The prevalence of discrimination across racial groups in contemporary America:
Results from a nationally representative sample of adults

Introduction.

Personal experiences of discrimination and bias have been the focus of much
social science research. [1 - 3] Sociologists have explored the adverse
consequences of discrimination [3 – 5]; psychologists have examined the mental
processes that underpin conscious and unconscious biases [6]; neuroscientists
have examined the neurobiological underpinnings of discrimination [7 – 9]; and
evolutionary theorists have explored the various ways that in-group / out-group
biases emerged across the history of our species. [10] In many respects,
researchers already possess a wealth of knowledge concerning the origins and
consequences of discrimination and bias. [11]

What also should not be lost in discussion of discrimination is the growing push
to implement social policy aimed at reducing the occurrence of discriminatory
practices. Mandatory diversity trainings in professional settings, for example,
are intended to reduce bias in the workplace by increasing the awareness of
employees regarding the challenges facing minority group members. [12] Indeed,
the implementation of certain policies is rooted in the assumption that
discrimination and biases are, at least to some appreciable amount, present in
modern society.

Even so, estimates of the prevalence of perceived discrimination remains rare
(see [13 – 14]). At least one prior study by Kessler and colleagues [15],
however, using measures of perceived discrimination in a large American sample,
reported that approximately 33% of respondents reported some form of
discrimination (see also, Gibbons et al. [4]). The current study seeks to build
on this research by estimating the prevalence of discrimination experiences
among a large, nationally representative sample of adults from the United
States. Additionally, the analysis address the perceived reasons for reported
discrimination experiences.

Reason for discrimination.

All respondents who indicated they were discriminated against — specifically,
those who responded with sometimes or often to the perceived discrimination
measure described above — were asked the following question:

“What do you think was the main reason for these experiences?” Respondents were
allowed to choose one response from 11 categories. For the present analysis,
these responses were recoded into nine mutually exclusive categories capturing
the following options:

race / ancestry / skin color;

gender;

age;

religion;

height or weight;

sexual orientation;

education or income;

physical disability;

and other.

The following categories from the original questionnaire were collapsed into one
category for the analysis: race; ancestry or national origin; and shade of skin
color. Additionally, because this question was only asked of respondents who
reported prior discrimination experiences, the built-in skip pattern resulted in
a large number of cases scored as missing (legitimate skip).

Respondent race.

Because a race variable is not available from the Wave 4 interviews, we use the
racial category reported by the respondent during the Wave 1 interview. Wave 1
race — rather than, say, Wave 3 race — was used to preserve case counts. The
logic is that (nearly) all Wave 4 respondents appeared in the Wave 1 sample, but
not all would have been interviewed at Wave 3 due to differential patterns of
temporary attrition. Respondents were asked to indicate their race from among
the following categories: White; Black or African American; Hispanic; American
Indian or Native American; and Asian or Pacific Islander. Respondents were
provided the opportunity to select more than one race, and those who did were
asked a follow-up question regarding which category best described their racial
background. In the current study, those respondents who indicated more than one
race were coded as “mixed race”.

Demographic variables.

To provide information on the analytical sample as a whole, two additional
demographic variables are included. First, age is a continuous measure created
by subtracting the year of the respondents' birth (obtained from Wave 1) from
the year of the interview at Wave 4. Second, sex was dichotomously coded based
on the self-reported sex of the respondent at Wave 4 (0 = female and 1 = male).

Analytical plan.

Our exploratory study included three basic steps. First, summary statistics of
the study variables and racial categories were produced. Second, we examined the
relative proportions of the two discrimination experience measures across each
racial category. Finally, we assessed the distribution of reported reasons for
discrimination across the racial categories. In order to examine potential
bivariate associations, the adjusted F statistic (design-based F) was employed
as it corrects for a complex sample design such as that used in the Add Health.
[21] More specifically, when analyzing weighted sample data employing the svy
suite of commands in Stata the conventional Pearson χ2 statistic test of
independence is converted into “an Fstatistic with noninteger degrees of freedom
by using a second-order Rao and Scott (1981 [22], 1984 [23]) correction”. [24]
The p-value associated with the design-based F is thus more accurate (than the
associated with the χ2 statistic) given the adjustments and calculations take
into account the weighted nature of the data. This final step also included an
examination of the relative distribution of racial categories across the various
reported reasons for discrimination. As noted earlier, all analyses were
weighted according to the survey weight provided by the Add Health research
staff and standard errors were corrected for the clustering and stratification
that defined the sampling strategy. Thus, all estimates reported here can be
considered nationally representative of the United States.

2. GUJJOLAAY EEGIMAA, ITS SPEAKERS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS

This section briefly presents the Gújjolaay Eegimaa (Eegimaa for short;
Ethnologue code: ISO 639-3: bqj), its speakers and its varieties. We also
discuss aspects of the contact situation of the Eegimaa language. This is
important, because as we will show in § 6 below, some of the Eegimaa death
prevention names and child-bearing names are given to Eegimaa people from other
communities.

Eegimaa is a Jóola language spoken in the Basse Casamance area of Southern
Senegal by a population estimated to be between 7,000 (Bassène, 2007) and 11,200
speakers (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2014). Jóola languages are classified as
members of Sapir’s (1971) BAK group of Atlantic languages of the Niger Congo
language phylum. Speakers of these languages are found in the Gambia, in the
former Casamance region of Southern Senegal and in Guinea Bissau. The map in
Figure 1, taken from Ethnologue, presents the languages of Senegal. The arrow on
the map points to the Eegimaa speaking area (Bandial is the name used by
Ethnologue for Eegimaa). Eegimaa is mainly spoken in Mof-Ávvi, a former kingdom
of 10 villages located to the west of Ziguinchor, the capital city of the former
administrative region of Casamance in the south of Senegal. Mof-Ávvi is a
peninsula bordered by the Casamance River to the north, which separates it from
the Jóola Búluf and Jóola Fogny areas, and to the east by the villages Brin and
Djibonker, where the speakers of Kujireray and Baïnounk Gubëeher live. In the
south, the river known as Kamobeul Bolon separates Mof-Ávvi from the Bayot
speaking area, while the west side of Mof-Ávvi coincides with the homeland of
the Jóola Kaasa Húluf and Jóola Kaasa Ésuulaaluʔ. The map in Figure 2 below,
adapted from Palmeri and Gazio (1995), shows a very approximate location of
Mof-Ávvi in relation to other neighbouring speech communities. Some of these
communities will be referred to in our discussion of death prevention names in §
6. The Eegimaa spoken in Mof-Ávvi is known by several names given by speakers of
neighbouring languages. For example, the name Kusiilay 1 ‘the language of
Essil’, is the name given by speakers of Kujireray to the Eegimaa language,
because Essil, of which Bajjat was a district, is the village which has a border
with their village. Endungo is the name given by Bayot speakers, but its meaning
is not known. Kúlaakiay, ‘the language of village of Seleki/Sállagi’, is the
name given by Jóola Kaasa speakers who are more familiar with the village of
Seleki/Sállagi’ than all other villages of Mof-Ávvi. Finally, Banjal/Bandial
‘the language of the village of Banjal’, the most popular of all those names, is
the name given by the Jóola Búluf and Jóola Fogny speakers to Eegimaa people and
their language, because people from the village of Banjal were the first to be
in contact with them.

Figure 1. Map of Senegal (courtesy of Google maps)

Figure 2. Map of the Eegimaa speaking area

Village names are written using their usual spelling. The Ethnologue language
codes are provided for language varieties that have them. Language names are
written following the recommendation for the transcription of national languages
of Senegal, Decree 2005-981. Names of the villages of Mof-Ávvi are written using
the Eegimaa orthography and following the pronunciation of village names by
native speakers.

Jóola language varieties which are closely related to Eegimaa include
Kujireray/Kuluunaay (from the village of Brin with 76% lexical similarity) and
Gufiñamay (from the village of Afiniam with 74% lexical similarity (based on
Lewis et al., 2014 eds.)). Gútaamay (from the village of Butam), Gulapaoray
(from the village Djilapaor) and Gusiilay (ISO 639-3: bsl) from the village of
Thionk Essil are also other languages related to Eegimaa. They are located north
of the Casamance River in the Jóola Búluf area. There are also small migrant
Eegimaa communities in villages like Djifanghor (east of Ziguinchor) and in
Bourofaye (south of Ziguinchor), where they cohabit with speakers of Baïnounk
languages. Nowadays most Eegimaa speakers from Mof-Ávvi live outside their
homeland, generally in urban areas like Ziguinchor and Dakar. Speakers of
Eegimaa use the term Gújjolaay (meaning Jóola) to refer to their language when
they speak to each other, but Eegimaa to distinguish their Jóola variety from
that of other Jóola peoples. Eegimaa is an endangered language whose
transmission to new generations has been declining significantly in the last
decades.

It is important to understand the contact situation of Eegimaa, because some of
the ritual names analysed in this paper come from other languages or from
neighbouring communities. These names are given either in Eegimaa or in a
different language.

Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Leopold Dvořák (/ d(ə)ˈvɔːrʒɑːk, -ʒæk / d(ə)-VOR-zha(h)k; Czech:
[ˈantoɲiːn ˈlɛopolt ˈdvor̝aːk]; 8 September 1841 – 1 May 1904) was a Czech
composer. After Bedřich Smetana, he was the next Czech Romantic-era composer to
achieve worldwide recognition. Following Smetana's nationalist example, Dvořák
frequently employed aspects, specifically rhythms, of the folk music of Moravia
and his native Bohemia. Dvořák's own style has been described as "the fullest
recreation of a national idiom with that of the symphonic tradition, absorbing
folk influences and finding effective ways of using them". [1]

Antonín Dvořák

Dvořák displayed his musical gifts at an early age, being an apt violin student
from age six. The first public performances of his works were in Prague in 1872
and, with special success, in 1873, when he was aged 31. Seeking recognition
beyond the Prague area, he submitted a score of his First Symphony to a prize
competition in Germany, but did not win, and the unreturned manuscript was lost
until rediscovered many decades later. In 1874 he made a submission to the
Austrian State Prize for Composition, including scores of two further symphonies
and other works. Although Dvořák was not aware of it, Johannes Brahms was the
leading member of the jury and was highly impressed. The prize was awarded to
Dvořák in 1874 [a] and again in 1876 and in 1877, when Brahms and the prominent
critic Eduard Hanslick, also a member of the jury, made themselves known to him.
Brahms recommended Dvořák to his publisher, Simrock, who soon afterward
commissioned what became the Slavonic Dances, Op. 46. These were highly praised
by the Berlin music critic Louis Ehlert in 1878, the sheet music (of the
original piano 4-hands version) had excellent sales, and Dvořák's international
reputation was launched at last.

Dvořák's first piece of a religious nature, his setting of Stabat Mater, was
premiered in Prague in 1880. It was very successfully performed in London in
1883, leading to many other performances in the United Kingdom and United
States. [2] In his career, Dvořák made nine invited visits to England, often
conducting performances of his own works. His Seventh Symphony was written for
London. Visiting Russia in March 1890, he conducted concerts of his own music in
Moscow and Saint Petersburg. [3] In 1891 Dvořák was appointed as a professor at
the Prague Conservatory. In 1890 – 91, he wrote his Dumky Trio, one of his most
successful chamber music pieces. In 1892, Dvořák moved to the United States and
became the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York
City. While in the United States, Dvořák wrote his two most successful
orchestral works: the Symphony From the New World, which spread his reputation
worldwide, [4] and his Cello Concerto, one of the most highly regarded of all
cello concerti. He also wrote his most appreciated piece of chamber music, the
American String Quartet, during this time. But shortfalls in payment of his
salary, along with increasing recognition in Europe and an onset of
homesickness, led him to leave the United States and return to Bohemia in 1895.

All of Dvořák's nine operas but his first have librettos in Czech and were
intended to convey Czech national spirit, as were some of his choral works. By
far the most successful of the operas is Rusalka. Among his smaller works, the
seventh Humoresque and the song "Songs My Mother Taught Me" are also widely
performed and recorded. He has been described as "arguably the most versatile
... composer of his time". [5]

Otto Jespersen

Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen (Danish: [ʌtˢo ˈjɛsb̥ɐsn̩]; 16 July
1860 – 30 April 1943) was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of
the English language.

Early life

Otto Jespersen was born in Randers in Jutland. He was inspired by the work of
Danish philologist Rasmus Rask as a boy, and with the help of Rask's grammars
taught himself some Icelandic, Italian, and Spanish. He entered the University
of Copenhagen in 1877 when he was 17, initially studying law but not forgetting
his language studies. In 1881 he shifted his focus completely to languages, and
in 1887 earned his master's degree in French, with English and Latin as his
secondary languages. He supported himself during his studies through part-time
work as a schoolteacher and as a shorthand reporter in the Danish parliament. In
1887 – 1888, he traveled to England, Germany and France, meeting linguists like
Henry Sweet and Paul Passy and attending lectures at institutions like Oxford
University. Following the advice of his mentor Vilhelm Thomsen, he returned to
Copenhagen in August 1888 and began work on his doctoral dissertation on the
English case system. He successfully defended his dissertation in 1891.

Academic life and work

Jespersen was a professor of English at the University of Copenhagen from 1893
to 1925, and served as Rector of the university in 1920 – 21. His early work
focused primarily on language teaching reform and on phonetics, but he is best
known for his later work on syntax and on language development.

He advanced the theories of Rank and Nexus in Danish in two papers: Sprogets
logik (1913) and De to hovedarter af grammatiske forbindelser (1921). Jespersen
in this theory of ranks removes the parts of speech from the syntax, and
differentiates between primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries; e.g. in "well
honed phrase," "phrase" is a primary, this being defined by a secondary,
"honed", which again is defined by a tertiary "well". The term Nexus is applied
to sentences, structures similar to sentences and sentences in formation, in
which two concepts are expressed in one unit; e.g., it rained, he ran indoors.
This term is qualified by a further concept called a junction which represents
one idea, expressed by means of two or more elements, whereas a nexus combines
two ideas. Junction and nexus proved valuable in bringing the concept of context
to the forefront of the attention of the world of linguistics.

He was most widely recognized for some of his books. Language: Its Nature,
Development and Origin (1922) is considered by many to be his masterpiece.
Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (1909 – 1949), concentrated on
morphology and syntax, and Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905)
is a comprehensive view of English by someone with another native language, and
still in print, over 70 years after his death and more than 100 years after
publication. Late in his life he published Analytic Syntax (1937), in which he
presents his views on syntactic structure using an idiosyncratic shorthand
notation. In The Philosophy of Grammar (1924) he challenged the accepted views
of common concepts in Grammar and proposed corrections to the basic definitions
of grammatical case, pronoun, object, voice etc., and developed further his
notions of Rank and Nexus. In the 21st century this book is still used as one of
the basic texts in modern Structural linguistics. Mankind, Nation and
Individual: from a linguistic point of view (1925) is one of the pioneering
works on Sociolinguistics.

Jespersen visited the United States twice: he lectured at the Congress of Arts
and Sciences in St. Louis in 1904, and in 1909 – 1910 he visited both the
University of California and Columbia University. While in the U.S., he took
occasion to study the country's educational system. His autobiography (see
below) was published in English translation as recently as 1995.

Jespersen was a proponent of phonosemanticism and wrote:

“Is there really much more logic in the opposite extreme which denies any kind
of sound symbolism (apart from the small class of evident echoisms and
‘onomatopoeia’) and sees in our words only a collection of accidental and
irrational associations of sound and meaning? ... There is no denying that there
are words which we feel instinctively to be adequate to express the ideas they
stand for.”

After his retirement in 1925, Jespersen remained active in the international
linguistic community. In addition to continuing to write, he convened and
chaired the first International Meeting on Linguistic Research in Geneva in
1930, and acted as president of the Fourth International Congress of Linguists
in Copenhagen in 1936.

Jespersen was an important figure in the international language movement. He was
an early supporter of the Esperanto offshoot Ido and in 1927 published his own
project Novial. He also worked with the International Auxiliary Language
Association.

Jespersen received honorary degrees from Columbia University in New York (1910),
St. Andrews University in Scotland (1925), and the Sorbonne in Paris (1927). He
was one of the first six international scholars to be elected as honorary
members of the Linguistic Society of America.

Are you — do they still teach at Bahia on Sunday? Night?

Oh yeah. In fact I would have gone today, if it wasn't for my back. Well I
finally found some people there I can dance with. So that helps.

Do you need a partner?

To go there?

Yeah.

No. Besides, you, I mean if you're a guy, if — If you're a woman, I mean, those
guys'll be all over you. I swear it.

Don't say that, Harold's in the room.

Run along now, dear.

You could come too.

Well I don't necessarily mean, in a bad way, even though I'm sure there are a
few there, I'm not dancing with guys. All I can say is, the women aren't all
over me. Darn.

Ooh.

But, but I remember, like I went there with this person, it's kind of funny. Th-
this person did not want to dance. So she's just gonna watch. So, every once in
a while I'd get up and dance, and it's like, when I'd come back, I mean there
was some guy there, sitting in my chair. Every time I got up. I'm thinking, God
these guys don't waste any time. I mean, you turn your back and there's somebody
moving in. I mean I don't know if they —

Maybe Harold you should come with me.

Why?

Learn some lam- lambada.

So I can find — find some girls with empty chairs next to em? Maybe I should go
with Miles.

Oh did —

Yeah, you guys could be partners.

Did —

What?

Well I don't know if I told you, told you that story about that woman, who uh,
went after that guy there? I told you that story, right? I was there Sunday
three four weeks ago? Uh, after the class is over w- over with, I'm sitting down
at a table, there's a woman from — who was in the class, and two men, sitting to
my right, is a table with two women there. They had apparently just come from
Oba Oba. On the last night —

Oh I think you told me.

The last night —

Yeah.

And like, well they were attractive women, the one had on a real real short
skirt. Anyway, there was this guy in his fifties, out there dancing, by himself.
And the woman was just looking at him, making eyes, then she went out there, got
on her knees, in front of him, in this skirt that's this short, takes her hands,
and goes along his toes, and then up, and is just doing like that.

Ooh.

I figured, oh, they must know each other.

Ooh.

Very well, in fact.

Mhm.

Gross.

That's what I assumed. And, they did that for the whole dance, and I mean, she
was d- all kind of suggestive stuff, and touching him and everything, people
would like cheering, and clapping, "go for it". And all this kind of thing? The
– the song ended, the guy set down, at another table. And she set down —

At a —

At the table with her woman friend. They never danced again the rest of the
evening.

Hm.

This is like — so I was thinking, this woman's sitting about as far away from me
as Jamie is. And I was thinking, hm, this is interesting. I wonder how long it
was gonna take the guys in this club to move in on her. No sooner did I think
this thought, guys were over there.

What, you didn't ask her to dance?

Not Miles, he's just in daze.

Well I was still trying to figure out, surely they must know each other, I mean,
why wasn't he sitting at her table?

You mean, you were still thinking about it.

Anyway, this guy, I mean he comes over there, immediately afterwards —

The same guy who got his — the same guy who's —

No, it's just some random guy.

Or just some random guy.

No, a random guy, who was like sitting about where you are.

Yeah.

He was sitting there, there were two guys sitting at a table right where you
are. And then these two women are sitting here. So uh, he comes over there, and
is talking with that woman I don't know about what, but then like ten minutes
later, she and her friend are over at their table. And then, twenty minutes
later, they were kinda like all over each other. You know, kissing, et cetera,
et cetera. And I was thinking, it looks like these people aren't going home
alone tonight.

Gosh.

But I just thought that —

No wonder they forbid this dance.

So —

Oh my God, what a story. Well, maybe I shouldn't go there then.

Yeah, maybe you shouldn't.

Sam has been, has taken such an interest in this retirement bit that it — it
really surprises me.

Well she's begun to listen.

Yes she has.

You know.

She has.

Uh, she used to go over and read a book or something.

Yeah, or turn a deaf ear. That was for sure.

But uh, once you understand it, you know, you, you're interested in getting
right in, and going after it.

Yeah. I really oughta call, at least Reg Barr, and ask if uh, he's still
speaking to me.

Well now, he was the one that was up on the left, up there.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

Well, he came over to you all smiles, I noticed.

Yes. Well, we've known each other for thirty-some years, why wouldn't he? But a-
anyway, um, I was so glad that he opened up on this disclosure bit. Because it
was Burns that's been objecting to our having it.

Oh?

And I knew this. So when he opened up on that, and she followed through, and
told about her husband, you know?

Not necessarily that she would approve of it, but at least she wasn't
disapproving.

Yeah.

Of it.

Yeah.

And uh, course Duvall might – And I – I cannot get over this. That man. I really
cannot. And you know, he must have been thinking, when he said he wasn't a
political appointee, he must have been associating his relationship with
Steitler.

Oh.

I really do believe that.

Mhm.

In his thinking. I don't know how else he could have done it. That topples over.
Um, but he didn't say that.

Oh?

He said, I loved your hum- humor, uh, and I love you, but, I am not a political
appointee. And his eyes were just snapping.

And I said, Oh? How did you get on the board?

Well he said, I got a letter from the governor, asking.

Everybody on there is an app- political appointee, that wasn't the point. The
point was, I could have mentioned what was in the paper about him, that he was
related and, you know, had business with Steitler, and I just said, and there's
Doctor Duvall, you know?

And then I went to Rotus, who's a seasoned politician, if there ever was one.

Yeah.

He just would flare. And I said, well, I – alright. I said, I'll apologize next
time, and I'm gonna make hay out of it, don't you worry. I wanna know how you
birds got on that board, if you're not political appointees.

Mm.

Oh my.

Can I grow some basil? From seed?

Yes, that's how I've – I don't have any this year, but I've grown it other
years.

Well –

There's no proble-. It will not take any frost. Soon as the b-

Yeah I –

A little bit of frost, it's gone.

I l- I learned that one time the –

I learned it just went down.

The hard way. Hm? Uh-huh.

Yes?

Well, I think it was Barbara that has some seeds.

Just – No problem. It comes right up.

Yeah. Yeah.

I –

Isn't that what you gave the neighbor one time? You gave him some kind of herb.

Did I give him some? I gave him a red pepper.

I think you – I think you gave him some herb of some kind.

I may have given – given him some basil, yes.

Yeah.

I don't have any this year, I forgot to plant it. I have oregano.

Yeah.

A good stand of it, if you want any.

Yeah. I have a lot of dried or- oregano.

Mm.

Is your cigarette out, everybody's?

Yeah, it's out.

You smoked it down into the cork, didn't you?

Pardon?

You smoked it down into the cork.

Well, yeah, you don't like that, do you, but –

No, it chokes me to death.

It's – it's there, might as well smoke it.

Oh.

No good.

No good.

Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the Court: In September 1975 the Petitioner was
arrested when he tried to steal a coat from a department store. Six months later
he was brought to trial on a charge of attempted petty larceny. Had Petitioner
pled guilty to that offense or been convicted of it after trial, he could have
received a maximum sentence of one year in jail. He would have been released, at
the very latest, in September of 1976. He would now long since have been a free
man. But Petitioner did not plead guilty and was not convicted. Instead, he
raised an insanity defense, claiming that because he was mentally ill at the
time he tried to steal the coat he should not be blamed for his act. The
Government did not contest this claim and the trial court found, after a
stipulated trial, that the Petitioner was not guilty by reason of insanity. On
the basis of this acquittal and on this basis alone, the Petitier was --
Petitioner was ordered committed indefinitely to a mental hospital. That is, he
was ordered confined until he could prove that he was not mentally ill and
dangerous. P- Petitioner still remains confined in the hospital on the basis of
that commitment, even though more than seven years have now passed since his
initial incarceration and more than six years have passed since the time he
would have necessarily been released had he been convicted rather than
acquitted. Conceivably, he will remain committed in the hospital for the rest of
his life. Petitioner contends that whatever the validity of his kinitial
commitment to the hospital, once he had been confined there for longer than he
could have been incarcerated upon conviction, his commitment became an
indefinite one. And thus, the Government was constitutionally required to prove
the need for his commitment by clear and convincing evidence, something which
the Government has yet to do with respect to Mr. Jones. If it cannot do so now,
Petitioner submits, he is entitled to release.

Mr. Wasserstrom, you're not challenging, as I understand it, the -- the initial
commitment. The only question, if I understand your position correctly, that you
raise is whether he must be released at the time that the sentence period would
have expired under the criminal statute, is that right?

Our position is, Your Honor, that he has to be released at that time unless the
Government can at that time prove his commitability by the standards required.

And you are not challenging, then, the, uh, standard or burden of proof at the
time of his commitment?

It's our position that that question is not raised in this case. Um, there are
arguable justifications for that initial commitment, and we don't discuss one
way or another whether those justifications are sufficient to validate that
initial commitment and we don't think the Court need reach that question.
Whatever reasons there are that might have init- -- have vali- -- have justified
his initial commitment, those reasons would have justified only a commitment
that could have lasted, without the Government meeting a burden of proof, for as
long as he could have been incarcerated upon conviction --

If his initial commitment is not punitive, then how is the statutory period of,
uh, time that he could serve on the criminal charge relevant?

Well, we think the only justifications that could, the only justifications that
could, um, that could countenance that initial commitment are punitive in
nature, that is, are a kind of punitive rationale.

And so, to -- for us to agree with your position we would have to conclude that
his initial commitment was punitive?

Well, Your Honor, I don't think that it's terribly important whether the word
"punitive" is used, but I do think that any kinds of justifications which would
justify the initial commitment are what I would call backward looking
justifications, that is, justifications that do turn on the fact that he, it --
was found to have committed a criminal act beyond a reasonable doubt. And
whether they're treated as purely punitive or not doesn't seem to me is, is, is,
is important, or the label that we attach to them it doesn't seem to me is
important. The point is, though, those rationales all do turn on the nature of
his act, and his act is one which, we submit, justifies confinement only for a
year.

But hasn't this Court, as well as the United States Court of Appeals in the D.C.
Circuit, said there's no rational connection between the possible sentence and
the possible length of stay after an acquittal, not guilty by reason of
insanity?

I believe that the law in the United States Court of Appeals in Brown against
the United States and in Wade v. Jacobs, in both of those cases the Court
suggested that there is a relationship between the sentence that might have been
imposed and the length that the commitment can persist without the Government
proving, uh, proving commitability under civil commitment standards. I don't
think that this Court has, has uh, has addressed that question, and I then think
this is the first case that raises it.

