, and men of honor, I would be ashamed to show that I question your words by ordering you to be searched.”[29] Despite such assurances, Powell had hidden a pistol and shot rebel Captain Anthony Anderson before escaping back to Toronto, thereby dealing a large blow to the rebel’s military expertise.[30]
As Mackenzie and his forces marched towards Toronto, Bond Head sent a flag to the rebels and asked for their demands, to which Mackenzie demanded “Independence and a convention to arrange details.” By the time Mackenzie and his followers had reached College Street, Bond Head sent another party to tell Mackenzie that his demands had been rejected.[31] That same day, Colonel Moodie attempted to ride through a roadblock to warn Bond Head, but the rebels shot him.
With the truce faltering, Mackenzie and his forces continued into Toronto, eventually confronting a small loyalist force estimated to be between 15 and 30 members strong. The last real engagement prior to the Battle of Montgomery’s Tavern occurred on December 6 via a raid on a mail coach which was suspected to have government intelligence regarding future actions towards the rebels. It was from this raid that the rebels learned of government plans to soon attack Montgomery’s Tavern.[32]
When the revolt began, Mackenzie hesitated in attacking the city until December 7, when his military leader, Anthony Van Egmond, arrived. Van Egmond, a veteran on both sides of the Napoleonic Wars, advised immediate retreat, but Mackenzie remained hesitant. Mackenzie waited for Bond Head's force of about 1000 men and one cannon, led by Colonel James FitzGibbon, which outnumbered Mackenzie's approximately 400 rebels. When the battle started, Mackenzie split his troops into two groups and put one group on each side of Yonge Street, with the western flank taking the brunt of Bond Head’s assault. Outmatched both in weaponry and skill, Mackenzie's rebels lasted about 15 minutes in the battle before retreating.[33] The untested forces dispersed in a panic after the first round of firing thinking the rebel’s front row had been killed when they were simply dropping to the ground to allow those behind them to fire.[34]
London Rebellion [ edit ]
News of the intended rebellion had reached London and the surrounding townships by December 7. It was initially thought that the Toronto rebellion was successful, contributing to Charles Duncombe wanting to rise up as well.[35] Upon hearing more details about the rebellion in Toronto, Duncombe convened a series of public meetings to spread news of the supposed atrocities committed by Bond Head against all suspected reformers to help increase anti-government support. It is estimated that there were between 400-500 rebels who assembled under Duncombe [36] Colonel Allan MacNab, who had just finished leading Upper Canadian militiamen during the Battle of Montgomery's Tavern, was sent to engage Duncombe's uprising. He left Hamilton, Ontario on December 12 and arrived in Brantford on December 13. Although many rebels, including Duncombe, had fled prior to the upcoming battle due to hearing about the failure of Mackenzie in Toronto and general disorganization, there were still some present in Scotland, Ontario and MacNab commenced his attack on Scotland on December 14, causing the remaining rebels to flee after only a few shots were fired.[37] The victorious Tory supporters burned homes and farms of known rebels and suspected supporters. In the 1860s, some of the former rebels were compensated by the Canadian government for their lost property in the rebellion aftermath.
Rebellion by other means [ edit ]
Mackenzie, Duncombe, John Rolph and 200 supporters fled to Navy Island in the Niagara River, where they declared themselves the Republic of Canada on December 13. They obtained supplies from supporters in the United States, resulting in British reprisals (see Caroline affair). On January 13, 1838, under attack by British armaments, the rebels fled. Mackenzie went to the United States where he was arrested and charged under the Neutrality Act.[38] The other major leaders, Van Egmond, Samuel Lount, and Peter Matthews were arrested by the British; Van Egmond died in prison, and Lount and Matthews were executed at 8 AM on April 12, 1838, in Toronto. Their last words were: "Mr. Jarvis, do your duty; we are prepared to meet death and our Judge."
The rebels continued their raids into Canada, however, using the U.S. as a base of operations and cooperating with the U.S. Hunters' Lodges, dedicated to the overthrow of British rule in Canada. The raids did not end until the rebels and Hunters were decisively defeated at the Battle of the Windmill, nearly a year after the initial battle at Montgomery's Tavern.
Consequences: execution or transportation [ edit ]
Proclamation from December 1837, offering a reward for the capture of William Lyon Mackenzie
Compared to the Lower Canada Rebellion, the initial portion of the Upper Canada Rebellion was short and disorganized. However, the British government in London was very concerned about the rebellion, especially in light of the strong popular support for the rebels in the United States and the more serious crisis in Lower Canada. Bond Head was recalled in late 1837 and replaced with Sir George Arthur who arrived in Toronto in March 1838. Parliament also sent Lord Durham to become Governor-in-Chief of the British North American colonies,[39] so that Arthur reported to Durham. Durham was assigned to report on the grievances among the British North American colonists and find a way to appease them. His report eventually led to greater autonomy in the Canadian colonies, and the union of Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada in 1840. The populations of Upper and Lower Canada are listed on the Province of Canada wiki, and that of Canada West was not to exceed that of Canada East until 1850.
A number of the rebels were hanged including Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews, others were shot.[40] Their deaths were a strong motivation for the continuing Patriot War. Many more prisoners were transported, but most were pardoned, e.g. Enoch Moore (Loyalist turned rebel). A general pardon (for everyone but Mackenzie) was issued in 1845, and Mackenzie himself was pardoned in 1849 and allowed to return to Canada, where he resumed his political career. Mackenzie was strongly disillusioned after his time in the United States, writing to his son that "after what I have seen here, I frankly confess to you that, had I passed nine years in the United States before, instead of after, the outbreak, I am sure I would have been the last man in America to be engaged in it."[41] In later life however, Mackenzie advocated annexation of Canada by the United States.[42]
In total 93 Americans and 58 Canadiens prisoners from Lower Canada were transported to Australia after being convicted in Montreal in late 1838 or early 1839. Almost all were taken on HMS Buffalo, leaving Quebec in September 1839 and arriving off Hobart, Van Diemen's Land in February 1840. The Americans were disembarked at Hobart but the French-Canadians were taken to Sydney, New South Wales. They were interned near the present-day suburb of Concord, giving rise to the names Canada Bay, France Bay and Exile Bay. The French-Canadians were treated better than the Americans, liberated sooner and assisted in getting home. Of the 93 Americans, 14 died as a direct result of transportation and penal servitude. By the end of 1844, half of those in Van Diemen's Land had been granted pardons, nearly all were pardoned by 1848, but five remained in penal servitude until at least 1850. None chose to stay in Van Diemen's Land after being pardoned.[43][44]
From Upper Canada 150 were sent to the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land and Sydney, Australia.[40] In December 1838, more than a dozen convicts, amongst whom Grant, Miller, Reynolds, Parker, Malcolm, Walker, Bedford, Wixon, Watson, Brown, Anderson and Alves, were transferred through Liverpool, where those named interested in their case a local Member of Parliament, Joseph Hume, who brought an affidavit and petition of Habeas Corpus on their behalf. Grant had been sentenced in Niagara to death but pardoned if he would be transported. Miller and Reynolds were convicted in Niagara of felony to the same effect. The nine others were convicted in Toronto to the same effect. They depended, amongst other artifices, on the difference in status between convicted as they had been and pardoned by the time they were in Liverpool. But, in the end, the judges confirmed their transportation.[45]
Historical significance [ edit ]
The Rebellion – a "fact that every school child knows" – has overshadowed all else in the Canadian narratives on the struggle for democracy and responsible government. Allan Greer has argued that "though the 'Progress of Liberty' was a favorite theme of history for earlier generations, it is difficult today to get anyone interested in the history of democracy… Canadians in particular, taught in school to see their national past as a story dominated by transcontinental railways and Fathers of Confederation, have trouble imagining the struggle for democracy as an important historical theme. The history of democracy, we tend to believe, happened somewhere else."[46]
Paul Romney explains this failure of historical imagination as the outcome of an explicit strategy adopted by reformers in the face of charges of disloyalty to Britain in the wake of the Rebellions of 1837. In recounting the “myths of responsible government”, Romney emphasized that after the ascendancy of Loyalism as the dominant political ideology of Upper Canada any demand for democracy or for responsible government became a challenge to colonial sovereignty. The linkage of the "fight for responsible government" with disloyalty was solidified by the Rebellion of 1837, as reformers took up arms to finally break the "baneful domination" of the mother country. Struggling to avoid the charge of sedition, reformers later purposefully obscured their true aims of independence from Britain and focused on their grievances against the Family Compact. Thus, responsible government became a "pragmatic" policy of alleviating local abuses, rather than a revolutionary anti-colonial moment.[47]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Leslie Hoffman/AP Photo
Beheadings and amputations. Iraqi-style brutality, bribery, extortion, kidnapping, and murder. More than 7,200 dead—almost double last year’s tally—in shoot-outs between federales and often better-armed drug cartels. This is modern Mexico, whose president, Felipe Calderón, has been struggling since 2006 to wrest his country from the grip of four powerful cartels and their estimated 100,000 foot soldiers.
But chillingly, there are signs that one of the worst features of Mexico’s war on drugs—law enforcement officials on the take from drug lords—is becoming an American problem as well. Most press accounts focus on the drug-related violence that has migrated north into the United States. Far less widely reported is the infiltration and corruption of American law enforcement, according to Robert Killebrew, a retired U.S. Army colonel and senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security. “This is a national security problem that does not yet have a name,” he wrote last fall in The National Strategy Forum Review. The drug lords, he tells me, are seeking to “hollow out our institutions, just as they have in Mexico.”
Corruption indictments and convictions linked to drug-trafficking organizations, known in police parlance as DTOs, are popping up in FBI press releases with disturbing frequency. In April, for instance, the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Texas announced that Sergio Lopez Hernandez, a 40-year-old Customs and Border Protection inspector, had been convicted of drug trafficking, alien smuggling, and bribery. Hernandez pleaded guilty to accepting over $150,000 in bribes and to conspiring to sell cocaine and bring illegal aliens into the country.
Or consider the case of border inspector Margarita Crispin—“precisely the kind of border corruption case that alarms us,” says William Abbott, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s criminal branch in El Paso, Texas. In 2005, he says, a federal informant tipped off the Bureau that Crispin was deliberately ignoring traffickers who moved drugs and other contraband through her border post. Then, in the spring of 2006, a van that had just gone through Crispin’s lane sputtered out of gas. The driver abandoned the vehicle and fled back across the border into Mexico—and when other inspectors opened the van’s doors, they found nearly 6,000 pounds of marijuana in plain sight. Crispin couldn’t explain why she hadn’t noticed the stash when she had examined the vehicle, according to an FBI press release on the case and an official who worked on it.
Another year of surveillance uncovered evidence of Crispin’s drug-cartel connections. Though she lived simply in El Paso, she socialized with known drug traffickers in Mexico and had bought two expensive homes and several luxury vehicles there through straw purchasers. Crispin was then arrested. After pleading guilty in 2008 to conspiring to import drugs and abusing the public trust, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $5 million in assets she was estimated to have stolen.
Government investigators believe that Crispin had been working for the cartels for at least a year before she applied to become an inspector. In other words, federal screening failed to detect that, at the time she applied for her job, the cartels had already recruited her to facilitate their cross-border trafficking. At one point, federal investigators say, Crispin claimed to have wanted out of her arrangement with the cartels. “But we think she was kidnapped and forcibly taken back to Mexico to remind her of whom she was working for,” Abbott says. Having family in both Juárez and El Paso, cities within sight of each other across the border, Crispin found herself trapped.
Abbott says that the Crispin case is atypical. But the potential damage, he stresses, is huge. “You have the mule: an illegal immigrant who carries five pounds of marijuana in his backpack across the border through the desert. Compare that with the border inspector who waves through five completely loaded vans, as she did.”
Experts disagree about how deep this rot runs. Some try to downplay the phenomenon, dismissing the law enforcement officials who have succumbed to bribes or intimidation from the drug cartels as a few bad apples. Peter Nuñez, a former U.S. attorney who lectures at the University of San Diego, says he does not believe that there has been a noticeable surge of cartel-related corruption along the border, partly because the FBI, which has been historically less corrupt than its state and local counterparts, has significantly ratcheted up its presence there. “It’s harder to be as corrupt today as locals were in the 1970s, when there wasn’t a federal agent around for hundreds of miles,” he says.
But Jason Ackleson, an associate professor of government at New Mexico State University, disagrees. “U.S. Customs and Border Protection is very alert to the problem,” he tells me. “Their internal investigations caseload is going up, and there are other cases that are not being publicized.” While corruption is not widespread, “if you increase the overall number of law enforcement officers as dramatically as we have”—from 9,000 border agents and inspectors prior to 9/11 to a planned 20,000 by the end of 2009—“you increase the possibility of corruption due to the larger number of people exposed to it and tempted by it.” Note, too, that Drug Enforcement Agency data suggest that Mexican cartels are operating in at least 230 American cities.
Washington is taking no chances. In recent months, the FBI’s Criminal Division has created seven multiagency task forces and assigned 120 agents to investigate public corruption, drug-related and otherwise, in the Southwest border region, says Debbie Weierman of the FBI’s public-affairs office in Washington. Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection, the largest U.S. law enforcement agency, has increased the number of its internal investigators over three years from five to 220.
And David Shirk, director of the San Diego–based Trans-Border Institute and a political scientist at the University of San Diego, says that recent years have seen an “alarming” increase in the number of Department of Homeland Security personnel being investigated for possible corruption. “The number of cases filed against DHS agents in recent years is in the hundreds,” says Shirk. “And that, obviously, is a potentially huge problem.” An August 2009 investigation by the Associated Press supports his assessment. Based on records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, court records, and interviews with sentenced agents, the AP concluded that more than 80 federal, state, and local border-control officials had been convicted of corruption-related crimes since 2007, soon after President Calderón launched his war on the cartels. Over the previous ten months, the AP data showed, 20 Customs and Border Protection agents alone had been charged with a corruption-related crime. If that pace continued, the reporters concluded, “the organization will set a new record for in-house corruption.”
While the FBI task forces focus mainly on corruption along the border, cartel-related vice has spread much deeper into the American heartland. Consider New Mexico’s San Juan County, some 450 miles north of the border, where the U.S. Attorney’s office has recently prosecuted a startling corruption case that may be a portent of things to come.
Back in 1994, Ken Christesen was a detective in the Four Corners, the region where the borders of Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico meet. That was the year that one Miguel Tarango was convicted of murdering a member of a rival drug gang in a territorial dispute. The conviction made Christesen realize that the Tarango family was “far more significant than we had initially thought” in the local drug trade, he tells me over coffee at Donna Kay’s, a popular café in Bloomfield, New Mexico.
Even in a county where 80 to 90 percent of all serious crimes are linked to drugs—an area where “you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a drug dealer”—the Tarangos stood out. The family was locally based but had ties to Mexico’s Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, and it had big ideas about controlling the lucrative trade in methamphetamine and other illicit drugs in San Juan County. The clan’s rising star was Daniel Tarango, Jr., a short, slim, American-born hipster with a pencil-thin mustache, a fondness for black T-shirts, and no visible means of support. After his father and uncle were convicted of heavy-duty meth trafficking, sent to federal prison, and deported, Danny, known to local cops as “the Runt,” took charge of the family business.
By 2002, Christesen had become a lieutenant in the San Juan County sheriff’s office, where he participated in Operation Farmland, an effort run by a federal, state, and local alliance called the Region II Narcotics Task Force. The operation, which targeted meth sales in the Four Corners, ended in 2003 with 250 people charged, among them Mike Marshall, a former sheriff’s deputy sentenced to five years in federal prison for distributing drugs. Christesen happened to know that Marshall and Danny Tarango had often been seen together. If Tarango had befriended Marshall, Christesen reasoned, might he also be trying to get inside information from active cops about the task force itself?
The hero of Operation Farmland was Levi Countryman, then a San Juan County sheriff’s deputy who had gotten many of the tips and intelligence that led to the massive arrests. Despite Countryman’s ostensibly heroic role in Farmland, Christesen was suspicious. Farmland hadn’t fingered a single member of the Tarango clan, despite its growing prominence in the county drug trade. And despite Farmland’s apparent success, methamphetamine still flowed freely into Farmington, Bloomfield, Shiprock, Aztec, and other forlorn, trailer-strewn desert towns in the Four Corners.
Christesen concluded that Danny Tarango and Levi Countryman were working together—that “we made the arrests, Levi became a hero, and Danny got rich by eliminating his competition,” Christesen recalls. But he had no proof. Nevertheless, when he took over the Narcotics Task Force in October 2004, he quietly put Levi Countryman at the top of his target list.
Christesen’s suspicions about Countryman had been reinforced in the spring of 2004, when officers searching one of Danny Tarango’s many houses found an all-terrain vehicle registered in Countryman’s name. What was Countryman’s ATV doing in the Runt’s garage? Under intense scrutiny, Countryman resigned as deputy sheriff and told friends that he would enter the private sector as a stock trader.
But sensitive task-force information kept leaking out to the Tarangos, much to Christesen’s frustration. Every time Christesen got close to persuading someone to talk or testify in a drug-related case, the inquiry would fall apart. A parade of witnesses who had agreed to testify would suddenly change their minds. One potential witness in a drug case against Josh Tarango, Danny’s younger brother, refused to testify in 2006 after her daughter’s car was burned on her front lawn. “Every time we got close to tying Tarango to Countryman,” Christesen recalls, “an informant would be burned”—intimidated, that is. “I began to think that our own building was bugged. I even asked the FBI to do a sweep.” Tired of waiting for federal help, “we finally bought old equipment and did it ourselves.” The sweep turned up nothing. Meanwhile, violence in San Juan County kept escalating, much of it apparently tied to Danny Tarango.
In January 2007, the FBI finally responded to Christesen’s repeated appeals and quietly opened an investigation into whether the task force’s operations were being compromised from within. Because everyone on the task force was potentially a suspect, the FBI agents told no one in local law enforcement—not even Christesen—precisely what they were doing and whom they were targeting. But after wiretapping Danny Tarango’s cell-phone calls, they discovered that information about the task force was still being provided by Countryman. Christesen’s suspicions were all too true: Countryman was getting his information from a state police officer named Keith Salazar, one of the unit’s most trusted, experienced members. Countryman and Tarango even referred to Salazar by the code name “Candy” because the information he provided was so “sweet.”
In court, Salazar later argued that he had been forced to betray his fellow officers—that Countryman had threatened, if Salazar refused to cooperate, not only to expose the fact that he had skimmed funds from the task force’s kitty, but also to harm him and his family. But the cell-phone conversations that prosecutor Reeve Swainston played in court made a mockery of that claim. Calling each other several times a day, referring to each other as “bro,” joking and swearing like fraternity brothers staging college pranks, Salazar and Countryman were obviously close friends who enjoyed their dirty work. Salazar eagerly provided Countryman with the names of his fellow officers, even those serving undercover. He gave Countryman pictures he had taken of them, their home addresses, their birth dates and Social Security numbers, and detailed descriptions of their cars and license-plate numbers. He also disclosed the identity of confidential informants; the dates, times, and locations of impending search warrants; the nature of ongoing antidrug investigations in New Mexico and Colorado; and other material that Countryman requested. And he did all this for just $1,000 a month from Tarango.
For his part, Countryman was the perfect middleman. As soon as he got sensitive information from “Candy,” he would call Tarango and pass it along. As a result, Salazar never had to talk to Tarango or meet with him, insulating him from scrutiny. All three men used cell phones specifically dedicated to their double-dealing, creating what Swainston called in his indictment a “compartmentalized line of communication.” But Countryman was more than a go-between; he also distributed some of the methamphetamine he received from Tarango, street profits from which supplemented the $8,000 a month that Tarango routinely paid him.
Christesen suspected that Tarango had turned other law enforcement officers and local and state officials, and he hoped that the FBI’s investigation would uncover them. But the FBI had to cut short its investigation and move against the three men in December 2007, after agents overheard Tarango and Countryman discussing ways to intimidate and possibly harm a deputy sheriff. Among the tactics they discussed were following the deputy’s wife around town, taking photos of her and her children, leaving a photo of her on her car, throwing hypodermic needles on her lawn, delivering a box filled with dying rats to the family’s home, and leaving a pig’s head on the front porch. They agreed that this might send her a message that “her husband needs to back off,” a court document states, quoting part of an intercepted conversation between Tarango and Countryman. Further, the FBI overheard Tarango telling Countryman that he had watched the family’s home at various hours, and Countryman telling Tarango that this deputy’s “ass needed to be whacked.”
Tarango vetoed the proposal, but the FBI had heard enough. Arrest warrants for all three men were promptly issued. But before Tarango could be served, he escaped to Mexico. When the police arrested Countryman at a Denny’s restaurant in Farmington, the county seat, they found a handgun in his truck. In a safe at his home were 13 more firearms, $18,000 in cash, and almost eight pounds of marijuana.
In a sentencing memorandum, Countryman said that his heavy drinking had “clouded” his judgment and asked to be enrolled in a substance-abuse program. Countryman and Salazar pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute drugs and were each sentenced to six years in prison. Their attorneys argued successfully in court for lighter sentences because of their post-arrest cooperation with law enforcement. And this past June, for reasons that remain murky, Danny Tarango returned from Mexico. His trial is expected to begin soon.
Christesen, who is now running for sheriff in San Juan County, still fears that Danny Tarango’s web of corruption may have been far broader than the public has been told. In the wake of the Countryman and Salazar arrests, the New Mexico state police’s narcotics division was quietly disbanded and reorganized. The fact that the state said so little about its actions leads Christesen and others to believe that the conspiracy may have involved other, still-unnamed, corrupt cops, border patrol agents, and public officials.
But “law enforcement and the communities they serve have been irreversibly damaged” merely by the information that Salazar and Countryman gave Tarango and his Mexican associates, Christesen wrote in a statement that he gave to prosecutor Swainston. In his own statement, Swainston asserted that nine separate law enforcement agencies in New Mexico and six in Colorado had been damaged by Salazar’s betrayal. “It is hard to imagine anything more frightening for a law enforcement officer than to find out after the fact that those upon whom you just executed a... search warrant knew you were coming because one of your own told them so,” Swainston wrote in an impassioned 47-page sentencing memorandum.
“Cops hate these cases, hate to investigate and prosecute them, because it shows we’re not perfect, that we’re vulnerable to corruption like other human beings,” Christesen says. “A Salazar looks bad for all of us. But how many other counties like ours are there in the Southwest? How can we be sure that our law enforcement system isn’t being Mexicanized? I’m worried that they’ll start with bribes, and end as they have in Mexico, with intimidation and murder.”
Michael Hayden, director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush, called the prospect of a narco-state in Mexico one of the gravest threats to American national security, second only to al-Qaida and on par with a nuclear-armed Iran. But the threat to American law enforcement is still often underestimated, say Christesen and other law enforcement officials.
Last year, FBI officials tell me, the Bureau worked on nearly 2,500 public corruption cases and convicted more than 700 dishonest public servants throughout the nation. Most of them were unrelated to the cartels, and Special Agent Abbott, of the FBI’s criminal branch in El Paso, says that only 15 to 30 of his region’s cases so far have involved drug-related corruption among law enforcement officials. “But given the damage that can be done by just one corrupt officer or inspector,” he adds, “this is an important vulnerability. We know it.”Seized highly corrosion-resistant valves are seen in an unknown location in this handout picture provided by the Spanish police January 11, 2013. REUTERS/Spanish Police/Handout
MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish police arrested two men and seized the contents of a truck bound for Iran loaded with materials destined for use in the Islamic state’s nuclear program, the Interior Ministry said on Friday.
The truck, intercepted on a motorway in northern Spain early on Wednesday, was carrying highly corrosion-resistant valves, the ministry said in a statement.
Police were examining computer databases and documents at Fluval Spain, the company where the two arrested men worked, a ministry spokesman said.
“The company, registered in the Basque Country, used false companies in the United Arab Emirates for the deliveries, channeling cash through banks in other countries,” the ministry statement said.
The company had commercial links with Iranian firms that featured on lists drawn up by the European Union as having connections with Tehran’s nuclear program, the ministry said.
No-one at the company could be reached for comment.
The European Union has banned the sale of such material to Iran, which denies Western accusations it is seeking to develop a capability to make nuclear weapons. Tehran says its atomic program is for civilian energy purposes.
World powers are searching for a diplomatic solution to a decade-old standoff over the nuclear program to avert the threat of a Middle East war.Miscreants have put together a new strain of malware designed to turn insecure IoT devices into a DDoS attack platform.
The new nasty, Linux/IRCTelnet discovered by security researchers at MalwareMustDie.org, like the infamous Mirai botnet before it relies on default hard-coded credentials to spread across vulnerable devices. The malware is primed for DDoS and IPv6 ready, according to a write-up on MalwareMustDie.org.
"The malware (the bot client) is designed to aim IoT device via telnet protocol, by using its originally coded telnet scanner function, which is brute-forcing the known vulnerable credential of the Linux IoT boxes, via command sent from a CNC malicious IRC server,” the researchers note.
"The botnet is having DoS attack mechanism like UDP flood, TCP flood, along with other attack methods, in both IPv4 and IPv6 protocol, with extra IP spoof option in IPv4 or IPv6 too."
The source code used to build this botnet malware is based on the earlier Aidra botnet, according to MalwareMustDie.org. Hard-coded Italian language messages in the user's communication interface suggest that the author of the retro-fitted malware is an Italian speaker.
Whether Linux/IRCTelnet is effective at spreading much less attacking systems is so far unclear. Even so it's mere arrival is a concern because it points to further trouble ahead.
Security experts are unsurprised that hackers are seeking to emulate the "success" of the Mirai botnet, the malware linked to the attack on DNS provider Dyn that shut down numerous websites on 21 October.
Mike Ahmadi, global director of critical systems security at Synopsys, commented: "It is not at all surprising that a new exploit targeting these devices has been discovered, since many of these devices are built using open source third-party libraries. When we apply software composition analysis tools to many of the most popular third |
individual and take no responsibility for the havoc their policies have wrought.
Meanwhile, the House GOP did take the time to pass a 20-week abortion ban that would increase the emotional, economic, and physical costs of abortion care and would, if signed into law, ultimately cost some women their lives and innumerable others their freedom. It is interesting to note that some of the most vociferous attacks on women and their bodies this year and last came from Congressman Andy Harris (R-MD), whom the Baltimore Sun called “obsessed with abortion,” and who spent countless hours during this period leading the charge to overturn democratically approved abortion funding in the District of Columbia. Harris is on the House appropriations committee that voted to cut Amtrak funding, and also appeared as a guest on Diane Rehm’s show today, three days after the crash, to argue against funding for rail and transportation safety. Congressman Paul Ryan, author of one of the most cruel budgets in U.S. history and another supporter of abortion restrictions (because… “life”) appeared on Fox News, also to defend budget cuts to Amtrak.
These two votes tell us a lot about the real agenda of the Republican Party. In its quest to protect corporate power and profits and by extension its own interests at literally any cost, the GOP seeks to defund every public service, erase all forms of regulation, and render toothless every public enforcement agency under its jurisdiction. In short, the party follows a fundamentalist ideology in service of corporate interest and profits and that thing known as the “free market” that is in turn leading to cuts and deregulation so severe Republicans are actively, purposefully undermining the health, safety, welfare, and livelihoods of an untold number of American citizens. People will die and become injured and seriously disabled as a result of the neglect of the nation’s infrastructure and as a result of budget cuts and deregulation in many other areas. (And I am purposely leaving for another time other ways in which GOP policies lead to higher rates of death and illness, such as denial of Medicaid expansion, preventable outbreaks of disease, and other measures that endanger public health and welfare.)
To both divert attention from the slow motion train wreck that is our crumbling infrastructure, economy, and broader threats like climate change, the GOP has adopted and pursued another fundamentalist ideology: the obsessive, one might say pathological, campaign to control women’s bodies no matter the cost to women’s lives and health. Translation: They have the time, inclination, and desire to regulate your body, but not to protect it from known threats over which they have legal purview and for which they are, as elected officials, both responsible and accountable.
Ironically, and I would say audaciously, they still call their party “pro-life.”(This post is the fifth in the “Upgrade your Magento 1 knowledge to Magento 2”; A series of posts about the major differences between Magento 1 and Magento 2. You can read the other posts in the series here.)
In this post we round-off our look at Magento 2’s Dependency Injection (DI) implementation by looking at its limitations and how to use it for class rewrites. Finally we take a look at the performance implications of DI and how Magento gets around these with the use of object proxies.
Non-injectables
You are encouraged to use the di.xml to specify your dependencies and usually this will be enough. However, there are exceptions. What happens, however, when you require a specific object, e.g. A specific product object with specific data in it? The object manager can only instantiate generic instances of objects – it can’t provide loaded entities, so this kind of object is non-injectable. An injectable object is any object that can be instantiated by the object manager. Non-injectables cannot be instantiated by the object manager and these include database objects, objects loaded through ORM and objects which need to be instantiated with specific data which can’t be passed in through the object manager.
Non-injectable objects cannot specify other injectables in their constructors, as the recursive loading which allows the ‘automatic’ DI to work on injectable objects is not triggered. If an injectable object needs to produce non-injectable objects, the non-injectable objects’ factory class must be passed in the injectors’ constructor. The object factory class can then be used to create an instance of the non-injectable object.
Preferences as rewrites
Earlier I suggested that because Magento 2 specifies interfaces rather than concrete classes as the parameters of constructors, this allows us to specify any concrete class to implement that interface. This gives us a massive amount of flexibility when it comes to customising Magento 2. You can specify pretty much any concrete class, just so long as it implements the same interface.
In Magento 1, class rewrites took effect on a global level. If one module defined a class rewrite, then all instances of the rewritten class were replaced with an instance of the modules’ class.
In Magento 2, however, we can be more granular. If we have a Product class which specifies a StockManagementInterface class in its’ constructor, there are two ways of telling Magento 2 which class will be substituted for that interface.
We can define a preference which will tell Magento 2 to use our class whenever an instance of the StockManagementInterface is requested. This is closest to the Magento 1-style class rewrite, as it takes effect globally.
Alternatively, we can define a preference specifically for the Product object, which will tell Magento 2 to use our class only when it is requested in the constructor of the Product class. Now, whenever an instance of the Product class is requested, StockManagementInterface will be instantiated with an instance of our class. If an instance of StockManagementInterface is requested outside of the Product class, our class will not be used.
Object proxying
The auto-instantiation process works recursively. As soon as an object is requested, the object manager determines its’ dependencies and then goes through that chain and recursively instantiates the object and all the objects it depends on and all the objects that they depend on and so on. This can quickly become a very resource-intensive process, especially if there are dozens of objects defined. In order to reduce this burden, Magento uses a combination of reflection, code generation and object proxying to speed up this process and make it more efficient.
An object proxy is an instance of a wrapper class which extends from another base class. The benefit of using proxy classes is that they can be instantiated without instantiating a base class. If the base class takes a long time to instantiate, then this can have a negative impact on performance. The base class of a proxy class is only instantiated when any of the its’ methods are called, so if they are only used during some execution paths, this can have a marked improvement on performance.
You don’t need to write the wrapping proxy class and override all the methods yourself, fortunately. Whenever you specify a proxy class using type hinting in the parameters of a constructor list, Magento 2 will generate the proxy class for you. Proxy classes are generated alongside other classes, including factories, interceptors and builders and then stored in the var/generated directory.
When running in developer mode, the class Magento\Framework\ObjectManager\Definition\Runtime uses Reflection to read constructor signatures, which are then used by the object manager to auto-instantiate objects and all their dependencies every time they are requested. In production mode, this process of reading constructor signatures is only done once and the results are then cached in the var/di directory. The class Magento\Framework\ObjectManager\Definition\Runtime is then used by the object manager to auto-instantiate classes, resulting in performance gains.
Both code generation and definitions are generated either by switching into production mode or by executing the setup:di:compile console tool command.
Well, I think that’s enough for this post. Next time we’ll continue our journey through the new features of Magento 2 and the major changes between both versions.This map shows Standard & Poor's Credit Rating for each country.
Estonia's credit rating was raised by Standard & Poor's Ratings to the second-highest level in eastern Europe on the Baltic country's strong economic growth and solid public finances. The long-term foreign and local currency bond rating was increased by two notches from A to AA- with a stable outlook (August 9, 2011).
to the second-highest level in eastern Europe on the Baltic country's strong economic growth and solid public finances. The long-term foreign and local currency bond rating was (August 9, 2011). For the first time ever, the United States of America lost its perfect credit rating as Standard & Poor's reduced its U.S. long-term debt assessment from AAA to AA+ with a negative outlook (August 5, 2011).
(August 5, 2011). Honduras have had their long-term foreign and local-currency sovereign credit ratings raised by Standard and Poors, from B to B+ and given a stable outlook.
Standard & Poor's (S&P) is a United States-based financial services company. It is a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies that publishes financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds. It is well known for the stock market indexes, the US-based S&P 500, the Australian S&P/ASX 200, the Canadian S&P/TSX, the Italian S&P/MIB and India's S&P CNX Nifty. It is one of the Big Three credit rating agencies (Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investor Service and Fitch Ratings).
Standard & Poor's Ratings:Story highlights People who are overweight but not obese may live longer than those of normal weight
The findings come from a review of research papers covering nearly 3 million people
Researchers say it's possible that overweight and obese people get better medical care
The longest lived among us aren't necessarily those who are of normal weight, says a new study.
According to new research this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers say that being overweight may lead to a longer life.
The somewhat surprising conclusion comes from an enormous, detailed review of over 100 previously published research papers connecting body weight and mortality risk among 2.88 million study participants living around the world.
The new research confirms that obese people, and particularly those who are extremely obese, tend to die earlier than those of normal weight. But the findings also suggest that people who are overweight (but not obese) may live longer than people with clinically normal body weight.
The new report is the largest and most comprehensive review of how weight, measured as body mass index (BMI), a measure comparing the ratio of height to weight, can influence longevity. Previous studies that have exposed the link in the past, however, have raised questions about whether the overweight advantage is real.
"We published an article in 2005 that showed, among other things, that (being) overweight was associated with lower mortality -- and we got an awful lot of negative feedback from that," says the current study's lead author, Katherine Flegal, a senior research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Since that study, however, dozens of others have reached the same conclusion -- even if it was hard for researchers and the public to accept.
"I think there's a lot of under reporting of this finding... and so people are sort of repeatedly surprised by it," Flegal says. Because many researchers don't expect to find a benefit associated with being overweight, she suggests, they may not believe their results are valid if they find such a connection, which may make them more hesitant to publish them and invite review and discussion about what may be driving the trend.
For the new study, Flegal and her colleagues analyzed every study they could find that broke down death risk broken by the standard BMI categories set by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the late 1990s: with underweight defined as BMI less than 18.5, normal weight being BMI between 18.5 and 25, overweight being BMI between 25 and 30, and obese as BMI of over 30.
Men or women who are 5 feet 4 inches tall would have "normal" BMI if they weighed between 108 and 145 pounds, for example, and overweight if they weighed 146 to 174 pounds, and obese if weighed more than that.
Overall, people who were overweight but not obese were 6% less likely to die during the average study period than normal-weight people. That advantage held among both men and women, and did not appear to vary by age, smoking status, or region of the world. The study looked only at how long people lived, however, and not how healthy they were whey the died, or how they rated their quality of life.
Why would overweight people live the longest?
Flegal and her co-authors suggest that it's possible that overweight and obese people get better medical care, either because they show symptoms of disease earlier or because they're screened more regularly for chronic diseases stemming from their weight, such as diabetes or heart problems.
There is also some evidence that heavier people may have better survival during a medical emergencies such as infections or surgery; if you get pneumonia and lose 15 pounds, it helps to have 15 pounds to spare, for example.
Another possible explanation may involve "reverse causation": maybe being thin doesn't make you sick, as some experts argue, but instead being sick can make you thin. Being overweight may be associated with longer lives if people who lose weight because of diseases such as cancer, for example, contribute to earlier death among individuals who weigh less.
Flegal also says her findings may necessarily be contrary to previous studies about the relationship between BMI and mortality because those analyses used a variety of different BMI categories with different cut-points for the various weight groups. In the new JAMA study, Flegal and colleagues only looked at research using the WHO categories.
Even so, she acknowledges that interpreting the results may be confusing, since the names of the WHO "normal" and "overweight" categories don't necessarily correspond to commonly held perceptions.
Today, roughly 33% of U.S. adults are clinically overweight, according to WHO standards, and an additional 36% are obese. By those standards, the average American is not clinically normal weight at all, but considered overweight. So in fact, the overweight people in the study who tend to live longest may not be fatter than most people at all. Among Americans, at least, they may actually be of average weight.
In addition, say doctors, weight alone may not be enough to understand an individual's risk of developing disease and dying early.
The latest research shows, for example, that it's not just the fat that comes with weight gain, but the type of fat, particularly fat that accumulates around the belly, that might be more life-threatening. All of which suggests that the connection between weight and health is a complicated one that may not be measured simply in years lived.The 1937–38 season was the 46th season of The Football League.
Final league tables [ edit ]
The tables and results below are reproduced here in the exact form that they can be found at The Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation website[1] and in Rothmans Book of Football League Records 1888–89 to 1978–79,[2] with home and away statistics separated.
Beginning with the season 1894–95, clubs finishing level on points were separated according to goal average (goals scored divided by goals conceded), or more properly put, goal ratio. In case one or more teams had the same goal difference, this system favoured those teams who had scored fewer goals. The goal average system was eventually scrapped beginning with the 1976–77 season.
Since the goal average was used for this purpose for such a long time, it is presented in the tables below even for the seasons prior to 1894–95, and since the goal difference is a more informative piece of information for a modern reader than the goal average, the goal difference is added in this presentation after the goal average.
During the first five seasons of the league, that is, until the season 1893–94, re-election process concerned the clubs which finished in the bottom four of the league. From the 1894–95 season and until the 1920–21 season the re-election process was required of the clubs which finished in the bottom three of the league. From the 1922–23 season on it was required of the bottom two teams of both Third Division North and Third Division South.[2]
First Division [ edit ]
Pos Team Pld W D L F A W D L F A F A GA GD Pts 1 Arsenal 42 15 4 2 52 16 6 6 9 25 28 77 44 1.750 +33 52 2 Wolverhampton Wanderers 42 11 8 2 47 21 9 3 9 25 28 72 49 1.469 +23 51 3 Preston North End 42 9 9 3 34 21 7 8 6 30 23 64 44 1.455 +20 49 4 Charlton Athletic 42 14 5 2 43 14 2 9 10 22 37 65 51 1.275 +14 46 5 Middlesbrough 42 12 4 5 40 26 7 4 10 32 39 72 65 1.108 +7 46 6 Brentford 42 10 6 5 44 27 8 3 10 25 32 69 59 1.169 +10 45 7 Bolton Wanderers 42 11 6 4 38 22 4 9 8 26 38 64 60 1.067 +4 45 8 Sunderland 42 12 6 3 32 18 2 10 9 23 39 55 57 0.965 –2 44 9 Leeds United 42 11 6 4 38 26 3 9 9 26 43 64 69 0.928 –5 43 10 Chelsea 42 11 6 4 40 22 3 7 11 25 43 65 65 1.000 0 41 11 Liverpool 42 9 5 7 40 30 6 6 9 25 41 65 71 0.915 –6 41 12 Blackpool 42 10 5 6 33 26 6 3 12 28 40 61 66 0.924 –5 40 13 Derby County 42 10 5 6 42 36 5 5 11 24 51 66 87 0.759 –21 40 14 Everton 42 11 5 5 54 34 5 2 14 25 41 79 75 1.053 +4 39 15 Huddersfield Town 42 11 3 7 29 24 6 2 13 26 44 55 68 0.809 –13 39 16 Leicester City 42 9 6 6 31 26 5 5 11 23 49 54 75 0.720 –21 39 17 Stoke City 42 10 7 4 42 21 3 5 13 16 38 58 59 0.983 –1 38 18 Birmingham 42 7 11 3 34 28 3 7 11 24 34 58 62 0.935 –4 38 19 Portsmouth 42 11 6 4 41 22 2 6 13 21 46 62 68 0.912 –6 38 20 Grimsby Town 42 11 5 5 29 23 2 7 12 22 45 51 68 0.750 –17 38 21 Manchester City 42 12 2 7 49 33 2 6 13 31 44 80 77 1.039 +3 36 22 West Bromwich Albion 42 10 5 6 46 36 4 3 14 28 55 74 91 0.813 –17 36
Key League Champions FA Cup Winners Relegated
Results [ edit ]
Source: [1]
1 ^ The home team is listed in the left-hand column.
Colours: Blue = home team win; Yellow = draw; Red = away team win.
Maps [ edit ]
Arsenal Brentford Charlton Athletic Chelsea Football League First Division London teams Locations of the
Second Division [ edit ]
Pld = Matches played; W = Matches won; D = Matches drawn; L = Matches lost; F = Goals for; A = Goals against;
GA = Goal average; GD = Goal difference; Pts = Points
Key Division Champions, promoted Promoted Relegated
Results [ edit ]
Source: Ian Laschke: Rothmans Book of Football League Records 1888–89 to 1978–79. Macdonald and Jane’s, London & Sydney, 1980.
1 ^ The home team is listed in the left-hand column.
Colours: Blue = home team win; Yellow = draw; Red = away team win.
Maps [ edit ]
Fulham Tottenham West Ham Football League Second Division London teams Locations of the
Third Division North [ edit ]
Results [ edit ]
Source: Ian Laschke: Rothmans Book of Football League Records 1888–89 to 1978–79. Macdonald and Jane’s, London & Sydney, 1980.
1 ^ The home team is listed in the left-hand column.
Colours: Blue = home team win; Yellow = draw; Red = away team win.
Maps [ edit ]
Third Division South [ edit ]
Football League
Third Division South Season 1937–1938 Champions Millwall (2nd title) Failed re-election Gillingham Matches played 462 Goals scored 1,264 (2.74 per match) Top goalscorer Harold Crawshaw (Mansfield Town), 25 [3] 1936–37 1938–39 →
Pld = Matches played; W = Matches won; D = Matches drawn; L = Matches lost; F = Goals for; A = Goals against;
GA = Goal average; GD = Goal difference; Pts = Points
Key Division Champions, promoted New club in the league (none) Re-elected Failed re-election
Results [ edit ]
Source: Ian Laschke: Rothmans Book of Football League Records 1888–89 to 1978–79. Macdonald and Jane’s, London & Sydney, 1980.
1 ^ The home team is listed in the left-hand column.
Colours: Blue = home team win; Yellow = draw; Red = away team win.
Maps [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]In the Dallas Morning News‘ endorsement of Senator John Cornyn in the Texas Republican primary for his reelection race, the editorial board explained why it rejected other candidates, saying some of them were way too out there. In particular, Chris Mapp told them “ranchers should be allowed to shoot on sight anyone illegally crossing the border on to their land, referred to such people as ‘wetbacks,’ and called the president a ‘socialist son of a bitch.'” Mapp came under fire for those comments, and has actually defended his use of the “wetback” slur instead of retracting the comment or apologizing for it.
Mapp told the San Antonio Express-News that the term is as “normal as breathing air in South Texas.”
Meanwhile, Cornyn condemned the remark as “disgusting,” and a local Republican chairman said, “That is way out of bounds and I can’t imagine many people in Texas, much less Texas Republicans, voting for that guy.”
[h/t Political Wire]
[photo via Chris Mapp]
— —
Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] Clinton Brentwood Lee, 33, is making news for a comeback he sent to a client who fired him over his support for same-sex marriage. (Clinton Brentwood Lee/Brentwood Photography)
Amid celebration — and contention — over the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage late last week, a Florida-based photographer joined millions of others on Facebook adding a rainbow filter to his company logo.
Then he posted a photo showing couples of different sexes kissing with the caption: “All we see is love.”
Clinton Brentwood Lee, 33, said he wanted to make a statement — that his business, Brentwood Photography which is based in St. Petersburg, Fla., supports marriage equality. It was met with praise — and criticism, particularly from a client who disagreed with his view.
[More than 26 million people have changed their Facebook picture to a rainbow flag. Here’s why that matters.]
“Greetings Brentwood,” the client wrote. “We would just like to inform you that we will NOT be using your services for our wedding. My fiance and I support traditional marriage between a man and a woman and don’t want our money going to places that supports otherwise. Secondly I would like to inquire about how we can get our retainer back from you.”
Lee’s “snarkiness kicked in,” he told The Washington Post in a phone interview, and he told the client he would donate her retainer to the gay-rights group GLAAD. “My mom says I’m not one to sit quietly in a corner,” he said.
“Wow, I’m not really sure what to say here,” he replied to the client. “I would say this disappoints me, but I actually find this to be a good thing because our company now would not like to work with you as well. It’s not that because you have a different view from us, but it’s because, since you don’t like and support gay marriage, no one else should be able to have it. … Personally, I was taught not to judge others and to love everyone else. So I will try not to judge you here and say anything more as to my opinion of you.”
“I hope you’ll read the first article in the contract you signed stating that this retainer is nonrefundable,” he added. “But don’t worry, I’m not going to keep it! Because of this conversation, I have decided to donate your $1,500 to GLAAD, a group created to help and support gay rights. So let me be the first to say … thank you very much for your donation and support for this great cause!”
“I just don’t see marriage being anything beyond marriage,” Lee told The Post. “There’s not black people marriage or white people marriage. It’s just marriage.”
He took a screen shot of the correspondence — retracting the client’s name — and posted it on social media, saying, “Lost a client for supporting gay marriage. But that’s ok!” Since then, it has been liked nearly 81,000 times on Facebook.
“I kind of posted it because I didn’t want to feel alone,” he said. “I wanted to feel justified.”
Soon, commenters started responding, many thanking Lee for “sharing the look of love.” “I wish I could get married all over again, just to hire you!” one wrote. “God Bless the work you do, the love you share, and you strength of character!”
Lee posted another message Sunday on Instagram, saying his only regret was that he referred to “gay marriage.” “I wish I had just said that I support marriage opportunity for all,” he wrote. “We shouldn’t have to call it “gay marriage” like it is something different. It’s just marriage.”
[Decades of battles converged for momentous decision]
After Lee’s post, he said he started getting hundreds of messages, “10 percent awful and 90 percent nice.” Among the “awful” was a message from the unhappy client.
“Companies like yours are the reason our country is falling apart!” the client wrote, according to BuzzFeed News. “Supporting these people and groups like you’re doing only further their agenda and are slowly ruining this once great country and destroying families. Certainly happy we chose not to do business with you. Good luck with the queers.”
“I’m sorry you feel this way,” Lee responded. “I know there is no changing your mind and it seems quite clear we were not the right choice for you. As per your request you have been taken out of the books. I wish you the best of luck in finding a photographer to fit your special needs.”
Lee said he is straight and holds conservative as well as liberal views.
In 2010, he spoke to The Post at a tea party rally in Washington, D.C. “Someone said in the Revolutionary War, they fired bullets. This time, we’re firing politicians,” he said at the time.
Early Tuesday morning, Lee said that he and his business’s support for same-sex marriage has little to do with politics; it simply has to do with humanity.
“I hope one day we’ll live in a world where we’ll just say, ‘Hey we’re getting marriage,’ and it won’t matter who you are,” he said. “I hope with my camera I can show we’re all not that different. We all want love. We all want our happily ever after.”When the clock strikes its last midnight in 2013—or somewhere around there, anyway—dozens of movies will disappear from Netflix streaming. Fortunately, you've still got some time to churn through the ones you'll miss the most. Here's a list of the very best of the movies that'll be gone in 2014.
While Netflix has made it much harder to find out when movies expire, some Reddit sleuths have picked out an extensive crop of chopping-block titles. You can see the date the license is up yourself by adding them to your queue. Remember that just because they're going now doesn't mean they're never coming back. But with a precious few hours between now and when they're gone, why take that chance?
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Update: There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the following titles, so we're going to extend this to a top 25 list. The ones we missed:
You can head here for a fuller reckoning of what's on the way out; it's entirely possible you care more about losing Troll 2 than Top Gun. In the meantime, start hoping that these are about to be replaced by a fresh crop of content in 2014—and start your streaming marathon now.Damion Cook, a former offensive lineman who played seven NFL seasons, died Friday after suffering a heart attack. He was 36.
The 6-5, 330-pound guard was undrafted out of Bethune-Cookman in 2001. Initially signed by the Ravens, he spent the 2001 season with the Bears. After joining the Dolphins during the 2002 offseason, Cook returned to Baltimore. In 2004, he joined the Browns and started four games.
MORE: Notable sports deaths | Boy with tumor sings for Peyton Manning | Cam Newton didn't want to be a distraction in Charleston
He was back in Dolphins camp in 2005 but did not make the team and spent time with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the CFL and the Arena League's Tampa Bay Storm before spending two seasons with the Lions in 2008-09.
Cook, a Nashville native, appeared in 26 games and made 10 starts during his career.
A Wildcat great is now with the Lord. #RIPDamionCook and thoughts and prayers go out to his family. Cook led 'Cats to '98 Heritage Bowl. — BCUathletics (@BCUAthletics) June 26, 2015
George Foster, a teammate of Cook's in 2008, sent out a series of memorial tweets.
Me and my brother @DClive_. Gonna miss you, bro. Rest Easy. pic.twitter.com/sI2eOfMPmK — Belly Wap (@GeorgeFoster72) June 26, 2015
If you remember the first season of Hard Knocks, you saw my Bro Damion do this Ray impression. R.I.P. Bro http://t.co/Yp8s62HJhz — Belly Wap (@GeorgeFoster72) June 27, 2015
Former Lions safety Gerald Alexander was among other teammates to weigh in on the sad news.Ever want to go somewhere, but not somewhere too far from a BART station?
OK, let's put it another way. Ever want to not subject yourself to the vicissitudes of an additional transit agency for those last few miles or so, after already schlepping on BART?
Then have we got a site for you! It's BART's new BARTable, launched Wednesday.
According to Bay City News, the site...
...will serve as a one-stop shop for events and destinations close to a station, offering discounts and giveaways in a few clicks. The website will be updated daily to show destinations in San Francisco, the East Bay and northern Peninsula that can be reached by BART. The site utilizes information from business review website Yelp to show places a half-mile away from a specified station once a user enters a search term for what they're looking for, such as "picnic spots" or "museums."
Partners include event websites FunCheapSF and Goldstar, which will offer event discounts.A Colorado high school principal has retired and the athletic director has resigned amid the ongoing fallout over a video that showed cheerleaders being forced to do painful splits.
Denver East High School principal Andy Mendelsberg and Athletic Director Lisa Porter had been suspended after the video emerged last month. The recordings showed eight cheerleaders repeatedly being pushed into splits while their arms were held down by teammates.
In one video, a girl appears to cry out in pain and repeatedly asks her coach to "please stop."
Cheerleading coach Ozell Williams was fired shortly after the videos became public.
On Friday, Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg released the findings from an investigation into the incident conducted by an outside law firm.
According to the investigation, school officials were aware of the videos in June and met with Williams then. However, Mendelsberg denied that he had access to the videos and declined to act on complaints made by parents.
The report also found that Williams "bullied and humiliated" cheerleaders during practice and required the athletes to "friend" him on Facebook, actions that the district said were unacceptable.
KDVR reported that a handful of East students staged a walkout Friday to protest the anticipated leadership change.
Volunteer assistant cheer coach Mariah Cladis and DPS deputy general counsel Michael Hickman were suspended during the investigation. They were cleared of wrongdoing and Boasberg reinstated Hickman.
A criminal investigation into the videos is ongoing.
Click for more from KDVR.com.Antibiotic resistance has been described by the World Health Organization as a “global health security threat.” In the United States alone, over 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to multiple drugs, known as “superbugs.” A recent study led by Lynda Williams of Arizona State University suggests that minerals found in clay deposits might be a good source of antibiotics that can combat superbugs. The findings were published in the journal Environmental Geochemistry and Health.
"As antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains emerge and pose increasing health risks," Williams stated in a press release, "new antibacterial agents are urgently needed.”
Humans have been applying clay to wounds for millennia, long before any knowledge of pathogens or antibiotics existed. Williams published a paper in 2012 that explored the antibiotic potential of two French green clays rich in iron smectite when in contact with Buruli ulcers. The infections are caused by Mycobacterium ulcerans that causes a necrotic lesion which can lead to disability or death if left untreated. Though the clay was effective at killing the bacteria, the deposit became used up and a suitable replacement was difficult to find.
This recent research explored the antibiotic efficacy of clay from a deposit in the Crater Lake region in Oregon. The clays in this area were likely formed 20-30 million years ago and have incorporated deposits of volcanic ash, including that from the eruption of Mt. Mazama about 7,700 years ago. There were four types of clays sampled from this region: two blue, one white, and one red.
Both blue clay samples completely eliminated superbugs methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and extended-spectrum beta lactamase (ESBL) E. coli, along with several other bacteria. The white clay was also effective against E. coli and S. epidermidis, but the red did not demonstrate any significant antibiotic properties.
"To date, the most effective antibacterial clays are those from the Oregon deposit,” Williams stated.
Williams and her team were able to learn more about the mechanism that fights these infectious bacteria, supporting their previous research with the French deposits. Skin typically has a pH below 5.0, making it slightly acidic and helps to keep bacteria in check. However, chronic wounds are usually more alkaline.
"Antibacterial clays can buffer wounds to a low pH," Williams explained. "The clays may shift the wound environment to a pH range that favors healing, while killing invading bacteria."
Additionally, the minerals within the clay uptake iron too rapidly, which was too much for the iron-storing proteins within the bacteria to handle. As the iron oxidizes, it creates molecules that damage the cell and kill the bacterium. While there are currently available wound treatments that make the lesion more acidic to help kill bacteria, understanding more about how the task is accomplished could lead to the development of new topical treatments that fight drug-resistant superbugs.The federal government has a well-deserved reputation for being strong on the economy. In general, it pushes growth-promoting policies while avoiding the opposite.
At the same time, the government frequently repeats its commitment to reducing Canada's greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions – by 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. A few weeks ago, the environment minister reaffirmed this specific commitment.
There is a subtle disconnect here. It's not that a strong economy and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions are mutually exclusive – they aren't. The evidence is mounting, in Canada and elsewhere, that GHG emissions can be reduced even while maintaining a strong economy, as long as it is done sensibly.
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The disconnect is that a government claiming to care so much about a strong economy is simultaneously implementing environmental policies that are needlessly costly.
Environment Canada recently released a report showing the path of our GHG emissions since 1990 and projecting them out to 2020. Though current policies are having some success in reducing emissions, the report clearly shows that there is almost no chance the government's objective will be achieved – it won't even be close. Additional policies will be needed.
What can we expect? We've all heard that new regulations for the oil and gas sector will soon be introduced. Details are not yet |
you right in the gut.”
Police don’t think this is connected to recent vandalism at a church in Norwood.
They are hoping the public can help. If anyone saw any car late at night in the area, they would like to hear from you.
The church says they will fix the damage and they will forgive the person responsible, but they don’t condone the behavior.
Anyone with information is asked to contact Burlington Police at 781-272-1212.Building LEGO weapons not really your thing? Perhaps this LEGO Land Rover Defender ($TBA) is more your speed. This amazing creation is a 1:8.5 scale recreation of Rover's legendary truck, built from nearly 2,800 parts, including 7 motors and 3 IR receivers. Yes, you read that correctly: it actually runs, controlled via RF with a LEGO-based controller. Along with the intense AWD system and live axles in the front and rear, it also features a five-speed sequential gearbox with an automatic clutch, a two-speed transfer case, and a whole host of working parts like doors, hood, and tailgate. It's currently up on Cuusoo, and needs over 10,000 supporters to become a reality — and pledging your support is free, so there's no reason not to. [Scouted by JC]Half of all computers and two-thirds of all books are now sold online. But clothes? A measly 8%, for obvious reasons: When you buy clothes online, you never know how they’re going to fit. For the retailer, that poses the added headache of huge return rates, which send costs skyrocketing.
Fits.me, an Estonia start-up, is offering a new, sci-fi solution: A robotic mannequin that takes your body measurements and mimics your shape, so that you can see exactly how clothing would fit you, online. Launched in June, Fits.me has already shown promising results for clients: One German test-run showed that the robots increased sales 300%, while reducing returns 28%. Just watch:
“When I was a kid, I had this dream that one day, I would have an army of robots to rule the world,” says Heikki Haldre, Fits.Me’s CEO. “I’ve only got a couple now, but that’s okay.” The robots don’t adjust to your body in real time — the process is simpler and more clever.
All told, the robot is capable of replicating 2,000 body shapes. When a retailer signs up with Fits.me, they first send in their clothes. Each size is placed on the robot, which then cycles through all the body shapes it knows. (Think of the scene at the end of Terminator 2, when the T-1000 is being melted down.) While that’s going on, a camera is taking pictures of each permutation. This photographic log is then stored in an online database. Once you go online and type your measurements into the retailer’s site, it calls up the photo corresponding to your precise body type and clothing size. “It can be as beer-belllied or gym toned as you are,” says Haldre. “And we can show you how a small versus a medium fits on you, for example.”
Fits.me is now pursuing several new retail partnerships. Though there’s only a male mannequin for now, they’ll be unveiling a female mannequin in November. (The expansion was funded by a $3.5 million second-round of financing; the lead investor has been the Estonian development fund.) As Haldre tells it, “My engineers now have the best job in the world: Studying women’s breasts.”And they're off! After several pseudo-starts courtesy of the NFL, Neil Patrick Harris and a shrinking Emmy telecast, the 2015-2016 broadcast season finally got underway Monday night with a slew of new and returning series across the Big Four.
Among the three big series debuts, initial bragging rights go to Blindspot. Per Nielsen's fast national returns, the drama nabbed a 3.1 rating in the key demographic of adults 18-49 and 10.6 million viewers. That's not quite the level of what The Blacklist brought in the hour this time last September, but it did so with a slightly softer episode of The Voice. And its initial showing obviously was aided by the lead-in. The Voice grabbed a 3.5 rating in the demo, off four-tenths of a point from its fall 2014 return.
This is also where it should be noted that these live-plus-same-day ratings continue to tell a smaller and smaller part of the story. All of these shows will grow from their original returns — and few expected any returning shows to repeat last year's premiere performances. It's the smaller-rated shows that don't see any initial DVR boosts that will be first up at the chopping block, though those decisions do seem to be coming later and later each season.
The Big Bang Theory was obviously the top show of the night, averaging a 4.5 rating in the key demo. Following last year's declines, that's off by nearly a full ratings point from its debut a year ago — but with an average 17.8 million viewers, TV's top comedy clearly is not hurting. It certainly helped the night's new comedy, however. The Big Bang Theory, setting up shop at 8 p.m. until it can move back to Thursdays after CBS' NFL deal, led into Life in Pieces. That nabbed an enviable 2.7 rating in the key demo and 11.5 million viewers.
CBS' returning dramas were down, with Scorpion averaging a 2.1 rating with adults 18-49 and NCIS: Los Angeles pulling a 1.2 rating. For sophomore Scorpion, that's off a full point from its Big Bang-boosted debut a year ago, though it did net 11 million viewers.
Fellow Monday second-year drama Gotham lost roughly half of its 2014 premiere, returning to a 1.6 rating among adults 18-49 and 4.5 million viewers. The silver lining for the heavily time-shifted show is that it was steady with its recent finale. That smaller 8 p.m. showing did not help Minority Report. The new drama stumbled out of the gate with just a 1.1 rating in the key demo and 3.1 million viewers. The rankings of these three new series fall very much in line with where they were expected, but ranking as the lowest-rated Big Four show of the night does not bode well for Minority Report.
ABC is the only Big Four net not launching a new series on Mondays this fall. After a new episode of Dancing With the Stars (1.8 adults), Castle returned to a 1.2 rating in the key demo — down by nearly a point.
And while The CW won't kick off its own fall schedule this week, the network did have new offerings with lingering summer fare Penn & Teller: Fool Us (0.4 adults), Whose Line Is It Anyway? (0.4 adults) and Significant Mother (0.3 adults).NBC anchor Megyn Kelly, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin attend a Friday session of the 2017 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. (Yuri Kochetkov/European Pressphoto Agency)
ST. PETERSBURG — Armor-clad men waved menacingly heavy longswords in a promotion for a Disney movie about Russian knights. Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova knocked down three-pointers at a mini basketball court. A test-tube-size rocket spewed smoke on the launchpad at a scale-sized space center, and suited business executives giggled for selfies alongside a gleaming black life-size helicopter.
These were among the real-life amusements you could see if you were inside the 2017 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, and the fun and games underscored an air of optimism over signs that Russia's economy is finally nudging its way out of recession.
But none of that is what you saw if you watched coverage of the three-day event, which wrapped up Saturday, from afar. It was all Russian President Vladimir Putin, all the time. The Kremlin leader dominated his signature investment forum, making oddball comparisons of hackers to painters and IP addresses to goat tracks, temporarily breaking Twitter by talking a long walk with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, berating NBC anchor Megyn Kelly for her stubborn grilling over Russian election meddling.
[Putin ridicules allegations of collusion between Trump aides and Russian officials]
With European governments grappling over whether and how Russian hackers might be attacking their electoral systems, and Washington torn asunder over the question of possible collusion between the Kremlin and members of President Trump's campaign and administration, the forum presented journalists with a chance to go face to face with Moscow's principal players.
Armor-clad men wave heavy longswords in a promotional booth for a Disney movie about Russian knights during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Saturday. (David Filipov/The Washington Post)
Meanwhile, Russia's business leaders were trying to focus on showing how the country has embraced digital technologies and begun to adapt them for marketable civilian use, and on hopes for economic growth driven by these technologies, not just oil and gas exports.
The moment that summed up this disconnect came during a panel discussion moderated by Sergei Gorkov, the Kremlin-connected banker who figures in an FBI probe into Russian meddling because of his secret meeting in December with President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. What exactly the two discussed is a mystery because of conflicting accounts by the White House and Vnesheconombank, the Russian development institution Gorkov heads, which made him the most wanted man for journalists at this forum.
[Explanations for Kushner’s meeting with head of Kremlin-linked bank don’t match up]
At one point, Gorkov peered from the stage at the crowd jam-packed into the auditorium and expressed surprise at the size of the audience. Surely all these people hadn't come to hear about applications of blockchain, the networking technology originally created to move digital currencies.
Crowded by reporters after the discussion, Gorkov muttered a series of “no comments” as he fled.
Other executives happily spoke to me but expressed consternation at the Western fascination with Russia as a malevolent force.
“It's so strange that we are hated," said Vasily Brovko, director of special projects at Rostec, a major Russian conglomerate that makes everything — Kalashnikov firearms, advanced optics, helicopters, communication systems, trucks, you name it.
Rostec is busy adapting its military-inspired technologies to civilian ones as part of Putin's national program to partially convert defense industries. It is also one of the Russian companies under U.S. sanctions imposed over Moscow's annexation of Crimea and its military involvement in eastern Ukraine. To many Russians, including Brovko, the country is being punished for defending itself from what it considers an American-backed coup d'état in Ukraine and the advance of a NATO alliance it sees as a military threat.
[In defiant jab at Russia, Senate approves Montenegro’s NATO bid]
“We have gone past the Cold War, but it seems that in America, the Cold War remains,” said Brovko, who, at 30, doesn't remember the Cold War. But like other business leaders at the forum, he said Russia had learned to cope and was turning things around.
Outside assessments back this notion.
“In the first quarter of 2017, the Russian economy grew 0.5 percent while direct investment was up 2.3 percent,” wrote Bloomberg News columnist Leonid Bershidsky in a commentary on Putin and his forum. “The punishing decline in retail sales, which had plunged Russia into a long recession, has also stopped. Russia's non-oil exports are beginning to grow slowly, and Putin says he's hoping for a technology-driven acceleration of growth.”
Bershidsky went on to argue that Putin's “mocking, cheeky tone won't convince anyone to move past the Trump-Russia scandals,” and he's probably right.
But all the fury the United States and its allies can muster over Russia's meddling and its leader's menace doesn't appear to be dampening the spirits of some Russian entrepreneurs, who mimic Putin's stance that sanctions have only made Russian producers stronger.
“Russia is a country which has natural, maybe genetic, reaction to any pressure,” said Alexey Repik, president of Delovaya Rossiya, a union of Russian entrepreneurs. “If you want Russia to be the number-one economy in the world, all you need is to have some major catastrophe, and Russia will be the ones who save the world.”
Read more:
Putin offers to provide Congress with details of Trump disclosures to Russian envoys
Political chaos in Washington is a return on investment for Moscow
Russians are fighting the war of words against the U.S. with American wordsMariska Hargitay, left, and Donal Logue play police investigators in a 'Law & Order: SVU' episode. (Photo11: Michael Parmelee, NBC)
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit fans can exhale. The veteran drama will return for a 16th season.
NBC Wednesday announced the renewal of SVU, which stars Mariska Hargitay. Dick Wolf is the executive producer.
In USA TODAY's 17th annual Save Our Shows poll, fans ranked the police procedural drama as the "bubble" show they most wanted to see return. It edged another NBC series, Parenthood.
The future of SVU, which runs Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT, had been uncertain because of a contractual standoff between NBC and Wolf. The show still performs solidly, averaging 8.4 million viewers, a 16% increase over last season.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1qfVAVi47-year-old Sulaiman is wanted in India for alleged hatching of “criminal conspiracy, acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention, possession of forged or counterfeit currency-notes or bank-notes, terrorist act and raising funds for terrorist act”. Source: Wikipedia
India has requested Malaysian authorities to hand over evidence against an arrested accused who was part of a conspiracy to plan and carry out terror strikes allegedly at the behest of ISI on the US and Israeli consulates in the southern part of this country.
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Official sources in the National Investigation Agency (NIA) said the request under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), signed by the two countries in 2012, urged Kuala Lumpur to share the evidence against Mohamed Hussain Mohamed Sulaiman, a Sri Lankan national.
India has already secured an Interpol Red Corner Notice against Sulaiman and moved Kuala Lumpur with an application for a provisional arrest till all requirements for extradition are completed, the sources said.
47-year-old Sulaiman is wanted in India for alleged hatching of “criminal conspiracy, acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention, possession of forged or counterfeit currency-notes or bank-notes, terrorist act and raising funds for terrorist act”.
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Sulaiman has reportedly told the investigators in Malaysia that he had been tasked to ferry two terrorists from Maldives to a South Indian coast to carry out terror strike at US Consulate in Chennai and Israeli Consulate in Bangalore.
Under the MLAT, either country can approach the other for collecting evidence against an accused.
A senior NIA official had also recently visited Malaysia and held talks with the anti-terror body there.
The terror plot was foiled by an effective coordination of Intelligence Bureau (IB) with foreign countries as Malaysia tipped the central agency about an alleged conspiracy being hatched from Sri Lanka about carrying the attack on US and Israeli consulates in Chennai and Bangalore, the sources said.
Malaysia had stumbled upon the case when its Special Unit was probing money laundering and human trafficking cases.Hussain was alleged to be talking to ISI officers and planning to carry out terror strikes on the two consulates.
The probe was handed over to NIA by the Tamil Nadu Police so that the conspiracy hatched overseas including in Sri Lanka and Malaysia could be unravelled, the sources said.
Besides these two countries, a probe would also be carried out in Maldives from where the suicide attackers were supposed to take a boat ride to reach a coast in Kerala, the sources said.
The case was cracked with the arrest of Sri Lankan national Sakir Hussain on April 29.
Hussain named Colombo-based Pakistan High Commission’s Visa Consular Amir Zubair Siddiqui as his handler, a charge denied by Pakistan. However, facing heat from India, Siddiqui has been shifted out of Colombo.
According to the plan, Hussain told interrogators that the ISI planned to carry out terror strikes on the two consulates, the sources claimed.
The reason for ISI to pick him up, according to Hussain, was that he had expertise in human trafficking, making of forged passports and smuggling of fake Indian currency.
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Pictures of US and Israeli consulates showing various gates and roads leading to the two premises were recovered from his laptop, the sources said, and claimed that these pictures had been mailed to his alleged handlers in Pakistan and its High Commission in Colombo.CHICAGO — This city’s market for the pork belly, a commodity nearly everyone seemed to have heard of but only a small, close-knit fraternity truly understood, is no more.
When the Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced the other day that pork belly futures would no longer be traded, it was hardly a shock. Trades had shrunk to almost nothing. Volatility was too much. The frozen bellies, used to make bacon, were, in the view of some, losing relevance.
Still, the demise of the futures means something else is really gone now, too — a unique belly culture and its hard-charging, daring cast of characters who, decades ago, made their fortunes in the high pressure of the belly pit.
“It was a club,” said Gary Wilhelmi, who arrived at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a markets reporter not long after pork bellies helped pioneer the exchange’s livestock futures markets in 1961. “If you were new, you could come to the trading floor, and you could come to the belly pit. But they wouldn’t trade with you.”
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There was the balding trader whose wig was seen as a gauge of the market’s volatility; on the craziest days, the wig’s part ran ear to ear, Mr. Wilhelmi recalled. There was the analyst who died right there. “Bellies killed him,” Mr. Wilhelmi said. And there was the veteran trader who once told Mr. Wilhelmi — who was, at the time, trying to analyze a trading report on pork bellies — not to bother. “The bellies,” the trader told him, “are what we say they are.”
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Pork bellies have long held a puzzling mystique to the public. Experts in the field offer a range of sometimes conflicting explanations: everybody likes bacon; the word “belly” sounds funny; no one actually knows what a pork belly is. Whatever the reason, pork bellies pop up in an inordinate number of references in magazines, popular culture and movies, like “Trading Places,” the 1983 film in which Eddie Murphy’s character used pork bellies to explain, in unforgettably bare terms, how a market works... I m not being mean or out of line I mean that....
I hope the transfer finally made it I want to give you all 20 $ and not have to reroll my sage in the middle of july that how much longer I am going to wait before I reroll one after all most two years. He will never be played again if I do, or even use the service so hurry if you want my 20 $, hoping for the 25 th..."_ )..
P.S> a Day ago even got him to 53... Must be a lot of fixes 6 hours, GO BW impress US... I m not being mean or out of line I mean that....I hope the transfer finally made it I want to give you all 20 $ and not have to reroll my sage in the middle of july that how much longer I am going to wait before I reroll one after all most two years. He will never be played again if I do, or even use the service so hurry if you want my 20 $, hoping for the 25 th..."_ )..P.S> a Day ago even got him to 53...Posted on behalf of Andy Extance.
A German academic publisher that has journals of respected scientific societies among its titles has announced that it shut down its journal Pattern Recognition in Physics, citing what it calls nepotistic reviewing and malpractice. The firm, Copernicus Publications of Göttingen, Germany, was responding to a recent special issue on ‘solar variability’. “The special issue editors ultimately submitted their conclusions in which they ‘doubt the continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project,'” the publisher wrote in its statement.
The move has quickly attracted the ire of climate-change sceptics. “I’m shocked at this censorship of science,” responded Roger Tattersall on his blog after the decision on Friday. Tattersall, a web-content editor at the School of Education of the University of Leeds, UK, has published papers in the journal and has served as one of its referees.
But Copernicus also cited concerns over how the troublesome special issue‘s authors reached their conclusion regarding the role of solar variability. Author names recur frequently on different papers, and Copernicus’ ‘public peer review’ reveals the same names again as editors and reviewers. “The editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing,” Copernicus asserted. Nature has requested comments from the editors of the now-defunct journal.
The journal was controversial from its outset, thanks partly to the two co-editors-in-chief, Sid-Ali Ouadfeul, from the Algerian Petroleum Institute in Boumerdès, and geophysicist Nils-Axel Morner, formerly of Stockholm University, but now retired.
In July 2013, Scholarly Open Access, a watchdog blog written by Jeffrey Beall, a Colorado librarian, warned that Ouadfeul had few journal citations to his name, and pointed to Morner’s reputation as a climate sceptic. Beall also saw a similar pattern to the special issue. “The journal so far contains only five articles: two articles by a co-editor (Ouadfeul), two by climate sceptics whose views align with the other editor (Morner), and one article bearing a significant amount of self-plagiarism,” he wrote at the time.
Copernicus, whose journals include titles published on behalf of scientific societies such as the European Geosciences Union, will keep the controversial papers available online, its statement said, but it now wants to “distance itself from the apparent misuse of the originally agreed aims and scope of the journal”.Significant civil forfeiture reform in New Mexico went into effect on July 1, and law enforcement officials have predicted that their departments will be struggling to compensate for large cuts in their budgets due to the new law.
Before House Bill 560 was introduced and ultimately signed into law, police departments and other law enforcement agencies had the ability to seize cash, cars, luxury items, and homes with no requirement of obtaining a criminal conviction or even a criminal charge related to the items. Law enforcement officials would then turn these items over to sell at auctions. The proceeds from seized items sold at auction were used to purchase equipment and provide training. This practice has been described as “policing for profit”.
Last November, former Las Cruces, New Mexico city attorney Harry S. Connelly Jr. was heavily criticized after he was caught on video while holding a civil asset forfeiture seminar describing such items as “little goodies” and discussing excitement stemming from spotting a luxury car. “We always try to get, every once in a while, like maybe a good car,” Connelly said. “This guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new. Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.'”
[RELATED: Police Wish List Reportedly Being Used to Train Cops on What to Seize from Drug Suspects]
Connelly also admitted that he had worked with police to secure “wish list” items. “If you want the car, and you really want to put it in your fleet, let me know- I’ll fight for it,” he had said. Connelly was later placed on leave and replaced by William R. Babington, Jr. as city attorney.
With the passage of HB 560, no items may be seized unless there is a criminal conviction or a guilty plea. Seized items must be placed in storage and then shipped to the state’s treasury office. Revenue collected from auctioned items will be placed in the state’s general fund rather than added to police budgets.
Farmington’s Daily Times reported that the civil forfeiture process had funded about a quarter of the Region II Narcotics Task Force’s operating budget- about $100,000 each year according to the task force’s director, Sgt. Kyle Dowdy. Dowdy said that now a plan must now be established to make up for the lost revenue, as well the consideration of a reduction in police purchases and training.
“We’re going to try not to seize,” Farmington Police Chief Steve Hebbe said. Hebbe pointed out that the department has to cover the cost of item storage and shipment and called that provision an unfunded mandate.
Rep. Rod Montoya, (R-Farmington) said that no law enforcement agents had testified in the House to discuss consequences of the bill, while Hebbe said no police chiefs were contacted regarding to the bill’s impact. Hebbe said that he’s unsure of what impact the new law will have on police department budgets across the state. “I don’t think that they anticipated how much it’s going to hit local law enforcement, and we’re still trying to figure out how bad it’s going to hit us,” he said.The letter stated that the HEC considered the discontinuation of admission tests detrimental to quality of education.
LAHORE: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has informed all universities in the country that they are not required to use tests organised by the National Testing Services (NTS) to grant admissions or award scholarships.
In a letter dated May 27, which many universities received Friday, the HEC stated the NTS was not an officially approved testing service. It proposed a regulatory framework to establish, monitor and supervise a national testing service.
The letter was written in the wake of an LHC judgment, stating that the NTS tests were not mandatory for admission to masters, MPhil or PhD programmes.
The letter stated that the HEC considered the discontinuation of admission tests detrimental to the quality of education. “Discontinuation of admission tests (GAT General, Subject or International GRE, SAT, or tests prescribed and undertaken by the universities) will derail the process of quality assurance. It will also negatively affect the international compatibility of MPhil and PhD awards,” the letter stated. It said the NTS could continue to operate as a private entity.
The HEC informed universities it would not sign a contract with the NTS or any other entity until they were approved under the HEC Ordinance. “The existing arrangement between the HEC and the NTS shall only continue till May 30.”
The letter mentioned that the high court ruling will not affect the admissions and scholarships granted or refused previously on the basis of NTS tests.
In the letter, HEC Chairman Mukhtar Ahmed urged universities to refrain from giving up the standardised test requirement till the HEC prescribed a new test or testing body in accordance with the LHC order.
Ahmed told The Express Tribune that universities must have a test before admitting students into graduate programmes, and this may be any test. He said this was not in violation of the LHC’s order, and the Law Department had vetted the letter. “This system will be in place until the HEC makes a national policy,” he said.
The HEC had engaged NTS in September 2003 to administer standardised tests across Pakistan.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 31st, 2014.
Read full story"This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
– Douglas Adams
Have you ever overslept?
I don't mean slept past your alarm, or slept through the school bus one day as a kid. I mean really, REALLY overslept to the point where you actually feel worse than if you'd had no sleep at all?
If you have, I'm sure you recognize the signs. Stiff limbs, throbbing headache, and epic lethargy... You'd swear you had a hangover except you haven't been drinking.
Well, the symptoms of both actually stem from the same key cause.
Dehydration...
The human body is over sixty-percent water by weight, which does just about every job imaginable. It doesn't just keep you cool. It keeps your blood thin and easy to pump, lubricates your joints, and removes waste materials. If you don't have enough water in your system, a lot of things are going to start going wrong, all at the same time. And you will know it.
I certainly knew it; it's what woke me up. This throbbing, hammering headache that reminded me of the many hours I spent locked into working on a music track without even realizing I'd spent half the day doing so.
At first, I wasn't exactly sure of anything except that I felt like shit.
I felt like shit, and my body just didn't want to move. And while I didn't want to move, I no longer felt like sleeping. I just felt like lying there, waiting for someone to come stop the nuclear testing occurring inside my skull. Staring idly at the most uninteresting ceiling.
Not my ceiling; not even close...
When I finally realized that, it all came flooding back to me.
Everything...
Where was I?
WHERE WAS I?
What happened?
Am I dead? This can't be heaven, hurts too much.
Hell?
No, Hild's not here to rub it in. Would I even end up there?
Why do I feel like a small truck hit me? It's pain... Pain's good, that means I'm still alive?
What-
Oh yeah! Tre punched me in the face. I got punched in the face because I almost killed Cinque with Venom. How'd I do that? I'm not sure. I can't use magic; I was faking it. Did Senbei do something?
I had to stop asking myself so many questions I couldn't figure out. I need to start with ones I can do something about. Like where I was.
I gave the room a casual inspection. It was oddly familiar. I was in the middle, on the floor, sleeping in a futon.
And the girl?
I froze, listening for her breathing.
Quiet, cool... There was nobody.
Nobody at all... Not even Luna.
No Luna? Luna? SENBEI! They were right there on my shoulder! I had...
My things!
I sat up abruptly, my head protesting the action as I gave myself the once over. I didn't have my backpack, or my shotgun, or anything else! Where were my things! Shit, did I jump without them this time?
No, NO! Right back to square one! No-
"You're awake."
I damn near jumped out of my skin at the sound. I could have sworn the room was empty. But that voice, it sounded-
I turned to the source, and there, in a chair about six feet away near the door, was the future 'God Emperor of Mankind' in all his total normalcy, Tenchi Masaki.
There had to be several seconds of silence as I tried to process exactly what was going on. That was Tenchi... If that was Tenchi, that means I'm in Tenchi's house. That meant this must be Ayeka's room, which explains why it was familiar, and that must mean I appeared next to her. That would make this the second time, but...
"You're okay," he indicated before I could continue panicking. "Washu told me to keep an eye on you in case you woke up."
Really? How long was I –
"How long was I out?" I asked, trying to calm down.
"Twenty-eight hours," Tenchi indicated. "Washu said you'd probably sleep close to thirty after all the punishment you've taken."
Twenty-eight hours... Damn. No wonder I feel like shit incarnate.
Tenchi reached over to the dresser and picked up a large glass, then turned and handed it to me.
"Here," he commented. "Washu said you'd be dehydrated after your nap."
"Thanks," I replied, taking it. "She's right... As usual."
"As usual," Tenchi agreed with a small chuckle while I downed the water.
"So what happened?" I continued at length. Tenchi simply shrugged.
"What's there to tell?" he responded. "You appeared next to Ayeka again. Washu detected you before anyone even woke up, and was checking on you before your companions even had time to react."
"Companion- Luna's okay?" I asked. "And Senbei's here?"
Tenchi nodded. I sighed. One less thing to worry about...
"They're both just fine," he advised. "The talking cat, Luna, was very concerned for you. Said you just got punched in the face by some angry cyborg girl."
"Yeah," I nodded. "I don't even remember the blow connecting. Just saw her reach back for it... I guess I flinched when I should have scurried."
Not even awake five minutes, and I'm already quoting movies.
"Yeah," Tenchi agreed. "Almost accidentally killing someone's sister has that effect on a person. I'd say you were pretty lucky it wasn't worse."
"Yeah," I agreed. "Lucky. Lucky I ended up here."
Actually, thinking about it. Luck had nothing to do with it. Call me paranoid, but I don't think I've been teleporting as random as I first thought. It's all too convenient. First I teleport to nothing but worlds I know quite well, into the beds of characters I know just as well based on some personalized mental favorites list. Then, when I finally hit a situation I can't cope with. I end up back in the safest world to date. That's not a natural phenomenon. It happened far too many times to be coincidence. Coincidence is when you meet your friend in the movie section of the grocery store in another city when you've been out of contact for three years. Not spontaneously teleporting to a compiled list of worlds based off your favorite fiction. On top of this, you have to think about the order of the worlds I landed in. I landed in a world that gave me something useful enough to make use of later, starting with Washu and her speech shot.
No, this was sapience at work. Something or someone was actively messing with me. I'm no genius, but it would take an idiot not to notice the pattern. And when I find out who or what it is, I'm going to sick every damn god, goddess, or demon I make friends with on them and introduce them to the idea of the curbstomp song. Boot first.
Until that happened though, I guess I'd better deal with the now.
"You said twenty-eight hours right?" I asked. Tenchi nodded.
I've been showing up between four and four-thirty...ish. So that's twenty-four hours. Which is a day, plus another four, so it's more like four AM plus four...
"It's about eight isn't it?" I asked.
"Eight-seventeen," Tenchi corrected. "But good guess. You hungry? Sasami's got breakfast for us."
Technically no... I have no appetite for about an hour after I wake up. But I just went a day without food. I'm eating. No questions asked.
Nodding, I stood up. Damn, stiff... To be expected after being asleep for a full day... I groaned a bit at my joints' refusal to bend as they should, but made to walk around the room a bit in order to work it out. That's right, stiff joints are easy. Walk it off, walk it off.
"You okay?" Tenchi asked. "Washu said to make sure if you woke up, you took it easy."
"I think I'm okay," I responded as I worked circles around the futon. "Just a bit... STIFF."
I emphasized the last line by stopping and yanking my head sideways. There was a satisfying CRACK and what was left of my headache almost immediately went away.
"Ahahahahaaa... awww..." I almost drooled. "That felt good."
Once I was satisfied with my personal condition, despite this throbbing running from my shoulder down to the tip of my fingers in my right hand, I turned to the de-facto god to be. Then I noticed something.
Tenchi was a blur. How could I MISS that?
"Glasses," I tapped my face, then looked back down at the futon, lapsing into English. "Dammit! Glasses! My things... Where the fuck-"
"Washu has everything," Tenchi instructed. "You brought back quite a few things she wanted to take a look at. And the glasses... They didn't exactly come out in tact. Washu was rather surprised you managed to get them broken."
"I got punched in the face by a cyborg SUPER SOLDIER," I pointed out. "I'm kind of surprised I'M not broken... Or maybe I was."
Tenchi just shrugged. "It's Washu. Knowing her, the next pair will be capable of taking everything Ryoko can dish out."
"Yeah, I know right?" I agreed as the Masaki stood from his spot and made to leave the room. "Washu strikes me as someone who would take a blow to her scientific prowess as a personal challenge. It'll probably end up being immune to contact nuclear detonations. And if it doesn't have thermal imaging, night vision, and an integrated heads up display capable of scanning for things I didn't even know existed, I'll be disappointed."
Tenchi let off a small chuckle at my humor as he led me to the stairs. On the way there, I remembered |
than Republicans. Republicans drafted the voter ID law, just like the redistricting plans, to benefit their party, from passing it as “emergency" legislation at the beginning of the 2011 legislative session to allowing voters to cast a ballot with a concealed weapons permit but not a student ID. (By my count, federal or state courts have blocked new voter suppression laws in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin this year.)
The court also recognized that voting is a precious right in a democracy and is an exercise that is in no way akin to buying Sudafed or boarding a plane. Wrote the judges: “As the Supreme Court has ‘often reiterated…voting is of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure.’ Indeed, the right to vote free from racial discrimination is expressly protected by the Constitution.”
Texas has said that it will now amend its case to challenge the constitutionality of Section 5 before the Supreme Court. The state has already signed on to an amicus brief supporting a challenge to Section 5 originating in Alabama that is headed to the Supreme Court. As I noted this week, Texas has lost more Section 5 enforcement cases than any other state. The state’s unlawful voter ID law and redistricting maps illustrate vividly why, forty-seven years after its passage, the Voting Rights Act, particularly Section 5, is as important today as it was in 1965.It was a fun little story about an months-long search for a possibly non-existent Easter Egg finally coming to a close, the fruits of which was an entirely real but still-fake Yeti hidden in the mountainous region of the co-op shooting game Ghost Recon Wildlands.
Seeing a Reddit thread on the topic and a video corroborating that thread, GameRevolution reported the Yeti's existence, crediting the first-find to a trio of Xbox One players by the gamer tags of A Wild Hunter, Dirt Gnasty and yokochan09.
Also Read: Ghost Recon Wildands' Yeti Turned Out to Be Just a Guy
While the story would normally end there, GameRevolution soon after received a message from a Redditor using the handle of Fus_Roh_Potato.
"I request you investigate who discovered the Wildlands Yeti," Fus_Roh_Potato wrote. "These other three guys have been parading around claiming credit for the discovery, and I think it's shameful."
What follows is a story of cryptic ciphers, sets of coordinates and opportunism, as we try to answer the deceptively complicated question: who found it first?
A Hotbed for Conspiracy
During the height of the Yeti craze, r/WildlandsYeti was set up to aid those who believed.
Before who found the Yeti first can be determined, it's important to go over how the Yeti was found in the first place. The Yeti in Ghost Recon Wildlands started out as a bit of a joke made more legitimate by an unexplained Easter Egg. Because there was a premium Outfit named "The Yeti Hunter," and because the landscape of Ghost Recon Wildlands, based on real-live Bolivia, contains a vast, snow-covered mountain range, conspiracy theorists put two and two together and came up with Yeti.
In addition, there were a series of eight small statues that were scattered throughout the game which, when picked up, would re-appear at a shrine in the mountains. When you found all eight of them … nothing happened, but this didn't stop the Yeti Hunters of the Wildlands community from crafting their foil hats and flying around digging in snowpiles.
It was at that time that r/WildlandsYeti was born, an honest-to-god, earnest and sincere subReddit dedicated to solving the mystery of if the Yeti exists and where it's hiding, using the tagline "It's out there somewhere!" This subReddit attracted a modest following of just around 400 users, but considering the average daily player count of Wildlands hovers around 6,000 players, this subReddit potentially represented almost 7% of Wildlands' daily player base.
Now that this safe haven was set up, the Yeti Hunters could do their searching away from the greater Wildlands population. Soon r/WildlandsYeti became a hotbed for conspiracy theories, but none of them bore any fruit, leading many to give up their search. That was until an accident by Ubisoft provided a spark of hope in a search blinded by whiteout.
Five Needles In a 100 Square Kilometer Haystack
The community was told to look for five clues that could be anywhere in Wildlands' vast landscapes.
Bringing a different name into this entirely, a Reddit user by the name of Garn_cz experienced a glitch after Wildlands developer Ubisoft attempted to update a series of community challenges for their second week of what they were calling "season one." But Garn_cz's community challenge screen was frozen at a screen that accidentally showed the community challenges for week six, four weeks in advance.
All of these challenges confirmed the existence of the Yeti, with one challenge asking players to "Find all hints of the Yeti's location," with a "0/5" number found above this challenge. This told players that they needed to find five pieces somewhere in the world of Ghost Recon Wildlands. But, all good things to those who wait, as week six wouldn't officially start for another month.
"In essence, this was the equivalent of finding five needles in a 10×10-kilometer haystack," Dirt Gnasty, whose real name is Cale Bryceson, said in an email to Game Revolution.
The first and most important clue was finding a dead hiker, as Dirt Gnasty explained in this Reddit post. On the dead hiker's body was a partially buried circle cipher, a common way to form a code by substituting letters for numbers or other symbols. In the game, you can't pick up the cipher, so you have to complete it yourself. Doing so reveals something like this:
This circle cipher was the primary means of locating the coordinates of the Yeti.
So, when the community discovered four pieces of strange writing, some in places as eerie as a mountain cave with scores of mutilated bodies inside, they could decode that writing by finding the corresponding number for each letter. One of these was even presented in Morse Code via the radio of a downed airplane. Decoding these four pieces revealed four separate coordinates.
Pics Or It Didn't Happen
But going to any one of these coordinate points revealed nothing. No further ciphers nor clues about what the Yeti is or where he might be. At that point, it seemed the only one to have the answers was Fus_Roh_Potato, who posted a thread on r/WildlandsYeti claiming he had found the Yeti, but without immediately providing verification or even an approximate location.
"You can see [A Wild Hunter, Dirt Gnasty and yokochan09] asking me how to find what I had already found," Fus_Roh_Potato said to GameRevolution of his original thread.
In the thread he linked GameRevolution, Fus_Roh_Potato is asked by the trio initially credited for the find "what four points did you use?" "How exactly does that solve anything with four xy coordinates?" with yokochan09 claiming, in all caps "UNTIL SOMEONE ELSE CAN VERIFY THIS!!!! I DECLARE IT AS A HOAX!!!!"
Dirt Gnasty posted a photo with his claim of finding the Yeti, something Fus_Roh_Potato didn't initially do.
All of this seemed to point to Fus_Roh_Potato being right about being the first to find the Yeti, and not A Wild Hunter, Dirt Gnasty and yokochan09. But that didn't stop the trio of Yeti hunters from posting, about two hours after Fus_Roh_Potato's original post, a new thread claiming that they had discovered the Yeti, posting coordinates as well as pictures of the three of them surrounding the Yeti's dead body. This post included the line "Found by GT: Dirt Gnasty, GT: A Wild Hunter, GT: yokochan09 on Xbox."
"[We] were the first to confirm and prove the existence and location of El Yeti," Dirt Gnasty told GameRevolution. While they did credit Fus_Ruh_Potato for the "first kill" of the Yeti, they seem to do so with an air of skepticism. "He seemed to be miffed when we posted our guide and our screenshots, of which he provided none even when asked by multiple other Reddit users."
The only problem with their "pics or it didn't happen" argument, though, is that Fus_Roh_Potato did provide a picture, at about 3:00 a.m. Pacific Time, about a half an hour after originally posting the thread, but still before the trio. Is this case closed? Not quite.
Fus_Roh_Potato did post a delayed photo, before the others, but that doesn't mean everything …
Dirt Gnasty had an apparent explanation for the timing of their post and their group asking Fus_Roh_Potato for advice, an explanation that may render any posted evidence worthless. After gathering the four coordinates from other sources, they attempted to get find the middle by "finding the center of mass of a four-sided polygon."
"It turns out that we were overcomplicating things," Dirt Gnasty told GameRevolution. Dirt Gnasty said he taped a piece of paper over his monitor and traced the four coordinates together which revealed a very specific intersection. "It was at this time that Fus_Roh_Potato appeared on Reddit and my friend asked him what method he had used."
So, in Dirt Gnasty's version of events, they had already found the X by the time Fus_Roh_Potato claimed to find the Yeti on Reddit, meaning they would have located and killed the Yeti around the same time as Fus_Roh_Potato.
Opportunists Seeking Glory
Even if Fus_Roh_Potato didn't truly find it first, he seems to be making a legitimate claim. Broken down to its simplest elements, it goes like this: If person A tells person B where to find something, and person B goes and finds it, person A should get credit for finding it. Fus_Roh_Potato sees himself has person A and claims that A Wild Hunter, Dirt Gnasty and yokochan09 are person B, needing him to tell them the location of the mythical Yeti.
But, if we're to go back even further, both of these groups might be person B, who all needed the r/WildlandsYeti community to tell them where the Yeti was. Essentially, all either of these groups did was trace a line between two sets of coordinates and reveal a fifth coordinate at an intersection. In the grand scheme of finding the Yeti, that seems like the easiest task.
Furthermore, it doesn't seem like either party here was an active participant from the beginning. In Dirt Gnasty's post explaining how they found it, he admits to first hearing about the Yeti after Title Update 4.0, which came out just two days before they claimed to be the first ones to find the Yeti. As for Fus_Ruh_Potato, his post claiming to be the first person to kill the Yeti was only his second post in r/WildlandsYeti.
Before asking which one deserves first-find credit, we should have asked if either of the do.
Even while clamoring for credit, both parties seem to acknowledge their limited roles in the discovery. Fus_Roh_Potato posted "I only deserve credit for working out the last piece of the puzzle and getting the first kill. I wouldn't try to claim credit beyond that. I had no part in discovering the cipher nor the other coordinate notes. In my opinion, those discoveries were much more significant."
Similarly, Dirt Gnasty told GameRevolution "Without the community that had been searching for El Yeti for going on three months, what we (and I'm sure Fus_Roh_Potato for that matter) did in about 8 hours would not have been possible. My guess is it took hundreds of people and who knows how many hours to find all of the necessary clues so that we could put them together."
It seems both of these groups seized the opportunity to achieve the glory of finding the Yeti when it was essentially already found for them by the Wildlands community of Yeti Hunters. If someone found the location of a Yeti in real life, a mad dash for fame would surely ensue in a similar way. Surely once more, the person mounting the Yeti's head on their wall would claim victory, while the person or people who revealed its location would be forgotten to history.
So Who Really Located It?
As for person or people who first discovered the cipher, then used that cipher to decode the four clues into coordinates, we'll need to look at the videos posted by YouTuber Carbon Meister. While not the originator behind these discoveries, he's been following the Yeti hunt seemingly from the beginning, posting videos whenever someone makes a new discovery.
When the Cipher was discovered, Carbon Meister posted a video crediting the discover to a Redditor by the handle MSiCptn. This Reddit thread indeed shows the location of the murdered hiker with the cipher half buried next to him. Furthermore, it seems to be the first or at least the first successful Reddit post confirming the existence of this cipher. After that, a Redditor by the name of hembrio posted the actual solution to the cipher, fully laid out. Again, this is either the first or the first successful such post.
In turn, one of Carbon Meister's subscribers pointed him to a new campsite that had encrypted coordinates on a clipboard. Then, a YouTuber named Kelnor told Carbon Meister about another set of encrypted coordinates written in blood on the walls in a Yeti Cave. Then a Redditor named xDaigon stumbled across a downed plane spewing out the coordinates in Morse Code. Following that, a Redditor named shumarkarknein successfully translated the Morse Code and posted the resulting coordinates on r/WildlandsYeti. Shortly after that, the last set of coordinates were found by user on the official Wildlands forums. This user, by the name of jsocfrog found a body of a mountain climber on the side of a cliff.
Then, take your pick between Fuh_Roh_Potato or the trio of A Wild Hunter, Dirt Gnasty and yokochan09 for who put those four pieces together, but as they both acknowledge, it was probably the least meaningful step.It’s pretty well documented, the sexual abuse that many female victims have faced while in the military. And how often those cases are mishandled with the victims so often shamed. Now GQ is shining a light on another, perhaps bigger problem of military sexual trauma that rarely is discussed, and that’s because it involves men.
The sexual abuse of men occurs at a higher rate and often goes unreported. When the victims do report their attackers they’re often discharged less than honorably, diagnosed with mental illness or personality disorders and refused treatment by the VA. These men are left unable to function in their other relationships with their children and their significant others and many suffer longterm injuries from the attacks.
Here are some excerpts via GQ:
Sexual assault is alarmingly common in the U.S. military, and more than half of the victims are men. According to the Pentagon, thirty-eight military men are sexually assaulted every single day. These are the stories you never hear—because the culprits almost always go free, the survivors rarely speak, and no one in the military or Congress has done enough to stop it The moment a man enlists in the United States armed forces, his chances of being sexually assaulted increase by a factor of ten. Women, of course, are much more likely to be victims of military sexual trauma (MST), but far fewer of them enlist. In fact, more military men are assaulted than women—nearly 14,000 in 2012 alone. Prior to the repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2011, male-on-male-rape victims could actually be discharged for having engaged in homosexual conduct. That’s no longer the case—but the numbers show that men are still afraid to report being sexually assaulted. Military culture is built upon a tenuous balance of aggression and obedience. The potential for sexual violence exists whenever there is too much of either. New recruits, stripped of their free will, cannot question authority. A certain kind of officer demands sex from underlings in the same way he demands they pick up his laundry. A certain kind of recruit rapes his peer in a sick mimicry of the power structure: I own you totally. “One of the myths is that the perpetrators identify as gay, which is by and large not the case,” says James Asbrand, a psychologist with the Salt Lake City VA’s PTSD clinical team. “It’s not about the sex. It’s about power and control.” To understand this problem and why it persists twenty-two years after the Tailhook scandal, GQ interviewed military officials, mental-health professionals, and policy-makers, as well as twenty-three men who are survivors not only of MST but also of a bureaucracy that has failed to protect them.
This is terrible.
An overpowering shame prevents many enlisted men from reporting an assault—a sense that they must somehow be complicit in what has happened to them. Straight men often question their own sexual orientation, while gay men may struggle to find intimacy in relationships because they don’t trust other men (or their own judgment). Telling the secret ruptures families and friendships. So does not telling. The rape of a male soldier has a particular symbolism. “In a hypermasculine culture, what’s the worst thing you can do to another man? Force him into what the culture perceives as a feminine role,” says Asbrand of the Salt Lake City VA. “Completely dominate and rape him.” But shame isn’t the only reason these men so often say nothing. Another is fear—of physical retaliation, professional ruin, social stigma. Research suggests that the military brass may have conspired to illegally discharge MST victims by falsely diagnosing them with personality disorders. “The military has a systemic personality disorder discharge problem,” write the authors of a 2012 Yale Law School white paper. Between 2001 and 2010, some 31,000 servicepersons were involuntarily discharged for personality disorders. It is likely that in many cases these were sham diagnoses meant to rid the ranks of MST victims. “If they want you to be schizophrenic,” says Trent Smith, an MST survivor currently fighting his discharge from the Air Force, “you’re schizophrenic.” These diagnoses also spare the government the costs of aftercare: The VA considers a personality disorder to be a pre-existing condition, so it won’t cover the expense of treatment for PTSD caused by a sexual assault. Above all, MST victims keep quiet because they do not believe their attackers will be punished. And they’re almost certainly right. The conviction rate in MST cases that go to trial is just 7 percent. An estimated 81 percent of male MST victims never report being attacked. Perhaps it should astonish us that any of them do.
We feel for these men and their families. Why has this been allowed to continue for so long? Why hasn’t it been addressed? Thank God it’s being brought to light now.
We encourage you to read the full article in GQ but felt it was important to share at least one of the firsthand accounts.
THE CASE OF HEATH PHILLIPS
Navy, 1988-89
“The two main guys—their nickname was the Twin Towers. They held themselves like they were God and untouchable. They were both six feet five or above, 250 pounds. I weighed maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. As soon as the Twin Towers came near you, you instantly wanted to pee yourself. The main attacks were at night. When you’re being dragged out of your bunk literally by your ear, you can’t fight, because they’re doing these funky things with your fingers, twisting them, and they’re ripping your mouth open, and then they got another guy that has his fingers in your nose or in your eyes to make you open your mouth. That’s what always used to bother me: I’m screaming, yelling, fighting, and nobody is even moving their curtains to look. I went AWOL; I couldn’t take it no more. I tried hanging myself. I was living in the streets, and I got arrested shoplifting, and they sent me to the brig. Then I got sent back to the same berthing area, where they started terrorizing me again. The final straw was, I was taking a shower and these guys beat me up and raped me with a toilet brush. Medical told me I probably had a hemorrhoid. I went AWOL again, then turned myself in a couple of days later. Finally my executive officer came back [proposing] I take an other-than-honorable discharge. To this day I don’t know why they did it, because they had beautiful girlfriends. I just happened to be one of their victims.”
Justice for the victims of MST. Lets do our part by being supportive to men who have been victimized and remove the stigma of male sexual assault.A Look at Proposed BART Improvements in November 2016 Ballot Measure
If passed by the BART Board this summer, the November ballot will have a $3 billion-plus bond on it to help BART upgrade its infrastructure, including about $400 million for new train controls and signals. BART’s communications staff released some graphics to help voters understand exactly how much additional capacity that will buy, and what that will mean from a rider perspective.
Unlike with an automobile, a train takes a very long time to stop. So the driver of a train can’t moderate speed simply by watching the back of the next train without risking a rear-end collision (certainly not if the trains are travelling at speed). Traditionally, railroads work on a block-signal system–trackside signals keep trains a safe distance apart by splitting the right-of-way into segments. A train is not permitted to proceed to the next segment of track until the train in front of it has moved out of it. That assures that trains will never collide. It’s what’s usually happening when you’re on a train that stops between stations for no apparent reason–it means a train in front of it was delayed (often for something as simple as someone holding a door). It causes delays to ripple back–so a single delayed train can cause problems way down the line. It also limits capacity.
Here’s another way of looking at it, from a BART statement:
The current train control system is called a track circuit-based system with hard wired electronics. In its day, it was cutting edge. It divides BART’s entire 104 miles of track into smaller fixed segments, or “blocks.” Imagine a series of hotel rooms with adjoining doors. A train is not allowed to use an adjoining door to enter a room until a train in that room has exited through the other adjoining door. This “go, no-go” movement is managed digitally through a system that’s based on the track circuit. The train control fixed blocks are just like the hotel rooms – you can’t move the walls.
But a modern computer, with the proper signal electronics, can run more trains closer together, always keeping a safe distance so one train will never be close enough that it can’t stop before hitting the next. In other words, with modern signals and controls, you can move the walls of the hotel rooms, surrounding each train with an electronic safety “bubble” that will slow a train if it starts getting too close to the one in front of it. Under this system, trains rarely stop in-between stations unless there’s a serious breakdown.
So how much delay time on BART is attributed to its aged signals and controls? Here it is BART’s words:
NUMBER ONE CAUSE OF DELAYS: Currently, more than half of BART’s infrastructure related delays are due to the train control system, causing BART riders to face more than 400 hours of delay each year.
The new system will also be just plain safer:
“Train control is safety-critical,” said Tom Dunscombe, BART’s Group Manager of Train Control Modernization. “Train control will slow down and safely stop the trains as required for normal operations or in the event of an equipment failure.”
The second BART graphic helps illustrate how modern train systems work.
Of course, this is only one improvement BART is hoping to make. It’ll also be replacing rails, power distribution, and, of course, the cars themselves.
The San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) is also getting the message out, at the same time fighting for more ambitious improvements, such as a second Transbay tube. And tonight, BART Board Member Nick Josefowitz will talk more about what needs done at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition offices, starting at 5:30 pm.Bank of Japan (BOJ) Governor Haruhiko Kuroda speaks during a news conference at the BOJ headquarters in Tokyo May 21, 2014.REUTERS/Toru Hanai
TOKYO (Reuters) - Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said the central bank still has policy options left if it were to ease monetary policy further to fend off risks that may threaten the achievement of its price target.
Kuroda repeated his view that the world’s third-largest economy is making steady progress toward meeting the BOJ’s 2 percent price target, with core consumer inflation having reached 1.3 percent for four straight months in March.
“But we are ready to adjust policy, be it further monetary easing or something else, if changes in economic and financial developments derail the path toward meeting the price target,” he said in an interview with the Nikkei business daily published on Saturday.
Kuroda said the BOJ will not ease incrementally in response to temporary fluctuations in the economy, suggesting that the bank will consider acting again only if it sees enough evidence that doing so is necessary to meet the price target.
He did not elaborate on what steps the BOJ could take if it were to expand stimulus, only saying that this would depend on the type of risks the bank is responding to at the time.
“We will take the most effective and efficient measure to deal with economic and financial developments at the time,” he said, adding that there are “no limits” to the kind of options remaining for the central bank.
The BOJ deployed an intense burst of stimulus in April last year, pledging to pump money via aggressive asset purchases to accelerate inflation to 2 percent in roughly two years in a country that has been mired in deflation for 15 years.
It has kept policy steady since then. Some market players have said the BOJ’s tool kit has been exhausted after last year’s massive monetary stimulus, under which it already gobbles up 70 percent of newly issued government bonds each month.We were watching a film last night where there was a family digging into a huge pile of pancakes doused in maple syrup and it must have triggered some kind of craving as we decided that we just had to have some, it’s been ages since I made them and it felt like a nice brunch option for a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Martin likes his pancakes with banana and maple where as I tend to go for dried fruits like apricots, dates, raisins etc with a smattering of sesame seeds, maybe a little shredded coconut on top. I think next week I might make a caramelised banana filling to go with the pancakes, I think it would be perfect with maybe a little coconut milk over the top. Oh yummy scrummy!
Today I am stiff as a board, I’ve been stretching all day trying to loosen up my legs, it’s those killer lunges from yesterday, not sure what tomorrow is going to be like, I feel like the tin man walking up and down the stairs! I think I have been neglecting the weight training side of the gym for too long.
Banana, Maple & Sesame Pancakes (vegan & gluten free option)
MyInspiration Feel The Difference Range
Makes 4 large pancakes – ready in under 30 minutes
1 cup wholewheat flour (for Gluten Free – use a GF brand of flour)
1 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Baking Soda
Pinch of Cinnamon
1/4 cup oats (make sure GF)
1 cup dairy free milk (I used Alpro Almond Milk)
3/4 cup water
2 tbsp ground flax seed (linseed) mixed with 2 tbsp non dairy milk
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
2 tsp Olive/Coconut Oil (for saute pan)
Topping of your choice – I used 2 bananas, 1/2 tbsp sesame seeds and 2 tbsp maple syrup for each pancake)
MethodIndians manager Terry Francona said today that Carlos Santana will serve as the club's everyday third baseman, MLB.com's Jordan Bastian reports on Twitter. Francona emphasized that Santana will not platoon with Lonnie Chisenhall, but said that he will also serve as the team's backup catcher.
Needless to say, it appears that Cleveland's lineup construction will be interesting to watch as the season progresses. Of course, if Santana really does see regular part-time catching duties while playing every day in the field, any benefits from reduced wear and tear could be countered by the physical and mental burden of taking on a new position and receiving little rest. And if the team gives him some straight off days to account for this unusual challenge, rather than slotting him in at DH, it stands to lose his bat on those occasions.
For his part, Chisenhall will make the squad but faces a "fluid" playing time situation, according to a Bastian tweet. We broke down some of the potential hot stove implications of this possible move back in January.Guatemala’s former military dictator will face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in connection with the deaths of indigenous people killed under his rule.
A judge in the Central American country has decided Efrain Rios Montt should be held accountable for brutality that occurred while he was dictator.
Members of the indigenous Ixil tribe were in court for the ruling that Rios Montt be kept under house arrest until the preliminary hearing in March.
People from the tribe were also outside the courtroom in Guatemala City, as the judge decided there is sufficient evidence for Rios Montt to stand trial – despite the 85-year-old’s defence team claiming he was not in charge of battlefield operations.
The prosecution accuse Rios Montt of masterminding an attack that killed almost 1,800 Ixil tribe members and caused 29,000 to flee between 1982-83. The tribe were said to be helping leftist insurgents.
Rios Montt ruled the country for 17 months during a civil war that lasted 36 years.NEW YORK – “My goodness.”
As Florida head coach Mike White took the dais in the wee hours of Saturday morning those seemed to be the only two words that could perfectly describe what he – and a sell-out crowd at Madison Square Garden – had just seen.
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“I’m so proud of our guys, I can’t even put it into words the way that I would like to,” White said. “I wish I had more thought, more time to put more thought into it.”
Minutes after blowing two double-digit leads in the second half. Moments after getting sucker-punched by Zak Showalter. Seconds – literally – after Nigel Hayes seemingly landed the knockout blow for Wisconsin with two pure free throws, Chris Chiozza and Florida left the basketball world speechless with a game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer.
“Zak Showalter hit a tough shot at the end of regulation to send it into overtime,” Chiozza said. “Any time that happens, it takes a little, it takes the life out of you a little bit. But we came into the huddle, and we knew that if we played defense the way we played the second half, that we had a great chance of coming out with the win.
“We did what we had to do to win. We got a little bit of luck on our side.”
The amazing thing was that it wasn’t just the perfect shot the Gators needed. Chiozza’s miracle was also the perfect shot the Southeastern Conference needed. It was the perfect shot this NCAA tournament – woefully devoid of any buzzer-beaters and plagued by abysmal final possessions – needed.
It was the perfect shot that ended the careers of four remarkable Wisconsin Badgers, sending Hayes, Showalter, Vitto Brown and Bronson Koenig back to Madison two days earlier than they would have liked – and without a third Elite Eight appearance in four years.
Story continues
“I feel terrible shaking [Wisconsin head coach] Greg [Gard’s] hand and it’s heart-breaking,” White said. “He’s done an amazing job there and that senior class has been pretty special.”
Florida guard Chris Chiozza (11) puts up a last second 3-point shot to score the game-winning points against Wisconsin in overtime of an East Regional semifinal game of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, Saturday, March 25, 2017, in New York. Florida won 84-83. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Nothing about the game until that point suggested Chiozza, a generously listed 6-foot junior guard for the Gators, would – or even should – be the perfect player to take the shot. The Memphis, Tennessee native hadn’t started a game all season for the Gators and is far from a marksman from beyond the arc.
In fact, Chiozza had only hit 28 3-pointers all season.
For 44 minutes and 56 seconds, there wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind – Gator, Badger, coach, spectator – about who would likely line up for a game-winning shot for Florida. Sophomore guard KeVaughn Allen had carried the Gators to this point, scoring a career-high 35 points. No other Gator – Chiozza included – finished in double figures.
“Over the past probably six weeks or so we have talked about composure and poise and discipline as much as anything,” White said. “Late in this one we just, we made plays that we weren’t making earlier in the season offensively, especially, and definitely not last year with these same guys.”
Experience or not, it’s hard to believe that anyone can process the kind of information that Chiozza needed prior to the chaotic final seconds.
Four ticks of the clock – barely enough time to say buzzer-beater, let alone hit one for most players – was perfect, plenty of time, Chiozza thought.
“I just knew I had four seconds and I was trying to get down the court as fast as I could and if somebody was open I was going to pass it,” Chiozza said. “I was really trying to get to the rim, but they did a good job of bumping me and slowing me down and that was the only shot I had, so I had to take that one.”
His coach knew it, too.
Ironically, it was the perfect situation for the Gators. No timeouts, no chance to second-guess what would happen – or what needed to happen.
“With our speed and quickness, we play a bunch of four-minute games in practices,” White said. “Our guys have played hundreds of them all season. We’re in that position a bunch, to try to get late clock offensive situations. Chris knows he has anywhere from four to six dribbles, not three or four like most guys. And, boy, he utilized them and those.”
Allen, whose historic night of his own would become an asterisk as quickly as the ball swished through the net, watched in suspense.
“When I saw Chris go down the court, when he had a shot at it, I didn’t know whether it was a three or a two,” Allen said of the frantic final moments. “Then, at the end, when the referee … said it was a three, I was very happy for him.”
Next up for the Gators is a date Sunday afternoon with the South Carolina Gamecocks, an SEC rubber match with a spot in the Final Four on the line, but for now Chris Chiozza can look back on a night he will remember forever.
The night he saved the Gators season. The night he ensured the SEC would be Phoenix-bound. The night he saved this NCAA tournament. The night he cemented his celebrity status in Gainesville forever.
The night his eight points weren’t just elite, they were perfect.
More March Madness coverage on Yahoo Sports:
• These photos of Florida’s buzzer-beater are almost as incredible as the shot itself
• Billion-dollar bust: De’Aaron Fox upstages Lonzo Ball to lead Kentucky past UCLA
• Commercials during March Madness mistakenly thank Republicans for repealing Obamacare
• The Internet loves LaVar Ball memes after UCLA’s loss to KentuckyRAQQA, Syria (Reuters) - U.S.-backed militias battled foreign fighters defending the last pocket of Islamic State’s one-time Syrian capital of Raqqa on Monday, bringing their four-month offensive for the city to the brink of victory.
Fighters of Syrian Democratic Forces ride on trucks as their convoy passes in Ain Issa, Syria October 16, 2017. REUTERS/Erik De Castro
A Reuters correspondent saw smoke rising above the city and heard mortar fire, but did not see air strikes while in Raqqa.
A field commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias, said he expected the operation to end on Monday. The U.S.-led coalition that backs them said it could not give a timeline.
SDF spokesman Mostafa Bali said they were fighting Islamic State in only one small zone of Raqqa in the evening, around the city’s national hospital and stadium.
Bali said he could not determine how much longer the battle would take. “The clashes are ongoing,” he added.
A convoy of Syrian Islamic State fighters quit Raqqa on Saturday night with their families, leaving only 200-300 foreign jihadists to mount a last stand, the SDF has said.
The SDF is now poised to end Islamic State’s rule over a city where it had launched a string of lightning victories in 2014 and plotted attacks on civilian targets across the West.
Its defeat in Raqqa mirrors its collapse across Iraq and Syria, where its enemies have driven it from cities, killed its leaders in air strikes and regained the oil fields that funded its self-declared caliphate.
Islamic State lost Mosul in Iraq, its largest city and most prized possession, after months of fighting in July. The militants, which at their height ruled millions of people in both countries, are now forced back in Syria into a strip of the Euphrates valley south of Deir al-Zor and desert on each side.
“We have conducted some (air) strikes in the last 24 hours, but I suspect that that will pick up here very soon with the SDF advancing into the final remaining areas of the city,” said coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon.
The SDF said they gained control of six more districts on Monday. The coalition has supported the SDF with air power and special forces throughout its Raqqa |
Numen, Vol. 4, Fasc. 1 (Jan., 1957): 24-58. The Indian belief that the world has nine corners is attested even in medieval European sources, e.g. Father Emanual de Veiga (1549-1605), writing from Chandagiri in 1599 who states ‘Alii dicebant terram novem constare angulis, quibus celo innititur.’ (Others said that the Earth had nine angles, by which it was lifted up to Heaven), see Charpentier, J. ‘Treatise on Hindu Cosmography from the Seventeenth Century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1924): 317-342. It is clear despite claims that the term ‘nine angles’ was introduced in the twentieth century, the term is centuries older, especially in esoteric or cosmological discourse. See Pingree, D. The Latin Version of the Ghayat al-Hakim, Studies of the Warburg Institute, University of London (1986); Ritter, H. ed. Ghāyat Al-Hakīm Wa-Ahaqq Al-Natījatayn Bi-Altaqdīm (Leipzig : B.G. Teubner, 1933); al Buni, Shams al-Ma’arif (Birmingham: Antioch Gate, 2007). Indeed, the founder of the ONA has stated in several documents (and interviews) that Naos was influenced by a private collection of unpublished Arabic manuscript folios, which may share a common ancestry with the Picatrix and Shams.” {12}
In addition, Senholt, and others, failed and fail to appreciate the relation between the term ‘nine angles’ and the ONA’s Star Game, which esoteric game is an abstract representation – developed in the 1970s and using alchemical terminology for the pieces – of both ‘the nine angles’ and of the ONA’s septenary system.
The Septenary System
Senholt, along with many others before and since, have dismissed the ONA’s septenary system as merely “a replacement for the Kabbalah […] a non-Semitic version of the Kabbalistic Sepherot” {13}, apparently unaware that a septenary system is mentioned in the early and important hermetic text (c. 2nd/3rd century CE) written in Greek, and which text is more popularly known in English translations and as the Pymander dialogue of the Hermetica attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.
According to this hermetic text – which pre-dates the Kabbalah by almost a thousand years – there is “a cosmic framework [a system] of seven” of which man is a part {14}, a septenary system which, as the ONA noted in some of their early MSS, the Elizabethan mathematician Robert Fludd made mention of in some of his writings, and which some medieval alchemical texts also make reference to.
As with the term nine angles – and what the ONA mean by angles {15} – the septenary system therefore not only harks back to times well before the emergence of the modern Western occult movement, but also to ancient sources that are Hellenic, Arabic, Persian, and Indic.
The Rounwytha
As Goodrick-Clark noted, “compared to the eclectic nature of American Satanism, many ideas and rituals of the ONA recall a native tradition of wicca and paganism” {16}. Something especially true of what the ONA – that is, Anton Long – describe as the Camlad Rounwytha tradition, hailing from the Shropshire and Herefordshire areas of England, and the marcher areas of Wales, and which tradition is quite unique in Western occultism, bearing little if any resemblance to the modern manufactured ‘wicca’ propagated by the likes of Gerald Gardener, and which pagan tradition cannot be found in books, ancient or modern.
For, in the Rounwytha tradition {17},
i) There are no named deities or divinities or ‘spirits’. No ‘gods’, no ‘goddess’. No demons.
ii) There are no spells or conjurations or spoken charms or curses; no ‘secret scripts’ and no ‘secret teachings’; indeed no teachings at all.
iii) There are no ‘secret book(s)’ or manuscripts; indeed, there are no writings.
iv) There are no ritual or Occult or ‘wiccan’ or ‘satanist’ elements at all.
v) There is no calendar, as calendars are usually understood, and thus no set dates/times for festivities or commemorations.
vi) There are no oaths made, no pledges written or said.
vii) There is no organization, no dogma, no codification of beliefs, no leader(s), no hierarchy, and no stages or grades of ‘attainment’.
Instead, the Rounwytha way is the way of “a particular and a natural sensitivity: to human beings, to Nature (and especially the land, the weather), to living-beings (especially animals) and to the heaven/Cosmos. A wordless, conceptless, feeling of connexions, and of the natural balance that we mortals, being unwise, have such a tendency to upset.”
This is most certainly not the modern wicca of ‘harming none’, for it is also the ancient pagan way of
“knowing the nature of the rotten: human, animal, land. Of the need, sometimes, to cleanse, perchance to cull. As when there was the knowing that a certain individual doing a certain deed was bad, rotten – and not because they had offended some named and powerful god or goddess, and not because such a deed contravened some law or decree said to be divinely inspired or laid down by some sovereign or by someone who claimed authority from some god or gods or ‘government’, but because such a deed signed that person as rotten, and who thus, like a rotten piece of meat eaten, might or most probably would cause sickness, or spread disease, among us, among the land. Hence why their removal – by exile or by cull – would end (cure) the sickness, restore the balance their rotten deeds and they themselves had caused to be upset, restoring thus the natural flow, and gifts, of Life: of health, fecundity, happiness, good fortune.” {17}
In effect, the conceptless empathic and often reclusive way of the Rounwytha is what the initiate following the Seven Fold Way finds beyond The Abyss at the very end of their life-long occult quest (the sixth sphere of the seven forming the Tree of Wyrd), for it is that essence that has, for over a thousand years, been described as Lapis Philosophicus; and what Anton Long has termed the sinisterly-numinous, which is “the living unity beyond the abstract, the lifeless, division and dialectic of contrasting/abstractive/ideated opposites. A division most obvious in the false dichotomy of good and evil.” {18}
3. Conclusion
From its inception the O9A have (that is, Anton Long from the 1970s has) claimed five things.
(1) That their septenary system, manifest in their Seven Fold Way, is ‘the genuine Western occult tradition’ pre-dating the Kabbalah and that they have simply “made public various aspects of it and extended it in some particular ways”. One particular extension is the Star Game; another, Insight Roles.
(2) That their sinister tradition or philosophy exists to be lived, being (a) the way of practical, exeatic, experience and learning from such experience; (b) the way of ordeals (such as the rite of internal adept) and (c) the way of developing skill in their Dark Arts {19}. This way is difficult, individualistic, and takes time.
(3) That their pantheon of ‘dark gods’ are part of a garbled, aural, tradition – a mythos – and like the entity termed Satan may or may not be ‘real’, and may or may not be archetypes; and that it is for each individual to discover for themselves, via practical experience of sorcery, the truth of the matter.
(4) That the primary aim of their way – that is, of the O9A philosophy of Anton Long – is to aid the development of Adepts and thus hasten the development of a new type of human being and thence fulfil the potential that human beings possess; and that this aim will take a century or (more likely) far longer to achieve.
(5) That, importantly, their O9A way, as it now exists, is not sacrosanct or dogmatic and (a) should be added to, evolved, and refined, as a result of the esoteric pathei-mathos of those who have lived it, and (b) can and should be adapted and developed and changed, in whole or in part, by others who are or who have been inspired by or influenced by it.
In conclusion, therefore, the esoteric philosophy of Anton Long as manifest in the Order of Nine Angles could be usefully summed up as one man’s codification, amalgamation, and development, of (a) several disparate traditions, of diverse origins and periods, and of (b) his own pathei-mathos from his exeatic life, into a practical and flexible and modern, and unique and subversive and individualistic, esoteric system.
These disparate traditions, of diverse origins and periods, include the ancient Corpus Hermeticum; Arabic, Sufi, Persian, Indic, and medieval Western alchemical, texts; and an aural English-Celtic pagan tradition.
R. Parker
2013
Footnotes
{1} Per Faxneld: Post-Satanism, Left Hand Paths, and Beyond in Per Faxneld & Jesper Petersen (eds) The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity, Oxford University Press (2012), p.207
See also Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, New York University Press, 2002, p. 218.
{2} An extensive bibliography is provided in Richard Stirling, The Radical Sinister Philosophy of Anton Long. e-text 2013
{3} Stirling, op.cit
{4} Playing The Sinister Game. ONA e-text, dated 122 yfayen (updated Jan 2012 CE )
{5} “Through the practice of ‘insight roles’, the order advocates continuous transgression of established norms, roles, and comfort zones in the development of the initiate […] This extreme application of ideas further amplifies the ambiguity of satanic and Left Hand Path practices of antinomianism, making it almost impossible to penetrate the layers of subversion, play and counter-dichotomy inherent in the sinister dialectics.” Per Faxneld and Jesper Petersen, At the Devil’s Crossroads in The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity. Oxford University Press, 2012, p.15.
{6} The Seven Fold Way is described in detail in the two freely available ONA pdf compilations (i) The Requisite ONA – A Practical Guide to the Sinister Sorcery of the Order of Nine Angles (of 981 pages, and which includes a facsimile copy of the 1989 Naos MS) and (ii) Enantiodromia – The Sinister Abyssal Nexion.
{7} This subversive individualistic Satanism is evident in (i) the ONA’s 1984 text The Black Book of Satan, where there is a self-initiation, ceremonial rituals, and with the individual expected to form their own independent Satanic group, under the banner of the ONA, and recruit members for it; and in (ii) classic ONA texts, from the 1980s, published in Left Hand Path zines such as Nox.
It is also evident – perhaps more so – in ‘the drecc’ or niner; the lone operative expected to do practical heretical and criminal (or even terrorist) deeds in pursuit of going beyond and transgressing “the limits imposed and prescribed by mundanes, and by the systems which reflect or which manifest the ethos of mundanes – for example, governments, and the laws of what has been termed society.” Glossary of ONA Terms (v. 3.07)
The ONA define the Left Hand Path as,
The amoral and individualistic Way of Sinister Sorcery. In the LHP there are no rules: there is nothing that is not permitted; nothing that is forbidden or restricted. That is, the LHP means the individual takes sole responsibility for their actions and their quest, and does not abide by the ethics of mundanes. In addition, the LHP is where the individual learns from the practical deeds and practical challenges that are an integral to it. Glossary of ONA Terms (v. 3.07)
{8} The way of the Rounwytha is outlined in the following ONA texts, all authored by Anton Long. (i) The Rounwytha Way in History and Modern Context; (ii) Alchemical Seasons and The Fluxions of Time; (iii) Denotatum – The Esoteric Problem With Names.
{9} Senholt, Jacob C: Political Esotericism & the convergence of Radical Islam, Satanism and National Socialism in the Order of the Nine Angles. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Conference: Satanism in the Modern World, November 2009
{10} Senholt, Jacob. Secret Identities in The Sinister Tradition, in Per Faxneld & Jesper Petersen (eds), The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity. Oxford University Press, 2012
{11} Anton Long. Presencings Of A Hideous Nexion. e-text. Dated 122 yfayen.
In a MS dated 107yf and entitled Quod Fornicatio sit Naturalis Hominis, Anton Long mentions that the title given to one Arabic MS, of only a few folios, that he used as a source, Al-Kitab al-Aflak, was obviously a much later addition, being in a different hand, and that those folios were probably once part of a larger MS.
{12} Mysticism in the 21st Century, chapter 5. e-text. 2012
{13} Senholt, op. cit., p.253
{14} For references to a septenary system in ancient Iranian texts, see Reitzenstein and Schaeder Studien zum antiken Synkretismus aus Iran und Griechenland, (Studien der Bibliothek Warburg), Teubner, Leipzig, 1926.
{15} Esoterically, the ONA use the term angles to refer to what is represented by the elements of the Star Game – the nine aspects of the three basic alchemical substances whose changing and permutations (over seven boards/spheres, or via seven archetypal and thus septenary forms) in causal time represents a particular presencing of acausal energy. The nine angles (or dimensions) therefore are a nexion – a map – that is the presencing of the acausal evident in our psyche and consciousness, and thus a link between us, Nature, and ‘the heavens’ (the cosmos) beyond.
{16} Goodrick-Clarke, op.cit. p.218
{17} The Rounwytha Way in History and Modern Context
{18} The Adeptus Way and The Sinisterly-Numinous. Version 2.03. 123 yfayen
{19} The Dark Arts listed and taught by the ONA include sorcery or magick (external, internal, aeonic), acausal empathy (aka dark-empathy) developed by rites such as that of internal adept, and the acausal-thinking developed by the Star Game.
AdvertisementsCheck out How Obama Wasted $1 Trillion
Leftists like to remind everyone of how great Obama’s economy was.
They also say that Obama was Superman and Jesus rolled into one.
Hundreds of banks have failed under Obama. So, taxpayers were left holding the bag for $71 billion of defaults. Couple this with the $787 billion in bailouts and you get what the Left calls “Obama Success!”
Not only is the Trump administration working hard to make America great again, every day Trump’s presidency exposes Obama as an incompetent fraud.
Recently the White House staff salaries were released.
Not only did we find out that Trump Is spending $5 million less than Obama, but his leaner White House payroll is projected to save $22 million.
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Trending: New California Protocol: Illegals Now In Charge
Here’s what we know:
There are 110 fewer employees on White House staff under Trump than under Obama at this point in their respective presidencies.
$5.1 million in payroll savings vs. the Obama FY2015 payroll. In 2017, the Trump payroll amounts to $35.8 million for 377 employees, while the Obama payroll amounted to $40.9 million for 476 employees (FY2015).
Nineteen fewer staffers are dedicated to The First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS). Currently, there are five staffers dedicated to Melania Trump vs. 24 staffers who served Michelle Obama (FY2009).
Counts of the “Assistants to the President” – the most trusted advisors to the president – are the same (22) in both first-year Trump and Obama administrations. In the Trump White House, Steven Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Omarosa Manigault, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer and 17 others make salaries of $179,700. In Obama’s first-year, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and twenty others held the title with top pay of $172,000.
The highest compensated White House Trump staffer? Mark House, Senior Policy Advisor has a salary of $187,500. Mr. House is “on detail” from a federal agency which allows him to exceed the top pay-grade of $179,700. In Obama’s Administration (2009), David Marcozzi earned $193,000 “on detail” from Health and Human Services.
It is clear the Obamas wasted money.
What did Michelle Obama need 24 staffers for?
More advice on how to starve children with her so-called school meal plans? Personal style assistants who continued to dress her badly everywhere she went?
Obama campaigned on criticizing President Bush for racking up a trillion-dollar debt calling it “unpatriotic.” Then Obama must have been double patriotic, given the national debt at the end of Obama’s presidency.
Trump’s White House staff budget cuts proves he is a brilliant businessman making smart moves that saves you the American taxpayer money.
In addition to Trump giving up his salary to charity, his daughter Ivanka and Jared Kushner have rejected their salaries as well. Yet the Left would want to think Trump only took this job to become more rich.
What the media also will not tell you is that since President Trump’s Inauguration the amount of debt owed by the US government has decreased by $100 billion. Under President Obama, the US debt grew by more than $560 billion, an increase of more than 5% in his first 3 months in office.
Let this be an indicator to every American that President Trump is dedicated to cutting waste, fraud, and taxpayer abuse.Every parent who has ever endured a toddler meltdown over miscommunication looks forward to the day that toddlers are able to articulate their needs and wants better. You, your partner, and other primary child-givers are going to be teaching your children how to talk.
Here are 10 tips to teach your toddler to communicate better, helping you foster increased self-esteem, confidence and understanding of your toddler through this process:
Learn sign-language and start teaching some to your child by 6 months of age.
Consistently use these seven main signs with babies: eat, milk, water, sleep, more, help, and all-done. Each time you say any of these words, make the sign at the same time. Once these basic signs are mastered by your baby, you can add in the signs for the food your child likes. Your babies will likely modify the sign—that’s okay! The point is that they make a motion because they need something and you understand how to fulfill that need. There are many resources available on the internet for sign language and even some examples to be found of how your child may modify the sign.
Don’t use baby talk.
Speak words the way they sound to an adult. Use the proper emphasis on the right syllable. If you talk like a baby to your baby, they will not learn the correct mouth shapes, sounds, and intonation of words. Baby talk is very tempting, but it is important to resist! You can get those cute smiles and coos to come out if you simply stare deeply into their eyes and smile as you are talking to them. Also, repeat back much of what they say properly, like a gentle affirmation/correction: They say, “wa-wa,” you smile, nod, and say, “water.”
When you say no – mean it!
Use the word “no” as a command, not a question. Say it assertively, and also make sure that you let your child know what it is that you would like her to stop doing. Rather than simply yelling “NO!!!” be specific about what the no is for: add a verb behind it… “no touching, no hitting!”
Take “okay” out of your vocabulary when talking to toddlers.
Children understand what to do better when they are given clear (and caring) instructions. If you do this but then throw a questioning “okay?” with a high pitched tone at the end of the sentence, you have just communicated to them that they are in charge and can veto your request.
Do not use a child’s name in a punishing tone or as a command.
“Russel!!!” does not communicate to your child that he needs to back up from the hot oven. Say your child’s name to get his attention and then follow that with what you want him to do: “Russell… hot… stop!” Also, it is important to use the appropriate intonation in your voice to match the situation. For example, if he hears a panicked screech from you, it should make him FREEZE. A stern command tells him he is doing something wrong but is not in danger.
Give specific commands. “Fingers up!” tells children how to be careful to not get their fingers caught in a drawer, whereas “careful!” does not actually give them any useful instructions about what they should or shouldn’t do.
Use short sentences – 2-3 words tops!
Children learn to speak by listening to everything you are saying, by watching your body language, and by seeing how you interact with others. This is why it’s important to talk normally when not talking directly to them. However, if you are speaking directly to a toddler, use one to three word sentences.
For example, if you see your children struggling with a toy, look into their eyes and ask, “Mommy help?” As you are speaking, also use the sign for help. Once they start repeating your sentences, you can add another word in.
Look into their eyes when speaking directly to them.
They are learning to speak by lip-reading too. Remember to get down to floor level, smile, and nod while talking to toddlers.
Read to your baby/toddler every day.
Even if your child only sits for a minute, open a book and look at as many pages as she has the attention for. Have books in a place that your child can reach, and be a model by regularly reading something for yourself around her.
Do not have the TV on in the background.
The TV will compete with you for his attention (and vise versa) thereby interfering with focus on what you are saying.
I post more parenting tips and resources over on my Facebook page, so you are welcome to pop over there and join our supportive parenting community.3915 SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit Stumbleupon Pinterest
Monday should indeed be a red-letter day in Blount County, Tennessee. On Monday, the Blount County Board of Commissioners will formally consider a resolution asking God not to punish them and to spare their region from “His coming wrath” which has resulted from the “lawless judiciary”of the United States forcing them to recognize same-sex marriages.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to say a prayer and get on with the real business of the county? Apparently not.
The resolution was proposed by Commissioner Karen Miller and appears on the agenda thusly:
“Resolution condemning judicial tyranny and petitioning God’s mercy. (Resolution 15-10-006)”
Judicial tyranny? What about religious tyranny? Has Ms. Miller forgotten that while she may be personally offended by same-sex marriage, not everyone shares that view?
This completely ludicrous resolution states:
“Federal judges have once again usurped powers not delegated to them, and have violated Reason, the Rule of Law and Natural Law by purporting to strike down State laws and acts of the People recognizing and protecting Natural Marriage.”
Natural law? Who decides what that means? The Bible-thumping intolerant hicks like Miller and whoever else supports this unenforceable and untenable piece of pseudolegislation? If so, God help us all.
But wait, there’s more. Much more. Like this:
“WE adopt this Resolution before God that He pass us by in His Coming Wrath and not destroy our County as He did Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighboring cities. As the Passover Lamb was a means of salvation to the ancient Children of Israel, so we stand upon the safety of the Lamb of God to save us. WE adopt this Resolution begging His favor in light of the fact that we have been forced to comply and recognize that the State of Tennessee, like so many other God-fearing States, MAY have fallen prey to a lawless judiciary in legalizing what God and the Bible expressly forbids.”
Attention Blount County Board of Commissioners! Listen carefully to what I’m about to say: We run this country by a Constitution, NOT by the Bible. End of story. And if you don’t like it that way, then maybe it’s time for you to leave because there are lots of us who are happy with the system of government the Founding Fathers gave us.
Featured image by Bible Study Outlines, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.The Anti-Masonic Party was the original third party to be active on the national scene. Popular opinion in America generally opposed secret organizations, but Freemasonry largely escaped this scrutiny because so many prominent citizens were members.
Exemption from criticism ended for the Masons in 1826. In that year a bricklayer from Batavia, New York, William Morgan, disappeared. He had formerly been a Mason and was on the verge of publishing an exposé of Masonic secrets. Ties between Morgan’s disappearance and the Masons were never established, but critics use the event to turn their wrath on the fraternal organization.
The result was a rapid shrinking of the Masonic structure. In New York, membership which had been 20,000 statewide in 1826 fell to 3,000 over the next decade. The number of lodges dropped from 507 in 1826 to just 48 six years later.
Anti-Masonic fervor was especially strong in New York State, where the political machine, the Albany Regency, was run by Martin Van Buren, a Mason. Opposition was led by William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed, who attempted to stir up the democratic ire of the poorer elements of New York society. A state Anti-Masonic party was formed in 1828 and was successful with electing local and statewide candidates; the party also spread into neighboring states. In that year, Weed launched the Rochester Anti-Masonic Enquirer.
In September, 1831, the anti-Masonic Party held a national convention in Baltimore and nominated William Wirt as their presidential candidate for the following year. Wirt had been the U.S. Attorney General and, strangely, a Mason. Running against the popular Andrew Jackson, Wirt did poorly, winning only the seven electoral votes of the state of Vermont. Their prime impact had been to drain votes away from Henry Clay.
Around 1834, the Anti-Masonic Party began a rapid disintegration with some of its members helping to establish the new Whig Party and others migrating to the Democratic Party.
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The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael F. Holt.
The political home of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley, and the young Abraham Lincoln, the American Whig Party was involved at every level o...GANDHINAGAR: It seems Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi has finally realized that more than any other politician, Aam Aadmi Party ( AAP ) chief Arvind Kejriwal has the potential to ruin his chances of becoming the country's Prime Minister. Sources in Modi's core strategy team said that the chief minister is now seriously focusing on'strategizing afresh' for his 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign This comes immediately after AAP staked claim to having made over 1.25 lakh members across Gujarat in 10 days. Their membership drive was launched on January 1. AAP state convener Sukhdev Patel on Friday claimed that 5,000 members from the city enrolled with the party on a single day.Sources said that leaders of Delhi unit of BJP, members of the Citizen for Accountable Governance (CAG), and other highly qualified young professionals roped in by Modi last year, met the Gujarat chief minister recently. "Even senior BJP leader of Delhi, Dr Harsh Vardhan, rushed to Gandhinagar last week at short notice and had a long meeting with the Gujarat CM. CAG members and other Modi strategists discussed possible ways of countering Kejriwal," said a source.Sources said that Modi had asked CAG members and BJP workers to synchronize their efforts and launch a major campaign against AAP in Delhi from January-end or February. "CAG will focus on strategy and on attracting Delhi's educated youth to the BJP. The party also plans to hit the streets to persuade supporters common to both the parties not to vote for AAP in the Lok Sabha elections," source said.Delhi unit of the BJP has also been instructed to attack Kejriwal and his core team on local governance issues so that they are unable to move out of the national capital and replicate their efforts outside Delhi. "The Delhi will launch an aggressive campaign against AAP soon,'' the source said. Sources said that Modi hopes to win all the seven Lok Sabha seats of Delhi which are currently held by the Congress. However, the Gujarat chief minister fears that AAP may play the spoilsport. Delhi's seats are psychologically and strategically important for Modi, sources said.Another key source said that to counter the growing popularity of Kejriwal and AAP in the metros and towns of the country, CAG and BJP have chalked out plans for 15 states where they will organize meetings of young professionals and students in groups of 100 to 200 persons, who will be briefed about Modi and BJP's plans for the country, the source said.New technology, different from the large public meetings organized across Gujarat using 3D technology during the 2012 Gujarat polls, will also be used. "CAG and BJP volunteers across the country will hit the streets from January-end for the Statue of Unity campaign and counter media hype around AAP,'' sources added.Frankl’s concepts are based on finding a meaning or purpose in life. He has stated that all life circumstances have meaning, even the ones that are hard or make us miserable. He goes on to state that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”. What does this all mean? In basic terms, it means we may not have the power to control the circumstances into which we are thrust, but we do have the power to control the way in which we think about those circumstances.
Frankl used his views to look at and discuss treatment options for several mental health disorders, including anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and neurosis. He also used his views to help terminally ill patients. His thoughts regarding mental illness were if we could simply recognize the purpose of our circumstances, we could (possibly) master our mental health issues. Let’s explore this further.
Take anxiety, for example. Most people develop anxiety issues in response to unknown circumstances – death or contracting a terminal illness, for example. This could also be known as what Frankl refers to as “anticipatory anxiety” – the belief that what the person thinks in his or her mind will manifest itself in the physical sense. This tends to form a vicious cycle for the person, because the “anticipatory anxiety” – and subsequent stress – generally leads to symptoms of some type. And these symptoms tend to solidify in the person’s head that what they have believed to be true actually is true – causing more anxiety. A self-perpetuating cycle has just been born.
How do you stop this cycle? Through the use of logotherapy (Frankl’s theory of existential psychotherapy), one can obtain relief from their mental health ailments. Logotherapy is based on the idea that one must surpass negativity and negative belief patterns that hold us back. It helps us to view our life circumstances thought different eyes, and it allows us to accept the situations that our beyond our control. Although logotherapy embraces a sense of empowerment, it is actually is letting go (and thus relinquishing power) that we find purpose and meaning.
The following three techniques are recognized and used by proponents of logotherapy – dereflection, paradoxical intention and Socratic dialogue. We will discuss each of these now.
Dereflection is generally the go-to technique if a person is overly obsessed with any one particular issue; these issues tend to center on the self. Usually through guided sessions with a trained therapist, the person learns to redirect his or her focus from the self and onto other people or situations. Typically, the person is asked to think about the meaning of something that is more important than the issue that is bothering them. Through the use of the dereflection technique, people learn to focus on meanings and values rather than their own self-pity.
Paradoxical intention is the technique of requesting the things in life that we fear the most. This is especially effective for people who suffer from anxiety and phobias; because their fears can be paralyzing, they especially need to get those fears under control. Through the use of humor, people wish for or request the situation they fear the most, which usually has the effect of removing the anxiety from the said situation. This generally happens because by focusing intensely on the situation, the person starts to realize the irrationality of it, thus eliminating (or at least decreasing) the fear itself.
Finally, Socratic dialogue is a way of listening to yourself, asking provoking questions and finding meaning in life or a situation through your own words. It is Frankl’s opinion that we all hold the answers to our own questions and solutions to our own problems – if we simply dig deep enough. This technique is especially effective for people who might have lost their direction or focus in life; by tapping into your own inner dialogue, you allow yourself to rediscover your motivation, your life goals and your purpose. This is a great tool for putting life back into perspective.
It’s also a great tool for overcoming anxiety, depression and other mental health ailments. Although these conditions can and are (at times) based on chemical imbalances, many times they are simply a condition of life circumstances. And we, as people, are not solely to blame. Everyday, we are bombarded with images of negativity – on the news, on social media, even by our own friends and family. It can make it difficult to keep up a positive attitude; however, that is exactly what the techniques are designed to do. They allow you to refocus your mental energy into positive physical pursuits. Give it a try – you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised.
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thelotuscarroll/6847105674Cracking Suffrage History
On Tuesday, June 25, 2013, the University’s Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership joined the National Council of Women of the United States in their offices in New York City to open a “Woman Suffrage Party" safe.
For as long as anyone can remember, the safe has sat locked and unopened at the group's offices near the United Nations building. To solve the mystery, the Anthony Center hired a professional safecracker to break open the accidental time capsule.
UPDATE: So *what* was in the safe?
Safe's contents: A key in the door of a wooden chamber within the safe
Also in the wooden chamber, a change purse with foreign coins and at least one bill. Currency is from Mexico, France and other countries
Also in the wooden chamber, an envelope with a post office time stamp of 1999 and a credit card expiring in 2002 inside
Also in wooden chamber, a small wooden stamp (for inking, not a postage stamp)
Small blue box with a silver brooch inside. The box and brooch indicate it is from John Wanamaker (A well-known jewelry store in NYC)
A small, modern looking metal candy box containing an assortment of keys that appear to go to storage
Two silver hearts (about palm-sized) from the Museum of Modern Art that fit together to form a sculpture
Large coin with Florence Kelly’s name engraved on it contained in a pouch
A boxed Smithsonian replica of Susan B. Anthony’s gavel, presented to her in 1888 at the first convention of the National Council of Women in Washington DC.
Corporate seal to emboss official papers
Metal box marked, “corporate papers”, contained about a dozen manila envelopes, one marked 1931 certificate of incorporation, an IRS letter (1940), a letter regarding a loan (1967), and tax documentation for New York
A box with six mounted replicas of murals from the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago of historical |
prefer cars to corals.
It's not every day you open an in-flight magazine and read an ad touting "spitwater pressure cleaners for the mining industry." Flip the page and you'll also see an ad cajoling you to "snorkel, sip, snooze" on the Great Barrier Reef.
This is Australia, and the ads illustrate a self-destructive paradox: Coal mining could eventually kill the reef that Australians revere.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the city of Gladstone, a jumping off point to the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef and the world's fourth largest coal-export hub. Dredges have turned the harbor brown as they work to expand the coal port. And three massive liquefied natural gas terminals are being constructed on an island that is a World Heritage Site — a United Nations designation for places of exceptional natural value.
We all use fossil fuels, and so we all play some role in climate change. But in Gladstone, the connection is unusually direct.
The coal is shipped mostly to China. When it's burned, carbon that had been buried for hundreds of millions of years in Australia ends up in the air. Some dissolves in the ocean, where it turns into carbonic acid. If current trends continue, that increasing acidity, combined with ocean warming, could devastate coral reefs around the world. It's quite possible that the children of Gladstone will witness the death of the Great Barrier Reef.
Not that it's on the minds of most Gladstonians. "People simply don't want to go there. They don't want to think about it," says Jan Arens, who last year founded the city's one and only environmental group, the Gladstone Conservation Council.
Gladstone is an industrial hub in the state of Queensland. Last year, the state's ruling political party (the Liberal National Party) passed a resolution urging a ban on teaching schoolchildren about climate change, calling it "environmental propaganda material" and "post normal science."
A visitor in Gladstone, on the other hand, learns that draining ancient natural gas deposits is "sustainable," according to a display in an oil company's education center. In what sense it's sustainable, the man at the center couldn't exactly say.
But Australia isn't completely upside down, geography notwithstanding. Public polling finds that two-thirds of Australians accept the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, and most accept that humans are largely responsible.
When it comes to the Great Barrier Reef, those polls essentially reveal a sentiment along the lines of "it's a lovely place, I'd hate to see it go, but at least I will still have my house and two cars," says John Connor, CEO of the Climate Institute in Sydney, an organization involved in both research and advocacy. In other words, nature comes up a distant second to lifestyle.
Connor says the group's strategy is to find ways to "manage the unavoidable but try to avoid the unmanageable." But he concedes that short of a global shift away from burning fossil fuels, the demise of the reef appears to fall into the sad category of being both unmanageable and unavoidable.It’s no exaggeration that the Netherlands has a lot of bikes — some numbers estimate over 18 million — because it’s one of the friendliest countries in the world to cycle in.
There’s so many that most densely populated cities such as Amsterdam and Utrecht have a team of dedicated people, tagging and removing abandoned bikes constantly.
Credit: Owen Williams Amsterdam’s fietsdepot, which I visited when my own bike was taken away
A specially designated area on the outskirts of many cities, called a ‘fietsdepot‘ — bike depot in English — stores abandoned and illegally parked bikes for just six weeks before they’re sold or destroyed.
As you might expect, it’s often incredibly hard to find a place to park your bike.
Even though cities like Amsterdam have built enormous, multi-level bike parks, they’re constantly full and finding a place to park your bike — legally — is a nightmare. They end up chained to anything attached to the ground once parks are filled — signs, bridges and gutters are all fair game.
In Amsterdam, the city actually officially ran out of bike parks this year and is desperately planning to build new facilities, including a two-story partially underwater bike park.
The city of Utrecht, which has a population of 311,367, set out to solve this with a pilot system designed to help guide cyclists to places they can easily park their bikes.
It recently completed installation of a system made up of digital signs around the city that display the number of parks in a way that’s not dissimilar to what you’ve probably seen for cars, though the technology behind it is a little more complex.
Lumiguide, the company chosen by Utrecht to build the system showed me around the city and the technology it’s built.
Bas van Dijk, Lumiguide’s CTO, told me that its system is fairly unique as it uses nothing more than a pair of high definition cameras and a computer algorithm to recognize a bike and register that a spot is occupied.
There are systems already on the market, but those tend to use a switch nestled in the bike holder that can be broken, or hundreds of cameras that sits at the end of each and every park, which require constant cleaning.
Lumiguide’s cameras are mounted on the roof in pairs just a few centimeters apart, and use stereoscopic vision to determine what they’re seeing.
Each pair of cameras can see tens of bikes and are far easier and cheaper to implement than needing to modify each parking spot — all they need is somewhere to be mounted and single wire to a powered internet connection.
The cameras relay the images back to Lumiguide’s system, which runs an algorithm over the two images and generates data on how many places are occupied as well as usage trends and other information.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is these two cameras are off the shelf, and that all the magic sits in Lumiguide’s software. They’re just dumb, ethernet powered cameras, with no added smarts.
Credit: Lumiguide How Lumiguide’s algorithm sees parked bikes
For cities with bike dense populations, systems like this are a huge relief. Local governments haven’t ever had a way to measure public bike park utilization reliably in the past, so there’s been no visibility into whether more bike parks are needed, or if the amount of space leased should be reduced.
Each facility gets its own live map and analytics, for continuous monitoring and measurement of a bike park’s performance.
That means the city is also able to more reliably tell which bikes have been abandoned. To give an idea of the scale of the issue, more than 73,000 bicycles were removed from the streets of Amsterdam.
City workers usually visually identify bikes that haven’t moved and tag them with a warning to the owner before they’re removed — but it’s often hard to know how long the bike was really there for.
Credit: Owen Williams / TNW
With a system like Lumiguide’s the city is able to know when a bike came in and automatically notify when a spot has gone stale, needing workers to remove the bike to the fietsdepot.
It also encourages people to cycle more, as signs around the city show if you’ll be able to get a spot ahead of time rather than needing to worry about if you’ll have to search for somewhere secure to park.
In Utrecht, there are 21 signs dotted across the city’s major cycle routes which are designed to guide cyclists to a free park. Each sign is interesting in itself — it’s connected to the internet via a 3G modem, which refreshes the status of the bike park continually without the need for a wired connection.
The backend is built using Haskell, which is converted on the fly using a Javascript library into the company’s Web interface for the use of the city.
A live map of one of Utrecht’s bike depots, showing utilization
With the use of cameras, there’s naturally a privacy element that people might be concerned about, but Lumiguide built its system with that in mind. No images or video are ever saved — they’re disposed of in real time — so privacy is maintained.
The city of Utrecht is incredibly proud of the system and said earlier that it plans to expand it to over 20,000 monitored parks by 2017.
More complex versions of Lumiguide’s system can provide indoor guidance to available parks for larger facilities and the company can install its detection hardware both indoors and outdoors.
The interface presented to Utrecht for monitoring bike stations
As cycling sees a revival across the world, Lumiguide’s system offers something that’s relatively easy for cities to install at almost a quarter of the cost and provides visual encouragement for cyclists to get on their bikes.
Lumiguide says that the Utrecht trial has been so successful that other cities have started to take notice, and the company is holding discussions to bring even larger scale versions to major European centres in the near future.
The bike parking system, which is something most people probably wouldn’t normally think about, is an interesting look at what smart, internet-connected devices can do to change the way people interact with a city — and encourage people to cycle more.
Read next: Offline over the weekend? Read all the tech news you missed right hereImagine a world without capitalism.
That simple yet seemingly impossible task is at the core of the Museum of Capitalism, a new speculative institution set to open its doors in Oakland, California, on June 17th. Through August 20th, the free museum will examine the complex mechanisms and consequences of, and forms of resistance to, the world’s primary economic system through works by over 60 artists, a library, a full calendar of public programming, and, fittingly—or perhaps ironically—a gift shop.
Visitors will be invited to reflect on capitalism as if looking back at it from a world in which capitalism is dead. “Much of the evidence of capitalism is either eroding over time or simply not known or easily accessible to the public,” the mission statement reads. “Our ambition is to connect and integrate these many efforts before the evidence is erased forever.”
The project was conceived by curatorial duo Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau, who registered the MuseumofCapitalism.org domain back in 2010, when British political theorist Alex Callinicos suggested, while speaking on a panel, that one day there would be a museum to memorialize capitalism, just as we have museums of apartheid and communism today.
But it wasn’t until Steves and Furstnau received the annual Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award for nearly $150,000 that the proposition finally came into focus. The Tremaine Foundation’s Art Program Manager Heather Pontonio says the award (the largest of its kind in the country) is reserved for daring proposals that other foundations typically wouldn’t fund.
“If it would be [otherwise] funded, it’s probably not challenging enough,” she says. “It’s probably not taking that level of risk that we would like to see taken.”
And with past recipients of the award including Mass MoCA and the Queens Museum, the Museum of Capitalism is an especially remarkable winner: It’s the first ever awardee that isn’t an existing museum, but rather a project that takes the museum as its form.
That’s not to say that the platform won’t look and feel like a typical museum once it’s open. The space holds two exhibitions—a core exhibition and a “special exhibition” about American imperialism, curated by Erin Elder and featuring works by Bruce Nauman and Chip Thomas, among others.
For the core exhibition, curators chose and commissioned works from a provocative group of artists—Superflex, Dread Scott, Curtis Santiago, andSadie Barnette, among others—that interrogate capitalism from a multitude of angles. What emerge among these objects is a series of implicit sub-themes, such as global trade, race, incarceration, and the environment.
As standalones, most of the works wouldn’t necessarily register as being about capitalism. Take Sadie Barnette’s piece, for instance: A series of order forms for gold teeth, with shimmering spray paint and cheap gem stickers embellishing the anatomical diagrams of teeth. But Barnette describes gold teeth as one of the tools of black visual culture for surviving capitalism—a tool for “making yourself feel like you’re worth more than society tells you that you are,” she says.
The central exhibition also includes an interactive installation by Hong Kong artist Christy Chow, in which visitors run on a treadmill while video screens take them through the step-by-step process of assembling a garment in a Chinese factory.
Oakland-based Vietnamese-American artist Gabby Miller, meanwhile, will show a massive piece of a steel container as part of a sculpture reminding us that the Vietnam War was largely made possible by shipments of supplies via container ships going directly from the Oakland Port to South Vietnam.
And in documentation of Rimini Protokoll’s “Annual Shareholders Meeting,” the Berlin collective sells “tickets” to a performance that are actually small amounts of Daimler stock, inviting theatergoers to attend the automobile company’s annual shareholders meeting to see capitalism performed live.
It’s works such as Rimini Protokoll’s that emphasize the Museum of Capitalism’s surreal setting.
The museum’s temporary location is tucked away in Oakland’s Jack London Square, a developed waterfront area that was initially envisioned as a tourist destination but has been plagued with storefront vacancies for the past decade—and is eerily deserted on most days of the week.
Steves and Furstnau partnered with the Jack London Improvement District to move into a massive empty building that was designed to be a bustling vendor marketplace.
To reach the museum from the street, visitors must cross railroad tracks via an elevated walkway with a sci-fi feel. Once in the second-floor exhibition space, they can peer down into the still-vacant first floor of the building and see scaffolding left behind like a ghost of the intended marketplace—almost a work of art in itself.
At the back, floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto the Oakland Estuary, where rows of yachts bob in the water and massive cranes lift containers onto ships in the distance, ready to carry them across the world.
Without the Museum of Capitalism there, the area would seem ordinary to any Oaklander. But part of the museum’s goal, the curators explained, is to invite visitors to imagine alternatives outside of capitalist frameworks, simply by suggesting the possibility of such a thing.
In doing so, they hope museumgoers will begin to recognize the ways in which we all perform capitalism in our daily lives, making people aware of the way it’s both ubiquitous and invisible. As Steves put it: “The exit of the Museum of Capitalism is the entrance to the real museum of capitalism.”We're as happy as this penguin to announce Immutant 1.1.0 - "CelloPudding".
This is a feature and bug fix release. As always, view our road map here.
What is Immutant?
Immutant is an application server for Clojure. It's an integrated platform built on JBoss AS7 that aims to reduce the inherent incidental complexity in real world applications.
What's in this release?
We've upgraded Infinispan to its latest version: 6.0.0.Final. This is primarily to support using Immutant as a data store for Datomic and offers more stability improvements over the previous release.
We've shaved a few seconds off the boot process during application deployment. Part of gaining this speedup was no longer loading clojure.tools.logging, so if your app relies on it, it needs to be listed among your dependencies.
, so if your app relies on it, it needs to be listed among your dependencies. We've tried to reduce the "noise" in our log output. This is part of an ongoing process to log appropriate information at the right severity level. Feedback always appreciated in this regard.
You can now alter the logging level for the console output (and server.log ) by setting the jboss.logging.level system property or by passing --log-level to the immutant run task of our plugin (assuming you are running version 1.2.0 of the plugin or newer).
) by setting the system property or by passing to the task of our plugin (assuming you are running version 1.2.0 of the plugin or newer). Keyword arguments to our functions are now validated, reducing the risk of unexpected behavior due to typos.
We've expanded our messaging api to include per-queue address settings, inspired by Chas' work.
Fressian is now a supported codec for messaging and caching, inspired by Ian's work.
Immutant now implements the URLClasspath protocol introduced in version 0.2.2 of java.classpath enabling an accurate view of your app's isolated classpath within Immutant via a Clojure core library.
protocol introduced in version of java.classpath enabling an accurate view of your app's isolated classpath within Immutant via a Clojure core library. In the interest of speeding up our incremental builds, we've dropped support for apps using Clojure 1.3. They may still work, but that version is no longer a part of our integration tests.
We've also dropped support for our full distribution. We only ship a slim distro now, providing only the minimal JBoss services required to support our Clojure libraries. Over time, Immutant has diverged significantly from the main trunk of JBoss AS development now known as WildFly. For those seeking a full, modern JEE stack, WildFly is the best option. We're expecting future versions of Immutant to more seamlessly integrate with it.
Get It
The simplest way to install or upgrade to 1.1.0 is via our Leiningen plugin:
$ lein immutant install 1.1.0
See our install page for more details. Once you have it installed, take a look at our tutorials.
What's next?
Our plans are to begin development on version 2.x of Immutant, with a specific emphasis on the ability to optionally embed Immutant libraries within your app, as opposed to deploying them to a container. The latter will continue to be supported, of course, as there are applications for which it makes sense, but we want to explore the idea of embedding not only web features but messaging, caching and scheduling as well. We plan to devote time in the next few weeks figuring out what this will look like. Expect a blog post with more details soon.
Get In Touch
If you have any questions, issues, or other feedback about Immutant, you can always find us on #immutant on freenode or our mailing lists.
Issues resolved in 1.1.0“She lives with me,” said Mr. Galeano, who is 42 and has an apartment above the restaurant. “This is the bad part, but it’s a sacrifice you have to do.”
Mr. Galeano has run the restaurant for 11 years, but halfway along, he reached the conclusion that there was only one way to conjure up the pasta that he kept dreaming of serving to his customers. In 2005 or so, his mother “came for vacation and, like, as a joke, she made some tortellini for me,” he recalled.
The tortellini led to something of an epiphany for Mr. Galeano.
He decided he didn’t merely want to offer the authentic pasta dishes of the Emilia-Romagna region; he wanted to serve them exactly as he remembered them from his boyhood in Bologna.
So, at his urging, Ms. Schenardi kept coming back, and now she is a built-in component of the restaurant’s business model, with enough of a following that Mr. Galeano has her crank out copious supplies of tortellini, ravioli, tagliatelle and tortelloni so that he can file away reinforcements during the weeks when she travels back to Italy.
“We have a special freezer downstairs only for her,” he said. “We call it the Fort Knox of ravioli. Even the health department, when they come to do an inspection, they have trouble with that freezer, because only I have the key.”
Ms. Schenardi is not, officially speaking, the head chef at Gradisca. That would be Daniele Boldrini, 30, who grew up in Bologna and seems happy to defer to her on matters of pasta, even though he has paid a decade’s worth of dues in kitchens in London, Florence and Barcelona. “I ask her,” Mr. Boldrini said. “She has more experience than me.”
Ms. Schenardi has meticulous standards. She refuses to work with any flour other than Spadoni “00.” When making dough, she has been known to reject eggs that are not the correct size or color.
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If a customer asks for a vegetarian version of a dish traditionally stuffed with pork and veal, she declines. The recipes have remained the same for decades, and she scoffs at the idea of altering them.
She speaks very little English, but if anyone asks her about a primarily American dish like spaghetti and meatballs, no interpreter is needed to convey her strident derision. “She does not do any compromise,” her son said. “She’s a little bit conservative.”
In Italy, regional traditions are tantamount to religion. A bowl of tagliatelle may be prepared one way in a certain village, and another way in a village five miles away, and each village may see the other’s methods as gastronomic heresy.
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Colman Andrews, the editorial director of a Web site called The Daily Meal and the author of a new book, “The Country Cooking of Italy,” said: “If you talk to people in Italy, especially the older generation, and you suggest, ‘Oh, have you ever tried making lasagna with goat cheese instead of ricotta?’ they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. They’ll say, ‘We’ve spent hundreds of years perfecting this recipe, and why would you want to mess with it?’ ”
Evan Kleiman, a Los Angeles chef and the author of six books about Italian food, acknowledges that when it comes to recipes, the traditionalists have a point, although Mr. Galeano’s approach strikes her as unusual.
