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Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola is reportedly keen on signing Juventus centre-back Leonardo Bonucci as he looks to improve a defence which has kept just one clean sheet in their last 17 matches.
The Juventus and Italy defender, regarded as one of the best in the world, is believed to be among City's targets in the January transfer window after the need for defensive improvement became increasingly acute following Saturday's 4-2 defeat at Leicester City.
The Mirror report that Bonucci and Athletic Bilbao defender Aymeric Laporte, who was linked with City strongly this summer, are amomng potential candidates for Guardiola to target.
Laporte is just 22 but has already made a huge impression in La Liga and the defender earned a call-up recently to France's senior squad.
However, with City more than aware that deals for such star players may be hard to complete mid-season, reports suggest they are targeting two Southampton players as back-up options.
Portuguese Euro 2016 winner Jose Fonte and lVirgil Van Dijk could represent more realistic options for City.
The 32-year-old Fonte was strongly linked with a move to Manchester United last summer but the deal failed to come to fruition and the experienced centre-back would add much-needed steel to the City backline.
Dutchman Van Dijk is viewed as one of the division's best defenders and has impressed in his displays for both club and country since signing for Southampton from Celtic in 2015.
Elsewhere, Celtic forward Moussa Dembele continues to be linked with a move to the Etihad.
The Daily Star report that Dembele is being chased by Liverpool and Arsenal too but that City have the advantage because of their loanee Patrick Roberts, who is currently at Brendan Rodgers' side.
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Rebel shareholder Nicholas Bolton has won his court battle with Brisbane toll-road builder BrisConnections.
Two planned meetings of unitholders will now go ahead, as scheduled, later this month.
The decision puts in jeopardy the future of Brisbane's $4.8 billion Airport Link toll road, the biggest infrastructure project under way in Australia. The company's unit holders will vote on a series of resolutions to have BrisConnections wound up at those meetings.
BrisConnections was seeking orders in the Victorian Supreme Court to have Bolton's company, Australian Style Investments, wound up on the grounds it was insolvent and would not be able to pay a $77 million instalment owed to BrisConnections.
BrisConnections was also seeking orders to have two meetings of unitholders - called by Mr Bolton, ASI's 26-year-old major shareholder - to be cancelled. BrisConnections told the court the meetings had been improperly called.
Justice Ross Robson found in favour of Mr Bolton and said the meetings could go ahead. "BrisConnections' objections to the meetings are not valid objections,'' he said.
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After successfully launching Gatiman Express, Railways is likely to hold trials of high-speed trains manufactured by Spanish firm Talgo that touch a maximum speed of 200 kmph, on existing tracks in June.
Tracks were strengthened between Nizamuddin and Agra stations for the launch of Gatiman, the country’s fastest train.
Dispatched in a cargo ship from Barcelona on March 27, currently nine Talgo coaches are on the high seas and expected to anchor at Mumbai port on April 21.
The Spanish train maker has offered to test run itd lighter and faster trains free of cost on the existing Indian Railways network.
After reaching the Mumbai harbour, the Talgo coaches will get customs clearance and then moved to Izzatnagar depot for trial expected to be in June.
According to a senior Railway Ministry official, “The first Talgo train trial will be conducted between Bareilly and Moradabad rail route at a maximum speed of 115 km per hour for oscillation test. This will be followed by another trial between Palwal and Mathura route at a maximum speed of 180 kmph.”
The third test will be carried out between Delhi and Mumbai at a maximum speed of 200 kmph.
According to Railways, Talgo trains are capable of running at speeds varying between 160-200 kmph on the existing infrastructure without any upgrade. Railways has to strengthen the tracks and upgrade the signalling system for running Gatiman Express at 160 kmph speed.
Barring minor changes, there will be no need for overhauling the tracks for the Talgo trial run, he said, adding, the cost of import of coaches and custom clearances will be borne by Talgo.
Besides reducing travel time, Talgo’s lighter trains consume 30 per cent less energy which will help railways reduce their power bill.
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New York's business tax incentives, a cornerstone of Governor Cuomo's two terms in office, are the most expensive and among the least effective of any in the country, according to a recent study by an economist.
The report, by Timothy Bartik of the Kalamazoo, Michigan W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, estimates that New York awarded $8.25 billion in tax incentives in 2015. The incentives, in comparison to those of the 10 most populous states in the country, cost as much as those of the next three states combined, according to Bartik's analysis.
New York gives out tax breaks to a wide variety of corporations, including developers, banks, craft beer brewers, film studios, and even, in the '90s, the owners of the New York Stock Exchange. The stated thinking behind this is that tax breaks entice corporations that might otherwise leave or invest less in the state to put money into building buildings, creating jobs, and making stuff, which will in turn lead to more jobs, more profits, and more buying along down the supply chain. Looked at another way, it's a form of trickle-down economics that rewards companies for threatening to break up with you.
There's also little evidence it works. As the Citizens Budget Commission of New York notes in a blog post on Bartik's study, a majority of the research published to date shows that tax incentives either have no measurable economy-boosting effect, or have high costs per job created. In 2013, Cuomo's own tax commission found that corporate tax incentives "may not result in a good return on investment," and suggested that "more efforts are needed to measure their effectiveness."
In this year's budget negotiations, both the state Assembly and the Senate called for new disclosure requirements to track the spending and results of economic development programs. But the reforms didn't make it into the final budget agreed on Sunday night. The final budget did include new annual reporting requirements for Empire State Development, a quasi-public organization that dispenses taxpayer money to companies and is controlled by Cuomo without much oversight.
New York's tax incentives are, according to Bartik, the costliest as a percentage of gross taxes, amounting to a whopping 75.9 percent of the state's gross taxes. And yet, what the state gives away in taxes is the second-least effective at 3.53 percent of value-added, an economic measure showing the difference between an economy's gross output and intermediary sales. Only New Mexico gives away a greater percentage of tax money for its value-added. By both measures, New York gives 2.5 times the national average.
Despite the absence of proof of tax incentives' efficacy, states around the country have increased their use since 1990, Bartik writes, with New York consistently leading the way. The growth of incentives has a snowball effect, with states competing to offer ever-more-enticing tax deals as corporations navigate an increasingly friendly set of options. So why do New York's politicians keep doing something that shows little or no likelihood of offering a return on investment?
"To give them the benefit of a doubt, they think that the next benefit will be effective," said David Friedfel, director of state studies for the Budget Commission, a New York-focused watchdog group. "There's a desire to be seen as improving the economy. The counter-factual would be [that they're saying], 'There's nothing we can do, so we're just going to throw our hands up and see what happens.'"
Friedfel said that the $420 million annual tax credit for the film industry, which the state just extended again, is particularly unnecessary.
"New York state has the most generous film tax credit," he explained. "We already have an established film industry in New York. It's time to scale it back."
New York's tax incentive burden grew again in this year's budget. The budget creates new tax credits of a maximum of $10 million a year for life science research. (A legislature-proposed music and e-gaming tax credit program got the approval of the Assembly and Senate, but didn't make the cut in the final budget.)
Friedfel praised the Excelsior Jobs Program, which requires companies to create jobs and report on their performance, as a model of a tax perk initiative that seems to be working.
For the time being, though, the dominant model looks more like Central New York Hub for Emerging Nano Industries, a $15-million, state-funded high-tech film studio upstate where Cuomo promised 350 jobs in 2014 and a total of two people were employed full-time as of August.
Developers who so happen to be Cuomo donors and recipients of tax breaks and copious state money for similar signature economic development projects are also at the center of federal criminal cases against two former aides to the governor and his handpicked nano-technology czar. The latest budget includes another $400 million for the Buffalo Billion projects at the center of the scandal.
This, according to another budget observer, is bizarre.
"Despite multiple federal indictments, poor program audits and lackluster annual reports, the state continues to move full steam ahead on economic development efforts without putting in place reasonable accountability and transparency measures to ensure the state is spending this money wisely," said Ron Deutsch, director of the Fiscal Policy Institute. Both the Institute and the Commission are calling for the state to release more comprehensive data to the public about who is receiving what from economic development programs, and whether the public is getting its money's worth.
The Governor's Office did not respond to a request for comment.
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Taking up the cause of military families could define Michelle Obama's agenda as first lady. Michelle's focus group: Military families
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. – Once portrayed as unpatriotic, Michelle Obama has quietly carved a niche on the campaign trail as a sounding board for military families, taking up a cause that could define her agenda as first lady.
Every few weeks, Obama meets with military spouses in swing states, where she presents herself as a kindred spirit and Barack Obama as the best choice for their families. She attended the two debates with military family members. And at the Democratic National Convention, she led a day of service on behalf of Blue Star Families for Obama, a two-month old group with the tagline: “Pro-Military, Pro-Obama.”
Story Continued Below
Obama aides say her work with military families has nothing to do with the controversy created by her February comment suggesting that the presidential campaign made her proud of the United States for the first time. But the effort could be viewed as an exercise in counterprogramming, serving as a rebuttal to criticism from Cindy McCain and others for a comment that Michelle Obama insists was misinterpreted – and the notion that her husband, a Democrat with no military service, cannot peel off voters from John McCain, an ex-Navy pilot and war hero.
“Barack and I know that too often it feels like you are alone, on your own,” Obama told military spouses last month in Santa Fe, N.M. “I know you become everything. In a small way, I have experienced that over the course of this campaign, but in no way does it compare to what you are going through.”
Michelle Obama's focus on military families puts her at the leading edge of the Democratic nominee's campaign to reclaim some of the military vote from Republicans – an effort that brought Barack Obama here Sunday for a rally near Fort Bragg, where a military wife introduced him and he touted his endorsement from Colin Powell, the retired four-star general and President George W. Bush's first Secretary of State.
Since the start of the campaign, Michelle Obama says she has focused on three things: keeping life normal for her young daughters, electing her husband, and discussing the work-life balance with women around the country. The spouses of service members captured her attention during a roundtable with working mothers, and she later hosted her first military-focused event in Fayetteville in May, a day before the North Carolina primary.
She will hold her seventh military spouses meeting Tuesday in Pensacola, Fla., following similar events in recent months in states heavily impacted by deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, including Virginia, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.
At each roundtable, she sits on stage with several spouses, delivers prepared remarks and opens a discussion. The roundtables draws local media coverage, and she answers questions about her involvement when asked by national reporters, as she did during an interview with CNN at the Democratic convention.
“Mostly I am here to listen and to do a lot of learning and then to transfer that information into the heart and mind of my husband as he moves forth,” Michelle Obama said in Norfolk, Va., in August. “The commander in chief doesn’t just need to know how to lead the military, he needs to understand what war does to military families.”
Her work in this area offers a hint at what could dominate her time in the White House.
“If she becomes first lady, this will be her cause,” said Amanda McBreen, 47, a Marine wife who participated in the Norfolk roundtable and helps coordinate 24 state chapters of Blue Star Families for Obama.
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I’ll be the first to admit that coming across a band with an unusual name makes me so much more interested in the band than a name that is “normal” or often “accepted in modern society”. Bands like Diarrhea Planet or anything that could be classified as “Witch House” fill me with an intense curiosity that might be akin to heroin withdrawal. The latest occurrence of this sense of discovery came late last month, when i discovered the band Sharkanoid almost three months too late. This post is the fourth in our Overlooked in 2014 series.
Sharkanoid is the brainchild/merger of Dan Potthast (known for fronting MU330, along with his solo work) and Mustard Plug bassist Rick Johnson. Together, the two established musicians have made an album, aptly titled Have A Great Summer, full of energetic pop-punk tunes that form a quasi-concept album about youthful joy and anticipation for the onset of summer.
As with anything Dan Potthast does, brevity is the name of the game. Only a handful of these twelve tracks reach over two and half minutes in length, which gives the record a fleeting presence that fits well with the album’s theme. Several songs are deceptively simple, like the minute long “Follow The Leader” or the chorus-reliant “Michelle”. The simplicity of these songs turn out to ultimately be a plus, as they accentuate the incredibly catchy melodies that stick with you hours after the album has ended. Additionally, several songs on the album (most overtly “Fall Into Shame” and “Seriously Sarah”) have contributions from ya boiii Jeff Rosenstock and ya grrrl Laura Stevenson.
Have A Great Summer was released last October by the always-excellent Community Records. A free download of the album is available via Community Records’ website, and if you like what you hear we recommend shilling out some cash for the physical release!
BIG TUNES: Chemicals, Fall Into Shame, Michelle
CHECK OUT IF YOU LIKE: Dan Potthast, Mu330, Mustard Plug, Jeff Rosenstock
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This article was first published on November 25, 2014.
So it’s crazy that I’m doing a non-Thanksgiving recipe this week when everyone is thinking about the big meal. But Thanksgiving dinner is just one meal, right? And what do you do for the other 20 meals this week? Eat other stuff, of course. (Unless you eat a lot of leftovers. I tend to end up with not much more than one meal’s worth of leftovers. We don’t even have that many plastic containers!!)
So back to this bowl of spicy savory goodness, which also counts as comfort food. I grew up eating a lot of instant ramen noodle soup (hey, don’t judge! My mom was awesome). Of course, because we’re Korean, we had the more spicy kind and not the salt or miso-based Japanese kind. This noodle soup, for those of us who had a chance to eat it before becoming vegan, is super addicting. I figured out a way to make it completely vegan, natural, and soo much better than the packaged kind, using sea kelp, shiitake mushrooms, and Korean red pepper flakes as the base. Even if you’ve never had Korean ramen before, try making this soup base–you’ll be amazed at the depth of umami flavor you can achieve with simple kelp and shiitake broth. I used fresh ramen noodles that we found at the refrigerated section at Whole Foods and discarded the soup packet that comes with it. If you can’t find fresh noodles, feel free to use the dry noodles.
Vegan Korean Ramen
1 package (4 oz) fresh ramen noodles (found in the refrigerated section)
2 tsp olive oil
1/2 tsp gochugaru (3/4 tsp if you want spicier soup)
4-5 dried shiitake mushrooms
1/4 oz dried kelp
4.5 cups water
2-3 large cloves garlic, minced
1/2 small carrot, chopped into 1/4″ pieces
4-5 white button mushrooms, sliced
1 tsp salt
1.5 tsp white miso
1/2 tsp gochujang (Korean red pepper paste)
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
1-2 scallions, chopped, plus more for garnish
1. In a medium bowl, soak the shiitake and dried kelp in about 1 cup of water until completely reconstituted. Then, slice the shiitake mushrooms and put them back in the bowl.
2. Heat 2 tsp olive oil in a medium pot over medium heat. Add gochugaru and toss for about 20 seconds until fragrant, being careful not to burn and blacken the pepper flakes (this happens quickly).
3. Add shiitake and kelp (including the soaking water) to the pot, then garlic, mushrooms, and carrots. Add 4.5 cups water, cover and bring to boil.
4. Add miso, salt, nutritional yeast, and gochujang and lower heat to simmer for about 4-5 minutes.
5. Add ramen noodles and scallions, and bring heat back up to medium. Boil for about 2 minutes until the noodles are al dente. Quickly take off the heat. Adjust seasoning as needed, garnish with more scallions and serve.
More Vegan Korean recipes: Vegan Korean Fried Chicken (Sweet and Spicy)
Bibimbap (Mixed Rice Bowl)
Japchae (Sweet Potato Glass Noodles)
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Photo: Peaceful Dumpling
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No. 10 Oregon (10-2) vs Texas (8-4
The Oregon Ducks and Texas Longhorns will meet for the first time since the 2000 Holiday Bowl on Dec. 30 in San Antonio, Texas. Kickoff is set for 5:30 p.m. local time, but 3:30 p.m. back in Eugene, Ore.
Oregon will resume practicing this weekend in preparation for the Alamo Bowl.
Here is a quick look at Oregon's match-up against Texas:
Last Time Out
Oregon last played on Nov. 29th against their rivals in Oregon State. The Ducks won 36-35 in come-from-behind fashion. Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota connected with senior receiver Josh Huff for the game-winning touchdown with just seconds left to seal the win. The touchdown was Huff's third of the game.
Texas played last weekend on the road at Baylor to end their regular season. The Longhorns fell 30-10 in blowout fashion. With freezing temperatures the Longhorns finished with just 217 yards of total offense and two turnovers. UT quarterback Case McCoy completed just 12-of-34 attempts for 56 yards, one touchdown, and two interceptions. Junior running back Malcolm Brown rushed for 131 yards on 25 carries, while catching four passes for 19 yards and the Longhorns lone touchdown.
Mack Brown watch
Entering this season Mack brown was on the hot seat after multiple down years for Texas standards. Four bad losses to BYU (40-21), Mississippi (44-23), Oklahoma State (38-13), and Baylor (30-10) have led to rumors following the season that Brown will be fired from Texas or he will step down prior to the bowl game.
Jackson Jeffcoat will be a tough matchup for Oregon.
Brown has denied those reports publicly to 247Sports.com's Texas site here.Sources tell Horns247 that Brown will eventually be replaced however.
This type of move could rally the Longhorns or crumble the locker room with the iconic head coach out.
Brown is 158-47 at Texas and 244-121-1 overall as a head coach. Since taking over the Longhorn program in 1998 the Horns had a nine-year stretch where they won 10 to 13 games, one national championship, and played for a second title. Since the 2010 season however the Horns have drastically gotten worse. In 2010 UT went 5-7, and followed that season up with three records of 8-5, 9-4, and 8-4. The last three years haven't been terrible, but for Texas and their reputation of winning and winning big that isn't good enough. To make matters worse they've struggled to compete against the better teams in the Big-12.
Horns lacking consistency at Quarterback
In recent years Texas hasn't had the typical play at quarterback, and that's hurt their entire offense. This season senior quarterback Case McCoy has been the starter for most of the year, but wasn't the starter going into the season. McCoy is 179-of-312 for 1,885 yards, 11 touchdowns, 11 interceptions, and a quarterback rating of 112 which is ranked 94th in the country.
Junior quarterback David Ash started the year's first two games, but was eventually replaced. He finished the year throwing for 760 yards, seven touchdowns, and two interceptions. He hasn't played since September 21st against Kansas State due to a concussion.
Two-headed monster at running back
Sophomore running back Johnathan Gray leads the team in rushing yards with 780 on 159 carries, but junior back Malcolm brown leads the team in carries with 188 for 774 yards. Brown leads the Horns in rushing touchdowns with nine while Gray and Joe Bergeron both have four.
Texas ranks 35th nationally with 197 yards rushing per game, but rank 53rd in yards-per-carry with 4.47 yards.
Star at receiver
Mike Davis is the lone star at receiver this season for the Horns. The 6-foot-2, 195 pounder has 49 catches on the year for a team-high 715 yards and eight touchdowns. In his career at Texas Davis has 198 catches for 2,741 yards and 18 touchdowns.
Junior receiver Jaxon Shipley is second on the team in receiving yards with 581 on 55 catches, while scoring one touchdown. In Shipley's career he has 158 catches for 1,925 yards and 10 touchdowns.
Defense
The Horns are far from stout on the defensive side of the ball. This season they've allowed an average of 402 yards per game, 63rd best in the country. Oregon meanwhile sits 48th in the country with 381 yards per game. Texas is 51st in the country in yards-per-play allowed with 5.37. Oregon is ninth with 4.69 yards allowed per play. Texas ranks 56th in scoring defense with 25.5 points allowed per game, 46th in passing defense with 221 yards allowed, and 81st in rushing defense with 181 yards allowed.
Star defensive player
Senior defensive end Jackson Feffcoat will be a handful for Oregon's offensive linemen. The 6-foot-5, 250 pounder won the Ted Hendricks Award this week, presented annually to college football's top defensive end. Jeffcoat led the Horns in tackles with 80. He led the Horns and the Big-12 in sacks with 12, and is third nationally in sacks.
My thoughts going in...
Have to wonder what type of state the Horns will be entering this game. A lot has gone on in the last 48-72 hours since the Bowls were announced with Mack Brown. Is he the coach? Will he coach this game? What type of focus will Texas have?
Teams who lose a head coach prior to a bowl game are tough to prepare for. You have a new person calling offensive and defensive plays in most cases, and in a sense you get an entirely new look at a program. Some teams rally and play better than expected, while others struggle.
Oregon has a collection of players from Texas and I believe that will carryover into this entire program. The Texas players will certainly have a lot of friends and family in the stands and will be a driving force to focus on this game and create that BCS type feel to it for them. If that focus and excitement spills over to the rest of the program the Ducks should come out fired up.
The Ducks do have their defensive issues, mainly stopping the run. Texas doesn't have a good passing game which will ease the workload on Oregon's secondary, but I still worry if Oregon can stop Brown and Gray enough.
This should be a game the Ducks on paper win by more than two scores, but considering Oregon's defensive struggles in November and the Ducks missing out on a BCS bowl bid I think this will be closer than some anticipate early on.
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I can't claim to have always known who Lord Kitchener was, but I knew his face well before I knew his name. I first encountered it in an old school history textbook, from whose black and white pages he looked up at me, sternly pointing. It turned out that Kitchener, the British War Minister, was also the poster boy for that country's recruitment campaign for the armed forces during World War I. He glared out at everyone who looked at the poster and urged them to enlist because the country needed "you". It's the same sort of poster that the Americans used later on, only with Uncle Sam on it. But somehow Kitchener was more effective. A glimpse of his unsmiling face, finger accusingly pointing, with the word "you" standing out, and I'd at once feel guilty for not going back in time myself and enlisting. Even if the world knew nothing about my misdeeds or fears, Kitchener did. Oh, he knew everything.
Maybe it's strange that it's Lord Kitchener that I am thinking about as I'm padding up for a day at the Lausitzring. I wear four layers as protection against the cold, before I begin tugging on my race suit and balaclava. I look at myself sternly in the mirror and point. It's an attempt to motivate myself. "You" can do this, my reflection tries to tell me. But other than appearing somewhat Bibendum-like owing to the many layers, I don't cut quite the dashing figure that Kitchener did. Was it his moustache that made the difference?
Driving at racetracks in general makes me get a little jittery. But driving on a racetrack in Germany is much worse. You can't fling a pair of earplugs away in Germany without hitting a former racecar driver. And the Germans you run into at racetracks also have this rather annoying habit of nonchalantly saying things like "Oh, not really raced. Just two European titles under my belt." Or the more modest, "I'm not used to driving fast. My daily drive is ze old Porsche 993. Only 450PS. Nothing zpecial." It can be very, very unnerving.
But as I sit down for the theory class, trying to get rid of the thought that one instructor planted nicely in my head when he said, "In your country you have the gearbox on the wrong side," I try hard to concentrate. On thoughts other than the fact that my clumsy right hand might slot the car into the wrong gear and break the whole gearshift. I try instead to keep in mind the many do's and the even longer list of don't's that are projected on the screen. And I tell myself that it's unlikely that the car will do anything I don't ask it to do.
Our first 20-minute stint out on track seems to go on for ages. It's those 'F' words. Fear and focus. I need to focus, but the fear of doing something wrong, and the fact that I'm not used to the car aren't allowing me to. At the same time, if I just determinedly focus, I might get ahead of myself. So maybe a little fear isn't such a bad thing? In the past I've had racers tell me that they still get scared and that it's alright to be scared. And there have been others who have told me that it isn't fear any longer, if you managed to twist it around in your mind and turn it into respect. And as I'm navigating these thoughts, the radio crackles and the voice of my instructor booms through. "You're at 30 per cent. There's much more potential. You need to focus more."
Outside the car, he's more encouraging. It's fine that I have been slow and gotten used to the track, but a finger is wagged in my face for not paying as close attention to my racing line as I should have. I mustn't react so late. Of course he's right. If I'm left to my own devices, my mind wanders off to other times and other worlds. I'm only jolted back into the present when I have the rather nasty shock of a McLaren P1 going past me down the main straight all of a sudden.
So begins the second stint an exercise in mind control. I talk to myself all through, looking from corner to corner, pointing myself in the right direction and repeating in my head. Brake. Shift down. Turn in. Accelerate. Shift up. Accelerate more. It's a constant unbroken string of words. A constant unbroken string of corners. Like playing high speed join the dots. And slowly, I find myself going faster each lap. My instructor isn't able to pull away quite so easily as he was before. And we're now going fast enough to have to brake later than we were in the previous stint. But most importantly, I can feel the rust and dust and grime that had collected in my mind being dislodged. My brain feels all well oiled and alive. I think it's that thing they call adrenaline.
The third stint goes even better. And when we're done, I'm greeted by the instructor leaping out of his car and giving me a big thumbs up. I've ended the day, I'm told, between 70 and 85 per cent. A marked improvement from my initial performance.
When I'm tugging off my race suit, looking a little less like Bibendum as each layer is peeled away, I reflect over all that I have learned that day. I have learned that mind control, whether we speak of the racetrack or of life itself, is our single biggest task. That time is relative because 20 minutes on a circuit can, when you're going fast and having fun, feel like five. That a day at the racetrack sometimes teaches you more about yourself than a year spent doing anything else. And that everything worthwhile lies on the other side of fear.
And just when I tell myself that I didn't do so badly after all, once again there's that mustachioed face, finger pointing at me, saying "You" could have done better.
Next time, Lord Kitchener. Next time.
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An full-scale domestic rammy played out in public in Greenock has gone viral after being posted on Twitter.
The video was shot on Saturday as the traditional Greenock Fair began when people sitting in their car in Cathcart Street near the town centre notice a couple having a row.
The man and woman at the centre of the footage are loading their car when the woman involved suddenly blows a fuse and goes for her stunned partner who tries to fend her off.
She then takes her jacket off and her partner soon finds himself trying to fend off blows. During a grappling session she even manages to rip his top off.
The bare-chested man then beats a hasty retreat to his motor but his partner comes back for more and tries to force her way into the car.
More wrestling ensues before he manages to reach the sanctuary of his car again but his partner then starts to try to rip the wing mirror off his car as bemused afternoon shoppers watch on.
The man then thinks about driving off but his escape plan is stopped in its tracks when his partner clambers on top of the vehicle and sits on the windscreen before chatting to shocked passers by.
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As well as being poet laureate for 30 years and a prolific writer of letters, Robert Southey was an avid recorder of his dreams. W.A. Speck, author of Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters, explores the poet’s dream diary and the importance of dreams in his work.
Robert Southey (1774 – 1843), the poet laureate, biographer, historian and, in Byron’s words, ‘entire man of letters’ used a note book to record many of his dreams. A celebrated line in his verse was ‘my days among the dead are past’, referring to the works by authors who had died, many of them centuries ago, which lined the walls of Greta Hall, Southey’s home in Keswick. An analysis of his dreams demonstrates that his nights were passed among them too, since a disproportionate number of those which he recorded dealt with the dead. Deceased relatives and friends frequently visited him in them. He also encountered dead authors, as in the dream he had on 7 January 1805. ‘I was supping at Garrick’s house, and seated at his left hand, at the top of the table; my memory had made up his face accurately; he got upon the table, and spoke an epilogue of his own writing in the character of a cook –maid, and promised, at Mrs Garrick’s desire, to recite a serious poem afterwards, that I might hear him’. In another dream he was ‘at Swift’s house in Dublin, where he was living with two sisters’. And in another he met Matthew Lewis, the author of a sensational Gothic novel, *The Monk*. ‘Monk Lewis’ had been a contemporary of Southey’s at Westminster school, though he confessed that he never ‘had any affection for the man.’ This, however, did not prevent him contributing to a volume edited by Lewis, *Tales of Wonder*. Southey’s contribution consisted of six poems, all of which contained Gothic elements, including dreams. Thus ‘Bishop Bruno’ wakes from a recurrent dream that he had rung his own death knell, only to discover that it was prophetic. ‘Lord William’ drowns young Edmund, his deceased elder brother’s son, to claim the house of Erlingford, only to find that
In vain at midnight’s silent hour
Sleep closed the murderer’s eyes
In every dream the murderer saw
Young Edmund’s form arise.
‘The Pious Painter’ was renowned for his realistic portrayals of the Devil
What the Painter so earnestly thought on by day
He sometimes would dream of by night.
Southey himself strongly believed that waking thoughts led on to dreams. It led him to organise his days so that he did not work on one topic all day but switched from one to another, from composing poems to reviewing books to writing letters. This routine was not only economical in its use of time but was ‘also essential to the preservation of my health; for, by long experience, I know that whenever my attention is devoted to one object my sleep is disturbed by perplexing dreams concerning it. The remedy is easy; I do one thing in the morning, another in the evening – I never dream of either’.
This routine was not foolproof, however, for his dream book records that what had occupied his mind during the day often inspired dreams that same night. The entry for 4 December 1821, for instance, describes a dream in which ‘Palmerin of England gave me Arcalaus, the enchanter, in the shape of an egg, the enchanter having taken that form, and bade me deliver it to Urganda. Urganda took the egg, and said her husband should eat it for his supper’. Southey then added to his account that his daughter ‘Isabel had been reading Amadis and Palmerin, and talking to me a great deal about both; hence this jumbled dream.’
Southey did not record all his dreams in the book by any means, he selected only those which he considered to be significant. As we have seen his poetry also alluded to dreamers and dreaming. The best source, however, for his reflections on his dreams is his 7000 or so extant letters. Unfortunately few of these have been published in reliable scholarly editions, most being scattered throughout repositories in Britain and North America. However, under the general editorship of Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer these are now being published electronically as The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. When the edition is complete it will be possible to trawl through it, for being on line the letters can be searched, for example for dreams. A search for ‘dream’, ‘dreamer’ and ‘dreaming’ brought up several passages in Southey’s correspondence in which dreams are mentioned. Some show the same morbid interest in death and ghosts that his dream book documents. Thus on 20 October 1793 he wrote to Horace Walpole Bedford:
I’ll betake me to bed & look sharp for a dream. God of dreams hear my prayer
To my pillow repair
Indulge my petition tonight
Around my wild brain
Send thy fanciful train
And give me a dream I may write
And later:
… bid thy sprightly phantoms rare
Round my sleeping head repair.
Let me see in church yard gloom
The ghost slow rising from the tomb
Slow & stern his pale hand wave
And bid me follow to the grave.
Three weeks later, in mid November, he wrote to Horace’s brother, his old school friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford: ‘I am going to bed … to dream of you & heaven & happiness unless the demon of dismal dreams pops up under my pillow & harrows up my heart with some of his chimeras – oh if life were all one agreeable dream – or rather if death were – would there be a crime in taking laudanum as an opiate? Good night.’
W. A. Speck is author of Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (Yale University Press, 2006) and ‘His nights amont the dead were passed: Robert Southey’s dreams’ in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism edited by Lynda Pratt (Ashgate, 2006).
Links to Works
See also Robert Southey on Wikisource
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[back]
THE ILLUMINATI FORMULA USED TO CREATE AN UNDETECTABLE MIND CONTROL SLAVE
a book by Fritz Springmeier & Cisco Wheeler
[Book in chapters]
INTRODUCTION AND WARNING
Dedication
WARNING
Introduction by Fritz
Paranoid Schizophrenics
False Memory Syndrome campaign
Glossary of How Basic Terms are Used In This Book
Beta
Councils (llluminati)
Delta
Deliverance ministry
Illuminati
Monarch Programming
System
New World Order
Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA)
Switching
CHAPTER 1: Science No. 1. The Selection and Preparation of The Victim
A. Genetics & dissociative abilities
B. Availability
C. Physical & Mental requirements
Mind-controlled slaves are created for different purposes, hierarchy or non-hierarchy purposes
Sharon Tate In review John Gittinger PAS (Personality Assessment System
D. List of organizations carrying out programming
E. 4 foundational steps for programming
F. Step 1. Spiritual requirements Moon Child ceremonies Aleister Crowley
Traumatization in vitro
G. Step 2. Trauma by premature birth
H. Step 3. Love bombing/love bonding
I. Step 4. Severing the "core" of the mind
The Initial Splits
J. Further considerations: The Illuminati have their own criteria as to who they select.
CHAPTER 2: Science # 2 The Traumatization and Torture of The Victim
A. A site for torture of children, NOTS China Lake , CA .
How Children Are Transported To A Major Programming Site
More About The Secret China Lake Base
Charles Manson Joseph Mengele
B. What trauma does, the creation of PTSD & DID (MPD)
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) "Hidden Observer" "the core"
C. How the torture is carried out, types of trauma Baron Guy de Rothschild
ritual aspect of trauma
D. What Occurs When The Mind Splits: How MPD works
E. The Core
F. How Programming is Anchored
How The Olfactory Nerves Are Traumatized
When Moonchild Traumas Miscarry
Ritual Torture Device
Review
CHAPTER 3: Science No. 3 The Use of Drugs
A. A list of drugs used
Herbs
B. brief history of use
C. Applications for drugs to control a slave
Some of the cautions that the programmers are alert to include
Summary
CHAPTER 4. Science No 4 - Hypnosis Understanding the Basics About Hypnosis
A. Dissociation, trance, & its historical use
The History of Hypnosis for Programming Hypnotic cues
B. How to program with hypnosis George Estabrooks Royal Institute of International Affairs Rhodes Scholarship
C. How to boost creativity of victim with hypnosis
The Vital Role of Movies for Hypnotizing Small Children
Spinning Tops
The Hypnotic Voice of the Programmer
D. Keeping the mind dissociative
E. Keeping the mind in a programming (Alpha) state
F. Hypnotic triggers & cues
Monarch Mind Control Codes Contents (A-T)
G. Hypnosis in programs & other uses
Alice In Wonderland Programming as it Pertains to an Alter Going Down in Trance for Internal
Hypnotically Building in Structures
CHAPTER 5 Science No. 5: The Skill of Lying, The Art of Deceit
A. Overview
B. The use of fiction
Judy Garland Charlie Manson Theosophical Society Adolf Hitler Mahatma Gandhi H.P. Blavatsky Alice Bailey Henry Steel Olcott Elvis Presley Manly P. Hall Frank Baum
PARALLELS BETWEEN:
A. THE WIZARD OF OZ BOOK & OCCULTISM
B. THE WIZARD OF OZ MOVIE & ILLUMINATI RITUALS Dorris Duke
C. THE WIZARD OF OZ SERIES OF BOOKS AND MONARCH PROGRAMMING Yellow Brick Road
Book 3. Ozma of Oz
Alice In Wonderland Alice Through the Looking Glass
The Tall Book of Make-Believe
Alien Programming Scripts
Island of the Blue Dolphins
The Lord of the Rings
The Most Important Programming Script--The Lesser Key
C. The use of lies externally, incl. covers and fronts
External Deceptions
Covers For Individual Slaves Agent Provocateurs
The Use of Religious Fronts Billy Graham
THE DECEPTION OF BILLY GRAHAM, A MIND-CONTROL FRONT
The List Of Known And Credible Witnesses
Clarifying What Is Looked For In Proof
The Motivation of the Co-Authors
Clarifying What is Acceptable Testimony
The Policies of Deception By The Billy Graham Crusade Staff
Billy Graham's Active Role In Satanic Ritual Abuse Hearst Jeanne Dixon Kissinger Nugen Hand Bank
How Billy Graham Plays a Key Role in Reprogramming Monarch Slaves Near Death Trauma Centers
References
The Actual Heritage and Name of Billy Graham
How Billy Graham is a 33° Mason
FLEECING THE SHEEP
Inadequate Reactions
Summary
The Top Secret Amish Front (And Hutterites)
How It Is Done
Hiding A Major Programming Center
External & Internal Deceptions Deflection, Blinds, Slides, Hegelian, Deniability.
Esoteric language
D. Internal Deceptions, incl. the art of hiding things in a system Gatekeeper alters
The Use of Esoteric Language
Saturn
SECRET HIGH LEVEL TEACHINGS
THE EXTERNALIZATION OF THE HIERARCHY
In Summary
CHAPTER 6 Science No. 6 The Use of Electronics and Electricity
Microwaves for Programming
Prozac and Slaves and Microwave Towers
The Use of Waves and Electricity to Implant Thoughts
Tracking/ID Implants
Monitoring Implants
Communication Implants
The ALEX system intersects with the Monarch Mind Control Programming.
Accessories
In Summary
CHAPTER 7 The Science of Structuring
A. Structuring of MPD worlds
B. The creation of roles
How the Self of a Man Alter Consists of Shattered Shadow Alters, A Script, Mirrors and Assigned Demons
The Presideo S-P-I-N = Segmented Polycentric Integrated Networks
Standard Roles Within An Illuminati Monarch Slave
Angry Alters Animal Alters Christian Front Alters Clones
Deltas How The Deltas Are Created How The Deltas Are Activated
Foreign Language Alters Gatekeeper Alters Hierarchy And Deeper Cult Alters
Egyptian Armies Flooding Alters Gems Looking Glass People Mirror Images
Programmer Alters Reporting Alters Scrambling Alters Sexual Alters
Names
Boxes And Self-Abuse
C. Building in layered defenses
Systems
Imagery
Defenses In Death
Overview Of The Princess Programming
D. Backup Programming
"Labyrinth", A View of a Monarch's Internal World
The Structuring Done in Monarch Star Trek and Star Wars Programming
CHAPTER 8 The Science of Body Manipulation and Programming
A. Scarring the brain stem
B. Split brain work
C. Medical technologies
D. Histamines I.G. Farben, DuPont, and Dow Chemical
E. The use of body programs
Pathways Virtual Reality
Programming Damage to the Body
Physical Aspects of the Human Brain
Genetic Engineering to Create Programmed Assassins Amphibious Man
CHAPTER 9 The Science of Mind Manipulation by Psychological Programming
A. Observing a satanic family conditioning their children
Other Items That Parents Do To Their Monarch Children
An Overview
Some of the elements which the Monarch program shares with other typical types of cult mind control are:
Handwriting
B. Behavior modification, obedience training
C. Isolation
D. Repetition
E. Psychological motivators, md. pride/needs/wants
F. Neuro-linguistic programming
Anchors
Future Pacing
Pacing For Hypnosis Milton Erickson
Reframing With Metaphors
The Right Brain And The Unconscious
Power Words, Reversals And Puns
The Mind's Natural Alarm Clock
G. The inversion of pain & pleasure
CHAPTER 10: The 10th Science - Using Spiritual Things To Control A Person
A. Using spiritual principles against a person
B. How the Monarch program miniaturizes what is done on a larger scale
C. Dehumanization
Porcelain Face Programming
Hearts Of Stone
Hypnotic Surgery
D. Fear
E. The use of guilt, shame & ridicule & anger
Anger
F. Teaching that the master is God
G. Portals, focal points golem baptism of the child victim to Satan
H. Vows & Oaths
I. The use of demon possession, layering etc. sabbat ceremony
HOW THE PROGRAMMERS UNDERSTAND DEMONOLOGY Voodoo
India
How The Anti-Christ Spirit Contributes To Controlling The Slave
J. The use of angel alters
K. The use of Scriptures In Programming
L. Theta programming
Some of the groups who did research for the Monarch’s Theta Programming
How Out-Of-Body Experiences (Astral Projection) Are Done
Telepathy
Killing From A Distance
In Quick Review
The Philosopher's Stone
Further Spiritual Bondage Snares
CHAPTER 11 Science No. 11--Internal Controls
A. Teaching Occult Philosophies
Teaching The Ideologies Of War
Various Delta Forces
Delta Assassination Teams
Delta Force First Earth Battalion Green Berets Bo Gritz
B. Internal Computers--Perfect Delegation; Internal Computers Which Auto-Control A Slave
Internal Computers Which Auto-Control A Slave
Power Sources
Color Codes And Ribbons
How Monarch Slaves Are Designed To Interface With The Unix System Of The Beast Computers
Components Of The Controls Some of the T.V. shows & movies, which served as Monarch programming scripts
Jokers
C. Internal Hierarchies
CHAPTER 12 The Science Of External Controls Monitoring (Asset Control)
A. Monitoring (Asset control)
9 subconscious desires ("weaknesses") Marilyn Monroe Draconian enforcers
Planning A Typical Intelligence Operation, Or The Standard Textbook Techniques Of A Modern Intelligence Agency
B. The art of blackmail
C. Bribes
D. The Control of the Milieu Mazda eagle Groton The Beta Theta Pi Quest Program Madonna gypsies USO Camp Shows, Inc. International Brotherhood of Magicians Intrepid Park Elvis Presley
Star Trek, The Next Generation
Videodrome
Trancer II
Krull
The Little Princess
Miss Universe Contest
The Manchurian Candidate Frank Sinatra Dean Martin William Joseph Bryan, Jr
The Simpson Cartoons
E. Bonding & twinning
F. Peer pressure
Appendix One The Programmers
Some of THE Illuminati's Companies
A. Introductory remarks Vril Society
B. Understanding the programmers Dr. Mengele Dr. Cameron Jerry Lee Lewis and Michael Aquino
C. Monarch Mind Control Programmers Country Music Industry The Temple of Set.
D. Dr. Green
E. Dr. White
F. The AntiChrist as a Master Programmer
Footnotes
Appendix Two: The Programming Sites
INTRODUCTION AND WARNING
Dedication This book is dedicated to the two million Americans and counting who have been programmed with Monarch-type trauma-based mind control. This book is written to destroy trauma-based mind control before it destroys the human race. It’s time for this horrendous secret to end.
It is also written as part of God’s end time work to propel people of faith to the high calling that is prophesied of the Body, but cannot be attained without men of faith understanding these things. Humanity’s great prophet said he came to heal those whose hearts had been broken--literally split and crushed, and to free those who are captive. That work needs to go forward. Blood, sweat and tears are associated with this book.
The blood of the innocent victims of this mind-control cries out in a single unison, along with the pungent sweat of those who have tried to minister help to the shattered humanity left by the sadistic programmers, and the pools of tears shed as this book was written, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, do you not judge and avenge our blood on earth?" Hope .... Thou shalt know that I am Lord: For they shall not be ashamed that wait on Me. Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered? But thus saith Yahweh, even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children. Isaiah 49:23b-25
WARNING, READ THIS FIRST BEFORE READING THE BOOK. IF THERE IS ANY CHANCE you the reader have had mind-control done to you, you must consider the following book to be DANGEROUS.
If you are consulting a therapist for DID (also known as MPD), it is recommended that you consult your therapist before reading this book. The complications that could result for those under mind control learning the truth--could be fatal. The co-authors take no responsibility for those who read or misuse this information. The reader’s mind is like a garden. It may not be time to plant the truth in your mind. Perhaps you need some weeding or ground preparation, before the garden of your mind is ready. Perhaps the weather is too stormy to plant the truth. Pray to the Lord of the Harvest.
The blessings that flow from planting the information of this book in your mind, will require the presence of living waters of love. If you do not have love in your heart, this book is not for you. The information contained in this book is the biggest news-story of the 20th century, and still the biggest secret. It will challenge you, shock you, horrify you and hopefully motivate you to redouble your efforts to humble yourself and seek strength from God Almighty.
The programming procedures which are described in this book are based on research and consultation with deprogrammers, ex-programmers, therapists, counselors and pertinent literature. To the best of our knowledge the statements made in this book are factual, although they may not reflect the latest or currently accepted methodology among each and every faction of the New World Order which carries out Monarch-type programming.
This book tends to devote more emphasis to Illuminati programming, which is the highest level of programming. For individual application in understanding a survivor of Monarch programming, therapists are admonished to use this material with consideration for the Monarch victim’s personal case and situation.
The authors disclaim any responsibility for therapeutic work based upon this material. Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler have co-authored They Know Not What They Do, An Illustrated Guidebook To Monarch Mind Control. Both Fritz and Cisco bring years of experience in dealing with Monarch programming to bear on the writing of this book. Fritz has researched the Illuminati, while he has worked with victims of its programming. He has authored The Top 13 Illuminati Families, and several other books.
Introduction by Fritz
There are many dangers to the human race, some real and some imagined. I believe that the trauma-based mind control which this book exposes is the greatest danger to the human race. It gives evil men the power to carry out any evil deed totally undetected. By the time the astute reader finishes this book, they will be as familiar with how to carry out trauma-based mind-control as some of the programmers. Ancient and more recent secrets will no longer be secrets.
Over the years, I have spent thousands of hours studying the Illuminati, the Intelligence agencies of the world, and the occult world in general. The centerpiece of these organizations is the trauma-based mind control that they carry out. Without the ability to carry out this sophisticated type of mind-control using MPD, drugs, hypnosis and electronics and other control methodologies, these organizations would fail to keep their dark evil deeds secret.
When one of the mind-control programmers of the Church of Scientology , who has left Scientology, was asked about MPD, he said, "It’s the name of the game of mind control." Research into this subject will never be complete. This book has tried to give a comprehensive view of how the programming is done. The basic techniques were developed in German, Scottish, Italian, and English Illuminati families and have been done for centuries. Some report that some of the techniques go back to ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon to the ancient mystery religions.
The Nazis are known to have studied ancient Egyptian texts in their mind control research. The records and secrets of the generational Illuminati bloodlines are very-well guarded secrets. Even when I’ve learned about the location of secret depositories of some of the Illuminati’s secrets in Europe , America , and Asia , their records and secrets are too well-guarded to be examined.
The intelligence agencies, such as MI-6 began investigating these mind-control techniques early this century, but their records have been routinely destroyed and tampered with. There are some survivors and professionals who know that the British used programmed trauma-based MPD (DID) agents in W.W. I. In Jan., 1987, Richard Kluft submitted an article to the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis about 8 MPD patients who were between 60 and 72 years of age. Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich (1880-1949), who was professor of philosophy at Tubingen University , Germany studied MPD and demonic possession and wrote a classic study of it in 1921 entitled Possession Demonical & Other, which was translated into english in 1930. His classic work on this subject provides documented cases which reveal that the basic trauma-based mind-control was going on in Germany , France & Belgium long before the 20th century.
Although he is unable to put together all the pieces and the clues for what they are, the reader of this book might enjoy reading the 1930 English translation of his classic work after they finish this book. Oesterreich’s research in early 1900s was the type of research that the Nazi mind-control programmers were very aware of.
In 1921, the Germans such as Oesterreich would describe personality switches, by the term "somnambuliform [hypnotic states] possession" or "demonical somnambulism" or what might be called "Besessenheit von Hypnotismus und bösen Geistern." The ability to study both the spiritual & psychological aspects of mind-control phenomena, is often lacking today. There are exceptions such as Dr. Loreda Fox’s book The Spiritual Dimensions of MPD.
In the 1920s, the Germans also were aware that the human mind has a variety of ego-psycho-psysiological states rather than one unified mind, which they termed "Sub jecklose Psychologie" or the psychology of having correlated psychological states rather than the concept of a single ego. The Germans and Italians under the Nazi and Fascist governments began to do serious scientific research into trauma-based mind control. Under the auspices of the Kaiser Wilhelm Medical Institute in Berlin , Joseph Mengele conducted mind-control research on thousands of twins, and thousands of other hapless victims. Himmler supervised genetic research.