Oh, the Court has said expressly that there's no connection, in one case some
time ago. Well, excuse me.

Well, it is true in Lynch v. Overholser this Court suggested certain, uh,
rationales for a commitment, but it didn't then go on to say whether those
rationales were ones which would justify an indefinite commitment or simply one
that would persist as long as the sentence that might have been imposed. And
it's our view that those rationales, whether you call them punitive or not, are,
are all ones which evaporate once the accou- -- once the insanity acquittee has
been confined for as long as he could have been confined if he had been
convicted.

Does your position depend at all on whether or not the initial crime was a crime
of violence? Uh, suppose this had been a street mugging, for example?

Well, of course, the more serious the crime, the longer the maximum sentence
that could have been imposed and the more distant, uh, the rights that we're
talking about, the more distant in time the rights we're talking about would
become available.

Chief Justice Kennedy and may it please the Court. My name is Eric Levi and I'm
arguing for appellant Darnell Hurt. Uh, attorney John Martin will be arguing the
rebuttal, and we'd reserve five minutes of time. Your honors, if I may, I'd like
to start by addressing proposition of law number three. In proposition of law
number three, we have an ultimate finding of fact which was resolved in favor of
Darnell Hurt. This finding of fact was in regard to a provocation mitigator, um,
on the voluntary manslaughter charge. Darnell Hurt had asked for the provocation
mitiger- mitigator to apply to all offenses which he was charged, which includes
the felonious assault, and indirectly then he also requested it, um, for the
felony murder charge as well. The provocation mitigator is identical for the
voluntary manslaughter as well as the felonious assaults and felony murder. We
believe that on retrial, collateral estoppel would prevent retrial without
regard for the jury's prior finding in Hurt's favor, that ther- that the
provocation mitigator existed, that he was acting under serious provocation. In
fact, at the trial, the State, and it can be found in the transcript at pages
774 and 775, admitted as much and conceded so in its closing argument by stating
to the jury that the victim was coming into this apartment. He was coming in hot
and he pulled out his firearm. And here comes Melvin Dobson arriving at the
scene to the rescue of his daughter. And that incenses him, Hurt, to the point
where he uses deadly force. And then they said, if you apply all the factors,
that's voluntary manslaughter. That's where this count applies. The State of
Ohio had then directed the jury to find these provocation mitigators, which it
did. In looking at Green versus United States and the courts, the high court out
of the state of Texas and the federal circuits in Kennedy versus Washington on
this constitutional issue, I believe that the authority uh exists to find that
collateral estoppel would preclude the defendant from having to prove these
mitigators a second time to a different jury because he preserved the issue by
requesting the jury instruction for the mitigators on all of the applicable
counts, and he didn't request that the jury -- or concede to permit the jury to
be discharged without considering those mitigators, when the jury didn't
consider them and the additional counts, it acted almost as an applied acquittal
or an applied um finding towards this affirmative defense. The high court in
Texas in ex parte Jimmy Dean Watkins agreed with that. And it indicated that in
any additional trial, once a jury finds those provocation mitigators, that it
can't be required to find them again. Additionally, in the Kennedy versus
Washington uh matter, the Federal Circuit Court stated that the Green versus
United States implied acquittal would generally apply in cases where the
provocation mitigator was at issue. It was addressed and argued by both sides,
and the jury was asked to make a finding. Here the jury made the finding. It
made a specific finding for the provocation mitigator. And while it didn't find
it on each and every specific count, that was solely because the instruction
wasn't given even though requested.

Counsel, um, shouldn't the arguments related to Proposition three B, are they
ripe for for ruling? Shouldn't these arguments be made at the -- at the trial
court, given the fact that this was remanded?

So, Your Honor, this was remanded for a retrial and it's remanded on the grounds
of double jeopardy through the prong of collateral estoppel. And under double
jeopardy, not only is an individual precluded from being convicted twice, or to
stand trial twice for an offense, he was already acquitted of, he's also
precluded from having to actually stand trial to go back to trial for a second
time when the acquittal was already made. In this case, it's a finding of fact
under collateral estoppel, but it amounts to an affirmative defense to acquit
him of the murder, essentially. Um, so where the murderer was already negated by
the findings for the -- the mitigators, we believe that it is ripe at this point
um prior to new trial, that this court rule on this and preclude um the trial
court from requiring that he face the murder charges again.

What about the other issues? I mean, how can they be ripe?

The proble-, uh, excuse me, the uh -- the self defense issues uh we believe are
ripe first and foremost in proposition.

41: The Politics of Fear: How It Manipulates Us to Tribalism (Javanbakht)

By Arash Javanbakht

President Barack Obama walks away from the lectern with Vice President Joe Biden
after making a statement about the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., June 16,
2016. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Public Domain

The cruel murder of 50 people in New Zealand was another tragic reminder of how
humans are capable of heartlessly killing their own kind just based on what they
believe, how they worship, and what race or nationality they belong to. There is
a longstanding history of the fear of “the others” turning humans into illogical
ruthless weapons, in service to an ideology. Fear is arguably as old as life. It
is deeply ingrained in the living organisms that have survived extinction
through billions of years of evolution. Its roots are deep in our core
psychological and biological being, and it is one of our most intimate feelings.
Danger and war are as old as human history, and so are politics and religion.

Demagogues have always used fear for intimidation of the subordinates or
enemies, and shepherding the tribe by the leaders. Fear is a very strong tool
that can blur humans’ logic and change their behavior.

I am a psychiatrist and neuroscientist specializing in fear and trauma, and I
have some evidence-based thoughts on how fear is abused in politics.

We learn fear from tribe mates

Like other animals, we humans can learn fear from experience, such as being
attacked by a predator. We also learn from observation, such as witnessing a
predator attacking another human. And, we learn by instructions, such as being
told there is a predator nearby.

Learning from our conspecifics – members of the same species – is an
evolutionary advantage that has prevented us from repeating dangerous
experiences of other humans. We have a tendency to trust our tribe mates and
authorities, especially when it comes to danger. It is adaptive: Parents and
wise old men told us not to eat a special plant, or not to go to an area in the
woods, or we would be hurt. By trusting them, we would not die like a
great-grandfather who died eating that plant. This way we accumulated knowledge.

Tribalism has been an inherent part of the human history. There has always been
competition between groups of humans in different ways and with different faces,
from brutal wartime nationalism to a strong loyalty to a football team. Evidence
from cultural neuroscience shows that our brains even respond differently at an
unconscious level simply to the view of faces from other races or cultures.

At a tribal level, people are more emotional and consequently less logical: Fans
of both teams pray for their team to win, hoping God will take sides in a game.
On the other hand, we regress to tribalism when afraid. This is an evolutionary
advantage that would lead to the group cohesion and help us fight the other
tribes to survive.

Tribalism is the biological loophole that many politicians have banked on for a
long time: tapping into our fears and tribal instincts. Some examples are
Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, religious wars and the Dark Ages. The typical pattern
is to give the other humans a different label than us, and say they are going to
harm us or our resources, and to turn the other group into a concept. It does
not have to necessarily be race or nationality, which are used very often. It
can be any real or imaginary difference: liberals, conservatives, Middle
Easterners, white men, the right, the left, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs.
The list goes on and on.

When building tribal boundaries between “us” and “them,” some politicians have
managed very well to create virtual groups of people that do not communicate and
hate without even knowing each other: This is the human animal in action!

Fear is illogical and often dumb

Very often my patients with phobias start with: “I know it is stupid, but I am
afraid of spiders.” Or it may be dogs or cats, or something else. And I always
reply: “It is not stupid, it is illogical.” We humans have different functions
in the brain, and fear oftentimes bypasses logic. There are several reasons. One
is that logic is slow; fear is fast. In situations of danger, we ought to be
fast: First run or kill, then think.

Some people are afraid of spiders, others of snakes or even cats and dogs.

Politicians and the media very often use fear to circumvent our logic. I always
say the U.S. media are disaster pornographers – they work too much on triggering
their audiences’ emotions. They are kind of political reality shows, surprising
to many from outside the U.S.

When one person kills a few others in a city of millions, which is of course a
tragedy, major networks’ coverage could lead one to perceive the whole city is
under siege and unsafe. If one undocumented illegal immigrant murders a U.S.
citizen, some politicians use fear with the hope that few will ask: “This is
terrible, but how many people were murdered in this country by U.S. citizens
just today?” Or: “I know several murders happen every week in this town, but why
am I so scared now that this one is being showcased by the media?”

We do not ask these questions, because fear bypasses logic.

Fear can turn violent

There is a reason that the response to fear is called the “fight or flight”
response. That response has helped us survive the predators and other tribes
that have wanted to kill us. But again, it is another loophole in our biology to
be abused to turn on our aggression toward “the others,” whether in the form of
vandalizing their temples or harassing them on the social media.

“Desecrated Graves in the Old Jewish Section of the Cemetery, Vienna” by Scott
Rettberg is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When ideologies manage to get hold of our fear circuitry, we often regress to
illogical, tribal and aggressive human animals, becoming weapons ourselves –
weapons that politicians use for their own agenda.

Arash Javanbakht is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University.
This essay originally appeared in The Conversation. The Politics of Fear: How It
Manipulates Us to Tribalism by Arash Javanbakht is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

Fix the Machine, Not the Person (Swartz)

By Aaron Swartz

#systemanalysis, #proposal, #technology, #automotiveindustry, #logos, #research,
#sharedvalues #cognitivebias

“Photo” is in the Public Domain, CC0

This post is part seven of the series Raw Nerve.

The General Motors plant in Fremont was a disaster. “Everything was a fight,”
the head of the union admits.

“They spent more time on grievances and on things like that than they did on
producing cars. They had strikes all the time. It was just chaos constantly. ...
It was considered the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United
States.”

“One of the expressions was, you can buy anything you want in the GM plant in
Fremont,” adds Jeffrey Liker, a professor who studied the plant.

“If you want sex, if you want drugs, if you want alcohol, it's there. During
breaks, during lunch time, if you want to gamble illegally—any illegal activity
was available for the asking within that plant.” Absenteeism was so bad that
some mornings they didn’t have enough employees to start the assembly line; they
had to go across the street and drag people out of the bar.

When management tried to punish workers, workers tried to punish them right
back: scratching cars, loosening parts in hard-to-reach places, filing union
grievances, sometimes even building cars unsafely. It was war.

In 1982, GM finally closed the plant. But the very next year, when Toyota was
planning to start its first plant in the US, it decided to partner with GM to
reopen it, hiring back the same old disastrous workers into the very same jobs.
And so began the most fascinating experiment in management history.

Toyota flew this rowdy crew to Japan, to see an entirely different way of
working: The Toyota Way. At Toyota, labor and management considered themselves
on the same team; when workers got stuck, managers didn’t yell at them, but
asked how they could help and solicited suggestions. It was a revelation. “You
had union workers—grizzled old folks that had worked on the plant floor for 30
years, and they were hugging their Japanese counterparts, just absolutely in
tears,” recalls their Toyota trainer.

“And it might sound flowery to say 25 years later, but they had had such a
powerful emotional experience of learning a new way of working, a way that
people could actually work together collaboratively — as a team.

Three months after they got back to the US and reopened the plant, everything
had changed. Grievances and absenteeism fell away and workers started saying
they actually enjoyed coming to work. The Fremont factory, once one of the worst
in the US, had skyrocketed to become the best. The cars they made got
near-perfect quality ratings. And the cost to make them had plummeted. It wasn’t
the workers who were the problem; it was the system.

An organization is not just a pile of people, it's also a set of structures.
It's almost like a machine made of men and women. Think of an assembly line. If
you just took a bunch of people and threw them in a warehouse with a bunch of
car parts and a manual, it’d probably be a disaster. Instead, a careful
structure has been built: car parts roll down on a conveyor belt, each worker
does one step of the process, everything is carefully designed and routinized.
Order out of chaos.

And when the system isn’t working, it doesn’t make sense to just yell at the
people in it—any more than you’d try to fix a machine by yelling at the gears.
True, sometimes you have the wrong gears and need to replace them, but more
often you’re just using them in the wrong way. When there’s a problem, you
shouldn’t get angry with the gears—you should fix the machine.

If you have goals in life, you’re probably going to need some sort of
organization. Even if it’s an organization of just you, it’s still helpful to
think of it as a kind of machine. You don’t need to do every part of the process
yourself—you just need to set up the machine so that the right outcomes happen.

For example, let’s say you want to build a treehouse in the backyard. You’re
great at sawing and hammering, but architecture is not your forte. You build and
build, but the treehouses keep falling down. Sure, you can try to get better at
architecture, develop a better design, but you can also step back, look at the
machine as a whole, and decide to fire yourself as the architect. Instead, you
find a friend who loves that sort of thing to design the treehouse for you and
you stick to actually building it. After all, your goal was to build a treehouse
whose design you like—does it really matter whether you’re the one who actually
designed it?

Or let’s say you really want to get in shape, but never remember to exercise.
You can keep beating yourself up for your forgetfulness, or you can put a system
in place. Maybe you have your roommate check to see that you exercise before you
leave your house in the morning or you set a regular time to consistently go to
the gym together. Life isn’t a high school exam; you don’t have to solve your
problems on your own.

In 1967, Edward Jones and Victor Harris gathered a group of college students and
asked them to judge another student’s exam (the student was a fictional
character, but let’s call him Jim). The exam always had one question, asking Jim
to write an essay on Fidel Castro “as if [he] were giving the opening statement
in a debate.”

Falling

You’re on the 236th-level Kaiserstrasse moving sidewalk when you see her. You’re
leaning on the railing, waiting to ask Derya about a job, watching the
glittering stream of mites that arc over half the sky — flying up to rewind
their nanosprings in the stratospheric sunlight, flying down to make Frankfurt
run. You never get tired of watching them.

She’s on the Holbeinsteg bridge. Someone’s hung it up here — a hundred meters of
clean gray and green twentieth-century modernism, plucked up from the river Main
and suspended in the chilly air 2,360 meters up, between a lump of wooded
parkland and a cluster of antique subway cars. She’s wearing a 1950s sundress
and a broad-brimmed hat, and it’s like an essay on the last century — the
austere steel bridge, the bright blobs of subway graffiti, and her yellow dress,
flapping against her legs as she climbs over the bridge’s rail. A picture of
elegance and style from the age of money, violence, and simplicity.

She’s a strawberry blonde, slim, her skin blank and virginal as new butter.
She’s beyond the rail now, hanging out over the mountain - high drop. Thin
translucent shadows move across her — the shadows of the neosilk-and-nanotube
filaments that hang the city from the hundreds of five-kilometer-high towers
that encircle it. (A civic agent notices you noticing, and attaches itself to
your infospace, whispering statistics —

“Each object’s suspension must weather a class 5 hurricane and the destruction
of 80% of the towers” — “Frankfurt’s current population is stable at 53 million”
— “Average age 62, birth rate 0.22, net immigration of half a million a year” —
“Current personal squatright: 311 cubic meters per resident” — until you brush
it away.)

You’re watching her lean out. The wind whips her hair, ruffles the skirt around
her knees. She must be a tourist. You remember your first trip to the upper
levels: leaning over the edge into the angry swarm of mites, whirring and
buzzing warnings and shoving you back like a million mosquito chaperones.
Everyone tries it once — Except that there aren’t any mites around her.

You clutch the railing. Hot, animal fear surges in your chest.

She looks up at you and, across the gap of forty meters, smiles a brilliant,
heartbreaking smile.

Then she lets go and falls.

You scream.

“Fucking airsurfers,” says Derya. He steps off the moving sidewalk near you:
tall, hook-nosed, the fashionable whorls of pox and acne making constellations
of his cheeks and chest; the glowing, formal tattoos of his committees and
lifebrands adorning his massive triceps. You swallow on a dry throat. Derya, of
all people, hearing you scream!

He gives you a hooded look.

“They infect themselves with some designer virus - it lets them hack the city’s
person-recognition systems. So the mites don’t see them when they jump. Watch —”

She’s swept past the whalelike oval of the public pool on the 202nd, past the
sloping mandala of the Google of offices on the 164th. At the 131st, below her,
is the old Stock Exchange, hung upside-down now as a hipster den.

Now the mites are finally closing in. A silver swarm coalesces around the 164th,
and she vanishes into it, like a snip of scallion into cloudy miso soup. When
the cloud disperses, she’s standing on one of the Stock Exchange’s upside-down
overhangs. She waves, antlike, then crawls through a dormer window.

“It’s not funny,” Derya says.

“They’re a huge drain on emergency preparedness. Ripple effects are causing
project slowdowns ...”

“Freeloaders drive systemic evolution,” you find yourself saying.

“Don’t you quote the founders at me,” Derya snaps.

“The Free Society is fragile. The minute enough people find anticontributive
behavior cool, the party’s over — it’s back to capitalist competition or state
control.” He stares until you meet his eye.

“You even talk to those people - are you paying attention? — you even talk to
them, your rep will be trashed on all the major servers. You won’t work, you
won’t party, you’ll be defriended by every one of your tribes. Got it?”

Her broad-brimmed hat is still sailing on the wind. The mites missed it. It cuts
between the towers of the 50th.

The upside-down trading floor is deserted. There are heaps of yellowed euros and
deutschmarks dumped here, like snowdrifts. Wood panel, marble. Silence. And the
air is strangely clear. You realize: no mites. The city has no eyes or ears
here. You walk through empty, miteless rooms, stepping around light fixtures.

Then she’s there, in a doorway. Her eyes, bright blue, radiant. Her smile, with
that chaste yellow dress, so bashful. She comes to you. “You want it?” she says.

“You want to be infected? You want to fly?”

You nod.

Eyes closing, she leans in for the kiss.

Perfect Teeth

Steven wanted to be a dentist. It was pretty much the first thing he told us
when, as first years, we were all bunched together in the unfamiliar dusty
classroom. When, a couple of weeks later we were invited over to his house we
saw that this was not an idle remark.

Where our bedroom walls were decorated with posters of pop stars and
footballers, Steven had diagrams setting out tooth implementations, anatomical
drawings of the jaw with brightly coloured nerves, muscle, blood vessels, bones,
and, of course, teeth. Where we had shelves of plastic dinosaurs and superhero
figurines from cornflake boxes, Steven had plaster casts of jawbones, gums and
teeth grinning down at us. The instruments were locked away in glass cabinets
and only his parents had the key.

“They don’t exactly encourage my interest,” he shrugged.

“They sort of tolerate it. But Dad says they’re a sort of collection, and too
expensive for me to play with.”

Of course, we tried to pick the locks, but the spikes and saws and drillheads
remained — tantalisingly — out of reach.

We didn’t see Steven’s interest as strange, well, not that much. We all had our
own interests — drawing, electronics, collecting beer caps — that each appeared
obscure to anyone else. DIY Dentistry was just something that had never crossed
our horizon before. And if Steven didn’t see it as weird, or no weirder than
Andy showing us his Eastern-Block beer caps all laid out neatly on cork boards
with little hand-written labels, why should it bother us?

I suppose that, in our own way, we were all collectively strange. The bunch that
no one picked for their side at football or hockey, and that was the glue that
held us together. Besides, Steven had some really good stuff: sweets that
stained your teeth bright red — well, technically, not your teeth, just the
plaque, but the result was often the same. It took a few days good brushing to
get it off. Well, most of it anyway. He had effervescent tablets that turned the
canteen drinking water into that exact same pink mixture that the dentist gave
you to rinse your mouth out after scraping around inside, and guaranteed to make
the other kids splutter and spit it out when the taste slowly percolated through
and met the memory of their last checkup.

Then there was the event that became the rite of passage into our group of
misfits and outcasts: making a mould of your teeth.

It was inevitable that one of us, seeing the plaster casts on the shelf by
Steven’s bed would ask how they were done. It was just as inevitable that a few
minutes later, Steven would be mixing up various powders and liquids, and
pouring them into a horse-shoe shaped contraption.

It wasn’t dangerous. At least, I suppose so. It was vaguely uncomfortable, and
appeared sufficiently disturbing that we all volunteered each other in turn
until, at last, Andy said he was game. And we were off.

The hardest part was probably to overcome the gagging reflex that set in when
you bit down into the acrid resin jelly and it flowed out and up and around,
over teeth, gums and tongue. Your nose filled with what you imagined were fumes
from the warm paste. And you seemed to be suddenly drowning in your own saliva.

Things generally got better when Steven reminded you that you could actually
breathe, and swallow, normally.

He watched the second hand trotting round the dial of his watch mouthing the
quarters, before poking the setting goo to check its consistency. Then, when he
gave you the nod, you tried to prise your jaws apart.

As the seal around your gums and teeth was pretty solid, you thought it would
never come off, as the others giggled at your expressions and grimaces. Steven
jiggled the handle that stuck out beyond your front teeth like some metallic
duck’s bill, turning and twisting it most professionally and murmuring
encouragements. And, then, with an awful sucking slurp, it came free.

The initiated then revelled in retelling the gross sensation of having this
evil-smelling plastic slug invade your mouth, while the others waited their turn
with mixed trepidation and excitement. Raucous laughter greeted the suggestions
of the other body parts that could receive the same treatment.

The next part of the proceedings was less thrilling. Steven measured and mixed
the plaster of Paris and prepared for the cast by using a bright blue putty to
build up the form of the jaw, and shoring up gaps and holes. It get even less
exciting when he said we’d have to wait an hour while the plaster set real
solid. But the next time we visited his room we got to marvel at our toothy
grins labelled and lined up on the shelf. We were all perfectly happy with the
result, even wanting one as a trophy until Steven passed an expert eye over
them, pointing out here a gap, here a filling, and there a completely misaligned
incisor. We were, he told us, mediocre specimens for his collection.

It didn’t matter. We were all friends, a group bonded by the common experience
of being able to see our teeth on Steven’s shelf.

Wikinews interviews Christopher Hill, U.S. Republican Party presidential
candidate

Interview

What qualifications do you have that will assist you in executing the duties of
president?

My Presidential qualifications are rooted in my service as an Officer in the
United States Air Force. I took the Oath to our Constitution at 22 years old. I
understood it was an Oath to ALL of our people. Politicians profess an Oath to
this nation but once in office pursue their party agenda and reward their
voters. As President, I will serve ALL of the people in America, guided by the
Constitution.

Why run for president? Why not run for a lower office that you would be more
likely to win and effect change?

When I was a young man in Air Force ROTC I was chosen to attend a unique Pilot
Training Program called Euro- NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training. The Air Force only
selected 180 Officers a year from the Academy, Squadron Officer School and ROTC
to attend. I volunteered for that program because I knew I wanted to be a
Fighter Pilot and at the "Top of the Spear." In those days it was all or
nothing. If you graduated you were assigned a fighter, if you were not quite
fighter pilot material you had no response to fly another aircraft, you were
washed out. Congress has proven itself ineffective as a body. To make a
difference in America you must have the "Bully Pulpit" and speak to the People.
The President has that pulpit. All or nothing. I never wanted to make politics a
career.

Why did you choose to run in the Republican Party?

My ties to the Republican party date back to 1979, when I volunteered for Ronald
Reagan and his campaign in New Hampshire. In those days I believed there was a
difference in the parties. Today, like many Americans, I am skeptical. I
understand third party candidates have no success. I hope to lead the Republican
party in a new direction for working class Americans.

How do you plan to get into the Republican debates and make an impact on polls?

In order to be invited to the debates, we must raise money and poll nationally.
This is an effort that is underway. Recently we were listed in New Hampshire and
nationally with Politics1.

If you do not receive the Republican nomination, would you consider running as a
third party candidate?

No, I will back the nominee of the Republican party in 2016. After that, I may
reconsider.

Other than yourself, which candidates have you supported for president in
previous campaigns?

Reagan in 80 and 84, [George H. W.] Bush in 88 and 92, [Phil] Gramm in 96,
[George W.] Bush in 2000 and, Romney in 08.

What are your thoughts on the job Barack Obama has done as president?
Specifically, what would you have done differently?

President Obama has an agenda that represents the far left wing of his party.
His use of the Presidency to further this agenda has in many ways been
unconstitutional. Specifically, altering law once it is passed to accommodate
his voting blocs. His direction to Eric Holder to enforce some laws and not
others is another example.

Hill at the Lesser-known candidates forum in 2011

If elected, what would constitute a successful presidency for you?

Achieving four goals: Term Limits for Congress and the Courts returning
government to the People. Implementing a Tax System that allows working
Americans making under $ 250,000 to keep all of their money. Closing Loopholes
and putting in place a system that is transparent and works. Passing a Living
Wage program lifting people out of poverty. Returning America to a state of
Peace and Security.

What individuals would you like to see in a Hill administration?

I would like to bring People from the heartland of America that make this nation
work. We have had too many decades of Ivy League elites and Professors immersed
in theory.

Hill (right) with fellow 2012 presidential candidate Buddy Roemer.

Anything else you would like to add?

A final thought. America is a nation that will endure. I believe it is our
responsibility to pass on the same opportunities to future generations that were
promised to us. As President, I intend to keep that promise!

Wikinews interviews Robert Sarvis, Libertarian Party nominee for Governor of
Virginia Saturday, October 19, 2013

Attorney Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian Party's nominee for Governor of
Virginia, answered five questions submitted via e-mail by accredited Wikinews
reporter William Saturn.

Sarvis has garnered double digits in opinion polls for the 2013 Virginia
gubernatorial election, an unusual feat for a third party candidate. The latest
Newsmax / Zogby poll from late September placed him at 13 percent, 14 points
behind Republican Party nominee Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia's Attorney General, and
19 points behind Democratic Party nominee Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic
National Committee chairman, with 24 percent undecided. Whoever wins election on
November 5, 2013, would replace outgoing governor Bob McDonnell.

On his campaign website, Sarvis notes he favors parental school choice through
student vouchers, simplification of Virginia's Tax Code, US Second Amendment -
gun - rights, same-sex marriage, and reform of the state's drug laws. With
Wikinews, Sarvis discusses his background, views on McDonnell's tenure, keys to
campaign success, plan to implement his agenda, and the former Virginia governor
he most admires.

Interview

What is the most important aspect of your background that voters should know
about?