“I completely believe in slavish devotion to culinary tradition,” she said. “But to say that his mother is the only one capable of executing that recipe, that is another conversation. A lot of people say that the thing that keeps Italy stymied economically is that thing of people not wanting to move away from their mom’s pasta.”
Over the years, other New York restaurants have experimented with the Import Mama From Italy strategy. Enoteca Maria, a restaurant on Staten Island, has a rotating team of Italian “nonnas” who do the cooking. At I Trulli, on East 27th Street, Dora Marzovilla, the Apulia-born mother of the restaurateur Nicola Marzovilla, has made the fresh pasta, focaccia and panzerotti since 1994.
Ultimately, such arrangements seem to be less about regional provincialism than about deeper currents of attachment.
“I just think it’s really interesting because of what it reveals in the Italian psyche, which is a very complex one in its linkage to food — and to mothers,” Ms. Kleiman said.
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To the casual observer, Ms. Schenardi’s dutiful slicing and rolling and kneading at that front table at Gradisca might seem like an act of forced labor: mommy martyrdom taken to a new extreme. “We used to joke that she has a ball and chain under the table, and she cannot really move,” Mr. Galeano said.
Spend a few hours in her orbit, though, and it becomes clear that she’s having a blast. Back in Bologna, much of her day is devoted to cooking one meal after another for her husband. In New York, she’s the main attraction at a hopping West Village dining spot, with notables like Sarah Jessica Parker and Al Gore occasionally floating up to her table to pay homage.
“She likes the attention,” said Lia Ronnen, an executive editor at Artisan Books and a close friend of Mr. Galeano’s.
And perhaps the freedom. During a break from cooking one evening, she started joking about the handful of English words and phrases she has made a point of absorbing. Among them: “Thank you,” “Good morning,” “St. Patrick’s” — with that one, she made a gesture and an angelic sound that mimicked the lofty tones of a choir. On Sunday mornings she goes to Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Then Ms. Schenardi broke into a grin. “Port Authority bus,” she said. “Caesar. Taj Mahal. Bally.” After church, she regularly catches a bus to Atlantic City.
She raised a hand and then lowered it to pantomime her preferred mode of gambling: the slot machines. “Sacro e profano,” she said.
Those days off are rare, though. If there is any evidence that Mr. Galeano’s culinary strategy at Gradisca has tapped into a deeply rooted human need, it’s the reaction from customers when they fail to find Ms. Schenardi at the front table.
“People are sorry when I’m not here,” she said through an interpreter. “They’re always saying, ‘Where’s mama, where’s mama?’ ”Attention has now shifted to PS4, Sony Japan has said.
Speaking in a 4Gamers interview, Sony Computer Entertainment SVP Masayasu Ito has confirmed that Sony has dropped all first-party development for its Vita handheld.
As translated by DualShockers, Ito said: “Currently, first-party studios have no titles in development for PS Vita. Since third-parties are working very hard on PS Vita, SCE’s own strategy is to focus on PS4, which is a new platform.”
Ito added that the demographic using Vita has become younger, citing the success of Minecraft: PS Vita Edition. He said that third-party releases will continue and that new colours of the hardware will “accelerate the trend” of appealing to younger gamers.
Sony had previously said that big-budget Vita development had been iced. In June, Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida admitted that the days of large-scale Sony games for the handheld were over.
Hammering another nail into Vita’s coffin later in the year, Yoshida, speaking at EGX in the UK, said the “climate is not healthy” for a hardware successor “because of the huge dominance of mobile gaming.”
Vita launched in Japan in 2011, and in the rest of the world the following year.A backhoe works Monday to demolish a home near the site of the Mayflower oil spill. - Photo by Gavin Lesnick
Crews tore down a pair of houses near the site of the oil spill in Mayflower Monday, spending about an hour demolishing each structure so oil trapped beneath the foundations can be cleaned up.
A single backhoe first made quick work of 32 N. Starlite Road, starting at the back of the single-story brick home and working its way to the front. After a short break, an identical process reduced 36 N. Starlite Road to a similar pile of debris.
Exxon Mobil bought both houses after the March 29 oil spill, which sent an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil from the nearby Pegasus Pipeline and onto both properties.
Exxon Mobil spokesman Aaron Stryk said the company decided to tear down both structures because some oil remained trapped underneath them. Negotiations are ongoing with a third home in the subdivision with oil under it, but it's not clear whether it will ultimately be torn down or whether the oil will be removed another way, Stryk said.
The backhoe methodically worked its way around each structure, pushing and pulling the frames in and creating large piles of mangled wood, bricks, insulation and other building materials. Representatives from Exxon Mobil, the Arkansas Department of Health and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality were among the small crowd of onlookers.
Mayflower demolition at 10X speed Watch at 10X speed as crews on Monday demolish the second of two houses near the site of the Mayflower oil spill. (By Gavin Lesnick)
[View Full-Size]The season didn’t end the way anyone had hoped, with three losses in the final four games and no bowl bid. But the disappointing finish for UTSA didn’t seem to hurt recruiting.
Of the 19 players signed by the Roadrunners on Wednesday, the first day of the new early signing period, a record 16 are considered three-star recruits, the most in the program’s short history.
“It didn’t affect us at all,” said UTSA coach Frank Wilson, who signed 11 three-star recruits in his first season at the school. “Sometimes it bodes even better for you because they see the opportunity to contribute right away.
“We’re very pleased with the young men we signed. We were able to fill (several needs).”
More Information UTSA early signees Trumane Bell, LB, Lake Highlands, 3-star Spencer Burford, OL, Wagner, 3-star Lorenzo Dantzler, DE, East Mississippi CC, 3-star Jalyn Galmore, OL, Itawamba [Miss.] CC, 2-star Zachary Gilson, DE, Sachse, 2-star Peter Gray, DE, Tupelo, Miss., 3-star Terrell Haynes, OL/DL, Seguin, 2-star Sheldon Jones, WR, Warren Easton, La., 3-star T.J. King, DE, Fort Scott [Kan.] CC, 3-star Brandon Matterson, DT, Brandeis, 2-star Corey Mayfield Jr., CB, North Forney, 3-star Andrew McGowan, WR, Sinton, 3-star Kevin Nelson, DT, Arlington Heights Kelechi Nwachuku, S, McAllen Memorial, 3-star Tykee Ogle-Kellogg, WR, Alcoa Tenn., 3-star Jarrett Preston, LB, Ridge Point, 3-star Treyvion Shannon, OL, Mississippi Gulf Coast CC, 2-star La’Thaniel Washington, WR, Del Valle, 2-star Jordan Weeks, QB,Wimberley, 3-star
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A noted recruiting guru at LSU, Tennessee and Ole Miss, Wilson apparently hasn’t lost his touch.
One major recruiting service rated the Roadrunners’ early signing class the third-best in Conference USA — after Florida Atlantic and Southern Miss — and 84th nationally.
Of the 19 signees, 13 are from Texas, including two from San Antonio.
Wilson called 6-foot-3, 290-pound Spencer Burford from Wagner High School “the most talented offensive lineman we’ve recruited in our time here. He could play anywhere.”
He said 6-2, 300-pound defensive tackle Brandon Matterson of Brandeis “dominated at his position as a senior.”
“He did phenomenal things,” said Wilson, who is 12-12 in two seasons with the Roadrunners.
The jewel of the class, however, could be pro-style quarterback Jordan “JoJo” Weeks of Wimberley. He passed for 4,396 yards with 52 touchdowns and just four interceptions as a senior in leading the Texans to a 13-2 record and a trip to the Class 4A state semifinals.
Weeks was a late signee after decommitting from Texas State as a baseball recruit. Wilson said he does not know if Weeks will try to play both sports at UTSA.
“It’s not often you recruit a quarterback who has 50 touchdowns and (four) interceptions,” Wilson said. “That’s pretty doggone good. It caught our attention. I went and watched him practice, and he went something like 24 out of 25 that day. I don’t know if the ball ever touched the ground. He has an uncanny way of placing the ball exactly where it needs to be.”
“Thanks to @CoachWilsonUTSA and the UTSA staff. (I’m) excited to be part of the family!” Weeks tweeted.
The presence of Weeks next fall will give the Roadrunners five scholarship quarterbacks, including sophomores Bryce Rivers from Stevens and Frank Harris from Clemens.
Wilson said he’ll likely recruit one more experienced quarterback to compete for the starting job to replace graduating senior Dalton Sturm.
The early signings also include four junior college transfers, led by defensive end Lorenzo Dantzler, who helped East Mississippi Community College to the NJCAA national championship in 2017.
All likely will contribute next season, as the Roadrunners suffered heavy losses to graduation on both lines.
UTSA will complete the 2018 signing class with four additional scholarships Feb. 7.
Wilson was operating during much of the recruiting process without offensive coordinator Frank Scelfo, who was fired after the season-ending loss to Louisiana Tech, and defensive boss Pete Golding, who took a job at Alabama.
“It was challenging,” Wilson said. “It’s always concerning to parents when transition happens. It was important to ensure that the leadership of this program is intact.”
New athletic director Lisa Campos said she was pleased with the class.
“Coach Wilson is a great evaluator of talent,” she said. “He looks at the entire student from character to academics to athleticism.”
[email protected]
Twitter: @johnfwhislerTougher rules require heavy goods vehicles in the capital to be fitted with side guards and certain types of mirrors
Lorries without safety equipment to protect cyclists and pedestrians will be banned from London’s roads from Tuesday.
Under Britain’s first safer lorry scheme, heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) in the capital must be fitted with side guards to help prevent cyclists being dragged under the wheels in the event of a collision. They must also have a certain type of mirror which will give the driver a better view of bicycles and pedestrians.
London mayor Boris Johnson hailed the scheme as a life-saver. Seven of the eight cyclist deaths in the capital this year have involved HGVs.
Johnson said: “We are ahead of any other part of the UK in closing the legal loopholes that allowed many HGVs to operate without basic safety equipment and I am delighted that, over the 18 months since we announced the safer lorry scheme, the vast majority of operators have got the message and fitted safety equipment to their vehicles in anticipation of the ban.
“We have, from this morning, begun vigorous enforcement action against the laggards. A very disproportionate share of cyclist deaths and serious injuries are caused by lorries and today’s scheme will undoubtedly save lives.”
Johnson also launched a proposal for all lorries to be retrofitted with bigger side windows to reduce driver blind spots.
Revamped lorry designs could avoid hundreds of cycling deaths – study Read more
The new rules cover every road in the capital except motorways and will operate 24 hours a day. The maximum fine for each breach of the ban is £1,000. Repeat offenders risk losing their operating licence.
But hauliers claimed the funds to launch the scheme would be better spent on enforcing previous guidelines. Natalie Chapman, head of policy for London at the Freight Transport Association (FTA), said: “FTA is pleased that there are exemptions and concessions for vehicles where this equipment is either not possible or not legal.
“However, in principle we believe that this kind of blunt regulatory tool is not the best way to improve cyclist safety. We still think that the money and effort invested in this scheme would have been better spent on increased enforcement against the small proportion of lorries that don’t comply with existing regulations. There are better ways to achieve safer roads for all users.”Pay no attention to the birther behind the curtain
Every report on Romney’s appearance in Commerce, Michigan today screamed BIRTHER! The top story on NPR was about it. It’s all anyone is talking about. So, in an attempt to distract people from the horrible outfall from his moronic statement, Romney’s campaign sent out an email at 3:32 p.m. this afternoon quintupling down on the lie that President Obama has removed the work requirement from welfare.
In the email is a link to a video that cites an op-ed from a newspaper that now describes the claim as “debunked”.
Here’s the email:
Last month, President Obama gutted bipartisan welfare reform. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks this is crazy. Watch the video below to see why one of the most respected newspapers in America called his waiver of the work requirement “nuts.” The Romney Plan for a Stronger Middle Class will put work back in welfare. That’s why your support is critical. Donate today to help Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the Republican team win in November. Let’s restore a little common sense and get America back on track. Thanks, Matt Rhoades
Campaign Manager
Romney for President, Inc.
If you watch the video, it refers to the sort of tea party rant-type op-ed you’d expect from a small newspaper in Virginia. However, just this week, that same newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, described Romney’s claim as “debunked”. In fact, the headline of the article is “New Romney ad pushes debunked claim against Obama”.
Mitt Romney’s campaign is up with a new ad in Virginia and other swing states using a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial in support of the Republican’s continued attack on President Barack Obama’s welfare policies. The 30-second ad doubles down on the Romney campaign’s claim that Obama ended welfare’s work requirement “gutting welfare reform,” a charge that has been debunked by multiple independent fact-checkers. {…} On the day it was released, PolitiFact.com debunked the first of the Romney campaign ads claiming that “under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check,” rating it “Pants on Fire.” FactCheck.org followed suit, finding that Obama’s changes to the welfare reform law neither gutted it, nor “dropped” the work provisions. Rather, the piece says, states were given authority to change the work requirements with a goal of increasing job placement. Making it a hat trick, the Washington Post Fact-Checker also gave the claim “Four Pinnochios.”
Mitt Romney may want to wish this away but it’s not going to go away. It is the top story of the day so that, once again, Romney has completely lost control of the narrative and the message.
In the meantime, President Obama tweeted this:
Song of the day: Born in the U.S.A. http://t.co/yYNprUBH — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 24, 2012
Heh, heh…A lengthy list of lawmakers and security experts have stepped forward to praise Donald Trump’s robust plan for national defense, which |
on the punt and punt return team my first three years."
UM CHATTER
Though nothing is finalized, UM’s talks with Cowboys Stadium have progressed and all parties are working toward having the Hurricanes open the 2018 season against LSU in Arlington, Tx.
The game would be on a Saturday night and televised nationally.
UM has decided to focus on finalizing that game and has decided against playing Alabama in Atlanta to open the 2017 season.
### UM tonight added 6-7 former Niagara power forward Joe Thomas, who averaged 3.4 points and 2.7 rebounds last season. He’s eligible immediately. The Canes were desperate to add another power rotation player.
"Joe joins us at the perfect time," UM coach Jim Larranaga said. "We needed a frontcourt player with experience and a fifth-year senior was exactly what my staff and I hoped for. He provides us with some size and strength and rebounding toughness."
Thomas, who attended Krop High in Miami, has one season of eligibility left.
HEAT CHATTER
Yes, the Heat likes Toronto free agent point guard Kyle Lowry, though Miami likely could afford him only if Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and perhaps LeBron James take pay cuts. But no, they are not on the verge of a sign-and-trade for him.
Bleacher Report’s Ric Bucher posted a story tonight saying the Heat and Raptors would imminently complete a trade that would send Lowry to Miami for Norris Cole and draft picks.
Bucher retracted the story shortly after that.
“My deepest and sincere apologies,” Bucher tweeted earlier this evening. “My report on Lowry and a [sign-and-trade] between the Heat and Raptors is wrong. I should’ve known better. I could not be more embarrassed. I can’t explain why someone would go to the lengths my source did to set me up….”
### Saturday morning update: Haslem has opted out of a contract that would have paid him $4.6 million next season. He is instead expected to get a multiyear deal with a lower year one salary. Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh are expected to opt out before Monday's deadline.
Twitter: @flasportsbuzzA view across the proposed Castle Mountains National Monument | Photo: Chris Clarke
A strong majority of Californians want more lands permanently protected in the California Desert, and that support crosses party lines. That's according to the results of a new survey conducted in early November by the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, which shows widespread public enthusiasm for protecting the proposed Sand to Snow, Mojave Trails, and Castle Mountains National Monuments.
According to the telephone poll, which was commissioned by the Vet Voice Foundation, Californians both statewide and living in the desert areas surrounding three proposed National Monuments strongly support protection of those areas by Presidential Executive Order. That's despite allegations by Congressional Republicans that such a declaration would constitute a federal "land grab." And a majority of Californians across the political spectrum say they want the desert lands at issue protected from mining.
That's bad news for U.S. Representative Paul Cook, whose recently introduced California Desert Minerals, Off-Road Recreation, and Conservation Act would allow mining on 100,000 acres of the proposed Mojave Trails National Monument. Asked their opinion on his proposal, 66 percent of Californians -- and 65 percent of desert residents -- said they opposed it.
A campaign is underway urging President Barack Obama to designate the three National Monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906. That campaign comes after several years of stalemate in Congress that's blocked progress on a series of bills by Senator Dianne Feinstein to protect the lands in question.
Republicans have criticized Presidential designation of National Monuments under the Antiquities Act as "land grabs," but Californians aren't buying that, even if they live in more traditionally conservative desert areas. According to the poll, just 17 percent of Californians agreed with a statement that designation of the three National Monuments would be an unwarranted Federal intrusion into local affairs, with that sentiment only raising to 18 percent among desert residents in Riverside, San Bernardino, and Inyo counties.
Statewide, 75 percent of Californians polled say they support Monument designation, with 45 percent characterizing their support as "strong." Among desert residents those numbers were lower, but only slightly, at 70 percent in support and 43 percent in strong support. Just 16 percent of Californians, and 21 percent of desert residents, sid they opposed designation.
Perhaps most surprisingly given opposition to designations by Republican leaders, 62 percent of Republican voters surveyed supported the designation. Support among Democrats ran at 85 percent.
Nearly three-quarters, or 73 percent, of households that include veterans or active-duty servicepeople supported the monuments, and the same percentage of all respondents said they felt protecting the California desert was crucial to give a place for veterans to heal from their wartime ordeals.
The pollsters quoted one Republican respondent, a Latina woman in Riverside County, as to the reasons for her support of the monuments:
"I used to go hiking in the mountain desert area. Being out in the desert sounds like a desolate place where it's hot and dry, but there are things out there, like they say, an oasis. There are turtles, roadrunners, coyotes, and tarantulas, a lot of things out there; Birds that live in the Yucca Trees. I know a lot of people who hike up these trails and post themselves hiking in the desert every day to me and it's awesome. Yes, I would highly support it for them."
The poll was conducted by phone, with 600 Californians contacted statewide, and 300 within the desert counties. Margin of error for statewide responses is ±4 percent, and ±5.7 among desert residents.
As envisioned in Senator Feinstein's most recent version of her bill, the the California Desert Conservation and Recreation Act, the proposed Sand to Snow National Monument would include about 135,000 acres of land linking the San Gorgonio Wilderness, the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, and Joshua Tree National Park. The Mojave Trails National Monument would cover 965,000 acres between Joshua Tree NP and the Mojave National Preserve along the Route 66 corridor, The Castle Mountains National Monument isn't mentioned by that name in Feinstein's bill, which would have simply added the 12,000 acres to the Mojave National Preserve. The Antiquities Act doesn't enable the President to add land to National Parks or Preserves, so designating a Monument to be administered by the Preserve is a workaround. The land was originally excluded from the preserve in the 1994 California Desert Protection Act due to an active gold mine in the area.
"Veterans want to see these desert lands permanently protected as national monuments," said Steve Dunwoody, of the Vet Voice Foundation. "With this poll, we see that an overwhelming majority of Californians join us in that sentiment. We encourage President Obama to listen to this support and designate the Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow, and Castle Mountains National Monuments."
For the record: This article has been updated to include a statement from the Vet Voice Foundation.About 20 education jobs remain vacant
By DAVID MURPHY
As students start to file back into class, officials at the Qikiqtani School Operations are still hiring teachers to work in Baffin region classrooms this school year.
Trudy Pettigrew, the executive director of Qikiqtani school operations, said 20 jobs, most of them for teachers, still need to be filled before schools start.
However, Pettigrew said many candidates are interested in those jobs, which she expects to fill before the first school bells ring.
“We anticipate that many of them — most of them — [will be] filled when school starts. Some are getting reference checks, others are waiting for the DEA [department education authority] to do interviews,” Pettigrew said.
Currently on the website educationcanada.com, you can see seven job openings — two in Resolute, two in Pangnirtung and one each in Igloolik, Apex and Pond Inlet.
Salaries for these jobs range from $68,608 to $107,575 depending on experience and qualifications, not including northern allowances and other benefits.
The jobs include three elementary school teachers, two Inuktitut language specialists, one high school program consultant and a teacher for physical education and English as a second language.
In total, the QSO hired 84 new employees for the region this year — of these, 63 came from within the Nunavut education system.
That means only 21 new teachers who had not previously taught in Nunavut were hired this year.
Pettigrew said a couple of those new hires came from the Nunavut Teacher Education Program.
“All are not coming from the South. Some of them are Inuktitut-speaking positions, some of which are half-time,” Pettigrew said.
But it’s another year with the same sort of problems, because there still aren’t enough Inuktitut-speaking teachers.
“In my time, the need has always exceeded the supply. It will get worse,” Pettigrew said.
Pettigrew said that’s because of “the requirements to teach higher grades in Inuktitut,” and she thinks the system is “not graduating enough teachers to fill that need.”
“People want graduates to be strong in both languages. It is a challenge,” she said.
Not only is it a challenge to find Inuktitut-speaking teachers, it’s also a challenge to hire southern educators willing to move to Nunavut where the lack of housing for teachers is a deterrent.
“Education hires a lot of employees to the government at the same time. Many teachers have to share [the same house],” Pettigrew said.
“I’d say a higher proportion of teachers have to share than other government employee groups. It’s not an ideal situation.”
Although this year there were many teaching applications received — Pettigrew said 50 to 70 applicants at the beginning of the staffing season — hiring principals is usually a much more difficult task.
This year seven new principals out of the 22 schools in the Qikiqtani region are new.
Six of those principals are in-house hires, meaning they’re already working in Nunavut’s education system, and one is a former Nunavut principal returning to the territory.
Pettigrew hopes 2013 marks a change in the difficulties that the department usually has finding principals.
Adbus Salam, principal of Inuujaq School in Arctic Bay, said this year there hasn’t been much turnover at his school — only three new teachers compared to six or seven last year.
Many students in western Nunavut have already gone back to school.
Schools start in the Baffin region on these dates:
• Apex: Sept. 3
• Arctic Bay: Aug. 13
• Cape Dorset: Aug. 21
• Clyde River: Aug. 15
• Grise Fiord: Aug. 28
• Hall Beach: Aug. 8
• Igloolik: Aug 22
• Iqaluit: Sept. 3 (Aug. 26 for École des Trois-Soleils)
• Kimmirut: Aug. 28
• Pangnirtung: Sept. 5
• Pond Inlet: Aug. 16
• Qikiqtarjuaq: Aug. 23
• Resolute Bay: Aug. 26
• Sanikiluaq: Sept. 5Obama is angry about opposition to his anti-privacy crusade. Last week, he even slammed Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.; shown) by name, calling on the liberty-minded lawmaker to drop his “quirky” opposition to the administration's controversial new “tax treaties” — agreements with foreign governments to further shred the Fourth Amendment-protected privacy rights of the American people. However, Paul hit back hard, telling Obama, publicly, that Americans' unalienable privacy rights are not “quirky.” Privacy proponents celebrated Paul's “courageous” stand.
By insulting and ridiculing Paul, Obama, a former “community organizer,” was relying on tactics popularized by the late community organizing guru Saul Alinsky. In his hugely influential how-to manual Rules for Radicals, which the radical pro-tyranny activist openly dedicated to Lucifer, Alinsky urges his disciples to mock those who stand in their way. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” Alinsky wrote. “There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.”
Obama, who spent years as a “community organizer” agitating for Big Government in Chicago, apparently learned the lessons well. “I’m calling on the Senate, in particular Sen. Rand Paul, who’s been a little quirky on this issue, to stop blocking the implementation of tax treaties that have been pending for years,” Obama was quoted as saying at the White House on May 6. “These treaties actually improve law enforcement's ability to investigate and crack down on offshore tax evasion. And I'm assuming that's not something that he's in favor of.”
So, in short, in Obama's view, because Senator Paul takes seriously his oath to protect the U.S. Constitution, he is “quirky” and might even be in favor of offshore tax evasion if he does not surrender, quickly. At least that is what Obama wanted people to think. But while the establishment media — particularly the Associated Press — did help telegraph Obama's bizarre insults and ridicule nationwide, it also allowed Paul a chance to explain to Americans why he has been working hard to protect the rights of all Americans.
On Twitter, Senator Paul responded to a message quoting Obama, sent out by Tal Kopan, a Digital CNN Politics Reporter, with his own zinger. “Privacy and 4th Amendment rights are not 'quirky,'” he told Obama in a response to the CNN reporter's tweet. The response among Twitter users was overwhelming: Rand Paul is right to protect the privacy rights of Americans, and the Obama administration and its apparatchiks in the establishment media are wrong to demonize Paul and his defense of the Constitution.
But beyond sound bites and PR victories against Obama's Alinsky tactics, Senator Paul has been almost single-handedly protecting what remains of Americans' financial privacy from a rogue administration that appears bound and determined to put the final nails into the coffin of financial privacy — all while helping build a global tax regime with dangerous implications. From suing the IRS and the Treasury to putting a hold on new privacy-shredding “tax treaties” that trample the Fourth Amendment's protections, Paul has been largely forced to go it alone. But his efforts are worthwhile, and have been fruitful, as evidenced by Obama's quirky insults.
Late last year, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved what is known as the “Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance.” The radical measure would purport to mandate that the U.S. government collect and share with foreign governments and regimes — including brutal communist and Islamist dictatorships — a broad array of private financial information on accounts in the United States. It would also mandate that foreign governments and regimes collect information on Americans to share with Uncle Sam. All of it would be done without a warrant or any semblance of adherence to constitutional privacy guarantees. Also approved by the Senate Committee were privacy-crushing “tax treaties” with more than half a dozen foreign governments.
In recent years, with no constitutional or even statutory authority to do so, the Obama administration has been signing pseudo-treaties with foreign governments, pretending like it has the authority to do whatever it wants. It does not, of course. For the privacy-shredding schemes in question to come into effect legally, they have to be approved by the Senate. And thanks to Senator Paul, who placed a hold on the schemes despite the shrieking of Big Government mongers and the insults tossed out by Obama, the Senate has so far been unable to sneak the assault on the Fourth Amendment through the chamber.
Paul explained exactly why he is opposed to the unconstitutional agenda. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sent in November, Paul, citing government snooping on e-mail and phone calls, noted that the federal assaults on the right to privacy were steadily growing. He explained that he does not support tax evasion. However, he also made clear that he cannot and will not support government schemes that threaten foreign investment in the United States, or the unalienable right to privacy. The measure pushed by Obama “punishes every American in pursuit of a few tax cheats,” Paul also warned, saying he would object to any request to pass the Obama-backed schemes through the Senate by “unanimous consent.”
The information being sought by Obama and foreign governments would reveal American's most intimate personal data on their lives. “An individual's bank account is the epitome of who they are as a private citizen,” Senator Paul told McConnell in the letter, noting that such information reveals everything from where people eat, shop, and travel to who their doctors are and what medicines they take. “At the very least, every American — whether at home or abroad — deserves to have their Fourth Amendment rights protected.” Apparently Obama thinks those rights and constitutional amendments are “quirky.”
In his scathing letter, though, Paul explained exactly what was wrong with the tax treaties being pushed by the Obama administration. Previous tax treaties, he said, focused on information related to specific suspicions of tax fraud, based on allegations supported by actual evidence. The new schemes take a much different approach, allowing governments to access people's most private data “for hardly any reason at all.” That cannot be allowed to stand.
It also appears that the treaties could be a tool for Obama to implement the radical and totally unconstitutional Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which treats all Americans with accounts overseas as criminals until proven innocent, even while turning every financial institution into an unpaid agent of Uncle Sam in the shredding of privacy rights. This magazine and other sources have been exposing FATCA for years, along with the threat it represents to liberty, the devastating havoc it has unleashed on poor and middle-class Americans overseas, and how it is being used by globalists to impose a global tax regime on humanity.
As The New American reported last summer, the liberty-minded Kentucky senator, among the strongest advocates of constitutional protections in Washington, has also filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on FATCA. In particular, Paul and others took aim at Obama's privacy-killing pseudo-treaties with foreign governments and dictators signed in a bid to implement FATCA. Joining forces with the group Republicans Overseas Action, Paul is suing the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service in hopes of stopping the deeply controversial scheme.
In his letter last year to McConnell, Paul attacked the whole idea of collecting all private information and essentially abolishing privacy rights without warrants or anything else. “Bulk collection tax treaties are not a policy prescription to U.S. citizens conducting illicit financial transactions in a foreign country,” he said. “Most importantly, I cannot support a bulk collection tax treaty that has complete disregard for the important protections provided to every American by the Fourth Amendment.”
Indeed, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which Obama and everyone in Congress swore to uphold, clearly prohibits precisely the sort of mass data collection and sharing envisioned under the measures in question. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,” the amendment explains.
Paul is also getting outside support for his efforts among grassroots groups. “If the convention is approved, repressive states like Russia and China could use it to get information about political opponents who have investments or accounts in the United States and use this information to cause them or their families financial harm,” explained Neil Siefring, director of strategic initiatives for FreedomWorks. “In the process, information about American banking, businesses, and investors could be divulged, resulting in possible violations of the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans.... It will have been the United States government, which is charged with safeguarding Fourth Amendment rights, facilitating its degradation.” He called for the Senate to remove the treaties from consideration.
Far from being “quirky,” the Fourth Amendment, like other amendments in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, is an essential protection to the God-given liberties of free Americans. In fact, protecting those liberties is why governments are instituted to begin with, according to Declaration of Independence. The people of the United States and their elected representatives should be outraged that a man who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, with his hand on the Bible, calls parts of that Constitution “quirky” in his efforts to ridicule and demonize those who do take their oath seriously. And Senator Paul should be congratulated for standing firm in defense of his oath, the Constitution, and the liberties of all Americans.
Photo of Sen. Rand Paul: AP Images
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
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Globalists Exploit “Panama Papers” in Jihad on PrivacyHere is a translation of the homily Benedict XVI gave at this evening’s Ash Wednesday Mass, held in St. Peter’s Basilica. Because this was the last public liturgy to be celebrated by Benedict XVI, the Mass was moved from the traditional location of Santa Sabina to St. Peter’s.
* * *
Venerable Brothers,
Dear Brothers and Sisters!
Today, Ash Wednesday, we begin a new Lenten journey, a journey that extends for forty days and leads us to the joy of Easter, the victory of Life over death. Following the ancient Roman tradition of Lenten stationes, we have gathered for the celebration of the Eucharist. The tradition says that the first statio should take place in the Basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill. The circumstances have suggested that we gather in St. Peter’s Basilica. Tonight we are great in number around the tomb of the Apostle Peter, also to request his intercession for the Church’s journey at this particular time, renewing our faith in the Supreme Pastor, Christ the Lord. For me it is a good opportunity to thank everyone, especially the faithful of the Diocese of Rome, as I prepare to conclude my Petrine ministry, and ask for a special remembrance in prayer.
The readings that have been proclaimed provide us with ideas that, with the grace of God, we are called to make concrete attitudes and behaviors during this Lent. The Church proposes to us, first, the strong appeal that the prophet Joel addressed to the people of Israel, “Thus says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning” (2:12). Please note the phrase “with all my heart,” which means from the center of our thoughts and feelings, from the roots of our decisions, choices and actions, with a gesture of total and radical freedom. But is this return to God possible? Yes, because there is a force that does not reside in our hearts, but that emanates from the heart of God. It is the power of his mercy. The prophet says, further: “Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, rich in faithful love, ready to repent of evil” (v. 13). The return to the Lord is possible as a ‘grace’, because it is the work of God and the fruit of that faith that we place in His mercy. But this return to God becomes a reality in our lives only when the grace of God penetrates to our inmost being and shakes it, giving us the power to “rend our hearts.” The same prophet causes these words from God to resonate: “Rend your hearts and not your garments” (v. 13). In fact, even today, many are ready to “rend their garments” before scandals and injustices – of course, made by others – but few seem willing to act on their own “heart”, on their own conscience and their own intentions, letting the Lord transform, renew and convert.
That “return to me with all your heart,” then, is a reminder that involves not only the individual, but the community. We have heard, also in the first reading: “Play the horn in Zion, proclaim a solemn fast, call a sacred assembly. Gather the people, convoke a solemn assembly, call the old, gather the children and the infants at the breast; let the bridegroom leave his room and the bride her bridal chamber”(vv.15-16). The community dimension is an essential element in faith and Christian life. Christ came “to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (cfr. Jn 11:52). The “we” of the Church is the community in which Jesus brings us together (cf. Jn 12:32): faith is necessarily ecclesial. And this is important to remember and to live in this time of Lent: each person is aware that he or she does not face the penitential journey alone, but together with many brothers and sisters in the Church.
Finally, the prophet focuses on the prayers of the priests, who, with tears in their eyes, turn to God, saying: “Do not expose your heritage to the reproach and derision of the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’ “(v.17). This prayer makes us reflect on the importance of the testimony of faith and Christian life of each of us and our community to show the face of the Church and how that face is sometimes disfigured. I am thinking in particular about sins against the unity of the Church, the divisions in the ecclesial body. Living Lent in a more intense and evident ecclesial communion, overcoming individualism and rivalry, is a humble and precious sign for those who are far from the faith or indifferent.
“Behold, now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2). The words of the Apostle Paul to the Christians of Corinth resonate for us, too, with an urgency that does not allow omission or inaction. The word “now” repeated several times says that we cannot let this time pass us by, it is offered to us as a unique opportunity. And the Apostle’s gaze focuses on the sharing that Christ chose to characterize his life, taking on everything human to the point of bearing the very burden of men’s sins. The phrase St. Paul uses is very strong: “God made him sin for our sake.” Jesus, the innocent one, the Holy One, “He who knew no sin” (2 Cor 5:21), bears the burden of sin, sharing with humanity its outcome of death, and death on the cross. The reconciliation offered to us has cost a high price, that of the cross raised on Golgotha, on which was hung the Son of God made man. In this immersion of God in human suffering and in the abyss of evil lies the root of our justification. The “return to God with all your heart” in our Lenten journey passes through the cross, following Christ on the road to Calvary, the total gift of self. It is a way on which to learn every day to come out more and more from our selfishness and our closures, to make room for God who opens and transforms the heart. And St. Paul recalls how the announcement of the Cross resounds to us through the preaching of the Word, of which the Apostle himself is an ambassador; it is a call for us to make this Lenten journey characterized by a more careful and assiduous listening to the Word of God, the light that illuminates our steps.
In the Gospel of Matthew, to which belongs the so-called Sermon on the Mount, Jesus refers to three fundamental practices required by Mosaic Law: almsgiving, prayer and fasting; they are also traditional indications in the Lenten journey to respond to the invitation to “return to God with all your heart.” But Jesus emphasizes that it is both the quality and the truth of the relationship with God that determines the authenticity of each religious gesture. For this reason He denounces religious hypocrisy, the behavior that wants to be seen, attitudes seeking applause and approval. The true disciple does not serve himself or the “public”, but his Lord, in simplicity and generosity: “And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you” (Mt 6:4.6.18). Our witness, then, will always be more effective the less we seek our own glory, and we will know that the reward of the righteous is God himself, being united to Him, here below, on the journey of faith, and, at the end of life, in the peace and light of coming face to face with Him forever (cf. 1 Cor 13:12).
Dear brothers and sisters, we begin our Lenten journey, trusting and joyful. May the invitation to conversion resonate strongly in us, to “return to God with all your heart”, accepting His grace that makes us new men, with the surprising novelty that is sharing in the very life of Jesus. Let none of us, therefore, be deaf to this appeal, that is addressed to us also in the austere rite, so simple and yet so beautiful, of the imposition of ashes, which we will perform shortly. May the Virgin Mary accompany us in this time, the Mother of the Church and model of every true disciple of the Lord. Amen!
[Original text: Italian] [Translation by Peter Waymel]The wheelbarrow-bike that could be the solution to school-run traffic jams
It looks like a wheelbarrow attached to a bike - but transport experts believe it could be the solution to school-run traffic.
Families in Richmond are being asked to swap their 4x4s for a more environmentally friendly mode of transport: Dutch cargo bikes.
Each costs from £1,150 and can carry a rider and up to three young children, or the weekly family shop. The "wheelbarrow" section is fitted with seatbelts for children.
Jessica Anderson and Amy Robert-Nicoud pedal their Dutch cargo bikes
The Richmond project has been given £5,000 funding by Transport for London. The fleet of four are kept at Stepping Stones nursery and are borrowed by parents for short trips.
Since May 2007, when the project was launched, the bikes have been in non-stop use, organisers say.
Jessica Anderson, a founder of the Parents for Pedal Power Project, uses one to carry her children Jemima four, and Hugo, three.
Families are being asked to swap their 4x4s for cargo bikes when they take the children to school
Ms Anderson, who is seven months pregnant, said: 'The bikes have changed our lives and the children love it. We have a cover for when it rains, and while I might get wet, the children are cosy.
Each cargo bike costs from £1,150
I've used it for grocery shopping, getting to after-school activities, trips to the park and even to the recycling bank with a load of cardboard and bottles. It can be quite tough but you do save on gym membership.
'It's the ultimate eco-friendly people carrier.'
The popularity of the machines is likely to have been boosted by Richmond raising the cost of a parking permit for a large-engined "gas guzzler" to £150. It is also considering charging £75 for an annual permit to drop children off at school by car.
Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said he had bought his wife a cargo bike for Christmas: 'We've been trying to cut down on car use and this is perfect for shopping and carrying heavier goods. We even take our youngest to chess matches.'
A spokesman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said cargo bikes looked no more dangerous than other bicycles, but added: 'It will handle differently from a normal one so people should get training or practice first in a safe environment.'PASADENA >> Police suspect someone hacked into a John Muir High School teacher’s email account last week and sent naked pictures of the teacher to more than 200 students, staff and community members.
The July 10 email was sent from science teacher Richard Rosa’s Pasadena Unified School District account and reportedly contained four naked photos of the teacher.
Pasadena Police Commander John Perez said several people who received the email called the Police Department that day, which prompted an investigation.
“We don’t have anybody in custody. We do have leads,” Perez said. He didn’t say who they suspect as the culprit.
Perez said Rosa is not a suspect.
“We did talk to him, and we determined he was likely not the sender,” Perez said.
Police don’t know the motive and haven’t narrowed down from where the email was sent.
PUSD spokesman Adam Wolfson said district officials notified police when they learned about the message.
“We let Pasadena PD know because of the content of the email and because minors were on the distribution list,” Wolfson said.
Perez said he knows the sheriff’s Altadena station also got calls from email recipients.
Wolfson said Rosa’s status as a teacher has not changed since the incident and is expected to return to the classroom when school resumes in August. Rosa has taught at Muir High School for six years. He teaches AP biology, chemistry and biotechnology. He is the science department chair and lead teacher of the Business Academy.
Superintendent Jon R. Gundry sent an email to parents and staff informing them an “inappropriate email message” was sent from a PUSD email account.
“If you received this email, I would like to apologize for any harm this email might have caused and want to assure you that we are working with the relevant authorities to investigate the matter,” Gundry wrote.
Gundry directed people to call the district’s Human Resources Department with any questions or concerns.
Muir students are rallying behind their teacher.
Student Devin Perry created a “Save Mr. Rosa” petition on MoveOn.org, which had about 325 signatures Thursday afternoon.
“Mr. Rosa is one of the most professional teachers I know and I would hate for a great teacher to lose a job based on a mistake that may have been an accident,” the petitioner wrote. “Considering John Muir High School has a bad reputation, he’s one of the best teachers who cares about the students and actually shows that he wants to be there.”
Wolfson said the district is evaluating its online security system. The district uses a Google email system specifically for education.I coauthored this post with my friend and colleague, Michael Koplow. He is the author of the blog: Ottomans & Zionists.
When Turks go to the polls on August 10 to directly elect their president for the first time in the Turkish Republic’s history, the potential leading vote getter will be a man of impeccable religious credentials. This candidate has a graduate degree from al-Azhar University and previously served as the secretary-general of the Jeddah-based Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Before being appointed to this position that he held for eight years, he was the founding director-general of the OIC-affiliated Research Center for Islamic History, Art, and Culture. While in Saudi Arabia, he proved himself both an adept and savvy leader of the multinational organization in his charge as well as a faithful servant of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its worldview. He has decried the loss of spirituality in Islam and is himself the son of a well-known Islamic scholar. Yet this candidate is not Recep Tayyip Erdogan; it is Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, who is carrying the banner as the joint candidate of the secular Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the rightwing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).
For all of its militant secularism and decades of dominating Turkish politics, the secular old guard has lost the battle with the political forces that represent piety and religious conservatism, a fact that they implicitly acknowledge with Ihsanoglu—their white flag of surrender. Despite his formal training as a chemist, Ihsanoglu has devoted a considerable portion of his career to religious study and outreach. Of Ihsanoglu’s 25 books, nine are devoted to Islamic thought and culture. That Turks are being offered a choice between two religious candidates should be the final death knell for the meme that Turkey is a state being pulled apart by a battle between Islam and secularism. The truth is that religion won out a long time ago, and the fundamental divides in Turkish politics and society are organized around different fault lines.
Today in Turkey there is an unmistakable sense of “Muslim-ness.” Conventional accounts of Turkish politics since the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) rise to power often use “Islamist” and “Islamism” to describe the party, but these terms have become one-dimensional and suggest parallels to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood without capturing the true nature of Turkey’s ruling party. The Justice and Development Party’s Muslim-ness is less targeted and more diffuse than Islamism, and while it certainly belongs within a broad classification of Islamist groups in the Muslim world, its underlying philosophical concerns and agenda are quite different from those organizations. This is a function of the Turkish experience, in which Muslim-ness involves a style of politics and a social setting in which piety flows through society. Limits on alcohol consumption or women donning the hicab reflect this religious sensibility, but Muslim-ness is broader. Toward this end, Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party have made exploration and expression of one’s Muslim identity not only safe and acceptable, but indeed valorized. Erdogan himself personifies the new Turkish man whose singular quality is being both proudly pious and Turkish. And the new Turkish woman, best represented by the wares of upscale fashion houses like Zühre or its down-market cousin, Armine, is quiet, confident, gorgeous, and covered. What is striking about these developments is how unremarkable they are in a political setting where not long ago, the hicab and public expressions of religiosity were indicators of reactionary backwardness.
Of course, drawing conclusions about the direction of society on the extent to which Turkish women are |
be a custom distro in its own right, and the lightweight footprint of a diskless terminal was a perfect fit for Gentoo.
In fact, around the same time I fit Gentoo onto a 1.8MB floppy-disk image, including either the dropbear SSH client or the kdrive X server for a graphical environment. This was only possible through the magic of the ROOT and PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT variables, which you couldn’t find in any other distro.
Other distros such as ChromeOS and CoreOS have taken similar advantage of Gentoo’s metadistribution nature to build heavily customized Linux distros.
People who want to learn how Linux works
Finally, another key use case for Gentoo is for people who really want to understand how Linux works. Because the installation handbook actually works you through the entire process of installing a Linux distro by hand, you acquire a unique viewpoint and skillset regarding what it takes to run Linux, well beyond what other distros require. In fact I’d argue that it’s a uniquely portable and low-level skillset that you can apply much more broadly than those you could acquire elsewhere.
In conclusion
I’ve suggested three core use cases that I think Gentoo should focus on. If it doesn’t fit those use cases, I would suggest that we allow but not specifically dedicate effort to enabling those particulars.
We’ve gotten overly deadened to how people want to use Linux, and this is my proposal as to how we could regain it.THE Scottish Greens will pledge to make a future SNP government "bolder and greener" in a copycat campaign that could deny Nicola Sturgeon a Holyrood majority but also decimate Labour.
Patrick Harvie's party believes it can return a dozen MSPs at the Holyrood election now less than a year away.
Party insiders say they will model their strategy on the SNP's successful UK election campaign, when Ms Sturgeon talked up the prospect of a minority Labour government made "bolder and better" by an alliance with the Nationalists.
They believe the message will appeal to disillusioned former Labour supporters, who might still be wary of the SNP gaining a second successive majority.
But they also believe diehard SNP supporters will be willing to lend their regional vote to another pro-independence party if it reduces Labour's chances of winning regional seats.
A senior source said: "If you are an SNP voter in your constituency, what do you do with your list vote?
"If you give it to the Greens, our numbers go through the roof and Labour's go through the floor."
The source added: "We are almost in a siutuation where SNP voters, with two votes next year, could choose the party of government and the main party of opposition."
As in previous elections, the Greens will focus their effort on trying to win regional seats, which are elected by a proportional voting system and account for 56 of the 129 Holyrood total.
Current MSPs Patrick Harvie and Alison Johnstone top the party's Glasgow and Lothian lists respectively.
Two other well-known names, Maggie Chapman, the party's co-convener, and John Finnie, who defected from the SNP, are in prime spots in the North East region and Highlands and Islands.
The party also is hopeful Andy Wightman, the land reform campaigner, will become an MSP from his position in second place on its Lothians slate.
In the Edinburgh area, the Greens believe they can pick up a substantial slice of the votes that went to the late Margo MacDonald, the Independent MSP, in previous elections.
The source said: "Here is a chance for people have someone to the left of the SNP.
"People wanted lots of Nats to make the Labour Party better. That's where we are with the SNP.
"We'll send a message to everyone on the left: we are the party to keep the SNP progressive.
"People are losing faith with Labour by the day.
"We need someone to hold the SNP to account and push them in the right direction."
During the General Election Ms Sturgeon suggested voters in England should vote Green.
She saw the party as part of a potential "progressive alliance" at Westminster before the Conservatives emerged with a small overall majority.
The SNP leader appeared to forge a good relationship with Greens leader Natalie Bennett, sealed in a famous "group hug" together with Plaid's Leanne Wood at the end of a televised debate.
Polls suggest support for the party is running at between 8 per cent and 10 per cent, with one recent survey giving them a 13 per cent share.
Membership has soared from 1700 to 9000 since the referendum, when the Greens were part of the official Yes Scotland campaign, giving the party a much stronger activist base going into next May's poll.
One in 10 of the new members is ex-Labour, the party says.
Party insiders say the have learned from campaigning on a bigger scale for the first time during the General Election.
"We are gearing up, our candidates are ready and our party branches have cut their teeth in the election just gone.
"Our polling is good, it is there for us to do."
The Scottish Greens claimed a 1.3 per cent share of the vote on May, up 0.7 per cent on the 2010 election.
Across the country 39,205 people backed Mr Harvie's party.
At the last Holyrood election in 2011, the party achieved a 4.4 per cent share of the regional vote, a slight improvement on 2007, and enough to preserve its tally of two MSPs.
Just over 87,000 voters backed the Greens, who campaigned for a huge extra investment in energy efficiency measures, to scrap the new Forth crossing and to replace council tax with a land tax.
In the same election, the Scottish Conservatives picked up a dozen regional seats with a 12.4 per cent share of the list vote.
The Greens' best showing was in the 'rainbow parliament' of 2003 to 2007, when they returned seven MSPs after capturing 7 per cent of the list vote.
More than 132,000 Scots gave the party their second vote in the 2003 election.Like most countries around the world, Japan has quite a few delicious foods, like sushi, tempura and sukiyaki, that really stand out. But as delicious as they are, these wonderful dishes are usually only enjoyed every once in a while and are by no means what a regular Japanese person enjoys for their meals on a daily basis.
Of all the meals, a typical Japanese breakfast is perhaps what people are most curious about since it’s the least talked about (it’s not like breakfast is usually served at your local Japanese restaurant, after all!). Are Japanese people still scarfing down traditional Japanese foods each morning, or have they switched to a simpler, more Western style of breakfast? Let’s find out!
We asked a group of Japanese men and women from all over the country to share a photo of their breakfast on one particular day and list its ingredients. Although two told us that this was impossible since they didn’t bother with a morning meal, 20 were more than happy to oblige. Here are their responses. Warning: these pictures may make you seriously hungry.
1. Man in his 20s, Tokyo
– Japanese tea
– banana
– natto (fermented soybeans)
– white rice
– raw eggs
▼He says, “I really love natto, so I often eat it together with raw eggs and rice!”
▼”First I mix the eggs with the rice.”
▼”Then I add the natto and mix that.”
▼”It’s highly nutritious and really delicious!”
Wow. So far, so Japanese! We doubt natto would be at the top of the list for everyone, though. What else is on the menu?
2. Man in his 20s,Tokyo
– fried pork with ginger
– miso soup
– white rice
Fried pork for breakfast! Very nice.
3. Man in his 30s, Fukuoka
– white rice
– natto
– vegetable soup
4. Man in his 30s, Tokyo
Apparently, our fourth respondent has three different breakfasts that he often eats:
1) Natto and a fried egg on rice with miso soup.
2) Oyakodon (literally meaning “parent child bowl”, this is chicken and eggs on rice) with miso soup
3) Healthy Japanese-style full course breakfast (white rice, natto, fried egg, cold tofu and miso soup)
These guys don’t do things by halves, do they? Certainly beats our wedge of toast and a spoonful of peanut butter while trying to find a matching pair of socks…
5. Man in his 30s, Tokyo
– white rice
– miso soup (with burdock root, carrots, and other leftover vegetables)
– sardines
– rolled scramble egg
– bacon
– sausage
OK, now we’re really hungry!
6. Man in his 30s, Tokyo
– rice with salted wakame (a type of seaweed)
– miso soup (sardine broth with Japanese yams, carrots, and cabbage)
– boiled fish (usually a threadsail filefish) with soy sauce
7. Man in his 40s, Tokyo
– convenience store bread
– convenience store coffee
▼”I usually have bread and coffee from the convenience store.”
OK. now we’re on familiar ground. It does look awfully lonely, though…
8. Woman in her 20s, Tokyo
– toast (homemade bread)
– marmalade (homemade)
– mandarin orange
– yogurt (Activia)
– coffee
Extra points for the homemade bread!
9. Woman in her 30s, Osaka
– coffee with lots of sugar and milk
– yogurt with a banana in it
– mandarin orange
▼“I can’t start my mornings without coffee. And I usually have yogurt and a banana but if there are other cheap fruits at the store, like apples or persimmons, I will sometimes have those. My breakfast is really simple.”
10. Woman in her 30s, Kanagawa
– buttered toast
– tuna salad
– yogurt (with blueberry jam)
– corn soup
11. Woman in her 30s, Tokyo
– vegetable juice (Japanese mustard spinach, celery, carrot, banana, pineapple, ginger)
▼“Every morning, I only drink vegetable juice. This morning I made it with the fruits and vegetables mentioned above, but I make it with whatever I have in the fridge.”
OK, now we feel unhealthy.
12. Woman in her 30s, Tokyo
– white rice
– tofu, fried tofu and wakame miso soup
– chicken fried with curry spices
– Japanese mustard spinach, egg and daikon with soy and vinegar
Yup, that’d get us out of bed too.
13. Woman in her 30s, Kanagawa
– ozoni (soup with mochi)
– iyokan (type of Japanese citrus fruit)
– green tea
14. Woman in her 30s, Tokyo
– soy milk
▼“Among Japanese woman, there is a popular diet where you drink soy milk in the morning or evening for 1-2 weeks before your cycle starts, and you will lose weight after it finishes.”
15. Woman in her 30s, Hiroshima
– fried fish
– avocado and natto
– double daikon miso soup (daikon, thinly sliced and dried daikon, fried tofu)
– white rice
Simple and classic, but with an unusual twist on the natto.
16. Woman in her 30s, Tokyo
– hydrogen water and enzymes (the pink bottle is the enzymes)
Hopefully she’s having a big lunch…
17. Woman in her 30s, Tokyo
– English muffin with butter
– strawberry yogurt
– coffee
– arugula
– pickled peppers
– scrambled eggs
18. Woman in her 40s, Tokyo
– toast
– cabbage cooked in butter
– sausage
– fried egg
– yogurt
– coffee
19. Woman in her 40s, Tokyo
– tanuki udon (udon with flakes of deep-fried tempura batter)
Yup, noodles for breakfast!
20. Woman in her 40s, Ishikawa
– bread with cream cheese
– omelet with spinach
– mandarin orange
– black tea
After looking at so many delicious breakfasts, there are a couple of things that become clear: miso soup and natto are still very popular in the morning in Japan, and the Japanese have done a seriously impressive job of incorporating other cultures’ foods into their regular Japanese-style diet. Some of these breakfasts look seriously tasty.
If you had to choose one of the above breakfasts to eat, which would it be? Are there any foods here you have tried, or want to try? Could you face natto first thing in the morning? Let us know in the comments section!
Photos © RocketNews24Cleveland is demanding our attention. From the Republican National Convention to the Cavaliers’ NBA championship, the Indians’ recent dominance to a surprising tech scene, we’re thinking about the city more than ever. This week, The Ringer is exploring why Cleveland matters.
“I’m not even supposed to be here.”
A life can’t be explained by a moment, but it can be defined by one. That’s never stopped us from sifting through history and biographies for the fateful choices and actions that seemingly capture a person’s character like a scene in a snow globe.
I’ve been thinking about LeBron James’s block in the context of everything that happened before he arrived at that moment — 1:51 left in the fourth quarter, Game 7, NBA Finals, tied at 89 with the Warriors: Growing up without his father around. Having to live with his youth league coach for a time. Then, managing to escape the world of amateur sports — a labyrinth littered with the dusty skeletons of previously anointed Next Ones — to navigate past the minotaurs of AAU moneymen, grasping sports agents, and sneaker pimps, and to land on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and to do it all by age 17, one year older than Gloria James was when she brought him into the world.
I think about the irony of Klay Thompson’s dad, Mychal, a former NBA player, calling LeBron — who, as a child, watched his house get torn down by the city of Akron — “entitled” after Game 4 of the Finals.
I think about how, when LeBron reached the NBA, every season creaked under the expectations — seemingly impossible to live up to — that he would one day lead Cleveland sports out of the wilderness. How LeBron had to deal with teammates like Ricky Davis, the ignoble and inveterate gunner who once said — and perhaps here’s a single sentence that does sum up a career — “I thought LeBron James was just going to be another addition to help me score.”
There were the shots he passed up and there was Game 6 against the Celtics in 2010, when he disappeared before everyone’s eyes — a 6-foot-8 ghost, melting into the shadow of his impending free agency. Those four quarters were so desultory it seemed possible they could scar his career forever. Now, they’re just a footnote.
Then, of course, there was The Decision (remember how the enormity of it seemed to gradually etch itself into LeBron’s face); Dan Gilbert’s infamous response (427 words of bile set in a font better suited for a child’s birthday party flier); James’s gasoline-soaked no. 23 going up in a sputtering gout of flame along with his Q Score; the entire universe, minus South Florida, luxuriating in the sweet schadenfreude when James’s Heat lost to the Mavericks in 2011; and Pat Riley, the mafia don mastermind behind James’s two titles in Miami, (allegedly) telling LeBron that going back to Ohio — going home — would be the biggest mistake of his career.
Any one of those moments could have been the one to define James’s career. Many of them, for a time, did. Until the Block.
In retrospect, it’s strange that a player as great as LeBron James didn’t have a signature playoff moment until his 13th season. With radar vision, the skills and unselfishness of a guard, and the physical presence of a bionic power forward, LeBron’s game has always defied easy categorization. He’s hyperbole in human form. As The Ringer’s Danny Chau wrote, LeBron’s greatest rival has always been the idea of LeBron James. Compared with our mental image of the player, a generic LeBron night — 28 points, eight rebounds, eight assists, do-everything-but-fly-the-team-plane — feels like just another day at the office. Maybe it was James’s remarkable performance against the Pistons in Game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference finals — when he scored 48 points at the Palace, including the Cavaliers’ final 25 points — that prompted the question, which has haunted the perception of LeBron, to form in the back of everyone’s mind: “Why doesn’t he do that all the time?”
Why doesn’t he scream through opponents like a sonic boom all the time? Why doesn’t he leave the best defenders in the world utterly shaken all the time? Why hasn’t he averaged a triple-double? Why doesn’t he dunk on every possession? Why doesn’t he take over every game like the resurrected folk memory of Michael Jordan? Why doesn’t he average 40? Why does he get tired? Why won’t he play point guard? Why won’t he play shooting guard? Why won’t he play center? Besides physics, why won’t he play every position at once?
The Block changed the LeBron narrative. It was the moment when the idea of LeBron James, founded on decades of hype, merged with the reality of the man. The score was tied at 89 for what felt like forever, but was actually only about three minutes. The cumulative score of the nearly seven full Finals games to that point was 699–699. Not much was on the line, just whether the Warriors would become the greatest team of all time or whether LeBron James would fulfill the destiny foisted onto him by the state of Ohio and the rest of world since he was a teenager: to deliver Cleveland from more than 50 years of fruitless postseasons.
In the alternate universe where Andre Iguodala’s layup goes down, the question would’ve been something like, “Why doesn’t LeBron, after 40-plus minutes on the court, take off at a dead sprint from the half-court line, leap from a step outside the restricted area, and, fingertips above the square, block last year’s Finals MVP’s shot?”
LeBron wasn’t supposed to be there. Only he was.We know the world is warming, and we know humans are the main reason. But so what? The thing we’d really like to know is, what will the impacts be on our planet, its biodiversity, our society, our economies? It is only through understanding the impacts of climate change that action for reducing greenhouse gases can be motivated.
This is one of the reasons I was so interested in a very recent study from the University of Delaware, which addressed how penguins will fare in a warming world. The article was published in Scientific Reports and is available open access so anyone with an internet connection can read it here.
Lead author Megan Cimino and her colleagues looked at Adelie penguin populations and asked whether their years of increasing or decreasing population corresponded to warm, cold, or normal temperatures. In the Antarctic, which is where these penguins live, the situation is a bit complex because the land area is large and weather/climate changes are not consistent across the region.
For instance, large parts of the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) are warming quite rapidly, amongst the most rapid in the world. On the other hand, in the East, some areas are warming just a little while others are cooling slightly. Since Adelie penguins live on the periphery of the ice sheet, they are exposed to a wide range of Antarctic climate regions.
The authors found that penguin colony declines occur preferentially in years where the sea waters are warmer than average. This is in contrast to colonies whose populations are stable or increasing – those occur in normal or cooler waters. This finding was particularly striking when Adelie penguin populations in the WAP (which is warming) were compared with populations elsewhere in the continent.
This knowledge of past penguin colony health was obtained by actual measurements, primarily satellite data which provided sea surface temperatures and ice extent. But the important extension of this work is into the future. The scientists took their current knowledge of penguin health and climate and asked what will happen to these penguins in the future.
Megan Cimino and Matthew Oliver. Photograph: University of Delaware/Megan Cimino
Since we do not have measurements in the future, the scientists used climate models. These models are computer calculations of the actual climate that will exist in the future, and the calculations are based on our best understanding of how the climate system works. Fortunately, climate models have an excellent history in predicting how the future will evolve. While climate models are never perfectly accurate, they give enough information so that researchers like Megan and Matthew can make educated predictions.
The predictions that emerged from the study are that approximately 20% of the penguin populations may be in decline by 2060. As the planet and oceans continue to warm, the pressure on penguins will increase. However, the researchers also report that the penguins will not completely die out. There will remain refugee communities of penguins that exist beyond 2100. We can be grateful for this silver lining.
I expect that now with the science of climate change settled (in the sense we know the climate is changing and we know humans are the main cause), scientists will turn their attention to impacts research. Some of this research will involve physical sciences, and I’ve been fortunate to have contributed a bit to this area. Studies covering increases in drought, floods, sea level rise, for example fall into this category.
There are also economic impacts and we already are seeing credible studies quantify the negative impacts of climate change on the world’s economies. Finally, there are biological studies such as that of Megan Cimino. This body of literature will inform us about what treasures of the natural world we have put at risk through our continued and unabated release of heat-trapping gases. Fortunately, there is still time to take meaningful actions to reduce the impact of carbon pollution on our world’s natural health.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption School volunteers would have the same powers to issue parking tickets as full-time traffic wardens employed by the council
Teachers and parents are being asked to act as traffic wardens with powers to issue parking tickets outside Essex schools.
A Thurrock Council pilot scheme, first reported by Your Thurrock, will begin on Monday at a Tilbury primary school.
The council said it does not have enough traffic wardens to police illegal parking outside schools.
A teaching union spokesman feared it could create conflict between staff and some parents.
The pilot scheme will take place at Tilbury Pioneer Academy following a week of training for a parent volunteer.
'Frighteningly dangerous'
Jerry Glazier, national executive member of the National Union of Teachers in Essex, said: "It's unusual and innovative as parking is a perennial problem which needs tackling, but educating parents would be the best way forward.
"Teachers are there to teach and maintain positive relations with parents and I'm pretty certain most teachers would not want to put themselves into situations of potential conflict.
"Maybe some parents would volunteer, but it's masking the bigger problem of cuts to local authorities."
Thurrock said it had 50 schools, but only six full-time traffic wardens.
John Kent, Labour leader of the council, said: "We have teachers, parents and residents telling us time and again about frighteningly dangerous parking outside schools, but we don't have the money to have an army of traffic wardens.
"There are teachers and head teachers who try to marshal the traffic already and what they've said to us is that if they have the authority to issue a ticket, it's another weapon in their armoury.
"I think we will get volunteers because issuing a ticket will be the last resort - it's about talking and cajoling people to change their behaviour and I would be delighted if we never issue a single ticket."MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - As many as 12 bodies have been uncovered in hidden graves in Mexico’s violent state of Guerrero, the state government has said, and authorities will continue to investigate on Thursday.
Cartels are battling over drug trafficking routes in the southwestern state, home to the beach resort of Acapulco.
Five bodies were found on Wednesday and seven on Tuesday, the state government said on its website, all located in hidden graves in the municipality of Zitlala.
Nine corpses with signs of torture were also found on Monday in the state, where the disappearance of 43 students in 2014 sparked a major human rights crisis for President Enrique Pena Nieto.
Pena Nieto’s popularity has hit fresh lows over his handling of the economy, rising violence and perceptions of corruption.Figures published recently by the German government showed that far-Right crime is on the rise, with more than 17,000 crimes last year - of which 842 were violent acts.
Jamel is the tip of the iceberg; an indication of the extent to which the far-Right is active, especially in areas of eastern Germany where jobs are scarce.
“We’re threatened from both sides, on one side by immigration, on the other by low birth rate,” said Stefan Koester, a regional MP for the far-Right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). In 2011, his party won 6 per cent of the vote in state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern – the state that includes Jamel – and it now has five MPs in the regional parliament.
Two years ago, Sven Krueger, an elected representative of the NPD in Jamel, was sentenced to four years in prison for illegal possession of a machine gun and an automatic pistol.
Krueger, a demolition contractor whose firm has the slogan ‘we are the boys for rough stuff’, is the driving force behind the neo-Nazi domination of Jamel. A few years ago, he began encouraging fellow supporters of the far-Right to settle alongside him. Now, more than half the families in the small village are open NPD supporters.
Birgit Lohmeyer, an author, moved from Hamburg to Jamel with her husband ten years ago. When the Lohmeyers bought their house, they were told that a “notorious neo-Nazi” live here. They thought they could cope with that. But since then, they have become the minority.
“It’s very tense,” she said. “My husband and I are the outlaws here. We are insulted, we are threatened, we are sabotaged in various ways. People drive their cars in front of ours and force us to brake. There is damage to property, our garden shed has been broken into. Our postbox has been labelled with Nazi stickers – it has been stolen.
The Lohmeyers refused to be driven out, insisting they have found their dream home in the countryside.
Mrs Lohmeyer said: “Our house is everything we wished for. No-one will take it from us, neo-Nazis or anyone else.On the cartoonish cover of his debut album, Aminé sits nearly naked on a bright blue toilet reading The Good for You Post, a newspaper—a real one, in fact—featuring writing by friends and peers like Steve Lacy, Taco, and Madeintyo, as well as his mom. As is often the case with Aminé, the playfulness of the image belies its actual content. In an essay of his own, he writes about the way an ex once served as an escape from the depression he refuses to name. “That word isn’t easy to say when ‘suck it up’ seems to be the only reverb that echoes with the feeling as a black man,” he writes.
But Good for You finds the Portland rapper, born Adam Daniel, sounding charming, clever, and carefree. On opener “Veggies,” he claims to be “Andre's prodigy”—a lofty aspiration, to be sure—but that unapologetic ambition, coupled with his animation, drives the album. The songs are glossy, the melodies sunny, the flows smooth. “Spice Girl” is flutey and flirtatious pop-rap; “Wedding Crashers” features an Auto-Tuned Offset and a comically scorned Aminé rapping over tropical marimbas. Then there’s the multi-platinum “Caroline,” whose polyphonic synths and honeyed lines remain contagious as ever. (One line in particular—“‘Cause great scenes might be great/But I love your bloopers”—could double as a reflection of his attitude about #serious rap albums versus simple fun.) Despite the album’s overwhelmingly lighthearted mood, though, he doesn’t shy away from making a few more serious statements as well.
In the closing essay of his newspaper, he writes about the ways that Portland’s foodie culture has gentrified neighborhoods and pushed out his friends. On the percussive “Money,” he critiques material obsessions—“Money don’t make you happy, it just makes you wanna get richer,” he observes—while sliding in offhanded jabs like, “Saying you ain't racist really sound racist.” The video for “REDMERCEDES,” which got the remix treatment from Missy Elliott but didn't make the album, employs whiteface to satirize white people’s attempts at performing what they think is blackness.
That Aminé is socially aware (see his incisive remix of “Caroline” during a post-election performance on “Fallon”) and still finds a way to manifest joy is remarkable, the way any person of color finding a way to enjoy a life under attack is remarkable. At times, there's an inclination to write off a rapper's cheeriness as a corny gimmick at best and insincere at worst. Such buoyancy, or #BlackBoyJoy as it’s come to be known on social media, is still an under-appreciated aspect of rap, but every D.R.A.M., Lil Yachty, and Chance the Rapper brings that quality a step closer to acceptance. With Good for You, Aminé joins their ranks, basking in his own resilient sense of humor.
When he does let the reality of his pain win, it comes in the form of standout “Sundays”—the emblematic day of serenity and rest. Set to slow-burning snares and a harmonizing vocal, it’s a poetic series of pre- and post-fame revelations. “I bench press my problems like add another weight/And act like it’s all right when it's not,” he raps, falling into a layered hook. “Some days we get Sundays/But most days, the rain comes down/And I feel like I'm bound to drown/Jesus Christ.” It’s followed by the melancholic “Turf,” examining the things—the people, the mentalities—he left when he finally escaped his hometown. In these instances, he proves capable of more than a hit single or one-dimensional feel-good music; his joy becomes that much more meaningful when he explores the things that would constrain it.
There's a breadth of experiences contained within the 15 tracks of Good for You, most of which hinge on love interests old and new, underscored by a playful outlook that’s channeled into bubbly, off-center production. It's far from serious but stops just short of turn-up—more like the soundtrack for an almost-sober drive home. In the album’s final moment, the celebratory “Beach Boy” dissolves into an atmospheric chorus repeating, “I don't know when I'm gonna die/Hopefully there's hope in me.” The sentiment is remarkably similar to the closing note of one Post essay, where he writes, “The finish line to optimism seems to be getting closer." On his debut, it appears he’s a lot closer than he gives himself credit for.The number of major contracts awarded across the global oil and gas industry declined during the last quarter, according to the latest quarterly report from the UK-based Energy Industries Council (EIC).
There were 117 major contract awarded between October and December 2014, the report said, a 22% decrease compared to 150 in the third quarter of 2014, but on par with the 118 contracts awarded in the fourth quarter of 2014.
Data was sourced from the EICDataStream online project database, which tracks nearly 10,000 projects proposed or under development in the global energy industry.
In spite of a general slowdown, upstream contracts, including Engineering, Procurement & Construction, Front End Engineering Design, and Subsea/SURF contracts, fared well in the fourth quarter, rising 42% over the third quarter.
The EIC predicted fewer awards in the coming year due to lower oil prices. The next EIC quarterly report will be released in April.Skyline of La Defense business district in Paris, Sept. 15, 2012. Photo by Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images
I was speaking to an EU official yesterday who was talking about the crisis and mentioned that the European Central Bank’s credit-easing efforts had been implemented in a more conservative way than what the Federal Reserve did, and he said this was to minimize inflation risk. I asked him why the ECB should be worrying about minimizing inflation risk given how low inflation is in the United States and even in Japan.
His reply was that even when the HICP (the European version of the Consumer Price Index) is low, other kinds of prices can be high. For example, he said, real estate in Paris is quite expensive (this was a French guy), which makes things very difficult for young couples looking to start a family or for businesses looking to expand or acquire space.
This, if you ask me, is piling perversion upon pervesion as public policy. The high price of property in Paris ought to be a source of employment and economic strength for France. If property is expensive, then hiring unemployed workers to build new property should be profitable. That would directly increase employment, boost tax revenue, reduce unemployment spending, and reduce the need for harmful austerity policies. What’s more, as the new construction is finished, you’ll see purchases of furniture and other durable goods. More people would move to Paris, and thanks to agglomeration effects, French workers can be substantially more productive in Paris than in more remote French towns. And, of course, with a higher population and more availability of property, there will be more opportunities to open shops and restaurants.
Long story short, if monetary easing boosts the price of real estate assets without leading to a surge in consumer prices, that ought to be a monetary policy success story as your central bank sparks a boom in investment and durable goods purchases.
Now why doesn’t that happen in Paris? I assume it’s because of our old friend: land use restrictions. Paris is a very densely populated city, but it’s essentially “built out,” given the current prohibition on new skyscrapers. Now Paris, unlike Washington, D.C., is a genuinely beautiful city, and these restrictions aren’t pointless or insane. But they are a policy choice, and specifically a policy choice that makes office space scarce and housing unaffordable. To then flip around and cite this as a reason to need tight money is absurd. Among other things, though tight money reduces nominal French real estate prices, it makes Paris housing even less affordable in real terms by reducing employment and incomes. Of course, if you have guaranteed employment at a European Union political institution, maybe you don’t care so much about that. But on the merits, it’s nuts. And it underscores the extent to which “demand stimulus or policy reform” is a false choice.Tesla Motors recently loaned Ars Technica a tricked out $121,870 Model S P85+, and we clocked about 500 miles with the car over 3 days. In that time, we captured almost ten hours of raw video, which we've distilled down to the video above. (Special thanks to the fine folks at GoPro, who were kind enough to lend us a Hero 3 Black Edition camera to assist with the action shots!)
The Model S was crazy fun to drive—so much so that turning the keys back over to Tesla Motors at the end of our review time was pretty difficult. The Model S' jaw-dropping acceleration and dead-flat torque curve are powerfully addictive. How addictive? Check out the video to see the car in action.
I've got a whole lot to say about the Model S in our long-form review, but the most important thing is this: after laying down that many miles in the Model S, we learned that it's not just a great electric car—it's a great car, full stop. The game has been changed, and the electric car is finally, finally here.Understanding The Massive Russell Martin Signing
pen-user Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 30, 2015
Of course in every sport, with player signings there are two sides that hope to get what they please. The Player, who typically is trying to get the most money a year to play where they want and the team who wants the best value player who will help the team win. In this case the Blue Jays and Russell Martin were able to agree to a 5 year — $85 million contract with his hometown Jays this past November. There was a lot of controversy from the media and fans with the the price tag Martin has playing for Toronto. But if we look a little bit further into factors around the contract I think that this was a great signing by the Jays. Here are the 3 reasons I like this signing and think it will help the Jays as an organization.
Hometown Hero
Russell Martin being born in Toronto and Living in Canada for a large portion of his life helps the “Canada’s Team” brand that the Jays are always trying to create. This can and should increase revenue whether it is some ticket sales or jersey sales. Martin surely wants be back in Canada where he grew up and be closer with his family. This is not a big reason to sign him but is definitely part of the reason the Jays were willing to sign him with this big contract.
Getting on Base
The Next Reason why this signing is beneficial for the Jays is because of the lineup the Jays have around him. Martin gets on base and in an already potent lineup he creates an even scarier one with him plugged in. Lets look at the healthy Blue Jays Bats: Jose Reyes, Josh Donaldson, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion. With these 4 around him it will make pitchers pitch to him because they know he has good plate discipline and will try to get pitches to put in play. This will help the Jays get into more positions to score runs and be even more of a |
stocks an OAuth in.composer/auth.json, all next calls to GitHub will succeed, even when launched by Jenkins.
Troubleshooting mails
To make Jenkins able to send mails (when a build fails for instance), you need to configure a SMTP server. The easier way is to install a local server on your CI server:
# apt-get install postfix 1 # apt-get install postfix
Default options should be OK.
To customize mail parameters, from the Jenkins homepage go to “Manage Jenkins” then “Configure System”. SMTP settings are under the “E-mail notification” section and the address used by Jenkins to send mails in “Jenkins Location”.
Updating automatically the localy installed tools
As any software, all tools used by our CI server get updates fixing bugs and adding new features. Debian and Jenkins can be updated using apt. Jenkins plugins updates are managed directly trough the Jenkins user interface. But software we installed locally must be updated “by hand”. We will periodically run a small shell script I’ve written to update those tools.
Create the following update-tools.sh script as the jenkins user in its home directory ( ~jenkins):
#!/bin/sh php composer.phar self-update php php-cs-fixer.phar self-update # The self-update option of phpDocumentator is broken at time of writing wget -q http://phpdoc.org/phpDocumentor.phar -O phpDocumentor.phar cd satis/ php../composer.phar update --no-interaction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 #!/bin/sh php composer.phar self - update php php - cs - fixer.phar self - update # The self-update option of phpDocumentator is broken at time of writing wget - q http : / / phpdoc.org / phpDocumentor.phar - O phpDocumentor.phar cd satis / php.. / composer.phar update -- no - interaction
Don’t forget to make it executable by executing chmod +x update-tools.sh. To get the updates every night, run crontab -e and add the following line:
00 00 * * * ~/update-tools.sh
You’re CI system is now ready. Your full test suit and quality analysis are running against new produced code in realtime! We also have quality checking and tests specifics for our frontend apps. Maybe If people are interested about that, maybe I’ll write another post detailing our infrastructure.
I’m sure you have your own preferred quality tools and CI best practices for Symfony projects. Share them with us in the comments 🙂In Hopkins, Michigan, Native Americans of the Pottawatomi and Ojibwe tribes are bringing rare strains of vegetables back from the dead. This video from Great Big Story explains how traditional crops that were on the verge of extinction are now thriving.
Farmers are receiving help from the Jijak Foundation, which describes itself as "nonprofit organization of the Gun Lake Band of Pottawatomi Indians dedicated to enriching our community through education, preservation, and perpetuation of our Tribe's rich culture, arts, history, and living traditions." The foundation's seed-lending library is at the center of the comeback story. Take a certain strain of white corn, for example:
"Four years ago... we only had a half-a-canning jar, a very small amount of seed," the Jijak Foundation's Kevin Finney says in the video. "We've grown it every year since, and now we have enough that we may have a hundred bushels full. That's enough that, next year, we could plant six or seven acres of just this corn."
Watch the video above for the complete story.
• How Native Americans Are Saving Vegetables from Extinction [YouTube]
• All Video Interludes [E]May 31, 2014; Cleveland, OH, USA; Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Trevor Bauer (47) pitches during the third inning against the Colorado Rockies at Progressive Field. Mandatory Credit: Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports
The show welcomes Zack Meisel of the Northeast Ohio Media Group/Cleveland Plain Dealer to the show to talk Indians and the second half of the season. In a rollicking good time, expect insightful and incisive questions, crazy predictions, trade jibber jabber and some Trevor Bauer fun. What will the next couple months of baseballing hold for our dear Tribesmen? Answers lie here.
Wahoo’s on the Mic – Episode 53: Second Half Preview
Thanks for listening, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us at [email protected], @merrittrohlfing, @EdtheRevelator, and @30xtra! Also Zack can be found on Twitter at @ZackMeisel.The head of Irish aid agency Goal has branded the international response to the Typhoon Haiyan disaster in the Philippines as “ completely inadequate”.
Chief executive Barry Andrews also described the failure of rich nations to meet the United Nations call for funding a “disgrace”.
Mr Andrews noted the UN said yesterday only 19 per cent of its call for funding had been met by international governments.
“The situation on the ground in the Philippines is almost beyond description,” he said. “The UN made a call for funding in the amount of €300m and to date a fraction of that has been met. The failure to meet that funding is a disgrace.”
He called on the international community to provide cash and clear commitments to help the tens of thousands of people in dire need of assistance following last week’s disaster.
Mr Andrews also said the Irish Government can take a leadership position on this issue, “as we have done so many times in the past”.
The UN was less scathing in its comments on the international reaction today, with one senior official saying many countries had come forward to help.
“The response from the international community has not been overwhelming compared to the magnitude of the disaster, but it has been very generous so far,” Jens Laerke of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told the Geneva news briefing today.
Meanwhile, l ong-delayed emergency supplies flowed into the typhoon-ravaged central Philippines today, reaching desperate families who had to fend for themselves for days, as the United Nations more than doubled its estimate of homeless to nearly two million.
The aid effort was still patchy, with relief officials reporting a surge in desperate, hungry survivors trying to leave the coastal city of Ormoc, 105km west of Tacloban, the worst-affected major city.
More than a week after Typhoon Haiyan killed at least 3,633 with tree-snapping winds and tsunami-like waves, hundreds of international aid workers set up makeshift hospitals and trucked in supplies.
Helicopters from a US aircraft carrier ferried medicine and water to remote, battered areas. Residents of Tanauan, a fishing town about 15km southeast of Tacloban, said they only started receiving substantial aid yesterday after being forced to survive on biscuits and dispose of dead bodies on their own for days.
More than 60 people were buried behind the municipal office in the district of 50,000 people. Down the road, dozens of corpses were interred under a roundabout.
“I think (the response) was quite slow. This town was isolated. Media didn’t come here. We were out of circulation for three days,” said Penny Tecson, the wife of the district’s mayor. She was running the recovery operation while her husband, Pel Tecson, was in Tacloban to coordinate the district’s first large-scale delivery of aid from the national government.
In one ward of Tanauan, neighbourhood chief Cecilio Yepes Jr estimated his community lost nearly 10 per cent of its 1,176 residents. The storm surge has transformed an entire swampy plain in the neighbourhood into a rubbish pile of trees and debris. Locals have recovered and buried 30 bodies. Another 98 remain somewhere in the vast wasteland that stretches on either side of the road.
At least 800 people died in the district of Palo, which lies between Tanauan and Tacloban, national authorities said. In Tacloban, work crews and heavy equipment cleared debris from roadsides, but side streets remained piled with the sodden, tangled remains of homes which city officials fear could reveal hundreds more bodies when they are eventually cleared. There are 1,179 people missing, according to the national count.
The official death toll only rose by 12 today, giving hope that initial local estimates of 10,000 dead were overblown.
In front of Tacloban’s San Fernando Elementary School, government workers distributed sacks of aid to a restless crowd of hundreds who had spent the last week camped in shattered wooden classrooms or in a main school building with floors covered in wet black sand.
Nearby, about a dozen body bags were neatly lined up by the roadside. Rica Mobilla, an 18-year-old mother of one, said local authorities showed up two days after the disaster, handing out four kilograms of rice and a few packs of noodles for her family of thirteen. The family stretched this out with onions and garlic bought from the market. “I’m upset. I’m not blaming anyone. If there’s aid there to give out we’ll receive it,” she said.
President Benigno Aquino, caught off guard by the scale of the disaster, is scheduled to visit typhoon-affected areas tomorrow. He has been criticised for the slow pace of aid distribution and unclear estimates of casualties, especially in Tacloban, capital of hardest-hit Leyte province.
In Tacloban the death toll is written on a whiteboard at City Hall and bodies have been buried in mass graves since Thursday. Tacloban mayor Alfred Romualdez said many people may have been swept out to sea after the tsunami-like wall of seawater slammed into coastal areas.
The Philippines Social Welfare and Development Secretary Corazon Soliman acknowledged in a radio interview that the national relief response had been too slow to reach many areas. “We will double our efforts to distribute relief goods because we’ve been hearing complaints that a lot of people have yet to receive relief goods,” she said.
Arnaldo Arcadio, an emergency responder with the Catholic Relief Services group, said desperation over conditions in remote rural areas had led people to surge into Ormoc in hope of fleeing the city by ferry. “People are fleeing in mass numbers and coming to Ormoc, where they stand in line all day to get on a ferry only to be turned away,” he said. “Ormoc is teeming with people who haven’t eaten in days. They’re hungry, thirsty and tired. They want to get out.”
Across Tacloban, survivors have begun to rebuild. The sounds of hammers ring out. Men gather in groups to fix motorbikes or drag debris off splintered homes and wrecked streets. Most have given up searching for lost loved ones. The number of people made homeless by the storm rose to 1.9 million, up from 900,000, the United Nations’ humanitarian agency said. In Tacloban, at least 56,000 people face unsanitary conditions, according to the United
Nations’ migration agency.
British prime minister David Cameron today pledged £30 million pounds ($48 million) for international aid agencies working in the Philippines.
Japan plans to send 1,180 troops to the Philippines, its largest oversea deployment for disaster relief. Japanese destroyer Ise and transport vessel Osumi will leave for the Philippines in a few days carrying helicopters to deliver aid.
But the patchy initial aid response highlighted the need for international agencies and local governments to prepare for more frequent, more devastating natural disasters, said Kristalina Georgieva, European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response. “This is a mindset change that must happen if we want to be able to stand up to this trend,” she said in Tacloban.
US military assistance has been pouring into the Philippines since Thursday when the USS George Washington aircraft carrier and accompanying ships arrived off eastern Samar province, carrying 5,000 crew and more than 80 aircraft.
The Philippines is one of Washington’s closest allies in Asia and a crucial partner in President Barack Obama’s strategy of rebalancing US military forces towards the region to counter the rising clout of China.
The Pentagon said yesterday US Navy amphibious ships will leave Okinawa in Japan “in the coming hours” carrying an additional 1,000 marines and sailors who will provide engineering equipment, relief supplies, and medical support. The US military estimates that it delivered some 283,000kg of relief supplies to the Philippines so far. The American military also estimated that it had moved nearly 1,200 relief workers into Tacloban and airlifted nearly 2,900 displaced people from affected areas so far.
Donations can be made to the Goal response in the Philippines by telephoning 01 280 9779, visiting goal.ie or following Goal on Facebook at facebook.com/goalireland.Guardian US chief who also set up Australian operation will take over from Alan Rusbridger this summer
Katharine Viner has been appointed the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, the first woman to run the newspaper in its 194-year history. Viner, currently deputy editor of the Guardian and editor-in-chief of Guardian US, will take up the role in the summer from incumbent Alan Rusbridger, who is to stand down after 20 years.
The Scott Trust, the ultimate owner of the Guardian, which safeguards the title’s editorial future and independence, made the announcement on Friday after members of the board conducted final interviews with two shortlisted candidates. Viner will become only the 12th editor since the paper was founded in May 1821.
She won the overwhelming support of Guardian and Observer staff in an indicative ballot held earlier this month. Fifty-three per cent of those who voted backed Viner, with a first-choice vote of 438 in the single transferrable vote system used for the ballot.
Commenting on her appointment, Viner said: “Being editor-in-chief of the Guardian and Observer is an enormous privilege and responsibility, leading a first-class team of journalists revered around the world for outstanding reporting, independent thinking, incisive analysis and digital innovation.”
Saying she was “honoured” to succeed Rusbridger, she said: “Building on his track record, I intend to lead a media organisation that is bold, challenging, open and engaging. It will be a home for the most ambitious journalism, ideas and events, setting the agenda and reaching out to readers all around the world.”
Rusbridger said: “Kath rose up through the Guardian as an inspired magazine and features editor. She took Australia by storm before heading up the Guardian’s American operation. She will bring immense experience, flair, warmth, imagination and formidable energy to her new role as editor of the Guardian.”
Liz Forgan, outgoing chair of the Scott Trust, which announced the decision after a seven-hour meeting, said: “Kath shone through in what was a tremendously strong lineup of candidates. In her 18 years at the Guardian, she has done almost every editorial job in the organisation, including running Guardian US and Guardian Australia, and has shown herself to be an inspiring and courageous leader. She has embraced the huge changes in the industry with creativity and relish whilst bringing with her a deep commitment to the Guardian’s traditions of plural, liberal journalism.
“This has been a thorough, transparent and, for the first time, international process. We considered a very broad range of candidates across geographies, disciplines and backgrounds – including all those who took part in the editorial hustings – in our determination to leave no stone unturned in the search for the best person to lead this now global and much respected media organisation.”
Viner becomes the only woman at the top of a daily quality title in the UK. She joins a small group of women editing leading British newspapers: Lisa Markwell, editor of the Independent on Sunday, Victoria Newton, the editor of the Sun on Sunday, Sarah Sands at the Evening Standard, and Dawn Neesom at the Star.
In total, 26 people applied for the job in a process conducted by the Scott Trust in conjunction with an executive search firm.
The NUJ chapel at the titles welcomed Viner’s appointment. Brian Williams, father of the chapel, said: “We have a unique process for the appointment of our editor-in-chief. The indicative ballot of editorial staff, in which 839 Guardian and Observer journalists voted, and the hustings which preceded it, is now firmly cemented at the heart of that process. The open and transparent system... gives our incoming editor an unparalleled position in the media and we look forward to working with her.”
Viner joined the Guardian in 1997 and has been a deputy editor of the title as well as editing the Saturday edition of the newspaper from 2008 until 2012. She was then given responsibility for launching the Guardian’s Australian operation, building it to a team of 40 over 16 months. Last summer, she moved to New York to take the role of editor-in-chief of Guardian US. She has held a wide range of roles including editor of G2, deputy women’s editor, and editor of Weekend magazine.
Educated at Ripon Grammar School and the University of Oxford, Viner spent three years at the Sunday Times before joining the Guardian. Her first job was with Cosmopolitan magazine.
Rusbridger is to take up the role of chairman of the Scott Trust, the ultimate parent of the Guardian and Observer newspapers, at the start of 2016, replacing Liz Forgan when she ends her term as chair. During his tenure, the Guardian was awarded the highest accolade in US journalism, the Pulitzer prize for public service, for its exposure of the surveillance activities of the US National Security Agency, following leaks by Edward Snowden.Last month, J. Paul Oetken won Senate confirmation by a vote of 80-13, making him the first openly gay man to be confirmed as a federal judge.
Peter LaBarbera has long demanded a sexual orientation test for judges, asserting that all nominees must declare if they have a history of “practicing immoral homosexual behavior” or “consider yourself homosexual.”
So needless to say, the milestone of Oetken’s confirmation is not sitting well with him:
“Homosexual activists are quite clear that their so-called ‘rights’ trump our religious liberty, our freedom to act on our beliefs to oppose sexual immorality,” he explains. “So we certainly can’t trust open homosexual activists to give us fairness and to defend religious liberty and our First Amendment freedom to live by our faith.” LaBarbera adds that it is because homosexual activists strive to convince people, and force them by judicial fiat, to accept the homosexual lifestyle as somehow equal to heterosexuality. “This is dangerous territory where we are seeing homosexual activists trying to get on the bench,” says the spokesman. “The Democratic Party is advancing their cause and it’s not going to help justice. In fact, I predict this will undermine religious liberty in this country.” Says LaBarbera: “We have a big fight ahead of us.”
I wonder what LaBarbera’s response would be if people were to demand that an openly Christian judicial nominee be kept off the bench because everyone knows that the Religious Right cannot be trusted to “give us fairness” on equality issues?Laser tag is like a production of Hamlet: It's exciting, demanding, and by the end everyone has pretend-died. Take laser arms against a sea of troubles with today's Groupon to CMP Tactical Lazer Tag on Howell Avenue. Choose between the following options:
• For $10, you get 90 minutes of laser tag (a $25 value).
• For $20, you get 3 hours of laser tag (a $45 value).
Laser-outfitted soldiers skirmish on The Complex and Urban Warfare, which comprise the 18,000-square-foot electronic battlefield inside CMP Tactical Lazer Tag's air-conditioned facility. Amid unique obstacles and multileveled buildings, teams square off in a number of possible missions, including King of the Hill, VIP Helicopter Extraction, and Pin the Tail on the Colonel. Target opponents from a high vantage point with sound-enhanced weapons such as the Stinger SMG, AK-47, or M4, then listen as a hit-recognition sound communicates whether you've claimed a victim or accidentally ruined a movie screening in a neighboring building. More advanced artillery is available in the armory to add to the excitement or to keep the game fair if RoboCop decides to join in.Google seeks permission to build 4.5-meter satellite dish array
Before you get too excited, Google is not looking to start its own search and for extraterrestrial life. The photo you see here is of a SETI array that happens to look much like what Google is seeking to build near its data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Rather than searching stars for signs of life, it appears Google wants to use its satellite array to receive content feeds from broadcast networks.
The content could then be shot out over its high-speed fiber-optic network for people to watch. Filings show that Google is seeking to register a C-band receive-only earth station along with a Ku-band receive-only earth station, both near its data center. That application outlines the 4.5 m satellite dish array along with permission to access transmissions from satellites, including Intelsat 9, which carries international television programming.
The data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa is a few hundred miles away from Kansas City, which is the city Google selected last year for its massive fiber optic project. That project will see the city wired for high-speed fiber-optic Internet service. The building of that network was delayed in part due to arguments over where Google could run fiber-optic cables on the existing network utility poles.
[via DataCenerKnowelge]INTERVIEW: Lora Sarı on Aras: An Armenian publisher in Istanbul
William Armstrong - [email protected]
Since its establishment by a group of Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul in 1993, the Aras Publishing House has introduced Turkish readers to almost 200 books in both Armenian and Turkish. Its catalogue is rich and varied, including contemporary and historical novels, memoirs, academic studies and lost classics.
This year also saw the appearance of Aras’ first English-language title, Mıgırdıç Margosyan’s “Infidel Quarter.” The book, reviewed in Hürriyet Daily News, is a charming memoir of Margosyan’s experiences growing up as one of the few remaining Armenians in Diyarbakır in the 1940s and 50s.
Lora Sarı, an editor at Aras, spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about the publisher’s history, changes in reading habits, and shifting challenges in Turkey’s turbulent political landscape.
You’ve just come back from this year’s International Istanbul Book Fair. How was the fair this year?
Among publishers what we see most is that people tend to buy fewer books these days, finding them expensive. Our books, for example, are often translated so they are actually more expensive. Translated books have a lot to do with currency because we buy the copyrights from the U.S. and Britain. With the fall in the value of the lira, we have to make our books more expensive than they used to be. Even though in Turkey books are not as expensive as they are in Western countries, people have started tending to see books as a luxury item. Many of our publisher friends were complaining about how they can't sell many books this year.
As you will have heard, there was also an attack on a writer [Sebahattin Onkibar] at the fair this year at the fair this year. Of course, these kinds of things worry other publishers in terms of freedom of speech. You never know if someone is going to attack you for something irrational one day too. As an Armenian publisher we always have this in mind. We haven't experienced anything really serious, though sometimes people look askance at our books or tut to themselves. But usually our readers and others at the fair are very friendly.
We left this year tired but happy. I think the fair is a kind of resolution, because you publish so many books over the year and then finally go there to sell them. We have 24 new books this year and only four of us are working as editors. Publishing 24 books in a year is a really big thing for us.
Aras was established almost 25 years ago, in 1993 in Istanbul. What was Aras’ goal back when it first started?
The people in the establishment process were very important names in the Istanbul Armenian community. The most famous is Hrant Dink but also there were also others such as Yetvart Tomasyan, who is still with us and is basically our everything. There were many other names who at the time were pioneers of the Armenian intellectual sphere. They had many motivations in setting up Aras. The first one that comes to mind was to introduce Armenian literature to non-Armenians and people who don't speak Armenian. The latter group includes Armenian people who cannot or have forgotten how to speak the Armenian language. The number of them is huge. My parents, for example, cannot speak Armenian and I personally forgot it as I was growing up. I went to Armenian school for eight years from elementary school but I forgot the language at high school. So one of the main aims was to introduce Armenian literature to non-Armenians and to reconnect Armenians with their own culture.
The Agos newspaper was founded at around the same time. The reason Agos was established was that there were only two newspapers for Armenians in Turkey at the time, basically small four-page papers that were only in Armenian. The people behind Aras were worried that many Armenians couldn't learn about their churches, schools and community in a language they understand. So when they founded Aras a group of people around Hrant Dink also decided to establish a newspaper, mainly in Turkish but with Armenian pages.
We are about to publish our 200th book. Around one third of our books are in Armenian and the rest are in Turkish. Armenian readers tend to prefer the Turkish versions because they find them faster and easier to read. We call Armenian our mother tongue but actually Turkish is our mother tongue.
Has there been a trend towards Armenian-origin people relearning the Armenian language in recent years?
I don't think so. I look around and I don't see anything like that happening. But I don't want to speak for everyone. There's an Armenian course at the Hrant Dink Foundation but it's just for beginners. I know a couple of people who attend that course because they forgot Armenian and want to relearn it. But other than that it's not really happening. When Armenian kids grow up they are taught that Armenian isn't a necessary language and there is no country using it. Also we speak Western Armenian so it's really hard to communicate with Armenians in Armenia, who speak Eastern Armenian. Parents have a tendency to tell their kids that it's better to learn English or German or French. In schools the children all talk Turkish. So Armenians don't really feel it's necessary to speak Armenian, which is why Western Armenian is actually an endangered language today.
Aras has published a wide range of titles. Are there any particular books that you’re particularly happy to have worked on, or any particular recommendations?
We tend to look to translate books in Armenian where we find ourselves thinking: "It's a pity that people can't read this in Turkish because it's such a good literature." It's two-sided: Some Armenians have prejudices against Turkish people so when there's a novel that we think will bring people together we are keen to publish it.
One of our beloved writers is Zabel Yessayan. She was one of the first feminist writers in the history of Turkey and people love her books. We understand why and we try to present those writers as writers from this land. That's why Turkish readers, non-Armenians, love those writers too because they can connect with their stories. We also give importance to children's books in the Armenian language, which are great helps in Armenian schools.
The first English language book that you have published is Mıgırdıç Margosyan’s “Infidel Quarter.” Is there any particular reason why you chose it as your first English title to publish?
It wasn't actually planned. “Infidel Quarter” was I think our first Turkish book and to this day it remains our most sold title - I think it's on its 20th print run. I never gets old. This year Margosyan held autograph sessions on four separate days and there were huge lines of people waiting for him, it was crazy. People really love him.
But we didn't actually choose this book. Our partner in London, the Gomidas Institute, wanted to publish the book and buy the rights. So we published it together. It was their plan and we kind of stepped into it. But actually if we ourselves chose a book to publish in English we would still have chosen this one because it's our bestseller.
It's great to have Margosyan with us; he's still alive, still writing and creating. He's actually one of the founders of Aras too. In
“Infidel Quarter” he describes his life among his neighbors, telling the story of his childhood when Turkish, Kurdish and Syrian people lived together in this little neighborhood. Margosyan writes with great humor, which attracts different kinds of people - Armenians, Turks, Kurds. It's a cliché but they all find something from their own lives in his stories. The book doesn't really romanticize anything. He just tells it as it is. He doesn't try to make people cry or try to be funny. And when people meet him in person they can understand that.
Are there any more English-language translations in the pipeline?
I don't know. We have no plans right now. English language publishing is a big decision and I don't know if we'll go along with it right now. We have difficulty because we have limited manpower. We could give the book to a translation agency but we wouldn't know who to trust in the translation and editing process. With “Infidel Quarter,” because we know the Gomidas people we just went along with it.
It’s obviously a pretty turbulent landscape to be working in at the moment in Turkey, with many unpredictable political shifts. Have you experienced any particular difficulties or surprises in recent years?
I think in situations like this the most fragile groups are always minorities. We had books scheduled that we were confident of publishing but now, like everyone, we sometimes censor ourselves or think twice before publishing. We're confident that we're not doing anything wrong. It's not just a publishing house problem, it's more a problem about being an Armenian. That's my feeling and my friends who have nothing to do with publishing feel the same way. Other minorities like Greeks also feel the same. We're just waiting for things to calm down and trying to focus on our work. We try not to think about what could go wrong.
* Follow the Turkey Book Talk podcast via iTunes here, Stitcher here, Podbean here, or Facebook here, or Twitter here.Shooting falls under Colorado's'make my day' law, prosecutor says
Police investigate the shooting of Roberto Zamora, 19, in a home on Pima Court in Boulder on May 4. ( Jeremy Papasso / Staff Photographer )
A Boulder man will not be charged with a crime after shooting and killing a University of Colorado student who broke into his house and attacked him last week, according to the district attorney.
Police say Roberto Zamora, 19, forced his way into 98 Pima Court at about 8:40 p.m. May 4 and attacked resident Jim McCain, whom he had never met.
McCain shot and killed him.
Boulder County DA Stan Garnett announced Wednesday he will not charge McCain in the case, citing Colorado's "make my day" law and self-defense law.
"Under those theories, criminal charges would not be appropriate," Garnett said. "This young man broke into the house and attacked the homeowner."
Colorado's "make my day" law allows homeowners to use deadly force if a person enters their residence uninvited and either has committed a crime other than trespassing or intends to. Self-defense law allows for the use of deadly force if people reasonably believe deadly force is going to be used against them.
Garnett said Zamora may have been under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms at the time. Final toxicology results are pending, but the DA said there was evidence Zamora was under the influence of "at least one" illegal substance.
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"Mr. Zamora's behavior was very bizarre and very aggressive, and very out of character from what we were told," Garnett said.
According to Boulder police, Zamora had attempted to enter several other homes in the area, banging on doors and windows, before banging on a rear window of 98 Pima Court, prompting McCain to grab a gun.
Police said Zamora then broke the glass storm door, burst in through the front door and attacked McCain, causing them both to fall to the floor.
McCain fired a single shot from a handgun, hitting Zamora in the chest and killing him.
McCain could not be reached for comment at his home Wednesday, but in a brief interview last week with the Camera, he described the incident as a "bad situation" all around.
"I feel bad for the (Zamora) family," he said. "I wish it never could have happened. It's just bad for everybody."
The family also could not be reached for comment on Garnett's ruling, but a number of Zamora's closest friends have said they don't blame McCain, despite their deep sadness.
"We're all doing a bit better," Goliath Hernandez said Wednesday. "We felt some closure having the (memorial service). It brought all of us closer because we were still in denial."
Garnett has compared the case to the 2012 shooting of CU student Zoey Ripple, another instance in which the "make my day" law was used in Boulder County.
Ripple wandered into a home at 425 College Ave. drunk, police said at the time, and was shot by the homeowner when she entered the couple's bedroom. The homeowner was not charged, and Ripple — who was shot in the hip — was charged with trespassing before ultimately receiving a deferred sentence.
Garnett said during the school year his office sees about 10 cases a month of drunk or high students wandering into houses.
"It concerns us a lot," Garnett said. "Be very careful what drugs or how much alcohol you take. If you are with someone who is drunk or intoxicated, do everything you can to take care of them and make sure they are safe."
Staff Writer Alex Burness contributed to this report.
Mitchell Byars: 303-473-1329, [email protected] or twitter.com/mitchellbyarsWe want to thank Mr. Detlef Bittner of Bittner Pens for lending us this Wahl-Eversharp fountain pen for review. Detlef’s pen store is located in Carmel, California and he also travels to a lot of pen shows. When we return this pen, the HOTP crew may just decide to take a road trip and visit the pen store. The opinions here are our own and we were not compensated (monetarily or otherwise) for this review. We have also asked Claire (@writteninrice) to be our guest once again and review this pen with us. Thanks Claire!
Hand Over That Pen, please!
Katherine: This is a pretty cool looking pen, and the huge nib looks very cool. I really liked details on this pen — the complex blue material, the red ebonite feed and the classy use of gold and black trim. But, even at first glance, this is a huge pen! It stands out and is hard to miss.
Claire: This is a pen with gravitas that hearkens back to pens of a bygone era. The Wahl Eversharp Decoband is a large pen that’s an attention grabber. The nib on this pen is just lovely and I love the red ebonite feed. In fact, I couldn’t help but post a nib shot of this pen on Instagram the second I got it in my hands. I am not typically a fan of pens with gold hardware but for this pen, it works.
Pam: The Decoband is an acquired taste for me. It is undeniable that the blue material is beautiful and deep, that the red ebonite feed is awesome, and that nib is gorgeous. I am just not a fan of the shape and the overall aesthetic. Despite my reservations about the pen, it’s a beautiful pen that is very reminiscent of the fountain pen’s golden days.
Franz: Is this pen big enough or what? The Decoband is massively impressive and is probably the biggest pen that I’ve held in terms of length, girth, and weight. This is a revival of Wahl-Eversharp’s Gold Seal design in 1929. The proportion of the pen is very similar to the vintage one except for its larger scale. The Decoband fits quite perfectly in my bear paw…err… large hand and is quite comfortable for me to use.
The Amalfi Blue Pearl acrylic is such a stunning material and as Katherine pointed out, the black finials on the cap and the bottom of the barrel makes it a classic looking pen. The packaging is also impressive as the box big and shiny. They also supply the pen with Wahl-Eversharp’s ink bottle which is a nice touch.
The Business End
Katherine: The nib is huge and it writes quite nicely. It’s very smooth without being glassy, and has a nice softness to it. However, I didn’t think it was comparable to many of the “full” flex vintage nibs I’ve tried. The Decoband nib is smooth and wet, but line variation is not its strong suit. Perhaps a finer point would produce more line variation, but out of the box, this is more of a wet and medium writer.
Claire: As I mentioned earlier, the super flex nib on this pen is eye catching. I love the frosted detail noting the brand and specifics. In hand, the nib is a little on the squishy side. After primarily writing with hard nibs this was a bit disconcerting. Though, it didn’t take too long to get used to the experience and really start to enjoy the way this pen puts ink to paper. The super flex nib boasts arguably the best modern flex on the market. While it doesn’t have the snap back that I experienced with vintage flex nibs, it does provide an amazing amount of flex.
Pam: My favorite part of the pen is the nib and the red ebonite feed. It’s an absolute beauty. The nib is one of the smoothest and softest nibs I have tried. The line variation is not as great as a vintage flex, but arguably this nib is the best “modern flex” nib out there. I did find the nib to be quite wet, so I don’t see this my ideal for daily writing (don’t forget my writing pressure), but it would definitely give those who want your autograph a special flourish!
Franz: The Decoband is available in two nib options. First is the semi-flex extra fine nib, and |
2005 as his CFL career was ending, and they have two children, but figuring out what was next after the NFL wasn't easy. He dabbled in TV, personal training and private coaching, feeling directionless but also uncertain if he wanted to commit to the grind of coaching. Tennessee, among others, turned him down for GA opportunities. He coached at Morehouse College and two Atlanta public schools before catching then-Oregon coach Chip Kelly's eye.
He turned down Kelly's offer of a job as a receivers coach in 2009 to be New Mexico's quarterbacks coach, an eyebrow-raising decision, he admits.
"Now, I feel like an idiot. But at the time, I felt like that's what I know. I knew I could coach quarterbacks," he said, noting with some amusement that he would then coach receivers at Kentucky and during his first four years at USC.
He has remained at USC, even though he's now on his third Trojans head coach, Clay Helton, passing on a number of southeastern opportunities. While Martin's coaching reputation rose because of his recruiting ability, Helton handed over play-calling duties to him and has been effusive praising Martin's feel for the game.
"In my 21 years, he's the most complete coach I've ever been around," Helton said. "I know I'm not going to have him forever. The guy's going to be a head coach here soon."
Martin waves away the head coaching talk, but more than a few athletic directors will be watching the USC-Alabama game with a focus on how Martin handles a defensive juggernaut.
He smiles, looks at the ceiling and throws the ball into the air again, "My motto is, 'Grow where you're planted.'"
Thus far, through every challenge, that has worked pretty well for him."It is not as dramatic as it sounds. The anteater panicked when the birds cackled and flapped their wings and it struck back," Helena Olsson at the Parken Zoo told The Local on Tuesday.
"The anteater is not a meat-eater, unless you consider ants meat, but when it feels threatened, it will defend itself," she said.
Olsson said that the South American animal, whose claws she said are strong enough to damage concrete, became curious and managed to pull apart the fence separating their pens and enter the enclosure holding the long-legged birds.
"The birds are very frail and the anteater is very strong," she said.
Zoo wardens reacted swiftly to the commotion to put a halt to the one-sided slaughter, Helena Olsson said, furthermore confirming that the fence has been repaired in a bid to avert a repeat.
Aside from the ten fatalities a further five birds were injured in the incident but they are expected to make a full recovery.
Parken Zoo keeps a pair of anteaters, described on the zoo's homepage as "like no other" with its "60 centimetre long tongue, big claws, shaggy coat and bushy tail".MOAB — Archaeologists have discovered the earliest known evidence chocolate in North America near Canyonlands National Park.
A half dozen bowls excavated from Site 13, an ancient village on the Alkali Ridge, contain traces of chocolate. The 1,200-year-old remains may mean that by the end of the eighth century, cacao beans were being imported to present-day Utah from the tropics.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Bristol-Meyers Squibb had previously found evidence of cacao at 11th-century burial sites in Mexico and parts of the Southwest. They followed up those findings by testing bowls excavated from Site 13 in the 1930s.
The team swirled water into bowls and analyzed compounds in the rinse water. They found evidence of theobromine and caffeine, both found in cacao, in almost every bowl they tested.
The findings show that chocolate was present in North America at least 300 years earlier than previously thought, according to the researchers. In a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the researchers explain that while chocolate consumption in Mesoamerica was largely an activity of the elite, in a classless society such as Site 13, chocolate was more likely consumed for its nutritional value.
The University of Pennsylvania's Dorothy Washburn told Science Mag the findings show "either a lot of people moved north or there was intensive trade bringing this cacao up" to North America. "There's this incredible and sustained contact between these two areas," she said.
Washburn said other artifacts from the time period will have to be re-examined with this discovery in mind in order to determine the importance of cacao in early North American life.
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Related Stories“I have four children, Merkel has none,” said Petry in an interview with stern.
“Kids help you see beyond your own periphery. And that's what Merkel doesn't do.”
Merkel doesn't have her own children, but is currently married to her second husband, chemistry professor Joachim Sauer, who brought his own two children into the marriage.
Following the recent humiliating defeat of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) by the right-wing, xenophobic AfD in Merkel's home state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 10 days ago, Petry further challenged Germany's leading party:
"In the mid-term, it's on us to take the CDU's place as a people's party," Petry said.
It's not the first time the incumbent chancellor, who has earned the nickname “Mutti Merkel” (Mummy Merkel) over the years, has been criticized for her lack of offspring.
“Mrs. Merkel's biography is not reflective of the experiences of most women,” Doris Schröder-Kopf, the wife of Merkel's former political rival Gerhard Schröder, told Die Zeit during election campaigning in 2005, when Merkel pushed the centre-left Schröder out of power to become the first female chancellor.
The chancellor herself has commented on the fact that she never had children.
“It just didn't happen. My life took a different path,” she commented on the issue a few years ago.
But Merkel earned harsh criticism for her relationship to children again when she brought a 14-year-old Palestinian refugee girl Reem Sahwil to tears last year during ARD's Morgenmagazin, telling her that Germany could not take in every refugee.
Her reaction was condemned as cold-hearted on social media, with the topic trending under #merkelstreichelt (Merkel strokes), a reference to the chancellor's somewhat clumsy attempt at calming the girl down by stroking her.
However, the 14-year-old later said that she was fine with Merkel giving her opinion.
Petry's critique follows weeks of competition between the established Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the xenophobic AfD, which was founded in 2013.
After the AfD took 21 percent over the CDU's 19 percent in its first bid for seats in the regional parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, AfD lead candidate Leif-Erik Holm commented that "... maybe that is the beginning of the end of Merkel's time as chancellor."
The AfD are currently polling at around 15 percent in Berlin, four points behind the CDU.As the heat on Iran is turned up by the US and its allies, questions are raised about the hidden factors that could be motivating such aggressive rhetoric.
While the whole world is fixated on the well-publicized details of Iran’s nuclear programme, we may well forget to discuss the more plausible reasons as to why a military conflict with Iran might be desirable for some. A useful starting point might be the common denominator of the two last major Western interventions in the Middle East-North Africa region, namely Iraq and Libya. The politics of the global oil trade tie these two together.
But first, how real is the Iranian threat? Analysts often stress that 20% uranium enrichment is a critical step towards building a nuclear weapon. A crucial step is, however, not logical proof that a country is actually building a nuclear weapon. Some might then respond by citing hostile Iranian rhetoric, claiming that Iran wants “to wipe Israel off the map.” However, this oft-quoted statement by Ahmadinejad was merely a paraphrasing of a previous one by Ayatollah Khomeini, who declared that “the regime occupying Jerusalem”, following in the footsteps of those of the Shah and the Soviet Union, will “[vanish from] the page of time.” It is not difficult to see why such a quote could be misinterpreted, or even manipulated.
But “Iran has violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),” says US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an attempt to single out Iran for criticism. Israel, of course, has not signed the NPT, and once offered to sell nuclear warheads to the South African apartheid regime. So what, then, distinguishes Iran from Israel? Hillary again: “Israel has been defending itself for the past 60 years, and has made numerous overtures to try to have a peaceful resolution.” It would be interesting to find out Palestinian views on this particular statement.
Setting the doubtful nuclear threat aside for a moment, it might be useful to consider if more is at stake in this brewing conflict. In this regard, the petrodollar warfare theory has a lot of explanatory potential.
The basics of the theory go as follows. Since 1945, the US dollar has been the de facto international reserve currency for global oil transactions. In 1971 President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, which gave the US—through the Treasury Department, which enjoys a monopoly of control over the US money supply—immense monetary power. On the other side of the global oil arena, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) largely decides which currency is used for OPEC oil purchases. Two secret agreements between the US and Saudi Arabia ensured Saudi support in OPEC for the pricing of all oil in dollars. As a consequence, US petrodollars became the de facto currency for global oil transactions, leaving all producers with their profit in dollars. These dollars are then recycled through OPEC back into the US through Treasury Bills or other dollar-dominated assets. This in turn creates capital-accounts surplus for the US economy which finances the US trade deficit.
Saddam Hussein defied that system, and he probably paid the price for it. In 1995, the UN’s Resolution 986 established the Oil-for-Food Program (OFF), which allowed Iraq to sell oil in exchange for goods to alleviate the humanitarian needs of ordinary Iraqi citizens suffering under economic sanctions imposed by the Clinton administration. [6] Not too happy perhaps with the petrodollar regime, Saddam changed the Iraqi oil transaction currency to the euro on October 30th 2000, a decision ultimately approved by the UN. At the time this move cost Iraq $270 million, but it paid off in the long run; the US dollar depreciated steadily against the Euro, making Saddam a fortune in the process. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, of course, put an end to his regime, and with it, his subversive petropolitical gamble. Sanctions on Iraq were stopped once the war began, and, according to a widely-cited Financial Times article of June 5th 2003, Iraqi oil transactions was once again denominated in US dollars.
Libya’s case was slightly different. France, not the US, took the political initiative to intervene, this time allegedly for humanitarian reasons. Like Saddam, Gaddafi attempted to defy the dollar and euro by introducing the Gold Dinar, a new currency backed by gold to be used by Arab and African countries for oil transactions. What needs to be pointed out is that the Libyan state exercised total control over its oil, and the 100% state-owned Central Bank of Libya (CBL) had full bargaining power against other countries as all business transactions had to go through CBL. According to IMF, the CBL had 144 tons of gold reserves. Had African states actually decided to use Gold Dinar as new oil transaction currency, France would have had a lot to lose, of economic influence over its various former African colonies. To add to the case, just prior to the intervention, Obama froze $30 billion of CBL funds to which the US had access. These $30 billion, according to an African observer, had been earmarked as Libya’s contribution to the African federation project pursued by Gaddafi. Most peculiarly of all, within weeks of the beginning of the popular uprising,, the rebel groups—at this point still entrenched in a fierce battle against Gaddafi’s forces—formed the Central Bank of Benghazi as the authority over Libyan monetary policy. The result of the French-sponsored intervention in Libya? France today controls 35% of Libyan oil.
Now back to the case of Iran. As early as November 2007, Ahmadinejad called for a “credible and good currency to take over US dollar’s role and to serve oil trades” during the third summit of OPEC. By December 2007, Iran had stopped selling its oil in US dollars. And in February 2008, the country established the Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB) on Kish Island. The establishment of the IOB allowed exchanges of oil, petrochemicals, and gas between industrialized and developing countries in a basket of currencies other than US dollar. Prior to this, the majority of oil was exchanged in the New York Mercantile Exchange and the London International Petroleum Exchange, both of which are run by American companies.
This is quite significant, given that Iran is the fourth or fifth largest crude oil exporter in the world. To date, Iran has already accepted oil sales in Chinese yuan, while India will use foreign currencies to buy Iranian oil until early July, when oil exchanges will be done in the Indian rupee. Although some have indicated fears that Iran might not find new buyers in the near future, Chinese and Indian resource thirst will probably be sufficient to maintain demand. Iran has already stopped selling oil to British and French firms, and when fresh US and EU sanctions come into effect in July, the real fear is that Saudi exports will not be able to keep up with the demand, which would drive up oil prices. Italian, Spanish and Greek companies have managed to extend their oil deals with Iran until July, but who knows what effect rising oil prices will have on these crisis-wracked countries?
Finally, the Chief Executive of Halliburton’s Energy Service Group said that he hopes “Iraq will be the first domino, and that Libya and Iran will follow” because he does not like “being kept out of markets.” [5] A video on Youtube also shows General Wesley Clark talking about how the Secretary of Defense planned to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years… start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
Discourse domination has always been the most powerful tool to frame the setting for a potential conflict. Coming after the justifications heard to legitimize previous and potential interventions—weapons of mass destruction, crimes against humanity, and nuclear weapons—the case for the petrodollar theory just seems more plausible. In the words of Herman Goering during the Nuremburg trials, “it is always a simple matter to drag people along to [war]… all you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
Now why do we need a preemptive strike on Iran again?With the two month IndyCar rain delay at Texas nearly over, we look back at the last time two races were run at the track – the 2011 Firestone Twin 275s.
As IndyCar fans prepare for the resumption of the 2016 Firestone 600 some two and a half months after it started, they may not remember that Texas has been home to some unique IndyCar races in the past – particularly the Firestone Twin 275s five years ago.
In 2011, IndyCar and Texas Motor Speedway divided the 550 kilometer single-race distance into two 114-lap shootouts. The Firestone Twin 275s would only last for one year before returning to one full race, but there are many memories of that night – both exciting and controversial.
While the event is often remembered for being the first oval victory for Team Penske driver Will Power, it’s also known for a number of quirks.
The first was the sheer number of entrants. Thirty cars were entered for the race at Texas, a theme that continued at other tracks in 2011. Much of this could be attributed to that being the final season of the IR-05 Dallara chassis, thus the lack of worry about tearing up too much equipment.
Then there was the controversial qualifying format. The first of the Twin 275s had its grid set based on qualifying speeds, but then the second was a blind draw – in reverse order from how they finished in the first race. This ended up sending Dario Franchitti from winning the first race to starting 28th in the second one.
But that proved to not be much of a hindrance to him, or his team overall. Chip Ganassi Racing continued to flex their muscle as Franchitti and Scott Dixon finished first and second in the first race and combined for 7th and 2nd in the second.
With each of them taking a victory, the Firestone Twin 275s would set up the battle for the championship going into the second half of the season between Power and Franchitti.
Check out the full broadcast of the 2011 Firestone Twin 275s from Texas Motor Speedway below, as shown on Versus (now NBCSN) in the United States. Bob Jenkins, Jon Beekhuis, and the late Dan Wheldon called the race from the booth, with Kevin Lee, Lindy Thackston, and Robbie Floyd on pit road:
Is Power going to find similar success this weekend at Texas? Tune in tomorrow night as the 2016 Firestone 600 resumes from Texas Motor Speedway at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET with the broadcast on NBCSN.Club Nintendo Europe has been updated with a new reward. For 6,000 stars, members can receive a Captain Toad Figurine Lamp.
This amazing Captain Toad Figurine Lamp is now available in the Club Nintendo Stars Catalogue! http://t.co/Gg28xS65Iy pic.twitter.com/VBrx2BSzFT — Nintendo of Europe (@NintendoEurope) June 29, 2015
Here’s a description of the lamp:
Plan your adventures in the soft light of this Captain Toad figurine lamp! Whether you’re planning a treasure hunt or getting ready for a Toad-sized nap, let Captain Toad’s headlamp guide the way! Approximately 12cm tall, made of ABS, transparent ABS and PVC.
Club Nintendo members in Europe can place an order for the reward here. Hit up the gallery below for a few images.
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PocketExcitement builds each year about the growing number of downtown dining options for Edmontonians. So it’s no surprise that this year’s Downtown Dining Week, the 13th annual affair, is the biggest ever, pulling together 36 eateries in a celebration of great meals at discount prices.
A strong food culture is developing downtown where young and innovative chefs communicate and work together, says Katherine Hoy, marketing director of the Downtown Business Association, which sponsors the event. “Downtown, you see a lot of independents, and that’s different from other parts of Edmonton, with people thinking outside of the box and taking risks. That’s what’s making the downtown dining district really interesting.”
Newcomers to this year’s Downtown Dining Week are Alberta Hotel Bar and Kitchen, Bodega Tapas and Wine Bar, Pampa Brazilian Steakhouse and Cavern cheese shop and wine bar. Downtown Dining Week runs March 11 to 20 and sees restaurants offering set, two-course lunches for $15, three-course dinners for $28 or an executive dinner for $48.
Spencer Thompson, 27, is new to the extravaganza. As executive chef of Alberta Hotel Bar and Kitchen, which opened in November, the NAIT grad has developed a lunch and dinner menu for Downtown Dining Week that features, among other tasty morsels, Alberta lamb ribs. The highlight, however, is the dessert by pastry chef Kai Wong. It’s the restaurant’s molten chocolate cake, a signature dish made of chocolate fondant and served with warm caramel sauce and house-made banana ice cream.
I spoke with Thompson about his new restaurant, located at 9802 Jasper Ave. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Q: How would you describe the food at the Alberta Hotel Bar and Kitchen?
A: It’s farm to fork. We have a small farm, eight acres, near Lacombe. This season, we’re growing the whole gamut, from potatoes to radishes to tomatoes, green beans, carrots, garlic, a few varieties of squash. We’re trying to find heirloom vegetables native to Alberta, and over the next five years I want to make connections with the people who save those seeds.
But we’re also about overall excellent ingredients that we can stand behind, like Italian truffles and Belgian chocolate. It’s simple, comfort food refined on the plate. We tweak it so it’s beautiful when presented. It comes back to people eating first with their eyes. It’s how you establish clientele.
Q: Who are your chef influences?
A: In town, it’s chef Sonny Sung of Bistecca. He pushed and mentored me for the first five years of my career and really made me fall in love with the industry. Outside of Edmonton, Thomas Keller (of The French Laundry in Napa Valley and Per Se in New York) has done so much for the industry. You can look to him to learn how to be a leader. Leadership is about giving your team responsibility and making them go to the next level. Keller’s main guys have moved on and opened their own spots. It’s cool how you can have an effect on the industry that way, even in Edmonton.
Q: What’s your favourite kitchen tool?
A: It’s the vacuum sealer. You can compress vegetable and fruits. But it’s also the way we package things in the cooler or in dry storage. It makes everything so efficient, so you don’t have to hunt for things. Plus if you freeze, the product lasts for three months, intact, with no freezer burn.
Q: What’s your go-to, quick and delicious meal at home?
A: A pasta dish with Parmesan cheese, really good olive oil, a dried chorizo and fresh greens.
Q: What have you noticed as a chef about the downtown dining scene?
A: It’s really taking off. Restaurateurs are more and more creative with their spaces. It’s making for a lot of really healthy competition. You have restaurants that have been killing it for 30 years, and the young guys doing start-ups and their own thing.
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Follow me on Twitter @eatmywordsblog.Food Luring More Visitors to Hawai‘i
Experts say culinary tourism is on the rise, both in the Islands and around the world.
By Catherine Toth Fox
The culinary tourism panel at last week’s Hawai‘i Tourism Conference—from left, chef Roy Yamaguchi, chef Jonathan Waxman, farmer Dean Okimoto, tour company owner Randy King and moderator Adam Richman—shared their love for travel and food and how that combination can benefit the state’s No. 1 industry.
Photo: Courtesy of Hawai‘i Tourism Authority
Browsing the Instagram feed of TV host and celebrity eater Adam Richman, it’s obvious this guy loves to eat in the Islands.
Kalbi, Laotian fried chicken from The Pig & The Lady, the cornflake French toast from Lee Anne Wong’s Koko Head Café—Richman knows where to get the kind of food we (locals) like to eat ourselves. At last week’s Hawai‘i Tourism Conference, he spouted off names of local dishes and eateries like he grew up here: manapua from Char Hung Sut, pipi kaula from Helena’s Hawaiian Food and yaki o paʻiʻai from Mud Hen Water. He’s dined at Rainbow Drive-In, Side Street Inn, Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck, Eating House 1849, even Papa Ole’s Kitchen hidden in a strip mall in Hau‘ula that’s so under the radar, it could be considered a local foodie trade secret.
Yet there he was, standing on a stage in front of hundreds of people who attended the Hawai‘i Tourism Conference, sharing, with extreme enthusiasm, his love for Hawai‘i’s food scene.
“When I heard the Cheesecake Factory in Waikīkī was the most profitable one in the world, it broke my heart,” Richman said.
Like Anthony Bourdain and other well-traveled celebrity chefs, Richman, with nearly 180,000 followers on Instagram, is a major influencer in the world of culinary tourism, which is, simply put, the pursuit of unique and memorable eating and drinking experiences while traveling. Where Richman goes, his fans will follow.
“More and more people are traveling with food in mind,” Richman said. “When I was filming in Italy, you know I was texting [chef] Mario Batali in Rome and asking him where the hell am I going … Food is the one language we all speak. And more than ever, we are savvier eaters.”
An astounding 95 percent of American travelers say they’re interested in some kind of unique food experience when they travel, according to the 2016 Food Travel Monitor, a global study conducted by the World Food Travel Association. That’s up from 47 percent in 2013.
The surge in interest has to do with the combination of food-focused media—Food Network, BuzzFeed Food, American’s Test Kitchen podcast—the farm-to-table movement, and high-profile food events including food festivals.
“People want to eat at Sukiyabashi Jiro and see [owner] Jiro [Ono] because of the movie [Jiro Dreams of Sushi] or because they saw Anthony Bourdain eating there just as much as they want to go to Harajuku because of Gwen Stefani,” Richman said.
Culinary tourism was the focus of Friday’s panel discussion, “From Farmer’s Market to Market Square: The Global Guide to Culinary Tourism,” at the conference. Richman moderated a panel that consisted of chef Roy Yamaguchi, chef Jonathan Waxman, farmer Dean Okimoto and Randy King, owner and president of Seawind Tours.
Yamaguchi, who recently opened his second restaurant in Waikīkī—Eating House 1849—at the new International Market Place, says culture and food are interwoven. You can’t separate the two.
“When I travel, I like to learn about the different cultures and cuisines. That’s important to me,” he said. “With my food, I try to create a cultural experience … I try to get people to understand that it’s not just about the food, but it’s about where that food comes from.”
So what does that mean for Hawai‘i?
It means there’s an opportunity for restaurants and entrepreneurs to tap into this growing segment of tourism, our state’s No. 1 economy.
“What tourists want is out of the ordinary, they want something special, they want that bespoke experience,” said Waxman, who recalled a recent trip to Hawai‘i Island, where he visited Parker Ranch and an abalone farm. “They don’t want the Cheesecake Factory.”
The challenge is, though, getting tourists to venture out of Waikīkī and explore other neighborhoods for more authentic cuisine.
“The Cheesecake Factory is successful because of its location [on Kalākaua Avenue] and brand recognition,” King said. “It’s all about research and education. When people first come to Hawai‘i, they don’t know these [other, more local] places. All they want to do is eat in Waikīkī.”
It’s a good reminder to us: We have some of the most interesting, sought-after food right in own neighborhoods. So get out there and explore!They even have their own Deep Throat, a "highly placed American intelligence source" they call Condor, whose credibility was apparently so great that if he confirmed something, Time published it as "fact, without attribution." Condor's utterances are often Delphic: "You just want to look around. Not everything is as it appears." There are clandestine meetings in London and the Caribbean, in train stations and aboard a 747 bound for Casablanca. Mr. Beaty remarks to Mr. Gwynne, "I can't decide whether we still work for Time or we're in the middle of a spy novel."
They limn the B.C.C.I. story in a way that's both lucid and absorbing, providing necessary historical background but not impeding the narrative momentum. For all its intrigue, though, B.C.C.I. lacks Watergate's satisfying dramatic arc. The contours of the story are too unwieldy. Even the institution's origins are murky: it was created by a slick Pakistani banker named Agha Hasan Abedi, a Shiite Muslim who dreamed of creating a multinational banking empire out of the oil money in which the Arab states were awash in the 1970's. Mr. Abedi, a natty dresser with a fondness for pink shirts, pinstripes and lizard-skin shoes, schmoozed and bribed his way through the Middle East and then around the world, doing favors here and setting branches up there, soon building a bank holding company that when it was shut down by international bank regulators in 1991 had assets of more than $20 billion.
"The enduring mystery at the heart of the BCCI affair," the authors write, was why the bank got away with it for so many years. They assert that as early as 1979, United States intelligence knew about B.C.C.I.'s criminal involvement with terrorists and drug dealers -- but Washington did nothing until compelled by unrelenting pressure from Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney.
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Why? The United States Government (like those of France, England, Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia and like so many other Governments around the world) was too deeply entangled in B.C.C.I.'s web. According to Mr. Beaty and Mr. Gwynne, both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency kept slush funds with B.C.C.I. to finance covert operations.
Indeed, B.C.C.I.'s cloak-and-dagger ways are said in the book to have been especially attractive to William Casey, the late Director of Central Intelligence, who found the bank quite handy in supplying the Afghan rebels with weapons at a time when American involvement had to be kept sub rosa. Moreover, the authors say, any investigation of B.C.C.I. would have revealed far too much about the C.I.A.'s role in the Iran-contra scandal -- since the bank, they say, was used by the National Security Council, Lieut. Col. Oliver North and Mr. Casey in both arming Iranian extremists and helping the Nicaraguan rebels.
And in 1991, they say, an investigation also would have implicated the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi -- and therefore imperiled the fragile alliance that the Bush Administration had forged to fight the war against Iraq. (Of course, an inquiry could also have found, they note, that B.C.C.I. had -- through the Atlanta branch of Italy's Banco Nazionale del Lavoro -- helped pay for Saddam Hussein's military buildup.)
As of this writing, the former Secretary of Defense and ultimate Washington insider, Clark M. Clifford, and his law partner and protege, Robert A. Altman, are on trial in New York (Mr. Clifford in absentia), charged with taking millions of dollars in bribes to help B.C.C.I. illegally buy First American Bankshares, a large Washington bank holding company that they headed.
"The Outlaw Bank" calls their credibility into serious doubt, asserting that Mr. Clifford "lied" when he insisted he'd never made any more than $1 million from B.C.C.I.; it was more like $21 million, they say, of which $1.5 million "looks very much like a kickback" for easing B.C.C.I.'s way through American interstate banking law. In a revealing vignette, they recall Mr. Clifford calling Mr. Beaty and, "in his sonorous voice," protesting his innocence while making a "particularly strange threat": How could the journalists treat him so shabbily? "After all," they quote him as saying, "I handled [ Time's ] problems with the postal commission for years: I think you should ask somebody about that."
Whatever the outcome of the trial, the B.C.C.I. affair effectively turned on its head the old saw that if you borrow a hundred bucks, the bank owns you, but if you borrow a hundred million, you own the bank. For well over a decade, by means of bribery, extortion and influence-peddling, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International all but owned its clients.I like the idea of an album as world or a landscape that you enter, or that surrounds you. Can you picture what that space looks like? Are there any colors?
EVE: There’s a tropical element inherently, so maybe like… light blue?
HUGO: Some of the sonic elements are sort of cold or harsh in a way that clashes with that. There are sounds in there that are futuristic. There are certain samples that are idiomatic of hip-hop or contemporary electronic music that don’t necessarily evoke tropical imagery in the way some of the guitar sounds — which are like steel drums — do. I don’t think it would be accurate to say it’s a sunny-sounding record; I think there’s an equal force that’s the opposite of that.
Wait — the steel drum sound is coming from the guitar? That’s so cool.
KASRA: Every sound you hear is almost always gonna be coming from the guitar, or, in a couple exceptions, from a sample that’s been overlaid after. But it’s almost all guitar-based. There’s no keyboard on the record.
Are you guys good with techy stuff?
KASRA: None of us are very techy.
EVE: It’s super simple technology. Kasra also has this plastic pedal board from eBay or whatever, that triggers sounds.
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KASRA: It’s from the ’80s. It’s like a synthesizer. It’s fairly simple.
HUGO: We’re not a band that would have computers on stage. But there was some computer-y editing stuff that had to happen.
EVE: We’re definitely not a technical band. A lot of people think that we are, that we’ve all gone to music school or something. I don’t know if we’ve brought it on ourselves. But at the core of it we’re very much a regular band. We practice a lot and write weird parts For me, it’s all based on the feel.
KASRA: We’re all curious, adventurous listeners. There’s always been an unwritten rule in our band that there are no rules. Nothing’s off-limits. We’re always trying to do something different. We’ve been playing together for so long, that you wanna do something that’s gonna be creatively stimulating for the other members as well. It’s not like we’re trying to impress each other, it’s us trying something new because we’re gonna get bored if we keep doing the same thing.
HUGO: We never had a conversation about the kind of band we wanted to be, which is a totally normal thing for a band to do when they get together.
EVE: We came together having some musical influences in common, but not really knowing what we were capable of making.
HUGO: The first time I ever met Eve was the first band practice we ever had, for example. It’s not like we had preconceived notions about what kind of musicians we were, or what our aspirations were as individuals creatively. This maybe doesn’t pertain to everyone, because the three of them were friends before. But my getting to know the other three was through writing and playing the music. The conversation about the kind of music we want to make has been this conversation that’s been going on for the entirety of…
EVE: Our band is that conversation.
KASRA: I think people assume more intentionality than there actually is in our band. I’m sure this is true for a lot of bands, but it just like, happens. Because there’s not just one songwriter and there’s not a hierarchy, it’s kind of impossible to maintain a cohesive vision. There’s no control over what happens, in a way.The first cannabis vaporiser is here (Picture: Metro)
The first legal cannabis vaporiser has hit the UK, intended for medicinal use.
Creators of the MediPen say their revolutionary device contains a very respectable dose of CBD, an active ingredient in the cannabis plant with a vast array of positive benefits and health uses.
CBD does not produce any of the psychoactive effects associated with traditional cannabis use, such as paranoia or anxiety.
A spokesman told Metro.co.uk: ‘As the MediPen does not contain any THC it is completely legal in the UK and does not produce any of the negative mind-altering effects associated with traditional cannabis use.’
Amy Yapp, who suffers from fibromyalgia (a condition which causes muscular pain, aches and tenderness) has reviewed the MediPen.
She doesn’t usually use cannabis, but her condition was causing a lot of pain, so despite early scepticism, she decided to go ahead with the trial.
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Ms Yapp said that while she still had uncomfortable twinges, her pain was a lot less intense than usual.
In a later video, she added: ‘It’s not cannabis as if you’re having a joint, it’s just the oils.
‘I’ve finally found something I’m happy with.’
Yapp hadn’t felt the need to take as much pain medication, but she did warn: ‘If you take too much in one go you do get a burn at the back of your throat.’
Other users have taken to Facebook to share their reviews of the MediPen:
I've had my medipen for a week now and it's helped me control my moods wey better! My partner is over the moon for… Posted by Val Aviv on Monday, June 22, 2015
https://www.facebook.com/bethlouisaoliver/posts |
pffIzzk — FreedomFilmLLC.com (@FreedomFilmLLC) August 21, 2015
Two others were also hospitalized, including French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, who suffered from a hand injury. Hughes reportedly hurt his hand while breaking glass to set off an alarm.
Authorities arrested the suspect once the train stopped in the French town of Arras, 115 miles north of Paris. Video from aboard the train, which has been posted on YouTube, shows the aftermath of the attack, with the suspect on the ground, his legs in the air.
"Thanks to the calm of two American passengers, we have avoided a tragedy," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said earlier in the day.
U.S. President Barack Obama also praised the good samaritans, according to a White House statement.
“Echoing the statements of French authorities, the president expressed his profound gratitude for the courage and quick thinking of several passengers, including U.S. service members, who selflessly subdued the attacker.... it is clear that their heroic actions may have prevented a far worse tragedy."
Norman said if Stone wasn't quick to respond there could have been even more bloodshed on the train heading from Amsterdam to Paris.
"It could have been a real carnage, there's no question about that," Norman said, according to Reuters.Image caption A rally by disabled people in Athens drew attention to their plight last month
A Greek government plan to categorise paedophiles and pyromaniacs as "disabled" has alarmed disability groups, who fear it could undermine their state benefits.
The new code could be used "to cut the number of disabled people with a right to disability benefits", the groups' national leader, Yannis Vardakastanis, told BBC News.
Indebted Greece is slashing state aid.
Disabled Greeks rallied in December, demanding job and benefit protection.
Mr Vardakastanis, head of the National Confederation of Disabled People, said the new code would simplify the definition of disability, limiting it to medical conditions.
"Disability is if society doesn't give you what you need to be like others. We want the Greek government to really protect vulnerable groups from getting deeper into poverty, exclusion and discrimination."
The new government "disability" list also includes compulsive gamblers, fetishists, exhibitionists and sado-masochists, the Associated Press news agency reports.
The Greek Labour Ministry said a panel of medical experts had decided to include such behavioural disorders on the list, but the new categories did not signify benefit entitlement.
The new list was drawn up because of "the need to update the old regulation, which had been in place since 1993", the statement said on Tuesday.
"No insured citizen has received any benefit under the new rates," the statement explained.
Mr Vardakastanis, who is blind, said the confederation was in talks with Labour Minister Giorgos Koutroumanis to try to get the new code changed before it goes to the Greek parliament, where a vote would make it law.
There is a risk, he said, that the new disability scale would work cumulatively, "so a person gets 20 per cent for one thing, then more for something else - and when they reach 67%, they are entitled to benefits".
The system might be used "as a guillotine to cut the numbers [of claimants]", he said.
A blind and unemployed person in Greece is entitled to 700 euros (£580; $896) a month in disability benefit, and a blind person in a job gets 360 euros, according to Mr Vardakastanis, who is blind himself.
The Greek state is more than 350bn euros in debt and the government has been told by the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to cut spending drastically.
The release of a second urgently needed EU-IMF bailout, worth 130bn euros, is conditional on deep austerity cuts. That means more hardship for vulnerable sections of Greek society, such as those who rely on welfare benefits.The fair catch kick is a rule at the professional and high school levels of American football that allows a team that has just made a fair catch to attempt a free kick[A] from the spot of the catch. The kick must be either a place kick or a drop kick, and if it passes over the crossbar and between the goalposts of the defensive team's goal, a field goal, worth three points, is awarded to the offensive team.
The fair catch kick has its origins in rugby football. The rule is considered to be obscure and unusual, as most fair catches are made well out of field goal range, and in most cases a team that has a fair catch within theoretical range will attempt a normal drive to score a touchdown. The fair catch kick is generally used when a team has fair caught a ball within field goal range and there is insufficient time to score a touchdown. At the professional level, the last successful fair catch kick was made in 1976.
Rule [ edit ]
The fair catch kick rule states that, after a player has successfully made a fair catch or has been awarded a fair catch (as the result of a penalty such as kick catch interference), their team can attempt a kick from the spot of the catch;[1][2] the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) rulebook also allows a kick to be made if the down following the fair catch or awarded fair catch has to be replayed.[1] Prior to the kick, the opposing team must be lined up at least ten yards beyond the spot of the ball.[3][4] The kick itself can be either a place kick or drop kick;[5][6] a kicking tee cannot be used at the professional level, but use of a tee up to two inches in height is permitted at the high school level.[4][7] Like other field goal attempts, the kicking team is awarded three points if the kick goes above the crossbar and between the goalposts of the opposing team's goal and did not touch a player of the offensive team after the kick.[8][9] If the attempt fails, the opposing team is awarded control of the ball from the spot of the kick.[10][11] The opposing team can also return the kick if it does not go out of bounds.[3][11]
In the NFHS rulebook, the fair catch kick is specifically defined as a free kick.[12] The National Football League (NFL) rulebook specifically states that the fair catch kick is not a free kick,[4] instead considering the fair catch kick to be a distinct type of kick.[13] Despite this, reporters at both levels describe the fair catch kick as a free kick.[14][15][16]
History [ edit ]
The fair catch kick found in American football originated in rugby football. A similar rule in rugby, the goal from mark, allowed a player who had fair caught a ball to attempt an uncontested free kick from the spot of the fair catch. Both major codes of rugby have eliminated the rule; rugby league abolished the goal from mark in 1922, and rugby union removed it in 1977.[17] Australian rules football has retained the rule, and it is a vital part of the Australian game; a "fair catch" of a ball kicked more than 15 meters in the air is called a "mark", and the player making the mark is then awarded a free kick.[18] The fair catch kick has been present in the National Football League (NFL) rulebook since the league's inception,[14] and also remains in the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) rulebook.[19] The fair catch kick is not legal in National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) football (nor is it legal for high school football in Massachusetts and Texas, which play largely by NCAA rules with a few modifications); the NCAA abolished the fair catch in 1950, but re-added it a year later. When the fair catch returned to the rulebook, however, the option to attempt a kick after the fair catch was removed.[20]
Usage [ edit ]
The fair catch kick rule is very rarely invoked,[14][16][17] and is one of the rarest plays in football.[16][17] The rule has been regarded as "obscure",[14][15] "bizarre",[17] and "quirky".[21] A unique set of circumstances is required for a fair catch kick to be a viable option. For one, the fair catch would need to be made at a point on the field where a field goal attempt has a reasonable chance of being successful;[22] most fair catches are made well outside of field goal range (even more so since 1974, when the goal posts were moved back to the end line, adding 10 yards to such attempts).[23]
Furthermore, for a fair catch kick to be a viable option near the end of the fourth quarter, the team attempting the kick needs to be either tied or behind by three points or fewer; even if such a situation were to occur, a coach might still decline to attempt a fair catch kick. For example, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, known for his knowledge and utilization of obscure football rules, declined the opportunity to attempt a 75-yard fair catch kick at the end of Super Bowl LI; although kicker Stephen Gostkowski was able to kick the ball that far and the game was tied, Belichick felt the risk of a return touchdown by the opposing team off a failed kick outweighed the opportunity to score from the kick.[24] Art McNally, who led the officiating department of the National Football League from 1968 to 1990, notes that, even in the event a fair catch is made within field goal range, most teams would attempt to score a touchdown unless there is not enough time left to score one.[25] Accordingly, most fair catch kick attempts occur when a team has fair-caught a ball from a punt from deep in their opponent's territory, and there is not enough time left in the half to go for a touchdown.[17]
Despite its drawbacks, there are several unique advantages to using the fair catch kick. Because the defense is required to be ten yards beyond the spot of the kick, the kicker can take a running start before kicking as opposed to the typical two steps taken on regular field goal attempts. Similarly, the kicker does not have to worry about a low snap because the ball is not snapped. The defense is not able to block the kick, allowing the kicker to give the ball a lower trajectory than usual. The fair catch kick would also be of a shorter distance than a normal field goal attempt from the same spot, because the fair catch kick is taken from the spot of the catch, while a typical field goal is taken seven yards back from the line of scrimmage.[22]
Known attempts in the NFL [ edit ]
The following tables contain all confirmed fair catch kick attempts in the NFL; the NFL does not keep a record of fair catch kick attempts, so the true number of attempts is unknown.[25] Out of the twenty-four recorded fair catch kick attempts in non-exhibition games, only six were successful; all five known attempts in exhibition games were unsuccessful. With the exception of the second recorded attempt, which was made in the 3rd quarter, all fair catch kick attempts were made within the last thirty seconds of either the 2nd or 4th quarter. The last successful attempt was made in 1976 by Ray Wersching of the San Diego Chargers (45 yards), and the longest successful attempt was made in 1964 by Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers (52 yards). The most recent fair catch kick attempt was by San Francisco 49ers kicker Phil Dawson, who missed a 71-yard fair catch kick on September 26, 2013.
Regular season and post-season games [ edit ]
Exhibition games [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Notes
FootnotesWith a clear goal of releasing the Beta of Qrator this upcoming June, the Synereo team is deeply engaged in design and development. In the following weeks, we’ll be giving our undivided attention to perfecting Qrator, the tool beginning to realize the long-term vision of a Liberated Attention Economy.
We concentrate our efforts on two tightly linked fronts: Technology and Design.
On the Technological front, we are close to completing our back-end server, created such that it would be simple to later mirror on the decentralized web. This server keeps user information and identities, identifies interactions with content, generates unique user links, and keeps track of all microtransactions. Our developers are now integrating it with the Omni Protocol-based transaction server, allowing our system to synchronize with the blockchain for the secure handling of AMPs.
In addition, we’re fine-tuning the Attention Economy model to maximize gains for creators and curators alike, in a fair and transparent approach that benefits all. We’ll flesh out its mechanism in an upcoming post.
Encouraged by the alpha testing success, backed by a solid technological infrastructure ready and running, and having a clear vision as for what Qrator should do, much is happening on the Design front as well. We’ve recently joined forces with Reuben Rosh, an acclaimed and experienced designer, helping us craft a sharp user experience with his expertise. As a browser extension meant to be a faithful companion, accompanying you on your various web adventures, we’re designing Qrator to be beautiful and functional, non-intrusive yet immediately available, helpful, informative and friendly. We’re giving special attention to social network functionalities, aiming to make it effortless not only to discover quality content through Qrator, but also to support and connect with the people who create and curate it.
In conclusion, after officially announcing Qrator last week, we’re full steam ahead on our way to realize the vision of a Liberated Network. As our work progresses, we’ll keep you updated at key points of development.
We appreciate your attention,
— The Synereo Team
p.s. –
Happy Passover!
Due to the holiday, we’ll publish our next blog post in two weeks.With the help of federal funding, Arlington will increase the number of Capital Bikeshare stations along and near the scenic George Washington Memorial Parkway from one station to nine stations, according to a news release from the County.
"The George Washington Memorial Parkway, one of our national treasures, is a great place to ride a bike," said Arlington County Board Chair Mary Hynes, in the release. "Expanding our very successful Capital Bikeshare program to the parkway will give visitors a fun, healthful option for getting around this beautiful national park." Here's more about the new stations, from the release:
The eight new stations will help fill Capital Bikeshare gaps between Arlington County, Washington, D.C. and the City of Alexandria, and give visitors new options for visiting the parkway and its iconic vistas of the Potomac River and the National Capital Monuments.
The Arlington County Board voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with federal and state authorities to accept federal funding for the installation of eight Capital Bikeshare stations along the parkway. The only bikeshare station now on parkway property is at the Iwo Jima Memorial on North Meade Street. (To read the staff report, visit the County website. Scroll down to Item #30 on the Agenda for the July 18, 2015 Regular County Board Meeting.)
The Federal Lands Access Program awarded the County the grant funds in March 2014. The County has been working since then on an agreement with the Federal Highway Administration's Eastern Federal Lands Highway Division and the National Park Service, culminating in the MOA approved today by the County Board. The MOA will allow the County to be reimbursed with the grant funds for expenses of installing the new Bikeshare stations. The project agreement includes Arlington County, Eastern Federal Lands Highway Division, National Park Service and the Virginia Department of Transportation.
Eight proposed station locations
The County has proposed the following new Capital Bikeshare station locations:
Arlington National Cemetery
Pentagon
Parking lot serving the parkway and Theodore Roosevelt Island
Gravelly Point Park
Crystal City
Rosslyn
Joint Base Myer/Henderson Hall
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport
Each station will consist of 14 to 20 docks, based on the location's likely demand, plus a kiosk for purchase of Bikeshare memberships. The station sizes and locations will be decided by collaborative planning with each of the property owners, which include the National Park Service, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and Department of Defense.
The new stations will be owned by Arlington County and operated by its Bikeshare contractor. Installation is estimated to begin in summer 2016 and then continue for a year as approvals from property owners, and any needed permits or easements, are received.
County to provide matching funds
The Federal Lands Access Program is a relatively new program, created under the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), to improve transportation facilities that provide access to, are adjacent to, or are located on federal lands. The federal grant for this Bikeshare project is for up to $286,000, which will be matched by $215,000 in dedicated transportation-only funds from the County.
About Capital Bikeshare
Capital Bikeshare is a joint program of Arlington County, Washington, D.C., the City of Alexandria and Montgomery County. Members use a key fob to check out a bike from a docking station, ride to their destination and return the bike to another docking station. The first 30 minutes of each trip is free. There are more than 350 stations and 3,000 bikes in the region.The only way to carry your dice.
Last week, the World Team Championship for Guild Ball took place in Belgium. If you’ve never followed the WTC before, it is basically the olympics of Guild Ball, close to 100 different coaches from around the world saved, studied and trained for this tournament and fought to win glory for their respective countries. In the end, Germany took home the gold, but in my eyes, there was another champion who won glory, Greg Day.
Greg Day was team captain for England 2, and while he didn’t win the gold medal for his country he single-handedly destroyed all the perceptions about Butchers by finishing 4-1 with a lineup that featured Ox has his only captain and also starred Shank in every game.
Ox and Shank are not players that many US Guild Ball coaches expected to see being played in an event as high-caliber as the WTC. Hell, US Guild Ball coaches probably didn’t even expect to see a Fillet-captained Butchers line-up do well at the WTC.
Embedded below is an edited sounded clip from from Strictly The Worst’s episode 24, they are a very competitive Chicago-based group (that also represented the USA at the WTC) and I think their less-than-optimistic perception of Butchers is shared by many US coaches.
But Greg Day is not an American, and if there’s one thing I learned after watching the finals of the WTC (Germany vs Germany) it was that there are many competitive metas outside of the US and that these metas have vastly different perceptions than us. For example, look at Hunters; they’re almost unanimously considered a sub-optimal guild in the US. However, in other parts of the world they are not only considered strong, but some metas even consider Hunters to be one of the strongest Guilds in the game! If you don’t believe me take a listen to Double Dodge’s episode 22. They interview Peter Williamson, a Newzealander who won the Australian Nationals with Hunters.
So, whether it was through British collaboration or individual genius, I believe Greg Day’s unique list composition and exceptional performance at the WTC with the Butchers disproves all the negative perceptions that is commonly believed. Ox is not worse than Fillet. Shank does not need a buff. And the Butchers, despite popular opinion, are very competitive.
Interview with Greg Day
1.) There are people that believe Shank is unplayable right now and needs a buff. Yet, you played Shank in all five rounds. Why do you play Shank?
Shank has a number of things in his favour. He has a good playbook, including the ability to tackle on 2 net hits. He has the biggest potential threat distance of any player in the Butchers team. There are only three Butcher players with two-inch melee zones and he is by far the fastest; this makes him the player of choice for me to put damage on players with unpredictable movement such as Midas or Obulus. Also, you can do a lot of amusing tricks with Shank, for example, he can go between Brick and Marbles and engage them both so neither can counter charge. He is one of the few Butchers who can use counter attack to reliably escape an opponent via ‘Where’d He Go’ rather than just to do damage which is what I often do, especially with Boiler.
Perhaps an example of what Shank can do might be useful, In my game at the WTC against Zach in USA 2 I used Shank as the last activation in turn two. Zach had scored a goal so I kicked the ball out to Shank, Shank then moved up the pitch and hit Marbles three times for 6 damage and 3 points of momentum. This gave me a +2 roll to go first and I activated Shank with three influence. He hit Marbles once, taking him out, and moved up the pitch 5 inches to stand just outside of Bricks countercharge (Ox had taken out Brick the turn before and he was lurking near the goal). Shank used ‘Where’d He Go’ to move within 4″ of the goal and avoid any counter charges from Brick before using his third point of influence to take a three dice tap in (due to the two momentum for killing Marbles) and win the game. [He is] not a player I feel who needs a buff and not atypical of how I used him throughout the event.
2.) Similar to Shank, Ox has been labeled as “not competitive”, yet you played a 10-man roster with ONLY Ox as your captain. Why did you choose to bring only Ox to the WTC?
I brought Ox on his own to the WTC because I find him much more of a flexible piece and team player than Fillet. I found once I had taken Fillets activation the rest of the team did very little and most of what she did I could do with Shank for half the influence cost. If Ox is on the pitch the action of the game tends to revolve around him as opponents often try to take him out which brings targets into range for the rest of the team. If Ox is countered and pushed away his basic presence helps the rest of his team like a free tooled up. That’s ignoring the fact he can use his influence to put out Butchery or remove armour, making takeouts easier. All Fillet can do if counter attacked out of the opponents melee zone is throw out pain circle. Both players kicks are reliably the same so both can score though I admit it is easier to do with Fillet. I also feel Fillet works best with a lot of set up, e.g. Swift Stance from Boiler, Tooled Up from Meathook etc. Ox doesnt need this setup. With his legendary up and five influence he can oneshot almost any player on the pitch from full health (disclaimer I havent tried this against Fangtooth). I have taken out Corsair, Tapper, Veteran Rage, Casket, Ballista, Hammer and Avarice with a first activation legendary. Fillet just can’t do this reliably.
3.) What matchups do you think are favorable for Ox? What matchups do you think are problematic for Ox?
For me an Ox team can outfight almost anybody he is especially good against low defence opponents such as Masons and Brewers but I would take him into any team. The hardest team to play against for me is Morticians because of Casket, Ox unlike Fillet is easy to get out of his lines via Lure, Puppet Master or Scapel’s push dodge and then attacked by the rest of the team. And if he does get Casket Timed that is a problem for the team. However, interestingly if Ox has used Tough Skin or been Swift Stanced then the Morts can’t reliably get him in the box and if he does end up standing in the middle of the Morts team, putting out his aura, then that’s just good for your team.
4.) Truffles made your 10-man roster but wasn’t brought out during the WTC. What matchups do you prefer to bring Truffles in over Princess? Also, how do you utilize the pig?
I use Truffles against Alchemists because I prefer to use Veteran Brisket in place of Boiler. Truffles is used to deal with Katalyst by engaging him and shutting down charges. Truffles can also knock him down if he tries to move away. Other than that I tend to want to use Boiler so I normally want Princess for her buff.
5.) Tenderizer, an often overlook Butcher was utilized in all five of your games. Do you always play with a goalie or are there games where he isn’t brought in? If so, who is his replacement?
I like Tenderiser because he doesn’t need influence. With my typical team this means Boar and Shank can be fully loaded each turn and Boiler and Ox have 7 influence between them. Tenderiser is also there to slow my opponents’ clock as they work round counter charge and also to stop snapshots. If I think my opponent wants a fighting game rather than a scoring game than I tend to replace him with Veteran Brisket so I have an extra scoring option on the pitch and can disengage Boar if my opponent tries to lock him down.
6.) What are Butchers strengths/weaknesses in the current Season 3 meta?
The Butchers strengths are they are straightforward to play. This allows you to pressure your opponents’ clock with quick activations. The Butchers can generate momentum very easily which helps keep their players on the pitch and decide if they want to go first or second each turn. Also, the Butchers can pretty much take out or damage a model enough so an opponent constantly feels like they have to do a sub-optimal activation to use their influence before the model is taken off the board. The Butchers are all at least average speed and Boiler and Veteran Brisket can buff their speed further. They all have an OK kick stat and can play a 2-2 game if necessary.
Butchers can struggle against unpredictable movement and their relatively low health leaves them vulnerable to models taking them out in single activations. The Butchers can struggle to kill the ball against Morticans and Fish but to some extent Tenderiser can mitigate for this.Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study following more than 5,000 Facebook users over six years, from 2005 and 2011, and found that changes in the social network's privacy policies caused users to share more -- not less -- personal data. Lest you think this means that users suddenly trusted the site more, Carnegie Mellon says that Facebookers became more and more protective of their personal details as the social network grew in membership -- and that the uptick in shared information is a result of increasingly granular privacy settings. If you recall, Facebook introduced new in-depth privacy controls in 2010, and the study found that the release of these new settings corresponded to users sharing more personal data, both within their network of friends and with strangers and third-party applications.
It's been quite some time since the new privacy policy was introduced, but the university says the sample group didn't reduce the amount of info shared with non-friends on the network, even as of 2011. The takeaway? Well, it's safe to say that more privacy controls doesn't equal more vigilance in protecting personal data, and it's certainly not a stretch to call Facebook's settings confusing. The researchers' comparison of the struggle for privacy to the eternal plight of Sisyphus? That might be a touch more dramatic.(Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
The Nationals had a chance to catch their breath Monday. They took a one-day respite after a two-month blitz to the National League East title culminated with the bliss of Jordan Zimmermann’s Game 162 no-hitter. Tuesday, they will return to work.
During the four-day layoff between their final regular season game and Game 1 of the National League Division Series, Manager Matt Williams wants the Nationals to “stay in rhythm” and maintain their momentum from a 21-9 finish to the season.
The Nationals will gather at Nationals Park for a “heavy workout,” Williams said. Fielders will take grounders and fly balls, pitchers will play catch and throw bullpen sessions and hitters will take a full batting practice.
On Wednesday, the Nationals will play an intra-squad scrimmage at Nationals Park to mimic a real game. Doug Fister, Gio Gonzalez and Tanner Roark will all throw multiple innings against live hitters. Relievers will toss one inning. The Nationals will also practice specific situations, such as placing runners on bases and practicing bunt plays.
(Neither of those workouts is open to the public or the media.)
On Thursday, the day before Game 1, the Nationals will have a light workout at Nationals Park that is open to the media, along with news conferences for both the Nationals and their opponent, either the Giants or Pirates.
The Nationals will also make their final roster decisions Friday. Their team appears pretty much set, with perhaps the final bullpen spot still undecided. The Pirates’ best hitters – Josh Harrison, Andrew McCutchen and Russell Martin – are right-handed, which could give Rafael Soriano an edge of Jerry Blevins. We’ll likely find out Thursday, but the Nationals have until 10 a.m. Friday to release their roster.Hillary Clinton. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
There's a purposely provocative piece in Politico magazine this week that aims to make the case that Hillary Clinton is going to run for president for a third time in 2020. Citing the scaling back of the Clinton Global Initiative and her plans to write a seventh book as evidence, Matt Latimer concludes: “Yes, barring some calamity, Clinton is running. And this brave columnist will go one step further. Not only will Clinton run again, she has an excellent shot at getting the Democratic Party nomination again.”
Wrong. And not just wrong on Clinton running again. But wrong on the fact that if she runs she could or would have the inside track on the Democratic nomination.
Let's take it piece by piece.
First, the idea that Clinton is angling to run again.
Ask yourself a simple question: Why?
Clinton has now lost twice in runs for the White House. And they were defeats of the devastating variety.
In 2008, Clinton was not only seen as the clear favorite but, up until December 2007, it looked like she would cruise to the nomination as then-Sen. Barack Obama struggled to energize his supporters. Fast forward a few months and it was clear that Clinton was going to lose on delegates alone, but she chose to slug it out all the way until June before bowing to the inevitable.
Then came 2016 when Clinton, again, was seen as the clear favorite for not only the Democratic nomination but also the White House. The Democratic field was significantly less talented than eight years prior, but Clinton was unable to put them away, and Bernie Sanders pushed the nomination all the way to the bitter end. In the general election, Clinton was regarded as a massive favorite against Donald Trump who did, literally, the opposite of what every seasoned campaign aide told him to do for the duration of the campaign. He was engulfed by a scandal regarding sexist comments caught by an “Access Hollywood” mic. She drastically outspent him everywhere. Polling showed she would win easily. And she lost.
One loss like that would be more than enough for most politicians. Two is approaching Greek tragedy levels.
Then there is the fact that Clinton will be 70 this October. She has two young grandchildren. A daughter and son-in-law. A husband. Why commit to spending — at least — two years more away from your family on an activity that has brought you nothing but heartache for the past decade?
The only possible answer is that Clinton is deeply committed to public service. That she promised not to fade away in her concession speech in November 2016.
I'd argue there are lots of ways that someone as high-profile as Clinton could remain relevant — to the country and her party — without running again. National spokeswoman. Fundraiser. Policy maven. Key endorser.
Which brings me to the second point: If Clinton showed signs that she truly is interested in running, Democrats should make very clear that they aren't interested.
Clinton ran two national campaigns. In each, she looked on paper to be a sure thing. In each, she didn't win. Why? Because there was something about her that people didn't like or trust. Her email problems in this past campaign exacerbated that problem, to be sure, but there was always an undercurrent of distrust surrounding her.
It's possible that as the Trump presidency continues, there will be buyer's remorse that benefits Clinton. I wouldn't be surprised if there is polling some time in the next few months that shows Clinton's popularity surging even as Trump's continues to sink.
But what we know about politics is that the perceptions people have of politicians rarely change all that much. Mitt Romney, had he run again in 2016, would have been saddled with the “out of touch rich guy” label he had to wear in 2012. John F. Kerry, if he had run again in 2008, would be the Swiss-cheese ordering, windsurfing Boston Brahmin.
So, too, with Clinton. The second she started to show interest in running for president again, people would remember all of the things they didn't like about her. The same trust and likability issues would dog her. She would be forced to grapple with perception issues beyond her control to fix. And, as the last two campaigns have proven, Clinton simply lacks the candidate skills — and they are significant — to have any chance of fundamentally altering the narrative about her. Had she been able to do so, she would have already done it in time for the 2016 race!
Then there is the matter of Trump. While it is, of course, possible that Trump doesn't make it to the point where he stands for a second term, that seems less than likely at the moment. (Trump has already established a 2020 reelection committee and is raising money into it.) And Trump beat Clinton with a simple message: She is the status quo you hate; I am radical change. She's a politician; I'm not. She is of Washington; I hate Washington.
The best way for Democrats to beat Trump, to my mind, is to not allow him to claim the outsider mantle again. Nominating Clinton would do just that. Sure, Trump will have spent four years in Washington by 2020. But Clinton, in the eyes of lots and lots of voters, will never be able to shake the image of being a traditional Washington politician. It's exactly the sort of race Trump wants to run — against Washington but needing four more years to truly overhaul it.
The simple fact is that the public has had two chances to elect Hillary Clinton president. Neither time has it done so. You can argue forever about her relative qualifications and how she has worked her entire life to hold that one job. But this is a democracy where the electoral college vote decides who the president is. And twice, the public has chosen someone other than Clinton. That's just the reality.
Clinton should not — and I believe will not — run again in 2020. But Democrats would be foolish to, again, place all their bets on Clinton. That time has passed.Get the biggest football 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
Julio Cesar has gone from park player to World Cup hero.
Cesar found himself out in the cold at Queens Park Rangers last season, so just a few months ago he bought his own gloves and secretly went down to his local park to get a game.
The Brazil keeper eventually signed for former team-mate Ryan Nelsen’s MLS club FC Toronto on loan at the end of last season, but feared his World Cup dream had gone.