The Nazi research records were confiscated by the Allies and are still classified. A trip can be made from downtown Washington D.C. on a gray-government van which serves as a shuttle to the Suitland Annex where the government’s secrets are buried including research papers captured from the Nazi Mind-Control research. Most of Mengele’s concentration camp research is still classified. Much of it dealt with mind control. A researcher can visit the top floor, but underground below the top floor are the real secrets. The real secrets are lying in millions of sheets of classified documents hidden behind blast proof doors. There they have vault after vault, and row after row of top-secret files that only a few privileged persons with security clearances above COSMIC--such as with a "C3" or "MJ" security clearance can visit.
Everyone with these high security clearances which I have identified is connected to the Illuminati. Each underground area at Suitland Annex has its own subset of secret access words, known only to the initiated. Most of the OSS records have been destroyed, a few have been left, the important ones have been misfiled or remade. (This is according to a reliable British intelligent agent.) Also according to reliable inside sources the CIA is working night and day to remake old records, to expunge all the real dirty secrets from their records. The basement of CIA HQ is known as "the Pit," In the Pit documents are being shredded and burned on a round the clock basis. The large remains of these secrets are sold for landfill.
The Illuminati have developed secrecy to a fine art. They train their people in the art of secrecy from the time they are born. Most everything they do, is done orally. They are trained not to write rituals and other things down. There is very little paper trail left by the Illuminati. The creation of slaves with photographic memories facilitates this secrecy. But this book is not about how they have managed to keep their trauma-based Monarch Mind-Control a secret. They have managed only to keep it a secret to the general public. They have not been able to completely cover-up the millions of wasted lives that their programming has ruined. For many years, they were able to shut-up and quietly discard their programmed multiples by labelling them Paranoid Schizophrenics. But therapists are now correctly identifying these people as programmed multiples and are not only diagnosing them better but giving them better treatment. After Candy Jones’s husband deprogrammed her enough that she could participate in writing a book exposing some of what had been done to her, the secret was out. (See The Control of Candy Jones Hypnotism and the CIA by Donald Bain.)
Ever since then, the intelligence agencies and the Illuminati have been carrying out damage control. Their biggest damage control campaign has enlisted the power of Hollywood and the controlled Media. This campaign is known as the False Memory Syndrome campaign, or as those of us who know the facts like to call it ""the false memory spin-drome." The headquarters of the False Memory Spin-drom Foundation is located at 3401 Market St., Suite 130 , Philadelphia , PA 19104 . Some of the original founders were doctors of the University of Pennslyvannia . The inside story about these early FMS doctors of the University of Pennslyvannia is that they practiced Satanic Rituals during their work days.
What is unusual about this--is that generally satanic rituals are performed at night, but these doctors did their coven work during the day. I know about these men. Now you can see why these men started the FMS! They started it to cover their own sins, because many of them were abusers themselves. In other words many of the EMS people are abusers of trauma-based mind-controlled slaves, or the victims of abuse who are in denial about their own abuse from trauma-based mind-control.
Martin T. Orn (the person credited with founding the FMS) had ties to the CIA. Two members of the EMS advisory board, Ralph Underwager, Ph.D. and theologian, along with Hollida Wakefield, M.A. let the cat out of the bag when they publicly supported pedophilia (that is adults having sex with children). Their support of pedophilia came in an interview with a Dutch magazine Paidika, The Journal of Paedophilia (Winter, 1993).
Although the False Memory Syndrome Foundation gets upset at any mention that there might be a conspiracy by the perpetrators of mind-control, because conspiracies supposedly don’t and can’t happen, they want us to believe that all therapists are conspiring together to implant false memories of abuse into their clients, which could not be further from the truth.
Monarch slaves typically run into a great deal of denial by their therapists that anything like this could be happening. The bottom line is that Multiple Personality Disorder (now refered to as Dissociative Identity Disorder) is a recognized bona fide diagnosis. False Memory Syndrome is not a recognized medical or psychological diagnosis and does not appear in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III-R nor the recently released DSM-IV.
Those who followed Fritz’s writings have learned about the close working relationship between the Mondavi’s and the Rothschilds (see his article about the Mondavi/Rothschild Napa Valley winery). Guess who got the court precedence which gives the EMS some legal ground to attack therapists? The precedence was supposedly a wife who went to a doctor who told her she had syphilis. The wife assumes she got it from her husband and divorces him. Then she learns she doesn’t have syphilis. The husband then sues the doctor. Upon this bizarre case rests the legal precedence for a third party to sue a person who gives advice, such as family members suing a therapist. Upon this weak precedence, an abusive father who worked for Monday in a winery in California successfully destroyed a legitimate therapist who was trying to save his daughter who was a programmed Monarch victim.
Supposedly the therapist had implanted false memories of rape in his daughter, when the record shows that the daughter’s mother told the therapist the girl had been raped by the father. When a valid case of SRA and repressed memories went to trial in Washington state involving a police officer whose family was MPD, Dr. Richard Ofshe of the False Memory Spindrom showed up to cause mischief. And mischief he did work. The case involved the children of a ""Christian"" police officer named Ingram who had satanically ritually abused his family for years. The daughter won in court, but Ofshe of the EMS was not above writing a book full of lies and distortions about the case. Lynn Crook, who was the abused daughter in the case wrote up a paper exposing what EMS person Richard Ofshe did to her.
The controlled media is giving full license and great coverage to the EMS people. Rather than fighting the government for scraps of declassified documents which have had their secrets marked out, and which may even be fake documents manufactured by the CIA, I have decided that there is a much better approach to expose the Monarch Mind Control to the world. If a person could never go to Nepal , he can see pictures of it and believe it exists. If a person can not get into the top secret records of the CIA and Office of Naval Intelligence and MI6, they can be given the exact RECIPE for creating a Monarch slave.
I believe that by giving the step by step recipe, people will see that A. all the ingredients are available, B. it is possible to combine the ingredients, C. all it takes is the motive to do it, and that motive is self-evident.
We’ll even provide some of the names and places as we go along. This book will provide the step-by-step recipe for making a Monarch Mind-Controlled slave. It is a trauma-based mind control which programs multiple personalities using every known technique of mind-control. Every type of mind-control technique has been combined into a group package which makes the total package almost impossible to break. It is this ability to synthesize all these methods into a group package which is so powerful.
Edward Hunter, author of Brainwashing In Red China, testified in 1958 before a U.S. Congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities: "Since man began, he has tried to influence other men or women to his way of thinking. There have always been these forms of pressure to change attitudes. We discovered in the past thirty years, a technique to influence, by clinical, hospital procedures, the thinking processes of human beings. Brainwashing is formed out of a set of different elements ... hunger, fatigue, tenseness, threats, violence, and in more intense cases...drugs and hypnotism. No one of these elements alone can be regarded as brain washing, any more than an apple can be called apple pie. Other ingredients have to be added, and a cooking process gone through. So it is with brainwashing..."
Hunter said brainwashing was a Red Chinese threat. He said that the Chinese were the ones using these tactics. In reality, this mind control was being done in the U.S. and Hunter was a pawn to help justify the criminal activities of the programmers should they ever be found out behind their cover of "National security." The handlers of mind-controlled slaves carry around a black or grey 3 ring notebook or a lap top computer with the access codes and triggers. Some of the programmers and handlers have this all memorized.
The deepest parts, core/gems/executive committee, false trinity etc. are charted in esoteric language such as Enochian, Hebrew (which is considered magical), and Druid symbols. I have never gotten the opportunity to look at one of these, although a number of the slaves who I’ve talked with have while they were being programmed. These notebooks have color-coded graphs showing the arrangement of alters, the structure of the system, the training of the alters, the history of the alters and other details. All the primary tortures carried out on a slave are coded using dates/no.s so that the memories can be pulled up by the programmers.
There is a standard set of hand signals, gestures, and codes that allow a handler to work with someone else’s slave, but the accepted code among the handlers is to leave another man’s slave alone. As one leading psychiatrist put it, "Different ideologies use the same methodologies of mind control."
The Illuminati have secretly put in base programming that allows them ultimate control over many of the other groups’ slaves. This will be described within this book. For both the ease of reading and the ease of writing, I have dispensed with most footnotes. To provide my sources would double the size of the book, and many of them are confidential. (In the past, when I have attempted crediting information, some people have gotten bruised feelings for having been passed over or for being named. When information comes in from several sources, it becomes difficult to pass out credit.)
I have made conservative judgment calls about what material I could use. Most of this information has been verified by several reliable sources. Confidential eyewitnesses are often the only source, when there is such a powerful conspiracy to keep this vast NWO mind control secret. Paper trails were not left or are not available. Programmed slaves who have worked for the military as mind-controlled slaves have witnessed their files expunged and sanitized.
The New World Order in 1981 made training films for their novice programmers. Monarch slave Cathy O’Brien was used to make both the film "How to Divide a Personality" and "How To Create a Sex Slave." Two Huntsville porn photographers were used to help NASA and the NWO create these training films. Undoubtedly, other porn training films exist too. In others words, there is film evidence of the Monarch Total Mind-control but these porn films are kept in very secure sites. During the last few years, I have visited with ex-programmers, I have visited with hundreds of victims of the Monarch type programming. I have gone to programming sites, I have visited with therapists who work with the victims of this mind-control, and I have met several of the programmers of the CIA/Illuminati face to face in the adventures of trying to save people from their programming.
I hope that God gives me the strength and the opportunity to get the information I have learned out to the world in general. When this information gets out, hopefully it will help lift some of the secrecy of the Monarch Programming.
The Monarch Programming is a foundation rock of the New World Order that when pulled up, will reveal the most evil two-legged bugs and slimy critters. When their rock is lifted, they will have to scurry to hide. Because the authors know what the programmers do, they must honestly record several areas of programming that will be controversial. The programmers are very much into demonology. Before therapists close their minds to this subject, the authors would like to point out, that they personally know of cases where Monarch slaves whose Christian personalities & other alters didn’t believe in demonology were talked into participating in real deliverance, and the slaves discovered much to their surprise that work they had unsuccessfully tried to do for years with their therapist was accomplished in a day or two.
Some prestigious researchers have decided the subconscious doesn’t exist because they can’t find it--its mysterious. To the man in the street the concept "subconscious" is as mysterious as the concept "demon". Both have been the objects of intense research by U.S./Brit./Ger. Intelligence groups. In fact, many of the concepts in this book have been purposely obscured by the Illuminati’s control over the media and universities. These obscured concepts include M.P.D. (DID), recovered memories, hypnosis, demonic possession, aliens, mind-control, the subconscious, a conspiracy to bring in a NWO, truth, etc.
The smokescreens of controversy will continue; but those who love the truth, if they seek it, will realize the importance of this book. It’s on public record that MK ULTRA, the mind control research which CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner admitted to in 1977 spent millions of dollars studying Voodoo, witchcraft, and psychics. On August 3, 1977 , at a Senate hearing the then CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner disclosed that the CIA had been conducting mind control on countless numbers of unsuspecting victims for years, without their knowledge or consent. These CIA mind-control operations were carried out with the participation of a least 185 scientists and at least 80 American institutions, including prisons, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and 44 medical colleges & universities. Many of America ’s most prestigious institutes of medical research, had cooperated with the CIA. as well as numerous big name corporations. Casey admitted that day that the CIA did mind-control consisting of drugs, hypnosis & electro-shock.
A few of the victims of the Monarch Project were even awarded financial compensation for their misery. But what was admitted was admitted in the spirit of covering up the extent of the full truth. The compensation was actually hush money, because victims were given "gag orders" by judges not to talk about what had happened to them.
It’s been a disaster for Monarch victims that so many ministers have ignored those words of their Scripture, "For we are not ignorant of the devil’s devices." 2 COR 2:11 This book is a must for those ministers who seriously believe "Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God." 2 COR 7:1. In 2 TIM 2: 19-21, believers who "nameth the name of Christ" are asked to purge themselves of their uncleanliness ( unclean spirits). There are many top notch Christians in the churches today who are under mind-control, incl. many of the Christian leadership. I would like to remind Christian ministers that Isaiah the great prophet said, "The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning; he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned." Ignorance is not godliness. Isaiah learned to speak with the great learned men of his day, just as Paul the great apostle could speak to the learned men of his time. One of the character traits of God is that He is all-knowing. WHO says it is godly to be ignorant? The prophet Daniel said Yahweh God "reveals the deep and secret things." (Dan. 2:22a) God’s instruments will do this revealing. Jesus’ advice to his disciples was in effect to "Be wise as serpents, and gentle as a lamb".
This advice certainly applies in helping the victims of trauma-based mind-control. Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians (1 Thes 5:14 ) says that in effect that different people need different counseling, but they all need to be treated with patience. The first step in suggesting a cure is to find out what happened. That is what this book is about. This book is about how the Occult Network creates the problem that therapists and a few ministers try to deal with. But the keys to open doors to healthy solutions for the victims of trauma-based total mind control will reveal themselves in this book for the reader as this book reveals the nitty-gritty of how the total mind-control happens. Christ came to free the captives (Isaiah 61:1). Satanic ritual abuse has a history that is almost as old as history itself. Good King Hezekiah was a victim as a child of SRA. (2 Chr. 29) who got free. Moses confronted the satanic magic of Pharoah’s magicians who could create live snakes from sticks. The Apostle Paul had to deal with Simon Magus, a leader of what is now known as Satanism. Solomon, one of the greatest men of faith, backslide and became one of the greatest satanists of all history. We have "no fellowship with unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them" (as per EPH 5:11 ).
While we have no fellowship with evil, the mind-control programmers are counting on us being so ignorant of their devices that they can hide their control devices behind perversion & filth that many people shy away from. We must be strong enough to face evil and not shy away from it. The victims of mind-control must look evil in the face & not look away to gain their freedom. We, who want to help them, must be courageous & strong enough to do this too. This book is written for that divine goal "till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." Eph. 4:13 If the body of Christ is to attain fullness, we need this book to weed out the hidden terrible cancer that is consuming the body from within. This book is written for ministers, secular and Christian therapists, and truth lovers of all kinds. If you love the truth this book is for you. If you see something good in the human race so that our species should be preserved as well as the spotted owl and the sand flea, then this book is for you. IF YOU LOVE THE TRUTH, this BOOK is for YOU.
Glossary of How Basic Terms are Used In This Book
For those readers who are not familiar with these basic terms let us introduce you to the definitions under which this book uses them. Alter-Our usage is trying to follow the programmers usage of this word. A dissociated part of the mind which has a seperate identity and is given cue codes by the mind-control programmers to trigger that dissociated part of the mind to come to the front of the mind. The alter’s identity may be a gem, rock, a tape recorder, a poodle, a white kitten, a dove, a horse, or even think of itself as a person or a demon. It all depends on its programming. An alter is different from an alter fragment in that the alter fragment is a dissociated part of the mind which serves only a single purpose. The programmers will give an alter a history, and insure that shadow alters will provide a full range of accessible emotions. Sometimes the distinctions between alters and alter fragments is vague, but examples from the two ends of the spectrum are easy to tell apart. We use the word alter in this book to conform to what the programmers’ charts are encoding as alters. A typical main Mengele-created grid would be a grid of 13x13 principal A-coded alters, which is 169 principle alter personalities. In Illuminati systems, ceremonial "alters will consist of 3 alters placed on a spinning pedistal together into triad goddesses or gods. That means that an A-coded alter on some levels is actually 3 alters spinning together, which must be locked in place to communicate with, and then rotated to communicate to the other two.
Beta--This is the second Greek letter, and it represents the sexual models and sexual alters that the Programmers are creating. The primitive part of the brain is involved in this type of programming. An early sexual abuse event will be used to anchor this programming. These sexual slaves will develop sexual abilities that are far beyond what the public is aware is even possible. They also receive the worst kind of abuse far beyond what most people’s imagination can picture. Beta alters generally see themselves as cats.
Councils (llluminati)--The Illuminati has frequent meetings. Some of these meetings are organized to appear "acephalous" and "accidential" in their meetings, when in reality they are structured and planned. One group, MJ-12 has gone by the following names: the Group, the Special Study Group, the Wise Men, the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), 5412 Committee, 303 Committee, 40 Committee, PI-40 Committee, and Policy Planning Group (PCG). Some of the formal policy and ritual groups have names that all Illuminati members who have gotten high enough to learn, will recognize: The Council of 3, Council of 5, Council of 7, Council of 9, The Grand Druid Council, The Committee of 300, and the Committee of 500 (known as Fortune 500). Many of the meetings are conclaves without formal names. The Grand Druid Council is not something fictional, but an actual body of people who formally meet and whose membership, we have been trying to keep track of. The groups which make decisions to control this planet are networked together. Each decision has its own origin and route that it takes.
Delta--This is a Greek letter shaped like a triangle which symbolizes change in calculus. It has become a favorite word to use in naming things for the occult elite. Delta teams are 4 person assassination teams which usually are secret teams. Delta Forces is an elite unit that operates under the Joint chiefs of staff that is made up of highly trained total mind-controlled slaves. Delta models are slaves whose sole purpose is assassination.
Delta alters are alters within an Illuminati alter system which are programmed to be assassins. These alters are often some of the deepest in a system and in a Genie bottle or with Umbrella programming.
Deliverance ministry-(This book is about HOW the mind-control is done, it is not a textbook on solutions.) The use of the term deliverance ministry in this book conotates any person(s) who via faith in God is able to pray for divine help in a fashion that a victim is helped from demonic activity. A deliverance ministry is a natural outgrowth of a life in harmony and fellowship with Yahweh God. However, this is not to be confused with Exorcism of the traditional Catholic or witchcraft nature in which certain spells and incantations are used in a prescribed method.
"Deliverance" connotates divinely inspired faith, exorcism involves ritual. A deliverance ministry might perhaps teach a person about forgiveness, or how they can renounce an oath, or how to apply Jesus Christ’s atoning blood to their life. In this fashion, the person finds deliverance through biblical spiritual principles rather than the efficacy of some ritual or hocus pocus spell. This book is in no way meant as a blanket endorsement of every spiritual warfare tactic. If anything, this book suggests that ministers learn more about mind-control, as well as grow stronger in their walk with Almighty God.
Illuminati--The Illuminati are 13 elite bloodlines which have maneuvered themselves into control over this planet. They lead double lives, one for society and a hidden one which is based on a gnostic luciferian philosophy which consists of lots of blood rituals.
Monarch Programming--This was a specific Project carried out by secret elements of the U.S. government and intelligence groups. There were, according to someone a few years ago who had access to the computer(s) which contains all the names of active monitored human slaves, 40,000 actively monitored Monarch slaves. However, this book uses the term generically to include all victims who have suffered this type of trauma-based mind-control. In the same way, that a brand name like "Hyster" is used to describe all lifts--when we use the term we use it in its broadest sense. This is the only way it can be used and technically correct, because as of this date, the authors have not seen who is on the active Monarch Program list of slaves.
System-- This term is used in several ways. It is frequently used to refer to a victim of total mind control because the victim consists of alters, program ming, implant(s), intern al computers, and numerous dissociative states which function together as a system. The word is also used in this book to refer to the body’s functional physiological units, such as the respiratory system. The word is also infrequently used to denote the established social-economic-political system controlling the world, also known insiders as the Network. Other standard meaning may also occasionally be used for the word. Multiple Personality/Multiple personalities or MPD Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID is the situation where different dissociative parts of a single brain view themselves as separate persons. The DSM-IIIR definition of MPD is the guideline for determining MPD for this book.
New World Order-- The New World Order is the global design for a One-World-Government One-World-Dictator and its constituents. Insiders call themselves the "network" and "the neighborhood".
Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA)--This is used to represent all categories of ritual abuse which would be inspired by the desire to rob, kill, or destroy something worthwhile in a person, especially their freedom of thought. Many groups carrying out SRA do not mention Satan by that name. They may make Pacts to Baphomet, and call upon Rex Mundi, or Belair, or Lucifer, or the Father of Light, God, or Kali or even "Jesus" or "Jesus Christ" (there are demons which call themselves "Jesus", who are not to be confused with Yeshua or Yehoshua ben Joseph who is known as Jesus Christ of Nazareth.) SRA is not a value judgement by the authors against some group, the victims themselves on some level know that he or she is being abused.
Switching--This is when one part (fragment) of the mind takes over from another, or in simple terms, this is when one alter personality (or alter fragment) takes the body from the alter which is holding the body. Switching can occur via the Programmers’ codes for calling up alters, or by external or internal stimuli that trigger an alter to come out. Switching will usually cause at least a flicker of the eyes, and for outside observers, who know the different personalities, they will observe another personality take the body.
Chapter 1: Science No. 1. The Selection and Preparation of The Victim
A - Selection Based on Genetics and Disassociative Abilities
B - Availability
C - Mental and Physical Features One of the primary reasons that the Monarch mind-control programming was named Monarch programming was because of the Monarch butterfly. The Monarch butterfly learns where it was born (its roots) and it passes this knowledge via genetics on to its offspring (from generation to generation).
This was one of the key animals that tipped scientists off, that knowledge can be passed genetically. The Monarch program is based upon Illuminati and Nazi goals to create a Master race in part through genetics. If knowledge can be passed genetically (which it is), then it is important that parents be found that can pass the correct knowledge onto those victims selected for the Monarch mind-control. The primary important factor for the trauma-based mind-control is the ability to disassociate. It was discovered that this ability is passed genetically from generation to generation.
American Indian tribes (who had traumatic ritual dances and who would wait motionless for hours when hunting), children of Fakirs in India (who would sleep on a bed of nails or walk on hot coals), children of Yogis (those skilled in Yoga, who would have total control over their body in trance), Tibetan buddhists, children of Vodoun, Bizango and other groups have a good ability to disassociate.
The children of multigenerational abuse are also good at dissociation. The Illuminati families and European occultists went to India , and Tibet to study occultism and eastern philosophy. These Europeans learned yoga, tantric yoga, meditations, and trances and other methods to disassociate. These skills are passed on to their children via genetics. A test is run when the children are about 18 months old to determine if they can dissociate enough to be selected for programming or not.
Mind-controlled slaves are created for different purposes, hierarchy or non-hierarchy purposes.
The Illuminati create mind-controlled slaves who are to function within the Illuminati hierarchy. These slaves will usually have their genealogies hidden, and will be created to have excellent cover lives to insure that they are not detected. They will be given multifunctional programming, and will usually be used to help program other slaves. The abuse will not be as physically visible as it will be on the bodies of slaves who are not born to be part of the Illuminati elite.
Members of Moriah’s (Moriah = the Illuminati) Luciferian elite will have undergone as much trauma as other slaves, however the torture scars and the control are better concealed. These children will often receive lavish experiences as well as talks to convince them that they are part of the elite. (By the way, body scars will show up better under black light, that is the same black light as used in clubs.) The Illuminati and other organizations have also programmed individuals who are simply expendable. These are sex slaves who are used up and killed very early in life, one-time use saboteurs, breeders, soldiers, drug couriers and so forth. The bodies of these people will often show visible torture scars.
The expendable are the children of parents who were blackmailed into turning their children over to the CIA. This is all hidden by the power of the National Security Act. These are children, who have been sold by pedophile fathers, or pornographic parents. The programmers/masters program them with the expectation that they will be "thrown from the freedom train" when they get to age 30. (Freedom Train is the code word for the Monarch trauma-based mind-control. To be thrown from the Freedom Train means to be killed.)
The CIA and the Illuminati are skilled at blackmailing parents to give up their children. They would watch the mail for porn. Pedophile and murderers who abuse their children are warned that they will go to prison for long lengths of time if they do not cooperate by selling their children into mind-controlled slavery. In return for the parent’s cooperation, they provide rich financial rewards to the parent(s). It’s clearly a case of "if you don’t cooperate you lose in life big time, if you do cooperate you win big time."
Ministers are often set up with Betas (a sexual model) who then blackmail them. The ministers do not want to lose their status and profession via scandals, so they agree to turn their children over when young to the CIA to work with. The Illuminati like to blackmail these ministers when they are finished with their Seminary schooling and committed to the ministry at about 33 years of age. The idea of having nothing to fall back on after they have committed their entire life to one profession is too much for these weak willed men, and they buckle under the threats. If they don’t buckle under, the resulting consequences will remove them from ministry. The type of father who is most preferred by the Programmers to offer up their children for programming is the pedophile. If a father will abuse his own little baby girl, then the Programmers know that the man has no conscience. This father’s involvement in criminal activity (and thereby his vulnerability) can be continually increased. They want men who they believe will not develop any qualms later on in life about what they have done. A man, who waits until his daughter is a teenager to molest her, is usually esteemed to have too much conscience for the programmers.
A big distinction must be made between hierarchy Monarch slaves, and non-hierarchy Monarch slaves. The reason there is such a big distinction is that they are not programmed the same way. Since this book is giving the recipe for how to create a Monarch slave, we will have to cover the distinction between slaves within the Illuminati and those slaves who function outside of the Illuminati hierarchy.
It is important to stress that the label "Monarch" is used in this book in a generic sense for the modern trauma-based total mind-control that is taking place. Whether an Illuminati mind-controlled slave is technically in the Monarch records or out of the actual Monarch Program data files kept on computer is merely a technicality.
In my (Fritz’s) other writings, I explain about how the Illuminati created the CIA. I know that some of its directors were members of the Illuminati and I strongly suspect that the other CIA directors were probably full-fledged members too. The two organizations need each other. If the CIA didn’t have the international backing of the movers and shakers of the world, it would have been exposed and done away with. Likewise, the Illuminati, because it is so secret, needs organizations through which it can work. The CIA is a front for the Illuminati, and the CIA in turn sets up fronts.
Some of those fronts, are elaborate well-staffed, well-equipped programming sites, (such as many of the state mental hospitals, McGill Psychiatric Training Network consisting of 8 Montreal hospitals esp. St. Mary’s, NASA in Huntsville, AL; the Presideo, CA; and NOTS at China Lake, CA, to name a few. (For a more complete list see Appendix B.)
The Illuminati couldn’t do it alone without its fronts. Satanists within the Network & the CIA took over Boy’s Town, NE in the early 1950s, & used that famous orphanage for a constant supply of boys for programming. Boy’s Town is perhaps the most famous, but there are whole long list of others. When the Monarch Programming started, the top men were Illuminati. Originally, Joseph Mengele was the lead programmer. He had already achieved the rank of Grand Master (later Ipssimus) within the Illuminati. He had become skilled in music, in Kabbalistic Magic, in dancing, in abortions, and in torture (by the way, Mengele had a sadistic mother) and programming children.
Many of the concentration camp children that Mengele programmed still survive and still love him to this day as "Daddy". Mengele disappeared from Auschwitz in Jan. 1945, several months before the final chaos began in the Third Reich. He disappeared so the Illuminati could smuggle him to the U.S. , so that his exceptional knowledge of programming--honed and fined tuned on thousands of concentration camp child victims could be put to use on a grande scale in the U.S.
He travelled worldwide but especially in western U.S. doing his programming accompanied by his pair of two black servants. American Monarch survivors remember his spotless German uniform, his shiny boots which he wore during programming, his thick German accent, his handsome features, his cleft chin, the space in his front teeth, the way he would jab with his thumb while programming, as if he were still saying "links, rechts" to lines of jews coming into the concentration camps.
The reason Mengele was so excited to do the selection process of inmates coming into Auschwitz was that he was choosing inmates for his numerous mind-control trauma experiments. He was especially anxious to get identical twins, because his genetic research related to mind control needed persons of identical genetic makeup.
Traditionally, the Illuminati had been having their children inspected by a woman with the rank of Grande Mother. She would determine the fitness of the children and then present them for a formal acceptance ceremony at age 3 to the Grande Druid Council. This procedure didn't change when Mengele came over--the programming just jumped from being an occult science to one that had full access to the Medical, Psychiatric, Judicial, Scientific and Governmental sectors via the power of the National Security Act and the Intelligence agencies.
The Illuminati's programming of multiples prior to Mengele's arrival were simplistic, compared to the sophisticated techniques engineered by the Nazi Germans (whose Mind Control research included some non-German nationals such as some Italians). Just as a victim who is killed by an 18th century musket is just as much victimized as someone killed by an M-16, so a victim of the pre-1946 programming was just as victimized as those programmed with more sophisticated techniques.
For the Illuminati, the child's programming is planned by the Circle (another name for their organization) before it is born. From the Illuminati's perspective their plans involve generational spirits and positions within the hierarchy. The child is conceived according to their rituals, and the steps that that child will go through follows a well-thought out detailed regimen for programming it.
In contrast, the children from foster homes, or pedophiles do not receive the same regimen. Hierarchy slaves will in turn be used to program and train other hierarchy children, while CIA slaves and Mafia slaves and KKK slaves etc. will be discarded.
This is why a Presidential Model is "thrown from the Freedom Train [the name of the Monarch Program in the Underworld]". Women and men in the Illuminati will continue to help with the programming their entire lives.
The Illuminati is programming such vast numbers of children, they need everyone of their able members to help. Moriah's total membership worldwide numbers in the millions. The Illuminati regimen for their children is far more controlling than the CIA's programming. Not everyone in the Illuminati gets their mind-split and becomes a programmed multiple. However, everyone does get some type of mind-control.
Those who have been spared multiplicity still must participate in a two-week intense mind-control session that might be compared to the Army's Ranger school. Those who participate in this have learned obedience. Those who haven't learned obedience, are forced into ritual gladiator type duels or other punishments to eliminate them. Finally, a traitor’s death as pictured on one of the Tarot cards is waiting. Sharon Tate was left hanging in the No. 12 Tarot Card’s "hangman position" from the house rafters.
The best therapists will quietly admit that traditional therapy is inadequate. Unless God intervenes, people who are born into the Illuminati don’t escape it while alive. This book isn’t a mere exercise of academic thinking, but is written with the assurance that freedom is possible, there are viable answers. Some children live in foster homes, or with adopted parents, or in orphanages, or with caretakers and guardians. Because these children are at the mercy of the non-related adults, these types of children frequently are sold to become mind-controlled slaves of the intelligence agencies.
In review, remember that because many of these organizations are controlled by the Illuminati; an Illuminati slave may often work for one of these front groups, while the Illuminati maintain control over the base-program.
The intelligence networks were started by and run by the Illuminati. They are Illuminati fronts. The use of slaves crosses many organizational boundaries within the overall Network. If a slave is to be used as a Delta model (assassination), they may be selected for strength and dexterity. The Delta Force is the army’s elite unit made up of Monarch slaves. If they are to operate as a Beta model (sexual slave), they will be chosen if they can master technique. Occasionally they might in some circumstances be selected for how pretty the programmers expect the child to become. Some parents have produced good looking children and are actually sought-after to bear children to sell into the Mind Controlled Slavery "Freedom Train" System.
However, vastly more important for Beta Sex Slaves are their ability to be programmed to have charm, seductive skills, charisma, and creativity. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the programmers can put almost any kind of body to use as a sex slave. Almost any sex slave can fit somewhere into the script of the Illuminati/New World Order/crime syndicate "porn" movies. (I place porn in quotation marks--because what they call porn doesn’t resemble what the public thinks of porn--we’re not talking Playboy type porn, we’re talking ghastly horrible atrocities that are as sick as anything done in the Nazi concentration camps).
For instance, it takes little acting ability or beauty to have one’s head chopped off while having sex. There are different types of sexual slaves, but the Illuminati wants to get Beta alters which are sharp, talented, skilled, and resourceful. They will use these Beta alters, such as the Black Widow alters, for espionage and blackmail.
To make sure that the child’s mind develops properly, the baby will be interacted with so that those areas of the brain that are important to develop will develop to the maximum. It is a well-known fact, that areas of the brain grow according to how much stimulation and use that area of the brain receives. For this reason, Grande Dames, who are involved in programming, will spend time drawing and showing faces to the child and seeing if the child can recognize identical faces. Almost any other item will be used, candy canes with stripes (match the candycanes with the same no. of stripes), trees, or pencils. The child must learn to match identical items very early--even before they can speak. This is so they will be able to build mirror images into their mind.
All the senses are trained for building the mirror images; for instance such as silks and cottons can be used for the sense of touch. The child will have to match textures. The Programmer, the Grande Dame, and Grande Mothers will teach the child to have good abilities in copying, reflecting, repeating, echoing, or re-echoing, and mirroring. They will be taught for hours how to re-echo something verbatim. Some of these teaching methods are almost like games. For instance, 20 pins will be in a box and the small child is given a short time to decide how many pins are in the box.
A certain level of intelligence and creativity is needed for time to be wasted on programming. You can not program a mind which is weak. Most of the people programmed are very intelligent. One study of multiples said that multiples were 130 or above in 1.0. and then mistakenly blamed their multiplicity on their 1.0. Attempts to program people with low intelligence or no creativity were discovered to be a waste of time. Methods are used to greatly enhance the victim’s intelligence and creativity. The Illuminati will also work on enhancing their psychic abilities such as telepathy and cliarvoyance.
The head programmers have their own little mottos about building solid structures which they like to express to new trainees. These include, "An unstructured house [mind of the slave] is like unto a house without walls", "A house undisciplined is like unto a house without walls, it will crumble within itself’, and "A house divided against itself will not stand."
Much of the structuring will be discussed in chapter 7, but the structuring begins at birth for the victim, so this chapter will discuss the first steps. In order to build a solid good house, one needs to have a solid foundation. In order to build a solid foundation, one needs to know how the land lays and what the weaknesses of the land are--if it is sand or rock or clay, etc. One needs to design one’s house to take advantage of the natural lay of the land. Will storms come from this or that direction? Where will the house need extra protection? The very same principles pertain to programming--because a structure is being built.
Many evil geniuses within the Illuminati added their contributions to the Monarch programming. One of the most important was John Gittinger of Oklahoma , because he was the genius who could understand how a little child’s mind was when it was in infancy. In order to work with something, you must know what you are working with. John Gittinger, who is no longer alive, worked at programming for years. His contribution was in the mental assessment area. John Gittinger (b. 1909) was the director of psychological services at the state hospital in Norman , Oklahoma . He got a master’s degree at age 30, and joined the CIA’s MK Ultra Mind Control in 1950. He was a high school guidance counselor and a Navy lieutenant commander during W.W.II. In the late 1970s, he moved back to Oklahoma . He was heavy set and goateed. Its been said he looked like the actor Walter Slezak. He had an insatiable curiosity about understanding human personality.
When the Illuminati looked around for men skilled in personality assessment to assist the Monarch Programming, John W. Gittinger was one of their men who they selected. Gittinger was not the only researcher into personality that the CIA hired, but he was their top man in terms of the programming of children. From the end of W.W. II until he began with the CIA in 1950, Gittinger was studying how to assess personality. At the Oklahoma State Hospital , he had large numbers of adults who could be studied. After Gittinger started doing personality assessment for the CIA. most of his work became highly classified. The Rolling Stone article of July 18, 1974 asked why years of research into personality assessment should be so secret. In fact it was so secret, that Gittinger was not allowed to talk to journalists, even though it was public knowledge that Gittinger did personality assessment work/research. The reason that such an apparently benign science was kept secret is that it plays a major part in the success of the Monarch Programming. John Gittinger designed the PAS (Personality Assessment System). This is an extraordinary method to evaluate human behavior and predict their future behavior. As far as we know, most of the PAS is still classified SECRET. The PAS is based on the ability to differentiate different types of people.
There are 3 major differentiations (or dimensions). They are called the E-I dimension, the R-F dimension, and the A-U dimension. People are born with their original placement within each of these three spectrums. In other words there are 3 axes that can be graphed to describe a baby’s personality. The baby might be graphed-- I (Internalizer), F (Flexible), and A (Role Adaptive). If the baby were graphed this way (i.e. I-F-A), then the Programmers would automatically know this child’s mind will become a social or religious reformer. The child’s programming charts would then be labelled some suitable occupation such as "Environmental Activist", "Pentecostal church reformer", "Consumer Advocate", or "Activist against Narcotics". The programming for that child then would follow 6 month goals to develop that mind-controlled slave into one of the best in that occupation. (In fact, one of the co-authors of this book, Fritz, is indeed I-F-A. which helps explain why he is trying to reform society and religion with this book. While it took Fritz many years to find his correct nitch in life, programmed multiples are steered in the correct direction very early in life with all the breaks and all the money needed from the Network to open opportunities.)
There are three possibilities for the child in regards to his original personality components. He can express the component, or suppress or repress it. As the child goes through life, he has two periods within which he can change (suppress or repress) his behavior/personality. In the PAS, the first period is called "compensation" and the second is called "modification". The amount of punishment for a personality trait and pressure to change from others will determine the amount of change which the child’s mind will perform on its original personality. The activity level of a person at each point in their life is also measured. The intensity of each of the scores is also rated. The actual PAS system is far more detailed than the example above, but it serves to give a simplified idea of how it works. The essential dynamics of an entire personality can be written in a short code which might be written for example 12(E-uc Fcu + A+u+u)H+. However, even that code is shortened E-uc can be written simply i’.
The basic 3 dimensions to personality provide 8 basic types. However, the PAS allows for 6 basic positions in each of these 8 basic types which yields 216 discrete basic types. Next, the person can change their predisposed primitive personality initially 5 different ways, and this then gives (30)³ or 27,000 different types. The second change can be done on 4 types of modification which makes for 1,728,000 types. Then the programmers can factor in activity level, their "Normal" level (intelligence base), age, sex, and education, and life experiences. In other words, what appears to be simple has a high degree of calibration to it. The person who was best with the PAS was its brainchild Gottinger himself. His intuition along with his PAS system, gave him an uncanny idea of how a person's s mind works now, and how it would work in the future. He sadistically reveled in putting his skill to use programming children.
The actual assessment codes that have appeared on programming assessment charts which the Monarch child assessment teams have used to evaluate, describe, & assess a child to be programmed follow the standard symbols created for PAS. Some about Gittinger’s work has escaped the secrecy of the intelligence agencies. Concerning the Gittinger Personality Assessment System see "An Introduction to the Personality Assessment System" by John Winne and John Gittinger, Journal of Community Psychology Monograph Supplement No. 38. Rutland , Vermont : Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., Inc. 1973. See also the Rolling Stone magazine article, July 18, 1974 , "The CIA Won’t Go public". Because so little is known about the PAS test, it needs to be explained some. Observations in relation to the Wechsler Intelligence Test provided the initial ideas behind the PAS.
The digit-span subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Test, which rates the ability to remember numbers forms the basic test used for the E-I dimension. What Gittinger discovered was that short order cooks had good number-memory which = Internalizer personality or "I". A high digit span in any person tells much about them. People who don’t separate themselves well from their environment are Externalizers = E. The "I" personality was a good baby. The "E" type who prefers doing to thinking is a "too-curious" baby, who will make demands. I’s would often be pressured to become more outgoing, and E’s are often pressured by parents to be more self-sufficient, and to progress from crawling (which they like) to learn to walk. Pure Internalizers become more withdrawn after several drinks, and uncompensated E's are more likely to become sloppy drunks, garrulous. Based on the E-I dimension, predictions can also be made for how LSD will affect a person. This is the E-I dimension.
The block design subtest shows whether a person is a Regulated (R) or a Flexible (F) person. This is the R-F dimension. The regulated person had no trouble learning by rote but didn’t understand what he learned. The Flexible person on the other hand had to understand something before he learned it. R children could learn to play the piano easily, but the great concert piano players were F children who had persevered to master what they considered drudgery.
The third dimension is the Role Adaptive (A) or a Role Uniform (U) person. A could be defined as Charisma, while people tend to ignore the U. The CIA has 40 patterns that a skilled observer looks for, and these then are related to the PAS and Wechsler subtests.
Illuminati Mothers-of-Darkness alters trained in observation chart what they see a child do. A child’s behavior with certain toys, certain hand responses, and certain social responses can be observed and used to assess how this child would score on the PAS test.
EEG (Electroencephalogram) patterns co-relate to the PAS digit-span test. This allowed them to use the EEG patterns to overcome cultural bias in the test. It also gave the Monarch programmers the perfect tool to assess small children before they have verbal skills. David R. Saunders, at the Univ. of Col. working with the CIA. wrote a paper in 1961 showing the connection between alpha waves and digit span. In 1960, Mundy-Castle wrote about the connections between EEG printouts and Wechsler-Bellevue Test variables.
Here is the tip of the iceberg that EEGs were being used to determine pre-verbal personality in children. And Salvatore et al wrote at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center , Boston , Mass, clear back in 1954 about the "predictive potential of Gittinger’s theory" in an unpublished research paper. (The Massachusetts Mental Health Center was an early participant in all this.)
The child’s guardians must teach the small victim obedience. They must teach the child to keep its eyes open and to hold still. These skills are important, because the child will be subjected to the EEGs in vast amounts. The hospital equipment would be something like an 11-channel Grass EEG machine where 11 electrodes are placed on the child’s head, and brain wave patterns are printed out charting such things as background, variability, discharges, background suppressions, sharp waves, etc. The electrodes will have designations such as T3, T4 etc. In special programming sites, a machine with electrodes will be hooked up to the child’s head for repeated tests. The newer machines accommodate up to 30 1/2 diameter pads (electrodes) which are attached with electrode adhesive tape or small needled ends to the child’s scalp. The child’s hair will be parted in an area, and the electrodes will be hooked to the skull. The attendant will tell the child, "Don’t move. Keep your eyes open. Look at this point. Don’t blink. Don’t move your body." Then this procedure will be repeated for 45 minutes to an hour. Eventually hundreds of readout from electrodes clipped to the skull of the child will chart the brain waves of the child.
From these brain waves, the programmers can determine what type of personality the child has. This personality assessment criteria and ability is one of the guarded secrets of the programming. Should unexpected behavior crop up, the slave may be hauled in for more EEGs. The PAS tests would reveal to Gittinger what a person’s weaknesses were. The PAS shows what a person wants. And these are called the soft spots of a person’s personality. Also the PAS shows mental weaknesses, on where a person will be instable and can be broken down. Certain types of stresses will have a cumulative effect of hurting a person.
A stress-producing campaign is run against CIA targets, and by doing this they can neutralize a potential enemy. This information collected from children who are potential victims for the Monarch programming, is essential for knowing how to structure that child’s programming. For instance IFU children often are autistic, IRU are schizophrenic children, and IR or IF are fantasy prone. It will be further explained shortly how this aids programming. An Internalizer personality would be important deep inside an alter system, while an Externalizer would be useful for a front personality. (Internalizers are predisposed to the production of mental fantasy.)
By knowing what the child was, the programmers know what they already have, and what they must add or build into the thinking of the alters they will create. Likewise, some alters need to be R and some F. And some need to be A and some U. Regulated (R) personalities like to have narrow limitations on their activity. This makes them suitable for programming. The R’s readily accept authority, and will not try to step out of the range of their habits. The R has a marked ability to learn without understanding. They easily learn material by rote, because they do not need to understand it before they will learn it. This is another asset they have that the programmers like.
The programmers may or may not want an A (Role Adaptive personality). A future country singer needs charisma -- a future computer programmer doesn’t. Without being able to finely determine what is there, the programming could not be fine tuned. If the child is good in math it will have its programming scripts steered in that direction. If it has artistic brainwaves, then the programmer will use art work in programming. The art work of the european artist M.C. Escher is exceptionally well suited for programming purposes. For instance, in his 1947 drawing "Another World", the rear plane in the center serves as a wall in relation to the horizon, a floor in connection with the view through the top opening and a ceiling in regards to the view up towards the starry sky. Reversals, mirror images, illusion, and many other qualities appear in Escher’s art work which make all 76 or more of his major works excellent for programming. The use of these kinds of elements will explained later.
Five children each given the same Alice In Wonderland script will each use the script differently during programming. The programmer takes the child’s own creativity and works with that unique creativity. The child must create the images itself if the programming is to hold. It won’t work if the images are someone else’s. The child organizes its internal world to suit his/her own experiences such as castles, boxes, rooms, and dollhouses. The PAS type testing will continue during the early years of the slave’s life to make sure the programming has not driven the child crazy or psycho. The child will move down the script decided for it for its whole life, based on these early tests. More about how this works later.
The EEG tests run frequently on children to be programmed also show brain tumors, and medical problems beside just the brain wave patterns. The PAS tests can show how easy a person can be hypnotized. If the testing by the EEG’s doesn’t reveal a child who can be easily hypnotized, they will be rejected for programming, even though modern drugs and extreme torture in some cases will be applied to "salvage" children they really think they need to program but are clearly not easily hypnotizable.
EEG’s can also be used to see what state of consciousness the brain is in. The Monarch Programming is based on structuring MPD alter systems which is covered in Chapter 7. The success of this structuring (its excellent finetuning) comes from the initial testing, which means programs are properly built on whatever foundation the mind has. The CIA front Human Ecology Society tested the PAS. In 1962, the CIA moved Gittinger’s base of operations to another CIA front on Connecticut Ave. , Washington , D.C. called Psychological Assessment Associates. Because Gittinger believed genetic-based differences exist in people, which is one of the bases for the Monarch Programming, his work was not accepted by main stream psychology. In 1974, Gottinger described the PAS system, "...the Personality Assessment System (PAS):
(a) indicates the kinds of internal and external cues to which the individual is most likely to respond;
(b) suggests the types of stimuli that are most likely to produce behavioral change;
(c) provides an understanding of the inter-, intra-, and impersonal environments in which a person is most likely to function efficiently; and (d) offers insight into what constitutes stress and predicts probable behavioral response to such stress, including maladjustments, should they occur.
"In the area of experience, the PAS offers a method for obtaining specific clues to personality structure and functioning. Thus, the PAS:
(a) allows for direct inferences concerning an individual’s primary response style:
(b) suggests the quality of the compensations and modifications he has achieved in response to social and environmental pressures;
(c) provides an understanding of personality development in terms of the interaction of primary structure, environmental pressures, and adaptive tendencies;
(d) offers a procedure for evaluating the surface or contact personality developed over time; and
(e) makes possible the assessment of the fundamental discrepancies between the surface personality and the underlying personality structure--discrepancies that typically produce tension, conflict and anxiety." Winne, John F. and John W. Gittinger. "Journal of Community Psychology Monograph Supplement No. 38. Rutland , Vermont : Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., Inc. 1973, p. 99. Wow! Gottinger’s description of PAS is specifically the needs & goals that the programmers had when they initiate programming the personality splits in tiny 18-month old children! People associated with the following listed organizations may assist the Network to use their child for trauma-based programming. Children from families where one or both parents belong to the following organizations are often routinely sent off in early childhood for trauma-based mind control.
We are now in 3rd and 4th generations of people who are programmed multiples. (And even into deeper generations in some Illuminati bloodlines.) What can’t be covered here is the enormous secret drama involved in Moriah finding and implementing control over parents via prescribed or illegal drugs, fear, blackmail etc. so that they will assist them in getting the children programmed. If the motherly instinct is too strong, the mom may be prescribed tranquilizers, so that there is a stable house for the child’s front alters to grow up in. Unreliable non-multiple fathers are "debriefed" by Ilium , multiples who debrief & then erase their memories of what is happening to their children. Parents may have only a limited view.