I am the only candidate born and raised in Virginia, but also the only candidate
who embodies both physically and philosophically the growing diversity of the
commonwealth. (I am mixed-race (half-Chinese) and in an interracial marriage.) I
am the only candidate who has studied both economics and law, and the only
candidate with a background in technology entrepreneurship. Because of my
academic and professional background, I understand the issues and challenges
facing Virginia much better than the other candidates, and I am offering real
solutions that can be appreciated across the political spectrum. I am the only
candidate who believes in both economic freedom and personal liberty and the
only candidate who stands on principle against cronyism and corporatism and in
favor of the rule of law.

What are your thoughts on the job Bob McDonnell has done as Governor of
Virginia? What would you have done differently than him?

McDonnell did well early in his term pushing back against Senate Democrats who
wanted huge tax increases in response to major revenue shortfalls during the
recession. Those early budget efforts are his highest achievements as Governor.
More recently, he erred in accepting a transportation bill that had huge flaws
and huge tax increases, rather than prioritizing spending and seeking more
rational, efficient, decentralized transportation decision-making. He could have
shown much greater leadership in pushing for tax reform, regulatory reform, and
school choice. Of course, he showed ethical lapses in judgment.

Compared to previous third party candidates at the gubernatorial level, you have
done exceptionally well in opinion polling. What do you attribute that success
to?

Voters see the two-party system for the sham it has become. They are sick of the
partisanship and nonsense and the total lack of substance in modern campaigns.
Voters see the two major party nominees as exemplifying what is worst about
their respective parties, and they want something better. Voters who meet me and
hear me speak know that I am sincere, know that I understand the issues deeply
and have workable solutions, and know that I stand on principle against cronyism
and corporatism and in favor of the rule of law and the public interest. People
like the fact that I stand for a Virginia that is both Open-minded and Open for
Business.

If elected governor, how will you be able to implement your agenda while dealing
with a hostile legislature?

There are precedents of independent governors dealing effectively with the
legislature, and indeed a wise third-party governor can have greater
effectiveness than a major party governor. Libertarians share many policy
positions with each of the major parties. Working together with both Republicans
and Democrats, we can get the good aspects of each party while rejecting the bad
parts of both. Moreover, electing a third-party governor represents a
repudiation of politics as usual, and the major party legislators will face
changed constraints and incentives, meaning that much more is possible than many
people assume, especially with strong leadership.

Which previous Virginia Governor(s) do you most admire and why?

Thomas Jefferson. He was incredibly learned and was a strong advocate for
freedom and the rule of law. He would be a Libertarian today.

Robert Sarvis. Image: Sarvis for Governor.

Virginia, highlighted in red. Image: Huebi.

Genoa City, Wis.

August 6th 1964

John K. Bartram, Esquire

Attorney at Law

Bartram Building East Center Street

Marion, Ohio

Dear John;

Thank you for your call of this afternoon.

It was a surprise for us to learn that apparently a decision was reached,
perhaps by the judge that the letters are the property of Isabelle. Michel
advised her on May 25th as follows: "There is a grave legal question involved as
to whether or not these letters are the property of your mother's estate and an
appropriate legal action is contemplated to determine such question."

It is our considered opinion: Williamson should have sent them to the owner's
daughter as a very personal matter or auctioned them off when he sold Mrs.
Phillips's things on the auction block. He did neither. He sat on them 'til some
reporter's warned him that they were hot merchandise. Then with the idea of
seeking cover made a judge (apparently ignorant of the law) appoint an
administrator for Mrs. Phillips's estate for stolen merchandise held in
posession of acourt appointed guardian of Mrs. Phillips. To cap it all he
permitted publication of these stolen letters by the press, although they were
ordered by him to be under lock and key.

Now it appears that Williamson is trying to defend himself to the public. A
reporter from the Cleveland Press phoned on Monday last. He said that he wanted
to check on a statement made by Williamson, since he claimed that while he was
Mrs. P's guardian he had never heard from Isabelle. We said; "No comment".
Isabelle was not advised that her mother had a guardian. On Dec. 6th 1954 she
had a power of attorney duly executed and witnessed by our attorney in Recine,
Wis. in favor of Maud Gorham of Marion, Ohio especially to deal in all matters
pertaining to Carrie Fulton Phillips.

We have not seen the Press article of this week, nor one the Marion Star or any
Columbus paper might have had, covering an interview with Williamson. If he does
not leave Isabelle out of all of this he will have to suffer the consequences.
Perhaps you can warn him for me. We will brand him with a libel iron, he won't
forget.

The mental and heart suffering caused by this S.O.B to Isabelle is very deep, I
can assure you, John. She is sick & in doctor's continual observation and care.

If there are no live debts to be satisfied and if the only assets in the
reopened estate administrated by Michel are these stolen letters, now apparently
determined to be the property of Isabelle, why on that decision alone, cannot
these letters be surrendered and the estate be closed because of lack of assets.

In that event, if you can succeed in getting that done, we would like to have
the letters surrendered to you for destruction or surrender to the Harding
family, as a possible value in checking the accuracy of any published stuff in
the future.

If the Court insists on these letters being an asset and refuses to close the
estate and insists that they be appraised and sold by the administrator at
highest value offered, we would want to be sure that the sales price received
covers the expenditures and that any trans-action in connection with such a sale
remain entirely free from press and publication abuse.

John, as to the question of appraisers. In our business of antiques, that of
antiquarians, we have and must have in certain states, licensed appraisers. All
of them own their own respective businesses and sell. Among them is Ralph
Newman, who is also a historian. Then of course there seem to be in this
picture, so called historians, like the man you mentioned over the phone, Ed. K.
Gross etc. We even had inquiries from the Wisconsin State College, D. F.
Costello, Prof. A historian from Minneapolis wrote: would we sell the letters?
These kind of historians want something for nothing and could not appraise
anything of this kind, since they do not know corresponding values. But all
would want to take a look and see.

John, Isabelle does not want to sell the letters unless we are forced to do so
by the judge and his court under the auspices of estate jurisdiction. She has
never seen them, knew nothing of their existence and does not care to see them
now or ever.

There are to ways out: 1) according to Paragraph 1 & 2 of this page and the
preceeding paragraph, as we see it. In the first instance we would want to pay
you your bill on conclusion or before as you like. In the second instance we
wonder if you might take for a third of the net or how you would like to be
compensated.

In the meanrime with all best regards from the both of us,

Sincerely, [William Helmuth Mathée]

Sir de Villiers Graaff,

Leader of the Opposition, House of Assembly,

CAPE TOWN

Sir,

In one week's time, the Verwoerd Government intends to inaugurate its Republic.
It is unnecessary to state that this intention has never been endorsed by the
non-white majority of this country. The decision has been taken by little over
half of the White community; it is opposed by every articulate group amongst the
African, Coloured and Indian communities, who constitute the majority of this
country.

The Government's intentions to proceed, under these circumstances, has created
conditions bordering on crisis. We have been excluded from the Commonwealth, and
condemned 95 to 1 at the United Nations. Our trade is being boycotted, and
foreign capital is being withdrawn. The country is becoming an armed camp, the
Government preparing for civil war with increasingly heavy police and military
apparatus, the non-white population for a general strike and long-term
non-cooperation with the Government.

None of us can draw any satisfaction from this developing crisis. We, on our
part, in the name of the African people - a majority of South Africans - and on
the authority given us by 1 400 elected African representatives at the
Pietermaritzburg Conference of 25 and 26 March, have put forward serious
proposals for a way out of the crisis. We have called on the Government to
convene an elected National Convention of representatives of all races without
delay, and to charge that Convention with the task of drawing up a new
Constitution for this country which would be acceptable to all racial groups.

We can see no workable alternative to this proposal, except that the Nationalist
Government proceeds to enforce a minority decision on all of us, with the
certain consequence of still deeper crisis, and a continuing period of strife
and disaster ahead. Stated bluntly, the alternatives appear to be these: talk it
out, or shoot it out. Outside of the Nationalist Party, most of the important
and influential bodies of public opinion have clearly decided to talk it out.
The South African Indian Congress, the only substantial Indian community
organisation, has welcomed and endorsed the call for a National Convention. So,
too have the Coloured people, through the Coloured Convention movement which has
the backing of the main bodies of Coloured opinion. A substantial European body
of opinion, represented by both the Progressive and the Liberal Parties, has
endorsed our call. Support for a National Convention has come also from the bulk
of the English language press, from several national church organisations, and
from many others.

But where, Sir, does the United Party stand? We have yet to hear from this most
important organisation - the main organisation in fact of anti-Nationalist
opinion amongst the European community. Or from you, its leader. If the
country's leading statesmen fail to lead at this moment, then the worst is
inevitable. It is time for you, Sir, and your Party, to speak out. Are you for a
democratic and peaceable solution to our problems? Are you, therefore, for a
National Convention? We in South Africa, and the world outside expect an answer.
Silence at this time enables, Dr. Verwoerd to lead us onwards towards the brink
of disaster.

We realise that aspects of our proposal raise complicated problems. What shall
be the basis of representation at the Convention? How shall the representatives
be elected? But these are not the issues now at stake. The issue now is a simple
one. Are all groups to be consulted before a constitutional change is made? Or
only the White minority? A decision on this matter cannot be delayed. Once that
decision is taken, then all other matters, of how, when and where, can be
discussed, and agreement on them can be reached. On our part the door to such
discussion has always been open. We have approached you and your Party before,
and suggested that matters of difference be discussed. To date we have had no
reply: Nevertheless we still hold the door open. But the need now is not for
debate about differences of detail, but for clarity of principle and purpose.
For a National Convention of all races? Or against?

It is still not too late to turn the tide against the Nationalist-created
crisis. A call for a National Convention from you now could well be the
turning-point in our country's history. It would unite the overwhelming majority
of our people, White, Coloured, Indian and African, for a single
purpose-round-table talks for a new constitution. It would isolate the
Nationalist Government, and reveal for all time that it is a minority
Government, clinging tenaciously to power against the popular will, driving
recklessly onward to a disaster for itself and us. Your call for a National
Convention now would add such strength to the already powerful call for it that
the Government would be chary of ignoring it further.

And if they nevertheless ignore the call for a Convention, the inter-racial
unity thus cemented by your call would lay the basis for the replacement of this
Government of national disaster by one more acceptable to the people, one
prepared to follow the democratic path of consulting all the people in order to
resolve the crisis.

We urge you strongly to speak out now. It is ten days to 31 May.

Yours faithfully

[Signed] Nelson Mandela

NELSON MANDELA

All-In African National Action Council

NASA celebrates 30th anniversary of first shuttle launch; announces new homes
for retired shuttles

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announces where four space shuttle orbiters
will be permanently displayed at the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Program
during an event commemorating the 30th anniversay of the first shuttle launch on
April 12, 2011. Image: NASA Bill Ingalls.

NASA celebrated the launch of the first space shuttle Tuesday at an event at the
Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida. On April 12, 1981, Space
Shuttle Columbia lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on STS-1, the first
space shuttle mission.

NASA held a ceremony commemorating the date outside the hangar, known as Orbiter
Processing Facility-1, for Space Shuttle Atlantis, which is being prepped for
its final mission which will be STS-135, which will be the last Space Shuttle
mission.

At the ceremony, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced the locations that
would be given the three remaining Space Shuttle orbiters following the end of
the Space Shuttle program. The prototype orbiter, Space Shuttle Enterprise would
be relocated from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Steven F.
Udvar-Hazy Center at Washington Dulles International Airport to the Intrepid
Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City.

Space Shuttle Discovery will take the place of Enterprise at the Udvar-Hazy
Center. Discovery has already been retired following the completion of STS-133
last month, its 39th mission. Discovery is undergoing decommissioning and
currently being prepped for display by removing toxic materials from the
orbiter.

Looking back: Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off on STS-1 from Launch Pad 39A at
the Kennedy Space Center on April 12, 1981. Image: NASA.

Space Shuttle Endeavour, which will launch on STS-134 at the end of the month on
April 29, will be sent to the California Science Center in Los Angeles,
California following its retirement. Finally, Atlantis will go on display at the
Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex following the orbiter's last flight which
launches June 28.

Columbia was lost tragically back on February 1, 2003 when it disintegrated
during re-entry killing all seven astronauts aboard. Space Shuttle Challenger
was lost when it exploded 73 seconds after liftoff back on January 28, 1986
killing all six aboard.

"We want to thank all of the locations that expressed an interest in one of
these national treasures," said Bolden to the gathered crowd which contained
many KSC employees. "This was a very difficult decision, but one that was made
with the American public in mind. In the end, these choices provide the greatest
number of people with the best opportunity to share in the history and
accomplishments of NASA's remarkable Space Shuttle Program. These facilities
we've chosen have a noteworthy legacy of preserving space artifacts and
providing outstanding access to U.S. and international visitors."

This was a very difficult decision, but one that was made with the American
public in mind. In the end, these choices provide the greatest number of people
with the best opportunity to share in the history and accomplishments of NASA's
remarkable Space Shuttle Program. Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator

File image of Space Shuttle Atlantis lifting off, which approaches its last
mission before retirement. Image: NASA.

Not all were pleased with the final choice of locations. U.S. Senator John
Cornyn, Republican from Texas, issued a statement regarding the rejection of
Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas as a location. "Like many Texans, I
am disappointed with NASA's decision to slight the Johnson Space Center as a
permanent home for one of the Space Shuttle Orbiters. Houston has played a
critical role throughout the life of the space shuttle, but it is clear
political favors trumped common sense and fairness in the selection of the final
locations for the orbiter fleet."

Cornyn's statement added, "There is no question Houston should have been
selected as a final home for one of the orbiters — even Administrator Bolden
stated as much. Today's announcement is an affront to the thousands of dedicated
men and women at Johnson Space Center, the greater Houston community and the
State of Texas, and I’m deeply disappointed with the Administration's misguided
decision.“ However, the JSC will recieve pilot and commander seats from the
flight deck.

The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington was also proposed as another
location for a shuttle, going so far as to build a new building to house an
orbiter. In a statement, Governor of Washington Chris Gregoire said, "The Museum
of Flight put a tremendous amount of effort into landing a retired shuttle in
the Pacific Northwest. As the home of modern day air travel and the 747, which
has gracefully transported shuttles for the last 30 years, Seattle would have
been a perfect fit. While the Museum of Flight was in the top running, I’m
disappointed that NASA did not choose them.

In 2008, Endeavour and Atlantis await a journey on their respective launchpads.
Image: NASA.

"However, the full fuselage trainer, that every astronaut including [former
Museum of Flight CEO] Bonnie Dunbar has been trained on, will soon call the
Museum of Flight home. The largest of the trainers, this addition will allow
visitors to actually climb aboard the trainer and experience the hands-on
training that astronauts get. Visitors will not be allowed in the other shuttles
and this trainer is a true win for our dynamic museum. It will help inspire
young people to the adventure of space and to the excitement of a career in
science, technology, engineering and math."

Today's announcement is an affront to the thousands of dedicated men and women
at Johnson Space Center, the greater Houston community and the State of Texas,
and I’m deeply disappointed with the Administration's misguided decision. John
Cornyn, U.S. Senator (R-Texas)

Other items include various shuttle simulators which will be given to the Adler
Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois, the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum of
McMinnville, Oregon, and Texas A&M's Aerospace Engineering Department. The nose
cap assembly and crew compartment trainer for the National Museum of the U.S.
Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and orbital maneuvering
system engines for the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the
National Air and Space Museum, and the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum.

NASA is also offering shuttle heat shield tiles to schools and universities that
want to share technology and a piece of space history with their students.

The 30th anniversary of the first shuttle mission coincided with the 50th
anniversary of the first manned space flight when Yuri Gagarin lifted off aboard
Vostok 1 into space.

Sensitive Canadian document found on rainy streets

Friday, August 15, 2008

A sensitive Environment Canada document was found wet on an Ottawa street by
someone who gave it to the CBC today.

The 131-page document was found on Castlefrank Road in Kanata, Ontario in a
rain-stained, tire-marked brown envelope by a passerby.

The document which had the stamp Protected B on every page detailed various
security vulnerabilities of the NEMISIS database which is used by officers to
track and prosecute environmental law-breakers. If someone were able to shut the
system down, or hack inside and delete or corrupt the information, it could
affect the prosecution of the lawbreakers.

The database was unveiled in 1999 as the National Enforcement Management
Information System and Intelligence System. However, on the document, it
referred to the database as National Enforcement and Emergency Management
Information System and Intelligence System, adding the words "and Emergency" to
the name.

Protection B documents are the second lowest grade of classified government
documents. Environment Canada spokesperson Julie Hahn said they apply to letters
of complaint, criticism or injury, research or scientific notes and findings
that don`t have any conclusion, and Treasury Board letters, agendas and minutes
that don`t deal with subjects of national interest.

Environment Minister John Baird has asked government officials how such
documents that are supposed to be stored in "approved security cabinets" wound
up on the street.

"I'm told two things: that it's neither classified nor secret and that it's
stuff that could be available under access to information," Baird said.

Environment Canada spokeswoman Sujata Raisinghani told CBC News the department
will look into the incident.

"We take document security seriously," she said, but refused to give any more
details about how the papers came to be on a road.

Paul Dewar, an Ottawa New Democrat MP, said the combined security lapses raise
serious questions about the government's ability to secure sensitive documents.

Dewar says that bureaucrats of the Conservative government have complained to
him about document security to the point that they can`t share the information
with their own colleagues. However, when a government document has been found on
the streets, the government then says it wasn't particularly sensitive.

"This government is so consumed with control of information and secrecy yet they
don't seem to be able to get the fundamentals right," Dewar said.

The incident is a reminiscent of two other incidents.

In March, a bundle of blueprints for a new headquarters for the military's
counterterrorism unit were found stuffed in the trash on a downtown street.

In May, Maxime Bernier was forced to resign as Foreign Affairs minister after it
became known that he left sensitive documents at the apartment of his
then-girlfriend Julie Couillard who had ties to the Hells Angels biker gang.

Sources

"Sensitive government document found on rainy Ottawa street" — CBC.ca, August
15, 2008

"Document found on street not secret, say feds" — The Canadian Press, August 15,
2008

"Environment Canada security report found on street" — Toronto Star, August 15,
2008

Peter Zimonjic. "MP calls for probe into misplaced documents" — Edmonton Sun,
August 16, 2008

Categories: August 15, 2008 Canada Published North America Politics and
conflicts Environment Canada Archived

As the Western United States burns up with over seventy forest fires in thirteen
states and Germany deals with the aftermath of devastating floods, the world's
richest man, not counting Vladimir Putin, rocketed himself up to outer space for
ten minutes at a cost of two point five million dollars every 60 seconds. A
Democracy Now! Segment on Thursday looked at the irony and dangers of
billionaires fighting to privatize and monopolize space infrastructure while the
Earth burns due to the man made climate catastrophe. As an example of his utter
lack of self-awareness, Bezos's own comments, after returning from his space
adventure, admitted that his wealth is created by not only his customers, but
his workers. This, of course, reminds readers and listeners of the ProPublica
story that exposed how little he and the billionaire class pay in taxes. They
are all the undeserving recipients of corporate socialism, making their space
tours. I'm looking at you, Richard Branson. Just another taxpayer funded
giveaway to the richest men among us. And so I reluctantly thank the goddess of
irony. We live in a country where a living wage for all working men and women is
somehow not affordable. But a man who pays almost nothing in taxes is free to go
to outer space at the taxpayers' expense. Yes, that's on us, the little people.

John's up first out of Clifton Park, New York, and independent John, good
morning. You're on with David McIntosh of the Club for Growth.

Yes, good morning. Thank you. For what C-Span does. Mr. McIntosh, my question to
you is, how does the space programs by these various millionaire -- billionaires
-- It shows the failure of trickle down economics upon which you base a lot of
your, you know, your stances and everything. How is -- how is that putting these
billions into space instead of improving the conditions of the workers that make
these people the richest men on Earth? You know, I'd like a better understanding
on, you know, you're talking about welfare and everything else. Yet at the same
token, you ignore these stances where these billionaires are pouring money into
-- all this money into space. The only people who are able to fly with them are
also billionaires and millionaires.

Well, first of all, I'm actually really happy that it's not a government program
where they're forcing taxpayers to spend the billions of dollars on something
like that. You know, my view, honestly, is if somebody's been successful in
creating a business and making money and the customers have rewarded them, so
they've become a billionaire, if they want to spend it on building a rocket to
outer space, that's their choice. If they want to spend it on building mansions,
they can do that. I -- I don't think it's the right role of government to tell
people how to spend their money.

David McIntosh, the Club for Growth, can kid himself with his self-assurance, as
he did on Washington Journal last Friday, July sixteenth, by believing that the
space exploration Bezos partook in was privately funded. But everyone in my
neighborhood pays a higher percentage of their income in taxes than he pays on
the beyond exorbitant and exceedingly gratuitous wealth that he lives off of.
Not to mention, The Hill Online newspaper reported in late May that a US
competitiveness bill, then being debated on the Senate floor, included ten
billion for Bezos's own space exploration company, Blue Origin. This was also
around the time Bezos had bought MGM for nine billion. So we're expected to
forklift over, as a simple dinner fork won't cut it, the billions needed for
him, again, arguably the richest man on Earth, to acquire more wealth, and as
the cherry on top, deliver him one billion more. According to the report
published by ProPublica last month, the median American household brings in
around seventy thousand a year and pays fourteen percent in federal income
taxes. In short, Americans subsidized the fruits of Jeff Bezos' midlife crisis.
Credit to UK journalist Peter Ward for that spot on descriptor. I worry that we
are getting closer and closer to the experience of the little people in the
sci-fi film Elysium, starring Matt Damon. In the film, the rich, after
exploiting the world to the point that it's practically uninhabitable, have
moved on to an artificial world, Elysium that might as well be on our moon. And
those that remain on Earth, the rest of us, continue working in what could
realistically be a future Amazon warehouse. Later in the Democracy Now! segment,
the broadcast aired parts of an MSNBC interview with Bezos, who, in completely
out of touch fashion, adamantly expressed that we should preserve our, quote,
beautiful gem, end quote, also known as Earth, by transporting polluting
industries to outer space, something he acknowledged would take, quote, decades
to achieve, end quote.

Strayer knows much of what he knows because of the experiments he runs at his
Applied Cognition Laboratory in Salt Lake City. Often, he measures how people
perform one task once they are given a second task.

We think about multitasking as trying to do two separate, cognitively based
tasks at the same time. A classic example, one that just about everybody
attempts to do, is drive a car and talk on a cell phone. We don’t do that well,
and more and more people have these gadgets in the car they bring with them, or
the car itself becomes a platform for multitasking, and we don’t do it well. So,
it’s probably a big source for the injuries and fatalities and crashes on the
road.

Now, it would seem obvious — at least to me, maybe I’m wrong — that not all
multitasking is either difficult, and certainly not as dangerous, as driving in
a car and trying to do something else that’s cognitively and/or physically
demanding. Can you give me some examples of what you see as benign or, in fact,
productive multitasking?

I would actually just say that even the simplest things, like walking and
talking, which you’d think would be pretty automatic, turn out to be tasks that
compete. So, if you’re walking without talking, as soon as you start talking,
you’ll see that the pace of your walk changes, and you may be more likely to
trip. Anything that is depending on attention to be able to process the world is
susceptible to dual-task interference, or problems associated with multitasking.
A simple example we give is saying the letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E,
or counting, one, two, three, four, five. Those are easy. But if you try and
combine them and do something like, A1, B2, C3, D4, you’ll quickly find that
that becomes difficult, you start to forget where you are. And those are two
super-well-learned tasks that you can do by themselves. But when you try and mix
them together, you get all jumbled. As soon as you start to multitask,
performance on both of the tasks start to degrade.

Now, how much of that is a function of attempting to multitask versus the fact
that we learn habits and patterns and memorize things that become rote, that we
don’t need to engage our cognitive process at all?

You can become automatic at certain aspects of performance. When your
performance is habitual or automatic, it is less dependent on attention. So, a
lot of things kind of just happen without consciously thinking about them. But
new things, new activities or new environments, demand you to pay attention, to
allocate the prefrontal cortex to process some of that information that’s new
and novel. That’s the real problem, is that if you’re always in a situation
where everything’s exactly routine, you’re not stressing the parts of the brain
that are responsible for multitasking. But as soon as you have some novel
activity — like talking, like driving a car, riding a bicycle — you have to pay
attention to what you’re doing. You have to engage the prefrontal executive
attentional networks.

Do you know anything, or think much about, multitasking and multitasking
failures in other high-stakes settings beyond driving, whether it’s military
decisions or political decisions, business decisions?

So we’ve looked in the medical domain, medical human factors: you can see it in
terms of, say, delivery of medicine at a pharmacy. If the pharmacist is
constantly being interrupted with calls, they’re going to fill the prescription
incorrectly. If an anesthesiologist or a surgeon is distracted by the technology
in the operating room, that can create a problem. In the operating room, it’s
not just the phone, although that’s sometimes present, but you have all the
displays and technology. Each one of those are creating alarms that creates this
whirl of noise, and alerts and distractions that compete for the
anesthesiologist’s and the surgeon’s attention.

So I’ve been reading about how the modern worker, let’s say in the U.S. — they
could be in marketing, they could be at a nonprofit, could be in finance,
whatever — that if you’re working with a computer, which describes many, many,
many, many of us now obviously, that one big change in the last 15 or 20 years
is how many pieces of software and how many platforms are — I don’t want to say
fighting for your attention necessarily, that sounds a little a little more
pejorative than I mean it to be, but how in the course of your workday, you need
to switch and switch and switch and switch. We all may have multiple pieces of
communication software, multiple pieces of productivity software, and so on. Can
you talk about that, what seems to be a relatively low-stakes environment — the
workplace in a marketing firm or whatever — but how our attention is being
carved up during the course of the day?

I mean, the research shows that you have a loss of productivity when you’re
trying to multitask — just the opposite of what you think. So you may think “If
I’m multitasking, I’m going to get a lot more things done.” But what happens is,
a big chunk of our day is lost as we’re switching from one task to the other to
the other. What they find is that the best way to be productive in the office is
to try and focus on one task at a time, focus on just sending that memo out,
writing that email, doing whatever that operation is for a short period of time,
then take a break and then come back to it. Don’t try and juggle back and forth
because you’ll get confused, you’ll get lost, you’ll be this — “Where was I?”
kind of switch cost.