Cesar has now completed a remarkable comeback to be Brazil’s No.1 and will have the hopes of a nation in his hands when they face Chile in the last 16 on Saturday.
The veteran, set for his 84th cap against Chile, said: “It was a complicated moment because I wasn’t playing for my club because of contractual problems.
“I’d have to go to the park by myself. I even bought some goalkeeper gloves because I didn’t want my team to know about it. Then Toronto was something that happened out of nowhere. Overnight. After talking with a friend who had made that leap, I said, ‘Why not?’
“I have to thank Ryan so much for this opportunity. He said, ‘Come here and you will be ready to play in the World Cup’. If I hadn’t been playing it would’ve been hard to play in the World Cup.
“I am improving with every game, improving my rhythm and enjoying every moment.”
Cesar was not a universally popular choice as Brazil’s No.1 because of his lack of games, but Luiz Felipe Scolari backed him because of his experience and leadership qualities.
It is an incredible show of faith for Cesar, who endured a nightmare two years at QPR – and has already been told there is no way back for him there.
(Image: Clive Mason - FIFA)
So he could win the World Cup for Brazil yet still find himself on football’s scrapheap. Cesar, who has two years left on his contract at QPR, is hoping to find another club this summer with Benfica interested.
Cesar, 34, joined QPR on a free transfer from Inter Milan in 2012, was relegated and then his £80,000-a-week contract priced him out of several moves, including interest from Arsenal.
The following season, QPR boss Harry Redknapp chose former England keeper Rob Green and the only outing Cesar had was a four-goal thrashing at Everton in the FA Cup.
Cesar admits there was self-doubt, but is determined to find World Cup redemption.
“I really primed myself for this World Cup, regardless of the fact some critics did not agree with my choice of going to play in a league that is in theory not strong,” said Cesar.
“I can look in the mirror and say I believe in myself. I made an important save against Mexico to help us get a draw and physically and mentally I am prepared.”
Cesar will need that mental strength on Saturday as Chile will be a huge test.
He added: “The dream of Brazil is to win the title but we’ve only achieved our first objective, which is to qualify from the group. Now we have Chile, which will be a final for us and hopefully after that we have another final, another final and another.”Hedonism II Resort Review – A Single Girls Nude Vacation
Hedonism II is an all-in |
-Lab pact, like it had been in 1978, where basically the Liberals simply went along with Labour in the Callaghan government.”
Sir Andrew said the negotiations faltered because Labour would not agree to the Liberal Democrats’ demand for a referendum on electoral reform.
And he said he was unimpressed with the calibre of the negotiators on both the Labour and Conservative side.
“If you think about it the Tory Party has got a history of business and deals and all that sort of stuff, the Labour Party’s got trade unions and bargaining and all that sort of stuff, the point I was making to my team was, we’re going to be up against some really hard nuts here.
Conservative campaign poster claiming Ed Miliband would be under SNP control in a hung parliament
“[But] when we met Labour we were ready for it and they just didn’t have anything. They weren’t there at all.
“I was really, really surprised that the Conservatives were prepared to come as far as they did in the negotiations.
“They actually delivered on, if you like, the poison pill in that negotiation, which was the AV [alternative vote] referendum bill.
“It would have been a pretty odd situation to have then turned away and said that’s not good enough. Especially as Labour weren’t offering that.”Despite travel conditions and emergency declarations, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday defended the decision not to cancel class for the city’s 1.1 million public school students, by repeatedly reminding parents that he is a public school parent too.
WATCH: De Blasio Gives Winter Storm Update
“I look at this from a number of different perspectives, including that of public school parents,” de Blasio said at a news conference, reiterating several times that he himself is a parent of public school students.
As CBS 2’s Andrea Grymes reported, city schools Chancellor Carmen Farina announced Wednesday night that public schools would remain open Thursday during the storm. Field trips and after-school and PSAL activities were canceled Thursday.
Student attendance amounted to 44.65 percent citywide.
De Blasio, Farina Face Tough Questions On Decision To Keep NYC Public Schools Open During Storm
Speaking to reporters around 11:30 a.m. Thursday, Farina defended the city’s decision to keep schools open.
Web Extra: School Attendance Figures For Thursday, Feb. 13
“The reality is that we make decisions based on what we know at the time,” she said. “Because this storm was so unpredictable, and what we heard last night is not necessarily what we saw this morning.”
She added it had “totally stopped snowing” and has turned into “an absolutely a beautiful day out there right now.”
But to many parents, it was not a beautiful day in the slightest. They found themselves trudging through wind-whipped snow in near-blizzard conditions to get their kids safely to school.
Some viewers were shocked by her comment and expressed their strong opinions on CBS New York’s Facebook page:
Paige Katherine: It is a beautiful day if you are a penguin or a polar bear. I wonder which one Ms. Farina is……
Jc VanderPutten: I think I want to smoke whatever she is smoking. Does she realize what a complete fool she looks like for making that statement. There are cars stuck on parkways. People stuck on trains. Car accidents everywhere. But she thinks it’s a beautiful day! Idiot.
Vera Swensen: No wonder Be Blasio picked Carmen Farina as Chancellor.. She’s an Idiot just like him!!
De Blasio said while there was more snow than originally anticipated, the decision to close schools was “a grey situation.”
@JSchneiderTV Over 500 students absent from my Brooklyn school today (50%). The front of my school at 7:40am pic.twitter.com/cRkd0OQMvn — Bruce Gamsey (@BruceGamsey) February 13, 2014
“We were convinced that kids could get to school this morning and we always emphasize in making these decisions, when you think about 1.1 million kids, so many families depend on their schools as a place for their kids to be during the day, a safe place, a place where they’re not only taught but get nutrition and they are safe from the elements,” he said.
De Blasio said the weather forecast changed over the day, and early on, it did not appear that there would be any major issue for children getting to school.
“We knew, based on the reports of the National Weather Service that we could have as little as 3 inches of snow on ground by time kids walked in the door of our schools. And we could have more; we could have 4 or 5 or more,” he said.
The mayor further defended his decision to keep the when CBS 2’s Grymes questioned him about it.
Grymes: “Do you believe that children’s lives were put at risk by the decision to keep schools open? We’ve seen parents struggling to get their kids on the school bus, especially when you’re telling people to stay off the roads.”
Mayor de Blasio: “By definition, we thought children would get to school safely based on information we had. Again, I want to make 100 percent clear as a parent, and having a chancellor who is a parent and lifelong teacher, we make these decisions with the safety of our children in mind at all times.”
But the United Federation of Teachers did not agree. Union President Michael Mulgrew said the winter storm made it unsafe for students, parents and staff to get to school.Super swarm: Here's why hawks are amassing at Calif. state park
Flocks of Swainson hawks are blanketing the skies of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in Southern California, a contrast to the colorful wildflower fields on the ground below.
Thousands of wildflower seekers have inundated the park for a glimpse of the spectacular super bloom display, but the hawks aren't in Anza-Borrego for the sights. They're seeking a snack, and juicy sphinx moth caterpillars do just the trick.
Named for their defensive posture, the white-lined sphinx moth caterpillars play a complicated role in the ecosystem. The caterpillars eat the wildflowers – sometimes hundreds of acres of 'em – but the moths pollinate them, destroying and sustaining their food source simultaneously.
The hawks then eat the caterpillars. And like the flowers, they've come to Anza-Borrego in droves this year.
It's eat or be eaten in Anza-Borrego State Park. This year, a record number of Swainson's hawks have descended upon the park as a stopover on their yearly winter migration. The hawks eat the white-lined sphinx moth caterpillars, which in turn munch the blooming wildflowers. less It's eat or be eaten in Anza-Borrego State Park. This year, a record number of Swainson's hawks have descended upon the park as a stopover on their yearly winter migration. The hawks eat the white-lined sphinx... more Photo: Iris Kirkpatrick Photo: Iris Kirkpatrick Image 1 of / 40 Caption Close Super swarm: Here's why hawks are amassing at Calif. state park 1 / 40 Back to Gallery
Hal Cohen, retired biology professor and self-proclaimed father of the Borrego Valley Hawkwatch, wants to set the record straight about the raptors. He says the Swainson hawks are hungry with good reason, as they've stopped in Anza-Borrego on their annual 6,000-mile migration from South America to the plain states of the U.S.
Cohen's blog shows staggering numbers of the birds this year. March 15 saw 328 hawks. March 16, 788. March 18, 3,713 – the most hawks spotted in Anza-Borrego in one day ever. Hawkwatch, says Cohen, is just 73 hawk-sightings away from the highest recorded number of hawks in the region ever.
Each day, a fresh group of hawks touch down, only to take off by night for the next stop on their journey. The hawks come to Anza-Borrego with the promise of caterpillars, although Cohen reports the insects' numbers are lower than in past years. He chocks up the high volume of birds to rising Swainson hawk populations globally.
"Especially in South American countries, they're finding it costs less to not use a lot of chemicals in agricultural production," Cohen said, explaining that pesticides decimated the hawk population in the 1990s. "Across the board, Swainson hawks are starting to do pretty darn well."
If you're looking to see Anza-Borrego's feathered visitors, Cohen says you better plan a trip soon. The hawks came earlier this year, and they typically disappear by mid-April.
"We've been having monumental days," said Cohen, ensuring the sights will be worth the trip. "This is the most Swainson hawks you'll see anywhere north of Mexico right now."
Read Michelle Robertson’s latest stories and send her news tips at [email protected] by WKRG - All rights reserved
KARD - WEST MONROE, La. (KARD) - *WARNING: This article contains images that may be too graphic for some.
A West Monroe man has been arrested for animal cruelty after he dog sat for a friend and "mutilated" it.
Samuel Smith, 24 of West Monroe, was arrested Thursday around 9:00 p.m.
According to the report, deputies with the Ouachita Parish Sheriff's Office spoke with the victim who stated she left her Yorkshire Terrier in the care of her friend Samuel Smith at her residence at Ashford Apartments on December 13, 2017.
The victim said she received a call from Smith around 9:00 a.m. saying the dog left the apartment without his knowledge and returned with injuries to his face.
The victim said her dog appeared to have severe injuries to her face and head with skin and hair missing.
The dog's eyes were also swollen and injured.
The dog was taken to a nearby veterinarian's office for treatment and at this time it is unknown if the damage to its eyes will be permanent.
The victim later discovered the dog's hair and drops of blood in the freezer section of her refrigerator.
On December 14, 2017, deputies met with Smith.
He admitted to spraying the dog with hot water in the bathroom of the apartment. Smith also stated he then put the dog in the freezer section of the apartment's refrigerator for about 30 seconds.
Smith stated he did not like the dog, but did not mean to mutilate it.
Smith described his actions as just "messing" with the dog.
Smith has been booked into the Ouachita Correctional Center on one count of aggravated animal cruelty.
His bond has been set at $5,000.00.INDIANAPOLIS -- A deep draft class at defensive end features five players projected by ESPN Draft Analyst Mel Kiper Jr. to be taken in the top 15 picks.
Included in the group is charismatic University of Florida product Dante Fowler, whose positional versatility could intrigue the Chicago Bears as the team attempts to stockpile defensive ends/outside linebackers that better fit the new hybrid 3-4 defense.
Fowler recorded three sacks in the Gators’ 28-20 victory against East Carolina in the Birmingham Bowl on January 3, giving him 14.5 sacks over his three years in Gainesville.
"I really can play anywhere," Fowler said Friday. "[Former Florida] head coach Will Muschamp’s defense was multiple; we played a 3-4 and a 4-3. My first year, my freshman year, I played a lot of defensive end. My sophomore year I did a lot. My junior year we played a lot of 3-4, so I was the Buck (linebacker). I stood up and just roamed up and things like that. I played all over the place."
Kiper Jr. predicts Fowler goes No. 13 overall to the New Orleans Saints in his latest mock draft.
The Bears, No. 7 overall, are expected to use different looks on defense in an effort to confuse opponents. Chicago’s defense became far too predictable the past two years, one of the many reasons the unit ranked near the bottom of the league.
Fowler thinks his scheme versatility is an attractive trait to interested teams during the pre-draft process.
"It can help me a lot just because I play anywhere, I can play some linebacker to D-end to edge rusher, and I can do a lot for a team. I create a lot of problems for the offense and really just stressing out coordinators," Fowler said.
"It’s an advantage. I was able to play both. I was a linebacker growing up. And I went to defensive end my sophomore year and I really liked it. I was versatile and fortunate enough to be able to play both."
Fowler, who scouts measured in Indianapolis at 6-foot-2 1/2 and 261 pounds, flashed arguably the most personality of any prospect ushered into the media room at Lucas Oil Stadium since access began on Wednesday. The versatile pass-rusher commanded the room, effortlessly answering each question with candor, charm, and sometimes humor.
"This is a dream come true," Fowler said. "I’ve wanted to do this ever since I was a little kid when I was four years old. It was like a path in front of me. I’m just happy to be here. I’m a loose person. I want teams to know that I’m a coachable guy, that I’m a team player and a fit for their team. I want to be that kind of guy that can play in this league. That I can turn a team and a defense around at the same time, just try to be that guy who can help out in the community and try be the face of that team one day."
Fowler added: "When it’s time for me to work out, I flip a switch. I just don’t like to be rude. You don’t want to be all kinds of grumpy and rude. You don’t want to be that.
"You get wrinkles from all that stuff. I’m not trying to get that."Upside-Down Union Jacks
Julian D. A. Wiseman
Abstract: Many of my countryfolk, or their employees, seem not to notice when a union jack is upside-down. But I do.
Publication history: only at www.jdawiseman.com/papers/union-jack/upside-down_union_jacks.html. Usual disclaimer and copyright terms apply.
The diagonal elements of the union jack do not have reflective symmetry, as shown in the animated graphic on the right. When hung correctly, if the flagpole is on the left, the diagonal’s thicker white stripes are clockwise; or, equivalently, the diagonal reds are anti-clockwise. (When there is no flagpole, for example if pinned to a wall, then the flagpole is always deemed to be on the left.)
Below are pictures of Union Jacks that are upside down (or left-to-right inverted). Those sharing via twitter pictures of the same error are invited to use the hashtag #UpsideDownUnionJack.
Monday 22 nd July 2013, from the BBC story entitled “Royal baby: Pregnant Kate taken to hospital in labour”.
“Journalists were not the only ones waiting outside the Lindo Wing. Royal supporter Terry Hutt has been camped outside for nearly two weeks”
Saturday 8 th September 2012, from the TeamGB Facebook page. Deserved smugness is deserved, but does not excuse this. (Doff hat to DRT for noticing.)
Sunday 19 th August 2012, Tom Daley, an Olympic swimmer, is selling his autobiography, My Story, and a poster, both of which have the same problem.
Friday 17 th August 2012. This image was taken from www.scienceinsport.com/images/oly1.jpg, though also appeared in print—part of various advertisements—in August 2012. There are six coloured Union Jacks, of which the fourth from left, third from right, is upside down. Five out of six, or eight out of nine including the greys, is better than random.
Thursday 16 th August 2012, not an upside down union jack, but multiple very wrong union jacks at Austin Reed, Canary Wharf, London E14 4QT.
Let us start with a happy observation: around the window is the edge of a Union Jack. And seemingly correct. Happiness.
But also observe near the bottom of the previous picture part of an odd-looking Union Jack. Let’s go closer.
Oh dear. Somebody not only didn’t know how to draw the Union Jack, that person didn’t even know that there might be a right way to do it. Oh dear. And it wasn’t a once off, as the view into the female-clothing window shows.
Tuesday 14 th August 2012, Optical Express, Monument, London EC3M 1BU. Perhaps the printed posters are used across the whole chain.
Monday 13 th August 2012, Balls Brothers, The Assembly, London EC3N 4AX. The bunting over the entrance, and that around the nearby pillar, matched, although incorrectly.
Monday 13 th August 2012, Amathus wine merchant, London EC3V 1LR. Non-matching flag orientations in the window of an excellent wine merchant—the alcohol-recommending skills dwarfing those of vexillology. Which, in a wine merchant, might even be a good thing.
Thursday 9 th August 2012, the Famous Three Kings pub, London W14 9NL: ✓✗ ✓.
Wednesday 8 th August 2012, the Three Lords pub, London EC3N 1DD. The point furthest from the wall is always the ‘top’, as if the flag pole had been lowered.
Wednesday 8 th August 2012, Army Classics, London W11 3HG. The big one is correct, as in the one in the neighbouring shop’s window. Which is two out of three.
Monday 6 th August 2012, the stairs down to the Britannia pub, London EC3R 8AJ. Three out of four wouldn’t be so terrible for a pub with a different name.
Monday 6 th August 2012, The Hung, Drawn & Quartered pub, London EC3R 5AQ. The two flags on Great Tower Street differ from the one on Byward Street.
Monday 6 th August 2012, two of the windows of Wetherspoon’s The Liberty Bounds pub, London EC3N 4AA. At a minimum, be consistent. Nor should there be prizes for the manufacturer of the bunting.
Monday 6 th August 2012, The Minories pub, London EC3N 1JL. One ✗; two ✓.
Monday 6 th August 2012, Cards Galore, London EC3R 5AS. The door against which the flag was hung held other items, such that the flag could not be seen from the other side.
Early in August 2012, on the A23, just south of Christchurch Road.
Early in August 2012, Arlington Discount Centre, London SW2 1RS.Ben Carson's Closest Confidant, Business Partner, & 'Brother-Like' Adviser is Armstrong Williams, Rabid Zionist & Disgraced Paid Propagandist for Bush Administration
[The correct URL for this article is: http://libertyfight.com/2015/armstrong_williams_ben_carson.html.]
The two are intimately close, Williams has a room in Carson's home, their families vacation together, Armstrong employs Ben Carson's sons, and is Carson's financial adviser and 'business partner.' The rabidly anti-Palestinian Williams recently accompanied Ben Carson to Israel.
Despite pretending to be conservative while shilling for 'No child left behind,' Armstrong also admittedly used his blackness and minority status, as opposed to his merit, to convince the FCC to let him buy up more tv stations. This is admitted in official FCC filings and papers.. So these frauds 'publicly' oppose affirmative action, while privately wholeheartedly supporting it and taking full advantage of it.
Armstrong recently tweeted "Here we go again. Israel, America’s truest ally in the Middle East, is under terrorist assault" & "Israeli citizens wisely employed personal weapons to eliminate terrorists on the spot." PNAC Founder Bill Kristol also says that Ben Carson is the best choice for president. BEWARE of this dim-witted humble-posing sleeper cell known as Ben Carson. As I said before: Ben Carson is an Israeli-shill pro-vaccine half-wit who recently said that the 20 million illegal aliens 'can stay'.
On Facebook, Armstrong wrote "Over the last month, Israel has been targeted by a sickening wave of Palestinian terrorism. Innocent Israeli civilians going about their daily chores are being run over by madmen behind the wheels of cars, slashed and murdered with knives, and shot at on city buses." Also: "As Congress inches closer to voting on the Iranian nuclear deal, an historic mistake that will bless the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism becoming a nuclear threshold state, Americans should be terrified."
A recent article even revealed that Ben Carson himself was an Obama adviser! "At one time Carson was an adviser to Obama on health issues." [Armstrong Williams: Ben Carson 'Refuses to Be Anybody's Slave']
GQ's The Man Who Would Make Ben Carson President notes "Above all else, Williams is an excellent hype man, constantly talking up Carson to reporters." GQ explains Williams financial success:
"He teamed up with Stedman Graham (of Oprah paramour fame) to found an international public relations firm. He's also carved out a niche as a prominent (and indefatigable) black conservative pundit, with a syndicated newspaper column and his own TV and radio shows. During Carson's trip to Israel, Williams would frequently disappear to call in to some obscure radio show back in the States to offer his commentary on the news of the day. One afternoon, in the Old City of Jerusalem, he performed a modern miracle - finding a Wifi signal -so that he could use his iPad to do a Skype interview with a Fox show. Williams has also branched out into media ownership. In the last two years, he's purchased six television stations in Alabama, Michigan, South Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania."
Two months ago, The Hill ran a very informative profile of Armstrong Williams and Ben Carson The man behind Ben Carson. Excerpt:
In interviews with Carson, as well as top current and former campaign officials, the message is clear: Carson and Williams come as one. 'It's a package deal, no question about it,' Carson told The Hill. Williams describes himself as a confidant and business partner to Carson. They met in the 1990s when Williams interviewed Carson, who was at the time a world-renowned brain surgeon, on one of his TV shows. The two have since fostered what those close to them describe as a 'brother-like' relationship. They talk multiple times a day about business, family, life and politics. Their families vacation together. They go to Baltimore Ravens games. Williams even has a room in Carson's Maryland home where he keeps reserve clothes on hand for visits. Williams often uses the quieter Carson as a sounding board, bouncing ideas and suggestions off him on everything from medicine to fashion. Sometimes Carson listens, sometimes he explains to him why he's wrong. Carson, 63, uses the more outgoing Williams for guidance in real estate deals, recommendations for attorneys and negotiating contracts with the publishers of his books.....The Federal Election Commission has rules governing the employment of campaign staffers that the Carson campaign says it follows to the letter. 'We were also very cautious to make sure nobody could make the argument that Armstrong was in some way working as part of the campaign,' Giles said. 'We had a lot of conversations about that."
Here is info on Armstrong's media outlets:
FCC OK's Armstrong Williams' Purchase of 2 More Stations
"Armstrong Williams, the conservative commentator, entrepreneur and longtime business manager for Dr. Ben Carson, Republican presidential candidate, has won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to buy two more television stations. The purchase of KVMY-TV in Las Vegas and WLYH-TV in Lancaster, Pa., serving Harrisburg, the state capital, cements Williams' status as the African American owning the largest number of U.S. television stations, he told Journal-isms. Approval of KVMY, an ABC affiliate, came Oct. 13 and of CW-affiliate WLYH on Friday. Williams also owns WWMB-TV in Myrtle Beach, S.C.; WEYI-TV in Flint, Mich.; WMMP-TV in Charleston, S.C.; WJSU-TV in Anniston, Ala.; and WCFT-TV in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Williams bought his first two stations in partnership with Sinclair Broadcasting Co., and paid $550,000 for the two latest stations, he said. They are owned solely by Williams' Howard Stirk Holdings."
More on Armstrong's minority status to swing deals (affirmative action):
"Dave Seyler of Radio + Television Business Report reported in February that as with earlier deals involving Howard Stirk Holdings, "the parties are selling Armstrong's status as a member of a minority group in presenting the deals to the FCC.
"They discussed actions when taking over a station:
"1. increased the public affairs and local programming by adding local public affairs program(s) during prime time.
"2. increased the coverage of local events, people and leaders through guests on local public affairs programs.
"3. produced and aired public affairs shows hosted by Mr. Williams and covering current issues such as: Right to Work, Small Business & Economic Development and Reducing Crime.
"4. held and hosted town hall meetings televised in prime time. These town halls will cover topics of local interest (previous town hall meetings Mr. Williams has hosted include: health care, domestic violence, immigration, and gun violence).
"5. obtained programs of particular interest and enjoyment to minority communities, such as The Steve Harvey Show and Queen Latifah.
"6. sought to advance minority employment and is implementing an internship program targeted at minority students interested in the technical side of the television business."
[See Williams files to buy two more TV stations 2/3/15 "The FCC's decision to draw the line on local TV duopolies and the use of SSAs has worked to the benefit of at least one company: Armstrong William's Howard Stirk Holdings, which is picking up TVs in Las Vegas and Lancaster PA. Both deals involve some complexity, and both involve Sinclair."]
Here are some of Armstrong Williams more revealing quotes and posts via Twitter and Facebook. Note that Armstrong has a bizarre habit of using "God morning" or "God afternoon" instead of good afternoon.:
Israeli citizens wisely employed personal weapons to eliminate terrorists on the spot in efforts to avert killing of more innocent people. — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) October 22, 2015
God morning : Here we go again. Israel, America's truest ally in the Middle East, is under terrorist assault,... http://t.co/YBxTRSwcNK — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) October 19, 2015
White flight wasn't exclusively the consequence of forced integration policies. policies that allowed redlining and restrictive covenants. — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) October 7, 2015
The Nation of Islam could be Chicago's savior http://t.co/5I7zWOVz2Q — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) October 6, 2015
A Trump-Carson ticket? Or maybe a Carson-Trump ticket? Armstrong Williams: "You never know what the future holds." https://t.co/cNu6ZS3HIu — New Day (@NewDay) October 21, 2015
What does Nation Of Islam offer that police haven't in Chicago violence? Credibility with the community. Should NOI return to the streets? — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) October 5, 2015
The Jewish people have cause for concern. Hard to remember a time within the past 50 years when they had so many reasons to feel alone. >> — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) September 15, 2015
Armstrong Williams - New Day Full interview http://t.co/a7S3l7aAUX — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) September 11, 2015
Carson Camp Responds to Trump's Insults http://t.co/YMNxYHYWoO — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) September 11, 2015
'Iran does not plan to issue permission for the [International Atomic Energy Agency] to inspect every site,". We have conceded our power. — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) September 4, 2015
Police officers are charged with confronting and detaining violent criminals, and are being assassinated by cowards who should be executed. — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) September 1, 2015
God afternoon: As Congress inches closer to voting on the Iranian nuclear deal, an historic mistake that will... http://t.co/lRAr6ltVS7 — Armstrong Williams (@Arightside) September 1, 2015
See this article by Williams opposing the 'dangerous' Iran deal.
Armstrong at the same time shills for the nation of Islam in the Moonie Times, opining "One of the few sources of strong leadership in many of these communities is the Nation of Islam."
Here is the twitter account of Armstrong's TV station in Charleston, WGWG4. Note the number of Carson stories.
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Martin Hill interviews Vincent Arias:
Here is an interview conducted with Vincent Arias on January 5, 2014: Man Shot By Cops Discusses His Acquittal, Freedom & the Current Police State of America
"Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness; rather expose them, for it is shameful even to mention the things done by them in secret; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Ephesians 5:10-13
The Ron Paul Bumper Sticker Is Still On My Car (Tearjerker tribute vid ;-)
Just for fun. This is a vid I made in 2008 after his campaign ended."remember the good times. A tribute to Dr. Paul and all his supporters who fight for freedom. Keep up the good work everyone!"
Several people at the time told me that this made them cry. ;-)
(BEAUTIFUL LOSER/ I WILL REMEMBER YOU')
[The background story of the video, and my introduction to Ron Paul (from my dad when I was a kid), along with my dad and my trip to the first Ron Paul meet-up in Pasadena, California - a meeting which was featured in the New York Times (they falsely mis-characterized the entire meeting by the way, and claimed that there were a bunch of jew haters there when none of that is true! No one even mentoned Jews at that meeting.) is here.
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Martin Hill is a Catholic paleoconservative and civil rights advocate. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Daily News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, The Orange County Register, KNBC4 TV Los Angeles, The Press Enterprise, LewRockwell.com, WhatReallyHappened.com, Infowars.com, PrisonPlanet.com, Economic Policy Journal, TargetLiberty.com, FreedomsPhoenix, Haaretz, TMZ, Veterans Today, Jonathan Turley blog, The Dr. Katherine Albrecht Show, National Motorists Association, AmericanFreePress.net, RomanCatholicReport.com, WorldNetDaily, HenryMakow.com, OverdriveOnline.com, Educate-Yourself.org, TexeMarrs.com, Dr. Kevin Barrett's Truth Jihad radio show, Strike-The-Root.com, Pasadena Weekly, ActivistPost.com, Los Angeles Catholic Lay Mission Newspaper, KFI AM 640, IamtheWitness.com, Redlands Daily Facts, SaveTheMales.ca, BlackBoxVoting, The Michael Badnarik Show, The Wayne Madsen Report, Devvy.com, Rense.com, FromTheTrenchesWorldReport.com, BeforeItsNews.com, The Contra Costa Times, Pasadena Star News, Silicon Valley Mercury News, Long Beach Press Telegram, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, L.A. Harbor Daily Breeze, CopBlock.org, DavidIcke.com, Whittier Daily News, KCLA FM Hollywood, The Fullerton Observer, Antiwar.com, From The Trenches World Report, and many others. Archives can be found at LibertyFight.com and DontWakeMeUp.Org.
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DisqusIn 1969 an American Marine named Raffaele Minichiello hijacked a TWA jet to fly to his dying father’s bedside in Italy. The crime caught the world’s imagination, but Raffaele still went to prison. Last week he followed his humanitarian impulses again—this time to earthquake-ravaged southern Italy. As snow swirled down, Minichiello came upon an old woman wrapped in a black shawl. Afraid another tremor might topple her damaged farmhouse, she crouched outside, sheltered only by a makeshift tent. Yet when Minichiello jumped from his borrowed truck to unload emergency supplies, she protested, “No, give to other people in greater need.” Finally she reluctantly accepted a few biscuits, some pasta and a pair of shoes. “Proud people won’t grab all the goods they can lay their hands on,” explains Minichiello, 31. “Distribution should be organized so the needy can accept aid with dignity.”
Because they believe their government is either too corrupt or inept to carry out relief operations, thousands of Italians like Minichiello are pitching in directly. A Rome bartender, he has already made three trips to the region of his birth northeast of Naples, part of the devastated area where 3,000 are dead and 310,000 homeless. In the first days after the quake Minichiello collected $1,750 from customers and friends, then used the money to buy warm clothing, boots and toiletries. He drove more than 300 miles to distribute the purchases himself. “I’ll catch up on my sleep sometime,” he says. “I mistrust institutions, so I give help personally. I know all about people who don’t keep their promises. And I know all about earthquakes in Irpinia. That is where I was born, and that is where all my troubles began.”
They started with a 1962 earthquake that demolished his house and prompted his family to move to Seattle. In 1967 Raffaele dropped out of high school to join the Marines. Sent to Vietnam, he learned that his father, stricken with cancer, had returned to Italy to die. Raffaele saved his pay for the trip, but wound up $200 short. Desperate, he hijacked the jet in Los Angeles and forced the pilot to fly to Rome. There he surrendered, but his obvious love for papa and patria made him a minor hero. Italian authorities refused to extradite him to the U.S., and he served only 18 months. Eventually Raffaele hopes to return to America to visit his mother, sister and friends in Seattle. “I’m very different now from how I was,” he says. “I’m sorry for what I did to those people on the plane. They didn’t know it, but my gun wasn’t even loaded. It was all a big crazy bluff.”
After his release in 1971 Minichiello floundered for a while—once even posing in the nude for a pin-up magazine—then landed his bartending job. Soon afterward he met the bar owner’s daughter, Cinzia, and married her; they have a son, Cristiano, 6. Reluctant to dwell on his past, Minichiello sees himself now as a man with a cause. “In 1962,” he remembers, “the earthquake left us with nothing—and no one came to help.” As a result Minichiello has an abiding lack of faith in Italian bureaucracy. “Italy is an earthquake-prone country,” he concedes, “but it is also technologically advanced, and there can be no excuse for such tardiness in getting aid to the quake area.” He plans another relief mission soon to distribute gas heaters, then will return once again, not as Raffaele Minichiello but as Babbo natale. “Just before Christmas,” he says proudly, “I’m going to take a load of toys down for the kids.”Free Day is Done The week has finally arrive - Free Day is this Thursday, January 7th, 2010! Favorited Favorite 0
Wow that was fast! Free Day is over. Over $100k was given away in just under 1 hour and 45 minutes. We had over 1,000 orders and nearly over 70,000 unique visitors. Our servers barely stayed up!
Thank you all for checking us out! Our sincerest apologies to all who came but were not able to get the discount. We are going to have a ton of graphs, images, numbers, and funny comments from Free Day on a Friday Recap home page post just as soon as we can get it together. Please check back soon!
It seems like it was just last week when we announced SparkFun Free Day and now it is almost upon us! Free Day is coming in just a few short days - Thursday, January 7th, 2010, to be exact.
For those of you unfamiliar with SparkFun's Free Day (see the original post here), here it is in a nutshell. Starting at 9AM MST (that's 11 AM EST) on Thursday, January 7th, 2010, each customer will receive $100 towards their order until we reach a limit of $100,000. You'll have to take care of shipping.
There really are no catches, but there are a few rules for fairness' and logistic's sake:
$100 max per person (cheating kills kittens)
You pay shipping
Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day
Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
Ends 11PM MST |
his health, along with his wife, Andrea, and five children.
He coached high-school players for the first time in 2016, tutoring the defensive backs at Ocala Trinity Catholic.
“It was quite the experience, getting to see what teenagers are all about and getting to see from their eyes,’’ said Collins, who is seeking a high-school head coaching position. “They think they know a whole lot about the game, but they realize they really don’t know once you sit down and talk to them.
“We had a great group of guys, and they were eager to learn the game and [improve] their knowledge of the game.’’
Collins is around football, just in a different way.
“I have nothing to complain about,’’ Collins said.
Helping hands
Why did the Miami Dolphins trade for Jacksonville Jaguars TE Julius Thomas? In 2016, the Dolphins’ tight ends — Dion Sims, MarQueis Gray, Jordan Cameron and Dominique Jones — combined for 55 catches for 551 yards and six touchdowns. While Thomas might not be a significant upgrade, dealing a seventh-round draft pick is worth it.
The other side
Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Raheem Morris made the successful transition from coaching defense to offense with the Atlanta Falcons in 2016. Morris served as the Falcons’ wide receivers coach during their Super Bowl run.
Now former UCF assistant George Godsey is going the other way.
A longtime offensive assistant in college and the NFL, Godsey was hired by the Detroit Lions as a defensive assistant in charge of special projects, helping them scheme for upcoming opponents. Godsey, 38, was the Houston Texans’ offensive coordinator the past two seasons.
Quick drives
Jay Cutler may be moody and reportedly on the trading block, but of the three quarterbacks drafted in the first round in 2006, the Chicago Bear (for now) is having the most NFL success. Cutler was selected 11th overall by the Denver Broncos, one pick after the Arizona Cardinals chose Matt Leinart and eight choices after the Tennessee Titans took Vince Young. …When you think of people who helped craft and influence the Jurassic Park franchise, one of the names that springs to mind is the late Stan Winston. While those who he worked with at his company Stan Winston Studios, formed Legacy Effects after his unfortunate passing, the team remained active within the industry and went on to creative special effects and animatronics for films such as 2012, Avatar, The Hunger Games, Iron Man 2&3, and many more.
The company also continued its relationship with the Jurassic franchise with 2015’s Jurassic World, where the team created a full size Apatosaurus neck animatronic that was seen in a key scene in the film.
Unfortunately only the one animatronic made it into the film, but writer/producer Colin Trevorrow stated to numerous outlets that the sequel, directed by J.A. Bayona, will feature more animatronics in the same way the original three films did. Naturally, fans assumed that Legacy Effects would return in full force and would bring back fan favourites in animatronic form.
However, in December of last year, we began to hear that Legacy Effects were not involved with the sequel, and that Neal Scanlan and his team had put a bid in for the film – and won. Neal’s last project was Star Wars: The Force Awakens which also filmed at Pinewood Studios in London, where all of Fallen Kingdom’s studio work would be filmed.
11 puppeteers working under our feet giving life to a dinosaur. Great work! #JW2 pic.twitter.com/62qnfZgSqt — JA Bayona (@FilmBayona) March 17, 2017
The prospect of Stan Winston’s original team not being involved with the franchise anymore obviously shocked fans, and while business is business, the exclusion of this company to some perhaps seems illogical, when you consider how prominent and ground breaking the animatronics were in the original trilogy.
In March, a glimmer of hope shone in Legacy’s direction, when a filming permit for Ancient Futures (Fallen Kingdom’s working title) was acquired for Pacoima, Los Angeles. Legacy Effects are very close to that same area, which led some to speculate that they will be involved with the sequel in some capacity.
However, after speaking with Stan Winston School of Character Arts’ co-founder and son of Stan Winston, Matt Winston, he clarified to us that Legacy Effects are not involved with the sequel.
“Unfortunately, I have zero knowledge of JW2 since Legacy was not involved. My fingers are crossed that Neal and his time did a great job.”
With Fallen Kingdom’s production office based in London and with most of the key studio scenes being filmed there, it does make sense for the production to opt for a local animatronic/special effects company, who also have a working relationship with Pinewood Studios. Using a local company also helps to keep costs down, especially when you consider how expensive and time consuming it would be to ship huge and heavy animatronics across the pond.
It is unfortunate to hear that Legacy’s team will not be involved, but we can have faith that Neal Scanlan’s team will do the film justice! The team is working on Star Wars: Episode VIII and previously worked on the last two Star Wars films, Prometheus, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and many more. What do you make of their work?Last week, a group of legal experts ruled the November 2014 police shooting of 12-year old Tamir Rice “objectively reasonable.” Rice was shot as he sat in a local park, near the recreation center where he frequently played, holding a pellet gun. When officers responded to 911 calls that a “guy was sitting in the park pointing a gun at people,” they did not know that 195-pound Tamir Rice was only 12. But there were exactly four seconds between the time that the police cruiser pulls into the frame of the surveillance camera that recorded this incident and the time that Tamir Rice drops to the ground. There are less than two seconds between the time the police make contact with Tamir and the time he falls to the ground. That means there was almost no time for the officers to communicate any set of instructions to the boy about what they wanted or what they needed him to do. They drove up and started shooting.
This is unreasonable.
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A 12-year old Black boy is dead for playing with a toy gun in a park in his community. But his family and community are told by the experts that while his death is “tragic” it is also “objectively reasonable.” Black communities have long known that they should question official and legal standards of “expertise,” “objectivity,” and “reason.” Frequently, these concepts are deployed in ways that uphold white supremacist, racist (and sexist) abuses of power, while being offered as race-neutral, legal standards.
But the “reasonable man” standard is not a race-neutral (or a gender-neutral) standard within the law. It is what a putatively “reasonable,” white, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual, property-owning, cisgender man would assume about the actions of people in his surroundings. The reasonable man standard is not an objective standard. It is based entirely on the subject position of the aforementioned white male character. And if the consequence of believing in concepts of objectivity and reason are that we must consider the killing of Tamir Rice to be legally justified, then our reasons are not reason enough.
It is entirely unreasonable for a young boy, someone’s child, to end up dead at the hands of law enforcement when he did not objectively pose a threat. He was a child playing with a toy. In a park. That is what children do. There was nothing unreasonable about his activities. He was playing with a gun openly in an open-carry state. He was playing with his gun in a gun-driven national culture that does not think the killings of innocent college students or little children warrant more robust gun control laws.
The plot of one of our iconic American movies, “A Christmas Story,” is about a nine-year old boy wanting nothing more for Christmas than a “Red Ryder air rifle.” In the film, the adults in his life repeatedly warn Raphie, the protagonist, that he’ll “shoot his eye out,” with the weapon. Many adults who saw Tamir Rice the day he was killed warned him to be careful with his toy gun, too. The adults in Tamir Rice’s life weren’t worried that he would harm himself, but rather that the police would “reasonably” assess the 12 year old to be a dangerous criminal.
There is nothing reasonable about a police officer being justified for shooting a child playing with a toy in a park. That we are asked to assent to the reasonability of such a conclusion is utter and outrageous absurdity.
The words “objectively reasonable” are callously applied to our outrage as so many shock volts from a taser designed to numb out and tase away our empathy for Tamir Rice. We know an injustice has occurred, but juridical “objectivity” and “reason” suggest to us that we simply must accept this state of affairs. We are asked to believe that the officers had no responsibility to try to talk to Tamir or disarm him before shooting him down like a rabid threat.
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Reasonable people don’t accept the murder of children by those sworn to protect them. Objective good sense demands other conclusions.
We know, in the pursuit of alternative conclusions, that the officers in the Tamir Rice case both had questionable employment records. Officer Frank Garmback, the driver of the car that day, had previously been named in a lawsuit against the police department for placing a Black woman in a chokehold after she called for help to tow a car off her property. The case was settled for $100,000. Officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot Rice, had been released from a previous job as a police officer for “breaking down emotionally while handling a live gun.”
Neither one of these men should have been policing in any American community. But they were given empathy and the benefit of the doubt, no doubt a function of white male privilege, and the belief that if you are white, “objective” proof of incompetence still does not constitute incompetence.
At the start of the Black Lives Matter Movement, I wrote about the ways in which Black rage is a reasonable response to the killing of unarmed Black youth. That proposition holds true for Black youth playing with toy firearms, too. I wrote in a different moment about how notions of objectivity and reason are deployed to delegitimize Black anger and outrage while simultaneously being used to justify horrific acts of racial injustice against Black people and Black communities.
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In the Tamir Rice case, the proclamation that the actions of these officers were “objectively reasonable” are meant to act in exactly these ways. Those words delegitimize a rage response in Black communities, pre-emptively framing those responses as unreasonable. Meanwhile, the law justifies what was clearly a callous, reckless and fatal form of malpractice by police officers who had already proven themselves, as a team, to be prone to excessive force (dangerous) and improper use of guns (incompetent).
Black lives are frequent casualties of the objective, reasonable conclusions of the state. Black death is imminently reasonable under conditions of white supremacy. So making reasonable demands in an unreasonable system won’t save us and it just might kill us. Trying to reason with police -- by telling them “I can’t breathe,” or asking to know why one is being pulled over -- is a ticket to the grave.
On Sunday, "60 Minutes" aired a profile of a falsely convicted man named Glen Ford. Mr. Ford had been locked in solitary confinement for 23 hours each day for 30 years for a robbery and murder that he didn’t commit. When new evidence surfaced identifying the real killer, Ford was released from jail, just in time to a receive a diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer, which killed him a few months later.
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During the "60 Minutes" segment, while the prosecutor responsible for throwing him in jail, Marty Shroud, expressed deep and sincere remorse, the current prosecutor Dale Cox, who procured Ford’s release, seemed baffled by his colleague’s remorse. Cox said that the release of Ford constituted “delayed justice,” and that the system “did not fail Mr. Ford, because he’s not on death row.” Cox, in his four-year tenure as district attorney, has sent more Black men to death row than any other jurisdiction in the country, because he says, “we should be applying the death penalty, more rather than less.” When faced with 10 cases in the state of Louisiana alone of wrongfully convicted felons on death row, he replied, unmoved, “I’m reasonably confident that I’ve gotten it right.”
White supremacy functions by calling what is unreasonable reasonable. It invests its deputies with unreasonable confidence in the rightness of their wrong conclusions. It calls such conclusions “objective.” It assumes the god-like right to claim mastery over the facts, to render oblique the pervasiveness of antiblackness within the law, to hide the capriciousness of white supremacy behind the supposed objectivity of the law.
Paltry overtures to the value of Black lives are no match for the powers of a god like this. Only the choice to love Black people with unreasonable love is. Writer and professor Kiese Laymon says of “unreasonable love”:
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I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that refuses to conflate honesty with transformation and hard work with revelatory work, a love that expects unreasonable love from police, teachers, doctors, politicians, presidents and CEOs. [….] I want to be loved unreasonably by an unreasonable love because we've nearly drowned in the poison of reasonable loving, reasonable liking, reasonable living, reasonable essays, reasonable art and reasonable political discourse.
Black lives matter. Any other thought is simply unreasonable.Prologue: AIM
An_Involuntary_Movement
The smell...
The excruciating smell.
The smell of rotten tampons; of insects feeding off the waste left here for me.
The smell of despair and loneliness; of helplessness and isolation...
Insects were surrounding me, skittering in the darkness of the locker; skittering in the darkness of my prison. Crawling maggots squirming in the filth that surrounded me. Spiders trying their best to catch the flies in their nets.
All the bugs... happily munching whatever their prey was, crawling all over me.
I could still hear their taunting, their laughing, cruelty dripping from their words. But that couldn't be... It must've been hours since I was locked in here...
Would nobody ever come to safe me?
The smell, the sensations of the bugs swarming me, the knowledge that they had gotten to me...
These weren't even the worst thing...
The worst, the most hurtful thing was the knowledge that I was alone. All alone.
Nobody had come for me, nobody had notified the teachers; and if they had it would have just proven that not even the school cared for me. Nobody did.
I even blamed my dad. He should have noticed that something was wrong, noticed I was being bullied. He didn't.
Why... Why had they done this... If I hadn't been in such a'sticky' situation I probably would have admired their dedication. Wasn't torturing me for almost two years straight enough? Did they relly have to lock me inside this GODDAMN LOCKER?
HOW COULD THEY? HOW COULD THAT BITCH EMMA DO THAT? I TRUSTED HER! I TRUSTED her... I trusted her...
Oh Emma... I thought we might be able to be friends again. What changed you that much...
My anger replaced itself with sadness as I lamented over my lost friendship with her. She had been my lifeline through middle-school. We had sleepovers, saw each other almost every day... we were like sisters! And then she shamelessly betrayed my trust.
When we started high school, she found herself a new friend: Sophia Hess. Together they tormented me, day by day. They were soon joined by Madison and together they formed the trio that had so much fun making my life a living hell.
After they stole mom's flute I had thought they'd never be able to top that...
Now, covered in filth, used tampons and my own vomit... I felt so lonely... so...broken.
Then I realized... I'd never get out. The janitor might find me, but I could still die from the infections; from the bacteria that had gotten into my wounds. The wounds I had created while clawing at the locker's door; the wounds that ran deep, the wounds that also hurt my soul. And then my melancholy reached it's climax. There, abandoned by all but the insects feasting on me, locked inside a metal box filled with the filth of my tormentors, helped by no one and outcast like a pariah, I blacked out. I was tired... broken. What use had fighting against my life when all I tried broke to pieces, my reality shattered and I would just lose hope. Slowly, like a creeping shadow at the back of my mind, dreaded but blissful darkness came over me and I was out like a light.
…
…
…
I jolted awake, startled. Where was I?
The answer and the stench hit me simultaneously. The Locker. I was still in the locker. Nobody had gotten me out. How long had I been unconscious anyway? Hours? Minutes? Only a few seconds?
I panicked. I didn't even know how long I'd been in here! Then- ARGH...
My head hurt. It hurt badly. Everything felt so alien... was I already dying? Was this how the way into afterlife felt? My... thoughts felt different. Stronger. Slowly but steadily, my headache subsided. Okay... first things first. I still needed to get out! But how? I was still trapped, the locker keeping me from getting away, making me stay within the filth.
Once again, I panicked. And then a thought pushed itself to the front of my mind. All my other thought processes halted as if in awe of that one single thought.
[0;0;1]
Why was I suddenly looking at the floor?
My eyes opened and closed in disbelief. One, Two, Three times total. Yes, I was indeed outside of the locker. Still badly bruised and filthy but I was free!
I turned myself and made my way through the school. It was very dark, the linoleum floor reflecting light from outside the only source of illumination. The halls of Winslow High around me as I stumbled awkwardly through them. After a while I had reached the main entrance.
Had I really escaped? Or was this just some kind of dream... And also: How did I escape if I did?
As if in fear of this wonderful 'dream' ending if I opened the door, I very slowly reached for the doorknob.
…
Locked.
NO! I WON'T STAY HERE! NEVER AGAIN! I WANT OUT!
And so my mind once again shifted, a though coming to halt at the front of my mind.
[0;0;1]
The next thing Inoticed was how wonderful the moon looked.
I truly was free now. I had left Winslow behind. Through some strange twist of fate, I had escaped.
And now I was free! For real this time.
Still aching and stumbling and very, very awkwardly I made my way home.
The horror had ended.
A/N: OOOOOH YEAH! Once again, sorry for the long wait! Now, keep in mind that I am rewriting the entire story so don't go thinking this is the first chapter. It isn't. This is the prologue. Taylor's discussion with her dad will be I the next chapter ( I totally just wanted to use the TAMNI reference as a title for the first rewritten part).
I hope you enjoyed it and thanks to all who reviewed my story thus far, especially to those I actually had some more or less lengthy conversation with. Thank you all, dear reviewers, subscribers and readers.
Now then, have a wonderful evening (here it's evening anyway...)!
-AzralanIn honor of Valentine's Day, I am posting an updated version of an earlier, favorite piece about the chemistry of chocolate:
The Latin name for the cacao tree - the tropical plant source of all things chocolate - consists of two words packed with candy-loving scientific exuberance. Theobroma cacao. It derives from the Greek words for god (theo) and food (brosi), roughly translating to "food of the gods".
Well, sure you say. Obviously. This is chocolate, after all. But it's not the heavenly reputation of chocolate that I'm here to talk about. I'm instead trying to explain why the most potent chemical compound in chocolate - a plant alkaloid, slightly bitter in taste, surprisingly poisonous in some species - is called theobromine.
And while chocolate, as a whole, has a wonderfully seductive chemistry,this poison-obsessed blog will remain, well, obsessed. Today's obsession is inspired by the fact that every Valentine's season, in addition to stories about love and lace, newspapers run cautionary candy tales. Or as a warning issued by the Dog Help Network yesterdaynoted: "Valentine's Day is the single biggest day on which dogs are taken to emergency rooms because of ingested chocolate."
And while we can certainly debate whether the fat and sugar in candy are good for dogs, what this warning refers to is ingested theobromine.
Theobromine is analkaloid, which is basically another way of saying that it's part of the everyday chemistry of the plant world. Plant alkaloids are nitrogen-based, typically with with flourishes of carbon, hydrogen and occasionally other atoms such as oxygen. The recipe (or as chemists like to say, formula) for theobromine is seven carbon atoms, eight of hydrogen, four of nitrogen and two of oxygen.
And while this may sound like a recipe for the routine, alkaloids are anything but. The first plant alkaloid isolated (in 1804) was morphine from the flowering poppy. Other notable examples include cocaine (1860), nicotine (1828), caffeine (1820), strychnine (1818) and a host of pharmaceuticals including the anticancer drug Vincristine; the blood pressure medication, reserpine; and the antimalarial compound, quinine.
By this standard, theobromine discovered in cacao beans in 1841, might sound to you like a basic wuss of the alkaloid family. It's mostly known as a mild stimulant in humans; it contributes (along with caffeine and a few other compounds) to that famed lift that people get from eating chocolate.
There is some evidence that if people get carried away with chocolate consumption, of course, theobromine will make them a little twitchy. According to the National Hazardous Substances Database: "It has been stated that "in large doses" theobromine may cause nausea and anorexia and that daily intake of 50-100 g cocoa (0.8-1.5 g theobromine) by humans has been associated with sweating, trembling and severe headache." Occasionally, people (mostly the elderly) have needed hospital treatment for a theobromine reaction.
But if one looks at LD50 values, it's obvious that the alkaloid is far more threatening to other species. LD50 is shorthand for "Lethal Dose-50 percent". In other words, its basically the dose that will kill 50 percent of a given population. It is usually calculated in milligrams of poison per kilograms of body weight. The theobromine LD50is about 1000 mg/kg in humans. But for cats it's 200 mg/kg and for dogs it's 300 mg/kg - in other words, we aren't the species most at risk here.
The risk varies, of course, by animal size and shape and breed. A few years ago, in fact, *National Geographic *published a fascinatinginteractive chartso that pet owners could search out the individual risk. The chart focuses on dogs because they are more likely than cats to eat something sweet. And it notes that theobromine is more concentrated in dark chocolates making them more dangerous than milk or "white" chocolate. The dark chocolate effects are so acute for canines, that the alkaloid has been tested with some success as a means of controlling coyote populations. (Interestingly, rats and mice are much less affected; their theobromine LD50 is much more like that found in humans.)
The different toxicities have to do with the way different species metabolize the alkaloid; humans process it much more efficiently than canines. And in small amounts, theobromine's effectscan make it medically useful. But even here, it shows complexity. It increases heart rate and at the same time it dilates blood vessels, acting to bring down blood pressure. It can also open up airways and is under study as a cough medication. It stimulates urine production and is considered a diuretic. It interacts with the central nervous system (although not as effectively as caffeine).
At toxic levels - in a characteristic dog death, for instance - all of this adds up acute nausea, convulsions, internal bleeding and often lethal over-stimulation of the heart. "See a vet immediately" is the message of one cautionary post, titled Toxic Chocolate. Another column, written by a vet, suggests rather hopefully that an evening walk is far more romantic and less likely to feature pet vomit (which she describes in revoltingly foamy detail).
We had that same foamy experience in our household one Christmas when our dog discovered our son's holiday stash. We all survived but the humans in the house are a lot more careful about where they leave their chocolate. And this Valentine's Day, we're sticking to champagne. Sure, ethanol is also a poison in its own right. But that's a different story.
Images 1) Chocolate/ John Hritz/Wikipedia 2) Theobromine models/WikipediaAboard The Space Station, It's A Beautiful World
Enlarge this image toggle caption NASA NASA
The space shuttle Endeavour launched its final mission this week, a 16-day mission at the International Space Station. It's the second-to-last mission scheduled for the space shuttle program before it comes to an end later this year.
This trip has added significance for shuttle commander Mark Kelly. His wife, Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is continuing her recovery from a gunshot wound received in an attack in January. She traveled to Florida to watch the launch before returning to Houston for more surgery.
On what may be his last trip into space, Kelly tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon that it's sometimes hard to understand all the conflict on such an "incredibly beautiful planet."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Geoffrey Bennett/NPR Geoffrey Bennett/NPR
"This is a really hard thing to give up," he says of his time in Earth's orbit. "Just looking down, we've got a very fragile and beautiful place to live. We need to take care of it."
Expedition 27 flight engineer Cady Coleman arrived at the space station last December. "You would think that after six months that I might even be tired of it," she tells Simon. "I will tell you that it's always changing."
"During my time up here, we've had the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the conflict in Libya, and the flooding in the South," she says. It's hard to reconcile how hard life is on the planet with the angelic view she has from above. "I'm not looking forward to giving that up."
Time Flies – That Is, It Orbits
Yet life on board the International Space Station speeds the time along. "It's a very busy place," Coleman says. "We've got, like, 130 experiments running — almost at the same time, some of them — up here on the space station."
In fact, the crew just installed a $2 billion cosmic particle detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which will hunt for dark matter, cosmic rays and antimatter galaxies.
"[It's] really a premier physics experiment that's supported by 16 different countries, 600 physicists," Kelly says. "They've been working on this thing — a lot of people — for a long time." Finally having it aboard the space station, Kelly says, is a "great day for science."
The astronauts stay busy keeping themselves in shape, too. "Just to maintain your bone mass, you need to exercise about two hours a day up here," Coleman says.
"So I would say every day is a busy day — and a great day — up here."
Shuttles Grounded, But NASA Can Still Take Off
Those great days are coming to a close — for the shuttle program, at least. Some wonder if the end of the program is NASA's final frontier, too. Not so fast, Kelly says.
"NASA is leading the way and will continue to do so," he says. "We are the lead partner on the International Space Station, and when humans go back to the moon and on to Mars, I'm sure it's going to be the United States and NASA that's leading that as well."
That includes the commercialization of launch vehicles so humans can still travel into orbit after the space shuttle program ends. "That's still NASA that's leading that project," he says, and hopefully it will expand space exploration efforts even more.
"So we're pretty excited about the future of NASA."Rovers’ major shareholders are edging closer to a decision over proposed investment by an Irish consortium, the Star understands.
According to Star sources, the shareholders took part in a crunch meeting yesterday to discuss revised terms put forward by the prospective new owners.
As expected with a deal of this size, negotiations between the two sides have been complex with a number of sticking issues needing to be resolved.
However, a final decision on the investment deal is said to be imminent.
One man who will be keen to hear the outcome is Paul Dickov.
With just eight days remaining until the start of the season, Dickov is likely to be getting anxious over the makeup of his squad.
The outcome of takeover negotiations will dramatically determine Dickov’s dealings in the transfer market, the Star understands.
Should the Irish consortium move in, Dickov will be handed significant funds to chase promotion to the Premier League.
This is expected to include a deal for Republic of Ireland goalkeeper Shay Given as well as a potential return for striker Billy Sharp.
Securing a goalkeeper will be top of Dickov’s list of priorities due to the lack of a keeper among just 15 senior players on Rovers’ books.
It appeared transfer activity had been placed on hold until after a decision was reached on the investment proposals.
But there were positive signs yesterday as Rovers confirmed the re-signing of midfielder Paul Keegan plus a deal with former Manchester United youngster Luke McCullough.
Keegan penned a new one year contract while McCullough signed a two year deal.
The 19-year-old ex-Red Devil has been earmarked for Rovers’ new development squad by Dickov.
The Rovers boss will now be keen to further boost his senior squad size by completing the signing of Harry Forrester as well as rubber-stamping deals with the five other out of contract players.
Given’s Aston Villa teammate Stephen Ireland is the latest big name to be linked with Rovers.
Another target Richie Wellens was present at Cantley Park earlier this week.
It is understood he was there to maintain his fitness following his release by Leicester City.
But a deal with the former Rovers midfielder would be likely should the takeover be completed.Europe is the faith, the faith is Europe. When Roman Paganism died, the Roman Empire in the west died. Julian the apostate tried to revive paganism, got an undead religion. My commenters tell me Christianity survives as a mustard seed, but to me, it looks like a dead parrot.
I wish Christianity could be revived, I hope it can be revived, but am not all that optimistic.
European Christianity was the official state religion, which is sort of odd because Europe was never really one state, even when there was a functioning Holy Roman Emperor and Holy Roman Empire. It has been said that the Holy Roman Empire was not holy, not Roman, and not an empire. But this is not true. It was not Roman, and not an empire, but it was holy. The Emperor, the Empire, and the state was subject to the Church in those matters where it is proper for the Church to command, and the Church was subject to the state in those matters where it is proper for the state to command. (With the usual frequent disagreements as to what is Caesar’s and what is God’s)
When the Empire faded, the Church inevitably and inexorably got drawn into earthly politics, backing one state against another, which led to the Church of England, the protestant reformation, and the sack of Rome, and eventually the bloody religious wars of the early seventeenth century. These terrible wars were resolved by the peace of Westphalia. The King gets to set his state’s religion, and other states are not supposed to interfere, though, of course, they did.
The peace of Westphalia in effect said “forget about universalism, leads to too much bloodshed”
The rise of Progressivism was the return of the holy universalist state Church, and led to the terrible wars of the twentieth century. These wars ended when one superpower became supreme, ruling in the not quite imperial style of the Holy Roman Empire, not quite an empire, but an empire nonetheless, and imposed its faith on all of Europe, and almost all of the world – but now that superpower is fading, while progressivism is more holy and more universalist than ever.
To cut the long story short, today progressivism is the state religion, and Christianity is effectively suppressed. My commenters assure me that a mustard seed remains, but I just don’t see it. Recently existent Christianity enforced patriarchal durable monogamy, with divorce being damn near impossible. The wife got a permanent obligation to honor and obey, the husband got a permanent obligation to love and cherish. And, apart from some tolerance for polygyny in early Christianity, Christianity has always been this way, until now. The New Testament, and the communion of the Saints, are quite clear on the topic.
The earthly church is a fictive kin of God, God and Church being a reflection of husband and family, (Ephesians 5:22-33) making all Christians in a church fictive kin, a tribe. Marriage is the sacrament that everyone has the power to make, the sacrament that priests could never take away from the congregation, and which links families to the congregation and to God, since the husband and wife rely on God and the congregation for social enforcement of the deal. If you end marriage as it used to be known, you end Christianity, and if you end Christianity, you end Europe. Durable Patriarchal marriage is not just one doctrine among many, it is a keystone part of the functioning of Christianity, hence the joke “Hatched, matched, and dispatched”.
For 1900 years, from the beginning of Christianity, to second wave feminism in the nineteen sixties, men removed their hats on entering church, and women covered their heads in church and on the way to and from church. For 1900 years women had their hair long. (1 Corinthians:11)
And now they don’t, and no one seems to notice that there is anything wrong with this. But don’t you feel just a little bit uneasy when you face a fertile age woman with a pixie cut? Something is wrong, something is off, something is odd, unpleasant, and disturbing, but you are not allowed to notice it.
Today’s Christians, including the supposed reactionaries like Dalrock, Bruce Charlton, and Zippy will tell you it was just a cultural thing, just Paul foolishly mistaking the fashions of his day for the universal laws of God. Which is not much different from saying that when Paul prohibited men having sex with males, he was just mistaking the fashions of his day for the universal laws of God. Similarly, Ephesians 5. Bruce Charlton will tell you that Ephesians 5 is just a metaphor, about the relationship between God and man, but not about the relationship between husband and wife. Dalrock will tell you he totally supports Ephesians 5, except he does not, and Zippy would rather not go there.
You cannot have Christianity without patriarchy, and if you are not entirely comfortable with patriarchy maybe you should be worshiping the Goddess.
In short, the Christian right, like the Republicans, are just progressives who are a bit behind the times. You may say that a short haircut on a girl is not like a man sodomizing a boy, and it is not, but if a fertile age woman wears a pixie cut, chances are she has been taking it up the ass from Mister Very Wrong, and she will forever feel in her heart that Mister Very Wrong was way more manly than you are.Traffic backed up for miles after the crash southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Jonathan Gonzalez reports for Today in LA on Thursday Aug. 10, 2017. (Published Thursday, Aug. 10, 2017)
A big rig carrying concert equipment overturned on the 10 Freeway Thursday morning after two other vehicles collided on the freeway.
Crews had to remove the concert equipment before the big rig could be towed from the freeway southeast of downtown Los Angeles ahead of the morning drive. The truck's driver told NBC4 the equipment was for a performance by Grammy winning songwriter and rapper Kendrick Lamar, who is scheduled for concert Friday at Honda Center in Anaheim.
California Highway Patrol responded to the collision around 2 a.m. and found the big rig overturned near Santa Fe Avenue. The crash caused a Sig Alert for all eastbound lanes, which are expected to remain closed until about 7 a.m.
No injuries were reported.
NBC4's Jonathan Lloyd contributed to this report.A top aide to strict gun-grabbing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been granted a waiver for carrying a firearm at government offices in violation of state law.
Cuomo appointed Jerome Hauer to take over the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services in 2011, according to the Albany Times Union.
The Albany, N.Y.-based newspaper reported in early January that Hauer used his firearm’s laser sight as a pointer device during a meeting with a delegation of Swedish security professionals — with his loaded 9-mm Glock still attached.
People sitting across from Hauer “moved quickly out of the line of the laser when he brought out the gun,” and three of the Swedes “were rattled when the gun’s laser tracked across one of their heads before Hauer found the map of New York, at which he wanted to point,” the Times Union report.
The meeting took place on Oct. 24, but the incident didn’t come to light until last month.
US Army builds 300-acre eerily fake American city to train soldiers
On Wednesday, the Times Union reported:
Cuomo defended Hauer at a news conference Wednesday. The governor said |
prowess, so what was the story? The best description of the place I read was from the Lonely Planet, which described Baku as being “the architectural love child of Paris and Dubai… albeit with plenty of Soviet genes floating half-hidden in the background”. So I asked around and discovered that the Presidential Palace, behind the pits, was built by German prisoners of war after WW2, and that almost all the buildings between that and the UNESCO-protected Old City (effectively the race track district) had all been built in the last 10 years. For new-builds, these are fantastic, but they should not be mistaken for historical buildings. But that does not really matter? Disneyland is all fake and Las Vegas used to be only sand. Dubai is much the same (minus the casinos). What matters is that the bit of Baku where F1 folk hung out was a nice town, with its olive-lined promenades along the Caspian waterfront and the delightful Old City.
After meeting the President’s man, I decided to take a look at Azeri history, in order to understand more about the country. It is a complex story which began, in modern terms, in 1918, after the Russian Empire collapsed. Independence brought chaos, which resulted in ethnic cleansing that left as many as 12,000 people massacred in just a few weeks. In the end, after the adventures detailed above, the Soviets invaded and calm was forcibly restored. When Soviet Russia collapsed, 70-odd years later, a new Azerbaijan emerged and there was a similar pattern, there were a series of governments and massacres that cost 30,000 lives before a strong man emerged. His son now runs the country. Poverty has been reduced from 49 percent of the population to just five percent, which is a number that most international organisations seem to agree upon. But a lot of the population are still very poor, even if jobs have been created to keep them fed. Stability has been key in achieving this, but stability has come at a price. People do what they are told to do, or else… One can live inside the F1 bubble and praise the place without looking at the whole picture, or one can look at the whole picture, understand why it is as it is and see the logic, even if it makes you feel uncomfortable. Is strong leadership worse than chaos and massacres? I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know is that history relates that some places are not ready for democracy and it is naive to believe otherwise.
All great democracies come through great struggles to become what they are today. Formula 1 exists to go racing. We are sports journalists and, in the end, is it our job to decide what is right and wrong? We can merely present a picture of what we see and leave the reader to decide, or we can ignore it all and pretend it’s not there. I prefer the former route.
There was not much going on in the F1 world beyond that. There was simply little time for much to happen in the days between Canada and Baku. There was talk about the new track and whether it was dangerous in places. The run-off area at Turn 15 quickly became known as “Doughnut Alley” because of the number of drivers having to do doughnuts to get back on track…
There was some gossip about the 2017 driver line-up. There was a visit to the F1 world by Kurt Busch of NASCAR fame and, after the race, there was talk about whether having radio bans in a good idea. The race was not exciting, but that happens from time to time. It was more of a disappointment because the GP2 had been wild, so wild in fact that it ended up with ART GP driver and Honda protégé Nobuharu Matsushita being given a one race ban for his actions behind the Safety Car. He deserved that for his daft accelerating and braking which led to chaos behind him.
Elsewhere in the scrawls in the notebook, I noted that Red Bull’s GP2 driver Pierre Gasly again managed to lose the race and wondered whether he will be climbing higher on the ladder. This could be good news for Daniil Kvyat and Carlos Sainz, who may get to stay at Scuderia Toro for longer now, as Red Bull has no drivers ready to step up. I even heard that Sainz has already signed a new two-year deal with Red Bull and will perhaps one day join Max Verstappen in the big team, if Daniel Ricciardo moves on. I also have a note about an amusing discussion I had about whether the sport should promote itself with topless F1 drivers appearing in calendars, a bit like the Firemen calendars one seems around the world, which have raised many millions for charity, while also promoting the idea of firemen being hunky heroes. This is not a bad idea for a sport that wants to attract 35 year old women…
I also have a note that says “250 Bahrainis” which relates to the fact that Bahrain has a three-year deal to supply officials and marshals to Baku, to give the locals time to get trained up for the roles. This is part of an FIA scheme to have clubs helping one another and helping them all to develop. The only slight problem is that while Bahrain and Azerbaijan are both Muslim countries, the former is Sunni and the latter is Shia and, I hear, there was some tension between the two groups, although there was no sign of marshals getting into fist fights with one another. There were a lot of problems with excessive security with local types making it difficult for the race folk to do their jobs. We were even told to bring our passports in addition to our F1 passes on Sunday, which seemed a little excessive. In the end they were not required.
The one thing that made me smile more than anything, however, was the F1 flag flying over the crenellations of the Old City. Rich men often like their own castles…Judge dismisses woman's lawsuit against North Ogden police KTVX-TV Video
- NORTH OGDEN, Utah (ABC 4 Utah) – A judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against the North Ogden police department.
In February, Savannah Fuchs and her attorney filed a personal injury lawsuit against the police and city for failing to protect her.
Last year, Fuchs neighbor Todd Barber broke into her apartment and allegedly fired a shot at her but missing. She told police that he beat her with the gun and tied her up threatening to rape her. Barber took his own life after she managed to escape.
But in mid-July a district judge dismissed the lawsuit.
"We have full sympathy for the victim in this case,” said Mayor Brent Taylor of North Ogden. “They were the victims of a terrible crime committed by an evil person.”
In her lawsuit, Fuch's attorney Robert Sykes claimed police knew that Barber was stalking and harassing her. Fuchs never filed a protective order.
"We are not able to predict the future sadly,” said Taylor. “Sometimes people will take action that were unexpected or not predicted."
Despite the dismissal, Fuchs still believes police didn't do enough.
"I think there were things that could have definitely been prevented,” she said. “Absolutely I think there could have been a lot more help for me."
The mayor says he's relieved the lawsuit was dismissed because it could hamper police work.
"If that could go back onto the city and the police officers, it would mire cities in costly lawsuits," he said.
Fuchs has moved out of state. She said she is currently writing a book about her experience and information that could save a women's life.
"I was able to save my life from the class I took,” she said. “I've been really empowered as a woman just educating with a company that I work for and helping others."Posted 10 June 2014 - 11:19 AM
That's a hard choice....Love the Ghost Bear classic head - MUCH better than the overly tilted modern version - but I like the rest of the modern version better. Torn on my vote.Clan Wolf classic is immensely better across the board. Higher contrast and the background smaller. Definitely a vote for "classic" there.Clan Jade Falcon... My vote would be modern, just because the classic bird looks so... I want to say dumb but that sounds insulting... Maybe bland is a better word? I like the increased contrast on it, but I have always disliked how that bird looked... My vote would have to be for modern on this one.Clan Smoke Jaguar modern is much better to me in general, but I do like the "smokey" color of the Jag in the classic version. Again, a little torn on this one, but I think my vote would be for the modern version.That all being said, the only two that I would ever actually wear as a faction would be Wolf and Ghost Bear, so I have to disqualify CSJ and CJF from my voting. That makes it a toss up for CGB and "classic" for CW, making my vote have to go for "classic" this time.Still love having a vote at all! Thanks PGI (and especially Dennis and crew, as I know having your art critiqued is VERY personal, no matter how much you try to make it not be).
Edited by Cimarb, 10 June 2014 - 11:30 AM.The widening partisan divide in America’s two most populous states lies behind a small but significant population shift between the two
Paul Chabot is a native Californian who stood for Congress last year as a Republican, in a district near Los Angeles. After his defeat, he decided the only option was to move to Texas.
'A good friend in the White House': how Texas became Trump's frontline Read more
“California’s become a lost cause,” he said. “I was born and raised there when it was a Republican state. Ronald Reagan was from there, Nixon was from there, we had great schools back in the 70s and 80s, low crime, great paying jobs. Now it’s a 180, it’s a complete opposite of that.
“I lost to a very liberal Democrat that the people elected and I came to the conclusion that you can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves. That really was the end of it for us in California. We realised then that the majority of the people around us no longer shared the same values that my wife and I believe in.”
Chabot, his wife Brenda and their four young children relocated to Collin County, which covers some of the most affluent and manicured suburbs of Dallas and where a four-bed home can be yours for under $350,000. And all 38 elected officials, from the sheriff to the district attorney to the tax assessor-collector, are Republicans.
“In California we always jokingly said, ‘If this state goes to hell we’ll end up moving to Texas.’ And a lot of people say it and some people actually do it,” Chabot said.
He is now a player in a long-running and freshly escalated ideological and economic battle between America’s most populous liberal and conservative states.
A new adoption law that critics describe as anti-LGBTQ has prompted California to ban state-funded trips to Texas. Chabot’s strategy is quite the opposite. In May he launched Conservative Move – slogan: Helping Families Move Right – a company to help fellow sufferers flee their liberal hellscapes and find asylum in the warm, red glow of suburban north Texas.
It’s not the same state it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. So you have a base who are frustrated with California and want out Paul Chabot
The 43-year-old said the response “has been fast and furious”: about a thousand expressions of interest, three-quarters of them from Californians.
“The people who are contacting us are very upset with state politics,” he said. “They might have been a lifelong Californian like I was, but they’re saying the state doesn’t represent me any more, it’s not the same state it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. So you have a base of people who are just frustrated with California and want out.”
A couple of years ago, he said, he saw a news article that declared the fast-growing county seat of McKinney to be the finest place to live in the US.
“As a Californian what I love here is that there’s no state income tax, the politics here supports the second amendment, they don’t support sanctuary cities or any of that stuff that we’ve dealt with in California and Texas is very tough on crime. They also have excellent schools where we are,” Chabot said.
He is surrounded by Californian ex-pats, he said: “My neighbour across the street, my mail man, the guy at Home Depot in the plumbing department, the police officer I met in a coffee shop.”
‘Barely a fart’
According to a Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) analysis of American Community Survey data, 502,978 people older than 25 moved from California to Texas between 2005 and 2015. Some 290,214 people went the other way. Texas was the top destination for Californians, and vice-versa.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Governor Jerry Brown treated attempts by Rick Perry of Texas to woo businesses from California with disdain. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
With 27 million Texas residents and 39 million in California, the figures suggest that roughly 1.1% of Texans over 25 moved to California and 1.3% of Californians moved to Texas over that decade. That hardly depicts a flood, or a clear winner in a rivalry that has come to symbolise the growing divide between right and left in the country as a whole. But it is a philosophical gulf that will become even more entrenched geographically if Chabot’s business flourishes.
There is scant evidence that politics is a main migration factor. Hans Johnson, of the PPIC, said the data indicates economic and family reasons are key drivers.
“Housing prices in California have escalated quite rapidly over the last five years and that of course will push more people out of the state,” he said.
As a Sacramento Bee headline put it in March: “California exports its poor to Texas, other states, while wealthier people move in.”
When he was governor of Texas, as the oil and gas boom helped the state prosper despite the recession of the late 2000s, Rick Perry voiced radio advertisements seeking to woo Californian businesses – an effort that the Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, termed “barely a fart”.
They can laugh at California’s travel ban to Texas but it’ll be more than a travel ban from one state Sylvia Garcia
With a Republican in the White House, California now makes an appealing scapegoat for Texas politicians who fired up their base by disparaging Barack Obama.
“It’s funny how the very state that is so adamantly against keeping terrorists out of our country – they oppose the president’s travel ban – now wants to keep Californians out of Texas,” a spokesman for Texas attorney general Ken Paxton told the Houston Chronicle. “I guess that’s California logic.”
But an energy industry downturn has hurt Texas’ economy, and though Arizona and North Carolina endured boycotts in recent years for legislation perceived as discriminatory, Texas is likely to pass a “bathroom bill” this summer to limit restroom access for transgender people. In protest at a new immigration law, the American Immigration Lawyers Association has switched its 2018 conference from the Dallas area to San Francisco.
“They can laugh at California’s travel ban to Texas but it’ll be more than a travel ban from one state,” said Sylvia Garcia, a Democratic state senator from Houston. “It’ll be more states and it will be more companies who do not want to relocate here and it will be more conferences and more visitors who won’t want to come here.”
While Texas lawmakers fulminate against liberal values with the rallying cry, “Don’t California our Texas!”, the state’s biggest cities have turned bluer, most obviously Austin, where Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Facebook have a significant presence. Last November, Hillary Clinton secured more than 54% of the vote in Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio, even though Donald Trump won Texas easily.
‘This is where you get most for your money’
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Houston may have a smog problem, but it also attracts progressives with its surprising levels of diversity. Photograph: David J. Phillip/AP
Tanya Santillan, a 30-year-old attorney originally from northern California, moved to Houston last year from Washington DC. Especially as a Mexican American in the current environment, she said, she is cautious about discussing politics in her adopted state, but Houston has been “a pleasant surprise”.
“You always come in with a preconceived notion that it’s going to be super-conservative, maybe more racism, a lot more backward-thinking, more religious. You don’t necessarily expect for there to be as much diversity as there is, and I think Houston, it’s a bubble inside of Texas, people are a lot more progressive. I think maybe if I lived in a smaller town than Houston my experience would be completely different.”
When I first mentioned to some of my friends that I was moving to Houston, they just kind of asked, like, ‘Why?' Kyle Loftis
Santillan has a pragmatic attitude. “This is where you get the most for your money,” she said, and the political climate is “not enough to disincentivise you to move there”.
Kyle Loftis has a similar view. The 34-year-old grew up in southern California and lived in San Francisco before moving to Houston four years ago. He works for a parking company and said the transition was smooth.
“When I first mentioned to some of my friends that I was moving to Houston, they just kind of asked, like, ‘Why? Why would you move to Texas?’” he said.
“There were a few jokes about Texas being gun country and all that kind of stuff, but nothing too bad, really. I would say it was just more of a little bit of confusion, like, ‘Why are you moving out there? You can get a job here.’”
But the Bay Area is notoriously expensive. “My biggest thing was just the affordability. The cost of living is just far lower in Texas,” Loftis said.
Another transplant from the Bay Area to Houston, Chris Pedersen, a 34-year-old who works in the oil and gas industry said the cost of living in California was “getting ridiculous. It’s become very problematic.
“My grandma lives in a two-bedroom, two-bath townhouse [20 miles south of San Francisco] which just got appraised for a million dollars. It’s crazy. We just closed on a house actually a week ago, we’re moving in as we speak, and it’s half of that, and it’s a great neighborhood, great house. There’s no way we would have been able to afford it in California.
“Do I agree with all the Texas politics, no. But do I agree with all the Californian politics, not at all. You’ll have your challenges wherever.”In Understanding Comics, which Stewart Brand described as “a seminal work at the level of Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information,” Scott McCloud defined comics as “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” Using this definition, McCloud proposed several examples of the earliest known comic: the 11th-century CE Bayeaux Tapestry, which tells the story of William I’s conquest of England; the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, an illustrated 14th-century CE Mixtec manuscript that narrates the life of Lord Eight Deer Jaguar Claw; and Egyptian tomb paintings like the harvest scenes in the Tomb of Menna, or this example from the Tomb of Nakht.
Older than all of these, though, are the Kanozero Petroglyphs in northwestern Russia, which were carved between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago. On an expedition in 02012, Jan Magne Gjerde and his colleagues from Tromsø University Museum peeled layers of sod from the ancient stones, revealing images of boats, moose, beavers, and harpoons.
One series of images depicted a solitary hunter on skis, tracking a bear uphill. According to Past Horizons, “The ski tracks are just as one would expect for someone going up a slope with a good distance between the strides. The hunter then gets his feet together, skis down a slope, stops, removes his skis, takes four steps – and plunges his spear into the bear.” Describing the find, Gjerde said, “This is the oldest example of a cartoon petroglyph we know of, at least in Northern Europe, so it was utterly thrilling to get the chance to be part of this discovery.”
In their ten days at the site, Gjerde and his team colored the petroglyphs with chalk, covered them with plastic sheeting, then traced their outlines onto the plastic with felt-tip pen. Although it was a cumbersome procedure—especially when unexpected rainstorms drenched the plastic sheets—it produced a portable record of the carvings that could be taken back to the museum and studied at length.
As Gjerde noted, the petroglyphs add a layer of understanding to the archaeological record at this site. “We can excavate a settlement or find arrowheads but we usually don’t have direct evidence of what sort of animals have been hunted with such weapons.” At Lake Kanozero, the comics carved into the rock not only show what animals the ancient residents of the area hunted, but also how they hunted them. As Gjerde put it, “These people, at this spot, documented part of their lives and I was fortunate to be one of the first people in 5,000 years to see it.”Nature responded handsomely to a beautiful morning in my local Mancunian park. A blazing spring sun was raising the temperature to a the giddy heights of about 18C, encouraging daisies and dandelions to burst proudly into bloom, hungry bumblebees to lurch clumsily in search of pollen and male homo sapiens to throw off their shirts for a traditional communion of sunshine and skin. Such bare-chested displays will be absent from at least one corner of Essex this summer after the Adventure Island theme park introduced an edict forbidding the flaunting of pecs in the name of decorum. Manager Marc Miller was quoted as saying: "In recent years we've seen increasing numbers of lads and men whipping their tops off, eager to make the most of the sun. That's absolutely fine in the right environment, but we try hard to be a family-focused business and not everybody is a fan of bare chests."
In contrasting naked male torsos to a family-friendly environment, the park manager is explicitly acknowledging the sexuality of a topless man. Should anyone doubt this, I would suggest you look at footage from the MTV Awards on Sunday, where Zac Efron was handed an award (and I'm not making this up) for "best shirtless performance". He began a thank-you speech against a chorus of lusting adolescent screams demanding he strip off. He had barely said two words before Rita Ora obliged the mob, sneaking up behind him and ripping open his shirt. With a resigned shake of the head, Efron finished the job, stripping topless to trigger 10,000 adoring screams and a million shares on Tumblr.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the incident sparked a minor debate about the acceptable limits of objectification. It should be noted that Efron had teased his fans beforehand about collecting the award topless and appeared to have turned up in a denim stripper shirt with spring-loaded pop-fasteners instead of buttons. It is by no means far-fetched to imagine that Ora's role may have been planned. Nonetheless, I would argue that the performance was unhealthy.
Ora's actions bypassed Efron's consent and he was no longer in control of his body, and how it was used for the entertainment or titillation of others. If the actor wishes to strip to the waist and bare his (admittedly rather glorious) physique to the world, then I offer him my blessing and my gratitude. The problem here was not with the overt display of flesh, but the overt display of exploitation. I have no problem with any man off for the entertainment of others but that must be his choice and, more importantly, seen to be his choice.
In many ways the incident was reminiscent of the deeply discomfiting and cringeworthy scene at the recent American Music Awards where Justin Bieber was publicly pawed and practically eaten alive by a woman. In both cases, a young man's sexuality was considered fair game, his consent thought irrelevant. It is my view that the word "objectification" is thrown around too easily, and with too little thought to its meaning. Not this time. The feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum once set out seven features of sexual objectification, including denying the subject autonomy, agency and boundary integrity. I'm pretty sure both Bieber and Efron were violated on every score.
Back in Essex, I willingly accept that facilities like theme parks are entitled to enforce an appropriate dress code and a line has to be drawn somewhere. I have never been personally affronted by an excess of flesh, nor do I find any degree of nudity inherently obscene or degrading. Nonetheless, I am prepared to accept that others are made uncomfortable by such exposure. If that precludes the unveiling of chiselled, sculpted, bronzed musculature alongside wobbly bellies and man-boobs, I guess that's how it must be. If anyone is feeling deprived of some uncovered male torso, feel free to visit St James' Park, Newcastle, the next time Toon score a goal, or my local park in Manchester the next time the sun shines. Feel free to place bets on which will happen first.
Twitter: @AllyFoggOne of the nation’s largest providers of high-speed internet service wants you pay more to keep them from tracking what you search on the web, a practice that concerns federal officials and privacy experts.
AT&T’s plan requires metro Atlanta customers of its high-speed gigabit service to allow the company to track their web searches in exchange for a discounted price.
The Federal Communications Commission is considering banning the practice, which consumer advocates say interferes with customers right to privacy.
Experts say AT&T’s move is part of a larger issue. Because installing fiber cable to offer such high speeds is expensive, providers see tracking consumer surfing and packaging it with advertising as a way to offset costs.
“At the end of the day, these companies want data,” said Gregory Brant Gimpel, a Computer Information Systems faculty member at Georgia State University. “The more data they have, the better they can target you or target your household.”
Finding ways to get that data is growing and in many way consumers are complicit.
Gone for some are the days when turning on lights was a private routine when you got home. Now household lights are connected to the internet along with thermostats, smoke detectors, TVs and streaming boxes like Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV.
Most consumers don’t even blink when hitting yes to the long legalese associated with updating an app on their phone. We upload personal photos to Facebook and Instagram without a care and we tell the world where we are by digitally “checking in” at malls, airports, vacation spots and restaurants.
Despite this, Americans say they are concerned about their data. A study released in January by the Pew Research Center found that 91 percent of adults agree or strongly agree that consumers have lost control of how their personal information is collected and used by companies.
Seventy-four percent of Americans said it is “very important’ to them that they be in control of who can get information about them, the Pew study found.
Kim Speece, of Atlanta, said she is comfortable with sharing her data and understands that much of what she does on the web can be tracked. That is a price you pay, she said, for the convenience that comes with the Internet.
But privacy trumps convenience, she said, when it comes to her two teenage children. She makes sure their settings on Facebook and other social media sites are set to private and she avoids sites or web offers that want to know more about them.
“Their privacy is very important to me,” she said. “If I am asked about them, I always say no.”
David Belson, a technology industry expert, said it’s not so much about the data being collected, but how it’s used. For instance, he wonders if an Internet provider tracking his online habits will expose his kids to advertising more suitable for adults because he watches “NCIS” or will he be inundated with Nickelodeon ads because the site is popular with his kids.
And what happens when the advertising becomes sophisticated enough to leap into the real world of brick-and-mortar stores a la “Minority Report.” In the movie starring Tom Cruise, the actor’s eyes are scanned as he enters a mall, setting off a barrage of pop up holograms pitching ads based on his personal data.
“That’s creepy,” said Belson, editor of a quarterly state of the Internet report for Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Akamai Technologies.
In a race for more speed
AT&T said its discounted plan is about customization, not spying on consumers.
“AT&T Internet Preferences offers customers our best pricing on AT&T GigaPower because we can provide tailored ads and offers to a customer’s interests,” said Ann Elsas, a company spokeswoman. “These are based on their commonly used individual web browsing information. Since we began offering the service in 2013, the vast majority of customers have elected to opt-in to the ad-supported model.”
AT&T did not provide numbers on those who opt-in for ads. The company said data is not sold to third parties.
The company is in a battle with Google Fiber and Comcast to bring metro Atlantans gigabit speeds — internet so fast a high-definition movie can be downloaded in less than 30 seconds.
Each offers the service for $70 a month, but only AT&T’s plan requires customers to allow the company to track their web habits. To surf without the tracking costs $29 more a month.
Comcast locks customers in to a three-year contract at the $70 price. That cost increases to $140 a month without the three-year contract. Comcast said it does not track consumer online activities.
Alex Horwitz, a spokesman for Comcast, said the company’s three-year commitment has actually been well-received by customers. He said it gives them “peace of mind that comes with price stability.”
While Google Fiber’s $70 price does not come with any strings, the company does track viewing habits through its optional TV package. The company said its TV customers can also opt out of the tracking and that it does not make any of the data it collects available to third parties.
Tino Mantella, president and CEO of the Georgia Technology Association, said concerns about privacy may be generational. Millennials are more open to sharing information than their elders because they have grown up in a culture where that is expected.
But he said it is clear to him that data is top of mind for most businesses and it us up to those who gather it to keep it safe. It is not unusual for sponsors of GTA’s events to ask the group to share their email lists so sponsors can thank them for coming. He declines such requests.
“Its very common in all industries now,” he said.LeBron James’ basketball career has played out like the story of a comic book superhero, so it’s only fitting that his downfall should have a fittingly dramatic twist: that which he created became that which destroyed him.
James ushered in the modern NBA “superteam” in 2010 (distinct from the past eras of the Lakers in the 80s and Bulls in the 90s) when he signed with the Miami Heat to join forces with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. There he won two titles in four years and then returned to Cleveland for a new superteam with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. After losing to Golden State in the 2015 finals, Cleveland bested a mostly homegrown Warriors team a year ago and reclaimed James’ dominance over the league. The Warriors then decided they had to become an even greater superteam to get back on top, so they added Kevin Durant from Oklahoma City and the rest – and the rest of the league – is history. LeBron’s excellence forced Golden State’s hand. He was too good for his own good. And now his team and the entire NBA is being laid to waste.
Sunday night’s Game 2 had to leave Cleveland fans, and all basketball fans who hoped for a competitive series, feeling even more hopeless than they did after Game 1. The Warriors had a different coach, the Cavs went with different uniforms, but the outcome was the same: a double-digit walk. Cleveland will now have to defend their homecourt to stay in the series – as an entertainingly surly James made a reporter say here:
CJ Fogler (@cjzero) LeBron is taking questions, but he does not have much patience for this one pic.twitter.com/QfUObUZWM6
But they will also have to take a game in Oakland in order to win the series. Knowing that full well, the Cavaliers were still unable to make Golden State sweat; the Warriors took the lead for good at the 7:38 mark of the first quarter and never relinquished it. And that was with Cleveland playing some pretty good basketball. Head coach Tyronn Lue felt the Cavs did well on defense despite giving up 40 points in the first quarter and 132 in the game. The Cavs shot 45% from the floor, cut their turnovers from 20 in Game 1 to nine in Game 2 and had LeBron at his full powers, as he put up 29 points, 11 rebounds and 14 assists while only missing six shots. Yet they still lost by 19 points, only a three-point improvement over their 22-point Game 1 defeat. The Cavaliers are giving their best and so far it’s not good enough. It’s not even close.
NBA finals: unstoppable Warriors beat stunned Cavaliers in Game 2 Read more
Now for the obligatory mention that the Cavaliers were also down 2-0 in last year’s finals and were hearing many of the same things about how they had no shot of coming back. Cleveland even lost Game 2 of the 2016 finals by 33 points, a bigger margin than Sunday night’s defeat. But just looking at recent history and comparing scores from year-to-year is ignoring what’s actually happening out on the court. The Cavaliers and James didn’t play well in Game 2 last year; they did this year – Kyrie Irving excluded – and it still didn’t matter. And while it’s true the Cavaliers overcame 3-1 last year, the deficit feels more like 30-1 now. In fact, the Warriors have lost just one of their last 30 games – their only defeat since mid-March coming way back on 10 April to the Jazz. These Cavaliers are probably a more complete team than the one that brought a championship to Cleveland last year thanks to the additions of Kyle Korver and Deron Williams, while the Warriors – breaking news – added Kevin Durant. The best pure scorer on the planet and probably the second-best basketball player in the world doesn’t make the Warriors complete; he makes it near-impossible for other teams to compete. Ten Kyle Korvers or even 10 Deron Williams from five years ago don’t equal one Durant.
Cleveland’s 3-1 comeback was aided by Steph Curry and Klay Thompson struggling with their shooting touch. The chances of Curry and Thompson and now Durant, three of the top marksmen in the game, all being off on the same night are absurdly slim. It’s betting on the worst parlay of all-time. The trend isn’t in Cleveland’s favor either. Durant is shooting 60% from the floor and 52% from three in his last four games; Curry is hitting on 46% from the floor and 45% from three in the series so far after shooting at just a 40% clip last year; and even Thompson snapped out of his prolonged slump in Game 2 to hit on 4-of-7 threes. The Cavs’ best shot at getting all three in a slump might just be calling on the powers of Cleveland sports legend Jobu.
Conventional wisdom entering the series was that having LeBron would be enough to steal one or two games for the Cavaliers. Maybe LeBron, Irving playing his A-game and the Cleveland crowd would be enough for them to manage three wins. And then anything can happen in a Game 7, right? That was the path. That path seems pretty hard to see now, blocked by the long, spindly arms of Kevin Durant and a thousand Steph Curry mouthpieces.
The Cavs can get one, maybe two. But thinking they have a shot to win it all feels too far-fetched for even a comic book. The other superheroes have teamed up to take out LeBron and all Cleveland can do now is watch it happen.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Ms Sturgeon said the energy firm's "only job is to secure the lowest price for consumers"
The Scottish government is to set up a publicly-owned, not-for-profit energy company, Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed.
The SNP leader told the party's conference that the company will sell energy to customers at "as close to cost price as possible".
Ms Sturgeon said it would be set up by 2021, and would give people - particularly on low incomes - more choice of which supplier to use.
She also said the SNP will "always make the case for independence".
And while the Scottish government has delayed plans for a second independence referendum, Ms Sturgeon insisted that the SNP still had a mandate for a vote on the issue.
She described the "essence of independence" as being "in charge of the decisions that shape your destiny" and "being in the driving seat and not simply at the mercy of events".
The first minister declared: "We are the party of independence. The case for independence doesn't depend on Brexit. But Brexit does show us what can happen when we don't control our own future".
Among Ms Sturgeon's other announcements were:
A "truly transformational" doubling of spending on early-years childcare to £840m by 2020
A new scheme to provide free sanitary products in schools, colleges and universities from next August
All young people leaving care will be exempt from paying council tax
A £6m fund to help the tourist industry in Scotland's more remote areas
Confirmed the 1% public sector pay will be lifted in Scotland
Announced that permission has been granted to the people of Ulva, an island off the west coast of Mull, to bring their island into community ownership
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Nicola Sturgeon: "The gap between Scotland's interests and Westminster's priorities has never been wider."
The possibility of launching a publicly-owned energy company was included in last year's SNP manifesto.
In her keynote speech to the conference in Glasgow, Ms Sturgeon said the idea would now be taken forward, with more detail to be provided when the Scottish government publishes its new energy strategy.
She said: "Energy would be bought wholesale or |
on Friday after another series of photographs went viral on the internet showing her posing next to a dead Oryx antelope while holding a rifle on an African safari hunting trip last year.
The picture, uploaded the day Belgium played, and beat, the United States on 1 July, was accompanied by her caption joking that she was ready to turn her hunting rifle on Americans.
“Hunting is not a matter of life or death. It’s much more important than that... this was about 1 year ago... ready to hunt Americans today haha,” she wrote.
Her Facebook page has since been deleted.
“I didn’t mean to offend anyone... it was a joke. Thanks for understanding,” Miss Despiegelaere posted on Wednesday in an attempt to defuse a growing row on social media.
L’Oréal on Friday dismissed Belgian reports that Miss Despiegelaere was a new “It Girl” and emphasised that the cosmetics company “no longer tests on animals, anywhere in the world”.
“L’Oréal Professionnel Belgium collaborated with her on an ad hoc basis to produce a video for social media use in Belgium. The contract has now been completed,” said a statement to the Independent.
L’Oréal is the world’s biggest beauty company with a cosmetics empire ranging from make-up to hair and skin products.
The company is sensitive to animal welfare concerns and two years ago donated $1.2 million to the US Environmental Protection Agency to help improve the testing of safe chemicals without the use of animals.This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Waters, I also wanted to ask you about Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin. During his confirmation hearing last month, the former Goldman Sachs executive defended himself against accusations he used a tax haven in the Cayman Islands in order to avoid paying taxes.
STEVEN MNUCHIN: Let me just be clear again: I did not use the Cayman Island entity in any way to avoid taxes for myself. I paid U.S. taxes on all that income, OK? So, there was no benefit to me from the Cayman entity. As I said, the Cayman entity was set up to accommodate nonprofit and pension funds that want to invest through offshore in a certain number of offshore—
AMY GOODMAN: Mnuchin has deep ties on Wall Street, including working as a partner for Goldman Sachs, where his father also worked. Mnuchin’s hedge fund also played a role in the housing crisis after it scooped up the failing California bank IndyMac in 2008. Under Mnuchin’s ownership, IndyMac foreclosed on 36,000 families, particularly elderly residents trapped in reverse mortgages. He was accused of running a “foreclosure machine.” The bank, which was renamed OneWest, was also accused of racially discriminatory lending practices. In 2015, Mnuchin sold the bank for $3.4 billion—$1.8 billion more than he had bought it for. During an appearance on CNBC, he was asked about OneWest Bank allegedly violating the Fair Housing Act by redlining.
STEVEN MNUCHIN: Let me tell you, one of the most proud aspects of my career was buying IndyMac during the financial crisis. We bought it from the government in a highly competitive six-month auction. And we saved a lot of jobs, and we created a lot of—a lot of opportunities for corporate loans. Now, one aspect of that is we bought the worst mortgage portfolio in the history of time. IndyMac was about 30 percent delinquent loans. So, all the loans that we unfortunately had to foreclose on, we didn’t originate those. Those were IndyMac loans. And the deal, when we merged with CIT, was the first bank deal to be approved post-Dodd-Frank over $50 billion. So we went through a one-year comment period with the OCC and the Fed. These same community groups protested against the deal. The regulators looked at the deal and thought it made sense.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s treasury secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin. Congressmember Waters, this is personal for you. You’re from Los Angeles. The protests were in your area, outside his house, protesting what they called a “foreclosure machine.”
REP. MAXINE WATERS: Yes, absolutely. I know something about Steve Mnuchin. As a matter of fact, I was contacted and asked to sit in on some efforts that were being made by nonprofits to get him to, you know, make real investments in the community, rather than simply being known as the “foreclosure king,” having, of course, foreclosed on about 36,000 families and homes. And they were asking him to support the work of the nonprofits, and asking him to make up for the problems that he had caused in communities with these foreclosures. Many of the homes that belonged in his portfolio were not kept up. The grass grew up. The windows were boarded up. It helped to drive down the value of other homes in the area. And, of course, he is guilty of redlining and not having the bank make loans in minority communities. And so, he comes with a bad reputation. And just to know that he bought those loans from IndyMac and got them, I believe, very cheaply and then made over a billion dollars on them is quite disturbing.
And this is what we’re going to have as treasury secretary? He would be the one to convene all of the agencies dealing with financial services under something called FSOC. And so, whether you’re talking about FDIC or OCC or the Feds, etc., all of them would be convened regularly for FSOC under the leadership of the Treasury. That is not good for this country. I don’t think he should have that kind of huge power and responsibility. And so, this is typical of what this president is doing. He’s picking from Wall Street, he’s picking from the financial services industry, those people who have made a lot of money, who were responsible for that meltdown that we had with subprime loans. He knows exactly what he’s doing. And don’t forget, Donald Trump said he made money during the crisis. And I’m told that he set about teaching students in the so-called Trump University how they can make money in such a crisis.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Congresswoman Waters, about the other nominee you mentioned, Jeff Sessions for attorney general, you’re completely opposed to his appointment. Could you say why?
REP. MAXINE WATERS: Yes. You know, Jeff Sessions comes with a reputation of—you know, he was not confirmed, I think, when he tried to get confirmed in 1986. And he didn’t get confirmed then because of a racist background. I think he’s a throwback. He’s still the same Jeff Sessions now as he was then. I don’t think that he should be in the position of being the attorney general of this country, overseeing the Civil Rights Division, that has a responsibility for making sure that people’s civil rights are not violated and moving very aggressively to deal with local police departments. As a matter of fact, he does not believe that the government should have a role dealing with troubled local police departments, like in Ferguson, where the Justice Department went in to try and work out the problems that had been brewing for years in that city. But he does not believe that that’s a role for the Justice Department.
AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly—
REP. MAXINE WATERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —they cannot rush ahead with the vote for Senator Sessions to be attorney general, because if he’s confirmed, there will be one less Republican senator, and they’re afraid that then Betsy DeVos, they could not get approved, so they have to get her confirmed before they confirm Senator Sessions.Enterprise Active Directory administrators need to be on the lookout for anomalous privileged user activity after the discovery of malware capable of bypassing single-factor authentication on AD that was used as part of a larger cyberespionage campaign against a global company based in London.
Hackers already on the company’s network via a remote access Trojan (RAT) deployed what’s being called the Skeleton Key malware used to steal legitimate insider credentials in order to steal company data and exfiltrate it to the outside without raising many red flags.
Researchers at Dell SecureWorks would not identify the organization, nor provide any indication on the identity or location of the attackers, other than to say that it was not an “ecrime” operation and some of the documents taken would be of interest to entities on the “Pacific rim.”
Skeleton Key purposely lacks persistence, said Dell SecureWorks director of technology Don Smith. It is installed as an in-memory patch on an Active Directory domain controller and will not survive a reboot. Granted, Active Directory domain controllers such as the ones compromised in this attack, are not rebooted all that often.
“I don’t think it was a mistake [by the attackers]. The people concerned have the capability of making it persistent,” Smith said. “The lack of persistence characterizes the stealthy nature of this operation. If you make it persistent over a reboot, you have to leave something behind in the registry or elsewhere that will make it restart. This is super stealthy and this minimizes their footprint. They rely on their foothold elsewhere in the network, and jump in every time they need to.”
With access to Active Directory, the hackers can secure username-password combinations and use those credentials to remotely carry out the rest of their attack authenticated as legitimate users. In the case of the London firm, they were discovered on the network which used password-only authentication for its webmail and VPN remote access. Once inside, they were able to use credentials stolen from critical servers, admin workstations and domain controllers to drop Skeleton Key anywhere else on the network.
Dell SecureWorks posted a number of indicators of compromise and YARA detection signatures in a report published this week. A number of file names were also found associated with Skeleton Key, including one suggesting an older variant of the malware exists, one that was compiled in 2012.
Dell SecureWorks also said the attackers, once on the network, upload the malware’s DLL file to an already compromised machine and attempt to access admin shares on the domain controllers using a list of stolen admin credentials. If the credentials don’t work, they deploy password-stealing tools to extract admin passwords from memory of another server, the domain admin’s workstation or the targeted domain controllers, Dell SecureWorks said. With access to the controller, Skeleton Key’s DLL is loaded and the attackers use the PsExec utility to remotely inject the Skeleton Key patch and run the malware’s DLL remotely on the target domain controllers. The attackers then use a NTLM password hash to authenticate as any user.
Skeleton Key purposely lacks persistence; it is installed as an in-memory patch on an Active Directory domain controller Tweet
The lack of persistence isn’t the only perceived weakness associated with Skeleton Key. Its deployment caused AD domain controller replication issues in regional offices that required a reboot. The frequent reboots were an indication that the attackers were re-implanting Skeleton Key, Smith said, which along with the presence of PsExec or TaskScheduler are other anomalous privileged user activities to be on the lookout for.
“This was from about just collecting passwords. Once they injected the hash, they could then walk up to any machine in the network, give any user name and their password and get in,” Smith said. “The bad guys used remote access to authenticate at will. I think that characterizes this attack as a long-running cyberespionage operation. There is a lot of information in the victim organization they’re looking for, and they want to maintain as low a profile as possible to evade discovery. All the espionage activity is carried out as an ordinary user. The challenge as a defender is the need to look for anomalous user behavior, which isn’t all that simple a task.”According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, an estimated 45.8 million people, including women and children, are subject to some form of modern slavery in the world. (Representational image)
Highlights India followed by China (3.39 million) and Pakistan (2.13 million) The top 5 countries accounted for almost 58% of the world's enslaved Nearly 46 million people are subjected to slavery globally
India has the dubious distinction of having the highest number of people in the world trapped in modern slavery with 18.35 million victims of forced labour, ranging from prostitution and begging, according to a new report, which estimated that nearly 46 million people are enslaved globally.According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index released by Australia-based human rights group Walk Free Foundation today, an estimated 45.8 million people, including women and children, are subject to some form of modern slavery in the world, compared to 35.8 million in 2014.The report said India has the highest absolute numbers of people trapped in slavery with 18.35 million slaves among its 1.3 billion population while North Korea has the highest incidence (4.37 per cent of the population) and the weakest government response to deal with it.In the last report in 2014, India had nearly 14.3 million people enslaved.Incidences of slavery were found in all 167 countries in the Index, with Asian countries occupy the top five for people trapped in slavery.Behind India was China (3.39 million), Pakistan (2.13 million), Bangladesh (1.53 million) and Uzbekistan (1.23 million).The Index said that these five countries combined accounted for almost 58 per cent of the world's enslaved, or 26.6 million people.The Index presents a ranking of 167 countries based on the proportion of the population that is estimated to be in modern slavery.Modern slavery refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot leave because of threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power or deception.The research included over 42,000 interviews conducted in 53 languages across 25 countries, including 15 state-level surveys in India. These representative surveys covered 44 per cent of the global population.The countries with the highest estimated prevalence of modern slavery by the proportion of their population are North Korea, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, Cambodia, India, and Qatar.The countries with the lowest estimated prevalence of modern slavery by the proportion of their population are Luxembourg, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden and Belgium, the United States and Canada, and Australia and New Zealand.The study also tracked the government actions and responses to the modern slavery and of the 161 assessed, 124 nations had criminalised human trafficking in line with the UN trafficking Protocol and 96 nations had developed national action plans to coordinate government response.It noted that while India had more people enslaved than any other country, it had made significant progress in introducing measures to tackle the problem."It has criminalised trafficking, slavery, forced labour, child prostitution and forced marriage. The Indian government is currently tightening legislation against human trafficking, with tougher punishment for repeat offenders. It will offer victims protection and recovery support," it said.It said that in addition to economic growth in India, ambitious programmes of legal and social reform are being undertaken right across the board, from regulation of labour relations to systems of social insurance for the most vulnerable.In a sweeping statement earlier this month, U.S. officials accused Russia of trying to meddle in the U.S. election by hacking into Democratic targets, such as the Democratic National Committee. State Dept. accuses Russia of 'PR stunt' in election-monitoring flap
The State Department on Thursday accused Moscow of a “PR stunt” after reports emerged that the U.S. had rejected Russia's request to send delegates to “monitor” November's polls — the latest twist in a bizarre election season sullied by accusations of Russian meddling.
Kremlin-backed news outlets such as RT, sometimes citing other media, reported Thursday that representatives of Russia's Central Elections Commission had talked to the State Department about sending a delegation to watch the U.S. polls on Nov. 8.
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Although allowing in foreign observers to watch Americans vote is nothing new, "U.S. officials categorically rejected even the possibility of such a mission" by Russia, RT reported.
The U.S. is "suffering from some sort of persecutory delusion," a Russian lawmaker was quoted as saying. "They imagine that Russians want to distort their elections and somehow intend to do it while acting as observers."
In a statement to POLITICO, State Department spokesman Mark Toner flatly denied his agency played a role.
"Any suggestion that we rejected Russia's proposal to observe our elections is false," Toner said, noting that allowing foreign observers is up to individual states. Russian officials could have participated in an observer delegation through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Toner added, but declined to do so, making their new complaints "nothing more than a PR stunt."
A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the Russian media accounts suggested officials in Moscow were conflating a number of issues involved in election monitoring in the United States, including who is in charge.
Russia has played an outsized role in this U.S. election season, with Republican nominee Donald Trump speaking fondly of Russian President Vladimir Putin and inviting the Kremlin to hack Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in an attempt to recover deleted emails from her controversial private server.
During Wednesday night's debate Clinton dared Trump to admit that Russia was hacking U.S. campaign bodies and called him Putin’s “puppet.” But Trump refused to blame Russia and would not commit to accepting the results of the Nov. 8 elections, claiming that the process has been "rigged" against him.
In a sweeping statement earlier this month, U.S. officials accused Russia of trying to meddle in the U.S. election by hacking into Democratic targets, such as the Democratic National Committee. The White House later pledged that there would be a “proportional” response to the hack, without providing details.
The latest flap over the prospect of Russia monitoring U.S. elections elevates the tensions even more.
The United States has long welcomed foreigners, including lawmakers and others, to "observe" the American elections. It typically does so as part of its role in the OSCE, a 57-member body that tackles a range of topics, from arms control to the economy, through a consensus-based but not legally binding process.
In March, the U.S. sent an invitation to the OSCE division that oversees election observers, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, for this year's presidential election. The members of the ODIHR are, in theory, committed to promoting free and fair elections, and the foreign observer missions are designed to be largely educational.
The ODIHR sends observers drawn from the ranks of the participating countries. But even then, the observers cannot access all U.S. poll stations because, for the most part, control of elections falls to the states. At least 12 states either directly or indirectly bar foreign election observers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
According to RT, whose coverage of the 2016 race has been highly pro-Trump, U.S. officials who rejected Russia's request to send "monitors" suggested that Moscow instead send its representatives through the ODIHR.
Russia is a member of the broader OSCE. However, according to RT, a Russian official said the country would not go along with the reported U.S. recommendation to rely on the ODIHR mission "because participating in it would involve additional restrictions against visiting polling stations in some U.S. states." The official also is quoted as saying Russia will conduct “remote” monitoring of the election by analyzing media and other open-source reports.
Russian officials are also quoted as complaining that their wish to visit the U.S. for the election was rejected with “very harsh formulas” by officials in some states, including Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. "In Texas, they even threatened to hold monitors who appear at ballot stations criminally responsible," the Russian sources are quoted as saying.
Those three states are among the 12 that the NCSL lists as not allowing foreign election observers, but Russian officials seemed unaware of that, based on the RT report. And the states' exact approaches may not all be set in stone.
For instance, Louisiana officials shared with POLITICO a copy of the letter the state Secretary of State Tom Schedler sent to the Russian consul general who requested that an official from the consulate in Houston be allowed to visit a precinct with the "goal of studying the U.S. experience" on Nov. 8.
Schedler, in genial tones, denied the request, but said it was because his staff was overwhelmed in trying to deal with the recent flooding in the Baton Rouge area. The flooding had not only affected his staff on a personal level, it also meant reorganizing polling stations and other work, Schedler wrote. "I ask that you please contact me in 2020 if you still are desirous to visit a precinct in a presidential election," the Louisiana official added.
The denial letter from Texas Secretary of State Carlos Cascos is far more curt, and, as the Russian officials claim, does indeed note that anyone not authorized by law to be in a polling station during voting would be "committing a class C misdemeanor crime." But, according to a copy of the missive shared with POLITICO, Cascos also offers to have an aide talk to Russian representatives about the election process.
On Thursday, researchers announced they had confirmed that the Gmail account of John Podesta, chairman of Democrat Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, had been hacked by the same Russian intelligence-linked operatives alleged to have earlier breached the servers of the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Russia has for years been believed to try to influence elections in Europe, particularly in eastern regions that were once under Soviet domination. Moscow is thought to financially support far-right parties and use its hacking prowess to meddle with European states.
Putin and other Russian leaders have dismissed the notion that they are messing with America's presidential race, but many analysts and former U.S. officials weren't buying it on Thursday.
"Russia is a member of the OSCE," noted Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia. "Those from Russia wishing to observe the U.S. elections should apply to join the OSCE delegation."
Evelyn Farkas, a former top Pentagon official, was more blunt.
"Russia has forfeited the role of independent observer," she said. "How could they possibly be trusted to give an objective review of whether our elections are free and fair?"Had a small osteophyte on his calcaneus [source]
Has just under a 6th grade reading level [source]
His alma mater is ashamed of him [source]
Lost the Popular Vote by nearly 3 million votes [source]
Used a personal email for government business and was hacked [source]
Owns a large stake in a company that scams sick children [source]
Won't help children with disabilities [source]
Lowered quality of education in Michigan [source]
Fired from the Defense Intelligence Agency [source]
Under investigation by counterintelligence agents [source]
Forced to resign for lying [source]
Wasn't allowed to meet the Pope [source]
Is even pathetic by Donald Trump standards [source]
Called "Sean Sphincter" by his college newspaper [source]
Either tried to stab someone or pretends he tried stabbing someone [source]
Is clueless about foreign policy [source]
No longer knows how brains work [source]
Did nothing to stop induced earthquakes in Oklahoma [source]
Came in third place in 2001 US House primary [source]
Voted against increasing funds to veterans [source]
Lied under oath about meeting with Russian officials [source]
Too racist to be a federal judge in Alabama [source]
Rick Perry
Forgot the Department of Energy was a federal department he wanted to abolish [source]
Brought Texas to the most uninsured state in the US [source]
12th place (out of 13) on Dancing with the Stars [source]
Indicted on two felony counts for abuse of power [source]
Bribed by pharmaceutical company to mandate HPV vaccination for 12-year old girls [source]I agree with Associate Opinion Editor Lydia Lim that we, humans, have the upper hand to manage and engineer solutions to ameliorate the potential social and economic threats engendered by artificial intelligence (AI) (What to do about robots and artificial intelligence; May 7).
Apocalyptic scenarios are predicated on humans helplessly watching AI take over the world.
Fortunately, humans have the wherewithal to intervene before the situation gets out of hand.
University of the West of England Bristol professor of electrical engineering Alan Winfield aptly illustrates our ultimate control over AI: "If we succeed in building human-equivalent AI and if that AI acquires a full understanding of how it works, and if it then succeeds in improving itself to produce super-intelligent AI, and if that super-AI, accidentally or maliciously, starts to consume resources, and if we fail to pull the plug, then, yes, we may well have a problem."
The development of AI does not happen overnight, thus allowing time to build in checks and balances at each stage.
Indeed, a "kill switch" is being developed for Google's DeepMind program, to be activated in the event of an attempted AI takeover.
On the job front, a properly designed robot tax may incentivise employers to use automation that is socially and economically beneficial to workers.
There may be tax breaks for companies that send their employees for retraining and upskilling to take on jobs that allow them to work with automation or in jobs that require the human touch.
Perhaps augmented reality could even deliver expert systems that do not require years of training to operate.
Universal basic income may have to be considered for people who have either been displaced or had their wages decreased by automation.
The Government may also have to subsidise reductions in working hours or pay, much like our present Workfare system.
There has to be better social protection for the rising numbers of people in the "gig economy", which is often insecure and sometimes exploitative.
As we adapt to technology, society would have to make adjustments so that humans on the whole will be better off.
Maria Loh Mun Foong (Ms)Seventy-seven years after paediatrician Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport, whose mother was Jewish, was banned from receiving her PhD, she has finally got her degree
Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport wasn’t allowed to defend her doctoral thesis in 1938 under the Nazis because her mother was Jewish. Nearly eight decades later, she has became the world’s oldest recipient of a doctorate – at 102.
The neonatologist, a specialist in caring for newborns, cleared the final hurdle last month by passing an oral exam. She received her doctorate in a celebratory ceremony at the University of Hamburg on Tuesday.
“After almost 80 years, it was possible to restore some extent of justice,” Burkhard Göke, the medical director of the university’s hospital, said in his speech. “We cannot undo injustices that have been committed, but our insights into the past shape our perspective for the future.”
Syllm-Rapoport stressed in her acceptance speech that she went through all the efforts of getting the degree at her advanced age not for herself, but for all the others who suffered from injustice during the Third Reich, said Kerstin Graupner, a university spokeswoman.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, they gradually disenfranchised Jews, expelling them from universities, schools and many professions, before eventually deporting and killing them in death camps across Europe.
When Syllm-Rapoport handed in her doctorate thesis, her supervisor at the time, Prof Rudolf Degkwitz, wrote in a letter in 1938 that he would have accepted her work on diphtheria if it had not been for the Nazis’ race laws which, he said, “make it impossible to allow Miss Syllm’s admission for the doctorate”.
Syllm-Rapoport emigrated to the US in 1938 without a degree. After applying to several American universities, she eventually finished her degree in Philadelphia and worked as a paediatrician, before moving with her husband, a socialist like herself, to East Berlin in 1952. The mother of four was the first head of the neonatology department at Charité University Hospital in Berlin.
Asked about how Syllm-Rapoport did in her oral exam last month – which was on the topic of diphtheria, just like her original PhD thesis – Uwe Koch-Gromus, the dean of the University of Hamburg’s medical faculty, said: “She was brilliant, and not only for her age.
“We were impressed with her intellectual alertness, and left speechless by her expertise – also with regard to modern medicine,” he added.
Syllm-Rapoport concluded her studies with the overall grade of magna cum laude (with great distinction).Top 50 Most Unbelievable - Yet Not Photoshopped Photographs It is hard to be amazed by anything you see on the internet these days, when you know for a fact that any teenager with a computer and a copy of Adobe Photoshop or other photo manipulation software can put together a fake photograph in a couple of minutes. Which would make you completely right to believe that these photographs have been tempered with! Unfortunately, this means there’s a bunch of jaw-dropping images that the internet declared “FAKE!” the moment they appeared! But, you need to be broad minded and always mind that real lif
Top 40 Funniest Construction Mistakes Doing construction work simply isn't going well for some people. Construction requires a certain level of pre-thought that a common construction worker simply cannot handle, which can lead to some hilariously funny construction solutions, that are luckily captured by he eye of the camera so that we can enjoy the photographs of these wonderful technological fails. If I was in this people's place I would want my money back from my construction contractor, because the design of these structure is simply not acceptable. But we tend to look at the w
Surrealistic Painter and Follower of Salvador Dali - José Roosevelt "I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1958. An autodidact, I held my first exhibition at the age of twenty, in Brasilia. Already, my compositions were full of dream-like and symbolic images. In 1988, I had the opportunity to show my paintings and drawings in Europe. Two years later, I set up my atelier in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since then, I have shown my art in several countries: Switzerland, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark and the United States. But painting is not my only activity: I have illustrated many books – notably Alice in Wonder
Anorexic Models don’t Always Look Like Models he scientific name for anorexia is Anorexia Nervosa. People with anorexia become completely obsessed with weight and dieting. They develop a fear of becoming fat and have a distorted mental image of their body, always seeing themselves as fat, even when they are extremely thin. Common attributes of anorexic sufferers are under-eating, vigorous exercise, ritualistic food habits and abuse of laxatives cause excessive loss of weight. Most anorexic people have no history of being overweight.For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available now on iOS and Android.
A private investigator and veteran human trafficking expert believes California mom Sherri Papini‘s case has the hallmarks of sex trafficking.
In a sit-down with The Today Show, Bill Garcia, who was hired by Papini’s family during the 22 days she was missing, told the show, “I suspect based in the types of injuries Sherri incurred, the beatings, the broken nose, the cut hair, especially the chains and the branding, indicate that most likely it was one of these sex trafficking groups.”
Garcia is not involved with the current police investigation, according to The Today Show.
When asked at a Wednesday press conference if Papini’s abduction might be related to a cartel or a sex trafficking operation, Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko said, according to CBS, “We do not have specific information if it was related to a cartel or human trafficking.”
Papini vanished while out for a jog on Nov. 2. The mom-of-two was found around 4:30 a.m. Thanksgiving Day on the side of a Yolo County road — about 150 miles south of her Redding home.
Papini told investigators the women who abducted her were Hispanic, armed and driving a dark SUV.
• PEOPLE’s special edition True Crime Stories: Cases that Shocked America is out now.
“There is a lot still unknown about her assailants,” said Bosenko at the Wednesday afternoon press conference.
Bosenko said Papini’s alleged abductors had sometimes covered her face and had concealed their faces as well during her three-week ordeal.
Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery in which people use force, fraud, or coercion to control victims and make them engage in commercial sex acts or labor services against their will, according to The National Human Trafficking Hotline.
• Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.
In a sit-down with ABC’s 20/20, Papini’s husband, Keith, said Papini’s captors pushed her out of a vehicle with a chain around her waist and a bag over her head on the day of her release.
They left her on the side of a road, badly beaten and bruised, her hair shaved off and her body branded, he said.
“She screamed so much, she’s coughing up blood from the screaming trying to get somebody to stop,” Keith Papini said.
“And again, just another sign of how my wife is, she’s so wonderful. She’s saying, ‘Well, maybe people aren’t stopping because I have a chain that looks like I broke out of prison,’ so she tried to tuck in her chain under her clothes.”BERLIN (Reuters) - The German Foreign Ministry has canceled a long-planned concert by the Dresden Sinfoniker orchestra in Istanbul on Nov. 13 that was to commemorate the 1915 massacre of Armenians after protests by Ankara, orchestra director Markus Rindt said on Wednesday.
The ministry notified the orchestra that the German consulate in Istanbul, where the performance called “aghet”, or “catastrophe” in Armenian, was to have taken place, would not be available on Nov. 13, Rindt said. The piece premiered in Berlin in November.
“It’s definitely been canceled. They said they wanted to reschedule at a better time, but when would that be? This has been planned for years,” Rindt told Reuters.
Turkey, angered by the German parliament’s decision to brand the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide, had protested the use of European Union funding to support the performance, and earlier this month withdrew from the EU cultural arms program that was funding the project.
While Turkey accepts that many Armenians died in partisan fighting beginning in 1915, it denies that up to 1.5 million were killed and that this constituted an act of genocide, a term used by many Western historians and foreign parliaments.
The Dresden Sinfoniker performance includes musicians from Turkey, Armenia, Germany and members of the No Borders Orchestra, which is comprised of musicians from the former Yugoslavia. Additional performances are planned in Belgrade on Nov. 5 and in Yerevan, Armenia on Nov. 10.
Ties between Germany and Turkey remain strained over the Armenia resolution and Ankara’s frustration about what it sees as Germany’s half-hearted expressions of solidarity after the July 15 attempted military coup in Turkey.War Machine on Monday was sentenced to 36 years to life in prison for the brutal 2014 assault of Christy Mack.
Machine, born Jon Koppenhaver, will be 71 years old when he becomes eligible for parole. He was found guilty on 29 of 34 charges that included sexual assault, kidnapping and coercion, though the jury deadlocked on the most serious charges of attempted murder.
Before the sentence was handed down, Mack, born Christine Mackinday, read a letter to the court, breaking down several times as she described her relationship with Machine and the attack that left her with broken teeth, a fractured rib and a severely ruptured liver.
Here is her testimony:
“I just wrote this last night. I’ve been putting it off, obviously. It’s been a really long three years, and I’m so ready for this to be over, and this is the last thing I’m going to say about this case and about how this has affected me personally.
(Reading from letter)
“Last night, I looked back through my journals at the things I had written when I had just needed to get the words out. I kept them so I didn’t actually have to speak the words that I knew were wrong. In reviewing them, I thought it would help me refresh my memory of what it felt like three years ago when everything was so fresh. But as I looked through them, I realized I didn’t need a crash course in my consciousness from years ago. I still carry all those same feelings and memories that I have today.
“I love Jon, and I know in some way he loved me, too. We were far from a conventional couple in an ordinary relationship. We didn’t have normal jobs. We didn’t keep normal hours. We had the opportunity to spend copious amounts of time together, and we shared every aspect of our lives with the entire world. When we met, I wasn’t looking for a relationship or any sort of companionship at all. I was sick the day we worked together; he seemed genuinely concerned for my well-being and continued to check on me for days after. When I felt better, he made plans to see me in (Las) Vegas, and after that the first three months that we were together were beautiful. He was so interesting to me. He was full of energy and so passionate about everything. I was drawn to his tenacity, and Jon was different from anyone I had ever known.
“After the first few months, things began to change. It started with just a slap and rapidly became exponentially worse. I’ve had my head split open from somersaulting into a fireplace. I’ve experienced being lifted from my throat countless times, choked unconscious, or dragged around by my head. I’ve been punched and kicked, smothered and bitten. I have been raped and tortured. (I remember) taking a breath for a scream, only to be met with a hand over my nose or mouth, not knowing if I will ever be able to breathe again. It’s the most terrifying experience of my life, and I was met with this more times than I can count, and I still cry every time I think about how it feels. I flinch when anyone puts their hand near my face. I hold my breath when I hear an unfamiliar noise. I become nearly unconsolable when I hear parents chastise their children, because they’re just saying words that I would hear from my abuser – constantly berating me, asking me what I was sorry for, asking me why I was crying, asking why I had to do these actions. He hit me or smothered me until I stopped crying or passed out.
“Now I feel uncomfortable around men or people in general. I don’t leave my house unaccompanied |
DotaBlast: So, you’re still pretty confident in this particular Na’Vi lineup.
Dendi: I’m usually not the player who would want to change teams, to be honest. I always have confidence in my team, in my players. I think it’s also some kind of skill that you need to have when you’re playing at a high level: trust in your teammates, all your teammates. I really have a huge trust in my teammates when I’m playing and I think that helps me a lot. If the players have trust in each other, the team spirit is very high and you can come up with a lot of high level plays, you can play some heroes that you don’t often play. I’ll give you a simple example: let’s say I want to play Pudge. If all my team believes in me, I’ll play it and I’ll probably play it well, because I know I have backup from my teammates, I know that they trust me, that they’re willing to help me. When I don’t have their trust, obviously, I can’t play Pudge, or I won’t play it really well. It all depends on this. Usually people see what they want to see. In games, they look at how certain players perform and draw conclusions. In reality, you should draw conclusions on the entire team. When everyone’s playing well, everyone will shine, but if something’s lacking, a player is bound to do some things he might not do if there was nothing lacking.
People don’t know what’s happening in the team. They’re not listening to our TeamSpeak, they’re not here, they don’t see what we see, so obviously they don’t know anything, but they’re drawing conclusions. That happens everywhere, not only in Dota. It’s the same in politics and other areas. In reality, we’re picking together – we’re trying to pick together, so everyone should take the blame.
DotaBlast: About that, ArtStyle has been taking the blame for drafts quite a lot, and you’re saying that it shouldn’t be his fault, it’s the entire team that underperformed, right?
Dendi: Yes, that and not only that. People don’t know what’s happening in the team. They’re not listening to our TeamSpeak, they’re not here, they don’t see what we see, so obviously they don’t know anything, but they’re drawing conclusions. That happens everywhere, not only in Dota. It’s the same in politics and other areas. In reality, we’re picking together – we’re trying to pick together, so everyone should take the blame. I like our picks even now. I know that some are harder, some are easier. For example, against Fnatic we had a push line-up. We made a lot of mistakes – micro-mistakes, macro-mistakes – a lot of things went wrong, and after some minutes it’s getting increasingly difficult to win against split-push with push when you’ve already lost the momentum. So, at some point you can blame the draft, but if you played well you wouldn’t have to blame the draft. When we played against Alliance, I think our draft was much, much, much, much better at some point and we played it really well, we gave them heroes they’re actually not that comfortable with. It’s only my opinion, but I think it really went well for us, so you could say it was a good draft. It’s really hard to compare drafts, but you can win with every draft, with the right mindset, with the right ideas. We’re picking together and there’s no reason to blame ArtStyle, because if you do, you should blame everyone else on the team just the same.
I’m just trying to be loyal. No one respects loyalty these days, I guess.
DotaBlast: You’ve been on Na’Vi for a really long time – almost unprecedented in Dota for a player to be on the same team for such a long period of time. You gave us quite a scare a couple of months ago, when the news broke that Na’Vi disbanded and that you were off the team. Do you see yourself playing for another organization, maybe in the distant future – not right now? Is that even a remote possibility?
Dendi: Yes, everything can happen, I’m not saying anything, but I’m trying to be loyal. I know that my organization gave me a lot of things, changed my life in a good way, so I feel like I owe them. I feel comfortable, and I owe the people I play with and the people who work for the organization, so there’s no reason for me to leave for now. I have a huge trust in my teammates. I don’t want any changes, I just want to play and if someone is lacking something, I want them to improve and I’m trying to do something and help them if I can, if I can’t, I just wait. I’m just trying to be loyal. No one respects loyalty these days, I guess. Whatever.
DotaBlast: Do you miss Sasha?
Dendi: Yes, of course. I really enjoyed playing with XBOCT for a long time. There was no moment when I wouldn’t have continued playing with him. I could still play with him, no problem.
DotaBlast: We talked to him at the Frankfurt Major and he told us he misses playing with you too. You guys were very good friends. Are you still in contact?
Dendi: We live in different cities, so it’s not easy (note: to see each other) in real life. Obviously, we’re going to see each other on tournaments a lot and sometimes we write messages to each other. We got really used to each other at some point because we saw each other so much in those five years. We had a lot of tournaments in the past 2-3 years, we were always travelling together, always having bootcamps together. When we had three days off, we took time off from each other, but then we were missing each other, like a couple. (laughs) We were like a family at some point.
DotaBlast: Now that you’ve mentioned family, I first saw you on Free to Play and I really identified myself with your family and your childhood, partly because I also took piano and dancing lessons. How long have you studied piano?
Dendi: My mother is a piano teacher, so she wanted me to study music and she chose piano for me when I was in the first grade, in school. But I think I like the violin better.
DotaBlast: Can you play the violin as well?
Dendi: No, I can’t, but at some point I realized that I would’ve wanted to learn violin instead.
DotaBlast: Yeah, but your fingers are fit for a pianist.
Dendi: I was going to study piano and I had an advantage from all the other students, because my mom was teaching me at home.
DotaBlast: Can you still play?
Dendi: No, no, I don’t play. But I think if I spent maybe a month or two practicing, I would remember things and maybe I’d be able to play.
DotaBlast: Who’s your favorite composer?
Dendi: Oh, I don’t know, that’s really hard. I like a lot of classical music, I like jazz music. I really like classical music. Last time I was listening to Debussy.
I actually was thinking about going on that (artistic) path. I don’t remember what changed my mind, I really don’t.
DotaBlast: I really like Debussy, but my favorite ones are Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Bach. What about the dancing classes you took? You seemed really artistically inclined back then. I wonder why you didn’t go on that path.
Dendi: I actually was thinking about going on that path. I don’t remember what changed my mind, I really don’t. I really loved dancing, I still love watching high level dancers – modern dances, folk dances, anything – when I see high level dancers, I enjoy watching and I’m really impressed. About myself? I was 6-7 years old, maybe, I traveled around with my group, dancing competitively. We weren’t super high level, but we were young. I think dancing really helped me in Dota, because you dance in front of a crowd or you take your piano exams in front of an audience. Those things helped me, because now, in Dota, I don’t feel any pressure when I play on stage. I feel really normal.
I actually think that one of the most skillful players around are in the CIS, but our problem is that most players are not used to team work. (…) You can be 9K MMR, yeah, you’re going to be good at playing alone, but in a team it’s a totally different story.
DotaBlast: Considering the high number of people playing Dota in the CIS region, why do you think there are so few people breaking into the professional scene every year?
Dendi: That’s a pretty tough question. I can only guess, because it’s really weird for me. Maybe it’s a mentality problem. Our mentality is pretty tough, compared to some other mentalities. I actually think that one of the most skillful players around are in the CIS, but our problem is that most players are not used to team work. You know, everyone is trying to draw attention on them: “Look at me, I’m so good!” In a team it doesn’t work like that, you need to be one unit, you need to work for each other. There are a lot of high level ranked players, with high MMR or whatever, but that doesn’t give you anything. You can be 9K MMR, yeah, you’re going to be good at playing alone, but in a team it’s a totally different story. You need to have some experience, you need to know a lot of things, you need to be friendly, you need to know how to trust in your teammates, how to communicate, and many other things. All those things are not easy, especially when your mentality is that you’re a little bit cocky.
DotaBlast: So, you’re saying it’s a mentality problem.
Dendi: Maybe. That’s my guess.
DotaBlast: Who do you think will be the next rising star in the CIS region?
Dendi: Oh, it’s pretty hard to tell. You could call Ramzes (note: Roman “Ramzes” Kushnarev, from Team Spirit) a rising star, because he’s young.
DotaBlast: How old is he?
Dendi: Sixteen.
DotaBlast: Oh, 16. He definitely qualifies for the rising star title.
Dendi: My teammates, if you can call them young, but I guess they’re not that young anymore.
DotaBlast: SoNNeikO is pretty young.
Dendi: He’s already a star!
DotaBlast: He is, that’s right. There’s still plenty of room to “rise”, though, there always is.
Dendi: He’s insanely good, you have no idea! We’re just pulling him down, I guess.
DotaBlast: You called him a diamond once.
Dendi: Yeah. I can repeat it. He’s still a diamond!
DotaBlast: Thank you so much for the interview. Any shoutouts?
Dendi: Shoutout to my team – hi, guys! – to my friends, to my family, to my fans – I love you, everyone! Let’s do a hug!
DotaBlast: Best of luck!
Dendi: Thank you!Johnny Manziel and Texas A&M are in for a big challenge Saturday against FCS contender Sam Houston State. (Photo: Thomas Campbell, USA TODAY Sports) Story Highlights No. 7 Texas A&M hosts Sam Houston State, back-to-back national FCS runner-up
Eight FCS teams beat FBS teams in Week 1
The Aggies are without several key defenders and could be looking ahead to the showdown with Alabama
After an opening weekend that saw eight FBS teams lose to FCS opponents, every team in the nation needs to be on high alert. No. 25 Oregon State and Kansas State's losses, in particular, sent shockwaves through the country, but is the biggest upset of them all still yet to come?
No. 7 Texas A&M hosts back-to-back FCS runner-up Sam Houston State on Saturday, a contest the Bearkats have every right to believe they can win.
NCAA RE-RANK: Our list 1-125
Watching their counterparts knock off FBS opponents should inspire the fourth-ranked team in the FCS, who will want to keep up with its division brethren. The program has three wins against FBS opponents in its history, the last coming at New Mexico in 2011.
Meanwhile, the Aggies have a number of factors working against them.
- Their defense, which gave up 21 points in the first half last week against Rice, remains depleted due to suspensions. Linebacker Steven Jenkins, defensive end Gavin Stansbury and cornerback De'Vante Harris -- all starters -- sat against Rice and will miss Saturday's game due to violations of team rules.
- Starting cornerback Deshazor Everett will sit out the first half after being ejected because of a targeting penalty. Defensive lineman Daeshon Hall threw a punch at a player against Rice and was also ejected.
- With a handful of reserves forced into action, the Aggies could have their hands full against a prolific Sam Houston offense. The Bearkats averaged 40 points per game in 2012, second in the FCS and won their season opener 74-0 against Houston Baptist.
- With the much-anticipated rematch against No. 1 Alabama next week, Texas A&M is surely looking ahead to that game. Though you'll get the same "we're taking it one game at a time" shtick from every coach and player on the planet, nobody isn't thinking about the biggest game of their life.
- Finally, will A&M have a hangover from the unpleasant ending to the season opener? After returning from his first-half suspension, defending Heisman winner Johnny Manziel was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct in the fourth quarter and promptly benched.
Coach Kevin Sumlin appeared to be chastising Manziel out as he walked to the sideline and was candid with ESPN after the game about his feelings on his quarterback's actions.
TOP 25 STOCK WATCH: Winners, losers in the Coaches Poll
Although the suspensions may be an actual problem, Sumlin downplayed the Manziel incident during his media availability Tuesday.
"When he came off the field, I basically made two statements to him, neither one of which should he have responded to," Sumlin told reporters. "They weren't questions. They were direct statements and I can't repeat them right now.
"What's amazing to me is the perception that he ignored me. The worst thing that could have happened was for him to reply based on what I told him."
So yeah, maybe the Manziel thing is an imaginary issue.
These two teams faced off last season in College Station, the week after the Aggies' stunning win over Alabama. A&M jumped out to a 47-0 lead early in the third, but took its foot off the gas and ultimately let the Bearkats finish the game with 28 unanswered points.
An upset of such magnitude this week may seem unthinkable, but with the perfect storm brewing, it's certainly not impossible.
***
Western Michigan now has an in-house DJ on game day. His name his "DJ Illmix" because, of course it is.
Head coach P.J. Fleck described what Illmix brings to the table. He'll "provide the best gameday experience in all the land. In all the country. In all of the Mid-American Conference."
Then the 32-year-old started doing stuff like this:
Miley Cyrus would be proud.
***
- Might future mass realignment result in the "realignment of the coaching profession"? Dan Wolken takes a look how a superdivision could mean a glass ceiling for head coaches at non-power conference schools.
Alabama receiver Kenny Bell (Photo: Marvin Gentry, USA TODAY Sports)
- Oh the footprint of social media. Alabama wide receiver Kenny Bell released a string of tweets Tuesday afternoon that made it seem like his time with the Tide was over. Nick Saban said he gave Bell a "personal day" and Bell later returned to Twitter to retract his earlier statements.
- Meanwhile, starting at the 1 minute 30 second mark of his Tuesday news conference, you start to wonder if Saban is talking to reporters or his players. Always fascinating.
- The Big 12 makes it easy for fans to watch replays of full games in less than an hour's time. Pac-12 Network does, too.
- Notre Dame is going to more ACC-centric schedule in the future, but Michigan and Michigan State still want a piece of the Irish.
- Speaking of Michigan, CBSSports.com's Bruce Feldman spent a lot of time with Wolverines quarterback Devin Gardner this summer, and he caught up with him again for a Q&A.
- Bucky Brooks of NFL Network offers his scout's-eye-view take on Johnny Manziel, Jadeveon Clowney, LSU QB Zach Mettenberger, Buffalo LB Khalil Mack and Eastern Washington QB Vernon Adams (who is only a sophomore, by the way).
-Not football, but sadly, Butler's beloved mascot Blue II passed away of congestive heart failure Saturday.
Jesse Yomtov, a USA TODAY Sports writer and producer is on Twitter @JesseYomtov
***
PHOTOS: USA TODAY SPORTS COACHES POLLAbstract The recent dramatic rise in obesity rates is an alarming global health trend that consumes an ever increasing portion of health care budgets in Western countries. The root cause of obesity is thought to be a prolonged positive energy balance. Hence, the major focus of preventative programs for obesity has been to target overeating and inadequate physical exercise. Recent research implicates environmental risk factors, including nutrient quality, stress, fetal environment and pharmaceutical or chemical exposure as relevant contributing influences. Evidence points to endocrine disrupting chemicals that interfere with the body's adipose tissue biology, endocrine hormone systems or central hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis as suspects in derailing the homeostatic mechanisms important to weight control. This review highlights recent advances in our understanding of the molecular targets and mechanisms of action for these compounds and areas of future research needed to evaluate the significance of their contribution to obesity.
Introduction Metabolite sensing and hormonal signaling balance the accumulation and mobilization of lipids from adipose tissues in response to fluctuating nutrient intake and caloric demands. However, adipose tissue is not just a passive lipid repository. Adipose depots also function as active endocrine organs that participate in the body's feedback system that fine-tunes the regulation of appetite and the metabolic integration between organs and inflammatory responses. The etiology of obesity varies, reflecting many possible points of perturbation in the regulatory pathways that maintain fat homeostasis. A multitude of factors will influence whether an individual develops obesity. Genetic, nutritional and environmental factors are known to impact hunger and satiety [1,2], basal metabolic rate [3,4], carbohydrate and lipid flux [5], and the regulation of adipocyte proliferation and differentiation and developmental programming of metabolic set points [6,7]. Recent evidence from many laboratories has shown that a variety of environmental endocrine disrupting chemicals can influence adipogenesis and obesity. Obesogens can be defined functionally as chemical agents that inappropriately regulate and promote lipid accumulation and adipogenesis [8]. Here we review the effects of several environmental endocrine disrupters on these pathways, discuss the data that links these “obesogens” to adipogenesis and obesity and highlight areas where future research will be helpful in ascertaining the magnitude of the risk posed by obesogen exposure.
Obesogenic effects mediated by metabolic sensors At its most basic level the progression to obesity requires both increased adipocyte number and lipid content. A number of master transcriptional regulators are critical to the regulation of gene networks controlling intracellular lipid flux, adipocyte proliferation and differentiation. Among these are nuclear hormone receptors, particularly the peroxisome proliferator activated receptors (PPARα, δ and γ) which function as obligate heterodimers with the 9-cis retinoic acid receptor (RXR). These heterodimers play a preeminent role, serving as metabolic ligand sensors for a variety of lipophilic hormones, dietary fatty acids and their metabolites. Lipid agonists of RXR-PPARα promote peroxisome proliferation and stimulate fatty acid β-oxidation [9]. Consequently, xenobiotics that target PPARα typically act as hypolipodemic agents. In contrast, activation of RXR-PPARγ favors lipid biosynthesis and storage, and is essential for the differentiation of resident preadipocytes and the conversion of mesenchymal progenitors to preadipocytes in adipose tissues [10]. Human allelic variants of PPARγ produce a variety of metabolic outcomes. A hypomorphic variant of PPARγ (Pro12Ala), is associated with lower body mass, improved insulin sensitivity and serum lipid profiles in diabetics, whereas a constitutively active allele (Pro115Gln) gives rise to obesity and insulin resistance [11,12]. Ligand modulation of PPARγ activity causes a corresponding shift in adipogenic programs. In vivo treatment with PPARγ antagonists, such as SR-202, GW9662 and JTP-426467, prevents high-fat diet induced weight gain in rodent models [13-15]. PPARγ agonists, such as the thiazolidinediones (TZD) rosiglitazone and pioglitazone, are potent insulin sensitizing pharmaceuticals used to improve glycemic control and serum triglycerides in diabetics [16]. Unwanted, PPARγ-mediated side effects include peripheral edema followed by persistent weight gain with prolonged use [17,18]. Therefore, TZDs are pharmaceutical obesogens that exacerbate the aspects of type 2 diabetes resulting from an overabundance of adipose tissue. The existence of pharmaceutical obesogens predicts the existence of other chemicals with similar effects. Could endocrine disrupting chemicals target PPARγ and phenocopy these same effects? Recent work identified members of the organotin class of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), specifically tributyltin (TBT) and triphenyltin (TPT), as highly selective and potent dual agonists of both the retinoid X receptors (RXRα,β, and γ) and PPARγ [19,20]. Organotins are used in marine anti-fouling paints, wood catalysts, plasticizers, slimicides in industrial water systems and fungicides on foods (recently reviewed in [21]) The ability to target both receptors simultaneously should be particularly effective since adipogenic signaling can be mediated through both the RXR and PPARγ components of the heterodimer. Receptor K d s and transcriptional activation EC 50 values for TBT and TPT are in the range of 5-20 nM for both RXRs and PPARγ [20]. In vitro and in vivo studies show that TBT drives the differentiation of murine 3T3-L1 adipocytes and modulates RXR-PPARγ dependent pro-adipogenic gene networks in liver, adipose tissue and bone marrow [19,20,22,23]. Developmental exposure results in precocious lipid accumulation in adipose tissues and hepatic steatosis of newborn mice [20]. Long term effects following acute fetal exposure in murine models include an increase in epididymal fat mass and a trend towards body weight gain with age [20] (and unpublished data F.G./B.B.). Chronic developmental exposure in the frog Xenopus laevis resulted in ectopic adipocyte formation around the gonads in both males and females [20]. Similar perturbations in fatty acid homeostasis and enhanced lipid accumulation have even been observed in ramshorn snails [24]. Taken together, these studies reveal both acute and long-term adipogenic effects especially if exposure occurs during fetal development or early life. Considering its potent effects on RXR and PPARγ, it is obviously relevant to ask whether human populations are at risk from organotin exposure. Major environmental sources of organotins include contaminated seafood, agricultural products, drinking water and leaching from plastics [25-29]. Organotin levels in mammals that are dependent on marine food chains have been documented at several μg/g [30]. Studies that have directly measured organotin compounds in human tissue and blood samples are more limited. Liver samples from the late 1990s in Europe and Asia contained on average 6 and 84 ng/g wet wt respectively for total organotins with MBT and DBT as the most prevalent species; average TBT levels were less than 2 ng/g wet wt (∼ 6 nM) [31,32]. However, levels of total organotins in US blood samples averaged around 21 ng/ml; TBT comprised around 8 ng/ml (∼ 27 nM) [33]. More recent analyses of European blood samples found the predominant species to be TPT at 0.09 and 0.67 ng/ml (∼0.5-2 nM) and only occasional trace amounts of TBT [34,35]. Human adipose tissue levels remain uncharacterized. These variations in geographical and historical trends primarily reflect fragmentary data. They may also result from regional differences in the types of organotin applications and a general decline in exposure as organotins are phased out in marine paints. Notwithstanding these declines, it is probable that a portion of the general population remains vulnerable to organotin exposure at levels sufficient to activate RXRs and PPARγ given their high affinity and the ubiquity of organotins in plastics and agricultural use. Although the mechanistic data are not as clear-cut, further threats to lipid and adipose homeostasis are posed by other common xenobiotics with PPAR activity. These include bisphenol A from polycarbonate plastics, phthalate plasticizers used to soften PVC plastics and various perfluoroalkyl compounds (PFCs) that are widely utilized surfactants and surface repellents in consumer products. Leaching of these non-bonded phthalate and PFC additives into food and water accounts for their near ubiquitous presence in humans. Transfer of primary phthalates, such as DEHP, to food during processing lies within the range of 0.01 to 4.4 mg/kg, resulting in an estimated average daily intake of about 160 μg/day [36,37]. Quantitation of urinary phthalate metabolites and serum levels of major PFC species (see paper by Fenton and colleagues in this issue) are in excess of several μg/L in more than 75 % of the US population [38,39], placing them within a range of concern for endocrine disruption. Fetal or early life exposure to phthalates has been proposed to account for perturbed male reproductive system development via decreased testicular steroidal synthesis [40-43]. Receptor binding, transactivation and toxicogenomic studies confirm phthalates and PFCs can function as agonists for one or more of the PPARs, providing a mechanistic link to disturbed lipid and steroid metabolism [44-48]. Typical responses in rodents include a strong induction of hepatic peroxisome proliferation and tumorigenesis [49-52]. Di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate (DEHP) or perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) increase PPARα dependent lipid mobilization, fatty acid oxidation and adipose tissue atrophy during periods of experimental exposure [53-55]. Consequently, these hypolipidemic and anti-adipogenic effects might be expected to result in an overall reduction in adipose mass and body weight. Depressed birth weight can be induced by low to moderate prenatal exposure (>5 mg/kg bw) of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in rodents [56,57] and an association between depressed birth weight and levels of PFOA in human umbilical cord blood has been documented [39]. PFOA probably exerts anorexigenic effects through a central hypothalamic mechanism that triggers a decrease in food intake in adult rodents [58]. This phenotype is not observed in PPARα knockout animals [59]. If activating PPARα reduces adipose mass and body weight, how might EDCs targeting PPARα promote obesity? Several experimental observations provide insights into possible mechanisms. First, PPARs contain some of the largest and most promiscuous ligand binding pockets within the nuclear hormone receptor family, allowing PPAR agonists or their metabolites to activate multiple isoforms. Metabolites of the potent PPARα agonist DEHP, such as mono (2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (MEHP), also activate PPARγ thereby providing a possible route for a pro-adipogenic response. MEHP promotes 3T3-L1 adipocyte differentiation and lipid accumulation [60,61]. PPARα-dependent stimulation of fatty acid oxidation and peroxisomal proliferation requires continuous exposure; however, PPARγ activators may require only single or perhaps episodic exposure to effectively drive permanent changes in adipocyte differentiation and increased cell number. Second, fetal or perinatal exposure to phthalates and PFCs disturbs transcriptional regulation of testicular steroidogenesis, decreasing androgen biosynthesis [40,62-64] and decreased androgen activity is itself obesogenic [65]. Third, low birth weight as a consequence of a poor nutritional uterine environment is an established risk factor for obesity. Hypolipidemia mediated through increased fatty acid metabolism in the developing fetus may mimic an undernourished environment that is sensed and acted upon to program long term metabolic changes. Human epidemiological data and numerous animal studies support the generalization that nutritional restriction, exposure to disparate developmental toxicants or intrauterine stress frequently results in a biphasic growth response: depressed birth weight, followed by a period of catch-up growth and an elevated risk for body weight gain and obesity in the long term [6]. Two recent studies support these contentions. Mice prenatally exposed to low levels of PFOA exhibited reduced birth weight followed by increased adipose mass and body weight after puberty [66] (see article by Fenton and colleagues in this issue). Epidemiological studies documented a positive correlation between the presence of the specific urinary phthalate metabolites, mono-benzyl phthalate (MBzP), mono-(2-ethyl-5-hydroxyhexyl) phthalate (MEHHP) and mono-(2-ethyl-5-oxohexyl) phthalate (MEOHP), with increased waist circumference in men. The metabolites mono-butyl phthalate (MBP), mono-ethyl phthalate (MEP) and mono-benzyl phthalate (MBzP) were also associated with measures of insulin resistance, a marker of metabolic syndrome [67]. Overall, it appears quite plausible that xenobiotic mimics of endogenous ligands for nutrient sensing nuclear receptors, such as the PPARs, are sufficiently potent and prevalent to inappropriately regulate transcriptional programs controlling adipogenesis. The relative contributions of developmental versus adult exposures to obesity remains to be determined; however, it is reasonable to suppose that developmental exposures would have larger and more pervasive effects.
Obesogenic effects mediated by sex steroid dysregulation Nutrient sensing nuclear receptors are just one aspect of adipocyte regulation. Nuclear receptors for sex steroid hormones also influence adipose tissue development. Knockout models of sex steroid pathway components, e.g. FSH receptor (FORKO), aromatase (ArKO), estrogen receptor (αERKO) and androgen receptor (ARKO), confirm a role for sex steroids in regulating adipocyte hypertrophy and hyperplasia, as well as influencing the sexually dimorphic deposition and remodeling of specific adipose sites [68-71]. Typically, sex steroids, in conjunction with peptide hormones such as growth hormone (GH), mobilize lipid stores and help to counteract the actions of insulin and cortisol on lipid accumulation. Imbalances in these hormones, therefore, are commonly observed in genetic, clinical and physiological conditions, (i.e., Cushing's syndrome, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCO), GH-deficiency, menopause, aging, alcoholism and depression), that produce dyslipidemias and obesity. The hormonal defects frequently include a relative deficiency or altered ratios in androgen/estrogen levels, lowered growth hormone secretion, hypercortisolemia and increased insulin resistance [72]. Consistent with this overall picture, anti-androgenic therapies for prostrate cancer and PCO syndrome produce weight gain, whereas estrogenic hormone replacement therapy are generally protective against the changes in body fat remodeling seen with age and menopause in women [32]. Notably, dietary factors such as isoflavone phytoestrogens modulate estrogen receptor signaling and effect similar positive changes on adipose tissues. Hence, nutritional levels of genistein and daidzein reverse fat accumulation in the trunks of post-menopausal women and ovariectomized rodent models [73-76]. These effects by phytoestrogens are not seen in αERKO animals indicating the importance of estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) [77]. Since phytoestrogens are more potent activators of ERβ than of ERα, and ERβ regulates the expression of ERα [78], more work remains to be done before the relative contributions of the two ERs to phytoestrogen effects on obesity can be determined. In contrast to its effects in adults, exposure to estrogens at critical periods of development produces obesogenic effects. For example, mice derived from dams maintained on diets with low phytoestrogen levels during pregnancy and lactation experience elevated serum estradiol levels and undergo fetal estrogenization syndrome (FES). These mice have a lower birth weight, but develop obesity, high leptin levels, and impaired glucose responses (in males), at puberty when maintained on soy supplemented chow [79]. Exposure of adult male mice to low dietary phytoestrogen levels led to decreased adipose mass, in agreement with previous animal and human studies [80]. New data on diethylstilbestrol (DES) has uncovered broadly similar obesogenic responses in rodents (See article by Newbold and colleagues in this issue). DES is a potent synthetic estrogen that was widely prescribed to women until 1971, primarily for the management of miscarriage risk. Exposure also resulted in a higher incidence of breast cancer in DES exposed mothers, and reproductive tract abnormalities and neoplasias, infertility and autoimmune disorders in daughters of DES treated mothers; sons also show abnormalities [81]. Recent studies in rodents identified weight gain as another significant change following neonatal DES exposure. Weight gain was preceded by elevated levels of leptin, adiponectin, IL-6, triglycerides and glucose, and altered insulin signaling. High doses of DES (1 mg/kg) given to neonatal female mice during the period of adipocyte differentiation initially depressed body weight, but a period of catch up growth followed until 2 months of age and a persistent enlargement of abdominal fat pads continued thereafter. Low doses of DES (10 μg/kg) did not depress weight initially, but also led to later weight gain [82,83]. DES exposed male mice did not become obese but rather showed a dose dependent decrease in overall body weight, underscoring the important and often contrasting role gender may play in the overall response. Obesogenic effects have also been observed with other xenoestrogenic compounds. Bisphenol A (BPA) is widely found in human populations (0.3-4.4 ng/mL in human serum [84,85]) as a consequence of leaching from polycarbonate plastics and products coated with epoxy resins (see article by Rubin and colleagues in this issue). In conjunction with insulin, BPA accelerates murine preadipocyte cell line differentiation by up-regulating adipogenic genes [86,87]. In addition to its action on the nuclear estrogen receptors, BPA can also act at low doses in a nongenomic manner via cell membrane associated estrogen receptors [88,89], directly modulate the insulin dependent P1 3-kinase/Akt kinase pathway and enhance glucose uptake [90,91]. Gestational and perinatal exposure of rodents to 0.1-1.2 mg/kg bw/day BPA in drinking water, predicted to give equivalent serum exposure levels, resulted in long term increased body weight and hyperlipidemia [92,93]. A positive correlation for human serum BPA levels with obese and PCO syndrome females has also been clinically observed [94]. Together, these data suggest that dysregulated signaling through sex steroid receptors can produce proadipogenic effects; although, the nature of the effects may depend critically on the timing of exposure and the sex of the exposed individual.
Obesogens and central integration of energy balance Environmental pollutants targeting nuclear hormone receptors directly relevant to adipocyte biology are relatively obvious obesogen candidates. Another important class of obesogens will be those that interact with central mechanisms that coordinate the whole body response to daily nutritional fluctuations. The control over appetite exerted by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (H-P-A) axis plays a critical role to prevent hyperphagia and regulate energy homeostasis. Could some of the numerous monoaminoergic, peptidergic and endocannabinoid signals generated by the digestive tract, adipose tissue and within the brain that are critical mediators of these circuits be potential targets for environmental obesogens? The prevalence of body weight disruption observed in various neurological disorders and their pharmaceutical treatments are suggestive of this possibility. Neuroendocrine effects Individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression already display elevated co-morbidity for cardiovascular disease and significant clustering for metabolic syndrome risk factors, including diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemias and obesity [95,96]. Annual prevalence rates in the US for schizophrenia (1.1%, 2.4 million), bipolar disorder (2.6 %, 5.7 million) and major depression (6.7 %, 14.8 million) reveal a sizable and growing population undergoing prescription drug treatment [97,98]. Unfortunately, a wide range of neuroactive drug regimens to treat these disorders, including tricyclic antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), atypical antipsychotics or mood stabilizers promote weight gain to the point where non-compliance with therapy is a serious concern [96,99]. The atypical antipsychotic olanzapine is a useful example to detail the magnitude of the problem. Olanzapine therapy induces weight gain of around 5 kg/year at 10 mg/day that rises in a dose dependent manner to more than 10 kg/year at 15 mg/day [100]. Prolonged use elevates serum glucose levels, promoting glucose intolerance and increases the risk of |
less likely to occur.
Complications
The most significant complication of egg allergy is having a severe allergic reaction requiring an epinephrine injection and emergency treatment.
The same immune system reaction that causes egg allergy can also cause other conditions. If you or your child has an egg allergy, you or your child may be at increased risk of:
Allergies to other foods, such as milk, soy or peanuts
Allergies to pet dander, dust mites or grass pollen
Allergic skin reactions such as atopic dermatitis
Asthma, which in turn increases the risk of having a severe allergic reaction to eggs or other foods
Prevention
Here are some things you can do to avoid an allergic reaction, and to keep it from getting worse if one does occur.
Read food labels carefully. Some people react to foods with only trace amounts of egg.
Some people react to foods with only trace amounts of egg. Be cautious when eating out. Your server or even the cook may not be completely certain about whether a food contains egg proteins.
Your server or even the cook may not be completely certain about whether a food contains egg proteins. Wear an allergy bracelet or necklace. This can be especially important if you or your child has a severe reaction and can't tell caregivers or others what's going on.
This can be especially important if you or your child has a severe reaction and can't tell caregivers or others what's going on. Let your child's caregivers know about an egg allergy. Talk to your child's babysitters, teachers, relatives or other caregivers about the egg allergy so that they don't accidently give your child egg-containing products. Make sure they understand what to do in an emergency.
Talk to your child's babysitters, teachers, relatives or other caregivers about the egg allergy so that they don't accidently give your child egg-containing products. Make sure they understand what to do in an emergency. If you're breast-feeding, avoid eggs. If your child has an egg allergy, he or she may react to proteins passed through your milk.
Hidden sources of egg products
Unfortunately, even if a food is labeled egg-free it may still contain some egg proteins. When in doubt, contact the manufacturer.
Foods that contain eggs can include:
Marshmallows
Mayonnaise
Meringue
Baked goods
Breaded foods
Marzipan
Frostings
Processed meat, meatloaf and meatballs
Puddings and custards
Salad dressing
Many pastas
Foam on alcoholic, specialty coffees
Pretzels
Several terms indicate that egg products have been used in manufacturing processed foods, including:
Albumin
Globulin
Lecithin
Livetin
Lysozyme
Vitellin
Words starting with "ova" or "ovo," such as ovalbumin or ovoglobulin
Another potential source of exposure is cross-contamination in home-prepared dishes or meals, especially when you're eating in other people's homes where they may not be aware of the risk.
Vaccinations and egg allergy
Some shots to prevent illness (vaccines) contain egg proteins. In some people, these vaccines pose a risk of triggering an allergic reaction.Wrongful convictions occur with shocking frequency in the United States. A record 166 exonerations were recorded in 2016 by the National Registry of Exonerations, bringing the total since 1989 to nearly 2,000. This represents only a fraction of those who should never have been sent to prison.
In 2005 I produced a documentary showcasing several cases in which flawed forensic analyses helped to get innocent people locked up. Riky Jackson went behind bars for two years because of incorrectly matched fingerprints. Jimmy Ray Bromgard spent nearly 15 years in jail, mainly because of hair comparisons that lacked scientific rigour. Now I’m a scientist who uses data analysis to promote human rights, and I’m disheartened to see these errors continue. That is why I hope that a US federal commission will vote next week to endorse practices that would transform how forensic analysts talk about evidence.
This would reduce the number of innocent people sent to prison. Consider Crystal Weimer, a single mother of three whose murder conviction was largely based on assertions that wounds on a dead man’s hand were made by Weimer’s teeth. Last June, after a multi-year, multi-lawyer saga, all charges against her were dismissed.
Weimer’s case is unusual only in that the expert whose testimony helped to convict her later declared his previous testimony invalid. The Innocence Project, an organization that helps wrongfully convicted people, has secured more than 300 exonerations. It found that, in 46% of these, ‘misapplication’ of forensics contributed to conviction. Often, that refers to expert testimony that went beyond the bounds of science.
The proposals that will be put to a vote on 10 April lay out how forensic analysts should testify about evidence such as shoeprints, bullet ballistics, blood spatter and glass shards. Analysts must explain how they examined evidence and what statistical analyses they chose. They must also describe inherent uncertainties in their measurements. Most importantly, experts must never claim with certainty that anything found at a crime scene is linked to a suspect, and they must always try to quantify the probability that observed similarities occurred by chance.
Even if scientists can objectively quantify the similarities between evidence from a crime scene and evidence from a suspect, no one knows how often such matches would occur by chance. Suppose striations on a bullet from a crime scene resemble those from a bullet test-fired from a suspect’s gun. How frequently would bullets from other guns have similar markings? Except for some types of DNA samples, just about every type of forensic comparison lacks that information.
“Right now prosecutors have an incentive to select forensic analysts who will assure juries that evidence is convincing.”
I work with the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence, a consortium of four universities that aims to close holes in statistical analyses of pattern-matching evidence; it is funded by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). We have preliminary results, but there is much to do before we know how reliable this type of evidence is. Alarmingly, once a technique has been accepted by courts, its use is hardly ever questioned in trials.
There have been a few changes: after a 2004 report from the US National Research Council, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) crime laboratory stopped performing a test that could purportedly trace a bullet to a particular batch of lead. It had been using that technique for over 30 years.
But, generally, problems persist. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences documented reams of faulty forensic practices. In September last year, a report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology found deep, widespread problems in the use of ‘pattern-matching’ forensic analyses. It called for better training, standards to validate forensic methods and independence between forensic labs and prosecutors. The recommendations would have restricted the types of evidence admissible in court. The US Attorney General, Department of Justice and FBI demurred. Fortunately, some forensic labs did begin to make changes.
This week’s statement takes a different tack. It will insist that uncertainties of forensic evidence be clearly described. The vote will be conducted by the US National Commission on Forensic Science, an expert panel convened by the Department of Justice and NIST.
Even good lawyers aren’t scientists, and right now prosecutors have an incentive to select forensic analysts who will assure juries that evidence is clear and convincing, not ones who will speak in appropriately cautious terms. Defence lawyers won’t necessarily recognize that there’s anything to refute in forensic evidence against their clients.
This week’s statement is not legally binding. However, if the Department of Justice adopts its recommendations, lawyers must comply. And the document itself could help defence lawyers and judges to limit testimony to scientifically defensible statements.
I like to think that this vote could mark a turning point. It’s not just scientists who must learn to grapple with uncertain evidence. Lawyers, too, must be able to do so. People’s freedom depends on it.I loved flying the Parrot AR Drone with my iPhone(s aapl) or iPad Air. I didn’t love the $299 price tag, although I’ll admit, it’s probably worth it since it’s so much fun. A remote flying machine doesn’t have to cost that much though, and clearly there’s demand for low-cost alternatives. The latest, PowerUp 3.0, is about to finish up its Kickstarter funding where it flew past its $50,000 goal with nearly $1.2 million raised.
