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The White House believes that foreign investment will be key to fulfilling President Trump's promise to upgrade U.S. roads, bridges, airports and other public works, officials said Tuesday. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the success of President Trump's $1 trillion infrastructure package — which is expected to rely heavily on the private sector — will likely depend on help from foreign investors. “Working with foreign investors is going to be a critical part of any plan we put forward,” Mnuchin said at the SelectUSA Investment Summit in Washington. "Public-private partnerships are crucial to ensuring that the American taxpayer does not bear the full cost of any proposed program." A number of foreign investors, including in Australia, Canada, Europe and the Middle East, already invest in U.S. infrastructure. ADVERTISEMENT But Trump’s infrastructure proposal will try to encourage even more private-sector involvement through various incentives, with the administration hoping to spend $200 billion to leverage $1 trillion worth of overall investment. The White House has also endorsed an idea known as asset recycling, which entails selling off public assets to the private sector and using the proceeds to pay for other transportation projects. Trump’s infrastructure proposal is also expected to include massive permit and regulatory reform in order to speed up project delivery and create a more attractive environment for private firms. The president’s infrastructure pledge, though far from finalized, has already spurred optimism among transportation advocates and investors. Japan said earlier this year that it plans to invest in U.S. infrastructure by buying debt issued by American companies. The investment will amount to $150 billion in public and private funds over 10 years and could reportedly create several hundred thousand U.S. jobs in projects related to artificial intelligence and robotics. And Saudi Arabia recently made a tentative pledge to invest $20 billion in a new infrastructure fund managed by The Blackstone Group, a private investment firm led by Trump economic advisor Steve Schwarzman. “The United States is one of the world’s most open investment environments and will remain a leading destination for international investment,” Mnuchin said. “The reform program we have put forward is going to make the U.S. an even more attractive place to do business ... Those investing here should have no doubt that their investments will be safe and secure.”
Construction exec stabbed in Kitakyushu, yakuza involvement suspected KITAKYUSHU (TR) – Fukuoka Prefectural Police suspect organized crime involvement in the stabbing of a construction company president early Friday morning, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Nov. 22). At approximately 5:40 a.m., the 47-year-old executive was attacked in the street by a knife-wielding assailant in front of his residence in the Tokiwamachi district of Kokurakita Ward. The victim, who was commuting to work, received wounds to the right side of his head and an arm and leg. He is undergoing treatment in a local hospital. His injuries are not considered serious. The attacker arrived at the scene by car. He is described as being approximately 170 centimeters in height. He wore a helmet that covered head and black clothing. Police believe an organized crime group is behind the attack and investigating whether the executive has had any disputes with gangs in the past.
tacotime Offline Activity: 1484 Merit: 1000 LegendaryActivity: 1484Merit: 1000 GUIMiner-scrypt: A GUIMiner fork for mining scrypt chains March 07, 2013, 08:56:34 PM Last edit: March 13, 2014, 07:29:50 PM by tacotime #1 The program is a frontend for reaper and cgminer and is intended to simplify things for new miners and remove yet another barrier to entry for scrypt/litecoin mining. DONATE (LTC): LiK1rotC2tNYNRbRfW2xsKLYJvKhQ3PwTN DONATE (BTC): 17bmYcP6Vio6c1gnyPsaDSv4B11SLe81Ab DONATE (VTC): VnL5jN9HLATM3PbVPcxcJcjJgGrmDcYwU4 Supports scrypt mining (Litecoin, Dogecoin, etc) and scrypt-n mining (Vertcoin, etc) DOWNLOAD (win32 binaries for Vista/7/8 v0.05) DOWNLOAD (Mirror) To upgrade from old versions, delete the entire contents of your old folder (settings are saved elsewhere) and replace them with the new zip file contents. Source on Github: Please ensure you have the following dependencies installed AMD APP SDK: Latest AMD drivers: or Known working for all cards AMD driver (12.8): 12.8 32-bit 12.8 64-bit AVOID 12.10 DRIVERS, THEY SEEM TO BREAK LITECOIN PERFORMANCE. 13.X SEEM TO BE OKAY. Code: 3-13-14: alpha version 0.05 is released. FEATURE: vertminer 0.5.2 added along with vertminer settings FEATURE: cudaminer stratum support added with latest version of cudaminer 12-25-13: updated GPU settings, cgminer version, and cudaminer version. merry christmas! 5-7-13: alpha version 0.04 is released. FEATURE: cudaminer added, although the program will not show valid hash rates. FEATURE: Latest version of cgminer added. FEATURE: Batch files for both cudaminer and cgminer are now created in their respective subdirectories, in case you still want to be able to see the exact console output. BUGFIX: Users with spaces in the Windows usernames are now able to use the program. BUGFIX: Correct settings for low usage in 7xxx series added. 3-19-13: alpha version 0.03 is released. FEATURE: Tooltips added to explain parameters for scrypt kernel. FEATURE: cgminer 2.11.3 added with env. var. settings to allow for high (>8192) thread concurrencies. BUGFIX: cgminer now displays hash rates more quickly. BUGFIX: cgminer now sets the GPU platform correctly. 3-10-13: alpha version 0.02 is released. BUGFIX: Number of total hashes per second now displays correctly. BUGFIX: Bug that caused only one reaper miner tab to function when multiple were present fixed. 3-9-13: alpha version 0.01 is released. FAQ Q: How do I use the stratum proxy? A: Enter the host and the stratum port and click start. It should announce that the proxy is connected. Then, point your miners at host: localhost, port: 8332. Run your miners as normal; you should see shares/hash rates reported. Also note that cgminer has its own stratum support built in. To use that instead, select "Yes" for Use stratum in the miner tab and point the miner directly at the stratum port of your pool. If you still want to use the stratum proxy with cgminer, you must select "No" for this option. Q: How do I update cgminer to the latest version? A: Download cgminer and dump the contents into the /cgminer/ folder, replacing the old version of cgminer. Q: Why are my speeds not close to those reported in the original FAQ? A: In addition to tuning the parameters of the program, you will need to tune the GPU core speed and memory. For 5xxx/6xxx cards a good ratio is 0.70 - 0.80 core / memory clock speeds. For 7xxx cards, ratios are best under 0.68, with the 7970 preferring ratios at or under even 0.57 in reaper. To find your memory speed from the core speed, simply divide by the ratio, e.g. 900 MHz core / 0.68 = 1325 MHz RAM. Q: Shares reported by the stratum proxy are not the same as shares reported by the card. Why is this? A: It is a bug to be fixed in a later update. Q: I hit the start button with cgminer for the first time and nothing happened! A: Wait for 2-3 minutes and see if mining begins. The reason is that cgminer needs to build the kernel to run. If nothing still happens, post in this thread as it may be a bug. Q: I'm getting lots of stales with cgminer and high thread concurrencies; why is this? A: The current cgminer kernel seems to have trouble with high thread concurrencies. If it throws lots of reject shares that come up at the pool as invalid, try switching to reaper. Q: I'm using an nVidia card and it doesn't work, why is this? A: You need to install the Q: My miner windows doesn't appear onscreen! A: Delete C:\Users\You\AppData\Roaming\poclbm\poclbm-scrypt.ini. Q: Why does my cudaminer miner tab hang on "Connecting"? A: Because python's subprocess can not see cudaminer's output no matter what I tweak on it. If the author of cudaminer releases a new version in the future that has stdout streams compatible with python 2.7, I will fix this. In the meantime, if you navigate to the "/cudaminer/" directory, you'll see that a batch file is added after you press start that you can check your performance from. Q: Something is wrong and cgminer isn't giving me helpful output to GUIminer-scrypt. What do I do? A: For more verbose output, run the batch file ("your-miner-name.bat") in the /cgminer/ directory. This is generated whenever you hit the "Start" button and will show the cgminer console so you can better troubleshoot your problem. Q: How do I setup a backup pool? A: Add a second pool with "-o stratum+tcp://yourpool.com:3333 -u user -p pass" in extra flags. You can add as many as you like in this fashion. Presenting GUIMiner-scrypt, a shoddily programmed fork of GUIMiner!The program is a frontend for reaper and cgminer and is intended to simplify things for new miners and remove yet another barrier to entry for scrypt/litecoin mining.To upgrade from old versions, delete the entire contents of your old folder (settings are saved elsewhere) and replace them with the new zip file contents.Source on Github: https://github.com/theRealTacoTime/poclbm Please ensure you have the following dependencies installed AMD APP SDK: http://developer.amd.com/tools/hc/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/Pages/default.aspx Latest AMD drivers: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx orKnown working for all cards AMD driver (12.8):Q: How do I use the stratum proxy?A: Enter the host and the stratum port and click start. It should announce that the proxy is connected. Then, point your miners at host: localhost, port: 8332. Run your miners as normal; you should see shares/hash rates reported.Also note that cgminer has its own stratum support built in. To use that instead, select "Yes" for Use stratum in the miner tab and point the miner directly at the stratum port of your pool. If you still want to use the stratum proxy with cgminer, you must select "No" for this option.Q: How do I update cgminer to the latest version?A: Download cgminer and dump the contents into the /cgminer/ folder, replacing the old version of cgminer.Q: Why are my speeds not close to those reported in the original FAQ?A: In addition to tuning the parameters of the program, you will need to tune the GPU core speed and memory. For 5xxx/6xxx cards a good ratio is 0.70 - 0.80 core / memory clock speeds. For 7xxx cards, ratios are best under 0.68, with the 7970 preferring ratios at or under even 0.57 in reaper.To find your memory speed from the core speed, simply divide by the ratio, e.g. 900 MHz core / 0.68 = 1325 MHz RAM.Q: Shares reported by the stratum proxy are not the same as shares reported by the card. Why is this?A: It is a bug to be fixed in a later update.Q: I hit the start button with cgminer for the first time and nothing happened!A: Wait for 2-3 minutes and see if mining begins. The reason is that cgminer needs to build the kernel to run. If nothing still happens, post in this thread as it may be a bug.Q: I'm getting lots of stales with cgminer and high thread concurrencies; why is this?A: The current cgminer kernel seems to have trouble with high thread concurrencies. If it throws lots of reject shares that come up at the pool as invalid, try switching to reaper.Q: I'm using an nVidia card and it doesn't work, why is this?A: You need to install the CUDA toolkit for the kernel to compile.Q: My miner windows doesn't appear onscreen!A: Delete C:\Users\You\AppData\Roaming\poclbm\poclbm-scrypt.ini.Q: Why does my cudaminer miner tab hang on "Connecting"?A: Because python's subprocess can not see cudaminer's output no matter what I tweak on it. If the author of cudaminer releases a new version in the future that has stdout streams compatible with python 2.7, I will fix this. In the meantime, if you navigate to the "/cudaminer/" directory, you'll see that a batch file is added after you press start that you can check your performance from.Q:A: For more verbose output, run the batch file ("your-miner-name.bat") in the /cgminer/ directory. This is generated whenever you hit the "Start" button and will show the cgminer console so you can better troubleshoot your problem.Q: How do I setup a backup pool?A: Add a second pool with "-o stratum+tcp://yourpool.com:3333 -u user -p pass" in extra flags. You can add as many as you like in this fashion. Code: XMR: 44GBHzv6ZyQdJkjqZje6KLZ3xSyN1hBSFAnLP6EAqJtCRVzMzZmeXTC2AHKDS9aEDTRKmo6a6o9r9j86pYfhCWDkKjbtcns
Few things in life are certain, but I'm pretty sure of this: I won't get to captain a real-life U.S.S. Enterprise. The technology simply doesn't exist. What technology did just let me do here at E3 2016 is take the helm of a virtual Star Trek starship. I loved every minute of it. Enlarge Image Ubisoft As I wrote this morning, Star Trek: Bridge Crew is a new game from Ubisoft coming to the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR headsets this fall. It puts you in the captain's chair -- or the helm, or the tactical conn, or the engineering panel -- of a brand-new Star Trek starship. You play one of those four roles, working together with three other people wearing VR headsets of their own. Now playing: Watch this: We flew a Star Trek starship in VR You can each see each other, talk to each other with integrated voice chat, even gesture to each other if you have a set of motion controllers. And you'll need to, because communication is key. You can't fire the phasers unless the helmsman gives you a firing solution. The helmsman can't go to warp unless engineering prepares the warp coils first. The chief engineer can't transport stranded survivors onto the ship unless the tactical officer lowers the shields. And so on. Only the captain can see everything the crew is doing -- and relay orders from Starfleet -- to help coordinate it all. When it works well, it really does feel a bit like an episode of Star Trek. And when it works poorly, it's hilarious. WHY OH WHY are the shields still down? Enlarge Image GIF by Sean Hollister/CNET At E3 I played both the helmsman and tactical officer positions, and both were a blast -- even though the early version here at E3 is a pretty simple game. Inside the headset, you've basically got a simple touchscreen interface. You plot in a course (or select a target, if you're the tactical officer) just by tapping on an object of interest, then dragging a slider to set your speed. As helmsman, there's a second touchscreen pad you can drag around to set your heading; as tactical officer, there are toggles to raise and lower the shields and arm the torpedoes, and buttons you can tap to fire each. But each bridge officer has a second job, too. Scotty doesn't just divert power from the engines to the shields and vice versa; he also mans the transporter bay. When it was my turn as tactical officer, I had to scan ships. I think helmsman is my favorite, though. They get to throw the silver lever that takes the ship to warp speed. For the most part, Bridge Crew looks and feels true to its Star Trek roots. It's not the prettiest game, but the bridge has just the right luster -- and plenty of lens flare -- you'd expect from an important ship in J.J. Abrams' rebooted Star Trek universe. The initial sequence, where you ride a shuttlecraft to the U.S.S. Aegis and see your starship in all its glory, is pretty breathtaking. Enlarge Image Sean Hollister/CNET Coming out of warp into the middle of a giant debris field, the wreckage of a space station in front of a sun about to go nova, is one of the coolest things I've seen in VR so far. And to think that Ubisoft is pitching this as a full game, one with a story, makes my inner Star Trek fan squeal with joy. I just hope Ubisoft has enough depth and enough scenarios to keep it entertaining for a good long while. After my sessions, I spoke to Brian Tate, the game's director. In no particular order, here's a long list of things I learned about Bridge Crew. The team came up with Bridge Crew as a VR experiment, and never thought it'd actually get made. But: "We went to CBS and they loved it right away. They said this is the Star Trek game they always wanted to see made." Don't expect to see any familiar faces from Star Trek in Bridge Crew. Tate says the game is about your own Star Trek adventures. Though most Star Trek ships have the front consoles facing forward, Bridge Crew has them turned 45 degrees towards each other to more naturally facilitate communication between the players. The chief engineer is also up on the bridge, instead of down in engineering, for the same reason. Ubisoft's excuse? The U.S.S. Aegis (NX-1787) is a brand-new ship specifically made for this game, and it does things a little differently. While there'll only be four roles -- captain, helm, tactical, engineering -- at launch, there might be more later. Ubisoft narrowed it down to the current roles to make sure each player would be constantly communicating and always had something to do. Though the game's premise is that the Aegis is on a mission to find a new homeworld for the displaced population of Vulcan, that's "just the launching point for the story." In addition to the story, you can randomly generate missions as well. When the ship takes a beating, you can see it visually. Sparks fly, fires break out and poor red shirts get thrown over their consoles. You can play with AI instead of friends with VR headsets, if need be. They'll respond to basic commands and issue basic status updates, and you can jump into their roles temporarily. The game's exclusive to VR, but you can use an Xbox One gamepad to play the game instead of touch controllers. Tate says each crewman's station also has advanced features that have yet to be revealed. The team has played the similar Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator around the office, but Tate says it wasn't an inspiration for the game. Combat isn't the focus of the game. "Combat is an essential part of Star Trek, but it's never the point of anything you're doing. It's always the thing getting in the way," says Tate. Instead, expect exploration missions, rescue missions, and more to be revealed later this year.
Twenty-one years ago I was assigned by Commentary to write about Jared Taylor—today known as one of the eminences of the “alt-right.” Taylor had written a grim book on American race relations, Paved With Good Intentions, which had been published by a mainstream house and was widely, if critically, reviewed. Though unusually skeptical about the prospect of blacks and whites living together harmoniously in the United States, it stopped well short of any systematically racist argument. The book had several fans among New Yorkers I knew prominent in journalism and city politics. When I referred to it in passing in a New York Post column, we quickly received a fax from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League stating that Taylor was far more extremist than I had let on. Curious to explore further, I queried Commentary—where I then did most of my non-newspaper writing—and they were interested. I interviewed Taylor, read back issues of his monthly newsletter, American Renaissance (AR), and drafted a piece. AR was devoted primarily to demonstrating that in American history racism was as accepted as apple pie and that this was by no means a bad thing. It contained large doses of the evolutionary and biological racial thought fairly commonplace amongst American elites in the ’20s and ’30s. A central contention was that the United States could not thrive as an increasingly multiracial and multicultural country and that American whites were facing a kind of cultural dispossession. I summarized this, quoting liberally, and concluded that the endgame vision of the AR crowd was potentially horrific, leading to national dissolution or civil war, while adding that continued mass immigration really would put the common culture of America under grave stress. If immigration rates went down, Taylor and AR would remain fringe players. If they rose, white racial anxieties would bubble to the surface, and Taylor might one day have his moment. Advertisement The piece was never published: Neal Kozodoy, Commentary’s editor, told me I had indulged Taylor too much and asked for a shorter, tighter rewrite. By then my brief summer vacation had ended, other tasks intervened, and I eventually lost interest. Jared Taylor’s moment has not arrived, but clearly he has edged into the national conversation. He has been pictured and quoted in an anti-Trump attack ad produced by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, he has been a guest on Diane Rehm’s show on NPR, and his core ideas have been broadcast—and excoriated—in magazines and websites great and small. He is now touted as one of the intellectual leaders of the alt-right, a diffuse movement of uncertain significance, but one deemed sufficiently important by the Clinton campaign for Hillary to devote a large portion of an August campaign speech to it. Donald Trump—who has almost surely never read a single article by an alt-right figure—is claimed by Clinton and other liberals to be under its influence and propagating its doctrines. The truth is quite different: parts of the alt-right have raised their own visibility by attaching themselves to Trump. At the same time, Trump and his unanticipated success in winning the Republican nomination are symptoms of the same political and civilizational crisis that makes alt-rightish themes—at least in a more or less bowdlerized and soft-core form—compelling to a growing number of people. ♦♦♦ Taylor, 65, is old by alt-right standards, and is an atypical representative, though just how much so is difficult to discern, for much of the alt-right is anonymous. The movement fields no candidates, publishes few books or pamphlets. It is a creature of the web, strongest on Twitter. Pepe, an internet cartoon frog, is an alt-right character—and has actually been formally denounced by the Clinton campaign. Alt-right internet trolling, sometimes ugly, blatantly racist and anti-Semitic, is also part of the movement. There is some debate whether it should be taken as an offensive and unfunny joke—merry keyboard pranksters who enjoy pretending to be internet neo-Nazis, rather like punk rock bands of the late ’70s deploying Nazi imagery for shock effect—or is something more sinister, a genuine resurgence of hardcore racism and anti-Semitism. Likely it’s more the former, but it’s also likely that the alt-right banner has given the minute number of genuine neo-Nazis in the country a kind of protective shield. Richard Spencer may serve as a bridge between older white nationalists such as Taylor and a younger alt-right internet crowd. It’s mistaken to call him or anyone else a leader—the movement has no procedure for choosing leaders—but he is clearly a pole of influence. He’s an intellectual entrepreneur who arrived in DC roughly ten years ago from a Duke graduate program. He worked at TAC for seven or eight months, where he was kind of a square peg in a round hole. Sometime thereafter his ideology began to crystallize. He started a website called AlternativeRight.com and later revitalized a white-nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, and launched a journal, Radix. Spencer can be engaging and amusing, but his core doctrine is likely to remain, barring some sort of Mad Max-type Armageddon, well outside what most Americans would consider plausible or desirable. What is the doctrine? At a recent press conference in DC, Spencer explained that the core of alt-right thought is race. Race is real, race matters, race is foundational to human identity. You cannot understand who you are without race. Many people would agree—at least privately or partially—with the first two assertions, but the third is the critical one, and has never been true historically or sociologically. (Not that there haven’t been groups of self-proclaimed pan-Asian or pan-African intellectuals who sought to make it true. Spencer fits into their tradition.) In any case, Spencer hopes somehow to spur whites into a kind of pan-white racial consciousness and galvanize them to become “aware of who we are,” and to prepare themselves, one day somehow, to form a white ethnostate. He refers to Theodore Herzl’s propagation of Zionism as a model for how such an ethnostate, seemingly a distant dream, could be eventually achieved. He fails to add that it took a Holocaust to make a Jewish State a reality. An argument Jared Taylor and other white nationalists make is that whites choose to live amongst their own given the opportunity. Church congregations self-segregate by race, whites flee black-dominated cities to white suburbs, etc. There is something to this, but an equally important part of reality is that, left to their own devices, people intermarry. Roughly 15 percent of American marriages are now between people of different races, the greatest portion between whites and Latinos and whites and Asians. Offspring of the racially intermarried may soon constitute the country’s largest “minority” group. So too with Jews, usually treated by white nationalists as an irredeemably separate entity: their rising intermarriage rates have for decades been an anxious obsession for Jewish communal leaders. Americans sometimes self-segregate, sometimes intermarry, sometimes neither. Spencer likes to present himself as a bearer of profound and inescapable sociobiological truths, realities that political correctness denies and seeks to suppress, but the evidence for his core assertions is ambiguous or non-existent. Real estate prices rise in multicultural Brooklyn, stagnate in white rural Connecticut. Prior to last fall, and before Hillary introduced the alt-right to a national audience, Spencer and Taylor held periodic conferences that could gather perhaps 200 people. (These were often held under shameful harassment by the leftist anti-First Amendment crowd, but that’s a different issue.) Spencer says he sees the alt-right as a vehicle that will influence politicians and intellectuals, taking as its model neoconservatism. But the differences with neoconservatism are vast. In terms of intellectual accomplishment and range of expertise, the roster of contributors to Commentary and The Public Interest in the 1970s compares to the alt-right like a contemporary version of the ’27 Yankees to, at most, a decent college team. This gap could probably be narrowed somewhat, and in Europe there are alt-rightish figures of genuine intellectual eminence. But in contrast to its post-Cold War advocacy of aggressive and militaristic foreign policies, brought to disastrous fruition in the George W. Bush administration, neoconservatism’s domestic views were center-right and not especially radical. They were more often a commonsense reaction to the excesses of a seemingly pervasive ’60s-era left liberalism. The hardcore alt-right, on the other hand, has genuinely radical aims, which would be overwhelmingly rejected if its core perspectives were more widely known. ♦♦♦ Yet Hillary Clinton and her campaign would not devote an entire speech to linking Trump to a shibboleth. When Steve Bannon, former head of the popular website Breitbart who now co-chairs the Trump campaign, describes Breitbart as an “alt-right” platform, he certainly isn’t thinking of advocacy for a white ethnostate. Milo Yiannopoulos—a popular campus speaker and political provocateur (British, flamboyantly gay, funny) who coauthored one of the first and most complimentary long-form articles about the alt-right—did not bother to mention a white state as a goal. For many who consider themselves alt-rightish, or alt-right sympathizers, who participate actively or passively in alt-right Twitter, this is not a significant omission. The surge in curiosity about the alt-right—Clinton claimed in her speech that some alt-right websites had seen their traffic increase a thousand fold—has virtually nothing to do with a rise in hardcore white nationalism. Which raises the question of what does drive the rise, and why is it happening now? The alt-right was obscure until the summer of 2015. The first mention of the term in the New York Times came at the end of last year, around the same time as a long piece in BuzzFeed. The BuzzFeed article explored such aspects of alt-right culture as the Pepe the Frog character and the emergence of the resonant term “cuckservative.” With its etymological links to “cuckold” and “cuckoo bird,” “cuck” was a term for that kind of establishment conservative who, wittingly or not, devotes his resources and energy to nurturing other people’s children at the expense of his own. By December “cuckservative” had become sufficiently mainstream for Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan to use the term on the air. What spurred this sudden emergence? It was not white-nationalist conferences or doctrine, which had been around forever, but events. Last year the West received a nasty high-voltage shock of political reality. The first jolt was the Charlie Hebdo attack in January. France had experienced jihadist murders before, but this time, the strike came in the center of Paris, and France was alarmed to find no small amount of support for the killing among its five million Muslim residents, many of them second- and third-generation citizens. That spring and summer, European newspapers began to fill with reports of intensifying migrant and refugee flows, driven partially by the Syrian civil war and partially by the expansion and streamlining of people-smuggling routes from Africa. The rescue of boats overflowing with African and North African migrants in the Mediterranean became a regular feature of European news. Finally, in the last week of August, Angela Merkel announced that Germany was open to migrants and refugees, and soon television viewers the world over saw long columns of mostly young men—from Syria, from Pakistan, from Afghanistan—marching into Europe. Because of Merkel and generous social benefits, the liberal northern social democracies were the preferred destination, and they were initially welcoming. By 2016 the welcome had grown cold. Hundreds of migrants sexually assaulted German women in and around the central train station of Cologne on New Year’s Eve, a mass assault that German authorities initially tried to cover up. It was subsequently reported that a similar assault had taken place at a music festival in Sweden in 2014. It became evident that Angela Merkel’s welcoming policies had thrown into sharp relief a cultural clash between European and Muslim social norms. Over a million new migrants entered Germany in 2015, and an equal number has done so this year—exceeding the number of German births by several hundred thousand. If the sexual assaults could be seen as the cultural edge of the migrant surge, it was more difficult for even liberal “anti-racist” European leaders to ignore or explain away the terrorism aspect. The Charlie Hebdo attack was followed by the mass slaughters at the Bataclan theater in Paris, at the Brussels Airport, then on a seaside promenade in Nice, culminating in the execution by knife of an aging French priest by two “assimilated” Muslim migrants in his church outside of Rouen. In many of these cases it was reported that though the perpetrators were already on various terrorism watch lists, the French security service—a tough-minded and far from liberal organization—simply lacked sufficient manpower to monitor those who had shown signs of potentially being terrorists. There were too many of them. One could interpret this alarming new reality in various ways: The Economist, probably the preeminent English-language voice of the European Davos class and political establishment, put Merkel on its cover as “the Indispensable European,” praising her for “boldly upholding European values” with her migrant policies in the fall of 2015. Voters, gradually shifting allegiance to the anti-immigrant parties of the far right, did not agree. Gilles Kepel—a highly respected, politically centrist French expert on Islam—raised the possibility that terrorism and the new migration would send the country into civil war. An aborted civil war formed the background to Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, a number-one bestseller in France. Richard Spencer may be incorrect about America, but one remark from his press conference in DC last month was arresting: The refugee crisis in Europe is something like a world war. It is in many ways a race war. In terms of direct violence it does not resemble World War I or II. It is a demographic struggle, a struggle for identity, a struggle of who is going to define the continent, period. It is a new kind of war, a postmodern war, a war through immigration. There are no trenches, no guns. But it is a world war. Of course, it is not primarily a race war. Religion, or religious culture, plays a major and perhaps decisive role in the conflict, and conflict between Christendom and Islam is not new by any means. Still, there is something in the bluntness of Spencer’s depiction that rings more true than 90 percent of what appears in the American media, which invariably depicts the refugee crisis in humanitarian terms and terrorism as a barely related law-enforcement issue. It is surely not a coincidence that the alt-right began making strides into American consciousness precisely at the moment Muslims were surging into Europe as refugees, while others were blowing up Parisian rock concerts or mounting mass sexual assaults on European women. In Europe, at least, such stark descriptions of what is taking place are no longer found only on the far right. Consider the response of Pierre Manent, one of France’s most renowned liberal intellectuals, formerly an associate of Raymond Aron, to the slaughter last July of 85-year-old Catholic priest Jacques Hamel outside Rouen: The French are exhausted, but they are first of all perplexed, lost. Things were not supposed to happen this way. … We had supposedly entered into the final stage of democracy where human rights would reign, ever more rights ever more rigorously observed. We had left behind the age of nations as well as that of religions, and we would henceforth be free individuals moving frictionless over the surface of the planet. … And now we see that religious affiliations and other collective attachments not only survive but return with a particular intensity. Whatever one might say about the alt-right, it is not perplexed. Few other political factions in America had a vocabulary ready for—or even made an effort to interpret seriously—what was going on in Europe, at a time when many people were seeking one. One can ask, of course, what do rapes in Cologne or terror in France have to do with “exceptional” America? Yet for more than a century, most educated Americans have been conscious of their cultural and civilizational ties to Europe. In some cases that may be a residue of past immigrant ties, but there is more. The American establishment—virtually none of it of French ethnic origin—reacted viscerally to Hitler’s occupation of Paris in 1940 in ways it did not to the Rape of Nanking. President Roosevelt found increasing leeway in public opinion and in Congress to inch a previously isolationist country toward an intervention to free Europe from Nazism. European civilization is the fount of our own. These are themes that alt-rightish Twitter understands and uses. Donald Trump understands it too: he is the only American politician who has openly criticized Angela Merkel and regularly evokes European problems with immigration. American developments in the fall of last year, while less critical than those in Europe, also spurred the alt-right. The rise of Black Lives Matter put into question one of the outstanding domestic-policy advances of the past generation, the dramatic reduction in urban crime rates, which has made possible the revitalization of many cities. The lie which held that America’s police forces were chock full of marauding racist murderers suddenly became mainstream, repeated endlessly on television and pushed in only slightly more subtle fashion by Obama’s own attorney general. Meanwhile, some urban neighborhoods were looted by rioters, and others saw dramatic spikes in their murder rates. At the same time, one American college campus after another was roiled by demonstrations over issues that seemed largely incomprehensible to most Americans. Video circulated of dozens of black Yale students surrounding a professor and demanding his firing because his wife had written an email suggesting Yale had better things to do than police student Halloween costumes. (He and his wife both subsequently resigned their positions.) Virtually every American politician responded to these disruptions by heading for the tall grass. One hardly needed to be a white nationalist to sense that something at once absurd and menacing was afoot. On some issues, establishment liberal opinion had moved so far to the left as to be unrecognizable. As blogger Steve Sailer noted, in 2000 the New York Times editorial page opposed amnesty for illegal aliens both because it would encourage more illegal immigration and because it would have deleterious effects on the employment and wages of lower-income native-born Americans. Sixteen years later, when Trump suggested that the core of immigration policy should be concern for its impact on the well-being of Americans, he was denounced as a raving bigot by the same New York Times. It was predictable that such developments, touching on visceral areas of personal security, national sovereignty, and freedom of expression, would stir desire for a muscular response. Donald Trump filled the bill, if not always eloquently. So too, occasionally, did segments of the more established conservative media. But there was a market for a pushback as scathing and polemically unafraid as the left’s own polemicists, which might not have been the case four years earlier. This, as much as anything, accounts for the emergence of the alt-right, at least in its less ideologically extreme iterations. ♦♦♦ There is ample reason to interpret Trump’s success as a nationalist pushback against globalism, as part of a political pattern one sees in Europe as well. But there is another structural dynamic to Trumpism, as deeply rooted as nationalism and far more significant than the controversies that drive daily campaign coverage. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, published 20 years ago, is that rare book that seems more obviously correct and relevant today than when it first came out. Clash was often mistakenly interpreted as a call to arms against Islam, but it was not: it was an effort to map the structure of world politics in the wake of the Cold War, an attempt which saw that the major fault lines were no longer between nation-states nor between alliances of states based on ideology. They were between civilizations—Islam, the West, East Asia, and so on. Huntington’s book was a guide advising the United States how to navigate this new kind of world, where civilizations rubbed up against each other all the time as never before in history. Huntington warned about getting involved in other civilizations’ internal conflicts, and he opposed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He also disdained the West’s, and especially America’s, pretention to be the bearer of universal values. Other civilizations may have envied and hoped to emulate and acquire the West’s material success, its science, its gadgets, its weaponry. But in the main, they have never aspired to become Western and to embrace such qualities as the West’s pluralism, its separation of church and state, its Christianity, its rule of law, its celebration of individualism. About certain aspects of his analysis Huntington was honestly uncertain: Latin America, for instance, could be seen as part of Western civilization or as separate, affiliated with the West but not of it. Latin Americans, Huntington noted, are themselves divided on the question. The answer to that question, however nuanced, has weighty consequences: it is obviously easier for the United States to assimilate—that is, make into Westerners—Mexican immigrants than it is for Europe to assimilate Muslims in any serious numbers. Because Trump has embraced immigration restriction; because Europe is clearly floundering under the weight of terrorism and a massive and potentially unending migrant surge; because a previous American president destabilized the Middle East by launching an invasion justified, in part, by claiming that the region would welcome having American values imposed upon it at gunpoint—because of all this, the 2016 election, unlike any before, is being held on Huntington’s turf. And though Huntington was a famous and deeply respected Harvard political scientist and a life-long Democrat, the concerns of Clash are those raised implicitly by Trump and explicitly by what I call the soft-core elements of the alt-right. There is, of course, much racism in American history, and there are enormous crimes for which Europe continues to strive to atone. But neither anti-racism nor respect for other cultures should be turned into a national or civilizational suicide pact. Here what Irving Kristol famously wrote about Sen. Joseph McCarthy comes to mind: “There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he like them is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.” In the now global faceoff between Western civilization versus mass immigration fused with multiculturalism, Kristol’s words describe with uncanny accuracy the dichotomy between Donald Trump and his supporters on one hand and those most feverishly denouncing him on the other. Among the former, for all their faults, are those who want, unequivocally, Western civilization to survive. About the latter, no such thing is certain. Scott McConnell is a founding editor of The American Conservative and the author of Ex-Neocon: Dispatches From the Post-9/11 Ideological Wars.
Microsoft patented a cool multi-axis or multi-pivot hinge (armadillo hinge) for computing devices. The patented hinge rotatably secure portions of the computing device. This is a flexible, articulated hinge that stabilizes the entire device, allowing it to recline and fold forward like a regular laptop, and fold backward to a comfortable angle. Hinge cover portions are provided over the multi-pivot hinges to protect the hinges from foreign objects and/or protect a user of the computing device from being pinched by the multi-pivot hinges during rotation. The patented hinge includes a quick attach/detach assembly can allow the user to be able to detach a first portion and a second portion of a computing device to use either portion independent of the other. For example, the first portion may be operated as a stand-alone tablet device, and then may be attached to second portion via armadillo hinge assembly to form a device more akin to a laptop device. A user may also be able to exchange first portion or second portion for application-specific devices. For example, an individual second portion may include a keyboard and/or a touchscreen. In certain scenarios, the user may attach a first touchscreen as the first portion and a second touchscreen as second portion, and utilize the device like a book. In other scenarios, a user may attach a touchscreen as the first portion and an input device, comprising a keyboard and trackpad, as the second portion, and utilize the device like a laptop. Other configurations and implementations are contemplated. Patent Information Publication number: US 20160132075 Patent Title: COVERED RADIUS HINGE Publication date: 12 May 2016 Filing date: 11 Nov 2014 Inventors: Errol Mark TAZBAZ; Applicant: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC US20160132075
Many times, at parties and in other conversations over the years, I have vociferously defended fellow journalists against charges of bias in their work. Particularly journalists working in the lowly field of print journalism, as opposed to TV. But within those caveats, I've always maintained that the majority of professional print journalists, anyway, try very, very hard to get the story right. But recently, I had an experience that gave me a new perspective on the issue. A few weeks ago, I attended the public launch of a company's product that had, until that point, been kept tightly under wraps. The product involved a breakthrough approach and new technology that had the potential of having a revolutionary impact on its industry, as well on consumers around the world. Unlike most of the journalists covering the event, I was not an expert on that particular industry. It wasn't my normal "beat." The reason I was there was because I'd been interviewing the company's CEO over the previous several months for a book project. But that also meant that while I wasn't an expert about the industry in general, I was in the odd position of knowing more about the company's "secret" product than any other journalist in the room. It was an eye-opening experience. A lot of major news outlets and publications were represented at the press conference following the announcement. A few very general facts about the product had been released, but the reporters had only been introduced to details about it a half hour earlier. There was still a lot about how it worked, how it differed from other emerging products, and why the company felt so confident about its evolution and economic viability, that remained to be clarified. But the reporters' questions weren't geared toward getting a better understanding of those points. They were narrowly focused on one or two aspects of the story. And from the questions that were being asked, I realized--because I had so much more information on the subject--that the reporters were missing a couple of really important pieces of understanding about the product and its use. And as the event progressed, I also realized that the questions that might have uncovered those pieces weren't being asked because the reporters already had a story angle in their heads and were focused only on getting the necessary data points to flesh out and back up what they already thought was the story. There is always a tension, as a journalist, between asking open-ended questions that allow an interview subject to explain something and pressing or challenging them on accuracy or details. But if you think you already know the subject, or already have a story angle half-formed in your head, it's easy to overlook the first part. The journalists at the press conference didn't have a bias as the term is normally used; that is, I didn't get the sense that they were inherently for or against the company or its product. They just appeared to think they knew the subject well enough, or had a set enough idea in their heads as to what this kind of story was about, that they pursued only the lines of questioning necessary to fill in the blanks of that presumed story line. As a result, they left the press conference with less knowledge and understanding than they otherwise might have had. And while nobody could have said the resulting stories were entirely wrong, they definitely suffered from that lapse. Especially, as might be expected, when it came to the predictions they made about the product's evolution or future. In his new book, How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer cites a research study done by U.C. Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock. Tetlock questioned 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends," asking them to make predictions about future events. Over the course of the study, Tetlock collected quantitative data on over 82,000 predictions, as well as information from follow-up interviews with the subjects about the thought processes they'd used to come to those predictions. His findings were surprising. Most of Tetlock's questions about the future events were put in the form of specific, multiple choice questions, with three possible answers. But for all their expertise, the pundits' predictions turned out to be correct less than 33% of the time. Which meant, as Lehrer puts it, that a "dart-throwing chimp" would have had a higher rate of success. Tetlock also found that the least accurate predictions were made by the most famous experts in the group. Why was that? According to Lehrer, Not that everyone in the field is perfect, unbiased, or even a good reporter. And not that I haven't ever encountered an editor who really, really wanted a story to say "X" as opposed to "Y." I remember one editor who complained that a story I'd done about NASA test pilots didn't make them sound like the wild cowboys he imagined they were. (Unfortunately--or fortunately--the truth about test pilots is, they're not cowboys. They're precision engineers and very calculated risk-mitigators, hitting test cards with calm, methodical accuracy. The risk isn't in their attitude. It's in the inherent hazards of testing new technology under real conditions for the first time.)
Yes, you read it right. We finally got our collective shit together and the long-unavailable, classic discography of beloved and iconic Seattle band, TAD – God’s Balls (1989), Salt Lick (1990), 8-Way Santa (1991), and assorted singles from the band’s 1988-1992 run – will finally receive the deluxe reissue treatment. Producer & engineer Jack Endino (who produced God’s Balls, TAD’s first full-length) has lovingly remastered all of the recordings from the original tapes. God’s Balls, Salt Lick and 8-Way Santa will be available throughout the known universe on November 4th of this very year. These deluxe editions of God’s Balls, Salt Lick, and 8-Way Santa feature new images from celebrated photographer Charles Peterson, bonus tracks, and expansive liner notes from the band and Jack Endino. The bonus material associated with each release will be included on the CD and digital formats; each of the the gatefold vinyl LPs will include that album’s bonus material as part of its free, associated download. PLUS all of the bonus material, from all three of these monumental heavy rock/punk albums will be collected on an additional bonus LP available for free with purchase of all three (3) albums on vinyl from the Sub Pop Mega Mart [preorder (is advised) here] and also from select independent retailers. New to the hard-churning world of TAD? Read all about it in the words of Tad Doyle himself right here, then further your education with these O.G. TAD videos: “Stumbling Man” (from Salt Lick) [watch here] and “Wood Goblins” (from 8-Way Santa). [watch here] God’s Balls (1989) God’s Balls, TAD’s punishing, noise-drenched debut album, was recorded with Jack Endino at Reciprocal Recording in Seattle in 1988 and released early the following year. In addition to their usual arsenal of guitars, bass, and drums, the band employed a variety of unusual instruments – an empty gas tank from a car, a hacksaw, a large brass tube from a microwave transmitter, CB radio mics, a cello bow used on cymbals to emulate guitar feedback – to thunderous effect, adding a Neubauten-esque clang to the band’s rock riffs. After releasing God’s Balls, TAD flew to Europe with Nirvana for both bands’ first European tour. The now-legendary, month-long tour took the bands to the UK, Ireland, Scotland, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy, Denmark and Sweden. This reissue of God’s Balls features bonus tracks from TAD’s 1988 debut 7”, plus the previously unreleased “Tuna Car” from the 7” session. God’s Balls has been out of print on LP/CD for many years, and this is its first digital release. Tracklist: 1. Behemoth 2. Pork Chop 3. Helot 4. Tuna Car 5. Sex God Missy (Lumberjack Mix) 6. Cyanide Bath 7. Boiler Room 8. Satan’s Chainsaw 9. Hollow Man 10. Nipple Belt 11. Ritual Device - (from “Daisy” 7” single) 12. Daisy - (from “Daisy” 7” single) 13. Tuna Car (Unreleased) w/ CD / Digital / LP Download Card only Salt Lick (1990) After their 1989 debut album, God’s Balls, TAD continued to write and record, releasing a string of singles and the Salt Lick EP between 1989 and 1990. Salt Lick features the single “Wood Goblins,” the video for which MTV banned because it was, to the delicate eyes of MTV programmers, “too ugly.” The sounds of Salt Lick are, indeed, wonderfully ugly, thanks in part to the involvement of noise-rock technician Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac, Nirvana, The Jesus Lizard), who recorded the EP. The band continued to release singles and gain momentum in the press. As TAD himself puts it: “Lyrically we had a lot of subject matter that was meant to be tongue-in-cheek from the beginning but that was presented by both Sub Pop and us as true-to-life. The press took it all seriously and began to feed on and ravenously devour the mythology we created.” This reissue of Salt Lick includes tracks from the “Wood Goblins” single, a split 7” with Pussy Galore, and the “Loser” 7”. This material has been out of print on vinyl/CD for many years, and this is its first digital release. Tracklist: 1. Axe to Grind 2. High on the Hog 3. Wood Goblins 4. Hibernation 5. Glue Machine 6. Potlatch 7. Loser (from “Loser” 7” single) 8. Cooking With Gas (from “Wood Goblins” 12” & “Loser” 7” single) 9. Habit Necessity (from “Dope Guns N Fucking in the Streets” 7” single on Amphetamine Reptile) 10. Damaged (from Pussy Galore split 7” single) w/ CD / Digital / LP Download Card only 8-Way Santa (1991) In 1991, after tens of thousands of miles on the road in support ofGod’s Balls and Salt Lick, and a run of powerful EPs/singles, TAD released their second full-length album, 8-Way Santa. Recorded at Smart Studios in Madison, WI with Butch Vig, whose work with Killdozer the band admired, 8-Way Santa finds TAD pushing their sound in new directions. Not a band to rest on its laurels, TAD began to add melodic touches to their sound, as evidenced by the lead single, “Jinx.” 8-Way Santa was the last record with the original TAD lineup, and their last album for Sub Pop before jumping to a major label. This reissue of 8-Way Santa includes tracks from the “Jinx” single, a 1990 EP, and a handful of unreleased album demos recorded by Jack Endino. This material has been out of print on vinyl/CD for many years, and this is the first digital release for the bonus content. Tracklist: 1. Jinx 2. Giant Killer 3. Wired God 4. Delinquent 5. Hedge Hog 6. Flame Tavern 7. Trash Truck 8. Stumblin’ Man 9. Jack 10. Candi 11. 3-D Witch Hunt 12. Cranes Café 13. Plague Years 14. Pig Iron (from Jinx 7” single) 15. Nuts ‘N’ Bolts (Unreleased) 16. Delinquent (8-Way Santa Jack Endino demos) 17. Giant Killer (8-Way Santa Jack Endino demos) 18. Wired God (8-Way Santa Jack Endino demos) 19. 3D Witch Hunt (8-Way Santa Jack Endino demos) 20. Eddie Hook (from U.S. “Jack” CD & all German “Jack” releases – 7”, 12” & CD – and from 8-Way Santa Butch Vig sessions) ** w/ CD / Digital / LP Download Card only Bonus LP Compilation Tracklist: (Available free with purchase of all three albums on vinyl from the Sub Pop Mega Mart [preorder here] and from select independent retailers) A1. Ritual Device (from “Daisy” 7” single) A2. Daisy (from “Daisy” 7” single) A3. Tuna Car (Unreleased) A4. Loser (from “Loser” 7” single) A5. Cooking With Gas (from “Loser” 7” single) A6. Habit Necessity - (from “Dope Guns N Fucking in the Streets” 7” single on Amphetamine Reptile) A7. Damaged (from Pussy Galore split 7” single) B1. Pig Iron (from “Jinx” 7” single) B2. Nuts ‘N’ Bolts (Unreleased) B3. Delinquent (8-Way Santa Jack Endino demos) B4. Giant Killer (8-Way Santa Jack Endino demos) B5. Wired God (8-Way Santa Jack Endino demos) B6. 3-D Witch Hunt (8-Way Santa Jack Endino demos) B7. Eddie Hook (from U.S. “Jack” CD & all German “Jack” releases – 7”, 12” & CD – and from 8-Way Santa Butch Vig sessions)
Articles Share Tips This is the section for all the share tips for the week ahead. These share tips include day-trading tips and are free stocks tips that are updated weekly as part of the ChartsView premium membership. If you would like to access this page please take out the ChartsView premium membership: Premium Membership. Free Stock Tips These free stock tips maybe worth trading from a short term view. These are the charts that maybe worth looking at over the coming week as they are near important levels or key turning points. It could be that it's near a trend line or possible top or bottom possibility or technical level of soughts. This is useful for those people that do not have professional stock trading software and maybe interested in finding a good company to trade. If you would like to try a professional charting software for free then take our our MetaStock Free Trial for 1-month, there is no obigation to buy so you have nothing to lose. FTSE 350 These charts are from the FTSE 350 so bear that in mind, these share tips have been found by manually going through the whole of the FTSE 350 to find good looking charts with good potential. It's up to you to decide what you want to do with these companies. These share tips will be posted in the stock trading forum from time to time where people can discuss them further. These shares may have high volitility associated with them due to the area they have formed in. Some of these maybe about to break out so be aware of this as moves can be fast. These charts should mainly be traded on a very short term basis as thats the primary goal of the share tips section. Day Trading Tips These day trading tips are mainly for day-trading tips as holding on for longer term requires more research so bear this in mind, hope this section is useful to you in your trading. Please bear in mind this is for information purposes only and that there is always a risk with share trading as it can come down as well as up.
A CRACK in the wall. A growing pothole. Strange rumblings in the night. When a sinkhole in suburban Abydos collapsed, it opened a portal to a long-lost temple of the dead. The Luxor Times reports that late in April this year a mysterious subsidence in a narrow suburban alley was drawn to the attention of city municipality workers. media_camera Urban decay ... Or is it? This sinkhole, which greeted workers in the Egyptian town of Abydos, contained an ancient mystery. Picture: Luxor Times The street had collapsed into a hole dug from inside one of the neighbouring houses. Only once workers entered the pit did they realise the dig was by illegal looters — and that they had uncovered an ancient construction. media_camera Road works ... the full scale of the collapse — and the tightness of the suburban setting — is evident in this picture from the Luxor Times. Egypt’s Tourism and Antiquities police were summoned, and the diggers arrested. Egyptologists then set about examining exactly what lay beneath a suburb established in 1935, only some 150 metres from the renown Temple of Seti I. media_camera Into the pit ... The sight that greeted workers and archaeologists, after the rubble and sewage system was removed. Picture: Luxor Times. After shoring up the entrance and tunnel roof with timbers, a short climb revealed wonderful things. First it was just rubble. Then archaeologists had to dodge a leaking sewage tank. media_camera Clean-up detail ... Mud, rubble and sewage is cleaned from the memorial chapel’s walls. Picture: Luxor Times. But a few metres beneath the street and the foundation of the houses were stained limestone blocks, marking the remains of an old wall. media_camera Out of the past ... An archaeologist sits amid the motifs — and muck — filling the memorial chapel found under homes in Abydos. Picture: Luxor Times. Once the excavators pushed their way inside, they were greeted with the crowded sight of neat rows of ancient hieroglyphs and high reliefs — proudly declaring the memorial chapel as belonging to Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II — who reigned about 2046-1995BC. media_camera Identification ... Archaeologists point to a cartouche, or royal mark, declaring the chapel as belonging to Mentuhotep II. Picture: Luxor Times. Few artefacts and inscriptions dedicated to this pharaoh remain. Most are in and around Abydos, Aswan and Thebes. media_camera Ancient unifier ... One of the few remaining depictions of Mentuhotep II. Mentuhotep II reigned at a time of civil war in Egypt, continuing the fight against Lower-Egypt for 39 years of his reign. His eventual victory saw him unify the two lands once again, and he was declared the first pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom. His title means “Horus, he who invigorates the heart of the two lands”. HELL’S GUARDIANS UNLEASHED: Excavations at the Temple of Pluto Archaeologists have since removed the sewage tank — leakage from which was eroding the stone inscriptions — and have begun restoring the room to prevent further damage. Excavator Ayman Damarany told the Luxor Times: “I expect there would be more to the site and maybe other sites of the era either former or later to Mentuhotep II.” Further excavation of the site is restricted due to the many occupied buildings above. media_camera In memoriam ... Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II, “Horus, he who invigorates the heart of the two lands”. Picture: Luxor Times Originally published as Sinkhole opens temple of doom
Much of the violence against albinos has occurred in Tanzania, where dozens have been slaughtered or severely wounded since 2006 (AFP Photo/Bunyamin Aygun) Kinshasa (AFP) - Albinos gathered Friday in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital Kinshasa for a first-of-its-kind festival to celebrate a minority that suffers rampant persecution in Africa. "We want to reinforce the visibility of albinos in the upper spheres of society and create role models that allow parents of albino children to not feel ashamed," said Yan Mambo, an organiser of the "Proudly Albino" event. Albinism is a hereditary genetic condition which causes a total absence of pigmentation in the skin, hair and eyes. In addition to facing discrimination at school and work, albinos in countries like Burundi and Tanzania are sometimes killed for their body parts for use in witchcraft. At least 76 albinos in Tanzania have been murdered since 2000, with their dismembered body parts going for around $600 (528 euros) and entire bodies fetching $75,000, according to United Nations experts. At a workshop on Friday, albino women got pointers on starting their own businesses. Dolees, a 23-year-old hair stylist and aesthetician in training, told AFP she was proud of being albino and planned to open her own salon. "I am elegant. I am beautiful. I have a nice size," she said. "God created me like this, why should I be hung up?" As well as discrimination, risks associated with albinism include skin cancer -- expensive sun creams are often difficult to obtain -- as well as eyesight problems. Instead of focusing on the negatives, the festival in Kinshasa aims to empower the group. "We want to highlight excellence, because in Congolese society, there are nearly no elite ndundu," said Mambo, using a local word from the lingala language for albinos. Prominent African albinos include Malian music legend Salif Keita who called this week for people with the condition to be protected, with fears rising over attacks in Tanzania "It is completely unacceptable for humans to sacrifice other human beings, it comes from ignorance," the musician told AFP in an interview during a visit to East Africa. Rights groups have warned of the risk of a rise in attacks against albinos in Tanzania, which has just begun campaigning for general and presidential elections on October 25. Some politicians have been accused of buying albino body parts for witchcraft and lucky charms. The Kinshasa festival, which includes lectures, awareness campaigns and a fashion show, wraps up Saturday with concerts and a march through the city.
A magnitude 7.0 earthquake has struck in the Pacific near the overseas French territory of New Caledonia, the US Geological Survey (USGS) reports. Tsunami waves have been observed after the quake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) reports. The quake was centered 82 km (51 miles) east-northeast of Tadine, on Mare Island, which has a population of over 5,600. The epicenter was 10 km (6 miles) deep. The numbers have been revised by USGS from earlier reports, which placed the epicenter 68 km from Tadine and 25 km deep, and reported its magnitude as 7.3. Read more The PTWC has warned of "hazardous tsunami waves" possible for coasts within 300 km of the epicenter, which puts the Loyalty Islands archipelago, with a population of over 17,000, within range. It later issued a message saying tsunami waves "have been observed." Waves up to 1 meter higher than the high-tide mark were forecast to hit New Caledonia, with the actual height varying depending on the coastline. The PTWC has warned that additional waves may roll in at intervals of five minutes to an hour, and may be higher than the initial ones. The 7.0 quake is one of the strongest in a recent string of tremors in the seismically active area, with the USGS reporting over 120 mostly shallow earthquakes of varying magnitudes since the end of October. Tsunami waves have not been detected before. Evacuations were ordered for coastal areas in New Caledonia, local broadcaster NCI reports, and also advised for the southern provinces of the island nation of Vanuatu, located north of the earthquake's epicenter. The PTWC has now released a final message saying that the tsunami threat has passed.
About This Game Over 40 square kilometers of lands to explore, from closed science villages and abandoned military facilities, to the forests of Tunguska and snowy deserts of Terra Nova. Deadly mutants, anomalies and hundreds of main story quests. Huge choice of artifacts, gear and weapons. Repair broken things or assemble new gear from scratch. Improve dozens of skills and abilities. Be a doctor, a scientist, a hunter, a soldier or an engineer. Take part in mass PvP, bring death or salvation to those around you. This is a story of human pride. Time is at hand when, in their utter desire to study the world, people will start destroying it. Tests of high-energy heavy particles accelerators will result in billions of microscopic black hole rupturing the structure of time and space. This will become the point of no return. A counter-strike from nature itself will follow and the Earth as we know it will cease to exist.This is a story of human strength and true heroes. Three generations after the apocalypse, not only did humankind survive in the man-made hell – it continued to develop. Gradually, the infrastructure restored, wars stopped, people were returning to normal life. However, the crippled nature was barely starting to fight back...So-called anomalous activity zones started appearing all over the planet, like terrifying scars left by the man-made catastrophes. The vast territories of post-apocalyptic world live their own life, which looks like nothing you have seen before. Bloodthirsty mutated monsters, inexplicable phenomena, mysterious anomalies are but the tip of the iceberg.One of the Zones was formed in the vicinity of Ukraine, in an area combining the unmistakable atmosphere of Soviet times and the fast pace of modern life. In order to contain the dangers of the Zone, the government decided to fence the perimeter, and introduce quarantine in the area. Local residents found themselves trapped and left to their own devices. However, forbidden fruit is always the most enticing. And this was when the "stalkers" came in. Mystical artifact hunters, former military men, explorers, adventurers, armed gangsters, mafia and just those who love getting away with shooting live targets – they swarmed in like locusts in Egypt to lead mortal combat with monsters and humans alike.This is a story about YOU.There is a non-stop battle between stalkers' clans, between aliens and locals. You can support any side or remain a free shooter. You can give a dota tion to your mates as a leader or take every loot to yourself. And if you don't want to lose your life in a proxy war, there is a PvE server and safety zones. You can shape your own story in the Zone.Who will you become?This is the Zone. Come to hell and make it your home.