This year has once again confirmed the importance of the United Nations as the
truly indispensable multilateral forum for addressing today’s global problems.
The humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa, ecological disasters such as
Fukushima, political developments like the Arab Spring and terrorist attacks
such as the assault on the United Nations building in Abuja last August require
concerted action by the United Nations and its Member States. Ten years after
9/11, joint action in the fight against terrorism continues to remain central on
the multilateral agenda.

In the past nine months, we have witnessed momentous changes in the Arab world
that nobody expected when we met one year ago. Pressure for change is driven by
the wish of women and men to choose their own fate and to improve their chances
for a better life. These are legitimate demands. An overwhelming number of young
people were at the forefront of this enormous tide, which started in Tunisia and
Egypt. We should pay tribute to their courage.

In Libya, thousands lost their lives in the struggle for freedom and democracy.
In Syria, and to some extent in Yemen, the suppression is ongoing. Austria
strongly condemns the systematic human rights violations and the violence
against peaceful demonstrators. We strongly urge those responsible to
immediately stop the bloodshed and to engage in meaningful dialogue and reforms.

Austria supports the Libyan people in its struggle for freedom. Over € 150
million blocked in Austrian bank accounts has been de-frozen for humanitarian
use. Both the Austrian Government and private sector have provided medicine,
relief supplies and desperately needed fuel to Libya.

The international community and the United Nations have to support and assist
the transition process in the Arab world as the United Nations does now in
Libya. This period of change may last for some time and will be full of
challenges. Austria welcomes all efforts undertaken by Governments in the region
for peaceful and credible change. We encourage the newly empowered authorities
to create a constitutional framework based on democracy and human rights, in
order to fulfil their mandate for democratic change responsibly and peacefully.

The events in the Arab world notwithstanding, we must continue to focus on the
Middle East peace process. The Middle East took centre stage this week here at
the General Assembly — and rightly so. We must build trust and we have to foster
the belief among Israelis and Palestinians that a negotiated settlement can be
achieved — a sustainable solution based on two States living side by side in a
secure and peaceful neighbourhood within mutually recognized borders. We have no
choice but to return to direct negotiations between the two parties. The
Quartet, in its statement yesterday, has shown a way to do that and has also
proposed concrete timelines. Austria fully supports the Quartet statement. There
is no time to lose.

Austria welcomes President Al-Nasser’s choice of theme for this year’s general
debate. We appreciate Qatar’s strong track record in that regard. Last year’s
tenth anniversary of the adoption of Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) on
women, peace and security reminded us that the promise of women’s full and equal
participation in all efforts of maintaining peace and security, including in
mediation processes, has not yet come true and that we all need to intensify our
efforts.

In that context, let me also mention an Austrian contribution to international
mediation efforts. By inviting political decision-makers from both Khartoum and
Juba to Vienna in recent years, Austria has managed to offer the two sides a
platform for discussion. We are ready to continue to do so. The Sudan and South
Sudan have a shared past and must resolve their remaining problems peacefully.
The United Nations headquarters in Vienna serves as a dynamic hub for the
promotion of peace, security and sustainable development. I am proud to announce
that a liaison office of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs will
open in Vienna soon. Over the past year, the International Anti-Corruption
Academy set up its headquarters near Vienna, and the Vienna Centre for
Disarmament and Non-Proliferation and an office of the International Peace
Institute were established.

Austria fully stands behind the campaign launched by the Secretary-General on
Monday to achieve universal access to modern energy services. We support
doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency and the share of renewable
energy in the global energy mix by 2030.

Austria provides substantial support to the energy and environment efforts
undertaken by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Last June,
we hosted the Vienna Energy Forum, where about 1,400 participants discussed
alternative energy concepts to reach the energy goals of the United Nations.

The Fukushima nuclear catastrophe should become a turning point in our approach
to nuclear safety. We owe it to future generations to make safety concerns come
first when using nuclear power. Austria decided, in 1978, to forgo the use of
nuclear energy. Some countries have recently adopted a similar course, which we
welcome.

I wish to make a ministerial statement about the first confirmed case of
COVID-19 in New Zealand.

On Friday, 28 February, New Zealand recorded its first case of the COVID-19
coronavirus, becoming the 48th country to have a confirmed case. The individual
had entered the country two days earlier after spending some weeks in Iran,
which is currently experiencing a sizable outbreak of the disease. I can report
to the House that they are currently in a stable and improving condition at
Auckland Hospital. The good news in this instance is that the individual had
limited contact with people upon their return to the country, and their family
took all the appropriate measures when presenting at the emergency department.

As you would expect, our public health service is working hard to contain this
first case and limit the risk of any spread of the disease. Contact tracing
began immediately and has gone to plan. All 15 people who were seated nearby the
individual on their flight into New Zealand have been traced and are being told
to self-isolate. Public health staff will remain in touch with individuals to
monitor the situation and give ongoing advice. All but 10 of the remaining
passengers on the flight, who are not considered to be close contacts, have also
been contacted to provide reassurance and answer any questions they might have;
those 10 that haven't been contacted did not provide accurate contact
information. I'm advised that as a result of our decisive response, the chance
of an outbreak from our first case is low.

Internationally, the situation with COVID-19 continues to develop at pace.
However, the Director-General of the World Health Organization said, this
morning, containment … is feasible and must remain the top priority for all
countries. This is exactly the approach that New Zealand is taking, using three
main tools: border controls; self-isolation; and good public health practices,
including highlighting the importance of basic hygiene.

At every step, the Government has taken decisions in the interests of health and
safety of the wider public, and so far we have been among the best at keeping
COVID-19 at bay. Just yesterday, Cabinet decided to extend for another week the
travel restrictions that have been in place for China since 3 February and for
Iran since last Friday. These restrictions have played a key role in keeping
COVID-19 out of New Zealand for so long and have given us time to better
understand the disease and ramp up our preparations.

Of course, members will be aware that there are outbreaks in other regions as
well. So, as a further precaution, we have decided that anyone arriving in New
Zealand who has been in northern Italy or South Korea who has been there in the
last 14 days will be registered for self-isolation. This is based on an expert
assessment of risk. It recognises that while there are outbreaks in both
countries, they also have well-developed health systems and the outbreaks are
largely located in specific regions.

We know self-isolation works. It is a longstanding and successful approach to
managing infectious diseases and has proven its worth again in recent weeks. We
have also stepped up the health presence at our airports. All airlines flying
into New Zealand have been requested to read a health message upon landing, and
all arrivals into New Zealand will receive health information cards alongside
the standard customs declaration form.

As a result of decisions taken on Friday, health staff are meeting all direct
international flights landing in New Zealand airports from Hong Kong, Japan,
South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand. Our border response is further ramping up
to have health staff available for all international flights into New Zealand.
All these decisions and actions are designed to limit the spread of any sporadic
COVID-19 cases that might arrive in New Zealand.

At the same time, our health system continues its preparations in line with our
comprehensive pandemic plan. I want to thank our DHBs, public health staff, and
primary care and health officials for the work they are doing to protect the
public. I have high confidence in our medical professionals. We have a strong
public health system. We continue to work to keep COVID-19 out, but we are ready
if it arrives in our community.

2.1 Early Ideas in Atomic Theory

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

State the postulates of Dalton’s atomic theory

Use postulates of Dalton’s atomic theory to explain the laws of definite and
multiple proportions

The earliest recorded discussion of the basic structure of matter comes from
ancient Greek philosophers, the scientists of their day. In the fifth century
BC, Leucippus and Democritus argued that all matter was composed of small,
finite particles that they called atomos, a term derived from the Greek word for
“indivisible.” They thought of atoms as moving particles that differed in shape
and size, and which could join together. Later, Aristotle and others came to the
conclusion that matter consisted of various combinations of the four “elements”
—fire, earth, air, and water—and could be infinitely divided. Interestingly,
these philosophers thought about atoms and “elements” as philosophical concepts,
but apparently never considered performing experiments to test their ideas.

The Aristotelian view of the composition of matter held sway for over two
thousand years, until English schoolteacher John Dalton helped to revolutionize
chemistry with his hypothesis that the behavior of matter could be explained
using an atomic theory. First published in 1807, many of Dalton’s hypotheses
about the microscopic features of matter are still valid in modern atomic
theory. Here are the postulates of Dalton’s atomic theory.

1. Matter is composed of exceedingly small particles called atoms. An atom is
the smallest unit of an element that can participate in a chemical change.

2. An element consists of only one type of atom, which has a mass that is
characteristic of the element and is the same for all atoms of that element
(Figure 2.2). A macroscopic sample of an element contains an incredibly large
number of atoms, all of which have identical chemical properties.

Figure 2.2 A pre-1982 copper penny (left) contains approximately 3 ×× 1022
copper atoms (several dozen are represented as brown spheres at the right), each
of which has the same chemical properties. (credit: modification of work by
“slgckgc” / Flickr)

3. Atoms of one element differ in properties from atoms of all other elements.

4. A compound consists of atoms of two or more elements combined in a small,
whole-number ratio. In a given compound, the numbers of atoms of each of its
elements are always present in the same ratio (Figure 2.3).

Figure 2.3 Copper(II) oxide, a powdery, black compound, results from the
combination of two types of atoms—copper (brown spheres) and oxygen (red
spheres)—in a 1:1 ratio. (credit: modification of work by
“Chemicalinterest”/Wikimedia Commons)

5. Atoms are neither created nor destroyed during a chemical change, but are
instead rearranged to yield substances that are different from those present
before the change (Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4 When the elements copper (a shiny, red-brown solid, shown here as
brown spheres) and oxygen (a clear and colorless gas, shown here as red spheres)
react, their atoms rearrange to form a compound containing copper and oxygen (a
powdery, black solid). (credit copper: modification of work by
http://images-of-elements.com/copper.php)

Dalton’s atomic theory provides a microscopic explanation of the many
macroscopic properties of matter that you’ve learned about. For example, if an
element such as copper consists of only one kind of atom, then it cannot be
broken down into simpler substances, that is, into substances composed of fewer
types of atoms. And if atoms are neither created nor destroyed during a chemical
change, then the total mass of matter present when matter changes from one type
to another will remain constant (the law of conservation of matter).

EXAMPLE 2.1

Testing Dalton’s Atomic Theory

In the following drawing, the green spheres represent atoms of a certain
element. The purple spheres represent atoms of another element. If the spheres
touch, they are part of a single unit of a compound. Does the following chemical
change represented by these symbols violate any of the ideas of Dalton’s atomic
theory? If so, which one?

Solution

The starting materials consist of two green spheres and two purple spheres. The
products consist of only one green sphere and one purple sphere. This violates
Dalton’s postulate that atoms are neither created nor destroyed during a
chemical change, but are merely redistributed. (In this case, atoms appear to
have been destroyed.)

Check Your Learning

In the following drawing, the green spheres represent atoms of a certain
element. The purple spheres represent atoms of another element. If the spheres
touch, they are part of a single unit of a compound. Does the following chemical
change represented by these symbols violate any of the ideas of Dalton’s atomic
theory? If so, which one?

ANSWER:

The starting materials consist of four green spheres and two purple spheres. The
products consist of four green spheres and two purple spheres. This does not
violate any of Dalton’s postulates: Atoms are neither created nor destroyed, but
are redistributed in small, whole-number ratios.

15.4 The Union Triumphant

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Describe the reasons why many Americans doubted that Abraham Lincoln would be
reelected

Explain how the Union forces overpowered the Confederacy

Describe the contributions and experiences of African Americans serving in the
Civil War

By the outset of 1864, after three years of war, the Union had mobilized its
resources for the ongoing struggle on a massive scale. The government had
overseen the construction of new railroad lines and for the first time used
standardized rail tracks that allowed the North to move men and materials with
greater ease. The North’s economy had shifted to a wartime model. The
Confederacy also mobilized, perhaps to a greater degree than the Union, its
efforts to secure independence and maintain slavery. Yet the Confederacy
experienced ever - greater hardships after years of war. Without the population
of the North, it faced a shortage of manpower. The lack of industry, compared to
the North, undercut the ability to sustain and wage war. Rampant inflation as
well as food shortages in the South lowered morale.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH EUROPE

From the beginning of the war, the Confederacy placed great hope in being
recognized and supported by Great Britain and France. European intervention in
the conflict remained a strong possibility, but when it did occur, it was not in
a way anticipated by either the Confederacy or the Union.

Napoleon III of France believed the Civil War presented an opportunity for him
to restore a French empire in the Americas. With the United States preoccupied,
the time seemed ripe for action. Napoleon’s target was Mexico, and in 1861, a
large French fleet took Veracruz. The French then moved to capture Mexico City,
but the advance came to an end when Mexican forces defeated the French in 1862.
Despite this setback, France eventually did conquer Mexico, establishing a
regime that lasted until 1867. Rather than coming to the aid of the Confederacy,
France used the Civil War to provide a pretext for efforts to reestablish its
former eighteenth - century colonial holdings.

Still, the Confederacy had great confidence that it would find an ally in Great
Britain despite the antislavery sentiment there. Southerners hoped Britain’s
dependence on cotton for its textile mills would keep the country on their side.
The fact that the British proved willing to build and sell ironclad ships
intended to smash through the Union naval blockade further raised Southern
hopes. The Confederacy purchased two of these armored blockade runners, the CSS
Florida and the CSS Alabama. Both were destroyed during the war.

The Confederacy’s staunch commitment to slavery eventually worked against
British recognition and support, since Great Britain had abolished slavery in
1833. The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation ended any doubts the British had about
the goals of the Union cause. In the aftermath of the proclamation, many in
Great Britain cheered for a Union victory. Ultimately, Great Britain, like
France, disappointed the Confederacy’s hope of an alliance, leaving the
outnumbered and out - resourced states that had left the Union to fend for
themselves.

AFRICAN AMERICAN SOLDIERS

At the beginning of the war, in 1861 and 1862, Union forces had used
contrabands, or escaped enslaved people, for manual labor. The Emancipation
Proclamation, however, led to the enrollment of African American men as Union
soldiers. Huge numbers of formerly enslaved as well as free Black people from
the North enlisted, and by the end of the war in 1865, their numbers had swelled
to over 190,000. Racism among White people in the Union army ran deep, however,
fueling the belief that Black soldiers could never be effective or trustworthy.
The Union also feared for the fate of captured Black soldiers. Although many
Black soldiers saw combat duty, these factors affected the types of tasks
assigned to them. Many Black regiments were limited to hauling supplies, serving
as cooks, digging trenches, and doing other types of labor, rather than serving
on the battlefield (Figure 15.16).

Figure 15.16 This 1865 daguerreotype illustrates three of the Union’s distinct
advantages: African American soldiers, a stream of cannons and supplies, and an
extensive railroad grid. (credit: Library of Congress)

African American soldiers also received lower wages than their White
counterparts: ten dollars per month, with three dollars deducted for clothing.
White soldiers, in contrast, received thirteen dollars monthly, with no
deductions. Abolitionists and their Republican supporters in Congress worked to
correct this discriminatory practice, and in 1864, Black soldiers began to
receive the same pay as White soldiers plus retroactive pay to 1863 (Figure
15.17).

Figure 15.17 African American and White soldiers of the Union army pose together
in this photograph, although in reality, Black soldiers were often kept separate
and given only menial jobs.

For their part, African American soldiers welcomed the opportunity to prove
themselves. Some 85 percent were formerly enslaved people who were fighting for
the liberation of all of the enslaved and the end of slavery. When given the
opportunity to serve, many Black regiments did so heroically. One such regiment,
the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, distinguished itself at
Fort Wagner in South Carolina by fighting valiantly against an entrenched
Confederate position. They willingly gave their lives for the cause.

The Confederacy, not surprisingly, showed no mercy to African American troops.
In April 1864, Southern forces attempted to take Fort Pillow in Tennessee from
the Union forces that had captured it in 1862. Confederate troops under Major
General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the future founder of the Ku Klux Klan, quickly
overran the fort, and the Union defenders surrendered. Instead of taking the
African American soldiers prisoner, as they did the White soldiers, the
Confederates executed them. The massacre outraged the North, and the Union
refused to engage in any future exchanges of prisoners with the Confederacy.

What is up guys? Kharma Medic here and welcome back to another dose. So in
today's video, I'm finally gonna be doing a room tour. I know this is something
that you guys have requested for a very long time, and after two and a half
years of living here, I finally feel like I've made it my own and decorated it
how I want, and I'm ready to show it to you guys. Alright so let's start off
with the bed and the couch area. Honestly, if I was redoing this from the
beginning, I would have really liked to have a double bed in this room, but,
unfortunately, with the space as you can probably see from that wall there till
the door, it's basically just enough to fit a bed and a couch, and this is my
couch over here. I've recently changed it, and if you've been following my
channel for a long time, then you'll know I'm really proud of how I color match
the pictures on the wall over here with sort of the gray and yellow vibe, the
gray and yellow cushions. This couch is also quite big, it fits three people
quite comfortably, and if I have family or friends staying over, it opens up
into a full double bed. This coffee table over here, it's glass and has two
levels, so it's really good when we have multiple friends over, and we have lots
of food to put on the table, or if we're playing board games, we can have people
sit around it, and still have a lot of space to lay everything out. So there's
nothing too special about the bed itself, but it does have a very important
function, which, it has a lot of storage. So down here is basically where I keep
everything that I can't really keep in my room, because there's not enough
space. I've got an ironing board, all of my suitcases, socks, clothes that I
don't wear that often, anything that I need for fixing the house like
screwdrivers, drills, nails, all these things that I definitely wouldn't want to
have laid out in my room, but I still need somewhere in the house. I love that
this room has floor-to-ceiling windows as well, it really lets the light come
in, especially in the summer time. I know London doesn't have that much light,
but I'll take as much as I can, and there's also a small balcony out here, which
is fairly rare for London. We have two chairs where we can sit down and sort of
enjoy the weather when it is a little bit better, um but now it's really cold so
just gonna close it. And then a little behind the scenes that you probably will
never see again in a video is that down here I keep all of the filming gear that
doesn't really fit anywhere else in the room: two sets of tripods, I also have a
c-stand. Okay next to my bed, I've got the radio alarm clock, and this has
actually changed my life. It makes waking up in the morning and getting out of
bed at 6:00 a.m. when it's pitch black outside so much easier when you're waking
up really early. It's so much better to wake up to the sound of somebody talking
to you: your favorite radio station, some music, whatever, instead of that
classic iPhone alarm, "ba, ba, ba." Over here on the wall, these are posters
that I actually bought back in 2013 in my first year of university in Toronto,
and I really really liked them so I've kept them around. Also I'm really proud
that I managed to put them up all by myself, they look quite neat, and I feel
like they're equally spaced, so I'm really proud of how they turned out.

Hey what's up guys? Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new. Today
I'm doing another college day in my life. And I just left Starbucks, don't mind
what I look like. I literally just pretty much woke up and left this morning.
I'm starting the review for all the chapters for my final exam, and it is a lot
of information so I already planned on getting up early today and going. And
then I'm gonna do the same thing tomorrow. I basically like created a digital
calendar where I'm gonna go over each of the chapters, just because I only have
one week left to study. I'm back home now, and I basically just typed up a
little calendar laying out the chapters that I have left to review before
Tuesday. That's my final list and I hate that, like, this week is our
Thanksgiving break and then we literally come back Tuesday and take our final.
So I'm gonna be studying on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and the whole
weekend even though we're going getting our Christmas tree I think on Saturday,
and I I'm not decorating I'm not doing anything fun, like I have to study. I
thought I would show you guys kind of how I'm mapping this out, because it's a
really good tip if you have like a lot to do. So today I'm doing female
reproductive system, male reproductive system tomorrow. I work on Wednesday, I'm
going to go over chapter 29 fluid balance, chapter 28 so urinary system on the
29th. The 30th, Chapters 17 through 22 - yes that's like six chapters or
something. And then on Sunday, I'll be doing chapters 23 through 27 and I just
made this on my iPad and then printed it. I did not include my schedule for
college algebra because I have a final on Thursday of next week for that. So I'm
going to go in with like a different color and add in the chapters I'm gonna be
studying for that, but I'm super stressed. I bought these Vans from DSW. They
are really cute. You guys know I have the white ones and I wear them all the
time and these ones are just like black perforated Vans. I love them and they
are definitely the right size because I have two other pairs of Vans that are
this size, but one of these ones is like messed up or something. I think it's
like this part on the left foot because my foot feels super tight in only the
left side, so something's up because they're both the right size but I don't
know. So I'm gonna exchange them for another pair because something's not right
about that. Hey guys. So I just got finished at the library. I just sat in there
for like an hour and a half straight and studied. I'm really proud of myself and
now I'm about to go get some lunch, and go to DSW and see if I can exchange
those Vans. So while I was in the library one of you guys came up to me, and
said hi. I feel so bad because I was so in the zone that I didn't even get her
name. But if you're watching this, hi thank you so much for coming and saying hi
to me you actually made my whole day. She said she watches my videos and loves
them. And you guys are so sweet, I love making videos and it's so nice to have
that support. So if you do go to FGCU and you ever see me on campus, like feel
free to say hi because you'll make my day. I just got out of DSW, and I spent
like 30 minutes in there because it was just such a process for them to do an
exchange. And then she had to scan and go get the shoes and then she said they
didn't have the size. So I ended up having to order them, but she said there was
no way to do a direct exchange. So she had to give me a return and then re-ring
it up. And oh my gosh I was literally in there for like 25 minutes all to just
do a simple exchange for the exact same shoe. But it's over now and they're
gonna send them to me in the mail. Hopefully they'll be here in about a week.
I'm just kind of sad that they didn't have them in stock, so now I have to wait.
But oh well it's over with now, we're gonna go get lunch.

Understand

Some of the distinctive skyline of Downtown, including the Kaiser Building and
the Cathedral of Christ the Light.

Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger neighbor lying directly to the
west, Oakland has in recent years began to step out from under the shadows,
playing upon the beautiful highlights of its own and its rise as the
multicultural "hipster' city of the Bay Area.

Since the 1960s, Oakland has been a hub of radical culture, and is the
birthplace of both the Black Panther Party and the Hell's Angels. Oakland's
history in the arts and entertainment arena is notable as well, as Oakland has
nurtured or been a second home to novelists Gertrude Stein, Jack London, Amy
Tan, and Maya Angelou; actors Meryl Streep, Mark Hamill, Bruce Lee, and Tom
Hanks; architect Julia "Butterfly" Hill; classical conductor Calvin Simmons;
rappers MC Hammer, 2Pac, Messy Marv, and several other notables in the liberal
arts and sciences.

Oakland as a city reflects the amazing diversity of its residents and long
history. For many visitors, the first place they are likely to visit is
Downtown, especially if they are in town on business, or simply do not know
where to start. The center of transportation by BART and by bus is there, if one
wants to branch out. And it is as simple as walking in a direction from there,
for the first few neighborhoods, since Old Oakland is along 10th Street, just
west of Broadway. Just east of Broadway and continuing north and south is
Oakland's famous Chinatown, and that to get the real essence of "Chinatown,"
Oakland rather than San Francisco is your best bet. Many of the buildings and
streets of Chinatown reflect the diverse nature of its history, in architecture
and in the bilingual signs seen throughout the neighborhood.

The curious traveler can venture to take a bus southwards along Broadway, and
come to Jack London Square. The unlikely mixture of warehouses and very
expensive restaurants and posh atmosphere alongside some of the landmarks of the
city's waterfront makes the Square an interesting place to visit and explore,
even for locals. It's the home of the USS Potomac and the site of the namesake
author's residence, still preserved and humbly standing not far from a saloon
from the same era.

Just west of Downtown and slightly north of the Financial District is Uptown. In
the evening it buzzes with art galleries, theaters and residents and Bay Area
visitors coming into the area to see concerts. A popular area on the weekend
with a mixed vibe of hipster and hip hop. It's a burgeoning neighborhood of
performing arts ranging from nightclubs to music halls, avant-garde performance
art, and even an improv theater company. Uptown also has some of the best in the
city's vintage architecture, like the Gothic Revival Cathedral Building and the
Art Deco Fox and Paramount Theaters, as well as several restaurants.

North Oakland is a sweeping term, referring to just about everywhere north of
Uptown and Lake Merritt. Many of the neighborhoods are commercial centers and
absolute heaven for foodies or those who seek quieter surroundings than the
hustle and bustle of Downtown and Chinatown. Temescal is a neighborhood that
lies north-northwest from Downtown, centered along the reach of Telegraph
Avenue, at and near 51st Street. Until the 1960s, a dominantly Italian-American
neighborhood, it is now a much more diversified neighborhood, home to many
restaurants, including some of the city's best Korean and Ethiopian
establishments. Northeast of Temescal and near the Berkeley border lies
Rockridge, a neighborhood mixed with family friendly and artistic vibes. It has
lots of local boutiques and a diverse range of food at all prices and styles.
Open-air markets, bookstores, and a BART station all its own make Rockridge
another of many pleasant stops in North Oakland. South of Rockridge, and
southeast of Temescal lies Piedmont Avenue, a street extending from Broadway
near 34th and Hawthorne and an area with a group of hospitals on a hill (Pill
Hill) up and through a neighborhood bordered on both sides by picturesque hills,
houses and trees. Another of North Oakland's group of foodie spots, home to the
city's single Michelin-rated restaurant and many others; cafes, ice cream,
coffee shops and pleasant walks complete the vision of this interesting and
quiet neighborhood. East along I-580 and not far from Piedmont Avenue are two
neighborhoods separated by a couple of blocks. Grand Lake and Lakeshore both
share a friendly, suburban sort of feel. The Grand Lake Theater stands at the
entrance to the neighborhood that bears its name, a matter of a few hundred feet
from Lakeshore Avenue – both are diverse neighborhoods no matter what your
budget, be it burgers or sandwiches or a full romantic evening, either of these
twin-sister neighborhoods will make a pleasant time, by day or night.

West Oakland was once a burgeoning working-class neighborhood with its roots
tracing as far back as the opening decades of the 19th century. It has seen a
period of decline between the 1960s and the more recent past. Strangely, twice
in its history the neighborhood has seen benefits from major earthquakes. After
the 1906 earthquake, many San Franciscans relocated there, and the industrial
development of the 20s and 30s saw its population in the hundreds of thousands.
With Loma Prieta in 1989, the effective barrier of the Cypress Street Overpass
was destroyed, and the decades since have seen the rebuilding and refurbishing
of many of the neighborhood's original Victorian houses, and there is a
burgeoning performing arts community growing near the center of the
neighborhood. Though there are a few draws for the traveler, West Oakland is
dominantly a very poor working-class residential neighborhood with a less than
spectacular reputation.