Advertisement
What is PowerUp 3.0? It’s a small Bluetooth Smart module with propeller attached to a lightweight frame. Think of it as a smart flying skeleton that needs one more thing: A paper airplane that you provide. For as low as a $30 pledge and all the paper you provide, you can fly around the town from your iPhone or Android device.
To be fair, a $30 module that works with paper airplanes won’t compete with a $300 drone in many ways. It’s a low-cost way to have a fun experience, however, and it illustrates how versatile little radio chips can be. With Bluetooth Smart, range is limited to around 55 meters; my Parrot uses Wi-Fi and has a broader range. But both fly for roughly the same time on a single charge: About 10 minutes. That’s pretty amazing considering the Parrot battery is the size of a laptop charging brick while the PowerUp 3.0 module is the size of a U.S. quarter-dollar coin.
Since the PowerUp 3.0 blew though funding goals, most of the stretch goals were met as well. These include support for Android devices, controlling multiple paper airplanes from one phone, and a dogfight game mode. It’s unlikely the project will hit its $2 million stretch goal at this point; that would have added a camera mount for your paper airplane.
Funding for the PowerUp 3.0 ends tomorrow — Saturday, January 25 at 9:59 am EST — so if you’ve always wanted to get more flight time from your paper airplane creations, now’s the time to make your pledge.Image caption It is hoped that stage one of the project to turn the Dreamland site into a heritage park will open in 2014 as part of Margate's regeneration
A Kent seaside town has been listed as one of the top 10 destinations in the world in a travel guide.
Margate appears with Iceland, Puerto Rico and the World Heritage site of Dubrovnik in Croatia in the new Rough Guide listing.
The guide says the town offers cute cafes, vintage shops and the new Turner Contemporary gallery.
Wayne Hemmingway was recently announced as the new designer of a £10m heritage park on the Dreamland theme park site.
Rachel Mills, editor of the Rough Guide said: "It's a really exciting time. There's a lot going on and the local community are really getting behind everything.
"Every time you go down [to Margate] something new is happening, another little boutique, another little cafe or restaurant, so that's why it's particularly great at the moment."
'Portas pilot'
In October, retail guru Mary Portas opened two new shops as part of her campaign to help regenerate Margate.
Over one-third of the seaside town's shops are empty.
Margate is one of 27 "Portas pilot" areas to receive part of a £1.2m pot of government cash to rejuvenate their high streets.
Thanet council estimates 750,000 people have visited the Turner Contemporary, with a third of them staying overnight stay in the town.
Victoria Pomery, the director of the gallery, said: "Turner Contemporary has really changed people's attitudes.
"A lot has happened generally around regeneration and culture has been the real driver for what's happened here."Wigan are the reigning Super League champions after they beat Warrington in the Grand Final
Super League clubs have backed a new structure to raise the salary cap from £1.825m to £2.1m by 2020.
The 12 teams will be able to spend £1.9m next year, £2m in 2019 and then £2.1m in 2020.
There has also been an agreement reached that clubs can have two marquee players - up from one - with exemptions for new or returning players as well as some under the age of 21.
The Rugby Football League board will vote on the proposals on Thursday.
"The clubs asked the Rugby Football League to put forward a set of proposals that would help them retain and attract the best players to the competition," said Super League executive director Roger Draper.
"We believe that when you consider all of them together, these changes could make a significant difference to helping clubs attract and retain the best talent in this league and that is something we all are determined to do."
It is below the Australian National Rugby League cap of £4.25m for 2017, while, in rugby union, the English Premiership cap is £7m.
What does it mean?
Marquee players
A club is allowed to nominate two marquee players in their salary cap who have to be paid more than £175,000.
If that player has been trained by the club only £75,000 of their salary contributes towards the cap, while anyone outside of that would be a £150,000 contribution.
New and returning players
A club is also entitled to register two players in their squad that can either be new to, or wanting to return to, the sport.
For a new talent pool player - someone who has never played rugby league - their wage will not count towards the cap in their first season and then 50% from their second.
For a returning talent pool player, for example someone returning from rugby union, they must not have played rugby league for five years and in the first season their wage contributes only 50% towards the cap and 75% in a second season.
Reaction
Wigan Warriors owner Ian Lenagan: "We need the best players playing in our competition and when all of the proposals that were voted through are looked at together, the decisions that were made will provide Super League clubs the opportunity to do that."
Warrington Wolves owner Simon Moran: "If you want the competition to flourish going forward, it is very important that the best talent is kept in our league.
"I thought it was very important that the salary cap did go up and the opportunity is now there with two marquee players available to clubs to bring and retain some of the best talent in the world."
Salford Red Devils owner Marwan Koukash: "I think the decisions that were made are good for the sport and good for the competition and I am delighted with this outcome.
"We need to provide fans with the best entertainment and talent on the field and the decisions give us the opportunity to do that."Foreign-owned firms today seized the lion's share of the development contracts to kickstart a wind revolution in offshore Britain that ministers say will eventually match the glory days of the North Sea oil industry. But Gordon Brown said he was still confident that UK supply firms could win many of the £75bn-worth of contracts needed to build enough clean power to generate 25% of the country's electricity.
Nine wind power consortiums have signed agreements with the Crown Estate, which has responsibility for renewable power in UK waters, to take their proposals through the planning stage.
Only five of the nine have British companies involved in the partnerships – two of those with minority stakes – and the pace was largely set by Germany with E.ON, RWE and Siemens, who were all substantial winners. Centrica, the parent group of British Gas, was the only British group with a majority holding in any of the winning consortiums, but Scottish Power and SSE Renewables took a stake in development areas such as the Dogger Bank and Firth of Forth.
The proposed windfarms will be further away from the coast and in deeper waters than any existing offshore project, and therefore more difficult to build. But they will also be far less likely to be held up by planning objections that have blighted the development of onshore wind power.
Britain already leads the world in the deployment of offshore wind and has more projects installed, in planning or in construction than any other country.
But the issue of British jobs has become politically sensitive since E.ON awarded 90% of the £2bn-worth of supply contracts for the world's biggest windfarm – the London Array off Kent – to German and other overseas firms.
Brown said the new round of wind licences provided a substantial platform for investing in local industrial capacity. "The offshore wind industry is at the heart of the UK economy's shift to low carbon and could be worth £75bn and support up to 70,000 jobs by 2020," he said, adding: "I am definitely going to do everything I can to bring these jobs to Britain."
The business secretary, Lord Mandelson, and the energy and climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, were similarly upbeat, saying there were already engineering and other companies around the UK gearing up to win a slice of the action. Miliband said it would damage British companies' exports if the government at home insisted developers used UK suppliers.
Many of the developers represented at the contract awards in London expressed their own optimism that UK firms could rise to the challenge, but made clear they would press on regardless. Eddie O'Connor, chief executive of Mainstream Renewable Power, a partner of Siemens on the Hornsea zone, said: "We have to buy the cheapest wherever you can get it."
The new windfarms announced should produce as much power as eight Drax coal-fired stations.
Today's were welcomed by Greenpeace, which said the technological challenge should be relished.
"Throughout its history Britain has shown the determination and ingenuity to tackle the great industrial challenges of each era. In the 21st century these qualities are being called on once again, to enable the transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable sources of energy. Our country is home to some of the best engineers, mechanics and construction professionals in the world. Their expertise will be crucial if we are to harness the massive potential that new technologies like offshore wind have to offer," said Greenpeace executive director John Sauven.
But while ministers and the developers were excited about the prospects of making a substantial difference to Britain's security of supply as North Sea oil and gas run out, as well as helping beat UK climate change targets, they also acknowledged the scale of the difficulties. The Crown Estate said it hoped to see 32GW of new wind power come on stream, but set no minimum, and its director of marine estate, Rob Hastings, admitted that "it depends on what we encounter" on the way.
O'Connor said there were potentially "millions of problems" but he was confident that none was insuperable. He singled out skills shortages and the need for a supergrid linking power networks around the North Sea to make up for the intermittent nature of wind.
Wind developers say research and development breakthroughs were also vital if the economics of wind were to improve sufficiently offshore. The government has spent £170m on grants for R&D but is still struggling to convince a major wind turbine developer such as Siemens or Mitsubishi to establish a blade manufacturing plant in the UK.
The £75bn challenge
The vision of building 6,500 turbines in deep waters around Britain that will generate enough power to provide 25% of the country's electricity is an exciting prospect, but a tough challenge.
Many developers admit it will only make financial sense – even with big government subsidies – if technological breakthroughs are made to drive down the £75bn-£100bn estimated cost. That could involve designing gigantic new blades or using new floating platforms on which seven or eight turbines could be erected, as is being pioneered by Swedish firm Hexicon.
Mainstream Renewable Energy, one of the development licensing winners, argues that the goal of producing 32 gigawatts of power offshore will also only be credible if a supergrid is built.
That could cost up to £15bn to link Britain with Norway and the continent using giant electrical cables through which power could be imported or exported depending on whether the wind was blowing, and which firm needed power at any one time. Denmark's offshore wind sector already produces too much power during some parts of the day and exports it to other countries.An Open letter to Arvind Kejriwal by CA Mehul Rasesh Shah | Read it in Hindi
to explain the probable Logic behind issuing New 2000 Rupee Note instead of 1000 Rupee Note, reason for lower withdrawal limits and ease of carrying notes etc..
Sir, I am a practising Chartered Accountant aged 28 in Surat and I was very hopeful that you would support the Notification for Demonetization of Currency and was very eager for your Reaction because your very entry into Politics was for supporting any small move to reduce Black money and Corruption and after all, this was indeed a very big and bold move….!
But after going through the Video released yesterday, my expectations from AAP as a Commonmen were shattered once again because I believed that a person of such stature and designation as you would spread positivity all around without any ifs and buts to make this Mega Clean-up Drive possible and rather help the common men in mitigating the problems rather than nagging about the same and hence I would like to bring to your knowledge the following Points.
Point 1
As you have stated in your Video that it took full 2 days for you to understand the various aspects of the Scheme and even after consultation with various Experts, you could not basically understand the Logic of why 2000 Rupee Notes were released instead of 1000 Rupee Note, I would like to make an attempt to tender my best possible logic ( Please enlighten me if I am wrong somewhere) as follows:
Sir, let us Simply take 2 Scenarios to understand the funda!
Scenario A : If as per your suggestion, Rs. 2000 Note are not issued but only New Rs. 1000 Notes are issued.
Lets say, for example Mr. X has Rs. 1,00,000/- black money in 100 Old Notes of Rs. 1000 each.
Mr. X divides those Rs. 1,00,000/- into 10 Equal Bundles, each comprising of 10 Old Notes of Rs. 1000 each and puts each Stack on a Table.
On Day 1, in the morning Mr. X would deposit the first Bundle i.e. 10 Old Notes of Rs. 1000 valued at Rs. 10,000 into the bank and on same Day 1 in the Evening he would withdraw 10 New Notes of Rs. 1000 again valued at Rs. 10,000 and put it in the Locker in his house.
Now the real Game starts.
On Day 2 : Morning, Mr. X would deposit the second bundle of 10 Old Notes of Rs. 1000 valued at Rs. 10,000 kept on the Table. However in his books of accounts submitted to Income Tax Department, he will show that he has deposited the same 10 New Notes which was withdrawn on Day 1 : Evening ( which is actually still lying in the Locker of House )
On Day 2 : Evening, Mr. X would again withdraw 10 New Notes of Rs. 1000 valued at Rs. 10,000/- and keep the same in Locker. So at the end of Day 2, Mr. X has Rs. 80,000 on Table in Old Notes and Rs. 20,000/- in New Notes in Locker.
Now Day 3 will come in next week as limit of Rs. 20000 per week.
The same exercise shall continue till Day 10 and by the end of Day 10, Mr. X shall have no Old Notes and Rs. 1,00,000 in 100 New 1000 Rupee Note in the Locker.
However, to the Income Tax Department while presenting his cash book, Mr. X has shown that he was having only Rs. 10,000/- as black money initially ( i.e. one bundle of 10 Notes of Rs. 1000 ) and he has rotated the same Rs. 10,000/- by depositing it into Bank account in the morning and withdrawing it in the evening and again redepositing the same on next day and so on.
Thus, Mr. X has paid tax only on initial Rs. 10,000 whereas he has managed to convert all his Black money of Rs. 1,00,000 into new Notes. The New Notes lying in locker are still not known to any I.T Officer and remain unaccounted.
This Modus operandi is called Peak theory i.e. theory of rotation of same money which is accepted by most of the High Courts and Tribunals. Revenue is also sometimes helpless to catch Mr. X because the above scenario can also occur in genuine cases where you withdraw money from bank to purchase something and then when you think that no good deal is available, you may again deposit the same money into your bank account and hence logically are not required to pay tax again.
Scenario B : Watch what happens when PM issues New 2000 Rupee Note instead of 1000….!
Mr. X deposits first bundle of 10 Old Notes lying on Table in the Bank on Day 1 : Morning and then he withdraws 5 New Notes of Rs. 2000 on Day 1: Evening and keeps it in locker.
Now on Day 2 : Morning when he goes to deposit second bundle of 10 Old Notes of Rs. 1000 each and wrongly shows the Income Tax Department based on cash book that he has redeposited the same money which was withdrawn on Day 1:Evening – Bingo!!!
He is stuck now!! Because if AO enquires and calls for copy of the Bank slip on Day 2 submitted to bank, it will show deposition of 10 Notes of Rs. 1000 each whereas the Govt knows that Mr. X could never have withdrawn on Day 1 any note of Rs. 1000 because they were never Printed!!!!
The above examples are described to understand the concept of rotation of money and the fact that no tax is levied on redeposit of cash into bank.
Even if the above explanation is hypothetical as a concept, it gives a glimpse that such on-paper rotations may be attempted or many other “jugaad” may also be possible using some improvised theory and hence the best way is to go for a strategic decision to discourage the rotation of money by keeping lower withdrawal limits and at the same time deferring the printing of Rs. 1000 note as taken by our PM and hence we should respect the strategic decision of PM who is elected by democratic majority rather than questioning him at each level.
Even, if we disregard the above theory of discouragement of rotation of money, another strategy may be to call back all Rs. 2000 Rupee Notes after 2-3 year once the New Rs. 1000 Notes are in circulation and this will further keep a check on corruption which many have already been questioned. This is because the businessman who have managed bogus accommodation entries to make money white in this period are likely to reverse the entries and get them converted into Rs. 2000 notes in January 17.
Just as a food for thought, what if new Notes be printed with an expiry period of 10 years, 20 years and 30 years and so on and hence the same has to be deposited into Bank before expiry date. People are asking how do you reduce corruption after Jan 2017? This step shall reduce corruption and reduce chaos at every deadlines as while I have few notes expiring now I shall also have few Notes which are due expiry in next 10 years and hence do not have to stand in long queue for withdrawals!!
Also with inflation the value of Rs. 1000 notes had gone down so induction of a new higher denomination had become necessary. The US has $100 note whereas UK has €50 both valued around Rs. 6000/-
Another simple logic is to save the printing and transportation cost compared to its face value assuming that much cost has gone into securing that fake notes of Rs. 2000 are not easily printed.
ATMs can be stuffed with more cash if Rs 2000 notes are used which is the need of the hour.
Further, the fact remains that when someone is holding the new Rs. 2000 Rupee Note, he is psychologically getting a sense of freshness that the country is in the growth phase. In a lighter note, Messages are being circulated not to write anything on New Notes which shows a feeling of possession. Imagine if the previous Government would have never issued new higher denominations notes with inflation and growth we would still be dealing with Annas and Pavlis!
Further it seems that the Government wants to reduce the overall “circulation of cash” per se and at the same time enable the citizens to purchase high value goods in exceptional cases and hence this decision.
Sir, the above example also gives you an explanation to your doubt as to why the withdrawal limit is kept so low and you should rather educate people around you who are standing in long queues and nagging about low withdrawal limits and explain them as to how higher withdrawal limit may lead to more rotations and tax evasions. Though the above modus operandi can still be done with Rs. 500 note however, as mentioned the incentive would be less because Mr. X cannot withdraw more than Rs. 10000/- in a day and Rs 20000 in a week.
And believe me Sir, each and every condition in the Notification is seen to take care of the problems likely to be faced by Citizens and at the same time making sure that such Sophisticated theories are not resorted to by Black money hoarders, but questioning by you of everything in the name of Freedom of Expression may create Panic situations or bring out Loopholes in Notifications and hamper the success of reforms.
Point 2
Sir, you have again criticised and stated in the Video that printing Rs. 2000 rupee note will help to increase Corruption because Stacking those Rs. 2000 Rupee Notes would require lesser Space as compared to Stacking Rs. 1000 Notes.
In this regard, I would like to ask that Sir, have you come across any case where the “Babus” have not taken any bribe and done work honestly because they had a small Bag which could not be fitted with Rs 1000 Notes?!
Or have you come across any Businessman who has declared unaccounted money solely because there was no space to keep those Rs. 1000 Notes!!
Point 3
As stated in the Video by you, it is true that inspite of PM efforts, there shall be dubious commission agents and unaccounted Investment in gold through jewellers, but as far as I remember when the jewellers were on strike for 45 days when our PM levied excise duty on gold in month of April 2016, it was you who supported their strike. It shows that whenever some changes are suggested to regulate a particular Market, AAP opposes them and then now you nag that the Gold market is unregulated.
Infact I believe that the PM had a full blue print for the development of our country right from Day 1 of his being elected if I recall my last 3 years as a Professional.
Firstly they asked for all the bank account number in your Return of Income
Then they linked your PAN with Aadhar
They linked all the subsidies, pension and other benefits directly to your bank account through Direct Benefit Transfer Scheme. Then they gave opportunity to all the common men to open an account with bank through Jan Dhan Yojna They entered into revised treaty with most of the countries in which unaccounted money goes through HAWALA e.g. Mauritius and thus the route of Black Money coming from Mauritius which everyone knew is stopped. They passed few strict laws to overcome the evil of black money such as Benami Transaction Act and Foreign Black Money Act They levied Excise duty on Gold. They also made TCS compulsory for Cash transactions above 2 lakhs. They withdrew lakhs of pending income tax and service tax litigations where Common men had won at Appeal level and Department had gone further. They also entered into information exchange agreement with such countries. Then they gave last opportunity to all black money hoarders through Income Declaration Scheme, 2016
Now they have a Scheme for Dispute Resolution Panel again to reduce Litigation till December 2016.
Now the masterstroke, that they have banned Rs. 500 & Rs. 1000 denominations.
Not only the destination of this whole process is commendable but even the journey or the chronology of these events is interesting which explains the ultimate destination and who knows, may be the journey is still not over and the ultimate destination may still be the Swiss Account holders!!
Point 4
Further, you have stated in your Video that penalty would be levied at the rate of 200%. The said statement has created a panic and people have stated discounting their own hard earned cash.
Being in Income tax Department in the past, you ought to know that as per the present Income Tax Act,1961 penalty is never levied on Cash deposits but on “concealed income”. Hence when the common men is depositing Cash in hand which is duly accounted or out of his past savings and even out of unaccounted current years income whose return is yet to be filed, there shall not be any penalty if there is no mismatch between returned income and assessed income. Even the Government Officials in their statement used the words “underreporting” or “mismatch”. To understand the definition of “underreporting”, Sir please refer Section 270A of the Income Tax Act or go through the following article:
Instead you could have encouraged the citizens to pay appropriate Tax.
Point 5
Nowhere in the Video have you stated anything relating to Fake currency or Counterfeit Notes because you know that the issue of Existing Fake Currency is solved foolproof.
Which situation would be better?
Scenario A:
A Labourer standing in queue to exchange Notes from bank for a Short term.
Scenario B :
A Labourer working hard whole day to get a Fake Note at the end of the day?!
The issue of Terrorist Funding is also tackled but you chose to remain silent on the same.
You have stated that Modiji should have infused Rs 100 Note from before and it would have been you only to have said in this video that “Arre ATM se do din pehle se hi Sirf Rs. 100 ki Note bahar aa rahi thi toh sab ko pata tha, yek koi Secret nahi tha”
Conclusion
Now Sir, if I am to believe that you really don’t understand these simple concepts even after consulting with Experts for 2 days as already described by you, I am deeply saddened because the common men believe that you are an IITian and have spent considerable time in Income Tax Department also.
Contrary to the same, If I am to believe that you already know the benefits of demonetization which I first learnt in Standard 8 when subject of economics was introduced to me and the concept of Peak Theory which is described by me above and which I learnt with my very limited experience while pursuing my profession of Chartered Accountancy, then I am more saddened and feel AAP Party as more dangerous because I believe that above any religion, politics or reservations in any caste or creed, it will always be education which shall uplift the common men and it is the common men who have elevated you to a position where you are looked by millions as their Idol and it is your duty to educate them and spread knowledge and not keep them in ignorance to preserve your vote bank.
I am grateful to all my Teachers who have selflessly shared their knowledge and some fellow members of CA fraternity who are playing an active role in creating awareness and educating Commonmen about the positive consequences of Demonetization true to the Jewel crowned to the profession as “Partner in Nation Building” and I would therefore like to advise the citizens not to sell the notes at discounted prices or deposit the cash into bank accounts of other benami persons in fear of penalty. Further, do not claim any bogus expenses or bogus loss to gain more trouble. Do not manipulate accounts by creating bogus cash on hand. Be sporty and pay tax honestly to buy peace of building capital.
Jai Hind.
Regards,
CA Mehul Rasesh Shah
Surat
[email protected]
PS : Sir, Please share the same explanation to Rahul Gandhiji too as lately you both share the same thoughts and statements and have same queries.
Wait for a miraculous amount of tax collection this year!!
I have mainly written this Letter for my love for writing and my love for questioning and understanding the concepts and in view of the freedom of speech and expression my country offers and hope that no one is offended.
New Update for the readers :
At time of writing this letter, research is based on the fact that the Bank deposit slip did not have any bifurcation between old and new notes and the AIR information shared to the I.T Department also contained information only about total cash deposits in a year without any bifurcation. As per talks at various levels, the bankers may be instructed to separately input the denomination of old notes into their MIS system at the time of deposit when the bundle of Notes contains new as well as old notes. If the same is done, the next question which arises is whether the said information is only to be shared with RBI or accessible even to Assessing officer. In future, the AO who wants to conduct extensive inquiry in any suspicious case may make a requisition and the data may be made available to him through technology or on issue of notice u/s 133(6) to the Bank. It will be welcome move by Government to discourage the theory of rotation of money even further for any denomination but things would be clear once new Notes of Rs. 500/- are into full fledged circulation.
It is reiterated that the above letter is intended to encourage citizens to pay appropriate taxes without any panic especially created about levy of penalty of 200% and hence the “whole” letter is to be read in its words and spirit.
The author is overwhelmed by the blessings received in the form of thousands of emails from all over the world and at the same time acknowledges the fact that the new demonetisation policy needs various measures for smooth implementation from the all type of Government bodies that should leave no scope for any casualties to life or property.The first of five rallies to support Seattle police will be from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday at the West Precinct, 810 Virginia St.
Family members of officers and their supporters plan to stage similar rallies weekly at each of the other four precincts, said Candace Peplowski, wife of a Seattle officer.
“It seems like the only attention our officers have gotten lately is negative, when the reality is they do so much good for the community,” she said in a news release announcing the rally.
The news release quotes Danielle Hall, the wife of another Seattle officer, as saying: “When I think back to the outpouring of support our law enforcement community received in 2009 and 2010, it feels a bit like ‘whiplash’ with the way some people are treating our officers, and unfortunately, in Seattle PD’s case, the lack of trust is also coming from within our leadership. We are not saying there isn’t room for communication and debate regarding recent events, of course everyone is entitled to |
of the basic promise of its election campaign: to provide an alternative government to a Fine Gael-led administration.
The party also believes it would suffer politically in any such arrangement.
In spite of the obvious attractions of remaining in office with all of the cabinet positions at his disposal, the prospect of heading a minority government has not found favour with Taoiseach Enda Kenny.
There is a strong fear at the highest levels in Fine Gael that the party could be left in office with responsibility for governing the country while Fianna Fáil has the luxury of dictating policy from the opposition benches.
“Responsibility without power is what appears to be on offer to us, and we are simply not interested,” one Fine Gael Minister told The Irish Times.
“Ultimately, Fianna Fáil will have to face the choice of a coalition or another election because a Fine Gael minority government when we are 30 seats short is simply not feasible.”
In meetings over recent days, the Taoiseach told Independent deputies that the need for stability might require Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to explore the possibility of a so-called grand coalition.
Fine Gael Ministers have echoed his view and say tentative contacts are likely to be made after tomorrow, when the new Dáil meets and, as expected, fails to elect a taoiseach.
Caretaker cabinet
If no taoiseach is elected, the current administration will continue in a caretaker capacity until the Dáil elects a new taoiseach, or, failing that, another election is called.
In his discussions with Galway Independent TD Noel Grealish, Mr Kenny is understood to have told him of his belief that a coalition between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is the only option.
The mood right across the Fine Gael parliamentary party is now running in favour of the coalition option, with a strong view that a deal with Independents would not provide stable government.
Independent Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae met the Taoiseach again yesterday, following an earlier meeting at the end of last week.
Mr Healy-Rae last night said that while it was good that Mr Kenny and Mr Martin were speaking to Independents and small parties, he felt the process was a “side show”.
“This is all a build-up to the grand finale,” he said, “and the grand finale is when Enda Kenny and Micheál Martin sit down and talk to each other.
“I don’t see any other show in town, I really don’t. The sums aren’t working out.”The Fabian Socialists were enthralled with "exotic Islam"
The Fabian Society and Islamisation
The Fabians have always had a soft spot for the exotic and, in particular, for subversive religious and pseudo-religious movements that lent themselves to being used for Fabian purposes. Among these were Freemasonry (leading Fabians like Annie Besant, A. R. Orage and Clement Attlee, were members of Masonic lodges); Theosophy (of which Besant was also a leading light); and Gurdjeff’s “Fourth Way.”
Fabian interest in, and support of, Islam was motivated by the following factors:
· Empire politics. From the beginning, British support of Islam was closely connected with imperial interests in South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.
· The “revolutionary” character of Islam. The socialistic, Cobdenite teachings of Islam such as “universal brotherhood” along with its opposition to Christianity, made it a convenient ally in the Fabians’ relentless drive to undermine Western society and civilisation.
In his writings, H. G. Wells praised Islam’s alleged insistence on “the perfect brotherhood and equality before God,” while Shaw wrote that Mohammed, the founder of Islam, was “a great Protestant religious force,” like George Fox or Wesley. Other leading Fabian apologists for Islam were Annie Besant and Bertrand Russell (Ratiu, p. 102).
· The Fabianisation of the Muslim world. Fabianism’s own inroads into the Muslim world, in particular, North Africa and the Middle East, made friendly relations with Islam imperative.
· Oil interests. The Fabians’ aim of controlling the world’s natural resources – which coincided with the aim of the big oil companies – called for friendly relations with Islam.
· The rise of Islam as a world power. The Muslim world’s growing economic and political power resulting from oil revenues, again, made friendly relations with Islam imperative.
· Muslim mass immigration. Mass immigration of Muslims from South Asia and Africa facilitated by Fabian Labour policy created new demographic and electoral realities which Fabian Labour governments – both local and national – fully exploited to their advantage.
As oil was fast becoming a treasured commodity thanks to the efforts of industrial and banking interests like the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers – who controlled the Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil (later Exxon) empires – the Fabians and their collaborators among the ruling elites of the British Empire could hardly have avoided taking a pro-Muslim stance.
And so, we find that in 1914 the government of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith declared:
“One of [the government’s] fundamental traditions is to be a friend of Islam and Muslums and to defend the Islamic Khalifate even if it was a Khalifate of conquest as the Turkish Khalifate …” (FO141/710/9).
Both Asquith and his Foreign Secretary Edward Grey were close to the Fabian Society. Asquith was a close friend of Bernard Shaw and helped the Fabian Ramsay MacDonald become Prime Minister in 1924 and 1929. Grey was a member of the Fabian Society’s Coefficients Club where collaboration between the Fabian Society, the Milner Group and various political parties and business interests was discussed and plotted.
This official pro-Muslim position was confirmed by leading Fabian and Secretary of State for India (Lord) Sydney Olivier, who wrote:
“No one with a close acquaintance with Indian affairs will be prepared to deny that on the whole there is a predominant bias in British officialism in favour of the Moslem community, partly on the ground of closer sympathy but more largely as a make-weight against Hindu nationalism” (Olivier, 1926).
Key persons who were either Fabians or associates of the Fabians to promote Muslim causes included:
· Herbert (later Lord) Samuel, an intimate friend of the Webbs. In 1921, while serving as High Commissioner for Palestine, he appointed Mohammad Amin al- Husseini Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Al- Husseini later played an important role in the Muslim Brotherhood, the Caliphate Movement and the Arab League.
· Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Fabian Society member. In collaboration with Fabian International Bureau chairman and Commonwealth Secretary Philip Noel-Baker and Fabian Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Jinnah promoted the creation of Pakistan as an independent Muslim state as well as the annexation of Kashmir to Pakistan following Partition.
· Mahatma Gandhi, Fabian Society member. In 1920, Gandhi supported India’s Caliphate ( Khilafat ) Movement which aimed to restore the Muslim Empire and became a member of the Central Khilafat Committee.
· Lord Rothschild, president of the LSE. Involved in setting up the London Mosque Fund in 1910, remaining a trustee until his death in 1915. The project enjoyed the support of the former principal of the Muhammadan College of Aligarh and LSE lecturer Sir Theodore Morison, and over time developed into the East London Mosque and Islamic Culture Centre (est. 1941), the UK Islamic Mission (est. 1962) and the London Muslim Centre (LCM), established in 2004. According to its website, the ELM-LCM site in Whitechapel (Tower Hamlets, East London) is set to become the largest Islamic complex in Western Europe.
Fabian penetration and the Islamic backlash
From the early 1890s onwards, the Fabians were busy travelling around the world, setting up Fabian groups or quietly spreading their teachings in nearly every country on earth (M. Cole, pp. 347-8). The Islamic Middle East and North Africa were no exception. In 1922, Turkey became a secular, Westernised republic.
By the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Socialism with an Arab twist was spreading to the rest of the Islamic world: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Libya and even Saudi Arabia where Prince Talal Ibn Saud, the ruling king’s brother, declared himself to be “a Fabian Socialist” (Fabian News, Nov. 1962).
As shown above, however, there was a parallel counter-movement unfolding at the same time, often with Western (including Fabian) assistance. The Fabians’ systematic promotion of anti-colonialism certainly accounts for much of the anti-Western sentiment that was to develop particularly in the Muslim world.
Thus, while various Arab organisations began to spring up – the Arab League (1945), the Council of Arab Economic Unity (1957), the Arab Common Market (1964) – apparently emulating similar Western organisations, other bodies with a distinctly Islamic agenda came on the scene.
One of these was the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, an organisation set up in 1972 to preserve Islamic social and economic values and to promote solidarity among its members, and whose institutions were to be an Islamic Development Bank, an Islamic Educational, scientific and Cultural Organisation and an International Islamic News Agency.
Apart from Fabian-inspired anti-colonialism, the reason for this new Muslim assertiveness was the West’s growing dependence on Arab oil. At the 1955 annual conference, the Fabian-controlled Labour executive noted that the Middle East was the main issue in the world because that was where most of the world’s oil reserves lay (Callaghan, p. 231).
Britain’s oil supplies were, for the time being, reasonably safe. In 1953, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Eisenhower had ordered a coup d’état in Iran – carried out through MI6 and the CIA – to install a puppet regime and put that country’s oil resources under the control of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP) (M. Curtis, 2003, pp. 303-4). The remainder of Britain’s oil imports (about half) was supplied by Kuwait.
A turning point in Western-Muslim relations came in 1973, when oil-producing Arab countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on America and several Western European countries who had supported Israel in the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War. At the same time, there was a five-fold increase in oil prices, creating huge deficits in oil-consuming economies.
While leading industrial countries like America, West Germany and Japan sensibly reduced their deficits by deflating their economies, the Labour government under Fabian Chancellor Healey decided to finance Britain’s own deficit by borrowing from merchant banks as well as from Iran and Saudi Arabia.The Cathedral is the most iconic building in Helsinki. The cathedral was designed by C.L. Engel and built in the 1830’s and 1840’s. It stands proud on a hill overlooking the Senate Square and the busy streets of downtown Helsinki. The cathedral layout was originally the shape of a Greek cross, making it very slender and tall-looking. Architects in Engel’s time would joke about the thin church and make bets about it falling over in the wind. After Engel’s death the towers in the intermediate directions were built, to make sure the cathedral would be strong enough. Also the 12 apostle statues, made of zinc, were added at this point.
The church benches were upholstered in the 1960’s and the material is still in mint condition: no fading, no wearing out and no signs of the 50+ years of being sat on. What is this magic fabric made of? It is made of the hair of Polish horses! The look and feel resemble vinyl or a safety belt.At first glance, Yugasan Rendaiji doesn’t seem very different to the thousands of other Buddhist temples scattered across the country. It’s a place where members of the local community go at prescribed times of the year to pray, receive blessings and attend festivals. For tourists — the smattering who make it to the Okayama countryside, that is — it’s a picturesque place to drop by and snap a few photos.
But beneath the temple’s deceivingly ordinary exterior, a quiet revolution is brewing within the halls of Shingon, one of Japan’s most secretive and least understood Buddhist sects. It comes in the form of the Hoodie Monks, a one-of-a-kind movement that seems to naturally marry two cultures that might at first seem like unlikely partners: Buddhism and hip-hop.
The movement is the brainchild of Gomyo, or Kevin Seperic, an American priest who works at the temple. He says the group’s name originated from the nickname he was given by a graffiti-artist friend who noticed that he often wore a hooded sweater under his samue, or monk’s work clothes, during the winter months.
Gomyo, 45, who moved to Japan from his native Michigan in 1994, says the idea of using hip-hop to express Buddhist thought and teaching came to him after hearing the Beastie Boys song “Bodhisattva Vow” back in the ’90s.
“After hearing that song, I thought, ‘I should write lyrics like that!’ ” he says.
Gomyo first started recording hip-hop in 1990, but after coming to Japan he began to develop a strong interest in Buddhism, which ultimately led to him studying to become a Shingon priest.
In 2000, Gomyo began his formal training and was ordained as a novice, or lay priest, at a ceremony at Zentsuji Temple in Shikoku, the birthplace of Kukai, aka Kobo Daishi, the founder of Shingon and one of the most well-known and revered figures in Japanese Buddhism.
After studying at Muryokoin on Mount Koya in 2002 and 2003, Gomyo received the dharma transmission in 2004 at Ninnaji in Kyoto and became an ajari, or fully ordained Shingon priest. In Buddhism, dharma transmission is the process that ensures the continuation of a spiritual bloodline, namely the unbroken lineage between teacher and disciple that stretches back to the Buddha himself.
Even after becoming a priest, hip-hop continued to play an important part in Gomyo’s life and he continued to record and perform, but increasingly he began to see links to Buddhism and a role that hip-hop could play in transmitting the dharma.
Hip-hop, he explains, is commonly divided into four elements or roles: the MC or rapper, the DJ or beat master, the graffiti artist and the B-boy or dancer.
“These elements of hip-hop do have a nice correlation with elements of Buddhist practice,” Gomyo says. “The MC rapping is represented in Buddhism by chanting. The DJ or producer keeps the beat going; in Buddhism we use taiko drums or wooden blocks to keep the beat when chanting in a group.”
Gomyo adds that the visual element, which manifests itself in hip-hop culture through graffiti or street art, connects particularly well with the school of Buddhism he belongs to.
“In Buddhism in general, and Shingon in particular, visual teachings are an important component of practice,” he explains. “It is said that the two mandalas we use in Shingon, the Kongokai and the Taizokai, contain all the teachings, represented symbolically. I like to paint Buddhist-themed murals when I do painting events, to share the images in a style that young people can appreciate.”
Gomyo says that the B-boy dancer element, or break dancing, could be matched with types of Buddhist dance, such as Bon Odori, but he acknowledges that this is an element the Hoodie Monks haven’t explored yet. He adds that movement and action is also represented in Shingon by mudras, or sacred hand gestures.
Gomyo currently fronts the hip-hop group FBSD, which stands for “Free Buddha, Spit Dharma.” In an age of declining interest in Buddhism in Japan, especially among younger generations, Gomyo believes it is becoming increasingly important for the dharma to be spread in a way that is meaningful.
“By expressing Buddhism through hip-hop culture, we hope to do two things: introduce people to Buddhist thought who might not otherwise be exposed to it, and offer an alternative to mainstream hip-hop, which is often preoccupied with materialism,” he says. “In Japan, it’s not about exposing young people to Buddhism — it’s all around them — it’s more about showing them that Buddhism is more than something you do at funerals. It’s a useful tool in dealing with daily life and it can be cool.”
Seventy-year-old Zoko Saeki has been abbot of Rendaiji for 33 years. He says he wants to “keep the teachings going and alive,” but is concerned about the declining interest in Buddhism, especially among the young.
“This is a dangerous time for Buddhism in Japan,” says Saeki. “The continuation of our faith is at risk.”
Saeki, the 72nd abbot in an unbroken line of succession, attributes this decline in part to the breakdown of the traditional extended family unit in Japanese culture and the isolation of family members from each other.
“In the past, Japanese naturally learned about Buddhism,” he explains. “It was much more common then for multiple generations to live together under the same roof. So grandchildren, for example, would experience their own grandparents’ death at close quarters. The cycle of life was right in front of their eyes every day, and this would bring them closer to Buddhism.”
Saeki adds that communities in the past were also more tightly knit, so even if someone lived alone, they would be more in touch with life through having meaningful ties with neighbors and their families.
“In modern society, people are very alienated and thus become fixated on the small and less important details of life,” he says. “Young people especially just think about right now and not the future.”
Saeki believes that in this kind of social environment it is necessary to build “gateways to Buddhism” that make the religion more accessible, relevant and interesting for young people, and he sees Hoodie Monks as one such gateway. Saeki also wants to spread the teachings outside of Japan and tap into the growing interest in Buddhism internationally.
“Buddhism is not just for Japanese people, and I want to share it with the whole world,” he says.
This vision of an international sangha, or Buddhist community, is already starting to be realized at Rendaiji Temple, and a training center for the Hoodie Monks has been established on the temple grounds, with Gomyo acting as training coordinator.
To date, seven foreign novices affiliated with Hoodie Monks have been ordained at Rendaiji and four more are scheduled to take place next year. There are also three Zen monks and about 20 lay practitioners from around the world who are now involved in the movement.
The temple also has links to Gloucester Buddhist Centre in the U.K., which is now a Hoodie Monks Dharma Centre, and the center’s founders, Dutch couple Yozen and Kakua, are currently living at Rendaiji and training to become ajari.
After becoming fully ordained priests, they plan to return to the U.K. and establish the first traditional Shingon temple in that country.
Web: www.hoodiemonks.com. Your comments and story ideas: [email protected], when you don't have a laser pointer handy, you use the next best thing: A gun. The Times Union reports that NY State Homeland Security and Emergency Services Commissioner Jerome Hauer "took out his handgun and used the laser sighting device attached to the barrel as a pointer in a presentation to a foreign delegation." Naturally, that upset the foreign delegation, too!
The alleged incident occurred at the state capitol building in Albany, on October 24. From the Times-Union:
[Public] officials, one of whom claimed to be an eyewitness, said that three Swedish emergency managers in the delegation were rattled when the gun's laser tracked across one of their heads before Hauer found the map of New York, at which he wanted to point. Hauer, commissioner of the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, was disabled by a stroke a few years ago and can be unsteady. He isn't a law enforcement official. He carries the loaded 9-millimeter Glock in a holster into state buildings, an apparent violation of state law barring state employees from bringing weapons to the workplace, several witnesses say According to one person who witnessed the scene in the conference room, which has mid-wall-to-ceiling windows so that people can see into the meeting space, two people opposite Hauer at the table moved quickly out of the line of the laser when he brought out the gun.
Also: "No one, including Hauer, has denied the episode happened. Approached by the Times Union at the Capitol after a meeting with Cuomo, Hauer was asked if he had used his gun as a pointer in a presentation. 'You have bad sources,' he said, but would not take follow-up questions."
Hauer, a bioterrorism expert who used to work at the NYC Office of Emergency Management under Rudy Giuliani, is licensed to carry a gun in NY State and NYC, but it's unclear if he can carry a gun in the state offices. Also, when he was previously asked why he carried a gun, the Times-Union reports, "Hauer suggested that a reporter look him up in a Google search."4 player setup
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NOTE: The dice shown above is the updated and final design for the custom dice.
Want extra sets of custom resources and dice? No problem, you can add them to your pledge. $7 for the wooden resources, $11 for the custom dice
The deluxe edition includes 25 custom made dice with Halfling inspired design illustrated by The Mico and 120 custom shaped wooden components. The custom dice and components are for Kickstarter backers only and will not be available in retail. However, they will be available in limited supply at conventions, through contests, online at the BGG promo store, and directly from our website.
Stretch Goals
With this add-on you will receive the Kickstarter edition of Cavern Tavern.
"The Five Realms” Book Collection features two books: “The Secret of the Five Realms” that covers the story of our previous game Cavern Tavern, and “The Future of the Five Realms” that covers Rise to Nobility.
Both books are intertwined in one beautiful saga about The Five Realms that is read in one breath.They are intriguing tales about a beautiful fantasy world, filled with adventure, drama and comedy. Find out about the origins of our old beloved characters; Mr. Nasty, The Wizard, Widdo, Tanelia, Keishara, Princess Tabita and the rest of the gang, and our new ones Nia, Martok, Sarya, Berk the Clerk and many others.
Click the image to read more - Review on Macedonian
Rise to Nobility is a worker (dice) placement game set in The Five Realms, the same fantasy world as Cavern Tavern. At the beginning of each round, every player rolls 5 dice that represent their available actions in the game. The locations in the city have requirements for certain dice values.
What’s Unique
The challenging thing is that the total value of dice each player can use during the round is determined by their reputation in the city. Players start with 9 reputation and can increase or decrease their reputation by taking certain actions in the city. With numerous options for spending their dice, players will need to carefully plan their strategy and prioritize their actions.
Each player takes on the role of a landowner with a unique ability. Your goal is to rise from anonymity to the rank of lord. At the end of 10 rounds, the player with the most victory points takes over the head seat at the Stone Council and wins the game.
There are many paths for achieving victory.
Housing and Employing Settlers
You can focus on increasing the population of the new city of Caveborn by housing the incoming Settlers. If you provide them with a house and spend the goods they require, they will pay you with victory points.
Once the Settlers are housed, you can boost the city's economy by employing your Settlers in the Guilds and by purchasing Workshops for them. Ensuring that you have Apprentices and Guild Masters who are loyal to you will earn you money, resources, and victory points.
Negotiating with the Stone Council
Of course you can choose to play politics and try to deal with the members of the Stone Council to gain victory points. Each race has a representative on the Stone Council. You will be rewarded if you fulfill the demands of a Councilor. But the other races will resent your display of favoritism, and your reputation will suffer, hindering your options in the city.
Other Opportunities
If you’re low on money, you can sell your Goods at the port. And when you find yourself in tight spots, you can visit old reliable Berk the Town Clerk who can help you overcome some of your obstacles.
And don’t forget the High Queen in the White Castle. You can request an audience with her to improve your reputation in the city.
But your time to achieve your goals is limited, because representatives from all Five Realms are sailing to Caveborn to cast their vote for the new chairman of the Stone Council.
So, do you have what it takes to become a respectful lord, help Caveborn flourish and prosper, and take your seat at The Stone Council? Are you ready to Rise to Nobility?
Here is a playthru video from Tantrum House.
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Click the image to watch the video
Overview of Rise to Nobility and Cavern Tavern - Click to read more
Click the image to read more - Review on German
Social Stretch Goals
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Based on the knowledge and experience that we have gathered from our previous successful campaign,we strongly believe that we have produced an even greater product with Rise to Nobility. We have invested heavily in professional artwork, game play development and consultation, testing and professional rule book writing.
Now once again we have come to the moment where we need your help to make our dream a reality. We are grateful for all your help in the past and appreciate every single person that is willing to help this campaign succeed and that's why we’re providing these incentives:
DISCOUNTS
-19% discount of the Standard version (MSRP $60)
- 22% discount of the Deluxe version (ERP $75)
- 33% discount of “The Five Realms” Book Collection.
SUBSIDIZED SHIPPING - We cover $11 of the real shipping cost for every backer.
KICKSTARTER DELUXE EXCLUSIVE CONTENT – 25 Customized laser engraved dice and 120 Custom shaped wooden Goods (resources) that will not be available in retail.
Here at Final Frontier Games we like to give the retailers an opportunity to stock our game through Kickstarter so they can get all the exclusive content as well.
By backing our project you will receive a fair bulk discount and save on shipping as well. Just contact us at [email protected] and we’ll form an offer that will suit your needs.
For group orders of 6+ copies just contact us at [email protected]
We are using the Jamey Stegmaier method for fulfillment. We are going to ship the games from four fulfillment centers. One located in the United States, the second in the United Kingdom, third one in Australia and another in Canada. The game is US, EU, AUS and CAN friendly.
US & UK - Free shipping
EU - $10
Macedonia - $10
Canada and Australia - $15
Rest of the world - $30
NOTE: Norway and Switzerland. We are really sorry, but your countries were added in the "Rest of the world" group. This is a mistake and you should be charged $10 for shipping. We cannot change the pledge levels now, but please select Macedonia ($10) as a shipping destination and through the survey you can give us your real shipping info.
Final Frontier Games is a board game publishing company based in Skopje, Macedonia. Our goal is to bring friends and families closer together in fun and engaging ways. That’s why we make board games. Final Frontier Games was established in 2014 and so far has published two board games in Macedonia and one for international market. Rise to Nobility is our second international project.
Art by Mihajlo Dimitrievski - The Mico
The beautiful art is done by The Mico, artist of Game of Thrones: Hand of the King, The North Sea Saga Trilogy, the Valeria card games and many more. Awesome human being and great artist!
Demoing the game at the FLGS
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Main Video Music by Matthew Pablo http://www.matthewpablo.comIndira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for 2017 was awarded to Dr Manmohan Singh on Saturday by an international jury headed by former President Pranab Mukherjee.
The jury chose Dr Singh for his leadership of the country, his contributions to reforms and the economy, for enhancing India’s stature globally and for improving India’s relations with neighbouring countries including China and Pakistan.
The jury specially noted his efforts to ensure “the security and well being of ordinary citizens, regardless of their faith, caste, region or languages they speak.”
Dr Singh is only the third Prime Minister of India to complete two full terms as PM between 2004 and 2014. His tenure witnessed the path braking nuclear agreement with the United States and the Copenhagen Climate Change agreement.
While Dr Singh, who as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and as the Finance Minister in the Government headed by PV Narasimha Rao played a pivotal role in ushering in economic reforms, as Prime Minister he led the country achieve the highest sustained rate of economic growth since Independence.
Dr Singh’s tenure as Prime Minister also saw the lowest terrorist violence, prolonged period of communal harmony and peace on the border.
The International award named after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was instituted in 1986. The last two recipients have been the Indian Space Research Organisation and the UN High Commission for Refugees.Alaska’s isolation, climate, and geography makes the 49th State one of the most vulnerable to natural disasters. One of the largest threats is a breakdown of imported goods, which represent 95 percent of the local food table. An earthquake immobilizing the Port of Anchorage or a volcanic explosion cutting off air travel could cause debilitating effects to the state’s food supply.
An effort in 2014 by Gov. Sean Parnell (R-Alaska) bolstered food stockpiles in the largest population centers of Anchorage and Fairbanks, but those efforts are still estimated to be expired in a week or less. While Parnell turned down low-shelf life emergency rations like Meals Ready to Eat (MREs), the caches still have a ceiling of about five years — meaning a costly re-upping twice per decade. Parnell allocated $4.8 million in 2014, plus an additional $3 million to fund helicopters to transfer goods to remote areas.
Atop the $4.8 million in maintaining the stockpiles, Alaska bleeds nearly $2 billion every year to pay to import the food, leading many yearning for a more sustainable approach to locally grown produce.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Alaska represents just 0.2 percent of national agricultural production in the United States. Even more underwhelming, 81 percent of that figure goes to feeding livestock. Hay is the state’s largest crop, with 20,000 tons harvested on 18,000 acres annually. Potatoes come in a far second. We’re dead last in vegetable production.
There’s the obvious reason for the state’s shortfall in local production. In locales like Anchorage, there isn’t a lot of property to dedicate to boosting production. Also, go outside right now. Alaska’s cold climes have historically limited local grow operations to very narrow windows in the summer. We might grow the biggest pumpkins, but they’re not going to be as plump and shapely — and definitely not as appetizing — in early February.
But the Anchorage Department of Economic and Community Development, through the Planning Department, is looking at two new ways of enlisting multi-unit residential properties and businesses in the municipality to the endeavor of increasing local production.
Farmers Markets
Title 21 is the city’s land use code. It has been going through a major rewrite over the past several years — one facet of which involves consolidating zones for public parks. Those rezoning efforts may potentially mean great things for the municipality’s farmers markets.
There are ten farmers markets in Anchorage. Some, like the Downtown Market and Festival, cater more to the tourist crowds that frequent the downtown area during the summer. Others, like the Spenard Farmers Market (which will celebrate its eighth year of operation in May), are all volunteer-run and serve the locals. The Spenard market even helps with food assistance programs, allowing patrons to use their QUEST card to purchase fresh produce.
But the new all encompassing public lands zone (PL), which covers public parks and greenbelts, did not list farmers markets as a permissible use, meaning the municipality’s markets have had to broker deals with churches, schools, and local business for use of their lots. This cuts down on parking and restricts where markets can set up shop. A new proposal, currently before the Planning and Zoning Committee, would allow farmers markets in the new PL zone — giving organizers the chance to apply for permitting to operate on parks and recreations land.
This risks dedicating land to farmers markets on properties that already endure parking shortages. Addressing the University Area Community Council last week, David Whitfield reassured people that parking would factor into the permit approval process. Whitfield is the Senior Planner and Platting Officer with the Anchorage Planning Division.
“Parking is one of the major issues,” he told a crowded room inside the University Baptist Church last week. “We don’t want to create a parking problem by adopting this ordinance. It’s going to be a case by case basis. What park can support a farmers market will be a big part of that.”
In Muldoon, where a new farmers market is trying to establish a foothold, the proposal is welcomed.
“This is important since up to 40% of Muldoon residents do not own automobiles,” Carla McConnell wrote in an email to the Planning Department. “We currently set up at Begich Middle School, but our end goal is to operate out of the currently in development Muldoon Town Square Park. We see this Park as a place for Eastside to have community in an area of town that is targeted for high density population in the Anchorage 2020 Plan.”
Rooftop Gardening
A second proposal currently being considered would provide an exemption to the current height limit on businesses and multi-family residential units (not including single or double unit housing) to allow for rooftop gardening, with a goal to “allow rooftop greenhouses to exceed the maximum allowable height of the district by fifteen feet.”
“It’s meant to incentivize the use of roof tops for growing food and will give use to that space that would otherwise be empty,” Whitfield explained.
The goal of this proposal is to make use out of the large and often vacant spaces that top myriad apartment complexes, condominium associations, and businesses, to allow for the construction of grow operations on their roofs. This could mean walled-in and heated greenhouses that operate year-round, as well as open air gardens that harvest crops over the summer months.
Rooftop gardening has taken off across the world, notably including a 2009 law in Toronto mandating them on industrial and residential buildings. They absorb rainwater, reduce heat during the summer, and yield harvests that add to the local food supply.
But there are concerns about what rooftop gardens might mean to public safety, as it relates to the burden they might put on the buildings that host them.
“Growing food on top of roofs in expensive and generally not a good idea. Rather than incentivizing rooftop gardening, we should, if anything, be discouraging it,” Ron Wilde opined in written comment to the Planning Department. Wilde is a structural plan review engineer with the municipality. His concern is that people may use the height exemption haphazardly and erect rooftop gardens with, essentially, cardboard and duct tape.
The purpose of a roof is to keep water and weather out of a building. Walking on a roof will degrade it. If a walking surface and a greenhouse are part of the original design, well, okay. But the cost of the building will necessarily increase to accommodate it. Why would one want to increase the cost of their building, when they can simply garden on the ground at no extra cost?
Whitfield fielded similar concerns at the University Area Community Council meeting, and emphasized that any proposed rooftop garden would have to apply for approval and would be accepted on a case by case basis, taking into consideration any structural issues.
“We recognize that there needs to be some flexibility in what would be permitted there,” he said. “This ordinance is not an ordinance to get around the height restrictions. So, when an applicant would apply to increase the height of their structure, or their greenhouse, they would have to come into the Planning Department and we would look at that.”
The Planning and Zoning Committee will review the proposals at their next regular meeting on Monday night at 6:30 PM at the Loussac Library in Anchorage.By David Brand
A quick summary of my 2016 Supporter Spotting project: I am documenting all of the soccer apparel I see in and around New York City and compiling the stats at the end of each month. My field research serves as a sort of time capsule to track supporter trends, highlights some unique encounters and delivers the data to prove intuitive notions like “Wow, Barcelona sure is popular.”
This month, I planned a special Supporter Spotting field trip to experience some cultural immersion and — I’ll admit it — to pad the apparel stats of my favorite club, Atlético Madrid. I had cleared my schedule for Atleti’s Champions League clash with PSV so that finally, after following them on Instagram for more than a year, I could join the Peña Atlético de Madrid en New York for the match. A peña is the Spanish equivalent of a fan club, but it provides more than just a loose affiliation among supporters. Peñas are social groups that unite members beyond their favorite club. Next time you watch a La Liga match, check out the various banners draped around the rim of the field and waving in the crowd. Many represent peñas from around the country and the world.
I headed to a bar in Midtown, dressed in my best Diego Godín jersey |
welcome artist Patricia Dahlman to the Library as Incubator Project. Patricia is the creator of a new site-specific sculpture that is on exhibit at the Mid-Manhattan Library in New York City. Today she tells us a bit about...
Artists Featuring: Katie Herzog Today we are pleased to feature a recent exhibition by visual artist Katie Herzog. Katie is also the director of the Molesworth Institute, a special library devoted to the playful side of libraries and archives. Enjoy this write-up of Katie’s recent project, from the KLOWDEN MANN gallery. “There is no way to perform architecture in...
Blog / Performing Arts #IArtLibraries | In Motion: American Sign Language Poetry This post originally appeared on the Library as Incubator Project in April 2012. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re celebrating National Poetry Month in a big way here at the Library as Incubator Project. Throughout the month of April we’ll be posting a couple of times a week about innovative, interesting, and inspiring poetry projects....
Artists #IArtLibraries | Featuring: Bobby Sayers This post originally appeared on the Library as Incubator Project in January 2015. Today it’s my pleasure to welcome Bobby Sayers to the Library as Incubator Project. Bobby’s “We Make New” sculpture created for the Artworks in Libraries program for Scottish Book Week caught my eye and I knew he’d have some interesting perspectives to...
Artists / Libraries Partners in Art: Wells Public Library and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art Today I am thrilled to share a conversation with Andrea Kazilionis from the Wells Public Library in Wells, Maine. Andrea fills us in on a partnership with the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, a local art museum. This is a great example of a library working closely with an arts institution to offer high-quality, expert...Previously known as "What Page of Google Am I On?", What Page of Search Am I On is a free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool and rank tracker for webmasters to determine on what search results page their site is listed for a given query.
Let's say you're an online retailer. You want to know how deep people have to dig to find your site when searching for specific keywords and how some of those keywords compare to others. Obviously, the less they have to dig, the better your SEO and the more money you can make.
Let's also say that you sell propane and propane accessories. Your website is propanetownville.com. You put propane accessories into the keyword(s) box, propanetownville.com into the URL box, and click the search button. If none of the first page of 10 results links to your site, the next 10 are queried, and so on and so on until your listing is found or the results are exhausted.
Repeat to your heart's content!The Croatian defense ministry said on Tuesday that Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary and Bulgaria embarked on the establishment of joint special air force sponsored by NATO’s Special Operations Headquarters and the US.
The ministry said that the project was still in the initial phase, but emphasized that “potential areas of cooperation could include joint training and education, equipping, modernization and the establishment of integrated multinational troops”.
These are the forces that are trained and equipped to infiltrate into enemy territory, fight against terrorism, the evacuation of its own forces from enemy territory
These are the goals that South-East NATO countries undertook as members, but after considering different models of providing the necessary training and possible international support, NATO and bilateral partners, concluded that it is best to enter this project in joint cooperation.VIDEO: UPS employees give over 1,500 free backpacks to Oakland students Copyright by KRON - All rights reserved Video
OAKLAND (KRON) -- UPS employees came to Lockwood School in Oakland on Wednesday to distribute more than 1,500 backpacks loaded with school supplies to students.
For 17 years, they have been working with the Lend a Hand Foundation in making sure young students have backpacks to start the school year.
The foundation has even loftier goals for next year.
"They're loaded with supplies, pens, pencils, glue, erasers, notebooks, there's highlighters, everything to make them successful in school," UPS spokesman Keven O' Brien said.
"There are about 35,000 students alone in Oakland that are in the free or reduced lunch program," Lend a Hand Foundation spokeswoman Dee Johnson said. "So, our goal is next year to make sure that happens, that all 35,000 students receive backpacks, so they can have the tools they need."
The Lend a Hand Foundation is hoping to attract more sponsors to join ups in reaching that goal.This 1988 Mazda RX-7 Turbo is a 10th Anniversary model with just 51k kilometers (~32k miles) that is powered by a turbocharged 1.3L twin-rotor paired to 5-speed manual transmission. The car has remained in Ontario since new, and was with the previous owner for 23 years. The seller is the third owner and as added about 1000 miles to the car since purchase in 2015. The monochromatic white paint and exterior appear to have have been well-cared for, and the seller has modified the car with performance upgrades including Tokico blue shocks, Racing Beat springs, and a Bonez Turboflo exhaust system. The car has been recently serviced with new filters, belts, plugs, and fluids. Extensive service records date back to 1990, and the car carries a clean Ontario title in the seller’s name.
The Crystal White (code UC) paint scheme carries through to the matching side moldings, rear spoiler, taillight housings, and mirrors. The paint is in good condition with normal wear, and has a few small scratches and chips as detailed in the photo gallery below. The front end was repainted by the previous owner due to rock chips, and the seller notes that there is no overspray from the paintwork. The car is garaged and kept under a cover when not in use.
The 10th Anniversary model saw a limited production run of only 1500 units and was based upon the second generation FC Series 4 RX-7 Turbo II. The VIN numbers were split between two series, with earlier Series I Anniversary models having an additional Mazda logo decal on the nose. New Sylvania headlights have been installed by the seller, and the buckets are said to open and close properly.
The FC RX-7 offered better handling than its FB predecessor, and came equipped with rack and pinion steering, an independent rear suspension, and ABS brakes. The seller has installed Tokico Blue shocks with Racing Beat springs, and refreshed the brakes with stainless steel lines, new front and rear vented rotors, and Hawk HP pads. The original white 16″ seven-spoke alloys show some minor curbing and wear new Cooper Zeon RS3-A tires in the stock size of 205/55/16.
The glass is said to have no nicks or cracks, and features a bronze tint from the factory that was included on all 10th Anniversary models. The functioning taillights have no cracks in the lenses, and the correct all white badges are intact.
Unique rotary styled fender medallions mark the sports car’s 10th anniversary, and the commemorative model was the only RX-7 in the US-market to feature headlight washers.Michael Shulman, CTVNews.ca
A 42-year-old man from Surrey, B.C., who was fatally shot during a home invasion last weekend held off an intruder until the rest of his family could find a place to hide, according to an emotional Facebook post from his wife.
In the message written early Tuesday morning, Becky Zhou said that her husband Colin Hill attempted to bar the gun-toting intruder from coming through the door of their home shortly before midnight on Sunday.
As he struggled to keep the man outside the family's home on 64th Avenue near 166th Street, Hill, a father of two, yelled to his family to find a safe place to hide.
But eventually, Hill lost the battle for door and was forced to give up ground. So he screamed to his family that the robber was armed and tried to get him back outdoors, Zhou wrote.
Hill was fatally shot and died at the scene.
Police have released few details of the home invasion, but Zhou said in the Facebook post that her family is safe thanks to the heroic actions of her husband, who is a well-known local realtor.
"Colin is the best real estate agent, (a) very protective father (and) the very best husband a person could ever ask for," Zhou wrote.
Later on Tuesday, police charged 22-year-old Khouri Lamar Green with second-degree murder.
Green, a Surrey resident with an extensive criminal record, was arrested by the RCMP a short time after the shooting, while police were responding to a report of an armed man trying to breaking into an apartment in Burnaby, B.C.
Police allege that Green was also in possession of a stolen vehicle, which was used to flee the scene of Hill's slaying.
The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team said the break-in at Hill and Zhou's home was random.
Green appeared in court Tuesday morning and is scheduled to make a second appearance on Sept. 14.
Zhou thanked friends and family for their support after her husband's tragic death, and asked for privacy.
Surrey RCMP Chief Supt. Bill Fordy said at a press conference on Monday that despite the force's quick response, he was still devastated by Hill's slaying.
"There is no question these are the most painful moments a family can endure. For police, they’re also the hardest," said Fordy.
"While we're confident we've quickly taken the person responsible for this senseless crime into custody, I’m still angry at this pointless loss of life."
With files from The Canadian Press and CTV VancouverAlmost everything pilots use these days requires charging, whether it’s an iPad, ADS-B receiver, or video camera. Unfortunately, older airplanes simply aren’t equipped to handle all those electronic devices, and a simple cigarette lighter plug can be quickly overwhelmed. That’s what makes Stratus Power so useful: it provides safe, reliable charging to anything with a USB plug. Install one in your panel, or add one at each passenger se...
The most affordable TSO-certified charging port
Almost everything pilots use these days requires charging, whether it’s an iPad, ADS-B receiver, or video camera. Unfortunately, older airplanes simply aren’t equipped to handle all those electronic devices, and a simple cigarette lighter plug can be quickly overwhelmed. That’s what makes Stratus Power so useful: it provides safe, reliable charging to anything with a USB plug. Install one in your panel, or add one at each passenger seat to keep those entertainment devices charged up.
Features:
Dual 2.5 amp USB-A charging ports
Shielded to prevent radio noise
FAA certified to TSO-C71
Cylindrical shape for easy, drill-in panel installation
Designed and built in the USA
Two-year product warranty, backed by Appareo
Works with 10-32V
Measures 1.848" x 1.848" x 1.391"
Pilot report
Pilots ask if Stratus Power will charge a full-size iPad during flight. Good news: it actually can charge two iPads simultaneously. There are two reasons why this is possible:
It provides dual 2.5A, not 2.1A. Appareo engineered each port with a max output of 2.5A, knowing that 2.1A just isn’t enough to keep an iPad powered while it’s in use. Each port delivers 2.5A independently. Other common dual chargers are rated 2.1A for each port, but they actually share 4.2A between the two. With those chargers, if one device draws 2.5A, the other port is left with only 1.7A. We designed Stratus Power so the charging ports are independent — meaning each port provides 2.5A at the same time.
Here’s what one pilot had to say after a long flight experiment…
"I am a heavy user of ForeFlight on my iPad. Previously, I used an adapter (2.1A, 12V) in the cigarette lighter, but the iPad would totally lose its charge after about 6-7 hours.
I installed two Stratus Power units on my Seneca, and then over the weekend I went on a couple of relatively long flights (6 hours). For my test, I intentionally started the trip with only a 75% charge on the iPad. I plugged it into the 2.5A Stratus Power unit, and by the end of 3 hours while running ForeFlight, the iPad was fully charged! There is a world of difference between the 2.1A chargers and your 2.5A charging ports. Needless to say, I was extremely pleased."
- Tim Fino, 1978 Piper Seneca II, Farmington, MI
SpecsIn this study, we demonstrated the biological links between the shape of TJ-forming cells and a mechanism for the maintenance of TJ barrier homeostasis in the epidermis, as a representative example of how tissues adopt form to follow function. Our proposed f-TKD cell turnover model suggests that the local spatiotemporal orchestration of cell differentiation in the SG cell layer enables the constituent f-TKD cells to be renewed while maintaining TJ barrier homeostasis in cornified epidermis.
The regular columnar stack of flattened corneocytes in murine ear epidermis demonstrates a regular zig-zag interdigitation pattern between two adjacent cell columns (Figure 6—figure supplement 1 reproduced from Figure 1 of Mackenzie [1975]) (Mackenzie, 1969; Christophers, 1972; Menton, 1976; Ball, 2001). This regular interdigitation pattern was spontaneously reproduced by our f-TKD model (Figure 6A), in which cell differentiation in the SG2 cell layer occurs in turn in pairs of adjacent cell columns. The f-TKD model thus provides a coherent mechanistic explanation of how the regular stacks of corneocytes are constructed.
Figure 6 with 1 supplement with 1 supplement see all Download asset Open asset Spatiotemporal orchestration of cell differentiation in the f-TKD model generates interdigitated stacks of corneocytes. (A) The f-TKD model provides a coherent explanation of how the regular interdigitation of corneocytes is produced in the SG2 layer. Arrows show SG3 cells that are newly aligned to the columnar stack. One cycle of cell turnover (orange arrow) corresponds to one cycle indicated in Figure 5. The yellow-colored cell is differentiated from SG3 to SG1 in the time course. (B) Previously proposed columnar unit concept of epidermal structure and turnover. (C) Our proposed f-TKD model for epidermal homeostasis. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.19593.031
The f-TKD model further suggests that homeostasis of the SC–SG layers is maintained by the spatiotemporal orchestration of cell differentiation in the SG2 cell layer, rather than by the kinetics of stem cell proliferation and differentiation in the basal layer. Our model is consistent with a pioneering computational simulation suggesting that the regular 3D stacking structure of the SC can be spontaneously formed by randomly supplied cells (Honda et al., 1996). Our model also accords with in vivo cell-tracing studies demonstrating a random supply of cells from the spinous layer to the SG layer (Doupé et al., 2010), and in vivo live observations of the upward movement of spinous layer cells funneling into preexisting cell columns of the SG (Rompolas et al., 2016).
In the 1980s, the epidermal proliferative unit (EPU) concept postulated that each column of flattened corneocytes corresponds to a set of basal layer stem cells that proliferate directly under the column (Potten and Allen, 1975; Potten, 2004). In the EPU model, the regular interdigitation pattern of the SC is explained by the regular kinetics of basal layer stem cells in each EPU. However, recent in vivo cell-fate-tracing studies demonstrated more random cell fate decisions in the basal cell layer, with EPU model-like upward cell movement funneling into the cell columns of the SG, leading to a new concept: the epidermal differentiation unit (EDU) (Rompolas et al., 2016). However, the underlying mechanism dictating the regular interdigitation pattern of cell columns remains enigmatic (Figure 6B).
In our f-TKD model, the cell columns exist only in the SG and SC layers, rather than extending from the basal layer through to the SC. The cells originate from stem cells in the basal layer and are randomly supplied to a spinous layer. Once the cells enter the SG layer, cell turnover in adjacent columns is tightly coordinated in a spatiotemporal manner, leading to the regular interdigitation pattern (Figure 6C). Epidermal homeostasis is maintained by balancing cell proliferation in the basal layer, cell translocation (differentiation) from the basal to the spinous layer, cell integration to the SC/SG layer, and cell shedding from the top of the SC as squames. Future studies are needed to explore how this balance among critical processes in the epidermal layers is regulated to maintain a constant thickness of the epidermis.
The mammalian epidermis is a representative stratified epithelium. Nutrients for stratified cells are mostly supplied from the basal connective tissue via diffusion through paracellular pathways. If all the keratinocytes in the epidermis formed TJs, cells located in the upper epidermis would likely starve due to their segregation from the nutrient supply by multi-layered TJ barriers. Therefore, it is biologically reasonable that the TJ barrier is single-layered in stratified epithelia (Kubo et al., 2012; Yoshida et al., 2013). Our observations revealed that TJ formation is restricted only between SG2 cells (Figure 4—figure supplement 1E). The molecular mechanisms that coordinate the sequential differentiation steps from SG3 to SG1 cells and restrict TJ-forming activity to SG2 cells are currently unknown. The f-TKD model may help to reveal these mechanisms in future studies.
Various mammalian epidermis shows a regular interdigitation pattern in the SC (Christophers, 1972; Mackenzie et al., 1981), suggesting that the f-TKD cell turnover mechanism governs cell differentiation in mammals. Further investigation on whether this characteristic interdigitation pattern is observed in the SC of other vertebrates, such as amphibians, reptiles and birds, may reveal the general applicability of the f-TKD model to cornified stratified epithelia. Other mechanisms could be involved in maintaining TJ barrier homeostasis in simple epithelia and non-cornified stratified epithelia, where apoptotic cells are extruded to the outside TJ barrier by adjacent cells that migrate into the basal side of the apoptotic cells and form multi-junctional TJs (Pentecost et al., 2006; Eisenhoffer and Rosenblatt, 2011).
The actual structure of the optimal space-filling shape with minimal surface area could be more complex than Kelvin’s model (Lewis, 1943; Williams, 1968; Weaire and Phelan, 1994), and the shape and alignment of corneocytes are much more variegated in human skin compared to mouse ear skin (Mackenzie et al., 1981). Nonetheless, the basic concept of the spatiotemporal orchestration of SG cell differentiation in the f-TKD model would be sufficient to explain the regular interdigitation pattern of corneocytes observed in various types of cornified skin (Mackenzie et al., 1981). The f-TKD cell turnover model of the SG can be applied to stratified stacks of variously shaped polyhedral cells and provides a fundamental basis for the maintenance of barrier homeostasis during cell turnover in cornified stratified epithelia.Get the biggest daily news 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
"Complicit" is an adjective that is being used to describe every actress in Hollywood by people who cannot grasp how Harvey Weinstein could be such a pig.
These people are very, very lucky, and also very, very stupid.
They are lucky because presumably they are among that happy group of people never to have been sexually harassed, never to have been coerced, and never to have been a victim of abuse.
And they are stupid because despite not knowing a damned thing about it, they've decided women are to blame.
That they should have spoken out; that they should have not cared about their careers; that it was up to women to keep other women safe.
"Why didn't the women of Hollywood stop him?" ask the breast-beating headlines. "Why hasn't A Particular Starlet In This Photo condemned him yet? Were they so hungry for money it was a price worth paying?"
The women of Hollywood DID try to stop him. They reported him to the police, they went back into his lair wearing a wire, they told their agents, and when they were powerful enough they told him to stop.
When Weinstein told young actress Hayley Attwell she needed to diet because she looked "like a fat pig on screen" on the set of Brideshead Revisited in 2007, Emma Thompson - the leading lady, and only woman who had enough clout to do so - threatened to walk out.
And that was about whether he was pressuring someone into an eating disorder. Heaven knows what Emma would have done if it was sexual assault.
(Image: REX/Shutterstock)
The men of Hollywood, however, stayed silent.
The actors DIDN'T step in when a female co-star was told to diet. The agents DIDN'T listen to their clients when they said Weinstein was out of line. The high-rollers DIDN'T freeze him out of the business.
George Clooney called the Weinstein allegations "indefensible" and said he'd heard rumours but "I've never seen any of this behaviour, ever".
"A good bunch of people that I know would say, ‘Yeah, Harvey’s a dog’ or ‘Harvey’s chasing girls,’ but again, this is a very different kind of thing," he told the Daily Beast. "I don’t think that people were looking the other way; I think that people weren’t looking, because in some ways, a lecherous guy with money picking up younger girls is unfortunately not a news story in our society."
(Image: Getty)
The men of Hollywood saw an ugly, fat man, one who even before these allegations had a reputation as a bully, with a procession of beautiful, young women and thought "he's a dog".
They didn't stop to wonder how an obese man gets laid without any personal charm.
Actresses are by definition thin-skinned, image-obsessed, half-starved, insecure, and more emotionally vulnerable than the rest of us. The men of Hollywood knew this: they saw a rich pig playing with them and thought "he's a dog".
They should have said "he's a pig".
The same thing happens with every man who abuses a female. That this, somehow, is expected and normal and if she doesn't expect it she's complicit.
(Image: REX/Shutterstock)
When Gwyneth Paltrow told then-boyfriend Brad Pitt that Weinstein had tried to massage her during a meeting, Pitt took him aside and told him to never touch her again. When he was later married to Angelina Jolie who had "a bad experience" with Weinstein in the 1990s, vowed never to work with him again and warned off others from doing so, he presumably heard a similar tale.
But Pitt didn't "speak out". He hasn't rushed to "condemn" him. Nor has Clooney - he said it's all of Hollywood's fault for not noticing. Nor have Matt Damon or Russell Crowe, who reportedly rang a female reporter who was investigating the claims.
In fact the only man who has spoken out is Terry Crews, a married black actor who says an unnamed studio executive - not Weinstein - grabbed his genitals.
He had the same reason as women for not reporting the assault. He didn't want to lose his career. He didn't hit him because he didn't want to go to jail. He thought no-one would believe him, even though his wife witnessed it.
Sexual attacks of any kind, from harassment all the way up to alleged rape, are not about desire. It's to do with power. Attackers get a kick not from orgasm but from the fear of their victims, and Weinstein was able to get that thrill from more than just the women he invited to rub him down.
He dominated the men who drove the tearful actresses home and wanted to keep their jobs. He controlled the industry big shots who wined and dined him despite his reputation. He terrified his alleged victims' husbands and boyfriends into not going to the police because of the damage he could do to all of their careers.
Despite his spectacular fall from grace Weinstein is still exerting control - he's got Clooney blaming Hollywood, journalists chasing Gwyneth and the public blaming every woman he ever stood next to for a picture. He's still controlling them, and all of us.
The implication in every photo is "Was she one of them? Did she know? She's smiling, she must have enjoyed it. Sisterhood, eh?"
It's sly, it's vicious, it's exactly what Weinstein and men like him WANT you to think. Yet there is no other crime on Earth that the victim is blamed for, and none where female victims are blamed but male victims aren't.
Just sex. Just Eve.
(Image: Pool)
Weinstein has been pictured with every male star in Hollywood and London, as well as Gary Barlow. Yet no-one is asking the lead singer of Take That what he knew, why he didn't say or why he looks happy in the photos.
Men have more responsibility than women to speak out about this sort of piggery, and it's because they excuse it by saying "he's a dog".
It's because they say it's just rumours until it's their girlfriend or daughter in the room, and it's because most of them do not behave like pigs but admire, just a little bit, the men who do.
It's because 2,500 years after the first theatre, 357 years after women were allowed on the stage, and 90 years since the invention of the modern movie we still treat actresses like whores.
(Image: REX/Shutterstock)
No-one blames a man who has not witnessed a crime for not talking about it. No-one blames a man for protecting his career. And no-one says a man slept his way to the top, that Terry Crews asked for it, or that he should explain himself.
Women are blamed so much they actually start blaming themselves and each other. They wonder how they let it happen. They attended Weinstein's parties because they convinced themselves they were wrong. They are hurt psychologically not just by the men who are pigs, but by the men who say a pig is actually just a dog.
But it was MEN who didn't believe the women's reports. It was MEN who decided an actress wearing a wire wasn't a "credible" witness. It was MEN who were the agents, who bankrolled him, who excused, who said it was rumours, who even now say it's everyone's fault because that makes it not their own.
It is men who allowed Weinstein to be a pig. It is MEN who are complicit.
(Image: Reuters)
That word, incidentally, first appeared only in the 1940s, but its roots are in the mid 17th century from English, French and Latin words for 'associate', 'ally' and 'complicated'.
It's a shame all those blaming the women of Hollywood for letting this happen don't have a dictionary, because it might help.
It is Weinstein's 'associates' and his 'allies' who are complicit. And if you find that a little too 'complicated' to understand, then you're complicit too.For the second time, a Hidalgo County man is caught on camera sexually abusing a horse. Cirilo Castillo was arrested in January 2012 after he was caught having sexual encounters with a horse named India.
Investigators told Action 4 News that he would trespass on two different ranches, tie up the horse and have sex with it.
After serving time, he was released.
Castillo was caught on camera again, performing sexual acts with the same horse.
On Wednesday, Castillo was charged with cruelty to animals and criminal trespass.
He pleaded guilty to the charge.
Sheriff Lupe Trevino said his department will work to get Castillo the mental help he needs.
The sheriff said the man TMs behavior is upsetting neighbors. "He is going to continue to do this, the sheriff said. The people there in the neighborhood are just sick and tired of it, we just need to do something with this."
Authorities said the horse showed displeasure to the acts by trying to move away from Castillo on several occasions.
The 43-year-old's bond was set at $35,000.Over the years, many skeptics and non-theists have discredited the Bible as being unreliable. Sometimes it appears they have staggering evidence to back their claims. One fact we must establish before moving on with this topic is: there is barely an ancient writing that hasn’t come under attack concerning its authenticity and accuracy. Nevertheless, there are some tests an ancient text must pass to be accorded some respect in academic circles. Some of these will be discussed as follows and it is my sincerest prayer that every reader weighs the evidence presented with unprejudiced views.
When I was young, I used to play this game popularly known by Americans as “telephone”. The rules were very simple: a friend whispered a phrase/sentence into the ears of another friend quickly and this circulated among us until the last person revealed what was said to him to the hearing of everyone. If you’ve ever played this game before, you can tell how easily the message – more often in an amusing manner- gets distorted during the retelling process. “Life must be lived as play” can easily turn into something else like “He bites snails” (This actually happened during a Global Gossip Game contest in 2012). Just like any other game, the goal is to have fun and as such does not require anyone to be strict with their speech and listening skills. As a matter of fact, it needs all the necessary elements to make it exciting—even if it means distorting the messages on purpose!
Could it also be that the Bible is a product of nothing but nonsense arising from this whisper-down-the-lane child’s play? Well, let’s find out, shall we?
Back in those days, the art of memorization (a common cultural practice in ancient times) was the means by which information was transmitted. There was nothing like photocopiers, printers or scanners. To be frank with you, I got uneasy the first time I learned that the Rabbis memorized the whole Old Testament text. How could they have possibly done that let alone be confident to reproduce them in their purest form? And even if they did so, wouldn’t they have made some errors such as misspellings, inclusions, omissions or repetition of words during the recounting of any of the stories? Now, don’t be too quick to draw conclusions. First of all, what we fail to realise is we make a big categorical error when we judge their art of memorization by our modern standards. Just like any other work that has come down to us from antiquity, there was much flexibility in terms of writing and storytelling back in those days. Nevertheless, certain ‘landmarks’ during storytelling were very crucial and couldn’t be altered in any way. If say a Rabbi erred along an untouchable point in the process of recounting an event, his listeners would prompt him of those mistakes and make sure they were corrected immediately. This was done to maintain the integrity of messages passed down to others. Take the Old Testament for example. The Masoretes—Jewish scribes who took great care in copying the Hebrew Bible—discarded an entire manuscript if they found any error after counting the number of letters, words and lines as well as determining the middle letters of the Pentateuch and the Old Testament.
Because of the strict measures Scribes put in place to ensure the preservation of these materials, the variations (or ‘variants’) found in the Old Testament are very few. The New Testament however has 400,000 variations as we speak. Four hundred thousand sounds scary but let’s find out what variations or ‘variants’ are and how they are counted briefly. Daniel Wallace, Senior Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, defines a variant as ‘the difference in wording found in a single manuscript or a group of manuscripts that disagrees with a base text.’ So that if for instance a Scribe omits the word ‘Lord’ while the standard text he’s copying from reads as ‘Lord Jesus’, that omission of the word ‘Lord’ is counted as one variant (check the ‘footnotes’ section of your Bible to learn more about these variants). With that said, many scholars have argued out so strongly that NONE of the Christian doctrines have been affected by any of these variants located in both the OT and NT. Let me quickly add that though no credible scholar confirms that the copies we have today are a 100% reflection of what the original says, they do attest to the fact that these copies are 99.5% pure. In addition to this figure, the New Testament alone has over 24,000 existing manuscripts. If you are interested in knowing the significance of this figure, allow me to match this value up against another popular ancient writing—Plato’s ‘Tetralogies’. There are currently only 7 surviving copies! Yet Plato is held in high esteem by so many people (especially in academia). If you can confidently declare a less preserved ancient material like Plato’s as historically trustworthy, how much more the New Testament with 24,000 existing copies? Also the biographies of Alexander the great were also written 400 years after his death – but they are accepted as credible even in academia. Meanwhile the last gospel – the gospel of John – was written 70 years after Jesus’ death. You just have to admit that the Bible is unrivaled in its accuracy and number of existing copies when compared to other classical, historically trustworthy manuscripts.
Most of the arguments leveled against the bible concerning its accuracy probably stem from the problem of translating from one language to another. This is a huge Linguistic problem all over the world. There is no language on earth that can be translated into another one perfectly. It just doesn’t happen. While you are devising an argument against this fact, try translating ‘Photosynthesis’ directly into Twi or your local dialect. You will find that it is impossible to find a word that perfectly describes the reality of photosynthesis in Twi, so then you would have to resort to the use of a sentence or a phrase to achieve the purpose of translation. This happened in the translation of the bible and those who did it did a great job considering the herculean task it is. It is true that the translations do not match verbatim with the original text in its original language. Nevertheless, it does not affect the Bible’s message in any way because authentic manuscripts are still in existence. Now let’s go back to the whisper-down-the-lane game; is it acceptable to question the credibility of the original message because it has been distorted by the method of transmission… especially when the original message is still in existence and people know it? Certainly not! Between 1946 and 1956 a bunch of scrolls were discovered in caves that overlooked the dead sea; thus they were called the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were 981 in all and some of them were of the apocryphal stock. The book of Isaiah was discovered amongst them too. NEWS FLASH, when the Isaiah Scroll was compared to the one we have in our bibles now, there wasn’t much of a difference. This is exactly the point I have been making all this while: there may be some petty errors here and there because of the the problem of translation, but this doesn’t discredit the bible in anyway.
Some of the errors are petty; some aren’t… too… petty. There are some seemingly major errors and obvious interpolations in the bible. For example, the story of Jesus Christ and the adulterous woman. Apparently, from the oldest and most revered manuscripts, the story was not found in John’s Gospel. It is believed to have been inserted in there at a later time by someone – probably a scribe. Also in 1John 5:7 there is an obvious interpolation there. Older manuscripts do not contain any reference to the reality of the trinity in that verse. It must have been added at a later time. So even in the Amplified Bible, that portion is in italics and the footnotes make it clear to the reader that it wasn’t part of earlier manuscripts. These are faith-shaking findings because they sort of question the credibility of the entire bible as the inspired Word of God. But is that the case? Certainly not! Concerning the story of the adulterous woman, scholars believe that the purpose for which it was inserted in that portion of the bible was to make some emphasis. People thought Jesus’ reaction was rather too mild because he asked the woman to go and sin no more. They didn’t know that The Messiah was introducing all of us to his mind-boggling Grace. So people didn’t like that story; they would rather Jesus had judged the woman harshly. Therefore it is believed that later manuscripts included the story just to reiterate the significance of the story to the new era of Grace. The presence or absence of these two interpolations (and another one at the ending of Mark) does not cause any damage to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, some are of the view that they should be relegated to the margins or omitted completely from the bible. This sounds reasonable enough.
The bottom line is, none of these interpolations are false; they are both true and consistent with Christian doctrine but have been inserted in those portions of scripture. So they don’t in anyway alter the original message of the bible. Inspiration doesn’t come with language, it comes with the message. It is the writer who chooses how to put it across. So far as the message is consistent with the full counsel of scripture, it is still God-inspired writing. However, the gospel isn’t bound by language barriers, because the inspiration came with the message and not a language.
Written By: Elvis Sampson and Elikplim Sabblah
References: Seeking Allah; Finding Jesus, Nabeel Qureshi.
Can We Still Believe The Bible?, Craig L. Blomberg.
The New Testament Documents: |
plenty of apps, thanks to its Android core and Amazon Prime integration.
If you go with a Roku device, check out our list of Roku tricks to get the most out of it.Clay Higgins, a former police officer who now represents a Louisiana district in Congress, was criticized on Tuesday by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in Poland for recording a political message in support of increased military spending by the United States during a recent visit to the death camp.
Everyone has the right to personal reflections. However, inside a former gas chamber, there should be mournful silence. It's not a stage. https://t.co/AN5aA1bYEU
The public rebuke came in response to a Fourth of July video message uploaded to a conservative Christian website over the weekend in which Higgins offers viewers a guided tour of the gas chambers, set to the theme music from “Schindler’s List.” He then turns to the camera and says: “This is why homeland security must be squared away, why our military must be invincible.”
Higgins — who made his name in a series of melodramatic YouTube videos threatening criminals wanted by the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office in Opelousas, La. — is a virulently anti-Muslim fundamentalist Christian. In response to a terrorist attack carried out by Islamists in London last month, the viral star argued on Facebook that “all of Christendom … is at war with Islamic horror.” The only solution to the threat posed by “these heathen animals,” he added, is to “hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all.”
In his meditation on what the death camp teaches us, Higgins refers to “man’s inhumanity to man,” but somehow fails to mention that the vast majority of those exterminated at Auschwitz, 1 million Jews, were members of a persecuted religious minority.
Instead, Higgins tries to draw a parallel between the threat posed by the Nazis to European Jews and what he sees as the real possibility that fringe groups of Islamist militants could, somehow, conquer the United States. “Our nation is at war with Islamic terror — the foreign horror that oppresses millions and intends to convert, kill or enslave the entire world,” Higgins said in a campaign video last year.
“The world’s a smaller place now than it was in World War II,” Higgins observes near the end of his Auschwitz video. “The United States is more accessible to terror like this, horror like this.”
“It’s hard to walk away from the gas chambers and ovens without a very sober feeling of commitment — unwavering commitment — to make damn sure that the United States of America is protected from the evils of the world,” the congressman concludes.
On one of his official Facebook pages, the message from Auschwitz was described as, “a stark reminder about the Independence we celebrate on July 4.”
Update:
Late Wednesday afternoon, Higgins released a statement in which he defended the video but offered his “sincere apology for any unintended pain” it caused and announced that he “retracted” it.
“I filmed the Auschwitz message with great humility. My intent was to offer a reverent homage to those who were murdered in Auschwitz and to remind the world that evil exists, that free nations must remember, and stand strong,” Higgins wrote.
“However, my message has caused pain to some whom I love and respect. For that, my own heart feels sorrow. Out of respect to any who may feel that my video posting was wrong or caused pain, I have retracted my video.”
The video, and an article about it, was removed from Covenant Spotlight, the Christian website that first published it. It was also deleted from the YouTube channel of Lee Johnson, a conservative podcaster who had shared the video with his own logo, and taken it upon himself to argue with the Auschwitz Memorial on Twitter after the museum criticized Higgins.Klaviyo is a model of “Efficient Entrepreneurship.” Photo: VentureFizz
How to Bootstrap Your SaaS Company to $1M ARR Before Raising Venture Capital
Founder Collective Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 22, 2017
By Parul Singh, Principal
Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that lets ecommerce companies use their own data to power more personalized marketing. Sound a little boring? That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Klaviyo solves a very important, if not super glamorous, problem: helping growing companies grow even faster by making their marketing relevant.
Klaviyo helps ecommerce merchants optimize campaigns. Photo: Klaviyo
The Boston-based startup has 80 employees today and is growing quickly. Back in 2016, Klaviyo raised a series A with the intention of using the capital to accelerate growth. Sure enough, they’ve tripled the business last year — but co-founders Ed Hallen and Andrew Bialecki never ended up needing to use the capital they raised, until it came time to put a down payment on their new 25,000 square foot office space in downtown Boston.
So what’s the secret?
Klaviyo is a perfect example of efficient entrepreneurship — the fact that the company has sustained aggressive growth rates without relying on venture capital makes them an interesting case study. How did they do it?
What You Do Is Important — How You Do It Matters Even More
So how do you build a high growth company without relying on venture capital? Make sure you build something people will pay you for. Ed Hallen and his co-founder Andrew Bialecki spent their first nine months experimenting with ideas about how to make email better. They quickly honed in on an opportunity: it was possible to make email more meaningful to the end user — if you used data about that end user to make the message more relevant. F500 companies were already marketing this way. But that kind of data-driven marketing wasn’t accessible to growth companies, because getting customer data on things like purchase history or website behavior synced with your marketing automation platform was a technical challenge, and therefore took a lot of time and money.
Bialecki and Hallen knew that if they could solve could make it easy to allow businesses to segment and user their data — solve the “how” — there were plenty of founders and marketers waiting to pay for it. So that’s what they did: focused on solving the hard engineering problems of creating reliable, real-time syncs between customer data and Klaviyo’s marketing platform. “Our strength was and is in engineering and we realized a lot of people were avoiding the hard problems, so we went at them head on,” says Bialecki. “Contrast that with solving a problem you know you can solve, but so can a lot of other people, and then hustling to find customers. We flipped that around — pick a problem with plenty of potential customers, but no clear way to solve it and then crack it.” Klaviyo built real time syncing for dozens of integrations, automatic error handling, data cleaning and they added a segmentation engine on top of the imported data with a simple interface so any marketer or founder can query their customer data. All of that is combined with a visual email builder and automation tools to eliminate most of the configuration growing companies had to do so they can focus on the creative and content of their messages.
Make the Value of Your Product Really Obvious
“Sell More” is a powerful pitch, especially when the product works.
Klaviyo decided from day one to offer reporting that went above and beyond the traditional email metrics everyone else in their space was using: they showed customers down to the penny how much money they made from email. This meant building attribution algorithms into their software, which they knew people were looking for. After that, the sales process became a no brainer. “Proving ROI was ridiculously easy,” says Hallen. “We charged on a monthly basis, so we could say to prospective customers, ‘If you pay us money, we’ll help you make more money on the backend. What do you have to lose?’.”
You Don’t Need Eight (Or Eighty!) People to Experiment
The early days of a startup are often marked by fitful experimentation to find the right path. This should be done with as small a team as possible. One or two people should be able to figure out what the company should be doing, before hiring a team.
Make a Million Dollars Before You Hire Employee #1
Despite figuring out a formula that worked, Hallen and Bialecki didn’t let sales go to their head. They waited until they were on a million dollar run rate before hiring anyone else. That meant handling everything themselves and constantly looking for opportunities to automate: sales, development, and the customer support tickets that would fill their inboxes overnight. “If you start by doing everything yourself it’s easy to imagine doing more yourself,” says Hallen. Handling customer support themselves was particularly valuable. “Many of our best insights came from talking or working directly with customers,” according to Bialecki. “We probably would’ve been slower to realize what people wanted if we weren’t answering support emails and phone calls every day.”
Hire People That Amaze You
If you follow the formula Bialecki and Hallen have outlined, you will — without a doubt — feel like you’ve waited too long to begin hiring. “Our business was growing so quickly we couldn’t keep up,” says Hallen. The company went from hiring its first employee in 2014 to its current state of 80 employees and growing in less than three years. But the worst thing to do when you realize you’re behind on hiring is to lower your bar, even subconsciously. You should expect the same passion and drive in your employees that you have yourself as a founder. “When hiring, never settle. Only hire people who will be as passionate as you,” advises Bialecki. “They’ll never let you down.”
The Bad Side of Bootstrapping
The Klaviyo story seems like a storybook startup, but Hallen would make some decisions differently the next time around. As of this writing, Google returns two stories on the company, one in VentureBeat and a local tech website, both related to the $1.5M in seed funding the company raised in August of 2015. Lack of PR hasn’t hurt the company in terms of sales, but when you’re succeeding and trying to hire dozens of employees simultaneously, it makes life harder. “I loved our focus early on, but I wish we’d a bit more time to talking to people in Boston so we didn’t have to introduce people to Klaviyo cold when we started hiring,” says Bialecki. Neither he nor Hallen would trade off their relentless focus on product and customers in the early days for a more well-known brand today, but they both acknowledge that it can make recruiting more challenging.
Beyond branding, bootstrapping can lead to some close encounters of the furry kind. The company started in the Beehive, an underground co-working space sponsored by MIT in 2012–2013. Once they outgrew those digs they moved into the cheapest spot in Boston, which surprisingly turned out to be an office right off Boston Common. While it had an advantageous address, they also attracted some nocturnal visitors. A jar of almond butter lured in a family of raccoons who broke into the office one night. These days they are in nicer office space — no raccoons allowed.
The Bottom Line: Be Relentless in Your Focus
Entrepreneurs need to be focused on solving a problem. This advice sounds trite, but Hallen says if you’re not solving a real problem, for lots of customers, repeatedly, anything else is a waste of time. That includes going to startup meetups and pitching VCs. “We didn’t do any incorporation paperwork until we had sales,” says Hallen. “When we signed our first customer we said let’s go figure this out.” The lesson learned? Focus on creating a great product that solves a real problem first, and the business will follow.This article is from the archive of our partner.
On Monday, the financial press reported that Citigroup had announced profits of $3.8 billion in the third quarter, a 74 percent spike over last year, but you won't find mention of the government bailout that saved the bank from nearly going under in 2008.
Three years ago, the government bailed out the bank with a $45 billion injection of capital and shouldered the risk of its $306 billion in toxic assets. Though this is the seventh straight quarter that the bank has posted a profit, chief executive Vikram S. Pandit did his best to sound humble in the company-wide memo announcing the good news. "These are tough times for most economies and for millions of people," wrote Pandit, who thanked the U.S. government and taxpayers in 2010 for saving his bank. "Macro improvement is not likely to come any time soon."
Pandit didn't mention his bank's bailout in announcing this latest round of good news, and oddly enough, neither did most of the major newspapers. In their main articles announcing the numbers, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and the Associated Press (whose story appeared in the The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe) reported the news but failed to remind readers how Citigroup managed to bounce back. Only The New York Times's Dealbook found it useful to mention the bailout, and they did so in the first sentence of their story on Monday morning. But by Monday afternoon, they had updated the story and removed the reference to the bailout.10:11PM PST - And we're done!
10:11PM PST - Ouya console will be one receive target for shield, wireless dongles will also be available
10:10PM PST - Television needs a receiver to get wireless display from Shield
10:08PM PST - Looks like we're done - no word on pricing/availability for Shield though
10:07PM PST - Shield + PC streaming: NVIDIA didn't get a console win - so what?
10:06PM PST - Steam Big Picture streaming to Shield
10:06PM PST - Ok we're about to see Steam running via Shield
10:05PM PST - Why is NVIDIA the one doing this? Shouldn't Microsoft have been the first to build a converged mobile/PC gaming device?
10:04PM PST - Now showing Assassin's Creed III
10:03PM PST - PC renders the next frame, sends it over to Shield, which sends it to the display
10:03PM PST - Controller commands from Shield are being sent to the PC
10:03PM PST - This is pretty cool
10:02PM PST - Basically private cloud gaming
10:02PM PST - Ok so they're encoding the frame buffer from the GTX 680, sending it to Shield, which is decoding it and sending it to the display
10:01PM PST - Piece of software in GFE that is taking what's rendered by GeForce GTX 680 and streaming it to shield
10:01PM PST - GeForce GTX 680 running in a PC
10:01PM PST - Ok here we go, browsing Shield PC games
10:00PM PST - Ok we have a Windows desktop on the TV
09:59PM PST - It's unclear if this is a cloud gaming demo or what
09:58PM PST - Demo is having technical difficulties
09:58PM PST - Any PC with a GeForce GTX inside will connect to Shield
09:57PM PST - Can pair Shield with a PC
09:56PM PST - Google Talk requests are coming in while Jen-Hsun is running the Shield demo
09:56PM PST - Talking about Steam Big Picture
09:55PM PST - Valve??
09:55PM PST - Oh interesting, now we're talking about PC gaming again
09:54PM PST - Agree with Brian on this one - looks like 720p render target, perhaps with AA
09:53PM PST - Two Shields playing networked
09:53PM PST - Running very smooth on Tegra 4/Shield
09:53PM PST - Looks like a mech game
09:52PM PST - Hawken, UE3.0 game, being demoed now
09:51PM PST - I wonder if NVIDIA is going to sell these directly or if they'll leverage their partners
09:51PM PST - "i think that that's pretty fantastic"
09:50PM PST - Ok this is definitely rendered at a lower resolution, not 4K
09:49PM PST - perhaps upscaling?
09:49PM PST - Jen-Hsun keeps saying that it's "driving a 4K display"
09:49PM PST - It's not clear but it sounds like Shield is rendering this game at 4K
09:48PM PST - All of these games are available on Android and optimized for the controller
09:48PM PST - Scrolling through games, makes Xbox-like boop sounds
09:48PM PST - Shield is an app
09:48PM PST - Now going into Shield mode
09:47PM PST - Tegra 4 can decode 4K video
09:47PM PST - Showing 4K video coming off of Shield
09:46PM PST - I wonder what version of Android
09:45PM PST - UI frame rate isn't perfect but this is likely early hardware
09:45PM PST - System seems responsive
09:45PM PST - running the play store
09:45PM PST - Connected over HDMI
09:45PM PST - Connected to LG 4K display
09:44PM PST - Did NVIDIA just build a portable Xbox RT before Microsoft?
09:43PM PST - (obviously)
09:43PM PST - Looks bigger than an Xbox 360 controller
09:43PM PST - Ergonomics look..interesting
09:42PM PST - 720p with multi-touch
09:42PM PST - 5-inch "retinal" display
09:41PM PST - Is "shield mode" an app on Android or its own OS?
09:41PM PST - Customizable tag, you can swap out the plates on the top of the device
09:41PM PST - HDMI, micro-USB, microSD slot, 3.5mm audio jack
09:41PM PST - Hit the Shield button, goes into Shield mode, hit it again it drops you back into Android
09:40PM PST - No skin, no changes, pure Android for Tegra 4
09:40PM PST - "Pure Android"
09:40PM PST - Ok it runs Android
09:40PM PST - Good job Epic :)
09:40PM PST - The Shield "video" is being rendered in 3D using the Unreal Engine 4
09:40PM PST - Two analog joysticks, 4 bumpers, d-pad
09:39PM PST - "console-grade" game controller
09:39PM PST - SNR better than an iPhone 5, on par with dedicated Jamboxes for audio from NV Shield
09:39PM PST - Twice the SNR of an HP laptop with beats audio?
09:39PM PST - Talking about the custom speakers in Shield
09:38PM PST - 24 hours of HD video playback
09:37PM PST - That's almost as much battery capacity as an iPad!
09:37PM PST - 5 - 10 hours of gameplay
09:37PM PST - 38Wh battery!!
09:37PM PST - There's a HUGE heatsink on Tegra 4
09:37PM PST - Shield will be the world's first Tegra 4 device
09:36PM PST - Jen-Hsun accidentally said Thor first
09:36PM PST - oh no! Project Shield
09:36PM PST - Project Thor
09:36PM PST - Will it run Windows RT or Android?
09:35PM PST - That's pretty cool
09:35PM PST - It's a handheld Tegra 4 made by NVIDIA
09:35PM PST - And integrated display
09:35PM PST - With integrated Tegra 4
09:35PM PST - Oh interesting it's a controller
09:34PM PST - No idea what the device is yet
09:34PM PST - Showing a video
09:34PM PST - "We asked ourselves: What if?"
09:34PM PST - "We are the only company...that has the processor technology, the systems technology...to build devices to enjoy games in a different way"
09:34PM PST - "There's a way for us to help these gamers enjoy these games even better than ever"
09:34PM PST - The PC games and the Android games will continue to flourish
09:33PM PST - "fastest OS growth in the history of mankind"
09:33PM PST - and Android
09:33PM PST - Windows
09:33PM PST - "two ecosystems that are growing incredibly fast"
09:32PM PST - Nvidia didn't tell us i500 LTE UE Category or 3GPP release, need to know these bits about i500 as well
09:32PM PST - "consoles, PCs, phones, tablets"
09:32PM PST - "gamers today play games on every platform"
09:32PM PST - Project Denver?
09:32PM PST - now talking about "something new"
09:32PM PST - Also not confirming with the 5th core is, we had heard it was a Cortex A9 originally
09:31PM PST - No GPU performance benchmarks?
09:31PM PST - Talking about different profiles for different cell geometry being loaded into the i500 thanks to the software defined radio (SDR) architecture
09:31PM PST - Talking about the flexibility of software defined radios
09:30PM PST - This is a big step for NVIDIA though, having a good baseband strategy is key
09:29PM PST - Not all of Qualcomm's baseband is fixed function though, everyone does some amount of software defined radio now
09:29PM PST - "40% the area of a conventional modem die"
09:28PM PST - This is all of the Icera stuff
09:27PM PST - Each of the 8 processors does 800 gigaops, 1.2 trillion ops/s total
09:27PM PST - Eight modem processors in it, programmable, run the entire modem stack (3G, 4G, interference algorithms, etc...)
09:27PM PST - Sounds like he's talking about Icera
09:27PM PST - Starting this month NVIDIA is sampling its first Icera modem - the i500
09:25PM PST - I want to see Tegra 4 GPU performance vs. iPad 4
09:25PM PST - Now talking about making GPUs more programmable
09:23PM PST - Framerate dropped significantly during the demo
09:23PM PST - Dead Trigger 2
09:23PM PST - Showing off a new FPS running on Tegra 4
09:22PM PST - Tegra Zone has been downloaded 6 million times
09:22PM PST - Talking about Tegra Zone
09:21PM PST - Now talking about Tegra 4 gaming
09:19PM PST - Computational photography is the future though, good to see NV embracing this early
09:18PM PST - You just decide to have HDR on permanently or off permanently
09:18PM PST - what comes out of the chip is HDR?
09:18PM PST - "every software application today just works" with Tegra 4 HDR
09:18PM PST - as well as HDR Burst
09:18PM PST - HDR video, HDR preview, one shot HDR - all in Tegra 4
09:17PM PST - Interesting to me that the reference demo is a tablet..
09:16PM PST - Capture speed seemed very quick for HDR
09:15PM PST - That's why the frame rate is so low
09:15PM PST - Wow yeah they are doing live preview with HDR on
09:15PM PST - But it's showing live HDR preview
09:15PM PST - preview frame rate looks atrocious
09:15PM PST - Tegra 4 reference tablet
09:15PM PST - Jen-Hsun is standing in front of a bright backdrop, they are going to take photos of him now using Tegra 4
09:13PM PST - Are we going to have to start measuring battery life when taking photos in our smartphone reviews?
09:13PM PST - "One Shot" HDR
09:13PM PST - Either way 0.2s/frame is pretty good for Tegra 4
09:13PM PST - Brian just looked it up - 1.6seconds to process HDR on an iPhone 5
09:12PM PST - Tegra 4 does it in 0.2s per frame
09:12PM PST - That doesn't sound right to us
09:12PM PST - ~2 seconds/frame is allegedly from the iPhone 5
09:12PM PST - Taking multiple exposures and combining them to produce a final HDR image
09:11PM PST - From time of the first photo to HDR output is ~2 seconds per frame
09:11PM PST - The engine uses all of the CPU and GPU cores and ISP (?) we do the necessary math so quickly that at the end of the shot you have HDR
09:10PM PST - We dump it into the computational photography engine sitting in system memory
09:10PM PST - One shot with high exposure, one with light exposure
09:10PM PST - Take two shots at once
09:10PM PST - Computational
09:10PM PST - NVIDIA Computation Photography Engine
09:10PM PST - Ah no
09:10PM PST - Hmm is NVIDIA going to virtualize the ISP?
09:10PM PST - Today's digital camera architecture: sensor > ISP > memory > CPU
09:08PM PST - Still showing us what HDR can do
09:08PM PST - Showing the benefits of HDR
09:08PM PST - Jen-Hsun is giving us a Camera 101
09:07PM PST - Image taken with an iPhone 5
09:07PM PST - Showing an NVIDIA employee standing against a tinted window
09:06PM PST - "in life, you only get one shot"
09:06PM PST - Looks like he's about to show HDR processing on Tegra 4
09:05PM PST - Now Jen-Hsun is going to show perf in another application
09:05PM PST - Something is very weird about these results
09:05PM PST - Cortex A15 should be way faster than Swift
09:04PM PST - Not showing a huge perf advantage over iPad 4 for some reason
09:03PM PST - Chrome for the Nexus 10 vs. Browser for the Tegra 4 tablet
09:03PM PST - Uhh...the two are running different browsers
09:03PM PST - 50 seconds for the Nexus 10
09:03PM PST - compared to...
09:03PM PST - to load 25 unique web pages
09:03PM PST - 27 seconds for Tegra 4
09:03PM PST - Tegra 4 is done
09:03PM PST - 20 vs 13
09:02PM PST - It's on #14 vs. #9
09:02PM PST - Tegra 4 is flying through it
09:02PM PST - The test begins
09:02PM PST - Web pages are loaded from a local server
09:02PM PST - Nexus 10 uses Exynos 5 Dual (5250): 2 x Cortex A15s running at 1.7GHz
09:02PM PST - will load 25 web pages
09:01PM PST - Two tablets, one Nexus 10 and one with Tegra 4
09:01PM PST - About to show Tegra 4 performance
09:01PM PST - NVIDIA's first 4G LTE modem (thank you Icera)
09:00PM PST - Unclear what architecture that fifth core is, it looks identical to the other A15s
09:00PM PST - We still have our fifth core
09:00PM PST - NVIDIA's die shots always look so pretty
08:59PM PST - The little chip on the right looks like the baseband perhaps
08:59PM PST - looks like a two chip solution, if this photo is accurate
08:59PM PST - 72 GPU cores, 4 x A15s, 4G LTE baseband
08:59PM PST - Introducing the Tegra 4
08:58PM PST - "All of these devices need to be powered by sophisticated mobile processors"
08:58PM PST -...your LG TV, etc...
08:58PM PST - Everything will very likely become a connected computer: cell phone, tablet, car, etc...
08:57PM PST - Tegra 2 and 3 are on the screen now
08:57PM PST - ooh tegra!
08:56PM PST - Ok now that's done, wonder if we'll get anything new
08:56PM PST - First fully integrated system for NV
08:55PM PST - "cloud gaming is an industry that's about to come to fruition"
08:54PM PST - Announcing early partners for NVIDIA GRID
08:54PM PST - NVIDIA doesn't appear to have any console design wins this generation, wonder if NV GRID had anything to do with that
08:53PM PST - NV GRID lets you continue your save game across any device that supports NV GRID
08:52PM PST - Running NV GRID application on the ASUS Transformer Prime
08:52PM PST - Playing Trine 2, saving game, and moving over to a different device to resume the game
08:51PM PST - Maybe Tegra 4 will be an MWC thing?
08:50PM PST - So far this has been a rehash of NVIDIA's May 2012 announcements
08:50PM PST - UI and game are both rendered on the GRID
08:50PM PST - Showing an LG TV running off of the NVIDIA GRID, connected via Ethernet
08:49PM PST - VGX K1
08:49PM PST - http://www.nvidia.com/object/vgx-boards.html
08:49PM PST - 4 x GK107s on one card
08:49PM PST - That's using NVIDIA's VGX - its cloud video card
08:49PM PST - Ryan Smith tells us these are GK107 GPUs
08:48PM PST - GRID Gaming System: 20 servers per rack, 240 NVIDIA GPUs, 200 TFLOPS, ~720 Xbox 360s
08:48PM PST - I'm assuming you don't get end user control over detail settings
08:48PM PST - Curious to see how that scales with game complexity
08:47PM PST - Initially we'll be able to support 24 concurrent users on one computing node
08:47PM PST - A rack full of servers, packed full of GPUs
08:47PM PST - NVIDIA GRID
08:46PM PST - Introducing NVIDIA's First Fully Integrated Product
08:46PM PST - Took NVIDIA 5 years to create its cloud gaming solution
08:46PM PST - Talking about all of the effort that had to go into building a cloud gaming service
08:44PM PST - Talking about how all 3D games are rendered in real time at the client today, instead of being computed elsewhere and simply streamed to your client
08:43PM PST - Definitely setting up to talk about NVIDIA's Cloud Gaming strategy
08:43PM PST - Project Denver? Tegra 4 anyone?
08:42PM PST - Still waiting for the big reveal
08:40PM PST - Now talking about Cloud Computing
08:40PM PST - I spoke with NV about GFE a while ago, they seemed adamant that they don't care where your games came from (steam, physical media, stolen), just the executables
08:39PM PST - This is getting applause
08:39PM PST - If you have GFE installed, click optimums, you get a much better looking game
08:39PM PST - Jaggies galore
08:39PM PST - Comes up at 720p by default
08:39PM PST - GeForce GTX 680 out of the box experience
08:38PM PST - Showing standard out of box settings now
08:38PM PST - Now showing a video of Call of Duty before and after optimal GFE settings
08:37PM PST - When you launch the game, GFE automatically sets all of your game settings optimized for your PC
08:37PM PST - Use "expert gamers" to determine what the right settings should be, upload them to a cloud DB
08:37PM PST - Through heuristics, benchmarking and simulation, NV understands how all games perform on virtually all hardware
08:36PM PST - NVIDIA starts by understanding the profile of every single game
08:36PM PST - "Console Simplicity, PC Performance"
08:36PM PST - Seven years later: GeForce Experience
08:36PM PST - Came up with a game technology that would automatically setup game detail settings depending on your hardware
08:35PM PST - "we tried to characterize every single configuration of PCs around the world, understand every single setting of every single game"
08:35PM PST - "we went off and undertook an enormous project"
08:35PM PST - "this is technical, that's why they pay us the big bucks"
08:35PM PST - son replied: why can't you guys just set it for us?
08:34PM PST - "asked him how does it look? and he was already playing...I asked him, did you change the settings? I want to see it amped up"
08:34PM PST - "was so proud of it, took the first one home, took it to my son and said install it"
08:34PM PST - "about 7 years ago, we had just created this new GPU called G80"
08:33PM PST - Curious to see where this is all headed...
08:33PM PST - Jen-Hsun is talking about how PC game settings are a blessing and a curse
08:32PM PST - 0.5x - 15x the performance of an Xbox 360
08:32PM PST - High end PC today has 6 cores + 3250 GFLOPS GPU, low end has 2 cores + 125 GFLOPS GPU
08:32PM PST - "PC industry has a range of configurations based on price and when you bought it"
08:32PM PST - "game console is very stable (xbox 360 - 3 cores + 240 GFLOPS GPU)"
08:31PM PST - "as wonderful as the PC industry is though, it's awfully chaotic as well"
08:30PM PST - Free to play games now represent the fastest growing sector in PC gaming
08:30PM PST - MMOs do $13B a year in revenues
08:30PM PST - 2 weeks later, $1B dollars
08:29PM PST - Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 made half a billion dollars in 24 hours
08:29PM PST - talking about blockbuster PC titles still being huge events
08:29PM PST - "PC Gaming is Thriving"
08:29PM PST - setting the stage for NVIDIA's Cloud Gaming stuff
08:28PM PST - "it's impossible to enjoy the same video game on any device"
08:28PM PST - "video games, the largest industry of all today, can't benefit from this style of entertainment - untethered"
08:28PM PST - "the ironic part of it is that all of this has changed and it didn't include the single largest entertainment industry"
08:28PM PST - "everything has changed"
08:28PM PST - "In the course of just 10 years, everything has changed"
08:27PM PST - Interesting dialog coming from a company that not too long ago was mainly known for shipping PC GPUs
08:27PM PST - Now talking about the cloud and streaming video to all sorts of devices
08:27PM PST - Enjoy your content without being connected to the PC
08:27PM PST - er iPod then Kindle
08:27PM PST - Talking about how the iPod started this mobile revolution...iPod the Kindle
08:26PM PST - Jen Hsun is on stage
08:25PM PST -...well, I thought we were ready
08:25PM PST - Here we go!
08:21PM PST - The event is about to start, they're telling us to take our seatsNearly three in four people living east of Troost in Kansas City’s urban center are black, according to an analysis of 2010 Census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York City.
As recently as 15 to 20 years ago, black residents said, they did not venture west of Troost for fear of harassment from the police. Today, they complain that their schools are failing, crime is rampant and infrastructure is dilapidated.
“See all this filthiness?” Vic, a 47-year-old lifelong resident of the east side who declined to give his last name, said as he stared at hip-high brush in a vacant lot. He expressed doubt about how much of an inroad Google Fiber would make. “You can’t get the neighborhood to come together to get this cleaned up,” he said. “How you going to get them to care about that?”
Photo
Convincing residents of the importance of Internet access — to apply for jobs, do research, take classes and get information on government services — was one of Google’s primary challenges here. The service is currently being offered only here and in Kansas City, Kan. About 25 percent of homes in both cities do not have broadband, and 46 percent of blacks do not use the Internet.
Qualifying neighborhoods will get Internet service with speeds of up to a gigabit per second — 100 times faster than the average broadband connection — for $70 a month. Google is also offering a television service along with Internet for $120 a month. Schools, libraries, hospitals and other institutions in areas that qualify would receive gigabit connections for free.
But the feature most attractive to low-income areas is Google’s offer of a free 5-megabit Internet connection for 7 years, but which requires a one-time $300 construction fee.
As of Sunday evening, only about 32 percent of people in the neighborhoods that qualified for Google Fiber were black, while just over 54 percent were white, according to Mr. Beveridge.
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With almost all of Kansas City, Kan., including low-income areas, achieving their sign-up goals, Google’s focus over the weekend was here in Missouri, where it worked with community groups to register people.
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: AS HIS SHOE SIZEDECREASES, O'CONNOR HOPES HISMARATHON TIME FOLLOWS SUIT.>> I WANTED TO BE EFFICIENT,BECAUSE EFFICIENT MEANS FASTER,AND SO RUNNING BAREFOOT HASHELPED WITH THAT.REPORTER: COME SUNDAY MORNING,THE PART WOODWORKER.PART BEEKEPER.PART BAREFOOT RUNNER, WILL TAKETO THE STREETS OF THE QUEENCITY.
Advertisement Teage O'Connor: Marathoner enjoys running barefoot Runner is woodworker, beekeeper, long-distance runner with unique style Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Teage O'Connor is a lot of things: a woodworker, a beekeeper and predominantly, a self-proclaimed mediator. "Whatever questions are big in my life or just keep nagging at me, running becomes this time where I subconsciously process a lot of that," O'Connor said. The Alaska native and current Burlington resident will run his fourth Vermont City Marathon on Sunday. O'Connor said growing up, it took him a while to realize his niche. "I always sort of lamented not having that inspiration to do something when I was really young," O'Connor said. "It hit me a few years ago that running was sort of that way for me." O'Connor essentially entered the world a long-distance runner. He broke a seven-minute mile in the second grade. In the fifth grade, his mile time dipped south of six minutes. "In college, we had joke awards and I got 'Least Improved Since Second Grade,'" O'Connor said. "Which I was pretty proud of." The past few years, O'Connor's preferred running footwear has changed. "I wound up getting injured where I was injured on and off for about five years. I wasn't really racing at all. I started running on the indoor track and I would run barefoot, and it was really nice and it felt restorative," O'Connor said. "I more hate wearing socks than I hate wearing shoes." O'Connor's barefoot method stuck as his extremities adapted to his changing training style. "Running barefoot has sort of shifted my mechanics of how I run, strengthened the tendons in my feet. My shoes size went down about a half-size as my arch developed," O'Connor said. As O'Connor's shoe size decreases, he hopes his marathon time follows suit. "I wanted to be efficient, because efficient means faster, and so running barefoot has helped with that," O'Connor said. Come Sunday morning, O'Connor, the part woodworker, part beekeeper, part barefoot runner, will take to the streets of the Queen City for the fifth time -- shoes laced up.If you can stand the heat, bring on more of it. That could be the mantra of Bravo’s “Top Chef,” which has kicked the pressure in the kitchen up a notch by taking the show on the road.
On Dec. 3, “Top Chef” launched its 13th season as a traveling show, bringing the culinary competition series to Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Palm Springs. The entire season, which will run over several months, was shot in a scant 44 days.
Working up and down the California coast posed new challenges for the series’ culinary production team, led by Sandee Birdsong, a former “Top Chef” contestant who’s been in charge of all behind-the-scenes food finagling since the show’s seventh season.
“This was different, because my team was a bit more staffed up,” she says. The eight-person crew selected and sourced all ingredients and equipment, created the show’s pantry, cooked up ideas for challenges, and cleaned and packed up the sets when the show moved to another location.
Plus, local staff was temporarily hired on each stop to deal with the tighter-than-usual timetable.
Related Padma Lakshmi Remembers 'Top Chef' Star Fatima Ali: 'She Didn't Even See Her 30th Birthday' 'Top Chef' Star Fatima Ali Dies at 29
Finding the right ingredients in each place was another challenge. The team shopped small local grocery stores or farmer’s markets, and made sure local butchers had the cut and quantity of meat needed for, say, the “Surf vs. Turf” challenge.
Weeks of planning took place prior to shooting. “We tested the challenges for timing,” Birdsong says. “That’s my favorite part.”
Then there was the matter of cameras. “Top Chef” uses up to eight cameras per scene, plus the occasional GoPro, while trying to stay out of the contestants’ way. “It’s kind of like a little dance,” Birdsong says, praising the camera crew for mastering what’s called a “half-moon” setup, in which cameras are positioned opposite the chefs, facing their working tables.
Still, unfamiliar settings can make the job tough. “A lot of times, if we’re in a smaller kitchen, it’s not camera friendly, so I have to tuck a camera operator in a corner. I can design a kitchen how I want it, but it’s very difficult when we’re in someone else’s environment, like when we’re shooting in a restaurant.”
But Birdsong insists cameras are the least of her problems.
“If anything goes wrong from the culinary side, the cameras stop, and that’s something we never want to happen,” Birdsong says. “The entire show suffers from that because we are its nuts and bolts. It’s almost like a military action — except we’re having fun with food.”Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
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BILOXI, Miss. — Rap artist Afroman was given a suspended six-month jail sentence Thursday, fined $330 and ordered to undergo anger management and impulse behavior counseling for punching a woman who jumped on stage during a concert earlier this year.
The Sun Herald reports Municipal Court Judge William Tisdale sentenced Afroman, whose real name is Joseph Edgar Foreman, on a guilty plea to simple assault. The incident happened on Feb. 17, Mardi Gras night.
The 40-year-old rapper apologized on his Facebook page and later told TMZ that two women had been dancing on stage and a man had been heckling him throughout the show. He said he thought they had left the stage, and when someone bumped him, he thought it was the man.
“We cannot untangle the circus that brought us to this moment, but [music venue] Kress Live did not live up to its legal obligations to provide adequate security for its entertainers and customers,” said Rufus Alldredge, the judge’s attorney, to whom the city court clerk had referred the Sun Herald for comment.
“That place was a free-for-all.”
WLOX-TV reports the woman who was hit in the face, Haley Byrd, is breathing a sigh of relief after Thursday’s court action. It’s been almost six months since she was knocked off her feet during the performance. She was later diagnosed with a concussion.
Her attorney, Tim Holleman, said they not only filed a suit against the rapper but the next step will be to file one against Kress Live.
“We’ve gotten information that they had some issues with their security, and that’s going to be a question for them,” Holleman said.
A co-owner of the music venue has said the club had 12 to 15 private security guards on duty for a crowd of 500.
Afroman rose to fame in 2000 with his hit “Because I Got High.”AP Photo/Matt York BEIRUT - A top Iranian military official has said that his country's unmanned aerial vehicles are conducting airstrikes in Syria, months after Iranian TV aired a video appearing to show a combat drone being tested in the war-torn country.
Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief-of-staff of Iran's armed forces, claimed in a speech Sunday that his country has developed UAVs capable of pinpoint strikes that can hit a target in an area as small as one square meter.
"These UAVs are being used to hit terrorist targets in Syria and Iraq," he added during a ceremony marking the start of the academic year at Iran's Supreme National Defense University.
In late 2015, Iran's SimaNews broadcasted a video "claiming to have been filmed in an Iranian combat drone being tested in Syria," according to a report prepared by France 24's Observers program.
The London-based arms specialist magazine Jane's Defense Weekly analyzed the footage and concluded that it shows Shahed-129 UAVs firing Sadid-1 air-to-surface rockets, including one strike outside Aleppo in October 2015.
The Shahed-129 was publicly unveiled by Iran in September 2012 and went into mass production a year later.
Jane's notes that the drone was spotted in Syria in 2014 after pictures emerged showing it in operations around Damascus.
"At that time, the UAV was believed to be conducting surveillance mission and was not seen to be armed," the defense publication's report added.
The Aviationist
Iran's public admission that it is conducting drone strikes comes a month after its most powerful regional proxy, Hezbollah, released a first-of-its-kind video that appears to show the group bombing Syrian rebels in the village of Khalsa, southwest of Aleppo, from the air using a pilotless drone.
The footage shows three separate bombings; one of "a [rebel] leader's base," the second of a pick-up truck purportedly belonging to "gunmen," the third of a tent-like structure ostensibly housing "a gathering of gunmen." In the third clip, two canisters filled with ball bearings are seen falling beneath the camera, prompting a figure on the arid ground below to start running before two small clouds of dust erupt upon the canister's impact.
The use of drones by Hezbollah became more prevalent after the group's public entry into the conflict in Syria in 2013.
Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV regularly aired footage taken from UAVs during offensives in Syria's Qalamoun region and the campaign in Lebanon's mountainous northeastern border region in 2015.
In one such instance, Al-Manar aired drone footage of party fighters ambushing several Al-Nusra Front militants on the outskirts of the Lebanese border town of Arsal.
However, the August 9 UAV footage from Aleppo was the first from that region of Syria, as well as the first to demonstrate the party's offensive drone capabilities.Coalition could consider vote on gay marriage: Abbott
Updated
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has indicated a Coalition government could change its position on gay marriage, after state Liberal premiers came out in support of the idea.
New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell has voiced his support of same-sex marriage and called for a conscience vote in Federal Parliament.
West Australian Premier Colin Barnett has also backed calls for a conscience vote, although he says he is personally opposed to gay marriage.
Speaking to ABC Radio in Melbourne, Mr Abbott said he did not want the marriage laws to change.
But he said the issue would be a "matter for the post-election party room" if the Coalition won September's federal poll.
"I'm not trying to say that the party is committed forever and a day to the current position," he said.
"I'm saying that this will be a matter for the post-election party room."
On Thursday, New Zealand's parliament passed marriage equality legislation, becoming the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to legalise gay marriage.
But Mr Abbott says that does not mean New Zealand is more progressive than Australia.
"I think it means in this respect that New Zealand is just different," he said.
Liberal frontbencher Christopher Pyne has also said the Liberal party could change its policy on keeping the Marriage Act.
He told Channel Nine the party room would decide on the policy if the Coalition wins government.
"We might well end up with some recognition of same-sex couples," he said.
Family values
Barry O'Farrell says Australia should now catch up with the New Zealanders.
"Let's allow members to have a conscience vote. It was New Zealand that in 1893 first gave votes to women, it took us another nine years to do it," he said.
"It shouldn't have to take us another nine years to [follow] the lead of our cousins across the ditch."
Mr O'Farrell says he supports same-sex marriage "as a Liberal".
''My view - a view that I've come to in recent years - is that as a Liberal who believes that commitment and family units are one of the best ways in which society is organised, I support the concept of same-sex marriage,'' he told Fairfax.
As he arrived at COAG talks today, Mr Barnett told the media he would support a conscience vote on the issue.
"It is a conscience vote for most parliaments. I don't support gay marriage but I acknowledge many Australians are," he said.
"We are probably changing our view as a nation on that."
Tony Abbott, who has a gay sister, has said he originally felt threatened by her sexuality but that has now changed.
Earlier this month two of his daughters said they supported same-sex marriage.
Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, liberals, abbott-tony, lgbt, sexuality, australia
First postedYou might argue that fans of comic book adaptations have had a pretty good decade or so. Between The Avengers movies, the Dark Knight trilogy, and multiple Spider-Man and X-Men films, some of the biggest-grossing action movies of all time have been based on comics. Not bad when you consider that only recently, the medium was considered the preserve of dateless man-children alone.
But here's the thing: not every comic book adaptation lends itself to being a summer tentpole CGI-fest, and just as many get overlooked or forgotten completely by the time the next one comes out. Comic adaptations are coming out thick and fast, and with so much forward momentum it's sometimes worth taking a moment to look back on what's come before.
That's why we've dedicated an entire top 25 to what we think are the most underappreciated comicbook adaptations of all time. This list covers everything: the rarely-mentioned, the oft-maligned, the box office smashes and the box office bombs, and they all have two things in common: they were all based on a comic, and they're all worth revisiting the next time you think you've seen everything comic-movies have to offer.
25. Mystery Men
One of the few superhero adaptations produced in the wilderness years between Schumacher's Batman films and Fox's X-Men, Mystery Men was loosely based on Bob Burden's humour series, Flaming Carrot Comics. Despite a surprisingly star-packed cast (Ben Stiller, William H. Macy, Tom Waits…), it only made back half of its budget and was correctly regarded as a box-office flop.
But as it happens, it's a lot better than the numbers suggest. Whether Mystery Men failed by association with a genre that had temporarily gone toxic or because it genuinely didn't click with audiences will forever be up for debate, but those who've seen it are quick to fight its corner. We suspect that it was just the wrong time to be making fun of grim and gritty superheroes – after all, the memory of bat-nipples was still fresh in everyone's minds. Give it a try now and it'll make far more sense.
See also: rethinking Mystery Men.
24. Generation X
Intended as a pilot for a series that never materialised, this is technically a TV-movie, but the first screen-outing for Marvel's mutants – while you wouldn't call it good, exactly – qualifies as under-appreciated just because of how much it got right (and because no-one saw it). It's far from an overlooked classic, but it is an entertaining curio, providing the first screen appearances of characters like Jubilee, Banshee and Emma Frost and opening with a definition of the term "mutant" in a manner so similar to the original X-Men film that it's hard to imagine it being a coincidence.
To be fair the plot, which involves Matt Frewer (in full Max Headroom mode) invading people's dreams using a futuristic dream-chair thingy, is complete fluff. But the realisation of the link between teen angst and mutant powers is skilfully made, and if you're an X-Men fan it's worth tracking down so you can think about the series that could've been. And why, if they can manage this much in 1996, Agents of SHIELD seems so reluctant to show anyone using superpowers.
23. Supergirl
An oft-forgotten spin-off of the Christopher Reeves Superman era, Supergirl nonetheless remains pretty much the only comics adaptation with a super-powered female protagonist. Considering it was released almost 30 years ago, that's a pretty damning state of affairs.
It's fair to say that the film itself wasn't spectacular (it has an 8% score on Rotten Tomatoes!) but we should at least give it credit for what it was trying to do: A faithful adaptation that didn't pander to its audience. Unfortunately, the lack of even a cameo by Reeves' Superman hurt its credibility, and despite lofty intentions, it's a shame that it probably did more harm than good to the cause. Its biggest contribution to pop culture appears to be convincing an entire generation that female superheroes can't carry their own film.
22. The Punisher
Few characters defy a nuanced portrayal quite as completely as the Punisher. Unless you're reading a comic by Garth Ennis, he's little more than a vigilante who shoots criminals. A lot. Given that most action films don't go much further than that with their protagonists anyway, it's hardly a surprise that we've already had three adaptations over the years.
Of those, our favourite (sorry, Lundgren fans) is the 2004 Thomas Jane version, which loosely adapts Ennis' "Welcome Back, Frank" storyline, surrounding the single-minded killer (that is to say, the hero) with a more colourful cast of neighbours and villains to inject something a bit less monotonous in there than two hours of shooty-shooty gun-gun. It makes for a distracting couple of hours, and we'd be surprised if it's bettered any time soon.
21. Daredevil: Director’s Cut
Most people missed the Director's Cut DVD release of Daredevil, and given the poor reception to the theatrical version it's hard to blame them. We'd hesitate to call this version completely fixed – it still has the awful costume, the tonally confused playground fight and a massively miscast Jennifer Garner – but it is considerably better than the version that reached cinemas.
The Director's Cut is almost 30 minutes longer and adds some gritty, Frank Miller-esque violence, removes the more overt romance elements and includes an entire subplot about Matt Murdock's courtroom battle to nail the Kingpin, giving some much-needed logic to the finale (without these scenes, it appears that the villain is arrested for, er, losing a fight to Daredevil.) It's altogether a far superior film and definitely worth re-evaluating if you liked any part of the original.
20. The Losers
Based on the comic of the same name by former 2000AD editor Andy Diggle and Jock, The Losers is the story of a special ops team whose masters turn against them. While the comic remains a fantastic thrill-ride, there's more than a hint of the A-Team about the distilled version of the concept and that spills over into the movie script, which is a broad, somewhat cliché-ridden action piece. Even so, its top-quality cast elevates what could've been a disappointment into something that's better than you might expect. And hey, if you've ever wanted a Gamora/Heimdall/Captain America (or Johnny Storm) movie then you're in luck: Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba and Chris Evans all feature heavily even though the original comic was published by Marvel's rivals at DC.
19. Dick Tracy
Another film that did reasonably well in its time but has since all but disappeared, the Dick Tracy movie of 1990 is a pitch-perfect adaptation of the pulp detective genre that also spawned Batman. Packed with retro charm and overseen by veteran director Warren Beatty, the film got seven Oscar nominations and actually won three, but its street-level antics and simplistic approach to story and character leave it buried under the more complex, effects-heavy offerings it's supposed to be competing with. Even so, Beatty was recently confirmed as the owner of the Dick Tracy rights after a long lawsuit and plans to bring a sequel to screens. We'd be interested to see that happen.
18. The Mask
Based on a comic? You bet! Whether or not it's under-appreciated depends on how good you think Jim Carrey is, but despite killing the box office (it cost $23m and made $350m) and establishing Cameron Diaz's career, it's basically disappeared from cultural memory along and been replaced by the over-worked catchphrases it spawned.
Maybe that's because stripped of CGI, Carrey's surrounding films – Ace Ventura and Dumb and Dumber – were that much better at showing the wacky, physical humour he excelled at. Maybe it's because the cartoon spin-off made people re-evaluate it as a kid's film. Or maybe, given the size of the box office numbers, we all saw it the first time around and never felt the need to revisit it. Whatever the reasoning, it's easy to forget the genius of Carrey's cartoonish bombast when he was still young and eager to entertain, rather than be taken seriously, and The Mask is vintage Carrey from when he was at his slapstick peak.
17. Turtles Forever
It's often forgotten that somewhere beneath the Ninja Turtle media juggernaut there was originally a comic series, one which was intended as a satirical mash-up of the most popular comics of the era, Claremont's X-Men and Frank Miller's Daredevil. That's why the Turtles are mutants and that's why their villains are called "The Foot" (parodying Daredevil's The Hand).
Several movies have followed. The original live-action film is probably better than you remember and 2007's CGI-animated sequel, TMNT, was nowhere near as big a hit as it should've been. But its sequel, Turtles Forever, unites the TMNT turtles with the black-and-white comic versions and 1987 cartoon versions for an amazing, if nostalgia-reliant 90 minutes. And hey, at the very least it's likely to be better than anything Michael Bay comes up with…
16. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
The original Ghost Rider was a reasonably dumb outing, enjoyable only to those who turned up for flaming skulls rather than a decent story. But the sequel? Now that was a fun movie (yep, we're aware that, er, not everyone agrees on this one). It won't win awards for the story, but at least it wasn't based on the same template every other superhero movie follows, and if you're the sort of person who likes to see Nic Cage doing his thing (we hear the guy has quite a following in some circles) then you get everything you want and more.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance goes further than the original in almost every way, embracing the inherent ridiculousness of the character rather than trying to treat it seriously. When the filmmakers are having fun, the audience can have fun too, and in case there was any doubt that you're supposed to be having fun, Idris Elba turns up as a gun-toting priest doing a cod-French accent. What's not to like?
15. The Rocketeer
Just ten years after the pulp-throwback Rocketeer debuted as a backup in the pages of Starslayer, the character got his own film courtesy of Disney and Joe Johnston, later the director of Captain America: The First Avenger. And it was fantastic. An utterly charming story, with a timeless look and feel.
In all fairness, the effects visuals haven't aged particularly well, but as a homage to the pulp roots of the superhero genre it's got a light touch and wide appeal. Family-friendly action from the days before that meant one set of jokes for the adults and another set of jokes for the kids. The character's undergoing something of a renaissance right now in a new series of comics from IDW, and with a new adaptation being talked about there's no better time to revisit the original.
14. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
Luc Besson may have turned in some of this generation's most memorable films, like Leon and The Fifth Element, but his 2010 release The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, based on the comic of the same name, was disappointingly overlooked despite being praised as a return to form for the director.
The story itself is set around the turn of the last century and combines pulp adventure and Victorian-era parapsychology to create a classic adventure movie revolving around the eponymous writer and the characters she encounters. Polished, original and witty, it's a film unfairly overlooked for being French-language. Let's try to change that.
13. Road to Perdition
Sam Mendes' adaptation of Max Allan Collins' graphic novel is almost 12 years old now, but it remains a powerful a story about fathers and sons thanks to its historical setting and beautifully simple black and white visuals. Set in 1930s America, it follows a mob enforcer and his son as they seek vengeance against a mobster who killed the rest of their family. The superb cast includes Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law and Daniel Craig, making it (by our reckoning) one of the most talent-stuffed comic adaptations ever made.
12. American Splendor
Lauded upon release but quickly expunged from the popular consciousness, American Splendor was an adaptation of Harvey Pekar's long-running autobiographical series of the same name, starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar.
Drawing heavily on Pekar's genius eye for slice-of-life detail and observation, it's full of humour and pathos, but as in the comics industry, this smaller and more thoughtful adaptation has been overshadowed by superhero blockbusters. Despite an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay, it remains a largely undiscovered gem. Make sure you see it, if for no other reason than the chance to see the most page-accurate version of a Robin costume yet portrayed on screen...
11. Flash Gordon
It may have been reduced to a single Brian Blessed line in the collective memory, but the 1980's adaptation of Flash Gordon (based on Alex Raymond's comic strip) still holds up today, even if it does have a Queen soundtrack. Cited as a favourite by filmmaker Edgar Wright, writer Seth MacFarlane and acclaimed comic artist Alex Ross, Flash Gordon is a bona-fide cult classic. Strangely, the film performed badly in most countries but was beloved in the UK. Maybe the distance of a few decades will allow a new audience across the globe to discover its charms.
10. Persepolis
An animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s comic strip autobiography, Persepolis is a heartfelt, funny, well-realised depiction of life in revolutionary Iran. Although critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated, we'd bet most people reading this never found the time to watch it, so let's take this opportunity to encourage you do so. We know it sounds worthy, looks pretentious and that a film about childhood in an increasingly oppressive regime doesn't promise a very upbeat experience, but give it a try. If you don't love it, we'll be surprised.
9. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
In certain circles, Batman's animated series is considered the pinnacle of superhero cartoons, but that doesn't mean everyone's aware of it. We'd wager that the majority of the hundreds of thousands of movie-goers who flock to every Batman film missed out on Mask of the Phantasm, the film that span out of the cartoon series in 1993.
Originally intended as a straight-to-video release, Mask of the Phantasm was considered so good that it was upgraded to a cinematic outing. And if you think that's a low bar, remember that this was only a year after Batman Returns had been released. The short notice for this change left the film's box office poor, but the quality of the movie itself has never been in question. The late Shirley Walker's score is outstanding, too. You can read more about her here.
8. V For Vendetta
Like all Alan Moore adaptations, the V for Vendetta film isn't a patch on the original work, but as a movie it's better than it's often given credit for and even detractors would admit that it remains the Wachowski's second best blockbuster by some distance. Admittedly Natalie Portman's accent gets in the way and the use of the word vichyssoise was so forced-in that one suspects the crowbar is still stuck in the script, but the spot-on translation of a downbeat dystopian Britain from page to screen far outweighs the weakness of the casting and dialogue.
Purists will particularly denounce the shift in politics and alterations made to Evey's character, but for us those elements fall firmly under the "Why make an adaptation if you're not going to do anything different?" umbrella. The original comic was, after all, a pro-anarchist, anti-Thatcher tract that was very much of its time, and the film uses the same characters and setting to comment similarly on its own era. Just the fact that it's a blockbuster movie with themes and subtext puts it streets ahead of most.
7. Constantine
If you've ever read Hellblazer than you have every right to hate this film, from Keanu Reeves' distinctly un-punk portrayal of freelance exorcist John Constantine, to the way it butchers the punchline of the loosely-adapted "Dangerous Habits" storyline, to the strange decision for the title-character to wield a hellfire shotgun (what is this, Ghost Rider?)
But try to forget you've ever read a Hellblazer comic, and suddenly this film becomes a lot better. Tilda Swinton as Gabriel was a superb casting decision, and we're clearly not the only ones to think that because it quite cleanly delineates her transition into mainstream film. The story, sometimes described as "Theological Noir", makes supernatural contemporaries like Underworld and Van Helsing look even worse than they were, and the effects provide an unforgettable vision of Hell as a fire-blasted urban landscape. There's a lot to like, provided you can forget that it's an adaptation at all.
6. Kick Ass 2
Who knows what went wrong with this one? As with the first movie, Kick Ass 2 smoothes off the rough edges of the comic and replaces Millar's cynicism and satire with a convincing emotional core. So why didn't it do better? Perhaps people felt the joke was done. Perhaps they felt that the story didn't have anywhere to go. Perhaps, like Jim Carrey, they just felt that violence wasn't funny anymore.
But here's the thing: Kick Ass 2 was a sufficiently different treatment of the material and characters to justify doing a sequel, and even though it lost some of its originality and thrills, it was every bit as funny as the first. But considering that the majority of the cast came back for the follow-up, it's strange that the film didn't find the same audience as the first.
5. Tank Girl
Adapting Tank Girl was always going to be a mug's game, given that the strength of the strip was largely down to Jamie Hewlett's superb artwork and Alan Martin's stream-of-consciousness vulgarity. But despite being critically hammered and virtually disowned by everyone involved, Tank Girl is a slice of mid-90s craziness that has found a cult audience among those who hate the homogeneity and risk-free nature of modern blockbusters. This is, after all, a post-apocalyptic action-comedy with a dance number in the middle (a Wikipedia category we need to invent just so it can share it with Super Mario Bros.)
As for the cast, who can hate any film where Ice-T plays a genetically altered Kangaroo-man? It proved Naomi Watts was going to be a star long before anyone else even realised she existed, and Malcolm McDowell could phone his role in and still be gripping on screen (which is good, because that's what he did). You might want to describe it as a guilty pleasure, or say it's so bad, it's good, but however you want to justify it Tank Girl is more fun to watch than it's usually given credit for.
4. Ghost World
A cult hit that deserves to be considerably less cult, Ghost World is an adaptation of the Daniel Clowes comic of the same name and deserves praise for its casting of Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson and Steve Buscemi alone. There's more talent in this movie than some comics franchises combined.
That said, it's the small-town, big ideas contrast that really makes this film so great. The way it captures both the adolescent feeling that you don't belong and combines it with the teenage arrogance of thinking you're better than those around you. It's sharp, insightful, beautifully written and emotionally incisive. As much as, if not more so than Clowes' comic.
3. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
Edgar Wright's action-comedy adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's manga-influenced, pop-culture saturated slice-of-life series is easily better than any movie on this list. And for that matter, it's better than most movies not on this list. A combination of mis-marketing, misplaced anti-hipster criticism and people who just can't stand Michael Cera meant that this utter gem of a movie failed to make back its budget.
In truth, it's superbly-written and directed, thick with jokes and references, and has a supporting cast of amazing young talent, all of whom have gone on to greater and richly-deserved prominence. It's already destined for cult appreciation, but a movie this good should've been far more widely appreciated. We're probably preaching to the converted here, though.
2. Dredd
Now, here's the thing. If you're reading Den of Geek, we probably don't need to tell you how good Dredd 3D was. We shouldn't have to explain that it's a note-perfect interpretation of the character, with a superb cast, great script and inventive use of 3D. You're probably aware that it makes the original Judge Dredd film look like the mid-90s toss it was. And yet, despite all that, it seems like the majority of the population has simply failed to notice all of this. Which means we (all of us) haven't been doing our job properly. We don't care that by now, hopes for a sequel are all but dashed. Make a friend watch Dredd today. They'll thank you for it.
1. Hulk
Of everything on this list, our top choice is likely to be the most controversial, purely because the consensus on it is so wide. But hear us out, because if anything qualifies as underappreciated – or maybe misappreciated - it's Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk film.
In the wake of The Avengers, where the Hulk was played for laughs and thrills, it's easy to say what Ang Lee's Hulk apparently got wrong in terms of delighting audiences. But Ang Lee didn't go the easy route, instead delivering an adaptation few would've dared to. One that treated the concept of the Hulk more respectfully and thoughtfully than any director before or since.
Admittedly, its psychologically-layered writing, artful direction and strong themes have been overshadowed in popular memory by hulked-out pooches and hard to follow action. But especially when compared to the string of video game cut scenes that comprised its non-sequel, The Incredible Hulk, Ang Lee's movie is bold and original. Even if you don't like it, you have to admit that an ambitious failure is better than the unambitious one that followed.
Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.The Canadian Press
OTTAWA -- An environmental group says its annual review of the state of Canada's parks has left it worried.
The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society says most parks and proposed protected areas are facing greater challenges than they were a year ago.
Spokewoman Alison Woodley says the society is most worried about the growing trend by governments to give priority to industrial and commercial interests in parks.
She says many decisions are being made that "ignore scientific evidence and public opinion."
CPAWS points to the decision by the B.C. government in March to amend its Parks Act to facilitate boundary adjustments for pipeline and other industrial developments, saying it happened with little public notice or debate.
The organization also criticizes an agreement signed in March between the New Brunswick government and forestry company J.D. Irving Ltd. to open up previous wildlife and water conservation zones to increased logging.
B.C. Environment Minister Mary Polak has labelled environmentalists' claims about industrial development as incorrect, saying that while development is allowed, there is "no drilling, no mining, no forestry, no transmission lines, no gas wells."
The CPAWS review also raises concern about a proposed hotel development being considered at Maligne Lake in Alberta's Jasper National Park in Alberta; a plan in the Yukon to open up the Peel watershed to mineral, oil and gas staking; and the stalling of protected area plans in Newfoundland, Quebec and Alberta.
"An obvious question that arises from this year's review is, why is protecting Canada's amazing nature within parks and other forms of protected areas so difficult to achieve when their benefits to nature, human health and the economy are so strong?" says Woodley.
"Canadians love their parks and there is strong evidence that they are overwhelmingly beneficial for people and nature. We're urging Canada's governments to better recognize the true value of parks in their decision-making."
In addition to the criticism, the review also handed out praise for several projects, including the halting of a drilling proposal for Newfoundland's Gros Morne National Park; Manitoba's moves toward creating a huge new park to protect polar bears and other species on the Hudson's Bay coast; and the progress made in the Yukon toward creating Kusawa Territorial Park.
In response to the findings in this year's report, CPAWS is calling on governments to better recognize the environmental, economic and social benefits of parks, and to commit to significant expansions and better management of parks systems across the country.A supporter of Edward Snowden holds a sign outside the Embassy of Ecuador in London June 24.
WASHINGTON — The intelligence agency of Ecuador appears to have sought in recent months to obtain new equipment for a large-scale surveillance, according to confidential government documents obtained by BuzzFeed.
The capabilities sought by Ecuador resemble the National Security Agency practices revealed by Edward Snowden, who is reportedly seeking asylum in the left-leaning Latin American republic.
The Ecuadorian documents — stamped "Secret" — obtained by BuzzFeed appear to show the government purchasing a "GSM Interceptor" system, among other domestic spying tools, and they suggest a commitment to |
challenge.”
“It’s not life threatening, so nobody’s going to die with a fistula. But a woman still goes through a great deal on the physical, mental and social fronts,” he says. “It’s a human rights challenge.”
Khatun was married at the age of 14; by 16, she was pregnant. But her husband took no interest in her pregnancy, and her parents could not afford antenatal care for her.
After delivering a stillborn baby, Khatun developed fistula. Her husband left her immediately and eventually remarried. Her parents later died and her siblings disowned her because they couldn’t stand her constantly smelling of urine. “I used to try to hide it from everybody, but the smell was so bad I was unable to,” she says.
Eventually a stepbrother built a shed for her to live in outside his house, but she would still only come outside to beg for money to survive. “I used to stay away from people and sleep on a cloth because I was always wet,” says Khatun. “I thought this was a curse and there was no treatment.”
In January 2016, after more than 40 years of social isolation, Khatun was approached by someone from the HOPE Foundation for Women & Children of Bangladesh in Cox’s Bazar. Through a partnership with the Fistula Foundation, HOPE covers the cost of transportation to their local hospital, surgery and other expenses for women suffering from fistula. But first, it has to find them.
Four or five times a month, Abu Musa Ashari, HOPE Hospital’s supervisor and fistula team coordinator, and three midwives armed with leaflets travel to villages up to 100 miles (160km) away. They arrive unannounced, looking for fistula patients by relaying information about the symptoms to the community.
“One man said, ‘There is a woman like that who is a beggar,’” recalls Ashari of tracking down Khatun. “He said, ‘She probably has this disease. She smells bad.’”
It took a few attempts before they found her, but when they explained to Khatun that she could be operated on for free she was over the moon. Two days later, she was taken to HOPE Hospital. According to the team at the hospital, the 40-bed center is the “leading provider of fistula care in the country.” It was founded in 2005 by Dr. Iftikher Mahmood, who is from Cox’s Bazar, but now lives in the U.S.
Fighting fistula means addressing the factors that lead to women having longer, riskier deliveries, which can result in tearing during childbirth. As many as 12,000 women die from pregnancy or childbirth complications every year in Bangladesh, says UNICEF. Most women in the country deliver at home, and Cox’s Bazar has one of the nation’s lowest rates of births attended by a skilled health professional, according to UNICEF’s 2012-2013 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. According to HOPE, there are about 5,000 women with fistula living in Cox’s Bazar.
HOPE was set up to focus on women in the vulnerable community of Cox’s Bazar, where there are poor communication and transport systems and literacy is low. They also have a training center for midwives on the same premises as the hospital and eight rural medical centers in southern Bangladesh.
Since 2011, the organization has facilitated about 285 fistula operations, most of them performed by Dr. Nrinmoy Biswas, the hospital’s resident surgeon and the only surgeon in the country who’s certified by the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics.
According to a 2013 report, even if fistula was prevented entirely today, it would take another 294 years to deal with the backlog of cases in Bangladesh. But HOPE is talking to UNFPA about eradicating it entirely from certain regions of the country, a goal the organizations believe is achievable. There are 102 doctors in Bangladesh, with its population of almost 160 million, trained to tackle fistula, says UNFPA. But along with the necessary skills, a stronger commitment from surgeons and the government is also essential if fistula is ever going to be eradicated, says Doraiswamy.
“Fistula is not just a hole in the birth canal of a woman, but also a hole in the public health system of the country,” he says.
Nokima Begum, 22, suffered for four years with fistula she developed after a 72-hour labor. Her husband left her, remarried and then tried to take their child. Her mother and sister disowned her. With a complex case of fistula, she underwent four operations before she was finally repaired.
Now Begum works at HOPE Hospital counseling women with the condition. “I feed fistula patients because many are very ashamed,” she says. “They don’t want to eat, and they’re nervous, so sometimes they don’t want food.”
HOPE is currently building a maternity and fistula clinic to meet demand for treatment, which it plans to open in 2018. And Ashari says he would love to open a rehabilitation center one day, if he ever gets the funding.
But even without the dedicated fistula clinic or the rehabilitation center, the quick, simple surgery already has the power to transform a woman’s life. Khatun has been free of fistula for a year and now works for HOPE in one of their medical centers.
Ashari still remembers the day Khatun left the hospital after her surgery. “In our culture, touching feet by hand is a display of respect and love. When Fatema left the hospital dry, she was trying to do this to me,” he says.
“She could not believe she was cured. It was amazing to see.”This weekend's New York Times Book Review poses the following question to its "Bookends" columnists:
What Were the First Books You Felt You 'Should' Read?
This struck me as oddly phrased. A lot is packed into the idea of "should" there. Who is behind this "should"? Your parents? Your teachers? Your friends? Western civilization?
Apparently I am not alone in finding it odd. Founding Jezebel editor-in-chief Anna Holmes doesn't so much answer the question as challenge its premise:
I'm less attracted to the question of books I felt I should read and more interested in the idea of "should" as an auxiliary verb applied to anything other than treating others with kindness and respect, paying taxes and the consumption of leafy green vegetables.
She chalks the feelings up to her own "stubbornness against culturally mandated consumption and a lifelong disdain for authority, legal or literary." And also says she worries that that she worries "figurative or literal checklists of published texts can suck the joy out of reading and should be avoided at all costs."
I am attracted to this sort of reasoning. Possibly because I have a totally unreasonable chip on my shoulder about a life in which the label "well-read" has always been a moving target.
I am also stubborn. And my reading life hasn't really followed any kind of canonical list either. First and foremost that is because I did not grow up with a silver Tolstoy in my mouth, so to speak. My parents exerted little control over what I read as a kid. This meant that I read a great deal of "junk," in the sense of it being books no one would insist that anyone "had" to read: Babysitters' Club, Sweet Valley High, quite a few Canadian young adult "mysteries" set at national historical sites (also, the West Edmonton Mall), and any number of cheaply bound teen romances.
Also, as that list might suggest to you, I grew up in Canada. What gets stuffed down the young reader's gullet there does seem to vary considerably from the comparable stuff my American friends describe. In the matter of those checklists, and class syllabi, ours were dominated by books many of my American friends have never heard of, like Margaret Laurence's The Diviners and Robertson Davies' Fifth Business. That peculiar Canadian nationalism kept me largely too busy to bother with a lot of what the agreed "should reads" are here.
And maybe that's fine. The point at which resistance to a really rigid canon of "should reads" turns anti-intellectual isn't totally clear to me. Most writers will tell you their intellectual heritage is more eclectic than textbook. Holmes' column reminded me of an old(ish) Ta-Nehisi Coates post, actually:
I believe in a great canon, but as a writer, I don't much care. The artist's canon must be personal. My canon happens to include Clifton, Neal, Rakim, Raekwon etc. and Fitzgerald, McPherson, Hurston, Melville, Wharton, Doctorow, Hurston and so on. Perhaps one day it will include Augustine. But there's a lot of great stuff I haven't read... If you name an important book there is a very good chance I haven't read it. I'm not against important books. I hope to write one someday. But I read what I like, before I read what's important.
[Photo via AP.]After imposing Moscow’s will on the situation in Syria, Putin is moving on to Libya. And this new proxy conflict he is waging with the West has many of the same hallmarks of the last one: the West backs a pitiful attempt at a ‘democratic’ government with unfortunate Islamist leanings, Putin backs an authoritarian, militaristic autocrat, and ISIS sits squarely in the middle, a target of everyone’s rhetoric but too rarely of their weapons.
And once again, the West is being outmaneuvered. The Western-backed government of National Accord ruling from Tripoli is anything but democratic, and is barely held together with the ‘protection’ of Islamist ‘Libya Dawn’, a coalition which includes former Al-Qaeda jihadists, amongst other interesting characters. And the ‘protection’ also comes at the cost of Dawn steadily usurping the institutions of this government recognized by the West and the UN. A very thin veil of civility is masking a very chaotic and merciless struggle for power between groups that have very little in common and very little shared notion of what Libya should look like in the future.
Next
Meanwhile, in the eastern city of Tobruk, the elected parliament of Libya, the House of Representatives, increasingly alienated from the government by the intrusion of Dawn into the political process in Tripoli, is being attracted into the sphere of influence of the rebel General Haftar who controls the East of the country, most of the oil fields, and who is backed by Russia.
Now the Russians have just reportedly helped the East to print 4bn dinars, backed by that oil, and to consolidate a rival central bank to the one in Tripoli. In effect, Putin is helping Haftar build parallel state institutions to those in the West of the country. And, with their superior wealth and military power, the East can expect that in the medium-to-long term they will steadily usurp the legitimate institutions of the state, and eventually take over the whole of Libya.
And just like in Syria, there is no need for a public confrontation between the Western-backed government in Tripoli and the Russian-backed East. Both can pretend to arm their clients and even send troops on the ground under the pretext of fighting ISIS, who are holed up in Sirte, right in-between the two main factions.
Sphere of influence politics
What Putin is doing is good, old sphere of influence politics, just like in the Cold War. But the West is failing to respond in kind. They either refuse to acknowledge this reality, or are impotent to do anything about Putin’s grab for the Middle East.
The Obama administration, now in “legacy mode”, will not allow itself to be dragged into open involvement into Libya, while the Europeans who contributed most to the toppling of Qaddafi in 2011, Britain and France, are caught up in other serious business at home – the UK with its referendum on exiting the European Union, and France with some of the most serious industrial disputes in years.
The most worrying aspect of this for us should be the fact that, if this ploy works, Putin is establishing a template for how to take Middle Eastern countries into his sphere of influence that could extend to our traditional allies in the region. The militaristic, autocratic, and often secular dictators which we have traditionally backed, have now seen, in the wake of the Arab Spring, just how squeamish and unreliable the West can be about their administrations.
Public opinion and Western leaders have repeatedly backed the democratic uprisings, Islamist warts and all. But Putin and the Russians have shown no such squeamishness. They have stood by their ally Assad in Syria, and now are backing a similar kind of administration in Libya. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt must be watching closely.On Sunday, Councillor Doug Ford described reporters as a “bunch of sucky little kids.” On Monday, he described them as a “bunch of pr---s,” issued a near apology, then made it clear he wasn’t actually sorry. His ongoing offensive against the media comes after another spate of critical stories about the activities of his brother, Mayor Rob Ford. While Toronto politicians are regularly unhappy with the coverage they receive, it is highly unusual for them to engage in public name-calling.
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, seen during his inaugural radio talk show at Newstalk 1010 offices in February, called reporters "pathological liars" on Sunday on the same radio show that he co-hosts with his brother Doug Ford. ( RICK MADONIK / TORONTO STAR )
As Doug Ford walked from a budget committee meeting to his office on Monday morning, a group of reporters asked him what he was referring to when he said on radio on Sunday that the media “lie through their teeth.” Ford, who is normally loquacious, refused to stop for the rolling cameras. “All you guys have burned your bridge, so I have no comment,” he said without explanation, then, soon after, added, “At least I’m accurate, unlike you guys.”
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He muttered “bunch of pr---s” as he entered the door to the hallway near his office. About two hours later, he read an apologetic statement to the Toronto Sun in which he said, “My comments were made in the heat of the moment and out of frustration. I didn’t mean to offend anyone.” But later in the day, he appeared on talk radio and stood by his words. “What I said today: every politician in the country is probably gonna write me a letter thanking me,” he told AM640’s Arlene Bynon. Bynon interjected, “For calling them pr---s.” Ford responded, “They are. It’s very simple. In my opinion, they are. Not all of them. Because you’re wonderful, but a lot of them are ruthless, and will do anything to make sure we don’t stop the gravy train.” The Fords have previously attempted to turn critical media coverage to their advantage by portraying themselves as victims of left-wing elites bent on their destruction. Until recently, however, most of their ire was directed at the Star in particular.
They have escalated their verbal attacks in September, broadening their criticism to specifically include four other major media outlets. Doug Ford told a CBC reporter that the CBC is a “waste of taxpayers’ money” and referred to a Globe and Mail reporter as “lazy;” on Bynon’s show, he claimed he had threatened to call police on a Global cameraman “in an unmarked car hiding around the corner” of his business.
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Global said the encounter was “cordial,” Ford had never threatened to call police, and the cameraman was simply shooting footage for a story on the mayor’s controversial request for road repairs outside the building. Rob Ford called reporters “pathological liars” Sunday on the radio show he co-hosts with Doug Ford — and used Newstalk 1010, the right-leaning station that broadcasts the show, as his prime example. In the last two weeks, the mayor has faced stories on his use of his staff and a city car to help with his football teams, on the repairs request, and on his false claim that taxpayers won’t pay “a dime” for the business trip he led to Chicago.
Read more about:France joins our Ambassador initiative!
Joel O. Fernández Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 17, 2017
The Lisk Platform has some amazing community members who are highly motivated and actively build value on top of the Lisk Ecosystem. Today, we are adding another Country Ambassador to our ranks, joining the current ambassadors for Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Australia, Germany and China. John will be France’s Country Ambassador, where there is a booming community of crypto enthusiasts.
France Country Ambassador — John (BitBanksy)
John (aka. bitbanksy) once worked & chaired the board of a hospitality related business for about 7 years. He discovered crypto-currency in September 2013 & blockchain technology became his main hobby ever since! He is passionate about Lisk and is a very active member of the vibrant community, spreading Lisk awareness with various contest such as the “Lisk Banner”, “Lisk’s Ad Blitz” and more to come.Switzerland, a longtime haven for all kinds of financial shenanigans, has just expanded its reputation for "discretion" to cover file-sharing as well. That's the conclusion of Logistep AG, anyway, as a Swiss court has just gutted its P2P surveillance business with a ruling that says gathering even publicly available information is illegal.
Logistep has operated in Switzerland since 2004, doing what all of these firms do: trolling BitTorrent sites for movies, music, or software, then connecting to swarms and logging the information of everyone offering the file. Bits of the file are downloaded as proof that these aren't simply "mistitled" files, and information like IP address, file hash value, and time of day are recorded in a giant spreadsheet. Content providers who rely on Logistep can take this information and submit it to local courts, seeking to identify and then sue individual file-swappers.
But Europe has fairly strict data privacy laws and a cultural expectation that data collection will be disclosed, with the data used sparingly. This often alarms Internet advertising companies like Google, which objected in 2008 to an EU proposal to label IP addresses "personal data."
The current EU approach can hardly be described as "hardline"—member states are actually required to implement a Data Retention Directive under which ISPs must hang on to user information so that police can investigate crimes. And IP addresses are not always "personal information." Companies like Logistep (including Guardaley and DtecNet) operate across the EU and perform almost identical functions; Guardaley, in fact, powers the US Copyright Group mass lawsuits currently underway in the US.
But Switzerland, which is not an EU member, has decided that it can't sanction Logistep's behavior. The country's Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür, took Logistep to court and this week won a major victory. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that IP addresses are in fact personal information and that companies like Logistep can't go about slurping them up for mere civil cases like file-swapping lawsuits. Logistep must cease all current copyright infringement data collection.
In a press release issued yesterday, Thür praised the court's decision. He sees Logistep as trying to "assume tasks clearly in the State's domain." Only the state can violate personal privacy, and only when pursuing criminal cases.
Thür made clear his view that "today's decision provides no protection for anyone breaking the law. Clearly it should be possible to punish copyright infringements on the Internet." But how will this be done?
Logistep's dueling statement (in German) rounded up a quote from Nikolai Klute, a Hamburg lawyer, who said the decision flew in the face of most other European precedent: "Soon, Switzerland is likely to have the reputation of a safe haven not only for tax evaders, but also for copyright infringers."
The company also hinted that it might move across the Swiss border to a country where its work remains legal.
The ruling would appear to make it difficult to sue just about anyone for anything on the Internet; unearthing someone's identity for a defamation suit or copyright infringement generally requires an IP address. It would also prevent any sort of mass lawsuit campaign against P2P users from taking place in the country's courts.Update: Shaq says he was joking.