D. Organizations Practicing Trauma-Based Mind Control (These groups form what insiders call "the Network." They are the backbone of what is known as the New World Order.)
Air Force Intelligence Army Intelligence (such as CIC), Atomic Energy Commission, Boeing, British Intelligence, in. MI-6, MI-5, & the Tavistock Institute, Bureau of Narcotics, Bureau of Prisons, Catholic Church (incl. Jesuits), Central Intelligence Agency, CIA (aka Agency, Company, Langley) Charismatic movement, Church of Satan, Church of Scientology, CIRVIS Club 12 & Club 41 Country Music Industry Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI Freemasonry (esp. the Palladium Rite, 33º and above degrees,Quatuor Coronati Lodge, SRIA, and other Masonic affiliated organizations) GEPAN German Intelligence (Shaback) GHG Hollywood The House of Saud in Saudi Arabia (which has un-programmed slaves too)
The Illuminati (also known as The Circle, Moriah, Moriah-conquering-wind, Gnostics, Luciferians etc.) at all levels is involved in trauma-based mind control as perpetrators & victims, incl. Frat. Saturni-Orden Fraternitas Saturni, THFS, FOGO, Golden Dawn, AntiC.Lucif. Dyn, etc. INS Ku Klux Klan (different KKK groups) Mafia Masons (see Freemasonry) Mod in Mossad (Mossad le Aliyah Beth) Mormon Church NASA (National Space Admin.) National Security Agency NSA National Programs Office National Science Foundation Naval Intelligence (ONI) Neo-nazi groups Oddfellows OTO (there are 4 groups) P.4 (elite MI6 section) Palo Mayombe Process Church and its offshoot Chingun etc. Professional Baseball, such as the L.A. Dodgers
Russian government & intelligence groups (GRU & KGB & KGB’s successor, historically an early group known as Spets Byuro #1 called "Kamera" in Russian which means "Chamber" did drug/hypnosis mind control research. The Spetsburo was responsible for assassinations.) Santaria Satanic Hubs, Soc. of Dk. Lily, Chdrn of Lucifer (UK) Temple of Power (previously known as Temple of Set) Umbanda
US Army--esp. the Delta Forces & the 1st Earth Batt. USAF Veteren’s Administration Werewolf Order Some Witchcraft groups besides Satanism & Moriah
E. 4 beginning foundational stages
If the Illuminati’s preferred plan is followed, it has 4 beginning foundational stages to prepare the victim for programming. Let’s list these, and then afterwards explain in detail these first 4 stages. One programmer named the stages 2,3, 4 as stages 1, 2, 3, but the In utero preparations and preliminary ceremonies actually form an initial first stage.
The first stage is the initial ceremonies & the In Utero traumatization. The second stage is to have a premature birth, the third stage is to provide intense love for the child for the first 18 months by 2-3 selected Illuminati caregivers, and the fourth stage is to pull that love away and split the mind of the child permanently. Not every Illuminati child is born premature--but many are, because that is the preferred method for programming.
F. Foundation Step 1.
Preparation of the Children by Spiritual Preparations & In Utero Traumatization--The Moon Children
The preparation for someone to be programmed also concerns the ability of a person to be demonized. Generational satanic families are sold out to Satan, and their children belong to Satan in a way that non-generational children do not. Because of the generational curses, because of the genetic bent toward the occult, because of the generational demonic forces, the Illuminati children are very good candidates for Monarch programming. Part of the programming includes the layering in of demonic forces, and the participation in blood rituals in order to draw in the most powerful of demons. An indepth review about this important but controversial subject is in chapter 10.
The Moonchild rituals are the rituals to demonize a fetus. However, the demons that are invoked are not the small ones but very powerful ones. In working with victims of this programming, it is clear that high level demons were placed within these people at very early ages, many of them it is believed were demonized before they were born by rituals like the Moonchild rituals. Blood sacrifices and human sacrifices are always required for this level of magic.
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was a Satanist who was a 33rd degree Scottish Rite Freemason. He also was a leader in a number of other Masonic rites as well as an OTO leader, a chief in Stella Matutina, and a MI-6 (Br. overseas intelligence) agent. His writings have been important within 20th century Satanism and with black magicians. He wrote Moonchild which was first published in 1917. The idea of the Moonchild is that via black magic a perfect soul can be captured. The belief in reincarnation, which is prevalent among the Illuminati and Satanic groups, lends itself to the belief that souls compete for a particular embryo. On page 107- 108 of Moonchild the idea is expressed, "To produce a man who should not be bound up in his heredity, and should have the environment which they desired for him." This perfect soul in a proper person is called Homunculus. The magical work upon which this is based is said to be derived from Bacon, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus who were all reported in occult circles to have captured souls and placed them into brass statues. The Hittites, the people of Asia Minor and Syria have long sought the ability to create a superman and a superwoman.
The Illuminati’s inside occult history places the Hittites in their ancestry. Clear back in 1917, long before superman appeared in comics and movies, Aleister Crowley was writing about a Superman. The magical idea is to capture a soul from the 4th dimension. In the book Moonchild, the villa used to produce a Moonchild was called "The Butter-fly-Net". The Monarch Project then which is named after the Monarch butterfly is also an allusion to the Moonchild project where Butterflies are an allusion to souls (what Christians call demonic spirits).
The actual rituals carried out to create a Moonchild are described in detail in three of Crowley ’s writings. A vague description of the rituals can be seen by reading the book Moonchild. The ritual took place at a villa nicknamed The Butterfly Net. The villa was really an occult temple laid out in sacred geometrics. It had figures of satyrs, fauns, and nymphs. It had statues of Artemis. Lots of silver objects and crescents and 9-pointed stars were at the villa, because these objects all relate to the Moon in magic.
The woman who was pregnant was surrounded by objects related to the moon. The moon’s influence was repeatedly invoked. A small triangular silver altar to Artemis was used. There was a sacred spring where the woman was washed. The number 9 which is sacred to the moon was used along with its square 81. Prayers were made to Artemis, and there was the reenactment of the capture of Diana by Pan. The woman was coached to identify herself with what is known as Grandmother Moon (in the book she simply is called the Moon or Diana) by identifying her thoughts and actions with the deities one is wanting to invoke.
The creation of the Moonchildren within the Monarch Project involves high level magic by the circle of Illuminati black magicians involved with a particular individual’s programming. It should be noted that Grande Master and Grande Dame alters will understand demonology, but the sections (levels) of alter above them, are not informed.
One of the biggest secrets kept from most of the slave’s alters is that their System was demonized while a fetus. First, this would give religious front alters the information they need to get them on the right track towards healing, and it could also adversely affect the programming lies of some of the front alters who don’t realize how premeditated all the trauma and torture is. The front alters of victims themselves remember the cover story that the moon children were produced via torture in the cages as little children.
The Illuminati have also planned that every one of the ten commandments of God will be violated in their favor with the child. They prefer the child to be born out of wedlock so that it is a bastard. This breaks God’s commandment on adultery, and also gives them more leverage to destroy the child’s self-esteem. This entire plan involves generational curses which are spoken and unspoken.
During Illuminati ceremonies, Ceremonial pacts which concern having the child out of wedlock to mock God are made. While the Illuminati destroy any godly spiritual foundation, they are creating a solid rock hard foundation of "love" (adoration or idolatry) within the new born upon which they will build the programming. The second commandment is "Do not take the Lord’s name in vain". In the Black Mass, the names of God are invoked to get spirits with blasphemous names such as Yahweh Elohim. Most parts of the little child will never even hear the Lord’s name--he will only hear the name of his master, who will someday be presented to him as "God". The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The child is being bonded to his future programmers.
Much later, great attention will be given to set up staged events to insure that the victim being programmed hates God.
In Utero Traumatization
The formal Monarch Mind-Control project was developed from observations of high level Satanic families. These families had no qualms about the concept of traumatizing the fetus. Italian generational witchcraft is called the Ways of the Strega. These generational occult bloodlines, esp. in Tuscany and Naples , are very much into generational ancestor spirits. These were the ones that Aleister Crowley went to learn how to create Moon Children.
Remember, that Italian and German generational Illuminati families were studied by the Italian fascists and the German Nazis to develop a scientific understanding of mind control. The Illuminati families in Germany were secretly and scientifically studied in the 1920s to determine what exactly was happening and how to systematically improve the Illuminati’s control over the people they were already programming.
Discipline and training has been lavished for centuries upon the children of these elite bloodlines. The contribution of the 20th century was the systematic collection and scientific study of all the various methodologies into one cohesive programming package. This research was begun on a large scale in 1940s, and has been systematically added to since then. Families who wanted dissociative children learned that dissociative babies could be born if the child in the womb is tortured. Thin needles are inserted through the mother into the fetus to prick the preborn child. Mothers, who are pregnant with children to be programmed, are also severely traumatized during their pregnancy with a whole assortment of traumas, which simultaneously traumatizes the babies which they carry. For instance, the father may purposely abandon the pregnant mother in the middle of a forest, or blast the mother with loud frightening music, and then follow this up with love.
G. Foundation Step 2. The Trauma of a Premature Birth
A premature birth is important because the naturally occurring events around a premature birth insure that the child is naturally traumatized. Studies (such as Fenaroff, 1972) have found that only 7-8% of the live births were premature, but 25 to 40% (about a third) of all battered children were born premature. It appears that the satanic cult involvement with causing premature births may be reflected in this type of statistic. Some of the Illuminati-induced premature births have made the newspapers, because the preemies set records for being born so small.
Premature labor is induced-the fact that a premature birth happens is not natural, but the traumas that occur to the preemie are. Specialized drugs (not just the exogenous oxytocins normally used to induce labor) are used on a mother to place her in a deeper trance than a twilight sleep. (Remember, that the underdeveloped liver & kidneys of the preemie make it difficult to naturally purge meds from the preemie’s body.) The mother will begin the process of delivery at this time. However, the mother must be brought out of this deep sleep in order to push the baby through the birth canal. The baby is too weak to help with the birthing process. This is the hardest type of birth that there is, because the baby is not able to help the mother in the small ways that a full term baby would. The strain on the heart of the mother is extreme. The Illuminati have learned that a mother can usually give 2 or 3 preemie births like this before she risks death to try it again. If this type of birth is repeated too often the woman’s heart will fail. This is why the Illuminati will have their breeders give 2 or 3 preemies for programming, and then have their breeders switch to full term babies which are used for sacrifice. If we describe how breeders and babies are used we must speak in general terms, because each bloodline, each baby, each mother is a separate case. However, there are some patterns that should be pointed out. A bloodline will often want a female’s first born male to be sacrificed to their belief system and the Lilith programming which is given the alters who function within the Kabballistic Tree of Life which is built in during Mengele’s programming for the deeper sections (levels) of alters which are trained in Illuminati black magic. (This subject will be dealt with later.) The Illuminati breeders may be women who were preemies themselves. Sometimes they skip a generation with the trauma of a premature birth to get a mother with a good sound heart. Some of these breeders have excellent bloodlines, but during their own preemie birth their brains were damaged and they don’t have the super-intelligence the Illuminati wants for programming. However, they still need to have had enough creativity to have allowed themselves to become a programmed multiple. When breeders are used by the Illuminati to obtain babies for programming, the Illuminati selects women who are themselves programmed multiples. They are used for breeders, because genetically they have genes for intelligence, even though they aren’t brilliant. These women of lesser intelligence will only make the beginning Priestess level of the women and might obtain a rank in that level of High Priestess. All these women, no matter their circumstances have been made to believe that offering their babies to Satan is the highest honor, so many of them do not have normal qualms about their job. It is important to interject that the Illuminati are Luciferians, but worship Lucifer/Satan. Satanists are organizationally a separate set up, with a separate history, but both groups have many common practices, including child sacrifice. (There is a science in how the Illuminati hides bloodlines, sometimes families are used as brooders for other important bloodlines. It will only be mentioned in passing here, because it is relevant to the selection process of how children are slated to be programmed. The Illuminati is fully aware of rare bloodtypes and other genetic properties that run in bloodlines, and breed individuals to get certain traits, and they also take into consideration that certain weaknesses such as weak hearts or AB- negative blood with no RH factor will call for special attention.) The criteria for non-Illuminati cults for their breeders is much lower. Often these are the cults’ leftovers. That is the difference between the good breeding of the Illuminati, and the degenerate thinking of the openly satanic groups. The Satanic groups which are organized into hubs, and some of the lesser occult groups like the KKK., have women which are kept under lock and key to serve as breeders. Breeders are kept from having outside talents that would help them function in the outside world. Some are not allowed to have driver’s licenses and other basics. How does the occult world manage to work things out within a hospital setting? The independent satanic cults may not use hospitals. I have worked with enough first hand information to be familiar with some of the cults which have home births attended by their own midwives. An example is the Satanic cult in Seminole & Garvin counties of Oklahoma where their section houses in the countryside have had unrecorded home births for years. First hand information also confirms that hospitals in Tacoma , Vancouver , Portland , and San Francisco are used by the Illuminati for premature births. By extension, it can be understood that many hospitals across the United States are now staffed with a large number of nurses and doctors who are loyal to the occult world (called by insiders the "Network") headed by the Illuminati. The preemies are attended to by satanic witches who are nurses, many of them multiples themselves. Further on in this book, we will cover how the Illuminati is turning out a great number of pediatricians via programming to insure control over the preliminary programming stages. If the occult world wants a mother to see her preemie, the occult nurses on night shifts will quietly let cult mothers in to bond with their preemies. There is a lot of corruption that goes on unnoticed too. These doctors and nurses have taken lots of preemies for the Network to use for programming experiments. If the mother is a low income mother, the Freemasons will let them use their network of hospitals for free. Some of these premature children are described as dead and taken with the excuse that "they can’t breathe". They then are used for programming experimentation. The Illuminati, working in conjunction with other occult groups, schemes up methods by which they can get other people’s babies. This gives them additional children to work on. By giving low income mothers free births at Masonic hospitals, the occult world can later contrive some reason for stripping a low income mother who is on drugs of her guardianship of her baby. They take these children, some of them drug babies, for programming uses. The mothers of different animals are examples of how important touch is to any baby. A mother cow, or dog will nudge its offspring soon after it is born. They will also begin to teach the baby immediately after it is born. Studies have learned that most mammals lick their newborn, which has been observed to be critical for the healthy physical development of the baby anima
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Story highlights "Funeral for 13,000" remembers soldiers who died 150 years ago at Civil War prison in Georgia
Events through Sunday will recall stories of courage, despair at Andersonville
Observances coincide with annual National POW/MIA Recognition Day
(CNN) A simple wooden casket, covered with a U.S. flag and placed on a raised bier, bore witness for thousands of Civil War soldiers who died while under the guard of fellow Americans.
Battlefields were the places for winners and losers. But survival was the only matter of magnitude at prisons in the North and South, the audience was told Saturday afternoon during the "Funeral for 13,000" at a national cemetery in southwest Georgia.
Funeral procession with a caisson bearing a ceremonial casket arrives for "Funeral for 13,000" at Andersonville National Historic Site near Americus, Georgia.
The juxtaposition of yesterday and today was apparent from the beginning of the memorial service at Andersonville National Historic Site: A bagpiper playing "Going Home" led a horse-drawn caisson carrying the ceremonial casket. Sheriff's deputies and members of the armed forces walked in the procession toward the cemetery rostrum. Among those in the crowd were men and women portraying Civil War soldiers and civilians. One woman wore a black mourning dress and veil.
Despite the somber mood, there was a prevailing note of appreciation for the sacrifice of those who died at Andersonville and other prisons.
"It's a great day to be a soldier," said Sergeant Major of the Army Daniel A. Dailey, referring to the role uniformed men played in the forging of a great nation through a bloody civil war that cost more than 600,000 lives.
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Smash content takes many forms. We have YouTube channels filled with tournament vods, player channels with vlogs and stream highlights, and endless hours of combo videos and highlight reels. Over the last three weeks we have been introduced to a brand new show, a piece of content that I believe will change the game for Smash content moving forward. Today I want to analyze the construction of this show, discuss why it works so well, and why I believe it is so important to the success of Smash in the future. That show, of course, is The Reads.
What is The Reads?
For those that have not seen it yet, first, I’m so sorry. Here’s a link to the first episode , go fix that before you continue to read. I’ll wait.
If you can’t watch it right now, let me give you a quick summary of the premise. Scar and Toph of Melee it on Me and Melee commentary fame bring on a guest to grind the ladder on Netplay. It’s an adaptation of another show on the Cross Counter channel, “The Excellent Adventures of Gootecks and Mike Ross”. The show is, in essence, a simple Let’s Play show a la Game Grumps or Super Couch Fighters . The hosts and their guest make jokes, cheer at great plays, and generally have fun playing a game they love.
Why This Show?
So, what makes The Reads so special? There are millions of Let’s Play shows on YouTube. Sure, this one is focused on Melee, which makes it relevant to readers of this blog, but why freak out about it? Well, simply put, The Reads is a better piece of content than any other YouTube video, highlight reel, or tournament VOD. It is the most perfect piece of evangelistic propaganda that any smasher could ever want.
To explain, let’s first examine what makes the show work so well. First, you have the two hosts. These are veterans in the Melee scene. They are well respected by every current Melee fan. Additionally, Scar and Toph are comfortable as entertainers. They have hosted the Scar and Toph show for years as well as being staples in Melee commentary. This also gives them a natural rapport with their guests. As evidenced by the first set of episodes, they are on a first name basis with many of the world’s best players.
This also means that guests will be more naturally comfortable with the relaxed nature of the show. The guest already knows Scar and Toph well, and likely has at least some level of respect for their status in the Melee community. This combined with the show’s relaxed atmosphere allows the guest to open up, and not be afraid of looking silly when they SD with Kirby’s backthrow live on camera. Like Summit, this gives us the chance to connect with these guests in a way we never can in a tournament setting. It humanizes the stars of the game, creating a unique connection between the player and the audience.
So Funny Because It’s True
Now, take a closer look at the structure of the show. Where most Let’s Play shows are simply about playing a game and making jokes, The Reads has a very clear goal. The show is about getting the Spenser account to the number one rank on the netplay ladder. They’ve given the show real stakes that connect with the audience.
Every modern gamer has played a game at some point where they were committed to climbing a ranked ladder. We’ve all imagined what it would be like if we could just call up a top player to help us with that grind. The show combines a relate-able premise with a dash of wish-fulfillment . There are stakes, but the stakes are not so high that they prevent the cast from having fun along the way.
Top-Notch Entertainment
Lastly, the production quality is excellent. There’s well-mixed audio, high quality cameras, and subtle viewing enhancements in the overlays. The show is well-edited to make sure we get all the great player reactions while not missing a moment of in-game action. The Reads takes full advantage of being a recorded show.
So What?
So, again, why is this such a big deal? Sure it’s a good show, but why write an article all about praising it, other than to get free Reddit karma? First, I believe that this show finally puts to rest the most problematic fallacy in the Smash community.
Every time we talk about growing Smash as an esport, or wanting to bring in better structure, there is always a contingent that fears we will lose what makes Smash truly special. We started out grassroots, and it is because of our grassroots origin that Smash is so fun, welcoming, and such a passionate community. The Reads proves once and for all that this fear is dumb, stupid, pointless, dumb, wrong, and silly. Also that it’s dumb.
Let me explain. As we discussed this show has high quality production. That means that there is real money behind it. The show is also not on the Melee it on Me channel, meaning it is owned and paid for by an organization outside of the Smash community. We didn’t fund a compendium for this show, and it’s not being produced in someone’s bedroom like a grassroots show would be.
We Really Esports Now
This is for all intents and purposes a professionally produced YouTube series. And yet, it is so perfectly Smash. It features our stars, our sense of humor, and shows the things about this game that we love. Nothing about the show is attempting to cater to an audience outside of Smash. The Reads proves that there are people outside of our community who want Smash to succeed, and recognize the things that make it great. Obviously this particular organization was an easier entry point, but we now have a proof of concept to take to any other major organization.
To that point, as I said before this show is wonderful for evangelizing the Melee scene. Toph and Scar are genuinely charismatic and entertaining. Even a non-smash fan can instantly connect with this cast and be entertained by the show. Further, the show is a perfect entry point for new fans of competitive Smash. They can be entertained by a fun show, but also learn about and connect with stars of the competitive scene.
As most readers know, I’m primarily a Smash 4 fan. I love Melee, but simply don’t follow it as closely. I knew who SilentWolf was, but I did not care about him at all. After three episodes of The Reads, I am now a rabid SilentWolf fan. I want a “Who Bird Dis Is” T-shirt. I want to watch his matches in bracket. If I see a tournament announce Silent Wolf as a featured player, I now suddenly care about that event. Before this show, that would not have been a draw for me. I promise you this will happen with fans even more casual than me. If we can properly promote this show to new viewers outside the community, they will love it. They will want to watch commentary sets that feature Scar and Toph. They will want to cheer for Otto in bracket.
Lend Me Your Views
This is big. I have enough marketing and esports industry knowledge to promise you that this show’s success matters. No matter what Smash game you support, it is in your best interest to support this show. Watch every episode. Give the channel your subscription. Comment, tweet, upvote–make our voices heard. Let sponsors, teams, and content creators everywhere know the reward waiting for them if they provide us with good Smash content. Give it views. Share it on other gaming sites and media platforms. Watch the views grow, and see how those views convert into new Smash fans. Hopefully, like me, you’ll start to watch this show not just for the entertainment value, but for the hope it gives me for the future of Smash.
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WASHINGTON -- Two statements, each with a kernel of truth, each contradictory to the other:
John Wall is settling for jumpers too much. John Wall must take jumpers with confidence when they're there, because otherwise, there's no way teams come out of their sagging defense to open up lanes to the basket.
This duality, Catch 22, whatever you want to call it has caused superstardom to elude Wall thus far in his four-year career. For Wall to achieve his optimal level of success, he must be a competent enough shooter to make defenses pay for playing off him, and yet still spend more time attacking and breaking down a defense, which is his strength. He's spent time vacillating between one extreme or the other throughout his career. Recently, by his own admission , he was spending too much time doing the former.
What is the optimal balance? We don't know, but it may have happened in Tuesday's win over the Timberwolves. Wall struggled with his shot, taking when appropriate if the Timberwolves sagged into the lane, but he also did a ton to break down the Timberwolves' defense, notching 16 assists against one turnover. He had one of those "he didn't shoot well, but he controlled the game" performances.
"That's a solid point guard right there," Randy Wittman said afterwards, with emphasis.
Was this a specific shift in Wall's mentality? Not necessarily, says his coach.
"He's got to have confidence in that 15-foot jump shot. He's got to take it" -Randy Wittman on John Wall
"They played him so far into the paint tonight, so he couldn't drive. He's got to have confidence in that 15-foot jump shot. He's got to take it," Wittman said. "Now, if he's not going to take it with confidence -- and that happens -- then move the ball on to the next guy. You don't have to take it. But I want him to. If they're going to play him like that, he's got to knock that down, and then it opens things up."
And not necessarily, says Wall himself.
"I need to get a little better at getting to the free throw line a little bit, but I did a great job of finding my teammates [tonight], and that's the biggest key," he said after the game. "Just trusting those guys and believing in those guys to make plays, knowing that I don't have to make all the plays all the time."
And not necessarily, say his teammates.
"John needs to continue to do what he's doing," Bradley Beal said. "We never pass up open shots. If they're going to continue to go under on him and there's all that space created, we want him to shoot that shot. We probably won't get a better shot than that."
"He has to take those jump shots, because in the end, we're going to need him to make one like he did at the end of this game," Garrett Temple said. "He needs to stay in tune offensively, take those mid-range jumpers when they're given to him, but also, like he did tonight, probe and find guys."
Confidence is a noun players and coaches use far more than scribes that pour over shot charts and see a sea of red from mid-range . Those players are more process-oriented, with more investment into improving for next time rather than dwelling on last time. It's in everyone's best interest to say that Wall needs to keep his head down and be himself. Self-doubt leads to dwelling on last time, which leads to fear of repeating last time.
Still, there are strategic fixes for maintaining the balance between aggression and taking what the defense gives you. Wittman suggested that it's in transition where Wall really must attack, something he hasn't done nearly as often this season.
"I think that if he were to [drive], because of the way they were playing him, he was going to turn the ball over trying to get to the basket," Wittman said. "He has to try to do that more in transition than in a half-court set."
Wall himself said that he has to constantly remind himself when it's appropriate to shoot the jump shot he's being gifted by teams correctly skeptical of his ability to convert it.
"I definitely don't need to take [jumpers] early in the shot clock" -John Wall
"That shot's going to be there every time for me, so I don't have to take it every time [it's there] and I definitely don't need to take it early in the shot clock. If I can get the ball back later in the shot clock and there are like 14 or 12 seconds left, I can take it then," Wall said. "But [it's better] to just move the ball and get some flow into our offense."
In this respect, Wall still has much room for improvement. Wall took 10 two-point jumpers last night, with five of those came in the first half of the shot clock. It's a problem he's had all year, and it carried over. This attempt in particular, where he pulls up despite Beal curling off a baseline screen as part of the set play, is the kind of shot he needs to avoid taking.
But at least Wall can put his problem into words. The next step is being able to act on it.
And being able to act on comes by not dwelling on the numbers. Wall can't stop taking certain shots because he's shooting X percent from Y range. He needs to understand when to take certain shots within the flow of the game, which, in turn, will cause his percentage from Y range will rise.
And above all else, he has to remember that scoring is just one part of his game.
"He had 16 assists tonight," Beal said. "That speaks for itself."
More from Bullets Forever:
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VUWSA forced into costly climbdown
VUWSA has caved into the New Zealand Union of Students’ Association’s demands, paying the national body its outstanding membership fees and agreeing in principle to hold a referendum on its continued membership.
In September 2014 the Executive decided to withdraw from NZUSA. This followed a 2013 student-initiated referendum on whether VUWSA should remain a member. 63 per cent of students voted “Yes, but only with reforms”—however, there was no straight “Yes” option. The Executive claimed reform hadn’t occurred and that this gave them a mandate to withdraw without holding a further referendum.
With NZUSA’s constitution requiring members to give 12 months’ notice of withdrawal, the national body has continued to invoice VUWSA for its $45,000 annual membership fee. VUWSA had intended to withhold over $20,000, and budgeted accordingly. But with NZUSA threatening court action, and legal advice that VUWSA would lose, the Executive has brought itself up to date with payments.
In doing so it has potentially scuppered its chances to post its first profit since 2010. VUWSA President Rick Zwaan confirmed that a review of the budget was currently underway, and that VUWSA may need to reprioritise its funds, particularly its $15,000 campaigns line.
The payment follows a secret meeting between the VUWSA Executive and NZUSA President Rory McCourt on 11 May. At this meeting, McCourt tried to persuade the Executive of the continued need for a unified national body. He described the meeting as “positive”, although he also delivered a legal threat over the fee.
After hashing out an agreement in private, the Executive voted on the proposal at an official meeting on 4 June. Salient, which is usually invited to all Executive meetings, was not told of the meeting or sent an agenda.
VUWSA has chalked this up to an administrative error. However, insiders have also confirmed that the 11 May meeting with NZUSA was deliberately concealed from Salient and no official record of the meeting exists.
As VUWSA’s withdrawal is to take effect from 23 September, its 2015 membership fee had already been reduced on a pro-rata basis. It budgeted only $11,250 for NZUSA levies and has now paid $25,000. VUWSA is yet to decide whether it will pay the remaining fee of around $11,000, which will be due sometime in July.
VUWSA’s climbdown flies in the face of recent precedent. The Otago University Students’ Association (OUSA) recently negotiated a partial payment of its remaining fees after notifying its withdrawal last November, and Waikato Students’ Union (WSU) has withheld all of its fees since mid-2013 after announcing its immediate withdrawal. NZUSA has refused to recognise WSU’s withdrawal and has continued to send it invoices, none of which have been paid.
With VUWSA and OUSA’s impending withdrawal, Auckland association AUSA will be the only large association left in NZUSA. The three associations contribute the majority of NZUSA’s funding and have been propping up the national body for some years.
The VUWSA Executive had previously discussed the levy at length, and decided that the 12-month notice period was unreasonable. They agreed that NZUSA provided no value to Victoria students and was unlikely to pursue the fee through legal channels for fear of political embarrassment.
According to a VUWSA insider, though, McCourt was relentless in his demands for payment. McCourt said that the NZUSA Executive “has shown that it is not willing to have member associations throw tantrums over levies they owe”.
VUWSA’s climbdown was also influenced to a large extent by its ostracism from smaller students’ associations, who were angry at VUWSA’s attempts to withdraw its financial support from NZUSA.
McCourt accused VUWSA of “shitting on the other associations” by withdrawing without paying its full levy. “It’s like a flatmate moving out without paying what they owe under the lease … the other associations will have to pick that up.”
McCourt said that since announcing its withdrawal, VUWSA has only paid lip service to the idea of a national student voice. He said VUWSA was “ostracised because VUWSA hasn’t engaged, it hasn’t stepped up and worked with the other associations”, and that VUWSA’s relationship with smaller associations “doesn’t exist” outside of NZUSA.
Zwaan admitted that he “wouldn’t say it’s a rosy relationship” between VUWSA and the smaller associations. He said there was “some truth” to the claim that VUWSA had harmed its relationships by withdrawing.
However, many within VUWSA also believe that McCourt, a former VUWSA President, has actively whipped up resentment toward VUWSA in an attempt to pressure the association into paying—a strategy that appears to have worked.
This year, Labour MPs including David Cunliffe and David Clark have spoken out against the exodus from NZUSA, and the perception within VUWSA is that it is losing the media battle.
McCourt’s desperation was reflected in comments he made to Critic magazine in March, in which he claimed that NZUSA would be forced to close by June unless the internal disputes over fees were resolved. He also claimed that NZUSA would lose its seat on the Committee on University Academic Policy (CUAP) in June if VUWSA and OUSA had not reversed their decisions to withdraw.
The two associations are now paid-up until the next quarter, although a question mark remains over $33,750 of fees for the remainder of the year. NZUSA’s position on CUAP will be determined at the Committee’s next meeting later this month. Neither VUWSA nor OUSA has reversed its decision to withdraw.
This year McCourt and Zwaan’s relationship has deteriorated to the point where Zwaan no longer responds to McCourt’s emails. The pair were once close, but the ongoing dispute over membership and fees, as well as VUWSA’s refusal to cast a vote for McCourt in the NZUSA presidential elections in January, has soured the relationship.
For his part, Zwaan was determined not to give in to NZUSA’s demands. He is understood to be frustrated by the Executive’s willingness to continue giving money to NZUSA.
VUWSA has not yet officially announced a referendum on continued membership, but this is expected to take place alongside the Executive elections in September.
McCourt was critical of the 2014 Executive’s decision to withdraw, claiming that the 2013 referendum result did not provide a proper mandate. He said that many of the promised reforms had in fact been delivered, and that “many, many members of [the 2014] Exec have expressed regret about that decision [to withdraw]”.
Although most of this year’s Executive including Zwaan are in favour of withdrawing from NZUSA, they also want to secure a stronger mandate. There are also fears that a pro-NZUSA field could sweep the 2016 VUWSA elections. A referendum is seen as less risky than the prospect of a future Executive reversing the decision to withdraw.
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Most local economists say we do not have a bubble in Australian house prices. A bit overvalued, yes. But not a bubble. So why is it that overseas economists - such as Nouriel Roubini, the professor at New York University who predicted the collapse of US house prices that led to the global financial crisis, and Yale professor Robert Shiller, joint winner of the Nobel prize for economics - beg to differ?
Another American economist, Harry S. Dent jnr, in his new book: The Demographic Cliff- he's promoting it in Australia next month - makes special mention of Australia. He believes that house prices are unsustainable. But while others warn of a bubble in Australian house prices, Dent also identifies a possible deflation trigger - a crash in the Chinese housing market.
Property markets can be unstable. All it takes is ...
While Sydney and Melbourne house prices are high at almost 10 times income levels, the ratio is 35 times in the major Chinese city of Shenzhen. Dent says the collapse of Chinese housing prices will be the biggest housing crash in history. It will cause commodity prices to rapidly fall and cause the fall of Australian house prices.
At a ''bare minimum'' [Sydney] home prices will fall 27 per cent and return to what they were in 2005, Dent says. Dent writes a widely followed financial newsletter and his 2009 book, The Great Depression Ahead, was a bestseller. He tends to analyse economic trends through demographics. And Australia's population is ageing more slowly than many other developed countries.
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Storing Water:
People are becoming more and more concerned with storing water, and with good reason. One only has to mention Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, or look at the drought crisis in California. It goes without saying that water is the most important natural resource we have. You can survive a week without food or sunlight. However, you cannot survive without water. When local municipal services are running, the average person in America uses around 150 gallons a day. That includes drinking water, cooking, shower, toilet, and garden/lawn. That may seem like a lot, but when it’s readily available we tend to take it for granted. In order to live you can get away with only using around 1 gallon a day just for drinking and cooking. During the summer months when your body needs to consume more to keep cool you may need something closer to 2 -3 gallons a day. Water is also incredibly heavy. One gallon of water weighs about 8.3 pounds. As such, one is limited on terms of how much you can carry over distance.
Whether you are storing water for irrigation in a pond, or are looking ahead to future disasters, there are many important factors to consider. For some reason I have heard the question “does water go bad,” more times than I care to remember. The blunt and obvious answer is no. But there is more to it than that. If water isn’t stored properly it can become undrinkable due to contaminants such as bacteria or toxins that can leach into it over time. This can be due to many different factors. Believe it or not, but even bottled water has an expiration date. The reason being that chemicals in the plastic can slowly leach into the water.
The first concern when it comes to storing water is the threat of harmful bacteria growing in your stored water. As such, it’s advantageous to either treat your water before storing it and/or investing in an adequate filter. It also depends on where you are getting your water. If you are storing water that you got from a treated municipality i.e city water, than treating it isn’t as big of a concern.
Many people treat their stored water with either bleach or chlorine; which may sound like a good idea, if you like the idea of drinking water that tastes like a swimming pool. Granted, it’s better than not having water at all. Many people are fond of using stabilized oxygen which is tasteless and odorless yet kills bacteria. (click here) to find it.
You may also find it advantageous to use a filter for drinking water. Water filters are easy to find at any outdoor supply store. However, you may consider investing in a gravity fed filter in the event that you don’t feel like working a hand pump. Not to mention that portable hand pumps are typically only good for around 150 gallons, which a family for four can go through pretty quickly.
Long Term Water Storage:
When it comes to long term water storage, you will want a dark container that is capable of blocking any sunlight from penetrating. Sunlight is the enemy when it comes to long term water storage due to the fact that it supports the growth of microbes. As such, you will either want to store your water in a dark environment or buy a dark container. Some people have even gone through the trouble of painting the outside of their container as a means of preventing sunlight from penetrating.
It’s also important to stay away from containers that had been used to hold liquids besides water. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for recycling, but these containers can be breeding grounds for bacteria. The taste of whatever it was previously used for can still linger even after excessive sterilizing and scrubbing. Many liquid containers that you buy at your local grocery store (soda bottles and so forth) are most likely made from inferior plastics that will leach chemicals into your water. Have you ever left bottled water in your car in the summer and came back to find that it now tastes like plastic? If you decide to use a metal container, it’s best to avoid aluminum since it can leach into the water. Ideally you want a container that was purposefully built to hold water for extended periods of time. They might cost a little more, but it’s something worth doing right. Checkout the “water brick” by (clicking here) .
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Despite announcing plans to flood the market with a number of new HD and Ultra HD TVs, Samsung still found room in its CES booth for the first 8K TV we've seen from the manufacturer. Labeled as QUHD or Quad Ultra HD, it's also only the second flatscreen with 7,680 x 4,320 pixels that we've seen, period. Still, our eyes may be getting jaded as a result of all the super high-res displays we've seen lately because this one didn't have the shock value Sharp's 8K Super Hi-Vision screen garnered with its debut a couple of years ago.
Another reason could be the demo content, as Samsung opted for a Robin Sparkles-ish mall scene that was impressive in its sharpness and realism, but didn't exactly draw us in as viewers and the crowded booth gave little room to take it all in. The demo video even magnified specific sections at time to emphasize the 8K res, but we'd prefer a reel with more action. Check after the break for a few more close up pictures and let us know if you can see the 8K difference.
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An Apple patent published today describes using iMessages instead of voice to interact with Siri in environments when speaking wouldn’t be practical.
This could span both ends of the spectrum, from very noisy environments like construction sites, where your voice cannot be heard, to very quiet ones like libraries, where you would disturb people by speaking. It would also be useful for people who don’t feel comfortable talking to their phone in public …
NordVPN
The patent employs the usual dense language.
In one example process, a graphical user interface (GUI) having a plurality of previous messages between a user of the electronic device and the digital assistant can be displayed on a display. The plurality of previous messages can be presented in a conversational view. User input can be received and in response to receiving the user input, the user input can be displayed as a first message in the GUI. A contextual state of the electronic device corresponding to the displayed user input can be stored. The process can cause an action to be performed in accordance with a user intent derived from the user input. A response based on the action can be displayed as a second message in the GUI.
The main illustration, however, makes it clear how this would work – showing typical Siri interactions as typed queries and written responses. The patent was spotted by Patently Apple.
It’s not the first time we’ve encountered the idea of using Siri in iMessage. An earlier patent described Siri proactively interjecting in iMessage chats, and there’s been a sketchy report that this type of feature will appear in iOS 11.
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Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is under investigation for involvement in an alleged plot to kidnap a Turkish dissident cleric living in the US and fly him to an island prison in Turkey in return for $15m, it was reported on Friday.
Flynn ally sought help from 'dark web' in covert Clinton email investigation Read more
The report in the Wall Street Journal is the latest of a string of allegations facing Flynn, a retired general and former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian manipulation of the 2016 US election, has already indicted Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and another senior fundraiser on charges including money laundering. A former foreign policy adviser has pleaded guilty to perjury.
Mueller is now reported to have gathered sufficient evidence to bring charges against Flynn and his son, Michael Flynn Jr, which would bring his investigation another leap closer to Trump.
The fact that no indictment has been made public may only increase concerns for Trump’s legal team. Flynn has expressed interest in an immunity deal and Mueller, in his dealings with former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, has shown himself ready to negotiate.
The former national security adviser’s company, Flynn Intel Group, is allegedly under scrutiny for failing to register work it did for interests linked to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Flynn is in legal jeopardy for his statements to investigators about his contacts with representatives of the Turkish and Russian governments.
The new allegation, that Flynn and his son engaged in a conspiracy to arrange the rendition of Fethullah Gülen to the Erdoğan government – which accuses the cleric of plotting an abortive coup in July 2016 – could if confirmed result in even more serious charges.
In September, the Wall Street Journal reported a meeting about the plan, in which former CIA director James Woolsey is said to have participated. Friday’s report describes a second meeting involving both Flynns at the 21 Club restaurant, a prohibition-era New York speakeasy patronised by Trump, in mid-December. According to “people familiar with the investigation”, it was at this encounter that the $15m payment was discussed.
One source said Gülen would be seized and flown by private jet to the Turkish prison island of Imrali. It is not clear if any money changed hands or if any preparatory steps were taken.
The timing of the 21 Club meeting is significant. The White House has distanced itself from the men charged by Mueller – Papadopoulos, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates. But by mid-December Trump had named Flynn national security adviser and he was playing a central role in the transition.
That period is a grey area when it comes to paid work for foreign interests, but if the arrangement was carried through past inauguration in January, Flynn could face bribery charges on top of questions of whether the New York conversations represented a conspiracy to carry out a forced extra-judicial rendition of a legal US resident.
“If the facts involving Flynn and his son are true, or even mostly true, it indicates an incredible propensity for outrageously illegal conduct,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York law professor and former Pentagon counsel. “Evidence that Flynn was prepared to act in such an unlawful way could help prove a case against him in other activities as well involving his ties to Russia during the campaign.
“If Mueller has sufficient evidence that Flynn and his son were involved in this audacious plot to kidnap the cleric, the special counsel can use that to pressure the former Trump campaign associate to flip and tell the FBI everything he knows of relevance to the Russia investigation.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Robert Kelner, Stephen Anthony and Brian Smith, attorneys for Flynn, said that so far, out of respect for the various investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, they had avoided responding to “every rumor or allegation raised in the media”.
“But today’s news cycle has brought allegations about General Flynn, ranging from kidnapping to bribery, that are so outrageous and prejudicial that we are making an exception to our usual rule: they are false,” they said in a statement.
Barry Coburn, representing Flynn’s son, said he had no comment.
The Alliance for Shared Values, a group representing Gülen supporters in the US, said: “The US justice system should be commended for not giving in to the Turkish government’s campaign against Mr Gülen, no matter how nefarious a plan the Erdogan regime could concoct nor how much money it could offer people who might entertain such plans.”
Flynn is one of the more intriguing figures at the centre of the Trump-Russia investigation. He came to prominence as an intelligence chief in Afghanistan, from where in 2010 he published an open critique of the way the war was fought. Instead of focusing exclusively on fighting the Taliban, Flynn and his co-authors argued, the US should be more sensitive to the general population.
However, by the time he appeared at Trump’s side as an early supporter, he had become an outspoken Islamophobe.
“Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” he tweeted in February 2016. According to some accounts, it was his forced retirement from the DIA under the Obama administration in 2014, apparently as a result of his abrasive management style, that left him with an enduring grudge against Democrats. On Hillary Clinton, Flynn led chants of “lock her up” at campaign events and the Republican national convention.
Flynn’s attempt to build a business empire appears to have got him into deeper controversy. He appeared on the Russian state channel, RT, and attended an RT-sponsored dinner in Moscow, sitting alongside Vladimir Putin.
In August, the Flynn Intel Group signed a deal with a Dutch firm, Inovo, owned by Ekim Alptekin, chairman of the Turkish-American Business Council and a close associate of Erdoğan, according to documents filed with the Department of Justice. Flynn’s firm was paid more than $530,000 to dig up information about Gülen and make a film about him, according to the documents. On election day, 8 November, Flynn published a commentary in The Hill, describing Gülen as “a shady Islamic mullah” and “radical Islamist”.
It was his Russian ties that caused his initial downfall, however. Flynn lasted only 24 days as national security adviser, being forced to resign after it emerged he misled officials over the extent and nature of his contacts with the former Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak.
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WATCH: Franklin Graham's LGBT-Friendly Biz Boycott Backfires, and Rachel Maddow Loves It
Rachel Maddow is glad to report that evangelist Franklin Graham traded one gay-friendly bank for an even gay-friendlier one.
If we learned anything about Rachel Maddow from her MSNBC show, it’s that she’s a big fan of instant karma.
As The Advocate reported, Christian evangelist Franklin Graham was so upset with banking titan Wells Fargo on account of its commercial featuring a lesbian couple adopting a deaf child, he announced a plan to boycott the popular bank and switch to another one.
But as Maddow was happy to report, his plan backfired in the best — and gayest — way possible.
As it turns out, the new bank that Graham switched his financial accounts to — North Carolina-based BB&T — is actually a platinum sponsor of the annual Miami Beach Gay Pride festival and parade, one of the country’s biggest pro-LGBT celebrations.
"I love this story so much I want to take it to Franklin Graham's new bank and marry it ... if it's a lady," Maddow said on her show.
Graham is defending his decision to switch banks and his call for a boycott. Click here for that report.
According to Maddow’s report, BB&T is also the chief sponsor of the “Legacy Couples” program, which “is a fundraiser that celebrates same-sex couples in committed relationships for 10 years or longer” and that the Miami branch of the bank even built a special chapel to let a gay couple get married there.
“Franklin Graham threw a Facebook hissy fit and moved his accounts because of a commercial showing two women adopting a deaf little girl, but it turns out his new bank is so much gayer than his old bank,” said Maddow. “The universe has a way of making these things work out!”
Watch the clip from The Rachel Maddow Show below.
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Disgraced former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner has checked into a sex addiction clinic, according to a report by the The Daily Mail.
This comes as the FBI continues scouring through Weiner’s semen-soaked electronic devices in search of further evidence detailing the pedophilic Democrat’s illegal sexual communications with a 15-year-old girl. During the course of the investigation, agents also found emails between Weiner’s estranged wife Huma Abedin and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, prompting FBI Director James Comey to announce the bureau’s renewed interest in determining Clinton’s potentially criminal activity.
Abedin abruptly ended her relationship with Weiner this time around after standing by her husband during prior sex scandals. This is the third time the 51-year-old former New York representative has been embroiled in controversy.
Weiner had previously exchanged salacious messages under the alias Carlos Danger with a 22-year-old woman he met in late 2012. At the time he was running for mayor of New York City. A couple months before his mayoral bid, Weiner had resigned from the House of Representatives after news broke of the Congressman’s obsession with sexting and sending naked images of himself to younger women.
Years of sexual debauchery have finally led Weiner to the doors of a sexual rehabilitation facility. The Daily Mail has not identified the name of the specific policy, but The Hill has independently confirmed the accuracy of the Mail’s reporting. The facility treating Weiner for sex addiction is separated by gender to prevent illicit contact. Patients are asked to participate in counseling for various sex-related addictions, including addictions involving cyber sex, exhibitionism, pornography, and high-risk anonymous sex.
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Germany's highest court has rejected the opposition parties’ bid to make the government reveal to a parliamentary commission investigating the activities of the US NSA spy agency in Germany, the spy targets they had jointly worked on.
The head of the Left Party in the NSA parliamentary commission, Martina Renner, said the ruling was a “bad day for democracy,” which signaled that the “secret services can continue doing what they want, undisturbed by parliamentary control," Zeit reported.
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The ruling is a response to a complaint filed by two opposition parties, The Greens and the Left Party, in September 2015 following reports that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) intelligence agency had collaborated with the NSA, helping it eavesdrop on European firms and prominent politicians.
The Constitutional Court's October ruling, that was made public only this Tuesday, said the US was against sharing the sensitive spy target list, and doing so without US permission would hamper German intelligence agencies' ability to cooperate with counterparts in the future, Reuters reported.
Anna Biselli of the digital research organization Netzpolitik called the Constitutional Court’s ruling “a blow for any clarification on the activities of the BND and the NSA and for the entire parliamentary monitoring of secret services.”
“The government has been successful with its universal argument that the state's welfare is in danger if the list is revealed. Unfortunately, this argument is widely used to avoid giving out information. This makes the parliament's job of monitoring the BND effectively very difficult, although that is exactly one of its responsibilities,” she told Deutsche Welle.
Biselli said that one of the commission's key tasks was to look into the selectors list, which included search parameters from the NSA that the German spy agency to track millions of surveillance targets worldwide.
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“The commission wanted to look into the list of selectors because it wanted to know which targets the BND illegally spied on for the NSA,” Biselli said. In the course of its investigation, it was found that the BND monitored sensitive targets, including European governments, institutions and corporations.