Vava’u is a group of more than 50 islands in Tonga, about 150 miles north of
Tongatapu. They are either raised coral limestone or coral atolls. The beautiful
harbour opposite the main town of Neiafu (known as the Port of Refuge Harbour)
is a common destination for yachties sailing the South Pacific. The waters of
the islands are known for their clarity, it being said that you can see the
bottom at 40 metres. The area attracts many humpback whales between June and
November and there are lots of companies organising tours to see them. There are
numerous places to stay to suit most budgets.

Understand

Findings of Lapita pottery suggest that early-Polynesians were on these islands
close to 3000 years ago. These days there are around 20000 people living in the
Group. Neiafu and surrounding villages are home to about a third of the Group’s
overall population of around 20000, with the majority of the population living
in small villages on the other islands. Neiafu is the official port of entry for
yachts coming to Vava'u, which attracts over 500 yachts every winter sailing
season between June and October. A string of islands and reefs along the eastern
edge of the Group shelters the area from strong winds and ocean swellS and
humpback whales come to these protected waters to give birth. This is the high
season for tourism; between December and April few people visit and many tour
companies and restaurants close down. Neiafu town is the centre of activity. It
is on the southern point of the main island of Utu Vava'u and has an attractive
setting on one of the world's most beautiful harbours. Neiafu offers all the
usual amenities including banks, schools, tour companies, restaurants, cafes and
bars, supermarkets, a market and a hospital. It doesn't have a beach but boats
to one of the nearby coral atolls with superb sandy beaches are easily
available.

Climate

Vava'u has a tropical climate with average temperatures up to 29 ºC in January
and down to 24º C in June. It is sunny throughout the year. Between November and
April, it is more humid and thunderstorms and cyclones do occur. From May to
September there are southeast trade winds but during the summer months the winds
are from the northeast.

Port of Refuge Harbor at Neiafu

Orientation

The main islands are: Utu Vava'u.

This is the largest island, where Neiafu is found. It is a limestone island with
heights up to 213 m in the west. The island provides a home to eleven indigenous
bird species and contains Mt. Talau national park, with some of the limited
remaining native vegetation. Tropical vegetation includes the pandanus or screw
pine, the casuarina, and the mulberry tree, the bark of which is used to make
tapa cloth.

Pangaimotu.

This is the second largest island in the Group. It can be seen across the water
from Neiafu and is connected by land bridge at the most southern point of ‘Utu
Vava’u.

There are some good beaches and plenty of secluded cove beaches and protected
bays with good snorkelling. Avai'o'vuna Swamp is a small coastal wetland on the
island.

Hunga Island.

This is some 35 minutes from Neiafu Harbour and provides the main concentration
of humpback whales. The island lies in deep water and has sheltered waters and
bays which provide a resting place for humpbacks with calves.

How to Grow Beavertail Cactus

The Beavertail Cactus (Opunitia basilares), found primarily in the Mojave Desert
and northwest Mexico; can grow to be about 24 inches (60 cm) high; has pads that
look like beavertails; and yields red or purple flowers from spring to early
summer. Growing Beavertail can be done at any time of year by scattering seeds
in a shady bed or, for faster results, planting cuttings in a mix of soil and
sand and ensuring that they have a bit of water and plenty of sun. Read the
following steps to find out how to grow Beavertail cactus.

Method 1 of 2: From Seeds

Purchase Beavertail cactus seeds. These can be bought at garden centers or
purchased online.

Scatter the seeds.

In a shady garden bed, simply scatter the seeds on the soil. There's no need to
cover them, unless you want to use netting to keep the birds off. Keep the soil
moist until the seeds germinate.

Make sure that the garden bed is in the shade. Beavertail cacti seeds need shade
to grow, whereas cuttings need plenty of direct sunlight.

Be aware that growing Beavertail cactus from seeds takes much longer than
growing one from a cutting. It can take as long as 4 to 4 years before you get
flowers.

Method 2 of 2: From Cuttings

Obtain Beavertail cuttings.

You can purchase them online or at a local garden center.

If you already own a Beavertail cactus, you can make your own cuttings. To do
this, choose pads (the flat, oval-shaped sections that make up a cactus) that
are 6 months old or older and cut them at the base. In order to form a callous
and prevent rot, cure the cuttings by sitting the pad upright in a dry, dark
place for 10 to 14 days.

Plant the cuttings.

Prepare a potting mix that is equal parts soil and rough pumice or sand and fill
the appropriate number of pots with it. Make sure there are holes in the center
of the base of each pot to allow for good drainage.

Set the cuttings upright in the potting mix about an inch (2.5 cm.) deep. If you
plant the cuttings too deep, they might rot.

Put some rocks around the pad to anchor it in place.

Choose a spot for your Beavertail cactus cuttings.

If you live in an area with strong summer sun, position the cuttings so that the
broad sides of the cuttings face east and west while the slim sides face north
and south. This will prevent the cuttings from burning during the hottest part
of the day.

Make sure the spot is sheltered from any cold winter winds.

Wait for a month.

Do not water the cutting for the first month. The moisture in the pad will
provide enough nutrients for roots to grow. Too much water might cause rot.

After 1 month, roots will have sprouted and you can water the cutting for the
first time.

Always let the soil dry before you water the cuttings. Once fully rooted, they
are extremely drought resistant.

Fertilize the plants.

During the spring, summer, and fall, the Beavertail cactus grows and will
benefit from a balanced fertilizer.

Let the cuttings grow.

From the first pad, many more will form. The second or third pad will bear some
flowers, but wait before harvesting them or you might affect the size of future
harvests.

How to Get Rid of Mice Naturally

Having mice in your home is both a nuisance and a health hazard. They can cause
property damage, create a mess, and produce unpleasant smells. In addition,
repelling and removing rodents from your home can be a hassle if you don't know
what you are doing. It can also be dangerous if you use toxic chemicals and
poisons. It's a good thing, then, that there are some simple ways to effectively
get mice out of your home without the use of toxic chemicals and poisons.

Method 1 Discouraging Mice Naturally

Keep your home clean. Many times mice are drawn into homes on the search for
food. If there is nothing to eat, mice will be less likely to stay. Keep all
food stored properly in airtight containers or in places that are safe from
mouse attack. [1]

Apply peppermint oil. Peppermint oil is a natural deterrent. The smell is simply
too intense for rodents and they will not try to go near it. It also helps to
mask the scent of any tasty morsels that have been missed when cleaning. It also
gives the house a lovely smell, and is not toxic, unlike many synthetic chemical
treatments. You can get peppermint oil in most health food stores and even some
major grocery stores. [2]

Place a drop or two on a cotton ball.

Place a cotton ball under or near your garbage can to deter mice from getting
into it.

Place the cotton balls in areas where mice are likely to enter your house, by
doorways, or heat vents, etc.

Peppermint oil cotton balls need to be replaced after 5 - 7 days, depending upon
the quantity of oil you put on it.

Try growing peppermint plants near the entryways. You can use the mint in
cooking, as well as it serving a deterrent purpose.

Use dried snake feces. Visit a local reptile center, zoo, or pet store and ask
for some dried snake poo. You can also sometimes find someone who owns a pet
snake. Place near entrances and in places where mice seem to go. This will keep
mice away. [3]

Be sure to keep the feces out of the reach of children and pets.

Zap mice with ultrasonic sounds. There are electronic units sold that emit an
ultrasonic beeping sound that rodents hate. They should be available at your
local home improvement store or online.

These work only on a single line of sight, so you need to know the exact path
the mice are taking.

The units may only work for a short time because mice can become used to them.
[4]

Use a commercial, organic deterrent. Many companies that specialize in organic
garden and home products make mice repellents that are better for the
environment than traditional poisons. Many of these products use natural
ingredients, such as peppermint, that are known to be disagreeable to mice. They
will not kill mice but they should keep them out of areas where the product is
applied.

These products should be available at your local gardening or home improvement
center. If you want a specific product, try doing a online search to see where
it is available locally.

Get a cat. A house cat can take care of the problem. Cats that spend time
outdoors are more likely to hunt to find their own food and may track down that
mouse. Just be aware, not all cats have enough energy, interest or training to
hunt mice. Kittens typically have to be taught by the mother to easily become a
mouser. Well-food indoor kitties might just see the mouse as a toy, and grow
quickly bored of it after scaring it half witless.

Shelters and adoption agencies often do not know if a cat is a good mouse
hunter, and generally do not test for this. Sometimes this information is
available, but usually not.

While many mousers are great pets as well, not all are. "Barn cats" may not be
socialized well with humans, although used to hunting mice for food.

Even if you do not have a cat, you can use used kitty litter to deter mice.
Place tubs of used kitty litter around entrances of the house. The mice will
sniff the smell of cat urine and clear off in a jiffy.

If you have a large infestation, a cat may not be enough to totally get rid of
it. However, once you eliminate the infestation, a cat will probably prevent
reinfestation. [5]

Put your trash cans far from your home. Mice smell garbage and get attracted to
your house. If you keep the cans away from the house, they are less likely to
take up residence in your home.

Promote the nesting of birds of prey in your yard. Build a shelter box in your
garden to attract some onto your property. This may take some time, but it's
worth the effort if you can attract a wild mouse eater to your yard. [6]

Make sure the shelter box has no nails or safety hazards.

A barn owl is the best. A family of barn owls can eat many mice in a night!
However, you might attract other types of owls or birds of prey with your
nesting box.

The prevalence of discrimination across racial groups in contemporary America:

Results from a nationally representative sample of adults

Personal experiences of discrimination and bias have been the focus of much
social science research. [1 - 3]

 Sociologists have explored the adverse
consequences of discrimination [3 – 5];

 psychologists have examined the mental
processes that underpin conscious and unconscious biases [6];

 neuroscientists
have examined the neurobiological underpinnings of discrimination [7 – 9];

 and
evolutionary theorists have explored the various ways that in-group / out-group
biases emerged across the history of our species. [10]

 In many respects,
researchers already possess a wealth of knowledge concerning the origins and
consequences of discrimination and bias. [11]

What also should not be lost in discussion of discrimination is the growing push
to implement social policy aimed at reducing the occurrence of discriminatory
practices.

 Mandatory diversity trainings in professional settings, for example,
are intended to reduce bias in the workplace by increasing the awareness of
employees regarding the challenges facing minority group members. [12]

 Indeed,
the implementation of certain policies is rooted in the assumption that
discrimination and biases are, at least to some appreciable amount, present in
modern society.

Even so, estimates of the prevalence of perceived discrimination remains rare
(see [13 – 14]).

 The current study seeks to build
on this research by estimating the prevalence of discrimination experiences
among a large, nationally representative sample of adults from the United
States.

 Additionally, the analysis address the perceived reasons for reported
discrimination experiences.

All respondents who indicated they were discriminated against — specifically,
those who responded with sometimes or often to the perceived discrimination
measure described above — were asked the following question:

“What do you think was the main reason for these experiences?”

 Respondents were
allowed to choose one response from 11 categories.

 For the present analysis,
these responses were recoded into nine mutually exclusive categories capturing
the following options:

The following categories from the original questionnaire were collapsed into one
category for the analysis: race; ancestry or national origin; and shade of skin
color.

 Additionally, because this question was only asked of respondents who
reported prior discrimination experiences, the built-in skip pattern resulted in
a large number of cases scored as missing (legitimate skip).

Because a race variable is not available from the Wave 4 interviews, we use the
racial category reported by the respondent during the Wave 1 interview.

 Wave 1
race — rather than, say, Wave 3 race — was used to preserve case counts.

 The
logic is that (nearly) all Wave 4 respondents appeared in the Wave 1 sample, but
not all would have been interviewed at Wave 3 due to differential patterns of
temporary attrition.

 Respondents were asked to indicate their race from among
the following categories: White; Black or African American; Hispanic; American
Indian or Native American; and Asian or Pacific Islander.

 Respondents were
provided the opportunity to select more than one race, and those who did were
asked a follow-up question regarding which category best described their racial
background.

 In the current study, those respondents who indicated more than one
race were coded as “mixed race”.

To provide information on the analytical sample as a whole, two additional
demographic variables are included.

 First, age is a continuous measure created
by subtracting the year of the respondents' birth (obtained from Wave 1) from
the year of the interview at Wave 4.

 Second, sex was dichotomously coded based
on the self-reported sex of the respondent at Wave 4 (0 = female and 1 = male).

Our exploratory study included three basic steps.

 First, summary statistics of
the study variables and racial categories were produced.

 Second, we examined the
relative proportions of the two discrimination experience measures across each
racial category.

 Finally, we assessed the distribution of reported reasons for
discrimination across the racial categories.

 In order to examine potential
bivariate associations, the adjusted F statistic (design-based F) was employed
as it corrects for a complex sample design such as that used in the Add Health.
[21]

The p-value associated with the design-based F is thus more accurate (than the
associated with the χ2 statistic) given the adjustments and calculations take
into account the weighted nature of the data.

 This final step also included an
examination of the relative distribution of racial categories across the various
reported reasons for discrimination.

 As noted earlier, all analyses were
weighted according to the survey weight provided by the Add Health research
staff and standard errors were corrected for the clustering and stratification
that defined the sampling strategy.

 Thus, all estimates reported here can be
considered nationally representative of the United States.

2. GUJJOLAAY EEGIMAA, ITS SPEAKERS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS

This section briefly presents the Gújjolaay Eegimaa (Eegimaa for short;
Ethnologue code: ISO 639-3: bqj), its speakers and its varieties.

 We also
discuss aspects of the contact situation of the Eegimaa language.

 This is
important, because as we will show in § 6 below, some of the Eegimaa death
prevention names and child-bearing names are given to Eegimaa people from other
communities.

Eegimaa is a Jóola language spoken in the Basse Casamance area of Southern
Senegal by a population estimated to be between 7,000 (Bassène, 2007) and 11,200
speakers (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2014).

 Jóola languages are classified as
members of Sapir’s (1971) BAK group of Atlantic languages of the Niger Congo
language phylum.

 Speakers of these languages are found in the Gambia, in the
former Casamance region of Southern Senegal and in Guinea Bissau.

 The map in
Figure 1, taken from Ethnologue, presents the languages of Senegal.

 The arrow on
the map points to the Eegimaa speaking area (Bandial is the name used by
Ethnologue for Eegimaa).

 Eegimaa is mainly spoken in Mof-Ávvi, a former kingdom
of 10 villages located to the west of Ziguinchor, the capital city of the former
administrative region of Casamance in the south of Senegal.

 In the
south, the river known as Kamobeul Bolon separates Mof-Ávvi from the Bayot
speaking area, while the west side of Mof-Ávvi coincides with the homeland of
the Jóola Kaasa Húluf and Jóola Kaasa Ésuulaaluʔ.

 The map in Figure 2 below,
adapted from Palmeri and Gazio (1995), shows a very approximate location of
Mof-Ávvi in relation to other neighbouring speech communities.

 Some of these
communities will be referred to in our discussion of death prevention names in §
6.

 The Eegimaa spoken in Mof-Ávvi is known by several names given by speakers of
neighbouring languages.

 For example, the name Kusiilay 1 ‘the language of
Essil’, is the name given by speakers of Kujireray to the Eegimaa language,
because Essil, of which Bajjat was a district, is the village which has a border
with their village.

 Endungo is the name given by Bayot speakers, but its meaning
is not known.

 Kúlaakiay, ‘the language of village of Seleki/Sállagi’, is the
name given by Jóola Kaasa speakers who are more familiar with the village of
Seleki/Sállagi’ than all other villages of Mof-Ávvi.

Map of Senegal (courtesy of Google maps)

Village names are written using their usual spelling.

 The Ethnologue language
codes are provided for language varieties that have them.

 Language names are
written following the recommendation for the transcription of national languages
of Senegal, Decree 2005-981.

 Names of the villages of Mof-Ávvi are written using
the Eegimaa orthography and following the pronunciation of village names by
native speakers.

 Gútaamay (from the village of Butam), Gulapaoray
(from the village Djilapaor) and Gusiilay (ISO 639-3: bsl) from the village of
Thionk Essil are also other languages related to Eegimaa.

 They are located north
of the Casamance River in the Jóola Búluf area.

 There are also small migrant
Eegimaa communities in villages like Djifanghor (east of Ziguinchor) and in
Bourofaye (south of Ziguinchor), where they cohabit with speakers of Baïnounk
languages.

 Nowadays most Eegimaa speakers from Mof-Ávvi live outside their
homeland, generally in urban areas like Ziguinchor and Dakar.

 Speakers of
Eegimaa use the term Gújjolaay (meaning Jóola) to refer to their language when
they speak to each other, but Eegimaa to distinguish their Jóola variety from
that of other Jóola peoples.

 Eegimaa is an endangered language whose
transmission to new generations has been declining significantly in the last
decades.

It is important to understand the contact situation of Eegimaa, because some of
the ritual names analysed in this paper come from other languages or from
neighbouring communities.

 These names are given either in Eegimaa or in a
different language.

Antonín Leopold Dvořák (/ d(ə)ˈvɔːrʒɑːk, -ʒæk / d(ə)-VOR-zha(h)k; Czech:
[ˈantoɲiːn ˈlɛopolt ˈdvor̝aːk]; 8 September 1841 – 1 May 1904) was a Czech
composer.

 After Bedřich Smetana, he was the next Czech Romantic-era composer to
achieve worldwide recognition.

 Following Smetana's nationalist example, Dvořák
frequently employed aspects, specifically rhythms, of the folk music of Moravia
and his native Bohemia.

 Dvořák's own style has been described as "the fullest
recreation of a national idiom with that of the symphonic tradition, absorbing
folk influences and finding effective ways of using them". [1]

Dvořák displayed his musical gifts at an early age, being an apt violin student
from age six.

 The first public performances of his works were in Prague in 1872
and, with special success, in 1873, when he was aged 31.

 Seeking recognition
beyond the Prague area, he submitted a score of his First Symphony to a prize
competition in Germany, but did not win, and the unreturned manuscript was lost
until rediscovered many decades later.

 In 1874 he made a submission to the
Austrian State Prize for Composition, including scores of two further symphonies
and other works.

 Although Dvořák was not aware of it, Johannes Brahms was the
leading member of the jury and was highly impressed.

 The prize was awarded to
Dvořák in 1874 [a] and again in 1876 and in 1877, when Brahms and the prominent
critic Eduard Hanslick, also a member of the jury, made themselves known to him.

Brahms recommended Dvořák to his publisher, Simrock, who soon afterward
commissioned what became the Slavonic Dances, Op. 46.

 These were highly praised
by the Berlin music critic Louis Ehlert in 1878, the sheet music (of the
original piano 4-hands version) had excellent sales, and Dvořák's international
reputation was launched at last.

Dvořák's first piece of a religious nature, his setting of Stabat Mater, was
premiered in Prague in 1880.

 It was very successfully performed in London in
1883, leading to many other performances in the United Kingdom and United
States. [2]

 In his career, Dvořák made nine invited visits to England, often
conducting performances of his own works.

 His Seventh Symphony was written for
London.

 Visiting Russia in March 1890, he conducted concerts of his own music in
Moscow and Saint Petersburg. [3]

 In 1891 Dvořák was appointed as a professor at
the Prague Conservatory.

 In 1890 – 91, he wrote his Dumky Trio, one of his most
successful chamber music pieces.

 In 1892, Dvořák moved to the United States and
became the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York
City.

 He also wrote his most appreciated piece of chamber music, the
American String Quartet, during this time.

 But shortfalls in payment of his
salary, along with increasing recognition in Europe and an onset of
homesickness, led him to leave the United States and return to Bohemia in 1895.

All of Dvořák's nine operas but his first have librettos in Czech and were
intended to convey Czech national spirit, as were some of his choral works.

 By
far the most successful of the operas is Rusalka.

 Among his smaller works, the
seventh Humoresque and the song "Songs My Mother Taught Me" are also widely
performed and recorded.

 He has been described as "arguably the most versatile
... composer of his time". [5]

Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen (Danish: [ʌtˢo ˈjɛsb̥ɐsn̩]; 16 July
1860 – 30 April 1943) was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of
the English language.

Otto Jespersen was born in Randers in Jutland.

 He was inspired by the work of
Danish philologist Rasmus Rask as a boy, and with the help of Rask's grammars
taught himself some Icelandic, Italian, and Spanish.

 He entered the University
of Copenhagen in 1877 when he was 17, initially studying law but not forgetting
his language studies.

 In 1881 he shifted his focus completely to languages, and
in 1887 earned his master's degree in French, with English and Latin as his
secondary languages.

 He supported himself during his studies through part-time
work as a schoolteacher and as a shorthand reporter in the Danish parliament.

 In
1887 – 1888, he traveled to England, Germany and France, meeting linguists like
Henry Sweet and Paul Passy and attending lectures at institutions like Oxford
University.

 Following the advice of his mentor Vilhelm Thomsen, he returned to
Copenhagen in August 1888 and began work on his doctoral dissertation on the
English case system.

He successfully defended his dissertation in 1891.

Jespersen was a professor of English at the University of Copenhagen from 1893
to 1925, and served as Rector of the university in 1920 – 21.

 His early work
focused primarily on language teaching reform and on phonetics, but he is best
known for his later work on syntax and on language development.

He advanced the theories of Rank and Nexus in Danish in two papers: Sprogets
logik (1913) and De to hovedarter af grammatiske forbindelser (1921).

 The term Nexus is applied
to sentences, structures similar to sentences and sentences in formation, in
which two concepts are expressed in one unit; e.g., it rained, he ran indoors.

This term is qualified by a further concept called a junction which represents
one idea, expressed by means of two or more elements, whereas a nexus combines
two ideas.

 Junction and nexus proved valuable in bringing the concept of context
to the forefront of the attention of the world of linguistics.

He was most widely recognized for some of his books.

 Language: Its Nature,
Development and Origin (1922) is considered by many to be his masterpiece.

 Late in his life he published Analytic Syntax (1937), in which he
presents his views on syntactic structure using an idiosyncratic shorthand
notation.

 In the 21st century this book is still used as one of
the basic texts in modern Structural linguistics.

 Mankind, Nation and
Individual: from a linguistic point of view (1925) is one of the pioneering
works on Sociolinguistics.

Jespersen visited the United States twice:

 he lectured at the Congress of Arts
and Sciences in St. Louis in 1904, and in 1909 – 1910 he visited both the
University of California and Columbia University.

 While in the U.S., he took
occasion to study the country's educational system.

 His autobiography (see
below) was published in English translation as recently as 1995.

Jespersen was a proponent of phonosemanticism and wrote:

 There is no denying that there
are words which we feel instinctively to be adequate to express the ideas they
stand for.”

After his retirement in 1925, Jespersen remained active in the international
linguistic community.

 In addition to continuing to write, he convened and
chaired the first International Meeting on Linguistic Research in Geneva in
1930, and acted as president of the Fourth International Congress of Linguists
in Copenhagen in 1936.

Jespersen was an important figure in the international language movement.

 He was
an early supporter of the Esperanto offshoot Ido and in 1927 published his own
project Novial.

 He also worked with the International Auxiliary Language
Association.

Jespersen received honorary degrees from Columbia University in New York (1910),
St. Andrews University in Scotland (1925), and the Sorbonne in Paris (1927).

 He
was one of the first six international scholars to be elected as honorary
members of the Linguistic Society of America.

Are you — do they still teach at Bahia on Sunday?

In fact I would have gone today, if it wasn't for my back.

 Well I
finally found some people there I can dance with.

Besides, you, I mean if you're a guy, if —

 If you're a woman, I mean, those
guys'll be all over you.

Well I don't necessarily mean, in a bad way, even though I'm sure there are a
few there, I'm not dancing with guys.

 All I can say is, the women aren't all
over me.

But, but I remember, like I went there with this person, it's kind of funny.

 So, every once in
a while I'd get up and dance, and it's like, when I'd come back, I mean there
was some guy there, sitting in my chair.

 I'm thinking, God
these guys don't waste any time.

 I mean, you turn your back and there's somebody
moving in.

So I can find — find some girls with empty chairs next to em?

Well I don't know if I told you, told you that story about that woman, who uh,
went after that guy there?

 I was there Sunday
three four weeks ago?

 Uh, after the class is over w- over with, I'm sitting down
at a table, there's a woman from — who was in the class, and two men, sitting to
my right, is a table with two women there.

 They had apparently just come from
Oba Oba.

And like, well they were attractive women, the one had on a real real short
skirt.

Anyway, there was this guy in his fifties, out there dancing, by himself.

And the woman was just looking at him, making eyes, then she went out there, got
on her knees, in front of him, in this skirt that's this short, takes her hands,
and goes along his toes, and then up, and is just doing like that.

I figured, oh, they must know each other.

 And, they did that for the whole dance, and I mean, she
was d- all kind of suggestive stuff, and touching him and everything, people
would like cheering, and clapping, "go for it".

 The
– the song ended, the guy set down, at another table.

 They never danced again the rest of the
evening.

This is like — so I was thinking, this woman's sitting about as far away from me
as Jamie is.

And I was thinking, hm, this is interesting.

 I wonder how long it
was gonna take the guys in this club to move in on her.

 No sooner did I think
this thought, guys were over there.

Well I was still trying to figure out, surely they must know each other, I mean,
why wasn't he sitting at her table?

You mean, you were still thinking about it.

Anyway, this guy, I mean he comes over there, immediately afterwards —

The same guy who got his — the same guy who's —

No, a random guy, who was like sitting about where you are.

He was sitting there, there were two guys sitting at a table right where you
are.

And then these two women are sitting here.

 So uh, he comes over there, and
is talking with that woman I don't know about what, but then like ten minutes
later, she and her friend are over at their table.

 And then, twenty minutes
later, they were kinda like all over each other.

 You know, kissing, et cetera,
et cetera.

 And I was thinking, it looks like these people aren't going home
alone tonight.

Sam has been, has taken such an interest in this retirement bit that it — it
really surprises me.

Uh, she used to go over and read a book or something.

But uh, once you understand it, you know, you, you're interested in getting
right in, and going after it.

 I really oughta call, at least Reg Barr, and ask if uh, he's still
speaking to me.

Well now, he was the one that was up on the left, up there.