I interned last summer at a law firm in the city. I stayed at my stepsister Sara's apartment. We got on well enough, and she spent most nights at her boyfriend's place so I had the apartment to myself much of the time. As it happens I would have welcomed more of her company because it's one of those towns where everyone heads back to the suburbs at five-thirty. Some nights I went out to a bar with some guys from work, but apart from that I didn't have much of a social life. And I hadn't had sex since breaking up with my girlfriend a couple of months before. So most nights I watched television or played around on the computer. In truth I was bored, which was why I wandered into Sara's bedroom one night to look around. I wasn't searching for anything in particular, but in a drawer next to the bed I found a dildo and lubricant and a pair of handcuffs. Sara is very pretty, but to me she had always seemed a little straight-laced, and it was hard to picture her using that dildo. But once that picture had formed in my mind I started to get horny. And then I found her underwear drawer and that confirmed that there was more to her than met the eye. I lingered over her collection of sexy panties trying to find her scent. I took some pretty white boy shorts back to my room and masturbated while holding them against my cock, being careful not to get my cum on them. After that first time, I went back to her bedroom every night I knew she would be out. Soon, just rubbing her underwear against my cock wasn't enough, and one night I slipped on a pair of her black panties and watched myself in the mirror next to her bed as I masturbated. The sight of her panties tight against my cock excited me so much that I got cum all over them them and had to scramble to clean and dry them that night. The next night I shaved off the hair around my cock and balls and the sight of her panties against my bare skin turned me on even more. And I started to explore her other clothes and experiment with her make-up. I spent hours in her room dressing and making myself up, then lounging on her bed with my skirt hiked up and my panties pulled down watching myself in her mirror as I played with my cock. And that is how Dan, Sara's boyfriend, found me one night as he walked into her bedroom. I froze in shock, my hand still holding my cock. Dan looked shocked too. Neither of us spoke. Then we both spoke at once. "Sorry," we said at the same time. Dan regained his composure quicker than me. "I didn't mean to surprise you," he said. "I let myself in and saw the light in Sara's room and thought she was home already." "She's coming home?" I stammered. "I thought she was going to be at your place." "She had to work late so she called me to tell me to meet her here," he said. "Oh god," I said. "She'll kill me if she finds me here." "You've got a few minutes to change," Dan said. "But you'd better hurry." He left the room and I quickly undressed. I hurriedly put her clothes back in the wardrobe and drawers and smoothed down the bed cover. I checked her make-up to be sure that I hadn't spilled anything. I didn't remove the make-up from my face; I could do that when I got back to my room, if I managed to get that far. But then I realized that I didn't have my own clothes with me; I had undressed in my room before going to Sara's bedroom, so I was going to have to walk out of her room and walk past Dan to my room wearing only my make-up. I stood by the bedroom door plucking up courage. I had no choice. I opened the door and walked out. Dan was sitting on the couch facing me. He watched as I walked towards him as nonchalantly as I could with a hard cock. I couldn't meet his eyes. I hurried past him and felt his gaze on my ass, but let out my breath with a sigh of relief as I reached for the door of my room. But then he spoke. "You've forgotten something." I turned to look at him. He was pointing to my ankle. Sara's ankle bracelet. "Just take it off," Dan said, standing up and walking towards me. "I'll put it back in her room." "Yes, thanks," I muttered, and bent down to take it off, but in my panic my fingers fumbled with the clasp, and as I fumbled I realized that I had turned my back to Dan giving him a close-up view of my ass, which made me fumble even more. "Let me do it," Dan said, and kneeled down to help me. "No, I can manage," I blurted out as I saw his face level with my cock. At last I managed to free the clasp. I stood up, handed him the bracelet, and rushed to my room. I showered, removed my make-up, and fell on my bed, almost weeping with the humiliation. Dan will tell her, I thought, and she'll tell my parents, and everyone will know, and I'll be ruined! I stayed in my room listening for Sara's key in the door. She arrived about five minutes later. "Hi bro!," she shouted out, as always. "Hi sis," I shouted back with less enthusiasm. I waited, and waited some more, for the inevitable explosion. But none came. So after a while I got off the bed and left the room. Dan was sitting on the couch and I heard the shower running in Sara's room. "Did you tell her?" I asked. "No. Did you think I would?" "I don't know," I said. "I mean, it's not everyday you find your girlfriend's brother wearing her clothes." "And playing with his cock," Dan added, smiling at me. "Don't forget that." "No," I said, "I'm not likely to." Sara called from her room. "I'll be out in a minute." "Ok," Dan called back. "We're going for dinner, " he said to me, "but we'll be back later. So maybe you shouldn't go back to her room when we leave." "No chance," I said. "I couldn't stand another shock like that." Dan smiled again, and was about to say something, but Sara came out of her room. "See you soon," she said. "Ok, have fun," I said. I went back to my room and lay on the bed. How many times in recent weeks had I imagined someone standing watching me as I masturbated, my panties pulled down to my thighs? How many times in recent weeks had I described this fantasy in texts and even telephone conversations with anonymous guys as they told me how they wanted to put me on my knees and pull down my panties and fuck me? My body quivered in excitement and humiliation and I came as I pictured Dan kneeling to help me with the clasp, but this time his face moving closer and closer to my cock. I woke up at the sound of Dan and Sara coming home and lay awake listening to my sister's muffled moans. I imagined her on her knees cuffed to the bed as Dan's cock slid in and out of her pussy. I played with my cock again as I pictured myself taking her place. I woke up the next morning as Sara left for her Saturday morning dance class. I got out of bed, showered, and walked out into the kitchen. Dan was sitting at the table drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. "Want coffee?" he asked. "Yes," I said. I sat at the table and picked up a section of the newspaper. He poured me some coffee and handed it to me with an odd expression on his face. "What?" I asked. "I never saw your resemblance to Sara before. I guess the make-up made me see it." "Really?" I said, genuinely surprised. "If I were anywhere near as pretty as her . . ." I saw where I was heading, and stopped. "Then what?" he asked. "I'd be more confident when I dress up," I said, quietly. "What do you mean?" I had said enough already. Dan noticed my reticence. "I didn't mean to pry," he said. "We can drop the subject." "It's ok," I said. "It's just that I've never told anyone about this before. I meant that if I were more confident that I could get away with it then I might do more than hang out in the apartment when I'm dressed." "So what else might you do?" "Go out. You know, to a bar or something, to meet someone." So now I had confessed. Not just to dressing up as a girl and playing with my cock but to wanting to be with another guy. Dan paused to take in what I had said. Then he said, "Sure you could get away with it. You looked so pretty last night. And you have a very feminine figure." I blushed, remembering again his eyes running over my body as I walked past him naked and hard. "And a great taste in underwear," he added. "I bought those panties for Sara." "I'm sorry," I said. "What for?" he asked, laughing. "They look just as good on you as they do on her." We were both silent for a couple of minutes, both pretending to read our sections of the newspaper. Then we looked up and caught each other's eyes and smiled. "Would you do me a favor?" Dan asked. "Tell me what it is," I said. "Will you dress up again. For me?" "You mean now?" I asked. "Here?" "Yes. Sara won't be home for another couple of hours." I sat there as though I were weighing how to answer, but in fact there was nothing to think about. "Yes," I said. "But it'll take a few minutes." "I'll try to be patient," he said. I got up from the table and walked to Sara's bedroom and closed the door behind me. I stood in front of the mirror and took off my t-shirt and jeans. Then I got to work. First the make-up; then the same panties as I had on last night and a matching black camisole; then a short black skirt and a cream-colored blouse; and finally the ankle bracelet. I stood in front of the mirror again and tucked my hair behind my ears. Can I really do this? I asked myself, then felt a familiar feeling in my cock and realized that I could and must. I walked to the door, opened it, and stepped out. Dan watched me as I walked towards him. I stopped a few feet away. "Well?" I asked, nervously. "You look so pretty," he said, "Turn around so I can see the full effect." I complied and again felt his gaze on my ass. I turned back toward him and he stood up and took two steps toward me. His hands went to hold my waist, but he paused and asked, "May I?" "Yes," I replied, and he held my waist and pulled me gently toward him. He kissed me softly and I sighed as his lips brushed mine. His next kiss was firmer. I opened my lips to invite his tongue into my mouth. He kissed me deeply and pulled me closer to him and his hard cock pressed against me. His excitement made me even more excited. His hands were now on my ass, lifting my skirt, his fingers sliding into my panties, caressing and exploring me. He undid my skirt and let it fall to the floor and unbuttoned my blouse and slipped that off my shoulders. Then he took my hand and led me back to Sara's bedroom. I stood in front of her mirror dressed only in her panties and camisole. Dan stood behind me; his hands slid under my camisole and he took my nipples in his fingers and gently pinched them. He kissed my neck. Then he undid his jeans and pulled them off. In the mirror I saw his hard cock. I had been imagining this moment for weeks and had no doubts about what I wanted. I knelt in front of him and and put my lips on his cock, then my tongue, and then took him into my mouth. He moaned loudly and with small movements he started pushing against my face, his hands on my head and his fingers in my hair. In the mirror I could see him gently fucking my mouth and I thought how it would look to an audience, and I imagined someone walking in and finding us like that and getting so excited watching us. Dan pulled his t-shirt over his head, and his nakedness made my cock strain harder against my panties. He fucked my mouth for long exquisite minutes. My confidence grew as my mouth and tongue caressed his cock and I got ready to to feel his cum shoot into my throat. But Dan reached down and took my hands and helped me stand. He kissed me and his hands again went to my ass and pulled my panties down. My cock sprung out and touched his. "Last night I wanted to put you over the couch and fuck you there and then," he said. "And I imagined that you were fucking me as I heard you fucking Sara," I said. He guided me to Sara's bed and placed me kneeling in front of the mirror. He took the lubricant from the bedside drawer and squeezed some on my ass and stood behind me. His hand guided his cock toward me. I felt his it against my opening, and then he pushed slowly into me. It felt so different from Sara's dildo; now, I wasn't in control of the movements. In the mirror I could see him thrusting against me, his hands grasping my ass, pulling out, pushing back in. I looked at myself, my panties pulled down around my thighs, my mouth making a wide O as I moaned with pleasure as his cock fucked my ass. My lipstick was smeared and my hair was no longer tucked behind my ears. My sluttiness turned me on yet more, as did the excitement on Dan's face as he fucked me. His thrusts got deeper and faster, rocking my body forward, then pulling it back for the next thrust. With each thrust his balls slapped against me. Then he came, forcing his cock deep into me, his hands gripping my ass hard and a loud long moan escaping from his mouth. Gently now, Dan continued fucking me as his cock softened. Then he pulled out of me. I lay on my back looking at him standing in front of me. Then he knelt beside me on the bed, and took my cock in his hand and started to stroke me, his hand held tightly around my shaft squeezing the tip of my cock with each long slow stroke. He kissed me softly on the lips and I came, my cum spurting out over his hand. We lay back on the bed, his arms around me, my head on his shoulders. "Is that how you imagined it would be, being on your knees and being fucked?" he asked. "Better than I imagined. It was incredible." "Oh no!" he said. "So much pressure to make it as good the next time!" I kissed him on the cheek. "So there will be a next time?" "You think I could resist fucking your cute ass again?" "So that's how you think of me? A girl with a cute ass?" "No," he said, rolling me over and lying on top of me. "I think of you as a girl with a cute ass, pretty little nipples, and a very pretty mouth. Oh, and a beautiful cock." "And my personality? That doesn't enter into it?" "Of course it does. You have a wonderfully slutty personality." I laughed and pushed him away. He stood up and helped me up off the bed. We stood together in front of the mirror looking at our reflection. "So cute," he said, his hand caressing my ass. He kissed me again, and I went back to my room. I stood in the shower, hot water running down my body, my cock hard again as I remembered how his cock felt inside me.
The 2001 discovery of the seven million-year-old Sahelanthropus, the first known upright ape-like creatures, was yet more proof of humanity’s place among the great apes. And yet Mike Pence, then a representative and now US vice president, argues for the opposite conclusion. For him, our ideas about our ancestors have changed, proving once more that evolution was a theory, and therefore we should be free to teach other theories alongside evolution in our classrooms. How to respond? The usual answer is that we should teach students the meaning of the word “theory” as used in science – that is, a hypothesis (or idea) that has been proved through repeated testing. Pence’s argument will then be exposed to be what philosophers call an equivocation– an argument that only seems to make sense because the same word is being used in two different senses. Just words Evolution, Pence argues, is a theory, theories are uncertain, therefore evolution is uncertain. But evolution is a theory only in the scientific sense of the word. And in the words of the National Academy of Sciences, “The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.” Attaching this label to evolution is an indicator of strength, not weakness. If you take this approach, you have failed to understand the purpose of Pence’s rhetoric, or why it is so appealing to creationists. Pence is an accomplished politician, and knows exactly how to appeal to his intended audience. He is also an accomplished trial lawyer, which makes him a conjuror with words, and like any skilful conjuror he has pulled off his trick by distraction. Pence has drawn us into a discussion about words, when our focus should be on the evidence. I would suggest the opposite approach. The problem is not really with the word “theory” at all. Students will have learned its meaning in the same way they learn meanings in general: by seeing how the word is used. They will have heard of atomic theory, which no one has seriously doubted for over a century. And what about the theory of gravity? Finally, they may have seen how Darwin himself uses the expression “my theory”, although at the time it was neither comprehensive nor well supported (there were huge gaps in the fossil record), to refer in a very general way to his linked ideas about mutability of species, common descent, and the power of natural selection. So if anyone says, “Evolution is a theory”, don’t give them a lecture on the meaning of the word “theory”. If you do, you’ve fallen into the trap of making it seem that how we define words should affect how we see reality. You will be fighting on ground of your opponent’s choosing, since arguing about how to apply words is the stock in trade of theologians, preachers and lawyers like Mike Pence. The correct response is to say that evolution is a theory – like gravity is a theory – and then redirect attention to the evidence. And that evidence is overwhelming. Evolutionary ammo Start with family relationships. Carl Linnaeus showed how living things can be classified into species, genera, families and so on, and Darwin pointed out that this is exactly the structure we would expect from a family tree. All dogs are canines, so dogs share an ancestor with foxes; all canines are carnivora, so dogs share a more remote ancestor with bears; all carnivora are mammals, so dogs and sheep are, albeit more remotely, related, and so on. Then look at the discovery over the past few decades of family relationships at the molecular level, and the fact that the molecular family tree matches that based on anatomical resemblances. Observe the fossil record. Once lamentably full of gaps (Darwin was among the lamenters), it is now densely populated. A century ago, it still made sense to point to the “missing link” between humans and pre-human apes. Now we know of several different hominin species living alongside each other, and the problem becomes one of distinguishing our grandparents from our great uncles. And yes, there are missing links in the chain, but without evolution we would not have a chain at all. And then there’s biogeography: for example, why marsupials are only found in South America and Australasia, and except for a few species that made their way across the Isthmus of Panama, are never found elsewhere. Plus we can actually observe evolution, and study it in the field or in the lab. The emergence of pesticide resistance is evolution in action, as shown in the justly famous Harvard/Technion demonstration “evolution on a plate”. So is the delightful Russian experiment of breeding tame foxes. Artificial selection, just as much as natural selection, is evolution in action. And finally, and most convincingly, we must look at the way that these different lines of evidence mesh together. We can apply biogeography to the fossil record, and link it to what we know about the movements of the continents. Using the methods of molecular biology, we can identify and time the mutations that led different species to diverge from their common ancestor, and match the timing against the fossil record. Thus the fossil record, deep anatomical resemblances, and DNA evidence agree in showing that whales, for instance, are closely related to hoofed mammals, diverging from them in the Eocene period. There are many other examples of such consistency. Then, and only then, pause to explain how a scientific theory is an interlocking connection of ideas that explain things about the world, and that evolution is one of the most successful examples. And challenge the Mike Pences of this world to spell out exactly what they would like to see taught alongside the Theory of Evolution – and why. Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, University of North Texas, and Honorary Research Fellow (formerly Reader) at the University of Glasgow. His research has involved topics related to the early Earth and the origins of life, and received support from NSF, NASA, Sandia National Labs, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. A version of this article was originally published on the Conversation’s website as “How to slam dunk creationists when it comes to the theory of evolution” and has been republished here with permission.
Author: Susan Linton When the long-awaited Gentoo 2008.0 release finally hit mirrors last month, the two largest groups of users found themselves out of luck: x86 users discovered that their live CD wouldn't copy the kernel during install, and the AMD64 image wouldn't fit onto a standard CD-ROM. This was not a great start for a distribution whose comeback may rest upon this release. Updated ISOs were released two days later, though, and those work well for getting a quick Gentoo install ready to customize. Gentoo was once the darling of the Linux distribution world, thanks in large part to its Portage package management system. Portage takes the source code for any given package and compiles it to the user's specifications as set up in configuration files. When I began using Gentoo in 2003, everything worked like clockwork. Results were practically guaranteed and always to my liking. I had stability and a slight but noticeable increase in performance. But the greatest thrill of running Gentoo was the sense of ownership. No other system in the world was exactly like mine, and mine was exactly as I wanted. That's hard to achieve with binary distributions. As time passed, however, the project's founder moved on and the quality of Gentoo began to decline. Packages no longer compiled cleanly, and some of the workarounds caused instability. I was on the verge of giving up on Gentoo, but I wanted to wait for the new release before deciding. This is the story of my two Gentoo installs. Installation #1 My story begins with the first release of the live CD installers. I'd been waiting for two years for this release because I didn't have any luck with 2006.0 and didn't have time to start from scratch. When the updated ISO was released, it delivered an improved installer, making it easy for anyone to achieve a starter Gentoo system. When I booted the live CD, I found myself in a sparse Xfce 4 desktop. Two installers are available: a graphical version and a terminal version. They're similar in operation, but I opted for the graphical version. I was disappointed that the installer didn't see all the partitions on my disks due to a limitation in SATA kernel support, but a nosata boot cheat code should have allowed me to use the older ATA drivers. It didn't work. Instead, I ended up having to install on an older, slower secondary disk. The first step in installing is working on partitioning (if needed), and the second step is defining which partition to use. I couldn't use my centralized /boot partition because the installer won't install onto a partition with any files present, so I just designated a / (root) partition and clicked Next. The installer completed setting up the filesystem, installing basic system elements such as the compiler, bash, and startup scripts, and copying the Portage distfiles. Then it stopped. From a chrooted environment, I began searching for elements missed by the aborted install. I found that I had to add users, set the root password, and edit the /etc/make.conf file. I changed the CFLAGS to better match my machine, using CFLAGS="-march=athlon64 -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe" . Next, I listed an ACCEPT_KEYWORDS , which sets the branch of Portage to stable or unstable trees for various architectures such as x86, AMD64, and SPARC. I also set LINGUAS="en en_US" , MAKEOPTS="-j2" , VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia vesa nv fbdev vga" , and INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse evdev joystick" . Next came setting up the USE flags, which control the hardware, features, and options built into your software. For example, if you'd like Portage to build MPlayer with support for popular video formats, you might add win32codecs to your USE flags. You also might add dvd and dvdread . You don't need to be leery of this process; just consult the online guide or the one included with Gentoo at /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc. Other settings you'll need to address with manual installs: time zone -- set in /etc/conf.d/clock default X session -- set in /etc/rc.conf host name -- set in /etc/conf.d/hostname domain name -- set in /etc/conf.d/domainname Next I emerged the kernel sources (which unpacks the kernel source into /usr/src and adds Gentoo patches), built the kernel, ran LILO, and changed /dev/ROOT to the actual partition in /etc/fstab. After booting my new basic Gentoo system, I rebuilt the system to use my new configurations with the command emerge -e world , and emerged KDE-meta, the Portage package that installs the KDE desktop environment in its entirety. If you prefer GNOME, just emerge gnome . Happily, 730 packages installed or rebuilt with only one compile-time error to fix. The error happened when compiling cURL. The error output die 'ldap and kerberos (gssapi) not playing nicely try version >=7.18.1' and USE=-kerberos emerge curl to fix. Since version 7.18.1 is still in unstable, I used the latter and added net-misc/curl -kerberos to /etc/portage/package.use. For details, see the USE flag documentation and the Portage Handbook. After moving into my new system, I added many of my favorite applications, such as XawTV, Njam, and the GIMP. Again, I had no problems with Portage or stability. This new install reminds me of Gentoo's glory days. Is Gentoo back? Before I can say that it is, the installer needs to work for users who have no prior Gentoo experience. Installation #2 (2008.0-r1) The second machine I tried has a Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G motherboard with SATA drives. Again, no shared /boot was possible for me when using the installer, so I picked a / (root) partition and let the installer go. The first few steps were as described above, but this time the process continued with the configuration steps that make the installer desirable. It allows setup of the root password, user accounts, time zone, network, and some system settings. A package-selection step is next, with limited choices. However, by using it you can get a basic Xfce 4 desktop from which to continue. Then it installs a bootloader, but doesn't add the other Linux systems on the machine to the bootloader's list. My only real complaint is that there's no eject mechanism when the installer is finished and rebooting. Since I wanted to test the installer as a new user might, I began emerging important components without touching any configuration files. A basic /etc/make.conf file was in place, containing very conservative CFLAGS (compiler environment settings) and no USE flags. I emerged GNOME, the GIMP, and 300 other packages, finishing with only that same cURL error. For someone with experience or desire, this error isn't a showstopper, but for a newcomer it might be. This install worked fairly well, but some USE flags would have made the applications more enjoyable. Also, it seemed to take longer compiling applications on this much faster machine when using the generic CFLAGS as set up by the live CD when compared to my everyday system that was optimized for the architecture. As of this writing, Gentoo's stable branch includes software such as Linux 2.6.25-gentoo-r7, Xorg-x11 7.2, KDE 3.5.9, GNOME 2.20.3, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, Firefox 2.0.0.16, and GIMP 2.4.2. In addition to compiling applications from source, Gentoo also offers binary applications (bins), which can save time for some of the notoriously long builds with little or no strategic advantage, such as Mozilla Firefox or OpenOffice.org. In these cases, for example, you would simply type emerge mozilla-firefox-bin . Conclusion After working with my new system for a couple of weeks, I'm happy with Gentoo again. Portage works wonderfully if you stay within the stable branch and set sane CFLAGS. The resulting applications are stable and responsive. The new 2008.0-r1 installer works great with a few limitations, but this is still Gentoo. You can get a starter system going with the live CD, but you probably will need to read some documentation to achieve a full-featured desktop system. If help is needed, there is a friendly user forum available and a wiki of howtos as well. Gentoo still isn't for everybody, but those who accept the challenge won't be disappointed. You too can have the sense of ownership and satisfaction of running a system like no one else's. Has Gentoo gotten its act together? Only time will tell, but it sure looks like Gentoo is back on the right path. I'm sticking with it.
Pattern recognition and classification in medical image analysis has been of interest to scientists for many years. Machine learning techniques have enabled researchers to develop and utilize complicated models to classify or predict various abnormalities or diseases. Recently, the successful applications of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures have rapidly expanded in medical imaging. Cutting-edge deep learning tools such as NVIDIA DIGITS along with deep learning frameworks like Caffe, Torch or Theano help researchers concentrate on problem solving and model development rather than coding. We have had success using deep learning and NVIDIA DIGITS for Alzheimer’s Disease prediction. Research groups around the world have put a lot of effort into classifying and predicting Alzheimer’s disease from brain imaging data. Alzheimer’s is a type of dementia that causes problems with memory, thinking and behavior. Symptoms usually develop slowly and worsen over time, becoming severe enough to interfere with daily tasks. Statistics show that Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the 6th leading cause of death in the United States. The US spends almost $236 billion per year to care for around 5 million people suffering from this brain disorder. A variety of imaging modalities are used in both clinics and research to produce AD data, including structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as well as functional imaging modalities such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional MRI monitoring the functionality of the brain. In this practical experience, we designed and implemented an end-to-end deep learning pipeline that includes several steps from preprocessing to prediction. We used NVIDIA DIGITS to train a Convolutional Neural Network model for Alzheimer’s Disease prediction from resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) data. Deep Learning Pipeline for Alzheimer’s Disease Prediction We designed the end-to-end pipeline shown in Figure 2 based on three major components. In the first layer, the rs-fMRI raw data (DICOM) is converted to a standard imaging format (NIfTI). The primary goal of NIfTI is to provide coordinated and targeted service, training, and research to speed the development and enhance the utility of informatics tools related to neuroimaging. The National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke are joint sponsors of the NIfTI initiative. The next step preprocesses the rs-fMRI data (explained later) and converts it into a format readable by our deep learning platform: NVIDIA Caffe DIGITS. Finally, we trained, validated and tested a 2-layer convolutional neural network model from the standard LeNet-5 architecture using DIGITS. For further analysis, we passed the test dataset through the “classify many” option provided by DIGITS to obtain a class score per sample. Data Acquisition and Preprocessing In this work, we selected 28 Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and 15 normal control (NC) subjects (24 female and 19 male) with a mean age of years from the ADNI1* dataset. The AD subjects’ Mini–Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores were reported to be over 20 by ADNI, and normal participants were healthy, with no reported history of medical or neurological conditions. Scanning was performed on a Trio 3 Tesla, which included structural and functional scans. First, anatomical scans were performed with a 3D MP-RAGE sequence (TR=2s, TE=2.63 ms, FOV=25.6 cm, 256 x 256 matrix, 160 slices of 1mm thickness). Next, functional scans were obtained with an EPI sequence (150 volumes, TR=2 s, TE=30 ms, flip angle=70, FOV=20 cm, 64 x 64 matrix, 30 axial slices of 5mm thickness, no gap). We pre-processed the fMRI data using the standard modules from the FMRIB Software Library v5.0. Preprocessing steps for the anatomical data involved the removal of non-brain tissue from T1 structural images using the Brain Extraction Tool. Preprocessing steps for the functional data included motion correction, skull stripping, and spatial smoothing (Gaussian kernel of 5-mm FWHM). We removed low-level noise using high-pass temporal filtering (= 90.0 sec), aligned functional images to individual high-resolution T1-weighted scans, and subsequently registered the scans to the Montreal Neurological Institute standard space (MNI152) using affine linear registration and resampled them at 2mm cubic voxels. The end results of the preprocessing step were 45x54x45x300 images, from which we removed the first 10 slices of each image, as they contained no functional information. Data Conversion and Augmentation We decomposed the preprocessed 4D fMRI data in NIfTI format across the z and t axes and then converted them to a stack of 2D images in lossless PNG format using the neuroimaging packages Nibabel and Python OpenCV. Next, we labeled the images for binary classification of Alzheimer’s vs. normal data. This conversion approach resulted in a fair number of samples. We removed the last 10 brain slices of each scan during the data conversion as brain imaging researchers showed that no functional information is often encoded in those brain slices (Table 1). Table 1: The number of subjects and samples created for training the CNN are shown in the table below. Subjects Slices Volumes Total 43 35* 300 451500 Training Testing Validation 60% 20% 20% 270900 90300 90300 Experience with NVIDIA Caffe DIGITS After completing the data augmentation, we used the samples to create Lightning Memory-Mapped Database Manager (lmdb) storage databases for high-throughput to be fed into a deep learning framework. DIGITS provides two options to users to convert the samples: either store the samples in different folders corresponding to the class labels or create custom text files listing the label for each sample. For simplicity, we used the first option provided by DIGITS by storing the samples into two folders AD and NC, for Alzheimer’s and Normal, respectively. DIGITS automatically created the training and testing lmdb datasets. Next, we selected the standard LeNet-5 model and initiated the training process. We used an Amazon AWS server image with NVIDIA GPUs, Caffe, and DIGITS already installed. Figure 5 shows the process of creating a new imaging dataset. In our case, we created Grayscale 32×32 images in lossless PNG format and divided the data into training, validation and testing samples (60%, 20% and 20%, respectively). DIGITS shows the distribution of labels in the datasets using histograms, as Figure 4 shows. Once the datasets were created, we selected the LeNet model and then clicked “Customize” to visualize the topology of the network (Figure 6). The visualization option helped us better understand the implementation of the CNN model at a high-level. In general, the visualization helps neural network architecture designers aiming to develop and test a new model. Figure 6: This figure illustrates the process of selecting a dataset and the LeNet neural network model (Left image). At right, the topology of the network is visualized.The beauty of using DIGITS as a training platform is the real-time monitoring of the network performance, which allowed us to carefully control the entire training process, visually analyze each epoch’s performance, and spot issues in the data and the training process. DIGITS also shows the Estimated Time of Completion (ETS), which helps predict when long training runs will complete. Figure 7 shows the DIGITS visualization of the network’s performance with a plot of the loss for the training and validation datasets and the accuracy achieved on the validation dataset over training epochs. Also, the graph in Figure 8 shows how the learning rate decreases over time. Users who have a deeper background in machine learning might be interested to see the effect of learning rate on the training process for further network analysis. In this work, we were interested in obtaining the class scores per testing sample for further analysis. There are multiple methods for this, such as using the Caffe command-line API or the PyCaffe API. DIGITS provides a GUI-based option called “Classify Many” where you can upload a text file list of testing sample paths (you can use the test.txt file generated by DIGITS) and obtain the class scores for every sample in the list. You can also limit the number of samples from your text file that are tested. Figure 9 shows how to select the text file and the number of testing samples (in this case, we selected 10 samples). We saved the output as an HTML file and then converted it into an Excel format readable by any programming language such as Python and MATLAB which allowed us to perform more data mining and to generate ROC curves to investigate the performance of binary classification. We also used the DIGITS “Classify One Image” option (Figure 10). Although the class scores can be obtained for all samples using the ‘Classify Many’ option, the visualization of certain preliminary or intermediary results for a given simple can be interesting and informative, as Figure 11 shows. This option creates a variety of results and visualizations that can be used in reports and publications, including the scaled input image, filters and feature weights, and pooling and softmax layer outputs. Additionally, you can use the DIGITS interface to download and save the Caffe model and then write a script to extract the filters and other network parameters. ROC Curve To validate the performance of the binary classification performed with the pipeline, we drew the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. Basically, ROC curves are plots of the true positive rate (or sensitivity) against the false positive rate (1-specificity) for the different possible thresholds of a classification test. We extracted the class scores for each sample using “Classify Many” as discussed previously and then calculated the true and false positive rates for 10 thresholds from zero to one with a step of 0.1 (0:1:0.01) as shown in the following equations. Figure 9 shows the ROC curve for validating the performance of the binary classification. Results We repeated the entire dataset generation and classification process five times for 5-fold cross validation, achieving an average accuracy rate of 96.85%. The end-to-end pipeline shows high reproducibility and consistency. We presented this deep learning experiment using DIGITS as “Deep Learning-based Pipeline to Recognize Alzheimer′s Disease using fMRI Data” in the Co-sponsored IEEE Future Technology Conference FTC2016 in San Francisco December 6 and 7th 2016, and won the best paper award. You can access our paper on IEEE Xplore. Future Work The upcoming project called “DeepAD” has begun by looking at both structural MRI and functional MRI data utilizing many more samples and various CNN models for classification. In addition to slice-level classification similar to the previous work, the project has performed subject-level classification followed by decision making. In addition, the project has investigated the effect of imbalanced data on CNN classification results. Figure 10 shows some preliminary results. We successfully showed how big data samples that were preprocessed carefully could achieve around 100% accuracy. Additionally, we developed decision making as a post-classifier on top of DIGITS results to purify the subject-level classification results. Get Started with DIGITS Today! DIGITS makes it easy to manage the design and training of deep neural networks. It also helps you create and manage training and validation data sets. You can download DIGITS today for free. Learn about the powerful image segmentation features in DIGITS 5 in this in-depth post by Greg Heinrich. Learn about object detection with DIGITS in this post on DetectNet and this one on SpaceNet. Acknowledgment I would to thank Drs. Danielle D. DeSouza, John Anderson and Ghassem Tofighi and also Ms. Kristin Uchiyama for extending their help and support to make these projects and this tutorial happen. *Data used in preparation of this article were obtained from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database (adni.loni.usc.edu). As such, the investigators within the ADNI contributed to the design and implementation of ADNI and/or provided data but did not participate in analysis or writing of this report. Here is a complete listing of ADNI investigators.
“You know, numbers just came out for her [Hillary Clinton] where she raised like $50 or $60 million and 20 people gave it. I think it was — let’s see, 20 people gave her $60 million in her fund. $60 million from 20 people. I want to get a list of those 20 people. Oh, those 20 people, I want to find out who they are, I want to find out how many I know. But I’ll tell you what, 20 people gave her $60 million. And that’s what I’ve been saying, folks. Look, I know the game better than anybody and the game is played that way. They own her. They own her.” — Donald Trump, remarks at a rally in Ashburn, Va., Aug. 2, 2016 We have puzzled and puzzled over these remarks until our puzzler was sore. As usual, the Trump campaign did not respond to requests to explain them. But as best we can tell, Trump is claiming that the announcement that the Hillary Clinton campaign raised more than $60 million in July was the result of donations from just 20 people. In fact, Trump mentions “20 people” six times, clearly trying to drive home the message that Clinton is in the pocket of her big contributors. ‘They own her,” he said. “They own her.” But there’s a very big problem with Trump’s claim. The Facts Clinton announced on Aug. 2 that her campaign had raised $63 million in July. Two joint fundraising committees that Clinton has with the Democratic National Committee brought in $26 million more for the national and state parties in July, giving her a monthly total of about $90 million. The full details of the contributions are not due at the Federal Election Commission until Aug. 20. Presumably, Trump, in citing $60 million, was referring to the $63 million raised for Clinton’s campaign. But here’s the rub: Under the law, contributions to Clinton’s campaign are limited to $2,700 per person in the primary season and $2,700 for the general election. Primary contributions generally can be collected until the official nomination, at the end of July this year, so in theory a person could have contributed as much as $5,400 in July. But that’s the maximum possible that can be given directly to the campaign. (The limits are much higher, about $100,000, to national party committees.) The Clinton campaign said that the average donation was $44 and that about 54 percent of the donations came from new donors. So let’s do the math: That works out to about 1.4 million contributors for the $63 million, a far cry from “20 people.” Update: It turns out a Clinton campaign spokesman had tweeted out a figure. Some people apparently donated more than once, so the figure is actually 900,000. In case anyone is wondering, @HFA raised $63m from about 900,000 people in July https://t.co/uen0fwIqyU — Josh Schwerin (@JoshSchwerin) August 2, 2016 The Trump campaign announced on Aug. 3 that it had raised $82 million with the Republican National Committee, but it did not detail how much had been raised for his campaign committee. Officials suggest that its fundraising has also been powered by small donors. But let’s not forget that in July, The Washington Post reported that sixty mega-donors gave at least $100,000 each to a joint committee raising funds for Trump and the GOP, accounting for $15.4 million from late May until the end of June. That was 30 percent of the $52.3 million that Trump raised overall over the five-week period. So why does Trump claim that only 20 donors provided $60 million in July to Clinton? Beats us. Our colleague Anu Narayanswamy looked at the big donors to the Clinton-DNC Joint Fundraising Committee and found that no one tops $1 million. The 20 biggest donors to Priorities USA Action, a Super PAC, have given about $75 million, according to opensecrets.org., but that’s over the course of the campaign, not just one month. The Pinocchio Test There’s a huge difference between 900,000 and 20. In an effort to spin a narrative that Clinton is controlled by a small group of donors, Trump relies on innuendo and fantasy math. In reality, Clinton raised her campaign cash in July from a substantial base of small donors. Four Pinocchios (About our rating scale) Send us facts to check by filling out this form Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter
VANCOUVER — This city has its own Prince of Pot, cannabis promoter Marc Emery. But he’s minor royalty next to Don Briere. Or Donald Joseph Briere, as he’s known inside the Canadian justice and penal systems. He was once this country’s most prolific marijuana producer and distributor, with 33 illegal growing operations hidden across B.C. In the late 1990s, before an informant ratted them out to police, Mr. Briere and his cohorts were growing and selling two tonnes of pot annually. “That’s a lot of weed,” he laughs. “We were outlaws. My share was $5-million a year.” He made B.C. bud famous. And he paid a price. Mr. Briere was convicted in 2001 on charges that included drug cultivation, possession for the purpose of trafficking and possession of a prohibited firearm. He was sentenced to four years in prison. While on parole in 2004, he was busted again, this time for running an illegal marijuana shop on Vancouver’s hipster high street, Commercial Drive. For that blatant infraction, he was convicted and sentenced to another 2.5 years behind bars. Mr. Briere is now 63, and with all the legal hassles and two heart attacks behind him, one might think he’d have retirement in mind. Far from it. The irrepressible pot impresario is back in the marijuana trade, making his mark in retail. He’s selling potent cannabis products from a chain of eight stores he has opened — and has managed to keep open, despite admitting he sells his product for “recreational” use — over the past 20 months in Vancouver. Weeds Glass and Gifts does a brisk business. He’s got six more shops on the way, including new outlets in Surrey, North Vancouver, Whistler and Sechelt, a vacation paradise just up the coast. Mr. Briere says he’s also looking at potential stores in Toronto and Montreal. These aren’t dimly lit backrooms where shifty-eyed dealers slip greasy dime bags into the pockets of nervous adolescents. Business is conducted openly, inside shops on busy streets. They have regular store hours. Mr. Briere compares his Weeds outlets to Tim Hortons Inc., the ubiquitous doughnut and coffee provider. The products are fresh and plentiful. The quality is consistent, and so, he hopes, is the customer experience. [np_storybar title=”Seven things to know about marijuana dispensaries in Canada” link=””] 1. Canada has well over 100 stores. The Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries says B.C. alone has 95 dispensaries. Two stores operate in Alberta, one in Manitoba, 13 in Ontario, and four in Quebec. 2. At least 60 dispensaries operate around Vancouver, with relatively little interference from law enforcement. “There has been no big outcry,” says Dana Larsen, the vice-president of the Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries, who opened a store in Vancouver’s east side in 2008. “If people were protesting our dispensaries and complaining and demanding something be done, maybe [the police would intervene]. But dispensaries get very few complaints and raids against dispensaries get a lot of complaints.” 3. Rather than shutting dispensaries down, Vancouver is investigating how the city can regulate the industry. Vancouver Coun. Kerry Jang recently asked municipal staff to determine whether dispensaries can be zoned as pharmacies, which would give the city the ability to directly oversee such operations and control their growth. “If we did that, we would be actually starting to regulate the number of dispensaries per street, their location, the same way we do with a regular pharmacy,” says Mr. Jang, who teaches psychiatry at the University of British Columbia’s medical school. “The concerns are the same, especially for pharmacies that dispense methadone.” 4. Some police agencies are enforcing the law. Halifax police raided the city’s only dispensary last year, shutting it down. Local RCMP officials in Grand Forks, B.C., and Parksville, B.C., recently warned prospective dispensaries they would be shut down if they open. Mounties raided a dispensary in Kelowna last month, though two others in the city remain open. 5. RCMP spokeswoman Sgt. Laurie White couldn’t say whether the force has a broad policy for marijuana dispensaries. “We will take enforcement action if there are any indications of contraventions to the [Controlled Drugs and Substances Act],” she says. “It depends on what the information is, what the source is, and that would then drive our investigation.” 6. The dispensaries all operate outside the federally regulated system, which the government overhauled last year to switch production from home grow-ops to large-scale commercial operations. Dispensaries were illegal under the old system and that didn’t change last year. Supporters of dispensaries argue the new federal system doesn’t meet patients’ needs, either because the legal marijuana is too expensive, supply is low, or commercial producers don’t offer an adequate variety of strains. The commercial system also doesn’t produce edible products or oils, but dispensaries do. 7. Paul Calandra, parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, says the government has no plans to formally legalize dispensaries. “They were illegal before, they remain illegal today and as long as we’re in government they will continue to be illegal,” Mr. Calandra says. “That is the law of the land, and we would hope our municipal and provincial partners would enforce the law as it stands today.” James Keller, The Canadian Press [/np_storybar] He’s hired a full-time accountant, and recently took on a young Vancouver lawyer, Ian Ramage, who now serves as the chain’s vice-president of operations and in-house counsel. On a recent morning visit to Mr. Briere’s flagship store in downtown Vancouver, customers selected bags of dried marijuana and edible cannabis products from dozens of trays. One fellow paid $5 for a heavy hit of highly concentrated cannabis oil, served from the store’s “dabber bar.” In the back office, Mr. Briere used a microscope to examine new product. “Quality control,” he explained. Officially, Weeds sells marijuana to people with medical needs only. Customers are required to obtain a membership card; for that, they must produce a note from a qualified health service provider, confirming they have a legitimate ailment — from multiple sclerosis to insomnia to headaches — that might be soothed with cannabis. Weeds employees will refer potential, non-card holding customers aged 19 or older to a local naturopath. Weeds doesn’t yet own the local market; competition is fierce in Vancouver. There are now 61 so-called medical marijuana dispensaries in the city, according to the Vancouver Police Department, with more opening all the time. Medical marijuana is astonishingly popular, in a city reputed to be a fitness and health leader. Three years ago, there were just a few dispensaries in Vancouver, and maybe a handful of others in the rest of Canada, says Jamie Shaw, president of the Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries, an organization that promotes and aims to regulate the sale of cannabis for medical purposes. Now there are approximately 100 across the country. “There’s been really crazy growth in the last year or two,” she says. “The only thing they have in common is they all dispense cannabis. Some are non-profit and some aren’t.” None of the Vancouver dispensaries have been issued city business permits. It’s a curious situation: Unlicensed, unregulated marijuana stores operate throughout the city, but few people — aside from prohibitionists, of whom there are almost none anymore — seem concerned. VPD spokesman Sergeant Randy Fincham says the city takes a “a priority-based approach” to marijuana. VPD officers know where all the pot shops are and they make regular visits, but they won’t consider disturbing an operation unless there’s a complaint made and public safety is at risk. For example, police will intervene if a store sells marijuana to minors, or is deemed unsanitary. Inspectors from Vancouver Coastal Health, the local health authority, and the Vancouver Fire Department also make regular visits to the unlicensed stores. “We don’t call them dispensaries,” says Sergeant Fincham, acknowledging that the term is, for many outlets, a semantic manoeuvre. Mr. Briere acknowledges that some customers have no medical use for his marijuana, and he agrees that his stores aren’t all about health care. “Of course not,” he says. “We’re setting this up to be recreational, full on recreational.” Besides, he says, marijuana “is far safer as a recreational drug than anything that’s out there. I don’t know anybody who smokes a joint and commits suicide.” It’s not the most alluring sales pitch, but Mr. Briere has a dozen more pro-pot arguments, and they boil down to these three: Times have changed; marijuana is no longer considered the devil’s weed; enforcing cannabis laws is a huge waste of money. Making a profit is not his main objective, he insists. But he’s in serious expansion mode, and he’s looking for equity partners. Mr. Briere owns three of the Weeds stores outright and he maintains a minimum 50% stake in the other “franchises.” All that’s required to partner up in a Weeds outlet is a capital investment of at least $40,000, a good location and a willing landlord. Mr. Briere says he’ll look after the access to product. He supplies his stores with marijuana from local growers, folks with Health Canada-issued personal production licences and other licensed producers, of whom there are thousands in B.C. alone. The federal government introduced new rules last year in an effort to restrict all marijuana production to a small number of highly regulated, closely inspected grow facilities. But a constitutional challenge launched by personal production licence holders has led to a temporary court injunction, and pending court decisions, which means that for now, small-time growers will continue to supply Mr. Briere and others with their marijuana. It’s not how the old system was meant to work, and it could end some day. The supply might dry up. Mr. Briere says he’ll be ready. “I plan to start growing this summer,” says the undisputed King of Cannabis. National Post • Email: bhutchinson@nationalpost.com \| Twitter: hutchwriter
For a forthcoming book…. comments welcome. Abstract Labor Brendan Cooney Introduction. As established in a previous chapter, if a coat and a quantity of linen are equal in value this means that both are products of an equal amount of labor time. However, the tailoring labor of the coat-maker is different in many respects than the weaving labor of the linen producer. If we look at the concrete motions of the tailor and weaver it is rather difficult to compare or equate the two in any meaningful way. However, if we abstract away all of the concrete details of both workers’ labor we are left with nothing but an expenditure of human effort over a period of time. Viewed this way, abstractly, both labors are qualitatively the same, allowing us to say that one hour of tailoring is equal to an hour of weaving. One might object that the above abstraction, in which we set aside all concrete details of the labor process and view each labor merely as an expenditure of human effort over time, would not make sense if the tailor expended more energy, or was more productive in an hour than the weaver. But if we subject this objection to scrutiny we see an even more difficult conundrum: How can we compare the productivity of weaving to the productivity of tailoring? If the weaver makes 5 bolts of linen an hour and the tailor makes 1 shirt an hour is there any meaningful way of saying one is more or less productive than the other? Just as we cannot compare or equate different use-values, we also cannot compare or equate concrete labors in any meaningful way. However, in a society governed by the imperative to produce at the socially necessary labor time, we know that each hour of work, regardless of whether it is tailoring, weaving, or any other concrete form, is held to a standard level of efficiency. Even if a worker is less efficient than average, her product is valued at the socially necessary labor time. Thus, in this sense, we know that an hour of tailoring, done at the socially necessary labor time, is equal to an hour of weaving or any other work done at the socially necessary labor time. Through the mechanism of socially necessary labor time all labors appear as equal expenditures of abstract human effort over time. This abstract expenditure of human labor over time is what Marx calls “abstract labor.” While the tailor performs abstract labor, this abstract expenditure of effort has a specific concrete form. The concrete labor corresponds to the particular labor process of tailoring. Concrete labor produces use-values. Abstract labor produces value. Labor is both concrete and abstract at the same time. At first glance, reading through the opening pages of Capital, one might get the impression that abstract labor is a purely theoretical short-cut designed to let Marx equate completely heterogeneous labors. But, as we have already seen, labor is not just treated abstractly in thought. It is treated abstractly by society itself, in reducing all labors to an equal expenditure of energy. This makes abstract labor an important concept in Marx’s theory of the capitalist labor process. Rather than just an academic category, abstract labor is real work that people actually do. As such, an understanding of abstract labor illuminates all of the dehumanizing ways that capital dominates the worker in production, reducing her work to an abstract, cog-like activity. Since abstract labor creates value, and since value is objectified abstract labor, the concept is also central to Marx’s value theory. It is upon this framework that Marx develops the theory of exploitation, of crisis, and all of the other critical observations of his value theory. Marx’s critique of capital is a radical critique aimed at penetrating the inner-most categories of capitalist production. Abstract labor is such a category. It is an essential aspect of capitalist social relations and thus also an essential aspect of Marx’s critique of capital. For this reason it is often the subject of much debate and criticism. This chapter attempts to sketch the main contours of Marx’s concept of abstract labor as well as address some of the main areas of criticism which have arisen in response to the concept. What does Marx mean by abstract and concrete labor? For Marx an idea is concrete if it encompasses all of the interrelated aspects of the thing which the idea describes. “Concrete labor” refers to a particular type of labor in all of its complexity and detail. The concrete labor of shoe-making involves all of the interrelated tasks required to make a shoe from cutting leather, to making patterns, to sewing, etc. The concrete labor that makes shoes is very different than the concrete labor that makes pianos. However, there are some common aspects that both shoe-making and piano-making share. They are both a “productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc., and in this sense both human labor.” But we can only see these common aspects if we abstract away all of the differences between the two types of labor. For Marx, an idea is abstract if it represents only part of the thing it is describing. An abstract idea is a partial, incomplete picture of reality. When we say that both labors are an expenditure of human brains, nerves and muscles we abstract away all of the concrete differences between the two labors and are left with only the most abstract, partial dimension of the labor process. Labor is both concrete and abstract. A particular labor, shoe-making for instance, is concrete in that it consists of a certain combination of activities that produces shoes and not pianos. But at the same time, considered abstractly, shoe-making is a “productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.,” and it shares this abstract quality with piano manufacturing and all other labors. The concrete aspects of labor correspond to the distinct use-values of commodities. Abstract labor, the aspect common to all labor, is what produces value. In some ways this presentation might not seem so different than other common uses of “abstract” and “concrete”. For instance, we might use a similar process in defining a ball. All balls have a common quality: they are a sphere that can be thrown. Each concrete ball is different in size, weight, color, etc. Each individual ball is a concrete object but also a member of a class of objects that we designate with the abstraction “ball”. But if we look a little closer at Marx’s presentation of abstract labor we begin to see ways in which the way “abstract labor” is abstract differs from the way in which”ball” might be considered abstract. “Ball” is a term used to classify a group of objects by their common properties. “Ball” is a linguistic construct that describes a class of objects. It is another matter with abstract labor. Abstract labor is not just a mental or linguistic abstraction made for the purpose of classification. The force of socially necessary labor time, in the real world, reduces labor to an abstraction. This abstraction emerges from a social process and not just a mind contemplating objects. Individual balls have no necessary relation to each other. They just share common properties. Abstract labors have a necessary, intrinsic connection to one another because socially necessary labor time is the result of a social process in which all labors participate. If this seems odd it may help to note that Marx’s notion of abstract and concrete are somewhat different than the way these terms often appear in everyday use. It is not uncommon to hear abstract/concrete as a stand-in for mind/matter, where abstract ideas exist in the mind and concrete things exist in reality. Marx’s use of the terms comes from a philosophical tradition inherited through Hegel in which ideas can be abstract or concrete and aspects of reality can be abstract and concrete. An idea is concrete if it captures a concept in all of its interrelated determinations while an idea is abstract if it only considers one-side of a thing in isolation. The same is true for the real world, outside of the mind of philosophers. Things exist concretely in a complex tapestry of interrelations which all create and define the concrete thing in question. But sometimes a thing itself can exist abstractly when it is developed one-sidedly, partially. As we will see below, capitalism develops the abstract aspects of labor, degrading work to an abstract expenditure of effort over time, in order to rid itself of its dependency on the concrete skills of workers. By developing labor as an abstraction, capital is able to achieve mastery over the worker, diminishing the worker to an abstract input in an objective production process. Abstract labor, then, is both a concept and a real thing. It is a concept that describes a real material phenomenon, the abstract labor that workers perform in a capitalist society. “Physiologically Abstract”? Some critics charge that Marx’s notion of abstract labor is problematic if it is interpreted as referring to physiological aspects of the labor process. Several times in Capital and the Critique of Political Economy Marx refers to abstract labor as a “productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.” These abstract elements of labor are a “physiological fact” to Marx. There is a line of criticism directed at Marx’s “physiological” definition of abstract labor. We find this critique in its classic form in the writings of the Soviet economist Issac Rubin who argued that a physiological definition of abstract labor implies that all labor throughout history has been abstract, thus “naturalizing” and “reifying” a category of capitalist social relations. It is tempting to agree with Rubin. After all, Marx is constantly critiquing bourgeoise economists for projecting categories like “capital” and “labor” back in time in a way that makes the elements of capitalist production seem like eternal, natural aspects of all social orders for all of time. It is true that all labor, regardless of the mode of production, is an expenditure of effort over time. This could make it appear as if all labor throughout history is abstract and therefore all labor has produced value. However, as explained in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, what allows us to say that the abstract expenditure of human brains, muscles and nerves of the tailor is equivalent to that of the weaver is the fact that both are subjected to the same social process, socially necessary labor time, which disciplines workers to produce at the social average and which only counts their product as social to the extent that it meets this social average. While we can use our powers of mental abstraction to see that the labor of cavemen, Roman slaves, etc. were all expenditures of human energy in the abstract, it is only in a capitalist society that society, not philosophy, performs this abstraction. It is only with capitalism that the abstraction “labor in general” becomes a “practical truth” . Thus labor can be physiologically abstract and at the same time abstract labor can be a historically contingent category, the result of specific social relations, and not an eternal category of all human history. Rubin’s difficulty in understanding how a physiological category can be abstract is a product of an artificial division which he erects between social aspects of capitalism and “material/technical” aspects of capitalism. For Rubin, social relations between people are the subject of value theory while the technical aspects of production are the subject of science. From this arbitrary dichotomy comes the conclusion that physiological aspects of labor cannot produce value because they are technical aspects of production and not a social phenomenon between people. Rubin’s arbitrary dichotomy of social/technical is similar to the above mentioned dichotomy of mind/matter. Both assume that material things can only be concrete and that abstraction belongs to the mind or to social reality. This way of dividing up philosophy short-circuits the power of Marx’s method, making it impossible to see how a physiological reality can be abstract, social and historical. Lest the reader think that such debates are purely for the realm of obscurantist philosophers it should be noted that Rubin’s social/technical dichotomy is reflective of the Soviet approach to socialism which treated the development of the forces of production as a purely technical issue while ignoring the fact that the Soviet worker was just as degraded, alienated and exploited as her counterparts in capitalist society. To truly free workers from the tyranny of abstract labor we need an understanding of abstract labor that does not reduce abstractions to purely mental activity and does not treat the labor process purely as a technical process unshaped by the mode of production. We will return to this theme later in the chapter. Abstract Ideas and Practical Truth “The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society.” Of course, for all of human history, labor has been “a certain productive expenditure of muscles, nerves, brain, etc.” However, human labor has not always produced value nor have all societies considered all human labor to be qualitatively the same in an economic sense. While the labor of a feudal serf and a guildsman may have both been productive expenditures of muscles, nerves, brains, etc. these societies did not have a notion of “man in general” or of the qualitative equality between labors. An hour of serf labor was not qualitatively equal to an hour of guild labor. While it may have been possible to form a mental abstraction of human labor in general in past societies, it is only in capitalism that such an abstraction becomes a “practical truth”. This is why the notion of labor in general as the source of economic value only emerges with the development of capitalism. When Marx says that abstract labor attains a “practical truth” in capitalism he means that labor is treated abstractly in actual social practice. Capitalists and workers, as personifications of the economic categories of capital and labor, treat labor abstractly. They do this not because of an idea they have of abstract labor, but because such social practice is an essential part of capitalist production. There are several overlapping ways that labor is treated abstractly in capitalist production. While socially necessary labor time assures that an hour of work is a uniform expenditure of abstract energy, this occurs within a complex of interlocking social relations which allow for such a practical abstraction. To start with, the fact that workers are separated from the means of production through the institution of private property means that an individual has no permanent relation to a particular type of labor. Workers in a capitalist society do not own the means of production but instead sell their labor to a capitalist who owns the means of production. Rather than workers being in control of the objects upon which they labor, workers are denuded, empty subjects with no objective connection to any specific labor process. They could be hired by any capitalist to perform any type of concrete labor. Divorced also from their means of subsistence, workers seek a job not to fulfill themselves as productive, creative beings but in order to make money to buy their subsistence in the market. The specific concrete labor they do has no particular bearing on the goal of earning money to buy subsistence goods. All jobs make money and so any job is as good as another, from this perspective, as long as it allows one to purchase the same subsistence goods as any other job. The result is a society in which workers are relatively indifferent to the type of labor they perform. People pass with relative ease from one occupation to the next and society educates the entire workforce in a general set of skills that prepares workers to do a variety of interchangeable jobs. The capitalist mode of production only arises historically when capital “confronts the totality of all labors potentially, and the particular one it confronts at any time is an accidental matter.” The skeptical reader may object that, subjectively, workers have a range of attitudes about their work, not all of which reflect an utter indifference to their occupation. It is unlikely that when Marx speaks of abstract labor being characterized by an indifference to concrete labor he is making a claim to describe all subjective feelings about work. Rather he is describing certain objective conditions which cause the particular concrete type of work to be a matter of relative indifference to both capitalists and labors. Subjective attitudes exist within what might be termed an “objective indifference” to the particular concrete form of labor. Compared to the rigid class-systems of pre-capitalist society, capitalist society shows a high degree of mobility between concrete labors. People in feudal Europe did not have “jobs”. They were born into a class and performed the labor associated with this class until they died. The relative mobility between occupations in a capitalist society is a reflection of the fact that workers are not tied to a particular means of production and are thus treated as abstract units which can be applied to any production process. More importantly, separated from the means of production workers do not own the product of their work, nor do they control the labor process. As denuded subjects, all they can do is perform labor at a pace and content dictated to them by the objective organization of production that they confront. This makes it impossible for workers to have an experience of work in which their labor is a true process of fulfilling their creative potential as social beings. Instead work is a task, an imposition, a job, a drag, something to get through in order to survive. Though workers work with means of production these means of production are the property of someone else, a capitalist whose material interest is to control the labor process for the purpose of maximizing exploitation. The means of production confront the worker as an alien being and thus concrete labor appears to the worker as an alien process imposed upon her. With no intrinsic relation to a concrete labor process the worker enters production as an abstract subject. The imperative to produce at the socially necessary labor time enforces a tendency toward uniformity of production norms. An assembly line worker at Ford might easily replace an assembly line worker at Chrysler because the pressure to produce at the average level of efficiency creates a tendency for the spread of technologies and labor practices across an industry so that work is virtually identical from one job to another. The particular worker is highly expendable, easily replaced by another. This is true between industries as well, as the cog-like activity of labor becomes increasingly similar from one type of work to another. Socially necessary labor time dictates that an hour of concrete labor performed at the socially necessary labor time is an hour of abstract labor. If the socially necessary labor time to make a widget is 1 hour and it takes me an hour to make a widget then I have performed an hour of abstract labor. If I take 2 concrete hours to make the widget then I still have produced an hour of abstract labor. This mechanism imposes a uniform efficiency on all labor so that all labor is valued equally as an abstract expenditure of human energy. By valuing commodities in this way capitalism erases the differences between workers so that any one worker’s labor is just an anonymous input in a giant mass of social labor, the individual pieces of which are indistinguishable from on another. The imperative to produce at or under the socially necessary labor time is the prime motivator in the mechanization of work and the scientific management of the labor process. Value is measured in hours and thus the vast majority of changes to the production process revolve around the need to decrease the time it takes to carry out tasks. The less control the worker has over the the labor process the easier it is for the capitalist to increase the speed and intensity of work. Machines and scientific management of the labor process are the prime weapons of capital in its quest to take control of the labor process away from workers. Machines free capital from its dependence on the concrete skills of the worker. By dictating the pace and intensity of work through a machine the worker becomes a cog in the machine, an abstract input into the production process with no space for the exertion of will or creativity. Lastly, it should be noted that capitalist production has one goal and this is to extract the maximum amount of surplus-value from workers. The capitalist’s only concern is to invest money in order to make more money. In order to increase surplus-value capital must pass through the stage of concrete labor. Commodities with use-values must be produced. But the specific type of commodity and the specific labor process required to produce this commodity are a matter of indifference for capital. It is the accumulation value for its own sake, abstracting away from use-value and concrete labor, that is the reason for capitalist production. To the capitalist all labor is the same as long as it produces surplus labor time. This absolute indifference to concrete labor contributes to the degradation and domination of the labor process, as discussed above. Simple and Complex Labor As we have seen, one of the most crucial ways in which labor is treated as abstract in practice is in the drive to produce at the socially necessary labor time. Socially necessary labor time assures capital that despite the different use-vales made by workers in different industries, each hour of work is an hour of abstract labor expended at the socially necessary labor time. Thus, an hour of one person’s labor is equal to an hour of anyone else’s, allowing capital to confront the totality of labors as one homogenous, abstract mass. However, the above claim would be more correctly stated as, “an hour of simple labor is equal to any other hour of simple labor.” Simple labor is “the labor-power possessed in his bodily organism by every ordinary man, on the average, without being developed in any special way.” It is what might commonly be referred to as “unskilled labor”, though the term “simple” is perhaps more appropriate than “unskilled” since all labor requires some degree of skill, no matter how basic. Simple labor is the labor that any average citizen of a society can perform. This average set of common skills changes over time and varies between societies, “but in a particular society it is given.” Simple labor stands in contrast to complex labor. Complex labor is labor that embodies a specialized skill-set that allows it to produce more value in an hour than simple labor. While one hour of simple labor produces the same amount of value as any other hour of simple labor, an hour of complex labor produces more value than an hour of simple labor. Some critics have argued that the fact that complex labor produces more value than skilled labor contradicts the idea that one hour of abstract labor is equal to any other person’s hour of abstract labor. Marx addresses the issue of complex and simple labor with brevity. In social practice complex labor is treated just as abstractly as simple labor. The difference between the two is not a difference of quality (concrete and abstract) but of quantity (how much abstract labor). Complex labor counts as multiples of simple labor. For instance, a doctor’s complex labor might produce five times more value per hour than the simple labor of a barista. But both the barista’s simple labor and the doctor’s complex labor are abstract because both are subject to the imperative to produce at the socially necessary labor time. An hour of doctoring done at the socially necessary labor time is, in this case, equal to five hours of barista labor done at the socially necessary labor time. The quantitative relation between complex labor and simple labor is determined by social processes carried out “behind the backs of the producers”. Most of the controversy that has surrounded Marx’s reduction of complex labor to simple labor stems from a misunderstanding of what Marx claims. Marx is sometimes misread to be arguing that complex labor is only abstract once it is reduced to simple labor. This leads to the charge that Marx should have specified a precise formula for how complex labor is reduced to simple labor. However, this line of thinking immediately sets Marx’s theory up for failure because there is no way to reduce one concrete labor to a multiple of another concrete labor. Like use-values, concrete labors are incommensurable. There is no meaningful way of comparing or reducing the concrete work of a doctor to that of a barista in a quantitative sense. A thing can only be a multiple of another if both are of the same quality. Complex labor can be reduced to simple labor because both are abstract. Both are abstract because both are subject to the imperative to produce at the socially necessary labor time. Marx’s comment that the reduction of concrete labor to simple labor is carried out by social forces “behind the backs of the producers”, likens this reduction to all of the other laws of capitalism like socially necessary labor time and the tendential fall in rate of profit which exert themselves without the conscious intervention of society. Primarily, the existence of complex labor is the result of the time it takes to train skilled workers. An hour of this complex labor is a concentrated expenditure of this stored-up energy. The Value-Form, Particular-Universal, and Abstract Concrete The following section of this chapter discusses the relation between Marx’s concrete-abstract labor argument and the particular-universal argument that he makes in the value-form section of Chapter One of Capital. This section would not necessarily be so crucial to include here were it not for the great deal of misreadings on this topic that one finds in the secondary literature. The argument Marx makes about the difference between particular expressions of value and universal expressions of value is often conflated with Marx’s argument about concrete and abstract labor. This section endeavors to make a few constructive points that may help the reader find clarity about the relation of the “value-form” to abstract labor. In the “value-form” section of chapter one of Capital Marx endeavors to explain how the abstract labor objectified in a commodity expresses itself in exchange-value. It may be helpful to remember that abstract labor is an activity that workers do, that it is objectified in commodities as the substance of their intrinsic value, and that this value must be expressed in exchange-value. While any commodity can express the value of any other commodity through a simple equation (A=B), Marx shows how this process results in one commodity becoming the universally recognized expression of value for all other commodities. This is the money commodity. Money is the “universal equivalent”. Commodities have a “natural form” and a “value form”. The natural-form is the physical body of the commodity itself. The “form of value” or the “value-form” refers to the form taken by the intrinsic value of commodities when this intrinsic value, this abstract labor time, is expressed in the physical form of another commodity. This happens whenever we equate one commodity with another. Any commodity can be the value-form of any other commodity. Linen can be the value form of coats. Sweet peas can be the value-form of linen. Bicycles can be the value-form of sweet peas, and so on, in an endless series of expressions of the “simple form of value”. It is easy to imagine the difficulties that would arise if society were to attempt to organize commodity production and exchange only using this method of valuing commodities. When each commodity measures its value in a different commodity there is no one commodity that can stand as a universal expression of the abstract labor embodied in commodities. The abstract labor in coats is expressed in the particular form of linen, in the physical body of the linen. The abstract labor in the sweet peas is expressed in the particular physical body of bicycles. Though these commodities are all commensurable because they embody abstract labor, no one commodity serves as a universal measure of abstract labor. Instead we just have a series of particular expressions of value, each in the form of a different use-value corresponding to a particular concrete labor. The defects of the simple-form of value lead to the emergence of the money-form of value. When money stands as the general-equivalent of all other commodities, it becomes a universally recognized expression of abstract labor. Abstract labor is expressed in a universal form, as general social labor. Rather than abstract labor being expressed in this or that particular use-value, it is expressed in one commodity. This move from the particular to the universal is an important theme in Marx’s discussion of the value-form. Marx’s argument about money becoming the universal expression of value is sometimes conflated or confused with Marx’s argument about concrete and abstract labor. Since the abstract labor in commodities cannot be expressed as universal social labor until it is expressed in money this has caused some readers to believe that it is the exchange of commodities for money that retroactively turns the labor embodied in a commodity into abstract labor. In this reading, the labor of a coat-maker remains concrete until the coat is exchanged for money. The act of exchanging the coat for money makes the labor that had been expended on it abstract. This line of thinking has spawned a sprawling body of thought loosely lumped together under the moniker “value-form approach”. The Soviet economist Isacc Rubin is generally considered the intellectual originator of this line of thinking. The “value-form approach” has some key differences with the value-form argument that Marx makes in Capital. It is not hard to see where this confusion might creep in. For instance, when discussing the defects of the simple form of value Marx says, “the specific, concrete, useful kind of labor contained in each commodity-equivalent is only a particular kind of labor and therefore not an exhaustive form of appearance of human labor in general.” A sentence like this seems to equate particular and concrete labor so that each person’s particular, private labor remains concrete even in the simple form of value, only becoming universal and abstract in the money form where particular labors are equated with the universal symbol of labor in general. However, a closer reading might catch the crucial phrase “form of appearance” in the above sentence. These three words make all of the difference. They clue us in to the fact that Marx is not discussing a process of concrete labor becoming abstract labor. Rather, he is discussing the inadequacy of the simple form of value as an expression of, a form of appearance of value. Value must be expressed. It must appear. The form of its appearance depends on what the commodity is equated with. If the coats are equated with linen then coats have a particular expression of value in the form of linen. If coats are equated with money then coats express their value in a universal form. This ability to express value in a particular or universal form is only possible because all commodities are already products of abstract labor, already contain intrinsic value, and are thus commensurable. The “value-form approach” , on the contrary, leads us to the conclusion that labor is solely concrete before commodities exchange and that therefore value doesn’t exist until exchange happens. (The “value-form approach” is often referred to as a “circulationist approach” since it implies that value arises in circulation rather than production.) This eliminates the concept of intrinsic value, so crucial to Marx’s value theory, as argued in a previous chapter. The debate over the value-form leads to an important question: Is capitalism fundamentally characterized by market exchange or by commodity production? If money is what makes labor abstract, if exchange produces value, then we can eliminate capitalism by replacing the market with state planning. But if abstract labor is rendered abstract by the practical truth of the role of the worker in production, and by the disciplining of production by socially necessary labor time, then a state plan does not necessarily constitute the overthrow of capitalism. This puts an understanding of abstract labor and the value-form at the center of any analysis of 20th century “communism” as well as discussions of how to supersede capitalism in the future. Marx developed his explanation of the value-form very carefully in order to counter the popular theories of Proudhon and his anarchist-mutualist followers who blamed money for distorting the natural laws of commodity production. Marx wanted to show that money, the universal equivalent, was just a developed form of the simple-form of value and that the form of value was an expression of the intrinsic value already existing in commodities. Thus, money is an inescapable part of any commodity-producing society. The social ills of capitalism are the result of the contradictions of the commodity form, not of some monetary distortion imposed on the natural order of things. When Rubin and the so-called “value-form school” argue that labor is rendered abstract in exchange, and that therefore value is created in exchange, they undo Marx’s value-form argument against Proudhon. Capitalism is given its distinctive form by exchange and not by commodity production. This point of view produces a politics which focuses on eliminating markets with planning rather than eliminating the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s view suggests a much more radical vision in which we are challenged to create a society in which work is not an alienated abstraction. Abstract Labor and Communism As this chapter has argued, although labor can be considered abstractly in any mode of production, it is only in a capitalist society that labor is treated abstractly in practice. This understanding is then crucial for the project of specifying what would be necessary to break with the capitalist mode of production and construct a new society based on the needs of people rather than the needs of capital. As discussed more fully in the chapter on Indirectly Social Labor, labor in a capitalist society is only counted as social labor to the extent that it is socially necessary labor. In a communist society each individual’s labor would be counted as social labor immediately and fully without having to be mediated through a process of social averaging. Thus, it would not be the case that labor was only counted as social labor in the most abstract sense. Rather, a communist society would treat concrete labor as social labor. With this understanding that a communist society would treat concrete labor as social labor, we can then ask what sort of social relations, and what organization of production would be necessary for this to be the case. For one, labor must cease to be a matter of indifference to the worker. This implies that workers are not divorced from the means of production, only encountering the means or production when they sell their labor to capital. Rather, workers must be in control of the means of production and shape the labor process in a way that makes their work meaningful and easier. Society must not be geared toward the production of abstract value for its own sake. Rather, communism must aim to provide use-vales for people and to organize the labor process in such a way that work becomes life’s “prime want”. The picture of a communist society without abstract labor which begins to emerge when one accepts Marx’s notion of abstract labor as real work rendered abstract by the peculiar sociality of capitalist production contrasts starkly with the picture of communism that can be deduced from the “value-form” interpretation of abstract labor in which labor is rendered abstract in exchange. In the latter case it is the market that is the defining feature of capitalism and thus a planned society which eliminates markets also eliminates abstract labor. This says nothing about the nature of work itself. A planned society could be just as degrading for workers, workers could still be compelled to work at the socially necessary labor time, and labor could still be treated abstractly in the sense that labor is only counted as social to the extent that it is an average expenditure of physical work. The difference in these two notions of abstract labor plays a big role in the debate over whether the 20th century “communism” of the USSR, China, etc. constituted an actual break with the capitalist mode of production or whether these societies were just planned-capitalism.