“There were several million, probably 13 to 14 million selectors [used to spy on targets], controlled together with the NSA over the course of 10 years,” Greens politician Konstantin von Notz, who is on the parliamentary committee investigating NSA activities, said in an interview with Deutschlandfunk on Wednesday.
“There are probably hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of European and German victims. There will be companies, journalists, probably politicians monitored for years, and this is unpleasant at the very least, and it will all remain under the seal of secrecy,” he added.
The NSA spied on German chancellors and their offices for over a decade, a WikiLeaks report revealed last year. Leaked NSA intercepts indicated that the US tapped the phones of the political offices of the last three German chancellors – Angela Merkel, Gerhard Schröder (in office 1998–2002) and Helmut Kohl (chancellor from 1982 to 1998) – and targeted at least 125 phone numbers of top German officials.
Another scandalous revelation made in April last year suggested that the German BND foreign intelligence agency helped the NSA spy on European firms and officials.
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NY Governor Andrew Cuomo Made $783,000 in Royalties From a Book That Only Sold 3,200 Copies
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tax returns show royalties from his book earned him $783,000 despite the fact that it only sold 3,200 copies.
International Business Times reports:
Fox News Channel parent News Corporation may be wrapped up in the sexual harassment accusations surrounding host Bill O’Reilly, but the company is facing another long-running scandal involving what appear to be exuberant payments to a Democrat — payments that occurred even as News Corp. was lobbying the New York State executive branch, which Gov. Andrew Cuomo oversees. The New York governor, whose memoir was published by the News Corp.-owned HarperCollins in 2014, saw his gross income more than double last year, to $417,748 for 2016 (from $196,243 the year before), the Buffalo News reported Tuesday. Cuomo attributed $218,100 of that increase to sales of his memoir, “All Things Possible: Setbacks and Successes in Politics and Life.” In 2015, the governor reportedly earned zero income from book sales and in the nearly three years that it’s been on the market, it has sold just 3,200 copies. But Cuomo, the Buffalo News found, reported that he received a total of $783,000 from HarperCollins in book sales over the past three years, a number that would translate to royalty payments of nearly $244.69 per copy. On Wednesday, the book was selling on Amazon for $13.05. A spokesperson for Gov. Cuomo told International Business Times, “This payment was contractual and per the agreement with the publisher.” A spokesperson from HarperCollins said the publisher does not “comment on financial matters relating to our books.” News Corp. did not respond to IBT requests for comment. News Corp., in the meantime, was registered as a lobbying client as recently as December 2016, according to the New York State government lobbying database. The mass media company, created and headed by Executive Chairman and former CEO Rupert Murdoch, has a long history of lobbying Cuomo’s office for the passage of bills beneficial to its businesses, as previously reported by IBT.
2015 is a year that is very important as far as Cuomo goes, two important things to note: 1. Rupert Murdoch cedes power of his company over to his son, James Murdoch (Murdoch owns HarperCollins, Cuomo’s publisher); 2. Cuomo earns NO MONEY from book sales – could this be because of the transition period?
Look closely at New York and look closely at Cuomo’s book: why was Cuomo given such a large ‘royalties check’ when he hardly sold any books? What is going on here? Seems a bit like a deli being used as used as a cover for the mafia – is a book really a cover for financial payouts/bribes leading to something much more sinister? Pull the thread . . .
Murdoch was married to Wendi Deng, some speculate she was a Communist spy – did they divorce because she was a spy? or because people found out? Murdoch funnels money into a huge globalist, open borders entity. Something to note: Cuomo lobbies hard in favor of open borders. Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo, was also thought to be involved with the mafia.
Hillary Clinton was a New York Senator with many ties to New York politics and just so happened to have announced her candidacy for the presidency a month prior to the ceding of power to James Murdoch, a globalist with liberal leanings. Was the ‘royalties check’ a payment from open borders Murdoch to perhaps help Hillary lock down New York?
A little more to chew on . . .
Cuomo says he didn’t know a bill he signed benefited Murdoch. Just pull the thread . . .
Another important thing to think about . . .
Andrew Cuomo’s former right-hand man and political/physical “muscle”, Joseph Percoco, was hit in 2016 with a 14-count indictment and “seven others on corruption charges in two wide-ranging bribery schemes”.
Cuomo was not charged with any wrongdoing.
The Observer reported around the time of the case:
Percoco, the governor’s former executive deputy secretary, will be just one of several figures arrested on still unknown charges in relation to an alleged bribery and kickback scheme, according to the Journal. Percoco served under Cuomo’s father and has been close to the governor for much of his life—so much so that Cuomo has described him as a brother.
Cuomo has a rich history.
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Those calm waters Republican John Koster sailed through in the primary are turning turbulent and threaten to bounce his latest expedition for Congress off course.
He’s navigating waves not of his own making or the creation of his Democratic opponent Suzan DelBene. They’re the result of tremors in the political cosmos caused by forces in his Grand Old Party.
First came U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan’s pick for vice president, then came Missouri Rep. Todd Akin’s comments on rape. Separately and together those events put wind in the national sails of the Democratic Party and, in turn, generated a headwind for Republican candidates across the country.
A new poll conducted jointly by NBC and the Wall Street Journal gives a glimpse of the situation.
Fifty-four percent of those polled said Republican candidates for Congress were out of step with the public compared with 38 percent who called them mainstream, according to information NBC posted online Wednesday. When asked about Democratic congressional candidates, 48 percent deemed them out of step and 45 percent found them mainstream.
More worrisome for the GOP might be this figure: 29 percent of registered voters said they had “very negative” impressions of the Republican Party. NBC’s Michael O’Brien reported online that that is the second-highest figure in two decades of the survey.
Any headwind at this point could be problematic for Koster as he battles DelBene from the Canadian border to Medina in the 1st Congressional District.
Koster embraced Ryan’s selection as “a great choice.” And he blasted Akins’ comments as “reprehensible and bizarre.” That’s not going to be the end of it by any means.
Thanks to those gentlemen, subjects that have had a hand in Koster’s undoing in two previous bids for Congress are now front and center in the campaign.
Abortion is one. Koster, a social conservative, opposes abortion even in cases of incest and rape. That’s not the view of most Washington voters who long ago endorsed legal abortions. Koster’s not made abortion a central theme of his campaigns in 2000, 2010 or even this year.
But Akin’s comments put it in the spotlight, and you can bet DelBene, who is pro-abortion rights, will do all she can to keep it there. While she’s at it, she’s going to push other social issues onto the stage such as same-sex marriage that, not surprisingly, she supports and Koster opposes.
Ryan’s involvement is drawing attention to his ideas on reforming Medicare and Social Security by steering future enrollees of each toward the private sector for services.
Democrats are almost apoplectic at the opportunity this presents. Seniors are a key bloc of voters and right now more older voters reject than embrace any move toward privatization.
Koster endorses Ryan’s concept to slim down Medicare by giving out cash vouchers for individuals to spend on the private health care plan of their choosing. He also likes the idea of letting future enrollees in Social Security invest their money in whatever private fund they want rather than leaving it with the federal government.
Again, he’s not been shouting his positions from district rooftops. Koster’s association with privatizing Social Security cost him votes in his loss to Democratic Congressman Rick Larsen in 2010. Larsen hit him repeatedly — and Koster asserted unfairly — and it made a difference in the outcome. Maybe even the deciding factor.
Larsen has handed off his playbook to DelBene and she’s certain to use it to make the political waters tough for Koster to navigate again this fall.
Political reporter Jerry Cornfield’s blog, The Petri Dish, is at www.heraldnet.com/thepetridish. Contact him at 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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Archie Comics has provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive preview of Riverdale #6, from writers Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Ross Maxwell, and Will Ewing and featuring art by Joe Eisma, Andre Szymanowicz (colors), and John Workman (letters).
In our preview, Betty Cooper interviews Pop Tate about "the secret history of Riverdale," something it seems she and Jughead get a little tease of in the season 2 premiere, based on some of the footage in the Comic Con trailer.
The series returns in October, but the comic has been going since just before the season ended, providing fans with a deeper understanding of some characters and exploring some concepts that did not (or have not yet) make it to the screen. You can check out the images in the attached gallery, and the official solicitation text for the issue below.
RIVERDALE #6
Set in the same universe as the hit CW series, this issue gives us a peek into all the secrets Pop Tate overhears in his day-to-day business, told through four vignettes in four different booths! Script: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Ross Maxwell, Will Ewing
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Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE (I-Vt.) on Monday said white Americans are often blind to the injustices that black people face when dealing with police.
“Many white people are not sensitive to the kind of abuse that African Americans, especially younger African Americans, receive at the hands of police officers and police departments,” Sanders said, according to Ebony.
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“I think for most whites their experience with the police has been good or neutral because they don’t interact with the police as much as those in the black community,” he said.
“One of the ongoing crises in America is institutional racism,” the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate added. "We have a very broken criminal justice system. Clearly these are issues that must be dealt with and changed.”
Sanders argued that law enforcement officials need to improve their outreach when engaging minority populations.
“We need to demilitarize local police departments so that they do not look like occupying armies,” he said.
“We want police departments that look like the communities they are serving,” Sanders continued. "If the community is a minority one, the police department should reflect that reality.”
Sanders has surged to second in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and now leads 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 in polls of New Hampshire, an early-voting state.
But while Sanders has seen an upswing in support, there are lingering doubts about whether he can expand his appeal beyond white liberals to other voting blocs within the Democratic Party, including African-Americans.
Sanders told Ebony he recognizes the challenges he faces.
“Yes, it’s true — I’m from a state that is overwhelmingly white,” he said.
“I am also aware that I am running against someone whose husband is very popular in the African American community,” Sanders added, referring to former President Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonKasich fundraises off 2020 speculation Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Howard Schultz must run as a Democrat for chance in 2020 MORE.
“The proposals that I talk about are actually more relevant to the black community,” he said, citing his calls for criminal justice reform and better youth education.
Black Lives Matter activists have repeatedly targeted Sanders this year, disrupting several of his stops along the 2016 campaign trail. Sanders has since met privately with the activists to discuss his agenda.
“We met on several occasions and those meetings have all been very productive,” he said. “I have found those meetings to be very useful.”
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Since Spotify launched on Sony Playstations on March 30, over 5 million gamers have downloaded the music streaming service onto their PS3 and PS4. The PlayStation Music service allows players to stream through Spotify and control the music without having to pause the game.
Since then, PlayStation 4 players have streamed over 785 million tracks – that’s 42 million hours worth of music! But what songs do they like to rock out to the most? The top 10 songs so far:
10. Kygo - "Stole The Show" (feat. Parson James)
9. Mark Ronson - "Uptown Funk" (feat. Bruno Mars)
8. Jason Derulo - "Want To Want Me"
7. Jack Ü (Skrillex and Diplo) - "Where Are Ü Now (with Justin Bieber)"
6. Flo Rida - "GDFR" (feat. Sage The Gemini and Lookas)
5. T-Wayne - "Nasty Freestyle"
4. OMI - "Cheerleader" (Felix Jaehn Remix)
3. Fetty Wap - "Trap Queen"
2. Major Lazer & DJ Snake - "Lean On" (feat. MØ)
1. Wiz Khalifa - "See You Again" (feat. Charlie Puth)
Were you surprised that any of those tracks made the list? Tell us what you think.
Also, thanks to the quick uptake by existing PlayStation Music users, Spotify will now be rolling out in Costa Rica, Panama and Ecuador sometime this summer, and more markets by the end of 2015. Keep your eyes open for more updates.
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Last night's vote to allow same-sex marriage was an unequivocally good thing. The classical liberal principle of equality before the law demands that the state treats gay couples the same way it treats straight ones. Giving gay couples the same recognition as straight couples will be good for them, their children, and society at large.
But there is a bigger question that has largely been ignored – whether the government should be involved in marriage at all. The debate over gay marriage has, fortunately, been won by the right side, but why is it any business of parliament who we may and may not marry at all?
Historically, marriage as a state-defined institution is a relatively new phenomenon. It was only in 1837 that the state began to register marriages, and less than 100 years before that that it made legislation concerning marriage at all. Before then, marriage was a contractual arrangement agreed upon by two individuals, upheld in the common law.
Nearly all of what makes up a modern marriage could be agreed on privately in a contract between two (or, indeed, more) consenting adults. Next of kin nomination, the sharing of property rights, duties of care, parental rights and other things that marriage affects could all be agreed upon voluntarily – there is no need for the state to regulate these agreements outside the general rules of contract law. The process of dissolution of a marriage would be agreed upon in advance. For example, a couple could agree on an arbitrator in advance to carry out a divorce, if it came to that. People would be able to sign their marriage contracts wherever they wanted – in a church, a function hall, a forest or a kitchen – with whatever kind of ceremony they wanted. As private institutions, individual churches would be free to take part in or opt out of any ceremonies they wanted to.
Extending state privilege to same-sex couples is a good thing, but fundamentally the government should not give special rights to married couples at all. It should de-couple things like inheritance tax exemptions and parental access from marriage.
Though it would allow for an unprecedented amount of freedom in the types of marriages people took part in, most couples would probably not want a special arrangement. It is easy to imagine law firms or even high-street shops offering popular "standard marriage" contracts, based on conditions that seem to have worked. That would allow most people to have "normal" marriages, while still allowing for more unconventional arrangements for those who wanted them.
Most importantly, this would take marriage out of the hands of the majority. As the marriage "traditionalists" (who are arguably misnamed, given mankind's long history of polygamy and same-sex coupling) have learned, dependence on the state to enforce the values you hold is a dangerous game. Most MPs have now accepted the value of gay relationships, but that might change. The best way to safeguard against state bigotry is to take power over marriage out of the hands of the state altogether.
Tradition is valuable, but only when it stands on its own without state support. As FA Hayek argued, social progress comes from people experimenting in how they live. The best system is the one that allows for that experimentation and accommodates diverse approaches to life. Getting the government out of the marriage business is one good way to foster diversity, give people control over their lives and end marriage inequality.
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Like many girls her age, 8-year-old Gizzell Ford kept a diary. The cover was striped with rainbows, and she used a pink marker to record her thoughts.
For the first few entries, Gizzell — known to friends as “Gizzy” — wrote about typical third-grade things: jumping rope, school teachers, clothes and friends.
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But her life in Chicago seemed to derail in the summer of 2013, as she began detailing abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her grandmother.
“I know if I be good and do everything I’m told I won’t have to do punishments,” Gizzell wrote. She described how she had been forced to squat for hours and told to stand in one place for “an hour or two.”
She wrote that she looked forward to the start of school again in August, when she would be out of the house.
“I am going to be a beautiful smart and good young lady,” she wrote one day. “I can do anything I put my smart mind to. People say I’m smart and courageous and beautiful.”
Gizzell Ford Handout
“I hope that I don’t mess up today because I really want to be able to just sit down, watch T.V., talk and play with everybody,” Gizzell wrote in that same entry. “I am going to be great all day.”
Later, she added a postscript. “Not true,” she wrote. “I failed.”
On July 11, 2013, she wrote her last entry: “I hate this life because now I’m in super big trouble.”
Gizzell was dead the following day, and her body was found soon after. Authorities say she was discovered in her grandmother’s trash-filled apartment, where she’d lived with her father for several months.
She had been strangled and badly beaten.
Helen Ford, 55, is on trial for her granddaughter's murder. Cook County Sheriff
Horrifying Accusations of Abuse
After Gizzell died, police arrested Gizzell’s father and grandmother. In court documents obtained by PEOPLE, investigators allege that her father directed the attacks, while her grandmother carried them out.
The grandmother, 55-year-old Helen Ford, is now on trial for murder. The father, Andre Ford, died in 2014 of a rare skin disease that caused him to have a heart attack.
In court on Wednesday, the prosecution introduced Gizzell’s diaries as well as other disturbing evidence against Helen. Prosecutors played cellphone video that allegedly showed her berating the terrified girl for breaking house rules. Gizzell stood silently, a sock stuffed in her mouth.
Prosecutors said that in the course of her abuse, Gizzell had been tied to a bed for several days. They also alleged that she was denied food and water and punished when she tried to sneak a sip of water from a toilet.
“They’re the most haunting images any of us will see until the end of our days,” Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Ashley Romito said of the evidence, in her opening at the trial.
“[Gizzell] had a terrific smile, beautiful, full hair and wonderful penmanship,” Romito said. “What Helen Ford did to her reduced that child to something completely unrecognizable.”
Andre Ford died in 2014 Cook County Sheriff
Wrenching Testimony
The testimony took its toll on witnesses: A veteran Chicago police forensic investigator broke down on the stand when she was shown photos of Gizzell’s body, describing the injuries as some of the worst she has seen in her 30 years on the force.
“I’m sorry,” said Officer Nancy DeCook as she wiped away tears. “This never happens.”
Gizzell’s 10-year-old half brother also took the stand, testifying about abuse that he, too, had allegedly received at the hands of his grandmother. Speaking softly, the boy told the judge that Helen would beat him with a belt. He said that she forced him to do squats as a punishment.
The boy testified that he had seen his grandmother use a spatula to hit Gizzell in the mouth. He also said that she would force the girl to eat hot peppers or stand in contorting positions for hours on end.
If Gizzell cried out in pain, the boy said, Ford would stick a sock in her granddaughter’s mouth.
As he described his little sister, the boy burst into tears. “She was very nice,” he said on the stand. “She liked to make friends. She liked to play.”
Helen, weeping, decided on Wednesday not to testify.
Defense: Self-Inflicted Wounds?
Helen’s public defender, Judie Smith, acknowledged the tragedy of the case in her opening statements. But she characterized the defendant as “overworked, overwhelmed and overcome” with the daily responsibilities of taking care of a bedridden son and three grandchildren.
Smith also alleged that many of Gizzell’s injuries were self-inflicted.
“She was a tragically troubled young lady,” Smith said. “She coped by inuring herself.”
The case is a non-jury trial which began Monday. A judge could render a verdict as early as Thursday afternoon.
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Samsung Officially Launches the Galaxy Note 7 Fan Edition in Korea
Many Samsung die-hards would claim that the Galaxy Note 7 was one of the best devices of its year. Despite Samsung recalling the device over incidents of exploding batteries, many customers still held onto the device and refused to part ways. Samsung eventually had to push out several updates to kill off charging and telephony, but consumers still persisted on by disabling updates to the device.
If you separate the Note 7 from its battery and explosion issues, it was indeed a remarkable phone. Samsung also had to face the monumental task of “disposing” off all unused Note 7’s components, which would be a nightmare for the environment as well as their balance sheet. But, of course, there are smarter solutions than disposal…
To kill two birds with one stone, Samsung has relaunched the Galaxy Note 7 as the Galaxy Note 7 Fan Edition. This launch is currently limited to South Korea and that too, for 400,000 units only. Samsung will decide whether to sell the Note 7 Fan Edition in other international markets later on.
With the rebranding, two important aspects of the device have been changed. First, the battery capacity has been decreased to 3,200 mAh, from the 3,500 battery originally found on the Note 7. The new battery has reportedly been subjected to the same rigorous 8-point battery safety test that Samsung began with the Galaxy S8.
Second, the ‘new’ Note 7 Fan Edition has also received a software upgrade. The device now features the same software that came on the new Galaxy S8 and S8+, complete with Bixby.
The Galaxy Note 7 FE is priced at 699,600 KRW, which roughly converts into $609. If Samsung chooses to relaunch the device in other markets, the pricing would change accordingly. With the limited launch, Samsung may be testing how the public reacts to the branding after the recall. A confidence check on the branding is a good idea before the Note 8 arrives.
What are your thoughts on the Galaxy Note 7 FE? At what price would you be willing to purchase this device? Let us know in the comments below!
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President Trump's top White House expert on Russia won't attend his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump and Putin will be joined only by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, as well as translators, according to reports. That leaves a leading Kremlin critic outside the first face-to-face meeting of the two leaders, which Tillerson prefaced by outlining a proposal for significant cooperation in Syria between the United States and Russia.
"The United States and Russia certainly have unresolved differences on a number of issues, but we have the potential to appropriately coordinate in Syria in order to produce stability and serve our mutual security interests," Tillerson said Wednesday evening.
He revealed only modest aspirations for the meeting itself, which takes place on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. "It's difficult to say what Russia's intentions are in this relationship," Tillerson told reporters aboard his plane, adding that he hoped the meeting would feature "a good exchange between President Trump and President Putin over what they both see as the nature of the relationship between our two countries."
Trump's team reportedly considered bringing Fiona Hill, who handles Russia and European policy issues for the National Security Council, but that proposal did not come to fruition. "If she [Hill] wasn't there it would be pretty bad, this is the most momentous thing in her portfolio," Evelyn Farkas, a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration, told the Daily Beast.
Russia has taken foreign policy positions diametrically opposed to U.S. interests in a range of areas, which could compromise even efforts to cooperate to consolidate the defeat of the Islamic State in Syria. Russia has worked with Iran to prop up Syrian President Bashar Assad and secure territory for Iran that would expand the Shia regime's ability to coordinate with terrorists in the Middle East, to the alarm of U.S. leaders. Tillerson, in recognition of this dynamic, warned against such Russo-Iranian collaboration in the plan he outlined Wednesday.
"The United States believes Russia, as a guarantor of the Assad regime and an early entrant into the Syrian conflict, has a responsibility to ensure that the needs of the Syrian people are met and that no faction in Syria illegitimately re-takes or occupies areas liberated from ISIS' or other terrorist groups' control," Tillerson said.
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Concord, Massachusetts has become one of the first communities in the U.S. to ban the sale of single-serving plastic water bottles.
According to the Associated Press, the plastic bottle ban resulted from a three-year campaign by local activists. The activists pushed to reduce waste and fossil fuel use.
Octogenarian Jean Hill lead the charge, telling The New York Times in a 2010 interview, "The bottled water companies are draining our aquifers and selling it back to us." She declared, “I’m going to work until I drop on this."
The campaign Ban the Bottle claims that "It takes 17 million barrels of oil per year to make all the plastic water bottles used in the U.S. alone. That's enough oil to fuel 1.3 million cars for a year." Their website also states: "In 2007, Americans consumed over 50 billion single serve bottles of water. With a recycling rate of only 23%, over 38 billion bottles end up in landfills."
According to the EPA, in 2010, the U.S. generated 31 million tons of plastic waste.
The Town of Concord's website describes the bylaw, stating "It shall be unlawful to sell non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water in single-serving polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles of 1 liter (34 ounces) or less in the Town of Concord on or after January 1, 2013." There is an exemption for an "emergency adversely affecting the availability and/or quality of drinking water to Concord residents."
The first offense results in a warning, the second in a $25 fine, and the third (and each following offense) in a $50 fine. Concord's Health Division staff are in charge of enforcing the ban.
Not everyone is happy with the ban. WHDH reports that some businesses are also working around it by selling larger bottles, since the rule only focuses on smaller ones. Local Jenny Fioretti voiced one concern to the news group: “Towns are close enough that people can walk two minutes and go get it from Acton or Bedford. It doesn't really help I don't think."
In a previous interview with Concord Conserves, Hill acknowledged the challenges, but added, "what I'm trying to do with this Bylaw is to increase the barriers to buying single-serve bottled water because in order to help people change, you need to put policies in place that steer them away from buying bottled water and toward considering the many other good alternatives... I hope that other towns will consider taking action too."
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AN underwater cameraman caught the heart-stopping moment he was almost EATEN by a giant whale.
The snapper got a little too close to the mysterious Bryde's whale - rarely seen by humans.
Exclusivepix Media 8 A photographer had a lucky escape when they were almost swallowed whole by a giant whale
Exclusivepix Media 8 A second cameraman caught just how close the snapper was to his ocean-going subject
Exclusivepix Media 8 The giant Bryde's whale was gathering up fish off the Pacific coast of Mexico
Exclusivepix Media 8 And the plucky snapper was brave enough to stick around and catch a series of breathtaking shots despite the incoming jaws of the 17 metre mammal
And as the 17 metre mammal opened its huge mouth to devour a shoal of fish, it almost gobbled up the photographer too.
The breathtaking pictures were taken off Mexico's Pacific Coast.
Many populations of the whale - pronounced "broo-dess" after a South African whaler - are believed to be near extinction.
Johan Bryde was a notorious Norwegian-South African whale hunter during the early 20th Century.
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They number around 100,000 worldwide.
Much of that population is believed to remain in the northern hemisphere.
Among the threats to their existence are collisions with boats and the whaling industry, led by Japan.
They can grow to a weight of nearly 40 tonnes.
On Friday, The Sun reported how drone footage had captured the moment a killer whale devoured a shark.
The rare moment was filmed by Slater Moore, who was whale-watching in Monterey Bay, California.
Exclusivepix Media 8 The Bryde's whale is one of the world's most secretive animals with experts knowing very little about their behaviour
Exclusivepix Media 8 Yet the 40 tonne beasts remain threatened by whalers and collisions with boats
Exclusivepix Media 8 The Bryde's whale is named after a notorious South African-Norwegian whaler from the early 20th Century
Exclusivepix Media 8 It is so little known that many cannot pronounce its name correctly - "Broo-dess"
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Sometimes you don’t need to look under rocks to find the objectionable.
The auction for T20 cricket’s Indian Premier League (IPL) broadcast rights, across geographies and media, has amplified the asymmetry in regulatory frameworks operating in the creative economy. The entire issue should also help triangulate a policy conversation between competition law, intellectual property rights and a sectoral regulatory/legislative narrative that has failed to comprehend the dynamics of India’s growing media and entertainment industry.
Star Group’s winning bid for IPL media rights was made via a transparent process. But the voluble protests preceding and following it have their roots in the Indian economy’s enduring legacy of cronyism and government patronage. Even if we move beyond the immediacy of the complaints and try to focus on the larger picture, the state of strife and conflict does underscore the need for regulatory reform in the creative economy. Specifically, it highlights three issues: multiplicity of regulators leading to lack of clarity on regulatory jurisdictions; need to grant supremacy to Indian Copyright Act—which governs creation, broadcasting and monetization of content—over a plethora of other laws and regulations that are stifling legitimate rights of content creators; and, finally, whether the 20th century mode of administered pricing for content produced in the private sector for sale in the open market can still work in the 21st century.
At the heart of the debate is the difference between monopoly over content and content monopoly. Monopoly over content arises when the content creator has the sole right, granted by law, to monetize the intellectual property embedded in the content for a specific period of time. Content monopoly arises when there is only one content producer in the entire industry and can hold distributors and consumers to ransom, which is clearly not the case in the India.
However, the extant regulatory framework seems to be ignoring these nuances and apprehension over content monopoly seems to have engendered systems that grant subordinate status to the Indian Copyright Act for broadcasting organizations, which is in contrast to global norms. Indeed, indications about content’s future were discernible in the IPL auctions: Facebook’s Rs3,900 crore bid for digital rights (for the Indian Subcontinent) trumped Airtel’s Rs3,280 crore and Reliance Jio’s Rs3,075.72 crore bids. Though Facebook eventually lost out to Star’s consolidated bid, the incident demonstrates how digital content is clearly the next battleground and how companies are according supremacy to content. It also brings into sharp relief the question of net neutrality and the role of gatekeepers. This then also begs the question: Is the current regulatory structure, erected to generate societal equity through mandated economic pricing, adequate and symmetrical for content delivered through cable/satellite and through digital pipelines?
The private television industry in India is of fairly recent vintage. Yet, a vice-like grip of regulators and regulations governs its creativity. The key regulatory institutions overseeing the industry are the ministry of information and broadcasting, the ministry of electronics and information technology, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal, the Competition Commission of India, the department of industrial policy and promotion in the ministry for commerce and industry, the Intellectual Property Appellate Tribunal and the department of telecommunications in the ministry of communications.
Given the multiplicity of agencies, there is a wide and bewildering assortment of laws, rules and guidelines that govern this sector: Indian Copyright Act, Information Technology Act, Consumer Protection Act, Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, plus a labyrinthine web of regulations from Trai.
Historically, all attempts to establish an appropriate regulatory regime for the broadcasting and cable industry fell victim to political fragility of the 1990s, till the Centre reclassified broadcasting and cable services as telecommunication services in 2004 and appointed Trai as the designated regulator. Occasional attempts to create an independent broadcasting regulatory authority suffered pre-mature deaths due to political uncertainty.
With Trai and so many other agencies, acts, rules and guidelines at play—often at cross-purposes to each other—it is only natural that the playing field gets skewed in favour of those with unequal political bargaining power. In the sector’s infancy, the boundaries were stretched by organizations that employed musclemen and were friendly with political parties. Not all companies were born from this violent crucible, but some of the leading names in media and entertainment rose to prominence from this brutal churning. In addition, as various stakeholders have pointed out, the regulator’s lack of capacity has also led to the current regulatory distortions.
According to the KPMG India-Ficci report on Indian media and entertainment industry, 2017, Trai’s March order on inter-connect and pricing of channels may lead to a decline in revenue for broadcasters and might even result in an increased monthly outlay for many subscribers, thereby defeating the very purpose of the pricing model. Clearly, it is time to either upgrade Trai’s capacity or to even start thinking again of an independent and separate broadcasting regulator.
Rajrishi Singhal is a consultant and former editor of a leading business newspaper. His Twitter handle is @rajrishisinghal.
Comments are welcome at views@livemint.com
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Worldwide UFO hoax scheduled for April 2014
// February 25th, 2014 // News
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The UFO community often finds themselves held under a microscope and naysayers are likely to have something to scoff about in April. UFO author Nigel Watson recently uncovered plans for a massive worldwide UFO hoax to take place on April 5, 2014. The event, organized by remote-controlled RC drone operators, was originally intended to launch on April 1 but organizers felt that the date would make the hoax too obvious. The organizers of the event, which they’ve named The Big UFO Project, are asking RC operators around the world to attach LED lights to their aircraft and fly them around at 8:00 PM on April 5. They wrote:
“Anyone who has a multirotor drone or anything that can carry a strip of LED lights and hover is invited to join in this event.”
The goal of the hoax? To “cause a wave of UFO sightings around the world and an apocalypse-like idea in the media.” Thus far they have gotten commitments from participants in the USA, UK, France, South Africa and the Netherlands.
You’ve been warned – even if they change the date in a bid to throw us off…
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After the Thursday resignation of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his entire cabinet, US officials say their “counter-terror operations” in Yemen are virtually entirely paralyzed.
The officials are saying they have put an entire halt to Yemen drone strikes and other operations in the wake of Hadi’s ouster. They insist this is temporary while they assess conditions.
The White House also tried to make it sound like the situation was extremely temporary, going so far as to deny that there were any policy changes as such at all.
Yet the Hadi government has been falling apart in Yemen for quite some time, and there’s no easy fix here. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that the Houthis will accept a successor in the military dictator model of Hadi or his predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, both of whom were on board with the US war.
That could be a problem, as the US has sought nominal support for its drone wars, even if in cases like Pakistan the claimed support was in direct opposition to what that government was saying.
If there is no government in place in Yemen for the long term, or indeed if a government that is not pro-US is installed, it’s going to be difficult for the US to make the claim that the war is being conducted with a government’s imprimatur.
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz
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Jihad is alive and well in Muslim Town. Source: Philadelphia woman who planned to join ISIS gets 8 years in jail
A Philadelphia mother who investigators say planned to abandon her two children and travel to Syria to join an ISIS fighter she met online was sentenced to eight years in prison Wednesday.
Authorities said Keonna Thomas, 33, used the online moniker “Young Lioness” to spread the terror group’s message and violent propaganda over the Internet.
“I’m not a evil or malicious person,” Thomas, 33, said before she was sentenced. “I’m just someone who, I guess, at one point, was impressionable.”
Thomas was arrested in 2015 and pleaded guilty last year to attempting to provide material support to a terrorist group.
Prosecutors compiled Thomas’ social media postings and her correspondence with the ISIS fighter, a radical Islamic cleric and a Somalia-based jihadi fighter to establish evidence of her willingness to support and join the terrorist organization.
In 2015, she said it “would be amazing” to participate in a martyrdom operation around the same time she bought an electronic visa and conducted online research regarding indirect routes into Turkey, a frequented point of entry for people seeking to slip into Syria and join ISIS , according to an affidavit that cited an ISIS manual.
Thomas also sought to raise money for the terrorist organization, re-posting a statement from a Twitter user that read, “Did you know… For as little as $100 you can provide a #Mujahid with his basic necessities for 1 month?” A mujahid is person who engages in jihad.
But as prosecutors lined up examples of her descent into racialization, Thomas’ attorneys depicted her as woman with a troubled soul. They said she fell prey to promises of an Islamic utopia in Syria that could give her the kind of pious life she couldn’t get in the local Muslim community.
“She lost her way, in a very, very real way,” her attorney, Kathleen Gaughan, said Wednesday.
Thomas spent countless hours between 2013 and 2015 absorbing ISIS propaganda and became enthralled with the idea of marrying a faithful Muslim man, according to her attorneys. And when she found what she was looking for through her communications with the ISIS member, Thomas made arrangements to join him in the Middle East.
“Trust me u haven’t seens anything yet,” the ISIS member wrote to her in December 2014 after she congratulated him for starting to train with the terrorist group in Raqqa, Syria, according to an affidavit. “U need to be here to see it.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
As noted in previous reports: Philadelphia: Mom pleads guilty, admits planning to abandon kids for ISIS
At some point, Thomas’ plans went beyond simply voicing support for terror groups online. She communicated directly with a radical Jamaican cleric, Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, and sought his assistance in finding a jihadist to marry.
She later struck up a relationship with Abu Khalid al-Amriki, an ISIS recruit newly arrived in the organization’s Syrian headquarters, and married the man in a ceremony conducted over Skype.
When Amriki contacted her in February 2015 to ask whether she was willing to take part in a suicide attack, Thomas responded: “That would be amazing. . . . A girl can only wish.”
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Fish sales in the run up to Good Friday have trebled with Irish shoppers sticking firmly to tradition.
Fish sales in the run up to Good Friday have trebled with Irish shoppers sticking firmly to tradition.
Hake in particular has proved a huge hit with shoppers with one fish supplier seeing a surge in demand from an average of 800 kilos to 14,000 kilos this week.
The country's oldest fish supplier, Dunns of Dublin, which has been selling fish since 1822, has seen sales of fish soar with workers on hand around the clock since last week to fill demand.
Ken Ecock, director of Dunns said sales of Hake had seen the greatest increase.
"There has been massive demand for hake. This weeks sales are up at 14,000 kilos when the norm would be 800 kilos on a week with no promotion. Five or six years ago there would be no interest in hake, now there are massive sales.
"In general demand for fish has trebled from what a normal week would be," he said.
The retailer supplies to stores across the country including SuperValu, Dunnes Stores and a number of independent stores. It has also seen a significant rise in demand for smoked salmon.
"We've been working 24 hours shifts since Wednesday of last week to get our deliveries out. The uplift is not just in our fresh fish, there's been a good uplift in our smoked salmon also. Easter Sunday is like a second Christmas and smoked salmon is always the starter of choice so it's a huge increase for us," he added. The tradition of fish on Good Friday is believed to have evolved culturally over many years. The Catholic Church has traditionally observed abstinence from meat on Friday but the rule of abstinence does not mention fish as a substitute.
Michael Deacy Jnr, who runs the oldest fish shop in Galway, Deacy's Fish shop on High Street, which has been in operation since 1916, said business has doubled over the past week.
"Sales have more than doubled this week, white fish is particularly popular. Yesterday and today will be the biggest day for sales and we've ordered almost double our normal fish order," he said.
Mr Deacy who is the fifth generation of his family to run the shop, revealed that their older customers would continue to buy fish every Friday and Wednesday but that across the board fish had become popular throughout the week.
He added that fish sales on average had increased across the board in the past six months. "There had been a dip but we're seeing it come back strong again."
Irish Independent
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Madeline Smith, The Canadian Press
TORONTO -- Canada's public health agency has confirmed the country's first case of Zika-related defects in a fetus.
A spokeswoman for the Public Health Agency of Canada said on Friday that the fetus has "severe congenital neurological anomalies," but didn't provide further information citing privacy reasons.
Rebecca Gilman said it is Canada's second case of maternal-to-fetal transmission of the virus, which has been linked to serious birth defects that include microcephaly, where babies are born with abnormally small heads and underdeveloped brains to mothers who were infected while pregnant.
Gilman said the first Canadian case of maternal-to-fetus transmission occurred in a baby that was confirmed to have the virus, but did not have related birth defects and so far appears normal.
A World Health Organization report released on Thursday also mentions Canada as the latest country to report a case of congenital malformation associated with a Zika infection.
Zika is primarily transmitted by the Aedes mosquito, which isn't found in Canada. Mosquitos transmitting Zika have recently been found in a part of Miami, Fla., prompting Canada's public health agency to warn pregnant women to avoid travelling there.
As of Thursday, there have been 205 confirmed cases of travel-related Zika infections in Canada and two cases of sexual transmission.
University of Toronto professor of medicine and infectious disease expert Jay Keystone said he isn't surprised to see more cases of Zika emerging, but the problem is much worse in countries dealing with mosquito-borne transmission of the virus, such as Brazil.
"It was a matter of time before we start seeing Zika cases in Canada and it's a matter of time before a fetus was infected from the virus," he said.
"The hope is there will be less and less as Canadians become more aware of the risk."
Keystone said the Aedes mosquito is a daytime-biting insect most active in the morning and late afternoon, and using mosquito repellent and covering your body as much as possible in areas with Zika outbreaks is important.
University Health Network infectious diseases specialist Isaac Bogoch said the full range of health issues related to Zika still isn't clear, and doctors will be closely watching babies who have been infected to see if cognitive problems emerge as they grow.
"We know microcephaly is one illness the developing child can have, and it can be pretty catastrophic at times. But they may have a whole spectrum of defecits which can include cognitive deficits, they can have problems with vision, they can have problems with hearing."
He added that Canadians should take precautions but don't need to be alarmed, calling the guidelines for preventing infections "spot on."
"The level of concern here is low, but we can't let our guard down," he said. "It's appropriately low, but it's not zero."
Canada's public health agency has recommended that women who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant shouldn't travel to areas with Zika outbreaks. But men who are travelling also need to be aware of the risks -- current Canadian public health guidelines say men who have travelled to Zika-infected areas should consider using condoms or avoid having sex for six months to avoid transmitting the virus to partners.
They also say women who have travelled to areas with Zika outbreaks should wait at least two months before trying to conceive.
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Manchester United fans have been waiting for news on Shinji Kagawa's injury since he was substituted during the game against Braga in the Champions league this week. He was due to have a scan on his twisted knee the day after the match but it's taken until today's press conference with Sir Alex Ferguson for any more news to come out.
Ferguson has confirmed that it is a knee injury and said it's similar to the one Ashley Young suffered, he's also said the player will be out for around 3-4 weeks. At the 4 week extreme of that it would mean he misses eight games for the club.
Those are:
Chelsea (a)
Chelsea (a - Capital One Cup)
Arsenal (h)
Braga (a - Champions League)
Aston Villa (a)
Norwich City (a)
Galatasaray (a - Champions league)
QPR (h)
The club said on their official website:
Shinji Kagawa has been ruled out for three to four weeks with a knee injury, similar to the one Ashley Young suffered earlier in the season. Chris Smalling is back training on the football side of things and Phil Jones will hopefully start football training a week on Monday
It will be a frustration for Kagawa who has admitted he's yet to hit his best form for Manchester United. The former Borussia Dortmund player has shown flashes explaining why he's so highly rated but hasn't been able to bring his whole game together yet.
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A suicide bomb attack on a market in a Shia Muslim area of north-west Pakistan has killed 26 people and injured at least 50 others, officials say.
The attacker blew himself up close to a mosque in the town of Parachinar in Pakistan's tribal region of Kurram.
Three more people died when security forces fired on crowds protesting against the attack.
Fazal Saeed, the leader of a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban, said it carried out the attack.
"We have targeted the Shia community of Parachinar because they were involved in activities against us," he told Reuters news agency.
Residents said the bombing destroyed at least eight shops in the bazaar, AFP reports.
A curfew has been imposed in the town.
Pakistan has been plagued by sectarian attacks, with Shia Muslims targeted by radical Sunni groups.
The Kurram region in particular has a history of violence between Sunni and Shia groups.
Prior to a peace deal last February, Shia tribes had been waging a three-year war to keep the Taliban out of the area.
Last July, Pakistani security forces launched an offensive against militant groups in Kurram.
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Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 12, 2014, 2:00 AM GMT / Updated Sep. 12, 2014, 7:14 AM GMT
A convicted school shooter who sparked a massive manhunt when he escaped from an Ohio prison Thursday has been caught, officials said.
Thomas "T.J." Lane, 19, was apprehended and returned to the Allen Correctional Facility in Lima, Ohio, according to Joellen Smith, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
Lane, who is serving three life sentences for killing three students at Chardon High School in 2012, escaped along with another inmate from Allen Correctional Institution in Lima, Ohio, at around 7:30 p.m. A dispatcher at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Lane said Lane was taken into custody at about 1:20 a.m. Friday in the area of the prison.
Lane’s escape prompted the school district which runs the high school where he shot dead the three students to cancel classes Friday and offer counselors to rattled students. Lane opened fire on a cafeteria table full of students at Chardon High School on Feb. 27, 2012, killing three students — Demetrius Hewlin, 16; Russell King Jr., 17; and Daniel Parmertor, 16 — and wounding three more, one of whom was reportedly paralyzed.
“Our thoughts and prayers today go out to the families of Demetrius, Russell and Danny and all others affected by the tragedy as well as by the troubling events from Thursday evening,” Chardon Local Schools Superintendent Michael P. Hanlon, Jr. said in a statement to parents.
Lane is serving three life sentences for the shootings. On the day he was sentenced, Lane wore a white T-shirt with the word “KILLER” scrawled on the front and shouted obscenities at the court.
The other inmate who escaped with Lane, Clifford Opperud, 45, is still on the loose, police said. Opperud was serving a 12-year sentence for aggravated robbery, burglary and kidnapping, according to prison records.
Three law enforcement agencies and a helicopter equipped with infrared detection equipment fanned out over the area around the prison looking for the escaped inmates, Ohio Department of Public Safety Director John Born said in a statement. A third inmate also escaped, but was caught shortly after breaking out of the prison, Lima police said.
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Whether they're allies or foes, tiny or towering beasts, robotic, undead or living, the kings of reptiles will always represent brutal power in any game. When they make their appearance, you can be certain that devastation, destruction, and, well, probably the end of the game, will follow.
We have collected below some of the most badass dragons video games can offer.
Up top is Onyxia from World of Warcraft, via the WoWwiki.
Ridley / Robot Ridley (Metroid series)
source: DragoonMyuutsu's longplay of Metroid: Zero Mission
Rayquaza (Pokémon)
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source: Bulbapedia
Volvagia (The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time)
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source: XHolyPuffX's longplay of the game
Spyro the Dragon (Spyro series)
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source: Spyro Wiki
Alduin (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim)
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source: The Elder Scroll Pages
Dran Draggore (Eye Of The Beholder II: The Legend Of Darkmoon)
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source: Doommaster's longplay of the game
Queen Of The Blackmarsh (Dragon Age: Origins)
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source: Dragon Age Wiki
Black Dragon Kalameet (Dark Souls)
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source: Dark Souls Wiki
Solo Wing Dragon Form (Panzer Dragoon Saga)
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source: xDriver4's longplay of the game
Fafnir (Megami Tensei series)
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source: Megami Tensei Wiki
Bahamut (Final Fantasy series)
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sources: samcadaris', WarrWeeny's and veteran0121's videos of FFVII, FFVIII and FFX
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MJ's Alleged Son DNA Test Results Are Bogus Ripped from 'Terminator'
Michael Jackson's Alleged Son -- DNA Test Results Bogus ... Ripped from 'Terminator' Movie
EXCLUSIVE
Here's a shocker -- the DNA test results that allegedly prove 31-year-oldis's son are BOGUS ... in fact, so bogus ... the logo from the so-called DNA testing lab was ripped from "Terminator Salvation."As we reported,'s put on a spectacle Thursday -- claiming he had DNA results proving singer B Howard was the biological son of the King of Pop. He then produced the results showing a "99.99999%" probability that MJ was Brandon's dad.TMZ obtained a photo of the DNA doc -- allegedly from a testing facility in Ireland called "DNA Lab." We searched high and low but could find no such generic DNA lab in Ireland.Skeptical, we investigated -- a simple Google image search of "DNA results" turns up a bunch of sample docs with the same exact easily-stealable format as the one we got.But the coup de grace -- we then Google image searched "DNA logo" and the first result ... literally ... was the same DNA pic used in the "DNA Lab" logo.And that's not even the best part -- a reverse image search of the logo shows a bunch of results for "Terminator Salvation." A little more digging revealed the logo was used on PROMOTIONAL T-SHIRTS for the movie.Can't say we're all that shocked.
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U.S. and Russian officials now believe that the vast majority of Syria’s nerve agent stockpile consists of “unweaponized” liquid precursors that could be neutralized relatively quickly, lowering the risk that the toxins could be hidden away by the regime or stolen by terrorists.
A confidential assessment by the United States and Russia also concludes that Syria’s entire arsenal could be destroyed in about nine months, assuming that Syrian officials honor promises to cede control of the chemical assets to international inspectors, according to two people briefed on the analysis.
The assessment, thought to be the most authoritative to date, reflects the consensus view of Russian and U.S. analysts who compared their governments’ intelligence on Syria during meetings in Geneva this month. The Obama administration has since briefed independent experts on the key findings.
The insights into Syria’s arsenal have been bolstered further by the Damascus government’s own accounting, which lists the types of chemical agents and delivery systems it possesses, and was presented Saturday to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. U.S. officials have reviewed the Syrian inventory, which has not been publicly released, and “found it quite good,” a senior State Department official told reporters.
The White House declined to comment on the assessments, which have been kept under wraps amid intense negotiations at the United Nations on a plan for dismantling Syria’s chemical stockpile. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council agreed Thursday on a resolution that requires Syria to surrender its chemical weapons.
View Graphic What chemical weapons does Syria have?
Russia has long been a close ally and arms supplier to Syria and maintains strong ties to its military and intelligence services. Obama administration officials have said that Russian and U.S. intelligence agencies had independently reached similar conclusions about the size of Syria’s chemical weapons program, regarded as one of the world’s largest.
Findings spur optimism
In private briefings to weapons experts, White House officials said analysts had concluded that Syria possesses more than 1,000 metric tons of chemical weapons, of which about 300 metric tons are sulfur mustard, the blister agent used in World War I. Nearly all of the remainder consists of chemical precursors of nerve agents, described as being “unweaponized” and in “liquid bulk” form, according to two people who attended the White House briefings.
In military weapons programs, two chemical precursors for the nerve agent sarin are blended using special equipment as the toxins are loaded into rockets, bombs or artillery shells.