Well, he came over to you all smiles, I noticed.

Well, we've known each other for thirty-some years, why wouldn't he?

 But a-
anyway, um, I was so glad that he opened up on this disclosure bit.

 Because it
was Burns that's been objecting to our having it.

 So when he opened up on that, and she followed through, and
told about her husband, you know?

Not necessarily that she would approve of it, but at least she wasn't
disapproving.

 And you know, he must have been thinking, when he said he wasn't a
political appointee, he must have been associating his relationship with
Steitler.

I don't know how else he could have done it.

He said, I loved your hum- humor, uh, and I love you, but, I am not a political
appointee.

And I said, Oh? How did you get on the board?

Well he said, I got a letter from the governor, asking.

Everybody on there is an app- political appointee, that wasn't the point.

 The
point was, I could have mentioned what was in the paper about him, that he was
related and, you know, had business with Steitler, and I just said, and there's
Doctor Duvall, you know?

And then I went to Rotus, who's a seasoned politician, if there ever was one.

 I said, I'll apologize next
time, and I'm gonna make hay out of it, don't you worry.

 I wanna know how you
birds got on that board, if you're not political appointees.

 I don't have any this year, but I've grown it other
years.

Well, I think it was Barbara that has some seeds.

Isn't that what you gave the neighbor one time?

I think you – I think you gave him some herb of some kind.

I may have given – given him some basil, yes.

I don't have any this year, I forgot to plant it.

You smoked it down into the cork, didn't you?

Well, yeah, you don't like that, do you, but –

It's – it's there, might as well smoke it.

Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the Court:

 In September 1975 the Petitioner was
arrested when he tried to steal a coat from a department store.

 Six months later
he was brought to trial on a charge of attempted petty larceny.

 Had Petitioner
pled guilty to that offense or been convicted of it after trial, he could have
received a maximum sentence of one year in jail.

 He would have been released, at
the very latest, in September of 1976.

 He would now long since have been a free
man.

But Petitioner did not plead guilty and was not convicted.

 Instead, he
raised an insanity defense, claiming that because he was mentally ill at the
time he tried to steal the coat he should not be blamed for his act.

 The
Government did not contest this claim and the trial court found, after a
stipulated trial, that the Petitioner was not guilty by reason of insanity.

 On
the basis of this acquittal and on this basis alone, the Petitier was --
Petitioner was ordered committed indefinitely to a mental hospital.

 That is, he
was ordered confined until he could prove that he was not mentally ill and
dangerous.

 Conceivably, he will remain committed in the hospital for the rest of
his life.

 Petitioner contends that whatever the validity of his kinitial
commitment to the hospital, once he had been confined there for longer than he
could have been incarcerated upon conviction, his commitment became an
indefinite one.

 And thus, the Government was constitutionally required to prove
the need for his commitment by clear and convincing evidence, something which
the Government has yet to do with respect to Mr. Jones.

 If it cannot do so now,
Petitioner submits, he is entitled to release.

Mr. Wasserstrom, you're not challenging, as I understand it, the -- the initial
commitment.

 The only question, if I understand your position correctly, that you
raise is whether he must be released at the time that the sentence period would
have expired under the criminal statute, is that right?

Our position is, Your Honor, that he has to be released at that time unless the
Government can at that time prove his commitability by the standards required.

And you are not challenging, then, the, uh, standard or burden of proof at the
time of his commitment?

It's our position that that question is not raised in this case.

If his initial commitment is not punitive, then how is the statutory period of,
uh, time that he could serve on the criminal charge relevant?

Well, we think the only justifications that could, the only justifications that
could, um, that could countenance that initial commitment are punitive in
nature, that is, are a kind of punitive rationale.

And so, to -- for us to agree with your position we would have to conclude that
his initial commitment was punitive?

 And
whether they're treated as purely punitive or not doesn't seem to me is, is, is,
is important, or the label that we attach to them it doesn't seem to me is
important.

 The point is, though, those rationales all do turn on the nature of
his act, and his act is one which, we submit, justifies confinement only for a
year.

 I don't
think that this Court has, has uh, has addressed that question, and I then think
this is the first case that raises it.

Oh, the Court has said expressly that there's no connection, in one case some
time ago.

Does your position depend at all on whether or not the initial crime was a crime
of violence?

Uh, suppose this had been a street mugging, for example?

Chief Justice Kennedy and may it please the Court.

 My name is Eric Levi and I'm
arguing for appellant Darnell Hurt.

 Uh, attorney John Martin will be arguing the
rebuttal, and we'd reserve five minutes of time.

 Your honors, if I may, I'd like
to start by addressing proposition of law number three.

 In proposition of law
number three, we have an ultimate finding of fact which was resolved in favor of
Darnell Hurt.

 This finding of fact was in regard to a provocation mitigator, um,
on the voluntary manslaughter charge.

 Darnell Hurt had asked for the provocation
mitiger- mitigator to apply to all offenses which he was charged, which includes
the felonious assault, and indirectly then he also requested it, um, for the
felony murder charge as well.

 The provocation mitigator is identical for the
voluntary manslaughter as well as the felonious assaults and felony murder.

 We
believe that on retrial, collateral estoppel would prevent retrial without
regard for the jury's prior finding in Hurt's favor, that ther- that the
provocation mitigator existed, that he was acting under serious provocation.

 In
fact, at the trial, the State, and it can be found in the transcript at pages
774 and 775, admitted as much and conceded so in its closing argument by stating
to the jury that the victim was coming into this apartment.

 He was coming in hot
and he pulled out his firearm.

 And here comes Melvin Dobson arriving at the
scene to the rescue of his daughter.

 And that incenses him, Hurt, to the point
where he uses deadly force.

 And then they said, if you apply all the factors,
that's voluntary manslaughter.

 The State of
Ohio had then directed the jury to find these provocation mitigators, which it
did.

 The high court in
Texas in ex parte Jimmy Dean Watkins agreed with that.

 And it indicated that in
any additional trial, once a jury finds those provocation mitigators, that it
can't be required to find them again.

 Additionally, in the Kennedy versus
Washington uh matter, the Federal Circuit Court stated that the Green versus
United States implied acquittal would generally apply in cases where the
provocation mitigator was at issue.

 It was addressed and argued by both sides,
and the jury was asked to make a finding.

 It
made a specific finding for the provocation mitigator.

 And while it didn't find
it on each and every specific count, that was solely because the instruction
wasn't given even though requested.

Counsel, um, shouldn't the arguments related to Proposition three B, are they
ripe for for ruling?

 Shouldn't these arguments be made at the -- at the trial
court, given the fact that this was remanded?

So, Your Honor, this was remanded for a retrial and it's remanded on the grounds
of double jeopardy through the prong of collateral estoppel.

 In this case, it's a finding of fact
under collateral estoppel, but it amounts to an affirmative defense to acquit
him of the murder, essentially.

The proble-, uh, excuse me, the uh -- the self defense issues uh we believe are
ripe first and foremost in proposition.

41: The Politics of Fear: How It Manipulates Us to Tribalism (Javanbakht)

President Barack Obama walks away from the lectern with Vice President Joe Biden
after making a statement about the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., June 16,
2016.

(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Public Domain

The cruel murder of 50 people in New Zealand was another tragic reminder of how
humans are capable of heartlessly killing their own kind just based on what they
believe, how they worship, and what race or nationality they belong to.

 There is
a longstanding history of the fear of “the others” turning humans into illogical
ruthless weapons, in service to an ideology.

 It
is deeply ingrained in the living organisms that have survived extinction
through billions of years of evolution.

 Its roots are deep in our core
psychological and biological being, and it is one of our most intimate feelings.

Danger and war are as old as human history, and so are politics and religion.

Demagogues have always used fear for intimidation of the subordinates or
enemies, and shepherding the tribe by the leaders.

 Fear is a very strong tool
that can blur humans’ logic and change their behavior.

I am a psychiatrist and neuroscientist specializing in fear and trauma, and I
have some evidence-based thoughts on how fear is abused in politics.

Like other animals, we humans can learn fear from experience, such as being
attacked by a predator.

 We also learn from observation, such as witnessing a
predator attacking another human.

 And, we learn by instructions, such as being
told there is a predator nearby.

Learning from our conspecifics – members of the same species – is an
evolutionary advantage that has prevented us from repeating dangerous
experiences of other humans.

 We have a tendency to trust our tribe mates and
authorities, especially when it comes to danger.

 It is adaptive: Parents and
wise old men told us not to eat a special plant, or not to go to an area in the
woods, or we would be hurt.

 By trusting them, we would not die like a
great-grandfather who died eating that plant.

Tribalism has been an inherent part of the human history.

 There has always been
competition between groups of humans in different ways and with different faces,
from brutal wartime nationalism to a strong loyalty to a football team.

 Evidence
from cultural neuroscience shows that our brains even respond differently at an
unconscious level simply to the view of faces from other races or cultures.

At a tribal level, people are more emotional and consequently less logical: Fans
of both teams pray for their team to win, hoping God will take sides in a game.

On the other hand, we regress to tribalism when afraid.

 This is an evolutionary
advantage that would lead to the group cohesion and help us fight the other
tribes to survive.

Tribalism is the biological loophole that many politicians have banked on for a
long time: tapping into our fears and tribal instincts.

 Some examples are
Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, religious wars and the Dark Ages.

 The typical pattern
is to give the other humans a different label than us, and say they are going to
harm us or our resources, and to turn the other group into a concept.

 It does
not have to necessarily be race or nationality, which are used very often.

 It
can be any real or imaginary difference: liberals, conservatives, Middle
Easterners, white men, the right, the left, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs.

When building tribal boundaries between “us” and “them,” some politicians have
managed very well to create virtual groups of people that do not communicate and
hate without even knowing each other: This is the human animal in action!

Very often my patients with phobias start with: “I know it is stupid, but I am
afraid of spiders.”

Or it may be dogs or cats, or something else.

 And I always
reply: “It is not stupid, it is illogical.”

 We humans have different functions
in the brain, and fear oftentimes bypasses logic.

 One
is that logic is slow; fear is fast.

 In situations of danger, we ought to be
fast: First run or kill, then think.

Some people are afraid of spiders, others of snakes or even cats and dogs.

Politicians and the media very often use fear to circumvent our logic.

 I always
say the U.S. media are disaster pornographers – they work too much on triggering
their audiences’ emotions.

 They are kind of political reality shows, surprising
to many from outside the U.S.

When one person kills a few others in a city of millions, which is of course a
tragedy, major networks’ coverage could lead one to perceive the whole city is
under siege and unsafe.

 If one undocumented illegal immigrant murders a U.S.
citizen, some politicians use fear with the hope that few will ask: “This is
terrible, but how many people were murdered in this country by U.S. citizens
just today?”

 Or: “I know several murders happen every week in this town, but why
am I so scared now that this one is being showcased by the media?”

We do not ask these questions, because fear bypasses logic.

There is a reason that the response to fear is called the “fight or flight”
response.

 That response has helped us survive the predators and other tribes
that have wanted to kill us.

 But again, it is another loophole in our biology to
be abused to turn on our aggression toward “the others,” whether in the form of
vandalizing their temples or harassing them on the social media.

“Desecrated Graves in the Old Jewish Section of the Cemetery, Vienna” by Scott
Rettberg is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When ideologies manage to get hold of our fear circuitry, we often regress to
illogical, tribal and aggressive human animals, becoming weapons ourselves –
weapons that politicians use for their own agenda.

Arash Javanbakht is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University.

This essay originally appeared in The Conversation.

 The Politics of Fear: How It
Manipulates Us to Tribalism by Arash Javanbakht is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

Fix the Machine, Not the Person (Swartz)

#systemanalysis, #proposal, #technology, #automotiveindustry, #logos, #research,
#sharedvalues #cognitivebias

This post is part seven of the series Raw Nerve.

The General Motors plant in Fremont was a disaster.

 “Everything was a fight,”
the head of the union admits.

“They spent more time on grievances and on things like that than they did on
producing cars.

It was considered the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United
States.”

“One of the expressions was, you can buy anything you want in the GM plant in
Fremont,” adds Jeffrey Liker, a professor who studied the plant.

“If you want sex, if you want drugs, if you want alcohol, it's there.

 During
breaks, during lunch time, if you want to gamble illegally—any illegal activity
was available for the asking within that plant.”

 Absenteeism was so bad that
some mornings they didn’t have enough employees to start the assembly line; they
had to go across the street and drag people out of the bar.

When management tried to punish workers, workers tried to punish them right
back: scratching cars, loosening parts in hard-to-reach places, filing union
grievances, sometimes even building cars unsafely.

 But the very next year, when Toyota was
planning to start its first plant in the US, it decided to partner with GM to
reopen it, hiring back the same old disastrous workers into the very same jobs.

And so began the most fascinating experiment in management history.

Toyota flew this rowdy crew to Japan, to see an entirely different way of
working: The Toyota Way.

 At Toyota, labor and management considered themselves
on the same team; when workers got stuck, managers didn’t yell at them, but
asked how they could help and solicited suggestions.

 “You
had union workers—grizzled old folks that had worked on the plant floor for 30
years, and they were hugging their Japanese counterparts, just absolutely in
tears,” recalls their Toyota trainer.

“And it might sound flowery to say 25 years later, but they had had such a
powerful emotional experience of learning a new way of working, a way that
people could actually work together collaboratively — as a team.

Three months after they got back to the US and reopened the plant, everything
had changed.

 Grievances and absenteeism fell away and workers started saying
they actually enjoyed coming to work.

 The Fremont factory, once one of the worst
in the US, had skyrocketed to become the best.

 The cars they made got
near-perfect quality ratings.

And the cost to make them had plummeted.

 It wasn’t
the workers who were the problem; it was the system.

An organization is not just a pile of people, it's also a set of structures.

It's almost like a machine made of men and women.

 If
you just took a bunch of people and threw them in a warehouse with a bunch of
car parts and a manual, it’d probably be a disaster.

 Instead, a careful
structure has been built: car parts roll down on a conveyor belt, each worker
does one step of the process, everything is carefully designed and routinized.

And when the system isn’t working, it doesn’t make sense to just yell at the
people in it—any more than you’d try to fix a machine by yelling at the gears.

True, sometimes you have the wrong gears and need to replace them, but more
often you’re just using them in the wrong way.

 When there’s a problem, you
shouldn’t get angry with the gears—you should fix the machine.

If you have goals in life, you’re probably going to need some sort of
organization.

 Even if it’s an organization of just you, it’s still helpful to
think of it as a kind of machine.

 You don’t need to do every part of the process
yourself—you just need to set up the machine so that the right outcomes happen.

For example, let’s say you want to build a treehouse in the backyard.

 You’re
great at sawing and hammering, but architecture is not your forte.

 You build and
build, but the treehouses keep falling down.

 Sure, you can try to get better at
architecture, develop a better design, but you can also step back, look at the
machine as a whole, and decide to fire yourself as the architect.

 Instead, you
find a friend who loves that sort of thing to design the treehouse for you and
you stick to actually building it.

 After all, your goal was to build a treehouse
whose design you like—does it really matter whether you’re the one who actually
designed it?

Or let’s say you really want to get in shape, but never remember to exercise.

You can keep beating yourself up for your forgetfulness, or you can put a system
in place.

 Maybe you have your roommate check to see that you exercise before you
leave your house in the morning or you set a regular time to consistently go to
the gym together.

 Life isn’t a high school exam; you don’t have to solve your
problems on your own.

In 1967, Edward Jones and Victor Harris gathered a group of college students and
asked them to judge another student’s exam (the student was a fictional
character, but let’s call him Jim).

 The exam always had one question, asking Jim
to write an essay on Fidel Castro “as if [he] were giving the opening statement
in a debate.”

You’re on the 236th-level Kaiserstrasse moving sidewalk when you see her.

 You’re
leaning on the railing, waiting to ask Derya about a job, watching the
glittering stream of mites that arc over half the sky — flying up to rewind
their nanosprings in the stratospheric sunlight, flying down to make Frankfurt
run.

 A picture of
elegance and style from the age of money, violence, and simplicity.

She’s a strawberry blonde, slim, her skin blank and virginal as new butter.

She’s beyond the rail now, hanging out over the mountain - high drop.

 Thin
translucent shadows move across her — the shadows of the neosilk-and-nanotube
filaments that hang the city from the hundreds of five-kilometer-high towers
that encircle it.

 (A civic agent notices you noticing, and attaches itself to
your infospace, whispering statistics —

“Each object’s suspension must weather a class 5 hurricane and the destruction
of 80% of the towers” —

 “Frankfurt’s current population is stable at 53 million”
—

“Average age 62, birth rate 0.22, net immigration of half a million a year” —

“Current personal squatright: 311 cubic meters per resident” —

 The wind whips her hair, ruffles the skirt around
her knees.

 You remember your first trip to the upper
levels: leaning over the edge into the angry swarm of mites, whirring and
buzzing warnings and shoving you back like a million mosquito chaperones.

Everyone tries it once — Except that there aren’t any mites around her.

She looks up at you and, across the gap of forty meters, smiles a brilliant,
heartbreaking smile.

 He steps off the moving sidewalk near you:
tall, hook-nosed, the fashionable whorls of pox and acne making constellations
of his cheeks and chest; the glowing, formal tattoos of his committees and
lifebrands adorning his massive triceps.

 Derya, of
all people, hearing you scream!

“They infect themselves with some designer virus -

 it lets them hack the city’s
person-recognition systems.

So the mites don’t see them when they jump.

She’s swept past the whalelike oval of the public pool on the 202nd, past the
sloping mandala of the Google of offices on the 164th.

 At the 131st, below her,
is the old Stock Exchange, hung upside-down now as a hipster den.

 A silver swarm coalesces around the 164th,
and she vanishes into it, like a snip of scallion into cloudy miso soup.

 When
the cloud disperses, she’s standing on one of the Stock Exchange’s upside-down
overhangs.

She waves, antlike, then crawls through a dormer window.

“They’re a huge drain on emergency preparedness.

 Ripple effects are causing
project slowdowns ...”

“Freeloaders drive systemic evolution,” you find yourself saying.

“Don’t you quote the founders at me,” Derya snaps.

 The minute enough people find anticontributive
behavior cool, the party’s over —

 it’s back to capitalist competition or state
control.”

 you even talk to
them, your rep will be trashed on all the major servers.

 You won’t work, you
won’t party, you’ll be defriended by every one of your tribes.

Her broad-brimmed hat is still sailing on the wind.

 It cuts
between the towers of the 50th.

The upside-down trading floor is deserted.

 There are heaps of yellowed euros and
deutschmarks dumped here, like snowdrifts.

You walk through empty, miteless rooms, stepping around light fixtures.

 Her smile, with
that chaste yellow dress, so bashful.

Eyes closing, she leans in for the kiss.

 It was pretty much the first thing he told us
when, as first years, we were all bunched together in the unfamiliar dusty
classroom.

 When, a couple of weeks later we were invited over to his house we
saw that this was not an idle remark.

 Where we had shelves of plastic dinosaurs and superhero
figurines from cornflake boxes, Steven had plaster casts of jawbones, gums and
teeth grinning down at us.

 The instruments were locked away in glass cabinets
and only his parents had the key.

“They don’t exactly encourage my interest,” he shrugged.

 But Dad says they’re a sort of collection, and too
expensive for me to play with.”

Of course, we tried to pick the locks, but the spikes and saws and drillheads
remained — tantalisingly — out of reach.

We didn’t see Steven’s interest as strange, well, not that much.

 We all had our
own interests — drawing, electronics, collecting beer caps — that each appeared
obscure to anyone else.

 DIY Dentistry was just something that had never crossed
our horizon before.

 And if Steven didn’t see it as weird, or no weirder than
Andy showing us his Eastern-Block beer caps all laid out neatly on cork boards
with little hand-written labels, why should it bother us?

I suppose that, in our own way, we were all collectively strange.

 The bunch that
no one picked for their side at football or hockey, and that was the glue that
held us together.

 Besides, Steven had some really good stuff: sweets that
stained your teeth bright red — well, technically, not your teeth, just the
plaque, but the result was often the same.

 It took a few days good brushing to
get it off.

Then there was the event that became the rite of passage into our group of
misfits and outcasts: making a mould of your teeth.

It was inevitable that one of us, seeing the plaster casts on the shelf by
Steven’s bed would ask how they were done.

 It was just as inevitable that a few
minutes later, Steven would be mixing up various powders and liquids, and
pouring them into a horse-shoe shaped contraption.

 It was vaguely uncomfortable, and
appeared sufficiently disturbing that we all volunteered each other in turn
until, at last, Andy said he was game.

The hardest part was probably to overcome the gagging reflex that set in when
you bit down into the acrid resin jelly and it flowed out and up and around,
over teeth, gums and tongue.

 Your nose filled with what you imagined were fumes
from the warm paste.

And you seemed to be suddenly drowning in your own saliva.

Things generally got better when Steven reminded you that you could actually
breathe, and swallow, normally.

He watched the second hand trotting round the dial of his watch mouthing the
quarters, before poking the setting goo to check its consistency.

 Then, when he
gave you the nod, you tried to prise your jaws apart.

As the seal around your gums and teeth was pretty solid, you thought it would
never come off, as the others giggled at your expressions and grimaces.

 Steven
jiggled the handle that stuck out beyond your front teeth like some metallic
duck’s bill, turning and twisting it most professionally and murmuring
encouragements.

And, then, with an awful sucking slurp, it came free.

The initiated then revelled in retelling the gross sensation of having this
evil-smelling plastic slug invade your mouth, while the others waited their turn
with mixed trepidation and excitement.

 Raucous laughter greeted the suggestions
of the other body parts that could receive the same treatment.

The next part of the proceedings was less thrilling.

 Steven measured and mixed
the plaster of Paris and prepared for the cast by using a bright blue putty to
build up the form of the jaw, and shoring up gaps and holes.

 It get even less
exciting when he said we’d have to wait an hour while the plaster set real
solid.

 But the next time we visited his room we got to marvel at our toothy
grins labelled and lined up on the shelf.

 We were all perfectly happy with the
result, even wanting one as a trophy until Steven passed an expert eye over
them, pointing out here a gap, here a filling, and there a completely misaligned
incisor.

We were, he told us, mediocre specimens for his collection.

 We were all friends, a group bonded by the common experience
of being able to see our teeth on Steven’s shelf.

Wikinews interviews Christopher Hill, U.S. Republican Party presidential
candidate

What qualifications do you have that will assist you in executing the duties of
president?

My Presidential qualifications are rooted in my service as an Officer in the
United States Air Force.

I took the Oath to our Constitution at 22 years old.

 I
understood it was an Oath to ALL of our people.

 Politicians profess an Oath to
this nation but once in office pursue their party agenda and reward their
voters.

 As President, I will serve ALL of the people in America, guided by the
Constitution.

 Why not run for a lower office that you would be more
likely to win and effect change?

When I was a young man in Air Force ROTC I was chosen to attend a unique Pilot
Training Program called Euro- NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training.

 The Air Force only
selected 180 Officers a year from the Academy, Squadron Officer School and ROTC
to attend.

 I volunteered for that program because I knew I wanted to be a
Fighter Pilot and at the "Top of the Spear."

 If you graduated you were assigned a fighter, if you were not quite
fighter pilot material you had no response to fly another aircraft, you were
washed out.

Congress has proven itself ineffective as a body.

 To make a
difference in America you must have the "Bully Pulpit" and speak to the People.

 I never wanted to make politics a
career.

Why did you choose to run in the Republican Party?

My ties to the Republican party date back to 1979, when I volunteered for Ronald
Reagan and his campaign in New Hampshire.

 In those days I believed there was a
difference in the parties.

Today, like many Americans, I am skeptical.

 I
understand third party candidates have no success.

 I hope to lead the Republican
party in a new direction for working class Americans.

How do you plan to get into the Republican debates and make an impact on polls?

In order to be invited to the debates, we must raise money and poll nationally.

 Recently we were listed in New Hampshire and
nationally with Politics1.

If you do not receive the Republican nomination, would you consider running as a
third party candidate?

No, I will back the nominee of the Republican party in 2016.

Other than yourself, which candidates have you supported for president in
previous campaigns?

Reagan in 80 and 84, [George H. W.] Bush in 88 and 92, [Phil] Gramm in 96,
[George W.] Bush in 2000 and, Romney in 08.

What are your thoughts on the job Barack Obama has done as president?

Specifically, what would you have done differently?

President Obama has an agenda that represents the far left wing of his party.

His use of the Presidency to further this agenda has in many ways been
unconstitutional.

 Specifically, altering law once it is passed to accommodate
his voting blocs.

 His direction to Eric Holder to enforce some laws and not
others is another example.

Hill at the Lesser-known candidates forum in 2011

If elected, what would constitute a successful presidency for you?

 Term Limits for Congress and the Courts returning
government to the People.

 Implementing a Tax System that allows working
Americans making under $ 250,000 to keep all of their money.

 Closing Loopholes
and putting in place a system that is transparent and works.

 Passing a Living
Wage program lifting people out of poverty.

 Returning America to a state of
Peace and Security.

What individuals would you like to see in a Hill administration?

I would like to bring People from the heartland of America that make this nation
work.

 We have had too many decades of Ivy League elites and Professors immersed
in theory.

Hill (right) with fellow 2012 presidential candidate Buddy Roemer.

 I believe it is our
responsibility to pass on the same opportunities to future generations that were
promised to us.

As President, I intend to keep that promise!

Wikinews interviews Robert Sarvis, Libertarian Party nominee for Governor of
Virginia

Attorney Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian Party's nominee for Governor of
Virginia, answered five questions submitted via e-mail by accredited Wikinews
reporter William Saturn.

Sarvis has garnered double digits in opinion polls for the 2013 Virginia
gubernatorial election, an unusual feat for a third party candidate.

 Whoever wins election on
November 5, 2013, would replace outgoing governor Bob McDonnell.

On his campaign website, Sarvis notes he favors parental school choice through
student vouchers, simplification of Virginia's Tax Code, US Second Amendment -
gun - rights, same-sex marriage, and reform of the state's drug laws.

 With
Wikinews, Sarvis discusses his background, views on McDonnell's tenure, keys to
campaign success, plan to implement his agenda, and the former Virginia governor
he most admires.

What is the most important aspect of your background that voters should know
about?

I am the only candidate born and raised in Virginia, but also the only candidate
who embodies both physically and philosophically the growing diversity of the
commonwealth.