Obama's Phony War on ISIS It was recently mentioned that U.S. Forces have dropped over 27,000 bombs on Syria and Iraq during Operation Inherent Resolve, the Obama administration's campaign against ISIS. Given the current controversies over the reliability of and possible political motivations behind American intelligence assessments, let's look behind this figure to see what these munitions have bought the U.S. during the campaign, and whether we can count on the Obama administration's related claims about the war on ISIS or the claims of his intelligence community in general. Historically, air campaigns are mostly measured by aircraft sorties rather than munitions dropped. In the age of precision munitions (and almost all the weapons deployed in Inherent Resolve are in that category), perhaps things are somewhat different. Still, it is useful to examine this figure against the number of sorties flown and most particularly against the administration's claims of ISIS losses. In doing this, it is not my intention in any way to impugn the motivations, determination, or skill of the American aircrew, ground crew, support, command and control, or special forces elements that have carried out this campaign so far. Although ISIS anti-aircraft defenses are extremely weak, the very fact that American forces have managed to fly tens of thousands of missions safely and with negligible losses, often at night, and requiring frequent in-air refueling, is extremely impressive. Those 27,000 bombs were dropped during the course of 40,635 combat sorties and 9,224 reconnaissance, intelligence, and support sorties. The first remarkable thing about these figures is the relatively small number of munitions dropped against the number of missions flown. It appears that fewer than 1.5 bombs were dropped for every combat sortie flown, this by modern aircraft, including heavy B-1 bombers, capable of carrying much greater bomb loads. These figures correspond to well oft reported allegations that up to 75% of combat sorties do not drop munitions under extremely restrictive rules of engagement. These aborted missions nonetheless put American aircrew at risk, wear out planes and parts, and cost billions of taxpayer dollars. The Obama administration's caution regarding civilian casualties may be admirable in certain respects, but only assuming that the campaign is otherwise accomplishing its missions. In two years of bombardment and assault by various local forces (Iraqi, Syrian, Kurdish, Turkish, among others) ISIS has been pushed back and weakened but still apparently remains a formidable fighting force, stymieing Iraqi forces at Mosul, launching effective counter-attacks in Syria, and continuing to recruit and inspire various murderous terrorists around the world. In large part, the Obama administration's answer to this is the 2016 claim that more than 26,000 ISIS fighters have been killed by coalition (mostly American) aerial bombardment alone, a historically impressive number of casualties given the relative paucity of munitions dropped. But how credible is this intelligence assessment? The biggest problem with the casualty number is that it alone accounts for more than the entirety of ISIS's strength according to the very same intelligence estimates that tout the losses. According to American intelligence, ISIS's overall strength in 2014 was between 25,000 and 31,000 men. And the number of ISIS killed does not take into account any wounded. Precision munitions may be extremely accurate, but they do not magically kill every person in the target zone. In modern combat, a good rule of thumb is a 3-1 ratio of substantially wounded (evacuated to a rear area for serious treatment) to killed, though in contemporary Western militaries, the ratio is much higher. Let's assume that with ISIS it, is much lower – say, 1-1. That still produces over 52,000 total casualties out of a force originally estimated at about one half that strength. Let's be very generous to the Obama estimates and also assume that between 2014 and 2016, ISIS was able to replace each one of its 30,000 original fighters with new recruits (which somehow it managed to train, equip, and transport to the front despite coalition and Russian interdiction efforts). If ISIS suffered 52,000 casualties from aerial bombardment (not even counting ground combat), that would put ISIS's remaining effective strength at barely 8,000 men, including command and support troops. Since ISIS is still fighting effectively, and even taking the offensive here and there, that would make the Islamic organization as a whole perhaps the most disciplined and well trained, led, equipped, and motivated fighting force in modern history. Generally speaking, a large-field fighting force of average quality will begin to dramatically lose cohesion and fighting effectiveness when losses exceed 30%. Extremely high-quality formations like, say, the German World War II 1st Parachute Division or the 1st U.S. Marine Division, might sustain greater losses while remaining highly effective, but not many other units. And ISIS is not a field military formation with well educated, especially fit and selected troops, able to indulge long-term training, with expert and educated leadership. It is an umbrella for a hybrid guerrilla force based in an underdeveloped mostly Arab area whose main advantage appears to be intense indoctrination and fanaticism. While the latter can produce brave and self-sacrificing fighters, that is not a substitute for effective personnel selection, training, and leadership. It is extremely unlikely that ISIS combat formations are elite in the sense of the aforementioned German or American formations, and woe onto us were they to have that character. Let's be generous again and assume that ISIS combat formations, while not elite, are of average quality by world standards and able to sustain 30% casualties without substantially losing combat effectiveness. Let's also assume (as before) that ISIS has essentially managed to replace 100% of its original fighting strength by CIA estimates so that its total fighting strength between 2014 and 2016 is 60,000 men. Since ISIS is still an effective fighting force, that means the most it might reasonably have lost is 18,000 (30%) to all causes, coalition bombing, Russian bombing, and ground combat against various foes. Of those, using again our very conservative estimate of killed to wounded, only 9,000 of those 18,000 are KIA. This means that even if coalition bombing were responsible for every single ISIS casualty (which is certainly not true), actual ISIS killed by coalition bombing could not be greater than 9,000, or one third of the Obama administration estimate – and this absurdly assumes that American bombing caused all those losses. This makes the notorious overestimated body counts of Vietnam, a practice that the U.S. supposedly forswore, seem precise. We can draw only two reasonable conclusions from this analysis. One would be that American raw intelligence and analysis is so bad that ISIS strength is actually orders of magnitude greater than the original estimate made only a couple of years ago, in order for ISIS to have sustained the losses claimed and still be an effective fighting organization. The second much more likely answer is that the highly politicized Obama intelligence community has repeatedly lied as to the extent of ISIS losses in order to justify the half-hearted and confused campaign authorized by the president, as well as the highly restricted rules of engagement that limit the actual effectiveness of the bombing campaign. This, of course, is the same intelligence community now claiming that the Russians effectively elected Donald Trump and feared Hillary Clinton. A house cleaning cannot come soon enough.
Juan Carlos's expensive trip to Botswana – from which he was flown home injured – arouses anger in recession-hit country While ordinary Spaniards cope with harsh austerity, recession and soaring unemployment, the country's royal family has been enjoying expensive hunting trips, one of which resulted in King Juan Carlos ending up in hospital. The 74-year-old monarch's fall in a park in Botswana provided an excuse for Spanish newspapers, who normally treat their royal family with kid gloves, to plaster their pages with photos of the king standing proudly in front of a dead elephant. The photograph came from the website of Botswana-based Rann Safaris, which had been taken down by Sunday. The pictures, taken before the latest hunting trip, also showed the king with two dead African buffaloes. Shoots with Rann Safaris cost upwards of $8,700 (£5,500) a week, with an elephant costing a further $15,000 to kill. A day out with professional hunter Jeff Rann, pictured with the king, costs a further $2,000. The king's accident, after which he was flown back to Madrid for a hip operation, came days after his grandson, 13-year-old Froilán Marichalar, shot himself in the foot while hunting in Spain. He also had to be hospitalised and doctors removed the contents of a 36-calibre shotgun cartridge from his foot. Newspapers reported that it was illegal for a 13-year-old to handle that type of gun. The king's hunting trip, which officials described as private, has caused a storm of angry comment from animal lovers and those wanting to know how much it had cost. A promotional video on YouTube shows Rann shooting elephants – which can be killed with licences bought at auction from the Botswana government – in the Okavango delta. "You have to manage the world's animal populations, to their betterment," says Rann, who did not answer queries from the Guardian. "We are trying to improve their habitat." King Juan Carlos has been involved in hunting scandals before. Six years ago, officials dismissed as ridiculous allegations that he had shot a drunken Russian bear that had been plied with honey and vodka. The royal family has a troubled history with guns. The king shot and killed his brother in an accident when he was a teenager. • This article was amended on 26 April 2012. The original said King Juan Carlos had been pictured with two dead water buffaloes. The animals were African buffaloes.
The hilarious, universally acclaimed "Meet the Team" shorts for Team Fortress 2 are more than fan service or game promotion. Valve founder Gabe Newell says they're experiments in movie-making, because the studio would prefer to do a Half-Life movie itself. Speaking to PC Gamer, Newell says Hollywood bombarded Valve with story pitches for a Half-Life movie, not long after the first game shipped in 1998. "Their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst," Newell said. "Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of." Newell said the team reached a consensus to not sign a movie deal, because the only way it would be don right was if it made the film itself. "And I was like, ‘Make it ourselves? Well that's impossible,'" Newell said. "But the Team Fortress 2 thing, the Meet The Team shorts, is us trying to explore that." It's a leap from animated, comedic shorts to a feature-length science-fiction drama, so at this rate, it's more likely that Half-Life: The Movie doesn't get made. But good on Newell and company for staying committed to seeing something done right, if it's done at all. "As a [World of Warcraft] player, I would much rather that the WoW team made the movie, right?" Newell said. "I like Sam Raimi, I've been a fan ever since Evil Dead came out, but I would rather see Blizzard making the movie. We think that customers are like, ‘OK, we're kind of sick and tired of the way you guys are slicing and dicing the experience of being a fan of Harry Potter, or Half-Life, or The Incredibles, and you need to fix it.' And the people that fix it will be rewarded, and the people that don't will be on the rubbish heap of history, or whatever the phrase is." Advertisement Valve Want To Make The Half-Life Movie Themselves [PC Gamer]
When it comes to interviews, if you look at my track record, it’s pretty clear that I’ll talk to just about anyone from the game of football. And while I’m more than happy to talk to any player from the professional ranks about their experiences, I have a soft spot in particular for players who hail from the state of Ohio. After all, I’m from Ohio myself. And on top of that, a substantial number of my readers and followers call Ohio home, too. So helping to shed some more light on the lives of those who come from my own backyard seems as much a duty as it does a privilege. Luckily, Ohio has a pretty deep pool of players that populate MLS rosters. And one of the brightest among those that call the Buckeye state home is Houston Dynamo right back, Kofi Sarkodie. A product of Huber Heights — a suburb of Dayton — Kofi has represented the US at the youth level, won a national championship with the Akron Zips and established himself as one of the league’s best up and coming young defenders. So with the Dynamo off to a blazing start to the 2014 season, this seemed like the perfect time to talk with Kofi to talk about his younger days here in Ohio, the importance of his close relationships with his soccer-playing brothers, and his career to this point. DJ @ WSOTP: Tell us a little about growing up and playing soccer in Ohio: who did you play club, and what’s your favorite memory from your youth days? Kofi Sarkodie: Growing up in Ohio was actually neat — and something that not everyone knows — but there were a lot of Ohio-based players that are now playing in the league. And during my youth career, we actually played with each other and against each other. It’s really neat to see everyone grow from youth soccer all the way to professional and be from Ohio. I played for Warrior Soccer Club for some time and then I went and played at Ohio FC Mutiny in Columbus, with Tim Horton who was my coach there. That was kind of a major step that I took in my youth career and played a major role in my development. Chad Barson who plays for the Crew right now, [former Crew player] Aaron Horton, and Nick Kellogg who played basketball at Ohio University… we all played together at the youth level there. DJ @ WSOTP: You come from a family of soccer players: your brothers Kwame and Ofori both played in college and professionally. I’m sure you guys played together a bunch growing up. Between you and your siblings, who was the worst loser growing up? Kofi Sarkodie: I’m going to be honest with you: I was the worst loser for sure! But we are all really different in terms of how way we play. In my opinion, Kwame is the most naturally talented of us three. Ofori is kind of like a soccer guru — it’s like a chess match for him — and is very thought oriented when it comes to playing. I’ve kind of matched off both of them, but a lot more greedy than the both of them! And that’s where me being the worst loser comes from. DJ @ WSOTP: So this is kind of one of those small world moments, but I’m on the broadcast team for the NPSL’s Cincinnati Saints. And the Saints just so happen to be the team for which your older brother Kwame currently plays. So I reached out to him for a question of his own which was: Do you think you could defend Kwame in a 1v1 situation? Kofi Sarkodie: Okay, wow… that is the question! This is where the thinking part of my game that I picked from Ofori comes into play. For those who don’t know Kwame, he’s ridiculous: he’s probably the fastest of us three and also has a lot of skill. So I would really have to push Kwame into some help… I guess I’m cheating with this answer! I would try to never put myself in a position to have to defend him 1v1. I would do the work prior to that, you know? DJ @ WSOTP: The intelligent soccer player’s response. Though Kwame thought you should have answered “No, there is no way I could catch Kwame!” Kofi Sarkodie: I wouldn’t have to: I’d be right behind Kwame all game so he wouldn’t have space to turn! DJ @ WSOTP: So after your youth career, you left Carroll High School — a regional soccer power in Dayton that won a state championship in what would have been your sophomore year — early to study and train at the IMG Academy in Bradenton. Was it tough decision or a no-brainer? Kofi Sarkodie: For me it wasn’t really a tough decision. It helped that my brother Ofori paved the path before two years earlier by being invited to the same program. It was a great opportunity and a great experience to go down to Florida for two years to be playing with the best players in the US at the time. And I was fortunate enough to train at the great facilities and make it to the U-17 World Cup in South Korea. DJ @ WSOTP: It’s like you read my mind, as your time at the 2007 U-17 World Cup was the topic of my next question. You guys played a number of teams that now have players playing at the highest levels of the game — Toni Kroos for German, Eden Hazard and Christian Benteke for Belgium. Did anyone stand out at the time as being “exceptional”? Kofi Sarkodie: I played against Toni Kroos twice, and that was the first time I had played against Hazard. But even at that time, Kroos in particular was just on a different level mentally. He was a lot more mature, and you could see it in his game. He’s still young, and now that he’s got all of this experience, he’s only going to get better. But they (Kroos and Hazard) had those intangible attributes about them that really separated them even at the youth level. DJ @ WSOTP: How about the guys that you played with on US the team or otherwise, as truly being a cut above the rest? Aside from yourself, of course. Kofi Sarkodie: At the time, Jared Jeffrey was in really good form. He went on to play in Germany for some time, but is back now playing in DC. A good friend of mine, Brian Dominguez, who’s not in the states anymore, was also playing really well. DJ @ WSOTP: Let’s talk a little about your time as an Akron Zip. You helped the team to win a national championship in 2010 and also picked up a number of prestigious personal honors in the process. Are there any memories that really stand out? Kofi Sarkodie: There were two for me that were huge. Probably the most memorable time was the year — 2009 — that we went undefeated all season, but lost on PK’s in the final against [the University of Virginia]. I stepped up and was third to take the penalty. I hit it and I thought it was going in… but it hit the post and pops out. Our fifth penalty taker, who hadn’t missed all season, went to hit it… and it went over, and we were all kind of in awe. We had worked so hard and had put in so much. I can’t even really explain that emotion, the sadness. But it was a sadness that ended up driving us the next year. The next year there was another memorable time that really stood out. We were undefeated all year and we went to play Cleveland State, which was kind of like a big brother/little brother in-state rivalry. I was injured at the time so I didn’t get to play. But they were unranked, and we were the number one team in the country… and they beat us. We get back off the bus, go into the locker room and Caleb and all the other coaches left, and we talked for like 30 minutes — though I can’t disclose what was said, that’s our little secret! And after that, there was no turning back. Everything in our hearts, everything in our minds was put towards winning a championship. And that’s what we were able to do. DJ @ WSOTP: So after college you were drafted by the Houston Dynamo as the 7th overall pick in the 2011 draft. And between playing for Houston and playing at Akron, you’ve had the opportunity to play under two of the more heralded coaches in American soccer in Dominic Kinnear and Caleb Porter. How have things differed under the two coaches, and have their been any noteworthy similarities? Maybe in playing style or man management? Kofi Sarkodie: They’re very different. But the one thing that they have in common — and you can tell in their winning percentages — is they both like to win. In terms of their playing style is completely different. The same with training and player management. But that one similarity is, they know what to do within their respective ways to win. Dom’s an older guy, and Caleb is a little bit younger. I’m not sure how he is in Portland, but it’s a different time really. Because the reality is that me, Caleb, Darlington, all those guys… we grew up together. We went through each of those stages from being ranked in the Top 20, to being National Championship contenders, to being champions, to people considering us the best college team ever. And so it’s kind of hard to explain the subtle differences because of that. Now while I’ve been playing under Dom, it’s been a little bit more of a professional environment. From that standpoint, it’s making sure I’m coming to work and doing my job every single day. I need to make sure I understand what Dom wants from the team. It’s just a different air all together. DJ @ WSOTP: So what has been the biggest change now that you’re playing in that professional environment? Was there a certain element of you play that you’ve had to work on in particular? Kofi Sarkodie: I’m always looking to work on different things in my game. Every year I talk to my big brothers Kwame — even though he’s trying to start stuff in my interview! — and Ofori because they’re guys that I trust that have played at high levels of the game. And I ask them about what aspects of my game that I need to improve. Do I need to be able to shoot balls from 50 yards out? Because of the way my team’s style is, that’s the only options I’m going to have. So if that’s the way it is, if I want to be more dangerous for my team, then that’s what I need to work on. This year in particular, I’ve been working on making sure that my nine out of ten of my services are right on point. Every time I touch the ball, I want to get a quality service in. In terms of the transition from collegiate to professional, that’s a really interesting one. Sometimes it depends on where you are in the team, and where your new coach envisions you. If you come into a situation where your coach wants you to start right away, you have a little support and grow in that position. On the other hand, if your coach wants to look at you as a back up type of player and your used to starting and winning the national championship… you might not be used to being in that secondary type of role. It’s more of an adjustment mentally. Then you have to do what you can to continue moving forward, and get back to doing what you were doing collegiately in the professional ranks. DJ @ WSOTP: Speaking of the Dynamo, you guys are off to a flying start for the 2014 campaign. What do you think has helped you guys to get off to such a good start? Were preseason preparations different? New players making a difference? Kofi Sarkodie: There’s so many things. Right now we’re young, but experienced. We have guys that have been able to get some time and perform despite being young. This year it’s showing in the opening two games of the season that we can come up with a lot of fire, but still have enough grit to be sure we’re grinding out wins. The first game we jumped out to an early start with some good combination play. I had a good service from out wide — something I had mentioned I’ve been working on — Will took a deft touch and was able to bury in the back of the net. He’s in good form, the team is in good form, and we just need to keep grinding out these kind of wins. We’ve got a good opponent coming up this weekend when we go to Vancouver, so hopefully we can continue to play well. DJ @ WSOTP: One of the things I do on my site is conduct Fan Guides for MLS Stadiums, and last season I had the privilege of coming down to Houston to visit BBVA Compass Stadium. That place seems REALLY loud… is it the same way down on the pitch? Kofi Sarkodie: You know, it’s funny man, but when we start playing, I’m zoned out. Sometimes when someone does a move and beats a guy, I’ll hear the “Oooohhh” of the crowd. Or when we score a goal, I can really hear the stadium. But otherwise, I’m in my own little world. For when you click out of that zone for a little while, it is kind of amazing how loud it can be. For visiting teams, I’m sure the noise is a bit of a shock. Especially in the summer is so hot and it’s so loud, I’m sure the noise affects them just as much. DJ @ WSOTP: Aside from playing BBVA of course, is there anywhere you’ve played that really stands out in your memory? Kofi Sarkodie: It was cool playing in Portland. They’ve got a great atmosphere over there. There are lot guys that I grew up playing with at Akron there and it’s always neat to see and play against them. Overall though, everything was cool and it was a really really neat place to play. DJ @ WSOTP: What are your goals for the 2014 season, both as a team with the Dynamo, and personally? Kofi Sarkodie: That’s a great question, and one that I’m constantly looking at trying to make sure I’m putting in the work to get there. But as a team, the last two years, we’ve been right there. Two finals and the Eastern Conference final last year. We’re just so close. I’ve been there with Akron, I’ve been there with the youth national team, and I’ve been there with State Cup winning teams and such. So I know it’s just going to take a little bit more, that we need to keep pushing and putting in that work to be successful. We just need to keep working to get to pick up that cup at the end of the year; we can almost touch it. Personally for me, I’m just going to just keep working on my crossing and being effective in that area. And I want to make sure my numbers are reflective of that, so that at the end of the year I can sit back and say I produced this many assists and produced this many dangerous balls. So that way at the end of the season, I can see a direct indication of the hard work that I’ve been putting in after hours with my crossing and wide play. And one other thing I’m working on that a lot of people don’t know is that we — me and my brothers — put together our first youth soccer camp at Gateway in Dayton this past winter. We’re looking to put together another youth camp this summer. It will probably be co-ed, for kids ages 10-15 from the Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati area to give back and spread some of the knowledge we’ve gained. It’s a chance for kids who want to get out and see what it’s like to train in a professional environment. Myself, my brothers, Chad Barson from the Crew will be involved, and we’re really excited to get the word out about that. DJ @ WSOTP: Well that’s everything I have for you Kofi. Thanks so much for taking some time to talk with me today, and best of luck with the rest of the season! Kofi Sarkodie: No problem, man. Thanks a lot for having me on. Advertisements
NUP_132614_0010 Photo: NBC/Getty Doing sketch comedy on live television while pregnant is like wearing a sombrero. You can pretend to be a serious person, but the giant hat gives you away. I have spent an inordinate amount of time on camera being pregnant. Sometimes it was real and sometimes it was not. When I shot the film Baby Mama I wore a fake belly. It was shaped like a watermelon cut in half and it was strapped onto my body with flesh-colored Velcro. I would adjust it to where it felt comfortable and then giggle at the sight of it under my clothes. I would rip my belly off at lunch and the satisfying Velcro rip would announce that my pregnancy was over. Many times I patted my sweaty and firm stomach and thought about how cool it was going to be when I really was pregnant. Real pregnancy is different. When I was first pregnant with my son Archie, I didn’t tell anyone, as you are supposed to keep it secret. It’s a really magical time, those first few weeks. It almost makes you wish you didn’t have to tell anyone, ever. You could just watch your belly grow bigger, and no one would be allowed to ask you about it, and you would have your baby and a year later you would allow visitors to finally come and meet your little miracle. I was halfway through my seventh season at SNL, and no one really noticed my nausea or extreme tiredness. That was par for the course at a job that made you stay up all night long and eat cold mozzarella sticks you had to buy yourself. My ob-gyn was a wonderfully old Italian man I will call Dr. G. Dr. G had delivered Sophia Loren’s children. I know this because everyone from his receptionist to the other doctors in his practice liked to tell me this fact. I was happy to hear that Dr. G was comfortable with beautiful and famous vaginas. I don’t consider myself beautiful or famous, but my vagina certainly is. Everyone knows this. Dr. G was European and old-fashioned in all the right ways. He reassured me I didn’t need an amniocentesis by reminding me that Italian women don’t worry about that sort of thing. I imagined Sophia Loren laughing off the idea of a needle being driven into her pregnant belly as she sipped an espresso. Dr. G dressed in stylish suits and moved very gently, squirting cold gel on my tummy while whistling a slow tune. He didn’t have a 3-D imaging machine. He had a utilitarian black-and-white deal that showed you a blurry picture of what looked like a big-headed frog. “Your baby is very smart,” he would say to me and my husband, Will Arnett. “You are doing everything right. Please drink one or two glasses of red wine a night.” The last week of SNL before Archie arrived was incredibly exciting. The 2008 presidential race was almost a dead heat and the entire year leading up to the election had been a magical time to work on a live satirical sketch comedy show. Everything felt electric. The audience knew the ins and outs of every political story, and a lot of it had to do with what Saturday Night Live was doing. We could barely keep up with the daily goodies and produced four prime-time Weekend Update Thursday specials during September and October. I was eight months pregnant and did fifteen live shows in thirteen weeks. Everyone came on. I met then presidential candidate Barack Obama while I was dressed as Dennis Kucinich. Maya was dressed as Barack Obama at the time, so the introduction might have been slightly more embarrassing for her. We were doing a sketch about how hot Kucinich’s wife was. That’s how much America was paying attention! Then Tina played Sarah Palin for the first time and blew the roof off the joint. The anticipation of Tina playing Palin was so fun to witness, and she explains it well in her book Fifty Shades of Grey. She totally took on what was expected of her and it was awesome to stand next to her as she killed. The sketch that night dealt with Hillary Clinton coming to terms with the possibility of a Vice President Sarah Palin. It dealt with fierce competitiveness in politics. It dealt with power and entitlement. It dealt with the way society forces women to define themselves and compete against each other. It tackled old theories about Madonna vs. Whore and Slut vs. Shrew. But most importantly, it was really funny. That sketch was written by Seth Meyers. Tina and I added jokes. SNL and now Late Show with Seth Meyers producer Mike Shoemaker wrote the legendary line “I can see Russia from my house.” I remember standing onstage and it being one of the few times that something felt perfectly whole. Archie did flips in my stomach each time the audience clapped. It was the closest to what I imagine it feels to write a hit song. Archie was due on a Saturday. The show that night would be Jon Hamm’s first time hosting. The musical guest was Coldplay. The Friday before the show, I was in the middle of rehearsing a Mad Men parody, and I called to confirm my three P.M. appointment with Dr. G. The receptionist answered the phone crying. She told me Dr. G had passed away from a heart attack in his sleep. I burst into tears so loudly and violently that I think water was squirting out of my eyes like in a Cathy cartoon. Nothing is more horrifying than a giant pregnant lady sobbing. Everyone got very quiet. I hung up the phone and told Jon and the hair and makeup people that my doctor had just DIED. And I was DUE TOMORROW. And that I knew it seemed like a weird punch line, but my beloved and dear Italian grandpa was not going to be able to help me. I felt so terrible about the fact that all I was thinking was “What about meeeeeee!” I cried and cried in my Mad Men dress. Jon Hamm held me by the shoulders and looked at me and said, “I know this is very sad, but this is a really important show for me, so I’m going to need you to get your shit together.” This made me laugh so hard I think I peed. Going from crying to laughing that fast and hard happens maybe five times in your life and that extreme right turn is the reason why we are alive. I believe it extends our life by many years. I told everyone at dress rehearsal. It freaked them out. At three P.M. I went to Dr. G’s office and was met by his grieving colleagues who had worked with him for decades. One of them, the lovely Dr. B, examined me and told me I shouldn’t worry. Nothing was happening and I would probably deliver a few days late. He had already treated and met with Dr. G’s other patients and would spend the next twenty-four hours delivering five babies. He was kind and professional, but it was extremely weird. I went back to SNL, where I stayed until two A.M. Maya and Fred Armisen were doing bits on the main stage pretending to be robot versions of themselves, and I laughed and laughed and for the millionth time thought about how lucky I was. Eddie the security guard walked me to the car and asked me how I was doing. “I’m tired,” I said. I went home and got in bed. It was three thirty in the morning and I put on my favorite TV show, Law & Order, to go to sleep. I heard the “bam bam” sound effect in the opening credits and my water broke. Archie was born Saturday, October 25, at 6:09 P.M., just about when we would have been getting ready to do our first run-through for “Weekend Update.” He was, and remains, perfect. My whole world cracked open and has thankfully never been the same since. I watched Saturday Night Live that night, drugged to the gills. I watched scenes that I had rehearsed hours before. I watched Maya and Kenan sing a song to me, and Seth tap my spot at the “Update” desk and tell me they loved me. I cried and cried and then laughed and laughed. I added a few more years to my life. I kissed Archie’s giant head, which was shaped like a beautiful balloon. Today we wear the same size sombrero. He is six. From the book YES PLEASE by Amy Poehler. Copyright 2014 by Amy Poehler. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
We are celebrating this week's Doctor Strange release (get your tickets here!) with a bunch of articles all dedicated to Marvel's Sorcerer Supreme. If there’s one mantra to be followed when sitting down to watch Marvel’s latest, a Steve Ditko-inspired visual delight, it’s The Ancient One’s advice to Stephen Strange, the brilliant, arrogant eidetiker embodied by Benedict Cumberbatch. “Forget everything you think you know,” and you will be shown something you never thought possible. For Doctor Strange, a western neurosurgeon who spends money faster than he can make it, and who destroys his own hands while in speedy pursuit of glory, what he never thought possible is multitudinous. And like most of our processes and perceptions of reality, it begins with what he sees. Within the realm of our understanding of visual storytelling, a kaleidoscope applied to an Inception-esque cityscape folding over itself is by no means impossible to imagine, nor are the various neon universes that Strange visits during his training. However, it’s the application of the aforementioned mantra to these visuals that allows for a fuller appreciation of them. As “traditionally” structured genre stories go, the second of Strange’s three acts is dedicated partially to his induction to this world, and yet the focus is rarely on the magical minutiae. Rather than terms, techniques and limitations (think Inception’s own second act), Strange’s training is centered entirely around his character and his approach to learning. Instead of needing to understand the hows and whys of the kaleidoscopic mirror dimension (Quantum entanglements! A realm between the layers of the multiverse! Or what have you), we’re thrust into this world of bending buildings and psychedelic skylines before we even meet our protagonist. When the time comes for further explanation, it’s denied us in favour of asking us to throw the rules of reality (and thus, visual cinema) out the window, provided we can find that window as it’s hovering somewhere between dimensions. Meredith says her eyes were “dancing around the IMAX screen” as a result of the visuals, an experience I found myself having as well, going so far as to sway my head to keep up with the combination of flying warriors and transforming landscapes moving musically across the screen (and through it – the use of depth here makes the 3D worthwhile), in ways I can’t say I’m accustomed to. It's as if a music visualizer had been programmed to display humanoid forms as I played a Goa Trance album. The meta-textual acceptance of these magical realms is, of course, merely step one. It opens Strange up to the idea of looking beyond himself, and it re-orients our senses and expectations during this familiar superhero origin story. Don’t let anyone tell you the egotistical Strange is simply an Iron Man retread, though. Tony Stark never learns, but with his photographic memory and desire to excel, learning is Stephen Strange’s entire deal, even if it’s rooted in selfishness. And yet, his excellence is impeded by what he’s learning, or rather, how he’s learning it. Strange seeks knowledge, but what he lacks is wisdom. It’s this wisdom that eventually speaks to his arrogance and his fear of failure, in the form of Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One, and it comes with a thematic unpackaging unlike anything Marvel has done since Guardians of the Galaxy, where Star Lord’s acceptance of his mother’s death allows him to finally reach out to people. Only here, in this film about infinite possibilities, it’s about the acceptance of the only one that’s inevitable: death itself. Spoilers to follow. In her moment of death, a singular moment spread out so it can feel infinite, The Ancient One delivers a walloping moment of exposition, coupled with the camera crossing over the pair of them (a moment of realization for Strange, seen through the prism of The Ancient One herself as she crosses over), a lesson made explicit because it needed to be explicit to reach such a pig-headed character: “It isn’t about you.” While an obvious reference to his self-centered nature, the line is preceded by The Ancient One’s long-lasting anxieties surrounding the idea of death, and in her case “long lasting” feels like an understatement. Like those of us forced to come to terms with mortality in our adulthood, she sees the moment of her death as an end-point (she literally sees it), and no matter how she’s been able to influence all possible futures, that one moment in time remains fixed. But in her final moments, as she projects her spirit through a window to catch a glimpse of snowfall, she comes to a realization which she imparts to her pupil. It’s death that makes life worth living. All the beauty and the magic is meaningless without it. Of course, this moment does slightly fall victim to the film’s penchant for undercutting emotional beats with a joke or a gag, cutting away far too quickly to Rachel McAdams’ reaction to a floating cape. The film is certainly a funny one, earning its laughs for the most part (praise Agamotto, for Beyoncé is now Marvel canon) but its injection of humor is also indiscriminate. In the process, moments like the one immediately following The Ancient One's death, and like Kaecilius espousing his own philosophies on loss and immortality, are prevented from landing completely. As much as “Mister Doctor” elicits a chuckle, I wonder if this tonal plate-spinning comes at the cost of a villain that truly made an impact. Perhaps a necessity, given the studio’s family-friendly branding and its collision with a story that tackles death head on, but it doesn’t certainly prevent any of these ideas from being introduced or woven into the narrative. A superhero “blockbuster” is rarely the place to wax poetic about the nature of life and death, but it does finally bring into view the reasons Scott Derrickson was perfect for the job. While credit must be given to writers John Spaihts and C. Robert Cargill, who bring mystical ideas to the Marvel universe without reveling in cultural exoticism (for more on its casting issues, allow me to steer you here), it’s Derrickson’s involvement that really catches my eye now that I’ve seen the film. The Exorcism of Emily Rose director has never been shy about his faith and his philosophies (both in his work and via his Twitter presence), and Doctor Strange feels like the kind of film that benefits from a religious or spiritual filmmaker. This is by no means an investigation into Derrickson’s personal life, as the film warrants comparison to no one theology – in fact, it has an almost atheistic view of death as the full stop to life’s run-on sentence. But it’s the sentence itself (where this site places “Movies”) that Derrickson and the Ancient One demand the rules be thrown out the window. The film is “consciousness expanding” in the most comicbook-y of ways (it really does feel like the arrival of a whole new set of possibilities for Marvel), but it grounds its mysticism in simple ideas of human ego and selflessness. The mystical does not stem from these concepts, but is channeled against and ultimately through them, with Strange learning to let go of the stoic Western knowledge he taught himself, and giving over to Eastern ideas that require an entirely different definition of the self. The breaking down of barriers between “the individual” and the universe, tapping in to something far greater than he knows. “It’s not about you” was never just a reference to shedding his ego, but also to the realization of all that he’s connected to. Events, people and possibilities, all the magics that make death seem limp in comparison. It’s this conquering of death through selflessness that allows him to bargain with the demonic Dormammu, dying many times over, and willing to do so many times more. His final act before leaving the realms bound by time is to undo all of Kaecilius’ death and destruction, a very sly and very literal reversal of Marvel’s third act set pieces. For Strange isn’t a destroyer or a warmonger, but a healer. He does not know for sure that his plan will work (he’s no Captain Kirk in Star Trek V!), but as he enters the Dark Dimension, ready to die repeatedly for all eternity, he does so having done things that would give his death meaning. Not only has he made up for some of the hurt he’s caused, apologizing to Christine and handing his scalpel over to Dr. West, he’s saved lives, really saved them, and not for his own glory. Dormammu, who has conquered death, isn’t bound by time. But while time’s biggest hurdle is that it makes death inevitable, Strange conquers time by accepting that inevitability. Doctor Strange may wield the Time Stone, but he truly makes time his ally when he accepts the nature of death. Once a man who refused his calling for fear of failure, he’s now ready to fail for all eternity until he’s able to succeed. It would not surprise me if, in his future appearances, we see Stephen Strange living life. Not in the fast lane, but rather, to the fullest.
Facebook hit an unprecedented benchmark: One billion users in a single day. That happened for the first time on Monday, and co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the milestone on Thursday. He noted in a Facebook (FB) post that a billion users is equal to about 1 in 7 people on Earth. "When we talk about our financials, we use average numbers, but this is different," Zuckerberg wrote. "This was the first time we reached this milestone, and it's just the beginning of connecting the whole world." The company reported in July that it had about 1.5 billion people logging on at least once a month. Zuckerberg said Monday's achievement is significant because it's a platform that lets users interact. "A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values," he said. Related: For Millennials, Facebook is political lated: Instagram breaks out of the square
Music fan Thomas Mrzyglocki (left) and drummer Josh Freese lay down tracks in a Los Angeles studio. Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comPaying $20,000 for a round of miniature golf might seem extravagant, but throw in the opportunity to hang out with a handful of rock stars, and you've got a truly priceless experience. Thomas Mrzyglocki, 19, ponied up that princely sum to buy one of Josh Freese's creative, limited-edition packages built around the drummer's new record, Since 1972, which is available as a download for $7. The deluxe packages all include copies of the record, but that's just the tip of the rock 'n' roll iceberg. Freese dreamed up wild extras like sessions in a sensory-deprivation tank, a mushroom-fueled Lamborghini ride and cool meet-ups with his rock star friends. Less-expensive bundles include lunch with Freese at P.F. Chang's or The Cheesecake Factory ($250, sold out!) and personal "thank you" phone calls from the drummer, which go for just $50. See also: Sold! Mini-Golf With Rock Stars Fetches $20,000 Drummer's Crazy Album Extras Take 'Freemium' to Weirdville Mrzyglocki, who flew from Melbourne, Florida, to hang out in Los Angeles with Freese for a week, said he is thrilled with his unique $20,000 purchase. "It's totally worth it," Mrzyglocki told Wired.com in a phone interview Thursday, as he prepared to go to a studio with Freese. That night, they laid down tracks for a couple of songs that the drummer is writing about Mrzyglocki — another element of the elaborate package. Freese's experiment comes as the music industry is grappling with steep declines in traditional sales. It's one of the most off-the-wall schemes yet to test fans' taste for the type of "freemium" pricing pioneered by Radiohead and Freese's former Nine Inch Nails bandmate, Trent Reznor. The quirky mix of star power and pure rock 'n' roll adventure has proven to be a winning combination for Freese, an in-demand session drummer who cooked up the highly creative packages to promote his solo album. Now the packages are earning the drummer real money in addition to boatloads of publicity. Mostly the cash goes to cover past recording costs, Freese said. "I've made a little bit of money," he said, "but I'm not out shopping for cars, you know what I mean?" For Mrzyglocki, the $20,000 package has turned into a ticket to mingle with rock 'n' roll royalty. He's met lots of Freese's musician friends during his stay in Los Angeles, including former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash and most of the members of Tool and A Perfect Circle. Mrzyglocki called the experience "the most fun I've had in a long, long time." The Florida teen said he first got wind of Freese's tiered-pricing packages from Tool's website. With the country in the midst of a financial mess and his birthday fast approaching, Mrzyglocki figured his broke friends would be getting him "half-assed postcards or T-shirts or something." To avoid a birthday bummer, the Florida teen treated himself to the $20,000 package, which featured a mini-golf game with Tool singer Maynard James Keenan and Devo front man Mark Mothersbaugh. Freese plays drums in Devo and in one of Keenan's side projects, A Perfect Circle. Mrzyglocki's friends were shocked when he told them what he'd done. "Their jaws dropped instantly," he said. Some tried to reason with him, saying he should buy a car with the money instead, but Mrzyglocki said he's landed something much more valuable. "Almost anybody can buy a car," said Mrzyglocki, who's a senior in high school. "Only one person gets to buy Josh Freese's limited-edition package." The Since 1972 stunt has been wild for Freese. He admits he felt a little like a hooker as it came time to fulfill many of the more personal aspects of the bundles. Since Mrzyglocki arrived, Freese has been going above and beyond, working out cool extras and generally clearing his week to spend time with his young fan. "We've been joined at the hip since Sunday," said Freese, adding that he feels like Mrzyglocki's big brother at this point. "I really do like the kid and know that it's a bizarre experience for him," Freese said. The whole experience hasn't been totally smooth, but Freese has pulled out all the stops in his attempt to provide a meaningful week. When a scheduling conflict kept Keenan and Mothersbaugh from being in the same place at the same time for the mini-golf game, Freese came up with a solution: a pizza party at Mothersbaugh's house in the Hollywood Hills. "That was like an added bonus," Mrzyglocki said. For the golf outing, Mrzyglocki and Freese were joined by Keenan, Joe Escalante (who plays bass in Freese's punk rock band The Vandals), several friends and a cameraman who recorded the match for posterity. Famous bullshitter Keenan went on a spiel about being a Putt-Putt golf champion in his younger days, Mrzyglocki said. "He backed it up with a crazy, lucky hole-in-one on the first shot," said Mrzyglocki. "I believed him for the first hole." In addition to the mini-golf game, Mrzyglocki also got a night aboard the Queen Mary (complete with a "ghost tour" of the ship), and other extras, like free tickets to shows by Keenan's band Puscifer and The Vandals. When it came time to fulfill the one part of the package Freese feared most — a choice between a drum lesson or a foot massage — he asked Mrzyglocki which he preferred. "It was really awkward," Freese said. "Just asking was funny and uncomfortable." The drummer lucked out: Mrzyglocki mentioned the sensory-deprivation tank sessions included in the $500 packages, and Freese jumped at the opportunity to provide a free upgrade. Wheeling and dealing aside, it's been a memorable week for both Freese and Mrzyglocki. It was scheduled to end Sunday with the drummer dropping off his new friend at Los Angeles International Airport for a flight back to Florida. Mrzyglocki will have one bonus waiting for him when he gets back. "One of my friends told me it took a lot of balls, and that he'd give me a huge high-five when I got back," he said. Josh Freese makes notes as he works on one of two songs he's writing in honor of Thomas Mrzyglocki, the fan who paid $20,000 for an elaborate package of rock 'n' roll adventures. Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com Josh Freese, Thomas Mrzyglocki and studio owner-engineer Tom Weir listen to a track that will probably make its way onto iTunes within the next few months. Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com Intro-verse-prechorus-chorus: Josh Freese shows off a song sheet that reveals the not-so-secret recipe for good ol' rock 'n' roll. Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com Thomas Mrzyglocki watches as Josh Freese pounds the skins in a Los Angeles studio. "I'm sure we'll be friends for a long time," Mrzyglocki said. Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.comSee also:
For would-be reformers of the mother of all parliaments, it was a brief and ill-fated courtship—ending with a door-slam to the face. One year ago, nearly six out of 10 Britons were telling pollsters they’d gladly dump the familiar first-past-the post electoral system (FPTP) in favour of a method that better reflected their democratic will. But when given their say in a referendum last week, voters dispatched the alternative with extreme prejudice: nearly 68 per cent opted to retain the old method of electing MPs, soundly rejecting the proposed system of preferential balloting known as the alternative vote (AV). Advocates for change were quick to marshal explanations. The rejection spoke less to disapproval of AV than to dissatisfaction with its chief proponent, Liberal-Democrat Leader Nick Clegg, they said. Some complained voters had been hoodwinked by hysterical-sounding advertisements suggesting that a costly overhaul of the electoral system would suck money from, among other vital services, intensive care for infants. None seemed to consider the possibility that FPTP might have its own inherent appeal. “It’s simple, and it normally produces parliamentary majorities,” says Louis Massicotte, a Université Laval political scientist who has studied electoral reform initiatives around the world. “The ambiguities of minority parliaments may fascinate intellectuals. But for the average folk in the street, a clear outcome is always better than a murky one.” The staying power of first-past-the post is becoming a point of fascination for Massicotte and other experts, who not long ago had cause to think it might someday go extinct. The centuries-old method faced growing challenges in the 1990s from activists who contend it discourages political diversity, and too often results in governments that lack an explicit mandate from the majority of voters. In FPTP, each voter chooses one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. That means an office-seeker with less than 50 per cent of votes in a constituency can take a given riding, and that a party with less than 50 per cent of the popular vote can win a majority of seats. It also means that small parties with diffuse support face steep odds in getting members elected. In Canadian federal politics, it has been blamed for producing a “false” Conservative victory, given that around six out of 10 electors are voting for other parties; and for shutting out the Greens, who in the 2008 election garnered nearly one million votes country-wide yet failed to gain a single seat. The NDP, too, has complained that its share of seats was far below its popular support, and made proportional representation (PR) a central policy plank during the recent election campaign. In a mid-campaign meeting with Maclean’s editorial board, Leader Jack Layton acknowledged that the New Democrats and Liberals were splitting the anti-Tory vote on almost every policy question. The solution, he said, was PR, which he argued would give parties of all stripes representation in the Commons, and encourage like-minded ones to work co-operatively to govern the country. Still, it takes a truly perverse outcome to get the wheels of reform actually turning. That’s what happened during the B.C. provincial election in 1996, when Glen Clark’s NDP lost the popular vote to the Liberals yet emerged with more seats. The result triggered an outcry, and a lengthy reform process that included a “citizens’ assembly” charged with considering new ways for British Columbians to choose their governments. In 2005, the panel recommended a single transferable vote system, in which voters would rank candidates—their second and third choices being counted after their first-choice candidates are either elected, or dropped from the ballot due to lack of support. The B.C. experience, however, proved complicated. In the referendum that followed, the Yes forces fell just 2.3 points short of the 60 per cent threshold set by the government, prompting premier Gordon Campbell’s government to endorse a second vote. Alas for the reformists, enthusiasm for electoral tinkering waned—in B.C. and across the country. In 2009, the second time around, less than 39 per cent cast ballots in support of the new model, while a similar initiative in Ontario, which saw a proposal for so-called mixed-member proportional representation, garnered 37 per cent support in 2007. Prince Edward Island had resoundingly rejected the same system two years earlier, while a lengthy reform effort in Quebec that began in 2003 failed to reach a vote. In Canada, as in Britain, the reasons for these failures vary. On a crassly partisan level, leaders who push forms of preferential balloting or proportional representation tend to lose their enthusiasm once they have actual power. “PR is something you support when you cannot implement it,” the late senator and constitutional expert Eugene Forsey famously said, “and that when you can, you no longer support.” In New Brunswick, for example, provincial Progressive Conservatives had promised a referendum on mixed-member voting before they were ousted in a 2006 election. They returned to office last year with an enormous seat majority (based on less than half the popular vote), but are hardly rushing to revive the initiative. Richard Johnston, the director of the University of British Columbia’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, says more subtle political judgments may also be at play. Johnston was part of a team of academics who studied the outcome of the B.C. referendum, and found opinions on the electoral system tended to break along ideological lines. Small-l liberals supported STV, he says, based on their beliefs about its inherent fairness and its capacity to foster co-operation among rival parties. Small-c conservatives, meanwhile, were more likely to support FPTP based on faith in its capacity to preserve order. “People on the right tend to be more responsive to things that have to do with governance,” says Johnston. “Things like stability, durability and commitment. They’re less worried about the process that gets you there.” Johnston’s observations run against the commonly held belief that reform initiatives fail primarily because voters simply don’t get them. One University of Toronto study following the Ontario referendum offered the rather patronizing theory that “an electorate that did not feel itself to be adequately informed found it difficult to overcome its uncertainty about how the new system would actually work.” In B.C., at least, responses on both sides appeared rooted in the respective models’ purported impact on the legislature. And if you accept the now common theory that Canadians are drifting to the political right, Johnston adds, it stands to reason that attachment to first-past-the post would grow. The same may apply to the referendum in Britain, where suspicion of multi-party parliaments runs as high as in Canada—and where plenty of intelligent minds were attracted to the simplicity of the old model. An explanatory pamphlet circulated by the U.K. electoral commission made their choice easy, summing up FPTP in three sentences, while taking four pages, complete with a sample election scenario and complicated diagrams, to describe alternative voting. This for a system that is considered among the more straightforward in the democratic family. What prospect, then, does electoral reform stand in countries where first-past-the post has stood the test of time? In Canada, at least, the federal New Democrats still carry the flame, despite having crashed into the mainstream with 104 Commons seats in the recent election. Reached this week by Maclean’s, a party spokesman insisted Layton remains commited to PR. But Massicotte, for one, will reserve judgment until the NDP finds its way out of opposition. “Some politicians will almost cry on your shoulder following a bad election outcome,” he says, chuckling. “But once they’re in office, they forget all about these things. When I hear major party leaders talking about PR, I don’t take them seriously.” As for the British result, Massicotte can’t help wondering if the cause of reform has taken a critical symbolic blow—landed, appropriately enough, in the birthplace of Westminster-style democracy. “It looks very much,” he says, “like a proverbial nail in the coffin.”