Weapons experts not privy to the briefings described the findings as encouraging. Several noted that it is far easier to destroy precursor chemicals than battlefield-ready liquid sarin or warheads already loaded with the toxin.
“If the vast majority of it consists of precursors in bulk form, that is very good news,” said Michael Kuhlman, chief scientist in the national security division at Battelle, a company that has supervised the destruction of much of the United States’ Cold War-era chemical stockpile. “Now you’re dealing with tanks of chemicals that are corrosive and dangerous, but not nerve agents. And the destruction processes for those chemicals are well in hand.”
If U.N. inspection teams can remove even one of the sarin precursors — or the equipment used for measuring and filling — they can all but eliminate Syria’s ability to launch a chemical attack even before the stockpile is completely destroyed, said Daryl Kimball, director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association.
“The mixing equipment itself is essential to using chemical agents,” Kimball said. “If you prioritize the destruction of the equipment, you can largely deny Syria the ability to use these weapons again on Syrian soil.”
U.S.-Russian assessments
Washington and Moscow have sparred repeatedly over Western allegations that Syria was behind a sarin attack that killed more than 1,000 civilians in Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21.
U.S. surveillance systems observed Syrian troops mixing chemical precursors three days before sarin-filled rockets exploded in a Damascus suburb.
White House officials say U.S. and Russian officials were mostly in agreement on the nature of Syria’s chemical arsenal and how to dismantle it, according to the two experts who attended the briefings.
The two governments did not agree on the number of storage sites for chemical munitions in Syria, and they differed on where the physical destruction of sarin and other toxins should take place. The Obama administration prefers to remove all chemical weapons from Syria as quickly as possible, in case President Bashar al-Assad changes his mind, while Russia wants the weapons destroyed on Syrian soil, said a weapons expert who attended one of the briefings. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the briefing.
A senior Russian official said Thursday in Moscow that Russia was prepared to provide troops to guard the chemicals as they are being destroyed.
Both countries expressed optimism that Syria will comply with U.N. demands to surrender its chemical weapons. Syria’s arsenal was initially developed as a deterrent to a future Israeli attack, but Assad may now view the weapons as a liability after the international outcry over the Aug. 21 attack, White House officials said at the briefings.
The apparent change of heart also could reflect discord within the Syrian government over the use of sarin, which some U.S. officials suspect may have been ordered by a senior regime official without Assad’s authorization, the briefers said.
In any event, they said, Assad is obliged to honor his promises or risk angering the Russian government and embarrassing President Vladimir Putin, who has given personal assurances that the weapons will be eliminated.
The White House briefers described the Russians as “serious and sincere,” and even more prepared that the U.S. team in addressing the legal and technical hurdles involved in bringing Assad’s arsenal under international control, one of the attendees said.
Anne Gearan in New York contributed to this report.
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The Department of Veterans Affairs, the second-largest federal agency with 313,000 civilian employees and a far-flung hospital system, is one of the few corners of the government that would see its budget grow in the next fiscal year — by 6 percent.
During his campaign, President Trump promised dramatic reforms at an agency he said was filled with a culture of “fraud, coverups and wrongdoing” after a 2014 scandal over coverups of patient wait times for medical care. His first spending plan would boost VA’s budget by $4.4 billion, to $78.9 billion, with much of the new money dedicated “to improve patient access and timeliness of medical care” for the more than 9 million veterans who use the system.
VA has more than 40,000 vacant health-care jobs that are exempt from the president’s federal hiring freeze, and hiring doctors and nurses is a top priority for Secretary David Shulkin.
The Trump administration also wants to make it easier for veterans who live in rural areas not served by VA, who need specialty care or who simply want to go outside the system to see private doctors. The spending plan would expand an Obama administration program that Congress approved after the wait-times scandal to allow veterans to see private doctors, with VA requesting an additional $3.5 billion from Congress to continue the “Veterans Choice” option.
Other new spending would cover programs that keep veterans out of homeless shelters and help them transition from military to civilian life.
The budget offers few specifics on how the agency would spend the extra money. But some of it would continue investments underway to modernize VA’s antiquated benefit claims system, which has accumulated a large backlog in appeals. Some claims still are handled on paper.
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I made this in one day, I needed to make something quick for my uni portfolio and it ended up being the best thing I've ever made. XDI had to draw this gorgeous girl who I thought looked like ariel! Here's the ref of the girl. [link] So thanks to the photographer of that who gave me the idea.The owner of the photo is hairdresser Eroll Douglas.I needed to look at clown fish because I have no idea what they look like. Anyway..is Flounder a flounder or a clownfish? Looks more like a clownfish to me.Ariel and Flounder (c) Disney.Edit: OMG A DD IM SO HAPPY DSFKJDF THANK YOUU!!...I'm meant to be sitting a graphics exam right now and all I'm doing is sitting here watching the comments and faves.I've disabled the comments for now due to the heavy traffic this image gets, I feel really bad about not replying to them. I'll enable them again one day when I feel less lazy.Edit: Enabled them again as ofPrincesses IRL seriesBelle - [link] Snow White - [link] Cinderella - [link] Rapunzel - [link]
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In recent years, while the fate of Hà Nội’s built heritage has been more closely monitored by specialists from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, a very large number of Hồ Chí Minh City’s historic buildings have been systematically demolished with apparent impunity, in the name of economic development.
As the city waits to see which elements of the original “Grands Magasins Charner” design will be incorporated into the façade of the 43-storey replacement for the doomed Saigon Tax Trade Centre, here are the city’s “Top Five” historic buildings which are currently under the greatest threat of redevelopment:
1. District 1 People’s Committee Building, 45-47 Lê Duẩn
Several weeks ago it was announced that the headquarters of the District 1 People’s Committee at 45-47 Lê Duẩn, housed in the former “Cercle des Officiers” (Officers’ Mess), would be rebuilt. Opened in 1876 and thus one of the city’s oldest colonial structures, it is typical of the colonial civic architecture of its period, with spacious exterior verandahs and shuttered windows. UPDATE: After an initial response to public concern which stressed that the building was not a historic, architectural, cultural or artistic vestige and therefore the redevelopment plan did not violate any regulations, the District 1 People’s Committee has now pledged that the old building will be preserved and the new building constructed behind it.
2. Phương Nam Mansion, 110-112 Võ Văn Tần
The largest and most imposing French building in District 3, the Phương Nam Mansion is believed to have been constructed between 1910 and 1920 for a rich Vietnamese businessman. Its unique design features a spacious surrounding upper verandah with decorative balconies and a high-ceiling interior with intricately carved coving work. The building is currently on the market for US$35 million, and at that price, it’s obvious that only demolition and reconstruction as a tower block will offer prospective buyers a big enough return on their investment.
3. Catinat Building, 26 Lý Tự Trọng
This 1927 apartment building stands on the so-called “Gold Land” block enclosed by Đồng Khởi, Lý Tự Trọng, Nguyễn Du and Hai Bà Trưng streets, which, according to newspaper reports, will soon be redeveloped to accommodate “services, culture, luxury hotels, finance offices and exhibition areas.” One of the best-loved icons in the heart of the city, the Catinat Building is known for its classic art deco interior design. For more information see Date with the Wrecker’s Ball (3): The Catinat Building.
4. 273 Điện Biên Phủ
The Hồ Chí Minh City Department of Science and Technology recently announced its intention to build a new Centre for Science and Technology Research and Transfer. The new centre will replace the current building, the French mansion at 273 Điện Biên Phủ, which was built in the 1920s and was once the residence and office of the Swiss Consul General to Cochinchina.
5. 59-61 Lý Tự Trọng
A few years back, the former Secrétariat général du gouvernement de la Cochinchine building (c 1888), currently the Department of Information and Communications at 59-61 Lý Tự Trọng, was earmarked for demolition as part of the scheme to build a new 14-storey Government Centre immediately behind the People’s Committee building. However, following the public outcry which attended the early demolition of its neighbour 213 Đồng Khởi and the controversial plan to replace the Saigon Tax Trade Centre with a 43-storey tower block, the authorities have just launched a new design competition which encourages participating architects to incorporate the façade of 59-61 Lý Tự Trọng into the design of the new building. For more information see Date with the Wrecker’s Ball (2): 59-61 Ly Tu Trong.
Tim Doling is the author of the guidebook Exploring Hồ Chí Minh City (Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giới, Hà Nội, 2014).
A full index of all Tim’s blog articles since November 2013 is now available here.
Join the Facebook group pages Saigon-Chợ Lớn Then & Now to see historic photographs juxtaposed with new ones taken in the same locations, and Đài Quan sát Di sản Sài Gòn – Saigon Heritage Observatory for up-to-date information on conservation issues in Saigon and Chợ Lớn.
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Image copyright AFP Image caption The Troadec family were last seen on 16 February
A relative of a French family of four who have been missing since mid-February has admitted killing them, a prosecutor said.
Pascal Troadec's former brother-in-law, named as Hubert Caouissin, told investigators he had killed them in a row about the inheritance of gold bars.
He battered them to death with a crowbar at their home in Nantes, local prosecutor Pierre Sennes said.
Mr Caouissin will be charged and jailed on Monday.
He was arrested in Brest on Sunday along with Mr Troadec's sister Lydie Troadec, his ex-wife.
Mystery of vanished French family
Pascal and Brigitte, both aged 49, their son Sebastien, 21, and daughter Charlotte, 18, were last seen on 16 February.
In a press conference, Nantes prosecutor Pierre Sennes said Mr Caouissin had admitted using a crowbar to bludgeon the family.
On 16 February, he spied on the Troadecs' home, using a stethoscope to listen through the windows, Mr Sennes said.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Hubert Caouissin's DNA was found at the Troadec family's home
That night he broke into the house, apparently with the aim of stealing a key. The family awoke when they heard a noise, and a fight broke out between the intruder and Pascal Troadec.
Mr Caouissin killed Mr Troadec first, and then the rest of the family.
The prosecutor said he dismembered the bodies, burying some parts and burning others.
Police are now scouring a piece of countryside near the city of Brest in search of remains.
Search teams with sniffer dogs have been combing the area, and divers have also taken part because the zone lies between two estuaries.
Image copyright AFP Image caption A police search for the family's remains is under way
According to the prosecutor, Mr Caouissin has no previous criminal record. He is now facing life imprisonment.
The role of Lydie Troadec is not yet clear, but she is accused of helping to clean the vehicle used to dispose of the bodies. Prosecutors have ordered her detention.
'The gold is a myth'
The inheritance argument reportedly centres on gold bars found during works at a building in Brest owned by Mr Troadec's father, who died several years ago.
However Mr Caouissin's mother has told journalists that the existence of the gold bars was a "myth".
Image copyright AFP/Getty Image caption Pascal Troadec's sister and former brother-in-law were questioned in Brest
Mr Caouissin, 46, had already been interviewed by investigators at the beginning of their inquiry into the family's disappearance, but he told them he had not seen the Troadecs for several years, French media reported.
However his DNA was reportedly later found on a glass left in a sink in their home and also on Sebastien's car, which was found last Thursday in the port of St Nazaire.
A day earlier, a social security card and a pair of trousers belonging to Charlotte had been found by a jogger in a forested area near Brest.
In a search of the family's house last week, investigators found bloodstains matching the DNA of the parents and Sebastien, but not of the daughter.
Traces of blood were found on Sebastien's phone, on Brigitte's watch and under the stairs, and it appeared that someone had tried to wipe them away.
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Update – July 31, 2014
BBM for Windows Phone is now publicly available for download
We’ve gotten an incredible number of requests for BBM to come to Windows Phone. In the coming weeks we’ll be ready to welcome millions of Windows Phone users to the growing BBM community.
Sharing Experiences with Control and Privacy
In this first release of BBM for Windows Phone, we’re focused on introducing Windows Phone users to the power of sharing experiences in the moment through the immediacy and privacy offered by BBM. Users can engage in BBM Chats with one or many contacts, with the ability to share pictures, voice notes, contacts and location.
BBM Groups let you connect and share with up to 50 contacts. In addition to a private group chat, BBM Groups offer you a shared photo album where group members can chat about pics as well as shared calendars and shared lists. Broadcast messages will also be included in the first release, providing a way to quickly reach large groups of contacts as well as creating a feed where you can check out news from all your BBM contacts.
We’ll be working to quickly add more features to BBM for Windows Phone such as stickers, BBM Voice, BBM Channels and location sharing powered by Glympse in the months ahead.
A Fresh New Native Look & Feel
Customers love apps that are simple, easy to use and beautifully designed. Over the last couple of releases we’ve focused on simplifying the BBM user experience to make it easier to sign up, sign in and add BBM contacts. When it comes to design, we’ve heard users asking for a native experience that matches the experience they’re accustomed to on their phone.
I’m excited to announce with this release of BBM for Windows Phone we will be moving to a more familiar, native user experience that embraces the clean, modern design of the Windows Phone UI.
The BBM for Windows Phone interface focuses on three key areas core to the BBM experience: Contacts, Chats and Feeds.
Swiping left and right will move you between these three pages. Common actions are found at the bottom of the page in the footer and additional controls can be found in the menu accessed through the three dots.
Contacts
In Contacts, we’ve created a single centralized place where you will find all your BBM contacts, regardless of whether it’s an individual, or a BBM Group. At the bottom of the Contacts page you have the ability to search for a contact, find friends, create a new BBM Group and select multiple contacts to create a new multi-person chat, send a broadcast message or organize a contact category. Another really cool thing you can do with BBM for Windows Phone is pin a BBM contact to the Start menu for easy access. When you select that BBM contact from the Start menu you will be taken directly to a chat window with them.
Chats
The Chats page is your single destination for all your BBM Chats including group chats, multi-person chats, and one-to-one BBM chats. From the chats page you can start a pick up a conversation or start a new chat, multi-chat or broadcast message. In a chat, you have lots of ways to share. You can attach a picture from your camera, add a voice note, send a contact, share a photo from your gallery or send your location.
Feeds
Feeds lets you see what’s happening with your BBM contacts. Here you will see when contacts update their status or profile photo. If you want to chat about one of their updates, just touch on their name and you’ll be taken to a chat. Here you can also quickly update your own status to share what you’re up to or what’s on your mind.
BBM for Windows Phone Beta Starting Soon
The BBM team here at BlackBerry has been busy getting BBM for Windows Phone ready to go. We’re preparing for an external beta ahead of our launch and are ready to start accepting applications to participate. Now remember, this is a beta and our expectation is that participants will help us make BBM for Windows Phone great by actively participating. If you’re not ready to report bugs, respond to surveys and provide feedback – better to wait just a bit longer for the full release. If you are excited to join the BBM for Windows beta program, please apply at BlackBerry BetaZone.
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HOLY WELLS, bridges, milestones, vernacular buildings, lime kilns and other industrial sites that post-date 1700 will be “left without any protection” following moves to “delist” them, the Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland has claimed.
In what it described as a “very worrying proposal”, the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht is seeking to exclude all post-1700 archaeological and historical structures and sites from the national Record of Monuments and Places (RMP).
Finola O’Carroll, the institute’s chairwoman, said this arose from “a perverse Civil Service sense of fair play” because of discrepancies between counties, with Cork having a “very comprehensive record” of monuments and others having little or none at all.
“Instead of seeking to apply the Cork standard across the board, they are instead opposing to level out the playing field by delisting the lot,” she said. “We are very concerned because this would not be regarded as best practice [in archaeology].”
The department said its review aimed for “a standard approach nationally that will ensure that all elements of the built heritage continue to be adequately protected” and there was “no question of any change to current arrangements” before it was completed.
However, the institute’s board believes that any delisting post-1700 would be “to the detriment of the country’s archaeological resource” and is now seeking the views of members with a view to putting “creative solutions” to Minister for Heritage Jimmy Deenihan.
The Archaeological Survey of Ireland (ASI) has been recording archaeological monuments for several decades, and “significant numbers of post-1700 monuments have been included in the RMPs for Cork, Galway and Dublin”, according to the institute.
It says the ASI is obliged under a 2005 policy document to ensure consistency. “Primarily due to limited resources as well as a backlog in processing the previously collected datasets, the ASI is proposing that any post-1700 monuments . . . should be delisted.” But it maintains that this cut-off date “has no basis in legislation” and points to a 1999 statement by Dóchas, the heritage service, that “any material remains which can contribute to understanding past societies may be considered to have an element of archaeological significance.”
By contrast to the ASI’s proposed delisting of post-1700 monuments, the institute notes that the Northern Ireland Environment Agency already lists more than 16,000 features and a second survey of historic buildings there is currently under way. “Projects such as the Industrial Heritage Survey of Fingalled by Mary McMahon are systematically examining the documentary and cartographic sources and have uncovered hundreds of new sites . . . It is ridiculous to believe these sites would have no legal protection.”
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The Millennium Tower, as seen as part of the skyline at night.
If Boston’s housing market is hot, then the center of the city is even hotter.
Condo prices in central Boston hit record highs in the third quarter, according to two recent reports, with the median price reaching $913,500, 43 percent above last year, according to data from real estate marketing firm LINK.
Driving that surge was Millennium Tower, which closed on most of its 442 units in the quarter that ended Sept. 30, at an average price of more than $1,400 per square foot, according to Campion & Co. But even absent the Downtown Crossing skyscraper, the median price of condos sold in central Boston rose 12 percent, and hit records in neighborhoods from Charlestown to the South End.
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“This is a significant jump,” said LINK president Debra Taylor Blair. “We’re at a major tipping point.”
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Several factors are driving downtown condo sales, experts say: Growth of high-wage jobs in the core of the city, a wave of empty-nesters downsizing from suburban homes, and international investors drawn to Boston’s economic stability and quality of life.
And there are a lot of people banking on that wave continuing. Dozens of condo buildings are under construction in Boston, ranging from small projects in South Boston and Charlestown to a 733-unit development in the Seaport District. Condo projects totaling at least 2,300 more units have applied for permits from the city — many on prime downtown blocks.
All that new supply could eventually dampen prices as units open over the next few years. But for now, the price to live in the core of the region just keeps going up.
Tim Logan can be reached at tim.logan@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter at @bytimlogan
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North Korean ambassador to the UN in Geneva, So Se Pyong, has reportedly assured that the country is not planning any missile or
According to the BBC, So was also quoted as saying that North Korea was ready to resume six-party talks on its nuclear programme.
Justifying the numerous missile tests, So said that North Korea had to be prepared to make counter measures against the US and North Korean military exercise against the country.
Meanwhile, the ambassador dismissed reports of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's ill health as "fabricated rumours".
Earlier, North Korea had publicly confirmed that Kim Jong-un was suffering from a medical problem, after reports of the Supreme Leader suffering from gout surfaced.
It has been reported that Kim, who was last seen in public on 3 September at a concert with his wife, has not made any appearances since then.
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Is Julian Castro headed for the White House?
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro arrives to introduce President Barack Obama at Central High School, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015, in Phoenix, about the recovering housing sector. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) less Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro arrives to introduce President Barack Obama at Central High School, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015, in Phoenix, about the recovering housing sector. (AP ... more Photo: Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press Photo: Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press Image 1 of / 44 Caption Close Is Julian Castro headed for the White House? 1 / 44 Back to Gallery
SAN ANTONIO — Is San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro the next Barack Obama?
It isn't inquiring minds in San Antonio, or Texans in general, asking that question. It's Die Zeit, one of Germany's leading weekly newspapers, in a full-page profile on the mayor that ran April 10.
In it, author Martin Klingst, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the newspaper, writes that Castro isn't just another mayor, “he's the new star of his party.
“Slight and unassuming … he comes across as a youthful version of Barack Obama at the beginning of his political career. Democrats hope that he will one day succeed Obama as president — as the first Latino to hold the office.”
The article goes on to say that it's just a matter of time before the first Latino wins the White House.
“The Democrats believe that with Julián Castro, they have found their candidate.”
Based on some of what the mayor told the reporter during the interview, that way of thinking also is shared by Castro.
“Sometime, says Castro, he wants to spend a year in Latin America with his wife and young daughter to perfect his Spanish. That has to wait, because the Democrats need him at home. They're concerned that at the current time, two graying Anglos are warming up to run for president in 2016: the 66-year-old former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the nearly 71-year-old Vice President Joe Biden. So it's good that the 39-year-old Julián Castro is in reserve. And Obama has previously shown how a novice can pull ahead of the favorites.”
If that happens, the White House will be in for one big Fiesta party of its own.
ezavala@mysa.com
Twitter: @elizabeth2863
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Michael Buerk's famished Ethiopia of 1984 has become a nation achieving 93% GDP growth in six years, finds study
"Dawn. And as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth."
That television news report by the BBC's Michael Buerk in 1984 framed Ethiopia for a generation as a place of famine and in need of salvation.
Almost 30 years later the country is hailed by pundits as an "African lion" after a decade of stellar economic growth.
Now further evidence of its turnaround has arrived with research showing that Ethiopia is creating millionaires at a faster rate than any other country on the continent.
The number of dollar millionaires in the east African nation rose from 1,300 in 2007 to 2,700 by September this year, according to New World Wealth, a consultancy based in the UK and South Africa.
That figure puts the country well ahead of Angola, up by 68%, and Tanzania, which had a 51% increase. Zambia and Ghana completed the top five.
The study finds that the rise in millionaires has been closely tied to GDP growth, in which Ethiopia has also fared best over the past six years achieving 93%, followed by Egypt (81%) and Angola (61%).
The authors note, however, that Ethiopia started from a very low base, and its per capital wealth is still just $470 (£287), compared to $3,187 (£1,948) in Egypt and $7,508 (£4,588) in South Africa.
Andrew Amoils, a senior analyst at New World Wealth, said: "The economic and wealth growth in Ethiopia over the last five or six years has been really strong. There has been a lot of privatisation and certain sectors are growing well. It's a huge upswing but it started from a low base."
As in other parts of Africa, however, the growth is not necessarily shared.
"The millionaires are growing at a faster rate than the middle class, which doesn't really exist in a lot of African countries, including Ethiopia," Amoils said. "Angola, for example, has had massive millionaire growth in the last 10 years but that hasn't spilled through to the average Angolan."
But whereas much of Africa's boom has been driven by mineral resources, leading sectors for millionaires in Ethiopia include agriculture, manufacturing and transport.
The richest Ethiopian is said to be the businessman Mohammed Al Amoudi, who divides his time between Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia, where he now has citizenship.
A construction boom is underway in the capital, Addis Ababa, but Amare Abebaw, a social entrepreneur, said the rest of the world does still did not appreciate the country's extraordinary transformation.
"When I go home and watch TV I still see the famine from the 80s and I wonder how do they still show this on the BBC when things have improved here? It is painful for us. We know it is part of our history but we want to focus on the present."
Nevertheless, while the number of millionaires is definitely increasing, they remain a fraction of the population.
"There are a few at the top but the majority of people are at the bottom, like in other countries," Abebaw said. "There are self-made millionaires and people are proud to know them. There are others where you don't know where they got the money from, and suspicions may arise from the population."
South Africa is the top African country for millionaires with 48,700 in 2013, followed by Egypt with 22,800 and Nigeria with 15,700.
Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, said he had witnessed the rise of tower blocks, traffic jams and people now "walking with a purpose" in Addis Ababa.
He added: "You don't see many Ethiopians in flashy cars, like you do with Luanda or Lagos [citizens in their respective countries]. Flaunting your wealth is not part of the culture."
The Ethiopian government claims credit for the growth but is criticised as authoritarian by human rights groups; there is only one opposition MP.
In a recent blog post, Dowden noted that the former prime minister Meles Zenawi once observed: "There is no connection between democracy and development."
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With its 100K+ owners (according to SteamSpy), Redout is perhaps the most successful in a bunch of anti-gravity racing games released recently by indie developers. Developed by Italian studio 34BigThings, the game just launched on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with the LightSpeed Edition (you can find more technical information on the console ports in our previous story).
We contacted Valerio Di Donato, CEO at 34BigThings, to learn more about the studio’s plans.
Related Tactical Space Shooter Redout: Space Assault Announced For PC
How many developers do you currently have? Do you plan to hire more in the future?
We are about 30 people in the studio right now. We grew quite rapidly from 3 (the original founders) to this number and we are finally slowing down. That doesn’t mean we are not hiring, we are *always* improving our team increasing seniority and looking for the most talented good people out there. I think we’ll add another couple of units to that number in the coming months if we find the right match.
What’s next for 34BigThings? More content for Redout or perhaps a full blown sequel?
Well, more content is always good for the players and us. I think we have some good surprises for everyone and more is coming now that we are getting closer to release the console versions. I would love to talk about a sequel at the moment, but it’s really early for that.
What do you think of the state of the industry in Italy? There are many small developers appearing on the scene.
Related Antigraviator Review – Falling Asleep At The Wheel
I think it’s finally coming into being. Just consider the number of professionals working in the industry doubled during the last year. We can see that the basics of game development are nowadays a given in our industry, which might sound “too basic”, but for us, it’s a good achievement. There’s still a lot of confusion between the definitions of game, product and “whole product” but the fundamental knowledge related to the marketing and business operations is finally spreading in our industry.
For those who haven’t tried the game yet, what makes Redout stand out within its genre?
I would say a series of interesting choices, quoting one of the fathers of game development, Sid Meier. First of all, we are true to our core: we ought to make the fastest game ever made and that’s what we delivered. And our community appreciated the direction and the execution. Keeping up what we poured into Redout other than the last three years of our lives, what we are and what we have become in that time, we wanted to create a challenge. Redout is not an easy game and it screams “hardcore” from the first time you pick up your controller to when your eyes start to bleed because of the Redout effect.
For years, this genre seemed forgotten. Now, though, we have a renaissance of sorts with Redout, Fast Racing Neo/RMX, Wipeout: Omega Collection, Formula Fusion and GRIP. Why do you think this happened?
Well, I think it was time for the genre to come up to its glory again and the only way that’s possible is via good games and well-marketed products.
The game has been available for a while on PC via Steam, though it is only compatible with Windows. Do you plan to add support for Mac and/or Linux?
Not right now. The Linux community is pretty strong and there’s a lot of interest in Redout, but supporting a wide platform as Linux requires some serious testing and QA that we simply cannot afford right now. The main problem for OSX are performances instead, but we are optimising a lot for consoles now and we might reconsider in the future.
We know you’re also working to release the game on the Nintendo Switch. What do you think of the platform and are you going to support any of its unique features? Also, what kind of technical compromises did you have to make for this port?
I personally love the Switch and what Nintendo is trying to achieve. For me, it is a lot more about the overall direction than the console itself, as that’s temporary. It’s a revolutionary console, but I don’t think players will use it as Nintendo intended, and that’s a good thing. I love the Switch because it will afford emergent and subversive gameplay in the real world, directly on the hardware. That being said, it’s a mobile console with a solid mobile GPU and that’s how developers should approach the porting and the optimisation challenges.
Will there be cross-play functionality between any of the platforms?
Unfortunately not. Maybe Redout 2, who knows!
Thank you for your time.
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Dhinesh Kallungal By
In the 60s and the 7os, the heady aroma of locally made liquor wafted through the air from this tiny Kerala village. The inhabitants of this sleepy hamlet of Marottichal in the state’s Thrissur district in Puthur Gram brewed liquor to make a living and were addicted to it. Later, stung by the fallout of their addiction, some of them persuaded excise officials to raid the village and put an end to the heady high. During the month-long midnight raids, the good Samaritans started playing chess to while away the long wait before the raids.
The checkered game caught on. Today, everyone in the village—from children to the aged—plays the game of kings and queens, knights and rooks, pawns and bishops. After check-mating their addiction to alcohol by their own free will, veteran tipplers replaced their addiction to bottles with the much ‘lighter and dry’ chess pieces.
Today, Marottichal is known as the “chess village” due to its hundred per cent chess literacy, where every inhabitant plays the black and white game. In its own unique way, the village is a silent reminder of Chess Fever, a short, quirky and fun-filled Russian comedy released in 1925.
Puthur Gram Panchayat president Sreenivasan says, “Around 90 per cent of the villagers are chess players. The panchayat has undertaken a mission with an objective of announcing that the village is the first comprehensive chess literate village in the country. The village will be formally announced as the first chess village in August.”
As part of the project, children, illiterate elders and migrants were introduced to the game with cooperation from government institutions, worship places, social organisations and NGOs.
The villagers’ obsession for chess has even found a place on the silver screen. Ananthapadmanabhan, son of Malayalam filmmaker Padmarajan, scripted a story based on the lives of these villagers. The movie, August Club, directed by K B Venu, hit the theatres in 2013.
Legislator from Ollur constituency in Thrissur, M P Vincent says, “After Marottichal’s status as a model village in the country, we have urged the state government, the Centre and other sports bodies to avail special grants and benefits to promote the game as much as possible in other villages in the Ollur constituency.”
Unnikrishnan, who trains debutants under the aegis of a chess academy set up by the villagers, says, “What makes this village different is that the quest to rescript our destiny has shaped this once-notorious hamlet into a chess players’ village. Five-time chess world champion Viswanathan Anand has congratulated the villagers’ effort to create a rare distinction in the field of chess.”
Black and White
● Villagers brewed liquor to make a living and were addicted to it
● Some of them persuaded excise officials to raid the village and put an end to the heady high
● While waiting for the raids to be executed, the informers started playing chess
● Children, illiterate elders and migrants were introduced to the game with help from government institutions, worship places and NGOs
● A movie, August Club has been made on the villagers’ obsession for chess
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Over the past 12-months the Canadian dollar has lost 15% of its value against the U.S. greenback and today it dipped below the 70-cent mark for the first time in 13 years. The last time the loonie was this low Disney’s Finding Nemo was still in theatres, 50-Cent’s “In da Club” topped the charts and Sidney Crosby was only just starting to turn heads in his junior hockey career. Admittedly those are some fresh memories. In contrast it wasn’t all that long ago that the Canadian dollar was on par—or higher—than the U.S. dollar, but that period somehow feels much more distant.
There’s no question that a low loonie creates economic challenges and negative effects on consumers, particularly for those travelling south this winter, but there are positives too. Obviously, the dipping dollar is good for exporters—the lower the dollar, the cheaper it is for other countries to buy the stuff we produce. We spoke to Sherry Cooper, chief economist at Dominion Lending Centres to give us some silver-linings to the low loonie situation. She says that the state of the Canadian dollar should also help stimulate job growth, increase stock prices and help the broader economy. Here are four reasons to love a low loonie:
1. Tourism will be booming
It will take time for the benefits of the lower loonie to trickle down to the manufacturing sector, but one area where it could have almost an immediate impact is on tourism. “Americans would almost certainly find Canada attractive for tourism and shopping,” says Cooper. The timing is certainly good since Canada’s starting to look cool again to foreign markets. The New York Times recently released its list of 52 places to visit in 2016 and Toronto comes in at No. 7. It’s also a great time to be a tourist in your own country, since it’ll be a lot cheaper to vacation in Banff than take a trip across the border.
2. Deals galore—at least for now
Given the volume of imported goods we consume in Canada, Canadians should brace themselves for higher prices at the register—but just not yet. According to Cooper the full effect of the decline in the dollar hasn’t appeared on store shelves for imported goods. This will change as inventory turn over, but as stores clear out merchandise, especially in the post-holiday shopping period, Canadians are getting unprecedented deals on imported goods. For example, the CBC reports that a Honda Accord is currently $5,700 cheaper in Canada than it is in the States. And if you’re in the market for a flat-screen TV, it’ll probably be a lot less pricey here than in the U.S.
3. U.S. investments are winning
Canadians who have been wise enough to shrug off the home-country bias and invest in U.S. equities in recent years have reason to celebrate. Not only have U.S. equities vastly outperformed Canadian stocks, the falling loonie has been giving investors an added boost if they convert their U.S. holdings back into Canadian dollars. The effect has been pronounced. In 2015, S&P 500 lost 5.7% over the past 12-months, but the fact the Canadian dollar has slid 15% relative to the greenback means Canadians who bought the index enjoyed a 12.6% gain. Unfortunately, as Cooper notes, more Canadians tend to invest domestically.
4. Good news for real estate investors
Canada has already seen more than its fair share of foreign interest in our real estate market, but the cheap dollar could help fuel that interest even more, says Cooper. Some of this increased demand will be from Americans buying vacation homes, while others will look to Canada as a place to invest. “Canada is seen as a safe haven for foreign capital so this helps to further encourage it,” she says. This isn’t good news if you’re in the market for a new home, but it is good news if you have already invested in real estate and are able to capitalize on higher sales prices. Enjoy.
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When it comes to Master of the Universe Classics figures, MeMade Customs has a knack for creating one of a kind figures. This week, he brings us his Custom MOTUC Bluu-Revol figure, which is a figure and character that does not currently exist in the Universe of the Masters of the Universe. Having collected these figures myself, I can tell that Bluu-Revol will fit into anyone’s collection. Taking on the persona as an ironclad ice horde gladiator, this figure has many cool attributes to it. First, the helmet is interesting as you don’t know what Bluu-Revol’s face looks like and you can only imagine. The apparatus strapped to his back is intriguing and I wonder if it is an ice generator. The look is completed with the broken chains dangling from his wrists and to get the full back story on that, go ahead and read MeMade’s original story about this killer figure:
“Working as a slave for his entire life, Marcus was always a slave. There is never a time in his life that he doesn’t remember being one. Raised in the Horde mines, he fought for his life protecting him and his younger brother Sparta from harm. One day Sparta was caught stealing a loaf of Eternian sweet bread by the on guard horde troopers. He would have been sentenced to death if it wasn’t for his brother Marcus. Marcus stood before her attack and offered himself up in place of Sparta. Hordak being of no mercy disintegrated Sparta on the spot in front of his brother Marcus. Marcus vowing to take his vengeance was placed in a mutagenic chamber transforming him from a simple young man into hey now ironclad ice horde gladiator. Now known as Bluu-Revo, Marcus does not remember who he exactly is but does remember vengeance will be his against he who has oppressed him the evil Hordak!”
You can check out MeMade’s Custom MOTUC Bluu-Revol figure and his others he has for sale over on eBay.
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Missouri businessman and political activist Scott Faughn doesn’t try to mask his political leanings.
“I am conservative,” he said. “Extremely conservative.”
But that didn’t stop him from moving his weekly public affairs show to a studio staffed by members of St. Louis Local 4. If anything, the IBEW affiliation enhanced the studio’s reputation for Faughn, who says being a conservative doesn’t equate to being anti-union.
“I like to be free to run my businesses as I see fit and in Missouri, unions provide significant advantages of skilled workers and an organized group to discuss partnering with,” he said.
Faughn is host of “This Week in Missouri Politics,” which airs on television stations in St. Louis and three other markets. In 2014, an executive from the Gate Way Group, a St. Louis lobbying firm, urged him to check out a studio in the suburb of Brentwood.
Pelopidas, Gate Way’s parent company, had started its own production company called First Rule Broadcasting, which was working out of the facility. Gate Way has mostly conservative clients. But the five production staffers are from Local 4, including Rob Glessner, who runs the studio and serves as a shop steward.
Scott Faughn, the host of “This Week in Missouri Politics,” discusses an upcoming show with St. Louis Local 4 Business Manager Michael Pendergast, left, and Rob Glessner, right, a Local 4 shop steward and the director of First Rule Broadcasting. Faughn recently moved his show from a nonunion shop to one staffed by Local 4 members.
Photo provided by The Labor Tribune.
“I definitely used the fact that we were a union shop as a benefit,” Glessner said. “But once he saw our studios, he realized they were definitely nicer. The union shop was a pretty easy sell.”
Local 4 Business Manager Michael Pendergast agrees it’s an unusual marriage, but one that unions should celebrate. That’s because they need all the friends they can get in Missouri, which has narrowly avoided passing right-to-work legislation in recent years.
Republicans have a veto-proof majority in the state’s General Assembly. Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed right-to-work legislation that passed last year and 20 Republican members of the state House crossed party lines and voted no on the override attempt, leaving it 13 votes short. The matter is expected to come up again in this year’s legislative session.
Faughn, however, says he’s against it. The more self-described conservatives like him come out against it, the better the chances it gets beat back again in the legislature, Pendergast said.
“We all know businesses that are really good at creating messages and lobbying groups,” Pendergast said. “For us to find someone with that type of background that isn’t against organized labor is really refreshing.”
“It’s important to bring some recognition to people like this because there’s probably a lot of employers that feel the same way as Scott Faughn, but are reluctant to come out from behind the bushes,” he said.
Glessner said he’s optimistic the addition of Faughn’s show will lead to more work for Local 4 at the studio. Once he sits down with prospective clients, they quickly realize that union workers come at the same price and are better trained, he said.
“It’s important for me to say we’re a union shop and get the word out any way we can,” Glessner said. “We’re going to be competitive in costs and we’re going to give you a quality product.”
For his part, Faughn plays it down the middle during most of his shows, which features in-depth conversations about current events that usually includes two Democrats and two Republicans. He says he’s against right-to-work because it’s another example of big government at work telling someone how to run his or her business.
“My determination was that my previous studio did a great job,” Faughn said. “First Rule has just been better, for a fair price, and yes, I enjoy the confidence in union labor.”
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BY SUSAN MILLER DEGNAN
sdegnan@MiamiHerald.com
Memo to the Miami Hurricanes: Skip the batting cages Saturday night.
In an embarrassing display of dominance, the University of Miami scored 20 runs in the first six innings Friday at Mark Light Field and continued to roll to a 26-0 victory over New York Institute of Technology.
The No. 17 Canes (36-13, 19-8) produced their most runs since May 2, 2003, when they beat Pace 27-1.
“Wild and crazy game,’’ said UM coach Jim Morris. “A very complete game for us. Sometimes you get rolling and it’s tough to stop.
“I don’t remember many times in my career I’ve seen games like this, to be honest with you.”
Morris said he began to “empty the benches pretty much” in the fourth inning, at the end of which UM led 17-0. “Every hitter we had went into the game.’’
The Canes hit four home runs: a two-run shot to center by Zack Collins in the second, a grand slam to right by Garrett Kennedy in the third and two in the sixth – a solo boomer by Jacob Heyward and two-run shot by David Thompson.
UM has now won six consecutive games, four of them shutouts. Over those six games (Florida State, Pittsburgh three games, Bethune-Cookman and New York Tech), Miami has outscored its opponents 82 to 8.
“We went into it not knowing what type of team they were,’’ Collins said. “I’m not saying because of the score they’re a bad team or anything, but we just played hard and hit the ball and pitched well and played defense well.’’
NYIT (14-28), which had six hits, used four pitchers who combined for 250 pitches.
Thomas Woodrey (5-2) pitched five innings for the win, with Jesse Lepore and Daniel Sayles each going another two.
The Canes, who are done with their school year, face NYIT again at 7 p.m. Saturday and conclude the weekend series at 1 p.m. Sunday.
“It feels good to be able to finish strong and now be able to focus solely on baseball,’’ said Kennedy, who earned his degree Thursday in business law.
Added Collins: “It’s awesome to just come out here and play ball and that’s all you have to worry about.’’
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Speedball 2 Tournament is a sequel to the Commodore Amiga futuristic sports video game Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe originally created by The Bitmap Brothers, published by Frogster Interactive Pictures and developed by Kylotonn.
Features [ edit ]
As of 26 July 2007, the official site states the game will feature fully customizable male, female and droid players, and a virtual marketplace for unlockable in-game content. The game will also feature live streaming of ranked matches, as well as live sports commentary and developer interviews.
The game also features a subscriber-based "Gold" mode in which players are granted access to worldwide officially ranked leagues.
Development [ edit ]
Typical gameplay screenshot
Public interest in a modern remake of Speedball 2 was rekindled by a high-profile Half-Life 2 modification, SourceBall.[1] The SourceBall project began development in November 2004,[2] and garnered interest from both Valve Corporation (many of whom claimed to be fans of the original Speedball 2), and from Mike Montgomery of The Bitmap Brothers. SourceBall was featured in a Steam News article broadcast to the Steam community, and was used by Valve in their 2005 presentation at The Gathering in Norway. Following a change of leadership in early 2006, development on the SourceBall project ended, but public demand for a new version of Speedball 2 remained high.
In October 2006, Frogster Interactive announced that it had secured the rights to remake Speedball 2. Frogster has slated for release in Autumn 2007, and on April 27, 2007 released a trailer for Speedball 2. For the production of Speedball 2, Kylotonn assembled a new team of game designers and programmers. As eminent advisor and lead producer, Mike Montgomery from Bitmap Brothers is supervising all steps in the development of the game.
The title was changed to Speedball 2 Tournament in November 2007.[3]
Distribution [ edit ]
On 5 November 2007, Kylotonn and Valve released information that they would distribute the game via Steam and the end of November, 2007.[4] The game has since been delisted from Steam,[5] though no official announcement or justification for this seems to have been published.
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Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster Was Made By Virtuos
By Spencer . January 6, 2014 . 1:47am
When Siliconera spoke to Final Fantasy producer Yoshinori Kitase he said Square Enix partnered with an outside developer to create Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster. The company that handled the enhanced port was Virtuos, a Shanghai studio that worked on a couple of Ben 10 Ultimate Alien games and Wii ports of 2K sports games. Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster was the studio’s biggest project to date.
Interesting to note since Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster was a high profile project for Square Enix, but this isn’t the first time Square Enix worked with an outside company to handle Final Fantasy titles. Matrix Software developed the DS remakes and Tose handled the PsOne ports for Final Fantasy Anthology.
Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster came out on December 26 in Japan and is slated for release on March 18 in North America.
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Photo
Hillary Clinton holds a three-point edge over Senator Bernie Sanders in Iowa, a tightening of the race with roughly three weeks until voting begins, according to a new set of surveys of likely voters from NBC/The Wall Street Journal/Marist.
In the Republican contest, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has 28 percent of support and Donald J. Trump has 24 percent in Iowa, but Mr. Trump maintains a commanding 16-point lead over Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, his closest competitor, in New Hampshire, the surveys show.
Mr. Rubio is in third place in Iowa at 13 percent, with Ben Carson at 11 percent. The other candidates are at 5 percent or less in the state.
In Iowa, Mrs. Clinton has 48 percent of support and Mr. Sanders has 45 percent as the competition between the two has become more contentious. Martin O’Malley, the third Democratic presidential candidate, has 5 percent in Iowa, meaning he will most likely qualify for the next presidential debate.
But in New Hampshire, the survey also found Mr. Sanders at 50 percent, to 46 percent for Mrs. Clinton.
That margin is smaller than a recent Fox News survey, in which Mr. Sanders led Mrs. Clinton by 13 points. An NBC survey last month showed Mr. Sanders ahead by nine points in New Hampshire.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is hoping for a strong showing in New Hampshire to vault him into contention for the nomination, has 12 percent in the state; Mr. Cruz has 10 percent; and Jeb Bush and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio each had 9 percent.
Mr. Rubio is in third place in Iowa at 13 percent, with Ben Carson at 11 percent. The other candidates are at 5 percent or less in the state.
The surveys also found Mr. Sanders, buoyed by the support of independent voters, outperforms Mrs. Clinton in hypothetical general-election matchups in both states among registered voters.
In New Hampshire, Mr. Sanders, who is from neighboring Vermont, beats all three, while in Iowa he tops Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz and is tied with Mr. Rubio.
The surveys were conducted from Jan. 2 through Jan. 7. In Iowa, the survey of 456 likely Republican caucusgoers has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points; the survey of 422 likely Democratic caucusgoers also has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.
In New Hampshire, the poll of 569 likely Republican primary voters has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Of 425 likely Democratic primary voters, the margin of sampling error is 5 percentage points.
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Legalizing marijuana.jpg
Over half of Louisianians polls this month said they would be in favor of following in Colorado and Washington's footsteps in regulating and taxing the sale of recreational marijuana.
(Brennan Linsley, The Associated Press)
Most Louisianians believe the state's tough marijuana laws should be changed, according to poll results released Thursday by Public Policy Polling. The poll results were released just three months after lawmakers in Baton Rouge failed to pass legislation to lessen penalties for repeat offenders.
State law says anyone convicted of possessing any amount of marijuana -- even a single joint -- can be jailed up to six months on a first offense. A repeat offender can be sentenced up to five years and face up to a $2,500 fine, and anyone convicted three or more times is open to a 20-year jail sentence and up to a $5,000 fine.
Of those polled, 64 percent said they are against the strict penalties for repeat offenders and more than half said they would be in favor of a simple $100 fine for those found in possession of an ounce or less of marijuana.
While nearly half of respondents -- 47 percent -- said they would support putting a much lower cap on repeat offender penalties, more than half -- 53 percent -- said they would be in favor of following the example of Colorado and Washington in allowing pot to be regulated and taxed by the state.
Thirty-seven percent of respondents were opposed to both those propositions, but more checked the "not sure" box for the lowered penalties question than for legalization.
Those polled exhibited the highest level of support for medical marijuana, however, with 65 percent saying they would be in favor of seriously and terminally ill patients having access to it.
The laws governing pot possession and distribution are not likely to change any time soon. Last year, in an ill-fated attempt to ease penalties for repeat offenders, a New Orleans area lawmaker introduced legislation aimed at capping jail time for simple possession of marijuana at eight years and fines at $2,500.
It failed three times, the last time by just two votes. The Legislative Fiscal Office estimated the change would have saved the state $2.2 million in 2014 in reduced incarceration costs.
While PPP is a left-leaning polling firm, the demographics in Thursday's poll skewed right and white, with 80 percent classifying themselves as conservative or very conservative, and 72 percent as white.
While New Orleans and Baton Rouge metro areas represent around 44 percent of the state's overall population, it only accounted for 36 percent of the respondents contacted for the poll.
PPP is based in Raleigh, N.C., and often undertakes polling for Democratic candidates and politicians. It was recognized by Fordham University as providing the most accurate polling information during the 2012 presidential election.
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Business news website Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that both Sony Pictures and Comcast Corp.'s Universal film division have considered bidding for anime distribution company Funimation Entertainment. However, Universal has reportedly decided not to proceed with bidding.
According to Bloomberg, Funimation confirmed that it received "unsolicited interest from a variety of companies." Bloomberg posted the following statement from Funimation:
The Funimation management team is more immediately focused on continuing to create compelling experiences for anime fans through physical, digital/streaming and theatrical efforts with goals of continuing to expand globally and maximizing shareholder value.
As of press time, Funimation has not responded to ANN's request for comment.
Funimation and Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (UPHE) already have a multi-year agreement in which UPHE manages distribution of all Funimation DVD and Blu-ray releases. Funimation has also partnered with Sony DADC New Media Solutions to utilize the company's Ven.ue channel creation service for its streaming app.
Bloomberg reported that Funimation has seen growth upwards of 10% per year since 2013, and its annual sales exceed US$100 million. Funimation announced a streaming and home video partnership with Crunchyroll last September.
Source: Bloomberg Technology (Anousha Sakoui)
Thanks to One-Eye and jlaking for the news tip.