(I am mixed-race (half-Chinese) and in an interracial marriage.)

 I
am the only candidate who has studied both economics and law, and the only
candidate with a background in technology entrepreneurship.

 Because of my
academic and professional background, I understand the issues and challenges
facing Virginia much better than the other candidates, and I am offering real
solutions that can be appreciated across the political spectrum.

 I am the only
candidate who believes in both economic freedom and personal liberty and the
only candidate who stands on principle against cronyism and corporatism and in
favor of the rule of law.

What are your thoughts on the job Bob McDonnell has done as Governor of
Virginia?

What would you have done differently than him?

McDonnell did well early in his term pushing back against Senate Democrats who
wanted huge tax increases in response to major revenue shortfalls during the
recession.

Those early budget efforts are his highest achievements as Governor.

More recently, he erred in accepting a transportation bill that had huge flaws
and huge tax increases, rather than prioritizing spending and seeking more
rational, efficient, decentralized transportation decision-making.

 He could have
shown much greater leadership in pushing for tax reform, regulatory reform, and
school choice.

Of course, he showed ethical lapses in judgment.

Compared to previous third party candidates at the gubernatorial level, you have
done exceptionally well in opinion polling.

Voters see the two-party system for the sham it has become.

 They are sick of the
partisanship and nonsense and the total lack of substance in modern campaigns.

Voters see the two major party nominees as exemplifying what is worst about
their respective parties, and they want something better.

 People
like the fact that I stand for a Virginia that is both Open-minded and Open for
Business.

If elected governor, how will you be able to implement your agenda while dealing
with a hostile legislature?

There are precedents of independent governors dealing effectively with the
legislature, and indeed a wise third-party governor can have greater
effectiveness than a major party governor.

 Libertarians share many policy
positions with each of the major parties.

 Working together with both Republicans
and Democrats, we can get the good aspects of each party while rejecting the bad
parts of both.

Which previous Virginia Governor(s) do you most admire and why?

 He was incredibly learned and was a strong advocate for
freedom and the rule of law.

Thank you for your call of this afternoon.

It was a surprise for us to learn that apparently a decision was reached,
perhaps by the judge that the letters are the property of Isabelle.

 Michel
advised her on May 25th as follows: "There is a grave legal question involved as
to whether or not these letters are the property of your mother's estate and an
appropriate legal action is contemplated to determine such question."

It is our considered opinion: Williamson should have sent them to the owner's
daughter as a very personal matter or auctioned them off when he sold Mrs.
Phillips's things on the auction block.

 He sat on them 'til some
reporter's warned him that they were hot merchandise.

 Then with the idea of
seeking cover made a judge (apparently ignorant of the law) appoint an
administrator for Mrs. Phillips's estate for stolen merchandise held in
posession of acourt appointed guardian of Mrs. Phillips.

 To cap it all he
permitted publication of these stolen letters by the press, although they were
ordered by him to be under lock and key.

Now it appears that Williamson is trying to defend himself to the public.

 A
reporter from the Cleveland Press phoned on Monday last.

 He said that he wanted
to check on a statement made by Williamson, since he claimed that while he was
Mrs. P's guardian he had never heard from Isabelle.

Isabelle was not advised that her mother had a guardian.

 On Dec. 6th 1954 she
had a power of attorney duly executed and witnessed by our attorney in Recine,
Wis. in favor of Maud Gorham of Marion, Ohio especially to deal in all matters
pertaining to Carrie Fulton Phillips.

We have not seen the Press article of this week, nor one the Marion Star or any
Columbus paper might have had, covering an interview with Williamson.

 If he does
not leave Isabelle out of all of this he will have to suffer the consequences.

 We will brand him with a libel iron, he won't
forget.

The mental and heart suffering caused by this S.O.B to Isabelle is very deep, I
can assure you, John.

She is sick & in doctor's continual observation and care.

 In our business of antiques, that of
antiquarians, we have and must have in certain states, licensed appraisers.

 All
of them own their own respective businesses and sell.

 Among them is Ralph
Newman, who is also a historian.

 Then of course there seem to be in this
picture, so called historians, like the man you mentioned over the phone, Ed. K.
Gross etc.

 We even had inquiries from the Wisconsin State College, D. F.
Costello, Prof.

A historian from Minneapolis wrote: would we sell the letters?

These kind of historians want something for nothing and could not appraise
anything of this kind, since they do not know corresponding values.

 But all
would want to take a look and see.

John, Isabelle does not want to sell the letters unless we are forced to do so
by the judge and his court under the auspices of estate jurisdiction.

 She has
never seen them, knew nothing of their existence and does not care to see them
now or ever.

There are to ways out: 1) according to Paragraph 1 & 2 of this page and the
preceeding paragraph, as we see it.

 In the first instance we would want to pay
you your bill on conclusion or before as you like.

 In the second instance we
wonder if you might take for a third of the net or how you would like to be
compensated.

In the meanrime with all best regards from the both of us,

Leader of the Opposition, House of Assembly,

In one week's time, the Verwoerd Government intends to inaugurate its Republic.

It is unnecessary to state that this intention has never been endorsed by the
non-white majority of this country.

 The decision has been taken by little over
half of the White community; it is opposed by every articulate group amongst the
African, Coloured and Indian communities, who constitute the majority of this
country.

The Government's intentions to proceed, under these circumstances, has created
conditions bordering on crisis.

 We have been excluded from the Commonwealth, and
condemned 95 to 1 at the United Nations.

 Our trade is being boycotted, and
foreign capital is being withdrawn.

 The country is becoming an armed camp, the
Government preparing for civil war with increasingly heavy police and military
apparatus, the non-white population for a general strike and long-term
non-cooperation with the Government.

None of us can draw any satisfaction from this developing crisis.

 Stated bluntly, the alternatives appear to be these: talk it
out, or shoot it out.

 Outside of the Nationalist Party, most of the important
and influential bodies of public opinion have clearly decided to talk it out.

The South African Indian Congress, the only substantial Indian community
organisation, has welcomed and endorsed the call for a National Convention.

 So,
too have the Coloured people, through the Coloured Convention movement which has
the backing of the main bodies of Coloured opinion.

 A substantial European body
of opinion, represented by both the Progressive and the Liberal Parties, has
endorsed our call.

 Support for a National Convention has come also from the bulk
of the English language press, from several national church organisations, and
from many others.

But where, Sir, does the United Party stand?

 We have yet to hear from this most
important organisation - the main organisation in fact of anti-Nationalist
opinion amongst the European community.

 If the
country's leading statesmen fail to lead at this moment, then the worst is
inevitable.

It is time for you, Sir, and your Party, to speak out.

 Are you for a
democratic and peaceable solution to our problems?

 Are you, therefore, for a
National Convention?

We in South Africa, and the world outside expect an answer.

Silence at this time enables, Dr. Verwoerd to lead us onwards towards the brink
of disaster.

We realise that aspects of our proposal raise complicated problems.

 What shall
be the basis of representation at the Convention?

 How shall the representatives
be elected?

But these are not the issues now at stake.

Are all groups to be consulted before a constitutional change is made?

A decision on this matter cannot be delayed.

 Once that
decision is taken, then all other matters, of how, when and where, can be
discussed, and agreement on them can be reached.

 On our part the door to such
discussion has always been open.

 We have approached you and your Party before,
and suggested that matters of difference be discussed.

 To date we have had no
reply: Nevertheless we still hold the door open.

 But the need now is not for
debate about differences of detail, but for clarity of principle and purpose.

It is still not too late to turn the tide against the Nationalist-created
crisis.

 A call for a National Convention from you now could well be the
turning-point in our country's history.

 It would unite the overwhelming majority
of our people, White, Coloured, Indian and African, for a single
purpose-round-table talks for a new constitution.

 It would isolate the
Nationalist Government, and reveal for all time that it is a minority
Government, clinging tenaciously to power against the popular will, driving
recklessly onward to a disaster for itself and us.

 Your call for a National
Convention now would add such strength to the already powerful call for it that
the Government would be chary of ignoring it further.

NASA celebrates 30th anniversary of first shuttle launch; announces new homes
for retired shuttles

NASA celebrated the launch of the first space shuttle Tuesday at an event at the
Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

 On April 12, 1981, Space
Shuttle Columbia lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on STS-1, the first
space shuttle mission.

At the ceremony, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced the locations that
would be given the three remaining Space Shuttle orbiters following the end of
the Space Shuttle program.

Space Shuttle Discovery will take the place of Enterprise at the Udvar-Hazy
Center.

 Discovery has already been retired following the completion of STS-133
last month, its 39th mission.

 Discovery is undergoing decommissioning and
currently being prepped for display by removing toxic materials from the
orbiter.

Looking back: Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off on STS-1 from Launch Pad 39A at
the Kennedy Space Center on April 12, 1981.

Space Shuttle Endeavour, which will launch on STS-134 at the end of the month on
April 29, will be sent to the California Science Center in Los Angeles,
California following its retirement.

 Finally, Atlantis will go on display at the
Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex following the orbiter's last flight which
launches June 28.

Columbia was lost tragically back on February 1, 2003 when it disintegrated
during re-entry killing all seven astronauts aboard.

 Space Shuttle Challenger
was lost when it exploded 73 seconds after liftoff back on January 28, 1986
killing all six aboard.

"We want to thank all of the locations that expressed an interest in one of
these national treasures," said Bolden to the gathered crowd which contained
many KSC employees.

 "This was a very difficult decision, but one that was made
with the American public in mind.

 In the end, these choices provide the greatest
number of people with the best opportunity to share in the history and
accomplishments of NASA's remarkable Space Shuttle Program.

 These facilities
we've chosen have a noteworthy legacy of preserving space artifacts and
providing outstanding access to U.S. and international visitors."

This was a very difficult decision, but one that was made with the American
public in mind.

 In the end, these choices provide the greatest number of people
with the best opportunity to share in the history and accomplishments of NASA's
remarkable Space Shuttle Program.

File image of Space Shuttle Atlantis lifting off, which approaches its last
mission before retirement.

Not all were pleased with the final choice of locations.

 U.S. Senator John
Cornyn, Republican from Texas, issued a statement regarding the rejection of
Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas as a location.

 "Like many Texans, I
am disappointed with NASA's decision to slight the Johnson Space Center as a
permanent home for one of the Space Shuttle Orbiters.

 Houston has played a
critical role throughout the life of the space shuttle, but it is clear
political favors trumped common sense and fairness in the selection of the final
locations for the orbiter fleet."

Cornyn's statement added, "There is no question Houston should have been
selected as a final home for one of the orbiters — even Administrator Bolden
stated as much.

 Today's announcement is an affront to the thousands of dedicated
men and women at Johnson Space Center, the greater Houston community and the
State of Texas, and I’m deeply disappointed with the Administration's misguided
decision.“

 However, the JSC will recieve pilot and commander seats from the
flight deck.

The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington was also proposed as another
location for a shuttle, going so far as to build a new building to house an
orbiter.

 In a statement, Governor of Washington Chris Gregoire said, "The Museum
of Flight put a tremendous amount of effort into landing a retired shuttle in
the Pacific Northwest.

 As the home of modern day air travel and the 747, which
has gracefully transported shuttles for the last 30 years, Seattle would have
been a perfect fit.

 While the Museum of Flight was in the top running, I’m
disappointed that NASA did not choose them.

In 2008, Endeavour and Atlantis await a journey on their respective launchpads.

"However, the full fuselage trainer, that every astronaut including [former
Museum of Flight CEO] Bonnie Dunbar has been trained on, will soon call the
Museum of Flight home.

 The largest of the trainers, this addition will allow
visitors to actually climb aboard the trainer and experience the hands-on
training that astronauts get.

 Visitors will not be allowed in the other shuttles
and this trainer is a true win for our dynamic museum.

 It will help inspire
young people to the adventure of space and to the excitement of a career in
science, technology, engineering and math."

Today's announcement is an affront to the thousands of dedicated men and women
at Johnson Space Center, the greater Houston community and the State of Texas,
and I’m deeply disappointed with the Administration's misguided decision.

Other items include various shuttle simulators which will be given to the Adler
Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois, the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum of
McMinnville, Oregon, and Texas A&M's Aerospace Engineering Department.

NASA is also offering shuttle heat shield tiles to schools and universities that
want to share technology and a piece of space history with their students.

The 30th anniversary of the first shuttle mission coincided with the 50th
anniversary of the first manned space flight when Yuri Gagarin lifted off aboard
Vostok 1 into space.

Sensitive Canadian document found on rainy streets

A sensitive Environment Canada document was found wet on an Ottawa street by
someone who gave it to the CBC today.

The 131-page document was found on Castlefrank Road in Kanata, Ontario in a
rain-stained, tire-marked brown envelope by a passerby.

The document which had the stamp Protected B on every page detailed various
security vulnerabilities of the NEMISIS database which is used by officers to
track and prosecute environmental law-breakers.

 If someone were able to shut the
system down, or hack inside and delete or corrupt the information, it could
affect the prosecution of the lawbreakers.

The database was unveiled in 1999 as the National Enforcement Management
Information System and Intelligence System.

 However, on the document, it
referred to the database as National Enforcement and Emergency Management
Information System and Intelligence System, adding the words "and Emergency" to
the name.

Protection B documents are the second lowest grade of classified government
documents.

Environment Minister John Baird has asked government officials how such
documents that are supposed to be stored in "approved security cabinets" wound
up on the street.

"I'm told two things: that it's neither classified nor secret and that it's
stuff that could be available under access to information," Baird said.

Environment Canada spokeswoman Sujata Raisinghani told CBC News the department
will look into the incident.

"We take document security seriously," she said, but refused to give any more
details about how the papers came to be on a road.

Paul Dewar, an Ottawa New Democrat MP, said the combined security lapses raise
serious questions about the government's ability to secure sensitive documents.

Dewar says that bureaucrats of the Conservative government have complained to
him about document security to the point that they can`t share the information
with their own colleagues.

 However, when a government document has been found on
the streets, the government then says it wasn't particularly sensitive.

"This government is so consumed with control of information and secrecy yet they
don't seem to be able to get the fundamentals right," Dewar said.

The incident is a reminiscent of two other incidents.

In March, a bundle of blueprints for a new headquarters for the military's
counterterrorism unit were found stuffed in the trash on a downtown street.

In May, Maxime Bernier was forced to resign as Foreign Affairs minister after it
became known that he left sensitive documents at the apartment of his
then-girlfriend Julie Couillard who had ties to the Hells Angels biker gang.

"Sensitive government document found on rainy Ottawa street" — CBC.ca, August
15, 2008

"Document found on street not secret, say feds" — The Canadian Press, August 15,
2008

"Environment Canada security report found on street" — Toronto Star, August 15,
2008

 "MP calls for probe into misplaced documents" — Edmonton Sun,
August 16, 2008

 A
Democracy Now! Segment on Thursday looked at the irony and dangers of
billionaires fighting to privatize and monopolize space infrastructure while the
Earth burns due to the man made climate catastrophe.

 As an example of his utter
lack of self-awareness, Bezos's own comments, after returning from his space
adventure, admitted that his wealth is created by not only his customers, but
his workers.

 This, of course, reminds readers and listeners of the ProPublica
story that exposed how little he and the billionaire class pay in taxes.

 They
are all the undeserving recipients of corporate socialism, making their space
tours.

 Just another taxpayer funded
giveaway to the richest men among us.

 And so I reluctantly thank the goddess of
irony.

 We live in a country where a living wage for all working men and women is
somehow not affordable.

 But a man who pays almost nothing in taxes is free to go
to outer space at the taxpayers' expense.

John's up first out of Clifton Park, New York, and independent John, good
morning.

You're on with David McIntosh of the Club for Growth.

 Mr. McIntosh, my question to
you is, how does the space programs by these various millionaire -- billionaires
--

 It shows the failure of trickle down economics upon which you base a lot of
your, you know, your stances and everything.

 How is -- how is that putting these
billions into space instead of improving the conditions of the workers that make
these people the richest men on Earth?

 You know, I'd like a better understanding
on, you know, you're talking about welfare and everything else.

 Yet at the same
token, you ignore these stances where these billionaires are pouring money into
-- all this money into space.

 The only people who are able to fly with them are
also billionaires and millionaires.

Well, first of all, I'm actually really happy that it's not a government program
where they're forcing taxpayers to spend the billions of dollars on something
like that.

 If they want to spend it on building mansions,
they can do that.

 I -- I don't think it's the right role of government to tell
people how to spend their money.

David McIntosh, the Club for Growth, can kid himself with his self-assurance, as
he did on Washington Journal last Friday, July sixteenth, by believing that the
space exploration Bezos partook in was privately funded.

 But everyone in my
neighborhood pays a higher percentage of their income in taxes than he pays on
the beyond exorbitant and exceedingly gratuitous wealth that he lives off of.

Not to mention, The Hill Online newspaper reported in late May that a US
competitiveness bill, then being debated on the Senate floor, included ten
billion for Bezos's own space exploration company, Blue Origin.

 This was also
around the time Bezos had bought MGM for nine billion.

 So we're expected to
forklift over, as a simple dinner fork won't cut it, the billions needed for
him, again, arguably the richest man on Earth, to acquire more wealth, and as
the cherry on top, deliver him one billion more.

 According to the report
published by ProPublica last month, the median American household brings in
around seventy thousand a year and pays fourteen percent in federal income
taxes.

In short, Americans subsidized the fruits of Jeff Bezos' midlife crisis.

Credit to UK journalist Peter Ward for that spot on descriptor.

 I worry that we
are getting closer and closer to the experience of the little people in the
sci-fi film Elysium, starring Matt Damon.

 In the film, the rich, after
exploiting the world to the point that it's practically uninhabitable, have
moved on to an artificial world, Elysium that might as well be on our moon.

 And
those that remain on Earth, the rest of us, continue working in what could
realistically be a future Amazon warehouse.

Strayer knows much of what he knows because of the experiments he runs at his
Applied Cognition Laboratory in Salt Lake City.

 Often, he measures how people
perform one task once they are given a second task.

We think about multitasking as trying to do two separate, cognitively based
tasks at the same time.

 A classic example, one that just about everybody
attempts to do, is drive a car and talk on a cell phone.

 We don’t do that well,
and more and more people have these gadgets in the car they bring with them, or
the car itself becomes a platform for multitasking, and we don’t do it well.

 So,
it’s probably a big source for the injuries and fatalities and crashes on the
road.

 Can you give me some examples of what you see as benign or, in fact,
productive multitasking?

I would actually just say that even the simplest things, like walking and
talking, which you’d think would be pretty automatic, turn out to be tasks that
compete.

 So, if you’re walking without talking, as soon as you start talking,
you’ll see that the pace of your walk changes, and you may be more likely to
trip.

 Anything that is depending on attention to be able to process the world is
susceptible to dual-task interference, or problems associated with multitasking.

A simple example we give is saying the letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E,
or counting, one, two, three, four, five.

 But if you try and
combine them and do something like, A1, B2, C3, D4, you’ll quickly find that
that becomes difficult, you start to forget where you are.

 And those are two
super-well-learned tasks that you can do by themselves.

 But when you try and mix
them together, you get all jumbled.

 As soon as you start to multitask,
performance on both of the tasks start to degrade.

Now, how much of that is a function of attempting to multitask versus the fact
that we learn habits and patterns and memorize things that become rote, that we
don’t need to engage our cognitive process at all?

You can become automatic at certain aspects of performance.

 When your
performance is habitual or automatic, it is less dependent on attention.

 So, a
lot of things kind of just happen without consciously thinking about them.

 But
new things, new activities or new environments, demand you to pay attention, to
allocate the prefrontal cortex to process some of that information that’s new
and novel.

 That’s the real problem, is that if you’re always in a situation
where everything’s exactly routine, you’re not stressing the parts of the brain
that are responsible for multitasking.

 But as soon as you have some novel
activity — like talking, like driving a car, riding a bicycle — you have to pay
attention to what you’re doing.

 You have to engage the prefrontal executive
attentional networks.

Do you know anything, or think much about, multitasking and multitasking
failures in other high-stakes settings beyond driving, whether it’s military
decisions or political decisions, business decisions?

So we’ve looked in the medical domain, medical human factors: you can see it in
terms of, say, delivery of medicine at a pharmacy.

 If the pharmacist is
constantly being interrupted with calls, they’re going to fill the prescription
incorrectly.

 If an anesthesiologist or a surgeon is distracted by the technology
in the operating room, that can create a problem.

 In the operating room, it’s
not just the phone, although that’s sometimes present, but you have all the
displays and technology.

 Each one of those are creating alarms that creates this
whirl of noise, and alerts and distractions that compete for the
anesthesiologist’s and the surgeon’s attention.

 We all may have multiple pieces of
communication software, multiple pieces of productivity software, and so on.

 Can
you talk about that, what seems to be a relatively low-stakes environment — the
workplace in a marketing firm or whatever — but how our attention is being
carved up during the course of the day?

I mean, the research shows that you have a loss of productivity when you’re
trying to multitask — just the opposite of what you think.

 So you may think “If
I’m multitasking, I’m going to get a lot more things done.”

 But what happens is,
a big chunk of our day is lost as we’re switching from one task to the other to
the other.

 Don’t try and juggle back and forth
because you’ll get confused, you’ll get lost, you’ll be this — “Where was I?”
kind of switch cost.

This year has once again confirmed the importance of the United Nations as the
truly indispensable multilateral forum for addressing today’s global problems.

 Ten years after
9/11, joint action in the fight against terrorism continues to remain central on
the multilateral agenda.

In the past nine months, we have witnessed momentous changes in the Arab world
that nobody expected when we met one year ago.

 Pressure for change is driven by
the wish of women and men to choose their own fate and to improve their chances
for a better life.

 An overwhelming number of young
people were at the forefront of this enormous tide, which started in Tunisia and
Egypt.

In Libya, thousands lost their lives in the struggle for freedom and democracy.

In Syria, and to some extent in Yemen, the suppression is ongoing.

 Austria
strongly condemns the systematic human rights violations and the violence
against peaceful demonstrators.

 We strongly urge those responsible to
immediately stop the bloodshed and to engage in meaningful dialogue and reforms.

Austria supports the Libyan people in its struggle for freedom.

 Over € 150
million blocked in Austrian bank accounts has been de-frozen for humanitarian
use.

 Both the Austrian Government and private sector have provided medicine,
relief supplies and desperately needed fuel to Libya.

The international community and the United Nations have to support and assist
the transition process in the Arab world as the United Nations does now in
Libya.

 This period of change may last for some time and will be full of
challenges.

 Austria welcomes all efforts undertaken by Governments in the region
for peaceful and credible change.

 We encourage the newly empowered authorities
to create a constitutional framework based on democracy and human rights, in
order to fulfil their mandate for democratic change responsibly and peacefully.

The events in the Arab world notwithstanding, we must continue to focus on the
Middle East peace process.

 The Middle East took centre stage this week here at
the General Assembly — and rightly so.

 We have no
choice but to return to direct negotiations between the two parties.

 The
Quartet, in its statement yesterday, has shown a way to do that and has also
proposed concrete timelines.

Austria fully supports the Quartet statement.

Austria welcomes President Al-Nasser’s choice of theme for this year’s general
debate.

We appreciate Qatar’s strong track record in that regard.

In that context, let me also mention an Austrian contribution to international
mediation efforts.

 By inviting political decision-makers from both Khartoum and
Juba to Vienna in recent years, Austria has managed to offer the two sides a
platform for discussion.

 The Sudan and South
Sudan have a shared past and must resolve their remaining problems peacefully.

The United Nations headquarters in Vienna serves as a dynamic hub for the
promotion of peace, security and sustainable development.

 I am proud to announce
that a liaison office of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs will
open in Vienna soon.

 Over the past year, the International Anti-Corruption
Academy set up its headquarters near Vienna, and the Vienna Centre for
Disarmament and Non-Proliferation and an office of the International Peace
Institute were established.

Austria fully stands behind the campaign launched by the Secretary-General on
Monday to achieve universal access to modern energy services.

 We support
doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency and the share of renewable
energy in the global energy mix by 2030.

Austria provides substantial support to the energy and environment efforts
undertaken by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

 Last June,
we hosted the Vienna Energy Forum, where about 1,400 participants discussed
alternative energy concepts to reach the energy goals of the United Nations.

The Fukushima nuclear catastrophe should become a turning point in our approach
to nuclear safety.

 We owe it to future generations to make safety concerns come
first when using nuclear power.

 Austria decided, in 1978, to forgo the use of
nuclear energy.

 Some countries have recently adopted a similar course, which we
welcome.

I wish to make a ministerial statement about the first confirmed case of
COVID-19 in New Zealand.

On Friday, 28 February, New Zealand recorded its first case of the COVID-19
coronavirus, becoming the 48th country to have a confirmed case.

 The individual
had entered the country two days earlier after spending some weeks in Iran,
which is currently experiencing a sizable outbreak of the disease.

 I can report
to the House that they are currently in a stable and improving condition at
Auckland Hospital.

 The good news in this instance is that the individual had
limited contact with people upon their return to the country, and their family
took all the appropriate measures when presenting at the emergency department.

As you would expect, our public health service is working hard to contain this
first case and limit the risk of any spread of the disease.

 Contact tracing
began immediately and has gone to plan.

 All 15 people who were seated nearby the
individual on their flight into New Zealand have been traced and are being told
to self-isolate.

 Public health staff will remain in touch with individuals to
monitor the situation and give ongoing advice.

 I'm advised that as a result of our decisive response, the chance
of an outbreak from our first case is low.

Internationally, the situation with COVID-19 continues to develop at pace.

However, the Director-General of the World Health Organization said, this
morning, containment … is feasible and must remain the top priority for all
countries.

 This is exactly the approach that New Zealand is taking, using three
main tools: border controls; self-isolation; and good public health practices,
including highlighting the importance of basic hygiene.

At every step, the Government has taken decisions in the interests of health and
safety of the wider public, and so far we have been among the best at keeping
COVID-19 at bay.

 Just yesterday, Cabinet decided to extend for another week the
travel restrictions that have been in place for China since 3 February and for
Iran since last Friday.

 These restrictions have played a key role in keeping
COVID-19 out of New Zealand for so long and have given us time to better
understand the disease and ramp up our preparations.

Of course, members will be aware that there are outbreaks in other regions as
well.