Swimming's world governing body Fina and the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) are investigating claims of anti-doping violations by Chinese competitors. A report in The Times claimed five positive tests by Chinese swimmers had been covered up. Fina has confirmed it is deciding whether any of the allegations require further investigation. A Wada spokesman said it is looking at information provided by the Times "to address this matter head on". Drug-testing in swimming - the numbers Fina carried out 1,094 out-of-competition tests on 654 athletes in 2015 It also carried out 815 in-competition tests on 569 athletes last year Fina spent £560,000 on anti-doping in 2015 - approximately one tenth of the figure that cycling's governing body, the UCI, spent A Fina statement read: "There are a small number of cases of failed doping controls by Chinese swimmers currently being investigated under the jurisdiction of Chinada, the Wada-recognised Chinese Anti-Doping Agency. "Fina and Wada are both fully aware of these cases, but we are bound by confidentiality until the moment an athlete is actually banned. "If the information we receive does merit further investigation, then Fina will leave no stone unturned in ensuring justice is served for the overwhelming majority of aquatics athletes who are clean." It comes after Wada said on Wednesday it would investigate allegations of systematic doping in Russian swimming. The Times had said it had "evidence of an organised drugs culture" similar to the one in Russian athletics but Fina said they were "not aware" of any "concrete evidence of systemic doping".
Beleaguered supporters were no doubt asking themselves on Tuesday, “Can Bernie Sanders still beat Hillary Clinton?” Of the five New England states up for grabs on Tuesday, Clinton beat Bernie in four of them, reported the New York Times. These wins weren’t small either. In Pennsylvania, Hillary surpassed Sanders by more than 10 percent, scoring 91 delegates — 30 more than Bernie did in the state. While the Maryland primary was smaller, it was even more beneficial to Clinton. With a nearly 30-percent lead on Sanders, she also went home with 30 more delegates than him. While Bernie did manage to come out ahead of Hillary in Rhode Island, he only picked up two delegates more than her there. Furthermore, Clinton still beat Sanders in Connecticut and Delaware, which more than off-set his small win. Bernie Sander's win has become downright impossible. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) With more than a 300 pledged-delegate lead now, Hillary has essentially beaten Bernie. While Sanders is likely to soldier on to the end, it’s become illogical to believe that Bernie can somehow still pull ahead after the New England Super Tuesday races. Clinton has been ahead of Sanders in nearly every recent state’s polling, and the final results have proved to reflect, and sometimes even exceed, those numbers. Nearly a month ago, political pollster Nate Silver classified it as “really hard” for Bernie to get the 988 more delegates he needed at the time to secure the nomination. Even in the Sanders-optimistic outcome Silver concocted, Bernie still couldn’t get the required number. Looking over that table a month later, it’s clear that that divide has grown even deeper, especially taking into account that Nate conceded Sanders wins in New York and Pennsylvania and cut Clinton’s margins back substantially in places like Maryland. Not even just political analysts are calling the campaign doomed. College Humor released a video earlier this week mocking Bernie supporters for their continued denial of his inevitable loss. Many Sanders voters, including his campaign manager, have continued to insist that extra delegates picked up from county caucus conventions and the few future states can turn the race. After all, how could Sanders lose his mojo after gaining momentum in places like Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Colorado? The answer for at least two of those states is simple. As the most liberal candidate, Bernie will, of course, do well in the nation’s most liberal states. It’s why he’ll almost assuredly clean house in Oregon on May 17. Unfortunately, even with 74 delegates, it’s still unlikely to be a game-changer. What Sanders really needs at this point is a massive win in California, but even that would have to be of miracle-sized proportions. California has 475 pledged delegates, meaning that even if Bernie managed to land 70 percent of the vote, he would only receive approximately 332 delegates to Clinton’s 142 — a 190 delegate gain that still wouldn’t pull him out of his current hole. Hillary is going to win the Democratic nomination unless something catastrophic hits her campaign. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images) That’s also assuming Hillary doesn’t gain on him anywhere else, which is perhaps more realistic than Sanders snatching Hillary’s lead in California and pushing it 20 percentage points in his favor. Even looking at the bigger picture, Bernie would have to win around 65 percent of the remaining delegates (1,200-plus) to beat out Clinton. Those numbers also completely rule out superdelegates, many of whom have pledged for Hillary. Sanders has argued in the past that such delegates who had previously pledged their support for Clinton would eventually migrate over to him as he emerged as the more viable candidate. Bernie has failed to prove this scenario’s validity, adding it to the pile of fan fiction that still has supporters hoping for the nomination. Barring that, it’s over: Bernie Sanders can’t beat Hillary Clinton. [Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Comedy Central]
Farhad Moshiri, billionaire and part owner of Arsenal Football Club and Metalloinvest Holding Co, poses for a photograph on the opening day of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum 2013 (SPIEF) in St Petersburg, Russia. Simon Dawson / Bloomburg Phil Neville remembers his first day at Everton’s old Bellefield training ground in 2005. “I walked in and Jimmy Martin, the kitman who has been there for years, looked at me and said: ‘Alright, Manc? How are you doing?’” Neville, who had signed from Manchester United, told him that he could not wait to get started. “Jimmy looked at me and said: ‘I’ll give you one piece of advice,” Neville recalls. “We don’t take fools, we don’t want flash people around here.’ What he meant was that ‘we all give our best here and as long as you do that you’ll be accepted’. It was blunt, but I remembered it.” __________________________________ More from Andy Mitten ■ Alaves: Basque club’s long road to Copa del Rey final ■ Blackpool: Demise of one club and rise of others __________________________________ Neville would go on to spend eight years at the club and become their captain. “Before I joined them I thought Everton were a good club who used to be great,” he said. “Then I went into the club and my perception changed. It’s an amazing football club. There are parallels with Valencia. If successful they could be one of the greatest and biggest clubs of England and Spain.” Moving to Everton from United was not, in Neville’s eyes, a big step down. “I came away after eight years there and thought ‘I love that football club’. I fell in love with Everton. Once it has touched you, you never let it go. I’m still in contact with lots of people there. They are unbelievable working-class, down-to-earth people who work at Everton and support it.” At the heart of Goodison A map of the area around Goodison Park from 1900 is almost unchanged. Dozens of dense, terraced streets pack tightly around St Luke’s church and the football ground on Goodison Road. This is England’s Wrigley Field, a historic sports venue sitting on an irregular block close to the city centre. It was England’s first major football ground described as ‘magnificently large, for it rivals the greater American baseball pitches’ in one 1892 report, but there are no ivy-covered walls at Goodison, where the main stand towers ominously over the nearby housing. The exterior of the 40,221 all-seater stadium is clad instead with pictures of heroes of yore against a backdrop of Mersey blue. It is match day and as The National surveys the scene, a child steps into a puddle in front of images of Neville Southall, Everton’s 750 game record appearance holder, and Joe Royle, a club hero, outside the main stand. Everton are due to play a Sunderland team managed by their former manager David Moyes in a Premier League game. The father shakes his head and escorts the child across the road to the Winslow Hotel which sits but 10 metres from the seven-storey main stand. The hotel is busy with fans, with quotes adoring the walls in blue and white. One – “Don’t forget boys, one Evertonian is worth 20 Liverpudlians” from former Everton captain Brian Labone reinforces the rivalry with their neighbours across Stanley Park at Anfield. The feeling has long been mutual. “If Everton were playing at the bottom of the garden, I’d pull the curtains,” former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once memorably said. All around, fans in blue come from small streets filling the arteries to the heart of Goodison, where the residents’ bedrooms are a mere 10 metres from the main stand. Sunderland’s luxury team bus arrives under police escort and young footballers wearing suits with caps or headphones and clutching large designer wash bags step off their transport. “Haway the lads!” comes a lone cry from a travelling fan. Moyes, who spent 11 years at Everton, receives a muted, curious, welcome. Over the road, a souvenir seller in Scouse hollers: “Everton hats! Everton scarves! Yer Everton badges!” and “Ross Barkley scarves! Lukaku scarves!” Lukaku, a £28 million (nearly Dh128m) club record signing in 2014, is already Everton’s highest goalscorer in the Premier League era – the era where Everton fell behind all their main rivals – with 67 goals. He is some way to go to catch 1930s striker Dixie Dean’s 395 goals. Enough focusing on the past The noise of the street sellers’ curses mingles in the damp air with the smell of fish and chips and the manure from police horses. In the ‘Everton one’ store (a second club shop cheekily called ‘Everton two’ is located in the ‘Liverpool one’ shopping centre), the tills are busy. The store is located away from the stadium, past the statue of Dixie Dean and sits under a large ‘Nil Satis Nisi Optimum’ motto (Latin for ‘Only the best is good enough’). Fans can buy a replica shirt from the 1985 Cup Winners’ Cup success in Rotterdam, while a wall is adorned with a picture of Howard Kendall’s great double title winning side from the same year. Everton, England’s fourth most successful club with nine league titles, are rightly proud of their past, but it can engulf the present. “There’s a lot of looking back to the glory years instead of looking forward,” Neville explains. “Because Everton had so much success in the 80s, people always refer to it. It’s probably the same the Nottingham Forest or Leeds United – past glories are thrown in your face. It can be a positive. I’d see the great former players around the club, the stars of Howard Kendall’s 1980s side and I’d want to emulate them, want to be a hero like they were. They motivated me, but the expectation of trying to emulate former heroes weighed others down.” “That 80s team hunted in packs,” recalls Norman Whiteside, a man who played against them and scoring the winning goal in the 1985 FA Cup final to stop them doing the treble, before joining them. “They were a true team over stand-out individuals.” The history is all there in St Luke’s church, where a collection of stalls fills the wooden floor of the hall, selling old match programmes, artwork, badges and arty T-shirts for the more middle-class fan. The mood in this Toffeopolis is friendly and familiar. With their side settled in seventh, a wealthy new owner and plans for a new stadium, plus an Under 23s team clear at the top of the Premier League 2, Everton fans have much to feel optimistic about. “It’s a club that has been through difficult times since our last great period in the 80s,” says Graham Ennis, the long-time editor of the When Skies Are Grey fanzine, who now mans a T-shirt stall, “but things are definitely on the up with the investment we’ve had in the last year. We can see steady improvements with the quality players that are being brought in like [Morgan] Schneiderlin and Ademola Lookman. We’ve got Yannick Bolasie, we’ve kept Lukaku and you can see a real team developing. We always like young players here who’ve come through the ranks like Tom Davies, too.” Davies, an 18-year-old local boy, signed a five-year deal with the club this Monday. No club has as many teenage goalscorers in Premier League history as Everton’s 17, the youngest being James Vaughan. Farhad Moshiri, a 61-year-old British Iranian who made his US$2.6 billion (Dh9.5bn) in steel and energy, has been the club’s major shareholder since 2016. “It’s not enough to say you are a special club and a great club, we don’t want to be a museum,” Moshiri told fans recently. “We need to be competitive and to win. We have a position but we do not have all the time in the world. We need to establish ourselves and we have a window to do it.” Graham Ennis agrees. “Everton’s troubles started towards the end of the John Moores’ family reign and the legacy they left,” he says. “The club stymied in that period. His successor Peter Johnson did invest some money until things started going wrong. Bill Kenwright then came in not as a successor, but a safe pair of hands. That reign probably last far too long.” “Bill Kenwright was a great chairman who knew the club’s values,” Neville says. “But he had to sell part of his shares to compete with the billionaires in the Premier League.” Opposition to Everton leaving their home of 125 years for a new place on the banks of the River Mersey, is hard to find. “If we build a proper stadium then everyone will welcome it,” Ennis explains. “We’re already talking about it being the fourth grace and when you have the cruise liner coming in sailing past the new Goodison Park it will be fantastic.” Could they not develop Goodison as Liverpool did with Anfield? “I wouldn’t like to do what Liverpool have done in expanding Anfield,” Ennis says. “They bought the houses behind Anfield, they let the neighbourhood degenerate and go to rack and ruin. I hope that Everton have more of a social conscience than that. On the current footprint we have you can’t do it. If you turn the ground around and rebuild then you’re losing Goodison anyway. Regrettably, I think we have to go and grasp the opportunity while we have it.” Last week, Everton and Peel, who own Manchester’s Trafford Centre and much of the land by the Manchester Ship Canal, agreed terms to acquire a site at Bramley Moore Dock – which forms part of a £5bn Liverpool Waters scheme – after negotiations brokered by Joe Anderson, the mayor of Liverpool. The 50,000-60,000-seater stadium will cost in excess of £300m and be fully funded by the club. Everton are moving into a bigger financial league and following the commercial lead set by bigger clubs in England north west. They are expecting to increase their shirt sponsorship by 300 per cent as they play catch up with the league’s biggest fish. Building a culture The Goodison Park public address system is a throwback to the 1980s. Songs by A-Ha, KC and Sunshine Band, Womack & Womack and Elton John ‘and I guess why it’s why they call it the blues’ add to the air of nostalgia. They are played alongside the 1985 FA Cup final song – sample lyric: ‘We’re the team, we’re supreme number one, and we love you, E-V-E-R-T-O-N.” The whole experience of watching the team is like a throwback – from the 1960s TV show Z-Cars theme tune which greets the players, to the wooden seats on wooden floorboards around the old ground. It has more character than many a new Premier League bowl, but character can be a hindrance. There are too many stanchions obstructing the view, too few executive facilities to bring in the revenues similar to rivals. And it’s too small. “Now, in Moshiri, we’ve got a man who is determined to build the new ground,” Ennis says, approvingly. “We’ve had 20 or 30 years of ground development ideas, but this one feels very real.” The demand is there. A full 30 years since they last won the league, Goodison Park has been 95 per cent full on average for 15 years. “Everton have been very good at making going to the match affordable,” Ennis adds. “A season ticket for a child under the age of 11 is £95, which is incredible. Young adults have concessions. Compare that with our neighbours Liverpool who are missing out on a generation of local children who cannot afford to go to games. A season ticket for me and my teenage year old son costs less than £500.” Ennis stood outside Goodison selling fanzines for years before going inside to watch the match. “We’ve had a couple of brushes with relegation and we were in a cycle of where we were unable to get out of the mess. Then we had Walter Smith in charge who downplayed our ambitions and made out that we were a team lucky to avoid relegation. For all Roberto Martinez’s fault, he came in and said ‘this club need to be winning things’.” Martinez could not deliver and was replaced by Ronald Koeman, who said: “If Everton was not an ambitious club then I would not be here.” Under the new owners, you can believe Koeman’s words and sources at the club tell us that diligence was done on Moshiri. __________________________________ More from Andy Mitten ■ Huddersfield: Worldly club nestled into the Pennines ■ Blackburn v Burnley: Enmity runs deeper than geography __________________________________ Everton had been approached by several potential suitors who saw their potential. One, Carson Yeung, who went on to be involved with Birmingham City, was politely declined. The new investment is helping the club promote talent via a youth system now headed up by director of football Steve Walsh, who excelled at Leicester City, while the club still want to stay true to their values. Every Premier League club has a charitable foundation doing good in the community, but Everton’s goes where others shy away from. They are raising money to purchase and operate a home close to Goodison which will offer 16 to 23-year-olds who have fallen on hard times, or have fallen out of the care system, a place to stay in Liverpool. Former player David Unsworth, now manager of the league-leading U23 team, says: “Modern-day footballers are in an incredibly privileged position and are supported by their club with everything, including dietary and fitness support and psychological matters. “The home will see us offer that same level of support to the most needy across Liverpool and draw upon areas of expertise within Everton in the community to ensure that those young people accessing the facility will be given tangible life opportunities and skills.” “We want to give all those people on the streets of Liverpool a helping hand and get them off the streets and somewhere safe where they can get back on their feet again. Everybody should have a roof over their head and we are going to give our all to this campaign to ensure that we can help as many young people as possible.” The home is where the heart is, yet they donated £200,000 towards the cancer treatment of Bradley Lowery, a young Sunderland fan. “Everton are firmly involved with salt of the earth type of people,” Norman Whiteside says. “They care and they don’t let anyone get too big for their boots. They’ve started a free school and they help disadvantaged people, but I hear stories which never get any publicity. Once a month, they take any former Everton players who are in care homes to the beach and buy them fish and chips and an ice cream.” Future is bright, future is blue Everton are comfortable in a 2-0 win against the league’s bottom club, but the atmosphere is flat, with low groans when things do not go right and a primal collective ‘Go on!’ when they do, as when Lukaku, 23, is fast enough and strong enough to hold off former Evertonian Bryan Oviedo to score the second. Goodison can be enchanting for a big game, especially at night. “It’s a special stadium, it’s iconic,” Neville says. “The sound bounces of the walls from the stands which come close up to the pitch. It’s an old school stadium – like Valencia – that supporters will be reluctant to leave but one which opposing players don’t want to play at.” Sunderland at home is not a big game and Moyes’s presence receives no reaction. It is odd when he managed the club for 11 years, but maybe it is pity, for his record against Everton since leaving in 2013 is played 4, won 0, drawn 0, lost 4, scored 0, conceded 8. “David Moyes blotted his copy book with his pursuit of Fellaini and Baines, and the comments he made at that time after he joined United,” Ennis says. Perhaps history will judge him better. “David Moyes was trying to move the club forward and he finished fourth, fifth and sixth,” Neville explains. “He was the perfect fit for the club at the time, a hungry manager who had to work on a budget at a club which was struggling. It needed freshness and energy and David gave them that. They’d become a club for which Premier League survival was a success. “David sieved out the expensive old stars and brought in young players. He built a team, he got Everton back into Europe, he lifted expectations and started to develop youngsters. He set the ball rolling for a team that challenged the top sides again and are still doing that. The biggest clubs began to look at Everton’s players and thought ‘if we buy Everton’s best players they’d improve our team’.” The game finishes and the music pipes up from the public address system. “It’s a grand old team to play for, it’s a grand old team to see, We don’t care what the red side say.” It sounds like a track from 1950s music hall and many of those in the main stand would probably know. The song cuts out at the end so that the fans can continue it, but few do so, as the fans shuffle awkwardly to the doors and past those images of 80s heroes. The club is now pushing to get back to where they were. “It’s not going to happen overnight,” Neville says. “There’s a big gap between the biggest six clubs [the two Manchester clubs, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur] and Everton. But look at Tottenham, who’ve established themselves in the top six under Mauricio Pochettino, reaching the [Uefa] Champions League, and are building a 61,000-capacity stadium. When I was at Everton we were a better team that Tottenham, but Everton do have the ingredients to make the top six or top seven. “They have to make the ground bigger, they have to improve the facilities, they have to keep moving forward or they’ll get left behind again.” “Everton became a Spurs of the north,” Whiteside adds. “They struggled for years, but they’re looking better now than they have for a long time.” “They have to keep hold of their best players like Romelu Lukaku and more importantly they have to keep hold of the manager Ronald Koeman,” Neville adds. “Without that kind of quality you won’t get in the top six, but it’s a very good club to play for. “Finch Farm is as good as any training ground in England and it’s on the outskirts of the city so you can easily live in South Manchester, as a lot of Everton players do, and play for Everton. And when they do, they’ll never forget it.” Editor’s note: This story is updated to correct an earlier version that stated Wayne Rooney as Everton’s youngest ever scorer. It has been corrected to James Vaughan. sports@thenational.ae Follow us on Twitter @NatSportUAE Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/TheNationalSport
ORLANDO, Fla. - An Orlando police officer has been arrested on charges of felony battery amid allegations he used excessive force against a man in custody. Officer Peter Delio was caught on surveillance video kneeing a man in the stomach while he was sitting in a holding cell in August of 2014. According to his arrest report, Delio could be heard on the video saying, "get up scumbag, do you want to be a tough guy?" The man, identified as Robert Liese, was injured so badly he had to undergo surgery for a ruptured spleen. OPD orally reprimanded Delio for the conduct and suspended him without pay for a week. "I was disappointed in the actions of the officer and that's why internally he was found at fault for mistreatment of handcuffed prisoners," said Orlando Police Chief John Mina. The results of the department's internal investigation were turned over to the FDLE for their review. On Monday, FDLE decided to pursue criminal charges of excessive use of force against Delio. "We wanted to be transparent and clear that this excessive force should be investigated fully," said Mina. "Not only by us internally, but also externally from the Florida Department of law-enforcement to see if any crimes were committed." Delio turned himself in at the Orange County Jail on Tuesday morning, where he posted $2500 bond immediately, and he was set free. He is currently on paid administrative leave from the Orlando Police Department, according to a police spokesman. The charges come on top of a federal lawsuit filed by the suspect, Robert Liese, who had been arrested for criminal mischief and petit theft. Copyright 2015 by ClickOrlando.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
On Ghostbusters 29th anniversary I added a not so coincidental update to Ecto-Containment. The instructions (Ecto-Containment Blog Post, June 8, 2013) for Kenner‘s Ghostbusters Firehouse HQ/Station. At the time I couldn’t share its decal sheet as the previous owner had applied them about a year earlier. Then over the weekend because a ghosthead needed a copy of Kenner’s Ghost Nabber instructions, (Ecto-Containment Blog Post, May 28, 2013) a conversation began which leads to today. Lee Hall aka hallpaleo scanned his Ghostbusters Firehouse/Station decal sheet, cleaned it up, and provided it for ghostheads. All I’ve basically done is made his scan a PDF file and added it to Ecto-Containment. The high res file is somewhat on the large side, smaller then the files I downloaded. Thanks so much again Lee Hall! Sources: Kenner Lee Hall Advertisements
Arizona lawmaker: If a new bill passes, we are one step closer to politics like those on the TV show "House of Cards." Kevin Spacey, left, and Michael Kelly appear in a scene from "House of Cards." The third season of the political drama will be available on Netflix on Friday Feb. 27, 2015. (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix/AP Photo) If a new bill in the Arizona Legislature passes we are one step closer to politics like those on the TV show House of Cards. Senate Bill 1516, now under consideration at the state Capitol, threatens to allow influence peddling at a level unimagined 30 years ago – when voters first passed a law intended to “prevent improper influence over state and local officials and to foster public confidence in the integrity of government.” The law made it illegal for politicians to give each other money from their campaign accounts – a practice which at the time resulted in influence peddling between lawmakers through the largess of political campaign war chests. It also limited the amount of power the party establishments had over lawmakers and required transparency in campaign contributions – so the public knew who was trying to influence them and their elected officials. After 30 years, we find ourselves in a time when we are even more concerned than ever about the corrupting influence of “dark money” in elections. Three major provisions stand out among many problematic elements of the bill. Problem 1: The 'kingmaker provision' Kevin Spacey stars as Frank Underwood in season two of "House of Cards." (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix) First, in what I call the “kingmaker provision,” politicians at the Capitol would be able to give each other money from their campaign war chests. This sets up a system where those with larger war chests could influence the votes and behaviors of other members with less cash in their accounts. To put it another way: influence peddling. Imagine a situation where the majority leader of the House, let’s call him Frank Underwood, could force members to vote in lockstep with the power of his campaign contributions. This is a world in which policies are not decided on their merit, but on who has more money to give to whom – even more so than today. Proponents of this bill like to say that this could happen now because politicians control political action committees, or PACs. What they don’t tell you is that SB 1516 also weakens the current laws that allow us to punish politicians who trade favors for campaign money. Problem 2: Political parties get more power Rep. Ken Clark, D-Phoenix. (Photo: handout) A second disconcerting provision allows political parties to pay for most of the costs of the campaigns of its nominees. Proponents like to say that this is just what parties should be doing. What they are not telling you is that this gives incredible power to the parties to dictate action to the candidates who run under their flag. This will make it more difficult for an elected official to vote his or her conscience. If you think that partisan politicians vote in lockstep today, just see what happens if this law goes in to effect. Problem 3: Dark money gets free rein "Dark money" is that which its donors are not disclosed. (Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto) Last, but certainly not least, this bill relies on the Internal Revenue Service to oversee and report the use of dark money in Arizona – something that we are very capable of doing here, and which the IRS has already shown it does not want to do. In other words, this bill gives free rein to dark money in Arizona – no transparency, no accountability. There will be even more money flowing behind the scenes, used to influence elected officials and making your voice weaker. The proponents of this bill say they are streamlining a confusing part of our law, but this bill is really about opening up dark money and influence peddling in ways that we can’t even imagine. The only way for this bill to stop now is for you to speak up and let your representative know that you will remember their vote in November, if they vote for this bill today. Rep. Ken Clark, D-Phoenix (District 24), is the ranking member on the House Elections Committee. Email him at kclark@azleg.gov; follow him on Twitter, @kenclarkforaz. Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1MuOCr9
Philanthropist Eli Broad seems to have his hands or his money in nearly every art museum in Los Angeles. Now his very own museum, The Broad, is nearing completion in downtown Los Angeles, right next door to Disney Concert Hall (which he also helped build, of course). Architect Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro hosted a preview of the building this week, including the first look at the 2,500 cast-concrete panels that make up the lacy facade. Advertisement Since Broad's foundation owns over $2 billion worth of contemporary art (he's got another $2 billion in his personal collection), the building has to serve double duty as both archive and exhibition space, two functions that Diller describes as as "the vault and the veil." The "vault" holds the archives, which are positioned in the middle of the building in a dense concrete slab. The "veil" is the porous, honeycomb-like structure that appears to hover over the building, lifting its corners to the street for a peek inside. Advertisement What's notable here is that the "veil" is almost a separate structure entirely that's supported on three different points, including a 57-foot beam that plunges five feet below the sidewalk. This approach also helps with seismic considerations since it was designed to (gently) rock independently from the rest of the building during an earthquake. Additional steel beams crisscross the building like a basket to hold the fiberglass-enforced concrete panels, including the dozens of smaller panels that make a little dimple, or "oculus" on the second floor. Advertisement The roof is slightly different, featuring 318 skylights in 15 different shapes. Like giant oblong periscopes peering out from the ceiling, the skylights all face north to avoid the harsher southern exposure light (blackout shades can also be lowered on the skylights to protect more delicate works of art). But when you're standing the gallery, you can rarely see the openings to the sky, giving the illusion that the ceiling is a single computer-modeled surface, like a smooth, massive, glowing egg crate. Advertisement Adding to the drama of the ceiling is the choreographed arrival. Museumgoers can choose their own adventure: an escalator that ferries them directly from the ground floor, a glass elevator which will also shoot through the core of the building, and a staircase with windows that allows peeks into the archive and behind-the-scenes art prep areas. And with their signature exceptional attention to detail, the architects also located all the ducting and electrical work in the floor below. This not only creates an unobstructed view, it also allows for ultimate flexibility when hanging art in the galleries, as temporary walls can be erected almost anywhere. The result is nearly an acre-sized column-free gallery space—a remarkably bright and airy space for art. The museum will open in late 2014. [All renderings courtesy The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro; top photo by Matt Ostrow / Diller Scofidio + Renfro]
If scientists have been "plotting" to show evolution, they had plant the lacking link someplace. individually, i do no longer think in evolution, yet your question is a splash..erm.. perplexing. you are able to no longer probably plant fossils interior the floor like that. Too many human beings might understand. As a Creationist myself, I do have faith there have been dinosaurs on earth. Hell, i'm no longer fullyyt confident that each and each single species is extinct. human beings locate stuff interior the Amazon widely used. there's a lot of land we've yet to locate. Who says there are not dinosaurs left? And via the way, they declare the fossils to be tens of millions of years old, no longer around 6,000, lol. brummage · 2 years ago 0 Thumbs up 0 Thumbs down Report Abuse
Freddy Got Fingered is a 2001 American surrealist black comedy film directed by Tom Green and written by Green and Derek Harvie. The film follows Green as a 28-year-old slacker who wishes to become a professional cartoonist. The film's plot resembles Green's struggles as a young man trying to get his TV series picked up, which would later become the popular MTV show The Tom Green Show. The film was critically panned at the time of its release, with many considering it as one of the worst films of all time. It won five Golden Raspberry Awards of its eight nominations, as well as a Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Award for Worst Picture. Despite this, the film developed a cult following, and has also met with more positive assessments over time, most notably from The New York Times, Metacritic, IFC.com and Splitsider, with some commentators interpreting satirical and metahumorous themes within the film's gross-out gags. Despite a mediocre box office run, the film became a financial success by selling millions of copies on DVD. Plot [ edit ] Unemployed 28-year-old cartoonist Gordon "Gord" Brody leaves his parents' home in Portland, Oregon, to pursue his lifelong ambition of obtaining a contract for an animated television series. His parents give him a car in which he drives to Los Angeles and starts work at a cheese sandwich factory. Gord shows his drawings to Dave Davidson, the CEO of a major animation studio; Davidson tells him that the artwork is really good, but that the concepts depicted, including a vigilante "X-Ray Cat", are nonsensical. Disheartened, Gord quits his job and returns to his parents. Gord's father Jim constantly insults and belittles him following his return, telling him to forget about being an animator and "get a job". When Gord pressures his friend Darren into skating on a wooden half-pipe he has built outside the Brody home, Darren falls and breaks his leg. At the hospital, Gord impersonates a doctor, delivers a baby, and meets an attractive nurse named Betty, who uses a wheelchair, has an obsessive penchant for fellatio, and wants to create a rocket-powered wheelchair. Gord lies to Jim that he has got a job and goes out to a restaurant with Betty, pretending he is at work. However, Jim sees him there, and also disparages Betty due to her disabilities. After a fight in the restaurant, Gord is arrested and bailed out by Betty. Following her advice, Gord attempts to continue drawing, however he gets into an argument with Jim, who then smashes Gord's half-pipe. Gord and his parents then go to a family therapy session, where Gord falsely accuses Jim of "fingering" Gord's younger brother, Freddy. The 25-year-old Freddy is sent to a home for sexually molested children while Gord's mother Julie leaves Jim, and ends up dating the basketball player Shaquille O'Neal. While in a drunken stupor, Jim tells Gord how much of a disappointment he is to him. Affected by Jim's words, Gord decides to abandon his aspirations to be a cartoonist and gets a job at a local sandwich shop. After seeing a television news report on Betty's successful rocket-powered wheelchair, Gord is inspired to pursue his dreams once again. He returns to Hollywood with a concept based on his relationship with his father: an animated series called Zebras in America. Jim follows him there after threatening Darren into revealing where he had gone. While Gord is pitching the show to Davidson, Jim bursts in and trashes Davidson's office. Thinking Jim's actions are part of Gord's pitch, Davidson greenlights Zebras in America and gives Gord a million-dollar check. Gord spends a quarter of that money on an elaborate thank you to Betty for inspiring him, and the remainder to relocate the Brody house to Pakistan with his father inside, unconscious — a response to Jim's earlier put-down that "If this were Pakistan, you would have been sewing soccer balls when you were four years old!" Gord and Jim soon come to terms, but are then abducted and held hostage. The kidnapping becomes a news item, as Gord's series has already become popular. After 18 months in captivity, Gord and Jim return to America, where a huge crowd, including Betty, welcomes them home. Cast [ edit ] Release [ edit ] The theatrical release is 87 minutes and received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America following requested cuts to tone it down from an NC-17, a rating which Green described as "like porn with murder." As an extra on the DVD release, Green also included a version which he had edited to secure a PG rating. The PG-rated cut of Freddy Got Fingered is a mere three minutes long with a comedic voiceover. Some footage was leaked by the Newgrounds website before release.[3] Years later, Tom Fulp, owner of Newgrounds, confirmed that the leak was a publicity stunt.[4] Reception [ edit ] Box office [ edit ] On a budget of $14 million, Freddy Got Fingered grossed $14,254,993 domestically and $78,259 overseas for a worldwide total of $14,333,252.[2] The film earned $24,300,000 from DVD sales, and was among the top 50 weekly DVD rentals chart.[5] Green has stated in a few interviews in 2010 that DVD sales have been growing many years later and that there was a cult following.[6] In a 2017 interview, Green stated that the box office receipts for the film did not reflect the actual attendance, as he thinks that movie goers under the age of seventeen bought tickets to Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles and then snuck into the theater showing his film.[7] Critical response [ edit ] In this infamous scene, Gord ties some sausages to his fingers, plays the piano poorly, and sings "Daddy, would you like some sausage?" The film was panned upon release, with many critics considering it to be one of the worst films of all time. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 11% based on reviews from 94 critics, with an average rating of 2.7/10. The site's consensus reads "Unfavorably comparing it with such infamously bad titles as Battlefield Earth, a significant number of critics are calling Tom Green's extreme gross-out comedy the worst movie they have ever seen."[8] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from film critics, the film has an "Overwhelming dislike" rating score of 13 out of 100 based on 25 reviews. CinemaScore polls revealed the average grade filmgoers gave Freddy Got Fingered was C-, on an A+ to F scale. The Toronto Star created a one-time new rating for Freddy Got Fingered, giving it "negative one star out of five stars."[citation needed] CNN's Paul Clinton called it "quite simply the worst movie ever released by a major studio in Hollywood history" and listed the running time as "87 awful minutes."[9] Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film a rare zero-star rating, listed it as one of his most hated films of all time,[10] describing the film thus: "This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels[...]. The day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny."[11] The magazine Complex also ranked the film at #14 on its "25 Movies That Killed Careers".[12] Similarly, David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz of SBS's The Movie Show were not impressed by the film's content and tone. Stratton gave the film zero stars while Pomeranz gave it one star.[13] Richard Roeper, in the TV show At the Movies, hosted by Roeper and Ebert, called it "horrible" and expressed the view that Green was a poor comedian, going so far as to say that he "should be flipping burgers somewhere". Along with Ebert, he was offended by the numerous "gross-out" gags.[citation needed] Film critic Leonard Maltin shared Ebert and Roeper's views of the film: "Instantly notorious word-of-mouth debacle became the poster child for all that's wrong with movie comedy. Gags include the maiming of an innocent child and a newborn spun around in the air by its umbilical cord—compounded by the almost unimaginable ineptitude with which they're executed."[14] Accolades [ edit ] The film received eight Golden Raspberry Award nominations in 2002, winning five. In acknowledgment of the critical consensus regarding the film's merits, Green personally appeared at the ceremony to accept his awards, bringing his own red carpet and saying: "I'd just like to say to all the other nominees in the audience: I don't think that I deserve it any more than the rest of you. I'd like to say that; I don't think that it would be true, though."[15] Green would go on to play the harmonica badly for so long that he was dragged off the stage.[16] In February 2010, it was announced that Freddy Got Fingered was nominated for "Worst Picture of the Decade" for the 30th Golden Raspberry Awards but "lost" to Battlefield Earth.[17] Legacy [ edit ] Resurgence [ edit ] Freddy Got Fingered began to see more positive praise over time. One of the few notable critics who gave it a generally positive review was A. O. Scott of The New York Times, who compared the film to conceptual performance art.[18] Critic Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club gave the film a rave review in his "My Year of Flops" column where he partially fulfilled Ebert's prediction, comparing it to the work of Jean-Luc Godard and calling the film "less as a conventional comedy than as a borderline Dadaist provocation, a $15 million prank at the studio's expense" adding "it's utterly rare and wondrous to witness the emergence of a dazzlingly original comic voice. I experienced that glorious sensation watching Fingered...I can honestly say that I've never seen anything remotely like it" and rated it a "Secret Success"[19] In a later column, Rabin stated "I was a little worried that I'd catch flak for giving mad props to a film as divisive and widely reviled as Freddy Got Fingered. So I was relieved to discover that every single comment agreed with my assessment of it... It also didn't escape my attention that my Freddy post was the most commented-upon post in the history of My Year of Flops by a huge margin."[20] Comedian Chris Rock listed Freddy Got Fingered as one of his favorite movies on his website.[21] Later, in his review of the film Stealing Harvard, a film co-starring Green, Ebert wrote: "Seeing Tom Green reminded me, as how could it not, of his movie Freddy Got Fingered, which was so poorly received by the film critics that it received only one lonely, apologetic positive review on the Tomatometer. I gave it—let's see—zero stars. Bad movie, especially the scene where Green was whirling the newborn infant around his head by its umbilical cord. But the thing is, I remember Freddy Got Fingered more than a year later. I refer to it sometimes. It is a milestone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something. It failed, but it has not left me convinced that Tom Green doesn't have good work in him. Anyone with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing."[22] The film has subsequently developed a large cult following. In Tom Green's interview on The Opie and Anthony Show, host Opie noted the film had begun to be regarded as 'one of the funniest movies ever made'.[23] Green noted the film had sold a million copies,[23] and that he wished to make a director's cut due to a lot of footage not making the final cut.[23] Green notes that he was not trying to make The Jazz Singer and that many fans of the movie shout out scenes from the film regularly at his stand-up performance.[23] Unreality Magazine featured the film in its list of "10 Hilarious Movies That Received Terrible Reviews", noting that critics' taste in comedies tend not to reflect the general public.[24] Vadim Rizov for IFC.com wrote an article titled "In defense of Freddy Got Fingered". He calls the film one of the great underrated comedies of the decade and says the film would go on to do better if it was released today, comparing it to the successful Adult Swim series Aqua Teen Hunger Force.[25] On their show "re:View" Red Letter Media advised their viewers to watch the film, albeit under the right mind set. Throughout the review co-host Mike Stoklasa takes the stance that the movie is a satire of early 2000s gross out comedies and an elaborate prank being pulled on the studio, going so far as to label Tom Green a "secret genius". [26] Director's Cut [ edit ] Green stated that he would like to do a "director's cut" DVD release of the film in 2011 to celebrate the 10-year anniversary.[6][27] On March 9, 2010, on Loveline, Green officially announced that a director's cut would be released.[28] In an answer to a question from a fan on his website tomgreen.com in December 2010, Green said that there was no progress yet in regards to the director's cut. In a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) Green did on the website Reddit on October 17, 2013, Green responded to a question regarding the release of the director's cut with: "The studio didn't give me the footage to make the directors cut. I want to do it. If you contact New Regency or 20th Century Fox and tell them you want a directors cut [sic] maybe it will happen!"[29]
A recent study published in the Geological Society of America Bulletin identifies an area of great volcanic activity along the Snake River Plain between Oregon and Yellowstone. While scientists have long known that the supervolcano now under Yellowstone left a trail of mega-eruptions across the Pacific Northwest, an international research team has found evidence of only 12 distinct eruptions, contradicting earlier theories that the eruptions were more numerous and less extreme. “The size and magnitude of this newly defined eruption is as large, if not larger, than better known eruptions at Yellowstone,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Thomas Knott, in a University of Leicester press release, “and it is just the first in an emerging record of newly discovered super-eruptions during a period of intense magmatic activity between 8 and 12 million years ago.” Scientists used paleomagnetic data, radioisotope dating, and rock and mineral chemistries to identify the size and location of these ancient eruptions. One eruption, called the Castleford Crossing eruption, produced a volcanic sheet that covers approximately 14,000 square kilometers – an area the size of Connecticut – in southern Idaho. Knott and his team identified 11 other super explosions that they say were likely similar in size to the well known, massive super explosions at Yellowstone. “While it is well-known that Yellowstone has erupted catastrophically in recent times,” said Knott, “perhaps less widely appreciated is that these were just the latest in a protracted history of numerous catastrophic super-eruptions that have burned a track along the Snake River eastwards from Oregon to Yellowstone.” Yellowstone certainly remains volcanically lively. In 2013, a study found that Yellowstone’s “supervolcano” was even larger than scientists had previously believed, with a magma chamber stretching 55 miles long, and 18 miles wide. If the Yellowstone supervolcano explodes, says the 2013 study, the resulting eruption could be up to 2,000 times as violent as the Mt. St. Helens eruption several decades ago. In the spring of 2015, scientists discovered an even deeper magma chamber. The last Yellowstone eruption occurred 640,000 years ago – a blink of an eye in the geologic time scale, compared to the Snake River Plain explosions 8 to 12 million years ago – but some remain concerned that this destructive supervolcano is ripe for an eruption. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy "Three super-eruptions at Yellowstone appear to have occurred on a 600,000-700,000 year cycle starting 2.1 million years ago," explains the BBC. "The most recent took place 640,000 years ago – suggesting Yellowstone is overdue for an eruption." This new study, with evidence of 12 volcanoes in about 3 million years, suggests that the Yellowstone supervolcano can erupt catastrophically on a much shorter cycle of about every 250,000 years.