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After a year of campaigning, it's mostly over but the counting for the 13 candidates in the Conservative leadership race.
As the final few votes are cast in person and the tabulation machines set to work Saturday, here's what to watch for when the results are revealed at 5 p.m. ET from the convention in Toronto.
Points, not votes
Campaigns are working to pull every last vote out to the 14 polling stations open until 4 p.m. ET. But it's important to remember that when it comes time for the result, the number of votes cast is simply the means to the end.
Every riding is worth 100 points: the votes of members in that riding determine how many points each candidate gets for that constituency.
As candidates drop off through subsequent ballots, the points for that riding reallocate according to those voters' second, third or subsequently-ranked choices.
It's a race to see which candidate can rack up 50 per cent of the total points, not total votes. It takes 16,901 points to win the leadership.
Public opinion polling hasn't measured riding-level support, but campaigns have targeted votes riding-by-riding from the start.
There were 108 ridings with over 1,000 members up for grabs. There were also, however, about 75-80 constituencies with short membership rolls, where candidates could score a lot of points with relatively few votes.
Follow CBC's coverage
CBC's live coverage of the Conservative leadership convention continues Saturday with a CBC News special hosted by Peter Mansbridge starting at 4 p.m. ET. Watch livestreaming video here and follow the live blog, or watch on CBC News Network or Facebook. First ballot results are expected around 5:30 p.m. ET.
We'll have more streaming video, live updates and analysis at cbcnews.ca/politics.
Turnout
This race has over 259,000 eligible voters. Despite some voting difficulties, the party said over 132,000 ballots were received by Friday's mail deadline.
Several thousand members are expected to vote in person Saturday, bringing the expected voter turnout over 50 per cent.
Previous Next
The party's base membership was less than 100,000 before this race. A turnout significantly higher than that suggests many new members were engaged in picking this leader.
If the party exceeds a 50 per cent turnout rate, it can boast that more of its members were engaged in this race than the most recent races for the Liberal and NDP leaderships.
Front-runner Maxime Bernier has said he needs a good turnout among new members, including those who signed up to support Kevin O'Leary, in order to win.
A strong showing for candidates seen as friendly to the party establishment, such as Andrew Scheer or Erin O'Toole, could signal that the base turned out.
Dead ballots
The first announcement, promised around 5 p.m. ET, will rank and reveal the points for all 14 candidates (O'Leary dropped out too late to remove his name from the ballot.) The lowest-ranked candidate will drop off, and his or her votes will be reallocated to their second-choice candidates.
The winner will have been tabulated at this point, but the party isn't going to share it right away. Instead, to build drama and help members understand the result, it's going to be teased out gradually.
A second announcement, expected after a short break, will reveal the next six candidates to drop off. Those votes will be reallocated, and the candidate rankings could start to flip around.
The third announcement, which will lower the field to four remaining candidates (assuming no one has reached 50 per cent) may be the one to watch. Candidates with more significant support bases will bow out and more second and third choices will take effect. At this point, it will be more clear whose support is growing and whose may be stalled.
After that, announcements will drop candidates one by one.
Because no voter was obliged to mark more than one choice, and others may mark up to ten, it's difficult to predict how many ballots will still be alive in each round. A voter who marked only a few choices for candidates who drop off early will cease to be a factor later on.
The number of these so-called "dead ballots" may grow significantly near the end, meaning a smaller, perhaps much smaller, subgroup of voters may decide this race if it takes many rounds to produce a winner.
1st-ballot lead
Most expect Bernier to have the lead when the first choices are revealed.
But the size of his lead could indicate what's in store. If he gets over 35 per cent support he's going to be hard to beat. Even if he doesn't, a lead bigger than five points in combination with a strong second-choice showing could put Bernier over the top.
If he doesn't have this kind of a lead, the plot thickens.
Thirteen candidates are vying to replace Stephen Harper as permanent Conservative leader in Toronto 7:30
Watch for signs of overlapping support for like-minded candidates — social conservatives Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux for example. If Trost were to drop off first, Lemieux may see an uptick as Trost's supporters migrate to him as their second choice.
Counting snags
Much about this race has been complex: the large number of candidates, the ranked ballot, the larger-than-expected number of members eligible to vote and the logistics of combining a national mail vote across a huge country with in-person polling stations across multiple time zones.
Will the result be ready on time and unfold without a hitch?
Chad Rogers, a former Conservative campaign strategist, talks about how the leadership vote works 1:39
Some describe the party as overstaffed and well-prepared to deliver the results on time Saturday. Others worry that the machines will have a glitch, there will be difficulties with one of the polling stations or some other late-breaking controversy will bog things down.
Live broadcasters hope none of this happens. As the well-worn news cliche goes, time will tell.
Eligible voters by province:
Newfoundland and Labrador: 1,194.
Nova Scotia: 4,692.
Prince Edward Island: 1,188.
New Brunswick: 3,674.
Quebec: 16,412.
Ontario: 114,508.
Manitoba: 9,243.
Saskatchewan: 12,966.
Alberta: 59,448.
British Columbia: 34,686.
Nunavut: 52.
Northwest Territories: 302.
Yukon: 645.
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Hello there!
Running a tournament for the first time is really a special experience. While I have been busy with stuff, I did want to get the first article out as soon as possible.
MONTREAL (QC), CANADA — 12 competitors took part in the first open* mahjong tournament using riichi rules. Dominating Day 1 was a member of Montreal’s new wave of talent, Claudel B., with all first places. On Day 2, he managed to maintain his advance by retaining his points as well as he could. Congratulations to Claudel, the Canadian Champion, who has won a Junk Mat as a prize with his +112.3 points over 8 matches. Filling the podium are Sean H. from Waterloo (ON) in 2nd place with +71.1 points, along with a tie for third place between Marc-André D. from Montreal and Luke M. from Rochester (NY), USA with +63.2 points each.
The tournament welcomed 3 players from the United States, as well as one from outside the province of Quebec, proving that Montreal is definitely going to continue growing as one of the continent’s poles of attraction for future growth at the club and in tournaments aiming to welcome players from Canada, the Unites States, as well as eventually Europe and abroad. The rules used were a suitable hybrid between local Montreal rules and practices (e.g.: inclusion of daisharin), and the rules used at the 2014 WRC in Puteaux, France (atama-hane, 15-5 uma, tenpai-renchan, no kazoe yakuman, no aborts, no weird stuff [so no ryanhan shibari or paarenchan]), while fixing the rules regarding tile exposures from any wall and the call priority (3.0 seconds BUT only 0.5 seconds to override).
The organizer (and author of this article) says: “Making sure this first tournament was a success was very important not only to me, but to the participants involved as well as some non-participants who provided critical support. My goal was to launch the first of many tournaments (not just for us but to see similar initiatives across the continent) that met the same organizational standards as tournaments in Europe (3 month advance notice, open to all, 16+ participants). While that goal was almost accomplished, historically speaking, Denmark also had 12-person tournaments for a while in 2008. I can therefore say I am totally satisfied by the event’s success, its result, as well as its eventual future.”
Speaking of the future, the next North American Riichi Open in Montreal can be planned for in advance: the date is 90% certain to be June 4-5, 2016 (the 10% uncertainty is due to scheduling away from the F1 Grand Prix weekend).
We hope to see more of you here next year, you might be able to stand on the podium too, the replica podium in front of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium as seen below!
To contact the organizing team for information and planning for the next event in 2016, please contact us using this year’s tournament e-mail, at: tournoi2015 ## riichi # ca (substitute usual symbols in the address). We plan on informing people well in advance with the explicit goal of obtaining registrations as soon as possible for next year, with an early bird special prior to February 29, 2016.
Rank Name Score (thousands) 1 Claudel B. 112.3 2 Sean H. 71.1 3.5 Marc-André D. 63.2 3.5 Luke M. 63.2 5 Senechal D. 56.5 6 Shan K. 37.8 7 Kyuu 28.7 8 Alex B. -21.7 9 Anne R. -30.4 10 Dasuke -38.9 11 Anne-Marie D. -167.7 12 Patrick M. -187.1
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Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism
Theists hate moral relativism. They often accuse atheists and secularists of having it. For them, only the pseudo-moral absolutism of Divine Command Theory, where God’s commands decree morality, seems to work in defining some sort of objective morality.
The problem is, though, that they aren’t very consistent. Because, it turns out, they actually adhere to something which I like to call (via Justin Schieber) Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism.
Atheist: Hey there, Christian, what’re ya doing eating that there shellfish, whilst wearing mixed cloth? Haven’t you taken on board the 613 odd rules from Leviticus?
Christian: Chuh, that’s so naive. Haven’t you heard of the New Testament? A testament is a covenant, an agreement with God. With Jesus, the Old Testament, as an agreement, was superseded by the new one. The old rules have been superseded by the new ones.
Atheist: Really? Wow. Who knew. So Jesus was lying when he said “every jot and title of the Law” would be fulfilled in and by him?
Christian: Well…
Atheist: Oh, and that means that what you did believe was good and right immediately became bad or not good and right when, what? When Jesus came to pass away, to die? When the book was released? When it was written? When exactly? Because I remember it mentioning someone getting killed for picking up sticks on a Sabbath. Shall we go and kill all those working in the supermarkets today? Doesn’t your Mum work in ASDA today? Why doesn’t God strike her down? Or what was a sin in that cultural milieu is no longer a sin? I get it! To me, it looks like what was good and right as a moral truth worked for one set of people in a geographical and historical location, but not for another. The second set of geographical and historically contextualised people (yourself included) appear to have a different set of rights and wrongs. Who’s to say that yours won’t be superseded? This looks like, ya know, moral relativism.
Christian: Um. Yeah, but God said it. Apparently. Or something.
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Macky Weaver will resign from the Jacksonville Jaguars later this month, according to a press release by the team. Weaver, former owner Wayne Weaver's nephew, has been with the Jaguars for the past 19 years in an executive role.
"Macky Weaver is one of a handful of people who can say they helped put the Jaguars on the map here in Jacksonville, and he should always be very proud of that," Jaguars owner Shad Khan said in a team release. "I'll always appreciate his personal efforts to introduce me to the community and make me feel at home as the new owner of the
Jaguars."
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The Jaguars also announced two executive promotions and a new hire in the release, as the team hired Hussain Naqi, Chad Johnson, and Megha Parekh in different roles.
Naqi was promoted to Senior Vice President of Fan Engagement, and has been with the team since 2012. Naqi spent the previous four years as the Vice President of Business Planning and General Counsel at MetLife Stadium. He will oversee the Jaguars' game day experience, which includes game day lines of business, game presentation, fan engagement activities, guest service and security. Naqi will also in overseeing the Jaguars fan development in the United Kingdom during the London series.
Johnson was promoted to the Senior Vice President of Ticket Sales and will be responsible for sales in all ticketing areas, including suites, premium seating, season tickets, and group and single game tickets, as well as the service and ticket operations portion of the business. Johnson has extensive experience in sales with the Miami Marlins, Florida Panthers, and Tampa Bay Lightning.
Parekh was hired as the Jaguars Vice President and General Counsel and has been a member of Proskauer LLP since 2009, which as a firm represents a wide array of professional sports leagues and teams. While at Proskauer, Parekh worked on things such as public and private company acquisitions, and equity and debt financing. Parekh will be joining the Jaguars officially on March 1, and was named to Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 Sports List last December. The list set out to identify those who "represent the entrepreneurial, creative and intellectual best of their generation." Parekh graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and was a sports writer for The Harvard Crimson as well as interning with the Boston Red Sox.
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Microsoft is currently putting the finishing touches on its next big Windows 10 update. Codenamed Threshold 2, Paul Thurrott reports that the update will arrive in November. The Verge can confirm Microsoft is planning to distribute the update to existing Windows 10 machines in early November, and likely during the first week of next month.
The update will contain a number of fixes and UI changes that were originally planned for the final version of Windows 10. These include colored title bars for desktop apps, improved context menus, and an extra column of Live Tiles for the Start menu. Microsoft will also ship Messaging and Skype Video apps for the Windows 10 update that bring native Skype calling and messaging to the operating system.
No extensions for Microsoft Edge until next year
While Microsoft had promised extensions for its Microsoft Edge browser, the software giant is now planning to include these in an update planned for next year. Microsoft Edge will get some tweaks with the November update, or "Windows 10 Fall Update" as Microsoft will label it, but they're not significant changes. Cortana will also be updated with the ability to send texts to friends from a PC with a Windows 10 Mobile device.
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At the end of the third quarter, when the New England Patriots already led, 38-7, and with the rain falling so hard it looked like a solid wall of mist and fog, Indianapolis Colts punter Pat McAfee launched one 57 yards through the weather toward Julian Edelman, who fielded the ball and headed upfield. Off to one side, New England special-teams ace Brandon Bolden spotted Indianapolis linebacker Andy Studebaker closing in on Edeprilman. Studebaker, alas, did not see Bolden, who utterly obliterated him, freeing Edelman for a 45-yard return, and making a play that came to define New England’s eventual 45-7 win, at least in the way Bolden described it.
“I saw it coming,” he said. “I knew it was going to be bad, but then it got real, real bad in a hurry.”
More on the Super Bowl Barnwell’s Super Bowl Breakdown
Belichick: The Great Defender
Giving Vince Wilfork His Due
Marshawn Lynch and the Media
Cousin Sal’s SB Prop Bets
Beware the Visor: Kam Chancellor
Among the Lurchers at Media Day
Pats and Seahawks Weaknesses
NFL Defense Championship Belt
Matthew Slater: Mr. Special Teams
Story of the First Tackle
How Belichick Rules the Draft
‘You Mad, Bro?’ Revisited
Pierce on the Deflatriots Farce
The Pats’ Homegrown Linebackers
More on the Super Bowl That was the game. People saw it coming. People knew it was going to be bad, but then it got real, real bad in a hurry. The Colts were obliterated as surely as Studebaker was. Meanwhile, the Patriots leave the field entwined in a legacy that is still green and still growing. This will be the team’s eighth appearance in the nation’s most prominent exercise in hype and nachos, and this is an operation that, 25 years ago, was being peddled to any city in America where they could find suckers who didn’t know how bad the Patriots really were. (My memory goes back to the days when the Boston Patriots once played a game in Birmingham, Alabama, and not a soul in Massachusetts knew they were out of town.) This will be the sixth Super Bowl for Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, which is more than any other quarterback-coach combination in NFL history. Brady has won more postseason games than any other quarterback. Belichick has won more playoff games than any other coach. If the Patriots win in Arizona, the two of them will have won four of these things, and will have legitimate claims at being the best ever at their jobs. (“Do your job!” is this year’s New England slogan, and, yes, you will be sick of it long before kickoff in Glendale.)
This is not a denouement you anticipate when you’re a sixth-round draft pick, and Belichick is still not all that long removed from having his entire franchise pulled out from under him in Cleveland. In the long arc of history, then, this isn’t a conventional ugly-duckling tale. In this one, the duckling grows up to be an F-16 and it strafes the record books into shreds and confetti. It really is one hell of a thing.
“I haven’t had too much time to reflect,” Brady said. “I think we’re right in the middle of it.”
It was not very much of a contest, especially by comparison to the turnover-laden hysterics in Seattle. (There will not be a better or more charming sight in the NFL this year than that of Seattle’s Michael Bennett, riding a bicycle around the field after the game.) Brady threw a bad interception deep in Indianapolis territory early on, and the Patriots led only 17-7 at the half. But they also were the only team on the field that looked like it had any kind of plan at all. There was a palpable sense of hanging on around the Colts. The rain fell harder, and you could see it coming, and then it got real, real bad in a hurry.
“Being in the rain? Running the ball? Walking out and hitting people?” said New England lineman Ryan Wendell. “It’s always fun.”
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Elsa/Getty Images
Let us leave the legacy business for another day and consider the remarkable story of LeGarrette Blount, who last night — on a night that was made for people who are 6 feet tall, weigh 250 pounds, and cut back like a NASCAR truck racer — ran for 148 yards, many of them after he’d already been hit by one Colt or another. (He at one point even gained 4 yards running backward with two Indianapolis defenders draped on him.) He scored three times. After the game, he stood in his locker with his new gray “AFC CHAMPIONS” cap on his head, the tag still prominent upon it, and told the winding tale of how he wound up back in New England.
“You get a different feeling here,” Blount said, the living definition of a slop-eating grin on his face. “You know you’re among people you can trust. You know there’s always somebody there who has your back, that there are lots of people who have your back.”
Ah, you say. Might this not always have been the case? Blount smiled again, his mouth as festooned as a Mardi Gras Indian with metaphorical canary feathers. “You’re not going to get me to say it,” he said. “It’s not going to happen.”
He has lived his career knowing that, somewhere out in file cabinets he’s never seen, there are notepads and memo sheets with his name on them, and that not all that’s written in those files is complimentary. It started when he was at Oregon. In the opening game of the 2009 season, when Blount was a senior, he flattened a Boise State player who was talking junk at him after beating the Ducks. This gained Blount not only admission to the YouTube Endless Reiteration Hall of Fame, but also a year’s suspension from the team. It also probably cost Blount a spot in the draft the following spring. He bounced around as an undrafted free agent, first with the Tennessee Titans, and then in Tampa Bay. He was traded to the Patriots in April of 2013, which is when the story really gets interesting.
Blount was a revelation in several games last year, especially against Buffalo late in the season, when he not only rushed for 189 yards from scrimmage, but also returned two kickoffs for 145 additional yards. His work with the Patriots was good enough to get him a fat two-year deal with Pittsburgh. Almost immediately, things got weird. Last August, while driving to the airport to catch the team plane to an exhibition game, Blount and sophomore running back Le’Veon Bell got popped for weed during a traffic stop. This, of course, frightened the Pittsburgh front office to death. There was a lot of anonymous whispering that Blount was not a good influence on a valuable rookie like Bell. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Blount’s playing time diminished, and his carries dwindled down to a precious few. This managed to increase the flow of bad blood in both directions. Finally, last November 17, Blount simply walked out early in a game against the Titans. Fed up, the Steelers released him, and Blount left town in a hail of anathemas and empty Iron City cans. Two days later, he re-signed with the Patriots for two years.
So if you’re keeping score at home, the LeGarrette Blount Career Path goes like this:
Join the league.
Play well in New England.
Sign with Pittsburgh.
Get busted.
Get pissed.
Walk off.
Get released.
Sign with New England.
Go to Super Bowl.
This is a great country. Truly, it is.
Last night, Blount goes rumbling through the mist and drear like he’d never left, and after the game, he stands in front of his locker and does not have a bad word to say about anyone, although he’s thinking of lots of bad words to say about lots of somebodies. There is an unmistakable joyful strain of hinky in LeGarrette Blount’s career at this point. If you are inclined to believe in the dark powers of Bill Belichick, you can set up all kinds of plots and machinations in your mind, and we have only two entire weeks to come up with new ones. Just don’t ask LeGarrette Blount about them. He’s not talking. He’s just grinning there, beneath his dreadlocks, and that’s another thing. Between Richard Sherman and Marshawn Lynch of the Seahawks, and Blount and Bolden on New England, this Super Bowl is going to be the greatest moment for dreads since they launched Reggae Sunsplash in Montego Bay back in 1978. I guarantee you, somebody at media day will ask a question about that, and that person may well be dressed as a carrot. You can see it coming. And you know it’s going to be weird, and then it will get real, real weird in a hurry. LeGarrette Blount should feel right at home.
This article has been updated to reflect that Le’Veon Bell played in his second year, not rookie year, this season.
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Superhero Costumes How cool would it be if you dressed just like your superhero on Halloween? It would be like bringing a cool dream to life. After all, how many times do you get a chance to save the world? There's a whole range of cool options to choose from - Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Hulk and Thor. With such a multitude of Halloween costume ideas, you can become a different superhero every day, packed with a new superpower. Fly around to any part of the world or discover a new universe. Fight crime and knock out the living daylights out of every hated villain. Establish a legion of justice - wherever you go. The criminal will tremble when they hear your name. Remember, each superhero costume has its own hidden super power. Choose from Avengers costumes, Batman costumes, Superman Costumes, Wonder Woman outfits, Black Panther costumes and more. Read More...
Superheroes are loved by everybody. They are your knights in shining armor. They save you whenever you are in trouble. So what would you like to be this Halloween? Do you like Superman with a body stronger than steel, eyes whose gaze can melt iron, the mighty son of Jor-El from planet Krypton? Or would you like to wear Batman Halloween costume? His fighting style, extreme tenacity and super fast brain make him a solid opponent. Or you could become Spiderman on Halloween and chase criminals with your spider sense. There are hundreds of awesome superhero costume ideas. Kids love genius Iron Man costume, great patriot Captain America costume, smashing Hulk costume and thundering Thor costume. Choose from various muscle chest costumes and superhero jumpsuits. We got amazing Halloween costume collection for men, women, kids and toddlers. You can definitely plan a family costume theme and you will find Superhero costumes in all sizes here. No other costume theme can beat timeless Superhero costume theme. All Halloween costume parties always expect several Superheroes for powerful celebration. We got exclusive collection of female superhero costumes for women and teen girls. Kids will look adorable in our cute little superhero outfits.
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February has just begun, and we’re feeling competitive. And you know what that means, time for another competition! It’s time for the Eyewire Winter Games! So start doing finger stretches, polish your spectacles, and make sure you have the mental fortitude to play hard, win big, and accumulate masses of points, badges, and bragging rights when you take home the gold at the Eyewire games!
The Games kick off on February 7th at noon EST. We have a variety of Eyewire challenges in store for you including a Relay, Bobsled Buddy challenge, and a marathon to see if we can complete a whole cell in just 26.2 hours!
Login for Trivia from nkem’s @inquizator on the hour every 3 hours at the following times US EST: noon, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm, midnight, 3am, 6am and 9 am every day of the winter games on eyewire.org.
Check out a full schedule of events on the interactive calendar or scroll down for overviews:
(You can click on any of the calendared events to go to the description of that event). All times US EST.
Many events are based on points earned — remember that you can earn double points by playing the Starburst Challenge.
Relay
DURATION: noon, Feb 7 – noon, Feb 9th
DESCRIPTION:
3 players over 3 hours
start any time within 48 hour window
most points wins
one hour per player, players must play back to back, sum scores
*If for any reason your partners don’t show up, we’ll allow you to reschedule*
PRIZE: 6K for each player on 1st place team; 4K for 2nd place; 2K for 3rd place.
Signup here. Full event description.
Buddy Games
DURATION: midnight, Feb 10 – midnight Feb 12
DESCRIPTION:
2 players, 48 hours
most combined points wins
PRIZE:
bonus of the sum total of points scored between you and your buddy over 48h
each member of winning team earns +25K points; 2nd place: +15K; 3rd place: +5K
Sign up here. Full description.
Trivia Days
In addition to trivia every three hours, we’re hosting four special trivia events.
DURATION: Feb 13 at 10 am and 10 pm; Feb 20 at 10 am and 10 pm. 60 minutes each; a question every two minutes.
DESCRIPTION:
the @inquizitor asks a question every 2 minutes
private message your answer using /msg inquizitor YOUR ANSWER GOES HERE.
Short answer – no need for complete sentences
PRIZES:
1st correct answer wins +300 points; 2nd correct answer wins +200; 3rd wins +100
Full game description.
Girls vs Boys Valentine’s Special
DURATION: 1-4 pm, Feb 14
DESCRIPTION:
ladies vs gentlemen
most points wins
PRIZES:
each player on winning team earns +7K points.
top player on each team wins +1400 points
Declare your team here. Full description.
Winter Hunt
DURATION: 12:01 am, Feb 15 – 11:59 pm Feb 16 (48h)
DESCRIPTION:
hunt for mergers (what?) on neuron called The Hunt
message @nkem_test with coordinates
PRIZES:
win +1,000 points for each merger you successfully identify
top players will be promoted to scouts. some scouts may be promoted to order of the scythe
Full event description. Get the 101 on previous hunts here.
Evil Cubes
DURATION: 12:01 am Feb 17 – 11:59 pm Feb 23
DESCRIPTION:
complete 10 of GrimReapers most sinister cubes
win by accuracy
PRIZES:
most accurate player wins +6,000 points; 2nd place wins +4K; 3rd wins +2K
all players who complete all cubes win +1K points
Full event description here.
Cube Race
DURATION: 12:01 am Feb 18, 24h
DESCRIPTION:
do as many cubes as you can and win lots and lots of bonuses
PRIZES:
20 cubes: 1,000 points
50 cubes: 2,000 points
100 cubes: 4,000 points
150 cubes: 8,000 points
200 cubes: 16,000 points
Every Additional 50 cubes: 2,000 points
Most cubes wins +3K, 2nd wins +2K, 3rd wins +1K
Full event description here.
Marathon
DURATION: 9:47 pm, Feb 20 – 11:59 pm Feb 22
DESCRIPTION:
complete a full neuron in 26.2 hours. seriously.
PRIZES:
if we complete the neuron…
Top ⅓ of all players will receive a gold badge and 20,000 points
Middle ⅓ of all players will receive a silver badge and 15,000 points
Bottom ⅓ of all players (must have completed at least 20 cubes to qualify) will receive a bronze badge and 10,000 points
Full game description here.
10K Challenge
DURATION: 12:01 am Feb 23, 24h
DESCRIPTION:
score 10K points
PRIZES:
win a bonus of however many points you scored in 24h
Full event description here.
Special Happy Hours
DURATION: Feb 12 and Feb 19, 2 – 4 pm
*Special Rules for these special Happy Hours*
Score over 1000, get 500 point bonus
Score over 2500, get 1000 point bonus
Score over 5000, get 2500 point bonus
Score over 10,000, get 5,000 point bonus
Every 1,000 points over 10,000, win an additional 500 point bonus
Additional 3000 for top player, on top of other bonuses
Additional 2000 for 2nd top player, on top of other bonuses
Additional 1000 for 3rd top player, on top of other bonuses
Full Happy Hour Descriptions here.
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See you at the podium!
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Fadnavis also promises to transform the city’s infrastructure. “My agenda for Mumbai has a two-pronged approach. One is to develop more space for commercial purpose as well as housing purpose and second is to improve the public transport structure in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) so that workers and executives from private and public sector can function more efficiently,” he said. “Commercial spaces must be developed for business and financial services sector so that the lease rates become affordable.Only one or two new central business areas have been developed in the last 20 years. There is a lot of scope to develop more such areas in the MMR region.”He also wants to slash commute times drastically. “I am going to push for the trans-harbour link which will connect Navi Mumbai to south Mumbai.”Also, financial centres allow unfettered currency trade and movement of capital at will, which India doesn’t permit.For full convertibility of the rupee, the Indian macro economy has to become more stable.Besides, inflation and fiscal deficit need to moderate from current levels. Modern financial products such as derivatives trading in currencies, bonds, credit default swaps are all tightly regulated currently in India.“The regulations will have to have the right framework to welcome necessary products,” said SBI’s Bhattacharya. But any relaxation in the rules may be difficult, given that recent developments have given financial innovation a bad name.“It is still premature to talk about it,” said a member of the Mistry committee, who did not want to be identified. “We are not there yet to go for capital account convertibility. The philosophy is inapplicable today.”The Mistry committee had laid out a schedule in its report. In the first phase, 2007-2012, Mumbai would link India’s financial system to the markets of Frankfurt, Paris and Tokyo, which are not full-fledged global centres. In the second phase, 2012-2020, Mumbai was to develop the capacity to compete with London, New York and Hong Kong for international financial services business beyond meeting India’s needs.“Over the decades, India has built up a licence-permit raj in finance,” said the report. “It over-emphasises compliance at the expense of competence, competition and innovation in financial services. A similar raj dominated the real economy since independence. But it was dismantled during the 1990s to the immense benefit of the Indian economy and particularly Indian global competitiveness.To achieve the same objectives, that raj in finance now needs to be dismantled if India is to develop IFS (international financial services) provision and export capabilities and if an IFC is to emerge in Mumbai.”Regulatory aversion to fancy financial products and the need for near-constant oversight of trading activities have kept the market small. With Raghuram Rajan as Reserve Bank of India governor, that may change.“This might be a strange time to talk about rupee internationalisation, but we have to think beyond the next few months,” Rajan said at the peak of the currency crisis last year. “We intend to continue the path of steady liberalisation.We cannot create depth by banning position taking, or mandating trading based only on well-defined ‘legitimate’ needs. Money is fungible, so such bans get subverted, but at some level, all investment is an act of faith and of risk taking.”Even if Fadnavis delivers on his pledge to build infrastructure, it won’t be possible to turn Mumbai into an international finance centre unless RBI and the central government can create an atmosphere of stable and light regulation in a short span.“The road to financial innovation in the 21st century cannot be travelled at any speed by regulation that results in India’s financial firms remaining the equivalents of antediluvian Ambassadors and Fiats in India’s financial services industry when the rest of the world is using BMWs and Ferraris,” said the Mistry panel. “Every year, the gap between Mumbai and London is growing, not narrowing.”
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Not only is Song-bong Choi almost destined to be a instant sensation, but he's got an amazing story as well.
The song below, performed on Korea's Got Talent, brought tears to nearly every eye in the room. Choi's voice simply astounds, proving that you really never know who has an amazing talent.
But he's a bit more than the next Susan Boyle. Choi's story by itself could bring you tears.
He refers to himself as a "manual worker" and has been living on his own since he was five years old. At one point, he describes how he had to sleep in public restrooms to find shelter.
It's hard to watch the video of 22-year-old Choi's performance below and not be shocked, stunned, and touched.
WATCH (Prepare to be blown away at about 3:00):
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It is often remarked that Americans will elect almost anyone except an atheist. Only one of the 535 members of the current Congress professes to be religiously unaffiliated.
Polls consistently show Americans want their political leaders to be religious. This applies even to the purportedly secularist Democratic Party. Though the figure has been declining, no less than 53% of Democrat supporters still say it is important for their candidate to have strong religious beliefs.
This should be yet another advantage for Hillary Clinton. Of all the qualities she brings to the election race, one of the least-remarked-upon is her religiosity. A lifelong Methodist, she is by all accounts a committed and sincere churchgoer.
The contrast with Donald Trump is stark. He might call himself a Presbyterian, but few can recall seeing Trump in the pews. The twice-divorced casino magnate regularly muddles his scriptural citations. And at one church in Iowa, he almost put money in the communion plate.
Yet here, as elsewhere, the race has defied conventional wisdom. Evangelicals are flocking to the Republican. Meanwhile, the so-called “nones” – those who identify as atheists, agnostic or nothing in particular – are siding with the Democrat.
Religion in the Clinton campaign
Clinton’s failure to win over religious voters has not been for lack of trying. At key moments through her career she has spoken openly of her faith. In a 2014 interview, she named the Bible as the biggest influence on her thinking.
At other times Clinton has described the role of theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich in driving her commitment to social justice. Unlike Trump, she knows scripture well enough to impress religiously minded voters at campaign stops. Put simply, she is fluent in religion in a way that her opponent is not.
Furthermore, her campaign has reflected this commitment, even if in a muted tone. Religion was everywhere at the Democratic Convention. The Democratic Faith Council held panels on religion and politics while Catholic nuns drew attention to the problem of social injustice.
Using religiously inflected language, a Protestant minister called on delegates to:
… shock this nation with the power of love.
Vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine spoke at length about his Roman Catholic faith and his missionary work in Central America.
Clinton herself summed up her credo with a Methodist motto:
Do all the good we can, in all the ways we can, for all the people we can.
In the midst of all this God-talk, it was revealed that the Democrat National Committee had been using religion in a more negative way. Hacked emails showed that committee members tried to discredit Bernie Sanders during the primary campaign by drawing attention to his supposed atheism.
Trump and the religious right
In the heady post-convention days, the Democrats dared to dream of peeling off elements of the religious right from their opponents. This dream is now clearly over.
With only a few exceptions, leaders of the religious right have endorsed Trump. One survey from mid-August shows Trump beating Clinton by a margin of 63-17 amongst white religious conservatives.
This has occurred despite the fact that hardly any voters see Trump as particularly religious. During the primary season, only 5% of Republican voters described Trump as “very religious”, compared to 47% for Ben Carson. There is little evidence that Trump’s belated attempt at Jesus-speak since then has shifted their opinion.
Explaining this evangelical embrace of Trump might be one of the larger puzzles of this campaign. One solution is that evangelicals have morphed into values voters instead of faith voters. Conservative Christians will now turn out for any candidate offering a return to a past America where discipline and order reigned, and where white lives mattered most.
It helps that Trump has promised the religious right much of what it wants. Under a President Trump, bakers will never be forced to sell wedding cakes to gay couples.
Even more than the plight of pious cake-makers, the religious right has been fretting about an obscure clause in the federal tax code, Section 501 c(3). Passed in 1954 at the urging of Senator Lyndon Johnson, the clause bans tax-exempt organisations such as churches from overtly supporting candidates for political office. Become too partisan, and you start paying tax.
Trump has promised to rescind this troubling restraint on religious freedom.
The times they are a-changin’
In the end, the fact that so much of the religious vote will go to the obviously less religious candidate says a lot about this race.
For much of the right, dislike of Clinton outweighs everything else. At the same time, very few appear to believe her when she talks about her faith.
The religious vote is typical in another way as well. Just as growing racial diversity has helped the Democrats, a steady decline in religiosity amongst young Americans might be having the same effect.
The latest survey shows the number of young Americans who are religiously unaffiliated is on the rise. Only 27% of young millennials (born 1990-1996) attend a weekly religious service compared to 51% of the so-called “silent generation” (born 1928-45).
Clinton has tried to win over the faith community. But if the trend towards a less religious America continues, future Democrat candidates may not even need to bother.
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To a certain extent, the old adage “out of sight, out of mind” is unavoidable for anyone, but we don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Western society and especially the American public, exhibit a generalized ignorance to events taking place beyond their borders that’s completely out of synch with the degree to which most Westerners have easy access to information. That is, if the US public cared to know what was going on outside of suburbia and beyond the Starbucks drive-throughs and the strip mall Targets they most certainly could find out, but that would likely mean discovering all manner of really inconvenient and often disturbing things and so, at the end of the day, willful ignorance allows everyone to perpetuate the myth that everything is fine. For its part, the media is more than happy to expose harsh realities as long as they’re conducive to ratings so, for instance, “unarmed black teen shot 18 times by angry white police officer” works well, while “Syria’s bloody civil war continues unabated” does not because to the largely ignorant public, Syria might as well be Mars and if for some inexplicable reason, life or death ended up coming down to being able to correctly identify Syria on an unlabeled map, well, it would be time to start praying.
Sometimes, however, the media stumbles across or, more likely, is fed an image or a series of images that are so indelible that they’re forced to run them, and the public consciousness is, if but for a fleeting moment, jarred out of its perpetual stupor. That’s what happened in 2013 when YouTube videos appeared to show the victims of a so-called “gas attack” that Bashar al-Assad decided, apparently out of the clear blue sky, to launch on his own people even though were the story true, it would seem to have been a rather peculiar strategy given that the strongman was fully aware that the US was just waiting on an excuse to launch a few cruise missiles. Then, a little more than two years later, we got another example of imagery powerful enough to focus the public’s attention on a far-away civil war when the body of a drowned toddler washed up on a beach in Turkey.
And even though connecting the proverbial dots isn’t something everyday Westerners are particularly adept at, it wasn’t too difficult for the media to paint the picture: 1) drowned toddler was a refugee, 2) there’s a refugee crisis thanks largely to a war going on in a place called Syria which isn’t on Mars but is in fact in the Middle East, 3) this place called Syria is where ISIS is, 4) the Russians are there too. It would be difficult to come up with a narrative more conducive to rallying public support for an invasion if you were trying. And indeed, maybe someone was trying, because as Reuters reports, the drowned child’s father might not have been a fleeing migrant after all, but rather a people smuggler and Aylan might have been on the boat not because his family intended to save their child from the horrific violence escalating daily in Syria, but rather because profiting off of other people’s misery was his father’s chosen profession and he often brought his family along for the ride. Reuters has the story, excerpts from which are presented below.
Via Reuters:
The father of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi was working with smugglers and driving the flimsy boat that capsized trying to reach Greece, other passengers on board said, in an account that disputes the version he gave last week. Ahmed Hadi Jawwad and his wife, Iraqis who lost their 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son in the crossing, told Reuters that Abdullah Kurdi panicked and accelerated when a wave hit the boat, raising questions about his claim that somebody else was driving the boat. A third passenger confirmed their version of events, which Reuters could not independently verify. "The story that (Aylan's father) told is untrue. I don't know what made him lie, maybe fear," Jawwad said in Baghdad at his in-laws' house on Friday. "He was the driver from the very beginning until the boat sank." He said Kurdi swam to them and begged them to cover up his true role in the incident. His wife confirmed the details. Jawwad said his point of contact with the smugglers was called Abu Hussein. "Abu Hussein told me that he (Kurdi) was the one who organized this trip," he said. Amir Haider, 22, another Iraqi who said he was on the same boat, confirmed Jawwad's account and identified Kurdi as the driver. He told Reuters by telephone from Istanbul that he initially thought Kurdi was Turkish because he was not speaking, but later heard him talking to his wife in Syrian Arabic. A photo of Aylan Kurdi's body in the surf off a popular Turkish holiday resort prompted sympathy and outrage at the perceived inaction of developed nations in helping thousands of refugees using dangerous sea-routes to reach Europe, many of whom have fled Syria's four-year civil war.
And more from The Daily Telegraph:
THE father of the three-year-old boy whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach, rocking the whole world to its core, has been accused of being a people smuggler who captained the fateful voyage. A woman who lost two of her three children on the vessel made the stunning claims to Network Ten via her cousin, who lives in Sydney, on Friday night. It was claimed on Friday night that his father Abdullah was a people smuggler who captained the dodgy boat for its entire voyage, capsizing in heavy seas and killing at least 12 people. Iraq-based Zainab Abbas, via her Sydney-based cousin Lara Tahseen, told Ten News she paid $10,000 for the voyage and Aylan’s father was in charge of the boat. “He was a smuggler, yes, he was the one driving the boat,’’ she said. She claimed a separate people smuggler to whom they paid the money had told them the captain was taking his own children on the voyage. “He said ‘don’t worry, the captain of the boat, the driver, is going to bring his two kids and his wife,” she said. The woman claimed the boat was travelling faster than its capabilities and had too many desperate asylum seekers on board. The family of five was told there would only be six on the boat but when they got on there were 14. “He was going crazy, like speed,” she said. “He was the one driving the boat right from the start. When they set off five minutes in he was looking left and right, worried, then he was speeding. Even his wife was screaming at him to slow down,” she said. Ms Tahseen said when the family arrived in Istanbul they phoned a number they were told was Mr Kurdi’s but another man answered. They paid this man the money and he told them when they arrived at the island they were heading for, on which they would move to another boat to go to Greece, to phone him. He and Mr Kurdi would then split the money, Ms Tahseen claimed. The trip was only supposed to take 15 minutes.
Now obviously, what happened to Aylan (and to an untold number of other refugees fleeing the Mid-East) is a tragedy and whether or not his father was the man driving the boat and profiting from the refugee crisis or was in fact a victim fleeing war like everyone else doesn’t change that (and in many ways, if the above account is true, Aylan's fate is actually even more tragic), but what is does change is the narrative being fed to the public.
It also seems - again, assuming the story outlined above is accurate - that it's possible Kurdi brought his family on the trip in order to make those paying him for the ride more confident in his ability to get them from Turkey to Greece safely. "If I was a people smuggler, why would I put my family in the same boat as the other people?" Kurdi asked MailOnline. That's a good question, but one (admittedly macabre) explanation is that it was a kind of people smuggling marketing ploy, something along the lines of this: "you know you can trust me because I have my own family on board." A less conspiratorial take on that theory would be that he did intend to get his family out of the Mid-East and so he simply overloaded the boat because the collective safety of the passangers was secondary to getting his family out of harm's way, but even if that's the case, the exact opposite ended up happening because by putting too many people on the boat, he inadvertently doomed Aylan, and besides, anyway you look at it, he was looking to make $5,000 off of the other passengers' desperation.
Coming full circle, the greatest tragedy here is that the entire episode will be used as an excuse to drop still more bombs on Syria and eventually to justify a ground invasion and because the public can't see past the various smokescreens being employed here, Americans and Europeans will end up tacitly accepting the patently ridiculous idea that the best way to stem the flow of refugees is to bomb the place from which the refugees are fleeing.
Of course the entire thing is made even more absurd by the verifiable fact that it was the West which destabilized Syria in the first place meaning Washington along with its European allies are now set to use a massive refugee crisis of their own making to create a still more massive refugee crisis by effectively doubling down on efforts to destabilize the country on the way to ousting Assad. And with that bolded passage in mind, we bring you what is quite possibly the most ironic statement to ever come from the mouth of a sitting US president:
Obama on Friday: "We are going to be engaging Russia to let them know that you can’t continue to double down on a strategy that’s doomed to failure in Syria."
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A massive $81 billion disaster aid bill will be broken out and have a separate vote. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP House Republicans ditch partisan spending plan ahead of shutdown
Facing opposition within their own ranks — and a potential government shutdown — House Republicans are once again changing their strategy on a funding bill.
Gone is the plan for a bill funding the Pentagon for the rest of the fiscal year and other government agencies until mid-January. Now House Republicans will extend funding only until Jan. 19 for the whole government, hoping the new strategy will produce enough support to stave off a funding lapse come midnight Friday.
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A massive $81 billion disaster aid bill will be broken out and have a separate vote. There is surprisingly strong opposition to that package, which was unveiled by the House Appropriations Committee only on Monday.
It is still unclear whether GOP leaders will include funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program as part of the new funding bill. And while some defense programs are expected to get a boost under the plan, those details are still under wraps.
A proposal to reauthorize so-called Section 702 spying powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will go as a standalone bill as well.
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A Senate plan to add bipartisan Obamacare stabilization funds to the funding bill — known as a continuing resolution — looks dead on arrival in the House. That is likely to spur a tense legislative back-and-forth in the final hours before funding is set to expire this week.
The change in direction shows once again how difficult it is for House Speaker Paul Ryan to get anything through the House, especially if he is relying on GOP votes alone.
Republican House leaders had planned to hold a vote Wednesday on the initial funding bill, seen as a way to placate the party’s most conservative members. But after deciding to tack on billions of dollars in disaster aid — with all that money set to add directly to the deficit — those same members ultimately reneged on commitments of support.
Now, House GOP leaders hope to vote on all these bills on Thursday, and then adjourn, leaving the Senate to finish up consideration of the measures. Top Republicans believe Senate Democrats will accept the plan and avoid a government shutdown, or having to return to Washington next week.
For their part, Democrats are already jumping at the opportunity to note the GOP’s miscalculation.
“Republican leadership is so preoccupied with their tax giveaway to corporations and contributors that they managed to get surprised by this — the most predictable train wreck in history,” said Matt Dennis, Democratic communications director for the House Appropriations Committee.
Sarah Ferris and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
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Nick Timothy is Director of the New Schools Network and a former Chief of Staff to Theresa May.
Two weeks after the General Election, David Cameron chose to make immigration the subject of one of his first speeches as the Prime Minister of a Conservative-majority government. The decision to do so – and the symbolic decision to make the speech at the Home Office – was quite deliberate. Downing Street advisers told me at the time that “David feels very personally and very strongly” that he had won the election only because Conservative voters who wanted much less immigration had decided to stick with him – despite the fact that net migration was three times higher than he had promised in 2010.
The speech reflected what those advisers told me. The Prime Minister told the civil servants gathered before him that “we are for working people. For them, we will control immigration. Now we’re on our own in government, we can be stronger.” And – like the Conservative Manifesto – he reiterated his commitment to the Government’s net migration target: “more than ever, this country needs a majority Conservative government – one which aims to get net migration into the tens of thousands – and that remains our ambition.”
But last week, the publication of the latest immigration statistics showed just how far away the Government is from hitting its target. And more worryingly, the small print of the Autumn Statement, which was published the day before the immigration figures, proves that it is not really the policy of the Government as a whole to cut immigration at all.
The immigration statistics showed, for the year ending June 2015, that net migration to Britain had reached a record high of 336,000. They showed that where Theresa May has had the freedom to change the immigration system, her reforms have had an effect and net migration has fallen. The number of family visas is down, the industrial-scale abuse of the student visa system has been ended, and work visas have been reformed to prioritise skills shortages. The number of people given permission to settle in Britain permanently is down from almost 250,000 in 2010 to less than 100,000 in 2015, while the number of people granted citizenship continues to fall.
But the statistics also showed that the rise in net migration is being driven by people coming to Britain through routes that the Government has no intention of reforming. The generosity of our student visa rules alone make the net migration target almost impossible to achieve: last year, non-EU student net migration was 93,000. Twice as many people come to work in Britain through intra-company transfers – which are exempt from the cap on economic migration – than through the general work permit system, which is capped. And, of course, there is European immigration, which thanks to EU free movement rules is impossible to control. EU net migration is up to a record 180,000, while more than two thirds of the increase in overall immigration in the last year was accounted for by EU nationals.
It is well known that the Home Office would like to reform the student visa system further, reduce the number of work permits issed to foreign workers, change the way the asylum system works, and win greater control of immigration from other EU countries. But many of these changes have been blocked already or will be blocked by other Government departments, while the Government’s stated policy of trying to control EU migration through benefits changes has been blown out of the water by its promise to introduce the biggest “pull factor” of all: a new ‘Living Wage’ of £9 an hour by 2020.
As Anthony Seldon recorded in his book, Cameron at 10, the Prime Minister is often heard to complain that “I am the only person in this government who supports the Home Secretary on immigration”, and he is right. Instead of supporting the manifesto drive to reduce immigration, within a few months of the election the Foreign Office, Business Department and Treasury combined to try to try to take foreign students out of the migration statistics altogether.
That campaign to weaken immigration control appears to have failed, yet the Autumn Statement shows that Government policy is not to reduce and control immigration but to keep immigration high. The spending review settlement between the Treasury and the Business Department is predicated upon the recruitment of an additional 55,000 non-EU foreign students by 2019/20, which it is estimated will raise £1 billion and take the total number of these students to 320,000. No work appears to have been done to estimate the costs of this additional immigration, such as its effect on the housing stock or public services, no thought seems to have been given to whether policy ought to distinguish between the brightest students and the rest, and no consideration appears to have been made about whether these students will ever return home: the Home Office estimates that one in five foreign students already overstay their visa.
Worse still, we can now expect the Business Department and Treasury to lobby the Home Office to liberalise the student visa system – by allowing more people on student visas to stay and work when their courses end for example – in order to meet this new target.
And it is not just foreign students about whom the Autumn Statement gave the game away. The Office for Budget Responsibility – whose revised forecasts the Chancellor relied upon to reverse the tax credit cuts and ease the reductions in public spending – said that it had changed these forecasts in part because of high projected net migration: “we have … revised growth up a little in 2016 and 2017, reflecting both higher population growth (driven by higher net migration) and the Government’s decision to slow the pace of fiscal tightening.”