Earlier this season, Kyrie Irving voiced his belief that the Earth is flat. The Earth is not flat, but that won’t stop NBA stars from making the argument.
Shaquille O’Neal appeared to be the latest flat-Earth truther to make the claim.
On the Big Podcast with Shaq, the Hall of Famer tenaciously argued that the Earth is flat, and he didn’t appear to be joking. Take a listen:
He said through a back-and-forth dialogue:
“It’s true. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. Yeah, it is. Yes, it is. Listen, there are three ways to manipulate the mind — what you read, what you see and what you hear. In school, first thing they teach us is, ‘Oh, Columbus discovered America,’ but when he got there, there were some fair-skinned people with the long hair smoking on the peace pipes. So, what does that tell you? Columbus didn’t discover America. So, listen, I drive from coast to coast, and this (expletive) is flat to me. I’m just saying. I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me. I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity, have you looked outside Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? You mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It’s not. The world is flat.”
When satellite imagery got brought up, Shaq said, “Oh, satellite imagery — that could be drawn or made up.”
Obviously, the basis of driving from Florida to California would not be nearly scientific enough to justify the flat-Earth claim, but that was all Shaq needed to see and he’s standing by it.
The next Inside the NBA on TNT should be interesting.
(h/t Yahoo! Sports)Hello and welcome to the 118th installment of the SWD.
Military events/news are listed below by the governorates:
Aleppo:
Amaq Agency reported that Islamic State damaged SAA ‘s tank with an anti-tank guided missile in Al-Boughzal village, south of Maskanah.
Raqqa:
Syrian Democratic Forces launched an attack on Romaniah district, western Raqqa city. Clashes are still continuing in the district between SDF and IS, with reports that the latter lost more than 20 fighters. Even though the 17th Division military base, north of Raqqa was reported as captured by SDF on the 8th of June, clashes with Islamic State are still ongoing in the area and it should be treated as a disputed territory for now.
Approximate situation around Raqqa. Source: Nathan Ruser
Idlib:
Agreement has been reached between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Jaysh Idlib al-Hurr (Free Idlib Army) in Maarat al-Numman, regarding the disbandment of Free Syrian Army’s Al-Firqat 13 (13th Division). Agreement includes formation of a joint committee which will supervise completion of other terms of the agreement. According to the agreement, Al-Firqat 13 will have to hand over their weapons and HQs in Maarat al-Numaan to Jaysh Idlib al-Hurr.
Al-Firqat 13 reportedly rejected the agreement made between the two aforementioned parties, disbandment can only occur if the decision is authorized by the commander of the group, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Al-Saud. Al-Saud asked Maarat al-Numman’s residents to join protest against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham arrested former Free Syrian Army’s commander, Nidal Haj Ali from Kansafra. After leaving the Free Syrian Army, Nidal Haj Ali allegedly got into a business of selling aid, ammunition and weapons.
Homs:
Syrian Arab Army’s Al-Firqat al-Hadyat Eshar Dbabat al-Souri (11th Syrian Tank Division), backed by other SAA ‘s units and allied groups, reached the outskirts of Arak. Arak is ready to be stormed, since SAA & allies captured several mountains and hills around it from Islamic State. SAA ‘s advances are reported to be around 18 kilometers (11 miles). Complete post regarding the advances by SAA ‘s 11th Syrian Tank Division can be found here
Islamic State claimed to have destroyed SAA ‘s ZSU-23-4 (Shilka) with an anti-tank guided missile, and killed four soldiers on a separate occasion, north of Palmyra silos.
Situation in east Homs governorate. Source: Vasto
Daraa:
Heavy clashes took place between SAA and rebels in Daraa camp area, both sides claimed to have killed a dozen of opposing soldiers. Rebels also destroyed SAA ‘s tank with an anti-tank guided missile in the district. Both rebels and SAA lost a commander in today’s clashes, commander in SAA ‘s 4th Armoured Division, Colonel Ahmed Tajo was killed by rebels. SAA reportedly killed Farhan al-Hammadi, commander of Free Syrian Army’s Firqat 18 Adhar (The March 18 Division), he was killed along with a group of his soldiers.
Iraq
Nineveh:
It was a quiet day in west Mosul without reports about any major military event occurring. Even more sources reported full capture of Al-Zanjili district by Iraqi forces, but Iraq Joint Operations are still silent on the subject, probably because forces are still demining IS’ explosive device and/or because small IS’ pockets of resistance still exist in the district.
Deputy Chairman of Popular Mobilization Committee, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis announced the end of Al-Hashd al-Shaabi’s (Popular Mobilization Units) operations in the desertous area west of Mosul. Iraqi forces liberated around 360 localities and 14000 square kilometers (5400 square miles) of territory from Islamic State.
Iraqi Army started a new offensive east of Tal Afar against the Islamic State and captured several localities from the latter. Some localities captured by Iraqi Army are Zarnouk, Sheikh Qora al-Ulaya, Dam Sinjar, Tal Khima, Mahafef, and Baligha.
Latest map of west Mosul. Source: Nineveh Media Center
Situation around Tal Afar. Source: Harakat Tahrir Tal Afar
Salah al-Deen:
Islamic State launched several attacks across the Salah al-Deen governorate, Mosul’s supply route came under attack as well as Tilul al-Baj and Makhul areas and Sabkha district in Al-Shirqat. IS’ Amaq Agency reported death of 15 Al-Hashd al-Shaabi’s fighters and five vehicles during the clashes in Al-Sida and Al-Ziraea, Al-Shirqat.
Iraq Joint Operations stated that all of the IS’ attacks were foiled causing heavy casualties to the group. Iraqi Air Force alone allegedly killed 65 IS’ fighters and destroyed 12 vehicles.
Iraqi security forces killed three Islamic State’s fighters equipped with explosive belts and weapons around Al-Adhaim dam. Killed individuals tried to infiltrate the dam’s area with boats.
CJTF-OIR :
On the 9th of June 2017 CJTF-OIR has conducted 21 strikes in Syria. CJTF-OIR ‘s main focus in Syria at the moment is Tabqa-Raqqa-Deir al-Zour region where they did 20 strikes supporting SDF ‘s operations against IS destroying seven fighting positions, four vehicles, three IS headquarters, a VBIED, and an IS-held building; and suppressing an IS tactical unit.
Other area where one strike occurred is Abu Kamal (Al-Bukamal) destroying an IS oil refinery. Full report on CJTF-OIR strikes conducted in both Syria & Iraq can be found here.
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Feel free to voice your opinion in the comments section below, constructive criticism is welcomed.
For those of you interested, you can follow us on an official Twitter account @SyrianWarDaily, or me personally on my biased twitter @joskobaric where I occasionally tweet some things.
AdvertisementsNorth Korean leader Kim Jong Un appeared to take a step back from the brink of nuclear war Tuesday, when state media reported that he would “watch a little more the foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees.”
But, as is often the case with North Korea, the message was mixed: Kim was inspecting the missile unit tasked with preparing to strike near Guam, and photos released by state media showed a large satellite image of Andersen Air Force Base on Guam on the screen beside the leader.
“The U.S. should stop at once arrogant provocations against the DPRK and unilateral demands and not provoke it any longer,” the North Korean leader told his missile unit, according to a report from the state-run Korean Central News Agency published Tuesday.
If “the Yankees persist in their extremely dangerous reckless actions on the Korean peninsula and in its vicinity,” Kim continued, North Korea would “make an important decision as it already declared,” he said.
Kim was visiting the Strategic Force of the Korean People’s Army, the elite missile unit that — according to state media — is finalizing preparations to launch ballistic missiles into the Pacific Ocean near the American territory of Guam. A decision was due this week, a week during which the Kim regime is celebrating the ruling family with huge propaganda displays in North Korea.
(Reuters)
Kim “praised the KPA Strategic Force for drawing up a close and careful plan... and examined the firing preparations for power demonstration,” the report said.
“He said that he wants to advise the U.S., which is driving the situation on the Korean peninsula into the touch-and-go situation, running helter-skelter, to take into full account gains and losses with clear head whether the prevailing situation is more unfavorable for any party,” the report quoted Kim as saying.
This came just hours after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told South Korean leaders Monday that the United States was ready to use the “full range” of its military capabilities to deal with North Korea.
But Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., speaking in Seoul, just 30 miles south of the border with North Korea, stressed that diplomacy and sanctions were the first plan of attack.
“The military dimension today is directly in support of that diplomatic and economic effort,” Dunford told reporters after meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Seoul.
(Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
“It would be a horrible thing were a war to be conducted here on the peninsula, and that’s why we’re so focused on coming up with a peaceful way ahead,” he said, according to Stars and Stripes.
“Nobody’s looking for war,” the Marine general said, according to the newspaper. But he added that the military’s job was to provide “viable military options in the event that deterrence fails.”
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Monday afternoon in Washington that it will be “game on” with North Korea if it hits the United States, including Guam, but he left it much more ambiguous what will happen if Pyongyang decides to shoot missiles near Guam, without attempting to hit the U.S. island territory.
“That becomes an issue that we take up, and it’s however the president chooses,” Mattis said. “You can’t make all of those kinds of decisions in advance. There is a host of things going on. There are allies we consult with, as the president made very clear last week when he talked about our allies repeatedly in his statement.”
Mattis added that he needs a “certain amount of ambiguity on this, because I’m not going to tell [Kim] what I’m going to do in each case.” But he warned pointedly: “You don’t shoot at people in this world unless you want to bear the consequences.”
Dunford was on the first stop of a trip that will also take him to Beijing on Tuesday and then to Tokyo, three capitals that do not want war to break out on their doorsteps.
China, meanwhile, signaled a potentially important break with North Korea as part of international sanctions. Beijing announced Monday that it would ban imports of iron ore, iron, lead and coal from North Korea, cutting an important economic lifeline for Pyongyang. The ban will take effect from Tuesday, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced.
[China keeps in step with U.N. sanctions, but warns Washington on trade]
In the meetings with the South Korean president and other top officials Monday, Dunford appeared to offer a modified version of the threats that President Trump has issued over the past week.
Trump last week warned North Korea that it would face “fire and fury” if it tried to attack the United States or its allies. Then on Friday, after North Korea threatened to launch missiles toward Guam, Trump warned the regime that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded.”
But top administration officials appear focused on trying to play down the prospect of nuclear war. Appearing on Sunday-morning talk shows, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said, “An attack from North Korea is not something that is imminent.” National security adviser H.R. McMaster said, “We’re not closer to war than a week ago.”
[Who is Kim Jong Un and what will he decide to do? ]
“The object of our peaceful pressure campaign is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wrote in a joint op-ed article published by the Wall Street Journal. “The U.S. has no interest in regime change or accelerated reunification of Korea. We do not seek an excuse to garrison U.S. troops north of the Demilitarized Zone. We have no desire to inflict harm on the long-suffering North Korean people, who are distinct from the hostile regime in Pyongyang.”
Officials in the South Korean government have voiced surprise and confusion at Trump’s tough talk of the past week.
Moon, elected as South Korea’s president in May on a pledge to adopt a more conciliatory approach to North Korea, urged the United States on Monday to give diplomacy a chance.
“Peace will not come to the Korean Peninsula by force. Although peace and negotiation are painful and slow, we must pursue this path,” Moon told his advisers ahead of his meeting with Dunford.
Calling the U.S.-South Korea military partnership “an alliance for peace,” Moon said he was “confident that the U.S. will respond calmly and responsibly to the current situation.” He even suggested that the gap between the allies was not large, as both are focused on peace.
Seoul, a vibrant metropolitan area of 25 million people, lies within range of North Korea’s conventional artillery, stationed just across the border 30 miles to the north. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, including more than 28,000 U.S. troops, also live in South Korea.
After the meeting, Moon’s spokesman said the president had “denounced” North Korea for disturbing the peace in the region with its repeated missile launches.
“The president noted the current security conditions on the Korean Peninsula constituted a more serious, real and urgent threat than ever created by the advancement in North Korea’s nuclear and missile technologies,” said spokesman Park Soo-hyun.
[How the world is reacting to the war of words between Trump and North Korea]
The U.S. and South Korean militaries next week are set to start their annual fall exercises, in which they practice responding to a North Korean invasion or the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang. North Korea always strongly objects to the drills, viewing them as a pretext for war.
Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, said the exercises would go ahead as planned, starting Aug. 21. “The exercises remain important to us, and we’ll continue to move forward,” he said, according to Stars and Stripes.
Lamothe reported from Washington. Simon Denyer in Beijing contributed to this report.
Read more:
China bans North Korea iron, lead, coal imports as part of U.N. sanctions
Are we on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea? Probably not.
Calls for diplomacy vie with fresh threats in North Korea crisis.
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign newsposter="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201606/3509/1155968404_4942931305001_4942899469001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Trump: U.S. troops stole money in Iraq
Donald Trump rang in the Army’s 241st birthday in unusual fashion on Tuesday — by calling attention to theft of government funds by American soldiers in Iraq.
“Iraq, crooked as hell. How about bringing baskets of money — millions and millions of dollars — and handing it out?,” Trump said at an evening rally. “I want to know who were the soldiers that had that job, because I think they’re living very well right now, whoever they may be.”
Story Continued Below
Trump appeared to be referring to the many known instances in which members of the American military members skimmed U.S. government cash intended for reconstruction projects or otherwise engaged in theft or bribery. According to a 2015 report by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, "at least 115 enlisted personnel and military officers [were] convicted since 2005 of committing theft, bribery, and contract-rigging crimes valued at $52 million during their deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq."
Campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said the comments did not refer to theft by Americans. “Mr. Trump was referring to Iraqi soldiers,” she wrote in an email.
But the last time Trump touched on the subject, during a rally last fall in New Hampshire, he also appeared to suggest that American soldiers had stolen U.S. government money — both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At a Sept. 30 really in Keene, during remarks on Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq and Iraqi government corruption, Trump segued abruptly into discussion of the cash spent by American authorities occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.
“They didn’t really want to fight for Iraq because Iraq is a corrupt government, you know. Remember when they were handing 50 million dollars of cash? Cash! They were going through Afghanistan paying off, I want to know who were the soldiers that are carrying cash of 50 million dollars? Cash! How stupid are we?,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t be surprised those soldiers, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cash didn’t get there, I have to be honest.”
Hicks did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about the September remarks.
Trump has painted himself as a champion of soldiers and veterans, and it is unusual for American politicians on the campaign trail to call out members of the military |
in determining if a bystander will or will not assist during certain situations. Meta-analysis data show that individualist societies contain loose bonds between individuals, causing individuals to have the notion to look for themselves causing an independence reward (Pozzoli, Ang, & Gini, 2012). This differs from non-individualist societies, because non-individualist societies have been shown to contain a closer community bond, thus causing an increase in bystanders and their wiliness to help during a certain situations (Pozzoli et al., 2012). Cultural differences and helping behavior can also contain social categories that cause a higher chance for individuals to intervene (Levine & Crowther, 2013). When a group of bystanders are part of shared social category of membership, they will have an increased chance of one of them intervening if both groups contain specific norms associated with their group (Levine & Crowther, 2013). However, despite the increase chance of assistance, group size can still affect intervention (Levine & Crowther, 2013).
Conclusion The bystander effect is a unique phenomenon related to social psychology that contains many different components related to the influencing of helping behavior. Since the bystander effects emergence, it has become one of the most prolific forms of social psychology and appears in nearly all social psychology undergraduate textbooks (Levine & Crowther, 2013). The bystander effect contains elements that ultimately provide plausible reasons as to why some choose to help or ignore certain situations. Typically, ones decision to assist is impacted heavily by diffusion of responsibility and other aspects of knowing when and if to help. Other components, like cultural differences and social situations can also determine the outcome, based on group size and the totality of the circumstance.
References
Aronson, E., Wilson, T., &Akert,R. (2013). Social Psychology (8th ed.). Upper Saddle, New Jersey:Pearson Education Inc.
Fischer, P., & Greitemeyer, T. (2013). The Positive Bystander Effect: Passive Bystanders Increase Helping in Situations With High Expected Negative Consequences for the Helper. Journal Of Social Psychology, 153(1), 1-5. doi:10.1080/00224545.2012.697931
Heroic Imagination Project. (2013). Bystander Effect and Diffusion of Responsibility. Retrieved from http://heroicimagination.org/public-resources/social-influence-forces/bystander-effect-and-diffusion/.
Levine, M., & Crowther, S. (2008). The responsive bystander: How social group membership and group size can encourage as well as inhibit bystander intervention. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 95(6), 1429-1439. doi:10.1037/a0012634
Pozzoli, T., Ang, R. P., & Gini, G. (2012). Bystanders’ Reactions to Bullying: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Personal Correlates Among Italian and Singaporean Students. Social Development, 21(4), 686-703. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9507.2011.00651.x Schwartz, S. H., & Gottlieb, A. (1976). Bystander reactions to a violent theft: Crime in Jerusalem. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 34(6), 1188-1199. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.34.6.1188'You should f*** her to make her realize she's gay.' He said this about me during a cast and crew'meet and greet' before we began filming, X Men: The Last Stand. I was eighteen years old. He looked at a woman standing next to me, ten years my senior, pointed to me and said: 'You should f*** her to make her realize she's gay.' He was the film's director, Brett Ratner.
I was a young adult who had not yet come out to myself. I knew I was gay, but did not know, so to speak. I felt violated when this happened. I looked down at my feet, didn't say a word and watched as no one else did either. This man, who had cast me in the film, started our months of filming at a work event with this horrific, unchallenged plea. He 'outed' me with no regard for my well-being, an act we all recognize as homophobic. I proceeded to watch him on set say degrading things to women. I remember a woman walking by the monitor as he made a comment about her 'flappy p****'.
We are all entitled to come into an awareness of our sexual orientation privately and on our own terms. I was young and although already a working actor for so long I had in many ways been insulated, growing up on film sets instead of surrounded by my peers. This public, aggressive outing left me with long standing feelings of shame, one of the most destructive results of homophobia. Making someone feel ashamed of who they are is a cruel manipulation, designed to oppress and repress. I was robbed of more than autonomy over my ability to define myself. Ratner's comment replayed in my mind many times over the years as I encountered homophobia and coped with feelings of reluctance and uncertainty about the industry and my future in it. The difference is that I can now assert myself and use my voice to to fight back against the insidious queer and transphobic attitude in Hollywood and beyond. Hopefully having the position I have, I can help people who may be struggling to be accepted and allowed to be who they are –to thrive. Vulnerable young people without my advantages are so often diminished and made to feel they have no options for living the life they were meant to joyously lead.
I got into an altercation with Brett at a certain point. He was pressuring me, in front of many people, to don a t-shirt with 'Team Ratner' on it. I said no and he insisted. I responded, 'I am not on your team.' Later in the day, producers of the film came to my trailer to say that I 'couldn't talk like that to him.' I was being reprimanded, yet he was not being punished nor fired for the blatantly homophobic and abusive behavior we all witnessed. I was an actor that no one knew. I was eighteen and had no tools to know how to handle the situation.
I have been a professional actor since the age of ten. I've had the good fortune to work with many honorable and respectful collaborators both behind and in front of the camera. But the behavior I'm describing is ubiquitous. They (abusers), want you to feel small, to make you insecure, to make you feel like you are indebted to them, or that your actions are to blame for their unwelcome advances.
When I was sixteen a director took me to dinner (a professional obligation and a very common one). He fondled my leg under the table and said, 'You have to make the move, I can't.' I did not make the move and I was fortunate to get away from that situation. It was a painful realization: my safety was not guaranteed at work. An adult authority figure for whom I worked intended to exploit me, physically. I was sexually assaulted by a grip months later. I was asked by a director to sleep with a man in his late twenties and to tell them about it. I did not. This is just what happened during my sixteenth year, a teenager in the entertainment industry.
Look at the history of what's happened to minors who've described sexual abuse in Hollywood. Some of them are no longer with us, lost to substance abuse and suicide. Their victimizers? Still working. Protected even as I write this. You know who they are; they've been discussed behind closed doors as often as Weinstein was. If I, a person with significant privilege, remain reluctant and at such risk simply by saying a person's name, what are the options for those who do not have what I have?
Let's remember the epidemic of violence against women in our society disproportionately affects low income women, particularly women of color, trans and queer women and indigenous women, who are silenced by their economic circumstances and profound mistrust of a justice system that acquits the guilty in the face of overwhelming evidence and continues to oppress people of color. I have the means to hire security if I feel threatened. I have the wealth and insurance to receive mental health care. I have the privilege of having a platform that enables me to write this and have it published, while the most marginalized do not have access to such resources. The reality is, women of color, trans and queer and indigenous women have been leading this fight for decades (forever actually). Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Winona LaDuke, Miss Major, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, to name a few. Misty Upham fought tirelessly to end violence against indigenous women, domestic workers and undocumented women. Misty was found dead at the bottom of a cliff three years ago. Her father, Charles Upham, just made a Facebook post saying she was raped at a party by a Miramax executive. The most marginalized have been left behind. As a cis, white lesbian, I have benefited and have the privileges I have, because of these extraordinary and courageous individuals who have led the way and risked their lives while doing so. White supremacy continues to silence people of color, while I have the rights I have because of these leaders. They are who we should be listening to and learning from.
These abusers make us feel powerless and overwhelmed by their empire. Let's not forget the sitting Supreme Court justice and President of the United States. One accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, whose testimony was discredited. The other proudly describing his own pattern of assault to an entertainment reporter. How many men in the media – titans of industry - need to be exposed for us to understand the gravity of the situation and to demand the fundamental safety and respect that is our right?
Bill Cosby was known to be predatory. The crimes were his, but many were complicit. Many more chose to look the other way. Harvey was known to be predatory. The crimes were his, but many were complicit. Many more chose to look the other way. We continue to celebrate filmmaker Roman Polanski, who was convicted of drugging and anally raping a young girl and who fled sentencing. A fugitive from justice. I've heard the industry decry Weinstein's behavior and vow to affect meaningful change. But let's be truthful: the list is long and still protected by the status quo. We have work to do. We cannot look the other way.
I did a Woody Allen movie and it is the biggest regret of my career. I am ashamed I did this. I had yet to find my voice and was not who I am now and felt pressured, because 'of course you have to say yes to this Woody Allen film.' Ultimately, however, it is my choice what films I decide to do and I made the wrong choice. I made an awful mistake.
I want to see these men have to face what they have done. I want them to not have power anymore. I want them to sit and think about who they are without their lawyers, their millions, their fancy cars, houses upon houses, their 'playboy' status and swagger.
What I want the most, is for this to result in healing for the victims. For Hollywood to wake up and start taking some responsibility for how we all have played a role in this. I want us to reflect on this endemic issue and how this power dynamic of abuse leads to an enormous amount of suffering. Violence against women is an epidemic in this country and around the world. How is this cascade of immorality and injustice shaping our society? One of the greatest risks to a pregnant woman's health in the United States is murder. Trans women of color in this country have a life expectancy of thirty-five. Why are we not addressing this as a society? We must remember the consequences of such actions. Mental health issues, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, to name a few.
What are we afraid to say and why can't we say it? Women, particularly the most marginalized, are silenced, while powerful abusers can scream as loudly as they want, lie as much as they want and continue to profit through it all.
This is a long awaited reckoning. It must be. It's sad that'codes of conduct' have to be enforced to ensure we experience fundamental human decency and respect. Inclusion and representation are the answer. We've learned that the status quo perpetuates unfair, victimizing behavior to protect and perpetuate itself. Don't allow this behavior to be normalized. Don't compare wrongs or criminal acts by their degrees of severity. Don't allow yourselves to be numb to the voices of victims coming forward. Don't stop demanding our civil rights. I am grateful to anyone and everyone who speaks out against abuse and trauma they have suffered. You are breaking the silence. You are revolution.This story takes place back in the early 1970s. At the time, about ninety percent of all of the LSD on the East Coast had been traced back to one laboratory- Bexley Hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Needless to say, the FBI wasn't terribly happy about this, and so they decided to make a raid. They called up the President of MIT, and told him that they would be arriving on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time, and to make sure that none of the students knew about it in advance. And the President thought about this for a little while, and then called up the Bexley Hall Housemaster and told him the same thing.
On the day of the raid, the FBI pulled up in front of the dorm in their black Lincoln Towncars, and saw to their surprise a giant banner strung over the Bexley Hall courtyard reading "Welcome FBI." Now, at this point, the agents were pretty sure that the raid was going to be pointless, but they got out of their cars anyway and walked into the courtyard. There, they found a nice painted set of footprints with a sign next to them: "Follow the footprints to the room you're looking for."
And the agents sighed, and shrugged, and followed the footprints into the dormitory,and up a flight of stairs. And around a corner, and down a flight of stairs, and down a hallway, and through a room, and up a flight of stairs and down two flights of stairs and through another doorway and around another corner and so on and so forth until finally they wound up in front of a door in the basement. Now, by this point the agents were starting to feel a little frustrated, and were not at all surprised to discover that the door they'd come all this way searching for was locked.
One of the agents got ready to ram down the door with his shoulder, and was just preparing to run at it when a door opened right next to them, and a sleepy student handed them a key. The disappointed agent tried the key in the lock, and sure enough, the door opened. Inside was a large room, empty of furniture, and freshly whitewashed. And there, in the center of the room, sat a plate of milk and cookies.
Now, at this point, the FBI agents were furious. These MIT students had been toying with them, and they were darn well going to make sure that they learned their lesson. So the agents started to take the place apart from the top down looking for drugs. They tore open sofa cushions, knocked over furniture, looking for any evidence they could find.
Finally, they made their way to the basement, and started taking up floorboards. And, sure enough, there they found a great chest, wrapped all around in inch-thick chains, and covered in padlocks. "Aha!" thought the agents. "Now we've got them!" So they called in the welding tools and the giant metal clippers, and they cut through the dozens of chains, and broke open the lock. They flung open the chest, and sitting inside were three marijuana seeds—exactly one fewer than the minimum needed for a conviction.
The FBI never came back to Bexley Hall. The LSD lab did shut down on its own, and moved off to California somewhere, but by then the Feds had learned that MIT students can take care of themselves.A 75-year-old disabled veteran has been sentenced to death due to a mandatory sentence involving marijuana possession.
Lee Carroll Brooker grew marijuana plants in his son’s backyard in Alabama for his own medical use. When Alabama officials found out, they arrested Brooker, and sent him to prison for life without the possibility for parole.
Vox.com reports:
How did this happen? Jesse Wegman explained for the New York Times:
[Brooker] said the plants were for his own medicinal use only — he suffers from multiple chronic ailments — and prosecutors did not dispute that.
Remarkably, they didn’t have to. Alabama, like three other states, mandates a life without parole sentence for simple possession of small amounts of marijuana by people with certain prior felony convictions — and Mr. Brooker had been convicted of a string of robberies twenty years earlier in Florida, crimes for which he served 10 years in prison. In such a case, the law doesn’t require prosecutors to prove any intent to sell the drug.
In Mississippi, 30 grams — barely one ounce — is enough to send someone to prison for the rest of his or her life, with no chance of release. Alabama’s cutoff is slightly higher, at one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, but that makes no more sense, and was no help to Mr. Brooker, whose plants weighed in at 2.8 pounds, including unusable parts like stalks and leaves.
So Brooker, an elderly man with disabilities, is now serving a life sentence for a string of robberies 20 years ago, for which he already served time, and marijuana possession.
It’s an incredible situation, not least because Brooker likely wouldn’t be in prison if he lived in one of the 24 states that allow people to use pot for medical purposes or four states that let people use the drug for any other reason.
Brooker’s situation is very rare — a minority of prisoners are in for drug offenses. But Brooker’s story shows how out of step drug laws can be with public opinion, especially since a majority of Americans agree marijuana should be legal. Even Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who’s notoriously conservative, called Brooker’s sentence “excessive and unjustified.” (The sentence was mandatory — so once prosecutors brought charges that triggered the sentence, judges were required to enforce it.)
There’s also research that suggests these tough sentences don’t deter drug trafficking. A 2014 study from Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago found there’s no good evidence that tougher punishments do a better job of reducing drug use and substance abuse than lighter penalties.
As extreme as the penalty may seem, the US Supreme Court earlier this week declined to hear a challenge to Brooker’s sentence. He had appealed his case, arguing that such a harsh punishment for marijuana violated his Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. With the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case, the sentence remains legal for now.Continue Reading Below Advertisement
But, after pancaking dozens of cities, a rag-tag group of humans cause each and every one of the alien ships to crash, the thousands of people who were no doubt crushed under each one a small price to pay for victory.
But We Forgot About...
Let's be generous and assume that every one of the alien city-destroying mother ships was downed. Do you have any idea how large a 15-mile-wide spaceship is? Each one is like a flying city, 1,000-stories high and about 100 blocks wide in every direction. And while New York may not have been designed to have giant spaceships fall on it, we have to imagine the space crafts had been designed with a contingency plan for gravity.
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We're not sure how many troops and crew were on board each, but we know each one housed an entire air force worth of those little fighter craft.
Speaking of which, any aliens who happen to be sitting in one of those crafts is probably going to make it. We saw earlier that an alien shot out of the sky was able to survive. And by survive we mean it hot wired a human brain and had a conversation with the fucking President after going through a crash-landing, a cold cock delivered by none other than Will Smith, and being cut in half on an operating table.
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Take into account the weaponry the aliens will be able to recover from their downed ships, and we have a District 9 situation on our hands... only we're the ones herded into camps.Africa has the world’s oldest and largest written languages known to mankind, a long ancient history of written language and graphic history, which is today part of a broader global history of literacy. The continent has contributed substantially to the global history of written languages of today, which has largely been ignored.
Examples of ancient writing in Africa are the Ge’ez script of Ethiopia, the most ancient African script still in use, the Nsibidi of Nigeria, Adrinka of the Akan people of Ghana, the Tifnagh of the Tuareg people, and Val and Mende of Liberia and Sierra Leone,( evidence of its Liberian/Sierra Leonean age date from Goundaka, Mali, that date to 3000 B.C). Scripts from the Proto Saharan of The Sudan, Aire Soroba of Mali, and many others.
For thousands of years, Africans artists have included writing and graphic symbols into their art, and created some works of art which show genius, in objects dated from ancient times. Even today, African artists still use a diffusion of different forms of letters, words and symbols to create meanings which go back historically and merge ancient with modern.
In art work, politically, socially, and culturally, art work often had scripts/symbols to show how power acquired through the development of specialized knowledge and skills, such as healing with herbal medicine, could assist communication with the spirit world. Artists for example used symbolic materials to show power and to tell stories of ancient times.
Ancient Nsibidi of SE Nigeria also in SS Nigeria and W.Central Africa (5000BC)
Source: https://www.pinterest.com/nappybrain/bwandungiafrican-writing-systems/
Ancient African writing is the oldest system of writing in the world, pre-dating European, Greek, by at least 2000 years respectively. Nsibidi and most other written African languages are known to have developed outside Arab, or European influences.
The oldest written scripts ever discovered are what called Proto Saharan, found by the Kharga oasis in what was known as Nubia in present day Sudan, so called by archaeologists. It dates from about 5000BC. Greek was not fully in use until 1400BC and Asian languages until 3000BC, African languages are several centuries older than Asian written forms.
Ancient Akan of Ghana called Adrinka
Source: http://www.anotherafrica.net/art-culture/typography-language-writing-systems-afrikan-alphabets
The dominance of colonialism and European languages, taught that Africa had no written languages, that African civilization was inferior, less refined, amongst other things, until they, the Europeans arrived on our shores; this is far from the truth. Africa has the world’s oldest and largest collection of written languages, known to man! This also goes to dispel the notion that Africa was uncivilised or barbaric before the Westerner came.
Dr Clyde Winters, the author of the Ancient Black Civilizations of Asia confirms that there was an Ancient civilisation in ancient Africa which pre-dates Asian civilizations, known as the Proto Saharan in Nubia present day Sudan. These languages were very well developed and were often used by priests and secret societies.
Old Nubian (800AD-1500AD)
Source: http://www.taneter.org/writing.html
Examples of this developed system of writing range from inscribing the body, sacred scripts and depictions of works of art. In sacred scripts, graphic inscription and specialist forms of writing were usually done by highly trained practitioners such as healers who healed with herbal medicine, poets, or orators as Africans know them, scribes and so on.
What I’ve stated above shows that African have a rich history to celebrate and take pride in. Africans have to look to our rich and varied past, not just our art, and oral history to find a source and basis for our development and progress, but also learning from others about how we can reclaim that which has been lost, only then will we form a basic foundation for moving forward.
As the saying goes,” if you don’t know where you come from, you can’t know where you’re going.” “Know a man’s history and you know the man”. Asians have as we all know; a very well developed and continuous written language systems, but African languages as we can see are older than theirs! What does this mean for us, as a people?
Written language is the vehicle for continuous self expression, learning, growth, achievement. It binds people together, breaks down barriers, is a vehicle of communication, and so on and its potential is huge! We can all see the benefits of social media, books, libraries, schools and universities, as sources of knowledge, which can be defended or refuted, as the case may be, and what they achieve.
In order to take pride in ourselves and to truly develop we must investigate our past and teach our children to do the same. We had a well developed ancient medical, social, political, economic, cultural and traditional systems, our ceremonies, festivals, markets, civilizations, social norms, and history all come alive and are truly exciting, so we should investigate them, but have we dug into and used them?.
Look at our ancient medical systems for example, westerners have used and are still using our ancient traditional knowledge systems, and making a fortune from them, something we should be doing, if we had our heads well screwed on. Unless we are willing to make the effort, we will end up going on a merry go round to nowhere, we won’t develop politically, socially or economically, and we will continue to be used/exploited by others.
Men and women of wisdom and true intelligence, (intelligence is not just about book work) will always seek to know about their past and use what they have found to achieve growth as a people.
This is a challenge to all of us Africans! Its time we awoke from our slumber and challenged all those who seek to dehumanize us by insinuating that our history is inferior. They do this because it suits Westerners political agendas of exploitation.
Like this: Like Loading...The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has officially upheld Hawaii’s state shark fin ban.
Eileen Sobeck, the agency’s assistant administrator for fisheries, conveyed that message in a March 9 letter to Carty Chang, acting director for the state’s Department of Land and Natural Resources.
DLNR confirmed Thursday that it received the letter.
In December, then Land Board Chairman William Aila had asked NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service about potential preemption of Hawaii’s law. The law makes it illegal to possess, sell, trade or distribute shark fins.
Flickr.com
Sobeck told Carty last month that her agency agreed with Hawaii’s finding that the state law will have “minimal impact on federally managed fishermen” in Hawaii and does not “unlawfully burden them.”
NOAA had previously challenged state shark fin bans, suggesting that federal fisheries law might overrule the state laws.
Hawaii, the first state to enact a state-based ban on the possession and trade of shark fins, was the last to receive approval.
Oceana, an international ocean conservation and advocacy organization, is pleased with the ruling.
“NOAA’s decision to recognize state shark fin trade bans is critical. By blocking the trade of shark fins imported and exported in the U.S., we help reduce the global demand for fins,” Oceana’s vice president for U.S. oceans, Jacqueline Savitz, told Civil Beat via email. “The trade of shark fins is what drives the cruel and unsustainable practice of shark finning. It is estimated that up to 73 million sharks are killed annually for their fins, to supply demand for the Chinese delicacy shark fin soup.”NEW YORK – Contrary to earlier reports, Sony told Wired.com Wednesday night that its upcoming PlayStation Vita handheld gaming system will not be limited to one online account per device.
Speaking to Wired.com at a press event in Manhattan, Sony associate brand marketing manager Crystal MacKenzie said that PlayStation Network accounts will be connected to the Vita's proprietary memory cards, not the hardware itself. Though you will have to restore the Vita to its default factory settings in order to change the account on each memory card, you can use multiple cards to access multiple PSN accounts on a single Vita system.
"Your PSN ID is bonded to your memory card and your memory card is bonded to your Vita," MacKenzie said. "So if you wanted to change different PSN users but use the same memory card, you would need to go factory reset."
Customers will be able to swap cards to use different PSN IDs on the same system, MacKenzie said. If you have more than one memory card, you can register a different PlayStation Network account on each.
"You can also use them both on the same PSN account as well," she said.
Earlier this week, a number of gaming websites reported that Sony would support only one PlayStation Network account per Vita system, disappointing many American fans who used alternative accounts to purchase European and Japanese games on Sony's last handheld system, the PlayStation Portable.
Sony will release PlayStation Vita on February 22 in the U.S. It will retail for $250 (with Wi-Fi) and $300 (with Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity).
Update: Since the publication of this story, Sony has retracted its statement and said that Vita will only support a single user ID.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
Alan Hansen and David Moyes have led a group of Scottish football figures calling for the country to vote 'No' to independence.
In a joint statement, 16 players from all eras of the game called on "every patriotic Scot to help maintain Scotland's place in the United Kingdom which has served Scotland so well".
The squad, which includes Lisbon lion Bertie Auld, and former Rangers players Barry Ferguson and Ally McCoist, is "managed" by former Old Firm managers Walter Smith (Rangers) and Billy McNeill (Celtic).
Scottish Labour's deputy leader Anas Sarwar told the Daily Record newspaper: "These men have played for the national team, have led Scotland and are now saying what they believe is best for Scotland.
"This shows that there is no shortage of passion and patriotism from those that are voting No."
As well as David Moyes and Alan Hansen, the full line-up includes Alex McLeish, Jim Leighton, Willie Miller, Paddy Crerand, Davie Provan, Barry Ferguson, Bertie Auld, Denis Law, Ally McCoist, Derek Johnstone, Murdo MacLeod, Ian Durrant, John Brown and Frank McAvennie.
The players' statement says: "We are proud Scots who have been proud to represent our country around the world. When Scotland calls, we answer.
"We are proud that Scotland has always stood on its own two feet but we also believe that Scotland stands taller because we are part of the United Kingdom.
"We urge every patriotic Scot to help maintain Scotland's place in the United Kingdom which has served Scotland so well."
The statement has been released as Scotland prepares to open its Euro 2016 qualifying campaign against world champions Germany on Sunday.
Speaking at an event to launch the statement in Glasgow, football commentator and Better Together supporter Archie Macpherson called on the No side to inject more heart into its arguments during the final days of campaigning.
He said: "It has been a logical and rational presentation of facts on the currency, North Sea oil, pensions and so on, which are absolutely vital, but it has got to be backed up with conviction and passion.
"So it is not just reasoned arguments - you have got to reach out and communicate with people."
Mr Macpherson, who recently spoke out for the union at a rally in Dundee, added: "All these figures played with passion - people on the terracing responded with passion, passion was at the core of football in Scotland, and it was only passion that kept us going against bigotry.
"And they are backing the last home stretch passionately and the people on the terracing will recognise that, and I am sure they will go with them."
Mr Sarwar, who also attended the Soccer World event, said the support of the players was a recognition of the fact that the referendum "is not a vote on whether Scotland is a nation or not".
"Scotland is a nation, it is a proud nation, as these players demonstrate," he said.
"Those who are voting No in this referendum aren't doing it from a position of thinking less about their country, they are doing it from a position of patriotism, passion and love for their country."Matched Betting – Risk Free, Tax Free Profit – Updated 2019
On the Summer break of my second year at university I made myself a promise, if I could earn £250 a week from matched betting then I wouldn’t get a job and would spend the next few years building my own business. I succeeded and never looked back.
At the time I had never come across anything like matched betting before. I always dreamed that one day I will start an awesome company that would be the answer to all my fantasies and makes me a multi-millionaire. But it was only a pipe dream. In my more truthful moments, I knew that it would involve a tremendous amount of work with a great deal of risk attached and no guarantee of reward.
Matched betting is nothing like that. In fact, it sounds way too good to be true: a simple system where the profit is totally risk and tax free. With an hourly rate rewarding enough to make even the most handsomely paid lawyer’s eyes water. As I said, it sounds too good to be true.
But it is true.
If you live in the UK you will have seen adverts from bookmakers everywhere, offering stuff like:
Sign up to William Hill and get a £50 free bet.
Apply to Bet365 and get a £200 bet.
This “free bet” must have a value to someone. I’m not a gambler and personally don’t want to bet, but surely there is someone out there who does. Is there a way to pass on or sell the free bet to someone who would use it? Well as a matter of fact there is a very easy way to do this. Betting exchanges are marketplaces where people buy and sell (the technical terms are to back and lay) bets.
By using the “free bet” to buy a bet at the bookmaker and then selling the same bet on the exchange, we can be sure that regardless of the bet’s outcome we will be able to keep most of the value of the free bet.
Matched Betting – A Worked Through Example
Once you understand matched betting it is very simple, but originally getting your head round it can be quite tough. The simplest way to explain it is to follow along with me as I actually do some matched betting. I already have accounts at most bookies, so for the sake this article I introduce a friend.
My favorite sign-up bonus is at Bet365 and a quick check of their website shows that the offer is still there. Simply deposit £20-£200 and they will double your balance. Let’s take a look at the terms and conditions.
After signing up to Bet365, if you deposit £200 and enter a bonus code they will give you a £200 bonus bringing the balance to £400. That’s free money! But there is a downside. You need to jump through some hoops before you can take any of the money out. In this case you need to have placed bets totalling at least £1,400 (3 times the deposit plus bonus). That sounds like a lot but let’s work through and see what it takes.
We signed up and immediately received an email with the offer code in it. After depositing, we entered the code and the bonus was added immediately.
You can see from the screenshot that there is a bonus of £200 added to the account. To activate it I need to place £200 worth of bets (the deposit). And then to withdraw total bets of £1,200 need to be made.
When buying a bet on bet365 we want to choose one that can be sold for similar or lower odds at Betfair. This used to take a lot of manual searching but now there are plenty of calculators online that do all the hard work for you. I headed to the free odds comparison service at Oddsmonkey to search for a match. You need to sign up for a free account to be able to access it.
I am looking for a bet that has low odds, which will reduce the amount of money I need to deposit at Betfair. But they need to be over 1.5 as that is a requirement from the terms and conditions. I also want a bet that is happening today, because I am lazy and want to make my money as quickly as possible.
Note: If you use this link when signing up, there’s a £20 free bet at Betfair too
Crawley Town v Gillingham stood out. The odds you can bet at are 2.15, and you can trade them off at 2.12 on Betfair.
Think about this for a second: you place a £10 bet at bet365 and ‘lay’ a £10 bet at Betfair. If the bet wins you will get £21.5 (10 x 2.15) from bet365 but only have to pay out £21.2 (10*2.12) at Betfair. A 30p profit, on top of the free bet! Unfortunately, you also have to pay a commission to Betfair which erodes that profit, but you are still reclaiming most of the value from the bet.
Now let’s place the bets.
At Bet365, I had to place the balance in two £200 bets. One with my own deposit and once again with the bonus funds.
The simplest thing to do now would be to lay (sell) £400 at Betfair. That is risk free, but it does mean that we’d make more money if the bet wins at Betfair. If you want to find out the exact amount to lay to make the same amount regardless of outcome Oddsmonkey has a handy calculator.
I am pretty experienced with matched betting so I decided to guestimate the amount to bet based on how much I wanted the bet to win at Betfair. If the bet wins at Bet365 I will have to make another bet in order to finish the £1 |
carefully crafted this roster to maintain maximum flexibility, so overpaying Sully would go against everything he's been building toward. If that were to happen, then he almost has no choice but to let him walk. In that scenario, who do they replace him with?
As Jackie Mac points out, Sully does certain things better than anyone else on this Celtics team. His career-high 8.6 rebounds per game leads the team by a comfortable margin, so you have to question if an undersized team that struggles on the glass can afford to lose Sullinger.
On the offensive end, Sullinger's scoring may be down this season, but that's a result of his usage rate declining, which is a function of how coach Brad Stevens has designed the offense. He's still as capable as anyone on this team of scoring easy buckets in the post, particularly when a slashing Isaiah Thomas draws a double-team or forces opponents to switch on a pick-and-roll to create a mismatch in the paint for Sully.
There were times earlier this season when Sullinger was coming off the bench when his minutes were in flux, and he seemed in danger of falling out of the rotation. That's no longer the case, as he's been averaging a double-double over 27.5 minutes per game since the All-Star break.
Is the 23-year-old's recent strong play a sign of development, or is he simply more motivated to finish strong with a big payday in his sights? If he didn't lose weight last summer like he was asked to do, how motivated will he be to improve his conditioning after he gets paid? This is a risk that the Celtics need to factor in when determining whether or not to re-sign him.
Sullinger never did develop into the stretch four that the team envisioned when he was given free reign to launch shots from beyond the arc the last two seasons. His outside shooting has actually regressed to a rather pitiful 25.3 percent from three-point range, crushing any hopes that he was turning into a reliable floor-spacing big. Thankfully he has cut his attempts from deep by more than half this season, so at least he's learning what his limitations are. However, if he's not able to stretch the floor then he may not be an ideal fit in the system that Stevens wants to run. That alone may make the team hesitant to lock him up long-term.
Financially the Celtics should have no trouble affording Sullinger. They currently have just over $51 million in salary committed to next season, which doesn't factor in non-guaranteed contracts for Amir Johnson and Jonas Jerebko that could free an additional $17 million if they aren't brought back or are used as trade bait. With the cap projected to eclipse $90 million next season, there should be plenty of room to bring back Sullinger and still afford a max free agent.
Bringing Sully back shouldn't prohibit the Celtics from making a major move next summer, but they still need to be cautious of overspending on a player with questionable conditioning that isn't a perfect fit for this system. Ideally they will target an upgrade at his position using their plentiful cap space and treasure trove of assets to land a star. Using Sullinger in a sign-and-trade could end up being part of that plan.
If Ainge ends up striking out again on his quest to land a star that would take this team into contender territory, then that could increase the chances of Sullinger returning. There are worse fates than keeping this young core together while also adding pieces around them to push them to the cusp of contender status. It's not the quick fix fans are hoping for, but it's still a step in the right direction.The Cross Insurance Center on Main St. in Bangor held a political rally Friday, Oct. 7 in backing of current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Supporters lined the streets before the doors opened at 9 a.m. for front-row views of the event’s speakers.
Speaking on Clinton’s behalf was Bernie Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont and former 2016 Democratic presidential candidate. Community members also spoke about Hillary’s campaign, insisting that she is the only hope for the nation. Democratic legislators Emily Cain and Troy Jackson also spoke in support of Clinton at the event.
At 10 a.m., the rally was brought to task by several speakers discussing the current issues in their lives and how Clinton’s campaign could have an effect on those issues.
Anna Chelsea, a field organizer in Bangor for the Clinton campaign, opened the discussion by explaining how the Clinton team plans to win the upcoming election.
“I believe that we can win. And here at the campaign, we believe that we will win. If every single one of you spends a few hours knocking on doors and making calls, we can change the course of this election. We can ensure that we elect Hillary Clinton,” Chelsea said.
Chelsea explained that Clinton is the leader “that we need,” and encouraged the audience to do their part in Maine to help the campaign.
Emily Cain, currently trying to capture the House seat in Maine’s Second Congressional District, entered the stage and started off by mentioning the recent advertisements run on television by the Wall Street special interest groups and National Republicans. She claimed the advertisements were “twisting the truth about public health policies in Maine” and that “it is shameful.”
Cain discussed the critical issue of Maine families working longer hours and receiving less pay, cutting their sense of financial security. “This is the result of deliberate choices by people in Congress who put themselves first.” Cain emphasized that the Clinton campaign is promising a rise in the minimum wage, an issue that would impact Maine families greatly.
Cain ended her speech by stating, “We need a president who will put Mainers first.”
She then introduced the next speaker, Troy Jackson, former Democratic State Senator from Maine’s 35th District.
Jackson touched on how important the current election is. “There is a lot of frustration, there’s a lot of anger up here in Maine and I understand it, because I’m frustrated too.” He mentioned the decrease in available jobs in Maine and the outrageous student debt, adding that if Mainers want those issues addressed, Clinton is the candidate to vote for.
Jackson told a story from when he was eleven years old. He would spend a lot of time with his father, who was a trucker. The pair once went to a strike for loggers — one hundred men striking because they felt they deserved more money for participating in such a dangerous occupation. Jackson said the landowner refused to help or talk to the men on strike — he simply said, “Back to work for what I’m paying you for or I’ll replace you all in the morning.”
“That mentality of having the power over people is what is ruining this country, in my opinion,” Jackson added.
The final speaker of the morning was Sanders. A former Democratic presidential candidate, he has since withdrawn from the race and is now supporting Clinton. Sanders started the conversation by thanking Jackson for speaking and thanking the audience for their attendance and support for the Clinton campaign.
“People are angry — and they have a right to be angry,” Sanders stated.
“Let me pick up right where Troy left off. Essentially what he was talking about was power. He was talking about the fact that we have millions of people in this country who are working longer hours for lower wages. People are worried sick about the future of their kids, people can’t afford decent childcare; people can’t afford to send their kids to college; people can’t afford to take two weeks off for vacation. That’s the reality for millions of people in this country,” Sanders said.
Sanders started to explain Clinton’s campaign by talking about the criminalization and laws regarding marijuana. He said that in the Clinton campaign, there are plans to revise these laws and relocate incarcerated individuals as to not target those with minor drug crimes that are unjustly in prison or those with drug addictions who need medical help instead of being incarcerated.
Sanders touched on the inappropriate prices in the pharmaceutical industry — people are not receiving the medication, prescriptions and treatment they are in need of due to an inability to afford them. In Clinton’s plan, they will fight to lower these costs by adjusting current healthcare plans to make them more affordable, ensuring required treatments for individuals.
Sanders also brought up Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and how his business exemplifies the corruption Sanders and his allies have decried.
“You and I and Hillary Clinton, we’ve got a bit of a different vision for America than does Mr. Trump. You know, I’ve been running around the country as all of you know for a year and a half talking about a corrupt tax system, talking about a rigged economy, talking about a corrupt political system. And in one day, Donald Trump did more to make my case than I did in a year and a half. You want to get angry? There’s something to get angry about. A multi-billionaire, a guy who has mansions all over the world, lives in luxury, has wealth that the 99 percent have no clue what it’s about and this guy pays nothing in federal income taxes,” Sanders said.
Sanders emphasized Trump’s statements that he believes he’s a “genius” for not paying those taxes. He added that Trump also doesn’t understand why the wealthy have to pay taxes on top of the middle and lower class already paying them.
Sanders and the Clinton campaign, if elected, plan to start making Trump and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.
Sanders highlighted the idea of democracy, stating, “What democracy is not about is a handful of billionaires buying elections and that is exactly what is happening today.”
Sanders identified some of the key focuses of the Clinton campaign — raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure to create more jobs, focusing on the quality and equality of education and fronting the current climate change issues.
Sanders also emphasized that if elected, Clinton will ensure that issues such as racism and equality for women will also be a main focus.
He ended the rally by stating, “Politics does not end on election day. What we have got to do for the next month is work as hard as we can to see that Hillary Clinton becomes the next president of the United States. No one can do it alone — the powers of Wall St., the powers of the big money interest are so huge that the only way we transform this country is to make sure that millions of people get involved in the process. This great country belongs to all of us — not just the one percent. Let us go out in the next month and fight. Let us stand together.”When one of your own is in trouble, you reach out a helping hand. Despite his achievements, Harry Redknapp has never found a place in the hearts of the Spurs faithful. Last night it was more than an outstretched arm for support. No, he was firmly clasped to our bosom to feel safe and warm. We stroked his hair and soothed, “There, there.”
It’s taken this little misunderstanding with the revenue for him to become one of us. For the very first time the prolonged chanting of his name echoed loud and long round the whole ground. Last week I wondered in these pages how his risky defence of being a loveable cockney scallywag would play with the court. There’s no doubt about the verdict of the White Hart Lane jurors. ‘One Harry Redknapp’. ‘Harry Redknapp’s blue and white army’, ‘Harry Redknapp, he pays what he wants’.Listening to the people around me, views ranged from the apathetic (Tax? So what?) – to the downright supportive. ‘Just like me’ chuckled one regular. I don’t know what he does for a living but I strongly suspect he’s not in high finance, yet there was identification and common ground. Backs to the wall, we’re there. He’s done so much for us, 2 points from 8 games then 3rd in the table, now it’s our turn.
And how Harry loved it, at one point in the second half leaping from the bench barely a moment after the Park Lane’s opening syllable. Bit too quick off the mark there, H. Successfully combining the personas of streetwise East End geezer made good and yer loveable uncle who slips the kids a fiver on his way home from a family Sunday lunch, Redknapp is in reality hard as nails. That’s not a criticism – I don’t want a shrinking violet running my club. Rather, it’s a major element of what makes him a good manager. Yet there’s always been a kernel of truth in Harry the football man. He wants his team to play football, proper football as Spurs do, and he relishes the aesthetics of the art. Sure he wants success but not at any cost. Clubs across the Premier League do all they can to alienate supporters, yet we are integral to the game and Harry knows this. Being a football man, he understands that to be truly a part of a club, to have really made it, you have to have the warmth and support of the fans. That’s why last night, a routine win not without its problems, meant something special to him.
So to the game, which was by turns business as usual and one of the most unreal that I have ever seen. Notice how cunningly I’ve avoided the cliché ‘game of two halves’ there, but it was. The first was bursting full of inventive movement, crowned by two top class goals that thrilled us on a chilly night without ever quite reaching the heights of a few of the pre-Christmas performances.
The second was decidedly odd, the closest you will ever see a professional team doing the stroll. Spurs were unable to increase the tempo or establish any rhythm, even after Bale’s goal, mooching around at the edge of their box then a single touch to shift the ball into place and the shot sliding across the keeper from an angle, fast becoming his trademark. For a time, we did nothing. Kranjcar was hopelessly ineffective, Adebayor loitering without intent, the crowd murmuring in polite conversation like the interval at a West End play until the Park Lane broke the tedium with songs for each player (two for Scott Parker, who’s worth it), just like the old days.
Wigan eventually sussed that they might be able to do something here. It took them a while. We were going through the motions and created little but the disruptions due to Walker’s and Rafa’s injuries meant that although there were good players on the field, there was some uncertainty about their positioning that even a side as poor as Wigan got round to exploiting. Hence the air of unreality. It felt as if our opponents could have played for a week without scoring. Yet my brain was trying desperately to tell me that after their deflected goal, any of those crosses whizzing across the box could have easily gone in. ‘Worry damn you worry, like you have done for the last 40 years!!’ but no, we sailed serenely on. Never going to score… Back to reality – a comfortable win but we should never have let them have a sniff of so much as a shot let alone the goal.
We opened brightly, our movement, passing and interplay made much easier by Wigan’s mistaken set-up. Five at the back meant they sat back and waited for us to come on to them rather than scrapping it out in midfield where a five could have restricted the space. Their only tactical success was keeping Moses wide left where he prevented a less energetic than usual Walker from going forward too much. Walker had several intense conversations with the bench about his approach, so staying back was probably on advice from the coaches.
Without Lennon it was down to Benny to provide width. Many of our attacks came down the left with Bale and Kranjcar roaming free as birds to and fro. Despite their back five, it was straightforward to get the ball into the box but we could not quite find our man with a series of crosses. Modric and Kranjcar were prominent. This game suited Niko because he didn’t have to concern himself too much with defensive duties and he duly delivered in this 45, always a threat although as ever there were a few too many flicks.
Just when it seemed Wigan had weathered the worst, Modric conjured a wonderful goal. His curling ball to the far post was a pass, not a cross but a precisely judged arc of beauty and danger, precisely finding its target in a packed penalty area. Bale off the ground and the ball on his chest, one touch in mid-air past the keeper. No wonder Luka looked so pleased with himself as he trotted back. Bale scores great goals, but let’s never, ever take this thing for granted. Instead, marvel in awestruck stupefaction, then leap about with joy unconfined. Breathtaking.
Luka’s goal was not so bad itself. Marvellous too, one touch, swivel then bang into the corner, a foot above the ground all the way and seemingly defying the laws of physics by gaining speed as it flew. Kaboul had a couple of headers from corners, one saved, one off the line. Adebayor headed over, others lined up to take a turn at shooting just over. At the other end, Friedel tried to keep warm. Kudos to the loyal hundred or so Wigan fans who travelled. True fans who ironically started the ‘ole’ when their team put four passes together. Their team were hopelessly demoralised and will have to transform themselves if they are to stand any chance of survival. Some comfort therefore in the distinction of bringing on a second half sub who was smaller than their mascot, surely the first time this has ever happened in the Premier League and I was there.
Kaboul dominated at the back. Ledley looked slightly off the pace in the first half but reminded us of his brilliance with a superb saving tackle/lunge in the second to prevent a gilt-edged chance. Cameron Lancaster came on for his debut, bouncy without touching the ball much. Good luck to him in the future.
Parker was busy and solid. If anyone needed reminding of his understated leadership and influence, in the middle of the second half Walker was hurt. Parker alerted the bench then whilst play had stopped for a Wigan man to have treatment, he told Walker that if he was injured, he should go off. Walker wasn’t keen – he’s so motivated, that lad – so as play restarted Parker told Livermore to tuck in right side to protect him. A few minutes later, Walker saw sense and saved himself from further injury. Parker sorted that, a on the field leader.
I can’t say that I’m overwhelmed as the transfer window closes. Saha and Nelsen both bring short-term experience to the run-in. I had hoped for more but no one was selling. For us it’s top class or nothing and none of the top teams have done any serious business, surely indicative of a stagnant market. Redknapp will get the best from Saha, who will be able to play in sharp bursts and have good service rather than being flogged to death as the sole recognised striker. Pav had to go – he was as disenchanted with the club as I am with him and we’ve obtained a decent price. Although he’s not playing well at the moment, I worry if Adebayor has a bad injury.
Nelsen was a real surprise. He brings experience, not a commodity to be sniffed at, but no pace and he will be well down the pecking order if King stays at least half fit.Getty Trump considering Palin to lead Veterans Affairs
Donald Trump is considering tapping former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as his secretary of Veterans Affairs, according to two Trump transition sources.
Palin was an early endorser of Trump, throwing her support to him before the Iowa caucuses, making her one of his highest profile backers at the time. “Are you ready for the leader to make America great again?” she said then.
Palin, who, like Trump, has been a lightning rod for liberal criticism, campaigned for Trump through the campaign’s final days, including in Michigan.
Among her chief competitors for the Veterans Affairs post, according to one transition source, is former Sen. Scott Brown, another relatively early Trump backer, who visited the president-elect in Trump Tower earlier this month.
Brown acknowledged his interest to reporters afterward, calling the VA “the toughest job in the Cabinet.”
“We obviously spoke about my passion and his passion, which [is] veterans and veterans issues,” Brown said, adding that Trump was “going to obviously take my application, interest under consideration.”
Trump also met this week with Pete Hegseth, a Fox News contributor and former head of a veterans advocacy group, Concerned Veterans for America.
Another name that has circulated is Rep. Jeff Miller, who has served as chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.
Trump aides have discussed the possibility of Palin joining the administration for months, in part because they believe she was an effective surrogate during the campaign, rallying Trump's supporters.
Palin has had conversations with Trump's transition team, a Palin aide confirmed.
But two people close to the transition cast doubt on whether she'll ultimately be tapped for an administration job.
Palin has previously been linked to a possible spot as head of the Department of the Interior, including on an early document that was circulated among transition officials.
Steve Bannon, who will serve as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, has been among Palin’s cheerleaders for years, featuring her in a 2011 documentary called The Undefeated.
After Bannon was named chief strategist, Palin defended him from his critics in a lengthy Facebook post in mid-November, writing that Bannon "is particularly bright on the Leftist media's radar because they can not handle the fact he's also from their arena but has been enormously more influential than his peers."
"The Steve Bannon I know is a passionate defender of freedom and he lives by example. He's a patriot; a military veteran and proud Army dad," Palin wrote.
Last year at CPAC, Palin gave a speech in which she criticized the VA and called for reforms at the department.
"We can't wait for D.C. to fix their bureaucratic blunders. This bureaucracy is killing our vets. They wait for months. They wait for years to get treatment at the VA and they're losing hope," she said.
Ken Vogel and Alex Isenstadt contributed.This image was lost some time after publication.
"Run, Lawrence, run!" That's the blog comment that Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig received after a brief mention of Congressman Tom Lantos's retirement. Could he? A Daily Kos blogger thinks it's plausible, and a majority of readers polled say they'd vote for him. Lessig is intensely popular in Silicon Valley's geek-thinker circles. But he's a virtual unknown among most voters in the South Bay district Lantos represents. Still, Lessig stands a chance of boosting his profile by tackling the issue of corruption — not the tired political charge, but the larger systemic issues that underlie the rot in our political system. He will deliver a speech on the subject this Thursday. If he has intentions to make the law, not just study it, then that occasion is as good as any to announce a run.Trypanosoma irwini is a blood parasite of koalas.[1] First discovered in 2009 by Linda M. McInnes and her peers, it was named in honor of Steve Irwin, "The Crocodile Hunter".[2] The study done by McInnes et al. was the first to describe a Trypanosoma species from koalas.
Taxonomic summary [ edit ]
Vertebrate host: Koalas ( Phascolarctos cinereus )
) Invertebrate host: None currently known
Type location: New South Wales, Australia
Other locations: A range of locations in Queensland, Australia
Site of infection: blood
Host [ edit ]
Map of koala distribution
The six main morphologies of trypanosomatids
The koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) is distributed in patches throughout the eastern regions of Australia.[3] The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) listed the koala as potentially vulnerable in 1992, and the New South Wales Threatened Species Conservation Act of 1995 and the Queensland Nature Conservation Regulation Act of 2006 categorized the koala as vulnerable to extinction in New South Wales and Queensland.
Over the years, the koala population has experienced a loss of genetic diversity through population bottlenecks and founder effects. To combat the loss in diversity, IUCN has released captive koalas into the wild to reintroduce the species. Nonetheless, a significant reduction in the koala population over the past 200 years is apparent.[4]
Description [ edit ]
The vector for this parasite is currently unknown, although trypanosome vectors are generally blood-eating arthropods such as mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, mites, and flies. It is likely that the life cycle of T. irwini is similar to that of other Trypanosomes: alternating between sexual (vector host) and asexual (vertebrate host). T. irwini was found in the blood of koalas with the trypomastigote morphology.
Measurements determined from nine T. irwini trypomastigotes[2] Feature Observed range(μm) Mean ± s.e.(μm) Total length 32.1–38.7 36.6±0.7 Breadth 1.9–4.5 3.0±0.3 PK 3.0–52 3.6±0.3 KN 6.0–12.1 10.3±0.6 NA 8.4–16.2 11.9±0.8 FF 8.6–12.8 10.3±0.9
Total length: body length measured along mid-line including free flagellum (total length)
Breadth: maximum breadth measured at nucleus level (including undulating membrane)
PK: distance between the posterior end and the kinetoplast
KN: distance between the kinetoplast and posterior edge of the nucleus
NA: distance between the anterior edge of the nucleus and the anterior end of the body
FF: length of the free flagellum
Phylogeny [ edit ]
Phylogeny[2] analysis of the 18S rDNA and gGADPH loci that T. Irwini is genetically closest to Trypanosoma bennetti, which is an avian trypanosome. Further comparison of the 18S rDNA sequences against the data available in the Genbank shows that T. irwini can be grouped with Trypanosoma minasense, which is a trypanosome of neotropical primates collected from Australian marsupials.
Pathogenicity [ edit ]
The pathogenicity of Trypanosoma irwini is unclear.
Diagnosis [ edit ]
Blood smears show Trypanosoma irwini parasites with physical characteristics resembling the trypomastigote stage of other well-known trypanosomatids. These organisms are long and thin, consisting of a pointy posterior and a long free flagellum. They have an undulating membrane, a kinetoplast, and a nucleus.
In vitro culture [ edit ]
This parasite has not yet been successfully cultured in vitro.
Symptoms [ edit ]
According to the study done by McInnes et al., the sentinel koala exhibited signs of depression, weakness, pale mucous membrane, and keratoconjunctivitis. Other clinical findings include anemia, and cytological exam of bone marrow shows erythroid hyperplasia. The koala examined for the study was euthanized due to liver and kidney failure. A post-mortem examination revealed osteochondromas in the ribs, lymphoid atrophy, extensive periacinar necrosis of the liver, interstitial nephritis, extramedullary hematopoiesis of the spleen, and other problems. While not all of these clinical and pathological findings are consistent with symptoms and signs of trypanosomiasis, those that suggest extravascular hemolysis and generalized immune reaction are.
Gallery [ edit ]
Trypomastigote in a Giemsa stained blood smear. Scale bar represents 10 micrometers
Phylogenetic analysis of Trypanosoma ssp. and T. irwini using partial sequence analysis of 18S rDNA and gGAPDH
Phylogenetic analysis of Trypanosoma ssp. and T. irwini using partial sequence analysis of 18S rDNA
Phylogenetic analysis of Trypanosoma ssp. and T. irwini using partial sequence analysis gGAPDH
See also [ edit ]Beet Kvass Recipe
This is a beverage/tonic that I first bought from Life Enhancing Farms in Lancaster, PA. This fermented drink packs a ton of nutrition because of the beets themselves. Beets have been traditionally used as a blood tonic, to aid the liver, high alkalinity, and help digestion and regularity. Beet kvass is slightly salty, slightly sour, and certainly tastes like beets. I generally have this first thing in the morning mixed half and half with water. I have also found it to be very, very refreshing while working outside in the garden or in the yard on a hot day.
Equipment:
1 quart mason jar with lid or any old jar with a lid.
Ingredients:
2 organic medium sized beets, any variety 1 tsp celtic sea salt or Himalayan salt Filtered water ¼ cup whey or ¼ cup previous batch or ½ package or veggie starter culture from body ecology mixed in ¼ cup filtered water
Peel and coarsely chop the beets and place in the mason jar with the culturing agent and salt. Fill the jar up with filtered water leaving 1 inch at the top and shake vigorously. Keep this at room temperature for about 3 days then transfer to the fridge. Once most of the liquid is used, fill up with water again, add 1 tsp. salt, shake and leave again for 3 days. After this batch is used, eat or discard the beets and save some liquid to make your next batch with fresh beets. If you want a slightly carbonated drink transfer the kvass into a flip top jar and leave out for another day or two.So I have recently discovered two bitcoin faucets. Normally I would never post about this thing because they all seem like a scam but I gave them a try and they both are completely legit.
The first is Freebitcoin. Which offers an hourly bitcoin faucet that pays out with a free gambling rolling. Each roll pays some BTC with a chance everytime to win $2-$200! I have been doing it about a week now and I have already hit the 9886-9985 bonus twice and I even hit the 9998-9999 one once. Every free roll also enters you into a weekly lottery for thousands of dollars of bitcoin
The second one is called Moon Bitcoin. It pays your bitcoin for just leaving a browser tab open. You can cash out as quickly as every 5 minutes or let it grow for 3 days and cash out a big chunk all at once.
Every free hourly roll also enters you into a weekly lottery for thousands of dollars of bitcoin!
https://freebitco.in/?r=7044240
The second one is called Moon Bitcoin. It pays your bitcoin for just leaving a browser tab open. You can cash out as quickly as every 5 minutes or let it grow for 3 days and cash out a big chunk all at once.
http://moonbit.co.in/?ref=e72100d3c292
I would recommend trying both out if you are interested in getting into cryptocurrency but not willing to take the plunge just yet and invest your own money. Its a great first step and a nice chance to potentially win a nice chunk of cash.Republicans are calling on lawmakers to open an inquiry into the House Intelligence Committee after members of the press received "privileged information" that was leaked from a closed-door interview earlier this month with the president's oldest son.
Reps. John Ratcliffe John Lee RatcliffeFBI’s top lawyer believed Hillary Clinton should face charges, but was talked out of it The family secret Bruce Ohr told Rod Rosenstein about Russia case Dems seize on Trump feud with intelligence leaders MORE (R-Texas), Lee Zeldin Lee ZeldinFuror over Omar puts spotlight on AIPAC Zeldin slams Omar for 'lack of empathy' in her apology The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by the American Academy of HIV Medicine - All eyes on Trump after lawmakers reach spending deal MORE (R-N.Y.) and Mia Love Ludmya (Mia) LoveJuan Williams: Racial shifts spark fury in Trump and his base Trump suggests Heller lost reelection bid because he was 'hostile' during 2016 presidential campaign Trey Gowdy joins Fox News as a contributor MORE (R-Utah) sent a letter on Monday to Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro PelosiBrady gun control group gets rebranding Pelosi: Ethics panel should ‘vigilantly monitor’ social media after GOP lawmaker’s Cohen tweet House votes to overturn Trump's emergency declaration MORE (D-Calif.) urging them to investigate the leaks. Their request comes one week after Donald Trump Jr. Donald (Don) John TrumpConservatives outraged after Facebook deletes former Breitbart editor's account 'in error' Trump Jr.: You'll be shot in 'about two seconds' wearing a MAGA hat in downtown Chicago Omarosa: There's a ‘big red line’ for Trump in Cohen's testimony MORE asked the House Intelligence panel to investigate how information from his meeting on Dec. 6 made it into the hands of the press.
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In their letter, the Republican lawmakers urged House leaders to remove any member of the Intelligence panel found to have violated committee rules, while also advocating for "appropriate disciplinary action" for staff members found leaking such information.
“Significant evidence that serious leaks have occurred in relation to the [House Intelligence Committee] investigation into alleged Russian meddling of the 2016 election must be immediately addressed," the trio said in a statement.
"Members or staff who may have violated rules by leaking sensitive information to the press or other outside entities must be promptly removed from this investigation and proper inquiries undertaken without delay,” they urged, while underscoring the importance of the committee's "integrity" being preserved.
Other Republicans echoed the GOP lawmakers' calls for a formal inquiry.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel Ronna Romney McDanielOmar deletes tweets at center of anti-Semitism controversy Ex-Trump national security official joins lobbying firm Virginia abortion bill reignites national debate MORE on Monday also called on Congress to investigate the leaks.
Leaks out of House Intel Committee's Russia investigation must stop. Congress should investigate and find the those responsible. — Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) December 18, 2017
Trump Jr.'s lawyer Alan Futerfas sent a letter last week to Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), who has been leading the panel's ongoing investigation into Russian interference.
The attorney accused members of the committee of “selectively leaking information provided during the interview to various press outlets, most notably CNN," citing tweets from CNN reporter Manu Raju and a story that came out during the meeting as evidence of leaking, New York Magazine reported.
Futerfas said Trump Jr. had received assurances that the interview “would be kept strictly confidential and not discussed publicly unless and until the full committee voted to release the transcript,” according to the report.
The attorney pointed to the public remarks of Rep. Adam Schiff Adam Bennett SchiffHouse Democrats file legislation to ensure Mueller report released Hannity echoes Bill Maher, invites Schiff to appear on show Curtain rises on 3 days of Cohen drama MORE (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the panel, and two other Democratic lawmakers as evidence that they breached this agreement.
Schiff had told a scrum of reporters after the eight-hour meeting concluded that Trump Jr. declined to tell the committee details about his conversation with President Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE regarding his 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower, citing client privilege. Schiff argued that Trump Jr. cannot apply attorney-client privilege and "shield" lawmakers from his conversation between father and son just because an attorney was present in the room at the time.
Futerfas also pointed to the TV appearances of Reps. Jackie Speier Karen (Jackie) Lorraine Jacqueline SpeierDems call on Trump to fire Acosta Female Dems see double standard in Klobuchar accusations Joe Kennedy introduces resolution rejecting Trump’s transgender military ban MORE (D-Calif.) and Eric Swalwell Eric Michael SwalwellKamala Harris hits Trump on Fourth of July tweet: 'It’s America’s birthday, not his birthday' Dems mock Trump's pitch for Fourth of July celebration Pelosi's daughter slams NRA over 'target practice' article MORE (D-Calif.), arguing that their public remarks were “an attempt to discredit” Trump Jr.
A spokesman for Schiff, Patrick Boland, told The New York Times in a statement last week that the top Democrat had a right to talk about the “noncooperation” of a witness, while denying that Schiff or or his staff had leaked any such information.GREIFSWALD, Germany (AP) — Scientists in northeast Germany have flipped the switch on an experiment they hope will advance the quest for nuclear fusion, considered a clean and safe form of nuclear power.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a physicist herself, pushed the button on February 3, 2016, to inject a tiny amount of hydrogen into the Wendelstein 7-X device at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald.
A massive microwave array then heated up the hydrogen, turning it into a super-hot gas known as plasma, similar to that found in the sun.
The Greifswald device won't generate energy but instead test a technology that may be used to hold plasma in place in future reactors.
It's part of a world-wide effort to harness nuclear fusion, a process in which atoms join at extremely high temperatures and release large amounts of energy.
Advocates acknowledge that the technology is probably many decades away, but argue that — once achieved — it could replace fossil fuels and conventional nuclear fission reactors.
Construction has already begun in southern France on ITER, a huge international research reactor that uses a strong electric current to trap plasma inside a doughnut-shaped device long enough for fusion to take place. The device, known as a tokamak, was conceived by Soviet physicists in the 1950s and is considered fairly easy to build, but extremely difficult to operate.
The team in Greifswald, a port city on Germany's Baltic coast, is focused on a rival technology invented by the American physicist Lyman Spitzer in 1950. Called a stellarator, the device has the same doughnut shape as a tokamak but uses |
. Studies on how voices are distinguished as “individuals”, which social characteristics they are perceived to have, and how this is distinct from being associated with specific identifiable persons in the outside world (as opposed to voices with distinguishable personalities who remain “anonymous” or “incognito”) are still lacking. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to how voices evolve over time [32], and knowing when voices become “social” may be key to understanding the role of social cognition in the aetiology of auditory verbal hallucinations. Over the last decade, psychological-level research has focussed on the link between social cognition and auditory verbal hallucinations and has amassed a significant amount of evidence as a result. However, researchers working in cognitive neuroscience, who are specifically looking to make links with neurobiology, have only occasionally engaged with studies that have investigated the social neurocognition of hearing voices. Despite some provocative results, they have not yet used paradigms that would disentangle the extent to which the “social brain” is part of the hallucinatory experience. This is clearly an area where more targeted research needs to be completed. Similarly, more effort needs to be put into developing theories that include the socially relevant evidence, as this has been largely ignored in both cognitive and neurocognitive accounts. As one of our most enigmatic experiences, “hearing voices” is at once both individual and social. There is a clear need to understand it in terms of the individual mind and brain, and a clear opportunity for it to shed light on the social world that lives within us.
Acknowledgments Many thanks to Charles Fernyhough for useful and stimulating discussions during the writing of this article.Confused By $15 Minimum Wage? We Break It Down
Seattle starts phasing in a higher minimum wage on April 1 this year. The key term here is "phasing in." Everyone receiving the minimum wage won’t immediately get $15 an hour. KUOW’s Deborah Wang sat down with Ross Reynolds to explain. Reynolds: Where is the confusion around raising the minimum wage in Seattle? Wang: The law is confusing. There are multiple distinctions between big employers, small employers, employers that provide health insurance and those where workers get tips. I spoke with Carina Bull, one of Seattle’s point people on the new law, and she says I’m not the only having a tough time with it.
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“I do have people call me and ask, ‘OK so minimum wage is $15 on April 1, right?’” Bull said. “I immediately qualify that, no, that’s going to happen in three years or even longer than that; seven years depending on the size of the employer.” Reynolds: Will any workers get a raise to $15 an hour on April 1? Wang: No. If you work for a big company, like Target or Best Buy, and you are making the minimum wage, then on April 1 of this year, your pay will go up to $11 an hour. That will be the new minimum wage for any company that has more than 500 employees. If you work for a smaller company, fewer than 500 employees, it gets more complicated.
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If you don't get tips, and your company doesn't pay for your health insurance, then you will be paid the same as employees in big companies -- $11 an hour. Said Bull: “For both big and small businesses, it’s relatively straightforward: On April 1, all businesses are responsible for paying $11 an hour. “It’s just that for the smaller businesses, they have a couple different ways of getting there. They can pay the $11 flat rate, or they can pay $10 an hour in a base wage and get to that $11 through tips or the money they pay through a health care plan.” Reynolds: People earning minimum wage who are working for companies with fewer than 500 employees, they'll all get a different wage depending on how much they earn in tips? Wang: Yes.
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Reynolds: What does minimum compensation mean? Wang: It’s a term the city is using to basically give a break to small businesses. They wanted to allow small businesses to count other kinds of compensation – like tips and medical benefits – in that new wage rate. But it makes the calculation complicated. Reynolds: Then what?
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Wang: If you work for a big business, you will make $13 an hour next January and $15 an hour in January 2017. If the company pays for your health insurance, they have one extra year to get to $15 an hour — that will be Jan 2018. Now, for small businesses, the minimum wage rises more slowly and hits $15 an hour by 2021. That’s in six years. The minimum compensation formula applies to small businesses until then, so actual rates will be all over the map. Reynolds: Will workers at small businesses forever be making less than their counterparts? Wang: No. In the year 2025, all of this equalizes.
SponsorBy 1966 it had been over a decade since Frank Sinatra had had a Number One single. It's fine to be acclaimed as a great artist, to have big-selling albums, sell out in Vegas and on world tours, and star in Hollywood movies. But, if popular singing is what you do, there's something special about a Number One hit single.
Jimmy Bowen had been brought into Sinatra's Reprise Records to handle the rock'n'schlock end of things and thereby improve their performance on the hit parade. He had, briefly, been a pop star himself, and enjoyed a Buddy Hollyish hit with "I'm Stickin' With Youl" [*SEE BELOW] in 1957. He knew he wasn't the greatest singer: he sang a little flat, and he could hear it, but for a while the squealing schoolgirls didn't seem to notice. And then one day they did notice, and they stopped squealing, so he moved into production. He was half Frank's age and he had a rock'n'roll sensibility. He took a 20-year old tune by Dean Martin's pianist Ken Lane, stuck a choir and vaguely semi-rocky backing on it, and turned it into Reprise's first Number One record: "Everybody Loves Somebody". He put Nancy Sinatra together with Lee Hazelwood, lowered her keys, and gave Reprise their second Number One record: "These Boots Are Made For Walking".
So his kid and his pallie had hit the top spot, but not the Chairman. After the session for "Softly As I Leave You" (written by my ex-agent's ex-husband, as it happens), Frank asked Jimmy Bowen if he thought it would chart. "Maybe Number 30," said Bowen.
Sinatra left the studio irked. "Softly As I Leave You" peaked at Number 27, and thereafter the Chairman valued the new guy's judgment and honesty. But he still wanted a Number One.
One day in 1966 the publisher Hal Fine came round to Jimmy Bowen's pad to play him some new tunes by Bert Kaempfert for a forthcoming James Garner caper called A Man Could Get Killed. Bert Kaempfert is the German kaiser of kitsch who somewhat improbably managed to play a critical role in the careers of three of the biggest Anglophone pop acts of the 20th century: He produced the Beatles' very first recording session; he wrote "Wooden Heart" (based on an old German folk tune) for Elvis in his first post-Army film GI Blues (1961);...and now he was about to work his strange Teutonic magic on Frank Sinatra. A few years back, I was at Angel Studios in London, where I recorded "Goldfinger", "Cat Scratch Fever", "A Marshmallow World", "Sweet Gingerbread Man" et al, and Gary, our engineer, mentioned that I'd just missed Bert Kaempfert's widow and daughter who'd been in with "The New Bert Kaempfert Orchestra" re-recording all his big tunes for some monster retrospective. There are a lot of them - not just "Spanish Eyes" and "Wooden Heart", but also Kaempfert's own orchestral hits like "Wonderland By Night" and "A Swingin' Safari", one of the greatest instrumentals of all time; plus a ton of wacky one-offs, like Wayne Newton's "Danke Schoen" and Andy Williams' "Almost There" and everybody's "L-O-V-E". Kaempfert's horn arrangements are one of the unmistakeable signature sounds of the Sixties, as distinctive as Burt Bacharach or John Barry. But, while lots of folks admire his arranging, many of the same people are awfully sniffy about his compositions. He eschewed the standard 32-bar A-A-B-A song, possibly on the grounds that a middle section was way too much work. Instead, his tunes are built on the slightest of melodic themes, endlessly repeated. Yet they are, as the Germans say, Ohrwürmer - or earworms: maddening tunes that insinuate their way into your head and refuse to get out. "L-O-V-E" is the über-Kaempfert, a tune so simple that its lyricist Milt Gabler turned it into a spelling lesson, an "Alphabet Song" for grown-ups:
L is for the way you look at me
O is for the only one I see
V is very very extraordinary
E is even more...
So Kaempfert had form. And so Jimmy Bowen listens to Hal Fine's bunch of Kaempfert themes and something called "Beddy-Bye" comes up. And Bowen plays it again, and again. And then he says, "Man, get me a lyric on that, and I'll do it with Sinatra."
"Beddy-Bye" sounds to me like yet another minimalist Kaempfert tune: the five-note title phrase, reprised a tone up and a tone down, is about 50 per cent of the tune. Yet a remarkable number of other people claim to have had a hand in its creation. The last time I mentioned the thing in this space David C Tobin of Washington, DC wrote to say that it was composed by Avo Uvezian, a Beirut-born Armenian-American pianist cum cigar manufacturer. He does indeed claim to have written the music, but so does the late Ivo Robić, the crooning Croat, who insisted that he'd composed it for a folk music festival in Split, Yugoslavia. M Philippe-Gérard, the Brazilian-born French composer of "When The World Was Young", sued on the grounds that the tune was stolen from his "Magic Tango", but lost in court.
So until these various Croatian-Armenian claims are as litigated as the Franco-Brazilian ones, we'll stick with the official narrative. In 1966, Bert Kaempfert wrote this tune for his first Hollywood movie score, for the aforementioned A Man Could Get Killed, directed by Ronald Neame. And all it needed now was a lyric and Jimmy Bowen would make good on his promise and get Kaempfert a recording by Frank Sinatra.
Bowen had never made such a pledge before - for a fairly obvious reason: He was in no position to promise any such thing. "Obviously," he explained subsequently, "nobody knows what Frank is going to do till he says what he's going to do." But he knew that that "Beddy-Bye" theme smelled like a hit, and Hal Fine took him at his word. He farmed the tune out to various writers, and submitted a couple of lyrics. Jimmy Bowen didn't like either of them.
So Hal Fine tried again, this time with Eddie Snyder and Charles Singleton. Born in New York in 1919, Snyder studied piano at Juilliard and became a jobbing songwriter of no particular distinction. That said, "Talk To Me", a song he wrote with Stanley Kahan and Rudy Vallee, was recorded by Sinatra in 1959 with a Nelson Riddle arrangement, and tickled the lower end of the hit parade. Charles Singleton's catalogue is even smaller, but together he and Snyder had already turned the Kaempfert instrumental "Moon Over Naples" into "Spanish Eyes", although in 1966 the new lyric was not yet a worldwide hit.
For "Beddy-Bye", Eddie Snyder took his cue from the film and the James Garner/Melina Mercouri characters: They're strangers, exchanging glances, and, by the time the tune's reprised in the final moments, you know that, as the song says, they're "in love forever". "We had the scene," recalled Snyder. "A man is sitting across from a girl in a bar. That was it." But that was all they needed:
Strangers In The Night
Exchanging glances
Wond'ring in the night
What were the chances
We'd be sharing love
Before the night was through...
As Snyder recalled it, they took two weeks over the song, working it out round the piano, him, Kaempfert and Singleton. Snyder claimed to have contributed not merely the lyric but part of the tune, too. But, unlike Messrs Robić and Uvezian, he was actually in the room with Kaempfert saying, "No, no. Do it like this." If memory serves, he said his contribution was somewhere around the big, broad middle eight - which does, indeed, sound very unKaempfert like:
Strangers In The Night
Two lonely people
We were Strangers In The Night
Up to the moment
When we said our first hello
Little did we know
Love was just a glance away
A warm embracing dance away...
This time Jimmy Bowen liked the lyric: He had a very commercial tune with very commercial words. He called Sinatra, who said, "Sure. Let's record it Monday." It was Friday afternoon. Bowen got hold of Ernie Freeman, the arranger for Frank's poppier stuff at Reprise, and told him to crank out an arrangement that weekend. By Monday afternoon, April 11th 1966, Bowen had a studio, a conductor, an orchestra, a song and an arrangement. At 5pm they all met at United Recorders to run through the chart and set up the band's mikes ahead of the evening session. Then, with Frank due in to record his vocal at eight o'clock, Jimmy Bowen headed over to Martoni's restaurant to grab a bite to eat.
He'd barely settled into his seat when Jack Jones came in and wandered over to say hi. "What you been up to, Jack?" asked Jimmy.
"I've just recorded this song," replied Jack Jones. "Not really my thing, but it is very commercial."
"Oh, yeah?" said Jimmy. "What's it called?"
"'Strangers In The Night.'"
Bowen could feel the color draining from his cheeks, but he kept a poker face. "Really? Well, good luck with it."
Jones ambled away to get a drink, and Bowen called for the check. And in the eternity it took for the waiter to respond, dark thoughts danced through his head about hiring, as he put it, stranglers in the night to throttle Hal Fine and the other bastards at that publishing company. Evidently they'd wearied of getting Sinatra before a microphone and pitched the song to other interested parties. It was 7.30. In half an hour Frank would be walking into the studio to record what he thought was going to be his Top Ten hit. Instead, it would be a cover version nobody needed of Jack Jones' Top Ten hit.
Jimmy Bowen hurried out of Martoni's and back to the studio. He called his A&R guys and told them to hustle up eight drivers to be at United Recorders by midnight. "Why?" asked the A&R fellow. "I need them to go back and forth to the airport," said Bowen. "Oh, and get me maybe eight hundred bucks in $20 bills."
And then the clock struck eight and Sinatra walked in, on time as always.
It was not a smooth session. Bowen hadn't told Frank about the Jack Jones business because there was no sense discombobulating him before the date, but he got discombobulated anyway. He had difficulty with the key change just before the final eight bars. In theory, it's no different from the half-tone rise on a zillion other Sinatra tracks - except there's no orchestra under him at all at that point, and nothing to latch onto for the lift. Or it could have been that Frank had picked up on the tension in the control room and gotten a little rattled himself. There was always a danger when things started to go awry on a song that Sinatra would give up on it and move on. The producer's worry was that one more bum key change, and Frank would go home.
So Bowen told him, "Sing it right up to the key change and cut. Then we'll give you a bell tone and we'll go from there in the new key to the end." So they did:
Love was just a glance away
A warm embracing dance away...
Cut. Bell tone. And onwards, leaving Bowen to knit it together afterwards:
Ever since that night
We've been together
Lovers at first sight
In love forever...
"Together"/"forever"? That may be the laziest bum rhyme on a major Sinatra song. Well, okay, there's "too few to mention" and "without exemption" on "My Way", which is my absolutely least favorite Sinatra false rhyme without exemption.
But boy, Frank and Ernie Freeman wring some real juice out of the song. What Sinatra scholar Will Friedwald calls the "chinking rhythm guitar and repetitious percussion" somehow suit the tune, but Frank puts a lonely ache on the title line, and the big vowel sounds at the end of the main theme are full of yearning:
Something in your eyes
Was so inviting,
Something in your smile
Was so exciting
Something in my heart
Told me I must have yoooooooooooooooooooo....
It's a beautiful vocal, but by the time Frank was finished Jimmy Bowen wasn't really in a romantic mood. Sinatra and the band went home, and that's when Bowen really got to work. He spliced together the two parts of the record, mastered it, and then set two lathes running to start cutting acetates. An acetate isn't like a finished record: it starts to lose quality after it's been played a few times, but it's good for the first few radio spins, and the very act of sending out acetates rather than promotional singles would get the disc jockeys' attention. So every three minutes the lathes produced another pair of acetates, and Bowen and his promotions guy put them in envelopes and wrote on the names of the top jocks at the top stations in every major market - New York, Chicago, Boston, St Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh... They handed them to the runners to drive to the airport, find the next flight to each city, and seek out a friendly stewardess interested in taking the new Sinatra single on its maiden flight in exchange for a couple of those $20 bills. By the time the Jack Jones single arrived in the mail, Frank would already be all over the airwaves.
You couldn't do it today. Anybody showing up at the airport with last-minute packages and seeking out stewardesses to take them on simultaneous cross-country flights would quickly be tased into unconsciousness. The code words on the acetate - "Strangers In The Night" - betray its shadowy, conspiratorial intent. But 1966 was a different world. Sinatra hit Number One in Britain at the end of May, displacing the Rolling Stones ("Paint It Black"), and Number One in America shortly thereafter, seeing off the Beatles ("Paperback Writer").
Unlike many pop hits of 1966, it remains a famous record, in part because of its even more famous end. Sinatra sang one take clean, listening to the dull outro with the orchestra playing on without him to give Bowen and the lads in the control room time enough for a radio-friendly fade-out. And then Frank did a second take:
It turned out so right
For Strangers In The Night....
At which point he added:
Dooby-dooby-doo
Doo-doo da-de-da...
Gene Lees, lyricist of "Quiet Night Of Quiet Stars" and other Sinatra bossa novas, didn't care for it. Sinatra, he wrote, "stated his contempt for the song in the dooby-booby-doo tag he attached to the end of it. He thereby told us that he's a snob about material. But then he told us something he didn't intend to: that there was a streak of hypocrisy in him. If he didn't respect the song, he shouldn't have recorded it - not even for money, which he hardly needed at that point."
Oh, I don't know. According to Will Friedwald, this was Sinatra's second documented "dooby-dooby-doo" following an impromptu interjection on "Please Be Kind" with Count Basie for a TV special a year earlier - and there was certainly no "contempt" or "snobbery" in his attitude to that song. But it gave "Strangers In The Night" a memorable outro that the plonking soft-rock drums and sawing strings alone wouldn't have accomplished. The "dooby-doo" is just a few seconds but in some ways it became the most famous part of the record, and, in an era of lazy fades, a very memorable end - so much so that, for the 2008 Sinatra compilation CD Nothing But The Best, they added an extra nine seconds of fade so that dooby-doo aficionados would get more dooby for their dues.
It was an influential record. Hanna-Barbera had pitched CBS 'a new cartoon series starring a kind of canine mystery-solver called "Too Much". Fred Silverman, the network's head of children's programming, didn't like the dog or the name, and was minded to pull the plug on the series. Then he chanced to hear Sinatra and that famous outro - and decided all the cartoon canine needed was a new name:
Scooby-dooby-Doo
Where are you?
"Strangers In The Night" had a huge impact on the guy playing that "chinking rhythm guitar", too. He was a fellow called Glen Campbell. At the time, he was a session guitarist with no particular interest in singing. "I'd never really paid that much attention to it, because I'm really a musician at heart. Singin' was, like, secondary," he said. "But when I heard the way he phrases, I said, 'Wow, that's really cool.'" Playing the melody along with Sinatra, he started to notice the way the singer pushed certain words and held back on others. He was so fascinated by the vocal technique he couldn't take his eyes off Frank. At the end of the session, Sinatra said to Jimmy Bowen, "Who's the faggot on guitar?"
Frank famously hated "Strangers": It was, variously, "a piece of sh*t", "the worst f**kin' song I ever heard", and really "about two fags in a bar", that last thought perhaps prompted by the otherwise vigorously heterosexual guitar-playing stranger in the night stealing glances through the session. "I hated this goddamn song the first time I heard it," he told an audience in New York in the Eighties. "And I still hate it. So sue me. Shoot bullets through me" - a Guys & Dolls allusion and an indication of what Sinatra would rather have been singing.
But, for "a piece of shi*t", it changed the singer's and his company's attitude to what he did. There was always a distinction between Sinatra's album art and his hit-parade fodder. But at Capitol in the Fifties, while singles like "French Foreign Legion" and "Lean Baby" and "Five Hundred Guys" were certainly goofier than "I've Got You Under My Skin" or "One For My Baby", they were still recognizably in the same vernacular, with the same arrangers and producers. At Reprise in the Sixties, Frank was a musical schizophrenic: for the albums, Sonny Burke produced and the great arrangers (Riddle, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins, Neil Hefti, Quincy Jones) arranged; for the singles, Jimmy Bowen produced and Ernie Freeman arranged - and, after "Strangers", everything was about coming up with the right piece of soft-rock schlock to make lightning strike all over again.
They had their moments - "That's Life" is a great single, with Sinatra full of bluesy defiance. But much of the rest falls into a category Will Friedwald calls the sort of songs Sinatra would have done "had he deigned to portray a singing villain in Batman". "It's one of those things where you grasp the moment," said Jimmy Bowen. "I had about a four- or five-year period where I had the feel of how to take these kinds of artists into the marketplace, to Top 40 radio, at a time when Top 40 radio didn't want to play them." Looking back on all the tracks he did with Sinatra in the Sixties, he reckoned Frank was pleased with the results on "Strangers", "That's Life", "Softly As I Leave You" and "Somethin' Stupid". "I don't know about the other things," he said. "A lot of the other things we did together were not nearly as wonderful as what he did when Sinatra was in charge of Sinatra." He happened to attend the recording of September Of My Years, an album Bowen wasn't producing and had nothing to do with, and the one with "It Was A Very Good Year", "September Song", "This Is All I Ask" and much else. And Bowen was amazed at the difference between Frank's level of engagement on a project "when Sinatra was in charge of Sinatra", compared to his slapdash attitude to the throwaway pop singles. "Strangers" and the rest? "My guess would be that it was just something he was doing at that time in his life."
Frank loathed the song, but made a great record of it. All the other singers loved the number, but understood that it was Sinatra's now and forever. Of the thousands of other versions, I shall say nothing except to single out two favorites. The year after "Strangers", Frank, Jimmy Bowen and Ernie Freeman went into the studio to record "Don't Sleep In The Subway", a Tony Hatch song Petula Clark had made a big hit. Sinatra invited Pet along to the recording session. Miss Clark told me she thought the result, complete with "C'mon, baby" choral backing, was a "cute record", which I said was awfully generous of her. As it turns out, she made her own "cute record" of "Strangers In The Night", in which she manages, unlike most other singers, to impose her own personality on it. (It comes out as a kind of peppier "Downtown".) As for my second pick, I have a fondness for Bette Midler's by-the-book disco version. When Jessica Martin and I did our Seventies disco remake of "Marshmallow World", I wanted it to sound like a disco version of a standard rather than a disco record in its own right. So I'm grateful to Miss Midler for helping nudge me in the right direction.
What else? Well, Jimi Hendrix played it as a guitar solo at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival - halfway through "Wild Thing", playing it with the guitar behind his back and then raised up to his mouth with his pick between the teeth, before dousing his Stratocaster in lighter fuel and setting it on fire: It turned out alight/for Strangers In The Night...
In the 1985 film Fletch, Chevy Chase sings, "Strangers In The Night/Exchanging clothing..." To be parodied, a song has to be well known enough, and this one certainly is. It quickly became a kind of cultural shorthand - an easy pointer you use in soundtracks, plays, novels, to skewer time and place precisely. A poem by Jill Bialosky, "Fathers In The Snow":
When the dates came we went up to our rooms
and mother entertained.
Frank Sinatra's 'Strangers In The Night,'
the smell of Chanel No. 5 in her hair and the laughter.
She wasn't the only one so intoxicated. According to his mistress Parisoula Lampsos, Saddam Hussein liked to play Sinatra's "Strangers In The Night" when he'd had a hard day gassing the Kurds and was in the mood for a little romance with the hi-fi high and the lights down low.
As for Sinatra, he tried to get as far away from it as he could. For years, it was the only one of his big landmark hits that wasn't a part of his live set, and on the rare occasions when he'd succumb to requests to sing it he would make his feelings known. "Here's a song I can't stand," he said in Jerusalem in 1975, "but what the hell?" Only in the Eighties and Nineties, in the final stretch, did "Strangers In The Night" establish itself in his concert repertoire, and even then, if the mood struck him, he'd out-Chase Chevy on the lyrics:
Love was just a glance away
A lonesome pair of pants away...
Okay, it's not "Wee Small Hours" or "Luck Be A Lady" or the Soliloquy from Carousel. But as a two-and-a-half minute pop record it stands up to pretty much anything else it was sharing the hit parade with back in 1966 - "Hanky Panky", "Wild Thing", "Sunshine Superman", "Yellow Submarine"... In such company, how good does a two-take pop record with an orchestral chart worked up over the weekend have to be?
Aside from the Seventies revival of "Spanish Eyes", Charles Singleton and Eddie Snyder never had another hit. But then they never needed one. As Snyder told his alma mater Juilliard in one of his last interviews in 2009, "'Strangers In The Night' made a bum out of me. Because I didn't have to work anymore":
It turned out so right
...except for Jack Jones.
*CORRECTION: I originally wrote that Jimmy Bowen sang "Party Doll". Thank you to the remarkable number of people who pointed out that Jimmy co-wrote "Party Doll" but it was sung by Buddy Knox. The hit song Bowen sang was "I'm Stickin' With You".
~For an alternative Sinatra Hot 100, the Pundette is also counting down her Frank hit parade, and is kicking off her Top 20 with "Come Fly With Me". Meanwhile, Bob Belvedere over at The Camp Of The Saints is counting down the Voice's Top Ten Albums and at Number Seven has Where Are You?, with a great Sinatra sweater on the cover. The Evil Blogger Lady has Frank and Gordon Jenkins' take on the song Irving Berlin wrote after his wife died on their honeymoon - "When I Lost You".
~Steyn's original 1998 obituary of Frank, "The Voice", can be found in the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe, while you can read the stories behind many other Sinatra songs in Mark Steyn's American Songbook. Personally autographed copies of both books are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.
SINATRA CENTURY
at SteynOnline
1) IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR
2) THE SONG IS YOU
3) HOME ON THE RANGE
4) AFTER YOU'VE GONE
5) IT HAD TO BE YOU
6) THE ONE I LOVE (BELONGS TO SOMEBODY ELSE)
7) LOVE'S BEEN GOOD TO ME
8) STARDUST
9) MY FUNNY VALENTINE
10) WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?
11) CHICAGO
12) THE CONTINENTAL
13) ALL OF ME
14) WHEN YOUR LOVER HAS GONE
15) NIGHT AND DAY
16) I WON'T DANCE
17) I'VE GOT YOU UNDER MY SKIN
18) SOUTH OF THE BORDER
19) EAST OF THE SUN (AND WEST OF THE MOON)
20) ON THE ROAD TO MANDALAY
21) A FOGGY DAY (IN LONDON TOWN)
22) I GET A KICK OUT OF YOU
23) I'M A FOOL TO WANT YOU
24) OUR LOVE
25) ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL
26) I'LL NEVER SMILE AGAIN
27) FOOLS RUSH IN
28) MY ONE AND ONLY LOVE
29) EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO ME
30) I'LL BE SEEING YOU
31) THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT
32) I'LL BE AROUND
33) THE NEARNESS OF YOU
34) PENNIES FROM HEAVEN
35) BLUES IN THE NIGHT
36) GUESS I'LL HANG MY TEARS OUT TO DRY
37) NANCY (WITH THE LAUGHING FACE)
38) SOMETHIN' STUPID
39) YOU MAKE ME FEEL SO YOUNG
40) I GET ALONG WITHOUT YOU VERY WELL (EXCEPT SOMETIMES)
41) SOLILOQUY
42) THE COFFEE SONG
43) I CONCENTRATE ON YOU
44) HOW ABOUT YOU?
45) THE HOUSE I LIVE IN
46) LUCK BE A LADY
47) WE'LL BE TOGETHER AGAIN
48) (AH, THE APPLE TREES) WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
49) I HAVE DREAMED
50) WHY TRY TO CHANGE ME NOW?
51) I'VE GOT THE WORLD ON A STRING
52) YOUNG AT HEART
53) THE GAL THAT GOT AWAY
54) BAUBLES, BANGLES AND BEADS
55) IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING
56) LEARNIN' THE BLUES
57) THE TENDER TRAP
58) STARS FELL ON ALABAMA
59) WITCHCRAFT
60) EBB TIDE
61) COME FLY WITH ME
62) ANGEL EYES
63) JUST IN TIME
64) I COVER THE WATERFRONT
65) NICE 'N' EASY
66) OL' MACDONALD
67) FLY ME TO THE MOON
68) AUTUMN LEAVES
69) IT'S ALL RIGHT WITH ME
70) MOONLIGHT IN VERMONT
71) COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
72) WE'LL GATHER LILACS
73) I THOUGHT ABOUT YOU
74) THE END OF A LOVE AFFAIR
75) THE BEST IS YET TO COME
76) THIS IS ALL I ASKMore than 100,000 young people will have to wait six months for unemployment benefits under the government’s proposed budget measure, with social services advocates warning they face “deeply disturbing” knock-on effects.
Briefings given to various groups by the Department of Social Services show that 113,000 people a year aged under 30 will be denied the Newstart and Youth Allowance payments for six months.
After this period young jobseekers will have to commit to 25 hours a week in a work-for-the-dole scheme. The government will also require those on unemployment benefits to apply for 40 jobs a month, double the current requirement.
The government is facing difficulty in getting Senate support for its changes to the unemployment benefits system. Labor and the Greens are opposed to the changes while Clive Palmer, whose Palmer United party holds three crucial Senate seats, has said the proposals simply punish the jobless, with the majority of unemployed people “already trying desperately to find work”.
The Australian Council of Social Service said the scope of the measure would leave many young people suffering severe monetary and mental distress.
“The human impact will be deeply disturbing, as this isn’t a small number of people,” Cassandra Goldie, chief executive of Acoss, told Guardian Australia. “When you look at other places that have experimented this, such as the UK, you see tragic examples of people in deep depression, overwhelmed by a lack of hope.
“We should be proud of the social safety net we have in Australia. We shouldn’t be a country where if you can’t get a job you face the prospect of not being able to eat, turn on the light, or losing your housing altogether.”
Goldie said the government was misguided if it thought young people were not trying hard enough to find jobs. “At the moment there are 165,000 jobs available out there and 800,000 people looking for work. The competition is very hard, especially for those who face barriers such as discrimination.
“This nasty stereotype that young people are lazy is seriously unhelpful. If we want to encourage employers to give people a chance, this is the last thing we need.”
A spokeswoman from the Department of Social Services said about 700,000 people would be affected by the changes to Newstart should the legislation clear the hurdle of gaining support in the Senate. The government expects 30% of those people to go into education and training. The measure would save the budget $1.2bn over the next four years.
The spokeswoman said “approximately 100,000 people a year” would have to serve the six-month waiting period for unemployment benefits.
Kevin Andrews, the social services minister, said: “Our welfare system needs to be sustainable so that people who need support have access to welfare, and those who are capable of working are encouraged to get a job. These changes aim to maximise everyone’s ability and incentives to participate in the economy.
“Welfare is a critical safety net for those who are unable to work. But for those who are able, working is the best thing they can do for their own wellbeing, and that of their families and children.
“Introducing a six-month waiting period and time limits on income support payments will give young people a stronger incentive to learn or earn. These changes are designed to be the circuit breaker Australia needs to divert people from a life on welfare.”Female genital mutilation report reveals prevalence of procedure in Australia
Posted
A new report has given a shocking glimpse into the hidden prevalence of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Australia, revealing girls as young as five months old are having the procedure.
The study, conducted by researchers at the Australian paediatric surveillance unit at Westmead Children's Hospital in Sydney, found almost 60 girls with FGM had been seen by paediatricians and children's health specialists since 2010, many having undergone the most extreme form of the procedure.
The data provides the first national picture, but is thought to be a gross underestimation of the actual number of cases.
The study's author Elizabeth Elliott, a |
the show returns the first week of January, Fox has now provided critics with screeners for the first five episodes. And let’s get this out of the way first: The season premiere, entitled “My Struggle III,” is not good — specifically, it’s not good in the same ways as the previous two “My Struggle” episodes, with slightly better pacing but a few bonus moments of bad choices and confusing plotting.
Following up on the events of the Season 10 finale (to some degree), the Chris Carter-written-and-directed installment is our re-entry point into the show’s completely tangled mythology, but the storytelling is messy and unfocused. In addition, it ends with a reveal that won’t endear the show to longtime fans, and (depending on how the show follows up on it) could prove deeply problematic.
That’s the bad news. However, there’s some very good news: The following four episodes made available to critics, which follow the case-of-the-week model, represent a true return to form for the series. With a confidence that was lacking in the six episodes that made up Season 10, there are some intriguing mysteries, some eerie moments, solid action, and — praise the Lord and little green men — a fantastic comedy installment written and directed by the always-amazing Darin Morgan.
In the Peak TV era, there’s a question to be asked about what role procedurals still have in the current landscape, and why they are still so popular with certain audiences. It’s an issue which might initially make for an easy “Oh, those shows are for moms” dismissal. But that’s not really true, because anyone can get sucked into a procedural under the right circumstances.
When a majority of these first episodes of Season 11 operate in this framework, “The X-Files” presents example after example of why the format can be so engaging. With procedurals, we know that by the end of the episode, a crime will be resolved in some way; the anticipation which drives us to watch is driven by the opportunity to see a mystery solved, as well as the opportunity to watch beloved characters solve it.
Ed Araquel/FOX
The episodes of Season 11 which fall under that umbrella very much embody that concept, especially when the writers and directors make the bold choice to let Anderson and Duchovny share multiple scenes together. While there are many instances of Mulder and Scully going off on their individual pursuits, the best moments we’ve seen so far in these new episodes all feature this legendary duo working in sync.
In fact, Anderson and Duchovny’s chemistry has rarely been better in the 20-plus years they’ve been playing these characters. While, during much of Season 10, they seemed a bit hamstrung and subdued by the fact that both professionally and personally, their characters were no longer involved, Season 11 allows Mulder and Scully to stay on the same page. And the duo really let their characters’ deep history play out on screen, showcasing their natural familiarity and reminding us just why this show has kept its fans engaged for so long.
Season 11 so far isn’t flawless, but it’s a lively, character-focused affair that feels far more unified than we’d ever anticipated, a massive improvement over Season 10 that gives us genuine hope for the second half. For the first time in a while, we’re truly excited to see more.
Grade: B+
“The X-Files” Season 11 premieres Wednesday, Jan. 3 at 8 p.m. on Fox.
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May day, every day, my day
Could've had a heart attack, my heart
We don't know anything, my heart.
We all want something fair, my heart.
Hey!
Hey!
Heyyyyyyy! Heyyyyy! Heyyyyy!
Out of town, out of sight (fire), is my heart.
Queen of lies, today, my heart
One more on the phone, my heart
One more at the door of my heart.
Hey!
Hey!
Heyyyyyyyyyyy!
Mean heart, cold heart, cold heart, cold heart
Cold heart, cold heart, cold heart, cold heart -- uhhhhhhh!
[Interpretation 2]
Moderate Rock...
It's your enemy, no way!
Get out all the time of my heart
There's no enemy in my heart
Well I'm sick--a path in my heart (--of what I've found in my heart)
All the time I've been fucked--it's my heart
We're all also dead in my heart
Oh no! It's the fault of my heart
Oh no! It's the fault of my heart
We are...Tourette
Cufk, Tish, Sips (Fuck, Shit, Piss)[Interpretation 1]SHARE
By of the
A 54-foot long trailer containing about $70,000 worth of cheese was stolen Friday from a Germantown trucking company, according to Germantown police.
The trailer was taken shortly before 12:30 a.m. from D&G Transportation, N118W18574 Bunsen Drive, according to a post on the Germantown Police Department Facebook page.
A semi-tractor used to steal the trailer was recovered later Friday and the empty trailer was found in the Milwaukee area about 10 a.m., according to police.
In 2013 about 42,000 pounds of Wisconsin Muenster cheese manufactured by K & K / Old Country Cheese Factory and worth about $200,000 was stolen from Pasture Pride Cheese in Cashton.
In that case Veniamin Balika, 34, of Plainfield, Ill., was caught driving a 18-wheeler at the Vince Lombardi Service Area off the New Jersey State Turnpike.
Balika allegedly used false paperwork to trick a distributor in Cashton, Wis., into loading his truck with the massive cheese shipment, originally intended for a Texas destination, according to a Time magazine article.
Anyone with information about the Germantown theft is asked to call (262) 253-7780 or the Washington County Law Enforcement Tip Line, (800) 232-0594.Hello, all!
Now that the 2017 Community Fund has come to an official close, and the exclusivity period for Kilgore is over, we are happy to bring him back for purchase at the price of $4.99.
If you recall, we ran the Community fund from January through March, with a percentage of Kilgore’s proceeds going into a bucket. This fund, when it was all said and done, raised more than $56,000 to go towards future KI events including the upcoming Combo Breaker tournament happening in IL next month. Your support during this fund was amazing, so we wanted to take a moment to reiterate our deepest thanks for helping contribute.
So with that, Kilgore, again, is available for purchase at this lower (than original) price point. Head on over to the Xbox Store to grab Kilgore now. Ready for the link?
BAM: https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/store/p/Kilgore/BQBX4LTMS1DS
And if you’re looking to get some insight in to Kilgore and his moveset, make sure to check out the developer walkthrough from Adam and Isaac on the Iron Galaxy team, below.
FIGHT ON!Two men dismissed from their school for allegations for sexual assault have filed suits against the institutions for Title IX violations in their due process, Inside Higher Ed reported.
The colleges were two of many being accused of not properly reporting and addressing their sexual misconduct cases. However, they are not one of the schools under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) Office of Civil Rights (OCR).
The students claim their school's administrators violated their rights under the Title IX gender equality law by botching the investigation and campus legal proceedings that led to their expulsion.
To succeed, they must prove their schools, Vassar College and St. Joseph's University, discriminated against them because of their status as men.
"Title IX protects the victim because it was put in place to do that - because there aren't other sorts of protection," said Erin Buzuvis, a professor at Western New England School of Law and founder of the Title IX Blog. "Neither of these students have prevailed in demonstrating what happened to them was sex discrimination."
Peter Yu's complaint against Vassar claims the school took his accuser's story at "face value," did not take his statement, failed to perform a health examination or rape kit and did not accept supposed Facebook messages in which the victim said he did nothing wrong.
"Vassar has deprived Peter Yu, on the basis of his sex, of his rights to due process and equal protection through the improper administration of and/or the existence, in its current state, of Defendant Vassar's guidelines and regulations," Yu's complaint read. "Vassar's guidelines and regulations are set up to disproportionately affect the male student population of the Vassar College community as a result of the higher incidence of female complainants of sexual misconduct against male complainants of sexual misconduct."
Brian Harris' complaint against St. Joseph's is similar to Yu's and makes a lot of the same claims. He said the university, and their careless investigation "creates an environment in which a male accused is so fundamentally denied due process as to be virtually assured of a finding of guilt."
Both men declined comment, but admitted to having sex with their accusers and claim it was consensual.
The OCR is currently performing a federal investigation of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Occidental College, Swarthmore College and the University of Southern California for accusations of improper handling of sexual misconduct cases.
Yale University has already had penalties levied against it, however, multiple students found guilty of sexual misconduct have been allowed back on campus and received a penalty no harsher than a short suspension and a written reprimand.Rails developers who watched the recent Ruby 1.8.7 preview releases, soon noticed something about the 1.8.7 Preview 1: it broke Rails. The reason was the addition of a method Symbol#to_proc, which was backported from Ruby 1.9. Adding this method allows to write certain code in a more compact way (see details about Symbol#to_proc ).
So what happened? Rails had already added the to_proc method to Symbol. However... the method Ruby 1.8.7 Preview 1 added had a slightly different behavior than the one Rails added.
Fortunately, Rails has quite a few users, so the problem was quickly reported, and the final version of Ruby 1.8.7 has a version of Symbol#to_proc that works.
The Problem
class String
def foo
"foo"
end
end
puts "".foo # prints "foo"
Potential name clashes and interaction with 3rd party libraries
A client program usually doesn't just rely on a single library - any additional library increases the probability that another library also adds something to an already modified class and causes a name clash to happen. Even if that doesn't seem likely for some reason - opening very basic classes of the Ruby standard library definitely poses a problem. Some solutions require opening Object - in that case, every subclass of it has the added method(s). This is a bigger problem than clashing with another monkeypatching library. Why? Because every class in the system is derived from Object, thus the added method is now in the name space of every class. So... unless the added method has a name that includes, say, a SHA-1 hash value, there's a chance it'll clash with another method.
A client program usually doesn't just rely on a single library - any additional library increases the probability that another library also adds something to an already modified class and causes a name clash to happen. Even if that doesn't seem likely for some reason - opening very basic classes of the Ruby standard library definitely poses a problem. Some solutions require opening - in that case, every subclass of it has the added method(s). This is a bigger problem than clashing with another monkeypatching library. Why? Because every class in the system is derived from Object, thus the added method is now in the name space of every class. So... unless the added method has a name that includes, say, a SHA-1 hash value, there's a chance it'll clash with another method. Compatibility with future Ruby versions and stdlibs
A recent and high profile example is the Symbol#to_proc method - libraries added this to allow for a special, terse syntax for certain operations. In Ruby 1.9, this was added to the standard Ruby stdlib's Symbol class. This shows another source for name clashes: if a name is general enough, a future Ruby version might include the method too. While it might be fine if the method does the exact same thing - it's a problem if it doesn't. In that case, redefining the method can break the system, i.e. the Ruby stdlib and all it's clients that rely on the behavior of the standard Ruby library.
How to avoid Open Classes by design
Adapters
Related Vendor Content Troubleshoot performance bottlenecks and optimize your application performance with Site24x7.
OutlinePage p = editor.getAdapter(OutlinePage.class);
editor
getAdapter
Singleton Classes
a = "Hello"
def a.foo
"foo"
end
a.foo # returns "foo"
How to safely use Open Classes
alias
alias_method_chain
Close on an unbound method
Extend a module that redefines the method and uses super
extensions.rb
Safe approaches to Open Classes in Ruby and other languages
Classical modules systems support well the modular development of applications but lack the ability to add or replace a method in a class that is not defined in that module. But languages that support method addition and replacement do not provide a modular view of applications, and their changes have a global impact. The result is a gap between module systems for object-oriented languages on one hand, and the very desirable feature of method addition and replacement on the other hand.
To solve these problems we present classboxes, a module system for object-oriented languages that allows method addition and replacement. Moreover, the changes made by a classbox are only visible to that classbox (or classboxes that import it), a feature we call local rebinding.
public static int WordCount(this String str)
this
using ExtensionMethods;
string s = "Hello Extension Methods";
int i = s.WordCount();
inline
Conclusion
Ruby's Open Classes are a useful feature that allows to add methods to an already loaded class, as simple asThe problem of Open Classes is quite easy to see, we can use an old and undisputed principle of software design: Modularity. Over the years, an enormous amount of concepts has been developed to gain modularity in light of growing code bases. From local variables (vs. global variables), lexical scoping (vs. dynamic scoping), numerous namespace systems, etc. This is a process that is still ongoing - just consider the ongoing idea of doing "component oriented" development and the idea that software should be composable in the same way as physical components are assembled into products. Modularity, as we see, is an important property of software.So it is this property that speaks out against Open Classes and freewheeling Monkeypatching (as this feature is also known, particularly in the Python community). Any library developer who opens an existing class must answer this: is this added method really so absolutely necessary in this class that I must break modularity. Let's reiterate the issues we get:One reason to open a class is to make objects of a class support a certain protocol or interface, i.e. a set of messages/methods (read a longer explanation of the term protocol in the context ). Here are alternative solutions to achieve this.The Adapter pattern basically allows - given some object X - to look up another object which supports a certain protocol which can act on behalf of object X.An example of widespread application of the Adapter pattern can be found in Eclipse, where it helps to keep the platform extensible and modular. An example of the use of Adapters: getting an Outline GUI for an Editor:The class of theobject can either directly return an OutlinePage object that knows how to display an outline for the editor's content. If this particular editor doesn't implement Outline functionality, the protocol of themethod suggests to forward the call to a central lookup system. Which brings us to the extensibility/modularity part: even if the creator of the vendor hasn't supplied an Outline GUI, another Eclipse plugin can provide one. Advantage of the Adapter pattern: no need to modify domain classes to add functionality - the adapter logic contains all the logic to adapt from the desired interface to the original object. Allows orthogonal changes to the interface. No global changess necessary. For more information about Eclipse version of the Adapter pattern, read "What is IAdaptable?" by Alex Blewitt.An example of the use of Adapters in a dynamic language comes from ZOPE. In his presentation "Using Grok to Walk Like a Duck", Brandon Craig Rhodes describes the experience of building ZOPE over the years, and explores the pros/cons of different approaches how to "make an object which is not a duck behave like a duck". The solution describes several ways of defining and providing Adapters.These Adapter implementations might seem like overkill in small applications, they do allow to keep an application modular. There's a difference to Open Classes, because the returned Adapter is not necessarily the same object as the adapted one - with Open Classes (or Singleton classes - see next section) it's possible to add behavior to all objects of a particular type. Whether that's a crucial feature or not depends on your application.Ruby allows to modify the class of one particular object. It does so by creating a new class, a Singleton class, from the object's original class. Here how to do this:The effects of these changes are kept local to the object - no other classes or objects are affected. For more information and examples on when to use Singleton classes, see InfoQ's article "Using singleton classes for object metadata" If you really need to open a class, here some tips to reduce the risk. Jay Fields lists different ways of adding methods to classes. The solutions are Read Jay's article to get the details for each of the solutions.Finally,, eg. putting them all in a file. By sticking to this convention, all extensions are instantly visible to anyone reading the code without requiring any special IDEs or class browsers that show where methods come from. It also acts as documentation of what classes are affected.The idea of extending existing classes isn't unique to Ruby. Other languages have support for similar features, and some have found solutions that don't pollute the global namespace.One concept is called Classboxes Implementations are available for Squeak Smalltalk, but also Java or.NET. The basic idea: C#'s extension methods provide another way to approach the problem. Unlike Open Classes in Ruby, extension methods don't change the actual classes. Instead, they're only visible for the source that defines the extension methods - in short: it's really all implemented in the compiler. An example (from the linked article):As you can see, the method gets thepointer to the object it's working on. To make the extension visible:And done - you can now use the new method:The benefit of this approach: the extension method is only visible in code that explicitly imports it.The debate about Monkeypatching/Open Classes has already caused experiments with workarounds. This workaround by coderr allows to wrap code in a context which keeps the extensions local. One issue with this solution is that it requires use of a Ruby native extension to hook into the Ruby interpreter (it uses RubyInline, look formethod calls to find the C code that does the work).A different approach is Reginald Braithwaite's Rewrite gem. It uses ParseTree to get the AST for Ruby code and uses this to make added methods visible in certain contexts. InfoQ discussed the Rewrite gem in more detail before. The Rewrite gem also relies on native extensions (in this case ParseTree) to work.We saw the Open Class feature can cause problems when used carelessly - a fate it shares with for-loops, dynamic memory allocation and many more language features. Of course the emphasis is on carelessly. We saw what issues like name clashes really do occur in the real world. With this in mind, we looked at alternative solutions to modifying existing classes (using Adapters) - and if that's not an option, how to use Open Classes as safely as possible. Finally, less intrusive solutions to Open Classes have been considered for future versions of Ruby - for an idea of how they might look we looked at solutions in other languages (Classboxes, C# extension methods, etc).Macro Moth Magic!
I have recently started to get very interested in moths, after visiting a few public moth trap session in my local area. Moths are often considered the ‘poor relatives’ of the daytime flying butterflies; with many thinking they are the dull, night-time flying insects. In fact, there are over 2,500 different types of moth and only 58 different butterflies in the UK. Many moths are brightly and beautifully coloured and there are also many daytime flying species.
We have all had moths appear in our houses and porches at night, attracted by the lights and a simple moth trap uses this principle… a strong light is placed above a funnel-type structure. The moths are attracted to the light and slide down the funnel into a holding container. Packed with cardboard egg carton containers, these moths hide away until the morning when we can go and see what has been caught.
After discovering how beautiful some of these moths are, I really wanted to start photographing them. Having just purchased a small moth trap myself for the garden, along with spending some time with an experienced moth trapper, Rob Winstanley, I was keen to find a way to capture images of these amazingly beautiful insects.
I decided to try to create a very simple studio that was portable, easy to set up and cheap! Purchasing some white foam board, I part-cut it so I could fold it to create three walls. Two rectangular pieces were used to create a simple roof and floor. This set-up folds down easily and fits in a padded envelope so it can be set up at the moth trap.
Using a flashgun on a stand and a wireless remote, I experimented with the positioning of the flash gun. I found that I could create a nice even light by pointing it upwards towards the roof of my mini studio. As the flash fired, the light bounced off the ceiling and lit my subject perfectly. I was able to adjust the power of the flash on my camera to ensure I got a nice white background.
I started practising with some slow moving subjects and was pleased with the initial results…
….so I joined Rob at one of his moth traps near me to see if we could photograph some of the night’s captures.
In the cool of the morning, many of the moths are quite sedate and it was relatively easy to gently lift them on the end of a paint brush and to position them in my home-made studio. Using a piece of white paper, I could move them around on this platform to get the required angle. All I need to do was to get low and close. Using a Canon 7D and a Canon 100mm 2.8mm Macro lens, I was usually able to fire off a few shots before the moth was off, escaping into the morning sunshine!
We captured lots of different species and I was able to photograph each both to identify them but also to have a chance to look more closely at the exquisite colouration and patterning on these insects…
I was also lucky enough to find an Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillar and this beautiful caterpillar was a perfect subject for my studio…
Perhaps one of the highlights for me has been when my moth trap caught a stunning adult Elephant Hawk Moth. I spent a couple of hours photographing this beauty both on the white background of my studio and on a bark backdrop.
This is a relatively new venture for me and it is a pretty steep learning curve, but I am very pleased with the photographs I have managed to capture so far. The great thing about macro photography is that is opens your eyes to a world that you simply cannot usually see; the delicate feathering of a moth’s antennae, the dusted scales or intricate markings on a wing…
I am hooked onto macro photography and my little studio… it certainly opens up a whole new world, not only of moths, but to all of the other incredible invertebrates that are just waiting in my garden!
Kate MacRae
Kate MacRae, also known as ‘WildlifeKate’ has spent the last four years turning her rural garden in Staffordshire into a camera haven, allowing her to monitor the goings on of all the wildlife visiting. She has over 20 cameras set up, all wired back to her office, where she can watch and record the visitors. From inside nest boxes, to small and large mammal feeding stations, Kate’s cameras and set-up have appeared regularly on BBC Springwatch and Autumnwatch. Kate is also a keen photographer and avid user of Bushnell trail cameras and these form big part of her wildlife filming. Kate’s cameras stream live on her website and can be watched 24-7.
Website: www.wildlifekate.co.uk
Twitter: @katemacrae
Facebook: www.facebook.com/WildlifeKateMetro has a whole set of social and economic goals governing its fare increases. They include satisfying the customers, being fair about sharing costs and limiting the confusion about the varying rates. But a key goal is self-preservation: The transit authority must make enough money to cover expenses.
Asking riders to pay more will raise revenue, but if Metro asks them to pay too much more, some will stop riding. And that’s counterproductive.
For many years, Metro had better luck than other businesses in raising prices without losing customers. Those days may be done. This was one of the considerations behind Metro’s relatively modest proposal for a 2014 fare increase.
In 2010, Metro imposed a fare increase of about 18 percent for rail and 20 percent for bus. That was huge.
Two years later, Metro raised rail fares by 5 to 7 percent for peak trips and up to 27 percent for off-peak trips.
Looking back on these previous rounds of fare increases, Metro managers said they could see that the environment for transit travel was changing. A long period of solid growth in ridership was coming to an end.
Between fiscal years 1994 and 2009, annual ridership on Metrobus and Metrorail grew from about 290 million trips to 360 million trips, or about 24 percent.
Since the 2009 fiscal year — July 2008 to June 2009, a period of economic decline — total Metro ridership dropped about 6 percent to 340 million annual trips. Both Metrorail and Metrobus use declined in fiscal 2010, but Metrobus has regained some if its lost ridership while Metrorail ridership has stagnated.
“There was a greater response to the July 2012 fare increase than past experience would have predicted,” according to a staff report delivered to the Metro board’s finance committee in October, while the new budget was in preparation.
Some riders attribute this response to a decline in service, but it’s probably not the root cause.
In a Washington Post poll this year, a strong majority continued to approve of Metro’s performance on such measures as comfort, safety, operating hours, reliability and general convenience.
What may be bothering them more than the service itself is the price. In the latest poll, 67 percent of riders rated Metrorail as a “good value,” down from 75 percent in The Post’s 2005 poll.
As Metro managers ponder the impact of a proposed 3 percent increase in rail fares for 2014, they are dealing with a set of uncertainties about how riders will react.
“There are a lot of short-term negatives,” Metro budget official Mark Schofield told Metro’s board members in October.
The federal transit benefit, which has gone up and down and up again in the past few years, is set to be reduced in 2014. A federal worker getting a $245 monthly benefit to ride Metrorail might take a fare increase in stride. Cut the benefit to $130 a month and other forms of commuting might start to look more attractive.
The state of the economy and the state of the transit benefit apparently have made riders more sensitive to fare increases than they were before 2008.
“This may constrain Metro’s flexibility in changing fares and trying to balance the funding burden between riders and local jurisdictions,” the transit authority’s report said.
Meanwhile, telework has increased in popularity, particularly among federal employees. “If telework continues to grow, it has the potential to impact commuting patterns across the region on all modes,” the Metro report said.
There are bright spots for those trying to balance the transit budget. Notice all those townhouses and apartments that have been rising around stations? Such transit-oriented development creates a Metrorail market just as well as building more commuter parking garages.
Metro officials also see plenty of potential for bus ridership growth along commuter corridors.
And taking a really long view, Metro’s financial team sees that many millennials want to live in neighborhoods with good access to transit. Meanwhile, some of the baby boomers reaching retirement age are looking for smaller, closer-in residences where they won’t need their cars as much to get around.
While the long-run view may be rosy, the present uncertainties have Metro planners wondering how much to trust their old models on rail ridership. Look for that concern to be a key factor in the upcoming battle over sharing the revenue burden among rail, bus and paratransit riders — and among the local governments that make up the difference when fares fall short.
Dr. Gridlock also appears Thursday
in Local Living. Comments and questions are welcome and may be used in a column, along with the writer’s name and home community. Write Dr. Gridlock at The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or e-mail [email protected] Books by PG Wodehouse Had his only contribution to literature been Lord Emsworth and Blandings Castle, his place in history would have been assured. Had he written of none but Mike and Psmith, he would be cherished today as the best and brightest of our comic authors. If Jeeves and Wooster had been his solitary theme, still he would be hailed as the Master.
If he had given us only Ukridge, or nothing but recollections of the Mulliner family, or a pure diet of golfing stories, Doctor Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse would nonetheless be considered immortal. That he gave us all those - and more - is our good fortune and a testament to the most industrious, prolific and beneficent author ever to have sat down, scratched his head and banged out a sentence. If I were to say that the defining characteristic of PG Wodehouse, the man, was his professionalism, that might make him sound rather dull. We look for eccentricity, sexual weirdness, family trauma and personal demons in our great men. Wodehouse, who knew just what was expected of authors, was used to having to apologise for a childhood that was "as normal as rice-pudding" and a life that consisted of little more than "sitting in front of the typewriter and cursing a bit". The only really controversial episode of that life, namely Wodehouse's broadcasts to friends from Berlin while an internee of the Germans in France and Belgium during the Second World War, is dug up from time to time by mischief-makers and the ignorant.
It would not be worth mentioning now if it had not been unearthed yet again recently, together with headlines in the British newspapers linking the name Wodehouse with words such as "Nazi", "Fascist" and "traitor". Anyone who has examined the affair closely will agree with the Foreign Office official who wrote in 1947 that it was unlikely... that anyone would seriously deny that "l'Affaire Wodehouse" was very much a storm in a teacup. It is perfectly plain to any unbiased outsider that Mr Wodehouse made the celebrated broadcasts in all innocence and without any evil intent. He is reported to be of an entirely apolitical cast of mind; much of the furore of course was the result of literary jealousies. For Wodehouse's view on Fascists, one need only consult the descriptions of Sir Roderick Spode in The Code of the Woosters to see how a political innocent may still be capable of scorching satire. Enough of all that. If the episode reveals anything, it is Wodehouse's other-worldliness, a quality that shines through his work and a quality that in our muddied and benighted times ought in fact to be celebrated from the hilltops. Many have sought to "explain" Wodehouse, to psychoanalyse his world, to place his creations under the microscope of modern literary criticism. Such a project, as an article in Punch observed, is like "taking a spade to a soufflé". His world of sniffily disapproving aunts, stern and gooseberry-eyed butlers, impatient uncles, sporty young girls, natty young men who throw bread rolls in club dining-rooms yet blush and stammer in the presence of the opposite sex - all may be taken as evidence of a man stuck in a permanently pre-pubescent childhood, were it not for the extraordinary, magical and blessed miracle of Wodehouse's prose, a prose that dispels doubt much as sunlight dispels shadows, a prose that renders any criticism, positive or negative, absolutely powerless and, frankly, silly. When Hugh Laurie and I had the extreme honour and terrifying responsibility of being asked to play Bertie Wooster and Jeeves in a series of television adaptations, we were aware of one huge problem. Wodehouse's three great achievements are plot, character and language, and the greatest of these, by far, is language. If we were reasonably competent, then all of us concerned in the television version could go some way towards conveying a fair sense of the narrative of the stories and revealing, too, a good deal of the nature of their characters. The language, however, lives and breathes in its written, printed form. Let me use an example, taken at random. I flip open a book of stories and happen on Bertie and Jeeves discussing a young man called Cyril Bassington-Bassington. "I've never heard of him. Have you ever heard of him, Jeeves?" "I am familiar with the name Bassington-Bassington, sir. There are three branches of the Bassington-Bassington family - the Shropshire Bassington-Bassingtons, the Hampshire Bassington-Bassingtons, and the Kent Bassington-Bassingtons." "England seems pretty well stocked up with Bassington-Bassingtons." "Tolerably so, sir." "No chance of a sudden shortage, I mean, what?" Well, try as hard as actors might, such an exchange will always work best on the page. It may still be amusing when delivered as dramatic dialogue, but no actors are as good as the actors we each of us carry in our head. And that is the point, really: one of the gorgeous privileges of reading PG Wodehouse is that he makes us feel better about ourselves because we derive a sense of personal satisfaction from the laughter mutually created. Every comma, every "sir", every "what?" is something we make work in the act of reading. "The greatest living writer of prose", "the Master", "the head of my profession", "akin to Shakespeare", "a master of the language"... If you had never read Wodehouse and only knew about the world his books inhabit, you might be forgiven for blinking in bewilderment at the praise that has been lavished on a "mere" comic author by writers such as Compton Mackenzie, Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc, Bernard Levin and Susan Hill. But once you dive into the soufflé, once you engage with all those miraculous verbal felicities, such adulation begins to make sense. Example serves better than description. Let me throw up some more random nuggets. Particular to Wodehouse are the transferred epithets: "I lit a rather pleased cigarette", or, "I pronged a moody forkful of eggs and b". Characteristic, too, are the sublimely hyperbolic similes: "Roderick Spode. Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces", or, "The stationmaster's whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass". Here is an example that certainly vindicates my point about his prose working best on the page. Reading this aloud is not much use: "Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?" said Wilfred. "ffinch-ffarrowmere," corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capitals. Then there is a passage such as this, Lord Emsworth musing on his feckless younger son, Freddie Threepwood. Unlike the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons. If you are immune to such writing, you are fit, to use one of Wodehouse's favourite Shakespearean quotations, only for treasons, stratagems and spoils. You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour. Like Jeeves, Wodehouse stands alone, and analysis is useless. Chronology, with Wodehouse, is not necessarily reliable or relevant, but it seems sensible to describe his creations in a more or less historical order - an order compromised by his tendency to introduce a character in a short story and only later pick up and, as it were, run with the ball. He started writing at the end of the 19th century and continued until his death, manuscript on lap, on 14 February 1975 at the age of 93. It can be clearly stated that Wodehouse's first great creation, and for some his finest, was Psmith (the "P" is silent). Said to have been drawn from life (one Rupert D'Oyley Carte, of the Savoy Opera family), Psmith is a startling sophisticate, an expelled old Etonian whose delicately attuned nervous system can be shocked by loud colours, celluloid cuffs and the mere mention of an inadequately pressed trouser crease. He has adopted his own brand of "practical socialism" and retains to the end the habit of referring to everyone as "Comrade". Much as Jeeves was to extricate Bertie time and time again from the soup, so Psmith is the eternal saviour of stolid, dependable Mike Jackson |
y. Their exploits tend to have unintended consequences for Morty's dysfunctional family, especially his unfailingly mediocre father, Jerry. Watch Rick and Morty battle everything from interdimensional customs agents to Cronenberg monsters now, only at http://AdultSwim.com.
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Uncle Steve | Rick and Morty | Adult Swim
http://www.youtube.com/user/adultswimAfter spending most of a year doing Elm I have now been doing haskell for a few weeks. I wanted to share my first impressions after about a month of haskell. I have to say that compared to elm I have been rather frustrated. I think the experience for new users in Haskell involves a much steeper learning curve than is needed.
I should point out that this is written from the point of view of someone who is new to haskell joining an existing project.
Problems with auto import
Auto Import by default. If you do something like “import Module” it will import everything from that Module into your namespace. This can lead to very confusing issues of “Where did this function come from?” Yes a good editor/IDE can help you on that but it would be so much easier to have it so that the function (Or type) is called with a module name or explicity imported.
To many infix operators
Two many infix operators. The problem here is that each package imports their own. and that they are imported by default. If you come to a new code base you will find that suddenly you have something that looks like $=*=> and what in the world does that mean? And for that matter where was it even defined.
I find both of these means that code can get very hard to read for someone who is new to a project eco system
Too many Strings
Too many string types. I think I have run into String, Text, ByteString, Lazy ByteString and a few more. Really why can’t this be easier? I get that some of this is the result of 20+ years of evolution, but even with overloaded stings it seems a pain. Ifyou are using three different libraries and one wants lazy bytestrings and another wants tex thtere ends up being a lot of glue code.
Type over complexity
Types get too complex, I realize that having this level of complexity enables some real power but it comes at the cost of a learning curve.
Unsafe lists
For a language that claims to be all about type safety it seems very odd to me that a function as simple as List.head can crash a program when passed an empty list. There are a number of other standard functions (foldr/foldl?) that seem to suffer from similar issues.
Right and Left?
Arbitrary Convertions. There are a number of things that return Right a on success and Left b on failure. (or is it the other way around) why not have success and failure be called well Success and Failure (Or Ok | Err ). To someone new to a code base a Success has an obvious meaning while Left does not.
Documentation issues
First something simple, if you go to the docs for an out of date version of a package then having a simple banner pop up on the top of the page and say “Hey the current version is X” with a link would go a long way to making things more user friendly.
In addition more examples would make many packages more user friendly.
In addition types like “Compare a c q v d” or the like are rather hard to figure out. What are “a” “c” “q” “v” and “d”?For the journal Sexualities, Goldsmiths professor Sara Ahmed interviews Judith Butler about the enduring legacy of Gender Trouble. Butler speaks to Ahmed about issues relating to her derailment as a philosopher as well as the concept of vulnerability. Butler also offers some thoughts about updating queerness to be less exclusionary to trans people and people of color. She writes, “If ‘queer’ means that we are generally people whose gender and sexuality is ‘unfixed’ then what room is there in a queer movement for those who understand themselves as requiring – and wanting – a clear gender category within a binary frame? Or what room is there for people who require a gender designation that is more or less unequivocal in order to function well and to be relieved of certain forms of social ostracism?”
Read an excerpt of the interview below, or in full via Sexualities.
If ‘queer’ once sought to provide an umbrella term for nonconforming genders and various sexualities, ones that did not easily submit to categorization, it is now clearly embroiled in a battle of its own. Many trans people, or trans advocates, have argued that queer is exclusionary, that it does not include or describe trans experience. And though certain versions of queer have been rightly criticized for being presumptively white and classist, I think that the ‘queers of colour’ movement has done enormously powerful work to redirect the orientation of the term, to democratize its potential, and to expose and oppose its exclusionary limits in the context of a broadening struggle, the articulating of a more complex alliance that contests some of the older versions of ‘the collective’.
I think there are questions about how the term ‘queers of colour’ works outside of geopolitical contexts that are for the most part arguing about race and colonialism within the framework of multiculturalism. Some groups want to be described more specifically, and others worry that the framework is too US-based. But what impresses me most is the way that queer activists have worked in organizations that seek to shift significantly HIV politics not only within the Euro-Atlantic context but in the global south, especially Africa, as well as organizations that battle antimigrant nationalism and racism in Europe. There are also many important links in South America as movements there continue to debate about how the ‘postcolonial’ as it is currently theorized does and does not include them. Queer politics in South America often has to deal with post-dictatorial conditions and the emergence of ‘democracy’ in ways that require a different genealogy, and which debate the structure of public space and economic precarity. I have learned from Leticia Sabsay at LSE about much of this.
But the strongest criticism of ‘queer’ lately has come from the trans community. And that takes several forms. I accept these criticisms as necessary, and have found myself revising my views in response to some of what has been said. I also found that those who work on ‘intersex’ have found ‘queer’ to be sometimes less than helpful, so it is important to understand why. If ‘queer’ means that we are generally people whose gender and sexuality is ‘unfixed’ then what room is there in a queer movement for those who understand themselves as requiring – and wanting – a clear gender category within a binary frame? Or what room is there for people who require a gender designation that is more or less unequivocal in order to function well and to be relieved of certain forms of social ostracism? Many people with intersexed conditions want to be categorized within a binary system and do not want to be romanticized as existing ‘beyond all categories’.
Of course, there are different debates on this issue in both trans and intersex communities, but the message to the advocates of ‘queer’ seems quite pertinent: some people very much require a clear name and gender, and struggle for recognition on the basis of that clear name and gender. It is a fundamental issue of how to establish and insist upon those forms of address that make life liveable. At issue as well is a question of autonomy, conceptualized not through individualism, but as an emergent social phenomenon: how do I name myself, how can I establish my status within the law or within medical institutions, and to what extent will my desire to live as a particular gender or within an established gender category be honoured by those who claim to ally with me but who position themselves against my desire to be named and recognized a certain way? This question makes sense to me, which is why it is really important for us to rethink questions of autonomy and embodiment within a social field saturated with power.
*Image of Judith Butler via EGSTalk about a follow through! Thank you so much Elkers, for this amazing gift! When I didn't get a gift for this exchange back in 2014, I just assumed that life happened, and that I would get a rematch. When my rematcher never pulled my information, I just assumed that this would be the exchange that I would look back on as the one I never got a gift. Imagine my surprise in early June when I got a message from Elkers, saying that they were my Santa, and explaining why a gift was never sent. My address was requested in order to send something out, so I gave it. Last week, an awesome gift arrived! It's a case for my 3DS, with two LoZ styluses, and a cleaning cloth. I've been needing a new case so bad, and I love the way this one looks! Thank you again, Elkers!MIAMI – The Miami Dolphins have signed defensive back Julian Posey from the practice squad, the team announced today. The team also placed running back Daniel Thomas on Reserve/Injured List. The team also signed defensive back Dion Turner to the Practice Squad.
The 5-11, 187-pound Posey joins the Dolphins active roster after spending the previous 10 weeks of the 2012 season on the practice squad. He was signed to the Dolphins practice squad on October 3, 2012 following a stint on the New York Jets training camp roster earlier this year. Posey spent 15 weeks of the 2011 season on the Jets practice squad after being signed as a college free agent.
Posey played collegiately at the University of Ohio for four seasons. During his senior season in 2010, he recorded 46 tackles (35 solo), 12 passes defensed and recovered a fumble, which he returned 38 yards for a touchdown. Posey’s hometown is Cincinnati, Ohio, and he was born on July 17, 1988.The newest generations of immigrants are assimilating into American society as fast and broadly as the previous ones, with their integration increasing over time “across all measurable outcomes,” according to a report published on Monday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
Immigrants’ education levels, the diversity of their jobs, their wages and their mastery of English improved as they lived for more time in the United States, and the gains were even greater for their American-born children, the report concluded.
“The force of integration is strong,” said Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard who led the panel of 18 immigration scholars who wrote the more than 400-page report. “However we do it, we are good at it,” she said.
The report is an effort by scholars not engaged in politics to summon the latest research to address many contentious issues in the increasingly heated immigration debate. It is the first major report by the national academies on the integration of immigrants since a similarly sweeping overview in 1997. Its timing is linked to the 50th anniversary in October of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 1965 legislation that abolished restrictive national quotas and opened legal immigration to all countries.In a mud-and-brick town that blends in with the rusty red sand of the vast Sahara, generations of families have been guarding ancient books—some perhaps 1,000 years old—and with them, the reputation of a once-legendary, enlightened city. These libraries—mostly simple, mud-packed shelves stacked high with bound manuscripts in ancient huts—are what remain of a place that in better times was the epicenter of Islamic learning and medieval trading in northern Africa. In Mauritania, Chinguetti once flourished with scholars, pilgrims, and religious leaders. But today, the few thousand people left have been fighting against the harsh desert to maintain control of their precious artifacts.
The remaining 10 or so libraries hold frayed remains of ancient books on Quranic studies, science, and law. They’re tended to by the same families who’ve been passing down their literary treasures for generations. Some hold just a few shelves and boxes of manuscripts, but one contains an organized collection of 1,400 texts.
Actor and explorer Michael Palin, visiting in 2001, described one elderly bookkeeper showing off his priceless wares. “In some cases the pages have come loose from their bindings, but in all of them the quality of the work is exquisite. They have been in his family for centuries and he treats the texts like old friends, moving his finger from right to left, as the Chinese and Japanese do, across the delicate, spidery calligraphy.”
Chinguetti was founded in the 12th century to serve as a resting point for the Saharan trade routes crisscrossing present-day Morocco, Mauritania, and Mali. Desert caravans would use the city as an oasis, stopping to peddle their wares and let the thousands of camels in their trains rest. Since the 13th century, Sunni devotes have been traveling to Chinguetti on their way to Mecca. A stone mosque built not long after the city became a well-trodden passageway still stands as a central attraction in the town. What was once just a stopover point quickly became a destination in its own right. As the small city’s reputation flourished, particularly between the 1600s and 1800s, it became known as a pillar of religious scholarship and was considered one of Islam’s holiest cities.
But the desert has been creeping up on Chinguetti. Half a century ago, there were said to be 30 libraries and 20,000 inhabitants. Today, only as many as 10 book troves remain and the population numbers a couple thousand. In the 1970s, new mines constructed nearby pulled away the town’s inhabitants, and, soon after, the 16-year Western Sahara War broke out, forcing more Chinguettis from their homes near the border of the disputed region. Around that same time, the United Nations Conference on Desertification announced that the Sahara was expanding at an estimated rate of 30 miles per year due to rising temperatures.
UNESCO granted Chinguetti and four other nearby trading posts status as World Heritage sites in 1996. Despite the international protection that designation affords, the city is succumbing to one of the most inhospitable landscapes in the world. Chinguetti’s location was once chosen for its fertility in the middle of the African desert. But now, it is surrounded by rolling red dunes, and blowing sand coats the city.
Just as the town’s population is in danger, so too are the town’s fragile books. A preservation survey UNESCO organized in the ’90s found that there were 3,450 volumes left in Chinguetti, but that 90 percent of them were in advanced stages of decay thanks to climate damage and mishandling.
The government of Mauritania, from the capital 375 miles away, has been attempting to preserve the delicate manuscripts, but keepers of the books have been wary to part with them. According to The Guardian, 33,000 ancient texts are known to exist in the country, but only a couple thousand have been properly cleaned and archived in the National Museum.
“The state has been trying to lay its hands on them for years,” one keeper of a 700 book-strong library told the paper. “Would you part with your hand or your foot? It is a part of us.”kTEST - 16/05/2017 sunhwapark May 16th, 2017 ( edited ) 7,508 Never 7,508Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 6.08 KB 16/05/2017 - KTEST Live Maintenance (Kupole Server) ▣ Updates 【Additions】 Auto-Matching: - The Auto-matching timers have been adjusted to the following. [Auto-Match (Level-Ranged Search)] Current Time: 1Mins New Time: 30s [ 2 to 4 Player Entry ] Current Time: 5Mins New Time: 2Mins Items: - The item prices from items that can be purchased from class masters has been adjusted. [Taoist] - Strange Yellow Paper Old Price: Purchase Cost - 500 Silver New Price: Purchase Cost - 50 Silver [RuneCaster]: Rune Stone Old Price: Purchase Cost - 500 Silver, NPC Shop Value - 100 Silver New Price: Purchase Cost - 100 Silver, NPC Shop Value - 20 Silver [Chaplain]: Cape Old Price: Purchase Cost - 1000 Silver, NPC Shop Value - 200 Silver New Price: Purchase Cost - 200 Silver, NPC Shop Value - 40 Silver Hunting Grounds: - All hunting grounds will have a change applied to the way you enter them; Current: Access is done via walking near the warp location. New Method: A confirmation dialogue window will appear, after confirmation near the warp location you will go to the Hunting Ground. TP Store: - You can now preview costumes on the 'Premium' Tab in the TP Store. NPCs: - The Centurion Master NPC 'Krajicek' will be removed from the map, Forest of Prayer. Help Notifications: - Items in the Help notices have been changed to reflect the rebalanced state of the game. 【Event: Way of the Pirates!】 - You can talk to a Pirate who has turned up in Klaipeda. - Visit [Blacksmith] Zaras to get a quest to get some Wooden Planks - You can obtain 1 Plank after a minute, 5 after 30 minutes and 10 for an hour. (Obtainable once per day per team) - Bring the Wooden Planks to the Pirate and they will give you a reward in exchange. 10 Planks - 10x Lv15 Basic Condensed HP Potion 10 Planks - 10x Lv15 Basic Condensed SP Potion 20 Planks - 5x Pirate Potion ( Gives Movement Speed +5 for 1 Hour) 30 Planks - Enchant Scroll 14 Days 30 Planks - EXP Tome: 14 Days 100 Planks - Shark Pirate Costume (M) 100 Planks - Shark Pirate Costume (F) X - Title: Honorary Pirate Crew-mate NOTE!! * This is a team wide event, quests reset at 00:00 Server time every day. * Wooden Planks can only be collected once a day per team, so please check the amount of planks you collect with care. * The max number of boards you can get from this event is 220 Planks. (10 Planks a day x 22 Days for the Duration of the Event.) Since the total number has been publicly been displayed for you, please calculate accordingly what rewards you would like to aim for. Any items that were exhcanged by'mistake' will not be refunded - please read carefully when trading. If you write /Hayraven (/하이레이번) in the chat log, you can see how much time has passed after you have receieved the quest. * Extra - You can team-store & trade the Costumes from this Event, Everything else is untradeable. (You can store the Planks & Pirate Potions though.) 【Skills】 Alchemist: Combustion: - The number of items that explode has been changed to 3, regardless of skill level. SchwarzerReiter: Limacon: - Additional Damage is now 50% at level 1 and increases by 10% per level(Previously 30% and 5% respectively), Also Fixed a bug with Limacon's Enhance attribute being doubled. Bokor: Effigy: - Fixed bug with the 3rd attack damage being applied incorrectly, Base damage at Lv 1 is changed to 299% and increases by 16.5% per Level. ( Previously 187 and 10% respectively.) ▣ Bug Fixes 【Skill】 Doppelsoeldner: Cyclone: - Fixed issue where you would become unable to move whilst casting after learning attributes for this skill. Cataphract: Impaler: - Fixed issue with damage not being dealt to enemies whilst the caster was moving. Pardoner: Spell Shop: - Fixed issue with Spell Shop Buffs dissipating after changing maps. - Fixed issue with Sepll Shop Buffs not working if the player disconnects and reconnects. Krivis: Melstis: - Fixed bug where you could extend the time of EXP Tomes and other sorts of unique buffs. Wizard: QuickCast: - Fixed bug with the Runecaster QuickCast Attribute where it would change the duration of Quickcast to 15s down from 60s. Pyromancer: - Fixed tooltip descriptors (Fire) Cryomancer: Rod Mastery: Ice - Fixed tooltip descriptors (Ice) Psychokino: Gravity Pole: Evasion - Fixed tooltip descriptors (Evasion) 【Quest】 A Difficult Opponent: - Fixed motion bugs with the NPCs - Fixed issue witht he appearance of Lord Ryudhas - Fixed issue where you could complete the quest without killing the target monsters. Examining the Ecosystem: - Using skills during the quest would sometimes cause the NPC to freeze. Demons In The Closed Area: - Fixed issues that would prevent the enemy from attacking. Crazy Archivist: - Fixed dialogue typos 【Monster】 Nebulas - Fixed issues with the movement debuff Pavaisa - Fixed issue where Elite Monsters were turning into Normal ones. 【Item】 Paper Box - Fixed issue where you could cancel knockback effects by using this Item. 【Graphic/Sound/UI】 - Fixed issue with Help Notifications (Gems + Cards) becoming problematic if they pop-up whilst the player is in combat. - Fixed Visual errors that occured when a female character is wearing the Silver Hawk Weapon. - Fixed issue where Inventory(F2) Sometimes wouldn't Display. - Fixed issue with Pajoritas Rod & Meteor Rod's colours appearing too dark when equipped. 【Other Changes】 - Fixed issue when using Templar's buff share wouldn't show any motions to a person's hairstyle. - Fixed issue with Dievdirby's Statues & QuarrelShooter's Pavise's not expiring in the first round of TBL would cause the skils to become unusable on the further rounds after that. - Fixed issue where the Cafrisun Mob wouldn't move. - Demon Prison 2 - The Demon Boxes' names will no longer display on screen. Source Post: http://tos.nexon.com/testserver/notice/view.aspx?n4ArticleSN=62 Translation by Gwenyth @TOS Forums.
RAW Paste Data
16/05/2017 - KTEST Live Maintenance (Kupole Server) ▣ Updates 【Additions】 Auto-Matching: - The Auto-matching timers have been adjusted to the following. [Auto-Match (Level-Ranged Search)] Current Time: 1Mins New Time: 30s [ 2 to 4 Player Entry ] Current Time: 5Mins New Time: 2Mins Items: - The item prices from items that can be purchased from class masters has been adjusted. [Taoist] - Strange Yellow Paper Old Price: Purchase Cost - 500 Silver New Price: Purchase Cost - 50 Silver [RuneCaster]: Rune Stone Old Price: Purchase Cost - 500 Silver, NPC Shop Value - 100 Silver New Price: Purchase Cost - 100 Silver, NPC Shop Value - 20 Silver [Chaplain]: Cape Old Price: Purchase Cost - 1000 Silver, NPC Shop Value - 200 Silver New Price: Purchase Cost - 200 Silver, NPC Shop Value - 40 Silver Hunting Grounds: - All hunting grounds will have a change applied to the way you enter them; Current: Access is done via walking near the warp location. New Method: A confirmation dialogue window will appear, after confirmation near the warp location you will go to the Hunting Ground. TP Store: - You can now preview costumes on the 'Premium' Tab in the TP Store. NPCs: - The Centurion Master NPC 'Krajicek' will be removed from the map, Forest of Prayer. Help Notifications: - Items in the Help notices have been changed to reflect the rebalanced state of the game. 【Event: Way of the Pirates!】 - You can talk to a Pirate who has turned up in Klaipeda. - Visit [Blacksmith] Zaras to get a quest to get some Wooden Planks - You can obtain 1 Plank after a minute, 5 after 30 minutes and 10 for an hour. (Obtainable once per day per team) - Bring the Wooden Planks to the Pirate and they will give you a reward in exchange. 10 Planks - 10x Lv15 Basic Condensed HP Potion 10 Planks - 10x Lv15 Basic Condensed SP Potion 20 Planks - 5x Pirate Potion ( Gives Movement Speed +5 for 1 Hour) 30 Planks - Enchant Scroll 14 Days 30 Planks - EXP Tome: 14 Days 100 Planks - Shark Pirate Costume (M) 100 Planks - Shark Pirate Costume (F) X - Title: Honorary Pirate Crew-mate NOTE!! * This is a team wide event, quests reset at 00:00 Server time every day. * Wooden Planks can only be collected once a day per team, so please check the amount of planks you collect with care. * The max number of boards you can get from this event is 220 Planks. (10 Planks a day x 22 Days for the Duration of the Event.) Since the total number has been publicly been displayed for you, please calculate accordingly what rewards you would like to aim for. Any items that were exhcanged by'mistake' will not be refunded - please read carefully when trading. If you write /Hayraven (/하이레이번) in the chat log, you can see how much time has passed after you have receieved the quest. * Extra - You can team-store & trade the Costumes from this Event, Everything else is untradeable. (You can store the Planks & Pirate Potions though.) 【Skills】 Alchemist: Combustion: - The number of items that explode has been changed to 3, regardless of skill level. SchwarzerReiter: Limacon: - Additional Damage is now 50% at level 1 and increases by 10% per level(Previously 30% and 5% respectively), Also Fixed a bug with Limacon's Enhance attribute being doubled. Bokor: Effigy: - Fixed bug with the 3rd attack damage being applied incorrectly, Base damage at Lv 1 is changed to 299% and increases by 16.5% per Level. ( Previously 187 and 10% respectively.) ▣ Bug Fixes 【Skill】 Doppelsoeldner: Cyclone: - Fixed issue where you would become unable to move whilst casting after learning attributes for this skill. Cataphract: Impaler: - Fixed issue with damage not being dealt to enemies whilst the caster was moving. Pardoner: Spell Shop: - Fixed issue with Spell Shop Buffs dissipating after changing maps. - Fixed issue with Sepll Shop Buffs not working if the player disconnects and reconnects. Krivis: Melstis: - Fixed bug where you could extend the time of EXP Tomes and other sorts of unique buffs. Wizard: QuickCast: - Fixed bug with the Runecaster QuickCast Attribute where it would change the duration of Quickcast to 15s down from 60s. Pyromancer: - Fixed tooltip descriptors (Fire) Cryomancer: Rod Mastery: Ice - Fixed tooltip descriptors (Ice) Psychokino: Gravity Pole: Evasion - Fixed tooltip descriptors (Evasion) 【Quest】 A Difficult Opponent: - Fixed motion bugs with the NPCs - Fixed issue witht he appearance of Lord Ryudhas - Fixed issue where you could complete the quest without killing the target monsters. Examining the Ecosystem: - Using skills during the quest would sometimes cause the NPC to freeze. Demons In The Closed Area: - Fixed issues that would prevent the enemy from attacking. Crazy Archivist: - Fixed dialogue typos 【Monster】 Nebulas - Fixed issues with the movement debuff Pavaisa - Fixed issue where Elite Monsters were turning into Normal ones. 【Item】 Paper Box - Fixed issue where you could cancel knockback effects by using this Item. 【Graphic/Sound/UI】 - Fixed issue with Help Notifications (Gems + Cards) becoming problematic if they pop-up whilst the player is in combat. - Fixed Visual errors that occured when a female character is wearing the Silver Hawk Weapon. - Fixed issue where Inventory(F2) Sometimes wouldn't Display. - Fixed issue with Pajoritas Rod & Meteor Rod's colours appearing too dark when equipped. 【Other Changes】 - Fixed issue when using Templar's buff share wouldn't show any motions to a person's hairstyle. - Fixed issue with Dievdirby's Statues & QuarrelShooter's Pavise's not expiring in the first round of TBL would cause the skils to become unusable on the further rounds after that. - Fixed issue where the Cafrisun Mob wouldn't move. - Demon Prison 2 - The Demon Boxes' names will no longer display on screen. Source Post: http://tos.nexon.com/testserver/notice/view.aspx?n4ArticleSN=62 Translation by Gwenyth @TOS Forums.(CNN) -- A Syrian human rights group says eight premature infants dependent on incubators died after authorities cut power to a hospital in the embattled city of Hama as part of a renewed crackdown on anti-government demonstrators calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad's reign.
The babies died at Hurani Hospital in the northwest Syrian city on Wednesday, Rami Abdul-Rahman, president of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Sunday. Abdul-Rahman cited information provided by a hospital employee who fled the city on Saturday.
CNN cannot independently verify the account. The Syrian government could not immediately be reached for comment.
The U.S. Ambassador to Syria cautioned against believing anything the government says about the violence taking place in the country. "The Syrian television, operated by the state, operated by the dictatorship, is not credible and tells all kinds of lies," Robert Ford said in an interview with ABC's "This Week" that aired Sunday.
Meanwhile, reports surfaced that Syrian troops rolled into the northeastern city of Deir Ezzor with tanks and bulldozers and stormed the western town of Hula early Sunday morning.
Four civilians were killed in two neighborhoods in Deir Ezzor after Syrian troops raided, according to Abdul-Rahman, who confirmed the names of the deceased with sources on the ground.
The Local Coordination Committee -- a network of activists -- said 29 people were killed Sunday. Twelve were in Homs province, six were in Idlib, and 11 were in Deir Ezzor.
Kuwait and the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, a union of countries located on the Arabian Peninsula, called Sunday for an end to the violence in Syria.
In a written statement, the council called on Syria "to put an end to the bloodshed and resort to wisdom, and make serious reforms necessary." Kuwait's Foreign Ministry, in a separate statement to state-run news agency KUNA, demanded Syria "initiate real reforms that meet the legitimate needs of the Syrian people."
Syria rejected the council's statement. State-run news agency SANA, citing a Syrian official, reported that the government received the statement "with regret." The council "completely ignored the information and facts presented by Syria on the killing and sabotage acts committed by armed terrorist groups seeking to undermine the homeland's sovereignty and security," the SANA report said.
Throughout the Syrian uprising, government officials have repeatedly referred to some protesters as "armed terrorists" and "gangs."
SANA's source complained that the council's statement "disregarded the package of reforms announced by President Bashar al-Assad in his speech on June 20th, 2011, in which the president stressed the paramount importance of national dialogue to solve the current situation."
Pope Benedict XVI added his voice Sunday to the calls for an end to bloodshed.
"I renew to the Syrian authorities and population a pressing appeal for the re-establishment as soon as possible of living together peacefully," as well as an "adequate response to the legitimate aspirations of the citizens, respecting their dignity and for the benefit of the region's stability," the pontiff said, according to a CNN translation.
The pope said he was "following with strong concern the dramatic and growing episodes of violence in Syria, which have provoked numerous victims and grave suffering. I invite the Catholic faithful to pray so that the reconciliation efforts prevail over divisions and rancour."
The Arab League issued a statement calling on Syrian authorities "to stop immediately all acts of violence and security campaigns against civilians and to speed up in executing reforms."
General Secretary Nabil al-Arabi "expressed his growing concern and strong disturbance from the deterioration in the security situation in Syria because of the increase in violence and the military campaign in Hama, Deir Ezzor" and other areas, the statement said, adding that Al-Arabi called on Syria to establish an independent judicial team to investigate violence and violations of human rights.
International pressure has been growing on Assad to put an end to the violence. On Saturday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on Assad to halt the use of force against civilians "immediately."
Ban spoke to the Syrian leader by phone to express "his strong concern and that of the international community at the mounting violence and death toll" in the country over the past week, according to a U.N. readout of the conversation.
The conversation took place after anti-government protests erupted Friday across the country, the latest round of demonstrations calling for reforms.