When I started making The Moonstone Equation it was just a test-bed for ideas and a place to try our new things; it didn’t even have a name. It was years into development before I considered making it a commercial product and because of this it’s ended up being created from the ground up on a custom engine, written in C++ using minimal external libraries. If you’re the sort of developer that thinks this is a good way of doing things then this page should serve as some sort of warning to you. Or at the very least give you some indication of what you might be getting into. You should also be warned that this is a really long and occasionally technical article. But, if you can’t get to the bottom of this page then you’ve got very little hope of actually doing the work it describes. Where to begin So you’ve decided to write a game and engine from scratch without using any of the hundreds of great libraries or dozens of existing engines. Good for you. Like me you’re probably doing this to learn more about game development (and programming principles) along with the various bits of code and technology required to make everything work. First thing to decide is where you’re going to draw your distinction for ‘no external libraries’ because unless you intend to start writing drivers you’re going to have to use at least a few libraries. In my case I chose to use some of the C standard libraries like stdio.lib (because I’m old) along with Direct X, XInput, XAudio and a few helpful windows libs like PSAPI and WinInet but that’s about it. Obviously I could have chosen a different minimal set and the inclusion of all that Direct X already represents quite gap between me and the actual hardware but it’s also a very very long way from what’s required to make a game engine (and game); as you’ll see below. So off we go. The very basic stuff Now it’s clear that you’ve decided to do things the hard way then you’ve definitely decided not to use any of the helpful C++ functional libraries or any of C++ standard templates and containers. This sort of thinking is actually very common in the games industry. In most cases we decide our additional context or domain knowledge and specific target platform decisions mean we can do a better job for the smaller set of cases we actually have to cover. This isn’t always completely crazy. For instance, the standard templates are very generic, very well tested and often very useful but they’re also pretty ugly, difficult to debug and often do things that make games developers teeth itch; like allocate memory in unpredictable (or annoying) ways. That’s okay for you though, you’re making everything yourself. So what will you actually need? Bear in mind here that I tried to just make the things I actually had a use for but occasionally some interesting shiny problem would catch my attention and I’d spend a few days implementing something obscure just to see how it worked. You might spot a few of these as you read. Basic global functions You’re not using those helpful libraries so you’re going to need to implement some basic universally useful functions in order to implement anything even a little bit complex. These are the sorts of functions that you see in computer science courses and you’ll find to be popular choices for interview questions for programming jobs so it’s good stuff to know about anyway. Bit Twiddling Lets start with the ones and zeros. There are tons of uses for functions that mess about with individual bits and better still they can all be quickly tested for all possible inputs to make sure they’re working (unless you’re doing everything in 64Bit). They’re also an endless source of distraction; my inner micro-optimiser loves nothing more than to stare at a ReverseBits function and wonder if it could be done in less cycles. At the very least you’ll need a bit swapper, counter, setter and getter along with functions calculate the next power of two and calculate log in base 2 of a given integer. You might also want to implement grey code conversions and and integer crushing while you’re at it. Hash Functions Even though I’m not talking about the cryptographically secure hashing functions you might use to protect your bank account here it’s worth noting that this field is crammed with people that can and have definitely done a better job than you could. These things should be approached for study, don’t go building big bits of your engine on top of your own hand-rolled hashing function unless you want to deal with some super obscure bugs in later life. Understand and implement an existing (non-patented) algorithm and stick with it. Strings You’re going to be asking lots of questions about parts of pieces of text so it’s good to get a strong (and well tested) set of string handling functions written. String processing is so common that the more different functions you can think of the better. You can even get distracted and spend days optimising and tweaking it all too if you like. I think these might be my inner micro-optimisers second favourite source files. Also, I’d suggest you stick with Unicode with occasional char conversions as needed (because some old function) you’ll thank yourself later. I opted for some obscure stuff along with lots of basics like ToUpper, StringLength, EndsWith and Concat but you can go as crazy as you like. Data If you’re not doing maths and logic or looking at strings then you’re probably moving blocks of data about. You’ll need some classes to contain and manipulate contiguous blocks of bytes. Initially you’ll just need to make them, fill them empty them and copy them about. Later on you’ll be doing a lot more. At this point you should also create the functions that allow you to convert ints, floats bools and all that into steams of data and back again. Timers A general purpose set of classes or functions for measuring the number of clock-cycles between two points in time is essential; either because you want to check that those high performance functions you’ve written really are or to control how much time different parts of your engine spend doing work. We’ve had high resolution timers available on our PCs for a long time now so they’re definitely the place to start. However, it’s worth doing a little reading to make sure you understand the effect of using such timers on modern chips that have multiple cores that may or may not all be running at the same speed as each other. Basic maths If like me you’ve opted to include Math.h then you already have most of the simple maths functions you’re going to need; many of which talk directly to the CPU and have very little scope for improvement or variation. There are a few places you might want to extend on the basics or write some more complex functions to solve specific problems. I’ve opted to write a quadratic and cubic solution finder (using the obvious methods) as well as domain specific high performance approximation functions for things like ExpBelowZero (which can calculated about 10 times faster than standard exp) or SinCos (calculating both at once within -PI to PI can be done very quickly) Random numbers Most games need lots of (pseudo) random numbers and your’s is probably going to be no different. You could just use the rand function but that’s really not in the spirit of writing everything yourself (it’s also pretty terrible). Much like hashing functions this is not an area to approach lightly. Lots has been (and still is) written about generating random numbers so you might find it much more useful to base this critical system on an existing (non-patented) algorithm instead of rolling your own. I’d also suggest avoiding the really big ones like the mersenne twister unless you really have a huge need for quality numbers over performance. Obviously you could write more than one. It’s also worth making sure that when needed you can control how your RNG is seeded; not only will this help you hunting bugs it will also make it easier to write procedural, network or replay code. Containers Humans make mistakes. Despite occasional evidence to the contrary, programmers are human. So I always try to write my code in a way that defends my future self from my own errors (or potential errors). I achieve this in a few ways. First there’s the testing, simply writing something and walking away assuming it’s all fine usually ends badly. Then there’s things like exceptions and asserts to make it clear when I’ve violated my original design assumptions or my past self did something stupid; he’s done that a lot. Finally, the part that’s relevant here, I try and make things that avoid the possibility for me to make stupid mistakes. If you’re going to spend years making your new engine and game then you might consider doing the same and a good place to start is your nice new container classes. Arrays Having at least two array classes, one pre-allocated and one that auto re-allocates is a good place to start. Your future self will thank you for having a simple array that clear’s up after itself and handles range checking instead of leaking or overflowing. Obviously you can spend as much time as you like considering important things like cache alignment, thread safety or what strategy to use for array growth; I used 1.5 but some people like doubling and others prefer a little bit of fibonacci, it all depends on expected usage patterns. Lists I love the intrusive linked list. It’s gone out of fashion in the last 20 years but for me it’s useful properties far out weigh it’s negative points (terrible cache behaviour or reliance on things being derived from a base list-node class often come top of that list). If this thing is new to you then great, that’s why you’re writing everything yourself right? In it’s simplest form an intrusive list is made up of classes that contain the list referencing machinery inside them; usually in the form of a next (and if you like previous) pointer. Once you’ve allocated a pile of list-node derived classes then these containers come with constant time insertion and removal, linear time traversal and zero extra allocations; all good stuff. Dictionary and PriorityQueue Now you’ve got the simple containers you can move on to the more tricky containers. The design of these is sufficiently complex that people continue to write research papers about their implementation. Once you’ve done some reading and gone straight to implementation you might find you have to re-write these a few times until you’re happy with them. The main benefit of doing these yourself is the huge amount of understanding you gain about their implementation. You also get to impose constraints on their design that allow for some domain specific optimisation. Strings Everyone needs a string class (probably). Now you’ve written all those helpful string functions and containers this is probably the first point where you can mix a few together to create a useful new class. The first thing you might want to consider in your new class that significantly differs from the standard strings is their immutability and behaviour for small units of data (a common use case). In my case I opted to make my string class use memory from a pool of 64 byte blocks unless it’s contents required more than about 28 letters (leaving some bytes to store length and hash) I also made then mutable (allowed their contents to be changed in place). This meant for 95% of my use cases there was no heap allocation when working them and simple work was nice and fast. Obviously you’re making your own game and engine so you can do what ever you fancy. Magical pointers A fun place where many programmers like to make their lives difficult is in the handling of references to locations in memory. If you like you can just rely on your own fleshy brain to remember all the places you stored pointers to objects with potentially dynamic life-times; or, you could do the sensible thing and implement some wrapper classes for common pointer behaviours. At the very least I’d suggest you need an unique-pointer (something that only one object can own) and a shared-pointer (something many objects can own). As with many things you should do some reading here and about 300% more testing than you think is appropriate. The less basic bit still universal stuff So now you’ve got the critical things written you’re on your way to developing your engine. The next thing you might consider doing is the other universally useful stuff that’s not necessarily game orientated but forms the back-bone of many game engine systems. We’re starting to move very distinctly into territory that’s coloured by the decisions I made when developing my engine. You can (and should) approach these things in any number of different ways. Threading Almost everyone that plays your game is going to do so on a device (in my case PC) that has more than one processor running on an operating system that supports multi-threading. So making some effort to use all that other processing power is probably a good idea. As threading makes everything just a little bit more complicated there are a few things you’re going to need. Atomics Adding values, assigning things and comparing values are all open to complex interdependence when threads get involved. To reduce the risk of thread bugs driving you insane I’d suggest some wrappers for basic atomic operations. For instance I have some atomic counters and classes to call functions under conditions defined by atomic operations along with a few atomic math functions. Synchronisation There are some times when you need to do a little more than assign and test an integer. Thread synchronisation primitives are there for those occasions when you simply have to talk between threads and as such need some way to mediate what’s going (so everything doesn’t just explode). This is another area where you should take significant caution. Even after years of working with threads they still occasionally catch me out. In the end I only needed to implement simple wrappers for the critical section and semaphore. Job Handler For threading bonus points you might find it helpful to make a generic handler for work you want doing on another thread. There are lots of occasions you might want to just throw work onto another processor and get the result when it’s done. For that you’d benefit from a general purpose threaded job handling system capable of picking work up from a pending queue, handing it over to a worker thread to deal with and informing the caller when it’s done. You’ll probably find it useful to allow for jobs made of many sub-jobs with potential for dependency between them. Even if you are an experienced software developer with lots of threading experience you should expect to find bugs in such a complex piece of software for the next 5 years (despite any amount of testing) Low level file handling This is the bottom level of the more structured file/resource handling system. The point of contact between the engine and the operating system for gathering data stored on disks either locally or perhaps across a network. It’s also another fun place to worry about performance. Paths It’ll not take you long to realise that file paths are like an extra complicated string handling problem. At that point you’ll realise you need a specialist path class to contain all the extra functionality used to manipulate what is basically just a string. Things like RemoveExtension, MakeRelative and Exists. In the end I found my simple path class needed 26 public functions. Raw file access You’re doing everything yourself so your only option is the basics fopen, fread, fseek, fwrite and fclose. Actually that’s close but not quite true. Some of those functions have some undesirable security characteristics so you should really be using fopen_s and fclose_s. Once you’ve wrapped these in a nice class and tested it endlessly you can move on to more significant things. Maths structures Your game is probably going to depict graphical objects moving around in some sort of space (I hear many do) so you’re going to benefit from some structures that relate to more complex mathematical objects like vectors and matrices. Again, there are definitely very functional, fast, well tested maths libraries out there but at least by creating some yourself you’ll grow to understand why you should usually never create them yourself, at least not entirely. Vectors The common approach is to create some 2d, 3d and 4d float and integer vector classes, fill them with tons of operator overloading and helpful functions and leave it at that. That’s exactly what I did because it makes game development easier each day. What it doesn’t do is make high performance code. Worse still, some people then decide the best route to improve each of their classes is to replace the individual members they simply called x,y and z with a SIMD primitive instead. If you want high performance vector operations don’t make tons of little classes. instead understand your problem domain and make big parallel blocks of vectors to suit. Anyway, rant over, back to making your game engine. Matrix and Quaternion When it comes to the next level of math classes you need something reliable and understandable. If you can’t verbally explain to another person how a quaternion works then you should probably not be writing a maths library. After spending some significant time writing things myself and finding occasional weird edges cases that didn’t work correctly I opted to throw the whole lot away and wrap the DirectXMath matrix and quaternion functions in a simple interfacing class and walk away; you might want to consider doing the same. Script Reading You’re not always going to want to read files stored in a binary format. A great deal of power comes from being able to read and interpret text files. This is where all this string functions get some use. When writing your script reading classes you should bear in mind that structured text files can be much more easily edited by fleshy error prone humans and are therefore much more likely to contain mistakes. Obviously binary files can also contain errors that need to be handled, but the nature of parsing makes the task of error handling in a text file a little bit more complex. As you’ll see when you implement it. Tokenizer Step one on the path to understanding text files is the creation of a tokenizer. This turns a stream of characters into a chain of objects with context information about things like it’s type and value. You could even create a general purpose tokenizer that takes some sort of syntax definition file (perhaps in Backus-Naur form if you like). I opted to just break the text file down into tokens using some common rules; the result is a list of tokens marked as int, strings, brackets, operators etc. For maximum flexibility you’ll probably want to read up on the many and various ways in which things like numbers can be described in a text file (because -.1e4f is a valid float syntax in many languages for -1000) Parser Once you’ve created your robust tokenizer and are happy it’s capable of dealing with all sorts of input you can move onto process of turning that into data inside the game engine. You could write an XML or JSON or just do as I did and write some helpful functions to read values and understand structure markers like brackets, semicolons and line-ends. More As you’ll see later there’s a great deal of power that comes with a reliable script reader. Compression I should start by saying that this is an absolutely non-essential feature of your engine (or mine) but it is a source of some very interesting (and very distracting) problems. It’s also an easy way of accidentally violating some patents so you should take a little care if you intend to implement any sort of compression. Interestingly, unlike hash functions and random number this is a great area to attempt to roll your own stuff. There’s very little risk and the worst thing that can happen (assuming you code is still tested and reliable) is that your files are all exactly the same size as they already are (and you wasted a few CPU cycles). Compress There’s lots of literature available about all sorts of methods for compressing data and if you want to write your own then you’re also going to have to do a lot of reading. There are lots of options ranging from very simple things like run-length-encoding through huffman encoding to horrors like adaptive arithmetic encoding. Obviously if you choose to implement something you don’t understand your future self will probably not thank you for it. Encode I’m mentioning encoding separately from actual compressors because they’re have different jobs. Encoders are primarily tasked with reducing the entropy of a block of data without necessarily making it any smaller. A few good encoding steps can often turn your average compressor into something pretty good. Again this is an area where you can roll your own code (as the results are easy to test and measure) but you’ll also want to implement some classics like the Burrows-Wheeler-Transform and the Move-To-Front transform. Package files Knowing that you have a single file location to go to for all your data is quite useful. It also makes deployment a lot easier. First thing you’ll have to do is extend your basic file handling to deal with files that are potentially stored inside larger files (which may now be compressed). Simple implementations of this are just big package files (all the content of all the files bunched together in a single file) with indexes of contents at the start. These can either be read when files are requested or read when your engine starts up. In either case you simply use that information to decide weather to read a file from a package or a loose file when it’s requested based on those indexes. I opted for variation of this method. I knew I didn’t need lots of data so I read all the packages in when the game launches and unpack them as needed, basically creating a file system located in memory that’s checked before disk. Oh, and don’t forget you’ll need to write some tools to create those packages. Memory tracking As your engine and game grow in size you are going to start leaking memory. I say that with certainty because I’ve never seen a situation where every programmer perfectly accounts for all their allocations 100% of the time; unless you’re some sort of memory allocation savant. That’s okay, you just need some tools to ensure that you can spot when it happens and fix it. That’s where you need a memory tracker. This is a piece of code that notices every single memory allocation and de-allocation and keeps track of its source and lifetime. It can be quite slow and memory intensive so it’s probably not something you want running in your released code. In my case I start the memory tracking up before everything else (including the initialisation of static objects) then analyse the results as the application closes and display a report in the debug window; simple but effective. The Engine Okay you’re doing pretty well; you’ve got some basic globally useful systems and you can start to think about the architecture of your engine. This is so subjective and there are so many ways to approach the problem that my only option is to tell you what would be required to make my engine. So, from now on I’ll assume you’ve curiously decided to make exactly the same design decisions as me, that may or may not be a good thing. Luckily I’ve made a fairly generic PC-centric engine so many of the things I talk about below can apply to other designs. I’ve defined the distinction between the engine and everything else as the point at which systems and classes are designed to be part of a complete whole that supports the creation of a game rather than separated parts that could be used in lots of different applications. There’s much more cross-dependency within the engine. Resources You’re not going to get very far without data, usually in the form of graphics and audio or scripts/binaries. You’ll quickly realise that simply calling a simple open-read-close style ‘loadBlah’ function when you want something is going to be horrible to use and add lots of stalls to your game when ever it happens. Instead you could make use of all that thread code you wrote earlier along with some of those containers to create a streaming resource system that supports lots of different type of file. Obviously you’ll need to handle the possibility that some resources rely on others and most need some sort of fix-up function once all that loading is complete, that should also be threaded. You should also make sure it’s easy to add new resource types as your engine grows, at the moment you’ve not got a renderer or a sound system but you’ll need to feed them both with data once they’re created. So what’s the minimum set of file types to support? That depends what you’re making. I didn’t need to load 3d models but I did need textures, audio, shaders, general scripts and binary data. The file handling for each of these is detailed in the sections below that relate to the systems they feed. Windows This is it. The point at which you’ll be able to compile your code, press run and see a window appear. Well it will be once you’ve understood all the weirdness of the windows message pump and spent at least a few hours cursing the smell of 20+ years of legacy code its functionality is clearly encumbered by. Startup As with everything else here I’m not going to detail the step by step process you’ll need go through to open a dialog window. There’s tons of exciting documentation littered around the rest of the internet for all that. However there is one very important thing you should ensure when you’re writing your window code. It needs to be responsive; all the time. It should appear as soon as absolutely possible, it should handle size changes quickly and it should close as soon as the player requests the game to quit. If you’ve ever been annoyed by how long a game takes to open its window or how long an application takes to quit you’ll understand how important this is. Don’t just open the window and present a black screen either, that’s just as bad. Message Pump Prepare to scour the internet for the best way to handle the windows message pump. Also prepare to find a lot of bad information. This is one of the more esoteric parts of the window handling process and you’ll probably be fiddling with it for years. Don’t forget about suspend and resume either. In these modern times more people have a laptop that they just fold shut when they want to pause for a while. That’ll suspend your game and unless you handle the resume you’ll find that everything is very very broken. Mouse and Keyboard It’s within your windows message pump that you’ll receive a lot of the information you might want about the activity of the mouse and keyboard. You’ve not yet written your input handling but now would be a good time to add the functions you need to transmit that mouse and keyboard info to other parts of your engine. You might also consider disabling the windows key while your game is running (and has focus), there are not many gamers that enjoy accidentally pressing the left windows key at some critical. Also, If you intend to make lots of use of the mouse you should also spend some time implementing high resolution data capture from the mouse device because getting an event only when the mouse pointer moves from one pixel to another is actually terrible for camera controls. Audio Even though you’re making everything yourself you still have to use some significant libraries if you want to use some devices. XAudio is about as low as you could go without being an audio engineer. Even then you still to have to do a lot of work yourself. Busses Once you’ve done lots of reading and have a second type of ‘bus’ in your vocabulary (as in, not the vehicles) you can start to create the framework classes for getting raw audio data from some source, through some mixers and effects to some configuration of speakers. This is another great place to make use of all that threading code you wrote earlier, because unless you want lots of pops and pauses you’re going to have to feed those busses constantly using threads. This will give you a new appreciation of the efforts that go into sound engine design. Simple Audio Time to make use of that threaded resource loading. Initially you’ll want to read uncompressed WAV files as these are much simpler than any of the alternatives. You can find lots of documentation on the RIFF format that it’s based on and from there you can quickly get some sounds on your bus. Music You’ve heard sound great music in other games and you want to have some of that emotional punch in yours. You’ve got two choices; write a sequencer or read compressed audio. I opted for the second using MP3 format. A fun thing to remember about MP3 format is that its creation and decoding is protected by patents and licensing. Luckily windows comes bundled with a licensed decoder. So, once you’ve read up on (and implemented) the acmDriverEnum function and all it’s friends and located some accurate information about the internal format of MP3 files you’ll have some data and a working decoder to feed. If you get everything right you’ll also have a set of classes to turn disk files into music streams. You’ll probably find the whole music handling part of your audio so time consuming and tedious that you’ll neglect things like smooth switching between different music tracks until you realise your game needs it. 3D You and many other people playing your game may have gone to the effort and expense of purchasing and installing arrangements of speakers to simulate spatially located audio. It’s up to you how far you want to push your support; 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 maybe even 11.1. In any case you’ll need the notion of an audio listener (or potentially many audio listeners if you’re making a split screen game) within your engine. This will need to handle additional things like environmental effects like reverb and filters. Graphics Graphics system design is sufficiently large and complex that some people mix and confuse ‘graphics engine’ with ‘game engine’. In this section we’re just considering the creation, manipulation and transference of geometric and textural data from somewhere in main memory (or disk) through the graphics devices onto the screen. That’s already a lot of stuff. The Device I’ve opted to use Direct X (something I occasionally regret). Unless you writing a software renderer you’re going to have a lot of pieces of data that you want to manipulate and send to some graphics device. Some of those pieces of data represent results from work on the graphics device while others represent relatively static data you want the device to use. Start up Lets start by detecting and selecting the device you’d like to handle all your graphics work. There’s often more than one to choose from and very regularly the least capable one is presented first (looking at you on-board intel cards). This whole job got a lot easier with the more recent versions of Direct X. It was ugly in DirectX 9 and terrible in the versions before then. Shaders Next, it’s time to make use of that resource loader you created earlier. If you’re using Visual Studio for your coding then you get the benefit of built in shader compilers so the only thing you need to do is handle the loading of the resultant binaries. Even if you don’t write your pixel and vertex shaders in pairs you’ll probably want to support some sort of pairing to create ‘material’ objects. You could even include details about other aspects of surfaces like the depth read/write modes or culling order. Before long you’ll find you’ve created a workable material format and all the loaders required to use it. You should also spend some time considering how you’ll be passing parameters into your shaders when it comes to actually rendering everything. That includes semi-global parameters like viewport values through per-pass or per-surface parameters all the way down to per-instance parameters like world-matrix. Pipeline It’s also very likely that your game is going to make use of some of those fancy modern pixel shader effects (like bloom) or need to be rendered in multiple passes. For that you’re going to need to implement something to keep track of all the shaders and render targets used in multi-pass rendering. You’ll also need to reuse things and make sure everything gets done in the right order. Also, don’t forget to handle the screen resolution changing, lots of those targets will need suddenly to be recreated when your player presses Alt-Enter. Textures/Images DirectX actually support loading and converting a huge number of different file graphics file formats but we’ll just consider creating some raw image loading. You’ll be surprised how often you just want some image data but don’t want (or have) a whole graphics device setup just to get it loaded. Luckily a long time ago the TGA format was created. It’s well supported by image software and it’s super easy to read. In it’s 24 or 32 bit uncompressed form (without palette) it’s just a 18 byte header followed by interleaved image data followed by a 16 byte footer; easy. Vertex Data All that image data is going to need something to hang onto. You could go for a very flexible vertex system that allows for easy broadening of vertex data as your requirements change but as you’re already spending years making something small scale I suggest that you’ll probably be just find with a few simple vertex declarations for common vertex formats. I use three. Then there’s the separate (but related) issue of vertex buffer management. As we’re assuming you’re making the same design choices as me, we’ll also assume that you’re creating a game with lots of dynamic geometry made up of lots of sprites. Unless you really love the idea of GPU memory fragmentation bugs I would strongly recommend not creating thousands of tiny vertex buffers. Instead you’ll want to allocate some nice big vertex buffers and handle the progressive filling and reuse of them as you go. Each large vertex buffer should act like a slightly dithered queue with new geometry being added at one end with the other end becoming progressively unused as dynamic sprites end their life. Once a vertex buffer has no more live sprites in it you can simply reset your write position to zero and start again. You’ll have to spend a little bit of time choosing the right balance of size for your big buffers to to avoid excessive wastage and keep a reasonable amount of vertex data ‘live’ at any one time. Draw Commands Yet another area of engine design where people continue to write articles and get excited and emotional about exactly the best way of feeding data and commands to the GPU in order to produce the final results on screen. I opted for a simple method that’s reasonably easy to adjust and debug. Each frame a list of jobs is created that represent geometry to be drawn to a specific surface (or surfaces); each containing details of vertex buffer and index buffer sources along with state, texture and shader requirements. These job lists are sorted to retain final results while reducing state changes or expensive resource movements. Then the lists of jobs are sorted by surface dependencies. Finally these lists are iterated through and applied. It works well but there are many better/faster/more-flexible approaches that have different time/bugs/complexity characteristics that you’ll probably be distracted by for a few weeks or months. UI You’re going to need some UI and it’s going to be more complicated than you expect so it’s worth considering how you intend to graphically describe, create and manipulate it. Ignoring (at least partially) how you’ll actually interact with it. UI has some interesting rendering characteristics that can complicate your handling of draw commands; it’s usually very draw order dependant and it usually uses lots of different textures. I’m ignoring any desire to have some parts of the UI mask out other parts (scroll windows for instance) because a lot can be achieved without it and if you really feel like you need it then you’ll just have to include render target switching in the generated draw commands. I opted to describe my UI using horizontal and vertical lists of elements that are either of fixed or flexible size arranged in a hierarchy defined in script files. This hierarchy is then traversed and the draw commands that represent it are built and marked such that they are never re-ordered. We’ll consider how UI is interacted with in a later section for now you can concentrate on problems like word wrapping and odd space distribution in a pixel aligned lists of boxes. Camera Beyond the actual rendering of your geometry there’s the more subtle aspects of camera motion and placement itself. This includes lots of things from cinema about framing and composition as well as lots of things learnt from games about motion and interaction. The first and best thing you can do here is look at every other game. There are lots of very good (and very bad) examples of game cameras and it’s important to be able to spot what makes one good and another bad. There’s also lots of room for subjectivity here so it’s important to put your camera in front of plenty of different people to see if their response is the same as you expect. Pro-tip; vomiting testers is bad. Interpolation At the root of any reasonable camera motion system is some robust interpolation code. That means something beyond move-halfway-towards-the-target maths and into critical damping. Once you’ve got some good interpolation you’ll find yourself using it all over the place. Even outside the camera code. Framing The code that handles this needs to balance what looks nice with what feels nice. There’s lots of literature on aesthetically pleasing composition and framing so I’ll just assume you’ve read, digested and implemented all of that. The other thing to handle is the motion of the camera as your character (or whatever) moves around. To start with you should obviously aim to keep your character on screen (almost) all the time. After that you can consider the extra marks stuff like giving a view ahead so the player isn’t so surprised when that pit comes into view or subtly include points of interest in the frame to guide the players eye. If everything goes well your player will never notice all the code you’ve written to move the camera; it’ll just work. This is probably a good reason in itself never to become a game camera programmer. Shake This covers anything you want to do to the camera that’s short lived and in response to some in-game event. Everyone loves camera shake, right? Well people love the idea of camera shake but it’s effectiveness is in the details of it’s implementation. If you want to implement good and convincing camera shake you should probably do a little research on the different sources and effects of cameras shaking. Attaching your phone camera to stuff and recording a few videos works quite well. Also, while were talking about shake you should also understand the difference between physical camera shake and cinematic frame shake. Input So now you’ve got your engine outputting graphics and sounds you might want to interact with it. You’ve already written the code to gather and transmit the keyboard and mouse events, the next step is to include gamepad input and bring it all together in a single system that can be used by your game. Lets call it the input system. XInput The first step is to gather the state of any attached gamepads (I ignored joysticks but you can include those if you like) and create events that can be handled along with those from the keyboard and mouse. As a general rule I try to avoid polling if I can do something using events but when it comes to gamepads at the very basic XInput interface you have to poll through the XInputGetState function. I turn these state polls into events by comparing against the state at the previous poll interval and informing higher functions about the differences. Once you’ve implemented all this you’ll be able to add listener functions to the input system from higher level game objects and have those functions called evenly from any connected device. Filters Unless you want multiple systems responding to the same input you’ll have to implement some code to filter input listeners in and out based on all sorts of complex constraints. This is useful all over the place but it’s critical when you start to implement UI interactivity. UI Now you’ve got a full compliment of input devices and signalling it’s time to make yourself some interactive UI. This is another of those subtle and complex areas of code design but you’ll find a lot less documentation around the internet about exactly how to handle certain things or respond in certain situations. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for information, just expect it to be harder. I think the main reason for this lack of reading material is that unlike other areas where it’s clear what good results look like, in UI and UX design the better it’s working, the less you notice it. There are a few subtle details of interaction that you can see in windows itself (you probably use them without noticing). For instance button clicks are handled on release to allow you to cancel the click by moving your mouse pointer off the button before letting go. Or, when the mouse buttons are pressed other UI buttons cannot be highlighted (gain focus) even by using keyboard navigation; to avoid confusion. There are lot of them (books full in fact) and if you’re going to implement a good UI system you’ll need to understand them. You’ll also have to integrate all that mouse based UI design with the gamepad and keyboard. Good luck. Game States Your game is going to need to move between different macro states. Loading screens, main menu, in game, etc. Writing some code to handle this stuff will make your life easier. I opted for a simple state stack. Moving on. Internet Being able to interact with any sort of online service is almost essential in modern game engines. Once you’ve got some basic system to handle basic HTTP/HTTPS requests and the generally asynchronous (occasionally unreliable) nature of network communication you can do all sorts of fun things. Don’t forget that you’re also going to need to learn PHP (or Ruby or what ever other language you fancy) and implement your server side code. This is a great way to learn about how all this works but it’s also a great way of opening yourself up to all sorts of security and privacy issues. In short, use an existing service unless you are an internet security expert. Scoreboards These are usually just simple sets of name-number pairs arranged in groups and sorted. super easy to implement and super easy to use. Analytics Game developers love analytics but players are often suspicious of it. It allows developers to get clear information about the impact of their design decisions and potentially pick up on (and fix) issues that evaded testing but it’s obviously open to abuse. I suggest that if you do implement analytics you should gather the minimum amount of data needed to answer only the key questions you might have. It’s tempting to generate events and value for every single tiny little player action. This just results in a swamp of data. I opted to use analytics during testing and then scale it right back for release. Anything Else? You’re almost there but the things listed above are just a summary of the big stuff. I’ve skipped some of the simple (but often critical) things that glue it all together. Things like Exception handling, crash-dump generation, release versioning or debug logging. you’ll need these ‘glue’ systems all over the place. The Game That’s it, you’ve built a primitive engine capable of handling a simple game on a single platform (PC). The work in the previous section probably constitutes a solid few months of programming if you’re able to spend all day doing it, but If you’ve only got a little bit of spare time to work with then you could expect all that to take many times longer; potentially years. At least it’s done now. You can move on to the fun part where you actually create your game. Obviously every game is different so there’s very little point in me attempting to detail the steps you’ll need to take to create yours. Instead I’ll detail the work that went into making the significant systems within The Moonstone Equation. Some are applicable to other games, like platform handling and save game support, other are very specific to my game. Even though it might not be directly applicable, it might give you some sense of the scale of the workload you’ll have to undertake. Physics and collision detection This doesn’t sound like making a game. Surely this is part of the engine? In most cases, yes, but as I’ve opted to make a platform game with tiles arranged in a grid I can avoid creating a generic collision detection and physics system and just handle the simpler case. There’s a lot of very heavy duty maths required to create a full scale physics engine but non-rotating axis aligned boxes is all I needed. Once I’d created some basic box penetration handling, simple gravity and buoyancy I had all I’d ever need. I also excluded traditional friction. Nothing needed vertical friction and things stop moving horizontally on surfaces based on game rules and simple damping. On top of this there are a few extra bits of code to improve the player experience, like changes to how box penetration is handled for the player when they jump upwards near corners. Platformer Handling When it comes to understanding how to make decent platform game handling It’s lucky that there’s so much reference material. By that I mean there are lots of great platform games that demonstrate how handling should feel. They also demonstrate that there’s still tons of scope for difference. If you play Super Mario 3 followed by Ray-Man Legends and you’ll see what I mean. Aside from the essential stuff like responsiveness and predictability there there are lots of differences in how they feel. On top of that there’s subtle (almost invisible) things these game do to make the player feel more in control. For instance, Mario allows to to successfully jump upwards from a ledge for a few frames after you might actually have walked off of it and Ray-Man subtly alters jump arks to guide the character between tricky platforms. These give the player a sense that they’re better and more accurate than they actually are and they make the game feel more enjoyable as a whole. With all this in mind and an understanding of how I wanted The Moonstone Equation to feel when it was played I set about implementing my variation of platform handling. Sprite based level editor If I was going to get anything completed I needed some tools that made the process of creating my game world as quick and fluid as possible. For that reason I opted to stick with 16×16 pixel tiles and a level editor built into the game. This is one of the areas where all that UI system wok really payed off. Making and changing editor dialogs is reasonably easy. Procedural tile selection To further speed things up I implemented some procedural tile selection for particular sprite sets. Things like selection based on tile neighbour or selection from a random pool. Decoration As this isn’t actually the last century there’s nothing to stop me from breaking a few rules for aesthetics when I want to. I’ve opted for an aligned grid of tiles to aid the primary game rules and give a particular look to the but sometimes I might want to place a decorative sprite in a very specific place. It’s all just polygons in the end so I made sure the editor allowed me to choose between grid-snapping and free placement. Lighting Ambient occlusion and light flow are not things I think I’ve ever seen in a 2d tile based game. So I implemented it. It allows me to better control the mood of the levels as well as helps differentiate The Moonstone Equation from all the thousands of other games it has to complete with in the wider world. Someday I’ll write a long article about how it’s done. For now I’ll summarise by saying; lots of maths that it took some time to get it looking just right. Virtual Machine The Moonstone Equation contains a few dozen computer terminals for the player to interact with. I wanted them to have rich functionality and really feel like computers (rather than the elaborate text boxes and menus used in many other games) so I basically implemented them as virtual computers; between them they’re running over 50 different little programs from games to email and services. To make all this stuff work I approached the problem from two sides with the aim of meeting in the middle. Machine definition The first step was to define the virtual computer I wanted to use. I didn’t need it to be an accurate simulation of the inner workings of actual hardware, I needed it to be convincing (and interesting). I started with the terminal display. It’s handled through a pixel shader referencing a 32×32 pixel texture representing screen memory. Each pixel can be one of 256 colours corresponding to one of 256 code symbols arranged in a grid on a larger texture. This basically means that I can use a 1024 byte array as traditional terminal screen memory with byte values representing letters (just like ASCII). It might sound archaic but it’s actually very refreshing to use. Once that was all working I wrote hundreds of simple helper functions to act as the basic terminal tool-set. These included things to write text, scroll the screen contents, read keyboard input, draw lines and so on. As this isn’t a real simulation, these were all just written in C++. The next step was to define the virtual processor that was going to actually handle the running of my little programs. Again because it’s not a simulation I could cheat, so I opted for a simple stack machine with 36 basic instructions that could operate on a range of types (ints, floats, bools and strings). This instruction set also included the ability to call specifically formatted C++ functions so once I’d created some glue code the virtual processor was interfacing directly with the entire terminal tool-set (along with any other functions I wanted to expose). Compiler At this point I switched to the other end of the problem. The tools to allow me to write code for these virtual machines. I wanted to write code using something that was enough like C/C++ to make it easy for me to write. I can write in C++ much faster than I can write pascal because I do it most of every day (I would also mean I could use code colouring in Visual Studio). It also needed to be simple, I didn’t want to extend the virtual machine functionality to accommodate it. At this point there was a bit of a pause while I did lots of reading. I obviously needed to do research for many of the other areas I’ve already covered but I think this is the only place I stopped and read nearly a whole book on the subject. If you ever feel the need to write a compiler I recommend reading Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, it’s basically got everything you need to get started all in one place, which is nice. In the end I opted to support C style syntax for functions and statements along with simple static allocation of basic variables, no structs and definitely nothing like classes. This was more than enough. With my language defined I set about creating the abstract syntax tree representation of it followed by converting it all into reverse polish notation (Code parsing is full of some great terminology). I didn’t find a need go beyond this to an intermediate language and I didn’t implement any optimisation steps aside from pre-evaluating constant statements. I’d opted to implement a stack machine (on purpose) So the result was something I could simply traverse to generate the instructions required by the virtual machine. The machine instructions could just be saved as a block of unsigned integers in a binary file. The result Doing all this extra work for the in game terminals meant I could implement a much richer experience for the player. Instead of simple boxes of text I’ve created full games to play, email systems, research terminals, and machine monitors that contain relevant and dynamic content. With a bit more work I went on to allow the virtual characters in the world to make use of all the terminals as a connected research network; sending messages to each other (and the player), logging in (and out) daily to create reports or write journals and just generally adding another layer of believably to the world that I couldn’t have done without it. Persistent real-time It’s been done in a few games but I don’t know of any puzzle-platformers containing a world that persists and changes while you’re away (a little bit like Animal Crossing). It would be trivial to just write some code that read the clock and made decisions based on it but (obviously) I wanted something a little more interesting. The first step was to make sure that in the places within The Moonstone Equation world where you could see the sky it (and the lighting) reflected the time of day. I already had a dynamic lighting system so this was the simpler part. The next step was to make sure that the characters and many of the objects in the world developed over real-time as well as in response to the actions of the player. This itself can be broken down into two parts. First there’s the simple but laborious task of making sure that the characters take account of any passed time when they say things to the player. So if someone hasn’t seen you for weeks they might comment on it, especially if they expected to see you sooner; or if they always see you early in the morning they might ask about you sleeping habits. This was basically achieved by a combination of heuristics and branching conversation trees that can persist or change over time; this also produces an absolutely huge number of possible ways to experience the story elements of the game, which is nice. The Second and more complicated part was making the world feel like it’s a little more alive. Characters are supposed to be doing research, sending emails, writing reports and notes, resting, going to sleep and so on. Things like the position of commonly used objects like books, mugs, small machines, boxes and so on should change over time. You’ll even see some plants grow if you play for long enough. For the characters this was achieved using a simple AI simulation that gives everyone a rough schedule and simple goals. This simulation is updated for the passage of real-time and when you return after being away it just catches up when the game loads (which is why it needs to be very simple). The objects in the world that change do so in only a few ways. Plants and such progressively develop from an initial form to a final (usually more interesting) state. Renewables like the contents of the vending machines cycle through a pattern with occasionally interesting ‘special’ states. Variable objects like the books or boxes on shelves are subject to semi-random changes based on how often they’re used. Finally there are some special objects develop in specific ways depending on things like plot and player action. When it’s all considered together, the areas of the game world where people live and work hopefully feel like that’s happening all the time. It also allows for some contrast against the areas of the game where it (intentionally) looks a little bit more like time stands still. Other Bits Just like in the engine there are lots of little parts of the game that are essential glue between the larger parts that are not large enough for a whole section of their own. Here are a few. Controller Switching Many less people than you might expect actually own a gamepad for their PC (about 12%-16%) so making sure your game is fun and playable on keyboard is critical stuff. The Moonstone Equation feels as good on game-pad as it does on keyboard. It’s also important to allow your players to switch from one to the other as they choose while the game is running, including unplugging or plugging in a controller. This should all happen seamlessly and without fuss. I’ve seen plenty of (sometimes big) games fail at this. Oh, and don’t forget that all those on screen controller hints will need to match the input device. I opted to make The Moonstone Equation so it can be played to completion using either game-pad or a keyboard but there are some occasions where you have to type on the keyboard if you want to experience everything; I think the computer terminals feel more authentic if you get to type simple commands into them. I hope that very few people find this design choice odd or inconvenient. I expect that everyone has a keyboard within easy reach and I have a very very low expectation of ever porting my game to a games console. Game Saves The earlier work on the engine to support structured files and versioning made most of the task of supporting game saves file a lot simpler. The hardest part was making sure that I could reliably iterate through all the world data and apply the changes the player had made since they started playing without missing anything new I’d added to the game since the save file was created. Effects There’s lots of different types of dynamic moments within the game world that call for some sort of audio-visual response. I didn’t write a particle system within the main engine because I didn’t want to spend the time writing the tools that would be required to turn a general purpose system into specific effects for specific occasions. Instead I opted to implement a simple code based system that make use of the dynamic vertex/index buffer handling to continuously generate particles when needed. It’s not the most optimal approach but I only need a few thousand particles at a time; PC hardware has been capable of those sorts of numbers for a long time. Along with the general particle stuff there’s also a few parts of the game that use pixel shader effects. These are always much easier to write directly as needed; especially when you’ve already written the rest of the engine. Conclusion Congratulations, You’ve battled through ten thousand words of my rambling warning about the risks and effort involved in making everything yourself (or you’ve just scrolled to the bottom to read this bit). If you’re still considering starting from some very basic point and writing an engine as well as a game then great, you’ve obviously got some serious determination. However, there are a few significant things I’ve left out (along with many small things). For a start I’ve only focused on the technical aspects of game creation, There’s a lot more to game production than just that. I’ve not mentioned the thousands of (occasionally animated) sprites that went into the Moonstone Equation, or all the other artwork and UI. On top of that there’s the creation and balancing of hundreds of sound effects and the composition and production of a dozen or so musical scores. If you opt for branching narrative and puzzles as I have you can expect that to take up a significant amount of time too. Once all that’s done (actually before all that’s done) you’ve also got to consider how you’re going to tell everyone/anyone about your amazing creation; that means marketing. So now you’ll also need to create screenshots, videos, trailers and other promotional materials along with a website, social media accounts and forums to put it all on to allow you to communicate with the fans and supporters you hope to find. All this effort might also lead you to write a long rambling article warning others about the perils (and potential folly) of your protracted development methods. Good Luck.
When someone mentions “paranoid ’70s thrillers” as an inspirational set of films, one of the movies they’re talking about is Three Days of the Condor. (Anthony and Joe Russo, for example, namechecked it often in the runup to Captain America: The Winter Soldier.) Sydney Pollack’s original film featured Robert Redford as a low-level CIA analyst whose entire office cohort is murdered while he’s out at lunch; he spends the rest of the film eluding his own death while trying to figure out what’s going on. And now David Ellison’s Skydance Productions, which backs the Mission: Impossible and new Star Trek films, is developing a Three Days of the Condor remake for TV. THR reports, saying that Skydance is just developing the approach now, with MGM and Paramount TV. Jason Smilovic (Lucky Number Slevin) and Todd Katzberg are writing, and they’re staring to take it out to various networks and possible broadcast homes. But at this point there’s no indication as to whether this would be a limited “event series” or a show intended to go for multiple seasons. The basic concept is certainly fertile, and despite the changes in technology, media and politics in the 40 years since the original source novel and Pollack’s film, there’s no shortage of paranoia now, and that’s what the story really trades on. It’s not too difficult to imagine how a remake might keep the basic character set and core approach while changing a lot of material. It’s worth noting that Pollack’s film already upped the stakes from the lean original novel by James Grady, and a longer series adaptation could add even more twists and turns, with plenty of room to express new paranoid avenues that have come into play since the film originally hit theaters. The real problem is that there’s no one quite like a young Robert Redford to anchor the cast.
Three-year campaign edges to fruition as late amendment tabled that will stop companies using laws to silence critics A three-year campaign to reform Britain's "chilling" libel laws is days away from victory after the government did a U-turn on a key proposal which would prevent companies using defamation laws to silence their critics. In an 11th-hour heave to get the defamation bill on the statute books, the government has tabled a fresh amendment that will prevent big businesses from suing newspapers, academics or citizens unless they can first prove "substantial financial loss" has been caused by their critics. The amendment will mean a new law forcing a court to strike out an application to sue "unless the body corporate can show that the publication of the words of matters complained of has caused, or is likely to cause, substantial financial loss to the claimant". Mike Harris, head of advocacy at Index on Censorship said: "We are cautiously optimistic that this should deliver the type of reform we were hoping for to stop corporations bullying individuals." The lobby group has been at the vanguard of a campaign to change Britain's laws which has let to controversial including one which saw a big US healthcare company sue a British cardiologist, Dr Peter Wilmshurt, who criticised their research and another where the British Chiropractic Association sued a British science writer, Simon Singh. The government blocked Labour's attempts to get a blanket ban on the statute books last week, but promised to reconsider the wording in the face of huge criticism that if the current libel laws weren't change, big businesses would continue to use their financial muscle to "take journalists out of the game". Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs were concerned that companies were also using the laws to silence academics and doctors who had been sued for criticising medical companies and health practitioners. "This amendment makes clear that bodies trading for profit must have suffered or be likely to suffer serious financial loss in order to satisfy the serious harm test for bringing a defamation claim," said a spokesman for the ministry of justice. Labour will support this amendment when the bill returns to the House of Lords on Tuesday. Shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan said: "We're pleased the government has accepted Labour's argument that a hurdle is needed before corporations can pursue defamation proceedings." However, the party still has concerns over government opposition to a law which would prevent companies contracted by local authorities to sue citizen critics. "We need a level playing field so that criticism of, say, a privately run prison is allowed just as it is allowed about prisons run by the public sector," said Khan. The party will push for its original Lords amendment, which was removed in the commons last week, to be reinstated. Lord Lester, who has spearheaded the campaign for libel reform, has tabled a third amendment aimed at putting belt and braces on legislation which bars local authorities from suing their critics. This ban has already been established in case law following a dispute between Derbyshire council and the Times newspaper, but he is concerned that the Localism Act of 2011 undoes some of this precedent. If the bill gets through the house of Lords on Tuesday it should have a safe passage to the statute books, ending a three-year battle by Lester and campaign groups including Index on Censorship, English Pen and Sense about Science.
PUERTO PRINCESA CITY, Philippines -The military’s Western Command (WESCOM) on Monday warned factions of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in Palawan to stop their recruitment activity as it was sowing fear among the people. Recruitment of members is prohibited under the peace process, added the Armed Forces of the Philippines. WESCOM spokesperson Captain Cherryl Tindog told the Philippine News Agency that “recruitment activities of any MNLF faction are provocative and inimical to the commitment to attain enduring peace.” Since the first quarter of the year, WESCOM has been continuously receiving reports about MNLF recruitment activities “from the ground,” and these are now causing public anxiety, according to her. “We have received intelligence that some MNLF front runners are recruiting in southern Palawan. To convince new recruits, they are exploiting President Rodrigo Duterte’s bid for a shift to federalism, and they are also pledging to give them money, identification cards, and firearms,” she said. The amount of compensation promised is said to range between P20,000 and P30,000. “They are supposed to get this after paying a required registration fee,” she said. The sightings were reported in Aborlan, Quezon, Rizal, and Bataraza in southern Palawan; at least two barangays in the fringes of Puerto Princesa going south; and in the northern towns of Taytay and El Nido. “They even had their selfies taken with local officials in one event in a southern Palawan municipality to show that their recruitment is legal. They wore uniforms bearing the name MNLF,” Tindog stated. She said they attempted to put up a MNLF camp in Bataraza town, but Mayor Abraham Ibba ordered the members not to persist because it was illegal under the comprehensive peace process and without his authority. Rip-off, dangerous “Aside from the fact that the recruitment [activities] all have the trimmings of being a scam, a rip-off — to fraud people into paying hard-earned money, what really raises our concern is the declaration of issuance of firearms, which is an outright violation of the peace process,” she said. Earlier, lawyer Teodoro Jose Matta, legal adviser of the Palawan government and vice-chair of the Provincial Peace and Order Council (PPOC), also confirmed to PNA reports about the recruitment sightings. “Yes, we are monitoring it. These acts are not allowed under the peace agreement. We have been monitoring this with WESCOM,” said Matta. In Palawan, there are two factions of the Moro separatist group: the MNLF under Prof. Nur Misuari, and the MNLF Mainstream (Central Committee) that takes command from Yusop Jikiri, the former governor of Sulu province in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). MNLF Mainstream high-ranking leader Estino Jairie Ayyobie, whose group alliance is with Jikiri, said they have heard about the concern and stressed their group was not involved. “We have heard about it, but we are not the one recruiting new members. It is not allowed for us to recruit under the peace process. What is allowed is only to reactivate our old MNLF members,” Ayyobie said. Ayyobie admitted this was treacherous, particularly because their faction was most often the one being accused. The MNLF bloc under Jikiri’s leadership is the biggest faction that is not hostile to President Duterte’s leadership and not antagonistic to the peace treaty, said Ayyobie. Promise of salary a hoax On compensation promises, there is no way the bona fide MNLF will pay salary, said the senior Moro leader. “I’ve been a member of the MNLF for more than 40 years, and not once have I been paid my salary,” he said. Ayyobie suggested that the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP) resolve the problem. A highly-placed source in OPAPP said in a text message: “The MNLF are not allowed to recruit. We have already reported this issue to the MNLF Implementing Panel for them to put a stop to it not only in Palawan.” This was in response to the text message from PNA inquiring if MNLF factions were allowed to recruit. The source said OPAPP would meet with all MNLF factions in the province to talk on the PAMANA or PAyapa at MAsaganang PamayaNAn, the national government’s “convergence program that extends development interventions to isolated, hard-to-reach and conflict-affected communities, ensuring that they are not left behind.” “Then, perhaps we can talk about other issues,” said the OPAPP source, who requested anonymity for now. Monitoring the movements of the MNLF recruiters is part of WESCOM’s efforts to continuously keep “Palawan safe” from any threat, Tindog said. “We continue to encourage the public to report to WESCOM any suspicious individual or group movements to ensure that they are safe, as well as their communities. Keeping Palawan safe involves more importantly the support of its people,” she said. Reports can be made by calling or texting the WESCOM Emergency Hotline 09178960014, and by accessing the Volunteers for a Safe Palawan Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/volunteersforasafepalawan/ Tindog gave assurances that WESCOM would keep anonymous the identities of those with useful information if they fear reprisal.
After being ignored by a company owned by the world’s richest man Carlos Slim, a tiny Mexican village has developed its own mobile network with international connections. The local service costs 15 pesos ($1.2) per month-13 times cheaper than a big firm’s basic plan in Mexico City, AFP reports. The village of Villa Talea de Castro , dotted with small pink and yellow homes, has a population of 2,500 indigenous people. Tucked away in a lush forest in the southern state of Oaxaca, it was not seen as a profitable market for companies such as Slim’s America Movil. The company wanted at least 10,000 subscribers to bring the village into its mobile coverage, AFP said.So the village, under an initiative launched by indigenous groups, civil organizations and universities, put up an antenna on a rooftop, installed radio and computer equipment, and created its own micro provider called Red Celularde Talea (RCT) this year.Calls to the United States, where many of the indigenous Zapoteco resident have migrated, charge a few pennies per minute.
“The View” host Joy Behar had to eat some crow on Monday after celebrating a story on air that turned out to be inaccurate. On Friday’s broadcast, the longtime host, 75, was handed a card with breaking news. She read from ABC News' exclusive “report” from Brian Ross that stated: “Michael Flynn promised full cooperation to the Mueller team and is prepared to testify that, as a candidate, Donald Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians.” Hours later, ABC News was forced to correct that report from Ross, noting that the alleged directive came after Donald Trump had already been elected president, not when he was a candidate. Because of the error, ABC News suspended Ross for four weeks without pay. Behar read the false report on air, prompting her audience to break into uproarious applause, which co-host Meghan McCain compared to Oprah’s now famous car giveaway. On Monday, Behar tried to make light of the error. “On Friday’s show, apparently I was guilty of premature evaluation. I hear they have a pill for that,” she said. In a statement read on “The View” Monday, ABC News said the report “had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process.” “It is vital we get the story right and retain the trust we have built with our audience,” the statement continued. “These are our core principles. We fell far short of that yesterday.” “People are slamming this as fake news, I think it’s a mistake,” Behar said, throwing the topic to the panel. “I will say that fake news and what we did on Friday, that’s what I was being accused of being a part of. I don’t want to sit on a show where I feel like we’re giving fake news or acting irresponsibly,” McCain said. However, the panel, which included Behar, McCain, Sara Haines, Ana Navarro and Sunny Hostin, seemed to unanimously agree that Ross’ suspension was warranted, but called it an error instead of deliberate, misleading fake news. “He clearly made a mistake, he’s paying the consequences for that mistake, and I think it’s a good standard,” Navarro said. “Now, it’s the same standard I’d like to hold the president of the United States to.”
Dimitris Costopoulos stood, worry beads in hand, under brilliant blue skies in front of the Greek parliament. Wearing freshly pressed trousers, polished shoes and a smart winter jacket – “my Sunday best” – he had risen at 5am to get on the bus that would take him to Athens 200 miles away and to the great sandstone edifice on Syntagma Square. By his own admission, protests were not his thing. At 71, the farmer rarely ventures from Proastio, his village on the fertile plains of Thessaly. “But everything is going wrong,” he lamented on Tuesday, his voice hoarse after hours of chanting anti-government slogans. “Before there was an order to things, you could build a house, educate your children, spoil your grandchildren. Now the cost of everything has gone up and with taxes you can barely afford to survive. Once I’ve paid for fuel, fertilisers and grains, there is really nothing left.” Costopoulos is Greece’s Everyman; the human voice in a debt crisis that refuses to go away. Eight years after it first erupted, the drama shows every sign of reigniting, only this time in a new dark age of Trumpian politics, post-Brexit Europe, terror attacks and rise of the populist far right. “I grow wheat,” said Costopoulos, holding out his wizened hands. “I am not in the building behind me. I don’t make decisions. Honestly, I can’t understand why things are going from bad to worse, why this just can’t be solved.” As Greece hurtles towards another full-blown confrontation with the creditors keeping it afloat, and as tensions over stalled bailout negotiations mount, it is a question many are asking. The country’s epic struggle to avert bankruptcy should have been settled when Athens received €110bn in aid – the biggest financial rescue programme in global history – from the EU and International Monetary Fund in May 2010. Instead, three bailouts later, it is still wrangling over the terms of the latest €86bn emergency loan package, with lenders also at loggerheads and diplomats no longer talking of a can, but rather a bomb, being kicked down the road. Default looms if a €7.4bn debt repayment – money owed mostly to the European Central Bank – is not honoured in July. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Farmer Dimitris Costopoulos in front of the Greek parliament in Athens. Photograph: Helena Smith for the Observer Amid the uncertainty, volatility has returned to the markets. So, too, has fear, with an estimated €2.2bn being withdrawn from banks by panic-stricken depositors since the beginning of the year. With talk of Greece’s exit from the euro being heard again, farmers, trade unions and other sectors enraged by the eviscerating effects of austerity have once more come out in protest. From his seventh-floor office on Mitropoleos, Makis Balaouras, an MP with the governing Syriza party, has a good view of the goings-on in Syntagma. Demonstrations – what the former trade unionist calls “the movement” – are a fine thing. “I wish people were out there mobilising more,” he sighed. “Protests are in our ideological and political DNA. They are important, they send a message.” This is the irony of Syriza, the leftwing party catapulted to power on a ticket to “tear up” the hated bailout accords widely blamed for extraordinary levels of Greek unemployment, poverty and emigration. Two years into office it has instead overseen the most punishing austerity measures to date, slashing public-sector salaries and pensions, cutting services, agreeing to the biggest privatisation programme in European history and raising taxes on everything from cars to beer – all of which has been the price of the loans that have kept default at bay and Greece in the euro. In the maelstrom the economy has improved, with Athens achieving a noticeable primary surplus last year, but the social crisis has intensified. For men like Balaouras, who suffered appalling torture for his leftwing beliefs at the hands of the 1967-74 colonels’ regime, the policies have been galling. With the IMF and EU arguing over the country’s ability to reach tough fiscal targets when the current bailout expires in August next year, the demand for €3.6bn of more measures has left many in Syriza reeling. Without upfront legislation on the reforms, creditors say, they cannot conclude a compliance review on which the next tranche of bailout aid hangs. “We had an agreement,” insisted Balaouras, looking despondently down at his desert boots. “We kept to our side of the deal, but the lenders haven’t kept to their side because now they are asking for more. We want the review to end. We want to go forward. This situation is in the interests of no one. But to get there we have to have an honourable compromise. Without that there will be a clash.” It had been hoped that an agreement would be struck on Monday at what had been billed as a high-stakes meeting of euro area finance ministers. On Friday, EU officials announced that the deadline had been all but missed because there had been little convergence between the two sides. With the Netherlands holding general elections next month, and France and Germany also heading to the polls in May and September, fears of the dispute becoming increasingly politicised have added to its complexity. Highlighting those concerns, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, attempted to end the rift that has emerged between eurozone lenders and the IMF over the fund’s insistence that Greece can only begin to recover if its €320bn debt pile is reduced substantially. In talks with Christine Lagarde, the Washington-based IMF’s managing director, Merkel agreed to discuss the issue during a further meeting between the two women to be held on Wednesday. The IMF has steadfastly refused to sign up to the latest bailout, arguing that Greek debt is not only unmanageable but on a trajectory to become explosive by 2030. Berlin, the biggest contributor of the €250bn Greece has so far received, says it will be unable to disburse further funds without the IMF on board. The assumption is that the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, will cave in, just as he did when the country came closest yet to leaving the euro at the height of the crisis in the summer of 2015. But the 41-year-old leader, like Syriza, has been pummelled in the polls. Persuading disaffected backbenchers to support more measures, and then selling them to a populace exhausted by repeated rounds of austerity, will be extremely difficult. Disappointment has increasingly given way to the death of hope – a sentiment reinforced by the realisation that Cyprus and other bailed-out countries, by contrast, are no longer under international supervision. In his city centre office, the former finance minister Evangelos Venizelos pondered where Greece’s predicament was now. “[We are] at the same point we were several years ago,” he joked. “The only difference is that anti-European sentiment is growing. What was once a very friendly country towards Europe is becoming increasingly less so, and with that comes a lot of danger, a lot of risk.” When historians look back they, too, may conclude that Greece has expended a great deal of energy not moving forward at all. The arc of crisis that has swept the country – coursing like a cancer through its body politic, devastating its public health system, shattering lives – has been an exercise in the absurd. The feat of pulling off the greatest fiscal adjustment in modern times has spawned a slump longer and deeper than the Great Depression, with the Greek economy shrinking more than 25% since the crisis began. Even if the latest impasse is broken and a deal is reached with creditors soon, few believe that in a country of weak governance and institutions it will be easy to enforce. Political turbulence will almost certainly beckon; the prospect of “Grexit” will grow. “Grexit is the last thing we want, but we may arrive at a point of serious dilemmas,” said Venizelos. “Whatever deal is reached will be very difficult to implement, but that notwithstanding, it is not the memoranda [the bailout accords] that caused the crisis. The crisis was born in Greece long before.” Like every crisis government before it, Tsipras’s administration is acutely aware that salvation will come only when Greece can return to the markets and raise funds. What happens in the weeks ahead could determine if that is likely to happen at all. Back in Syntagma, Costopoulos the good-natured farmer ponders what lies ahead. Like every Greek, he stands to be deeply affected. “All I know is that we are all being pushed,” he said, searching for the right words. “Pushed in the direction of somewhere very explosive, somewhere we do not want to be.”
Alan Jones will go back to school on checking his facts and have his editorial copy subbed for errors before being broadcast under new measures from ACMA. Pre-broadcast fact-checking, by the program’s executive producer, of any material provided by third parties and any editorial pieces scripted by Jones. Identification, by the executive producer, of controversial issues of public importance that are not covered by other 2GB current affairs programs. Communication of these exceptions to 2GB's program director who will then be responsible to ensure that another current affairs program presents an alternative significant viewpoint to that presented in the program hosted by Jones so that 2GB can discharge its obligations under the codes. Creation and retention (for at least six weeks) of records of the verification material sourced by the executive producer for the facts contained in the editorial pieces. Training will be conducted (including with Jones) focusing on the ACMA findings concerning factual accuracy and significant viewpoints. Alan Jones' editorial comments will be fact-checked before going to air, under a deal struck between 2GB management and the Australian Communications and Media Authority. The controversial broadcaster will also undergo training to ensure his on-air statements are factually accurate and that he understands the Commercial Radio Codes of Practice. 2GB, Sydney's top-rating network, will also have to make greater efforts to ensure the station presents a range of viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance. The agreement -- detailed by ACMA this morning -- tops off a torrid month for Jones, whose show has been hit by an advertiser exodus following public uproar about his statement that Prime Minister Julia Gillard's father died of shame. Earlier this month, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal ordered Jones to apologise on air and in writing for describing Lebanese Muslims in Sydney as "vermin" and "mongrels" in 2005. The 2GB/ACMA deal follows a June finding that Jones breached the broadcasting code by claiming human beings produce only 0.001% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. ACMA found that statement, made on air in 2011, was unsubstantiated and 2GB had not made "reasonable efforts" to ensure its accuracy. 2GB admitted to the media watchdog that "no research was conducted by staff and that Mr Jones researched the figures himself". A 2GB review subsequently found the station does have fact-checking measures in place, but that Jones' editorial pieces do not always include the involvement of his wider editorial team. Jones was also found guilty of breaching accuracy requirements in 2009 comments about a missing Irish national and 2010 comments about native vegetation. Among the measures to be implemented by 2GB are:2GB has not responded to Crikey's requests for comment.
The Buffalo Bills have declined to use the franchise tag on their top cornerback Stephon Gilmore, which would’ve paid him $14.2 million for the 2017 season in order to keep the former 10th overall pick on the Bills roster for at least another year. Now, it appears Gilmore will be testing the free agent market to seek out the big money deal he’s been demanding since last training camp. According to multiple sources via Pro Football Talk, Gilmore will be looking to exceed the deal Janoris Jenkins scored on the open market last offseason (five-year, $62.5 million), and it’s quite possible he could be looking to match or exceed Richard Sherman’s contract (four-year, $56 million). Annually, that would cost potential suitors around $14 million per season. With Washington Redskins cornerback Josh Norman inflating the market last offseason (five-year, $75 million), the price for borderline great-to-elite cornerbacks will be on the rise thanks to the rapid growth of the salary cap. Other free agent cornerbacks who will benefit from these factors are A.J. Bouye, Logan Ryan and Dre Kirkpatrick. While Gilmore has flashed the ability of a shutdown cornerback, the inconsistencies have plagued his career. Standing 6-foot-1 with 4.4 speed, Gilmore possesses rare physical tools that are coveted in today’s NFL, which will persuade a lot of NFL teams to throw boatloads of cash at him once free agency commences. With limited cap space, a ton of needs and 24 unrestricted free agents on the dock, the Bills may have no other choice but to let their No. 1 cornerback pursue greener (literally) pastures in free agency.
One of the world's longest high-speed railways has started operating in China, linking the country's prosperous eastern coast to the less-developed southwest, the state Xinhua news agency has reported. Just how many tunnels does China's #Shanghai-#Kunming high speed rail run through? Watch footage taken along part of the route pic.twitter.com/Dma3iKaKmH — People's Daily,China (@PDChina) December 28, 2016 The 2,264-kilometer Shanghai-Kunming rail line runs across the five provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guizhou and Yunnan. It cuts the travel time from Shanghai to the capital of Southwest China's Yunnan province Kunming from 34 to 11 hours. The #Shanghai-#Kunming high-speed railway, the longest east-west high-speed railway in China, starts operation on Wednesday pic.twitter.com/B3Mi1BZuL1 — China Xinhua News (@XHNews) December 28, 2016 According to train driver Wang Jinda, the trains can travel at speeds up to 330 kilometers per hour. In 2012, China started operating another high-speed link, the 2,298-km Beijing-Guangzhou line which stretches north to south. READ MORE: China to build 'world’s largest' high-speed railway station under Great Wall The country has more than 20,000 km of high-speed rail lines and expects to more than double that to 45,000 km by 2030. 570 meters above valley! World’s highest bridge in SW China's Guizhou ready to open for #Shanghai–Kunming High-Speed Railway pic.twitter.com/PWNrLXPWc1 — People's Daily,China (@PDChina) December 23, 2016 Beijing is also actively developing its own high-speed train technology. In the summer it set a new speed record with a train reaching 840 km per hour on a test run. Two trains were tested at the same time to prove the quality of Chinese technology. The trains, known as Golden Phoenix and Dolphin Blue zipped past each other with only 1.6 meters of space between them. China tests two 420 kmph bullet trains at once https://t.co/5WZs2R6xxtpic.twitter.com/ZROdGU6blC — RT (@RT_com) July 15, 2016 China recently unveiled plans to build the world’s deepest and largest high-speed railway station as part of its preparations for hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics. The station will be constructed directly underneath Badaling – the most-visited section of the Great Wall of China, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors a day. The three-floor underground station will be located along the railway which is currently being built to connect the cities of Beijing and Zhangjiakou. The track will stretch 174km and is expected to be finished by 2019. READ MORE: China to build 400km/h train for Russia's high-speed railway China is also developing a new generation of trains capable of reaching speeds of 400 kilometers per hour for Russia's Moscow-Kazan high-speed railway. Beijing plans to provide a $6 billion loan for the route which in future may become a part of a $100 billion high-speed railway connecting the two countries. WATCH MORE:
FEATURES Scott Hartsman Talks Guilds, Games, Corgis and More Gaiscioch Magazine managed to catch up with Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds, at PAX West 2016 in Seattle, WA for a short video interview. In our interview Scott discusses the development challenges with regard to differences in perception of guilds and player bases from the eastern and western regions. He shares how corgis infiltrated Trion Worlds and started making their way into their games. In addition he shares some information about RIFT, ArcheAge, Trove, Atlas Reactor and Devilian in this general overall look at the Trion Worlds big picture. Watch the interview below to hear some interesting responses to questions asked by the Gaiscioch Community. About the Author Benjamin "Foghladha" Foley Managing Editor Benjamin founded the Gaiscioch Social Gaming Community in 2001 and has since been the founder & activities director for this well known community. His role has gone beyond just running the Gaming Community and now includes running the Athletics Program in Portland, Oregon, as well as acting as the Managing Editor of the Gaiscioch Magazine, and is the Lead Producer on the Gaiscioch Livestream Productions. Additionally he networks with game developers to form relationships between Gaiscioch and development studios. His experience in publishing dates back to helping his Grandparents who operated a printing press for over 40 years. In high school and college Benjamin excelled in journalism and played an active part in the school newspaper. Benjamin currently works full time as the director of technology for a franchise trade publication & education company. View Profile About RIFT RIFT is an epic fantasy adventure set in the magical world of Telara. As an Ascended hero, you’ll battle against legions of elemental invaders, purge evils from dungeons and raids, and explore your way across the vast planes of existence. Whether you’re fighting titans at the edge of the cosmos or building your very own Dimension, endless adventures await. Learn More RELATED CONTENT FROM AROUND THE WEB SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
Aaaaaand finished. Alex Verus #8 is written, has had its first brief edit, and is in the hands of my publishers as of two days ago. This one has been really tough to get through – I started around October 1st of last year, meaning that I’ve been working on it for six and a half months straight. I don’t generally take breaks when I’m working on a new book, at least not for more than a day or two, and so the first thing I’m going to be doing as of next week is going on holiday. I’ll queue up some posts for the website, and I’ll try to clear my now-far-too-big email backlog before I go. The bad news (for those who’ve just finished Burned and want to know what’ll happen next) is that just because I’ve finished the second draft, that doesn’t mean it’ll be published anytime soon. I did a blog post on the writing process and wait times, but the short version is that my books take at least 10 months to go from first draft to publication, and that’s the low end. The average is more like a year. So I wouldn’t expect Alex Verus #8 to be out in shops and on the Kindle store until around Spring 2017. Yes, I know it’s a long time to wait. Sorry. But in the meantime, if there’s anything you REALLY want to know, you can ask me at my Reddit AMA on r/fantasy this coming Tuesday, on April 26th. For those who don’t know, a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) is pretty much what it sounds like – a general Q&A aimed at fans and other interested parties. I’ll be starting it at 12pm GMT on April 26th, and finishing at 12pm GMT on April 27th; in between those times I’ll check in regularly and answer anything I can. I’ll post a direct link on Twitter and here one the AMA goes live. And that’s about it! See some of you (hopefully) on Tuesday and I’ll have more to tell you then!