No doubt this will cause advocates of more and more immigration to argue that this is the proof that mass immigration is good for the economy. But while selective immigration can of course bring benefits such as filling skills shortages, there is no evidence that mass immigration brings any significant economic benefit for the existing population. The OECD, for example, concluded that: “the impact of the cumulative waves of migration that arrived over the past 50 years in OECD countries is on average close to zero, rarely exceeding 0.5% of GDP in either positive or negative terms.”
Instead, there is evidence that mass immigration can hold down wages and displace some workers from the labour market. But these effects – and other downsides of immigration – are always excluded from the impact assessments used by governments when they take decisions on immigration policy. In fact, the Treasury orthodoxy is, in the words of Sir David Metcalfe, the chairman of the independent Migration Advisory Committee, “that more immigration is automatically a good thing because it raises GDP”, a view he politely describes as an “odd conclusion”.
And there is a new reason why the Treasury is keener than ever on mass immigration. It might not bring any significant economic benefits for existing British citizens, but it does mean a bigger population, and a bigger population means a bigger economy overall, which means that the effect of spending cuts increases when the deficit is measured as a percentage of GDP. In the past, the Treasury has sought to inflate its way out of economic trouble. These days it takes a similar approach – not just by artificially increasing the money supply but by inflating the size of the population: quantitative easing meets demographic loosening.
But this is a mistake. As the OECD says, “immigrants are … neither a burden to the public purse nor are they a panacea for addressing fiscal challenges.” And – notwithstanding the undoubted benefits that controlled immigration can bring – the very good reasons the Prime Minister and Home Secretary have repeatedly set out for why we need to reduce immigration remain. The trouble is, as the Autumn Statement made plain last week, other than in the Home Office the Government is no longer trying to cut net migration – and we can expect the numbers to keep going up and up.
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Installation Media and supportability of i386 in 18.04 LTS Re: Ubuntu Desktop on i386
Hello Bryan, Let me resurrect this thread. In the context of what we should be doing in 18.04 and what to do between now and then. In 2018: - it will be over 2 years since 3rd party ISVs stopped supporting software on i386, or even never had it officially - e.g. Google Chrome, ZFS, Docker, etc - with both desktop and server software developed, tested and deployed on amd64 only And in 2018, the question will come if we can effectively provide security support on i386. Between now and 2018, it would be logical to limit amount of new installations of i386, because cross-grading between i386->amd64 is not something we can reliably ship. We must continue provide the i386 port, to support multiarch and 3rd party legacy application that are only available as i386 binaries. Building i386 images is not "for free", it comes at the cost of utilizing our build farm, QA and validation time. Whilst we have scalable build-farms, i386 still requires all packages, autopackage tests, and ISOs to be revalidated across our infrastructure. As well as take up mirror space & bandwidth. Thus the question is what can we and what should we do to limit i386 installations before they become unsupportable? Here is an example draft plan to bikeshed over: 16.10, 17.04, 17.10: * continue to provide i386 port to run legacy applications on amd64 * continue to build i386 d-i / netboot installer * continue to build i386 kernel * continue to build i386 cloud-images * stop producing i386 ubuntu-desktop.iso * stop producing i386 ubuntu-server.iso 18.04 LTS: * continue to provide i386 port to run legacy applications on amd64 * stop producing i386 d-i / netboot installer * stop producing i386 kernel * stop producing i386 cloud-images * stop producing i386 ubuntu-desktop.iso * stop producing i386 ubuntu-server.iso 18.10+: * Stop providing i386 port * Run legacy i386 only application in snaps / containers / virtual machines Or some other variation of above things and/or adjusted timelines. What do you think is appropriate? Can we survey and/or somehow validate if above would be appropriate or needs to be extended or can be shortened? The key point here is lack of upstream software support and upstream security support on i386, rather than actual hardware being out of stock and/or old. In essence this would mean April 2021 as the sunset for i386 as the host/base OS architecture. And April 2023 to run legacy i386 applications with security support. Regards, Dimitri. On 2 February 2016 at 02:12, Bryan Quigley <bryan.quigley at canonical.com> wrote: > The plan from the session we did over a year ago was: > "Specifically the Ubuntu (x86_32) desktop CD will be moved to cdimage > around opening of 16.10". The argument is that it was easy to build > the CD and it was cheap to do. It would be a community build that > wouldn't be promoted on the Ubuntu website or officially tested. > > It doesn't make sense to stop building the CD unless: > * We make the unity packages x86_64 bit only (what's the point in > having less easy to test latest 32-bit unity packages?) > * We drop x86_32 bit kernel support (guessing not something to > consider until after 18.04?) > > I think it also makes sense to see if other derivatives want to go > x86_64-bit only like maybe Kubuntu (like I believe project Neon > targets just 64 bit). At some point we are going to want drop x86_32 > kernel support and just have 32-bit compatibility libraries, but I > don't know when that makes sense. > > Also, does Valve Steam product rely on i386 multiarch binaries? > Yes, it does, but it also downloads it's own Steam runtime with it's > own libraries. > > And Netflix - does that run on amd64-only without i386 > multiarch? I believe that runs completely with libs if you use Google Chrome. > Oh, and also Google Chrome is dropping Linux x86_32 bit support. > > I'm also happy to revisit my survey [2] and see where people are today. > > Thanks for bringing this up again! > Bryan > > [1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/development-1411-drop-x86-32 > [2] https://bryanquigley.com/crazy-ideas/32-bit-usage-survey-results > [3] http://summit.ubuntu.com/uos-1411/meeting/22353/when-should-we-stop-making-32-bit-images/ > > On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 5:14 PM, Dimitri John Ledkov <xnox at ubuntu.com> wrote: >> Hello, >> >> Ubuntu has an i386 port which is fully supported. >> >> There a bunch of 3rd party applications that rely on the Multi-Arch >> technology to support/use i386 binaries on amd64 (e.g. Skype from the >> partner archive). BTW, can we ask Microsoft to publish native amd64 >> binaries, rather than those that rely on multi-arch i386? Also, does >> Valve Steam product rely on i386 multiarch binaries? or is it fully >> amd64? (and e.g. downloads/bundles/ships any required i386 binaries >> that it needs)? And Netflix - does that run on amd64-only without i386 >> multiarch? >> >> However, it seems to me that this is done specifically on otherwise >> full amd64 installations. >> >> My guess is that: all currently shipped hardware, with enough support >> to run full Unity (7) Desktop, is amd64. Tested with amd64 kernel, and >> amd64 graphics drivers. And hardware validation is done on amd64 too. >> >> In 2016, people with i386-only hardware are unlikely to be capable to >> run Unity 7 Desktop, and probably run other Ubuntu variants. I guess >> there are some accidental i386 users, e.g. those that have installed >> i386 variant on amd64 hardware. >> >> Does it still make sense to build ubuntu-desktop-i386.iso? Validate >> it? Test it on amd64 hardware? Ship it? >> >> To me this seems like a futile effort. Imho, we should only test the >> relevant multiarch i386 pieces that are there to support 3rd-party, >> i386-only apps on amd64 desktop. >> >> This is specifically about building, validating and shipping >> ubuntu-desktop-i386.iso, specifically for the Ubuntu Desktop flavour. >> Which I am suggesting should be dropped. Without any other changes to >> the archive and/or publishing i386 binaries. >> >> -- >> Regards, >> >> Dimitri. >> >> -- >> ubuntu-devel mailing list >> ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com >> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel -- Regards, Dimitri.
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The House Intelligence Committee passed a controversial cybersecurity bill on an 18-2 vote Wednesday.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, known as CISPA, is expected to be voted on in the House next week with a set of other cybersecurity-focused bills.
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House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), the authors of the bill, expressed optimism that Wednesday's markup vote signaled they have enough momentum to pass CISPA through the House, as it did last year."What we came up with, we think, is the right approach. It is the one bill out of everything you've seen on both sides of this great institution of the United States Congress that protects a free and open Internet and allows people to share cyber threat information to protect their clients, their business, their [personally identifiable information]," Rogers told reporters following the markup. "It's been a work in progress."
The aim of the bill is to encourage industry and government to share information about malicious source code and other online threats with each other in real time, so companies and government agencies can take steps to thwart cyberattacks.
The bill is intended to remove the legal hurdles that discourage companies from sharing cyber threat data with the government. Companies have said they are hesitant to share threat information with the government because it may result in legal action against them.
A set of six amendments backed by Rogers and Ruppersberger were incorporated into the bill during the markup. Among the approved changes, the bill would require the government to strip personal information from the cyber threat data they receive from companies. The Intelligence panel also agreed to strike a provision from the bill that would allow the government to broadly use the information for "national security purposes.'
Many of the amendments were aimed at allaying the concerns of privacy groups and the White House. So far, the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Democracy and Technology and other privacy advocates are not won over by the changes.
The panel also approved language stating that the bill would not allow companies to "hack back" against other entities that have stolen trade secrets or other proprietary information from them.
Reps. Adam Schiff Adam Bennett SchiffTech takes heat as anti-vaxers go viral Demands grow for a public Mueller report Bharara: It would seem 'odd and unusual' if Mueller report isn't made public MORE (D-Calif.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) both voted against the bill during the markup. Amendments offered by the two lawmakers, which were backed by privacy groups, were not agreed to.
"I think there are positive changes to the bill but they don't go far enough," Schiff said after the markup.
"I do think that the reservations that the White House has stated to the bill are still there and my expectation is that they would be appreciative of the steps that were taken, but also call for additional steps," Schiff later said in response to a question about how he expects the administration to react to the revised bill.
Civil liberties and privacy groups have rallied against CISPA, arguing it would undermine existing privacy laws and increase the pool of people's electronic communications that flow to the National Security Agency (NSA). This week a group of privacy advocates launched an online campaign to rally public opposition to CISPA.
The bill leaves it up to companies to decide which government entity they want to share cyber threat data with, although the NSA is among the list of agencies that the measure allows them to relay information to. CISPA would also enable companies to receive valuable government intelligence about cyber threats and grant them liability protection from legal action if they share threat data with the government.
Rogers said the changes adopted to the bill on Wednesday add another layer of privacy and oversight protections to it.
"You can't get more oversight on making sure that people's personally identifiable information is protected than the way we structured it in this bill," he said.
The House Intelligence Committee leaders argue that the bill is needed to help American companies stop foreign hackers from siphoning trade secrets and proprietary data from their computer systems, as well as protect private-owned critical infrastructure from cyberattacks.
"We feel we have to move now," Ruppersberger said. "We don't want another 9/11."
The bill cleared the House Intelligence panel on a 17-1 vote last year and passed the House last spring. CISPA was not taken up in the Senate.
The White House issued a veto threat against the bill a day before it went to the floor for a vote last year. Among its concerns, the Obama administration said it believe the bill lacked sufficient privacy protections.
In a statement, the White House said the changes adopted to CISPA "reflect a good faith effort" to address some of the substantive concerns it has with the measure, but don't go far enough to solve its "fundamental" issues with the bill. It's still unclear whether the administration will issue another veto threat against the measure before it heads to a vote.
"The administration seeks to build upon the productive dialogue with Chairman Rogers and ranking member Ruppersberger over the last several months, and the administration looks forward to continuing to work with them to ensure that any cybersecurity legislation reflects these principles," said White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden in a statement. "We believe the adopted committee amendments reflect a good faith-effort to incorporate some of the administration’s important substantive concerns, but we do not believe these changes have addressed some outstanding fundamental priorities."
Schiff's amendment would have required companies to remove personal information from cyber threat data prior to sharing it with the government or other businesses. Under the bill, companies are not required to take that step when sharing threat data with the government.
Schakowsky's amendments would have narrowed the liability protection available to companies under the bill and ensured threat data would be handled by a civilian agency, like the Homeland Security Department, before being funneled to the NSA and other military agencies.
--This report was updated at 9:23 p.m.
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Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that the country does not permit terrorist groups to operate on its soil, and denounced what it called “the false narrative of safe havens.” Instead, Pakistan blamed their long-running dispute with India over Jammu and Kashmir as the root cause of instability in the region.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was responding to President Donald Trump’s assertion that the US “can no longer be silent about Pakistan’s safe havens for terrorist organizations, the Taliban, and other groups that pose a threat to the region and beyond,” during his speech on Aug. 21 that outlined US strategy towards Afghanistan and the wider South Asia region.
“Pakistan has also sheltered the same organizations that try every single day to kill our people,” Trump said later in the speech, which was a scathing rebuke of Pakistan’s perfidy towards the US and its allies in Afghanistan. “No partnership can survive a country’s harboring of militants and terrorists who target US service members and officials.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to Trumps comments yesterday in an official statement which was released on its web site.
“As a matter of policy, Pakistan does not allow use of its territory against any country. Instead of relying on the false narrative of safe havens, the US needs to work with Pakistan to eradicate terrorism,” it claimed. “The threat to peace and security cannot be isolated from the complex interplay of geopolitics, continued existence of festering disputes and pursuit of hegemonic policies. Non-resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute remains the primary obstacle to peace and stability in the region.”
Pakistan’s denial of harboring terrorist groups quickly falls flat on its face when examining Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which not only supports both al Qaeda and the Taliban, but has executed numerous attacks in India as well as in Afghanistan. While LeT is by no means the only jihadist group supported by Pakistan, it is one of the most prominent.
LeT was founded in 1987 by its leader, Hafiz Saeed, along with Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, the godfather of international jihad. Bin Laden helped LeT establish training camps in Afghanistan’s provinces of Kunar and Paktia, where it continues to operates to this day. LeT shares al Qaeda’s goal of establishing an Islamic state in South Asia and beyond.
In a report submitted to Congress in June, the US Department of Defense explained the enduring importance of the jihadists’ safe havens in Pakistan. LeT was mentioned as one of several jihadist groups that maintain “sanctuary on the Pakistan side” of the border.
“Attacks in Afghanistan attributed to Pakistan-based militant networks continue to erode the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship,” the Pentagon noted. “Militant groups, including the Taliban and Haqqani Network, continued to utilize sanctuaries inside Pakistan.
“The Afghanistan-Pakistan border region remains a sanctuary for various groups, including al Qaeda, al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), the Haqqani Network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), ISIS-K, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Sanctuary on the Pakistan side and presence on the Afghan side remain a security challenge for both countries and pose a threat to regional security and stability.”
Inside Pakistan, LeT operates openly and has offices throughout the country. Markaz-e-Taiba, its headquarters in Muridke near Lahore, is a sprawling complex used to indoctrinate future jihadists before they are sent off for military training. The provincial government of Punjab has financed Markaz-e-Taiba in the past.
LeT has mastered the art of using charitable groups to fundraise as well as promote its message and recruit. Since 2010, the US has identified the following groups as LeT fronts: Falah-i Insaniat Foundation, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Al-Anfal Trust, Tehrik-e-Hurmat-e-Rasool, Tehrik-e-Tahafuz Qibla Awwal, and Al-Muhammadia Students. These LeT fronts continue to operate inside Pakistan without consequence.
This terrorist infrastructure has been used to conduct egregious terrorist attacks in India and Afghanistan. In its Country Reports on Terrorism 2016, the US State Department noted that LeT “has conducted operations against Indian troops and civilian targets in Jammu and Kashmir since 1993; several high profile attacks inside India; and operations against Coalition Forces in Afghanistan.”
The most prominent attack took place in Mumbai, India, when a suicide assault team fanned out across the city and targeted multiple locations, including a theater, a train station, hotels as well as a Jewish center and killed 164 people. The attack lasted for three days. Indian intelligence traced phone calls back to handlers in Pakistan as the assault was ongoing. The handlers directed its fighters to execute non-Muslims, often brutally, and laughed when their instructions were carried out.
The US has listed LeT as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since Dec. 2001, after an assault on the Indian Parliament building, and its emir Hafiz Saeed and numerous LeT leaders, financiers, and operatives since then.
Despite LeT’s overt ties to al Qaeda and its campaign of terror in India and Afghanistan, the Pakistani government has refused to crack down on the group. The organization’s complexes in Muridke and throughout the country remain open and its leaders and charitable fronts operate unfettered. Hafiz Saeed is feted by Pakistani officials, who refuse to hold him and other LeT leaders accountable for their actions. Not a single member of LeT who has been implicated in the Mumbai attack has been prosecuted.
According to the US Department of State, the only “significant action against LeT” taken by Pakistan in 2016 was to continue “implementing an ongoing ban against media coverage of their activities.”
But that is just the LeT. Pakistan continues to justify its support of terrorist groups by distinguishing between what it calls “good Taliban” and “bad Taliban.”
Simply stated, the so-called “good Taliban” are groups that advance Pakistan’s foreign policy goals and do not threaten the state or wage war within its borders. “Good Taliban” and other groups deemed acceptable by the Pakistani establishment such as the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani Network, the Mullah Nazir Group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, conduct numerous heinous acts of terrorism in the region, and are directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and civilians.
“Bad Taliban” are any jihadist faction that challenges the primacy of the Pakistani state. The Pakistani military has pursued these groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province with some success. However, when targeting these groups, the military has often stopped pursuing when a “good Taliban” group such as the Haqqani Network provides shelter and support for the “bad Taliban.”
For more information on Pakistan’s support of terrorist groups, see FDD’s The Long War Journal report – Pakistan: Friend or Foe in the Fight Against Terrorism?
Alexandra Gutowski contributed to this article. Alexandra is a military affairs analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
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Due to a suggestion from I've decided to work on vectoring the rest of the mane 6 with Twilight's "She's Evil!" face!Up next is Applejack looking quite smuggly evil! I was going to get creative and title this "Buy Some Apples", but I figured I would continue with the pattern that I've been using already. Again, I used my She's Evil template and redid the colors, mane, and eyebrows/eyelashes. As always, feel free to critique and I hope you like it! Svg can be found here: [link] Rarity and Pinkie should be done and uploaded tonight (and I may include a surprise pony as wellIf you do use this (or any of my other artwork), please let me know so I can check out what you make with it!
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How does an entrepreneur help his fiancé fight Cancer? With software, of course.
Jorge Cortell Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 26, 2016
My name is Jorge.
I started Kanteron Systems, a medical imaging open-source software company, in Valencia (Spain) in 2005.
In 2011 I moved to New York to open our US subsidiary. While living in New York, I started dating a woman that was battling breast cancer. Her name is Stephanie.
Stephanie and Jorge in New York
Stephanie’s oncologist was at Beth Israel Cancer Center, her surgeon at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital, and her radiation therapist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC).
As I held her hand through the process twice (she had surgery, and a recurrence a year later) and met with her doctors, I saw first-hand how broken many cancer-care processes involving data and medical imaging sharing were.
For example:
Tumor samples transported from Mount Sinai to MSKCC by courier, taking weeks and many forms
The oncologist not having access to the tissue samples or images
Test being repeated because they could not be found
Reports faxed several times (yes, faxed!) because they could not be read
Measurements done with a ruler on a printed image and written down in pencil on a post-it
Genetic tests only for tumors, not patients, and only for 3 genetic traits (estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, and HER2)
No unequivocal or automatic recurrence checking or incidental findings
No mechanism in place to check for adverse medication prevention or genomic screening for optimized medication result
A major anomaly in a medical image missed by several radiologist, only detected when we physically took a CD with the images to another physician for review
Her case was complicated by an unusual reaction to an ineffective medication. According to research, up to 75% of some cancer cases fit that pattern. The most likely cause: a genomic variant interfering with the prescribed medication. With existing systems it would take months, and a lot of money, to test that hypothesis.
Something had to be done about it, and I was not going to sit and wait for somebody else to do it.
I wanted to put together the “missing pieces” to solve the puzzle to help her, and millions of other patients like her. So I had to design a new technological platform working with my tireless developers to add many “new components” to our existing radiology imaging solution (known as PACS-RIS), like:
How did we tackle such a monumental task?
First, I went back to school. My 6 years of medical imaging experience, business, and computer degrees were not enough. Since I am not an MD, I was only admitted into a postgraduate clinical genomics program due to my determination. Seeing the love of your life fade before your eyes is indeed one strong motivation. I ended up not only graduating with top grades but also learning enough to understand how complex what I wanted to achieve was! I even persuaded my genomics professor to join my company as an advisor.
Being an open-source company meant we did not have to re-invent the wheel for everything. Fellow domain expert alumni at MIT, Oxford, and Harvard helped fill in the knowledge gaps. But even so, we had to develop a lot of new code and algorithms make of all the “components” mentioned above work.
Two years and a million lines of code later, we finished the software and called TMIS (Translational Medical InformationServer) — the first and only integrated personalized medicine system in the world.
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TOKYO (Reuters) - An explosion rocked a warehouse at a U.S. military base in Sagamihara, Japan, but there were no reports of injuries, Japanese fire officials said on Monday.
The local fire department said it received a call just after midnight of an explosion at a U.S. Army depot where it said “dangerous material” is stored and sent firefighters.
It added that the fire had subsided and there was no danger of it spreading since there were no adjacent buildings. The cause of the fire was not immediately known, the fire department said.
In Washington, U.S. Navy Commander Bill Urban said the blast was at a building at the U.S. Army Sagami General Depot in Sagamihara, about 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Tokyo.
“There are no reports of injury, and base firefighters and first responders are currently fighting the resulting fire to prevent its spread to nearby buildings,” Urban said in an emailed statement.
A U.S. Army spokesman said the building did not in fact store any hazardous material.
“The building that exploded was not a hazardous material storage facility. We are in the process of determining the contents of the building. The depot does not store ammunition or radiological materials,” Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Toner told Reuters in an email.
He added that no troops lived at the depot, where an estimated 200 personnel work in the daytime.
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Nope, not the style of wrestling we here in the UK have inherited from Japan. Still no, I am not writing about British strong-style wrestler Will Ospreay. In actual fact, I am talking about one of the hottest factions in indie wrestling right now. Pete Dunne, Tyler Bate, Trent Seven. You mightn’t have heard of these guys, but they’re taking over right now, and are not planning on slowing down.
In this article, I’ll provide an introduction to the group, explaining what makes them so good. There will be a part 2 to this story and I will be fantasy booking these three and discuss what I feel WWE should do with their new recruits. Sound good? Even if it doesn’t, we’ve still got your website click now, you can go.
Summary
Basically, they’re three lads who happen to wrestle, really well. They’ve been taking over the UK-indies, travelling all over the nation wrestling quality match after quality match. Along with the likes of Marty Scurll and Zack Sabre JR, they’ve aided the British wrestling scene to a revival, and helped get a UK wrestling show put on the WWE network.
They may be a faction, but they’re not consistently a team, often wrestling each other, with Dunne and Bate even going head-to-head at the next NXT Takeover. As we progress through, I’ll teach you all that you need to know about the individuals that make up the world’s best wrestling trio right now.
Trent Seven
Moustache Mountain baby. Seven is probably one of the most unlikely wrestling stars of recent history. Buying his own ring to train himself back in 2008, Trent’s has been on an upward rise through the ranks since 2010. He’s one of the most consistent performers in the UK and is getting better with age. He may not have that UK title just yet, but I wouldn’t put it past him to win it in a couple of years.
Finisher: Spiking Piledriver (Seven Heaven)
Championship History:
• Attack 24/7! Champion
• Chikara Campeonatos de Parajas (W/ Tyler Bate)
• Fight Club: Pro champion
• Infinity Trophy winner 2013
• ICW World Heavyweight Champion
• 2x Progress Tag Team Champion (W/Pete Dunne currently, W/Tyler Bate)
So where would Trent fit in? Most likely, he’d be a reputable midcarder. He would never achieve the main event status, but he’d be a face or heel capable of having a decent US title run. A pro in the ring and gentleman outside of it, keep your eyes peeled for Moustache Mountain.
Tyler Bate
19 years of age, that’s it. Some people have ruined their lives by 19. Tyler is out there winning title after title. The most traditional wrestler out of the group, he mixes martial arts with strong-style to great effect. Bate has really flourished recently, improving at a massive rate and well deserving his run with the UK title.
Finisher: Sitout double underhook power bomb (Tyler Driver 97′)
• 3x Attack 24/7! Champion
• Chikara Campeonatos de Parajas (W/ Trent Seven)
• Great Bear Junior Heavyweight cup winner (2014)
• URSA Major One Night Tournament winner (2013)
• Kamikaze Pro Tag Team Champion (W/ Dan Moloney)
• Kamikaze Relentless Divison Champion
• Progress Tag Team Champion
• SWA British Lions Champion
• British Lions Tournament Winner (2014)
• wXw Shotgun Champion
• WWE UK Champion
• WWE UK Championship Tournament Winner
At 19 years of age, the sky is the limit for young Tyler. The best bet for WWE is to keep on doing what they’re doing (for once), and make sure that the crowd is exposed to as much of him as possible. After that, slowly move him up and up, and if he continues his accelerating development, there is no reason he can’t be a main-eventer.
Pete Dunne
My genuine favourite of the group, Pete Dunne is a natural born heel. Able to generate toxic heat, Dunne can hold a crowd in the palm of his hand, as proven by the Network’s UK tournament. You can see Dunne beautifully playing the heel role at the UK tournament by clicking here. At only 24, he really is a bonified star and someone you could definitely argue was born to wrestle. He works very hard, is a dedicated worker and deserves every success he gets.
Finisher: Tiger Suplex or Pumphandle lift transitioned to a reverse STO (Drop Dead!)
Championship History:
• 4FW Junior Heavyweight Champion
• AWW British Tag Team Champion (w/ Damian Dunne)
• 5x Attack! 24/7 Champion
• Elder Stein Invitational Winner (2012)
• Fight Club: Pro Champion
• Infinity Trophy Winner (2015)
• Kamikaze Relentless Division Champion
• 2x OTT No Limits Champion
• Pro Wrestling Kingdom Champion
• Progress World Champion
• Progress Tag Champion (w/ Trent Seven)
• RPW British Cruiserweight Champion
• RevPro British Cruiserweight Championship Tournament Winner
• Young Tigers Cup Winner (2015)
• VII Pro Champion
• VII Trifecta Trophy Tournament Winner
• wXw Shotgun Champion
I may be bias, but Dunne should be given a monster push. A future World champion, Dunne is over and will keep on getting attention. He deserves to be the first English world champion, and there is no reason he can’t be.
I hope this article provided some insight on who the future of WWE is, and why this trio is the most interesting act in strong-style.
Read part 2 of our British Strong Style piece by clicking here!
Writing credit goes to Nathan Sartain
Follow us on Twitter! @WrestlinNewsPro
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Palestinians end four-year rift at Cairo ceremony
Updated
The two rival Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, have struck a landmark agreement to form a single, united government in Gaza and the West Bank.
The militant, Islamist Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, ousting the secular Fatah to the West Bank.
Now, leaders of both factions have signed a deal in Cairo that will see the two governments replaced by a united, interim leadership until Palestinian elections are held by early next year.
"We announce to Palestinians that we turn forever the black page of division," Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah's leader, said in a speech.
But the new government will face enormous obstacles, not least of which Israel, which says it will not deal with any government that includes Hamas, and says Fatah must choose between peace with Hamas or peace with Israel.
Hamas, whose founding charter calls for Israel's destruction, seized the Gaza Strip from Fatah forces in a brief Palestinian civil war in 2007. It has opposed Mr Abbas's quest for a negotiated peace with the Jewish state.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a visit to London: "What happened today in Cairo is a tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism".
Many Palestinians say the four years of warfare between Hamas and Fatah have undermined their campaign for peace with Israel.
The United States has been cautious about the Cairo ceremony.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner says the US continues to believe Hamas must recognise Israel's right to exist, reject violence and abide by interim peace agreements if it wants to play a meaningful role in the political process.
He says the US will look at the formation of any new Palestinian government before taking steps on future aid.
"It's important now that Palestinians ensure implementation of that agreement in a way that advances the prospects of peace rather than undermines them," he said.
"We'll wait and see what this looks like in real and practical terms... We still don't know what, if any changes, there will be at the governmental level."
Lingering friction
In what appeared a sign of lingering friction, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal did not share the podium with Mr Abbas and the ceremony was delayed briefly over where he would sit. Against expectations, neither signed the unity document.
Hamas leaders will meet Mr Abbas next week, possibly in Cairo, to start work on implementing the accord, deputy Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk said after the ceremony.
In his speech to the gathering, Mr Meshaal said Hamas sought a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza devoid of any Israeli settlers and without "giving up a single inch of land" or the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
Challenging Israel to peace, Mr Meshaal offered to work with Mr Abbas and Egypt on a new strategy to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict but said he did not believe Israel was ready for peace.
"We have given peace since Madrid till now - 20 years - and I say we are ready to agree among us Palestinians and with Arab support to give an additional chance," Mr Meshaal said, referring to the 1991 international Middle East peace conference that launched Israeli-Arab peace talks.
"But, dear brothers, because Israel does not respect us, and because Israel has rejected all our initiatives and because Israel deliberately rejects Palestinian rights, rejects Fatah members as well as Hamas... it wants the land, security and claims to want peace."
Hamas has stated before it would accept as an interim solution in the form of a state in all of the territory Israel captured in the 1967 war, along with a long-term ceasefire.
Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005. It has kept up settlement activity in the much larger West Bank.
The unity deal calls for forming an interim government to run the West Bank, where Mr Abbas is based, and the Gaza Strip, and prepare for long-overdue parliamentary and presidential elections within a year.
In his speech, Mr Abbas repeated his call for a halt to Jewish settlement construction as a condition for resuming peace talks with Israel that began in September but fizzled after the Jewish state refused to extend a limited building moratorium.
Mr Abbas is widely expected, in the absence of peace talks, to ask the UN General Assembly in September to recognise a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel and the United States oppose such a move.
"The state of Palestine must be born this year," Mr Abbas said.
Palestinians view reconciliation as an essential step towards presenting a common front at the United Nations and a reflection of a deep-seated public desire to end the internal schism amid popular revolts that have swept the Arab world.
But the deal presents potential diplomatic problems for Mr Abbas's aid-dependent Palestinian Authority.
- ABC/Reuters
Topics: world-politics, government-and-politics, palestinian-territory-occupied, egypt
First posted
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Coming up short of successfully wrapping up a magical 2015 season at Super Bowl 50 left the Carolina Panthers and their fans with an awful taste to deal with for the past six months. But Thursday night could serve as the refreshing dose of mouthwash they’ve all been waiting for.
The reigning NFC champions will kick off their 2016 preseason slate against the Baltimore Ravens today at 7:30 p.m. ET from M&T Bank Stadium. Although this exhibition will mark a new beginning to a new journey, Carolina’s goal, of course, remains the same.
So who should you keep your eyes on as the Panthers embark on their hopeful journey to the pinnacle? Here’s a start:
Wide receiver Kelvin Benjamin
Just as they’ve been waiting for the 2016 campaign to begin, Panthers fans have been salivating over the return of their team’s No. 1 wideout in Benjamin. That anticipation, obviously, comes for a very good reason.
Prior to sustaining a torn ACL in his left knee last Aug., the second-year pass catcher was, by many accounts, in line for a breakout season. Coach Ron Rivera had gone on record saying Benjamin, whose weight had previously helped bring on minor hamstring issues, entered 2015 training camp in “tremendous shape.”
A year and a full recovery later, Benjamin seems to have carried over that halted momentum into this summer. According to numerous camp spectators, the 6-foot-5, 245-pounder has been just fine throughout practices, consistently making plays while utilizing that monstrous and now healthy frame.
Even though his role will likely be very limited, Benjamin will see his first real action on Thursday for the first time since last year’s exhibition in Buffalo – one in which he hauled in an impressive touchdown grab. Don’t look for a handful of targets to come his way. Just look for Benjamin, as stated by Rivera, to regain the feel and pace of the game.
“It’s about introducing him back into the game first and foremost, but in the right situation and circumstances,” Rivera said in a report from the Charlotte Observer on Sunday. “The biggest thing about this is a grass field, which is outstanding for us. So having him out on the field, you feel pretty comfortable and confident.”
Defensive tackle Vernon Butler
Who doesn’t love to play with shiny new toys? For the Panthers, they’ll have a chance to do exactly that in Baltimore with the biggest addition to their already extensive toy chest.
Butler, Carolina’s first-round selection back in April, will carry 323 pounds of terror to an interior defensive line that already includes All-Pro Kawann Short, Star Lotulelei, Paul Soliai and Kyle Love. Although he won’t spend his rookie year as a starter, the draft’s 30th-overall pick will be expected to contribute quite a bit alongside his fellow hog mollies.
Related Rookie Vernon Butler showing quick progression in training camp
A four-year player out of Louisiana Tech University, Butler brings a potent mixture of agility, versatility and power defensive coordinator Sean McDermott will absolutely love in his deep interior rotation. NFL draft expert Mike Mayock, in fact, compared him to other two light-footed big men in Minnesota’s Linval Joseph and Los Angeles’ Michael Brockers.
Expect to see Butler pick up a decent number of reps throughout the night as he tries to make a positive first impression.
The Three Amigos
In this three-for-one special, rookie cornerbacks James Bradberry, Daryl Worley and Zack Sanchez join Butler in seeing their first NFL downs. But unlike Butler, at least one of these three will likely be in the team’s starting lineup come Week 1.
Before holding their annual Fan Fest event at Bank of America Stadium last Friday, the Panthers released their first depth chart of 2016. Listed as the No. 1 and No. 2 corners in the release were Bradberry and Worley.
Related Panthers heavily hinting at rookie CB tandem starting
Now, this is an unofficial pecking order and is one that is far from finalized. When you consider the play of the team’s second and third-rounders in training camp thus far, their names might be written in pen on those exact spots very soon.
With Bradberry and Worley taking the starting nods against the Ravens in this one, watch for Sanchez as he continues his transition into a slot defender. Sanchez, who was a very good playmaker in his own right at the collegiate level, primarily played the outside for the University of Oklahoma. Can he prove to be a viable backup to Bené Benwikere in nickel packages?
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To the untrained eye, it's a plain-looking white mushroom, popping up in yards and boulevards of Vancouver, Victoria and the Fraser Valley.
But experts recognize Amanita phalloides — the so-called death cap mushroom that poisoned someone in Victoria this week — as the deadliest mushroom in the world, responsible for an estimated 90 per cent of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide.
Twenty years ago, it hadn't been spotted in B.C.
But now, the death cap is growing in prevalence in urban areas of the South Coast, prompting a warning from health officials last month.
Among B.C.'s thousands of mushrooms, this is one that should be on your radar.
"It's worthwhile learning how to recognize this particular species because of the consequences if you accidentally eat it," said Andy MacKinnon, a biologist and forest ecologist in Metchosin who teaches field courses on mushroom identification.
Toxins in the death cap attack the liver, kidney and other organs and ingesting one cap is enough to kill.
Paul Kroeger holds up young death cap mushrooms, which can resemble puffballs or straw mushrooms. These were found near Main Street in Vancouver. (Tristan Le Rudulier/CBC)
Lurking underground for years
The first death cap mushroom was found in B.C. in 1997, though the fungus was likely lurking underground for years, if not for decades, before that.
It's believed to have hitched a ride to B.C. on the roots of imported trees, including European oak, chestnut and hornbeam, that were planted to beautify city streets, said MacKinnon.
The mushrooms emerged years later: in Mission in 1997, Victoria in 1998, and not until 2008 in Vancouver itself.
More are coming, said Paul Kroeger, a founding member of the Vancouver Mycological society and a mushroom consultant on poisonings in B.C.
"We're looking at many many locations now where the suitable host trees are just beginning to produce the death cap mushroom."
The list of suitable hosts could also be growing, said MacKinnon, with anecdotal evidence the death cap may be spreading from European oak to the native Garry oak.
"If the death cap mushroom can somehow figure out how to live with Garry oaks, then there's a much greater range for them to explore ... and that's a little worrisome."
Death cap mushrooms are now common in Vancouver, Victoria and the Fraser Valley. The fungus that sprouts these mushrooms is believed to have arrived on European oaks and other imported trees. (Paul Kroeger)
Looks like edible straw mushroom
Death caps can vary in size and colour, so the best way to learn how to spot them or any mushroom is to see them in the wild — or city yard — with an expert, said MacKinnon. Mycological societies in Vancouver and Victoria regularly hold mushroom walks.
"Absolutely the best way to learn mushrooms is to go out with other people who know their mushrooms."
That said, there are distinguishing features, said MacKinnon and Kroeger:
Fairly large when mature, up to 15 cm across.
White or yellowish stem, often with shades of green or brown in cap.
Cap rounded when young and flattens with age.
Bulbous base of stem, which may be buried in soil.
Skirt-like ring on the stem when mature.
It doesn't closely resemble any popular edible species that are native to B.C., but young death caps do look a lot like the paddy straw mushroom that grows in Asia, said MacKinnon.
"It's possible to confuse it with other mushrooms … if you're used to collecting the edible paddy straw mushroom in another part of the world."
In one of the B.C. poisonings, it was confused with a paddy straw mushroom, said Kroeger. In another, a very young death cap was confused with a puffball mushroom.
It's not known why the most recent poisoning victim ate the mushroom.
Death cap mushrooms can look like puffballs when they're young, but if you slice them open it's possible to see the death cap developing, said Kroeger. (Paul Kroeger)
3 poisoned in B.C.
No one has died from eating a death cap in B.C., according to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, though this is the third significant poisoning.
"Fortunately so far we've had relatively few actual ingestions and poisonings from our death cap mushrooms here," said Kroeger, who helps identify mushroom species responsible for poisonings.
"But given they've only been known in the province for a couple of decades, we've still had three significant mushroom poisonings. Not fatal, but nearly so."
Amanita phalloides contains amatoxin, and someone poisoned may have no symptoms for anywhere from six hours to two days, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Then comes sudden, severe abdominal pain, persistent vomiting and other gastrointestinal problems. The patient may appear to recover, before the toxins overwhelm the liver.
"Death occurs in 50 to 90 per cent of the cases," the U.S. FDA reports, following a coma and possible convulsions.
Last month, the B.C. CDC warned it was "especially concerned" about the death cap, and calls to the Drug and Poison Information Centre about foraged mushrooms had doubled this past July, compared to the year before.
The increase may have been due to unseasonably wet weather in the late spring and early summer, said Kroeger.
"And now unfortunately it looks like we've got another flush of mushrooms and exposures to them."
If you suspect you've eaten a poisonous mushroom, keep a sample of the mushroom, and call B.C.'s Drug and Poison Information Centre at 1-800-567-8911 or call 911 and seek medical attention.
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My goal when I started writing this blog post was to write a review of The Startup Way. In this new book Eric Ries writes about the application of Lean Startup principles to established businesses and organizations. Rather than write a dry book review, I will try to tell a story in this blog post about a phenomenon I lived through called the Telecom Bubble in order to illustrate a few points that Ries makes in his book. The principal character in this story is a company known as Level 3, which was in the beginning an internal startup inside a huge construction company named Kiewit.
As background, while the Telecom Bubble was related to the Internet Bubble, it was actually a different phenomenon that started in a different way and ended at a different time. How much capital was lost by investors in the Telecom Bubble is impossible to calculate with certainty. Om Malik wrote a book on this period in which he estimated that $750 billion vanished when the telecom bubble burst. That’s a reasonable estimate in my view. The most interesting questions about a phenomenon like this are always: Why did it happen? What can we learn?
Most people believe the starting point of the Telecom Bubble was the purchase of Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS). The buyer was a construction company based in Omaha named Kiewit run by Walter Scott. Scott is a very successful business leader who is arguably as famous in Omaha as Warren Buffett. Scott’s ability to build things and otherwise get things done is legendary. With the help of a talented executive named James Crowe, MFS quickly became one of the nation’s biggest providers of fiber based communications operating as a “competitive local-exchange carrier” or CLEC. In 1993, MFS became a public via an IPO. The business model of MFS was relatively sound since it engaged primarily in cream skimming enabled by clever arbitrage of a broken regulatory system. An article in Barons described the situation at the time:
The idea was to offer bandwidth-hungry businesses a money-saving way to route their voice and data traffic past the Bells and other local monopoly providers. The Bells, of course, loathed Crowe and his renegade unit, MFS Communications, for skimming the cream off their customer base. Reminded of this during a recent interview, a chuckling Crowe says, with a refreshing touch of malice: “As if the Bells haven’t been cream-skimming for years by concentrating their efforts on the affluent metropolitan markets, while relegating the remote rural areas of the U.S. to independent phone carriers.”
The mid-1990s was an interesting time in the business world since the Internet was just emerging as a major phenomenon and investing opportunity. As an example of how under the radar the Internet was then, Steve Jobs met with Craig McCaw sometime in the early 1990s and explained to him the nature of the business opportunity that the Internet would create. Craig said to Steve: “Let’s buy it.” Of course doing that was not possible, but people did understand that there were related places to invest that would benefit as the Internet developed. For many people investing in CLECs seemed to be a good place to start. Unfortunately there were many people who thought that same thing at the same time.
Fortune magazine described what happened next:
In April 1996, MFS bought UUNet for $2 billion, a record price for an Internet company. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers must have watched mushrooming MFS with some alarm. MFS looked to be a step ahead of his burgeoning empire. Ebbers had a solution: Buy MFS! In late August he offered an astonishing $14 billion of WorldCom stock for MFS. “People made a bunch of money on MFS,” says Omaha investor Ron Carson “people began to think about it like you could get rich overnight.”
The $14 billion dollar acquisition of MFS by WorldCom kickstarted the great CLEC explosion. What was a modest cream skimming business for MFS became a gold rush. Scores of other CLECs were created in just a few years. A partial list of CLECs would include Allegiance, Covad, Northstar, Teligent, Electric Lightwave, ICG Communications, Intermedia Communications, 360networks, Broadwing, Global Crossing and Level 3. The telecommunications business empire of Craig McCaw was no exception creating a company called NextLink (later renamed XO Communications). The problem NextLink and others CLECs faced was overcapacity. Craig McCaw said to me often during this period: “You are always at the mercy of your stupidest competitors.” And in this case there were scores of competitors.
Level 3 was the most glamorous company involved in the Telecom Bubble since Crowe was the leader and because of its affiliation with Scott and Kiewit. For example, when Level 3 went public the stories read like this one:
NEW YORK — April 1, 1998. In an unusual debut in the Nasdaq Stock Market today, an Internet-related company will begin trading as Nasdaq’s third-largest telecommunications firm, behind giants WorldCom Inc. and MCI Communications Corp. Unlike other recent Internet start-ups such as ISS Group Inc.–which staged a stunningly popular initial public stock offering last week–this newcomer, Level 3 Communications Inc., is far from an IPO. It already has a market capitalization of $9 billion.
How did the vast bulk of telecom bubble end? The Economist magazine wrote in 2002: “George Gilder in February 2001 predicted that two telecoms firms, Global Crossing and 360networks, ‘will battle for worldwide supremacy, but in a trillion-dollar market, there will be no loser.’ Yet within a year, both had filed for bankruptcy—a graphic illustration of how quickly the industry’s titans have been toppled.” The end was shockingly swift. In January of 2001 it was possible for a telecom firm to raise billions of dollars in the bond and debt markets and yet by April it was not possible to raise 5 cents those markets for a telecom business. It took a while for the CLECs to fail depending on how much cash they had on hand. Wen the new cash spigot from the bond and debt markets went dry, it was over. One press report from the time put it simply:
“Once investors noticed that little chance existed for some CLECs to raise the money they would need to continue expanding, an avalanche of selling began. Winstar closed on Monday at 34 cents, off its 52-week high of $54.13, while Teligent finished at 40 cents, down from a peak of $55.50. In essence, both have lost 99 percent of their value.”
A few weeks after George Gilder had said there would be “no loser” in telecom, all of the CLECs were decidedly losers.
You might ask: What about Level 3? The were lucky in that When the financial markets essentially closed to telecom businesses Level 3 had massive amounts of cash on hand to build networks which Crowe and his team were able to use instead for operations which allowed then to ride out long painful recovery. In other words, money that was raised to build out new Level 3 capacity was usable for operations during a time when the debt and bond markets were closed. But even then, the road for Level 3 was very, very long and the financial returns modest. Crowe and his team at Level 3 did impressive things to ride out the period and eventually generate an exit with the sale to CenturyLink. People who do what Crowe did with Level 3 don’t get enough credit. Sometimes just surviving something like the Telecom Bubble requires extraordinary skill and effort. This can be seen in the Level 3 chart that looks like this:
The remainder of this blog post will discuss how the CLEC/telecom bubble story, most notably the stories of MFS and Level 3, might be applied in the context of The Startup Way by Eric Ries. Can we learn anything by revisiting the Level 3 story?
All quotes in bold below are from the new book by Ries.
“A value hypothesis tests whether a product or service really delights customers once they begin using it.” (page 93)
In The Lean Startup Ries wrote: “The value hypothesis tests whether a product or service really delivers value to the customers once they are using it.” This is a critical factor for any business since most products fail for the simple reason that customers don’t value the product enough to pay for it. This may seem obvious, but if it was easy to see whether product/market fit existed there would not be so many failures in the business world. Andy Rachleff, who invented the terms “growth hypothesis” and “value hypothesis,” describes the second term as follows:
“A value hypothesis is an attempt to articulate the key assumption that underlies why a customer is likely to use your product. Identifying a compelling value hypothesis is what I call finding product/market fit. A value hypothesis identifies the features you need to build, the audience that’s likely to care, and the business model required to entice a customer to buy your product. Companies often go through many iterations before they find product/market fit, if they ever do.”
MFS had a proven business model based on “cream skimming” but Level 3 really didn’t have one before it decided to pursue a growth hypothesis. Why? So many CLECs suddenly appeared that the business of cream skimming based on regulatory arbitrage was just to small to support them all. So everyone running a CLEC at that time grabbed on to a model that was trying to take advantage of the arrival of the Internet. Unfortunately, what looked like a glamorous Internet business was really a business involving backhoes digging up streets, high up front costs and expenses and brutal competition. Many years later Level 3 would regain a decent business model based on a proven value hypothesis after the other CLECs went though bankruptcy, but it was long painful road. Financial returns today in that business are modest and it scales poorly.
2. “An internal startup is an atomic unit of work in the context of extreme uncertainty.”
In his first book Ries defined a startup as “a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” The simplest way to think about Lean Startup is as a process that applies the scientific method to challenges faced by businesses and other organizations. The Lean Startup is at its core based on a simple idea: since all businesses face inevitable extreme uncertainty the best way to discover genuine innovation is through experimentation. Innovation is discovered rather than planned. What is unique about the business environment today is that experiments cost so little to do as a result of the rise of cloud services and can be completed far more rapidly and with better results since customers are connected to the supplier by electronic networks.