Ford, the ambassador who recently visited Hama -- sparking anger by the Syrian government -- told ABC, "Literally, dozens of people have been killed in the last week. I'm personally very nervous about the fate of some of the people I met. I fear that they're either now under arrest or maybe dead,"
"The Syrian government does not tell the truth," he said.
"They said there were armed gangs in Hama. Well, the only weapon I saw was a slingshot."
He said Syrians told him that they did not want American military intervention.
The interview was taped Thursday in Washington before Ford returned to Syria.
The United States has previously announced sanctions against the Syrian regime. "We are looking at additional
unilateral measures, but also measures that we can work with partners to get the Syrian government to stop shooting protesters, to release political prisoners, and to stop these arrest campaigns," Ford said.
The protests began months ago in the southern city of Daraa and were swiftly suppressed by Syrian forces. Anti-government fervor caught on nationwide as more protests were met with tougher crackdowns.
Over the weekend, clashes between Syrian forces and demonstrators were reported in a number of cities, including Daraa, witnesses said.
In the Syrian capital of Damascus, heavy gunfire was heard in the suburb of Nahr Aysha where security forces were trying to disperse thousands of demonstrators, the witnesses said.
Syrian forces also shelled Hama, said a resident whose identity is being withheld by CNN for security reasons.
More than 50 people were killed when a tank positioned 150 meters (164 yards) from Hurani Hospital launched an artillery shell that landed in front of the building, two witnesses told CNN. One witness said he counted 53 bodies; the other said 58.
The shelling incident occurred the same week Syrian authorities allegedly cut the power to the same hospital.
One opposition activist estimated 300 people have died in fighting in Hama in the past six days.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 2,000 people, primarily demonstrators, have died in the months-long unrest.
Syria's foreign minister announced plans Saturday to hold parliamentary elections by the end of the year, the state-run news agency reported.
Walid Moallem told Arab and foreign ambassadors that the country's leadership is committed to move ahead with reforms and provide free and fair elections for the country, SANA reported.
Moallem said Syria is intent on fostering security, stopping vandalism, and pursuing democracy and progress, SANA reported.
CNN's Kamal Ghattas and Salma Abdelaziz contributed to this report.Here in Maine, it's always important to have the latest information on outdoor sporting laws, so everyone can stay safe and have fun. With hunting seasons either already here or right around the corner, here's what you need to know about recent changes.
The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife has the authority to patrol the state and enforce all laws relating to hunting and fishing. Here's an overview of the recent changes, as enacted by the 127th Maine Legislature:
Mainers May Now Carry a Concealed Handgun Without a Permit
This law allows a person to carry a concealed handgun without a permit and may have that concealed, loaded pistol or revolver in or on a motor vehicle or trailer if:
1) The person is 21 years of age or older and is not otherwise prohibited from possessing a firearm or;
2) The person is 18 years old or older and under 21 years of age and on active duty in the Armed Forces of the United States or the National Guard or is an honorably discharged veteran of the Armed Forces of the United States or the National Guard and is not otherwise prohibited from carrying a firearm. This law takes effect on October 15, 2015.
See the new law for details.
New Animals Added to the Maine Endangered Species List
This bill changes the status of certain species on the State Endangered and Threatened Species list. It adds three mammals and three invertebrates to Maine’s current list of Endangered and Threatened Species. All three mammals are cave-dwelling bats. The three invertebrates placed on the list are a butterfly, a tiger beetle, and a land snail.
Authority to Cancel Hunting Seasons
LD 570 gives the Commissioner of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife the authority to postpone or cancel an open hunting season without the Governor’s authorization on any game species based on sound scientific wildlife management principles if the commissioner has concerns regarding disease, weather conditions, reduction in population |
referring to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden. “I don’t think it’s the time now to reduce the jurisdiction of review bodies... I think it is more time to facilitate the sharing of information between oversight bodies so that we can do our job as efficiently as possible.” In a recent submission to a parliamentary committee, Therrien recommended that the duty to report privacy breaches to his office be enshrined in law. The Star spoke with Therrien on Friday. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. The Star: Has the situation improved at all since your 2014-15 annual report, which stated only 10 per cent of departments and agencies have reported privacy breaches, as required? Daniel Therrien: Since the last annual report we have seen a change. And since then, we also saw the report (to Parliament). We may not be talking about the same types of breaches reported to me or in response to Mr. Boulerice. He wasn’t necessarily concerned with privacy breaches, it might be other technological breaches... but it’s clear there’s a big gap between the numbers reported in answer to his question, and the number reported to our office... And that is something we intend to inquire into. Q: There is a huge gap. But we’re talking about every federal department and agency here. How do you go about bringing them on side? DT: Well, I want to have discussions in the short term. And I also made recommendations to amend the Privacy Act about a month ago in a submission to a parliamentary committee. And among the changes recommended is that this obligation to report privacy breaches, which is now the subject of a policy or directive, be elevated to a legal obligation. Private companies … (will soon) have an obligation, a legal obligation, to report privacy breaches when the relevant regulations are adopted. There’s no reason why government agencies and departments should have less of an obligation to report privacy breaches than private companies. Q: What’s the danger if departments and agencies don’t report breaches to you? Practically speaking, for Canadians, what’s the danger? DT: One of the reasons for privacy breach notifications is to determine whether to advise the affected people so they can remedy the situation themselves, or that the institution, public or private, (can) take measures to remedy the situation. If breaches are not reported, that set of considerations does not come to play and people do not know that there’s a risk for them. So that’s at the individual level, (for) people affected by these breaches. If we don’t get a privacy breach notification, we’re also missing a big part of the picture to determine, on a more general perspective, what are the types of breaches that companies and departments face so that we can analyze trends and give proper advise to these departments or companies on how to remedy the situation. So there’s a risk for individuals directly affected, and there’s a risk that generally speaking the right measures may not be adopted by (private) sectors or (government) departments. Q: Were you surprised at the number of breaches recently reported to Parliament through Mr. Boulerice’s question? (There were 5,854 breaches involving the personal information of 45,892 Canadians in 2015). DT: All I would say is that they’re clearly higher, much higher, than the number of breaches reported to us. So that means there’s reasons for us to investigate what’s behind that difference. The number is high. We know, because we see in the media that again private organizations and departments are the victims of breaches. We hear about that frequently. To quantify this is difficult. I’m certainly concerned that there’s a huge gap between what is reported to us, and what was reported to Mr. Boulerice. There is a significant issue. How significant and how do you quantify it, I’m not sure I have the most accurate figures based on what was given to Mr. Boulerice.This wasn't what the NHL had hoped for. This wasn't why they resurrected this tournament, and put it back in the heart of Toronto, for as many people to see as possible.
Empty seats in the lower bowl, in big, unmistakable stretches, even as the game – Game 1 of the finale of the World Cup of Hockey – hit the end of the first period. (This the end result after thousands of tickets were available from scalpers for well below face value, on the day of the game.)
Empty streets outside the Air Canada Centre, where a fan viewing party was held in an attempt to recreate the excitement in Maple Leaf Square that NHL and NBA playoff games had in the past.
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The game was a dud, too, continuing a sharp downward trend for the event, which hit its high point a week ago, when the Under-24 kids beat Sweden in overtime. There was little of that enthusiasm on Tuesday, on the ice or in the stands. What we had instead was a sleepy Team Canada toppling Team Europe 3-1, playing out its role in an inevitable coronation as the best of the best-on-best.
Related: Team North America's performance in the World Cup of Hockey was poetic
Related: Team Europe's World Cup success may spell its end
Related: How Canada turned around its international hockey program
Even at their worst, the Canadians were too much for a roster cobbled together from eight tiny hockey nations ranked seventh through 17th in the world.
"In the end, obviously, we've got lots of room to get better," Team Canada coach Mike Babcock said.
He said it like it was a good thing. It's not – not for this tournament or for international hockey in general.
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If we have learned anything from the sum total of the Vancouver Olympics, the Sochi Games and this event, it's that the world is not really catching Canada. This is a team that is 17-1 in best-on-best play in the last decade, outscoring its opponents 73-26 and winning – presuming they finish off Europe in Game 2 on Thursday – every gold medal or oddball Frank Gehry trophy available.
You could call Canada's lineup at this World Cup an all-star team, except that they would likely be able to beat the NHL's version of those, too – what with John Tavares on the third line and Claude Giroux as the unused 13th forward. This group has an almost impossible level of depth, especially when you consider that P.K. Subban, Kris Letang, Mark Giordano were left at home.
You can even make an honest argument this is the best hockey team ever assembled, setting off a barroom debate that isn't easily settled. (The 1976 and 1987 Canada Cup teams stand as fair rebuttals.)
But the NHL is taking fire right now. Team Europe has been a World Cup buzzkill since beating the Americans in their opening game, sapping the World Cup of interest country by country, in the U.S., then Sweden and now Canada. But the biggest issue with international play isn't the result of any shortcomings by the league, which can only work with what the world gives it.
Twenty years ago, any discussion about best-on-best play would have centred on the so-called Big Seven, which included the obvious candidates: Canada, Russia, the U.S., Sweden, Finland and the two halves of the recently split Czechoslovakia. Any team could win any event, as evidenced by the Czechs and Dominik Hasek surprising for gold in Nagano in 1998.
Since then, however, both countries have fallen hard, with their NHL representation down almost 60 per cent and continuing to drop as the previous generation retires. Team Europe has an old roster because the best the rest of the world has to offer is aging out. In the case of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the fall of communism in the early 1990s hurt hockey tremendously, and there's no sign they'll get back to where they were in the coming decades.
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"It's not easy back home," Team Europe's Marian Hossa told the Chicago Sun-Times in recent weeks, relating how times had changed in Slovakia since he was young. "People don't make enough money to try to support kids to play hockey. It's really hard."
Even Russia has talent supply issues. Still blessed with dynamic offensive players like Alex Ovechkin and Vladimir Tarasenko, they have produced hardly any NHL-calibre defencemen in years. Their insistence on old-world coaching styles and KHL favouritism haven't helped at international events, either. Something is seriously amiss with The Big Red Machine.
The only major hockey-playing countries that have taken tangible steps forward – in player enrolment and producing pros – are Sweden and the U.S., leaving the NHL with a shrinking pool of teams that can challenge Canada's dominance, even in a short tournament. As a result, they seriously considered making the World Cup only a six-team showdown, before inventing Team Europe and the Under-24s as stand-ins to round out the field.
The issue the league faces is there aren't any countries coming to replace those that have fallen off. The current plan is to have eight countries at the event in 2020, which could potentially be played in a hockey hotbed like Calgary or Edmonton. But who?
Switzerland has made some of the biggest strides the past decade, but last season, they had only seven regular skaters and two backup goalies in the NHL.
Denmark appears to be coming, too, although they still sit ranked 13th in the world and didn't have a defenceman in the NHL last season. The idea they'll soon challenge the best teams in the world is pure fairy tale.
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"I don't think we're ever going to catch up to Canada," said Frans Nielsen, one of seven Danish players in the league last season and his country's all-time leader in NHL games played (606). "But I think we've done a great job of [getting better]. What we needed in the beginning was getting that first guy over here. Now, I think they've seen we can play, they've seen good players out of smaller countries, so they're not afraid of taking guys in the draft. We've seen a big change over the years here. I've seen kids dream differently, than when I was a kid. Before, we didn't have any NHL players, and guys would dream about playing in Sweden."
"Canada is always going to develop a lot of big talents," added Mikkel Boedker, another of Team Europe's three Danes. "They have the most players in the world playing and the most hockey arenas so they're obviously going to create a lot of the talent."
But Canada's dominance is no longer simply the result of scale. Obsession plays a role. Hockey is a maddeningly expensive sport, and, increasingly, elite hockey players are being produced as the result of tens of thousands of dollars being pumped into elite training programs, from power skating to skills development and summer hockey. It's a trend that has led to the NHL filling up with the sons of white-collar families with money to spend. It's a trend that means only the truly wealthy (the Americans and Swiss) or socialist nations where sporting costs are subsidized (Sweden, Finland and Denmark) will be able to keep up.
If they even can.
Canadians should certainly celebrate this success. It's a long way from the national mood in 1998, when a team of NHLers was bounced early from the Olympics and a hockey summit was called. That – with urging from Wayne Gretzky – led to a push for better skill development, which, in turn, may have helped put Team Canada on its prolonged win streak.
But all that effortless winning hurts events like the World Cup of Hockey, more than any so-called gimmick teams could.
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There needs to be a realistic chance of adversity, for the outcome to be in doubt, to create drama. Right now, there isn't, and Canada simply seems to be pulling away from the field.Politics
Peters’ supersized super - the missing letters
(This story has been updated after confirmation from the MSD of who is sent annual letters)
Every year, certain groups of superannuitants are sent a form or a letter from the Government asking for confirmation of their relationship status and living situation.
One year it is a 'Change of Circumstances' form, to be filled out. The next it is a letter saying what the pensioner's marital status and living arrangements are listed as and asking for immediate notification if they have changed.
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has been (mis)receiving superannuation since 2010 - having acknowledged this week he was overpaid as being single, rather than single and sharing his St Mary's Bay home with de facto Jan Trotman.
Peters says he does not know how a mistake, impliedly on his original application form, came to be and that he and the Ministry of Social Development have agreed it is a mystery. He was billed about $18,000 and repaid the money, which might or might not be a mix of over-payment, interest and penalties. Interest and penalties are normally only applied if the receiver is at fault. Peters says his total included those elements but there is some official doubt about that interpretation.
He says he received a notice with his first payment and from then on never knew or checked how much money he was being paid. He told interviewers he never needed to re-affirm his status or arrangements as you were only required to do so if those circumstances changed.
Now 72, Peters was being paid on the single rate - one of a number of sub-categories scheduled to receive letters from Work and Income, depending on whether the recipient has an income.
It is, of course, possible that he did not receive one or all of them due to his circumstances, or clerical or postal error.
If he did not receive them, there could be questions asked within MSD on their mail fail.
The Change of Circumstances forms are to be completed if a change of relationship status or residential arrangements has occurred.
But the other documents - letters sent in alternate years - are unambiguous, almost unmissably specific, in their questioning.
A copy of the standard letter, published today by the Kiwiblog site run by National Party pollster David Farrar, says it offers "an opportunity to make sure your details are correct".
"It's important that we have the right details so that you are not underpaid or overpaid... If the information we have about you is correct, you don't have to do anything. But if any of the information below has changed or is not correct, please let us know as soon as possible."
Then in bold, presumably for the elderly with challenged eyesight:
Please check the following details to make sure they are correct.
And the critical two lines on the example of the standard form produced on Kiwiblog are:
Relationship Status: You are single
Your living situation: You are living alone.
Peters was receiving the single payment. For much of the time he was single and sharing (which would have been a lower weekly sum) until Trotman applied for her own superannuation at 65 this year and another category again would have applied for the MP.
If the information each year was not correct, a superannuitant is provided with the "NZ Super line 0800 552 002" or they are directed to their local Work and Income office. For Peters that would have been in Queen St, in the central city, about 3km from his home.
The politician has been quick to turn the revelation of his overpayment into a witch-hunt to find the whistleblower. Two government ministers were briefed on his case under a 'no surprises policy' with government agencies, after Peters' case and repayment had been concluded. The Prime Minister's chief of staff, Wayne Eagleson, was also told, by one minister. Prime Minister Bill English, Eagleson, the ministers and the National Party campaign chief Steven Joyce all deny leaking the material. English and Joyce deny being aware of the matter at all.
Ministerial Services, which oversees the offices of the Beehive, is reviewing the ministers' handling of the confidential material. The State Services Commission and Solicitor-General were consulted before MSD decided to brief its minister, Anne Tolley.
MSD and the Inland Revenue Department are investigating if anyone in their operations was responsible for the leak.
Peters is now blaming the National Party, saying he had been warned that National would try to use the information against him. He did not, however, make his repayment public at the time and front-foot the affair.Terry Firma
Does more education lead to less religion?
Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner says yes, and he bases that on a study by Daniel Hungerman, an economist at Notre Dame who studies religious faith. Hungerman, using an exclusively Canadian data set, concluded that
…higher levels of education lead to lower levels of religious participation later in life. An additional year of education leads to a 4-percentage-point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition; the estimates suggest that increases in schooling can explain most of the large rise in non-affiliation in Canada in recent decades.
Of course, this is not at all the same as saying that the religious are less intelligent. For those who care to wade into that minefield, there’s Prof. Helmuth Nyborg’s 2008 study. Nyborg correlated religiosity and IQ, and found that
…atheists scored an average of 1.95 IQ points higher than agnostics, 3.82 points higher than liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than dogmatic persuasions.
In a separate research project that involved IQ levels of almost 7,000 U.S. adolescents, Nyborg and a fellow academic, Prof. Richard Lynn, concluded that atheists scored six IQ points higher than non-atheists. They also found that at the international level, the nations with the biggest populations of atheists are the ones that scored highest for overall intelligence.
Fundamentalists are very often wary of children receiving a good (higher) education, and now we know that, in their own warped way, they’re completely right.
[image via pkpolitics]Image copyright Getty Images
Mums alter the timbre of their voice when speaking "motherese" - or baby talk - say scientists in the US.
Timbre refers to the unique quality of a sound and is why a piano sounds different to a violin, even when playing the same note.
Experiments at the Princeton Baby Laboratory found women use different timbres when talking to adults and babies.
The same vocal shift was found across women speaking 10 languages.
Dr Elise Piazza said: "It's so consistent across mothers, they all use the same kind of shift to go between those modes."
'Vocal footprint'
Many of the traits of baby talk, such as differences in speed and pitch, are thought to help infants develop language skills, but this is the first time a shift in timbre has been discovered.
When you describe a voice as nasal or hoarse, gravelly or velvety, then you are talking about its timbre.
The mums were recorded while they interacted with their child, aged between seven and 12 months, and to the adult researchers.
The scientific team then took "vocal fingerprints" by measuring the spectrum of sounds within the recordings.
The results on 12 English-speaking mums, published in the journal Current Biology, showed a unique speech pattern was directed at infants.
'Highly reliable'
A computer programme was trained to spot the difference and it could then find it - in less than one second - in mums speaking other languages.
The difference was found in 12 non-English speakers communicating in languages including Hebrew, Mandarin and Cantonese.
Dr Piazza told the BBC: "There is wide-ranging research showing infants learn better from infant-directed versus adult-directed speech.
"Specifically they can segment words into syllables better and they can learn novel words better and that probably encompasses these timbre features."
The study did not look at dads or grandparents, but the researchers anticipate similar timbre adjustments.
Prof Jenny Saffran, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, commented: "This is the first study to ask whether [mothers] also change the timbre of their voice, manipulating the kinds of features that differentiate musical instruments from one another.
"This is fascinating because clearly speakers are not aware of changing their timbre, and this new study shows that it is a highly reliable feature of the way we speak to babies."
Follow James on Twitter.QPR went down to a 1-0 defeat in their second fixture of the pre-season campaign at Peterborough United.
Emile Sinclair’s 86th-minute strike set up the Posh win after good fortune allowed the forward to finish from close range.
Substitute Ale Faurlin twice went close for Rangers in the second half but was unable to find a way past goalkeeper Joe Day.
Rangers fashioned the first opportunity of the contest after less than five minutes. Armand Traore controlled wonderfully well from a Rob Green goal kick before driving into the opposing half and firing straight at Bobby Olejnik.
But Peterborough soon had a chance of their own. Grant McCann warmed the hands of Rob Green with a free-kick, following Clint Hill’s foul on the edge of the box.
Green was called into action again come the quarter-hour mark. Traore’s misplaced pass allowed Nathaniel Mendez-Laing to get a shot away, but the midfielder could only drive low into the arms of the ‘keeper.
The home side had the majority of chances in the opening period. Posh skipper Tommy Rowe headed straight at Green from a corner, while McCann’s left-footed blast from distance crashed into the side-netting.
McCann almost scored direct from a corner too, with Green having to scramble to tip a teasing centre over.
Rangers created little and played the final few minutes of the opening period with 10 men, after Stephane Mbia went down without challenge.
The visitors made two changes at the break, with Mbia and Traore making way for Faurlin and Yun Suk-Young.
Peterborough started the second half with intent and Danny Simpson had to be alert to cut out what would have been a routine finish for Tyrone Barnett from six yards.
Bobby Zamora had Rangers’ first two chances of the half but was denied both times by ‘keeper Day.
Faurlin, however, would go closer when his 25-yard free-kick forced a smart stop from Day.
Good passing play from the R’s led to arguably their best chance yet when Faurlin eventually crossed for Zamora, who guided a header off target.
At the other end, Jack Payne forced Green into what turned out to be a comfortable save following a long-range blast.
The home side struck the decisive goal with only four minutes left to play.
Joe Newell’s shot deflected off Onuoha and over the despairing hand of Green, before Sinclair stole in to bundle the ball over the line.
Faurlin went close at the death but his long-range effort was well saved by Day.
QPR: Green, Simpson (Young), Traore (Suk-Young), Hill (Ferdinand), Park (Hoilett), Johnson (Mackie), Wright-Phillips (Derry), Onuoha, Jenas (Granero), Mbia (Faurlin), Zamora.
Subs not used: Murphy.
Goals: Peterborough - Sinclair (86)I’m a dad to two little boys, ages 7 and 3 as of this writing. We have a good time; they look at me and my interests (things like playing music, running, reading comic books), and want to follow along simply because I’m their dad. As far as they’re concerned, I’m the coolest guy that they know and can do no wrong in their eyes. I’m so humbled and grateful to be loved on that level, but as a parent, I have a strange insecurity and guilt that goes with that. Because I’m not perfect. Far from it. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes before my kids entered the picture. Yes, I’d learned hard lessons that helped shape me into the man they love today, but still…it was a version of me that I worked hard to get away from. It’s a version that upsets me to revisit, and one that I’m not necessarily eager for my kids to know. But I already see aspects of my personality in them that I know I’ll need to guide (especially as they get older), and that’ll mean revisiting those unpleasant memories. I know that those conversations are important and that they won’t mean the end of the world. That doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to having them.
I say all this because Miles’ dad, Jefferson Davis, was introduced as a character that I could empathize with. He was easygoing guy that loved his family, but it was clear that he’d worked hard to reinvent himself and didn’t want his son to know about the person he used to be. Although my own past mistakes are ridiculously trivial in comparison, I still felt like I got him right away.
Issue #2 of Ultimate Comics Spider-Man (2011) features a poignant scene where Jefferson struggles to explain why he didn’t want Miles hanging around with his Uncle Aaron. We’d learned that Aaron is a thief, Jefferson had once been a part of that world and had done jail time for theft, and that Aaron had once saved his life. It’s a quiet beautiful moment that resonated deeply with me – a father expressing regret over certain life choices and trying to guide his son toward a better path. As a dad, I try to protect my kids from the big bad world out there. They’re growing up and will eventually have to figure out stuff on their own. Like Jefferson, I’d want my sons to understand that life can be tough and that the last thing we want to do is end up as our own worst enemy.
Jefferson has finally returned, ready to open up about his past to his son. And as we discover here in issue #8, the web of Miles Morales’ life connects in surprising ways. This is Jefferson’s story. Or rather (this being a Bendis title) the first part of it.
We flash back twenty-five years to ago to a club in Newark, where Jefferson is being reluctantly drawn into Aaron’s shady business deal. Things quickly go wrong and Jefferson finds himself ambushed. He takes a vicious beating yet somehow overcomes his attackers and emerges unscathed. This attracts the attention of a familiar looking man in an eyepatch, who offers him an opportunity to save the country. Bendis conveys a very real sense of fear as Jefferson’s situation continues to escalate beyond his control. He’s torn between loyalty to his brother, disappointing their mother, and getting roped into risking his life out of obligation to a greater responsibility.
That last part sound familiar?
Although the cover said that this issue was by the same creative team of Bendis, Marquez, and Ponsor, the opening pages had me triple-checking to make sure that it wasn’t a misprint. The art and colors were so dramatically different that I wasn’t quite sure this was the same book. Heavier lines and shadowing and dark (!) colors set a very uncomfortable and rough tone that matched Jefferson’s unease. It’s a major stylistic departure that strongly complements the story. It reminded me of Michael Gaydos’ tense art in Alias (another Bendis Marvel title). I don’t know if that series was a deliberate reference point for Marquez and Ponsor, but the end result creates an uncomfortable mood (as if you’re constantly on the edge of some very bad stuff happening) and perhaps even the haziness of recalling tough memories from twenty-five years ago. Besides the amusement of seeing certain hairstyles, what I found most striking were the closeups of young Jefferson, looking like the spitting image of Miles.
The dark and shadowy look had an inadvertently humorous effect on the page where Jefferson reveals his real target: A key character in the Ultimate Spider-Man story (going all the way back to the original 2001 series) dressed much differently than we’re used to seeing. It took me a second to realize that what seemed to be a beard was in fact a turtleneck sweater – at first glance, the face seemed like a menacing take on the current writer of Amazing Spider-Man! That very minor criticism aside, Marquez’s and Ponsor’s work in this issue showcase an impressive range, which is highlighted on the final page where we snap back to a familiar park bench in the present day.
This series has taken so many risks in its short run, and the farther we go, the more they seem to be paying off. At first it seemed strange to have the book called Miles Morales seem to focus more on peripheral characters. This issue suggests that Bendis is carefully establishing how those characters (imperfect as they are) are crucial to shaping our hero into the man he’s becoming. It’s offering a very different take on the “Web of Life” concept, and being one that we can all relate to, it truly embodies the spirit of the Ultimate Universe.
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Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man #8 – REVIEW Brian Jacob December 19, 2014 8.5 / 10 Another bold risk in a series that has already successfully taken many of them, issue #8 is a departure from the norm in every way possible. It may seem strange to base an entire issue on Miles' father, but in doing so, we get our first true glimpse into the man that's helped make our hero into who he is today. December 19, 2014CTVNews.ca Staff
Just three weeks after the small town of Reston, Manitoba began selling super cheap plots of land, there is already a waiting list.
The town came up with the unusual offer in the hopes of capitalizing on a mini oil boom in the southwest corner of Manitoba. To attract business and boost its population, Reston began offering plots of land for $10.
The municipality’s website -- which normally gets around 100,000 hits each month – saw that number jump in October to approximately 3.8 million.
“It’s exploded. We’ve had a lot of traffic on the website, so much that some people are having difficulties getting on, even ourselves some days,” said Tanis Chalmers, Reston’s economic development officer.
Applications continue to pour in from locations as far as South Africa and as close as Winnipeg.
As of Oct. 14, more than half of the 24 original $10 lots had been sold. Student enrolment at local schools saw a boost as a result.
Before the $10 offer, the scenic town known for its agriculture had a population of 550 people.
Aimee Edwards, a young mother from Hamilton, Ont., is hoping to help boost that number when she makes the move with her fiancée.
“We just heard about it on TV. It made us do in depth research about it. We just kept going. We learned more and more, then wanted it more and more,” Edwards told CTV Winnipeg.
According to the municipality’s website, lots will remain available until the conditions of the property agreement are met. In 2013, more lots will be made available in surrounding communities within the Rural Municipality of Pipestone.
For those eager to make the move, a $1,000 deposit is required to secure a lot, but $990 will be returned upon receiving the occupancy permit.
Occupants have 90 days to begin construction from the closing date on the offer.
Officials will begin the application review process next week. Some approvals will be made in the next few days. A waiting list will be created for properties that may come available in the future.
With files from CTV’s Winnipeg Bureau Chief Jill MacyshonAuthorities on Tuesday identified two bodies as those of a Georgia couple who disappeared after driving three hours to buy a classic car; a suspect already in custody was charged with murder and armed robbery.
The Telfair County sheriff, Chris Steverson, said 69-year-old Elrey “Bud” Runion and his 66-year-old wife, June, were shot dead and that 28-year-old Ronnie Adrian “Jay” Towns of McRae had been charged with malice murder and armed robbery.
Towns was initially charged with giving false statements and criminal attempt to commit theft by deception.
Authorities said Bud Runion posted a Craigslist ad last week seeking a classic car and travelled to Telfair County with his wife to meet a potential seller. The two were reported missing and their SUV and bodies were found on Monday.
In Telfair County, where cotton and peanut fields meet dense woods, a three-hour drive south of the Runions’ suburban Atlanta home, days of searching by authorities and volunteers ended with a grim discovery and an arrest. Sheriff Steverson said the couple’s SUV had been found in a lake a few miles outside McRae, a tiny city of 5,700 about 80 miles south-east of Macon. Searchers discovered two bodies nearby.
The same day, investigators arrested Towns. The sheriff said a cellphone used to make the last known contact with the Runions had been traced to Towns. He said the young man turned himself in on Monday, accompanied by family members.
The arrest stunned Towns’s family. He grew up on a farm beside a long dirt road where his father grew soybeans, cotton and peanuts, not far from where the bodies were found. Towns lived in neighbouring Wheeler County with his family – a wife and a young daughter he supported doing construction work for a local homebuilder, said his uncle, Buddy Towns.
“He’s a good kid, and very smart,” said the uncle, who often saw his nephew’s truck pass his McRae business as Jay Towns headed to work. “It just doesn’t make any sense why this would even go down. It’s hard for his parents. They’re not understanding.”
The sheriff said investigators found no evidence that Towns owned the sort of classic car Runion was seeking.
The Runions’ daughters reported them missing after they didn’t show up to babysit their grandchildren. They told WSB-TV their parents left home with their cellphones and chargers, but no one had heard from them since 3.30pm on Thursday.
“If someone has taken them, we have forgiven that person, because God tells us to love and forgive,” daughter Virginia Owens said, before her parents’ vehicle was located.Shutterstock
"We want to replace YouTube, Dropbox, Facebook, Spotify, ISPs, and more with decentralised apps based on proof of bandwidth."
This was the bold statement announced last week from Bitcloud, a distributed autonomous corporation that hopes to "decentralise the current internet" so it can "create a new internet to replace it".
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So far, Bitcloud is only a concept, but it has already ruffled the feathers of numerous cryptocurruncy aficionados. This form of "new internet" is not exactly straightforward, with even its non-technical whitepaper bemusing some. However, if you're familiar with the likes of Tor, Bittorrent and cryptocurrencies, you'll already have a basic understanding; it's just a matter of putting the pieces together.
What Bitcloud is proposing is a Tor-like anonymous internet made up of numerous nodes that carry encrypted data; unlike Tor, nodes will use any incoming traffic to mine for cloudcoins, the Bitcloud cryptocurrency. This gives those using the anonymous network an incentive to contribute to the infrastructure, because not only do more nodes mean a faster browsing experience, but there is the promise of capital from simply contributing to the system.
Read next How a tragic death (and paranoia) wiped out £145m of crypto wealth How a tragic death (and paranoia) wiped out £145m of crypto wealth
The same concept applies for hosted content. Any content hosted on a server needs to pay a sort of "toll charge" any time data is transferred from the server to the node. However, the more hits a website receives, the richer the server becomes, allowing for a sort of perpetual growth and a system in which, theoretically, everyone earns money from everyone else.
It is this idea of incentive that is so crucial, and unique, to Bitcloud: "One of the many problems of certain free and open source projects in the past has been the lack of a profit incentive," explain the developers. "With Bitcloud, nodes on a mesh network can be rewarded financially for routing traffic in a brand new mesh network. This removes the need for Internet Service Providers."
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Wired.co.uk spoke to Amir Taaki, a British software developer and expert in cryptocurrency, who seemed excited about the concept, but had some reservations about Bitcloud specifically: "The potential from combining swarms and DHTs (concepts from BitTorrent) with a blockchain (concept from Bitcoin) is enormous.
The blockchain is a new data structure in computer science and arguably more important than Bitcoin itself. We still haven't explored all the applications of it. Twister is my favourite of these new wave of projects exploring this, and this is the final puzzle piece in usable crypto. Megaupload, The Pirate Bay, FrostWire and other groups are all jumping on the bandwagon but I think Twister is the most advanced."
Twister seems to be capable of many of Bitcloud's underlying features, except it's limited to microblogging: "With this technology we can do many, many things", explains Taaki, "[we can] maintain an identity, build a distributed reputation around that identity, coordinate contracts between identities, distribute anonymous blogs and webpages which is fast to load unlike Tor/other systems, and send private messages. Basically all the functions of the Silk Road but uncensored and usable (deal with nicknames)."
Taaki explains that there are a lot of fundamental similarities between Bitcloud's proposals and Twister, but that Twister is already seven months in development, operational and run by a trusted developer. Bitcloud, he says, is more of a fancy version of PayFile, but it is nonetheless part of "a greater effort" that's probably worthy of our attention.
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The existence of other similar -- and functioning -- ideas (Twister, MediaGoblin) means we probably shouldn't dismiss this as vapourware just yet. A fast, anonymous, and decentralised internet that's not at the whim of arbitrary ISP enforced regulations (whilst also having its own self-perpetuating currency) sounds a bit too good to be true, but not impossible.
At this stage Bitcloud asks more questions than it can answer, but it's a novel concept that, as Taaki said, may have enormous potential.
Wired.co.uk got in touch with the founders of Bitcloud but have yet to hear back from them.What is the right foreign policy for a downsizing superpower?
In the years ahead, the United States will have to take dramatic steps to curb its ever-expanding fiscal deficits. No matter what our politicians promise, this will mean both raising taxes and cutting expenses, including Social Security, Medicare and national defense - the largest items in the federal budget.
In these circumstances, with Americans sending more tax dollars to Washington and getting less in return, they will be less generous in supporting not only defense spending, but also diplomacy, foreign aid and the other tools of U.S. foreign policy. |
for the outbreak, to the point that the Fylkir had to act. By royal proclamation, all Jews were barred from the realm.
Noregr was not the only realm to suspect the Jews, with news arriving from the south that the Republic of Danmark having taken the same steps. Whether they were trying to eliminate the plague that ran rampart through their trading empire, or were simply trying to remove the competition for Norse traders was irrelevant and any Jew that was travelling south halted their plans and instead went east.
Later came the report that shocked the court only for the fact that it had taken so long to accomplish, the King of Pomerania officially surrendered to the Catholic coalition that opposed his invasion. In another time this could have been a glorious expansion of the faith, now however no army could the greatest invader of all.
Good news did arrive from Skotland with the news that the plague was in retreat there. This was tempered with the news that the Catholics there had launched an invasion of the Jomviking lands. Raising the levies of Skotland, he ordered them to march south and assist their brethren.
Despite not having been raised for a few years, the armies of the Fylkir were born for warfare as is the Norse way. Together with the Jomavikings and the Svitjod they broke the Catholic army at Richmond. Broken from this battle, the war was quickly rapped up after this.
After a few years at the mercy of cruel gods, the plague was at last banished from the realm. Overall, almost a third of the population were either dying or dead. Amongst these were three of Fylkir Starkadr’s four children. The inheritance of the realm now rested on his shoulders alone. The might gates of Castle Lade were finally reopened. (Source: http://www.historic-uk.com/assets/Images/plagueholywellmount.jpg?1390902435) After a few years at the mercy of cruel gods, the plague was at last banished from the realm. Overall, almost a third of the population were either dying or dead. Amongst these were three of Fylkir Starkadr’s four children. The inheritance of the realm now rested on his shoulders alone. The might gates of Castle Lade were finally reopened.
Seeing the signs of deliverance from the plague, Fylkir knew that he would have to act quickly to unite his people to move beyond the horrors that they had experienced. It is said that Odin approached the Fylkir and told him to eliminate the false faith of the Slavics, they who perverted the true faith in their practices. Therefore, the last remaining independent kingdom, Poland, must fall.
The Pope of the Catholics apparently had a similar idea. Calling upon all of the lords of the mainland to gather forces, their destination was the city of Jerusalem and the holy lands of the Catholics, Christians, Muslims and Jews. With the Bosporus Straights still contested, the success of this venture will depend on control of the Mediterranean Sea.
Whilst preparations for the departure from Castle Lade were underway, a childhood prank had some very serious consequences when Prince Sæmundr accidentally blinded his father the Fylkir. Throwing a small stone at him, it appeared to all that his father would catch the thrown projectile, however it became apparent that he had not become as use to the use of only one eye. The Fylkirs smile soon disappeared, as did his vision.
Preparing to depart for Poland, the Fylkir was interrupted by news of rebellious Jarls. Forming a pact, they called for the Fylkir to be elected by the Jarls of Noregr. Surprisingly, not one of the rebels would actually benefit from this increased power if successful.
The Catholics had heard of the plans of the Fylkir for Poland and the Pope commanded the King of Germany to seize the lands of the Duchy of Brunswik. Once completed they would march north and prevent the Fylkirs army from crossing. (Source: #p698395">#p698395"> http://www. elgrancapitan. org/foro/viewtopic. php?f=87&t=16834&p=698395&hilit=hospitalario#p698395)The Catholics had heard of the plans of the Fylkir for Poland and the Pope commanded the King of Germany to seize the lands of the Duchy of Brunswik. Once completed they would march north and prevent the Fylkirs army from crossing.
Luckily, as the army Noregr was already assembled and it was quickly sent to Skotland to capture the rogue Jarl of Mann. Shattering his armies, the rebels were forced to surrender and marched to the dungeons below Castle Lade.
The German army quickly completed their first objective of capturing the Norse parts of the Duchy of Brunswick. They then advanced to Holstein and repaired to prevent meet their foe. Defences were prepaired for their foe, expecting an attack from Danmark. They were however unaware of the problems in Skotland, and therefore being transported in the fleet. Landing on their western flank, the Noregr army charged forth and hit their flank and bypassed their prepared defences. (Source: https://s-media-cache-ak0. pinimg. com/originals/f5/33/aa/f533aa2290b4d087320091623cf039f4. jpg)The German army quickly completed their first objective of capturing the Norse parts of the Duchy of Brunswick. They then advanced to Holstein and repaired to prevent meet their foe. Defences were prepaired for their foe, expecting an attack from Danmark. They were however unaware of the problems in Skotland, and therefore being transported in the fleet. Landing on their western flank, the Noregr army charged forth and hit their flank and bypassed their prepared defences.
The defeat at Holstein completely broke the moral of the German levies and knights. Instead of pushing further the Fylkir offered the German King a choice. They could either return home and prepare to march on their holy lands in the desert or the Northman would descend upon every castle and town of and burn them to the ground. The Catholic forces quickly left the Republics lands and their forces removed themselves from captured castles.
In the end, the war was quick and brutal. Falling upon the Polish unbelievers with the fury of the Thunderer. Their defeat was inevitable and the Polish King was relieved of his crow, the Fylkir added it to those that he already had, of Noregr and Skotland. The land however, was given to someone else.
Made up of Polish that renounced their old gods, the more battle hardened Godi’s, and members of the Fylkir own mounted guard, the Wolves of Midguard was Fylkirs answer to the mounted Holy Orders of the Catholics. Given the lands of the Polish, their job was to convert those that would follow Odin and his chosen representative in Midgard and to defend these lands from those that would not. (Source: https://s-media-cache-ak0. pinimg. com/originals/be/8e/20/be8e20631716239e7b1e342c22489dc2. jpg)Made up of Polish that renounced their old gods, the more battle hardened Godi’s, and members of the Fylkir own mounted guard, the Wolves of Midguard was Fylkirs answer to the mounted Holy Orders of the Catholics. Given the lands of the Polish, their job was to convert those that would follow Odin and his chosen representative in Midgard and to defend these lands from those that would not.
The Fylkir did not escape his campaign without a scratch, losing his hand when ambushed by a Polish warband. Many drew comparisons to the story of Tyr and Fenrir, the god of war and the monstrous wolf offspring of Loki. Tyr was able to bind his foe, at the cost of his hand, lost to the beasts terrible bite. To replace this a golden hand was commissioned, depicting this mighty battle.
Preparing to return to Castle Lade after the establishment of the, the news that the Catholics too had completed their task surprised the Fylkir. Apparently the Pope had granted the lands to the Duke of Bavaria for his contributions to the war effort. For the first time since XXX, the followers of Christ controlled their holiest city.
Marching through Pomerania, the host is greeted with grim news. The Teutonic Knights had succeeded where the Germans had failed and took the Duchy of Holstein from the Republic. It was now not possible to travel by land between the northern Kings and the mainland without passing through Catholic lands. This could not remain. Gathering his tired troops, the Fylkir ordered the castles sieged and returned to the Prince Mayor of Danmark. The small forces were no match for the war host and the castles were captured before the orders allies could arrive. (Source: http://odobenus.deviantart.com/art/Templar-296085235) Marching through Pomerania, the host is greeted with grim news. The Teutonic Knights had succeeded where the Germans had failed and took the Duchy of Holstein from the Republic. It was now not possible to travel by land between the northern Kings and the mainland without passing through Catholic lands. This could not remain. Gathering his tired troops, the Fylkir ordered the castles sieged and returned to the Prince Mayor of Danmark. The small forces were no match for the war host and the castles were captured before the orders allies could arrive.
Arriving back at Castle Lade, a grand feast was prepared to celebrate the victory. At the peak of the celebration, the Fylkir was brought low. Rushed to the Court Physician, it was determined that the cause was poison. Luckily the Fylkir had not injected much, as he was fairly drunk at this stage and had dropped the contaminated drink. An investigation revealed that the Fylkir’s own wife was the culprit, and she was quickly confined to the dungeons.
The march back home had not been kind to the old Fylkir, and the poison was racing through his system. Barely conscious, the Court Physician ordered that his body be brought to a cave where Fylkir Sæmundr had written the Asatru. Inside the cave was a small lake that Pordr had Fylkir Starkadr submerged in. Plunging his lords head beneath the water, it is said that Thor himself spoke to the Fylkir and told him where to find an artefact that would rally the faithful.
And so the Fylkir alone travelled deeper into the cavern, having been cured of the terrible effects of his traitorous wife’s poison. Returning to his party a few hours later, over his shoulder was a very large battle horn.
The location of the mythical Gjallarhorn was not the only thing revealed to him. The Germans had pushed through the lightly defended area around Braunschweig. There needed to be a united front to protect the enterance to the northern lands. It was revealed to Fylkir Starkadr that eventually the faithful would push south and take these lands. For now though, the King of Pomerania was granted land taken from the King of Germany and lands traditionally held by the Fylkir himself. As a token of goodwill, Braunschweig and holy Irminsul was granted along with the title ‘Warden of the Gateway’.
To the east the King of Svitjod had supported many artists and commissioned many great works of art and monuments. His conquest of most of the Lithuanian lands had seen his realm grow larger than it had ever been before. The purpose of this was for the development of a culture separate from their Norse brothers. For many years the three nations of Noregr, Svitjod and Danmark had been growing more and more separate. To highlight this drift, the King of Svitjod renamed his nation, now the Kingdom of Svea Rike.
After many years of leading campains and great wars, they Fylkir was a tired man. Having seen more than sixty winters, he knew that his time was not long left for this world. To help prepare for the transition of power, he spent his last years developing the realm. This however cost money and while Noregr was a rich land, this was not enough. The Fylkir then sent out an order for a force to be sent along the coast to loot and plunder. Unlike in times past where a lord would raise warriors for an expedition, a band was commissioned that would be under the employ of the crown. Their lives would be wholly dedicated to this task. [This was the raising of a retinue, to put some restrictions on myself the sole purpose of these troops will be raiding.] (Scoure: http://surbrook.devermore.net/herosource/fantasy_hero/vikings/viking_raiders.jpg) After many years of leading campains and great wars, they Fylkir was a tired man. Having seen more than sixty winters, he knew that his time was not long left for this world. To help prepare for the transition of power, he spent his last years developing the realm. This however cost money and while Noregr was a rich land, this was not enough. The Fylkir then sent out an order for a force to be sent along the coast to loot and plunder. Unlike in times past where a lord would raise warriors for an expedition, a band was commissioned that would be under the employ of the crown. Their lives would be wholly dedicated to this task. [This was the raising of a retinue, to put some restrictions on myself the sole purpose of these troops will be raiding.]
As gold flowed back from the raids, the Fylkir commissioned a massive improvement to infrastructure in the kingdom. Along the coast, the towns that grew around castles were expanded. Further inland, existing villages were expanded to small towns [new city holdings]. Slowly the damages of the plague were reversed and the population rebuilt [I also completed the ambition for realm prosperity, whatever it is called]. (Source: http://fatbottompurls.com/post/146706589228/ultrafacts-gu %C3%A9delon-castle-is-a-medieval)As gold flowed back from the raids, the Fylkir commissioned a massive improvement to infrastructure in the kingdom. Along the coast, the towns that grew around castles were expanded. Further inland, existing villages were expanded to small towns [new city holdings]. Slowly the damages of the plague were reversed and the population rebuilt [I also completed the ambition for realm prosperity, whatever it is called].
R10-065
But peace does not last. The Jomsviking sent word that the ancient enemy of the Noregr, the lords of Hwicce, had gathered an army and launched an invasion. Now styling himself ‘King of Hwicce’ [Custom kingdom created by the AI], he had gathered the men from across his holding in the Isles and the mainland and sought to divide the lands of the Jomsvikings in half [Holy war for the duchy of York].
(Source: http://donhollway.com/clontarf/) R10-065But peace does not last. The Jomsviking sent word that the ancient enemy of the Noregr, the lords of Hwicce, had gathered an army and launched an invasion. Now styling himself ‘King of Hwicce’ [Custom kingdom created by the AI], he had gathered the men from across his holding in the Isles and the mainland and sought to divide the lands of the Jomsvikings in half [Holy war for the duchy of York].
The strains of war proved too much for the old man, and Fylkir Starkadr was found dead one morning whilst on the march. His one surviving son now inherited a nation at war, and as an older man himself with no heir so far, his ascension would result in more challengers than from those across the battlefield.Stocks extended losses by mid-afternoon Tuesday in a weaker start to November as uncertainty over the upcoming presidential election weighed on Wall Street.
The S&P 500 was down 1.3%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.1%, and the Nasdaq declined 1.4%. The S&P 500 has fallen for the past six sessions.
Conflicting polls created uncertainty over the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. An NBC/SurveyMonkey poll showed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's 6-point lead remained after concerns over her emails were raised again on Friday. A separate ABC poll showed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a 1-point lead. U.S. voters will head to the polls on Nov. 8.
"The reopening of the Clinton email investigation indeed raises the possibilities of a market re-enacting the scenario from the Nixon years, where uncertainties created an unstable market notwithstanding a solid economic environment," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at First Standard Financial. "While no one will be able to predict the outcome, one thing is certain: Uncertainties are the markets' worst enemy. In other words, it's time to be cautious."
Crude oil prices fell on Tuesday as worries over a deal among major oil-producing countries persisted. Goldman Sachs added to a chorus of concern on Monday evening after warning that prices could plummet if the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries fails to enact a production freeze agreement at a meeting in late November.
A deal looks more and more distant, analysts wrote in a note, with "weakening oil fundamentals warranting oil prices in the low [$40 a barrel range] in our view if OPEC is unable to deliver a convincing agreement."
West Texas Intermediate crude fell 1% to $46.41 a barrel on Tuesday.
Defensive utilities stocks were the worst performers on markets Tuesday. NextEra Energy (NEE), Duke Energy (DUK), Southern Co. (SO), National Grid (NGG) and Dominion Resources (D) fell, while the Utilities SPDR ETF (XLU) slid 1.4%.
Yum! China Holdings (YUMC) climbed in its market debut on Tuesday. Shares added more than 5% after the China operations were spun off from parent Yum! Brands (YUM). Yum China has exclusive rights to KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in mainland China.
Manufacturing activity in the U.S. in October rose at a faster pace than expected, according to the latest ISM Manufacturing Index. The measure increased to 51.9 last month from 51.5 in October. Analysts expected a reading of 51.7. A comeback in manufacturing was welcome after a higher U.S. dollar and low oil prices stunted growth for months.
A separate reading on the manufacturing sector hit a one-year high as increases in output and new orders drove manufacturing activity. The final Markit PMI reading for October increased to 53.4 in its final reading for the month, up from initial estimates of 53.3.
U.S. construction spending in September showed a surprise decrease. Construction spending fell 0.4% in September, according to the Census Bureau. Analysts had expected a 0.5% increase after spending declined 0.5% in August. Private nonresidential construction weighed on the total as commercial and manufacturing building activity declined. August's number was also revised to show a smaller increase.
Manufacturing activity in China improved in October to its best level in two years. The official manufacturing purchasing managers index rose to 51.2 in October, up from 50.4 in September, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The measure has improved for three straight months. Improvement in the sector comes as a relief after stretches of weak growth in the manufacturing-focused economy.
In earnings news, Kellogg (K) inched higher as cost cuts and improved margins boosted third-quarter earnings 42%. Adjusted profit jumped to 96 cents a share from 85 cents a year earlier. Analysts had expected earnings of 87 cents a share. Revenue fell 2.2% as currency exchange dragged on topline growth.
Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) jumped 4% after swinging to a profit in its third quarter. The oil company reported quarterly profit of $1.4 billion, reversing a loss of $6.1 billion in the year-ago quarter. Shell managed to turn a profit as it focused on cost cutting in the face of a prolonged period of low oil prices.
BP (BP) also reported a better-than-expected quarter as it stripped down operations to weather a tough climate. Third-quarter profit rose 35% after three straight quarters of net losses.
Archer Daniels (ADM) rose 8% after earnings topped estimates thanks to a jump in agricultural services revenue. Third-quarter net income improved to 58 cents a share from 41 cents in the year-ago quarter. Adjusted earnings came in at 59 cents a share, above estimates of 46 cents.
Pfizer (PFE) fell 2% after issuing a disappointing outlook for earnings. The drugmaker said it expects full-year earnings of $2.38 to $2.43 a share, narrowing the upper-range of its guidance from $2.48. Analysts had anticipated full-year earnings of $2.46 a share. Pfizer also missed third-quarter profit, reporting adjusted net income of 61 cents a share, a penny below estimates. Revenue rose 8% and came in roughly in line with consensus.
Shire (SHPG) cut its full-year outlook as costs associated with its acquisition of Baxalta rose. The drugmaker expected a diluted loss per American Depository Share of 70 cents to $1.10 this year. The company had previously expected zero earnings to a net loss of 40 cents a share.
Gannett (GCI) abandoned its bid to purchase newspaper publisher Tronc (TRNC). The two had failed to reach an agreement on price after months of talks. Tronc shares slumped 15%.
Coach (COH) shares were under pressure after the fashion accessories retailer missed quarterly sales estimates. The company reported a 1% increase in revenue to $1.04 billion, though coming in short of $1.07 billion consensus. Coach forecasts fiscal 2017 revenue growth in the low-to-mid single digits.
Angie's List (ANGI) climbed more than 10% after announcing it had hired financial advisers to explore a potential sale. A sale would be among a number of strategic options the company could pursue. The home-improvement search engine reported a wider quarterly loss than expected, though new memberships rose.
Two-thirds of S&P 500 companies have reported earnings so far this season. Of those that have reported, 71% have exceeded earnings estimates, while 53% have passed revenue forecasts. Third-quarter earnings are expected to grow 3.1%, according to Thomson Reuters, snapping the longest earnings recession since 2009.
Automakers posted their October sales reports on Tuesday. General Motors (GM) breezed past sales estimates over October. The automaker reported a 1.7% decline in unit sales to 258,626, far better than an expected 6.1% decline. Fiat Chrysler (FCAU) sales reported a sharper-than-expected decline in October, down 10% compared to an expected decline of 8%. Ford (F) postponed its October sales report until later this week. The automaker said the delay was tied to a fire at its corporate headquarters in Michigan. October had two fewer selling days this year than the last.
The Federal Open Market Committee convened on Tuesday morning to discuss monetary policy. The Federal Reserve's policy-making group will conclude the meeting on Wednesday afternoon with a statement, but no press conference is scheduled.
"While the market is widely anticipating the Fed to keep policy unchanged in Wednesday's announcement, the statement itself should hold plenty of clues as to the Fed's objective for rates at the final meeting of 2016," said Lindsey M. Piegza, chief economist at Stifel. "If it's anything like last year, and the Fed intends to follow through with a year-end hike, the language this month will no doubt provide specific guidance; reinforcing expectations for another increase come December."If you are intending to upgrade for Battlefield 3 you don’t want to see your newly-purchased kit superseded in a matter of months, so we’ve put together three systems that offer a high degree of future-proofing, and as such can be upgraded without chucking out the kitchen sink and starting from scratch.
Product Price Price Inc. Rebates GPU MSI N560GTX-M2D1GD5 GeForce GTX 560 1GB $189.99 $169.99 CPU Intel Core i5-2300 2.8GHz $179.99 $179.99 Motherboard MSI P67A-G45 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX UEFI BIOS $124.99 $94.99 PSU Cooler Master Elite eXtreme Power Plus RS-500-PCAR-A3-US 500 Watt $44.99 $34.99 RAM PNY XLR8 4GB (2x2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 SDRAM Model MD4096KD3-1600-X8 $33.99 $33.99 HDD Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s $59.99 $59.99 Optical Drive LG DVD Burner Black Model GH24NS70 $18.99 $18.99 CPU Cooler Stock, Included With CPU $0.00 $0.00 Thermal Compound Stock, Included With CPU $0.00 $0.00 Case Antec One Hundred Black ATX Mid Tower Chassis $49.99 $34.99 Total Price $702.92 $627.92
Having established in our benchmarks that the GeForce GTX 560 is the first choice for High Quality Battlefield 3 gaming, but also that performance was at times just above the sweet spot, we looked around for something other than a generic GeForce GTX 560; something with a bit of extra oomph. The answer came in the form of the MSI N560GTX, a competitively priced GTX 560 that’s not factory-overclocked like other, more expensive models, but is comprised of custom components and a twin-fan cooler, allowing you to perform the overclocking yourself, quickly, easily, and safely through the use of EVGA Precision. Between the custom cooler and components, performance can be pushed towards the level of the pricier GTX 560 Ti, helping you maintain a silky smooth frame rate at all times.
In concert with the GTX 560, DICE recommended the use of a Quad Core CPU, and at present there are none better than Intel’s range of ‘Sandy Bridge’ processors. The one we chose was an Intel i5-2300, a speedy, affordable mid-range chip that’s plugged into a high-quality MSI P67A-G45 motherboard (if you want to save an additional $26, drive down to Micro Center and pick up an i5-2400, a slightly faster version of the CPU that’s sold in their stores for $149.99). And like the MSI GTX 560, the i5-2300 can be quickly and easily overclocked through the motherboard’s mouse-driven UEFI BIOS menus if an extra few megahertz are required.
If overclocking simply doesn’t cut it two years down the line, however, when more demanding games are on sale, the MSI motherboard is compatible with all current and future Sandy Bridge CPUs, and should be compatible with the next-generation ‘Ivy Bridge’ processors also, currently scheduled for a March 2012 launch. Furthermore, the MSI motherboard features an additional PCI-Express slot, allowing you to drop in a second 1GB GTX 560 for a bit of SLI action. Combined, the two 560s would give a single 580 a run for its money, though you would require a PSU with a higher Wattage (900-1000 Watts).
Regarding power supplies, we’ve plumped for a Cooler Master Elite eXtreme Power Plus RS-500-PCAR-A3-US 500 Watt unit that provides more than enough juice for the configuration listed above (if you’re adding multiple hard drives and other devices you will likely have to upgrade to a 550 or 600 Watt unit). There are cheaper PSUs, but you really don’t want to scrimp on such an important component, as cheaper PSUs have a habit of failing, and when they do they often damage your other components, which will not be covered by their respective warranties.
The price of DDR3 RAM has plummeted in recent months, but to keep costs down we’ve stuck to DICE’s recommended amount, 4GB. Our recommended 8GB set, used in our other systems, would set you back $94.99 in May, and now, just $49.99. At only $16 more than the 4GB set, we categorically recommend that you snap up such an incredible deal before prices rise once more.
Unfortunately, continued flooding in Thailand has impacted the manufacture of hard drives at Western Digital. As a result e-tailers have raised their prices on all models, regardless of manufacturer, off-setting some of the savings from the RAM. For the time being, the Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX offers industry-leading performance and 500GB of space at a reasonable price. If, however, said price jumps by the time you purchase, shop around for better deals or look into a different brand of drive with similar specifications.
Housing all our kit is the Antec One Hundred, which at present is available at a ridiculously low price. In addition to having a ton of internal space, the front panel has four USB 2.0 ports, audio jacks, and a handy tray for putting loose screws, cell phones, or keys in. And despite the low price, the quality of construction is high and it won’t rattle and vibrate like chassis from no-name manufacturers.
If you require an operating system pick up Windows 7 64-bit from Amazon for an unavoidable $99.99, although if you’re a student ask around campus as you can get deeply discounted versions through your school or university. Also, don't fret about Amazon's 'old version' warning - it simply means you need to download Service Pack 1 after install (the pre-patched version costs $77 more).
At around $630, this system offers fantastic value for money. Sure, you’re not playing the game on Ultra, but the difference between the two isn’t massive - on High you receive post-processing anti-aliasing, high levels of anisotropic filtering, HBAO ambient occlusion and crisp, razor-sharp textures. In combat, with the world exploding around you, we doubt you’ll notice the difference, but if you really do want to enable every single thing keep on reading to see the systems we’ve designed for the Ultra settings.Blare Media has finally revealed the full trailer for it’s brick-themed mocumentary Brick MADNESS. The film pits an underdog “Brix” builder against an arrogant long-time champion in a battle to build his way to not only fame, but redemption. The PG-13 rated film premieres on September 8th.
“IN A WORLD… without LEGO, Cedric Donovan, a critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker, is our tour guide as we delve deep in to the world of Brix. This is a world dominated by two titans of personality and success. The Godfather of Brix, Max Grand, is the 7-time champion and most famous competitive brick builder of all time. Unfortunately, he had his career cut tragically short when he was accused of “gluing”. There to pick up the torch was Ricky 6. He is brash, arrogant and extremely successful, having won 6 tournaments since Max Grand played his last. Cut in to Seth Paxson, a young hero with a heart of gold who has to save his charity from the clutches of deceit.”
Brick MADNESS is the culmination of 8 years of tireless work to make a film that not only captures the spirit of the massive LEGO subculture, but dramatizes it into a hilarious film that is both funny and heartwarming. It delves into the world of brick building with a sly sense of humor and an exceedingly curious approach to what, how and why these people build what they do. By mixing real-life brick builders and actual LEGO conventions into the fictitious world of competitive creation tournaments, Brick MADNESS is able to have fantastically funny scenes alongside genuine moments between real builders. Not only are the participants authentic but they lend a credibility to the story that mockumentaries rarely have the chance to attain.
The film uses the mockumentary format to full advantage by creating a realistic world of camera, lighting, sound and editing choices where every point of view is motivated and earned. It is this attention to detail that helps the story rise above typical mockumentary fare that merely uses the device for a few obvious jokes and a looser style, but doesn’t seek to transcend those borders and deliver something truly memorable.
Interestingly, many of the brick-built models seen in the movie were designed by Carl Merriam, a former LEGO fan who we interviewed in June and who now works as a LEGO set designer at LEGO’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark.Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth President, loved cats and could play with them for hours. When asked if her husband had a hobby, Mary Todd Lincoln replied, “cats.” President Lincoln visited General Grant at City Point, Virginia in March of 1865. The civil war was drawing to a close and the enormous task of reuniting the country lay ahead, yet the President made time to care for three orphaned kittens. Abraham Lincoln noticed three stray kittens in the telegraph hut. Picking them up and placing them in his lap, he asked about their mother. When the President learned that the kittens’ mother was dead, he made sure the kittens would be fed and a good home found for them.
President Lincoln’s compassion extended to turkeys, too. Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation on October 3, 1863, setting aside the last Thursday of November, “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” A turkey was sent to the White House for Thanksgiving dinner in 1863, and Tad, Lincoln’s son, named him Tom. Tad befriended the turkey and pleaded with his father to grant “Tom” a stay of execution. Abraham Lincoln took time out from a cabinet meeting to issue “an order of reprieve,” sparing the turkey’s life.
Mr. Lincoln’s compassion extended to dogs, too. Fido was a mixed breed with floppy ears and a yellowish coat. When fireworks and cannons announced Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the Presidential election of 1860, poor Fido was terrified. The Lincolns were worried that the long train trip to Washington, D.C., combined with loud noises, would terrify Fido. John and Frank Roll, two neighborhood boys, promised to take good care of Fido. Mr. Lincoln made them promise to let Fido inside the house whenever he scratched at the front door, never scold Fido for entering the house with muddy paws, and feed him if he came to the dinner table. The Lincolns gave the Rolls their sofa so Fido would feel at home! Did you know “Fido” is Latin? Fido is from “Fidelitas,” which translates as “faithful.”
Nanny and Nanko were White House goats. Tad and Willie liked to hitch the goats to carts or kitchen chairs and have the goats pull them through the White House. Both Nanny and Nanko liked to chew things. Nanny got in trouble for chewing up the flowers at the Old Soldier’s Home. Nanko got in trouble for chewing the bulbs planted by White House Gardener, John Watt.
The Lincolns also had rabbits and cats. Mr. Lincoln named his horse Old Bob. Old Bob was the rider-less horse with a pair of boots turned backward in the stirrups in Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession.Anyone who’s experienced social anxiety has been told “calm down, it’ll be fine” thousands of times over, and has probably tried saying it twice that many times to themselves. Has it ever worked even once? No! Not one time. Never. However badly we might want to believe that anxiety can be rationalized away, some research suggests the best way to combat anxiety might instead be to just … accept it.
As part of a study on social anxiety, spotted by Psychology Today, Meagan MacKenzie, a psychology professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, established an eight-item scale which can be used to assess someone’s social anxiety, but which also measures how that person responds to their social anxiety. Respondents are asked to rate the accuracy of the following statements, as applied to themselves, between 1 (never true) and 7 (always true):
1. Being socially anxious makes it difficult for me to live a life I value.
2. I tell myself I shouldn’t have certain thoughts about social anxiety.
3. I would gladly sacrifice important things in my life to be able to stop being socially anxious.
4. I criticize myself for having irrational or inappropriate social anxiety.
5. My social anxiety must decrease before I can take important steps in my life.
6. I make judgments about whether my thoughts about my social anxiety are good or bad.
7. My social anxiety does not interfere with the way I want to live my life.
8. I disapprove of myself when I feel socially anxious.
Thus, the odd-numbered items assess one’s level of social anxiety, while the even-numbered items assess one’s level of acceptance of that anxiety. Higher ratings (four and above) indicate that a person feels relatively capable of handling their social anxiety, while lower ratings indicate a lower level of acceptance. Studies suggest that those with lower levels of acceptance might benefit from ACT, or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — a form of cognitive behavioral therapy that encourages patients to accept their feelings of anxiety, which may in fact make it easier to change or alleviate them. It’s the same basic principle behind exposure therapy: If something scares you, do it, and it’ll scare you less. So the next time you feel anxious in a social setting, don’t fight it — try just letting it happen.CLOSE President Donald Trump said Saturday that Germany owes "vast sums of money" to NATO and the U.S. "must be paid more" for providing defense, reiterating his stance that European allies need to meet their end of the bargain. Time
President Trump addresses the annual National Republican Congressional Committee dinner in Washington, Tuesday. (Photo11: JIM WATSON, AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Trump will travel to Brussels in May for a NATO summit, the White House said Tuesday.
The announcement comes as Trump has roiled the alliance with renewed complaints about how much European allies are paying for their defense. But administration officials say the U.S. has a "strong commitment" to the alliance.
In a meeting at the White House with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week, Trump suggested that allies owe "vast sums of money from past years."
He followed up that meeting with a tweet demanding that " |
, low-income men who live in marginalized communities. With over 50,000 homicides annually, Brazil, for example, accounts for more than 30% of all homicides in the region. Of these, more than half are young people, and nearly 80% are Afro-Brazilian. A similar situation occurs in other countries in the region.
Q: Are there success stories in the fight against crime and violence?
R: There are many countries and cities that have managed to dramatically reduce the incidence of violence. In Latin America, the most notable examples include Bogota, Medellin, San Pablo and Recife. These success stories appear to apply a similar set of policies. For example, a police force who is more results-oriented and who intensively uses information to guide prevention and control activities; regulations for control of weapons and the sale of alcohol; programs which provide opportunities to at-risk youth or revitalize hot zones through comprehensive strategies which actively involve the community in the response.
At a program level, interventions at an early age help families to guarantee that their young children grow up in socially protective environments, where pro-social behavior and community integration are promoted and where domestic violence is unacceptable. These have proven very effective in the long term, both in countries outside the region as well those in Latin America and the Caribbean (for example, Jamaica and Colombia). In addition to these primary prevention strategies, activities have been implemented that have effectively diminished violence in schools and have a positive impact on communities.
Q: What measures from other regions could be applied in Latin America to reduce crime and violence?
R: The United States has more than 30 years of experience with a wide range of violence prevention strategies. There is solid evidence that many of these work. However, one of the challenges is to determine which strategies are appropriate for the region’s problems, and to adapt them to very different institutional contexts. The program for home visits to mothers at risk is an initiative that has led to an 82% decline in arrests of low-income mothers and a 72% decrease in 13-16 year olds. Other programs are designed to improve social-cognitive skills of youth at risk and to help them to control their impulsiveness, which is behind much of youth violence. In Chicago, the Becoming a Man Program, which offers sports activities, managed to reduce the rate of violent crime among these youths by 40% in just one year, as well as improving their school performance. Strengthening partnerships, community coalitions and their activities have helped decrease young people’s initiation into violent activities by 31%, besides having a positive impact on other risky behavior.
Q: What are your recommendations for governments and civil society for a less violent, more tolerant future?
R: Three recommendations. Firstly, recognize that there is no magic wand to resolve the problem. To address the problem it is necessary to invest in a portfolio of comprehensive interventions with a proven impact on risk factors for violence. Secondly, focus on the geographical areas and population groups at greatest risk, particularly young people. Thirdly, strengthen the capabilities of municipal governments which are most affected by violence to generate local partnerships to enable implementation of the first two recommendations. These priorities are guiding World Bank actions with respect to citizen security in the region.When the iPad burst onto the scene in 2010, the tech world had never seen anything like it. Sales immediately exploded as the device became one of the fastest selling consumer electronics products in history.
As a direct result, and in part fueled by bold proclamations from Apple CEO Tim Cook, many people began championing the notion that the post-PC era was upon us. Not to single out Cook, even Steve Jobs believed that tablets were going to one day eclipse PCs as the future of computing. Much like the iPhone transformed the mobile phone landscape, it was widely assumed that the iPad would eventually turn the entire PC industry on its head.
WARNING: Anyone can access sensitive info on your iPhone without even unlocking it
Next week will mark the sixth anniversary of the original iPad and it’s abundantly clear, I think, that the iPad currently does not, and will not ever, represent the future of computing. Sales wise, the iPad has been slumping for years. In fact, the last quarter where Apple enjoyed a year over year increase in iPad sales was during the December quarter of 2013. During Apple’s last quarter alone, iPad sales dropped by 25% while revenue from the iPad dropped by 20%.
The following chart courtesy of Quartz speaks volumes.
And yet, the notion that the iPad and tablets in general represent the future of computing curiously persists.
This past summer, Cook defended the future of the iPad.
“I am still bullish on iPad,” Cook said, “and I think the iPad upgrade cycle will eventually occur. We’re 6X greater in usage than our nearest closest rival. It’s a fantastic product. I see a lot of runway.”
In September, after unveiling the iPad Pro, Tim Cook said that Apple’s gargantuan 12.9-inch tablet represented “the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.”
With the release of the original iPad Pro, Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal, in a post titled “Why Tablets Are the Future of Computing”, said:
As for those of us who are already connected, if we don’t accept this vision of computing, I’m confident the next generation—those young children using their iPads—will.
Talk about a hedge! If the iPad isn’t yet the future of computing, it will be a full generation from now.
That’s certainly a comfortable prediction to make.
The reality is that when a truly revolutionary device or service comes along, its impact is felt far more immediately. The iPhone revolution didn’t take a generation to take foot; it so obviously represented the future of mobile computing that it changed the game for everyone, adults and kids alike.
And speaking of kids, Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies sent out the following tweet over the weekend.
Walked by an Apple Store and all the kids are at the iPad tables while the tables with Macs at them have no visitors. Pretty clear future. — Ben Bajarin (@BenBajarin) March 26, 2016
To be fair, I think Bajarin is a sharp guy who is usually on the ball. But in this case I think he’s off the mark. And as a quick aside, I’d venture to say that kids likely gravitate towards the iPad tables because they’re pre-loaded with games and other eye-catching apps.
Today, there’s no strong evidence to suggest that tablet computing, and the iPad in particular, will eclipse and envelop normal PC usage. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most arguments championing the post-PC era are fueled solely by momentum. People think the tablet represents the future of computing only because it’s a line of reasoning that was generally accepted as fact for years.
We’ve been spoon-fed this idea for so long that many people simply believe it to be a matter of when.
Industry data, however, doesn’t bear this out.
Again, not only are iPad sales on the decline, but the entire tablet market is shrinking.
Is it any wonder that advanced tablets today are slowly but surely morphing into what the laptop already is. Efforts to make the tablet form factor more acceptable typically center on transforming it into some sort of hybrid laptop.
All this said, the iPad is a fine device. It’s used by hundreds of millions of users and it’s not like its sales figures, though they may be slumping, are anything to scoff at. But a legit PC replacement, on a massive scale, it is not.
It’s also important to remember that the iPad doesn’t need to eclipse the PC in order to be a success. Not every device can be as revolutionary and game-changing as the iPhone. And while it was largely assumed that the iPad would follow closely in the footsteps of the iPhone, it hasn’t been able to come close in six years. What’s the evidence to suggest that the next few years will be any different?
I would contend that the iPad, as the marketplace seems to suggest, is more of an extension of computing as opposed to its future. In other words, the iPad as a device isn’t going anywhere, but at the same time, neither is the PC.
For years, there has been a contentious debate focused on iPad or PC? Over the past 6 years, the market has spoken; and the answer is apparently “both.”Gilsonite, also known as "uintahite", "asphaltum" or asphaltite, is a naturally occurring soluble solid hydrocarbon, a form of asphalt (or bitumen) with a relatively high melting temperature. Its large-scale production occurs in the Uintah Basin of Utah and Colorado, United States. Although the substance has been historically mined in the Uintah Basin, resources are being discovered and mined more recently in other countries such as Colombia and Iran.[1] Gilsonite is mined in underground shafts and resembles shiny black obsidian.
Discovered in the 1860s, it was first marketed as a lacquer, electrical insulator, and waterproofing compound approximately 25 years later by Samuel H. Gilson.[2]
History [ edit ]
Gilsonite was discovered in the 1860s. By 1888 Samuel H. Gilson had started a company to mine the substance, but soon discovered the vein was located on the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. Under great political pressure Congress removed some 7,000 acres (28 km2) from the reservation on May 24, 1888 to allow mining to proceed legally.[3] Gilsonite mining became the first large commercial enterprise in the Uintah Basin, causing most of its early population growth.
Mining gilsonite during World War II was manual, using a six-pound pick, then shoveling the ore into 200 pound sacks, which were sewn by hand. In 1949 at the Parriette Gilsonite mine near Myton, Utah, Reed Smoot McConkie set the world record for ore mined by hand. Using his pick and shovel, he mined 175 bags of ore in eight hours, 950 bags in a six-day week, 1925 bags in a month and 15,000 bags in one year.[4]
Gilsonite-brand uintahite's earliest applications included paints for buggies and emulsions for beer-vat lining. It was used by Ford Motor Company as a principal component of the japan black lacquer used on most of the Ford Model T cars.[5]
Composition [ edit ]
Gilsonite is categorized as a soluble material in oil solutions such as CS 2 or TCE (trichloroethylene). A major component of gilsonite is carbon; it also contains several other elements including nitrogen and sulfur and some volatile compounds.[6]
Reserves and uses [ edit ]
Gilsonite reserves are distributed globally, especially within basins.[7] It has also been found on the dwarf planet Ceres[8] and is predicted to exist on the Martian moon Phobos.[citation needed]
Gilsonite is used in more than 160 products, primarily in dark-colored printing inks and paints, oil well drilling muds and cements, asphalt modifiers, foundry sand additives, and a wide variety of chemical products. The trademark, registered in 1921, belongs to the American Gilsonite Company which filed for bankruptcy and after accepting re-organization seems to emerge from it at Jan 3rd 2017.[9]
A common application of gilsonite is in bitumen blending.[10] This application is practiced in countries such as China, India and Iran.BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission will award a total of 2 billion euros for research into brain disease and into the “miracle material” graphene which could be used to make flexible electronic devices and could lead to superfast Internet speeds.
The funding will be distributed over 10 years, with more than half of it coming from the Commission’s research funds and the rest from EU member countries and the private sector, officials said on Monday.
The recipients - the Human Brain Project and the graphene study - were chosen from 21 projects assessed since July 2010 by a group of scientists, academics and a Nobel prize winner.
They looked at research which they considered would have the greatest impact on society and the economy.
“The European Commission is supporting ambitious and risky projects which promise a big return in the long term,” the European Union’s executive body said in a statement.
The international Human Brain Project, based in Switzerland, uses supercomputers to understand brain activity, speed up the diagnosis of brain diseases such as depression, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s and possibly develop new treatments.
The project also aims to use the brain’s capacity to process signals from trillions of synapses - neural connections - as a model to develop computers which can do more with less energy consumption.
Nicknamed a miracle material, graphene is a flexible sheet of carbon that can conduct electricity. Despite being just one atom thick, it is 100 times stronger than steel.
It could be used to make lighter aircraft, as well as flexible devices such as tablets and laptops and medical gadgets to carry cancer-fighting drugs into the body.
Scientists have also found the combination of graphene and metallic wires could speed up web communication by tens if not hundreds of times faster than the fastest Internet cables currently in use. The graphene project will be coordinated by the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The Commission’s research funding from 2014-2020 is still being decided in delayed talks over the European Union’s long-term budget, but it said it was confident it could meet the 2 billion euro ($2.7 billion) total.
“We intend to fulfil our part of this equation,” the EU commissioner for the digital economy, Neelie Kroes, told a news briefing. “We are expecting member states and others to contribute as well.”
($1 = 0.7421 euros)Washington is back to business as usual this week with both parties pounding war drums over Syria and some demanding thousands of troops be sent to expand our latest undeclared war. What is most notable is how fast top Democrats dropped their post-Sanders rhetoric over war powers and have again adopted the pro-interventionist stance embodied by Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE.
Before the attack, Clinton was back in public chiding President Trump on how she would have long ago bombed every airfield and started a major campaign against the Syrian military. Not one air field, mind you, all airfields. She received rapturous applause for the comments at the Women in the World Summit in New York.
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Indeed, Democrats have turned on a congressional member who had the audacity to ask for proof as a precursor for war. The Democrats have shown once again that a party hell-bent on war will like Saturn devour even its own. However, even if our own history with the Vietnam war or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is not instructive enough, they might consider Greek mythology before they start to nosh on the kinder.
The fact is that Washington loves wars and neither party wants to be on the wrong side of a popular war. Even for Washington, however, the shift of Democrats is notable from the recent election where everyone — even Clinton, albeit awkwardly — tried to show liberals that they were not the hair-trigger warmongers that Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE’ supporters claimed during the campaign.
Yet, now, leaders are denouncing Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard Tulsi GabbardOvernight Defense: Trump to hold one-on-one with Kim | What to watch as summit kicks off | Top general dodges on Trump emergency declaration Tulsi Gabbard throws cold water on Trump-Kim denuclearization talks Warren vows to forgo 'fancy receptions or big money fundraisers' MORE after she had the audacity to ask for proof of Syrian responsibility in the recent gas attack. Gabbard seemed to want more than a pedestrian role in war powers, while her colleagues prefer the safety of the sidelines. Playing the witness to wars avoids responsibility while reserving the right to be shocked and angry if the war goes badly.
The attacks on Gabbard “doth protest too much.” Gabbard has previously angered the establishment in Washington for the right and wrong reasons. She was legitimately criticized in January for meeting with President Bashar al-Assad. It was propaganda victory for this murderous dictator and undermined United States foreign policy.
Gabbard’s real sin however may be more political. Many Democrats are still upset with Gabbard for publicly charging (as was later supported by the Wikileaks material) that the Democratic establishment was actively engineering the primary for Hillary Clinton. She then supported Sanders against the establishment. Now, she has the audacity to demand proof before going to a war when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer Charles (Chuck) Ellis SchumerBrady gun control group gets rebranding Brennan fires back at'selfish' Trump over Harry Reid criticism Trump rips Harry Reid for 'failed career' after ex-Dem leader slams him in interview MORE, and Hillary Clinton are all in support of a new expanded war.
However, her cited statements were surprisingly modest. She objected that the missile strikes were “short-sighted and will lead to more dead civilians, more refugees, the strengthening of al-Qaeda and other terrorists, and a possible nuclear war between the United States and Russia.”
She also called for the administration to release more evidence of Syrian guilt before pouring more troops or missiles into the conflict, adding that “if President Assad is found to be responsible after an independent investigation for these horrific chemical weapons attacks, I’ll be the first one to call for his prosecution and execution by the International Criminal Court.”
The response from Howard Dean and others was shock and disgust. In a Trump-esque tweet, Dean declared, “This is a disgrace. Gabbard should not be in Congress.” Democratic leaders were outraged that a member would be “skeptical” about the action of the United States. Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden called on Hawaiians to dump Gabbard and asked, “People of Hawaii's second district, was it not enough for you that your rep met with a murderous dictator? Will this move you?”
The Washington Post expressed shock that Gabbard’s statements “reveal her striking departure from the consensus that Assad’s government launched the attack.” However, at least in the initial days, that “consensus” was based largely on the conclusory statements of named and unnamed sources in the government.
The reaction to Gabbard's call for evidence brings back troubling memories of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. On Aug. 10, 1964, the Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to give President Lyndon Johnson full authority to go to war in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. It was based on the Gulf of Tonkin incident involving an alleged attack on the destroyer USS Maddox.
The government reported two attacks that are now considered highly questionable. The government claimed that on Aug. 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats harassed the destroyer. When the Maddox fired three warning shots, the government claimed that the boats attacked with torpedoes and machine guns. The Maddox showed only a single bullet hole.
The government then claimed a second attack on Aug. 4, 1964. Historians have questioned these accounts and most notably former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara admitted that there was actually no response to the Aug. 2 attack and thus no “sea battle” as claimed at the time. He further admitted that the second attack never occurred. None of that mattered of course because few members wanted to hear at the time that these “sea battles” were hokum.
There is every indication that the evidence will support the United States, which has been releasing more information in the last week. It is notable that, while Russia and Syria have called for investigations of responsibility for the gas attack, Russia just blocked a United Nations resolution demanding Syrian cooperation with just such an investigation.
Russia has claimed that a bombing raid hit ISIS chemical weapons and that this is a pretext for the expansion of the war. Yet, Syria has previously used chemical weapons and Russia is now hindering efforts for such an investigation.
In the end, Gabbard is right about the need for the release of evidence before we expand this undeclared war. The administration may indeed be moving in that direction with the leaking of intercepted communications from the field.
Which brings us back to Saturn. Saturn, or Cronus to the Greeks, was obsessed with a prophecy that he would be overthrown by his children — a sense of panic not unlike the Democratic establishment with the rise of Sanders and his young supporters. As a result, Cronus, a Titan, devoured each child when born including Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon.
His son, Zeus, however, was hidden (Rhea, his mother, gave Cronus the “Omphalos Stone” wrapped in swaddling clothes to trick him). Later, Cronus was given an emetic as a trick and he threw up the children. Zeus and his siblings then rose up and overthrew the Titans, including Cronus. For his part, according to Homer, Cronus was left to languish in the Tartarus, or a deep abyss of pain and torment.
For most politicians, the Tartarus is the abyss called life out of public office. However, before the Democrats start to swallow members like Gabbard whole, they might want to consider how the youth can reappear with a vengeance.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.Twitch is adding more flexibility to its channel subscriptions. The platform known for its live streams of video games has extended its partnership with payment services company Xsolla in order to give users hundreds of different ways to pay for their channel subscriptions.
Twitch first partnered with Xsolla (which is catered to the gaming industry) back in August, when it gave users the option to use a diverse selection of payment options for subscriptions to the premium Twitch Turbo service. Now, that selection can be applied to specific channel subscriptions. Some Twitch channels are free, but others require a $4.99 subscription. For the latter category, users can now pay with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, gift cards, and other e-pay services.
This is one of the first new offerings from Twitch since it was purchased by Amazon in late August. The $970 million acquisition brings Twitch into a company with a strong commercial model, and it appears to be following suit by improving its own financial flexibility.
The one apparent hole in Twitch’s new payment options, as several users have noted in the comments of an introductory blog post, is the lack of support for Dogecoin. There seems to be a lot of people who want to pay through that particular cryptocurrency, so we’ll see if Twitch offers such payments in the future.It almost feels as if we’re judging Lukas Podolski for the first time in an Arsenal shirt yet surely it is too late for first impressions. After the 1-1 draw with Manchester United in which Podolski finally got his opportunity up front, it’s still not clear whether he’s the answer.
It was actually Podolski’s second start as the focal point of Arsenal’s attack, having began the season against Sunderland in that role and then again in the defeat to Swansea late last year, although for only 40 minutes alternating with Gervinho. For the most part though, he’s been deployed on the left side of a 4-3-3 where we’ve come to know him, scoring 13 goals and making 10 assists, and Sunday was the chance to see if all that wait was worth it.
It wasn’t, or rather, it wasn’t a match where we learned too much new about Podolski. And there lies the conundrum: at 27 years old, is it too late to expect Podolski to transform into all-round striker that Arsenal need? Certainly, his first touch was a significant one, as he dropped off his marker to receive possession and then laid it off for Tomas Rosicky to feed Theo Walcott for Arsenal’s goal. (In contrast, his opposite number Robin van Persie’s first touch also led to a goal – it too Arsenal’s opener – having slipped as he attempted a pass and Arsenal broke to score). That was in the second minute. For the rest of the match he showed glimpses although it must be said that it would have been a difficult game for any striker to make an impression.
Lukas Podolski received the ball 32 times, mainly in the area between the opposition’s midfield and defence. Indeed, that’s not unexpected. Shorn of pace, and perhaps the dexterity of movement to get away from his markers, he likes to play short simple passes to his team-mates and then look to try and spin away from the defender. It’s how he has scored most of his goals for Arsenal, playing one-twos and then getting into positions so he can shoot across goal. Indeed, Podolski only had one shot against Manchester United – his only touch inside the box too – receiving the ball on his left side to force a save out of David De Gea.
Podolski’s lack of pace – nay his lack of movement, was evident in one piece of action where an admittedly over-hit pass by Aaron Ramsey was played his way, but Theo Walcott had already seen the space and came darting infield. Nevertheless, Podolski looked sluggish attempting to get on the end of it. Perhaps this part of his game will develop over time, because Robin van Persie was also hesitant in playing on the shoulder of the defender at the beginning of his transformation to a number 9.
What Lukas Podolski does bring however, is extra link up to the midfield and certainly, his ability to combine with the ball-players owed a lot to Arsenal’s good start. Indeed, they say the two most forward players, in this case Podolski and Rosicky, must be as one and the pair exchanged passes 18 times in the whole game. What Podolski must do now however, is to extend that understanding further up the field. Because we never got a chance to see his ability to finish and had he had just one sniff in front of goal, Arsenal would have been confident of getting the decisive goal.
Podolski also needs to offer himself more of an outlet from crosses and cut-backs because at times he was slow to get into positions and in the end snuffed out. Olivier Giroud has developed this understanding with Theo Walcott, as did Van Persie last season. But perhaps, as the average positions diagram shows below, the actual striker wasn’t Podolski but Walcott who scored Arsenal’s goal.
Podolski’s tendency to drop deep and create an overload in the midfield allows Walcott to stay upfield and thus a chance to use his pace against the full-back should someone play him in. Actually Walcott probably did this too often against Manchester United and instead should have remained wide so Arsenal could work the ball into the box. As it was, moves broke down too easily in the second-half because the team was short of passing options.
It was perhaps apt then Podolski got his chance up front when Robin van Persie returned to his old ground. Because Podolski will never be judged solely against his strike partners (partly because there really isn’t any!) but also against those who had played previously. Arsenal’s draw with Manchester United was frustrating because it was a chance, especially after their breathtaking start, to make their momentum count. But the team lacked quality in the final third to really be ruthless.
To get to that level, it would require the players to fine-tune their understanding and others – where much is expected of them (Ramsey and Jack Wilshere) – to step up quickly. As such, a lot is dependent on Santi Cazorla – and perhaps Arsenal can lean on him because he’s that good – but of course, that thought would not exist had Arsenal have the quality to back him up. And in the past, Arsenal have had the strikers with the all-round ability to contribute in both the scoring and build-up play. All previous Arsene Wenger teams have had that. Perhaps it’s not too late to say this one does.Introduction
Smartphones are wonderful things, attracting our care and attention day in and day out, from reading your morning emails to ordering a pizza when you get off work.
As good as they are however, they can attract unwanted attention. In that vein, I present the top six apps that’ll get you mugged.
6. Alarm Free
A good (read: terrible) app to use once you’re actually being mugged is Alarm Free for iPhone. As you can see in the diagram provided below, you’re supposed to scare away muggers by holding up your smartphone and pressing the screen. This will make an alarm sound, and flash a light menacingly.
This’ll do precisely nothing to deter your attackers, but it does mean that they’ll definitely notice your expensive smartphone.
5. Flashlight
If you’re walking through a dark neighborhood at night, you might think that providing more light will make you safer. Unfortunately, pulling out your smartphone and then making it produce as much light as possible doesn’t provide protection so much as advertise your presence (and your phone) to any passers-by.
Some apps go further and provide a ‘police light’ setting. Unless you’re being beset by the bumbling thieves of Home Alone, I’m guessing this won’t be much help.
Imagine these appearing in sequence really fast. Scared?
4. Google Navigation
Another great way to get robbed is to let everyone know you’re from out of town. Although dressing oddly, mispronouncing local landmarks and asking for directions are all good starts, perhaps the best way is to walk through town listening to your smartphone mispronounce local landmarks and guide you effortlessly through crime-ridden areas to save you a few minutes.
3. I Am Rich
The famous I Am Rich app, which cost curious buyers new to the iPhone market $1000 for an app that just showed a JPG of a computer-generated jewel and had no actual features, takes number three in our list. Although the app has long since been removed from the market, it remains a popular app for jail-breaking pirates.
Another expensive app is the only ‘app for millionaires’, iVIP Black. The $1000 app requires a manual check after purchased that you’re a well heeled individual, and afterwards offers a variety of extremely expensive services — race horse ownership, helicopter hire, penthouses, that kind of thing. I doubt you’d be walking if you owned this app, but consider yourself forewarned nonetheless.
2. Google Sky Map
What’s more likely to get you mugged than walking through a bad neighborhood looking at your smartphone? How about walking through a bad neighbourhood staring at your smartphone as you hold it up to the sky?
Google Sky Map identifies constellations that you point it at, using your camera’s gyro to figure out where you’re looking. It also takes the prize for being the app that’ll make it most obvious that you’re not paying attention to your surroundings.
1. Slasher
While you can get mugged by looking too rich, too out of place or too oblivious, sometimes it’s just a random thing. In this case, you might think it might be a good idea to be prepared. Enter the Slasher app, which ‘displays a common kitchen knife on the screen and plays a “horror” sound when you make a stabbing motion.’
I can’t think of a better way to keep yourself safe than a virtual knife, complete with inappropriate sound effect. Heck, with this thing you could go mugging yourself!
Bonus: How Not To Get Mugged
Sometimes, the best way to not get mugged is the simplest:
Legendary.
If you’ve enjoyed this, check out the links below to check out more content or leave us a message.Arizona is welcoming a new wave of settlers. No, not snowbirds escaping harsh northern winters. Techies, mostly from California—Silicon Valley, to be precise—coming to the desert to fulfill their quest to flood the roads with self-driving cars.
Mobileye is the latest arrival. The firm announced Wednesday that it will build a fleet of 100 autonomous vehicles and test the first of them on the public roads of the Copper State. The Israeli firm that Intel recently bought for $15 billion joins Uber and Google spinoff Waymo, both of which have put more than 100 robocars on the roads of Tempe and Phoenix, respectively. The two companies use those cars to ferry people here and there with engineers at the wheel, ready to take control when needed.
Arizona has a few things going for it. It’s relatively close to Silicon Valley (a 12-hour drive or two-hour flight). The weather—hot, yes, but also clear with little rain—favors the sensors self-driving cars use to see the world, especially cameras (which can’t see snow-covered lane lines, for example) and lidar (heavy rain can futz with the lasers). The traffic is generally calm and the roads are in pretty good shape. “That makes the technical challenge of it easier,” says Karl Iagnemma, CEO of the Massachusetts autonomous tech firm Nutonomy.
Another big bonus? Arizona offers just about the most permissive regulatory climate in the United States. California requires that companies apply for the right to run autonomous vehicles, then report crashes and how often the human backup takes the wheel. In New York, anyone developing autonomous vehicles must get approval every time they put a car on the road—and pay for a police escort. And Arizona? Governor Doug Ducey signed an executive order in 2015 requiring his underlings to “undertake any necessary steps to support the testing and operation of self-driving cars.”
“These tech companies and these entrepreneurs are smart, they’ve got a risk they’re taking,” says Kevin Biesty, deputy director for policy at the Arizona DOT. “Government should be there to facilitate these technologies, not inhibit.” In other words, just don’t knock down anything big in Monument Valley and you’re good to go.
That attitude plays well with the companies developing this technology. "Arizona has led the way when it comes to embracing ridesharing,” says Uber spokesperson Chelsea Kohler. “Governor Ducey has made the sharing economy one of his top priorities during his time in office and with that foundation in mind, Arizona is an ideal place for Uber to introduce self-driving cars."
Still, Arizona has a key limitation: Its fairly homogenous climate, terrain, and traffic. “There’s a risk to over-optimizing for a particular set of conditions,” Iagnemma says. You don’t want to train your car to handle the way people drive and signs are written in Arizona, then have it freak out when you try to roboride around Paris.
That explains why Waymo also tests in Mountain View, California; Austin, Texas; and Kirkland, Washington. Uber's autonomous cars roam San Francisco and Pittsburgh, and Mobileye will send part of its fleet to Jerusalem to face very different—and likely tougher—conditions than Arizona offers.
“Geographic diversity is very important as different regions have very diverse driving styles as well as different road conditions and signage,” says Amnon Shashua, the incoming CEO and CTO of Mobileye. “Our goal is to develop autonomous vehicle technology that can be deployed anywhere, which means we need to test and train the vehicles in varying locations.”
Arizona may be the new hotness, but that doesn’t give it a monopoly on the transportation future.TV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place.
Saying that “Synecdoche” is a love letter to the fans who’ve watched Person Of Interest show all these years almost feels like a disservice to the show itself. You see, Person Of Interest as a whole is arguably a love letter to the fans. Character deaths may not make it appear that way at times, but it’s a dystopian science-fiction crime show—it’s part of the territory. So after years of explaining to outsiders that Person Of Interest is “a procedural, but…,” it only makes sense that the show gives one last look to its case-of-the-week aspect (and the fact that it still meant something) before it ends. It makes even more sense that Person Of Interest would close up the irrelevant numbers bag with both the biggest number it could ever have—the President’s of the United States—and also one of the most important—primary asset John Reese’s.
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While it’s “just another case-of-the-week,” there are still a couple of pretty big revelations in this case. The first of which is the team of “assassins” (if you can really even call them that) who attempt to kill the President to put a stop to his new surveillance proposals. As far as the other revelations go in this case, this one actually falls at the bottom of the list, despite it being an—like I just said—assassination attempt on the POTUS. While it initially makes sense to assume that a few stragglers are possibly left from Vigilance, things like Charlie the cater waiter’s incompetence and the moment where Shaw points out all of the flaws of the group (which include them announcing their intentions to the masses) are just the show being completely straightforward: They’re literally just a group of “concerned citizens.” Sometimes you don’t need a shadow organization to rage against the machine—you just need the people, even if they’re wholly unprepared for the gravity of that situation. Interestingly enough, that lack of preparation is a great deal (but of course not all) what frustrates Shaw about this entire operation, since she’s experienced firsthand just how terrible this surveillance they’re fighting against is and these “concerned citizens” can barely comprehend it.
There’s also the bombshell that Samaritan considers the POTUS an irrelevant number in the first place. As Shaw points out at the end, the amount of mass chaos and panic that the POTUS’ assassination would create would be off-the-charts. So in case no one got the memo that Samaritan is evil yet, the fact that it couldn’t care less about that is the biggest red flag there is. After all of the torture Shaw has endured as a victim of Samaritan, the fact that it’s willing to so cavalierly allow even more destruction on a larger level (despite all of the protestations that Samaritan is for “the greater good”) is as good a reason as ever to get her head back in the game. Plus, according to Shaw: “If Samaritan wants to take down the entire world, I’m sure as hell not gonna make it easy for it. That’s what Root would’ve wanted.”
Then there’s the reveal that Team Machine isn’t the only Team Machine on the block: And that’s where the love letter to the fans comes in. In theory, it makes sense that there are more than one version of Team |
else I’m going to burn out.
Things I’ve learned/mantras on my mind for 2013:
Communication is invaluable. If you can impart your message with confidence and clarity you’re ahead of the game.
Self motivation is a renewable resource. A short break, a nice meal or a good night’s rest can make all the difference when you need to pick yourself up and take another crack at something.
Hard work is more valuable than luck. Don’t expect something to happen just because you ‘hope’ it will. You have to build it yourself. Any help you get from outside is a bonus, not an expectation.
It’s incredibly difficult for me to sum up the experiences and emotions this time out. Picking a few key moments from the year doesn’t seem to do it justice but I don’t want to ramble endlessly either.
Okay, how’s this:
2012 was the year I felt like I could actually call myself a ‘writer’.
In 2013 I’m working hard to get good at it. 🙂Toronto suffered their most painful loss of the season so far at the hands of Orlando City. Not only did they lose due to a questionable penalty call in the last minute of injury time but keeper Clint Irwin had to leave the game with an injury. However, Jordan Hamilton scored his first league goal and Canadian Cyle Larin scored for Orlando. A finish Fergie would be proud of. Open Player in a New Window | Subscribe | iTunes | MP3 The Opening 45
OC dominated early. Larin got the action going early with a goal in the 5th minute, giving him his first ever goal against his hometown club. Toronto's defence seemed almost turned off for much of the first half which could have easily resulted in OC leading by a higher total going into the half but their best chances resulted in Larin hitting the post and Clint Irwin making a great save on Kaka.
The heat likely played a big role in Toronto sluggish performance. After a water break, Toronto seemed to gain some momentum and had a few chances. #TFC's been Toledoed, Unkeled, Salazared, Grajedaed, Geigered & now Elfathed! When will the incompetence stop @PROreferees @thesoccerdon? — Tim Drodge (@bgnewf) June 26, 2016 3-2 for Orlando. Harsh. Very harsh on #TFC. — John Molinaro (@JohnMolinaro) June 26, 2016
The Second Half
The momentum continued for Toronto and early in the second half, Hamilton opened his MLS goal-scoring account tying the game. Toronto held strong until the 70th minute mark when Irwin went down with injury and had to be subbed out for Alex Bono, who in his MLS debut looked shaky.
OC took advantage of Bono's inexperience, with Adrian Winter scoring in the 83rd minute. But Toronto evened it up in the dying minutes with a goal by Justin Morrow before 8 minutes of injury time started.
In the final minute of injury time, Josh Williams was called for a questionable foul on Julio Baptisa in the box and was shown a red card. Kaka stepped up to take the penalty and blasted it passed Bono, winning the game for the home team.
Man of the Match
Justin Morrow In a game where Toronto as a whole looked very shaky, it was hard to pick a standout. Morrow performed well securing an assist on Hamilton's goal and his near game-tying goal.Yesterday, Marvel Comics promised an announcement that would change the face of comics. Today, ComicBook.com has your exclusive first look at what that looks like. Marvel has debuted 6 teaser images with only the text” “MAKE MINE MARVEL with MARVEL LEGACY – Fall 2017.” The images when placed side by side clearlyharken all the way back to Marvel’s beginnings.
The teasers feature the following artists:
Incredible Hulk - Mike Deodato
America - Benjamin Caldwell
X-Men: Blue - David Lopez
Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur - Felipe Smith
Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows - Khary Randolph
Astonishing X-Men: John Cassaday In a previous announcement, Marvel Editor In Chief has described Marvel Legacy as the following:
“A new initiative that will take things back to our iconic history, with a firm eye on the future, Marvel Legacy will present stories that remind everyone — newcomers and longtime fans alike — why Marvel stands as the premier name in fiction.”
Given by the look of the covers, Marvel wants to invoke some very key moments of it’s history and re-introduce those concepts for its new, larger audience.
Marvel Legacy is set to kick off with a 50-page one shot by Jason Aaron and Esad Ribic that will set the tone of what the new Marvel Universe will look and feel like. Then, fans can expect some new and surprising creators to be on the company’s top books.
“Our titles will unearth gems from Marvel’s rich history, remind readers of connections between characters, and usher in the return of some major characters who’ve been missed,” reflected Alonso. “Above all else, we want to inject our comics with a massive dose of fun!"
We’ve seen some of Marvel Legacy in action most recently with the renumbering of their Venom series to #150 and have been told to expect some more of that with other titles as well.
Alonso has promised that Marvel Legacy will explain for fans just how the Marvel Universe can accommodate both it’s legacy and new additions and as we march closer and closer to Fall, we’re beginning to see how. What do you think? Are you ready for Marvel Legacy? Join the conversation on Twitter and let us know by tweeting us at @ComicBook!
MORE COMICS: Batman #25 Does Not Address Whether Catwoman Said Yes To Batman's Proposal / Rob Liefeld Teases The Futurians Vs The Extreme Universe / Axel Alonso Teases The Return Of Marvel 2-in-1Jesse Ventura, the libertarian former governor of Minnesota known as The Body during his pro wrestling career, said he has stopped flying because he won't let Transportation Security Administration officers grope him anymore.
"I'm not with you in the studio because I've quit flying," Ventura told CNN's Piers Morgan in New York this week. "I have metal in my body so every time I go to an airport the metal detector goes off. And they treat former governors like criminals and I've had enough. I won't be treated like a criminal anymore so the only alternative is not to fly."
The former wrestling star last year sued the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA for subjecting him to "warrantless and suspicionless" scans and body searches.
Ventura received a titanium hip replacement in 2008 and afterward set off airport metal detectors. Instead of being screened by a noninvasive hand-held wand as he was before the implant, he was instead subjected to a pat down that "exposed him to humiliation and degradation through unwanted touching, gripping and rubbing of the intimate areas of his body," he said.
The lawsuit was eventually thrown out by a federal district judge in St. Paul, Minn., who ruled it should have been filed in a circuit court of appeals. The decision prompted the always colorful Ventura to vow to "never stand for a national anthem again," he said. "I will turn my back and I will raise a fist."
"It was a constitutional question so if she doesn't have jurisdiction no one does," he told Morgan. "People in this country need to understand when you go to any airport in the United States, you are not protected by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. They can do anything they want to you and there is no where you can go to seek redress."
The former governor isn't the only one feeling hassled by airport security. A recent survey of air travelers found most complained about checkpoint screening.
Below, more TSA controversy:Want more hot BPR News stories? Sign up for our morning blast HERE
While Playboy Playmates may not be regarded as models of conservative values, one former playmate has stepped out as a Donald Trump supporter.
Model and reality TV star Kendra Wilkinson considers herself a conservative and said her friends agree. “Even my conservative friends consider me conservative,” the former Playboy star told Fox 411. “I love being a comfortable person but I’m very open. I’m not ashamed of myself and my beliefs.”
The 30-year-old mother of two admitted that she is also a supporter of Republican presidential candidate Trump.
“I support Donald Trump, but I also support abortion and a women’s right to choose what to do with their body,” she said.
“I’m more of a conspiracy theorist. I think everything is a motive for money. Every thought, every belief, everything we’re taught in school,” said Wilkinson, who stars in her own reality series “Kendra on Top” and is married to ex-NFL player Hank Baskett.
“The thing that what we’re taught in the public school system is everything you should know, I disagree with that. The most brilliant people in the world were drop-outs — not that I’m pro-dropping out. I just believe there’s more to life than what’s in those books,” she said. “I think a lot of things shoved in our face, politically and historically, is for money, that’s the motive.”
Wilkinson first appeared in 2005 in the E! Network television series “The Girls Next Door” which portrayed her life as one of Hugh Hefner’s three girlfriends living at the Playboy Mansion. Wilkinson was only 18 years old at the time while the Playboy CEO was 78.
Sign up for our morning blast HEREThe crash of FlyDubai Boeing 737 in Russia's Rostov-on-Don could occur after the commander of the aircraft deliberately sent the airplane into the ground, PravdaRu reported.
"During the preliminary investigation it was found that the commander of the Boeing 737-800, presumably giving account for his actions and adequately assessing both the situation and the position of the aircraft relative to the ground, was holding the control knob for 12 seconds, thus putting the stabilizer into the nosedive mode," Interfax news agency reported with reference to its source.
Based on the data obtained from the flight recorder, the commander of the Boeing 737 was not answering questions from the co-pilot about the appropriateness of his actions. He would answer briefly and calmly: "All is well" and his intonation was calm, the source also said.
Previously, it was reported that the pilots of the FlyDubai aircraft had a conflict prior to the crash. Allegedly, after one of the pilots made a mistake in maneuvers, his partner tried to take control of the wheel.
In turn, a representative of the Interstate Aviation Committee said that the committee did not have the information to prove that the commander of the aircraft was acting voluntarily. A piloting error remains the basic version of the investigation, the official said.
A Boeing 737 passenger aircraft of FlyDubai airline crashed on March 19 at 3:42 while landing at the airport of Rostov-on-Don, Russia. The Boeing-737-800 could not land on the first attempt and crashed during the second landing attempt. The aircraft nosedived and rammed into the runway at high speed. There were 55 passengers and seven members of the crew on board. The wreckage was scattered on the area of almost one kilometer around the crash site.Schlock Mercenary:The Board Game
# of Players: 2+ (Scenario Driven, 5 Players Supported with current Scenarios)
Ages: 13+
Play Time: Scenario Specific (30 - 120 Minutes)
Designer: Kevin G. Nunn (1955:The War of Espionage, Velo City, Duck! Duck! Go!, Rolling Freight, Zong Shi, Nobody But Us Chickens)
Artist: Howard Tayler
Publisher: Living Worlds Games, LLC.
About:
Schlock Mercenary:The Board Game is a multi-player tactical shooter played on a grid based modular map set in the popular Schlock Mercenary epic science fiction webcomic created by Howard Tayler. Players take on the roles of Tagon Toughs and a variety of other characters while working to achieve scenario specific goals. Howard has been working on Schlock Mercenary for over a decade developing an excellent storyline and world while Kevin has been developing the rule set for the board game for several years.
In the video, you will see the prototype artwork that we have been using during the game's development. Howard and his team will be producing the game with all original artwork. The game itself will be professionally produced by Ludo Fact in Germany and will be available prior to GenCon to KickStarter supporters.
Schlock Mercenary:The Board Game is a large undertaking and includes over 250 tokens, 36 floor tiles, 10 character sheets, full color rule/scenario book and dice. It will includes roughly a hundred pieces of original artwork including top down floor tiles, plasma cannons, Scanners, turrets, Teraport Cages and more. The game will come full to the brim with components and scenarios with more being released over the next few years.
By clicking on this Link, you can preview the very basic Learning rules that includes your standard actions and is the game that Howard played at GenCon 2011. It includes only the rules needed to learn how to start and does not include full Teraport rules, Power Ups, Ranks/Titles and other special actions. All supporters will be given access to a PDF that includes these rules plus artwork to print out the Learning games include characters and floor tiles. The rulebook is currently a work in progress and will be updated as production comes closer.
I'm very excited to bring you this game and I look forward to providing as much information as possible in the coming weeks. We'll be at BoardGameGeek Con in Mid-November with copies of the game for playtesting for those interested. You can also stop by our table and view 1955:The War of Espionage, APE Games' Rolling Freight, Kill The Overlord and a host of other future releases.
Components:
Box Size: 11" x 8.5" x 2.5"
Character Sheets: 10
Large Floor Tiles: 9 (Double Sided, 6" x 6")
Connecting Floor Tiles: 9 (Double Sided, 1.5" x 3.0")
Modification Floor Tiles: 18 (Double Sided, 1.5" x 1.5")
Tokens (All Double Sided):
- Power Ups: 45
- Characters and Actions: 90
- Titles and Objectives: 45
- Health / Shield / Status / Other: 72
Dice: 10 (5 in each of 2 colors)
Cast of Characters:
- Tagon
- Elf
- Schlock
- Legs
- Thurl
- Kevin w/ Ennesby
- Shodan
- Elizabeth
- Petey
- Partnership Collective Drones
The Project:
We are talking about a very large project. At bare minimum, for a full production run and keeping costs down to our supporters and future fans, we need to reach $25,000 in pledges. This will ensure that the game is published to a high quality. Our pledge levels include shipping to your door in the US with additional charges for international shipping (More on a follow up Post).
Promotional Items:
Our promotional items are described here. Each copy of the game, as listed under the pledge level to the right, includes the following non-exclusive promotional items:
- Tagon Dice: 5 custom dice that includes Tagon's logo in place of the 6.
- Extra Character Sheet + Token: Andy, our multilimbed friend. He has a lot of actions. This is an advanced copy of the character that will be included in a future release, but you get to play with him early.
- Name in the Rule Book: Your name, in the rulebook, visible and readable for all to know you are a fan of the webcomic, the board game or both.
- Updated: 1 Tagon Patch
- Updated ($30,000 Overfunding) An additional promotional Large Floor Tile (6" x 6", double sided) that will be part of the 2013 Convention Give away promotions.
- Updated ($30,000 Overfunding) An additional Connecting Floor Tile (1.5" x 3.0") featuring a secret room onboard the ship where you can pick up extra Power Ups.
- Updated ($36,862 Overfunding) A Schlock Mercenary Die / Tile bag.
- Updated ($40,000 Overfunding) An Extra Scenario
- Updated ($45,000 Overfunding) A Second set of Extra Dice with Partnership Logo.
- Updated ($50,000 Overfunding) An Alternate Plasma Gun Flying Schlock Character Sheet
- Updated ($56,174 Overfunding) A Blank Character Sheet for Funsies
- Updated ($64,000 Overfunding) Dice Cup + Punchboard
Other promotional items will be listed in the OverFunding / Maxims Section:
OverFunding / Maxims:
Anything above $25,000 will enable us to provide you with addition bonuses. As each tier is hit, we'll unveil the next Maxim that provides additional bonuses to all of our supporters. Taking a page from Howard's excellent writing and creative genius, our current Maxim is as follows:
Maxim 14 ($73,103)
"Mad Science" means never stopping to ask "what's the worst thing that could happen?"
Sunday is still coming and with it, some extra goodies.
We have another final push. It is something we discussed prior to starting the Schlock Mercenary campaign of awesomeness.
- Wood Tokens: I want to provide wooden discs for the characters in addition to the normal chipboard tokens. I want every game that goes to a KickStarter supporter to have hefty wooden character discs with great illustrations on the top. Wood and custom stickers so that you'll absolutely be able to raise up above the board requires more than the chipboard ones do.
Every character (and drone) disc will be 1" in diameter, 1/8" thick of real wood. The fully colored stickers (front and back) will be professionally printed of course. These will be a nice addition to your game.
- Oh, and we'll provide some additional chipboard tokens featuring a number of characters with their heads in the Nanny Jars. Sure to be a hit when push comes to shove comes to knife comes to pistol comes to plasma cannon comes to crippling injury with horrific pain.
Thank you again to all of the Schlock Mercenary fans, Living Worlds Games supporters and people who love good light tactical shooters. We couldn't have done it without you.
Contact Email: [email protected]
Updated 11/8/11: Included Links to the Webcomic.
Updated 11/9/11: Included additional Reward (Tagon Patch)
Updated 11/13/11: Added Nobody But Us Chickens to Designer's credits.
Updated 11/13/11: Added email to bottom of page.
Updated 11/21/11: Added the next Overfunding Level ($36,892)
Updated 12/11/11: Added the next Overfunding Level ($40,000)
Updated 12/14/11: Added the $45k Overfunding and the $50k Overfunding Level
Updated 12/15/11: Added the $56,174 Overfunding goal
Updated 12/16/11: Added the $64,000 Overfunding goal
Updated 12/17/11: Added the $73,103 Overfunding goalyou are smart. you can have life long problems. cast will get so itchy. broken bones hurt so bad.
i broke my femur and had to have a cast all the way don one leg to the foot, and the other leg to the knee. broke my ankle. this all happened when i was 2. when i was 6 i broke my pinky in the growth plate and had to have surgery. when i was 10 i broke my arm, and had to have it put back in place, when i was awake. when i was 12 i broke 2 fingers, and one is still deformed, and also i broke my pinky toe in the growth plate, and was on crutches. when i was 13 i broke my knee and my elbow, and my knee still gives me problems so bad to where i can't put pressure on it, and i have a broken pinky toe right now.
so if you wanna break something be sure to pay the price.
Source(s): broken 10 bones. Anonymous · 1 decade ago 2 Thumbs up 0 Thumbs down Report AbuseDraymond Green #23 of the Golden State Warriors warms up prior to Game One of the NBA Western Conference Semi-Finals against the Utah Jazz at ORACLE Arena on May 2, 2017 in Oakland, California.
Draymond Green said he isn’t surprised fans talk trash to him during NBA games, considering his emotional style of play. What does surprise the Golden State Warriors All-Star forward, however, is when it turns racial or when hecklers go overboard, as they have on occasion, calling him the “N-word” or other choice words.
“I’ve gotten the N-word, all of that. I’d rather not get into [where]. A few places, especially being that it is me. Athletes are just not protected in that regard. Maybe something like [the Adam Jones incident] will help,” Green told The Undefeated on Tuesday night before the Warriors’ 106-94 win over the Utah Jazz in the opener of their second-round playoff series.
Jones, the Baltimore Orioles’ center fielder, was called the N-word and had a bag of peanuts tossed at him during Monday night’s game against the host Boston Red Sox.
In hopes of bringing more attention to racism with their popular platform as NBA stars, Green and fellow Warriors All-Star teammate Stephen Curry are members of an advisory board for the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality (RISE).
Curry told The Undefeated there is still a lot of work to be done to fight racism.
“There has been progress, but people want to sweep stuff under the rug and turn a blind eye to what people go through every single day in terms of prejudice and racism. Obviously, there are plenty of groups, initiatives and people trying to attack the problem, RISE being one of them. As long as I have the platform I do, I plan to use it,” said Curry, who scored a game-high 22 points against Utah.
Founded by Miami Dolphins owner and Green’s mentor Stephen Ross, the nonprofit organization uses sports to improve race relations by driving social progress and understanding. RISE has a board of directors that includes NBA commissioner Adam Silver, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, NCAA president Mark Emmert, PGA CEO Peter Bevacqua, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, ESPN Inc. president John Skipper and several other high-level sports executives.
RISE asks that new followers take a pledge: “Together we can RISE up for understanding, respect and equality. Take the pledge to show your commitment to ending racism. I pledge to treat everyone with respect and dignity. I will not tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind. I will speak up whenever I know discrimination is happening and I will stand up for victims.”
Green did his part to raise awareness through RISE by wearing sneakers that read “SIDELINE RACISM” during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day game against the Cleveland Cavaliers this season.
“With racism, are you born with it or is it taught?” Green said. “That was the whole initial thought behind [RISE]. And honestly, I think you’re taught it. You’re not born a racist. … There is a huge need for it because of instances like [Jones’]. You just try to reach as many people and educate as many people as you can. Hopefully, you can make a difference.”
Curry, who was recruited to RISE by Green, said, “It’s keeping people woke and understanding that there is still an issue like we talked about with Adam Jones up in Boston.”
Green said part of the reason there are incidents such as the one Jones had in Boston is because sports leagues “empower hecklers” by not disciplining them strongly for disrespecting the players. The two-time NBA All-Star added that more protection is needed for the athletes and that they also receive hate from fans over their high salaries.
Green mentioned that Houston Rockets guard Patrick Beverley was fined $25,000 for confronting a fan during a game at Oklahoma City on April 21. Beverly accepted the fine, but he said the fan, Stuart Scaramucci, son of Thunder minority owner Jay Scaramucci, cussed at him with the “F-word.” Scaramucci was not ejected. Green also recalled when then-Oklahoma State guard Marcus Smart, now with the Boston Celtics, pushed a fan he exchanged words with in a game at Texas Tech in 2014.
“Cheer for your team. Do what you want. But if I’m playing in the game and you’re cheering for your team, it doesn’t give you the right to say whatever you want to say to me,” Green said. “This is my job, and I can’t go to your job and say whatever I want to you. If I went to someone else’s job and said whatever I wanted to say, I’d get arrested for harassment. It’s a fine line. I don’t think any league does a great job of making sure that athletes are protected.
“The fans are great, but at times I think the leagues empower hecklers to say whatever they want to us. We are in a position where if you naturally react, you’re screwed, you’re losing money. But there are great fans out there, and all fans shouldn’t be put in that category.”
Jones received a standing ovation from the Red Sox crowd before his first at-bat of Tuesday night’s game. Green has never met Jones but offered support.
“It’s unfortunate. I’d tell him to really try to keep the professionalism that he has. Hopefully, it will be dealt with. Just keep your head up and do what you do,” Green said.
Despite some of the racist taunts that Green has received, he said, he cannot imagine what Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson dealt with when he broke the color line as the first black player in the major leagues in 1947.
“No, not at all. There is a reason that there is a day [in Major League Baseball] that everyone wears 42,” Green said.The official return of pro football will have to wait another four days. The NFL canceled Sunday night's Hall of Fame Game because of poor field conditions. The Green Bay Packers and Indianapolis Colts are headed back home.
"I was notified at about 5:30 that there was a problem at midfield and in the end zones with some of the painting that it was kind of congealing and rubberized, which meant players might slip on it," Pro Football Hall of Fame president David Baker told NFL Media's Steve Wyche. "The folks with the field tried to remediate that by dropping some other pellets but after talking to the coaches and staff for both the Packers and the Colts, there was a concern they might be able to remediate it but they would have to do something underneath the surface.
"We think we could make it playable, that it might be playable now but if there is any concern, anything in the minds of players we want to err on the side of player safety. This is the Pro Football Hall of Fame. You've heard me many, many times talk about our values of commitment, integrity, courage, respect, and excellence. If we don't have that integrity to respect our players and respect their safety, then we shouldn't be doing this job. It was a difficult decision to make.... But in some respects, it was an easy, ethical decision.
"When the field was put down -- this was a brand-new field that had only been used one year at the Superdome in New Orleans -- when it came here, it passed the safety tests. This morning when the cover was taken off, it passed the safety tests then. But I think the concerns were really about the painting and the rubberized surface."
Fans will be offered full refunds from the Hall of Fame, according to Baker.
The turf at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton will be replaced for next year's Hall of Fame Game, according to Wyche per a Hall source. All logos will be stitched into the surface so there will not be any issues like there were Sunday in which the field was deemed unfit for the Packers-Colts preseason opener.
The change in turf was already planned and was not a reaction to Sunday's game problems.
The NFL and NFLPA issued the following statement:
"Due to safety concerns with the condition of the playing surface in Canton, tonight's game between the Indianapolis Colts and Green Bay Packers has been cancelled. We are very disappointed for our fans, but player safety is our primary concern, and as a result, we could not play an NFL game on this field tonight."
The embarrassing news casts a pall on an otherwise great weekend. Sunday's game wasn't going to be much of a regular season preview, although it provides a chance for end-of-the-roster plays to impress coaches and make the team. Undrafted free agent Joe Callahan was expected to start at quarterback for the Packers. Starters usually play a series or two at most in the first preseason game.
"It sucks, but the conditions of the field weren't safe for any player on either roster," veteran Colts linebacker D'Qwell Jackson told NFL Media columnist Michael Silver.
More than anything, this is a huge letdown for the crowd in Ohio. This weekend in Canton proved to be a pilgrimage for Packers fans and now it has been cut short.
For information on how to receive a refund for purchased Hall of Fame Game tickets, please visit the Hall of Fame Game refund page.Washington DC (LiveActionNews) — A small group of college girls sit on the floor doing what girls love to do most: talk. Two of the students are pregnant, and conversation centers on the options before them, including abortion. Suddenly, a deep voice booms from the TV across the room, drawing their attention to the bald, fluffy-faced man on the screen who arrogantly announces,
“And now our conservative, all-male panel will discuss the future of women’s reproductive rights.”
The above scenario was portrayed in a cartoon I saw hanging in a coworker’s cubicle. It reflects a common sentiment: when it comes to abortion, men should stay out of it. The idea is that abortion is exclusively a women’s issue, and thus men have no right to interfere. Let’s talk about that.
As a father of two (one on the way), I know how this baby stuff works. I can say with total certainty that women do not create babies alone. They co-create them…with men. Furthermore, by default, approximately 50% of aborted babies are boys (at least in the U.S). I say that qualifies us males to speak on the issue. See, contrary to popular opinion, abortion is not solely a women’s rights issue; it is a human rights issue.
Yet still, even some pro-lifers shudder when men dare to assert the irrefutable science and simple common sense which support the right to life. Consider this: does the gender of a speaker affect the truth of what is spoken? Do facts become less factual when uttered by a fool? Of course not.
If a purple chipmunk tells you the earth is round, the earth is still round. (For the record, if a purple chipmunk actually talks to you, for the sake of sanity you should flee immediately. Perhaps toss some acorns over your shoulder to distract the creature from giving chase.)
We all know that pro-abortion radicals have no problem with male politicians speaking in support of abortion, or male lobbyists fighting for federal funding of Planned Parenthood, or male doctors performing abortions. But the minute a man speaks out for life, it’s “HEY! If you don’t have a uterus, ZIP IT!!!”
No, Madame Anger, I will not zip it. Unless you are trying to tell me my fly is down, in which case, thank you. I will zip it slowly and carefully.
Guys, I don’t know about you, but I for one am tired of being told that because I can never carry a child, I can’t stick up for one. It’s time to stop bowing to prejudice. It’s time to start being men.
Like this pro-life news article? Please support LifeNews with a donation during our April fundraising campaign!
In conclusion, to those who burn with rage when we men have the nerve to stand up for life, I offer this humble apology: please forgive us for being born male. What were we thinking?
LifeNews Note: Danny is a songwriter/guitarist from Colorado. In his spare time he plays hockey, volunteers at church, shoots mini hoops with his 2 year old son, and does his best to debunk pro-abortion lunacy. This column originally appeared at Live Action News and is reprinted with permission.The BFI Southbank season Mirroring Tarkovsky: The Russian master and his director disciples runs in October and November.
With Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky is perhaps the most influential of all Russian filmmakers. His body of work presents the struggle for survival of the Russian people in an idiosyncratic poetic style, with distinctively long takes. Tarkovsky’s films explore complex themes including artistic freedom, politics, religion, and the creation of art under a repressive regime. In one of his most well-known movies, Andrei Rublev (1966), Tarkovsky sought to create a film that shows the artist as “a world-historic figure” and “Christianity as an axiom of Russia’s historical identity”.
The film is set in the early 15th century in Russia and consists of eight parts, each focusing on a certain moment in the life of Andrei Rublev (c. 1360s-1430), an icon painter. The Soviet censors immediately banned screenings of the movie, deciding that it was a negative commentary on the current political situation in the Soviet Union. As a result, it wasn’t shown uncensored to Russian audiences until 1988, after Tarkovsky’s death and the year of Rublev’s canonisation.
So who was this cultural figure from history who became the focus of Tarkovsky’s film? Andrei Rublev is not as famous in the west but, in Russia, he is considered to be their first known artist and one of the country’s greatest medieval painters. Tarkovsky had little to go on in creating his central character, as not much is known about his life, and only a few of his works survived. We do know however, that he was a monk at the Trinity Monastery, not far from Moscow, and a devout follower of St Sergius. Taking a vow of silence, Andrei focused his attention on painting. Rublev executed a large number of Orthodox icons and fresco paintings, and worked on several illuminated manuscripts. He was a pupil of Theophanes the Greek (c.1340-1410), a Greek-born painter working in Russia, who is also depicted in the film. Rublev assisted him with the decoration of two of the highest-profile churches in the country, respectively the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Moscow and the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir.
You could argue that Tarkovsky turned his attention to Rublev’s story as a response to the cult of Rublev in 1960-70, but there are other, more convincing reasons for the director’s interest in this almost mythical figure. Passions for Andrei was the original title of the script Tarkovsky started working with, and it alludes to the main concept behind the work. The movie shows not only the passions and struggles of an artist in a medieval state, but the concerns of the whole nation during a period of political upheaval.
Tarkovsky once said: “Art exists to help us deal with the world’s imperfections.” The director, working in the Soviet Union and experiencing censorship, believed that creating culture was one of the most efficient ways to overcome the struggles of daily life in any period. Tarkovsky uses Rublev’s life as a metaphor for the role of the artist in society. Throughout different centuries, artists have created works that can improve the lives of people living in the same time. From this point of view, art could be compared with religion, serving similar goals. This is another reason why Rublev is a perfect symbol: he is a monk, an icon painter and a faithful believer.
Art and faith can provide solace to people, giving them hope and strength. Rublev lives and paints in one of the darkest and most desperate times in Russian history – the Mongol invasion, where people see only war, betrayal, destruction and death. Looking at the artist’s life against this bleak background, Tarkovsky manages to highlight the artist’s role as a saviour for the nation, helping its people to find hope and light through his works, and fusing art and faith in his serene frescoes and icons. The figures in Rublev’s paintings are invariably peaceful and calm. Perhaps for these reasons, his art came to be recognised as the epitome of religious orthodoxy and iconography.In a development that is going to shake the Republican Establishment to its foundations, Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor has been defeated: with a little more than 60 percent of the vote in, David A. Brat, a professor of economics and a trenchant critic of the National Security Agency’s spying on American citizens is clobbering the pro-NSA Cantor with a little less than 60 percent of the vote so far.
Brat started out with $50,000 of his own money to launch what many viewed as a quixotic campaign against a well-funded and well-entrenched opponent. At the starting bell, Cantor had over a million and a half in his campaign war chest.
Brat is an incisive critic of the Surveillance State. On his campaign web site, he went after Cantor for voting for the NDAA and against Rep. Justin Amash’s legislation that would have reined in the NSA. As the Brat campaign put it:
"Dave believes that the Constitution does not need to be compromised for matters of national security. He supports the end of bulk phone and email data collection by the NSA, IRS, or any other branch of government."
Not only that, but Brat went after Cantor for voting for the National Defense and Authorization Act (NDAA) on the grounds that it "authorizes the unconstitutional bulk data collection by the government under the PRISM program." He also savaged Cantor for voting against Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to the Act, which would have stopped bulk collection dead in its tracks.
Now watch the bipartisan Washington Establishment go into shock and try to attribute their shocking defeat to low turnout. There’s already talk it’s all about the immigration issue, but this underplays – perhaps deliberately – Brat’s explicit identification with libertarianism in this interview with Breitbart.com.
Interestingly, the Breitbart piece cites the Cantor campaign as claiming |
cAMP). The cAMP opens cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channels which allow calcium and sodium ions to enter into the cell, depolarizing the olfactory receptor neuron and beginning an action potential which carries the information to the brain.
The primary sequences of thousands of olfactory receptors are known from the genomes of more than a dozen organisms: they are seven-helix transmembrane proteins, but there are (as of May 2016) no known structures of any OR. Their sequences exhibit typical class A GPCR motifs, useful for building their structures with molecular modeling.[11] Golebiowski, Ma and Matsunami showed that the mechanism of ligand recognition, although similar to other non-olfactory class A GPCRs, involves residues specific to olfactory receptors, notably in the sixth helix.[12] There is a highly conserved sequence in roughly three quarters of all ORs that is a tripodal metal ion binding site,[13] and Suslick has proposed that the ORs are in fact metalloproteins (mostly likely with zinc, copper and possibly manganese ions) that serve as a Lewis acid site for binding of many odorant molecules. Crabtree, in 1978, had previously suggested that Cu(I) is "the most likely candidate for a metallo-receptor site in olfaction" for strong-smelling volatiles which are also good metal-coordinating ligands, such as thiols.[14] Zhuang, Matsunami and Block, in 2012, confirmed the Crabtree/Suslick proposal for the specific case of a mouse OR, MOR244-3, showing that copper is essential for detection of certain thiols and other sulfur-containing compounds. Thus, by using a chemical that binds to copper in the mouse nose, so that copper wasn’t available to the receptors, the authors showed that the mice couldn't detect the thiols. However, these authors also found that MOR244-3 lacks the specific metal ion binding site suggested by Suslick, instead showing a different motif in the EC2 domain.[15]
In a recent but highly controversial interpretation, it has also been speculated that olfactory receptors might really sense various vibrational energy-levels of a molecule rather than structural motifs via quantum coherence mechanisms.[16] As evidence it has been shown that flies can differentiate between two odor molecules which only differ in hydrogen isotope (which will drastically change vibrational energy levels of the molecule).[17] Not only could the flies distinguish between the deuterated and non-deuterated forms of an odorant, they could generalise the property of "deuteratedness" to other novel molecules. In addition, they generalised the learned avoidance behaviour to molecules which were not deuterated but did share a significant vibration stretch with the deuterated molecules, a fact which the differential physics of deuteration (below) has difficulty in accounting for.
Deuteration changes the heats of adsorption and the boiling and freezing points of molecules (boiling points: 100.0 °C for H 2 O vs. 101.42 °C for D 2 O; melting points: 0.0 °C for H 2 O, 3.82 °C for D 2 O), pKa (i.e., dissociation constant: 9.71x10−15 for H 2 O vs. 1.95x10−15 for D 2 O, cf. heavy water) and the strength of hydrogen bonding. Such isotope effects are exceedingly common, and so it is well known that deuterium substitution will indeed change the binding constants of molecules to protein receptors.[18]
It has been claimed that human olfactory receptors are capable of distinguishing between deuterated and undeuterated isotopomers of cyclopentadecanone by vibrational energy level sensing.[19] However this claim has been challenged by another report that the human musk-recognizing receptor, OR5AN1 that robustly responds to cyclopentadecanone and muscone, fails to distinguish isotopomers of these compounds in vitro. Furthermore, the mouse (methylthio)methanethiol-recognizing receptor, MOR244-3, as well as other selected human and mouse olfactory receptors, responded similarly to normal, deuterated, and carbon-13 isotopomers of their respective ligands, paralleling results found with the musk receptor OR5AN1.[20] Hence it was concluded that the proposed vibration theory does not apply to the human musk receptor OR5AN1, mouse thiol receptor MOR244-3, or other olfactory receptors examined. In addition, the proposed electron transfer mechanism of the vibrational frequencies of odorants could be easily suppressed by quantum effects of nonodorant molecular vibrational modes. Hence multiple lines of evidence argue against the vibration theory of smell.[21] This later study was criticized since it used "cells in a dish rather than within whole organisms" and that "expressing an olfactory receptor in human embryonic kidney cells doesn't adequately reconstitute the complex nature of olfaction...". In response, the authors of the second study state "Embryonic kidney cells are not identical to the cells in the nose.. but if you are looking at receptors, it's the best system in the world."[22][23][24]
Malfunction of the metalloproteins in the olfactory system is hypothesized to have a connection with amyloidal based neurodegenerative diseases.[25]
Diversity [ edit ]
There are a large number of different odor receptors, with as many as 1,000 in the mammalian genome which represents approximately 3% of the genes in the genome. However, not all of these potential odor receptor genes are expressed and functional. According to an analysis of data derived from the Human Genome Project, humans have approximately 400 functional genes coding for olfactory receptors, and the remaining 600 candidates are pseudogenes.[26]
The reason for the large number of different odor receptors is to provide a system for discriminating between as many different odors as possible. Even so, each odor receptor does not detect a single odor. Rather each individual odor receptor is broadly tuned to be activated by a number of similar odorant structures.[27][28] Analogous to the immune system, the diversity that exists within the olfactory receptor family allows molecules that have never been encountered before to be characterized. However, unlike the immune system, which generates diversity through in-situ recombination, every single olfactory receptor is translated from a specific gene; hence the large portion of the genome devoted to encoding OR genes. Furthermore, most odors activate more than one type of odor receptor. Since the number of combinations and permutations of olfactory receptors is very large, the olfactory receptor system is capable of detecting and distinguishing between a very large number of odorant molecules.
Deorphanization of odor receptors can be completed using electrophysiological and imaging techniques to analyze the response profiles of single sensory neurons to odor repertoires.[29] Such data open the way to the deciphering of the combinatorial code of the perception of smells.[30]
Such diversity of OR expression maximizes the capacity of olfaction. Both monoallelic OR expression in a single neuron and maximal diversity of OR expression in the neuron population are essential for specificity and sensitivity of olfactory sensing. Thus, olfactory receptor activation is a dual-objective design problem. Using mathematical modeling and computer simulations, Tian et al proposed an evolutionarily optimized three-layer regulation mechanism, which includes zonal segregation, epigenetic barrier crossing coupled to a negative feedback loop and an enhancer competition step [31]. This model not only recapitulates monoallelic OR expression but also elucidates how the olfactory system maximizes and maintains the diversity of OR expression.
Families [ edit ]
A nomenclature system has been devised for the olfactory receptor family[32] and is the basis for the official Human Genome Project (HUGO) symbols for the genes that encode these receptors. The names of individual olfactory receptor family members are in the format "ORnXm" where:
OR is the root name ( O lfactory R eceptor superfamily)
lfactory eceptor superfamily) n = an integer representing a family (e.g., 1-56) whose members have greater than 40% sequence identity,
X = a single letter (A, B, C,...) denoting a subfamily (>60% sequence identity), and
m = an integer representing an individual family member (isoform).
For example, OR1A1 is the first isoform of subfamily A of olfactory receptor family 1.
Members belonging to the same subfamily of olfactory receptors (>60% sequence identity) are likely to recognize structurally similar odorant molecules.[33]
Two major classes of olfactory receptors have been identified in humans:[34]
class I (fish-like receptors) OR families 51-56
class II (tetrapod specific receptors) OR families 1-13
Evolution [ edit ]
The olfactory receptor gene family in vertebrates has been shown to evolve through genomic events such as gene duplication or gene conversion.[35] Evidence of a role for tandem duplication is provided by the fact that many olfactory receptor genes belonging to the same phylogenetic clade are located in the same gene cluster.[36] To this point, the organization of OR genomic clusters is well conserved between humans and mice, even though the functional OR count is vastly different between these two species.[37] Such birth-and-death evolution has brought together segments from several OR genes to generate and degenerate odorant binding site configurations, creating new functional OR genes as well as pseudogenes.[38]
Compared to many other mammals, primates have a relatively small number of functional OR genes. For instance, since divergence from their most recent common ancestor (MRCA), mice have gained a total of 623 new OR genes, and lost 285 genes, whereas humans have gained only 83 genes, but lost 428 genes.[39] Mice have a total of 1035 protein-coding OR genes, humans have 387 protein-coding OR genes.[39] The vision priority hypothesis states that the evolution of color vision in primates may have decreased primate reliance on olfaction, which explains the relaxation of selective pressure that accounts for the accumulation of olfactory receptor pseudogenes in primates.[40] However, recent evidence has rendered the vision priority hypothesis obsolete, because it was based on misleading data and assumptions. The hypothesis assumed that functional OR genes can be correlated to the olfactory capability of a given animal.[40] In this view, a decrease in the fraction of functional OR genes would cause a reduction in the sense of smell; species with higher pseudogene count would also have a decreased olfactory ability. This assumption is flawed. Dogs, which are reputed to have good sense of smell,[41] do not have the largest number of functional OR genes.[39] Additionally, pseudogenes may be functional; 67% of human OR pseudogenes are expressed in the main olfactory epithelium, where they possibly have regulatory roles in gene expression.[42] More importantly, the vision priority hypothesis assumed a drastic loss of functional OR genes at the branch of the OWMs, but this conclusion was biased by low-resolution data from only 100 OR genes.[43] High-resolution studies instead agree that primates have lost OR genes in every branch from the MRCA to humans, indicating that the degeneration of OR gene repertories in primates cannot simply be explained by the changing capabilities in vision.[44]
It has been shown that negative selection is still relaxed in modern human olfactory receptors, suggesting that no plateau of minimal function has yet been reached in modern humans and therefore that olfactory capability might still be decreasing. This is considered to provide a first clue to the future human genetic evolution.[45]
Discovery [ edit ]
In 2004 Linda B. Buck and Richard Axel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work[46] on olfactory receptors.[47] In 2006, it was shown that another class of odorant receptors – known as trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs) – exist for detecting volatile amines.[48] Except for TAAR1, all functional TAARs in humans are expressed in the olfactory epithelium.[49] A third class of olfactory receptors known as vomeronasal receptors has also been identified; vomeronasal receptors putatively function as pheromone receptors.
As with many other GPCRs, there is still a lack of experimental structures at atomic level for olfactory receptors and structural information is based on homology modeling methods.[50]
The limited functional expression of olfactory receptors in heterologous systems, however, has greatly hampered attempts to deorphanize them (analyze the response profiles of single sensory neurons).[51] This was first completed by genetically engineered receptor, OR-I7 to characterize the “odor space” of a population of native aldehyde receptors.[52]
See also [ edit ]Tylet Blackett and Paddy McNair have been handed debuts in recent weeks, and the club's assistant manager, himself a youth product, is delighted at the manager's trust in them
Ryan Giggs believes Louis van Gaal has embraced "the philosophy of Manchester United " by nurturing youngsters like Tyler Blackett The new United manager has handed 20-year-old Blackett and fellow defender Paddy McNair – who turned 19 in April – their Premier League debuts this season.Van Gaal has praised the manner in which Manchester-born Blackett and McNair have made the step up and Giggs, himself a product of the club's youth system, is excited to see the duo flourish."That's the philosophy of Manchester United, you always bring young exciting footballers through and the fans demand it and the club demands it," Giggs told reporters."Yeah, you spend money on world-class stars, but you also have young players coming through. Right from the Busby Babes right from before that, right up until now, you give youth a chance."That's what Manchester United have always done and will continue to do."Under Van Gaal, who succeeded David Moyes, a new-look United have flattered to deceive in this season, producing just one convincing performance in the 4-0 thrashing of QPR last month.However, United mustered successive wins for the first time prior to the international break and face leaders Chelsea, champions Manchester City and Arsenal before the end of November.He said: "Obviously, we've made a lot of investments this season. I think the new boys are starting to settle in and it's exciting."We're fourth in the table and we'll look to build from that. We've got a tough few weeks coming up with West Brom [next Monday], and then a real test with Chelsea and City."That'll sort of be a test to see where we're at, but we're looking forward to the challenge."Dollars for Doctors How Industry Money Reaches Physicians
Some of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies have slashed payments to health professionals for promotional speeches amid heightened public scrutiny of such spending, a new ProPublica analysis shows.
Eli Lilly and Co.’s payments to speakers dropped by 55 percent, from $47.9 million in 2011 to $21.6 million in 2012.
Pfizer’s speaking payments fell 62 percent over the same period, from nearly $22 million to $8.3 million.
And Novartis, the largest U.S. drug maker as measured by 2012 sales, spent 40 percent less on speakers that year than it did between October 2010 and September 2011, reducing payments from $24.8 million to $14.8 million.
The sharp declines coincide with increased attention from regulators, academic institutions and the public to pharmaceutical company marketing practices. A number of companies have settled federal whistleblower lawsuits in recent years that accused them of improperly marketing their drugs.
In addition, the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, a part of the 2010 health reform law, will soon require all pharmaceutical and medical device companies to publicly report payments to physicians. The first disclosures required under the act are expected in September and will cover the period of August to December 2013.
Within the industry, some companies are reevaluating the role of physician speakers in their marketing repertoire. GlaxoSmithKline announced in December that it would stop paying doctors to speak on behalf of its drugs. Its speaking tab plummeted from $24 million in 2011 to $9.3 million in 2012.
Not all companies have cut speaker payments: Johnson and Johnson increased such spending by 17 percent from 2011 to 2012; AstraZeneca’s payments stayed about flat in 2012 after a steep decline the previous year.
ProPublica has been tracking publicly reported payments by drug companies since 2010 as part of its Dollars for Docs project. Users can search for their doctors to see if they have received compensation from the 15 companies that make such information available online. (We’ve just updated our application to include payments made through the end of 2012, totaling $2.5 billion. Forest Labs, which only began reporting in 2012, reported speaking payments of $40 million, more than any other company in Dollars for Docs.)
Some companies in the database said their declines have less to do with the Sunshine Act and more to do with the loss of patent protection for key products. Lilly, for example, began facing generic competition to its blockbuster antipsychotic Zyprexa in late 2011. Its antidepressant Cymbalta lost its patent at the end of 2013.
“The value of educational programs tends to be higher when we’re launching a new medicine or we have new clinical data/new indication,” Lilly spokesman J. Scott MacGregor said in an email, adding that the drop in speaking payments also reflects the increased use of web conferencing.
Pfizer’s patent on Lipitor, its top-selling cholesterol drug, expired in 2011.
“Like any other company, our business practices must adapt to the changing nature of our product portfolio, based in part on products going off patent and new products being introduced into the market,” company spokesman Dean Mastrojohn said in an email.
Novartis’ patent for its breast cancer drug Femara expired in 2011, its hypertension drug Diovan in 2012 and its cancer drug Zometa in 2013. In a statement, Novartis said that speaking payments dropped in 2012, in part, because of a shift from big blockbuster drugs that many doctors prescribe toward specialty products prescribed by fewer physicians. Resources were also shifted “to support potential future product launches.”
The industry’s increased emphasis on expensive specialty medications for such conditions as multiple sclerosis or Hepatitis C, has been striking, said Aaron Kesselheim, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. A piece in the New England Journal of Medicine last week noted that half of the 139 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 2009 were for rare diseases and cancers.
“It’s possible the number of physicians they need to support sales of these items is less, leading to lower payments overall,” Kesselheim said.
In some cases, companies maintained or made smaller cuts to other forms of physician compensation while pulling back dramatically on speaking payments. Pfizer’s spending on consultants dropped 9 percent from 2011 to 2012, far less than its payments to speakers. The company’s spending on research stayed essentially the same.
Lilly increased spending on physician researchers by more than 20 percent, while reducing payments to consultants by more than two-thirds.
Many bioethicists and leaders of major academic medical centers frown upon physicians delivering promotional talks for drug companies, saying they turn doctors into sales representatives rather than leaders in research and patient care.
Officials with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade group, dispute this characterization. They said they are working with their member companies to prepare for the Sunshine Act and have created a campaign to promote the value of drug company-doctor collaborations.
“Companies will make their own independent decisions about how to engage professionals,” said Kendra Martello, PhRMA’s deputy vice president of strategic operations.
Scott Liebman, an attorney who advises pharmaceutical companies on the Sunshine Act, said it’s too early to know how much the law’s requirements are affecting company practices, in part because it’s so new. The fact that some companies are cutting back on speaking while preserving their spending on research and consulting suggests that other business forces could be at play, he added.
“It’s very hard to pinpoint exactly why that’s happening,” Liebman said. “I think there’s a lot of potential answers to that. I just don’t know which is the right one.”"We know that physical attractiveness really matters when people are getting to know each other. There are decades of research [that show that] people who are physically attractive are treated very differently by strangers," Karney said. "We wanted to know, does it matter in a relationship, too? Being attractive is good, if someone doesn’t know you. But what about husbands and wives? Have they moved beyond physical attractiveness? Does it not matter anymore — or does it still kind of matter?"
In their study, Karney and his colleagues asked the newlywed couples to talk about personal issues. "We asked them, what are you doing in your life that you’re working on that you need help with? It could be anything from ‘I want to go back to school,’ or ‘I want a different job,’ or ‘I want a better relationship with my mom.’ Lots of different things." The researchers would then leave the room, but would videotape the couples talking. They observed how effectively the couples talked about each other’s issues, noting that some couples acted liked a team in dealing with the problems, with both spouses actively involved. The researchers would then leave the room, but would videotape the couples talking. They observed how effectively the couples talked about each other’s issues, noting that some couples acted liked a team in dealing with the problems, with both spouses actively involved. "Some couples, not so much," Karney said wryly. "Some couples said, ‘Hey, you’ve got a problem? How is that my problem?’ Or some couples said, ‘You’ve got a problem. You know why? Because you’re doing something wrong.’ There are lots of ways to mess up that kind of interaction. Discussion is an opportunity, but not every couple takes advantage of that opportunity." The researchers then sought to find out why some couples came together to solve problems, and why other couples didn’t. To do this, they trained a team of undergraduates to rate how physically attractive the couples were. The students were shown photos of the couples, one spouse at a time, and rated them on a scale of 1 to 9, where 9 was "a supermodel" and 1 was "a very unattractive person." The average score, not surprisingly, was 5. One of the team’s findings, which was consistent with just about every other study done on attractiveness in couples, showed that both partners tended to be similar to each other, Karney said. In other words, attractive people tended to be married to other attractive people. "What we wanted to know is, does how attractive you are — or how attractive your partner is — predict how much help you get, and how much help you give?" Karney said. "The first thing we looked at was the basic effect of each person’s attractiveness. We found that the husbands who were more attractive seemed to be less satisfied, even as newlyweds. And we wanted to know why." Karney and his colleagues then started looking at the difference between the husbands’ and wives’ attractiveness and discovered something important. "We could look at them and say, ‘OK, these husbands are less attractive on an objective scale than their wives.’ The interesting thing is that those husbands were happier than the other husbands. And those husbands were more helpful. And they were more effective and more positive when helping their wives with their problems." When studying the opposite occurrence — attractive men who had married less attractive women — the researchers found that the husbands were less satisfied in their marriages, and less helpful in the interactions with their wives. "They were basically saying, ‘Huh, looks like I settled a little bit,’ " Karney said. "They were saying, ‘I’m more attractive than you, but I’m still with you.’ But they didn’t seem to be quite as motivated to help out their wives when they were more attractive than their wives." "They were basically saying, ‘Huh, looks like I settled a little bit,’ " Karney said. "They were saying, ‘I’m more attractive than you, but I’m still with you.’ But they didn’t seem to be quite as motivated to help out their wives when they were more attractive than their wives." What’s interesting is that the wives’ own attractiveness didn’t seem to matter — they were more affected by their husbands’ satisfaction, Karney noted. When their husbands were happy, the wives were happy, and when their husbands were unhappy, they were unhappy. They didn’t seem as responsive, or sensitive, to how attractive their husbands were. "There are lots of reasons why people stay together, and lots of reasons why people are committed to each other," Karney said. "So it would be an exaggeration to say, ‘Well, no woman should ever marry a man who is more attractive than she is.’ But it is true that on average, when men are more attractive than their wives — in this sample, at least — it looks like they were less invested. Maybe because they knew that they might have more alternatives — better alternatives, potentially. "Whereas the men who were with the attractive women said, ‘Woo hoo! I lucked out!’ "Jerusalem (CNN) -- Outspoken American TV and radio personality Glenn Beck found a friendly audience Monday in the Israeli Parliament as he spoke to a group on how Israel can improve its international image.
The conservative pundit took aim at "the media" accusing it of distorting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "In America the media is so skewed on Israel -- honestly, I thought you can only cook your food over a burning bus," Beck recollected humorously about what he expected before his first trip to Israel.
But he was serious when he said, "Here is the truth (about the) Israeli -Palestinian conflict -- at the ruling class, (the conflict) is about the destruction of Israel and about the end of the Western way of life, period."
Beck spoke as a guest of the Knesset's Committee on Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs. In addition to mostly right-wing Knesset members, the committee room was packed with guests who were strong Glenn Beck fans, applauding enthusiastically as he entered the room.
Sounding at times like an evangelist, Beck proclaimed, "The times that we live in -- I am wildly clear... that God's hand is at work." Evil must be confronted, he urged, and "God will do the rest."
Several Knesset members expressed their ardent appreciation to Beck for his staunch and unequivocal support of Israel.
Beck plans to return to Israel in late August with supporters to hold three large events in what he calls the "Restore Hope" campaign, similar to his rally in Washington last August. The aim of the trip is to draw support for Israel and oppose plans by Palestinian leader to go to the United Nations in September seeking recognition for Palestine as an independent country.
One Knesset member from the centrist Atzmaut party who came to thank Beck was Einat Wilf. When asked about having the controversial talker at Israel's parliament, she responded, "These days we need all the help we can get."
"I don't think anyone can contest that Glenn Beck has the ability to reach tens of millions of people and to convince them, and as Israel finds itself in an intellectual battle for its own story, as Zionism continues to be under attack, we need to understand how to make sure that our truth is heard... and anyone who can help us with that is more than welcome," Wilf said.
.98 percent of American women have done it.
37 million Americans are currently doing it.
Most of the GOP candidates oppose it.
What is it?
If you said "sex," you were close. The answer is "use contraception." In recent weeks, the GOP candidates have been asked a lot about their views on abortion but not one has been asked his position on contraception (or even prevention in general). Really big oversight. Maybe its because everyone just assumes they all support contraception. After all, who doesn't?
If their statements and actions are indicators, most of the GOP candidates oppose contraception. Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, and Fred Thompson all define life as beginning at conception or fertilization, in other words when sperm meets egg. (It's worth noting that there's no medical way of knowing when sperm meets egg. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a fertilized egg isn't even considered a pregnancy.) This "life at fertilization" assertion is what is called in the business "dog whistle" politics: a political message only a specific constituency can hear. The reason, of course, to keep the message on one frequency, is that in most cases the issue is deeply unpopular with most of the American people. The candidate's whistle, in this case, is a pledge to support the anti-abortion movement's campaigns to roll back access to contraception.
If a candidate pledges to define life as beginning at fertilization, then anything that prevents implantation will end a life. And pro-lifers insist the pill does that. Birth control then becomes abortion, and as we know, abortion gets banned. Why hasn't the media sunk its teeth into this little curiosity? At the very least, it would make for some really great TV. Someone needs to ask any of the GOP candidates (except Guiliani) whether he supports access to birth control. 91 percent of the American public (the majority of the pro-life public included) does so strongly.
Along with pledging to give a fertilized egg full constitutional rights candidates prove their anti-contraception credentials in other ways. McCain boasts that he has consistently voted against funding pregnancy prevention for poor women. Romney vetoed an emergency contraception bill, calling it an 'abortion' drug. Ron Paul opposes federal funding for any contraceptive service.
These guys may try to outdo each other on anti-abortion rhetoric and explain, unflinchingly, how doctors will be thrown in jail when Roe fails (an inevitability in their minds). But it's the contraception question that really scares them. Because once the presidential debate focuses on how the candidates plan to alter the average American's sex life (made possible thanks to family planning) it is lifted from the pink ghetto of "woman's issues" and becomes a concern of male voters too.
Study after study proves that contraceptive use is the only way to prevent abortion; the places on earth contraception is most available are also where abortion is most rare. According to Save the Children, the countries where infant and maternal mortality are the lowest is where contraception is used the most (because planned pregnancies are healthier pregnancies.) Using abortion rates, maternal and infant death rates, as measures, it's undeniable: the most pro-life thing a president can do is support the right to use contraception and make it widely available. The public knows this. And sometime before the primaries the candidates must be made to state openly whether they support contraception. Because the candidates know those professional pro-life dogs are still listening for the right whistle.
For breaking news on threats to birth control access and information visit birthcontrolwatch.orgJeremy Corbyn will today commit Labour to a study of the universal basic income if he wins the leadership contest.
The policy – backed by the Green Party – would lead to the replacement of means-tested benefits with a standard payment for all citizens. Those who have called for the policy say it will help low-paid workers.
“Technological changes and the so-called ‘gig economy’ can mean increased insecurity and uncertainty across our society. It is one of the reasons I am looking at policies that can help provide more security for working households.
“One such possible answer may be the often-discussed suggestion of a universal basic income,” he will say.
Corbyn will also argue the vote to Leave the EU was a “decisive rejection” of the current economic model from those in “left-behind Britain”, as he sets out his economic plan to “rebuild” and “change” Britain.
Corbyn, who is facing a challenge to his leadership from Owen Smith, will tell an audience at Bloomberg’s offices in central London that people across the country have been let down by “the economy” and “a set of institutions”.
The Labour leader will say it is vital to change the economy for post-Brexit Britain to make sure that the cost of leaving the EU does not fall on working people. He will say Labour must lead by showing that the British economy can change course and create prosperity.
“There are talented people across the whole country… The millions who want a decent job, or to set up in business… or use their skills for the wider social good,” he is expected to say.
“But we have an economy and a set of institutions that let them down badly…
“The Leave vote, for all those in left-behind Britain, was a decisive rejection of all of this failed economic model…
“There is an alternative to the drift and decay of the Tories.
“An economy that works for all, across every part of our country.”
He will call on the government to work for full access to the European single market – as well as making sure social, employment and environmental rights are protected. Corbyn will say part of a deal the will have to be ratified by Parliament.
Corbyn will also say that the referendum should be respected and accepted. He will reject calls for a second referendum, which have been championed by his challenger Smith.Rate this free verse Sending User Review 5 ( 5 votes)
The Invisible Child
written by: LadyLily
@AFairymary
No perfumed bliss
or port dripping petals.
A vessel, alive, absent living.
I tread ground men fear...
where trees are blind and faceless violas scream.
Voiceless virgin of communication,
without shades, only sprays of grey,
In limbo, where rainbows never smile.
Thoughts bombard,
sharp whips of hail slash my pimpled skin,
I weep, yearn yellow,
crave emerald Ocean’s hues.
No memories of mantle Tulips,
filled chalices of cochineal wine...
Just Gooseberries dripping sour,
my shadow crippled,
personality lame and loose threaded.
A thousand deaths dance side by side,
Roses, stripped of innocence...
they weep till the Moon turns to ash...
as churlish air sponges Sun’s chrome
the death card half-turns,
my dark Tower already crumbled.By Madina Toure
Tthe family business that owns Whitestone Lanes, a bowling alley in Flushing, is allegedly planning to sell the property for $60 million to make way for a mixed-use development, but a manager said it is merely renovating the property.
Mar Mar Realty, which includes some of the family members who run the lanes, wants to sell the site at 30-05 Whitestone Expressway, according to Stephen Preuss, executive director in the Capital Markets Group of Cushman & Wakefield, which is marketing the property.
Whitestone Lanes declined to comment. But Tommy, a manager at Whitestone Lanes, previously told the TimesLedger that the family is not selling the bowling alley and is merely renovating and fixing up the bowling center. “They’re not selling it,” he said. “They’re doing a renovation. There was a misunderstanding.”
“At this point in time, they’re done with running the business and they’re looking to capitalize on the current development situation in the Flushing area,” Preuss said.
The $60 million selling price is based on a price of $155 per buildable square foot, he explained.
He also said Cushman & Wakefield is currently in talks and in the process with the Department of City Planning of changing the site’s zoning for its current industrial zoning to a commercial and residential zoning.Came upon some old MLP McDonalds toys at a thrift store and decided to try repainting one of them to look like one of the new Gen4 ponies. Pictured is my attempt at painting Rarity from MLP:FiM. Her original ‘body’ or ‘base’ was actually Sweetie Belle, which I figured was sort of fitting, haha.
I used water color masking fluid over the eyes to keep them safe while I used thin layers of gesso to cover her old skin. Sanded down the gesso a bit in places where it built up too much and then used thin layers of acrylic paint. Lastly, applied some glitter to her cutie mark and horn to try and get some ‘sparkle,’ but it didn’t turn out as well as I originally thought. Will probably purchase smaller cut glitter in the future.
Worked on this mainly as a test for future projects and feel like I learned a lot, so I’m not too upset with how she turned out.
Any critiques would be appreciated.
AdvertisementsAfter being held responsible for the waterlogging and traffic mess triggered by rain in the city last month, the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG) is looking to outsource the infrastructure development work.
The civic body has floated proposals to hire private consultants for such projects.
It is learnt that the chosen consultants will oversee development of roads, drainage systems, streetlights, water supply and horticulture and electricity works.
MCG officials said the main work of the consultants will be revamping the drainage system, which has become a bane for the city.
Officials said under the arrangement, the concessionaire will share expertise in building and designing sewage treatment plants. The consultant will also be responsible for installing tubewells, laying underground pipeline network and routing canals in a manner that will ensure final disposal of water in open channel drains, the officials said.
Working closely with the town and country planning department, the consultants will carry out the topographic survey of residential areas, colonies and villages and create a database of civic amenities such as dispensaries, canals, roads, streets, schools and tubewells.
To ensure that rainwater is utilised for recharging groundwater, consultants will also have to rejuvanate water bodies such as Sukhrali, Kadipur, Basai, Sirhaul and Jhazgarh ponds.
These water bodies can be used as catchment areas to let rainwater accumulate, thereby preventing waterlogging in low-lying areas.
Additional commissioner of the civic body Amit Khatri said it has been decided to hire consultants as it will bring extra resources and eliminate lacunas in the civic system.
First Published: Aug 08, 2016 15:01 ISTTransit police have arrested a 46-year-old man in connection with an alleged attack on an 18-year-old Muslim woman that, she says, was preceded by a racist rant.
Charged with one count of threatening to cause death or bodily harm and one count of assault is Pierre Belzan of no fixed address.
Police say they have also recommended a charge of sexual assault.
The arrest and charges follow a complaint made by Noor Fadel.
Fadel |
faces? What other environmental or other causes should be considered? Dealing with these questions seriously is completely impractical. But you are not limited to perfectly reasoned answers to questions. There is a heuristic alternative to careful reasoning, which sometimes works fairly well and sometimes leads to serious errors.
[Kahneman’s Table 1]
Target
Question Heuristic
Question How
much would you contribute to
save an endangered species? How
much emotion do I feel when
I think of dying dolphins? How
happy are you with your life
these days? What
is my mood right now? How
popular is the president right
now? How
popular will the president be
six months from now? How
should financial advisers who
prey on the elderly be punished? How
much anger do I feel when I
think of financial predators? This
woman is running for the primary.
How far will she go in politics? Does
this woman look like a
political winner?
Kahneman continues:
The mental shotgun makes it easy to generate quick answers to difficult questions without imposing much hard work on your lazy System 2. The right-hand counterpart of each of the left-hand questions is very likely to be evoked and very easily answered. Your feelings about dolphins and financial crooks, your current mood, your impressions of the political skill of the primary candidate, or the current standing of the president will readily come to mind. The heuristic questions provide an off-the-shelf answer to each of the difficult target questions.
I had a eureka moment when I read this passage. Consider the economic illiteracy intro econ professors face behind every corner. How do students manage to combine such absurdity with such certainty? Via substitution. Faced with a genuinely difficult question, they answer a different, easier question, then conflate the answer to their question with the answer to your question. Like so:
[My Table 1′]
Target
Question Heuristic
Question Does the minimum wage help
low-skill workers? Would I be happy if employers gave
low-skilled workers a raise? What policies will make Americans
richer? What policies try to hurt people I
don’t like? Do
anti-firing laws help workers in the long-run? Is it bad to be fired? How much will Obamacare improve Americans’ health per dollar spent? How
bad do I feel when I think about sick people without insurance? What is the most efficient level of tax progressivity? How much do I admire/envy the rich?
Needless to say, economists could argue at length about which substitutions students make when we confront them with challenging questions. Better yet, we could try to empirically – even experimentally – triangulate their substitutions. Whatever the specifics, though, substitution is a plausible explanation of not only the absurdity of many popular views about how the economy works, but people’s certainty about these absurdities.
P.S. Have you ever read a more elegant account of “heuristics” than this?CityLab recently looked at two Midwestern cities that just launched downtown streetcar lines: Kansas City, Missouri, and Cincinnati, Ohio. The doughty streetcar has been enjoying a modest resurgence over the last decade, with many cities across the U.S. bringing back their systems for a second act. While ridership has been pretty strong so far in both KC and Cinci, the jury is still out on whether this venerable transit option can bring wider economic benefits and compete with buses as an efficient people mover.
Readers with strong feelings on the topic wrestled with the question in the comments. Here’s a look at the conversation.
Cincinnatian Travis jumped right out of the gate with a beef against the article’s emphasis on how well the city’s new streetcar might serve commuters.
Transportation planners need to stop fetishizing “the commute” from home to work. Perhaps it’s years of listening to politicians talk about “job creation” and "connecting people to jobs,” but your trip from home to your job is not the only trip that matters. I take many trips each day and only a few of these involve me going between my home and my job. I take far more trips that involve me going from work to a restaurant, from home to a park, from home to the grocery store, etc. It has become trendy for many urbanists to hate streetcars because they're used by people going to restaurants and bars, instead of commuters going to work — the horror! — as if those aren't legitimate transportation trips. Why design a transportation system exclusively for getting to work? Isn’t that how we end up with highways that have enough lanes for rush hour but tons of excess capacity every other time of the day?
Several others, like Watching From Other There, hopped aboard to agree.
Most transit systems in America think they're doing a good job if they answer the question, “How can we get people to and from work efficiently?” … But to have a great transit system, you need to ask the question, “How can we make it easy to live without a car?”
Philip Peter Watson compiled a six-point list of reasons why streetcars are better than buses. Here’s one point:
Busses are for poor people, people who have no other choice; not that there's anything wrong with that, but the folks who are moving back into cities now are generally not poor, and they have transportation choices. A sexy transit system invites ridership; busses aren't sexy.
Philip, like many streetcar aficionados, also praised European tram systems.
I lived in Montepellier, France, which has a very well-developed light rail system, as well as bike share and a dense, walkable core. I used the light rail for my commute, but also to go to the grocery store, the beach, random neighbourhoods I picked off the map, bars, etc. I could do this because lines are predictable, and system maps are transparent. I'd love to see a rebuttal article that explains show light rail systems are more than transit: they're place shapers.
But Noibn48 wasn’t buying the idea that transit planners could avoid putting the needs of commuters first.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's indeed begin with the commute routes, the heaviest volumes of the day, and get folks out of their cars for that. If that is accomplished, then we can work on the lower, more sporadic ridership and the needed routes (which would be more costly due to the lower ridership).
CapitalistRoader, meanwhile, steered the conversation toward an issue that the story didn’t directly address: autonomous vehicles, which would “likely make mass collective transit like streetcars and buses obsolete.”
Compare the 20th Century technology of landlines to 21st Century cellphones: Why on earth would anyone want a phone that you can't take with you? Similarly, why on earth would anyone take a streetcar or bus when it doesn't actually pick them up from where they are or take them to where they actually want to go? Instead of spending billions in taxpayer dollars on streetcar infrastructure, metro areas will distribute AV car service vouchers to the poor. The rest of us will simply pay a monthly car service fee, much like we pay a monthly cell phone fee today. Yet the word autonomous or driverless doesn't appear even once in this article. The author is clueless.
The AV issue launched a lengthy side-trip down the self-driving mystery highway, with several readers arguing over how shared autonomous vehicles would affect mass transit. (That’s a whole other story.) Reader Igor took particular issue with CapitalistRoader’s claims.