The pronunciation in English is lay-say-fair. Its French origins date back to the late Renaissance. As the story goes, it was first used about the year 1680, a time when the nation-state was on the rise throughout Europe. The French finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, asked a merchant named M. Le Gendre what the state could do to promote industry. According to legend, the reply came: “Laissez-nous faire,” or “let it be.” This incident was reported in 1751 in the Journal Oeconomique by the free-trade champion Rene de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson. The slogan was codified finally in the words of Vincent de Gournay: “Laissez-faire et laissez-passer, le monde va de lui même!” The loose translation: “Let it be and let goods pass; the world goes by itself.” To generalize the principle: Leave the world alone, it manages itself. A Simple, Beautiful Ideal People should enjoy the liberty to manage their own lives, associate as they please, exchange with anyone and everyone.All these renderings express not only the idea of free trade — a main subject of dispute in 18th-century European politics — but also a larger and more-beautiful vision of the way society can be permitted to work. This idea can be summed up in the phrase “laissez-faire,” or in the doctrine of what was once called simply liberalism, which today is clarified as classical liberalism. This idea is this: Society contains within itself the capacity for ordering and managing its own path of development. It follows that people should enjoy the liberty to manage their own lives, associate as they please, exchange with anyone and everyone, own and accumulate property and otherwise be unencumbered by state expansion into their lives. In the centuries that have followed, millions of great thinkers and writers have elaborated on this core idea within all disciplines of the social science. Then as now, there stand two broad schools of thought: those who believe in state control of one or many aspects of the social order and those who believe that such attempts at control are counterproductive to the cause of prosperity, justice, peace and the building of the civilized life. These two ways of thinking are different from what is called the Right and the Left today. The Left is inclined to think that if we let the economic sphere be free, the world will collapse, which advances some theory of the disaster that would befall us all without government control. The Right is similarly convinced that state control is necessary lest the world collapse into violent, warring, culture-destroying gangs. The laissez-faire view rejects both views in favor of what Claude Frédéric Bastiat called “the harmony of interests” that make up the social order. It is the view that the artists, merchants, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and property owners — and not the cartelizing thugs with state power — ought to be permitted to drive the course of history. This view is now held by millions of thinkers around the world. It is the most exciting intellectual movement today, and in places where we might least expect to find it. The growth of the idea of laissez-faire in our times is infused with a digital energy. Distributed networks take the idea to a whole new level: no one in control but everyone in control, with no central point of failure. But the idea itself is not new in world history. Deep Roots Though it is mostly associated with 18th-century British thought, it is a view of society that has much-deeper roots in the Christian Middle Ages and early Jewish thought. Nor is laissez-faire somehow a Western idea alone. The deepest roots of laissez-faire actually trace to ancient China, and even today, the thoughts of the masters offer a fine summary. Here are some examples from non-Western thought: Lao Tzu (6th century B.C.): “The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished…The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be…” “The Sage says: ‘I take no action, yet the people transform themselves, I favor quiescence and the people right themselves, I take no action and the people enrich themselves…’” Chuang Tzu (369-286 B.C.): “I would rather roam and idle about in a muddy ditch, at my own amusement, than to be put under the restraints that the ruler would impose. I would never take any official service, and thereby I will [be free] to satisfy my own purposes...." The world “does simply not need governing; in fact, it should not be governed.” Pao Ching-yen (4th century A.D.): “Where knights and hosts could not be assembled, there was no warfare afield…Ideas of using power for advantage had not yet burgeoned. Disaster and disorder did not occur…People munched their food and disported themselves; they were carefree and contented.” The inviolability of property rights, the primacy of peace in world affairs and the centrality of free association and trade in the conduct of human affairs.Ssu-ma Ch’ien (145-90 B.C.): “Each man has only to be left to utilize his own abilities and exert his strength to obtain what he wishes…When each person works away at his own occupation and delights in his own business, then like water flowing downward, goods will naturally flow ceaseless day and night without being summoned, and the people will produce commodities without having been asked.” These early beginnings of the idea began here but can be traced through thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome and through the Middle Ages, until the notion swept the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, giving rise to unheard-of prosperity, liberty and peace for all. In the 18th century and in large parts of the world (other than the English-speaking world), laissez-faire has been called liberalism or classical liberalism, a doctrine of social organization that can be summed up in the words of Lord Acton: Liberty is the highest political end of humankind. 20th Century Corruption To be sure, the notion of liberalism was already corrupted early in the 20th century. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in his book Liberalism (1929), “The world today wants to hear no more of liberalism. Outside England, the term ‘liberalism’ is frankly proscribed. In England, there are, to be sure, still ‘liberals,’ but most of them are so in name only. In fact, they are rather moderate socialists. Everywhere today, political power is in the hands of the anti-liberal parties.” That remains true today. And the revolt against this is often termed “libertarian,” a word that has long been associated with a primary concern for human liberty. It was a neologism for the postwar generation that was synonymous with liberalism. In current understanding, it refers to a tightening and radicalizing of the old liberal view. It asserts the inviolability of property rights, the primacy of peace in world affairs and the centrality of free association and trade in the conduct of human affairs. It Can Exist The state is on the march, but the resistance is growing.Such a society is not historically unprecedented. Murray Rothbard wrote about Colonial America as an example of a wildly successful experiment of society without centralized state management. Medieval Europe made the first great economic revolution without recourse to the power of the nation-state. David Friedman has documented competitive legal orders in medieval Iceland. Other writers go so far as to say that given how we conduct our lives day to day, relying on the productivity of private institutions and associations, we never really leave a practical anarchy. As Mises says, liberalism/libertarianism/laissez-faire is not a completed doctrine. There are so many areas remaining to be explored and so many applications to make both in history and in our time. The most exciting books of our time are being written from the vantage point of human liberty. The state is on the march, but the resistance is growing. It is a debilitating thing to watch the state push and push to gain more power, under the flags of Equality or Greatness or Security or Fairness, but it is a source of joy to know that ideas are more powerful than all the armies of the world. Reason, clarity, innovation, and relentless work for what is right and true will eventually lead the idea of laissez-faire to victory.
Canada is on track to spend millions over the next three years in its bid to win a rotating two-year seat on the United Nations' Security Council — even as some inside and outside the UN say the election process needs an overhaul. According to the government's own estimates, Canada has already spent almost $500,000 on its campaign, which pits Ottawa against Ireland and Norway for the two available spots, opening in 2021. That includes everything from postage stamps to travel to hospitality. It does not include the salaries of the 10 government employees appointed to work full-time on Canada's bid. I think the way they have to campaign to get the votes has become unacceptable - William Pace, World Federalist Movement "Whatever the number is that they're admitting to, you can be certain it is [many] times more," says William Pace, the executive director of the World Federalist Movement, which advocates for more transparent elections at the UN. The five permanent veto-wielding members on the Security Council are the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia and China, also known as the P5. The remaining 10 seats are distributed to countries on a regional basis. "In terms of prestige … it's a tremendously important achievement for a government," Pace says of membership on the Security Council. ''But I think the way they have to campaign to get the votes has become unacceptable." Pace estimates almost one-third of the 193 UN member states are "undemocratic", which forces some Security Council hopefuls "to buy votes from countries that they ought to be insisting stop causing wars and denying human rights and committing religious and racial discrimination." He does not suggest that Canada is following that path. Horse-trading for a seat at the table Pace says giving aid money to developing countries in return for votes is a common aspect of "horse-trading" for a seat at the UN's top table. New Zealand's UN Ambassador Gerard van Bohemen raises his hand during a vote in December 2016. He said New Zealand flew 60 UN Ambassadors to Wellington during its campaign for a seat. (The Associated Press) Then there are the free trips for UN ambassadors, which have become de rigueur for any country hoping to be elected to the council. New Zealand's envoy to the UN, Gerard van Bohemen, says the trips are a costly and unfortunate aspect of the election process, but "everybody does it now, including developing countries." Van Bohemen hosted about 60 ambassadors over four, week-long trips to New Zealand during his country's campaign for a Security Council seat starting in 2015. He says the trips were not meant to buy votes, but he thinks they garnered some "affection and loyalty," as well as built a greater understanding of his country and its challenges, such as climate change. Campaign treats to the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/UN?src=hash">#UN</a> member states @ Security Council election <a href="http://t.co/Ij1JoJaPe6">pic.twitter.com/Ij1JoJaPe6</a> —@NorwayUN On the day of the vote, delegates will find small gifts piled on their desks in the General Assembly, left by those running for a seat on the council. In addition to the gifts and financial incentives, Pace says "vote-swapping" among member states for posts on various bodies and organizations is common. "You vote for us on this and then we'll vote for you on that." Rising cost of competition Canada is running against Ireland and Norway for two available seats in the Western European and Others Group (WEOG). UN member-states are divided into five geographic groups to ensure regional representation. Two seats open in the WEOG group — which includes New Zealand, Israel and Turkey — every two years. Some regional groups prefer an internal rotation or pre-selection process, eliminating competitive elections on the day of the vote. In less than one month's time, five new countries will be elected to the council for a two-year term, beginning on Jan. 1, 2018. Peru, Poland, Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea and Kuwait are all currently running unopposed in their respective regional groups. "The Western group … thought it was a good example that they would have contested elections," says Pace. "But I believe the world would benefit from the literally hundreds of millions which would be saved from these elections every few years if they would find a different [voting] mechanism." Canada back in the race Canada announced its intent to run again in 2016. Despite winning a seat on the UN Security Council every decade since its inception, in 2010, the Conservative government withdrew its candidacy when it became clear it would not receive the votes required to secure a seat. The projected operational costs for Canada's Security Council bid for fiscal year 2016-2017 were provided by the Department of Foreign Affairs and made public following a request by Conservative MP Guy Lauzon. Of the 10 employees assigned to work full-time on Canada's campaign, almost all were reassigned from within, according to a government spokesperson. Two additional staff based at the Canadian Mission in New York City were hired locally. According to calculations by CBC News, the total remuneration for the 10 employees assigned to work on Canada's bid is between $868,000 and $1.05 million per year. "In terms of democracy, of course competition is good," says ambassador Carl Skau, Security Council co-ordinator for Sweden at the UN. It allows the membership to choose the country they feel is the best fit for the job, but he concedes the system has flaws. "Looking at some campaigns, I think that they have probably crossed the line in terms of what are reasonable costs," says Skau, without naming names. Carl Skau, Security Council co-ordinator for Sweden at the UN, says competition is part of a democracy but admits some campaigns 'have probably crossed the line' in terms of cost. (Richard Drew/Associated Press) Sweden spent $4 million on salaries, envoys and receptions in the last two years of its campaign, according to the government's cost breakdown. Media reports suggest Turkey spent $85 million on its campaign when it won a seat on the council in 2008. Australia reportedly spent just under $25 million when it won a rotating seat in 2012. "We have taken initiatives in the past to try to find some kind of rotation scheme for the WEOG group," Skau says. "To find that formula has proven to be very, very difficult." He adds that contested slates can also make it "awkward" for countries to choose "between friends." Worth the cost? Canadians will probably never know exactly how much is spent ''because there are so many intangibles," Pace says. Despite the cost, New Zealand's van Bohemen maintains a seat at the council is worth fighting for — and that it can be won without compromising principles. "We don't think it's appropriate to leave it entirely to the big guys to call the shots," he says. "Countries like Canada and New Zealand have to be prepared to step up." Voting takes place by secret ballot, so it's never clear until the day of the election whether the money and the effort have paid off — something that Australia's ambassador famously and undiplomatically referred to as the "rotten lying bastards" factor after Canberra lost its bid for a seat on the council in 1996.
Only a few weeks in office and Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s communications team is developing strategies to lift his national profile. Hancock’s media specialists, led by communications director Wil Alston, are working on ways to get him into national publications and onto television news shows, and his name into the smartphones of the country’s top reporters. “We think the ability to raise Denver’s profile is going to be driven by the ability to raise Hancock’s profile,” Alston said. “We have to be proactive. He is a new mayor. He has good legs locally, but he doesn’t have a national presence.” The idea is that more national exposure will bring business and tourists to Denver and spur the local economy. Alston said that among his top priorities as communications director will be to work on developing Hancock’s national profile, while press secretary Amber Miller will work with local media. Mayors across the country have successfully raised their national profiles by working with the media, including Cory Booker of Newark, N.J.; Kasim Reed of Atlanta; and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles. The marketing of Denver’s mayor worked for John Hickenlooper. Shortly after he was elected in 2003, he was presented to East Coast media as a brewpub entrepreneur with unconventional ideas of streamlining government and attacking homelessness. “Hickenlooper was wonderful because he had a bunch of new ideas about government,” said Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation, who was on the trips. “Instead of giving sound bites, he would engage reporters, asking their opinions,” Clark said. “It’s a time-honored tradition. But if you have an uninspiring or undifferentiated politician of any ilk, you don’t last long in those meetings.” Less than 18 months after Hickenlooper was sworn in to office, Time magazine named him one of the nation’s top five mayors. In November 2005, Governing Magazine picked Hickenlooper as the only mayor among the top public officials of the year. Clark is working with the Hancock administration to set up similar media meetings next month and believes Hancock’s inspiring personal story of rising out of poverty and his ideas about spurring Denver’s economy will create the same interest. “Michael has a compelling story, and that will get you in the door,” he said. “He will be able to talk about his ideas, . . . and that will move things along.” The strategy carries risk. Lindy Eichenbaum Lent, Hickenlooper’s communications director in 2003, said the plan back then was to tell Denver’s story, not the mayor’s. “Hickenlooper was never one to toot his own horn,” she said. “It wasn’t about him. It was about Denver. We focused on telling how we were making the most positive impact possible on Denver and welcomed any opportunity to tell Denver’s story to a national audience.” Katy Atkinson, a political consultant, said it’s not a good idea to elevate the man over the city. “If you are trying to get a story out that Denver is open for business, I would think that is a good idea,” she said. “You can do everything you can to be successful, get on to ‘Good Morning America’ and a guest spot on ‘Glee.’ But if he is not getting the kind of coverage he needs here, that is not going to work.” Eric Sondermann, a political analyst, said he would counsel patience to Hancock. “National recognition will come with local success,” he said. “His priority should be firmly grabbing the reins of the office, putting his team in place and dealing with the immediate challenges on his plate. He’s going to be in office for four years. He will have plenty opportunity to pursue a national presence.” Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com
Mourinho’s team are five points clear of Barcelona at the top of the Spanish league, but his position has been undermined by publication of a training-ground argument between the manager and two of his senior players, defender Sergio Ramos and goalkeeper Iker Casillas. The exchange was carried in full by Madrid-based newspaper Marca, which usually serves a cheerleader for the club. Mourinho has not questioned the accuracy of the report, which portrayed him as tetchy and even paranoid. Towards the end of Sunday’s 4-1 win over Athletic Bilbao, some Madrid fans chanted Mourinho’s name, as if to indicate their continued support for him despite the report. However, a larger section of the Bernabéu crowd responded by whistling, sending a clear signal that they are unhappy with the former Chelsea manager. After the game, a leading Spanish journalist, Siro López of AS, told television viewers Mourinho had decided to leave Madrid at the end of the season. López said his source was one of Mourinho’s closest allies. The training-ground exchange occurred after Madrid’s 2-1 defeat at home by Barcelona in the Spanish Cup, after which Mourinho was widely criticised for his side’s negative tactics. They go to the Nou Camp needing to win the second leg. Mourinho claimed Ramos had given a disloyal interview to journalists immediately after the first leg. “You [guys] killed me [with your quotes] in the mixed zone,” Mourinho is reported to have said. According to Marca, Mourinho then claimed that the media gives Spanish internationals such as Ramos and Casillas preferential treatment, while Mourinho has to defend his team from the sternest criticism. “As you Spanish are world champions, your friends in the press protect you ... like the goalkeeper,” he said. Casillas overheard and shouted: “Boss, here we say things to our faces.” Mourinho then became embroiled in an exchange with Ramos over the failure to mark Carlos Puyol for one of Barcelona’s goals. Ramos had the final word with a devastating reference to Mourinho’s modest playing career. “Depending on the match situation, sometimes it’s necessary to change the marking,” he said. “And as you have never been a [professional] player, you wouldn’t know that this is sometimes necessary.” Ramos, though, denied that the exchange revealed divisions within the squad. “Whoever says the changing room is divided or that some kind of fracture exists is lying,” he tweeted yesterday. “This is a great group that is well united, regardless what is said.” Mourinho has also been criticised for the behaviour of Portuguese defender Pepe, who provoked outrage in Spain by feigning injury during the game against Barcelona before appearing to stamp on Lionel Messi's hand without sanction. The Spanish ruling body said yesterday that it will take no action against Pepe after studying the incident. The player insisted it was accidental. Publicly, Mourinho insisted that he would win over the fans who barracked him. “I’m not bothered by the whistles at me,’ he said after the win over Bilbao. “It’s not a problem. “It’s the first time it’s ever happened to me. There’s a first time for practically everything. “[Zinedine] Zidane was whistled at here. Ronaldo has been whistled at here. Cristiano [Ronaldo], who is the latest Golden Boot winner, has also been whistled at. Why can’t I? “Zidane responded with his football, the same as Ronaldo and Cristiano. “I work hard to be able to respond like they did some day, but there may come a day when the fans are sad.” What was said in the Bernebeiu dressing room JOSE MOURINHO: You [plural] killed me in the mixed zone. SERGIO RAMOS: No, mister, you only read what it says in the papers, not everything we said. JM: Sure, because you Spaniards have been world champions and your friends in the media protect you and because the goalkeeper... IKER CASILLAS: Eh, Señor, round here you say things to our faces. JM: Where were you on the first goal [against Barcelona], Sergio? SR: Marking Piqué. JM: Well, you should have been marking Puyol. SR: Yes, but they were blocking us off with Piqué and we decided to change the marking. JM: What? So now you’re playing at being coach? SR: No, but depending on the situation in the game, sometimes you have to change the marking. Because you’ve never been a player, you don’t know that sometimes happens. Source: Marca
Americans bombing Syria. Wow, that escalated quickly. It all started earlier in the week with Trump scapegoating Obama for the chemical attacks in Syria: President Trump on Tuesday blamed his predecessor, Barack Obama, for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s suspected use of chemical weapons in an attack that left dozens, including women and children, dead this week. In a written statement, Trump called the attack “heinous” but blamed it on the Obama administration’s failure to impose consequences on Assad for his past use of chemical weapons. “Today’s chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world,” Trump said Tuesday. “These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution. “President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a ‘red line’ against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing,” he added. “The United States stands with our allies across the globe to condemn this intolerable attack.” While the statement declared that the attack “cannot be ignored,” it offered no path forward. Then I sat down at work yesterday morning. Once I had some free time around lunch I started reading a piece about the banning of Bannon from the NSC entitled, Steve Bannon is Losing to the Globalists: To most members of the Washington foreign-policy establishment, regardless of party affiliation, that will come as an immense relief. It suggests that business as usual—Atlanticism, free trade, American economic and military engagement across the globe—will ultimately prevail. Bannon has embraced an alternative vision, which he calls “economic nationalism.” Many of his critics have identified it as a desire to upend the international order that was established after the Second World War, and to replace it with a protectionist, ethnocentric model—one in which the United States, Russia, and nationalist-led European countries join together to fight Islam and confront a rising China. During the campaign, and even during the transition, Trump sometimes seemed to be leaning in Bannon’s direction. But since he has taken office, the actions of his Administration have indicated otherwise. This summary had me wondering, as weird as Bannon might be, whether his demise signals a turn for the worse. Hillary Clinton, oddly enough, was the messenger of the turn for the worse once the afternoon rolled around here on the West Coast: In her first interview since her stunning presidential election defeat by Republican rival Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton on Thursday called for the United States to bomb Syrian air fields.Clinton, in an interview at the Women in the World Summit in New York, also called Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election a theft more damaging than Watergate. Asked whether she now believes that failing to take a tougher stand against Syria was her worst foreign policy mistake as secretary of state under President Barack Obama, Clinton said she favored more aggressive action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “I think we should have been more willing to confront Assad,” Clinton said in the interview, conducted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. “I really believe we should have and still should take out his air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them.” Lo and behold, as I was driving home in the evening, a dear friend sent me a text saying we’re going to war with Syria. I did a double take and confirmed it was true by turning to NPR, which by then was beating the war drums. Late in the evening, at home, the hashtag #WW3 was trending among alt-right and conspiracy types. They were speculating whether this isn’t just the establishment doing what it always does when there’s a divided country: rashly going to war. But what if the nutters are not so far off the mark? . . .
We may subconsciously gauge a person's reproductive fitness from the symmetry of their bodies Phwoar! Look at the symmetries on that! Scientists using hi-tech body scanners have discovered that people with more symmetrical bodies are more attractive to the opposite sex. The research backs up previous findings that symmetrically proportioned faces are more attractive and suggests that our brains are hard-wired to find symmetry sexy in a potential partner. In our evolutionary past, symmetry may have been an honest signal of flawless development and health. "It is widely believed that human beings are attracted to one another as a result of genotypic and phenotypic quality – in other words, their prospect as a mate who will yield higher quality offspring for the chooser," said Dr William Brown, an evolutionary psychologist at Brunel University who led the study. "Your body proportions, shape and stature are signals that conspicuously advertise your good development or health and therefore the degree to which you are a desirable reproductive partner. In many species fewer departures from perfect symmetry are associated with good development, health and reproductive success." The theory is that disturbances in the womb, infections, poor nutrition and genetic flaws all increase your degree of asymmetry and so good proportions are an honest indication of healthy development and hence a partner's ability to produce healthy children. Brown's team asked 40 men and 37 women to strip down to their underwear and enter a 24-camera body scanner. The device rapidly takes hundreds of measurements of the subject's body allowing the researchers to build up a 3D image. They also calculated a composite measure of symmetry from the hundreds of minute symmetry differences recorded by the cameras. The team showed each of these images to 87 evaluators who rated them for attractiveness. The researchers were particularly interested in how body asymmetry would affect the ratings, so to avoid adding another factor to the evaluators' decision, the team presented each image with the head of the subject removed. The evaluators preferred more symmetrical body shapes in both men and women. "They are choosing individuals who would have evidence for good development which means that maybe their offspring would be more healthy and have good development as well," said Brown. The results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Geir Haarde, whose trial began this week, could face up to two years in jail if convicted over country's 2008 economic collapse On a low hill overlooking Reykjavik's harbour the members of a small camera crew wrapped in many layers of winterwear are wrestling with the horizontal snow in an attempt to film a short comedy sketch. The set-up of the skit, one explains, involves "a bum, he lives in the park and he is trying to sell tickets at crazy high prices for the show". The show in question is taking place in a nearby white building, and the joke turns on the fact that, three and a half years after what is known here simply as The Crash, Icelanders have learned the hard way that you can't, after all, value something worthless simply by naming your price, and then adding zeroes. That's not to say that what is taking place inside the white building – Reykjavik's Culture House – is not, in its own way, a hot ticket. In a smart wood-panelled former library on the first floor a special criminal court has been convened for the first time in the country's history. Its purpose is to try the former Icelandic prime minister Geir Haarde over the spectacular economic collapse in October 2008 which catastrophically bankrupted the small island nation. Haarde, 60, is to date the only politician anywhere in the world to face criminal charges over the financial crisis. The charges, which he denies, include "serious neglect of his duties … in the face of major perils looming over Icelandic financial institutions and the state treasury, a danger he knew of, or should have known of". If convicted he could face up to two years in prison. If the world has been rocked by the financial collapse, its effect on Iceland was convulsive. Once the poorest country in Europe, which before 1990 did not have its own stock market, Iceland in the years after the millennium set out to reinvent itself as a global financial hub, embarking on what has been described as "one of the purest experiments in financial deregulation ever conducted". Successive politicians privatised Iceland's natural resources and dismantled its regulatory mechanisms, sparking an economic bonanza for its bankers and mixing for its citizens the now-familiar toxic cocktail of bountiful credit, flaccid financial oversight and an unspoken collective agreement not to ask too many questions but just keep on spending. In 2007 Iceland topped the UN Human Development Index as the most developed country in the world. Its three main banks, controlled by a tiny elite cabal, had a paper value of more than 10 times the country's GDP. "I had the belief that Iceland could become an international financial centre," Haarde, who became prime minister in 2006, told the court this week. "None of us realised at the time that there was something fishy within the banking system." The collapse of the three banks, requiring the country to take an emergency IMF loan, was "the most terrible shock", says Silla Sigursgeirsdottir, assistant professor of public governance at the university of Iceland. "Those first two weeks of October [2008], it was like the sky had fallen on our heads. Most people didn't know anything about this." Prefiguring what would happen elsewhere, the country was forced to enact harsh cuts to public services, and many families suddenly found themselves sharply poorer. It has left a bitter taste, she says. "The sense of injustice is very strong here, because people feel they were deceived. They were kept in the dark and they were fooled. "We were told the world had never seen entrepreneurs like this before. This was preached here by the people in positions of authority, like the president. "When people suddenly realised, what the hell is going on here?, they were taken aback. How could I ever have gone along with this?" She stresses, as does everyone I talk to, Iceland's tiny size – with 320,000 inhabitants it is only slightly larger than Hull. Betrayal feels much more personal when everyone knows everyone else. Margre Tryggvadóttir, then a literary theorist and editor, was living abroad until 2008, and had scratched her head, she says, over how "Icelanders could go abroad and live like millionaires. There were a lot of moments when you read something or noticed something and thought, this really can't be how things work." Iceland's entire political elite failed, she believes, in not holding the executive, or the bankers, to account. "I was just a regular person out there, taking care of my kids and working, but after the crash I just felt like my whole existence was based on a lie." Angered and appalled, she stood for the Althing, Iceland's ancient parliament, and was elected as an MP in 2009 in the wave of protest that saw Haarde ousted in favour of current PM Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir. It was the country's parliamentarians, as empowered by the country's constitution, who unearthed an obscure piece of legislation many thought to be obsolete and sought to prosecute four of the principal political players. After a series of legal challenges and political concessions, charges could be made to stick only to Haarde. Tryggvadóttir voted for the indictments, and was disappointed the other three did not stand. "Some people have said of course that it's ridiculous to blame one man for this, and that's a little bit true. "The Crash was of course the result of a lot of things, not just the fault of the man who was PM for a while." She still believes the case is worthwhile, however. "I think it's very important to get to the truth, even if just for regular Icelanders to feel that this was not OK. "Nobody wants to say, 'I was responsible for this thing that went wrong, and I have to live with it.' Everybody says, 'It was someone else's fault.' "I don't think we can live here and raise our children here unless we feel that there is some kind of justice." While the anger with bankers is palpable, however, few legal observers believe there is much chance of Haarde being convicted; many people say they don't want to see the former PM go to prison – an acknowledgement of responsibility would be enough. Shoppers and cafe customers braving the Reykjavik wind largely purse their lips or shrug when asked about the prosecution. Sunna Mgoll is typical – she lost her job as a care worker in a home for the elderly as a result of public sector cuts, and says her mother, a hairdresser, lost IKR 80,000 (£400) from her income in the space of a month. And yet, "when all this was on the news I stopped watching the news". Is she angry? She shrugs. "I live a good life even though I have less money." Like many, she is less inclined to blame Haarde than Davíð Oddsson, PM for 13 years until 2004, who chaired the Icelandic central bank at the time of the collapse. Oddsson is one of the three against whom charges collapsed. He now edits Iceland's main newspaper. Eirikur Bergmann, director of the centre for European studies at the Bifrost University in Iceland, sees Haarde's trial as "vastly significant". But he stresses it is only one of a number of processes that are "marking the resurrection not only of Iceland's economy but its society". These include criminal indictments against a number of bankers, still pending, the debate over Iceland's possible entry into the EU, and the redrafting of the constitution, a process in which he is personally engaged and from which he has snatched a short break to meet in a lively Reykjavik cafe. Iceland's economic fightback has certainly begun – its economy grew by 1.9% in the last quarter alone, while its credit rating was revised by Fitch last month from junk to an investment grade BBB+. But Bergmann says the country must emerge from the ruins of its collapse "almost a renewed society, so it will become something different in a significant way from what it was before" – less elitist, more open, more democratic. In this context, the Haarde trial "kind of feels like a circus, really". "Nothing is anyone's fault. As of yet it doesn't yet really provide us with what it was meant for, that we'd get some sort of closure, an understanding of what happened. "Not to punish, but to say once and for all, this is what happened, now we move on."
A Texas State University student destroyed a pro-life activist’s on-campus display and screamed obscenities at him on Monday. According to Campus Reform, Emma Brockway, a student at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, who describes herself on Twitter as a “progressive activist,” shared a video of a man kicking down a pro-life display on school grounds. “Get the f* out of here with this bullst,” the man in the video yells. “This is f*ing bullst! Get this st out of here! F*!” When the activist tells the man that “this is free speech,” the student replies, “No, it’s not man, it’s wrong!” (Content warning: Lots of offensive language): Brockway told The Tab that she is pro-choice and she was “annoyed to see the anti-choice people again.” “I’m a junior at Texas State and they constantly come on campus,” she said. She said that during the incident “there weren’t a ton of people near the Stallions while this was happening — normally there are more people.” According to Texas State's website, the Fighting Stallions sculpture is "an iconic landmark" at the school and designates the university's "free speech area." “I was shocked, but I have to admit I admire him in some ways because I think he did what we were all wanting to do,” Brockway told The Tab. “I am a supporter of free speech, but again, I think everyone was secretly wanting to do what he did. People around me were shocked. After I saw the incident, I immediately began organizing a peaceful counter protest. It’s important that the pro-choice side has a presence at the Stallions as well.” The school's Pan African Action Committee shared Brockway’s video accompanied by raised fist emojis in what appeared to be a sign of solidarity. Campus reform reported that the Pan African Action Committee is an "officially recognized group on campus." “What can we do to make sure this student is safe from any university action?” they asked in a subsequent tweet. @theEmmaBrockway What can we do to make sure this student is safe from any university action? — PAAC (@PanAfricanAct) April 3, 2017 “It's a good day to knock down some signs,” they said in another tweet, later adding, "Y'all ever find it weird how 'Free Speech' arguments only come up when defending white people's right to be racist/oppressive?" Campus Reform reported that Texas State University confirmed that their university police have launched a criminal mischief investigation into the incident. (H/T: Campus Reform)
Recently, we stumbled upon this list of “fun” books that every woman should read in her 20s — needless to say, if you’re even a casual visitor to this space, the books (Confessions of a Shopaholic, Bitches on a Budget) aren’t exactly the ones we’d choose. So, perhaps rather predictably, we decided to put together our own list instead. Now, don’t forget, these are books for women in their 20s — we assume you’ve already read as much Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott as you care to, we expect that you’ve already tackled To Kill a Mockingbird and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Jane Eyre. And though women should read all books about all kinds of things and by all kinds of authors, this list sort of necessarily skews towards both female writers and characters, given the topic of the day. Click through to check out our reading list — and since every woman should read more than 20 books in her 20s (hundreds, ladies!), add your own favorites in the comments. Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill Gaitskill’s now-legendary debut collection, full of longing, strange sex, dislocation and disillusionment, reminds us that no matter how damaged we may find ourselves, we are not alone. We have Mary Gaitskill.
European Union commissioners decided to impose an arms embargo on Venezuela Wednesday. File Photo by Symbiot/Shutterstock/UPI Nov. 9 (UPI) -- European Union ambassadors have agreed to ban the sale of weapons and surveillance technologies to Venezuela, placing greater pressure on President Nicolas Maduro's regime. The move was approved by members of the 28-member EU at a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, and foreign ambassadors are expected to sign off on the ban on Monday. The ban is intended to stop the government from using force to repress opposition. The EU members also agreed to ban the export of surveillance technologies to Caracas and potentially some travel for Venezuelan officials. New punishments would add to the list of sanctions already imposed against Maduro's government. Since Maduro took power, opposition figures have been prosecuted and jailed or stripped of their political authority. In August, the United Nations found human rights violations and "widespread and systematic use of excessive force" amid anti-government protests. Canada and the United States have already placed sanctions against Caracas and frozen the assets of individuals they believe are linked to human rights abuses. In August, the United States banned trading of new debt by the Venezuelan government and the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela -- a move Maduro said was "choking" the nation's access to credit.
A few days back, I discovered a new Docker feature—multi-stage builds. The multi-stage build feature helps you create thin Docker images by making it possible to divide the image building process into multiple stages. Artifacts produced in one stage can be reused by another stage. This is very beneficial for languages like Java as multiple steps are required to build the Docker image. The main advantage of the multi-stage build feature is that it can help you create smaller size images. This feature is not yet available in stable versions of Docker. It will become available in Docker 17.05. To use this feature, you have to use the edge version of Docker CE. To build a Docker image for a Java application, you first need to build the Java project. Java build process needs JDK and a build tool like Maven, Gradle, or Ant. Once a Java binary artifact is produded, you can package the binary in a Docker image. For running a Java binary, you only need JRE, so you don’t have to pay the cost of bundling the whole JDK. One of the ways people have handled the multiple staging builds is by using the Builder pattern. This pattern requires you to have two Dockerfile files — Dockerfile and Dockerfile_build. The Dockerfile_build file will be used to build the Java binary, and Dockerfile will be used to create the final runtime image. Below is the content of the Dockerfile_build file for a Spring Boot Gradle project. FROM openjdk:8 ENV APP_HOME=/root/dev/myapp/ RUN mkdir -p $APP_HOME/src/main/java WORKDIR $APP_HOME COPY build.gradle gradlew gradlew.bat $APP_HOME COPY gradle $APP_HOME/gradle # download dependencies RUN ./gradlew build -x :bootRepackage -x test --continue COPY . . RUN ./gradlew build The above Dockerfile first downloads all the dependencies and then builds the project. Please note that we are copying source code after downloading the dependencies. This allows Docker to reuse the layer that downloaded Gradle dependencies. We will be changing the source code more often so we have kept it later in the Dockerfile. To create the Java artifact, we will first build a Docker image and then create the container using the commands mentioned below. $ docker build -t myapp_build -f Dockerfile_build . $ docker create --name myapp-build-container myapp_build Now, you have to copy the artifact from the myapp-build-container using the docker cp command and create the final image that will be used for execution. As you’ll see, it is a tedious process requiring you to maintain multiple Dockerfiles. Docker Multi-build Feature to the Rescue With multi-stage builds, a Dockerfile can contain multiple FROM directives. The last FROM directive output is the resultant image. So, now you have to maintain a single Dockerfile that will build the Java artifact in the first stage and then create the final image in the second stage using the artifact produced in the first stage. FROM openjdk:8 AS BUILD_IMAGE ENV APP_HOME=/root/dev/myapp/ RUN mkdir -p $APP_HOME/src/main/java WORKDIR $APP_HOME COP Y build.gradle gradlew gradlew.bat $APP_HOME COPY gradle $APP_HOME/gradle # download dependencies RUN ./gradlew build -x :bootRepackage -x test --continue COPY . . RUN ./gradlew build FROM openjdk:8-jre WORKDIR /root/ COPY --from=BUILD_IMAGE /root/dev/myapp/build/libs/myapp.jar . EXPOSE 8080 CMD ["java","-jar","myapp.jar"] In the Dockerfile shown above, We have two FROM commands. FROM command can also take an alias name so that you can reference the name later. If you don’t provide an alias, then you can refer using the index starting from 0. There can be more than two stages. The example above uses two stages. The first FROM command uses openjdk:8 image as the base image as it needs to build the project. The second FROM command uses openjdk:8-jre as it needs to run the binary. We used the from option of COPY command to copy the artifact produced by first image into the second image. The from option can either use the alias name that you can mention with FROM command or it can be an index starting from 0. For example, if we remove AS BUILD_IMAGE in the first FROM command then we can write COPY command as COPY –from=0 /root/dev/myapp/build/libs/myapp.jar . To build the image and run the application, you can use standard commands as shown below. $ docker build -t myapp . $ docker run -d -p 8080:8080 myapp The size of the image is drastically small compared to the image used for building the Java binary as shown below. $ docker images myapp latest 45f3dfc8c0bc 10 minutes ago 325MB myapp_build latest b2115749abff 32 minutes ago 857MB Conclusion You should certainly give Docker multi-stage build feature a try for your applications. It can streamline your Docker image building process, helping you maintain fewer Dockerfiles and smaller Docker images.
XI Questions With … Nashville FC In the modern era, American soccer has grown from the top down. Wealthy investors buy a franchise in a soccer league, slot in at whatever level of the so-called American pyramid they bought into and hire marketing staff to build an identity and attract fans. The largest soccer clubs in the world grew from the bottom up. They started as community organized efforts and over a long period of time gathered steam until they became the powerhouses they are today. Manchester United started as a club for railway workers. Liverpool FC is an offshoot of Everton FC, which was started as sports club for local youngsters by a Methodist minister. Celtic FC was founded by a Marist brother looking to raise money for a charity to help alleviate poverty in the Glasgow area. Real Madrid was founded by Spanish students who returned from studying in England. FC Barcelona was formed at a meeting advertised in a local newspaper. The world’s biggest clubs come from humble beginnings. If you look back to the American soccer clubs of the earlier part of the 1900s, you see the same humble beginnings. Bethlehem Steel FC was a club for the immigrant workers of the steel giant, for example. The Great Depression did in many of these clubs and professional soccer in America didn’t begin to rise again until the late 1960s. Understandably, we Americans aren’t patient enough to wait 100 years to catch up to the Europeans. So we did it our way. As Major League Soccer, the North American Soccer League and the United Soccer League jockey for position, community soccer clubs with humble beginnings are forming at the lower levels, in leagues like the NPSL. Detroit City FC, Grand Rapids FC, San Francisco City FC and Nashville FC are examples of grassroots soccer clubs taking hold in their communities, and these clubs have the potential to develop into something much bigger. Nashville FC aims to do just that. Nashville FC is a community owned soccer club, a concept that is popular across the world but discouraged by the United States Soccer Federation’s Professional Standards. As such, Chris Jones and his peers know that if they want to take their club to a higher level, the present structure where members nominate a board and participate in major club decisions will have to evolve to suit the US soccer paradigm. That is a sacrifice they are prepared to make as one of the missions of Nashville FC is to bring professional soccer to the Music City. Midfield Press was able to speak to founder Chris Jones about club’s past, present and future ambitions. 1. How and why was the team founded? We had a fairly humble grassroots start. I had come across a YouTube video years ago of FC United of Manchester. I thought to myself how amazing it was for supporters of Manchester United could walk away from a club of that stature and start their own team, and do so successfully. We really modeled the club after them. Then it was bootstrapping and hitting the pavement. Going to local tournaments, pretty humble beginnings. We felt Nashville deserved a team to represent and connect with the community. 2. What venue does the team currently play in? Vanderbilt University’s football stadium. The first year we played in the soccer stadium but our attendance began to push the limits. The football stadium was suggested and although it was a massive jump, we have made the best of it. In Nashville, there aren’t a whole lot of stadiums that work for soccer during the summer months. 3. What does attendance look like a typical match? We get on average around 1500 per game. Going into this we thought if we could get 500 a game we could break even. The community support has been phenomenal. 4. What was your best attended match and the circumstances around it (including the attendance numbers)? The first home game was the best attended, with around 2000 people. Our first three or four games were on the road so, to come home to that was an amazing site. 5. What does the supporter culture look like? It’s a great culture. Since we’re a community owned team, the supporters group and the club are essentially the same thing. So, it’s hard for those outside of Nashville to understand how much of a family we are. 6. What is the long term vision for the team? The long term vision is Major League Soccer. I know that sounds cliche, but we really do believe that because we are one of the larger cities in the Southeast. With a great brand and a great start, if we can partner with the right investors and get a pro side here, and then have a good couple of years, who knows? Nashville culturally enjoys things that are built not bought, so the organic nature of the team will help propel it forward. 7. What does the team’s current investor profile look like? Nashville FC is a non-profit, community owned team so the members pay dues and we nominate board members, who with the help of volunteers, run the day to day activities of the club. Members also vote on important issues facing the team. 8. Have you spoken with potential monied investors about moving the team up to USL or NASL? There have been a lot of people who have reached out to us over the last couple of years but the talks have always been very much at a 30,000 foot level. There is a lot of interest in Nashville and in Nashville FC. 9. If you had sufficient investment to move up, would you have a preference between USL or NASL? I don’t. Both leagues have strengths. NASL has some good brands and ownership groups with deep pockets. They are modeling it like a European league. All good things. The USL has the connection with MLS which is a huge feather in their cap. By and large it seems less expensive to operate a USL club than a NASL club. The lower costs of the USL are attractive. In an ideal world we wouldn’t have to pick and could work our way up through the leagues, but we aren’t there yet as a country and soccer federation. 10. Would the current venue hold up if you moved to USL/NASL or would you need to find a new home? If so, are there existing stadiums you could use in your area or would the investors need to build a new one? We would probably have to find something else. To do it right we would need to build something soccer specific. 11. What else should the readers of Midfield Press know about your team? I would say that if you enjoy the grassroots mentality and you enjoy rooting for the little guy, then Nashville FC is a great club for you and a great club to follow even from a distance. A big thank you to Chris for taking the time to answer our questions, and look for more “XI Questions With…” NPSL and PDL teams in the future. More on Nashville FC:
Men lie; women lie; everybody lies. There's no way to avoid dishonesty. It's not like there are any "truly straightforward" human civilizations floating around you could pack your bags and move to in a moment's time. If there were, trust me, I'd find the nearest one ASAP. As it happens, though, dishonesty is simply part of human nature. Like I said, you can't run from it, so you might as well embrace it and try your best to stay one step ahead of it. In the world of relationships, or in any other forms of dating, lies pop up with the frequency of Kevin Hart films – and sometimes they'll go as unnoticed, too. For that reason, it's always important to have your bullsht detector on high power. Look, lying is normal – especially concerning matters of trivial importance. With that said, when these lies start piling up, it's important to keep it a buck with yourself and wonder whether or not you've strapped yourself to someone with their pants on fire. And, no, that wasn't a high-fashion pun about your girl's choice of denim. Here are 15 common lies that women will tell us, and what they actually mean. If a lot of these sound familiar, sht, man, it might be time for a talk. Maybe inquire about the cost of polygraph rentals, too, while you're at it. 1. “I’m fine.” What it means: If today were opposite day, yeah, I’d be fine. Why they use it: Because it would be too easy to just come right out and tell us that something’s bothering them. Used in a sentence: “Don’t worry about standing me up at dinner last night, I’m fine.” Synonyms: It’s whatever; Don’t worry about it, Let’s just move on 2. “I never do this.” What it means: I do this quite often, really. Why they use it: To give the impression that they don’t do sht like this on a week-to-week basis. Used in a sentence: “Oh... you didn’t use a condom – it's OK, I never do this." Synonyms: This is new for me; Wow, first time for everything I guess 3. “I’ll be ready in five minutes.” What it means: I’ll be ready in 25 to 35 minutes. Why they use it: To buy themselves some more time while getting ready. Used in a sentence: “You can wait outside, I’ll be ready in five minutes.” Synonyms: Gimme a couple; I’ll be out soon; Five mins; Take a five 4. “I’m not drunk.” What it means: I’m very drunk. Why they use it: To prove that they’re very in control of themselves and liquor consumption. Used in a sentence: “What Er u saying I’m yb hte bar…..I’m not drunk.” Synonyms: I barely even drank; I’m not durnkk 5. “I’m not gonna puke.” What it means: Start the countdown, she’s about to blow. Why they use it: I don’t know, maybe because she’s triple the legal BAC limit and her perception is slightly skewed. Used in a sentence: “No, I just need to use the bathroom within the next 10 seconds – no, I’m not gonna puke.” Synonyms: I feel fine; I just have to use the ladies' room; Excuse me for a second; Where the FCK is the nearest bathroom 6. “I’m usually not this crazy.” What it means: I’m usually crazy, just maybe not THIS crazy. Why they use it: To salvage any remains of their integrity and perhaps their chance at a second date. Used in a sentence: “Wow, that escalated really fast. I’m usually not this crazy.” Synonyms: I’m normal; I’M NORMAL 7. “Oh, he’s just a friend.” What it means: He’s a friend, but, yeah, I probably have slept with him at some point or another. Why they use it: To keep their sexual history as vague as possible. Used in a sentence: “The guy who just touched my ass? Oh, he’s just a friend – stop being so paranoid." Synonyms: We went to camp together; I know him from high school; he’s like a brother to me 8. “I didn’t expect anything from you anyway.” What it means: She expected quite a bit from you, in fact – now that you’ve split ties with her – the book of baby names she bought will undoubtedly go to waste. Why they use it: To project the fact that they’re independent and by no means emotionally invested in you. Used in a sentence: “Oh, we’re breaking up… now? That’s fine, I didn’t expect anything from you anyway.” Synonyms: We weren’t anything, anyway 9. “I promise I won’t get mad.” What it means: Wait and see how mad I’m about to get. Why they use it: To entice you into divulging something you wouldn’t have, prior. Used in a sentence: “Just tell me the truth, everything, I promise I won’t get mad.” Synonyms: I don’t care, just tell me; Just tell me now and I’ll forget about it 10. “I’m not the type to get jealous…” What it means: Something just made me jealous. Why they use it: To provide themselves with some feigned confidence. Used in a sentence: “I saw you check out that girl, good thing I’m not the type to get jealous or else we’d have a problem." Synonyms: She was gross 11. “We were bar hopping.” What it means: There was probably a club, or two, as well as a dude’s apartment involved. Why they use it: Because “bar hopping” sounds fun-loving and innocent. Used in a sentence: "Yeah, it was a girls' night, we just went bar hopping." Synonyms: Bounced around some dive bars; We had a low-key night; It was an early night 12. “I don’t care about her, she’s in your past.” What it means: I really haven’t been able to do much of anything since I saw you like her Instagram. Why they use it: To make it known that she’s aware of your dating history and ensure that it remains “history.” Used in a sentence: "Your ex texted you? True, I don’t care about her, she’s in your past." Synonyms: Whatever; She’s old news; Do you still want her? 13. “I’m on my period.” What it means: We ain’t having sex! Why they use it: Because they ain’t trying to have sex with your sorry ass! Used in a sentence: "Stay right there, I’m on my period." Synonyms: It’s my time of the month; I don’t think you’re going to wanna go down there; These sheets are new; Yeah, I’ve got the new stringless tampons 14. “Sorry my phone’s dying and the charger is on the other side of the room.” What it means: You just got ignored via text. Why they use it: To seem polite, even though they just blatantly ignored a string of your text messages. Used in a sentence: "Sorry, my phone’s dying and the charger is on the other side of the room – I’m just getting these now." [...Weeks later.] Synonyms: I'm sorry, the number you have reached is not in service or is temporarily disconnected 15. “I’ve only had sex with [insert low number here] people.” What it means: I’ve had sex with [that tiny number of] people, multiplied by three. Why they use it: To appear more sexually selective than they might be. Used in a sentence: "I’ve only had sex with three people, and I’m just keeping the Costco-sized box of dental dams in the closet for my roommate." Synonyms: I’m a virgin
Executors for the estate of Michael Jackson demanded Wednesday that MSNBC drop its plan to air a "reprehensible" documentary that promises a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the singer's relationship with Dr. Conrad Murray, but which they charged smears the late pop icon. In a letter to MSNBC President Phil Griffin and the cable channel's corporate overseers, the Jackson representatives argued that Murray, convicted Monday of involuntary manslaughter in Jackson's death, uses the documentary "to shift the blame post-conviction to Michael Jackson, even though a jury considered the evidence and rejected this very argument." MSNBC purchased "Michael Jackson and the Doctor: A Fatal Friendship" from a British production company and plans to air it Friday and Monday night, along with an "exclusive" interview with Murray by NBC News correspondent Savannah Guthrie. DOCUMENTS: Read the Jackson estate letter to MSNBC A Los Angeles Superior Court jury convicted Murray for administering propofol, a surgical anesthetic, to Jackson and then failing to monitor the pop star as he stopped breathing. MSNBC representatives had said earlier that the cable channel did not pay for access to Murray or contribute to his legal defense. The producer of the documentary, October Films, said it paid only $1 for two years of access to Murray and a behind-the-scenes look at his legal defense. Representatives of MSNBC and October Films said they did not know what arrangements might have been made by the film's distributor, Zodiak Rights. Zodiak representatives could not be reached. The Jackson family representatives questioned whether additional payments were made to Murray. "Was it really only $1, or was it more?" said a letter from John Branca and John McClain, who are co-executors of the Michael Jackson estate. MSNBC did not immediately respond to the demand to cancel the airing of the documentary. RELATED: Murray jury quarreled, yelled on way to verdict Michael Jackson fans to Conrad Murray: "Beat it" D.A.: Conrad Murray unlikely to serve "appropriate" sentence -- James Rainey and Harriet Ryan Photo: Michael Jackson performs on stage during the 2006 World Music Awards. Credit: Dave Hogan / Getty Images
The Cryptomaster behemoth may sound like a villain from a superhero film. But it's actually a newly-discovered species of spider - or more correctly arachnid - living in the forests of Oregon in the US. Californian scientists found it when they went on an expedition to find out more about its close relative, the Cryptomaster leviathan. They think the behemoth developed differently when the population was divided by mountain ranges. Read iWonder's giude to spider super powers. What are Cryptomasters? The Cryptomasters are a type of arachnid - which are in the same family as spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites - living in the mountains of southwest Oregon. Although their 4mm bodies look small, both kinds of Cryptomaster are much larger than many other similar arachnids - and you can find smaller and larger version of each type even though the different sizes have the same genes. Cryptomasters come from the harvestman family of arachnids, which are said to have got their name because they were seen most often during the harvest season. They also belong to a wider group of spiders called Laniatores, which are made up of more than 4,100 different kinds of arachnid. Why is it called a Cryptomaster Behemoth? Both the leviathan and the behemoth are mentioned in the bible - one is a sea creature and the other is a different kind of large beast. Scientists chose the name Cryptomaster for the group of arachnids because they are "notoriously difficult to find" and usually hide under logs and leaves on the forest floor. The species has not been researched very much since its relative the Cryptomaster leviathan was discovered in one place in 1969. When scientists sat down to examine nearly 80 Cryptomasters they'd collected from 14 different parts of the American state, they realised there was something different about some of them. They revealed they had discovered the behemoth in their report in the scientific journal ZooKey, calling it "a new monster from southwest Oregon forests". Unusually, the scientists were mainly able to tell the two species apart because the leviathan has two spikes on its penis, which the behemoth does not have. Aren't 'daddy longlegs' crane flies? Harvestmen are also known as daddy longlegs. But don't confuse it with the crane fly - which is a flying insect that are also called daddy longlegs. For more stories like this one you can now download the BBC Newsbeat app straight to your device. For iOS go here. For Android go here.
7 Day Plan to Stay Productive vantageinternetgroup Lifestyle shared byon Mar 18, 2014 in 51,359 views 96 faves 96 shares 6 comments After much research, we've come across the same theme. It seems that creating habits comes down to organization and planning for a period of 21 days or more. In this infographic, we've broken this... down into 7 days. Each day has an inspiring quote and a reminder of what should be done. Just create the following prior to starting: 1 Definite Monthly Goal 1 Weekly Stepping Stone 2-3 Daily Tasks Do this only 3x (21 days) to make your habits long-term and achieve your goals like you never imagined. Great for anyone in a rut that is looking to really get on track! Share it, Save it, and Print it.