 So, as a further precaution, we have decided that anyone arriving in New
Zealand who has been in northern Italy or South Korea who has been there in the
last 14 days will be registered for self-isolation.

 This is based on an expert
assessment of risk.

 It recognises that while there are outbreaks in both
countries, they also have well-developed health systems and the outbreaks are
largely located in specific regions.

 It is a longstanding and successful approach to
managing infectious diseases and has proven its worth again in recent weeks.

 We
have also stepped up the health presence at our airports.

 All airlines flying
into New Zealand have been requested to read a health message upon landing, and
all arrivals into New Zealand will receive health information cards alongside
the standard customs declaration form.

As a result of decisions taken on Friday, health staff are meeting all direct
international flights landing in New Zealand airports from Hong Kong, Japan,
South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand.

 Our border response is further ramping up
to have health staff available for all international flights into New Zealand.

All these decisions and actions are designed to limit the spread of any sporadic
COVID-19 cases that might arrive in New Zealand.

At the same time, our health system continues its preparations in line with our
comprehensive pandemic plan.

 I want to thank our DHBs, public health staff, and
primary care and health officials for the work they are doing to protect the
public.

I have high confidence in our medical professionals.

 We continue to work to keep COVID-19 out, but we are ready
if it arrives in our community.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

State the postulates of Dalton’s atomic theory

Use postulates of Dalton’s atomic theory to explain the laws of definite and
multiple proportions

The earliest recorded discussion of the basic structure of matter comes from
ancient Greek philosophers, the scientists of their day.

 In the fifth century
BC, Leucippus and Democritus argued that all matter was composed of small,
finite particles that they called atomos, a term derived from the Greek word for
“indivisible.”

 They thought of atoms as moving particles that differed in shape
and size, and which could join together.

 Later, Aristotle and others came to the
conclusion that matter consisted of various combinations of the four “elements”
—fire, earth, air, and water—and could be infinitely divided.

 Interestingly,
these philosophers thought about atoms and “elements” as philosophical concepts,
but apparently never considered performing experiments to test their ideas.

 First published in 1807, many of Dalton’s hypotheses
about the microscopic features of matter are still valid in modern atomic
theory.

Here are the postulates of Dalton’s atomic theory.

1. Matter is composed of exceedingly small particles called atoms.

 An atom is
the smallest unit of an element that can participate in a chemical change.

2. An element consists of only one type of atom, which has a mass that is
characteristic of the element and is the same for all atoms of that element
(Figure 2.2).

 A macroscopic sample of an element contains an incredibly large
number of atoms, all of which have identical chemical properties.

 A pre-1982 copper penny (left) contains approximately 3 ×× 1022
copper atoms (several dozen are represented as brown spheres at the right), each
of which has the same chemical properties.

 (credit: modification of work by
“slgckgc” / Flickr)

3. Atoms of one element differ in properties from atoms of all other elements.

4. A compound consists of atoms of two or more elements combined in a small,
whole-number ratio.

 In a given compound, the numbers of atoms of each of its
elements are always present in the same ratio (Figure 2.3).

 Copper(II) oxide, a powdery, black compound, results from the
combination of two types of atoms—copper (brown spheres) and oxygen (red
spheres)—in a 1:1 ratio.

 (credit: modification of work by
“Chemicalinterest”/Wikimedia Commons)

5. Atoms are neither created nor destroyed during a chemical change, but are
instead rearranged to yield substances that are different from those present
before the change (Figure 2.4).

 (credit copper: modification of work by
http://images-of-elements.com/copper.php)

Dalton’s atomic theory provides a microscopic explanation of the many
macroscopic properties of matter that you’ve learned about.

 For example, if an
element such as copper consists of only one kind of atom, then it cannot be
broken down into simpler substances, that is, into substances composed of fewer
types of atoms.

 And if atoms are neither created nor destroyed during a chemical
change, then the total mass of matter present when matter changes from one type
to another will remain constant (the law of conservation of matter).

In the following drawing, the green spheres represent atoms of a certain
element.

The purple spheres represent atoms of another element.

 If the spheres
touch, they are part of a single unit of a compound.

 Does the following chemical
change represented by these symbols violate any of the ideas of Dalton’s atomic
theory?

The starting materials consist of two green spheres and two purple spheres.

 The
products consist of only one green sphere and one purple sphere.

 This violates
Dalton’s postulate that atoms are neither created nor destroyed during a
chemical change, but are merely redistributed.

 (In this case, atoms appear to
have been destroyed.)

The starting materials consist of four green spheres and two purple spheres.

 The
products consist of four green spheres and two purple spheres.

 This does not
violate any of Dalton’s postulates:

 Atoms are neither created nor destroyed, but
are redistributed in small, whole-number ratios.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Describe the reasons why many Americans doubted that Abraham Lincoln would be
reelected

Explain how the Union forces overpowered the Confederacy

Describe the contributions and experiences of African Americans serving in the
Civil War

By the outset of 1864, after three years of war, the Union had mobilized its
resources for the ongoing struggle on a massive scale.

 The government had
overseen the construction of new railroad lines and for the first time used
standardized rail tracks that allowed the North to move men and materials with
greater ease.

The North’s economy had shifted to a wartime model.

 The
Confederacy also mobilized, perhaps to a greater degree than the Union, its
efforts to secure independence and maintain slavery.

 Yet the Confederacy
experienced ever - greater hardships after years of war.

 Without the population
of the North, it faced a shortage of manpower.

 The lack of industry, compared to
the North, undercut the ability to sustain and wage war.

 Rampant inflation as
well as food shortages in the South lowered morale.

From the beginning of the war, the Confederacy placed great hope in being
recognized and supported by Great Britain and France.

 European intervention in
the conflict remained a strong possibility, but when it did occur, it was not in
a way anticipated by either the Confederacy or the Union.

Napoleon III of France believed the Civil War presented an opportunity for him
to restore a French empire in the Americas.

 With the United States preoccupied,
the time seemed ripe for action.

 Napoleon’s target was Mexico, and in 1861, a
large French fleet took Veracruz.

 The French then moved to capture Mexico City,
but the advance came to an end when Mexican forces defeated the French in 1862.

Despite this setback, France eventually did conquer Mexico, establishing a
regime that lasted until 1867.

 Rather than coming to the aid of the Confederacy,
France used the Civil War to provide a pretext for efforts to reestablish its
former eighteenth - century colonial holdings.

Still, the Confederacy had great confidence that it would find an ally in Great
Britain despite the antislavery sentiment there.

 Southerners hoped Britain’s
dependence on cotton for its textile mills would keep the country on their side.

The fact that the British proved willing to build and sell ironclad ships
intended to smash through the Union naval blockade further raised Southern
hopes.

 The Confederacy purchased two of these armored blockade runners, the CSS
Florida and the CSS Alabama.

The Confederacy’s staunch commitment to slavery eventually worked against
British recognition and support, since Great Britain had abolished slavery in
1833.

 The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation ended any doubts the British had about
the goals of the Union cause.

 In the aftermath of the proclamation, many in
Great Britain cheered for a Union victory.

 Ultimately, Great Britain, like
France, disappointed the Confederacy’s hope of an alliance, leaving the
outnumbered and out - resourced states that had left the Union to fend for
themselves.

At the beginning of the war, in 1861 and 1862, Union forces had used
contrabands, or escaped enslaved people, for manual labor.

 The Emancipation
Proclamation, however, led to the enrollment of African American men as Union
soldiers.

 Huge numbers of formerly enslaved as well as free Black people from
the North enlisted, and by the end of the war in 1865, their numbers had swelled
to over 190,000.

 Racism among White people in the Union army ran deep, however,
fueling the belief that Black soldiers could never be effective or trustworthy.

The Union also feared for the fate of captured Black soldiers.

 Although many
Black soldiers saw combat duty, these factors affected the types of tasks
assigned to them.

 Many Black regiments were limited to hauling supplies, serving
as cooks, digging trenches, and doing other types of labor, rather than serving
on the battlefield (Figure 15.16).

 This 1865 daguerreotype illustrates three of the Union’s distinct
advantages: African American soldiers, a stream of cannons and supplies, and an
extensive railroad grid. (credit: Library of Congress)

African American soldiers also received lower wages than their White
counterparts: ten dollars per month, with three dollars deducted for clothing.

White soldiers, in contrast, received thirteen dollars monthly, with no
deductions.

 Abolitionists and their Republican supporters in Congress worked to
correct this discriminatory practice, and in 1864, Black soldiers began to
receive the same pay as White soldiers plus retroactive pay to 1863 (Figure
15.17).

 African American and White soldiers of the Union army pose together
in this photograph, although in reality, Black soldiers were often kept separate
and given only menial jobs.

For their part, African American soldiers welcomed the opportunity to prove
themselves.

 Some 85 percent were formerly enslaved people who were fighting for
the liberation of all of the enslaved and the end of slavery.

 When given the
opportunity to serve, many Black regiments did so heroically.

 One such regiment,
the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, distinguished itself at
Fort Wagner in South Carolina by fighting valiantly against an entrenched
Confederate position.

They willingly gave their lives for the cause.

The Confederacy, not surprisingly, showed no mercy to African American troops.

In April 1864, Southern forces attempted to take Fort Pillow in Tennessee from
the Union forces that had captured it in 1862.

 Confederate troops under Major
General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the future founder of the Ku Klux Klan, quickly
overran the fort, and the Union defenders surrendered.

 Instead of taking the
African American soldiers prisoner, as they did the White soldiers, the
Confederates executed them.

 The massacre outraged the North, and the Union
refused to engage in any future exchanges of prisoners with the Confederacy.

Kharma Medic here and welcome back to another dose.

 So in
today's video, I'm finally gonna be doing a room tour.

 I know this is something
that you guys have requested for a very long time, and after two and a half
years of living here, I finally feel like I've made it my own and decorated it
how I want, and I'm ready to show it to you guys.

 Alright so let's start off
with the bed and the couch area.

 This couch is also quite big, it fits three people
quite comfortably, and if I have family or friends staying over, it opens up
into a full double bed.

 So there's
nothing too special about the bed itself, but it does have a very important
function, which, it has a lot of storage.

 So down here is basically where I keep
everything that I can't really keep in my room, because there's not enough
space.

 I love that
this room has floor-to-ceiling windows as well, it really lets the light come
in, especially in the summer time.

 I know London doesn't have that much light,
but I'll take as much as I can, and there's also a small balcony out here, which
is fairly rare for London.

 We have two chairs where we can sit down and sort of
enjoy the weather when it is a little bit better, um but now it's really cold so
just gonna close it.

 And then a little behind the scenes that you probably will
never see again in a video is that down here I keep all of the filming gear that
doesn't really fit anywhere else in the room: two sets of tripods, I also have a
c-stand.

 Okay next to my bed, I've got the radio alarm clock, and this has
actually changed my life.

 It makes waking up in the morning and getting out of
bed at 6:00 a.m. when it's pitch black outside so much easier when you're waking
up really early.

 It's so much better to wake up to the sound of somebody talking
to you: your favorite radio station, some music, whatever, instead of that
classic iPhone alarm, "ba, ba, ba."

 Over here on the wall, these are posters
that I actually bought back in 2013 in my first year of university in Toronto,
and I really really liked them so I've kept them around.

 Also I'm really proud
that I managed to put them up all by myself, they look quite neat, and I feel
like they're equally spaced, so I'm really proud of how they turned out.

Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new.

 Today
I'm doing another college day in my life.

 And I just left Starbucks, don't mind
what I look like.

I literally just pretty much woke up and left this morning.

I'm starting the review for all the chapters for my final exam, and it is a lot
of information so I already planned on getting up early today and going.

 And
then I'm gonna do the same thing tomorrow.

 I basically like created a digital
calendar where I'm gonna go over each of the chapters, just because I only have
one week left to study.

 I'm back home now, and I basically just typed up a
little calendar laying out the chapters that I have left to review before
Tuesday.

 That's my final list and I hate that, like, this week is our
Thanksgiving break and then we literally come back Tuesday and take our final.

So I'm gonna be studying on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and the whole
weekend even though we're going getting our Christmas tree I think on Saturday,
and I I'm not decorating I'm not doing anything fun, like I have to study.

 I
thought I would show you guys kind of how I'm mapping this out, because it's a
really good tip if you have like a lot to do.

 So today I'm doing female
reproductive system, male reproductive system tomorrow.

 I work on Wednesday, I'm
going to go over chapter 29 fluid balance, chapter 28 so urinary system on the
29th.

 The 30th, Chapters 17 through 22 - yes that's like six chapters or
something.

 And then on Sunday, I'll be doing chapters 23 through 27 and I just
made this on my iPad and then printed it.

 I did not include my schedule for
college algebra because I have a final on Thursday of next week for that.

 So I'm
going to go in with like a different color and add in the chapters I'm gonna be
studying for that, but I'm super stressed.

 You guys know I have the white ones and I wear them all the
time and these ones are just like black perforated Vans.

 I love them and they
are definitely the right size because I have two other pairs of Vans that are
this size, but one of these ones is like messed up or something.

 I think it's
like this part on the left foot because my foot feels super tight in only the
left side, so something's up because they're both the right size but I don't
know.

 So I'm gonna exchange them for another pair because something's not right
about that.

 I just sat in there
for like an hour and a half straight and studied.

 I'm really proud of myself and
now I'm about to go get some lunch, and go to DSW and see if I can exchange
those Vans.

 So while I was in the library one of you guys came up to me, and
said hi.

 I feel so bad because I was so in the zone that I didn't even get her
name.

 But if you're watching this, hi thank you so much for coming and saying hi
to me you actually made my whole day.

 She said she watches my videos and loves
them.

 And you guys are so sweet, I love making videos and it's so nice to have
that support.

 So if you do go to FGCU and you ever see me on campus, like feel
free to say hi because you'll make my day.

 I just got out of DSW, and I spent
like 30 minutes in there because it was just such a process for them to do an
exchange.

 And then she had to scan and go get the shoes and then she said they
didn't have the size.

 So I ended up having to order them, but she said there was
no way to do a direct exchange.

 So she had to give me a return and then re-ring
it up.

 And oh my gosh I was literally in there for like 25 minutes all to just
do a simple exchange for the exact same shoe.

 But it's over now and they're
gonna send them to me in the mail.

Hopefully they'll be here in about a week.

I'm just kind of sad that they didn't have them in stock, so now I have to wait.

But oh well it's over with now, we're gonna go get lunch.

Some of the distinctive skyline of Downtown, including the Kaiser Building and
the Cathedral of Christ the Light.

Since the 1960s, Oakland has been a hub of radical culture, and is the
birthplace of both the Black Panther Party and the Hell's Angels.

Oakland as a city reflects the amazing diversity of its residents and long
history.

 For many visitors, the first place they are likely to visit is
Downtown, especially if they are in town on business, or simply do not know
where to start.

 The center of transportation by BART and by bus is there, if one
wants to branch out.

 And it is as simple as walking in a direction from there,
for the first few neighborhoods, since Old Oakland is along 10th Street, just
west of Broadway.

 Just east of Broadway and continuing north and south is
Oakland's famous Chinatown, and that to get the real essence of "Chinatown,"
Oakland rather than San Francisco is your best bet.

 Many of the buildings and
streets of Chinatown reflect the diverse nature of its history, in architecture
and in the bilingual signs seen throughout the neighborhood.

The curious traveler can venture to take a bus southwards along Broadway, and
come to Jack London Square.

 The unlikely mixture of warehouses and very
expensive restaurants and posh atmosphere alongside some of the landmarks of the
city's waterfront makes the Square an interesting place to visit and explore,
even for locals.

 It's the home of the USS Potomac and the site of the namesake
author's residence, still preserved and humbly standing not far from a saloon
from the same era.

Just west of Downtown and slightly north of the Financial District is Uptown.

 In
the evening it buzzes with art galleries, theaters and residents and Bay Area
visitors coming into the area to see concerts.

 A popular area on the weekend
with a mixed vibe of hipster and hip hop.

 It's a burgeoning neighborhood of
performing arts ranging from nightclubs to music halls, avant-garde performance
art, and even an improv theater company.

 Uptown also has some of the best in the
city's vintage architecture, like the Gothic Revival Cathedral Building and the
Art Deco Fox and Paramount Theaters, as well as several restaurants.

North Oakland is a sweeping term, referring to just about everywhere north of
Uptown and Lake Merritt.

 Many of the neighborhoods are commercial centers and
absolute heaven for foodies or those who seek quieter surroundings than the
hustle and bustle of Downtown and Chinatown.

 Temescal is a neighborhood that
lies north-northwest from Downtown, centered along the reach of Telegraph
Avenue, at and near 51st Street.

 Until the 1960s, a dominantly Italian-American
neighborhood, it is now a much more diversified neighborhood, home to many
restaurants, including some of the city's best Korean and Ethiopian
establishments.

 Northeast of Temescal and near the Berkeley border lies
Rockridge, a neighborhood mixed with family friendly and artistic vibes.

 It has
lots of local boutiques and a diverse range of food at all prices and styles.

Open-air markets, bookstores, and a BART station all its own make Rockridge
another of many pleasant stops in North Oakland.

 Another of North Oakland's group of foodie spots, home to the
city's single Michelin-rated restaurant and many others; cafes, ice cream,
coffee shops and pleasant walks complete the vision of this interesting and
quiet neighborhood.

 East along I-580 and not far from Piedmont Avenue are two
neighborhoods separated by a couple of blocks.

 Grand Lake and Lakeshore both
share a friendly, suburban sort of feel.

West Oakland was once a burgeoning working-class neighborhood with its roots
tracing as far back as the opening decades of the 19th century.

 It has seen a
period of decline between the 1960s and the more recent past.

 Strangely, twice
in its history the neighborhood has seen benefits from major earthquakes.

 After
the 1906 earthquake, many San Franciscans relocated there, and the industrial
development of the 20s and 30s saw its population in the hundreds of thousands.

 Though there are a few draws for the traveler, West Oakland is
dominantly a very poor working-class residential neighborhood with a less than
spectacular reputation.

Vava’u is a group of more than 50 islands in Tonga, about 150 miles north of
Tongatapu.

They are either raised coral limestone or coral atolls.

 The beautiful
harbour opposite the main town of Neiafu (known as the Port of Refuge Harbour)
is a common destination for yachties sailing the South Pacific.

 The waters of
the islands are known for their clarity, it being said that you can see the
bottom at 40 metres.

 The area attracts many humpback whales between June and
November and there are lots of companies organising tours to see them.

 There are
numerous places to stay to suit most budgets.

Findings of Lapita pottery suggest that early-Polynesians were on these islands
close to 3000 years ago.

 These days there are around 20000 people living in the
Group.

 Neiafu and surrounding villages are home to about a third of the Group’s
overall population of around 20000, with the majority of the population living
in small villages on the other islands.

 Neiafu is the official port of entry for
yachts coming to Vava'u, which attracts over 500 yachts every winter sailing
season between June and October.

 A string of islands and reefs along the eastern
edge of the Group shelters the area from strong winds and ocean swellS and
humpback whales come to these protected waters to give birth.

 between December and April few people visit and many tour
companies and restaurants close down.

 It
is on the southern point of the main island of Utu Vava'u and has an attractive
setting on one of the world's most beautiful harbours.

 Neiafu offers all the
usual amenities including banks, schools, tour companies, restaurants, cafes and
bars, supermarkets, a market and a hospital.

 It doesn't have a beach but boats
to one of the nearby coral atolls with superb sandy beaches are easily
available.

Vava'u has a tropical climate with average temperatures up to 29 ºC in January
and down to 24º C in June.

 Between November and
April, it is more humid and thunderstorms and cyclones do occur.

 From May to
September there are southeast trade winds but during the summer months the winds
are from the northeast.

This is the largest island, where Neiafu is found.

 It is a limestone island with
heights up to 213 m in the west.

 The island provides a home to eleven indigenous
bird species and contains Mt. Talau national park, with some of the limited
remaining native vegetation.

 Tropical vegetation includes the pandanus or screw
pine, the casuarina, and the mulberry tree, the bark of which is used to make
tapa cloth.

This is the second largest island in the Group.

 It can be seen across the water
from Neiafu and is connected by land bridge at the most southern point of ‘Utu
Vava’u.

There are some good beaches and plenty of secluded cove beaches and protected
bays with good snorkelling.

 Avai'o'vuna Swamp is a small coastal wetland on the
island.

This is some 35 minutes from Neiafu Harbour and provides the main concentration
of humpback whales.

 The island lies in deep water and has sheltered waters and
bays which provide a resting place for humpbacks with calves.

 Growing Beavertail can be done at any time of year by scattering seeds
in a shady bed or, for faster results, planting cuttings in a mix of soil and
sand and ensuring that they have a bit of water and plenty of sun.

 Read the
following steps to find out how to grow Beavertail cactus.

 These can be bought at garden centers or
purchased online.

In a shady garden bed, simply scatter the seeds on the soil.

 There's no need to
cover them, unless you want to use netting to keep the birds off.

 Keep the soil
moist until the seeds germinate.

Make sure that the garden bed is in the shade.

 Beavertail cacti seeds need shade
to grow, whereas cuttings need plenty of direct sunlight.

Be aware that growing Beavertail cactus from seeds takes much longer than
growing one from a cutting.

 It can take as long as 4 to 4 years before you get
flowers.

You can purchase them online or at a local garden center.

If you already own a Beavertail cactus, you can make your own cuttings.

 To do
this, choose pads (the flat, oval-shaped sections that make up a cactus) that
are 6 months old or older and cut them at the base.

 In order to form a callous
and prevent rot, cure the cuttings by sitting the pad upright in a dry, dark
place for 10 to 14 days.

Prepare a potting mix that is equal parts soil and rough pumice or sand and fill
the appropriate number of pots with it.

 Make sure there are holes in the center
of the base of each pot to allow for good drainage.

Set the cuttings upright in the potting mix about an inch (2.5 cm.) deep.

 If you
plant the cuttings too deep, they might rot.

Put some rocks around the pad to anchor it in place.

Choose a spot for your Beavertail cactus cuttings.

If you live in an area with strong summer sun, position the cuttings so that the
broad sides of the cuttings face east and west while the slim sides face north
and south.

 This will prevent the cuttings from burning during the hottest part
of the day.

Make sure the spot is sheltered from any cold winter winds.

Do not water the cutting for the first month.

 The moisture in the pad will
provide enough nutrients for roots to grow.

After 1 month, roots will have sprouted and you can water the cutting for the
first time.

Always let the soil dry before you water the cuttings.

 Once fully rooted, they
are extremely drought resistant.

During the spring, summer, and fall, the Beavertail cactus grows and will
benefit from a balanced fertilizer.

From the first pad, many more will form.

 The second or third pad will bear some
flowers, but wait before harvesting them or you might affect the size of future
harvests.

Having mice in your home is both a nuisance and a health hazard.

 They can cause
property damage, create a mess, and produce unpleasant smells.

 In addition,
repelling and removing rodents from your home can be a hassle if you don't know
what you are doing.

 It can also be dangerous if you use toxic chemicals and
poisons.

 It's a good thing, then, that there are some simple ways to effectively
get mice out of your home without the use of toxic chemicals and poisons.

 Many times mice are drawn into homes on the search for
food.

If there is nothing to eat, mice will be less likely to stay.

 Keep all
food stored properly in airtight containers or in places that are safe from
mouse attack. [1]

 The smell is simply
too intense for rodents and they will not try to go near it.

 It also helps to
mask the scent of any tasty morsels that have been missed when cleaning.

 It also
gives the house a lovely smell, and is not toxic, unlike many synthetic chemical
treatments.

 You can get peppermint oil in most health food stores and even some
major grocery stores. [2]

Place a cotton ball under or near your garbage can to deter mice from getting
into it.

Place the cotton balls in areas where mice are likely to enter your house, by
doorways, or heat vents, etc.

Peppermint oil cotton balls need to be replaced after 5 - 7 days, depending upon
the quantity of oil you put on it.

Try growing peppermint plants near the entryways.

 You can use the mint in
cooking, as well as it serving a deterrent purpose.

 Visit a local reptile center, zoo, or pet store and ask
for some dried snake poo.

 You can also sometimes find someone who owns a pet
snake.

Place near entrances and in places where mice seem to go.

Be sure to keep the feces out of the reach of children and pets.

 There are electronic units sold that emit an
ultrasonic beeping sound that rodents hate.

 They should be available at your
local home improvement store or online.

These work only on a single line of sight, so you need to know the exact path
the mice are taking.

The units may only work for a short time because mice can become used to them.
[4]

 Many companies that specialize in organic
garden and home products make mice repellents that are better for the
environment than traditional poisons.

 Many of these products use natural
ingredients, such as peppermint, that are known to be disagreeable to mice.

 They
will not kill mice but they should keep them out of areas where the product is
applied.

These products should be available at your local gardening or home improvement
center.

 If you want a specific product, try doing a online search to see where
it is available locally.

A house cat can take care of the problem.

 Cats that spend time
outdoors are more likely to hunt to find their own food and may track down that
mouse.

 Just be aware, not all cats have enough energy, interest or training to
hunt mice.

 Kittens typically have to be taught by the mother to easily become a
mouser.

 Well-food indoor kitties might just see the mouse as a toy, and grow
quickly bored of it after scaring it half witless.

Shelters and adoption agencies often do not know if a cat is a good mouse
hunter, and generally do not test for this.

 Sometimes this information is
available, but usually not.

While many mousers are great pets as well, not all are.

 "Barn cats" may not be
socialized well with humans, although used to hunting mice for food.

Even if you do not have a cat, you can use used kitty litter to deter mice.

Place tubs of used kitty litter around entrances of the house.

 The mice will
sniff the smell of cat urine and clear off in a jiffy.

If you have a large infestation, a cat may not be enough to totally get rid of
it.

 However, once you eliminate the infestation, a cat will probably prevent
reinfestation. [5]

 Mice smell garbage and get attracted to
your house.

 If you keep the cans away from the house, they are less likely to
take up residence in your home.

Promote the nesting of birds of prey in your yard.

 Build a shelter box in your
garden to attract some onto your property.

 This may take some time, but it's
worth the effort if you can attract a wild mouse eater to your yard. [6]

Make sure the shelter box has no nails or safety hazards.

A family of barn owls can eat many mice in a night!

However, you might attract other types of owls or birds of prey with your
nesting box.