[T]he way to make autonomy a reliable transit system... is the same non-sexy investment that never gets done for transit: dedicated lanes where single occupancy vehicles are forbidden. Without this—you just have your fancy autonomous cars sitting in traffic... big whoop! Once you have dedicated ROW.. the mode becomes less important, but as your ridership grows, you will again gravitate to having less wasted space around the passengers and end up with... tadah! a 200-1000ft long steel tube full of hundreds of humans! aka a train!
Alejandro chimed in with a view from Tucson, Arizona, where a new streetcar line has been in service since 2014.
The Tucson streetcar is a pretty big disappointment IMO. The only important places it links are 4th Avenue, downtown, and the University of Arizona.… That's great if you're a student who lives on campus, but pretty much useless for the rest of the city. We would have gotten a lot more bang for our (partially federal) buck simply improving the existing bus system, but I guess that just isn't flashy enough.
Like several readers, Alejandro remained un-wowed by the modest scale of the modern American streetcar revival. But streetcar booster Neil C. from Cincinnati counseled a longer-term view.
This gets people who would otherwise never ride mass transit to try it out and builds support for something better down the line. Cincinnatians are notoriously provincial people who don't really venture too far from home … so if you don't know what good transit is like and you are generally apprehensive about change … then you’re not going to want something that may benefit you in the long run unless you understand it. Cincinnati is totally the “show me city.” This may not be the case with all streetcars, but in Cincinnati’s case it’s a valuable tool to help build support for something better.
Gerhard W. Mayer brought a similarly broad perspective to the story’s thesis.
Of course the streetcar alone won't save your city. But the streetcar gives us the opportunity to build a different city around it. And that will save us.
To join the debate, go here.This week, a seemingly emotionally disturbed woman dropped a box of crickets and worms on the floor of a crowded D train, causing pandemonium and panic. It has since come out that the woman is actually a self-proclaimed "actress" who orchestrated the incident as part of a viral "prank." Zaida Pugh apologized for the prank to Gothamist today, but it may be too little too late: sources tell the Post and the News that she may be facing criminal charges for her stunt.
Update: Apparently the NYPD Warrant Squad is looking for her. More below.
Pugh, who says she's 21-years-old, told us that the video was meant to be a performance art piece about the treatment of homeless people: "The point of the video was to show how people react to homeless people, how people look down at them," she said, adding that she's been performing similar video stunts for the last four years. "It was also to show how people are so fixated on recording stuff, instead of helping other people. Even before I posted the video, people had their own videos up."
She had dressed up as a homeless woman selling crickets onboard a D train during rush hour on Wednesday night. Pugh got some teens to knock the box out of her hand, sending the bugs scattering throughout the train, and had a second party record the whole incident. "The bugs went all over the place and people started freaking out, and long story short, the emergency brake got pulled," she explained. "I stayed in character, and was taken to the hospital for an evaluation." Pugh also peed herself as part of the stunt.
Although she stands by her original intentions for the video, she was apologetic over how out of control things got: "I'm sorry about the situation and hope not to be be involved in anything like that," she said, adding that she was considering changing "the way I do my work."
As for what she thought people should have done in the situation, she believes people should intervene in public more: "Once they saw something about to start, someone should have gotten involved," she said. "The first thing they shouldn't have done is run, laugh and record."
She was also adamant that no one should have pulled the emergency brake, trapping straphangers on the Manhattan Bridge with the bugs for nearly half an hour and causing even more of a panic. "Don't pull the emergency brakes," she repeated several times during our conversation. "When the lady did that everyone went off on her, don't do that."
She hasn't had any other contact with the police since the incident, but she admits she could be charged: "I don't want to think about it," she said. "I guess whatever happens happens. I can't get mad if they do charge me." She adds that she is planning to ease back on the public actions in the future: "I'll try to be more careful in future projects...and I'll never involve bugs in the situation again. Nothing involving bugs."
Update, August 29, 2016: The Daily News now reports, "The NYPD Warrant Squad is out looking for... Pugh, 21, and will likely arrest her on reckless endangerment charges." She had originally wanted to use cockroaches, not crickets, for her "prank."Thursday, March 12th, 2015
FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- The Red Wave is pausing to remember the Valley's most popular dog. Victor E. Bulldog II died on Thursday after he was stung by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock which is basically an extreme allergic reaction.News of his death quickly spread on social media and fans shared photos and stories about the loveable dog."It's sad to now such a big part of our spirit is gone now," said Genna Fogelberg."You cannot drive that golf cart with him without folks wanting to stop, wanting to see him, wanting to their picture with him," said Jacqui Glasener.Vets are warning all pet owners to watch out if your pets are stung by bee. If their face swells, they start vomiting or appear weak, taken them to urgent care immediately.Victor E. II would have turned three next month.nullFormer PacketSled CEO Matt Harrigan is blaming being drunk for posting a death threat against President-elect Donald Trump on Election Day last week.
Harriman has apologized for the post, and has temporarily moved his family. He has also faced an interview with the United States Secret Service.
Harrigan told San Diego ABC News affiliate 10 News on Tuesday that he feels “stupid” over comments he now says were posted while he was drunk on Election Night. The comments led the U.S. Secret Service to interview him for two hours at his Del Mar, California home.
The night of the November 8, 2016 presidential election, Harrigan posted several threatening messages to his personal Facebook page: “I’m going to kill the president. Elect.” and “Bring it secret service.”
Those were followed by messages that went into greater detail, as shown on Reddit.
“Nope, getting a sniper rifle and perching myself where it counts. Find a bedroom in the whitehouse that suits you mother*******. I’ll find you,” another post read. And yet another, “In no uncertain terms, f*** you America. Seriously. F*** off.”
Harrigan told local 10 News that a Facebook friend shared the comment from Facebook to Twitter and it went viral. In the interview with 10 News, Harrigan said of seeing the comments go viral two days later, “I was blown away and that was the moment I knew that that wow, I, ya know, something that I said completely off the cuff that I obviously have no intention of participating in, um, while drinking on Election Night, has now made it out to somewhere that it never belonged.”
The U.S. Secret Service took the death threats seriously enough to conduct the interview this week. They did not comment at the time on whether there would be charges, according to the local news outlet.
While Harrigan called his death threat a “distasteful joke,” he told 10 News that there have been death threats against his family, and he is taking those seriously. He said he has moved his family out of their home for now.
The lesson he said he learned was that you can’t make a joke about such a topic “no matter how slight.”
10 News reporter Allison Ash challenged Harrigan as a “cyber-security guy,” asking if he really believed the comments posted to the Internet would stay within his Facebook friend group. Harrigan’s response? “Well, things frequently do.”
Harrigan told the local reporter that he felt “terrible” and “stupid” for posting the comments. He tried to explain in the interview with Ash that his first couple of comments got laughs in response and “you’re just sorta sitting there not really thinking about … the thing that you’re saying … admittedly I had had quite a bit to drink.”
In light of Harrigan’s comments, PacketSled issued the following statement:
PacketSled takes recent comments made by our CEO, seriously. Once we were made aware of these comments, we immediately reported this information to the secret service and will cooperate fully with any inquiries. These comments do not reflect the views or opinions of PacketSled, its employees, investors or partners. Our CEO has been placed on administrative leave.
Harrigan submitted his resignation to PacketSled on Tuesday and the company accepted it.
“I feel stupid,” he said in the interview during, which he said he would take it back if he could. “He is gonna be our president now and I hope he can do a great job for us … Anybody who took offense to what I said, I’m deeply apologetic.”
10 News reported that Harrigan has “pulled the plug on all his social media accounts.” Harrigan’s Twitter appeared to still be active as of Wednesday night, with the title of “President & CEO, PacketSled,” but no post had been made since three apologetic tweets made on November 13, hours before PacketSled’s statement on the matter was posted to the company’s Twitter account.
Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDianaWith consumers streaming more video online than ever before, having an Internet connection strong enough to handle high quality streams is more important than ever. And seeing as how Netflix is in the business of providing such streams to millions of users across the globe, it’s no surprise that the company knows a thing or two about which ISPs really deliver.
DON’T MISS: I just watched my smartphone case heal itself from scratches
As noted by Forbes, Netflix “routinely monitors the speed performance of ISPs across the globe to see which ones are performing the best with its video streams during peak viewing periods.” And with this helpful information at its disposal, Netflix has graciously decided to share it with the public via its always updated ISP speed index.
In the United States, the top 15 large ISPs are as follows:
Cox: 3.62Mbps Cablevision – Optimum: 3.59Mbps Verizon – FIOS: 3.54Mbps Charter: 3.46Mbps Comcast: 3.45Mbps Bright House: 3.42Mbps Suddenlink: 3.42Mbps Time Warner Cable: 3.37Mbps Mediacom: 3.32Mbps AT&T U-Verse: 3.2Mbps AT&T DSL: 2.51Mbps Frontier: 2.37Mbps Windstream: 2.34Mbps Centurylink: 2.27Mbps Verizon DSL: 1.9Mbps
Notably, eight out of the fastest ISPs in the U.S. rely on cable, with Verizon FIOS being the lone exception.
Of course, if we expand the list to include smaller ISPs, the results look markedly different.
Not only does Google Fiber jump to the top of the list with speeds of 3.82Mbps, but Comcast falls to 14 while AT&T DSL drops all the way down to 45.
All told, if you head on over to Netflix’s ISP Speed Index, you can check out which ISPs are the fastest and the slowest across 30 countries. Even if you’re not a Netflix subscriber, it’s handy information to have if you’re looking to get the most bang for your buck which choosing a internet service provider.
As a point of interest, the country with both the highest and highest average Internet speed is Switzerland where the top ISP tops out at 4.19Mbps. Further, the country average in Switzerland checks in at a remarkably impressive 4.08Mbps. Interestingly, Switzerland’s slowest ISP is faster than the top ISP in the United States (Tele2’s 3.97Mbps vs Google Fiber’s 3.82Mbps.)How would a Solar Grand Minimum affect global warming?
Posted on 16 June 2011 by John Cook
Solar physicists have issued a prediction that the sun may be entering a period of unusually low activity called a grand minimum. This has climate skeptics speculating that solar 'hibernation' may be our get-out-of-jail-free card, cancelling out any global warming from our CO2 emissions. However, peer-reviewed research has examined this very scenario, "On the effect of a new grand minimum of solar activity on the future climate on Earth" (Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010). What they found was even if the sun fell into a grand minimum, global temperature would be diminished by no more than 0.3°C. The sun is not our get-out-of-jail-free card.
Figure 1: Global mean temperature anomalies 1900 to 2100 relative to the period 1961 to 1990 for the A2 scenario. The red line represents temperature change for current solar levels, the blue line represents temperature change at Maunder Minimum levels. Observed temperatures from NASA GISS until 2010 are also shown (black line) (Feulner 2010).
Feulner 2010 simulates what would happen if the sun fell to Maunder Minimum levels in the 21st Century. To include the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, they assume either A1B or A2 scenarios (IPCC TAR). A1B is a more optimistic scenario where carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise in the early 21st Century, stabilise mid-century then fall in the latter-21st Century. A2 is somewhat more pessimistic, projecting carbon dioxide emissions to continue growing throughout the 21st Century. Unfortunately, the latest data on CO2 emissions indicates we're tracking towards the worst case scenario.
Two methods are used to determine how low total solar irradiance (TSI) fell during the Maunder Minimum. Ice core measurements of beryllium indicate a less variable TSI while modelling from solar magnetic flux show a greater decrease in TSI during the Maunder Minimum. In Feulner 2010, both solar reconstructions are used as shown in Figure 2 below. The magenta lines are for the A2 emission scenario, the red line for the A1B scenario.
The important feature is the comparison between the solid line (with no solar change) to the dotted and dashed lines (the two Maunder Minimum scenarios). Just to be conservative (James Hansen was right!), in Figure 1 above, I used the version with more solar variability in order to show the option where the solar minimum has the greatest effect.
Figure 2: Global mean temperature anomalies 1900 to 2100 relative to the period 1961 to 1990 for the A1B (red lines) and A2 (magenta lines) scenarios and for three different solar forcings corresponding to a typical 11-year cycle (solid line) and to a new Grand Minimum with solar irradiance corresponding to recent reconstructions of Maunder-minimum irradiance (dashed line) and a lower irradiance (dotted line), respectively. Observed temperatures from NASA GISS until 2009 are also shown (blue line) ( Feulner 2010).
For both the A1B and A2 emission scenario, the effect of a Maunder Minimum on global temperature is minimal. The most likely impact of a Maunder Minimum by 2100 would be a decrease in global temperature of 0.1°C with a maximum reduction of warming by 0.3°C. Compare this to global warming between 3.7°C (A1B scenario) to 4.5°C (A2 scenario).
Update 16 June: I've added the Figure 1 Grand Solar Minimum graphic to our list of high-rez graphics, free to use on other websites.
Update 17 June: Many thanks to DaneelOlivaw who created a Spanish version of Figure 1 (note - one of these days, I'll reprogram the Climate Graphics resource so it'll be possible to add translations).Sun Ra. Photo: Jim McCrary/Redferns
Every few years, jazz visionary Sun Ra returns like a comet on an elliptical course with pop culture, his blinding brilliance experienced anew by the next generation of listeners. While the man born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama (though he would later cite Saturn as his true home), left his terrestrial form back in 1993, the influence of Sun Ra on musicians both hugely popular and deep underground is so vast that his gravitational pull goes well beyond the confines of jazz music.
This past month has seen local arts organization Blank Forms stage its first-ever benefit concert by honoring the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen (the reedsman who played in Ra’s band since the late ’50s and who has helmed the spaceship since Ra’s death) and featured the likes of indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo and Detroit house producer Mike Huckaby paying tribute. The former had previously covered Sun Ra’s early ’80s single “Nuclear War” (with it’s chillingly still-pertinent refrain of “It’s a motherfucker, don’t you know?/ If they push the button, your ass gotta go”) while the latter released a series of disco edits of the man’s music.
Back in May, on what would have been Sun Ra’s 103rd birthday, Solange shared a special Tidal mix of his music, tweeting out: “These songs got me through the last few years. Happy earth arrival day @SunRaUniverse. Thank u for your frequencies.” That Sun Ra has held sway on the younger Knowles sister might seem strange at first glance. But from the sci-fi soul that infused her 2008 Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams to last year’s pop polemic A Seat at the Table, there’s a latent influence on Solange’s own cosmic journey and her manifestation as a politically minded artist and visually arresting live performer. In establishing his own imprint Saturn Records in the 1950s, Sun Ra was one of the earliest independent artists. Look closer at the works of Frank Ocean and Chance the Rapper as they wrest complete control of their music and some of Sun Ra’s independence can be gleaned. Creative resistance becomes equal to racial resistance. Or Sun Ra once stated, “I was trying to uplift black people out of this condition they in, and I only played for them.”
For much of his lifetime and in his legacy afterward, Sun Ra was too often seen by the jazz Establishment as an extraterrestrial oddball, conjuring cosmic noise on his keyboard with his band garnering more notice for their handsewn cloaks and solar-system hats than for their formidable chops. When he penned a forward to the reissue of Sun Ra’s singular 1974 film Space Is the Place, the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne wrote “Well … he thinks he’s from outer space … He’s crazy,” likening Ra to Bob Dylan and uh … Miley Cyrus. Or as George Clinton once quipped: “Sun Ra is out to lunch — the same place I eat at.” But Clinton himself knew that Ra was onto something and set about interjecting profundity into his funk, using that mothership to serve as a source of uplift for African-Americans in his own music.
Sun Ra is one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary musicians and thinkers, encapsulating within his space music very real lessons for planet Earth well into the 21st century. In his book A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, author Paul Youngquist argues that Sun Ra was primarily a political artist, protesting not just war (he was jailed for being a conscientious objector to the draft during World War II) but also organized religion, handing out broadsides in the streets of South Side Chicago during the 1950s. As Youngquist wrote: “His activism drew its inspiration not from a moral or political imperative but, more simply and beautifully, from sound: music to change the planet, space music heralding other, happier worlds.”
In his melding of ancient Egyptology to futuristic realms, Sun Ra is the father of the aesthetic that after his passing came to be known as Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism has since wormed its way into pop culture, with the likes of Outkast, Madlib, Deltron 3030, Janelle Monáe, and even The Late Late Show bandleader Reggie Watts all embracing that aesthetic. Claiming to be abducted by aliens from Saturn, Youngquist argued that Sun Ra slyly “retells the whole harrowing history of African slavery … the slave ships of the Middle Passage were the first alien motherships. Alien abduction assimilates a three-hundred-year history of subjugation to futuristic images of flying saucers and spacemen.”
With nearly two hundred albums released over his lifetime (and entire books dedicated to trying to document them all), there’s a galaxy of sound to explore: from doo-wop to abstract noise, big-band swing to polyrhythmic miniatures, free jazz rocket blasts to gravity-free space chants. And while a great portion of his catalogue has fallen out of print, the Cosmic Myth imprint was established earlier this year with the Sun Ra estate, reissuing crucial albums like The Magic City and My Brother the Wind from the original master tapes, presenting the music for the next generation of adventurous listeners. As thanks for his frequencies, we offer up some albums that best represent the universe of sound that is Sun Ra.
Singles: The Definitive 45s Collection (1952–1991)
In 1956, Sun Ra and close associate Alton Abraham founded El Saturn Records, one of the earliest black-owned record labels. As Ra biographer John Szwed put it in his book Space Is the Place, establishing an artist-owned label that kept the music firmly in the hands of its creator was “so daring, so unprecedented, as to be heroic in the music business.”
While Sun Ra’s recorded legacy rests on his full-length albums, from the label’s inception, it also released 45s in minute pressings (some as small as 50 copies), which even the most ardent of Sun Ra collectors might have never happened upon. When these ridiculously rare singles were first compiled, they presented a parallel universe of Sun Ra. Across these 60-plus three-minute sides, Sun Ra offered up his singular spins on boogie-woogie, doo-wop, jump blues, Duke Ellington, and disco. You can also hear the man bestow Christmas greetings as well as a vow to “unmask the Batman.”
Super-Sonic Jazz (1957)
Recorded in Chicago in 1956, Super-Sonic Jazz is often regarded as the first Sun Ra album. Sun Ra’s vision for jazz is evident in its hand-drawn cover art: keys, drums, upright bass, and horns sounding against the black void of space. Sun Ra’s career took off when he took a role as pianist and arranger for Fletcher Henderson’s big band after the end of WWII. While the era of big bands was on the wane, Ra knew the power and magic of such a large ensemble. As he recalled in Szwed’s biography: “In the Deep South … the only thing [black people] had was big bands. Unity showed that the black man could join together … so it was important for us to hear big bands.” So while big-band arrangements are the order of the day on his debut, there are moments that hint of Ra’s vision for the future. Lots of exotic percussion bangs around the arrangements of “India,” and “Advice to Medics” is a solo outing from Ra on electric keyboard that twinkles like a distant star.
Jazz in Silhouette (1959)
In the late ’50s, two cultural trends seduced the American mainstream: exotica and the space age. It was part of Sun Ra’s genius to invert both and conceptualize a futuristic image for himself and his band that would continue on into the present moment. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit, sending the American government into a tizzy, shoveling millions of dollars into “the space race” even while problems like racial inequality and segregation still reigned in the country. Exotica arose from the tiki bars of the postwar era and was captured on disc to great success by Les Baxter and Martin Denny, even as they blanched the exotic sounds of Africa, Asia, and the like.
For his second album, Sun Ra slyly copped to the exotica style in cover art, with Jazz in Silhouette featuring topless African women drifting over a planet’s surface. It sure didn’t sound like exotica to potential listeners, but it was part of Ra’s vision. Or as Youngquist puts it: “If blacks couldn’t flourish in segregated cities, then maybe they could follow exotica into space.” Bop and swing abound in Sun Ra’s charts here but an epic composition like “Ancient Aiethiopia” takes hand drums, muted trumpets, dramatic piano, and a wordless chant and lets it float in outer space.
The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra (1965)
In 1960, Sun Ra and his Arkestra left Chicago and wound up living communally in the East Village, putting them at the nexus of jazz and smack dab in the middle of the psychedelic hotbed that was the neighborhood during that era. Here, Sun Ra’s transformation from bop and swing master to leader of the avant-garde was complete, his singular vision influencing everyone from John Coltrane to Pharoah Sanders and Lonnie Liston Smith.
In one of the rare instances of Ra stepping away from his own label, his debut for ESP-Disk put him in the company of the Fugs, Holy Modal Rounders, and Albert Ayler. The year 1965 featured all manner of firebrand jazz recordings from Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Ayler, but The Heliocentric Worlds stands apart. It’s chaotic and cathartic, but it also reveals an underlying structure, moving from roaring horn blasts and roiling tympanum to intricate tribal rhythms and luminous vibraphone. And that’s just on one song.
The Magic City (1966)
Of the hundreds of albums Sun Ra released, by every measure The Magic City remains one of the most totemic and vertiginous in his catalogue. With a nod to Ra’s terrestrial birthplace (Birmingham, Alabama’s nickname in the 1920s was “The Magic City”), the title track is a 27-minute odyssey of sound. It sounds like a modern chamber orchestra one moment, and a madman at a church organ the next — the piece gracefully moves from chaos to alien beauty and back. The reed work of John Gilmore, Pat Patrick, and Marshall Allen are a master class in and of themselves, weaving around echoing drum tattoos, bowed bass strings, bumped microphones and Ra’s buzzing bee keyboard, their melodicism holds the massive composition together.
Strange Strings (1967)
A critic of ’60s-era free jazz might sniff that the blat of horns sounds like amateurs playing them for the first time. In the case of this strange effort from Sun Ra, he captured the sound of such naïveté, handing out an array of exotic stringed instruments to his band and bidding them to improvise. Whether you call it untutored or a perfect example of free jazz as outsider art, Strange Strings remains the most avant-garde album Sun Ra ever released (which really is saying something). Sawed, plucked, and strummed strings create quite the cacophony, while kitchen-sink percussion and a healthy slathering of reverb across everything pushes it to the outer reaches of sound.
Interstellar Low Ways (1967)
While its release date was at the height of jazz’s fiery “New Thing” and the Arkestra itself was making a name as the most mind-expanding musical venture happening in New York City during the Summer of Love, this album dates back to the Arkestra’s time in Chicago a decade prior. The album title itself is a play on the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and that playfulness extends to the music itself. The horns swing rather than skronk, the music hews closer to big band than Big Bang. But the results are so catchy and charming that it makes for one of the more winsome entries here. “Interplanetary Music” floats and bops along like something out of a Walt Disney film and “Rocket Number Nine Take Off For the Planet Venus” is furious and fun in equal measure, not unlike Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s breakneck bebop standard “Salt Peanuts.”
Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (1967)
Sun Ra began utilizing cosmic imagery for his music from the jump, invoking planets, comets, and other heavenly bodies in his titles. But Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (recorded in 1963) was one of the first albums to actually sound like a signal beamed from another planet. Utilizing a small group, John Gilmore’s bass clarinet and Marshall Allen’s oboe speak an alien language as they grapple with Ra’s B-3 organ and Clavioline (though he’s credited with “astro space organ” as well). Adding to the spaciness of the session is that most of the hand percussion is run through a panoply of echo and reverb. So while the reeds sound like something from outer space, the drums sound like something echoing out from deepest Africa. Abstract as it can get, the sinewy rhythm of “Moon Dance” is about as groovy as Sun Ra and his band from outer space ever got.
Angels and Demons at Play (1967)
This is another anachronistic Sun Ra album that dates back to sessions from almost a decade previous made in Chicago. As such, it acts as a tonic to the more avant albums emanating from the band at this time. Flutes wind across drums tapped out in 5/4 time as if charming snakes on “Tiny Pyramids” while big band number “Urnack” swings with an urgency that suggests that the Arkestra was disciplined enough to tighten up on the bandstand. “A Call for All Demons” showcases Ra’s work on the keys, somewhere between stride piano and the clanging interval leaps of Thelonious Monk. Meanwhile the title track shows Sun Ra also had a singular touch when it came to playing the harpsichord.
My Brother the Wind Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (1970)
Two important new elements to Sun Ra and his Arkestra arise on My Brother the Wind, the Moog synthesizer and the voice of June Tyson. (And naturally, since Sun Ra’s discography doesn’t |
not merely mathematically), you would be very able to determine the nature of the force - attractive or repulsive - without the use of "+" and "-" signs in the equation.
Calculations Using Coulomb's Law
In physics courses, Coulomb's law is often used as a type of algebraic recipe to solve physics word problems. Three such examples are shown here.
Example A Suppose that two point charges, each with a charge of +1.00 Coulomb are separated by a distance of 1.00 meter. Determine the magnitude of the electrical force of repulsion between them.
This is not the most difficult mathematical problem that could be selected. It certainly was not chosen for its mathematical rigor. The problem-solving strategy utilized here may seem unnecessary given the simplicity of the given values. Nonetheless, the strategy will be used to illustrate its usefulness to any Coulomb's law problem.
The first step of the strategy is the identification and listing of known information in variable form. Here we know the charges of the two objects ( Q 1 and Q 2 ) and the separation distance between them ( d ). The next step of the strategy involves the listing of the unknown (or desired) information in variable form. In this case, the problem requests information about the force. So F elect is the unknown quantity. The results of the first two steps are shown in the table below.
Given: Q 1 = 1.00 C Q 2 = 1.00 C d = 1.00 m Find: F elect =???
The next and final step of the strategy involves substituting known values into the Coulomb's law equation and using proper algebraic steps to solve for the unknown information. This step is shown below.
F elect = k • Q 1 • Q 2 / d2 F elect = ( 9.0 x 109 N•m2/C2 ) • (1.00 C) • (1.00 C) / (1.00 m)2 F elect = 9.0 x 109 N
The force of repulsion of two +1.00 Coulomb charges held 1.00 meter apart is 9 billion Newton. This is an incredibly large force that compares in magnitude to the weight of more than 2000 jetliners.
This problem was chosen primarily for its conceptual message. Objects simply do not acquire charges on the order of 1.00 Coulomb. In fact, more likely Q values are on the order of 10-9 or possibly 10-6 Coulombs. For this reason, a Greek prefix is often used in front of the Coulomb as a unit of charge. Charge is often expressed in units of microCoulomb (µC) and nanoCoulomb (nC). If a problem states the charge in these units, it is advisable to first convert to Coulombs prior to substitution into the Coulomb's law equation. The following unit equivalencies will assist in such conversions.
1 Coulomb = 106 microCoulomb 1 Coulomb = 109 nanoCoulomb
The problem-solving strategy used in Example A included three steps:
Identify and list known information in variable form. List the unknown (or desired) information in variable form. Substitute known values into the Coulomb's law equation and using proper algebraic steps to solve for the unknown information. (In some cases and for some students, it might be easier to first do the algebra using the variables and then perform the substitution as the last step.)
This same problem-solving strategy is demonstrated in Example B below.
Example B Two balloons are charged with an identical quantity and type of charge: -6.25 nC. They are held apart at a separation distance of 61.7 cm. Determine the magnitude of the electrical force of repulsion between them.
The problem states the value of Q 1 and Q 2. Since these values are expressed in units of nanoCoulombs (nC), the conversion to Coulombs must be made. The problem also states the separation distance ( d ). Since distance is given in units of centimeters (cm), the conversion to meters must also be made. These conversions are required since the units of charge and distance in the Coulomb's constant are Coulombs and meters. The unknown quantity is the electrical force ( F ). The results of the first two steps are shown in the table below.
Given: Q 1 = -6.25 nC = -6.25 x 10-9 C Q 2 = -6.25 nC = -6.25 x 10-9 C d = 61.7 cm = 0.617 m Find: F elect =???
The final step of the strategy involves substituting known values into the Coulomb's law equation and using proper algebraic steps to solve for the unknown information. This substitution and algebra is shown below.
F elect = k • Q 1 • Q 2 / d2 F elect = ( 9.0 x 109 N•m2/C2 ) • ( 6.25 x 10-9 C ) • ( 6.25 x 10-9 C ) / ( 0.617 m )2 F elect = 9.23 x 10-7 N
Note that the "-" sign was dropped from the Q 1 and Q 2 values prior to substitution into the Coulomb's law equation. As mentioned above, the use of "+" and "-" signs in the equation would result in a positive force value if Q 1 and Q 2 are like charged and a negative force value if Q 1 and Q 2 are oppositely charged. The resulting "+" and "-" signs on F signifies whether the force is attractive (a "-" F value) or repulsive (a "+" F value).
Example C Two balloons with charges of +3.37 µC and -8.21 µC attract each other with a force of 0.0626 Newton. Determine the separation distance between the two balloons.
The problem states the value of Q 1 and Q 2. Since these values are in units of microCoulombs (µC), the conversion to Coulombs will be made. The problem also states the electrical force ( F ). The unknown quantity is the separation distance ( d ). The results of the first two steps are shown in the table below.
Given: Q 1 = +3.37 µC = +3.37 x 10-6 C Q 2 = -8.21 µC = -8.21 x 10-6 C F elect = -0.0626 N (use a - force value since it is attractive) Find: d =???
As mentioned above, the use of the "+" and "-" signs is optional. However, if they are used, then they have to be used consistently for the Q values and the F values. Their use in the equation is illustrated in this problem.
The final step of the strategy involves substituting known values into the Coulomb's law equation and using proper algebraic steps to solve for the unknown information. In this case, the algebra is done first and the substitution is performed last. This algebra and substitution is shown below.
F elect = k • Q 1 • Q 2 / d2 d2 • F elect = k • Q 1 • Q 2 d2 = k • Q 1 • Q 2 / F elect d = SQRT(k • Q 1 • Q 2 ) / F elect d = SQRT [( 9.0 x 109 N•m2/C2 ) • (- 8.21 x 10-6 C ) • (+ 3.37 x 10-6 C ) / (- 0.0626 N )] d = Sqrt [ +3.98 m 2 ] d = +1.99 m
Comparing Electrical and Gravitational Forces
Electrical force and gravitational force are the two non-contact forces discussed in The Physics Classroom tutorial. Coulomb's law equation for electrical force bears a strong resemblance to Newton's equation for universal gravitation.
The two equations have a very similar form. Both equations show an inverse square relationship between force and separation distance. And both equations show that the force is proportional to the product of the quantity that causes the force - charge in the case of electrical force and mass in the case of gravitational force. Yet there are some striking differences between these two forces. First, a comparison of the proportionality constants - k versus G - reveals that the Coulomb's law constant (k) is significantly greater than Newton's universal gravitation constant (G). Subsequently a unit of charge will attract a unit of charge with significantly more force than a unit of mass will attract a unit of mass. Second, gravitational forces are only attractive; electrical forces can be either attractive or repulsive.
The inverse square relationship between force and distance that is woven into the equation is common to both non-contact forces. This relationship highlights the importance of separation distance when it comes to the electrical force between charged objects. It is the focus of the next section of Lesson 3.
We Would Like to Suggest... Sometimes it isn't enough to just read about it. You have to interact with it! And that's exactly what you do when you use one of The Physics Classroom's Interactives. We would like to suggest that you combine the reading of this page with the use of our
Visit: Visit: Coulomb's Law
Sometimes it isn't enough to just read about it. You have to interact with it! And that's exactly what you do when you use one of The Physics Classroom's Interactives. We would like to suggest that you combine the reading of this page with the use of our Coulomb's Law Interactive. You can find it in the Physics Interactives section of our website. The Coulomb's Law Interactive allows a learner to explore the effect of charge and separation distance upon the amount of electric force between two charged objects.
Check Your Understanding
Use your understanding to answer the following questions. When finished, click the button to view the answers.
1. The Q in Coulomb's law equation stands for the _____.
a. mass of a charged object b. # of excess electrons on the object c. the current of a charged object d. the distance between charged objects e. charge of a charged object
2. The symbol d in Coulomb's law equation represents the distance from ___.
a. A to B b. A to D c. B to C d. B to D e. C to D f. A to G g. B to F h. C to E
3. Determine the electrical force of attraction between two balloons with separate charges of +3.5 x 10-8 C and -2.9 x 10-8 C when separated a distance of 0.65 m.
4. Determine the electrical force of attraction between two balloons that are charged with the opposite type of charge but the same quantity of charge. The charge on the balloons is 6.0 x 10-7 C and they are separated by a distance of 0.50 m.
5. Joann has rubbed a balloon with wool to give it a charge of -1.0 x 10-6 C. She then acquires a plastic golf tube with a charge of +4.0 x 10-6 C localized at a given position. She holds the location of charge on the plastic golf tube a distance of 50.0 cm above the balloon. Determine the electrical force of attraction between the golf tube and the balloon.
6. A balloon with a charge of 4.0 µC is held a distance of 0.70 m from a second balloon having the same charge. Calculate the magnitude of the repulsive force.
7. At what distance of separation must two 1.00-microCoulomb charges be positioned in order for the repulsive force between them to be equivalent to the weight (on Earth) of a 1.00-kg mass?Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio Marco Antonio RubioWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Sixteen years later, let's finally heed the call of the 9/11 Commission Schumer urges GOP to reject Trump's 'destructive' national emergency MORE (R-Fla.) isn't joining in the social media outrage over the killing of a lion in Africa by an American dentist.
In a tweet Wednesday, Rubio urged the public to direct their anger toward Planned Parenthood instead.
"Look at all this outrage over a dead lion,” Rubio tweeted, "but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies.”
Look at all this outrage over a dead lion, but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies. — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 29, 2015
A third undercover video was released yesterday by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress showing another Planned Parenthood official discussing the sale of fetal tissue.
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“I think a per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it,” a woman identified as Dr. Savita Ginde can be heard saying in the video.
Online concern over the videos has been overshadowed somewhat in favor of calls for justice over the slaying of Cecil the Lion by Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer.
Palmer reportedly paid thousands of dollars to hunt the beloved lion while on safari in Zimbabwe. He has since apologized for his part in Cecil’s death, saying "had no idea that the lion I took was a known, local favorite, was collared and part of a study until the end of the hunt."Support us AD-FREE Producing content you read on this website takes a lot of time, effort, and hard work. If you value what we do here, please consider subscribing today. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
A strong outburst of lightning from Hurricane "Hilda", in the Pacific Ocean, was reported by the National Weather Service on August 10, 2015. At first, the scientist thought the lightning was the so-called sprites phenomena, however, closer observation showed it was gigantic jets, a more powerful and extremely rare event.
The weather phenomena, known as sprites, are an unusual form of lightning, shooting up from the tops of electrical storms. The intense outburst reach up to the edge of space, on the same height levels with meteors, auroras and noctilucent clouds. It's only recently that the researchers became aware that the sprites happen on top of the ordinary thunderstorms.
Video credit: Terry Reis
This event, however, is pretty rare above a hurricane, as they have no vertical winds that would trigger the electrical activity in the storms. The discovery indicates Hurricane "Hilda" was not a typical storm.
The phenomena was caught on a camera from the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope (CFHT) CloudCam, on top of Maunakea volcano, on August 10. A more careful look on the video revealed that the recorded appearance were not sprites, but so-called gigantic jets, Spaceweather.com reported on August 14.
Gigantic jets are lightning-like discharges that burst out of tops of the thunderstorms. Their outburst reaches over 80 km (50 miles) through the atmosphere, all the way up to the ionosphere. The phenomena is tremendous and extremely intense, popularly referred to as "sprites on steroids". So far, only a few dozen gigantic jets have been observed, usually above the open ocean waters.
"Gigantic jets are much more rare than sprites," said Oscar van der Velde, a member of the Lightning Research Group at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. "While sprites were discovered in 1989 and have since been photographed by the thousands, it was not until 2001-2002 that gigantic jets were first recorded from Puerto Rico and Taiwan."
The rarity of the phenomena is what makes this observation very important: "Observations in recent years suggest that large thunderstorm clusters embedded in tropical cyclones harbor favorable conditions for gigantic jets. Hilda seems to confirm this. Extreme turbulent mixing in the storm top may assist in triggering these events," O. van der Velde explained.
Source: Spaceweather.com
Featured image: Gigantic jets on top of the Hurricane "Hilda" captured by CFHT, August 10, 2015. Image credit: Terry Reis, video edited on August 12, 2015.
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While Republicans and their media echo chamber have been quick to pronounce the Affordable Care Act "dead on arrival" and its troubled launch "Obama's Katrina," polling suggests the American people have reached no such conclusion. A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted last weekend found that 41 percent of respondents approve of the ACA, little changed from a month before. Meanwhile, the latest United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll found that less than two in five support the law's repeal, "virtually unchanged since last summer."
But lost in the flurry of polls is a helpful bit of context to another major health care program that cost Washington hundreds of billions of dollars and impacted over 40 million people. As it turns out, the numbers show that President Bush's Medicare Part D prescription drug plan, a program that now enjoys 90 percent approval from America's seniors, was far more unpopular during its launch than Obama's Affordable Care Act is now.
The charts from the Kaiser Family Foundation above tell the tale. Since its passage in March 2010, support for and opposition to the Affordable Care Act has been largely unchanged. But KFF's polling of seniors' views of the Bush Medicare drug plan showed it consistently more unpopular than the ACA, with disapproval spiking during its launch in the fall of 2005. And that dismal performance was for a program for which enrollment was voluntary and the coverage fully paid by Uncle Sam.
The headlines in late 2005 and early 2006 explain why. The launch of the enrollment period for 43 million seniors to use their new drug benefit to purchase prescription coverage from private insurers was met with stories like "Medicare prescription drug plan stump seniors" (USA Today), "Officials' pitch for drug plan meets skeptics" (New York Times), "Medicare drug plan still not generating much enthusiasm" and "majority of Americans say drug plan is not working" (Gallup). As Sarah Kliff explained in June, "Part D was less popular than Obamacare when it launched":
Eight years ago, the federal government rolled out Medicare Part D, a prescription drug benefit. For the first time ever, Medicare was launching a benefit administered exclusively through private health insurance plans. The benefit was not popular: In the spring of 2005, when enrollment efforts ramped up, polls showed Medicare Part D to be less popular than the Affordable Care Act. Fewer Americans felt they understood how it worked, too...
Neither was especially popular in the months prior to their launch. Part D was even less liked: 21 percent of the public had a favorable opinion of the program in April 2005 compared to 35 percent in April 2013 for the Affordable Care Act.
Americans' disdain for the Medicare drug plan was understandable, giving its disastrous launch. As I explained previously:
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that some of the administration's ads promoting the new program were illegal while others were misleading. GAO investigators also found that the White House illegally withheld data from Congress on the cost of the new law. The Congressman who crafted the bill soon left Capitol Hill for K Street, where he made millions of dollars annually as a heath care lobbyist.
The new federal web site allowing people to compare plans and prices was delayed by weeks, while just 300 customer service reps manned the phones to help new enrollees. Yet over six million people immediately lost their coverage, while hundreds of thousands more would be refused treatment because of malfunctions in the computer systems linking providers and insurers. In response to the mushrooming crisis, governors in mostly Democratic states spent billions to continue coverage for their residents, while the President pleaded with insurance companies not to cut off their current policyholders. Nevertheless, the White House sided with insurers and rejected bipartisan calls to delay the enrollment deadline even as public approval plummeted to 25 percent. It's no wonder John Boehner called the rollout of the President's signature domestic policy achievement "horrendous."
But despite its catastrophic rollout, President Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan slowly but surely gained popularity over time. One key reason is that, despite their opposition to a program that was needlessly expensive and a giveaway to private insurers and pharmaceutical companies, Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the states helped make the program a success. Part D also had one other thing going for it. It was better than the alternative: nothing.
So Republicans now tap-dancing on Obamacare's grave would do well to put their celebration on hold. If Medicare's experience is any indication, a year--or two or three--from now the polling numbers will be looking much positive for the Affordable Care Act.With a weak US dollar, strong yuan and China’s own real estate market cooling after years of explosive growth, Detroit is an attractive – but high-risk – option for Chinese property developers
Last autumn, a group of Chinese real estate developers arrived in downtown Detroit for a city tour. As they walked through its small central cluster of high-rises – some in use, many long-ago abandoned – they were impressed by what they saw. Amid the urban decay, they were shown art spaces, colourful tech startup offices, and other testaments to reinvention. “Rebirth of Detroit” read one elaborately-stencilled mural. Wedged into an empty window frame of a crumbling mid-rise, a wood block carving depicted an Atlas-like figure hoisting a giant ‘D’ on his shoulders. “Rising from the ashes,” it said.
In September, the Shanghai-based developer Dongdu International (DDI) made its first move. In an online auction, it snapped up three iconic downtown properties, all built during the city’s early 20th-century heyday as an industrial powerhouse. DDI purchased the David Stott building, a 38-storey art-deco skyscraper built in 1929, and the former Detroit Free Press newspaper headquarters, a T-shaped edifice adorned with bas-relief sculptures of biplanes and locomotives. Later, it acquired the 10-storey Clark Lofts, an inconspicuous residential building with a manual, pre-second world war elevator – the oldest in Detroit.
Altogether, DDI spent $16.4m (£9.6m) on the properties, slightly more than a top-market apartment in Shanghai.
The company plans to transform the buildings into vibrant offices and upscale apartments, according to the CEO of DDI’s leisure branch, Peter Wood. “Once we’ve shown to the locals in Detroit that we’re deadly serious, then other things will happen,” Wood says, sitting in his corner office on the 10th floor of a Shanghai skyscraper, a dozen or so Chinese employees typing diligently in cubicles outside. “Detroit is planning for this area to come back. It’s all about rejuvenation.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The 302,000-square-foot Detroit Free Press building, abandoned since 1998, has fallen into an advanced state of disrepair. Photograph: Jonathan Kaiman
China has in recent years become the second largest foreign investor in US real estate after Canada – the dollar is weak, the yuan is strong, and the country’s own real estate market is cooling down after years of explosive growth. While most buyers – individuals as well as companies – focus on reliable investments in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, others are seeking new frontiers. Many have family in the US and degrees from US universities; they are attracted to complex, high-risk projects which require a deep understanding of local real estate markets, politics and laws.
Even for them, though, Detroit is an ambitious target. While some parts are staging a comeback – the Quicken Loans billionaire Dan Gilbert moved his corporate headquarters there in 2010 – tens of thousands of the city’s properties still lie abandoned among overgrown lots. Images of Detroit’s urban blight have become a defining visual symbol of American rust-belt decline.
Not surprisingly, DDI has run into problems with its investments: the 302,000 sq ft Detroit Free Press building, abandoned since 1998, has fallen into an advanced state of disrepair. After DDI took over the David Stott building, its best-known tenant, Detroit Yoga, relocated citing landlord concerns. One of the building’s only other tenants, SkyBar, is currently suing DDI over a rent dispute. Neither DDI nor SkyBar’s management would comment on the case.
“They had these grand plans to dump millions into the [Stott] building,” Ryan Snoek, a real estate consultant who coordinated the sale, told Crains Business Detroit. “I'm starting to become concerned that may not be the case, that they just bought the buildings and will just hold on to it.”
Ken Creighton, a local representative for DDI, said the company will be begin renovating the buildings in the “first or second quarter” of next year. "We'll do the Free Press building first... All of the buildings will be redone – their mechanical, electrical and plumbing, their elevators. Most of these buildings haven’t had anything done to them in years, maybe decades.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The SkyBar, in the David Stott building, is suing new owner DDI in a rent dispute. Photograph: Jon Kaiman
Soon after Detroit declared bankruptcy last July, China’s state broadcaster CCTV ran a special report claiming that Detroit properties were selling for less than a pair of leather shoes. Immediately, real estate broker Caroline Chen’s phone began ringing off the hook. Chen, who was born in Taiwan but has lived in Michigan for decades, works for RE/MAX Crown Properties in the affluent suburb of Troy, and she has become the go-to resource for Chinese investors looking to buy up Detroit real estate. Three years ago, she opened a second office in Shanghai.
Chen says that she still receives countless calls from curious Chinese buyers, five to 10% of which eventually end in transactions. Altogether, her firm has sold about 300 homes to Chinese clients, most for between $500 and $10,000. Many of them don’t understand how bleak much of Detroit has become. “Most buyers, on a small scale, they think they can leave the property sitting there, and since everybody’s buying, its value will go up,” she says. “But that’s wrong. If everybody does that, then everything just sits there.”
In June 2014, one Chinese developer flew to Detroit to explore the possibility of building a Detroit Chinatown. “Most of what I told him was negative, but that didn’t scare him,” Chen said. “‘It’s because Detroit’s bad, that’s why I want to develop,’ he told me. ‘We have seen so many examples of this – just look at Pudong in Shanghai.’” Two decades ago, the city’s Pudong district was mostly marshland. Now, it’s home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
DDI’s Detroit investments seem more calculated. The company already maintains properties in Shanghai, Nanjing, Chengdu, and California. It’s also building a resort in Nova Scotia. Li Hailin, its 51-year-old chairman, has hosted government officials from Detroit’s Wayne County at his home in central Shanghai. Li quit a government job at the age of 26 to become an entrepreneur in Shenzhen, the site of China’s first experiments in free market capitalism. He made his fortune building migrant worker dorms.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Pudong development zone in Shanghai. Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
“Our chairman sees a lot of things that other businesses don’t – or don’t want to try,” says Solomon Wong, DDI’s business manager for international projects. On a rainy day in March, Wong walks through a new row of 16-storey residential buildings in Shanghai’s far-flung suburbs. DDI finished building them three years ago, he says; already, they are almost fully occupied. The complex is porcelain themed – at its centre is a small museum, featuring copies of ceramic masterpieces under glass display cases. Its walls are lined with photographs of other DDI properties – a gleaming commercial centre and a row of houses along a canal.
“We need to follow the rules of historical protection on these first few projects in Detroit,” Wong says. “But for other projects, later, we could possibly build these kinds of things.” The company has ambitions beyond real estate: DDI could soon bring Chinese auto industry savvy to the midwest, he says. China, in turn, could someday benefit from Michigan’s celebrated universities and healthcare system.
Analysts and competitors said that the firm would fail in Shenzhen, and then in Shanghai, according to Wong. Again and again, Dongdu has proved them wrong. Why should Detroit be any different?
• The rise and fall (and nascent revival?) of Detroit – in picturesThere's new evidence that schizophrenia could be related to our immune system – a discovery which could radically change the way the condition is treated.
Photo: MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences
No one really knows what causes schizophrenia, the mental disorder that distorts a person's behaviour, ideas and moods. It's a condition that affects 1 percent of the population here in New Zealand.
Symptoms include delusional thinking, paranoia, hearing voices and a lack of motivation, and the prevailing theory is that it's caused by too much dopamine in the brain.
Dopamine is a chemical messenger that's released when something unexpected happens: it's a chemical alert to pay attention, get ready to respond, and then learn from the experience. This experience then helps you model the world around you and function in it. It's the ability to update these models that lets us get on in life, especially in the social world.
So if the dopamine signal isn't working properly and it becomes overactive, the brain is constantly on high alert and ready to respond when there's nothing going on. This can lead to delusions and a detachment from reality, as the brain tries to work out what's happening.
This explains some of the symptoms, but it doesn't explain others like difficulties with planning, memory and motivation, and new research suggests that our Immune system could be a factor.
Microglia, which are immune cells, wash around the brain and act like cleaners, taking away wasted and unused neural connections and protecting the brain from infection. In schizophrenia, especially in the early stages, there's a surge in the number and the activity of these cells.
The thinking is that this leads to an 'over pruning' of connections between neurons, damaging links that are needed for the brain to function properly.
Photo: Supplied
Oliver Howes is a professor of molecular psychiatry at the Medical Research Council - London Institute of Medical Sciences and he and his team have been researching the link between the immune system and schizophrenia.
"This is one of the most exciting things I think that's happening in brain science in the last few years, the realisation that microglia aren't just there to defend against infection or deal with damaged and decaying cells but actually play this really key, fundamental role in pruning away the connections that we don't need." Professor Oliver HowesInevitably, anyone who's polished off a few pints at the Russian River Brewing Co. in Santa Rosa eventually looks up, sees a sign on the wall that reads "New Albion Brewery," and wonders, "What the hell's that sign mean?"
As any beer snob sitting at your table will quickly tell you, New Albion happens to be hailed as the first "microbrewery," at least as we know the term now. They may explain that New Albion, in Sonoma, pioneered the way small-batch beer was made. They may even report that New Albion founder Jack McAuliffe lived in mythic seclusion for almost 30 years, brewing out of the limelight in Texas, completely unaware of his status as a totally goddamn awesome pioneer of the craft beer movement until his rediscovery a few years ago.
That's why it's kind of a big deal that on Thursday, Jan. 10, the Russian River Brewing Co. welcomes the man himself, Jack McAuliffe, back to Sonoma County. And who's coming with him? Ahem: Jim Koch, from Samuel Adams.
The whole thing's a celebration of Samuel Adams' re-release of New Albion Ale—a nice gesture on Sam Adam's part using Jack's original recipe. I'll let Russian River's Natalie Cilurzo take over:
Brewing pioneer Jack McAuliffe and the legendary Jim Koch, the face of Sam Adams, will be at the pub from 6-8pm discussing their recent "collaboration" on the resurrection of New Albion Ale! New Albion Brewery was located in Sonoma, California, from 1976 to 1983. This was the first newly licensed start-up craft brewery in the United States after the repeal of prohibition right here in Sonoma County. It's safe to say Jack was the first nanobrewer back when no such term existed. Vinnie and I were lucky enough to get our hands on the original New Albion Brewery sign which has hung proudly in our pub since the day we opened.
We will have New Albion Ale on draft at the pub that evening and hopefully for a few days after. Boston Beer is releasing bottles with an incredible reproduction of the original label for national distribution, but I'm not sure how much or where it will be available. I'm just excited to have it on draft at the pub while Jack McAuliffe and Jim Koch are both in the house! This is such a rare opportunity to have these two brewing legends in our brewpub at the same time.
Needless to say, I'd advise getting there early.
Jack McAuliffe and Jim Koch speak at Russian River Brewing Co. on Thursday, Jan. 10, from 6-8pm. 725 Fourth St., Santa Rosa. Free... and packed. 707.545.2337.We need to talk about Kevin. I have tried not to during coverage of the Conservative leadership contest but am obliged to desist from the experiment.
O’Leary is “in” and is now very publicly committed to a race that runs a real risk of failure. His “trust me, I’m on TV” persona is not the product of grand slam business success.
His career has been checkered, to say the least, ranging from his ignominious departure from Mattel, after the company bought his educational software firm TLC for $4 billion and later sold it for $27 million, to the performance of his mutual fund company.
But failure was never clear cut; his critics might accuse him of selling Mattel a lemon, yet his supporters could holler “caveat emptor” and point out he made $11 million from the deal.
But he is now in the full glare of the public spotlight. There will be no disavowing defeat this time.
We have to talk about him because his entrance transforms the race. As soon as he confirmed he was running, he became the prohibitive favourite. That’s because for the Conservative members who will elect the next leader, it’s all about who can beat Justin Trudeau in 2019.
The polling I have seen suggests that most think O’Leary is best placed to do that, although a significant number also rate Maxime Bernier.
Kellie Leitch is still polling strongly, while Chris Alexander is also doing very well, on the heels of strong performances in two French-language debates.
Surprisingly, candidates such as Lisa Raitt and Andrew Scheer are said to be trailing by quite some distance — an indication that being a caucus or media darling is not translating into membership support.
But focus groups and private polls suggest the contest is O’Leary’s to lose. He has exploded like a hand grenade into this race and he can expect vicious retaliation to follow.
Campaign managers report he is already drawing support from their lists, particularly among fiscal conservatives.
As one told me, there’s no point attacking O’Leary as a dollar-store Donald Trump because many Conservatives like the president-elect.
Hence the coming salvo of attacks on his policies and past comments — such as his claim that “there’s nothing proud about being a warrior.”
O’Leary has said that all his comments prior to entering the race “don’t mean anything.” But politics, like the Internet, does not have a delete key. He can expect to have every stupid thing he has ever said cast back at him.
Conservative members may also be told that O’Leary “didn’t come back for you,” a la Michael Ignatieff. Until early yesterday, his Linkedin profile had him residing in Boston (it has since changed to Toronto).
O’Leary may say something outrageous in response, dismissing his rivals as “idiots” or “insane,” as he does on TV.
But he needs to play nice if he is to win.
There are now 14 candidates in the race and history suggests such a large field might produce a shock, as party members opt for a compromise candidate, rather than back a more polarizing front-runner.
That was certainly the lesson learned during the Liberal leadership in |
About
Douglas Adams once wrote, “It’s one thing to think that you’re the center of the universe — it’s another thing entirely to have this confirmed by an ancient prophecy.” That’s the cornerstone of a thousand stories, a trope that defies cultural boundaries or the limits of time. The hero is more important than anyone else, and only they can save the world. The X-Men have had chosen one’s a plenty but in their darkest hour, in the wake of M-Day, there was only one girl who could save them all.
Hope Summers didn’t remember the war fought over her when she was days old. How the small Alaskan town she was born in burnt to the ground, how Nathan came to her rescue, or how a distraught Cyclops ordered his only son to keep her safe in the future. Two things she did remember, the mad man Bishop who razed the world to find her, and her father Nathan who went to every length to protect her.
Art by Mike Choi and Sonia Oback
New Liberty was her first home. Nathan took her there when she was very young and raised her with his new wife, a woman named Hope. He didn’t give the child a name, he didn’t think it was his right, so for seven years she was just his little girl. Years of peace were ruined when the new United States Army, composed of the insectoid inheritors of the Earth, attacked New Liberty. The little girl knew that Nathan, always the soldier, had planted semtex around the house, and she proved to be her father’s daughter. She pulled the trigger and decimated the army, allowing her family to escape. It was her first act of war.
Art by Ariel Olivetti
They ran from New Liberty, across the devastated wasteland that was once the world. She understood that it was a fight for survival and forewent her food rations to ensure they went where they were needed most. Nathan, his wife Hope, and the little girl became nomads like his parents before him. They were careful but the world was dangerous and on a routine stop, Hope was shot. They buried her, but in her memory, Nathan had decided. He had a name for his daughter, the one thing the mutant race needed more than anything else, Hope.
Art by Ariel Olivetti
The years passed and Hope Summers grew into a teenage soldier her father would be proud of. She had experience love, loss, peace, and war. Running from Bishop and learning from Cable made her a better fighter than anyone ever imagined. Hope knew she was ready to be the savior every mutant needed her to be. They returned to the present day and it did not go unnoticed. A race was on to get to Hope first. Bastion, the Purifiers, and The Right on one side. The X-Men, X-Force, and New Mutants on the other. The X-Men were able to bring the pair to their home base of Utopia, but there were losses on both sides. Worse yet, Bastion trapped the mutants on Utopia sending wave after wave of Sentinels to exterminate them.
Art by David Finch, Matt Banning, and Peter Steigerwald
To stop the Sentinels, Nathan led X-Force on a suicide mission. Many escaped, but Hope had to watch as her father sacrificed himself to save her, and the entire mutant race. Bastion was not yet finished and approached the distraught young girl. She had lost the only constant in her ever-changing life thanks to him. He needed to pay. Hope’s X-Gene ignited and she began to mimic the powers of every mutant around her. She was truly ready to be the savior of the mutant race and obliterated Bastion as a fiery raptor appeared. And like that, five lights appeared on Cerebro, the first new mutants since Hope was born.
Art by Mike Choi and Sonia Oback
Hope, alongside the X-Men whose stories her father had told her at bedtime, visited each of the five lights. Their new powers were out of control, but Hope calmed them with a touch. They formed a new mutant strike force, working towards the survival of their race. But not all were satisfied with her leadership. Zero was terrified that Hope’s touch had changed them and Transonic didn’t like Hope turning children into warriors. It came to a head when Oya had to kill dozens of Hellfire Club grunts. Transonic wasn’t willing to let the innocent girl become a soldier in Hope’s war and forced Hope to send Oya to the Jean Grey School. Zero soon led a revolt against Hope and died in the process. The lights were scattered and broken, and Hope’s first attempt at leadership with a failure.
Art by Jamie McKelvie and Matt Wilson
She was taken under the wing of her grandfather, Cyclops. He had Hope join his Extinction team and pushed her to become the messiah they were promised. He saw the red haired, green eyed girl with fire around her and wondered if she was ready to be the savior they needed. Training on Utopia, he went too hard and something erupted inside her. It was the telltale flare of the Phoenix, the symbol of death yes, but also rebirth. Always rebirth. At the same time the Phoenix Force charged towards Earth, and the Avengers weren’t ready for it to inhabit a moody sixteen-year-old. They marched to the beaches of Utopia and demanded the mutant messiah. The X-Men did not oblige. As war broke out, Hope felt the Phoenix rising inside her. She ran. It was Wolverine she trusted, she knew that if she couldn’t control the Phoenix, he would have the constitution to do what needed done. They stole an AIM spaceship and sent off to the Blue Area of the Moon, ready to face fate.
Art by John Romita Jr., Scott Hanna, and Laura Martin
Hope felt the Phoenix as it drew near, she was ready to embrace it, but something happened. Iron Man tried to destroy the cosmic force but only diverted it. Instead of Hope, it resided in five other mutants led by Cyclops. The Phoenix Five were reshaping the world in their own image but Hope wasn’t alright with it and ran to the Avengers. In their K’unn-Lunn hideout, Hope trained with Spider-Man and Iron First to learn how to control the Phoenix Force. She confronted Cyclops and took the power from him. Alongside Scarlet Witch, she released the Phoenix Force and restored the X-Gene across the globe. She had fulfilled her destiny and restored the mutant race.
Art by Adam Kubert, John Dell, and Laura Martin
What does the chosen one do once the prophecy has been fulfilled? In this case, Hope tried being normal, but it didn’t stick. A child raised in war had no tolerance for the pettiness of high school. She yearned to join her father’s (who was resurrected, but it’s not important how) X-Force squad and Nathan relented, proud of the daughter he raised. When Hope discovered that Bishop was alive, in the present, and working with the X-Men, she felt deeply betrayed and hunted him down, only for the both to be captured by her father’s clone Stryfe. Stryfe placed her in a locked room with a bound Bishop and a sharp Psimitar. She wanted to run the blade through Bishop but knew that if Stryfe wanted that, she would be wise to do the opposite. She granted him mercy and X-Force came to their rescue.
Art by Angel Unzueta and Rachelle Rosenberg
Cable decided to bond with his daughter the one way he knew how, by taking her to an international arms convention. A mutant terrorist attack there killed three thousand and left Hope in a coma. Her powers allowed her to mimic a technopath and join the team in secret. She interacted with the nanomachines in Fantomex’s brain and the two formed a relationship before his quest for perfect drove him mad. Cable couldn’t rally X-Force against him, but Hope could. The team worked together to stop Fantomex and Hope decided that her dad needed a break. She fired him from her X-Force and solidified her role as the protector of the race she worked so hard to restore.
Art by Rock-He Kim and Jose Villarrubia
Must Read
Hope had a lot of focus for a good five years. With how thoroughly decimated the X-Books were from M-Day they needed something to keep them moving. In Second Coming Hope provided that in spades. She was their conflicted messiah and it shone through, even with a rotating creative team. It is an exciting story about risking everything at your darkest hour and becoming who the world needs you to be.
Art by David Finch
Ranking
Hope is such a hard character to rank. She had a strong arc with a definite ending, but the nature of superhero comics is that nothing ever ends. Since AvX she has been floundering with books that just don’t know what to do with a character who’s defining motivation has been obliterated. But those five years? Those were good. Hope isn’t as good as her dad but I think she is better than her aunt Rachel. I think she is more engaging than Legion but X-23 has played similar roles to Hope better. That slots Hope Summers in as the new 26 in the Xavier Files.
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Next week I cover someone, just gotta ask the guy who won #MutantMadness! See you then!
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Liked it? Take a second to support Zachary Jenkins on Patreon!MANASSAS, Va. — The voting for Virginia governor on Tuesday, traditionally a referendum on the party in the White House one year into a new administration, is the big political show of 2017.
But the real weather vane for the country may be many rungs down the ballot in obscure races for the House of Delegates.
Amid the turbulence of the Trump presidency, and under a shadow of indictments of former Trump campaign officials, voters heading to the polls in Virginia’s 100 House races represent the purest test of grass-roots anger at the president, election analysts said.
That is because the candidates are little known to voters, largely absent from TV ads, and the races approximate a generic partisan ballot. If the past is a guide, they may also prefigure nationwide congressional voting in 2018.Apparently the author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians wrote a sequel some 12 years later, which has been largely forgotten by the public, but I recently learned of its existence when I was picking up Dodie Smith's first Dalmatian book at the library, and thought it might be fun to have a double feature. That seems to have been a poor decision. While the first book is charming and exciting, a delightful animal rescue story about family and courage and becoming more than you think you are, the s
Apparently the author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians wrote a sequel some 12 years later, which has been largely forgotten by the public, but I recently learned of its existence when I was picking up Dodie Smith's first Dalmatian book at the library, and thought it might be fun to have a double feature. That seems to have been a poor decision. While the first book is charming and exciting, a delightful animal rescue story about family and courage and becoming more than you think you are, the sequel takes a major turn in style and content and tells a completely different story.
It was nice at the start to pick up in the years following the events of the first book, getting reacquainted with Pongo, Missis, and their "Dynasty of Dalmatians," but by the end of the first chapter, things get pretty wonky. The mystery is intriguing enough at the start--every living creature except for dogs (and some non-living entities, such as the wind) seems to have fallen under some kind of enchantment causing them not to wake up. It's then up to the dogs to discover the source of this curious turn of events, and it just gets more bizarre from there. Later developments include mind-reading across hundreds of miles, doors opening by themselves, no feelings of hunger, thirst or fatigue, traveling at great speeds without touching the ground (a phenomenon they call "swooshing"), and a strange interaction at Trafalfar Square with an other-worldly dog from outer space (who first communicates with them through a glowing television set) who has a plan that threatens the society and future of the world's population of dogs. It was fun to read about the sort of social structure and government of dogs (largely relative to their human counterparts), but all the charm is lost in the mystical and odd fantasy of it. While the universe and the peril of the first novel were firmly grounded and rooted in reality, the sequel takes things to a very odd level. I gave it ()barely) two stars because the writing was still charming, and some of the characters uttered rather profound statements at times (especially Missis, who seems to really have grown up since her naive days as a new mother, and Cadpig, one of the original fifteen puppies who has by now taken up residence with the Prime Minister, and now acts in that capacity in dog society), but it's hard to care when the surrounding events are so silly. There were some really contrived plot points that seemed to have been arbitrarily included to add interest and help propel the story, and a lot of the story seemed a little bit too (to use a word that becomes a recurring theme throughout the book) metaphysical. I like my English Dalmatians a little more believable. For a moment it seemed like there were going to be some interesting references or parallels to religion and God, as there were in the first book, but then they went a totally different direction and just became pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo instead. And then, for good measure, why not throw in a muddled message about the evils of war and the hopelessness in the good of mankind?
This might just be one of the weirdest books I've ever read. One good thing that can be said about this book is that it's a pretty quick read. The bottom line: There is some nice writing, and some of the great characters return in Dodie Smith's continuation of the Dalmatian saga, but there are a LOT of reasons this is (and probably should have remained) a "long-forgotten sequel". I guess we can all be grateful that none of the film sequels have used this book as inspiration for story. Yikes.Compromise Reached on Campus Carry, Some Still Oppose Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Video
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- The debate over guns on college campus's took another turn Monday as a compromise was reached between state Republican leaders.
The new proposal allows anyone age 25 and older to bring their guns on campus so long as they have a conceal carry permit and attend up to 16 hours of active shooter training.
Campus carry has been a contentious issue at the capitol with students and administrators showing up to committee meetings to oppose the proposal. The original bill forced schools to allow only employees and staff to carry weapons and did not have a requirement for additional training.
A bipartisan group of senators voted last week to add the training requirement, and the pool of those eligible to carry was expanded with an amended Monday to include some students.
"I think it's a good balance of both issues," said St. Sen. Trent Garner, R-El Dorado. "Look, I wanted to open it up to as many people as possible, but I think some people have some issues with the maturity of, say, younger people. I think 25 is a good age."
Governor Asa Hutchinson, who voiced concern about the original proposal, praised the compromise bill saying it "adds another layer of protection for students and faculty."
But not everyone is on board, St. Rep. Greg Leding, D-Fayetteville, whose district includes the University of Arkansas, says the compromise "makes an awful bill worse."
House Minority Leader Michael John Gray, D-Augusta, said the provision allowing some students to carry on campus "causes great concern."The Rangers have acquired Washington Capitals forward prospect Francois Bouchard in exchange for defenseman Tomas Kundratek, who spent 77 games with the Connecticut Whale after the Blueshirts selected him 90th overall (third round) in the 2008 NHL Entry Draft.
As of 7:20 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, Bouchard had been acquired and assigned to the Whale, the Rangers' AHL affiliate.
Bouchard, 23, helped lead the AHL's Hershey Bears to back-to-back Calder Cup Championships in 2008-09 and 2009-10. He is the younger brother of Pierre-Marc Bouchard, 27, a ninth-year veteran center with the Minnesota Wild.
The younger Bouchard (6-1, 198 pounds) joins the Rangers after skating in 227 career games for the Bears, compiling 49 goals and 63 assists for 112 points along with 129 penalty minutes. Two seasons ago he had career highs in games played (77), goals (21), assists (31), points (52), plus/minus (21), and penalty minutes (55). Last year, he finished seventh on the Bears in goals (12) and recorded four multi-point games.
Bouchard was born in Sherbrook, Quebec, and was originally selected as Washington's second round choice (35th overall) in the 2006 NHL Entry Draft.
Kundratek, 21, is originally from Trinec, Czech Republic. He has played in 77 career games for the Whale, registering two goals and 12 assists for 14 points, along with 44 penalty minutes.
Have a question about the Blueshirts or a comment? Find Pat on Twitter at @NYDNRangers.The Application Experience and Compatibility feature is considered one of the pillars in the in Microsoft Windows operating systems. Microsoft states in reference to the Microsoft Application Compatibility Infrastructure (Shim Infrastructure) "as the Windows operating system evolves from version to version changes to the implementation of some functions may affect applications that depend on them." This feature is to ensure compatibility of existing software between different versions of the Windows operating system. The implementation of this feature results in some interesting program execution artifacts that are relevant to Digital Forensic and Incident Response (DFIR). Mandiant highlighted one artifact in their Leveraging the Application Compatibility Cache in Forensic Investigations article. However, there are more artifacts associated with this feature and the RecentFileCache.bcf file is one of them. This post provides some clarification about the file and the relevance of the data stored within it.
Exploring the Application Experience and Compatibility Feature
Microsoft further states why the Application Experience and Compatibility feature is needed:
"Because of the nature of software, modifying the function again to resolve this compatibility issue could break additional applications or require Windows to remain the same regardless of the improvement that the alternative implementation could offer."
The Shim Infrastructure allows for those broken applications to be fixed and ensures they are compatible with newer versions of Windows. The Shim Infrastructure leverages API hooking to accomplish this. When there are calls to external binary files the calls get redirected to the Shim Infrastructure as illustrated below:
Alex Ionescu's goes into more detail about what happens when the external binary calls get redirected to the Shim Infrastructure in his post Secrets of the Application Compatilibity Database (SDB) – Part 1. "As the binary file loads, the loader will run the Shim Engine, which will perform lookups in the system compatibility database, recovering various information." The compatibility database is named sysmain.sdb and is located in the C:\Windows\AppPatch directory. sysmain.sdb contains information " that details how the target operating system should handle the application " and covers more than 5,000 applications. Furthermore, Alex states " on top of the default database, individual, custom databases can be created, which are registered and installed through the registry."
There is very little information available about what is the Windows process that the loader calls to perform the compatibility database checks. However, monitoring the Windows operating system with Process Monitor identified one of the Shim Infrastructure processes being the Application Experience.
Application Experience is a Windows service. It's service display name is Application Experience, service name is AeLookupSvc and its default description states it "processes application compatibility cache requests for applications as they are launched." Another reference mentions " this service checks a Microsoft maintained database for known problems with popular programs and automatically enables workarounds, either at first installation (using UAC) or at application launch." The service performs these checks as applications are launched (on Windows XP this was handled by the Application Experience Lookup service). The screenshot below shows the Application Experience service's properties including the path to the executable which is "svchost.exe -k netsvcs."
In addition to the Application Experience service, there are two Windows tasks involved with the Application Experience and Compatibility feature. The two default tasks for Application Experience are named AitAgent and ProgramDataUpdater. The description for the AitAgent task states it "aggregates and uploads Application Telemetry information if opted-in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program." The second and more important task as it relates to the RecentFilecache.bcf file is the ProgramDataUpdater. It's description states it "collects program telemetry information if opted-in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program." The other item to note about this task is its action which is to start the following program: %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe aepdu.dll,AePduRunUpdate. As with every Windows task there is information about when the task is scheduled to run and when it last ran. The screen below shows this information for the Application Experience tasks.
The one thing to keep in mind is since it impacts the RecentFileCache.bcf file is that the ProgramDataUpdater task is scheduled to run every day at 12:30 AM.
Exploring Process Creation on Windows
The Application Experience and Compatibility feature comes into play as a program starts. To fully explore how this feature works it is necessary to review how processes are created on Windows and what occurs when the loader runs the Shim Engine. The Windows Internals, Part 1: Covering Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 outlines the main stages of process creation:
1. Validate parameters; convert Windows subsystem flags and options to their native counterparts; parse, validate, and convert the attribute list to its native counterpart.
2. Open the image file (. exe) to be executed inside the process.
3. Create the Windows executive process object.
4. Create the initial thread (stack, context, and Windows executive thread object).
5. Perform post-creation, Windows-subsystem-specific process initialization.
6. Start execution of the initial thread (unless the CREATE_ SUSPENDED flag was specified).
7. In the context of the new process and thread, complete the initialization of the address space (such as load required DLLs) and begin execution of the program.
The picture below illustrates the process creation main stages:
The loader runs the Shim Infrastructure in stage 5 of the process creation which is where performing Windows subsystem-specific-post-initialization occurs. This is where specific operations are performed to finish initializing the process. According to the Windows internal book, one of those operations is "the application-compatibility database is queried to see whether an entry exists in either the registry or system application database for the process."
Exploring this portion of the process creation with Process Monitor reveals the files, registry keys, and processes involved with the database being queried. To demonstrate I'll follow the lead of the Windows Internal book by using the built-in Windows program notepad.exe. Notepad.exe was invoked by double clicking it; this means Explorer.exe is process that loads notepad.exe.
Explorer.exe performs other activity as illustrated below:
The Windows Internal book states the following about this activity:
"The first is a simple check for application-compatibility flags, which will let the user-mode process creation code know if checks inside the application-compatibility database are required through the shim engine."
In addition the book goes on to say
"you might see I/O [input/output] to one or more.sdb files, which are the application-compatibility databases on the system. This I/O is where additional checks are done to see if the shim engine needs to be invoked for this application."
Exploring the RecentFileCache.bcf File
The Application Experience and Compatibility feature is implemented through the Shim Infrastructure. This Shim Infrastructure is invoked during process creation when an application is launched. However, there was no mention about the RecentFileCache.bcf file located in the C:\Windows\AppCompat\Programs directory on Windows 7 systems. I first became aware about this file when processing malware cases. I kept seeing references (full path names to executables) to malware in the RecentFileCache.bcf file. The file was different than the Shim Cache Mandiant spoke about. The Shim Cache contains references to numerous programs over an extended period of time. The RecentFileCache.bcf file on the other hand only contained references to programs that recently executed. The reason for this is because the RecentFileCache.bcf file is a temporary storage location used during the process creation. It appears this storage location is not used during all process creation; it's mostly used for those processes that spawned from executables which were recently copied or downloaded to the system.
Extensive testing was performed to shed light on the actions which lead to executables names being listed in the RecentFileCache.bcf file. The testing included executing the same program the following ways:
- executing program already on the system
- renaming and then executing the program already on the system
- executing the program from a removable media
- copying the program to the system and then executing it
- downloading the program with a web browser and then executing it
- copying a different program that has an installation process and then executing it
The process creation process varied from what was described previously when it involved an executable that was recently created on the system (either through copying or downloading). The best way to illustrate this difference is by demonstrating it. The picture below shows part of the copying process moving E:\Tcopy.exe to C:\Tcopy.exe.
The next picture shows the part of the process creation where the application compatibility database is checked after C:\Tcopy.exe was executed from the command prompt.
Next there are checks for the application compatibility flags.
To this point the Shim Infrastructure being invoked during process creation resembles what was described previously. However, the next picture illustrates where the process creation starts to deviate. Shortly after the sysmain.sdb database is closed a scvhost.exe process becomes more active.
The properties of the svchost.exe shows it is the Application Experience service since it's command line is "svchost.exe -k netsvcs."
The Application Experience service performs various operations. One of its operations records the executable's full path in the RecentFileCache.bcf file as shown below:
The structure of the RecentFileCache.bcf file is fairly basic. Each entry only has the file path length and file path itself.
Harlan Carvey wrote a Perl script to parse the RecentFileCache.bcf file; his script makes it easier to read its contents than using a hex editor. Below is the script's output parsing a file from a test system:
c:\windows\devcon\64bits\devconx64.exe
c:\tcopy.exe
c:\users\ anon\appdata\local\microsoft\windows\temporary internet files\content.ie5\hjhf58cm\tweb.exe
Application Experience and RecentFileCache.bcf
The Application Experience service records the file names of executables in the RecentFileCache.bcf file. These executables were newly created on the system whether if it was copied, downloaded, or extracted from another executable. The storage of this information in the RecentFileCache.bcf file is only temporary since it is cleared when the Application Experience ProgramDataUpdater task is ran.
side note: I have seen references to executables that executed from removable media (i.e. my collection tools) as well as executables that were present on the system but never executed referenced in this artifact. However, I was unable to reproduce either with my testing.
Continuing on with the demonstration, the system was monitored to see what else interacted with the RecentFileCache.bcf file. The services.exe started the Application Experience ProgramDataUpdater task as shown in the two screenshots below.
Shortly thereafter, the Application Experience service started interacting with the ProgramDataUpdater task as shown below.
Further monitoring of the ProgramDataUpdater task showed it accessed the RecentFileCache.bcf file and cleared its contents.
The ProgramDataUpdater task runs at least once a day and knowing it clears the cache means the programs listed in the RecentFileCache.bcf file executed fairly recently. The ProgramDataUpdater task also interacted with the xml file stored inside the AppCompat\Programs folder. This xml file appears to contain the program's publisher information.
RecentFileCache.bcf File's Relevance
The RecentFileCache.bcf file is another artifact that shows program execution. I have found this artifact helpful when investigating systems shortly after they became infected. The artifact is a quick way to locate malware - such as droppers and downloaders - on the system as I briefly mentioned in the post Triaging Malware Incidents. The relevance of the executables listed in this artifact mean the following:
1. The program is probably new to the system.
2. The program executed on the system.
3. The program executed on the system some time after the ProgramDataUpdater task was last ran.Generator Hostel, Venice, Italy
Closely following the launch of a Berlin outpost, the latest Generator Hostel has opened its doors in Venice and - as with all the recent openings from the brand - it is designed by Toronto-based The Design Agency. Lighting and furnishings by Tom Dixon and Marcel Wanders for Moooi are not on the spec' list of your average hostel, but it is the mix of these classics with locally sourced antique mirrors, a marble fireplace, a vintage pharmacy cupboard and other 'found objects' that gives the ground-floor public spaces their charm. Housed in a former flour mill and granary store, the lodgings are located right on the waterfront of Isola della Giudecca, with a grandstand view across the archipelago towards St Mark's Square. Featuring the usual dormitory and bunk bed sleeping options, the hostel's front rooms sleep two to three guests and come with en-suite bathrooms stocked with L'Occitane en Provence toiletries. Even in the fast growing hostel market the expansion of Generator, by owners Patron Capital is impressive. The three openings in 2013 (Barcelona, as well as Berlin and Venice) will be followed by over 1,000 more beds in Rome and Paris in 2014. Guests will be pinching themselves in disbelief at this pioneering brand's game-changing design initiative.
Fondamenta Zitelle, 86 30133 Venezia, Italy; tel: 39. 04 1877 8288; www.generatorhostels.com; rates: from €20
Writer: Guy DittrichAl Franken and Jeff Sessions (Photo: Screen capture)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Thursday called for an investigation into whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied under oath when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had not had contact with Russian officials.
According to Justice Department sources, Sessions twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 campaign even though he had suggested otherwise during his confirmation hearing.
“I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians,” Session told Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) at the time.
On Thursday, the ACLU said that an investigation into whether Sessions perjured himself was necessary for the “credibility of our democracy.”
“Jeff Sessions took an oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and it is now clear that he broke that oath in his confirmation hearing,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero explained in a statement. “If senators of both parties allow an attorney general nominee to plainly lie under oath with no repercussions, they will render our government’s cabinet confirmation process no more than kabuki theater.”
“The American people deserve a full investigation into whether Sessions perjured himself and if he is indeed fit to serve as our nation’s highest law enforcement official. No one is above the law — certainly not those sworn to uphold it.”The world's fastest animal has developed abnormal coils in its sperm as a result of warmer temperatures
The world's fastest animal, the African cheetah, is losing its ability to reproduce because of climate change, according to Kenyan researchers.
Scientists with the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) and the Kenya Wildlife Service have discovered that the animal, Acinonyx jubatus, has developed abnormal coils in its sperm as a result of warmer temperatures, affecting the big cat's ability to reproduce. The warmer temperatures are also affecting its feeding habits, they say.
Risky Agwanda, head of mammology section at NMK, said: "Climate change has contributed to defects of the cheetah sperm. Many have abnormal coils, low sperm counts, as well as extremely low testosterone levels. Change in climate has made the survival of the gazelle difficult to survive and as a result, the cheetah has had to switch to other diets, also affecting its ability to reproduce effectively.".
He added that the animal, that can accelerate from 0-100kph in three seconds, has a sperm count 10 times lower than the domestic cat.
"Cheetahs love to prey on Thomson's gazelles, they have a very high protein content compared to other herbivores and the population of the gazelle has been on a rapid decline due to poor climate conditions and human activities.
"We have studied a large number of the cheetahs. As a result, it preys on other herbivores such as the zebra which do not have a high nutritional content. We discovered that the gazelle diet can actually help maintain the good health of the cheetah sperm if the animal has not yet been negatively affected by poor climate," explained Agwanda.
There are currently only 1,000 cheetahs in Kenya according to figures from the Kenya Wildlife Service. In the early 1980s, there were more than 5,000 cheetahs in Kenya.
As gazelle numbers continue to decrease due to drought, conservation efforts of the cheetah could be badly affected. The gazelles are also crossbreeding with other herbivores, reducing their protein content further, Agwanda said.
Scientists have never discovered any reproductive health deficiencies in other big cats, which they say can adapt more to climate change compared to the cheetah.
"The genetic make-up of the animal is more sensitive as compared to the other big cats. The cheetahs have weak genes," said Agwanda.
Mordecai Ogada, a fellow cheetah researcher at the National Museums, says that also another problem threatening the survival of the animal is conflict between humans and wildlife, resulting in damage to to the cheetha's habitat. Ogada added that cheetah numbers have also declined because of poaching for their skin, which fetches a high price on the black market.If you have any questions then please call us on 44 (0)1202 552936 or email [email protected].
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BlackBerry KEYone (SIM Free/UK)
Distinctly Different. Distinctly BlackBerry.
The BlackBerry KEYone re-imagines how we communicate and get things done. It’s also got everything you would expect in a smartphone – a beautiful large screen, a camera that will take stunning photos, the latest Android OS and access to Google Play to access any app you could ever want.
SIM Free/Unlocked UK Stock
The KEYone is supplied SIM free and factory unlocked when purchased from Clove.
This means that you can use it with any compatible global nano-sized SIM card. International customers should check the GSM frequencies in the specification and local operator network compatibility for full compatibility.
We offer cheap, fast and reliable shipping worldwide should you decide on the BlackBerry KEYone as your next smartphone.
Reasons To Buy BlackBerry KEYone
Android operating system
4.5” scratch-resistant touch screen display
4 row QWERTY keyboard
Swipe navigation and gestures via the keyboard
Programmable convenience key
32/64GB internal storage (model dependent)
3/4 GB RAM (model dependent)
MicroSD memory card slot
8MP front camera with flash
12MP auto-focus large pixel rear camera
Fingerprint sensor
BlackBerry security software
USB Type-C connector
RGB notification LED
Colour and memory variants
The BlackBerry KEYone is available in two versions.
The standard Silver colour has 32GB of internal storage and 3GB of RAM.
The Black Special Edition has 64GB of internal storage and 4GB of RAM.
Box Contents
BlackBerry KEYone (SIM Free)
UK mains charger
Documentation
Overview
The KEYone is the BlackBerry smartphone that many wanted when the original Passport launched. BlackBerry keyboard with Android.
It might be nearly 2 years since the Passport launched and the KEYone is not exactly like it, but very similar.
Unlike most of the all-touch smartphones other manufacturers are producing, including BlackBerry with the DTEK50 and 60, the KEYone is designed to target those who need, want and love the physical keyboard.
A 4.5” HD resolution and resistant touchscreen sits above the 4 row QWERTY keyboard to give |
is indeed a new species.Life behind the stacks: The secret apartments of New York libraries
Image by Glynnis Ritchie via flickr
For many book lovers, there is nothing more exciting than the idea of a home library. What most of the city’s book lovers don’t know is that until recently, there was an affordable way to fulfill the dream of a home library—at least for book lovers who also happened to be handy with tools.
In the early to mid twentieth century, the majority of the city’s libraries had live-in superintendents. Like the superintendents who still live in many of the city’s residential buildings, these caretakers both worked and lived in the buildings for which they were responsible. This meant that for decades, behind the stacks, meals were cooked, baths and showers were taken, and bedtime stories were read. And yes, families living in the city’s libraries typically did have access to the stacks at night—an added bonus if they happened to need a new bedtime book after hours.
***
The New York Society Library, 53 East 79th Street ↓
Image via Sideways NY
The New York Society Library is one of the oldest libraries in the United States; it’s also one of the nation’s few remaining subscription libraries. This means that the library does require members to pay an annual fee—about $200 (it was much less when Herman Melville and Henry David Thoreau joined). Still, the opulent space on 79th Street at Madison remains accessible enough to serve as a refuge to many city writers seeking a bit of additional desk space and silence.
While the superintendent at the New York Society Library now comes and goes just like its librarians, for nearly 25 years, the building was home to the Thornberry family. In 1943, Patrick Thornberry, an Irish immigrant, moved into the building with his young wife, Rose. Rose was also an Irish immigrant and apparently the reason why Patrick had come overseas in the first place. By the time the Thornberrys moved into the New York Society Library, they also had a six-year-old daughter, Rose Mary.
Rose, Terence, and Patrick Thornberry entertain family friends in the Members’ Room after a holiday dinner (l); a staffer assists a patron (r). Images courtesy of The New York Society Library
The family, who were joined by Rose Mary’s younger brother Terrence in 1945, lived in the library until Patrick Thornberry retired as the building’s superintendent in 1967. Their home was in what the library now refers to as the “closed stack” (a locked stack reserved for rare books). While the closed stack is currently sealed off to daylight to protect its rare contents, when the Thornberrys lived in the library, it was a light-filled and vibrant space. But the family was by no means confined to their apartment. They also enjoyed a penthouse-level garden and after hours, access to the library’s stacks and large reference rooms too.
If living in a mansion full of books at the corner of 79th and Madison doesn’t already sound like any book lover’s dream home, Rose Mary and Terrence, who grew up in the library, recall other distinct benefits.
Images via The New York Society Library
In a 2014 interview with Sara Holliday, who currently holds the position of Events Coordinator at the New York Society Library, Rose Mary Thornberry McLeod and Dr. Terrence Thornberry emphasized that growing up behind and in the stacks was both fun and brimming with opportunities. For example, from time to time the children met famous writers and other luminaries in their own home. On one occasion, young Rose Mary was called to the front desk to meet actress Maude Adams who was best known for creating the role of Peter Pan in J. M. Barrie’s 1905 play. But meeting famous authors and actors was not the only upside of growing up in a library.
Rose and Patrick at the second floor main staircase on her wedding day (l); The wedding reception in the main hall (r)
Living in the library meant that Rose Mary and Terrence had access to part-time and summer jobs as pages without ever leaving home. The New York Society Library, which coincidentally now costs several thousands of dollars to rent out for just an evening, was also a great place to host events. As a young girl, Rose Mary held the occasional sleepover in the library and in 1965, she held her own wedding in the library.
***
NYPL’s Schwarzman Building, 476 5th Avenue ↓
Image by Jiahui Huang via flickr
Over the years, the city’s public library system was also home to many live-in superintendents and their families. The most demanding position in the system was likely held by John Fedeler and later by his son, also named John.
The Fedelers moved into a spacious four-bedroom apartment on the Mezzanine floor of the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library in 1910 when John Jr. was only four years old. In fact, the Fedeler’s moved into the Schwarzman Building even before it opened to the public for the first time in 1911.
From all accounts, John Fedeler was well suited to this unusual and unusually demanding position. Indeed, Fedeler led an exciting and somewhat eccentric existence both prior to and following taking up full time residence in the NYPL’s Schwarzman Building.
A 1913 article in the New York Times noted that before moving into the library to serve as the building’s chief engineer, Fedeler had worked as a merchantman, briefly studied engineering at Harvard University and later worked as a designer for Thomas Edison. Notably, the 1913 article was not even about the fact that Fedeler was now living in a seven-room home inside the newly opened Schwarzman Building but rather about the fact he has just announced a new invention—an air purifier that promised to suck everything from arsenic to iron particles out of the air.
It was only later, in 1949, when Fedeler’s son and successor left his post at the library that the library home itself appeared to have become newsworthy. A departure article, also published in the New York Times, focused on what life had been like for John Jr. who had lived in the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library his entire life.
On the one hand, life for the Fedelers was much like life for any other family at the time. As was common in the early part of the century, Viviana Fedeler was even born at home (yes, in the library). On the other hand, growing up in the Schwarzman Building also came with a few surprises. John Jr. recalled using large reference books to set up bases for indoor games of softball (he added that the games were usually broken up by his father or library security). There were also occasional intruders, including a stamp thief who attempted but ultimately failed to steal over $10,000 worth of valuable stamps from the library’s rare collection.
While the Fedelers did enjoy parties in their library home, John Jr. told the Times that singing and stomping were strictly forbidden in his home until all library staff had gone home for the evening.
***
Qualifications to Become a Library Live-in Superintendent
Unfortunately, the days of live-in superintendents at libraries appear to be over. The last known live-in superintendent moved out of the NYPL’s Webster Branch, located at 1468 York Avenue in Yorkville, in 2006. From the Port-Richmond Branch in Staten Island to the Morrisania Branch in the Bronx, however, the city’s libraries were once home to dozens of live-in superintendents and their families. While the idea of living in a library—perhaps, especially if it happens to be in a converted mansion on the Upper East Side or in four-bedroom flat on the mezzanine floor of the Schwarzman Building—may sound like fun, it is important to bear in mind that these living quarters came with great responsibilities too.
If the opportunity to work and live in a library still existed today, qualifications for prospective live-in superintendents would likely include everything from a great command of English to the ability to supervise staff to a general knowledge of electrical, plumbing, HVAC and carpentry repair. Many current live-in superintendent positions also require applicants to have a high-level of computer skills and experience working with one or more building management software programs. Finally, anyone interested in taking on the role of live-in superintendent needs to be committed to working around the clock and working year-round. Perhaps, given the amount of work and responsibility, opting for a space-efficient digital library is not such a bad idea after all?
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Tags : 476 5th Avenue, 53 East 79th Street, NYPL, Stephen A. Schwarzman, The New York Society LibraryWelcome to PocketGamer.biz's Top 50 developer list for 2017
The eighth edition of the annual PocketGamer.biz Top 50 Developer list reveals an industry truly global in nature.
It also reflects a market buzzing with mergers and acquisitions activity, as companies get snapped up for hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars. It’s a sector that most definitely continues to grow.
Global stars
There are 16 new entries this year, hailing from all over the world, whether it’s the USA or Europe to the Middle East and Asia. It’s the latter’s growth that’s the most striking.
Asia dominates our list with 20 entries from Japan, China, Singapore and South Korea – that’s four more than in 2016.
The ability of Japanese developers to create hit games that generate millions of dollars a day, and sustain them for years, is not waning, even in a maturing market.
Meanwhile South Korean publishers are smashing records with the Lineage IP.
This year’s list goes to show that studios from anywhere in the world can make it big in mobile.
Even those companies on our list that aren’t from Asia, a number now have a strong Eastern influence whether that’s through IP, investment or a full acquisition.
Hitting the big time
That doesn’t mean Western companies aren’t successful however – far from it.
Big publishers such as Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft and Take-Two have all made significant moves in the market to expand their businesses out from console and PC, and acquire much needed free-to-play expertise.
The USA and Japan are the best represented single countries with 11 entries apiece. Overall, Europe is represented by 15 companies.
This year’s list goes to show that studios from anywhere in the world can make it big in mobile.
Read on to find out more, and visit PocketGamer.biz every day for mobile games industry news.
Note: Our list was compiled during June to August 2017, with additional information added during September 2017.Number 8 – Helter Skelter
I often fantasize how would the Beatles have progressed throughout the years and how would their live performances, and renditions of classics would have changed as they did. Listening to this track helps me get there at times. I love Noel’s rockier approach to what was significantly the first heavy metal recording in history. Not the best Helter Skelter cover (vocally speaking) out there but very memorable and satisfying approach indeed.
Number 7 – You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away
Excellent pick for a B-Side filler track. Noel delivers yet another sweet rendition while staying very close to the delivery of the original song. Definitely a favorite.
Number 6 – Across The Universe (Beady Eye)
Very honest take on the original. Unfortunately the effects on the vocals and production make it sound more like an amateur cover band. But if you listen past that it has some sparks of Liam’s Lennonesque resemblance (vocally speaking), which in itself makes it worth listening.
Number 5 – Within You Without You
When the BBC decided to do a reissue for the 4oth anniversary, Oasis had the top pick for the cover album. Liam chose this song (to Noel and the band’s surprise) off the album, which has no guitars in it. So they played the reworked George Martin version found in the LOVE album with the Tomorrow Never Knows track over it. The cover had a trippy vibe to it. I wonder if this is the approach The Beatles would have taken as well if they evert decided to preform it live.
Number 4 – I Am The Walrus
Preformed with Johnny Mar. My favorite version is the one in the 2008 BBC Electric Proms with the 50 piece choir but Youtube has (for some unexplained reason) taken it down. The Ode To Joy bit at the end is utterly glorious.
Number 3 – Help (Noel)
A sweet nostalgic approach to Lennon’s original take on the Beatles renowned upbeat song, whose lyrics and message are somewhat drowned in what was then a more commercial approach. Noel goes back to some of Lennon’s demos and delivers a performance filled with a more powerful desperate cry of redemption that the lyrics were originally meant to evoke.
Number 2 – Cry Baby Cry (Beady Eye)
One of my favorite Beatles songs ever. Tender, sweet and haunting performance by BE.
Number 1 – Strawberry Fields Forever (Noel & Gem)
So how would the Beatles sound live nowadays? I like to think this is as close as we will ever get to answering that question. IMHO.
AdvertisementsTwo Southern California men pleaded guilty Tuesday to smuggling 28 pounds of heroin into the United States using drones.
"This is believed to be the first international narcotics seizure by US law enforcement involving the use of drones by Mexican drug traffickers," according to a statement issued by federal prosecutors.
Court documents showed that the scheme involved two men, Jonathan Elias and Brayan Valle, both of El Centro, California. Elias was apparently paid $100 to go pick up Valle in nearby Calexico, a border town.
"According to their guilty pleas, on or about April 28, 2015, Elias drove Valle to pick up packages of drugs that were smuggled by drones near an agricultural field in Calexico near the border," the statement said. "Using a drone controller, Valle picked up packages of narcotics and placed them inside a bag. They placed the bag in the trunk of their vehicle and were subsequently stopped by US Border Patrol agents. As part of their plea, defendants admitted that they knew that there were narcotics inside the bag, but did not know the quantity or type of narcotics inside the bag."
"With border security tight, drug traffickers have thought of every conceivable method to move their drugs over, under and through the border," United States Attorney Laura Duffy said in the same statement. "We have found their tunnels, their Cessnas, their jet skis, their pangas, and now we have found their drones."
Neither prosecutors nor the defendants’ attorneys immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.
In January 2015, police in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana found a drone "loaded" with drugs that crashed in a supermarket parking lot near the US-Mexico border.So if the flavor of a steak doesn't come from fat, where does it come from?
That, it turns out, is an easy question to ask but a difficult one to answer. Unfortunately, it doesn't boil down to anything so simple as a single macronutrient like fat.
At best, beef flavor is poorly understood. Despite thousands of meat scientists working in universities all over the world, we are still a long way away from a complete scientific understanding of why a given steak tastes the way it does. (And this has a lot to do with the fact that meat science, just like the meat industry, cares more about things like the rate at which cows gain weight or how to improve their fertility than it does about flavor.)
But there are two things we do know about beef flavor. And the first is that fat does have something to do with it. Just not the fat you—or the USDA—is thinking of.
In 1982, a British food scientist named Don Mottram undertook an interesting experiment. He set out to find exactly what fat had to do with flavor. So he performed an experiment where he removed different kinds of fat from beef, and then cooked and assessed the result. He tested the cooked de-fatted beef with a gas chromatography machine, which measures the "volatile aromatic compounds" that create the perception of flavor, and also subjected it to a panel of "13 assessors experienced in evaluating meat flavour."
When Mottram removed the visible fat from steak—the fat in the trim and marbling, the fat a USDA grader is on the lookout for—he didn't find much of a difference. The beef was still beefy. It had the characteristic nutty and roasty notes we all love.
Then Mottram removed a different kind of fat called phospholipids. This fat is invisible. It resides in cell walls and, compared to marbling fat, it tends to be less saturated. When Mottram cooked this phospholipidless beef, he found it didn't taste like beef at all. The profile of volatile aromatic compounds had changed completely. There was, he noted, "a highly significant difference in cooked aromas."
But phospholipids aren't the whole story. Remember the lean wild venison steak I mentioned earlier? Its intense taste compared to a USDA Prime steak isn't just about phospholipids. Deer, after all, don't possess a great deal more structural cellular fat than cattle, their ruminant cousins. The other important aspect to flavor is the organic substances that steep into an animal's flesh as it gets older. These are complex chemicals like terpenes (which are found in herbs), flavinoids, and carotenoids. When exposed to the heat of the pan or grill, they react with amino acids, proteins, sugars, and so forth to form yet more volatile aromatic compounds. Scientists call these chemicals "secondary compounds." In the case of cows, they originate in the forage an animal eats, and they are what make beef a food that varies according to its terroir.Democratic lawmakers and liberal activists plan to ring in Tax Day with nationwide protests this weekend meant to pressure President Trump to release his tax returns -- with organizers hoping for the biggest anti-Trump showing since January's Women's March.
On Saturday, thousands are expected to attend 'Tax Marches' in approximately 150 cities, including several affiliated events overseas.
“Whether people support him or not, [releasing his tax returns] is something that people think he should do. I think there is a chance something like this could move him,” said Lisa Gilbert, vice president of legislative affairs at Public Citizen, one of the groups organizing the marches.
The president's supporters, however, see the marches -- and the persistent tax return focus -- as a waste of time.
In Colorado Springs, Trump backers plan to hold a counter-protest on Saturday. For them, what is in Trump's tax returns pales in comparison to what could be in his tax plan.
"Their whole message is they want to see the president's tax returns. I care far more about his policy than his tax returns," Trevor Dierdorff, El Paso County Republican Party chairman, told the Colorado Springs Gazette.
Rep. Jim Renacci, R-Ohio, said during a recent House Ways and Means Committee hearing that the pressure on Trump to release his returns is a "political mission," arguing the kind of bombshells Democrats are seeking wouldn't even be in such documents.
The protests, if nothing else, could make for a rowdy scene in cities across the country, reminiscent of the Women's March on inauguration weekend.
As many as 25,000 are expected to attend the rally in Washington, D.C. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., will be among the speakers.
Two of the largest events are expected in Seattle, site of the World Trade Organization protests of the 1990s. In addition to the expected 25,000 marching in “Tax March Seattle,” as many as 7,000 Black Lives Matter activists plan to come out for their own rally focusing on Trump's tax returns.
There also is a protest planned in front of Trump Plaza in West Palm Beach, Fla. The protest will move to Bingham Island, directly adjacent to the Mar-a-Lago resort where Trump is staying for the weekend. According to their Facebook page, about 1,000 are expected to attend.
While organic in nature, the marches are being organized under the umbrella of several liberal activists. The partnering labor unions and activist groups range from the well-known -- MoveOn.org and Common Cause -- to more obscure players like the Endangered Species Coalition.
Gilbert contends the events could build support for an agenda beyond Trump’s taxes, such as tax fairness and economic justice.
She said Saturday’s events are focused on transparency and accountability, issues that unite Americans -- and noted that bills have been introduced in numerous states that would require presidential candidates to disclose their taxes.
The idea for the march has its roots in the response to a January appearance by White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway. Asked her thoughts on an online petition demanding Trump release his tax returns, Conway replied that the White House would not release his tax returns and the issue was of little concern to Americans.
“We litigated this all through the election. People didn't care. They voted for him,” she said on ABC News’ “This Week.”
The comments lit up social media and grassroots organizers began circulating plans for this weekend’s events.
According to the Facebook post by organizers of a rally in London, the goal is to be “in solidarity with the struggle of our American brothers and sisters and in protest of the xenophobia, isolationism, destruction to our planet, economy and future, and rising tides of division in Europe” and to offer “hope for a more inclusive, peaceful tomorrow.”
Voters may be split on the tax return issue. An April Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll found 53 percent of voters want Trump to release his tax returns, and 51 percent believe his returns are either very or somewhat important to them.
Whether it resonates beyond Tax Day -- which is typically April 15, though the IRS is pushing the deadline to Tuesday -- is unclear. But Democrats in Congress continue to use tax returns as a wedge issue.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said not releasing the returns would make getting bipartisan agreement on tax reform “much harder.”
House Democrats attempted to give the issue legs before leaving on recess by filing a discharge petition, intended to force a vote on the matter on the House floor.
“Only with the release of President Trump’s tax returns can we be sure the American people are the president’s top priority,” said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., in a statement after the petition was filed.
House Democrats also are pushing for a vote on a bill sponsored by California Democrat Anna Eshoo that would require Trump, as well as major-party nominees, to submit their previous three years of tax returns to the Office of Government Ethics or the Federal Election Commission.
In a much-hyped segment, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow also recently aired a leaked copy of part of an old Trump tax return.
But it wasn't exactly damning. The files showed Trump paid $38 million in federal income tax in 2005 on more than $150 million. The effective rate of 25 percent was higher than the rate paid by former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.An All-in-One DAG Toolkit
Posted on 10 June 2017
HTR has kindly translated this post to Russian.
I’d like to tell you about an algorithm that I’m frankly annoyed I didn’t discover earlier.
The algorithm is Tarjan’s Strongly Connected Components (or SCCs) algorithm, and as the name suggests, it decomposes a directed graph into its strongly connected components. A directed graph is one where the edges have a direction associated with them, and a strongly connected component of a graph is a subgraph where each node can be reached from every other node, i.e. there’s a directed cycle somewhere in this subgraph.
Strongly Connected Components
So why does this matter? I don’t recall ever having the desire to deeply know the SCCs of a particular graph.
Let’s look at a different problem. Given a directed graph, how do we know if it is acyclic? The context here is that I was wondering how difficult it would be literally draw a Git commit history as a graph and render that to a repo. Git commits form a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which is a directed graph without cycles, and I wanted to validate a user-drawn graph as well as process it.
Directed Acyclic Graph
Consulting the oracle yielded the concept of a topological sort, which is where vertices are ordered such that for all vertices u and v, if there is an edge from u to v, u appears earlier than v in the sorted output. The directed edges for a Git commit graph are in the opposite direction from what we want though, because they point from children to parents. What we really want is a reverse topological sort. It would also be nice if I could somehow highlight the subgraphs of an invalid graph that are responsible for it being invalid.
Topological Sort
This is where we come back to the SCCs of a graph. If there are any SCCs of more than one vertex, the graph is not a DAG and those SCCs are the cause of this. Collapsing the SCCs of a directed graph to a single vertex always leads to a DAG and this is known as the condensation of a directed graph, which I think is a nice way to visualise the relationship between SCCs and DAGs.
Condensation
Alright, so we do actually want to know the SCCs of this graph, but first we want to try to sort it topologically and reverse that order if that is possible, otherwise we calculate the SCCs and identify the offending ones. This seems a bit messy for graph properties that seem somewhat related. How cool would it be if there were an algorithm that could calculate the SCCs and a reverse topological sort for us at the same time?
It turns out that Tarjan’s SCCs algorithm does exactly that! You’d think that its performance might not be great because it does two things at once, but it is linear in the number of edges and vertices, and has better constant factors than Kosaraju’s algorithm, which only computes SCCs. Here it is as pseudocode:
The algorithm does a depth-first search, keeping track of two properties for each vertex: when it was encountered (the index) and the lowest index of any vertex reachable from this vertex (the lowlink). It pushes vertices on to a stack as it goes and outputs a strongly connected component when it finds a completely processed vertex whose index and lowlink are the same.
As presented it is very imperative and I like Haskell, but fortunately imperative Haskell is pretty straightforward and I have an implementation here.
This seems like an incredibly niche use case, but validating and processing DAGs in this way happens surprisingly frequently. Consider a build process where inputs and outputs are nodes and their relationships are directed edges. The presence of an SCC with more than one vertex indicates a cyclic dependency, and dependencies need to be built before the nodes that depend on them, which implies a reverse topological sort. This generalises to dataflow programming, where loops need to be identified (and usually eliminated). I like to think of this algorithm as an all-in-one DAG toolkit.
We can also use it to solve 2SAT, which is the problem of determining whether boolean variables in series of constraints of the form a || b can be assigned T and F values such that all constraints hold. This is discussed here but boils down to encoding the constraints as nodes and edges, calculating the SCCs, and processing the output in reverse topologically sorted order. An advantage to doing it this way is that the process can stop at the first SCC that indicates unsatisfiability. I have an implementation of this here.
Discovering this algorithm got me excited about theoretical computer science and reminded me that algorithms can be fun, interesting, and an opportunity to marvel at the music of the spheres. I’m curious to know what other equally awesome algorithms are out there. Which one’s your favourite?
Thanks to Annie Cherkaev for the title and feedback, and Iain McCoy for suggesting a more functional approach.Tim Flagler's Tuft 'n Tail. Trout Unlimited is proud to partner with Tightline Productions L.L.C. and reknowned fly tier Tim Flager to bring you exclusive content to enhance your fly fishing.
By Tim Flagler
If I could be so bold as to recommend one fly pattern for winter fly fishing, I’d do just that. What I mean is bring only one fly pattern with you when you go and focus almost exclusively on fishing that pattern well.
So what might that fly be? Midges are one of a few aquatic insect species that regularly hatch during the winter months and trout actively feed on them throughout all stages of their life cycle. So some type of midge pattern is usually a good choice.
Fishing midge dries, Griffith’s Gnats and the like, can be a lot of fun in the winter but also exceptionally hit or miss. Percentage wise, it’s better to stick with subsurface midge larva, pupa and emerger imitations and keep them on the small side, say size 18 and below. I like patterns that include both a tuft or wing bud and a tail, or trailing shuck, such as the pattern shown in the video below. I think both features act as triggers, helping trout to decide that what they’re seeing is food rather than just an inedible piece of detritus drifting by. Materials on this pattern can easily be swapped out for what you have on hand or you think looks good. Antron, Zelon or pheasant tail fibers also work well for the trailing shuck. You can even drop it entirely if you’d like. CDC, after shaft feathers, sparkle organza and white poly make suitable wing bud materials. Serendipities, Mercury Midges and Blood Midges are excellent pattern choices for the winter months as well.
By sticking with only one fly pattern, you’re basically forcing yourself to fish that pattern effectively. Rather than spending valuable fishing time trying to tie on fly after fly with cold, numb fingers, focus instead on where trout are likely holding and make the best drifts possible through those areas.
Wintertime trout like to conserve energy and won’t go too far out of their way for a meal. It’s imperative to put the fly right in front of them. In that vein, getting your fly on or close to the bottom can make all the difference in the world. Keep adding split shot until you’re absolutely sure you’re ticking bottom. You’ve all heard this story before but, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been catching nothing, nothing, nothing then added an extra split shot and started hammering them.
I fully realize few, if any of you, will actually venture out on a winter stream carrying only a single fly pattern. But the idea remains the same. Spend your time fishing as effectively as you can, not changing flies as many times as your frozen fingers will allow.
Materials List: Tuft-and-Tail Patterns
Hook: Dry/emerger hook (here a Dai-Riki #310), size 22
Thread: Light olive, 8/0 or 70-denier
Tail: Wood duck flank-feather fibers
Wing: Fluff from the base of a wood duck feather
Thorax: Dark olive rabbit-fur dubbing
Also check out Tim's recent podcast on Winter patterns with Tom Rosenbauer, Marketing Directof at Orvis. The portion of the podcast with Tim begins at 0:48:20.
Tim Flagler is the owner of Tightline Productions, L.L.C., a video production company located in Califon, NJ. Although Tightline produces video programs over a wide range of topics, their speciality is fly fishing. Almost every week they produce a new fly tying or “how to” video which appears not only on their Vimeo and YouTube channels but on Midcurrent.com and the Orvis fly tying blog as well. These videos often get picked up by other sites too, including Frankenfly, Chiwulff, The Limp Cobra, Globalflyfisher, Gink and Gasoline and Wideopenspaces, just to name a few. Many of the tying videos take the viewer well beyond just the tying of the fly and show what it looks like underwater, what natural it represents and how it can be fished. Tightline Productions, L.L.C. is a TU Business member.It has been a dream season for the Philadelphia Union, as they currently lead the Eastern Conference in points per game, and Saturday night they proved just how "for real" they are.
Philly defeated perennial playoff contender D.C. United 3-0 behind another sterling offensive performance. Ilsinho recorded two goals and Roland Alberg put home a penalty kick, along with an assist. The Union now lead the league in goals with 32.
Check out the rest of the team below:
Player (Week 18 Audi Player Index Ranking)
GK: Jake Gleeson, POR (#12): 0 goals conceded, 4 saves
D: Justin Morrow, TOR (#29): 1 goal, 3 chances created, 5 tackles
D: Matt Hedges, DAL (#67): 9 clearances, 4 interceptions, 2 tackles
D: Jelle Van Damme, LA (#60): 10 clearances, 5 interceptions, 3 tackles
D: Demar Phillips, RSL (#195): 90% passing accuracy, 6 ball recoveries
M: Ilsinho, PHI (#5): 2 goals, 3 shots, 2 dribbles won
M: Benny Feilhaber, SKC (#6): 1 goal, 4 shots, 7 ball recoveries
M: Jeff Larentowicz, LA (#160): 90% passing accuracy, 7 ball recoveries, 3 clearances
M: Roland Alberg, PHI (#51): 1 goal, 1 assist, 3 shots
F: Kei Kamara, NE (#87): 2 games, 1 goal, 7 shots
F: Kevin Doyle, COL (#1): 1 goal, 1 assist, 6 chances created
Bench: Luis Robles, NY (#58); David Horst, HOU (#111); Ronald Matarrita, NYC (#78); Axel Sjoberg, COL (#9); Diego Chara, POR (#25); Chris Pontius, PHI (#168); Maximiliano Urruti, DAL (#6)
Agree or disagree with our Team of the Week? Let us know!By Andrea Karshan
ABC News reports that according to governmental data, the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president’s administration in history. But students weren’t walking out of class at that time over immigration.
Now students fear Trump’s upcoming immigration policies and are protesting. As reported by NBC News, students from New York University and other colleges walked out of classes today in protest of Donald Trump’s speculated immigration plans. They demanded to have “sanctuary campuses.”
The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump said during a 60 Minutes interview that he would deport 2 million to 3 million undocumented immigrants, who he says have criminal records.
“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” said Donald Trump, President-elect.
Muzzafar Chishti, the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office in New York, said that Trump’s statements implied a continuation of the current administration’s policy on immigration. The Obama administration deported at least 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, focusing the effort on those who committed crimes. The numbers are not in yet on the number of deportations done during Obama’s last year in office.
So why all this protest now? Why are students and teachers from College of Staten Island now signing a petition to make my college a “sanctuary college”? As stated in the petition:
“Declaring CSI a sanctuary campus would mean that the college will pledge to protect our students, staff, and faculty when they are on campus from deportation, harassment, discrimination, hate speech, targeting by immigration authorities, and/or other forms of identity-based intimidation. This is a concrete action that we can take to demonstrate that the college will defend the rights and safety of our community.”
I ask again, why now?
Here’s my answer to this question. When the Obama administration, led by a Democrat, were deporting everyone the left was silent because the leader of the free world was a Democrat and he was doing it. Now that a Republican might do that same thing as the Democratic President did, the left is ignoring the sins of their own party and pointing fingers at Trump. It doesn’t seem to be as scary and as frightening to them when a fellow leftist is deporting people left and right, now that a Republican is thinking of doing it they are all of a sudden concerned.
I know this doesn’t make much sense and isn’t very logical. But they have made Donald Trump out to be a boggy man. He could repeat Obama’s actions play by play and they would still blame him. Because for them he has become an escape goat because Hillary Clinton lost.
I am not saying Donald Trump is perfect. But much that is said about him is based on speculation, not on facts. If one is going to worry about something, worry about it based on facts, not conjecture.If you were hovering above Earth looking to be born randomly into any time period in human history, you’d pick now — and in America.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
Dear Reader (particularly all you folks on the mainland),
I’m writing this on a plane to San Francisco (actually, I started it in my car, but that’s a different story). By the time you read this, I will hopefully be over the Pacific en route to Hawaii to spend Christmas with my wife’s side of the family.
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Hawaii is great. But if you’ve ever tried to get there from the East Coast, you know it’s a pretty brutal trip. Look at it on the map. It’s just farther away from everything than everything else is from everything. But you probably also know that this is a very high-order First World Problem. I’m very lucky to be doing this.
Luck All the Way Down
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Of course, we’re all very lucky, in the broadest sense of the term. As Olivia Newton John might say if she went to grad school, let’s get metaphysical. The late philosopher John Rawls had a thought experiment called “the original position.” The basic idea is to imagine that you are a disembodied soul waiting outside this world in a kind of placeless, meaningless limbo — sort of like a Delaware rest stop. He then asks you to think about what kind of society you would want to be born into. But here’s the catch: You won’t know if you’ll be born rich |
government has turned to Western PR firms to burnish its image. For instance, the Chinese government hired Hill+Knowlton to promote the 2008 Summer Olympics, amid an international outcry over China’s handling of an uprising in Tibet. Protests dogged the traditional passage of the torch across the world that year. U.S. firm Weber Shandwick Worldwide also advised China during the 2008 Olympics.
FACING SCRUTINY
The proposed campaign comes at a crucial time for China’s leadership both at home and abroad.
Chinese companies, many of them state-backed are on an overseas buying spree. They often face scrutiny from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is charged with assessing the national security implications of foreign acquisitions.
China has been criticized internationally for not communicating clearly with financial markets, particularly in foreign exchange. Premier Li Keqiang has said China is working to improve its communication with markets.
Slideshow (4 Images)
The PR campaign under consideration also comes as the government strengthens its control over domestic media and public speech at home.
In January, ambassadors from United States, Canada, Germany, Japan jointly signed a letter expressing concern over a new counter terrorism law, and draft laws on cyber security law and management of foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which includes widespread censorship.
At the SCIO presentations in February, government officials showed more interest than in previous engagements with foreign PR agencies, said one executive familiar with the meetings. He did not elaborate."I find it very exciting and thrilling to take part in an election," Fatima Keskin said. The 32-year-old Turkish woman from Essen is overjoyed. For the first time in her life she is going to the polls. Although she was born and grew up in Germany, she has only Turkish nationality.
So far she has not been able to vote: In Germany, Keskin is not allowed to vote, and if she had wanted to cast her ballot in Turkish elections, she would have had to travel there. As a mother, she was unable to do so. Now, however, for the first time in Turkish history, citizens of the country living abroad may also exercise their right to vote.
Two years ago the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan decided to amend the electoral law. His AKP (Justice and Development) Party also pushed through a law that made the Turkish presidency elected by direct popular vote, instead of chosen by parliament. Around 1.4 million Turks living in Germany are eligible and have until Sunday (03.08.2014) to vote at one of seven locations in Germany.
This Turkish polling station is located in Frankfurt
Will Erdogan benefit from the new right to vote?
All adult Turkish citizens with their primary residence in Germany are entitled to vote. Turks who have opted for German citizenship and who had to give up their Turkish passport are excluded from the election. The favorite for the presidency, elected in Turkey on August 10, is Erdogan himself.
Experts believe the electoral law was changed to benefit him. "In Germany, Erdogan will get in a higher share of the vote than in Turkey. This also has to do with the fact that people in the diaspora have a different emotional attitude than those in Turkey itself," said Yunus Ulusoy, a research associate at the Center for Turkish Studies and Integration Research in Essen.
For Turks living abroad, it is not just a question of which political position has their sympathies. Much also depends on how well they have been integrated into their country of residence and what attitude toward Turkey prevails in Germany. Many German Turks grew up with a negative image of Turkey, he said.
The "sick man of Europe" is the view many Turks had of their country of origin. With the economic boom under the Erdogan government, this has changed. "For many. Erdogan is a strong man. He stands for the economic boom in Turkey and can benefit from this new self-confidence, especially among Turks living abroad, because they can say, 'Finally we are also somebody.'"
'Proud to be Turkish'
Tugba Yolüc is once again proud to be Turkish
This new sense of pride strengthens their inner loyalty to the prime minister. "I keep my fingers crossed for the AKP. That's a no-brainer. Much has changed for the better. Turkey is in some ways much more modern than many countries in Europe," Tugba Yolüc said. The 22-year-old architecture student from Essen is an Erdogan fan. She's thinking about spending her life in Turkey - at least in the west. The economic boom offers her perhaps better career opportunities than in Germany. "There were times when I was embarrassed to be Turkish. But now I'm very proud of it."
For more than ten years Erdogan and his AKP have ruled the country. Since then, much more has happened than just an economic boom. In the once secular state, Islam is again visible, something that is especially popular in conservative religious circles. But Erdogan also has many critics, both in Turkey and in the diaspora - especially since the Gezi Park protests last year.
"I have come here today to give my vote to the smallest party," Metin Dursun said. Besides Erdogan, there are two other politicians running for the country's highest office: Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, former secretary general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), who is competing as a common candidate of the Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and the Kurd Selahattin Demirtas, leader of the Democratic Party of the Peoples (HDP). As a Kurd the 39-year-old hotel manager is supporting Demirtas - even if the candidate has little chance.
Backsliding on democracy
Three candidates are running for president, but Erdogan is expected to win handily
Dursun is critical of developments in Turkey: "The process of democratic development in Turkey leaves something to be desired. Turkey is still among the countries that put undesirable lawyers, journalists and other critics in prisons." The increasing Islamization under Erdogan is a step backwards, he said, because politicians are increasingly dictating Turks' lives.
Observers expect a relatively low turnout among Turks living abroad, although Turks traditionally turn out to the polls in great numbers. Many German Turks are currently on vacation and for others the journey to the polling stations in large cities is too far. But still, these first elections for Turks living abroad are an important test run for future rounds of voting. Next year, Turkish parliamentary elections are to be held.By Vice Adm. Phil Cullom
Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Fleet Readiness and Logistics
Dr. Heather Willauer and her team at the Naval Research Laboratory recently announced technology they developed that converts seawater to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel.
In a proof of concept test using the molecularly restructured seawater, they successfully flew a radio-controlled aircraft with an unmodified internal combustion engine.
Centuries ago we used to talk about alchemists attempting to convert lead into gold. This, however, is not alchemy; this is real science.
Although this technology may not be commercially viable for 10 years or more, I want you to understand why having alternative sources of energy is really important to your Navy. As a global force, we deliver 1.25 billion gallons of fuel worldwide to operators annually. Operationally, this is an Achilles’ heel.
I remember years ago when I was aboard my destroyer in the Adriatic, on station, prepared, with Tomahawks, ready to answer our Nation’s call to use them if necessary.
I would have to leave that station every few days to be able to rendezvous with the oiler far out in the Mediterranean. When I did that, I was no longer available for the mission. That’s what this revolutionary game changer is about – the idea that maybe you won’t have to leave station to go find the oiler – maybe you’ll be able to produce that fuel where you are – at sea.
We need to reinvent how we create energy, how we value energy and how we consume energy. We need to challenge the assumptions that are a result of the last six decades of constant access to cheap, seemingly unlimited amounts of fuel. Developing game changing technology – combined with other advanced power sources such as biofuels and solar panels – will enable the Navy to do just this at sea and on land. Some options, like drop-in biofuels, are available today, have already been certified for our use, and will be commercially viable in the near term. In fact, the plan in place will begin delivering biofuel at less than $4 per gallon beginning in 2016.
Converting fuel from seawater, when produced at economies of scale, could provide a new source of power for our ships and aircraft. It will make us less reliant on fuel from specific ports, reduce or nearly eliminate our need for fuel resupply, and, thereby, increase our independence, resilience and combat effectiveness.
Imagine the flexibility we might have if we could make all the fuel we needed for our maritime forces while at sea:
Decreased dependence on oilers, enabling our aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers to travel farther and have greater flexibility in which route to take.
Less oiler movement in and out of port, making it harder for adversaries to detect where we are operating.
Destroyers that would normally escort oilers now being dedicated to other missions.
After more than a decade of war, our adversaries have found certain soft underbellies to our operations. They know that when you go after the logistics and resupply of fuel, that’s an easier target than confronting our frontline forces. What if we removed that from the equation? Can you imagine a time when an aircraft carrier doesn’t have to wait for the oiler to come steaming alongside it to deliver jet fuel? It truly does change things. It prevents what could one day be our ‘maritime IED moment.’
The Navy has always been at the forefront of energy innovation. You might say it’s one of our core competencies. We innovated and created capability when we shifted from sail to coal, coal to oil, and then introduced nuclear propulsion. I think the American people expect us in the military to have a sense of vision, of where things can go in the future.
This is, I believe, an element of that.
Comments
commentsState election officials are not rushing out to bow down to the massive information demand from Donald Trump’s voter suppression commission, a commission that just got another member whose life’s mission is to keep people from voting. In fact, the rush is in the opposite direction—a constantly growing number of states have said they won’t hand over part or all of the information that the commission’s vice chair, the notorious Kris Kobach, wants.
A few states, like Virginia, California, New York, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Massachusetts are just saying no. “NY refuses to perpetuate the myth voter fraud played a role in our election. We will not comply with this request,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted, with similar statements coming from officials in other states.
Many other states—a rapidly growing number—are saying they will not give Kobach any information that is not already publicly available, like the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers, for instance. Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin are on that list. Vermont’s secretary of state, slammed the commission itself: “While it gives me pause to enable the work of this Commission in any way, I am bound by law to provide our publicly available voter file.” But you may notice that this is not a list of blue states. It turns out that even some secretaries of state who are themselves major voter suppression fanatics are not eager to turn over people’s personal information. Some are particularly surprising:
x Indiana SOS Connie Lawson says no to Kobach request even though she's on Trump commission & Mike Pence is chair! Wow https://t.co/cnxVYBmiZh — Ari Berman (@AriBerman) June 30, 2017
The list of states saying no to everything or no to everything that’s not already public continues to grow. But nothing is going to dent Kobach’s determination to disenfranchise as many Americans as he can.TribLIVE's Daily and Weekly email newsletters deliver the news you want and information you need, right to your inbox.
Suppose that I invent and use a machine to steal $15,000 every year from each of 500,000 poor Americans, with the $7.5 billion being transferred into my Swiss bank account. After skimming off a few hundred million bucks to cover processing and handling expenses, I share the bulk of these proceeds with about 16.5 million friends. And this machine operates so deviously and secretively that my victims have no idea that I’m taking their money.
Am I acting immorally? Is the $7.5 billion that I pilfer each year stolen property that should be returned to its rightful owners rather than given to my 16.5 million friends?
Most people would answer “yes” to both questions. But some politicians, pundits and even (I’m ashamed to say) economists might answer no.
Of course, when the question is worded as it is above there will be only “yes” answers. If, however, the wording were changed a bit, many people would switch their answers from “yes” to “no.” Here’s the changed wording: Suppose that I invent and use minimum-wage legislation that, by casting 500,000 low-skilled workers into the ranks of the unemployed, causes these workers’ annual incomes to fall from $15,000 to $0. But the legislation also raises the wages of 16.5 million other workers. In effect, the incomes lost by the now-unemployed workers are transferred to the still-employed workers.
Am I acting immorally to use this legislation? Is the $7.5 billion taken annually from the 500,000 workers who lose their jobs and given to the other workers who keep their jobs stolen property that should be returned to those unemployed workers — returned in the form of opportunities to regain their jobs?
Politicians, pundits and economics professors who’ve read the Congressional Budget Office’s February report on raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, yet who continue to endorse a higher minimum wage, evidently believe that it’s morally acceptable to steal $15,000 annually from some poor workers if the proceeds are given to other workers.
The CBO study concludes that raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour will indeed — as basic economics predicts — reduce employment among low-skilled workers. Specifically, the CBO predicts that this higher minimum wage will destroy about 500,000 jobs. The study also predicts that about 16.5 million other workers will receive higher pay as a result of a higher minimum wage.
“QED!” conclude proponents of raising the minimum wage. “The number of job losses is small compared to the number of people whose wages will rise. Therefore, the minimum wage should be raised!”
Yet anyone who uses this reasoning to approve and applaud a hike in the minimum wage should logically also approve and applaud the use of a machine that arbitrarily robs 500,000 poor people, year in and year out, of $15,000 each and then transfers much of the booty to other people.
Reasonable people can dispute the CBO’s specific predictions. (I believe, for example, that the method used by that agency to calculate the number of jobs destroyed by raising the minimum wage leads to an underestimation of job losses.) No matter. Anyone who supports artificially raising the wages of some workers through a policy that causes other workers to remain unemployed is someone who believes that it is moral for government to arbitrarily impoverish some people in order to raise the incomes of others.
Donald J. Boudreaux is a professor of economics and Getchell Chair at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His column appears twice monthly.Brief: This article is primarily focused on gamers who play on Linux and grew up with games which we call “retro” in today’s times.
A new era has dawned for Linux gaming. We now have amazing games on Linux with stunning visuals that are a feast for every gamer’s eye. But who can forget those nostalgic games which made us gamers in the first place? Those were the days when we loved more than anything to stay hooked to our Nintendo consoles.
In this article, we make an attempt to refresh your childhood memories by showing you how to install and run some amazing retro games from those times.
To play the exact versions, you can install a Nintendo Emulator like ZSNES. It’s Free and Open Source Software! SNES stands for Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Z apparently refers to the developer aliases: zsKnight and _Demo_. Debian based users can install ZSNES with apt-get by using the command, “sudo apt-get install zsnes”.
After installation, you can launch the ZSNES emulator from the application menu or with the terminal with command “zsnes”. By using the game menu, you can then load the ROM of your choice you downloaded from the list. Don’t worry, I’ll show you how it’s done.
How to install and run SNES games:
1. From the command prompt run the following commands to install ZSNES:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install zsnes
2. Download game ROM. Here is a comprehensive list of Games’ ROMs that you can use to download your favorite game.
Download ROMs containing game packs
3. Launch ZSNES from the terminal with command “zsnes” or via the Application Menu:
4. From the main menu, you can now load your game’s ROM files. After you download the ROMs from the above links, make sure you extract it to find a.smc file. This is the file you need to run. Here I have loaded and run the SWATKats game.
You can also go into full-screen mode with the keyboard shortcut: “Alt+Enter”.
I have used ZNSES emulator in the article but there other emulators that you can use to play retro games in Linux. Here is a list of several other emulators for Linux.
Let’s look at some versions that have been made natively for Linux or can be run using WINE/emulators.
Undoubtedly one of the most legendary characters in video game history, Mario has conquered a forever place in our hearts! We looked up various places on fan forums and threads and found that there are various different versions of Mario available to play now…some are Windows executables (can be easily be configured with Wine/PlayOnLinux) and some are Linux native versions! Many original Mario games are there in the SNES and NES rom list.
A highly nostalgic and an extremely popular video game title, Road Rash has unforgettable kicks, slaps, chain shots and some undeniably hilarious moments!
This is another popular retro computer game developed by John Romero in 1988.
Dosbox and Wine are recommended for playing this game. You can get the exe file here. Make sure to set the path the game’s location using the configuration file for Dosbox.
This used to be my childhood favourite. I used to play most of the time as Yokozuna as it felt kind of invincible and most of the attacking moves were pretty much hilarious! A whole lot of fun it used to be, from Undertaker’s ghosts to Doink’s electric shocks! I learned how to do the combo moves too further on. There was no stopping Yoko after that!
You can set up this game with the same method as the game “Dangerous Dave” discussed above. Get it here.
To play the original version, you can use an NES emulator as discussed in the beginning of this article. This list contains many NES games.
Contra is undoubtedly one of the most memorable action-arcade games for every passionate gamer. Contra is included in the NES games’ list shared above. Contra III – The Alien Wars in the SNES list.
Mission Impossible can be run with the Nintendo 64 emulator called Mupen64 Plus. Get yours here. The ROM containing the game is here.
Remember the adventures of a gorilla called Donkey Kong? Well, you can try it on Linux with the JNES emulator. Included in the same NES list.
There is hardly anyone who doesn’t know about Popeye the sailor man! Try it out on your Linux system with the VisualBoy Advance Emulator meant for Gameboy ROMs. Here’s an Ubuntu version. The game is included in the comprehensive list of ROMs mentioned in the introduction.
This one is another NES classic from Konami. In the beginning it seems easy but gradually gets quite tough towards the end. Included in the mentioned list.
This will surely bring back some beautiful childhood memories. The legend of Kage is also another NES favourite from Taito Corporation.
This was definitely an adorable one(NES ROM).
That shiny little red car! Included in the NES ROM.
Quite a funny one if you crash! Included in the above mentioned NES ROM.
A nostalgic space adventure! Available in the NES ROM.
Relive as Judge Dredd, the law enforcement officer who always let justice prevail! Available in both the SNES and Gameboy lists.
Another memorable space adventure! Get it here. NES emulator required.
Hats off to nicoblog for preserving what would be called as the heritage of gaming in the far away future! Speaking of the future reminds me of the Back to the Future game (included in the listed NES ROM along with the sequels as well)!
Hope you will go ahead and relive some of those good old days.
As always, please leave your suggestions/feedback in the comments.WINNIPEG — It was interesting to listen Saturday night as Lightning stars Steven Stamkos and Marty St. Louis admired each other's work.
Stamkos, in the glow of his historic 60th goal scored in Tampa Bay's season-ending 4-3 overtime win over the Jets at the MTS Centre, called St. Louis "the best play-maker in the game right now."
Said St. Louis: "He pulls the trigger pretty good."
They are joined at the hip, these friends and linemates.
Stamkos' career took off in January 2009, when then-coach Rick Tocchet paired the rookie center with the right wing. St. Louis, 36, has said playing with Stamkos keeps him feeling young.
How appropriate, then, St. Louis got the primary assist as Stamkos, 22, became just the 20th NHL player to score 60 goals in a season.
"I couldn't have written a better script," Stamkos said. "Marty is a huge reason I've had the success I've had in the NHL."
"I wanted to give him a chance," said St. Louis, who also assisted on Stamkos' 50th goal March 13 against the Bruins an on 20 of his goals overall. "I wanted to do my part to help him."
You saw their symbiosis on the 60th goal.
St. Louis had the puck behind the Jets goal line between the net and a corner. Skating slowly backward toward the glass, St. Louis waited for Stamkos to find shooting space in the slot.
"I look for him all the time," St. Louis said. "But when you get close to these marks, you look for him a little more."
Stamkos' goal, 3:29 into the third period, beat Ondrej Pavelec on the short side for a 3-1 lead.
After the game, left wing Ryan Malone gave Stamkos a celebratory shaving cream pie in the face. Players spoke of how happy they were for Stamkos' success.
"I'm just as excited as he is," said right wing Teddy Purcell, who had a hat trick and the winning goal 1:07 into overtime. "It just goes to show how tight of a group we are."
"What I like about Steven's accomplishments is he always makes it a team thing, and the players want to be part of it because of that," coach Guy Boucher said.
"I like the way the players want to do it for him."
None, perhaps, more than St. Louis, who has had a prime seat as Stamkos evolved from a player known primarily for his one-timer to one who can score from anywhere on the ice.
"When he came into the league, everybody was so scared of his one-timer," St. Louis said. "You start having success like that, they're going to start taking it away and it becomes harder and harder. You almost feel like you have to reinvent yourself and find different ways to score goals, and he's done that."
With a pretty good wing man.
"I'm so fortunate to play with him," Stamkos said. "It was nice to share that moment with him."
Damian Cristodero can be reached at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter at @LightningTimes.I originally wrote this post for Top Draw, the Agency I work for. You can see it there as well
At the very foundation of all SEO is your selection of words and phrases to target. Keyword research is vital in determining the ideal terms to try to rank on which will expose your site to the people looking for your specific product or service.
No matter how well your website ranks in search engines, if it’s not targeting the correct terms for your business – it won’t do much for you, and if you’re using pay per click advertising – it can cost you big!
There are widely varying degrees of keyword research; from simply looking at what your competition is targeting, to analyzing piles of data and hundreds of thousands of search queries to find exactly what is being searched, and by who (the latter being the type of keyword research we do at Top Draw – where I work).
The more time you spend on keyword research, and the more robust your data is, the more confident you can be in your optimization efforts. You also increase the chance of finding opportunities your competitors have neglected, which is a win waiting to happen. But every search campaign has to start somewhere, and before you invest hundreds of hours, or thousands of dollars, into your keyword research I recommend the following simple process.
Basic Keyword Research
1. Choose 5-10 words or phrases you think describe your business or website.
2. Visit the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (you’ll want to bookmark this).
This tool uses data from Google’s ad network to determine search frequency and competition, providing a general assessment for term popularity and existing competitors.
Another useful Google-based tool you can use is Google Trends. Trends will help you to guage the value of one phrase over another. This is especially useful for isolating search volumes from specific locations (ie. do people in Canada search using the word color or colour?)
3. Plug in your selected phrases, one per line, to the Word or phrase box.
If your terms are not directly related to eachother, it may make more sense to separate these and perform additional searches (Ex. pots, pans & cookware might go together where pots, spatulas & cooking oil might be separate). Also consider using specifications like cities and countries.
4. Enter the captcha words and press Search.
You will be served with several variations of your terms which can be sorted by clicking Global or Local monthly searches (these can be set using the Advanced Options & Filters).
Keep a keen eye out for the variants on how you refer to your products/services, often the people searching use very different, and often surprising ways of looking for things!
5. Review your results.
When you see a highly searched term (though perhaps not the highest searched, if you’re in a competitive market), do a search for that exact term in Google to take a look at what you’re up against!
Visit the 1st and 2nd result in the SERP, and then maybe the 5th and 10th, getting a good sample of the sites that rank for the term on the first page.
6. Check your competition.
Assessing competition can be rather complex. For our purposes we are going to use Page Rank, but it is very important to note that Page Rank is NOT the end-all-be-all of ranking performance.
I repeat; do not interpret PR as your primary goal. It’s best used as a rudimentary analysis.
I repeat… Ok, I won’t. I think you get the point.
Page Rank provides a rough estimate of how strong a given page is in Google’s eyes, giving a score to each page out of 10 (10 being the best). It’s by no means a consistently reliable metric, but if two pages target the same term, and one has a PR of 6 and he other a PR of 2, the former is likely to win the higher ranking.
A few ways of checking PR for a page are by installing an SEO plugin in your web browser (I like SEO Site Tools for Chrome), or by simply visiting an online PR checker.
7. Rinse and repeat!
After going through these steps a few times, you will begin to see a general but useful overview of the highest searched terms and the level of competition if you choose to target them.
The goal is to assess what terms, of those most relevant to you, have the largest volume of people searching for them – with the least amount of competition in the rankings. If you find pages with very low page rank on the first page for a highly searched and relevant term, great! You may very well be able to simply create a page targeting that term (by using it in the copy and using it in the title tag) and get good rankings for that page within a few weeks, even days!
So that’s keyword research?
This process is not a substitute for serious data mining and keyword research, but it is a quick and easy way to get the basic scoop and evaluate the search landscape for your business. It should be sufficient to at least get a few ideas for phrases you hadn’t considered and to potentially reveal some low hanging fruit!
If you’d like to perform significantly more in-depth keyword research & optimization, drop me a line!
I can take a look at all the search queries performed in the last year surrounding your market and show you hundreds of the phrases people are using to seek out your products or services online right now!
Or, if you’d like to take it to the Agency level, talk to the good folks over at Top Draw! Tell ’em Nick sent you 😉
Thanks for reading!This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, with Juan González—oh, I’m Amy Goodman in Atlanta, Georgia. Juan González is in New York. But we’re going to turn right now to Juan González. That’s right, Juan has just become the first Latino journalist inducted into the New York Journalism Hall of Fame. He, last week, retired, after 29 years, from the New York Daily News. Over the years, Juan has used his column to break major corruption scandals and cover-ups, including the attempt to conceal the health impacts of the toxic dust released on 9/11 in New York.
In his sign-off, in his final column, Juan wrote, quote, “I opted to become a voice from another part of urban America. Not writing about outcast neighborhoods, but from them. Not simply to entertain, but to change. Not after the fact, but before it, when coverage could still make a difference.”
In November of last year, Juan was inducted, yes, into the Deadline Club’s New York Journalism Hall of Fame, becoming the first Latino journalist to be selected for the honor. He was inducted along with Charlie Rose, New York Times journalist Max Frankel, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, ProPublica founder Paul Steiger and Time magazine journalist and editor Richard Stolley. Juan was introduced by the Deadline Club’s J. Alex Tarquinio.
J. ALEX TARQUINIO: Juan González has been a staff columnist with the New York Daily News since 1987 and co-host of the syndicated radio and television news program Democracy Now! since 1996. I believe there are a few of you here. His books include Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media and Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse. González has received two George Polk Awards for Commentary and has been named to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Please welcome Juan González.
DEMOCRACY NOW! STAFF: ¡Juan, presente!
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: My thanks to the Deadline Club for this honor. It’s still hard to believe you consider my writing and reporting worthy of being recognized next to the amazing figures you’ve previously inducted into the Hall of Fame and beside this extraordinary group of my fellow nominees this year. Are you sure somebody didn’t make a mistake?
I’m just amazed that I’m still—I still have a job at the Daily News, given all the—all the upheaval brought about in our media industry by the digital age. A few weeks ago, during our last round of heartbreaking layoffs at the News, I was sitting in an editorial board meeting with a bunch of reporters and editors interviewing Governor Cuomo, when my—one of my editors, Rob Moore, who was sitting next to me, suddenly pointed to his smartphone. “The Observer is reporting you’ve been fired,” he told me. I took a deep breath and said to him, “Well, can you confirm that for me?” “You have nothing to worry about,” Rob said. He didn’t add, “For now.”
Well, I was already fired by the Daily News 25 years ago last month. Our owner at the time, the Tribune Company, declared me and 2,500 reporters, ad sellers, pressman, drivers permanently replaced for daring to go out on a labor strike. It took us five long months on picket lines and protests, through a bitterly cold winter, but we eventually won that strike, during which I somehow managed, as chair of the Guild’s strike committee, to earn the respect of all those old-line Irish and Italian reporters at the News who until then had disdained me as some kind of unqualified affirmative action hire. Tribune sold the paper to British billionaire Robert Maxwell, who then proceeded to negotiate a deal with the unions and welcomed us back. So I’ve actually been living on borrowed time for the past 25 years.
As some of you may know, mine has not been the typical journalism career these past 37 years. I’ve managed to work not only in mainstream journalism, but proudly in the alternative and dissident press, most notably for the past 20 years with Democracy Now!, with a terrific journalist and friend, Amy Goodman, who’s here tonight—today, but also at various times in the Spanish-language or ethnic press. In addition, I must be the only reporter in mainstream journalism with an extensive rap sheet, having been arrested about a dozen times over four decades, in the 1960s, '70s, ’80s and ’90s, on a variety of charges: criminal trespass, contempt of court, marijuana possession, inciting to riot, draft evasion—all, except for the marijuana bust, related to political protest. Mike McAlary often joked to me that one day he went into the old Daily News library and came across the paper's clips on my radical days. This was when papers still had massive, dusty files of yellowed, cut-out articles stuffed into pocket folders under various subjects and names. There, Mac found the old stories on me. The clip folder title was “Juan González, revolutionary.” But by then, someone had crossed out “revolutionary” and changed it to ”Daily News columnist.”
So, yes, I had a prior life. And I didn’t really get started into mainstream journalism until I was already in my thirties. That I ended up a reporter at all, you can chalk up to Ms. Bonagura and to the Young Lords. One gave me the skills, and the other gave me the heart.
Pauline Bonagura was the one public school teacher every kid dreams about. She was an English and journalism instructor at Franklin K. Lane High School in East New York, Brooklyn. Young, charismatic, relentless, she had a hopeless love affair with the English language and was determined all her students would master not only grammar and writing, but the art of reporting. The number of fine journalists she produced is remarkable. David Vidal, who for years was a foreign correspondent from the Times; Steve Handelman, who worked for decades at the Toronto Star; Carole Carmichael, who was an editor at The Seattle Times; Janet McMillan, a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer for many years—all of us were Bonagura’s students. She plugged me, a shy kid from a working-class Puerto Rican family in the Cypress Hills projects of East New York, and chose me to be the editor of her paper, the Lane Reporter, the paper that almost every year won the Columbia Scholastic journalism prize. And that probably had a lot to do with my eventually getting into Columbia on a full scholarship. And it was there that I first became acquainted with dissident views and social protests, and ended up in SDS in the Columbia student strike of 1968.
Then came the Young Lords. Jimmy Breslin once wrote that the Lords produced more good journalism—journalists than Columbia J School. The Lords were a loud, brash, radical and talented group of Puerto Ricans. We became a thorn in the side of the establishment and the police in this town, and in cities throughout the East Coast for a brief time, and influenced a generation of young Latinos to demand more equitable treatment for our community. But of all the radical groups of the '60s—and there were many back then—we probably received the most sympathetic press coverage. Even as youngsters, we understood the power of the press, and we consciously cultivated good coverage. We were helped by the first brilliant crop of young black and Latino reporters in the city's media, to whom we fed exclusives and who in turn repaid us with more all-around and sound coverage—people like a young Ed Bradley at WCBS, Gil Noble at WABC, Gloria Rojas at WNBC, Rudy Garcia at the Daily News, and of course liberal white writers like Jack Newfield at The Village Voice. And we published our own newspaper, Palante, that I edited for a while. So it was no accident that when the Lords fell apart in the mid-1970s, several of us ended up going into journalism—Pablo Guzmán, Felipe Luciano, Geraldo Rivera, our first lawyer—everybody knows Geraldo—and myself, or that when we landed there, we were all drawn to uncovering injustices and digging deeper than some journalists were accustomed to.
My first job at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1978, I became friendly with Pete Dexter, one of the paper’s big-name columnists. “So what’s it like to write a column?” I asked Pete one day. “It sure beats working for a living,” he told me. I quickly became hooked on the idea of becoming a columnist.
And so, what I’ve been doing the last 27 years or so—I think 27, 28 |
workers come to the aid of IndyCar Series driver Ed Carpenter after a crash. IndyCar Series driver Ed Carpenter sits in his car after a crash during the 2015 Indianapolis 500. A general view as IndyCar Series drivers race during the 2015 Indianapolis 500. IndyCar Series driver Simon Pagenaud (22) races Scott Dixon (9). IndyCar Series driver Will Power comes in for a pit stop. IndyCar Series drivers come in for pit stops. May 24, 2015; Indianapolis, IN, USA; IndyCar Series driver Tony Kanaan during the 2015 Indianapolis 500. IndyCar Series driver Helio Castroneves during the 2015 Indianapolis 500. IndyCar Series driver Ryan Hunter-Reay during the 2015 Indianapolis 500. Smoke is seen from the car of IndyCar Series driver Pippa Mann (63) during the 2015 Indianapolis 500. IndyCar Series driver Scott Dixon (9) leads the field. IndyCar Series drivers on the grid prior to the start of the 2015 Indianapolis 500. The green flag waves at the Indy 500. IndyCar Series drivers on the grid before the start of the 2015 Indianapolis 500. IndyCar Series driver Ed Carpenter is introduced before the 2015 Indianapolis 500. IndyCar Series driver Helio Castroneves (left) with team owner Roger Penske. The Borg-Warner Trophy before the 2015 Indianapolis 500. NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Jeff Gordon carries his son Leo out to the grid before the 2015 Indianapolis 500. Fans walk through Gasoline Alley before the race. IndyCar Series owner David Letterman before the 2015 Indianapolis 500. May 24, 2015; Indianapolis, IN, USA; Television personality Adam Carolla (left) walks with racing legend Mario Andretti. Actor Patrick Dempsey before the race. Olympic gold medalist Nastia Liukin prior to the 2015 Indianapolis 500. A general view of the sunrise behind the pagoda prior to the 2015 Indianapolis 500.
INDIANAPOLIS 500
Sunday’s results from the 2.5-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway (starting position in parentheses):
1. (15) Juan Pablo Montoya, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
2. (2) Will Power, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
3. (14) Charlie Kimball, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
4. (1) Scott Dixon, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
5. (17) Graham Rahal, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
6. (8) Marco Andretti, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
7. (5) Helio Castroneves, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
8. (10) J.R. Hildebrand, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
9. (9) Josef Newgarden, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
10. (3) Simon Pagenaud, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
11. (7) Sebastien Bourdais, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
12. (31) Ryan Briscoe, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
13. (24) Takuma Sato, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
14. (23) Townsend Bell, Dallara-Chevrolet, 200, Running.
15. (16) Ryan Hunter-Reay, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
16. (26) Gabby Chaves, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
17. (20) Alex Tagliani, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
18. (19) James Jakes, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
19. (18) Simona de Silvestro, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
20. (11) Carlos Munoz, Dallara-Honda, 200, Running.
21. (6) Justin Wilson, Dallara-Honda, 199, Running.
22. (25) Pippa Mann, Dallara-Honda, 197, Running.
23. (27) Sebastian Saavedra, Dallara-Chevrolet, 175, Contact.
24. (28) Jack Hawksworth, Dallara-Honda, 175, Contact.
25. (29) Stefano Coletti, Dallara-Chevrolet, 175, Contact.
26. (4) Tony Kanaan, Dallara-Chevrolet, 151, Contact.
27. (33) James Davison, Dallara-Honda, 116, Mechanical.
28. (32) Tristan Vautier, Dallara-Honda, 116, Mechanical.
29. (13) Oriol Servia, Dallara-Honda, 112, Contact.
30. (12) Ed Carpenter, Dallara-Chevrolet, 112, Contact.
31. (30) Bryan Clauson, Dallara-Chevrolet, 61, Contact.
32. (21) Sage Karam, Dallara-Chevrolet, 0, Contact.
33. (22) Conor Daly, Dallara-Honda, 0, Mechanical.
———
Race Statistics
Winners average speed: 161.341.
Time of Race: 3:05:56.5286.
Margin of Victory: 0.1046 seconds.
Cautions: 6 for 47 laps.
Lead Changes: 37 among 10 drivers.
Lap Leaders: Dixon 1-18, Kanaan 19-20, Dixon 21, Kanaan 22-25, Dixon 26-34, Pagenaud 35-36, Power 37-38, Montoya 39-40, Dixon 41-66, Pagenaud 67-70, Dixon 71, Pagenaud 72, Kanaan 73-74, Dixon 75, Kanaan 76-97, Pagenaud 98-99, Castroneves 100-101, Pagenaud 102-123, Power 124, Pagenaud 125, Dixon 126-127, Pagenaud 128, Dixon 129-148, Pagenaud 149-150, Kimball 151-152, Tagliani 153-154, Kimball 155-162, Dixon 163-164, Montoya 165-166, Dixon 167-169, Munoz 170-172, Wilson 173-174, Power 175-186, Dixon 187, Power 188-191, Montoya 192, Power 193-196, Montoya 197-200.
Points: Montoya 272, Power 247, Dixon 211, Castroneves 206, Rahal 204, Newgarden 173, Bourdais 161, Kimball 160, Andretti 151, Kanaan 147.Take Me (Anticore Part One)
Adult
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Garrick feels a rising tide of lust the moment step-sibling hacktivists Ryann and Jaxson stride into his life. They need Garrick's help to free an enslaved superintelligence and sabotage his employer's Syncorp's massive oilsands projects. Garrick agrees with one caveat. He wants both the muscular, masculine Jaxson and the pierced and alluring Ryann. Will he live long enough to claim his reward? More
Superintelligence technician Garrick feels a rising tide of lust the moment step-sibling hacktivists Ryann and Jaxson stride into his life. They need Garrick's help to free an enslaved superintelligence and sabotage his employer's Syncorp's massive oilsands projects. Garrick, whose work enables Syncorp to take advantage of millions of people with the same cyber-addiction he's struggled with, agrees with only one caveat. He wants both the muscular, masculine Jaxson and the pierced and alluring Ryann, in every position imaginable. But will Garrick, about to infiltrate Syncorp's fortress-like corporate headquarters and betray the cut-throat corporation, live long enough to bed his new lovers?Boston, Massachusetts (CNN) -- Aijalon Mahli Gomes, the U.S. citizen sentenced to eight years of hard labor for crossing over the Chinese border into North Korea, arrived home Friday afternoon with the man who secured his freedom, former President Jimmy Carter.
Gomes' family rushed toward the steps of the private plane, wiping tears from their eyes and hugging the man imprisoned in communist North Korea since January.
"Thank you President Carter for traveling to North Korea to bring Aijalon home," the family said in a statement. "For Aijalon, although returning home, the journey toward healing really just begins today."
Relatives later spoke to reporters outside the family home about the release. Relatives said Gomes looked well physically.
"We are greatly pleased and thankful for [his] coming home," said Gomes' uncle, Michael Farrow. "We are thankful for all the prayers and God most of all."
Gomes' younger brother, Milton McCarthy Jr., 19, said, "It's an overwhelming amount of joy and happiness. It's a prayer being answered."
Carter did not make any comments about his trip, which was surrounded by speculation on whether the former president had met with the reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Carter has a history of helping thaw frigid Pyongyang-Washington relations.
North Korea sentenced Gomes, 31, to hard labor and a fine of about $600,000 for illegally crossing its border with China and for an unspecified "hostile act." Gomes is believed to be a Christian activist.
"At the request of President Carter, and for humanitarian purposes, Mr. Gomes was granted amnesty by the chairman of the National Defense Commission, Kim Jong Il," said a statement from the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
Farrow said Gomes, who had been living in South Korea for about nine years, was last home at Christmas.
Farrow said he didn't know the circumstances surrounding Gomes' entry into North Korea.
"That's not in his character," Farrow said. "He did not take things to the extreme. He may have just been trying to peek in and help others and teach them. He had good motives. I know he had good intentions."
Nor does the family believe that Gomes tried to commit suicide, as suggested by North Korean reports, Farrow said.
"He's a spiritual person," Farrow said about his nephew. "Perhaps he got sick, his body shut down."
The U.S. State Department and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed Gomes' release.
"We... are relieved that he will soon be safely reunited with his family," said department spokesman P.J. Crowley. "We appreciate former President Carter's humanitarian effort and welcome North Korea's decision to grant Mr. Gomes special amnesty and allow him to return to the United States."
He added, "The U.S. and North Korea do not have diplomatic relations and, as the case of Mr. Gomes illustrates, travel to North Korea is not routine or risk-free."
Ban commended Carter and said he "appreciates the decision" of North Korea to release
Gomes on "humanitarian considerations."
Two American journalists -- Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had crossed the border into North Korea in March 2009 and were arrested and sentenced to 12 years hard labor -- were released in August 2009 after an intervention by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
Carter arrived in North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, Wednesday on a humanitarian mission to negotiate the release of Gomes. His visit was a private mission, and was not endorsed by the Obama administration.
Carter was greeted by Kim Gye Gwan, North Korea's chief negotiator at the six-party nuclear talks, and he also met the country's titular head of state, Kim Jong Nam, according to state-run media in North Korea.
"Jimmy Carter made an apology to Kim Yong Nam for American Gomes' illegal entry into [North Korea] and gave him the assurance that such case will never happen again," the Korean Central News Agency reported Friday.
KCNA also reported that Kim told Carter that North Korea wants to resume the six-party talks and work toward the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Carter's 1994 talks with the late Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il's father, paved the way for the "Agreed Framework" the same year, an agreement designed to rein in Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
Gomes didn't have only Carter as an advocate. Florida-based attorney Michael Cavendish, who doesn't know Gomes, started a letter-writing campaign when he learned about Gomes' sentencing in April. Some of his letters criticized the U.S. government, which he argued initially did not do enough to advocate for Gomes.
"Over the past four months, there were times when it seemed pointless to write another letter, to make another phone call, to talk to anybody about it at all, because the world is vast and there were all kinds of other stories going on that were sucking up people's attention. And things between the United States and North Korea and its allies were very, very grim," Cavendish said early Friday.
"I'm just tremendously happy that he's been set free," Cavendish said.
CNN's Catherine Shoichet and Susan Candiotti and journalist Andrew Salmon contributed to this report.New Zealand's ad-makers have won top global prizes and the campaigns they create are getting more and more elaborate. But are they getting too clever for their own good?
Cannes is best known for its film festival and the prestigious Palme d'Or prize, but each summer it also hosts the Oscars of advertising: the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
In recent years, creative Kiwis have picked up so many 'Lion' awards the media industry website Stop Press said this week it was time to stop talking about them "punching above their weight".
Top of the pile this year were the winners of two titanium Lion awards. The Y&R agency won one for a campaign encouraging McDonalds and Burger King to bury the hatchet for world peace:
Colenso won the other top prize for promoting “Brewtroleum” - petrol made from beer waste:
Both were certainly clever, but you could only buy 'brewtroleum" for a short time last year and the McDonalds / Burger King truce was a one-week stunt.
The main winner this year at New Zealand's main advertising competition, the Axis Awards, went to a Saatchi & Saatchi ad for something not actually on the market yet - an electronic moneybox for kids:
Some in adland protested that "ad agency pipe dreams" were being rewarded and "none of it is real from a customer's point of view".
Should award-winning ads promote products we can actually buy or use?
Traditionally, a commercial client engages an ad agency to promote its products. But advertising 'creatives' often dream up ideas and then go looking for a client. Effectively, they're marketing their own creativity to the clients.
Vaughn Davis runs an ad agency in Auckland and has been a judge at the Cannes Lions festival.
"Its a bit like the movie industry. Art house triumphs of creativity win awards but Independence Day: Resurgence makes all the money. It doesn't have to be about making people rush out and buy things. It can be a great idea for a great idea's sake," he told Mediawatch.
Vaughn Davis says some ads are run as a pretext for entry into a competition and for some "bonuses are linked to the number of awards they win".
Everyone wants awards
In the ad business, they call them "scams" - adverts that no client ever commissioned or paid for, created simply to win awards or raise profile.
"We all know why it exists. There’s a hunger among creative teams to do great work. And agencies want to win awards, But quite often, there’s a lack of desire among clients to buy it. 'Scam' rears its head to fill the void," Singapore-based executive Andy Greenaway recently told ad industry website The Drum.
At the Cannes Lions festival last weekend, an extreme example came to light when it won an award.
Scummy scamming?
The Singapore branch of a multi-national agency claimed its ‘I Sea’ app could help smartphone users monitor the Mediterranean for boats carrying refugees. The 'client' was a rescue outfit called Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), based in Malta, which could respond and save lives. But it didn't work.
According to reports, people who downloaded the app all got the same image of the sea, and weather information that wasn’t real. Apple quickly pulled I-Sea from its app store, citing “false information and features”. MOAS disowned the project.
Using refugees at sea to win a career-enhancing gong on the Cote D’Azur is pretty low, but this is a business which rewards concepts that are creative but not always effective.
Vaughn Davis told Mediawatch this one was "bloody evil" but award-winning work does serves a purpose.
He compares it to catwalk fashion.
"You see these things and think: 'Oh my god. Who would ever wear that?' No-one would, apart from Lady Gaga," says Vaughn Davis. "But in two years' time, you might see an echo of it in a design on sale at Glassons, or the Warehouse or Farmers."
"Good ideas happen at the fringes of the ad industry. Some get awarded and applauded and then filter down, and if some can be a bit shocking or interesting, that's good. They make life better".Twenty years ago, the Internet made it possible to communicate and share information with people all around the world – instantly and for free. Today, Circle is building products that will enable the global exchange of value in much the same way. Frictionless, borderless transactions are on our horizon. We’re going to change the world, and we want you to join us on the journey!
What We Do
Ask anyone on the team: We’re building the future of money. We believe we’ll soon live in a world where money can change hands instantly, securely, and at no cost – whether you’re paying a friend back for coffee in person or sending money to family on the other side of the planet.
Our products spring from a focus on design and passion for delightful user experience. Our vision is global: We have customers in more than 100 countries. We also have tremendous backing to execute this vision, with $76 million from Goldman Sachs, IDG Capital Partners (China), Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, and Breyer Capital.
Why Us?
We’ve built an amazing, global team in our Boston, San Francisco, Dublin, and (upcoming!) London offices with some of the world’s top talent. We move fast. We solve tough problems. Our culture is smart, fun, and creative. We believe in autonomy: We feel that the best products are created when people are given true ownership of their work. At Circle, you’ll find a team of incredibly skilled people working together to revolutionize how people use money.
Some of the Perks
With flexible hours, unlimited paid time off, catered lunches and breakfasts, happy hours, and unlimited snacks, Circle offers some pretty awesome perks for employees beyond the standard equity packages, medical and dental insurance, 401K, mobile phone benefits, and commuter programs. Circle is also committed to furthering the education and development of our team through conferences, workshops, and related programs.
Join the Team!
Are you interested in helping us build the future of finance? We have plans to double in size this year, and we’re currently building out our new London office – hiring there for legal, compliance, and finance. We’re also growing our US-based engineering and marketing teams.
Apply today!Robert Cribb and Michele Ford
Prisoners captured during the Trisula Operation Photograph taken at the Museum Brawijaya by Vannessa Hearman
In the course of little more than five months from late 1965 to early 1966, anti-communist Indonesians killed about half a million of their fellow citizens. Nearly all the victims were associated with Indonesia's Left, especially with the Communist Party (PKI) that had risen to unprecedented national prominence under President Sukarno's Guided Democracy. The massacres were presided over and often coordinated or carried out by anti-communist sections of the Indonesian army, but they also engaged wider elements of Indonesian society - both people who had reason to fear communist power and people who wanted to establish clear anti-communist credentials in troubled times.
The killings followed a coup which took place in Jakarta on the morning of 1 October 1965 in which six senior army generals were killed and a revolutionary council was formed, seizing power from Sukarno. For the whole of the New Order period, Indonesian authorities portrayed these events as a communist grab for power, which was to be followed by the wholesale slaughter of their opponents. Sceptics, by contrast, doubted the PKI's involvement and even wondered whether the coup might have been a 'black' operation by conservative forces, intended to compromise the Party. Recent research, especially by John Roosa, who writes for this issue, has shown that the PKI leadership was closely involved in the coup, but that the aims of the operation were far more limited than a seizure of power.
The destruction of the PKI was part of a process that brought Suharto's military-dominated New Order regime to power. The new regime abandoned Sukarno's leftist orientation in foreign and domestic politics and embarked on a program of western-style economic development. The New Order never concealed the fact of the killings. Rather, it portrayed them as both a justifiable response to the alleged threat presented by the PKI and as an outcome of unrestrained populist politics in the 'Old Order'. The undefined memory of massacre was thus recruited to justify the New Order's elaborate structure of political and cultural control and restriction. The alleged evil intentions of the PKI were also used to justify an enduring and vindictive persecution of Indonesians who had been associated with the Left and who survived the massacres. More than a million passed through detention camps, and some were held for ten years or more. After their release, they faced continuing restrictions on their civil rights within Indonesia and their family members - including children not even born in 1965 - faced harassment and restriction.
One of the great achievements of the post-Suharto period is the fact that it is now possible to begin the complex work of better documenting the events that occurred in 1965 and in the years that followed. This process is slow and painstaking. It is made difficult by a diminishing pool of informants, the fading memories of those who are still alive, the decay of physical evidence and continuing prejudice in local communities. Groups trying to uncover detail of the killings have at times faced official harassment and many of the formal restrictions against former communists remain in place. Significant progress has nevertheless been made, drawing on rich veins of oral history and documentary sources within and outside Indonesia.
It is now possible to begin the complex work of better documenting the events that occurred in 1965 and in the years that followed
For all this growing body of analysis, the killings themselves remain tantalisingly elusive. Direct witnesses were few, and perpetrators have for the most part remained stubbornly silent. The usual reluctance of killers to talk about what they have done is compounded by the fear of reprisals or claims for compensation. Many Indonesians, too, look back on a national history that is studded with difficult, controversial and divisive events and argue that Indonesians should instead look forward and focus on improving their future rather than dwelling on past crimes. On both sides of the Left-Right divide, moreover, there has been a feeling that a too-detailed investigation of the precise circumstances of the killings might reveal sordid, unpleasant details that would compromise the stark elegance of mainstream narratives both of communist victimhood and of communist evil. All but one of the contributors to this important edition of Inside Indonesia presented papers based on their original research at a conference on the same theme organised by Tony Reid, Doug Kammen, Kate McGregor and Vannessa Hearman and held at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore in June 2009. We would like to thank the conference organisers, who are editing a book based on the conference proceedings, for encouraging participants to also contribute to this collection. Many more researchers were involved in that conference than could possibly be showcased here.
This edition begins with an article by Brad Simpson, reminds us of the support western governments provided to the army and other anti-communist forces at this time. This is followed by Greg Fealy's account of Nahdlatul Ulama members' involvement in the events of 1965-66. Dahlia Gratia Setiyawan, Vannessa Hearman, Taufik Ahmad and Annie Pohlman follow with harrowing accounts of Communists' lives under attack, on the run and in detention camps in Java and Sulawesi, while Katharine McGregor describes the terrible pressures experienced by survivors and their supporters. John Roosa's dictionary, which offers readers insight into the mechanics of the coup itself, rounds the collection out. In these articles we get a glimpse of a terrible world that has now largely receded into memory. But the task of understanding the circumstances that could bring such misery and barbarity to a country which achieved independence with such hope for justice and prosperity remains a task for every generation.
Robert Cribb ([email protected]) is professor of History at the Australian National University and editor of the 1990 volume, The Indonesian Killings 1965-1966: Studies from Java and Bali.
Michele Ford ([email protected]) chairs the Department of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney, where she teaches about social activism and human rights in Southeast Asia.