All specimens are three-dimensionally preserved with little or no distortion. Several bones have been removed from the matrix, but their foramina, other openings and fractures are still filled with carbonate. The holotype skull is prepared from dorsally and both lateral sides, but ventrally embedded in matrix ( Fig 3A ). A large crack dorsally at the cranial table has been filled with glue. The juvenile skull DFMMh/FV 605 has been prepared completely. Teeth are preserved in situ on both skulls and the isolated dentary (DFMMh/FV 790.12). Both skulls were slightly crushed dorsally during diagenesis, and in particular DFMMh/FV 200 shows medially tilted dermal bones because of the distortion of the skull. Investigations by μCT of the juvenile skull DFMMh/FV 605 supplement the description. Most vertebrae lack their neural spines. None of the bones shows signs of abrasion or weathering, but several bones have fractures along their surfaces. Completeness and preservation of small cranial elements and other bones indicate a short distance transport before burial. Details on preservation of the skeletal regions are given together with the description. Skull External naris. On both specimens (DFMMh/FV 200 and DFMMh/FV 605), the indentation of the medial margin of the premaxilla indicates that the external naris was positioned in the rostral half of the bone (reaching the rostral skull margin) and faced dorsally (Figs 4A, 5A and 5C). The nasopremaxillary suture, well exposed in DFMMh/FV 200 suggests together with the medial premaxillary margin that a median thin spine of the nasals reached the caudal margin of the external naris. It remains unclear if there is a complete separation of left and right naris by a median bone bar of the nasal. Antorbital foramen. The right maxilla of DFMMh/FV 200 shows an indentation of the caudomedial margin associated with a rostrally positioned depression on the maxilla that is interpreted as the margin of a small antorbital foramen (Fig 4A). The antorbital foramen of DFMMh/FV 200 is proportionally only slightly reduced in size in comparison to DFMMh/FV 605. The antorbital foramen of DFMMh/FV 605 is located rostral to the orbit and is rostrally, rostromedially and ventrally restricted by the maxilla (Fig 5C and 5D). The caudal and caudomedial margin are bounded by the lacrimal. The antorbital foramen is longitudinally oval in outline and a slight antorbital fossa is developed in the maxilla of DFMMh/FV 605. The length of the antorbital foramen is 9% that of the orbit (Fig 5C). Orbit. The large, longitudinally oval orbit is 54% longer than it is wide in DFMMh/FV 200 (Fig 4B) and 27% longer than it is wide in DFMMh/FV 605 (Fig 5A and 5C). Rostrolaterally, the orbit is bounded by the lacrimal, rostromedially by the prefrontal. Its lateral and caudolateral margins are formed by the jugal, which excludes the maxilla from the orbit. The xpillarlike postorbital bar separates the orbit caudally from the infratemporal fenestra. The caudomedial margin of the orbit is restricted by the frontal, which is not elevated from the orbital margin, and the caudal margin of the orbit by the postorbital. Supratemporal foramen. In DFMMh/FV 200, the supratemporal foramen is irregular in shape, with a rounded rectangular rostromedial and rostrolateral margin, and a narrow and rounded caudal half (Fig 4A). It is 42% longer than wide. In DFMMh/FV 605, the supratemporal foramen is narrow oval-shaped and 54% longer than wide (Fig 5A). In DFMMh/FV 200, the supratemporal foramen is bounded by the postorbital along the rostral and rostrolateral margin (Fig 4A). In contrast, in DFMMh/FV 605, the rostromedial corner of the supratemporal foramen is formed by the frontal (see also “Ontogeny”) (Fig 5A). The caudomedial margin of the supratemporal foramen is bounded by the parietal in both specimens, the caudal and caudolateral margins are formed exclusively by the squamosal. The wall of the supratemporal fossa is formed rostromedially by the frontal and caudomedially by the parietal. The squamosal seems to contribute to most of the lateral part of the supratemporal fossa, but because of the poor preservation of this region in both specimens, it remains unclear if there is also a contribution of the quadrate. Infratemporal fenestra. The infratemporal fenestra of both skulls is roughly rounded trapezoidal in outline, laterally longer than medially and tapers caudolaterally to a tip. It is 1.5 times as long as it is wide. The fenestra is bounded rostromedially by the postorbital, rostrally by the postorbital bar and laterally by the jugal. Caudomedially, the infratemporal fenestra is bounded by the squamosal and caudolaterally by the quadratojugal. Secondary choanae. The paired secondary choanae are partly preserved in DFMMh/FV 605 (Figs 5B and 6C). The openings of the secondary choanae are positioned within the through-like depressions (choanal groove) at the rostral process of the pterygoid and are medially separated by a rounded crest. The secondary choanae are longitudinal slitlike openings placed with its caudal half in the rostral narrow process of the pterygoid. The rostral edge of the choanae is situated between the suborbital fenestrae in the palatines. Only a small, caudalmost part is positioned in the pterygoid wings. Caudal to the secondary choanae, the pterygoid surface is slightly elevated, but there is no distinct vertically high rim present. PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 6. DFMMh/FV 605, skull and mandible of Knoetschkesuchus langenbergensis gen. nov. sp. nov., juvenile specimen. (A) Occipital view of skull, (A1) photograph of the original specimen on the left side, (A2) interpretative drawing with labels in the middle, and (A3) reconstructed 3D data as derived from MeshLab (FOV: Ortho; only skull elements originally visible and important in the respective view are shown). (B) Caudoventral aspect of skull with basisphenoid exposed. (C) Pterygoid in ventral aspect. (D) Pterygoid in dorsal aspect. (E) Dorsal aspect of ventral skull elements, featuring quadrates, exoccipitals, basioccipital and basisphenoid. (F) Left lateral aspect of braincase wall including pterygoid, prooticum and laterosphenoid. (G) Medial aspect of left laterosphenoid and prooticum. (H) Mandible in left ventrolateral aspect. (I) Mandible in ventral aspect. (J) Mandible in dorsal aspect. For anatomical abbreviations, see text. 3D images are not to scale. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0160617.g006 Premaxilla. DFMMh/FV 200 preserves the left premaxilla with one tooth in situ but the rostral-most portion of the bone is missing (Fig 4A). In DFMMh/FV 605, the left premaxilla is complete but without teeth and disarticulated from the rostrum, whereas only a small part of the right premaxilla is exposed (Fig 5C and 5D). The premaxilla is approximately 1.5 times wider than long. Its lateral margin forms a convexity. Its medial margin is concave and thus provides space for the external naris. The premaxilla contacts the maxilla caudolaterally with a slightly serrated rostromedially extending suture and is medially connected to the nasal by a longitudinally straight suture, thus it participates only little in the internarial bar, if at all. The 3D reconstructions revealed that the suture between premaxilla and maxilla in ventral aspect is jagged and rostromedially directed (Fig 5C and 5D). Maxilla. The maxilla is medially bent along its long-axis. The maxilla is widest in its rostral fourth, bifurcating then into a short medial and a long lateral process. The rostral margin of the maxilla is slightly rostromedially oriented and shares a serrated suture with the premaxilla. The lateral margin of the maxilla is convex in its rostral third with a maximum curvature at the fourth maxillary tooth. Caudally to this convexity it becomes slightly concave, then straight. The medial maxillary margin, including the medial process, contacts the nasal along a sagittally aligned suture. Caudal to the nasal, the medial process of the maxilla roofs the antorbital foramen and contacts the lacrimal. A dorsal furrow at the rod-like part of the maxillary process represents the contact area to the lateral part of the lacrimal, which attaches dorsally to the maxilla (Figs 4C and 5C). Only in DFMMh/FV 605, the length of the maxillolacrimal suture is visible over approximately four maxillary alveoli and the caudal contact to the jugal (Fig 5C). The lateral process of the maxilla preserves its maximum rod-like process that thins out far caudally. Directly caudal to the lacrimal, the maxilla underlaps the jugal, which attaches dorsally on the very thin caudalmost part of the lateral maxillary process with a smooth suture. In ventral aspect, the posterior palatal branches of the maxillae meet entirely rostral to the palatines (Fig 5B). The rostralmost part of the medial suture of the ventral maxilla to the palatine lies shortly rostrally to the suborbital fenestra. Nasal. The nasals are a wedge-like pair of bones, forming the medial third of the rostrum (Figs 4A and 5A). The elongate element is narrowest rostrally and continues between the premaxillae to send a medial spine into the external naris. Caudally, the nasal widens to reach at the contact with the prefrontal five times of its rostral width at the contact with the prefrontal. Caudally to this contact, the nasal tapers again and wedges out between the lateral prefrontal and the medial frontal level with the rostral orbital margin. The contact between the left and right nasals is a straight median suture. The lateral suture to the maxilla is restricted to the cranial half of the nasal bone and directed vertically (Fig 4A). Lacrimal. The lacrimal of DFMMh/FV 200 possesses in dorsal and lateral aspect a massive rounded squarish body from which a delicate process descends caudolaterally (Fig 4A). The rostral and caudal margins of the lacrimal are concave and mark the boundaries of the antorbital fenestra and the orbit, respectively. The medial margin of the lacrimal is slightly wavy and contacts the maxilla with its rostral tip and the prefrontal with its medial margin. The lacrimal is nearly completely excluded from a contact with the nasal by both of these elements, and touches the nasal only with a small rostromedial tip dorsal to the antorbital foramen. Laterally, the lacrimal attaches to the maxillary process and contacts the jugal in the rostral third of the orbita (Fig 4A). In contrast, the lacrimal of DFMMh/FV 605 is more delicate than in DFMMh/FV 200, having a more robust dorsal part from which a delicate caudoventrally bent process descends (Fig 5C and 5D). The delicate caudolateral process of the lacrimal is enlarged and also forms the boundary between antorbital fenestra and orbit (Fig 5C). Prefrontal. The prefrontal is nearly triangular in outline in dorsal view (Fig 4A and 4C). Having a nearly straight medial margin, it tapers rostrally to a tip and forms a narrow expansion laterally (Fig 5A and 5C). Caudally, the prefrontal forms another narrow expansion that represents the rostral third of the dorsal orbital margin. The medial margin of the prefrontal is bounded in its rostral half by the nasal and in its caudal half by the frontal. Craniolaterally, the prefrontal is restricted by the lacrimal, caudally it contributes to the orbital margin. The rostral margin of the orbit bears in its rostromedial half a broadened depression that comprises equal parts of lacrimal laterally and prefrontal medially (Fig 4A). This depression represents the attachment area for the palpebral. The prefrontal pillar is not exposed in DFMMh/FV 200, but preserved as a narrow and flat ventral process in DFMMh/FV 605 (Fig 5E). The prefrontal pillar is positioned in the rostromedial edge of the orbit and decends from the prefrontal body ventromedially to contact the palate (Fig 5B and 5E). The prefrontal pillar is dorsally and ventrally expanded, with a medial constriction. Palpebral. A left and a right palpebral are preserved in the orbits of DFMMh/FV 200 (Fig 4A and 4C), and a left palpebral is preserved in DFMMh/FV 605 (Fig 5A and 5D). The palpebrals are roughly drop-shaped in outline with a convex dorsal margin that mirrors the concave medial orbital margin and a narrow rostral end. The lateral palpebral margin is straight and aligned rostrocaudally. The external surface of the palpebral is slightly vaulted and weakly sculptured. On its internal smooth surface, the palpebral is slighty concave in its caudal two thirds. In its rostral third, the palpebral forms an oval articular surface on the internal side that probably was positioned in the depression of the rostral orbital margin. Frontal. In DFMMh/FV 200, only the rostral and interorbital part as well as the caudalmost part of the frontal are preserved (Fig 4A). The frontal contributes both to the interorbital bone and the rostral part of the cranial table. From its rostral, wedge-like process, the bone widens moderately in caudal direction to reach twice its rostral width at the orbit. The frontal maintains its width between the orbits, being roughly as wide as the nasals, and widens continuously on the skull roof (Figs 4A, 4C and 7A). From the direct contact between postorbital and parietal here it is visible that the frontal is mostly excluded from the supratemporal foramen (Fig 4A), and the serrated frontoparietal suture lies at the rostral end of the supratemporal foramen. The frontal bone is complete in DFMMh/FV 605 (Fig 5A). The frontal contacts contacts the postorbital laterally at the skull roof. The rostral, midorbital part of the frontal is somehow inflated in comparison with DFMMh/FV 200. The medial frontal wedge is more acute and more narrow than in DFMMh/FV 200 (Fig 7). Caudally, the suture to the parietal is jagged and rostrally convex, so that the caudal margin of the frontal becomes deeply concave. The frontoparietal contact is positioned in the rostral fourth of the length of the supratemporal foramen. In DFMMh/FV 605, the frontal bears a median blunt ridge that denotes the median suture of the once unfused frontals. The caudal third of the frontal is vaulted medially and slightly depressed laterally. In ventral aspect (Fig 5B), the orbital margin of the frontal is recurved, so that the ventral surface of the frontal forms a shallow trough. Caudal to the orbit, the frontal forms a lateral projection, which is unsculptured and slightly depressed to enter the supratemporal fossa. PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 7. Reconstructions of the skull and mandible of Knoetschkesuchus langenbergensis gen. nov. sp. nov. Reconstruction of larger skull based on specimen DFMMh/FV 200, missing information supplemented with information from skull DFMMh/FV 605. (A) Dorsal aspect. (B) Left lateral aspect with mandible. Reconstruction of juvenile specimen DFMMh/FV 605, based on skull morphology and 3D data obtained in MeshLab. (C) Dorsal aspect. (D) Ventral aspect. For anatomical abbreviations, see text. Not to scale. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0160617.g007 Parietal. The parietal is roughly rounded rectangular in outline, but its width slightly increases caudally (Fig 4A). The lateral parietal margin forms in its cranial half the medial margin of the supratemporal foramen, and in its caudal half is bounded by the squamosal so that it does not contribute to the caudal margin of the supratemporal foramen. The parietosquamosal suture is longitudinally straight. In DFMMh/ 200, the caudal margin of the parietal is medially slightly notched and forms the medial third of the caudal margin of the cranial table, excluding the supraoccipital from the latter (Fig 4A). In DFMMh/FV 605, the caudal margin bears a deep incision that exposes the supraoccipital dorsally (Fig 5A). The parietal is incompletely fused and bears in its caudal two thirds a thin median longitudinal suture, but its dorsal surface is even (Fig 5A). Squamosal. The squamosal is approximately four times wider caudally than it is rostrally (Figs 4A and 5C). Rostrolaterally, the squamosal contacts the postorbital in the rostral third of the length of the supratemporal foramen, where it overlaps the postorbital laterally in its rostral extent. Its lateral margin is convex. In its medial third, the lateral squamosal margin is beveled to form an unsculptured lateral bordure set off from the cranial table by a marginal crest. The unsculptured beveled lateral area in DFMMh/FV 200 is small and extends from the caudolateral third of the dorsal squamosal area to the caudal squamosal corner (Fig 4A and 4B). The beveled portion is similarly long in DFMMh/FV 605 as in DFMMh/FV 200, but deeper, hanging into the infratemporal foramen (Fig 5C and 5D). The caudal margin of the squamosal is medially concave, but drawn out into a caudolaterally directed lobe at its lateral corner. This lobe is one fourth longer and more narrow in DFMMh/FV 605 (Fig 5A) than in DFMMh/FV 200 (Fig 4A). Similar to the beveled lateral margin, the caudolateral process of the squamosal is unsculptured and abated from the cranial table. The dorsal margin is straight in occipital aspect and the ventral contact of the squamosal to the exoccipital is visible in parts. Contact areas to the quadrate are in both specimens either destroyed or obscured. Postorbital. Details of postorbital anatomy are visibly mostly in DFMMh/FV 605 (Fig 5A). The postorbital lies dorsal and medial to the jugal. In dorsal aspect, the postorbital divides into a medially directed part contacting the frontal, and a caudally directed part that contacts the squamosal, both having an orientation in a wide angle of approximately 130° to each other (Fig 5A). The caudally directed part of the postorbital is broader in DFMMh/FV 200 than in DFMMh/FV 605 and sculptured (Fig 4A and 4B), thus forming a broad dorsal surface between the orbit and the supratemporal fossa. In contrast, the postorbital bar between orbit and supratemporal fossa is very narrow in DFMMh/FV 605 (Fig 5A), being only half as wide as in DFMMh/FV 200. The junction between these two parts forms a gentle curve in the rostrolateral corner of the cranial table. Laterally on the corner is a slightly ventrally tilted and medially depressed area from which a constricted and smooth process descends and unites at mid-height of the postorbital pillar with an ascending process of the jugal (Figs 4B, 5A and 5C). Together, the processes of the jugal and the postorbital form the thin, pillarlike postorbital bar. The postorbital part of this bar is a laterally directed crest, and contains at its dorsal end a small vascular foramen (Fig 5C and 5D). In medial aspect, the postorbital medial margin, which forms the rostrolateral wall of the supratemporal fenestra, is recurved ventrally and does not contribute to the inner wall of the supratemporal fossa. Jugal. The jugal is a rostrocaudally elongate bone that contributes both to the orbit and the infratemporal fenestra (Figs 4B, 5C and 5D). At mid-length, it forms a rod shaped caudodorsally ascending jugal process that constitutes the ventral half of the postorbital bar. This process is displaced medially from the lateral surface of the jugal and separated from the latter by a ridge. The dorsal margin of the jugal is convex at the rostral end of the postorbital bar, and rostrally and caudally to it weakly concave. The jugal body is rostrally to the postorbital bar only slightly dorsoventrally higher than caudally, where it forms a slender rodlike process (Fig 5A). The most rostral part of the jugal becomes very slender and wedges out between the underlying maxilla and the caudoventral process of the lacrimal (Fig 5C and 5D). Quadratojugal. The quadratojugal is preserved only in DFMMh/FV 200 (Fig 4B). In lateral aspect, the quadratojugal is an elongated, rectangular bone that extends from rostromedially to caudolaterally. Medially, it contacts rostrally the squamosal with a narrow process, and caudally with a straight and tight suture the medially positioned quadrate. The quadratojugal forms the caudolateral corner of the infratemporal fenestra (Fig 7A). Lateroventrally, the quadratojugal attaches to the jugal, and forms together with the quadrate the caudolateral corner of the skull. Quadrate. In DFMMh/FV 200, a strip of the left quadrate is visible laterally, underlying the squamosal and being laterally in contact with the quadratojugal (Fig 4A). In DFMMh/FV 605, the articular condyle of the left quadrate is visible on the specimen directly, but the lateralmost extent is obscured by sediment. μCT data of DFMMh/FV 605 depict both quadrates, with the right quadrate being completely preserved and the left one being fragmentary and lacking its condyle (Figs 5B and 6E). In occipital aspect, the quadrate condyle, which is entirely formed by the quadrate itself, possesses a kidney-shaped outline from which a rounded prong ascends dorsally. There is no good separation into a medial and a lateral hemicondyle and no intercondylar groove is visible. The ventral margin of the condyle is concave, and the medial part of the condyle is enlarged in comparison with the lateral part (Figs 5B and 6B). In dorsal aspect, the quadrate is elongate and rounded rectangular in shape. It is divided into a large dorsolateral part and a medially inclined medial part that is half the size of the lateral part, both separated from each other by a rounded longitudinal bulging crest (Fig 6E). The dorsolateral part ends laterally with a serrated margin that forms a suture to the quadratojugal. The dorsolateral surface is caudally flat, but medially depressed in its rostral half. In the center of the rostral half lies a large, rostrocaudally rounded oval shaped otic foramen. The open (i.e., unroofed) cranioquadrate canal is visible in dorsal view, extending from the dorsal margin of the medial quadrate condyle rostrolaterally (Fig 6E). Squamosal and exoccipital do not contribute to the cranioquadrate canal. Medial to the cranioquadrate canal, the surface of the quadrate bends ventromedially. The medial margin curves from the quadrate condyle in medial direction and contacts the exoccipital with a serrated, straight medially directed suture. The caudal edge of the quadrate is narrow and strongly concave dorsal and lateral to the otoccipital contact. Dorsal to this curved margin, the quadrate is roofed by a crest that overhangs the foramen vagii (Fig 6A3 and 6B). The foramen leads into a canal in rostral direction. Rostrodorsally to the crest, the ventromedially directed part of the quadrate bears another large and rounded oval foramen (Fig 6A3 and 6B). This foramen opens into a larger bipartite passage for the carotid artery and the cranial nerves IX–XI. The quadrate contacts the pterygoid ventrally, and the prootic and the laterosphenoid of the braincase rostrodorsally. These bones, however, are not preserved in articulation so that the contact cannot be determined more precisely. The ventral quadrate surface bears a well developed and high crest B [52], that extends from the lateral part of the quadrate condyle rostromedially, and a more rounded crest A, positioned relatively central at the quadrate (Fig 6E). Pterygoid. The pterygoid is well preserved in DFMMh/FV 605, where it is exposed in ventral aspect on the ventral face of the skull (Figs 5B, 6C and 6D). The pterygoid wings are well developed and straight laterally directed. The pterygoid wings make the bone twice as wide as it is long. The pterygoid wings possess in ventral view a slightly concave rostral and a slightly convex caudal margin. The rather straight lateral margin extends obliquely from craniomedially to caudolaterally. A distinct pterygoid flange is visible as a rugose and thickened area at the margin of the pterygoid wing (Fig 6C and 6D), rostral to which the pterygoid wing is laterally depressed. The pterygoid body is slightly depressed on its ventral face, but it bears a faint median ridge. The pterygoid forms a median process that tapers rostrally. Left and right to the median ridge, a small, distinct longitudinally oval depression is developed that continues rostrally on each side of the narrow rostral process like a furrow (choanal groove) (Fig 6C). No distinct contact to the rostrally adjacent palatines is visible. Caudally, the pterygoid is in contact with the basisphenoid, which itself is only preserved in small bone fragments. The dorsal part of the pterygoid extends dorsally to contact the laterosphenoid and form the ventrolateral edge of the trigeminal foramen (Fig 6F). The suture to the quadrate and the laterosphenoid is clearly visible (Fig 6F). Ectopterygoid. The only preserved left ectopterygoid of DFMMh/FV 605 is visible in the μCT reconstruction (Fig 5F), but preserved slightly disarticulated. The ectopterygoid has a constricted and slightly twisted body with a nearly straight rostromedial margin that forms the boundary of the suborbital fenestra, and a strongly concave caudolateral margin. The rostrolateral margin is slightly concave and rough, and attaches to the maxilla and the jugal. Because of the isolated position, the length of this contact and the contact to the maxilla cannot be determined, but the size of the ectopterygoid in relation to the skull size suggests that the ectopterygoid reached caudally at least to the dorsal process of the jugal. Caudally, the ectopterygoid is drawn out into a tongue-shaped and slightly striated and rugose medial process (Fig 5F). This process is attached to the rostrolateral margin of the pterygoid wing (Fig 7D). Supraoccipital. The supraoccipital is subtrapezoidal in outline. On the occiput, it is ventrally bounded by the exoccipital (Fig 6A). It is separated from the cranial table by the parietal in DFMMh/FV 200, however, in DFMMh/FV 605, the supraoccipital is dorsally expanded and forms the medial third of the caudal margin of the cranial table (Figs 5a, 6A and 7C). In occipital view, the supraoccipital bears a rounded median crest and laterally to that a circular depression. Exoccipital. DFMMh/FV 200 bears only fragments of the exoccipital, but this element is better preserved in DFMMh/FV 605 and could be depicted in the 3D reconstruction (Figs 5B and 6A). Left and right exoccipital are separated from each other in DFMMh/FV 605, and the paroccipital process is preserved only partially. The exoccipital bears a bone texture of weak grooves and pits, which is either diagenetic or a sign of poor ossification due to the ontogenetically young age of DFMMh/FV 605. The lateral half of the dorsal margin of the exoccipital is bounded by the squamosal. Medially, the exoccipital contacts the supraoccipital. The exoccipital forms the dorsal, lateral and lateroventral margins of the foramen magnum and excludes the supraoccipital from the latter. The ventral contact to the basioccipital is a broad and straight suture (Fig 6A). Lateroventrally to the foramen magnum, the exoccipital bears three circular foramina. The largest foramen lies at the exoccipital level to the dorsal margin of the foramen magnum and is interpreted as foramen for cranial nerve X and XI (foramen vagi) (Fig 6A and 6B). The foramen vagi is enlarged and internally bipartite to create a separate passage of cranial nerve IX medial to cranial nerves X and XI. A small foramen dorsomedial to the foramen vagi probably represents the exit of cranial nerve XII, whereas another, circular foramen ventral to the foramen vagi is interpreted as foramen caroticum posterior (Fig 6B). Basioccipital and basisphenoid. The basioccipital and basisphenoid are preserved in DFMMh/FV 605, where they have been segmented from the 3D data (Fig 6A and 6B). Both are preserved adjacent to each other, but not in original articulation. The basioccipital is preserved with the occipital condyle, which is rounded trapezoidal in caudal aspect and slightly wider than high. Ventrally to the condyle, the basioccipital expands and the occipital surface bears in its ventral half a median crest. The ventral margin of the basioccipital bears a deep median indentation that represents the dorsal half of the median Eustachian foramen (Fig 6B). The left and right margins of the basioccipital are thick and each bears in its ventral third a large, oval foramen that is interpreted here as the lateral Eustachian foramen (Fig 6B). In rostral aspect, the surface of the basioccipital is medially slightly depressed and bears a pair of rounded depressions ventrally (Fig 6E). The basisphenoid is preserved isolated and segmented with its nearly complete body (Fig 6B), but with a very irregular and incomplete lateral surface. Its occipitoventral part, which lies ventrally adjacent to the basioccipital and is exposed on the occipital surface of the skull, forms left and right a thickened flange with a median incision that together form the ventral half of the median Eustachian foramen (Fig 6B). The ventral part of the basisphenoid is attached to the pterygoid and excluded from the ventral surface of the skull. Thus, the Eustachian tube is entirely enclosed between basioccipital and basisphenoid (Fig 6B). The basisphenoid rostrum is hatchet-shaped, i.e. dorsoventrally expanded and with a slightly convex rostral margin (Fig 6F). In rostral view, the hypophyseal fossa is exposed caudodorsally to the basisphenoid rostrum (Fig 6E). The caudodorsal wall of this fossa, the dorsum sellae (which floors the brain cavity rostrally) is preserved as well, and perforated by two medial, circular anterior carotic foramina (Fig 6E). Rostrolaterally to the anterior carotic foramina, the left and right foramen for the cranial nerve VI are visible (Fig 6E).
While the CPI(M) and the Congress candidates were supported by their allies from the LDF and UDF coalitions, respectively, the BJP fought this bypoll alone. Though it finished third behind the Congress and the CPI(M) in the Aruvikkara by-election, results for which were announced on Tuesday, the BJP gave a jolt to its rivals by increasing its vote share four-fold. Advertising BJP veteran O Rajagopal got 34,145 votes, up from the 7,694 votes the party had got in the 2011 assembly elections. In 2006, the BJP had bagged 1,834 votes when it fielded a Christian candidate in the constituency. While the CPI(M) and the Congress candidates were supported by their allies from the LDF and UDF coalitions, respectively, the BJP fought this bypoll alone. The party got 12,175 votes less than the CPI(M), which improved its tally by only 197 votes as compared to 2011. [related-post] Though the Congress retained the seat, the party got 349 votes less than it did in 2011. The by-election witnessed a 7 per cent increase in polling as compared to 2011. “We have grown our vote share at the cost of the CPI(M). Hindu voters are drifting away from them and joining the BJP. My candidature also contributed to the BJP’s performance. This would go a long way in improving the party’s showing in the coming local body elections and assembly elections,” said Rajagopal. The BJP is yet to open its account in the Kerala assembly. However, CPI(M) state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan said his party’s vote bank remained intact. “There was a Hindu consolidation in favour of the BJP against the state government, which is controlled by minority forces. Rajagopal was also a factor… The anti-incumbency votes got divided between the CPI(M) and the BJP. In fact, the winning candidate only got 39 per cent of the votes,” he said. In Aruvikkara constituency, the upper class Hindu Nair community, to which the candidates of the Congress, the CPI(M) and the BJP belong, constitutes 31 per cent of the population. The second largest segment is the Christian Nadar community, which makes up 24 per cent of the population and is traditionally pro-Congress. The backward Hindu segment makes up 15 per cent of the electorate, while Muslims account for 14 per cent. The Muslims appear to have rallied behind the Congress, given that the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party bagged only 703 votes. Advertising In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had got 14,000 votes in the Aruvikkara assembly segment, which is part of Attingal Lok Sabha seat.
My first experience with steam punk. I got it for free recently. It is not a real long book, more of a novella. I did not believe the steam powered walker was even remotely possible, even with modern technology and control systems it is not practical, but that was a minor part of the story. I also found the rigid airship technology that was used as being unlikely as well. I didn't see anyway you were going to get a rigid airship to Siberia. And there was the goofy technology that the author tried to describe that substituted for parachutes I found implausible as well. The story did not focus on the technology much though. Most of the story focused around the attempt to rescue a nuclear scientist and his daughter from the Bolsheviks in an alternate 1917 universe before he can create an atomic bomb for the Bolsheviks. Some of it was pretty plausible, but lots of it I found not so plausible, both the alternate history and the story line itself. But, I did find it moderately enjoyable reading so I gave it three stars. I think the author is asking 99 cents normally and it is worth 99 cents to me.
Trujillo's parting shot at 'racist, backward' Australia Updated Former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo has taken a parting shot at Australia after his controversial reign at the telco, labelling the country racist and backward. The American executive's four years as Telstra CEO, which earned him more than $30 million, were marked by his clashes with the Federal Government. Mr Trujillo quietly slipped out of Australia a week-and-a-half ago, more than a month ahead of his expected June 30 exit date. In February, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd selected just one word to respond to news that Mr Trujillo was leaving Telstra and Australia: Adios. "Many Australians have come up to me and they've apologised, because they're embarrassed by that kind of behaviour," Mr Trujillo told the BBC from the United States. "I think by definition [it was racism] - there were even columnists who wrote stories that said it was. "But my point is that does exist and it's got to change because the world is full of a lot of people and most economies have to take advantage - including Australia - of a diverse set of people. "If there is a belief that only a certain people are acceptable versus others, that is a sad state." Mr Trujillo says being in Australia is like "stepping back in time". "Just simply because some of the policies, some of the laws, or more recent, when you think of immigration policies that weren't changed until 30 years ago or so, which were very restrictive," he said. Mr Trujillo presided over a 37 per cent share slump and battled both the Howard and Rudd governments. A spokeswoman for Mr Rudd says Mr Trujillo's statements are ridiculous comments which will disappoint Australians who welcomed him to this country. Topics: telecommunications, race-relations, australia First posted
You Done Good Earn all other Trophies. 3.6% Ultra Rare 11.94% Rare The Stranger Complete the Wharf District. 87.3% Common 91.35% Common The Survivor Complete the Hanging Gardens and speak with the Survivor in the Bastion. 57.6% Common 65.68% Common The Singer Complete Prosper Bluff and speak with the Singer in the Bastion. 44.6% Rare 54.61% Common The Ura Stop to the siege on the Bastion. 28.7% Rare 40.09% Uncommon The End Complete the story. 16.8% Rare 28.96% Uncommon The Beginning Complete the story, embracing the New World. 16.5% Rare 26.62% Uncommon Calamity Kid Complete the story in New Game Plus. 6.5% Very Rare 16.75% Rare Mind Voyager Complete each trip to Who Knows Where. 10.6% Very Rare 20.12% Uncommon Kid-at-Arms Use the Forge to apply at least one upgrade to every weapon. 17.3% Rare 29.78% Uncommon Pet Sitter Get four different domesticated creatures in the Bastion. 27.8% Rare 39.07% Uncommon Vigilante Complete at least 50 percent of the Vigils in the Memorial. 21.2% Rare 31.84% Uncommon Altruist Complete 100 percent of the Vigils in the Memorial. 7.6% Very Rare 18.56% Rare Man-at-Arms Use the Forge to fully upgrade every weapon. 6.6% Very Rare 16.80% Rare Whatever's Out There Complete the Kid's Dream with five or more Shrine Idols invoked. 7.0% Very Rare 17.65% Rare Just Like That Complete the Kid's Dream with all ten Shrine Idols invoked. 4.9% Ultra Rare 14.83% Rare Lock Yourself In Complete the Singer's Dream with five or more Shrine Idols invoked. 5.9% Very Rare 15.75% Rare Calamity All Around Complete the Singer's Dream with all ten Shrine Idols invoked. 4.4% Ultra Rare 13.60% Rare A Lasting Peace Complete the Survivor's Dream with five or more Shrine Idols invoked. 5.0% Ultra Rare 14.43% Rare Ashes in the Sky Complete the Survivor's Dream with all ten Shrine Idols invoked. 4.1% Ultra Rare 13.01% Rare All in the Mind Complete the Stranger's Dream with five or more Shrine Idols invoked. 4.2% Ultra Rare 13.09% Rare About the Author Complete the Stranger's Dream with all ten Shrine Idols invoked. 3.9% Ultra Rare 12.46% Rare
The statements below make reference to Allah, Muhammad, and jihad. According to them, killing Jews is an act of Muslim worship (as is suggested by the genocidal hadith in which Muhammad says: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” So does Allah really command murder of Jews? Does jihad really involve the murder of Jews? Does Muhammad exemplify such behavior? Quoting the statements below will immediately be classified as “Islamophobia,” but once, just once, couldn’t one of those who will cry “Islamophobia” explain how the Gaza rallyers were Misunderstanding the Religion of Peace and Tolerance? They won’t, of course. But the challenge stands: can Honest Ibe Hooper, or Boy Reza Aslan, or Man of Peace Rauf, explain why these statements are false and not Islamic? And if not, what does that tell us about Islamic antisemitism and Islam in general? “Islamic Militants in Gaza: Allah’s Teachings Are the Fire with Which ‘We Harvest the Skulls of the Jews’; ‘We Move Closer to Allah through Blood, Body Parts, and Martyrs,'” from MEMRI, November 3 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
We are gathered here today to mourn Sad Affleck. We hardly knew thee. Ben Affleck just barely escaped from the disaster zone that was 2016. Trying to promote a movie colorfully described by one critic as “a stink bucket of disappointment” while navigating the media fallout from your highly public split is a position even Lex Luthor wouldn’t subject his most formidable foe to. Nah, too evil. Alas, “Batman v Superman,” loved by some and hated by many more, became the film of a cultural moment. Affleck was certainly made aware of the harsh critiques, but up until now no one thought to actually ask the guy his opinion. We all just assumed he thought it sucked too. During an interview for his new film “The Accountant,” FOX 5’s Kevin McCarthy put forth that very question, eliciting a thoughtful and notably upbeat answer from Affleck about why the film was such a lightning rod for criticism. “It’s interesting: It was a huge hit movie ― more people went to see that than any movie I’ve ever made in my career,” Affleck said of “Batman v Superman.” “It was the biggest hit of my career and then it had so much editorial negativity.” “Fans went, and I got a lot of positive response. It was interesting, that movie, because it was judged not necessarily on execution so much as on its tone. People seemed to want to have a lighter tone to the movie, and I thought that was interesting,” he continued. “Tone isn’t a qualitative thing. It’s subjective, right? Some tones resonate with me that might not with you. And the tone of the movie was really parallel to the Frank Miller book, which I liked and thought was great. I’m glad that so many people went and so many people liked the movie.” When prodded further about whether he liked the movie or not, Affleck admitted, “I loved it.”
TORONTO – Gender-neutral birth certificates could be issued to those who want them in Ontario as early as next year, provided the province can work out bureaucratic hurdles involving other governments. Ontario’s minister of government and consumer services says consultations will be held on the matter this summer and the province is working to ensure a gender-neutral birth certificate would be legally recognized in other jurisdictions. Tracy MacCharles says she’s hopeful Ontario can issue gender-neutral birth certificates by 2018. READ MORE: Youth soccer coach explains why he told his players he’s transgender in heartfelt video She says she’s been closely following the story of Joshua M. Ferguson, an Ontario-born filmmaker who identifies as neither male nor female and has applied to have a change of sex designation on their birth certificate from male to non-binary — a term used to define someone who doesn’t identify with either gender. MacCharles says she knows the issue is important to the trans and non-binary community. Currently, Ontario offers gender-neutral options for drivers’ licenses and health cards but not for birth certificates. Ferguson, who lives in Vancouver, is also a writer and activist. READ MORE: U.S. language guide OK’s ‘they’ as gender-neutral pronoun The 34-year-old has submitted a physician letter along with the application to confirm that the sex on their current birth certificate does not match their gender identity. Last month, activist Gemma Hickey applied for a non-binary birth certificate in Newfoundland and Labrador, but no decision has been announced.
Desmond Tutu is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town and a Nobel Peace laureate. Throughout my life, I have been fortunate to have spent my time working for dignity for the living. I have campaigned passionately for people in my country and the world over to have their God-given rights. I have been fortunate to have long spent my time working for dignity for the living. Now, with my life closer to its end than its beginning, I wish to help give people dignity in dying. (Dignity in Dying and Compassion & Choices) Now, as I turn 85 Friday, with my life closer to its end than its beginning, I wish to help give people dignity in dying. Just as I have argued firmly for compassion and fairness in life, I believe that terminally ill people should be treated with the same compassion and fairness when it comes to their deaths. Dying people should have the right to choose how and when they leave Mother Earth. I believe that, alongside the wonderful palliative care that exists, their choices should include a dignified assisted death. There have been promising developments as of late in California and Canada , where the law now allows assisted dying for terminally ill people, but there are still many thousands of dying people across the world who are denied their right to die with dignity. Two years ago, I announced the reversal of my lifelong opposition to assisted dying in an op-ed in the Guardian. But I was more ambiguous about whether I personally wanted the option, writing: “I would say I wouldn’t mind.” Today, I myself am even closer to the departures hall than arrivals, so to speak, and my thoughts turn to how I would like to be treated when the time comes. Now more than ever, I feel compelled to lend my voice to this cause. I believe in the sanctity of life. I know that we will all die and that death is a part of life. Terminally ill people have control over their lives, so why should they be refused control over their deaths? Why are so many instead forced to endure terrible pain and suffering against their wishes? I have prepared for my death and have made it clear that I do not wish to be kept alive at all costs. I hope I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life’s journey in the manner of my choice. Regardless of what you might choose for yourself, why should you deny others the right to make this choice? For those suffering unbearably and coming to the end of their lives, merely knowing that an assisted death is open to them can provide immeasurable comfort. I welcome anyone who has the courage to say, as a Christian, that we should give dying people the right to leave this world with dignity. My friend Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has passionately argued for an assisted-dying law in Britain. His initiative has my blessing and support — as do similar initiatives in my home country, South Africa, throughout the United States and across the globe. In refusing dying people the right to die with dignity, we fail to demonstrate the compassion that lies at the heart of Christian values. I pray that politicians, lawmakers and religious leaders have the courage to support the choices terminally ill citizens make in departing Mother Earth. The time to act is now.
There is no room in the Republican Party today for a noninterventionist conservative, at least in presidential politics. This flies in the face of many hopeful signals and predictions over the last year among conservative and libertarian writers — including some on these pages — that the Tea Party zeitgeist, combined with a federal budget crisis and malaise over seemingly unwinnable wars overseas, could shift the tide among voters and candidates along the right side of the political spectrum. But the explosive rhetoric that has transpired after President Barack Obama announced the “final” withdrawal of American troops from Iraq last month was the latest — and greatest — indication that the Republican needle is still stuck on the same broken record and that this presidential election will prove to be no different from any other in the last decade. “The idea that a commander in chief would stand up and signal to the enemy a date certain of when we’re going to pull our troops out I think is irresponsible … it’s putting our kids’ lives in jeopardy,” proclaimed Gov. Rick Perry, Republican candidate for president from Texas, only days ago on Fox News Sunday. Rick Perry “He has lost his standing from the standpoint of being a commander in chief who has any idea about what’s going on in those theaters,” Perry added smoothly. Ah, warmed-over Republican campaign talking points — comfort food for the unreconstructed primary electorate! Let’s take a listen to some more of these oldies-but-moldies. “President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women,” charged former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for president, in a statement after Obama’s Oct. 21 announcement. “[It’s] a political decision and not a military one; it represents the complete failure of President Obama to secure an agreement with Iraq for our troops to remain there to preserve the peace and demonstrates how far our foreign policy leadership has fallen,” chirped presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, and Rick Perry Presidential candidate Herman Cain did not hesitate before postulating that withdrawing troops was a “dumb thing to do.” This from a man who once said there were “easy answers to fighting the terrorists” — just “kill all the terrorists. ” Recently he compared his addled approach to foreign policy to his first foray into the pizza business . Perennial candidate Newt Gingrich, caught by a reporter in a seemingly lucid moment, actually agreed with Obama’s withdrawal strategy — on Oct. 21. “This is not about Obama,” he pontificated. “This is about the general effort that far transcends Iraq. That we have to really reassess our strategies in the region and what we think we’re accomplishing. The president is right. You can’t just leave 3,000 or 5,000 troops there. They would simply become targets. If you’re not going to occupy the country, you have to withdraw.” Gingrich also said it was time to assess “what we are doing” in Afghanistan. That was Gingrich before he hit the campaign stage at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition, where he really turned up the gas . “The president has announced what will be seen by historians as a decisive defeat for the U.S. in Iraq,” declared the former speaker of the House, who fancies himself a historian. “After eight years, thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, we will leave in defeat. Don’t kid yourself, it is defeat. Iran is stronger.” Even Jon Huntsman, whom realists in the conservative ranks had suggested was the best shot for transcending the schizo hawkishness of the last two presidential elections, climbed onto the bandwagon from his dreadful poll numbers in the presidential campaign. “President Obama’s decision, however, to not leave a small, focused presence in Iraq is a mistake and the product of his administration’s failures,” he said Oct. 21. “The president’s inability to reach a security agreement leaves Iraq vulnerable to backsliding, thus putting our interests in the region at risk.” Most candidates haven’t bothered to answer to the fact that Obama’s “decision” was based on the 2008 status of forces agreement that President George W. Bush agreed to with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. It requires that American troops leave Iraq — now a sovereign, independent country that can make its own decisions — by Dec. 31, 2011. Negotiations to keep a small force there after December broke down, reportedly, after Maliki would not acquiesce to criminal immunity for U.S. soldiers , a privilege they enjoy now. When confronted with this inconvenient truth, Cain tried valiantly to blame Obama anyway . It was “irresponsible for George Bush to set a date certain,” Cain said on CBS’ Face the Nation, adding that “a responsible commander in chief” would have asked, “Should we continue with this or should we modify it?” We mustn’t forget Republican Rep. Ron Paul — though the national party would like to. He sure gets presidential candidate Rick Santorum sore. Poor Rick seems so consternated by Paul’s firm resistance to Republican national security orthodoxy during the debates that he sometimes appears on the verge of a temper tantrum. In his most recent column , Paul declared, “It is not too often I am pleased by the foreign policy announcements from this administration, but last week’s announcement that the war in Iraq was in its final stage and all the troops may be home for Christmas did sound promising.” However, like many here at Antiwar.com, he doesn’t altogether buy what he sees as window dressing. “Better late than never, but, examining the fine print, is there really much here to get excited about? Are all of our men and women really coming home, and is Iraq now to regain its sovereignty? And in this time of economic crisis, are we going to stop hemorrhaging money in Iraq? Sadly, it doesn’t look that way.” Sadly, too, Paul remains an outlier, a noninterventionist standard-bearer in the company of hawks. While he stands alone on the presidential stage, the rest of the field is bolstered by the same old surrogates representing the defense industry, neoconservative zombies (yes, sometimes they do come back ), Kool-Aid drinkers, and other zealous interests and crass opportunists on Capitol Hill. It’s no surprise that the likes of Max “Jack” Boot , the Flying Kagans , Charles Krauthammer, Stephen Hayes , and Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham were all over Obama’s plans like pepperoni on a pizza. But what does this relentless predictability say about the Republican Party? That it is obdurate? Reactionary? Cut off from reality? When 60 percent of Americans say they approve of how the president is handling Iraq, can flinging red meat to a small pack of primary voters really win the hearts and minds of the nation? Furthermore, how far does this set back real progress for conservatives who want to get it right, finally, where foreign policy and national security is concerned? Republican Politics, as Usual “The rhetoric is crowding out any alternative in the Republican primary campaign. It turns the Republican Party platform and the candidates’ statements on defense into largely irrelevant mush that is way off the point,” said Gordon Adams , American University professor of foreign policy and co-author of the book Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for its Global Role and Safety at Home (2010). So, again, reasonable voices that reflect the country’s angst over recession and war, not to mention a defense budget any judicious mind would recognize as bloated and unchecked and beleaguered by waste and cronyism, are squeezed from the public definition of “conservative” and drowned out in the Thunderdome of 21st-century electoral politics. “There is no question [that the noninterventionist wing] has lost a lot of ground here,” Adams told Antiwar.com in a recent interview. “Let’s look at the Republican candidates and the debate. Who is the noninterventionist? Ron Paul. And how much play and press does he get? Close to none,” blasted Chuck Peña , senior fellow at the Independent Institute, author of The Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism, and Antiwar.com contributor. “First and foremost, [the candidates] need the backing of the party faithful — it always works when you wrap yourself in the flag and make it sound like we are under siege.” Thus the hyperbolic talk about how withdrawal from Iraq will “embolden” the Iranians, which will in turn put our Israeli allies more at risk. Peña says it was “naïve” to think the Republican power brokers and major fundraisers would heed the growing anti-interventionist streak among grassroots conservatives and libertarians. As for the Tea Party, “I think there was a lot of wishful thinking when they thought the Tea Party would be a natural ally — not! All they care about is reducing taxes, first and foremost, not cutting defense spending, especially if it is defense spending in their own districts.” While he doesn’t call the optimism of the last year “naïve,” Adams does say conservatives could have seen what was coming easily enough. Bigger than the wars themselves is the Republican Party’s quadrennial need to puff out its chest, flex those muscles, and pose among the markers at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s all about defining who is the “strongest” leader, all reason and practicality be damned. “It’s 99 percent about leadership and 1 percent about policy,” he said. “That’s why all these guys are trying to position themselves with ‘I’m a tough leader, I won’t make wishy-washy decisions. You don’t make nice with people, you tell them what to do; you don’t build coalitions; you make policy and go out and look for people who are willing to play. Obama is the weak one.‘” They’re not entirely wrong, either. “Toughness speaks to the male vote,” and polls prove it, Adams added. Unfortunately, this kind of superficial talk is making for “silliness” in the candidates’ supposed platforms. “It reduces Republican national security thinking to Jell-O.” Critics say Republicans are digging themselves into a hole on this issue, and that might not be such a bad thing. “The polls show overwhelming opposition to the Iraq War, and if the Republicans want to say that ‘Obama lost Iraq,’ Lord let them,” quipped Conn Hallinan, a writer for the liberal Institute for Policy Studies. It’s time for noninterventionists and libertarian-leaning conservatives to look elsewhere if they want party representation — if they haven’t already. Read more by Kelley B. Vlahos
After scrapping nudity to boost advertising revenue, Hugh Hefner’s son – now at the helm – announces the magazine is ‘taking back our identity’ Out with the old, in with the nude: Playboy brings back naked women Playboy has gone back to basics in the latest attempt to make over the ailing magazine, restoring nudity to its pages a year after banishing naked women in an effort to boost advertising revenue. The latest bid for relevance comes as Cooper Hefner, the 25-year-old son of nonagenarian founder Hugh Hefner, takes the reins as the magazine’s chief creative officer. “I’ll be the first to admit that the way in which the magazine portrayed nudity was dated, but nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem,” the younger Hefner said in a statement. The Playboy problem: has the brand ever endangered women? Read more “Today we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are.” Playboy scrapped nudes for the January/February 2016 issue, which featured Pamela Anderson on its cover. “The question everyone will likely be asking is, ‘Why?’” a statement in October said, announcing the change. “Playboy has been a friend to nudity, and nudity has been a friend to Playboy, for decades. The short answer is: times change.” The publisher decided to return to business as usual after finding that while “no nudes” permitted greater ability to display the magazine on newsstands, it did not offset a fall in subscription sales. “I said when they dropped the nude spreads it would be a big mistake,” said industry analyst Samir “Mr Magazine” Husni. “Nudes were the brand, so if one day you remove them, then you technically kill the brand image. Playboy with no nudes was an oxymoron. So this is a step in the right direction.” Using the marketing headline “Naked is normal”, Hefner called the return of naked women a “remarkably special moment personally and professionally”. In an essay titled The Playboy Philosophy, Hefner insisted many had missed his father’s original intention – “to promote a healthy conversation about sex while also encouraging dialogue on social, philosophical and religious opinions”. He claimed that “many misinterpreted that message or missed it entirely”. Under his new Playboy philosophy, the magazine would be “swinging back to tradition”. Utah rejects sex education bill, so porn site redirects to instructional videos Read more It is reported that the new issue displays breasts and butts, but not full frontal nudity that had typified the publication over most of its 63-year existence. The new issue would feature Scarlett Johansson, Van Jones and Run the Jewels, along with several nude playmates, including Scarlett Byrne, who writes on the importance of owning female sexuality and the double standards that still exist between women and men. In addition to nudes, the re-imagined magazine will include old elements, including ribald “party jokes” and a “heritage” section of vintage spreads. Husni believes the return of naked women may allow Playboy to reclaim some of its former self. “As a brand will it ever go back to having a 7 million circulation? No it cannot. It needs innovation not renovation. With Hugh on the way out, and under the creative leadership of Cooper, it will have a better chance to succeed, and to introduce an new idea of what it could be.”
It’s time to re-open the doors to Rabbit House, where good friends are ready to take on the next exciting adventure, and there’s always something unusual going on. After all, how many cafés have waitresses who collect firearms and a rabbit that actually talks? However, trouble may be burrowing into the Kafu residence when a magazine runs an article on places to eat and neglects to mention Rabbit House! Will an investigation into what’s been “haunting” Syaro’s house be a wild goose chase, or will someone get a lot of grey hare as a result? Is the sudden appearance of Cocoa’s big sister a blessing or a disaster waiting happen? Still, nothing is as scary as the prospect of graduating school! Will everyone make the grade, or will some friends be left behind? The tail will be told as Chino, Cocoa, Rize, and the gang all return in Is The Order A Rabbit?? Season 2! SHOW TRAILER:
When is the Equality Act not providing equality? When you’re a male carer. I have a question for you. Can it ever be acceptable to withhold education or training courses from someone on the grounds of gender? Further to this, what if the training is backed by a local authority and funded by the tax payer? In this instance we’re talking about courses to help people improve their IT skills. I can’t help feeling that such a stance can rarely, if ever, be justified. Even so, over the past few months I have stumbled across two instances of this happening. The courses in question have been designed for women returning to work after taking time off to raise children. What happens if a dad needs training? I don’t question the need for these services to be available to women. In fact I encourage it. There’s a very clear need for them and they’re no doubt of huge benefit to the women who have sacrificed careers to raise children. I hardly need to tell you that it’s tough for women returning to work after years of economic inactivity. Even so, it’s tougher still if you’re male. People don’t expect men to fulfil the main childcaring role. Not only are these men (which would include me as a stay-at-home father), battling society’s expectations, but there is simply no support for them. Being a mischievous soul, I approached both organisations providing the aforementioned training. I explained that I’m a stay-at-home dad and asked what would happen if I wished to undertake their training courses. One of them was operating in the private sector, the other, though technically a private sector body, has the backing of a local authority and is funded with tax payer’s money. To my great surprise, on both occasions the Equality Act was quoted back at me and used as justification to keep men off the training courses. Denying men services Yes, the Equality Act. You know, that piece of legislation that says you can’t discriminate on the grounds of gender. Unless, it seems, your gender is male. (I was told that if you turned up to the training course offered by the publicly-funded body, claimed to be transgender and presented as a woman, they’d let you on.) Before I go on, I’m going to disappoint you. I’m not going to reveal who I have been having these discussions with. I think these things are best done behind the scenes. The justification for denying men the same services as women, however, does need to be discussed openly. It all comes down to a clause in the Act that states that you can take “positive action” to meet the needs of distinct groups. I would quote the entire clause but it is incredibly lengthy. I shall therefore paraphrase thus; you can limit the provision of services to particular groups if they have a “protected characteristic,” that you “reasonably think” they may be disadvantaged and your actions to remedy this are “proportionate”. Not just dads Both organisations claim to have identified a need for women to receive such training. They are using this as a means to justify their stance. I have some sympathy with the argument. Women who fulfill the main child-caring role are often disadvantaged when re-entering the workforce. That said, where is the alternative training for men? It simply doesn’t exist. Where does the widower go? Where does the stay-at-home dad go? He doesn’t go anywhere because he’s being ignored and has been forgotten about. The need for such services to men may be limited, but when it’s needed, the need is considerably more acute. I can’t help thinking it’s a very short-sighted view to take when same-sex couples are raising children and same-sex marriage is an accepted norm. Over time this is inevitably going to lead to more men needing this kind of training when their relationships break down or they’re widowed. Let’s also not forget that eight per cent of single parent families are headed by men. In other words, there is a clear need to make these kind of services available to men. In reality these services are already being provided. The unfortunate truth is that men are being denied them. By John Adams Photo: Flickr/Mike Licht Are you a stay at home dad who has been excluded from services targeted at mums? Or have you come across any other instances where men are denied services due to their gender? Tell us about it in a tweet or a comment. John Adams is a married stay at home dad with two young daughters. He was previously a journalist and PR / communications professional but gave this up in 2010 to be a homemaker and look after the children. In 2012 he launched a parenting blog focused on his experiences as a “man that holds the babies” called Dadbloguk.com and he now writes for a variety of different publications in addition to his own blog and writes regular articles for insideMAN. Also on insideMAN:
In a world gone mad, commuters in Kansas City are being terrorized by a highway sniper, already wounding three By Shepard Ambellas KANSAS CITY, Mo. (INTELLIHUB) — The FBI is now hunting an urban sniper which has already struck three people with bullets, who were traveling along a specific stretch of Interstates 435 and 470. While authorities have told commuters using those Interstates to “remain vigilant”, others, such as Cindy Lester, say they would rather take a detour from that route. However, interestingly, witness reports vary–while one victim claims a person, wearing a black ski mask, drove toward them, firing from an oncoming traffic lane, others say that no cars were around when they were struck. According to a recent report by ABC News, authorities say that most of the shootings have taken place near highway exits or interchanges. Authorities also stated that “handguns” may have been used in some of the cases. Police urge drivers to remain on “high alert”. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
31 Pages Posted: 26 Jun 2017 Date Written: June 25, 2017 Abstract The impact of poor nutrition has been established as an important determinant of learning and achievement among school aged children. It has also been demonstrated that the single monthly treatment of food stamps leaves meaningful nutritional deficiencies in recipient households during the final weeks of the benefits cycle. This paper exploits detailed administrative data on standardized math tests scores and randomized food stamp receipt dates to allow us to measure the impact of these low nutritional periods on student performance. Our main results are that scores are notably lower when the exam falls near the end of the benefit cycle and when food stamps arrive on the four days immediately preceding the exam. While both boys and girls experienced a similar penalty with receipt near the end of the cycle, the effect from receipt just prior to the exam appears to be partially explained by a large negative effect associated with weekend receipt, which coincides with the four days prior to the exam, that is concentrated among African-American boys. Our results provide evidence that households do not sufficiently smooth consumption and that this has measurable effects on student performance. The fact that weekend receipt differs suggests a behavioral response from households beyond food insecurity that also has meaningful effects.
A proposal for a party leaders' 2015 election debate to be staged on the internet is being launched by a unique alliance of YouTube, the Guardian, and the Telegraph. The initiative for a debate broadcast through YouTube would break the monopoly of existing broadcasters and allow innovative forms of audience participation for the political parties. The proposal, using the hashtag #onlinedebate, has been in preparation for months and was sent to the main party leaders on Thursday following informal talks with politicians. The cross-platform collaboration would put an online debate before the vast majority of the UK's 55 million internet users, and would be aimed at engaging a younger and more interactive audience. A live feed could be embedded on any media site and be carried by any broadcasters on traditional TV and radio. Until now, there has been an assumption that any 2015 election debates will be screened by the existing range of TV channels. But the new alliance claims this is to misunderstand the degree to which traditional boundaries between TV and the web, including newspaper websites, have eroded. For those aged under 44 the internet is now the main source of news, the three news media groups say, arguing that the format would reach an audience often alienated by traditional broadcasters. It would give those voters more opportunities to engage with debates through tweets, likes, shares or questions to politicians. The format would also make it easier for the political parties to set up arrangements for viewers to make contact or donate. The three-pronged consortium argues that the experience in America shows elections, including leader debates, are increasingly being fought out online, rather than on the old TV networks. Videos uploaded to YouTube tagged Obama or Romney were viewed 2.7bn times during the 2012 election cycle. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown at one of the three leaders' debates before the 2010 general election. Photograph: Getty Images The consortium of YouTube, which is owned by Google, the Guardian and the Telegraph, combining the left and right in UK politics, has given a commitment that the moderator in any debate would be a woman. All three moderators in 2010 on the traditional TV channels were men – Adam Boulton, Alastair Stewart and David Dimbleby. YouTube, the Guardian and the Telegraph say they are open-minded about the precise format for the debate, including the complex issue of which leaders would take part and in what combination. One advantage for the websites is that they are not as curtailed by strict broadcasting rules about the format and so could offer a more flexible alternative. Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor-in-chief, said: "The digital world has become an increasingly vital democratic tool and forum for debate, and it's imperative that politicians understand and embrace the opportunities afforded to them by it. Open, digital-first journalism that holds power to account lies at the heart of the Guardian's mission, which is why we believe the proposed partnership between us, the Telegraph and YouTube is such an important and exciting next step in the changing relationship between politicians and the electorate." Jason Seiken, editor-in-chief of Telegraph Media Group, said the advantage of the internet was that the TV debates could become a "two-way conversation" between viewer and politician. He said: "The power of digital media comes in its ability to connect our leaders and the public in a two-way conversation. It appeals to millions who have not previously bothered to engage in the political process." Peter Barron, a former editor of BBC2's Newsnight and now head of communications for Europe at Google, added: "Given the way voters are consuming and engaging with news these days we think it's time for an online election debate." In a first for British politics the three party leaders in 2010 held three TV debates, but since then David Cameron has voiced doubts about the format saying they drained the oxygen out of the rest of the election campaign. Broadcasters themselves have admitted to surprise at the extent to which the debates resonated and admit the focus on ensuring the debates happened led to a lack of imagination about the format, and instead a determination to simplify. The Labour election campaign co-ordinator Douglas Alexander has suggested a repeat of the 2010 format in which the three leaders debate three times, first on Sky, then BBC and finally ITV. Channel 4 News was excluded from the arrangement, but is now likely to mount a joint bid with Sky. Nick Clegg has warned that if Cameron tries to exclude him from the debates, he will mount a legal challenge. A House of Lords committee said in a report this week that there was clear public support for more televised debates next year but warned that a "whole range of obstacles" stood in the way of the exercise being repeated. The committee, headed by the Tory peer Lord Inglewood, called on broadcasters to do more to encourage voter participation in the elections and create an online "hub" where the debates could be watched on demand.