Ries describes the ideal “internal startup” structure in this way:
“A small, cross-functional team with a scarcity mentality, with what we call metered funding, that has a fixed resource budget to apply, that’s accountable to a board of directors. It’s not governed by your usual corporate review process, which is just not at all suited to innovation. Building a minimum viable product using a system we call innovation accounting to measure results, etc. It’s like a special kind of tool in your toolbox, and companies like Amazon do this all the time.”
In The Startup Way Ries argues that large businesses and non-profit organizations can successfully create “an internal startup.” Some of the CLECs including Level 3 were internal startups created inside far larger companies like Kiewit and eventually spun out as independent entities. Successfully creating an internal startup is tricky since the purpose of a business that has a proven business or operational model is to execute on that model. The unfortunate truth is that operating business and organizations tend to create antibodies against what an internal startup must accomplish to be successful. Senior management must be willing to go the last mile—which can means something that competes with existing business. For the internal startup obtaining the necessary “go to market” resources can be non-trivially hard. Ries outlines a process that he believes will accomplish this goal even inside a business that is executing on another model. Level 3 was able to do this but the teams led by Jim Crowe doing this inside Kiewit had just hit a home run with the sale of MFS to Worldcom. One can argue that this previous MFS home run made the internal startup at Kiewit too easy.
“Long term growth requires a method for finding new breakthroughs repeatedly.” (page 9) In order to creates cycles of continuous innovation and unlock new sources of growth, companies need to have teams that can experiment to find them.”
Paul Graham of Y Combinator talks about the importance of growth in this way: “A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.” Existing businesses that have proven business models want to grow too, but that is easier to say than actually do. Many business of all kinds today have dedicated “growth teams” that are responsible for driving new sources of growth. Ries succinctly describes his thesis for achieving growth here:
“The fundamental idea is to treat everything a start-up does as an experiment. Everything a start-up does should be a test — a hypothesis. You really want to organize your company so that it’s built to learn. The Lean Startup idea is based on lean manufacturing—a management philosophy that we can easily adapt to the start-up culture. A key part is creating a feedback loop: build, measure, and learn. We want to get through that loop as quickly as possible. But it’s not just failing fast, it’s failing well.”
The other point that Ries raises concerns the need for continuous innovation. “One and done” innovation simply does not apply in the real world of business. There are too many well-funded and well-run competitors for an business to feel like that can coast along without generating repeated breakthroughs.
In order to grow quickly Level 3 created a state of the art rail plow that allowed fiber to lid alongside train tracks very quickly in relative terms. Unfortunately for Level 3, competitors like Qwest acquired or created rail plows too:
Right now, an army of 1,500 latter-day railroaders is slaving to make the mammoth project a reality: 16,000 miles at an average 120 miles a week. The vast majority of the cable is being laid alongside existing railroad tracks, installed by four or more “rail plow” cars. A custom-designed 25-foot arm extends from those cars and digs up the earth 12 feet from the side of the tracks. It then lays in protective tubing – 2-inch-diameter high-density polyethylene conduit – and cables 4 feet below the surface.
People loved the plans of companies like Level 3, NextLink/XO, Global Crossing and Qwest to build these new fiber networks. Promoters like George Gilder somehow convinced investors that vastly more supply of fiber back-haul would create unprecedented profitability. Unfortunately for Level 3 (and XO which acquired a 1/3 of Level 3’s long haul fiber capacity) increases in supply kills value without a moat. It is true that vastly greater supply it can create new value in complementary markets like software, but that is easier said that done. Skill in building fiber networks is not translatable into writing innovative software. The amount of fiber and conduits made suddenly available was staggering. When supply explodes, it was not good for prices. Yes, the internet was increasing demand but not as fast as supply was being added in long haul markets. I remember like it was yesterday the night I discovered that Internet capacity was not increasing as fast as UUnet/Worldcom was claiming. This was the key sentence in the paper written by Andrew Odlyzko that I read late one night in August of 2000:
In the intermediate run, there would be neither be a clear “bandwidth glut” nor a “bandwidth scarcity,” but a more balanced situation, with supply and demand growing at comparable rates.
My reaction after reading Odlyzko’s paper that night was: “Holy crap. UUnet is lying.” What I said was similar to the reaction I had when I read about a deal between Enron and Blockbuster for internet bandwidth since I knew that Enron had no bandwidth to sell. Again, “Holy crap.”
The supply limitations that existed at the time of the Telecom Bubble could be found in the metropolitan markets and specifically in the last mile. There were no rail trains to get this work done. This was expensive work that involved getting permits and digging up city streets. These metropolitan fiber build outs ate cash at prodigious rates. The cash burn was ugly and so was the outcome for investors.
4. “A growth hypothesis tests how, given some customers, it’s possible to get more.” (Page 93)
Ries wrote in his first book: “The growth hypothesis tests how new customers will discover a product or service.” This ties to what Rachleff first described: “A growth hypothesis represents your best thinking about how you can scale the number of customers attracted to your product or service. Growth without value to the customer is likely to lead nowhere–or worse, to a big flameout.” The CLECs were able to grow revenue by brute force methods. Large sales commissions and up front financial incentives for customers can result in the sale of almost anything. But unless the unit economics of the business are right and the business has a way to fund growth, that will not prevent the inevitable disaster ahead. In other words, selling five dollars for four dollars cannot scale for very long no matter how great the hype around the service. In contrast it is a very wise thing to spend fifty dollars to acquire a customer to pay you ten dollars a month for five years.
Inside the CLECs were many people who had once been in the wireless business and they knew the lifetime value (LTV) model well from that experience. Despite the excitement created by the gold rush atmosphere some of these people could see that customer acquisition cost churn was a big problem for the CLEC business model. They knew that bundling services together increased retention so they acquired related businesses like web hosting firms to add to their service bundle. While adding new services to the bundle did reduce churn, the effort would prove to be too little and too late.
5. “Create an experiment to test [leap of faith] assumptions as quickly and inexpensively as possible (minimum viable product- MVP) (page 86)
Ries talks about a MVP approach here:
“Minimally viable” does not mean operating in a sloppy or undisciplined way, building bad code that’s going to result in a lot of technical debt, or ignoring safety or health concerns. An MVP is not an excuse to throw our beliefs about quality out the window; it’s simply an experiment on the way to excellence. Instead of taking one big swing with the launch of a new product—devoting months to the design of one technical feature or spending years in stealth mode developing a product without evidence that customers want it—it is an iterative approach to learn who the customer actually is, and what’s honestly required to delight them.
The CLECs were trying hard to find more services to sell as part of their bundle in 1999. As a result, a few CLECs created systems to sell hosted web services. This was the equivalent of software as a service (SaaS) today, but it was provided by firms that were called names like “Application Services Providers.” The software was not optimized for operating off the promises of the customers, but the plan was to see if the dogs would eat the dog food. Many things about this effort did not scale well since few things had been automated. It was a classic MVP. Customers liked the hosted services but the costs were too high given the state of the software. Unfortunately, the clock struck midnight in early 2001 and the sources of new cash disappeared, so the MVP was never transformed into a scalable service that could have helped the CLECs. If you run out of cash nothing else matters. Bankruptcy proceeding are not something that one does happily even if it is Chapter 11 and not Chapter 7.
6. “Experiment to lean what’s working and what’s not (validated learning)” (page 86)
Ries argues:
Regardless of size, mission, or sector, no organization can survive without the ability to adapt continuously. I believe that ability has to be a structural part of every organization—that companies need a standardized way to test ideas, run experiments, and follow through on the ones that will bring sustainable growth and long-term impact.
One thing that the CLECs learned via experimentation was that some business was not worth chasing. The customer acquisition costs associated with a commissioned salesperson just killed the unit economics on some small accounts. The only way to stop that from happening was to not give commissions to the sales team on very small accounts.
The ability of the CLECs to experiment was limited in many cases since they were selling services based on infrastructure owned by the incumbent telephone companies. The incumbents had far better data and control over their systems than the CLECs. Competing with someone using a competitor’s facilities is a really hard thing to do. Some people will argue that it is impossible, especially in today’s world where customer data is so valuable. The joke then was that all it took was a screwdriver for a incumbent telephone company to take down the network of a CLEC. As an analogy, imagine trying to run a bakery using the mixers and ovens of dominant company to compete in the business of selling bread.
The challenges of creating growth are not only numerous but particularly challenging in today’s business world. I don’t know anyone involved in a real business today who does not believe: (1) that the pace of business has increased and (2) that the nature of business has fundamentally changed. What is different? The answer to that question involves so many things that it is hard to know where to begin. Jeff Bezos describes one important change here:
“The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered. The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other….In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.” “Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.”
Another change is that customers are increasingly connected to businesses which generates valuable telemetry data about behavior and preferences. This data about customers, when combined with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, enables vastly more value to be delivered to customers. When a business “knows the consumer” as a result of this connected relationship the products and services delivered to that customer are vastly better. If your competitor can do this and you can’t math or better that, you are in deep trouble. The race is on to create connected relationships with customers. Everything that can be connected via a network will be connected. A radio or wired connection is going into almost everything. Key to all of this is trust- if that does not exist the data provided by the customers will not be as valuable. Customer trust is earned is an asset that is as important as anything on a balance sheet.
7. “Take the learning from each experiment and start the loop over again (build-measure-lean feedback loop)” (page 86)
What artificial intelligence enables a business to do is conduct thousands of growth experiments which can potentially enable a better products and services. Most of the growth experiments will fail, but that is a natural part of the scientific method that Ries advocates in his books. The vastly lower costs that cloud services enable means that most experiments fail or even nearly all experiments fail is OK since the payoff from the experiments that succeed can be so massive.
Ries suggests:
Enter the Build phase as quickly as possible with an MVP that will allow us to test a clear hypothesis we have about our product or strategy.
Measure its impact in the marketplace using actionable metrics that help us analyze customer behavior.
Learn whether our original assumptions about the product, process, and customer needs were correct or whether we need to change strategies to better meet our vision.
The Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop does not end once we’ve put our first product into the market. Every new launch of an MVP is an opportunity to gain valuable information about how well we’re meeting customer needs—and whether we need to adjust our strategy with a pivot.
The CLECs knew that serving building with fiber was expensive so they bought radio spectrum in the millimeter wave bands (e.g., 24 and 38 GHz) to try and connect business using an approach they called LMDS at lower cost. Rather than rolling out the service slowly after product/market fit was proven, the CLECs starting building out these LMDS wireless networks quickly. There was no iterative process where the value hypothesis was proven first based on a MVP. The result was a disaster. Why the rush? Some of it was fear of missing out (FOMO) but some of the rush was driven by the fact that people knew inside the CLECs that the fiber-based approached really wasn’t working well financially and that an answer was needed quickly. It is hard not to fall prey to confirmation bias and loss aversion when the business really needs a solution and has a lot of time, money and reputation invested already.
8. “Because of the short term pressure, [businesses tend to focus] on the projects they believe will maximize that quarter or fiscal year.” (Page 14)
Ries is talking in that sentence about the danger of a short-term focus in business. This short-term focus is often created by dysfunctional metrics that I call Siren Call Ratios (e.g., IRR, P/E and RONA). I wrote about Siren Call Ratios recently in my blog post about the demise of post-break up AT&T. In that example, while the long distance business seemed like be a wonderful opportunity to AT&T based on the Siren Call Ratios, it had zero barriers to entry. The long distance business without a local loop monopoly was one of the most deadly mirages in business history. If you manage a business to make ratios like P/E look good in the short-term you can end up with a long term disaster.
9. “It is important to create metrics that measure success… that often replace a company’s traditional metrics- often ROI…” (page 176)
A business that is managed to achieve vanity metrics has never been more at risk. In today’s economy ever business must think and act based on long-term financial returns in order to survive. If a business is instead focused on short-term metrics, competitors that do invest for the long-term will come along and crush it. Customers are far too well informed given the information transparency created by the internet to accept inferior products. One of the better examples of a company that is driven by long-term metrics is a company that has the following operational model for its internal startups: Once a year (in summer at the start of their fiscal year) the company “stack ranks” proposals that product managers believe will drive growth. Every product manager (PM) must make a case for what they want done at this stage. The PMs essentially sign up for improvements to key metrics like revenue and cash flow growth in their six page proposal. The senior leaders of the business then do the stack ranking. Some things make the cut and some don’t. There is another valuation period six months later. I am making it simpler than it really is since they must write an imaginary press release first, but those are the key steps. Compensation and promotions are based on hitting the numbers in the metrics. Post-mortems are done on failed efforts. Do you know or can you guess who this company I just described is?
10. “Provide metered funding to startup teams… denominated in a fixed budget of either time or money.” (page 289)
More startups, including internal startups, die from indigestion than from starvation. Too much funding can very often be a curse for a startup rather than a blessing. When a startup is over funded, cash is too often used to solve problems that are better tackled through innovation and organizational culture. Too much funding can also cause the organization to grow headcount too quickly and to work on the growth hypothesis to begin before the value hypothesis is solved. All of this happened in the case of CLECs.
FOMO on the CLEC opportunity caused legions of business people and investors to bet massive amounts of capital on an industry that would eventually be shown not to have a sound business model. It is worth pointing out that the company that kicked the telecom Bubble off with the purchase of MFS was Worldcom. The New York Times article on that company that is most relevant read in part on July 22, 2002:
“WorldCom, plagued by the rapid erosion of its profits and an accounting scandal that created billions in illusory earnings, last night submitted the largest bankruptcy filing in United States history…. the chief financial officer, had devised a strategy that improperly accounted for $3.85 billion of expenses.”
Over a period of years it became more and more clear that the unit economics of the CLEC business simply didn’t work financially. Here is a short description of the CLEC investing thesis:
The CLECs built a fiber ring in a city and connected that system to some office towers. The landlord must agree to allow the fiber provider and access to a room for equipment, Fiber must be run up a “riser” to each floor. All that requires cash outlay up front. The CLEC then hired sales people who go to buildings and travel up and down the elevators trying to sell a bundle of local phone service, long distance and Internet connectivity. Sometimes they also sold web hosting in that bundle. The lifetime value (LTV) calculation for a small office tenant might look like this:
That’s an ugly financial outcome that continues linearly with scale. When the end to the telecom bubble came (i.e., when the cash ran out), the demise of the CELCs was swift and merciless.
11. “On a regular schedule (cadence) make a decision about whether to make a change in strategy (pivot) or stay the course.” (page 86)
One of the hardest things about internal startups is that there are no market forces that sort out which efforts should be shut down and which should be funded further. The process can become arbitrary and political in a large organization. By creating a regular review cadence with a set of relatively independent reviewers these intra-company startups/ experiments all potentially face a process that mimics the market. Instead of seeking financing in rounds from venture capitalists internal startups try to convince a board that they have achieved certain success metrics. This is not an easy process to make happen in a large company, but it is a necessary one. During the Telecom Bubble the markets did not perform their usual function due to the power of FOMO (fear of missing out) until billions of dollars had been lost. Obviously the markets were neither perfectly efficient of rational and agents were not perfect informed when it came to CELCs. Level 3 survived until it was recently bought by Century Link, but it was a long painful road.
12. “Modern companies need the ability to consistently and reliably make bets on high risk, high reward projects without having to bet the whole company.” (page 45)
Amazon is a leading example of what Ries is writing about in that sentence. Bezos describes the objective at Amazon as follows:
One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.
If you find yourself wanting to refresh your memory about Learn Startup by reading my previous blog post about Ries, the unfortunate news is that it is now only available in my new book. About 35 of my previous blog posts have been rewritten in a revised format that has been professionally edited. That book will be available in a few days and can be pre-ordered now. 100% my royalties from that new book will go to the charity No Kid Hungry.
Notes:
http://money.cnn.com/2001/04/10/technology/herring_clec/
https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Way-Companies-Entrepreneurial-Management/dp/0147523303
https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=V9B2W5YKZ23VS2J01P84
http://www.leanblog.org/2017/10/podcast-290-ericries-leanstartup-startup-way/
https://www.inc.com/lee-clifford-julie-schlosser/lean-startup-eric-ries-testing-your-product.html
http://www.economist.com/node/1234886
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2002/07/22/326291/index.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/us/worldcom-s-collapse-the-overview-worldcom-files-for-bankruptcy-largest-us-case.html
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=236108
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Map of the land owned or leased by colleges and universities in the Boston area as of 2007
This is a list of colleges and universities in metropolitan Boston. Some are located within Boston proper while some are located in neighboring cities and towns, but all are within the 128/95/1 loop. This is closer to the "inner core" definition of Metropolitan Boston, which excludes more suburban North Shore, South Shore and MetroWest regions. Although larger institutions may have several schools, some of which are located in cities other than that of the main campus (such as Harvard Medical School and Tufts University School of Medicine), each institution is listed only once and location is determined by the site of each institution's main campus.
There are a total of 52 institutions of higher education in the defined region, including 4 junior colleges, 15 colleges that primarily grant baccalaureate and master's degrees, 8 research universities, and 22 special-focus institutions. Of these, 49 are non-profit organizations while 3 are for-profit businesses, and 47 are private ventures while 5 are public institutions (4 are run by the state of Massachusetts and 1 is operated by the city of Quincy).
In 2007, enrollment at these colleges and universities ranged from 108 students at the Episcopal Divinity School to 32,053 students at Boston University. The first to be founded was Harvard University, also the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, while the most recently established institution is the Urban College of Boston. All but five of these schools are accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), the oldest regional accrediting body in the United States, and all but one are recognized by the United States Department of Education.
Institutions [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Founding year is institutionally determined. It may differ from the institution's charter year, the year it became an institution of higher education, or the year it took its current name.
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NEW YORK: Software major Satyam Computer Services has reportedly been banned from doing any off-shore work with the World Bank after forensic experts and bank investigators discovered that spy software was covertly installed on workstations inside the bank's Washington headquarters, allegedly by one or more contractors from Satyam Computer Services. ( Watch According to a FOX News report, apart from Satyam, two IP intrusions have been reported from China, and there have been six intrusions in all.Investigators say that the software, which operates through a method known as keystroke logging, enabled every character typed on a keyboard to be transmitted to a still-unknown location via the Internet.Upon its discovery, bank officials shut off the data link between Washington and Chennai, where Satyam has long operated the bank's sole offshore computer center responsible for all of the bank's financial and human resources information."I want them off the premises now," World Bank President Robert Zoellick reportedly told his deputies. But at the urging of CIO De Poerck, Satyam employees remained at the bank as recently as October 1 while it engaged in "knowledge transfer" with two new India-based contractors.Satyam is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange and boasts having two billion dollars in sales and more than 150 Fortune 500 companies as clients.In 2003, Satyam won a lucrative five-year "sole source" contract to design, write and maintain all of the World Bank's information systems. The contract, which began at $10 million, had grown to over $100 million by 2007. This year, the contract was not renewed. Satyam has declined to comment.FOX News claims that outsiders have raided the World Bank Group's computer network, one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation, repeatedly for more than a year.It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July.The crisis comes at an awkward moment for Zoellick, who runs the world's largest and most influential anti-poverty agency, which doles out $25 billion a year, and whose board represents 185 member nations.This weekend, the bank holds its annual series of meetings in Washington, and just in advance of those sessions, Zoellick called for a radical revamping of multilateral organizations in light of the global economic meltdown.Zoellick is positioning himself and the bank as an institution that can help chart a new path toward global financial stability. But that reputation, more than ever, depends on the bank's stable information infrastructure.According to internal memos, "a minimum of 18 servers has been compromised," including some of the bank's most sensitive systems, ranging from the bank's security and password server to a Human Resources server "that contains scanned images of staff documents."One World Bank director told FOX News that as many as 40 servers have been penetrated, including one that held contract-procurement data. It took ten days for bank officials to detect that they'd been invaded. Once they did, they shut down all external servers, except for e-mail, which it turns out the invaders were already using as their entrance point.A World Bank spokesman, however, rubbished the Fox News story, saying it is riddled with falsehoods and errors.
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World Renowned Heart Surgeon Speaks Out On What Really Causes Heart Disease
We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.
I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.
The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.
It Is Not Working!
These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.
The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.
Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.
Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.
Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.
Inflammation is not complicated — it is quite simply your body’s natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.
What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well,smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.
The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.
Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.
What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.
Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.
Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.
While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.
How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?
Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.
When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.
What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.
While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator — inflammation in their arteries.
Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential -they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell — they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s.
If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.
Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.
To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.
There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.
There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.
One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.
Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labelled polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.
The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.
What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.
Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital , Mesa , AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ. Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is also the author of The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie.
The official news release can be found here: Prevent Disease
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The U.S. House Domestic Policy Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), held a hearing today on the White House's drug war budget and forthcoming 2010 National Drug Control Strategy. The Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (also known as the drug czar), Gil Kerlikowske, gave testimony. I also testified.
Below is the testimony I gave today:
Good morning. I'm Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation's leading organization advocating alternatives to the failed war on drugs. I want to thank the subcommittee for inviting me to testify on ONDCP's priorities and objectives. It is hard to talk in detail about ONDCP's overall strategy when their 2010 Strategy is not yet out, but there are certain things we know based on their proposed FY11 Budget Highlights and recent statements and remarks by Director Gil Kerlikowske and others.
I want to highlight four issues -- ONDCP's flawed performance measures, the lop-sided ratio between supply and demand spending in their budget, the lack of innovation in their proposed strategies, and their failure to adequately evaluate drug policies. But first a little context is required.
The predominant role that criminalization and the criminal justice system play in dealing with particular drugs and drug use in this country is unsustainable in both fiscal and human terms. Police made 1.7 million drug arrests in 2008 alone, including 750,000 for nothing more than possession of marijuana for personal use. Those arrested were separated from their loved ones, branded criminals, denied jobs, and in many cases prohibited from voting and accessing public assistance for life.
The United States now ranks first in the world in per capita incarceration rates, with less than 5% of the world's population but nearly 25% of the world's prison population. Roughly 500,000 people are behind bars tonight for a drug law violation. That's ten times the total in 1980, and more than all of western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for all offenses. More than half of federal prisoners are there for drug law violations; relatively few are kingpins and virtually none are queenpins.
Yet, despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars and arresting millions of Americans, illegal drugs remain cheap, potent and widely available throughout the country and the harms associated with them continue to mount. Meanwhile, the war on drugs is creating problems of its own - broken families, racial disparities, and the erosion of civil liberties. Few government policies have failed for so long without any serious effort to question or revise them.
U.S. Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) said recently, speaking about our country's uniquely high incarceration rate, "either we have the most evil people in the world or we are doing something wrong with the way we approach the issue of criminal justice." He went on to say "the central role of drug policy in filling our nation's prisons makes clear that our approach to curbing illegal drug use is broken." Unfortunately, ONDCP seems unwilling to reassess this role in any meaningful way.
Performance Measures
When it comes to performance measures, ONDCP historically has pointed to increases or decreases in the total number of Americans who admit to using an illegal drug within the last year as the most important criteria for judging the success or failure of U.S. drug policy. The agency sets two- and five-year goals based on annual surveys of drug use. It is not evident yet what performance measures ONDCP will lay out in its forthcoming Strategy, but when speaking before the 53rd UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs last month Director Kerlikowske said, "[t]he U.S. Strategy will emphasize and focus on our commitment to reduce U.S. drug consumption."
Drug use rates tell us surprisingly little, however, about our nation's progress toward reducing the actual harms associated with drugs. If the number of Americans using illegal drugs decreases, but overdose fatalities, new HIV/AIDS infections, racial disparities and addiction increases, the Drug Policy Alliance would consider that failure. In contrast, if the number of Americans using illegal drugs increases, but overdose fatalities, new HIV/AIDS infections, racial disparities and addiction declines, the Drug Policy Alliance would consider that success. Key performance measurements should focus on the death, disease, crime and suffering associated with both drugs and our drug policies, not drug use per se.
Simply stated, ups and downs in how many people say they used marijuana or other drugs last year are far less important than ups and downs in drug overdose fatalities, or new HIV and hepatitis C infections, or expenditures on incarceration of non-violent drug offenders.
If this subcommittee advances only one drug-related reform it should be to require ONDCP to set objectives for reducing the harms associated with both drugs and the war on drugs. ONDCP shouldn't just set short- and long-term goals for reducing drug use; it should set specific goals for reducing fatal overdoses, the spread of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, racial disparities, the number of nonviolent offenders behind bars, and other negative consequences of both drug use and drug control policies.
Ideally, ONDCP will use their 2010 Strategy as an opportunity to set a new bottom line in U.S. drug policy, but if they fail to do so Congress should set it for them. The U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, and the National Latino Congreso have all called for setting new performance measures in U.S. drug policy that focus on reducing both drug- and drug-war-related problems.
Supply vs. Demand
In terms of the broad strokes of ONDCP's proposed FY11 drug war budget, it is largely a continuation of the failed drug policies of the last three decades, with most of the money dedicated to ineffective supply-side programs, relatively little going to treatment and prevention, and almost none going to harm reduction. Director Kerlikowske told the Wall Street Journal last year that he doesn't like to use the term "war on drugs" because "[w]e're not at war with people in this country." Yet 64% of their budget - virtually the same as under the Bush Administration - focuses on largely futile interdiction efforts as well as arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating extraordinary numbers of people. Only 36% is earmarked for demand reduction - and even that proportion is inflated because the ONDCP "budget" no longer includes costs such as the $2 billion expended annually to incarcerate people who violate federal drug laws.
The U.S. is never going to significantly reduce the problems associated with drug use and misuse as long as most of the drug war budget is dedicated to supply reduction instead of demand and harm reduction. Drug strategies that seek to interrupt the supply at its source have failed over and over again for cocaine, heroin, marijuana and virtually every drug to which they have been applied - including alcohol during alcohol Prohibition. The global markets in marijuana, coca, and opium products operate essentially the same way that other global commodity markets do: if one source is compromised due to bad weather, rising production costs, or political difficulties, another emerges.
In contrast, experts have known for years that increasing funding for treatment is the most cost-effective way to undermine illicit drug markets and reduce substance misuse. A 1994 RAND study commissioned by the U.S. Army and ONDCP found treatment to be 10 times more effective at reducing drug abuse than drug interdiction, 15 times more effective than domestic law enforcement, and 23 times more effective than trying to eradicate drugs at their source. A 1997 SAMHSA study found that treatment reduces drug selling by 78%, shoplifting by almost 82% and assaults by 78%. More recent studies have reached similar conclusions.
In 2000, voters in California approved the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act - also known as Proposition 36 - which had been drafted and sponsored by the Drug Policy Alliance and allied organizations. That initiative requires the state to provide drug treatment, rather than jail, for nonviolent drug possession offenders. It also doubled previous annual state funding for drug treatment. A recent evaluation by UCLA found that California taxpayers saved nearly $2.50 for every dollar invested in the program. Of people who successfully completed their drug treatment, California taxpayers saved nearly $4 for each dollar spent. In all, Proposition 36 is estimated to have saved the state government and localities roughly $2 billion dollars.
The problems with ONDCP's FY11 proposed drug budget involve more, however, than the bias in spending in favor of supply reduction. Most of the programs being funded are not all that different than those funded by previous administrations, yet the Bush Administration's assessment of roughly half of federal drug war programs found just one that could be rated moderately effectively, a few were rated adequate, and most were rated ineffective or results not demonstrated. Not one was rated truly effective.
The solution thus involves more than re-balancing the proportion of funds spent on supply vs. demand reduction. Drug education and prevention may be underfunded, but existing expenditures are also poorly spent. The federal government continues to waste tens of millions of dollars each year on D.A.R.E., the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, student drug testing and other scared-based prevention programs repeatedly proven to be ineffective. More funding for treatment is needed but those expenditures will prove most beneficial if they are no longer inappropriately circumscribed by drug war politics and ideology.
Lack of Innovation and Missed Opportunities
Most indications suggest that ONDCP is unlikely to propose any new initiatives that differ in significant ways from those of preceding administrations - although there are some modest steps in the right direction such as requesting funding to train physicians to identify and respond to substance misuse in their patients and better coordinating treatment and prevention services. ONDCP is requesting needed money for the Second Chance Act and other programs designed to reduce recidivism and help offenders reintegrate into society, but the prison door will remain a revolving door as long as police make 1.7 million drugs arrests each year. Reintegration will also be difficult so long as federal and state laws prohibit formerly incarcerated individuals from accessing public housing, student loans, and other public assistance.
Director Kerlikowske has said in several recent speeches that U.S. drug policy should be "evidence-based" and "balanced" but there is little reason to believe that ONDCP's 2010 Strategy will be either. U.S., foreign and international agencies that focus on preventing HIV/AIDS domestically and internationally routinely rely on harm reduction interventions and employ the language of harm reduction. Deputy ONDCP director Tom McLellan appeared to break new ground in 2009 when he stated that "we support all harm reduction efforts that also reduce drug use." But that acknowledgement of the important role of harm reduction in drug policy was repudiated last month when Director Kerlikowske declared that "we do not use the phrase 'harm reduction' to describe our policies because we believe it creates unnecessary confusion and is too often misused to further policies and ideologies which promote drug use." Dozens of foreign governments that employ harm reduction language and policies reportedly found the statement foolish, although they welcomed the United States' belated support of needle exchange and other science-based policies.
Congress's recent repeal of the ban on federal funding for sterile syringes to reduce HIV represented an important step forward in elevating science over politics. It is a shame that ONDCP appears to have played little to no role in accomplishing that important reform and has yet to articulate a plan for working with states to improve syringe availability to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C. Their FY11 Budget Highlight contains no dedicated funding for syringe exchange. This is a missed opportunity to create a continuum of care linking syringe exchange and other harm reduction programs with treatment and rehabilitative programs in ways that blur the boundaries among programs and truly focus on helping people manage or even stop their dependence on illicit drugs.
Director Kerlikowske has spoken eloquently and forcefully in support of reducing fatal drug overdoses from legal and illegal opiates. ONDCP, however, has yet to demonstrate any leadership in advancing the most effective (and cost-effective) means of reducing fatal ODs - increasing access to the overdose antidote, naloxone. Dedicated funding appears to be absent from their Budget Highlight and there is no indication it will be part of their Strategy. Thousands of lives a year could be saved if ONDCP prioritized this intervention.
Fatal drug overdoses increased more than 400 percent between 1980 and 1999 and more than doubled over the last decade. Overdose is now the second leading cause of accidental death (second only to automobile crashes) and the leading cause of accidental death in 16 states and among Americans aged 35 to 54. More Americans died last year from drug overdoses than firearms.
Naloxone is a highly effective opioid antagonist that rapidly reverses an overdose when administered by a peer or medical professional. Participants in overdose prevention programs are trained how to administer naloxone, perform CPR, initiate rescue breathing and put a victim in the recovery position until emergency help arrives. Naloxone distribution programs are commonplace abroad and can also be found in a growing number of U.S. cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City and San Francisco; New Mexico and Massachusetts have statewide programs. Many more would be available if federal funding were available.
ONDCP has also dismissed two other highly successful, evidence-based harm reduction strategies - supervised injection facilities and heroin assistance treatment. Their FY11 budget contains no funding for even trial or research programs on them, notwithstanding abundant evidence that they have succeeded in a diversity of foreign locations.
An estimated 90 supervised injection facilities currently operate in forty cities around the world. To date, 28 methodologically rigorous studies on the impact of supervised injection facilities have been published in leading peer-reviewed medical journals. These studies demonstrate that supervised injection sites are associated with reductions in overdose fatalities, syringe sharing, public injecting, and publicly discarded syringes, increased uptake of drug detoxification and addiction treatment programs, and no increases in drug-related crime or rates of relapse among former drug users.
There is but a single supervised injection facility in North America - Vancouver's Insite program. Director Kerlikowske visited that program during his tenure as Seattle police chief and wrote a brief but straight-forward memo on it for his command staff. Public health officials in San Francisco and other U.S. cities have considered establishing pilot supervised injection sites in the U.S., but are wary of attempting to proceed in the face of federal opposition. The mixture of arrogance and fear with which ONDCP officials dismiss even the possibility of supporting research in the area is sadly reminiscent of past ONDCP opposition to syringe exchange programs notwithstanding the scientific consensus in their favor. Their opposition provides a powerful reminder that President Obama's mandate that politics no longer trump science does not extend to federal drug policy.
Evidence in support of heroin assisted treatment is equally strong. These programs enable people addicted to street heroin who have not succeeded in other treatment programs to be prescribed pharmaceutical heroin as part of a broader treatment regimen. Heroin assisted trials have now been conducted in six countries - Switzerland, the Netherlands, England, Spain, Germany, and Canada. Denmark recently decided to skip pilot projects and go straight to offering heroin assisted treatment for those who need it because the evidence from elsewhere was so conclusive.
Peer-reviewed studies around the world have concluded that heroin assisted treatment is associated with reductions in crime, overdose fatalities, risky behavior and other problems as well as improvements in physical and mental health, employment and social relations. Cost-benefit studies demonstrate that the relatively high cost of heroin-assisted treatment is more than covered by reductions in criminal justice and health care costs. Some of these results were reported in an evaluation of the Canadian research trial (known as NAOMI - the North American Opiate Medication Initiation) published in the distinguished New England Journal of Medicine. By contrast, few reports can be found in refereed scientific journals demonstrating any significant failures or harmful consequences of heroin assisted treatment.
Professor Peter Reuter at the School of Public Policy and Department of Criminology, University of Maryland, College Park published a report last year that analyzed heroin assisted treatment programs around the world and considered whether Baltimore should establish a pilot project. He concluded:
The potential for gain...is substantial. Even in the aging heroin-addict
population, there are many who are heavily involved in crime and return frequently to the criminal justice system. Their continued involvement in street markets imposes a large burden on the community in the form of civil disorder that helps keep investment and jobs out. If heroin maintenance could remove 10 percent of Baltimore's most troubled heroin addicts from the streets, the result could be substantial reductions in crime and various other problems that greatly trouble the city. That is enough to make a debate on the matter worthwhile.
The same could well be said of dozens of other U.S. cities where heroin is used illegally by significant numbers of residents. For those who hesitate to allow the legal prescription of heroin, it is worth pointing out that two research trials found that longtime users of heroin could not distinguish it, in controlled double blind studies, from hydromorphone (more commonly known by its trade name, Dilaudid), which is widely used in pain management both here and abroad.
During his speech at the UN Commission on Narcotics Drugs, Director Kerlikowske told representatives from other nations that "We [the U.S. government] support evaluating individual programs and policies on their own merit, not on whether they do or do not fall under any particular ideological label." Yet ONDCP's persistent refusal to support even trying what has worked so well in every foreign research trial cannot help but call into question its commitment to science over ideology.
Need for Reassessment
Finally, ONDCP's request for $15.5 billion in drug war expenditures for FY11 includes virtually no allocation for rigorous assessment of the efficacy of U.S. drug policies. This continues a long ONDCP tradition of spending enormous amounts of taxpayer money on demonstrably failed policies without examining alternatives. Even a modest allocation to commission the National Academy of Sciences (or a similarly objective, non-politicized entity) to assess alternative drug policies both here and abroad would represent an important breakthrough in holding U.S. drug policies accountable to more objective evidence-based criteria. So would a requirement that federal agencies involved in the drug war devote a portion of their budgets to evaluating the efficacy and unintended consequences of their policies and programs.
Congress and the Obama administration have broken with the costly and failed drug war strategies of the past in some important ways - by allowing federal funding of syringe exchange to reduce HIV, by allowing state governments greater latitude to regulate the availability of marijuana for medical purposes, by moving forward on reducing racially discriminatory crack/powder mandatory minimum sentences, and by working more diligently to integrate effective drug treatment into ordinary medical care. But the continuing emphasis on interdiction and law enforcement in the federal drug war budget, the persistent preference for typically futile supply reduction initiatives over demand and harm reduction efforts, the refusal to jettison federal programs that show no signs of success, the arrogant rejection of harm reduction initiatives that have proven successful abroad, and the absence of any commitment to rigorous evaluation of current policies and alternative options - all suggest that ONDCP's plans for the future are far more wedded to the failures of the past than to any new vision for the future.
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Hillary Clinton on Friday needled Donald Trump for his apparent obsession with Alicia Machado, saying it was easier for Trump to insult the former Miss Universe than to demand payment for his border wall from the Mexican president.
Speaking to a crowd in Coral Springs, Florida, Clinton said Trump “finds it a lot easier to insult women than to talk to the president of Mexico about building a wall. I mean, really? Who gets up at 3:00 in the morning to engage in a Twitter attack against a former Miss Universe?”
“I mean, he hurdled as many insults as he could,” she added, “Really? Why does he do things like that?”
Clinton also taunted Trump on his “only infrastructure plan”: demanding that Mexico pay for a wall along its border with the United States.
“My opponent’s only infrastructure plan is to build a wall! I loved that he went down to Mexico and he choked,” Clinton said. “He didn’t even raise it. He’s been going around telling people for months we’re going to build a wall, make Mexico pay for it, so he’s sitting with the president of Mexico and he doesn’t even bring it up.”
On Friday, Trump began tweeting about Machado — who he previously criticized Tuesday morning for “gain[ing] a massive amount of weight” after winning the pageant — early in the morning, saying she had a “terrible” history and encouraging readers to “check out sex tape and past.” Machado does not appear to have been featured in any porn films, despite reports pushed by conservative news sites.
Clinton’s campaign tore into Trump’s habit on Friday, tweeting that his obsession with Machado was “unhinged, even for Trump.”
And Machado herself responded to Trump in two posts on Instagram, one each in English and Spanish, calling Trump on his insistence “on discrediting and demoralizing a woman, which is definitely one of his more frightening characteristics.”
Watch below:
This post has been updated.
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Thursday, July 3rd, 2014
FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- The mother of twin Fresno brothers who are accused of murdering a Good Samaritan is coming to their defense.But, police say what happened to 49-year-old Nathan Halsted can only be described as a senseless crime. "Like an animal pursuing prey and that's what they were if one person walked by, they went after them," said Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer.Gerald and Jared Smith's mother told Action news her twin sons were just trying to defend themselves early Monday morning. "My boys they got jumped, and these weren't boys they were fighting with; these were grown men," said Lou Ann Smith. "They just turned 18, and they have a lot of dreams they work hard for."Detectives say surveillance video which captured the crime tells a very different story and the teens were actually the predators who attacked a woman near Belmont and Calaveras. They say Halsted tried to protect her before the suspects turned on him.In a news conference, Chief Dyer said the pair brutally beat Halsted until he was lying unconscious in the middle of Belmont Avenue. Minutes later a driver ran over him and that impact may have killed him. The suspects' mom says that driver, not her sons, should be the one facing murder charges. She said, "They did not run over this man, so where is the person who hit this man. Where is he at?"But investigators disagree. "The people who are responsible for this are Gerald and Jared Smith who were the ones that beat this victim and allowed him to be run over and killed," said Chief Dyer.At one point the video shows a driver in a white car pull up. Investigators say the suspects tried to fight him and banged his car leaving some crucial evidence behind. "The crime scene bureau that processed the vehicle, they were able to lift fingerprints from the vehicle," added Dyer.The suspects got away but detectives say those fingerprints are what led to their arrests. Officers say both teens have confessed and they are now being charged with murder.null
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Rahul Gandhi doesn't expect to be prime minister in 2019. His target is 2024. Time is on his side. In May 2024, he will still be only 53. Narendra Modi, even if he wins a second term in 2019, will be 73 in 2024. Rahul believes that his time will then have come.
Prediciting so far into the future in politics is of course foolhardy. Events can overturn the best-laid plans. Still the Gandhi family's blueprint is clearly etched. Sonia Gandhi will hand over the Congress presidency to Rahul in the course of the next one year, possibly earlier. She will turn 70 in December 2016: a good time to bequeath the fief.
Congress old-timers who've blocked Rahul's coronation for a while, fearing their own obsolescence, have more or less come around. Rahul's hyperactivism in recent months has been directed as much at them as at the BJP.
The old guard in the Congress has for long doubted whether Rahul had fire in his belly. They persuaded Sonia to carry on as president last year. She radiates a European sense of purpose. Her body language is assertive. She speaks with firmness that brooks no dissent.
Rahul, half-European, quarter-Kashmiri and quarter-Parsi, is milder. It has taken him 12 years in Parliament to capture the aggression his mother projects effortlessly. And yet, when it comes to the crunch, Sonia is ruthless, Rahul conciliatory. A recent example highlighted the difference between mother and son. When the party journal Congress Darshan called Sonia's father a fascist she had the magazine's editor sacked in 24 hours.
Sanjay Nirupam, in overall charge of the publication, was also on the chopping block despite his contrite apology. When Rahul visited Mumbai, he met Nirupam and accepted his apology.
Sonia was still furious. The F-word (fascist) had hit a raw nerve. She insisted on Nirupam's sacking till Rahul intervened. Nirupam survived.
Unfortunately for Rahul, he is not a natural politician. But then neither was his father. Rajiv Gandhi joined politics at the age of 36, contesting his first Lok Sabha by-election in 1981 from Amethi, months after younger brother Sanjay Gandhi's death in an air crash.
By 40, he was prime minister, following his mother Indira Gandhi's assassination. At 46, he was dead.
By contrast, Rahul's progression has been glacial. He will be 46 this June and has still not held a constitutional post. As vice-president of the Congress, a family company, he has not had to deal with meaningful opposition within. He doesn't have to report to anybody. He isn't accountable to anyone.
At his age, Rajiv had been prime minister for five years, faced huge crises, including the defection of close confidants VP Singh, Arun Singh and Arun Nehru, carried out complex negotiations in Sri Lanka, Punjab, Assam and Mizoram, and countered fierce media attacks over Bofors before becoming an outspoken opposition leader in Parliament for over a year.
In comparison, Rahul has had it easy. Out of power, he has the advantage of attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi without fear of serious retaliation. As the prime minister, Modi has to preserve the impression of being above the fray. The aggressive campaigner Modi of 2014 was a very different politician from the high-minded prime ministerial-Modi of 2016.
Rahul has taken full advantage of this. But the question remains: does Rahul have the stomach for the top job?
The same question was asked of Rajiv when he assumed the prime ministership following his mother's assassination. In the recently published second volume of his memoirs, President Pranab Mukherjee writes that on the flight from Calcutta to Delhi after hearing the news of Mrs Gandhi's assassination, Rajiv asked him if he "would be able to manage as prime minister".
A few months after that conversation, I interviewed Pranab Mukherjee. After also interviewing others who were on that Calcutta-Delhi flight along with Rajiv, this is what I wrote in my biography Rajiv Gandhi: The End of a Dream (pg 136-139), published by Penguin:
"After reading the message twice over I asked the policeman near our car to do three things immediately," Mukherjee told me. "First, to ascertain whether a pilot could be contacted at Calcutta by wireless and, if so, to keep him standing by to fly to Delhi by an air force jet. Second, to contact simultaneously the air force bases in Kolaikunda and Calcutta and keep one air force jet standing by at both places. And third, to keep us informed every five minutes over the car radio about the latest news from Delhi."
By now it was 9.45am. Mukherjee, Ghani Khan Chowdhury and Rajiv (still accompanied by his security officer) abandoned their Ambassador and got into a Mercedes (which was a part of the convoy) and sped off towards the junction at Kolaghat. "We thought the Mercedes would make better time than the Ambassador, hence the switch," Mukherjee told me.
Meanwhile, Rajiv put on the car radio and tuned into BBC. At around 10.00am the three men, sitting silently in the back seat of the Mercedes, now speeding towards Kolaghat at eighty miles per hour, heard the news of the assassination with shocked disbelief. BBC did not confirm Mrs Gandhi's death but did report that she was at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in critical condition. The broadcast went on to give details, sketchy as they were then, of the shooting and the suspected assassins. The men sat in the car in grim silence. "The only words Rajiv spoke," recalls Mukherjee, "turning to look sideway at me, were: 'Is this all she deserved?'"
The three men flew by helicopter to Calcutta, 30 miles away. Two aircrafts were standing by at the Calcutta airport. Within minutes Mukherjee, Chowdhury and Rajiv were on board an Indian Airlines (IA) Boeing in which they were joined by Uma Shankar Dikshit, his daughter-in-law Sheila Dikshit, Lok Sabha speaker Balram Jakhar and veteran Congress leader Shyamlal Yadav. Accompanying them were Lok Sabha secretary S Aggarwal and Rajya Sabha secretary S Kashyap.
The IA Boeing left Calcutta for Delhi at 1.15pm. Inside the plane the mood was sombre. Mukherjee, Dikshit and Rajiv sat in seats 2A, 2B and 2C, just behind the cockpit; Rajiv was seated next to the aisle. Within minutes he made his way to the cockpit where he had spent 12 of the last 16 years as an airline pilot. In the cockpit, the atmosphere was equally tense. The pilot, in continuous touch with ground control, kept Rajiv informed of the latest situation in New Delhi.
At around 1.25pm the news Rajiv had subconsciously expected, but dreaded to hear, came crackling over the aircraft radio. Mrs Gandhi had succumbed to her injuries.
A few minutes later, at 1.30pm, an expressionless Rajiv came out of the cockpit and told Mukherjee and Uma Shankar Dikshit that Mrs Gandhi had died. His voice was calm, his composure striking. "He was in complete control of himself," recalls Mukherjee, "though he was obviously in deep shock."
Mukherjee, as the seniormost minister in Mrs Gandhi's cabinet, was now unofficially in charge of the government. "I broke down completely and wept," he confessed to me. "I went to the bathroom and was there for half-an-hour trying to compose myself. I don't remember what happened for the next 30 minutes."
Balram Jakhar, who as speaker of the Lok Sabha would have a pivotal role to play in ensuring an orderly succession, finally asked Mukherjee bluntly: "Do you think Rajiv should be inducted as prime minister?"
In his interview with me, Mukherjee recalled the conversation: "I said yes, he must be inducted as prime minister. Further, I pointed out that if we announced Mrs Gandhi's death at that stage, the country would be without a government. President Zail Singh was also out of town, remember. I urged them all to ensure that All India Radio and the national TV network should not announce the death till Rajiv had been sworn in as PM."
Everyone agreed with Mukherjee on this point and it was thus that AIR and Doordarshan did not officially broadcast the news of Mrs Gandhi's death till evening, long after the international media had confirmed the news. By then Rajiv was about to be sworn in as the prime minister.
Rahul has a bit of Rajiv in him. But he has a lot more of Sonia. The mother-son duo run a tight ship. The Congress has no credible leader to challenge the family. Historian Ramachandra Guha said recently that Rahul is unfit to be prime minister because he simply isn't bright enough. Guha is wrong. You don't need to be brilliant to be prime minister. If you did, a neuroscientist or physicist would be one. What you need is common sense - and the common touch.
The Budget session of Parliament beginning on February 23 will reveal whether Rahul has matured as a political leader. The first job of such a leader, of course, is to reject dynastic privilege and build the party of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Netaji Subhas Bose and Maulana Azad into a genuinely democratic organisation.
That task proved beyond Indira, Rajiv and Sonia. It could alas prove beyond Rahul.
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