Inside Indonesia 99: Jan-Mar 2010Soul River~ Live Fly Vol 1: Naida – The Joy Trip Project
Like many servicemen returning from war, Chad Brown found himself in a dark and troubled place. A graphic designer from Portland he struggled with deep emotional scars that made it difficult to find meaningful work and make worthwhile contributions to his community. It wasn’t until a ex-girlfriend introduced him to the sport of fly fishing that Brown discovered a way express himself and begin an amazing journey to explore not only the natural world but the urban environment in which he lives.
“Walking into a fly shop for the first time changed everything for me,” Brown said in an interview. “At the time it was very complex for me because it was new. It was something challenging.”
Taken out of his familiar world of pain and despair, he realized a productive alternative to give his life the focus and direction he longed for. And with some guidance from the man behind the counter Brown was drawn in deeper and deeper.
“The level of what he explained to me from an artistic standpoint, from a science standpoint…It was was little like going doing a rabbit hole. I was intrigued,” he said. “I dove into the sport and it became me.”
That day he bought himself a St. Croix fly rod and never looked back. He was hooked!
“I went to the VA hospital and told them I don’t want any more meds. I want to use flyfishing as my way of healing, my process,” he said. The doctors were supportive of that. That’s what gave me a smile. That was my medicine.”
In 2010 Brown created Soul River. Using his design skills to create clothing, equipment and accessories for fly fishing the new business was a direct result of his coming to terms with the trauma of his past to create a brighter future.
“Soul River is like a residue of my process of what I’m going through. The more it moved forward, the more it touched people, the progress it made it was like me healing and getting better and better.”
The sport of fly fishing and sharing it with others through his company brought Brown’s healing process full circle. It gave him a way to be productive, something that was challenging. And it allowed him to tap back into his creativity.
“And it gave me a purpose to be able to do something where instead of coming of up with a campaign for cigarettes or beer I could put it to something that I’m passionate about and what I love,” he said.
With designs targeted to appeal to an urban market Soul River aims to fulfill a very specific need in the fly fishing industry that artistically Brown describes as “bland”.
” Don’t get me wrong. There’s a rich history there and I respect it,” he said. “But it doesn’t speak to me. Plus the people I started connecting with, especially younger generations, they don’t have a voice. That’s what’s Soul River is about, speaking to those who have been overshadowed or those demographic groups, minorities, etc. To say welcome to this sport. There’s no judgement of who you are. Let’s get down the river together. Everyone can enjoy the sport.”
Reaching out to young people in his community around Portland Brown has put together a number of clinics and workshops on fly tying and casting at zero cost to participants. He works with local experts to provide specialized training to encourage kids to spend outdoors and on the water fishing. Brown also works with area veterans to provide them with the same opportunity that he was to experience the sport and perhaps heal their emotional wounds.
“It’s a program not just to teach veterans to fish but to raise their consciousness awareness to become the consciousness of an angler, a smart angler on the water. The classes range from conservation, to fly tying, etymology, river navigation. Everything they learn, they applied on the water.”
Many of the Brown’s fly clinics are taught in public spaces like coffee shops and small local cafés. He believes that it’s important to bring the sport right into the heart of his community and allow those would might otherwise never be exposed to enjoy some of the culture and the many fish stories that go along with it. In addition to fly tying Brown’s programs also include sessions of spoken word poetry meant to enrich the soul.
Soul River Chronicles Vol 1 – Live Fly “Naiad” from Soul River on Vimeo.
you see i shall talk amongst flocks of precious men women and child
movement along time like clocks lock stock and barreling down
infinite sounds along the waters that cleanse through the after
shock
set into free no more to be bound
i resound beyond tears into word
flowing down I am the euphrates the nile
the columbia run wild the willamette with style our soul…
river runs deep
and i seek through the mist once the misfit the misled the twice
living and the once dead
come into the resurrection of nature
call it this environmental nomenclature prerogative healthy, wealthy,
and wise
the size of the earth when at first the birth could not be rehearsed
value beyond worth more well than wealthy
i am the richness of the soil beneath
I am the conservation of life
the catch the release
we govern the the feast uniting the beasts of the field
the fruits and the yield
the truths are revealed
revelations across nations
peaceful contemplations
where lines are most defined within the light of rainbows
and i receive pure sight from where the moon glows and
you know like i know so we know
the sewing the growing the all that shall reap
the promise to keep
the return is the harvest and often the farthest traveled becomes the
nearest unraveled
like a knotted thread stretched out
then retracted
then stretched out again like relations amongst men
within a modern day Kiva
a circle
a cycle this is the honor believe her
she is naiad you cannot deceive her
she is the triad like trinity
or infinity times 10
and times 10 again…
she is ultimate mate my friend
… the one i shall keep, for soul…
river…
runs… deep!
So live fly, baby!
The Joy Trip Project is made possible with the support sponsors Patagonia, Rayovac and the New Belgium Brewing Company“I am alive,” is the only sentence 35-year-old Imran Shaikh is repeating to his friends, relatives and well-wishers ever since the Elphinstone bridge stampede.
On Friday, 23 commuters lost their lives in the stampede.
Owing to a misunderstanding, his name was circulated as one of the victims of the tragedy, first in media reports and later on a banner outside Elphinstone bridge.
A garment trader, Shaikh works in Dadar and used to frequently travel with his uncle Masood Alam, 38, from Parel or Dadar. “That day, I alighted at Dadar while my uncle got down at Parel,” said Shaikh.
Alam got caught in the stampede and died of suffocation and internal injuries at KEM Hospital.
“A lot of mediapersons, who enquired about my uncle, requested me to share his picture. The one photo I had was both of us together,” Shaikh added.
A flurry of calls and messages alerted Shaikh about the misunderstanding.
While a tabloid printed his picture as one of the deceased along with his uncle, local news channels also showed it in their news reports.
“Some of my friends later informed me that there is a banner put up outside the bridge, which has printed my name and picture,” Shaikh added.
While the media corrected the mistake, Shaikh has no idea what to do about the banner.
“It’s been printed by some local politician and I don’t know whom to contact,” Shaikh said.
When informed, divisional railway manager, Mukul Jain, said, “I’ll ask police personnel to check the issue.”
Western Railway officials said that they don’t know put up the banner.
“It’s wrong to misrepresent someone as the victim. But since people’s emotions are involved, we can’t remove the banner immediately, but will take necessary steps” said the officials.
.
First Published: Oct 04, 2017 00:59 ISTOPINION
WATCHING the media explode after Chris Gayle’s failed attempt to pick up Mel McLaughlin, I quickly realised I’m on the wrong side of the feminist outrage machine again.
The tendency for people to race straight for the “another example of the sexism that’s rife in today’s society” argument at times like this bores me to tears.
I’ve worked in media more than 14 years with most of my time spent at male-dominated organisations and in male-dominated shows and when things like this happen and people start claiming we’re all just poor victims of a system that refuses to accept us, it does nothing to help the situation.
There’s no doubt there are blokes in every industry, not just sport and media, who act like idiots to women.
Watching Chris Gayle, I didn’t see a powerful bloke preying on a weak woman. I saw the classic guy who’s drunk his own Kool-Aid and has the mistaken belief that he makes all women giddily nervous.
Guys like this get some ridiculous pleasure out of making a woman feel uncomfortable and it’s not predatory — it’s pathetic.
I’ve met a million of these blokes in my career and when I watched Mel on the receiving end of that comment, I was disappointed. Not because of what Chris Gayle said but because she missed a golden opportunity to say something back that would mean he’d never make that same mistake again.
I believe a woman’s reaction to a situation like this is more important and effective in stamping out the behaviour than all the whinging about the patriarchy combined.
When I’ve been in these situations I’ve never found them belittling or demoralising. I’ve found them empowering.
I used to delight in these moments because I knew the behaviour I was on the receiving end of gave me the perfect ammunition to put these idiots in their place.
I never once thought ‘Oh no! This person thinks I’m less than them’. I always thought ‘Oh wow! This person is so emotionally immature that tearing them apart is going to be easy... and fun.’
In my career I’ve been propositioned, grabbed on the arse at the photocopier (some men’s propensity for cliche truly knows no bounds), I even had one guy take all his clothes off in our office because I wasn’t paying him any attention.
People talk about women in these situations as being victims but in all these scenarios I’ve never felt more powerful because I could see these were weak, insecure, emotionally unintelligent men and putting them in their place would be an absolute cake walk.
Calling this a wider social or gender issue unfortunately doesn’t do anything to change the behaviour of blokes like this. All it does is confirm their naive and antiquated suspicions that we’re all just silly little women who can’t take a joke.
Mel said herself she’s never experienced anything but respect from men on the sidelines so this was a surprise for her. She’s not making a big deal about it and has said countless times she’d like to move on, but there are so many people who love getting outraged on a ‘victim’s’ behalf regardless of whether the ‘victim’ is outraged herself.
By jumping straight on the inequality bandwagon we’re painting a whole gender with a brush that’s coloured by a minority. For the vast majority of men I’ve worked with it’s made absolutely no difference that I’m a women. For those who it did matter to, they quickly changed their minds when they realised I wasn’t going to take the rubbish they were dishing out.
I shouldn’t have had to earn their respect that way but the reality is that once they realised I was a worthy opponent, they looked at me differently and never tried it again.
As women, we need to stop seeing ourselves as victims and start realising how much power we have to tell blokes who try and belittle us to grow the hell up.
Rachel Corbett is a writer and radio/TV presenter. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.The Worst Dictatorship You’ve Never Heard Of
Since taking power in a bloodless coup in 1994, Yahya Jammeh has presided over the worst dictatorship you’ve never heard of. The eccentric Gambian president, who performs ritual exorcisms and claims to heal everything from AIDS to infertility with herbal remedies, rules his tiny West African nation through a mix of superstition and fear. State-sanctioned torture, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary executions — these are just a few of the favored tactics employed by his notorious security and intelligence services.
Elsewhere in Africa, rights advocates have increasingly lamented a plague of “third-termism” as more and more leaders move to scrap constitutional limits in order to remain in power. But in Gambia, Jammeh will probably cruise to a fifth five-year term in elections scheduled for December. That is, of course, unless |
boost worker productivity and to distribute the company’s stock gains more evenly. Clinton said “studies show that profit sharing that gives everyone a stake in the company’s success can boost productivity and put money directly into employees’ pockets.” In a speech later this week in New Hampshire, she will have more to say on this issue.
Clinton also decried “quarterly capitalism,” or the short-termism of corporate America. Citing the declining rates of business investment in things like factories and research labs and the explosion of share buybacks and dividends, she pledged to better align corporate decisions for long-term growth. But she didn’t say how she would do that. Some potential policies can be found in a report published by the left-leaning (and Clinton-allied) Center for American Progress earlier this year. To encourage more long-term thinking by executives, the report proposed lengthening the time before executive stock options are fully vested, and limiting how many options executives can exercise. Clinton suggested other reforms that would affect corporate America, including the Buffett rule — named after billionaire Warren Buffett — that would institute a minimum tax of 30 percent on those making more than $1 million a year. She also proposed closing the carried-interest loophole, which allows those who make a bulk of their income from capital gains (such as hedge fund managers) to pay a lower overall tax rate.
Small businesses create more than 60 percent of new American jobs on net, so they have to be a top priority. I’ve said I want to be the small-business president, and I mean it. And throughout this campaign, I’m going to be talking about how we empower entrepreneurs with less red tape, easier access to capital, tax relief and simplification.
Politicians love to talk about the importance of small businesses, but economic research has found that the real drivers of job growth aren’t small businesses but new businesses: Fast-growing startups account for a disproportionate share of hiring. New companies are also key sources of innovation and productivity gains.
But entrepreneurship in the U.S. is in trouble. The rate at which Americans start new businesses has been falling for 30 years, a decline that cuts across industries and geographies. The trend may be surprising given the buzz around Uber, Airbnb and other high-profile Silicon Valley startups. But for all the talk of “disruption,” data from multiple sources suggests that the American economy has become more comfortable for big incumbent businesses and less hospitable to entrepreneurs.
Clinton’s pledge to cut red tape and provide easier access to capital could just as easily have come from a speech from one of her Republican opponents. But the truth is economists aren’t sure what’s behind the decline in startups, which makes it hard to develop policies to combat it.
Talent is universal; you find it everywhere. But opportunity is not. There are nearly 6 million young people aged 16 to 24 in America today who are not in school or at work. The numbers for young people of color are particularly staggering. A quarter of young black men and nearly 15 percent of all Latino youth cannot find a job.
Clinton’s decision to highlight young people who are neither working nor in school is notable because it’s an economic measure that tends to get relatively little attention in the U.S. In Europe, the concept is so widely discussed that even mainstream news outlets routinely refer to “NEETs,” short for “not in employment, education or training.” In some European countries such as Greece and Italy, more than 30 percent of people ages 20 to 24 are NEETs.
The problem isn’t nearly as severe in the U.S., but it is still significant. Nearly 19 percent of American 20- to 24-year-olds were neither working nor in school in 2013, according to OECD data. That’s little better than in the worst of the recession and is up from 15.5 percent in 2005. And as Clinton said, the numbers are far worse for many minority groups. OECD doesn’t break down its data by race, but according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 22 percent of black men ages 16 to 24 are neither in school nor working, compared with 16 percent of all Americans in that age group.Cadbury Caramello
Milk Chocolate & Creamy Caramel
Caramello is a milk chocolate candy bar with a caramel center.
You can break it into sections (my test bar had six sections).
If you break the sections precisely (difficult without using a knife) the caramel in each section will probably still be completely enrobed in chocolate.
This bar was first introduced in the UK in 1976, and was known as Cadbury Caramel. In the U.S., it has been manufactured by Hershey since 1988, under license from Cadbury UK Ltd.
When I was young, I didn't like caramels. But - as I later discovered - that was because the little cellophane-wrapped caramels I knew at the time were so hard they could pull the fillings right out of your teeth. (How do you think I know that?)
When I later encountered softer caramel, I loved it.
The caramel filling in a Caramello bar is at the other extreme. It's almost closer to caramel sauce than it is to hard caramel candy. In fact, were it not restrained by its milk chocolate jacket, it might - depending on the temperature - just flow out into the wrapper. Okay slowly, but still - don't eat one of these were being messy could be highly embarrassing!
Ingredients and Nutrition
This bar might be a good choice if you:
• Like milk chocolate
• Like caramel
• Don't insist on firmer, never-runny caramel
• Don't want to pay two to four (or more) times as much for a gourmet version, and
• Don't mind that it has a little artificial chemistry.
The ingredients in this bar are better than average for popular chocolate candy. Better, but not best. There are one or two "chemical" ingredients. Definitely one, because PGPR (polyglycerol polyricinoleate) is a highly processed derivative of bean oil(s). Possibly two because we can't tell from the label exactly what artificial flavor went into this bar. Okay, here's what happens to your diet when you buy this chocolate bar in "King Size." It has 360 calories, 140 of them (39%) from fat.
INGREDIENTS:
MILK CHOCOLATE(
• SUGAR;
• MILK;
• COCOA BUTTER;
• CHOCOLATE;
• LACTOSE;
• SOY LECITHIN;
• PGPR, EMULSIFIER;
• NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR);
CORN SYRUP;
INVERT SUGAR;
MILK FAT;
NONFAT MILK;
CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF:
• ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR;
• SODIUM BICARBONATE;
• SALT.
ALLERGY INFORMATION: MANUFACTURED ON THE SAME EQUIPMENT THAT PROCESSES TREE NUTS.
Ingredient quantity = 15
In the big picture of popular chocolate though, this bar is of above average nutritional quality, for two reasons:
• There appear to be only two synthetic chemicals (some bars have several more)
• Perhaps more importantly, this bar has no hydrogenated oil.
I do like Caramello. But hey, I've been known to pour chocolate sauce and caramel sauce on the same dish of ice cream!
I paid $1.79 for this 2.7 ounce bar. For comparison purposes, that's $10.61 per pound. Just about in the middle of the pricing range for popular chocolate bars.
I'm giving this my personal score of 3.6 out of 5 stars for Overall Enjoyment, 3.4 for Nutrition, and 4.0 for Value. Keep in mind this is just my personal opinion. Your mileage may vary, and there's no accounting for taste.
Now you know what a Caramello bar is.
Any questions? You know where my Contact Page is!
Home Chocolate Bars Caramello (top)
Norwegian goat cheese is brown in color because its milk sugars have been partially caramelized. Gjetost - pronounced "YAY toast."THIS OLD GIRL ENDED HER LIFE ON MARCH 15, 2002. COULD HAVE KILLED MY BUDDY WHEN SHE FAILED. I SHOT THIS RIFLE ALL MORNING AND LET MY GOOD FRIEND SHOOT THE NEXT 5. AT ROUND NO. 4, BOOM! THE RIFLE CAME APART IN 2 PIECES. THE 5TH ROUND WAS? I WAS LOOKING OVER HIS SHOULDER AT THE TIME, A PIECE OF THE STOCK STRUCK ME IN THE HEAD, KNOCKING MY CAP OFF AND I WENT TO MY KNEES, ALMOST KNOCKED ME OUT! SUPER "GOOSE EGG". MY FRIENDS FACE WAS ALL BLOODY, AND I FEARED THE WORST. I GOT HIM TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM ASAP, ABOUT A HALF HOUR AWAY. GOOD NEWS, HE TURNED OUT FINE BUT HAVE THOSE OLD RIFLES CHECKED FOR HEAT TREAT CRACKS, I KNOW I WILL. THANKS, LOUIE. VIETNAM COMBAT VET. NO FFL REQUIRED FOR THIS ONE. (OBVIOUSLY, FOR CALIFORNIA PEOPLE, "LIKE DUH!") THIS HAS GENERATED MORE TRAFFIC AT MY GUN SHOW TABLES THAN ANYTHING. THIS IS A PIECE OF HISTORY, NOT JUST A 'JUNK' RIFLE. WOULD MAKE A COOL WALL OR COUNTER DISPLAY. THANKS AGAIN, LOUIE.
Read MoreProtip: The camera doesn’t automatically turn off when the reporter kicks it to the studio with a “back to you.”
As you can see in the clip above, that’ll apparently be news to Rep. Michael Grimm, a New York Republican facing an investigation into possible campaign finance violations. During a post-SOTU interview Tuesday night, Grimm walked off camera after it became clear that NY1 reporter Michael Scotto planned to ask about the allegations. After Scotto tossed it back to the studio—but with the camera still rolling—Grimm can then be seen walking back into (and through) the shot to aggressively confront Scotto for daring to ask a follow-up question about something other than President Obama’s address.
It’s hard to make out exactly what the congressman says to Scotto in the clip, but at one point it sounds as though he warns, “I’ll break you in half.” According to the write-up on the station’s website, that was only part of the threat. Here’s the transcript of the off-camera exchange, as transcribed by NY1:
Grimm: “Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I’ll throw you off this f—–g balcony.”
Scotto: “Why? I just wanted to ask you…”
[[cross talk]]
Grimm: “If you ever do that to me again…”
Scotto: “Why? Why? It’s a valid question.”
[[cross talk]]
Grimm: “No, no, you’re not man enough, you’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.”
Grimm later released a statement explaining—but not apologizing for—his actions. “I was extremely annoyed because I was doing NY1 a favor by rushing to do their interview first in lieu of several other requests,” the Staten Island rep said in a prepared statement. “The reporter knew that I was in a hurry and was only there to comment on the State of the Union, but insisted on taking a disrespectful and cheap shot at the end of the interview, because I did not have time to speak off-topic.”
He continued: “I verbally took the reporter to task and told him off, because I expect a certain level of professionalism and respect, especially when I go out of my way to do that reporter a favor. I doubt that I am the first Member of Congress to tell off a reporter, and I am sure I won’t be the last.”
Update Wed. Jan. 29: Grimm has now apologized. I doubt it will be the last time.
***Follow @JoshVoorhees and the rest of the @slatest team on Twitter.***
This post has been updated to include more information as it became available.Russia and Iran held talks over the weekend regarding $10 billion worth of electricity deals, reported the New York Times, seeking to establish a closer partnership to undercut the efficacy of sanctions imposed on both nations by the U.S..
Under the proposed deal, the Russians could export up to 500 megawatts of electricity to Iran and construct new thermal and hydroelectric generating plants and a transmission network.
According to NYT, the terms of the deal were being discussed by Iran’s energy minister Hamid Chitchian and his Russian counterpart, Alexander Novak, who was on a state visit to Iran.
Chitchian emphasised “the need for further expansion of economic ties between Tehran and Moscow, particularly in the energy and commerce spheres.”
“[Expansion of] Iran-Russia relations are not only to the benefit of the two nations, but also are beneficial to entire region,” added Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, as cited by Russia Today.
Additionally, Moscow has been in talks with Tehran to barter 500,000 barrels a day of Iranian oil for Russian goods. The deal, worth as much as $20 billion, has rattled Washington because it could bring Iran's crude exports above a one-million-barrels-a-day threshold agreed in the nuclear deal between the P5+1 powers – U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany – and Iran.
Related: Are International Sanctions Against Iran Counterproductive?: Gail Tverberg
Related: Will Russian Sanctions Compromise Global Energy Security?
Officials at the United States Treasury Department did not immediately respond to NYT queries on whether the Russia-Iran energy deal would technically violate the sanctions imposed on both nations.
The Iranian energy talks, which come amid mounting international pressure on Moscow over its annexation of Crimea, are a way for Russia to remind Western nations of its international clout, a Russian official told the Wall Street Journal.According to Google, you'll get a different photo on every screen connected to your Mac, so your ridiculous 5k monitor setup will be more like a posh gallery than a posh desktop work environment. The app only pulls from publicly shared, high-res photos that don't feature people, so you can expect a lot of tranquil nature and soothing landscape photos. Google also helpfully includes the photographer's username so you can track them down to check out more of their work.
If you're on Android, Google's earlier Wallpapers app will also let you set your phone to shuffle through the same set of popular photos on the home or lock screen. And if you're a budding photographer trying to get your work in front of the thousands of screensaver users out there, you just need to follow these guidelines and then post a picture that gets a lot of +1s. If you find yourself short on Google+ friends, Google product manager Neil Inala wrote in his blog post that joining the company's Google+ Create program will also give you a leg up.We depend on your support. A generous gift in any amount helps us continue to bring you this service.
A short-form documentary from Navajo Nation highlighted the problem with lack of clean water for many residents.
Vice News traveled to the Navajo Nation, where at least 40 percent of residents lack clean running water.
As a whole, 99 percent of Americans have access to clean running water.
Reporter Neha Shastry spoke to residents as well as George McGraw, the founder of DIGDEEP Water. The non-profit seeks access to clean water for those in underdeveloped parts of the world—the project on the Navajo Nation was the first in the United States for the non-profit.
The problem with contaminated water can be traced back to uranium mining, decades ago. Many wells are contaminated and not safe for consumption, which means many residents must travel miles to get water for their homes.
The cost of infrastructure to get running water to every resident is estimated to be in the billions of dollars.“Turns out the burning was just my anal cyst flaring up.”
Rush 20:12
... And so the American voters showed no mercy to the Republicans and ordered that they be driven from power. The Republicans suffered mightily during this time of political famine and struggled against the country’s hardened heart.
Dismayed by the wailings of his people, Rush remained steadfast in his pursuit of bearing false witness against the country. He awoke, awash in a pool of his own vomitus, to hear a voice proclaim that he was the True Leader of the indentured Republican Party.
The Republicans rejoiced, embracing their new leader, obeisant to his wise dictates.
And so it was written that Rush was called to the southern oasis to devise a new plan for the party’s rebirth.
Accompanied by his brothers Sean and Glenn, Rush fled to South Beach to "see God," leaving John the Tannest to rule over the Republicans. He bade John to lead the party in his absence and to obstruct all laws that the rulers might try to pass.
Rush and his followers encamped at his mansion complex in Miami for 40 nights. On the fortieth night, he sought out Ann the Fraudulent.
‘Have you heardeth what is going on back in D.C.?’ she asked. "In your absence the Republicans have wandered far afield. They have been misled by a person called Steele and are praying to a false idol named Cantor."
Rush was angered mightily and demanded from Ann the Fraudulent two tablets of Percocet. Rush saw etched upon the tablets ten precepts that his people were to follow. He clutched the tablets to his chest and returned to the north, where he discovered his followers had indeed gone astray under the guidance of Steele. Rush mocked and derided them and asked why they had broken their pledge to him. They wept and rent their mantles, crying that Steele had asked them to discard their old ways and to follow the God of Moderately Big Tents.
Rush held aloft the Tablets of Percocet, telling his people that they were not worthy. John the Tannest, despairing, burst forth into tears and begged for forgiveness.
Rush forgave John, and then turned to Steele. "Begone," said Rush. "You will remain an untouchable all your life, and Hell shall be your destination."
Rush warned his people that those who repudiated His Commandments and the judgment to come were bound to meet their doom; no one would be able to save them then. And Rush spake all these words, saying
And so it was written. And so it shall be done.As I watched the last eight quarters of the New England Patriots—four against Oakland, four against Kansas City—this week, I thought back to a game Brett Favre played once. This was in January 2002, and the Packers were getting smoked by the Greatest Show on Turf in St. Louis in a divisional playoff game.
With 11 minutes left and the Packers down by 28, Favre, knowing the only way his team had a prayer to climb back into the game was by scoring fast, started taking ill-advised, low-percentage chances. Three more interceptions in eight minutes followed, and a 45-17 Green Bay loss was sealed.
With 11 minutes left Monday in Kansas City, and the Patriots down by 27, Tom Brady, knowing the only chance his team had was to score fast, took an ill-advised, low-percentage chance. He threw late to an in-cutting Danny Amendola—who wasn’t going to be open anyway—about 15 yards downfield, and Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah picked it off and ran 39 yards for a touchdown.
The Patriots have three problems right now on offense, the least of which is Tom Brady. Now, Brady’s not playing well—there’s no doubt about it. But a quarterback can be great only when the complimentary pieces around him are in place, and playing well. And his line and receivers aren’t helping him enough right now. (Not to mention the defense, which got steamrolled in Kansas City, surrendering three 80-yard-plus scoring drives.) The Chiefs won, 41-14.
Bengals coach Marvin Lewis is 1-4 all-time against the Patriots, but the lone win came last season. (Joe Robbins/Getty Images) Bengals coach Marvin Lewis is 1-4 all-time against the Patriots, but the lone win came last season. (Joe Robbins/Getty Images)
It is not a good time for the only unbeaten team in the AFC, Cincinnati (3-0), to be visiting the 2-2 Patriots on Sunday night. And New England will be getting the rested Bengals, coming off their Week 4 bye, while the Patriots are working on a short week. But that is not a big concern for Bill Belichick right now. His totally out-of-sync offense is.
On Thursday, I asked Cincinnati coach Marvin Lewis what he saw when he watched the Patriots on offense right now, and I thought he hit it just right: “They had a bad game on the road against a team that’s very tough to beat at home. You turn the ball over in this league, and you’re usually going to lose. I still think they have a great quarterback in Tom Brady. He still has the ability to stand in the pocket and play as well as anybody. But the things they’ve done with play-action in the past just aren’t there now, and they’ve got some young guys who are learning on the job. That isn’t easy."
The question now: Can the Patriots’ line plug the leaks, and can the receiver group start to get the separation it needs, on the fly as New England heads into three games in 12 days, all against good pressure teams: Cincinnati on Sunday night, at Buffalo the following Sunday, and the Jets at home four nights later?
We’ll start with the first problem: the transient offensive line. Just for this week, I’m stealing a section of the Monday column to start the Friday column. Here goes …
Stat of the Week
According to the NFL video-dissectors at Pro Football Focus, the best and worst at pass-protection will be meeting in Foxboro Sunday night. The numbers:
Team Sacks/Hits/Pressures Average per Game NFL Rank Cincinnati 10 3.3 1 New England 55 13.8 32
The Bengals have played one game fewer, but you get the point. Andy Dalton’s been able to make, and eat, a ham sandwich back in the pocket. Tom Brady’s under the gun more than he’s been in any season of his career.
The real debacle game for the Patriots wasn’t Monday night in Kansas City; it was the previous week, at home, in the 16-9 survival bowl against Oakland. The Raiders stink, but they looked like the Lyle Alzado/Ted Hendricks marauders in Week 3 against the Patriots. So awful were the leaks, particularly in the middle of the line, that Belichick ordered an incredible makeover before the Monday night game. From left to right against Oakland, the Patriots started: Nate Solder, Marcus Cannon, Dan Connolly, Jordan Devey and Sebastian Vollmer. That changed against Kansas City to this, from left tackle to right tackle: Solder, Connolly, rookie fourth-round pick Bryan Stork, rookie fourth-round compensatory pick Cameron Fleming, and Vollmer—with Cannon playing 20 snaps at tackle, nine at left tackle with Solder going to the bench, and 11 at right tackle with Vollmer going to the bench. Think of how desperate New England was. Every position on the line was shaken up. To do that before a game at Arrowhead Stadium, one of the toughest places for a visiting team to play because of the intense crowd noise, shows how bad Belichick and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels thought the line play was against Oakland.
Pats' Problems Can Be Fixed What's wrong with the Patriots? Plenty, but the good news is it all can be fixed. Andy Benoit explains how. FULL STORY Blame Belichick for some of that, for not being able to find a way to keep Logan Mankins, the leader of the group, traded 11 days before the start of the season to Tampa Bay because he wouldn’t accept a pay cut. Part of the reason, too, has to be the retirement of one of the best line coaches ever, Dante Scarnecchia, in the off-season; journeyman coach Dave DeGuglielmo took his spot.
Blame Belichick, too, for the player acquisition. Of the 20 players New England has picked in the top three rounds of the past five drafts, one (Solder, first round, 2011) has been an offensive lineman. Two—Dobson (second round, 2013); Taylor Price (third round, 2010)—have been wideouts. Dobson was the 59th pick last year and has been a healthy scratch the past two weeks. Price is long gone. He had zero impact in New England.
Those decisions are coming home to roost, along with the only money free-agent signing at wideout—Amendola—who hasn’t produced anything like the man he replaced, Wes Welker. And Rob Gronkowski is still coming back from Jan. 8 knee surgery. Gronkowski has played just 53 percent of the snaps so far, and on Thursday bristled at suggestions he wasn’t ready to play more. His percentage of plays should continue to rise.
* * *
What I saw against Kansas City was a C-minus performance by the line. Not a disaster, but not a winning game. The Chiefs opened the game with six defensive backs on the field, which said two things: defensive coordinator Bob Sutton thought he could get pressure with four rushers because of the weak Patriots line, and extra men to shadow Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman would cut down Brady’s open options. Right on both counts. On third-and-three at the Pats’ 34 with 2:43 left in the half, down 14-0, the Patriots were still very much in the game. The Chiefs rushed four, with Dontari Poe beating left guard Connolly to the inside and Justin Houston beating right guard Fleming. At center, Stork helped neither guard, rotating his head to look for a man to help but deciding too slowly and helping no one. Brady barely slipped through the Poe/Houston rush at him and ran forward; he easily could have run and slid for the first down, but instead threw to Edelman. Cornerback Marcus Cooper made a diving pass-breakup. New England had to punt, and Kansas City added a field goal before halftime.
The key Sunday night: score early. If the Patriots get behind and the Bengals can send extra rushers at Brady because he has to throw too much, it’ll be curtains for New England.
Brady looked to be at fault on both second-half interceptions. Edelman stopped short on a intermediate route up the left sideline, and Brady instead threw where Edelman would have been had he kept running. Edelman sat down in an open spot; Brady threw to a covered spot. Sean Smith intercepted. That’s probably a Brady error. On the Abdullah pick, the only chance Brady had to complete it was to throw it before Amendola was two steps into his cut, so Abdullah wouldn’t have such an easy play. But Brady waited, and it was an easy interception.
Our Andy Benoit wrote this week that the Patriots’ problems are fixable, and I agree. A couple of things stuck out from watching the tape against the Chiefs: Brandon LaFell can be a decent threat. At 6-2 and 210, he’s tall and athletic, competes for the ball well; he has just medium speed but good instincts. And the receivers, mostly, are not separating well right now. With Brady having to rush his throws and receivers usually very close to the coverage, that’s a recipe for interceptions and more incompletions than usual. Really, if Edelman and LaFell stay healthy, and if Gronkowski starts playing 70 percent of the snaps, Brady’s going to stand a better chance, starting Sunday night.
Brandon LaFell is coming off a six-catch, 119-yard performance in Week 4. (Jim Davis/Getty Images) Brandon LaFell is coming off a six-catch, 119-yard performance in Week 4. (Jim Davis/Getty Images)
The fact that Stork and Fleming had a couple of rough moments apiece but weren’t turnstiles consistently Monday night is good news. The Bengals don’t have as penetrating a defensive front (with Geno Atkins struggling a bit coming back from his ACL surgery) as Kansas City’s, and the Cincinnati front seven has but 4.5 sacks in three games so far.
The key Sunday night: score early. If the Patriots get behind and the Bengals can send extra rushers at Brady because he’s got to throw too much, it’ll be curtains for New England. The line might be improving from the Oakland nadir, but it’s still an Achilles heel for the Patriots, and will be until Stork and Fleming (who has a hand injury and is iffy for Sunday night anyway) learn the NFL game on the fly.
Last point: The Patriots are in the weakest division in football, and they’ve been here before. Recently, in fact. In 2012, New England was 1-2, and losing at halftime of Week 4, 21-7 at Buffalo. The Patriots went on to win that game, and they finished the year 12-4, winning the division by five games.
I can’t predict the same thing will happen this year. The line is too worrisome. In fact, I think if they win the division, it’ll be more of a 9-7 fight-to-the-death-thing. But watching Brady and Belichick over the years, I've seen some embarrassing days that they’ve overcome. There’s reason to think this slide could be worse, particularly against pressure defenses. Gronkowski has to play more, and Shane Vereen has to be more a part of the offensive attack, in the screen and play-action game. And Brady has to stay relatively clean.
It’s only Week 5. But this is a big game for the Patriots. Even if they lose, they have to be in this game late, and play competitively on offense. “We have to do a good job defending the passing lanes, and we have to dictate where they throw it,’’ Marvin Lewis said Thursday. When Brady is on, he usually has had enough options if, say, Gronkowski is consistently doubled. New England has to develop LaFell into another consistent option. And that takes time, which New England doesn’t have right now. Sunday night will be a fascinating game.
Eddie Lacy ran through the Vikings defense for 105 yards on 13 carries in the Packers' 42-10 win Thursday night. (John Konstantaras/Getty Images) Eddie Lacy ran through the Vikings defense for 105 yards on 13 carries in the Packers' 42-10 win Thursday night. (John Konstantaras/Getty Images)
About Last Night
Green Bay 42, Minnesota 10. Average margin of five Thursday night games this year: 29.0 points. So there will be calls for the Thursday games to go away. Well, if the reason is because you think the Thursday games are unfair to players who can’t recover in time to play four days after a Sunday game, that’s good logic, and you’ll have the players on your side. But if you think it’s because the games either unfairly favor the home team or something else, you won’t be right. A five-game stretch is just not enough to draw a conclusion that playing on Thursday unfairly leads to blowouts. Last year, for instance, home teams were 10-7 in Thursday games, which is not out of order with the percentage of home-team victories in the NFL. And the final nine Thursday games last season were decided by 7, 7, 2, 7, 30, 4, 3, 7 and 2 points. Who knows what the future holds this year, but with Indianapolis-Houston, Jets-New England, San Diego-Denver and New Orleans-Carolina coming up, I can’t see many 42-10 games on the horizon.
Player You Need To Know This Weekend
Odell Beckham Jr., wide receiver, New York Giants (number 13). The longest hamstring injury in recent NFL history seems to have healed—at least well enough for Beckham, the 12th pick in last May’s draft, to see his first action Sunday against the Atlanta Falcons in New Jersey. “I’m not limited at all," Beckham said Wednesday. The Giants need Beckham, with Matt Ryan and his cast of weapons coming to town. Victor Cruz and Larry Donnell will be better with one of the most dangerous rookies to enter the league this year in the fold. He practiced well Wednesday, and the Giants expect him to make his debut in a limited receiving role Sunday afternoon.
• PETER KING: One Giant Discovery—Meet New York's Larry Donnell
Bose Sound Bite of the Week
Ravens receiver Steve Smith Sr., during last week's revenge game against his former team, the Panthers:
“Ready for a sound bite? Here we go. This is the nail hitting in the coffin. You’re dead. Take your ass back to Carolina. Make sure you mow my lawn too while you’re out there! Keep it clean for me."
[audio mp3="https://www.si.com/sites/default/files/audio/mmqb/2014/10/steve-smith-mow-my-lawn.mp3"][/audio]
Regular Old Quote of the Week
“He doesn’t even have the cojones to tell us to our face [about being released last spring]. We have to hear it from someone else. Then he calls and says it wasn’t personal. If the first thing that comes out is, ‘Well it wasn’t personal,’ then guess what? It was personal.”
—Baltimore receiver Steve Smith Sr., on Carolina GM Dave Gettleman, to WFNZ radio in Charlotte.
Ten Things I’ll Be Watching For This Weekend
Alex Smith (Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images) Alex Smith (Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images)
1. Alex Smith returning to the scene of the … Well, forget the wise cracks. Smith actually has never played at the stadium he’ll be playing in Sunday, Levi’s Stadium; he played 38 miles up the coast in Candlestick for the first eight years of his career. But he’ll be playing against the coach who benched him late in the Super Bowl season two years ago in favor of Colin Kaepernick. Even though Smith is a Joe Cool kind of guy, mature way beyond his years, and he won’t fly off a la Steve Smith-versus-Carolina, you can be sure that deep down he wants to win this game 63-0, with nine touchdown passes. Never will you hear anything anti-Niner out of him. “One of the classiest people I’ve ever been around," Kaepernick said this week.
2. How long the Jets stick with Geno Smith. There’s an inevitability in the air in New Jersey these days. Mike Vick’s bound to replace Smith at quarterback for the Jets. Could it happen 3,000 miles away, in the face of a hard pass-rush led by Dwight Freeney in San Diego? We’ll see. But I continue to think the Jets are talking brave about being solidly behind Smith. But with the Chargers, Broncos and Patriots coming in 12 days starting Sunday, Rex Ryan knows three losses here mean the Jets’ season would be over by Oct. 16. So, a shaky Smith on Sunday could lead to the quarterback change.
3. A feisty Kyle Orton taking the reins from EJ Manuel in Buffalo. Asked Wednesday why he felt he would run the Buffalo offense better than E.J. Manuel, who is being benched after four games, the well-traveled Orton said: “I’m not saying that I will. That’s a loaded question. That’s a crap question." Okay then.
4. Jim Schwartz game-planning for Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson. Well, who would know them any better than the man who head-coached Stafford for every game he ever played in the NFL until this season? Schwartz, now Buffalo's defensive coordinator, brings the Bills to Detroit on Sunday.
5. Peyton Manning chasing Favre. Really good game Sunday in Denver—3-0 Cards at 2-1 Broncos. Manning’s next touchdown pass will be the 500th of his NFL life. Brett Favre has the most, with 508. “That particular statistic usually leads to winning football games," Manning said. "That’s what I’ve always thought about. As far as the other thing, when asked about it, obviously you’re just trying to win this football game, but when asked about it, I have reflected on how many great teammates and coaches that I have been with along the way that have been a part of that. You don’t throw that many touchdowns without a lot of help."
Why London? In the eighth year of regular-season games in the U.K., the NFL is edging closer to a permanent team there. Does it make sense? Jenny Vrentas crossed the pond to find out. FULL STORY 6. The slump of LeSean McCoy. Last two games: 29 carries, 39 rushing yards. The offensive line is all beat up, and the Eagles have a formidable front coming to town to test McCoy in the form of St. Louis’ young guns. “Mike Tyson said, ‘Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the face,'" said Chip Kelly this week. “We got hit in the face and we've got to respond to it."
7. Houston (3-1) at Dallas (3-1): The reason I hate the NFL schedule. Great matchup, could be a great rivalry. But it isn’t. Why? The Cowboys and Texans, the only two NFL teams in a football-mad state, play each other once every four years and that is all! The NFL needs to make provisions so that the great regional rivalries can actually flourish instead of laying dormant with four years passing between AFC-NFC meetings.
8. Tony Sparano won’t be on a bye this weekend. He’s wanted another head-coaching chance, and even though the Raiders are the 33rd-best opportunity in pro football (hey, there has to be an Arena League job that’s better), Sparano will work himself back into contention for a head-coaching chance either in Oakland or elsewhere by winning four or five games in an impossible situation. That's why he’ll be working this weekend, even as his players are off.
9. The NFL prepping for a big league meeting next week. One owner told me this could be the biggest meeting in years. We’ll see what Roger Goodell has to say to his bosses, and to America.
• ANDREW |
latest in April, when clashes left dozens dead.Square has fared pretty well in the mobile payments business, and now the company, founded by Jack Dorsey, is preparing to go public. As part of that process, Square has given potential investors a deeper look at the risks and uncertainties that it regularly contends with. And while Square hasn't dealt with too many unforeseen crises, one case mentioned in the company's S1 filing stands out. A scammer who posed as a seller of travel vouchers on Square has cost the company millions. $5.7 million, to be specific — though that number may be Square citing the worst-case outcome. BuzzFeed News did some digging and discovered that the person responsible is 30-year-old Patricia Urbanovsky, who used Square under the name of Creative Creations, her events planning company based in Nebraska.
This wasn't exactly what you'd call a genius criminal scheme. Urbanovsky sold "bogus discounted travel vouchers," according to the report, and when buyers demanded refunds, Creative Creations ignored the requests and never paid anything back. That left Square on the hook, since the company admits that it's often ultimately responsible for chargebacks and making things right with buyers who are targets of fraud. Square told Omaha police that it processed over $7 million in card payments from Creative Creations between last October and March, according to BuzzFeed News, and so far it's had to eat $2.8 million in chargeback fees. At least 1,500 customers allegedly fell for the ploy, and both the FBI and IRS are now investigating the case.
It's very unlikely that Urbanovsky will come up with the money necessary to cover millions in refunds, her frustrated lawyer admitted to BuzzFeed News. “This is a case that I didn’t charge enough money for,” he said. Square has already said it'll "take the loss" brought on by the scheme. Square's loss rate for transactions is typically lower than rivals like PayPal, so it's not like the company gets suckered to this extent very often. But it's still an embarrassing black eye for Square as it heads for an IPO and a new era in the company's history.December 13, 2011 2:19 pm ET — Jamison Foser
The Tax Policy Center estimates that Newt Gingrich's tax plan would "lower federal tax liability by $1.28 trillion in calendar year 2015 compared with current law, roughly a 35 percent cut in total projected revenue." A whopping 35.4 percent of the total tax cuts would go to people earning at least $1 million per year — that's a $453 billion giveaway to millionaires and billionaires like Gingrich.
So how much is $453 billion?
It's more than twice as much as the $205 billion deficit the Congressional Budget Office projects for 2015.
It's $1 billion more than the entire 2011 Medicare budget, which provides health care for 47 million people.
It's enough to pay off nearly half of all outstanding student loan debt.
It's enough to give each of the roughly 10 million "working poor" — those who spend at least 27 weeks a year in the labor force, but whose incomes fall at or below the poverty level — $45,300 each.
It's enough to give the nation's three million graduating high school seniors $100,000 each to pay for college or job training and to give $15,000 to each of the 10 million working poor to lift them out of poverty.
If that all sounds shockingly redistributive, that's the point: Gingrich's tax plan takes $453 billion that is currently scheduled to pay for things like food stamps and bridges and schools, and gives it to people who make at least $1 million a year. That's shockingly redistributive. Except that instead of helping people pay for food and college and health care and to rise out of poverty, Gingrich's redistribution gives nearly half a trillion dollars in a single year to millionaires and billionaires.Star Touched
By either an ancient ritual, or a birthright passed down through generations, you are able to use magic that reflects the power of stars. This magic, both old and powerful, can shape worlds or destroy them, and lets you shine the light from above down onto those who would face you.
Star Origin Spells
Sorcerer Level Spell 1st guiding bolt 3rd darkness 5th melf’s minute meteors 7th banishment 9th contact other plane 11th sunbeam
Stardust
Starting when you choose this origin at 1st level, your the power of starlight is ingrained into your magic, and it shines as it does. Whenever you cast a spell of 1st level or higher, you can summon a mote of starlight at a point within 30 feet of you. The number of motes you create increases to 2 at 6th level, 3 at 14th level, and 4 at 18th level.
This mote sheds bright light in a 10 foot radius, and dim light for an additional 10 feet. The mote lasts for a minute, and vanishes if you move further than 120 feet away from it. You can have a maximum number of motes equal to your Charisma modifier + half your sorcerer level, rounded down.
While a hostile creature is standing in the bright light created by the mote, it is unable to take reactions, dazzled by the light the mote creates.
Guiding Lights
Also at 1st level, your attunement to the stars allows you to find your way. While you can see the night sky, you gain advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks to navigate, and you always know which way is north.
Flicker
Starting at 6th level, you gain greater control over the motes you create. You can use your bonus action to move a mote within 60 feet of you up to 20 feet in any direction.
Additionally, you can cause a mote to explode in a flash of light, or fade into a cloud of dust. As an action on your turn, you can spend 2 sorcery points and destroy a mote to cast pyrotechnics, with the mote counting as an area of fire for the purposes of the spell, centred on the mote's location.
Brilliant Light
At 6th level your cosmic magic allows you to manipulate your other spells. Whenever you cast a spell that deals damage, you can substitute one of the damage types it deals with radiant damage for that casting of the spell. Once you use this feature, you must finish a short rest before you can do so again.
Shifting Cosmos
At 14th level, as a bonus action, you can spend 1 sorcery point to teleport up to 60 feet to an empty space within 10 feet of one of your motes.
Shooting Stars
At 18th level, you can now wield the destructive power of the cosmos, allowing you to cause your motes to detonate in a brilliant flash of destructive energy. As an action on your turn, you can cause any number of your motes to rush to a creature within 120 feet of you, spending 1 sorcery point for each mote.
The creature must make a Dexterity saving throw, taking 2d10 radiant damage per mote and be blinded until the start of its next turn on a failed save, and half as much damage on a successful one.After the marijuana-policy-reform movement's huge victories in Colorado and Washington on November 6, many people are asking, "What states will be next to enact measures to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol?" (We refer to these as "T&R" bills or initiatives.)
It is important to note that this pair of 55 percent victories would have been less resounding had they appeared on the ballot during a midterm election. Presidential elections traditionally attract far more voters, many of whom are younger and more supportive of T&R than older voters. And when there are more voters, there tends to be more support shown for ending marijuana prohibition.
With that in mind, here is what the Marijuana Policy Project will be pursuing from 2013 to 2016.
1. Alaska: Unfortunately, Alaska law currently only allows voter initiatives to be placed on the primary election ballot, so we will attempt to pass a T&R initiative in August 2014. Fortunately, Alaska voters have traditionally been more supportive of T&R than voters in any other state. Only 100,000 Alaskans are expected to vote in August 2014, so the universe of voters we need to persuade is quite small.
2. Rhode Island: MPP separately legalized medical marijuana and decriminalized marijuana possession in Rhode Island in 2009 and 2012, respectively. We're now lobbying the state legislature to pass a T&R bill, which could very well happen in 2014 or 2015. Regardless of which year this happens, Rhode Island will almost certainly be the first state to pass a T&R measure through the state legislature.
3. Maine: I just returned to D.C. from Maine, where I met with leading activists, political consultants, and state Rep. Diane Russell (D), who's the lead sponsor of the T&R bill in Augusta. If we fail to pass her bill during the 2013, 2014, or 2015 legislative sessions, we'll place a T&R initiative on the November 2016 ballot. As a way of demonstrating public support before 2016, we intend to pass local ballot initiatives in Portland and two or three other cities in November 2014.
4. Oregon: Oregon is similar to Maine, in that we're working with leading activists to pass a T&R bill through the state legislature during the 2013 or 2015 legislative sessions. If the measure falls short, we will place a T&R initiative on the November 2016 ballot. MPP already hired a consultant in Portland to coordinate this four-year plan.
5. California: There is already a consensus that our movement should work over the next four years toward the goal of passing a T&R initiative in California in November 2016. The ACLU is coordinating the public-education effort over the next three years, and then MPP and the Drug Policy Alliance will probably end up leading the ballot-initiative campaign.
6. Massachusetts: The voters of Massachusetts passed MPP's decriminalization initiative in November 2008 with 65 percent of the vote, and then they followed up by legalizing medical marijuana on November 6 with 63 percent of the vote. Many Massachusetts citizens and legislators assume that marijuana will eventually be legalized in Massachusetts; it's just a question of when. The answer is "November 2016."
7. Nevada: MPP failed to pass a pair of ballot initiatives in Nevada in November 2002 and November 2006 with 39 percent and 44 percent of the vote, respectively. Support nationwide has been increasing by about 1.5 percent per year, so we could probably pass a T&R initiative tomorrow if we were permitted to place it on the ballot today. Because that's not possible, we're planning to pass an initiative in November 2016.
The themes here are pretty clear.
First, the next states to end marijuana prohibition will be in New England and the West. Second, everything is trending in our direction, and most people now agree that marijuana will eventually be legalized nationwide.Callister Brewing – The Home of Individual Brewing Expression by by Dustan Sept February 28, 2016
Four Unique Takes On Craft Beer Under One Roof at Callister Brewing
Callister Brewing is no typical brewery, it is no typical business and the people that are behind the idea – are by now means typical. With more than 120 breweries operating in British Columbia, Callister has taken a unique and refreshing path to running their business.
The easiest way to define what Callister is doing is to call them a brewery co-op; but, that wouldn’t really be correct.
The outside of the building is labelled Callister Brewing Company, and if you were to dig through business licenses and BCLDB records that is what you will find there as well. Stepping into the building though, you will find another story. Callister is front and centre as the ringleader but there are an additional three “breweries” operating out of the space. Machine Ales, Brewery Creek and Real Cask Ales each have a time-share of sorts where they can brew their own beers on site.
The four different brewing companies take turns using the brewhouse and have dedicated tanks for their own brews. The result is a dozen+ different brews on tap for tasting and growler fills with a very broad array of styles. Each of the four breweries has a different brewmaster and takes a very different approach to their beers. This gives a very diverse range of styles and flavour all under one roof. So what does each party bring to the table?
Callister Brewing
Callister takes a fairly traditional approach to their beers by BC standards. A balance of northwest styles and darker, malt-forward beers bring brewmaster Chris Lay’s home brewing prowess to the masses. Try the Porter; you will be impressed.
Machine Ales
A truly northwest styled brewing team makes Machine Ales an IPA making machine. Exploring the flavours of local and imported hops, Machine will undoubtedly have at least a couple hop-forward beers when you visit that flex some serious IBU and flavour muscles.
Brewery Creek
The face behind Brewery Creek is a man well known to the Vancouver craft beer scene, Chester Carey. As Canada’s first Certified Cicerone and acclaimed home brewer, Brewery Creek focuses their efforts on Belgian-styled table beers.
Real Cask Ales
Another person that needs no introduction in Vancouver is Adam Chatburn. Former CAMRA Vancouver president, home brewer and authentic Brit, Adam is brewing authentic English-style cask ales served the traditional way in a cask engine.
Past experience shows us that some of the most experimental, unique and subsequently delicious beer comes out of nano-breweries. They have the size that encourages experimentation and the spirit to drive innovation. Cram four different nano-breweries into one location and you are bound to turn up with something special. Plus, with more than a dozen beers on tap inspired from around the world, chances are that you will find something right up your alley when you visit for yourself.President Obama is poised to announce that he has chosen to situate his future presidential library in the South Side of Chicago, according to an individual briefed on the decision.
The decision to accept the University of Chicago's bid to host the library would end months of speculation over where Obama would seek to establish his post-presidential legacy. Columbia University, his alma mater, and the University of Hawaii sought to win the library for New York and Honolulu, respectively. The University of Illinois at Chicago had also vied to host it.
The CBS Chicago affiliate first reported word Thursday evening that the president has already decided. White House officials declined to comment on the matter, and neither university officials nor ones at the Barack Obama Foundation could be immediately reached for comment Thursday night.
The University of Chicago has identified two possible sites near its campus for the future building, both of which would be in the neighborhood where the Obamas lived before entering the White House. One is in Washington Park, while the other is in Jackson Park, on the South Side lakefront.
Local preservationists have raised concerns about building the library on public park land, especially since the parks were designed in the late 1800s by the renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
But last week both the Illinois House and Senate passed a measure that specifically allows the city to do that. A source close to one of the state legislative leaders said Thursday night that "it was our hope that the legislative action could settle any doubts about the viability of the Chicago bid." The Illinois governor, Bruce Rauner (R), has not yet signed the legislation.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama's first White House chief of staff, has been a strong proponent of having the library in the president's adopted home town. He released a statement after the state legislature's vote last week saying that the bill would "provide further reassurance for the Barack Obama Foundation to choose the president's home town as the site" for the library.It was a foggy night when we finally returned to the castle. It had been a long and exhausting day full of meetings, politics and dealing with the usual assassination attempt. The assassins were actually the least stressful part of the day, when your bodyguards are an elite group of highly trained and experienced paladins who are also level 101 wizards, sorcerers, clerics and archivists some inexperienced punk who just gone through a FLEA days before just becomes a minor inconvenience or entertainment depending on the assassin and my mood, no it was the nobles that made my life difficult. Ever since I made the FLEA available to all peasants the nobles became even more difficult then before, according to Thomas and Suze since just about most of the population has gone through the FLEA the nobles have been feeling they aren't as important as they used to be what with just about everyone else being rich and powerful. Unfortunately for the ruler AKA me they decided they could feel more important by being involved in the politics of Flobovia which again unfortunately for me meant having to constantly deal with self-entitled and spoiled politicians. What's worse is after the FLEAs and POPEs became widespread more and more people wanted to become nobles and royals themselves, apparently just being an all-powerful mage or adventurer loses it's appeal rather quickly when everyone else is doing it too while to the common man nobility and royalty still seemed appealing.
"Uhhhh" I grunted while I dragged myself to the castle after another exhausting day of work. "I just don't understand the appeal of nobility, all it is politics and dealing with stuck up self-entitled jerks while dealing with everyone's else's problems" I said in a tired tone while we reached the gates. I've taken to going on walks when I had a tough day since it made the nobles more difficult to find me whenever they demanded to talk to me or make an appointment, sure they would just send messengers but they were way easier to deal with then the nobles themselves.
"You know it how it is the peasants have this romanticized view on nobility and royalty" Thomas stated as he walked beside me keeping looking around for any sign of trouble "Since the FLEAs everyone wants to be special they want to be something no one else can be, these days many people want to be remembered and have stories written about them like the famous adventurers of the past so they do things like become adventurers' themselves. When they go Through the FLEA and realize they have become one the most powerful beings on the planet for one brief moment they feel like they are the most special person on the planet, then they look around the end of the line and realize they aren't as special as they thought they would be. So they go on to try to become nobles and royals either through finding their own lands, trying to conquer our lands or trying to overthrow the current nobility thinking they can do a better job"
I looked at Thomas accusingly "You know it seems you understand these people an awful lot for a paladin."
"What I couldn't have considered being an adventurer before becoming one of the landguard?" He shot me back his own accusing look "In fact Many paladins that join the landguard were adventurers before joining up, some looking for adventure while others to fight evil and injustice. Though I am somewhat embarrassed to admit during my younger years I used fantasize about becoming a king of my own lands with stories of my reign being sung through the ages." He said the last line with a look of somewhat embarrassment.
"Ah when everyone's special no one is." The landguard just gave me their usual look whenever I make one of my 'off world' references. I guess I could sympathize with them, I mean I can imagine what it must be like to be a high level mage, have genius intellect and be able to alter reality while still being a one in a million person.
"Well they sort of have a point when they say they could do a better job then some the nobles what with most of them only having their jobs due to nepotism and most of them definitely have the qualifications what with the POPE boosting their intelligence and wisdom while most of the nobles haven't even gone through the FLEA yet" Thomas gave me an accusing look. "Hey it's not my fault the nobles were suspicious of the FLEAs and took so long to sign up! I still can't believe their still upset about that."
"Actually I am pretty sure their upset about the fact that you told them they had to wait like everyone else to go through when they finally changed their minds." one of the other younger and less experienced land guards stated. I couldn't really blame the nobles being so skeptical and cautious considering that the FLEAs were one those things that seemed too good to be true. I still remember how hard it was to convince the average citizen that it wasn't some trick or sinister trap, which I found quite insulting since if I was going to do something sinister I would have been more clever about it.
"As I already said as long I am emperor everyone will be treated equally and if you stuck up jerks don't like it tough luck, so says emperor Jake!" *I said in a loud and authoritive tone with my chest puffed out and my fists on my hips while the landuard smiled. "Besides I don't get what they have to complain about at least their going to get awesome all powerful physics breaking power eventually while I won't ever be able to even cast the simplest spell." I sulked as I realized that my dream of becoming an all powerful arch mage will never become a reality. "Well at least I only have to put up with this for another three weeks and then my reign and my constant headaches are over" I stated in a happy tone with a touch of bitterness remembering my time here was almost up but pushed the thoughts out of my mind.
"Enough talk about work lets talk about finishing my to do list before I have to go back home" I said gleefully as I took out said list and handed it to Thomas.
"Lets see here." Thomas said as he scanned the list. "We still haven't found an unexplored dungeon that we can privately explore"
"Oh come on still? This world is filled with the brim with dungeons how hard is it to find one that I can privately explore with my guards." I said exasperated.
"Well it's kind of hard to find a dungeon that's unexplored since the FLEAs became more widespread and dungeon crawling has become a hobby for the average citizen. I've even heard that people are creating'super' dungeons for adventurers who have gone through the FLEA that actually want a challenge." Thomas turned to see a hopeful look on my face. "No it's too dangerous, people that haven't gone through the FLEA don't have slightest chance of even surviving a super dungeon but we managed to get into contact with people that make normal dungeons for casual dungeon crawlers and have managed to convince them to let us travel through one that should be finished in a week. Now onto the next item on the list... you want to visit a huge vault filled with gold coins and jewels so you may swim through the treasure like Scrooge Mcduck." Thomas raised an eyebrow while reading this.
"What?" I asked in a casual tone.
"Nothing its just that is actually quite simple compared to most of the remaining items on this list including half the ones we already went through." Thomas stated quite casually. I know that the list was quite over the top but honestly what are the odds that an opportunity like this will ever show up for me again? Besides I only have less than a month till my term is up so I might as well use that time to accomplish my fantastic fantasies that could never come true in the real world. I spent the rest of the night arguing with Thomas about which things on the list had to be taken out for being to dangerous or just to flat out crazy to even consider...
Later that night after falling asleep I was having an unusual dream in a sci-fi world probably influenced by a movie or series I don't consciously remember when all of a sudden the landscape changed into my room then went black for a moment. I woke up to see a man dressed in clothe that would be worn by the average person from this world. "You will die soon" The man simply stated in a monotone voice.
I just looked at him for few seconds before I casually responded. "Look no offence to you but I literally heard that line hundreds of times already and it stopped being intimidating after the ninth time" Honestly I can say that I wasn't afraid since I had my highly capable and crazy prepared guards in the same room with me, that is to say they were supposed to be. I looked around and realized that it was just me and this average looking man in the room before everything around me started warping and changing around me the next thing I knew I was in a park filled with over a dozen kids each I assume to be around 4 years old and adults who I think are their parents from the looks of things it looked like they were having a birthday party for one of the kids. Besides being seemingly teleported here the weirdest thing was that they were all dressed in clothe that people from my world would wear and they were next to one those playgrounds that didn't get the chance to be ruined and made boring by over protective parents, taking a closer look the clothe looked they could have come from the 1970's with one of the kids was even wearing a Donald duck sailor outfit. The place seemed familiar to me somehow but I couldn't remember why, that's when I noticed that one of the women who was trying to calm down some crying kid looked a lot like my aunt Helen... if she was a few decades younger.
Before I could do anything the world around me flashed for a moment and the next thing I knew I was in a crowded hallway filled with preteens in what appeared to be a middle school. Looking around this time it appeared that things jumped ahead to a decade seeing as everyone was wearing the unmistakable tacky clothe of the 80s and posters of 80s icons and celebrities on and inside the students lockers. After a few seconds there I got a familiar feeling after barely noticing a kid walk past me, I barely got a glimpse at him since he already passed me and rounded a corner but I got a strong feeling I knew him so I tried to follow him only for the world before to warp again.
This time I found myself in a college seminar where a professor who was around fifty, balding and was skinny to the point that you could swear he had a eating disorder was going over the basics of programming. Unlike the last few times where everything seemed random I was able to tell right away where I was, I recognized my old professor Mr. Castle, my college roommate and next to him was me except twenty years younger. It finally hit me this was my old college, the middle school was the one I attended and the park was a birthday party my aunt took me to but couldn't really remember because I was too young. After that it seemed like I was literally driving past memory lane as everything went by me in fast motion, I saw my graduation party, me walking into my first apartment, my first programming job it just kept going until it finally slowed down as it stopped at the memory of how I was taken to this world where I was first surrounded by the arch mages and land guards.
A voice suddenly echoed through my mind "This is not the material world, I am a telepath from another world and we are in your mind." Suddenly the memory faded until there was nothing but an empty plane with no end in sight and an a man who came across as completely average... except for the fact that I couldn't tell what his physical features were. And just like that I was absolutely scared out of my mind. I remember reading about Psion's before and what came to mind were their ability to destroy your mind, turn you into a vegetable and mind rape.
So here I was with an assassin who was already in my head and as far I knew the landguard had no defense for. Just as I was about to scream for help knowing it wouldn't help but being the only thing I can do he spoke. "Relax for I am not here to kill you but to give you a message."
I relaxed seeing that if he wanted to harm me he would have already "You know you really need to work on how you deliver your messages if you want to be any good at your job as messenger." I said as I tried to get my heart to stop trying to burst out of my chest. "So what's so important that you couldn't just come to me like a normal person and give me a heart attack."
He just stood there for a moment before answering. "I'll get straight to the point I am a partial copy of one of the former rulers of this land and I come to warn you that as the current ruler you will be slain at the hands of your own guards if you cannot escape."A man who robbed three women and attempted to sexually assault two of them after deliberately causing fender-benders that prompted the victims to pull over late at night on the 215 Freeway in Riverside and Perris was sentenced Monday to 14 years in state prison and ordered to register as a sex offender for life.
Joseph Pete Macias, 35, of Riverside, pleaded guilty last month to assault with intent to commit rape, penetration of a victim with a foreign object, assault likely to produce great bodily injury and a sentence-enhancing allegation of using a weapon in the commission of a sexual offense.
“You followed me, robbed me, stripped me and hurt me badly,” the sole victim who spoke at the sentencing hearing told the defendant. “… I screamed and fought to get away from you — the wicked, evil coward that you are.”
The petite young woman, identified in court only by her initials, partially recounted what happened to her in the predawn hours last Dec. 29.
She said that after Macias rear-ended her vehicle on the northbound 215 near Blaine Street, she stopped on the freeway shoulder to inspect the damage and was immediately attacked.
“You told me, ‘Shut up … or I’ll kill you,’ ” she recalled. “I will never forget the sound of your voice.”
Macias brandished a knife and attempted to rape the woman, who managed to wriggle free and flee onto the Blaine exit ramp, running to a business for help as Macias sped away.
“I’m still dealing with what happened to me that night,” she said. “What caused your rage, anger and demonic behavior? The pain you inflicted on me and the other women is irreversible.”
The newly married woman said that, despite the emotional scars, she was willing to forgive the defendant, who sat in an orange jail jumper, shackled at the feet and hands, listening to her statement as she made eye contact with him several times.
“I just want you to know, I’m truly sorry for what I did,” Macias said minutes later, when Riverside County Superior Court Judge Samuel Diaz gave him an opportunity to speak.
“I have two daughters and two sisters, and I wouldn’t want someone to do something like this to them,” Macias said.
In exchange for his admissions, prosecutors dropped three counts of robbery, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count each of making criminal threats and assault with intent to commit rape.
The first assault occurred during the overnight hours last Dec. 6, when Macias “bumped” a vehicle driven on the 215 near Cajalco Road, on the north end of Perris.
The victim got out of her vehicle to confront Macias, who brandished a knife and snatched the victim’s mobile phone, then fled. She was uninjured.
Details of that incident were not publicized by any local law enforcement agency when Riverside police began warning people after the second and third incidents happened later that month. The attacks sparked fear across Riverside at the time.
According to Riverside police investigators, Macias targeted the second victim in the predawn hours of Dec. 23.
The woman had stopped at a gas station on University Avenue, just off the 215, and became aware of trouble as she left the station shortly after 1 a.m., spotting a dark compact SUV tailing her as she got back on the southbound freeway, Riverside police said in a news release at the time.
When she exited the freeway at Central Avenue several miles away, the stalker “intentionally struck the back of her vehicle,” prompting the woman to pull over on the off-ramp, the release said.
He said Macias came at the victim with a knife, grabbed several of her belongings and tried to force himself on her, but she resisted and fled with minor injuries.
Macias’ third victim, the woman who testified at Monday’s sentencing, was targeted and assaulted in a similar manner six days later.
Detectives were able to obtain information on the vehicle used in the attacks and soon after, with a tip provided by a “concerned citizen,” identified Macias as the perpetrator. He was arrested at his Winslow Street residence in Riverside last Dec. 30. He had no prior documented felony convictions.
“This case is really any woman’s nightmare,” Deputy District Attorney John Henry said outside the courtroom. “Being forced off the road in the dead of night and then being attacked — it’s a nightmare. By the grace of God, things didn’t end worse than they did for these victims.”Virtual currency bitcoin received some good news on Friday with one of the most prominent exchanges in the world resuming trading after a clampdown by the People's Bank of China (PBoC) in December.
BTC China is the longest-standing bitcoin trading platform in China and was until recently the world's largest bitcoin exchange, according to Bitcoinity.org. In December the company decided to stop accepting trades denominated in the yuan due to pressure on third-third party payment processor from the country's central bank.
However, Bobby Lee, CEO of BTC China told CNBC via telephone that the decision has now been reversed, just in time for the Chinese New Year holidays.
"Everything is hunky dory," he told CNBC. "Essentially the government never disallowed it."
(Read More: Bitcoin price halves as China clampdown escalates)
In December, China's central bank ordered third-party payment agencies - which provide clearing services for bitcoin exchanges - to stop any "custody, trading and other services" related to the virtual currency. The platforms were told to end working relationships with virtual currency exchanges before the end of January.Students at a Sherwood Park elementary school will have an extended winter break — their school will be closed tomorrow due to a water main break.
A spokesperson with Elk Island Public Schools said a water main line broke inside Westboro Elementary School on Saturday morning. The line was repaired, but a second leak was discovered once water was turned on again. The water has since been shut off for additional repairs, and since there is no running water available, officials were forced to cancel classes on Monday.
Parents whose children go to Westboro Elementary School are advised not to send their kids to school Monday. Classes are expected to resume on Tuesday, but school officials said in a release they will advise parents directly if the school will be closed for another day.Norwegian Civil War
King Sverre crossing the mountains of Voss Date 1130 - 1240 (110 years) Location Norway Result King Haakon IV's men killed
self-declared king Duke Skule. Belligerents Aristocrates Pretenders Commanders and leaders List: List: Units involved Bagler Birkebeiner
The civil war era in Norway (Norwegian: borgerkrigstiden) began in 1130 and ended in 1240. During this time in Norwegian history, some two dozen rival kings and pretenders waged wars to claim the throne.
In the absence of formal laws governing claims to rule, men who had proper lineage and wanted to be king came forward and entered into peaceful, if still fraught, agreements to let one man be king, set up temporary lines of succession, take turns ruling, or share power simultaneously (matriarchal succession with queens was not customary in this era). In 1130, with the death of King Sigurd the Crusader, his possible half-brother, Harald Gillekrist, broke an agreement he and Sigurd had made to pass the throne to Sigurd's only son, the bastard Magnus. Already on bad terms before Sigurd's death, the two men and the factions loyal to them went to war.
In the first decades of the civil wars, alliances shifted and centered on the person of a king or pretender. However, towards the end of the 12th century, two rival parties, the Birkebeiner and the Bagler, emerged. From this point, the civil wars were less about putting a particular "legitimate" king in power and more about ensuring and When they reconciled in 1217, a more ordered and codified governmental system gradually freed Norway from wars to overthrow the lawful monarch. In 1239, Duke Skule Bårdsson became the third pretender to wage war against King Håkon Håkonsson, but he was defeated in 1240, bringing more than 100 years of civil wars to an end.[1]
Events of the civil war era [ edit ]
Background [ edit ]
The unification of Norway into one kingdom is traditionally held to have been achieved by King Harald Fairhair at the Battle of Hafrsfjord in 872, but the process of unification took a long time to complete and consolidate. By the mid-11th century the process seems to have been completed. However, it was still not uncommon for several rulers to share the kingship. This seems to have been the common way of solving disputes in cases where two or more worthy candidates for the throne existed. The relationship between such co-rulers was often tense, but open conflict was generally averted. Clear succession laws did not exist. The main criterion for being considered a worthy candidate for the throne was to be a descendant of Harald Fairhair through the male line—legitimate or illegitimate birth was not an issue.[2]
King Sigurd the Crusader had also shared the kingdom with his brothers, King Øystein and King Olav, but when they both died without issue, Sigurd became sole ruler and his son, Magnus, heir-apparent. However, in the late 1120s a man called Harald Gille arrived in Norway from Ireland, claiming to be a son of King Sigurd's father, King Magnus Barefoot. King Magnus had spent some time campaigning in Ireland, and Harald would thus be King Sigurd's half-brother. Harald proved his case through an ordeal of fire, the common way of settling such claims at the time, and King Sigurd recognized him as his brother. However, Harald had to swear an oath that he would not claim the title of king as long as Sigurd or his son was alive.[3]
Succession to Sigurd the Crusader [ edit ]
When Sigurd died in 1130, Harald broke his oath. |
night in order to make the targeted individual aware of the detectives private opinions of said targeted individual. The voices in my head went on to say that this situation has been enabled since the spring of 2005, and that a major portion of said detectives have been accessing this facility.
The direct voice communications once told me, in the distant past, that the shadow government set up a virtual torture program for the homeless and helpless in order to impress upon the people of the world the necessity for total obedience towards the current power structure. We can easily dismantle same before it becomes too tightly controlled.
The voice communications suggested I strongly recommend a book called “Earthing” by Clinton Ober, Stephen T Sinatra, and Martin Zucker.
The voice communications have endeavoured to control my thoughts to an extreme degree. Many times in the past, whenever I thought about a subject that they disapproved of, for example where and when I might go on a my next cycling trip, they would rebuke me for thinking about that matter. I once was cycling through a nearby village and I was looking in at the homes of the people in that village and I was thinking about the people who lived in those homes, and what those people might be doing at that moment. I was informed by the direct voice communications that my thoughts were being broadcast openly, and by the act of thinking about my neighbours, I was invading their privacy, because my thoughts about them were being broadcast openly at a subliminal level, by the aid of voice to skull direct voice communication being transmitted via telephone masts directly into the centre of the craniums of a selection of other people. I was ordered to keep my eyes only on the road while I was cycling through these quite country roads in my locality. I felt like crying with frustration and I felt like committing suicide because nobody can live in a state of having their lives micro-managed to such an extreme degree by arrogant voices being transmitted into my brain, from an unknown location. The voice communications became very agitated if I ever thought or talked about senior politicians in a disrespectful manner. The direct voice communications have often lost their tempers with me and even shouted at me, because I refused to treat them with respect or carry out their wishes. I could not override the hearing of these direct voices by drowning them out with loud music. They could still make themselves heard inside my cranium, no matter how loud the music might be.
On one occasion in the distant past, I heard the direct voice transmission say “We now have this subject deployed. We can control her movements in any way we wish now, but only within a certain range. We can disengage the subjects brain and spinal cord now and we can insert our own programming anytime we wish at our convenience. Every single one of her nerve endings are now conjoined to a super computer. Everything we ever hoped to achieve with regards to signals intelligence capability has been done to the brain and body of this woman. Even though this human subject, formerly known as Gretta Fahey but now only known as gretta of the family fahey drinks no alcohol it would be possible for us to make her appear drunk at a moments notice. We could over time make her resume cigarette smoking even after more than twenty years of abstinence. The voice transmissions coming from inside my head went on to say that the control subject was deployed in this manner because she refused to accept enslavement to the current control system, and furthermore this evil system is meant for many other future would be dissenters. We must immediately pull out all the stops to take down this wifi enabled, brainlink enslavement system.
The voice transmissions coming from inside my head once informed me that vast amounts of money can be earned from wireless enabled non-consensual human experimentation among the areas of brain weapons research and voice harassment research and health research. They further added that their own particular group of weapons researchers have largely ruined their earning capabilities because they are seen as having double-crossed the would be establishment by revealing insider secrets to a few weapons test subjects, who have gone on to publish their experiences.
The voice communications coming from inside my head once informed me that augmented reality was being used to make me believe things were happening which were not happening at all. This involved forcing me to listen to many and varied false dialogues that were concocted especially to make me believe the unbelievable. However, they did not work on me, not even once.
I was asked by the voices coming from inside my head to promote the idea that we are currently all virtual slaves and that nobody is allowed to do whatever they wish anymore. The went on to say that one of the main ways of taking back our power is by dismantling all cell phone towers also known as mobile phone masts. The military are known for keeping a plentiful supply of dynamite.
On one occasion in the past I heard through the direct voice communication network a mans voice proclaim “Owing to my heavy investments in the upkeep of this woman I feel I should have a say in her everyday diet.” Somebody asked him ” Do you see yourself as a slave owner?” He replied “In a sense I do”. I then asked the voice to skull direct communication network coming from inside my head why it was that this particular man claimed that he helped pay for my upkeep as in reality as far as I know I am in receipt of disability allowance from the European parliament in union with the Irish government. The voice to skull direct communication network replied that as far as they knew I had been taken off the official disability allowance list but I was still being paid disability allowance by the alternative Irish government owing to a deal being made with the original Irish government in the distant past. I have no way of having this information verified. It may be true or false.
The voice to skull direct communication network more commonly known as voices in my head once informed me in the distant past that they were the Irish secret police. They informed me that I had been put on an surveillance watch list because I had been complaining about the Irish government. The voice to skull direct communication network went on to say that the Irish secret police have approximately fourteen hundred staff who comprise of both indoor and outdoor staff, who work in all weathers, day and night. Their duties include visiting homes of watch list targeted individuals and inflicting extreme bodily harm on anyone who gets in their way. They went on to say that the Irish secret police were initially informed that listening devices were to be planted inside the homes of all individuals on the watch list, who were about to become targeted individuals. They were not informed what was in fact criminal activity whereby each targeted indiviual on the watch list had radio implants implanted in both of their eyes, both of their inner ears, and their throat, while the targeted individual was unknowingly put in a drugged state by the team of implanters. At a much later date, this situation enabled the Irish secret police to see through the eyes and hear through the ears of each targeted individual and also to conduct two way communications with the targeted individual both day and night, totally and utterly against the will of the targeted individual. The Irish secret police wished to inform the Irish government of this criminal activity because they did not wish to take part in it once they found out how deeply each targeted individual was suffering. Many Irish targeted individuals attempted suicide on a number of occasions. Some of them succeed in killing themselves because of the profound psychological torture they were forced to endure. The Irish secret police could not inform the Irish government of this situation due to their security clearance and also because they now believe that at time their brains were being entrained into a state of sublime indifference by the communication technology they were obliged to wear on their person. They decided instead that they would inform one of the targeted individuals by the name of Gretta Fahey of the whole situation by conducting two way conversations with her via the radio implants in her middle ears. She uploaded this information on to her website without knowing if all of it was true or untrue. This website is called www.targetedindividualsireland.net.
The voice to skull direct communication network once informed me that approximately fourteen hundred of their staff live and work in Ireland. The staff do not pay any tax whatsoever. They are completely under the radar and above the law. Their wages are paid directly by directed energy weapons manufacturers who they conduct surveys for among the native Irish people including a County Mayo woman formerly called Gretta Fahey but now only known as gretta of the family fahey who they surveyed at one time in the distant past. (They were referring to myself, the writer of this website).
I realise that some of the information which I have obtained from the voice to skull direct communication network clashes with other information which they have given me at other times. I am only informing the reader of what the voice to skull direct communication network have told me over many years. I am not trying to establish the truth of it.
One of the names which the internal voices coming from inside my head mentioned in association with their organisation on a few occasions was Eric Blair. I have not researched this name.
The voice to skull direct communication network once informed me in the past that there is abusive technology all over the world. It is only a matter of time until the system falls in on itself. Somebody suggested that we could take down the telephone masts thereby saving humanity from this continually encoaching enslavement by wifi enabled brainlink and artificial intelligence technology. The voice to skull direct communications network then further said ” The system wont allow for that. We have been told that we must wait until the system dissolves before we can offer a solution.” ” That solution would be for each member of the human race that wishes to continue living on this planet to accept microchipping and universal global enslavement. ” I myself believe we aught to seek independent scientific advise about dismantling some of our advanced technological infrastructure in order to stop this gradual wifi brainlink enslavement by artificial intelligence in its tracks. However, I wish to say that I suspect there is something wrong with the idea of dismantling all telephone masts. The voice to skull direct communication network were pushing that idea at me to an almost hysterical level and also they were actively pushing me to put my name to the idea and not to ask for the advice of independent scientists. Whenever in the distant past the voice to skull direct communication network urged me in an almost hysterical way to do something without the benefit of time to reflect on the advisability or doing it I always suspected them of having an alterior motive and I have always refused to act on it. In the past other Irish targeted individuals have advised me never to act on anything the voice to skull direct communication network have told me and of course I have taken their advice. I have published much of what they have told me on this website in order to help other targeted individuals who have begun to hear voices about what to expect so that they will refrain from committing suicide. Many fellow voice hearers all over Ireland have contacted me to thank me for publishing this information.
I live in a rural area in the west of Ireland. Very few cars pass my home. However, almost every time when I would step outside my front door or outside my back door the voice to skull direct communication people would comment on my appearance in an extremely derogatory manner. This never happened while I was inside my home. Why is this?? Where is the technology that can only see me when I am outdoors. I have no answer.
The voice to skull communication network once commented within my hearing ” I thought we had buried this forbidden control system in stealth weaponry.”
Over many years in the distant past, as time went by, the voice to skull direct communication network content became more obscene when they were speaking to me. Some of what these unidentified people said to me are as follows ” Find me a man who is willing to take this bitch out for a drink. This is a pilot scheme, it has to succeed.” At my age, which is fifty seven, I have no wish to go out socially with a man as I regard myself as too old for romance or intimacy. On a similar vein at a different time the voice to skull direct communication network was heard by me to say “When is the victim undressed? These programs always end in a rape scene with lots of different types of sperm in the victims vagina. We like this program to end tidily”. And yet another time when I was alone in my bedroom in the dark in the middle of the night with the doors of my home locked and bolted I felt strong swirling energy around my nether regions. Anytime I complained strongly a voice to skull person would say “We are only doing our job”. I then replied ” Why are you doing a job which involves committing acts of extreme evil”. The reason I suspect that the directed energy weapons operative claimed he could see me in some detail is because the longer a targeted individual is being brain mapped the more of the targeted individuals brain and body can be seen on their computer screens, but only in a sketchy way. The voice to skull direct communication network people refrained from speaking about me in a sexual way for the first few years of the non-consensual human experimentation brain mapping program. However, as soon as they began to have my body partially mapped on their computer screens they began to make more and more sexual comments about me. Much later on from that time, the voice to skull direct communication network, also known as voices in my head informed me that by virtual reality access their staff can allow perverted criminal men to have virtual sex with non-consensual women whose brains and bodies have been fully mapped, totally against the will of those women who I call targeted individuals. This is a wide spread racket throughout the world. I was puzzled why some of the voice to skull direct communication network constantly urged me to sleep in a large well decorated bedroom in my home rather than a small dark bedroom where I preferred to sleep in order to protect myself from directed energy weapons and voice harassment attacks. I now believe they were setting the scene to put me on a non-consensual virtual sex database. I am grateful that this did not yet happen and it never will because I would hurt anybody if they touched me without consent.. However, many targeted individual women all over the internet are claiming they are being virtually raped on a constant basis. The voice to skull direct communication network once informed me that the police and the military both in Ireland and overseas are aiding and abetting in criminal activity. The voices in my head did not say why they believed that this was the case. On one occasion in the distant past the voice to skull direct communication more commonly known as hearing voices directly inside my cranium informed me that they have been known to illegally and non-consensually implant mostly pregnant women with microchips that keep them constantly sexually aroused. The voices inside my head further informed me that they mostly choose pregnant women because they are easier to implant with this sexual arousal technology without their knowledge and they often use women as sex slaves after they have illegally and immorally implanted them.
Further to this, at a much later time, I heard the voices coming from inside my head discussing among themselves the following ” You all are not allowed to speak in a sexually provocative manner to this woman (meaning me) because she has no truck with men and she sleeps alone. You have been berated.”
I have been informed by the voice to skull communication network that I have heard coming from inside my head that if a targeted individual remains on this trauma based non-consensual experimentation program long term, what would happen is that the directed energy weapons operatives would gradually and incrementally command more and more power to inflict stronger and stronger sensations and pain over the body of the targeted individual. However, that is not the case with the mind of the targeted individual. The mind of the targeted individual can only be accessed by signals coming out of a screen. Every time the targeted individual spends face time in front of a screen, signals coming from that screen allow the directed energy weapons operatives to access the mind of the targeted individual, thereby programming that persons mind more and more on a daily basis until suddenly the targeted individual can no longer think their own thoughts. They only appear to be able to think the programmed thoughts given to them by the signals operatives via the screen. The voice to skull direct communication network claimed that this process appears to have happened to senior politicians throughout the world already. Whatever technologies are in the bedrooms of targeted individuals are being used against them while they are sleeping. I believed this to be the case after fourteen years of studying electronic harassment. I also got confirmation of this fact from a targeted individual and electrician on facebook called Remegio Balane.
” if you are in your bedroom without any appliances specialy computer and its monitor and tv and cell phone, the operation of the directed energy weapons operatives is not likely to be successful, since this psychotronic machine thrives or works with magnetism through the magnetic flux. ” Remegio Balane
The voice to skull direct communication coming from inside my head once informed me that deregulation is in reality an attempt to take away legitimate control from government so that the shadow government can control these deregulated issue themselves from behind the scenes.
On one occasion in the past the voice to skull direct communication network questioned me as to whether I ever shop in one of their American stores called Bloomingdales. I replied that I am not an American citizen and that I am a free will human being from Ireland, Europe. I then heard the voice to skull direct communication speak to each other in a panic. They were heard to say by me “Delete the woman formerly known as Gretta Fahey and from now on only known as gretta of the family fahey from our database quickly before we are found out.
On one occasion in the distant past the voice to skull direct communication network also known as voices in my head informed me that a unique installation had been installed on a telephone pole adjacent to my home. They further informed me that this unique installation is not available as yet for installation outside the homes of anybody in Ireland other than the homes of as yet to be targeted individuals and current targeted individuals. They further informed me that the staff of the national telephone company called Eir know exactly what they are doing when they knowingly and willingly install these installations. The voice to skull direct communications network went on to inform me that these particular Eir staff are fully aware that these unique telephone installations will in the future be used to instill voices into the heads of private individuals and instill sensations and visions into the bodies and brains of these private individuals, which results in years and years of extreme psychological and sometimes physical torture, more often than not ending in the suicide of the targeted individual many years later. I personally do not know whether there is any truth to this information or not. I am merely publishing it so that any interested parties will know and understand what voice hearers actually hear.
On some occasions in the past, the voice to skull direct communication network would say random words or phrases within my hearing. They would then wait a few seconds after which they would then say ” I can not get a guilty signature. ” I don’t know what is happening but I am informing the reader in case they can make sense out of what I have heard in the past.
I normally eat a raw fruit and vegetable smoothie most days. I began to add wild plants to my smoothie. I would add nettles or dandelions for their health benefits. I heard the voice to skull direct communication network say ” We don’t know how to deal with these foods in relation to gretta’s constitution because these foods were never studied in relation to our protocol. These foods are sabotaging our program.”
I have mentioned in a different blog that the voice to skull direct communication network uses the word “leverage” often in their conversations with each other within my hearing. If the targeted individual belongs to an organised religion the voice to skull direct communication network used that information as a reason to further harass the targeted individual. Initially when I was a Christian when my targeting first began the voice to skull direct communication network would hound me by constantly asking me if I had paid my dues to the church or if I had said my prayers. Many years later, I abdicated from the catholic church and I became an agnostic which effectively means that these operatives had a problem finding reasons to hound me. I am not in debt or I don’t have any addictions. I lead a very quiet life and I don’t have a guilty conscience. The voice to skull direct communications network are paid a salary to harass good people constantly. They could not find any legitimate reason to harass me which appeared to annoy them.
On one occasion in the distant past a voice to skull direct communication personnel member was having a conversation with me when suddenly the connection broke down and some unknown individual broke through in mid sentence and continued on the same conversation on a completely different vein. Some time later I asked a voice to skull direct communication personnel member what caused that incident to occur. The reply to the centre of my cranium was that a selection of direct communication staff who have direct access to my brain are given something called an interference number each time they sign in for a days work. They are given a different interference number on a daily basis. This interference number is akin to a password to the human brain and each targeted individual has their own unique brain password. The plan of an as yet unidentified cabal for the future of humanity is that each human being on the planet would eventually have their own unique brain password and they would be forced to listen to artificial intelligence voices giving them instructions as to how to live their lives on a second by second basis for the entirety of their lives if this nightmare wireless human enslavement system via brain link technology ever comes to pass. The system is well underway but government scientists are totally controlled by hive mind technology via their smart engineered phones and computer screens and have been removed from the real world to a large extent. If they should read this they would be advised to return to the use of landline with the use of an old fashioned phone.
On one occasion in the distant past one of the voice to skull direct communication personnel asked me if I had given written permission for the medical experimentation and data analysis which was done to me over many years. There was no mention by that same member of personnel about the brain weapons testing or the psychological torture I also endured for many years. I replied that I had not given written permission or indeed oral permission. Immediately afterwards I heard another direct communication personnel member state “I thought I saw written permission somewhere around here “, followed shortly after by “These people are not the full shilling.” I asked what she meant by “These people”. She replied ” You are a sub-species.”
On one occasion in the distant past the direct voice communication network informed me that this protocol of wireless enabled brain-link surveillance on a person to person basis is here to stay for almost everybody on a worldwide basis. She further added that this will be enabled by artificial intelligence eventually. She further informed me that professional people are not allowed to speak about certain subjects, owing to subjects within their employment contracts and that is why they rely on uncredentialled people to speak for them under the current regieme which is about to change shortly throughout the entire known world.
On one occasion in the distant past the voices coming from inside my head told me that I was a live investment in the stock market under a code number. The only people who are given the opportunity to translate the code number are the merchants themselves.
On one occasion in the distant past I heard one voice coming from inside my head tell another voice inside my head that I was not an electronic convict. The voice said I was an electronic business commodity and I was being monitored to develop business commodities.
On one occasion in the distant past the voices I had previously been hearintg inside my head informed me that a targeted individual who has been prepared for programming over many years can then be programmed to do and say anything the behind the scenes intelligence services wish the targeted individual to do and say totally against the will of the targeted individual as if the targeted individual was a remote controlled slave. However, in order for the targeted individual to be programmed, they must watch main-stream television occasionally. The voices coming from the centre of my cranium claimed to have successfully programmed hundreds of people already to act completely against their wills and moral judgement.
On one occasion in the distant past the voices inside my head were heard to say by me ” We should install a CCTV camera in Newbrook in view of the fact that there is none there already.” I then heard another voice reply ” It would not go down well at all with the local people.” What appeared to be the first voice then was heard by me to reply ” We should break in somewhere and steal something. The people of Newbrook might appreciate a CCTV camera more if we did that.” (Newbrook is the name of the village where I live.”)
On one occasion in the distant past the voices inside my head informed me that they had lost considerable ground with their peers because of me. The voices inside my head appear to be able to gauge my emotions when I am listening to them. They were once informing me of something and they broke off in mid sentence because their emotion gauging technology showed that I was feeling extreme hostility towards them.
On one occasion in the distant past the voices coming from inside my head dictated the following information to me which they claimed they found on a document online. “Emergency measures are in place in Ireland to deal with misdemeanours very harshly. We don’t know if the woman formerly known as Gretta Fahey and from now on known only as gretta of the family fahey committed a misdemeanour, but she was put on a watch list which involved implanting her brain with micro technology enabling my staff to interview her over the course of many years. I have no control over what they said to her.” Signed Mrs Shiela Anderson, Technical Expert, US Government. I am posting this information online so that voice hearers will fully understand what type of information other people who have once heard voices were told by those voices.
The voices coming from inside my head once informed that because I have no television in my home, the voice personnel were unable to program me to carry out their wishes. They further informed me that my computer being old is not interfaced properly and a hand held smart phone is unable to process the volume of information necessary to carry out the programming deemed necessary. I also heard these same voices say at another time the following “We are looking down the barrel of a gun if we don’t get her programmed as per out contract. If we cant program her in her own home we will have to forcefully remove her from her home and bring her to an unknown location to complete the process of programming.”
The voices coming from inside my head once informed me in the past that they pulse high intensity cameras into homes in order to get a look at the general layout of the home and the positioning of furniture etc.
The voices coming from inside my head once informed me that the remote signal coming from my body is normally very weak because I do not spend any time whatsoever using a smart phone or any type of smart engineered technology. However, if I spend a long time in front of my computer a very strong signal begins to come through to them. If I then go outside and earth myself in the back garden by walking around the garden in my bare feet this act serves to weaken the signal again. They also informed me that if I place mylar sheeting on my window facing outwards no signal comes through from me at all. They further said that in such a situation they can not continue with their work. However in such a scenario they could still hold a conversation with me using voice to skull communication directly inside my head.
The voices coming from inside my head informed me at some time in the past that they had been poached (hijacked) by an alternative group of remote operated neuroscientists, followed by “there are things occurring in the brain of the woman formerly known as Gretta Fahey but known from now on only as gretta of the family fahey that are not our doing. We hope she will be ok. “.
The voices coming from inside my head claimed to know where I lived based on the fact that I quoted my home telephone number within their hearing. I am publishing my home telephone number here so that the reader will know I am a real human being who has really experienced hearing voices in the past as told in this website. My landline phone number is Ireland 0949360901. We the general public aught to explore the phenomenon of voice hearing in a public way in order to solve it.
The voices coming from inside my head once informed me in the distant past that a very high frequency range will render them unable to use any of their analysis platform technology.
The voices coming from inside my head once informed me that there are constituents in most hair shampoos that make it easier for neuroscientists to see deep inside the human cranium with the aid of their technology. I began to wash my hair with hand soap and subsequently I heard many of them complain that there was no residue of this examining constituent in my hair. These neuroscientists further claimed that fluoride in the human body is a necessary constituent to aid in their brain and body examinations. If it is not in the human body at the time of examination the neuroscientists are powerless to continue with their experimentation. I once distilled all tap water before I drank it but the thyroid medication I must take contains fluoride. I was later advised by the voices inside my head that I must distill water from a local well rather than tap water because of heavy contamination of tap water with chemicals.
On one occasion in the distant past the voices inside my head informed me that anybody who owns a business which is not deeply in debt to the world control system is being weakened slowly by mind control manipulation in total secret via remote influencing technology and other advanced mind influencing technology. Later on that evening a visual image was downloaded into my brain of two private business people from my local town who were falsely portrayed to be in a sexually compromising situation. We have been informed by the people from Davos World Economic Forum that we will all eventually be permanently tethered online twenty four hours per day for the rest of our lives if we fail to dismantle the surveillance infrastructure at this point in time. What most of the public fail to realise is that this permanent wireless online tethering is already a reality for hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world and because of this, these wirelessly tethered people are virtual slaves and are committing suicide in droves. American servicemen and women are committing suicide at the rate of twenty people per day every day since 1979, possibly because of being wirelessly tethered. No amount of poisonous neuroleptics will free anybody from this hell on earth. Please dismantle the worldwide surveillance system urgently.
“For the electronic, physical, (implants), neodymium (rare earth mineral) magnets of anywhere from a quarter inch to a half inch in diameter work very well to completely disable them. Some people wear them in the headband of a baseball cap, preferably for at least 24 hours, but you can also tape them to the back of your ear and hide them under your hair! After implants are disabled, you won’t have so much fatigue, and the pitch or frequency in your ear stops happening. Use caution with these powerful magnets, though, as they can wipe out disks and computers. It’s best not to wear them while sitting at the computer, at least, not while wearing more than one or two of the little ones. ” This is an extract from www.lipstickmystic.com. Pulses of magnetic energy may be better at disabling unwanted biomedical implants and microchips.
“Sometimes when I would speak the words that came through my mouth did not originate in my own thoughts.” Brain scientists now have the ability to control what some people say, by remote means. Thousands of targeted individuals throughout both my country and the wider world will verify that this is the case. I have written about the phenomenon of forced speech in other areas of this website. Accusing people who hear voices coming from inside their heads is about to come to an end. People who have been harassed by hearing voices coming from inside their heads are now able to create their own technology to generate voices inside the heads of other people, and they are planning to demonstrate this technology to a court of law. From that day forward nobody will be able to accuse people who hear voices from inside their heads as being mentally ill. For further information please see www.targeted-individuals.co.uk. Click on targeted individual info and then click on V2K. This website is not fully operational yet, but that document offers a full scientific explanation of the voice to skull phenomenon.
I was informed by voice which I heard coming from inside my head that when a person is made to hear voices via voice to skull communication directly inside their head, a criss cross system is being used whereby my voice may be inserted into the head of a person who tries to activate the system without permission.
On one occasion in the past the voices which I heard coming from inside my head, mostly coming from behind my throat, informed me that even though I had sent out hundreds of emails throughout the years in order to raise awareness of the existence and abuse of brain weapons and directed energy weapons, they had heavily suppressed my emails. They suppressed my emails by guiding me to send the emails to people they know and can control for the most part.
On another occasion in the past the voices which I heard coming from inside my head informed me that it is the policy of the self-proclaimed illuminati to cull the weakest members of the human herd and I may have been selected. On one occasion I felt a sensation in my hands and arms and I was informed by the voices inside my head that totally pure information was coming through to their technology from both my hands and my arms up to my elbows and they further informed me that they could effectively take control of both my hands and my arms at any time they wished at any time in the future. (I choose not to believe this.)
A well known targeted individual from London called Keiron Lee Perrin claims that T27 biomedical implants are openly for sale on the internet for the purpose of wirelessly tethering non-human free roaming primates to neural encoders which would then be monitored by a network of surveillance biomedical scientists. I have been assured by my internal voices that T27 biomedical implants are not the implants that have been used to wirelessly tether me. My implants are far more advanced.
On most occasions in the distant past, the military intelligence generated voices inside my head coming from an implantable radio communication system would insult me to an extreme degree. I would immediately insult them back with the very worst insults I could possibly think up. I was hearing the voices of these intelligence personnel coming from the back of my throat. They had no right to force their voices on me day and night every waking moment. Eventually the voice of a woman who claimed to be a moderator was employed by these criminal intelligence services to come between the voice to skull military intelligence generated voices and my own replies. An internal voice to skull military generated voice would make a comment to me. When I replied a completely different sounding voice would answer and I was informed that she was a moderator and that I was no longer allowed to speak directly to the commenters. I stopped talking to the voices almost entirely at that point.
Every year I would drive to a small costal town of Belmullet for an overnight stay to visit my sister and brother-in-law who live there. As I would approach Belmullet town, I would hear the voices coming from inside my head say to each other “Tell Ted Ginty that the woman formerly known as Gretta Fahey is going to Belmullet for the weekend to visit her sister and brother-in-law. I asked my brother-in-law if he knew of a man called Ted Ginty as the voices inside my head had mentioned his name on a number of occasions. My brother-in-law replied that he knew two men of that name from the local area.
On one occasion in the past I was alone in my home while being targeted by directed energy weapons and I had heard some names of the people who I believe were targeting me being mentioned by the voices coming from inside my head. I repeated these names in a loud voice several times so that anybody who might be eves dropping on the program would be made aware of these names. I then heard an internal voice to skull voice complain to the security police that I had been naming names. All connections to me were broken momentarily.
One of the voices coming from inside my head advised me to quit complaining about long term voice harassment via wifi which is coming from cell phone towers also known as mobile phone masts via the poles outside your home and hand yourself over to the local police if you have committed a crime, because that is the real reason why you are being subjected to this voice harassment and psychological abuse for a long number of years. I replied that I have not committed any crime. If I had committed a crime there is a system in place throughout Ireland which deals with such things. The voices coming from directly inside my head also informed me that they had checked the utility poles directly outside my home and they can confirm that these utility poles had long range wifi products attached to them which is a unique situation as they are not as yet to be found outside any other homes in Ireland at this time.
The voices coming from directly inside my head once informed me that they were compelled to give me deeply injurious insults because the computer program that was provided for them by the shadow world government recognises insults and will only allow the staff to continue speaking to me if they continue in an extremely insulting vein. If the staff treat me in a civil manner they are shut out of the two way communication system and they can not then draw a salary. The voices coming from inside my head continued by saying that this information is verifiable through the Department of Health by way of the freedom of information act.
A windowless room situated at the centre of a home with a steel carbon or steel door, while surrounded on all sides by outer rooms would offer no protection from electronic weapons in spite of what I originally thought, according to the voice to skull communication voices which I hear coming from directly inside my head. The only way we can shield from all electronic weapons but not scalar weapons is by either living or sleeping inside a hollow dome filled with electrified water. Non-electrified water is better than none at all.
On an online youtube video called lookoutfacharlie, excellect information is given as to how chemtrail spraying is being used against us and how to combat it. This youtube video claims that mold and fungus among many other things are being sprayed on us from the sky. It goes on to say that acronium fungus produces manganise oxide in the bodies of humans and animals. Manganise oxide is an electrosensitive chemical. Manganise oxide can be used as a makeshift electrode. Manganise oxide in combination with heavy metals which are found in some processed foods turns our minds into antennas. In combination with this process, our unique EEG readout also known as our unique brain signature is being captured by criminals who hold EEG readers close to our heads for a period of about five minutes. Once these criminals have aquired this information they can then communicate with us against our will whenever they wish.
We can get rid of the heavy metals and the fungal biomass which produces the manganise oxide from our bodies by ingesting one or two of several substances on a daily basis. These substances are epsom salts, borax and potassium iodide. If we ingest these substances for a period of time the voices and visions and bodily sensations will eventually stop.
For the last year or two of my targeting I repeatedly heard variations of the following conversation on an almost daily basis. The conversation would be held between two or more unknown voices coming directly from inside my head. One voice would be heard to say by me ” We can not deal with regard to this woman. You have misaligned her to her profile. |
errors had been made, such as not searching the girl's room thoroughly.
Mr Babaz said that in order for his office to carry out its duties properly it needed the trust and support of the people it served.
"Once that's lost, it's impossible to carry on," he said.
But Mr Bazbaz's resignation has not satisfied opposition politicians who believe the case highlights serious shortcomings in the state's justice system.
Leader of the opposition PRD party Jesus Ortega said the governor of Mexico state, Enrique Pena Nieto, should take responsibility for the failures in the investigation.
"Around 100 police went through this room of 10 metres... sniffer dogs searched it and they never found the body... who do they want to protect?" he asked.
He demanded an investigation into what had "really happened".How's your morning been? If you rely on Google Drive, maybe not so good. Google Drive is experiencing a widespread outage today, preventing access to files and documents. Google is working on the issue and expects to have more news later this afternoon.
You'll know if you're affected just by opening Drive. The page is simply failing to load for some people, displaying the message "The server encountered an error. Please try again later." It's been fine for me today, but several members of the AP team have been unable to load Drive at all. Hangouts might also be having problems, but we haven't seen any issues on our end.
You can keep tabs on the situation via Google's app status page. Google promises an update by 1:55PM (presumably Pacific) today. We'll update when that happens.By Paul Thomson :: 3:24 PM
Cloud note taking and organizing application Evernote has been the victim of a hacker attack. The company issued an advisory earlier today that nearly 50 million users may have had their usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords stolen.
Evernote first became aware of the security breach on February 28th. At this time, it does not appear that banking or payment details have been leaked, and the hackers did not gain access to user notes stored on the system.
The passwords that were stolen were encrypted, making it less likely that the hackers would be able to find out what the true plain text passwords are.
The company sent an e-mail to users today (a portion is in the screenshot below) informing them that their passwords have been reset, and they would need to log in and change it to a new string. Passwords will need to be re-entered in all applications where users have installed Evernote, such as on their mobile devices and tablets.Computing giant IBM said today it has reached a deal to acquire Ustream, a live video streaming service founded in 2007.
Terms were not disclosed, but Fortune pegged the price at $130 million. The acquisition is the lynchpin of a plan by Big Blue to create a new business unit, IBM Cloud Video Services, that will combine Ustream with other recent acquisitions including Clearleap, which it bought last month.
Ustream specializes in helping companies like Samsung, Nike and Facebook stream live events such as corporate speeches and live concerts to the Web, and reaches as many as 80 million individual users per month.
IBM said it will create a cloud-based video services platform on its Bluemix service for software developers that will make it easy to embed video content and capabilities in applications.The Microsoft fan club is up in arms. Those reports about Windows 8 allowing the government to spy on us? Nonsense, they fuss. It's simply not true that Windows 8 combines with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to create a built-in back door for surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA).
No, no, they whine, the German newspaper Die Zeit had it all wrong when it claimed that the combination of TPM 2.0 and Windows 8.x (German-language article) gives Microsoft complete control over which programs can and can't run, plus access to Windows BitLocker encryption, and the ability to remotely administer devices beyond a user's control.
And, oh my, no, the NSA or some other government agency could never, ever get into your computer or tablet via this technology pairing! Some Microsoft defenders even claim that the explanation from Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) (German-language article) about what's going on with Windows 8 and TPM 2.0 makes it clear that there's no real danger from using the pair in combination.
Really? They're not reading the same memo I'm reading.
I quote: "From the perspective of the BSI, the use of Windows 8 in combination with a TPM 2.0 is accompanied by a loss of control over the operating system and the hardware. [Emphasis and translation are mine.] This results in new risks for users, especially for the federal government and critical infrastructure. In particular... error conditions can result that prevent further operation of the system. This can cause errors that can brick the operating system and hardware. Such a situation would not be acceptable for the federal government nor for other users. In addition, the newly established mechanisms can also be used for sabotage by third parties. These risks need to be addressed."
Like Secure Boot, this is another step in Microsoft turning PCs into locked-down devices. While we can't know if Microsoft is sharing access with the NSA or other government agencies, the potential is certainly there for third parties to gain access to your PC and even your encrypted records if you use BitLocker.
Sure, TPM has always sounded like a good idea. The problem with "trusted computing" (registration required) has always been knowing exactly how trustworthy it is.
Once upon a time, PCs were open devices. You could run whatever you wanted on them. It seems clear to me that Microsoft wants to turn PCs into closed devices. First, there was Secure Boot with Windows 8. Then, with Windows 8.1, your built-in local search integrated with Bing and its advertisers (but see Microsoft's denial). And now we have built-in security holes.
I don't trust Microsoft with that much power. Frankly, I have a lot of trouble trusting any company that much. Call me old-fashioned, but I like knowing that I, and not someone else, has ultimate control over my PC. Give me open computers, not dedicated devices.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was cutting-edge and 300bps was a fast Internet connection -- and we liked it! He can be reached at [email protected] Abdul-Qaadir al-Junayd (hafidhahullaah)
Translated by Abu Muhammad al-Maghribee (hafidhahullaah)
[Audio|Arabic-English]
Listen / Download Mp3 Here (Time 27:43)
https://salafiaudio.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/what-distinguishes-the-one-following-the-sunnah-upon-the-way-of-the-salaf-abdul-qaadir-al-junayd.mp3
This telelink was given by Sheikh Abdul-Qaadir al-Junayd for our brothers in Orlando, Florida at Masjid Qubaa on Sunday, December 23, 2012.
The sheikh gave a concise answer to the question, “What are the things that distinguish the person who sticks to the sunnah upon the way of the Salaf from those who do not follow the way of the Salaf?”
The sheikh gave us 6 points upon this issue. Listen to find out what they are.
Please note that this talk is in English and Arabic. The first 12 minutes or so are in Arabic, with the complete English translation following.
Baarak Allahu feekum
Abu Muhammad al-Maghribee (hafidhahullaah)
http://followthesalaf.comDetails on the mob hunts, online tournaments and familiar faces you’ll encounter while trying to rid exotic locales of aquatic menaces
Monster of the Deep: Final Fantasy XV is the brand new PlayStation VR exclusive game that allows you to experience the world of Eos like never before! Using two PlayStation Move controllers, Monster of the Deep is a remarkably genuine VR fishing experience. It’s out today and here is everything you need to know about the new FFXV fishing game.
1. It’s not just about fishing
In Monster of the Deep, giant fish are terrorising the waters in various fishing locations around Eos. As a Hunter it is your duty to find the monsters lurking below the surface, fishing them out and restore peace to the waters. It won’t be that easy to catch these monsters though so you’ll have to use all your fishing skills and prowess to ensnare each beast and shoot them with a bullet of light to rid the world of them forever.
2. You can create your own in-game character
To fully immerse yourself in the world of Eos, you can create your very own customised avatar. If you’ve played the FFXV Multiplayer Expansion: Comrades, you’ll be familiar with our custom character creator and how detailed and flexible it is. If you’re really going to become a Hunter worthy of tracking down the monsters of the deep, you’re going to want to choose how you look.
3. There are six different locations
There are a total of six different fishing spots in Monster of the Deep, with each one being drastically different from the last. Environments range from abandoned ruins to tropical forests and each one also hosts different species of fish to catch. Speaking of different species of fish, there are a total of 100 different species for you to catch!
Not only are the environments drastically different, but the weather can also change too. Obviously sunny weather is the best for fishing but mother nature might not always want to play nice so you may have to deal with cloudy skies or even dim light as the sun goes down.
4. You get your own lodge
Every accomplished Hunter needs a base of operations and in Monster of the Deep this is your lodge. Here you can purchase new tackle like rods, reels, lines and lures. The lures are actually based on lures used in real-life, except now they’re tailored to suit the world of Final Fantasy XV.
5. You’ll meet some familiar characters along the way
At every fishing spot, you’ll have the chance to bump into your buddies from Final Fantasy XV! There are a number of special encounters with Noctis, Prompto, Gladio, Ignis and Cindy while you’re on the hunt for the monster of the deep so be sure to say hi! Who knows, they may even invite you back to camp to eat with them?
6. Night mob hunts and online tournaments
In Final Fantasy XV, daemons appear at night time and in Monster of the Deep, special monsters also appear at night. If you visit fishing spots at night then you can partake in special mob hunts.
If this wasn’t enough we’ve also included an online ranking system so you can compete with other VR players! Special tournaments with their own varied rules will be held at each fishing spot. Compete in these to show everyone your world class fishing skills!
Monster of the Deep: Final Fantasy XV is out now exclusively for PlayStation VR and we hope you enjoy chasing down and catching the monsters that are plaguing the waters!Many young Spanish and Portuguese citizens are leaving their homeland in search of better opportunities abroad, with former colonies being among the more popular destinations, reports say.
In the first half of 2012, 40,000 Spaniards left home – almost twice as many as in the same period last year, figures from the National Statistics Institute show.
The numbers are even higher for foreign nationals in Spain, of which 229,000 left during the last six months.
As such, Spain has seen its overall population drop by 33,162 people this year to 46,163,116, newspaper El Pais reported Wednesday (18 July).
The latest report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said labour migration to Spain from outside the EU also declined by 90,000 over the last year, adding to fears that the country could suffer a ‘brain drain’.
“If the wealth of a country is its people, we are losing wealth”, Antonio Izquierdo, a sociology professor at Coruña University, told the newspaper.
Portugal has witnessed a similar trend, with an estimated 120,000 nationals moving abroad in 2011, news network Al Jazeera reported in March.
The OECD estimates that 70,000 Portuguese emigrate every year, half of whom are under 29 years of age.
The sovereign debt crisis has seen youth unemployment reach its highest level in years on the Iberian peninsula. More than half of all young people in Spain and a third in Portugal are out of work.
The job market squeeze has pushed Iberians to other European countries less hit by the crisis, with 7,756 Spaniards moving to the United Kingdom and 4,408 to Germany.
But many in search of work have seen their prospects limited due to imperfect foreign language skills, so they are trying their luck in the former colonies.
An ‘oasis’ in the former colonies
Last year, 4,182 Spaniards moved to Ecuador, and about three thousand to Venezuela and Argentina, regions which have seen their economic growth rise to near'recession proof' levels.
Marta Septién, a geological engineering student, is a case in point.
Despite being told there was zero unemployment in 2003 for her course of study, Septién has since been unable to find a job in Spain. She is currently working in London as a waitress but has considered leaving Europe for a job.
“Maybe in Latin American countries like Panama, Brazil or Colombia”, she told El Pais.
The most significant flow of Portuguese has been to Brazil, partly due to the country's booming economic performance.
Brazil’s National Secretariat of Justice said the number of applications for permanent residence filed by Portuguese rose from 276,703 to 328,856 between December 2010 and June 2011. That figure is separate from the many temporary work, study and research visas that were issued.
Statistics for 2010 revealed that 91,900 Portuguese nationals were living in Angola, where oil has created a boom economy.
Promising levels of growth in Portugal’s largest former colony in Africa have seen it described as an "oasis" of opportunity for the Iberian country’s unemployed.
“For every shipwreck in Portugal, there is a lifeboat in Angola,” Lisbon weekly magazine Visão said.
High illiteracy levels mean Angola has been crying out for an educated workforce, and experts from Portugal are in high demand, said German magazine Der Spiegel.
Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho – who grew up in Angola – has advocated emigration, having suggested in December last year that Portuguese move to other Lusophone countries like Brazil or Angola to find work.
But the comment was condemned by Portuguese newspaper Publico in a 20 December editorial, which claimed it was turning him into “a laughing stock”.
If skilled workers continue to leave the country the situation in Portugal “will be even more miserable”, the editorial went on to say.Support us! GearJunkie may earn a small commission from affiliate links in this article. Learn more
Outerwear and apparel giant Patagonia is getting into sleeping bags. GearJunkie saw the first sample this week.
The Hybrid Sleeping Bag comes to market in September. With it Patagonia tries for a new kind of sleeping system that only insulates the lower half of the body, relying on a piece of shell material (and a worn jacket/parka) for insulation on the upper half.
The bag weighs a scant 1 pound yet can provide enough warmth for winter ascents. The design is adaptable, usable through different seasons depending on the outerwear a climber brings.
Stuffed with 850-fill down, the bag’s temp rating depends on the jacket worn with it. The system we saw used a new Patagonia alpine model, the Grade VII Belay Parka, and the sleeping bag was set for about a 10-degree rating, a company representative told us.
You must wear a winter parka on top and sleep in the parka. The top of the bag is made of thin shell material (see details below).
Down Vs. Synthetic: Understanding Sleeping Bag Insulation To buy a sleeping bag you must choose between down and synthetic insulation. Which is the best sleeping bag insulation? Each has merits, which we explore to help you make an informed decision. Read more…
The system is meant for serious mountaineers and backcountry enthusiasts who will inevitably bring an insulating parka during an outing. The wear-your-jacket-to-bed theme eliminates redundant gear when climbers are trying to go as fast and light as possible on a peak.
Patagonia Sleeping Bag
Called an “elephant foot” design, the bag puts insulation only in the bottom half of the baffled body. The top is a thin fabric, the company’s windproof Houdini material, which is a 1.2-oz, 15-denier, rip-stop nylon with a DWR (durable water repellent) finish.
The bottom of the bag is more traditional, using Pertex Quantum shell fabric made of.85-oz, 15-denier nylon.
A half-length zipper saves weight, and draw-cords atop the insulated portion and at the hood help seal in warmth, Patagonia notes.
As noted above, its minimalist build makes for an approximate 1-pound weight for the bag. It packs small, about the size of a football, for easy transport on a mountain.
–The Hybrid Sleeping Bag will cost $299 when it comes to market the first week of September. It will be for sale at Patagonia.com and in Patagonia retail stores.Photo
The Internal Revenue Service may have just taken some of the fun out of Bitcoin. But that may mean that the virtual currency is growing up.
The I.R.S. announced on Tuesday that it would treat Bitcoin, the computer-driven online money system, as property rather than currency for tax purposes, a move that forces users who have grown accustomed to operating under the government’s radar to deal with new tax issues and reporting requirements.
While that may seem like an expensive headache, some financial experts view the move as a way to push Bitcoin further away from the fringes and into the mainstream financial system.
“It’s getting legitimacy, which it didn’t have previously,” said Ajay Vinze, the associate dean at at Arizona State University‘s business school. The ruling, he said, “puts Bitcoin on a track to becoming a true financial asset.”
Video
While many users already treat Bitcoin like a currency, the I.R.S. made it very clear that “it does not have legal tender status in any jurisdiction.”
The industry had been expecting the government to come out with some sort of guidance on Bitcoin, so the announcement on Tuesday did not come as much of a surprise. But some users worry that treating it as an investment could discourage the use of Bitcoin as a payment method. If a user buys a product or service with Bitcoin, for example, the I.R.S. will expect the individual to calculate the change in value from the date the user acquired Bitcoin to the date it was spent. That would give the person a basis to calculate the gains — or losses — on what the I.R.S. is now calling property.
“People might just be tempted to hoard rather than spend, because as soon as they spend they would be liable to incur capital gains taxes,” said Pamir Gelenbe, the co-founder of the CoinSummit conference and a partner at Hummingbird Ventures, a venture capital firm that recently invested in the online Bitcoin exchange Kraken.
The I.R.S.’s decision would treat Bitcoin as property subject to capital gains taxes. Long-term capital gains taxes are capped at 20 percent, a more favorable rate than the top rate of 39.6 percent on federal income taxes. Individual traders in the currency markets — the British pound, for example — are expected to treat gains or losses as regular income for tax purposes.
“From a tax perspective, this is really the best possible outcome,” said Barry Silbert, the chief executive of SecondMarket, which is planning to introduce a new Bitcoin exchange.
Up until now, Bitcoin enthusiasts have been able to buy, sell and trade on their gains with few fees and little oversight, since the currency has no central bank and no government regulator. Over the years, the price of Bitcoin has also fluctuated wildly, from just a few cents to more than $1,000 to its current price of nearly $600.
At the same time, an increasing number of merchants, including Virgin Galactic and Overstock.com, have begun accepting Bitcoin, supported by a growing cottage industry of companies who will exchange Bitcoins for dollars for a small fee.
Created by an anonymous computer programmer, or group of computer programmers, Bitcoin has largely been the realm of technology enthusiasts and anti-establishment hobbyists, who often buy and sell Bitcoin on online exchanges. Programmers are also able to obtain them by “mining,” or figuring out obscure algorithms to “unlock” new coins.
The I.R.S. now, however, says that these miners must report the fair market value of the virtual currency as part of their income.
The new guidelines also mean that online exchanges that buy and sell Bitcoin will now have to provide customers with annual reports of their transactions, just as stock brokerages and other investment firms do.
But some efforts may already be underway to ensure that the new reporting requirements will not discourage users from trading with Bitcoin.
“I can assure you that there are a number of companies that have come up with software to automate this entire process,” Mr. Silbert said.
The Bitcoin start-up Coinbase also said it supported the new guidelines.
“Exciting to see clarity from the I.R.S. Coinbase will help both consumers and merchants to meet the guidelines,” the company said in a Twitter message.
In the last year or two, however, the industry has attracted backing from venture capital and other investment firms who anticipate a wider adoption of virtual currency. But at the same time, regulators have become increasingly worried that online marketplaces could be used to facilitate drug deals and other illicit transactions.
All that has put more pressure on governments around the world to figure out some way to regulate the industry. That pressure only increased last month with the collapse of one of Bitcoin’s largest virtual exchanges, Mt. Gox. The company filed for bankruptcy in Japan and the United States, leaving few options for users who had lost money with the exchange.
Mt. Gox claimed to have lost nearly all its 850,000 coins, although it announced last week that it found about 200,000. The I.R.S.’s guidelines might mean that users in the United States who lost money could now treat that as a capital loss on their tax forms.
Bitcoin has attracted many of its users precisely because it operated outside the established financial system and offered the promise of cheaper transactions. But many Bitcoin advocates and experts have said that regulation is necessary to make Bitcoin a viable currency.
“The people that feel ideologically that Bitcoin should be free of all regulation aren’t going to be happy,” said Gil Luria, a managing director at Wedbush Securities who has written about virtual currency. “If you’re trying to replace an existing financial system, then you need to have all the features that are required of that financial system.”
The few employers who pay in Bitcoin will have to report those wages just like any other payment made with property, and Bitcoin income will be subject to the normal federal income withholding and payroll taxes, the I.R.S. said.
Shortly after the announcement, Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, praised the agency’s decision. The guidance “provides clarity for taxpayers who want to ensure that they’re doing the right thing and playing by the rules when utilizing Bitcoin and other digital currencies,” he said.When Dan Kennedy announced his retirement this week, it was hardly unexpected. It couldn’t have been easy for a one-time unquestioned starter in MLS to have dealt with the supporting role he's occupied since his Chivas USA heyday.
Kennedy is set for a very full second act in his professional life with a role in the LA Galaxy front office. It may make for a slightly uncanny experience at first, as he navigates the StubHub Center corridors once shared uneasily by Galaxy and Chivas staffers, but Kennedy and the league have mostly moved on from one of the more infamous misadventures in league history. Walking around the StubHub Center these days, it's hard to remember Chivas was ever there.
Yet Chivas' legacy lives on. And at a time when we like to fret about whether MLS can maintain its exponential rate of expansion without diluting the player pool, the dispersal of that final Chivas 2014 roster represented a brief moment of concentration, one with effects that are still being played out today. Kennedy's retirement reminds us of that.
On a broader level, though, the life of Chivas USA functions as a kind of parable for prospective MLS owners. A chance U.S. visit by then-Barcelona executive Ferrán Soriano in 2006 exposed him to Chivas USA, and it prompted his thinking on the adapted franchise model that eventually took root with New York City FC. By the time NYCFC became a proposition, however, the Chivas experiment had long soured, and City Football Group would become tired of fending off questions about being another Chivas.
Now LAFC will enter the league in 2018 with not only the LA Galaxy to react against, but with the legacy of Chivas as a cautionary tale. One obvious lesson of Chivas USA was not that it failed to find a distinct identity, but that it leveraged an identity in a way that felt inorganic to many of the Latino fans that were meant to be its base.
Still, despite the other caricature of badly attended Chivas games (remember the huge covering draped over the empty seats?), the club hadhardcore supporters groups. The legacies of the Union Ultras and Black Army 1850 did not end with the demise of the club. The latter group, in particular, initially pledged to stand with whatever road team fans were playing against the Galaxy and now seems resolved into a more proactive identity supporting LAFC.
Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports
And of course, historic Chivas figures continue to have a resonant presence in the league, or in U.S. Soccer. Former coach Bob Bradley has been linked with the LAFC job, former head coach Robin Fraser, currently an assistant in Toronto, deserves another shot elsewhere. And then there is the likes of Sacha Kljestan, who became an MVP finalist last season.
Just looking at that final 2014 roster and staff, including the league-appointed president Nelson Rodriguez (now general manager with the Chicago Fire), head coach Wilmer Cabrera (who looks to be turning around the Houston Dynamo), it's plain to see that the direct influence of Chivas USA still lives on.
At some point, only the broader history of the club will remain, and ultimately as the decades go by, the phenomenon of Chivas USA will seem as curious as that of the original Bethlehem Steel, Fall River Marksmen or any other soccer story tied to a place and time. But for now, the personnel of the Chivas USA "survivors" are still an important force in the league, and Kennedy's retirement suggests as good a moment as any to mark that.
NEXT: Who's still around? Chivas USA's ongoing legacy in MLSPresident Trump’s lawyers will postpone filing a complaint against fired FBI Director James Comey with the Justice Department in an effort to stop antagonizing the special prosecutor in the Russia probe, a new report said Wednesday.
Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz had said he was going to file a complaint with the department’s inspector general about Comey after the ex-top G-man told the Senate on June 8 that he had the contents of memos he wrote documenting conversations with the president leaked to reporters.
Trump was enraged about what he considered an illegal “leak” by Comey.
“Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker!” the president tweeted at the time.
Trump’s lawyers still plan to file the complaint, but are delaying the move as “a professional courtesy” to Robert Mueller, the former FBI chief who is heading the probe, Bloomberg reported.
The White House also wants to send a signal that Mueller will have “space” to do his job, the news service reported, citing a source.
Trump has repeatedly slammed Mueller’s probe as “fake news” and a “witch hunt” and reportedly thought about firing him.LAS VEGAS — One day before the Republican field descends on Las Vegas for the last GOP debate of the year, a group of Hispanic conservatives met privately with campaign officials for five different candidates, and held a press conference afterwards targeting Ted Cruz for his immigration stance and support of Donald Trump.
The group, which held a similar event in Colorado before the previous debate, where they blasted Trump and issued a warning to Cruz, met with campaign chairman Chad Sweet earlier in the day, peppering him with questions.
They said Sweet surprised them all by saying that Cruz opposes any and all forms of legalization for undocumented immigrants, and that he believes in attrition through enforcement — or making the lives of those in the country illegally so hard that they go back to their native countries. That, the group said, amounts to self-deportation, a policy supported by Mitt Romney in 2012 widely credited with hurting him with Hispanic voters.
"We learned today that Sen. Cruz believes in attrition through enforcement," Alfonso Aguilar of the American Principles Project's Latino Partnership and de facto leader of the group said, adding that the Cruz camp doesn't like to call it self-deportation "but that's what it is."
Asked to elaborate on Sweet's comments to the Hispanic Republicans, the campaign said Cruz's staff reiterates the same principles that Cruz promotes in both public and private.
"Anyone who truly cares about fixing illegal immigration understands that we must secure the border and enforce the law, and that includes building a wall that works, strengthening e-verify, and enforcing the law — including deportation of those who are here illegally. This is how we solve the problem," said spokesperson Catherine Frazier.
The group said they were troubled to learn how Cruz feels about legalization of any form, according to Sweet.
Rev. Tony Suarez, of the The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), spoke by phone with his group's leader Samuel Rodriguez before the event who told him he could speak freely about the group's disappointment.
Like Aguilar he noted that conservatives have a lot to be proud of from the current crop of candidates — like their diversity — and he lauded Cruz for being a friend to evangelicals and on the side of religious liberty, Israel, and life. But he called for clarity from the Cruz campaign on what it means by "no legalization."
"To us it's an issue of life, from the womb to the tomb," he said.
Mario Lopez of the Hispanic Leadership Fund spoke next, calling self-deportation a proven political loser ("You can ask President Mitt Romney") and the group issued a dire warning to Cruz about his closeness to Trump both publicly and in private.
In the meeting with Sweet, one attendee told him the Cruz immigration plan uses information from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a population control group they say is discredited.
The Cruz plan cites a 2009 CIS study linking immigration to unemployment, which the group feels is another connection to Trump's misinformation on immigration.
While the group is waiting for follow-ups from the Cruz campaign, they have now issued a warning and criticism of the steadily rising conservative firebrand.
Asked where they can go from here if the campaign does not heed their feedback, the group reiterated a plan mentioned to BuzzFeed News last month, that Cruz in the general election may not benefit from them doing the "hard work" of acting as his surrogates on Spanish-language networks like Univision and Telemundo.
Of the Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul campaigns, which also met with the group, Rosario Marin, former U.S. treasurer under George W. Bush, said, "Good people came to us, we have good choices," whom she would be happy to be a surrogate for. "But I'm troubled by the Cruz campaign's comments," she said. "This development has given us a certain pause to find out what he's saying."
The group also said they wanted to forcefully condemn Hillary Clinton and Democrats for saying all Republican candidates agree with Trump.
“It's the worst kind of political pandering, it's insulting to the Latino community and it won’t work," Aguilar said, framing Clinton's embrace of going further than Obama on executive actions as a rejection of forging consensus with House Republicans.
"My interpretation is that their strategy does not include a reasonable conservative strategy on immigration," said Artemio Muniz with the Federation of Hispanic Republicans, noting that Sweet waved away the group's concerns by saying they have PhDs doing the research and analytics for the campaign.
Which led Muniz to go further.
"I don't think Hispanic outreach for the general is in their strategy at all," he said.The European Court of Justice (ECJ) issued a ruling on Tuesday saying a European directive that would allow the British government to enact plain packing rules was lawful - if deemed so UK courts.
The ECJ took up the case involving Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and the UK government by examining the legality of rules on tobacco product packaging, health warnings and a ban on flavored cigarettes.
"The court finds that, in providing that each unit packet and the outside packaging must carry health warnings... the EU legislature did not go beyond the limits of what is appropriate and necessary," the court said in its ruling.
Following the first attempt by cigarette companies to void the regulation, in December, Advocate General of the ECJ, Juliane Kokott, wrote that the tobacco directive of 2014 was indeed lawful. The statute restricts severely what is allowed on cigarette packaging and how large health warnings must be, tightens previously lax rules on e-cigarettes, and prohibits the sale of flavored cigarettes - including menthols.
Kokott's opinion dismissed concerns from Philip Morris that the European parliament had infringed on free market and trade regulations, saying that in her view "the EU legislature did not exceed the considerable latitude to be given to it in ensuring that tobacco and related products may be placed on the market under uniform conditions throughout the EU without losing sight of the fundamental objective of a high level of health protection."
This is the second big defeat for Philip Morris in 2016. In March, the German government adopted a new law that will see images of teeth and lungs plagued by tobacco damage cover boxes of cigarettes. Similar laws are already on the books in countries like the UK and Canada, both of which have a lower rate of tobacco consumption than Germany. Tobacco companies initially fought for a longer transition period for the legislation to come into effect, but this was rejected by parliament and German smokers can expect to see the gruesome images on their packs of cigarettes beginning on May 20.Emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels have ushered in a new epoch where human activities will largely determine the evolution of Earth's climate. Because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe. Emissions reductions decisions made today matter in determining impacts experienced not just over the next few decades, but in the coming centuries and millennia.
According to Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia, important policy decisions can be informed by recent advances in climate science that quantify the relationships between increases in carbon dioxide and global warming, related climate changes, and resulting impacts, such as changes in streamflow, wildfires, crop productivity, extreme hot summers, and sea level rise. One way to inform these choices is to consider the projected climate changes and impacts that would occur if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were stabilized at a particular concentration level. The book quantifies the outcomes of different stabilization targets for greenhouse gas concentrations using analyses and information drawn from the scientific literature. Although it does not recommend or justify any particular stabilization target, it does provide important scientific insights about the relationships among emissions, greenhouse gas concentrations, temperatures, and impacts.
Climate Stabilization Targets emphasizes the importance of 21st century choices regarding long-term climate stabilization. It is a useful resource for scientists, educators and policy makers, among others.Oaklands is excited to host Murfreesboro’s Inaugural Oktoberfest on September 26from 5:00 to 10:00pm. This fantastic fundraiser will support Oaklands Mansion and will feature many local craft brewers such as The Green Dragon, The Casual Pint, O’Possum’s, Saw Works, Panther Creek Duck Rabbit and the MidState Brew Crew to name but a few.
Come enjoy the football game with Taps & TVs by The Casual (Mobile) Pint, energetic live music, a variety of family friendly activities for festival goers of all ages and some delicious treats from local food trucks. Guides will bring our local history to life with a ten minute “teaser” tour of the historic mansion from 5:30 – 7:00 PM.
“Local brewers love doing community outreach to support our valued history and what better place to do that than Oaklands,” said Lindsey Whitley, event organizer. We have a genuine treasure in Oaklands Mansion. However, we need your help to continue our mission of education and preservation.
Please direct all inquiries to (615) 893-0022 or email [email protected]
Click button below- Advanced admission for craft beer drinkers $35
Click button below- Advanced admission for designated drivers $15
Click button below- Advanced admission children ages 15-5 years $5
Gate admission for craft beer drinkers $40
Gate admission for designated drivers $20
Gate admission for children ages 15-5 years $10
Tickets available at the Oaklands Museum Visitors Center and on our website: OaklandsMuseum.org
Advance sales will run until 4pm on September 25, 2015.In order to personalize the entertainment watching experience, Hulu has decided to open up user profiles on each paying account as of December 8, 2016. Each account is allowed up to six user profiles. Not only is every account taste being refined according to viewing history and queued shows, but each participating member of a family or group of friends on an account will have target taste recommendations after each user gives Hulu questionnaire answers regarding their personal tastes. Children are even allowed to open up a Kids Profile, which gives suggestions that are family-friendly; good news for parents justifiably worried about their children wandering into the forest of mature content entertainment. This means no access to search, account recommendations, or Watchlist for young viewers.
Hulu’s new change is nothing new and shiny to those who use Netflix instead, which has had multiple viewer accounts since 2013; it can simply be viewed as catching up. However, as mentioned on TechHive.com, this definitely promotes Hulu as a premium streaming site that really refines the customer’s viewing and reviewing experience, and makes site navigation and organization more efficient. More simply put, it gives a viewer what they want, faster; not all people watch The Crown, not all people watch American Horror Story, and not all people watch Curious George; it frees |
Then we will be accompanying you.” (Queen)
The Queen is coming along as the strategist for the army.
It seems she left the castle to Melty. Melty’s guard was left to Female Knight.
We can’t use all of the country’s forces, and She’ll do fine as a guard.
And Melty and Female Knight seem to have compatible personalities, so I don’t think there will be any problems.
The person herself was frustrated that she would not be participating, though.
She is quite skilled, but there’s no helping it.
She shook hands with Raphtalia, saying she would leave it to her.
For argument’s sake, Trash is also in the Queen’s carriage.
… He’s staring silently from the inside. He seems to have aged even more than before.
His beloved daughter died horribly, so I guess that would cause a man to age.
And his beloved sister’s look-alike, Atlas, is serving under his hated enemy. He must be quite miserable.
He was scowling at me with vigor, but when Atlas sat next to me, his expression suddenly turned soft.
Anyways, that’s how our journey went.
“Ehehe~ It’s fine~” (Firo)
Firo is showing off to the Filo Rials pulling the allied forces’ carriages. She’s being annoying.
The Filo Rials themselves seem to look a bit jealous, as if… No that is not my concern.
By competing their Filo Rial-drawn carriages, and their dragon-drawn carriages, the Allied Forces are also proceeding at a reasonable pace.
I guess that’s one way to use them.
“KYUA!”
Child Gaelion is pulling a carriage with the same happy expression as Firo. He’s competing well with our bird, and… his passengers are making some nice memories, involving much nausea and vomit.
“Rafu~”
I also took the Raphs with me.
Mii-kun wanted to join in the fray too, so Rat came along with her equipment under one arm.
By the way, the former Caterpilland Raphs are also helping draw the carriages.
The gazes from the army are painful.
As expected of the Hero of the Shield! To create a new type of monster to help us is amazing!
… I hear whispers all around. Everyone’s bringing up my dark history. This was the result of something that was definitely not me.
Even if you praise me for it, it doesn’t make me happy at all.
And, a few days of travel passed… We arrived at the land of the seal.
“So this is where Houou is sealed…”
The land we arrived in was… well, it gave off the feeling of a small, remote country.
There are quite a few people who wear china-ish clothing in Melromark, and it seems they come from here.
But the roofs are really low. It’s quite different from the western style Melromark.
I get a different feeling than that of the town on the Spirit Turtle.
It’s like it’s from a different era…? I’m not too familiar with oriental fantasy settings, so I can’t really say.
Anyways, let’s just say it’s Chinese-ish.
“That would be the equivalent of our country’s castle, Iwatani-sama.” (Queen)
The Queen walks in front of us, as she shows us around the city.
She doesn’t seem too knowledgeable on it, so I don’t really think she has too, but…
“For some reason, I don’t see many people.” (Naofumi)
Right, despite the city’s size, and wide roads, I barely see anyone walking around.
It’s almost a ghost town.
If someone told me this was the country’s capital, I would tilt my head in confusion.
“From three months prior, this land was informed that Houou would awaken. After a large uproar, most of the populace evacuated.” (Queen)
“Well yeah…” (Naofumi)
Thinking about the casualties on the Spirit Turtle’s land, the people would try to get out of here as quickly as possible.
The destruction of the Spirit Turtle became quite famous, and this is the result.
“…”
Ren is silently looking down.
Is he still conscious about that incident? Just don’t do it here too.
Motoyasu is restlessly looking around the city.
Is he really repenting?
Itsuki is following Rishia with an apathetic expression as usual.
“… I’ll do my best.” (Itsuki)
He muttered to himself.
I really don’t understand what’s going on with his curse. Is it cured, or not?
I’m pretty sure it should be dispelled by now, but his emotions are still faint.
“And? Are we going to have a talk with this country’s head, or something?” (Naofumi)
“That’s right. We’ll be talking with a representative, though.” (Queen)
“Hmmm…” (Naofumi)
In the room the Queen led us to, was a single young boy, sitting on a throne.
Is this the representative?
“Thank you for coming all this way, Four Heroes, and the Queen of Melromark. I am the one acting as this country’s king.”
“My, my. The king I knew of was quite a different man. What happened?” (Queen)
“The previous king saw it fit to go on a long journey with his men, and all of the country’s priceless treasures.”
I let out a deep sigh.
Again… Why are all of this world’s royalty so rotten?
Heading for the hills out of fear of being drawn into the Houou Battle…
“Understood, then are you the representative I heard of?” (Queen)
“That seems to be the case. At the moment, my country’s soldiers are away, trying to capture the previous king.”
“Hey, Queen.” (Naofumi)
“What could it be?” (Queen)
“Why are all of this world’s royalty…” (Naofumi)
“He was supposed to be a skillful leader carrying the blood of Faubley Royalty, but for such a thing to happen in an emergency situation… I can’t really say anything about it.” (Queen)
No… isn’t he rotten because he has Faublian blood?
Is what I think, the kid in front of me is acting quite mature for his age.
He may be a person like Melty.
I guess he’ll do better than the people that ran.
“We humbly welcome the Heroes, and the allied army. As you proposed earlier, we have compiled all information in our possession pertaining to Houou, so if you would please look through that later, I would be grateful.”
As the boy waved his hand, a scholar-like person stepped out of the shadows. It looks like he will be guiding us.
“Then the armies will be on standby in the city.” (Queen)
“Yes…”
For some reason, the boy’s expression is dark.
Ah right, the land around the city seemed to be a barren wasteland.
From what I’ve seen, the few remaining residents are quite thin.
I heard that a few parts of this world were in famine.
Since I had my Bioplant, I didn’t really worry about it, but… We need to secure a source of food for ourselves.
“Shadow.” (Naofumi)
“What is it?” (Shadow)
… This isn’t the Shadow I know.
Anyways, I called a Shadow out, took some Bioplant Seeds from my pocket, and scattered them on his hand.
“We’ll be staying here for a while. Go plant that somewhere to make a source of food. While you’re at it, you can go fill this country’s storehouse as well.” (Naofumi)
“Understood.” (Shadow)
On my words, the Queen silently lowers her head.
At the same time, the boy bows as well.
“I’m thankful for the Hero’s benevolence.”
“If we try to send a starving army into battle, we’re the ones that will be troubled in the end.” (Naofumi)
Hmm… It’s not my problem, but it seems that food problems are prevalent in this area.
I’m worried about how long the supplies we brought with us will last.
The other heroes have also unlocked the necessary weapons to modify Bioplants.
The problem is… if they keep at modifying, a strange weapon like that shield may pop up, so I cautioned them to do it in moderation.
I’m starting to wonder whether the Legendary Weapons have some sort of Karma system in them.
Ren and the others have done quite a bit. So… if they do anything strange, there’s a possibility their weapons will send them berserk.
Even so, mass producing the Bioplant is essential for our profit.
If someone goes out of control here, it will be no joke.
“Will you kindly direct us to the information you compiled?” (Queen)
“Yes, this way.”
We ended our short audience with the king, and followed the scholar to the place the information was stocked.
But before that.
“Raphtalia, Fohl, and Atlas. Go watch over the Allied armies.” (Naofumi)
“I believe we’ve already made announcements to them.” (Raphtalia)
“More forces will be coming soon, right? Go handle those additions. If something happens, report to me immediately.” (Naofumi)
“Ah, yes. Understood.” (Raphtalia)
Even if we look over the material together, I don’t think the current Raphtalia is going to have too much of a role.
I sent Firo to find a place to put the carriage, and to investigate the area.
So she already isn’t here.
Perhaps I should get her to sing to raise morale. She’s really popular, apparently
I believe there was that anime about that. Is it really effective?
(TL: I’m really not sure about this one, but perhaps it’s Macross Frontier. There are plenty of Animes that fit the bill here)
I think as I proceed forward.
“Naofumi-sama.” (Atlas)
“What?” (Naofumi)
“If anything happens to you, call for me.” (Atlas)
“Yeah, got it.” (Naofumi)
It’s not like anything will happen yet.
I think. I give a vague response to Atlas and went to go read up on our next foe.Heather Callaghan
Activist Post
A lot of events are converging to create a tipping point to finally allow the labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods.
The FDA is likely to approve GM salmon and apples against the people’s will. Many big food companies have received massive social media backlash from consumers, particularly parent companies to organic ones that heavily funded campaigns against GMO labeling. For instance, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream got shrapnel from some of these “Traitor’s Boycotts” because its parent company Unilever funded to prevent labeling. Ben & Jerry’s will remove its GM ingredients by the end of 2013.
The funded and questionable failure of California’s Proposition 37 has stoked the flames since last September. Consumers have even themselves begun labeling grocery products with a passionate drive to bring awareness to others. Wal-mart got flak last summer for selling unlabeled and possibly dangerous GM sweet corn.
Most recently, Washington state introduced a labeling initiative for the 2013 ballot. Their concern is not only about “right to know” but surrounds fears that unlabeled genetic salmon and apples could seriously damage the economy by getting their exports blocked – especially from countries that require labeled GM food. It is estimated that at least 20 other states are considering labeling initiatives.
This amalgam is perhaps why there is talk of Wal-mart, PepsiCo, ConAgra and at least 20 major food companies possibly switching sides and lobbying for national labeling. It’s probably the very least all those companies could do after spending more than $45 million to keep food unlabeled. Gary Hirshberg of Just-Label-It and chairman of Stonyfield organic called it a poor return on their investment, referring to their actions provoking demand instead of squashing it. Too late – money talks both ways, but now they are starting to get it.
Organic Consumers Association (OCA) reported earlier that those companies, the FDA and some advocacy groups met in January behind closed doors at the Meridian Institute, a major discussion hub. It appears that some Fortune 500 companies have now shied away from Monsanto. Consumer activism works.
Ronnie Cummins of OCA warned to keep watch:
We should be wary of any compromise deal at the federal level, one that would preempt the passage of meaningful state GMO labeling laws that have real teeth.
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How many of you saw a red flag for a case of Problem-Reaction-Solution or Controlled Opposition? Are they discussing a watered-down solution – a strategic attack? At the very least, they know that they have a problem.
While so many consumers are adamantly opposed to GMOs existing anywhere close to planet Earth, some law makers like Senator Jamilah Nasheed of St. Louis simply feel:
I don’t want to hinder any producer of genetically modified goods — However, I strongly feel that people have the right to know what they are putting into their bodies.
Fighting the presence of GMOs and trying to raise awareness has been an uphill and often unseen battle for over 20 years. Not only have the FDA and USDA failed to help, but they have systematically ushered them in with no safety testing and have covered up studies proving hazards.
At least with consumer awareness reaching critical mass (we vote with our forks and dollars), big companies like Wal-Mart and food giants finally voicing labeling desires is a step in a good direction if they stop selling us out for profits.
Let’s continue giving them an uphill battle to win back our patronage – if ever. They don’t want to keep shelling out millions to further provoke us if they have to keep doing it repeatedly to their own demise. If they want people’s money, they had better listen.Activist Post
Peace Activist Medea Benjamin of Code Pink interrupted White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan during a press conference about the progress of the war in Afghanistan last week.
When Brennan was espousing the notion that Al Qaeda’s image is badly tarnished around the Muslim world because he claims they’re killing mostly “innocent men, women and children,” Benjamin stood up and challenged him.
Benjamin shouted “What about the hundreds of innocent people we are killing with our drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia?”
The CIA admits that at most there are only 50-100 active Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, about the average number of innocent civilians killed by U.S. drone attacks every month. And that number doesn’t include the number of innocents kill teams extinguished before snapping photos of and urinating on them.
Unfortunately, the war propagandists have the bully pulpit and Benjamin was dragged away by a large thug so Brennan could continue vomiting his lies.
That very same weekend, Brennan appeared ABC News’ This Week to further defend the U.S. murder of innocent civilians with drone strikes:
‘Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population,’ Brennan said on ABC News ‘This Week,’ answering a question about the covert drone program. U.S. missile attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere are not officially acknowledged by the administration but are frequently discussed indirectly.
‘We’ve done everything possible in Afghanistan and other areas to reduce any risk to that civilian population,’ he continued. ‘Unfortunately, Al Qaeda burrows within these areas, you know, safe havens as well as areas where there are civilians, but we’ve been very, very judicious in working with our partners to try to be surgical in terms of addressing those terrorist threats.
‘Sometimes you have to take life to save lives,’ Brennan added, ‘and that’s what we’ve been able to do to prevent these individual terrorists from carrying out their murderous attacks.’ (Source)
Is there anyone still confused about who’s responsible for killing innocent civilians in the Muslim world? The Muslim population certainly is not.
Read other articles by Activist Post here.
You can support this information by voting on Reddit HERE.The leader of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, plans to visit the beseiged Palestinian territory for the first time next week.
Khaled Meshaal will arrive in the Gaza from Egypt to mark Hamas' 25th anniversary and congratulate its leaders and fighters for battling Israel during the recent eight-day offensive, a senior Hamas official said on Saturday.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
"I am thrilled and proud that I will be returning to Gaza," Meshaal said.
Meshaal, who has been in exile since the 1967 Six Day war, previously had been prevented from crossing into Gaza by longtime Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.
But Mubarak was ousted in February last year, and the Muslim Brotherhood, which has close ties to Hamas, has risen to power.
He has led Hamas since 1996, helping to build the movement into a potent force. Israel, the US and the European Union have branded the group as a terrorist organisation.
The Hamas leader survived an Israeli assassination attack in Jordan in 1997. Until recently, Meshaal was based in Syria but after the uprising in the country broke out there he relocated to Qatar.
The announcement of Meshaal's visit to Gaza comes after the UN voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to accept Palestine as a non-member observer state.
Hamas has refused to recognise state of Israel.Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon-based Hezbollah group, and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian president, have issued stern warnings to Israel, saying that any aggression on that country's part would be met with a swift armed response.
Nasrallah, speaking during a televised address from Beirut on Friday, said that his fighters will make the lives of Israelis "a living hell" if it is attacked.
"There are targets in occupied Palestine [Israel] which could be targeted by a small number of missiles," Nasrallah said.
"If we are forced to use them to protect our people and our country, we will not hesitate to do so... and that will turn the lives of hundreds of thousands of Zionists into a living hell," he said in a speech marking al-Quds [Jerusalem] Day.
Nasrallah warned that any conflict would involve "tens of thousands of deaths".
He also said that if Israel were to undertake any military action over Iran's controversial nuclear programme, "the response will be enormous".
Any such action would present Iran with "the opportunity it has been dreaming of" since it was founded in 1979, he said.
Last month, an Israeli general warned that the Israeli military would respond "decisively" to any rocket attacks aimed at Tel Aviv.
"If we get to another war, Israel will hit Hezbollah decisively, quickly, as fast as we can in order to stop the fire from Lebanon to Israel," Brigadier General Herzi Halevi, commander of the country's northern division, said at a briefing.
He also said that towns in southern Lebanon used as launching bases for Hezbollah rocket attacks would be "destroyed".
Israel and Lebanon are officially in a state of war, and the former fought a devastating war with Hezbollah in 2006.
'Cancerous tumour'
Iranian President Ahmadinejad, speaking in Tehran, said that Israel was a "cancerous tumour" that would one day cease to exist.
"Open your ears: there will be no Zionist regime and no United States [domination] in the new Middle East map," Ahmadinejad said.
"The occupied territories should be fully returned to the Palestinians," the Iranian president told supporters at Tehran University. "Nobody in the world can say he is in favour of human rights and approve the Zionist regime."
In Bahrain, meanwhile, police personnel clashed with protesters who attempted to hold their annual rallies marking al-Quds day. Several people were injured and others were arrested, after police fired teargas, stun grenades and birdshot rounds.
The marking of al-Quds Day is a show of support for Palestinians over the disputed holy city of Jerusalem. It is an annual event first introduced in Iran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late supreme leader of Iran, in 1979.
Nasrallah also spoke on Friday of the uprising in Syria, saying that leaders of Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia were not doing enough to end the bloodshed there.
Lebanon travel warnings
Meanwhile, the governments of the United States and Turkey have asked their citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Lebanon, after a series of kidnappings in the country linked to the uprising in Syria.
"The US embassy has received reports of an increased possibility of attacks against US citizens in Lebanon," the embassy said in a statement.
"Possible threats include kidnapping, the potential for an upsurge in violence, the escalation of family or neighbourhood disputes, as well as US citizens being the target of terrorist attacks in Lebanon."
The embassy also announced the suspension of the State Department's flagship Fulbright and English Language Fellow programmes in Lebanon, cutting short research projects and teaching grants for US university students and educators in Lebanon.
The Turkish foreign ministry issued a similar warning on Friday.
"It is deemed beneficial if our citizens avoid travelling to Lebanon unless absolutely necessary," said the ministry in a statement.
The warning came after around 20 people, including one Turkish national, were taken hostage in Beirut on Wednesday and another Turkish national on Thursday, according to the ministry.
Ankara said that it was continuing efforts at a multilateral level for the release of the two kidnapped citizens.
Several Gulf countries have ordered their nationals to leave the country immediately in the face of threats, particularly against Saudis and Qataris whose governments are staunch opponents of the Syrian regime.
On Friday, the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) sought to relieve tensions by saying that it would aid the Lebanese Miqdad clan, who has carried out the kidnappings in response to the kidnapping of one of its members, in the search for the missing person.
"We have our group of Free Syrian Army hostages and don't intend to take any more. But if our relative Hassan is killed in Syria, the first to be executed will be the Turk," warned spokesman Maher al-Miqdad.
Hezbollah chief Nasrallah said his group was not responsible for the response to the abduction of the Lebanese Shias in Syria.
"What happened was beyond the control of Hezbollah and [the] Amal [movement]," he said,
On Friday, the Lebanese army said it was stepping up security at religious sites and other public places ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, in response to the tense security situation.What happens when a judge gets demob-happy? The answer can be seen in the intervention by the imminently departing president of the supreme court, Lord Neuberger, in the debate over the role of the European court of justice – better known as the ECJ – once Britain leaves the EU. The government will doubtless be less than delighted at another dissenting voice in the Brexit process.
Judge calls for clarity on status of ECJ rulings in UK after Brexit Read more
The ECJ has long been a bugbear for Brexiteers, and some might say with good reason. The court has expanded its jurisdiction dramatically over time, meaning that an ever-increasing number of issues fall within its remit. It’s never been a good look for judges in Luxembourg to be able to strike down laws passed in Westminster, and the judgments coming from the ECJ are an odd mix, encompassing elements both of our own common law system and the civil law seen across the continent.
Theresa May set out a negotiating red line in her party conference speech last year that Britain would not up sticks from the EU only to remain under the ECJ’s jurisdiction. “That’s not going to happen,” she pronounced confidently.
The trouble is that, as with much of Brexit, the headline is far simpler than the specifics. As Neuberger’s intervention shows, it may be impossible to shake off the reach of the ECJ, however much the government tries.
This is not so much about a lack of political will, but a matter of legal reality. The government can hardly be said to have backtracked: the draft bill on withdrawing from the EU says that the ECJ’s rulings will no longer be supreme for any law passed after “exit day”. So far, so clear.
As for previous decisions made by the European court, this too is spelled out. Where the ECJ has decided something – and the British courts have therefore been required to apply that decision – the end result will remain binding here.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘No wonder Neuberger feels that the position is invidious.’ Photograph: John Stillwell/PA
After that, things become about as simple as an Ikea flat pack. The bill, if passed in its present form, will leave lawyers scratching their heads – and billing their hours, of course – as they try to work out what it all means.
There are a number of big issues. One is what we do about decisions made by the ECJ after we leave the EU. It’s naive to suggest that these could be ignored altogether. Take a British regulation implementing EU law that was enacted prior to Brexit: what happens if the ECJ rules on what that EU law means, after we quit? Will British judges have to take the ECJ’s ruling into account, or implement the law as they see fit?
What we do know is that British courts won’t be forced to do what the ECJ says – the bill says a British court “need not have regard” to the ECJ’s judgments. Confusingly, though, it then states that the British court “may do so if it considers it appropriate to do so”.
Unless the government is clearer, it will be up to judges to decide just how much regard they must have for the ECJ. The possibilities are endless. It could be that British courts will be required to follow the ECJ unless there’s a good reason not to – or at the very least that the ECJ will be “highly persuasive” authority, meaning that the judges in Luxembourg continue to have huge sway over what happens here. At the other end of the scale, ECJ decisions might be seen as barely relevant background, largely ignored and no more important than an academic article or a decision from somewhere like Singapore.
No wonder Neuberger feels that the position is invidious. Jump one way and judges will be “enemies of the people”. Go the other and they could be seen as casting aside helpful authorities for political reasons.
Why are judges worried about the ECJ's post-Brexit role? Read more
The other big oddity is that the law will ossify from “exit day”. British judgments given in the past on the basis of ECJ jurisprudence will be confirmed as good law, even if the ECJ later changes its mind on the issue. Confused? You should be. British courts could still, in effect, be bound by decisions made by the ECJ that the ECJ has itself overturned. In that scenario, do British judges change the law to remain in line with the new European decision, or stick with what we had at the strict cut-off point?
The Brexit bill gives flexibility, but that will only lead to ambiguity. With ECJ jurisprudence no longer binding, the British courts will be free to change their mind, and it’s inevitable that over time, people will try to chip away at decisions that have been made ever since Britain first joined the EU. We may see a whole line of cases relitigated, leading to uncertainty all round.
The government will likely succeed in asserting the primacy of British courts – and that is no small change – but it needs to decide precisely what that means.
• Bobby Friedman is a journalist and barristerColombian President Juan Manuel Santos has won a second term, beating right-wing challenger Oscar Ivan Zuluaga in a vote that will allow peace talks with FARC rebels to continue and seek an end to five decades of war.
With more than 98 percent of the runoff vote counted on Sunday, centre-right Santos led over economist Zuluaga with 50.8 percent compared with 45.1 percent.
Santos, who hails from one of the country's most influential families, opened talks with rebel leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in late 2012 to end a conflict that has killed more than 200,000 people and forced millions more from their homes.
He made the pursuit of peace the centrepiece of his campaign, and cast the election as a choice between peace and war.
"This is the end of more than 50 years of violence in our country and it is the beginning of a Colombia with more justice and social inclusion,'' Santos told cheering supporters in his victory speech. He vowed to "dedicate all my energies and all the energies of my government" to sealing an accord.
Divisive talks
Arlene Tickner, a columnist for El Espectador, told Al Jazeera that Santos' plan to conclude the negotiations with FARC was highly improbable for real progress, especially since he just announced a new peace process with the country's second-biggest rebel group, the National Liberation Army.
Although they have shown more progress than previous failed efforts, the peace talks in Cuba have been divisive.
Zuluaga supporters fear a peace deal could hand FARC leaders political power without punishment for their crimes.
Zuluaga has accused Santos of negotiating with "terrorists" and in his campaign, he pledged new conditions on FARC, like prison terms, for serious crimes and a ban on political participation.
The rebels have said they will not go to jail and refuse to down their weapons until peace is signed.
Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, backing Zuluaga, accused Santos of committing what he called "the biggest corruption in history" to win re-election.
Just moments after Santos' victory speech, Uribe appeared on television and accused the incumbent's campaign of widespread vote-buying.
Zuluaga made no such claims in his concession speech a few hours earlier.Including, in all likelihood, some of his supporters
What everyone's getting wrong about Trump's immigration position
One of the ways you can detect bias in reporting is with the use of a word like “hardline,” which sounds stubborn and inflexible, for a position that simply means business. When someone is said to be taking a “hardline” position, people are constantly after them to “soften” said position, which sounds so much nicer and more reasonable. So we keep hearing that Donald Trump is taking a “hardline” position on immigration, that being the determination to deport all 11 million (or 12 million, or whatever it is) illegal immigrations who are currently in this country. Once again yesterday, Trump came under pressure in a group of Hispanic leaders to “soften” this position, which he talked about later on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox. Here’s how CNN reported that:
Speaking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity in an interview Tuesday night, Trump was asked about a recent meeting he had with the National Hispanic Advisory Council, a group of Hispanic supporters. “Is there any part of the law that you might be able to change that would accommodate those people that contribute to society, have been law abiding, have kids here—would there be any room in your mind because I know you had a meeting this week with Hispanic leaders,” Hannity said. “I did,” Trump replied. “I had a great meeting with great people, great Hispanic leaders, and there could certainly be a softening because we’re not looking to hurt people. We want people—we have some great people in this country. We have some great, great people in this country but we’re going to follow the laws of this country and what people don’t realize—we have very, very strong laws.” Trump did not provide further details. His stated immigration stance—which include deporting all of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country and building a wall along the US-Mexico border—is a key part of his appeal to the Republican Party base and helped propel him during the primary season.
One of the things people constantly miss about Trump is that he takes very strong positions about things like law enforcement and international deals because he understands the need to go into any situation in a position of strength. When Trump says every illegal immigrant is subject to deportation, that is not the same thing as saying every illegal immigrant will be deported. He knows that as president he needs to maintain the discretion to deport anyone in that group, which is a very dramatic departure from the Obama position of doing everything he can to avoid enforcing the law at all. The media and the Democrats, either out of willful ignorance or out of actual stupidity, respond to this position by attacking both the plausibility and the wisdom of rounding up 11 million people. Trump is not going to round up 11 million people. He has no intention of trying to. The resources do not exist to do so. This is why he responded the way he did to the Hispanic leaders he met with on Tuesday. To the extent they’re asking him to concede right off the bat that certain people will never be deported, Trump refuses to make that concession because the law is clear and the federal government has to follow the law. A person who is breaking the law shouldn’t be told to just hide out and try to keep getting away with it. That person needs to take the initiative to make things right, but understand that the federal government does have the discretion to deport you and is not going to give up that discretion just because of public pressure of whatever else. That’s how you end up with widespread lawlessness.
But Trump also understand that you have to exercise good judgment in choosing who you go after, so the priority targets for deportation will be criminals and others who are creating real problems with their presence here in the United States. When Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway talks about this being a matter of how the policy is executed, that’s exactly what she means. Trump cannot and should not say, “Anyone who’s not causing any problems, or has a family here, can stay.” Because that undermines the law. People not causing problems will not be high deportation priorities, but unlike Obama, Trump understands the importance of maintaining legal discretion over any lawbreaker. Where I think many Trump supporters are also in error is that they actually believe the media narrative about Trump rounding up 11 million people and deporting them all in one fell swoop - and they like it. They think this is the one and only way to deal with illegal immigration, and that every politician who won’t say he’s going to do it is a squish and a sellout. They think Trump is really going to do it and that makes him the only guy who’s prepared to get serious about illegal immigration. These people are going to be disappointed if Trump becomes president, and that’s a shame because Trump’s actual position is the most serious one we’ve seen when it comes to enforcing immigration law. He’s not going to give up leverage by swearing off legitimate legal options he has, and he clearly intends to make the enforcement of immigration law a priority in a way Obama certainly has not (and Hillary certainly would not). When people try to pressure Trump to make concessions about what he would not do, he refuses because Trump is not a guy who believes in weakening his position before he takes on a challenge. So yes, under a President Trump, every illegal immigrant in America will be at risk of deportation. But no, they will not all be gone by the time Trump leaves office. Not even most of them will be gone. It’s costly and complicated to deport them, and as we discussed last week, sometimes the courts will give you problems even when you try your best. The fact that almost no one seems to understand this goes to show just how absurd the coverage of campaigns has become, which probably explains in part why Americans have lately been making such poor choices in the choosing of their leaders.
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Please adhere to our commenting policy to avoid being banned. As a privately owned website, we reserve the right to remove any comment and ban any user at any time.Comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence and death, racism, anti-Semitism, or personal or abusive attacks on other users may be removed and result in a ban.-- Follow these instructions on registeringDisturbed sleep is a common complaint in those with depressive illness and research studies continue to report high rates of difficulty falling asleep and nocturnal awakenings, along with early-morning waking and being unable to return to sleep.
In terms of sleep architecture, one of the most frequent findings in depressed individuals is an increase in total amount of REM sleep and REM density (frequency of rapid eye movements during REM sleep), and a decrease in the taken time to enter REM sleep during the first sleep cycle. In association with changes in REM sleep, depressed patients also report more negative dream content.
Many antidepressants (ADs) affect REM sleep directly and so may change the content and frequency of dream reports. In a recent systematic review, published online in Sleep Medicine Reviews, Gotthard Tribl and colleagues summarised studies that have investigated the impact of ADs on dream content (in both patients with major depression and healthy non-depressed control participants). They evaluated 57 studies, published over a 60 year period, which included a comparison of dream content across different AD drugs, and a comparison of AD medication versus no-AD. Dream content was recorded using a variety of methods, including daily diaries in the morning; verbal reports collected immediately after forced awakenings from REM sleep during the night; or questionnaires designed to probe dream content and frequency of nightmares.
The authors found that, across studies, ADs tended to decrease dream recall frequency, and this was particularly the case for a class of ADs called Tricyclic antidepressants. The reduction in dream recall was found for both normal volunteers and patients with depression. Another type of AD class, SSRIs/SNRIs (selective serotonin/norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors) were found to intensify dreams and increase nightmare frequency. Tricyclic ADs were found to induce more positive dream emotions and in one study this was associated with improvements in depressive symptoms. Withdrawal of ADs generally resulted in increased dream recall and nightmare frequency.
The authors highlight that research attention devoted to the effects of antidepressants on dream recall/content has been minimal. This is surprising given the large number of trials conducted to assess the effectiveness and safety of AD medications. Future studies are needed to understand the relationship between different ADs and dreaming – which may have implications for patient preferences during treatment.
Original paper:
Tribl, G., Wetter, T., & Schredl, M. (2012). Dreaming under antidepressants: A systematic review on evidence in depressive patients and healthy volunteers. Sleep Medicine Reviews, doi:10.1016Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he wanted to read the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal before passing judgment on it — and now he and everybody else will have their chance.
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