Here are two extra-cute girls we spotted walking down the street together in Harajuku. When not dressed as Mario Bros., these fun girls are actually 16-year-old Japanese high school students. One of the cool things about their outfits is that they’re put together from items found at several different popular Harajuku resale clothing shops. On the left, with a double bun hairstyle, is Yuna (aka Mario). She’s wearing a Mario Bros-inspired outfit that features a Mario hat, cutoff denim overalls from Sevens (a Harajuku store famous for selling items, mostly resale clothing, for 700 yen), a red shirt from Thank You Mart, and red Vans sneakers. Her accessories include a bow tie, a large eyeball pin, tube socks, and a GreenAirline backpack. Yuna’s favorite fashion shops include Nadia Harajuku and Panama Boy. Her favorite band is flumpool. If you’d like to know more about Yuna (and see more cute pictures), check out her official blog! On the right, with pigtails, is Fumika (aka Luigi). She’s wearing a Mario Bros-inspired outfit featuring a Luigi hat, a denim jumper dress from Sevens, a green shirt from Thank You Mart, and green Vans sneakers. Her accessories – some of which are handmade – include a bow tie, glasses, a watch, several rings, a Spinns Harajuku pin (you might recognize the pattern from Kyary’s Pon Pon Pon video), a felt mushroom, polka dot socks, and a black backpack. Fumika’s favorite shops include Spinns, Panama Boy, and Galaxxxy. Her favorite band is the visual kei group SuG. If you’d like to know more about Fumika, check out her blog! Click any of the street snaps to enlarge them.
Photo It is the first photo from the first spacecraft to orbit the first rock from the Sun. On Tuesday morning, NASA’s Mercury Messenger took this photograph of the surface of Mercury. The bright pockmark in the upper half of the image is a 50-mile-wide crater called Debussy. (Craters on Mercury are named after artists, musicians and writers.) The spacecraft then took 363 more photographs before sending the images to Earth; more will be released to the public on Wednesday, when NASA will hold a news conference about what it sees on Mercury. The Messenger began its trip through the inner solar system six and a half years ago, and it entered orbit around Mercury on March 17. Since then, engineers have been checking out the spacecraft before turning on the instruments, including the camera. During the mission, expected to last at least a year, the Messenger is to take 75,000 more photographs, allowing scientists to map out the planet’s entire surface and study its geology and atmosphere in detail.
There’s a new band in town that’s guiding national security by quietly tutoring the most powerful man in America. Never-Trump Republicans who’d been apprehensive about President Donald Trump are celebrating the trio’s influence, calling Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Homeland Secretary John Kelly the “Axis of Adults.” Through near daily contact with the trio, as well as Trump’s National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and CIA director Mike Pompeo, Trump’s world view appears to be morphing more closely to match hawkish conservatives of the Bush administration. They point to the men’s influence in the Tomahawk strike in Syria—in contrast to Trump’s isolationist slogans on the campaign trail; the outreach to China, compared to Trump’s threats to launch a trade war; a possible escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and Trump’s hardening stance toward Russia. None of these key national security chiefs were part of the Trump campaign, or movement. They are seen by those who work most closely with them as loyal to the office of the president but still getting to know the man himself, said a senior administration official, speaking anonymously to describe the interactions just 11 weeks into the fledgling presidency. “They realize this is a tumultuous White House, and they are serving as a leveling influence over fractious personalities… responsibly protecting the country from enemies both foreign and domestic,” the official said, lumping Trump campaign veterans like embattled advisor Steve Bannon into the “domestic” enemy camp. Bannon’s removal from the official NSC roster by H.R. McMaster is seen as a sign the “adults” are winning. “H.R. has been a steadying force,” a second senior administration official said. A third senior administration official described last week how there is now an efficient process to debate ideas, put them before the president and come to fairly swift decisions—a contrast to the chaos NSC staffers described in the early weeks under now-resigned National Security Advisor Mike Flynn. Last week’s Marist poll shows the majority of Americans still disapprove of how Trump is handling foreign policy, but there’s a slight shift upward from the last time Marist measured. Trump’s behind-closed-doors, boardroom style of decision-making may not be winning over the bulk of the American people, who feel blindsided by the recent national security moves that come with little warning before, and scant explanation afterward. And even those supportive of the Trump administration’s recent actions aren’t sure there’s any sort of coherent policy behind them yet. But many former staffers for President George W. Bush told The Daily Beast that they are now putting their names into the ring to work in one of the “safe zones” with Mattis, Tillerson or Kelly, according to three former Bush staffers who now all work for the administration or are interviewing for jobs there. (And it was actually a former Obama administration staffer, Colin Kahl, who was one of the first to publicly use the phrase “Axis of Adults” to describe the three national security chiefs.) Mattis earned their trust during his military career as a Marine General who unsuccessfully pushed the Obama administration to challenge Iran, combined with his scholarship on civil-military relations. Kelly, also a retired Marine general, commanded in Iraq, ran the U.S. military’s Southern Command, and bears the heartbreaking distinction of having lost a son in combat. Tillerson has never served in combat, but has done high-stakes business in many conflict zones, and eschews the limelight as much as his counterparts. “He’s consulting all these guys and they have a high degree of comfort among themselves,” said a senior administration official. “There is the band of military brothers—Mattis, Kelly and McMaster. Tillerson and [UN Ambassador] Nikki Haley are not military but play a big role.” “What’s making this work for the president is the mix—not one or the other,” the official said, speaking anonymously to describe the president’s decision process. All the administration officials interviewed say the key discussions happen not at the NSC, but at fairly regular informal dinners with Tillerson and the others. “The president deserves credit for being incredibly flexible and listening,” said Michael Waltz, a former senior advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. “It’s his style—in The Art of the Deal, you see even in the late 80s he was on the phone and having dinners all the time. That’s how he learned,” Waltz said. Trump had two dinners with Mattis only last week, a senior U.S. official confirmed, speaking anonymously to describe the president’s schedule. “[President Barack] Obama was cerebral and consumed lots of written information and liked to have highly structured meetings,” said Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security and a former adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain. ”That clearly is not Donald Trump, who is more freewheeling and informal and responds with his gut.” The chemistry that’s developed amongst Trump’s advisors is also key to their leveling influence on the president. Mattis and Tillerson have a standing breakfast once a week, where they share views to be able to present a more united front on defense and foreign policy at key White House meetings, two of the senior administration officials said. Their low-key approach is materializing in the form of a blunt bat to rhetorical and incendiary pitches from North Korea, such as the Mattis’ weekend comment on Pyongyang’s failed medium-range missile launch: “The president and his military team are aware of North Korea’s most recent unsuccessful missile launch. The president has no further comment.” That was matched by Tillerson’s 23-word comment about an earlier North Korean test: “North Korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment.” And Mattis tamped down swirling anti-Russian sentiment last week after Moscow defended the Syrian regime’s suspected sarin gas attack last week and cut off military deconfliction communications with the U.S.-led coalition. “It will not spiral out of control,” Mattis insisted in a sober press conference, adding that he’s confident Russians will “act in their own best interests,” which means stand down on the panic. Of the relationship between the two men, a Pentagon spokesman would only confirm they have a weekly breakfast, and State Department spokesman R.C. Hammond would only say that, “the Secretary is in daily contact with his Cabinet and NSC colleagues, and works to give the President information and options.” U.N Ambassador Nikki Haley doesn’t work as closely with the group because of the simple fact of geography, being based at the U.N. in New York. But she told CNN that she talks regularly with the president, and one of the senior administration officials said her views are melded into the developing strategies for ISIS, Russia and North Korea. Haley and Lt. Gen. McMaster are quickly becoming the face of the president’s national security strategy, praised for handling high-stakes television interviews, while Mattis, Kelly and Tillerson only make rare appearances. McMaster has also won kudos internally for leaving his ego out of NSC debates, running efficient meetings that end with recommendations for the president (something that past NSC insiders say didn’t always happen in the last administration) and then translating the outcome of those meetings to Trump, even bringing his own NSC experts to the Oval Office for the president to question. There’s one potential downside for the Bush-era influx the “axis of adults” is encouraging. One of the senior administration officials said as more Bush veterans join Team Trump, they are reconnecting with each other and the old relationships are facilitating getting things done, and they seldom see eye-to-eye with the less experienced true believers from the campaign. That’s adding to the friction, and the delays in hiring to fill a couple thousand still-empty posts. Hiring is still hamstrung by a “loyalty test,” which puts a black mark against any job applicant who once expressed #NeverTrump views. “For a lot of people who put their name on the first #NeverTrump list, they did it on the basis of what they heard on the campaign trail and to be fair, I can see why they’d say that,” said former Trump transition official James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation. “Those of us briefing Trump saw more depth, maturity and responsibility there.” “If you look at how he’s used his leadership team, they don’t look half bad, and people are a lot less risk averse in signing on now,” said Carafano, whose job was to line up potential hires for the new administration. The so-called “adults” have also had some misfires. Kelly’s comments endorsing Trump’s tweeted accusations that the Obama administration wire-tapped him—and floating the idea of splitting up immigrant families—have drawn heavy criticism. Tillerson is criticized for not engaging enough with his department’s experienced diplomats, engaging with the press as little as possible, and not objecting strongly enough to Trump’s proposed slashing of the State Department and USAID budgets. And as for an overall defense strategy, it’s not yet clear that there is one. The Tomahawk strike in Syria seems to be a one-off, to signal Russia that it better rein its client state into line. The massive bomb dropped in Afghanistan seems to be just one more salvo in a never-ending war with no end. And Mattis said they are “fleshing out” an ISIS strategy, but early reports are that it’s much like the Obama administration’s longterm plan: manage the chaos with the minimum of U.S. troops, but don’t expect to intervene too heavily or change much. Still foreign policy watchers say the direction they are going is largely positive, with the “axis” drawing praise from moderate national security watchers as well as the more conservative ranks. “After more than two months of relative chaos and uncertainty surrounding U.S. foreign policy…when a lot of people have been questioning the administration’s basic competence, this looked like governing at its finest by a group of highly experienced professionals,” said former Bush official John Hannah, now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He said the personalities involved “start from the basic premise that U.S. leadership, realistically applied, remains an essential bulwark for maintaining a minimally acceptable degree of international order and security.” “All three understand very well civilian control of the military, among other core principles of our democracy, and all three are very serious men with their egos in check and no fascination with the maximization of personal power,” said Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. Some Republicans are still waiting to see what happens next before applying for jobs, stung by Trump’s tweet storms, the most recent seeming to goad North Korea into direct conflict. McMaster, Haley, Pompeo, and the “Axis” are still in reactive mode when it comes to the president’s tweets, which often complicate their development of policy, such as Trump’s taunting tweets that “North Korea is looking for trouble.” Their staff deeply wish they would have a heart-to-heart with POTUS and at least coordinate the messages. “Even if you have adult supervision above you at the cabinet secretary level, is that enough? To work really hard on something, and then have the president roll in with a tweet, it doesn’t matter how much Mattis protects you, because the tweet just undercut your negotiations,” said Mieke Eoyang, a vice president at the Democratic think tank Third Way, of conversations she has had with would-be Trump staffers. “I have a lot of Republican friends really wrestling with this.”
New research from BDO Canada shows that it isn’t the lagging economy that’s keeping tech companies up at night — it’s the country’s talent pool. The second annual report, titled “BDO Canada Technology RiskFactor Report,” shows that one of the primary concerns of the tech sector is finding and retaining talented personnel — 85 per cent of the organizations surveyed cited this as one of their biggest worries. “The Canadian tech industry has had some notable wins over the past few years and is emerging as an important engine for Canada’s economy,” said Scott Rodie, partner and leader of the technology and life sciences practice at BDO Canada, in a statement. “However, as the industry grows, competing to find and keep the right talent has become increasingly challenging. The next big question for Canadian tech firms hoping to maintain their success is determining how to address this talent gap.” The research compiled the risk factors mentioned in the financial statements of publicly traded tech companies across Canada (think homegrown heroes of the sector like Hootsuite and Shopify), and narrowed down their concerns to the top 25 most common issues cited by these organizations. The other top concerns in the sector included competition in their market and pricing (another 85 per cent cited this), as well as their ability to drive innovation by developing and marketing new products or services. While other woes trumped it on this list, Canada’s flagging economy was certainly on the radar of the majority of the country’s tech firms. More than 70 per cent of organizations mentioned it in their financial statements, with one third of those specifically pointing to commodity prices (particularly oil) as a risk. This represents of spike of 30 per cent over last year’s numbers.
Tony Podesta, the longtime Democratic rainmaker on K Street, is stepping away from the Podesta Group, a lobbying firm he founded almost 30 years ago. Podesta and the firm have been pulled into the federal investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election, run by special counsel Robert Mueller. In the wake of Podesta’s departure, a new firm will be formed without his name, CNN reported, citing an unnamed source. The Hill has confirmed that there will be a new entity, with a source familiar with the developments saying that the roll out will likely take place before the end of the week. "They've been thinking about it and planning it for awhile; it'll be quick," the source told The Hill, asking for anonymity to discuss the events. A source at the firm told The Hill that a small group is "now working to salvage as much of our current business as possible," saying that the response has been positive thus far. The person asked for anonymity in order to discuss the sensitive topic. "There are a bunch of people here who just want to get back to doing what we do best," the person from Podesta Group told The Hill. "This group believes we should always win on the merits, and that whether we were sufficiently transparent with the government should never, ever, be an issue. We want this behind us." Politico first reported the news of Podesta stepping down. Kimberley Fritts, Podesta Group’s CEO, will be in charge of the new firm. The news about Podesta came on the same day the Justice Department filed a 12-count indictment against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his associate, Richard Gates. Prosecutors charge that Manafort and Gates knowingly evaded foreign lobbying disclosure laws by doing work for a Brussels-based nonprofit called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, which falsely claimed to have no ties to Ukrainian government officials. Both Podesta Group and Mercury worked for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine from 2012 to 2014. The Podesta Group earned more than $1.2 million from the client during that period, according to disclosures it filed with the Justice Department. Collectively, the two firms earned more than $2 million. The firm had registered lobbyists for the group under domestic lobbying laws — which are less strict than ones required of those who work for foreign governments or political parties — but retroactively filed paperwork with the Justice Department earlier this year to report the foreign lobbying. Manafort and Gates directed the lobbying firms on the advocacy strategy for the Centre, The Associated Press reported in August. The reports that surfaced about Manafort’s foreign lobbying ultimately led him to step down from the Trump campaign. Monday’s indictment from Mueller’s team goes into more detail about what Gates and Manafort allegedly did to conceal the lobbying activity, including crafting false talking points about the origins of the nonprofit’s funding. In response to Gates’s email with the talking points, sent last year amid media reports about the work, a person from Company B replied: “There’s a lot of email traffic that has you much more involved than this suggests,” according to the indictment. "We will not disclose that but heaven knows what former employees of [Company B] or [Company A] might say." The Justice Department does not name the Podesta Group or Mercury in its indictment against Gates and Manafort — referring only to Company A and Company B — but the context points to the firms. Gates and Manafort had worked for the pro-Russian Ukrainian party, called the Party of Regions, and Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was later forced out of the country amid protests over corruption. The Podesta Group has previously said it had no idea that the Centre could be connected to the Ukrainian government. The firm said it had consulted lawyers about whether to file disclosures under federal laws governing foreign lobbying, and the Centre had certified to the firms that no foreign government or political party had funded it. Another source familiar with the situation told The Hill that Company A is Mercury and Company B is the Podesta Group, a detail first reported by NBC News. While Mercury made similar statements about certifying that the non-profit did not have foreign influence behind it, Mueller wrote in grand jury indictment that Gates told Company A that it would be "representing the Government of Ukraine in [Washington], DC." The indictment against Gates and Manafort alleges that they provided false statements to the Justice Department when questioned about the foreign lobbying, such as repeating comments made to the press that they had “served as a means of introduction of Company A and Company B.” Company A and Company B were not paid by the nonprofit, the indictment says, but by offshore bank accounts run by Gates and Manafort. Last week, Mueller reportedly began probing Podesta and his firm last week, NBC News reported, citing three unnamed sources. A spokesman for the firm, in a statement, told NBC News it was cooperating fully with the special counsel’s office “and has taken every possible step to provide documentation that confirms timely compliance.” “In all of our client engagements, the Podesta Group conducts due diligence and consults with appropriate legal experts to ensure compliance with disclosure regulations at all times — and we did so in this case,” the firm’s statement continued. In August, Mueller issued grand jury subpoenas to six public relations and lobbying firms who had worked with Gates and Manafort for the Centre — including Mercury and Podesta Group, NBC News reported. Podesta is the founder and chairman of the Podesta Group, which he started in 1998 with his brother, John Podesta, the former campaign chairman of 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’s 2016 run for the White House. It has since grown to one of the top lobbying firms in Washington, with dozens of well-connected lobbyists from both parties. The firm also runs lobbying and public relations campaigns for blue-chip clients and foreign governments. Podesta is also a prolific Democratic donor, having given $260,425 to lawmakers, the Democratic Party or federal candidates for office during the two-year 2016 election cycle, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. — Updated at 6:56 p.m.
After flying EVA Air’s incredible 777 business class between Los Angeles and Taipei, I was very much looking forward to the connection on one of EVA Air’s Hello Kitty planes. This wasn’t my first EVA Air Hello Kitty flight — years ago I took Hello Kitty flights from Tokyo to Taipei and Taipei to Los Angeles. For those of you who still have no clue what I’m talking about, EVA Air has a partnership with Hello Kitty, and they have a handful of planes that are Hello Kitty themed. Everything about the experience incorporates Hello Kitty, from check-in, to the gate, to the plane’s livery, to the onboard experience. It’s sort of crazy and amazing. So I intentionally booked a Hello Kitty flight between Taipei and Singapore while enroute to Bali. I could have flown nonstop, but what’s the fun in that when you could instead hang with Hello Kitty for a few hours? Boy was the experience something, alright… There was a dedicated Hello Kitty check-in area at Taipei Taoyuan Airport. Then there was a special Hello Kitty gate. Next to the Hello Kitty gate was a Hello Kitty store, perfect for some retail therapy. The flight was operated by a 777, which was identical to the one I flew from Los Angeles. However, this one had Hello Kitty flair. There was a Hello Kitty pillow, Hello Kitty slippers, Hello Kitty barf bag, Hello Kitty napkins, etc. There was a Hello Kitty video playing during boarding, and even Hello Kitty artwork on the bulkheads. After takeoff I was served Hello Kitty snacks and Hello Kitty champagne (okay, maybe it’s not actually Hello Kitty champagne, but they do serve rose champagne in Hello Kitty’s honor). The food had Hello Kitty touches, and the cheese cube was even made to look like Hello Kitty herself. The lavatory had Hello Kitty toiletries, and even Hello Kitty toilet paper. If you’re in the mood to shop, there’s a special selection of Hello Kitty goodies for sale. I purchased a Hello Kitty apron (the same one worn by the crew) and Hello Kitty model airplane. I can neither confirm nor deny that I may or may not have put on the apron during the flight, and may or may not have taken a picture with the entire crew wearing matching aprons. The crew took note of my Hello Kitty enthusiasm (I was the only person visibly excited by the whole thing), so they gave me Hello Kitty playing cards, Hello Kitty pens, etc. I asked the two flight attendants taking care of me if they loved Hello Kitty as much as I did. Their answers? “I did like Hello Kitty… before I started this job.” “Mmmm, to be honest, no.” If you haven’t yet taken a Hello Kitty flight, you absolutely must. Right now the only destination in the U.S. with Hello Kitty service is Houston (which seems like an unusual market for Hello Kitty). I regret not routing through Houston in order to be able to enjoy 16 hours of the Hello Kitty service. It’s such a cool experience. What do you make of EVA Air’s Hello Kitty service — do you love it as much as I do, or is it your version of hell?
By David Callahan The views expressed are his own. Occupy Wall Street protestors are pondering their next steps after police raids this week dismantled more Occupy encampments in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. In some ways, though, the movement has already scored its most important victory: It has changed the “narrative” that frames public debate. Polls show that the Tea Party story – about an America being destroyed by big government – has been pushed aside by the Occupy Wall Street story, which stresses rising inequality and corporate greed. This is good news for President Obama. While there is little that Obama can do between now and next November to jumpstart the economy, he may have a strong chance at reelection anyway if Americans keep gravitating to a progressive worldview. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier this month, 76 percent agreed that the “current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.” In another recent poll, by The Washington Post/ABC News, respondents were asked: “Do you think the federal government should or should not pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans?” A majority – 60 percent – said the government should pursue such policies. Meanwhile, public concern about the Tea Party’s linchpin issues – taxes and the deficit – has receded. Asked in late October to name the most important issue facing the country, just 5 percent of respondents to a New York Times/CBS News poll named the budget deficit. A majority said jobs and the economy. This same poll included another result that should give Democrats hope: A strong 69 percent of respondents agreed that the policies of Republicans in Congress “favor the rich” while just 12 percent thought the same thing about Obama’s policies. Clearly, it is too early to count Obama out – even if it’s true that no president since FDR has won re-election with the economy in such bad shape. To keep this new wind at Obama’s back, and to beat the historic odds, the White House needs to find ways to amplify the inequality narrative in coming months. Obama got off to a strong start when he proposed the Buffett Rule back in September (just a day after Occupy Wall Street set up camp in Zuccotti Park). And he has stayed on track this fall by pushing both higher taxes on the rich and new spending for job creation in appearances around the country. But let’s be real here: tax hikes and big new spending plans aren’t going anywhere on Capitol Hill right now. And it’s hard to influence public debate with ideas that disappear into a black hole. What Democrats need are proposals that can both engage Republican lawmakers and feed public angst at being left in the dust by the top 1 percent. That’s a tall order, but here’s one idea that could thread the needle: Tax reform. Nearly everyone in Washington wants to streamline the IRS’s Swiss cheese tax code and – with congressional approval at record lows – both parties have an interest in showing they can get something — anything — done on Capitol Hill. Tax reform could have the biggest payoff for Obama. He should keep his efforts toward a fairer tax system, and less inequality, on top of the national agenda. A progressive tax reform plan would go after the plethora of tax breaks that favor wealthy individuals and corporations – while also creating a simplified, more efficient tax system and raising new revenues. We got hints of this potential strategy earlier in the fall, when Obama called for eliminating tax breaks for corporate jets and oil companies at the same time as he proposed the Buffett Rule. A grander initiative would go after a bigger swath of corporate tax breaks – or all of them, as proposed by the Simpson-Bowles Commission last year. Ending the special treatment of capital gains and dividends, which dramatically favors the wealthy, should also be part of any plan. In addition, Obama should push to restructure individual tax breaks that primarily benefit the well-off, like deductions for home mortgage interest and 401(k)s. It’s wrong that millionaires can write off the interest on their vacation homes while struggling renters get no help at all from the tax code. And it’s wrong to give the affluent big tax breaks for saving for retirement when 40 percent of Americans don’t have access to a 401(k) plan at work. Inequality can feel like an abstract issue and voters may turn to other concerns before next November. But if Obama targets specific and grossly unfair ways that the rich get richer on the public’s dime, he could solidify what’s at stake in the new debate over inequality. It would be an epic battle with the legions of lobbyists who defend the 1 percent in Washington. But it would be his. PHOTO: Members of the Occupy Wall Street movement hold a puppet of Former U.S. President George Bush as they re-enact a scene resembling a tea party in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street in New York October 14, 2011. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
Tasha Thomas, who was with Crawford when he was fatally shot while carrying a pellet gun at the Ohio store, killed when car struck a pole at high speed The girlfriend of John Crawford, the young man who was shot dead by police while holding a pellet gun and speaking on his cellphone in an Ohio supermarket last year, has been killed in a car crash. Tasha Thomas died on New Year’s Day when the car she was travelling in struck a pole in Dayton at high speed and overturned, according to police. The driver, Frederick Bailey, died soon after at a hospital. John Crawford III shows Crawford, right, with his mother, Tressa Sherrod. Photograph: AP Thomas, who was 26, was shopping with Crawford at the Walmart in Beavercreek, a Dayton suburb, in August last year when Crawford was shot dead by a police officer. The officer was responding to a 911 call from a customer who said Crawford was pointing a gun at passersby. Last month the Guardian disclosed that Thomas was aggressively questioned by police after the shooting. A detective accused her of lying, threatened to send her to jail, and suggested that she was high on drugs before telling her that Crawford, 22, was dead. “It’s just tragic,” Michael Wright, the attorney for Crawford’s family, said on Friday of Thomas’s death. “It is a sad set of circumstances continuing from what happened at Walmart.” Wright, who advised Thomas soon after the shooting, said that her death had been confirmed to him by Anthony VanNoy, Thomas’s attorney. VanNoy could not be reached for comment. An official in the Montgomery County coroner’s office confirmed that Thomas, who lived in Fairborn, was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash on North Broadway street at 3.06pm and that Bailey, 30, died at the emergency room about 22 minutes later. Police told ABC22 that the car was travelling at between 90 and 100mph. Surveillance footage released after Crawford’s death showed he was shot after walking around the store with the pellet gun and occasionally swinging it at his side. The shooting was investigated by state officials and handled by a special prosecutor. A grand jury decided in September that the two police officers involved should not face criminal charges. Crawford’s family last month filed a civil lawsuit over Crawford’s death against the officers, the Beavercreek police department and its chief, and Walmart. All deny wrongdoing.
AMMAN: The last Islamic State stronghold in Homs province did not fall over the weekend, contrary to recent media reports, Syrian army sources on the ground told Syria Direct on Monday. The Islamic State “still holds the northern, eastern and central districts” of Sukhna, a desert settlement 200km east of Homs city, a Syrian Arab Army source told Syria Direct on Monday, asking not to be named. A second SAA source, who is not quoted in this report, gave a similar account. Both military sources contradicted reports in the international media that regime forces captured Sukhna on Sunday. Rather, SAA forces—backed by Russian and Syrian airpower—captured only the southern districts of the city on Sunday “without any clashes” after a sudden Islamic State (IS) withdrawal, the first source said. On Tuesday, regime forces were defending the newly captured positions from a “surprise IS counterattack,” he said. The battle for Sukhna is part of an ongoing regime push towards government-held districts of Syria’s eastern Deir e-Zor city, where thousands of civilians and pro-government fighters have been encircled by IS since 2014. If Sukhna falls to the Syrian army, 110 kilometers of desert, small towns and villages would remain between government forces and Deir e-Zor city, the Islamic State’s second city in Syria. “Sukhna matters because it is the gateway to both Deir e-Zor and Raqqa,” the SAA source said. “If we take it, the way ahead is wide open.” As pro-government fighters push eastward in Homs province, a parallel campaign southwest of Raqqa city has brought the SAA within 70km of Deir e-Zor city to the northwest, and cut off any potential advance by US-backed forces in the same area. Syrian state news agency SANA reported a “large army advance” near Sukhna over the past several days, and on Sunday said that “SAA units have tightened the noose on the Daesh terrorists in Sukhna,” but did not report the capture of the city. Regime forces and the allied Afghan Liwa Fatemiyoun militia currently surround Sukhna city to the north, west and south. In addition to controlling the southern districts, the regime reportedly has fire control of the western districts, and holds al-Tantour Mountain, which overlooks the city. The SAA source told Syria Direct on Monday that it appeared IS had “withdrawn” the bulk of its forces from Sukhna prior to this past weekend's advances. He speculated that further withdrawals could occur. “Either IS will fully withdraw from the city, which is likely based on our latest information,” he said, “or it will turn into urban warfare.” A Syrian army drone’s-eye view of Sukhna on Sunday. Photo courtesy of War Media. Islamic State fighters captured Sukhna from the Syrian regime in May 2015, just before a surprise offensive won them the ancient city of Palmyra, 50km to the southwest. All 35,000 civilian residents of Sukhna have fled the city in recent years, an activist from the city told Syria Direct on Monday. Many residents now live in desert camps in nearby Islamic State territory, in the Rukban and Hadalat camps to the south along Syria’s southern border with Jordan, or in Raqqa and Idlib provinces to the north and northwest. “Sukhna has been empty for more than 10 months because of the bombing of civilians inside by Russian and Syrian planes,” the Sukhna activist told Syria Direct on Monday. The SAA source told Syria Direct on Monday that aerial bombardments of Sukhna had “not stopped for the past three months” and that “a percentage of the city’s districts have been destroyed, since there are only IS elements there.”
Share 2 Email 87 Shares The mayor of Barre has temporarily withdrawn a proposal for a multimillion-dollar downtown redevelopment project that would include housing, retail space and a hotel, partly on land he owns. Mayor Thomas Lauzon said he was disappointed when information and documents he shared about the project in a recent private meeting were leaked to the press. The mayor is spearheading the development. Get all of VTDigger's daily news. You'll never miss a story with our daily headlines in your inbox. He told city councilors at their meeting Tuesday evening that they can “release whatever documents” they want, but the information will change, he said, “because I’m always coming up with new ideas.” “I’ve never experienced an environment in 12 years quite as political as this one,” he said, adding that he has had to watch his back. In an interview after the meeting, he said he plans to bring the project back to the City Council “with a vengeance.” The agenda for Tuesday’s meeting included an action item for councilors to consider accepting real estate purchase options connected with the project. But when that item came up, Councilor Lucas Herring said they wouldn’t be acting on it because the offer of purchase options had been withdrawn. It appears Lauzon took that step Friday. An email VTDigger obtained that Lauzon sent to City Manager Steve Mackenzie on Friday said: “(P)lease consider the offer to assign said property withdrawn.” Asked Tuesday night why he had withdrawn the project, Lauzon replied: “I felt that the interest of the project — and therefore our citizens — were best served by not having the city be the custodian of the options. I don’t think it was a good idea for the city to be in that chain of title.” VTDigger is underwritten by: According to other documents VTDigger recently obtained, the project could cost between $25 million and $30 million and would be financed with tax credits, federal grants and possibly funding from immigrant investors through the federal EB-5 visa program. From the beginning, it has been controversial. Details have been shielded from the public, prompting questions about whether the city and mayor had broken the state open meeting law. But at Tuesday night’s meeting, the City Council voted to release some of the documents Lauzon presented privately. Councilor Brandon Batham made the motion to do so. Mackenzie said he expected to release them Wednesday. Some councilors also say the mayor has a conflict of interest and should recuse himself from discussion of the project. Batham said in an interview that Lauzon has been cycling freely between his roles as mayor, developer and property owner. It’s a textbook case of conflict of interest, he said. “I don’t know how anybody could objectively look at that and not see a conflict of interest,” Batham said. Councilor Sue Higby has also said she is concerned about overlapping interests that are obscured by the various companies Lauzon and others may be using to pursue the project. Lauzon said after Tuesday’s meeting that he has no conflict of interest. “My property may or may not be involved,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be.” What he’s trying to do, he said, is put together a group of stakeholders who can work objectively on a project to improve Barre.
WEST MEMPHIS (KATV) - Three teens allegedly raped and beat a male special needs student in the bathroom at West Memphis High School. According to police records, 16-year-old Terrence Jones, 17-year-old Kenneth Bedford (aka "Lil Kenny") and 15-year-old Orlando Hamilton were all charged as adults on counts of rape and first degree battery. When questioned separately by police, all three said that they were skipping class February 13 when they went into one of the school's bathroom. The victim then walked in and the trio started bullying him. After that, each of the suspects had a different version of what happened. Jones and Hamilton each pointed the finger at each other as the person who actually raped the victim. Bedford denied a rape happened at all but said that they tried to rob him. The victim told police he was going to the bathroom when the three suspects came up behind him and forced him to the ground. He said one of the boys held him down while a second raped him. Afterwards, the victim went to report the incident to the principal but told officers he was sent back to class. He called a family member after school who then notified the police. After talking to investigators, the victim was taken to a Memphis hospital to be tested for evidence of sexual assault. At last check, no word on the results of those tests. West Memphis Police Capt. Ken Mitchell confirmed the victim is a special needs student but would not specify the nature of his disability. "The West Memphis School District Administration andthe West Memphis Police Department are working together to protect the rightsof the victim in this incident," Capt. Mitchell said, "and to help keep the entire school district asafe place for all students that attend West Memphis Schools."
A major overhaul of how buses and other traffic negotiate Geary Boulevard is set to reach a significant milestone early next year. The Geary Bus Rapid Transit project, which aims to make buses behave like trains by repurposing a lane of car traffic exclusively for buses, released its final environmental impact report Dec. 9, which may be approved in early January. Along the way, the project’s planners received thousands of public comments, from fiery verbal lambasting at meetings — where a box filled with paper public comments was stolen, then returned — to online surveys, to meetings with multitudes of community groups. “We heard from the community,” said Eric Young, a spokesperson for the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, which lead the environmental report. Along with Young, Kate Elliott, an SFMTA spokesperson; Colin Dentel-Post, SFCTA’s project manager for the environmental report; and Wahid Amiri, project manager for the EIR at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, led the San Francisco Examiner through the most recent changes to the project that will shape Geary Boulevard for decades to come. The project would see a red bus-only lane run along the sides of Geary Boulevard from 34th to 26th avenues, and the center of Geary Boulevard from 26th Avenue to just past Arguello Boulevard, and then again on the sides of Geary Boulevard the rest of the way to Market Street. Buses would truly be “rapid,” with the potential for riders to save “20 minutes per round-trip,” according to transit planners. That time saving would be enjoyed by the 38-Geary line’s 55,000 daily riders, which makes it one of the busiest bus lines in the western U.S., and roughly the same size as Caltrain’s daily ridership, according to transit planners. Prior to the release of the final EIR, planners heard both complaints and praise for the plan, Dentel-Post said — and revamped the project accordingly. As many as 91 sidewalk corners would be “bulbed” out to make street crossing shorter and safer. (There were previously 26 new bulb-outs planned.) New boarding islands in center lanes would see buses offload passengers much like trains. Among the largest changes are that bus-only lanes were expanded nine blocks, from 26th Avenue to 34th Avenue, to give quicker access to nearby schools, and much of the parking originally slated to be lost will be preserved. All told, 20 parking spaces will be lost along the project, Dentel-Post said. “That’s not because of the bus lanes, but these pedestrian bulbs at corners,” he said. And in another bit of good news for drivers, planners will maintain key left turns along the corridor — unlike Van Ness Avenue and its own BRT project, which stopped left turns all along the corridor, much to drivers’ consternation. One contentious part of the plan, which was derided in public meetings, was the removal of a pedestrian bridge that hovers over Geary Boulevard at Webster Street. That bridge will be saved, thanks to a Z-shaped pedestrian crossing that will allow walkers to be seen better by cars. Initially, planners were concerned pillars from the bridge hid pedestrians from drivers, leading to collisions. “We think we ended up with a solution that keeps everyone happy, except frankly those that think the bridge is ugly,” Dentel-Post said. But, he emphasized, the bridge is not compliant with the American with Disabilities Act. Surface crossing is necessary for those with wheelchairs and other disability needs, he said. The “Z” shaped criss crossing crosswalks are already in place at Market and Valencia streets, near Martuni’s bar, leading Dentel-Post to nickname it a “Martuni’s” crossing. However, the Steiner Street pedestrian bridge, which is near Raymond Kimball Playground and is designed similarly to Webster Street’s, will be torn down. “We had a couple of people saying they wanted that bridge, but not nearly the hue and cry of Webster,” Dentel-Post said. Amiri said 80 percent of pedestrians cross on the surface, not on the Steiner bridge. Crossing Geary Boulevard at Webster and Steiner streets, there will be multiple concrete median “refuges” and other wide portions of Geary Boulevard, so pedestrians who are slower — like seniors — have multiple points while crossing the street where they can pause. That may see a traffic lane repurposed at certain portions of Geary Boulevard as well, planners said, but that’s not necessarily a concern. “There’s really more traffic capacity than is needed,” said Dentel-Post, which Amiri noted “results in speeding.” On Jan. 5, the EIR will go to the SFCTA board for approval. After that, the SFMTA will bring individual elements of the project to neighbors for further public input, which will require individual approvals by the SFMTA Board of Directors to move forward. Some Geary Boulevard neighbors have asked the SFCTA commission to delay approval of the environmental report so they have more time to read and analyze it. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce also sent a letter to the transportation authority asking for the board to delay action on the final EIR until February or early March, and wrote that meeting during the holidays “does not serve the public interest.” Responding to the request for delay, Supervisor and Transportation Authority Commissioner Eric Mar said, “The significant community outreach done and many community meetings with those in the audience, and staff work, has been years in the making.” “There have been endless delays,” he said. Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that 20 bus stops will be lost to make way for the Geary BRT project. Twenty parking spaces, not bus stops, will be eliminated. Click here or scroll down to comment
May 1 debate deepens as gov’t bans Taksim rally ISTANBUL Security forces again resorted to tear gas to prevent union members from issuing a press statement over May 1 celebrations at Taksim. DHA Photo Turkey’s political scene is again being riveted by a debate over May Day, with the government vowing to block ceremonies in Istanbul’s iconic Taksim Square, even as the opposition has reiterated its intention on marching on the public space.Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said yesterday he would not allow May Day gatherings in Taksim Square, the scene of protests that have dogged the government for months. A similar decision in May last year to ban the use of the square – a traditional and symbolic rallying point for unions – led to violence as police attacked protesters in a prequel to the wave of nationwide anti-government demonstrations in June.“Those who insist on celebrating it here [in Taksim Square] are just saying: ‘I am ready for clashes,’” Erdoğan defiantly said at a meeting of his party’s parliamentary group meeting.“Give up on your hopes of Taksim. Do not engage in a fight with the state. Do not disturb the peace of our people. Our people do not want to see streets where stones and Molotov cocktails prevail,” he said. “We will not tolerate this. You are not above the law.”Erdoğan has instead suggested the rally area in Yenikapı, which was recently constructed by filling in the sea, and offered free transport on May 1. However, leftist unions have already vowed to ignore the ban.“Yenikapı and Maltepe are designated places to hold demonstrations and the trade unions should now learn the culture of democratic demonstration,” said Erdoğan, adding that public transportation would be free on May Day if trade unions accept the proposal.The opposition Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) leader Selahattin Demirtaş said they would not give up their demand to gather in Taksim.Demirtaş called on the prime minister to give up his insistence on blocking Taksim to May Day gatherings, adding that the BDP would be there on that day.The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader also called on the government to allow people to gather for May Day wherever they demand in order to prevent any clashes on that day.“There was been no fight on May 1, 2010, [when Taksim was open to unions]. The prime minister himself stated [on May 2, 2010] that ‘May 1, 2010, is a concrete example that Turkey has changed.’ But [three years later], Taksim was banned. If you use pressure [on people by bans] then the fight occurs. We call on [the government] to allow people to gather anywhere they demand,” Kılıçdaroğlu said in his group meeting.Labor and Social Security Minister Faruk Çelik said he could meet with the union members over the location of May Day but also signaled that Taksim would be blocked for the rally.“It is difficult to understand the union’s insistence on Taksim. They can commemorate the workers who lost their lives in Taksim with the participation of a limited number of union members. But if they attempt to gather there, then the scenes will not contribute to Turkey,” said Çelik yesterday upon a question.At least 34 people were killed in clashes in Taksim Square on May Day in 1977. Since then, the square has acquired paramount importance for the Turkish left.On April 21, police attacked members of the May 1 Committee – made up of unions and civil society groups – with tear gas to prevent them from issuing a statement about May Day demonstrations in Taksim.Eight people died when a relatively small environmentalist movement to save Istanbul’s Gezi Park – adjacent to Taksim Square – evolved into a nationwide wave of protests against Erdoğan.Fresh protests have erupted over a graft scandal implicating key Erdoğan allies and controversial measures taken by the prime minister including an Internet crackdown that saw Twitter blocked for nearly two weeks. Despite the protests and the corruption scandal, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came out unscathed from the March 30 local elections.
Budget Students and Backpackers Hostels in Kenya Backpackers Hostels in Kenya. One of the major challenges when it comes to backpacking is finding cheap or budget hostels, campsites, and lodges. This becomes less of a hustle if the destination country has advanced in technology and websites like Airbnb, Hostelbrokers and HostelWorld are available. This most of the time is not a problem to the rough travelers who look for a place to spend the night on arrival. In most cases, these are lodges and campsites which are not listed on the internet. Kenya is one of the best backpacker’s destinations in the World. Due to her amazing nature, wildlife, coast, eco-system and development, many travelers visit the country throughout the year. The major backpacking destinations in Kenya are Nairobi, Mombasa, Watamu, Kilifi, Diani, Lamu, and Kisumu. These cities and towns attract a high number of backpackers as well as tourists and hence the demand for budget accommodation is very high. To cut the existing gap, hospitality industry investors have developed high standard low-cost accommodation facilities in these places. A good example is Mombasa and North coast where most of the travelers are on a budget and looking for cheap deals. This region has adapted to this need and provided high-class hostels which are heaven to the backpackers. Below is a list of some of the best budget backpackers hostels, lodges and campsites in Kenya. List of Budget Backpackers Hostels in Kenya Follow Kenyan Backpacker on Facebook for Hostel Deals and Giveaways. Do you know of any other Low-cost Hostel that I haven’t included? Leave a comment below with its name.
Edited DSParda-Laurelai retelling a guest Aug 23rd, 2012 2,090 Never a guest2,090Never Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up , it unlocks many cool features! rawdownloadcloneembedreportprintdiff text 3.86 KB The Truth about Laurelai needs to get out: It's about time that someone went ahead and exposed this person for the manipulitive bitch she is. Laurelai is a very familiar name to a lot of you here on reddit. I had the misfortune of interacting with her in person for about a month. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. First off, I will not be posting any personal information here. Not because I care about what happens to this person but because I don't want harm to come to the people that may have also interacted with her. Not at the beginning of July I was told that if I could house Laurelai for a short time that she wouldn't cause any trouble. Now I guess me being the person I am was stupid enough to believe this and spent ~$300 in gas to get this person. Yeah I realize that I was a fool for believing what I was told, but that's what makes me who I am. On to the first week, SO everything is going okay, I'm letting her settle into where she lives. One thing I was not told, was she does nothing but reddit or IRC during the day, and on top of that she is active with [REMOVED PER REDDIT RULES]. Yet I am made uncomfortable when I am getting messaged on my personal site by someone that knows my home address and who I am living with, as well as my full name. I digress, what I have come to say is that like the pastebin that has been floating around on the net, Laurelai is impossible to live with, I understand that you may have certain food allergies that prevent you from eating foods. Yet I do not think it is that hard to, after or during the time you make food for yourself, to clean up and dispose of anything that needs to be put in the trash. This person does not understand the concept of cleaning up after yourself. In any way. I believe that had I not gotten up in the morning to clean up the mess that was left the night before, nothing would have gotten done. My living partner rarely if ever showered, and the smell was actually enough to get ingrained into my apartment(I am actually in the process of getting rid of the couch this person slept on), but rarely showering I mean 3-4 times in a month, and even then I doubt the water even touched a part of this person's body. Food was left out over night, drinks were half finished and left sitting where ever, dishes were left in the sink until I came along to do them. This person never left the screen they were sitting in, be it playing video games or on a combination of IRC/Reddit. This person made no effort to bring in money to help pay for the things she needed, nor did she make an effort to find employment, made harder by the fact she has no form of ID. I did offer to help her get the necessary documents to find employment, come to find out she does not want a “conventional” job but instead wants to be a sex worker, and while I have no problem with this I do have a problem with random johns in my living area. NOW there are claims by her here on reddit that I raped her, now yes we had “sexual relations” all with her consent. We had an argument one night and I will admit I did fly off the handle at the state of my apartment. After that (4 days) we did engage in a sexual act( I recommend NOT DOING ANYTHING SEXUAL WITH THIS PERSON) again, verbal consent was given, several times. On August 6th when I drover her to [REMOVED PER REDDIT RULES] to hand her over to a new roommate I was made aware by a mutual friend that they were told that I forcibly raped her. These are false allegations and they are being spread by someone that has an extreme internet addiction, a few hours without internet and they get extremely hostile and look for other ways to get online. My partner and I were also harassed and attacked over twitter, her tweets have since been deleted. TL;DR- There is no TL;DR read it and inform yourselves. My stuff that I feel applies to this that I've been made aware of and want to pass on to you all RAW Paste Data The Truth about Laurelai needs to get out: It's about time that someone went ahead and exposed this person for the manipulitive bitch she is. Laurelai is a very familiar name to a lot of you here on reddit. I had the misfortune of interacting with her in person for about a month. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. First off, I will not be posting any personal information here. Not because I care about what happens to this person but because I don't want harm to come to the people that may have also interacted with her. Not at the beginning of July I was told that if I could house Laurelai for a short time that she wouldn't cause any trouble. Now I guess me being the person I am was stupid enough to believe this and spent ~$300 in gas to get this person. Yeah I realize that I was a fool for believing what I was told, but that's what makes me who I am. On to the first week, SO everything is going okay, I'm letting her settle into where she lives. One thing I was not told, was she does nothing but reddit or IRC during the day, and on top of that she is active with [REMOVED PER REDDIT RULES]. Yet I am made uncomfortable when I am getting messaged on my personal site by someone that knows my home address and who I am living with, as well as my full name. I digress, what I have come to say is that like the pastebin that has been floating around on the net, Laurelai is impossible to live with, I understand that you may have certain food allergies that prevent you from eating foods. Yet I do not think it is that hard to, after or during the time you make food for yourself, to clean up and dispose of anything that needs to be put in the trash. This person does not understand the concept of cleaning up after yourself. In any way. I believe that had I not gotten up in the morning to clean up the mess that was left the night before, nothing would have gotten done. My living partner rarely if ever showered, and the smell was actually enough to get ingrained into my apartment(I am actually in the process of getting rid of the couch this person slept on), but rarely showering I mean 3-4 times in a month, and even then I doubt the water even touched a part of this person's body. Food was left out over night, drinks were half finished and left sitting where ever, dishes were left in the sink until I came along to do them. This person never left the screen they were sitting in, be it playing video games or on a combination of IRC/Reddit. This person made no effort to bring in money to help pay for the things she needed, nor did she make an effort to find employment, made harder by the fact she has no form of ID. I did offer to help her get the necessary documents to find employment, come to find out she does not want a “conventional” job but instead wants to be a sex worker, and while I have no problem with this I do have a problem with random johns in my living area. NOW there are claims by her here on reddit that I raped her, now yes we had “sexual relations” all with her consent. We had an argument one night and I will admit I did fly off the handle at the state of my apartment. After that (4 days) we did engage in a sexual act( I recommend NOT DOING ANYTHING SEXUAL WITH THIS PERSON) again, verbal consent was given, several times. On August 6th when I drover her to [REMOVED PER REDDIT RULES] to hand her over to a new roommate I was made aware by a mutual friend that they were told that I forcibly raped her. These are false allegations and they are being spread by someone that has an extreme internet addiction, a few hours without internet and they get extremely hostile and look for other ways to get online. My partner and I were also harassed and attacked over twitter, her tweets have since been deleted. TL;DR- There is no TL;DR read it and inform yourselves. My stuff that I feel applies to this that I've been made aware of and want to pass on to you all
Watching and listening to the night sky. Photo by Knate Meyers, from the video. In 2012, I posted an astonishing time-lapse video by Knate Meyers, put together using images taken from the space station as it orbited the Earth. Meyers is working on a new project, as yet untitled, but he’s created a short teaser for it, and, as I’d expect, it looks really good: I like how in some segments the longer exposures make the stars seem huge, but in others they are sharp and crisp and seemingly countless. His use of slow tracking and then accelerated motion is very compelling, too. My favorite, I think is the few-seconds-long scene looking out an airplane window, starting at 1:14. I’d love to see more shots like that. Meyers as an excellent eye for how the pieces of a video fit together, so I’m looking forward to the final project, which he says will be out this fall. Tip o’ the lens cap to We Love Timelapse on Facebook.
It’s NOT EASY using the V word. Personally, I don’t LIKE it. It’s not a word I’ve used to describe myself through very many situations in my life, because I am the kind of person who takes responsibility for things that happen to me. While, I certainly had choices and consequences (thus responsibility) in my relationship with a narcissist as an adult – it is the only experience I think the V label accurately describes and depicts. I was caught unaware. I was told things that weren’t true. By relying on those things, I made decisions that put me in harms way. I was sold a bill of goods and promises by a person who was well aware that they had no intention of ever delivering on those promises nor being capable of being a good person towards me, so that he could use me for things that benefited one person in the “relationship”: THE NARCISSIST. This being said, I don’t throw this word “Victim” around LIGHTLY. I think that the topic of FALSE VICTIM claims by narcissists should be evaluated with a more discerning eye when considering the damage and injustice done by a narcissist to the lives that their false allegations destroy. Let’s examine the traits of a well-trained pathological liar, a narcissist; with a history of duping others and manipulating to avoid responsibility vs a credible, honest, albeit “emotional” target of the narcissist. FALSE VICTIM vs. TRUE VICTIM 1. FLAT AFFECT A FALSE VICTIM isn’t emotionally vibrant and attached to the events which they are sharing that were abusive. They appear as if they’ve just gotten back from a calming vacation. Very smooth. Cool. Detached. Whereas, a TRUE VICTIM will appear FRAZZLED, RUFFLED and SPENT. They’ll cry hysterically, appear jumpy, nervous and afraid. They’ll space out then come back to the conversation with shocking emotion. They have an urgency with their speech and inflection and it will be PEPPERED with emotions that are all over the place. There are instances of true victims of narcissists who are completely detached and disengaged; hopelessly depressed with a flat affect from the abuse. There will still be evidence of victimization in that “spaced out” appearance not like the cold, cool demeanor of a lying narcissist. TRUE VICTIMS experience the grieving process. Shock. Denial. Anger. moving all the way through acceptance. Whereas a FALSE VICTIM will appear to get over the emotions of the experience rather quickly. They don’t appear to dwell, (ruminate / obsess) over the “abusive” experiences. 2. BRILLIANT USE OF WORDS, DESCRIPTIONS and PHRASES. Suspiciouly Articulate. Though the words they’re using say, “I’m afraid. Stalker. Scared for my life.” Their behavior says something else. They’ve studied their true victim long enough and know the dark deeds they’ve committed to be able to twist history to use a convincing choice of dialogue, placing themselves in the position of the “Poor person who had to deal with YOUR shenanigans.” They’re able to take conversations you’ve had previously and articulately add / detract from them just enough to appear as if you were behaving as a crazy person. Perfect example: Cutting and pasting parts of an email conversation (when you forward conversations, you can change the language) and present those, in their EDITED form as “Evidence”. That’s not really “evidence” of course, it’s actually a CRIME called falsifying evidence. But the narcissist with their belief they’re above the law and backing by accomplices is given the opportunity to present their lies to people just dumb enough to believe them. NOW ASK A TRUE VICTIM WHAT HAPPENED: Foggy. Forgetful. Inarticulate. Shows confusion. Their words and thoughts are ALL over the place. Chaotic. Disjointed. You can even see them stop and question the absurdity and validity of THEIR OWN STORY, MID SENTENCE. It may appear that we’re trying to think of an answer, but we’re realizing based on the “surreal” details and the fact that the person were telling has changed their demeanor (eye rolls, doubtful looks) to them our story sounds artificial or we’re being accused of being “hysterical”, we feel defeated – we want to defend our honesty. Suddenly our credibility waivers – even though we’re the ones telling the honest to God’s truth; it’s very isolating. The stuff that is done to us by narcissists, is SO INSIDIOUS; it literally baffles us into muddled brain fog. On the surface to others and even ourselves – the narcissist TRIES to appear “nice”. They can’t be openly ugly – their images mean EVERYTHING to them. Unless they’re in a profession where being a big, ugly, bad ass is how they’re paid, they more often than not, present as YOUR BEST FRIEND. Imagine having a best friend who does and says SO MANY wonderful things to you – suddenly throwing in jabs at you when no ones around. Who calls a woman the love of their lives in one breath, then in the next conversation calls her a slut and tells her that no one will really ever love her for who she is, just that she’s only ever wanted by people for sex? A perpetrating narcissist, that’s who. Where does a loving person go with this kind of conversation? Most targets question themselves. We became accustomed to explaining the inexplicable by assuming responsibility. We try harder. We try to understand and empathize with the feelings of a narcissist, because we think that if they are that extreme, they MUST be genuine. 3. LACK OF CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR, PERSONALITY OR LIFESTYLE Narcissists as FALSE VICTIMS don’t change a damn thing about their behavior. They don’t seek help. They don’t look over their shoulders. (Unless they’re paranoid about karma catching up with them) They don’t have trouble sleeping at night or difficulty breathing at times. They aren’t afraid of you in the ways they’ve claimed to be afraid. They aren’t as afraid of you as you are of them. They don’t hang out in support groups. They don’t share their stories with other survivors. They don’t endure the traumatic symptoms of PTSD. TRUE VICTIMS can’t survive by any other way than REACHING OUT for support. Seeking validation, seeking therapy, GOD, or other “SAVING” modalities is a revelation of our TRUE, inner state. We’re shocked, scared and hurt, we feel broken by the abuse. We reach out, give back and share our stories with others. We try to warn the next victim out of fear that the narcissist will victimize others. We have the ability and show true empathy for other survivors because we KNOW what the abuse from a narcissist feels like. We KNOW how confusing it is. We don’t take the experience lightly, nor the feelings of those who’ve suffered this lightly. TRUE VICTIMS become very involved in our own therapy. We are motivated by hurt, anger, fear and determination to never be made a victim again, and thus pour ourselves into learning about our own behavior, vulnerabilities and areas in need of improvement. A narcissist believes it’s everyone ELSE that needs to change. Where is the narcissist in their protestation that THEY were victimized? (This is like OJ saying he’s going to devote the rest of his life to finding the “Real killers” of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. YEA RIGHT. He spent his time searching golf courses because in his narcissistic fashion, the killer looked just like HIM, and that’s where you’d find Him; on a golf course) The narcissist isn’t at home tending to their self-care and reading every tidbit of information regarding recovery they can get their hands on. They’re out meeting new dating partners, out selling themselves on websites for dating, flirting, laughing and gayly enjoying a life not fettered by consequences. They post pictures of where they’re located or broadcast to social media that they’re at such and such location. TRUE VICTIMS are AFRAID of announcing those things because we KNOW the true danger of someone who uses that information to track us down. We show FEAR and take ACTION to change our previous lifestyles, one that’s more PROTECTED because WE’VE KNOWN VIOLATION. 5. FALSE VICTIMS DON’T QUESTION THEMSELVES, THEY PROJECT ARROGANCE True victims are FULL of self-doubt. If a person was very self-assured, they would instantly recognize abuse and walk away. They’d be confident that they could handle the situation and feel very comfortable labeling their former partner as “abusive”. TRUE VICTIMS are not QUICK to use the word abuse – we’re not even looking outside ourselves for answers. We’re busy looking within; carrying tons of borrowed shame and guilt. We don’t throw the term around because of the far-reaching consequences and implications of the words, “Abuse” and “Victim”. 5. TRUE VICTIMS GET PTSD

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